Today is just some cut and paste stuff. I could vent my frusterations but I think that this is more effective. All numbers come from RasmussenReports.com...
If they could vote to keep or replace the entire Congress, just 25% of voters nationwide would keep the current batch of legislators.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 57% would vote to replace the entire Congress and start all over again. Eighteen percent (18%) are not sure how they would vote.
While Democrats have become more supportive of the legislators, voters not affiliated with either major party have moved in the opposite direction. Today, 70% of those not affiliated with either major party would vote to replace all of the elected politicians in the House and Senate. That’s up from 62% last year.
One reason for this attitude may be that most voters say they understand the health care legislation better than Congress. Just 22% think the legislature has a good understanding of the issue. Three-out-of-four (74%) trust their own economic judgment more than Congress’.
54% Say Government Probe of Past CIA Interrogations Will Threaten National Security
•Pelosi’s Unfavorables Now Up To 64%
•55% Disagree with Obama’s Decision to Close Gitmo Prison
•62% Like Tax Cuts Over More Government Spending
•70% Prefer Government That Provides Fewer Services With Lower Taxes
•49% Say Workers Should Be Able To Opt Out of Social Security
This summer brought a significant shift in voter preferences in the Generic Congressional Ballot. As Republican Congressional candidates once again lead Democrats by a 43% to 38% margin this week, this is now the ninth straight ballot the GOP has held a modest advantage.
Over the past nine weeks, Republicans have held a two-to-five point advantage over Democrats every week. It is important to note, however, that the recent shift is not only because Republicans have been gaining support, but that Democrats have slipped in support. While support for Republican candidates ranged from 41% to 43%, support for Democrats ranged from 37% to 39%.
Things are looking good.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Saturday, August 29, 2009
Seig Heil Furher Obama...
Bill would give Obama emergency control of the internet. I wish I was joking...
Internet companies and civil liberties groups were alarmed this spring when a U.S. Senate bill proposed handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the Internet.
They're not much happier about a revised version that aides to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, have spent months drafting behind closed doors. CNET News has obtained a copy of the 55-page draft of S.773 (excerpt), which still appears to permit the president to seize temporary control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency.
The new version would allow the president to "declare a cybersecurity emergency" relating to "non-governmental" computer networks and do what's necessary to respond to the threat. Other sections of the proposal include a federal certification program for "cybersecurity professionals," and a requirement that certain computer systems and networks in the private sector be managed by people who have been awarded that license.
"I think the redraft, while improved, remains troubling due to its vagueness," said Larry Clinton, president of the Internet Security Alliance, which counts representatives of Verizon, Verisign, Nortel, and Carnegie Mellon University on its board. "It is unclear what authority Sen. Rockefeller thinks is necessary over the private sector. Unless this is clarified, we cannot properly analyze, let alone support the bill."
Representatives of other large Internet and telecommunications companies expressed concerns about the bill in a teleconference with Rockefeller's aides this week, but were not immediately available for interviews on Thursday.
A spokesman for Rockefeller also declined to comment on the record Thursday, saying that many people were unavailable because of the summer recess. A Senate source familiar with the bill compared the president's power to take control of portions of the Internet to what President Bush did when grounding all aircraft on Sept. 11, 2001. The source said that one primary concern was the electrical grid, and what would happen if it were attacked from a broadband connection.
When Rockefeller, the chairman of the Senate Commerce committee, and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) introduced the original bill in April, they claimed it was vital to protect national cybersecurity. "We must protect our critical infrastructure at all costs--from our water to our electricity, to banking, traffic lights and electronic health records," Rockefeller said.
The Rockefeller proposal plays out against a broader concern in Washington, D.C., about the government's role in cybersecurity. In May, President Obama acknowledged that the government is "not as prepared" as it should be to respond to disruptions and announced that a new cybersecurity coordinator position would be created inside the White House staff. Three months later, that post remains empty, one top cybersecurity aide has quit, and some wags have begun to wonder why a government that receives failing marks on cybersecurity should be trusted to instruct the private sector what to do.
Rockefeller's revised legislation seeks to reshuffle the way the federal government addresses the topic. It requires a "cybersecurity workforce plan" from every federal agency, a "dashboard" pilot project, measurements of hiring effectiveness, and the implementation of a "comprehensive national cybersecurity strategy" in six months--even though its mandatory legal review will take a year to complete.
The privacy implications of sweeping changes implemented before the legal review is finished worry Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. "As soon as you're saying that the federal government is going to be exercising this kind of power over private networks, it's going to be a really big issue," he says.
Probably the most controversial language begins in Section 201, which permits the president to "direct the national response to the cyber threat" if necessary for "the national defense and security." The White House is supposed to engage in "periodic mapping" of private networks deemed to be critical, and those companies "shall share" requested information with the federal government. ("Cyber" is defined as anything having to do with the Internet, telecommunications, computers, or computer networks.)
"The language has changed but it doesn't contain any real additional limits," EFF's Tien says. "It simply switches the more direct and obvious language they had originally to the more ambiguous (version)...The designation of what is a critical infrastructure system or network as far as I can tell has no specific process. There's no provision for any administrative process or review. That's where the problems seem to start. And then you have the amorphous powers that go along with it."
Translation: If your company is deemed "critical," a new set of regulations kick in involving who you can hire, what information you must disclose, and when the government would exercise control over your computers or network.
The Internet Security Alliance's Clinton adds that his group is "supportive of increased federal involvement to enhance cyber security, but we believe that the wrong approach, as embodied in this bill as introduced, will be counterproductive both from an national economic and national secuity perspective."
Update at 3:14 p.m. PDT: I just talked to Jena Longo, deputy communications director for the Senate Commerce committee, on the phone. She sent me e-mail with this statement:
The president of the United States has always had the constitutional authority, and duty, to protect the American people and direct the national response to any emergency that threatens the security and safety of the United States. The Rockefeller-Snowe Cybersecurity bill makes it clear that the president's authority includes securing our national cyber infrastructure from attack. The section of the bill that addresses this issue, applies specifically to the national response to a severe attack or natural disaster. This particular legislative language is based on longstanding statutory authorities for wartime use of communications networks. To be very clear, the Rockefeller-Snowe bill will not empower a "government shutdown or takeover of the Internet" and any suggestion otherwise is misleading and false. The purpose of this language is to clarify how the president directs the public-private response to a crisis, secure our economy and safeguard our financial networks, protect the American people, their privacy and civil liberties, and coordinate the government's response.
Internet companies and civil liberties groups were alarmed this spring when a U.S. Senate bill proposed handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the Internet.
They're not much happier about a revised version that aides to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, have spent months drafting behind closed doors. CNET News has obtained a copy of the 55-page draft of S.773 (excerpt), which still appears to permit the president to seize temporary control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency.
The new version would allow the president to "declare a cybersecurity emergency" relating to "non-governmental" computer networks and do what's necessary to respond to the threat. Other sections of the proposal include a federal certification program for "cybersecurity professionals," and a requirement that certain computer systems and networks in the private sector be managed by people who have been awarded that license.
"I think the redraft, while improved, remains troubling due to its vagueness," said Larry Clinton, president of the Internet Security Alliance, which counts representatives of Verizon, Verisign, Nortel, and Carnegie Mellon University on its board. "It is unclear what authority Sen. Rockefeller thinks is necessary over the private sector. Unless this is clarified, we cannot properly analyze, let alone support the bill."
Representatives of other large Internet and telecommunications companies expressed concerns about the bill in a teleconference with Rockefeller's aides this week, but were not immediately available for interviews on Thursday.
A spokesman for Rockefeller also declined to comment on the record Thursday, saying that many people were unavailable because of the summer recess. A Senate source familiar with the bill compared the president's power to take control of portions of the Internet to what President Bush did when grounding all aircraft on Sept. 11, 2001. The source said that one primary concern was the electrical grid, and what would happen if it were attacked from a broadband connection.
When Rockefeller, the chairman of the Senate Commerce committee, and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) introduced the original bill in April, they claimed it was vital to protect national cybersecurity. "We must protect our critical infrastructure at all costs--from our water to our electricity, to banking, traffic lights and electronic health records," Rockefeller said.
The Rockefeller proposal plays out against a broader concern in Washington, D.C., about the government's role in cybersecurity. In May, President Obama acknowledged that the government is "not as prepared" as it should be to respond to disruptions and announced that a new cybersecurity coordinator position would be created inside the White House staff. Three months later, that post remains empty, one top cybersecurity aide has quit, and some wags have begun to wonder why a government that receives failing marks on cybersecurity should be trusted to instruct the private sector what to do.
Rockefeller's revised legislation seeks to reshuffle the way the federal government addresses the topic. It requires a "cybersecurity workforce plan" from every federal agency, a "dashboard" pilot project, measurements of hiring effectiveness, and the implementation of a "comprehensive national cybersecurity strategy" in six months--even though its mandatory legal review will take a year to complete.
The privacy implications of sweeping changes implemented before the legal review is finished worry Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. "As soon as you're saying that the federal government is going to be exercising this kind of power over private networks, it's going to be a really big issue," he says.
Probably the most controversial language begins in Section 201, which permits the president to "direct the national response to the cyber threat" if necessary for "the national defense and security." The White House is supposed to engage in "periodic mapping" of private networks deemed to be critical, and those companies "shall share" requested information with the federal government. ("Cyber" is defined as anything having to do with the Internet, telecommunications, computers, or computer networks.)
"The language has changed but it doesn't contain any real additional limits," EFF's Tien says. "It simply switches the more direct and obvious language they had originally to the more ambiguous (version)...The designation of what is a critical infrastructure system or network as far as I can tell has no specific process. There's no provision for any administrative process or review. That's where the problems seem to start. And then you have the amorphous powers that go along with it."
Translation: If your company is deemed "critical," a new set of regulations kick in involving who you can hire, what information you must disclose, and when the government would exercise control over your computers or network.
The Internet Security Alliance's Clinton adds that his group is "supportive of increased federal involvement to enhance cyber security, but we believe that the wrong approach, as embodied in this bill as introduced, will be counterproductive both from an national economic and national secuity perspective."
Update at 3:14 p.m. PDT: I just talked to Jena Longo, deputy communications director for the Senate Commerce committee, on the phone. She sent me e-mail with this statement:
The president of the United States has always had the constitutional authority, and duty, to protect the American people and direct the national response to any emergency that threatens the security and safety of the United States. The Rockefeller-Snowe Cybersecurity bill makes it clear that the president's authority includes securing our national cyber infrastructure from attack. The section of the bill that addresses this issue, applies specifically to the national response to a severe attack or natural disaster. This particular legislative language is based on longstanding statutory authorities for wartime use of communications networks. To be very clear, the Rockefeller-Snowe bill will not empower a "government shutdown or takeover of the Internet" and any suggestion otherwise is misleading and false. The purpose of this language is to clarify how the president directs the public-private response to a crisis, secure our economy and safeguard our financial networks, protect the American people, their privacy and civil liberties, and coordinate the government's response.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
In Soviet Amerika, kids count you!
props to anyone who got the Yakov Smirnov refrence. Anyway here's the most disturbing story of the year...
Anyone tempted to ignore the 2010 Census will have a tough time doing it — especially if they have kids in school.
The government has launched Census in Schools, an all-out campaign targeting superintendents, principals, teachers, students and, indirectly, parents, as schools open across the nation this month and next. The message: The Census is coming and here's why everyone should care.
The goal is to send posters, teaching guides, maps and lesson plans to every school in the nation, Puerto Rico and U.S. island territories to encourage everyone to participate in the national count. The materials will land in more than 118,000 schools and reach 56 million students.
"It's great to reach the children because children are such strong voices in their homes," says Renee Jefferson-Copeland, chief of the Census schools program. "In households that are linguistically isolated, they can express the information to their parents."
The school effort is more ambitious than in 2000, the last time the government set out to count everyone. At that time, teachers had to request the material and it was available only in print. Now, the kits and lessons will arrive in every school and lesson plans can be downloaded online, where they will be available in 28 languages.
The Constitution mandates a complete population count every 10 years. The tally — down to the city block — helps redraw political boundaries and determine states' representation in Congress and the distribution of more than $400 billion in federal funds to state and local governments every year.
"It's extremely important for us," says Michael McGrady, associate director for partnership development at the National Head Start Association, which promotes school readiness for low-income children and their families. "Historically, Head Start families have been undercounted and that has a negative effect on their communities."
Between January and March, the Census Bureau will help plan a week of Census education in schools. During Census Week, teachers will devote 15 minutes every day for five days to the topic by discussing such things as civic participation, confidentiality or geography. Beginning in mid-March, more than 120 million Census questionnaires will be delivered to residential addresses.
The Census Bureau is partnering with Sesame Street to extend the 2010 Census message to preschoolers and adult caregivers. Under consideration: Using Sesame Street characters on Census materials and having characters participate in school events and public service announcements.
How comforting. Let the re-education of America begin er, I mean continue.
Anyone tempted to ignore the 2010 Census will have a tough time doing it — especially if they have kids in school.
The government has launched Census in Schools, an all-out campaign targeting superintendents, principals, teachers, students and, indirectly, parents, as schools open across the nation this month and next. The message: The Census is coming and here's why everyone should care.
The goal is to send posters, teaching guides, maps and lesson plans to every school in the nation, Puerto Rico and U.S. island territories to encourage everyone to participate in the national count. The materials will land in more than 118,000 schools and reach 56 million students.
"It's great to reach the children because children are such strong voices in their homes," says Renee Jefferson-Copeland, chief of the Census schools program. "In households that are linguistically isolated, they can express the information to their parents."
The school effort is more ambitious than in 2000, the last time the government set out to count everyone. At that time, teachers had to request the material and it was available only in print. Now, the kits and lessons will arrive in every school and lesson plans can be downloaded online, where they will be available in 28 languages.
The Constitution mandates a complete population count every 10 years. The tally — down to the city block — helps redraw political boundaries and determine states' representation in Congress and the distribution of more than $400 billion in federal funds to state and local governments every year.
"It's extremely important for us," says Michael McGrady, associate director for partnership development at the National Head Start Association, which promotes school readiness for low-income children and their families. "Historically, Head Start families have been undercounted and that has a negative effect on their communities."
Between January and March, the Census Bureau will help plan a week of Census education in schools. During Census Week, teachers will devote 15 minutes every day for five days to the topic by discussing such things as civic participation, confidentiality or geography. Beginning in mid-March, more than 120 million Census questionnaires will be delivered to residential addresses.
The Census Bureau is partnering with Sesame Street to extend the 2010 Census message to preschoolers and adult caregivers. Under consideration: Using Sesame Street characters on Census materials and having characters participate in school events and public service announcements.
How comforting. Let the re-education of America begin er, I mean continue.
Ted Kennedy...
I have struggled with how I should express my personal view of this man on my blog ever since I heard of his death on the BBC at about 1230am on tuesday morning (one of the reasons I didn't post yesterday was because I wanted to see how other MOB memebers would react) and I've decided to come out in a way that may surprise some of you; entirely neutral. He's dead, I honestly don't care and the media sideshow that will result from this is going to probably be worse than it was for Princess Di and Michael Jackson because this guy was a politician. To be fair I felt about the same when Reagan died (I was 2 when he left office, get over it). So he was part of the Kennedy clan, so what? He wouldn't have even been elected senator in 1962 if his older brother(s) weren't President and AG. He killed a woman. He served in the Senate 47 years and was the epitome of what is wrong with politics in this country. He got elected because of his name, not his merit (and the fact his older brothers were assassinated). I think its safe to say only the good die young because I would like to believe JFK and RFK would be embaressed at the way he conducted his political career. Ted Kennedy is dead. You will NEVER see his name mentioned on this blog again.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
today's post...
I was going to focus on something more hard hitting today but I think that it would be better to have a little humor. H/T to Ed from AntiStrib for posting this first.
I got this email from my son this morning. My SON. (His son, not me obviously)
And you think George W. Bush was a dummy?
If George W. Bush had made a joke at the expense of
the Special Olympics, would you have approved?
If George W. Bush had given Gordon Brown a set of
inexpensive and incorrectly formatted DVDs, when Gordon
Brown had given him a thoughtful and historically
significant gift, would you have approved?
If George W. Bush had given the Queen of England an iPod
containing videos of his speeches, would you have thought
this embarrassingly narcissistic and tacky?
If George W. Bush had bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia,
would you have approved?
If George W. Bush had visited Austria and made reference
to the non-existent "Austrian language," would you
have brushed it off as a minor slip?
If George W. Bush had filled his cabinet and circle of
advisers with people who cannot seem to keep current on
their income taxes, would you have approved?
If George W. Bush had been so Spanish illiterate as to
refer to “Cinco de Cuatro” in front of the Mexican
ambassador when it was the fourth of May (Cuatro de Mayo),
and continued to flub it when he tried again, would you have
winced in embarrassment?
If George W. Bush had miss-spelled the word advice would
you have hammered him for it for years like Dan Quayle and
potatoe as “proof” of what a dunce he is?
If George W. Bush had burned 9,000 gallons of jet fuel to
go plant a single tree on “Earth Day”, would you have
concluded he’s a hypocrite?
If George W. Bush’s administration had okayed Air Force
One flying low over millions of people followed by a jet
fighter in downtown Manhattan causing widespread panic,
would you have wondered whether they actually “get” what
happened on 9-11?
If George W. Bush had been the first President to need
A teleprompter installed to be able to get through a press
conference, would you have laughed and said this is more
proof of how inept he is on his own and is really controlled
by smarter men behind the scenes?
If George W. Bush had failed to send relief aid to flood
victims throughout the Midwest with more people killed or
made homeless than in New Orleans , would you want it made
into a major ongoing political issue with claims of racism
and incompetence?
If George W. Bush had ordered the firing of the CEO of a
major corporation, even though he had no constitutional
authority to do so, would you have approved?
If George W. Bush had proposed to double the national
debt, which had taken more than two centuries to accumulate,
in one year, would you have approved?
If George W. Bush had then proposed to double the debt
again 10 times within years, would you have approved?
If George W. Bush had reduced your retirement plan’s
holdings of GM stock by 90% and given the unions a majority
stake in GM, would you have approved?
If George W. Bush had spent hundreds of thousands of
dollars to take Laura Bush to a play in NYC, would you have
approved?
So, tell me again, what is it about Obama that makes
him so brilliant and impressive? Can't think of
anything? Don't worry. He's done all the above in
just 5 months -- so be patient you've still got three
years and seven months to come up with an answer…
Why IS Obama special? Because he's not GW Bush, basically...
I got this email from my son this morning. My SON. (His son, not me obviously)
And you think George W. Bush was a dummy?
If George W. Bush had made a joke at the expense of
the Special Olympics, would you have approved?
If George W. Bush had given Gordon Brown a set of
inexpensive and incorrectly formatted DVDs, when Gordon
Brown had given him a thoughtful and historically
significant gift, would you have approved?
If George W. Bush had given the Queen of England an iPod
containing videos of his speeches, would you have thought
this embarrassingly narcissistic and tacky?
If George W. Bush had bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia,
would you have approved?
If George W. Bush had visited Austria and made reference
to the non-existent "Austrian language," would you
have brushed it off as a minor slip?
If George W. Bush had filled his cabinet and circle of
advisers with people who cannot seem to keep current on
their income taxes, would you have approved?
If George W. Bush had been so Spanish illiterate as to
refer to “Cinco de Cuatro” in front of the Mexican
ambassador when it was the fourth of May (Cuatro de Mayo),
and continued to flub it when he tried again, would you have
winced in embarrassment?
If George W. Bush had miss-spelled the word advice would
you have hammered him for it for years like Dan Quayle and
potatoe as “proof” of what a dunce he is?
If George W. Bush had burned 9,000 gallons of jet fuel to
go plant a single tree on “Earth Day”, would you have
concluded he’s a hypocrite?
If George W. Bush’s administration had okayed Air Force
One flying low over millions of people followed by a jet
fighter in downtown Manhattan causing widespread panic,
would you have wondered whether they actually “get” what
happened on 9-11?
If George W. Bush had been the first President to need
A teleprompter installed to be able to get through a press
conference, would you have laughed and said this is more
proof of how inept he is on his own and is really controlled
by smarter men behind the scenes?
If George W. Bush had failed to send relief aid to flood
victims throughout the Midwest with more people killed or
made homeless than in New Orleans , would you want it made
into a major ongoing political issue with claims of racism
and incompetence?
If George W. Bush had ordered the firing of the CEO of a
major corporation, even though he had no constitutional
authority to do so, would you have approved?
If George W. Bush had proposed to double the national
debt, which had taken more than two centuries to accumulate,
in one year, would you have approved?
If George W. Bush had then proposed to double the debt
again 10 times within years, would you have approved?
If George W. Bush had reduced your retirement plan’s
holdings of GM stock by 90% and given the unions a majority
stake in GM, would you have approved?
If George W. Bush had spent hundreds of thousands of
dollars to take Laura Bush to a play in NYC, would you have
approved?
So, tell me again, what is it about Obama that makes
him so brilliant and impressive? Can't think of
anything? Don't worry. He's done all the above in
just 5 months -- so be patient you've still got three
years and seven months to come up with an answer…
Why IS Obama special? Because he's not GW Bush, basically...
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
RIP Prince of Darkness
Well it is just coming across all the wire news agency's now and I would just like to spend a moment reflecting on the second greatest conservative columnist and writer of the last 50 years (Bill Buckley being #1). I enjoyed watching Novak (aka the Prince of Darkness) during the show Crossfire back when I was still forming my political belief system. I will plan on picking up his memoirs' later this week maybe even today. This is from CNN.
WASHINGTON (CNN) — Conservative columnist and former CNN "Crossfire" co-host Robert Novak has died after a year-long battle with cancer, his family announced Tuesday. He was 78.
Novak died at home, just over a year after doctors diagnosed him with a malignant brain tumor in August 2008. He was a veteran columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and a regular commentator for CNN for 25 years, beginning when the network launched in 1980.
For most of that time, he was a co-host of the political debate program "Crossfire." But he also hosted a show with his longtime column co-author, Rowland Evans, and appeared as a panelist on shows like "The Capital Gang" and on PBS' "The McLaughlin Group."
He was dubbed "The Prince of Darkness" by friends for his pessimistic persona, and he used the nickname as the title of his 2007 memoir.
Novak got his first newspaper job in 1948, when he was still in high school. He served in the Army during the Korean War before turning to the news business, eventually starting his column with Evans at the now-defunct New York Herald-Tribune in 1963.
In 2003, he found himself at the center of the scandal over the exposure of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson, when he published a column revealing her CIA status days after her husband challenged a key Bush administration justification for the invasion of Iraq. The scandal ultimately led to the conviction of Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on charges of perjury, obstruction of justice and lying to investigators probing the leak.
Novak cooperated with a special prosecutor and was not charged in the case.
And as always, the Democrats are classy and don't mock his death...
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=4020297&mesg_id=4020321
I'm usually more compassionate, butnot today. Boo fucking hoo. One dirtbag "conservative" down, a gazillion to go...
Diane
His role in that GOT PEOPLE KILLED. Good riddance. No loss.
World just got a little better, actually.
Why did you have respect for him?
He was a horrid, deceitful, harmful man
You've got to be fucking kidding me. He outed a CIA agent at the behest of the b*s* administration!
"...a vile conservative that committed treason against his own country..."
The only thing I will raise is my kilt, so I can piss on his grave.
Fuck you, Novak. Burn in hell.
To be fair it was probably 2:1 in positive comments but yeah, nothing like a bunch of tolerant libs pissing on the recently dead. Oh, and by the way I don't plan dancing on Ted Kennedy's grave but let it be known he was directly responisble for the death of an innocent person.
WASHINGTON (CNN) — Conservative columnist and former CNN "Crossfire" co-host Robert Novak has died after a year-long battle with cancer, his family announced Tuesday. He was 78.
Novak died at home, just over a year after doctors diagnosed him with a malignant brain tumor in August 2008. He was a veteran columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and a regular commentator for CNN for 25 years, beginning when the network launched in 1980.
For most of that time, he was a co-host of the political debate program "Crossfire." But he also hosted a show with his longtime column co-author, Rowland Evans, and appeared as a panelist on shows like "The Capital Gang" and on PBS' "The McLaughlin Group."
He was dubbed "The Prince of Darkness" by friends for his pessimistic persona, and he used the nickname as the title of his 2007 memoir.
Novak got his first newspaper job in 1948, when he was still in high school. He served in the Army during the Korean War before turning to the news business, eventually starting his column with Evans at the now-defunct New York Herald-Tribune in 1963.
In 2003, he found himself at the center of the scandal over the exposure of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson, when he published a column revealing her CIA status days after her husband challenged a key Bush administration justification for the invasion of Iraq. The scandal ultimately led to the conviction of Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on charges of perjury, obstruction of justice and lying to investigators probing the leak.
Novak cooperated with a special prosecutor and was not charged in the case.
And as always, the Democrats are classy and don't mock his death...
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=4020297&mesg_id=4020321
I'm usually more compassionate, butnot today. Boo fucking hoo. One dirtbag "conservative" down, a gazillion to go...
Diane
His role in that GOT PEOPLE KILLED. Good riddance. No loss.
World just got a little better, actually.
Why did you have respect for him?
He was a horrid, deceitful, harmful man
You've got to be fucking kidding me. He outed a CIA agent at the behest of the b*s* administration!
"...a vile conservative that committed treason against his own country..."
The only thing I will raise is my kilt, so I can piss on his grave.
Fuck you, Novak. Burn in hell.
To be fair it was probably 2:1 in positive comments but yeah, nothing like a bunch of tolerant libs pissing on the recently dead. Oh, and by the way I don't plan dancing on Ted Kennedy's grave but let it be known he was directly responisble for the death of an innocent person.
Monday, August 17, 2009
DUDE! WOW!
I really couldn't believe this article as I was reading it. Sure its from CNS a right leaning publication but the poll was done by gallup, hardly a conservative pollster, which is why this is credible.
(CNSNews.com) - Self-identified conservatives outnumber self-identified liberals in all 50 states of the union, according to the Gallup Poll.
At the same time, more Americans nationwide are saying this year that they are conservative than have made that claim in any of the last four years.
In 2009, 40% percent of respondents in Gallup surveys that have interviewed more than 160,000 Americans have said that they are either “conservative” (31%) or “very conservative” (9%). That is the highest percentage in any year since 2004.
Only 21% have told Gallup they are liberal, including 16% who say they are “liberal” and 5% who say they are “very liberal.”
Thirty-five percent of Americans say they are moderate.
During Republican President George W. Bush’s second term, the number of self-identified conservatives as measured by Gallup dropped, riding at a low of 37% as recently as last year.
According to new data released by Gallup on Friday, conservatives outnumber liberals in all 50 states--including President Obama’s home state of Illinois--even though Democrats have a significant advantage over Republicans in party identification in 30 states.
“In fact, while all 50 states are, to some degree, more conservative than liberal (with the conservative advantage ranging from 1 to 34 points), Gallup's 2009 party ID results indicate that Democrats have significant party ID advantages in 30 states and Republicans in only 4,” said an analysis of the survey results published by Gallup.
“Despite the Democratic Party's political strength-- seen in its majority representation in Congress and in state houses across the country--more Americans consider themselves conservative than liberal,” said Gallup’s analysis.
“While Gallup polling has found this to be true at the national level over many years, and spanning recent Republican as well as Democratic presidential administrations, the present analysis confirms that the pattern also largely holds at the state level,” said Gallup. “Conservatives outnumber liberals by statistically significant margins in 47 of the 50 states, with the two groups statistically tied in Hawaii, Vermont, and Massachusetts.”
Massachusetts, Vermont and Hawaii are the most liberal states, even though conservatives marginally outrank liberals even there. In Massachusetts, according to Gallup, 30% say they are conservative and 29% say they are liberal, a difference that falls within the margin of error for the state. In Vermont, 29% say they are conservative and 28% say they are liberal, which also falls within the survey’s margin of error for the state. In Hawaii, 29% say they are conservative and 24% say they are liberal, which falls within the margin of error for that state.
In one non-state jurisdiction covered by the survey, liberals did outnumber conservatives. That was Washington, D.C., where 37% said they were liberal, 35% said they were moderate and 23% said they were conservative.
Even in New York and New Jersey, conservatives outnumber liberals by 6 percentage points, according to Gallup. In those states, 32% say they are conservative and 26% say they are liberal. In Connecticut, conservatives outnumber liberals by 7 points, 31% to 24%.
Alabama is the state that comes closest to a conservative majority. In that state, according to Gallup, 49% say they are conservative and 15% say they are liberal.
In President Obama’s home state of Illinois, conservatives outnumber liberals, 35% to 23%.
Gallup's results were derived from interviewing 160,236 American adults between Jan. 2, 2009 and June 30, 2009.
Even though conservatives outnumber liberals in all 50 states, in 21 of these states self-identified moderates outnumber conservatives, and in 4 states the percentage saying they are conservative and the percentage saying they are moderate is exactly the same.
The two states with the highest percentage of self-identified moderates are Hawaii and Rhode Island, where 43% say they are moderate.
For a ranking of all 50 states by the advantage that self-identified conservatives have over self-identified liberals see the Gallup analysis here.
Things are looking very good for 2010.
(CNSNews.com) - Self-identified conservatives outnumber self-identified liberals in all 50 states of the union, according to the Gallup Poll.
At the same time, more Americans nationwide are saying this year that they are conservative than have made that claim in any of the last four years.
In 2009, 40% percent of respondents in Gallup surveys that have interviewed more than 160,000 Americans have said that they are either “conservative” (31%) or “very conservative” (9%). That is the highest percentage in any year since 2004.
Only 21% have told Gallup they are liberal, including 16% who say they are “liberal” and 5% who say they are “very liberal.”
Thirty-five percent of Americans say they are moderate.
During Republican President George W. Bush’s second term, the number of self-identified conservatives as measured by Gallup dropped, riding at a low of 37% as recently as last year.
According to new data released by Gallup on Friday, conservatives outnumber liberals in all 50 states--including President Obama’s home state of Illinois--even though Democrats have a significant advantage over Republicans in party identification in 30 states.
“In fact, while all 50 states are, to some degree, more conservative than liberal (with the conservative advantage ranging from 1 to 34 points), Gallup's 2009 party ID results indicate that Democrats have significant party ID advantages in 30 states and Republicans in only 4,” said an analysis of the survey results published by Gallup.
“Despite the Democratic Party's political strength-- seen in its majority representation in Congress and in state houses across the country--more Americans consider themselves conservative than liberal,” said Gallup’s analysis.
“While Gallup polling has found this to be true at the national level over many years, and spanning recent Republican as well as Democratic presidential administrations, the present analysis confirms that the pattern also largely holds at the state level,” said Gallup. “Conservatives outnumber liberals by statistically significant margins in 47 of the 50 states, with the two groups statistically tied in Hawaii, Vermont, and Massachusetts.”
Massachusetts, Vermont and Hawaii are the most liberal states, even though conservatives marginally outrank liberals even there. In Massachusetts, according to Gallup, 30% say they are conservative and 29% say they are liberal, a difference that falls within the margin of error for the state. In Vermont, 29% say they are conservative and 28% say they are liberal, which also falls within the survey’s margin of error for the state. In Hawaii, 29% say they are conservative and 24% say they are liberal, which falls within the margin of error for that state.
In one non-state jurisdiction covered by the survey, liberals did outnumber conservatives. That was Washington, D.C., where 37% said they were liberal, 35% said they were moderate and 23% said they were conservative.
Even in New York and New Jersey, conservatives outnumber liberals by 6 percentage points, according to Gallup. In those states, 32% say they are conservative and 26% say they are liberal. In Connecticut, conservatives outnumber liberals by 7 points, 31% to 24%.
Alabama is the state that comes closest to a conservative majority. In that state, according to Gallup, 49% say they are conservative and 15% say they are liberal.
In President Obama’s home state of Illinois, conservatives outnumber liberals, 35% to 23%.
Gallup's results were derived from interviewing 160,236 American adults between Jan. 2, 2009 and June 30, 2009.
Even though conservatives outnumber liberals in all 50 states, in 21 of these states self-identified moderates outnumber conservatives, and in 4 states the percentage saying they are conservative and the percentage saying they are moderate is exactly the same.
The two states with the highest percentage of self-identified moderates are Hawaii and Rhode Island, where 43% say they are moderate.
For a ranking of all 50 states by the advantage that self-identified conservatives have over self-identified liberals see the Gallup analysis here.
Things are looking very good for 2010.
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Obama and the Practice of Medicine (WSJ)
Today is another hard news day, I like keeping the weekends fun and easy but this is too important not to talk about
Why is the president convinced so many doctors and patients are making irrational decisions?
On the defensive because of an increasingly skeptical public, President Barack Obama has recently spoken extemporaneously about his health plan. In doing so, he has revealed his lack of understanding about aspects of medical practice and the reasons for rising health-care costs.
One theme the president has focused on is doctors' motives. During a prime-time press conference on July 22, the president referred to a doctor who muses that she makes "a lot more money if I take this kid's tonsils out"—even if the child might not need surgery. Responding to a woman whose spry 100-year-old mother was given a needed pacemaker despite her age, the president said a few weeks earlier (at an ABC News town-hall event at the White House) that doctors should let patients know that sometimes "you're better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller."
Mr. Obama's clinical scenarios represent an excessive—if not erroneous—take on how doctors are influenced by financial incentives. This jaundiced view on medical decision-making may explain why programs the White House is proposing to lower health-care costs rely on the direct regulation of medical decisions. If Mr. Obama is serious about lowering costs, he'll need to reform the economic structures in medicine—especially programs like Medicare.
Medicare data shows that for the most part, major surgeries aren't the source of waste in health care. These kinds of procedures are typically guided by clear clinical criteria and are closely scrutinized by doctors and patients alike. Rather it is in routine procedures and treatments that economic incentives factor heavily into doctors' decisions.
The use of branded over cheaper generic drugs until recently fell into this category. Doctors would regularly prescribe the more expensive option. Today this is far less prevalent, since patients with private plans realized that they were being saddled with higher co-pays when they opted for the brand-name drugs over generic alternatives.
Other areas where doctors have been accused of excessive utilization include radiology scans and home medical equipment. In the absence of financial incentives to restrain excess use, relatively safe diagnostic procedures can often be justified—even if their benefits are slim.
Instead of addressing the distorted financial incentives that influence these kinds of routine tests and treatments, Mr. Obama's policies seek to directly regulate doctors and their decisions.
The Obama administration has proposed establishing an "Independent Medicare Advisory Committee" to set binding rules on Medicare reimbursement policies. Mr. Obama has also called for the creation of a new federal entity that would conduct "comparative" research on the cost-effectiveness of various treatments in order to establish federal "guidelines." The House health reform bill calls for "health information tools" that would enable Medicare to deny payment for a particular treatment right in the doctor's office.
Regulating medical decisions should not be the responsibility of a remote Washington bureaucracy. The only way to instill more reflection at the point of medical decision making is to give doctors and patients reasons to consider the cost of various options.
For doctors whom Medicare pays per intervention, the problem isn't the fee-for-service model, but the way that the government program sets the fees. Fees are set according to a fixed price schedule with no tie to the physician's quality, experience level, or the outcome of the service.
A more rational system would pay doctors for entire "episodes of care," rather than individual procedures. Private health systems like the Geisinger Clinic and some Blue Cross plans have adopted this model and pay doctors for taking care of an entire illness.
Medicare doesn't have the ability to track episodes of care. It has struggled to adopt even modest payment reforms such as restricted panels of providers, value-based insurance, and account-based coverage, where consumers control their own spending—all techniques used by private insurers to improve efficiency.
Medicare's size demands that it keep payment systems simple. Thus it relies on fixed prices for checklists of services tied to discrete billing codes. These uniform payment rules reward low and high quality care the same. What's troubling is that the heart of the president's plan—a government-run "public" insurance program—is modeled directly on Medicare.
Medicare compounds its shortcomings by insulating patients from costs. This causes a total lack of financial restraint at the point of care. Cost-sharing in Medicare has actually declined over time as a percent of patients' total health bill.
My colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, Tom Miller, estimates that U.S. patients have the lowest out-of-pocket costs as a percent of total national health spending of any developed country except France, Luxembourg, the Czech Republic and Ireland. They're even lower than the single-payer health system in Canada. Mr. Miller calculates that out-of-pocket spending on physician and clinical services in the U.S. was about 60% of total real per capita spending on health care in 1960. By 2002 it had fallen to 10%.
Unsurprisingly, Medicare data show that over the past two decades Medicare's costs for care have sharply outpaced spending in private plans, where co-pays and cost sharing are standard. While these estimates are confounded by factors such as the age of Medicare's population, Medicare certainly hasn't been austere.
Mr. Obama says as much as one-third of medical spending is wasted on services that provide little or no benefit. But closer scrutiny of these kinds of marginal medical decisions can't be imposed by government regulation. Cost consideration must be internalized at the point of care by patients and doctors with a stake in the price, as well as the outcome.
Dr. Gottlieb, a former official at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a practicing internist. He's partner to a firm that invests in health-care companies.
In other words...
Why is the president convinced so many doctors and patients are making irrational decisions?
On the defensive because of an increasingly skeptical public, President Barack Obama has recently spoken extemporaneously about his health plan. In doing so, he has revealed his lack of understanding about aspects of medical practice and the reasons for rising health-care costs.
One theme the president has focused on is doctors' motives. During a prime-time press conference on July 22, the president referred to a doctor who muses that she makes "a lot more money if I take this kid's tonsils out"—even if the child might not need surgery. Responding to a woman whose spry 100-year-old mother was given a needed pacemaker despite her age, the president said a few weeks earlier (at an ABC News town-hall event at the White House) that doctors should let patients know that sometimes "you're better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller."
Mr. Obama's clinical scenarios represent an excessive—if not erroneous—take on how doctors are influenced by financial incentives. This jaundiced view on medical decision-making may explain why programs the White House is proposing to lower health-care costs rely on the direct regulation of medical decisions. If Mr. Obama is serious about lowering costs, he'll need to reform the economic structures in medicine—especially programs like Medicare.
Medicare data shows that for the most part, major surgeries aren't the source of waste in health care. These kinds of procedures are typically guided by clear clinical criteria and are closely scrutinized by doctors and patients alike. Rather it is in routine procedures and treatments that economic incentives factor heavily into doctors' decisions.
The use of branded over cheaper generic drugs until recently fell into this category. Doctors would regularly prescribe the more expensive option. Today this is far less prevalent, since patients with private plans realized that they were being saddled with higher co-pays when they opted for the brand-name drugs over generic alternatives.
Other areas where doctors have been accused of excessive utilization include radiology scans and home medical equipment. In the absence of financial incentives to restrain excess use, relatively safe diagnostic procedures can often be justified—even if their benefits are slim.
Instead of addressing the distorted financial incentives that influence these kinds of routine tests and treatments, Mr. Obama's policies seek to directly regulate doctors and their decisions.
The Obama administration has proposed establishing an "Independent Medicare Advisory Committee" to set binding rules on Medicare reimbursement policies. Mr. Obama has also called for the creation of a new federal entity that would conduct "comparative" research on the cost-effectiveness of various treatments in order to establish federal "guidelines." The House health reform bill calls for "health information tools" that would enable Medicare to deny payment for a particular treatment right in the doctor's office.
Regulating medical decisions should not be the responsibility of a remote Washington bureaucracy. The only way to instill more reflection at the point of medical decision making is to give doctors and patients reasons to consider the cost of various options.
For doctors whom Medicare pays per intervention, the problem isn't the fee-for-service model, but the way that the government program sets the fees. Fees are set according to a fixed price schedule with no tie to the physician's quality, experience level, or the outcome of the service.
A more rational system would pay doctors for entire "episodes of care," rather than individual procedures. Private health systems like the Geisinger Clinic and some Blue Cross plans have adopted this model and pay doctors for taking care of an entire illness.
Medicare doesn't have the ability to track episodes of care. It has struggled to adopt even modest payment reforms such as restricted panels of providers, value-based insurance, and account-based coverage, where consumers control their own spending—all techniques used by private insurers to improve efficiency.
Medicare's size demands that it keep payment systems simple. Thus it relies on fixed prices for checklists of services tied to discrete billing codes. These uniform payment rules reward low and high quality care the same. What's troubling is that the heart of the president's plan—a government-run "public" insurance program—is modeled directly on Medicare.
Medicare compounds its shortcomings by insulating patients from costs. This causes a total lack of financial restraint at the point of care. Cost-sharing in Medicare has actually declined over time as a percent of patients' total health bill.
My colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, Tom Miller, estimates that U.S. patients have the lowest out-of-pocket costs as a percent of total national health spending of any developed country except France, Luxembourg, the Czech Republic and Ireland. They're even lower than the single-payer health system in Canada. Mr. Miller calculates that out-of-pocket spending on physician and clinical services in the U.S. was about 60% of total real per capita spending on health care in 1960. By 2002 it had fallen to 10%.
Unsurprisingly, Medicare data show that over the past two decades Medicare's costs for care have sharply outpaced spending in private plans, where co-pays and cost sharing are standard. While these estimates are confounded by factors such as the age of Medicare's population, Medicare certainly hasn't been austere.
Mr. Obama says as much as one-third of medical spending is wasted on services that provide little or no benefit. But closer scrutiny of these kinds of marginal medical decisions can't be imposed by government regulation. Cost consideration must be internalized at the point of care by patients and doctors with a stake in the price, as well as the outcome.
Dr. Gottlieb, a former official at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a practicing internist. He's partner to a firm that invests in health-care companies.
In other words...
Friday, August 14, 2009
A letter to President Obama...
Found it on Facebook. It wasn't written by me but it might as well have been
Mr. Obama:
I have had it with you and your administration, sir.. Your conduct on your recent trip overseas has convinced me that you are not an adequate representative of the United States of America collectively or of me personally.
You are so obsessed with appeasing the Europeans and the Muslim world that you have abdicated the responsibilities of the President of the United States of America . You are responsible to the citizens of the United States ... You are not responsible to the people of any other country on Earth.
I personally resent that you go around the world apologizing for the United States telling Europeans that we are arrogant and do not care about their status in the world. Sir, what do you think the First World War and the Second World War were all about if not the consideration of the people of Europe ? Are you brain dead? What do you think the Marshall Plan was all about? Do you not understand or know the history of the 20th century?
Where do you get off telling a Muslim country that the United States does not consider itself a Christian country? Have you not read the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution of the United States ? This country was founded on Judeo-Christian ethics and the principles governing this country, at least until you came along, come directly from this heritage. Do you not understand this?
Your bowing to the king of Saudi Arabia is an affront to all Americans. Our President does not bow down to anyone, let alone the king of Saudi Arabia . You didn't show Great Britain , our best and one of our oldest allies, the respect they deserve yet you bow down to the king of Saudi Arabia .. How dare you, sir! How dare you!
You can't find the time to visit the graves of our greatest generation because you don't want to offend the Germans but make time to visit a mosque in Turkey ... You offended our dead and every veteran when you give the Germans more respect than the people who saved the German people from themselves. What's the matter with you? I am convinced that you and the members of your administration have the historical and intellectual depth of a mud puddle and should be ashamed of yourselves, all of you.
You are so self-righteously offended by the big bankers and the American automobile manufacturers yet do nothing about the real thieves in this situation, Mr. Dodd, Mr. Frank, Franklin Raines, Jamie Gorelic, the Fannie Mae bonuses, and the Freddie Mac bonuses. What do you intend to do about them? Anything? I seriously doubt it.
What about the U.S. House members passing out $9.1 million in bonuses to their staff members - on top of the $2.5 million in automatic pay raises that lawmakers gave themselves? I understand the average House aide got a 17% bonus. I took a 5% cut in my pay to save jobs with my employer. You haven't said anything about that. Who authorized that? I surely didn't!
Executives at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will be receiving $210 million in bonuses over an eighteen-month period, that's $45 million more than the AIG bonuses. In fact, Fannie and Freddie executives have already been awarded $51 million - not a bad take. Who authorized that and why haven't you expressed your outrage at this group who are largely responsible for the economic mess we have right now.
I resent that you take me and my fellow citizens as brain-dead and not caring about what you idiots do. We are watching what you are doing and we are getting increasingly fed up with all of you.
I also want you to know that I personally find just about everything you do and say to be offensive to every one of my sensibilities. I promise you that I will work tirelessly to see that you do not get a chance to spend two terms destroying my beautiful country.
Sincerely,
Every real American
Ms Kathleen Lyday
Fourth Grade Teacher
Grandview Elementary School
11470 Hwy . C
A TEACHER wrote that. Props to her.
Mr. Obama:
I have had it with you and your administration, sir.. Your conduct on your recent trip overseas has convinced me that you are not an adequate representative of the United States of America collectively or of me personally.
You are so obsessed with appeasing the Europeans and the Muslim world that you have abdicated the responsibilities of the President of the United States of America . You are responsible to the citizens of the United States ... You are not responsible to the people of any other country on Earth.
I personally resent that you go around the world apologizing for the United States telling Europeans that we are arrogant and do not care about their status in the world. Sir, what do you think the First World War and the Second World War were all about if not the consideration of the people of Europe ? Are you brain dead? What do you think the Marshall Plan was all about? Do you not understand or know the history of the 20th century?
Where do you get off telling a Muslim country that the United States does not consider itself a Christian country? Have you not read the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution of the United States ? This country was founded on Judeo-Christian ethics and the principles governing this country, at least until you came along, come directly from this heritage. Do you not understand this?
Your bowing to the king of Saudi Arabia is an affront to all Americans. Our President does not bow down to anyone, let alone the king of Saudi Arabia . You didn't show Great Britain , our best and one of our oldest allies, the respect they deserve yet you bow down to the king of Saudi Arabia .. How dare you, sir! How dare you!
You can't find the time to visit the graves of our greatest generation because you don't want to offend the Germans but make time to visit a mosque in Turkey ... You offended our dead and every veteran when you give the Germans more respect than the people who saved the German people from themselves. What's the matter with you? I am convinced that you and the members of your administration have the historical and intellectual depth of a mud puddle and should be ashamed of yourselves, all of you.
You are so self-righteously offended by the big bankers and the American automobile manufacturers yet do nothing about the real thieves in this situation, Mr. Dodd, Mr. Frank, Franklin Raines, Jamie Gorelic, the Fannie Mae bonuses, and the Freddie Mac bonuses. What do you intend to do about them? Anything? I seriously doubt it.
What about the U.S. House members passing out $9.1 million in bonuses to their staff members - on top of the $2.5 million in automatic pay raises that lawmakers gave themselves? I understand the average House aide got a 17% bonus. I took a 5% cut in my pay to save jobs with my employer. You haven't said anything about that. Who authorized that? I surely didn't!
Executives at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will be receiving $210 million in bonuses over an eighteen-month period, that's $45 million more than the AIG bonuses. In fact, Fannie and Freddie executives have already been awarded $51 million - not a bad take. Who authorized that and why haven't you expressed your outrage at this group who are largely responsible for the economic mess we have right now.
I resent that you take me and my fellow citizens as brain-dead and not caring about what you idiots do. We are watching what you are doing and we are getting increasingly fed up with all of you.
I also want you to know that I personally find just about everything you do and say to be offensive to every one of my sensibilities. I promise you that I will work tirelessly to see that you do not get a chance to spend two terms destroying my beautiful country.
Sincerely,
Every real American
Ms Kathleen Lyday
Fourth Grade Teacher
Grandview Elementary School
11470 Hwy . C
A TEACHER wrote that. Props to her.
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Camille Paglia sez Pelosi must go...
Ok for any of you who read my blog on a consistant basis (for all I know that number might be zero but I still have fun doing this) you know that I have tremendous respect for Camille Paglia, who, in my opinion, is the last sane, honest voice on the left. Check out her article today from Salon.com:
Aug. 12, 2009 | Buyer's remorse? Not me. At the North American summit in Guadalajara this week, President Obama resumed the role he is best at -- representing the U.S. with dignity and authority abroad. This is why I, for one, voted for Obama and continue to support him. The damage done to U.S. prestige by the feckless, buffoonish George W. Bush will take years to repair. Obama has barely begun the crucial mission that he was elected to do.
Having said that, I must confess my dismay bordering on horror at the amateurism of the White House apparatus for domestic policy. When will heads start to roll? I was glad to see the White House counsel booted, as well as Michelle Obama's chief of staff, and hope it's a harbinger of things to come. Except for that wily fox, David Axelrod, who could charm gold threads out of moonbeams, Obama seems to be surrounded by juvenile tinhorns, bumbling mediocrities and crass bully boys.
Case in point: the administration's grotesque mishandling of healthcare reform, one of the most vital issues facing the nation. Ever since Hillary Clinton's megalomaniacal annihilation of our last best chance at reform in 1993 (all of which was suppressed by the mainstream media when she was running for president), Democrats have been longing for that happy day when this issue would once again be front and center.
But who would have thought that the sober, deliberative Barack Obama would have nothing to propose but vague and slippery promises -- or that he would so easily cede the leadership clout of the executive branch to a chaotic, rapacious, solipsistic Congress? House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whom I used to admire for her smooth aplomb under pressure, has clearly gone off the deep end with her bizarre rants about legitimate town-hall protests by American citizens. She is doing grievous damage to the party and should immediately step down.
There is plenty of blame to go around. Obama's aggressive endorsement of a healthcare plan that does not even exist yet, except in five competing, fluctuating drafts, makes Washington seem like Cloud Cuckoo Land. The president is promoting the most colossal, brazen bait-and-switch operation since the Bush administration snookered the country into invading Iraq with apocalyptic visions of mushroom clouds over American cities.
You can keep your doctor; you can keep your insurance, if you're happy with it, Obama keeps assuring us in soothing, lullaby tones. Oh, really? And what if my doctor is not the one appointed by the new government medical boards for ruling on my access to tests and specialists? And what if my insurance company goes belly up because of undercutting by its government-bankrolled competitor? Face it: Virtually all nationalized health systems, neither nourished nor updated by profit-driven private investment, eventually lead to rationing.
I just don't get it. Why the insane rush to pass a bill, any bill, in three weeks? And why such an abject failure by the Obama administration to present the issues to the public in a rational, detailed, informational way? The U.S. is gigantic; many of our states are bigger than whole European nations. The bureaucracy required to institute and manage a nationalized health system here would be Byzantine beyond belief and would vampirically absorb whatever savings Obama thinks could be made. And the transition period would be a nightmare of red tape and mammoth screw-ups, which we can ill afford with a faltering economy.
As with the massive boondoggle of the stimulus package, which Obama foolishly let Congress turn into a pork rut, too much has been attempted all at once; focused, targeted initiatives would, instead, have won wide public support. How is it possible that Democrats, through their own clumsiness and arrogance, have sabotaged healthcare reform yet again? Blaming obstructionist Republicans is nonsensical because Democrats control all three branches of government. It isn't conservative rumors or lies that are stopping healthcare legislation; it's the justifiable alarm of an electorate that has been cut out of the loop and is watching its representatives construct a tangled labyrinth for others but not for themselves. No, the airheads of Congress will keep their own plush healthcare plan -- it's the rest of us guinea pigs who will be thrown to the wolves.
With the Republican party leaderless and in backbiting disarray following its destruction by the ideologically incoherent George W. Bush, Democrats are apparently eager to join the hara-kiri brigade. What looked like smooth coasting to the 2010 election has now become a nail-biter. Both major parties have become a rats' nest of hypocrisy and incompetence. That, combined with our stratospheric, near-criminal indebtedness to China (which could destroy the dollar overnight), should raise signal flags. Are we like late Rome, infatuated with past glories, ruled by a complacent, greedy elite, and hopelessly powerless to respond to changing conditions?
What does either party stand for these days? Republican politicians, with their endless scandals, are hardly exemplars of traditional moral values. Nor have they generated new ideas for healthcare, except for medical savings accounts, which would be pathetically inadequate in a major crisis for anyone earning at or below a median income.
And what do Democrats stand for, if they are so ready to defame concerned citizens as the "mob" -- a word betraying a Marie Antoinette delusion of superiority to ordinary mortals. I thought my party was populist, attentive to the needs and wishes of those outside the power structure. And as a product of the 1960s, I thought the Democratic party was passionately committed to freedom of thought and speech.
But somehow liberals have drifted into a strange servility toward big government, which they revere as a godlike foster father-mother who can dispense all bounty and magically heal all ills. The ethical collapse of the left was nowhere more evident than in the near total silence of liberal media and Web sites at the Obama administration's outrageous solicitation to private citizens to report unacceptable "casual conversations" to the White House. If Republicans had done this, there would have been an angry explosion by Democrats from coast to coast. I was stunned at the failure of liberals to see the blatant totalitarianism in this incident, which the president should have immediately denounced. His failure to do so implicates him in it.
As a libertarian and refugee from the authoritarian Roman Catholic church of my youth, I simply do not understand the drift of my party toward a soulless collectivism. This is in fact what Sarah Palin hit on in her shocking image of a "death panel" under Obamacare that would make irrevocable decisions about the disabled and elderly. When I first saw that phrase, headlined on the Drudge Report, I burst out laughing. It seemed so over the top! But on reflection, I realized that Palin's shrewdly timed metaphor spoke directly to the electorate's unease with the prospect of shadowy, unelected government figures controlling our lives. A death panel not only has the power of life and death but is itself a symptom of a Kafkaesque brave new world where authority has become remote, arbitrary and spectral. And as in the Spanish Inquisition, dissidence is heresy, persecuted and punished.
Surely, the basic rule in comprehensive legislation should be: First, do no harm. The present proposals are full of noble aims, but the biggest danger always comes from unforeseen and unintended consequences. Example: the American incursion into Iraq, which destabilized the region by neutralizing Iran's rival and thus enormously enhancing Iran's power and nuclear ambitions.
What was needed for reform was an in-depth analysis, buttressed by documentary evidence, of waste, fraud and profiteering in the healthcare, pharmaceutical and insurance industries. Instead what we've gotten is a series of facile, vulgar innuendos about how doctors conduct their practice, as if their primary motive is money. Quite frankly, the president gives little sense of direct knowledge of medical protocols; it's as if his views are a tissue of hearsay and scattershot worst-case scenarios.
Of course, it didn't help matters that, just when he needed maximum momentum on healthcare, Obama made the terrible gaffe of declaring that, even without his knowing the full facts, Cambridge, Mass., police had acted "stupidly" in arresting a friend of his, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. Obama's automatic identification with the pampered Harvard elite (wildly unpopular with most sensible people), as well as his insulting condescension toward an officer doing his often dangerous duty, did serious and perhaps irreparable damage to the president's standing. The strained, prissy beer summit in the White House garden afterward didn't help. Is that the Obama notion of hospitality? Another staff breakdown.
Both Gates and Obama mistakenly assumed that the original incident at Gates' house was about race, when it was about class. It was the wealthy, lordly Gates who committed the first offense by instantly and evidently hysterically defaming the character of the officer who arrived at his door to investigate the report of a break-in. There was no excuse for Gates' loud and cheap charges of racism, which he should have immediately apologized for the next day, instead of threatening lawsuits and self-aggrandizing television exposés. On the other hand, given that Cambridge is virtually a company town, perhaps police headquarters should have dispatched a moderator to the tumultuous scene before a small, disabled Harvard professor was clapped in handcuffs and marched off to jail. But why should an Ivy League panjandrum be treated any differently from the rest of us hoi polloi?
Class rarely receives honest attention in the American media, as demonstrated by the reporting on a June incident at a swimming pool in the Philadelphia suburbs. When the director of the Valley Swim Club in Montgomery County cancelled its agreement with several urban day camps to use its private pool, the controversy was portrayed entirely in racial terms. There were uninvestigated allegations of remarks about "black kids" made by white mothers who ordered their children out of the pool, and the racial theme was intensified by the director's inept description of the "complexion" of the pool having been changed -- which may simply have been a whopper of a Freudian slip.
Having followed the coverage in the Philadelphia media, I have lingering questions about how much of that incident was race and how much was social class. Urban working-class and suburban middle-class children often have quite different styles of play -- as I know from present observation as well as from my Syracuse youth, when I regularly biked to the public pool in Thornden Park. Kids of all races from downtown Syracuse neighborhoods were much rougher and tougher, and for self-preservation you had to stay out of their way! Otherwise, you'd get knocked to the concrete or dunked when they heedlessly jumped off the diving board onto our heads in the crowded pool.
In general, middle-class children today are more closely supervised at pools because the family can afford to have a non-working parent at home -- a luxury that working-class kids rarely have. What happened at the Valley Swim Club, whose safety infrastructure was evidently also overwhelmed by too many visiting kids who were non-swimmers, may have been a clash of classes rather than races. Were the mothers who pulled their kids out of the pool that day really reacting to skin color or what they, accurately or not, perceived to be an overcrowded, dangerous disorder? The incontrovertible offense in all this, which went unmentioned in the national media, was the closure for budgetary reasons by the city of Philadelphia this summer of 27 of its 73 public pools. There is no excuse for that kind of draconian curtailment of basic recreational facilities for working-class families, sweltering in the urban summer heat.
Those were the good parts of the article basically. Coming tomorrow, my expose on the creep known as Peter Singer
Aug. 12, 2009 | Buyer's remorse? Not me. At the North American summit in Guadalajara this week, President Obama resumed the role he is best at -- representing the U.S. with dignity and authority abroad. This is why I, for one, voted for Obama and continue to support him. The damage done to U.S. prestige by the feckless, buffoonish George W. Bush will take years to repair. Obama has barely begun the crucial mission that he was elected to do.
Having said that, I must confess my dismay bordering on horror at the amateurism of the White House apparatus for domestic policy. When will heads start to roll? I was glad to see the White House counsel booted, as well as Michelle Obama's chief of staff, and hope it's a harbinger of things to come. Except for that wily fox, David Axelrod, who could charm gold threads out of moonbeams, Obama seems to be surrounded by juvenile tinhorns, bumbling mediocrities and crass bully boys.
Case in point: the administration's grotesque mishandling of healthcare reform, one of the most vital issues facing the nation. Ever since Hillary Clinton's megalomaniacal annihilation of our last best chance at reform in 1993 (all of which was suppressed by the mainstream media when she was running for president), Democrats have been longing for that happy day when this issue would once again be front and center.
But who would have thought that the sober, deliberative Barack Obama would have nothing to propose but vague and slippery promises -- or that he would so easily cede the leadership clout of the executive branch to a chaotic, rapacious, solipsistic Congress? House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whom I used to admire for her smooth aplomb under pressure, has clearly gone off the deep end with her bizarre rants about legitimate town-hall protests by American citizens. She is doing grievous damage to the party and should immediately step down.
There is plenty of blame to go around. Obama's aggressive endorsement of a healthcare plan that does not even exist yet, except in five competing, fluctuating drafts, makes Washington seem like Cloud Cuckoo Land. The president is promoting the most colossal, brazen bait-and-switch operation since the Bush administration snookered the country into invading Iraq with apocalyptic visions of mushroom clouds over American cities.
You can keep your doctor; you can keep your insurance, if you're happy with it, Obama keeps assuring us in soothing, lullaby tones. Oh, really? And what if my doctor is not the one appointed by the new government medical boards for ruling on my access to tests and specialists? And what if my insurance company goes belly up because of undercutting by its government-bankrolled competitor? Face it: Virtually all nationalized health systems, neither nourished nor updated by profit-driven private investment, eventually lead to rationing.
I just don't get it. Why the insane rush to pass a bill, any bill, in three weeks? And why such an abject failure by the Obama administration to present the issues to the public in a rational, detailed, informational way? The U.S. is gigantic; many of our states are bigger than whole European nations. The bureaucracy required to institute and manage a nationalized health system here would be Byzantine beyond belief and would vampirically absorb whatever savings Obama thinks could be made. And the transition period would be a nightmare of red tape and mammoth screw-ups, which we can ill afford with a faltering economy.
As with the massive boondoggle of the stimulus package, which Obama foolishly let Congress turn into a pork rut, too much has been attempted all at once; focused, targeted initiatives would, instead, have won wide public support. How is it possible that Democrats, through their own clumsiness and arrogance, have sabotaged healthcare reform yet again? Blaming obstructionist Republicans is nonsensical because Democrats control all three branches of government. It isn't conservative rumors or lies that are stopping healthcare legislation; it's the justifiable alarm of an electorate that has been cut out of the loop and is watching its representatives construct a tangled labyrinth for others but not for themselves. No, the airheads of Congress will keep their own plush healthcare plan -- it's the rest of us guinea pigs who will be thrown to the wolves.
With the Republican party leaderless and in backbiting disarray following its destruction by the ideologically incoherent George W. Bush, Democrats are apparently eager to join the hara-kiri brigade. What looked like smooth coasting to the 2010 election has now become a nail-biter. Both major parties have become a rats' nest of hypocrisy and incompetence. That, combined with our stratospheric, near-criminal indebtedness to China (which could destroy the dollar overnight), should raise signal flags. Are we like late Rome, infatuated with past glories, ruled by a complacent, greedy elite, and hopelessly powerless to respond to changing conditions?
What does either party stand for these days? Republican politicians, with their endless scandals, are hardly exemplars of traditional moral values. Nor have they generated new ideas for healthcare, except for medical savings accounts, which would be pathetically inadequate in a major crisis for anyone earning at or below a median income.
And what do Democrats stand for, if they are so ready to defame concerned citizens as the "mob" -- a word betraying a Marie Antoinette delusion of superiority to ordinary mortals. I thought my party was populist, attentive to the needs and wishes of those outside the power structure. And as a product of the 1960s, I thought the Democratic party was passionately committed to freedom of thought and speech.
But somehow liberals have drifted into a strange servility toward big government, which they revere as a godlike foster father-mother who can dispense all bounty and magically heal all ills. The ethical collapse of the left was nowhere more evident than in the near total silence of liberal media and Web sites at the Obama administration's outrageous solicitation to private citizens to report unacceptable "casual conversations" to the White House. If Republicans had done this, there would have been an angry explosion by Democrats from coast to coast. I was stunned at the failure of liberals to see the blatant totalitarianism in this incident, which the president should have immediately denounced. His failure to do so implicates him in it.
As a libertarian and refugee from the authoritarian Roman Catholic church of my youth, I simply do not understand the drift of my party toward a soulless collectivism. This is in fact what Sarah Palin hit on in her shocking image of a "death panel" under Obamacare that would make irrevocable decisions about the disabled and elderly. When I first saw that phrase, headlined on the Drudge Report, I burst out laughing. It seemed so over the top! But on reflection, I realized that Palin's shrewdly timed metaphor spoke directly to the electorate's unease with the prospect of shadowy, unelected government figures controlling our lives. A death panel not only has the power of life and death but is itself a symptom of a Kafkaesque brave new world where authority has become remote, arbitrary and spectral. And as in the Spanish Inquisition, dissidence is heresy, persecuted and punished.
Surely, the basic rule in comprehensive legislation should be: First, do no harm. The present proposals are full of noble aims, but the biggest danger always comes from unforeseen and unintended consequences. Example: the American incursion into Iraq, which destabilized the region by neutralizing Iran's rival and thus enormously enhancing Iran's power and nuclear ambitions.
What was needed for reform was an in-depth analysis, buttressed by documentary evidence, of waste, fraud and profiteering in the healthcare, pharmaceutical and insurance industries. Instead what we've gotten is a series of facile, vulgar innuendos about how doctors conduct their practice, as if their primary motive is money. Quite frankly, the president gives little sense of direct knowledge of medical protocols; it's as if his views are a tissue of hearsay and scattershot worst-case scenarios.
Of course, it didn't help matters that, just when he needed maximum momentum on healthcare, Obama made the terrible gaffe of declaring that, even without his knowing the full facts, Cambridge, Mass., police had acted "stupidly" in arresting a friend of his, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. Obama's automatic identification with the pampered Harvard elite (wildly unpopular with most sensible people), as well as his insulting condescension toward an officer doing his often dangerous duty, did serious and perhaps irreparable damage to the president's standing. The strained, prissy beer summit in the White House garden afterward didn't help. Is that the Obama notion of hospitality? Another staff breakdown.
Both Gates and Obama mistakenly assumed that the original incident at Gates' house was about race, when it was about class. It was the wealthy, lordly Gates who committed the first offense by instantly and evidently hysterically defaming the character of the officer who arrived at his door to investigate the report of a break-in. There was no excuse for Gates' loud and cheap charges of racism, which he should have immediately apologized for the next day, instead of threatening lawsuits and self-aggrandizing television exposés. On the other hand, given that Cambridge is virtually a company town, perhaps police headquarters should have dispatched a moderator to the tumultuous scene before a small, disabled Harvard professor was clapped in handcuffs and marched off to jail. But why should an Ivy League panjandrum be treated any differently from the rest of us hoi polloi?
Class rarely receives honest attention in the American media, as demonstrated by the reporting on a June incident at a swimming pool in the Philadelphia suburbs. When the director of the Valley Swim Club in Montgomery County cancelled its agreement with several urban day camps to use its private pool, the controversy was portrayed entirely in racial terms. There were uninvestigated allegations of remarks about "black kids" made by white mothers who ordered their children out of the pool, and the racial theme was intensified by the director's inept description of the "complexion" of the pool having been changed -- which may simply have been a whopper of a Freudian slip.
Having followed the coverage in the Philadelphia media, I have lingering questions about how much of that incident was race and how much was social class. Urban working-class and suburban middle-class children often have quite different styles of play -- as I know from present observation as well as from my Syracuse youth, when I regularly biked to the public pool in Thornden Park. Kids of all races from downtown Syracuse neighborhoods were much rougher and tougher, and for self-preservation you had to stay out of their way! Otherwise, you'd get knocked to the concrete or dunked when they heedlessly jumped off the diving board onto our heads in the crowded pool.
In general, middle-class children today are more closely supervised at pools because the family can afford to have a non-working parent at home -- a luxury that working-class kids rarely have. What happened at the Valley Swim Club, whose safety infrastructure was evidently also overwhelmed by too many visiting kids who were non-swimmers, may have been a clash of classes rather than races. Were the mothers who pulled their kids out of the pool that day really reacting to skin color or what they, accurately or not, perceived to be an overcrowded, dangerous disorder? The incontrovertible offense in all this, which went unmentioned in the national media, was the closure for budgetary reasons by the city of Philadelphia this summer of 27 of its 73 public pools. There is no excuse for that kind of draconian curtailment of basic recreational facilities for working-class families, sweltering in the urban summer heat.
Those were the good parts of the article basically. Coming tomorrow, my expose on the creep known as Peter Singer
Sunday, August 09, 2009
Remember to Support Obama everyone...
We all need some laughs, but sometimes even paradoys hit close to home...
Saturday, August 08, 2009
Movie reviews
A new segment I am doing on either Saturday's or Sunday's now.
Link in the title is for IMDB.com, THE place for average people reviewing movies. Rottentomatoes.com is where the "elite" aka movie reviewers have their say.
500 days of Summer
I had gone in expecting an interesting movie. When the movie opens you see the two main characters holding hands and her with a diamond wedding ring on so you know everything works out in the end like any lame-ass chick flick right? Wrong, dead wrong, and as a sidenote this story hit close to home because of how the guy gets dragged through hell but the secret (that I've learned, the hard way) is to never let things get you down too much. Zooey Deschanel (Summer) is absolutely amazing and might get nominated for some awards for her role, she had some very memorable lines. This movie could almost be viewed as a 16 candles version for guys in their 20's who have had their hearts broken by previous girlfriends. Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Tom) (also the kid from 3rd Rock and oddly GI JOE, more on that later) does a great job. Doing the male version of Ice Cream and chick flicks after his heart gets broken (his version is vodka, orange juice, and TWINKIES). The movie is what I hope chick flicks can become so the guys that get dragged to these enjoy it too. There is Chloe (Tom's 12 year old, and wayy too wise for her age little sister) who steals the few scenes that she was in. Overall I can honestly say I enjoyed this movie from its first to last frame, no fill 95 minutes of hilarity, heartbreak, and wisdom.
I give it a 9/10 and say this could be a dark horse for best picture.
rottentomatoes.com- 89% positive reviews (almost unheard of)
IMDB.com- 8.7(#129 on the top 250 all-time movie list, as of 8/9/08)
G.I. Joe
Let me start off by making two points, one I was too young to see the G.I. Joe saturday morning cartoons and two I went in to this movie having absolutely no expectations. I actually half expected to have to walk out of this movie. That being said I was STUNNED and sadly almost no one agrees with me on this. I thought that despite lacking in plot the two main characters, Snake Eyes (Ray Park) and Ripcord (Marlon Wayans) steal the show in the obvious good vs. bad and lost love angle. Of course the movie ends like all "good" movies do today, setting up the inevitable sequel (I was hoping they would wrap it in one movie like watchmen did but alas no luck). I haven't even mentioned the chase scene in Paris which is basically taking the best of the Jason Bourne car chases and the fight scenes of the Matrix and combining them. My jaw hit the floor a few times, this movie was visually stunning. A Transformers like performance but with more humans this time. Hasboro has made lightning strike twice what can I say I loved this movie.
me: 8/10
rottentomatoes.com: 39% (frankly I thought that was high considering I hadn't seen a positive review yet)
IMDB.com: 6.2
Orphan
Ok I have to say that this director did a really good job putting the audience on edge for the first half of the flick. He likes toying with your emotions and at first its cool but I have to say by the fourth and fifth times he did it I screamed "fuck you" at the screen, and people around me laughed because I think they agreed. Isabelle Fuhrman (Esther) I think should get a best actress nomination because she absolutely stole the show. I have not been so freaked out by little girls since that scene in the shining where those little girls appear in the hallway when the kid is riding around in his big wheel. Except Esther is on screen for 100+ minutes while those girls had 10 seconds tops. I'm not going to get to detailed but there is a twist at the end you will not see coming but will make things come together nicely. It's hard to call this a horror flick but it kind of is. I would put it in the category of psycological thriller like the 6th sense. I had to drive home in a massive thunderstorm after which freaked the hell out of me and added to the creepiness of the movie. You know how some movies will have you sleep with the lights on or look around corners before you step out into the open? This movie will have that effect on people. Go see it, during the day though.
me: 9.5/10
rottentomatoes.com: 51%
IMDB.com: 7.2
Link in the title is for IMDB.com, THE place for average people reviewing movies. Rottentomatoes.com is where the "elite" aka movie reviewers have their say.
500 days of Summer
I had gone in expecting an interesting movie. When the movie opens you see the two main characters holding hands and her with a diamond wedding ring on so you know everything works out in the end like any lame-ass chick flick right? Wrong, dead wrong, and as a sidenote this story hit close to home because of how the guy gets dragged through hell but the secret (that I've learned, the hard way) is to never let things get you down too much. Zooey Deschanel (Summer) is absolutely amazing and might get nominated for some awards for her role, she had some very memorable lines. This movie could almost be viewed as a 16 candles version for guys in their 20's who have had their hearts broken by previous girlfriends. Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Tom) (also the kid from 3rd Rock and oddly GI JOE, more on that later) does a great job. Doing the male version of Ice Cream and chick flicks after his heart gets broken (his version is vodka, orange juice, and TWINKIES). The movie is what I hope chick flicks can become so the guys that get dragged to these enjoy it too. There is Chloe (Tom's 12 year old, and wayy too wise for her age little sister) who steals the few scenes that she was in. Overall I can honestly say I enjoyed this movie from its first to last frame, no fill 95 minutes of hilarity, heartbreak, and wisdom.
I give it a 9/10 and say this could be a dark horse for best picture.
rottentomatoes.com- 89% positive reviews (almost unheard of)
IMDB.com- 8.7(#129 on the top 250 all-time movie list, as of 8/9/08)
G.I. Joe
Let me start off by making two points, one I was too young to see the G.I. Joe saturday morning cartoons and two I went in to this movie having absolutely no expectations. I actually half expected to have to walk out of this movie. That being said I was STUNNED and sadly almost no one agrees with me on this. I thought that despite lacking in plot the two main characters, Snake Eyes (Ray Park) and Ripcord (Marlon Wayans) steal the show in the obvious good vs. bad and lost love angle. Of course the movie ends like all "good" movies do today, setting up the inevitable sequel (I was hoping they would wrap it in one movie like watchmen did but alas no luck). I haven't even mentioned the chase scene in Paris which is basically taking the best of the Jason Bourne car chases and the fight scenes of the Matrix and combining them. My jaw hit the floor a few times, this movie was visually stunning. A Transformers like performance but with more humans this time. Hasboro has made lightning strike twice what can I say I loved this movie.
me: 8/10
rottentomatoes.com: 39% (frankly I thought that was high considering I hadn't seen a positive review yet)
IMDB.com: 6.2
Orphan
Ok I have to say that this director did a really good job putting the audience on edge for the first half of the flick. He likes toying with your emotions and at first its cool but I have to say by the fourth and fifth times he did it I screamed "fuck you" at the screen, and people around me laughed because I think they agreed. Isabelle Fuhrman (Esther) I think should get a best actress nomination because she absolutely stole the show. I have not been so freaked out by little girls since that scene in the shining where those little girls appear in the hallway when the kid is riding around in his big wheel. Except Esther is on screen for 100+ minutes while those girls had 10 seconds tops. I'm not going to get to detailed but there is a twist at the end you will not see coming but will make things come together nicely. It's hard to call this a horror flick but it kind of is. I would put it in the category of psycological thriller like the 6th sense. I had to drive home in a massive thunderstorm after which freaked the hell out of me and added to the creepiness of the movie. You know how some movies will have you sleep with the lights on or look around corners before you step out into the open? This movie will have that effect on people. Go see it, during the day though.
me: 9.5/10
rottentomatoes.com: 51%
IMDB.com: 7.2
Friday, August 07, 2009
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