Day By Day

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Our future under Government healthcare

(CNN) -- A Missouri VA hospital is under fire because it may have exposed more than 1,800 veterans to life-threatening diseases such as hepatitis and HIV.
John Cochran VA Medical Center in St. Louis has recently mailed letters to 1,812 veterans telling them they could contract hepatitis B, hepatitis C and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) after visiting the medical center for dental work, said Rep. Russ Carnahan.

 http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/06/30/va.hospital.hiv/index.html

This is a f'ing tragedy, but it's typical of any Government bureaucracy, ineptitude, mismanaged, hideously expensive failure making mistakes that have fatal consequences for the victims of Government sponsored neglect. 

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Speaking of the crossroads

This would be my friend "Lizard"

Iowahawk goes to the crossroads

Very cool story with pictures about being recruited by Fender to bring his hotrod to the 2010 Crossroads Blues Festival, complete with backstage pass...

http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2010/06/we-went-down-to-the-crossroads.html

green with envy I am....

Sunday, June 27, 2010

Ain't it the truth!

A great day for golf


I expect the incompetent 0ne in chief has a grueling 18 holes to deal with again today.....

Now for something different

Apathy and Anger

The bookworm room has an interesting piece up about Obama's binary reaction to all events (when he's not busy golfing as the nation burns)
Obama has been in office roughly a year and a half.  That’s long enough to get a handle on what motivates our president.  He’s pretty binary.  When he’s not partying with rock stars, he’s either apathetic or angry.
It's worth the read....

Saturday, June 26, 2010

A tale of three rivers

I've just returned from my annual pilgrimage to northern New Hampshire to fish with my friend John. Driving up on Wednesday I found John at the camp and we walked in on the FFO section of the Androscoggin River in Errol and fished. Quite honestly the fishing was atrocious, there was no insect activity, no fish were showing and I managed a couple of small salmon and a 8" brook trout.

Thursday we met our guide Ken in Colebrook, NH by mid morning and he took us on a 12 mile drift down the Connecticut River. Neither John nor I had much experience on the Connecticut and I was surprised to find that the river is mostly slow water fishing. There were some fish showing at the put in and we managed a couple of small rainbows on caddis emergers. As we headed down the river the weather kept changing from hot and humid to cold and rain and back again. It seemed like as soon as we were too hot and took off the rain jackets it'd cool off start to rain again. The weather was keeping the fish down. Ken worked his tail off changing out our flies and working the boat but the fish just weren't cooperating. About 6PM it started to rain quite hard and Ken switched me up to a small streamer and I had some fast action as long as the rain was heavy but didn't catch any large fish. Despite the unfavorable fishing the trip was enjoyable and I learned a good deal about the river.

Ken shows off a small trout

Wednesday evening John and I fished the Magalloway river just below the dam on Aziscohos Lake. The river there drops 250 feet in 2 miles and it's quite steep so fishing it required a bit of scampering about the rocks and boulders along the shoreline. There were mayflies, caddies, and stoneflies hatching in great numbers and John seemed to do well with an elk hair caddies but I didn't hook up at all. Still it was a great night to be out and fishing in such a beautiful location.

John mid river

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Saturday, June 19, 2010

RomneyCare vs. ObamaCare

Anyone who thinks that Romney is a conservative needs to consider this; he's a Republican elected as Governor in one of the most liberal states in the US, Romney is about as conservative as your average centrist democrat.
Let this be a lesson in just how bad 'mandatory' insurance is



Two additional articles that sum up the fail that is Mitt.

http://money.cnn.com/2010/06/15/news/economy/massachusetts_healthcare_reform.fortune/

The lessons of RomneyCare?
Lesson 1: The Massachusetts plan does not control costs.
Lesson 2: Community rating, guaranteed issue and mandated benefits swell costs.
Lesson 3: Huge subsidies for low-to-medium earners could prove extremely expensive.
Lesson 4: The exchanges reward people for working less and earning less.
Lesson 5: The generous plans and added mandates give employers an incentive to drop health insurance.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/mitt-romney-tries-to-play-the-jobs-card-2010-02-23

The Massachusetts experience?
The Republican contender was the governor of Massachusetts from January 2003 to January 2007. And during that time, according to the U.S. Labor Department, the state ranked 47th in the entire country in jobs growth. Fourth from last. 
Mitt isn't a conservative and he might have been a great businessman but he's a lousy Government bureaucrat. Under his leadership Massachusetts economy didn't improve at all and he left them saddled with a failing health care experiment that's destroying coverage for those who had it.

Evil rules in Gaza

Rudi gives MSNBC hell

Solar Roadways?



God knows that the constant repaving of our roads has given reason to driver frustration and cynical comments like "repair season" which is apparently 8-9 months a year here in Maine. I agree with this guy that the current technology is antiquated. The useful lifetime of asphalt and the cost of repairs is certainly driving taxes ever upward.

I'd suspect that the paving industry will object to wide scale adoption of this type of technology since road repairs is a multi billion dollar industry; one that is likely rife with payoffs, ripoffs and fantastic profits for those on the inside.

I have reservations as to the reliability of the entire LED light scheme; the LED lights that I've purchased, flashlights, desk lighting etc. have all had failure rates that disappointed me. I don't understand how the LEDs in my appliances, TVs, guitar gear and so on can last for decades but an LED flashlight develops issues in less than a year. I had purchased some nice LED lights to go under the shelving on the hutch of my home office desk and almost every single one failed within 3-4 months and the replacements have also failed. I also note that Lowes no longer carries that light fixture anymore. Perhaps it's just cheap construction.

I also have questions about how well this road will respond to the winters of the north, will they buckle when the temps swing 50 degrees in a day? How will they withstand the salts, the snow plows, chains on tires, studded snows?

Still it's an off the grid idea and I think we need to encourage more of that type of thinking.

Thursday, June 17, 2010

I love this line....

A mini review of Jeff Beck's Emotion & Commotion CD

If you're a fan of Beck then this CD needs to find a place in your collection. Opening with the haunting Corpus Christi Carol Jeff provides the kind of unpredictable noodling that has made him one of the world's foremost guitarists. Joss Stone joins for an interesting version of I Put A Spell On You as well as Theres No Other Me. 





Also joining in for vocals are Imelda May on Lilac Wine and Olivia Safe on Elegy For Dunkirk.


There is plenty here for Beck fans to enjoy








Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Carrier ops

Cool video of a cat shot and landing taken with a camera on the pilot's helmet.

Monday, June 14, 2010

Resign or impeach!

This man should either resign immediately or be impeached.



Then he should be charge with assault.

Dear Village Idiot...

Sunday, June 13, 2010

Friday, June 11, 2010

I need to buy more of this guy's movies

Because he makes perfect sense to me

Sunday, June 6, 2010

Vote for Joe

My good friend and former bandmate has a song up in the Rock The Space 2 contest.



Not sure how the voting works to be honest.

Is this the end of blame Bush?


From http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jun/4/likely-intel-chief-clapper-held-disputed-wmd-view/
President Obama's choice to be the next director of national intelligence supported the view that Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq sent weapons and documents to Syria in the weeks before the 2003 U.S. invasion.
OMG! Someone who believes that Iraq had WMD, that they sent them to Syria before the war started. There's tons of other testimony to this fact.
The man who served as the no. 2 official in Saddam Hussein's air force says Iraq moved weapons of mass destruction into Syria before the war by loading the weapons into civilian aircraft in which the passenger seats were removed.
The Iraqi general, Georges Sada, makes the charges in a new book, "Saddam's Secrets," released this week. He detailed the transfers in an interview yesterday with The New York Sun.
"There are weapons of mass destruction gone out from Iraq to Syria, and they must be found and returned to safe hands," Mr. Sada said. "I am confident they were taken over."
Mr. Sada's comments come just more than a month after Israel's top general during Operation Iraqi Freedom, Moshe Yaalon, told the Sun that Saddam "transferred the chemical agents from Iraq to Syria."
http://www.nysun.com/foreign/iraqs-wmd-secreted-in-syria-sada-says/26514/
 Other users noted that Syrian journalist and human rights activist Nizar Nayouf told the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf in 2004 that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein smuggled his arsenal of chemical and biological weapons into Syria just prior to the United States' invasion of Iraq in 2003.
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/what-is-assad-hiding-in-his-backyard-1.292935

It's been reported in the western media that an investigation showed that no such transfer took place yet that's not really what the reports said:
It seems to be commonly accepted that Iraq did not have WMDs at all. The intelligence was obviously flawed, but the book has not been closed on what actually happened. The media blasted the headline that Charles Duelfer, the head of the Iraq Survey Group tasked with finding out if Saddam had WMDs, concluded that a transfer did not occur. In reality, his reportsaid they were “unable to complete its investigation and is unable to rule out the possibility that WMD was evacuated to Syria before the war” due to the poor security situation.
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/satellite-photos-support-testimony-that-iraqi-wmd-went-to-syria/

One of Saddam's Generals concurs: http://www.globalpolitician.com/21610-iraq-syria-wmd

Where there's smoke there's usually a fire. The left will continue to deride this story and shout "no blood for oil" but the facts are that Saddam once had WMDs. Not all were accounted for during the UN inspections. The question is still valid, where did they go? Did Saddam destroy them? Unlikely. Are they still buried in Iraq or were they moved to Syria?

Saturday, June 5, 2010

I'm starting to really like Gov. Christie

Straight talk OMG!



and he's right it's about power and control and we the people should be in control, not the unions who have shown a total disregard for fiscal sanity.

That unbiased media reporter Helen Thomas



STFU you deranged old bat, shouldn't you be retiring?


Eichmann 1937: You people should go back where you came from – Palestine.
Thomas 2010: You people should go back where you came from – Germany.

More signs of the deep seated insanity of the left



Ernst Rhome is that you? What a great idea! Let's make our political opposition illegal and jail those who embrace those ideas. Democrats like Grayson do not believe in our political system and they're working to dismantle it. Is it any surprise that this guy is a strong supporter of this President and his administration full of incompetent thugs? Demogauges like Grayson are a clear danger to our republic.

Another sign that the left in the US has lost it's mind

Thursday, June 3, 2010

On the continuing rehabilitation of the Carter Presidency.....

When you're full of shit it eventually catches up with you.....

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Plug the damn hole!

I'm sure shouting orders always works in these cases, besides I don't see any leak.....

Obama is continuing his round the clock efforts to make Jimmy Carter look like a good leader.

Michael Yon's War

It began with a bridge. On the morning of March 1, a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device detonated on Tarnak River Bridge near Kandahar, Afghanistan, killing multiple civilians and one American soldier. While the destruction of a single bridge might ordinarily pose a mere inconvenience to the U.S. war machine, in the oppressive terrain of Afghanistan it became a logistical chokepoint, halting ground-based operations for days.
War correspondent Michael Yon sought the answer to an uncomfortable question: who was responsible for the security of that bridge?
Yon is no ordinary reporter. A former Green Beret with U.S. Army Special Forces, he has spent more time embedded in Iraq and Afghanistan than any other journalist. His dispatches have produced some of the most memorable combat narratives of the war, and a large share of its most iconic images. Make no mistake; Michael Yon is not a dispassionate observer of the Columbia J-School variety. When writing about U.S. forces, he says "we." When writing about insurgents, he calls them terrorists or Taliban. And when reporting failures in the war effort, he names names. This has earned him both the respect and ire of senior military staff. In the case of the Tarnak River Bridge, the name most repeatedly mentioned as responsible for its security was Daniel Menard, the Canadian brigadier general in charge of Task Force Kandahar. Yon went public with this information
I've long been a fan of Yon's coverage, he's the best, one of the sources I trust the most. This is a great article that explains much of how Yon came to lose his embed.  I fear that Yon is correct and that we're about to throw the war in Afghanistan. Read the rest of this fine article here:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/06/michael-yons-war/57483/

This is a total outrage!

What it boils down to is the Department of Defense is docking disability payments to a wounded Iraq war vet to pay for equipment that was lost when he was wounded and evacuated from the battlefield.

PORTLAND, Ore. -- Gary Pfleider II served his country for six years before he became a member of the new generation of disabled veterans. 
Pfleider, a former Oregon National Guard soldier, was shot by a sniper while on patrol in Iraq in September 2007. He has only vague memories of the event, but now must live with a permanent reminder -- a brace he'll have to wear on his leg for the rest of his life. 
"I remember grabbing a hold of my leg, and realizing I had blood on my hands," he said. "And from that point on until I got loaded onto the Stryker was just a big blur."
Three days after he was shot, Pfleider received a Purple Heart. 
Almost two years later, he received a bill from the military for missing equipment. 
The sum of the bill, which includes interest, is $3,175. It itemizes a list of gear the military issued to Pfleider that did not come back with his unit in 2008. The lists includes clothing items, canteens and grenades.
Disgusting!

Hot air and ice

Steve Goddard over at Whats Up With That has a nice article about how the arctic sea ice has recovered to where it was about 10 years ago. It's well worth a look.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/31/wuwt-arctic-sea-ice-new-7/#more-20063

Halp me the ice is disappearing!
Is not amused!