It’s not only seniors who should be wary of the healthcare games the administration and congress are now playing. Everyone stands to lose from the government’s grab, including the younger demographic who will be forced to buy insurance whether they want it or not.

As we used to say when I was a kid, “there’s a rat in the woodpile.” Or maybe more appropriately, “there’s a hidden virus inside the Trojan Horse.”

From the Patriot Post:

Something Smells Fishy About This Kool-Aid

President Barack Obama appeared to backtrack on a key provision of his attempted health care coup, telling a Colorado town hall audience that “the public option, whether we have it or we don’t have it, is not the entirety of health care reform. This is just one sliver of it, one aspect of it.” So the president is giving in on the government-run option, right? Wrong.

While it’s a given that some on the Left are going bananas over the announcement, none other than former DNC Chief Howard “The Scream” Dean let the cat out of the bag on the strategy. “[T]he president knows very well that you aren’t really going to have health care reform without a public option,” Dean told MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough. “But he also knows he has to get this out of the Senate.” So the president is playing a cynical game of politics with health care? Say it ain’t so!

For now, 60 votes in the Senate are necessary to avoid a filibuster, and the public option is making that threshold harder to reach. If the bill were passed without the public option, it could be added back during reconciliation, at which point only 50 votes would be necessary for passage.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs spun the strategy shift by calling it a “boring consistency to our rhetoric.” Nothing’s changed, according to Gibbs. The facts, as usual, contradict the Democrats. On July 18, Obama said, “[A]ny plan I sign must include an insurance exchange: a one-stop shopping marketplace where you can compare the benefits, cost and track records of a variety of plans — including a public option to increase competition and keep insurance companies honest — and choose what’s best for your family.” But according to Gibbs, changing “must include” to “whether we have it or we don’t have it” is just “boring consistency.”

The proposed alternative to the public option is nonprofit health insurance cooperatives. However, as the Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner explains, “Government-run health care is government-run health care no matter what you call it. The health care ‘co-op’ approach now embraced by the Obama administration will still give the federal government control over one-sixth of the U.S. economy, with a government-appointed board, taxpayer funding, and with bureaucrats setting premiums, benefits and operating rules. Plus,” Tanner adds, “it won’t be a true co-op, like rural electrical co-ops or your local health-food store — owned and controlled by its workers and the people who use its services. Under the government plan, the members wouldn’t choose its officers — the president would.”

As for the public option, Jacob S. Hacker, the liberal Yale scholar widely attributed with originating the idea, denies that it is a “Trojan Horse” to sneak in single-payer, government-run health insurance behind citizens’ backs. It seems, however, that Hacker also suffers from an acute case of “boring consistency.” In 2008, Hacker sounded a different note: “Someone once said to me, ‘Well, this is a Trojan horse for single payer.’ I said, ‘Well, it’s not a Trojan horse, right? It’s just right there! I’m telling you!’ We’re going to get there [to a government-run system] — over time, slowly.” He continued, “But we’ll do it in a way that we’re not going to frighten people into thinking they’re going to lose their private insurance.”

Sounds like the frog in the boiling water to us.

Tesla Motors is a Silicon Valley-based manufacturer of Electric Vehicles (EV). They are the only company to offer EVs for sale to the general public in North America or Europe.

Tesla EVs use the lithium-ion battery technology and have a range of over 200 miles on a full charge. The standard EV roadster is capable of 0-60 in 3.9 seconds.

While all that sounds wonderful, the Tesla Electric Car just might have a few drawbacks . . .

Right: The Tesla Standard EV

From Planet Gore:

More on Tesla [Henry Payne]

President Obama, Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm, and an army of Washington politicians with no experience in the auto industry say that electric vehicles are the future. They’re so sure of it, they’ve invested $489 million of your taxpayer doctors [sic] in the EV tech leader, Tesla. But as Tad Friend’s in-depth look at Tesla for The New Yorker shows, the future is not quite ready for primetime.

A few highlights:

• The price for the power train alone for battery-powered Tesla cars costs $15,000 — or about five times more than a standard gas-powered sedan. The average price paid for an entire new car in America today is $26,000.
• Tesla’s hard-driving founder, Elon Musk, says Tesla plans to populate American rest stops with QuickCharging stations, which will allow drivers to recharge their batteries in “just” 45 minutes. In the meantime, Americans have to plug it into 110-volt wall sockets. Friend tried that while test-driving the Tesla for his story. “Its battery gained only nine miles in two hours,” he writes.
• To charge the Tesla in the five minutes that American are used to spending at the gas pump (while on their way to work or taking the kids to soccer practice) it “would require an 840-kW connection, which would drain the grid as much as a 100-unit apartment building does in the course of a day.”
• And then there’s this from longtime Detroit product guru, Bob Lutz (now with GM), an admirer of Tesla — even as he points out the gulf between a boutique technology currently prized by Hollywood millionaires and a mass-produced technology: “Over thirty-five hundred parts sourced from around the world have to come together at the right place and the right time to produce sixty to seventy of these things an hour. And to make them, you need. . . an unbelievable amount of reliability testing that Tesla can’t afford to do right now — and we can’t afford not to.”

Emphasis mine. This is just another example of the non-achievable Utopian hope and change that all those uninformed voters (I have some less politically-correct descriptions of them, which I won’t present here) thought they were going to get.

I went into the back yard this morning and saw a hawk perched on my garden utility cart. I quietly rushed back into the house to get my camera and quietly returned to get some photos. The young bird stayed long enough for me to get several images. The composite image above is made from the best of the perched and in flight images.

According to my copy of “Birds of the Los Angeles Region,” this is probably a juvenile Cooper’s Hawk. This species is a year-round resident in the area and is known to ambush smaller birds as they feed. Cooper’s Hawks are often seen hunting around bird feeders - our feeders are to the left of the perched image, just out of the frame.

This bird and his ancestors have been coming around our yard for several years. We enjoy seeing their beautiful plumage and love the way they glide and soar overhead showing off their flares feathers.

After a busy day, we have little to offer for the weblog other than to note that this Colt Tactical .22 caliber carbine sure looked pretty in this month’s “Dope Bag” feature in American Rifleman. Damsel had the magazine open to the page with this gun on my computer desk when I got home from work tonight.

Well, it’s more like a trade-off than a sacrifice. We’re giving up our annual vacation to the City of Avalon on Catalina Island. Our wedding anniversary falls in the middle of September and we generally go back to Avalon, where we were married, to celebrate.

We’ve gone to Catalina for the last five years straight, but we’re not going this year. Instead, we will be going to the Gun Blogger Rendezvous in Reno, Nevada. We will spend our anniversary at the Silver Legacy Hotel among the ranks of some of the Gun Bloggers.

We look forward to going next month, but we will also miss some of our favorite Avalon places, like the Casino, where this world-famous art-deco image of a mermaid lives.

Image credit: Damsel - click on the image to enlarge.

We went to the South Coast Botanic Gardens today to see the Dahlia Society’s annual show. We try to attend every year, but missed it last year for some reason. Today, we were glad we didn’t miss this one. They outdid themselves from the last time we were here.

There were dahlias of nearly every size, color and variety. The colors were stunning. Hundreds on hundreds of beautiful flowers and arrangements. I took over 150 photos today and I wish I could show them all. The slideshow below is but a small sampling of the wonderful flowers we saw.

Move your mouse cursor over the images to stop the slideshow; move out to resume.

Damsel acquired some beautiful sunflowers yesterday for the table centerpiece vase. She snapped this close-up of the center of one of them. When I downloaded the picture, I couldn’t help but notice the natural symmetry of the Fibonacci spiral pattern that dominates the center of the flower.

From the center of the flower, the spirals propagate in both right and left hand patterns outward. The spirals are not only aesthetically pleasing, but mathematically perfect*, in my book. Click on the flower for a closer look at the spirals.

* Definition of the Fibonacci series:

F(0) = 0, F(1) = 1, F(n+2) = F(n + 1) + F(n)

We went shopping for groceries this afternoon. When we got to the flower concession, I found these pretty mums in a pot. These remind me of the “whirligig” African daisy we see in the botanic gardens in the spring and summer months. Click on the image to enlarge.

Damsel is quick to remind me that there is no M.D behind my name when I complain about a pain or something and try to self-diagnose it. “See a professional,” she will insist.

Fair enough. I see the doc and get a real diagnosis. The president should take Damsel’s advice and get some professional help as well (psychiatric perhaps?).

As Obama desperately pushes his health care reform agenda, he doesn’t care whose toes he steps on along the way. Witness this statement from the American College of Surgeons (emphasis mine):

Statement from the American College of Surgeons Regarding
Recent Comments from President Obama

CHICAGO—The American College of Surgeons is deeply disturbed over the uninformed public comments President Obama continues to make about the high-quality care provided by surgeons in the United States. When the President makes statements that are incorrect or not based in fact, we think he does a disservice to the American people at a time when they want clear, understandable facts about health care reform. We want to set the record straight.

Yesterday during a town hall meeting, President Obama got his facts completely wrong. He stated that a surgeon gets paid $50,000 for a leg amputation when, in fact, Medicare pays a surgeon between $740 and $1,140 for a leg amputation. This payment also includes the evaluation of the patient on the day of the operation plus patient follow-up care that is provided for 90 days after the operation. Private insurers pay some variation of the Medicare reimbursement for this service.

Three weeks ago, the President suggested that a surgeon’s decision to remove a child’s tonsils is based on the desire to make a lot of money. That remark was ill-informed and dangerous, and we were dismayed by this characterization of the work surgeons do. Surgeons make decisions about recommending operations based on what’s right for the patient.

We agree with the President that the best thing for patients with diabetes is to manage the disease proactively to avoid the bad consequences that can occur, including blindness, stroke, and amputation. But as is the case for a person who has been treated for cancer and still needs to have a tumor removed, or a person who is in a terrible car crash and needs access to a trauma surgeon, there are times when even a perfectly managed diabetic patient needs a surgeon. The President’s remarks are truly alarming and run the risk of damaging the all-important trust between surgeons and their patients.

We assume that the President made these mistakes unintentionally, but we would urge him to have his facts correct before making another inflammatory and incorrect statement about surgeons and surgical care.

Hat Tip Jonah Goldberg

Last weekend, I had the onerous task of trimming back an aggressive California Fan Palm in the back yard. I put this off hoping for a low marine overcast day to keep me cool while working. As luck would have it, the overcast burned off shortly after sunrise.

Anyhow, I got out the electric chain saw and started in on this beast. After having the chain jump off of the track once early on, I readjusted the tension and generated two green bins worth palm fronds.

The image is the before and after. Click to enlarge.

I mentioned that this is an aggressive tree. These start growing in cracks in the sidewalks, between ties in the local railroad tracks, out of the sides of other trees - places you would find hard to believe. In fact, most of the local gardeners and tree trimmers consider them as weeds.

Another ‘feature’ is the presence of extremely sharp spikes that line both sides of the frond stems. See this post from March 2007 (content warning - gross injury depicted).

The act of trimming this tree is only a prerequisite to taking it down. Damsel has asked me to get ALL of these out of the yard and I agree that it needs to happen.