This is what you get when you care more about skin color than capability

Moochelle Obama's Princeton pal top exec at company that received no-bid contract for Obamacare website.

Gosh, a no-bid contract for multiple millions of dollars that ends in complete and total disaster?  Where are all the ProgNazis screaming "HALLIBURTON!  CHIMYMCHITLERBUSH!"

Hurting

Due to a combination of something I ate and work I've done, my abs feel like there's an alien about to chew it's way out of my guts.  So pardon me if the posting is light.

If you'd like to waste a couple of hours, go watch this.  (NSFW)

You want to fix health care?

Two VERY SIMPLE things that could be done to cut costs of both health insurance and the additional costs of malpractice insurance for hospitals, clinics and medical personnel (which WILL get passed onto the consumers, e.g., you and me and everyone else).

First, a simple change to malpractice lawsuits: Loser pays. Court costs, attorneys fees for both sides, filings, costs associated with juries, all of it. That will cut down nuisance suits to damned near nothing, because when personal injury lawyers can file a suit over damned near any sort of "pain and suffering" and settling is cheaper than having to pay thousands or millions to fight even the most bullshit of cases. (Remember that case of "I didn't know coffee would be hot!"? Eventually settled while on appeal.)

If the lady who didn't know that hot coffee would be hot had been told up front that she would have had to pay the legal fees for the other side if she lost (because juries can sometimes suffer attacks of common sense), do you think she would have started attorney shopping, hoping for a big payday from a corporation with deep pockets? After all, she had originally only asked for $20,000, to cover both "past and anticipated future medical expenses", and what's 20 grand to a corporation that makes almost a billion in profits every year?

Yeah, I don't think so, either.

Second, allow for insurance companies to spread out. Right now, health insurance companies are operating under a federally-applid restriction to not cross State lines. That means you can get car insurance from a company in a different State, but your health insurance MUST be offered from an insurance company in the same State as you. MUST.

That limits the available pool out of which your company must make up its payouts, and in many small States, there is no real competition. Allowing your health insurance company to widen its pool and spread out the risk allows them to lower the costs for everyone, and the instant competition will drive down prices to truly competitive levels, since every insurance company will be looking to get as many customers as they can by offering better deals, while still turning a profit for its shareholders. Which is, after all, why the shareholders invested in the company in the first place.

The math behind actuarial tables hasn't changed since the time of Hammurabi, so it will also come down to better service, lower rates and happier consumers.

And all by opening up the State borders.

Easy. Simple. "Loser Pays" means lower costs to the providers of medical services, and opening the State borders means lower costs to the consumer of medical services. We save money coming and going.

I know it's wrong

But I can't stop laughing...




!!!!!

Forgetting the Past

“Anyone who clings to the historically untrue -- and -- thoroughly immoral doctrine that violence never solves anything I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler would referee. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor; and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms.”

Robert. A. Heinlein

There are multiple reasons why a majority of Americans today would just look at you and go "Huh?" when you mention the anniversary of the attack in Beirut.  The collective symptoms of those reasons are manifest in the blithering Marxist jack-ass currently infecting the Oval Office.

We've lost the lessons of the past, and now we're going to relearn them in painful ways that could have been avoided.

Two. Just two,

Army's chief of staff Gen. Ray Odierno told a Washington conference Monday that the U.S. Army had not conducted any training in the last six months of the fiscal year ending Sept. 30. And, he said, there currently are only two Army brigades rated combat-ready. That's a total of between 7,000 to 10,000 troops and less than one-third what the combat veteran regards as necessary for proper national security.
"Right now," Odierno said, "we have in the Army two brigades that are trained. That's it. Two."

That's roughly one-third of the troops we would need to merely defend our own borders. But we have money to waste on 404Care and closing down national monuments?

Burn it down. Scatter the stones, salt the ground then take off and nuke it from orbit.

This bears repeating

Ace pointed it out to me first yesterday, but it still bears repeating.

The Phone Help Line for the 404Care our Democratic Overlords are attempting to ram down our throats was announced by TFG his own self. (Because, of course, the website was a colossal failure.)

1-800-F1U-CKYO.

No, I'm not kidding. (800) 318-2596

Of course, the phone lines crashed soon after his announcement (overwhelming call volume can do that), in yet another stunning display of both Smart Power (tm) and government pre-planning.

And these are the people who claim they know our health needs better than we do?

Listening to Mark Levin

As I was driving around doing errands tonight, and he had a couple of clips of Mitch McConnell on some Sunday talk show, and 'ol Mitch is promising that there will be no more government shut-downs, and golly, we have a sayin' back in old Kentucky about blah blah blah blah.

This is why this country is fucked.  Because the Progressive Anti-American Left doesn't even need to send out their own spokes-holes on Sunday - the GOP does it for them.  And these are the people in charge of the GOP - they're the ones who get to dole out the dollars for election and re-election bids; they're the ones who get to set the course for the party as a whole, and they are wholly, completely and totally given to be quivering, spineless little bitches for Obama and the rest of the Anti-American ProgNazis.

Take a country and culture of pefectionists

And then introduce Catholicism.

And then have them learn Latin Hymns.



I truly did enjoy my time over in Korea.  To this day, the Ragin' Mrs. and I go to a Korean BBQ restaurant every chance we get.

Bela Fleck

Doing Bach





Yes, a banjo.  LISTEN!


!!!!!

This is where Dave's content would normally go

My days right now are like shoving ten pounds of crap into a five pound bag.  Thanks, Drum, for doing the yeoman's work.

Oh Dear Lord

The Dodgers lost, and they're out of the playoffs.

Now I'm going to have to spend my weekend dodging suicidal LA people who downed a handful of qualudes to drown their sorrows before they snorted handfuls of coke to wake up before they got into their cars to drive from where-ever to where-ever.

In other words, it'll probably be just like every other weekend on the roads here.  This place might not be Hell, but you can see Satan's front porch.

Of course he does

And it's not like the courts would actually rely on the plain language used by a bunch of old, white, privileged slave-owners, am I right?

Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to run for President

I mean, he was born in another country and served as Governor of the most populous State, so why not let him serve as President of all 50?

Well, Article 5, Section 2 of California's State Constitution only requires that the Governor be both a citizen of the United States and a resident of California, for the five years preceding the election.


The United States Constitution is a little more stringent. Article 2, Section 1, Paragraph 5:

No person except a natural born Citizen, ... shall be eligible to the Office of President;

Arnold was born in Austria, so that rules him out. Of course, given that the courts have repeatedly ignored the plain language of the Constitution on multiple occasions, I wouldn't be in the least surprised. And he's been thinking about it for a while, it seems...

Columbia University Law School professor Michael Dorf, an expert in constitutional law, said about the Governator’s case in 2007, “The law is very clear, but it’s not 100 percent clear that the courts would enforce that law rather than leave it to the political process.”

Oh, one other thing. If you cannot run for President, you cannot run for Vice-President*, either, although there have been numerous Senators and Representatives, and even Cabinet members who were foreign-born. (If disaster strikes, and they have to start figuring out who the senior Executive Department Secretary is, they would just skip over who is ineligible.) So he could get to attend meetings in the White House, and maybe even stay overnight a few times, but he won't get to live there...

* - Last sentence of the 12th Amendment: "But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States."

I've liked Jeff for years

so I tend to stop by his site a few times a day, even when he isn't posting, just because the comments are so great.

But he posts a wonderful link that will help us keep track of exactly what the Federal Government is doing. To you and I, and everyone we know, if you wanna be picky about it...

I'm not on Facebook, but I imagine a few of you are... Enjoy

One minor quibble is something that geoffb points out:

Instead of the poor guy having to go hat in hand asking for his debt limit to be raised, he simply writes a new debt limit amount on his contract himself and if the bankers can’t all agree to cancel it in a few days then it becomes the new limit.

Rinse, repeat, as needed until the walls fall down

Instead of the poor guy having to go hat in hand asking for his debt limit to be raised, he simply writes a new debt limit amount on his contract himself and if the bankers can’t all agree to cancel it in a few days then it becomes the new limit.
Rinse, repeat, as needed until the walls fall down
- See more at: http://proteinwisdom.com/?p=51586#sthash.AskiwoO9.dpuf

Instead of the poor guy having to go hat in hand asking for his debt limit to be raised, he simply writes a new debt limit amount on his contract himself and if the bankers can’t all agree to cancel it in a few days then it becomes the new limit.
Rinse, repeat, as needed until the walls fall down
- See more at: http://proteinwisdom.com/?p=51586#sthash.AskiwoO9.dpuf

Instead of the poor guy having to go hat in hand asking for his debt limit to be raised, he simply writes a new debt limit amount on his contract himself and if the bankers can’t all agree to cancel it in a few days then it becomes the new limit.
Rinse, repeat, as needed until the walls fall down.
- See more at: http://proteinwisdom.com/?p=51586#sthash.AskiwoO9.dpuf

Instead of the poor guy having to go hat in hand asking for his debt limit to be raised, he simply writes a new debt limit amount on his contract himself and if the bankers can’t all agree to cancel it in a few days then it becomes the new limit.
Rinse, repeat, as needed until the walls fall down.
- See more at: http://proteinwisdom.com/?p=51586#sthash.AskiwoO9.dpuf

Instead of the poor guy having to go hat in hand asking for his debt limit to be raised, he simply writes a new debt limit amount on his contract himself and if the bankers can’t all agree to cancel it in a few days then it becomes the new limit.
Rinse, repeat, as needed until the walls fall down.
- See more at: http://proteinwisdom.com/?p=51586#sthash.AskiwoO9.dpuf

For all the bluster

It turns out that the Obama Administration is nothing but a bunch of software pirates, after all...

They were using a piece of software that was actually FREE to use, so long as the copyright notice was included in the page(s) where the software was to be used. Not hard, and it is quite easy to post such notices, especially when it's just a case of copy-and-paste.

But NNNNOOOOOoooooooo... they actually DELETED the copyright notice. But, in their infinite knowledge of how we should be doing things, they left in the internal comments that allowed the company to prove that the software is theirs.

Yeah, these yahoos should be handed control of our most private lives... the parts that are so private, it is actually one of the four protected classes of communication (husband-wife, priest-penitent, doctor-patient and lawyer-client). So private, that doctors are actively protected from having to report anything they learn from patients while testifying.

Until ObamaCare, that is.

Burn it down. Scatter the stones.

How long?

Okay, this one will be a little math-intensive, so you can skip it unless you want to skip down to the end, just to see how boned we truly are.

Okay, as of the writing of this column, the running National Debt is $16,963,909,000,000 ($16.96 trillion) dollars.

If we were to suddenly stop borrowing and started spending a million dollars per minute - every minute, round the clock, round the calendar, 24/7/365 - on paying off the principal amount (the interest is handled as a separate expense, so we are just talking about the principal), how long would it take to pay off that amount?

A million dollars every minute x 60 minutes in an hour x 24 hours in a day x 365 days in a year = 525,600 minutes (which is where the song title from "Rent" comes from, btw) x $1,000,000 per minute = $ 525,600,000,000, or $525.6 billion per year. Divide into the number above, and we get... (drumroll, please)

32 years and 14 weeks.

That'a more than a generation... That long ago, Diana Spencer was walking down the aisle at St. Paul's Cathedral to meet Prince Charles... Ronald Reagan had just nominated the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court... The Space Shuttle had celebrated its first space mission...

That's if we stop borrowing NOW and start paying it off at $1 million/minute. Slower means longer. Not stopping makes it worse.

What cannot go on forever, simply won't.

To make it even easier

Let's see if we can make the First Amendment a little simpler to understand

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

 Simplest terms, brass tacks and bottom line, that means that the Government cannot tell you

1) what to think
2) what to say
3) who to say it to.

They cannot tell you, force you, or coerce you in any of your most personal beliefs, nor can they prevent you from giving voice to those beliefs, and they don't get to decide who you hang out with in order to discuss those beliefs.

They can limit conduct, especially if there is a clear and present danger of harm, and remember that a Democracy has the right and authority to fight back against actions that can harm it (pity the Weimar Republic didn't learn that lesson).

Lots of court cases have defined what limits can be placed on certain dangerous expressions (shouting 'fire' in a crowded theater, so-called "fighting words", intimidation, etc.), but absent the clear harm or threat of harm to another, the government does NOT get to tell you what to believe, what to say (or print out), and who your friends are. Those most basic of tenets must be defended.

And if it is a case of my neighbor trying to build a church on his property that crosses over our shared fence line, I would expect the police and courts to limit his expression insofar as it infringes upon my own rights, using force if necessary.

But what if it is the Government that is doing the infringing upon those rights? What fallback position do we have in those cases?

Relax, that's the next Amendment. Our Founders had just used all those "hunting tools" to kick out the most powerful Empire on the planet at that time.

The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed - where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once. -- Justice Alex Kozinski, Ninth Circuit Court, in his dissent to Silveria v. Locker

and
 

The very enumeration of the right takes out of the hands of government - even the Third Branch of Government - the power to decide on a case-by-case basis whether the right is really worth insisting upon. A constitutional guarantee subject to future judges' assessments of its usefulness is no constitutional guarantee at all. -- Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the 5-4 majority in District of Columbia, et al., v. Heller (2008)

Glendale Boy

Becomes youngest African-American Eagle Scout.

Good on 'im.  Making Eagle Scout is hard.  Doing it by the age of 12?  Unreal.

You want to know what the biggest help for him was?  I spotted it pretty early.

His name is James Hightower the Third.

His father's name is James Hightower the Second.

His mother's name is Lucretia Hightower.

Stable nuclear families produce good kids, as a rule.  Both his parents are active as Scout Leaders, based on the shirts they were wearing for the interview.  A nuclear family, setting good examples, produces good kids.  Eagle Scouts.  Leaders.

Now, compare this family to a majority of the EBT crowd that freaked out yesterday, and hazard a guess at how many of those folks come from families where they all share the same last name?

The Progressive mind in one paragraph

From a comment by Vox Day at his blog.

Phony is clearly one of the rhetorical crowd. He literally cannot learn from new information. That's why "Shut up, Tad" and "Go away, man talk" are valid responses for people like this. They simply have no ability to change their minds on the basis of information, they only change their minds in response to their changing emotions.

Phony will not change his mind on the subject unless someone he recognizes as his authority tells him to do so, and then he would very likely deny that he ever believed otherwise.

Doesn't that just perfectly capture how Progressives process information?  You can explain reality to a Progressive all day long.  You can point out the inherent flaws in their arguments.  You can use logic, reason, deductive reasoning, facts, numbers and statistics, and yet after explaining reality to a progressive you're met with "YOU'RE RACIST!" and they walk away convinced that they're the smartest people on the earth while you're a knuckle-dragging racist red-necked sister-humper.

Facts do not penetrate a Progressive brain.  Which is why they can look at Obama and call him their God, King and Savior, even while the economy tanks, American influence abroad is reduced to tatters, the military is being turned into a gutted, hollow shell of it's former self, our enemies act without any fear, and our former allies use the knives we've shoved into their backs to begin to severing ties to us.  Because you're racist.  And it's Bush's fault.

Seen all over the Conservative side of the web

Because it's that damn good.

A vet still serving his country by giving the barrycades back to the anti-American clown who ordered them put up around the WWII Memorial.

The pic is already going viral.  I'm just helping it along.