Reagan Coffee Cup Speech Still Pertinent
I intended to leave politics out of this blog for the most part but with the whole health care debate going on it's hard to avoid completely.
I realize that this clip of Ronald Reagan speaking out against medicare has been going around and getting a lot of play lately. While it might sound cold hearted to suggest that the medicare system should be done away with that doesn't change the basic fact that it is true. All of the arguments against socialized medicine that Reagan touches on are still true today as well as the warnings he gave about the dangers of letting the government get this kind of power over us.
During his campaign in 1980 Reagan was criticized for his earlier opposition to medicare and social security both. He managed to deflect these questions and while in office didn't manage any sort of meaningful reform. By 1980 both of these programs had become political kryptonite and continue to be unassailable for the foreseeable future.
We need to take the opportunity that the current health debate has given to us and assuming that the total socialization our health care can be avoided we need to start talking about cutting all of the entitlement programs back. There needs to be a sane solution to deal with the people that the government has forced onto these programs. Sane and compassionate are not mutually exclusive there are answers if we can ever get to a point where we can ask the questions.
Click the play button below to hear the speech.
Right Click Save As to download mp3
Full transcript via Lonely Conservative.
Posted Sunday 07:49 PM
Blogging Tools
Added ftpsync a perl script to my list of simple blogging tools. This a perl script that compares the files on the remote server with those in the local directory where I keep a copy of my blog.
That eliminates the hassle of having to write my own perl script to sync things up. So far I've got markdown along with BlazeBlogger and ftpsync working together along with some simple bash commands run as external tools in gedit and things are pretty much automatic. I write the post using the markdown markup code then one key press and that is converted to html that blaze likes and it gets added in to blaze then when I'm through with all my writing a ctrl-F6 runs blaze-make and then uses ftpsync to put it all on the site.
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Stargate Universe
So I gave the new Stargate series on SyFy several episodes to get past a monumental case of suck but it still sucks. So I'm giving up on it. I enjoyed the the original and the Atlantis spin off but this newest incarnation is filled with a host of characters that are thoroughly unlikeable. The scientists seem totally incompetent along with the military personnel that are with them. I mean come on these are people that were hand picked to serve on a super secret off planet mission could they really not find anyone better suited for that than this bunch of losers? I am extremely disappointed.
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Ubuntu Upgrade
So I took the plunge and did a clean install of ubuntu 9.10. I had been running ubuntu 8.04 for a very long time now and I was getting tired of running into things that I couldn't install because of out of date libraries and such. One of those is calibre the open source ebook management tool. I managed to install it on 8.04 so that I could use the command line conversion tools but wasn't able to use the gui. That was just one of the things that I was wanting to use and couldn't. I'll get to the others later on.
I've found that as I've gotten older I really don't enjoy tinkering with the computer as much as I used to. Now days I really just want most everything to work with a minimum of fuss. So far this is proving to be just that easy. Nothing that I've tried has really caused any problems. Admittedly I haven't really been doing much that could be considered ground shaking with this release but all of the basics seem to work well. I can browse whatever internet sites I want and everything seems to work flash etc, and I haven't run into any applications that I need that haven't been available through the repositories.
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Things That Bind
Via AWR Hawkins » PajamasMedia » The Documents That Bind Americans Together
Before the left began its determined assault on education in the 1960s, citizens in the United States were proud to be “Americans.” There was such a thing as an American culture and through freedom it bound citizens of this country together, even if imperfectly, regardless of their race, creed, or religion.
Found this post at PajamasMedia and thought it was worth reading. The way things are going right now it would be good for all Americans to remember just what it is that ties us all together.
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