Clipping blog

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• Clearing the Browser Tabs – Podcast Suspense Tuesday Edition
• So Sad: It’s Possible that Snooki Will Book a Commencement Address Before the President
• It’s Not a Death Panel If It’s Just One Person, Right?

Clearing the Browser Tabs – Podcast Suspense Tuesday Edition Posted: 08 Mar 2011 03:10 AM PST If all goes well, I’ll have a fantastic guest on tonight’s Delivery Show. If all dos not go well, I have a few topics locked and loaded and, though I can’t promise I’ll bring the rant, I can’t not promise it either. More than likely, though, I’ll have a guest for the full hour, pending a confirmation or two. No, I won’t tell you who quite yet because that ball is still up in the air and the person I believe it till be may not be the person it actually will be. What I can say is that tonight’s potential guest has been on the show before and is very entertaining. There. Cryptic enough? Trust me, you’ll enjoy whatever happens on the live show tonight. And now, links! Iowahawk is back at it again with another withering takedown of Paul Krugman. Actually, it’s a continuation of his original takedown, wherein he answers Krugman’s many feeble defenders. The results are just as brutal as the original, though. Awww…isn’t that cute. Arianna Huffington’s unpaid dupes think they deserve a piece of the millions she reaped from all their hard work. America really is broke, though you’ll have a very hard time convincing the New York Times of that fact. Has Barack Obama created a brand new underclass? Signs say Yes. Pat Austin takes us on a tour of Mardi Gras in Shreveport, LA. Cool stuff. I’ve enjoyed the ongoing series of James Bond movie reviews at Big Hollywood. Here’s the most recent one, this time about You Only Live Twice. The NHL will roll out a new ad campaign for the 2011 Stanley Cup Playoffs and I really like what I’ve seen of it so far. I also remember the Capitals/Islanders four-overtime game that is the subject of the second clip at the link. I watched it live and went to bed broken-hearted. Guillermo del Toro’s celluloid rendition of At the Mountains of Madness is reportedly a go. Filming should start in June and the movie will star Tom Cruise. This is one of my favorite Lovecraft stories, so I very much hope del Toro hews at closely to the original as humanly possible. If he does, he’ll still get a very creepy horror adventure flick that will pack the theaters.

So Sad: It’s Possible that Snooki Will Book a Commencement Address Before the President Posted: 07 Mar 2011 08:26 PM PST Normally, a President is overwhelmed at this time of year with invitations to speak at high school commencement exercises all over the country. Not this year. No, folks, this year the bloom is off the Hopenchange rose. The White House is ramping up an effort to promote a nationwide competition to decide which high school wins a commencement speech by President Obama. An internal White House memo indicates that the White House is facing a shortage of applications less than a week before the deadline. The competition was extended from the February 25 deadline until Friday, March 11 after few schools met the original application deadline. CBS News has learned a White House Communications Office internal memo dated February 22 noted “a major issue with the Commencement Challenge.” “As of yesterday we had received 14 applications and the deadline is Friday,” the memo said. The memo also urged recipients to, “please keep the application number close hold.” Does anyone know how many public high schools there are in the United States? Anyone? You…yes you, in the back. What’s that? You said about 20,000? Bingo! As of the 2007-2008 school year, there were about 20,000 public high schools in the United States. Of those, only 14 had any interest at all in the President as a commencement speaker. That’s 7/100 of one percent. In other words. Ouch. According to the memo, the White House is so desperate to get more invites that it’s asking members of Congress, Governors, Mayors, and Cabinet members to shake the educational trees in the hopes that a few more ripe apples will fall into their hands. I wouldn’t expect them to find many more takers. What student body wants to sit for an hour and listen to the President drone on and on about the future and how we need to win it knowing full well that he’s left them a future full of debt payments and unemployment? Allah says he almost feels sorry for the guy. Me, I’m just cruel enough to splash about in the warm, comforting schadenfreude. Perhaps once this harsh rejection from the very naive youth whose adulation he was hoping to ride into a second term sinks in, we’ll get ourselves a humble President more interested in getting the heck out of our way so we can win the present. I wouldn’t bet on it, but I can hope.

It’s Not a Death Panel If It’s Just One Person, Right? Posted: 07 Mar 2011 01:05 PM PST I don’t suppose it’s far for me to point to this story and mutter “Death Panels” under my breath because an actual panel isn’t involved. It’s just one woman who, thanks to the her national government, wields a ridiculous amount of power and wants to let babies die because she thinks the money spent to save their lives could be better spent elsewhere. Babies born after just 23 weeks of pregnancy or earlier should be left to die, a leading NHS official has said. Dr Daphne Austin said that despite millions being spent on specialised treatments, very few of these children survive as their tiny bodies are too underdeveloped. She claimed keeping them alive is only 'prolonging their agony', and it would be better to invest the money in care for cancer sufferers or the disabled. Dr Austin, who advises local health trusts how to spend their budgets, said doctors were 'doing more harm than good by resuscitating 23-weekers' and that treatments have 'very marginal benefit'. The NHS spends around £10million a year resuscitating babies born this early and keeping them alive on incubators and ventilators. I could, quite literally, write thousands of words about the questions this doctor has loaded into just a few sentences. How much is your life — or any human life — worth? How does that amount change when the decisions are made by unaccountable bureaucrats instead of the people most affected by the decision? Who is Dr. Austin to determine whether your child’s life is valuable enough to save? I won’t even begin to answer any of these questions, because, quite honestly, I can’t. Neither can anyone else. In truth, Dr. Austin is only telling you what she thinks the British Government can afford to keep a baby alive, not what she believes that baby’s life is worth. In truth, if it cost a million dollars to save a baby’s life, there are people all over England who would come up with that money in short order of their own volition. But that’s the problem with government-run health care systems. With a finite pool of money, the bureaucrats in charge can’t leave the decisions to doctors or patients. Those folks would say all sorts of crazy things like “Damn the cost; save the baby!” and “Price is no object”. But in government-run health systems, price is the only object. Expensive long-shots like keeping a prematurely-born baby alive, or extending the life of an old person a couple more years will always lose to safer methods used on healthier patients. Before long, we simply let the weakest among us die off because we can’t afford to keep them around. It’s not a long step from there until we have de facto eugenics, as preached by progressives for at least a hundred years. I’m pretty sure we don’t want to go down that road, which is why we need to practice a little mercy killing of government-run health care here in our own country. UPDATE: More thoughts here, from Old Line Elephant.

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