This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Society

  • Bush signs SCHIP

    With a lot less ceremony (read that: media frenzy) than his veto of the two previous SCHIP proposals Congress sent him, President Bush signed an extension of the current Children’s Health Insurance Program through March of 2009(AP/Washington Times link);

    President Bush yesterday signed legislation that extends a popular children’s health insurance program after twice vetoing attempts to expand it.

    Politically, the move was a victory for Mr. Bush, although Democrats say it will come back to hurt Republicans at the polls.

    The extension of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program is expected to provide states with enough money to cover those enrolled through March 2009. Mr. Bush and some Republican lawmakers say the program will still serve those who it should: children from families who earn too much to qualify for Medicaid but cannot afford private insurance.

    “We’re pleased that the program will be extended and that states can be certain of their funding,” White House spokesman Tony Fratto said.

    Yet many Democrats — with help from some Republicans — wanted to give the program a significant cash infusion and broaden coverage to an estimated 4 million children. They overwhelmingly supported a tobacco-tax increase to pay for the expansion.

    The story neglects to mention that the “4 million children” that didn’t get covered in this bill were the children of parents who made enough money to buy health insurance. Maryland just raised their tobacco tax, and the federal government wanted to raise tobacco taxes to pay for the expanded coverage – how much do they think smokers will pay for cigarettes? When smokers quit, how do they plan to pay for their largesse? At least Bloomberg comes clean;

    The law funds a 0.5 percent payment increase for six months to doctors who treat patients under the government’s Medicare and Medicaid plans, which provide health care to the elderly, disabled and poor. The legislation also maintains current funding for the State Children’s Health Insurance Program until March 31, 2009.

    Bush twice vetoed bills to increase SCHIP funding and boost enrollment to 10 million from about 6 million because he objected to moving more children into a government program rather than into private health insurance. Democrats, who control Congress, had sought to boost the program’s budget over five years by about $35 billion to $60 billion.

    When Bush vetoed the previous bills, it was front page news. Now that he’s signed it, the news is relegated to a wire story link in just about every newspaper. If the news services told the whole story, instead of the intellectually vacant “for the children” line, Republicans would be hailed as heroes holding the line against the socialists in the Democrat party.

    Spree at Wake Up, America asks;

    Amazing to me how some politicians would have rather made it a short extension, risking the low incomes childrens health insurance in upcoming battles, simply to “use” the children as a political tool in the 2008 elections.

    How sick is that?

    Well, Spree, we’ve become accustomed to knee jerk neoliberals manufacturing issues that distract from reality, aren’t we?

  • “Fair and Balanced” isn’t what they want

    I read with some amusement Pam Meister’s post at Blogmeister USA that some pointy-headed types discovered that Fox News Channel is indeed fair and balanced in their political coverage – what the political Right has been saying for years;

    Fox News Channel’s coverage was more balanced toward both parties than the broadcast networks were. On FOX, evaluations of all Democratic candidates combined were split almost evenly – 51% positive vs. 49% negative, as were all evaluations of GOP candidates – 49% positive vs. 51% negative, producing a perfectly balanced 50-50 split for all candidates of both parties.

    But then, while tooling around, I read at DUmmie FUnnies that individual Leftist news-nazis are going around demanding that Fox News broadcasts be removed from the private business they frequent. So just by using my limited understanding of statistics and math, I gotta figure that the Left doesn’t want “balance” – they want complete, unquestioned dominance of the media. I guess it’s just too bad for the Left that a majority of Americans don’t feel the same way.

  • Number One Crapbox distributor

    I really don’t understand why Toyota is the number one car manufacturer in the world, other than the fact that they make cheap deathtraps that they market in the third world to people who can barely afford the $9 thousand price tag price on crapbox cars that an American (or a Japanese) buyer wouldn’t look at twice.

    On my trips south of our border, I’ve had the occasion to rent and borrow from relatives their various versions of Toyota’s finest. Remember when you could “feel” the floor boards in cars? Remember the tinny sound those imported Japanese cars made when you slammed the door shut? Well, those cheaply made crapboxes still exist in the third world – in fact if you’re nostalgic for those tiny little pickup trucks Toyota used to market here, you can pick up a 2008 version down there.

    Toyota’s strategy for selling so many cars in the third world? Cheap spare parts compared to American spare parts. My brothers-in-law all own one of the countless versions and all tell me that the only reason is the price of spare parts. They all admit that American cars are more dependable and easier to fix, but down there, people actually BUY cars and those cars have to last ten or twenty years.

    I rented a 2006 Toyota Camry in Panama last year and it was nothing like an American market Camry – except it’s shape. The doors were paper thin, the engine sputtered whenever the vehicle came close to 60/mph. You could almost feel the road through the floorboards. The same with my brother-in-law’s brand new Yaris this last year and the Nissan we rented two years before.

    So, even though they may be selling a product in the US somewhat equal to the American equivalent, they can sell it cheaper here because they sell those crackerboxes on wheels in the third world, then steal marketshare in the US on the backs of those brown people.

    Another thing I have against Toyota is the fact that next to the pill pushers of Cialis and Viagra, Toyota dealers are my biggest spammers.

  • Zapatero & legislated history

    It’s difficult to believe that in this post-Soviet day and age, a liberal democracy in the western world would consider rewriting their history to create an official, government-approved version. But, that’s what is happening in modern Spain. In October, the Spanish parliament passed a “Law of Historical Memory”. No Pasaran’s Joe Noory warned of this impending farce last year;

      Zapatero is exercising a chilling fascist revision of the past. The Spanish Socialist Worker’s Party, Alvino-Mario Fantini reports, is even dispensing pensions to some who make a nice prop for their revision of the Spanish Civil War.

    The law, one of Zapatero’s many electoral promises, will honor the communists and socialists persecuted by Franco’s regime during his 36-year dictatorship.

    Specifically, the proposed law stipulates that the Spanish government will provide 60 million Euros–about $76,244,000–in “pensions, compensation and recognition schemes” to honor the estimated 285,000 (according to historian Hugh Thomas) Republican victims of the Civil War and the post-war dictatorship.

    It says nothing, however, of the nearly 145,000 members of the Nationalist coalition who were killed in action by Republican forces and executed by their militias. In fact, the law will ban all images, symbols and references to Franco and his regime in all public places (though most statues around the country have already been removed).

    Ian Buruma compares Zapatero’s attempt to rewrite history to dictatorships like Red China in the Japan Times;

    There are plausible reasons for enacting such a law. Many people killed by the Fascists during the Spanish Civil War lie unremembered in mass graves. There is still a certain degree of nostalgia on the far right for Franco’s dictatorship. People gathered at his tomb earlier this year chanted “We won the Civil War!,” while denouncing socialists and foreigners, especially Muslims. Reason enough, one might think, for Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero to use the law to exorcise the demons of dictatorship for the sake of democracy’s good health.

    But legislation is a blunt instrument for dealing with history. While historical discussion won’t be out of bounds in Spain, even banning ceremonies celebrating bygone days may go a step too far. The desire to control both past and present is, of course, a common feature of dictatorships.

    In the Australian, Buruma continues;

    While the Spanish Civil War was not on par with the Holocaust, even bitter history leaves room for interpretation. Truth can be found only if people are free to pursue it. Many brave people have risked or lost their lives in defence of this freedom. It is right for a democracy to repudiate a dictatorship, and the new Spanish law is cautiously drafted, but it is better to leave people free to express even unsavoury political sympathies, for legal bans don’t foster free thinking, they impede them.Â

    Richard Rahn writes in today’s Washington Times that the law might have the effect of deepening polarization among Spaniards, already divided by language and culture. He points out the under Zapatero’s predecessor, Jose Maria Aznar, Spain became a successful European nation, both economically and politically, once again, but that Zapatero threatens that stability with his socialist game-playing right out of Orwell’s “1984”.

    Beth Twiston Davies (Times Online) joins Joe Noory in the opinion that the Law of Historical Memory is an anti-Catholic swipe;

    Three days before the law of historical memory was passed, nearly 500 of those religious victims were honoured by the Catholic Church in a mass beatification ceremony. The 498 individuals now on the path to sainthood were killed, often after being tortured, in 1934, 1936 and 1937.

    The Vatican described them as “martyrs of the 21st century”. Spanish Catholics such as Alejandro Rodríguez de la Peña, secretary-general of the Asociación Católica de Propagandistas (The Catholic Propagandists’ Association), describe them as innocent victims of the wave of anti-clerical persecution that swept 1930s Spain.

    “The Left wants to portray the martyrs as politicised clerics ,” says Rodríguez. “They don’t want to recognise the fact there was a religious persecution. These were simply Christians who died forgiving their assassins, and were killed out of hatred for the Christian faith.”

    Imagine if the left in the United States succeeds in forbidding the various ceremonies we’ve to which we’ve become accustomed honoring soldiers from both sides in our own Civil War. Suppose for a minute, we succumb to their demonization of those who say that Senator Joe McCarthy turns out to be right about Communists in the State Department and in Congress – and in Hollywood and ban such research and scholarly work.

    Suppose we weren’t allowed to speak out against John Kerry’s “Winter Soldier” testimony of 1971 during his presidential campaign and that the thousands of veterans who gathered outside of the Capitol had been imprisoned for questioning his veracity at those hearings.

    I don’t what the Europeans are thinking when they allow their governments to limit the discussion of unpopular political opinions, but we need to be on guard against imitating them.

  • Will Smith:”Hitler was a good person”

    The actor said he believes Hitler was essentially a good person who wasn’t intentionally doing “the most evil thing” possible.

    “Even Hitler didn’t wake up going, ‘Let me do the most evil thing I can do today.’ I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was good,” Smith says. “Stuff like that just needs reprogramming.”
    Transworld News Story
    The bit about reprogramming doesn’t make sense, unless you know Smith has joined the celebricult of Scientology.

    While Smith is an actor and a singer, the impact of his statements is MASSIVE because so many out there are stupid enough to believe famous=wise.
    He should take Laura Ingram’s advice and SHUT UP AND SING

  • Looking into the past

    My dad sent me this picture a few months ago and I’ve been kind of fascinated with it. It was taken in September 1905, that’s my greatgrandfather (born Carl Wilhelm Lilja in 1866 – but the immigration people changed his last name to Lilyea at Ellis Island when he immigrated in 1899 from Sweden with his young bride fifteen years his junior). That’s my grandfather next to him, Oscar Wilhelm Lilyea, born in August 1900, my Great Aunt Edith is the two-year-old cutie in the front, my Great Uncle Charlie is standing next to my Great Grandmother, and that’s Uncle Elmer on her knee.

    On the back of the picture, my grandfather writes that he remembers the picture because he hated having his hair curled for the occasion. I can imagine, my grandfather ran a one-man sawmill operation until he was seventy years old. Elmer had a farm in Penn Yan, NY that he handed on to his son, who still runs that farm. Edith married a man, my uncle Barney (who’d fought across the Pacific with the Army) from Montana who raised beef cattle in Penn Yan until they both passed.

    My grandfather also writes that he remembers none of them spoke English at the time – until he started school a few weeks after this picture was taken.

    I’d always wished that I could see the world the way my grandfather saw it – he was born before the Wright Brothers’ flight and watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. Wonder where we’ll be a hundred years from now.

  • IRS employee caught in Harriet Walters’ scam crew

    With tens of millions of dollars skimmed out of tax receipt coffers, an IRS employee was scooped up iin the net according to the Washington Examiner;

    An IRS manager and his estranged wife were charged with receiving $2.8 million as part of the growing D.C. property tax scheme in which tens of millions of dollars were embezzled from the District’s coffers. (more…)

  • 68% of Mexican Immigrants Illegal

    Brace yourself, there are bound to be shrieks of racism.

    In an AP story, in the IHT A report funded by the Mexican government has determined that SIXTY-EIGHT PERCENT of Mexicans who immigrate to the US do so illegally, 55% of those using smugglers to get in.
    More than two-thirds of the Mexican immigrants here are criminals. Wow.