Bashing the VA is ignorant and unfortunatley quite common.  It has its roots in complaints about the treatment of soldiers at Walter Reed since the beginning of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  However, that’s Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and it’s not a part of the VA.  In fact, the VA provides care for almost 8 million Americans at a cost of $45 billion per year.  That works out to under $6000/person.  The national average is $8000/person.  While saving $2000/person, the VA provides a level of care that’s better than that received by most Americans in every measurable category.  Expanding the VA to be the United States’ National Health Service would unquestionably increase the quality of care for the vast majority of Americans and go a long way towards avoiding the impending catastrophe of increased health costs.  The down side is that insurance companies and medical providers would go out of business and drug companies would have to stop relying on America for the entirety of their profits around the world.  In reality, Kristol is worried about this downside and doesn’t really believe that quality of care will suffer or that government healthcare can’t work.  He should probably pick an example closer to reality for his bogeyman, though.

Billboard reads: “Sling some rocks at Chocoliath”

I spotted this billboard (for Snickers I guess?) from the bus yesterday.  I suspect that, despite the intended joke, advertisements about slinging rocks are tone deaf in a city that may be more devestated by drug abuse than any other.  I’m usually not all that PC.

Click here to view the embedded video.

What’s wrong with this picture? Americans do not bow to royalty. In my view, when the royal is the ruling tyrant of a despotic regime, the wrong is compounded. Putting aside the breach of American protocol, it is akin to Jimmy Carter succumbing to Brezhnev’s infamous kiss at the signing of the arms accord in Vienna in 1979. It is a disgrace. As in Carter’s case, Obama’s supplicant attitude signifies his spirit. In this respect I distinguish it from George Bush’s otherwise embarrasing handholding with the the king.

Image removed — check link below; here’s a video of Bush bowing to Abdullah as he’s given a medal and then kissing him (not as a greeting but as part of the medal ceremony apparently).  This is silly.

Saudi King Abdullah, right, presents President Bush, left, with the King Abdul Aziz Order of Merit following their dinner at Riyadh Palace, Monday, Jan. 14, 2008, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

The entire day was commemorated in pictures over at Free Republic.

He returned to the subject of cap-and-trade later and said some largely unintelligable stuff that at least included the word “revenue” before jumping to, “oh and by the way; it’s not cap-and-trade, it’s cap-and-tax.”  McCain used to be so much better at seamless transition into one-liners; the campaign ruined him.

Update – Thanks to a mysterious commentor for McCain’s exact remarks: “They’ve earmarked $634 billion for cap and trade; by the way, a betrayal of everything I’ve ever believed in about cap and trade, which I’m a supporter of.”

While I can think of better photo ops, this is kind of a silly uproar. How exactly do folks think their food gets to them? Your t-bone is not born in shrink wrap. If this upsets you, you may want to visit a slaughter-house- you will never eat meat again. Truth be told, I would prefer if everyone visited a major slaughterhouse, because once they see how gross it is, they might start to support their local farmers for their meat.

[From Balloon Juice ]

A commenter at Balloon Juice notes that the proper term for the device employed here is a Kill Cone which is sort of awesome.

Palin sliced the program by more than half, laying out a mere $3,000 for special needs kids for the year and saving the tax payers of Alaska less than $5,000.

I don’t know about Alaska, but I suspect that Williams’ state is short changing special needs funding if she thinks the bottom-line budget for any class of school is $8,000.  I never really thought of “All dollars shown in thousands” as a warning label before today.

Palin repeated her first gaffe last night, which isn’t reflected in this timeline.

Over at Little Green Footballs, ace investigator Charles Johnson is on the case!

In the Linux console, if you enter the following commands, you can learn the secrets of a political dirty trick. First, look up the host of ‘sarahpalingayrights.com’ to get the site’s IP address.

host sarahpalingayrights.com
sarahpalingayrights.com has address 74.208.74.232

Then use the same command to look up the domain name pointer of that IP address.

host 74.208.74.232
232.74.208.74.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer obamadefense.com

Well, well. “Obamadefense.com,” eh?

…

Here’s another site that traces back to obamadefense.com: ObamaTaxCut.com.

FYI, someone registered ObamaTaxCut.com for me and forwards the traffic to alchemytoday.com/obamataxcut; this same someone may also run ObamaDefense.com.  This is probably the case, even!  That site now directs to an Obama site, but only because it used to a similar, independent site that became obsolete once Obama started doing the same thing.

To his their credit, the story was quickly updated when I pointed this out.  After everything I’ve ever done that’s available online was uncovered, but that’s cool.

From one free-market capitalist to another, Larry, you’re full of it.