When socialized medicine and Islam intersect

You know how I'm always ridiculing some of the practices of Islamic cultures abroad as backwards, third-world, and barbaric? Well guess what? I'm right!

Women are being given controversial "virginity repair" operations on the NHS, it emerged last night.
Taxpayers funded 24 hymen replacement operations between 2005 and 2006, official figures revealed.
And increasing numbers of women are paying up to £4,000 in private clinics for the procedure apparently under pressure from future spouses or in-laws who believe they should be virgins on their wedding night.
Doctors said most patients are immigrants or British of ethnic origin.

The trend has been condemned by critics as a sign of social regression driven by Islamic fundamentalists. Some countries have made hymen reconstruction operations illegal.

And just in case you think I'm unfairly impuning a culture not my own, out of xenophobia and ignorance, read this...

Dr Magdy Hend, consultant gynaecologist at the Regency Clinic, Harley Street, London, who started hymen reconstruction more than 18 years ago in the Middle East and the Gulf, said: "In some cultures they like to see that the women will bleed on the wedding night. If the wife or bride is not a virgin, it is a big shame on the family."

How absurd, stupid, and insecure are these Muslim men that they think hymen repair means their wives didn't have sex with people besides them already? And how barbaric to want to see the woman you love(and by "love" I mean "own") bleed in pain on your wedding night to prove she's a virgin? If your culture demands that you give your daughter's husband three pigs and a puka-shell necklace as a dowrey, fine. If your culture demands that you wear a bamboo pole on your penis as a sign of virility, fine. I can respect that, but even these primitive jungle tribesmen aren't deluded enough to think that hymen repair restores a woman's virginity.

The only funny thing about this story is that Great Britain's idiotic socialized medicine system is paying for it all. And in doing so, they're welcoming still more of the creeping infestation of radical Islamic culture into their own.

Hillary Care v2.1

Still smarting from the spanking she took from the American people over her proposed socialized medicine disaster of an idea back in the 90's, Hillary still fantasizes about seizing control of 1/7 of the U.S. economy, only this time through the back door, or S-CHIP program. Hillary is conniving enough and knows better than to tell the Americans what she's up to, but other democrats aren't that smart. Here's Tom Vilsack, former dem. governor of Iowa, in a rare moment of honesty about universal health-care...

"I think there is going to be a commitment to universal coverage. I don’t think it’s necessarily going to be a sector by sector process. I think you either need to go in whole hog or not. We tried to sort of squeeze the middle here with doing children and doing seniors, and trying to squeeze it. If anything happens, it would more likely look something like this: you would extend eligibility for children from 200% of poverty to 300% of poverty, and create resources to insure the parents of those children.”

300% of poverty plus the parents?--that means that a family of four whose household income was roughly $64,000, would have their health-care paid for by other, more productive tax-payers. Even single adults who make up to $31,000 would be covered. As with all democrat proposals, regardless of how disastrous they might be, it's always for the children. But this new expansion of S-CHIP covers vast numbers of adults too. See where this is going? By incrementally covering more and more of the population, eventually enough voters will be dependent on "government"(read-fellow taxpayers) for their medical care, that it won't matter. Those hand-out voters will continue to vote for the people who guarantee that somebody else pays their medical bills. And the liberals will have succeeded in seizing control of the single largest slice of the American economy besides national defense.

"But Ed" you whine, "what about the poor little children whose parents don't have insurance?"

Fine, if their parents make too much money to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to pay for their own insurance, that's assuming their employers don't generously provide coverage, then cover only the children under 18 or 21 even. I don't have a problem with that. Why not just expand Medicaid if all you want to do is cover the children? But if what you want is to sneak universal, government-controlled, European-style, socialized health-care onto Americans while they're busy playing guitar hero and watching reality TV, then stealthily expanding the S-CHIP program during an election year is the perfect way to go about it.

You see entitlement-minded, MTV Americans have come to believe that employer-provided health-care is a birth right, an obligation. It's not! Employers offer coverage as a negotiating tool to compete for labor, that's all. You don't have a right to coverage by somebody elses money? But this is the mindset that democrats love because lazy, degenerate Americans will support making somebody else pay their medical bills.

I don't care who the nominee is, vote R next November or Hillary-Care v2.1 is right around the corner. It might be anyway.

The UN prepares to make a play for more US tax dollars

I'm growing a little tired of debating the whole man-made global warming charade, and up until now, the dreadful collection of despots, thugs, and criminals known as the United Nations has stayed safely at a distance. But that's all about to change, especially if Hillary gets elected queen. First, here are are a few paragraphs from a recent article reporting on the UN's latest declaration about the menace of global warming...

VALENCIA, Spain - The Earth is hurtling toward a warmer age at a quickening pace, a Nobel-winning U.N. scientific panel said in a landmark report Saturday, warning of inevitable human suffering and the threat of species extinction.

The report also offered blueprints to avert the worst catastrophes. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said climate change imperils "the most precious treasures of our planet."

The potential impact of global warming is "so severe and so sweeping that only urgent, global action will do," Ban told the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change after it issued its fourth and final report this year.

That's the usual meaningless diatribe we've come to expect from the useless UN, but here's the kicker...

The report does not commit participating governments to any course of action. But it is important because it is adopted by consensus, meaning those countries accept the underlying science and cannot disavow its conclusions. It provides a common scientific baseline for the political talks.

Translated, that means the UN will reserve the right to levy taxes on countries which do not meet the ridiculous emissions goals set forth by them. The UN thugs have always wanted a larger piece of the American economic pie and punitive emissions taxes to save the Earth from the imaginary menace of global warming is how they'll go about it. A conservative in the oval office will simply tell the UN where to stick their taxes, but a liberal democrat, i.e. Hillary, will subserviently bow to the UN demand because liberals place the financial gluttony of the UN before the economic welfare of the US. Liberals don't think it's fair that America is richer than other countries and would gladly "share" our wealth with poorer countries....as if tax-payers don't fork over hundreds of times more in aid than any other country on Earth already.

Reader Mail

Thoughtful reader Freedom2Learn writes in and asks, "Is Ron Paul worthy of a mention? I'm curious as to what your gang thinks.

I don't have a lot of time to participate on your blog, but I at least skim it daily - I learn a lot - very interesting!"

Well thanks for stopping by Freedom. I always enjoy your comments and I think you should dive in more often.

Here's my take on Ron Paul: That he's a libertarian tells you most of what you need to about his positions on the issues...he believes in the supreme rights of the individual, limited government meddling in our lives, a reactionary military rather than a pre-emptive one, and basically the right of the individual to pursue happiness in any way, both personal and economic, that doesn't obstruct any other individual from pursuing happiness. He's fiscally conservative and socially liberal. Actually, most conservatives fall into that category too, though they won't admit it. The big difference between Ron Paul and rank-and-file republicans is that he doesn't wish to legislate morality as do Bush, Rove, and others.

That's the basic question you have to ask yourself about the republican and libertarian parties.

That being said, the Libertarian party is a marginal party and you could say that voting for Ron Paul is a wasted vote or a vote not cast against Hillary. On the other hand, a purist would say voting your beliefs, regardless of chances of winning, is as useful as voting for a major party candidate. Because if enough people do that, other major candidates start to take notice the next time around, and compete for those votes by embracing the principles those voters respond to. To reflexively vote for republicans just re-enforces the dreadful big-government policies they have embraced. The point is that your vote counts regardless for whom it is cast.

Bottom line, the longer Ron Paul stays in the race, putting his ideas out there, and getting financial support for them, the more the other candidates will take notice and move in the libertarian direction in order to win those votes. To me, that can only be a good thing.

Belated Ann Coulter Thursday....on Friday

Sorry for not posting anything yesterday. I was out of town without Internet access. Anyway, in case you missed it, here's Ann's column from Thursday in which she lends support to our ally Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan.

Embarrassing!!!

Even if these babes didn't remind us of uptight librarians, there seditious behavior in China cannot go unpunished...

A team of women who represented the United States at the world bridge championships in Shanghai last month is facing sanctions, including a yearlong ban from competition, for a spur-of-the-moment protest.

At issue is a crudely lettered sign, scribbled on the back of a menu, that was held up at an awards dinner and read, “We did not vote for Bush.”…

“What we were trying to say, not to Americans but to our friends from other countries, was that we understand that they are questioning and critical of what our country is doing these days, and we want you to know that we, too, are critical,” Ms. Greenberg said, stressing that she was speaking for herself and not her six teammates.

Look, when you represent your country overseas, you cannot go around undermining it's efforts. (Of course democrats, specifically Clinton and Carter, do this all the time, and that's why I think of them as America-haters) When you sign a contract with an organization, a contract that specifically forbids politicization of your position, and then you do something overtly political, you deserve to be punished.

And I know what your argument will be before the "thought" even forms in the rudimentary ganglion that serves as your brain..."But Ed, she's just exercising her first amendment right of free speech." Sorry hippie, your right of free speech ends where your signature on a contract banning such speech begins. Nothing's stopping her from making a jack-ass of herself any time she wants, but when she's officially representing an apolitical organization which paid for her to attend the event, political speech is forbidden. Virtually every employment contract in the world contains a clause in which dismissal is included as punishment for behavior that the organization deems unacceptable.

I hope this vile wretch gets mocked, ridiculed, and harrassed when she comes home.

Color-blind society? Please!

Since when is it racist to call an Hispanic rapist, an Hispanic rapist? Apparently when the Hispanic programming VP for a local radio station says it is...

If a person of Hispanic origin rapes a woman and, in an attempt to catch this violent criminal, police publish a description identifying the suspect's general racial makeup, is that a "racist" thing to do? Apparently the folks at KMYL (1190 AM) in the metro Phoenix, Arizona area think it is. It appears that we cannot even discuss the basic appearance of a wanted criminal now without being "racist" about it all.

The story comes to us from The East Valley Tribune, where the paper quotes the vice president for programming at KMYL as saying that calling a criminal an Hispanic is "racial profiling."

How stupid! This isn't a race issue, it's a law enforcement issue. When somebody commits a crime and the police want everybody to be aware and alert so they don't fall victim too, they issue a description of the suspect. It doesn't matter if he's African-American, Caucasian, Hispanic, Asian, Indian, or whatever. Saying what a wanted criminal looks like isn't racist, it's good police work. What are they going to say, "Be on the look out for a guy"? Yeah that really narrows the suspect pool down.

The problem is that nowadays everybody who views themselves as a minority has a hair trigger about perceived racism and racial profiling. The mere mention of race, skin color, ethnicity, or any characteristic that suggest it is perceived as a racially insensitive remark and the offending person must attend mandatory sensitivity training, where in the mother of all ironies, he'll be lectured about striving for a color-blind society even as he's lectured about the special privileges and protections of minority status based solely on skin color.

Trouble

There's something very weird going on with Blogger's fonts today so please bear with me until I straighten it out.

--The management

UPDATE: So at home this morning on the PC, all the fonts on the page were extremely small, unreadably small. In preview/edit mode everything looked normal. Now, I'm at work on my MAC and everything seems fine. Let me know in the comments thread if you notice anything wrong....and I don't mean "Ed, you're a horrible writer" or "Ed, you're a xenophobic homer who hates anybody who doesn't look like you" or "Ed, you think you're funny getting laughs at the expense of others, but you're not". I've heard it all and am unphased by it. What I mean is the physical appearance of the blog, but of course you knew that.

UPDATE #2: YEEEAAAA!!! Apparently something in the post about the Muslim car disagreed with the display on PCs. When I deleted it, everything reverted back to normal, so I took the opportunity to give the TRR a new look. I may or may not leave it this way. Feel free to criticize the new look and suggest different color schemes, as always, in the comments thread...heck, you feel free to criticize everything else, mine as well.

Busted!!!

Like it's a big surprise that the Clintons plant softball questions so they don't have to answer the hard ones...

Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton’s campaign admitted Friday that it planted a global warming question in Newton, Iowa, Tuesday during a town hall meeting to discuss clean energy.

The story here will be how the media glosses over this deception. They want badly for Hillary to get elected so they will report no negative thing about Hillary unless they're forced to. You see, liberals(which 90% of the media are) see nothing wrong with doing literally anything to get elected if you are a liberal. They view conservatives as evil and the reigns of power a liberal birthright, therefore; using any means necessary to defeat conservatism is justified. If this had been a republican or liberterian who got caught cheating, there'd be no measure to the wailing and gnashing of teeth in the national media. It would make front page news for days, or until the poll numbers for that candidate were sufficiently low as to no longer pose a threat to their chosen liberal candidate.

This post is more about the hypocrisy of the media than about Hillary....we've known for years that the Clinton machine uses deception and lies to avoid tough questions and manipulate the dolts who're voting for her.

....from my cold dead hands!

And you people think it's important to have balanced Constitutional views on the Supreme Court?

WASHINGTON: Both sides in a closely watched legal battle over the District of Columbia's strict gun-control law are urging the Supreme Court to hear the case. If the justices agree - a step they may announce as early as Tuesday - the Roberts court is very likely to find itself back on the front lines of the culture wars with an intensity unmatched even by the cases on abortion and race that defined the court's last term.

The question is whether the Second Amendment to the Constitution protects an individual right to "keep and bear arms." If the answer is yes, as a federal appeals court held in March, the justices must decide what such an interpretation means for a statute that bars all possession of handguns and that requires any other guns in the home to be disassembled or secured by trigger locks.


Look, every where gun-control has been tried, UK, Canada, Australia, campus gun-free zones, there is an immediate sky-rocketing of violence against the unarmed citizenry. Likewise, everywhere there are liberal conceal/carry permits, there has been a dramatic drop in violent crime. Which one of you out there is brave/stupid enough to claim that criminals will give back their guns if gun-control laws are passed? It'll be open season on innocent people if we allow the federal government to force us to disarm ourselves.

"But Ed" you whine, "they're talking about trigger guards and disassembling your home weapon, not confiscation". You moron, what good is a disassembled gun if a bad guy is crashing through your front door at 3 in the morning, or car-jacking your wife, or shooting up the school your kids go to?

If you are so in favor of gun-control, then I dare you to put a sign in your front yard declaring your property to be gun-free. The only reason you are alive today is because the bad guys don't know if you have a gun or not.