The Tornado

Michael Ramirez nails it. Click to enlarge.

Quote of the Day

"I've come to New Hampshire today because I'm very concerned. I want to see the original long-form certificate of Donald Trump's Republican registration."

-- Rand Paul

Some notes on Donald Trump's politics, first from John Hinderaker of Power Line:

Donald Trump has no history as a Republican. In the past, he has contributed mainly to Democrats. He was as bitter a critic of President Bush as he now is of President Obama, and his policy positions--support for universal health care, protectionism--are, in key respects, more liberal than conservative.

Then there's this look at Trump by Michelle Malkin:

Trump has been wooing conservative activists for months and flirting with a GOP presidential run — first at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington and most recently at a tea party event in South Florida. He touts his business experience, “high aptitude” and “bragadocious” deal-making abilities. But he’s no more a standard-bearer of conservative values, limited government and constitutional principles than the cast of “Jersey Shore.”

Too many mega-developers like Trump have achieved success by using and abusing the government’s ability to commandeer private property for purported “public use.” Invoking the Fifth Amendment takings clause, real estate moguls, parking garage builders, mall developers and sports palace architects have colluded with elected officials to pull off legalized theft in the name of reducing “blight.” Under eminent domain, the definition of “public purpose” has been stretched like Silly Putty to cover everything from roads and bridges to high-end retail stores, baseball stadiums and casinos.

While casting himself as America’s new constitutional savior, Trump has shown reckless disregard for fundamental private property rights. In the 1990s, he waged a notorious war on elderly homeowner Vera Coking, who owned a little home in Atlantic City that stood in the way of Trump’s manifest land development. The real estate mogul was determined to expand his Trump Plaza and build a limo parking lot — Coking’s private property be damned. The nonprofit Institute for Justice, which successfully saved Coking’s home, explained the confiscatory scheme:

“Unlike most developers, Donald Trump doesn’t have to negotiate with a private owner when he wants to buy a piece of property, because a governmental agency — the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority or CRDA — will get it for him at a fraction of the market value, even if the current owner refuses to sell."

So, despite the Trump-induced media circus about Obama's birth certificate, Donald Trump is neither a conservative nor a free-market businessman. Instead he's an opportunistic leech on the taxpayer in capitalist disguise.

I'm willing to let him keep pushing for the release of more of Obama's documentation (in particular his college records), but don't want to let the guy anywhere near the GOP nominating process.

Happy Easter!

It's very simple:

Jesus wins.

Satan loses.

Read the Book.

Navy Medicine

Great video.



My roommate works at a Navy medical center in patient care. I'm very proud of her.

You can also watch it at YouTube here.

Quote of the Day

Today's quote is from an email I was copied on from one of my friends to our mutual friend, who had said she agreed with her daughter: This daughter posted on her Facebook status that Turner Classic Movies had ruined her by giving her unrealistic expectations of men.

"Unrealistic expectations of men, huh? You should socialize as much as I do, my friend. You won't have unrealistic expectations anymore. You will expect them all to be clods, ask inappropriate questions, not call back, lie, expect sex on the first date, drop you for someone younger, thinner, and stupid, who will then get knocked up and trap them...

Remeber, men are like parking spaces: all the good ones are taken, the rest are handicapped."

-- My friend the astrophysics major

Rescued Again!

A few years ago, I had some "special" challenges with my computer. A virus pretending to be antivirus protection invaded my laptop and tried to destroy it. But I stopped it with a little help from my friends in India.

All was good until Friday night just a little after midnight (that would be Saturday morning for those of you who get nit-picky about such things). A little box popped up from my taskbar, telling me that I might have a virus and should click on it to check.

Not having been born yesterday, I ignored it and double-clicked on McAfee to make it go find the virus and destroy it, but it said a crucial module was missing, so it didn't open. The virus must have stealth weapons that attack and disable the real antivirus software. I shut down my computer by holding down the power button and didn't turn it on again all weekend.

My daughter brought her laptop to my house yesterday, so I used it to sign up for my India buddies to clean up my system. Just after midnight I called and within a half hour, my new favorite friend Dinesh had my computer in tip-top shape again. Even better than before, because after the time I had to have my operating system re-installed, it couldn't find the icon for Internet Explorer, so I've been clicking on a generic icon to get to the internet for over a year.

Now the proper icon is back, thanks to Dinesh, who probably had no idea he was fixing that problem for me for free. It's good to be back.

Eating Budget Cuts

When you're talking about real money, like billions or trillions of dollars, those numbers are so big we have no clue how much that really is. So they give us analogies, like if you stacked dollar bills on top of each other, a trillion dollars would go to the moon and back and halfway to the moon again. But we still don't get that.

We do understand food, though.

Back in March, John Hinderaker at Power Line explained the $6 billion spending cut in that continuing resolution in terms of a Big Mac Value Meal.


Hinderaker gives the math, but I'll just cut to the chase:

So, consider: if you were to go on what the Democrats consider a starvation diet, and "slash" your calorie intake to exactly the same degree that the Republicans' $6 billion cut has "slashed" the federal budget, you would do the following. Go to McDonalds and order a Big Mac Extra Value meal. Eat the Big Mac. Drink the Coke. Eat 86 of the 87 french fries. Carefully take the last fry and bite off two-thirds of it. Put the remaining one-third of one fry back in the bag.

Yep. I understand that.

But that was then. This is now. Now they're talking budgets for whole years, not just continuing resolutions for three weeks. A year is over 17 times bigger than three weeks, and the proposed budget cuts are only 10 times bigger than the continuing resolution cuts. It feels as though we're going backwards, while Washington is screaming either that we've really done a Great Thing (the Republicans) or that we're Killing Babies and Old People (the Democrats). How do we make sense of it all?

With more food, of course. Leave it to Michael Ramirez to make understanding the budget cuts as easy as pie (HT: Power Line). Click to enlarge:


Now isn't that clear? They're all full of beans, soon to be followed by a lot of hot air.

And we're not swallowing any of it anymore.

Obama's Inner Bracket

There's a sport that people follow, but I don't because I'm not a sport. They call it basketball, but I don't believe that's really what game it is.

When I was in junior high, they taught us basketball, and there was this rule that I've never seen enforced in the professional version of the game. The rule is that if you're moving and you have the ball, you have to keep the ball bouncing. If you don't, you get called for traveling, and there's some dire penalty that you have to pay that I don't remember because it's been way too long since junior high.

They don't have that rule in the professional game that they pretend is basketball. The men with serious pituitary problems who play the game make a show of bouncing the ball once or twice, but who are they kidding? That's why I don't watch this sport, because I get too frustrated by the lack of ball-bouncing enforcement.

And there's another part of the sport that I have trouble understanding. There are two seasons each year that are devoted to "basketball." There's the Regular Season, and then there's the Tournament Season which lasts longer than Regular Season. And if you're a betting man (which I'm not), you pick the team you think will be the winner of Tournament Season, but it's not that simple. You can't just say, "I think this team will kick everybody's butt." You have to say exactly how you think the butt-kicking will happen by picking the butt kicker of every game and how that all works to having YOUR team be the top kicker of the other butt-kicking team's butt. All that kicking is written down in a format known as a bracket. And everyone who's a betting man (which I'm not) has his own bracket.

Got that? Me neither.

So what does this have to do with President Obama?

Much has been made in the news about Obama's 2011 bracket. This is for college basketball, but I don't know enough about how they play it in college to decide if it's fake basketball like the pros or if it's real basketball like high school. Even people I otherwise respect pay attention to college Tournament Season (Bekah's comment is what gave me the clue that people actually take ownership of their brackets), so it might be real.

The President has been criticized for playing the fiddle and not noticing that Rome is burning. Or something like that. But this isn't the point I'm trying to make.

Obama really likes having a bracket. So much so that he took time out of his busy presidential schedule to make not one but two: Men's and Women's.

There are other people who like brackets too. People who like to make brackets about things that aren't basketball (real or fake). One of those people is Zombie, who made a bracket about Presient Obama's inner cranial workings (HT: Power Line).

That’s all very well and good, but one wonders: Don’t we all have what is essentially an “inner bracket” which delineates our personal hierarchy of priorities, beliefs, behaviors and traits? If there was a bracket which revealed the inner workings of Obama’s mind, what would it look like? And what trait would emerge dominant?

Here's what she came up with. I think she came pretty close. (Click to see full size.)

Educating Afghanistan's Children

America's Marines are making it possible (HT: Mark Hemmingway at the Weekly Standard).

Don't let Corporal Lottering's South African accent fool you. He's one of ours.



If you want to donate, go to the Spirit of America's site here.

Quote of the Day

The confusion of the possessive "its" (no apostrophe) with the contractive "it's" (with apostrophe) is an unequivocal signal of illiteracy and sets off a simple Pavlovian "kill" response in the average stickler.

--Lynn Truss

From my Page-A-Day calendar that has excerpts from Eats, Shoots & Leaves.

Apparently, I am the average stickler. You don't want to be around when I see that someone has used the wrong "its" or "it's."

Who's Your Daddy?

You can tell by people's actions exactly who they owe their allegiance to. On my job my schedule is pretty flexible, so I can run quick reports for people in other parts of the organization. But when there's a conflict with my time, I'm answerable to my boss. She gets what she needs from me when she needs it, and everybody else has to wait. The other people understand, because that's the way of things everywhere.

The Democrats in the Wisconsin legislature have shown by their actions this week who they're accountable to, and it certainly isn't the voters who elected them. They're bought, paid for, and completely owned by the public employees' unions.

This is how the AP reported the reaction of the Democrats:

Faced with a near-certain Republican victory that would end a half-century of collective bargaining for public workers, Wisconsin Democrats retaliated with the only weapon they had left: They fled.

The Wisconsin state Senate needs one Democrat to be present in order to hold a vote. If they stayed in the state, they'd be subject to being arrested and brought back to the Capitol to vote for the losing side. So they did the scaredy-pants thing and ran off to Illinois in a desperate attempt to save the unions from having their chokehold on Wisconsin pried away.

In 2009, when Democrats were busy ramming Obamacare through Congress, they loved to say things like, "Elections have consequences." But since Democrats were turned out of office in 2010 in large numbers, they've stopped repeating that mantra. Just because they don't say it anymore, however, that doesn't stop the consequences of elections from happening.

It's 2011, and 2008 is nothing but old news. The election of 2010 is the one we're dealing with now. Last year voters overwhelmingly demanded fiscal responsibility by tossing Democrats out of office and replacing them with Republicans. Even in Wisconsin.

It's time for Democrats to face the consequences of the most recent election. In spite of what they may believe, their Daddy isn't the union bosses. Their Daddy is the voters, who won't be forgetting what a slap in the face the Democrats delivered. I see the back of a very big woodshed in the Democrats' future...

Why You're Not Married

This was posted Sunday. The day before Valentine's Day. On (you'd never guess) the Huffington Post. It's remedial help for feminists who find themselves suddenly wanting to be married. If you're a regular reader of my blog, this does not apply to you. Here are her top six reasons why "you" the feminist are not married (tasteful editing of bad words is mine):

1. You're a B***h.

Here's what I mean by b***h. I mean you're angry. You probably don't think you're angry. You think you're super smart, or if you've been to a lot of therapy, that you're setting boundaries. But the truth is you're pissed. At your mom. At the military-industrial complex. At Sarah Palin. And it's scaring men off.

The deal is: most men just want to marry someone who is nice to them. I am the mother of a 13-year-old boy, which is like living with the single-cell protozoa version of a husband. Here's what my son wants out of life: macaroni and cheese, a video game, and Kim Kardashian. Have you ever seen Kim Kardashian angry? I didn't think so. You've seen Kim Kardashian smile, wiggle, and make a sex tape. Female anger terrifies men. I know it seems unfair that you have to work around a man's fear and insecurity in order to get married -- but actually, it's perfect, since working around a man's fear and insecurity is big part of what you'll be doing as a wife.

I'll just list the rest. You'll have to read the article to see the details.

2. You're Shallow.
3. You're a Sl*t.
4. You're a Liar.
5. You're Selfish.
6. You're Not Good Enough.

OK. On second thought, I'll explain that last one. She means that "you" the unmarried feminist don't think you're good enough, so that affects your relationships.

My overall take on her assessment of this kind of never-married women is that she's exactly right. Men don't marry angry, shallow, sl*tty, lying, selfish women who think they're not good enough. Men of good character (which is the kind of man a woman wants to marry) marry women of good character. Which I suppose can be kind of a shocker for women of low character.

And the comments aren't nearly as apoplectic as I expected.

Going After Issa

Darrell Issa (pronounced "EYE-suh") is my congressman. When the Republicans took over the House, Issa became the chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (aka the Oversight Committee), and he promised to do plenty of investigating.

Funny thing, but the likely investigatees don't see Issa's promise as a good thing. So their friends have started what Politico calls an "anti-Darrell Issa crusade." (Can they say, "crusade"? I mean, Issa is Lebanese... you know, Arabic.... Isn't that hateful, racist, beyond-the-pale rhetoric? Just asking...)

But a handful of liberal political operatives in California — including a former Hillary Clinton hand — are taking their anti-Issa passion to a whole new level, launching a nonprofit group, a website and even paid media advertisements aimed at undermining and investigating the rabble-rousing chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

I didn't know my congressman was a genuine rabble-rouser.

The launch of this group — which calls itself The Third Lantern, and is naming the website the Issa Files — is remarkable because it’s wholly focused on the activities of one lawmaker who has no immediate plans to run for higher office. The purpose of this new group is to make public documents more public, make life difficult for Issa and sow seeds of doubt on his investigations.

They plan to run TV advertisements and other paid media in the future, saying they already have a “significant commitment” of cash.

The structure of the organization does not require that it disclose its funding.

But the goal is clear: Newman, Smith and the third partner, Sean Clegg, want to raise enough questions about Issa’s background and personal history that anything he turns up in probes of the Obama administration will be immediately discredited.

You can read about Issa's background and the kinds of incidents they're going to "expose" in the Wikipedia article about him.

Frankly, this smells of desperation on the part of the Left. They wouldn't want anyone to find out about the culture of corruption that's running rampant in the Obama administration.

Just be forewarned. When you read hit pieces about Rep. Darrell Issa, it's really about trying to keep the curtain shut that's hiding the truth about the man (Obama) behind it.

Gutenberg and Grammar

It's really about punctuation, but "Gutenberg and Punctuation" loses the alliterative effect, so I opted for taking alliterary license this time.

This year my boss gave a Page-A-Day calendar to each of us in our group. The lady next door got a Brevity calendar like the one I had last year, and I got Eats, Shoots & Leaves, which is all about the joys of proper punctuation.

Today, Lynne Truss quotes from the Oxford Companion to English Literature: "There never was a golden age in which the rules for the possesive apostrophe were clear-cut and known, understood and followed by most educated people." I must not be "most educated people."

I already knew, from my days trying to become a romance writer, that printers were responsible for the rule about the period ALWAYS belonging inside the ending quotation marks. The typesetting machines had a doohickey with a period-quote on it but a quote-period doohickey did not exist. Hence, the period always goes inside the quote. Same for the comma.

The last several days of my calendar trace the evolution of the use of the apostrophe, and all of the changes were the result of decisions made by printers.

First, in Shakespearean times, printers started using the apostrophe to substitute for missing letters. That's all the tiny apostrophe did. Possessives were on their own without any special punctuation.

In the 17th Century, printers started using apostrophes for singular possessives. In the 18th Century, printers added them for plural possessives as well.

If you've got your eyes open at all, you can see the trend. It's because of Gutenberg the Genius and his Marvelous Invention that we have apostrophes in use today, if only most of us could remember the right way to use them:

1. When letters are missing (gov't).
2. When it's a non-pronoun plural (the girl's dress, but NOT the dress is hers / the girls' dresses, but NOT the dresses are theirs).

And maybe there's a morphing of the language again, because people often choose to use it for plurals of acronyms or numbers (RUS's or 100's) because sometimes it looks funny without the apostrophe. But these haven't become hard-and-fast rules yet. Personally, I'm for using the apostrophe with plural acronyms but not with plural numbers.

Given a little more time, though, I'm guessing the printers will let us know what's correct for sure.

Handshakes

While I was blogging about my Lazy Saturday, I naturally went to IMDB to get links to the movies I was mentioning in the post. They had a banner across the top inviting me to watch a clip (not a trailer) from the upcoming thriller Black Death, starring Sean Bean. The clip is about two and a half minutes long.

There's a moment toward the end of the clip where the spokesman for the town offers his right hand to Sean Bean, who hesitates...

And during that offer of a hand and the hesitation, I wondered if people really shook hands in the Middle Ages, or if it might be a more recent cultural invention.

... and then decides to shake hands. Then he shifts his sword, which has been in his right hand in readiness for whatever danger the village may have held, to his left hand and shakes.

That's when I realized that a handshake is much more profound than a "Howdy, good to meet you."

A handshake is a disarming of oneself, a laying oneself bare to the risk of fatal attack. Sean Bean left himself undefended by his own sword (yes, he had his men as backup) when he gripped the right hand - the sword hand - of the stranger.

We speak about certain people having a "disarming smile," and this moment in the movie captures what that term means: someone whose smile is so warm and reassuring that you would willingly put down your defenses before them.

I don't know anything more about this movie, except that IMDB called it a thriller. So I suspect that this village has one or two secrets that the clip didn't reveal. But it taught me something already, that sometimes the little things in life have much bigger stories to tell.

I'll be shaking hands in the future with a fuller understanding of just what that means.

Lazy Saturday

It's one of those wonderful Saturdays when I have nothing I have to do. I had a smoothie for breakfast, something I don't have time to make - or eat - during the week:

1-1/2 cups frozen berries (I have about 1 cup strawberries & 1/2 cup mixed berries and usually end up with closer to 2 cups, but who's counting?)
1 cup non-fat milk (or a splash more if I went extra on the berries)
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp ground flaxseed (optional)
Blend. Eat. The whole thing counts as ONE serving! It takes a long time to eat.

I had planned to help a friend, who moved recently, put her kitchen stuff away today. But when I called her to arrange a time, she said she couldn't sleep a couple nights ago, so she got up in the middle of the night and got it done. Her furniture is arriving this afternoon, so we'll see what she needs help with tomorrow. And that frees me up today.

One of my Lazy Saturday favorite things I do is to follow the rabbit trail of internet news and commentary links on the sides of interesting articles I read. Last night I followed a link from one of the Working Group websites (Hugh Hewitt?) to an article on one of Breitbart's sites (I forget which one off the top of my head and don't want to back my way into it right now), and that had a link to a video of MSNBC's Chris Matthews hyperventilating over Sarah Palin's not-really use of "WTF" and contrasting that to Matthews completely agreeing when Sen. Grayson really used "STFU." To paraphrase Sarah Palin, if Chris Matthews didn't have double standards, he wouldn't have any standards at all. Well, I was too tired to watch it last night, so I left that video up on my computer when I put it in Stand By mode before I went to bed. So this morning I watched it.

But over on the side of that video was a link to some wonderful news for California. A California judge stopped the implementation of the state Cap-and-Tax law, because an extreme environmental justice group filed suit because they didn't think the law did enough damage to the business environment in the state, or something. Useful idiots can actually be useful once in a while.

And that article had a link on the side to Big Hollywood's Countdown of the Top 25 Christian Films, which turned out to be a plea for nominations for a list that will be announced this Easter.

Imbedded in the plea was a link to someone else's list of the Top 25 Conservative Movies. I have a lot of these movies. Things like, We Were Soldiers (Did you watch the video of Randall Wallace's keynote speech at the National Prayer Breakfast? Amazing!), 300, The Incredibles, and Groundhog Day, as well as the reasons for each choice.

Watching movies is one of my other favorite things to do on a Lazy Saturday. My roommate has Netflix, and this week the movie we got is The Edge. It's on the Top 25 Conservative Movies list. Now that I don't have other plans, we can watch the movie today. So as soon as my roomie gets back from the bank, I'll be in my spot on the loveseat watching a movie I now know will be safely conservative.

Have a happy Saturday!

Education Agenda

The light went on for me today. It's subtle but oh so clear.

Today's Page-A-Day calendar (daily excerpts from the book, Eats, Shoots & Leaves) has this quote:

The trouble with grammar books is that they are read principally by keen foreigners; meanwhile, native English-speakers who require their help are the last people who will make the effort to buy and read them.

I showed it to my next-desk office buddy, and she mentioned that they're not used by schools either. That's what flipped the light switch on.

The education establishment is dominated by people on the Left. People on the Left value "fairness" above all, with fairness meaning (to them), equal outcomes for everyone. Then-Candidate Obama said as much with his "spread the wealth around" comment to Joe the Plumber.

So what does that say about education?

It says that if America is on the top worldwide, that's not fair. After all, traditionally we have the biggest, best military (well, maybe China has more people in their military, but we're still the best); we have the biggest, most robust economy; we have the best advances in medicines and health care techniques. The Left just can't handle having all that best-itude in one place. They have to "spread the wealth around."

And they've decided to start with education. They don't teach our kids spelling and grammar and punctuation, but instead let them figure it out for themselves eventually. Which doesn't translate well onto the achievement tests.

A while back, my Page-A-Day calendar said that in the UK, by the age of 8 schoolchildren have been taught the three major uses of the comma (in lists, before dialogue, to set off a clause). So I asked my office buddy if her 9 year old has learned any of that. He hasn't. And the teacher is letting him spell things any way he wants to. There's some sort of psychobabble term for letting them keep their self-esteem over their spelling.

It's all part of the agenda. Make American kids do poorly so some other country's kids get a chance to shine. It's only fair.

Spilled Milk

Holy cow! Thomas Sowell's column tomorrow raises the issue of the EPA's latest power grab. Yes, it really is about spilled milk.

We all understand why the Environmental Protection Agency was given the power to issue regulations to guard against oil spills, such as that of the Exxon Valdez in Alaska or the more recent BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. But not everyone understands that any power given to any bureaucracy for any purpose can be stretched far beyond that purpose.

In a classic example of this process, the EPA has decided that, since milk contains oil, it has the authority to force farmers to comply with new regulations to file "emergency management" plans to show how they will cope with spilled milk, how farmers will train "first responders" and build "containment facilities" if there is a flood of spilled milk.

Milk has oil? Who knew???

Oh wait. I guess the EPA knew. And now their regulations will raise the price of milk, butter, cheese, yogurt, whipped cream, and ice cream. But it'll be worth it, because we'll be safe from... I'll let Sowell explain:

Does anyone seriously believe that any farmer is going to spill enough milk to compare with the Exxon Valdez oil spill or the BP oil spill?

Do you envision people fleeing their homes, as a flood of milk comes pouring down the mountainside, threatening to wipe out the village below?

It doesn't matter. Once the words are in the law, it makes no difference what the realities are. The bureaucracy has every incentive to stretch the meaning of those words, in order to expand its empire.

A long time ago, probably in the late 1970s, I saw the movie, The King of Hearts. It's set during World War I, when a British army private is sent into a French town to disarm a German bomb, and the Brits speak English, the Germans speak German (with English subtitles), and the French speak French (with English subtitles). But what the hapless private doesn't realize is that right before he entered the town, it was evacuated. Except for the insane asylum, whose inhabitants leave the asylum and pose as the regular townspeople. He has no idea, so he interacts with them as though they're normal.

That sort of thing is delightful to watch on a big screen. Throughout the madness, in the back of your mind you know it will end and you'll be going home where sanity reigns.

But it's distressing to know that the lunatics now have the power to regulate and control, to coerce and punish. If they have the power to regulate milk as though it's crude oil, there's no telling how far the draconian regulations will spread into all areas of our lives.

Stop the madness! (I just wish I knew how.)

Hu Disses America (Updated)

I first read about The State Dinner Incident at Power Line over the weekend when Scott Johnson quoted this report from the Epoch Times:

Lang Lang the pianist says he chose it. Chairman Hu Jintao recognized it as soon as he heard it. Patriotic Chinese Internet users were delighted as soon as they saw the videos online. Early morning TV viewers in China knew it would be played an hour or two beforehand. At the White House State dinner on Jan. 19, about six minutes into his set,< v="kroEprEpvtA"> Lang Lang began tapping out a famous anti-American propaganda melody from the Korean War: the theme song to the movie "Battle on Shangganling Mountain."< v="2-aTpkd6-P8">

The film depicts a group of "People's Volunteer Army" soldiers who are first hemmed in at Shanganling (or Triangle Hill) and then, when reinforcements arrive, take up their rifles and counterattack the U.S. military "jackals."

The movie and the tune are widely known among Chinese, and the song has been a leading piece of anti-American propaganda by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for decades. CCP propaganda has always referred to the Korean War as the "movement to resist America and help [North] Korea." The message of the propaganda is that the United States is an enemy—in fighting in the Korean War the United States' real goal was said to be to invade and conquer China. The victory at Triangle Hill was promoted as a victory over imperialists.

The song Lang Lang played describes how beautiful China is and then near the end has this verse, "When friends are here, there is fine wine /But if the jackal comes /What greets it is the hunting rifle." The "jackal" in the song is the United States.

Very nice. So glad we could throw a State Dinner for these charming people.

Today, though, Power Line's John Hinderaker followed up with this, quoting from Jay Nordlinger's post at The Corner providing a fuller descripton of the insult to America:

Last week, I had a note in this space about Lang Lang, who has become a kind of court pianist for President Obama and the Chinese leadership -- the Chinese dictatorship, to put it more bluntly.

He played at the Beijing Olympics. He played at Obama's Nobel ceremony. He played at the White House event for Paul McCartney -- the one at which McCartney made a ridiculous anti-Bush crack, which caused Lang Lang and the Obama crowd to laugh like hyenas. And he played at Obama's state dinner last week for Hu Jintao.

What did he play? Most notably and significantly, he played a famous anti-American propaganda song. Famous in China, that is. Wei Jingsheng, the great Chinese democracy leader, exiled in the United States since 1997, wrote a letter to Congress and Secretary of State Clinton. He said, "I listened to that music with a big shock." Wei explained that the song, "My Country," or "My Motherland," comes from "the best-known Communist propaganda movie about the Korean War," depicting the Chinese army's fight with the Americans. The movie is called The Battle of Triangle Hill. Wei said that the movie is as well-known in China as Gone with the Wind is here.

The song refers to the Americans as "wolves" or "jackals," and says that the Chinese will use weapons to deal with them. Wei commented, "Is that not an insult to the USA to play such . . . music at a state dinner hosted by the US President? No wonder it made Hu Jintao really happy." Yes, no wonder. As Wei pointed out, Hu is not ordinarily given to public emotion, but he emotionally embraced Lang Lang. ...

The Epoch Times quotes a Chinese psychiatrist living in Philadelphia, Yang Jingduan: "In the eyes of all Chinese, this will not be seen as anything other than a big insult to the U.S. It's like insulting you in your face and you don't know it, it's humiliating." In his letter, Wei said that so-called patriotic Chinese -- supporters of the Communist party and the dictatorship -- were ecstatic over "My Motherland" at the White House. One such "patriotic Chinese" exclaimed, "The right place, right time, right song!" (This is a phrase with roots in CCP propaganda, as the Epoch Times article explains.)

Either President Obama knew about the insult and approved - how could he, really, unless some Chinese person told him? - or he sat there and enjoyed the music, oblivious to the import of its meaning. Neither possibility speaks well for our president, his State Department, his advisors, or our nation.

The honor shown to the leader of a human-rights violating, oppressive, communist dictatorship by throwing him a State Dinner is bad enough, but to have that dictator and his loyalists insult our country in the process is beyond the pale. I'm not holding my breath, however, that President Obama will have any response at all. Just more of the same kowtowing to countries that want to destroy us.

Heaven help us all.

Update:

The White House did respond. They "insist[ed]
the song, 'My Motherland,' was no insult to the United States."

Oh. If they say so.

Think about it. When you hear the melody of "America the Beautiful," the lyrics never start running through your head. No. Not at all. And Sunday during communion, when the pianist started playing, "I Stand in Awe of You," my friend sitting next to me and I didn't start singing very softly with the music. No, that was just random squeaking we were doing, not singing the words!

The White House is either stupidly clueless or lying because their lips are moving. This was an insult to America, Hu enjoyed it, the White House is trying to cover it up, and there's no escaping any of that.

Debating Obamacare

In Congress they're debating the repeal of Obamacare. At the same time, a milestone in the national "debate" has been reached. Over half of the states are involved in lawsuits to escape Obamacare. One of the regular commenters at Michelle Malkin's blog, 123upnorth, a Canadian, had this to say about Canadacare, which is where Obamacare would take us:

I realize the constiutional argument is strong and should be fought and won. However, I want to implore Americans to fight the battle against healthcare not only on a consitutional basis, but based upon the grounds that the quality of healthcare within a publicly-mandated system will S.U.C.K. beyond explanation, whether or not the constiution allows for it.

I live in Canada and regularly have to travel to America for healthcare. In Canada, people don’t have adequate quality of health services, nor do they have access to it. For example, approximately 15% of Canadians are without proper access to a family doctor. The majority of patients, once referred to a specialist, wait anywhere from 3 to 6 months to see the specialist.

After waiting for a specialist, a patient then has to go on a waiting list to get diagnostics, then wait for a follow up appointment with the specialist, at which time the patient will be instructed as to whether other tests are needed. If surgery is scheduled after the first round of tests, the wait for this too can be extensive. Because of the extensive waiting times, patients become more sick than otherwise would be the case if they were seen faster and their chances of beating their ailments is reduced.

In the end, to go through the process of seeking help and getting full treatment, the duration can often exceed one year. And that is if everything goes well. If tests are inconclusive, if a patient needs a second opinion etc., the total duration can exceed 18 to 24 months.

Even more depressing is the fact that we don’t get to choose specialists for the most part because each family doctor only works with a few specialists in each field of treatment in their geographical region. Because there is such a shortage of family doctors, you can’t switch between them to get access to another group of specialists. If you receive inferior treatment from the specialist you are directed to, it is much harder to go elsewhere and get the needed referral.

Lastly, because there is no incentive for doctors and specialist to invest in better medical treatment technologies, advancements that are introduced in the ‘for profit’ system in America and elsewhere aren’t made available to Canadians because they don’t have to be made available. Think about it, why would a public system that has a monopoly ever invest in doing things better if they are the only option for patients?

A public system is a death trap and the only players in the trap that can side-step it and get adequate treatment are members of the privelaged class that have the connections to do so. You can already see evidence of this with all the wiavers that are being granted.

Commenter bjc added this to the conversation:

I am from Canada, with many family members still there, and all that 123 says is factual; It was deplorable 15 to 20 years ago, and worse so now; My parents have no good options to maintaining quality of life under such a system; It has been painful to watch them suffer in a supposedly first world country!

I realize the House doesn't have the power to completely repeal Obamacare at this time, but they do have the power to defund its implementation. I pray the Republicans in the House have what it takes to actually do it.