What I found at Lucianne.com

I don't take the Caller Times so I can't claim I didn't see this in it, but this is from the Canada Free Press:
Stand Up Patriots
By Armand C. Hale

On Saturday September 5, at 1 – 4 pm in Austin,
Texas, a “Stand Up for Texas Rally” will give the Texas people a chance to voice their opposition to health care, cap-and-trade, and other D.C. atrocities.

Joe the Plumber will be the keynote speaker at this event. The rally is on the south steps of the Capitol, 1100 Congress Avenue, Austin, TX.
Patriots of freedom in general and Texans specifically must push our Congress to stop this federal power grab. Section 1221 (b) from H.R. 3200 legislation now ending in Congress would require doctors and hospitals to provide interpreters and translation services free
of charge to non-English speaking patients. This adds billions of dollars to health care costs and gives immigrants no incentive to learn English!

Read the rest here. (It is a letter from the President of Physicians for Reform)

From Michell Malkin Today

Conservative books on top, but NYT concludes Marx is “back in vogue”

Mark Levin held the #1 spot on the NYTimes best-seller list for 12 weeks this summer.

Culture of Corruption has held the top spot for the past 3 weeks.

Glenn Beck’s latest book has topped the paperback non-fiction list for 9 weeks.

The latest broadside against Obama from Dick Morris and Eileen McGann has also been on the NYT list for two months.

So what does a NYTimes book reviewer conclude?

Why, Karl Marx is “back in vogue.

Also:

Bugseeds and milkvetches and pyrgs, oh my!

Sean Paige explains how Obama’s environmental bureaucrats are exploiting Endangered Species Act listings to destroy jobs, drive up energy costs and thwart progress.

If you aren't in the habit of reading Michelle, go there and browse today.

Death Books for Veterans? You Decide

From the Wall Street Journal Online
Death Books for Veterans
Ex-Soldiers don't need to be told they are a burden on society.
by Jim Towey

If President Obama wants to better understand why America's discomfort with end-of-life discussions threatens to derail his health-care reform, he might begin with his own Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). He will quickly discover how government bureaucrats are greasing the slippery slope that can start with cost containment but quickly become a systematic denial of care.

Last year, bureaucrats at the VA's National Center for Ethics in Health Care advocated a 52-page end-of-life planning document, "Your Life, Your Choices." It was first published in 1997 and later promoted as the VA's preferred living will throughout its vast network of hospitals and nursing homes. After the Bush White House took a look at how this document was treating complex health and moral issues, the VA suspended its use. Unfortunately, under President Obama, the VA has now resuscitated "Your Life, Your Choices."

Who is the primary author of this workbook? Dr. Robert Pearlman, chief of ethics evaluation for the center, a man who in 1996 advocated for physician-assisted suicide in Vacco v. Quill before the U.S. Supreme Court and is known for his support of health-care rationing.

"Your Life, Your Choices" presents end-of-life choices in a way aimed at steering users toward predetermined conclusions, much like a political "push poll." For example, a worksheet on page 21 lists various scenarios and asks users to then decide whether their own life would be "not worth living."

This is just the first half of a piece that is very sympathetic to the returning vets of this war and others. Go read it all

You've just Gotta Love Victor Davis Hanson

The Obama Meltdown—Symptoms/Diagnosis/Prognosis
Victor Davis Hanson in Pajamasmedia.com

Strange things are happening to the Obama administration and quickly so. His polls are diving and may not stop at 50/50, the most precipitous drop in approval of a first-year President since Bill Clinton in 1993 (cf. Hillary care).

First, here are some of the problems the President faces:

Symptoms and Diagnosis

1) Health Care. Health-care take overs and socialized medicine have terrified not just the right and conservatives, but the elderly of all persuasions who fear their shaky Medicare funds will be diverted to Obama’s new plans. In short, they believe their care will be rationed and given to all sorts of new recipients. And they fear age will be a basis for meriting treatment; as if the gang banger with a long felony
record of mayhem at 22 would be more deserving before a federal health panel than would someone at 90 who scrimped and saved for insurance in case of some future need for a hip replacement (and was still active and productive; cf. great octogenarians from Sophocles to Barzun who did their best work in their late lives).

It was an insane political move to demonize these town-hallers,
when streaming video showed the participants scared and angry, but not violent, trying to get answers from smug politicos who either cell phoned away, ridiculed questioners in the manner of Barney Frank, or mocked their interrogators. These were for the most part not Code Pink/Cindy Sheehan type protestors. (And by the way, what happened to Code Pink, given we are still in Iraq and Afghanistan?)

2) The Spell is Broken. Cap-and-trade, the mega-deficits, the
apology tours, and the sleaze of some appointments and congressional grandees (cf. Rangel, Dodd, Murtha, etc.) were stimulants, but not in themselves enough to awaken the somnolent American people from their collective trance. Yet health care was like a shot of adrenaline that jolted the patient out of his slumber......

3) The Counter-attack is not working. The Obama shotgun has
blasted all sorts of magnum loads—town-hall and tea-party critics were un-American, Nazis, tools of the insurance industry, dupes, and Astro-turfers. Now the religious argument is thrown out at the 11th hour: those who doubt neo-socialist care are somehow un-Christian and uncaring. .....

The Therapy

1) Cool the “this is our moment”, “hope and change” rhetoric. Obama reminds me of what Wellington supposedly said of Napoleon’s Old Guard at Waterloo “They came on in the same old way, and we sent them back in the same old way.” Instead, he should quietly follow the 1995 triangulation model of Bill Clinton/Dick Morris....

2) Return to the “no more blue/red state” bipartisan tropes.
Consider Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Barney Frank as the real challenges, since the animosity that they engender can do far more damage to Barack Obama than Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and all of the Fox News cast put together. Voters are more comfortable with Blue Dogs than Barbara Boxer. Soon the tea-party anger is going to spill over and result in Boxer, Reid, etc. having reelection nightmares.

Go read it all, VDH is always great and this is just portions.

Sign the Health Care Petition

http://www.freeourhealthcarenow.com/
You have to follow the link to get to the petition. I cannot cut and paste it here. Just go there, sign the petition.

Ann Althouse on Obama as a Religous Leader

Obama would like you to see government as religion.
He addresses a group of religious leaders: (she quotes from the NY Times)

“I know there’s been a lot of misinformation in this debate, and there are some folks out there who are frankly bearing false witness,” Mr. Obama told a multidenominational group of pastors, rabbis and other religious leaders who support his goal to remake the nation’s health care system.

Bearing false witness? Breaking the 9th Commandment? So his opponents are sinners. I'm trying to imagine the separation-of-church-and-state freakout if George Bush had taken this approach to arguing for one of his policies.

According to the lede paragraph in the linked NYT article:
President Obama sought Wednesday to reframe the health care debate as “a core ethical and moral obligation,” imploring a coalition of religious leaders to help promote the plan to lower costs and expand insurance coverage for all Americans. Strangely, the context of that quote — "a core ethical and moral obligation" — is missing from the body of the article. Was something cut? Was it too embarrassing? Too Bush-y?
I have to go elsewhere:

GRETA VAN SUSTEREN, FOX NEWS HOST: OK, for some, that public option has gone over like a lead balloon. So how about plan B, morality? Is that the secret weapon strategy to get health care reform? President Obama went on a conference call today with thousands of religious people, arguing health care reform is a moral issue. The president also argued against what he calls "ludicrous lies" made up about his health plan.

Go read it all, she says some good things that need to be said.

Media Still Against Former President Bush

Bush Quietly Saved a Million African Lives
by Dr. Paul Kengor in Townhall.com

What if a president, on his own initiative, under no demands from staff or from supporters or opponents, set out to spend an unprecedented amount of money on AIDS in Africa, literally billions of dollars, at a time when the nation could not afford it, citing his faith as a primary motivation and, ultimately, saved more than a million lives?

Wouldn’t the story be front-page news, especially in top, liberal newspapers? Wouldn’t it lead on CNN, MSNBC, and the “CBS Evening News?” Might statues be erected to the man in the nation’s more “progressive” cities?
What if the president was George W. Bush?

It is no surprise to us there has been nothing in the past or present that would show George W. Bush in a favorable light. Go read it all.

Republican Appeals Court Justice Rose Vela announced today she is seeking election to Place 9 on the Texas Supreme Court.

Let's start now. Support ALL Conservatives.

Vela, known as a no-nonsense conservative, was elected in an historic 2006 election to the Thirteenth Court of Appeals becoming the first Republican elected since the court’s creation. Vela will seek the seat being vacated by Supreme Court Justice Scott Brister who has announced his intention to resign and not seek re-election in 2010.

Can Evil be Banal? Read on...

The Banality of Evil – The Health Care debate takes a dangerous turn by Matt Holzmann

This evening the New York Times is reporting that the President and Congressional leaders plan to go it alone on their health care bill. Since this leadership includes Henry Waxman, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid, and we have seen their hysterical response to the growing concerns of many in the electorate with the various bills introduced so far, I am deeply concerned.

Despite massive and growing resistance and incontrovertible declines in the popularity of their positions, they plan to take the gloves off and pass something, anything to be able to declare victory. For that is what this is all about now. Better, more widespread health care is not the issue any more. This is the most craven of partisan politics.

In 1962, Hannah Arendt, in writing about Adolph Eichmann, the architect of the Final Solution, tried to understand the phenomenon of pure evil. Having been a good German who lived under Hitler until her life was threatened, she escaped the Holocaust. These were her people
who did this thing. She was desperately trying to understand how the German people would participate in such horrors. “The Banality of Evil” was her description of the way in which ordinary people accepted the orders of their leaders and committed such crimes. The defense of “following orders” was disallowed by the International Military Tribunal in Nuremburg, who stated that following illegal orders was not a valid defense provided a moral choice was possible.

So what does this have to do with health care? Please allow me to relate a true story. Today seems to be my day for such if you have read my earlier blog.

Read on to see how his aunt in England died. This is what is coming to America unless we fight it, even if passed we must change it later.

Rasmussen Reports has Good News

Generic Congressional Ballot
Republicans Now Ahead By Five on Generic Ballot

Republican candidates have now matched their biggest lead over Democrats of the past several years on the Generic Congressional Ballot.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 43% would vote for their district’s Republican congressional candidate while 38% would opt for his or her Democratic opponent.

The level of support for Democratic candidates is unchanged this
week, but backing for GOP candidates rose one point from a week ago. This is now the eighth straight week Republicans have led on the Generic Ballot.

These findings come at the same time that voters, for the first time in over two years of polling, say they trust Republicans slightly more than Democrats on the handling of the issue of health care.

Now if we can just hold on to this till November 2010.

Dr. Sanity has a blog

I don't read it every day, just usually when someone links to it.
Dr. Sanity says:

Two posts back, I wrote about the intellectual bankruptcy of U.S. academic institutions.

If you want to understand what is waiting for us at the end of the left's rainbow, then we need to look at the agenda being implemented by the heroes of the left .

I won't copy the whole post, go there and read it for yourself. Be sure to follow all the links to get the whole picture.

More Chicago Cronyism

From Politico
by KENNETH P. VOGEL

Critics of President Obama’s health-care overhaul are zeroing in on his senior adviser David Axelrod, whose former partners at a Chicago-based firm are the beneficiaries of huge ad buys — now at $24 million and counting — by White House allies in the reform fight.

The unwelcome scrutiny, largely from Republicans, comes at an inopportune time as Obama seeks to shore up support for health care reform. It revolves around two separate $12 million ad campaigns advocating Obama’s health care plan that were produced and
placed partly by AKPD Message and Media, a firm founded by Axelrod that employs his son and still owes Axelrod $2 million.
Read more

Posts from Gateway Pundit

I do read GatewayPundit.com every day. Today they have all this:

ANOTHER PHONY OBAMACARE DOCTOR-- Is Really a Far Left Nut ...Update: She's a Realtor- Never Practiced Medicine

White House Organizes Obamacare Rally in Jackson, MI-- Bus in SEIU Members From 146 Miles Away

Dems Cheered Blocking Social Security Reform in 2006-- Now It Could Face Default Within 2 Years (Video)

PALIN SLAMS OBAMA Over Funding Brazilian Offshore Oil Development
(the gov't is sending money for oil exploration in Brazil!)

Flashback: At Daily Kos Hate Website Obama Told Far Left to "Brook No Compromise" On Progressive Agenda

Barney Frank to Town Hall Constituents: "What's the Matter With You All?" (Video)

And that is just today. You might want to make Gateway Pundit one of your daily reads. (just don't stop clicking on Rockport Conservatives!)

Do You Read Lilek?

I don't read him every day, but he is such an eloquent speaker for nostalgia maybe I should. Reader's Digest is his post for Wednesday's The Bleat. He has a photo of the table of contents of a 1941 issue. Go read it, get notalgic, know why Reader's Digest just declared Chapter 11.

Reader’s Digest has declared Chapter 11 - or, as the final documents read after their editors finished with them, Chapter 5. I once wrote that Reader’s Digest contained the first practical application of Nanotechnology - no matter where you put the magazine, tiny mites embedded in the cover would pick it up and move it to the top of the toilet tank.
I have an issue from 1941. Take a look at the topic list.

Michael Yon Reports on the War in Afghanistan

If you do not describe to the emails from Michael Yon, at least read this dispatch.
Do Americans Care about British Soldiers?

9 August 2009Helmand Province, Afghanistan

A gunshot ripped through the darkness and a young British soldier fell dying on FOB Jackson. I was just nearby talking on the satellite phone and saw the commotion. The soldier was taken to the medical tent and a helicopter lifted him to the excellent trauma center at Camp Bastion. That he made it to Camp Bastion alive dramatically improved his chances. But his life teetered and was in danger of slipping away. Making matters worse, the British medical system back in the United Kingdom did not possess the specialized gear needed to save his life. Americans had the right gear in Germany, and so the British soldier was put into the American system.

British officers in his unit, 2 Rifles, wanted to track their man every step of the way, and to ensure that his family was informed and supported in this time of high stress. Yet having their soldier suddenly in the American system caused a temporary glitch in communications with folks in Germany. The British leadership in Sangin could have worked through the glitch within some hours, but that would have been hours wasted, and they wanted to know the status of their soldier now. So a British officer in Sangin – thinking creatively –asked if I knew any shortcuts to open communications. The right people were only an email away: Soldiers Angels. And so within about two minutes, these fingers typed an email with this subject heading: CALLING ALL ANGELS.

Soldiers’ Angels Shelle Michaels and MaryAnn Phillips moved into action. Day by day British officers mentioned how Soldiers Angels were proving to be incredibly helpful. The soldiers expressed deep and sincere appreciation. Yet again, the Angels arrived during a time of need.

The severely wounded soldier, whose name I will not print without explicit permission, is recovering in the United Kingdom.

Two or three weeks after the injury, I was having dinner with a British Major and several Captains. The Major talked reverently about Soldiers Angels, and then about a herculean effort that the United States military extended to save a single British soldier. I had no idea about that effort. I just heard the gunshot, saw the soldier carried away into the night, and heard the helicopter roar into the darkness. I knew Soldiers’ Angels had intervened back in Germany, but the details that followed came as incredible surprise. The U.S. military had quietly moved Heaven and Earth to save a single British “Squaddie.”

Please read the following description, authored in part by Soldiers’ Angel MaryAnn Phillips:

The Needs of the One...
Then send this around to all your friends. Support our wonderful troops, and Micahel Yon who embeds and reports on them.

I Wish this Really Meant Something

Talking heads bite Barack Obama

from Politico by Mike Allen

When you’re Barack Obama and you’ve lost Jon Stewart, you’ve got a problem.

“Mr. President,” the “Daily Show” host said Monday night, “I can’t tell if you’re a Jedi — 10 steps ahead of everything — or if this whole health-care thing is kickin’ your [rear.]”

White House officials, by acknowledging that a public option (or government plan) is not essential to achieving health care reform, may have improved their chances of ultimately getting a bill.

In the meantime, though, they have touched off the most ferocious backlash among liberal talking heads since President Obama took office....

In The New York Times, columnist Bob Herbert scolded the president under the withering headline, “This Is Reform? Why are the insurers and the drug industry are smiling”

Read it all.

CREATORS SYNDICATE columnists pay tribute to Robert Novak

This is a link from Drudge. Go read it for some very heartfelt comments from people who knew Robert Novak. He was an honorable man.

Tributes to Robert Novak

From Human Events
Robert Novak (1931-2009)by Kenneth Y. Tomlinson 08/18/2009

The Evans-Novak column ran under the title “the Sonnenfeldt Doctrine.” When I finished reading that early spring day in 1976, I remember thinking, this is quintessential Bob Novak.

State Department Counselor Helmut Sonnenfeldt had told a London gathering of American ambassadors that Soviet domination of Eastern Europe was actually necessary for world peace.In fact, Poland was a good example of the benefits of Soviet control because that had enabled the Poles to overcome their “romantic” political instincts which had led to so many “disasters in their past.”

This column had almost everything. Those words were contained in an official State Department cable slipped to Novak by a highly placed source. Henry Kissinger’s right-hand man was confirming that détente was code for Communist victory over freedom.

Within days, candidate Ronald Reagan who was challenging President Ford in Republican primaries, declared the Sonnenfeldt Doctrine meant “slaves should accept their fate.”For Novak, about the only one
of his political obsessions that’s missing were Republican green-eyeshades defending 70% tax rates as the only means to get a balanced budget.

From The New York Times:
Mr. Novak rose from a $68-a-week cub reporter to become the wealthy proprietor of almost a cottage industry, achieving prominence and celebrity as an influential Washington pundit whose views leaned decidedly to the right while parlaying that renown into books, newsletters and political seminars he organized.

At one point his column appeared in as many as 300 newspapers, and he was one of the first personalities to emerge on all-news cable television. CNN put him on the air its first weekend.

He first drew attention as an old-fashioned, notebook-and-shoe-leather newspaperman. For three decades his was the second byline with "Inside Report," a syndicated column, written with Rowland Evans, that became a must-read for many both inside and outside Washington.

From Townhall March 2009 issue:
The Prince of Darkness as a Beacon of Dissent
by Tim Carney

Robert David Sanders Novak has been called many names. His close friends call him “Bob.” Most people call him “Novak.” His wife calls him “Robert.”....

I have had the honor of calling him “Boss.” Since I went to work for him at the end of 2001, Novak has been a mentor and a friend. I learned a lot at his side, but all journalists—and all Americans, for that matter—could learn important lessons from this man, now retired and ill.

In these days of single-party rule and a media that fawns over the
president, we can all stand a dose of his pervasive skepticism, distrust of those in power and doggedness to dig up the hard facts ....

Many people know Novak primarily from his long stint on CNN, but I think it bothers Novak—it always bothers me—when people describe him as a television commentator instead of as a columnist.

To some extent it’s understandable: People watch television more than they read newspapers. Even when people read your work in print, they often don’t bother checking the byline. On TV, they can’t help but see your face.

So, while Novak’s fame primarily resulted from his on-screen work, his real vocation was the written word. And although his work was found exclusively on the opinion pages for the last 45 years of his career, he was a political reporter more than anything else. Sure, he has always had his opinions—and over his life, he has become progressively more pro-life, more pro-market and more anti-interventionist— but so do all reporters. Novak was different from the news-page reporters because he didn’t hide his opinions.
Bob Novak was a great reporter on the American Political scene for many years, I have missed him since he has been ill. RC

Right vs Left in Baseball

A Little fun from the Townhall Blog
Townhall.com Founder Knocks Progressives Out of Softball Tourney
Posted by: Garrett Murch

The softball team of center-right think tank, the Heritage Foundation, eliminated the team of liberal-progressive advocacy group, Center for American Progress (CAP), from the D.C. Think Tank League softball tournament on Monday night with a 16-11 victory.

Heritage’s Capitalist Tools led from the third inning on. Previously undefeated CAP rallied in the bottom of the sixth, closing an 11-run deficit to 3.

Heritage, which founded Townhall.com in 1995, responded with two runs in the top of the seventh to enter the bottom of the final inning with a 5-run lead. CAP’s hopes were ultimately dashed, though, when a 6-3 double play followed by a 4-3 groundout ended both the game and CAP’s season.

Heritage now moves on to the quarter finals, while team CAP may be hauling out the hacky sacks a little sooner than hoped.

The Conservative Challenge

From Powerline an answer to many of the questions we discussed at the 912 meeting last night. Where are we going? How are we going to accomplish it?
Scott Johnson discusses an article by Charles Kesler, editor of the Claremont Review of books. See links at the bottom of this post.

He quotes:

"If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it," Abraham Lincoln counseled in his great 1858 House Divided speech.

In Lincoln's spirit, Professor Charles Kesler situates the dire position of the conservative movement confronting Barack Obama. "In President Barack Obama, conservatives face the most formidable liberal politician in a generation, perhaps since John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson," writes Kesler:

Charles Kesler is of course the editor of the Claremont Review of Books (subscribe here) and professor of government at Claremont College. His brilliant essay "The conservative challenge" leads the new issue of the CRB and has been made available online at our request.