Maybe we should start calling Dick Cheney former President Cheney as he is leaving no doubt who was in charge during the “bush” administration.
Update: It also seems that Mr Cheney is trying to make-up for his role in the September 11 attacks, my only question is does he know he screwed-up and is intentionally trying to hide it, or does he really beieve he knew what he was doing. My guess is that he really thinks he did a good job as president, even though the country suffered three thousand casualties n his watch and lost thousands more service-men all thanks to Dick’s negligence. That would be hard for most of us to deal with.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 10:34 PM GMT+4
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Probably not the end but looks like they may go to a five day schedule from the current six days of delivery, given that the US mail is mostly a delivery system for bad advertising that goes straight into a landfill, it might be better to go to delivery four days a week or perhaps even three.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 10:35 AM GMT+4
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One of the more interesting debates over the past few months has been whether Texas should secceed, and while I recognize that it would create a third world country on our southern border, it might be for the best. Rick Perry the governor of Texas does not seem interested in being president of the worlds newest third world cesspool, and is now claiming he never talked about secceeding.
A few years ago the future president of Aftexistan would have been able to get away with denying he ever wanted to secceed, now however he is all over you-tube and their are imbedded videos of him talking up seccession.
I guess we just need to negotiate some sort of guest worker program with Texas where we know that after coming up to the 49 states to help pick fruit and vegetables we have some guarantee that their citizens will return home; then Texas can enter its rightful place as the leader of conservative nations such as Somalia and Darfur.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 10:33 AM GMT+4
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Yglesias trys to explain Reagan worship:
Scratch a liberal, and he’ll find some good things to say about FDR. Some good things to say about JFK. These days there’s more and more appreciation of the fact that Lyndon Johnson did some very great things along with some very bad ones. Jimmy Carter’s not so popular, but there’s still stuff to like in his legacy. Bill Clinton’s administration was in many ways a disappointment but also in many ways an exemplar of successful governance. And so it goes. History is a mixed bag, and major historical figures in the progressive tradition all have their praiseworthy aspects along with their shortcomings.
In the conservative official view, by contrast, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, George HW Bush, and George W. Bush were all big government sellouts who strayed from the True Path as defined exclusively by Ronald Reagan. And yet at the very same time we’re supposed to believe that America is an intrinsically conservative country that years for hard-right policies. There’s an obvious contradiction. And the portrait of Reagan as a down-the-line man of the right isn’t even accurate. The whole thing is bizarre, and there’s genuinely nothing like it on the left.
Anyone who posts on the internet or even talks to conservatives runs into Reagan worship, conservatives seem to believe that Reagan was perfect, even though he left the country in a financial mess and at least partially created the situation we have today in Afganistan. Not to mention the whole Iran-Contra mess.
Reagan was a master of saying one thing and doing another and somehow conservatives are stuck with the the myth that Reagan did waht he said, while they try to do what he did. In some ways Reagan is a senile Albotross hanging around the neck of te Republican party until they get over their Reagan myths they will be innefective at governance and unable to create new policies or ideas.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 10:48 AM GMT+4
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David Schuster succinctly explains the Miss USA pageant and the people in it:
David Shuster expressed a negative view of the Miss USA pageant after Donald Trump announced at a press conference that Carrie Prejean would remain as Miss California, despite apparently breaking her contract and posing for topless photos.
“Can I vomit right now, literally, can I vomit?” Shuster said just after Trump thanked the press for attending. “Doesn’t this represent everything that is wrong with the superficial nature of these pageants?”
Shuster then proceeded to tee off on Prejean: “I mean she talked about how women could make a difference in this world. She lied. She avoided taking personal responsibility. She blamed others, whether it’s Perez Hilton or the photographer.”
And doesn’t it seem like Trump is pimping out the contestants?
Posted by John Rove as Words at 6:44 PM GMT+4
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Effective treatments are not the most profitable, therefore we shouldn’t use them. The market has spoken.
You’d think that doing research to figure out which treatments are most effective would be an obviously good thing. But no: it is, apparently, the first step on the road to socialized medicine. A lot of the attacks rely on this “first step” argument. For instance, the Heritage Foundation wrote that “The type of information collected by CER could eventually be used inappropriately if a “Federal Health Board” was created to decide which types of treatment would be available to whom and when.”
It could be used to do bad things! At least, if a board that doesn’t exist were created and told to use this information! Pass me my smelling salts. I await with eager anticipation the Heritage Foundation’s realization that this very same logic could be used to ban guns: after all, they too can be used to do very bad things, and (unlike comparative effectiveness research) actually are so used. Do you think consistency will oblige Heritage to come out in favor of a ban on all guns? Me neither.
But the Heritage Foundation is a marvel of sanity and good sense compared to John Griffing in the American Thinker, who describes the language providing for CER as “a line that would sentence millions of people to death”, and adds, by way of explanation: “If you are picturing Germany circa 1930, you’re right on. With the passing of this bill, government, not doctors, will decide who receives care and who doesn’t, in essence, who lives and who dies.” Deacon for Life, for his part, calls it “Mengele-esque”. The idea that Hitler and Mengele’s great sin was conducting research into the comparative effectiveness of various medical treatments is, shall we say, peculiar.
More seriously, there is something about the arguments against CER that I have never understood. The opponents of CER claim that it will inevitably be used to make decisions about care. Insurers will not want to pay for care that is not effective, and so people will be deprived of the care they need. But notice what “deprived of care” means here. No one is seriously proposing to make it illegal to purchase whatever medical care you want on your own.
This means that even if your insurance company decides that it will not pay for some treatment that has been shown to be ineffective, you will, under any proposal being seriously considered, still be able to get that care; you just won’t be able to get someone else to pay for it. If not having someone else pay for your medical care counts as being “deprived of care”, then 46 million people are being deprived of care even as we speak — and that’s just the uninsured; it doesn’t include people who have insurance that doesn’t cover the treatments they need. And yet, strange to say, the opponents of CER generally do not see this as a problem.
Moreover, once you notice that what the opponents of CER describe as “being deprived of care” just consists in someone’s deciding not to pay for some treatment, the idea that decisions about who gets what treatment are currently made by your physician is true only if you pay for your care out of your own pocket. If, like most of us, you rely on medical insurance, then someone other than your doctor is already making decisions about your care. All CER would do is allow this person to do so on the basis of actual knowledge about what works and what doesn’t.
It seems like a lot of bad policies rely on the idea that it would be a stppeing stone to something else, i.e. Marijuana policy.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 9:37 AM GMT+4
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More from Grayson<object width=”425″ height=”344″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/PXlxBeAvsB8&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1″></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/PXlxBeAvsB8&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”425″ height=”344″></embed></object>
Posted by Al Swearengen as Economics, Video at 11:23 PM GMT+4
1 Comment »
I got this from a militia recruitment web site:
It is the opinion of the Militia that there is a world wide effort on the part of Islam to populate Western nations and, when numbers are sufficient enough, declare Sh’ria law. Islam is not a religion that accomodates other faiths or shares western values concerning freedom of religion. For that reason, we must reciprocate by declining your membership.
The best way to fight this imaginary threat is to try to outbreed the Muslims, who really loses in this war. The rest of us, these people overwelm the welfare system and create huge amounts of pollution with their clans and overwelm public school systems, especially when you consider these are the same people insist on teaching creation myths as science, basicaly dumbing down the rest of the country.
I don’t know how you stop these people from dragging the country down with them but I am starting to see the need for stricter gun laws and perhaps and end to welfare policies that reward people for having big families.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 9:56 AM GMT+4
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We’d love more of this! <video>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKP05AyfRsI</video>
Posted by Al Swearengen as Economics, History, Justice, Video, politics at 11:04 PM GMT+4
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People forget that Reagan was also a pretty crappy president
My sense is that for the vast majority of Republicans, their current and alleged beef with President Bush is that he espoused some sort of ‘big government conservatism’. He was profligate with the nation’s finances and left the country settled with huge structural deficits.
How is this different from Reagan’s time in office exactly? They’re actually surprisingly similar.
Both presidents pushed through big tax cuts, squeezed domestic discretionary spending, though never as much as opponents feared or supporters professed to hope for, and spent lavishly on defense. Having two big wars gave President Bush more to spend on. But the broad pattern is very similar. And both ended up leaving the country with really big deficits, though Reagan did a bit in the latter years of his administration to even the balance. Again, very, very similar. So either Bush is well within the conservative tradition or Reagan is another phony.
Perhaps, had conservatives been a little more honest about the eighties maybe Bush would not have repeated all the mistakes Reagan made.
Posted by John Rove as Words at 10:57 AM GMT+4
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