Miss him yet?

‘The sonogram’s great, we don’t need to have baby girls any more.’

“We were expecting Islam to adapt to France and it is France adapting to Islam.”

…because voting is shirk.

Help the Chicago Boyz get their book started.

Next time libs complain about the incivility of the flack Obama’s been catching, take a walk down memory lane with The Gallery of Bush = Hitler Allusions. Such a huge file, yet the fellow compiling it apparently gave up barely into Bush’s second term.

“…those meddling kids!”

If Thomas Friedman could be China for a day, maybe he could straighten out other people’s weird names for them also, no charge.

Michael Totten at the party at the end of the civilized world.

And a final Labor Day thought from the Book of Proverbs: “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.” Have a great one!

…but Jimmy Breslin is quite another.

You Bible-eaters.  Kennedy-shooters.  Because you come with the double barrels of a Low IQ and High Color Fear.  You hope for tragedy and wait for the return of the worst of memories.

h/t Ace.

h/t Ric at Wizbang

Some may remember a British TV doco from a few years back, The War Against Britain’s Jews.

My thesis was that while the Far Right hasn’t gone away, the motive force behind the recent increase in anti-Jewish activity comes from the Fascist Left and the Islamonazis.

It was an idea which vanished into the bowels of the commissioning process, never to return. Eventually the Beeb told me that they weren’t making any more ‘authored documentaries’.

I couldn’t help wondering what might have happened if I’d put forward a programme on ‘Islamophobia’. It would probably have become a six-part, primetime series and I’d have been up for a BAFTA by now.

But I persevered and Channel 4 picked up the project. You can see the results on Monday night.

When some people heard I was making the programme, their first reaction was: ‘I didn’t know you were Jewish.’

I’m not, but what’s that got to do with the price of gefilte fish? They simply couldn’t comprehend why a non-Jew would be in the slightest bit interested in investigating anti-Semitism.

If I had been making a film about Islamophobia, no one would have asked me if I was Muslim.

I saw a couple of YouTube clips of it, before the copyright cops took it down. In brief, Britain’s Jews are increasingly having to live their lives behind locked doors and high walls, due to the threats of violence from radical Muslims, with the tacit approval of British proggs. “The Jews have been asking for it and now, thank God, we can say what we think at last,” as one latter such said, in regard to the wave of suicide bombings in Israel in the early Aughties.

So it’s more than a little wince-inducing when a parachute journalist from The Guardian exclaims over the existence of New York City’s Satmar Hasidim neighborhood, Kiryas Joel.

Now, just for a moment, imagine that the good people of Kiryas Joel were not conservative Jews. Imagine them, instead, as Muslims. Muslims who had asked visitors to cover up when they come to their town. Muslims offended by the sight of any female flesh above the ankle or the wrist or below the neck. Muslims who wanted women and men passing through their community to stay apart. The outrage of America’s conservative classes could well be astonishing.

The largely silent acceptance of Kiryas Joel’s wishes tells us much about America’s admirable tolerance for minorities. Just as the ugliness of the Ground Zero mosque debate tells us much about its fear over Islam.

Dinna be sae sure, laddie; dinna be sae sure. Cheap parallelism can be deceiving at times. We are sensitive to Muslims’ sensibilities to a fault, sometimes. And the worst thing the hasidim ever did to America was to produce hate rabbi Meir Kahane–who incidentally was possibly al-Qaeda’s first victim on American soil.

No, it’s those whose belief system rejects the concept of Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You who earn our mistrust–not people in old-fashioned headgear who just want to be left alone.

In yet another measure of the Most Intelligent President evah!!, his coterie of advisors have proven their competence yet again …

President Obama’s new presidential rug seemed beyond reproach, with quotations from Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. woven along its curved edge.

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” According media reports, this quote keeping Obama company on his wheat-colored carpet is from King.

Except it’s not a King quote. The words belong to a long-gone Bostonian champion of social progress. His roots in the republic ran so deep that his grandfather commanded the Minutemen at the Battle of Lexington.

For the record, Theodore Parker is your man, President Obama. Unless you’re fascinated by antebellum American reformers, you may not know of the lyrically gifted Parker, an abolitionist, Unitarian minister and Transcendentalist thinker who foresaw the end of slavery, though he did not live to see emancipation. He died at age 49 in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War.

Fun is to be had following the Twitter hashtag #obamarugquotes for suggestions of quotes that didn’t make the rug …

“You don’t need a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” — Bill Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn #obamarugquotes

“You shall not pass!” -Ted Kennedy’s Bar Examiner #ObamaRugQuotes

Feel free to list your own or your favorites.

h/t geoffb

Let’s start with the headline: Millions Die Due to Withheld Medical Treatment.

Is this article about Britains notorious NHS with its attendant higher rates of cancer deaths due to its refusal to allow early screenings for things like cervical or prostate cancer? …er, No.

Imagine we found the cure for heart disease or diabetes, but as a society chose to withhold that treatment from those who need it most. Would it be ethical to withhold effective treatments when the result is unnecessary suffering and death that costs our health care system hundreds of billions of dollars a year?

The answer is obvious, yet that is exactly what occurs today in America. We know the most effective treatments for some of the deadliest diseases of our time, but millions are denied access to them. In effect, we are conducting a large experiment on our population without their consent. This happened in America once before. It is a dark stain on our scientific history that most of us would rather forget. It was the Tuskegee experiment.

MY GOD, you might say (if you were a bitter-clinger), what conspiracy is this? Dear me, what evidence does this writer have to bring?

Right now we are in the midst of a similar experiment, but few know about it. The tragedy of this experiment happened in my own family. My stepfather, who had diabetes and heart disease, was a victim of our modern Tuskegee experiment. He ultimately died last year as a result, and cost our health care system $400,000 along the way.

Who are these fiends!!? What was withheld from this poor man and his family?

If he were simply provided the choice of a different treatment–a treatment that is proven to be more effective and cost less than medication and surgery–namely a program for sustainable and comprehensive lifestyle change, perhaps he would still be alive and our national debt would be reduced by $400,000.

Wha….huh? Lifestyle change? LIFESTYLE CHANGE?!!

What am I missing here? That Hyman’s stepfather was totally unaware of what he needed to do via diet and exercise to manage his diabetes and heart disease? No one told him, not even his stepson writing this article?

Physicians do what they know (often as a result of training in a medical educational system dominated by Big Pharma) and what is paid for by insurance. [...]

The surgery and subsequent medical therapy with blood pressure medication, cholesterol-lowering medication, and blood thinners did not enhance the quality of his health and life. In fact, he continued to be sedentary, craved sugars and refined carbohydrates, and rapidly declined physically and mentally.

And this was the fault of whom?

Oh … wait for it …

Lifestyle intervention is often more effective in reducing cardiovascular disease, hypertension, heart failure, stroke, cancer, diabetes and all cause mortality than almost any other medical intervention [...]

Unfortunately, insurance doesn’t usually pay for it. No one profits from lifestyle medicine, so it is not part of medical education or practice. It should be the foundation of our health care system, but doctors ignore it because doctors do what they get paid to do. They get paid to dispense medication and perform surgery.

Ah, the Obama “doctors want to take off your leg or rip out your tonsils because of … [drum roll] PROFIT!!” meme.

Puh-leeze. I can’t remember a time when I went into the doctor’s office without a “lifestyle” coaching session and an armful of pamplets from the nurse about proper diet, healthy cooking tips, managing stress, easy-at-home exercise recommendations, etc.

The new health care bill provides for community based wellness initiatives like these, and that’s a step in the right direction. The National Council on Prevention, Health Promotion, and Public Health has begun to develop policies that will create a healthier nation. But what’s missing is insurance and Medicare reimbursement for treatments known to be effective for heart disease and diabetes–lifestyle-based therapies that are critical not just for prevention but also for the treatment and reversal of these modern epidemics. By not offering reimbursement for these treatments we have, in effect, begun the Tuskegee experiment of the 21st century.

The future of medical care must be to transform general lifestyle guidance–the mandates to eat a healthy diet and get regular exercise that many physicians try to provide to their patients–into individually-tailored lifestyle prescriptions for both the prevention and treatment of chronic diseases. The only way this is going to happen is if doctors are paid to do it. Lifestyle is often the best medicine when applied correctly, and it is the only thing that will end our modern Tuskegee experiment.

Tuskegee was an exercise in withholding critical information from the patients. Who, today, doesn’t know about what consitutes a healthy lifestyle?

And exactly what does Hyman, who couldn’t force his stepfather to adhere to a better lifestyle, want to actually do to other individuals who know the information and choose not to follow it?

Is it incompetence or is it corruption?

Christina Romer, chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, was giving what was billed as her “valedictory” before she returns to teach at Berkeley, and she used the swan song to establish four points, each more unnerving than the last:

She had no idea how bad the economic collapse would be. She still doesn’t understand exactly why it was so bad. The response to the collapse was inadequate. And she doesn’t have much of an idea about how to fix things.

I’m sorry; chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers?

What she did have was a binder full of scary descriptions and warnings, offered with a perma-smile and singsong delivery: “Terrible recession. . . . Incredibly searing. . . . Dramatically below trend. . . . Suffering terribly. . . . Risk of making high unemployment permanent. . . . Economic nightmare.”

Anybody want dessert? [...]

Romer, wearing a green suit, read brightly from her text – a delivery at odds with the dark material she was presenting. When she and her colleagues began work, she acknowledged, they did not realize “how quickly and strongly the financial crisis would affect the economy.” They “failed to anticipate just how violent the recession would be.”

Even now, Romer said, mystery persists. “To this day, economists don’t fully understand why firms cut production as much as they did or why they cut labor so much more than they normally would.” Her defense was that “almost all analysts were surprised by the violent reaction.”

I see.  And were almost all analysts deaf, blind, and dumb too?  Because here’s a theory:
(more…)

Gotta love this headline:

Unemployment rate hits 9.6%; fewer jobs lost than feared

George Lakoff returns to his familiar refrain that the hoi polloi are too emotional to “get” what the Left is trying to do for them for their own good.

This election is about more than just jobs, mortgages, and adequate health care. All politics is moral. All political leaders say to do what they propose because it is right. No political leaders say to do what they say because it is wrong. Morality is behind everything in politics — and progressives and conservatives have different moral systems.

Oh don’t we all know. Howard Dean elegantly stated the Left’s view of conservative morality

Our moral values, in contradiction to the Republicans’, is we don’t think kids ought to go to bed hungry at night.

Lakoff is a bit more circumspect than Dean, but not by much.

In the conservative moral system, the highest value is preserving and extending the moral system itself. That is why they keep saying no to Obama’s proposals, even voting against their own ideas when Obama accepts them. To give Obama any victory at all would be a blow to their moral system. Their moral system requires non-cooperation. That is a major thing the Obama administration has not understood. [...]

The good policies — extending unemployment benefits, help to small businesses, help for teachers and firemen, limits on credit card rates, restrictions on rate increases and service reductions by HMO’s — in themselves fit a progressive moral system, but don’t in themselves make a case for progressive moral leadership.

Why are so many people about to vote against their interests? The Republicans are not offering kitchen-table benefits. When people are voting against their interests, more interest-based arguments don’t help.

If the Left is not arguing that everything Republicans/conservatives/libertarians do springs from bad motives they are arguing that the people who reject Leftist dogma are as intelligent as inbred turkeys drowning themselves in a rain storm.

Is it possible that Lakoff, et al, really do not understand why so many people reject the collectivist, statist principles of the Left? Certainly we are treated, yet again, to another “Tax the RICH” spiel from Robert Reich that can be boiled down to You people don’t spend your money the way WE think you should, so WE, Big Government, will take it and spend it the correct way!

Say what you will about Beck’s non-partisan, religiously themed, rally last Saturday (predictably the Left is … now moving to attack his Mormonism, but they’re not bigots of course), but no where was there any call for top-down, Big Government solutions. There was no demand for theocracy, only an urging for individual responsibility.

If one were to point out the major difference between, in Lakoff’s words, Progressive and Conservative morality, is that Progressives believe in controlling people (via Big Government) for their own good and Conservatives call for people to control themselves as individuals for their own good.

Now which is really the foundation of Liberty?

…The Washington Post, for Put the millionaires’ tax money to good use

8O

Okay, columnists often don’t write their own headlines, they’re supplied later by an editor. Still, it’s hard to even begin to consider the assertions that follow, when he leads with the assumption that millionaires’ money is not being put to good use if it’s left in the possession of the person who earned it.

At the same time, even conservative economists acknowledge that while the rich account for a disproportionate share of consumer spending, raising their taxes by a modest amount won’t alter that spending or have much of a short-term impact on the economy. The reason: Wealthy people make considerably more than they spend, and they save the rest.

See? They keep getting richer simply by continuing to do the things that made them rich. Just like the poor and struggling border-liners stay that way by continuing to do the things that made them poor or struggling. Their filthy lucre, acquired in accordance with the right of the pursuit of happiness, is just sitting there, the nerve! Let’s just take it, and let them get busy saving up some more, for later. Isn’t that a plan? It’s reminiscent of the mindset that reasons that, since crime is going down, we may as well let all these inmates out of jail.

We hear so much about “hard choices” ahead. So long as the choices don’t include cutting federal spending–which will never happen while the federal budget process is simply “last year plus x percent”–they aren’t hard enough.