Quick Quiz... name the country

Just came across this in the Christian Science Monitor. For the moment, I'll block out the names. Try to figure out what country the story is about:

Just a few weeks ago, it appeared XXXX’s President XXX XXXX was in for a tough 2011. His party had lost seats in the parliament scheduled to sit in January and his political opponents were vowing to roll-back his socialist program.

But it now appears he has made up for his losses. The outgoing parliament passed a flurry of controversial initiatives that included giving Mr. XXXX decree powers for 18 months.

As is always the case in polarized XXXX, opinions are divided over the laws, which range from extending government control over universities to limiting foreign funding for NGOs. Critics, who seem to oppose President XXX no matter what he does, called the measures a “coup d’etat,” while his steadfast supporters say they ensure that his socialist “XXXX Revolution” is not halted in its tracks.

Or maybe I won't say. It just sounds very familiar, doesn't it??

Actually, it's the Comrade's idol, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Ol' Monkey-Face just finagled some kind of "government by decree" thing, where he can pretty much do what he damn pleases without any interference from the Venezuelan legislature. And he was shocked that some people accused him of being a dictator.

Sorry, Comrade, this will happen in the USA only in your dreams... despite Dr. Deathwish and all your other psychopathic czars and czarinas.

Save the Republic.

Dr. Deathwish's end run around congress

Remember Dr. Deathwish -- actually Berwick, who's in love with British socialized medicine? Apparently what he likes the best is determining how long people should live, just like the Brits do with their misnamed N.I.C.E. committee, which draws up the guidelines for healthcare rationing in the U.K.

Anyway, a big objection many people had to the Comrade's original socialized medicine bill was what Sarah Palin dubbed "Death Panels." The bill paid and encouraged doctors to "counsel" their terminally ill patients about "alternatives" -- apparently alternatives to continuing to go on living. You know, like wipe out the old people -- I mean, what good are they anyway? -- and spend the socialized medicine funding on someone else. Probably members of Acorn, the SEIU or the UAW. But I digress.

The Comrade and merry marxists had to take the death panel provision out of the socialized medicine bill before anyone in congress would vote for it -- even those senators who ended up taking huge bribes to vote for it. I mean, even those morally-impaired scumbags -- Landrieu, Nelson, et. al. -- didn't want to vote for the death panels -- even if they were paid off. So the death panels came out of the bill.

But Dr. Deathwish has now enabled the death panels by some kind of decree. That is, he likes the ideas of death panels and rationing, and screw the public, he's going to have them.

Of course, some moron in congress named Bumhead or something like that was so overfilled with joy at thought of resurrecting the death panels that he couldn't restrain himself from making this public He wrote some kind of memo or news release or something about it, adding a cautionary note at the end, something to effect, "Hey, guys, don't let the public know about this because they won't like it."

BUT DO IT ANYWAY? Does he think we won't find out? Does it occur to him that this has been considered by congress and tossed out? Yeah. Ignore congress and screw the public. Our job here is just to pay for the executive branch's god fantasies.

(I'm trying to control my language here....it ain't easy.)

When my mom was about 75 years old, she had a heart valve replacement. The doctors told her she'd be dead within five years if she didn't have the operation, but would probably live another 10 years, at least, with the valve replacement. She opted to have the replacement. She made the decision herself. I'm sure she wanted to spend more time with the grandkids and great-grandkids. And why not? They all loved her, too.

So I was visiting her in the hospital after the operation. A teaching hospital. While I was there, a doctor brought in about a half-dozen students to look at my mom. (I'd had pneumonia in that hospital about 15 years prior, and they'd brought in a bunch of students to listen to my congested breathing.) Anyway, I went and stood in the hall while that was going on. While I was out there, one of students left the group and stepped out to talk to me. She was from China. I mean, like a Chinese national studying here.

She asked me, "If your mother is 75, do you think it was a really wise decision to extend her life?"

What? I'd never thought about it. It was my mom's decision. I thought it was up to her. I really didn't know what to say to the student. I thought it was a bizarre and somewhat mean-spirited thing to mention all the way around. Why was it any of her business? I told her that. I mean, the other alternative for my mom was to die.What would you do?

Then some other person who was helping the doctor herd the students around came over to get the Chinese girl back with the group. That person said to me, "I hope she didn't upset you."

I wasn't upset. I was confused. Why was it anybody's business? My mom had an operation and somehow it's a social issue? Of course, this was before the crackpot liberals seized control of the government and decided to dictate what kind of health care we can have. That kind power-mad life-and-death decision-making was, then, pretty much confined to the U.K. and to dictatorships like Red China. Where individual human lives don't seem to matter much.

By the way, Mom lived another 15 years or thereabouts. And she didn't die from heart trouble.

With socialized medicine, the rest of us, I guess, will die at 75. Or at the first signs of impending death? And you do know, in the words of Bob Dylan, if you ain't busy being born, you're busy dying. So where do you want to draw the line? This far, this age, and then you're no longer worth the medication? Exactly where and when and to whom does that happen? I think Dr. Deathwish has already outlived his usefulness already. Let's put him on an ice floe and set him adrift in the Bering Sea.Maybe the Russians will find some good in him and extend his life.

Having a somewhat weird and questionable love relationship with British National Health, Dr. Deathwish seems to believe he has the supernatural power to determine the value of each and every human life. Truth is, he's more likely just a power-crazed sociopath like all the rest of the merry marxists.

You know, Dr. Deathwish, in the U.S., we don't ration anything. We just make more. And my life span, like my mother's, is none of your goddamn business.

Save the Republic.

Nihilism by any other name....

For a long time I was fascinated by Russian culture. I'm still a rather huge balletomane -- that means "fan" of ballet. Such a unique and peculiar group of folks, we deserve our own strange, French-sounding label. (Though ballet apparently originated in Italy, and was greatly promoted in France, when it hit Russia via a French company, a small group of Russian balletomanes once requested a dancer's shoes, so that they could boil them and eat them for dinner.)

At any rate, I never could quite conquer the Russian language or the cyrillic alphabet, and never got the pronunciation right, so I just read everything I could in translation. Sometimes different translations of the same thing. Sometimes it was the same book, but with the title translated differently. Anyway....

I read all of Dostoyevsky by the time I was about 18 years old. (Net result, I never read all of one author's works anymore, because I find that makes me feel lonely -- Ah, he's gone now. It's all over.) I've read a lot of Turgenyev, Tolstoy -- who I think is over-rated. War and Peace is very long. That's about the most remarkable thing about it, even if Tolstoy forswore his family's wealth and walked around barefoot or whatever. I was not terribly impressed. I like Dostoyevsky better. You can usually depend on the fact that at least one character in any Dostoyevsky novel will come down with "brain fever." Not sure exactly what that is, but it certainly makes for lots of drama. And Pushkin was rather strange, romantic in a rather old-fashioned way. Also perhaps a balletomane; he was supposed to have had a foot fetish. I don't know. Who else?? Boris Pasternak, Solzhenytsyn....

Anyway, my fascination with Russia led to my absolute revulsion for communism. Beneath the very regulated calm surface, Russia is sort of a cauldron of very rich passions. In addition to the literature, you can hear it in the music -- beautiful, beautiful music. Think of Tchaikovsky for one. And with a tradition of intellectual discipline -- I mean real discipline, and a capability of sorting out the garbage from the authentic. If you've ever argued with a Russian about anything, you know what I mean. And they're all a little crazy, too.

But what I really want to get to is that Russia -- under a calm surface totally regulated by ruthless Cossacks, among others -- was preparing for some sort of revolution for decades before it actually happened. See, the czars and the Cossacks kept beheading every protest movement. They'd kill the leaders or send them to Siberia, and that tended to discourage anti-czarist political activity. Lenin was successful because he fled Russia and did all his organizing and rabble-rousing from Switzerland or someplace. And too bad it was Lenin and communism that took over Russia. The tight clamps of political control remained, just given another name.

Like, got involved in a discussion about today's "anarchy." Like the idiots who turn up at the G-something conferences to run wild through the streets and break windows. Who've been helping the Greeks and the British disillusioned labor movements throw temper tantrums? Those anarchists.

I argue, if they want socialism, they can't be anarchist. Anarchy, literally, means "no government." None. For socialism, you need lots and lots of government, because only the profoundly committed are willing to abandon private property, and eventually you need a really strong government -- preferably with Cossacks -- to "redistribute the wealth." And threaten, intimidate, humiliate, and eventually incarcerate people who never liked the idea, along with those who become disenchanted with it when they've seen it in practice. And this last group almost always is made up of about 95% of the population.

So anyway, the so-called "anarchists" who are tearing through Europe right now, aren't "anarchists" at all. They are, more accurately defined, "nihilists." That is, they just want to destroy everything.

Odd, too, Turgenyev mentions them, and so do many other Russian authors. If you read the fiction, rather than simply political monologues and dry definitions of all the various "isms," you'll get an idea of what it really means to live with all this, and inside of it, annihilated by it. Not a pretty picture. Just something to think about.

Save the Republic.

Lame duck pretty lame

Well, the rat-bastards of the 111th Congress have finally packed up and gone home. My main concern was extending the Bush Tax Cuts, and that did happen. The rest is less important. But I do have a couple questions.

First, why do we allow Russia to dictate our missile defense policy? Russia's basically sort of a third-work nation, and they aren't the only other people in the world with atomic weapons. I'm tempted to say that Russia is rather more civilized than Iran or North Korea -- but foreign policy and governments are run by people who may or may not be reflective of the population. I think most individuals, on their own, are decent people no matter where they're from. However, give someone a taste of political power -- in the USA as well as overseas -- and they seem to go completely crazy, begin entertaining visions of their own infallibility and perfect wisdom, and become obstructions to human life on the planet. So I was going to say maybe Russia is a more trustworthy caretaker of nuclear weapons than Iran or North Korea -- who appear to be the more dangerous threats -- but probably not, after all. I mean, Russia appears to be so dead broke it's selling nuclear technology to North Korea and Iran. And I don't think the START treaty will stop that.

But I don't see why Russia should have anything at all to say about what we do with domestic defense. And I suspect no one's going to pay any attention at all to that treaty. The whole thing is, maybe, giving Hillary Clinton a little pat on the back for all her bad hair days as Secretary of State, then shunt her back to the hinterlands of upstate New York.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell was repealed. Well, if the soldiers don't mind, I don't. Do the soldiers mind? Does anyone really know? Anyone ask them? Seems some of the top command was not convinced, but do they speak for the soldiers, the actual "boots on the ground"? I don't know.

1st Responders aid I already talked about. Not against it, just question the excesses of it. As the bill passed, its funding was reduced from $6.2 billion to something like $4 billion. Apparently the feds don't recognize any spending figures in units of less than a billion. That's a very bad habit. It tends to devalue money and only generates a terrific amount of fraud and waste.

Something I found really interesting was that the lame duck congress also passed legislation that makes it illegal for a TV advertisement to blast at a higher volume than the rest of the TV show.

God knows, that's an issue that was keeping me awake at night. I mean, I got down on my knees every night, hoping that even a politically divided congress could come together to save the nation from the scourge of noisy TV commercials.

But you know what? I have a TV that you can set to modulate the sound -- all the sound. Congress had nothing to do with it. Wonder if, in the raucous and hysterical public meetings they held (joking) about this controversial proposal, the thing about the TV sets was ever brought up.

Why is this any of congress's business? What a bunch of douchebags, you know? But they can all go home and remind their constituents: "Ah, but TV commercials now can't be any louder than the other content." Think that will win them any votes?

That's enough for now. A few more things I want to write about, but they deserve their own titles.

Save the Republic.

Communications is SUPPOSED to be out of control

Hey, FCC -- shove it up your ass.

My speech, my communications -- none of your goddamn business.

I could elaborate, but short on time. Suffice it to say:

Save the Republic.

1st Responders - another look

Hey, I doubt there's anyone in the USA who is more grateful or respectful of the 1st Responders -- those people who rushed to the World Trade Center on 9/11 and in the days afterward than I am. They and their families have suffered and continue to suffer the most personal ill effects of that attack.

But let's look again at the proposed bill to fund the ongoing health care needs of the 1st Responders.New York Senator Gillibrand, who's sponsoring the bill, noted that there are about 100,000 surviving 1st Responders. They're a group that's already been identified -- there won't be any more added to the list.

So the proposed bill asks for $6.2 billion for their care -- or roughly that number.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that $600 million for each one?

I mean, isn't that just a bit excessive? Seems to me, with that kind of money, each one of them could buy their own country somewhere.

If any one of them stood on top of the Statue of Liberty and tossed $20 bills into the wind one bill at a time, it would be hard for any one of them to spend that much money over the course of a natural lifetime --which many of them -- due to their sense of honor and love of country -- will not enjoy.

So, while I totally agree with the spirit of that bill, I think the cost is more reflective of Washington's general inability to conceive of the value of money than it reflects the actual need.

That's all I got to say about it right now.

Save the Republic

Lame duck dems: an insult to human intelligence

Well, congress is supposed to pass a bill that would allow for keeping the lights on in government facilities. Just a "continued funding" thing.

So, Nero Reid's knee-jerk blockheads in the Senate dumped a 1,900-page bill in the hopper that provides for continued funding, but also for lots and lots and lots of pork and earmarks for loads and loads and loads of useless crap. Like funding the production of tennis shoes for mallard ducks and things like that. Just the usual silly crap designed, primarily, to sink the US into debt and destroy the nation.

Do you ever get the feeling that the dems are just simply demented? I mean like serious brain damage, you know? Or maybe even criminally insane? Yeah. Closer to criminally insane.

Do the dems find this bullshit to be in any way productive? Any way at all? Or are they more like some snotty team of extremely spoiled 9-year-olds who just lost the soccer game, so they spray paint swear words all over the locker room, crap in the stadium seats, pour Crazy Glue down the shower drains and things like that.

Yet these are the dem members of the House. They were elected by... whom? Can't for the life of me figure out what kind of a moron would vote for any of these clowns. What a bunch of infantile buttheads. They apparently have experienced no intellectual or emotional development since their middle school years, if they matured that far. And I don't mean to insult middle schoolers, who are probably much wiser and more adult than these damn fools in congress.

But what do you expect from people who elected, several times, some asshole like Nero Reid to be their "leader?" I mean, that pretty much says it all, doesn't it?

You know what? Don't pass anything. Let CommEd come and shut off the power to the White House. I'm sure the Venezuelan Embassy will shelter the Comrade. Or maybe the Comrades can spend Christmas in Chappaqua with their good frends, the Clintons. Whaddaya think? Better yet, the Comrades can blow a half-million on an extended vacation in Martha's Vineyard or someplace. Not that they revel in behaving like what they call "fat cats" or anything like that.

At this point, we'd all be much, much better off without this federal government. They just are not grown up enough to understand that most of us little peons out here really, truly do want to see them gone. Or, preferably, dead and buried. We voted against the stupid bastards. Threw them out of office. They don't seem to have the sensitivity required to pick up on that message.

What next? They'll be pulling false fire alarms to send police and fire trucks to all of our  houses? Sit in their cars in the parking lots of our office buildings and tailgate us all the way home? Call and hang up in the middle of the night? Toilet paper our houses? Sounds exactly like what we can expect.

Any wonder WHY they were voted out?

Save the Republic.