Shovel Ready: It Needs to be Buried

This is for the half dozen people left who still think that the racist rightwing whack jobs were exaggerating about the impact Obamacare would have on healthcare in America.

Fortune Magazine has read the 2000 plus pages and analyzed the impact so that neither you, nor any of our elected officials, have to. Their report is –while far from surprising – deeply disturbing.

NEW YORK (Fortune) -- In promoting his health-care agenda, President Obama has repeatedly reassured Americans that they can keep their existing health plans -- and that the benefits and access they prize will be enhanced through reform.

A close reading of the two main bills, one backed by Democrats in the House and the other issued by Sen. Edward Kennedy's Health committee, contradict the President's assurances. To be sure, it isn't easy to comb through their 2,000 pages of tortured legal language. But page by page, the bills reveal a web of restrictions, fines, and mandates that would radically change your health-care coverage. Read the rest and weep

H/T to Adrianne’s Corner, who advises that Repeal is the Answer. I concur: repeal of the bill, as well as every single legislator who voted for it.

Finally, a shovel-ready project we can believe in:

Maureen: Time To Shut-up and Sing

Oh my goodness, MoDo. If this is the best you’ve got, you might wish to consider a late mid-life career change.  Saturday’s  column, “Playing all the Angles” didn’t even clear the hurdle for “just phoning it in.”

It’s more like a, well, like a mean girl from high school hit job. Yeah, like the kind of attack she’s accusing the “Mean Republican Girls” of  in her piece. Although I think it’s pretty clear that her main issue with these Republican “mean girls” is that she just doesn’t consider them cool enough for her to hang around with. Not only are they “mean” but, worse, they are terminal dweebs.

Oddly, she describes the “mean Republican girls” in terms that one could easily imagine applied more to her than her nemeses: “grown-up versions of those teenage tormentors who would steal your boyfriend, spray-paint your locker and, just for good measure, spread rumors that you were pregnant.” And for good measure throws in “They are the ideal nihilistic cheerleaders for an angry electorate.”

Uh, “nihilistic” MoDo? That’s a pretty big word to be throwing around if you don’t know what it means, or how to use it properly with respect to your subject matter.

nihilism (ˈnaɪɪˌlɪzəm) — n

1. nihilist - someone who rejects all theories of morality or religious belief
2. a complete denial of all established authority and institutions
3.  philosophy - an extreme form of skepticism that systematically rejects all values, belief in existence, the possibility of communication, etc
4. a revolutionary doctrine of the destruction of the social system for its own sake
5. the practice or promulgation of terrorism

It’s probably just me, but when I think of nihilism, my mind shoots immediately to liberals who think the Constitution is a dead document that needs to be rewritten by empathetic judicial activists. Or someone who thinks that capitalism is an anachronistic economic model that’s vastly inferior to, and therefore ought be replaced by, Marxist socialism. Or perhaps even the liberal segment of society who believe that God is dead and has been replaced by Gaia who wants us to use leaves and twigs to wipe our butts.

Oddly enough the Mean Republican Girls (MRGs), “Jan, Meg, Carly, Sharron, Linda, Michele, Queen Bee Sarah and sweet wannabe Christine”  per MoDo, seem more interested in reinstating the values, morals, and beliefs that served as the backbone and mettle of this country since its inception. The people bent on tearing them down further all seem to be our liberal brethren. Which “some critics” would argue is far more nihilistic than the bitter clingers who just want the freedom to hold onto their Bibles, beliefs and guns – just in case the good liberals decide someday that they are detrimental to society, like cigarettes and salt, and must go.

The only thing MRGs are skeptical of is government’s ability to do all things for all people by taxing the hell out of only the “richest” citizens. If ever there is an economic model that is not – liberal shibboleth alert – sustainable, that is it. Oh, and maybe the pseudo-science supporting Al Gore’s financial interests in sham man-made global warming and his disgustingly ridiculous and self-serving carbon credit trading scheme. But don’t get me started or I’m likely to sound like one of those “nihilistic cheerleaders for an angry electorate.

There was a time when I’d wonder out loud how someone with the mental prowess of Maureen Dowd landed a gig writing a column for the New York Times. But then, the answer is embedded in the question.

Next time you go to Vegas Mo, stay in the casino. Your odds of scoring – anything - are better there.

 

Despair: The moment you first realize the limitations of Botox and gauze photography

Who’s the Whore N.O.W.?

Everyone is jumping crazy over a comment made by Parry Bellasalma, president of the California chapter of N.O.W., about Meg Whitman, indeed, being  a “political whore” after all.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. N.O.W. is a hypocritical front group for an ultra-liberal feminist organization. That’s not exactly a news flash.  So can we just act like grownups and stop with the  holier than thou position regarding the recently outlawed use of the “W” word. Since when is “whore” so offensive it can’t be spoken out loud on television? Well, I guess since National N.O.W. President Terry O'Neill condemned its use as " hate speech that carries with it negative connotations associated with women, and it has no place in contemporary society," shortly after endorsing the candidate whose campaign staff used it to describe Meg Whitman, their opponent.

But please – can we stop accepting special interest groups directives for what is and isn’t acceptable? For what is and isn’t “hate” speech? Who died and made them the arbiters of fair use? Frankly, context serves to define what is offensive, not the word police. If you call someone’s mother a whore, that’s probably meant to be offensive. If you call a politician a whore, it’s intended to be descriptive of an age old political gambit.

Let’s stop wasting perfectly good – and useful – words just because MSM has determined it is divisive, even derisive. We aren’t in junior high anymore, and as far as I can tell we are not yet a “zero tolerance” culture. In fact, we’re even been told that in the context of rap lyrics written by downtrodden black males from the ghetto, even “nigger” is  a perfectly acceptable word. If there can be exceptions made for - easily - the most explosively offensive term in the English lexicon, I don’t see how anyone could take offense at calling a politician of either party a “whore.” As the old joke goes: “we’ve already established what you are, now we’re just arguing over the price.”

Politicians have been called whores (a generic term that applies equally to men and women in this usage) for eons. P.J. O’Rourke’s best seller, The Parliament of Whores released in 1991, is still laugh-out-loud funny 20 years later. On release, the book received rave reviews: Time Magazine called it "a riotously funny and perceptive indictment of America's political system." The New York Times called it "a funnily savage attack on the political authorities of the United States."

Why? Because it skewers the type of hypocritical, whorish behavior of politicians who are perpetually currying favor and buying the support of special interest groups in order to get themselves re-elected. It is ingrained in the big government, big union, big lobbies, big media system that we have allowed to pollute our democratic process.

So don’t get all huffy with me if someone calls your favorite pol a whore, because odds are a lot better than even that they fit the (alternate) textbook description: a person considered as having compromised principles for personal gain. 

If you’re sick of whores in positions of power, vote for a Tea Party candidate and hold them accountable for getting the whoring out of governing. It will be a much better use of your energies than bitching about  Jerry Brown’s wife calling another kettle black.

Which may, or may not, be offensive. Get over it.

Dennis Does Not Suffer Fools Gladly

Tell us how you really feel about Harry Reid, Dennis:

H/T Professor Jacobson at Legal Insurrection

Dutch Treat

There’s something going on in Holland that should have every self respecting Dutchman in the streets carrying a sign. It’s the Re-Education Camp style trial of Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders.

Ms. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former member of the Dutch parliament, now a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of "Nomad: From Islam to America—A Personal Journey through the Clash of Civilizations", writes in today’s WSJ  opinion piece, “In Holland, Free Speech on Trial”, chronicles the descent into submission of a once proud and free nation.

Wilders is the former Liberal Party leader who broke ranks and founded the Freedom Party, in response to the “rise of political Islam in the Netherlands.” If you’re not familiar with the term “political Islam”, you’re probably hopelessly progressive, but it recognizes the fact that Islam, as defined by the quran, is more political/legal system, than religion.

The Islamic ’sharia system incorporates such classically liberal, tolerant principles as female genital mutilation, death by stoning for being raped (unless the victim can produce 3 male witnesses to her innocence), honor killing, and just for sport, killing Jews and other infidels.

According to Ms. Ali, the Islamification of Dutch politics begins with:

... immigrants from Morocco and Turkey in the 1960s and 1970s, and then by asylum-seekers and refugees from various Muslim countries beginning in the 1990s. Most elites responded by preaching "tolerance." Give Muslim immigrants benefits and wait until they voluntarily integrate, their argument goes. Even if that process would take generations—even when it became apparent that some Muslims practiced female genital mutilation and honor killings, and imams openly urged their congregations to reject Dutch culture and law—citizens were not to criticize Islam.

She reports that in the beginning, Wilders “was dismissed as a far right-wing extremist.” He was never one to constrain his rhetoric to the soothing, politically correct jargon of his Liberal Party:

He's famously compared the Quran to "Mein Kampf" and described it as a "fascist book," he's called Muhammad "the devil," and he's proposed policies—such as banning the construction of mosques and taxing women who wear the burqa—to halt further Islamification.

But it was when his Freedom Party started to take a bite out of the legacy power parties Parliamentary control:

In the national elections held in November 2006, his party won nine seats in parliament. When the Dutch government fell again this year, June elections saw his party take 24 seats in the 150-seat body.

Wilders’ Freedom Party was growing faster than the Tea Party movement here in the US. And the similarities do not end there.

The legacy powers in Holland were no longer amused. Their attempts to marginalize, ridicule and dismiss Wilders, his Freedom Party and his supporters had failed, so there was no other alternative left to protect their power and control: they made him illegal:

This has spooked Dutch parliamentarians, particularly those wedded to multiculturalism. That's why, in the fall of 2009, they modified Article 137C and 137D of the Penal Code to make it possible for far-left organizations to take Mr. Wilders to court on grounds of "inciting hatred" against Muslims.

So here we are today, watching, impotently, without recourse, a political trial the likes of which have not been seen in Europe since the fall of Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Fascist Italy.

Yes, I am calling the perpetrators of this crime against civilization Nazis and Fascists. Americans did not fight and die World War II for this charade.

“First they came for Geert Wilders…”

And remember, the “peaceful majority doesn’t matter.”