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Spain’s state-controlled rail operator has been forced to axe one of its newest high speed train services after it emerged that the only nine passengers were using it each day.

Oh, hey, we need one of those in this country….

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They examined data from a representative sample pf physicians. Specifically, they looked at how often physicians accepted new patients by insurance type and year.

What did they find? The overall acceptance rate of new patients was pretty static from 2005-2008, going from 94.2% to 95.3%. The percentage of physicians accepting new Medicare patients dropped from 95.5% from 92.9% (about 2.5%). But here’s the thing. There was a bigger drop in physician acceptance of patients with private noncapitated insurance from 93.3% to 87.8% (about 5.5%). In fact, they found that over 90% of physicians accepted new Medicare patients. Reports of reimbursement rates driving away physicians may be more anecdotal than widespread.

And who could blame them?

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Undesirable or dangerous immigrants who may face ill-treatment at home cannot be deported, no matter how bad their crimes in Britain, human rights judges have ruled.

In a test case ahead of more than 200 similar actions pending against the UK, the Strasbourg judges decreed that the UK’s duty to protect people against torture or inhuman treatment is ”absolute”.

How long before the Brits realize that joining the EU was possibly the stupidest thing the British government has done since pissing off their American colonies?

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If it moves, regulate it. If it keeps moving, tax it. If it quits moving, subsidize it.

The only thing that saves us is that we don’t get all the government we pay for.

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They have the technology.

“They have a very clever mechanism, with several advantages. The first is financing, which they have better access to because Chinese companies are mostly state-owned. It is getting more and more difficult for European contractors to access financing, and you need to have a lot of finance in the construction industry,” he said.

“Then they have managed to transfer Chinese workers, who are cheaper.

They can also use construction machinery they have built in China.

Finally, because they can generate still profit despite their low bids, they use that money to hire famous architects and demonstrate they can deliver a project above the normal standard”.

I remember, when I was young, seeing signs on products that said ‘Hand-made by slave labor in the Soviet Union’. Who says that slavery is economically inefficient?

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The British settlement of Sydney in 1788 has been officially declared an “invasion”, following strong pressure from the Aboriginal contingent of the city council.

The City of Sydney voted 7-2 to remove the words “European arrival” from documents and rejected a compromise plan to describe the First Fleet’s arrival as “colonisation”.

Of course, you can’t ‘invade’ something that wasn’t a nation at the time. It’s comforting to know that Australians have to suffer through the same Politically Correct ‘oh, the poor suffering natives’ nonsense with which the rest of us are afflicted. Perhaps they ought to look to the American experience and dump all the Aborigines in some outback reservation area (without clothes or medical care) to resume their former stone-age existence. Sheesh.

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While American cities are synchronizing green lights to improve traffic flow and offering apps to help drivers find parking, many European cities are doing the opposite: creating environments openly hostile to cars. The methods vary, but the mission is clear — to make car use expensive and just plain miserable enough to tilt drivers toward more environmentally friendly modes of transportation.

I guess they regret having invented automobiles. Forward into the past!

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There seems to be a deliberateness to the chaos, a purpose to the ever-increasing exclamation points, as in crisis (!), catastrophe (!!), act now or else (!!!), … we’re on the verge of (!!!!). An attempt to keep so many parts moving so quickly that by the time we realize what has happened, we will have an economic and political system based on punishing achievement in the name of fairness, redistributing goods and services in the name of equality, and above all, dependence on a government which controls everything by endlessly proclaiming that only it has good intentions.

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I am not making this up.

No doubt it never occurred to them that, in their attempt to avoid stereotypes, they’re actually confirming a really big one.

Former Congressman Jim Leach is Obama’s head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a poster-child for the proposition that the Federal government in the modern era has abandoned any pretext to be a government of derived and strictly limited powers.

Jim Leach was allegedly a Republican Congressman from Iowa for 30 years. In that time, according to Wikipedia, his accomplishments were:

• the creation of an international AIDS Trust Fund,
• debt relief for the world’s poorest countries,
• authorization of an International Monetary Fund quota increase,
• making the Peace Corps an independent federal agency,
• requiring the federal government to use soy ink,
• prohibiting Internet gambling,
• restraining federal employee growth, and
• redressing certain Holocaust asset losses.

Eight bullet points — of which only 25% are even plausibly Republican. Chop off the last two, and Barney Frank would be hard put to beat it.

This is the challenge for the Republican party: Develop a program that differs from the Democrats, and stick to it; not running candidates who are merely ‘Democrat light’. Unless and until it does that, it is doomed to failure.

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A look at how little protection is afforded in New York for those who choose not to embrace same-sex ‘marriage’.

(There are no protections in New York for vendors who are not clergy or religious institutions.)

So if you refuse to sell something that is to be used in a same-sex ‘marriage’, or rent property, or publish notices, or whatever — unless you’re clergy or a religious institution, you get whacked with the Discrimination Bat.

But that’s really only the tip of the iceberg — and probably the easiest conflicts to resolve — when it comes to discussions of religious liberty and gay rights. Will same-sex marriage laws impact the rights of religious organizations to place children for adoption as they see fit? What about Lutheran parochial schools that have faced civil rights lawsuits over their honor code? Will Muslim doctors have the right to refuse to do in vitro fertilization treatment on a woman in a lesbian marriage? Will an evangelical referring a patient to someone without religious qualms over same-sex marriage lose her job or license? What about the civil servants who have religious objections to same-sex marriage? Apart from wedding vendors, there are all sorts of other lines of work where individual religious liberty and religiously-motivated objections to same-sex marriage where the questions persist. What about adoption services, for instance? How might public school curriculum change? Will that pose a challenge for any public school teachers who are Muslim, Jewish or Christian?

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RAF chiefs fear that the “cream” of the air force is leaving after a dozen group captains resigned or asked for voluntary redundancy in the past month, The Daily Telegraph has learnt.

And, really, who could blame them? There is no ‘career’ available in the British military any more.

Senior RAF sources have said that the officers decided to quit after they had “seen the writing on the wall” with reductions in equipment and personnel.

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To understand the impact, I’ll exaggerate to make a point—your healthcare provider doesn’t care about you unless they can see the whites of your eyes. Why is that? Today’s flawed reimbursement scheme only compensates the healthcare provider for a face to face visit. It’s hard to fault the primary care physician who has been put on a hamster wheel of 30-40 appointments per day and can’t even give their practice away upon retirement (that was once their retirement plan) for not wanting to deal with their patients sending email or sharing information from their personal health record.

My doctor will allow me to e-mail him questions and concerns — if I sign up for a paid subscription plan. Which I won’t do, because my medical insurance doesn’t cover it.

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A former president of the Maryland State Medical Society, Dr. Sroka has practiced family medicine for 32 years in a small, red-brick building just six miles from his childhood home, treating fishing buddies, neighbors and even his elementary school principal much the way doctors have practiced medicine for centuries. He likes to chat, but with costs going up and reimbursements down, that extra time has hurt his income. So Dr. Sroka, 62, thought about retiring.

He tried to sell his once highly profitable practice. No luck. He tried giving it away. No luck.

Considering the way the government and the insurance companies (under the lash of the goverment) treat doctors these days, it’s a surprise anybody wants to go to med school.

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The bodies of soldiers killed in Afghanistan will no longer be honoured with a public parade but will be driven through back streets to avoid upset, it has emerged.

…

“I am not sure taking coffins in hearses past schools, past families, past married quarters is necessarily the thing that everybody would wish to see … the focus must be on the families of the dead service personnel. They are the people who care most. That is where our focus is.”

Not Churchill’s Britain any more, is it?

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I’ve seen pictures of the Glastonbury festival — like Woodstock, without the organization.

Perhaps he got a glimpse of what the future holds for Britain and took the natural way out.

Can’t say that I blame him.

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Wouldn’t want to be insensitive, you know.

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Imagine a twentieth century Justice who was a Social Darwinist; who had a self-proclaimed disdain for facts, and who often substituted flip aphorisms for legal analysis; who was the most hostile Justice of the century to the rights of African Americans, dissenting even in cases invalidating peonage laws as violations of the Thirteenth Amendment; who showed virtually no interest in civil liberties, dissenting, for example, from the Court’s decision invalidating a law banning the teaching of foreign languages in private schools; who wrote one of the most intemperate opinions in Supreme Court history, affirming the sterilization of alleged imbeciles, with his only regret that his colleagues made him tone down his wording; who wrote, even after being censored by his colleagues, that instead of waiting to “execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility,” it’s best to prevent the “manifestly unfit from continuing their kind”; who mocked the notion that the Nineteenth Amendment signaled that the law should treat women equally with men: “It will need more than the Nineteenth Amendment to convince me that there are no differences between men and women, or that legislation cannot take those differences into account;” who was such a strong majoritarian that he argued that “a law should be called good if it reflects the will of the dominant forces of the community, even if it takes us all to hell.”

In fact, you don’t have to imagine such a Justice, as I’ve described Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Almost every Supreme Court Justice (indeed, every judge) that is famous today is so as the result of his willingness to twist the law to achieve what ‘progressives’ consider a good result. Cardozo, Frankfurter, Brandeis, Thurgood Marshall — all of them figured out where he wanted the case to wind up and then carefully crafted a verbal rationalization that he knew people would swallow because they agreed with his conclusions rather than the law. The technical term for this is ‘sophistry’ and the fact that lawyers just love the shit out of the ability to do this is the chief reason I’ve never practiced law.

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At various times in the past, New England has threatened to secede.

Perhaps we could encourage them to do so. It would solve a lot of problems.

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The guy keeps trying to come up with reasons to get her to leave her front yard, first suggesting that she can’t film from the sidewalk (so she takes a step back) and then complaining that she’s “anti-police” and that he doesn’t feel safe unless she goes inside. She points out that she’s in her own front yard and not doing anything wrong. The cop then threatens her with arrest, and quickly arrests her, claiming that she didn’t obey a police order.

Really, you can’t make this stuff up.

‘All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.’ — Benito Mussolini

Read it.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

The European Union is, of course, merely an additional layer of Crust on top of the existing sclerotic European governments, cleverly crafted to multiply the number of pigs at the public trough while further insulating them from either scrutiny or accountability.

Much like the U.N., come to think of it….

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Sad news indeed.

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Oh, really? Imagine that.

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Hey, gotta bring that price of gas down if there’s to be any re-election chances in 2012, don’t you know.

National interest be damned, it’s all about Democrats keeping power. First things first.

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Look, the West can’t help everyone and the regimes would be insulted if we tried. But they don’t need our help. The greatest poverty in our time has been in China and India. Did these countries reduce poverty because of our help? No. They did it themselves.

Giving is problematic. We take money from poor people in rich countries and give it to rich people in poor countries. Aid sometimes creates corruption.

‘Sometimes’?

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Confused about which 4G wireless broadband service really is the fastest? U.S. Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) wants wireless operators to disclose the true speeds of their self-proclaimed “4G” services.

The congresswoman today introduced a billed called the “Next Generation Wireless Disclosure Act,” which, if passed, would require carriers to inform consumers at the point of sale of the minimum data speeds, network reliability, and coverage of their advertised 4G services.

I am trying — and failing — to understand how this is the business of the Federal government. What is it about Democrat Congresspeople that whenever they run across something they dislike they introduce legislation? Is this just political posturing? “Look, I’m doing something! Vote for me in 2012! I’m you’re only friend!”

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Against the advice of his military commanders, Obama announced a drawdown of forces on a transparently political timetable — the timetable of American presidential politics.

I don’t profess to know the right thing to do, but whatever it is, that ain’t it. And placing the context of the drawdown on the need for “nation building” at home: that’s not right either. It makes me want to say that nation building at home will begin with the departure of Obama from office.

National interest? Who cares? What’s important is Democrats hanging on to power….

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Because of that pesky GPS bracelet on her calf.  Those big meanies in Massachusetts, making her stay under the indignity of house arrest for one, itty-bitty conviction of “iding and abetting the filing of false tax returns by her brother, Robert Eremian, a fugitive from federal charges of racketeering, illegal gambling, money laundering and witness tampering.”  I mean, she served a whole month of jail time for that!  What do they want, blood?

Funny how sitting Democrat Congressmen seem to have connections that would get a Republic hounded out of office — and excluded from any future party activities. But the Party of Crime apparently has a broader view.

Take, for example, Alcee Hastings — removed as a Federal judge for bribery, the Democrats in Florida elected him to Congress, where he is fighting the good fight through sexual harassment. Pure class, those Democrats.

Prominent author Holly Lisle learns a hard lesson.

If you’re on Facebook, Facebook owns you. They own your information, they own your contacts, they own your family members, they own your mailbox, they own whatever you create on the site. And in an instant they can take it away, and you cannot get it back. You have no other way to contact friends you connect with through the site but the way they offer you—so all the people you love can disappear out of your reach in an instant’s notice, through no fault of your own.

If you friended me on Facebook, I’m very sorry I could not reach you. I’ll apologize here and hope anyone who knows me from both Facebook and my weblog, mailing list, or Twitter, will pass this along so the people I care about, with whom I have once again lost contact, will at least know where to find me if they want to.

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Somehow California manages to spend a whole lot on something it’s not even doing. Our friends on the left coast haven’t executed anyone since 2006 but they have more than 700 prisoners waiting on death row — the most of any state. More impressively, according to a new study from the Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review, California managed to spend $4 billion on death penalty expenses, with 13 prisoners executed since the reinstatement of the state death penalty in 1978. (54 prisoners, on the other hand, have died of “natural causes.”)

My granddaddy used to say that the only thing that saves us is, we don’t get all the government we pay for. But this is ridiculous.

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An environmental group threatened to sue two of the nation’s biggest rail owners Tuesday under a novel legal theory that would classify diesel exhaust as hazardous waste.

The Natural Resources Defense Council sent letters to Union Pacific Corp. and Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway, saying it will file a lawsuit within 90 days under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, which regulates hazardous solid waste disposal.

Environmentalists! Of course! If horses were good enough for Queen Victoria, they ought to be good enough for you, dammit.

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It’s nice to know that at least somebody in this world has a realistic appreciation of where the threat lies.

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Not that it matters a damn what ‘scholars say’. Crustians only obey the law when it’s convenient.

The White House bypassed the administration’s own written guidelines for resolving major legal disputes when it overruled the Justice Department’s advice that the president seek congressional approval for U.S. military operations in Libya, according to some legal scholars.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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It would appear that Mexico seems to think they have a right to send us all their discontented people. If they were cars, this would be called ‘dumping’ and the government would give them such a noogie….

The bill would also make it illegal for illegal aliens to receive public benefits. Again, I’m pretty sure that’s how it works down in Mexico, too, assuming there’s much in the way of beneficios públicos to be had. Either way, I’d consider it ill-mannered if I were to barge into an emergency room somewhere in the Free and Sovereign State of Chihuahua and demand that they yank out my gall bladder for free.

Georgia’s bill also specifies that when making such inquiries, police “shall not consider race, color, or national origin,” which seems rather gallant given the fact that four out of every five illegal immigrants in America is from south of the border.

I guess American Exceptionalism means never getting to play by the same rules as everybody else….

In their legal brief, the entire country of Mexico, as well as every last inhabitant of nearly every other maize-kneading nation south of Texas, complained that those meddlesome busybodies in Georgia who write Georgia’s laws had enacted legislation that “substantially and inappropriately burdens the consistent country to country relations between Mexico and the United States of America…interfering with the strategic diplomatic interests of the two countries and encouraging an imminent threat of state-sanctioned bias or discrimination.”

Such as the state-sanctioned bias or discrimination that Mexico (to choose a purely random example) uses on its neighbors to the south? That sort of state-sanctioned bias or discrimination?

According to the most reliable accounting I’ve seen—one which excludes legal adult immigrants but includes the educational and medical tabs run up by the “anchor babies”—each one of those oft-scorned “average American households” is forced to pay over $1,000 a year to cover the costs accrued by these “undocumented individuals” and their spawn. And that calculation includes all of the tax revenues that these brave and humble un-naturalized soil-tillers reputedly pump into our system. Even after the taxes are tallied, illegal immigrants cost America over a hundred freakin’ billion dollars yearly.

Funny how that works….

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No doubt for some warranty repair.

[Wheel of the Crust keeps on turnin’, don’ know where I’ll be tomorrow….]

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What’s cooler than jetting from Paris to Tokyo in under three hours?

Trying to figure out how many people actually need to do that — you might have to take your shoes off — and how many could afford to take this inevitably-absurdly-expensive service, almost all of whom have their own jets already. Oh, and UN officials, who’ll be riding on our dime; can’t forget them.

Yet another Crustian toy masquerading as technological progress.

Class warfare comes to Britain.

Or maybe it never left.

There may be an argument for high-speed rail in places that have people wanting to go long distances between major metropolitan areas, such as the U.S., China, India, Russia, etc., but no case whatever has been made for needing it in Britain, where you can get pretty much anywhere in the country in six hours by car and ten by rail. The railroads in Britain suck, and have ever since they were nationalized after WWII; this is not Sherlock Holmes territory any more).

So why build high-speed rail in Britain? Why, because all the Cool Kids are doing high-speed rail.

“A vocal minority are determined to block our ambitious proposals to create a railway fit for the 21st century,” he said.

“It is important that all those who are in favour make themselves heard by responding to the consultation under way so that we put the national interest ahead of purely local interests. ”

Can’t have Britain without the latest toys, even though they can’t even afford a decent Navy any more.

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California currently ranks #49 among U.S. states for “business tax climate” (Tax Foundation) and #48 for for “economic freedom” (Mercatus).  It shouldn’t be any surprise then that companies are leaving the “Golden State” in record numbers this year (see chart above) for “golder pastures” and more business-friendly climates in other states.

And who could blame them?

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And over the cliff they goooooooooooo….

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The figures appear to refer primarily to those Americans wealthy enough to warrant notifying the Internal Revenue Service of their change of status, rather than all expatriates. A total of 499 Americans fell into this expatriate category during the first quarter of this year. The number during the first quarter in each of the previous seven years averaged 115.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

The U.S. tax rules for U.S. citizens living overseas can be quite complex. The increase in awareness of the penalties has caused many individuals with dual citizenship to conclude that their U.S. citizenship is not worth the stress and hassle of the U.S. tax filing rules. The U.S. is almost the only country in the world that requires its citizens that live permanently in another country to continue to file tax returns in the country of citizenship. Combine the U.S. tax return filing complexities with the potentially bankrupting penalties for failing to report certain items, and many individuals conclude that their lives would improve by shedding their U.S. citizenship.

I wish I could say that I blamed them.

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“Mitt Romney pledged in the last campaign that he would be a pro-life president and of course he pledges it today,” said Romney Campaign communications director Gail Gitcho. “However, this well-intentioned effort has some potentially unforeseen consequences and he does not feel he could in good conscience sign it.”

Weasel. Scratch Romney as a candidate.

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Gee, they used to do that all the time in the Soviet Union. What’s the big deal? I’m sure Nikita Kruschev is squatting on the coals grinning because the Brits are busy burying themselves.

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I don’t think I’ve used a phone book in 15 years. Once they set up a way you could opt out of phone book delivery on the Internet I signed up and haven’t gotten one lately. Don’t miss it, either.

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Last week a Los Angeles County jury convicted Alan Kimble Fahey of 12 misdemeanors for building Phonehenge West, a quirky series of buildings atop utility poles sunk into his property in the Antelope Valley. The convictions—for maintaining illegal structures, unlawfully installing electrical wiring, and disobeying orders to stop construction—did not include a single real crime. And for a long time, the county’s building enforcers did not seem to think Fahey’s fanciful project was worth worrying about. Fahey says that after a series of visits and exchanges in the early 1980s, the county ignored him for 20 years before suddenly demanding that he tear it all down.

Yet another reason to avoid California.

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My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Megan McArdle points out an inconvenient truth.

Proponents of health care reform are gnashing their teeth, while opponents grimly say “I told you so”, at the news of a study from Illinois showing that children in Medicaid/SCHIP have difficulty getting specialists to treat them….

And Illinois is a Blue State.

Obviously, this has implications for the plans to cut Medicare reimbursements.  And for the success of ObamaCare, since most of the coverage expansion will come, not from the exchanges, but from extending Medicaid.

Indeed. Unless you dragoon medical people into your coercive system, like the National Health Service in Britain or whatever they call that monstrosity of government-run health care in Canada, you can’t keep cutting the pay of health care providers and expect them to work for you. The market doesn’t work that way, and we still have the remnant of a free market in health care in the U.S.

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Americans’ life expectancy may be 78 years, but a new report says only 69 of those years tend to be healthy ones _ and the problems can start long before people reach a doctor’s office.

The Obama administration is releasing a plan Thursday that calls for preventing disease and injury, with a greater emphasis on creating healthier homes, communities, foods, roads and workplaces.

Funny, I don’t see anything in the Constitution empowering the Federal government to make us live healthier lives. Or even to develop a plan for our doing so. Especially when we’ve got terrorists dedicated to killing Americans and destroying American property seemingly crossing the border like jaywalkers in Manhattan.

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The Democratic Congress hasn’t adopted a budget in more than two years. This isn’t just irresponsible, it is illegal. Jeff Sessions, the ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, has been hammering away at the Democrats’ dereliction, and things are starting to get a little hot for Harry Reid and Kent Conrad. Loyal Democrats like Dana Milbank and Tim Kaine are criticizing them for blowing off the budget, and Senate Democrats who have to fact the voters next year are reportedly getting nervous. So Harry Reid, naturally, is trying to change the subject.

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Over the past five years, New York State has awarded more than $7.4 billion in contracts to clients of law firms that employ state legislators, according to a review of court filings and other records.

The surprise here is that the New York Times bothered to mention it, since it’s universal knowledge and since the overwhelming majority of corrupt legislators are Democrats, beloved of the New York Times.

This may also be marked down as further evidence that lawyers ought to be disabled from serving as legislators. The classic argument for preferring lawyers as legislators is that it promotes well-formed laws, but recent history shows that, on the contrary, having lawyers as legislators tends to facilitate overly complex and virtually opaque laws, making more work for … wait for it … lawyers.