Unlike Her Cohort, Susan Collins Makes Sense

Maine's other Republican Senator, Susan Collins, reacted swiftly to the pro-health reform vote of Olympia Snowe, who calls herself a Republican but says her party has changed for the worse.

Seeing through the Senate Finance Committee reform plan, Senator Collins said the bill not only does not lower costs but actually raises them:

The goal of health care reform must be to rein in costs and provide consumers with more affordable choices. Yet, many individuals and families would be forced to pay more for their health care under the Finance Committee bill, and they would have fewer choices. Our health care reform efforts should give Americans more, not fewer, choices of affordable coverage options.

She also lamented the gutting of Medicare for senior citizens.

It would be laughable if not palpably tragic to listen to Barack Obama and his Demo-cronies hail health reform as "deficit-neutral" and lowering costs for Americans.

Instead of my going on and on, however, read Senator Collins' perceptive comments here.

Must See in Germany: The OSH Museum

OSH stands for Occupational Safety and Health, and it's the name of both a Nixon-era law--the OSH Act--and an ongoing federal agency, the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA). It's also the name of a museum in Dortmund, Germany.

I have no first-hand knowledge of the Occupational Safety and Health Museum, but since OSHA in the U.S. deals with a lot of workplace injuries and fatalities, I can imagine all kinds of grotesqueries in the museum, but that's evidently not the case. Here's a description for the site travelblog.viator.com:

Amongst the many, many things on offer are playful robotic arms, interactive games that mess with your visual perception, aircraft cockpits to sit in and mock-ups of a power station’s control room.

All manner of machinery is on display, from weaving looms and printing presses to helicopters used to repair power lines. There are lots of buttons to press, computers to play with and enormous contraptions to control. All information is in German, so you might not understand what’s going on most of the time if you don’t speak the language, but the sheer scale and ambition of the exhibition make it worth visiting.

Unfortunately, the site offered no pictures of the place.

Predatory Cell Phones Target of New Law

As I've mused before, why don't they just implant us all with mind-reading GPS devices at birth? They, of course, are our brilliant legislators in Washington, D.C., Sacramento (fill in your state's capital), and in every City Hall nationwide.

Now comes this gem out of a Republican Congressman from New York. His Camera Phone Predator Act (he wasn't watching his abbreviations here--this works out to CPPA and CREEP would be better) would require cell phones with cameras to make a loud noise every time a photo is snapped. This, he reasons, would alert women that they were being photographed up skirt, as it is called.

Presumably, another law covers the taking of illicit photographs of people's privates, but CPPA would make it a crime to disable or silence the camera tone.

Brilliant, isn't it? Barf....