Clipping blog

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Clearing the Browser Tabs – It’s the Coercion, Stupid Tuesday Edition Posted: 28 Jun 2011 03:10 AM PDT I’m going to put two stories above the links here because they’re both big and they are, in a way, related to each other. First, read Doug Ross article on the administration’s plan to send undercover rats “secret shoppers” into physicians’ offices to see which doctors will take Medicare patients and which will not. I see his conclusion, that at some point the coercion will come, as dead-on. What other purpose could such a program have other than to determine which doctors need the corrective hand of Obamacare upon them? He linked to an Avik Roy article at National Affairs that details what only the most obtuse or dishonest among us still deny — Medicare is doomed unless we make some pretty significant changes to it as soon as possible. The only weapon that remains in the progressive holster is the brute use of government force to keep the system wobbling along for perhaps a few more years, long enough certainly to ensure that the people who are in office right now can away to their lavish retirement pensions and benefits, not to mention their considerable personal fortunes. When that coercion comes, you can be sure that any of our complaints will be met with the same bored response that the TSA has given us to explain why it needed to search a 95-year old, wheelchair-bound, Leukemia patient’s adult diaper. These days, “our officers acted professionally and according to proper procedure” is the new “we were just following orders”. Don’t forget to clear the decks at 9:30 PM Eastern tonight for the live recording of The Delivery. We’ll celebrate our 100th episode with some old friends and lots of fun. You will kick yourself later if you miss it tonight. And now, links! Line of the day, from Ace: “I’m sure they mean well. I’m also sure they attended a party commemorating Frasier’s last episode.” Of course business owners are sitting on their money. What sane person would sink money into a business with so much uncertainty about which way the government will jump between now and 2012? Dear young Democrats, here is a big reason you are unemployed right now. Finally, there is a reason to like Hewlett-Packard. Well, hello crazy left-wing anti-war protesters! I had begun to think you all had fallen asleep after January 20, 2009. Jeff Goldstein saw a rough cut of the Sarah Palin biopic The Undefeated and really liked it. I suppose I had better pay some attention to it now. Normally, I avoid grand biographical movies about politicians, especially ones who are still alive. Such efforts stink as much of ego as do the obligatory “stuff I’d do if I had just a little more political power” policy books members of Congress write from time to time. But if the movie blew Jeff away, it might be more than I think it is. Want a preview of Erich Whitacre’s newest choral piece? Sure you do. Here’s “Alleluia”, a vocal adaptation of a wind piece called “October” he wrote a few years ago. James Lileks saw Cars 2 and, while he liked it, he didn’t love it.

Hang Your Heads, New Orleanians, For Your Beloved Ex-Mayor Has Beclowned You. Again. Posted: 27 Jun 2011 04:33 PM PDT "...and the CIA Death Needles were this long!" What a wonderful representative for the city of New Orleans former Mayor Ray Nagin turned out to be, huh? Not only did he botch the city’s response before, during, and after Hurrican Katrina about as badly as it could have been botched, but he’s also one heck of a conspiracy theorist. The former mayor of New Orleans has revealed how he became so paranoid after Hurricane Katrina he was convinced the government was trying to poison him. Ray Nagin also tells the bizarre story of how heavily-armed men in combat suits allegedly stormed his command centre and attempted to plant bugs, as he led the response to the 2005 disaster. He makes the revelations in a self-published memoir, Katrina’s Secrets: Storms After the Storm. You really don’t want me to stop quoting the story here, do you? No, I didn’t think so either. He said it first started after his infamous rant on September 1, in which he attacked two U.S. Senators who allegedly boasted ‘about how well things were going’, even though evacuees were still living in terrible conditions. He wrote: ‘I thought to myself, 'I'm a dead man! I have just publicly denounced the governor, U.S. Senators, FEMA and the president of the United States. ‘I started wondering if during the night I would be visited by specially trained CIA agents. Could they secretly shoot me with a miniature, slow-acting poison dart?’ Because, goodness knows, everyone who criticized President Bush before Hurricane Katrina ended up dead, right? I mean, we had to hold special elections left and right for all the Representatives and Senators who mysteriously croaked after denouncing George W. Bush as a warmonger, liar, and thief. And the airwaves? Why you cojuldn’t find a left-wing bomb-thrower anywhere on the broadcast dial, radio or television. If not for the vast progressive farm team, MS-NBC would ahve had to go off the air. Not to mention Air Americ…oh wait. Well, that did go belly-up, but not until 2006 and certainly not because its staff suffered a series of coincidental accidents after they criticized the Bush administration. But back to Nagin. Oh, did I mention that this book is Volume One in a series? Yes, there’s more of this on the way. His paranoia reached new heights the Monday after the hurricane, when he visited the USS Iwo Jima, an assault ship which served as the base for the federal rescue operation. When he arrived, he was taken to the infirmary, where two doctors ‘had orders to examine me and give me shots.’ He wrote: ‘I was still a little paranoid and again started imagining a secret CIA plot where in six months I would be gone,. ‘After thinking for a minute, I said to them, “Okay, you can give me shots, but I want you to do the same for my two security guys”. ‘My thinking was it would have been easier to spin that stress ultimately took me out, but it would be much harder to explain all three of us suddenly dying mysteriously.’ You know what the funniest words in all of Nagin’s quotes are? “My thinking…” If Nagin had been thinking at any point during Katrina, his city wouldn’t be the utter wasteland it is right now. People might have their lives back who still haven’t been made whole at least in part because this assclown couldn’t tell the difference between routine inoculations to keep him from dying from a disease transmitted by the fetid water and a CIA death injection. Then again, if Nagin had been thinking about six months ago, he would have stopped his publisher from printing this embarrassment of a book.

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