"Fifth question “from a Republican so I don’t know what I’m doing here.” Question on a universal health care plan, and that if you create a public option, whether it will lead to an entirely government run system. Obama says there’s a difference between a “universal” plan and a “single-payer” plan. Obama says the private industry can compete against the government. “They do it all the time,” he says. “If you think about it, UPS and FedEx are doing just fine. It’s the Post Office that’s always having problems.”

This is classic.  1.  the post office has a monopoly on first class mail.  there is NO competition.  2.  they lose gobs and gobs of money and are only kept around because they have a big union and a government balance sheet (our grandkids) to offset those mega-losses.  3.  they are able to compete against Fedex and UPS because they can afford to operate at mega-losses.

 I cannot think of a better way to prove the argument against nationalized healthcare than to trot out the USPS vs. FedEx and UPS. Two of the companies are consistently rated among the most admired companies in the world compared to an organization that is a punch line to workplace killing sprees…

CORRECTION:  Actual numbers for the USPS

Year     Operating Revenues     Net Income

2003     $68.5 bln                     $3.9 bln

2004     $68.9 bln                     $3.1 bln

2005     $69.9 bln                     $1.4 bln

2006     $72.5 bln                     $0.9 bln

2007     $74.8 bln                     - $5.1 bln

2008     $74.9 bln                     - $2.8 bln

But that really doesn't help President Obama's arguement

two more takes from He who is Godlike, whos tongue has been dipped in the unvarnished truth:

There are so many major issues with this guy that we must raise our voices. This may seem trivial by comparison, but it irks me every time the liberal establishment refers to this guy as "gifted" or "brilliant."

Without a teleprompter, the real Obama displays his ignorance of his native (?) language:

5/26/08- Las Cruces, NM - "I have a uncle...." L

7/24/09 - Washington, DC - "He (Crowley) is a excellent police officer."

8/11/09 - Portsmouth, NH - "...a employer-based system."

Could he have been absent when they taught basic English at Punahou, Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard?

If Bush said these things, it would be a front page laugh riot on most mainstream outlets. Actually, W spoke better than Obama....even when he was drinking.

Then theres the whole "grandma" thing .....

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MICKEY KAUS:   If, as Harold Pollack argues, “rationing of life-saving or life-extending care” would not really be a priority for the “effectiveness” panels–such as the Obama-endorsed IMAC–then it was all the more stupid to bring the topic up, no? Here’s the first graf from a Bloomberg account of an early Obama health care foray back in April: April 29 (Bloomberg) — President Barack Obama said his grandmother’s hip-replacement surgery during the final weeks of her life made him wonder whether expensive procedures for the terminally ill reflect a “sustainable model” for health care. Gee, where could the misinformed town hall crazies have gotten the idea that Obama was thinking about saving money by denying expensive procedures toward the end of life?

I'll be off this in a day or two ....maybe ... here's a few more looks at the walk down memory lane

In 2003, Olbermann saluted protests: “It is political dissent that created this country and sustained it and improved it.” But on Friday’s Countdown, Olbermann called the anti-Obama protests “societal sabotage,” determined that the grassroots groups are “fake” and insisted that “the protestors are not interested in hearing any voices other than their own.” (But the anti-Bush protesters were open-minded?)

That same night, ABC called the protests “ugly,” while CBS termed them “nasty.” Also on Friday, former CNN reporter Bob Franken scolded the “organized intimidation” of “a crazed group of people,” whom he described as “partisan groups that whip up their fear-of-change ultra-conservative base.” MSNBC ran graphics on Monday about “unhinged” conservatives “scaring seniors” with their “health care hysteria.” Those don't doesn't sound like efforts to elevate dissent as a key element of a healthy democracy.

■ Co-host Harry Smith: "[Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan] talks about the failure of mainstream media to hold the Bush administration’s feet to the fire in the run-up to the war. Is that an allegation that feels to you like it has merit or not?"...
CBS anchor Katie Couric: "I think it’s one of the most embarrassing chapters in American journalism. And I think there was a sense of pressure from corporations who own where we work and from the government itself to really squash any kinds of dissent or any kind of questioning of it. I think it was extremely subtle but very, very effective. And I think Scott McClellan has a really good point."
— CBS’s The Early Show, May 28, 2008.

■ “Whatever you think of its policies, the current administration has been more secretive, more mistrustful of an inquisitive press, than any since the Nixon administration. It has treated freedom of information requests with contempt, asserted sweeping claims of executive privilege, even reclassified material that had been declassified. The administration has subsidized propaganda at home and abroad, refined the art of spin, discouraged dissent, and sought to limit traditional congressional oversight and court review.”
— New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller delivering the Hugo Young Memorial Lecture in London, as reported by Britain’s Guardian newspaper, November 29, 2007.

■ “When those who dissent are told time and time again — as we will be, if not tonight by the President, then tomorrow by his portable public chorus — that he is preserving our freedom, but that if we use any of that freedom, we are somehow un-American; when we are scolded, that if we merely question, we have ‘forgotten the lessons of 9/11;’ look into this empty space behind me and the bipartisanship upon which this administration also did not build, and tell me this: Who has left this hole in the ground? We have not forgotten, Mr. President. You have. May this country forgive you.”
— MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann on September 11, 2006, ending his Countdown with a commentary from the site of the World Trade Center.

■ “This has been a year in which dissent, especially taking an unpopular or minority political opinion, has been attacked by people like Mr. O'Reilly. In the last year, it has not been enough just to disagree with dissenters. Many of us have decided it is necessary to silence them. Which is really kind of ironic since it is political dissent that created this country and sustained it and improved it. But ask the Dixie Chicks about how well this year we Americans kept our pledge to be tolerant of dissent, our delight in disagreeing with your opinion but being willing to fight to the death to protect your right to express it. ”
– Keith Olbermann on MSNBC’s Countdown, Sept. 29, 2003.

■ Peter Jennings: “Finally this evening, what it sometimes costs to be in the minority and say what you think publicly. There is nothing like a war to create tension between some of those who most fervently support it and those who do not. And as we’ve seen in the case of this war, when those who are opposed happen to be in show business, well, some other people want to make them pay....”
Actor Tim Robbins: “A chill wind is blowing in this nation.”
Jim Wooten: “In Washington this week, Robbins criticized the political climate in which his right to express his views has come under attack....All this has reminded some of the McCarthy era’s blacklists that barred those even accused of communist sympathies from working in films or on television.”
— ABC’s World News Tonight, April 16, 2003.

■ “Across the country, citizens have been coming out to voice their opposition, all calling for the same things. They want government accountability, they want environmental justice, and most of all, they’re calling for peace....While protesters like today are a statistical minority, in American history protests like this have been prescient indicators of the national mood. So the government may do well to listen to what’s said today.”
– ABC correspondent Chris Cuomo previewing an afternoon protest rally planned for Times Square, on a special five-hour Saturday edition of Good Morning America, March 22, 2003, three days after the war in Iraq began.

■ “I decided to put on my flag pin tonight...I put it on to take it back. The flag’s been hijacked and turned into a logo — the trademark of a monopoly on patriotism. On those Sunday morning talk shows, official chests appear adorned with the flag as if it is the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, and during the State of the Union did you notice Bush and Cheney wearing the flag?...More galling than anything are all those moralistic ideologues in Washington sporting the flag in their lapels while writing books and running Web sites and publishing magazines attacking dissenters as un-American.”
— Bill Moyers on PBS’s Now, February 28, 2003.

■ “It’s an obscene comparison, and I’m not sure I like it, but there was a time, in South Africa, where people would put flaming tires around peoples’ necks if they dissented. And in some ways, the fear is that you’ll be necklaced here, you’ll have the flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck. Now it’s that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions and to continue to bore in on the tough questions so often. And again, I’m humbled to say, I do not except myself from this criticism.”
– Dan Rather on the BBC’s Newsnight program, May 16, 2002.

From Dan Gainor: 

For eight years in America, protest was in and all the cool kids did it. We had flamboyantly dressed Code Pinkers demonstrating at conventions and in sessions of Congress, calling Marine recruiters “traitors” and protesting wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Then there was Acorn stalking Wall Street executives at their homes. And anti-war lefty Cindy Sheehan got so much news coverage from the major networks and top newspapers that they practically had to create a bureau to handle her antics.

Through it all, the left whined that President George Bush was a fascist – with “BusHitler” a common term among the foam-at-mouth Birkenstock set. (Google Bush and Hitler and you’ll get more than 1 million hits including a bunch of Photoshopped images of Bush in a Nazi uniform with a Hitler mustache.) We were supposed to bear with it. Dissent was patriotic we were told. Those hate-spewing anti-war activists really loved our soldiers – especially when they were mocking the war right outside a veteran’s hospital. And the endless stream of Nazi comparisons were just free speech, after all.

That all happened before January 20, when the left, along with their supporters in the news media, decided protest and dissent were suddenly unpatriotic. Welcome to hypocrisy, the millennial edition. Now everything said or done in those eight years is forgotten. America has a blank slate to build hope and change under Obama, so we are told.

Don’t dare criticize him, knock his policies or voice your opinion. Do it and you are called “mobs” or racist by the media and treated as scary forces of hate reminiscent of Waco, the Klan or Nazis. (Cue Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi for one of the most idiotic statements of this or any century by linking protesters to Nazis. And she followed that by saying they’re also “un-American.”)

For the rest of this op-ed, please go to www.businessandmedia.org or click on this link.

And my las clip on the subject today, from Clay Waters:

After years of mainstreaming and idealizing antiwar protesters and marches supporting illegal immigrants as "grandmothers with canes, parents with children in strollers," dissent against a president's policies is no longer cool at the New York Times.

The Times finds the newest batch of protesters against Obama health care to be "angry," "irritable" crowds of whites taking marching orders from conservative talk radio and web sites.

Wednesday's front-page story by Ian Urbina and Katharine Seelye on protests at Democratic Sen. Arlen Specter's town hall meeting in Lebanon, Pa., "Senator Goes Face to Face With Dissent." The front page of the Times showed a confrontation between a stiff-faced Specter and a shouting protester.

They got up before dawn in large numbers with angry signs and American flag T-shirts, and many were seething with frustration at issues that went far beyond overhauling health care.

More than 1,000 people showed up here Tuesday morning in this largely Republican town in central Pennsylvania for a town-hall-style meeting with Senator Arlen Specter, though the auditorium could seat only 250. Like many of the dozens of such meetings held by members of Congress over the last few weeks, this one was punctuated with rowdy moments, and interviews with many of those who showed up made it clear just how much underlying dissent motivated them.

....

Ms. Abram described herself as a stay-at-home mother from Lebanon, and in many ways she was representative of the almost entirely white and irritable crowd, most of whom were from the area.

For once, unions like the Service Employees International Union didn't hold sway at a town hall meeting, apparently not sufficiently motivated to arrive in time to get in. The Times spun that embarrassment as just another result of inchoate right-wing anger: "It was the angriest people who got in line first."

Many of the union members who showed up to support health care reform did not arrive early enough to get into the auditorium at the Harrisburg Area Community College, and thus were largely not represented among the 30 questioners called on by Mr. Specter. It was the angriest people who got in line first.

You might remember leftists protested Bush's attempt at Social Security reform back in 2005 -- or perhaps not. The Times didn't exactly focus hard on the rowdy protests that greeted another Pennsylvania senator -- conservative Republican Sen. Rick Santorum, who backed Bush's Social Security reform. (Santorum was defeated by Democrat Robert Casey in 2006).

The Times was much milder and less obsessive in its description of left-wing Social Security protesters. Here's reporter Robin Toner's description, from a February 23, 2005 article from Chester, Pa., where Santorum was holding a meeting on Social Security:

Almost no one is a more outspoken advocate of President Bush's Social Security plan than Senator Rick Santorum, the third-ranking Republican in the Senate leadership, who is campaigning across his state this week, trying to get young people to focus on their retirement.

Toner described the hecklers in non-judgmental fashion as providing a "freewheeling atmosphere." The word "angry" was nowhere to be found:

But Mr. Santorum, who is chairman of the Senate Republican Conference and a favorite of conservatives nationally, was plowing ahead this week with 10 public forums, 7 of them on college campuses. That translates into a far more freewheeling atmospherethan, say, one of Mr. Bush's tightly controlled forums on Social Security.

At Drexel University, for example, Mr. Santorum was greeted by protesters, was heckled during his speech by people declaring their loyalty to Lyndon LaRouche, and was asked several questions by young people on issues that had little to do with Social Security, including same-sex marriage and the global fight against AIDS.

Unlike the two front-page Times stories on the angry health-care protesters, the 2005 article on the Social Security protests appeared on page 16. The protests also weren't the focus of the Santorum article, which was more about how young people weren't paying attention to the debate in Washington.

And speaking of liberal accusations of conservative protesters being not genuine grassroots, check out Andrea Stone's write-up of similar anti-Santorum protests in the March 16, 2005 edition of USA Today:

Santorum was among dozens of members of Congress who ran gantlets of demonstrators and shouted over hecklers at Social Security events last month. Many who showed up to protest were alerted by e-mails and bused in by anti-Bush organizations such as MoveOn.org and USAction, a liberal advocacy group. They came with prepared questions and instructions on how to confront lawmakers.

Those details didn't make the Times.

Back to Specter's raucous town meeting. The senator made an effort to control things, with the Times citing "concerns about a potentially unruly crowd."

But for all his efforts, tempers boiled over 15 minutes into the meeting. Standing two feet from the senator, Craig Anthony Miller, 59, shouted, "You are trampling on our Constitution!" A half-dozen security people quickly swarmed but refrained from touching him as Mr. Specter, raising his voice, said sternly, "Wait a minute! Wait a minute!" He said the man had the right to leave....But most of those who spoke Tuesday seemed unlikely to vote in the Democratic primary. Many seemed concerned about issues that are either not in the health care legislation or are peripheral to the debate in Washington -- abortion, euthanasia, coverage of immigrants, privacy.

The Times doesn't consider abortion rights, euthanasia, or illegal immigration important? Could have fooled us. Yet when conservative protesters bring those same issues up (and there are valid concerns about abortion and end-of-life care) they suddenly become "peripheral."

As my MRC colleague Matthew Balan  pointed out:

The Associated Press, which is no right-wing press outlet, reported on August 5 that "health care legislation before Congress would allow a new government-sponsored insurance plan to cover abortions, a decision that would affect millions of women and recast federal policy on the divisive issue." That detail is the main reason why the abortion issue has been thrust into the health care debate.

 

The future of the WII

If you adore your Wii but lament the fact that its motion controls don't allow you to get more intimate with it, take heart. The company has patented a controller that lets you straddle it and ride it like a big boy.

Siliconera scoped out a European patent database to discover the somewhat disturbing innovation:

The inflatable seat has a pocket for the Wii remote, which is used to sense movement via the accelerometers. Players hold the nunchuck to simulate holding the reins or, as the Nintendo patent describes, "a raised hand for balance as in Bronco riding, a lasso, a sword or other weapon, etc."

The story goes on to say that the controller will work with games that simulate not only riding horses but "bulls, camels, elephants, burros, dolphins, whales, dragons, griffons, unicorns, giant eagles..." Whoah there, Nintendo. All the other things are standard — who hasn't dreamed of riding Ms. Pac-Man, uh, I mean, a unicorn — but giant eagles? Nintendo, you're even freakier than I imagined.

Siliconera [Siliconera, via Joystiq]

If Obama has his way, his health care plan will be funded by his treasury chief who did not pay his taxes, overseen by his surgeon general who is obese, signed by a president who smokes, and financed by a country that is broke.

On a similer note:

There are two basic points about health-care reform that President Obama wants to convey. The first is that, as he put it in an ABC special in June, "the status quo is untenable." Our health-care system is rife with "skewed incentives." It gives us "a whole bunch of care" that "may not be making us healthier." It generates too many specialists and not enough primary-care physicians. It is "bankrupting families," "bankrupting businesses" and "bankrupting our government at the state and federal level. So we know things are going to have to change."

Obama's second major point is that--to quote from the same broadcast--"if you are happy with your plan and you are happy with your doctor, then we don't want you to have to change ... So what we're saying is, If you are happy with your plan and your doctor, you stick with it."

So the system is an unsustainable disaster, but you can keep your piece of it if you want. And the Democrats wonder why selling health-care reform to the public has been so hard?

MEET THE SCARY MOB.

PROTESTING VIOLENCE at SEIU Headquarters in St. Louis. “Although he was too weak to speak after his beating on Thursday, black conservative Kenneth Gladney attended the event. Kenneth was beaten, kicked and called racist names by SEIU Russ Carnahan supporters after a town hall meeting on Thursday.”

Here’s a news report.

HARRY REID’S “EVIL” MOMENT:

Remember when polite society treated a politician’s use of the word “evil” as a sign that the old boy was dangerously lacking upstairs?

We saw it in 1983, when Ronald Reagan famously used the word in a speech to describe the Soviet empire. What a rube! New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis spoke for the smart set when he wondered what Soviet leaders must think: “What confidence can they have in the restraint of an American leader with such an outlook?”

We saw it again in 2002, when George W. Bush characterized North Korea, Iran and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as an “axis of evil.” Tom Daschle, a Democrat and then Senate majority leader, warned that “we’ve got to be very careful with rhetoric of that kind”; former President Jimmy Carter called it “overly simplistic and counterproductive”; and comedian Will Ferrell parodied it on Saturday Night Live. Soon the phrase became acceptable only in the ironic sense—as in the Chris Fair cookbook titled “Cuisines of the Axis of Evil and Other Irritating States: A Dinner Party Approach to International Relations.”

With all this history, you would think Harry Reid (D., Nev.) had ample warning. Nevertheless, the Senate majority leader invoked the e-word himself last week at an energy conference in Las Vegas, where he accused those protesting President Barack Obama’s health-care proposals of being “evil mongers.” So proud was he of this contribution to the American political lexicon that he repeated it to a reporter the next day and noted the phrase was “an original.”

And then . . . nothing. No thundering rebuke from the New York Times. No outburst from Mr. Carter. In fact, it’s hard not to notice that the good and gracious people who instinctively recoil at words like “evil” or “un-American” (the preferred term of Mr. Reid’s counterpart in the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi) have all been silent.

But the people he was calling “evil” were opponents of the Democratic agenda.

that blows no good.

You know how global warming is increasing the number and intensity of hurricanes? At least it was a year ago, according to Time and its preferred sources:

All these hurricanes in such a short period of time begs the question: are storms getting stronger, and if so, what's causing it? According to a new paper in Nature, the answer is yes — and global warming seems to be the culprit.

Well, this year doesn't look so bad, according to a brand-new analysis:

According to its August Atlantic hurricane season outlook, NOAA now expects a near- to below-normal Atlantic hurricane season, as the calming effects of El Niño continue to develop.