Month: September 2008

Palin's great moment

Michael Koppelman, , , 6 Comments

A friend sent me this. We’ve all seen that Palin clip by now. I think it is maybe the first time that SNL was able to use a quote word for word and have it be absolutely hilarious. Jack is mad and he should be.

I would forgive Palin for having one bad moment. We all say stupid things. Lord knows micadelic is going to paste some Obama clip to insure proper balance. But with Palin they are ALL bad moments. I haven’t heard her say an intelligent thing yet, outside of her speech at the convention. She’s not quick on her feet, she’s not well-informed, she’s not highly educated and she’s not articulate. She would be a horrible candidate for President. With McCain being 72 years old, she is running for President. And thus the MaCain-Palin ticket is excluded from being a serious choice for your vote.

I know, I’m some big elitist because I want our highest leaders to be highly intelligent.

WTF.

Palin's great moment

Palin is a liability

Michael Koppelman, , , 1 Comment

Palin is a liability to McCain and the US of A. She is the intellectual equivalent of George W. Bush. She is not educated, not informed, not intellectually curious, not quick on her feet and completely inappropriate for the job of President. It has nothing to do with her being a woman. I’m glad that we are starting to get women in these races. I would love to vote for a woman for President if she shared my views and demonstrated the skills necessary to do the job.

Palin is doing the one thing that a VP candidate should never do — weakening the ticket. The Republican ticket consists of an old man who can’t seem to control his campaign and a woman who clearly doesn’t have a clue. The financial crisis on Wall St. is damning as hell to the incumbent party and I think we are at the beginning of a McCain tailspin to defeat.

It’s clearly not over yet, but the Palin love affair, with the exception of the most brain-washed pro-lifers, is completely over.

Palin is a liability

Bush: A Socialist

Michael Koppelman7 Comments

Reports the BBC:

US President George W Bush has defended a rescue package to tackle the worst financial markets crisis for decades.
…
Mr Bush said the measures required the US “to put a significant amount of taxpayer dollars on the line…But I’m convinced that this bold approach will cost American families far less than the alternative,” he said.

When times are good the profiteers on Wall St. reap the benefits. When times are bad, instead of letting market forces adjust, all the rich folks suddenly become socialists. The government must step in with billions!

The real alternative, Mr. Bush, was tighter regulations to prevent this sort of catastrophe in the first place!

Bush: A Socialist

Obama's Resume

Michael Koppelman, Leave a comment

Over at 2 Focus Inn there is a post of an email forward comparing Palin and Obama. Look, Righties, we know that Obama is running against McCain. YOU invited the comparison between Palin and Obama because you keep harping on this incorrect notion that Obama is inexperienced. McCain is old and his VP choice has a reasonably good chance of becoming President. Palin must be judged as a potential President.

Here’s a quote from the above link:

If you spend 3 years as a brilliant community organizer, become the first black President of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter registration drive that registers 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years as a Constitutional Law professor, spend 8 years as a State Senator representing a district with over 750,000 people, become chairman of the state Senate’s Health and Human Services committee, spend 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 million people while sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works and Veteran’s Affairs committees, you don’t have any real leadership experience.

Obama’s resume is fantastic. He is the most qualified candidate since Clinton, in terms of his intelligence, education and firm grasp of the issues. He has good judgment, good insights, he’s candid, articulate and personable. He’d be a great President.

Obama's Resume

The Republicans are DEAD WRONG about health care

Michael Koppelman, , Leave a comment

A major cause of the health care crisis in America is that millions of dollars are spent every day by health care providers and medical insurance providers arguing. Talk to any doctor. They spend tons of money managing the crushing bureaucracy of insurance companies. The insurance companies do this on purpose because they ultimately have a sole fiscal duty to their shareholders.

People need medical care. It’s required in this day and age. Life is precious and we’ll all spend whatever we need to if we need to. So the market is guaranteed and health care providers have the actual services of value. In between consumers and these providers is a massive corporate for-profit bureaucracy that is trying to milk profits out of the system.

We should learn from France:

Americans often assume that when people get universal coverage, they give up their choice in doctors, hospitals and care. That’s not the case in France, Dutton says. The system is set up both to ensure that patients have lots of choice in picking doctors and specialists and to ensure that doctors are not constrained in making medical decisions.

In France, the national insurance program is funded mostly by payroll and income taxes. Those payments go to several quasi-public insurance funds that then negotiate with medical unions to set doctors’ fees. (Doctors can choose to work outside this system, and a growing minority now charge what patients are willing to pay out of pocket.) The government regulates most hospital fees. This system works collectively to keep costs down.

When someone goes to see a doctor, the national insurance program pays 70 percent of the bill. Most of the other 30 percent gets picked up by supplemental private insurance, which almost everyone has. It’s affordable, and much of it gets paid for by a person’s employer.

“There are no uninsured in France,” says Victor Rodwin, a professor of health policy at New York University, who is affiliated with the International Longevity Center. “That’s completely unheard of. There is no case of anybody going broke over their health costs. In fact, the system is so designed that for the 3 or 4 or 5 percent of the patients who are the very sickest, those patients are exempt from their co-payments to begin with. There are no deductibles.”

I couldn’t find the statistic, but I think we are the only G8 country without some kind of national health care system. Ask the Republicans and France is wrong, the rest of the world is wrong and the US is correct to pay more for a worse system because we fear government bureaucracies more than private bureaucracies. It’s nonsense.

Bush is wrong, McCain is wrong, the Republicans are wrong — we need a national approach to health care. It’s the fiscally conservative thing to do.

The Republicans are DEAD WRONG about health care

The Objective-C 2.0 Programming Language

Michael Koppelman, 2 Comments

I’ve been playing around with iPhone development and I have to say — I love the Objective-C 2.0 Programming Language. It’s got all the simple goodness of C but with very nice OOP extensions. I’m not sure to what extent, if any, it’s used besides in the Appleverse, but it’s nice and I like it. Here is a tiny example:

1: NSMutableArray *particles = [[NSMutableArray alloc] init];
2: [particles addObject:newParticle];
3: ...
4: Particle *p;
5: for(n=0;n<[particles count]; ++n ) {
6: p = [particles objectAtIndex:n];
7: [p setName:[self ownerName]];

In line 1 we see the Obj-C way of initializing an object. First we send an alloc message to the NSMutableArray class and then send an init message to the object returned by it. We then assign it to a pointer variable of the appropriate type. In line 2 we add a new object newParticle to the particles array. Later, at line 4 we create a C-style pointer to a Particle object and in line 5 we find out the number of objects in the array particles by sending it a count message. In line 6 we pull out a specific object from the array and in line 7 we send the setName message to our Particle object (the normal “setter” for the instance variable name) and send as a parameter the value from the “getter” of the class we are in (self) for the instance variable ownerName.

You can see there is an odd mix of traditional C and object stuff.

It’s also quite flexible. For example, if you have an instance variable named isEnabled you can refer to that variable in 3 different ways:

isEnabled = NO;
self.isEnabled = NO;
[self setIsEnabled:NO];

In the first two we access the variable directly and in the third we call the setter method. As we saw in lines 1 and 7 above, you can nest these as much as you like.

self.currentParticle.size = 10;
[[self currentParticle] setSize:10];

But at any time you can whack in some normal ol’ C:

size = (sizeFactor *2.0*arc4random() / (float)UINT_MAX)+sizeFactor;

Pretty cool.

The Objective-C 2.0 Programming Language

The McCain campaign — lame and getting lamer

Michael Koppelman11 Comments

(From the LA Times)

“You can put lipstick on a pig,” Obama said. “It’s still a pig. You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change. It’s still going to stink after eight years.”

For the McCain campaign, the comments were a not-so-subtle reference to Palin’s comments at the GOP convention. She asked delegates if they knew the difference between a pit bull and a hockey mom. “Lipstick,” she said.

The McCain camp called Obama’s comments “offensive and disgraceful” and said Obama owed Palin an apology. In its latest advertisement, the McCain campaign today called Obama’s comments sexist and used the punch line: “Ready to lead? No. Ready to smear? Yes.”

But Obama said the ad was a tactic to avoid serious debate.

“They’d much rather have the story — this is the McCain campaign — about phony and foolish diversions than about the future. This happens every election cycle. Every four years this is what we do. We have an energy crisis. We have an education system that is not working for too many of our children and is making us less competitive. We have an economy that is creating hardship for families all across America. We’ve got two wars going on, veterans coming home not being cared for, and this is what they want to talk about.

If you think Obama was making a sexist remark towards Palin you are a brain-washed idiot.

Even Huckabee saw though this stupid McCain tactic:

HUCKABEE: It’s an old expression, and I’m going to have to cut Obama some slack on that one. I do not think he was referring to Sarah Palin. He didn’t reference her — if you take the two sound bites together, it may sound like it, but I’ve been a guy at the podium many times, and you say something that’s maybe a part of an old joke and then somebody ties it in. So, I’m going to have to cut him slack.

The McCain campaign — lame and getting lamer

On the Republican watch

Michael Koppelman, , , , Leave a comment

Let’s see, a high-level recap of the things that happened under the Republicans over the last 8 years:

1. 9/11
2. Katrina
3. The credit crisis
4. The closely related housing crisis
5. Iraq
6 Afghanistan
7. $4 gas

Now the government just nationalized Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac — another example of deregulation at work.

While the Democrats are deeply flawed in many ways, the Republicans are just completely incompetent. They are unfit to lead this country. They want their cake and eat it too and the math does not work out.

Recall the Republicans held the Congress for 6 of the last 8 years and the Presidency for 20 of the last 28 years.

This has been 8 years of a financially irresponsible administration, a foreign policy based on expensive national building, an economic policy of caving to the rich and sticking it to the middle class and a deregulation policy that has led to Yet Another Expensive Government Bailout.

It makes no sense whatsoever to believe that the Republicans are the answer to the problems that the Republicans created.

We need a president like Clinton again — a really smart moderate with liberal tendencies. We don’t need another President like Bush.

Obama could be a very Clinton-like President. McCain would be another Bush-like President.

On the Republican watch

Palin's denigration of community organizers

Michael KoppelmanLeave a comment

It is ironic as hell that a party that has a goal of shrinking the government and a party that extols the virtues of the private sector as being a more powerful force than government should denigrate the role of community organizers. If the Republicans weren’t hypocrites they would hold up Obama as the exact kind of community leader that drives their small, local government agenda. Instead Sarah Palin mocked Obama as having some country club sort of a career, free from all responsibility.

Here one such community organizer responds.

Look — I think the experience argument is perfectly legitimate for everyone on the Presidential tickets. McCain spent the last 26 years not being a chief executive. Same with Biden. That doesn’t disqualify them in the slightest. Obama has a great resume. Sarah Palin has an impressive resume. Let’s grill them on their record and how it supports their ambitions.

As a side note, the bulk of Palin’s “executive experience” was managing a city with an annual budget around $10 million. To an order of magnitude I manage a budget that big at the company I own. Obama is managing a budget now, for his campaign, that spends more than that in a month. I think being a mayor is good experience and it looks just fine on her resume. But it’s not some trump card.

Palin's denigration of community organizers

Raving pro-life lunatics

Michael Koppelman, Leave a comment

As you know by now, Obama officially has the nomination of the pro-death Democratic Party. Money is flowing into his campaign from the radical homosexuals, God-haters, and baby-killers all over the country.

Yes, we on the Left love death. We want to spread death as far and wide as possible. That’s why we support war in Iraq! (Oh wait, we don’t.) That’s also why we support capital punishment! (Oh wait, we don’t.) That’s also why we want to put commercial interests over the environment, in hopes of creating a global climate crisis! (Oh wait, we don’t.)

If these idiots really believed in a culture of life it would be a philosophy that extended further than abortion. That don’t have a culture of life, they have a culture of theocracy, where their religious views are the law of the land.

I respect that some people truly believe abortion is murder. That doesn’t excuse this inane rhetoric at all. Troy Newman, President, Operation Rescue — are you an idiot.

Raving pro-life lunatics