Saturday, August 23, 2008

Presedential Seal - Obama


(HotAir props) An addition to a recent post... still very presumptuous!


Via Ace and Stop the ACLU, it looks like the design team at the Barack Obama campaign have too much time on their hands. On their campaign website, the background image adapts the basics of the presidential seal — again — into an Obama campaign logo. This time, though, they’ve managed a little subtlety:

http://hotair.cachefly.net/images/2008-08/bgdetail.jpg

This time, Team Obama avoided the faux Latin for the normal “E Pluribus Unum”, but the rest of the design still screams “presumptuous”. Once again, we have the O Logo in the dead center, and an oddly oriented eagle — or what appears to be an eagle — clutching nothing but olive branches.

Didn’t Barack Obama learn from his last attempt to fashion his own “seal”? This looks a lot like compensation for either an unbridled ego or a person worried about his lack of credentials.

Find Waldo

Media Bias

Newsbusters has a great article that is worth perusing here... it is a slam against the typical Left-wing bias that bis typical. Take note Matthews lauds middle-of-the-road journalists (they too are actually left-leaning) and then proceeds to be anything but. (I just heard Bob Beckle - on FOX - say it shouldn't have been Biden but Hillary.)


Hailing Barack Obama's attacks on John McCain's foreign policy as “profound” with “the fire I've been waiting for,” during live MSNBC coverage Saturday afternoon of Obama introducing running mate Joe Biden, Chris Matthews was pleased “he finally took on John McCain on the issue of our time, which is Russia” as “he used the word bluster twice.” Matthews then smeared John McCain and conservatives as warmongers: “There are a lot of neo-conservatives out there that just love the old black and white mannequian cold war feeling again. They'd like to get rid of color television, in fact. Let's go back to the '50s and let's fight with the Russians again.” That earned approving laughter from co-anchor Keith Olbermann who later cited Biden's call “to restore America's soul” and wondered: “Does it bring it up to this kind of Lincolnian greater than the sum of the parts public good mission almost?”


Matthews explained to his viewers that Obama “referred to it as bluster because if you read the really smart columnists,” and those would be “people like David Ignatius and Tom Friedman” who are “in the middle politically,” Obama was just “calling it what it is, bluster. It's just words, just sword-rattling, and he called it today. I thought that was profound.”


At about 3:42 PM EDT, just after Biden finished speaking, Matthews oozed over Obama's address with “dignity and indignation,” comparing him to actors Denzel Washington and Spencer Tracy. Really:


When I was watching Barack, I said there's the fire I've been waiting for. Maybe it was the camera angle, but I was looking up, if you look at some of the stronger performances, and they're almost always strong by the actor Denzel Washington, when he's really sticking it to the bad guys at the end of the movies, when he's really making his sort of Spencer Tracy moment, there's something about the face, there's something about that statement of strength and even anger where you really make your point with dignity and indignation, and I thought he was doing it today for the first time as a candidate: Barack Obama taking the fight to the bluster of the opponent.

To Lighten the Mood


Wall Street Journal Article on Canadian Health-Care

Unsocialized Medicine
A landmark ruling exposes Canada's health-care inequity.

Monday, June 13, 2005 12:01 a.m.

Let's hope Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy were sitting down when they heard the news of the latest bombshell Supreme Court ruling. From the Supreme Court of Canada, that is. That high court issued an opinion last Thursday saying, in effect, that Canada's vaunted public health-care system produces intolerable inequality.

Call it the hip that changed health-care history. When George Zeliotis of Quebec was told in 1997 that he would have to wait a year for a replacement for his painful, arthritic hip, he did what every Canadian who's been put on a waiting list does: He got mad. He got even madder when he learned it was against the law to pay for a replacement privately. But instead of heading south to a hospital in Boston or Cleveland, as many Canadians already do, he teamed up to file a lawsuit with Jacques Chaoulli, a Montreal doctor. The duo lost in two provincial courts before their win last week.


The court's decision strikes down a Quebec law banning private medical insurance and is bound to upend similar laws in other provinces. Canada is the only nation other than Cuba and North Korea that bans private health insurance, according to Sally Pipes, head of the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco and author of a recent book on Canada's health-care system.


"Access to a waiting list is not access to health care," wrote Chief Justice Beverly McLachlin for the 4-3 Court last week. Canadians wait an average of 17.9 weeks for surgery and other therapeutic treatments, according the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute. The waits would be even longer if Canadians didn't have access to the U.S. as a medical-care safety valve. Or, in the case of fortunate elites such as Prime Minister Paul Martin, if they didn't have access to a small private market in some non-core medical services. Mr. Martin's use of a private clinic for his annual checkup set off a political firestorm last year.



The ruling stops short of declaring the national health-care system unconstitutional; only three of the seven judges wanted to go all the way.

But it does say in effect: Deliver better care or permit the development of a private system. "The prohibition on obtaining private health insurance might be constitutional in circumstances where health-care services are reasonable as to both quality and timeliness," the ruling reads, but it "is not constitutional where the public system fails to deliver reasonable services." The Justices who sit on Canada's Supreme Court, by the way, aren't a bunch of Scalias of the North. This is the same court that last year unanimously declared gay marriage constitutional.


The Canadian ruling ought to be an eye-opener for the U.S., where "single-payer," government-run health care is still a holy grail on the political left and even for some in business (such as the automakers). This month the California Senate passed a bill that would create a state-run system of single-payer universal health care. The Assembly is expected to follow suit. Someone should make sure the Canadian Supreme Court's ruling is on Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's reading list before he makes a veto decision.


The larger lesson here is that health care isn't immune from the laws of economics. Politicians can't wave a wand and provide equal coverage for all merely by declaring medical care to be a "right," in the word that is currently popular on the American left.


There are only two ways to allocate any good or service: through prices, as is done in a market economy, or lines dictated by government, as in Canada's system. The socialist claim is that a single-payer system is more equal than one based on prices, but last week's court decision reveals that as an illusion. Or, to put it another way, Canadian health care is equal only in its shared scarcity.



When asked whether he was worried about being known as the man who helped bring down his country's universal health-care system, Mr. Zeliotis told the Toronto Star, "No way. I'm the guy saving it." If the Canadian ruling can open American eyes to the limitations of government-run health care, Mr. Zeliotis's hip just might end up saving the U.S. system too.

IBD Article

A Canadian Doctor Describes How Socialized Medicine Doesn't Work

By DAVID GRATZER | Posted Thursday, July 26, 2007 4:30 PM PT

I was once a believer in socialized medicine. As a Canadian, I had soaked up the belief that government-run health care was truly compassionate. What I knew about American health care was unappealing: high expenses and lots of uninsured people.

My health care prejudices crumbled on the way to a medical school class. On a subzero Winnipeg morning in 1997, I cut across the hospital emergency room to shave a few minutes off my frigid commute.

Swinging open the door, I stepped into a nightmare: the ER overflowed with elderly people on stretchers, waiting for admission. Some, it turned out, had waited five days. The air stank with sweat and urine. Right then, I began to reconsider everything that I thought I knew about Canadian health care.

Dr. Jacques Chaoulli faces the media in Montreal in June 2005, after he got Canada's Supreme Court to strike down a Quebec law banning private insurance for services covered under Medicare — a decision the rocked the country's universal health care system.

Dr. Jacques Chaoulli faces the media in Montreal in June 2005, after he got Canada's Supreme Court to strike down a Quebec law banning private insurance for services covered under Medicare — a decision the rocked the country's universal health care system.

I soon discovered that the problems went well beyond overcrowded ERs. Patients had to wait for practically any diagnostic test or procedure, such as the man with persistent pain from a hernia operation whom we referred to a pain clinic — with a three-year wait list; or the woman with breast cancer who needed to wait four months for radiation therapy, when the standard of care was four weeks.

Government researchers now note that more than 1.5 million Ontarians (or 12% of that province's population) can't find family physicians. Health officials in one Nova Scotia community actually resorted to a lottery to determine who'd get a doctor's appointment.

These problems are not unique to Canada — they characterize all government-run health care systems.

Consider the recent British controversy over a cancer patient who tried to get an appointment with a specialist, only to have it canceled — 48 times. More than 1 million Britons must wait for some type of care, with 200,000 in line for longer than six months. In France, the supply of doctors is so limited that during an August 2003 heat wave — when many doctors were on vacation and hospitals were stretched beyond capacity — 15,000 elderly citizens died. Across Europe, state-of-the-art drugs aren't available. And so on.

Single-payer systems — confronting dirty hospitals, long waiting lists and substandard treatment — are starting to crack, however. Canadian newspapers are filled with stories of people frustrated by long delays for care. Many Canadians, determined to get the care they need, have begun looking not to lotteries — but to markets.

Dr. Jacques Chaoulli is at the center of this changing health care scene. In the 1990s, he organized a private Quebec practice — patients called him, he made house calls and then he directly billed his patients. The local health board cried foul and began fining him. The legal status of private practice in Canada remained murky, but billing patients, rather than the government, was certainly illegal, and so was private insurance.

Eventually, Chaoulli took on the government in a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court. Representing an elderly Montrealer who had waited almost a year for a hip replacement, Chaoulli maintained that the patient should have the right to pay for private health insurance and get treatment sooner. A majority of the court agreed that Quebec's charter did implicitly recognize such a right.

The monumental ruling, which shocked the government, opened the way to more private medicine in Quebec. Though the prohibition against private insurance holds in the rest of Canada for now, at least two people outside Quebec, armed with Chaoulli's case as precedent, are taking their demand for private insurance to court.

Consider, too, Rick Baker. He isn't a neurosurgeon or even a doctor. He's a medical broker — one member of a private sector that is rushing in to address the inadequacies of Canada's government care. Canadians pay him to set up surgical procedures, diagnostic tests and specialist consultations, privately and quickly.

Baker describes a man who had a seizure and received a diagnosis of epilepsy. Dissatisfied with the opinion — he had no family history of epilepsy, but he did have constant headaches and nausea, which aren't usually seen in the disorder — he requested an MRI.

The government told him that the wait would be 4 1/2 months. So he went to Baker, who arranged to have the MRI done within 24 hours — and who, after the test revealed a brain tumor, arranged surgery within a few weeks. Some services that Baker brokers almost certainly contravene Canadian law, but governments are loath to stop him.

Other private-sector health options are blossoming across Canada, and the government is increasingly turning a blind eye to them, too, despite their often uncertain legal status. Private clinics are opening at a rate of about one a week.

Canadian doctors, long silent on the health care system's problems, are starting to speak up. Last August, they voted Brian Day president of their national association. Day has become perhaps the most vocal critic of Canadian public health care, having opened his own private surgery center and challenging the government to shut him down.

And now even Canadian governments are looking to the private sector to shrink the waiting lists. In British Columbia, private clinics perform roughly 80% of government-funded diagnostic testing.

This privatizing trend is reaching Europe, too. Britain's Labour Party — which originally created the National Health Service — now openly favors privatization. Sweden's government, after the completion of the latest round of privatizations, will be contracting out some 80% of Stockholm's primary care and 40% of its total health services.

Since the fall of communism, Slovakia has looked to liberalize its state-run system, introducing co-payments and privatizations. And modest market reforms have begun in Germany.

Yet even as Stockholm and Saskatoon are percolating with the ideas of Adam Smith, a growing number of prominent Americans are arguing that socialized health care still provides better results for less money.

Politicians like Hillary Clinton are on board; Michael Moore's new documentary, "Sicko," celebrates the virtues of Canada's socialized health care; the National Coalition on Health Care, which includes big businesses like AT&T, recently endorsed a scheme to centralize major health decisions to a government committee; and big unions are questioning the tenets of employer-sponsored health insurance.

One often-heard argument, voiced by the New York Times' Paul Krugman and others, is that America lags behind other countries in crude health outcomes. But such outcomes reflect a mosaic of factors, such as diet, lifestyle, drug use and cultural values. It pains me as a doctor to say this, but health care is just one factor in health.

Americans live 75.3 years on average, fewer than Canadians (77.3) or the French (76.6) or the citizens of any Western European nation save Portugal. Health care influences life expectancy, of course. But a life can end because of a murder, a fall or a car accident. Such factors aren't academic — homicide rates in the U.S. are much higher than in other countries.

In The Business of Health, Robert Ohsfeldt and John Schneider factor out intentional and unintentional injuries from life-expectancy statistics and find that Americans who don't die in car crashes or homicides outlive people in any other Western country.

And if we measure a health care system by how well it serves its sick citizens, American medicine excels. Five-year cancer survival rates bear this out. For leukemia, the American survival rate is almost 50%; the European rate is just 35%. Esophageal carcinoma: 12% in the U.S., 6% in Europe. The survival rate for prostate cancer is 81.2% here, yet 61.7% in France and down to 44.3% in England — a striking variation.

Like many critics of American health care, though, Krugman argues that the costs are just too high: health care spending in Canada and Britain, he notes, is a small fraction of what Americans pay. Again, the picture isn't quite as clear as he suggests. Because the U.S. is so much wealthier than other countries, it isn't unreasonable for it to spend more on health care. Take America's high spending on research and development. M.D. Anderson in Texas, a prominent cancer center, spends more on research than Canada does.

That said, American health care is expensive. And Americans aren't always getting a good deal. In the coming years, with health expenses spiraling up, it will be easy for some to give in to the temptation of socialized medicine. In Washington, there are plenty of old pieces of legislation that like-minded politicians could take off the shelf, dust off and promote: expanding Medicare to Americans 55 and older, say, or covering all children in Medicaid.

But such initiatives would push the U.S. further down the path to a government-run system and make things much, much worse. True, government bureaucrats would be able to cut costs — but only by shrinking access to health care, as in Canada, and engendering a Canadian-style nightmare of overflowing emergency rooms and yearlong waits for treatment.

America is right to seek a model for delivering good health care at good prices, but we should be looking not to Canada, but close to home — in the other four-fifths or so of our economy. From telecommunications to retail, deregulation and market competition have driven prices down and quality and productivity up. Health care is long overdue for the same prescription.

Gratzer, a physician, is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. This article is adapted from the forthcoming issue of City Journal.

What Do... Communists, upsidedow flags, illigel Presedential seals, missing flags, anti-American preachers, and Canadian soldiers all have in common?

Communists, upsidedow flags, illigel Presedential seals, missing flags, anti-American preachers, and Canadian soldiers all have in common?

Democrats!


Upside down flags at the DNC is somewhat unnerving to me, considering what the history of the Dems has been since the Vietnam era, but especially lately.



It seems the Dems are at their usual unpatriotic modus operandi. I can think back to these photos from the DNC saying the GOP is hurting our soldiers, and in the photo is a soldier... only problem was he is a Canadian soldier.



It made one blog ask if anyone at the DNC know what an American soldier looks like?” Now we come to the upcoming DNC, and you will note something missing (I will be curious is they add a few flags by the time the convention roles around).



HotAir

Update: Courtesy of the comments section, here’s Ronald Reagan at the 1976 Republican Convention:


Whether it is different this time than it has ever been before, I believe the Republican Party has a platform that is a banner of bold, unmistakable colors, with no pastel shades.

We have just heard a call to arms based on that platform, and a call to us to really be successful in communicating and reveal to the American people the difference between this platform and the platform of the opposing party, which is nothing but a revamp and a reissue and a running of a late, late show of the thing that we have been hearing from them for the last 40 years.


(RNC Stage)


Update II: I’m not the only one who noticed the chaotic nature of the Democratic design. Kate Phillips at the New York Times advises … sunglasses:


The differences couldn’t be more stark. You may need to wear your sunglasses indoors at the Democratic convention to mute the eye-popping colors. And while the cameras will surely zoom in on each evening’s speakers, the speakers on the stage will seem invariably dwarfed by the overshadowing backdrop. Someone already likened it to a game-show stage; get ready to call your lifeline for concentration.


The Republican stage, on the other hand, was designed to capture the intimate settings Senator John McCain enjoys when he talks to voters in town hall settings, according to convention plans. It’s not that high off the main floor of the arena, and its drama may be in its simplicity. And using the enormous American flag as its background serves as an echo of the campaign and convention motto, “Country First.”


It’s almost as if the Democrats wanted to distract viewers ….


... distract them from this?



The below is the Presedential seal. I am sure you have seen it, but the one below that is a new one! The Chicago Sun Times broke the story:

The new Obama seal--inspired by the real presidential seal--debutted in Chicago on Friday at a meeting presumptive nominee Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) had with Democratic governors. The seal--with the Obama "Yes we can" slogan in Latin--was created by the Obama campaign graphics team. In a bit of graphics whimsy, the seal incorporates the Obama "O" rising sun icon.




It caused one reader to comment that Obama is "unbelievably arrogant!"RedState blog made the poignant point that what Barack's stffers did is illegal:


RedState:

Sec. 713. Use of likenesses of the great seal of the United States, the seals of the President and Vice President, the seal of the United States Senate, the seal of the United States House of Representatives, and the seal of the United States Congress

  • Whoever knowingly displays any printed or other likeness of the great seal of the United States, or of the seals of the President or the Vice President of the United States, or the seal of the United States Senate, or the seal of the United States House of Representatives, or the seal of the United States Congress, or any facsimile thereof, in, or in connection with, any advertisement, poster, circular, book, pamphlet, or other publication, public meeting, play, motion picture, telecast, or other production, or on any building, monument, or stationery, for the purpose of conveying, or in a manner reasonably calculated to convey, a false impression of sponsorship or approval by the Government of the United States or by any department, agency, or instrumentality thereof, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than six months, or both.
  • Whoever, except as authorized under regulations promulgated by the President and published in the Federal Register, knowingly manufactures, reproduces, sells, or purchases for resale, either separately or appended to any article manufactured or sold, any likeness of the seals of the President or Vice President, or any substantial part thereof, except for manufacture or sale of the article for the official use of the Government of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than six months, or both.
  • Whoever, except as directed by the United States Senate, or the Secretary of the Senate on its behalf, knowingly uses, manufactures, reproduces, sells or purchases for resale, either separately or appended to any article manufactured or sold, any likeness of the seal of the United States Senate, or any substantial part thereof, except for manufacture or sale of the article for the official use of the Government of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than six months, or both.
  • Whoever, except as directed by the United States House of Representatives, or the Clerk of the House of Representatives on its behalf, knowingly uses, manufactures, reproduces, sells or purchases for resale, either separately or appended to any article manufactured or sold, any likeness of the seal of the United States House of Representatives, or any substantial part thereof, except for manufacture or sale of the article for the official use of the Government of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than six months, or both.
  • Whoever, except as directed by the United States Congress, or the Secretary of the Senate and the Clerk of the House of Representatives, acting jointly on its behalf, knowingly uses, manufactures, reproduces, sells or purchases for resale, either separately or appended to any article manufactured or sold, any likeness of the seal of the United States Congress, or any substantial part thereof, except for manufacture or sale of the article for the official use of the Government of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than six months, or both.
  • A violation of the provisions of this section may be enjoined at the suit of the Attorney General, (1) in the case of the great seal of the United States and the seals of the President and Vice President, upon complaint by any authorized representative of any department or agency of the United States; (2) in the case of the seal of the United States Senate, upon complaint by the Secretary of the Senate; (3) in the case of the seal of the United States House of Representatives, upon complaint by the Clerk of the House of Representatives; and (4) in the case of the seal of the United States Congress, upon complaint by the Secretary of the Senate and the Clerk of the House of Representatives, acting jointly.

EFFECTIVE DATE OF 1971 AMENDMENT

Section 3 of Pub. L. 91-651 provided that: The amendments made by this Act [amending this section] shall not make unlawful any preexisting use of the design of the great seal of the United States or of the seals of the President or Vice President of the United States that was lawful on the date of enactment of this Act [Jan. 5, 1971], until one year after the date of such enactment."


All legalities aside, some of what we have seen in this campaigne is really disturbing, we can all remember the campaigne offices caught on film:



Well, at least Obama knows how to show his true patriotism!


Friday, August 22, 2008

OBAYH!

Could or could not be... I can buy a McCain/Rice 08 stickers. People are saying a private jet has landed close to Biden's home.


(Click on it... Drudge Report props)


Same guy that does that poster (Obey sirts and posters) does the popular Obama posters.

When Will It Stop!


Bush & Stem Cells

Bush was ahead of his time on this matter... but it is because he had people like Robert P. George on his bioethics committee. Robert P. George is one of my favorite authors on hot-button topics. If you want good conservative answers that incorporate natural law (you know, the “stuff” the Constitution was formulated after) into arguments, he is your guy:

  1. In Defense of Natural Law;
  2. Embryo: A Defense of Human Life;
  3. The Meaning of Marriage: Family, State, Market, And Morals;
  4. Clash Of Orthodoxies: Law Religion & Morality In Crisis;
  5. Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality.

MATTERS OF LIFE AND DEATH

Scientific breakthrough! No embryonic stem cells needed

New research uses adult sources to grow heart, lung, brain tissues

August 22, 2008

By Bob Unruh


The argument for embryonic stem cells as the potential solution for a vast array of human diseases has taken another significant hit with the successful testing of an adult cell that can match tissues in the heart, lung, liver, pancreas, blood vessels, brain, muscle, bone and fat.


The San Francisco research and development company Medistem Inc. says its newest tests reveal the cell can regenerate failed blood vessels, allowing a restoration of health in limbs once given no alternative but amputation.


Many medical researchers long have cited their desire for embryonic stem cells to study as a possible solution to myriad human diseases, although few results actually have been documented. Celebrities also have chimed in, including actor Michael J. Fox, who suffers from Parkinson's disease. During the 2006 election he lobbied for a Missouri plan that enshrined in the state constitution the right to clone human embryos for "research."


Now officials with Medistem Laboratories have confirmed their Endometrial Regenerative Cell has treated an advanced form of peripheral artery disease known as critical limb ischemia successfully.


In a peer reviewed publication, the team supported by Medistem said the administration of ERC "preserved leg function and viability in animals induced to mimic the human condition of critical limb ischemia."


"As a physician to sufferers of critical limb ischemia, I am extremely proud to be involved in developing therapeutic applications using the ERC cell. If approved by the FDA, we may one day provide this patient population with an option to amputation," said Dr. Michael Murphy, a vascular surgeon who served as lead author....