I was flipping around the dial tonight and just for the heck of it stopped on "Nightline."  I haven't watched it since Koppel left.  What caught my attention was a story they were doing on locally produced whisky, aka moonshine.  Moonshine is one of those folksy things you hear rumors about from friends or relatives or see depicted on tv shows like "The Dukes of Hazzard" or "The Andy Griffith Show".  It's a part of American folklore.  The one thing that kept coming to mind as I watched this program was the timing.  "Why"  I wondered, "are they doing a program on this kind of topic the day before Thanksgiving?" " Why do it at all?"  Then it hit me like a ton of bricks.  The area they kept showing in the report was southern Virginia.  The correspondent kept referring to moonshine as being a tradition "in this part of the country."  They even interviewed a guy, naturally white, even though running a still is color blind, who confirmed that yes indeedy at one time he ran a still, as did his daddy and his daddy's daddy.  It goes back for generations.  Some of you at this point may be thinking "So what?"  Well here's the so what.  What the report does not directly say but implies so strongly they might as well have, is that most of the people in the southern part of Virginia are white, moonshining whisky drinking rubes.  So why go after them?  Because the msm would like you to believe that these "rubes" are the reason that a Republican was just elected governor of the state.  What other explanation could there be?  It couldn't possibly be that people have finally woken up and realized what a mistake they made, no no. This time the "rubes" were motivated because they wanted to stick it in the eye of that "darkie" in the White house.  Well doesn't it follow that if they're white, make and drink whisky, that they must be racist as well, and of course that and that alone is the reason, well the new manufactured reason, ( some of you may remember that up until now it was because the Dems had a weak candidate who disavowed Obama until the last minute) that the Republican won in the until all to recently, newly minted "Blue State" of Virginia.  None of this was ever directly stated, but my oh my how they do imply. Remember you heard it hear first, if in fact you do hear it anywhere else. 

Happy Thanksgiving.

Conservatives who may be relishing the sweet taste of victory due to the administration's so called removal of a public option in health care reform should not be lulled into a false sense of security.  The concept of co-op insurance with government oversight sounds strangely familiar, not unlike Freddie and Fannie and we all know what happened there.  This has the sense of a boondoggle in the making and bankruptcy in the future.  If the legislature has any involvement what so ever there is no doubt that abject failure is what we have to look forward to.  Not to beat a dead horse but some measure of torte reform needs to be a part of the overall plan and congress needs to be kept from putting their very sticky fingers in the pie.  Yet another example of government ineptitude was the partial privatization of the postal service and they continue to lose money year after year.  Conservatives need to continue to press all branches of government until there is a definitive plan on the table rather than ethereal promises so that we have to ability to judge a concrete proposal on it's true merits.  Most important is the truth of what the actual cost to tax payers will be and how they're going to pay for it.  Until that time we cannot afford to rest on our Laurels.

The President and his party are in a rush to ramrod a plan for national health care down the throats of an unwilling public with some assistance from liberal members of the opposition party all for the sake of controlling rising health care costs.  The truth of the matter is regardless of what plan they come up with that will never happen.  The dramatic rise in the cost of health care has little to do with Doctors, hospitals or insurance companies.  The culprit is and has always been trial lawyers.   

Certainly there are physicians guilty of malpractice and the same can be said of hospitals and the victims of such negligence deserve to be compensated.  At one time such compensation was difficult to come by as the medical profession was seen by many as incapable of doing any wrong.  However that pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme and the nation as a whole has become grossly litigious. 

Tune in any channel and you are guaranteed to see at least one ad every hour on the hour by someone claiming to be " for the people", read that for those who are looking for quick buck.  More often than not both clients and attorneys think nothing of trying to squeeze as much as they can out of someone in the medical community.  The result has been increased costs to the consumer for everything from office visits to surgical procedures and every kind of treatment in between because someone ultimately has to pay for the increasing costs to health care providers for malpractice insurance, and that someone is "John Q. Public.' 

Both Democrats and Republicans are up to their necks in contributions from the Trial Lawyer lobby so the odds of congress passing Torte reform that would reign in frivolous law suits are slim to none, but, until this is addressed there is no hope of reducing the ever increasing costs of medical treatment and rationing is not and never will be the answer.

During the campaign of 08 we heard over and over from then candidate Obama that if we would only sit down, talk with our enemies and sing "kum by ya", they would miraculously be transformed from enemies to allies.  Now that he as taken office as commander in chief we see the results of his foreign policy naivete.  Russia told him to pound sand when he offered to remove the missile defense system from Eastern Europe in return for their intervention in Iran.  Chavez has become more strident and tied itself more closely to Russia. Worse, Iran has just test fired a ballistic missile capable of reaching Israel, U.S bases in the Mideast and our allies in Europe and Obama has been in office less than six months.  Even Democrats in congress and his own FBI director realize how dangerous his shoot from the hip polices are as they joined Republicans today in rejecting Obma's plans to close Guantanamo and relocate terrorists to domestic soil.  Not since the days of James Earl Carter have we seen such incompetence in the oval office.

Clearly this man is unqualified to deal with foreign policy.  Over and over he has been the first to undermine the reputation of his own nation with constant criticism of policies that led the U.S to become the worlds lone superpower.  If Obama has such disdain for his own country how can he expect to garner respect among enemies and allies alike.  Our only hope to survive this debacle is to hold Congress's feet to the fire so that they will continue to reject the reckless policies of the Obama administration until conservatives find their voice and take back the Republican party from the mushy centrists that have brought this nation to the brink of disaster.

In a commencement address to graduates of  Arizona State University, President Obama said the following:

" Did you study business? Why not help our struggling non-profits find better, more effective ways to serve folks in need. Nursing? Understaffed clinics and hospitals across this country are desperate for your help. Education? Teach in a high-need school; give a chance to kids we can't afford to give up on - prepare them to compete for any job anywhere in the world. Engineering? Help us lead a green revolution, developing new sources of clean energy that will power our economy and preserve our planet." 

Is that what parents have slaved and sacrificed to send their children to school for, to increase the size of the welfare state?  Or did they they send them there so that they would develop the tools that would make them self sustaining so they wouldn't end up back on their doorsteps at age 30 with their husbands wives and children?

According to Obama we are in the shape we are in because for generations we pursued individual achievement at the expense of the common good and the only way out of it is to suppress that desire in future generations.  The following could just as easily come out of his mouth:  "Don’t set out to raze all shrines—you’ll frighten men. Enshrine mediocrity, and the shrines are razed."  Those are the words of Ayn Rand's collectivist character Ellsworth Toohey in the Fountainhead.  After the statements that were made at ASU there can be no doubt that is who now sits in the White House.

This past weekend Jeb Bush stated that "it's time for the Republican Party to give up its "nostalgia" for the heyday of the Reagan era and look forward, even if it means stealing the winning strategy deployed by Democrats in the 2008 election."  Bush went on to say " President Obama's message of hope and change during the 2008 campaign clearly resonated with Americans."  Statements like that show just how out of Touch Mr. Bush is with history and his party.  It was Obama who co-opted the Reagan message of hope, change and tax cuts and if Bush is that blind he has no business running for the party's nomination.  The Bush family has always been part of the country club / Rockefeller wing of the party and that hasn't changed.  It was his father that benefited from Regan's legacy and the first thing he did after taking office was to distance himself from the man who put him there.  His younger son won the nomination in 2000 by running on the Reagan agenda and the longer he was in office the further he got away from it, along with those in congress.   The reason McCain lost is because he completely abandoned the principles of Reagan and many conservatives failed to turn up at the polls as a result.  How can Bush and the rest of these so called leaders possibly believe that the key to winning back the oval office is to go even further down that path?  They say they are going to go on a listening tour?  Well perhaps they should all stock up on "miracle ears" because they are stone deaf to the members of their own party.  The icing on the cake was R.I.N.O. Republican now Democrat Arlen Specter blaming Jack Kemp's death on conservative principles.  I would rather see us wander the political dessert for as long as it takes to rid ourselves of these kind of influences than to take a chance on putting one of them in a position of power simply for the purpose of having a "Republican" in the White House.

As I mentioned in my previous post "Too many people", those on the left have been predicting dire consequences for decades due to "overpopulation" and have been chastising us to limit reproductivity.  Well mother earth has a way of dealing with over population herself as she did in 1918 with the Spanish flu pandemic taking 40,000,000 of the populace out of circulation.  Now it appears we may very well be on the brink of yet another such pandemic and while we have tools to fight it that were not in place during the last one, over use of antibiotics may have rendered us impotent in combating the current threat.  The earth is quite capable of taking anything we throw at it as the late George Carlin stated on more than one occasion: 

"The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through all kinds of things worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles…hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages…And we think some plastic bags, and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet…the planet…the planet isn’t going anywhere. WE ARE!"

http://www.mercurynews.com/politics/ci_12102370?source=rss