The gov't won't even leave your toilet alone

When I built my house in Raleigh in 1986, I couldn't figure out why I had such wimpy pressure in my shower.  (This was a common Delta head, not some luxury version.)  I finally took the head apart and found there was a pressure-reducer (a glorified washer) installed as a result of government fiat.  I removed it and voilà, a normal shower experience!

Since I had my own well, it was clearly no damn business of the government how much water I used in a three-minute shower.  

But the bureaucracy didn't stop there.  When I bought my Minneapolis house eight years ago and decided to replace a worn tile floor in the master bath, I wasn't allowed to re-install the beautiful 1928 toilet!  The remodelers informed me that "If you ever take the toilet up, code won't allow you to put it back in place.  You're only permitted a 1-1/2 gallon one."

So I had to do cartwheels to find a new Kohler that roughly matched the delicate pink color and have the old American-Standard one destroyed.  (So no scofflaw could salvage it!)  

But worse —how shall we say this delicately— it doesn't do its job properly.

These incompletely-flushing toilets are such a travesty that they became the subject of a whole episode in "King of the Hill," where users had to flush the johns five or six times to finish the job.

It seems that when it comes to crap, the government giveth but not taketh.

The following is from Powerline.com

Get your hand out of my shower

Posted: 22 Jul 2010 06:10 AM PDT

Before the advent of the modern environmental movement, Bill Buckley used to assert with a glint in his eye that a liberal is someone who wants to reach into your shower and adjust the temperature of the water. Man, oh, man, was he right. The liberals' environmental agenda has brought Buckley's satirical thrust uncomfortably close to reality.

See, for example, the Wall Street Journal article "A water fight over luxury showers." Stephen Power reports:

Gene Goforth sells showerheads--big ones, like the Raindance Imperial 600 AIR. Selling for as much as $5,457, it has a 24-inch spray face, 358 no-clog channels and a triple-massage option. "You can just stand under it, and it helps your psyche," says Mr. Goforth, who has one in his home.

Now, Mr. Goforth is in a lather over the federal government's tough new line on water-hogging showerheads, part of a new effort to enforce energy- and water-use regulations. "Leave my shower alone," Mr. Goforth recently wrote in a letter to the Department of Energy.

Regulators are going after some of the luxury shower fixtures that took off in the housing boom. Many have multiple nozzles, cost thousands of dollars and emit as many as 12 gallons of water a minute. In May, the DOE stunned the plumbing-products industry when it said it would adopt a strict definition of the term "showerhead" in enforcing standards that have been on the books--but largely unenforced--for nearly 20 years.

The Journal explains in the handy sidebar to the story that the federal maximum for a showerhead is 2.5 gallons per minute, at 80 pounds per square inch.

I have a great idea for a political movement. How about a movement devoted to the restoration of limited government?

Rx for dems who think Obamacare will help them: get a second opinion

If Spector gets defeated in the democratic senate primary, it may go down as yet another example of Obama's toxic "help" in campaigns.

Needless to say, the White House is doing everything they can to aid this quisling. They've also sent in Joe Biden, which always presents the possibility that he will put not one but both feet in his own mouth.

As to trumpeting Obamacare, there's just one problem: most of the public hates it.

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/healthcare/march_2010/health_care_law

Cut Gordon Brown some slack!

Tomorrow’s election in the UK is critical.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/election-2010/7683391/General-Election-2010-five-possible-result-scenarios-for-the-Conservatives.html

David Cameron (Conservative) was comfortably ahead of Gordon Brown (Labour) just months ago. And Nick Clegg (Liberal Democrat) was far behind.

Then they had a US-style televised debate where Clegg charmed viewers, and now there’s a possibility, God help us, that he could win.

This could mean a radical change in the special relationship between the UK and America, with Clegg bowing and pandering Obama-style to Europe.

Clegg’s surge is IMHO a good reason not to have televised debates, which give an advantage to slick pretty-boys, and a disadvantage to anyone remotely cerebral.

We’ve been cursed with these sound-bite charades since 1960. Why Britain chose to introduce them after all these years is beyond me.

Earlier tonight, PBS aired a parade of British voters saying they weren’t “excited” about Brown’s appearances or “leadership.”

Since I regularly watch Prime Minister’s Question Time on C-Span, I wonder if I don’t have a better feel for Brown’s qualities than a lot of these UK voters.

(God knows US voters are criminally uninformed when they vote, and I’m sure the UK is working to catch up. With TV debates now a major factor, you can deduct another 20 points from the collective IQ.)

Brown is smart, albeit not as engaging as Tony Blair, and acquits himself well when being questioned on a bewildering array of subjects from his critics on the right and left.

True, so have previous prime ministers. Their system puts more emphasis on having political leaders who can think on their feet instead of making canned statements.

(In contrast to Obama, for example, always with a background of adoring listeners or other props, like “doctors” issued white coats before they’re allowed to sit in the Rose Garden and listen to him blather about health care.)

But the other factor is reported to be Gordon Brown’s comments after a voter encounter, where he forgot his mike was still on after he got in his car.

I heard the entire audio clip. What’s the worst thing he said? “That bigoted woman.” And for this he had to call on her and apologize!

So people are offended by that, compared to Crazy Joe Biden’s obscenity when he didn’t know his mike was on? Or pinhead Carl Levin producing a whole string of comments that had to be bleeped while he was grilling a witness at his House committee?

Naturally, I’d prefer to see Tory David Cameron win.

But for God’s sake, Brits, give Gordon Brown a break on this tempest-in-a-teapot.

You don't need a UK equivalent of John Edwards.

The “birther” conspiracy: glorified horse-puckey

There are endless charges right-thinking Americans can make against Obama, including his unparalleled combination of arrogance and incompetence.

But one thing that makes us look stupid and paranoid is this continuing obsession with Obama’s alleged non-American citizenship.

Depending on which of the trumped-up emails you receive, he was born in Kenya or Indonesia or Mars.

Note that all this stuff appears only in endlessly-circulated emails. No legitimate right-wing media outlet talks about this.

But for the fanatics, any signature and seal on any presented birth certificate is contested, carbon-14 dating is demanded, subterfuge and bribery is alleged, ad nauseum.

These are the grassy-knoll conspiracists of the right wing.

There is no “cover-up.”

Nobody wants Obama out of office more than me, but only a fool will waste one moment of attention on this distraction instead of the main objections to the re-election of The Anointed One and his congressional cronies.

Yes, there’s no question the lamestream media is ignoring or downplaying all sorts of Obama flaws.

But journalists' greed for fame would trump this.

Ask yourself this: If there was the slightest scintilla of evidence supporting this conspiracy theory, wouldn’t the win-at-any-price Hillary campaign have jumped all over it?

That is what campaigns do through their “oppo research.” The Clintons’ ruthless staff already did that.

Yes, the mainstream media is overwhelmingly liberal, but Fox, the Wall Street Journal, Investors Business Daily, and a host of other reliable anti-Obama conservative voices will jump on any remotely-credible lead in a heartbeat.

If you want to get technical:

Part of this baloney-fest is based on two things:

a) Ignorance of the law, specifically the legal concepts of jus sanguinis (right of blood) and jus soli (right of birthplace)

and

b) A willful attempt to conflate evidence about his birth certificate being faked, the ludicrousness of which, once examined, recalls Oliver Stone’s paranoid “JFK.”

These claims have been exhaustively debunked by UrbanLegends, Snopes.com, the Chicago Tribune, FactCheck, the US Immigration Service, Grolier Online, and Wikipedia, to name just a few authorities.

For proof, just read the following and their linked articles:

http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/born_in_the_usa.html

http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/barackobama/a/obama_citizen.htm

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/07/28/hawaii-declares-obama-birth-certificate-real/

Anyone who receives one of these silly emails should send this link to whoever sent it to you. Not that it’ll do much good.

Carly for California?

A response to a California correspondent (who says she prefers Devore to Fiorina):

If I were a betting man, I'd have guessed that this is where you'd come down. It's your back yard, so I can only watch and hope from a distance.

I think they're both impressive in this Hannity debate:

http://hotair.com/archives/2010/03/31/video-fiorina-vs-devore-on-hannity/

My two cents:

I can't believe anyone would go for Campbell, who's lost races for Senate twice. If so, we could dig up Harold Stassen for your primary voters.

I'd probably like Devore (though his mailings are such hackneyed direct mail tripe that I can't bear to read them), and after reading the article from WSJ magazine (that came with yesterday's issue), I sense that there are parts of Carly that are less than perfect.*

BUT, your state is now heavily dem, and we can only reminisce fondly of the days when Hayakawa and Murphy were Senators backing up Governor Reagan.

I think it's dangerous for Republicans to hope for another Scott Brown upset in any blue state. IMHO "angry" swing voters will determine elections mostly in purple states.

I think under those circumstances Fiorina is the only real chance to drive Boxer from office. And if she spends millions of her own money, thank God for it.

* Re her H-P record: I'm a Mac person and only care about their printers. But as for the stock price during her tenure, everyone got pummeled after the 2000 meltdown. I don't even want to figure out how much I lost on Sun micro.

“Never been reported in the media” and other myths

One of my favorite real-life anecdotes: (I’ve witnessed this numerous times over the years):

C-SPAN CALLER: “I want to talk about X, because it’s never been covered by the media.”

C-SPAN HOST: “How did you learn about this?”

C-SPAN CALLER: “I heard it on the radio.”

What the caller is unconsciously saying is that it’s not being reported in the mainstream media.*

Fortunately, the days are long gone when three networks, the NYT, WaPo, and AP pretty controlled everything being reported. But today thanks to everything from the web to Twitter, there’s virtually nothing that goes unreported.

That doesn’t mean you don’t have to dig for it sometimes, but Google makes that easy, especially if you know a little about structuring search parameters.

And if you bookmark about half a dozen websites, a conservative can get all the less-reported information he could want. Or he can enjoy Fox news or talk radio. It’s no coincidence that these broadcast resources have overwhelming ratings. They are the antidote to the MSM.

But you don’t even need a computer or television. The Wall Street Journal is now the nation’s largest daily, which I have delivered to me each morning instead of the local rag.

It’s “straight news” reporting is scrupulously unbiased, and its editorial page —which is conservative— provides a refreshing alternative to the knee-jerk liberalism of most of the nation’s newspapers.

More important, the WSJ is big and profitable enough to have a very large news staff. This is in stark contrast to the average daily newspaper which simply regurgitates AP and NYT stories for its national reporting.

The UPI is effectively gone,** and Reuters is rarely used as a news feed in this country, even though it’s offensively liberal.

The real tragedy of journalism is that US newspapers are folding at record rates. Almost all afternoon papers (historically “the working man’s paper” in every city) have disappeared. And only a handful of cities have more than one paper, period.

Unfortunately, this means that through attrition, The New York Times essentially drives all American newspaper coverage. Newspaper and network editors look at what the NYT is covering and follow it like trained monkeys.

NYT stories —and more important, its slant on the news— get passed through with no scrutiny or editing. When I was in journalism school, at least AP stories were typically rewritten by the local pubs.

Such concentration of orientation would be bad under any circumstances, but it's especially dangerous since the Times management has passed on to one of the idiot children, “Pinch” Sulzberger.

Many of us can exult in the Times’ slide towards bankruptcy, but know that won’t help. The execrable Minneapolis Star & Tribune (referred to locally as the Star & Sickle or Red Star) is hemorrhaging money, but even as it lays off staff by the carload, the most brain-dead liberals within the publication cling like lamprey eels.

Notwithstanding all the above, “never been reported in the media” is the unicorn of modern communications: a wholly mythical creature whose attraction borders on the mystical.

And one of the perverse results of this myth is that it creates endless bogus “never been reported” emails, which pretend to be some sort of magical truth unavailable anywhere else.

Refer to my upcoming post “Top Ten ways to spot hoaxes, urban legends, and bogus emails."

* Often abbreviated as MSM. Or as ex-CBS reporter Bernard Goldberg wryly describes it, the lamestream media. It is so heavily biased nowadyas as to be something of a joke, if it weren’t a disservice to the American public.

** Its share plummeted with the disappearance of afternoon newspapers, its primary niche. It was finally sold by the founding Scripps family, with two subsequent bankruptcies. Now owned by the Unification Church.

"Last train from Hiroshima" pulled due to fraud

One again, a book with a political agenda turns out to be a canard.

Remember the Bellesiles book that claimed early Americans didn't own firearms? It too was full of blatant fabrications, and its author was stripped of the Bancroft Prize and given the boot from the college where he taught.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_A._Bellesiles

Holt to Cease Publication of 'Last Train to Hiroshima'

Rachel Deahl -- Publishers Weekly, 3/1/2010 12:58:17 PM

After Charles Pellegrino, author of Last Train to Hiroshima, became embroiled in a dust-up over being deceived by a source for his book about the immediate aftermath of the bombing of the Japanese city, publisher Henry Holt has decided to go with the drastic move of ceasing publication of the title. The Macmillan imprint announced last week that it would make corrections to future editions of the book but now, after questions have surfaced about the validity of other accounts Pellegrino sourced in the book, Holt has decided to shelve the title entirely. In a statement issued today Holt said that while Pellegrino "fully admitted his mistake" and went about immediately fixing it, in the wake of the initial discovery "questions about other sources and the author's credentials arose." Holt went on to say: "The author of any work of non-fiction must stand behind its content. We must rely on our authors to answer questions that may arise as to the accuracy of their work and reliability of their sources. Unfortunately Mr. Pellegrino was not able to answer the additional questions that have arisen about his book to our satisfaction." A Holt spokesperson said that following the initial disclosure the publisher began receiving other questions from media sources about the book and while Pellegrino answered the questions, Holt was not fully satisfied with the answers. Holt shipped 18,000 copies of the book and will issus a credit to wholesalers and retailers on returns of the book. Consumers can also seek a credit from their retailer on the title.

Here's the NYT story:

file:///Users/garyknutson/Documents/Doubts%20Raised%20on%20Book’s%20Tale%20of%20Atom%20Bomb%20-%20NYTimes.com.pdf

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/books/21hiroshima.html?pagewanted=print

An illuminating review appears on Amazon:

1.0 out of 5 stars What's Gone Wrong With Book Reviewers?,February 21, 2010

By	Thomas J. Frieling (Athens, GA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I just read the New York Times article about the deception Mr. Pelligrino fell for--a Mr. Fuoco claiming to have flown on the bombing run on Hiroshima and also related a story about a pre-flight accident with the bomb that killed a scientist and rendered the bomb a "dud". (Some dud--70,000 people killed when it hit.) All of this not true. My problem here is not so much that Mr. Pelligrino wrote a bad book--anyone can do that. Or that the errors in the book amount to historical mal-practice which is deplorable as this book will be held by many libraries for many years, perhaps duping many more readers down the years. My problem is the fact that this book got positive reviews in the mainstream press (including the NYT). I have to ask--what has gone wrong with the process of reviewing books? And backing up one step--what's gone wrong with the publishing industry that allows error-riddled books to pass muster? Doesn't the publishing industry employ copy editors and fact-checkers any more? And who gets selected to review books like this--reviewers who obviously aren't qualified to pass judgemnet on the book's quality or accuracy? Where are the experts who could vouch for a book's accuracy--why aren't they being sought out to review books about which they are recognized subject experts? It should be a scandal. The same thing happened last summer with the publication of Craig Nelson's book Rocket Men. It got glowing reviews in the mainstream press and he even appeared as part of a panel discussion at a NASA History Office conference celebrating the fourtieth anniversary of Apollo 11. Yet his book is full of errors of fact and, perhaps, worse, very questionable assertions (e.g.; that the Gemini Program was of limited success and it should have been more integrated into the Apollo Progarm---both ludicrous assertions) both of which betray his lack of understanding of his subject. He may have written some well crafted prose, but the demands of a good history require the author get the facts correct first and foremost. Both of these books failed that elemental test and still got rave reviews. That's the real disgrace. Thomas J. Frieling University of Georgia Libraries tfrielin@uga.edu

More about this scandal later. Suffice it to say that publishers aren't vetting books, the reviewers aren't taking the elementary step of consulting noted experts (such as, in this case, the author of "Racing for the Bomb"), and so slanted views and political agenda poison readers.

Note also that the book's author plans to make corrections only for the "paperback and foreign editions." We're supposed to ignore the lies in the 18,000 copies already publisshed.