Beck (2008) vs. Beck (2009)

...the private health insurance industry is irreversibly compromised by its need to turn a profit. But we don't want people's access to health care to be governed by whether or not they're profitable.

Ezra Klein (link)

The boys made me cards for my birthday yesterday.  Here is the birthday “List to do” that Finn suggested in the card he made:

• eat kace
• opin presints
• eat more kace
• have ice crem
• play your geitar
• say ye ha

From his Wall Street Journal column (link):

We still find all of this [rhetoric from the Obama administration that to some seems authoritarian] far from alarming. American institutions are strong enough, and the country’s culture of freedom deep-seated enough, to thwart any authoritarian impulses Obama and his men may have.

The conservative columnist for The Wall Street Journal had this to say about calling your political opponent a Nazi (link):

…we disapprove, on both rhetorical and moral grounds, of comparisons between Obama and Hitler or ObamaCare and Nazism. (It should go without saying that such expression is fully protected by the First Amendment.) One should never in earnest liken a political opponent to the Nazis if that opponent does not practice or advocate genocide or totalitarianism.

To do so is a rhetorical error because it calls attention away from the speaker’s message and toward his lack of perspective. It is a moral error because of that lack of perspective. There may be plausible arguments that ObamaCare is evil in intent or would be evil in effect, but it is insane to equate it to the singular evil of Nazism. The easy recourse to Nazi analogies--far more common on the left than the right--debases the currency of moral outrage and can only diminish moral clarity.

This morning a 15-year-old allegedly stabbed and killed a 17-year-old and critically injured an adult man and two other children in his foster home.  It's not the kind of thing that happens around here very often.  I think this is the first time that I've read a story like this in the local newspaper (link) and paid attention to the "Reader Comments" section.  It's very strange...comments from the biological mother of the victims, from friends of the alleged murderer, etc.

Tonight we watched Burn After Reading (2008,R).  From ScreenIt!:

Fitness center employees' attempts to blackmail an ex-CIA agent go awry and end up involving more people than expected.

Coen Brothers.  Nuff said.  I give it 4 out of 5.