The Lemming Watch

Pure chutzpah

In an article from the AP, President Obama is said to have welcomed Hamid Karzai’s election as President of Afghanistan. But his congratulations came with some advice. Obama said “he expects a more serious effort to end corruption,” and to “ready his [Karzai’s] nation to defend itself. . .”

Well, that is good, much needed advice. But Obama should have stopped there. Instead, when Mr. Karzai offered assurances, Obama told him “The proof is not going to be in words. It’s going to be in deeds.”

Now that is real chutzpah; the president of the United States, who has now talked his way through nine months of his presidency with no significant tangible results to show, is suggesting that Mr. Karzai should show real actions instead of just words.

What a complete hypocrite.

It’s a magic trick

As posted on American Thinker 10-29-09 as Obamacare and the art of distraction.

It’s a trick and the lemmings of this country are going to fall for it. It is not a new trick; magicians have used it for hundreds of years. It’s called sleight of hand—one hand is the one we watch while the other (the one you don’t watch) is the one doing the real trick or hiding the pea under the shell.

In the case of the healthcare bill, the “hand” we are watching is the public option and we are focused on it while the other hand we are not watching is the one that will fool us. While we are focused on the hand creating a big fuss and constant news about the public option, there is the entire health bill with all it’s really obnoxious ideas and costly provisions that is the “hand” we are not watching and is the one doing the active trick—that is bringing health care under government control.

Ignore the public option debate; the provision will probably not happen. But the rest of that terrible bill will, like the magician’s rabbit, be pulled out of the hat by the hand we are not watching. Be vigilant and don’t let the magician fool you. Fight the entire bill, not the public option alone.

Hat tip: Urgent Agenda

How Righteous Can You Get?

In the several bulletins coming from the recent UN Climate Change Conference there was one small piece regarding the enormous carbon footprint (whatever that means) resulting from all the officials’ travel to and attendance at the meeting. Realizing their huge use of carbon based fuels (about 450 tons) to travel to and attend the meeting, they decided to offset that use by purchasing carbon offsets to neutralize this massive use of carbon based fuels.

And just how did they do this? Well, they decided to fund “a power project in rural India that converts agricultural waste such as corn husks and stalks into electricity.” This plant contributes to reducing carbon emissions in India, which, according to an AP article, is “one of the world’s largest emitters of greenhouse gases.”

Being a simple, literal minded person, I wondered just how could this be done. So I decided to do a little research on Carbon Offsets and Carbon Credits. They are the same except for the type of transaction concerned.

After doing a bit of reading about carbon credits/offsets, I’m beginning to think I’ve been drugged and moved, without knowing it, into some kind of nut-house parallel universe invented by an incarnation of Lewis Carroll.

The description of any of the concepts in the carbon reduction mission is full of convoluted wording, neologisms (biosequestration, additionality, supplementarity), a host of new acronyms and catchphrases (e.g., CDM, CER), scores of cross-references, and a very high number of references to authorities—some of them of questionable value or credentials. It is eerily similar to the House Health Care bill in obfuscation.

This whole thing is a bureaucrat’s dream come true. And that is what the UN loves; they dote on a host of bureaucratic controls over all nations.

So the UN Clinate Change conference attendees salved their collective conscience by contributing something to a remote Indian waste processing plant. That will certainly reduce carbon emissions. How very righteous.

If one reads between the lines and searches the literature, one can hardly make sense of this other than accept it as a big con game, a scam, a shell game in which the savvy players will earn a lot of money and not contribute much to reduction of greenhouse gases. It is eerily similar to the old scam of selling lots in the Florida swamp lands. That, however is not a good idea anymore because the oceans are rising and the land will soon disappear.

By the way, I wonder if it ever occurred to these do-gooders that they could reduce their carbon footprint to near zero by just staying home. I think the result for the world would be a net gain.

Playing At Being President

As published in American Thinker Sept 30

The longer he is in office, the more it appears that Barack H. Obama doesn't really want to be president but only to play at being president. He doesn't seem interested in dealing with the messy, day-to-day responsibilities of the president's job. He doesn't want to be the Chief Executive and propose legislation that will move the country forward to new heights. He doesn't want to be Commander-In-Chief of the military and execute a necessary war. He doesn't take on the fiscal responsibilities required of the executive to deal with our economic issues. He doesn't want to be leader of the United States and act with dignity and forcefulness to put American interests forward in the world community.

Barack Obama, like a child playing a game, seems to ignore reality and live in a make-believe world. He goes to international conferences and makes speeches so that (as he imagines) the countries of the world see him as the organizer of a global community; he appears on radio and television to speak and be seen as the leader of the country that he refuses to lead; he wants to talk; he loves to talk. And like the child who plays at being doctor or father or mother, he talks about what he wants. Like a child, he overuses the first person pronouns. All his rhetoric is "I" and "me" and "my" and, sometimes, the inclusive "us" and "our." He wants to be seen and heard. But he doesn't want to do (except to make speeches, and even these are prepared by others, canned, and read from a teleprompter). Those speeches in which he does seem to be taking charge are followed by a child-like loss of interest in the subject. He loses interest in playing that game and goes on to another.

In the meantime, other world leaders, especially our enemies and potential enemies are operating in the real world of economic turmoil, international power rivalry, and horrendous weapons. In these perilous times, made more so by his apparent lack of interest in dealing maturely with real issues, we cannot afford to have a chief executive who abdicates his duties and only plays at being president

They Have No Conscience and They Have No Shame

While we have soldiers being killed in Afghanistan, Senator John Kerry has the gall to insert a $20 million earmark in the defense spending bill to fund the Edward M. Kennedy Institute. The purpose of the institute is to house Kennedy’s papers. It is to be built on the campus of the University of Massachusetts at Boston.

The leftists have no conscience, they have no shame, and they have no memory. Have they forgotten that Kennedy was a sot, a womanizer, possibly a traitor, and, through his negligence and cowardly concern for career, allowed a young woman to suffocate and drown in his submerged car. He also skipped a full term military stint (courtesy of his father).

Now Kerry (who, you will remember, served in Vietnam and then ratted on the military) wants to honor Kennedy with money from a military bill. Well that figures since Kerry detested the military anyway and Kennedy essentially ignored it; why not debase the military further with this piece of pork. It’s beyond comprehension.

It’s a travesty to tie funds for this institute to a military spending bill. It’s a travesty to spend any tax money on any such self-righteous program. But, if they have to spend our tax money for this kind of pork, let them take it from some other bill—preferably from some other pork fund.

Dear Senator Feinstein

Thank you for your e-mail response of September 8 to my recent e-mail. It seemed to be a well-crafted form letter regarding your views on the health care reform issues. I appreciate that you and your staff took the time to prepare such a letter and the thought that went into it. It seems to spell out your ideas on the subject quite well.

I must, however, disagree with you almost one hundred percent. It isn’t that I think that health care in this country does not need to be improved. It is that I think the government should not be involved in the health care of Americans at all. What gives you, as a United States Senator, the right to tell me, my family, and any other American citizen how to care for our health? Where in the Constitution does it give Congress or the president or a bloated bureaucracy any rights at all to determine how I care for my physical well-being, how I choose a doctor, and how I will pay for it? It just amazes me that you and your colleagues think it is right to do this.

It is not an issue, as your letter states, of how insurance companies operate or how much profit they should make. That too is not your business. Most of the problems with insurance are caused by government interference. If we allowed free enterprise among those companies, did not restrict inter-state purchase of insurance, and stood out of their way, the issues (including the issue of pre-existing conditions) would disappear for all but a very few special cases that could be dealt with equitably. Competition would, as it always does, reduce costs and improve the product. Government involvement, as it always, always does, will increase costs and reduce the benefits from the health professions.

Senator, I consider you one of the rarely more thoughtful and concerned of the 100 people in the Senate. So I cannot conceive how, if you have read and understand the concepts of the basic bill (HR 3200), you could even consider imposing the provisions of this bill on the American people. How could you and your colleagues, with a clear conscience, propose to force 300 million people in what is the freest, most dynamic, most individualistic nation on earth into one mold. It is essentially the same as the iron maiden of the Inquisition and the brainwashing the Koreans and Chinese practiced on our soldiers. And it will result in a costly bureaucratic infrastructure (with all the related red tape and meddling in our lives) that cannot possibly be fair to Americans.

Please do all you can to defeat this atrocious bill and anything like it, and take another long look at how health care in this great country can be properly achieved with government support but without government interference.

Sincerely,

The Camel's Nose

It is a wise rule to resist the beginnings of evil.
 - Horace Scudder, The Book of Fables and Folk Stories

The story of the camel's nose tends lately to be a bit overused. But it is an apt allegory for most of the programs foisted on us by the government. What appear to be reasonable legislative acts often become, over time, burdensome and costly. The current discussion in particular -- health care reform (so called) -- is a case in point.

There has been a concerted effort all summer by American citizens to let their representatives in Congress know that the reform as given in HR 3200 is not wanted. But Congress and the president are determined to come up with some kind of reform and force a government run health program on the country. So Congress has heard the protests, and they are now trying to come up with some kind of watered down plan that will be acceptable to both the right and left in congress so that it will pass. The problem is that once any such government run program is passed and becomes law, no matter how innocuous it is, two things will happen.

First, implementation will be turned over to bureaucrats and they will find all kinds of miscellaneous wording that will allow them to take actions never envisioned by the framers of the law. And those bureaucrats will apply the rules with all of the police power the law gives them.

Second, the law will be used as a base to add all sorts of additional bells and whistles in the future. These add-on laws will eventually give us a convoluted legislative mess that will be as bad if not worse than a watered down form of HR 3200. It may take years, but it will happen. And it will be more costly and more draconian and bureaucratic than anything we can think of today.

So any compromise bill, reduced bill, anything that smacks of health care control by the government will be the camel's nose in the tent. First the nose, then the forelegs, then the body, and finally the entire camel. We will have what the socialist left of the country wanted in the first place. It will just take a little longer.

We must keep up the pressure and "resist the beginnings of evil." Write your representatives in congress; attend Tea Parties; let them know that any bill, in any form, that impacts our health care is not acceptable.

As posted in the American Thinker, Sept 9

Kennedycare!?

The healthcare bill, it turns out as more and more of its content comes to light, is a major disaster in the making for Americans. It is also a major impact on every citizen’s liberties. As I point out elsewhere, this bill is wrong and should be trashed. Or better yet, here is another solution:

There is a move in the Senate to rename the healthcare bill as some form of “The Edward Kennedy Health Care Bill.” There seems to be two reasons for this. First, those in congress want to honor a former colleague; second, and much more cynically, they want to use his name to build some momentum to draw the public and those resisters in congress into backing the bill.In either case, this would be a travesty. It would be a slap in the face of every American to put this man’s name on any national entity much less a statute that affects every American citizen.

The man was a sot, a womanizer, possibly a traitor, and—we won’t say murderer because he was never indicted for such—through his negligence and cowardly concern for career, allowed a young woman to suffocate and drown in his submerged car.

The diver who recovered Kopechne’s body, John Farrar testified at the official inquest that her body was found where the air pocket would have formed. He said: “Had I received a call within five to ten minutes of the accident occurring, and was able, as I was the following morning, to be at the victim's side within twenty-five minutes of receiving the call, in such event there is a strong possibility that she would have been alive on removal from the submerged car.

So here is the solution. Let’s indeed call the bill the Teddy Kennedy Health Care Bill and bury it with him.