If so, this site may offer some comfort:

Regretmyvote.com

If you voted for Obama, and don't regret your vote yet, just wait. You will.

I'm not exactly a huge fan of American radio talk show host Michael Savage, but I'm even less a fan of trumped up British neofascists banning him from Britain for no better reason than to provide ideological balance to the ban list. Yes, Affirmative Action Banning, brought to you by the Liberal Party of the United Kingdom!

The Daily Mail:

Emails written by Home Office officials privately acknowledged the ban on Mr Savage would provide 'balance' to a list dominated by Muslims - and linked the decision to Gordon Brown and Foreign Secretary David Miliband.

The officials admitted their action could look 'duplicitous' and cited his 'homophobia' as a reason the move would receive public support.

The Right-wing radio presenter, whose hardline views on Islam, rape and autism have caused outrage in the US but whose show, The Savage Nation, has eight million listeners, was identified in May by (former UK Home Secretary) Ms Smith as one of 16 people barred due to their political views.

Neofascists think in terms of "fairness" and "balance." They really are cynical manipulators of anyone they can. They seek to pit one group of people against another. It's the oldest trick in the book--divide and conquer.

The race-baters of all colors in the US do the same thing, for the same reasons. It's not about race, it's about power. Their power, stolen fair and square from you.

Investor's Business Daily

It doesn't say much for a "reform" plan when the example used to promote it explicitly warns against it. But that's what happened when the Mayo Clinic on Tuesday refuted the Obama administration's sales pitch for a 1,018-page health care reform bill, promising everyone a Mayo-like program.

The clinic warned the proposed reforms won't create anything like the low-cost system for which Mayo is envied worldwide.

"The proposed legislation," Mayo says on its policy blog, "misses the opportunity to help create higher-quality, more affordable health care for patients. In fact, it will do the opposite.

Here's the link direct from the Mayo Clinic.

Obamacare. Do Not Want.

I love Japan and the Japanese. They are truly a "silly little people," at least when they're not plotting to take over the world.

Do you think I exaggerate? That perhaps I'm just a gaijin big white barbarian?

Oh, no, my friends, oh, no.

Via Fark.com and, apparently, the Russians at Fishki.net, I present this gallery of epic strangeness from the Land of the Rising Sun. Keep scrolling, it gets weirder and weirder. OK, it just gets weird fast and stays there. A few of the pictures are NSFW and might be offensive if you're really tightly wound.

Like I said, I love Japan.

That's my only quibble with this: Global Warming: Scientists' Best Predictions May Be Wrong:

"In a nutshell, theoretical models cannot explain what we observe in the geological record," said oceanographer Gerald Dickens, a co-author of the study and professor of Earth science at Rice University. "There appears to be something fundamentally wrong with the way temperature and carbon are linked in climate models." . . . The conclusion, Dickens said, is that something other than carbon dioxide caused much of the heating during the PETM (the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum--an unusually warm period, much warmer than present day, about 55 million years ago). "Some feedback loop or other processes that aren't accounted for in these models -- the same ones used by the IPCC for current best estimates of 21st Century warming -- caused a substantial portion of the warming that occurred during the PETM."

The models are broken. They can't explain known conditions in the past. This makes their predictive "skill" regarding future climatic conditions utterly nonexistent.

Why then are we betting the entire world economy on bad computer models?

. . . I was going to say "seen but not heard" but I think I'll amend that to "neither seen nor heard."

And I suspect at this point, that given the behavior of not only the current incumbent but several of the previous occupiers of that position, that this proposition would receive widespread, bi-partisan support.

Did it really pass?

I posted previously on this here.

In the Boston Globe, law professor Jonathan Adler confirms what we already knew about the Waxman-Markley climate change/economy destruction bill:

“When Waxman-Markey finally hit the floor, there was no actual bill. Not one single copy of the full legislation that would, hours later, be subject to a final vote was available to members of the House. The text made available to some members of Congress still had ‘placeholders’ - blank provisions to be filled in by subsequent language.’’

Malfeasance in office:

Nevertheless a few "elements" can be distilled from those cases. First, malfeasance in office requires an affirmative act or omission. Second, the act must have been done in an official capacity—under the color of office. Finally, that that act somehow interferes with the performance of official duties—though some debate remains about "whose official" duties.

I think that any lawmaker (not his or her staff, but the lawmaker in his own person, who has been duly elected to office) who fails to read the content of the bill they are voting for has satisfied all three of these criteria. Therefore, I hold that every single Representative who voted for this non-bill has committed malfeasance in office and should be immediately removed from office by the most direct lawful means necessary.

Oh, and no, I wouldn't lose any sleep over those Congresscritters losing their office who voted through the rammed-through Patriot Act, either. Once is a mistake, twice is policy.

From Visual Economics comes this interesting chart depicting where the average American family spends its money: A larger version is viewable at the above link.

Being a semi-loyal Dave Ramsey listener, I had one immediate observation: Where is "debt service" on the chart? I don't see it.

Still, here's how it breaks down, in chart form, from largest to smallest percentage:

20.2% Shelter
17.6% Gasoline, motor oil
10.1% Pensions, Social Security
7.0% Food at home
7.0% Utilities, fuels, public services
6.5% Vehicle purchases ("net outlay")
6.3% Transportation expenses-"other transportation"
5.7% Health care
5.4% Entertainment
5.4% Food away from home
3.8% Apparel and services
3.7% Cash contributions
3.6% Household furnishings, equipment
2.0% Household operations
1.9% Education
1.6% Miscellaneous
1.3% Housekeeping supplies
1.2% Personal care (products & services)
0.9% Alcoholic beverages
0.7% Tobacco and supplies
0.6% Life, other personal insurance
0.2% Reading

Another odd omission is . . . taxes. Apparently, to the Visual Economics people, taxes and debt service (i.e. interest) aren't household expenses. Well, isn't that nice to know? Also, going to the source--the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the data are from 2007, NOT April, 2009. And, while debt service isn't broken out in the BLS data, taxes paid are, which makes it a fairly egregious omission from the chart, in my humble opinion.

Burrowing further into the BLS stats, here's where the average family's money comes from:

All Income $63,091
79.76% Wages and Salaries
10.11% Social Security, private and government retirement
5.46% Self-employment income
2.77% Interest, dividends, rental income, other property income
0.34% Unemployment and worker's compensation, veteran's benefits
0.53% Public assistance, supplemental security income, food stamps
0.73% Regular contributions for support
0.30% Other income

And, finally, how much of that $63,000 goes to taxes?

3.54% Personal taxes
2.49% Federal only
1.05% State, local, and other

Of course, if you're actually making $63,000, you're paying a LOT more than 3.54% of your gross income ($1,569 a year) in Federal taxes, aren't you? I seem to recall my federal tax, back in the day when I was in that approximate income class, was closer to $5k a year. Ah, the wonder of averaging the tax bill over the entire population--where nearly half of everyone doesn't pay a single cent. So, one way to think of it is, if you're that $63,000 person, any Federal tax over $1,569 that you're paying, is pulling the load for someone else who isn't. And, the beauty of a "progressive" income tax is, the more you make, the more freeloaders--oops--unfortunate poor people--oops--your saintly fellow citizens you get to subsidize. This is called "fair." Parenthetically, I'm not sure how this figure of 3.54% squares with the proposals to replace the Federal income tax with an 18% "flat" tax--the so-called "Fair Tax." Something is seriously screwy with this number, I think, but I might just not quite comprehend what I'm looking at. Wouldn't be the first time.

Anyway, while I don't think this graphics rates a full FAIL, it is not completely chock-full of WIN either.

In my last post, I let loose a rant about Who We Are. Well, if that's who we are (and yeah, I know that what I wrote is a bit of a stereotype, but aren't all such descriptions, really?) then who are they who are not us.

They're Control Freaks, basically. They aren't all on the Left, either. The right-wing Control Freaks, for the most part, wave a book around and demand that everybody live their lives by their own particular interpretation of what the words in that book means. As such, right wing Control Freaks are usually fairly easy to identify and, if necessary, avoid.

Leftie control freaks are more subtle. (Subtlety is bad here, by the way. Substitute sneaky or disingenuous.) Control freaks on the left want to control your entire life too, but they hide their core desire behind high-minded words and causes--"War on Poverty," "Fight climate change," "universal health care." The list is long and ignominious. But boil it all down, and all Leftist causes reduce do "I know better than you do how you should live your life, and I'm willing to use the force of government to make you behave."

If you have ever said "you need to . . ." then you are a Control Freak, a danger to others, and should be opposed by all people of good will. Nobody likes a busybody. If you have ever said "we need to . . . " then you're showing your inner Control Freak, and need to think long and hard about your deep psychological need to control the actions (and money) of others. If your thoughts tend to run to "I need to do . . ." then you're probably a normal, sane person, who people tend to like, or at least not dislike too intensely.

I'm not sure, but it looks to me that most colleges, but Ivy League schools especially, have remedial classes in How To Be A Control Freak For Fun And Profit. The major national media is almost completely infested with Control Freaks--people who went to Journalism School to "make a difference." The phrase "make a difference" is another code word for "make you behave the way I want you to." It is a marker to indicate that the person using that phrase may be a Control Freak.

Everybody has their Control Freak moments, of course. Truly mature people learn to control themselves first, however, and curb their juvenile impulses to control everybody else. The Founding Fathers were mature and rational people. Our political leadership today--not so much.

Politicians are, by their very nature, Control Freaks. That's why the Constitution was set up the way it was--to throw obstacles in front of the Control Freaks to make it more difficult for Them to control Us. That's why Control Freaks want to ignore the plain words of the Constitution at every turn.

The current group of politicians in Washington are an extreme example of Control Freaks. (Yes, I know, it's tempting to drop the word "Control" when referring to Congress, especially." President Obama is nothing more or less than a particularly extreme example of a Control Freak--and the warning signs were there for all to see during the 2008 campaign.

John Stossel, writing at Reason:

We saw this in Canada, where we did find one area of medicine that offers easy access to cutting-edge technology—CT scan, endoscopy, thoracoscopy, laparoscopy, etc. It was open 24/7. Patients didn't have to wait.

But you have to bark or meow to get that kind of treatment. Animal care is the one area of medicine that hasn't been taken over by the government. Dogs can get a CT scan in one day. For people, the waiting list is a month.

I think this really says it all, doesn't it? If you want to kill people by making them wait for months for treatment, then by all means, pass "health care reform."

First, do no harm.