Quote of the day

"It’s a catastrophe," said Dan Joergensen, a member of the European delegation, of the five-nation agreement. "We’re so far away from the criteria that was set up in order to call it a success, and those weren’t really that ambitious to start with."

(italics, ours)

Well, the President was able to save some face by getting India and China to buy into a vague and totally meaningless non-binding carbon emissions reduction agreement that was not endorsed by the balance of the 193 nations voting on the official accord so I guess we can classify this as a win-win situation.

Do they have a vaccine for this?

New cottage industry: Libs who have their guy in the Oval Office and majorities in the House and Senate now whining about “the system” being broken because they can’t get an excrable piece of legislation passed.

Sigh. If you've been watching the Washington healthcare debate, you know what that sigh was about. We Americans have always been proud of our constitution and the principle of separation of powers. The system has always ensured that the minority party has certain rights and that the executive branch cannot just muscle through Congress any old thing that it wants. Our founders wanted a system that moved slowly.

Do they ever have it. In fact, we now have a system that barely moves at all. Watching American politics through British eyes, you must be utterly mystified as to why Barack Obama hasn't gotten this healthcare bill passed yet. Many Americans are too. The instinctive reflex is to blame Obama. He must be doing something wrong. Maybe he is doing a thing or two wrong. But the main thing is that America's political system is broken.

Michael Tomaskey writing for the Guardian UK, did not get the memo, the Gallup memo, if you will that shows that 48% of the public do not want this version of healthcare reform vs. 46% who do. This represents an undeniable trend from just back in October where the numbers were 41% not wanting healthcare and 51% wanting it.

And here’s E.J. Dionne of the WaPo on his definition of what constitutes a real American:

Normal human beings -- let's call them real Americans -- cannot understand why, 10 months after President Obama's inauguration, Congress is still tied down in a procedural torture chamber trying to pass the health-care bill Obama promised in his campaign.

If you are not one of those who “cannot understand”, you must not be a real American? Didn’t we just spend the better part of this past decade listening to liberals whine about their patriotism being questioned?

Paul Krugman whining about the 60-vote filibuster:

A message to progressives: By all means, hang Senator Joe Lieberman in effigy. Declare that you’re disappointed in and/or disgusted with President Obama. Demand a change in Senate rules that, combined with the Republican strategy of total obstructionism, are in the process of making America ungovernable.

But meanwhile, pass the health care bill.
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Yes, the filibuster-imposed need to get votes from “centrist” senators has led to a bill that falls a long way short of ideal. Worse, some of those senators seem motivated largely by a desire to protect the interests of insurance companies — with the possible exception of Mr. Lieberman, who seems motivated by sheer spite.

Beyond that, we need to take on the way the Senate works. The filibuster, and the need for 60 votes to end debate, aren’t in the Constitution. They’re a Senate tradition, and that same tradition said that the threat of filibusters should be used sparingly. Well, Republicans have already trashed the second part of the tradition: look at a list of cloture motions over time, and you’ll see that since the G.O.P. lost control of Congress it has pursued obstructionism on a literally unprecedented scale. So it’s time to revise the rules.

Hang Lieberman in effigy? Is Krugman also suggesting that perhaps mobs of angry statists take to the streets wielding signs and/or confront their respective congressmen at town hall meetings? Now that would be downright uncivil behavior and might also be considered unpatriotic.

It remains absolutely mind-boggling to us just how behind the curve the alleged taste-makers like Dionne and Krugman are on the issue of Obamacare and the current plight of the Democrats.

Just pass the bill? Is it possible that these people really do live under a rock and are not aware of the tanking poll numbers for Obamacare? Oh, we forgot - passing Obamacare should not be about politics, it’s about doing the “moral” and “just” thing.

And we don't remember this degree of moral indignation for the years that the Democrats were in the minority during the Bush years and where they were only to happy to use filbusters to derail Bush's judicial appointments.

Setting aside the procedural rules of the Senate, could it be that the reason why Obamacare has not passed yet is because as a piece of legislation, it stinks? There’s a reason why the bill is currently holed-up in Harry Reid’s office and won’t see the light of day until the last possible moment and it’s not because it is a tidy, easily-comprehended bill absent an unseemly amount of amendments and loopholes.

The American people know this, they have expressed this and that is why Obamacare has not yet passed and no amount of bitching and carping by state-controlled media will change this fact.

Great moments in the history of government-managed health care

Health officials are recalling hundreds of thousands of doses of swine flu vaccine after tests indicated they may not be potent enough to protect against the virus.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notified doctors about the recall Tuesday. The recall involves about 800,000 doses made by Sanofi Pasteur. The doses are pre-filled syringes intended for young children, ages 6 months to almost three years.

Health officials recommend children those ages get two doses, spaced about a month apart.

Health officials say it's not clear how many doses have already been given, but they don't think children need to be re-vaccinated. The lots passed potency tests when they were first shipped, but tests indicate the potency waned after.

They don’t think the children need to be re-vaccinated? That’s reassuring.

Again, massive government efforts at the federal level are fine when it comes to fighting wars as degrees of inefficiency and inaccuracy are acceptable in order to “get the job done”. Not so much, however, when it comes to your personal health or that of your children.

P.S. Prepare yourself for some more “thinking”. They finally broke Nelson.

Radio KBwD is on the air

Folks, it’s office party season so blogging will be light and/or incoherent for the duration.

We leave you with a clip from the greatest concert film of all time. Ladies and Gentleman, from the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, it’s Paul Butterfield and The Band in their performance from The Last Waltz and their take on the blues standard, "Mystery Train".

Enemies of our enemies or something...

Obama’s left flank is in full rebellion over the healthcare bill as they have just recently figured out that all the compromises have made the legislation a “sell-out”. And to be specific, what they are having the most heartburn over is the fact that they will be forced to purchase a service from a private entity – individual mandates – a feature of Obamacare that we have been all over from the get-go.

Hey, lefties…we’ve saved a seat for you all down here at the bar. Grab a beer with us when you get done venting.

Markos Moulitsas, he of the liberal Daily Kos on individual mandates:

“My take is that it’s unconscionable to force people to buy a product from a private insurer that enjoys sanctioned monopoly status,” says Moulitsas. “It’d be like forcing everyone to attend baseball games, but instead of watching the Yankees, they were forced to watch the Kansas City Royals. Or Washington Nationals. It would effectively be a tax — and a huge one — paid directly to a private industry.”

The Royals? The Nationals? Now, that would be cruel and unusual punishment.

Alas, ‘Kos as representative of the rest of his crowd, comes to the right conclusion for the wrong reason (to use his example, even if the Yankees are your favorite team, why should you be forced to watch them). He isn’t against individual mandates, per se, or as a matter of principal, he’s against individual mandates that are decoupled from the public option. In ‘Kos World, individual mandates are fine as long as the government option is in play and where an individual isn’t forced to sign up with an evil private insurer, only.

Of course, this reasoning is totally lacking in principle as the individual mandate, public option or not, is the antithesis of freedom of choice (something we are told is cherished by this country’s liberal-Left) and most likely unconstitutional.

Think about it: the federal government is forcing you to purchase a product produced by a private, for-profit entity. No amount of alliteration can free one from the wrongness of that scenario.

Be that as it may, we welcome a temporary partnership with our statist friends of whom do not find the satisfactory amount of statism in Obamacare.

Copenhagen 101

Confused about global-warming, are ya? Not sure whether or not you are to blame? Can’t quite get your brain wrapped around the climate conference at Copenhagen? Is that what’s troublin’ ya, bunky?

Maybe this will help you make sense of it:

President Chavez brought the house down.

When he said the process in Copenhagen was “not democratic, it is not inclusive, but isn’t that the reality of our world, the world is really and imperial dictatorship…down with imperial dictatorships” he got a rousing round of applause.

When he said there was a “silent and terrible ghost in the room” and that ghost was called capitalism, the applause was deafening.

But then he wound up to his grand conclusion – 20 minutes after his 5 minute speaking time was supposed to have ended and after quoting everyone from Karl Marx to Jesus Christ - “our revolution seeks to help all people…socialism, the other ghost that is probably wandering around this room, that’s the way to save the planet, capitalism is the road to hell....let’s fight against capitalism and make it obey us.” He won a standing ovation.

That puts a nice neat bow on things, now doesn’t it?

That we would even think about throwing our hat in with the freedom-loathing, capitalism-destroying, faith-based AGW zealot-wing of the Star Wars cantina scene is a disgrace.

Not so random thought of the day

After witnessing the repeated and vicious attacks on the likes of Sarah Palin (literally), Carrie Prejean, Michelle Malkin, and now Joe Lieberman’s wife which comes on the heels of Chuckie Schumer (D-NY) calling a flight attendant a “bitch” , one has to ask oneself, just what does the liberal-Left have against women?

Your brother's keeper?

So, why is the notion of a single-payer healthcare system so antithetical to our exceptionally American sensibilities?

Setting aside the rationing, the deficit-busting and the invasion of privacy that Obamacare will certainly deliver, the fact that you will, in effect, be paying for someone else’s crappy diet and poor lifestyle choices is reason enough to abort this bill. B-Daddy has more here.











That's an awful lot of cotton that went into that T-shirt. Now shut up and pay up!

Porky's revenge

Porkulus the younger, in fetal form, survived the lower chamber yesterday.

WASHINGTON, Dec 16 (Reuters) - The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday approved a $155 billion measure that seeks to create jobs and blunt the impact of the worst recession since the 1930s.

By a vote of 217 to 212, the House approved additional spending for "shovel-ready" construction projects and money to avoid layoffs of teachers, police and other public employees.

The Senate is expected to consider the measure early next year.

It’s like déjà vu all over again as several of those terms used in the short paragraphs above should sound mighty familiar. It is duly noted that Reuters terms it “additional spending” without referencing to what it is additional. It’s as if Porky Jr. is some sort of bastard child. How’s that for tolerance and understanding?

But with the Senate bogged down trying to find a way to have an open floor vote on a health care bill that no one has yet seen (is it possible to vote on a bill that has not been written?), we will be partying like its February 2009.

Single issue voting

Speaker Pelosi has conceded that Obamacare won’t get done this year but rather next year when job creation and deficit reduction will be the central Democratic themes, (hey, you in the back – no laughing) Politico is reporting but this paragraph caught our eye:

“We are in a define-or-be-defined occupation,” she said, and her adversaries have had the advantage of picking out single issues, such as abortion or the public option, to characterize the whole.

…or rationing or the expansion of Medicare or how it will increase the deficit or how it will infringe upon physician/patient privacy or how it will stunt medical innovation or how it will actually push people out of their current employer-based health insurance or how it will cover illegal aliens or how it will raise health insurance premiums or....

The cherry-picking by Obamacare opponents has been downright shameful.

Do we need an alternative to alternative energy

Watched us a very interesting PBS segment on Copenhagen, green technology, rare earths and China the other night.

The producer of the segment contended that all the efforts to control green house gases in Copenhagen were worthless without first addressing the environmentally ruinous practice of extracting a rapidly shrinking supply of rare earths which are at the heart of the renewable energy industry and which 95% of its production is located in China.

Let’s see: China, environmentally unsound mining, increasing demand, decreasing supply. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, what could go wrong is exactly what one would predict given this scenario. China is cutting back on rare earth exports citing environmental concerns and a shrinking supply of these rare earths. Good for China’s environment – not so good for the world’s green technologies.

And, as predictably, according to the PBS piece, China is leveraging this export cut back to force green industry to move to China and indeed, have mastered-planned a business-city in Bayan Obo, the epicenter of China’s rare earth extraction activities, to facilitate this.

And this remains our heartburn with our country’s and much of the world’s business approach to green technology: Instead of relying on true R&D at the university and professional society level that can “look around the corner” and forecast and react to potential dead-ends like the rare earth dilemma, we have locked ourselves into, both legislatively and monetarily (picking winners and losers), the production of electric cars, solar panels and wind turbines – technologies all that may well be DOA before they are even market-viable because of the rare earths shortage and its environmental and geo-political ramifications.




In the meantime...




...anyone up for an alternative to alternative energy until we truly get this whole renewable energy thing figured out?