I am thinking of rebranding my RFC Radio show on blogging. The name “Bloglines” is one that I used when I was doing “A Field Guide to American Politics,” and it just carried over to the new show.

But I was thinking it didn’t really come across well. Maybe I’m wrong, which is why I’m asking your advice.

Thanks for answering. I look forward to seeing what you think.

A Tucson Tea Party meeting was interrupted by a pro-ObamaCare protestor who marched through the meeting attendees, stood in front of them shouting over the speaker and eventually through an elbow at a person asking him to leave.

American Power has the video:

Here’s another angle:

“That was one white angry mob.”

This moron hasn’t even seen a white angry mob. Now you understand what the left is doing. They take a group of concerned citizens and slander them by calling them racists. It’s odd that he isn’t labeled a racist. In fact I’m gonna go ahead and do that now. This racist looked at a crowd full of people, but all he saw was white faces. Obviously he’s either trying to slander whites or he has some animosity against white people. His bias kept him from seeing the faces of color.

Sad really.

This guy was a clown looking to get assaulted so he could make the news and hurt the counter-ObamaCare movement.

Gateway Pundit has more.

There is a memo that has been leaked that shows General Electric playing a shady political game. They see the writing on the wall and are angling to make a profit from it, meaning they are willing to spend a lot of money to influence legislation that will result in huge profits for them.

Before we go any further, I am all for profits, but those profits have to come in a free market system. This is not anything close to a free market way of making profits. This is rent seeking:

"The intersection between GE’s interests and government action is clearer than ever," General Electric Vice Chairman John G. Rice wrote in an Aug. 19 e-mail to colleagues.

Rice was calling on his co-workers to join the General Electric Political Action Committee. "GEPAC is an important tool that enables GE employees to collectively help support candidates who share the values and goals of GE."

The full letter suggests that "share the values and goals of GE" really means "support policies that profit the company."

…

"On climate change," Rice wrote, "we were able to work closely with key authors of the Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill, recently passed by the House of Representatives. If this bill is enacted into law it would benefit many GE businesses."

Most of all, Waxman-Markey would profit a GE joint venture called Greenhouse Gas Services, which deals in greenhouse gas credits, products that have value only if a cap-and-trade bill like Waxman-Markey passes.

General Electric also stands to make a mint off of the health care reform bill. Andrew Wilcow and Nick Rizzuto outlined this in the Washington Times back in May:

Recently at the Business and Social Responsibility Conference, General Electric Chief Executive Officer Jeff Immelt referred to America’s current economic crisis as part of a "reset" rather than part of an economic cycle, saying, "People who understand that will prosper in the future, and people who don’t understand that will get left behind."

In the same address, Mr. Immelt, who is also a member of Mr. Obama’s economic recovery advisory board, added, "The intersection of government and business will be changed, maybe for a generation." In other words, companies should be prepared to beg for a seat at the government’s table if they plan on remaining lucrative.

…

Mr. Immelt’s words betray GE’s willingness to partner with the Obama government in order to turn a profit. To this end, GE has appointed Mr. Obama’s former nominee for secretary of health and human services, Tom Daschle, to the board of advisers for Healthymagination, an initiative launched by General Electric in partnership along with Intel, which will invest $6 billion over the next six years on "health care innovation that will help deliver better care to more people at lower cost."

Mr. Daschle said, "We can only find real solutions in health care when business, government and their partners work together."

…

The profitability of GE’s new venture will depend heavily on the nationalization of the health care industry. The standardization and streamlining of health care recordkeeping, something on which Mr. Obama ran in 2008, would require a massive government contract for the technology to achieve such standardization.

Mr. Obama has introduced a plan to computerize all health records within five years. Independent studies from Harvard, Rand Corp. and the Commonwealth Fund have estimated that such a plan could cost at least $75 billion to $100 billion over the next 10 years. Healthymagination is readying just such a technology, claiming that they will seek to "increase the use and capability of electronic medical record (EMR) technology and other information technology." With Mr. Obama’s ally Mr. Daschle on board, Healthymagination is sure to have more than a leg up on its competition when it comes time to dole out these massive contracts.

GE plans to invest $6 billion over six years in hopes of making $100 billion over the next 10 years. Which is why GEPAC has given so much money to Democrats lately.

Rep. Charlie Rangel of Harlem received $2,000 from GEPAC. He is not in electoral danger, but he is chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee. Rep. Henry Waxman of Hollywood also doesn’t need GE’s help getting elected, but the $1,000 from GEPAC might make Waxman, who’s chairman of the Commerce Committee, more amenable to a GE-friendly climate bill or health care reform bill.

Of the six House members who have received more than $4,000 from GEPAC this cycle — all Democrats — only Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., faces a tough re-election next year, thanks to accusations that he has used his chairmanship of the Defense Appropriations subcommittee to benefit donors and patrons. GE is a top defense contractor.

The other top recipients are all safe incumbents in powerful positions: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Budget Committee Chairman John Spratt, House Majority Whip Steny Hoyer, Ways and Means member Richard Neal, who chairs the subcommittee on Select Revenue Measures, and key appropriator Norm Dicks.

Flopping Aces notes the power GE has in comparison to some corporations vilified by the left. Halliburton comes to mind:

Democrats used to complain about Halliburton’s influence and profit from government connections during the Bush years. But Halliburton, at #167 on the Fortune 500 list pales in comparison to the impact that #6 G.E. can wield. And if our liberal friends would dispute that then, answer me this: how many news networks does Halliburton own?

General Electric owns NBC, CNBC and MSNBC, all of which are carrying the water for the Administration. This is not how free markets work. This is how government power has corrupted the system. Do I blame GE? Oh yeah, but the fact remains that had the government remained within the constraints of the Constitution, this wouldn’t be possible. It is ultimately the fault of those who advocate government intrusion into the free market.

Regaling the old days of Kennedy on a radio show, Ed Klien, former editor of Newsweek and the New York Times Magazine remembered a lighter side of the Lion of the Senate. Kennedy, known for being an advocate for the downtrodden, a voice for the weak and poor, a man bringing the issues of the people to the halls of Congress, this patron saint of the Left loved to hear jokes about how he killed a woman.

Mary Jo Kopeckne died not from drowning, but from asphyxiation. The doctor who prepared her body for embalming “noticed a severe lack of water in the lungs which would confirm death by asphyxiation rather than drowning.”

She could have been saved, but Kennedy was more worried about other things, like himself.

Mary Jo lived long enough to breathe the last remaining oxygen in that air pocket. And while Mary Jo was breathing her last . . . what did Ted Kennedy do?

Well, among other things, he began trying to concoct a cover-up story: "Why couldn’t Mary Jo have been driving the car? . . . Why couldn’t she have let him off and driven to the ferry herself and made a wrong turn?" His own cousin, Joe Gargan, talked Ted out of attempting to get away with that.

Kennedy beat the rap. Multiple witnesses have testified that Kennedy had been drinking all day. It was a clear-cut case of vehicular manslaughter, but he was allowed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge of leaving the scene of an accident.

The media will forgive liberals anything. Just look at the passive-voice construct in his obit: "an accident that left a young woman dead."

Think about that, about Kennedy soliciting jokes concerning the death of young Mary Jo, and ask yourself if this is really a man who should be raised up and admired.

If you are honest, you know he is not.

Hat Tip on the Video: Hot Air

Great Britain has a supercomputer with 15 million megabytes of memory. It can do 1,000 billion, or a trillion, calculations a second. They use it to predict the weather, and it’s considered one of the most valuable tools in the fight against climate change.

It also uses enough energy to power 1,000 homes, making it one of the biggest polluters in Great Britain:

The machine was hailed as the ‘future of weather prediction’ with the ability to produce more accurate forecasts and produce climate change modelling.

However the Met Office’s HQ has now been named as one of the worst buildings in Britain for pollution – responsible for more than 12,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.

It says 75 per cent of its carbon footprint is produced by the super computer meaning the machine is officially one of the country’s least green machines.

Green campaigners say it is ‘ironic’ that a computer designed to help stave-off climate change is responsible for such high levels of pollution.

But Met Office spokesman Barry Grommett said the computer was ‘vital’ to British meteorology and to help predict weather and environmental change.

He said: ‘We recognise that it is big but it is also necessary. We couldn’t do what we do without it.

‘We would be throwing ourselves back into the dark ages of weather forecasting if we withdrew our reliance on supercomputing, it’s as simple as that.’

But, but, but…I though there was nothing as important as curbing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. I thought we only had a few years and then we were all as dead as disco. I guess it’s all relative. If you make the electricity, you are evil. If you use it for climate change propaganda, it’s all good.

Google and Yahoo contribute heavily to the carbon output also. From Neatorama:

Google is secretive about its energy consumption and carbon footprint. It also refuses to divulge the locations of its data centres. However, with more than 200m internet searches estimated globally daily, the electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emissions caused by computers and the internet is provoking concern. A recent report by Gartner, the industry analysts, said the global IT industry generated as much greenhouse gas as the world’s airlines – about 2% of global CO2 emissions. “Data centres are among the most energy-intensive facilities imaginable,” said Evan Mills, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. Banks of servers storing billions of web pages require power.

But don’t worry, Google has goats taking care of its landscape. Yep…that’ll do it.

There is a rich history of Democrats blaming America for the state of other countries. Cuba comes to mind. Here is a country that embraced “change” disguised as something it wasn’t and instead found itself dealing with Fidel Castro and his executioner, Che Guevara. Both men had love affairs with Marxism and embraced the Soviet Union.

The communism that has oppressed that nation since has created an island prison that cannot even provide toilet paper to its people.

The left says this is America’s fault.

Apparently not content with blaming America for Cuba, Jim Webb says that we are to blame for Myanmar, aka Burma. According to Webb, our sanctions have lead to bad things in that country:

Webb, who became the first US official to meet the junta’s reclusive leader Than Shwe, voiced concern that Western isolation of Myanmar pushed it into the arms of China, “furthering a dangerous strategic imbalance in the region.”

The United States and European Union have imposed sanctions on Myanmar, earlier known as Burma, due to its refusal to recognize the last elections in 1990 and prolonged detention of the victor, democracy iconAung San Suu Kyi.

“While the political motivations behind this approach are laudable, the result has been overwhelmingly counter-productive,” Webb wrote Wednesday in The New York Times.

“The ruling regime has become more entrenched and at the same time more isolated. The Burmese people have lost access to the outside world,” he said.

Is there a Democrat in America that will not blame America for the state of communist nations around the world? How can we be to blame for Myanmar? Seriously, this is a country that was taken to the woodshed by a typhoon, and then refused to allow volunteers into the country to help. They even refused some of the aid.

But it’s our actions that have been “overwhelmingly counter-productive.”

How productive is it to visit a communist dictatorship like Myanmar, then come home and distribute the position that the dictatorship is behaving the way they do because of America’s actions? Do you think the brutal thugs running Myanmar are laughing at the latest useful idiot to shift the blame from where it belongs to the shining city on the hill?

How can this party be taken seriously when it comes to dealing with the enemies of America when they enable dictators to continue oppressing their people? Between Obama’s apology tour and this latest example of idiocy, I know the perception the world has of America has changed, and not for the better.

As if the insult of freeing this dog wasn’t enough, now comes word that good ole hyper-compassionate Kenny MacCaskill may have been duped.

The Scotsman via Jihad Watch:

JUSTICE secretary Kenny MacAskill was last night under pressure to reveal more details of the medical evidence that led to the release of the Lockerbie bomber, after it emerged that only one doctor was willing to say Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi had less than three months to live.

Labour and Conservative politicians have demanded the Scottish Government publish details of the doctor’s expertise and qualifications, amid suggestions he or she may not have been a prostate cancer expert.

The parties have also raised questions over whether the doctor was employed by the Libyan government or Megrahi’s legal team, which could have influenced the judgment.

The evidence provided by the doctor is crucial as compassionate release under Scots law requires that a prisoner has less than three months to live….

Only one doctor? Are you kidding me?

I got the advice of two doctors just to see if my son’s tonsils needed to be removed (the doctor and the specialist said they didn’t, so take that Obama).

What kind of upside down world are we living in?

Glenn Beck talks with the Media Research Center’s Seton Motley about President Obama’s choice for the FCC Diversity Chief, Mark Lloyd. Here’s the video:

One of the problems President Obama has identified in America’s health care system is the prescription of unnecessary tests, performed by doctors driven by greed. He has decried the ripping out of children’s tonsils for pocket change and the hyper-inflation of the amputation of feet in diabetics.

However, it’s unsure what his position is on the repeated testing of a patient with “a virtually universally fatal brain cancer.” After all, if it is almost always deadly, what is the point of all that testing? Just give the patient a little end of life counseling and send them away to die.

That would be cost effective, and is how Great Britain handles things, but in a free market (or as close as health care gets in America to a free market), the patient can pay for whatever tests they want to take, even if they are most than likely to be terminal. And that’s just what Ted Kennedy did:

He suffered from a virtually universally fatal brain cancer. He struggled valiantly and admirably, as he pursued all possible expertise and advanced medical care, just as anyone would do in his place. Kennedy sought out the best doctors, the world leaders in neurosurgery, neuro-oncology, and neuroradiology, from the West Coast to the East Coast of the U.S.

He underwent diagnostic tests using the latest, most advanced imaging technology available in the world. He was treated at some of the most elite medical centers in the country. He received the latest therapies and accessed the most innovative medical care in the world. When he sought out the best doctors, when he needed access to the latest diagnostic tests, the most sophisticated surgical techniques, the most innovative medical therapies, Kennedy enjoyed the best care available anywhere in the world–right here in the U.S.

Sen. Kennedy’s last year of life and his battle with cancer was all about individual choice, timely access to subspecialty trained doctors, access to medical technology, access to new drugs, capitalizing on the unique innovation that distinguishes our medical system, while having the freedom to choose for himself how to deal with disease. This even with a disease that has little chance of survival, even with a disease that would cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for advanced medical care, all for only a small hope of success or for a relatively short prolongation of life without cure.

Kennedy was fully autonomous, empowered by our current health care system as an individual, without needing to limit his options due to government-proven outcomes or “appropriateness” criteria that could take years and would come far too late to matter.

And his own actions, when it mattered most to him, when it was a matter of life and death, must be the strongest endorsement for making sure that health reforms empower Americans and their families, rather than government.

When it came down to it, Sen. Kennedy relied of the health care system created by free market principles, the same health care system with the best cancer survival rate. He didn’t go to Sweden or France or Cuba. He never left the country, but he did leave Massachusetts, even though they have the system the Democrats modeled their health care bill after.

When Kennedy was first diagnosed with brain cancer, I wasted no time writing about what his treatment would be like under socialized medicine.

Thankfully, he didn’t have to go through what others have had to, but it wasn’t because of anything the government had done. It was because profit has motivated people to innovate and create.

Don’t let them deny you the same opportunity.