Respect

From Public Secrets.

Meanwhile, Back In The Rest Of The Country

Outside of the Obama echo chamber in Washington (and the bigger one in the media) there are other things happening. For example, a number of states are looking at the pile of money Washington is pushing at them and finding that the strings attached are not a good thing. CNN blames it all on Republicans, but this is a real problem. Washington is pushing itself into the business of the states. It is time for the states to push back. Some are.

From Montana to South Carolina, lawmakers in mostly red states have pushed ahead with measures calling for state sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment, saying the federal government has overstepped its bounds with the stimulus package. The states are calling for the right to ignore laws they deem unconstitutional.

Oklahoma state Sen. Randy Brogdon, a Republican and the first to introduce this type of legislation last year, originally pursued it because he thought then-President Bush and Congress exceeded their authority with the Real ID Act, which required states to include certain information on driver’s licenses.

He called the stimulus package “immoral and unconscionable” and said it was “the final straw that broke the financial back of America.”

Brogdon’s bill passed the state Senate on Wednesday and the state House approved a similar measure. The office of lead House sponsor Republican Rep. Charles Key said it is confident a joint resolution will get through.

The legislation would be binding. So, if the governor signs it, it theoreticallly(sic) would allow Oklahoma to ignore laws that are not “enumerated and granted to the federal government by the Constitution,” as stated in the Tenth Amendment.

Could it be that the red states are not quite so in love with big government?

Well, duh.

The states that are pushing back here are in the right, not of the right. The latest spending spree by Washington Democrats usurps the powers reserved for the states by the constitution. Pushing back is what is needed. Too bad some states (by inference from the story, mostly blue ones) are more in love with the money than they are in resisting the surrender of their rights.

Obviously, the economy is not the best. However, it has been worse in the past. It has always recovered. So why the rush to surrender sovereignty in the name of a short-term money fix? Put it down to greed or stupidity.

Found On Yahoo! News

The “Gimme” menatality on full display:

Things Lost

Or the day I killed the Crabitat.

For the past two weeks or so I have been trying to get the original bluecrabboulevard.com domain back up after the hosting company took it down. I can’t really blame them, the site was having real issues with slow SQL queries. The lags became so bad that it was impacting the entire server. I was able to get the .net domain up and running as a backup. Then I tried to find someone to fix the website.

This turned out to be more than a bit difficult.

I still have not received replies to emails I sent to several website designers who advertise the ability to handle any problems with websites. One I did hear back from offered to build me a nice, custom website for the better part of a grand. Without being sure they could repair the old site.

Regular readers know I am a bit of a geek. Okay, more than a bit. But I’m a hardware geek or a software user geek. I am not a programmer. The most formal software training I have ever had was in Fortran 77. I do not know anything about PHP and my knowledge of SQL is all more than 20 years out of date. And that was a one week course.

So, yesterday, I finally reached the point where I had to decide what to do absent any expert help. I had to kill the Crabitat. In other words, completely erase the existing WordPress installation and the database. Three years of posts, comments, pictures, etc., etc.

I talked it over with tech support at the hosting company (and they have generally been great throughout all this mess). They advised backing up everything, especially the irreplaceable image files.

So I downloaded the image files to my computer, logging the directories they had been placed into so they could be reloaded. After I had everything I thought I needed, I flipped the switch, so to speak, and deleted the entire Crabitat.

Then I reinstalled WordPress into the newly empty space and the hosting company helped migrate the database back from the backup domain. After that reloaded, I loaded the image files back into where they had been before the euthanasia, flipped the switch again and went live with the “new” website.

And have since discovered that I missed one (or more) files in my backup efforts. Some images are gone. If I’m lucky, I have those files in a huge .tar file that the website backup routine made. If not, they are gone forever, at least from here. (They may live on in Google cache, but I’ll have lost them.)

Ah, well. I was forced to fix several problems with the old website and to clean up some database problems. So, in that sense, some good has come of this. It has still been very painful to get through. I’ll reinstall any other files I can in the next few days. For now, I’m back on line with a site that appears to be running fairly well. Albeit with a few less files.

Math President Is Hard….

Remember the furor over Teen Talk Barbie, ‘way back in the early ’90s? A small number of the dolls shipped with programming that had the doll say, “Math class is tough!” That morphed into “Math is hard!” as the story went nationwide – even though that isn’t what the dolls said. Well, the Obama administration IS saying that “being President is hard!” as an explanation for Barack Obama’s insulting of Gordon Brown and, by extension, Britain. No, like, really they are.

Sources close to the White House say Mr Obama and his staff have been “overwhelmed” by the economic meltdown and have voiced concerns that the new president is not getting enough rest.

British officials, meanwhile, admit that the White House and US State Department staff were utterly bemused by complaints that the Prime Minister should have been granted full-blown press conference and a formal dinner, as has been customary. They concede that Obama aides seemed unfamiliar with the expectations that surround a major visit by a British prime minister.

But Washington figures with access to Mr Obama’s inner circle explained the slight by saying that those high up in the administration have had little time to deal with international matters, let alone the diplomatic niceties of the special relationship.

Allies of Mr Obama say his weary appearance in the Oval Office with Mr Brown illustrates the strain he is now under, and the president’s surprise at the sheer volume of business that crosses his desk.

A well-connected Washington figure, who is close to members of Mr Obama’s inner circle, expressed concern that Mr Obama had failed so far to “even fake an interest in foreign policy”.

You have got to be kidding me. It comes as a surprise to Obama and his administration that being president is actually a full-time job and then some? He’s so overwhelmed by the job that he is spending an awful lot of time in permanent campaign mode, flitting about for photo-ops? So he’s too tired to even fake an interest in foreign policy?

This is the President of the United States? Too tired to even pretend to be a gracious host to an ally? Too tired to assign a staffer to get a decent gift for the leader of an important ally? To tired to offer anything like a grown-up excuse for his thoughtlessness?

Gosh. Math IS hard.

UPDATE: This story is now up at Memeorandum. Some others blogging: Pajamas Media, Flopping Aces, Power Line, JustOneMinute, QandO, Wizbang, Hot Air,

Chicken Penguin

When is a penguin a chicken? When he’s afraid of the water.

As his feathered friends bathe happily in the pool below, Kentucky the penguin sticks to his perch and looks on – because he’s afraid of cold water.

The petrified penguin, refuses to take the plunge at Blackbrook Zoological Park, Leek, Staffordshire.

But staff at the zoo have seen 11-year-old Kentucky become a surprise hit with visitors due to his unusual phobia.

It’s possible that Kentucky, being the runt of the litter, so to speak, has less tolerance for cold water as the zoo staff tells it. On the other hand, he just might have internet access.

How To Insult An Ally

Mark Steyn looks at Barack Obama’s shoddy treatment of Gordon Brown.

Evidently, the White House gift shop was all out of “MY GOVERNMENT DELEGATION WENT TO WASHINGTON AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT” T-shirts. Still, the “classic American movies” set is a pretty good substitute, and it can set you back as much as $38.99 at Wal-Mart: Lot of classics in there, I’m sure – “Casablanca,” “Citizen Kane,” “The Sound Of Music” – though this sort of collection always slip in a couple of “Dude, Where’s My Car? 3″ and “Police Academy 12″ just to make up the numbers. I’ll be interested to know if Mr. Brown has anything to play the films on back home, since U.S.-format DVDs don’t work in United Kingdom DVD players.

Steyn makes a bold prediction: After four years of the Obama ego, our relations with the rest of the world will be far worse than they were under George W. Bush. I suspect he’s right. I don’t think we’ll see many of our allies treated very well by Obama. But I’m quite sure our enemies will love him.

Obama doesn’t really seem interesting in much of anything but staying on endless campaign and seeing how gloomy he can be about the economy. While using that economy as a reason for expanding government and spending money like mad, of course.

Read the whole thing, Steyn is, as usual, witty and brutal at the same time.

UPDATE: Well, when I wrote this line, “But I’m quite sure our enemies will love him,” I had no idea how quickly this would pop up over at Memeorandum.

 President Obama declared in an interview that the United States was not winning the war in Afghanistan and opened the door to a reconciliation process in which the American military would reach out to elements of the Taliban, much as it did with Sunni militias in Iraq.

The difference, of course, being that George Bush didn’t reach out after telling the enemy that we had lost already. Wow, just wow. This is the biggest foreign policy blunder to date. And he’s been in office a month or so. One simply cannot wait to see what’s next.

Is The Ground Shifting Under Barack Obama?

Mark Tapscott believes it already has. His column is a roundup of things that indicate Obama is beginning to slip, hard and fast.

* Obama remains personally popular with the public, but worries and even outright opposition to some of his cornerstone proposals are growing. Democrats in Congress are even beginning to express in public print their worries that Obama has reached too far with the $787 billion economic stimulus package, the $410 billion omnibus spending bill and the $3.6 trillion budget proposal (and the trillions more senior aides whisper are coming in further bailouts, loan guarantees, “tax cuts” that are really just grants, and other spending accountrements (sic) of Leviathan Unleashed.)

* Paralleling these developments, a potentially devastatng (sic) conservative case against Obama is coming together rapidly. Two influential columns this week tell the tale: On Thursday, Daniel Henninger offers this crucial observation in a WSJ piece otherwise devoted to asking why Republicans aren’t more eagerly and quickly taking advantage of the fact the Obama Democrats have all but declared war on the 75 percent of the U.S. economy that is private and therefore productive of the nation’s wealth:

“Beyond the stock market, there is a reason why, despite much goodwill toward his presidency, the Obama response to the faltering economy has left many feeling undone. There isn’t much in his plan to stir the national soul. It’s about ’sacrifice’ now so that we can live for a future of small electric cars and windmills. This may move the Democratic Party’s faith communities, but it cannot revive a great nation. If the Democrats want to embrace market failure as a basis for their ideology, let them have it. As politics, it’s a downer.”

It is a huge roundup of items, you’ll have to read it all. I’ve never been an Obama supporter, obviously, mostly because I saw someone far, far to the left for this country. I don’t believe in statism, Obama obviously does. Congress and the White House have been on an unprecedented spending spree for the past month. And they are plotting even more spending at a pace never seen in America. Who is going to pay for all this?

You and I. Not the rich, not the corporations. You and I, the regular people of this country and our children and grandchildren. We are the ones being victimized in the name of advancing a statist agenda.

Via Memeorandum

Twisted Truth

Sally Pipes, writing in the Wall Street Journal, points out that many of the stories being used by Democrats to justify socialized medicine are just that: stories. As in fiction. It isn’t Pipes’ opinion, either. The fictions are revealed by the Congressional Budget Office and its director.

Another common argument for more government insurance is that the uninsured shift costs to private payers when they avail themselves of the health-care safety net — thus jacking up health-care premiums in the private sector. Many reform advocates make this claim, including Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D., Mass.) and Sen. Baucus in an op-ed in this newspaper.

This is not the case. In the first place, a recent CBO report (”Key Issues in Analyzing Major Health Insurance Proposals, ” December 2008) is clear on one issue: Working to achieve universal coverage through expanding government’s role in health care will increase total costs and therefore either increase premiums or taxes, not reduce them. As for the argument that the uninsured shift costs, Mr. Elmendorf was quite direct dispelling this myth in his testimony before Mr. Baucus’s committee. “Overall,” he said, “the effect of uncompensated care on private-sector payment rates appears to be limited.”

In fact, insofar as there is a cost shift, it derives from the government programs Medicare and Medicaid, which reimburse providers at rates roughly 20% to 40% lower than the private providers. This has been detailed by the widely used and quoted health consultant firm, the Lewin Group. But this is conveniently ignored by those who want to expand government health care.

Gee, what a surprise. A badly run government program is driving up costs. I’m shocked, shocked I tell you.

There is a lot more at the link, please do read it all.

This Bytes

Well, the Crabitat appears to be back up and running on the original domain. There is a redirect set to push anyone over here if they try to us the .net domain. I’m slowly pawing through the database attempting to clean up problems (there were a bunch of bad entries left over from some long-disused plug-ins). As of right now, everything appears to be functioning except the comment feed. Not sure what’s up with that. I am still having a few slow SQL queries according to the log files on the server. But these may actually be related to my accessing the database and making changes/deletions. I certainly am getting very few compared to the pre-crash situation.

I’d appreciate readers letting me know what is working for you and what isn’t.