The Origins of Global Warming

An interesting article on where the hype originated.

Blago's Slime

Seriously, this guy brings the concept of sleazy politicians to new levels. Plus, does he look like a cartoon character to anyone else?

Warning: shower may be necessary after viewing this video:

Part 1



Part 2



Gross. Gross. Gross.

You've just been slimed.

Another article against nationalized health care

A Health Care Model For Failure

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Tuesday, January 27, 2009 4:20 PM PT

Socialized Medicine: Anyone who thinks a national single-payer system would be an improvement isn't paying attention. Medicare, which provides coverage for less than 15% of the population, can't get it right.

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The federal government seems to always be in a hurry to dole out pork, but it has problems reimbursing doctors who see Medicare patients.

Payments have been so late in some cases that doctors from New York to California have had little choice but to take out loans — some as large as $3 million — to bridge the gap.

The late payments, which can be over $100,000, are only part of the problem for doctors.

In too many instances, the compensation that is eventually provided by Medicare — an amount determined by bureaucrats, not the market, and is therefore subject to error — is simply not enough to cover the physicians' costs.

"When I saw a Medicare patient with pneumonia and they needed a shot that cost $30, and Medicare would reimburse only $21, I gave him the shot," Eugene Wood, a recently retired Jackson physician, told the Mississippi Business Journal last fall.

"I went ahead and practiced good medicine. But I just kept going in the hole."

The trend toward late and below-cost reimbursements creates trouble at two levels.

First, some doctors are cutting back on the number of Medicare patients they see — limiting medical care access for the elderly who rely on Medicare and have paid into it for 40 years or more.

Still others found that they have had to lay off staff and trim their own salaries to continue their practices.

Second, the arrangement kills incentives for medical school students to practice family medicine, which already seems to be a dying art, as only 8% of 2006 U.S. medical school graduates opted for family practices. That's about half the number of graduates who were choosing to go into family practice in the early 1990s.

Making $150,000 a year right out of school might sound like a dream to many, but when doctors owe a year's salary and often more in medical school student loans, their handsome incomes don't look as attractive. A family physician has to be as good a businessman as a doctor if he is to keep his practice above water.

If this is the mess that Medicare is producing, imagine the intractable complications that a universal government system would bring.

Who would want to practice medicine under those conditions? Where will sick Americans go when doctors are fleeing practices and the demand for care under a "free" system outstrips supply?

Medicare and Medicaid, the program for low-income Americans, cover a quarter of the U.S. population and will account for a fourth of federal outlays this year.

No matter how much a Washington player promises that he or she can bring health care costs down through a national system, the numbers say that under a universal program, the entire federal budget will be dedicated to providing health care.

Like it or not — and we don't — Medicare and Medicaid, both established in 1965, have become deeply embedded in the American fabric. They will not go away. The best we can hope for is some sort of reform that lessens the taxpayers' liabilities and increases the responsibility of individuals.

What the country doesn't need is universal care. If universal care is the only alternative, we'd prefer the status quo.

But even that's trouble. Already Medicare's Hospital Insurance is paying out more in benefits than it takes in from tax revenues. By next year, outlays for the entire program will exceed income. The Hospital Insurance Trust Fund will be exhausted by 2019.

System trustees estimate that over the long term, Medicare will have $36 trillion in obligations that aren't funded under the current setup. That, according to analysts at the Heritage Foundation, means "every American household's share of Medicare's unfunded obligation is like a $320,000 IOU."

If Washington can't run a program for 44.1 million people without bankrupting the nation, how can it possibly operate a national health care system for more than 300 million?

But unless Republicans resolve to stop the movement for good, Washington will surely try — and fail.

Lack of grace and dignity from a wildly popular man

Obama hasn barely been in office a week and he has already shown a lack of humility and graciousness in the way he is handling the Rush Limbaugh situation. I, personally, cannot stand Limbaugh and will tell anyone who asks that I think his tactics are divisive and ridiculous. I, however, am not the President of the United States of America.

After one little attack from a right-wing pundit, Obama has already lowered himself to Rush's level, by responding and taking a jab at the conservative talk show host. Really? You've got to be kidding me.

President Obama warned Republicans on Capitol Hill today that they need to quit listening to radio king Rush Limbaugh if they want to get along with Democrats and the new administration.

"You can't just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done," he told top GOP leaders, whom he had invited to the White House to discuss his nearly $1 trillion stimulus package.

Now, it would have probably been better if someone from the Bush administration had responded to at least some of the constant barage of attacks, to try to elucidate Bush's reasons for certain decisions and actions, rather than just letting the press and the public have a field day with Bush jokes. But, Bush, himself, was right as to never lower himself to respond to silly personal attacks as Obama has just done.

Not to mention, this hints at our anointed President's true feelings about free speech. Can anyone say: Fairness Doctrine?

Yeah, about that change...

maybe not so much.

Why not ban ALL distractions?

Radios, CD players and mp3 players are distracting. They should be banned while driving. Having a passenger in your car is distracting. Cars should be constructed with only one seat. Windows are distracting, lets eliminate those.

Where does it end?

A national safety group is advocating a total ban on cell phone use while driving, saying the practice is clearly dangerous and leads to fatalities.

Grace and dignity from unpopular man

I've said it before and I'll say it again, I'm not a big fan of Bush (mostly because of his fiscal policies and religious bias), but the hatred he incurs is outrageous and undeserved. He's kept us safe, which is the MOST important of a presidential task. So, it's nice to see articles, such as this one, recognizing the grace with which he has endured the taunting, personal attacks and general hatred constantly spewed against him. It takes a special person to rise above these things. And while I think he should not be so apologetic now, especially about his foreign policy decisions, this is another reason why he is a good, if not great man. Can you see Clinton being sincerely apologetic about anything? He's about as humble and sincere as O.J.

Velcro Presidency

Leadership: George W. Bush was pegged as a hate figure even before being sworn in. Yet he resisted bitterness, stuck to principle and became what history will judge to be one of our better presidents.

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We may have witnessed in the last eight the Anti-Watergate. Richard Milhous Nixon never forgot a slight, used federal law enforcement powers against his political enemies and infuriated the Republican Party's conservative base with policies ranging from wage and price controls to detente with communists to Supreme Court appointments.

President George W. Bush

Soon-to-be-ex-President Bush, on the other hand, has taken at least as much personal abuse, yet his graciousness seldom fails. While the 37th president acidly told the press, "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore," the 43rd told the reporters at his final presidential press conference Monday that they were "just people trying to do the best they possibly can."
That's charitable in the extreme: Every step of the way, the establishment press has been eager to see this president fail.
And unlike Nixon, who so disappointed his supporters on the right that he was challenged for the GOP nomination in 1972, Bush stuck to the conservative principles on many if not most issues, including income and investment tax cuts, the invasion of two terror states and the appointment of Supreme Court justices.
Bush came to the plate with two strikes against him. He was falsely accused of stealing the 2000 election and hit the ground in the middle of a recession. Then came the first attack on the homeland since Pearl Harbor. In the face of the threat to both the U.S. and the free world, the commander in chief made war against governments that sponsored terrorism and cut taxes to revitalize the post-9/11 economy.
As he noted Monday, when the establishments of both parties in Washington insisted on throwing in the towel in Iraq, rather than accepting the status quo because the party might end up not doing well in the elections, Bush "decided to do something about it — and sent 30,000 troops in as opposed to withdrawing."
Asked about alleged damage to America's international image, the president offered a challenge: "Ask Africans about America's generosity and compassion; go to India . . . go to China and ask . . .. No question parts of Europe have said that we shouldn't have gone to war in Iraq without a mandate, but those are a few countries."
On Hurricane Katrina, he asked: "When I hear people say, 'The federal response was slow,' then what are they going to say to those chopper drivers, or the 30,000 that got pulled off the roofs?"
The one foreign-policy area where Bush may legitimately be faulted in the history books is in dealing with Iran's nuclear ambitions. As the New York Times reported Saturday, a major covert program that would "subtly sabotage Iran's nuclear infrastructure" was begun by the administration early last year. It would "undermine electrical systems, computer systems and other networks on which Iran relies" and "is aimed at delaying the day that Iran can produce the weapons-grade fuel and designs it needs to produce a workable nuclear weapon."
If Barack Obama lets that program succeed, it'll be yet another reason history may place "the Velcro president" somewhere near the top tier occupied by the "the Teflon president," Ronald Reagan.