Anyone want to join me in a class action lawsuite against The Big Bang Theory. 

BurkeanSon is normally a very healthy kid.  His temp has only reached 101 a few times in his 10 years.   He has never had a fever as high as this one.  Worse yet he WANTED to stay in bed.  This is a kid who has never wanted to go to bed a day in his life.  When he had surgery for a bone spur he came out of anethstetic a half hour early.   So for BurkeanSon to want to nap is like President Obama to want to give tax relief.   We got an appointment with our pediatrician the same day.  The doc said he had the flu and it was most likely swine flu, since that is the only flu going around right now.  I was hoping he had bronchitis because I didn’t want to hear those piggy words.  He said BurkeanSon is not showing any of the danger signs, in fact his colorining was very good.  This is true to look at his coloring you would never know he was sick.

The doctor prescribed TamiFlu and here is the only newsworthy point of this blog post.  There is no liquid dose of TamiFlu available.  The pharmacy’s have run out and they are waiting for more.  So they took the adult capsules of TamiFlu and made a liquid syrup out of it right there in the pharmacy.  This involved a call to the insurance company to get approval.  Once the situation was explained to the “evil heartless” insurance company, approval was immediately granted.  It seemed like an eternity, but actually it was only an hour from getting to the pharmacy to getting the medicine.    Would a government bureaucrat have been able to get us the medicine in an hour?  Would a government bureaucrat have been able to get us the medicine in a week?   I can’t possibly see how layers of gov’t bureaucracy would have done anything but made the situation far worse.

The next day BurkeanSon’s fever went down a degree.  Now he has just a low degree fever, and cough and stuffiness and still doesn’t want to get out of bed, which is what worries me the most.  He is sicker than he has ever been, but that’s just because he is normally an energizer bunny rabbit who pounds away viruses.  As long as his fever doesn’t come back or his breathing get difficult he is fine.   As long as I don’t watch network news swine flu hysteria I should be okay as well.

I assume the lack of TamiFlu in a children’s dose is due to the fact that children aren’t usually in danger from the flu.  Since the flu is usually a threat to the elderly they have clearly been focusing their manufacturing efforts there.   Since the adult medicine can be adapated for children this is not a serious problem.  But still Tamiful manufacturers should get on the ball.

In this issue:

1. Big Green 2. Elections 3. Endangered
4. Withholding 5. Coal 6. Photo Op

1. Big Green. I wrote a column in The Alaska Standard a couple weeks ago taking the local greens, the AP and the local fishwrapper to task for their latest effort to designate Cook Inlet as a critical habitat for “threatened” beluga whales. The column smoked out the executive director of one of the self-appointed local green organizations with comments in opposition. He was pretty good, and picked up a few things that I should have stated more accurately. But he didn’t want to discuss funding for his organization, the Cook Inlet Keeper. One of my correspondents, Dennis Oakland of MatSu Valley News http://matsuvalleynews.com/ forwarded me a copy of the organization’s IRS Form 990; essentially it’s income tax form for that year. While it did not list all the contributors, the form did demonstrate that fully a third of the funding for this organization came in the form of government grants. Further investigation into their funding led to their web site which had a page thanking their funders, which included US EPA, US Fish and Wildlife Service, NOAA Fisheries, Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation and the City of Homer – funding from all three levels of government. This organization has not only figured out how to tap into the firehose sized stream of leftwing foundation grants, but is also supplementing that money with our tax dollars; all of which is being used to turn Cook Inlet into a giant park. I expect this funding model is not uncommon among most if not all self-identified environmental organizations: Roll out a small education program for The Children; apply for educational grants to support those program; and use those monies to fund their obstructionist assault on development, life, livelihoods, jobs, and the future of all of us. Should any of you readers want to do similar research, a good place to start would be GuideStar at http://www2.guidestar.org/ At this location, you can register for free and download the most recent non-profit 990s. For a significant monthly subscription fee to the site, you can download other documents for the nonprofits. These little groups work in the dark, out of sight, pushing their view of the world with the unknowing assistance of taxpayers at all levels of government. It is long past time to start shutting off the public money and defund the left.

2. Elections. There are elections for governor in VA and NJ tomorrow. Both elections involve democrat held seats. The VA race appears to be swinging strongly conservative, with an unabashed conservative currently ahead by double digits. Things are so bad that the Obama WH went after the democrat candidate personally two weeks ago for not sufficiently aligning himself with the Obama WH. They accused the democrat candidate of not listening to WH advice. In NJ, one of the currently bluest states out there, decades of democrat spending and corruption may have come back to haunt the incumbent democrat, John Corzine, former US Senator from NJ and former head of Goldman – Sachs. In a three-way race, the Republican candidate appears to be edging ahead in local polling. There is a third candidate who is running to the right of the Republican, who is likely a democrat shill inserted into the race to split the conservative vote. Corzine’s campaign devolved to the point where all he was doing was calling the Republican fat – which he is – and so what? This race may be outside the margin of corruption. The most interesting race is a special election in New York for NY-23 congressional seat. This district is a reliable conservative district. Local party officials selected a doctrinaire leftist state senator named Dede Scozzafava as their candidate. The Republican establishment got into the act and strongly supported her also – even though she did not support a single conservative position. The NY Conservative Party endorsed a conservative candidate for the seat, Doug Hoffman, and there has been a three-way race. During the campaign, Scozzafava’s non-existent support finally translated into cratering polling and she withdrew from the race over the weekend, quickly and happily endorsing the democrat candidate. At this point, the conservative appears to be comfortably ahead in local poling. The final race is a special election to fill the CA-10 congressional seat. CA-11 is a Bay Area district, and as such ought to be a very safe democrat hold. For the majority of the race, the democrat, who is the LtGov of CA, appeared to be cruising to an easy victory. Over the last few weeks, polling sharply closed, as the Republican candidate has successfully managed to wrap the blame for California’s fiscal disaster firmly around the neck of the democrat. The impending congressional disaster of ObamaCare is also a significant issue in this race. Regardless of how any or all of these races turn out, it appears that the conservative base is nicely spun up, fully engaged, and may be turning out to change things at the local and state levels. It will be a matter of time before it impacts things at the federal level. This is a beginning. Do not be deterred from the task of removing power from the hands of those inside the Beltway and returning it to the hands of the citizenry. [Editor's Note: My apologies for delay. Mr. Gimarc sent his weekly "interesting Items" on Tuesday Morning and I didn't get it posted until Wednesday. His remarks were not edited and they still reflect pre-Tuesday's results.]

3. Endangered. As the wheels of the political wars continue to grind, it appears that they are going to crush some recent political animals; specifically the erstwhile RINO (Republican in Name Only) and the sainted Blue Dog democrat. The conservative resurgence may be in the process of retaking control of the Republican Party from the moderates on both coasts. As they do so, expect primaries with self described RINOs to be hotly contested over the next few years. Democrats in 2006 and 2008 did us a favor by destroying RINOs on both coasts. It is now up to local conservatives to replace those democrats with reliable conservatives who have a better memory of where they come from and why they were elected. The Blue Dogs in congress have a more difficult path, for while Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi both need their votes for ObamaCare and Cap and Trade legislation, once passed, neither needs them any more. Limbaugh believes that the Blue Dogs are screwed either way they go. For if they vote with the leadership, they will never be reelected; and if they vote against the leadership, they will get no democrat money for their next campaign and will also lose. Sometimes species extinction is a Good Thing. In this case, it tends to clarify things in the political world nicely.

4. Withholding. The State of California, still in the midst of a self-inflicted financial disaster, has resorted to simple thievery to cover the dollar shortfall. The latest trick is to increase tax withholding from paychecks statewide by 10%. They promise to refund the extra cash next April. But earlier this year, they were issuing IOUs for tax refunds due to a shortage of cash. There is no guarantee that they will do anything else next April. So the description of this as thievery by Ed Morrissey in Hot Air Saturday is absolutely correct.

5. Coal. As he promised two years ago, Barack Hussein Obama’s EPA has started the process of bankrupting everything that uses coal for fuel; starting with half of our electrical generation. One of the vehicles for this is playing with permits for surface mining. Since infesting office, the newly led EPA has held up over 70 surface mining permits on grounds that they would violate provisions of the Clean Water Act and are therefore subject to increased scrutiny. Last week they retroactively revoked a mining permit for a West Virginia coal mine. Should they keep this up, the utilities won’t have time to be bankrupted by new cap and trade taxation. They will be bankrupted by simple failure to get coal out of the ground and into the generation units. Hot Air, Tues.

6. Photo Op. Obama made a midnight trip to Dover AB, Delaware last week to pay his respects to the fallen. Dover is the receiving point for bodies of those servicemen who have been killed in action. He also took a contingent of photographers with him. Apparently only a single family gave permission for him to be photographed saluting the caskets of the fallen. President Bush and VP Cheney made continuous visits to pay their respects to the fallen and comfort their families during their eight years in office. Neither one took a team of photographers with them on those visits. Expect to see these midnight photographs in future campaign spots, along with the infamous Air Force One NYC flyby earlier this year. It is all about the continuous campaign.

More later — AG

“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”
- Samuel Adams, speech at the Philadelphia State House, August 1, 1776.

Note: Interesting Items can be found also at the following locations: MatSu Valley News and the home page. Rod Martin’s The Vanguard site is also a long-time supporter of this column. Alex Gimarc is a long-time member of the Town Hall Conservative group.