Two words

Government healthcare.

If this was a private sector clinic or dental office, it would be out of business in about 10 seconds once this story got out, and not because of some heroic bureaucrat, but because there would be no patients. Not to mention the fact that the potential for financial ruin due to legal liability might encourage the owners and operators to be a little more, scratch that, a LOT more careful in the first place.

Florida sales tax on boats capped

Charlie Crist recently a law that capped the sales tax on boats at $18,000, which means that boats that cost over $275K get a significant tax break. The boat lobby must have worked on that one for quite a while.

Let me get this straight, taxes on income, savings and investment are scheduled to go up at the end of the year, but taxes on the purchase of a high priced boat will be cut dramatically? (Yes, I realize that one is Federal policy and the other is state of Florida policy.)

Apparently, what this economy needs is people to buy more really expensive toys. What's next, a tax deduction for high priced country club memberships?

Another scientific breakthrough produced by stem cell research that doesn't require destroying human embryos

This is one of the most heartwarming, downright awesome stories of the year:

Scientists have found a way to restore sight to the blind, using the patient's own "adult" stem cells. Just incredible.

The Anchoress has thoughts, and points out that as of 2006, non-embryo-destructive stem cells had been utilized in over 70 actual treatements, while the total for embryo-destructive stem cell research was 0 back then and is still at 0 today. I do not expect that this fact was mentioned in your local newspaper or the network newscasts.

(Previous posts on stem cell research, including some back and forth with a liberal friend and blogger, here, here, here, here, here, and here.)

A walk on the wild side

Tomorrow is the gay pride parade in New York City. Neither of the Mailmen will be in attendance, but ten years ago I paid the march a visit.

Bill Whittle on hating soccer

I don't hate soccer, but I can't stand the fake injuries. Bill Whittle has this to say on the subject:

So I have a few suggestions on how to improve soccer, to make it more palatable to the American psyche. First of all, the fake injuries. How do these people face themselves? I've heard that these drama queens are actually popular among the women of their countries, and some of these women are actually pretty hot. How can that be? Americans look at this stuff and they want to go grab a rifle. I don't these players are in any danger of achieving the American football ethic of "hey buddy, shake it off and get back out there". So we are going to have to kind of lower ourselves down to their level.

I say if the game is tied after regulation, we have a version of the ice hockey shootout but not against the goal. Rather, we line up each member of each team, and have some randomly selected four year old girl come down from the stands, dribble the ball to each of one these guys, and the one that can best convey a crushed spine, concussion and compound fracture of both legs and arms simultaneously, wins a point. May the best drama queens win.

It helps to watch the accompanying video footage here, about 7 minutes in.

Rand Paul's tough love comment

This comment from Rand Paul goes in the category of a politician offering the opposite of what has been offered in the past.

As bad as it sounds, ultimately we do have to sometimes accept a wage that's less than we had at our previous job in order to get back to work and allow the economy to get started again... Nobody likes that, but it may be one of the tough love things that has to happen.

Hopefully, my P90X theory will hold.

Lakers Win, Laker Fans Hurt Selves

One of the strangest rituals in American life is the one in which the fans of a team that has just won a sports championship to celebrate by attacking their own city, breaking windows, setting cars on fire, and beating up passersby. You'd think we were a nation of soccer fans.

Ugh

ABC News reports:

Against Gov. Jindal's Wishes, Crude-Sucking Barges Stopped by Coast Guard

Eight days ago, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal ordered barges to begin vacuuming crude oil out of his state's oil-soaked waters. Today, against the governor's wishes, those barges sat idle, even as more oil flowed toward the Louisiana shore.

"It's the most frustrating thing," the Republican governor said today in Buras, La. "Literally, yesterday morning we found out that they were halting all of these barges."

So why stop now?

"The Coast Guard came and shut them down," Jindal said. "You got men on the barges in the oil, and they have been told by the Coast Guard, 'Cease and desist. Stop sucking up that oil.'"

A Coast Guard representative told ABC News today that it shares the same goal as the governor.

"We are all in this together. The enemy is the oil," said Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Dan Lauer.

But the Coast Guard ordered the stoppage because of reasons that Jindal found frustrating. The Coast Guard needed to confirm that there were fire extinguishers and life vests on board, and then it had trouble contacting the people who built the barges.

The governor said he didn't have the authority to overrule the Coast Guard's decision, though he said he tried to reach the White House to raise his concerns.

"They promised us they were going to get it done as quickly as possible," he said. But "every time you talk to someone different at the Coast Guard, you get a different answer."

After Jindal strenuously made his case, the barges finally got the go-ahead today to return to the Gulf and get back to work, after more than 24 hours of sitting idle.

Sigh. Who would have thought that in the year 2010, the government of Louisiana would be so much more effective, more competent, more and less corrupt than the federal government?

The New Black Panthers, Same Old Left

One of the hallmarks of Left is its tendency to nestle up to Power, particularly the sort of Power that isn't afraid to use violence to get what it wants. This seems counterintuitive at first, as leftists like to portray themselves as peace-lovers. But think of the Left's ongoing love affair with the murderous Che Guevara, their pilgrimages to kiss the ring of Fidel Castro, and more recently, its endless excuse making for anyone who lobs a bomb at Israel. The enthusiasm for Hugo Chavez by, among others, Sean Penn, Bill Ayers, and to a lesser extent, President Obama, is probably another example of this. So long as the threatened violence can in some sense be characterized as revolutionary, transgressive, or liberating, Leftists' legs get all tingly.

The classic example, of course, is the New Left's support for the Black Panther Party in the late '60s and early '70s -- on the one hand making peace signs and urging the country to make love not war, and on the other providing political cover and financial support for what was, at its core, a gang of violent, murderous thugs. To learn more about the Left and the Panthers read this chilling 1993 piece by David Horowitz, describing how his friendship with the Panthers ended when they killed his friend Betty Van Patter; and the chapter in Horowitz and Peter Collier's Destructive Generation on the rise and fall of Huey Newton, which you can download here.

In this context, the Obama Justice Department's decision to dismiss a clear-cut, slam dunk, voter discrimination case against an outfit calling itself the New Black Panther Party calls to mind that saying about history repeating itself. As readers may recall, members of the NBPP were caught on videotape in military garb brandishing nightsticks outside a Philadelphia polling place on election day. Career civil rights attorneys at Justice filed the suit just before Obama took office, and were on the verge of obtaining a default judgment against the NBPP, which had failed to respond to the suit, when the political appointees inexplicably pulled the plug. Jennifer Rubin provides the gory details in a must-read article in the Weekly Standard.

The headline says it all.

Today on Slate:

The Ethanol Trap

The oil blowout will mean more
subsidies for the corn-fuel industry. That's bad news for consumers.

Conservatives have been writing about the ethanol scam for years -- how it is a lousy, inefficient fuel that drives up food prices; wastes food, fuel, and cropland; does zilch to help the environment; and gobbles up enormous amounts of public funds to no good end. It is nice to see that at least some liberals can take a break from sneering at how dumb and greedy conservatives are long enough to agree with us.

Not that the Slate author mentions that conservatives have been banging the drums on this for years, but no matter. The important thing is that the truth about this boondoggle -- a boondoggle fully supported by President Obama and his band of selfless supergeniuses -- is being reported in a place where liberals might read about it.

Politicians could learn something from P90X success

Darren Rovell over at CNBC.com has this report on the wild success of the fitness program P90X.

P90X is a success because it is the exact reverse of what has been offered in the past. You have 90 days, but instead of working out for only minutes a day, you have workout hard for 60 to 90 minutes. The success stories and the bodies of those who do it turn out to be so outrageous that it ranks as one of the best word-of-mouth products you’ll ever see.

The "exact reverse of what has been offered in the past". P90X says, if you want to get in shape, it's going to require that you work extremely hard for 90 days. There are no shortcuts, gadgets, miracle supplements, or overpriced equipment that will just sit in your garage.

Maybe people are ready to hear something similar from their politicians, perhaps even the "exact reverse of what has been offered in the past". You want this country to not go bankrupt, to be around for your children, with all of the opportunities that you had growing up? Well, here are the choices, the cuts, we are all going to have to make. No more free rides, no more something for nothing. Let's get back to basics, and get this country back in the shape we all deserve it to be in.

Amazon's number one selling book, any category

Apparently, Glenn Beck devoted an entire episode to discuss the book, and recommended it to all of his viewers. The horror!

The President takes Spike's advice

Spike Lee to Obama: "One time, go off! If there's any one time to go off, this is it."

President Obama on Today show: "I don't sit around just talking to experts because this is a college seminar, we talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers, so I know whose ass to kick."

More awesomeness from Chris Christie

"I say, you punch them, I punch you. That's the fight."

I think these stories are related

Yesterday, Warren Buffet announced that he has been reducing his investment in municipal bonds, stating that "There will be a terrible problem and then the question becomes will the federal government help."

And then today, this story came out about a woman named Camille Cates Barnett, who "will get nearly $50,000 annually from the [Philadelphia] city pension fund for the rest of her life after June 30, when she leaves her post as Philadelphia's managing director after two years, five months, and 24 days."

It goes on:

On the same day that a City Council committee moved to close the loophole that allows short-time employees such as Barnett to buy credit in the city's pension fund based on public service elsewhere, the Board of Pensions and Retirement revealed that Barnett had done just that.

Barnett has paid $122,303 to become vested in the pension plan, according to the Mayor's Office and the Pension Board, a privilege unionized employees are entitled to only after serving five years.

I just ran a quote for a Single Premium Immediate Annuity that would produce a lifetime annual payout of $50,000 for a 60 year old female (I'm not sure how old she is), and the cost is almost $750K. She got the same thing for $122K. Amazing.

[Update]

Apparently, this was not the first time she had pulled off something like this. Line one of this article from 1999 reads: "We are "shocked, shocked," to discover the District is paying Camille Barnett $500,000 for one year's mediocre work."

Haitians go hungry so leftists can feel good about themselves

A new, disgusting chapter in the Left's long tradition of making poor people suffer in the service of its own ideological fixations.

This Democrat sounds like one of those tea party fanatics