I am right now in the process of aggregating more IG-Gate related links [in addition to the ten I added this morning], but it will take me a bit to 'get r done'.  Your patience is appreciated.

To see what's linked so far, please click here.

If you can't wait for me to complete the task, Stacy McCain has already linked to some of them here.

Doug Ross [Director Blue] has published two very interesting postings lately...

1) Somehow the man has gotten ahold of some of the questions that have been submitted to Al-Qaeda's #2 Ayman Zawahiri on his website and that he has vowed to eventually answer.  Here's two of them:

Dear Mr. Doctor Zawahiri,

If your group happens to gain access to a nuclear weapon and detonate it in a western country, would you be so kind as to purchase some carbon offsets to make up for any thermonuclear warming that might endanger our snowcaps? Please visit PimpMyOffsets.com or call +1-888-555-GORE, toll-free, for more information. Thanks for your support in helping keep the world a greener place,

A. Gore, Belle Meade, TN

* * *

Dear Dr. Zawahiri,

How can I help?

Sincerely, Keith O., NYC

Please take the time to click here and read the rest.

2) Mr. Ross is truly an amazing man—he's now outdone himself: somehow, someway he's gotten his hands on a government newsreel from the near future!  He's got stills and the transcript.  A highlight from the narration:

And more positive news on the economic front: the rate of unemployment increases has slowed, moving from 17.1% to 17.4%, a tenth-of-a-percent less than analysts had predicted! Proof positive that Stimulus Seven is working!

What a man is this Ross-fellow.  Please click here to see and read the whole amazing thing. [tip of the fedora to Instapundit, who's also an amazing (and generous) man]

Over at Paco Enterprises, we're being treated to another installment in the saga of Detective Paco.  A taste:

“Take a look, Bo. What’s that big object on the bow that looks like a deck house or a port-a-potty?”

Bo squinted through the lenses. “Naw, that ain’t no deck house. That’s Al Gore. He’s taken to wearin’ a white uniform; got his crew wearin’ ‘em, too. And he changed the name of his boat from the Bio-Solar One to the Koenigen Luisa. Puttin’ on a lotta airs, is what he’s doin’.”

“Say!” Wronwright snapped his fingers. “The Koenigen Luisa. Wasn’t that the name of the warship in that movie…what’s the name?”

“The African Queen,” I said. “The Koenigen Luisa was the German ship that patrolled the lake.”

Bo brightened considerably. “Hey, I saw that one! Got sunk by a homemade torpedo, I recollect. That’s a possibility, ain’t it, Detective Paco?”

I pulled a coffin nail from the pack in my shirt pocket and lit it. “Listen, Bo. In the first place, if we torpedo the boat, somebody’s likely to get hurt, maybe even killed. In the second place, where would we get a torpedo, anyway? No, we’ve got to figure something else out.”

Do yourself a favor Clyde and take a short hop over to Paco's.  When ya get there take a gander at the rest of the story.

What is collectively being called Obamacare is one of the most complex pieces of legislation ever proposed on the national level.  There are so many nooks and crannies within it that even a single expert person, let alone us regular folk, would have trouble understanding it all.  While there are a number of experts in this area that we can rely upon [such as Keith Hennessey, Sally Pipes, Warner Todd Huston, and John Graham, to name but four of the best] to provide us with useful analysis and explanations, this is still not good enough.  Most of us average folk who are working hard to keep our jobs and raise our families don't have the time to bounce from website to website and sift through the mounds of background and analysis being provided.  We need the aggregators—those willing to look at it all, cull the best  and most useful of them, and then provide us with descriptions, commentary, and links.  Thankfully, there are a number of these types on the conservative side who are doing yeoman's work.

Out of them all, Pundette of Pundit & Pundette, in my opinion, is the best.  She's been out there slaving away, searching through much and distilling the best.

Here's an excerpt from a recent posting of her's entitled: Beyond Rationing: Controlling More Than Health:

Imagining your own or a loved one's fate in the hands of bureaucrats and "experts" is horrifying. Read this WSJ article about NICE, the UK board that decides who is and who is not worthy of particular drugs and treatments. They've made some very bad medical decisions because their decisions are based on cost and "there is a limited pot of money." Examples: rationing of medicine to treat macular degeneration, which causes blindness, to one in five, and for only one eye, because "When treatments are very expensive, we have to use them where they give the most benefit to patients." The board ruled to refuse treatment of early Alzheimer's with Aricept though the drug is most effective when taken at the onset of dementia. The article gives more examples of the board going against best medical practice.

Here's some links to more of her recent postings:

-Obama v America on health care reform

-Rush: Obama lying on health care changes

-What's really in the Obamacare bills

-Kyl on Obamacare

Please visit Pundit & Pundette often for the latest on the attempts to socialize and destroy the American Health Care System.

In the first posting of Pundette's I linked to above, she provides a link to and a quote from an op-ed by Betsy McCaughey in the New York Post:

There's plenty of waste in Medicare, but the Congressional Budget Office estimates only 1 percent of the savings under the legislation will be from curbing waste, fraud and abuse. That means the rest will likely come from reducing what patients get.

One troubling provision of the House bill compels seniors to submit to a counseling session every five years (and more often if they become sick or go into a nursing home) about alternatives for end-of-life care (House bill, p. 425-430). The sessions cover highly sensitive matters such as whether to receive antibiotics and "the use of artificially administered nutrition and hydration."

This mandate invites abuse, and seniors could easily be pushed to refuse care. Do we really want government involved in such deeply personal issues?

Another link Pundette provided recently is to this spot-on editorial by the Editors of Investor's Business Daily:

What wasn't known until now is that the bill itself will kill the market for private individual coverage by not letting any new policies be written after the public option becomes law.

The legislation is also likely to finish off health savings accounts, a goal that Democrats have had for years. They want to crush that alternative because nothing gives individuals more control over their medical care, and the government less, than HSAs.

With HSAs out of the way, a key obstacle to the left's expansion of the welfare state will be removed.

The public option won't be an option for many, but rather a mandate for buying government care. A free people should be outraged at this advance of soft tyranny.

My only quibble: I think it should be called 'Stealth Tyranny'.

Literally, our lives, and those of our families and all Americans, are on the line here.

OBAMACARE DELANDA EST!

SIDENOTE: Please also keep visiting the special section [Socializing Health Care] I've set up in the JUST THE FACTS, MAM part of the WWU-AMpage.  There I provide permanent links to background and analysis on this issue.  After, visiting Pundette, make your next stop JUST THE FACTS, MAM.

UPDATE: I've just added seven new permanent links on the Socialization of our Heath Care System over at JUST THE FACTS, MAM.  This one is the most important.

This past Saturday was the 40th Anniversary of the death at Chappaquiddick of Mary Jo Kopechne due to the negligence of one Edward Moore Kennedy.  He never paid for the crime because he paid enough for it to go away, and he took advantage of the pity Americans felt for his family and lied in a televised broadcast.  Those of us who believe in justice can only take heart in the fact that he will have to answer for his sins once he dies.

The Blogprof has provided is with a top-notch commemoration of the event over at his site.  As he comments: 'The Democrat party ought to be proud!'.

Please take the time to click here and view his full posting.  [tip of the fedora to Stacy McCain]

My greatest hope is that, once the Senator dies, Americans will wake up and say 'Enough with this wretched family!  Go away and 'serve the public' no more!'  As I wrote in a Dispatch here on 16 December 2008 when it seemed Princess Caroline Kennedy-Schlossberg was going to be appointed Senator:

My main objection to her appointment is the belief that seems to infect all Kennedys: that they are entitled to public offices.  There's an arrogance about them that, along with a sense of entitlement, makes my republican blood boil.  [I wish they would all, every single one of them, go away; they've done enough damage.]

I generally let some time pass before I speak ill of the dead, but in this case, before the mythologizing gets too out of hand and set in stone, I feel compelled to release the following into the ether...

RE: Walter Cronkite

He was indeed one of the most trusted men in America for two decades.  He was aware of this and he abused that trust in a most shameless and dishonorable way by slanting his coverage of important events by editing them to fit his Leftist point of view.

He had a presence like a General Galvin—oozing authority and commanding respect.  We allowed him the privilege to be our news-editor-in-chief, and he abused the privilege.  Yes, we deserve some of the blame for allowing him to get away with it for so long, but we Americans were a less skeptical and cynical people back then [we younger ones, at least, wised-up in the late 1970's and early 1980's because we had been through some very disheartening times at an impressionable age].

His bringing of his Leftist biases into his news reading and reporting only served us well when it came to the space program.  And this was just a mere happy confluence.

The lionizing of him in death has already begun.  The MSM [and, sadly, with Fox News Channel as fellow travellers] are building a figurative grand statute of him.  We must be prepared to topple it at the first opportunity.  Getting to it will not be easy, but, once we can break through the barriers, it will be easy as it is a statute made of sand.

May the man rest in peace in the arms of The Lord.  May the myth burn away.

Paco has up a some spot-on personal recollections of Mr. Cronkite.  A highlight:

He was one of the gravediggers of Vietnam, a key member of that band of journalists and opinion-mongers who turned the Tet offensive from what it actually was – a crushing defeat for the Communist guerillas, that permanently destroyed the Viet Cong as an effective fighting force – into a defeat for U.S. and South Vietnamese military forces. Cronkite helped the Communists snatch victory from the jaws of defeat by contributing to a massive shift in public opinion in the U.S. that eventually led our government to abandon Southeast Asia to the inevitable bloodbath.

Please take the time to click here and read his full posting.