Apparently John Hinderaker over at Power Line blog can’t come up with anything better so he makes fun of the way Obama pronounced the word Orion at a White House roundtable on clean energy issues.
Note to Hinderaker….I don’t know how Orion Energy Systems pronounces its name but I do know that OAR-ee-on is one way to pronounce Orion. For instance there is Orion Samuelson, and John? It’s pronounced OAR-ee-on.
Dumbass.
Megan McCardle writes of a national healthcare system:
It will be something jury rigged out of Medicare, S-Chip and insurance mandates, ugly and very expensive.
How is what we currently have not jury rigged out of the same pieces she mentions with private insurance thrown in for good measure? People with no insurance tend to wait to go to a doctor until things get so bad they have to use the emergency room at the hospital. Most likely they can’t afford that either so we all end up paying for it anyhow. People who do have insurance through work still pay for it. People who don’t have insurance through work but can “afford” it are paying incredible amounts of money to have coverage.
I’m just not getting how having some base level of coverage for everyone, which allows people to get regular, preventative healthcare, is going to be more expensive. Certainly we are not going to have the French healthcare system on the other hand we do not have a good system now. The last time the World Healthcare Organization ranked healthcare systems of the world the US placed 37th, one notch ahead of Slovenia, and that was in 2000. I don’t believe we’ve gotten any better. How is it that the most prosperous country in the world ranks 37th? It’s disgusting.
Douthat from the Atlantic gets the nod to replace that turd Kristol. I’d have preferred Daniel Larison myself but as DFS at Balloon Juice said:
Anybody who thought they would seriously consider Larison is delusional. He writes about seventeen grade levels above what they’d be going for.
If I hear another mention of “pork”, or “earmarks” in the news I’m going to scream. Today the news was filled with the hand wringing being done over President Obama signing the Omnibus bill that had almost 9000 earmarks in it. John McCain has been especially vocal over it. Here are my thoughts:
Seriously. You’d think that a significant portion of the bill was pork when the reality is it was a very small percentage of total spending. This piece by McClatchy loves to point out the numbers without really explaining them in context:
Then he signed a spending bill that contains nearly 9,000 of them, some that members of his own staff shoved in last year when they were still members of Congress .
and….
The bill contains 8,816 earmarks worth $7.6 billion , according to Taxpayers for Common Sense.
and best of all….
Notable among them are $155.9 million worth of projects that six members of the Obama administration who were members of Congress last year, when the bill was originally written, inserted into the bill.
Why is it notable that six members of Congress had earmarks in the bill that now happen to be members of the Obama administration? There are legitimate reasons to have earmarks in spending bills. Let me know what they were for and I’ll be the judge. In fact one of the examples the authors give is from Vice President Biden, when he was a senator, for “$190,000 to help build a children’s museum in Wilmington”. This is an example of wasteful spending???
I’d also prefer when you do mention their purpose to let me actually know more than a snippet. McCain loves to use snippets to try to decry earmarks. Why is he being intellectually dishonest?
The truth of the matter is that the government would have had to shutdown at midnight tonight if this bill would have been vetoed. I’d rather have the President and Congress working on getting us out of this mess instead of niggling over 7.6 billion dollars out of 410 billion dollars.
But I saved the best quote for last:
The president could have done better. He couldn’t have eliminated the earmarks in this bill, but he could have at least cut them back significantly,” said Steve Ellis , the vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a budget watchdog group. “We appreciate how he kept them out of the stimulus, but we think he’s only batting .500.
Talk about an awful analogy. If you’re going to use a baseball analogy to decry something at least have it make sense. Batting .500 is fantastic.
I commute on the train every day to work. I live far enough from the city that my monthly pass costs about $152. Up until April I could only get $120 of that pre-tax. As of April, and because of the stimulus bill signed by President Obama on 2/17 I can now get my full ticket taken care of pre-tax. The new limit is $230. My only question is why did this take so damn long? I can’t use the transit check money for anything else so why haven’t I been able to get the full amount pre-tax before this? The Republicans have claimed they want me to have more of my own money and this would have been an easy way for me to keep more of my own money but previously the bumps in the amount that could be use for transit pre-tax were very small.
So thanks to the Democrats in the House and Senate, as well as the three Republicans who had the balls to stand up for regular people against their party’s temper tantrum, for finally bumping this up high enough that anyone’s train ticket can be covered by pre-tax dollars!
On NewMajority.com today David Frum related the story of his “appearance” on the Mark Levin talk radio program. While I’m not surprised at what happened (I listened to the segment as linked) I am pretty surprised that the instigator of Frum’s call-in was his wife.
Apparently Frum’s 15-year old son heard the broadcast and tried to call in … presumably to stick up for his father. He was denied by the producer and this prompted Frum’s wife to insist that a call to the show was necessary. Frum says:
We argued about this. “There’s no point calling into these shows,” I said. “The host controls the mike. He rants and raves, you end up ranting and raving back – then you sound just as crazy as he does.”
Yes. Quite right. These shows are not designed for serious debate. They’re designed to let the egomaniacal host have his way. However David Frum’s wife didn’t like that response and said:
My wife (from whom Nat seems to have learned his debating tactics) insisted: “Are you afraid to do what a 15-year-old will do?” Okay, okay, I conceded: I’ll call.
I really hope he is making this up with the excuse of artistic license because not only is this a cheap shot but it’s an awful way to teach your teenager a lesson. The smart thing, and the adult thing, would have been to ignore it.
I’m as excited as anyone else I think about Obama being President. Starting tomorrow we have the possibility ahead of us to heal this country after 8 years of complete mismanagement by the Bush administration. But it worries me to see what is happening prior to the inauguration tomorrow.
All weekend cable news has been covering the inauguration when there really hasn’t been anything happening worth covering. Certainly there have been newsworthy moments over the weekend but nothing warranting 24/7 coverage. I just don’t get how these people do it. The term “talking heads” certainly is appropriate.
The local coverage has also been pretty insane. Given that I’m in the Chicago area I suspect it has been doubly intense but are constant stories about the locals travelling to Washington D.C. really necessary? I’m happy that these folks are able to go and witness history but it isn’t newsworth to hear their stories. I guess in the end it beats the hell out of hearing about the latest fire or shooting in Chicago but it still seems pretty extreme coverage given that nothing has happened yet.
I was at the chiropractor today and overheard a conversation between one of the patients and a therapist. The patient explained that he really hoped Obama was going to be able to turn things around but noted that the guy doesn’t walk on water and he is afraid that too many people are getting a bit too hopeful. I agree with him completely. I hope Obama is going to be able to get this country back on track. I just am trying to be realistic that it’s not going to happen in a year…or even a first term.
I’m keeping my fingers crossed that other people are thinking the same thing.
Obama is President-elect. I can’t believe it. Just can’t believe it. Not much else to say at the moment. Have to witness this amazing moment in history.
If anything this presidential election has been an eye opener. And these days it’s becoming kind of scary. With the world economy tanking the McCain/Palin campaign is stoking fear in their supporters with the “palling around with terrorists” crap. We are now hearing regular shouts of works like “terrorist”, “treason”, etc. coming from the people in the crowd. What the hell is going on in this country?
At McCain’s townhall meeting with supporters today in Minnesota we heard various ridiculous statements like the guy who is afraid of raising his still-to-be-born child in an Obama presidency because of the potential choice of judges. Ummm…what? We then heard a woman say that she doesn’t trust Obama because he’s an Arab. Today McCain finally said enough is enough and told his people that Obama is a decent guy and they should be respectful. But why should he have to say that at all? What is going on with these people? What are they reading? Who are they talking to to get these ridiculous ideas?
Also over the last few days we’ve been seeing ridiculous video like this:
or this:
He’s got the bloodlines? I’ve read about Obama and he’s an Arab?
Does the old woman at the McCain rally in Minnesota today know that in order to be President of the United States you have to be a natural born citizen?
Does the much younger woman in the first video above who says “He’s got the bloodlines” include white women from Kansas in the 1960s as Arab terrorists?
Do the idiots in the videos who say Obama is a Muslim know that he actually is a Christian? Why does that make a difference in the first place?
This kind of complete, willful, ignorance is ridiculous but also scary at the same time. I’ve got no problem with people who disagree with Obama on a policy standpoint but the rest of it is just crap. And to see the McCain/Palin campaign using these tactics is just digusting to me. It’s un-American and John McCain should be ashamed of himself.
