For months now I’ve shamefully neglected important matters that should have taken priority over blogging. I’m taking a posting hiatus to put things back in perspective. I’ll be back soon so check in often. Meanwhile, headlines and summaries from a few of the blogs I read regularly are in the post above. Enjoy!

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Richie Rich at Bizblogger: In his Notre Dame speech, Obama stressed finding the “common ground” on abortion. But as Greg Johnson points out, there is little common ground here…unless, of course, he means that we should only kill one out of every two babies instead of every one.

Greg Johnson at Knoxville News Blogs:

After applauding his own magnaminity with a story about removing hate-filled language toward pro-lifers from his campaign Web site, Obama called for abortion debaters to use “fair-minded words.” How thoughtful. How magnanimous. How fair minded. How, frankly, ridiculous.

Obama, of course, is the candidate who told NARAL Pro-Choice America that the first thing he would do as president is sign the Freedom of Choice Act. Obama is the former Illinois senator who refused to vote for a born-alive infant bill that would have outlawed infanticide. It is the Obama administration that has floated a possible repeal of conscience clauses which, if the repeal is enacted, could force health care workers to provide abortion services and/or contraception even if doing so violates the providers’ religious beliefs. It was Obama who issued an executive order that released US taxpayer funding for overseas abortions. It is Obama who supports the use of taxpayer funds to provide abortions in the US.

Continued….

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This morning I had a problem accessing CSJ and my other websites. It didn’t take long to see that the problem was caused by Google’s ad script. By that I mean Google ad servers were not responding to script request. That caused the pages to start loading but then hang when Google ad script tried to execute. I went looking around the Net to see what else was wrong.

I found live blogging at Internet Storm Center. That assured me that it was not a local problem. Also “Update 4″ at the ISC was assigning the blame to AT&T. I was skeptical of that because there are so many ways that AT&T can reroute traffic. I was also perplexed because ISC was posting — and I was able to verify most of it — that the outages involved Google Ad Servers, Gmail, Youtube, Docs, Reader, News, Apps and more. In fact it seemed to involve the whole Google enchilada. But how can that be? Surely Google’s worldwide enterprise has distributed servers. How could one event cripple the whole outfit?

Well, here’s what Google says happened:

The Official Google Blog

This is your pilot speaking. Now, about that holding pattern…

5/14/2009 12:15:00 PM
Imagine if you were trying to fly from New York to San Francisco, but your plane was routed through an airport in Asia. And a bunch of other planes were sent that way too, so your flight was backed up and your journey took much longer than expected. That’s basically what happened to some of our users today for about an hour, starting at 7:48 am Pacific time.

An error in one of our systems caused us to direct some of our web traffic through Asia, which created a traffic jam. As a result, about 14% of our users experienced slow services or even interruptions. We’ve been working hard to make our services ultrafast and “always on,” so it’s especially embarrassing when a glitch like this one happens. We’re very sorry that it happened, and you can be sure that we’ll be working even harder to make sure that a similar problem won’t happen again. All planes are back on schedule now.

Posted by Urs Hoelzle, SVP, Operations

Heh! Now I don’t feel so bad about an event in 1972. One of my programmers screwed up and shut down Citibank’s Commercial Banking System for three days.

By 1980 I was truly amazed at how we (IT) had progressed with backups, redundancy, restores and recoveries. Our goal was to get “always on” at least to service levels of electric, gas and phone companies. By the time I retired ten years ago, IT services in most industries were equal to the service levels of most utility companies.

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And that includes fake “Republicans.”

Just when you think politicians in Washington have already done all the dumbest things on the planet, they pop up and prove you ain’t heard nothing yet. Now they’re saying that health care benefits businesses give employees should be taxed.

Taxing worker health benefits considered

The Senate’s top tax writer said Tuesday that taxing employer-provided health benefits is a possibility as lawmakers search for ways to pay for overhauling the nation’s health care system and to insure 50 million Americans who lack coverage – a stance that riles both business and union leaders and is at odds with some leading Democrats.

At the last in a series of public forums on health care reform, Sen. Max Baucus, Montana Democrat and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said scaling back the tax-free status of employer-provided health care benefits must be considered.

Continued….

While they’re jacking around with raising our taxes to directly fund health care for illegal aliens, the Social Security and Medicare “trust funds” are going broke at an accelerated rate.

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Yesterday, after listening to the opening remarks of Obama’s initiative to rape and destroy the U.S. health care system, I wrote a short article on what I heard. However, my draft was so full of expletives that I decided to sleep on it and try again today. The wait didn’t help. I’m still outraged. Not so much at Liar-in-Chief, I know he’s a pile of crap and a charlatan. But the health care “execs” lined up behind him really pissed me off.

It’s infuriating to see so many “esteemed” executives buy into the Obama shibboleth of promising un-provable rewards for accepting patent bullshit.

Everybody with a whit of common sense knew BHO’s campaign promise of “saving” 5 million jobs was crap even though millions of mindless voters loved to hear it. But to see execs from the AMA and AHA as well as honchos from insurance and pharmaceutical industries lined up with union leaders behind Him and giving de facto approval to his new line of bullshit was disgusting.

We now have the line-up of Obama, the MSM, union leaders, as well as the whole health care industry, promising that the cost of health care will be decreased by $2 trillion dollars over the next 10 years, notwithstanding the cold hard fact that in 2019 NOBODY will be able to prove one iota of the “promise” one way or the other.

Camouflaged by the MSM’s hero worship is another cold hard fact: Health care cannot be improved by reducing payments to doctors and nurses. That will only drive the best ones away into other professions.

There is much waste and overspending in U.S. health care. I know that because I used to work in the field, but doctor and nurse income is not the place to squeeze.

One place to cut cost to the consumer and the government would be to eliminate duplicate services offered by every hospital and clinic. For instance, I live three miles from an outstanding hospital and within 25 miles of five other excellent hospitals. All of them offer almost every service one could possibly need. That’s stupid on its face. Government could, and should, regulate: the number of beds; expensive ancillary services like scanners and laboratories; pharmacies; and physician specialties not necessary for emergency care.

But the best place to cut U.S. health care cost is to secure our borders and reduce the number of illegal aliens that are here to take advantage of uninsured free health care offered at every ER and hospital in America. Centralizing payments for health care in Washington will only invite more illegal aliens.

Obama, Health Industry Pledge to Cut Health Spending Growth by $2 Trillion

(CNSNews.com) – Hoping to sell a health care reform package to Congress by the end of the year, President Barack Obama pledged that with the help of other “stakeholders” in the health care industry, the growth of costs can be cut by $2 trillion by 2019.

Representatives of the insurance, pharmaceutical, and hospital industries, as well as doctors and organized labor met with Obama at the White House on Monday to discuss ways to cut costs by 1.5 percent a year for the next 10 years.

“Their efforts will help us take the next and most important step – comprehensive health care reform – so that we can do what I pledged to do as a candidate and save a typical family an average of $2,500 on their health care costs in the coming years,” Obama said.

“What they’re doing is complementary to and is going to be completely compatible with a strong, aggressive effort to move health care reform through here in Washington with an ultimate result of saving health care costs for families, businesses and the government,” said Obama.

“That’s how we can finally make health care affordable, while putting more money into the pockets of hardworking families each month. These savings can be achieved by standardizing quality care, incentivizing efficiency, investing in proven ways not only to treat illness but to prevent them,” the president said.

Obama was accompanied when he spoke by Thomas Priselac, CEO of Cedars Sinai Health System; Richard Clark, CEO of Merck & Co.; George Halverson of the Kaiser Foundation; James Rohack, president of the American Medical Association (AMA); Dennis Rivera of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU); and Michael Mussallem, CEO of Edwards Life Science.

(more…)

How We’re Killing Our ‘Living Constitution’

While President Barack Obama has, in one sense, tipped his hand by saying he wants judges with “empathy” for certain groups, he has in a more fundamental sense concealed the real goal:

Getting judges who will ratify an expanding scope of the power of the federal government and a declining restraint by the U.S. Constitution.

This is consistent with everything else Obama has done in office and is consistent with his decades-long record of alliances with people who reject American society’s fundamentals.

Judicial expansion of federal power is not really new, even if the audacity with which that goal is being pursued may be unique. For more than a century, believers in bigger government have also been believers in having judges interpret the restraints of the Constitution out of existence.

Continued….

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Cheney is exactly right.

Fox News:

Colin Powell has left the Republican Party, former Vice President Dick Cheney charged Sunday.

Cheney had tough words for the Bush administration’s former secretary of state when asked about the controversy over Powell’s recent suggestion that the GOP move more to the center. He was asked specifically about conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh’s call for Powell to join the Democrats.

“I think my take on it was Colin had already left the party. I didn’t know he was still a Republican,” Cheney said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

Asked to clarify, Cheney noted that Powell endorsed Barack Obama, a Democrat, for president shortly before the general election.

“I assumed that that is some indication of his loyalty and his interest,” Cheney said.

Continued….

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I’d bet the ranch this is not in BHO’s 0.0049 percent budget cut.

U.S. Government Funds $400,000 Study on Gay Sex in Argentina Bars

Government researchers are spending more than $400,000 in taxpayer money to hit the bars in Argentina.

The National Institutes of Health are paying researchers to cruise six bars in Buenos Aires to find out why gay men engage in risky sexual behavior while drunk — and just what can be done about it.

Doctors and specialists from the New York Psychiatric Institute are using the generous grant from NIH’s National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism to help tailor HIV prevention programs to work at bars and clubs.

Though public health officials say that HIV/AIDS rates are higher in Washington, D.C., than in some parts of West Africa, U.S. government funds are going to help curb dangerous liaisons in Argentina’s capital.

The study began in September 2008, according to an online abstract, and has already cost taxpayers $198,776, NIH documents show.

Continued….

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Partial transcript of ABC’s Jonathan Karl’s video report

– KARL: “Welcome to the John Murtha Johnstown Cambria County Airport, with a $7 million air traffic control tower, $14 million hanger, and an $18 million runway, big enough to land any airplane in North America.”

– KARL: “For most of the day, the only thing this airport doesn’t have is airplanes.”

– KARL: “This is the John Murtha Airport at 10:30 in the morning. There is nobody here. It pretty much looks like an airport ghosttown.”

– KARL: “The airport isn’t always deserted. There are 3 flights a day. All to Washington D.C.”

– KARL (on flight from Washington to John Murtha Airport): “The federal government subsidizes every flight into this airport to the tune of about $100 per passenger. In other words, taxpayers spent about as much money for my ticket on this flight as I did. (Camera pans nearly empty cabin): Subsidized fares and plenty of empty seats.”

– KARL: “We have rented a car but the Hertz counter is as deserted as the rest of the airport.”

– KARL: “Its a monument to the power of Congressman John Murtha who has steered some $150 million taxpayer dollars to this airport over the last decade.”

– KARL (to airport patron): “As you look around the airport, whether it be the reinforced runway, the radar facility, the new terminal, how much of this is thanks to John Murtha?” PATRON: “All of it.”

– ANOTHER AIRPORT USER: “It’s a breeze to get through security. No crowds. It’s right in your backyard.”

– KARL: “But last year an average of just 20 people per day flew out of the Murtha Airport.”

– KARL: Even so, the airport was just awarded another $800,000 in federal stimulus money to repave an alternate runway.”

Karl’s video report

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