Blog Heap of Links for the day 13 November 2012

…states should decline to implement Obamacare's Medicaid expansion. The Supreme Court gave states that option. All states should exercise it. Medicaid is rife with waste and fraud. It increases the cost of private health care and insurance, crowds out private health insurance and long-term-care insurance, and discourages enrollees from climbing the economic ladder. There is scant reliable evidence that Medicaid improves health outcomes, and no evidence that it is a cost-effective way of doing so. …expanding Medicaid will cost individual states up to $53 billion over the first ten years. That's before an emboldened President Obama follows through on his threats to shift more Medicaid costs to states.

Neither the states nor the federal government have the money to expand Medicaid. If all states politely decline, federal deficits will shrink by another $900 billion.

In response to [Papa John's CEO] Schnatter’s candid assessment of his company’s future, Twitter liberals – in their predictably moronic and clueless fashion – called for a “boycott” of Papa John’s pizza (see the tweets at the Twitchy link). Because to them, Schnatter lives in a nice home and is “rich” so he can afford to pay for ObamaCare and should ABSORB the higher costs associated with it, damn it. … What a stupid, naive mindset. It’s class warfare at its most dangerous, a tactic mastered by ignorant liberal Democrats who despise companies that are successful – unless they are contributing to the DNC machine, that is. And we’re supposed to try and “appeal” to these people???

The problem for Conservatives comes from the attempt to reason with the unreasonable. A giant crowd on mind-numbed Zombies created by a socialist education system…. How to win without lowering themselves to the level of the Liberals and ignoring the idea of a intelligent vote. How do you convince the Zombies that freedom is more important that handouts, who’ve been conditioned to demand handouts? How do you convince the Zombies that their own children should be protected and provided for and not consumed and discarded in their quest for more toys?

It’s a losing battle as more and more Americans cease being humans and succumb to the zombie virus.

China has nearly 750 theater and tactical nuclear warheads in addition to more than 200 strategic missile warheads, a stockpile far larger than U.S. estimates, according to a retired Russian general who once led Moscow’s strategic forces. … “In all likelihood, the [People’s Republic of China] is already the third nuclear power today, after the U.S. and Russia, and it undoubtedly has technical and economic capabilities that will permit it to rapidly increase its nuclear might if necessary….”

Israeli military experts have concluded that a conventional strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities may fail, and have been forced to change their plans accordingly…. Defense experts claim Israel have two options, either deploy special forces on the ground, or use ballistic missiles with tactical nuclear warheads….

There has been an impressive string of anonymous attacks on military-related personnel and facilities in the region that are deemed to pose a threat to Israel and moderate Arab states.

…isolating the key control systems of our critical infrastructure from the Internet should be a national goal. But the trend is in the opposite direction.

During an Oct. 25 debate at Montclair State University, Professor Grover Furr denied the systematic mass murders committed under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin:

“What you said is a bulls–t. It’s wrong. It’s a lie. . . . I have yet to find one crime that Stalin committed.”

Watch the video again and notice (around 1:50) that there is applause when Professor Furr makes his adamant defense of Stalin… [video]

How smugly pleased the media is — like an evil child that has succeeded in drilling a hole in the bottom of a boat, not bright enough to realize that he will soon drown.

"The challenge has been the fog of war, and the greater challenge is that it's political hunting season, and so this whole thing has been turned into a very political sort of arena, if you will…. The fact that came out today is that the ground forces there at the CIA annex, which is different from the consulate, were requesting reinforcements.
 "They were requesting the – it's called the C-in-C's In Extremis Force – a group of Delta Force operators, our very, most talented guys we have in the military. They could have come and reinforced the consulate and the CIA annex. Now, I don't know if a lot of you have heard this but the CIA annex had actually taken a couple of Libyan militia members prisoner, and they think that the attack on the consulate was an attempt to get these prisoners back. It's still being vetted.
 "The challenging thing for Gen. Petraeus is that in his new position, he's not allowed to communicate with the press. So he's known all of this – they had correspondence with the CIA station chief in Libya, within 24 hours they kind of knew what was happening."

The outer reaches of our solar system may have been shaped long ago by a close encounter with another star that tore up both nascent planetary systems like colliding buzz saws, astronomers said today.
The dramatic encounter, if it occurred, might even have deposited an alien world into our midst.
 The scenario was devised to describe unexplained observations of the solar system but is based on speculation about actual events. The resulting computer simulations suggest a range [of] possible outcomes for a close celestial brush shortly after the planets formed, about 4.5 billion years ago.

[4,500,000,000 years ago the enormous Angona system began its approach to the neighborhood of this solitary sun. The center of this great system was a dark giant of space, solid, highly charged, and possessing tremendous gravity pull. -Urantia Paper 57 (1934)]

A new carnivore shaped like a candelabra has been spotted in deep ocean waters off California's Monterey Bay. The meat-eating species was dubbed the "harp sponge," so-called because its structure resembles a harp or lyre turned on its side.

You can't even make this shit up. It's not a love triangle. It's a love Pentagon.

The disgrace of David Petraeus has ended more than a great military career. It is also the symbolic end of a major chapter in American security strategy. The fall of the former Iraq and Afghanistan commander adds a tawdry exclamation point to the decline of counterinsurgency, the military theory for which Petraeus offered a heroic public face.

It’s not a love triangle. It’s a love Pentagon. —Gabriel Malor at AOSHQ
 What the hell? Is our entire government staffed with people who have nothing better to do with their time than to chase poontang? Are our taxpayer dollars being used to pay for this stuff?
 Hey, we’ve got a trillion-dollar deficit and we’re in hock to the ChiComs, but don’t you worry, America — we’re getting our money’s worth out of these dedicated public servants who occasionally do some actual work in between their cybersex sessions.

A recent rush of petitions to the White House’s website from anti-Barack Obama partisans hoping their states will secede from the U.S. has produced its first backlash: online petitions asking the Obama administration to exile anyone who signed them. [Makes me want to rush out and sign the petition... to secede, I mean.]

As of writing, the Texas petition to peacefully “withdraw” from the United States via the White House’s open petition webpage is up to 62,481 signatures, on its way to tripling the required names needed to trigger a response from the Obama administration. … Texas could pull it off. Here’s why…

Conservatives have voted more than 375,000 times since Election Day to pick up their marbles and go home. That’s how many virtual signatures appeared Monday night, as clocks in Washington, D.C. chimed midnight, on petitions asking President Barack Obama’s administration to allow 47 of the 50 U.S. states to secede from the country.

Reports that there is over-voting in St. Lucie county is speculative. The candidates and amendments took up two voter cards, so some voters just voted on one card and not the other, some voted on both and turned them in, which accounts for the fact that there were more voter cards turned in than actual registered voters. West’s campaign does believe that there could be at least 700 extra cards submitted, that could translate into 350 extra votes.