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Archive for July, 2011

It’s the spending stupid

by Phantom Ace ( 6 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Economy, Special Report, unemployment at July 13th, 2011 - 9:32 am

Barack Hussein Obama is holding firm on raising taxes. He claims it will only be targeted on those making 250,000 or more. The problem is there are not enough people making that amount to equal 1 Trillion in new taxes. The GOP should turn the tables and point out that GE paid no taxes last year. Their CEO Jeffery Immelt is one of Obama’s biggest supporters and this hypocritical stance should be pointed out. The problem with our deficit and debt is spending, not revenue!

There are a lot of pieces to the debt-ceiling deal. There are the taxes upon taxes, as the Wall Street Journal editors describe it. That’s the roughly $1 trillion in new Obama taxes on top of what he’s already signed into law. It’s an economy and jobs killer.

Then there’s the entitlement piece, which may be more interesting since Obama is apparently open to extending the Social Security and Medicare retirement age and using the so-called chained-CPI, which would lower cost-of-living adjustments (and increase income-tax thresholds). Whether the president is serious about these entitlement measures, no one knows. It’s noteworthy that he’s at least talking about them, although he’s linking them to higher taxes.

[….]

And the public is onto this. The highly accurate IBD/TIPP pollsters have just released an incredible result. Get this: The public rejects a debt-ceiling increase by a huge 58 to 36 percent. That includes 59 percent of independents and even 38 percent of Democrats. That is the tea party revolt.

Read the rest: The Spending Is the Problem

Spending is the problem. Why should we spend more than we take in? Most families and businesses can’t do this. Yet the Progressives feel the government must spend money. If Obama wants to increase revenue, then we should enact pro-growth policies that increases the amount of tax payers, that is the answer to the revenue part.

Clean Your Contacts Properly!

by coldwarrior ( 3 Comments › )
Filed under Headlines at July 13th, 2011 - 9:00 am

Because this is what happens if you don’t:

 

Volume 17, Number 7–July 2011

Letter

Ameba-associated Keratitis, France

 

To the Editor: Amebic keratitis is an aggressive infection usually associated with soft contact lenses, and its poor outcome can lead to a corneal graft (1). Ameba can host ameba-resistant bacteria (2) and serve as a source for numerous organisms to exchange DNA, adapt to changing environments, and become pathogenic to the host (3). However, mixed keratitis caused by amebae in association with ameba-resistant pathogens is rarely seen.

Figure
Figure.
Figure. Ameba-associated keratitis in a 17-year-old woman (contact lens wearer), France, showing a paracentral corneal scar (A) and recovery at 13-month follow-up (B). Original magnification ×10….

A 17-year-old woman who was myopic and had worn soft contact lenses for 3 years consulted our ophthalmology department for pain and redness of the left eye that had persisted for 2 weeks. No visual loss was reported, and a slit-lamp examination showed a millimetric epithelial defect associated with a round stromal infiltrate (Figure). No intraocular reaction was observed, and bacterial keratitis was diagnosed. Her condition improved after a 7-day topical fluoroquinolone treatment, and follow-up at 13 months showed only a slight superficial stromal scar. The patient reported that she had inappropriately worn monthly contact lenses for 3 months, cleaned and rinsed lenses with a commercial cleaning solution but diluted the solution with tap water, and washed her hands with tap water but did not dry them before handling the lenses.

Results of microbiologic analysis of a corneal scraping, which included molecular detection of ameba (18S rDNA), bacteria (16S rDNA), and herpesvirus (DNA polymerase), were negative. However, culture of contact lens storage case liquid in Page-modified Neff ameba saline enriched with heat-killed Enterobacter aerogenes (2) identified Pseudomonas fluorescens and Stenotrophomonas maltophilia, both of which were identified by matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry (4); Mycobacterium chelonae, which was identified by rpoB gene sequencing; and Acanthamoeba polyphaga, which was identified by partial 18S rDNA sequencing.

 

READ THE REST

Our Standing On The World Stage: Has Cliche Passed The Test As A Viable Policy Agenda?

by Flyovercountry ( 104 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Economy, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Politics, Progressives, Sudan and South Sudan at July 13th, 2011 - 8:30 am

Hat tip NoThreat2U

Here is something you would not expect to see written about a county with a leader, also called the President, claiming that financial Armageddon awaits, should they fail to expand their debt beyond $14 Trillion.  Yet there we are, a scant one day past Barack Obama’s holier than thou speech in which he gave one of his famous tongue lashings to the GOP Leadership.  He told us all, like we did not know without his help, valuable as it is, that our problems were serious.  He complained that we were trying to politicize the problem by not just acceding to his view of what should be done.  He told us in a somewhat sarcastic manner that we should, “Eat our peas.”  Then, a friend posted this little gem referenced in the link above.

 

The U. S. State Department yesterday announced that the Obama Administration has agreed to contribute $4 billion to the United Nations Global Fund to fight AIDs, Tuberculosis, and Malaria from 2011 to 2013.
The $4 billion represents a 38% increase over the previous U.S. commitment to the fund.

This means that over one-third of the money will come from the pockets of US taxpayers. 

 In addition to the annual gift of $1.33 billion to the Global Fund, President Obama has agreed to provide billions more for UN projects.These allocations are set forth in a 28 page document as follows:

  • Funnel $63 billion to the Global Health Initiative during the next six years
  • Make $1 billion annually to education programs
  • Give $475 million to the Global Agricultural and Food Security Program’
  • Provide $800 million from the Overseas Private Investment Corporation to Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and North Africa. An additional $3.2 billion will be provided by private equity capital sources to these Muslim nations
  • Shell out millions more available through USAID for developing tech hubs in Uganda, Kenya, Cameroon, South Africa, and Senegal.
  • Dole out $80 million through the Overseas Private Investment Corporation for small to medium enterprises in the Middle East and North Africa.
  • Cough up $2.5 billion annually to 90 countries to “strengthen governance and democratic institutions.”
  • Make available $30 billion through the Obama’s Climate Change Initiative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In addition, $100 billion a year will be provided through taxpayer and private resources to deal with the alleged threat of global climate change.

The United States is assessed at 22% of the U.N. regular budget and more than 27% for U.N. the peacekeeping budget. Mr. Obama has requested $516.3 million for the U.N. regular budget and more than $2.182 billion for the peacekeeping budget for 2011.

 The United States also provides money to the U.N. through the State Department, Department of Agriculture, Department of Energy, Department of Health and Human Services, and other agencies.

 Putting aside for the moment the entire argument about the value of the U.N., (we’ll get back to that soon enough,) is this pledge for increasing our funding of this organization by an amount that is no where near the neighborhood of negligible, what a sane leader of a nation on the brink of financial collapse would be doing?  An open question for President Obama, or one of his supporters:  What is the truth here?  Ar we facing the end of our fiscal lives as we have known it, or do we still in fact have money to throw away on an organization which has never fed any hungry children, cured or even treated any disease or affliction anywhere on the planet, or even succeeded in preventing a single hostility anywhere on the globe?   I personally do not like being talked to like I am Five years old.  I especially do not like to be lectured by the likes of an arrogant, vacuous ass.  This man who administered the tongue lashing from the press room in the White House is the least qualified person in any room he enters.  He, and his party during their Four years in control have failed to pass a single budget, or even for that matter present one for consideration.  When the President’s party controlled the White House and both chambers of the Legislative body, they did not even bother with a budget.  The only possible reason to avoid it then was that they feared the political repercussions of their voters should anyone realize what on Earth they were up to.  So, Let’s do a little basic math here.  Let us pretend for a moment that Barack Obama gets his, “Airplane loophole,” closed.  Let us further pretend for the moment that nobody alters their behavior as a result of the new tax.  If we went back in time to the birth of Jesus, (apologies to my Christian friends, but I felt a reference point people could identify with was in order,) and instituted this tax with today’s airplane flying jet set, we could have by now covered one half of one year’s Obama shortfall.

 We do not have a revenue problem.  These piggies should be able to get by on $2.5 Trillion.  We have a spending problem, which apparently Obama is clueless about, since he just committed $.1 Trillion per year more to the U.N., all of it by the way, money we do not have.

Now, on to that U.N. discussion. Our Jizya paid to the U.N. represents about a quarter of the Organization’s operating budget. The humanitarian aid stations and hospitals established in the Congo actually became the largest houses of ill repute in the world and served as a jumping off point for thousands of young ladies sold into slavery. The money collected on behalf of UNICEF every year is in fact handed over blindly to Hamas and Fatah and used to build rockets and suicide vests and to fund the intifada. Libya, the place where we had to remove the thuggish dictator due to the generally rotten way he treated his own people was the head of the Human Rights Council. Iran, the place where women are stoned to death if they are caught speaking to a male who is not a family member is the head of the U.N. women’s rights council. Anywhere people are actually suffering at the hands of thuggish despots, you can count on the U.N. to be silent, (Sudan, and Tibet.) Anywhere a society is actually free and open, you can count on U.N. condemnation, (U.S. and Israel.) We should be cutting our funding to the U.N. to a level commensurate with our population, and deduct our rent for prime NYC real estate to boot.

Now, for the next question, has the agenda by cliche worked?  During the campaign of 2008, we heard that we needed to address our standing in the world.  The rest of the world hated us, or so we were told.  Yesterday, I saw a picture on my T.V., which put that nonsense to rest, (for me at least anyhow, and probably for anyone who has at least one functioning brain cell as well.)

Kiir dons a 2006 gift from Bush. AP

The image, is the new President of a brand new country, South Sudan, wearing a cowboy hat to honor George W. Bush. That right there should say it all. A new country formed as the result of someone who was hated by the U.N., in a place that caused much hand ringing and zero action by the same lefties who said they hated us, and the leader of that country gives credit to who, President Bush. Hillary’s reset button did nothing to help bring this about. In his speech, he mentioned President Obama exactly zero times. In Obama’s speech, in which he took credit for the new country, he gave no credit to Bush. Therefore, I believe the image, being worth a thousand words is worth another peek.

Kiir dons a 2006 gift from Bush. AP

So, I guess the score stands at President Bush 50, smart diplomacy 0.

Cross Posted at Musings of a Mad Conservative.

Goose Teeth

by Bunk Five Hawks X ( 76 Comments › )
Filed under Evolution, Humor, Open thread at July 12th, 2011 - 11:00 pm


[via]
They’re not true teeth, but lamellae, or more precisely pectines.
Comment from “Jess” at the link:

“Whatever they are, a pissed off goose will use them. It hurts and they usually won’t go away until you smack them with a shovel.”

 
Experience is knowledge, and knowledge obtained from another’s experience is often better. If you’re gonna go and piss off a goose, bring a shovel to the fight, and that’s The Blogmocracy Practical Tip O’ The Day, presented for discussion on The Overnight Open Thread.