…and mandated them all to low-flow, and I said nothing because I didn’t care. I just flushed a few more times … although others took a different approach. At some point they mandated the wine bottles, and I said nothing, because as long as they still have a hole in the top it doesn’t affect me.

Now they’re coming for the light bulbs, and most people seem completely insensible to the danger.

Yet about 75 percent said they are not aware of the impending federal requirement for greater energy efficiency that will lead to the phaseout of less efficient lighting.

“Less efficient” by a standard of raw energy consumed, perhaps. “Less efficient” by a standard of, you know, actually lighting things to a visible spectrum and being safe to handle around your toddler, not so much: Incandescents are far more efficient than flourescents on both counts. And there’s this ill-considered boilerplate from GE:

“We’re not sensing a rush by consumers to comply with the looming federal standards,” Kathy Sterio, GE Lighting’s general manager of consumer marketing said in a prepared statement.

“There’s a major shift to CFLs but it’s clearly is a matter of educated consumers choosing CFLs for their strengths,” she said. “Our marketing, advertising and packaging have espoused the value of energy-efficient CFLs for over a decade.”

Such a charming implication, that those of us who still prefer incandescents are uneducated yokels.

H/t J.

Got it from Instapundit.

So now that it looks like the public “option” is dying, those of us who want the government to stay out of our purchasing and consumption of medical treatment can breathe a sigh of relief, right? Don’t believe it. They will next try to pass some watered-down piece of garbage that is still garbage, probably at the very least to include mandated health insurance. And doesn’t that look like fun? And if they pass that and it’s a boondoggle, they’ll point to it to say “See! That’s why we need the government to run it!” The camel’s nose under the tent.

I don’t understand why I’ve only seen one post anywhere that even mentions the real problem and points the way to a perfectly workable, even fairly cheap, solution: cut the tie between employment and health insurance. How many people even know what that tie is–the reason why most people get medical insurance from their employers? It’s because when you buy it that way, it’s bought with pretax dollars, whereas if you buy it yourself, it’s posttax. So your company is paying some money in on your behalf instead of paying it to you as wages, it doesn’t get taxed, and you kick in the rest off your paycheck, pretax as well. So who do the insurance companies market their plans to? Your employer, who wants to get a great plan that pays for everything that it can hold up as a swell “benefit” of coming to work for them. I’d rather have more money and buy cheap insurance myself–catastrophe-only insurance that would pay if I had to be hospitalized or needed ongoing treatment for a serious illness but that would let me pony up on my own when I go to see my doctor about that damned itchy eczema on my elbow or take my son to his doctor because he bonked his head even though there’s obviously absolutely nothing wrong with him.

Sever the link via changes in the tax law. Either lay the income tax on all money that pays for medical insurance, or take it off of all of it–one seemingly simple way to do that might be to have your insurance company send you a tax form in February, like a W-2, that lists the total of all money you’ve paid in insurance premiums that year, and you file that with your tax return and the amount is deducted from your taxable income. Then insurance companies would have to market their plans to individuals, not corporations, and suddenly paying $600 per month or whatever it is for a small family to go to the doctor a total of seven times in a year doesn’t look so damn good, does it? Buy yourself some cheap catastrophe-only insurance with a high deductible, and wham, you’ve just “lowered your costs.” And the real cost of an actual doctor’s visit would come down too, since the docs would be so happy to have patients who pay cash on delivery rather than cutting through eight layers, minimum, of red tape to get paid less than they charge. You think doctors and hospitals don’t inflate charges because they know the insurance companies won’t pay at that rate anyway? I don’t think that.

I’m no expert in any of these fields; I’ve just been watching what’s going on for a long time and watching Obama attempt to push us off the cliff of socialism. IF they can’t pass socialized medicine, they’ll pass something lesser and expect us to wipe our foreheads and give thanks that we dodged the bullet, Comrade. Don’t do it. Don’t blink. Stand firm and insist that instead of more regulation, they take regulation away. Strip out the tax irregularity that incentivizes employers to “pay” for our medical insurance instead of paying us and letting us get our own. Medical insurance never should have come to this pass; it should be like car insurance, which would never pay to take the car in for an oil change. Deregulate medical insurance and I got your costs savings right here.

The third that hates Huckabee with a fiery passion and the third that loves him with a … fiery white passion. Don’t mess with me, punk.

How hard is this crap? Get divorced before you send love emails to the new chick. Get divorced before you fly off for four days and turn off your state cell phone. This man had a few thoughts of running for president? We can take a divorced president, champ. We can’t take a stupid one–even though for a lot of voters, it takes a lot to prove stupidity. You chose the fastest route. Congratulations, Mark Sanford, you get–new love. Hope it was worth it.

How’d you like to be that fighter jock who buzzed his F-16 over Manhattan today?

How’d you like to be the pilot of that AF-1?

How do you like knowing that the NOTUS calls your shots?

How do you like your Commander-In-Chief? I feel for you, I really do. Sign up to protect America and spend your afternoon recreating New York’s worst nightmare. For a photo op.

Sleep tight, Caldera. Heckuva job, you colossally self-important airhead.

Liberals who advocated unrestricted abortion in the name of government butting out of “reproductive freedom” and universal health care start demanding that the government dictate who may have babies and how many since, after all, with universal health care, we’re all paying for it.

That would be why the smarter among us keep howling NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO to universal health care. Duh.

Via Ace.

From interview with Peter Liguori, entertainment chair at Fox:

Is Dollhouse as bad as we are hearing?

Joss Whedon has an unbelievably loyal fan base, and he really knows how to write to that fan base. I expect that they’re going to be there. They’re going to enjoy his show. One of the things about airing on Friday night, a show is not expected to have those boffo ratings.

So you’re not burying him in the Friday graveyard?

No, I’m not burying him in the Friday graveyard. I’m giving him a little bit of a reprieve by being on Friday.

Whew. Nothing like praising a show with faint damns, as Dorothy Sayers would say (yes, it’s Sayers Week here at Chez Anwyn). I’m giving him a little reprieve, to see if there’s any snowball’s chance in hell he can draw in anybody who’s not already in love with either Captain Mal or Eliza Dushku. And if not, then we’ll dump it.

Are people who like Buffy and Firefly completely unreliable indicators of a large enough demographic to keep a show alive? Given the fifth-network treatment of Buffy and Angel and the quick death of Firefly, I’d have to say it seems so. The question would seem to be why? Joss’s shows are about people with somewhat fantastic powers or circumstances (but ultimately still about the human interest), but so are Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings. Is the lesson that if it can’t be marketed to children, as well, then the adults of our stripe aren’t enough? Where does that leave Star Wars? I was three when A New Hope came to theaters–I wasn’t buying a ticket.

The only shows I can think of with a Joss vibe lately are Veronica Mars and Chuck. Veronica survived three years in the fifth-network dimension and suffered from a lack of a coherent vision from her creator. Chuck, however, has spent a season and a half on Monday nights, and while not exactly “boffo,” got itself bought for a full-season renewal this year. It’s holding its own. Despite Liguori’s positive spin about the base and Friday night not holding much expectation, let’s not forget what happened to vampire tale Moonlight on Friday nights. No matter what he says, Friday night is a graveyard for ordinary viewers (i.e. anybody not already frantically devoted to a show plus people who don’t like The Ghost Whisperer). It takes a lot of doing and some blind luck to get a show that does well on Fridays. The question is, what will Fox settle for with Dollhouse? Are they okay with it if it comes in a perennial second behind Ghost Whisperer? And if not, look out for the half-season cancellation, Joss fans.

The folks at Whedonesque, of course, have much, much more to say.

Oregon governor Kulongoski to pursue mileage tax.

Now that you’re beaten into submission on that whole fuel-efficiency thing, you’re using less gas, but we still demand that you drive less, and oh yeah, we are determined not to lose a single penny of revenue by you curbing the behavior that we demanded you curb to begin with.

The online outline adds: “The governor is committed to ensuring that rural Oregon is not adversely affected and that privacy concerns are addressed.”

How can rural areas possibly NOT be adversely affected except through special exceptions that will no doubt rile suburban dwellers? If I had no choice but to drive ten miles one way to the nearest drugstore rather than the two I drive now, that’s an adverse effect. And please believe me when I say: I’m from North Carolina, I’ve lived in Texas and small-town Indiana, and Oregon outside Portland is the single largest rural area I’ve lived in close proximity to.

They say they’re dealing with the privacy issue–i.e. although while they plan to track the car they don’t plan to record its travel–but I fail to see how that can be assured since the distance tracking will be done, obviously, through GPS. So it seems to be more a case of “Trust us! We promise we won’t track vehicle location even though, obviously, we could!”

Tell me another one, Nanny Salem.

Via Drudge.

Email your representatives. It probably won’t stop it, but let them know you’re angry. They’re about to write a blank check for huge, unwieldy, inefficient, and bloated corporations practically held hostage by the UAW … held hostage in their private jets, that is. This is preposterous. Let your reps know what you think. I just did.

“You know you’ll see it anyway.”

Will not. Won’t even watch the trailer. The outrageous stunts of the last couple of films, including and most especially the death of Data and his oh-so-stupid replacement by an oh-so-stupid lookalike, years ago turned me off to any more Trek. The glory days of the shows with continuity and similar look and just enough recall of the old show, i.e. the TNG, DS9, and Voyager triumvirate, are gone. And frankly, even without that, I’m just not into prequels, actor changing, and most especially not into Sylar as Spock. Forget it. I’m not even going to watch the trailer. I’m just not as easy-going a person as Lileks, who seems to take the new manifestations of things in stride even as he meticulously catalogues and dreams of the old. If you can’t bring it back, and you can’t, let it die in peace. And if you try too hard, may you die violently, instead, new Trek, after one spectacularly failed flick. I know, I know: Dream on.

As a kid trying to understand the scale of human civilization, I once observed to my father that our culture seemed to act like a pendulum, swinging back and forth between the two ends of the liberal/conservative spectrum. In my limited understanding of zeitgeists some of which were before my time, I cited the supposed characters of the various decades: the fifties, staid and proper; the sixties, loose and vulgar; the seventies, trying to recover from the sixties; the eighties–well, my pattern ended there because I was living in it and I couldn’t see anything so very decadent about jellies and stirrup pants. Dad said no, that isn’t the way it works: The civilization presses towards the loose and irresponsible end of the spectrum until it collapses.

I wasn’t completely wrong, I know, but my image was wrong. Closer to correct is that various people and forces work to hold back the tide flowing to the irresponsible end and sometimes succeed in briefly damming it. Some people seem to believe the dam has now forever burst, or if it hasn’t already, it will as soon as Obama’s economic policies are enacted and turn bigger-than-ever swaths of the electorate into dependents.

As the previous post shows, I’m cautiously pessimistic. But I wonder if, even if our time has not come now, will it, irrefutably, inexorably, and inevitably? Can Western civilizations actually collapse any more? Or do they, as Peter Hitchens says, subside into the Third World?

Taylor tanks for Obama, like Billy and Bruce.

Advice for stars endorsing Obama: Say as little as possible about why your man is The Man. Please:

“And I just feel so good about seeing Obama present himself, and people getting to know who he is, and how he responds, how he works. I have a huge amount of hope.”

Come on. There’s also this gem:

“I am an Obama guy. I’m sure we don’t know the entire John McCain, we don’t know the entire Barack Obama. That’s what the campaign really needs to be about. We need to know who these guys are.”

Two things: 1) It would have been ridiculous, back in the day of “We don’t really know Obama,” to claim the same of McCain, who’s been on the national scene for decades and has run for president already. If you don’t know enough about it him it’s because you aren’t paying attention. 2) That claim is over even about Obama. We know as much as we need to: He favors socialist economic policies, tells generalistic lies about what caused the finance crisis, couldn’t see outside the bubble of his Chicago pals to know that his relationship with Ayers doesn’t play well with the rest of us, and uses race as a disingenuous club while having sat under a man who is certainly, at the very least, the most racist and flat-out craziest preacher I’ve ever seen or heard of, and I’ve seen and heard some fiery Southern Baptists in my time, people. That is “who this guy is,” James. You know I love you, and it’s certainly not going to stop me from singing “Sweet Baby James” to my son at night or keeping “Frozen Man” among my top favorite songs, but good grief. Just come out and say you’re in favor of rich people paying higher taxes and that Obama’s relationship baggage doesn’t bother you. Something wrong with that?

Allah thinks it’s refreshingly honest when they don’t bother to talk about issues, and it may be, but it also makes me think either A) they’re just not too bright or B) they absolutely think we’re not too bright. Probably some truth in both of those, but why embrace them?

H/t: J.