Title Bout

Posted on December 18, 2008 by Phil Kadath

(general crowd noise)

In the Taupe Corner….. People of African descent who are dependent on public transportation!

(wait for the crowd cheer to quiet down)

And in the Mauve Corner…… Asian lesbians who uses off color language!

(more waiting for crowd cheer)

A lesbian Asian bus driver was fired by Brisbane City Council after she wrote a note referring to commuters as “spear chuckers with prams” .

But Lillian Tam – who said she has fought discrimination all her life – said the note was not meant to be malicious or racist.

She claimed the phrase was used by bus drivers to describe the 110 bus route after a group of Sudanese, Tongan, Samoan and Caucasian passengers wearing face masks and carrying spears were picked up one day.

Ms Tam said other routes were dubbed the Orient Express, the Bombay Express and the Granny Run.

Oh, to be a fly on the wall of that “Diversity Hearing”.

Found via Counting Cats

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

RNS Quote of the Day: 12/18/08

Posted on December 18, 2008 by Phil Kadath

Want to send a message to Obama? You had better be nice about it.

All messages must be placed by 6:30pm on Friday, January 16th. All ads must be congratulatory in nature. The Washington Post reserves the right to reject any notice. Available to private individuals only.

The Washington Post

Wouldn’t want to harsh his mellow on his first day of school.

Posted in Order of the imperial upraised middle finger. | Leave a comment

Him: Insolent

Posted on December 18, 2008 by Phil Kadath

Me: Howling with laughter

John Aravosis, of the inappropriately named Americablog, gets all whiny about his health insurance provider

Yes, the cost of covering me has gotten so expensive that BlueCross felt compelled to up my premium by a whopping 23%, according to the letter I just got from them. Funny, since I found out last week that they haven’t upped my prescription benefit cap in 12 years – it’s still at the 1997 level of $1500, which means they’ve actually cut my prescription benefits by about 25% over that period (since drug prices, and inflation, keep going up while my benefits stay the same) while nearly tripling my premiums. And now I get a whopping 23% increase in one year to my insurance premium. I’m paying $417 a month, the best self-employed plan that CareFirst offers, and these bastards cut off my prescription drugs two months ago. I had readers offering to buy me drugs in Mexico. What country do we even live in anymore? These people are thieves. So help me God, Obama and the spineless wonders we call Democrats on the Hill had better fix this.

So, let us do the math:

He pays $5004 per year for “The Best” plan offered (or, if the 23% increase comes after the stated amount, he pays $6154.92 @ $512.91 per month).

For this, he gets multiple prescriptions and doctor visits for his “conditions”.

I don’t know if he reads his doctor’s billing statements before they get sent off to the insurer, but if he did, he’d see that if he was paying for this himself he’d either be breaking even here, or more likely, saving at least $1000 per year.

Does this guy even understand how health insurance premiums work? I mean, I’m sure he is one of those who believes that health care is a right and all, but c’mon. No one can be this inept, can they?

How can he just sit there and whine into his blog and not talk about how he is searching for a new provider?

Oh, right. He’s a Democrat. He wants things handed to him.

Posted in Dare To Be Stupid | 1 Comment

A Day Late

Posted on December 17, 2008 by Phil Kadath

But I’m posting up a linkfest to tales of the City Hall meeting on the topic of Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels’ attempt to ban CCW holders from city property.

Here is the Seattle Times’ article.

And here is Don Ward’s article in the Seattle Weekly.

You’ll notice in both of those how there is some spin attempted about “non-Seattle residents” being the majority in attendance.

That doesn’t matter. Resident or non, Nickels has repeatedly says that what effects Seattle effects the entire tri-county area.

So I think you might prefer to hear from some of the bloggers that attended.

Gay Cynic from NW Free Thinker

Joe Huffman has a couple of posts up

Ry Jones was the photo operative and he says that the city will be rebroadcasting the hearing here.

While I’m still more than slightly unhappy that my employment obligations made it so that I couldn’t attend (more on this next week), I have a complete lack of surprise that the Mayor himself refused to show up. Which proves once again just how little he cares about the people he works for.

Posted in Heroes, Comrades and Brothers | Leave a comment

“Associated” with the incoming Executive Branch

Posted on December 17, 2008 by Phil Kadath

That must be what the A in AP stands for now, after what an AP spokesman said of the hysterical frightmongering of Seth Borenstein’s Sunday article.

A spokesman for the Associated Press said that the news agency stands by its story. “It’s a news story, based on fact and the clearly expressed views of President-elect Barack Obama and others,” spokesman Paul Colford told FOXNews.com in an e-mail.

OK, it is a fact that the article followed the views of the incoming Obama administration. But it is far from fact that “time is running out to solve the climate crisis”.

There is no crisis.

If you haven’t swung through Tim Blair’s place in the past couple days he has cut and pasted some absolutely hilarious snippets from the watermelon’s down there.

Aussie PM, Kevin Rudd, announced the “carbon cutting goal” Australia is supposed to meet by 2020 and they weren’t happy about it.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd says Australia will cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 5 per cent of 2000 levels by 2020, but could make a cut of up to 15 per cent if other countries also sign up to stronger reductions.

The eco-socialists were hoping for ten-times that. They showed their unappreciative nature by commenting on the story in the ABC comments section, as well as the Sydney Morning Herald.

If you’re down in the dumps today, those will perk you right back up.

Posted in The Global Warming Death Cult | 2 Comments

Umm, Yeah!?!

Posted on December 17, 2008 by Phil Kadath

Reason.tv has a video up asking if Obama’s “New New Deal” is going to be as bad as the old “New Deal”.

Isn’t the sequal worse than the original ninety some-odd percent of the time? And if the original was horrible, there is never any chance for the followup.

Posted in The Left is Never Right | Leave a comment

RNS Quote of the Day: 12/17/08

Posted on December 17, 2008 by Phil Kadath

In terms of “The Worst That Could Happen” to the US economy, Eamon Javers of Business Week set up sets up four truly crappy, and realistic, scenarios and reviews them one by one at The Politico with James Rickards of Market Intelligence .

His conclusion is today’s quote

There are vulnerabilities for the United States, but also opportunities. I’d rather be the United States than any of these other countries.

James Rickards

Posted in Quote of the Day | Leave a comment

You don’t say

Posted on December 17, 2008 by Phil Kadath

It seems that the propaganda is wearing off

Debate ran high within Barack Obama’s transition team over whether the next secretary of Education should be a traditionalist in sync with the national teachers’ unions or a reformer who will help break the hold those unions have on Democratic Party policy. Obama’s choice of Chicago School Superintendent Arne Duncan is seen as a move to bridge those competing camps.But two-thirds of U.S. voters (66%) say the teachers’ unions – the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers – are more interested in protecting their members’ jobs than in the quality of education.

Only 23% of voters say educational quality comes first for the unions, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Twelve percent (12%) are undecided.

Men and women are equally critical of the teacher’s unions. Married voters are more critical than unmarrieds by 12 points. Seventy percent (70%) of voters with children at home think the unions are more interested in jobs, compared to 63% of those without children in the house.

While 78% of Republicans and 66% of unaffiliated voters say teachers’ jobs are the chief focus of the unions, only 55% of Democrats agree.

That is because 45% of Democrats will believe anything a Union Rep says, having been raised to distrust only management.

The key words when talking to an anti-school choice prag are: The System

They always whine about money being “taken out of the system”.

That is when you need to ask them if they are for children getting educated or are they for “the system”.

With large numbers of metropolitan school districts having a 50% drop-out rate, we know “The System” isn’t working. Yet these people always want to throw more money at “The System”, as though money will be a defibrillator to “The System”.

Alone, without significant reforms, no amount of money has ever been shown to improve a failing school system. Those people are fools.

Found via the Evergreen Freedom Foundation blog

Posted in Academia and Other Nonsense | Leave a comment

Good/Bad

Posted on December 17, 2008 by Phil Kadath

Idaho Edition

First, The Good:

Two northern Idaho lawmakers say they will introduce legislation that would penalize employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants.Sen. Mike Jorgenson, R-Hayden Lake, and Rep. Phil Hart, R-Athol, said they will try to pass the proposed law that has been rejected the last two years.

Lawmakers in the last session rejected a bill that would have required employers to verify workers’ immigration status. But Hart said that some lawmakers who voted against the bill have either been voted out of office or have changed their minds.

If the proposed law passes, companies that violate it could have their business licenses suspended or revoked.

I like the lack of fines. Just shut them down. There is no way to cover the loss caused by the fines that way.

Unfortunately, now The Bad:

Rep. Stephen Hartgen, R-Twin Falls, is drafting a bill to require bloggers to post under their real name, and require online commenters to do likewise. In essence, Hartgen wants online commentary to more closely resemble newspaper opinion pages, where letter writers are generally required to identify themselves.

Would you find in odd if you found out that this guy is a former newspaper editor/publisher?

He is, and I don’t.

Some folks don’t care about their anonymity. I do. Although, I will say anything I say here in person. In fact, I actually hold back here. Just can ask David. He was running a list of quotables during the last Boomershoot. I think I’m somewhat lucky he didn’t have a pen and paper handy.

Posted in Freaks, Mutants, and Morons | 3 Comments

Get Ready for “Blizzard Watch 2008!”

Posted on December 16, 2008 by Phil Kadath

No, that doesn’t have enough “fright factor”.

How about “Run for cover, it’s the Seattle Snow-Pocalypse!”?

Almost, but not quite.

OK, here we go….

“Polar Onslaught! We’re all gonna die!”

Yeah, that is the ticket!

Yep, Seattle is “bracing” for 3-6 inches (or some other piddling amount) of snow tonight and tomorrow to cover up the 1-2 inches we had Sunday morning (and that is almost gone).

I’m making sure Buddy has his provisions (safety and recovery gear), but am otherwise ready for whatever Canada has in store for us (you did know that their second largest export was snow, right?).

Oh, and unlike when we get record high temperatures in the summer, which always mean the planet is warming, record low temperatures in the winter do not mean the planet is cooling.

The cries of “Weather is not Climate!” are being shouted across the land at every opportunity.

Pics if I can find the camera in my moving boxes.

Posted in Life in the Atomic Age | 8 Comments