3,500 year-old Egyptian princess had clogged arteries

Egyptian princess from 3,500 years ago had clogged arteries proving heart disease is not a modern condition | Mail Online

My gosh, I would think that anyone 3,500 years old would have clogged arteries! Bet her teeth were rotted, too!

Update: Great minds think alike!

Addicted to the dole

Victor Davis Hanson, "Patient Obama:"

The electorate is not as it was when it finally sickened of Jimmy Carter in August 1980. Far more are on public assistance, unemployment, Social Security, food stamps, etc., or work for thousands of new state and federal bureaus. There are millions more illegal aliens that have become citizens since the late 1970s. And the voting rolls have expanded exponentially among “nontraditional” voters. Thus, the political calculus about which pundits and talking-heads debate is not always what half the electorate worries about. The national debt, the annual deficit, the problems with ObamaCare, the tax code — all that matters very little. The key question for millions of voters in 2012 will be simply who ensures that my check arrives unchanged or augmented, and who either stops or reduces it.

And so my question again: do the American people actually have the spine to support making the cuts that have to be made to save the country from collapse?

There is no shortage of voters who say they want the federal budget cut and the size of government reduced. What they (okay, we) really mean is, "I want the federal programs and agencies that benefit me to stay intact and the ones that benefit someone else to be slashed like it's Halloween night in a horror movie."

The reason is, I think, that we voters ideologically approve cutting the budget but operationally don't want it done on our own backs. My parents are in their 80s. Do I really want Medicare to be cut? Baby boomers, of whom I am one, are just starting to retire in large numbers. Guess what's going to happen to Social Security spending? Do we really want those payouts slashed just as we're starting to draw them?

Including government employees, more than 88 million Americans are personally dependent to some degree on government payouts. That's 29 percent of us. Do you really think it is politically possible for even a veto-proof Republican Congress to slash those programs, jobs or benefits enough to make a meaningful dent in the trillion-dollar-plus deficit?

The answer is no. Just.Plain.No.

WSJ and NBC found in a survey that nobody wants to touch Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid.

Hysterically, even Tea Partiers oppose cutting Social Security by a 2-1 margin.

There is some support for increasing the retirement age to 69... by the year 2075.

Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are what is breaking the federal bank, all by themselves. And they are exactly what Americans won't support cutting as substantially as necessary, once individualk Americans find out what it means to them, personally.

Update: "Americans Oppose Entitlement Cuts, Support Raising Taxes On 'The Rich'"

WASHINGTON — Alarmed by rising national debt and increasingly downbeat about their country’s course, Americans are clear about how they want to attack the government’s runway budget deficits: raise taxes on the wealthy and keep hands off of Medicare and Medicaid.

At the same time, they say that the government should not raise the legal debt ceiling, which the government must do soon to borrow more money, despite warnings that failing to do so would force the government into default, credit markets into turmoil and the economy into a tailspin.

Federal judge voids entire Obamacare law

A federal judge has declared 100 percent of Obamacare is unconstitutional, based on his key ruling that the the individual mandate, requiring persons to purchase healthcare insurance, is unconstitutional.

U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson, appointed to the bench by President Ronald Reagan in 1983, ruled that the reform law's so-called "individual mandate" went too far in requiring that Americans start buying health insurance in 2014 or pay a penalty.

"Because the individual mandate is unconstitutional and not severable, the entire act must be declared void. This has been a difficult decision to reach, and I am aware that it will have indeterminable implications," Vinson wrote.

What matters most here is that the mandate is "not severable," which is proof (if any were needed) of how badly written the act is. As I wrote in November,

Severability clauses are common in public laws and contracts. The clause specifies that if a section of the bill or contract is found to be invalid, then only the affected section is stricken. The rest of the bill or contract remains in force.

There is no "severability" clause in the Obamacare bill.

What that omission means is that Judge Vinson had the discretion on whether to strike down part of the law or all of it. He chose the latter, and bully good for him. Last month, a federal judge in Virginia also struck down the individual mandate, but did not invoke the law's lack of a severability clause to invalidate the whole act.

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee: OK to kill babies, but repealing Obamacare is murder

Jared Loughner killed six people this month and the leftwing media (but I repeat myself) were all over how he must have been inspired by rightwing rhetoric. Even after his friends told police that Loughner didn't even listen to radio or pay much attention to politics, the media would not surrender their preset narrative.

So how will Paul Krugman, Daily Kos, et. al., react to this: "West Philadelphia abortion doctor killed 7 babies with scissors."

WEST PHILADELPHIA - January 19, 2011 (WPVI) -- A doctor who gave abortions to minorities, immigrants and poor women in a "house of horrors" clinic was charged with eight counts of murder in the deaths of a patient and seven babies who were born alive and then killed with scissors, prosecutors said Wednesday.

Dr. Kermit Gosnell, 69, made millions of dollars over 30 years, performing as many illegal, late-term abortions as he could, prosecutors said. State regulators ignored complaints about him and failed to inspect his clinic since 1993, but no charges were warranted against them given time limits and existing law, District Attorney Seth Williams said. Nine of Gosnell's employees also were charged.

Gosnell "induced labor, forced the live birth of viable babies in the sixth, seventh, eighth month of pregnancy and then killed those babies by cutting into the back of the neck with scissors and severing their spinal cord," Williams said.

I think that the media's investigative reporting should include Dr. Gosnell's party affiliation (if any), what radio shows he listens to and what his reading preferences are. After all, if those things were fair game for one killer, they must be fair game for this one.

Okay, this is sarcasm on my part, but only partly. Hypocrisy might be "the tribute that vice pays to virtue," but the hypocrisy of the Left isn't run of the mill stuff. The Left denies virtue of any position but its own. Not even open self-contradictions bother Leftists, for reasons I explained here.

How ironic that on the day charges against the accused abortionist serial killer were announced, Democrat U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee arose in the House chamber to accuse Republicans of wanting to kill countless Americans by repealing Obamacare. View all, but the key points come starting about 2:30 in:

"Frankly, I would just say to you, this is about saving lives. Jobs are very important; we created jobs. But even the title of their legislation, H.R. 2, 'job killing' — this is killing Americans if we take this away, if we repeal this bill [italics added].

Rep. Lee, D.-Texas, also claimed that repealing healthcare violates the rights of the people under Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments because repeal would deny the people due process of law and equal protection under the law. Hence, she said, to repeal Obamacare would itself be unconstitutional. No, really, she said that.

What does all this have to do with abortion? Abortion is the glass house that Sheila Jackson Lee, D.-Texas,  lives in even as she throws stones at Republicans. What exactly is Rep. Lee's record on abortion? Thanks to OnTheIssues.org, we know. (My excerpt here is far from the complete record, boldface is original.)

Voted NO on restricting interstate transport of minors to get abortions.

Voted NO on making it a crime to harm a fetus during another crime.

Voted NO on banning partial-birth abortion except to save mother’s life.

Voted NO on funding for health providers who don't provide abortion info.

Voted NO on banning Family Planning funding in US aid abroad.

Voted NO on federal crime to harm fetus while committing other crimes.

Voted NO on banning partial-birth abortions.

Rated 100% by NARAL, indicating a pro-choice voting record.

So I would like to ask Rep. Lee, D.-Texas, these questions:

If Dr. Gosnell actually did what he is accused of, did he do anything morally wrong when he (allegedly) performed abortions later than 24 weeks, in contravention of state law?

Do you think there should be any legal impediment on abortion after 24 weeks, or for that matter, at any time during the entire term of woman's pregnancy?

Can you offer a coherent argument of how an aborted baby benefits from equal protection and due process while losing its life, while repealing Obamacare deprives people of the same?

Can you defend your explicit accusation that Republicans don't care whether Americans die while also defending your 100-percent voting record in support of ending the lives of millions of unborn children (30 million-plus since Roe v. Wade)?

And in reply, no doubt, the sound of crickets chirping.

But don't worry. The Dems can always fall back on accusing the Republicans of Nazism.

Update: Rep. Lee should consider the racism of legalized abortion. The Rev. Dr. Edwin King, a white Methodist clergyman instrumental in the civil rights movement in Mississippi, was a chaplain at Tougaloo College near Jackson, Miss., in the early 1960s. He worked to convince white pastors in the area to issue a statement against racial segregation.

Denied membership in the Mississippi Conference of the UMC by its other white clergy, Rev. kinf joined the almost-wholly black Central Jurisdiction. In 2002, Rev. King, now a professor of Sociology and Medical Ethics at the University of Mississippi Medical Center — spoke about legalized abortion’s negative impact on black Americans.

Today in Mississippi, two thirds to seventy five percent of the abortions are done for black children in the womb. In America in 1995 we had reached the point that black abortions were about thirty eight percent of all abortions in America, almost three times the black population rate, and Hispanic abortions then had approached twelve percent which was close to the Hispanic level, and the Hispanics being predominantly Roman Catholic. In 1995 the majority of the children whose life was snuffed out in the womb were black or Hispanic. Today it is about sixty percent [of] all abortions in America. Is that freedom for somebody or is something else going on? Fannie Lou Hamer was the first person to talk to me after Roe vs. Wade came down and she said, “Rev. King, this is another racial thing, this is the answer to the civil rights movement, they are going to get rid of black babies.” I know you have a variety of opinions on that [italics added].

And, as NARAL's rating of Rep. Lee affirms, she is 100 percent in support of getting "rid of black babies."