Health Care Socialism: Bad! Buying Drugs Cheapened by Socialism: Good!

Please. Someone explain this to me. Evidently, it's a bad thing to put in the price controls on drugs that other countries like Britian and Canada have - a combination of government negotiation (which was actually not allowed during the Bush Medicare drug plan - that's right, the government can't negotiate for cheaper drugs in the United States. Hooray for "free market" forces!)

However, people want to import the drugs from Canada - after that country has used their "OMG SOCIALISM" government to make the drugs cheaper.

So remember - putting in price controls and regulations to control runaway costs? Bad.

Buying from other countries who put in the price controls and regulations to get around the fact that your government is too scared of the pharmaceuticals to, you know, negotiate for cheaper prices for its citizens - good!

It's not honesty to confess after you've been caught

All hail Republican House Majority Leader Kevin Garn, who confessed he paid $150,000 to silence a woman he had been with. In a hot tub. Naked.

When she was a minor and he was 28.

What strength of character to confess his sins on the House floor, and how his fellow politicians applauded his honesty!

Only one problem:

It's not brave to confess after you've been caught.

It would have been brave if he had left it out there and said "You know what, 20 years ago, I was a jackass and did something stupid-judge me by my actions since them" before the incident came out.

Or maybe if he had told the woman "You know - I was stupid, but I'm not paying you hush money."

But to do the stupid thing of being almost 30 and hanging out with a 15 year old girl naked in a hot tub, then pay her money to keep quiet, then confess only *after* the newspapers started picking up the story - that's not bravery.

That's damage control.

So bravo, Mr. Garn. Bravo. Truly, the heart of a lion. Well, after the lion has run away, hid in the bushes, waited until everybody went away.

More Fiscal Responsibility: Tax cuts for the rich, tax increases for the middle class

Republicans: party of fiscal responsibility! Just ignore all of that massive deficit spending during the Reagan and Bush years.

Republicans: Party of cutting your taxes! Well, at least rich people anyway.

And Republicans, who evidently think people have really short memories when they come out with a tax and budget plan that cuts taxes for the rich, gives little to the poor/middle class, and introduces even bigger deficits.

It's like a broken record. Republicans get out of office. And as soon as the Democrats are in power, Republicans start going on about the "tax and spend" Democrats. How the Democrats are the ones "breaking the budget." How the Democrats have these crazy schemes.

And, in the meantime, the Democrats pass Pay-Go legislation that calls for any new spending to be matched with either tax increases or budget cuts elsewhere to pay for the new spending - and do so over every Republican who voted against it.

Democrats propose a health care bill that includes measure to have it be paid for, as opposed to Republican tax cuts and Medicare drug expansions that didn't.

And then, along comes Congressman Ryan who says "You know what would be awesome? Get rid of Medicare, cut taxes to the rich, and magical fiscal fairies will make up the difference! Yes, I know, we tried it under the Reagen years, under the Bush years, but it'll *really really really* work this time!"

And the worst part is - people with political memories of a goldfish are lining up to go "Yeah, great idea!"

Tom Delay Fails Basic Math

Tom Delay: ...there's some studies that have been done that shows that people stay on unemployment compensation and they don't look for a job until two or three weeks before they know the benefits are going to run out

1. Average income in Florida (which I'm focusing on because I live here): $41,436 per year

2. Maximum unemployment benefits in Florida for one year: $14,300 (Max unemployment payout is $275 with no dependents)

3. Reason for people to stay on unemployment making an average of $-27000 less a year (unless maybe they were waiting one more week for a better job): 0

Are there people who will game the system? Sure. But cutting unemployment benefits for the majority of people just because *some* will benefit more than they should shows Delay has no clue about reality, about finances, about people - or about basic economics.

Glenn Beck: Leave churches that teach social justice

I want to congratulate Mr. Beck, who produced information that demonstrates that any church that preaches the concept of "social justice" is really preaching both communism and naziism.

Granted, this would mean that people would have to leave the Catholic church and others. It would mean that the work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, of Ghandi should be rejected.

But most importantly of all, I believe that Mr. Beck's comments highlight something important:

They reveal that, according to Mr. Beck, the Latter Day Saint (aka LDS aka Mormon) church has nothing to do with social justice.

It has to do with money.

The LDS church recently announced the City Creek project, which would be a combination mall and apartment complex that will be built in Salt Lake City. It will costs hundreds of millions of dollars, and, according to church leaders, will not be exclusively for Mormon use.

So why do this? According to H. David Burton, Presiding Bishop for the church:

Church leaders said the desire to head off economic decline in downtown was their prime directive at City Creek.

“Along with economic malaise comes an element that we were concerned about in proximity to the temple,” said Mr. Burton, the presiding bishop. That the temple area might one day start to feel dangerous was simply intolerable, he said. “With decay, sometimes comes crime,” he said. Source: New York Times

It's not about the "threefold mission of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints" which is "Proclaim the Gospel, Perfect the Saints, Redeem the Dead."

It's about all those poor people who might be hanging around downtown, and we can't have that. So instead, we'll build up a private business that we own, and then we can kick the ruffians out.

It's not about feeding the hungry, or tending to the sick, or clothing the naked. You know - the things Jesus said to do to get into Heaven when he said:

34 Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:

35 For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:

36 Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.

37 Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink?

38 When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee?

39 Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?

40 And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

So, thank you, Mr. Beck, for at least being honest with us in this issue. That your faith - the Mormon church - doesn't care about "social justice". About doing what Jesus actually preached to do. No, thanks to you, we can all see now that it's about money.

Sure, the LDS church could have built a giant hospital downtown, and used the tithing of their members to create a center for healing that would the admiration of the world and demonstrate Christian values. How I long for such a thing - that instead of giant megachurches and buildings, that Christians would actually tend to the sick the way their God calls them to.

Or maybe the LDS church could have created a shelter for homeless women and children, with full jobs programs and schools, so not a single child in the country would go without food and an education. What a testament to their faith that would be.

But, no. Thank you, Mr. Beck, for exposing what you believe religion, Christianity, and the Mormon church are all about. Not about doing the things that Jesus actually said to do to enter heaven.

Instead, Mr. Beck tells us what he believes Mormonism and Christianity stands for: greed, and money, and power. I'm sure Jesus himself who hung about with the prostitutes, the leapers, the destitute would so agree.

Minimum Standards and States Rights

Last Wednesday, there was a vote in the House to establish that schools across American could not tie down, use solitary confinement, and other medieval techniques of discipline that should never be applied to children.

Nearly every single Republican voted against it, on the idea of "states rights."

I have to say - what exactly is wrong with a minimum set of standards? We set up minimum standards for air quality on the federal level, for automobiles, even federal standards for what should be taught in classes.

There are some 22 states without provisions against treating children as if they were criminals, which this law seeks to address by establishing minimum standards to let all teachers know "No, you may not tie down Jimmy when he's bad. No, you can't put Susie in solitary confinement - you run a school, not a prison."

Evidently, the vast majority of Republicans thought that setting up these standards and spending $22 million a year to enforce them is too much. So remember, trillions for war, billions for tax cuts - but torturing kids? Well, they, we can't go spending money on that.

Lectured on Fiscal Prudence By Those Who Spent It All

Spending is an important issue. It's a serious issue, and one that needs addressing.

Government spending, and overspending, is an important issue as well.

Which is why it's not funny, more sad and infuriating when you read about people like Gretchen Hamel, a former Bush admiinstration official, are the ones doing the lecturing.

Let's seriously think about this for a moment. Let's pretend we have a business - call it Big Bubba's Shipping. Larry gets appointed to the head of the company, and he proceeds to spend every penny in the savings accounts on the greatest security system ever, on hiring a whole new group of employees, and then racks up tons of debt for the company in the process. He cuts prices on shipping charges with the theory of "it'll bring in a ton of new customers" - which reduces revenue just as the company should be paying the bills.

In the meantime, he ignores that the shipping trucks are breaking down to pieces and the accounting department is racked with fraud.

So when the new head the company comes into office, they say "Look, we need to buy some new trucks and fix up what we've got, or else we won't have any business. So we need to extend our line of credit, fix up the fleet, get back in business, and then we'll be able to repay our bills."

At which point Larry starts to complain "We can't do that - we'll go further into debt! Debt is bad!" All the while ignoring the fact that it's Larry's fault *we're in so much debt right now*.

So let's review the Bush administration, who:

• Started out with a surplus in the yearly budget.
  
• Expanded government to create a whole new department called Homeland Security - without cutting expenses to pay for it or raising taxes.
  
• Offered a huge tax cut without cutting any spending to pay for it.
  
• Expanded Medicare without any tax increases to pay for it.
  
• Started two wars without cutting spending or increasing taxes to pay for it.
  
• Let the Pay-Go rules lapse (these were the rules in place during the Clinton administration, that said that any new spending by the government had to be paid for either by a tax increase or a budget cut elsewhere)
  

And then - these are the people who want to come out and start lecturing about "fiscal responsibility." When we're trying to bring down costs in health care (which has the potential to bankrupt the government), or when we pass Pay-Go under the Obama administration over *every Republican in the Senate who voted against it*.

It's like being lectured on diet and exercise by the obese guy stuffing Twinkies into his mouth. It's like being told to be morally chaste by a pimp.

Blond and Pabst declare secularism has failed. By ignoring history, science, reason....

I thought I'd take about, oh, 5 minutes and show why the Blond and Pabst article is full of fail.

The article itself is in the Opinion section of the New York Times. If this is the level of quality for the New York Times opinion section, it may explain why newspaper readership is down.

Or, they were hoping for some sensationalism to drive traffic, like John C. Dvorak.
Either way, it only takes a few minutes to see how they have major failings in their argument.

This was a profoundly secular move: It simply denied natural knowledge of God and thereby eliminated theology from the sciences. Religion, stripped of rationality, became associated with a blind unmediated faith — precisely the mark of fanaticism. Thus religious fundamentalism constitutes an absence of religion that only true religion can correct.

I would say that secularism argues that there is no supernatural or divine beings in the absence of evidence. Even Richard Dawkins, in a recent podcast, mentioned that you can't say "there absolutely is no god", the best you can say is "there is no evidence of a god."

That's all secularism asks for. Rather than assuming that X exists, it first starts with "what is the evidence for X", and if the evidence does not hold up, then secularists are free to assume X does not exist. Provide evidence for unicorns and leprechauns and I'll believe. Until then, I'm not running after every rainbow to get a pot of gold.

Richard Dawkins's barely literate polemic "The God Delusion" declares that religion is irrational without ever explaining the foundations of reason itself.
This, to be blunt, is simply asinine. I don't need to go into a history of the background of reason and logic to explain why there's no Santa Claus.
Sam Harris's diatribe "The End of Faith" has to falsify history by claiming that Hitler and Stalin were religious in order to make its case for the malign influence of faith.

I'd say the job of falsifying history by claiming that Hitler was an atheist when he spoke of Christianity often, had his soldiers wearing Gott mit uns during World War II. Or ignoring Stalin's educational training at Greek Orthodox schools. Either way, trying to deny these facts and put them into the "atheism" box is disingenuous. Nobody knows what these two monsters really felt about religion, but it's clear - as Sam Harris has said - that what they lacked was not overfill of reason and opinion opinions, but a more - if I may say so - "faith based approach" that went out of its way to assert the dogma of Communism and Nazism was correct against all evidence.
One more, and then I don't know if I can keep up my gag reflex in the face of this much stupidity.

Darwinism is close to being completely rewritten. Hitherto, it had been assumed that forms of life are the product of essentially arbitrary processes, such that (as Stephen Jay Gould put it) if we ran evolution again life would look very different. However, evolution shows biological convergence. As Simon Conway Morris, a professor of biology at Cambridge University, has argued, evolution is not arbitrary: If it ran again, the world would look much as it already does.

How often does it have to be said: evolution by natural selection is not random, it is not arbitrary. It follows rules that were first discovered 150 years ago by Darwin and refined since then. Saying "evolution is random" is no more true than saying "plate tectonics are random" or "germ theory is random." If the clock was run back and run again, things would look the same because the same environmental pressures upon the species would be there to make them adapt in exactly the same way.
This doesn't mean that some power sat from above to push things that way. If I set up a series of dikes and channels, then ran water through it, the results would be the 99.9999% the time each time I ran the clock back and did it again.

This is only getting halfway through the article. I don't know who Blond and Pabst are, but they're clearly people that can be ignored as either ignorant of science and reason, or lacking the brain power to tie their shoes, let alone make statements regarding Secularism or, well, anything.

Man is tried as terrorist in civilian courts, and I get rude

Today in the news, Najibullah Zaza was tried in court.

In Brooklyn.

Of terrorism.

For the last few months, there's been a group of people who pee their pants protesting the idea of having terrorist trials in New York. You shouldn't read people their Miranda rights when you want to charge them with terrorism, you don't give them any Constitutional rights.

This group of people who wake up in the middle of the night with sopping wet diapers go on about how you can't give non-US citizens protections of the Constitution, even though the Supreme Court has said so for 150 years. Nope, it's all too much to use all of that "law" stuff on people whom, with their scary middle eastern brown skinned powers, will vanish and pop in and out like djinns from that Alladin movie and unleash their attacks on the US. It's like they're all The Joker from Batman or a character from "24". Save me, Jack Bauer! Save me!

Then we get back to Najibullah Zaza, who was tried in Brooklyn under terrorism charges. He had been read his Miranda rights, he had been brought into the courthouse by a New York police department that, contrary to what Cheney and Bloomberg and yes, I'm including those scaredy pants Democrats of New York who ran around screaming "Terrorists! Terrorists! Find me my mommy!" - somehow, the New York police officers didn't let a prisoner flip off the lights and run amok in the streets killing everyone he saw.

Granted, I'm sure this won't have these complete cowards give up their teddy bears at night, for fear that somewhere, someone is actually upholding the rule of law that this country was based on. I mean, according to these people who probably throw their children out the door at the first sign of danger screeching "take them first and leave me alone", it's unAmerican to actually arrest people, try them, and actually follow through what the Constitution and all of those pesky laws say.

Though, I think I'll stick with the law. Then again, I don't need a night light by my bed.