Some people lie, and some people lie big time:

Carrollton [Texas] Mayor Becky Miller’s City Council colleagues are assessing the fallout from questions about her past.

Ms. Miller has told acquaintances she sang backup for Linda Ronstadt and Jackson Browne and was engaged to Eagles singer-songwriter Don Henley. She has also said she had a brother who died in Vietnam. Spokesmen for the famous singers said the three don’t know her. And the mayor’s father said she never had a brother who died in the war.

I think Ms. Miller doesn’t have much wiggle room here. Let’s see, maybe her father out of trauma can’t remember his son …

So, barring some amazing proof of her claims, is Ms. Miller a pathological liar or a compulsive liar? This makes you curious whether she used a string of lies to help get her elected as mayor. Imagine, a lying politician.

Update: Here is Becky Miller’s website. In the last video she says “all my friends come from all different kinds of religions”. Truth or untruth? Who knows.

Update2: Ms. Miller defends herself, sort of.

Update3: Some more details on Ms. Miller’s claims. She is in pretty deep.

Update4: Becky Miller loses the election.

Instead of using corn to make Ethanol, this is a much better way to go:

Farmers in Nebraska and the Dakotas brought the U.S. closer to becoming a biofuel economy, planting huge tracts of land for the first time with switchgrass—a native North American perennial grass (Panicum virgatum) that often grows on the borders of cropland naturally—and proving that it can deliver more than five times more energy than it takes to grow it.

Working with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the farmers tracked the seed used to establish the plant, fertilizer used to boost its growth, fuel used to farm it, overall rainfall and the amount of grass ultimately harvested for five years on fields ranging from seven to 23 acres in size (three to nine hectares).

… The use of native prairie grasses is meant to avoid some of the other risks associated with biofuels such as reduced diversity of local animal life and displacing food crops with fuel crops. “This is an energy crop that can be grown on marginal land,” Vogel argues, such as the more than 35 million acres (14.2 million hectares) of marginal land that farmers are currently paid not to plant under the terms of USDA’s Conservation Reserve Program.

The US needs to migrate away from diverting corn to make ethanol. With the new worldwide spike in food prices partly blamed on US ethanol subsidies, it is just a bad idea to be planting fields of corn and then using them to power our SUVs.

As farmers grow more corn to chase the government ethanol subsidies, farmers plant less wheat. This increases the price of wheat due to reduced supply. There are many other ways that US subsidies for ethanol production are driving up food prices around the world. With the poor in poor countries most affected, it is time for the US to change policies.

John McCain wants to end ethanol subsidies. For a politician he had some surprisingly forthright things to say in a speech last November in Ames, Iowa:

Yes, I oppose subsidies. Not just ethanol subsidies. Subsidies. And not just in Iowa either. I oppose them in my own state of Arizona. I am a proud of the conservative tradition that the government can sometimes best serve the interests of the American people by knowing when to stay out of their way. And I’ve always been reluctant to grow the size of government to do the business of the American people for them or to favor one industry over another or because one sector of our economy has better lobbyists than another. I want the government to do its job, not your job, to do it better and to do it with less of your money. I want our economy to grow, not the size of government.

More classical piano. This time by Vladimir Horowitz, one the greatest classical pianist of all time. This piece is slow and beautiful. (Via Pejman Yousefzadeh’s blog).

Mr. Horowitz is playing Liszt Consolation No. 3.

This surprises me:

Conservative blue-collar “Reagan Democrats” left the party in the 1980s for Republican President Ronald Reagan and many never came back. In 2000, Democrat Al Gore lost working-class whites by 17 points, and in 2004 John Kerry lost them by 23 points.

But wait, the Democratic party is supposed to be the party of the working man and woman! What irony.

And Obama is in really bad shape with working class whites (that bitter bunch):

In Pennsylvania, exit polls found Clinton captured two of every three white voters from families earning less than $50,000 a year and the same number of those without college degrees, extending the dominance she showed in other big-state showdowns from Ohio to New Jersey and California.

I suppose that the only white working class voters that Democrats can hang on to in the general election are union workers. Kerry beat Bush by 59-40 in union households in 2004. Union workers strongly support Democratic politicians because they strongly favor using government power to force businesses to accept union contracts. (Otherwise, no business would ever sign a union contract.) This allows union members to receive above market wages and benefits. Unionism is a branch of the welfare state where employers are required to pay extra due to government coercion. So government forces companies to pay more to union workers rather than government subsidizing the workers directly.

Along with union workers, blacks and Hispanics vote strongly Democratic. Why? For one thing, there is much desire to expand the welfare state (jobs programs, more education spending, training programs, more tax credits and subsidies, expanded government-mandated health care, housing subsides, etc.).

This leaves upper middle class white liberals as the remaining whites that vote Democratic. Why? Well, for one thing, while the welfare state benefits them less, they believe so strongly in the value of an expansive welfare state that they naturally vote Democratic. It is like religious faith. Unions are wonderful, we need to give them more power. Every anti-poverty program is wonderful, they can do no harm - we need more. More social spending is needed on all fronts - we should be more like Sweden. Plus Democratic politicians are so right on those paramount issues of our time - like allowing abortions, stopping global warming, and getting out of Iraq immediately even if the place collapses.

I’d say the Democrats are in much worse shape to win the White House than they were a few months ago. I just wish McCain was better on the issues.

The left-wing institutions that have so much power in Canada have reached a new level of nuttiness:

Datt wouldn’t wash her hands. She just wouldn’t — she said she couldn’t. So her employment was terminated. The B.C. Human Rights Tribunal ordered that McDonald’s pay her not only $23,000 for “lost income”, but an additional $25,000 for her “dignity and self-respect”. You see, in B.C. a food preparation worker’s self-respect trumps a company’s commitment to cleanliness. They violated her “human rights”.

The $50,000+ penalty — plus several years of legal fees and medical and rehab experts — isn’t the worst of it. Inventing a “human right” for a worker to go to the bathroom and then to handle meat without washing her hands in between, as an excuse for that $50,000 shakedown isn’t the worst of it either.

The worst of it is that the BCHRT has ordered that McDonald’s, in paragraph 298 of the decision, to “cease the discriminatory conduct or any similar conduct and refrain from committing the same or similar contravention.”

Beena Datt and her filthy hands are gone. But the restaurant has been ordered not to enforce its hand washing policy in any future cases like Datt’s.

Here is a reminder of the wonders of Western civilization. Wilhelm Kempff plays Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata mvt. 3. If you are ever going to listen to just one piece of classical piano, this is the guy to watch. I believe he is around 75 years old here, but maybe he is older. He was born in 1895.

This website has been doing strange things lately. It may be due to the zillion spam hits I get everyday. Spammers will try to break into your site too. Recently I have had posts edited with advertising materials (in the actual posts, not the comment section).

Today I see that an old draft post was published. I had never finished the post and had not intended to publish it. If you saw a post today about Ward Churchill, that was a draft made over a year ago that I had never published. It is really strange to see a post get published that I did not tell the site to publish. (So this means that a hacker has managed to get into this site.)

I have about 100 posts that I have never published. Some are half-complete and some are simply half-baked.

Maybe I need to upgrade Wordpress (the site software) to improve security. If anyone has other suggestions, please let me know.

Update: I installed some spam blocking software about a year ago. Amazingly, it has blocked 439,524 spam comments on this site so far. It is hard to keep ahead of the spammers, they are out of control.

Update2: To comment at this site, you now must register and login. Sorry for doing this, but I am having to take more security measures to stop the hackers and spammers.

Western countries that have long been run by left-wingers have begun imposing various limits on free speech. As an American, this is a really frustrating thing to watch. Here is a new example in France:

PARIS (Reuters) - French former film star Brigitte Bardot went on trial on Tuesday for insulting Muslims, the fifth time she has faced the charge of “inciting racial hatred” over her controversial remarks about Islam and its followers.

Prosecutors asked that the Paris court hand the 73-year-old former sex symbol a two-month suspended prison sentence and fine her 15,000 euros ($23,760) for saying the Muslim community was “destroying our country and imposing its acts”.

…Prosecutor Anne de Fontette told the court she was seeking a tougher sentence than usual, adding: “I am a little tired of prosecuting Mrs Bardot.”

How about this instead Ms. de Fontette: You should refuse to prosecute in protest of having to blatantly deny Ms. Bardot’s right to free speech.

If we lose the right to say things that are seen as offensive to some groups, basically we give up our freedom of speech. Where are the protests in the streets of France?

Sadly, Canada is having similar problems with ridiculous restrictions on free speech. And hurrah for Ezra Levant.

A news article today notes the same points that I did in my last post regarding the US president boycotting the opening ceremonies of the Olympics in China. Fortunately, President Bush will likely show more sense than Clinton or Obama who insist that he should boycott. From the news article:

Bush is giving no indication he will skip the event. Too much may be at stake for him to do so.

Any Olympic protest by the United States would deeply offend a proud Beijing leadership that hopes the games will show China’s emergence as a new world power. It also would run the risk of hindering a host of international efforts the Bush administration needs China’s help to solve, including efforts to confront Myanmar’s military junta and North Korean and apparently Iranian nuclear programs. China holds a veto on the U.N. Security Council, and the U.S. and Chinese economies, as well as many of the countries’ political efforts around the world, are increasingly intertwined.

On Friday, Bush repeated his position that the Olympics are for sports, not politics. He told ABC News that his decision to attend the games is not affected by pleas from activists who want world leaders to skip the opening ceremony to protest violence in Tibet. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says the United States will “press the Chinese on human rights issues before, during and after these upcoming Olympic Games.”

… That position could change if Beijing were to stage a crackdown reminiscent of the one against pro-democracy protesters at Tiananmen Square in 1989.

But Michael Green, Bush’s former Asia adviser, says the president probably will attend the opening ceremonies.

“The problem with a boycott is you end up taking 1.3 billion Chinese — who have different views of democracy, of the U.S., of human rights, but all want the Olympics to be successful — and you turn them all against the U.S.,” said Green, an analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank. “It’s a crude and blunt instrument to just boycott.”

Bush, he added, is “stubborn when he thinks he’s got the right decision.”

The point that is a bit of a stretch is that Bush believes that the “Olympics are for sports, not politics”. In a world where all countries are free and democratic, this could be made true. But for now the games are political. For example, it is a political decision that the world would not stand for having the games in say North Korea. So it is a political decision by the countries of the world that some countries are not worthy of hosting the Olympics.

The decision to have the games in China in the first place was a political decision. The IOC’s idea was that the games would help push China toward improving human rights. So these Olympics in China are turning into one the most politicized in recent years.

I have never liked the idea of the Olympics being held in China. The Olympics shouldn’t be held in countries that are not democracies and that regularly abuse human rights. But isn’t it a little late for our leaders in the US to start protesting now by thumbing our noses at the Chinese? The Democratic candidates for president think otherwise:

LEVITTOWN, Pa. - Barack Obama joined Democratic presidential rival Hillary Rodham Clinton on Wednesday in calling for President Bush to boycott the opening ceremonies for the Olympic Games in Beijing.

Clinton had commended British Prime Minister Gordon Brown for announcing that he will skip the August ceremonies in China’s capital, and called on Obama and likely Republican presidential nominee John McCain to join her in urging Bush to do the same.

Obama did later in the day; his campaign issued a statement in which, for the first time, he urged Bush to boycott the festivities.

If President Bush follows their advice, yes it will be an embarrassment for the Chinese government. Furthermore, the public in China will be very offended.

Of course, they say in Asia that a very big mistake is to cause someone to lose face. So if President Bush boycotts the opening ceremonies he will cause the whole of China to lose face. That is not going to cause China to react positively to Western demands for China to improve its human rights record. In fact, it will likely make things worse as the Chinese think “the West be damned”. The Chinese leaders will then have an excuse to run things according to what they say is the unique “Chinese way”.

US leaders should have tried long ago to keep the Olympics out of China. The selection rules for the Olympic body should be changed to only have them in democratic countries. Have them in Japan, or South Korea, or Taiwan - but not China. Have them in Italy or Botswana - but not China. Have them in Iceland or Australia - but not China.

Primary care doctors who accept Medicare and Medicaid patients are often doing charity work. If the federal government is going to fund an insurance program for the retired and the poor, then they should reimburse doctors at the going rate. Otherwise doctors are in the difficult position of having to make a choice between turning away the poor and the elderly or subsidizing them directly. Consider:

Primary care doctors typically fall at the bottom of the medical income scale, with average salaries in the range of $160,000 to $175,000 (compared with $410,000 for orthopedic surgeons and $380,000 for radiologists). In rural Massachusetts, where reimbursement rates are relatively low, some physicians are earning as little as $70,000 after 20 years of practice.

Officials with several large health systems said their primary care practices often lose money, but generate revenue for their companies by referring patients to profit centers like surgery and laboratories.

Dr. Atkinson, 45, said she paid herself a salary of $110,000 last year. Her insurance reimbursements often do not cover her costs, she said.

“I calculated that every time I have a Medicare patient it’s like handing them a $20 bill when they leave,” she said. “I never went into medicine to get rich, but I never expected to feel as disrespected as I feel. Where is the incentive for a practice like ours?”

And this is a problem that is going to get much, much worse over the next 20 years. Spending is projected to explode for Medicare as baby boomers begin retiring. Taxpayers will resist the higher taxes - and pressure will be on Congress to pay even less to doctors.

I have long argued at NoSpeedBumps that both Medicare and Medicaid should be phased out and replaced by a system of mandatory Health Saving Accounts (HSAs). For those that can’t afford to save enough, the federal government can subsidize their HSAs. This could solve the out of control costs coming for Medicare and Medicaid while holding off the takeover of health care by the government once the crisis is upon us.

A properly working system of private health insurance will pay doctors adequately. Since part of the HSA savings are used to purchase private health insurance, government can no longer set the rates that doctors are reimbursed. Instead, market forces are the primary determinant.

Medicare, Medicaid, taxpayers, and doctors are all in for big trouble ahead unless major reforms are implemented soon. The mistakes of the Great Society programs of the 1960s will be coming home to roost.