Meet the Roberts electric car. Built in 1896, it gets a solid 40 miles to the charge — exactly the mileage Chevrolet advertises for the Volt — the much-touted $31,645 electric car General Motors CEO Dan Akerson called “not a step forward, but a leap forward.”

I disagree with the comments critical over the lack of progress in 115 years. I see the $40K Volt’s equalling the 1896 Roberts’ performance as a notable achievement. That the Volt’s designers could match the accomplishments of a sane, civilized age whose industry wasn’t shackled and hamstrung at every turn by myriad inane and onerous government regulations & mandates surely ought to qualify the Volt as one of the great marvels of 21st century Marxist/progressive engineering.

After all, most of us assumed that zero & his Marxist friends and their Islamist allies were trying to roll us back to a 7th century standard of living. An 1896 living standard w/b a huge improvement. Personally I wouldn’t mind going back to an era when we had no federal income tax, no FICA, no IRS, no DOE, no EPA, no CMS, no Federal Reserve, no fiat currency, real gold and silver coins, no Obamacare, no War on Drugs, no Sarbanes Oxley, no suffrage, no designated hitter rule, no free agency, no juiced baseball, McKinley in the White House, and the phrase “gay 90s” meant something positive.

On the flip side, they didn’t have a space program back then, but then we don’t have one now either. At least the 1896’ers weren’t spending billions on a NASA whose primary mission is . . . raising Muslim self-esteem?!?

Yes, much better to live in the good old days when children worked in the coal mines and life was a beautiful thing.

Added bonus: the article includes a Moxie reference—yet another reason why 1896 beats 2011!

H/t: Drudge

Paul Krugman is a cowardly, evil, lying sack of dung-beetle excrement. (With apologies to other cowardly, evil, lying sacks of dung-beetle excrement whom I’ve defamed with the unfair comparison.)

On the 10th anniversary of the most horrific attack on US soil, this is what Krugman had to say:

Is it just me, or are the 9/11 commemorations oddly subdued?

Actually, I don’t think it’s me, and it’s not really that odd.

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. Te (sic) atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?

The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.

I’m not going to allow comments on this post, for obvious reasons.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/the-years-of-shame/?smid=tw-NytimesKrugman&seid=auto

This man is literally consumed with hatred—not against the perpetrators of indiscriminate murder and mayhem that day—but toward the patriots who responded to those attacks with decisive determination and resolve to prevent other attacks and bring those responsible to justice.

No response to this vile calumny is necessary. Krugman’s column does not even attempt to make a coherent argument or articulate a political position. His malevolent screed does not even rise to the level of “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” Rather, his words are evidence of something else altogether. Call it spiritual sickness, mental illness, moral imbecility or more precisely, the metaphysical refuse of a diseased soul. They all fit.

No response to this blood libel would be persuasive. You cannot convince a person through reason or logic to abandon positions (or hatreds) that were not arrived at by way of reason or logic in the first place. His despicable remarks deserve no response except condemnation by decent Americans on both sides of the political spectrum.

To put Krugman’s comments in proper context, it is worth recalling this: in the immediate aftermath of a bloody and brutal civil war that left over one million dead and nearly destroyed the union, Abraham Lincoln appealed to the better angels of our nature as he asked his fellow Americans on both sides to forego hatreds and divisions that make our current political disagreements look like petty schoolyard fights. Lincoln sought to heal the nation’s fresh wounds “with malice toward none, with charity for all.” On this, the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Krugman hijacks the memory of 3,000 dead and uses the hallowed ground of Ground Zero as a Porta-Potty to publicly dump on his political opponents.

I’m not surprised he disabled comments in advance “for obvious reasons.”

Cowardice and spitefulness are the obvious reasons that come to mind.

“Socialism is a modern incarnation of godlessness, the Tower of Babel built without God, not to raise earth to heaven, but to bring heaven down to earth. They hope to make a just order for themselves, but having rejected Christ, they will end by drenching the earth with blood, for blood calls to blood, and he who draws the sword will perish by the sword.”
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Our country desperately needs someone like this great American patriot in the White House.

Keep the Change. 
Let’s take back America . . . one branch at a time:
Congress—2010
The White House—2012

The Cleveland Plain-Dealer (4/24) editorializes:

State officials are poring over the Obama administration’s 961-page health care package to estimate its effect on Ohio’s perennial budget-buster, Medicaid costs. The math is understandably complex, and Ohio’s tab isn’t yet known.

But this is: The two-bill measure may add about 550,000 Medicaid clients to Ohio’s caseload over the next few years. Such an increase would blimp Ohio’s current Medicaid caseload, about 2.1 million people, by more than 25 percent. The congressional measures will make an estimated 275,000 more Ohioans eligible for Medicaid.

. . .

Because the federal health care legislation also will boost public awareness of Medicaid eligibility in general, Ohio analysts estimate that about 279,000 Ohioans — already eligible for Medicaid, but for whatever reason not currently participants — may sign up. For those already eligible Ohioans, however, the federal share of Medicaid costs will be the same as it is now — 63.4 percent. That means Ohio’s budget will have to muster 37 cents for every $1 spent in patient costs.

This is what I and other ObamaCare opponents have been saying this all along. As I wrote in a blogpost titled Adverse Selection on Steroids:

[ObamaCare] massively expands access to Medicaid, another bankrupt entitlement program largely responsible for the financial crises in many states. Think about this. While the government is cutting Medicare (which our parents and grandparents PAID FOR), it is expanding Medicaid. In other words, it’s taking away health benefits from seniors who paid for them while providing care for those who didn’t.

Needless to say, this predicted Medicaid expansion will force state governments to increase healthcare spending at a time when state budgets are about to implode thanks to European-style retirement benefits. I likened this massive increase in government spending during a severe recession to a person facing bankruptcy splurging on a brand new Rolls Royce.

However, the Cleveland Plain-Dealer editorial reaches a startlingly different conclusion:

An ounce of prevention is indeed worth a pound of cure. That’s why it’s reasonable to believe that Medicaid expansion may, in the long run, make less steep the seemingly perpetual upward curve in Ohio’s Medicaid costs. Still, the expansion approved by Congress and signed by President Barack Obama presents yet another long-term challenge to an Ohio budget facing plenty of hurdles already.

Yes, and it’s equally reasonable to believe this Medicaid expansion will increase the state’s supply of rainbows and unicorns for Ohio’s children. Safe bet the Plain-Dealer editorial board writers are donkeys.

PROBLEM
Finding a calculator with enough digits to perform simple math on the spending and stimulus packages coming from the Obama administration.

Have you found yourself trying to visually quantify the amount of money being proposed and spent in Washington? The Obama administration takes no shame in using the term trillions where most Americans were shocked when the term billions were used in recent years.

Look around your home or office for a calculator with enough digits for a trillion dollars. You’ll find standard calculators from school or office supply stores with 8, 10, or 12 digits. A trillion dollars is $1,000,000,000,000 (12 zeros) and requires a 13 digit calculator.

SOLUTION
The Obama Spendulus Calculator has 14 digits; enough digits for $99,999,999,999,999. That’s one dollar short of 100 trillion dollars.

The Obama Spendulus Calculator is a full featured calculator with large keys and an easy to read display. With 14 digits, it can handle the spending and stimulus packages coming from Washington.

Courtesy of Religion News Service:

(RNS) With her careers as veterinarian, astronaut and U.S. president behind her, Barbie has at last found her true calling: as a second-career Episcopal priest.

The 11.5-inch-tall fictional graduate of Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, Calif., has donned a cassock and surplice and is rector at St. Barbara’s-by-the-Sea in (where else?) Malibu, Calif.

She arrived at the church fully accessorized, as is Barbie’s custom. Her impeccably tailored ecclesiastical vestments include various colored chasubles (the sleeveless vestments worn at Mass) for every liturgical season, black clergy shirt with white collar, neat skirt and heels, a laptop with prepared sermon and a miniature, genuine Bible.

Apparently a devotee of the “smells and bells” of High Church tradition, the Rev. Barbie even has a tiny thurible, a metal vessel used for sending clouds of incense wafting toward heaven.

No word yet on when there’ll be a Bishop Ken doll complete with Diocesan checkbook to write large checks to his disgruntled former gay lover.

Since you work for a health insurance company, what impact will this health bill have not only on you, but the policy holders?

I’m sick of everyone having their hands out but I’m especially sick and tired of the politicians, Democrats and Republicans, who vote with what the latest poll indicators reflect rather than voting what they think is best
for their constituents and the country. As I’ve said many times before, the number one priority of every politicians is to win reelection.

I really don’t follow politics that close so I’m showing my ignorance here. But I needed to vent.

My response:

I have to correct you on two points. First, this isn’t Democrats and Republicans doing. Not a single Republican in either the House or the Senate voted for this. Second, this isn’t a case where the politicians are following polls instead of principles because a majority of Americans don’t want this. The Democrats are following principles, they’re just principles that are radically at odds with everything this once great country stood for, but would fit in with what Chavez is doing in Venezuela.

This healthcare law creates yet another unaffordable government entitlement program when the government has essentially maxed out its credit. The real purpose isn’t to lower costs (which will actually skyrocket once it fully takes effect in 2014), but to greatly expand the size and power of government and radically redefine the relationship of citizen and state, and not in a good way, i.e., more dependency, less freedom and personal responsibility.

Consider that our current national debt is approximately $15 trillion. Consider also that the national debt is not measured according to generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) that businesses use to report their finances, which include unfunded liabilities. Using GAAP, the US as a business would have a net worth of negative 70 trillion, nearly double the GDP of the entire world. Would you invest in such a business?

Given the predicament we are in, what’s Obama done? He’s increased the deficit from $400 billion under Bush’s last year in office to $1.8 trillion, with $2 trillion or greater annual deficits projected for the next decade. Using the government-created financial crisis as a pretext, Obama decided that healthcare “reform” was needed to “fix” the situation.

Instead of doing things that would help lower healthcare costs, the Democrats opted to take over 1/6th of the US economy. They used Enron-like accounting gimmicks to make the legislation appear almost affordable when it will cause the deficit to skyrocket. These gimmicks include: (1) counting 10 years of tax revenue and 6 years of spending (most of its provisions don’t take effect until 2014 after the Presidential election, (2) double counting the same savings under different headings, (3) funding some of the cost via Medicare cuts that are unlikely to happen, and (4) using unrealistically rosy projected economic growth to skew the numbers further.

Despite the various gimmicks, the CBO still says the legislation will cost 1 trillion. Take away the accounting gimmicks and the cost rises to 2.5 trillion. Even that figure’s too low because CBO estimates are invariably lower than actual costs. Why? Because they fail to take into account the spike in demand when something is “free” or somebody else is paying. Spikes in consumption when goods/services are provided “for free” are the CBO’s blind spot (not their fault, they have to score based on the assumptions they’re given and the government never assumes “free” will increase demand).

The 75% of Americans who currently have health insurance won’t see any benefit from this, but they will see their taxes go up. If this bill would leave the 75% of us alone and actually do something for the remaining 25%, it likely would have had bipartisan support. In reality, the bill will drive up costs on insurers and small businesses, causing premiums to skyrocket. This in turn will cause many companies to stop providing health insurance altogether, thereby increasing, not lowering the number of uninsured.

Costs will go up because the law says insurers can no longer deny coverage for pre-existing conditions or impose lifetime maximums. You don’t have to be an actuary to understand that this will cause premiums to skyrocket. Imagine if auto insurance companies were forced not to deny coverage for your car’s pre-existing conditions? What that means is people will wait until AFTER they get into an accident to buy insurance, and the insurance company will have to cover them as though they already had insurance. This undermines the very concept of insurance, which depends on the many people who stay healthy to cover the few who get sick.

The elimination of lifetime maximums has the same effect. When you buy auto insurance, you can get minimum coverage or pay extra for more coverage. The cost doesn’t go down when you increase coverage, it goes up. Another way of looking at what the bill does is from a financially responsible customer’s point-of-view. I have much more than minimum coverage with my auto insurance policy, but I don’t have unlimited coverage, because that costs more than I can reasonably afford. The government bill forces everyone to have unlimited coverage, whether we can afford it or not. What will that do to premiums?

Some people think this doesn’t affect them because their employer “pays for their healthcare.” This is nonsense. Our employers pay us less than they otherwise would because of the high cost of healthcare. When premiums skyrocket (Did I mention the bill also includes additional mandates that private insurance must provide, which will further drive up prices?), either our salaries will go down, our cost share will go up, or we’ll lose our healthcare coverage altogether. So much for the empty promise that if you like your existing insurance (most do), you can keep it (many won’t).

To address these obvious problems, the law forces people to buy insurance whether or not they want/need it. Except it doesn’t. The fine is much less than the cost of health insurance so most healthy people will find it cheaper to pay the fine than buy insurance until they get sick. One of the things that causes premiums to skyrocket and insurers to go broke is a problem known as adverse selection, which is what happens when you have a much sicker insurance pool than the general population. ObamaCare is adverse selection on steroids.

The new law also massively expands access to Medicaid, another bankrupt entitlement program largely responsible for the financial crises in many states. Think about this. While the government is cutting Medicare (which our parents and grandparents PAID FOR), it is expanding Medicaid. In other words, it’s taking away health benefits from seniors who paid for them while providing care for those who didn’t. Spread the wealth, eh, eh comrades?

I haven’t even mentioned the bloated Byzantine health care bureaucracy the legislation creates to decide what treatments/drugs will and won’t be covered, how much doctors/hospitals are paid, etc. The bill is over 2,000 pages long (not counting the many thousands more pages in regulations to follow). Compliance costs associated with this legislation will be enormous. Needless to say, this regulatory burden will not add one penny to our wealth as a nation. In fact, it will make us poorer. It’s as if we forced farmers to run on treadmills for several hours a day during harvest time, leaving them too tired to gather crops before they spoil. Government never seems to consider the opportunity cost of time wasted on activities that serve no other purpose than complying with arbitrary government rules and regulations.

To put this legislation in everyday terms, imagine if the government was an individual named Uncle Sam. Sam is completely broke, yet he wants to buy a brand new Rolls Royce (ObamaCare). Sam can’t afford the Rolls Royce, so he plans to use his inheritance from his grandfather (Medicare) to cover the payments. But Grandpa is broke too, and even if he had the money, he wouldn’t give it to his miserable grandson who stole from Grandpa to buy a new sports car for his girlfriend (Medicaid).

Even if Grandpa had the money and was willing to give it to Sam, how can Sam afford a Rolls Royce when he’s maxed out all his credit cards and has several girlfriends with expensive tastes. Yet Sam just went and bought himself a Rolls Royce.

What kind of person behaves this way? Someone who belongs in jail or on Jerry Springer. Which tells you exactly the kind of Congress and President we have.

And to top it all off, that Rolls Royce is actually a lemon.

That’s why Americans who’ve been following this are so stoked. But I’m not worried for the poor Democrats. They’re going to ram through immigration “reform” next to add 7–10 million new Democrat voters to provide even more Hope and Change.

Just like in Venezuela.

“On the very day Toyota was making a high-profile defense of its cars, one of them was speeding out of control,” said CBS News–and a vast number of other media outlets worldwide. The driver of a 2008 Toyota Prius, James Sikes, called 911 to say his accelerator was stuck, he was zooming faster than 90 miles per hour and absolutely couldn’t slow down.

It got far more dramatic, though. The California Highway Patrol responded and “To get the runaway car to stop, they actually had to put their patrol car in front of the Prius and step on the brakes.” During over 20 harrowing minutes, according to NBC’s report, Sikes “did everything he could to try to slow down that Prius.” Others said, “Radio traffic indicated the driver was unable to turn off the engine or shift the car into neutral.”

In fact, almost none of this was true. Virtually every aspect of Sikes’s story as told to reporters makes no sense. His claim that he’d tried to yank up the accelerator could be falsified, with his help, in half a minute. And now we even have an explanation for why he’d pull such a stunt, beyond the all-American desire to have 15 minutes of fame (recall the “Balloon Boy Hoax” from October) and the aching need to be perceived as a victim.

I wonder if this character is connected to Government Motors and/or the UAW.

Here’s a snippet from Episode 1 of Season Six:

These people are stuck on an island. They tried detonating a bomb to disrupt a space time continuum, which is 100 times better than using a boat when trying to get somewhere. The bombing didn’t work (or did it?!?!?! it didn’t.) so now everyone is dying left and right and everyone is mad at Jake (sic) because his plan didn’t work. Juliette is trapped under a bunch of steel. How’d she get there? She fell down a hole, survived, and then beat an H-bomb (according to my cable TV episode guide) with a rock til it blew up. Sawyer seems pretty grouchy about the whole thing. Juliette dies. Meanwhile, the Indian guy got shot but they just ignored him even though he was coughing up blood and still had a chance to live. I guess they figured since Juliette was at the center of a bomb detonation, they had less time to save her.

This island also has ghosts of people who died in Westside Storyesque knifefights (Jacob) or bald people (John). The ghosts are of differing helpfulness. The Jacob ghost tells the fat guy to take the dead Indian to a hole in a temple and not to forget the guitar case. That sounds like the beginning of a joke or one of those sentences that contains every letter of the alphabet.

The more I watch this character, the more I’m reminded of a 1970’s era Soviet apparatchik desperately grasping for smidgens of positive news to report amid the devastating failure of the latest Five Year Plan. Witness Harry in December 2009 describing the 3.7 million jobs lost during Obama’s first year in office as “great progress.”

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.”
—George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” 1946

H/t: Drudge