Monthly Archives: May 2012

Dr. Shakil Afridi

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This is the doctor who is now in prison in Pakistan for helping the CIA confirm bin Laden’s whereabouts.
Ignatius writes about how using this doctor who vaccinates children is going to cause further distrust between people and health organizations. True.

The doctor was sentenced last week to 33 years in prison for treason, prompting indignant protests from Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

U.S. officials shouldn’t treat the Afridi case simply as outrageous behavior by Pakistan. They’re right that the doctor’s actions weren’t treasonous: He was seeking information about terrorist leaders who were Pakistan’s enemies.

Who the hell outed him? That’s who Ignatius should be writing about. CIA missions should not be in the papers. They shouldn’t be taking credit for UK plants and they sure the hell shouldn’t be letting anyone know that they used a local physician to confirm bin Laden’s location.

I don’t want to even see the letters CIA in the papers. How else can they do their job?

Freedom

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via the DiploMad 2.0.

This was a good column musing about freedom and how we/they relinquish it for other things deemed more important. No worries? Comfort? Vacation? Regarding Europe and what’s going on there:

It was all made possible by citizens surrendering their freedom. They gave away the angst, the worry, the drama, the agony, and the joy and pride of self-reliance. They gave it away to politicians and ideologues who promised, “We will take care of you. Worry about nothing. Relax. Take another week off.” Europeans allowed, first, their own governments to grow and absorb the nation’s wealth and assume control over their lives, then those governments created the Frankenstein’s monster known as the EU with its magic Euro and all-encompassing regulations and edicts that would lead all to an American-free Utopia.

The US of A still have a slim chance to not go down this road that is bound to lead to destruction. I believe that the Tea Party innards against such an exchange of freedom for safety is alive and well here, if and only if freedom remains in the forefront of thought. I believe that Memorial Day can remind us that freedom is so very important that other people die that the rest of us might keep it. But we have to fight for it lest it be slowly taken from our grip by one more chance to remain free of worry.

Worry, fret, plan ahead, stay free. Carry on.

Powerline

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Congratulations to Powerline who turned 10 this weekend.

10 years…..
I remember those years. Powerline/Captain’s Quarters/Chrenkoff/Iraq the Model were my go to sources.
Powerline’s advertising became too obnoxious for regular reading, but their content is really always worth a read.

Congrats!

Chicago

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Since the LATimes started charging for reading online, I switched to a few other dailies including the Chicago Tribune.

Sadly, as I’ve read the headlines since mid March, there has been only 3 days where there has not been someone shot in a story on the front page. I am happy to hear this is an unusual year for Chicago as “10 Killed, dozens more shot” was the headline over the weekend.

Shootings are up nearly 14 percent over last year, according to the unofficial summaries. There have been 851 shootings so far in 2012 compared with 747 during the same period in 2011, police data showed.

Avoid Chicago.

Finding the News and Bringing it Together

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From HotAir today we get this headline:
Do men find Dumb-Looking Women More Attractive

hmmmm

From Maggie’s Farm today we get a link to this post entitled
Mutually Beneficial Arrangements

The post is mostly about college age women who get into debt for school and then find beneficial “arrangements” to help them pay for the school.
Here’s one woman’s story:

Fed up with young, unemployed men her own age, Jennifer recently began trawling for a sugar daddy to pay down about $20,000 in student loan debt. She also wouldn’t mind a clothing allowance or rent money for her studio apartment in New York’s East Village.

A week ago, she boarded a plane to Florida to spend the weekend with a 30-something banker she met on SugarDaddie.com. He told her his house was undergoing a renovation and instead drove her to a nearby hotel, where they spent the night together. …

Um, Dear Jennifer, I bet you are REALLY attractive.

Health Insurance

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I’m late, but
“Putting the ‘Insurance’ Back in Health Insurance” gets a thumbs up.

As does this Ed Morrissey piece on Ave Maria University canceling their insurance. Here’s the conclusion:

The reason that Ave Maria’s health plan was reasonably priced before ObamaCare was because it was tailored to the needs of younger clients. At that age, people mainly need to indemnify themselves from hospitalization or major medical attention rather than buy comprehensive plans they won’t use. Very little in preventive care is necessary for college students, certainly not five hundred dollars a year in such services — plus the extra $150 in deductible.

Unfortunately, Ave Maria can no longer offer coverage tailored to the actual needs of its students. Why? Because bureaucrats in the HHS decided that adults of all ages need to buy comprehensive plans that cost younnger adults far more than the value they will ever extract. And the reason for that is that HHS wants healthy young adults to subsidize coverage for older and less healthy adults. This is a demonstration of the perverse redistribution of wealth from younger adults to middle-aged adults, which was the only way that ObamaCare could even pretend to be cost-neutral.

So much for “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.”

That “War on Women”

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This was a good column out of the Washington Post about how women are not only interested in contraception, but how they are also interested in things like religious freedom and knowing what sorts of medications go into their daughter’s bodies.

She has gotten a lot of feedback via email from an earlier column, including:

First, while the mandate covers contraception, abortion-inducing drugs and surgical sterilization for women, it covers none for men. In other words, the government is facilitating only women’s ingesting chemicals (which the government’s own data indicate have some proven harmful side effects) and is placing the burden of pregnancy prevention entirely on women.

I had assumed…..guess I should never have assumed that men’s health might be affected by having sex and hence they too should receive free contraception.

Here’s a test: Which is more indicative of bad health….an STD or a pregnant girlfriend?

doh.