WHY OBAMACARE?

Congressman Mike Rogers (R-MI) answers the question in his opening statement on Health Care reform in Washington DC:

SPACE CENTER USA

Taken at Johnson Space Center south of Houston, Texas. The building contains a full-scale Saturn V/Apollo command module and is visible on Google Earth. The vehicle inside is the size of the picture painted on the side of the building.


The Saturn V, taken from the base of the first stage. To give a sense of scale, there is a tour group barely visible at the other end of the building.


A "Little Joe" booster with an Apollow command module and escape system on top. The system was built as a testbed to verify the escape system in a high-altitude emergency situation. In the actual test, the Little Joe booster itself malfunctioned and the escape system functioned as designed, bringing the Apollo capsule to a safe landing.


[Personal Note] Those were exciting days, even though I was only peripherally involved in Apollo and its precursors.

EARLY RETIREMENT BURDEN

Civil service retirements in California are running 16 percent ahead of last year, suggesting that pay reductions, furloughs, diminishing resources and heavier workloads are pushing many employees to the exits.

"I've done the math," said Terry Sutherland, a Franchise Tax Board supervisor in the Bay Area with 43 years of state service. "I'll be making more retired than working. I just can't afford to subsidize my job any more."

Decrease the contributor base and increase the recipient base, that's the ticket to solvency. Given the state of the California pension funds, I'm just wondering if Sutherland can afford to live on IOUs.

Via Instapundit.

ROAD TRIP

From a road trip through Pennsylvania to revisit some old times as a graduate student/instructor at the Pennsylvania State University in 1976-77.

This is 136 Longmeadow Lane, our home in State College. It was new in 1976 (we were the first tenants) and the neighborhood has hardly changed in the 30-plus years since we left.

Sunset Park, immediately behind our duplex. The house that is barely visible in the center background belongs to Joe Paterno, the head coach of the Nittany Lions.

Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, a small town about 20 miles from State College. The older parts of the town along the river don't appear to have changed from 1977.

The river and park that run through downtown are still as pretty as ever.

Rural Pennsylvania is still beautiful country.

GALVESTON ISLAND - 1 YEAR LATER

These were taken on the western side of Galveston Island looking out into the Gulf of Mexico. There is little evidence remaining of the devastation caused by hurricane Ike just under a year ago.


The beaches are clean and almost fully restored, although there is some beach erosion in places and there are a few piers that haven't been either demolished or fully restored.


Downtown Galveston has been almost fully restored. The port area and tourist district were busy, with a cruise ship in port, and this offshore drilling platform appeared ready to be towed out into the Gulf.


Hard to believe the island was almost completely devastated less than a year ago.

IS OBAMA'S LOSS WALL STREET'S GAIN?

Jim Cramer seems to think so. Cramer plotted the Obama disapproval numbers against the S&P 500 performance index and found a nearly identical trend line since the March low. I tend to agree with Cramer, though for somewhat different reasons, as I posted as far back as last March (here and here).

Here's a chart similar to that Cramer showed. I've plotted President Obama's approval index as taken from the Rasmussen daily tracking poll against the Dow Jones Industrial Average (year-to-date) taken from the CNN Money web site. The Obama approval index is in black; the DJIA is in lighter blue behind it.

Until early March, the two indices both declined, almost in lockstep; then in March they began to diverge, and as shown, the DJIA is increasing at about the same rate that Obama's approval is declining.


And, yes, I know correlation does not imply causation.

My speculation is that it took roughly the first two months of the Obama administration for Wall Street to realize that the administration is simply incompetent and decide to "go it alone." In that sense, Wall Street was about two months behind the American people, who came to the same realization much earlier.

The tea parties and now the health care townhall debates are simply the physical manifestations of that realization.

Hat tip to Instapundit.

BAIL 'EM OUT?

From my email inbox: "Hell, back in 1990, the Government seized the Mustang Ranch brothel in Nevada for tax evasion and, as required by law, tried to run it. They failed and it closed. Now we are trusting the economy of our country, our banking system, our auto industry and possibly our health plans to the same nit-wits who couldn't make money running a whore house and selling whiskey!"

MILLIONAIRE CASHES IN CLUNKER

Michael Silence reports that former [TN] Sen. [Bill] Frist cashes in a clunker for a new auto. Is anyone surprised?

As commenter Joe Michels pointsd out: "Who ever said CFC was for poor people? If you though[t] that you misunderstand who buys new cars. It is not poor people. They buy... well clunkers. Instead of having clunkers to buy o[u]r government is taking that opportunity away. What then do poor people buy?"

Good question.

OOPS!

Here's MSNBC hyperventilating about an ObamaCare protestor who appeared at a health care rally outside of President Obama’s speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Phoenix, Arizona who "wore a semiautomatic assault rifle on his shoulder and a pistol on his hip."



There was only one little, teeny problem that the "news"-casters from MSNBC missed - the man carrying the weapons is black!

Here he is, in a news photo from the Arizona Republic newspaper.



Read the whole article at NewsBusters.

UNIQUE BONDS

Till Death Do Us Part

"Any man in combat who lacks comrades who will die for him, or for whom he is willing to die," William Manchester wrote of his time as a Marine in World War II, "is not a man at all. He is truly damned." A century earlier, Robert E. Lee famously remarked that it was good that war "is so terrible. We should grow too fond of it." Neither was glorifying war -- they hated its carnage. They were, rather, paying homage to the unique bonds forged in war, especially the one that enables so many to risk their lives, not only for friends but also for those they might have just met or have nothing in common with back home.

I was at a military retirement ceremony last week. Truer words have never been spoken.

CRAZY IS A PREEXISTING CONDITION

Birthers, Town Hall Hecklers and the Return of Right-Wing Rage. Rick Perlstein in the Washington Post August 16: "The lockstep strangeness of the mad lies on the protesters' signs -- too uniform to be spontaneous. They are both. If you don't understand that any moment of genuine political change always produces both, you can't understand America, where the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy, and where elites exploit the crazy for their own narrow interests."

I'll let Professor Bainbridge respond to Perlstein's nuttiness, and simply add the following picture which was part of the Perlstein diatribe in the print edition, but not available online.



Note the "crazies" in the picture - the signs in the background are all pro-Obama. The "Obama as a Nazi" poster in front is being held by an Obama supporter, and the poster itself was found to be from "LaRouchePAC.com," the political action committee website for Communist and perpetual [Democratic] Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche. No right-winger he. The poster can be found here.

Perlstein's right, of course. Crazy is a preexisting condition; he's just wrong about which side is crazy.

HOW TO TELL THAT OBAMA IS FAILING

The Washington Post is attacking the Bush administration.


(Cartoon appeared Sunday, August 16)

OBAMA'S APPROVAL STILL FALLING

President Obama's approval index in the Rasmussen daily tracking poll continues to fall.


This chart differs from earlier ones (here and here) in that I've extended the scale through December 2009, changed the trend lines from linear to a first-order polynomial fit, and projected the trends forward 90 days.

Based on the trend lines, Obama's base (strong approvals) appears to be leveling ever so slightly, but the "undecideds" (no strong feelings) appear to be moving much more strongly toward disapproval as compared to the earlier charts I posted, where the trend was for strong approvals to migrate to approvals, approvals to disapprovals, disapprovals to strong disapprovals.

Gallup is showing roughly the same trends as the Rasmussen tracking poll when strong approvals are combined with approvals, strong disapprovals with disapprovals (via Instapundit).

The Obama administration is in trouble.

WHAT’S SAUCE FOR THE SENATOR ...

In an editorial titled "More Quitters (R-Fla., R-Tex.)," the Washington Post complains about (Republican) elected officials who quit posts to which they were elected.

Donald J. Boudreaux asks a very good question: “So why no mention of Barack Obama? Not only did he quit the Senate seat to which he was elected, but during much of the time he held that seat, he was away from Washington campaigning for higher office.”

SIGN OF THE TIMES

Or something. In Maryland, traveling down a two-lane highway, we came across this sign: "Two-way traffic use headlights."

So ... if we're not returning on that highway, are we not supposed to use our headlights? Or perhaps only one?

FREEDOM ISN'T FREE

Seen on a bumper sticker today.

Rather a ubiquitous bumper sticker; even in the Washington DC metro area.

But it needs updating. Given what we know about the Obama administration plans (nationalize banks; nationalize the auto industry; nationalize health care) and cost (now estimated at $17,000,000,000,000 over 10 years), a better one would be

FREEDOM ISN'T FREE
But it's a darned sight cheaper than slavery.

A reminder:

CAP AND RAGE

From a Washington Post editorial extolling the virtues of passing the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade legislation:

Or they can entertain a carbon-based tax designed to reduce emissions and give the money back to taxpayers in an equitable manner.

Did I really read that correctly? Why, yes. Yes I did.

THE POST MISSES AGAIN

Richard Cohen, editorial writer for the Washington Post, is on the attack again. As usual, his aim is off by a country mile.

However ...

With a universal replacement of "Barack Obama" for "Sarah Palin" he'd be a lot closer to the target.

BREWSTER ROCKIT ON OBAMACARE

From the pen of Tim Rickard.

FROM THE EMAIL

Obama's health care plan will be written by a committee whose head says he doesn't understand it, passed by a Congress that hasn't read it, signed by a president who smokes, funded by a treasury chief who did not pay his taxes, overseen by a surgeon general who is obese, and financed by a country that is nearly broke.

What possibly could go wrong?