Nom de plume: Rivrdog

Tuesday trespass...

...wherein we show some more examples of how the Left tramples on traditional American values.

Example One: Nanny Medicine. Watching the noon news on Channel eight here in Stumptown, I heard the newsbabe try to explain a new definition of "obese", which, BTW, USED to have the meaning of more than 30 pounds over ideal weight. The "new" definition of "obese" apparently means flabby-looking, because the reporter explained that one can be "obese" AT one's ideal weight. This is nothing more than a blatant attempt to use scare tactics to scare people into being underweight, or becoming gym rats, or both. I reject it.

Example Two: Qualification of Presidents: Obama does not meet the qualification listed in the Constitution because he is NOT a "natural born citizen" as required, then defined in the SCOTUS case Minor v. Happersett. In that case, a "natural born citizen" was defined as, "all children born in a country of parents who were it's citizens". There is no argument that Barack Hussein Obama was not born of parents who were both citizens. There is argument that he was born here. US District Court Judge Anderson of TN  has cited Minor v. Happersett as being on point. Sheriff Arpaio thinks that this is important enough to let superior courts decide whether Obama should even be on ballots across the country. Read about this new angle on the "birther" controversy here. I support Sheriff Joe in his quest to have the truth come out. This Nation could stand the minor constitutional crisis caused by discovering that Obama was never qualified to hold office, at this point, but if Obama wins another term of office, and THEN a court tells him he is not qualified, there is a high potential for a MAJOR Constitutional crisis. A gun sort of crisis, if you know what I mean, Verne.

Example Three: The Fourth Estate as Obama shills. It seems to me that there are rules about this. At what point do the rules get enforced? When is someone going to start accumulating all the minutes and hours of TeeVee time used strictly to re-elect Obama, and the column-miles of newsprint used for the same reason, and decree that said media either have to give equal time to the Romnizer or be classed for tax purposes and purposes of license renewals as political shills?

Example Four: We're not Los Angeles, and don't need their air pollution rules in Oregon. It seems that City of Portland garbage rates are about to rise by almost 10% just so the garbage collectors can buy new trucks that meet the most stringent emissions rules. Those would be Kalifornica's rules, which are written for the extreme example of the Los Angeles Basin airshed, arguably the worst place a large city has been built, on the entire planet. The topography and local micro-climate makes it impossible to get rid of man OR nature-generated air pollution, and rules for emissions were written to consider those facts, but then, those rules have been foisted off on the entire rest of the Nation, which does not need them because the rest of the Nation does not have the airshed problems that Los Angeles has. No matter, the insane Portland City Council, led by the Gay Pedophile Mayor, Sam Adams, brought in the CA rules, and so all the trucks have to be changed out. No matter that the current trucks still have life left, the haulers must buy new ones, and oh, while you're at it, City Council, did you remember to mandate that those trucks use "bio-diesel" fuel at $7.00+ per gallon? That stupid rule, which the City Fleet is, itself, saddled with, would make the perfect capper for this insane additional expense in an already insanely-expensive city.

Example Five: When the history books tell us that Liquor Prohibition failed as a social-control experiment, let's try it all over again! The self-same insane City of Portland, which has forced foodcart entrepreneurs into what used to be called by the Nazis, "lagers" or concentrations, smarted recently when the Oregon Liquor Control Commission, acting on their legal counsel's advice that such establishments, once forced to tie themselves down, had to be treated, for purposes of liquor licensing, as brick-and-mortar restaurants. They issued a liquor license (beer and wine only) to one food cart, in the lager known locally as "Cartlandia", no doubt, after the TV series "Portlandia". So the city is mightily cheese(burgered)ed off, and has filed suit against the State liquor agency. The Rivrdog blog, no real friend of the OLCC, nevertheless sides with them on this one, and hopes their legal beagles turn into legal pitbulls and rip the City a new one.

That's enuff for today. Suffice it to say I do NOT forgive these trespasses.

The "Single-Payer" Fallacy

Even the most die-hard liberal seems to believe that the SCOTUS is about to either gut or utterly destroy Obamacare, so there's angst all over the media.

Too bad it's misplaced angst, for angst can be a good thing if it leads to logical solutions.

The misplaced angst here is the failure of the entire liberal side to look at the One Big Question* in the single-payer scheme of health insurance.

That question is simply this: shouldn't any mandated insurance plan have, at it's core, efficiency in payment? Let us not forget these points:

An insurance plan is just that, and that only: a plan to arrange payment for a service: rebuilding your home after a fire or other loss, rebuilding YOU after an illness. All those restorative services have COST associated with them, so PAYMENT is required.

It almost seems like liberals think that a health insurance plan must first change health care delivery. No, it doesn't have to, all it has to do is arrange PAYMENT for services. This is where Obamacare over-reached, it attempted to reconfigure health care delivery, then pay for the new delivery system.

Obamacare was a deliberate attempt of the President and his party to use health care services, or the control of them, to drag the USA into a new political system, socialism. You see, the health care insurance system we have now is not mandatory. People can and do forgo health care. They can and do shop around for the best price for health care AND health insurance, and their choices lead directly to the efficiencies in the health care marketplace. The LACK of efficiency in the health care marketplace is due entirely to non-payers. Yes, a health-care services bill is the easiest one to refuse to pay. All you have to do is declare that you can't afford to pay, and the bill will either be put off, or reduced, or some arrangement made to pay it from public funds.

The lack of certainty in payment for health care services causes the ineffiencies. To solve that one, relatively easy problem, Obamacare proposed to re-write the entire idea of delivering AND paying for health care services. This is the equivalent of using a SWAT team to bring an overtime-parking violator to justice.

BTW, your Rivrdog won't keep you in suspense. The way to solve the problem of uninsureds in the system is to have a pool of money for payment. This has been done in the auto insurance industry almost since the start of auto insurance some 80 years or so ago. It's called "assigned risk", and the system works well. If you are in the assigned risk pool, you pay higher premiums, but you get insurance, the equivalent of using a SWAT team to arrest an overtime-parking violator. The higher premiums encourage you to do whatever it takes to improve yourself so that you get OUT of the Assigned Risk pool.

All the Feds had to do to execute Universal Health Care was establish the Assigned Risk Pool for those payers who couldn't find normal insurance, and make paying for medical care the same level of debt that everything else is. Establishing that pool would have required only a small fraction of the bureaucracy and a small fraction of the money which Obamacare demands from us in it's various forms. Assigned risk wouldn't have imposed insurance, it just would have paid for all those who don't have insurance to get it.

The health insurance system in this country works. It can and should be made more efficient, but most of the job of making it more efficient would be done by establishing the Assigned Risk pool.

The Assigned Risk solution isn't glitzy though, it doesn't require a "Czar" to run it, and it certainly wouldn't require the pogrom against health care that is now in place and hopefully, will soon be erased by the SCOTUS.

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* The "One Big Question" is a construct of Joe Huffman, who blogs frequently, here. He says that most propaganda can be unraveled by the simple technique of digging out the One Big Question, and examining it for the truth.

How Bromantic!

The "First Gay President" magazine cover.

H/T to Uncle

Okay then, now the realpolitik: this is a lesson in how not to do politics.

First, take this to the bank: the gay community is not a serious asset for the President. He already had them in his pocket, because, except for the few "Log Cabin" gay rethuglicans, they're already dummycrats. He's not converting anyone with this message. Are there any lazy gays who need energizing? Again, maybe a paltry few, but most I know are VERY politically active for the Left already, so the Obumbler didn't pick up many votes by "energizing" that base, either.

Second, he HAS succeeded in energizing the GOP base with this issue, in a way that the Romnizer could only have had wet dreams about, and there may well be some Christian or Jewish undecided voters who will push the Romnoid button for sure because of this. My guess: far more of those than any pro-gay votes just changed loyalties.

Net loss of votes for Obama? Well, we aren't voting this week (except in the primary in OR, and Obummer is not seriously opposed here), but if the national polls are to be believed, the Wahn just lost 7% to Romniddy. More important, five Democratic Senators runnng for re-election have just spent the weekend distancing themselves from The First Gay President.

Many more gems like that, and Obama will retire 1-20-13. If he does, his first term and his campaign for re-election will become THE textbook case of how NOT to do politics.

Now, which one of his Two Left Feet will Romney trip over this week?

Earth Day, 2012

There's some history behind Earth Day, you need to go to the Wiki and read it. You actually only need to read the first paragraph, because it will tell you (between the lines, I'm sure it wasn't written that way on purpose or the Wiki would have been deleted by now). Note in the Wiki that the original Earth Day was all about stewardship of the planet and it's natural environment, which is what it should be about today, but isn't.

Note also, in the Wiki, that the United Nations hijacked Earth Day three years ago. It is now just another tool of that anti-national-sovereignty body, which uses and recommends socialism as it's mechanism to destroy sovereign capitalist governments.

When the UN hijacked Earth Day, they brought in the "Mother Earth" thing. Back when the original Earth Day was proclaimed, the Mother Earth or Mother Nature thing was a joke, as in the margarine commercial. Now it is a religion, and as such, is the only religion the United Nations recognizes (overtly, they recognize Islam under the table).

So, we have had a progression here, a progressive change. It's just another one of the progressive changes that wound up as a socialist tool, but environmentalism went from "conservation", as advanced one hundred years ago by Teddy Roosevelt, to Earth Day (let's ALL save the Planet) in 1970, to today's version (we're acolytes of Gaia, the Earth Goddess).

The only true version is the original. We can use the bounty of nature, but we must conserve it, so there will always be some.

That's what your Rivrdog follows as his outdoor creed. I recycle, too, in fact, devoted yesterday morning to getting the non-curbside recyclables together to take to City Hall, where, once a year, their huge parking lot is used for actual GOOD, and becomes a massive recycling center for the hard-to-recycle items.

If you conserve nature, you've done your duty to the planet. Socialism does not count as doing your duty to the planet, nor does prostrating yourself before the false idol of Gaia.

I knew Ronald Reagan, and you may NOT compare yourself to him, Obama

I knew Ronald Reagan because being stationed in CA during the late 1960s then the late 70s to early 80s, he was the talk of the State. The much-more-respectful MSM reported more accurately on the President then.

Ronald Reagan started out as a union guy, President of the Screen Actor's Guild, but at the time, the "wild-eyed socialists"* in Hollywood were in the minority, not the majority like now. There were a LOT of WW2 veterans calling each other Brother and Sister at Union meetings then, and there was at least SOME respect for the USA amongst the members of SAG.

After his SAG stint, Reagan went on to get elected Lieutenant Governor, then Governor of California, which, at the time really WAS "paradise on earth" (yes, readers, I could easily have been a dope-smoking hippie myself, they were graciously accepted most places then, as somewhat of a side-show, but they were accepted there).

Reagan went on to become President, taking over from Jimmy Carter, who dispite being a Naval Academy graduate, and a small businessman, made a piss-poor President. I had a fellow B52 crew-member who bought a residence in Riverside in '81, and had to pay a 18% mortgage rate (and the rates were FALLING then!), IIRC. I rented, was scared out of the home-buyer's market.

President Reagan's Airborne Command Post used to land at my duty station, March AFB (Now March Air Reserve Base), which was then the headquarters for the Strategic Air Command's Fifteenth Air Force, and it was home to double-Squadron wings of both B52s and KC-135 tankers. The Presidential Airborne Command Post was a brand-new E-4 (Boeing 747), which was outfitted as the President's place to fight a nuke war with the USSR from, even before Air Force One, it was THAT important. I got a VIP tour of the top-secret aircraft, which was later featured (a mock-up of it was featured) in the HBO movie "By Dawn's Early Light".

Gawd, this is digressy, isn't it?

*The point here was supposed to be: I knew Ronald Reagan, I probably knew him better than you do, Presient Obama. He was NOT a "wild-eyed socialist", but YOU ARE. Plus, you're a liar to boot, Obama, and I never knew Reagan to lie. 

Oh, BTW, President Obama, Warren Buffet, who has put up with you to an excessive degree, has just signaled you to quit calling your "tax the producers out of existence" plan the "Buffet Rule". Do the old, sick guy a favor and stop with that nonsense. Don't bother to try to call it the "Reagan Rule", either. Reagan wanted to lower taxes for EVERYONE, not just the dependable sloths who will always vote to get their "free stuff". Oh, and quit smoking that history-revisionist crack-pipe, Mister President. It's not legal yet. If you want it to be, fire Biden from your ticket and put Ron Paul on there.... 

I might not be an airline pilot, but...

....oh, wait! I WAS a heavy air transport navigator, so I guess I am qualified to suggest that whoever wrote this inane article overlooked the fact that out over the middle of the Atlantic, the USAF transport aircraft would not have had his landing light on at all, unless instructed to do so by Air Traffic Control, but if that was the case, the same controller would have been talking to the Air Canada jet on the same frequency or on Guard, which all planes monitor.

Also, when a pilot has been off the controls (sleeping) for a while, and he comes back on, it is customary for that pilot to request and get a briefing from the other pilot who HAS been flying, and to not touch the controls until that briefing has been given. There is a hand-off routine for change of flight control in the cockpit, with request, followed by agreement, followed by change of controlling pilot, followed by acknowledgement of change of pilot. That system is almost never broken, because breaking it can lead to FUBARS like this one.

What the First Officer did was use full elevator deflection downward, which caused the aircraft to fly a negative-G path, which causes unrestrained passengers and gear to hit the overhead in the cabin, then fall back down (when nearly full deflection upward was applied to reverse the abrupt descent).

There is a CAAS (Collision Avoidance Alerting System), now in it's 3rd generation, IIRC, that would have given the pilot warning that an actual collision was imminent, and probably flown the airplane out of danger. The First Officer did not need to react this way.

That First Officer needs immediate re-training. 

Watch TV, get stupid

Example: Yesterday, the local Evening news I watched, (KATU, the ABC affiliate) had a story on the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. Oh, the emotion! Oh, now we can have "closure".

Wait a farging minute, boneheads. 100 years have passed since the ill-fated (and poorly-built and operated) liner went down. Who is left to "close"? No survivors of the shipwreck remain, the last one died several years ago, IIRC. Probably few sons or daughters of victims remain, either, since they would have to be at least 99 years old. Maybe a few grandchildren of victims remain, but they'd be at least in their 70's, and those people grew up to be adults before "closure" became the fad it is now, so they probably don't miss their grandpas and grandmas, either, never having seen them.

When someone says "closure" to you, they are probably a mush-for-brains liberal product of the past two generations of our failed educational system. Closure is when you shovel the dirt on the casket, or, at the very last moment, when the insurance company issues the check if you are the beneficiary.

Closure, my ass, but it's not the worst example. In an almost-comical display just last week, a Civil War soldier was re-buried from wherever he had been planted, to the Willamette National Cemetary here in Stumptown. The reason given was that he had not been properly buried when he expired some time after that war. Of course, the rifle squad were Civil War re-enactors (who had a problem doing a speedy reload of their percussion-ignition, muzzle-loading rifles to fire the second volley, (the telly didn't show the third volley). Of course, some shirt-tail family member was there to receive a flag (they didn't say how many stars were on it), and of course the anchorwoman had to gravely intone, "Now the family has "closure". Be still, my retching stomach...

Second example. Afghanistan just suffered though a spate of coordinated attacks in the capital, Kabul. Most were suicide kabooms. There were a bunch of them. This ayem, I am watching Fox News' morning show, and they trot out a retired General, name of Jackson. He immediately reminded me of GEN Wesley Clark, the Clintoon apologist First Class during the Serbian War. This General Jackson opined that the attacks were NOT a military setback for Obama's Afghani policy, since they were not done by the Taliban, but by the Haqqani Network who we are at war with, but won't admit it, in Pakistan.

Oh, REALLY, General? If we have weakened the Taliban but allowed a new group to take their place as the strong terror-mongers, just HOW is that a demonstration of success?

It must be Bonehead Monday.

Why the culture loses

On the telly, was watching the 4pm news on KATU in PDX.

The newsbabe is Natalie Marmion, who has been around a loooooooong time.

The story was a vid from St. Maartens in the far-off Carrib, and the videographer was on the beach road where the main airport runway comes very close to the edge of the water. Basically, there is room for a narrow beach, a stubby seawall, the narrow roadway, then a fence and then the runway.

The adrenaline junkies gather there to get their adrenaline fix by having landing aircraft pass over their heads maybe 20 feet up. Since it's the only runway there, departing jets also use it, and that was the subject of today's vid.

Several people were standing at the perimeter fence, hanging on for dear life whilst a large jet ran up it's engines to takeoff power, preparing to depart. This generates jet blast of tornadic force. First the guy lost his grip and got blown away, then the gal, who landed, noggin first against the seawall. Both idiots were injured.

OK, sic semper ignorati, right? Game over?

Not quite. Natalie Marmion was the ignoramus of the day. She tut-tutted, "why don't they close that runway, people are getting hurt there?"

OK, for Natalie, because I usually do not teach kindergarten kids, I'll have to work at this.

• Look at the airport, Natalie. There is no room for another runway.
• Look at the huge warning sign in several languages, Natalie. FYI, it was in the field of view of that video.
• Do we bulldoze mountain cliffs because BASE jumpers jump off and occasionally die?
• Do we drain oceans because SCUBA divers drown in them?

Stick to the script, Natalie. That's why the producer gave you one.

For the rest of youse, this is why we lose!

Question for Mister President

Were you really just taken in by the pathos of it all, or did your peeps actually do any research before having you declare, "If I had a son, he'd be just like Trayvon"?

Info here. If that blog can come up with such info, why couldn't all your advisers? I maintain that they should have, and could have, since the investigation into the kid's death was almost a month along by then.

That leaves us with the un-avoidable conclusion that your "Son just like mine" comment was actually meant to deceive. If it was, you owe us all an apology, Mister President. Even if you WERE caught off-guard by the cover-up of this lad's thuggish background, you owe us a follow-up, and that follow-up had better work to turn off all the "blood-in-the-streets" rhetoric we keep hearing from the race-pimps and their Black Marxist enablers.

If there is race-rioting over this issue, Mister President, you are more at fault for starting it than any who throw the first firebombs or use the first guns.

You have a role here, Mister President. Turn off this race war before it starts. If your people think you can hide a failed economy and a failed foreign policy behind the acrid smokescreen of a race war, you are mistaken. Election Day WILL happen, and you will lose anyway, because you will have been fired by We The People. Your Chicago-stype machine will not be able to stuff enough ballot boxes to prevent your being thrown into the dustbin of history.

The only difference is, that without a race war, you will have been fired for simple incompetence, and we've had a few incompetent Presidents before, several still living, in fact. If there is a race war, you will also have been fired for fomenting it, and you will NEVER live that down. You will be reviled for the most shameful chapter of our history that any President ever wrote, and there have been plenty written before you, such as FDR's WW2 Japanese ancestry internment orders or the many railroadings of the American Indian tribes.

You owe us, Mister President. You were elected to effect positive change in this society, and no matter how you lie, you can't fit either race war OR racial appeasement politics into the category of positive change.

If you want to make positive change, support this Nation, it's economy and it's heritage. It's your duty to suppress the hegemony of racial politics, not support it. We can live in harmony in these United States ONLY if we live as One People, not as a collection of races each with it's own racial heritage celebrated as if it was a positive thing. Racial heritage is nothing, NATIONAL heritage is everything. Support your Nation, sir, or step aside for someone who will.

That is all.

Fit of Pique

After the Oregon House voted overwhelmingly to keep the Concealed Handgun License database (mostly) under wraps, the daily asswipe fishwrapper had a fit of pique, and wants the Guv'ner to veto it. He's a lib, the Guv'ner is, but he knows which side his bread is buttered on, so after only a paltry 5 House members voted against the shield bill, it would suprise me if Doctor Guv vetoed it.