The New York Times is smoking Hopium

First let me show you a screenshot of a portion of the front page of the NYT website today:

And from the Wizbang Blog:

Yesterday The New York Times disclosed that one of its reporter's, David Rhode, had escaped from his Taliban captors after having been held for seven months. If you're scratching your head wondering if you've heard this story before you are not alone. The Times went to extraordinary lengths to keep this information from the public for the purposes of protecting the life of their employee.

Times Executive Editor Bill Keller said this to Howard Kurtz:

"We agonized over [the decision to suppress the news] at the outset and, periodically, over the last seven months," Executive Editor Bill Keller said yesterday. "Of all the subjects we discussed with the family, that was the one we discussed more intensively than any other: Should we change strategy and go public?"

Keller decided against it, and he was aided by silence from at least 40 major news organizations -- including, after a personal appeal, al-Jazeera -- that continued until yesterday, when the Times confirmed that Rohde and an assistant had escaped their Taliban captors in Pakistan. Keller consulted not only government experts but also other news organizations that had been through similar experiences, and there was "a pretty firm consensus," he said, "that you really amp up the danger when you go public. . . . It makes us cringe to sit on a news story," but in a life-or-death situation, "the freedom to publish includes the freedom not to publish."

For the record, it is a good thing that Mr. Rhode is safe and alive. The Times did the right thing by placing the safety and well being of its employee first given the Taliban's history of torturing and murdering captives. However, the Times' conduct in this matter raises the obvious point as to why the newspaper affords such discretion for its own reporters while defending its loathsome record of disclosing United States national security secrets and placing U S citizens and their military at greater risk.

There exists not a clearer example of the double standard by which this newspaper operates. They will decide what is best for their own and what is best for the rest of us. In that respect, the next time national security secrets are exposed by the New York Times perhaps someone will pursue the charge of treason.

All things old are new again

HopeyChangey blast from the past. Doesn't this sound familiar?

Direct link to youtube video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IlRVy7oZ58&

And now for something completely different

Perpetuum Jazzile is a Slovenian choir. The video is of an a cappela performance (in English) of the tune "Africa" with simulating the thunderstorm and the background music. Amazing!!!!

Perpetuum Jazzile's website:
http://www.perpetuumjazzile.si/en

The direct YouTube link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05ip-N0H1Ig

Enjoy! I certainly did.

Gore-Bull warming changes to "Climate Change"

This article from the UK Telegraph.

For the second time in little over a year, it looks as though the world may be heading for a serious food crisis, thanks to our old friend "climate change". In many parts of the world recently the weather has not been too brilliant for farmers. After a fearsomely cold winter, June brought heavy snowfall across large parts of western Canada and the northern states of the American Midwest. In Manitoba last week, it was -4ºC. North Dakota had its first June snow for 60 years.

That's not the gospel of Gore-Bull warming that has been preached by Pope Albert I and all of his disciples. It's supposed to be getting hotter. What's going on here?

There was midsummer snow not just in Norway and the Cairngorms, but even in Saudi Arabia. At least in the southern hemisphere it is winter, but snowfalls in New Zealand and Australia have been abnormal. There have been frosts in Brazil, elsewhere in South America they have had prolonged droughts, while in China they have had to cope with abnormal rain and freak hailstorms, which in one province killed 20 people.

Gore-Bull warming at work. Remember, to these idiots, weather is indicative of Gore-Bull warming.

None of this has given much cheer to farmers. In Canada and northern America summer planting of corn and soybeans has been way behind schedule, with the prospect of reduced yields and lower quality. Grain stocks are predicted to be down 15 per cent next year. US reserves of soya – used in animal feed and in many processed foods – are expected to fall to a 32-year low.

All because of Gore-Bull warming, no doubt.

In China, the world's largest wheat grower, they have been battling against the atrocious weather to bring in the harvest. (In one province they even fired chemical shells into the clouds to turn freezing hailstones into rain.)

Sounds like the Gore Effect. Has Pope Albert been in China lately?

In Europe, the weather has been a factor in well-below average predicted crop yields in eastern Europe and Ukraine. In Britain this year's oilseed rape crop is likely to be 30 per cent below its 2008 level. And although it may be too early to predict a repeat of last year's food shortage, which provoked riots from west Africa to Egypt and Yemen, it seems possible that world food stocks may next year again be under severe strain, threatening to repeat the steep rises which, in 2008, saw prices double what they had been two years before.

There are obviously various reasons for this concern as to whether the world can continue to feed itself, but one of them is undoubtedly the downturn in world temperatures, which has brought more cold and snow since 2007 than we have known for decades.

Yet there will still be idiots who believe in Gore-Bull warming. The Earth has been cooling since 1998 and why do you think that is? Look at that big yellow thing up in the sky. Solar activity is currently declining and that causes the Earth to cool off.

It is now more than 200 years since the great astronomer William Herschel observed a correlation between wheat prices and sunspots. When the latter were few in number, he noted, the climate turned colder and drier, crop yields fell and wheat prices rose. In the past two years, sunspot activity has dropped to its lowest point for a century. One of our biggest worries is that our politicians are so fixated on the idea that CO2 is causing global warming that most of them haven't noticed that the problem may be that the world is not warming but cooling, with all the implications that has for whether we get enough to eat.

And they are going to use their religion junk science to subject the largest tax increase ever (The Cap-and-Tax) on an already struggling economy. Meanwhile Pope Albert's net worth has risen from $2 million when he left the White House to over $100 million now. His failed year at Vanderbilt's Divinity School has been very profitable for him.

It is appropriate that another contributory factor to the world's food shortage should be the millions of acres of farmland now being switched from food crops to biofuels, to stop the world warming, Last year even the experts of the European Commission admitted that, to meet the EU's biofuel targets, we will eventually need almost all the food-growing land in Europe. But that didn't persuade them to change their policy. They would rather we starved than do that. And the EU, we must always remember, is now our government – the one most of us didn't vote for last week.

And remember, Obamanation wants to turn us into the UK. Elections have consequences.

Hope. Change. High energy prices. Food shortages.

Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine

A YouTube video that is an audio file of Ronald Regan speaking of Socialized Medicine in 1961 (before the government proved they can't run socialized medicine for seniors, Medicare, without a 30% fraud rate). The direct link to this piece is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRdLpem-AAs

hope and change

GM Reinvention Commercial

SarahCuda on Hannity

Prove that you can fix Medicare first!

Virginia Postrel has a great post up that asked the question, "Why not fix Medicare first?" I would add to that all government healthcare operations that are controlled by government. On Medicare the Council of Economic Advisors' report says"Nearly 30 percent of Medicare’s costs could be saved without adverse health consequences."

OK, then "Show me the money!!!"Start with Medicare, Medicaid, government employees, the military, the Indian Health Service and the VA. If you can demonstrate a more efficient system, then and only then, we'll talk.

Postrel writes:

Think about this for a moment. Medicare is a huge, single-payer, government-run program. It ought to provide the perfect environment for experimentation. If more-efficient government management can slash health-care costs by addressing all these problems,why not start with Medicare? Let's see what "better management" looks like applied to Medicare before we roll it out to the rest of the country.
This is not a completely cynical suggestion.

Medicare is, for instance, a logical place to start to design better electronic records systems and the incentives to use them. But you do have to wonder why a report that claims that Medicare is wasting 30 percent of its spending thinks it's making a case for making the rest of the health care system more like Medicare.

Peter Orszag at OMB contacted Virginia after her post circulated the blogosphere and related:

The administration does have big Medicare changes planned, both immediate cuts in reimbursements and "game changers" to impose more scientific management, potentially realizing savings down the road.

2) "I hope I’m not making anything sound like they’re painless." There are going to be "hard, CBO-scored cuts" in Medicare, "mostly involving provider payments." The administration is proposing cutbacks in home-health care and Medicare Advantage payments, for instance. It isn't expecting to get its initial savings from better management.

3) Medicare First--changing Medicare and waiting to see how it works before messing around with the rest of the health care system--won't work politically. "I don’t think you’re going to get these aggressive changes in Medicare unless you do some coverage expansion now."

You should understand that there are a lot of health service providers not taking any more Medicare patients now because of the reimbursement rates and the hassle of dealing with government bureaucracy.

I believe that the goal of "universal coverage" is really a massive price-fixing scam seeking to dictate what healthcare professionals get paid. That is where they think they will save money. Remember in HilaryCare they were going to control the number of specialists in each field? As the single (only) payor they can dictate what they pay.

I blame...

Global Warming:

North Dakota city sees first snowfall in June in 60 years

Prius sales drop 45% in US despite price reduction

Burger King tries to muzzle Franchisee

Skeptics say, "Al Gore has been wrong all along!"

McCarthyism:

There are Communist spies in the State Department, who knew?

US Imperialism:

Iraq arrests Americans for killing an American civilian!

Obama's Press Corps not spinning fast enough:

Zionists build "Obama Hut"

European Press has not yet submitted to the Obamessiah

Europe's voters not understanding MetroLiberals*

Leftists see clout faltering

European Parliment elections lean right

The Katie Couric syndrome:

Conan's ratings drop with every episode

Pension Fund Greed:

Supreme Court asked to block Chrysler sale to Fiat

Pig-in-a-Poke

The chart below consists of actual data points added to the chart developed by the Obamessiah's disciples to sell the idea of the stimulus package. The red points have been added. The blue is what you were sold and will be paying for, the red is what you got. Buyer's remorse anyone?