Posts from — November 2010

The Miami Herald reports that Legislators inadvertently give ‘pill mills’ a break

TALLAHASSEE — In their zeal to slow down government regulations, Florida lawmakers have inadvertently halted an effort to regulate so-called “pill mills” that fuel an epidemic of prescription drug abuse.

The regulations were set to take effect Sunday for most pain clinics. But they are stalled by a new law intended to crack down on expensive state regulations. The law requires legislative approval of rules that have a significant fiscal impact.

The twits in Tallahassee “accidentally” passed a bill that would stop the cut off a certain radio host from his Oxycodone supply from cash-only “pain clinics”.

In Florida medical clinics are currently only subject to inspection and regulation if they accept insurance payments. Barbers have more stringent requirements than doctors, and that is a relic of their profession’s past as the surgeons and dentists in the 19^th century.

This highlights the need for a Swiss Army knife in every room: Woman stuck in bathroom for three weeks

French firefighters have freed a 69-year-old woman who spent three weeks trapped in her bathroom.
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Police said the woman, who is recuperating in hospital, survived by drinking warm water from the bathroom tap and at night tried to call for help by tapping on piping.

But neighbours in the apartment block said they thought someone was doing home repair work and launched a petition to find out who it was and to have it stopped.

Apparently the lock on the bathroom door jammed trapping her inside without the ability to dismantle it.

For future reference: ‘S’ is three short and ‘O’ is three long. It is important to tap on the pipes in a consistent pattern as most humans will eventually realize that it is a message and not random noise.

The next housing association meeting should be ‘interesting’. You have to wonder why it required a petition to find out who was doing the tapping. There may be a rule against knocking on your neighbor’s door 😈

Thought for the day: They put the gaskets in the faucet stem kits for a reason, so it really does make a difference if you don’t use them [you bloody stupid, incompetent maroon who wasted my day locating the leak inside the wall].

After the latest artillery exchange the President says that North Korea is ‘a serious threat’ and South Korean leader threatens ‘retaliation’.

North Korea has been a threat since the Truman administration. My Father and I both were awarded service medals for dealing with those mentals. They are going to be staging a number of provocations to prove the mettle of the newly designated heir-apparent Kim Jong-un who will be taking over from his father, Kim Jong-il. The boy has to show the military leaders that he’s tough and worthy of respect. The reality is that only China has the possibility of putting a lid on this insanity.

It is being reported that a Pakistani shopkeeper conned Afghan and Western officials into believing that he was a top member of the Taliban, and he received some major “gifts” to help government-Taliban negotiations. If I had ever been in Pakistan, I might remember that most of their shopkeepers were fairly astute negotiators, so it would be a logical move on the part of the Taliban, or a gutsy rip-off on the part of the shopkeeper. All officials are denying this happened for the record, but many have already admitted it off the record.

In the US I see that Government Leaders Can Skip Security, TSA Says. That should make everyone feel safer knowing that only the “little people” have to put up with these indignities. Of course, there are a number of Repub Congresscritters who don’t seem to remember that they are carrying a weapon when they show up at the airport. They say they need a weapon because DC is so dangerous, not realizing that the “little people” don’t get to carry weapons to protect themselves, and they don’t have the multiple layers of armed officers that the Congresscritters have available 24/7. “All men are created equal” but some are more equal than others.

But you take what is offered.

Lucy Morgan of the St. Petersburg Times continues her coverage of the Taj Mahal courthouse

TALLAHASSEE — Chief Judge Paul M. Hawkes resigned Friday from the top job at the 1st District Court of Appeal, just a few weeks before moving into a new courthouse critics have dubbed the “Taj Mahal” and “Taj MaHawkes.”

Hawkes, 53, who did not resign from the court, would not discuss his reason for resigning as chief judge before his term was up June 30, 2011.

Hawkes offered his resignation at an emergency conference with his fellow judges Friday morning. In a one-sentence letter later in the day, court clerk Jon Wheeler notified the Supreme Court and other district court of appeal judges of the election of Judge Robert T. Benton II to replace Hawkes.
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Hawkes says the building, nearing completion about six miles east of the Capitol, is dignified and appropriate for a courthouse. He contends state legislators contributed to the escalated costs by requiring that the court build an environmentally friendly structure.
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He [Hawkes] also has been in a dispute with the Supreme Court over the use of some of the space in the new building. [Supreme Court Chief Justice Charles T.] Canady is exploring using some of the new courthouse to house administrative employees who work for the entire court system and are now housed in rental quarters at a cost of about $287,000 a year.

He’s still a judge, but he did lose the top spot. He is a classic bureaucratic empire builder with an unlimited sense of entitlement. He is also a classic deficit hawk – the little people need to tighten their belts so he can have mahogany paneling and granite counter tops. The crack about “environmentally friendly” is typical because he doesn’t care what the utility bill is, and he certainly doesn’t want to share space with anyone’s “peasants” but his own.

Because you probably don’t really know what it means if you watch the M$M.

Erika Bolstad of McClatchy Newspapers has a nice piece about this: Alaska faces tough road if Congress really cuts earmarks

WASHINGTON — Long the reigning champion of earmarks and never a state to turn down federal money, Alaska may have to change its ways as Congress reconsiders a practice that’s come to symbolize runaway government spending.

House Republicans last week voted on an earmark ban that will take effect when they assume control of the chamber in January. Their Senate Republican counterparts also approved a moratorium — notably without the support of Alaska’s senior senator, Lisa Murkowski.

The Welfare States are in for a bit of shock when they find out that the Feds are not going to be picking up the tab for their stupidity, thanks to the “deficit hawks” and Tea Party minions.

Julia O’Malley’s opinion piece in The Anchorage Daily News gave them fair warning in January.

It was afternoon and I was on my way to a chemistry class. I had stopped for a drink of water when the news came over the speakers in the classrooms.

For those who weren’t alive at the time: remember what you felt on September 11, 2001 for a taste of November 22, 1963. It was a massive change for the worldview of my generation and it marked the beginning of a period of disruption and decline in the civility of American society. Arthur had died and Camelot fell.

At his inauguration John Kennedy made the point: “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.”

The colors of my world will never be as bright as they were on November 21, 1963.

I see little hope that there will be any change for the better as the current President attempts to return to a time that never existed = the good old days of Reagan.

Having already expressed some doubts about Obama in Debunking the Reagan Myth on 21 January, 2008, Krugman decides that Obama has consumed the kool-aid in FDR, Reagan, and Obama.

His policy choices are not a matter of attempting to find a “bi-partisan solution”, Barack Obama is a true believer in the myth of Ronald Reagan.

Hyper-Patriotic Order of ChickenHawks

A yellow ribbon with brown edges indicating that they listen to bad pop songs, and what would happen if they had to serve. The bronzed base metal medallion has a bas-relief of a mouthy cartoon character with delusions of grandeur. The members are awarded the white feather device for each armed conflict they advocated for while avoiding service.

It is time to haul it out after five years as we have discovered a candidate for the Commandant of the Order: Bryan Fischer.

Badtux nominated him when Mr. Fischer became upset that they award the Congressional Medal of Honor for something other than killing a lot of people. Had Mr. Fischer ever served in the military he would know that killing people is the job of a number of military specialties, and you don’t get medals for doing your job.

Adrastos at First Draft was so ticked off by Mr. Fischer’s attitude that he made him Malaka Of The Week.

Now Digby notes that Mr. Fischer is pushing the concept that Christians are supposed to be killing Muslims because John the Baptist said so – if you read the Bible in the right light, at the proper time of day, and take certain pharmaceuticals, or something. Apparently Mr. Fischer’s Bible doesn’t contain the Gospel of Matthew, and makes no reference to the Sermon on the Mount or the Beatitudes because that is pacifist propaganda which should be ignored.

If anyone cares, the “just war” is a concept from Augustine, not the Bible.

Like it says on the sidebar, I started putting my opinion out there for people to criticize six years ago, after annoying other people on their blogs.

I missed the cut as a paleo-blogger because I didn’t start until after the disaster of the 2004 election. My anger over the stupidity of the US electorate in re-electing the Shrubbery needed a release and this was it.

Things were a lot more collegial back then, as there were almost no “professional” bloggers, and a blog roll was manageable, but you can’t live in the past or people will assume you’re senile [if you have gray hair].

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of those who stop by, as it helps me maintain the belief that I’m not talking to myself.

The BBC On This Day widget notes that on this day in 1939 German police were ordered to begin arresting the Roma and shipping them to concentration camps. The Nazis didn’t limit their persecution to a single minority group, but filled the camps with just about every group that didn’t fit their concept of “racial purity”.

At no time was it noted that Dr. Goebbels dismissed a member of the propaganda ministry for making disparaging remarks about an ethnic minority – that was the specific function of entire departments at the ministry.

That’s what makes Fox News chairman Roger Ailes’s denunciation of NPR executives as Nazis over the termination of Juan Williams so weird. Williams’s comments and the Fox News reaction of hiring him immediately is more in line with the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda than what NPR did.

The article notes that Mr. Ailes has apologized to the Anti-Defamation League for his use of the word “Nazi”, but no one at Fox has ever apologized to Muslims for the stereotyping and slurs at the core of this incident. Mr. Ailes also used his apology to cast new slurs at NPR.

I was already aware that as a professor of Constitutional law, President Obama has some rather unusual views of the meaning of the Bill of Rights, but he is apparently just as ignorant about the history of the United States.

Anglachel pointed this out in her post today, but the error was so egregious I looked for the transcript to verify what was said.

The statement was made in the White House meeting with five bloggers that I mentioned, so I knew that Duncan had what I was seeking.

This is a quote from the transcript of the October 27, 2010 meeting with “liberal” bloggers, in which President Obama said:

This notion that somehow I could have gone and made the case around the country for a far bigger stimulus because of the magnitude of the crisis, well, we understood the magnitude of the crisis. We didn’t actually, I think, do what Franklin Delano Roosevelt did, which was basically wait for six months until the thing had gotten so bad that it became an easier sell politically because we thought that was irresponsible. We had to act quickly.

I’m quoting the entire paragraph to provide the available context for the remark.

In the Wikipedia article, New Deal, subsection – The First Hundred Days they note” “Ever since, presidents have been judged against FDR for what they accomplished in their first 100 days.”

The basic programs of the New Deal were law within 100 days of the inauguration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It required calling Congress into session to make this happen, but he set the standard for every President since.

President Obama was parroting conservative revisionist history which is filled with lies about Presidency of FDR. As he apparently believes this garbage, I see no reason for Democrats to vote against impeachment when the Republicans push their trumped up charges. It’s not as if a member of their party was being attacked.

She’s Back

That doesn’t look like food.

[Editor: Lucrezia has been hanging out at a neighbors, but they have moved, so she’s back eating with the “family”. Actually she isn’t nearly as hostile and skittish as she was as a kitten, and the look is more puzzled than concerned because it was near “dinner time”.

Friday Ark

I’m “working” on two rentals that my Mother manages to get them ready to rent, so my time near a computer has been limited.

I’ve noticed a major reduction in inventory at the big box “home improvement” stores, with things I have used for years no longer available, and a lot of cheap substitutes for things that are not inexpensive, just obviously cheaply made.

There is something wrong with the world when you have to wait for them to “mix” off white interior paint and you can’t to buy anything smaller than a gallon.

Why would anyone sell a 3½-inch door hinge with a non-removable pin?

Before this is over I just know I will be yelling at people. This does not help my anger management routine.