From the “Best of the Web Today”

Great Moments in Socialized Medicine

“X Factor judge Simon Cowell showed his more generous side [yesterday] when he gave £100,000 [about $160,000] to help save the life of a cancer-stricken youngster,” reports London’s Daily Mail:

The pop Svengali donated the money for 18-month-old Sophie Atay–from Birtley, Gateshead–to fly to the US for pioneering treatment at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital in New York.

He acted after learning the youngster’s family launched a last-ditch appeal for £500,000 to pay for the treatment last week after they were told Sophie was suffering from a rare form of neuroblastoma and needed treatment within days.

Alexandra Burke, last year’s X Factor winner, broke the news to Sophie’s mum Karine, 33, on the telephone today that Simon had now dipped into his own pocket to top up the total to the necessary amount.

Wait, we’re confused! Why does a little English girl have to come all the way to the U.S. to get medical care, and why does this Cowell fellow have to pay for it? We thought Britain had free medical care!

But wait, another Daily Mail story reports on what happens to older people who get cancer in Britain:

Alarming research is showing that elderly cancer patients are missing out on the breakthroughs in chemotherapy and surgery that have dramatically improved the outcome of younger patients.

In fact, up to 15,000 elderly people with cancer in the UK are dying prematurely every year when compared to the rest of Europe and the U.S., according to a report published by the North West Cancer Intelligence Service (NWCIS) which compiles cancer statistics. . . .

A major concern is that the NHS Cancer Plan, introduced in 2000 to improve cancer survival in the UK, has a cut-off point at 70. This results in hospitals having less interest in the elderly. “Yet half of all those diagnosed with cancer are over 70,” says Dr Tony Moran, NWCIS research director. “It’s an area that has been grossly neglected. . . .”

Yet according to former Enron adviser Paul Krugman, “In Britain, the government itself runs the hospitals and employs the doctors. We’ve all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories are false.”

click for larger

Obama a tough guy, at least with Fox News

The strange disparity between the heavy-handed community organization at home and the ever cockier untouchables abroad risks making the commander in chief look like a weenie – like “President Pantywaist,” as Britain’s Daily Telegraph has taken to calling him.

The Chicago way? Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight? In Iran, this administration won’t bring a knife to a nuke fight. In Eastern Europe, it won’t bring missile defense to a nuke fight. In Sudan, it won’t bring a knife to a machete fight.

Mark Steyn

Two European Nuclear Scientists Arrested as Al-Qaeda Suspects

“What’s going to happen if al-Qaeda gets their hands on WMD?” the pilot asked.

“They already have,” the defense contractor said. Then he told the story of how, just last January, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) had bungled a WMD experiment using bubonic plague.

“None of you press wrote about that,” the man said, eyeballing me.

I had to correct him because I did write about that story — for Pajamas Media [1]. My article cited two papers, the Sun and the Washington Times; I couldn’t locate any firsthand sources with access to the information. “How do you know that the information was correct?” I asked my fellow banquet guest.

“I was at the military briefing,” he said. Then he added that the briefing was not classified and included several members of the press.

“Why do you think that story wasn’t more widely reported?” I asked.

He said something to the effect of: there are some things the public finds easier to ignore.

I had the same reaction when I returned home from my trip on Friday night to read a single-line item on the Counterterrorism Blog [2]: “Switzerland: Terror cops arrest Collider scientist linked with al-Qaeda,” it said. The Collider is the largest nuclear research facility in the world. For at least the next forty-eight hours the story did not appear anywhere in the U.S. press, despite the fact that the arrested nuclear scientist, a 32-year-old Algerian-born French man named Dr. Adlene Hicheur, was being described by France’s Central Directorate of Interior Intelligence as a “very high-level” operative with AQIM. That’s the same group who’d been experimenting with bubonic plague earlier in the year. Adlene Hicheur had attended Stanford University [3], in California, in 1999 and 2002.

via Pajamas Media

Just keep your head in the sand folks, there’s nothing to see here…

Quote of the Day

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage.”- Alexander Tyler

via boortz.com.

Good thing there is no such thing as a “Death Panel”…

or any of that hideous “rationing” in the UK system, technically none anyway…:

AN 80-year-old grandmother who doctors identified as terminally ill and left to starve to death has recovered after her outraged daughter intervened.

Hazel Fenton, from East Sussex, is alive nine months after medics ruled she had only days to live, withdrew her antibiotics and denied her artificial feeding. The former school matron had been placed on a controversial care plan intended to ease the last days of dying patients.

Doctors say Fenton is an example of patients who have been condemned to death on the Liverpool care pathway plan. They argue that while it is suitable for patients who do have only days to live, it is being used more widely in the NHS, denying treatment to elderly patients who are not dying.

via Daughter saves mother, 80, left by doctors to starve

No illusions here…

LONDON (MarketWatch) — In a decision as shocking as Friday’s surprise peace prize win, President Obama failed to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences Monday.While few observers think Obama has done anything for world peace in the nearly nine months he’s been in office, the same clearly can’t be said for economics.

The president has worked tirelessly since even before his inauguration to wrest control of the U.S. economy from failed free markets, and the evil CEOs who profit from them, and to turn it over to wise, fair and benevolent bureaucrats.

From his $787 billion stimulus package, to the cap-and-trade bill, to the seizures of General Motors and Chrysler, to the undead health-care “reform” act, Obama has dominated the U.S., and therefore the global, economy as few figures have in recent years.

Yet the Nobel panel chose instead to award the prize to two obscure academics — Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson — one noted for her work on managing collective resources, and the other for his work on transaction costs. See full story on the Nobel winners.

Other surprise losers include celebrity noneconomist and filmmaker Michael Moore; U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner; and Larry Summers, head of the U.S. national economic council.

It is unclear whether the president will now refuse his peace prize in protest against the obvious slight to his real achievements this year.

via Obama fails to win Nobel prize in economics – MarketWatch

A million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 31 years. A trillion seconds is 31,688 years.

Quote of the Day

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. – C. S. Lewis

Time for Obama to Act Like a President

Richard Cohen:

The trouble with Obama is that he gets into the moment and means what he says for that moment only. He meant what he said when he called Afghanistan a “war of necessity” — and now is not necessarily so sure. He meant what he said about the public option in his health-care plan — and then again maybe not. He would not prosecute CIA agents for getting rough with detainees — and then again maybe he would.

Most tellingly, he gave Congress an August deadline for passage of health-care legislation — “Now, if there are no deadlines, nothing gets done in this town . . . ” — and then let it pass. It seemed not to occur to Obama that a deadline comes with a consequence — meet it or else.

Obama lost credibility with his deadline-that-never-was, and now he threatens to lose some more with his posturing toward Iran. He has gotten into a demeaning dialogue with Ahmadinejad, an accomplished liar. (The next day, the Iranian used a news conference to counter Obama and, days later, Iran tested some intermediate-range missiles.) Obama is our version of a Supreme Leader, not given to making idle threats, setting idle deadlines, reversing course on momentous issues, creating a TV crisis where none existed or, unbelievably, pitching Chicago for the 2016 Olympics. Obama’s the president. Time he understood that.

Quote of the Day

It is not hard to see why a standing ovation awaits the president at Turtle Bay. Obama’s popularity at the UN boils down essentially to his willingness to downplay American global power. He is the first American president who has made an art form out of apologizing for the United States, which he has done on numerous occasions on foreign soil, from Strasbourg to Cairo. The Obama mantra appears to be – ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do to atone for your country. This is a message that goes down very well in a world that is still seething with anti-Americanism.

via The UN loves Barack Obama because he is weak

Quote of the Day

The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money. – Alexis de Tocqueville

Hi, we're all giant neo-marxist douchebags.

Oceania Visible On Horizon 25 Years Later

Victor Davis Hanson:

We were once told that military tribunals, renditions, the Patriot Act and Predator drone attacks in Pakistan were George Bush’s assault on the Constitution rather than necessary tools to fight radical Islamic terrorists.

Not now. These policies are no longer criticized — even though they still operate more or less as they did under Bush. Guantanamo is still open, but no longer considered a gulag. The once-terrible war in Iraq disappeared off the front pages around late January of this year.

George Orwell, a man of the left, warned us that freedom and truth are not just endangered by easily identifiable goose-stepping goons in jackboots. More often he felt that state collectivism would come from an all-powerful government — run by a charismatic egalitarian, promising to protect us from selfish, greedy reactionaries.

Orwell was on to something.

ObamaCare: Using his own words against him

JustOneMinute: There He Goes Again (Just Don’t Call Them “Death Panels”).

Medal of Freedom for a racist and anti-semite?

Yes we can!

Israel Matzav: Surprise: Mary Robinson wasn’t vetted

Obama Joker Poster Popping Up In Los Angeles

It’s sad because the comparison is very apt. They both want to frack up a good thing….

Obamacare courtesy of Dr. Marx

Who is in Your Wallet?

zeitgeist by drudge, snark by jcrue

He does a better job than most – DRUDGE REPORT

click the image

And they will make us look like idiots….

for committing “progressive suicide” in this nation:

German Chancellor Angela Merkel defended her plan to cut taxes despite the country’s soaring budget deficit as she introduced her conservative alliance’s manifesto ahead of national elections in September.

Lower incomes taxes would “provide motivation” and encourage economic growth, Ms. Merkel told a conference of her party, the Christian Democratic Union, and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union.

“It would be wrong not to do what is right and necessary for growth, and so prevent ourselves emerging quickly from this crisis,” Ms. Merkel said in her conference speech.

via WSJ.com

Hopefully, Obama is watching and that he might learn something useful to our nation.

ReasonTV on healthcare

New additions to the store

One-timers…

I’m headed to Tahoe for the weekend, so I’m gonna leave you with these tidbits.

First, in the true Obama tradition of pissing on the military every chance he gets is this story I missed in May.

SWORDLESS SAILORS

Graduating midshipmen of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis are being told in writing to leave at home or in their vehicles all “ceremonial swords” and anything else “that might be considered a weapon or a threat by screeners” for Friday’s outdoor commencement ceremonies featuring an address by President Barack Obama.

Inside the Beltway has obtained the academy’s list of prohibited items for this year’s graduation exercises, which, besides ceremonial swords, includes umbrellas.

Yes, cell phones and texting are still allowed.

via Inside the Beltway – Washington Times.

I don't understand you and therefore, I fear you...

I received these comments via email:

No Weapons for Anyone

From today’s you couldn’t make it up if you tried file…….Obama’s protectors have ordered graduating Midshipmen….and I suppose Commissioned Officers through Flag rank…to leave their swords at home. Full Dress White includes “wear sword”. More to the point…those badges of office have been earned in a manner Obongo and his minions just wouldn’t begin to understand. Important traditions that inspire are kind of lost on the red banner crowd, apparently.

Further, ceremonial swords never seemed to bother the Secret Service for any previous President. And before World War II, the swords were not particularly “ceremonial”, I’ve seen some of those blades, boarding actions did occur on the China Station pre-war against river pirates, warlords, etc. Those swords were worn not just to graduation, but to Inaugurations, in the receiving line at the White House afterward, to the Inaugural Ball. Somehow nobody gave it a second thought. Somehow even Presidents in the past didn’t presume to specify items of uniform.

But of course, what worked for Harry Truman, Ronald Reagan, F.D.R., the Bushes, T.R., any other rational non-cult leader…..doesn’t work for this former state senator anointed by the Chicago machine.

Does he secretly consider our Naval and Military leaders “the enemy”? Perhaps the message this sends escaped his handlers. Sad. And …..follow me on this Obama and minions…..insulting. Actually it’s contemptible.

You can’t make this stuff up. Even the Clintons didn’t show this much disdain for our military and their traditions. He should have spent less time with Ayers, Wright, and the rest of his little circle of friends and more time with the likes of Colin Powell, Petraeus, and the men and women who really serve this nation.

Here’s the second shot: Hope And Change — But Not For Iran

Millions of Iranians take to the streets to defy a theocratic dictatorship that, among its other finer qualities, is a self-declared enemy of America and the tolerance and liberties it represents. The demonstrators are fighting on their own, but they await just a word that America is on their side.

And what do they hear from the president of the United States? Silence. Then, worse. Three days in, the president makes clear his policy: continued “dialogue” with their clerical masters.

Dialogue with a regime that is breaking heads, shooting demonstrators, expelling journalists, arresting activists. Engagement with — which inevitably confers legitimacy upon — leaders elected in a process that begins as a sham (only four handpicked candidates permitted out of 476) and ends in overt rigging.

Then, after treating this popular revolution as an inconvenience to the real business of Obama-Khamenei negotiations, the president speaks favorably of “some initial reaction from the Supreme Leader that indicates he understands the Iranian people have deep concerns about the election.”

Where to begin? “Supreme Leader”?

I gotta a delivery to make to my fellow Americans and our allies alike

Well, these brave Iranians can’t vote for Obama, so what does he really care. He has 230+ years of progress to destroy.

Ralph Peters comments:

We just turned our backs on freedom.

Again.

Of all our foreign-policy failures in my lifetime, our current shunning of those demanding free elections and expanded civil rights in Iran reminds me most of Hungary in 1956.

For years, we encouraged the Hungarians to rise up against oppression. When they did, we watched from the sidelines as Russian tanks drove over them.

For decades, Washington policymakers from both parties have prodded Iranians to throw off their shackles. Last Friday, millions of Iranians stood up. And we’re standing down.

That isn’t diplomacy. It’s treachery.

And finally, comes this from the only Middle Eastern ally who would fight with us if necessary: ‘6% see US administration as pro-Israel’

That’s down from 31%, way to go Mr. President! Now I understand these posters much better.

It’s 3:00 AM, Mr. President

Via Gateway Pundit: Please quit hitting the snooze button, sir.

Enough with the personal anecdotes, Mr. President!!! (updated)

They are MEANINGLESS to the serious issues you are supposed to be discussing. Just read this clip from your terrorism speech today:

…I believe with every fiber of my being that in the long run we also cannot keep this country safe unless we enlist the power of our most fundamental values. The documents that we hold in this very hall – the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights –are not simply words written into aging parchment. They are the foundation of liberty and justice in this country, and a light that shines for all who seek freedom, fairness, equality and dignity in the world.

I stand here today as someone whose own life was made possible by these documents. My father came to our shores in search of the promise that they offered…

via Los Angeles Times

Are you frickin’ kidding me? You want to bring up your dad?

Your biological father didn’t come to America for those things our founding documents promise, he came for an education.

Plain and simple. (Well, there were a few “other” things…wink wink nudge nudge, know what I mean?)

Your father could have received the same education anywhere in the world and did not benefit from anything uniquely American. He didn’t have to come to America to get what he did. He came (no pun intended) and went in what, four or five years, and then he spent the rest of his life in Africa, right?.

Not exactly the example I would use of how one benefits from what our Founding Fathers created. His story sounds more like how one benefits from a few drinks, some smooth talk and a nice smile at a party. So please, stop spinning yarns and blowing smoke.

Respectfully, Mr. President, please explain to me again how your father coming to America for a degree or two along with a few pieces of tail has to do with the ugly, difficult, painful, and deadly work of protecting this country and its citizens. You know, that important work you have only been doing the last few months and for the first time in your life?

Because after reading your speech I have the feeling you still don’t get it. You don’t understand the big picture. You still sound like a pie-in-the-sky Liberal who lives in an imaginary world world of relativism and intangibles and not an American leader.

Hopefully, in the next few years you will learn you can’t miracle peace, love, and cooperation with our enemies with “just words”, speech-i-fi-cation and personal anecdotes. It takes a great deal more than what you have displayed to preserve those things our founding documents intend for us. But until then you leave the White House, please save the family stories for the hags on The View and your sycophants in the Dominant Media in the future.

UPDATE: This is also a great description of the speech I think hits the nail on the head:

Obama’s is the speech of a young senator who was once a part-time law professor–platitudinous and preachy, vague and pseudo-thoughtful in an abstract kind of way. This sentence was revealing: “On the other hand, I recently opposed the release of certain photographs that were taken of detainees by U.S. personnel between 2002 and 2004.” “Opposed the release”? Doesn’t he mean “decided not to permit the release”? He’s president. He’s not just a guy participating in a debate. But he’s more comfortable as a debater, not as someone who takes responsibility for decisions.

UPDATE: Report: One-fourth of overseas votes go uncounted

I wonder which political party benefits more from military votes not being counted.

hmmmm.

Let’s get ACORN to look into this for us!!!

UPDATE: Case in point.