Articles of Interest...

Saturday 11 April 2009 - 20:05
President:
Iran's nuclear development a remarkable political gain



President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Saturday that the recent achievements in Iran's nuclear activities should be regarded as a major gain towards self-sufficiency, independence, national confidence as well as political victory for the Iranian nation.
President Ahmadinejad made the remarks in a meeting with universities' presidents and heads of research centers in Tehran on Saturday.
The fact was that the enemies failed to deal with the political will of the Iranian nation, he said.
"If we give helping hands in other areas and become mobilized, we can witness subsequent achievements," he added.
Iran's victory and success in the field of nuclear technology proved that the country should be compared with big powers in this sphere and this indicates that the global equations have changed significantly, said the Iranian president.
All political equations were linked to the decision of the Iranian nation and the way the country would deal with some big powers, he said.
He noted that,this was the era of prosperity, victory of justice over injustice and the domination of monotheism.




Uh huh....




out.

Nuclear Nightmare

Posted 06/22/2009 07:11 PM ET

Nuclear Proliferation: Al-Qaida says it will use Pakistan's nuclear weapons against the U.S. if it ever gets the chance. We're not surprised. Nor would we be surprised if it eventually got the opportunity.
'God willing, the (Pakistani) nuclear weapons will not fall into the hands of the Americans, and the mujahedeen would take them and use them against the Americans." So says Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, al-Qaida's top commander in Afghanistan, where the terror group has found a friend and ally in the Taliban.
If you think 9/11 was bad, just wait until al-Qaida gets a nuke, which is not as far-fetched as it sounds. Based both in Afghanistan and Pakistan's untamed northwest frontier, al-Qaida in April launched a major offensive into Pakistan's Swat Valley, engaging in fierce fighting with Pakistani army forces.
Swat is just 60 miles from Pakistan's capital of Islamabad. If al-Qaida beats the Pakistan army in Swat, what will keep it from marching on Islamabad and gaining control of the Pakistani nuclear arsenal — said to number as many as 55 warheads? If you said Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency, guess again. It's riddled with fundamentalist al-Qaida sympathizers.
If this isn't frightening enough, the U.S. stands under direct threat of possible attack by a nuclear power — North Korea. That country, in the destabilizing throes of a leadership change, warns it will launch a missile on July 4 toward Hawaii — even as the U.S. shadows a North Korean ship containing nuclear contraband.
Meanwhile, the world is rightly riveted on Iran's massive anti-government protests. But even if Iran's corrupt religious regime falls, the potential threat of a nuclear Iran remains. Once Iran builds a weapon, which now seems certain, its traditional enemies in the region — including Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Egypt and Syria, among others — will want to do the same.
This calls for leadership — the kind only the U.S. can supply. Unfortunately, the U.S. has followed a laissez-faire policy on nuclear weapons, abdicating its leadership to the entirely inept and corrupt U.N.
With the U.S. happy merely to talk, North Korea, al-Qaida and most seriously, Iran, are collectively thumbing their noses at us.
Pakistan's recent history shows where Iran may be headed.
Despite warnings from the U.S. and U.N. in the 1990s, Pakistan acquired nuclear know-how and designs from China and the former USSR. And it bought dual-use technology from Western Europe.
A.Q. Khan, the German-educated metallurgist who served as scientific midwife to Pakistan's bomb, then resold Pakistan's nuclear technology on the global black market to bad apples such as Iran, Libya and North Korea.

[youtube]R0-MIl1YqKg[/youtube]

Just thought it was funny...

CrackerJax said:

Just thought it was funny...

Click to expand...

lol good shit.. however...



... i hope it goes under

lol

CrackerJax said:

Okay, here is the first installment of an article of interest (to me). I will update on this thread stories i feel pertinent to the political arena. frankly, the awesome amount of carnage being waged against us as free citizens makes it a daunting task but... head in the sand just isn't going to cut it so here goes...





April 1: We have to admit, we were surprised when the headline "Obama Orders Chevrolet and Dodge Out of Nascar" turned out to be an April Fools' joke. How can it be a joke when today's reality is far more extreme?
Car and Driver has nothing on the federal government. If you think we're exaggerating, just look at some of the recent days' events, each at least as outrageous as the April Fools' joke of Obama ordering Chevy and Dodge to leave Nascar, and maybe more so. They include:
• The government's stimulus efforts, as toted up by Bloomberg.com, so far total $13.8 trillion — roughly equal to our entire GDP for one year, or $45,245 for every man, woman and child.
• A U.S. president with virtually no private-sector experience fires GM CEO Rick Wagoner, a 30-year industry veteran, and forces Chrysler into a shotgun wedding with foreign carmaker Fiat.
• Democratic Rep. Barney Frank, who also has never toiled in the private sector, declares "We own AIG," and advocates sweeping government control over corporate pay and bonuses.
• The Service Employees International Union asks the White House to fire the CEO of Bank of America — and, because organized labor spent more than $100 million to get Barack Obama elected in 2008, it just might get its wish.
• The "New GM," or "Government Motors" as some call it, is told it might have to scrap half its profitable models to build what President Obama calls the "next generation of clean cars" — cars that don't yet exist, and have no proven market demand.
• Further afield, a key adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hangs up a "no vacancy" sign on the Earth, arguing that the world at 6 billion people is "overpopulated" — echoing the nutty Malthusian comments from a top British official last month that the United Kingdom's population needs to shrink by 30 million.
• Congress declares carbon dioxide, a naturally occurring gas necessary for all life, to be a poison and seeks to regulate it through a "cap-and-trade" system — a costly tax on everyone who uses energy, at a time when the global economy is in recession.
Yes, sadly, we could go on. And on.
Each one of these pernicious tidbits has been dropped upon us just within the past week. We wish somebody could tell us they are all April Fools' jokes. But they aren't. So many things emerging from our government these days are so, well, crazy, that it's hard to keep up with them all. And maybe that's the point.
The recession, the market meltdown, huge job losses, and plunging home sales and prices have left Americans reeling and frightened of the future. In such a fraught state, they're vulnerable to those who seem to have simple, pat answers for the questions of the day. And whatever the question is, the answer will always be the same: More government.
Unfortunately, this is the kind of small-ball socialism that will ring the death knell for American capitalism, if it goes unchecked.
Today, we have the least capable, least accomplished people in the country — our 535 national legislators, abetted by a handful of presidential advisers and Cabinet members — seizing control of the private sector in ways that appear to be a violation of the spirit, if not the letter, of the U.S. Constitution.
And we, the people, are letting them do it. Where's the outrage?


yes indeed...quite a week...




out.

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Way to keep your finger on the pulse of what ails our republic. Where's the outrage you ask? People are sittin on it cause they've got their heads up their asses! instead of paying attention to the changes taking place, many peole are happily distracted. All the information you gave in this post is all factual and floating out there for all to see, but who really reads the newspaper anymore or actually pays close attention to what our elected officials are up to. People are sure not to miss an episode of American Idol or Dancing With the Stars, or John and Kate plus eight. The distractions are endless and we gladly eat em up and ask for seconds. There is a big dinner being planned in honor of the average american and the main course on the menu is going to be shit! I hope millions of people have got castiron stomachs.

jfgordon1 said:

lol good shit.. however...



... i hope it goes under

lol

Click to expand...

How can it go under with cops as the owners? That was one old donut shop... what was it 113 years old? That's a lot of cop heart attacks....

Great little article on the realities of the Health care debacle of 2009....


Weight Of Reality Sinks Health Reform

By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER | Posted Friday, July 24, 2009 4:20 PM PT
What happened to ObamaCare? Rhetoric met reality. As both candidate and president, the master rhetorician could conjure a world in which he bestows upon you health care nirvana: more coverage, less cost.
But you can't fake it in legislation. Once you commit your fantasies to words and numbers, the Congressional Budget Office comes along and declares that the emperor has no clothes.
President Obama premised the need for reform on the claim that medical costs are destroying the economy. True. But now we learn — surprise! — that universal coverage increases costs. The congressional Democrats' health care plans, says the CBO, increase costs in the range of $1 trillion plus.
In response, the president retreated to a demand that any bill he signs be revenue neutral.
But that's classic misdirection: If the fierce urgency of health care reform is to radically reduce costs that are producing budget-destroying deficits, revenue neutrality (by definition) leaves us on precisely the same path to insolvency that Obama himself declares unsustainable.
The Democratic proposals are worse still. Because they do increase costs, revenue neutrality means countervailing tax increases.
It's not just that it is crazily anti-stimulatory to saddle a deeply depressed economy with an income tax surcharge that falls squarely on small business and the investor class.
It's that health care reform ends up diverting for its own purposes a source of revenue that might otherwise be used to close the yawning structural budget deficit that is such a threat to the economy and to the dollar.
These blindingly obvious contradictions are why the Democratic health plans are collapsing under their own weight — at the hands of Democrats.
It's Max Baucus, Democratic chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, who called Obama unhelpful for ruling out taxing employer-provided health insurance as a way to pay for expanded coverage.
It's the Blue Dog Democrats in the House who wince at skyrocketing health-reform costs just weeks after having swallowed hemlock for Obama on a ruinous cap-and-trade carbon tax.
The president is therefore understandably eager to make this a contest between progressive Democrats and reactionary Republicans.
He seized on Republican Sen. Jim De-Mint's comment that stopping Obama on health care would break his presidency to protest, with perfect disingenuousness, that "this isn't about me. This isn't about politics."
It's all about him. Health care is his signature reform. And he knows that if he produces nothing, he forfeits the mystique that both propelled him to the presidency and has sustained him through a difficult first six months.
Which is why Obama's red lines are constantly shifting. Universal coverage? Maybe not.
No middle-class tax hit? Well, perhaps, but only if they don't "primarily" bear the burden. Because it's about him, Obama is quite prepared to sign anything as long as it is titled "health care reform."
This is not about politics?
Then why is it, to take but the most egregious example, that in this grand health care debate we hear not a word about one of the worst sources of waste in American medicine: the insane cost and arbitrary rewards of our malpractice system?
When a neurosurgeon pays $200,000 a year for malpractice insurance before he even turns on the light in his office or hires his first nurse, who do you think pays?
Patients, in higher doctor fees to cover the insurance.
And with jackpot justice that awards one claimant zillions while others get nothing—and one-third of everything goes to the lawyers — where do you think that money comes from?
The insurance companies, who then pass it on to you in higher premiums.
But the greatest waste is the hidden cost of defensive medicine: tests and procedures that doctors order for no good reason other than to protect themselves from lawsuit.
Every doctor knows, as I did when I practiced years ago, how much unnecessary medical cost is incurred with an eye not on medicine but on the law.
Tort reform would yield tens of billions in savings. Yet you cannot find it in the Democratic bills. And Obama breathed not a word about it in the full hour of his health care news conference.
Why? No mystery. The Democrats are parasitically dependent on huge donations from trial lawyers.
Didn't Obama promise a new politics that puts people over special interests? Sure.
And now he promises expanded, portable, secure, higher-quality medical care — at lower cost! The only thing he hasn't promised is to extirpate evil from the human heart. That legislation will be introduced this week.
© 2008 Washington Post Writers Group

Ghoulish science + Obamacare = health hazard

By Michelle Malkin • July 24, 2009 06:27 AM
My syndicated column today presses again on the freaky-deaky science czar John Holdren and the implications for Obamacare. Related read: Stacy McCain sheds light on Big Money and the Culture of Death. And Matt Barber wonders: Will there be a co-pay for forced abortion under Obamacare?
Ghoulish science + Obamacare = health hazard
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2009
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius tried to reassure citizens in New Orleans this week that Obamacare bureaucrats will make sound medical decisions for all Americans. She failed. Under the government-run plan, she promised, a team of health care experts will recommend what should be covered: “I think it would be wise to let science guide what the best health care package is.”
Gulp. It’s precisely the Obama administration’s view of sound “science” that should send chills down patients’ spines. Case in point: The president’s prestigious science czar John Holdren refuses to answer questions about his radical, published work on population control over the last 30 years.
Last week, I called the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to press Holdren on his views about forced abortions and mass sterilizations; his purported disavowal of Ecoscience, the 1977 book he co-authored with population control zealots Paul and Anne Ehrlich; and his continued embrace of forced-abortion advocate and eugenics guru Harrison Brown, whom he credits with inspiring him to become a scientist.
After investigative bloggers and this column reprinted extensive excerpts from Ecoscience, which mused openly about putting sterilants in the water supply to make women infertile and engineering society by taking away babies from undesirables and subjecting them to government-mandated abortions, the White House issued a statement from Holdren last week denying he embraced those proposals. The Ehrlichs challenged critics to read their and Holdren’s more recent research and works.
Well, I did indeed read one of Holdren’s recent works that reveals his clingy reverence for, and allegiance to, the gurus of population control authoritarianism. He’s just gotten smarter about cloaking it behind global warming hysteria. In 2007, he addressed the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference. Holdren served as AAAS president; the organization posted his full slide presentation on its website.
In the opening slide, Holdren admitted that his “preoccupation” with apocalyptic matters such as “the rates at which people breed” was a lifelong obsession spurred by scientist Harrison Brown’s work. Holdren heaped praise on Brown’s half-century-old book, “The Challenge to Man’s Future,” then proceeded to paint doom-and-gloom scenarios requiring drastic government interventions to control climate change.
Who is Holdren’s intellectual mentor, Harrison Brown? He was a “distinguished member” of the International Eugenics Society whom Holdren later worked with on a book about – you guessed it – world population and fertility. Brown advocated the same population control-freak measures Holdren put forth in Ecoscience. In “The Challenge to Man’s Future,” Brown envisioned a regime in which the “number of abortions and artificial inseminations permitted in a given year would be determined completely by the difference between the number of deaths and the number of births in the year previous.”
Brown exhorted readers to accept that “we must reconcile ourselves to the fact that artifical means must be applied to limit birth rates.” If we don’t, Brown warned, we faced a planet “with a writhing mass of human beings.” He likened the global population to a “pulsating mass of maggots.”
When I pressed Holdren’s office specifically about Holdren’s relationship with Harrison Brown, press spokesman Rick Weiss told me he didn’t know who Brown was and balked at drawing any conclusions about Holdren’s views based on his homage to lifelong intellectual mentor, colleague and continued inspiration Brown just two years ago.
Weiss lectured me rather snippily about the need for responsible journalism (he was a Washington Post reporter for 15 years). He then me not to expect any response from Holdren’s office to my question on whether Holdren disavows his relationship with a eugenics enthusiast who referred to the world population as a “pulsating mass of maggots” and championed a scheme of abortion and artificial insemination quotas.
If this is the kind of ghoulish “science” that guides the White House, we can only hope that Obamacare is dead on arrival.

OKAY, HERE IS AN EYE OPENER FOR ALL THOSE PPL WHO THINK THE GOVT. HEALTH CARE PLAN IS A GOOD IDEA....

Third World Care?

Posted 08/11/2009 06:54 PM ET

Reform: Buffeted by growing outrage that ObamaCare will ruin quality medical care in America, a top administration official has resorted to telling desperate lies.
'Frankly," HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told a recent meeting of AFL-CIO leaders, "the health delivery system is under-delivering in terms of quality of care. We spend over twice as much as any nation on earth, and our health results look like we're a developing country."
Tell that to all the princes and potentates from developing countries who flock to America for lifesaving treatment. Saudi billionaires could go anywhere in the world to cure what ails them, but they check into the Mayo Clinic or the Texas Medical Center.
And poll after poll shows Americans are much more satisfied with the quality of their care than their counterparts in industrialized countries with government-run health care.
More than 70% of adults in countries with government-controlled health care — Britain, Germany, Australia and New Zealand, as well as Canada — complain that their systems need either "fundamental change" or "complete rebuilding."
That's because they wait longer for treatment and die sooner than Americans from common cancers and other diseases, according to a study by Dr. Scott W. Atlas, a Hoover Institution senior fellow and chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center.
Consider breast cancer mortality, which is 88% higher in Britain and 9% higher in Canada. Or prostate cancer mortality, which is 604% higher in Britain and 184% higher in Canada.
We have better cancer survival rates not only because we have better treatment, but because we have earlier detection. And we have earlier detection because we have better access to tests that screen for cancer.
For example, almost 90% of middle-aged U.S. women have had a mammogram, compared with 72% of Canadians; more than half of U.S. men — 54% — have had a prostate-specific antigen test, while only 16% of Canadians have had a PSA, and fully 30% of Americans have had a colonoscopy — the procedure for detecting colon cancer — compared with 5% of Canadians.
We also spend less time waiting for care. In fact, Canadians and Britons "wait about twice as long — sometimes more than a year — to see a specialist, have elective surgery such as hip replacements, or get radiation treatment for cancer," Atlas found.
Access to lifesaving drugs is also better in the U.S. Some 56% of Americans take statin drugs that reduce cholesterol and protect against heart disease, compared with 36% of Dutch, 29% of Swiss, 23% of Britons and 17% of Italians.
Finally, we have better access to critical diagnostic equipment. The U.S. has 34 CT scanners per million people vs. 12 in Canada and eight in Britain. And we operate 27 MRI machines per million compared with six per million in Canada and Britain.
The U.S. medical industry is responsible for the vast majority of all health care innovations in the world. It's no coincidence that since the mid-1970s, the Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology has gone to Americans more often than recipients from all other countries combined.
America decidedly does not have a Third World health care system. But it will if Washington takes control of it.

CrackerJax said:

Great little article on the realities of the Health care debacle of 2009....


Weight Of Reality Sinks Health Reform

By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER | Posted Friday, July 24, 2009 4:20 PM PT
What happened to ObamaCare? Rhetoric met reality. As both candidate and president, the master rhetorician could conjure a world in which he bestows upon you health care nirvana: more coverage, less cost.
But you can't fake it in legislation. Once you commit your fantasies to words and numbers, the Congressional Budget Office comes along and declares that the emperor has no clothes.
President Obama premised the need for reform on the claim that medical costs are destroying the economy. True. But now we learn — surprise! — that universal coverage increases costs. The congressional Democrats' health care plans, says the CBO, increase costs in the range of $1 trillion plus.
In response, the president retreated to a demand that any bill he signs be revenue neutral.
But that's classic misdirection: If the fierce urgency of health care reform is to radically reduce costs that are producing budget-destroying deficits, revenue neutrality (by definition) leaves us on precisely the same path to insolvency that Obama himself declares unsustainable.
The Democratic proposals are worse still. Because they do increase costs, revenue neutrality means countervailing tax increases.
It's not just that it is crazily anti-stimulatory to saddle a deeply depressed economy with an income tax surcharge that falls squarely on small business and the investor class.
It's that health care reform ends up diverting for its own purposes a source of revenue that might otherwise be used to close the yawning structural budget deficit that is such a threat to the economy and to the dollar.
These blindingly obvious contradictions are why the Democratic health plans are collapsing under their own weight — at the hands of Democrats.
It's Max Baucus, Democratic chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, who called Obama unhelpful for ruling out taxing employer-provided health insurance as a way to pay for expanded coverage.
It's the Blue Dog Democrats in the House who wince at skyrocketing health-reform costs just weeks after having swallowed hemlock for Obama on a ruinous cap-and-trade carbon tax.
The president is therefore understandably eager to make this a contest between progressive Democrats and reactionary Republicans.
He seized on Republican Sen. Jim De-Mint's comment that stopping Obama on health care would break his presidency to protest, with perfect disingenuousness, that "this isn't about me. This isn't about politics."
It's all about him. Health care is his signature reform. And he knows that if he produces nothing, he forfeits the mystique that both propelled him to the presidency and has sustained him through a difficult first six months.
Which is why Obama's red lines are constantly shifting. Universal coverage? Maybe not.
No middle-class tax hit? Well, perhaps, but only if they don't "primarily" bear the burden. Because it's about him, Obama is quite prepared to sign anything as long as it is titled "health care reform."
This is not about politics?
Then why is it, to take but the most egregious example, that in this grand health care debate we hear not a word about one of the worst sources of waste in American medicine: the insane cost and arbitrary rewards of our malpractice system?
When a neurosurgeon pays $200,000 a year for malpractice insurance before he even turns on the light in his office or hires his first nurse, who do you think pays?
Patients, in higher doctor fees to cover the insurance.
And with jackpot justice that awards one claimant zillions while others get nothing—and one-third of everything goes to the lawyers — where do you think that money comes from?
The insurance companies, who then pass it on to you in higher premiums.
But the greatest waste is the hidden cost of defensive medicine: tests and procedures that doctors order for no good reason other than to protect themselves from lawsuit.
Every doctor knows, as I did when I practiced years ago, how much unnecessary medical cost is incurred with an eye not on medicine but on the law.
Tort reform would yield tens of billions in savings. Yet you cannot find it in the Democratic bills. And Obama breathed not a word about it in the full hour of his health care news conference.
Why? No mystery. The Democrats are parasitically dependent on huge donations from trial lawyers.
Didn't Obama promise a new politics that puts people over special interests? Sure.
And now he promises expanded, portable, secure, higher-quality medical care — at lower cost! The only thing he hasn't promised is to extirpate evil from the human heart. That legislation will be introduced this week.
© 2008 Washington Post Writers Group

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The ending of the article is classic. I would give you + rep if I could CJ, but I can't. Good find, though.

For truth, justice and the CrackerJax way!

Shhh! Gallup Reports That Conservatives Outnumber Libs in All 50 States; Media Plays Dumb

Media ignores stunning news--again.

By TOM BLUMER

You know this is important polling news, because the establishment media is pretending it doesn't exist.
You can't find a relevant reference to it in searches on "Gallup" at the New York Times, AP.org, the Washington Post, or the LA Times. A Google News search on "Gallup conservatives outnumber liberals" (not in quotes) comes up with all of eight results.
The news isn't just that self-identified conservatives outnumber self-identified liberals nationwide. That's old hat. The big news from Gallup is that conservatives outnumber liberals in every state in the union, including supposedly uberliberal Vermont and Massachusetts.
Note the Gallup story's clearly impertinent headline, accompanied by an absolutely wrong subheadline (HTs to LifeNews.com, CNS News [linked by Drudge], and an e-mailer):
Political Ideology: "Conservative" Label Prevails in the South
Conservatives outnumber liberals in nearly every state, but not in D.C.
The strength of "conservative" over "liberal" in the realm of political labels is vividly apparent in Gallup's state-level data, where a significantly higher percentage of Americans in most states -- even some solidly Democratic ones -- call themselves conservative rather than liberal.
...Despite the Democratic Party's political strength -- seen in its majority representation in Congress and in state houses across the country -- more Americans consider themselves conservative than liberal. While Gallup polling has found this to be true at the national level over many years, and spanning recent Republican as well as Democratic presidential administrations, the present analysis confirms that the pattern also largely holds at the state level. Conservatives outnumber liberals by statistically significant margins in 47 of the 50 states, with the two groups statistically tied in Hawaii, Vermont, and Massachusetts.
The margins may not be "statistically significant," but the reported result still shows conservatives on top in HI (+5), VT (+1) and MA (+1). I also have to wonder how you can have a 5-point or more margin of error in a poll of 160,000 people.
As to how Gallup's online report was organized, the answer is "not well." Sorry guys, it's not exactly news that the conservative label prevails in the South, so why did you emphasize and lead with that obvious point? The news is that conservatism prevails at least slightly in each and every state; the District of Columbia, despite Democrats' fondest wishes, is not a state. It was also "clever" of Gallup to save its 50-state table for Page 2 of its three-page report.
It's hard not to wonder if someone at Gallup did what they did with the headline and subheadline to help ensure that establishment media outlets ignored this stunning news. I would suggest that they didn't have to work that hard; the media would have ignored it anyway.
A final bit of good news: The poll was taken over a spread-out period from January through June. I don't think anyone would want to bet against the percentage of self-identifying conservatives being higher at the end of the polling period than it was in the beginning.

This truly exposes for all to see what is TRULY going on here, and why the American ppl despise this sort of politics. Read on.... bold is for emphasis.
===============================================

Health Reform Is Just Subterfuge; Dream Is Democratic Dictatorship

By JOHN F. GASKIPosted 09/22/2009 05:55 PM ET

By now the realization should be taking hold that the Democrats' health care plan has been exposed as a hoax. And it was the Democrats themselves who discredited and exposed it, but in a very ironic way. Of course, you won't hear this bombshell news reported by Democrat partisans Katie Couric, Charles Gibson and Brian Williams.
As for the substance, remember the Democrats' original rationale for their national health care takeover scheme? They wanted all uninsured Americans to be covered, right? Remember?
But now they concede that their mega-upheaval of a plan would still leave about 15 million without medical insurance. Yet they still advocate the plan! Why?
First, a digression: Don't believe that "47 million uninsured" number. That canard is beyond a hoax. It is a fraud and a lie.
For example, it includes at least 10 million illegal aliens (yes, that is the right term for those who enter our country by violating American law) and an additional five million or so legal foreign residents. Those categories are not "uninsured Americans" because they are not Americans.
The notorious 47 million also includes millions of wealthy people who do not purchase medical insurance — rendering themselves self-insured, not uninsured.
The biggest deceptions of all may be counting a large cohort of the young and vigorous who make the rational cost/benefit decision not to buy medical insurance yet, and several million others who qualify for free insurance and just don't bother to sign up!
Bottom line, subtract out the un-uninsured and other inapplicable categories and the true number of Americans without health insurance is somewhere around 7 million, maybe 10 million conservatively (compared with 15 million after Democrat "reform"?). Google the issue for about 10 minutes to verify.
Another way the Democrats inadvertently reveal their own national health insurance dishonesty is through infidelity to a second objective — cost control.
Remember that one? They are hoping you don't, especially since the Congressional Budget Office has reported that the Obama-Democrat scheme would add $1 trillion to the national health tab over the next decade. Yet the Dems still want their plan. Why?
Why, indeed? It must be something else, therefore. If their own action undermines their stated aims, and still they desperately favor the action, then the Democrats' real purpose must be something different, something they will not reveal. But what? Simple:
Have you noticed how the Washington Democrats like to take control of things, particularly big things in the economy such as the major banks and the auto industry, as well as health care?

(Obama has realized he doesn't have to literally own the banks to control them. He can, instead, achieve control through bank dependence on TARP money and through his own coercion and intimidation. Step out of line, that is, and a bank will be publicly vilified by Barney Frank and other operatives, and maybe even have its executives prosecuted.)
When American business, American jobs and the American people become totally dependent on Obama and the Democrats for money and credit, including student loans for good measure, how much power will that give the Obama Democrats over our country?
The portrait coming into focus is one of either totalitarian socialism or an unholy socialist hybrid with fascism. And when you are dependent on the decision of a Democrat bureaucrat for crucial medical treatment, how much power does that give the Democrats over you?
(Do you suppose party registration or political contributions might enter the bureaucrats' calculus? Recall how, in the GM reorganization, the Dems axed profitable dealers who were known to be Republican.)
When the Democrats achieve literal death-grip power over the lives of all our people, that is when they also achieve their long-cherished dream of absolute power and a Democrat dictatorship.
Dictatorship in a virtual one-party state is the correct forecast because our present rulers can never be voted out of national power after they grant amnesty to the millions of illegal aliens, who would promptly be registered as mostly Democrat voters by Acorn!
Now do you see what the real scheme is? Now does it all make sense? This is not your father's Democrat party. This is also not about health care, ultimately. It's about raw political power and the long-promised socialist takeover of the United States.
No public option, they now suggest? Don't believe it. They'll create a public option, soon to become the only option, by stealth — a kind of Fannie-Freddie co-op, because government control, in this case medical dictatorship, is an article of theology for the lib Dems.
We do not have a health care crisis in this country — because everyone already gets health care. It is just that some rely on the emergency room as their private medical services provider, so the system is inefficient and definitely too expensive overall.
We do have a health insurance problem , and a health care cost crisis, but not a national health care crisis. And both real problems are readily manageable if the Dems would only allow it.

We need to permit and foster interstate insurance competition, medical savings accounts and tort reform to help reduce costs, and tax credits for health insurance purchase to expand coverage — from about 98% of the population, in reality, to closer to 100%. Those numbers also help punctuate, and puncture, the true nature of the liberal Democrats' health hoax.
Incidentally, or not, despite the Democrats' fumbling of this whole issue, the Republicans are succumbing to their opponents' red herring, straw man, jiu-jitsu diversionary misdirection on the "death panels" matter. It is not those prospective end-of-life counseling "services" that are the real death panels, although that is a fair term for them.
The real Democrat death panels would be the thousands of politically appointed bureaucrats wielding life-and-death power over our citizenry through their decisions concerning whether to bestow or withhold lifesaving treatment.
This is it, America. This isn't really about a health policy issue; it is about the survival, or takeover, of our nation. If the Dems succeed in cramming their bitter medicine, actually poison, down your throat, the country is finished. It is the town hall protestors who seem to sense this most clearly. I hope the preceding diagnosis and prognosis help, too.


• Gaski, an associate professor at the Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame, has been a registered Democrat for more than 20 years. He is also author of the recently published "Frugal Cool: How to Get Rich — Without Making Very Much Money" (Corby Books, 2009).

First, that's an opinion piece. Opinion is not the same as fact, or it would be called a "fact piece".

Second, it's from the same guy who 5 years ago called raising the minimum wage "immoral".

John Gaski as a registered Democrat = sheep in wolf's clothing. I could go register as a Republican, would that make my anti-republican sentiments any more valid in your eyes?

I'll wait for someone with a bit more on the ball......

CrackerJax said:

I'll wait for someone with a bit more on the ball......

Click to expand...

Good luck with that. I'm sure when people see you're posting about health care again, they'll just FLOCK over here to respond.

Hmm.. still waiting, I see. =) don't worry, I'm sure they'll be along shortly.

The warning that was ignored

In the 1990s, most people didn't know the Commodity Futures Trading Commission's chairman was warning about derivatives and being ignored. Frontline's Michael Kirk reports on Brooksley Born's fight against the economic establishment.
Former Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairwoman Brooksley Born. (Frontline / PBS)
Kai Ryssdal: Despite its name, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission does more than keep an eye on trades in pork belly futures and winter wheat prices. The CFTC is the federal agency that regulates trading in derivatives. Things like credit default swaps that you'll recognize from the days of the AIG bailout. Those swaps helped drag the whole financial system to the brink of collapse last year.
There's a lot of talk lately about coming up with new regulations for the derivatives market and the CFTC is in the financial news all the time. In the mid and late 1990s, though, most people didn't even know the CFTC existed. They probably didn't know about the warnings its chairman was giving about the dangers of derivatives trading. And they almost certainly didn't know she was ignored.
Tonight Frontline on PBS offers its documentary about that story "The Warning." Frontline's Michael Kirk reports.
MICHAEL KIRK: In 1996, the U.S. economy was on a roll. The stock market was mid-way through its greatest run in history. And in August, President Bill Clinton named a new head of the CFTC -- Brooksley Born.
Her first priority: to look into the booming new market in over-the-counter derivatives.
That year, the market in over the counter derivatives was worth roughly $20 trillion and growing at about 20 percent annually. But it wasn't the market's size or the speed of its growth that worried Born.
Born believed the lack of transparency left the market open to fraud.
Joe Nocera's a reporter with the New York Times. He says fraud came up during Born's first meeting with the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan.
Instead of taking the hint, Born began investigating. She immediately ran up against opposition from the president's Working Group on financial markets. She even got an angry call from Larry Summers, the Deputy Treasury Secretary.
Summers, his boss at the Treasury Robert Rubin, and Alan Greenspan were big believers in letting the markets look after themselves.
Mark Brickell is a former derivatives banker at JPMorgan Chase, and an industry lobbyist. He says Greenspan wanted to regulate over-the-counter derivatives as little as possible.
Where Greenspan saw benefits, Born saw risks. She prepared a document that laid out her concerns. The president's working group discussed it at an emergency meeting in May 1998.
Michael Greenberger was one of Born's aides at the time.
Undeterred, Brooksley Born published her list of concerns. The members of the Working Group struck back. They insisted Congress shut Born down.
Four congressional committees called on her to testify. But they weren't persuaded. Instead, they stripped the CFTC of its powers to regulate the markets. Born quit. Ten years later, she watched, appalled, as the market collapsed.
Despite the financial crisis, the market in over-the-counter derivatives is now more than $450 trillion in size. The House Financial Services Committee approved new rules for the market last week. But many people say the rules aren't enough to protect the economy.
In Boston, I'm Michael Kirk for Marketplace.

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Look no farther than Billy Boy Clinton folks.......you know the one that wanted to ride the economy....to increase his popularity....knowing FULL WELL that the seeds for disaster were being not only sown... but watered.
One person started the call to stop..... muzzled.

Clinton sold us all out long ago!!!

Why Government Health Care Keeps Falling in the Polls

The health-care debate is part of a larger moral struggle over the free-enterprise system.



By ARTHUR C. BROOKS

Regardless of how President Barack Obama's health-care agenda plays out in Congress, it has not been a success in public opinion. Opposition to ObamaCare has risen all year.
According to the Gallup polling organization, the percentage of Americans who believe the cost of health care for their families will "get worse" under the proposed reforms rose to 49% from 42% in just the past month. The percentage saying it would "get better" stayed at 22%.
Many are searching for explanations. One popular notion is that demagogues in the media are stirring up falsehoods against what they say is a long-overdue solution to the country's health-care crisis.
Americans deserve more credit. They haven't been brainwashed, and they aren't upset merely over the budget-busting details. Rather, public resistance stems from the sense that the proposed reforms do violence to three core values of America's free enterprise culture: individual choice, personal accountability, and rewards for ambition.
First, Americans recoil at policies that strip choices from citizens and pass them to bureaucrats. ObamaCare systematically does so. The current proposals in Congress would effectively limit choice across the entire spectrum of health care: What kind of health insurance citizens can buy, what kind of doctors they can see, what kind of procedures their doctors will perform, what kind of drugs they can take, and what treatment options they may have.
Meanwhile, ObamaCare would limit the ability of people to choose affordable insurance coverage through less-comprehensive, consumer-driven insurance plans. And it wouldn't allow Americans to shop for better health-care plans from out-of-state carriers.
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Associated Press





Second, Americans believe we should be responsible for the consequences of our actions. Many citizens bitterly view the auto and Wall Street bailouts as gifts to people who took imprudent risks, imperiled the entire economic system, and now appear to be walking away from the mess.
Similarly, Americans are cold to a health-care system that effectively rewards individuals for waiting to get insurance until they get sick—subsidizing their coverage by taxing those who responsibly carry insurance in good times and bad.
On its face, the reformers' promise to provide health insurance to nearly all, regardless of pre-existing conditions, is appealing. But as most instinctively realize, if people don't have to worry about carrying insurance until they need it, many won't buy it. Already, the Census Bureau tells us that 21% of the uninsured are in households earning at least $75,000. Although there are certainly plausible reasons for this in some cases, this phenomenon will worsen under ObamaCare.
Third, ObamaCare discourages personal ambition. The proposed reforms will institute a set of government mandates, price controls and other strictures that will make highly trained specialists, drug researchers and medical device makers less valued now and in the future. Americans understand that when you take away the incentive to make money while saving lots of lives, the cures, therapies and medical innovations of tomorrow may never be discovered.
Yet we are told this is all for the best. In his commencement speech at Arizona State University earlier this year, Mr. Obama told the graduates not to "fall back on the formulas of success that have been peddled so frequently in recent years": "You're taught to chase after all the usual brass rings . . . let me suggest that such an approach won't get you where you want to go."
Crass materialism is indeed a tyranny that can lead to personal misery. But most Americans believe it's up to individuals, not a nannying government, to decide what constitutes too much income and too much ambition.
An April 2009 survey conducted by the polling firm Ayers, McHenry & Associates for the conservative nonprofit group Resurgent Republic asked respondents which of the following statements about the role of government came closer to their view: (a) "Government policies should promote fairness by narrowing the gap between rich and poor, spreading the wealth, and making sure that economic outcomes are more equal"; or (b) "Government policies should promote opportunity by fostering job growth, encouraging entrepreneurs, and allowing people to keep more of what they earn." Sixty-three percent chose the second option; just 31% chose the first.
This is consistent with nonpartisan surveys showing that most Americans think our increasingly redistributionist government is overstepping its bounds. For example, a September 2009 Gallup Poll found that 57% believe the government is "doing too much"—the highest percentage in more than a decade. Just 38% said it "should do more."
We will continue to hear both sides of the health-care debate argue about particulars of insurance markets, the deficit impacts of reform, and the minutiae of budgetary assumptions. These arguments, while important, do not address the deeper issues involved.
The health-care debate is part of a moral struggle currently being played out over the free enterprise system. It will be replayed in every major policy debate in the coming months, from financial regulatory reform to a cap-and-trade system for limiting carbon emissions. The choices will ultimately always come down to competing visions of America's future. Will we strengthen freedom, individual opportunity and enterprise? Or will we expand the role of the state and its power?
Mr. Brooks is president of the American Enterprise Institute and author of "The Battle: How the Fight Between Free Enterprise and Big Government Will Shape America's Future," to be published by Basic Books next June.



Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Sex for pleasure may not seem revolutionary until you apply the idea to other species. Other creatures appear to be having sex for much more than procreation, with each newly discovered sex act further firing up the “what’s natural” sexual debate.
Dirty, naked, animal, grunting sex can have you feeling like you’re one with nature. But that takes on a whole new meaning when cast against all of the action had in the Animal Kingdom.
Foreplay
Not only do spiders warm up, LiveScience reports that male Australian redback spiders engage in 100 minutes of foreplay. In arousing a female, he must perform an intricate dance upon her web. If she digs it, he’s given the green light to insert one of his two sexual organs into one of her two semen “storage” organs.
She may then actually eat him, even just partially, during sex. After 15-20 minutes, they’ll separate, only for the male to do another mating dance in hopes of gaining access to her other sperm storage organ. University of Toronto researchers found that males who wooed potential mates for 100 minutes or more were likelier to mount again.
Men, take note: the shorter the male’s foreplay session, the greater his likelihood of being eaten by his mate on the first go-around.

Oral Sex
Who would’ve thought? Fruit bats have oral sex. According to Chinese and British researchers, oral sex for these mammals means more time having sex. While having sexual relations in a “hanging” position,” the female will perform oral sex on the male.
Same-Sex Attractions
Nature is trumping nurture in the great “what makes people gay” debate. Humans have observed same-sex attractions in approximately 1,500 species, including deep-sea octopuses, dolphins, killer whales, crabs, and giraffes. The entire dwarf chimpanzee species, one of the closest to humans, is bisexual.
While some interactions are quick sexual encounters, others court each other, like the male ostriches, known to perform “pirouette dances” for a male of interest. Sometimes the sex is regular. Male lions guarantee loyalty and tribal bonds by having sex with each other.
Sometimes the romance is for life. Male penguins have been known to nest, as have female black-headed gulls, with nearly one-fourth of black swan families headed by same-sex couples.
Required Commitment
Female painted dragon lizards accept only long-term relationships. This is in large part because she’s not going to reproduce after the first tryst. According to researchers at Göteborg University in Sweden, reproduction will happen only if her mate doesn’t skip town.
One-Night Stands
Female crickets are into the thrill of the chase. According to Illinois State University researchers, they actually mark their mates with a chemical imprint during sex to make sure they don’t “do it” with the same male twice. A female cricket will also stay clear of males bearing the mark of their identical twin sisters.
Extreme Sexual Sadism
Remember those Australian redback spiders? They actually regularly engage in something thankfully rare to the human species – sexual killings. Even when a male spider breaks out all of his best dance moves, there’s a good chance that he’s still going to be killed and eaten by Mrs. Hannibal Lecter when the deed is done.
Adding insult to injury, another male spider may work his way into the action. Apparently, she can’t tell – or doesn’t care to tell – the difference between mates.
Swinging
Bonobos (dwarf chimpanzees) are known for being very promiscuous, having heterosexual and gay sex more often than all other primates. This female-dominated, nearly nonviolent group has been observed engaging in all sorts of sexual activities. Mothers have even been known to mate with their grown sons. Such free love is believed to strengthen social bonds and alleviate conflicts amongst these fairly peaceful creatures.
Group Sex
Given their short breeding season, some species need to be promiscuous in the name of survival. In passing along their genes, red-sided garter snakes are known for “orgies” – with a bunch of snakes forming big “mating balls.”
Female toads sometimes have sex with several males at once. This activity may result in her drowning or going on to produce offspring with several dads.
Masturbation
Monkeys, red deer, porcupines and killer whales are among a host of animals known to pleasure themselves. And they go out of their way to get creative, doing things like rubbing themselves against stones or roots.
Cheating
Most animals are promiscuous. The female sparrow, for example, has “extramarital” relations, even when she has paired with a mate. She’s always on the lookout for mates who are small, dark and handsome.
“Mile-High” Club
Humming birds and the highly aerial swifts take sex to a whole new level, mating while airborne.
Transsexualism
The desire to change from one sex to another isn’t found only among humans. Worms, fish and slugs are among the species that undergo “sequential hermaphroditism.” They begin life as one sex, but change to another later in life.
Prostitution
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany discovered that male chimpanzees give females pieces of meat for sex. These males were found to get twice as much action as males who didn’t share.
Male flies have also been observed giving females food for sex. The gifts given by balloon flies are empty silk balloons, meant to fool the female into sex. Of course, if this is discovered, it doesn’t matter. He has sex several times a day with a number of females anyway.
Suddenly, maintaining our sex lives doesn’t seem nearly as exhausting, does it?
Dr. Yvonne K. Fulbright is a sex educator, relationship expert, columnist and founder of Sexuality Source Inc. She is the author of several books including, "Touch Me There! A Hands-On Guide to Your Orgasmic Hot Spots."