Sadly, No!

ABOVE: Free Republic Meet-Up

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Bill Maher nailed it when he said that Birthers couldn’t be convinced even if you

hand them in person the original birth certificate with the placenta, and have a video of Obama emerging from the womb with Don Ho singing in the background.

Want proof that they can’t be convinced? Head over to the alternate Freeperverse and watch their response to the discovery of the Australian birth certificate of David Bomford that was used to fabricate the Kenyan birth certificate that Orly Taitz has been running around waving like a reliquary filled with toenail clippings of the Virgin Mary.

Although some of the Freepers are having a troubling encounter with the fact that they’ve been duped by an elaborately transparent fake, the truly insane among them have concocted an awesome explanation: the real Kenyan birth certificate of Obama was used to Photoshop the fake Australian birth certificate of David Bomford and then inserted on the Bomford family genealogy site by Obama’s team of expert hackers.

Some favorite comments:

[104] Is This the Source of Obama’s the “Kenyan” Birth Certificate?
Nope, doesn’t appear so. The folds are in different places, so that kills it, IMO.

It being impossible, of course, for someone to print out the photoshop and refold it.

[144] [W]e are assuming that Taitz has a paper copy. Its [sic] one thing to build a photoshop document that looks almost identical to another. Its [sic] another thing entirely to produce that onto paper that looks to be almost 50 years old.

Ooh, yellow paper!

[157] I have read criticism of Orly. But…Geeze! She’s an inexperienced attorney with an on-line degree. Naturally, she is not going to be polished and will make naive mistakes. She [sic] likely doing many things for the first time.

Apparently there should be a handicapping system for lawyers so that those with on-line degrees have a fair chance of beating better lawyers in court. That way, even if Orly loses, the Birthers win by virtue of Orly’s incredibly high handicap and Obama must step down.

[160] Further, if the Kenyan BC were a fake, why is Hillary going to Kenya?

Why indeed? Presumably to track down the guy that signed the Kenyan certificate and do a Vince Foster on him. That’s why.

I think we now know why no one ever saw George W. Bush’s birth certificate.

Atlas Tugged?

Sadly, No! Productions presents “Officer Barrett and the Jungle Monkey” for your viewing pleasure.

ABOVE: Andy McCarthy

Shorter Andrew C. McCarthy,¹ National Review Online
Suborned in the U.S.A.

• Even if Obama was “actually” “born” “in” the United States,² I still want to see the vault copy of the birth certificate because it could prove once and for all that Obama is a Muslim Socialist.³ It will also tell us how his parents described themselves, which I imagine is “Kenyan Muslim terrorist” and “Hawaiian atheist skank.”

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

Ezra Klein and Ben Domenech (!) both do a fine job of upending Megan McArdle’s widely linked, glibertarian mess of an argument against national health care.

But they leave a few basic things out, which we’ll get to.

Klein accurately breaks down the McArdle position:

Megan has two primary concerns. The first is that national health insurance would succeed in reducing health-care costs, and that would limit the rewards available for medical innovation (drugs, devices, etc), which would in turn reduce medical innovation and prevent future generations from enjoying wonder drugs. “If you worry about global warming,” she writes, “you should worry at least as hard about medical innovation.”

Second, national health care gives elites license “to wrap their claws around every aspect of everyone’s life.” Her primary example is obesity. Megan believes that national health insurance will give the government license to decide that we can never really want a second chocolate eclair. She also believes that the real reason most every epidemiologist in the country is worried about obesity is because they hate, and are disgusted by, poor people.

McArdle’s second point is standard wingnut scare-mongering over a government takeover of our lives — not really worth spending much time on. Suffice to say that Big Insurance already does plenty to penalize that second chocolate eclair, and Domenech credibly fingers Big Pharma as the culprit in our redefining of obesity downward:

As a side note: If you want to understand why in 1998 the medical community suddenly decided that you were overweight at a body mass index of 25 instead of 27.8, taking the WHO view (based on the BMIs of Africa and other developing nations as opposed to the long-held U.S. definition) and suddenly making 30 million Americans ‘fat’, just look at the makeup of the advisory panel — Pharma pushed this decision through, which had the effect of instantly adding millions of customers. But again, it’s nothing personal, just business.

But it is McArdle’s first point that is the glibertarian landmine, that long-standing trope that government provision of goods and services necessarily destroys innovation, which can only ever be fostered by the good old invisible hand. Again, Domenech (!) makes an excellent point about one particular peril with the worship of the market — big profit-making entities are not incentivized to produce better products or products that would benefit more people if doing so would possibly cannibalize or otherwise jeopardize their existing revenue streams.

Now robust competition in the marketplace can force the big companies’ hand in this regard. But there isn’t always robust competition and even if there is, the sheer size of a market leader can often delay the development and penetration of the better product for quite a long time. This is why Microsoft and Oracle continue to sell tons of expensive boxed software products despite the growing realization that hosted ‘software-as-a-service’ or ‘cloud computing’ is probably a cheaper and more efficient application delivery system for most of the market. Cloud computing is almost certain to win out in the end, but probably not before your company sinks a ton of capex into Windows 7 licenses.

McArdle also shows her bias by presenting innovation as purely the development of the next generation of wonder drugs. She rightly notes that innovation is not normally due to some Eureka! moment ‘by a mad scientist somewhere’ but rather ‘more often a matter of small steps towards perfection.’ Which is fine, but McArdle is wholly blind to an entire category of medical innovation — one that many other countries have hands-down achieved in superior ways to the United States, and it is this:

The delivery of better health care to more people at less cost.

Is this not a medical innovation? Is it not, perhaps, the most important medical innovation? Wonder drugs for future generations are great and necessary, but the delivery of better outcomes to people today must be considered equally important, if not more so. And just like the development of wonder drugs, delivering better health care to more people at less cost requires smart people and incremental steps and means-testing and a competitive ecosystem and all the criteria that McArdle might use to characterize ‘innovation’.

It’s a bit ironic, too, that McArdle chooses Wal-Mart’s supply chain management as a shining example of American free-market innovation. Because a centrally administered, regionally operated distribution network that leverages economies of scale and serves a national market is so totally opposite to what a national health care system would look like.

But perhaps McArdle is correct and wonder drugs would disappear if we were to expand national government-run health care beyond the very successful programs we already have for seniors, veterans and, with S-CHIP, children. If so, it seems clear that countries that already have such expansive national health care programs would necessarily have little or nothing in the way of wonder drug production.

A point to McArdle, but as Columbo might say, there’s just one more thing that’s bothering me:

The 50 Largest Drug and Pharmaceutical Companies in the World

By Revenue

Johnson & Johnson USA 53,324
Pfizer USA 48,371
Bayer Germany 44,200
GlaxoSmithKline United Kingdom 42,813
Novartis Switzerland 37,020
Sanofi-Aventis France 35,645
Hoffmann–La Roche Switzerland 33,547
AstraZeneca United Kingdom 26,475
Merck & Co. USA 22,636
Abbott Laboratories USA 22,476
Wyeth USA 20,351
Bristol-Myers Squibb USA 17,914
Eli Lilly and Co. USA 15,691
Amgen USA 14,268
Boehringer Ingelheim Germany 13,284
Schering-Plough USA 10,594
Baxter International USA 10,378
Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. Japan 10,284
Genentech USA 9,284
Procter & Gamble USA 8,964
Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Israel 8,408
Astellas Pharma Japan 7,850
Daiichi Sankyo Japan 7,158
Novo Nordisk Denmark 6,520
Eisai Japan 5,583
Merck KGaA Germany 5,175
Alcon USA 4,897
Akzo Nobel Netherlands 4,694
UCB Belgium 4,426
Nycomed Switzerland 4,264
Forest Laboratories USA 3,442
Solvay Belgium 3,268
Genzyme USA 3,187
Allergan USA 3,063
Gilead Sciences USA 3,026
CSL Australia 2,788
Chugai Pharmaceutical Co. Japan 2,787
Biogen Idec USA 2,683
Bausch & Lomb USA 2,292
Taiho Pharmaceutical Co. Japan 2,069
King Pharmaceuticals USA 1,989
Watson Pharmaceuticals USA 1,979
Mitsubishi Pharma Japan 1,945
Shire United Kingdom 1,797
Cephalon USA 1,764
Dainippon Sumitomo Pharma Japan 1,763
Kyowa Hakko Kogyo Japan 1,698
Shionogi & Co. Japan 1,640
Mylan Laboratories USA 1,612
H. Lundbeck Denmark 1,552

30.

Freedom of speech is dead in America.
Posted by John Freeman July 29, 09 05:31 PM

32.

I think this is a free speak issue if he wasn’t acting in his official capacity as a P.O.
Posted by pia3 July 29, 09 05:31 PM

Got it: Freak peen issue (very serious cookie) — Freep speak, not officially a previous owner or Post Office. Welp, here we go:
Read the rest of this entry »

ABOVE: Pat Boone (Click here for the uncensored NSFW version).

Pat “Junk in a Box” Boone has a new column up at Wingnut Daily about waterboarding. I don’t know about you, but when I have questions about waterboarding and other forms of torture I think there is no better expert than a washed-up pop singer.

Until a couple of years ago, “waterboarding” sounded like some kind of fun at the beach.

Unless, of course, you had ever read a book about the World War II war crime tribunals.

Thanks to much media exploitation, politically motivated accusations, certain criminally leaked classified information and of course some actual facts, the word “waterboarding” became synonymous with heinous, barbaric torture.

If you suspect that Boone is going to say heinous, barbaric torture is a good thing, well, you’ll be half-right. It’s a good thing when done to Muslims.

Almost ignored in all the anti-American clamor was the fact that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, confessed mastermind of the World Trade Center carnage, as a result of being “waterboarded” 130 times – with no lasting damage at all – finally divulged information that thwarted the destruction of the Brooklyn Bridge and saved an estimated 10,000 innocent lives! So the technique, harsh as it is, proved effective.

Sadly, of course, no! Iyman Faris, the person convicted of the Brooklyn Bridge plot, had, according to Bush’s own DOJ, abandoned his plot at the end of 2002, after deciding that his scheme to collapse the bridge by using a blow torch on the cables was unlikely to succeed. This was before Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had even been captured, much less waterboarded. Another difficulty with his plot would have been luring the “estimated 10,000” people to stand on the bridge while the terrorists tried to melt the suspension cables with a blow torch.

But what’s good for the Muslim is bad for the Amurikun.

And now, whether expressly intended or not, America is being waterboarded!

The nation – its economy and political body – has been strapped down, blindfolded and hosed. A new administration, empowered by control of both houses of Congress and the most liberal president in history, is immersing us all in a torrent of debt. While we gasp for breath and try to cry “Time out!” we continue to be flooded with staggering commitments neither we nor our children have approved or will be able to fulfill

That may well be most preposterous extended metaphor since Britney Spears’s “Circus,” and Boone is only just getting wound up.

And now, while we’re strapped down by the Democrat-controlled Congress, gasping and gulping beneath a flood of strong-arm tactics, the “health reform” bill taking shape outlines a “minimum-benefits package” that will be universal – that is, required of every American’s insurance plan, whether provided by a private firm or by the government.

No! Please, stop! Don’t inundate me in more health care! I’ll say anything you want, just don’t pour anymore of the elimination of preexisting condition exclusion down my nose! I can’t breathe!! Oh, God, no! I’m choking on keeping my health insurance when I lose my job. I confess. I’m part of a cell that wants to change the name of Reagan National Airport back to National Airport and turn every Dunkin’ Donuts store into an abortion clinic. Just stop! I beg you. I’ll say anything.

This just in, Red Sox fans. Manny and Big ‘Skin’ Papi (Big, Bigger, Biggest Papi?) tested positive for performance enhancing drugs in 2003. Tainted championships. Bury your heads in shame, etc.

O’Reilly is trashing those commie drug-lovers in Yurp again. One of his Dutch viewers hits him with, you know, reality:

It’s amazing how quickly right-wing arguments lose validity the minute you start looking at actual facts. If only our media would do the same.

UPDATE: Looking at my bestest friend NationMaster, I also see that the United States has more prisoners per capita than Russia. Yes, Russia. The country that has made imprisoning people a point of national pride for centuries.