It's all about where you draw the line

A bit dated at this point, but definitely worth a link: So, about all that “hostile, violent rhetoric?” « Tattered Bits of Brain.

An open letter from Dr. Becky Hollibaugh of Friend, Nebraska to Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.):

Dear Senator Nelson:

I send this message under “Tort Reform” because the current monstrosity you have pledged your support to says nothing whatsoever about Tort Reform. You have sold the physicians of Nebraska for zilch (zilch for us, but beaucoup federal bucks for you and the liberal partisans in this state). As a family practice physician in Small Town, Nebraska, I was counting on you to be the lone voice of Democratic sanity on this issue, but you sold me out. I will dedicate every spare minute of my time and every spare dollar I have to defeating you, should you run for re-election. The long hours I spent on my medical education and the long hours I spend treating my patients are nothing but chump change to you and your Democrat colleagues in Washington. I especially can’t wait for your equivocation and milquetoast evasion when your “compromises” on the abortion language in the bill are silently erased or quietly (on-little-legislative-cat’s-feet) eviscerated in the House/Senate give-and-take. Go on: Bet me that you won’t wuss-out on this issue!

I know you won’t give two-seconds to this letter, but I had to write it. I’m a primary care doctor in YOUR state, and you sold me out. I didn’t slog through 4 years of college and 4 years of medical school and 3 years of residency just to have you hand my career and my patient/doctor relationships over to government lifers. Your gutless acquiescence to Obama and Harry Reid and ‘Nanny’ Pelosi will NOT be forgotten.

Thank you, Ben, for forcing doctors like me to earn less than the repairmen who fix our appliances. Case in point: We recently had our dishwasher fixed. The repairman who came to our house charged $65 just to come and ‘diagnose’ the problem, then charged another $180 to ‘fix’ the problem. You and your fellow lawmakers have fixed MY going rate (Medicare) at $35 per-visit. Thank you for securing such a ‘lucrative’ rate for me! Thank you so much for making me–someone with 8 years of education!–make less than a mechanic or appliance repair technichian. And thanks especially for falling in line with Obama and the rest of the Democrats to make such a socialist system permanent.

You have my disgust and disdain forever, you socialist-coddling coward.

Sincerely,
Becky F. Hollibaugh, D.O.
Warren Memorial Hospital
Ziimmerman Clinic
Friend, NE 68359

Good on you Doc!

Dr. Hollibaugh follows up with:

…To those who would accuse me of greed: I don’t make as much as you think I do. I give every one of my patients the very best care I can offer, regardless of their ability to pay. And I do NOT begrudge my mechanic or my appliance repairmen their salaries. Not one bit. I gladly pay them what I owe them. What you leftist idiots don’t understand is this: I am forced to accept $35 for an office visit by a medicaid or medicare patient. I. Can’t. Afford. It. On that enforced wage, I can’t pay my nurses. I can’t pay my billing secretaries. I can’t pay my receptionist. I. Can’t. Survive. On. Obamacare. Get it?! I. Can’t. Pay. My. Nurses. On. Ben. Nelson. Wages. Get it? I hope so. You think I’m greedy? I went to medical school as a former nurse at age 36. I have over $180,000 dollars in student loans. I. Can’t. Survive. On. Obamacare. I hope this helps. I don’t make as much as you might think. And most of what I earn goes to repaying my student loans. I love my little family medicine clinic in Friend. I love being a doctor in rural Nebraska. I love my patients and I love rural family medicine. But Ben Nelson sold me out. Thanks again for letting me vent. I’m not greedy. I don’t envy the wages of my blue-collar friends. But I can’t survive or pay my employees on Uncle Sam’s reimbursement rate for my services.

Personally I don’t care if the dictated price is enough for her to make a living. The government, flat out, has no place dictating how much money a citizen should be permitted to charge for their services. The government, flat out, has no right to dictate what products or services a citizen is required to purchase. Either of these is the illegal seizure of private property (money) by government fiat.

Obamacare doesn’t really kick in until 2013 or so. I personally will support and vote for any candidate who vows to repeal this monstrosity before then; and it appears to be about 60% of the populace who agrees with me. Goodbye, Democrats — you have dug your graves with this legislation.

Found at Michelle Malkin, via Matteo.

Bore Patch blog has an excellent post up: Should You Be a Global Warming Skeptic?. He details the problems with the AGW theory, much of it known even before the revelations of the “Climategate” leak.

Read the whole thing, really, but I especially want to point out this paragraph, which is a pointed response to any argument that “the science is settled”:

I thought there was a consensus that Global Warming is occurring? The “science is settled”, isn’t it?

Actually, there’s never been a consensus. We’ll come back to this later, but the most interesting thing about this argument is that it’s not a scientific argument. Science simply doesn’t care about consensus, it cares about data and reproduceability of results. If your data is solid, and other people can get the same results, it simply doesn’t matter if you run with the crowd or not.

Simply put, if science depended on consensus, we would never get anywhere — as any fundamentally new theory pretty much depends on throwing an old theory out. Reputable scientists in modern times never argue that something is “settled”. I mean gravity isn’t “settled” science for Chrissakes — do you really think that the climate is settled science, when we can’t even predict next week’s weather?

If you’re hearing “the science is settled”, what you’re hearing is politics, not science. It’s smoke and mirrors. It a different way of saying “We have a vested interest in people believing us, so everyone who doesn’t agree with us should just shut their mouths.” Specifically, it’s an Appeal to Popularity fallacy — an attempt to shame critics into silence — and it is shameful coming from people who claim to be scientists. Don’t let them get away with it.

A lot has been written about the revelations found within the documents leaked from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, which are the scientists behind virtually all of the core Global Warming theory; but I think a “Climategate” article by Christopher Booker at the London Telegraph sums it up the best:

There are three threads in particular in the leaked documents which have sent a shock wave through informed observers across the world. Perhaps the most obvious… is the highly disturbing series of emails which show how Dr Jones and his colleagues have for years been discussing the devious tactics whereby they could avoid releasing their data to outsiders under freedom of information laws.

They have come up with every possible excuse for concealing the background data on which their findings and temperature records were based.

This in itself has become a major scandal, not least Dr Jones’s refusal to release the basic data from which the CRU derives its hugely influential temperature record, which culminated last summer in his startling claim that much of the data from all over the world had simply got “lost”. Most incriminating of all are the emails in which scientists are advised to delete large chunks of data, which, when this is done after receipt of a freedom of information request, is a criminal offence.

…The second and most shocking revelation of the leaked documents is how they show the scientists trying to manipulate data through their tortuous computer programmes, always to point in only the one desired direction – to lower past temperatures and to “adjust” recent temperatures upwards, in order to convey the impression of an accelerated warming….

What is tragically evident from the Harry Read Me file is the picture it gives of the CRU scientists hopelessly at sea with the complex computer programmes they had devised to contort their data in the approved direction, more than once expressing their own desperation at how difficult it was to get the desired results.

The third shocking revelation of these documents is the ruthless way in which these academics have been determined to silence any expert questioning of the findings they have arrived at by such dubious methods – not just by refusing to disclose their basic data but by discrediting and freezing out any scientific journal which dares to publish their critics’ work. It seems they are prepared to stop at nothing to stifle scientific debate in this way, not least by ensuring that no dissenting research should find its way into the pages of IPCC reports.

(That’s an excerpt — you can read the whole thing here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/6679082/Climate-change-this-is-the-worst-scientific-scandal-of-our-generation.html)

This all goes hand in hand with the political drumbeat that “the science is settled”. In other words, “Shut up!” — the first and last resort of liars everywhere.

Booker calls this “the worst scientific scandal of our generation”, but to me it goes further than that. When you look at the trillions of dollars that countries all over the world are preparing to spend to combat something that these scientists invented from whole cloth, this is the single biggest fraud in history. Forget losing their jobs — these men should be in prison.

Congressional Candidate Lieutenant Colonel Allen West:

Good man. We need more of this. Much more.

A very nice teardown of the health insurance legislation now going through the senate (Mike Rogers — R Mich. speaking):

Marred on slightly by the fact that the quote at the beginning was actually spoken by William Boetcker in 1916; though it is commonly, as here, mis-attributed to Abraham Lincoln.

The nice point he makes in this is just how much power over individuals’ lives this bill grants to government. It’s amazing to me that leftists will go on and on about the greed and corruption of big business, and at times also acknowledge that government is also corrupt, but then turn around and claim that the only group that can fix it is government.

Here’s the trick, folks: Government and business are, at times, both corrupt. It’s people. It’s powerful people, and power corrupts. Business is in it to make money, and government is in it to “make” votes. The difference is that I can turn down big business. Microsoft may be a massive company and control most of the world’s computers, but they can do *nothing* to force me to buy a Windows machine. If I don’t like the product I don’t have to buy it. But imagine if everyone had to use whatever operating system was most popular? Goodbye Mac, goodbye Linux. (Oh, and goodbye iPods, iPhones, and so forth, which wouldn’t exist because Apple would have been forced out of business years before they were invented.)

Government is like a business that can force you to buy their product — no matter how crappy it is, no matter how wasteful, no matter how poorly implemented. We’ve known for years that Social Security is going bankrupt. Virtually nobody my age believes that they’re every going to see a penny of what they’ve paid in to it, yet we have no choice but to continue paying in to this government “product”.

A common “straw man” argument against conservatives is that they claim that “government can’t do anything right”. That’s not the case, and not the claim. However, history has proven that government frequently gets it wrong — sometimes drastically, and tragically so — yet because it’s government we can’t choose not to buy that bad product.

(Note that despite the comparison, Microsoft products aren’t in the same league with the sheer crappitude that is Social Security, because any company that puts out product that bad ceases to exist in the private market. For a better comparison, imagine if Bernie Madoff could have forced anybody he wanted to invest in his scam: that’s Social Security in a nutshell.)

Ironically this came up to slap some liberals in the face when the Health Care bill was altered before the vote to prohibit funding for abortion. Pro-choice advocates were screaming that this was going to infringe on a woman’s right to an abortion… but why? Haven’t we been told repeatedly that everyone will be able to keep their current coverage? This bill will only help the uninsured? Their protests put the lie to the claim, and though I don’t agree with the specific problem they have (I’m pro-life), the principle of their problem is significant, and valid: if government controls it, then you are completely subject to the whims of government and politics. You no longer have control, and you no longer have freedom.

As goofy as health insurance sometimes is in this country, the companies still have to appeal to their customers. When government is in control, they are not accountable to you. You’re not a customer buying a product; you’re a subject, and they’re doing you a favor because it’s “free” — so quit complaining. It’s not like you have any other options.

And once you’ve handed over that power, good luck getting it back.

Video via Smallest Minority

A Canadian writes at the Heritage Foundation:

Everything I want to say about this is summed up in a story that happened to my partner Shelley. Shelley and I are partners in a restaurant, and she actually runs it. She was given an appointment at the hospital for a procedure, and she duly showed up at the appointed time. Two hours later she was still sitting there waiting to be called. Now she was only able to get a two-hour parking meter, and so she approached the desk and asked if she could go and put money in the meter. She was curtly told that she was free to go and put the money in, but that if her name were called while she was away, that her name would fall back to the bottom of the queue. So she just decided that she would take the parking ticket as part of the price of getting the medical service she needed. Another two hours passed, and still she was not called, so she again approached the counter, and very patiently and politely explained (as only Shelley can, because she is the soul of graciousness) that she actually had a small business to run; that she was there at the appointed time for her appointment; that she had waited four hours, which is far longer than she had been led to expect the whole thing would take; that she had other commitments because of the business; and could they possibly at least give her some idea of how much longer she might have to wait?

Well, the woman behind the counter got on her dignity, drew herself up to her full height, glared at Shelley and said, “You’re talking as if you’re some kind of customer!”

There you have it, ladies and gentlemen, the essence of the problem: When the government supplies you with “free” health care, you are not a powerful customer who must be satisfied. They are doing you a favor and you owe the state gratitude and servility in return for this awesome generosity. They can give you the worst service in the world, but because it is free, you are totally disempowered. One of the most important lessons I have learned from my contact with the Canadian Medicare system is that payment makes you powerful. And its absence makes you risible if not invisible.

Now the articulate and the middle class do not let little things like that get them down. Even though they do not pay, they still get in the faces of the people providing service and make their wishes known. But often the vulnerable, the poor, the ill-educated, and the inarticulate are the ones who suffer the most because no one’s well-being within the health care system depends on patients/consumers being well looked after. And by depriving them of the power of payment within the health care system, Medicare disempowers them. And the poor see this, because while they may be poor, they are not stupid.

As you look at this, just recall the China is *exempted* from the Kyoto Treaty.

http://deanesmay.com/2009/11/13/sky-is-blue/

h/t Brian

I reprint this article every year around Halloween, so enjoy. Happy Halloween!

I’ve got a lot of music in my ol’ iTunes Library — well over 3,000 songs — and in the spirit of Halloween, I have assembled a short playlist of the very, very best creepy songs I’ve ever come across (but you probably haven’t).

First off we have “Lover’s Last Chance”, by a little-known Celtic group from New Orleans called The Poor Clares. It starts off sounding just a bit cheesy, as the singer goes on about Halloween night and “werewolves a-howlin’”, but it quickly takes a turn for the dark, moving to a haunting ghost story and… well, give it a listen and tell me if it doesn’t give you the creeps.

The album is called Resurrected Lover, and though it may be a bit hard to find, it seems they pop up on eBay and the like from time to time. Get going in time for next year! If you like good Celtic music, one of the singers, Beth Patterson, has released some other albums that are available as well.

Note: The Poor Clares’ rendition isn’t available online that I could find, but another singer’s version is on iTunes. I like the Clares’ version much better, as the haunting background vocals really make the song.

Next we have I Am Stretched On Your Grave, as performed by Kate Rusby.

Creepiest. Song. Evar.

No, really. If Edgar Allan Poe had been a songwriter, this would have topped his greatest hits. It’s a traditional Celtic song (what is it with those Irish makin’ wit’ the creepy, anyway?), and it has been performed by others before, but this rendition really takes the cake, with a minimal rhythmic drive carrying you along down a very dark road. The only thing a bit odd about this song is that it is a woman singing what is lyrically clearly a man’s “role” in the story, but that’s easily ignored. it’s from her album Hourglass. Go get it! (link is above)

Third in the list is yet another Celtic tune (funny, when I started this post I hadn’t realized the common source of these three songs — the sound of them is different enough that they are far from sounding alike!) called “She Moved Thro The Fair”. This one is performed by Finbar Wright (former member of Irish Tenors) on his album A Tribute to John McCormack. There are several versions of this song out there, but again, rendition means a lot when looking for the truly creepy song. The interesting thing about this one is that it can sneak up on you. It’s entirely possible to hear this one several times before it suddenly hits you what happens in it — the lyrics are clear but subtle, in a way sure to appeal to fans of ghost stories.

New for 2008 I present a song by “the Geeks’ Weird Al”^*, Jonathan Coulton. A couple years ago he underwent a project he called “Thing a Week”, in which he created a new song every week for an entire year, and put them up on his web site. Some are hits, and some are misses; but when he’s good, he’s great. One of these productions was a song called “Creepy Doll“, and tells the story of a house, and a locked door, and (naturally) a doll. Heck, you can listen to it on his site, so rather than me describing it, head on over there and listen.

Let us not forget Sting’s “Moon Over Bourbon Street“. A song written by Sting, inspired by Interview With The Vampire. ‘Nuff Said.

Okay, okay, okay I’ve got a bonus song for you. You’ve all heard this one, you just didn’t realize how creepy it is.

First, it’s story time:

A man comes home late one night to find his wife murdered, lying in a spreading pool of her own blood. He actually catches the killer in the act! There is a struggle, during which he clearly sees the man’s face, but the man overpowers him and escapes into the night. The police never catch him.

Years pass. The man never really recovers from his wife’s horrible death, or the thought that he was so close to catching the bastard who did it. That face — those eyes — are seared into his memory.

Late one cold winter evening he is walking at night when he hears faint cries for help in the distance. He follows the voice, and comes to a frozen lake, where someone has broken through a thin patch in the ice. The man runs toward the lake, grabbing a fallen branch along the way that he can use to help the man trapped in the icy waters. He gets to the edge of the ice, and slowly starts to work his way out closer to the man struggling desperately for purchase on the slippery edge of the hole. Suddenly he stops.

He knows that face.

He knows intimately the face of the man in the water. He has seen it exactly once before and will never forget it. After standing there for a moment, watching the man reach out to him from the freezing water, he turns and makes his way back to the shore and drops the branch, then turns and sits down.

..and watches.

Now go listen to Phil Collin’s In the Air Tonight. It will never be the same song again.

Happy Halloween.

Dear Mass Media:

You have been alternately reporting the turnout for the Tea Party protests in D.C. this weekend as “thousands”, or “tens of thousands”. Guys, describing it as “thousands” is pathetic. It’s not even “tens of thousands”. It’s tens of tens of thousands.

Conservative estimates have the numbers at 230,000, while on the high end estimates are that half a million people showed up to protest government spending. Details here: http://proteinwisdom.com/?p=15283.

The media counts conservatives the same way Democrats count conservative votes.

Update: Looks as though the actual number is closer to a million or more. Some estimates (probably inflated) say 2 million; but from what I’m seeing it looks as though anywhere from 900,000 to 1.2 million is accurate.

Some Links:
http://www.examiner.com/x-20909-Columbia-Independent-Examiner~y2009m9d13-As-many-as-2-million-protestors-attend-912-Washington-DC-Tea-Party-Rally
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2009/09/12/nyt-reports-rally-crowd-thousands-daily-mail-says-two-million
http://reason.com/blog/show/136041.html