It’s Crippled… But That’s What They WANT

Very true, Billy , it does only go 250 miles per charge… or less….  And, as you say, it then needs three or four hours to recharge on a good day. 

What you fail to reckon with, however, is that’s the kind of range are global planning friends would like to limit you to. You see, in your not considering all the design criteria involved here.  The U.N. for decades has been pushing the idea of pushing the populations back towards the population centers and keeping them there.  And, of course, into “public” transportation.  This we are told, is more “earth friendly”.  More “sustainable”. 

But let’s not consider too closely where the energy to power this thing comes from. 

Now, because of the ‘electric car’…(Otherwise known as a golf cart) we won’t have the oil companies to kick around for all the pollution in the cities, now will have electric generating plants doubtless using nuclear power or coal fired steam power to generate electricity to drive the cars.  Of course, this will create an even worse situation in terms of pollution.

But, Hey…. at least the cars themselves are clean, right? 

It’s as I told Joyner some months back:

Personally, when they can come up with something that will tow 6000 lbs, for 700-plus miles per day, without a safety issue, as my current vehicle does, and yet will haul me back and forth to my job sites, I’ll admit they’ve got something. A plug-in doesn’t cut it.

The Supreme Court sent a clear message to Judith Miller and the New York Times, to wit the minions of Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. are not above the law.

WASHINGTON -(AP)- The Supreme Court ruled against The New York Times on Monday, refusing to block the government from reviewing the phone records of two Times reporters in a leak investigation of a terrorism-funding probe.

You can not impede a federal investigation under the colors of freedom of the press.

Via USAToday

MEDICARE SPENDING SEES FIRST DECLINE

Medicaid spending has declined unexpectedly this year, the first drop since the health program for the poor was created in 1965.

The historic reversal will free up billions of dollars in state budgets. Medicaid has been the fastest-growing expense for states over the past 10 years.

Medicaid spending fell 1.4% in the first nine months of the year compared with the same period a year ago, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The drop was even greater — an unprecedented a 5.4% decline — after adjusting for the rate of health care inflation.

The spending has been reduced by cost-controlling efforts and a shift of some prescription-drug expenses to Medicare, the federal health program for the elderly.

“States have made really aggressive changes in how care is managed in Medicaid,” Arizona Medicaid Director Anthony Rodgers said. “Every state has taken a different approach, but the success can be seen almost everywhere.”

According to USAToday, 56 million Americans (and how many illegals?) receive benefits through Medicaid, which the federal government pays 57%.  For 2006, Medicaid is projected to cost $300 million (just $5.30 per person!!). Sounds wonderful, Washington and the states have gotten their act together and have found a way to cut costs, right?  Nope, not the case:

Some Medicaid savings are the result of shifting costs to the federal government’s Medicare program. ….  This complicated cost shifting between the two programs makes it impossible to know precisely how much Medicaid cost cutting is simply shifting expenses to the federal program.

So as usual, Washington will trumpet its ability to cut costs, throwing out a huge smoke-screen to hide the shifting of those costs to another program.

…. to Billy Beck.

NEW YORK -AP- High traffic disrupted Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s Web site for much of Friday, one of the year’s busiest shopping days.

The Walt Disney Co. also had problems handling the rush of online activity Friday, while Amazon.com Inc.’s site had brief disruptions a day earlier due to a Thanksgiving Day sale on Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox 360 video game machines.

Walmart.com spokeswoman Amy Colella blamed a “higher than anticipated traffic surge.”

The Wal-Mart site appeared to be back to normal mid-afternoon Friday, after frustrating countless potential shoppers for some 10 hours.

Keynote, which regularly monitors performance at leading Web sites, said its probes began detecting problems at about 4:30 a.m. EST. Throughout the morning, visitors still could access portions of the site but generally ran into difficulty before completing purchases.

Whoa, hold it.
The traffic overwhelmed the server at 4:30am?
Sorry, I don’t care HOW crazy stuff gets… I don’t buy that this was naturally occuring traffic that crippled them. I’ve got to assume some sort of coordinated attack was going on. And, why would they want to do THAT, do you suppose? (Snork)

The WaPo says that the EPA is going to start regulating Nano-products sold as Germ Killing agents.

The Environmental Protection Agency has decided to regulate a large class of consumer items made with microscopic “nanoparticles” of silver, part of a new but increasingly widespread technology that may pose unanticipated environmental risks, a government official said yesterday.

The decision — which will affect the marketing of high-tech odor-destroying shoe liners, food-storage containers, air fresheners, washing machines and a wide range of other products that contain tiny bacteria-killing particles of silver — marks a significant reversal in federal policy. It also creates an unexpected regulatory hurdle for the burgeoning field of nanotechnology, which involves the creation of materials just a few ten-thousandths the diameter of a human hair.
…
Under the new determination, first reported on Tuesday by the Daily Environment Report, a Washington publication, and confirmed yesterday by the EPA, any company wishing to sell a product that it claims will kill germs by the release of nanotech silver or related technology will first have to provide scientific evidence that the product does not pose an environmental risk.

Call this what you will, I’ll likely agree with you.  But I find it strange that they should wait until such time as a democrat victory occurs before the bureaucrats start in with their major power grab.  Clearly, this idea was sitting in somebody’s drawer, waiting for a moment of leased opposition to the government power grab.  Apparently the recent election provided that. 

Go ahead and tell me how this most recent election only affects what happens in Congress, per se’.

BBCT: The Inactivist

When John Kerry disparged the intelligence of our American Fighting Men, it was said that Kerry botched a joke.  Yet was it really a botched joke or just the standard democrat position?.  The incoming chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Charlie Rangel, said much the same thing on Fox Newsm, “If a young fellow has an option of having a decent career, or joining the Army to fight in Iraq, you can bet your life that he would not be in Iraq,”

Being a former serviceman, as both Rangel or Kerry are, or having served with honor as Rangel did, does not give anybody the right to insult American Fighting Men.  These are better men than you Charlie and John.  It is long past time you started showing them the respect they have earned.

PowerLine:

During this year’s political campaign, Republicans accused the Democrats of having no ideas other than opposition to whatever President Bush is for. To counter that perception, Nancy Pelosi announced a legislative program the centerpieces of which were raising the minimium wage (how that’s for an original idea?) and freeing the government to negotiate lower drug prices in connection with Medicare’s new prescription-drug benefit. To say that this agenda was no “Contract with America” would be to understate its banality. Implementing these agenda items and the one or two others that went with it would take perhaps two weeks. But that was one of its virtues, since the Dems would then be free to move on to the happy business of issuing subpoenas and hauling administration officials to Capitol Hill for grilling.

But it turns out that the Democrats face what the Washington Post calls a “challenge” when it comes to reforming President Bush’s prescription drug benefit plan — the plan is too successful as it is.

Much as I dislike the idea of government being involved with this process, it does show clearly that the biggest objection they had to President Bush on this as with all other things…. was not the ideas and policies in play, but simply that the man is not a Democrat. As Powerline suggests:

I was no fan of the prescription drug benefit, and I have no idea whether it’s the smashing success the Post depicts. But I find it interesting that the Post waited until after the election to extol the virtues of a program the criticism of which was an important element in the Dems campaign.

Interesting? Damning, more like.

-(Newsmax)- Whistle-blowers tipped off the government to $1.3 billion worth of fraud cases over the past year, largely at hospitals or other health care providers, the Justice Department said Tuesday.In all, the department recovered $3.1 billion in settlements – what prosecutors said was a record amount – from individuals and companies during the 2006 fiscal year that ended Sept. 30.

Most of it came from the healthcare sector….

The single largest settlement, worth $920 million, came against Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare Corp. (THC), the nation’s second-largest hospital chain. Following claims from six whistle-blowers, prosecutors accused Tenet of overbilling the government for $806 million in Medicare payments and paying $49 million in kickbacks to doctors who referred patients to the health care chain.

Someone want to explain to me how it is that Hillary care is going to make us that much more efficient?  The bottom line is that every time we turn anything over to the government this kind of thing ensues.  (Note the choice of words.)

Every single time.

And don’t tell me about how a well designed government one health care system will solve this problem.  What you’re talking about is establishing more law to deal with criminality.  That never works.  Criminality by definition is outside the law.  Redesigning the law is simply a shuffling of the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Good news for you folks who read BitsBlog offline.
I’ve got the RSS and ATOM feeds going, in the usual locations. If you’re getting me via BlogLines… and there were a bunch of you on the other site… I’d suggest using the ATOM feed… it’s a bit more inclusive.

A few clips of Fran, yesterday, along with my comments;

Your Curmudgeon is an ardent hawk. He believes passionately that Islam must be whipped back into its Arabian kennel and quarantined there, no matter what that undertaking might do to the price of oil. The evidence of the past thirty years is unambiguous on this point: Islam is intrinsically hostile to freedom, animates its devotees to work against freedom, and cannot be permitted to take root in a free society. (Please, no objections about the “nice Muslims” who live next door to you. There were plenty of nice Communists who merely thought that Stalin “went too far.”) But the necessity of this undertaking does not diminish the hazards it poses to American society.

Very true. I think a lot of Americans of lost sight of that point.

Over the five years of the War on Terror, Americans have endured virtually no additional infringements of their “civil liberties.” That may sound strange to some, but it is true nonetheless. No right of Americans protected by the First, Second, Third, Fourth, Sixth, Seventh, or Eighth Amendments has been abridged.

Well, as worded, not strictly true, but it’s a minor quibble; Perhaps we should say, rather, that no additional rights abridgments have occurred in this war on that would not have occurred otherwise .  Particularly as regards the Patriot act:

The sole impact of the PATRIOT Act was to empower the federal government to collect and make use of information from sources that were already deemed public by long-established precedent and law. While some of these activities might in time be adjudged imprudent, none violate either the letter or the spirit of the Constitution of these United States. Paradoxically, Americans have been quite vigilant about their privacy and procedural rights — and the equivalent rights of others — during this time of trial. Perhaps we’ve been sensitized adequately by the events of the century past.

Again, very true.  And Look;

I would be a liar, if I did not stipulate that the concerns expressed by some Americans over those issues involved in the Patriot act are completely justified… But I think under the circumstances, that they should also be satisfied with the answers provided, at least insofar as the patriot act and our government’s actions surrounding the War on Terror are concerned.  But here’s where we’ve gotten into problems; the growth of government outside those parameters,and in those areas where most Americans have not been paying as close an attention as Fran rightly puts it :

The infamous Kelo decision was only the most conspicuous aspect of these excisions. Note how much higher state and local taxes have become, most especially property taxes, virtually everywhere in America. Note the tightening of restrictions on the development of real property, particularly on environmental and “open space” pretexts. Note how, despite the obvious, immediate urgency of expanding our domestic energy sources, the mazes to be negotiated even to increase the capacity of an existing refinery are more complex and forbidding than ever. And note as always how businesses “offshore” ever more activities that American law, regulation, and tort practice have made impossible or prohibitively expensive.

None of this sounds directly attributable to the War on Terror — and it isn’t. But Americans have been so narrowly focused on the War, and on the related activities of the federal government, that the above incursions on their property rights and freedom of enterprise have passed almost entirely under their radar. In other words, our attention to our martial activities in defense of “our way of life” has distracted us from matters of ultimately equal importance to that way: advances against our rights by entities of predatory nature, which are massed much closer to our doorsteps than the forces of the Islamic menace.

I would point out that it was not Republicans, nor conservatives, that were behind Kelo, but leftist Democrats.
As such I’m not sure I’d use the words that Fran does here to describe the issue.. rather, that while we have been so worried about intrusions on our rights of these of the the prosecution of the WOT, which I consider to be a just prosecution, we’ve lost sight of the intrusions in our daily lives from government that were not related to the WOT. Which, by my measurement is just as the Democrats would HAVE you thinking.

There is something of a dichotomy there that needs to be examined, though I expect they’d rather you didn’t..

The people on the Democratic side of the aisle, who, let’s face it… have traditionally not been all that worried about the rights of the individual before the Patriot Act was on the table, and who certainly to this day are not overly concerned about, for example, the gross taxation and other intrusions being placed on the American people, were the very same ones screaming the loudest and longest at the slightest intrusion.  It’s enough to make one wonder whether they are really focusing on individual rights, or, simply about stopping us from defending ourselves, or perhaps just scoring political points, or both. This thought would seem to mesh with the idea that now they’re won the most recent election they’d not a clue as to how to deal with the terrorism problem. Maureen Dowd as much as admitted this the other day.
I note with some pleasure, though that Fran does.

Let there be no mistake: We are at war because we must be. America is under attack by external enemies who must be defeated utterly. Their aim is our subjugation or destruction. They will not slacken in their efforts until we have so humbled them that the very thought of displeasing us causes them to lose their sphincter control.

Aside from being closed by a classic line, the absolute truth is in that paragraph.  Go back and read it again.

But the necessity of this war must not be used as a pretext for the unjustified and permanent expansion of state power over us. Indeed, Americans desirous of reclaiming individual liberty and Constitutional governance would be better advised to regard the war as an opportunity for counterattack.

Quite so.  Yet at the same time, it should be pointed out that it has not been used as such. For example the infamous Kelo decision as Fran mentions, was most certainly not made under the pretext of the war on terror. Nor, I suspect, will it be .

Certainly, we should be vigilant.  We should not let down our guard.  Yet, let’s not be so all consumed on rights as regards our actions the the war on terror, and lose sight of the rest of it. Because I think that’s where the real attack on rights is coming from.

There are those currently in government, and more who will take their oaths of office after the first of next year, who would prefer you have so tight a focus on the rights issues surrounding the war on terror, and there alone… so tightly would they have you focus on those, that you lose sight of their kind of intrusions, which are of a far more odious, and a less defensible nature. Consider the rights losses that occurred during their last long run in power… losses that are now set in the stone of law, and practice.

At the end of the day, governments , and the members thereof, can be replaced.  In some measure, the rights that they remove from us, under any given pretext , can be returned to us, though often it is not.  Sometimes, the method of that reclaiming be violent.  But there it is.

I submit, however that the kind of rights losses we would be suffering if we were not fighting this war on terror, would be irreparable.  I submit , then, that we should be making our judgments about rights won, lost, and protected in the light of THAT measurement.

OTOH, we could always take up the issue of individual rights with the Imams who would surely be the authority if we were to, as the Democrats would have us..  stop fighting this war on terror.

Ummmmm… Good luck to you, on THAT one.

Just yesterday, I commented on this brand new Israeli initiative for peace.

First of all this is a game we’ve played so many times, it’s taking on the status of Charlie Brown and the football. The game always ends the same Charlie Brown’s flat on his back looking up at the sky.

Secondly the final para catches me laughing. The concept of a “moderate of the Fatah party” is nothing if not laughable, particularly even with a basic understanding of what the word “Fatah”, means. The article goes on to say that he’s trying to create a more moderate government. More moderate, than what, seems that question.

That was just last night. So, along comes the following newsflash in my watch files, this morning:

JERUSALEM —AP- Israeli troops withdrew from the Gaza Strip as a last-minute cease-fire deal took hold Sunday morning, but two major Palestinian militant groups, saying they had no intention of stopping their attacks, fired volleys of homemade rockets into Israel.  The ongoing rocket attacks by Hamas and Islamic Jihad tempered hopes for a lasting truce, which was meant to end five months of deadly clashes. The rockets landed in open fields and caused no injuries.

It’s well past time we ask ourselves the question, of how many times we have to play this game before we finally get the message there’s no winning it, save by the defeat of our enemy? These people do not want peace.  They use negotiation as a weapon against their enemy, not as a tool toward peace.

Proof that I was right was not long in coming.  Though, in all honesty, I can’t remember when I have been so annoyed about being right.

Lori Montgomery and Christopher Lee’s article the the Washington Post is illumunating.

One, it illlustrates how the MSM ignored largely successful republican programs in the run up the the election and let the democrats run on sound byte politics.

Two, it demonstrates the problem when sound byte campaign run smack into real world politics.  Democrat politicians ran on promise to fix a program that was not broken .  Now they are faced with attempting to improve a working program with little more than a monkey wrench.

WND- A Democrat community leader who would “offer a homily during worship services” and facilitated his congregation’s “opening our doors to all people regardless of sexual orientation” has been given a slap on the hand after pleading guilty to extensive child pornography offenses involving children as young as six.

Authorities say Andrew Douglas Reed, 53, who reported for an abbreviated jail term just a few weeks ago, had pleaded guilty to a page-long list of counts of 2nd-degree sexual exploitation of a minor.  Court records in the Asheville, N.C., case said he admitted that he would “record, develop and duplicate material containing a visual representation of a minor engaging in sexual activity.” That activity is defined by state law as including masturbation, intercourse and “touching – in apparent sexual stimulation or sexual abuse – of the genitals, pubic area or buttocks.”

However, instead of the 967 months in jail – nearly 81 years – for which he was liable, Judge Robert Lewis, another Democrat, gave him, in a plea bargain with the office of District Attorney Ron Moore, who was elected as a Democrat, a 10-12 month sentence.

Now, I will guarantee you that unless you’re a regular reader of World News Daily, this will be the first you’ve heard of this.

But let’s play a little game, you and I…  Let’s imagine that both the offender and the judge and the D. A. involved were not Democrats as they are in this case, but were, rather, Republicans.

Why, it wouldn’t be five minutes, before CNN would shift into wall to wall coverage for at least 72 hours.  We would see the printed press issuing editorials and playing on public sympathies for the abused children. We would see it all be blamed on the fact that George W. Bush is still in the White House.

But, these are Democrats we’re talking about.  So, as I say, this is the first you’ve heard of this.

JERUSALEM Nov 25, 2006 (AP)— Israel and the Palestinians agreed to a cease-fire Saturday to end a five-month Israeli military offensive in the Gaza Strip and the firing of rockets by Palestinian militants into the Jewish state a major step toward possibly reviving long-stalled peace talks.

The cease-fire was to go into effect at 6 a.m. Sunday (11 p.m. Saturday EST), both sides said.

The truce announcement was a significant achievement for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas as he tries to put together a more moderate government to replace the one currently led by Islamic Hamas radicals. Abbas, a moderate from the Fatah Party, hopes a deal with Hamas will persuade the West and Israel to lift crushing economic sanctions against the Palestinians.

First of all this is a game we’ve played so many times, it’s taking on the status of Charlie Brown and the football.  The game always ends the same Charlie Brown’s flat on his back looking up at the sky.

Secondly the final para catches me laughing. The concept of a “moderate of the Fatah party” is nothing if not laughable, particularly even with a basic understanding of what the word “Fatah”, means.  The article goes on to say that he’s trying to create a more moderate government.  More moderate, than what, seems that question.

If we ever needed proof that the word “moderate” is a relative term we need look no further than this.