SPPPLLBBBT!

That's how you spell it when you have just read something that causes you to spit your coffee out.

Michael Brenner of the Center for Transatlantic Relations, (whom I am not familiar with) has published a column at the Huffington Post (!) pointing out Obama's failure at diplomacy in the Middle East. It seems the 52 percenters are just now figuring out that The One is all show, no go. Brenner's piece is a withering, dead-on assessment of Obama's posturing about the neverending Israeli/Palestinian conflict. I am gobsmacked that this appeared in HuffPo. Read the article here and then read the comments and you will see, as it happens in real time, what it's like to witness the public coming to the realization that they made a huge mistake in electing Obama. Speechless, I'm speechless I tell you!

UPDATE: Gore Vidal joins the fail parade: "How’s Obama doing? “Dreadfully. I was hopeful. He was the most intelligent person we’ve had in that position for a long time. But he’s inexperienced. He has a total inability to understand military matters...."

UPDATE 2: Kathleen Parker, a putative conservative though previously an Obama admirer, bails out on Him, too.

More problems coming

Tim Cavanaugh at Reason.com has an excellent article about the accelerating collapse of the American real estate markets, both residential and commercial. Yes, I said "accelerating". Cavanaugh says that home mortgage delinquencies are "...rising at a faster pace."

In the meantime, Obama, Bernanke and the boys have all declared that the recession is over, to the point that O is on his way to Copenhagen to stump for the O-lympics coming to Chicago. Question: If by invading Iraq Bush took his eye off the supposedly more important war in Afghanistan, didn't O just do the same thing by ignoring the economic crisis while trying to put through his ridiculous health care reform bill? If the economy isn't functioning on all cylinders, there is no point at all in having health care reform.

I am all for reforming health care, or health insurance or whatever it is that the focus groups are telling Axelrod now, but I am opposed to this mess that O and the Dems in Congress have thrown over the transom. I would like to see, in no particular order:

• True portability, the way that our car insurance is portable.
• True competition in the insurance market. Let insurers compete across state lines.
• Pretty much everything that Whole Foods CEO John Mackey discussed in his Wall Street Journal commentary back August, link here.

In the end, we have to make significant changes to health care and the changes made should put more power and choice in the hands of the people, not their elected officials.

Death by Committee

The goddamn health care bill hasn't even been passed yet and it already has a rationing mechanism codified in it. I really thought they wouldn't write this sort of thing in it, preferring instead to let it appear as an administrative decision, or at least for it to develop over time. Read this horseshit:

"Beginning in 2015, payment would be reduced by five percent if an aggregation of the physician's resource use is at or above the 90th percentile of national utilization." Translated into plain English, it means that in any year in which a particular doctor's average per-patient Medicare costs are in the top 10 percent in the nation, the feds will cut the doctor's payments by 5 percent."

Full article here.

Pretend for a moment that you are a doctor. (Maybe you are a doctor.) Let's say that you specialize in age-related conditions; arthritis, cardiac care, pulmonary care. The day this bill passes, it's a safe bet that you will be in the top 10%, because you know that older patients require more attention and more expensive procedures. Your margins will be cut by 5 percent. What do you do? Take on fewer patients? Close your office every day at noon? You can't refuse to take on those 75 year olds, you're in medicine to help people after all and besides, it would be illegal to refuse care or the MediPolice will pay you a visit. If it's my practice, I would scale my practice down. The whole idea of forcing people to work more for less is an idea that could only be dreamed up in Washington. The rat bastards tend to forget that they work for us, not the other way around. Especially the control-freak Democrat rat bastards.

OK, Maybe a Different bugger...

My local entomologist told me it was the Japanese Hornet, but now have it on good authority that I am dealing with the European Hornet, Vespa Crabro (do you think that is where Vespa scooters got the name? Bet it is.):

Not as big, not as dangerous but still a pretty good sized, nasty bugger, but not potentially life-threatening like the dude down below there. Man, I gotta move into the city!

Been Away for a Few Days...

...been dealing with these:

Meet Vespa mandarinia, the Asian Giant Hornet or the Japanese Hornet. According to Wikipedia, getting stung by one of these monsters is like having a "a hot nail driven into your leg". Wikipedia also fails to mention, though, that they are now found not just in Asia, but right here in the southern US, specifically here in central North Carolina. I have probably killed upwards of a hundred of them in the last two months, half a dozen in the last week. The really bad part, for me, is that the ones that I have killed this week were killed while they buzzed the motion-sensor light on my back porch. Six feet from where I go in and out of the house. How do you spot a flying insect at night, before the light goes on? Answer: You don't.

My local extension agent gave some ideas on how to get rid of them, the best one being to call an exterminator. I would do that if I had any idea at all where the nest is. So, I have set a trap for them and hope that I get all of them before they get me. So far, I haven't been stung yet, but if I do, you will know about it.