Nightly Ramble:The “With Fowa You Get Eggwoll” Edition

Welcome Weary Travelers, to the most intense nightly read anywhere on the sphere… The BitsBlog Nightly Ramble

This is the “”With fowa you get Eggwoll” Edition. Let is repair to the table and chair and this fine establishment’s board of fare.

• Global warming my butt: I’ve been telling you that the junk science behind global warming would never stand up to any serious scrutiny.  It appears that global warming fanatics agree. It should be a shock to nobody that Paul Krugman is now suddenly a climate expert.  John Hawkins has this one covered.  Look also at the report I linked this morning. We’re being lied to by this administration. I wonder how many people are listening to the implications of what Roger Simon over at Pajamas Media is saying, this  evening.
• Payback is nigh: That vote on cap and tax the other night, has left a number of vulnerable Democrats
• Coup, Coup is not a bird: There seems to be some argument as to whether not what we’re seeing currently in Honduras is a coup or not .   It wasn’t. I do notice a report from Hot Air which suggests that the White House tried a step in to prevent the Honduran president’s ouster.   If that’s true, it can only be regarded as yet another foreign policy failure for the Obama administration. The WSJ wades into this one.  You have to wonder, though about the utility of any event that Crazy Uncle Hugo complains about.  And Cuba. Leftist leaders in Honduras are complaining loudly, as well.   Essentially what happened here is that the presdient tried to alter the constitution so as to stay in power beyond the second term… rather like Chavez.  Let’s see.. as David noted earlier today… leftist leaders in Honduras, Hugo Chavez, Castro, and Obama. All on the side of ripping up the constitution in Honduras.  All of them complaining because the people in Honduras stood up for their democracy.  I told you Obama doesn’t believe in Democracy and freedom. Do the math, people; this is just another practical example of that point. Obama is about making the world safe for socialism. Period. Full stop.
• A Reminder: Interesting how this John Edwards sex tape showed up , just now.  Apparently, somebody who had the tape figured we needed a reminder of that incident.  Personally, I’d like to see somebody concentrating not on the tape itself but on the Democrat reaction to it at the time, versus the Democrat reaction to Governor Mark what’s- his- name, now. If (reax)then <>(reax)now then…..
• And the Splashback: Speaking of that, I believe I’ve already said (repeatedly) the guy is toast and should be.  Consider that to my response to the emails I’ve been getting out that particular scandal and whether not the guy should be out of office by now.  He should have been out of office as of that weird news conference.  I suppose it shouldn’t surprise anybody that The New York Times it managed to put up a fairly reasonable profile on the woman scorned. After all, it fits the pattern.  If it makes democrats looked at it doesn’t run.  If it makes republicans look bad, it runs on the front page above the fold. When does the Times do a sympathetic writeup on the wife of a Republican, under any OTHER conditions?
• PHP and other foibles: The problems that we had that kept us off line yesterday, have been for the most part solved.  Apparently, something was hitting the PHP module pretty hard , either from this site, or from one of the other sites that this particular server has on it.  There’s a few tests I want to go through later this evening, but were fine for now apparently.
• If this is the best they’ve got…. If Universal is banking on “Bruno” to save it’s sorry ass, then it deserves to be sunk.
• Kaus gets it on Healthcare:
  

  Kaus

  So if one of these promising new cancer treatments winds up working 25% of the time, but costs $150,000, will Peter Orszag give to you?

  Well that depends on who you supported in the last five elections, ya see. The first thing you’re going to have to understand about all that is when politicians run health care, health care is not about making you well. Health care is about how you affect government in general and how you affect their political careers. Every other consideration is secondary. Which is why we have situations like the one I mentioned last night, with the Parents in Hamilton being unable to get health care for their child in Canada, and shipping the poor kid to Buffalo. As I said last night, not an uncommon thing. Billy Beck addresses this, today:

  

  Billy Beck

  Sooner or later, the facts of medical production will have their ways. Medicine is an economic good which must be produced just like anything else, no matter anyone’s protestation of “rights”. It is being regulated out of production (the basic problem in Canada) right in front of your eyes. The implications will be profound for everyone’s general quality and length of life, and acute for specialized cases. The dynamic flexibility of free production will not avail in cases like this, and they will eventually be allowed to discreetly — and then not so discreetly — die.
  How soon all this becomes real-life fact depends on the alacrity and severity with which DeathCare is imposed in this country. It should be noted that every “deployment” (there’s a fnord for you) necessarily demands its own successors. This is rationale for curing the ills that it inflicts. Coercive interventions, the essential nature of government, instigate demand for coercive interventions. This makes it extremely difficult or impossible to foresee every logical extension of principles in action. The degree and rate of advance into actionable tyranny by any reasonable measure are more logarithmic than linear, and all is subject to swerves of short-range political emphasis.

  As I’ve been saying here for years, now… Canada.. and to a lesser degree, the UK… lesser due to the physical distance, mostly… are the coalmine canaries, gang. And they’re shipping their acute cases south when they can. I sit and watch this stuff happening from some 40 miles distance, and I look at the current move toward government healthcare and I wonder.  The implications on this stuff are much broader than just health care, of course.  Consider Cap and Trade, as an example of these same principles being applied elsewhere.

• Remember that middle class tax hike Obama promised he’d never do?  He’s doing it.  One more promise past it’s expiration date. I mean, leaving aside, of course the Cap and Trade monster which is in reality the largest tax hike in history.
• Madoff: I’ve already commented on madoff today… but it amuses me that he got 150 years for running a ponzi scheme… and yet nobody’s seeing any jailtime for Social Security. Telling, that.

• Conservative?  Dr. Thomas Sowell looks at why it is that most Americans consider themselves conservative, and yet the Republicans are on the outs.  I’ll give you the short answer… While most Americans consider themselves conservatives, the Republicans are not conservative. As I’ve been telling you guys since the late 80’s when Bush 41 got into office, back when I was writing on the old GT network.
• Lest we forget:  The crackdown in Iran continues apace.
• Pop Culture dies:  Well, let’s see. MJ. Farrah. Ed McMahon. Carradine.  Now, Billy Mays, too.  All gone, and all in a very short time.OK, I more than grant tacking Mays onto that list is somewhat incongruous, but pop culture is like that. And yes, that’s the point here. In the trivial world of the pop culture, there is seldom a hard and fast rule for what is and is not popular.  It becomes a matter more than anything else, of what can capture the public attention span, which is notoriously short to begin with.?The depth of the talents of the people on that list are variable at least. Yet the passing of each of them provided a diversion.  When the trivial pushes the reality off what passes for ‘the news’, as MJ’s passing did, for example, you know the reality is by far harder to face.  Jackson’s demise was fairly easy to predict,  He was on an easily identifiable self-destruction course. Apparently so was Carridine if I read the signs aright.  Farrah Fawcett’s passing while tragic at such an age, was predictable… we know it was going to happen soon… The story there, far as I was concerned was not her having cancer and her death but how she faced it all. Oddly, it’s the part of the story that wasn’t told very much. (Too much reality, perhaps?)And then, Mays. Not outstandingly popular, yet well known… and his passing is enough to hold the attention of the public for a few days. The ability to be manipulated into creating a diversion is the one thing they all had in common.  I wonder… what would ahve happened with the Cap and Tax thing, had there not been quite so much on the way of dversion showing up in the news?  No, I don’t think it was at all intentional… but it can’t be denied that there was a curb on our attention to such matters offered by these diversions… 

  You know, I posted an RIP for Mary Lou Forbes earlier today. I would argue that she did more with her writings for the human condition than any of these others, by a longshot. And yet, her passing will be hardly noticed by the folks busy playing trivial pursuit. If there is any indication our priorities are hosed, it’s that.