Scumbag Blues

In honor of tonight's vote.

Random surfing (sorta)

And I came upon this screed:

I was a normal size until my late 20s, and still hated my body and started dieting when I was 12 and a size 5. And when I was a 9/10 during my early 20s, I thought I was HUGE and disgusting and “Oh my God, how can you even LOOK at me?” gross. And when in the fuck is that going to CHANGE? When are we women going to stop treating NORMAL like it’s DISGUSTING? I’m not advocating for “fat acceptance,” that’s not my scene, and I don’t love being a size 20.

But Jesus fuck, this shit has to STOP. It’s sick and it’s a wrong way to go through your life. We women need to think more like men, or even better: like the Bush administration. NOTHING TO SEE HERE, EVERYTHING’S GREAT AND RIGHT AND TRUE! DON’T MIND THAT GIANT TURD SCHMEAR WE LEFT ON THE CONSTITUTION, THIS IS THE GREATEST NATION ON EARTH!

It's interesting* that even a rant about weight somehow all comes back to DAMN THAT BUUUSHHSSHSH1111!!!!


By "interesting" I mean pathetic.

Dana Perino Nominated to Broadcasting Board of Governors

Is this just Obama's way of shutting her up?

The only good I see from this is that it's really pissing off the HuffPo crowd.

Harry's New Taxes

You'd think this would be getting a bit more play in the MSM ... from NRO's Healthcare Blog:

An income surtax on taxpayers earning more than $500,000 a year,[1]
An excise tax on high-cost "Cadillac" health insurance plans that cost more than $8,500 a year for individuals or $21,000 for families,[2]
An excise tax on medical devices such as wheelchairs, breast pumps, and syringes used by diabetics for insulin injections,[3]
A cap on the exclusion of employer-provided health insurance without offsetting tax cuts,[4]
A limit on itemized deductions for taxpayers with a top income tax rate greater than 28 percent,[5]
A windfall profits tax on health insurance companies,[6]
A value-added tax, which would tax the value added to a product at each stage of production,[7]
An increase in the Medicare portion of the payroll tax to 3.4 percent for incomes great than $200,000 a year ($250,000 for married filers),[8]
An excise tax on sugar-sweetened beverages including non-diet soda and sports drinks,[9]
Higher taxes on alcoholic beverages including beer, wine, and spirits,[10]
A tax on individuals without acceptable health care coverage of up to 2.5 percent of their adjusted gross income,[11]
A limit on contributions to health savings accounts,[12]
An 8 percent tax on all wages paid by employers that do not provide their employees health insurance that satisfies the requirements defined by the Secretary of Health and Human Services,[13]
A limit on contributions to flexible spending arrangements,[14]
Elimination of the deduction for expenses associated with Medicare Part D subsidies,[15]
An increase in taxes on international businesses,[16]
Elimination of the tax credits paper companies take for biofuels they create in their production process—the so-called "Black Liquor credit,"[17]
Fees on insured and self-insured health plans,[18]
A limit or repeal of the itemized deduction for medical expenses,[19]
A limit on the Qualified Medical Expense definition,[20]
An increase in the payroll taxes on students,[21]
An extension of the Medicare payroll tax to all state and local government employees,[22]
An increase in taxes on hospitals,[23]
An increase in the estate tax,[24]
Increased efforts to close the mythical "tax gap,"[25]
A 5 percent tax on cosmetic surgery and similar procedures such as Botox treatments, tummy tucks, and face lifts,[26]
A tax on drug companies,[27]
An increase in the corporate tax on providers of health insurance,[28] and
A $500,000 deduction limitation for the compensation paid by health insurance companies to their officers, employees, and directors.[29]

I know that the first two, at least, are not indexed for inflation.

Who doesn't want the Federal Reserve audited?

These people.

Another Saturday Night Vote?

Under the cover of darkness they're going to vote to proceed on this monstrosity in the Senate.

Appropriate, since if people saw the bill for what it is, it wouldn't have the meager support it currently enjoys. One wonders why the AP assigned two reporters to fact check this stuff, while Sarah Palin's book got eleven?

Grace-Marie Turner write for National Review on the Reid plan:

The 2,074-page health reform bill that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid unveiled last night is a maze of complexity and duplicity. It spends $848 billion over ten years to provide new subsidies for health coverage, increases taxes by $486 billion, and allegedly cuts spending by $491 billion. Yet it still leaves 24 million people without insurance.

The new taxes never will be enough to pay for Reid's reform plan because Congress does not have the will to make the cuts to Medicare and Medicaid he uses to bring down the bill's advertised cost.

What's that? It's going to cost more and 24 million are still uninsured?

Even worse, at this moment, is the job-killing aspect of the plan.

Job-killing taxes on employers: Employers will be faced with new penalties and taxes, especially if they hire workers who qualify for any of the new federal subsidies for health insurance. According to the Congressional Budget Office, "Firms with more than 50 workers that did not offer coverage would have to pay a penalty of $750 for each full-time worker if any of their workers obtained subsidized coverage through the insurance exchanges."

Expect to see more part-time hires. Or no hires.

And then there are the taxes. OH, there are the taxes. On "the rich", for now. But the taxes are not indexed for inflation, so expect yourself to be considered rich in the near future. More from NRO:

Then there are the tax increases. CBO gives Senator Reid credit for cutting the budget deficit in a second decade, but that’s not because the plan would do anything to slow the pace of rising health-care costs. It wouldn’t do much of anything in that regard. What it would do is impose massive tax increases, in part by resorting to the same kind of discredited “bracket creep” so despised by the public in the 1970s. At that time, the thresholds separating the various income-tax brackets were not indexed for inflation, which meant that every year many people paid taxes at a higher rate simply because inflation had boosted their wages. Of course, many in Congress liked it that way because it meant a tax increase without the nuisance of a politically unpopular vote. Senator Reid and his Democratic colleagues are trying to pull off the same trick now. They are proposing two tax increases which would hit America’s middle class increasingly hard over time because the dollar thresholds used to assess the tax are not indexed to full inflation. The first, the 40 percent excise tax on high-cost insurance plans, would apply initially only to family policies exceeding $23,500 in annual premiums and individual plans with premiums exceeding $8,500. Those thresholds would increase by general inflation plus one percentage point each year, but that would be still below the rate of expected medical inflation. Consequently, more and more middle-class families would find themselves bumping into the premium thresholds as time passed.

The same trick is being used on the payroll tax, 2.9 is increased to 3.4 on those making more than $200,000 a year. As more and more hit that $200,000, they join the ranks of the "rich" as that income increasingly become "middle class."

Hope and Change?

Trolling Drudge headlines ....

Not so much change. And, I'm not feeling very hopey either.

In other news, no Afghanistan decision until after Thanksgiving. Smart Power.

Look at my breasts

Over at Pandagon, they are up in arms over the new government recommendations regarding breast cancer screening:

Government to women: Women over 40 are expendable. They have outlived their usefulness now that they need to dye their hair, and their breasts aren't so naturally perky anymore. Let 'em die, because we don't want to have to pay for their treatment.

Oh, wait. There isn't a single post about this at Pandagon. There are, though FOUR posts on Sarah Palin on the front page.

I mean, why should we be concerned that a government task force has determined that breast cancer screening is too expensive for women under 50? It's not like any of us know any women who had breast cancer under the age of fifty ... oh, except for these folks who run a a breast imaging center:

"I feel strongly against this. It's a large step backward," she says. "It puts a lot of confusion out there. Starting at age 40, a yearly mammogram reduces a woman's chance of dying from breast cancer by 30 percent. We detect breast cancer in women in their 40s every week here."

This should allay our fears:

Linda Douglass, the communications director for the White House Office of Health Reform, responded to Mr. Camp’s comments by stressing that the task force had no power to deny insurance coverage. “This is a typical scare tactic designed to protect the health care status quo of rising costs, unaffordable coverage and unfair insurance company practices,” she said.

Richard Kirsch, the national campaign director for Health Care for America Now, a group supporting expanded coverage, said Republicans could be expected to exploit the issue.

Let me shorten that for you , Pay no attention to those teabaggers! And, Ms Doulass, the task force has no power to deny coverage ... for now.

American Cancer Society says:

Our experts make this recommendation having reviewed virtually all the same data reviewed by the USPSTF, but also additional data that the USPSTF did not consider," ACS said. "The USPSTF says that screening 1,339 women in their 50s to save one life makes screening worthwhile in that age group. Yet USPSTF also says screening 1,904 women ages 40 to 49 in order to save one life is not worthwhile. ... With its new recommendations, the USPSTF is essentially telling women that mammography at age 40 to 49 saves lives; just not enough of them."

That extra 565 women makes it not worth it, apparently. Most outrageous is the idea that women shouldn't be doing self-exams. What's the issue? That a woman might find a lump? Leading to that "unnecessary" mammography.

Plus, false positives cause "anxiety" .... and you know how deadly that is.

Bravo Pandagon for being intellectually inconsistent! I know how hard it is when you've got all those pressing articles on Sarah Palin to write ...

People are funny

Now you can own an Authentic imitation Lincoln/Obama Inaugural Bible!

The reviews are in ....

65 of 67 people found the following review helpful:
Awesome history in my awesome hands, November 18, 2009
By William Sullivan "Im in ur Amazon, reviewin'"
I bought the other version of the bible which was actually held by the Baby Jesus, but it doesn't radiate awesome as much as this version. I bought this in a fit of patriotism and joy at no longer being racist a year ago. I sat it on a bookshelf but, even a year later, it hasn't gathered any dust. Not long after, my father caught cancer from a tea party protest. I had him touch this bible and he was instantly cured. I touched it and won the lottery. I'd have to say this is the best bible I have ever bought. In fact, I don't even need my viagra anymore. A+++ would elect again.

And another:

Nice additon to collection., November 19, 2009
By Erik Ruhling "negentropy" - See all my reviews

I find it complements the awesomeness of my replica Carter/Obama Nobel Peace Prize. I hear there are plans for a Milli Vanilli/Obama replica Grammy to be offered in the future. Can anyone confirm this?

I'm also hoping beyond hope that I can add a replica Gore/Obama Academy Award to the collection in the next few years. Don't let me down Academy!

Obama lied, people ...lost their jobs

From Hot Air:

Obama promised to stimulate the private sector with Porkulus, but the vast majority of the jobs being reported are those of government bureaucrats. Peter Morici, the University of Maryland economist, told the Free Press that 90% of the supposed stimulus would take place in the public sector, not the private sector — and the FP’s numbers support that conclusion. Even those jobs are questionable[.]

Michigan unemployment is over 15%. Findings from the Freep Analysis :

-Three of every four stimulus grants, contracts and loans approved in Michigan created or retained one job or less.

- Fewer than 700 awards had received some money, and nearly half of those -- 327 -- had created one job or less, at a cost per job of $2.7 million.

And, the Freep is a librul paper.

Here's a cool little link where you can enter your zip code (or any zip code) and get a list of who received some of that mad Obama-money. A quick look at my zip, finds that most of it went to schools and a little bit to local City government.

I checked my old zip code and what did I find? City of ... City of ... County of ...

Honestly, this is really fucking depressing. We've bailed out ... the government.

No jobs have been created or saved. Don't take my word for it. Take my liberal-, Obama voting-, and democrat backing- paper:

Seven months into the massive federal stimulus program, the vast majority of government grants, contracts and loans in Michigan so far have created or retained virtually no jobs, a Free Press analysis shows.

Extra heh:

"It looks to us like the program is unfolding much as we hoped in Michigan," said White House economic adviser Jared Bernstein.

Really? Really? This is what you hoped for?

Great News!

Government Motors only lost a billion dollars last quarter.

Political Correctness as Cultural Marxism

Bill Lind (hat tip, Adam Baldwin:

Second, the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness, like economic Marxism, has a single factor explanation of history. Economic Marxism says that all of history is determined by ownership of means of production. Cultural Marxism, or Political Correctness, says that all history is determined by power, by which groups defined in terms of race, sex, etc., have power over which other groups. Nothing else matters. All literature, indeed, is about that. Everything in the past is about that one thing.

Third, just as in classical economic Marxism certain groups, i.e. workers and peasants, are a priori good, and other groups, i.e., the bourgeoisie and capital owners, are evil. In the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness certain groups are good – feminist women, (only feminist women, non-feminist women are deemed not to exist) blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals. These groups are determined to be "victims," and therefore automatically good regardless of what any of them do. Similarly, white males are determined automatically to be evil, thereby becoming the equivalent of the bourgeoisie in economic Marxism.

Fourth, both economic and cultural Marxism rely on expropriation. When the classical Marxists, the communists, took over a country like Russia, they expropriated the bourgeoisie, they took away their property. Similarly, when the cultural Marxists take over a university campus, they expropriate through things like quotas for admissions. When a white student with superior qualifications is denied admittance to a college in favor of a black or Hispanic who isn’t as well qualified, the white student is expropriated. And indeed, affirmative action, in our whole society today, is a system of expropriation. White owned companies don’t get a contract because the contract is reserved for a company owned by, say, Hispanics or women. So expropriation is a principle tool for both forms of Marxism.

And finally, both have a method of analysis that automatically gives the answers they want. For the classical Marxist, it’s Marxist economics. For the cultural Marxist, it’s deconstruction. Deconstruction essentially takes any text, removes all meaning from it and re-inserts any meaning desired. So we find, for example, that all of Shakespeare is about the suppression of women, or the Bible is really about race and gender. All of these texts simply become grist for the mill, which proves that "all history is about which groups have power over which other groups." So the parallels are very evident between the classical Marxism that we’re familiar with in the old Soviet Union and the cultural Marxism that we see today as Political Correctness.

Of course, the "first" attempts at Marxism failed, in so much that it didn't overtake the globe. So, what did those little Marxists do? They founded a think tank, the Institute for Social Research. They couldn't call it the Institute for Marxism, now could they? Born here was "Critical Theory."

The stuff we’ve been hearing about this morning – the radical feminism, the women’s studies departments, the gay studies departments, the black studies departments – all these things are branches of Critical Theory. What the Frankfurt School essentially does is draw on both Marx and Freud in the 1930s to create this theory called Critical Theory. The term is ingenious because you’re tempted to ask, "What is the theory?" The theory is to criticize. The theory is that the way to bring down Western culture and the capitalist order is not to lay down an alternative. They explicitly refuse to do that. They say it can’t be done, that we can’t imagine what a free society would look like (their definition of a free society). As long as we’re living under repression – the repression of a capitalistic economic order which creates (in their theory) the Freudian condition, the conditions that Freud describes in individuals of repression – we can’t even imagine it. What Critical Theory is about is simply criticizing. It calls for the most destructive criticism possible, in every possible way, designed to bring the current order down. And, of course, when we hear from the feminists that the whole of society is just out to get women and so on, that kind of criticism is a derivative of Critical Theory. It is all coming from the 1930s, not the 1960s.

Now, Feminism, gay studies, black studies and all the other offshoots of Critical Theory have, so far, failed to bring around the new Marxism. But, they have a new tool in their belt with dangerous potential. Environmentalism. This article/ speech was given around 2000, but the reality of this today is even more alarming.

Speaking of "Global Warming", Dicentra points us to this little tidbit and has this to say:

Richard Lindzen of MIT finally proves that the founding assumptions of AGW are a crock. [PDF]

AGW promoters say that the more CO2 you get in the atmosphere, the less heat will radiate into space. On page 45, he shows all of the estimates by AGWers as to what will happen with the increased accumulation of CO2.

On the next page, he shows actual measurements of what has happened.

Conclusion? Increased heat in the atmosphere results in increased amounts of heat radiated into space.

Ergo, it’s all wrong. Every bit of it. But then, Lindzen also knows that no one will stop promoting the AGW cause: it’s just too good to stop.

I'm still reading the Lindzen piece, but he quotes Eisenhower:

"Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitue for intellectual curiosity ... The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present - and is gravely to be regarded."

"Global Warming" aside, you know who needs to start cleaning up their act? China. YUCK! Maybe Obama should bring that up while he's over there.

Late Night Conversations at the Hostages

Last night, BiW had this to say:

[W]e each have a choice to make, because if it hasn’t yet become clear to you yet, you should know that the government, those tasked to rule within the confines of the law set forth in the Constitution, is now largely a mix of coniving schemers who will ignore it when they can no longer twist it to meet their ends, and ignoramuses, who have no idea what it says and cannot contemplate a limitation on their ultimate aims and powers, both intent on centralizing their power without regard to the cost or the damage they leave in their wake.

Part of the reason that we find ourselves in the predicament we’re in today is because the schemers deftly distracted us, and because we ourselves comforted ourselves with the idea that someone was going to “take care of it”, and nothing would be expected of us…we who understood what was going on, and quietly abdicated our duty to become involved and take our turn preserving and defending the republic not just against its enemies, but from a creeping lack of character that allowed such craven calculation to run its course, and make corruption commonplace.

Bingo. Discuss.

(more)

At issue, for those of denser make-up, is the centralization of power in Washington, and the infringement on individual and State's rights. This experiment has been tried again and again, and can be viewed, in real time to the South of us where the smartest man in the world has decided he can run his country better than those awful capitalists.

shamelessly stolen

From Small Dead Animals, because it's too good.

Puppy Blender received this email:

Just something that occurred to me today while trying to cross Fifth Ave in Manhattan during the Veteran’s Day Parade:

The towers fell in New York on 9/11/01, Kabul fell to American led forces on 11/14/01. That’s 65 days.

President Obama’s hand-picked replacement commander in Afghanistan, GEN McChrystal, delivered his Afghanistan war plans to President Obama on 8/30/09, and President Obama hasn’t acted on his General’s recommendations as of today, 11/11/09. That’s 73 days, and waiting.

Kate juxtaposes that with the news that Obama has rejected all the Afghan war options presented by his national security team.

The Recovery Continues Apace

A girl I know got laid off on Monday. My kids take music lessons from a local joint which, since Obama has taken office, has gotten in increasingly dire financial straights. Last January/Feb they laid off one of their most popular teachers because she was also a manager and thus was paid more.

So, on Monday, they laid off yet another person. Once again, because she was the highest paid employee. Hourly rate, I doubt she made much more than minimum.

Music lessons, and the accompanying accoutrements, are how people spend their disposable income. If they have no "disposable" (or any) income, all that shit goes away. So, people who get paid "too much" and all Obama's bullshit spreading the wealth around socialism means that only the very rich (not the middle class, not the lower middle class) will be able to enjoy such things.

You see, shit rolls downhill.

Oh my ...

Zac Efron goes to the White House:

"I admire anyone who has devoted their lives to public service," Efron said.

Linklater is also an Obama fan. "It's great to have a president with such obvious empathy," he said. "You can see it in his books, his speeches and hopefully his politics, although I know that we've got to be patient."

What world is Efron living in? Just about every politician who "devotes their lives to public service" comes away a millionair. Or, in Al Gore's case, a soon-to-be Billionaire.

We've abandoned that ideology, Zac. Get a bit of education.

As for this Linklater fella (I have no idea who he is) ... well, the mind wobbles. "Obvious empathy?" I've got a "shoutout" that says otherwise.

I don't think I can stand ...

.... another privileged, overpaid Hollywood asshat lecturing me about the evils of Capitalism.

“I was thinking about it this morning, how this story ties into everything we’re going through,” says Carrey, who, thanks to the technology, plays Scrooge as well as the three ghosts haunting him. “Every construct we’ve built in American life is falling apart. Why? Because of personal greed and ambition. Capitalism without regulation can’t protect us against personal greed."

STFU, Jim Carrey. Honestly.

Why we'll be worse off than Europe

American leftists screw it up:

Well, America is now more like Europe when it comes to unemployment. But not when it comes to social benefits and protections. The American Left knows how to import Europe’s failures, but not its successes.

The massive health-care bill passed by the House on Saturday is a classic example. It would expand health care coverage somewhat, but not to European levels, and it would vastly increase the costs of our health care system, rather than reducing it to European levels. It would also increase taxes to “European levels of taxation.” The health care bill contains politically-correct provisions that Europeans would never put up with, like pork for trial lawyers and racial preferences. And restrictions on national competition in health insurance, which do not exist in Europe.

In France, doctors don’t need to be paid as much, because competing professions, like lawyers, are paid less. French law is much more conservative than American law when it comes to lawsuits, including lawsuits against doctors. There are NO punitive damages, and France discourages lawsuits by making unsuccessful plaintiffs pay the other side’s legal bills. (Other European countries have specialized health courts, rather than American-style jury trials, to cut lawyers’ bills, speedily compensate the injured, and prevent American-style baseless lawsuits against doctors.) There are no racial preferences — even my Marxist father-in-law, a French trade unionist who likes Michael Moore’s book Stupid White Men, thinks that racial preferences are evil. French people do not let political correctness shackle their minds the way American leftists do.
Europe is not as far to the left of America as people think, and America’s business climate is already not much more favorable than Europe’s. For every three ways in which Europe is more socialistic than America, there are two ways in which it is less socialistic than America. The Obama administration is getting rid of our advantages, but not our disadvantages.

American tort law and family law are much more burdensome, anti-business, and bent on redistribution of wealth, than Europe’s

But, you know, let's rush the vote so Obama can brag about all he got done in his first year. Stuff he got done, you will note, without harming his lawyer friends.

Why those Islamists better keep women under those Burkas

Sgt Kim Munley. Kicking jihadi ass. I hope peps are letting Hasan know, now that he's awake, who capped him.

So, let's review. Pussy jihadi Mulsim attacks unarmed , innocent Americans, but is brought down by a woman.

Suck it!

Important Update:

Nice Deb on the other officer who brought down the pussy jihaid muslim, Sgt Mark Todd.

Another kuffir who rocks. Once the pussy jihadi Muslim had to face someone who was armed, he only lasted about 30-45 seconds. Allah's not gonna be happy about that.


Update again
The art of framing a snapshot, the art of framing a President. No telepromters here, nope! .

Yet again:

If Obama wants to play the role of our nation's healer, he can start by not calling us teabaggers.

Yet again, again:

Via RSM, Dan Riele notes this obagasm of Marc Ambinder:

Today, at Ft. Hood. I guarantee: they'll be teaching this one in rhetoric classes. It was that good. My gloss won't do it justice. Yes, I'm having a Chris Matthews-chill-running-up-my-leg moment, but sometimes, the man, the moment and the words come together and meet the challenge.

Yea! Obama gave a speech! Isn't he the dreamiest?

Kill the bill