Peregrinating
2011

March

1 March
BlueWater Resort & Casino
Parker, AZ

Also last week, Wikileaks released papers signifying that Saudi Arabia's oil reserves were quite a bit less than they had claimed...
It hardly made an impression on a US public preoccupied with comings and goings of Charlie Sheen. President Obama wants to pretend that American life-on-wheels will just keep rolling along. He hasn't so much as hinted to the US public that the time approaches when gasoline will have to be rationed either by high prices or odd-and-even licenses plates or some other method. Charming fellow that he is, his fecklessness in the face of disintegrating oil markets will go down in history as something like Nero's musical solo while Rome burned down.

2 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees Co-op
Pahrump,NV

3 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees Co-op
Pahrump,NV

World food prices rose 2.2% in February from the previous month to a record peak, the United Nations' food body said Thursday, as it warned that volatility in oil markets could push prices even higher.
The Food and Agriculture Organization price index rose by 2.2%—the eighth consecutive rise since June—to an average of 236 points last month, the highest record in real and nominal terms since the agency started monitoring prices in 1990.

4 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees Co-op
Pahrump,NV

5 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees Co-op
Pahrump,NV

"And I like that lady—Sarah Palin. She's great. I like the cut of her jib." The former governor of Alaska, he says, "is in the good tradition of America, which this awful political correctness business goes against." Plus: "She's got courage. That's very important in politics. You can have all the right ideas and the ability to express them. But if you haven't got guts, if you haven't got courage the way Margaret Thatcher had courage—and [Ronald] Reagan, come to think of it. Your last president had courage too—if you haven't got courage, all the other virtues are no good at all. It's the central virtue."
"Mr. Reagan had thousands of one-liners." Here a grin spreads across Mr. Johnson's face: "That's what made him a great president." Jokes, he argues, were a vital communication tool for President Reagan "because he could illustrate points with them." Mr. Johnson adopts a remarkable vocal impression of America's 40th president and delivers an example: "You know, he said, 'I'm not too worried about the deficit. It's big enough to take care of itself.'" Recovering from his own laughter, he adds: "Of course, that's an excellent one-liner, but it's also a perfectly valid economic point." Then his expression grows serious again and he concludes: "You don't get that from Obama. He talks in paragraphs."

6 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees Co-op
Pahrump,NV

That's all you need in life, a little place for your stuff. That's all your house is: a place to keep your stuff. If you didn't have so much stuff, you wouldn't need a house. You could just walk around all the time. A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it.

7 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees Co-op
Pahrump,NV

More than half the states—28 and counting—are challenging the law in court, saying that it violates the constitutional rights of their citizens and the sovereignty of the states. A new study from the Senate Finance and House Energy and Commerce Committees found that as a result of ObamaCare, budget-strapped states face at least $118 billion in unfunded mandates during the first 10 years after the law takes effect.
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has handed out nearly 1,000 waivers to allow select companies, unions and states to escape, at least temporarily, some of the burdensome new insurance rules she has created. This is a continuation of the trend of the "Cornhusker Kickback" and the "Louisiana Purchase" that Senate Democrats used to get the law passed in the first place, and that so disgusted the American people.
Independent experts have shown that the cost of health insurance will rise faster than it would have without the law. The Congressional Budget Office expects the price of a family policy in the individual market to be $2,100 higher by 2016 than it would have been had the law not passed. In at least 20 states, it's now impossible to buy child-only health insurance because of Ms. Sebelius's onerous new rules.
Seniors are at risk of losing access to physicians and medical care. Medicare actuaries say that the cuts built into the law will force as many as 40% of providers to eventually stop seeing Medicare patients or go bankrupt.
Many thousands of people are already losing the health insurance they have now as companies are exiting markets for individual, small group and Medicare Advantage coverage.
The former director of the Congressional Budget Office, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, says that the costs of ObamaCare are set to explode when employers opt to drop coverage and send their workers to the new, federally subsidized health exchanges for coverage. He estimates that this will drive up the cost of the law by $1 trillion or more in the first 10 years.

8 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees Co-op
Pahrump,NV

9 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees Co-op
Pahrump,NV

What's missing is a coherent U.S. energy policy. At best, the Obama administration's approach to U.S. domestic oil and gas production can be characterized as a strategy of ambivalence, an uneasy equilibrium between desire to lessen the role of fossil fuels and the reality of their necessity in a functioning U.S. economy. Last year's Deepwater Horizon tragedy in the Gulf tilted the current administration's policies to an even more punitive posture vis-a-vis domestic energy production.
As the French philosopher Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wisely observed, "A goal without a plan is just a wish." Unfortunately for the U.S., there is not even a wish. The time to rethink and redesign our entire energy strategy is now.
The Obama administration must seriously ponder the following questions, because they relate directly to what the president likes to call "winning the future." What will be the make-up of the energy-supply pie, and how can we dramatically increase, even double, our energy efficiency? What exactly are our carbon emission goals? And how do we go from where we are today—importing about 20% of our daily energy supply—to where we want to be in 2026, perhaps even an energy exporter?
We've already entered a new energy era that is dramatically more competitive, diverse and high-tech than the past. The global consumer is king. The future energy picture for the U.S. or the planet is not constrained by the availability of supplies, either fossil or non-fossil, but by efficiency gains in generation and consumption.
This will require real leadership and the clear articulation of energy goals, costs and priorities. Ambiguity will not serve the best interests of future generations. The U.S. does not have an energy problem. It has an energy strategy problem.

10 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees Co-op
Pahrump,NV

Sandy Chung is grappling with a new kind of request at her pediatrics office in Fairfax, Va.: prescriptions for aspirin and diaper-rash cream.
Patients are demanding doctors' orders for over-the-counter products because of a provision in the health-care overhaul that slipped past nearly everyone's radar. It says people who want a tax break to buy such items with what's known as flexible-spending accounts need to get a prescription first.
The result is that Americans are visiting their doctors before making a trip to the drugstore, hoping their physician will help them out by writing the prescription. The new requirements create not only an added burden for doctors, but also new complications for retailers and pharmacies.
"It drives up the cost of health care as opposed to reducing it," says Dr. Chung, who rejected much of a 10-item request from a mother of four that included pain relievers and children's cold medicine.
Though the new rules on over-the-counter drugs amount to a small part of the massive overhaul of the health-care system, the unintended side effects show how difficult it can be to predict how such game-changing legislation will play out in the real world.

11 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees Co-op
Pahrump,NV

12 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees Co-op
Pahrump,NV

Whatever else one might say about President Obama's Libya policy, it has succeeded brilliantly in achieving its oft-stated goal of not leading the world. No one can any longer doubt the U.S. determination not to act before the Italians do, or until the Saudis approve, or without a U.N. resolution. This White House is forthright for followership.
That message also couldn't be clearer to Moammar Gadhafi and his sons, who are busy bombing and killing their way to victory against the Libyan opposition. As the U.S. defers to the world, the world can't decide what to do, and the vacuum is filled by a dictator and his hard men who have concluded that no one will stop them. "Hear it now. I have only two words for our brothers and sisters in the east: We're coming," said Gadhafi's son, Saif al-Islam, on Thursday. ..
Libya today is what a world without U.S. leadership looks like.

13 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees Co-op
Pahrump,NV

14 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees Co-op
Pahrump,NV

15 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees Co-op
Pahrump,NV

Potassium iodide pills are reportedly flying off the shelves at drug stores in at least three West Coast states -- Oregon, California and Hawaii -- according to several local press accounts.
The Wall Street Journal also reports that one Virginia-based supplier, Anbex Inc., sold out of its entire supply of 10,000 14-tablet packages on Saturday.
Alan Morris, president of the company, reportedly said that the supplier is receiving about three orders a minute for $10 packages of its Iosat pills.
"Those who don't get it are crying. They're terrified," Morris told the newspaper.
U.S. health officials have said that dangerous levels of radiation leaking from a crippled nuclear plant in Japan pose little or no risk to people on the U.S. West Coast. But the reassurances have not stopped worried Americans from clearing out potassium iodide supplies at drug stores in Hawaii, Oregon and California.
Stores in Eugene, Ore., for example, have reported a sudden spike in sales of the pill. Janell Davis, vitamin manager at Sundance Natural Foods, told the Register-Guard that the store was sold out of the tablets by Saturday afternoon. In Redding, Calif., some store owners say they can't stock their shelves fast enough with the tablets.

16 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees Co-op
Pahrump,NV

17 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees Co-op
Pahrump,NV

Do You Know What This Is? Or Where This Is?

18 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees Co-op
Pahrump,NV

One knock on Barack Obama in the 2008 election was his record as an Illinois state senator, where he repeatedly ducked tough issues by voting "present." It seems old habits die hard. ..
If, however, you are curious about where the most powerful man in the universe stands on Libya, radiation, a possible government shutdown, the future of Social Security, or rising oil prices, don't look to the White House. Those issues are tough. Those issues risk mistakes. Those issues might mean unhappy voters. And right now, it's approval ratings the White House cares about. ..
And so as Moammar Gadhafi has visited a bloodbath on opposition forces, the White House has for weeks spun its wheels at the United Nations, waiting for someone else to go first. The White House has argued intervention might provoke an Arab backlash against the U.S., and it could be it actually believes such crazy talk. Yet it seems equally concerned that any U.S.-led military action in Libya—no matter how minor—will invite comparisons to the dreaded Bush warmongers and prove unpopular.
And as Congress lurches from one budget crisis to the next, President Obama leaves negotiations to Vice President Joe Biden. It has been clear for weeks the only way this gets settled is for Mr. Obama and House Speaker John Boehner to find a fiscal 2011 spending-cut number that gets bipartisan support. But Mr. Obama worries that number will be too much for the left, and not enough for the right, and that means . . . controversy.
Today he instead leaves for a five-day Latin American tour. On that trip he will not be visiting Colombia or Panama, whose trade deals he's squelched since he took office. Trade deals, after all, don't always sit well with the public (and rarely with unions).
It took until yesterday for Mr. Obama to address Japan's nuclear problem, and only then to clarify that Americans should and should not be worried about radiation, while also knowing that U.S. power plants are and aren't safe. The president had been touting a new love for nuclear energy (to coax Republicans into a "clean-energy" deal), but the White House is now worried Japan is the hydrogen version of the BP oil spill, and thinking the safest short-term policy is incoherence.

19 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees Co-op
Pahrump,NV

A new assessment of President Barack Obama's budget released Friday says the White House underestimates future budget deficits by more than $2 trillion over the upcoming decade.
The estimate from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says that if Obama's February budget submission is enacted into law it would produce deficits totaling $9.5 trillion over 10 years — an average of almost $1 trillion a year.
Obama's budget saw deficits totaling $7.2 trillion over the same period...
The White House's goal is to reach a point where the budget is balanced except for interest payments on the $14 trillion national debt. Such "primary balance" occurs when the deficit is about 3 percent of the size of the economy, and economists say deficits of that magnitude are generally sustainable.

20 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees Co-op
Pahrump,NV

21 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees Co-op
Pahrump,NV

22 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees Co-op
Pahrump,NV

Last week, President Obama’s budget chief, Jack Lew, took to his White House blog to repeat his claim that the Social Security trust fund is solvent through 2037. And to chide me for suggesting otherwise. I had argued in my last column that the trust fund is empty, indeed fictional.
If Lew’s claim were just wrong, that would be one thing. But it provides the intellectual justification for precisely the kind of debt denial and entitlement complacency that his boss is now engaged in. Therefore, once more unto the breach.
Lew acknowledges that the Social Security surpluses of the last decades were siphoned off to the Treasury Department and spent. He also agrees that Treasury then deposited corresponding IOUs — called “special issue” bonds — in the Social Security trust fund. These have real value, claims Lew. After all, “these Treasury bonds are backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government in the same way that all other U.S. Treasury bonds are.”
Really? If these trust fund bonds represent anything real, why is it that in calculating national indebtedness they are not even included? ... The debt ratio completely ignores the kind of intra governmental bonds that Lew insists are the equivalent of publicly held bonds.
Why? Because the intra-governmental bond is nothing more than a bookkeeping device that records how much one part of the U.S. government (Treasury) owes another part of the same government (the Social Security Administration). In judging the creditworthiness of the United States, the world doesn’t care what the left hand owes the right. It’s all one entity. It cares only what that one entity owes the world....
Invoking the “full faith and credit” mantra for those IOUs in the trust fund is empty bluster. It does not change the fact that, as the OMB itself acknowledged, those IOUs “do not consist of real economic assets that can be drawn down in the future to fund benefits.” Yet Lew continues to insist that these “special issue” trinkets will pay off seniors for the next 26 years.
Nonsense. That money is gone with the wind. Those trust fund trinkets are nothing more than a record of past borrowings. They say nothing about the future....And there is nothing in the lockbox.

That's what makes this administration's claim that Social Security is solvent so cynical. The Republicans have said that their April budget will contain real entitlement reform. President Obama is preparing the ground to demagogue Social Security right through the 2012 elections. The ad writes itself: Those heartless Republicans don't just want to throw granny in the snow, they want to throw granny in the snow to solve a problem that doesn't even exist! Vote Obama.
On Tuesday, Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia denounced Obama for lack of leadership on the debt. It's worse than that. Obama is showing leadership. With Lew's preposterous claim that Social Security is solvent for 26 years, Obama is preparing to lead the charge against entitlement reform as his ticket to reelection.

23 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees Co-op
Pahrump,NV

24 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees Co-op
Pahrump,NV

25 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees Co-op
Pahrump,NV

Imagine the uproar if President Bush had unilaterally launched air attacks against Libya's Moammar Gadhafi. But since it's Mr. Obama's finger on the trigger, Democratic leaders in Congress have kept quiet—demonstrating that their opposition to presidential power during the Bush years was political, not principled.
Mr. Obama's exercise of war powers in Libya is firmly in the tradition of American foreign policy... Since Vietnam, however, antiwar Democrats have sought to replace the Constitution's reliance on swift presidential action in war with a radically different system appropriate for peacetime: Congress makes policy, the president implements it...
President George W. Bush's campaign against terror upped the stakes in this contest. Opening the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, establishing special military courts for terrorist trials, ordering tough interrogation of al Qaeda leaders, and conducting warrantless wiretaps of electronic communications—all without congressional approval—fed the left-wing narrative of an "imperial presidency." Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and other prominent Democrats regularly attacked Mr. Bush for acting "above the law" and "cutting out Congress." Then-Sen. Joe Biden even opposed the Supreme Court nomination of Samuel Alito because he would not agree that Mr. Bush would need congressional permission to attack Iran.^*
Mr. Obama once agreed with his Democratic colleagues, saying in 2007 that "The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation." Fast forward four years: Last Monday, Mr. Obama notified Congress that he ordered military action in Libya "pursuant to my constitutional authority to conduct U.S. foreign relations and as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive."...
Unfortunately, Mr. Obama's desire to work through the United Nations has only substituted one source of delay and unaccountability for another. While he wasted weeks negotiating with the Arab League, NATO allies and finally the U.N. Security Council to win the international approval he so desperately seeks, Moammar Gadhafi reversed his battlefield losses and drove the rebels into one last holdout in Benghazi. The Constitution centralized the management of war in the president precisely to avoid the delays and mistakes of decision-making by committee. While Mr. Obama has done well to part ways with antiwar Democrats, he has shown that he still has to learn the ways of the executive.

26 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees Co-op
Pahrump,NV

27 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees Co-op
Pahrump,NV

28 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees Co-op
Pahrump,NV

TRIPOLI, LIBYA — Forces loyal to Moammar Gaddafi entered the eastern rebel stronghold of Benghazi Saturday after shelling and fierce fighting, a fresh act of defiance even as the United States and its allies prepared to launch military attacks on Libya.
Government troops in tanks and trucks entered Benghazi from the west, in the university area, and began to shell the city, including civilian areas. Intense fighting broke out in some enclaves. The city of 1 million quickly became a ghost town, with residents fleeing or seeking cover in barricaded neighborhoods.
Later in the report, the details of two quite different letters Qaddafi sent to President Obama, and to the U.N., Britain, and France respectively. Apparently the colonel has much love for BHO. Either crazy, or crazy like a fox:
In what appeared to be a desperate attempt to avert military action, Gaddafi sent two letters to international leaders, according to deputy foreign minister Khaled Kaim, who read the letters to journalists. One was a warm, conciliatory note to Obama, and the other was a sharply worded, menacing message to the United Nations, France and Britain.
To Obama, he wrote: “If Libya and the US enter into a war you will always remain my son, and I have love for you.” Libya is battling al-Qaeda, he said, seeking Obama’s advice. “How would you behave so that I can follow your example?” he asked.
In the other letter, addressed to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon and the leaders of France and Britain, he warned that the entire region would be destabilized if they pursued strikes against Libya. “You will regret it if you take a step to intervene in our internal affairs,” he wrote.

29 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees Co-op
Pahrump,NV

In his speech on Monday.. Obama posited that the Libyan air assault was acceptable because it involved a broad coalition and was in service of a humanitarian goal.
In the speech at a 2002 Chicago anti-war rally that launched Obama’s career in national politics, the future president argued against U.S. intervention in Iraq for humanitarian reasons thusly:
"I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. He has repeatedly defied U.N. resolutions... But ... Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors ..."
The Obama Doctrine, as laid out on Monday, holds that action to prevent brutality by dictators is OK, though, if there is a broad coalition in support of the action because “American leadership is not simply a matter of going it alone and bearing all of the burden ourselves.”
But Obama has enlisted the help of only nine nations for his Odyssey Dawn coalition, compared to the 40 George W. Bush enlisted for Iraqi Freedom. Obama does have the advantage of a commitment from NATO to take over command, which Bush lacked. But since NATO is a predominantly American organization, the actual burden bearing looks to be substantially the same.

Ellsworth Toohey, speaking to Peter Keating in The Fountainhead

30 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees Co-op
Pahrump,NV

Ellsworth Toohey, speaking to Peter Keating in The Fountainhead

31 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees Co-op
Pahrump,NV

We struck regime forces approaching Benghazi to save that city and the people within it. We hit Qaddafi's troops in neighboring Ajdabiya, allowing the opposition to drive them out. We hit his air defenses, which paved the way for a no-fly zone. We targeted tanks and military assets that had been choking off towns and cities, and we cut off much of their source of supply. And tonight I can report that we have stopped Qaddafi's deadly advance.

Forces loyal to Muammar al-Qaddafi used deadly force against rebels and civilians in Misrata Wednesday, killing at least 20 people, a rebel spokesman told Reuters.
The spokesman says that Qaddafi forces are using artillery to bombard the rebel stronghold.
"Artillery bombardment resumed this morning (Thursday) and is still going on. The (pro-Qaddafi) brigades could not enter the town but they are surrounding it... Massacres are taking place in Misrata," the spokesman told Reuters by phone.
A Libyan government spokesman tells Reuters that Qaddafi and his sons will remain in the country "until the end."

Ellsworth Toohey, speaking to Peter Keating in The Fountainhead