Sen Metzenbaum - RIP

Ohioans from both sides of the aisle are pausing to pay respects to Sen Howard Metzenbaum.

The good Senator was a "dyed in the wool" liberal. I virtually never agreed with him (I can't actually think of a single time I did, but I certainly can't remember them all). Even so, Sen Metzenbaum was a man of his convictions. He was honorable. He was someone that Ohio could be proud to call one of ours.

May he Rest In Peace.

Shots Across The Bows

There is a shot across the bow from the Democrats. A bunch of folks are making hay about McCain not beinging a "natural born" citizen. He was born in the Panama Canal Zone (general legal opinion is that that was never US territory), to two US Citizens, thus being a citizen at birth. He has never held other citizenship.

So the "issue" is a very narrow reading of "natural born" as requiring birth within the US. It would require an extremely narrow reading of "natural born". The more obvious reading is that you are either a "naturalized" citizen or a "natural born". No one disputes he's a citizen. No one has suggested that he was ever "naturalized". Hence he's "natural born". Seems simple to me. (Interestingly, the folks making this case would argue that someone born here, of parents here illegally, that then spends the next 35 years back in the country of the parents, would qualify.)

Now McCain's shot(s). Watch this

So other than this being a great (and I mean great) ad, why a shot?

Did you hear the dig at 1:06? "I don't seek the office out of a sense of entitlement." Who might be doing that? Then there is the text at 1:31. "More than Aspiration. Leadership." Perhaps aimed at the other Democrat me thinks.

News of the Day

I couldn't decide which of these to write about, so I decided to do short paragraphs on each.

I will not participate in the "piling on" that's going on with regard to Gov Spitzer (D-NY), Re: prostitute. I will instead say that based on the photos of him and his wife... Well that's one cheezed off lady. Not that I can blame her. That's why I won't pile on. It looks to me like he's going to get everything that he has coming.

Next, we see that Sen Obama has rejected Sen Clinton's suggestion of him being VP on the ticket with her. I can't see her accepting the VP position, so it looks like it will continue to be a knock-down drag-out to the end between the two Dems. It's almost too good to be true.

Now the really bad news. The CDC reports that one quarter of girls between 14 and 19 have an STD. That is unbelievable. Very distressing. One wonders how we, as a society, got to this point. And how to get back to something more reasonable. But I'm not worried. I'm sure that once Congress gets done with steriods in baseball they'll get right on this. And I know that the film and television industries care about young girls, so they'll stop promoting promiscuity.

Didn't They Learn the First Time?

In today's San Diego Union Tribune there is an article about the possibility that the California Public Utilites Commission (CPUC) may open the system to allow private residents and businesses to buy power directly from suppliers.

Do they not remember the summer when California had an electrical power crisis? The brown outs? The spiraling costs? The fact that the first deregulation fiasco cost us BILLIONS? That it cost Gov Davis his job?

The simple truth is they remember. So, when it isn't obvious why they'd do this, follow the money. The CPUC is being petitioned by businesses for this. Somebody sees a way to reduce their costs, probably leaving all the unrecovered costs from lat time to the regular folks. I really hope the CPUC comes to its collective senses, but I'd bet against it.

Importing Pharmaceuticals - Now That's a Bad Idea

From a few days ago here,

China's drug safety agency, commenting on a probe into the recalled drug heparin, said Wednesday it enforces strict controls on chemicals used in pharmaceuticals, but that importing countries are ultimately responsible for ensuring product safety.

So instead of testing the batch in China, we are expected to test the final products. Are they serious? To test a batch only requires a relatively small sample of a large homogenous mixture. This essentially guarantees that all samples will be the same. On the other hand, once a batch has been divided (be it tablets, pills, bottles, whatever), you can not know if one or more part gets contaminated, without testing every item, which is, of course, impractical.

But, given what has happened over the past year or so, can we trust a test done by China? I don't think so. But even so, while I hate to admit it, I agree with the statement above by China. We are resposible for the safety of our products.

So if we are responsible for the safety of our products, and we can not trust tests done by other countries, and can not practically test the products once they get here, I draw a conclusion that I suspect the Chinese would disagree with. I conclude that we should not import phamaceuticals!

This Time The Democrats Are Absolutely Right

Just got back from a family thing over in AZ (got the jump on the time change that way).

Anyways, the IRS is about to waste $42,000,000 of your and my money. How? By sending everybody that's going to get a check from the stimulus package a mailer telling them that they will get the check. The Democrats are complaing that that is waste of money. They are right.

This apparently is the IRS version of a Dilbert Cartoon. In the next panel Dilbert will suggest to the IRS that maybe we can't just jump into a mailer to explain the check and need to send a pre-mailer to tell them they'll get a mailer.

Seriously, I can understand including a flyer with the checks that explains how the amount of the check was determined. But a separate mailing? Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Proud and Ashamed at the Same Time

First, I've been away on business and away from a computer, so this is my first chance to blog since Sunday.

That means I finally get to brag about how proud and pleased I was to see Ohio put Sen. McCain over the top to "certain nominee" status on Tuesday night.

My pride lasted exactly 12 hours.

On Wednesday morning I found a USA Today outside my hotel room door. As I was reading through it over breakfast, I became ashamed of Ohio. Well, not just Ohio, Texas, too. Actually, pretty much everybody. Why?

Well, on page 5A they showed the data for "Who Voted for Whom, and Why, in Two Key States", specifically Texas and Ohio (unfortunately I couldn't find the numbers on their web site, so I can only link to some graphs, which are not nearly as clear as the raw numbers). The part that made me ashamed was the breakdown of voters, by race and sex, and how they voted for Senators Clinton and Obama. Short version: The whites voted for the white and the blacks voted for the black, while the men voted for the man and the women voted for the woman. (By the way, the same was observed earlier in South Carolina.)

And this was by the voters of the party that prides itself on being the party of inclusion? The party of diversity? The party of tolerance?

Apparently racism and sexism are not yet things of the past, not even for Democrats.

Amen!

I've posted a couple times about my concern over the cause of fiscal sanity (you know spend less than what you make and save the rest) and how I want that to be the tack our government officals take. I think that at one time not so long ago that was actually the opinion of conservatives.

Apparently so does Nate Beeler, the editorial cartoonist for the Washington Examiner, clcik here.