Fannie Med

Don't be fooled. Obama is faking center-right.

The "public option" is nothing more and nothing less than government-run health care. Americans have figured that out, and they don't want it. So what do you do when you're desperate to sell a product nobody wants? You rename it.

Co-ops = Public Option = Government-run health care

The sooner America learns that equation, the better.

• Co-Ops Would Be Funded By Federal Government.

• Co-Ops Would Be Regulated By Federal Government.

• Co-Ops Would Force Individuals Who Want To Join To Go Through State Governments.

• The Federal Government Would Use Co-Ops To Monopolize Health Insurance.

Fannie Med, the mini-me public option:

“[T]hese co-ops sound a lot like a health-care Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac... The duo proceeded to use their government subsidy to dominate the market and drive out private competitors.”

Sen. Leader Harry Reid: "We’re going to have some type of public option, call it 'co-op,' call it what you want..."

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...

This post is a direct steal from RightKlik

Tattoo Tax possible in California

Democrats in Legislature target Sure Moneymaker

(GNN) Sacramento - As California's fiscal crisis deepens, despite desperate efforts by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Legislature, the state's politicians are casting about for ways to relieve the financial - and political - pressure.

That's why, out of the clear blue, taxing tattoos at an annual rate of $1.50 per marking, has moved to the Capitol's front burner.

The California Teachers Association and other labor unions are pushing this tax on body art, citing an increased number of tattoos in the general population. Tattoos that, in California, have escaped taxation for decades.

The Legislature's majority Democrats already have endorsed an extra $1.00-per-tattoo surcharge for markings above the neck or on the hands. The new taxes, if adopted, are expected to raise at least $2 billion per year.

Any tax on body art, however, would require at least some Republican support because of the constitutional requirement for two-thirds votes on new taxes. So it's not surprising that tattoo parlors and rock stars have been ramping up their opposition, distributing an informational handout explaining that citizens who would be impacted by this tax are individuals who, by lifestyle, reject the concepts of taxation and government control. .

The tattoo industry argues that tattoo taxes would encourage more "intimate and subtle body art" and fail to generate the purported $2 billion in new revenues.

Taxing tattoos or body piercings is politically attractive because polls consistently show it to be one of the few popular proposed levies. However, some critics argue that it's a regressive tax that falls mostly on lower-income consumers, and that tattoo revenues will fade as tattoing declines, making it an unstable source of money.

Californians purchased nearly 0.3 tattoos per capita per year four decades ago, but popularity has now increased to some 302 million tattoos a year in all.

The Mackinac study estimates that 16.8 percent of California's tattoos are hidden on shoulders, breasts, and lower backs, 10.7 percent on genitalia, 8 percent on the face, and 35.5 on the legs or arms.

We should hear a lot more about this in the months ahead as the state's fiscal noose tightens.

Save the Trees

I walked to town this morning. My household supply of martini olives had grown alarmingly low, so I strolled up to the local Shop 'N Bag with the goal of replenishing a few of life's staples. I almost turned back after spotting Corina Flatt-Tuttle perched at a card table just to the right of the automatic doors.

She's an energetic steel-eyed New Age gal who resembles a shorter and less mellow Bea Arthur. Corina was collecting signatures. I gathered my pluck and paced steadily forward.

"Corina, what a glorious morning. God's up there in the big chair and, basically, the world's not bad."

She lit up like a puppy.

"Nickie, I need your help. The Nevada County Mothers for Healthy Air need you to support us. We want people to breathe freely. I know you do too."

I looked for a quick escape, but a gaggle of Seniors were approaching the entrance with a hesitancy usually reserved for llamas leaping through inner tubes.

"It's at the top of my list."

Relief swept over her.

"We must ban fireplaces and woodstoves that spew out their filth and poison our children. You have probably noticed the extreme heat lately. Someone has to do something to lessen this County's carbon footprint. We'd also be saving our native forests and their habitat. Sign right here."

I breathed deeply and spoke slowly.

"I have noticed the heat. I chalked it up to that whole Summer thing. Corina, this community is surrounded my millions of acres of forest, and, at present, there is an active forest fire gobbling up thousands of acres a day. T'was ever thus. Show me where I can sign to have the government ban forest fires.

Anyhoo, I've always considered trees to be a renewable resource. Chestnuts roasting on an Aga stove? I'm gonna have to think this one over."

At that moment, I felt as one with child molesters perp-walked past glaring parents. Bill Buckner and I were birds of a feather. Corina Flatt-Tuttle's glare clearly wished harm to my spawn for generations to come.

The oldsters at the entrance had collectively solved the puzzle of the stacked red shopping baskets, so I slunk gingerly into the air-conditioned sanctuary.

I bought olives, ham steaks, and a jar of fair trade organic dye-free peppercorns.

I'm not totally unsympathetic to the cause.

Nothing is as liberating as prosperity

Janet Daley of The Telegraph takes a look at Britain's love-hate relationship with prosperity.

Then we were into the 1980s and suddenly the Conservatives were saying genuinely radical things to working-class people: you don't have to stay where you started out in life; you can buy your council house and join the property-owning class; you can start your own business and leave behind your old assumptions about your place in the world. There followed a generation of Essex Men, with their much-reviled "Loadsamoney" mentality and vulgar habits which Left-wing intellectuals found so easy to despise.

When I first arrived in Britain from America in the 1960s, I was shocked by the class system. Not because such social divides were unknown in the US, but because there was an utterly different attitude here towards the possibility of moving on from the condition into which you had been born. It was not the poverty or the deprivation of British working class life that staggered me – there was plenty of that where I came from. It was the passivity and defeatism, the ineradicable sense of resignation, of people who believed it was inconceivable that they or anyone they knew should transcend their social and cultural limitations. I had never met people who said, when you encouraged their children to aim for university, "Don't go putting ideas in his head."

My memories of that time had faded over the years, but they were brought vividly back to life by last week's controversy over which political party is the truly progressive one. I was on the Left in those days, a veteran of the student revolution at Berkeley: indeed, one of the reasons I had become an expatriate was my disenchantment with America's capitalist values. So my natural political sympathies hovered between the Trotskyite New Left and the fundamentalist wing of the Labour Party.

There was, at first, something deeply stirring in the message that class solidarity was the answer to the unjust arrangements of a hierarchical society, and that solidarity meant loyalty to your roots. It was easy to romanticise the attempt to make an ideological virtue out of entrenched social immobility. To believe, indeed, that to move out of the working class would be treacherous to your brethren, that it was selfish (a word that was to play an enormous role in anti-Thatcherite rhetoric) – an abandonment of those with whom you shared a common misfortune.

Labour's message to what it used to call "our people" was a mix of trade union militancy ("We hate this unjust society, so we will sabotage it") and paternalist, welfare state condescension ("Stay where you are and we'll look after you"). What it preached, above all else, was that the working class could only triumph collectively: that the true struggle was between one fixed set of people who had been born into disadvantage, and another who had, for illegitimate reasons, every privilege that life could offer.

But the Marxist mystique collapsed pretty readily once you looked at the real consequences. Individual aspiration and self-determination – the things that actually made a life worth living in terms of personal fulfilment – were being devalued or forcibly crushed. Opportunities were not so much being denied to working-class people as being renounced by them. And the party that was most enthusiastic in perpetuating this grotesque state of affairs was Labour, because its electoral power base depended on it.

(More...)

Palin wins 'death panel' battle

Sarah Palin makes Obama's Mob say "Uncle"
Wins public debate over Death Panels for Older Americans

"Recently, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin speculated that Obama and other Democrats wanted to set up "death panels" to decide who gets medical services and who does not."

"The Palin claim about "death panels" was so widely discredited that the White House has begun openly quoting it in an effort to show that opponents of the healthcare overhaul are misinformed."

"Still, a week after first using the term on her Facebook page, Palin defended her claim this week with a new posting. And senators on the finance committee decided to get rid of the provision that appeared to be animating the claim."

(More...)

Senate committee scraps healthcare provision that gave rise to 'death panel' claims

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More Health Care Nonsense

By Charles Krauthammer

WASHINGTON -- In the 48 hours of June 15-16, President Obama lost the health care debate. First, a letter from the Congressional Budget Office to Sen. Edward Kennedy reported that his health committee's reform bill would add $1 trillion in debt over the next decade. Then the CBO reported that the other Senate bill, being written by the Finance Committee, would add $1.6 trillion. The central contradiction of Obamacare was fatally exposed: From his first address to Congress, Obama insisted on the dire need for restructuring the health care system because out-of-control costs were bankrupting the Treasury and wrecking the U.S. economy -- yet the Democrats' plans would make the problem worse.

Accordingly, Democrats have trotted out various tax proposals to close the gap. Obama's idea of limits on charitable and mortgage-interest deductions went nowhere. As did the House's income tax surcharge on millionaires. And Obama dare not tax employer-provided health insurance because of his campaign pledge of no middle-class tax hikes.

Desperation time. What do you do? Sprinkle fairy dust on every health care plan, and present your deus ex machina: prevention.

Free mammograms and diabetes tests and checkups for all, promise Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer, writing in USA Today. Prevention, they assure us, will not just make us healthier, it also "will save money."

(More...)

More Health Care Nonsense

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Warning From the Tomb

Hat Tip to No Pasaran

Surge in casualties undermining Afghan war effort, Army report says

Do you remember all those protesters demanding to know why we were in Iraq instead of Afghanistan?
Here's one reason why...

By Sean Rayment, The Telegraph's Defence Correspondent

A top level report ordered by General Sir Richard Dannatt, the chief of the general staff, warns that pressure on the Army is being "compounded" by the growing number of troops wounded in Afghanistan.

In an astonishing admission the report also reveals that the Army does not have accurate figures for the number of seriously injured soldiers within its ranks and admits that many are not receiving the appropriate medical support.

Details of the document can be disclosed as the Ministry of Defence (MoD) named three soldiers killed in a multiple improvised explosive attack close to Sangin on Thursday.

Captain Mark Hale, 42, Rifleman Daniel Wild, 19, both of the 2nd battalion the Rifles and Lance Bombardier Matthew Hatton, 23, of 40th Regiment Royal Artillery, were killed in two separate explosions.

Their deaths brought to 199 the number of British troops killed in Afghanistan since 2001.

The document, entitled the Chief of the General Staff's Briefing Team Report, also warns that "soldiers' morale and operational effectiveness" is being undermined by a shortage of vital equipment and that troops of all ranks are suffering from "widespread professional dissatisfaction".

* The Army has great concern over long-term care of wounded;

* There is widespread concern that soldiers are waiting too long for treatment for non-operational injuries;

* Families fear returning troops are suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder;

* Thousands of soldiers are not fit for operations;

* Every unit is carrying "gaps" in officer numbers;

* Increases in pre-deployment training are leading to tour lengths of 10-12 months;

* Bureaucracy is increasing across all levels of the Army;

* Territorial Army (TA) soldiers can earn more working shifts in Starbucks;

* It is "not unusual" for TA pay to be delayed by six to eights months;

* The Treasury has consistently refused to give soldiers on operations a tax-free allowance.

It also states that commanders are increasingly worried that they are being asked "to do too much with too few resources".

(More...)

Whole Foods Boycott Picks Up Steam

An update to the inspiring article below.
Click Here

The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare

Eight things we can do to improve health care without adding to the deficit.

By JOHN MACKEY (Wall Street Journal)

"The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out
of other people's money."

—Margaret Thatcher

With a projected $1.8 trillion deficit for 2009, several trillions more in deficits projected over the next decade, and with both Medicare and Social Security entitlement spending about to ratchet up several notches over the next 15 years as Baby Boomers become eligible for both, we are rapidly running out of other people's money. These deficits are simply not sustainable. They are either going to result in unprecedented new taxes and inflation, or they will bankrupt us.

While we clearly need health-care reform, the last thing our country needs is a massive new health-care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new unfunded deficits and move us much closer to a government takeover of our health-care system. Instead, we should be trying to achieve reforms by moving in the opposite direction—toward less government control and more individual empowerment. Here are eight reforms that would greatly lower the cost of health care for everyone:

• Remove the legal obstacles that slow the creation of high-deductible health insurance plans and health savings accounts (HSAs). The combination of high-deductible health insurance and HSAs is one solution that could solve many of our health-care problems. For example, Whole Foods Market pays 100% of the premiums for all our team members who work 30 hours or more per week (about 89% of all team members) for our high-deductible health-insurance plan. We also provide up to $1,800 per year in additional health-care dollars through deposits into employees' Personal Wellness Accounts to spend as they choose on their own health and wellness.Money not spent in one year rolls over to the next and grows over time. Our team members therefore spend their own health-care dollars until the annual deductible is covered (about $2,500) and the insurance plan kicks in. This creates incentives to spend the first $2,500 more carefully. Our plan's costs are much lower than typical health insurance, while providing a very high degree of worker satisfaction.

• Equalize the tax laws so that employer-provided health insurance and individually owned health insurance have the same tax benefits. Now employer health insurance benefits are fully tax deductible, but individual health insurance is not. This is unfair.

• Repeal all state laws which prevent insurance companies from competing across state lines. We should all have the legal right to purchase health insurance from any insurance company in any state and we should be able use that insurance wherever we live. Health insurance should be portable.

• Repeal government mandates regarding what insurance companies must cover. These mandates have increased the cost of health insurance by billions of dollars. What is insured and what is not insured should be determined by individual customer preferences and not through special-interest lobbying.

• Enact tort reform to end the ruinous lawsuits that force doctors to pay insurance costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. These costs are passed back to us through much higher prices for health care.

• Make costs transparent so that consumers understand what health-care treatments cost. How many people know the total cost of their last doctor's visit and how that total breaks down? What other goods or services do we buy without knowing how much they will cost us?

• Enact Medicare reform. We need to face up to the actuarial fact that Medicare is heading towards bankruptcy and enact reforms that create greater patient empowerment, choice and responsibility.

• Finally, revise tax forms to make it easier for individuals to make a voluntary, tax-deductible donation to help the millions of people who have no insurance and aren't covered by Medicare, Medicaid or the State Children's Health Insurance Program.Many promoters of health-care reform believe that people have an intrinsic ethical right to health care—to equal access to doctors, medicines and hospitals. While all of us empathize with those who are sick, how can we say that all people have more of an intrinsic right to health care than they have to food or shelter?

Health care is a service that we all need, but just like food and shelter it is best provided through voluntary and mutually beneficial market exchanges. A careful reading of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution will not reveal any intrinsic right to health care, food or shelter. That's because there isn't any. This "right" has never existed in America

Even in countries like Canada and the U.K., there is no intrinsic right to health care. Rather, citizens in these countries are told by government bureaucrats what health-care treatments they are eligible to receive and when they can receive them. All countries with socialized medicine ration health care by forcing their citizens to wait in lines to receive scarce treatments.

Although Canada has a population smaller than California, 830,000 Canadians are currently waiting to be admitted to a hospital or to get treatment, according to a report last month in Investor's Business Daily. In England, the waiting list is 1.8 million.

At Whole Foods we allow our team members to vote on what benefits they most want the company to fund. Our Canadian and British employees express their benefit preferences very clearly—they want supplemental health-care dollars that they can control and spend themselves without permission from their governments. Why would they want such additional health-care benefit dollars if they already have an "intrinsic right to health care"? The answer is clear—no such right truly exists in either Canada or the U.K.—or in any other country.

Rather than increase government spending and control, we need to address the root causes of poor health. This begins with the realization that every American adult is responsible for his or her own health.

Unfortunately many of our health-care problems are self-inflicted: two-thirds of Americans are now overweight and one-third are obese. Most of the diseases that kill us and account for about 70% of all health-care spending—heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes and obesity—are mostly preventable through proper diet, exercise, not smoking, minimal alcohol consumption and other healthy lifestyle choices.

Recent scientific and medical evidence shows that a diet consisting of foods that are plant-based, nutrient dense and low-fat will help prevent and often reverse most degenerative diseases that kill us and are expensive to treat. We should be able to live largely disease-free lives until we are well into our 90s and even past 100 years of age.

Health-care reform is very important. Whatever reforms are enacted it is essential that they be financially responsible, and that we have the freedom to choose doctors and the health-care services that best suit our own unique set of lifestyle choices. We are all responsible for our own lives and our own health. We should take that responsibility very seriously and use our freedom to make wise lifestyle choices that will protect our health. Doing so will enrich our lives and will help create a vibrant and sustainable American society.

Mr. Mackey is co-founder and CEO of Whole Foods Market Inc.

Hat tip to Left Coast Rebel

Two Democrats on an Escalator

The Blue Dog "Forlorn Hope Brigade"

Nancy Pelosi does not care if the passage of ObamaCare costs her seats in the House come 2010. She has already done a head count. And she knows exactly how many Blue Dogs and other vulnerable Democrats in that chamber she can spare in 2010 to fully enact her and Barack Obama's radical agenda to quickly implement a government takeover the health care system.

Call them the Blue Dog "Forlorn Hope Brigade." The real Forlorn Hope Brigade was nicknamed after the French army pawns that would always be the first to charge into battle, with little to no hope of survival. They were in essence cannon fodder. But they were told to think of the glory. To know that their sacrifices were for a good cause.

And that's the position Pelosi and Obama have put the Blue Dogs into. They are now the sacrificial lambs by which to enact an agenda that is almost alien to the American people. They gave the radicals in the Democrat Party the numbers they needed to achieve a majority in 2006.

And if 30 or so of them must now be sacrificed to achieve that end, then that's just what Pelosi is going to do. They're expendable.

Only they have a choice. Which was undoubtedly why 40 Blue Dogs in June signed a letter stating they would not support a plan that was not "deficit-neutral." Barack Obama said that, too, only one hopes that the "Forlorn Hope" actually means it.

Testifying in July the director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), Douglas Elmendorf, told the nation that the plan now proposed would not include "the fundamental changes that would be necessary to reduce the trajectory of federal health spending by a significant amount."

"On the contrary," he said, "the legislation significantly expands the federal responsibility for health-care." Mr. Elmendorf said the cost curve was being raised instead of cut. Previously, Barack Obama and Democrat leaders had promised to cut the growth in spending of health care programs with their proposal.

In July, Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson explained the dynamics involved, "The Blue Dog Democrats realize that there is blood in the water. They are hearing from constituents angry over the $1.8 trillion deficit, the $13 trillion in committed bailouts, the failed, wasteful $787 billion 'stimulus', and the costly cap-and-tax. So, the Dogs know that their political necks are on the line."

Wilson added, "The American people do not want government-run socialized medicine. Right now, the Blue Dogs have enough signatories to kill the legislation or, at the very least, slow it down. And if they value their political survival, that's exactly what they will do."

They did slow it down, but now they know that will not save them in the end.

Recently, meeting with El Dorado Tea Party leader John Wilson, Congressman Mike Ross (AR-CD4), a Blue Dog leader, on Wednesday told his constituent that he did not think the final version of the bill would include the contentious public "option"—the mandatory government-run health care currently contained in the bill.

Which is funny. Because he already voted for the so-called public "option," in a compromise deal with lawmakers on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Is he now saying he will not vote for the bill when it comes up again on the floor?

John Wilson does not know, because Ross did not say. "I certainly hope he's right, but what I still want to know is, will he support or oppose having a government-funded 'public option?'" Good question.

The fact is, Ross' silence on the matter is telling. He is, after all, the captain of the Blue Dog "Forlorn Hope Brigade." And now he is simply hoping that he is not going to be sacrificed when in his heart he knows the fateful decision has already been made.

By Robert Romano
GetLiberty.org

Debbie Stabenow

How's that Hope and Change workin' for ya?





"Climate change is very real," she confessed as she embraced cap and trade's massive tax increase on Michigan industry - at the same time claiming, against all the evidence, that it would not lead to an increase in manufacturing costs or energy prices. "Global warming creates volatility. I feel it when I'm flying. The storms are more volatile. We are paying the price in more hurricanes and tornadoes." - U.S. Senator DEBBIE STABENOW (D) Michigan
(More...)

Both U.S. Sens. Carl Levin, of Detroit, and Debbie Stabenow, of Lansing, said they could support the detention of nearly 230 Taliban, al-Qaeda and other foreign fighters in Michigan if security concerns are addressed and state and local officials agree.

The Michigan Department of Corrections said it has also received interest from Pennsylvania prison officials to house inmates in Michigan.
(More...)

The “cash-for-clunkers” trade-in program begun this month has spurred 16,351 new-vehicle sales so far, the Transportation Department said on July 29. The plan, which set aside $1 billion, ran through the money six days after it began, a sign of its success, Senator Debbie Stabenow said yesterday.
(More...)

Thomas Athans, the husband of U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow told police he paid a prostitute $150 for sex at a hotel. Stabenow and Athans married in 2003. He started liberal TalkUSA Radio in 2006 after leading programming at Air America, the liberal network that declared bankruptcy that year. Stabenow, D-Mich., said in a statement it was "very disturbing and serious. Obviously it's a deeply difficult and personal matter..."
(More...)

CNN Reports: Philadelphia Eagles change name to "Beagles", and in Unrelated Development Sign Michael Vick

(Cutter Network News) -- In a stunning development today, the Philadelphia Eagles changed their name to the Philadelphia Beagles. The name change was announced via a press release delivered to only three news outlets at 10 AM EST: the CNN, Philadelphia Daily News, and Zoo Too.

The Beagles' statement read, "We believe that changing the name to the Beagles reflects our values of being sensitive to the plight of animals, particularly dogs. Many of our players own dogs, and we determine that they all like dogs before we draft or sign them. We work our players like dogs, but that means we love them. We will do anything pretty much anything for dogs now."

This announcement came as a rumors mounted that NFL's Philadelphia franchise was being required to make heavy concessions to animal rights' activists as a condition for signing convicted dog-abuser and closet Republican, Michael Vick.

Four hours later at 2 PM EST, the Beagles informed all local and national media that QB Michael Vick had indeed been signed, ending intense speculation as to where the convicted dog-fighter would land. "I'm very happy to be out of the dog house and with the Beagles," Vick said.

An unnamed Beagles spokesman in the GM's office confirmed that, as a condition of Vick's signing, in lieu of interminable lecturing by sanctimonious animal rights' activists, Vick would be required to write 100 times on the Eagles' chalkboard before every game:

"I swear that I understand how insufferable pro-abortion liberals are steaming mad at me and would hold me -- an NFL jock -- to a higher moral standard than the U.S. Congress, I swear I do ... What a steaming 'Fortress'!!"

Surgeon General Seeks a Healthier America

(GNN) - President Obama's nominee for surgeon general, whose job it is to help encourage Americans to get thinner and healthier, has been working part time as a scientific adviser to the fast-food giant that sells sandwiches like the Whopper and BK Triple Stacker.

Dr. Regina Benjamin, hailed by Mr. Obama for her efforts in running the Zoftig Sisters Health Clinic in hurricane-ravaged rural Alabama, has been paid $10,000 since last year for serving on a scientific advisory board for Burger King, according to newly filed public financial disclosures.

The Goomba News Network has now compiled a comprehensive list of healthy Burger King innovations initiated by Dr. Benjamin:

1. Dr. Benjamin is an acknowledged advocate for offering healthy and delicious food choices. She stopped Burger King's selling of the Dutch Apple Pie (a hot and gooey apple filling in a flaky baked crust) at 360 calories, and replaced it with a slightly higher calorie but significantly more nutritious Lo-Cal Cheesecake Slice.

2. On her first day of decision-making, she immediately removed CHEESY TOTS® (Hot, golden brown fried cheese balls filled with melted cheese) from the menu and replaced the popular item with SUPER CHEESY CHEESY TOTS® with an added nutritious melted cheddar cheese topping.

3. She modified the ANGRY TENDERCRISP® (tender, premium breaded white meat chicken filet topped with sizzling bacon, Pepper Jack cheese, deliciously spicy jalapenos, angry onions and the signature angry sauce) by adding a sprinkling of healthy feta cheese, and served the sandwich with small packets of high-fiber blue cheese sauce.

4. Dr. Benjamin fought hard against the continued sale of the Oreo® BK® Chocolate Shake Sundae. Benjamin argued that the concoction was almost entirely without protein, but Burger King officials refused to add any cheese products into their popular dessert item. It was finally resolved that 2 small packets of blue cheese sauce would be offered with each sundae.