I just got an email from Michael’s Mom, announcing that the Michael C. Rothberg Scholarship’s annual fund-raising dinner and silent auction will be held on Wednesday, May 26, 2010, at Saphire Estate in Sharon, Massachusetts.
In addition, they’re currently selling a beautiful set of monogrammed note cards on the scholarship website, 100% of the purchase price of which will go to benefit the scholarship.
And of course, if you’re able to contribute to the scholarship in any way, please do so! Be it your time, money, or talents, I’m sure every contribution would be greatly appreciated.
Methinks he’s forgetting that the only real way to gain someone’s respect – real respect – is not to cower in front of a bully who will merely abuse you, but rather stand up to them, show real strength of conviction, and stand independent and free. No one will ever truly respect you when they know they can walk all over you. It’s the first thing any woman learns when they finally, truly understand what it means to be in a healthy relationship. You know what? It applies just as much to international relations as it does romantic relations.
The capitulation of our freedoms will never get the “international community” to “like us more” or “respect us more”. It’ll merely give our enemies the tools they need to win the ideological world war we’re currently embroiled in between Islamic extremist dictators and the free world. When someone considers you an Infidel who is absolutely deserving of death, there’s absolutely no way to gain their respect, besides just kneeling and offering them your neck. But that’s hardly a form of respect I think we should be aiming for, do you?
You want to know the real reason why the people – the people – of the Middle East don’t respect America right now? This is a perfect example: we’re partnering with EGYPT to curtail freedom of speech. When you get in bed with dictators, the world doesn’t look at you the same way in the morning. And it’s not good.
Not many people are aware of this, but it’s law in the UK that if a baby is born before 22 weeks – even if it’s alive and breathing – it’s flatly denied care.
It’s time to meet the real-life consequences of this brutal inhuman law, and the real-world consequences of giving up your individual rights to the government. This is the reality of turning over health care to the government; it stops being about you and your doctor, but rather how the government can save money, regardless of the individual consequences.
Meet Sarah and her baby Jayden, who was unlucky enough to be born – alive – only 48 hours before the legislated cut-off. Despite breathing, moving, and having a full regular heartbeat, doctors left the room and repeatedly refused to even see or evaluate the baby. Instead he was left alone to die in his poor mother’s arms. They were even going to deny him a birth certificate, so that he could be counted as a “miscarriage”, rather than a real human being who had been born alive, only to die from neglect.
In decrying the state of our nation’s medical care, liberals like to trump out figures that state that our infant mortality rate is so much worse than that of other developed – and even some under-developed – countries.
Don’t believe them. Jayden is proof of why those statistics are inaccurate. Why? Because Jayden, despite being born alive, will be counted as a stillborn, a miscarriage.
In the United States, not only would Jayden have been immediately cared for and given every opportunity to live, even if he had died despite every effort made by the doctors, he would have been added to the infant mortality rate.
Yeah, statistics look so much nicer if you don’t even properly count the babies who are actually born alive and breathing. It’s so much easier to make your statistics look better if you just let the babies die rather than risk having him added to your numbers of dying infants. Count him as a stillborn, it looks so much better that way, right?
Tell that to his mother, who held him for two hours as little Jayden struggled for life.
He most likely could have been saved. But by giving up their health care rights to the government, so that the government could take care of them as dependents rather than relying on independence and personal responsibility, Britons sacrificed their rights to make decisions for themselves. It was no longer about Jayden’s Mom deciding what was best for her and her child, but rather, it was about stone-cold unfeeling, inhuman across-the-board rules that refuse to acknowledge individual circumstances, all for the sake of streamlining care to cut costs and pinch pennies. There was no way out of that streamlined system so that one child could be saved. Even if Jayden’s Mom had all the money in the world, she wouldn’t have had the freedom to spend it to save her child’s life.
That’s the reality of government-run health care. That’s the reality of dependence! The minute you give up your independence in order for someone else to care for you, you give up the right to make decisions for yourself. You give up the right to determine the course of your own future and the future of your children.
We cannot make that same mistake here. A public option isn’t worth being shackled by dependence. Don’t even open that door a tiny inch, don’t let the government squeeze itself between a single person and their doctor. You give them an inch, they’ll take a mile. We’ve seen it everywhere else it’s ever been tried. Jayden’s death is now proof of that.
Don’t let it happen here. I’m begging you, do not let it happen here.
This just churns my stomach. On September 8th, for the first time in history (correction: see below), a sitting President is going to deliver a speech to all students in the nation, from pre-K straight through to 12th grade. The White House isn’t giving any details on what exactly Mr. Obama’s speech will involve (see below), but we can at least take a guess based on the teaching guide that was sent out to principals and teachers. Here are a few sample questions that the children are supposed to think about while listening to Barry:
• What is the President trying to tell me?
• What is the President asking me to do?
• What new ideas and actions is the President challenging me to think about?
After the speech, teachers are going to ask students to answer even more questions, such as:
• What do you think the President wants us to do?
• Does the speech make you want to do anything?
• Are we able to do what President Obama is asking of us?
Call me crazy, (oh, and I can think of several liberals who will) but I don’t exactly want the Dear Leader asking my children to do anything for him personally. Hey, I have an idea! How about we just keep politics outside of the classroom? Like I always say, I think it’s slightly more important that kids learn to read before they’re schooled in political agendas. But then again, that’s just me.
And of course, I’m getting awfully tired of seeing situations where this sentiment keeps cropping up in my mind, but it’s worth repeating yet again: can you imagine the uproar if President Bush had done something like this? If he’d announced it so suddenly, less than a week before it would happen, and given so few details about the contents of the speech? We all know the furious screams from the left would have dominated every single news broadcast until the White House relented. And you know what? They’d be right!
But where are they now? Yet again, their silence is deafening.
I was looking for a good synopsis of this story, since I heard about this on the news as well. I’ve really got to get some sleep, so I didn’t have much time to search. But it seems Michelle Malkin’s done a pretty good job of summing it up. Click here to check out ‘No Junior Lobbyist Left Behind’.
It looks like lots of people are planning on conveniently calling their kid in “sick” that day. If I had kids, that’s what I’d do. I’d like to encourage you to do the same. Heck, let’s make a party out of it! Keep ‘em home, talk about freedom, get the family together to read the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, maybe even some of the writings of Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and other founding fathers. Sing some patriotic songs, watch ‘1776′, eat a hot dog! If it’s legal in your state, set off some fireworks! Or hey, maybe even do a little service project for our service men and women – let me tell you, they sure love to receive cards and letters of thanks from kids back home. Make it a day of American patriotism they’ll remember!
And maybe, just maybe, if we all do this together, there’ll be record number of sick kids that day. At least, we sure can hope.
09-06-09 – Update & Correction: I wanted to let you all know that I need to issue a correction to a tidbit of information included in this post, and also there’s a bit of an update on this issue.
So, first off, I want to apologize for getting a fact wrong on this issue! I have since found out that two prior presidents have delivered speeches to school children while in office; the first was Ronald Reagan, the second was George H. W. Bush. Apologies for that!! The very first news blurb I saw on this issue didn’t mention that fact, and as I said, when I first posted this I didn’t have much time to do more searching. Shame on me for posting so quickly without doing a thorough enough job vetting the info! I promise to try harder next time.
Now for the updates! The Department of Education has reworded one of the offending questions in the lesson plan having to do with how children can “help the President.” I thought I’d included that in this post, but apparently I neglected to include it. So all’s well there. Although I still think some of the other questions are bothersome as well, and as far as I’ve heard, haven’t been amended.
Lastly, President Obama has finally relented with regard to releasing the content of his speech prior to delivering it to the school kids. I believe it will be released tomorrow. Once I find a link for it, I’ll post it here.
Thanks! And once again, apologies for getting that fact wrong! What can I say? I’m human, and alas, make mistakes. I can promise you, though, that I will try harder in the future!
09-07-09 – Update: Obama released the speech today. Click here to check it out in pdf format. In my opinion, if the White House had simply released this speech in the beginning, without any of the quasi-political lesson plans, there would have been no major controversy at all. Chalk this one up to unbelievably bad planning by the administration and officials at the Department of Education who, frankly, should have known better that releasing lesson plans at all was in violation of the department’s own charter.
Lastly, the folks over at HotAir have some interesting insight into the contents of the speech. Check it out. (Also, if you’d rather not have to deal with a pdf version of the speech, HotAir provides it at that link as well.)
The White House was caught with its hand in the proverbial cookie jar when a brave artist dared to record what was thought to be a private phone conference between devoted Obama followers who had been instrumental in securing Obama’s campaign for the presidency.
Patrick Courrielche, an artist, producer, and contributer to Breitbart’s Big Hollywood, received a series of emails in early August from the National Endowment for the Arts, inviting him to participating in a “brand new discussion” between the NEA, the White House, several political organizations, and several select artists, producers, writers, actors, poets, gallery owners, influential individuals, and “cool people”, to discuss how the art community can best come together in order to “push the President, his administration, and his agenda.”
Yes, you read that right. The White House has directed the National Endowment for the Arts to bring together a coalition of artists and culturally influential individuals in order to produce creative works that will help push the President’s agenda.
I believe the dictionary would define such state-initiated works as “propaganda”.
But it didn’t stop there. Indeed, during the conversation, both the officials from the NEA and the White House specifically requested that the artists focus on several of Obama’s key platform issues, including health care, energy, and the environment. And just in case there’s any question as to the ideology they hoped this artwork would reflect, they specifically mentioned Shepard Fairey’s iconic ‘Hope’ poster and will.i.am’s “Yes We Can” song as examples of what they were hoping the artists could achieve. Yeah, they weren’t exactly hoping for bipartisan messages of patriotism.
Thankfully, when Mr. Courrielche received these emails, something didn’t feel quite right about this whole prospect. So when he joined in on the phone conference, he had his iPhone ready to record the entire conversation. If it hadn’t been for his bravery, this likely would have remained buried.
But the funniest part is, despite having an absolute record of each email and a complete audio recording of the entire conversation, the lead official from the NEA in this project, Yosi Sergant, is actually daring to deny any involvement in the project. But he doesn’t stop there; indeed, he’s trying to deny the project’s very existence. That’s a bit of a stretch, considering the fact that Mr. Sergant’s voice is heard throughout the entire recording, with him going so far as to even voice caution to the participants about being careful with their language, as they’re still ironing out certain legalities. Meaning, they know full well what they’re doing is crossing not only ethical boundaries, but legal ones as well.
Good luck denying all that, Mr. Sergant. You’re gonna need it.
I don’t have much time, as I’m trying to publish three quick posts here before heading off to bed, so I don’t have the best links and resources available for you yet. So please bear with me. But I simply had to post information about this for those of you who may have missed all the hubbub about this today. When I told a friend about this, their first response was, “What? You’ve got to be kidding, this has to be some sort of YouTube hoax, right?” That convinced me I couldn’t wait to post this.
Anyway, the best place to start is probably Mr. Courrielche blog entry that started it all. It’s a bit long, and unfortunately he doesn’t have the audio posted with it, but it’s well worth a read. Click here to check it out.
As I said, unfortunately Mr. Courrielche hasn’t posted the recording on his blog yet, at least not as far as I’ve been able to find. I did manage to find a YouTube clip of an interview Mr. Courrielche gave to the Glenn Beck program. I know, I’m sorry I’m posting a link to Glenn Beck, I’m sure that will probably offend or upset some of my more moderate readers. Please, put aside your feelings about Mr. Beck, because Mr. Courrielche does a brilliant job of explaining the situation quite concisely. But most importantly, it features audio clips of the actual conversation.
I know there are more audio clips out there from the original recording, since I heard several on the news program where I first heard about this. Again, apologies for not having those ready, I’ve really got to get some sleep. I’ll do some more searching on this tomorrow and post more links as soon as I can.
I saw this on my new favorite web-haunt, ProbablyBadNews.com, and I just had to share! It’s yet another epic fail courtesy of NBC News, because – as they say at PBN – journalism isn’t dying fast enough. At least, mainstream journalism anyway.
Meh, no worries, NBC, it’s not like our housing markets are important or anything! Psshaw, like, my inner valley girl is sooo bored with it already, fer shure!
In fact, I’ve been so impressed with NBC News lately, especially after seeing this report about those awful town hall attendees, that I decided to come up with my own slogan idea for NBC News!! I’m, like, so totally excited to share it with you!
How long do you think it’ll be before I get an excited phone call from the head of NBC News, telling me how much they totally love my new slogan?
Yeah, I’m not holding my breath…
I saw a couple of pictures on one of my all-time favorite blogs, Black & Right, and I just had to repost them here, because it’s just absolutely frightening.
It’s a beautiful – and frightening – before and after. Take a look.
Here’s the before, a delightful picture of the oft-hyped SmartCar ForTwo. Awww, isn’t it all cute and teeny and precious with its shiny leftist ideological gleam? Fabulous!
All is perfect utopian sweetness and light. That is, until – like most leftist ideology – it’s smacked upside the head by cold, harsh, merciless reality:
That’s precisely why I will never, ever, ever set foot butt in a SmartCar or any similar teeny-tiny pocket hybrid.
And that’s also precisely why I absolutely love my BMW.
Now before you start accusing me of being the typical evil rich white conservative, let me quickly point something out. I’m a proud, proud owner of a 1996 BMW 318i (yes, that’s a tiny engine, but my, how she can pick up n’ go!) It was my very first car, for which I haggled $5,000 off the salesman’s asking price! Not bad, eh?
My baby still looks brand new, despite having dealt with a few significant scrapes over the years. That’s right, it has kept me and my passengers safe through multiple accidents (none of which were my fault, by the way) and it’s still running strong.
But not only is my baby Bimmer safe to drive, it can compete in fuel efficiency too: it just got 35 miles to the gallon on a recent road trip to Georgia & back. That’s pretty damn good, don’t you think?
And to think, the government would declare my darling baby a clunker! My car and I find that offensive.
If you’re still not convinced check out this frightening footage of the Smart Car being subjected to basic crash testing. It did so badly that even the normally generous Insurance Highway Safety Institute is giving you the same warning I am! I’ve never seen them issue such a warning before, and I’m a crash test junkie!
So please, take my advice: if you value your life and the lives of those who travel with you, please consider safety as well as fuel efficiency when buying your next vehicle. I firmly believe you shouldn’t have to sacrifice safety to suit some ideologue’s idea of a vehicular utopia. After all, what use is that vehicular utopia if we’re all dead?
My life and the lives of my family are of the utmost importance to me, and when their lives are in my hands when I’m behind the wheel, I like to know that should we end up in an accident, we’ll have the best chance possible of walking away unharmed. That’s why I’ll never drive or ride in a Smart Car, and why I’m sticking with my “clunker” BMW. After all, nothing says “safety” like pure Autobahn-tested driving perfection.
As if there were still any doubts about the Democrats’ true intentions regarding their healthcare “reform”, I’ve found yet another article that clearly outlines a few nuggets of truth hidden throughout the latest healthcare bill to come out of Congress.
This time the article is from the NY Post of all places. They’ve discovered that – besides outlawing personal private health insurance policies – there will be an entirely new government agency whose sole purpose is to evaluate every single health insurance company and the policies they provide. This agency will then select certain specific policies which will meet some sort of arbitrary set of guidelines (and who knows what those are); these bureaucrat-approved policies will then be called “qualified plans”.
The kicker is, if you or your employer don’t select one of these government-approved qualified plans, you’ll be fined thousands of dollars via the IRS and then automatically enrolled in a randomly selected plan against your will. So in other words, even though you’ll have the freedom to pay through the nose for a private health insurance plan, whose cost will skyrocket, you won’t have the freedom to choose a plan that fits your own needs. No, silly mindless puny human, obviously a government bureaucrat knows far more about what you need than you do! How could you be so naive…
Yet again, this flies in the face of Obama’s campaign promise that “if you like your health plan, you can keep it,” even after he reforms our healthcare system. Yeah, well, what if I happen to like my current plan but a government bureaucrat isn’t as fond of it as I am? I guess then Obama’s promise won’t mean squat. But hey, maybe there was fine print hidden at the end of his teleprompter that we just couldn’t see.
In all honestly, I’m absolutely thrilled with my health insurance, just like 87% of Americans who are very satisfied with theirs as well. Through my Father’s job, my family has a plan with Anthem/Blue Cross Blue Shield. They’ve been absolutely wonderful, even when dealing with my rather obscure and difficult to treat disease. Compared to the treatment my friends with the same disease get from their socialized medical systems in the UK, Canada, & Australia – i.e. no care at all – I think I’m much better off under the current system than I would be under ObamaCare’s medical dictatorship.
To give you some idea of the quality of my care, I have three nurse case managers, one with my Dad’s company and two with Anthem, all of whom help to track and coordinate my care so that I can get the most out of my coverage. They’ve never disputed anything that I’ve had done, and believe me, I’ve had a LOT done. My medical bills just for the past couple years have added up into the millions. Hell, a few years ago when I desperately needed five rounds of high volume liposuction to keep the disease from killing me by age 22, Anthem actually paid for all of it, even though they’d never before in the history of the company ever encountered medically necessary liposuction, let alone paid for it in full. And that’s just a small sample of the great working relationship I’ve had with Anthem – I could go on and on about all that they’ve done for me and my doctors.
So all in all, I adore my health insurance company. I love them to pieces. In fact, if it weren’t for their help, I’d be dead by now. I’d damn well like to keep Anthem as my health insurance provider. But if Obama and the Democrats have their way? Well, their good track record of taking care of me won’t matter anymore – it’ll be up to some no-name in a suit who has never met me, sitting behind a government desk, whether or not I’ll get to keep paying this company for their wonderful services. That hardly seems fair, that hardly seems free, and that hardly seems to be in keeping with everything Obama and his fellow Democrats have been saying about their true incentives for passing their healthcare “reforms”.
You know, as I was reading that NY Post article, I couldn’t help but think of something. If their healthcare plan is going to cost us a whopping $1 trillion dollars in the first year alone, only to go up by the trillions from there, couldn’t we use that money in a more effective way, without stripping those of us who have health insurance away from our current coverage?
I actually came up with an idea that I’d find more palatable, but still as radically comparable to Obama’s proposed reforms. As I’ve already explained, despite everyone claiming there are 40 million Americans uninsured in this country, the truth is the actual figure is closer to roughly 12 million or so, once you discount illegal aliens, citizens making more than $50k a year, and those who already qualify for existing government programs. How about we take that $1 trillion dollars from the first year of the Democrats’ proposed reforms and instead split that up amongst the 12 million uninsured? We could give them some sort of government coupon that would only be applicable toward purchasing health insurance, that way they couldn’t go and blow it on big screen TVs and exotic vacations. If we did that, each and every one of those 12 million uninsured Americans would receive $83,333. Don’t you think that’d buy one hell of an insurance plan? Hell, even if there really were 40 million uninsured American citizens, they’d still get a whopping $25,000!! That’d definitely be one way that Obama could actually fulfill his campaign promise of ensuring that those who are already insured won’t lose their coverage, yet we’d still be able to get the uninsured covered without creating another massive, bloated government bureaucracy whose sole purpose in existence is to siphon off our freedoms.
Oh, and it’d also help with Obama’s unnamed – yet painfully obvious – goal of drastically expanding our deficit. Hooray.
Whaddya say, Obama? Or gee, is getting people insured not your real incentive here at all? Cause honestly, my idea’s sounding a heckuva lot more appealing right now than yours is.
I was having lunch with a dear friend of mine not long ago and we were having a discussion about just how bad off I feel politics and the state of our country has become over the past several years, both under Obama AND Bush. When he asked me for something specific, I brought the travesty that is our federal and state taxation system. I mentioned in particular that I feared we could soon see more and more people paying close to 50% in taxes, outside of such taxes as sales tax and things like that which are harder to quantify. He seemed completely aghast at my concerns and basically passed it off as utterly ludicrous, that no one was anywhere close to paying 30 or 40 percent, let alone 50.
Well, I was listening to the news just now and they gave me a set of interesting figures out of New York. Certain higher tax brackets in New York City are paying the following tax ranges:
- 35-39% in Federal Income Tax
- 8-12% in New York State Income Tax
- 4 and a half percent in ‘City tax’
That’s getting awful close, don’t you think? (Hehe, yeah, ya think?!) Hell, the Federal income tax alone is already inching far too close to 50% for comfort, so I certainly don’t think it’s that outlandish of a concern to think that we could soon see half of our income being taken away in one form of taxation alone, let alone all the various taxes combined. And I’m not just talking about the wealthy, although frankly, I don’t feel they should have half of their income taken away any more than anyone else’s. After all, the wealthy are the ones who are investing in companies, creating their own, and getting all that capital out into the system that makes the world go round. But beyond that, everyone’s taxes are escalating, and the threshold for the so-called “wealthy” seems to dip ever lower with each passing year. Those who are currently wagging their fingers at the “evil wealthy” and proclaiming it necessary for them to be unfairly punished, they may soon find themselves in the same boat.
Granted, I don’t personally have any experience with taxation at the moment, given the fact that I’m no longer working due to disability and have no income to speak of. But do any of you out there have any personal experiences to share? How much of your income is being taken away to the government’s National Money Hole?
By the way, I want to apologize for the long delay between new entries lately. My health has declined a bit over the past several months as I’ve been battling both a long term upper respiratory infection as well as decompression sickness (don’t ask…) I’m trying to keep up, but alas, sometimes my body and brain just won’t let me. I’m doing my best, though, and will keep trying to bring you my perspectives on the latest political tidbits. Of course, if any of you would like to suggest a topic, or even if you want to write an entry and submit it, that’d be peachy with me!
You have to see this to believe it. It’s that bad.
As if that isn’t bad enough, check out the plaque she presented to the school.
This is one of the saddest, most pathetic things I’ve witnessed come out of Congress in a long time – and that’s saying something. She’s seriously, seriously, a part of the US House of Representatives? Seriously!? Her vote in that respected body actually has a sway over each and every one of our lives?
And yet she can’t even manage to form a proper sentence? She can’t even congratulate someone without pulling made up words out of her butt? What in the hell is she doing in that esteemed chamber?!
What the hell is this country coming to? Not only that so many people come out of our schools this illiterate, but that they somehow manage to become representatives in Congress?! Is this seriously what the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King, Jr fought so hard – and died – for? Are representatives like her really going to bring us closer together racially? Is she really the best example of African American success this nation could produce?
Is she really the type of person we should be electing as a representative of ourselves and our communities? I sure as hell hope not, because that’s just pathetic. If we can’t expect more than this from our representatives, if we can’t even expect them to have a basic, elemental grasp on the English language, how could we possibly expect anything from our system of government?
You know, this might be funny, if it weren’t for the fact that she’s voting on vitally important legislation that affects the future of our nation. That kind of takes all the fun out of it, doesn’t it?
Hehe, although, it is kind of funny that she’s part of the Democratic party, which has been so thoroughly savaging President Bush for the past 8 years for mispronouncing “nuclear” (in the exact same manner that President Kennedy did, by the way.) That is at least worth a chuckle.
Congratulations, Ms. Brown, for making a complete and utter fool out of yourself.
At least, we sure can hope.
