Does this sound familiar?

First of all. I've not written anything for a bit because of a 2 job run that's going on right now. While I've been busy doing that and dealing with Alex's surgery, I've also been reading. Here's a bit from Rand's Atlas Shrugged:

It was the chance conversation of two men somewhere behind her that came beating
suddenly against her closed attention.

“But laws shouldn’t be passed that way, so quickly.”

“They’re not laws, they’re directives.”

“Then it’s illegal.”

“It’s not illegal, because the Legislature passed a law last month giving him the power to issue directives.”

“I don’t think directives should be sprung on people that way, out of the blue, like a
punch in the nose.”

“Well, there’s no time to palaver when it’s a national emergency.”

“But I don’t think it’s right and it doesn’t jibe. How is Rearden going to do it, when it says here—“

“Why should you worry about Rearden? He’s rich enough. He can find a way to do anything.”

Instructions: Replace "Rearden" with "America." Think cap and trade. Fabulous.

Since everyone's playing the blame game...

why not join in?

If this is true, it's absolutely outrageous

Apparently to help his own campaign out, Barrack Obama asked the Iraqi administration to delay sending the troops back home. Isn't this the promise that he's been making to everyone. What a shmuck!

Local Politics

Yesterday we held city council elections for my city Warr Acres. I live in Ward 3 where you can see, if you visit the site today, that Phil Owens is the winner of our ward. Phil Owens is the eldest brother of one of my best friends growing up, David Owens. Something that's a bit funny about that is that my home owner's association, Wind Tree is in a lawsuit with Warr Acres and wants to resolve the situation. If I haven't mentioned it before, I'm the VP of the board for the association. We invited the incumbent, Walter Johnson and the other Ward 3 council member, Dean Johnson to the meeting. Dean Johnson returned our phone call to come and said he would come right off the bat. Walter Johnson, however, did not return our phone calls. Since I knew that Phil Owens was running for council and since he was a friend of the family, I called him up and invited him to our meeting. He said that he had heard about the meeting from Dean Johnson and that he had spokent to Walter Johnson about it and that Walter had said that he wasn't interested in going. I invited Phil and he said that he would come out.

The meeting was scheduled for last Wednesday (2/28) and we finally got a hold of Walter Johnson. He said (ready for this) that he was sick and couldn't come (yeah right). So Wednesday, I let everyone at the meeting know that when I invited Phil to the meeting, he had already told me that Walter wasn't coming. After that, everyone at the board meeting got behind Phil and in the end he won, but boy it was a close one. The final vote count was 136 votes to 132 votes. By the way, there are 4 members of the board of directors of Wind Tree.

Medicaid, a sign of what's to come with socialized medicine

I was watching Good Morning America (due to the fact that my wife likes the show) today and they were doing a piece on this little kid in New York who was dying from a heart condition. The condition (that I didn't pick the name up) has three different causes and there is a test that is administered by one single laboratory in the US. This laboratory had not applied "properly" for New York's medicaid program, however, and the kiddo couldn't get the test because, due to the paperwork hangups, New York wouldn't pay for it and his parents couldn't afford it. This was, according to GMA, due to the beurocracy in NY's medicaid program and according to NY due to the bureaucracy of the lab. Of course, since the media got into the picture, the problem has been solved, but my problem is that once this "holy" socialized medicine kicks in and this kind of crap becomes common place, will the media cover it or since it becomes common place will the media not care anymore?