From Fox News Channel’s Slide Show:

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Funny… I tried working with images like those Fox/Witowski used but I kept coming up with:

You gotta see it to believe it.

September 18th, 2007:

This is an unusual love story involving an 89-year-old woman and her beloved Chariot. The two have been together for decades and traveled more than 540,000 miles across this nation’s highways and side streets.

July 6th, 2009:

In this episode of the Growing Bolder TV Show, we’re hopping in the backseat of the most famous classic car on the Internet. Rachel Veitch, America’s favorite gun totin’, flag wavin’ 91-year-old, takes us on a wild ride.

Bonus for site visitors: I counted over 140 photos of vintage cars and trucks.

An emerging talking point from Democrats and some of their allies in the press is that there is no national health care bill. Yes, that’s right: despite all the debate of the past year, despite the fact that the House and Senate have actually passed national health care bills, and despite the fact that the Senate bill is the single bill that will have to be passed for national health care to become law, there is not, in fact, a national health care bill. It might seem somewhat counterfactual, but in a new interview with CNN, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi flat-out says there is no health care bill currently under consideration.

“You think people don’t understand the bill?” asked CNN’s Candy Crowley.

“No, I don’t think — there isn’t a bill,” said Pelosi. “When we have a bill, which we will in a matter of days, then that is the bill that we can sell. Our bill, the House and the Senate bill, had major differences which we are hoping now to reconcile. And then when we have a bill — you — as I say, you can bake the pie, you can sell the pie, but you have to have a pie to sell. And when we do we will take it out there.”

Read more at the Washington Examiner….

Steyn explains the real difference between the U.S. today and Western Europe:

While Barack Obama was making his latest pitch for a brand new, even more unsustainable entitlement at the health care “summit,” thousands of Greeks took to the streets to riot. An enterprising cable network might have shown the two scenes on a continuous split-screen — because they’re part of the same story. It’s just that Greece is a little further along in the plot: They’re at the point where the canoe is about to plunge over the falls. America is further upstream and can still pull for shore, but has decided, instead, that what it needs to do is catch up with the Greek canoe. Chapter One (the introduction of unsustainable entitlements) leads eventually to Chapter 20 (total societal collapse): The Greeks are at Chapter 17 or 18.

What’s happening in the developed world today isn’t so very hard to understand: The 20th century Bismarckian welfare state has run out of people to stick it to. In America, the feckless insatiable boobs in Washington, Sacramento, Albany and elsewhere are screwing over our kids and grandkids. In Europe, they’ve reached the next stage in social democratic evolution: There are no kids or grandkids to screw over. The United States has a fertility rate of around 2.1 – or just over two kids per couple. Greece has a fertility rate of about 1.3: 10 grandparents have six kids have four grandkids – i.e., the family tree is upside down. Demographers call 1.3 “lowest-low” fertility – the point from which no society has ever recovered. And, compared with Spain and Italy, Greece has the least-worst fertility rate in Mediterranean Europe. [Bold added]

More….

Go ahead and read it all. It’s a stark look into our future.

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SALISBURY, N.C., Feb. 25 (UPI) — Police in North Carolina said a woman opened a package she believed to be her new computer and discovered 45 pounds of marijuana.

Lt. Rodney Harris, acting chief of the Salisbury Police Department, said Sarah Howell Leach believed the package she received Tuesday morning was the computer she ordered, but instead she found the stash of pot brought to the wrong address by a UPS driver, The Salisbury (N.C.) Post reported Thursday.

Harris said the package, sent from McAllen, Texas, was meant for another address in Leach’s mobile home park. He said officers set up surveillance at the apparently vacant address but the intended recipient did not show up to claim the package when it was left outside the door.

The acting chief said the marijuana had an estimated street value of $35,000.

Leach said a FedEx driver delivered her new computer later in the day.

SOURCE

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From over the transom:

Liberals want to give Obama time.

We think 25 to life would be nice.

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America needs Obamacare like Nancy Pelosi needs a Halloween mask.

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Q: Have you heard about McDonalds new Obama Value Meal?

A: Order anything you like and the guy behind you has to pay for it.

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Q: What does Barack Obama call lunch with a convicted felon?

A: A fund raiser.

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Q: What’s the difference between Obama’s cabinet and a penitentiary ?

A: One is filled with tax evaders, blackmailers and threats to society. The other is for housing prisoners.

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Q: If Nancy Pelosi and Obama were on a boat in the middle of the ocean and it started to sink, who would be saved?

A: America!

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Q: What’s the difference between Obama and his dog, Bo?

A: Bo has papers.

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Why does your spell check program tell you Pelosi and Obama are wrong?

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ROME, Feb. 25 (UPI) — An Italian antiques dealer said she argued with Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi about his plans to widen a bed once belonging to Napoleon Bonaparte.

Annamaria Quattrini said she sold the “priceless” bed to Berlusconi, 73, for an undisclosed price and the Italian leader insisted on widening the antique, which was created for the French emperor Berlusconi has often cited as a personal hero, the Daily Mail of Britain reported Thursday.

“It had a large canopy, bronze fittings and eagles on the four corners — it’s beautiful and I hope he has sweet dreams on it but it caused us our first argument because he wanted it widened,” Quattrini said. “When the bed was delivered as he requested he was delighted and he gave me a kiss and said it was beautiful.”

SOURCE

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MSNBC:

In a deft move, the Republicans turned to the congenial Lamar Alexander to make the GOP’s opening remarks at today’s health-care summit.

Alexander called for President Obama and the Democrats to start over. “This is a car that can’t be recalled and can’t be fixed… We need to start over.”

Alexander also made this interesting argument: Congress doesn’t do a good job passing comprehensive bills — health care, immigration, energy. “We don’t do comprehensive well,” he said. “They fall of their own weight. Our country is too big, too complicated, too decentralized…

The Tennessee senator also said that the best way to increase health-care access is to reduce costs.

Finally, he said that if today’s meeting is truly bipartisan, the White House needs to “renounce” the idea of “jamming a partisan vote on reconciliation.” He added, “It has never been used for anything like this.”

Oakland Tribune:

GOP to Obama at summit: ‘We have a better idea’

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Obama lamented the partisan bickering that has resulted in a stalemate over Democratic legislation to extend coverage to more than 30 million people who are now uninsured. “Politics I think ended up trumping practical common sense,” he said.

The first thing Obama neglected was to point out that about half of the uninsured are illegal aliens.

And yet, even as he pleaded for cooperation — and “actually a discussion, and not just us trading talking points” — he acknowledged agreement may not be possible. “I don’t know that those gaps can be bridged,” Obama said. “If not, at least we will have better clarified for the American people what the debate is all about.”

His skepticism was vindicated as soon as the first Republican spoke — in opposition to the mammoth bills that passed the House and Senate. Alexander said Congress and the administration should start over with small steps including medical malpractice reform, allowing Americans to purchase insurance across state lines and expanding health savings accounts.

“Our views represent the views of a great many American people,” he said.

With those opposing positions well staked out before the meeting and no signs of them changing, the president and his Democratic allies prepared to move on alone.

One option is passing a comprehensive plan without GOP support, by using Senate budget reconciliation rules that would disallow GOP filibusters.

Another is going smaller.

*** More….

But the “bickering” didn’t end with Alexander’s remarks. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK and an MD) really bickered by talking to Obama and the other Democrats like they can be reasoned with.

Coburn suggested a bill that would take into account the things that can be agreed to for immediate reduction in cost of health care. He suggested: mal-practice tort reform; creating real financial incentives for measurable preventive medicine; revising the food stamp program to make stamps available for healthy diets only; revising school lunch program to stop giving kids diabetes; allowing the purchase of health insurance across state lines; “There is $15 million in fraud in Medicaid in NYC alone,”; and more.

Obama responded with the mother of all lies: he said all the things to reduce costs were already in the Democrat’s bill.

UPDATE: Peter Wehner at Commentary Mag, thinks Alexander was perfect. Not so much because he made Obama and the other Dems look like fools, but because Alexander was “nice.” … Now isn’t that nice?

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Study claimed in 2009 that sea levels would rise by up to 82cm [32.28in] by the end of century –- but the report’s author now says true estimate is still unknown.

Scientists have been forced to withdraw a study on projected sea level rise due to global warming after finding mistakes that undermined the findings. [Bold and emphasis added]

The study, published in 2009 in Nature Geoscience, one of the top journals in its field, confirmed the conclusions of the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It used data over the last 22,000 years to predict that sea level would rise by between 7cm [= 2.75in] and 82cm [= 32.28in] by the end of the century.

At the time, Mark Siddall, from the Earth Sciences Department at the University of Bristol [England], said the study “strengthens the confidence with which one may interpret the IPCC results”. The IPCC said that sea level would probably rise by 18cm-59cm [7.08in-23.22in] by 2100, though stressed this was based on incomplete information about ice sheet melting and that the true rise could be higher.

Many scientists criticised the IPCC approach as too conservative, and several papers since have suggested that sea level could rise more. Martin Vermeer of the Helsinki University of Technology, Finland and Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany published a study in December that projected a rise of 0.75m to 1.9m [29.5in to 74.8in] by 2100.

More….

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