Last night 40% turned to 80% and it 80%'ed all over,

and today's 40% has turned into 'raining off & on all morning'. Range I'd thought of is definitely out; even if it hadn't kept coming down, walking to the target stands would be wading through a swamp after last night. So,
The American Psychological Association apparently should lose its not-for-profit status if this is how they usually conduct meetings:
"The introduction to Westen’s session was a real eye-opener. The moderator was so confident everyone in the room was a staunch Democrat that he jokingly interrupted his disclaimer that the APA couldn’t be seen as endorsing any particular political party with repeated exhortations of “Barack!” (You might think I’m kidding, but I’m not.) Party unity thus assured, the session began.

A brief video of an embarrassing Jennifer Lopez-inspired slip of the tongue by Fox newscaster Shepard Smith led to Westen’s first key point: the general public associates the word liberal with negative connotations that, (he confidently assured us), were untrue—elite, tax and spend, out of touch, big government. The word conservative, on the other hand, had no negative associations.

Hold on a minute. Has Westen studied this? If so, why didn’t he present the results so we could judge for ourselves? It would be interesting to analyze Westen’s own word linkages. As he spoke, I heard the word conservative disdainfully associated with racist, intolerant, and narrow-minded."


So on top of assault and so forth, Gladney is going to file hate crime charges against the thugs who attacked him. First, if you're going to have these idiot 'hate crime' laws, then you better be prepared to enforce them against ANYBODY, any color, any religion, any politics, if they violate said law. Second, I wonder how the lefty clowns will handle this? After all Gladney is a conservative, so that's probably considered- by them- to disqualify him as 'black', so calling him a nigger, which the thugs did, will be seen as no big deal to a lot of them.
Allman in the Morning at 97.1 FM Talk Radio reported today that Kenneth Gladney, the man who was beaten by Russ Carnahan-supporting SEIU thugs after a town hall meeting last Thursday, will file hate crime charges against his attackers. 5 people were arrested at the town hall meeting after the public beating of Gladney. At least one of the Leftist attackers called him a n**ger before pummeling him.
(I have a question: when you're speaking of a straight news story like this, reporting what the attackers said, why the ** stuff?)


Ed Koch is having problems with the socialized medicine scheme. He seems to be working real hard to give Obama the benefit of the doubt on everything, but after his own health problems the health-care takeover scheme is worrying him just a bit.


'Rationing By Any Other Name' is still rationing. What we currently have- except where the government has helped to screw things around- is that if your insurance for some reason won't cover a treatment, you have to pay for it yourself or find some other assistance, but nobody is saying you can't have the treatment; if the government is in charge of health care(far more than they're involved now), then some bureaucrat or formula says you can't have it, then YOU CANNOT HAVE IT.
But there is also a real difference between having something rationed by a process and having it rationed by a person. That is, in fact, why progressives are so fond of rules. They don't want to tell grandma to take morphine instead of getting a pacemaker. It's much nicer if you create a mathematical formula that makes some doctor tell grandma to take morphine instead of getting a pacemaker. Then the doctor can disclaim responsibility too, because after all, no one really has any agency here--we're all just in the grips of an impersonal force.

But this won't do. If you design a formula to deny granny a pacemaker, knowing that this is the intent of the formula, then you've killed granny just as surely as if you'd ordered the doctor to do it directly. That's the intuition behind the conservative resistance to switching from price rationing to fiat rationing. Using the government's coercive power to decide the price of something, or who ought to get it, is qualitatively different from the same outcome arising out of voluntary actions in the marketplace. Even if you don't share the value judgement, it's not irrational, except in the sense that all human decisions have an element of intuition and emotion baked into them.


It seems the weenies in Congress are listening to the screaming about their deciding to buy more luxury planes for themselves at the same time they're cutting funding for a bunch of F22 fighters we actually need.
Yet when the Pentagon-spending bill was taken up by the House, first in the Defense subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, then the full committee, and finally on the chamber floor, the executive-plane provision attracted no notice and no opposition emerged from either side of the aisle.”
Which is why so many of us are considering the therapeutic effect of a neck stretching for about 90% of both Houses; they're so busy scratching each others' backs they just don't even think about a lot of this crap anymore; just vote themselves more perks and payoffs and bribes and then get upset when we take notice of it.


Obama's little dictator in charge of setting pay for some executives is running into that wall of reality.


A new poster has been seen in Missouri:


The sky is clearing, the sun is shining, which means it's going to get nasty-level humid in an hour or so. And in a day or two I'll have to mow again, because I can damn near hear the grass growing out there.


The Word on the White House Snitch Program:

Some words from Mark Steyn:
A lot of the developed world has already gone quite a long way down this road. If you want to know what Obama’s pledge to “save or create” four million jobs would look like if the stimulus weren’t a total bust, consider what “good news” means in an Obama-sized state: A couple of years back, I happened to catch an intriguing headline up north. “The Canadian economy is picking up steam,” reported the CBC. Statistics Canada had just announced that “the economy added 56,100 new jobs, two-thirds of them full time.” That’s great news, isn’t it? Why, the old economy’s going gangbusters, stand well back.

But I was interested to know just what sectors these jobs had been created in. And, upon investigation, it emerged that, of those 56,100 new jobs, 4,200 were self-employed, 8,900 were in private businesses, and the remaining 43,000 were on the public payroll. “The economy” hadn’t added those jobs; the government had: that's why they call it “creating” jobs. Seventy-seven per cent of the new jobs were government jobs, or “jobs”, paid for by the poor schlubs working away in the remaining 23 per cent. So the “good news” was just more bad news, just a further transfer from the vital dynamic sector to the state.

In Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, government spending accounts for between 72 and 78 per cent of the economy, and, as I wrote here earlier this year, that’s “about the best a ‘free’ society can hope to attain this side of complete Sovietization.” But, if you’re not on welfare, working in the welfare office or working for a “green solutions” company that’s landed the government contract for printing the recycled envelopes in which the welfare checks are mailed out, it’s not an attractive society to be in. It’s not a place to run a small business – a feed store or a plumbing company or anything innovative, all of which will be taxed and regulated into supporting that seventysomething per cent. After all, what does it matter if your business goes under? Either you’ll join the government workforce, or you’ll go on the dole. So you too will become part of the dependent class, or the class that’s dependent upon the dependent class. Either way, Big Government wins (as we already see in California).

Various people have noted the way the left and the major media are again using the 'RACIST!' accusation to try to shut people up. Generally, not only is it not working but it's really ticking people off.


The other day we had one of those 'moments where a politician tells the truth while lying to you' about the socialized medicine scheme:

CONSTITUENT: My question to you, Congresswoman Tsongas, is that if this is such a great plan, why did you opt out of it when you took the vote [loud applause, standing ovation]?

TSONGAS: People often say why don’t the American people have what those of us in Congress have. [Audience erupts] Let me explain what I have. Let me explain what I have. What I have is a tremendous array — you know, last year when I went to a discussion — what I have is a tremendous array of choices. And I made a choice based on what I was willing to pay for and what made sense in terms of coverage for me and my family. [Audience shouts out: "We want choice! We want choice!] This is essentially what we are creating for the American people. We are creating greater choice.

Let's see, the weasels in Congress get to choose among a number of insurance plans, NONE of them government-run so far as I know, but Tsongas considers forcing us to take government-run medicine 'creating greater choice'? How the hell does a supposedly intelligent someone stand in front of a crowd and lie to them like this? With a straight face?

The bills in both houses require that Americans purchase insurance through “qualified” plans offered by health-care “exchanges” that would be set up in each state. The rub is that the plans can’t really compete based on what they offer. The reason: The federal government will impose a minimum list of benefits that each plan is required to offer.

Today, many states require these “standard benefits packages” — and they’re a major cause for the rise in health-care costs. Every group, from chiropractors to alcohol-abuse counselors, do lobbying to get included. Connecticut, for example, requires reimbursement for hair transplants, hearing aids, and in vitro fertilization.

The Senate bill would require coverage for prescription drugs, mental-health benefits, and substance-abuse services. It also requires policies to insure “children” until the age of 26. That’s just the starting list. The bills would allow the Department of Health and Human Services to add to the list of required benefits, based on recommendations from a committee of experts. Americans, therefore, wouldn’t even know what’s in their plans and what they’re required to pay for, directly or indirectly, until after the bills become law.

Damn, there's a lot going on out there. More later, assuming I don't get lost in the piles of crap stuff I need to clean up or put away.