The dope on swine flu

Biden puts his foot in it. (Query: Why would anyone listen to him?)

Napolitano and Gibbs spend the day trying to take it back.

The White House issues an advisory to all who traveled to Mexico with the president; a member of the delegation appears to have been infected and passed the virus on to his family. ABC now says the man tested negative.

Some people don't understand why one would close schools but leave the borders open.

Others wrestle with the thorny issue of what to call it. (Related post here.) *More suggestions here.

And others are mean to old ladies.

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'Barack's Beauties'?

Just in from Pundit:

What the heck?
From Political Punch: Barack's Beauties

The glossy's "100 Most Beautiful" issue this year features first lady Michelle Obama, along with a "Barack's Beauties" section with White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Social Secretary Desiree Rogers, and White House Chef Sam Kass. The president's right hand man, personal aide Reggie Love and his speech writer, Jon Favreau also made the list.

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Beauty, like swagger, is in the eye of the beholder.

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Pontiac GTO

#1 son is grieving over the demise of Pontiac. He's not alone. And he just doesn't understand how Buick could survive and Pontiac could not. I have no insight into this, aside from idly speculating about the decline of the red-blooded American male and the rise of the metrosexual, but here are some cool-looking cars:



I'll take the orange one.

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We're all blowhards on this bus

William Jacobson (or should we call him Legal Insurrection - so confusing) owns Alan Colmes. Quite entertaining. And updated with a note from Alan, which makes it impossible for me to say all the scathing things I'm thinking about him.

Remind me to stay on Prof. Jacobson's good side.


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What Obama finds humbling

Favorite part of last night's press conference:

Q: What has humbled the new president in his first 100 days?

Humbled by the — humbled by the fact that the presidency is extraordinarily powerful, but we are just part of a much broader tapestry of American life, and there are a lot of different power centers. And so I can’t just press a button and suddenly have the bankers do exactly what I want or, you know, turn on a switch and suddenly, you know, Congress falls in line.

He's humbled to discover that he doesn't wield absolute power. Dang.

(Does he know what "humbled" means? Perhaps he's got it confused with "disappointed.")

Deliver us, O Lord.

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Shales embarrasses himself over Obama

Again.

In today's Washington Post, Obama's Enchanting Quizfest

Tom Shales loses all perspective when it comes to Obama, and the spectacle can be painful to watch:

You ask, he'll answer -- earnestly, disarmingly, enchantingly, even -- and most of the time convincingly, which is no small accomplishment for a politician.

. . . he was his comfortingly cool and collected self last night . . . .

Barack Obama is a truly flabbergasting president. And in a good way -- not the way some of his predecessors were. He's not flabberghastly.

Take care with your coinages, lest ye be hoist on them yourself.

Mr. Shales makes it clear that I'm not his intended reader:

When Obama answers a question, you don't slap your forehead and moan, "Oh, brother!"

Speak for yourself, Tom. You have no idea of the agonies we experience while listening to him. Or to the likes of David Gergen:

He is, as guest expert David Gergen noted on CNN after the news conference, not only "up to speed" on the pressing issues of our time but also articulate about addressing them in a friendly, accessible way. He's not the student who wears a button that says, "Smartest kid in class," but clearly he is, at least when surrounded by the White House press corps.

Obama can use a five-dollar word such as "overarching" in one sentence and a few sentences later utter a folksy "doggone it." His verbiage is a melting pot that's always bubbling. A few times, he did stumble over words, and once or twice appeared semantically stranded, unable to find the precise language he wanted to use. But compare him with his predecessor and such moments seem trifling.

What would the liberals do without Bush? Nixon was wrong -- your enemies can continue to kick you whether you're around or not.

I missed the following, which comes as a surprise to me:

Gracious to a fault (even if there has been talk about prosecuting members of the previous administration for authorizing torture of prisoners), Obama even went out of his way to praise the Bush administration for gearing up to face the bird flu.

Glad to hear it.

Obama recites a litany of all the problems he has to deal with, and appeals to our common sense -- with all this handle, why oh why would he want to privatize the auto industry, the banks, and expand government? Shales swallows it down whole and scoffs at those who don't:

He really doesn't want to be President Everything, he as much as said -- not an all-purpose problem-solver who takes the nation's temperature and holds its hand while devising budgetary reforms, fighting a few wars, changing immigration laws and shoring up Detroit to keep it from sinking lower than New Orleans did. Obama doesn't want to run car companies or banks, he said late in the session: "I've got enough to do." He was deflecting criticism from those who contend he wants to grow the government. The disbelievers will still be unconvinced, but there appear to be relatively few of them, and many are just the predictable strident voices of the kind of partisan pedantry that Obama has said he abhors.

Shales easily dismisses the "disbelievers," who are few in number and, as always, "strident."

But he saves this shocker for last: He thinks Keith Olbermann is smart.

MSNBC showed its strengths -- at least two of them, anyway -- by going to ravaging Keith Olbermann and ravishing Rachel Maddow. Two smart people are a lot better than an arsenal of computerly contraptions.

And obscene advertising revenues be damned! Quit complaining, or you nasty television networks might become the next General Motors:

Some industry sources were heard to grumble in recent days about the advertising revenue being lost because of the presidential news conferences. Oh, boohoo! What's a president going to have to do: Start programming networks, too?

One wonders why his editor doesn't stop him. But perhaps what gets printed is a toned-down version of what he really wants to say.

Linked at Memeorandum.

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Swagger is in the eye of the beholder

On swagger: We like it in Obama (even when it's not there), despise it in Bush.


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Rationing healthcare to the 'temporarily alive'

Kid from Brooklyn agrees with Krauthammer: Obama is preparing the ground for the rationing of medical services, and the weak, the chronically ill, the elderly, and the dying will be its victims. Obama's recent remarks leave no doubt:

THE PRESIDENT: Exactly. And I just recently went through this. I mean, I’ve told this story, maybe not publicly, but when my grandmother got very ill during the campaign, she got cancer; it was determined to be terminal. And about two or three weeks after her diagnosis she fell, broke her hip. It was determined that she might have had a mild stroke, which is what had precipitated the fall.

So now she’s in the hospital, and the doctor says, Look, you’ve got about — maybe you have three months, maybe you have six months, maybe you have nine months to live. Because of the weakness of your heart, if you have an operation on your hip there are certain risks that — you know, your heart can’t take it. On the other hand, if you just sit there with your hip like this, you’re just going to waste away and your quality of life will be terrible.

And she elected to get the hip replacement and was fine for about two weeks after the hip replacement, and then suddenly just — you know, things fell apart.

I don’t know how much that hip replacement cost. I would have paid out of pocket for that hip replacement just because she’s my grandmother. Whether, sort of in the aggregate, society making those decisions to give my grandmother, or everybody else’s aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they’re terminally ill is a sustainable model, is a very difficult question. If somebody told me that my grandmother couldn’t have a hip replacement and she had to lie there in misery in the waning days of her life — that would be pretty upsetting.

Q: And it’s going to be hard for people who don’t have the option of paying for it.

THE PRESIDENT: So that’s where I think you just get into some very difficult moral issues. But that’s also a huge driver of cost, right?

I mean, the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out here.

Q: So how do you — how do we deal with it?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place. It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that’s part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance. It’s not determinative, but I think has to be able to give you some guidance. And that’s part of what I suspect you’ll see emerging out of the various health care conversations that are taking place on the Hill right now.

He puts the question in sentimental terms -- "upsetting"-- rather than in moral terms: that his grandmother's life has just as much intrinsic value as his, even though it has been "determined" that she's "terminal." "Upsetting" places the situation in Obama's "tough decision" category. He uses that phrase when he's about to stick it to someone.

When it comes to human life, Obama takes a utilitarian point of view. He measures the value of a baby's life by the legal implications rescuing it might create. May God save us from the kind of "independent group" his administration will create to decide for us who is worthy, and under what circumstances would continuing medical care constitute throwing good money after bad.

Don't forget that for Obama, some people are merely temporarily alive.

Please read Kid from Brooklyn's comments. An excerpt:

Allow me to cut through the sales pitch and translate: We’re gonna ration. Dude, if end-of-life and chronic care is 80% of the bill, and you’re looking to cut costs, isn’t that the first place you’d look to cut? I don’t see any other possible justification for a “difficult democratic conversation”, and I don’t think Obama’s vision of “guidance” is similar to mine. His kind of “guidance” is currently on display with TARP, GM, and Chrysler. Congressional Democrats aren’t looking to cram socialized healthcare through budget reconciliation just to give themselves “not-determinative guidance”.

Related posts here and here.

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Noblesse oblige

This condescending nonsense from Arianna Huffington is just a bit much:

He has also offered tone setters that are a useful reminder that the President is more than just the country's Chief Executive - that he and the First Lady are potentially its chief teachers. They have already taught a lot of lessons - about what and how we eat by planting an organic vegetable garden at the White House, and about commitment to family through their relationship with their daughters and by having the First Granny move into the White House.

Ri-i-ight. We knew nothing about "commitment to family" (if that 's what you call bringing your live-in childcare with you to the White House) until we had the Obama example to follow. We had never before heard the profound and novel advice, offered by Michelle, to eat more fruits and vegetables. (By the way, the Obamas had never grown anything, ever, until their recent token effort.) In the pre-Obama era, we merely groped about in the darkness. But now, with advice from our "chief teachers," we can lead better lives. I treasure this bit of wisdom from Michelle:

“You can begin in your own cupboard by eliminating processed food, trying to cook a meal a little more often, trying to incorporate more fruits and vegetables,” she said.

Sigh.

h/t: Andrew Stuttaford

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Obama on "folks waving tea bags around"

Rush called this another bitter clinger moment for Obama. This is what he said at his latest campaign stop 'town meeting':

"Those of you who are watching certain news channels on which I'm not very popular, and you see folks waving tea bags around," Obama said, “let me just remind them that I am happy to have a serious conversation about how we are going to cut our health care costs down over the long term, how we are going to stabilize Social Security.”

“But,” Obama continued, “let's not play games and pretend that the reason [for the deficit] is because of the Recovery Act."

I guess he can get away with that swipe at Bush in front of a partisan crowd that is perhaps unaware of the fact that Obama has quadrupled Bush's deficit. Who's playing games here?

Note his ominous remark about cutting healthcare costs. He's headed toward rationing of healthcare. And Americans are going to be very unhappy with it.

Gateway Pundit has photos of some pesky tea bag wavers who showed up at the St. Louis town meeting to help commemorate Obama's "100 Days of Lies" (see sign).


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"Hotness gap"?

*Scroll down for updates.

I can't believe I wrote that title. But notice the quotes. That means it didn't really come from me.

Matthew Archbold of the Creative Minority Report has had an important epiphany, and calls us to action:

If there are any female Catholic bloggers who would like to make a male list feel free. We'll link to it. I just couldn't bring myself to do it.

This is too much for me to take on, but it's a nice idea to give the men their due. A few suggestions:

Adam Baldwin
Todd Palin
Bruce Willis?
Clint Eastwood?

Lots of fodder here, though they needn't be actors. One-man global content providers also qualify. (There is such a thing as an intelli-crush, you know.) Hyacinth girl also likes Ari Fleischer. And some think Simon Cowell is conservative. Dunno.

(My friend Phyllis will never forgive me if I omit Tom Selleck. But I just saw him last night in a Magnum PI rerun and his short-shorts were enough to disqualify him. Sorry!)

*The late Patrick McGoohan, who created The Prisoner television series, must be included. Cerebral, strong, honorable, and coolly handsome, he was:


The Prisoner is to television what 1984 is to literature. Okay, I'm exaggerating. But Big Brother lived well and prospered in The Village created by McGoohan. These quotes capture McGoohan's theme:

I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.

And:

I am not a number, I am a free man.

He reportedly turned down the role of James Bond that ultimately went to Sean Connery. McGoohan's Secret Agent Man was a deliberate contrast to Bond:

"When Drake fights, he fights clean," Mr. McGoohan once explained. "He abhors bloodshed. He carries a gun, but doesn't use it unless necessary -- and then he doesn't shoot to kill. He prefers to use his wits. He is a person with a sophisticated background and a philosophy. I want Drake to be in the heroic mould, like the classic Western hero -- which means he has to be a good man."[emphasis added]

John Drake was not what was once called a "womanizer."

Just a heads up to CMR: there already is a calendar: Pretty in Mink.
And then there's the Sarah Palin calendar, too.

*Suzanna Logan has something to say about this. So does Monique Stuart. (Phyllis, check it out: your hero Tom is there, and thankfully without the 70's hot pants it's just a head shot.) Be warned that Monique includes the obligatory Speedo shot. Little Miss Attila adds some photos of
her own and demonstrates that RSM has managed to infiltrate every last corner of the blogosphere. NTTAWWT.

*Deuce at the Skepticrats wrote about this question back in March, taking the guys at Ace of Spades and Blackfive to task for using the words "cuties" and "Code Pink" in the same sentence. He has more good points in his updated post.

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Scarier than swine flu

Two worthy posts from the Hyacinth Girl:

First, on America's slide into complete (media- and WHO-driven) paranoia:

I don’t know about you, but I am sick with worrying about all of the things I need to worry about. I’ve actually had to start entering all of the pandemics and coming catastrophes into my Blackberry to keep track of them all. Monday is the day to worry about swine flu, Tuesday is global warming, Wednesday is comets and asteroids, &etc. It’s all very exhausting.

She quotes from Wesley Pruden's column, A Pandemic of Panic -- Are We Dead Yet?. Here's another excerpt, this on the ebb and flow of what's hot and what's not, apocalyptically speaking:

We haven't seen a panic quite like this one since the last one. SARS was once thought to be the ultimate panic, though the longest running panic was the AIDS scare, when big media set out to convince us that "now we are all at risk." SARS was never a threat in the United States, and worth the P-word only in China and even there a risk confined mostly to people who sleep with their chickens. You can step in all manner of unpleasant things in a chicken house. AIDS continues to be a succession of personal tragedies, but it has lost its power to terrorize continents. Worse, it lost its media cachet. Besides, nobody at the New York Times or at CNN wants to credit George W. Bush with anything good, or even acknowledge how he has become a hero in Africa for the American campaign against AIDS in Africa that has saved millions of lives.

The liberal media will tell us what to worry about. Some impending disasters are politically correct and others are not.

Second, she directs our attention to Michael Ledeen's column on Obama's approach to intelligence and national security. (She's right, it is worth reading.) Obama's toxic mix of ignorance, arrogance, and bad intentions in these areas, as in others (the economy, foreign policy), is what worries me most.

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Electronic medical records will not cure what ails you

Most people assume digitalized medical records would be a significant improvement over low-tech written records. But, as we've touched on before, studies have shown that computerizing medical records will not save money or improve care, and may in fact be harmful to patients.

Here's a telling anecdote:

The Data Model That Nearly Killed Me

The law [the stimulus bill] also explains how to test systems built with federal money but it does not explain how to measure semantic validity of information - garbage in garbage out! Good luck with all of that Mr. President.

During the last week of January 2009 a faulty electronic, networked, health information data model nearly killed me despite its vaunted status as a component of two state-of-the-art, health information systems at two of the world’s most advanced medical facilities. This will come as no surprise to healthcare IT experts because health information is inherently complex, medical science develops extraordinarily rapidly, patient interactions are intensely personal, and the number of data types and sheer volumes of healthcare data explode prodigiously with new tests, instruments, and treatments. . . .

My near-death experience at one of the best tertiary medical centers in the world, with modern electronic health information systems, illuminates the chasm between the President’s NHIN vision and its reality.

If you don't like horror stories or are prone to nightmares, skip this. The patient lived but with no thanks to the multiple doctors and nurses who dutifully took his history (11 times, and he could hardly breathe), entered his information into their laptops, and did little else. One nurse stood out in her efforts to correct errors, pull his records together, and try to obtain ordered medications. Thank goodness the patient's wife was there as his advocate. She had the foresight to bring his own meds along and finally gave him what he needed on the sly. He believes that this saved his life.

An excerpt:

I was in ER for 20 hours before being admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) where I spent another 28 hours. Throughout my stay, I was hooked to network attached monitors that incessantly sounded alarms to which no one responded. I was asked 11 times to repeat my medical history, medication, and allergies to as many different medical professionals. I was seen by seven doctors each of whom asked me similar questions. Five doctors were never to be seen again. All doctors mumbled something about putting their findings into the hospital’s electronic records system - most did not according to ICU nurses. No one read my allergist’s detailed report about my condition and health history.

As I moved from ER, to an ER holding room for admitted patients, back to ER, and to and fro other departments for tests, and finally to ICU, I was visited by nurses and technicians who pushed laptops mounted on wheeled sticks. They checked my vitals; asked me questions about my history, medications, and allergies; and entered findings into the hospital’s electronic medical record using the laptops mounted on wheeled sticks.

I asked every nurse and doctor who met me, and I was told that I would receive medication to relieve the intense pain from my lungs. Each claimed they would note this in my electronic medical record. No one did until about 14 hours later, during the middle of the night, when one thoughtful ER nurse finally found a doctor to authorize giving me the oft approved but never delivered pain relief medication.

There's a lot more where that came from.

What follows this hellish anecdote is an analysis that smart, analytical types like Pundit will breeze through. I did not attempt it. I'll ask him to give me the Cliff Notes version later. (It's one of the perks of marrying a genius.) But I gather it explains why merely digitalizing records are at best not helpful, and finding a solution that deals with the extraordinary complexity of contemporary medical practice is not on the horizon.

And there's no way that Obama or any of his brilliant team has any inkling of this. But this change has been mandated anyway. Cuz it sounds good.

h/t: Slashdot via Pundit

Cross-posted in The Green Room.

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Flyover makes no sense

*Updated to add link to Powerline's Is there a Story Here? (h/t: FM)

The more I think about the Air Force One flyover and talk about it with my kids, the less I understand what, how, and why this happened. Rush doesn't get it either. Where are the blowhard senators when you need them, bellowing about an investigation? This surely warrants some kind of looking into.

But here's a funny take on it from the creative Pat Hickey: Bush did it!
And the inside story from Teleprompter.


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Obamas still haven't chosen a church

Naive of me to wish that the decision of which church to attend would be based on religious beliefs instead of politics and race. That's clearly not what's happening here. The church decision is so politically loaded that, almost six months after the election, the family still has no church to call their own.

Quiet Prayer in D.C. Churches for Obama's Decision


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Quote of the day: Michael Caine on work and taxes

He has had quite enough:

"The Government has taken tax up to 50 per cent, and if it goes to 51 I will be back in America," he said at the weekend. "We've got 3.5 million layabouts on benefits, and I'm 76, getting up at 6am to go to work to keep them. Let's get everybody back to work so we can save a couple of billion and cut tax, not keep sticking it up."

Mr. Caine's experience with actual work and improvement of his lot in life makes him an excellent role model:

Maurice Joseph Micklewhite – Caine's real name – definitely knows all about raising himself up. Indeed, he strikes me as the embodiment of a very British kind of social mobility.

The star of Get Carter was born in Rotherhithe, south-east London, the son of a charlady and a fish market porter. He passed his 11-plus, winning a scholarship to a grammar school, left school at 16 and saw action in the Royal Fusiliers in the Korean War. From a job as a messenger, he worked his way into acting and became one of the sharpest stars of his generation – a crisply tailored contemporary of other working-class boys who smashed a social glass ceiling in the 1960s.

Not everything on his CV since has been beyond reproach: his appearances in The Swarm or Jaws: The Revenge spring to mind. But even on the subject of his bad films he is entertaining. "I have never seen the film," he said of one flop. "But by all accounts it was terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific."

Everything Sir Michael has made, he made by his hard work. That his story is much more difficult to imagine in contemporary Britain demonstrates how far backwards we have slid. Privilege is once again becoming the key that unlocks the right doors. Access to the best schools is increasingly limited to the affluent, which in turn leads on to the best universities and the plum places in the professions.

I love his accent, too.

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Arlen Specter: it's not me, it's you

From Specter's statement:

“Since my election in 1980, as part of the Reagan Big Tent, the Republican Party has moved far to the right. Last year, more than 200,000 Republicans in Pennsylvania changed their registration to become Democrats. I now find my political philosophy more in line with Democrats than Republicans.”

He was apparently the last to know.

Michelle says: "Don’t let the door hit you on the way out."

I do wish the guys at This Ain't Hell would come out of their shells and tell us how they really feel:

Specter to go to the Dems, and I couldn’t be happier since that piece of crap has been screwing America for years. Despite being a lawyer, he knows as much about law as I do Cricket.

I hope Toomey beats him into the ground.

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This photo is crying out for a caption

What Hillary actually said to Libyan National Security Adviser Dr. Mutassim Qadhafi:

SECRETARY CLINTON: I am very pleased to welcome Minister Qadhafi here to the State Department. We deeply value the relationship between the United States and Libya. We have many opportunities to deepen and broaden our cooperation. And I’m very much looking forward to building on this relationship. So, Mr. Minister, welcome so much here.
NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR QADHAFI: Thank you.
SECRETARY CLINTON: Thank you. We’re delighted you’re here.
NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR QADHAFI: Thank you.
SECRETARY CLINTON: Thank you all very much.

If you choose to caption this you may use some of the above.

h/t: Althouse

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Obama expected to wear the Notre Dame robe at commencement

*Scroll down for update.

I tend to avoid talking about "Catholic" institutions like Notre Dame and Georgetown that appear so eager to trivialize or jettison their faith for their liberal politics, because 1) it's such an old story, and 2) as a Catholic, when I think about it for more than three minutes my blood starts to boil.

But for the record, these two stories should be distressing to Catholics and all Christians.

First, what Georgetown President John DeGioia said when he introduced our abortion-promoting president at the university on April 14th:

“Throughout these past months and these early days of his presidency, and addressing our most difficult challenges, he has been resolute that in this moment we as a people will only be equal to the demands of the day if we stand up to the needs of the marginalized, of the powerless, of those without voice,” said DeGioia. [emphasis added]

This somehow does not apply to the unborn, or the inconveniently, unintentionally born?

h/t: Laura Ingraham

Then this: Sick. White House Expects Obama To Wear Traditional Notre Dame Robe With Prayer to Virgin Mary

I thought Obama might ask Notre Dame to temporarily change its name so as not to offend or mislead. But even if he knows what it means (doubtful), he doesn't care. He will don the robe which bears an emblem that includes words from a prayer to the Blessed Virgin:

The phrase ‘Vita, Dulcedo, Spes,’ taken from the ancient prayer to the Virgin, the ‘Salve Regina,’ means ‘our life, our sweetness, our hope’ the combination of these phrases with the symbol for the university indicates the dedication of all Notre Dame’s activities, intellectual, spiritual, athletic, and so on, to Our Lady.”

That's awkwardly stated, but it means that everything that is undertaken at Notre Dame is dedicated to Mary, who is "our life, our sweetness, and our hope."

In a related story, Mary Ann Glendon has decided that, because the University will be honoring Obama at the commencement, she will not attend or accept the Laetare Medal. Read her letter here. This woman has integrity.

Teleprompter ought to be working overtime on the prep for this event, which, putting the travesty of it aside, could easily result in some serious Obamaisms.

*Update: Michelle Malkin has a clever photo here.

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And how do you think it makes pigs feel?

JERUSALEM – The outbreak of swine flu should be renamed "Mexican" influenza in deference to Muslim and Jewish sensitivities over pork, said an Israeli health official Monday.

Deputy Health Minister Yakov Litzman said the reference to pigs is offensive to both religions and "we should call this Mexican flu and not swine flu," he told a news conference at a hospital in central Israel.

Both Judaism and Islam consider pigs unclean and forbid the eating of pork products.

Scientists are unsure where the new swine flu virus originally emerged, though it was identifed first in the United States. They say there is nothing about the virus that makes it "Mexican" and worry such a label would be stigmatizing.

Two Israelis who recently visited Mexico have been hospitalized with symptoms of the flu. Health authorities have not yet confirmed whether they actually have the virus.

The current strain of swine flu is thought to have originated in Mexico where more than 100 people have been killed by the disease so far.

Laboratories in the U.S. and Canada have confirmed that of the samples tested so far, the swine flu virus in Mexico and U.S. appear to be the same.

Mark Steyn:

How come those deadbeats at CAIR weren't on to this before the Jews? The naming of influenzas:

JERUSALEM – The outbreak of swine flu should be renamed "Mexican" influenza in deference to Muslim and Jewish sensitivities over pork, said an Israeli health official Monday.

What about Mexican sensitivities? Undocumented Flu?

A Wahhabi health official adds: "But doesn't swine influenze refer to the sinister Zionist influenze on the American government?"

We can laugh, but I'll betcha $10 that the pc press will start calling it something else, in deference to Muslims, Jews, Mexicans, the porcine community, whatever.

I personally love the word 'swine' -- very expressive.

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NYC flyover: WIIHBB?

*Scroll down for updates.

Such a bore to keep repeating What if it had been Bush? when Obama screws up. But just imagine the reaction if this had happened under Bush's watch. The din would be deafening, and rightly so. But on CNN.com right now it's the sixth story from the top. MSNBC.com features the video about a third of the way down the page, but the incident isn't included anywhere in the list of top stories. If you used ABC news as a source of information you'd have trouble finding the story at all. CBS puts it fourth in their list of news items but features no video or photo. The Washington Post puts it on page A3 and buries it online. The HuffPo places it ten or eleven stories down on its homepage this morning. Like I said, WIIHBB?

See Donald Douglas for the videos and various analyses. His own: "This is one hundred times worse than 'Mission Accomplished.'" RS McCain congratulates the Obama admin: "It seems to have been conceded that the stunt was conceived for political P.R. purposes. Happy Hundred Days, morons."

*I'm not going to sit here all day and obsessively post updates. But I'll allow myself just one three: "We are all just extras in the Barack Obama show."

Exactly. Some are worrying about the effect that the swine flu story is having on Obama's Glorious 100th Day Gala.

Donald Douglas has unearthed a deranged person who thinks Obama orchestrated the NYC flyover to show the evil Wall Street bankers who's the boss. Get a grip, man.

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Frank and Ava: 'Doomed from the start'

. . . partly because Ava was one messed up lady, and partly because Sinatra was already married.

I try to focus on his music and not his life, but I couldn't let this pass by.

Big Hollywood: Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner Shoot Out the Night by Robert J. Avrech

Ava downed more liquor, squinted down the barrel of the Smith & Wesson and fired into the window of a hardware store.

Ava shot the chambers empty and continued to shriek the rebel yell.

That dame was poison. He was a fool to want her.

Sinatra with his wife, Nancy Barbato Sinatra. She never remarried.

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Roxana Saberi celebrates birthday in Iranian prison

Michelle Malkin implores us to spread the word on this injustice.


From Michelle:

US journalist Roxana Saberi turns 32 today in an Iranian prison. After an hour-long trial, she was sentenced to eight years behind bars for “espionage.” She was initially told she was arrested for buying bootleg wine, and then because she was working as a journalist without a license. She’s now on day five of a hunger strike. Today, one of her defense lawyers was denied access to her.

Most recent posts here.

The arrogant and the ignorant

Choice bits among many from Jay Nordlinger. He quotes this head-banger from El Supremo:

Did you note what our president said in Strasbourg? “I think that it is important for Europe to understand that even though I’m now president and George Bush is no longer president, al-Qaeda is still a threat. We cannot pretend somehow that because Barack Hussein Obama got elected as president, suddenly everything is going to be okay.”

Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you very, very much. Thank you ever so much. Gee.

There’s an expression I heard some years ago that I like very much: “Get over yourself.”

Not likely. It's what he's all about.

And Pundit sent me this, which cleverly highlights the arrogance of some hirelings:

You know my favorite Phil Gramm story, right? (One of them, anyway.) He’s on MacNeil-Lehrer (I believe) with some woman from the education establishment (what Bill Bennett used to call “the Blob”). Gramm says, “My educational policies are based on the fact that I care more about my children than you do.” The woman says, “No, you don’t.” Gramm says, “Okay: What are their names?”

Owned.

Also from Pundit, some tragicomedy from our poor brainwashed young:

In a column last week, I had a little item about environmentalist alarmism: the practice of scaring the bejesus out of children, particularly. This item attracted a lot of mail: most of which provided examples of green psychological warfare (for lack of a better, or pithier, phrase). I would like to publish just one letter — lightish. It goes,

Hi, Jay,

I coach my eight-year-old daughter’s soccer team. [This is a mom writing — a soccer-mom-coach.] Wednesday at practice, my daughter bent down and picked up a stick and started drawing out a play in the dirt for her teammates. With one voice, at least three of the girls howled, “What are you doing?! It’s Earth Day! You’re hurting the Earth!” Indoctrination works.

Don’t it ever — on many.

File that under 'another reason to homeschool.'


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Maybe you should get married

And maybe sooner rather than later. That suggestion from a sociologist who has studied the subject.

*Scroll down for updates.

There's been chatter in the blogosphere of late about the benefits of marriage and babies. RS McCain takes a radical view and proposes that marrying young is a good thing, and that Christians might want to take the words "be fruitful and multiply" to heart. My response here.

Now, from yesterday's Washington Post, a secular argument for earlier marriage: Say Yes. What Are You Waiting For? by Mark Regnerus. (On the same page is an account of the decision to marry 'early' -- age 26 -- from an editor of Self magazine. More on that below.)

Excerpts from Mr. Regnerus:

First, what is considered "early marriage" by social scientists is commonly misunderstood by the public. The best evaluations of early marriage -- conducted by researchers at the University of Texas and Penn State University -- note that the age-divorce link is most prominent among teenagers (those who marry before age 20). Marriages that begin at age 20, 21 or 22 are not nearly so likely to end in divorce as many presume. . . .

Marriage actually works best as a formative institution, not an institution you enter once you think you're fully formed. We learn marriage, just as we learn language, and to the teachable, some lessons just come easier earlier in life. . . .

My wife and I married at 22 with nothing to our name but a pair of degrees and some dreams. We enjoy recounting those days of austerity, and we're still fiscal conservatives because of it, better poised to weather the current crisis than many, because marriage is an unbelievably efficient arrangement and the best wealth-creating institution there is. Married people earn more, save more and build more wealth compared with people who are single or cohabiting. (Say what you will about the benefits of cohabitation, it's a categorically less stable arrangement, far more prone to division than marriage.) We can combine incomes while reducing expenses such as food, child care, electricity, gas and water usage. Marriage may be bourgeois, but it's also the greenest of all social structures. Michigan State ecologists estimate that the extra households created by divorce cost the nation 73 billion kilowatt hours of electricity and more than 600 billion gallons of water in a year. That's a mighty big carbon footprint created in the name of solitude. Marriage may not make you rich -- that's not its purpose -- but a biblical proverb reveals this nifty side effect: "Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their work."

There's a great deal of social pressure on young women to wait and wait:

Sara, a 19-year-old college student from Dallas, equated thinking about marrying her boyfriend with staging a rebellion. Her parents "want my full attention on grades and school because they want me to get a good job," she told me. Understandable. But our children now sense that marrying young may be not simply foolish but also wrong and socially harmful. And yet today, as ever, marriage wisely entered into remains good for the economy and the community, good for one's personal well-being, good for wealth creation and, yes, good for the environment, too. We are sending mixed messages.

More on this in the aforementioned column by Erin Hobday.

If age 26 is considered young in her circle, let's say that marrying between age 30 and 35 is considered average by these educated young women. In this scenario, after 10-15 years of contracepting, the not-so-young woman tries to turn her fertility back on. When this doesn't work as well as the couple hopes, they consult Dr. Frankenstein, who may or may not be able to help them obtain the child they're now so desperate to have. Does it not strike you as ironic when this story ends with the placement of the treasured child in full-time daycare? Just for the record, I hate daycare. I think it's bad for kids. And just for fun, here's a poem about marriage.

*Update: May I direct your attention to RS McCain's post about Jessica Valenti's book, The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity Is Hurting Young Women. Here's one awesome quote:

Common-sense observations about human nature are now politicized as "conservative," so that every knocked-up 15-year-old can be said to be engaged in liberal activism and her baby-daddy is a "community organizer" of sorts.

And another:

Dishonest writers like Valenti seek mainstream acceptance of their ideology by expressing it in mild language that won't offend the soccer moms. The critic who distills their argument to its radical essence -- as is my wont -- will naturally be denounced as an extremist. Which I suppose is true in the sense that it takes one to know one. But one cannot be moderate in the discussion of virtue, which allows no compromise.

One is virtuous or one is not, and while I have never claimed to be a paragon of virtue, I can at least distinguish between virtue and vice. And must, lest I incur the ancient curse:

Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil . . . -- Isaiah 5:20 KJV

A perverse non-judgmentalism, that refuses to praise virtue or condemn vice, is moral nihilism. Valenti goes beyond this, to celebrate whoredom and condemn chastity.

**Welcome, Creative Minority readers. For other topics of interest, see labels on lower left sidebar.

***John Derbyshire quotes Dr. Johnson on marrying young:

I believe it will be found that those who marry late are best pleased with their children, and those who marry early with their partners.

****Ramesh Ponnuru takes comments on the Regnerus article here.

*****RS McCain continues the discussion here, including links to those who disagree.

******Here's an interconnected chain of posts on marrying early: Elizabeth Foss, Rebecca Teti, and Frederica Mathewes-Green. The first two are from last fall and the third is from 2005.

Provocative thoughts from Mathewes-Green:

In fact, I have a theory that late marriage contributes to an *increased* divorce rate. During those lingering years of unmarried adulthood, young people may not be getting married, but they’re still falling in love. They fall in love, and break up, and undergo terrible pain, but find that with time they get over it. This is true even if they remain chaste. By the time these young people marry they may have had many opportunities to learn how to walk away from a promise. They’ve been training for divorce.

Late marriage means fighting God’s design for our bodies, and that’s never a fight we can win. My hobbyhorse in the project of restoring a viable idea of adulthood is to encourage finding ways to support and enable young marriage. A couple of years ago I wrote a piece detailing some recommendations for this, which I gave the intentionally shocking title, "Let’s have more teen pregnancy."

And from Elizabeth Foss, pure anecdotal support for marrying young:

This year, I've been married half my life--the better half, by far. I know the boy my husband was and I was there, holding his hand, as he became a man. We have history together and sometimes, it's history that gets you through the rough patches. We also had energy and youth and--frankly--hormones on our side in those early days of growing. Now, I think that perhaps the habits of affection step in and take over when energy and youth and hormones fail. We know each other. We know what works and what doesn't. It's not perfect. We still have rough patches, but time has always been on our side.

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Simon Cowell, truth teller

P. and I don't really watch American Idol, and when we started writing here we intended for it to be an Idol-free zone. But when we do watch it's to hear Simon. Now Kurt Schlichter of Big Hollywood does him justice in the column excerpted below. We've written before about the scourge of the phony self-esteem movement and why constant empty praise does our children and our society no favors. I imagine many people believe that Simon, not the deluded contestants who trash him for being arrogant after he's given them a dose of reality, is the narcissist. Mr. Schlichter makes a compelling argument that he is not.

Here's a big chunk of the column, but read it all:

It’s the fourth judge, English expat Simon Cowell, who makes “Idol” so conservative and so refreshing. Because he just doesn’t care. And it’s glorious.

“That was bloody awful,” he will casually observe. Then the camera will pan to the 22-year old singer slash Hooters girl as her jaw drops in the face of an undeniable truth no one has ever dared tell her before.

“But singing is my dream,” she’ll protest.

“Get a new dream,” Simon will reply without a hint of emotion, “because your singing is a nightmare. Go home.” And they usually do - the audience tends to vote off those not making the Cowell cut.

There are still a few places left in American society where hard truth and unrelenting standards still intersect - courtrooms, basic training, match.com. But those are exceptions. . . .

Only in a society where children’s’ self-esteem has been made the Holy Grail of the educational system could a 19-year old communications major from Maryland State with a love of show tunes presume to place her opinion about singing on the same scale with that of a 30-year record industry vet who could tile the floor of his mansion with the gold records he’s honchoed. And who lied to this young woman and told her that the amusement she derived from her activity is somehow relevant to evaluating the skill she displayed in executing it?

But you can see in the eyes of the smart ones that they are thinking about what Simon said. That’s good - criticism is the key to improvement. Validation is the key to staying lousy.

Simon, like all rebels, comes in for his share of grief. He is mocked for his huge ego, but he has a right to a healthy ego - Simon is tremendously successful music impresario. He earned it. The problem is the huge egos of people who have not.

Mostly, Simon is accused of taking pleasure in slashing the contestants down to size, but a closer look proves that is just not so. Simon is never happy when trashing a performance - there’s no smile, no hint of delight. If anything, he is irritated, offended that he and the audience were presented with a poorly arranged, lazily performed, overindulgent mess of a performance. The only time he is clearly happy, in fact, is when someone does well.

“That was brilliant,” he will say in exactly the same way he just told a lesser performer that she sounded like a broken woodchipper with a chest cold. But you can see the comer of his thin lips turn upwards in delight. Simon does not enjoy failure. He enjoys earned success.

Where society seeks to avoid at all costs “stigmatizing” people by telling the truth about them, Simon swims upstream against this feel-good nonsense like some kind of truth-telling salmon. Like so much of society, many of the contestants show up believing they are somehow entitled to validation. In the past, this misconception would have been dispelled by parents and teachers. Now it’s up to Simon.

Read the rest.

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The liberal agenda: taxes, socialized medicine, and revenge, but not necessarily in that order

After spending yesterday fraternizing with fellow right wing extremists while the rwe kiddies cavorted about in the woods shooting paintballs at each other in the 95 degree heat and brushing brown recluse spiders from their persons, I'm feeling very out of it this morning. And then I wasted an hour trying to find a cutesy retro photo to accompany a thank-you post to all those who have recently linked to me. I gave that up in despair but will somehow get those thank-you notes written like a good girl.

This is all to say that I'm playing catch-up with the actual news of the day and will pass items on as I find them.

On taxes, Mark Steyn quotes Andrew Lloyd Weber:

Here's the truth. The proposed top rate of income tax is not 50 per cent. It is 50 per cent plus 1.5 per cent national insurance paid by employees plus 13.3 per cent paid by employers. That's not 50 per cent. Two years from now, Britain will have the highest tax rate on earned income of any developed country.

I write this article because I fear the inevitable exodus of the talent that can dig us out of the hole we find ourselves in... Last Thursday I met with a thirtysomething guy. I absolutely depend on him in a highly technical area of theatrical production. For legal reasons he has to employ himself through his own company. Under the new tax regime, he will have to pay 13.3 per cent to employ himself before he pays himself anything. And then he will have to pay 51.5 per cent on what's left.

This is a guy at the cutting edge of his profession who works all over the world. He is in demand in every major territory where entertainment is produced. He has a young wife and two children. Last Thursday he told me that he and his wife had decided that the UK was no longer where they wanted to live.

Mark adds:

As I like to say about Obama's plans to raise taxes only on the rich, you'll be surprised what percentage of the population find themselves in "the richest five per cent" by the time we're through. There are simply not enough of "the rich" to pay for what western governments are spending. [emphasis added]

Think NYC, where a tiny percentage of the population pays a huge percentage of the taxes that keep the city running. What happens to New York when the "rich" decide they'd be better off living somewhere else?

On politics, William Jacobson believes that Obama's release of CIA interrogation documents was a tactical blunder for which he'll pay dearly. Congress wants Bush's and Cheney's blood and their quest to get it will supersede Obama's agenda:

From a narrow, self-centered point of view, allowing Democrats to sidetrack Obama's agenda would be an accomplishment Republicans could only hope for. But since the price will be diminished national security, Republicans cannot in good conscience acquiesce in the Democrats' plans. As interesting as it would be to call Nancy Pelosi as a witness, the country comes first. If the hearings and investigations proceed over Republican objections, Republicans will have no choice but to expose Democratic hyperventilating hypocrisy for what it is, but Republicans should not wish too hard for the opportunity.

On Obama's attempt to nationalize healthcare, Wes Vernon suggests we bring back those Harry and Louise commercials. He hopes that Americans, when they see the details of the reform, will make some attempt to fight back.

"Activist" groups lavishly funded by multi-billionaire George Soros — the de facto leader of the Democrat Party — have ordered their puppet in the White House and their Reid-Pelosi minions on Capitol Hill to stop talking, even talking with private health interests behind closed doors — where they are accused of plotting to "cave" to (gasp!) the "for profit" private insurance industry.

(And we all know how capitalist profits are inherently evil, don't we? Except for Democrat Party leader Soros, who swims in billions — says he is having a "glorious crisis" — while the rest of us watch our portfolios/savings plummet.)

Our guess is they have nothing to worry about as far as President Obama is concerned. What these socialist activists have reason to fear is the reaction of the American people when they become acquainted with the details likely to emerge in the witches brew in store for them if socialized medicine comes to America.

Finally, on fashion and air travel: Ladies, be warned. Don't wear billowy skirts to the airport.
I'm not sure if wearing a narrow pencil skirt will invite the same attention from security.

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The day the music died

For these Pakistani men, anyway:

Taliban shaves men's heads for listening to music

For years many people have pointed out that most music is contrary to traditional Islamic law. For this they have been called "Islamophobic." The Taliban must be Islamophobic as well.

Here is a glimpse into the West's future if it continues to accommodate Sharia: "Taliban shave men for listening to music," from Agence France-Presse, April 26 (thanks to JE):

TALIBAN militants in northwest Buner district shaved the heads and moustaches of four Pakistani men as punishment for listening to music, one of the men said.

Buner has been subject to huge US concern after hundreds of Taliban fighters advanced into the area from the neighbouring Swat, where the hardliners fought a brutal, nearly two-year insurgency to enforce Islamic law.

"I was with three other friends in my car, listening to music when armed Taliban stopped us and, after smashing cassettes and the cassette player, they shaved half our heads and moustaches,'' he said.

"The Taliban also beat us and asked us not to listen to music ever again,'' said the terrified man.

*Updated to add witty (slightly edited) comment from Daley Gator:

Pundit & Pundette brings us even more Sharia ***backwardsness, who, apparently think music is evil. No, ***hats, music is a gift from God, YOU are evil! [emphasis added]

They know that music is powerful and can slip its influence in under the radar.

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Liberals try to deny the reality of the West Coast plot

And, not coincidentally, the proven effectiveness of waterboarding in saving American lives.

A must read by Marc Thiessen, who exhaustively corrects the record on what has been gained from the use of waterboarding. Excerpts, but please read it all:

Critics of the CIA program are desperate to convince Americans that no valuable information came from the interrogations of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) and other senior terrorists. They know that if our citizens learn the details of how enhanced interrogations stopped terrorist plots, most would support the CIA program. A recent Pew poll showed that 71% of Americans believe that there are circumstances under which torture (not just enhanced interrogations, but actual torture) is justifiable to get information from captured terrorists.

This is why Timothy Noah of Slate (with Andrew Sullivan cheerleading him on his blog) is at such pains to debunk the story of the West Coast plot. . . .

These two try to argue that, after 9/11, the US was no longer threatened by planes. Demonstrably not so:

Really? Planes were off the table after 9/11? That would come as a surprise to every passenger in the past three years who had their liquids confiscated in an airport security line. Those security measures were instituted because in 2006 we foiled an al-Qaeda plot to hijack airplanes leaving London’s Heathrow airport and blow them up over the Atlantic (a plot our intelligence community says was just weeks from execution). Apparently al-Qaeda didn’t get Noah’s memo explaining that hijacking airplanes for terrorist attacks is “no longer viable al Qaeda strategy.”

Mr. Thiessen provides a great deal of evidence.

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Infectious disease: Another reason why our borders need to be secure

C'mon, Janet. Neither you nor your boss probably ever heard of the 1918 flu epidemic, but even you can tell that something called swine flu must be a bad thing. Especially when the word pandemic is being tossed around. It has spread from Mexico to California, Texas, Kansas, and New York. Even President Obama was exposed on his visit to Mexico.

Course you could re-label it and that might make it go away. Something that takes the sting out of it, such as "naturally occurring unpleasantness."

The whole point of having a border is to keep things that will kill your people out.

Memorandum has lotsa links, including: US Slow to Learn of Mexico Flu

But I see that Troglopundit thinks it's just another boy crying wolf.


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NASA image of Saturn

Space fans, feast your eyes on this:

Click to enlarge and be blown away.

This beautiful image of Saturn and its rings looks more like an artist’s creation than a real image, but in fact, the image is a composite (layered image) made from 165 images taken by the wide-angle camera on the Cassini spacecraft over nearly three hours on September 15, 2006. . . .

On this day, Saturn interceded between the Sun and Cassini, shielding Cassini from the Sun’s glare. As the spacecraft lingered in Saturn’s shadow, it viewed the planet’s rings as never before, revealing previously unknown faint rings and even glimpsing its home world. Seen from more than a billion kilometers (almost a billion miles) away, through the ice and dust particles of Saturn’s rings, Earth appears as a tiny, bright dot to the left and slightly behind Saturn.

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Susan Boyle makeover photo

From the Post: Susan Boyle 2.0:


I like it. How about you?
(Cue song.)

All Susan Boyle posts here.
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Napolitano: How is she qualified to run DHS?

Mark and Hyacinth Girl (her title gets to the point immediately) don't know how in the world Napolitano can not know how the 9/11 terrorists entered the US.

Pretty stunning, ain't it? Janet's making quite a name for herself in her new job. She's dissed American veterans and pro-lifers in particular, and law-abiding patriots in general. (For the record, she has issued three apologies.) Now she's ticked off Canadians. From Mark:

. . . the CBC's Rex Murphy gets to the heart of the matter:

What is Barack Obama doing appointing someone to head Homeland Security, who, eight years after the attacks, does not even now know where the hijackers came from and how they got into their country? Here, it’s not her ignorance about Canada which should be troubling. It’s her ignorance of the most publicized event in modern American history. How can anyone be head of Homeland Security and not know the history of the 19 men who killed nearly 3,000 Americans?

Just so. The mass murderers of Secretary Napolitano's compatriots never set foot in Canada. Under the State Department's Visa Express program for young Saudi males, they filled out joke perfunctory U.S. government paperwork, and even then barely troubled to observe the niceties: "Address while in the United States: HOTEL AMERICA," etc. No octogenarian Toronto snowbird who's been wintering in Florida every year since 1947 would try to get away with answers like that.

A person too incurious to have picked that up over the last eight years is now in charge of Homeland Security.

"Too incurious" shows a great deal of restraint. Understatement is what the satirist must resort to when the subject has come pre-satirized. But I think it effectively though subtly conveys a sense of disbelief. And who can #@%&$ing believe this?? ("#@%&$" stands for "bleep." This is a family blog, mostly, and I don't use that kind of language.)

Hyacinth Girl puts it this way:

How did Napolitano get her current job? Was it some sort of affirmative action thing? . . . The saddest thing about this is that she was the GOVERNOR of a BORDER STATE for quite awhile. She should be a bit more knowledgeable about border issues, dammit. It’s just embarrassing.

But Janet's not really into that border thing. As with Obama, we just can't stop asking: stupid or evil? Andy McCarthy wants to know, too:

So the question is: Is Napolitano just a dimwit or is she willfully misrepresenting the law as a rationale for not enforcing it? In any event, this is quite the administration. The president has just turned the attorney general loose to prosecute political adversaries for actions that were not crimes and saved American lives, while the Homeland Security Secretary, fresh from slandering the the president's political adversaries, is either in ignorance or denial about the actual crimes it's her job to go after.

And the answer to the eternal question, again, is "Both."

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Obama vs. America: some opinions

From Gerald Warner of the UK:
Why does President Pantywaist hate America so badly?

If al-Qaeda, the Taliban and the rest of the Looney Tunes brigade want to kick America to death, they had better move in quickly and grab a piece of the action before Barack Obama finishes the job himself. Never in the history of the United States has a president worked so actively against the interests of his own people - not even Jimmy Carter.

Obama's problem is that he does not know who the enemy is. To him, the enemy does not squat in caves in Waziristan, clutching automatic weapons and reciting the more militant verses from the Koran: instead, it sits around at tea parties in Kentucky quoting from the US Constitution. Obama is not at war with terrorists, but with his Republican fellow citizens. He has never abandoned the campaign trail.

His release of CIA documents has undermined our efforts to prevent attacks on the US:

So, next time a senior al-Qaeda hood is captured, all the CIA can do is ask him nicely if he would care to reveal when a major population centre is due to be hit by a terror spectacular, or which American city is about to be irradiated by a dirty bomb. Your view of this situation will be dictated by one simple criterion: whether or not you watched the people jumping from the twin towers.

This leads me to wonder where Obama was on 9/11. Was he not watching with the rest of us as the Towers came down?

President Pantywaist Obama should have thought twice before sitting down to play poker with Dick Cheney. The former vice president believes documents have been selectively published and that releasing more will prove how effective the interrogation techniques were. Under Dubya's administration, there was no further atrocity on American soil after 9/11.

President Pantywaist's recent world tour, cosying up to all the bad guys, excited the ambitions of America's enemies. Here, they realised, is a sucker they can really take to the cleaners. His only enemies are fellow Americans. Which prompts the question: why does President Pantywaist hate America so badly?

*More views Warner's column at Memeorandum.

From Diana West, cleverly done and making the same point (from about a month ago, in case you missed it): Jack Bauer meets Barack Obama

Tony: "Copy that, too. Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

Jack: "Copy. No American president would ever, could ever, lower himself and our nation to grovel like this to that vicious Islamic regime. Unless -- Tony, someone's gotten to the president. He's in trouble."

And Wesley Pruden on Obama's destructive politics of revenge:

We're on unfamiliar ground now. No president before has sought to punish his predecessor for policy decisions, no matter how wrong or wrong-headed. Lyndon B. Johnson's management of the Vietnam War was often ham-handed, as anyone who was there could tell you, and his policy makers sometimes verged on criminal incompetence. But Richard Nixon was never tempted to send LBJ or any of those presidential acolytes to prison. Abraham Lincoln, by his lights, would have had ample opportunity to hang Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, but even the rabid Republicans who survived the assassination stopped short of putting Davis in the dock, finally releasing him from imprisonment at Fort Monroe when judgment overcame lust for revenge. Lee was never touched.

Exacting revenge for unpopular policies is the norm in the third world, heretofore more likely in Barack Obama's ancestral Kenya than in America, more in the tradition of gangland Chicago than in Washington, where we count on cooler heads to prevail when raw emotion threatens to overwhelm sobriety and the undisciplined senses. We recall perceived national mistakes with the sadness of regret and even gratitude for lessons learned, not the frenzied catharsis of a St. Valentine's Day Massacre. Mr. Obama, having won the White House fair and square, is entitled to change any presidential policy he chooses, but the vindication of a national election does not entitle any president to exact mindless revenge.

Read the rest.

*Update: Why didn't I read Mark Steyn first? From yesterday's column:

In Europe, the president was asked if he believed in "American exceptionalism," and he replied: "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism."

Gee, thanks. A simple "no" would have sufficed. The president of the United States is telling us that American exceptionalism is no more than national chauvinism, a bit of flag-waving, of no more import than the Slovenes supporting the Slovene soccer team and the Papuans the Papuan soccer team. This means something. The world has had two millennia to learn to live without "Greek exceptionalism." It's having to get used to post-exceptional America rather more hurriedly. . . .

Since January, President Obama and his team have schmoozed, ineffectively, American enemies over allies in almost every corner of the globe. If you're, say, India, following Obama's apology tour even as you watch the Taliban advancing on those Pakistani nukes, would you want to bet the future on American resolve? In Delhi, in Tokyo, in Prague, in Tel Aviv, in Bogota, they've looked at these first 100 days and drawn their own conclusions.

So it turns out that all those signs, big and small -- his reluctance to wear the flag pin or put his hand over his heart while reciting the pledge of allegiance, his listening to anti-American rhetoric for twenty years in 'church,' his relationship with the anti-American Ayers, etc. -- that were so heartily pooh-poohed by the media, pointed with absolute accuracy to Obama's real feelings and beliefs about the United States.

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Caption this

My kids say that everyone loves caption contests. And you all came up with some good ones for the Obama-as-gentleman-farmer photo, so here's another one:


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Plan-B allows boys/men to use girls/women

Well-expressed point from Cranky Con:

People just don't understand the dangers of the promotion of contraceptives

What he’s [RS McCain, here] getting at is that the ready availability of contraception and abortion only promotes the idea that women are nothing but sex objects. It feeds into the notion that we shouldn’t care about refraining from sex before marriage, especially for teenagers. So long as the woman has her backup plans at the ready, the oversexed teenage male can look at his date as little more than a sperm depository. I’m sorry to put it that way, but to me that’s what our “enlightened” sexual attitude ultimately leads to.

Naturally the moonbats that responded in the comments section and linked to McCain don’t fully appreciate this. To them McCain, and by implication anyone that agrees with him, is a misogynist who wants to control women. What they miss is that the opposite is the case. We recognize the consequences of this contraceptive culture which breeds the notion that teenagers are free to view sex as harmless fun to be had to pass the time on a Saturday night.

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Be fruitful and multiply

Where have I been? I missed all these interconnected posts over the past couple of days:

Stand Firm in the Faith
Pro-Life Poltiics and the Several Catholicisms
Forbidding to Marry
Forbidding to Marry (HotAir)

Well-worth reading and only one (the last and best) is on the long side. Excerpts:

How many Christians have embraced this false — dare I say, evil — worldview? How many young Christian married couples use contraception because “we can’t afford children now”? And how many married Christian couples have unwittingly subscribed to the Zero Population Growth ideal of exactly two children per couple? Did you know that surgical sterilization (tubal ligation) is the No. 1 form of birth control for American women? It’s the “two and tie ‘em” mentality: Have exactly two children, then get yourself surgically sterilized. . . .

Too many people who consider themselves Christian conservatives are disobedient to God’s commandments, yet idolatrously reverent toward the conventions of a middle-class lifestyle. Their true religion is the Theology of Niceness: Get a nice job so you can live in a nice neighborhood with nice schools for your nice children who will wear nice clothes when you drive them in your nice car to play with their nice friends. . . .

If young Christian conservatives want to be “pro-family,” then, they need to be getting married and having babies. And what a youth rebellion that would be, huh? “No, mother, I’ve decided against law school. As a matter of fact, Jennifer and I went to the courthouse and got married last Saturday and . . .” Strange to say that the most shocking thing a young person can do in 2009 is to get married. They can change the world one “I do” at a time.

Think about the implications of that for a moment. Large families collect comebacks to the question "Why do you have so many kids?" and here's one I once heard: "We're trying to take over the world." Okay. Heed the call, Christian conservatives. Let God plan your family and the world will be a vastly better place.

*Update: Another thing mothers of large families hear whenever they leave the house is, "Well, you've got your hands full!" In this spirit, RSM has linked to this post and enhanced it with a very appropriate photo.

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Krauthammer: Healthcare RATIONING is coming

I know I'm slighting Mr. Krauthammer's dignity (and my own if I had any) when I say that I heart him. He refers to today's column as his "Unified theory of Obamaism, fifth (final?) installment."

Previous installments, as far as I can tell:

The Sting, in Four Parts
Obama's Ultimate Agenda
The Great Non-Sequitur
The Obamaist Manifesto

Each column will increase your understanding of our president, his agenda, and his methods.

I know we're all feeling beaten down by the socialist Obama juggernaut, even to the point of nearly losing our will to read Mark Steyn, and having to acknowledge how tired we are already, not even 100 days into the Obama-time:

However weary I may grow of disagreeing with and disliking the policies of the president, he makes it damn near impossible for a freedom-loving, classically liberal, capitalist girl like me to settle comfortably into the mind-numbing, astounding illogicality of this sustained Obamania. It’s going to be a long, long journey to 2012.

In spite of this, here's something that will tear you down even further. From Mr. K:

Obama's own budget projections show staggering budget deficits going out to 2019. If he knows his social agenda is going to drown us in debt, what's he up to?

He has an idea. But he dare not speak of it yet. He has only hinted. When asked in his March 24 news conference about the huge debt he's incurring, Obama spoke vaguely of "additional adjustments" that will be unfolding in future budgets.

Rarely have two more anodyne words carried such import. "Additional adjustments" equals major cuts in Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid. . . .

His plan is to cut Medicare and Medicaid by RATIONING:

Why do you think the stimulus package pours $1.1 billion into medical "comparative effectiveness research"? It is the perfect setup for rationing. Once you establish what is "best practice" for expensive operations, medical tests and aggressive therapies, you've laid the premise for funding some and denying others.

It is estimated that a third to a half of one's lifetime health costs are consumed in the last six months of life. Accordingly, Britain's National Health Service can deny treatments it deems not cost-effective -- and if you're old and infirm, the cost-effectiveness of treating you plummets. In Canada, they ration by queuing. You can wait forever for so-called elective procedures like hip replacements.

Rationing is not quite as alien to America as we think. We already ration kidneys and hearts for transplant according to survivability criteria as well as by queuing. A nationalized health insurance system would ration everything from MRIs to intensive care by myriad similar criteria. . . .

Social Security used to be the third rail of American politics. Not anymore. Health-care rationing is taking its place -- which is why Obama, the consummate politician, knows to offer the candy (universality) today before serving the spinach (rationing) tomorrow.

Taken as a whole, Obama's social democratic agenda is breathtaking. And the rollout has thus far been brilliant. It follows Kaus's advice to "give pandering a chance" and adheres to the Democratic tradition of being the party that gives things away, while leaving the green-eyeshade stinginess to those heartless Republicans.

It will work for a while, but there is no escaping rationing. In the end, the spinach must be served.

Related: Just don't get sick. Or old.

*Updated to add This Woman Is Obama’s Point Man On Infanticide And Rationing Healthcare

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