Texas is a Red State of Mind

The Beck Rally and What its Media Coverage Means

2010-09-02T04:56:00.000-07:00

So, TV/radio talk show host Glenn Beck held a rally in Washington on Saturday at which well over half a million folks were in attendance, and the leftist nitwits in the news media and on the radical blogs don't know quite what to make of it.

The New York Times dealt with the event by writing it off as a "Tea Party" rally, and tossing out a lowball estimate of 87,000 in attendance. The use of an odd number like 87,000 was no doubt designed to promote the notion that the Gray Lady had somehow actually performed a real head count and come up with this exact number of attendees. To understand what a bald-faced lie this number really is, all one has to do is view aerial photos of the event, which shows that the throng of people stretched all the way from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument. Any of you who may have actually walked the length of the reflecting pool and onto the Washington Monument knows that is a long and tiring walk, especially in the heat of a Washington summer. The reflecting pool itself spans 2,028 feet. It is at minimum another 1,000 feet from the end of the pool to the Washington Monument.

By comparison, Darrell K. Royal Texas Memorial Stadium in Austin easily holds 100,000 people. From stem to stern, that stadium is about 600 feet in length.

The New York Times, as is its habit, lied to its diminishing base of readers.

The Times also bald-faced lied by characterizing the Beck event as a "Tea Party" rally. The event itself in fact had nothing to do with any of the myriad Tea Party chapters around the country. Nor was it organized by Fox News, as some lefties have claimed. It was organized by Beck and contractors in his employ, and promoted by Beck on his television and radio programs.

And, whether the leftwing activists at the New York Times, MSNBC, the Huffington Post, CBS and ABC like it or not, more than half a million peaceful, respectful, well-behaved Americans showed up. They came to praise America, to celebrate the members of the U.S. military who achieved victory (yes, victory, a word you will never hear President Obama use) in Iraq and are now returning home to their loved ones to resume their lives. They came to talk about the need to return this nation to the traditional values that made it great, and the fiscal responsibility that made it the strongest economy the world has ever known.

Much to the dismay of the leftwing news media, no one carried any nasty signs – you know, the kind you invariably see at leftwing rallies that are habited by professional protesters and malcontents. There was no talk of the Tea Party, little talk of politics of any sort, no one calling anyone else nasty names – in other words, none of the things the leftwingers who infest our national news media were hoping and praying to see.

Heck, these folks even cleaned up after themselves. Unlike what invariably happens at leftist rallies of the sort held on Earth Day, National Abortion Rights Day, and the Obama Inaugural, this half-million throng of people left the national mall free of litter – one Park Service spokesman said it was almost as if there had been no rally at all.

Another big disappointment to the leftist radical editors at the NY Times.

All of which leads me to the following observation: the Democrats running for office this year are by and large going to be slaughtered. The polling data just keeps getting worse and worse for politicians with a (D) by their name, and there is little they can do to change that.

One of the main drivers of this anti-Democrat tidal wave is of course the rank unpopularity of the policies pursued by President Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. That is a given.

But an even bigger driver is the utter, outright contempt that Democrat leaders at the national level and their press agents in the national news media have shown and continue to show for ordinary everyday Americans like those who showed up at the Beck rally on Saturday. It is as if these elitist thugs cannot believe that the average old Joe Schmoe from Beeville Texas has exactly the same number of votes – one – that they do. The attitude of entitlement and contempt for anyone who disagrees with them literally oozes from their pores with every speech they make and report they file.

One leftist commentator on MSNBC stated last week that 'people who watch this show know what's going on because we are here to analyze it and tell them'.

That attitude, that hubris, that inability to understand that Americans in "flyover country" can figure out what is going on without being told by Washington elites is, more than any other factor, why the coming election will be a landslide in favor of the Republicans.

Life in the Liberal Zoo is becoming hazardous for liberals.

Reading the November Tea Leaves

2010-08-27T04:03:00.000-07:00

When you get within 90 days of any national election, overarching voter attitudes and trends are pretty much set in stone, and there is little anyone can do to change them.

There will always be isolated exceptions to that, races in which a candidate who appears to be leading by a significant margin 90 days out will mess up and blow the lead. The most vivid example of this in Texas politics in modern times came in 1990, when Republican gubernatorial candidate Clayton Williams was 18 points ahead of Democrat Ann Richard in a Labor Day poll, then went on to make a series of major gaffes and lose the race to Miz Annie by a hair.

But Claytie's self destruction was the exception in Texas in that election year, a year in which Republicans otherwise made significant gains in state government. Four years later, in 1994, the overall trend continued, with the Republicans winning every statewide elected office but one. That one was the last time a Democrat won a statewide election in this state.

The trends don't look any better for the Democrats in Texas this year. Despite the changing demographic makeup of the electorate and upwards of 1,000 people moving to Texas every day, this remains a firmly GOP state for the foreseeable future. President Obama's fading public approval ratings, along with a sagging national economy are factors that only make the task of winning elections that much harder for Democrat candidates for legislative and statewide offices.

The most likely outcome based on current data appears to be that the Republicans will again win every statewide elected office, will maintain their current significant edge in the state Senate, and will pick up between 6 and 13 additional seats in the House, where they currently hold only a 76-74 margin. If the President's public approval rating continues its long downward trend, the GOP gain in the House will trend to the upper end of that range. Right now, I'll predict that is the most likely result, and the Republicans will increase their margin from 76-74 to 88-62.

You are no doubt hearing reports that the race for governor is competitive and Democrat Bill White has a real shot to win. Don't bet the farm on that. The reality is that he is extremely unlikely to receive more than 42-43% of the vote on Election Day, and lose to Governor Perry by about 7-8% of the vote, with the remaining 5-6% going to the libertarian candidate, whomever that may be. Absent some major, Claytie-esque gaffe by Governor Perry – something he has managed not to commit in more than 25 years in elected office – there's just not much reason for voters in a Republican majority state to turn him out of office in favor of any Democrat.

Nationally, it is now almost a certainty that the Republican Party will regain control of the U.S. House of Representatives. Even very reticent prognosticators like the National Journal's Charlie Cook are now projecting Republican gains of 45-60 seats, with Cook now saying the upper end of that range seems the most likely outcome. The GOP needs to gain 39 seats to be in the majority for the 2011-12 congressional term. Frankly, I think 45-60 is pretty modest, and the possible range at this point is more like 55-70, with the upper end being far more likely than the lower.

In the Senate, the Republicans would have to pick up 10 seats to gain the majority. That does not appear to be in the cards, mainly due to the race for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's seat in Nevada. In that race, the GOP could have nominated a raccoon or a potted plant and defeated Mr. Reid, who is perhaps the supreme nitwit in the history of the U.S. Senate. Instead, the Republicans nominated Sharon Angle, who appears to be almost as goofy as Reid, and fully capable of blowing that race. If the Rs can't win Nevada, they cannot gain the necessary ten seats. As discussed in an earlier column, GOP voters also nominated Rand Paul, the crazy son of the also-crazy Texas Representative Ron Paul, in the senate race in Kentucky. Rand Paul, like Sharon Angle, also seems to be goofy enough to blow what would otherwise have been a certain Republican pick up. My prediction is that either Angle or Paul – but not both – will lose their race, keeping Republican gains just below the necessary ten to gain the majority.

But here's the thing to remember about the Senate: in the 2012 and 2014 elections, 43 Democrats will have to defend their seats, while only 23 Republican seats will be up for grabs. So while the GOP will not likely gain control in that body this coming November, they almost certainly will do so in 2012, with their margin growing larger in 2014.

That's what the trends say, and they're not likely to change in any significant way before November. Bank it.

Game Time in the Liberal Zoo

2010-08-27T04:00:00.000-07:00

Let's play a game today, folks. It's called "Liberals/Leftists/Progressives/Socialists Think You are a Racist/Bigot/Ignorant/Hateful if You…".

Why shouldn't we play this game? After all, it's the game the Obama Administration and its mindless supporters on the radical left of American politics and their propaganda ministers in the mainstream news media have been playing all summer with anyone who opposes the President's position on any subject. Having no rational, logical, fact-based means of defending the President's bizarre and unnecessary forays into every controversial subject available to him, his defenders are invariably left with lashing out at his opposition, playing the race or hate card at every conceivable opportunity.

So here we go!

Liberals/Leftists/Progressives/Socialists Think you are a Racist if You…: Believe the State of Arizona has a right to instruct its law enforcement officers to enforce the federal immigration laws that are on the books today, and that the federal government refuses to enforce. That's what the infamous Arizona immigration law does, period. Immediately upon Arizona Governor Jan Brewer's signing of the law, President Obama jumped in with both belligerent feet, cynically seizing upon what he and his Chicago thug advisors believed would be a golden opportunity to increase turnout among Hispanic voters in the November elections. The President's mindless supporters on the radical left and propaganda ministers in the mainstream national news media immediately began branding anyone who disagreed with Mr. Obama as a racist.

The latest polls on the issue show that Arizona's right to enforce this law is supported by around 65% of the American people. That's a whole lotta racists.

Liberals/Leftists/Progressives/Socialists Think You are a Bigot if You…: Oppose the siting of a radical Muslim Mosque run by a radical Muslim Imam within 2 blocks of 9/11 Ground Zero in New York City. That's what the Mosque would be, that's who the Imam is, and that is where he proposes to place it. Much to the chagrin of Democrats running for political office around the country, President Obama leapt into this issue unprompted with both belligerent feet Friday before last, and then tried to walk his leap back the following Saturday morning. The President clearly endorsed the building of this Mosque by this Imam at this site that Friday evening, and then waffled on Saturday by saying he was merely pointing out that Muslims enjoy the religious freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment, not endorsing the wisdom of siting this particular mosque at this particular place at this particular time. The President's mindless supporters on the radical left and propaganda ministers in the mainstream national news media immediately began branding anyone who disagreed with Mr. Obama – whichever position one assumes the President actually supports - as a bigot.

The latest polls on the issue show that Americans oppose the siting of this particular Mosque at this particular location at this particular time by a 2 to 1 margin. At the same time, a similar majority of Americans fully recognize that Muslims enjoy the same religious freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment as anyone else.

That's a whole lotta First Amendment – believing bigots.

Liberals/Leftists/Progressives/Socialists/neo-Fascists Think You are an Ignorant Hateful Racist Bigot if You…: Are a participant in the "Tea Party". No matter who you are, what you have accomplished in your life, how you raise your children, what grades you made in school, which charities you support, what you do for a living, how you deal with your fellow man, or how you conduct yourself at Tea Party gatherings, those on the radical left in this country label you as an Ignorant Hateful Racist Bigot. The old guilt by association deal that liberals used to claim to detest. Those were the good old days, huh?

President Obama, though occupying an office whose previous occupants have been careful to avoid getting involved in such defamation of large groups of Americans, has on several occasions let his disdain for the millions of Tea Party participants be know, as have Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and pretty much every other national leader of the Democrat Party. Given that the Tea Parties now count their members in 8 figure numbers, and have nominated and elected several candidates for office already, one might think the President and his party would leave the slandering of a huge voting bloc to their agents in the national news media. One would be wrong in entertaining that thought.

Even a radical leftist nitwit like former Democrat National Committee Chairman Howard Dean sees the folly of this kind of behavior. Dean is one of the few liberals to express his opinion that the 9/11 Mosque sends a bad signal and should be built at another site, and stated in an interview on Sunday that President Obama and his administration are "out of touch" with most of the rest of America on that and other issues of the day.

Gee, ya think so, Howard?

Life in the liberal zoo is consistently entertaining, if nothing else.

The Nadler Definition of "Equity"

2010-08-10T05:58:00.000-07:00

"The basic costs of life in the New York region are much steeper than in most parts the country. The reality is that a dollar in New York isn't worth nearly as much as a dollar in Spokane or Knoxville or Topeka. It's time for our tax code to take reality into account when assessing someone's tax liability." - Rep. Jerrold Nadler, Leftist Democrat from New York

In its ongoing war against the middle 3/4ths of the North American continent, i.e., "flyover country", the national Democrat Party now presents to you Jerrold Nadler, leftist Democrat congressman from Manhattan. Mr. Nadler, along with an impressive array of fellow leftist nutjob Democrats in the congress, announced on Monday the introduction of what he and his cohorts shamefully call the Tax "Equity" Act, a bill that would require the Internal Revenue Service to adjust individual federal income tax rates based on the average cost of living in each state.

Thus, people living in states where leftist Democrats have reigned supreme for decades and taxed the bejeebers out of the public – creating the high costs of living endured by residents of traditional Democrat states like New York, California, Michigan, etc. – would see their federal income tax rates adjusted downwards as a reward for so stupidly voting for leftist Democrats for all those years. Meanwhile, residents of states like Texas, who have chosen to elect more prudent stewards of the state coffers and tax rates over those same decades, resulting in a much lower cost of living, would see their federal income tax rates raised as a punishment for having the good sense to keep leftist nitwits out of statewide offices and their legislatures.

No, I'm not kidding here. This is real. This concept is typical of what Democrats in Washington these days refer to as "social justice", a philosophy wherein the federal government is used to punish Americans for sensible and prudent behavior, i.e., not voting for leftist Democrats.

In addition to his whining about "the basic costs of life in the New York region" being higher than much of the rest of the country, Mr. Nadler went on to express dismay over the fact that, in addition to having one of the highest state income taxes in the nation – New York City residents also must pay a City income tax on top of that – New York state also sports some of the highest property tax rates in the country.

Well, who is responsible for that? The unarguable truth of the matter is that the Democrat Party has utterly dominated the political life of New York in modern times. Oh, the Republicans will occasionally elect a governor and gain control of one house of the legislature every now and then, but over the long haul, there is simply no question that the state suffers the effects of decades of leftwing Democrat governance. The same is true of other high-tax, high-cost-of-living states like California, Massachusetts, Washington, Minnesota, New Mexico and on, and on.

The cost of living is higher in traditional Democrat states due to favorable treatment of unions that artificially raise the price of every good or service, liberal social regimes that must be paid for with steadily rising taxes, and a refusal to ever consider cutting spending when budget deficits inevitably occur. California today finds itself on the verge of insolvency – the state has in reality been insolvent for several years now, avoiding the final fate only due to massive borrowing and federal bailouts – as the direct result of irresponsible governance by the Democrat Party and liberal Republicans like its current governator. New York, Michigan and other traditionally liberal states are well on their way.

Meanwhile, New Jersey finds itself getting back on track towards solvency and economic recovery thanks to the determined efforts to control state government spending and taxing and force concessions from government unions by Republican Governor Chris Christie. If Christie succeeds in bending the Democrat legislature and unions to his will, the long-term result of his fiscal restraint will inevitably a lower cost of living for the people of his state. This is the kind of behavior by public officials that should be applauded.

Instead, Nadler and his fellow leftist nitwits seek to reward the irresponsible state and local officials in New York and other high tax, heavily-unionized states, as well as the irresponsible voters who put them into office.

If residents in New York and California suffer from high taxes and a high cost of living, they should be encouraged by federal officials to take a step back, examine what it is about their own selfish behavior that has led to that situation, and work to change that behavior. The simple truth of the matter is that consistent voting for leftist nitwits to state and local offices leads inevitably to high taxes and higher costs of living.

Rewarding voters for such stupid, self-destructive behavior will only make their situation worse, but then, such self-destructive behavior is the life's blood of the perpetuation of the Liberal Zoo that America has become.

Some Hopefully Final Thoughts on the BP Disaster/Moratorium

2010-08-05T03:42:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to add a few more thoughts on the whole BP/Moratorium deal before it completely fades from the media/public’s collective mind now that BP has the well under control:

The best call I’ve had in many weeks came yesterday from a friend intimately involved with the National Oceans Policy Commission. He confirmed preliminary media reports that the Obama Administration is now likely to lift the moratorium in very short order – likely during the August congressional recess when the action will receive minimal media coverage. Political pressure coming from officials in the Gulf Coast region, as well as a changing tone of media coverage has finally put enough pressure on our hard-hearted President to start dealing with this tragic situation in a realistic manner. Better late than never.
As I drove from Shreveport to Houston early Wednesday morning, I flipped the XM radio back and forth between the early shows onMSNBCandCNN. The obvious panic among the liberal hosts of these shows over the fact that cleanup crews in the Gulf can no longer find any oil to clean up was as predictable as it was hilarious. The BP disaster has become a crutch for these folks, an easy way to bash the hated oil and gas industry as well as an ever-present time filler for their shows when other news sources slow down. So there they were, live on the air, in a literal tizzy of confusion about what they’re going to do to make up for the loss of their crutch. Most telling, I heard not a single expression of relief for the lives and well-being of those who live along the Gulf Coast now that the oil is no longer flowing or soiling beaches and marshes. Just another example that these East- and West-coast liberals could not care less about those of us who live in flyover country.
On my new favorite leftwinger guilty pleasure, MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”, the hosts went on and on about the evils of BP’s having used “over a million gallons” of chemical dispersants to help break up the oil and better enable it to evaporate and be absorbed into ocean around it. There was not a person among them with the intelligence to understand that a million gallons of anything in the context of the enormity of the Gulf of Mexico is not even a drop in the proverbial bucket. In fact, it’s not even 1/10th of 1/1000th of 1 percent of a drop in the proverbial bucket. But of course, these are the very same media dimwits who actually believe that the 13/100ths of 1 percent of so-called “greenhouse gas” emissions represented by mankind’s production of carbon dioxide is somehow responsible for any weather-related malady that ever occurs, not to mention earthquakes, tidal waves and fires and mudslides in California. Hell, these same people also believe Al Gore is not a crazed sex poodle, but that’s another topic for another time.

As I write this, BP has begun the process of pouring cement down the hole to permanently plug it off. This likely saves the Republic from the nitwittery of the “oil spill” bill shelved this week by noted nitwit Harry Reid because he did not have enough votes from even liberal Democrats to have a hope of passing the atrocity into law. Reid promises to bring the bill back up in September, but this is more bravado than anything else, given the fact that by the time congress comes back after Labor Day, this story will have been out of the media for a month and faded from the public’s short attention span.

All of which is good news for America, despite the wails you hear emanating from the morning show hosts on CNN and MSNBC.

Have a great day.

The Criminal Moratorium

2010-07-28T05:08:00.000-07:00

You may have seen or heard news reports regarding the Rally for Economic Survival event that was held in LaFayette, LA last Wednesday at that city's Cajun Dome basketball arena. Fully 12,000 mostly ticked-off Louisianans – including Governor Bobby Jindal, Lt. Governor Scott Angele, and other elected officials - were in attendance to protest the ongoing efforts by our fascist President, Barack Obama, and his evil minions at the Department of Interior (DOI) to destroy the oil and gas industry in the Gulf of Mexico.

I felt fortunate to be there. It was a wonderful, compelling and emotional event. Too bad no one at the White House or at DOI was listening.

The imposition by Dear Leader Obama of a six month moratorium on drilling in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico on the pretense of allowing DOI to review safety processes in that arena in the wake of the BP disaster seems innocuous enough to the average man on the street who doesn't understand how the oil and gas industry works. But to anyone who does have an understanding of the industry, and who has been paying attention to the collateral actions the Obama Regime has taken in the context of this moratorium, it is a de facto permanent shutdown of the enormously productive and historically safe deep water region, and a massive scaling back of oil and gas exploration activities in the shallower waters along the Outer Continental Shelf.

Here's why: the daily rig rate – the rate just to reserve the rig for usage by a given operator – of these deep water drilling rigs and ships can run to $150,000 per day and even more. Anyone who thinks the owners of these rigs are going to allow them to sit idle for 180 days and longer is living in a fantasy world. Two such rigs have already been removed, one to Egypt and the other to the Congo. The operator who is moving its rig to the Congo announced the decision was made to move the rig to a nation that had a more stable political climate than the United States of America.

Think about that for a second: It is the judgment of the executives of that company, in making a decision that runs into the tens of millions of dollars, that the Congo has a more stable political climate than the USA. Is that the kind of "hope" and "change" those of you who voted for Mr. Obama had in mind?

Once these rigs leave, they are not coming back for a long, long time, if ever. They will be locked up into multi-year deals by other operators in other parts of the world – that is the reality. The President and his minions fully understand this, and they do not care. They are focused on placating the radical anti-development groups that fund their political campaigns to the exclusion of all other considerations.

A memo written by Interior Secretary Salazar and leaked to the media last week clearly showed that the Administration understands the true impacts of this action, and that, as Salazar stated, issues like loss of jobs and devastation of the Gulf Coast economy do not matter to this bunch of thugs. They do not matter. The memo further demonstrates the Administration's intent to prolong this moratorium long past their stated six month time frame, and to slow-play issuing any new permits in the shallow water as well.

To understand the impact of all of this to South Louisiana, all one needs to know is that roughly 80% of all operations in the deep water of the Gulf of Mexico are staged out of Port Fourchon at the very southern tip of the State. A large portion of shallow water operations are also staged out of this port. The men and women who work at that port and on those rigs are by and large Louisiana citizens, although a high number of Texas and Mississippi jobs are at stake as well. In all, tens of thousands of direct, well-paying, secure jobs are threatened by the callous indifference of the Obama Regime.

Then you have all the indirect jobs created by all of this economic activity: the cafes, hotels, motels, clothing stores, filling stations, movie theatres, fitness shops, furniture stores and every other kind of small business you can imagine that depend enormously on the health of two industries impacted by recent events: the fishing industry that has been decimated by the BP disaster, and the Gulf of Mexico oil and gas industry that the Obama Regime is attempting to destroy.

We should all be concerned about the tragic effect the BP disaster has had on the Gulf Coast region. But you won't bring back the Louisiana fishing industry by destroying the Gulf of Mexico oil and gas industry, and the thousands upon thousands of jobs that are dependent on it.

In a sane society, the people responsible for this moratorium would be brought up on criminal charges. But in the liberal zoo, they just go on about destroying people's lives with impunity.

The Sham That is Elena Kagan

2010-07-20T17:32:00.000-07:00

So I was watching "Morning Joe" on MSNBC Tuesday morning. I've gotten to where I actually like "Morning Joe" in a sadistic sort of way – spending an hour listening to the opinions of the collection of plagiarists, freaks and nitwits that appear daily on that show tells me all I really need to know about why our country is in such a sorry state today.

Anyway, on this particular morning, the show's hosts – Joe ("Morning Joe" – get it?) Scarborough and Minka Breszinski were interviewing Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island. When asked to describe his view on the judicial philosophy that would be employed by leftist Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, Sen. Whitehouse was only able to use the words "pragmatist" and "consensus builder" over and over again: "I think it would be one of a pragmatist and consensus builder," the Senator said, "She has been a pragmatist and consensus builder her entire career. She was a pragmatist and consensus builder at Harvard, and was certainly a pragmatist and consensus builder as Solicitor General. So I think you'll see a philosophy of pragmatism and consensus building when she is on the court."

Ummmm...ok. Can somebody please let the good Senator know that "pragmatism" and "consensus building" do not a judicial philosophy make? Not to criticize them, of course – "pragmatism" is a perfectly honorable personal trait, one in fact that we all should aspire to achieve in our own lives. And "consensus building" is a fine pursuit to employ in life. Why, if every one of us was a "consensus builder", we'd all end up agreeing about every damn thing, and wouldn't that be wonderful?

But somebody really ought to let Senator Whitehouse and, presumably, Ms. Kagan know that "pragmatism" and "consensus building" are not essential elements of the judicial philosophy of a justice on the United States Supreme Court. See, the job of being a Court Justice involves a) hearing arguments from both sides in a case before the court, and b) deciding which side wins the case in the context of the text of the United States Constitution. This is not supposed to be a bargaining process between the justices that involves "pragmatism" and "consensus building". The Constitution says what it says, and the justices are charged with deciding which side of each given case is constitutional. Period.

Yet, Sen. Whitehouse wants us to believe that character traits that would be admirable in any member of, say, congress or the Texas legislature, are the essential elements of what makes a fine Supreme Court justice. This is sheer and utter nonsense.

Of course, in fairness to Sen. Whitehouse, this nonsense regarding Ms. Kagan was put into the public domain by the White House on the day she was nominated. The President's initial statement used those same words to describe her, and those words were broadly parroted by the propaganda arm of the National Democrat Party, i.e., the establishment news media, for days afterwards. They were obviously words that had been carefully tested in focus groups in advance of the nomination.

Leftists have to use such touchy-feely nonsense to describe their judicial nominees, because they know they cannot dare discuss the truth about their true judicial philosophy. Poll after poll shows conclusively that an overwhelming majority of Americans utterly reject the leftwing philosophy of ignoring what the Constitution actually says in order to legislate social policies from the federal bench that Democrats could never hope to achieve through the legitimate legislative process set up by the Constitution.

Leftwingers must obfuscate and outright lie about their nominees, because the truth about Ms. Kagan is that she is a radical leftist who likely has never read the Constitution of the United States and has no intention of ever doing so. She is a radical who hates the military and wants to destroy American society as we know it. I mean, who else would Barack Obama nominate to the Supreme Court? It's not like this is rocket science here. So, neither she nor her supporters can ever honestly and directly discuss her actual judicial philosophy, because the truth about her judicial philosophy is that the Constitution is wholly irrelevant to any decisions she will issue from the Court.

Thus, to a person, they all fall back on nonsensical irrelevancies like "pragmatism" and "consensus building" when asked to describe Ms. Kagan's philosophy.

In this, as with everything else they do, the radical leftists who run the National Democrat Party believe we are all too stupid and ignorant to figure out the truth before they get their damage done. In 2008, they turned out to be right.

But the nation will survive the rule of Elena Kagan on the Supreme Court, because the great pendulum of

American politics is swinging back towards traditional values and conservatism, as it always does when confronted by the ugly face of leftism. This too shall pass, because nonsensical talking points only fool the public for so long before reality slaps us all back to our senses.

The True Meaning of "Futbol"

2010-07-15T05:37:00.000-07:00

Ok, it's official: I have finally, at long last, after a lifetime spent hating the sport with a passion bordering on lunacy, discovered value in the game of soccer – or, as a young lady at work told me the other day, "futbol, as they call it in all the rest of the world" (Really? Do the Russians, Dutch, Brits, French, not to mention the entire continents of Asia and Africa, use a Spanish word to describe the game?) – and now am officially a fan.

No, really, I'm serious here. During the 72 month run of the FIFA World Cup "Futbol" Championships (ok, it was really only maybe 2 months, but it sure seemed like 72), there were three Saturdays and one Sunday when I desperately needed to take a nap, but because I was in pain from one ailment or another, I had a heck of a time falling asleep. Each time this happened, I forced myself to flip the TV in my bedroom over to one of the 85 channels televising a "futbol" game (presumably, roughly 8 Americans were tuned into each channel at any given time), and I kid you not, each time I was sound asleep within five short minutes.

Those of you who have insomnia and currently take Ambien or some other medication to help with rest, I am here to tell you that you too can live a drug-free life. Just run down to the local Barnes & Noble and purchase DVDs of any "futbol" contests that might be on the clearance rack, slap 'em into your player, and you will now be able to enjoy hour upon hour of sound, uninterrupted sleep.

I used to believe that the best thing to have on TV when trying to take a nap was golf. But compared to socc…er, "futbol", golf is positively stimulating. I mean, there is actual scoring in the game of golf. On every hole, there is scoring.

In most sports, you see, scoring is the point of the game. But not "futbol".

No, in "futbol", the point of the game is to bore the fans in the stadium to such a high degree of frustration that they engage in riots both inside the stadium and outside. The other object is to frustrate the leaders of the countries represented by the teams to the point that they declare war on one another, as Paraguay did with Argentina back in the '60s. There is also a growing body of evidence that Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 not to put a buffer between his country and the Russians, but out of the incredible frustration he felt after the German and Polish national teams played to their 5^th consecutive scoreless tie in "futbol". (And yes, that's how Hitler pronounced it, too.)

I have learned that this true objective of the game of "futbol" is the reason for the senseless rule that denies the players the use of their hands. Think about it: If "futbol" players were allowed to use all of their God-given limbs, there would most likely be actual scoring in most of the games. So, the prevention of scoring becomes the only reasonable explanation for why "futbol" officials would place such an idiotic restriction on those who play the game.

This also explains why the official "futbol" field of play is roughly the same size as Manhattan Island. I mean, if the game were played on a reasonably-sized field, one that could be adequately covered on high-definition, wide-screen television, then again, there would be scoring going on, and that would greatly lessen the level of frustration felt by viewing fans and national leaders before, during and after the games. And honestly, where would be the fun in that?

No, golf is a far more exciting game than "futbol", and thus not nearly as frustrating for the viewer or for national leaders. I mean, you've never seen an American President declare war on Europe over losing the Ryder Cup, have you? No, although I personally think President Bush could have made a really good case back in 2006. But I digress.

Luckily, I didn't need to take a nap on Sunday. So, rather than flip the TV over to the final FIFA "futbol" frustration fest, I put it on NBC and watched Paula Creamer's masterful taming of Oakmont Country Club to win the LPGA U.S. Open Championship. Her score? Three under par 281. My God, there haven't been 281 goals scored in the entire history of competitive "futbol". Yes, friends, even the LPGA is more exciting than "futbol". No way I could have slept through that.

At any rate, I am thrilled to death that I have finally discovered the true meaning and usefulness of the game of "futbol". Because for those of us who simply don't care about the ultimate outcome of any given "futbol" game, it is the greatest sleeping aid ever invented by the human race.

Gosh, after writing this, I think I need a nap.

Michael Steele Was Right! And Wrong.

2010-07-06T05:23:00.000-07:00

So we have this dustup going now over the remark made last week by Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele that Afghanistan is now "Obama's war", and that the President should have known "you can't win a land war in Afghanistan". Leftists in the national news media, desperate for a story, any story, that might help stem the growing anti-Obama tide coming this November, immediately pounced on Steele's comment and have treated it as if it were the smoking gun in the Kennedy Assassination. Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol and other conservative hawks have called on Steele to resign, and some senate Republicans – most notably John McCain and Lindsey Graham – have been extremely critical of the RNC Chairman.

There are several observations to make about this episode in the ongoing American political soap opera.

First, Steele should not have made such comments in a public setting – his critics are right that it is inappropriate for national leaders of either party to make such discouraging comments about a war while congress continues to fund a war that puts thousands of brave American soldiers in harm's way. Steele's remarks are on a par with statements from the likes of Democrats Harry Reid and then-Senator Barack Obama that the Iraq war was "unwinnable" and "already lost", which were made just a few months before the beginning of the Surge strategy that won the war. Steele should know better than to cast doubt on the ability of the U.S. armed forces to accomplish any goal they set out to accomplish.

Second, the rank hypocrisy of leftists in the Democrat Party and the national news media on this matter is so thick you could cut it with a knife. If not "Obama's War", Afghanistan is without any valid argument the

Democrat Party's war. How many thousands of times did we hear from Democrat politicians and liberal pundits in 2002 through 2008 that President George W. Bush had "fought the wrong war" by choosing to go into Iraq?

According to the national vast leftwing media/political complex, Afghanistan was the noble war, the place where the U.S. should be focusing its efforts to kill Al Qaeda, even as Al Qaeda massed its forces in Iraq and was demolished by the American military. Not content with making grossly irresponsible statements on a daily basis about whether or not the Iraq War was "winnable", the Democrat leadership in the congress went to great lengths to actively undermine the effort for crass political purposes. This is an inarguable truth of American history that we must never forget.

Barack Obama and Joe Biden based much of their campaign strategy in 2008 on the promise to massively escalate the Afghan War, a promise that they have kept in a big way since assuming office. Not only have they escalated in Afghanistan – much as Lyndon Johnson escalated in Vietnam in the wake of the Kennedy Assassination – they have also ramped up U.S. incursions into Pakistan in a very big way.

For the leftwing media/political complex to now suddenly recoil at the idea that Afghanistan is "Obama's War" is absurd on its face, and a revelation of the truth about their deceitful motives for promoting its escalation since 2002: They were doing that purely for political reasons, to damage Bush and undermine the effort in Iraq, and are even today not serious about actually "winning" the conflict there.

Third, Vice President Biden, in his trip to Baghdad over the weekend, noted that the U.S. phased withdrawal from Iraq would begin on schedule in August, and claimed that his and Obama's strategy there has been a great success. Huh? Beg Pardon? Say What?

The most hilarious aspect of this current Administration for my purposes of ridiculing the cocky, snotty leftwingers responsible for putting this collection of incompetent thugs into office is that the Obama Administration has not changed a single thing about the Bush strategy in Iraq. A phased withdrawal once a viable Iraqi government had been established was always the Bush strategy. The Guantanamo Bay holding facility for terrorists remains open and undisturbed despite the Obama campaign promise to close it.

Warrantless surveillance policies enacted during the Bush years remain intact and functional. Terrorists continue to be tried in military tribunals to this day. Hell, Obama has even adopted the Bush "Surge" strategy for the Afghanistan War, and hired Bush's favorite general to conduct it.

The greatest irony for the dishonest lefties who put this bunch into office in 2008 is that Obama has continued the Bush policies because they were the right policies, and is now applying the Bush strategies to Afghanistan because they were the right strategies. There is simply no other honest interpretation of the actions Obama has taken since assuming office.

But back to Michael Steele: Should he resign? Yes. He was right in saying Afghanistan is "Obama's War", but wrong to doubt it is winnable. It is winnable, thanks to Obama's decision to stick with Bush's policies, employ Bush's strategies, and hire Bush's favorite general.

Our Disgraceful National Fourth Estate

2010-06-28T08:12:00.000-07:00

In the wake of last week's firing of General Stanley McChrystal and hiring of President George W. Bush's favorite general – David Petraeus – to run the War in Afghanistan, the snotty leftwingers who run MoveOn.org quietly removed their famous "General Betray-us" ad from their goofball website. That characterization of General Petraeus was fine when he was working for the hated Bush and preparing to testify before a Democrat congress skeptical about his "surge" strategy in Iraq, but not so good for snotty leftwingers now that he's working for their hope 'n change savior, President Barack Obama.

The great irony of the McChrystal firing (an entirely justifiable act by President Obama) and hiring of Petraeus was the glowing praise Petraeus received from media blowhards and congressional Democrats who took great pleasure in ridiculing and slandering him while he was employed by President Bush. This group of Democrats includes President Obama himself, who, as a Senator, strongly opposed Petraeus' surge, which of course became the hugely successful winning strategy in Iraq, and which Mr. Obama ultimately adopted in Afghanistan. Of course, a consistency of thought and honesty of reportage long ago became lost concepts to the leftist news media in America, which is why they find themselves in a long, irreversible death spiral.

It was kind of a bad week for the leftwing media in general. In addition to the utterly hypocritical reaction to the hiring of Gen. Petraeus, it was revealed about midweek that the Portland Oregonian and other admirers of Al Gore in the leftist news media had sat for four years on allegations in a police report that he groped a masseuse in a Portland hotel room in 2006. So what media entity finally made this complaint public? Why, the National Enquirer, of course – the same media entity that issued the original reporting on liberal hero John Edwards' affair and fathering of an illegitimate child with a former campaign staffer.

One would think that, sooner or later, the snotty leftists who run the New York Times would tire of being scooped by the Enquirer, but one would be wrong in that thought, at least when it comes to reporting on the foibles of leftwing folk heroes.

Then, of course, there is the announcement by CNN that it is pinning its prime time ratings hopes on a new talk show featuring disgraced former New York Governor Elliott Spitzer, who was forced to resign the office a few years back when it was revealed that he had been hiring high-priced call girls on the state's dime. Can there be any doubt that CNN is out trying to bring in Gore as the show's weatherman, Bill Clinton as a political correspondent, and Tiger Woods as its sports anchor? Now, that would be a lineup lefties could be proud of.

You really can't make stuff like this up.

The final failure of the lapdog leftist media I want to discuss here is its abject refusal to do any real reporting on the criminal negligence of the Obama Administration when it comes to the BP oil spill. Were this a Republican Administration, the media would be making every effort to hound the president from office, as it did to President Bush following Hurricane Katrina. We all know that is true – even the most hopeless snotty leftwinger knows that is true.

Take the refusal by President Obama to suspend the Jones Act for this national emergency. For those unfamiliar with it, the Jones Act protects labor unions by requiring all vessels performing oil and gas-related operations in U.S. waters to be U.S. flagged, and operated by U.S. citizens, i.e., members of U.S. labor unions. Were the President to suspend this disgusting law, there would shortly be dozens if not hundreds more vessels in the Gulf, skimming up this oil. But he refuses to do so strictly due to the fact that labor unions in this country are tools of the Democrat Party. And the news media sit idly by and allow him to get away with this kind of criminal negligence with impunity. It's disgusting and disgraceful.

Seriously, after a week like the last one, you have to wonder if anyone at the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, MSNBC, NBC, ABC, CBS or any of the other reliably leftwing mainstream media outlets around the country ever stops, takes a step back, and ponders the reality that the only news organs actually performing any investigative journalism in America are a scandal rag and a magazine staffed by stoners. Of course, this would assume that those who run these leftist media outlets were remotely capable of the slightest bit of introspection, which they obviously aren't.

That is your fourth estate these days – nothing more than a lapdog propaganda organ for the national Democrat Party and this feckless, incompetent, criminally negligent Administration.

Last Monday Morning in the Oval Office...

2010-06-28T07:58:00.000-07:00

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs: 'mornin', Mr. President.

President Barack Obama: Hello, Bob, what can I do for you?

Gibbs: Well, uh, I kind of need to talk to you about whole BP situation and the, uh, golf game you had this weekend.

Obama: Yeah, it was great, man! Shot a 78! Can you believe that? Of course, that was with 7 mulligans, and those great secret service guys kept kicking my ball out of the rough when they thought I wasn't looking, but still, best round of golf I've had since the whole BP thing started. I'm finally getting that slice with my driver worked out, and…why are you looking at me like that, Bob?

Gibbs: Well, you know, Mr. President, we're starting to take a little heat from all these golfing trips you've been having here recently. I mean, you know that was the seventh round you've gotten in since this well blew out and…

Obama: Yeah, this job's great! I mean, if I'd known a President of the United States could just go out and have an entire golf course to himself and his foursome any old time he wanted to, I'd have run sooner.

Gibbs: But sir, the impression all of this golfing and vacationing creates with the public is that you're more worried about your handicap than you are about all the people getting put out of jobs down there in hick country, er, Louisiana and Mississippi and Alabama.

Obama: Well, what could give anyone that idea? I mean, I've already flown down there and given three speeches, walked around on those crummy beaches and met with all those losers who voted for McCain in '08 – I mean, c'mon, Bob, there's a real limit to how much compassion I can show to anyone south of the Mason Dixon line.

Gibbs: Sir, don't forget, you won Florida…

Obama: Oh, sure, Florida, throw that one in my face. Besides, the beaches getting hit by the tar balls are up there in the Panhandle part of the state, and that's just South Alabama as far as I'm concerned.

Gibbs: Ok, I'll give you that one, but still, sir, we have to think about appearances.

Obama: 'Appearances'??? Hell, BP's not worried about appearances – that Hayward guy spent Saturday at a yacht race!

Gibbs: Well, yessir, I'll give you that one, too, but still…

Obama: Still what? There is no 'still' here – look, Bob, he's at a yacht race, I'm playing golf. Every slob in flyover country plays golf, or at least that's what I'm told, but how many of 'em do you think get to go out and ride on a yacht? I mean, if you put it in the right context, I'm the really common man here, doing what the common man does.

Gibbs: Wow, you are good.

Obama: You bet your butt I am, that's why I'm President and McCain's out there in Arizona having to fight with everything he's got to beat an ex-radio DJ who's been in more tanning booths than George Hamilton just to get his own party's nomination. Meanwhile, I am somehow surviving with a walking gaffe machine as a vice president and have my main rival rendered completely irrelevant as my own secretary of state. I am really, really good.

Gibbs: Ok, well, having conceded you're really, really good, sir, I am going to ask you one more time to really, really consider lightening up on your golf game while this well is still out of control.

Obama: Look, Bob, I already cut my vacation short by a full day to go make a speech down there – how much more sacrifice must I make here? I mean, if I can't play golf, what can I do?

Gibbs: Well, there's a bowling alley down in the basement…

Obama: That was Nixon's deal – not for me. Besides, you saw me bowl during the campaign – that probably cost me 40,000 votes in Akron, Ohio alone.

Gibbs: Sir, all I'm asking you here is to focus more on governing and less on recreating while this thing is going on. Maybe, you know, have some cabinet meetings about Afghanistan and Iran and stuff like that.

Obama: Dude, you are one serious buzz kill, you know that? Have you spent any time with my Cabinet?

Gibbs: Well, not all that much, no…

Obama: Well, you go spend two hours in a room with Janet Napolitano and tell me how you feel. Gimme another idea here.

Gibbs: Ok, how about I get you a pool table installed in the East Wing?

Obama: All right, that's a start. Pretty sure I can take Biden at billiards. And if I can't, I can always get Rahm to break one of his thumbs. Hey, this actually sounds like fun!

Gibbs: So do we have a deal?

Obama: Done! But call that nitwit BP CEO and tell him he needs to hurry up and get that damn well plugged, because I really need work on my long irons.

Gibbs: Consider it done.

Barack Obama: President of ... What?

2010-06-01T08:25:00.000-07:00

The biggest problem with President Obama is that he so often seems not to have a grasp on just exactly what it is that he is president of. There appears to be no recognition in this White House that, once the election campaign is over, the winner becomes the president of all 50 United States, along with every person who resides within them.

We have never had a president who so openly demonizes huge swaths of American society on such a regular basis as we have seen this President repeatedly do with Tea Partiers (even resorting to the obscene "tea bagger" reference), opponents of socialized healthcare, anyone making more than $100,000 per year, and the entire state of Arizona, to name just a few of his chosen rhetorical targets. Then there are those segments of our society to whom this President and his gang of Chicago thugs offer nothing more than benign neglect: The people of Nashville, who just weeks ago suffered through flooding comparable to what Katrina did to New Orleans with barely a mention from this President, millions of Americans living along the border with Mexico who suffer with the drug trafficking and violence that are a facet of daily life in the region while this Administration steadfastly refuses to do anything about enforcing the laws on the federal books, and the people of the Gulf Coast, who had to wait 37 days before this President summoned the interest to deign to hold a press conference about the ongoing tragedy of the BP oil spill.

To that growing daily list, we can add the families of America's fallen veterans, insulted on Monday by this President's choice to vacation in Chicago rather than take part in the traditional Memorial Day presidential ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery. The breaking of this tradition is just the latest in a long line of insults to the military offered by Mr. Obama and his Administration over the last year and a half.

Given these and many more divisive acts taken by this President, it is increasingly obvious that Mr. Obama considers himself the "president" only of those who voted for him and support his radical leftist political agenda. Can there be any real question, for instance, that had it been a very blue-state Boston that suffered through massive spring flooding rather than deep-in-the-heart-of-a-red-state Nashville, this Administration would have staged a massive federal response to the disaster?

If the BP oil spill threatened the coastlines of blue-state California, Oregon and Washington rather than red-state Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Texas, does anyone really believe that this President and his minions would have sat benignly by for a full month doing little other than deflecting blame before finally and begrudgingly beginning the process of treating the event as a disaster of national proportions? If you do believe that, well, you'd be much better off reading Alice in Wonderland than this column.

Whatever else one thinks about George W. Bush, as President – and as Texas Governor before that – he was studiously careful not to use derogatory rhetoric about any segment of our society. Where Obama derides Tea Party activists at seemingly every given opportunity, Bush never lowered himself or the office he occupied to criticize those who participated in the thousands of obscene and often violent anti-war protests that became a staple of American life after the invasion of Iraq.

Bill Clinton was also very careful to avoid the use of divisive rhetoric against any segment of the American public, and clearly understood the necessity of any president staying above the fray. In reality, until the elevation of Mr. Obama to the office, one would be at great pains to find an example of any sitting president since Woodrow Wilson who openly and frequently demonized large segments of the U.S. population for political gain.

Clearly, President Obama feels no similar need for restraint, and in fact obviously believes that dividing the nation is in his own self-interest. As long as that political calculation holds at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, we can anticipate two and a half more years of a nation becoming increasingly and more bitterly divided.

And there is no reason to believe the political calculation will change. This strategy is in keeping with the Obama Administration's adherence to the demonize-and-conquer strategies taught by late Chicago radical Saul Alinsky, whose teachings have guided this President throughout his adult lifetime. This is who Mr. Obama is, and who he will remain.

This reality will bring joy to the hate-filled cretins who inhabit leftwing websites, but it won't do much for the rest of a population yearning for a President who actually gives a damn when a tragedy such as the BP oil spill devastates an entire region of the country, regardless of how that region voted in the 2008 presidential election. For that, they will have to wait until January 20, 2013.

2010-05-23T08:08:00.000-07:00

Welcome to yet another thrilling edition of the only newspaper column in America that hasn't lied about serving in Vietnam, Hobnobbing With Dave!

Item: So this is why libertarians never win elections…

Well, Sarah Palin can celebrate now: the leftwing news media has discovered a new boogeyman to hound, and his name is Rand Paul, the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Kentucky. Though nominally a Republican, Mr. Paul is in fact a libertarian, as is his father, Texas Congressman Ron Paul. While libertarian views tend to be technically correct about what the Constitution actually says, those GOP voters in Kentucky who nominated Mr. Paul for this senate seat are about to find out exactly why it is that the Libertarian Party seldom fields candidates who can actually win elections.

Libertarianism is all about telling people what the government cannot do for them. Like it or not, the truth about America is that most voters want to know what the government can do for them, and base their voting decisions accordingly. In a poll released just after last Tuesday's primary vote, Mr. Paul led his Democrat opponent by more than 20%. You can bet that the leftist news media will make sure that gap closes quickly – helped along by the foot-in-mouth disease that Mr. Paul inherited from his father – and that what ought to be an easy Republican win in November will instead become a nail-biter at best, and possibly even a Democrat win.

Item: Blumenthal is the left's latest gold medalist.

So a Democrat politician is revealed to be a bald-faced liar, and liberals rally around him in support. What else is new? From Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton to Al Gore to John Kerry to Barack Obama, American liberals have made it obvious for a long, long time that bald-faced liars have real political potential as far as they're concerned.

The latest winner of the liberal gold medal for creative prevarication is Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, who has now been starkly revealed to have repeatedly lied throughout his political career about having served in Vietnam. Were he a Republican, Mr. Blumenthal would not only be removed as the Party's nominee for higher office, he would be hounded from the AG's job by the leftwing news media.

But because he's a Democrat, the reaction from the news media has been a round of perfunctory reporting on the matter that will soon die away, and a statement from the Obama Administration that its support for Blumenthal has not changed. Knowing this would be the case, Blumenthal last week responded to the revelation of his serial lying with a statement that he would not allow his record to be attacked.

His "record" is that of a bald-faced liar, which makes him the perfect liberal candidate for the U.S. Senate in Connecticut.

Item: The Great Climate Fraud Morphs into the Great Species Fraud.

If you thought that the death of Global Warming as a viable driver of government policy means you can relax a little bit, think again. As is always the case with the world socialist movement – the driver behind Al Gore's Great Climate Fraud - the death of one political fraud only gives birth to the next. As of Friday, May 21, we know what that next fraud will be.

On Friday, the United Nations leaked excerpts from its soon-to-be-published fake study on endangered species, and in the process made it obvious that this will be the next great cause of world socialism. For those who closely followed the political drivers of the Great Climate Fraud, it will come as no surprise that this Great Species Fraud will advocate that the UN report will advocate:

"...a whole sale revolution in the way humans do business, consume, and think about their lives." And
"…massive changes to the way the global economy is run."

In other words, like the Great Climate Fraud, the Great Species Fraud will be little more than a concerted attack on the free market industrial economies of Western Europe, and more importantly, the United States of America. The devolution of market-based economies to the socialist model – with ever-increasing influence of the UN and other world government organizations – has been the singular focus of socialists around the world since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989.

The collapse of the Great Climate Fraud changes nothing in that regard, and the frightening fact of the matter is that this kind of thinking completely dominates the Democrat Party at the national level, and pervades the senior leadership of the Obama Administration.

So while we should all celebrate the death of fake climate "science" as a driver of government policy, we mustn't kid ourselves that the world socialist movement has died along with it. These people are like zombies – they just keep coming back from the grave to try to strangle us.

The President Gets the Bad News

2010-05-12T19:32:00.000-07:00

Recently in the Oval Office…

President Obama: Rahm, I gotta talk to you about this memo we just got from our pollsters.

Rahm Emmanuel: um, yeah, go ahead, but I'm in a hurry here – got some heads to bash on the whole Wall Street reform deal, and then I gotta go dig up some dirt on a couple of Blue Dogs who aren't toeing the party line on climate change.

Obama: Says here that our pollsters are advising Democratic congressional candidates to avoid mentioning things like healthcare reform, immigration reform, and jobs in their re-election campaigns.

Rahm: Yeah, so?

Obama: Says that the very mention of these issues – issues, by the way, that have been the very centerpieces of my administration thus far – can ensure defeat for members of our party in November.

Rahm: (glancing at watch) uh-huh, uh-huh, can we get to the point here?

Obama: Well, uh, Rahm, reading this memo, you'd think our policies are unpopular with the people or something.

Rahm: (nodding head rapidly while fidgeting in chair) Ok, so what are you wondering about?

Obama: …

Rahm: Look, you're acting as if you're surprised here – haven't you been paying attention?

Obama: Well, I've been kind of busy…

Rahm: Mr. President, the people hate our policies.

Obama: What? But I'm fabulously popular!

Rahm: Sir, don't you read those polling memos we place on your desk each morning?

Obama: Not really. I'm not good with paper. I'm more of a high-tech guy. It'd be better if you'd give them to Betty over there and have her scroll them on the TelePrompter, like she does with the newspaper every day. That as you know is my learning tool of choice.

Rahm: (Sigh) Sir, I hate to be the one to break this to you, but you are not fabulously popular anymore.

Obama: I'm not?

Rahm: No, sir. Now, you're not in Bush territory or anything like that, but your job approval rating has been down in the 40s for quite some time now.

Obama: (gasp!) But how can that be? I mean, I'm The One and all…

Rahm: um, well, sir, it turns out that country really didn't move to the left politically in 2008 like we initially thought. Turns out the voters just had Bush fatigue, and voted for you just because you were less like Bush than McCain was.

Obama: Wow. You know, that's damn near impossible for me to believe. I mean, my entire world view is now in jeopardy because of what you just said there, Rahm. Are you certain about this?

Rahm: Yessir, I can get you the polling data if you like.

Obama: Ok, just get it to Betty over there so she can scroll it up on the TelePrompter.

Rahm: And, uh, sir? It really is worse than that.

Obama: What do you mean?

Rahm: Well, see, you are actually more personally popular than your policies are.

Obama: (smiling broadly) Well, that's good news, right?

Rahm: Depends on your outlook, really. I mean, I guess it's good news to you…

Obama: Yes! I knew it!

Rahm: …but it's really not good news to Democrats running for re-election who voted for your healthcare nationalization bill, and who support your policies on other issues.

Obama: But, but I've always thought that good news for Barack was good news for everybody. I mean, that's how I've lived my entire life!

Rahm: Yessir, I know that – it's pretty self-evident to everyone. But the reality of the situation is that your healthcare bill makes about 60% of the population sick to its collective stomach, and public approval for your immigration policies is even lower than that.

Obama: hmmm…that does present a bit of a problem, then. But what about jobs? I mean, wasn't the public listening last November when I announced from my TelePrompter that my administration would henceforth have a "laser-like focus" on job creation?

Rahm: uh, well, yes they were, but you know, they were also watching as we moved on to healthcare nationalization immediately after you read that speech. And then they watched as you moved to Wall Street reform immediately after that. And they have watched over the last couple of weeks as you have spent your time bashing the State of Arizona over the immigration law they recently passed. And they've also watched as the rate of unemployment has continued to hover at around 10% ever since you read that speech last November…

Obama: Ok, ok, enough! Geez! So tell me this: If our candidates can't run on healthcare, immigration, or jobs, and Wall Street reform isn't doing us any good either, how in the world are they supposed to run?

Rahm: Well, I'm suggesting they run away from you, sir. Heh-heh.

Obama: Ok, that was uncalled for.

Rahm: I know, but I couldn't resist. Now excuse me while I go bash some heads and blackmail some Blue Dogs. After all, that's the way we really get things done around here.

The Consequence of Incompetence

2010-05-04T05:34:00.000-07:00

The continuing utter ineptitude of the current presidential administration has never been more starkly displayed than over the last week, in relation to the disastrous BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and the attempted Islamo-fascist bombing in Times Square.

The Bombing

For those of you who haven't been keeping count, Friday night's attempted bombing in Times Square constitutes the fourth significant terrorist attack by Islamo-fascists on U.S. soil since President Obama took office. That compares to zero significant terrorist attacks by Islamo-fascists on U.S. soil during the Bush Administration post-9/11. So do the math: that's 4 in 16 months compared to zero in 87 months.

If you think this is somehow mere coincidence, think again. This is a matter of focus, or lack thereof by this current President and his Chicago thug minions on the real threat this nation faces. President George W. Bush, for all of his touchy-feely political correctness when it came to airport security and constantly referring to Islam as a "religion of peace", also consistently and clearly identified and targeted the real terrorist threat to America in modern times, which invariably comes from male followers of radical Islamic factions between the ages of 18 and 35. That is the demographic the Bush Justice Department and intelligence agencies focused on, and that focus kept this nation safe from terrorist attack for the final 87 months of the Bush presidency.

By contrast, the Obama Administration can't even bring itself to use the word 'terrorist' until absolutely forced to do so when reality slaps it in its collective face, as happened on Tuesday morning, and it is incapable of using any iteration of 'Islam' in describing individual terrorists or the terrorist threat in any event whatsoever.

To make matters worse, the Justice Department under feckless Attorney General Eric Holder has made it clear that its focus will be on domestic, 'right-wing' paramilitary groups, the likes of which have not staged any sort of attack in this country in the 15 years since Tim McVeigh attacked the FBI building in Oklahoma City.

It should surprise no one that this refusal by U.S. law enforcement officials to focus on the real threat at hand has emboldened Islamo-fascists around the world and led inevitably to frequent deadly attacks on American soil. Islamo-fascists are like vicious dogs – if you don't take the threat they present seriously, they will bite you in the butt until you do. Until the Obama Administration begins to take the vicious dog in the neighborhood seriously, the dog will continue to bite.

The BP Spill

First, let's be crystal clear here: This disaster is the fault of BP and its contractors, and they will and should pay dearly for it. That said, the response to this terrible event by the Obama Administration has been shamefully inept, and the parallels to the Bush Administration response to Hurricane Katrina are too obvious to let pass.

President Bush was pilloried by the national leftist news media for being two days late in responding to Katrina – which was undeniably true. They were late, they were inept when they finally did respond, and the President's advisors gave the appearance of being uncaring. No question about any of that. But they were also dealing with an utterly incompetent Mayor of New Orleans, and an utterly incompetent Governor of Louisiana who waited two days to cede her own jurisdiction over disaster response to the federal government. This lack of clarity of jurisdiction was at least partially responsible for the mass confusion that existed after the hurricane's devastation of New Orleans.

By contrast, there is no lack of clarity whatsoever in who has jurisdiction in response to major oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico. That jurisdiction goes to the U.S. Department of the Interior. Period. It is an undeniable fact that the Obama Administration waited nine full days following the initial massive explosion before mounting any sort of meaningful response to this event.

You will note that there is no similar outcry in the nation's Obama lapdog news media regarding this Administration's failure to respond in a timely and effective manner. Oh, the New York Times published a half-hearted editorial on Sunday that mildly criticized the Administration, and Bill Maher belched out a typically obscene comment on his HBO show on Friday night, but those and few other isolated criticisms are pretty much the extent of the non-outrage displayed by the supposed protectors of the public interest towards this Administration's incompetent response to what could become the worst ecological disaster in the nation's history.

But don't worry: the President finally, at long last made it to Louisiana on Monday, 13 days following the explosion, to announce that his Administration would not rest until the disaster has been contained. He was so serious about this commitment that he even made his announcement without the aid of his ever-present TelePrompter.

I know the people of Louisiana feel much better now that The One has spoken.

Three Positives From the BP Disaster

2010-05-02T07:19:00.000-07:00

1) In the last 20 years, the only thing our public school children have learned about the oil and gas industry has been the Exxon Valdez disaster. From this point forward, the only thing future school children will learn about the oil and gas industry will be this BP disaster. So Exxon will be able to feel better about its contribution - or lack thereof - to our system of education.

2) If "climate" legislation wasn't already dead as a doornail before this happened, it certainly is now. A big part of the compromise surrounding the Kerry/Graham/Lieberman (KGL) bill currently under senate consideration was the Obama Administration's recent announcement that its 5 year plan for the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf would include opening up new areas for exploration for oil and gas. That has been key to getting the votes of Democrats like Mary Landrieu, Blanche Lincoln, Mark Pryor, Jeff Bingaman and a few others. The BP disaster will destroy that compromise. Good riddance.

3) Over the last few days, we have been treated to the spectacle of our first openly fascist President, Barack Obama, and other high officials in his administration defending exploration for oil and gas in the offshore United States. The only reason they are doing that is because they are desperate to hold together the votes to pass the KGL bill. Had they not included expanded offshore access in their 5 year plan, they would without any question whatsoever have spent the last 10 days excoriating Republicans for their support of offshore drilling. It has been hilarious to watch the rank hypocrisy in action.

If y'all can think of other positives from this horrible tragedy, let me know, because I'm keeping a list.

In all seriousness, our hearts should all go out to the people of Louisiana and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast whose environment and livelihoods will likely be impacted - and in some instances, devastated - by this broadening disaster. It is now obvious that the oil from this spill will become an ecological and economic disaster along the Southern coast of Louisiana. It is already moving into sensitive coastal wetland areas that were devastated just five years ago by Hurricane Katrina, and will almost certainly have severe impacts on the Louisiana fishing, shrimping and oyster bed industries that constitute such a vital part of the Louisiana economy. It seems likely that the currents in the Gulf of Mexico will ultimately carry this oil to the shores of other states, ultimately even being carried around the Florida peninsula and impacting that state's Eastern shore.

All sorts of theories are beginning to float around about what might have caused the initial explosion that triggered this disaster, most of them centering around the failure of the blowout preventer to trigger and shut down the flow of oil through the well bore. I have heard some of my colleagues talk about what "bad luck" BP has had in recent years, with several major disasters taking place at their U.S. facilities. The truth is that such accidents at large facilities of this sort are almost always due to some form of human error - they are almost never the result of a "bad luck" mechanical failure.

The reality is that BP has established an unfortunate safety record at its U.S. facilities in the last 5 years - both the explosion at its Texas City Refinery and its pipeline leak on the North Slope of Alaska were clear results of its personnel failing to follow safety procedures. BP and the federal government will perform their investigations and ultimately identify a cause, and we can expect that cause to have very little to do with "bad luck", and much to do with human error. Blowout preventers with triple-redundant triggering systems just don't fail on their own.

The sad part of this is that the oil and gas industry as a whole has over the last 20 years established an extraordinary record for safety in the Gulf of Mexico. The federal government defines a "significant" oil spill as any spill over 1,000 barrels. Not even the devastation wrought to oil and gas platforms in the Gulf by hurricanes Katrina and Rita triggered a single such spill.

That record will now be totally discounted in the U.S. liberal news media by this single incident, and the nation will become far more dependent on foreign oil as a result.

That's very sad, but it's also an unavoidable outcome of this terrible tragedy.

We are also seeing questions beginning to arise, even in the Obama lapdog media, about the slowness of the federal government's response to this event, with some even beginning to speculate that this could become "Obama's Katrina". Only time will tell if that ultimately becomes the case, but we must all realize that only the lapdog news media can make that happen, and given that they have richly earned their "lapdog" moniker in relation to this President, such an outcome seems very unlikely to ultimately take place.

After all, life in the liberal zoo bases its entire existence on a compliant and cooperative lapdog media.

Lindsey Graham, Pitiful RINO

2010-04-27T04:11:00.000-07:00

Pity poor Lindsey Graham. Ok, well, don't pity him – rather, snicker at him for his stupidity in becoming the latest Republican senator to get caught up the crossfire of Democrat mid-term electoral calculations.

Mr. Graham, of course, is the Senator from South Carolina who styles himself as the second coming of the now former "maverick", Arizona Senator John McCain. (McCain, we recently discovered, is now an ex-Maverick, having recently disavowed having ever been anything but a loyal conservative Republican in the face of a strong GOP primary challenge from former congressman J.D. Hayworth.)

Senator Graham has spent the last six months engaged in a negotiation with Democrat Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts and "independent" (but really Democrat) Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut on "climate", i.e., cap and trade legislation. Keeping with the hubris of their massive egos, these three senators have proceeded on the belief that they, and only they, can devise the ideal solution to the non-existent "problem" of man-caused global warming, with Sen. Graham taking on McCain's former role as the poster child for Republican-in-name-only (RINO) stupidity.

The Kerry/Graham/Lieberman bill – we'll call it KGL for short – was set for a grand unveiling this past Monday, but a funny thing happened on the way to Lindsey's coronation: Democrat election year politics intervened. On Saturday, poor Lindsey issued a plaintive message announcing he was pulling out of his negotiations on the KGL bill – meaning, one supposes, that we will have to henceforth refer to it as simply the KL bill – due to the fact that the White House has now convinced Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to take up immigration reform rather than "climate" legislation next on the senate's agenda. Graham's note went on to express his disappointment that the Democrats have chosen to yet again delay dealing with such a critical issue, after they had promised him that KGL would be next on this year's agenda.

Oh me, oh my, what is a poor RINO to do?

The only surprising thing about this shift in Democrat strategy is that it comes as a surprise to anyone, much less Sen. RINO. The Democrat agenda is never about dealing with issues that are somehow important to the American people. If it was, healthcare would have been far down the list of priorities, and "climate" wouldn't even be on the list. After all, large majorities of the public adamantly opposed the healthcare atrocity, and that majority has continued to grow since the bill's passage, and "climate" legislation consistently places dead last in polls that ask respondents to the issues that are most important to them. In most polls, it wouldn't even register as an issue at all unless the questioner specifically asks about it.

Immigration, on the other hand, does register in the collective public mind, and so, as the Democrat leadership in Washington looked at this year's remaining congressional schedule, and realized they were quickly running out of days on which issues could be brought to the well of the Senate for consideration, they had a choice to make. Not surprisingly, they made the choice that they perceive will give them the greatest political advantage in November. Despite Sen. RINO's complaints, it was an entirely rational choice.

For the Democrats, "climate" legislation is about one thing and one thing only: placating the radical leftist "environmental" groups who contribute tens of millions of dollars to Democrat campaigns. But while the radical greens control gobs of money, they don't control a lot of votes at the end of the day, and they can just as easily be placated through the regulatory processes at EPA and the Department of the Interior as they can through legislation. So, although they give great lip service to it, for the Democrats, "climate" legislation is really a secondary priority, especially in an election year.

Immigration reform, on the other hand, is where the votes are. One of the great looming problems the Democrats face in this year's elections is a great deficit in what pollsters call "voter enthusiasm". The

Democrat voter base always tends to experience lower turnout in mid-term congressional election years, and that is only exacerbated in years, like this year, when the Democrat voter base – made up largely of ethnic minorities – is less motivated to vote than the GOP voter base.

So, facing this election-year reality, the Democrat leadership in the White House and congress made the very cynical and simple calculation: What better way to stir up the voter base than with a big fight over immigration reform? It doesn't matter to the Democrats if they win or lose, it makes no difference whether a bill is ultimately signed into law or not – the fight is what matters in an election year.

So, the Arizona immigration bill that was passed late last week gave the President and Sen. Reid their opening, and they jumped through it, with Sen. RINO becoming the big loser in the whole process.

Gosh, don't you feel terrible for poor Lindsey?

The Tea Party Demonization Campaign Continues

2010-04-19T07:19:00.000-07:00

The single most consistent truism in American political life is this: If you see a liberal/leftist/progressive/ socialist/neo-fascist accusing conservatives of engaging in some unseemly behavior, you can be absolutely, positively certain that said liberal/leftist/progressive/socialist/neo-fascist is either currently engaging in the exact same behavior or has done so in the past. This absolute truism has never been more starkly on display than in the ongoing effort by the Democrat Party and its propaganda arm in the old, tired, dying leftist news media to demonize the millions of ordinary Americans who participate in the Tea Party rallies all over the country.

A couple of weeks ago we detailed how several members of congress leveled obviously false charges that Tea Party participants in Washington hurled racial and homophobic epithets at them as they filed into the capital building. That effort having been exposed as a fraud and failing to move the public opinion needle away from the Tea Partiers, the Democrats and their media agents redoubled their efforts last week, desperate to find some traction as the November elections grow ever more near.

The fun started with Chris Matthews, who believe it or not is still on MSNBC, hosting a show viewed by literally dozens of people late each afternoon. Mr. Matthews went into a literal hissy fit – the kind only smarmy leftwingers can throw – after hearing Rush Limbaugh refer to the current administration as the Obama "Regime" on his radio program. Matthews went on and on about how the use of that specific word is simply unacceptable in American public discourse, contending Limbaugh should be shunned for having used it to refer to any duly-elected American president, because in so doing he might incite those evil Tea Partiers to violent behavior.

One problem: a cursory Google search on the term "Bush Regime" returned 1.4 million hits, including hundreds of examples of its use by Democrat members of congress, and several instances when Matthews himself used the term to refer to the George W. Bush Administration.

Oops.

Next we had NY Times columnist Frank Rich, in his Saturday column, trotting out the tired and disgusting canard that the only reason why the Tea Partiers oppose the current President's policies is due to their inherent racism. He went on to contend that race is in fact the sole motivating factor of the Tea Parties, and that Republican politicians who encourage the Tea Parties are in fact inciting violence and risking creating another Timothy McVeigh. This from a guy who never had word one to say about the hundreds of real violent protests conducted by those on the far left during the Bush years, and who has never had a word to say about real race baiters like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, and the criminal behavior their acts have provoked over the years.

Not content to merely use media tools to drumbeat this "Tea Partiers = Violent Racists" message into the public consciousness, the Democrats trotted out the big gun over the weekend in the form of former President and Oval Office Fornicator Bill Clinton. At an event recognizing the 15^th anniversary of the Oklahoma City Bombing, the former Prevaricator in Chief built upon Rich's comparison of the Tea Partiers as one big Timothy McVeigh waiting to happen, stating that the rhetoric he is hearing from the Tea Parties today is reminiscent of the rhetoric he heard from the right prior to McVeigh's atrocity. Those of us with long memories will remember that Clinton, on the advice of pollster Dick Morris, disgracefully used the tragic deaths of almost 200 Americans as a tool for attacking his political enemies, attempting to blame the event on conservative talk radio hosts like Limbaugh, instead of the abuses of the FBI under his own watch at Mount Carmel and the earlier incident at Ruby Ridge, as McVeigh himself attested to.

Not content with merely labeling millions of ordinary Americans as hateful, violent, racist terrorists, the Democrat demonization campaign continued onto the Sunday morning talk shows, where Time Magazine leftist nitwit Joe Klein accused Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin – and by extension, the Tea Partiers – of making statements that border on "sedition". To quote Klein: " I looked up the definition of sedition which is conduct or language inciting rebellion against the authority of the state. And a lot of these statements… rub right up close to being seditious."

Oh, ok, so now those on the radical political left would have you all believe that statements criticizing the taxing and spending excesses of this Administration and congress are somehow seditious in nature. This is life in the liberal zoo carried to its logical conclusion: any idea contrary to those held by the poobahs of American leftism must be criminalized in order to be shut down, because those on the left have no means of making any fact-based argument to refute them.

At long last, it has come to this. November cannot get here soon enough.

Must be Global Warming, 2010 Part V

2010-04-18T08:15:00.000-07:00

I swear, the most gifted fiction writer in the world could never make up the abject bullshit that global warming "scientists" belch out on a daily basis. Now we're supposed to all cower in fear because there is just not enough air pollution around anymore to keep the planet cool:

Why Cleaner Air Could Speed Global Warming

Seriously, does anybody actually believe anything these clowns have to say anymore? Amazing.

Have a great Sunday.

The 16 Year Cycle of Presidential Politics

2010-04-12T08:37:00.000-07:00

I have long held the theory that each new generation of Americans has almost a genetic need to experiment with liberalism/leftism/progressivism/socialism or whatever '–ism' is being attached leftist ideology in this country these days. Thus, every 16 years or so, as a new generation of American voters comes of age and the people begin to get bored with whatever moderate-to-conservative administration happens to be in power at the time, the country elects a leftist to the presidency, and waits to see what happens.

It generally doesn't take too long for the public to collectively recoil in horror at the terrible mistake it has made, and to then begin the process of correcting things at the polls. It's very easy to go back in history and observe this apparently unavoidable cycle of American politics.

Let's begin in 1960, when a public tired of 12 years of boring prosperity under Truman and then Eisenhower elected the young liberal John F. Kennedy to the presidency. Kennedy's liberal social policies and feckless, amateurish conduct of foreign affairs had his public approval rating on a downward trajectory by late 1963, and the country was well on its way to a correcting election the following year. But then JFK was assassinated, and the public turned to Lyndon Johnson in a sympathy vote. The Democrats were turned out of office in 1968, but not until Johnson had saddled the country with the massive escalation of the Vietnam conflict, and a set of Great Society programs that are still wreaking damage on the population to this day.

Fast forward 16 years to 1976, and a new generation of voters tired of the Watergate scandal turned to a liberal peanut farmer from Georgia. The most incompetent presidency in the nation's history followed, resulting in the Reagan landslides of 1980 and 1984. When George H.W. Bush prevailed over leftwinger Mike Dukakis in 1988, it looked as if the public had learned a lasting lesson from the Carter debacle, and might well avoid another disastrous flirtation with leftism.

But it wasn't to be. In 1992, the magic 16 years after 1976, a public furious at Bush for breaking his "no new taxes" pledge in a shameful deal with congressional Democrats turned leftwards again, elevating Bill and Hillary Clinton to their co-Presidency. This time the public caught on far more quickly than it had following the mistakes of 1960 and 1976, recoiling in terror as the Clintons attempted to socialize the healthcare system and implement a massive new BTU carbon tax. Voters were so appalled by these and many other Clintonian initiatives that they awarded the Republicans with a massive congressional sea change election in 1994, turning both houses of congress over to the GOP for the first time in almost half a century.

Many anticipated that a personal repudiation of the Clintons would follow in the 1996 presidential contest, but Bill Clinton was smart enough to shove Hillary and her hard-core leftism aside, choosing instead to adopt the strategy of "triangulation" suggested to him by pollster and then-White House aide Dick Morris. Thus, throughout 1995 and 1996, Clinton co-opted Republican positions on everything from military policy to welfare reform, and ended up being re-elected and presiding over a successful presidency for the most part.

All of which brings us forward now to 2008, sixteen years after Clinton's 1992 victory. Another new generation of voters grew tired of 12 years of moderate-to-conservative policy, and also tired of a war in Iraq that had dragged on for 6 years. Predictably, another lurch to the left occurred, this time elevating a true leftist radical to the presidency.

This time the public learned even faster than it had following the 1992 mistake, beginning the process of turning the Democrats out of office in November of 2009, as it recoiled in horror at the radical leftist, even fascist, policy pursuits of President Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats in congress. All indicators today point to the likelihood of another sea change election coming this November. True, there are still more than six months between now and Election Day, but it's hard to see what could happen between now and then that would turn back this growing tide.

Should such a sea change take place this November, the question will then become whether President Obama will choose to moderate his worst impulses as Bill Clinton did following 1994? At this point, there is no indication whatsoever that this President has a moderating bone in his body. Bill Clinton was all about Bill Clinton, and was willing to do whatever it took to secure some sort of positive legacy for himself in history. Leftist ideology was Hillary's deal, not his.

Barack Obama, on the other hand, is all about ideology, and transforming the country as he promised repeatedly to do during his election campaign. Given that, there appears little chance he will divert himself from the Jimmy Carter-esque path to a one term presidency he currently finds himself treading. Such a fate could not happen to a more deserving person.

The Mindless and Disgraceful Alinsky Democrats

2010-04-06T07:52:00.000-07:00

One of the most amusing pass times I've engaged in recently has been to observe as the Democrat Party and its press agents in the old, tired, dying, Dinosaur national news media demonize those who participate in the loosely-organized Tea Parties around the country. The Democrats are in fact so frightened by the Tea Partiers that they have resorted the tactics preached by their apparent guiding philosopher, the late radical Saul Alinsky, attempting to brand all Tea Party participants as racist rednecks.

In the runup to their vote on the healthcare nationalization atrocity a few weeks back, several African American Democrats leveled accusations that some of the participants in the Tea Party rally that took place on the day of the vote had shouted racial epithets at them as they filed into the Capitol building. Barney Frank, the gay pathological liar from Massachusetts, similarly alleged that at least one of the tens of thousands of Tea Partiers there that day hurled a gay slur at him.

The leftist news media, as always utterly incurious about why these specific members of congress would choose to enter the capitol building at ground level, rather than use the tunnels they use about 99% of the time, breathlessly reported the accusations from these members of congress as fact (after all, they're all liberals, they wouldn't lie, would they?), and have spent the last three weeks tarring and feathering everyone who has ever participated in a Tea Party rally.

On the day of the vote, I told some friends that I suspected these accusations were fake, and after a few days of the demonization of the Tea Partiers, others began to wonder the same thing. After all, dozens of members of the media recorded every step those members of congress took that day, and yet none of them managed to catch audio or video of a single racist or homophobic remark coming from the crowd. Yet no one in the dinosaur media found this to be curious.

Andrew Breitbart, a journalist who runs the very successful website, Breitbart.com, realizing that there had to be hundreds of individuals in the area using either video cameras or cell phone capable of recording audio, decided to offer a $10,000 reward for anyone who could produce any evidence at all that any racist or homophobic remarks had come from the crowd. After a week of getting no response, he upped the reward to $100,000. To this day, there has been no response.

Why? Because the accusations were clearly fake, staged by these Alinsky Democrats as a means of marginalizing a movement they perceive as a threat to their political future. These fake accusations are based on these rules from Alinsky's Rules for Radicals:

RULE 5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.

RULE 12: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.

So, the Tea Party participants now become demonized as a bunch of lower-class, uneducated, racist rednecks. Nevermind recent polling data that show a) more than 40% of Tea Partiers are political independents or Democrats, b) the average education level of Tea Partiers is virtually identical to that of the population at large, and c) the average income level of Tea Partiers is virtually identical to that of the population at large. In the Alinsky Democrat view, Tea Partiers cannot be perceived to be a cross-section of the population at large because that lends them legitimacy in the eyes of others.

I think this Alinsky Democrat tactic will fail – and already has failed, in fact – with everyone who is not already a hopelessly smug, leftist ideologue. Because most Americans are going to understand that an attack on the Tea Partiers is really an attack on middle America, that vast swath of the country that lies outside of the leftist media centers in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. The Alinsky Democrats used the same tactics against Sarah Palin, and were largely successful in marginalizing her. But Sarah Palin is one person – the Tea Partiers are millions of ordinary Americans, whose views are supported by millions more.

The Tea Party movement is the single most important political development of the last 20 years, and the Alinsky Democrats know it. When 48% of those surveyed in a recent poll say their political views are closer to the Tea Partiers than to the President's, the Alinsky Democrats know they have a very real problem.

Lashing out and demonizing millions of registered voters, at a time when your party is already lagging behind in the polls, does not appear to be a recipe for success, regardless of what Saul Alinsky taught.

Meanwhile, from our Peace-loving nancy-boys at Greenpeace...

2010-04-05T04:57:00.000-07:00

...we have this declaration of war on global warming skeptics like yours truly:

http://weblog.greenpeace.org/climate/2010/04/will_the_real_climategate_plea_1.html

Emerging battle-bruised from the disaster zone of Copenhagen, but ever-hopeful, a rider on horseback brought news of darkness and light: "The politicians have failed. Now it's up to us. We must break the law to make the laws we need: laws that are supposed to protect society, and protect our future. Until our laws do that, screw being climate lobbyists. Screw being climate activists. It's not working. We need an army of climate outlaws."

The proper channels have failed. It's time for mass civil disobedience to cut off the financial oxygen from denial and skepticism.

If you're one of those who believe that this is not just necessary but also possible, speak to us. Let's talk about what that mass civil disobedience is going to look like.

If you're one of those who have spent their lives undermining progressive climate legislation, bankrolling junk science, fueling spurious debates around false solutions, and cattle-prodding democratically-elected governments into submission, then hear this:

We know who you are. We know where you live. We know where you work.

And we be many, but you be few.

Bring it on, Shirley. I'll be happy to introduce you to my little friend, Mr. Sawed-off 16 Gauge.

Sheesh.

A Low Degree of Equanimity

2010-04-04T07:17:00.000-07:00

Equanimity.

About 20 years ago, my boss at the time recommended me for a promotion. A partial basis for his recommendation was that I possessed, in his view, a "high degree of equanimity."

I read that and thought, "Wow, that's great! Who would have ever thought I would have a 'high degree of equanimity'?"

And then, about 2 seconds after that, I realized I didn't know what the word meant. So I looked it up. Turns out this is a fancy word used to describe a person who exhibits 'grace under pressure'. Cool. I'll take it.

Since that initial exposure to 'equanimity', it has become one of my favorite words, mainly because it turns out pretty much nobody else knows what it means, either. I can only conclude that this particular word is not a standard feature in high school vocabulary curricula.

For a while back in the early '90s, I'd toss the word into columns here and there just for fun. But then I thought, what's the use in that? I mean, I'm trying to get a point across in these things – generally speaking, of course – so what kind of sense does it make to use words that people aren't going to know? It doesn't, so I quit doing it, at least consciously.

I do still use it in business memos from time to time, with mixed results. Back in 2004, I used the word in a memo that was distributed to the executive team of the company I worked for at the time. The next morning, I noticed a reply had come in from the company's CEO.

Now, for a guy in my position, attracting the attention of your CEO can either be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on the context. In this case it was hard to tell, because the note read "You are the first person I've ever seen use the word 'equanimity' in a business memo. I'm impressed. Don't do it again." He was just joking. I think.

I bring this all up because it occurred to me during the last few weeks that our current President, Barack Obama, is not in possession of a 'high degree of equanimity'. He often appears sorely lacking in this quality, in fact. This reality becomes especially apparent when the President finds himself without the crutch of his near-omni-present Teleprompter.

We saw a great example of this just on Saturday, in fact. At a townhall meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina, the President became flustered when a woman complained about the myriad tax increases contained in his healthcare nationalization law, complaining that "we are already over-taxed". In response to this question that his trusty thugs, er, aids had clearly failed to screen ahead of time, Mr. Obama launched into a rambling filibuster that went on for 2500 words and lasted more than 17 minutes. This answer was so extraordinary in its disjointedness and lack of logic that even the liberal Obamatons who run the Washington Post felt compelled to publish an article dedicated to it in the paper's Sunday edition.

Then there was the interview on Fox News with Brett Baier, the first interview ever conducted with this President in a truly journalistic manner, i.e., an interview in which the questions were actually tough, and the person asking them was willing to follow up when the President refused to answer directly, or did not know the answer. In this interview, one or the other was pretty much always the case. It became readily apparent that the President did not want to directly answer questions about what was actually in the healthcare legislation, and in fact that he did not even know what was actually in it. He became ever more testy as the interview when on and he was caught in a seemingly endless series of prevarications and information voids.

No doubt that will be the last interview Mr. Obama ever grants to any media source that has not agreed to serve as a member of his propaganda bureau. He has since gone back to conducting cozy puff pieces on NBC and CBS in which he is shown playing basketball, and taking questions about how his wife maintains her buffed arms, and how his daughters are adjusting to life in Washington.

Faced with tough polls in the wake of the healthcare nationalization vote showing that upwards of 60% of the population disapproves of the rank atrocity, the President has lost all semblance of grace. The speeches delivered at a seemingly endless procession of staged townhall events have taken to sounding more like Comedy Central monologues than presidential addresses.

As the November elections grow nearer, with no sign of the polls presaging a massive repudiation of Democrats around the country moderating, one senses a level of near-panic setting in at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

The President needs to work on his own equanimity, because the pressure will only get worse from here.

The Costs of American Fascism

2010-03-28T06:54:00.000-07:00

Back in the first term of George W. Bush, yours truly penned a series of columns that posited that the Republican Party, then in control of all levers of power as the Democrat Party is today, would do the country a great service by moving towards a market-driven, private-sector-based system of universal healthcare.

The reasoning then was that there was a growing mood among the public that something needed to be done to improve the delivery of healthcare services to those who either did not have health insurance provided through their employment or could not afford to purchase it themselves. This line of thought further concluded that, if the Republicans did not seize their moment in power to move the nation to some form of market-based universal delivery of health services, then the Democrats would move the nation to a ruinous government-based form of the same thing the next time they assumed absolute power.

Predictably, the Republicans did nothing in this regard, and the nation now stands saddled with the worst-case scenario: a nationalized system of healthcare delivery based upon the fascist model (private ownership, government mandate and control) preferred by the nation's first outwardly fascist congress and President.

This is undeniably what Obamacare amounts to – there is no logical, fact-based argument to the contrary, though there is plenty of dissembling, name-calling and lying from the President and his supporters.

You begin with the unprecedented mandate that everyone must purchase a healthcare policy. The President and his army of liars like to reply that this is no different than the mandate to buy auto insurance, something only a blatant liar or an oaf who flunked his Logic 101 course would attempt to argue. You are forced to purchase auto insurance in order to engage in a privilege – the privilege of driving an automobile – and we have always paid all manner of fees in order to engage in privileges in this country. The mandate on health insurance is the first time the federal government has imposed a mandate on citizens for the simple fact that they are alive. If you take in breath on a regular basis, the federal government now says you must purchase health insurance. If you do not purchase health insurance, you will be fined. If you refuse to pay the fine, you will be thrown in jail.

This is the very essence of fascism. Benito Mussolini would be proud.

Obamacare will have a depressing effect on the economy in the short run, and ruinous effect in the long run. It received a 10-year "score" from the Congressional Budget Office of "just" $984 billion only due to the fact that it imposes its new taxes immediately, but does not implement its budget outlays until 2014. Thus, you have 10 years of Obamacare taxes counted against just 6 years of outlays. Its mandate that any business employing more than 50 people provide them with healthcare insurance will ensure that thousands upon thousands of small businesses will never grow beyond 49 employees, and many of those who currently exceed that number will lay enough off in order to get themselves under that threshold. That process has already begun.

Where larger businesses are concerned, we've already seen announcements from Caterpillar that Obamacare will impose a new cost of $100 million on that company in its first year, and from AT&T that its cost will be more like $1 billion. What do companies do when they incur massive new costs? They increase the prices they charge to their customers, and they lay people off.

Continuing on the fascist model, the Democrats in congress next move into bullying and intimidation mode. This morning, House Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman announced he will subpoena CEOs from these and other large companies to explain their calculations to his committee next month. See, their announcements do not fit into the approved story line, and any deviation from that storyline must be discredited and punished.

On the insurers themselves, the government now imposes mandates that they allow parents to carry their kids on their policies until age 26, and that they can no longer screen applicants for pre-existing conditions, among other things. So what will happen there? Well, both mandates will dramatically increase costs to healthcare insurers, and so the rates they charge will naturally go up as a result. The anticipation of these higher rates is largely the basis for the cost estimates from companies like Caterpillar and AT&T.

This is not rocket science here, folks. It is all very, very easy to predict.

Finally, the Obamacare army of liars love to compare this atrocity of a bill to Social Security and Medicare, and predict it will ultimately become as well-liked by the public as those prior entitlements. Let's note that both Social Security and Medicare are currently actuarially insolvent and will be completely broke within the next decade. Let's also note that the combined un-funded liabilities of those two massive programs that must somehow be paid by future generations of Americans is upwards of $50 trillion. That's Trillion with a "T".

Those two programs may be popular, but the reality is they are well on their way to bankrupting this nation. Obamacare will just speed that unhappy process along.

The Liberal Zoo welcomes you all to Fascist America. Hope you enjoy the stay, but be sure to meet all your mandates.

On Losing Your Wallet

2010-03-26T15:52:00.000-07:00

So I lost my wallet on Sunday. Credit cards - gone. Social Security card - gone. Driver's license - gone. Lost it on my way to Lake Charles for a three day stay at L'auberge Du Lac. It was purely a business trip, I assure you. Luckily I had some cash and my passport on me, so I was able to go ahead and check in.

What I am finding out is this: cancelling and replacing your credit cards is a cinch. Took me about an hour and a half altogether to replace 5 cards.

Replacing your driver's license is no different today than it was 40 years ago. Drive to an inconveniently located Texas Dept. of Transportation office. Wait in line 30 minutes for a disgruntled state bureaucrat to look at your insurance card and passport and tell you to fill out a form at a table where there are pens on chains. Find out that none of the pens on chains have any ink in them, and borrow a pen from the Scottish guy in front of you who just moved to Houston from Aberdeen. Nice guy - he tells me not to be too upset - it works the same way in Scotland.

Fill out the form and stand in another line for another 30 minutes, before another disgruntled low-talking bureaucrat who speaks English as a third language calls you over, looks at your paperwork and says something completely incomprehensible. Get a dirty look from the disgruntled low-talking bureaucrat when you respond with "huh?". Lean in very close to her and listen intently as she mumbles "take off glasses, stand in front of blue screen", and then try to smile as she takes the most god-awful photo that has ever been taken of you in your entire life, or at lease since the last time you had to replace your drivers license.

Listen very intently again as the disgruntled low-talking bureaucrat mumbles "eleven dollar", and count out the bills. Take your receipt and ask how long it will take to get the license in the mail. Recoil in shock at the utter futility of it all when she replies "thirty, forty-fi day".

Run out of there in utter despair knowing that this is what my healthcare service is going to be like for the remainder of my life now that the system has been federalized.

I just cannot wait for my visit to the Social Security office next week. I'd rather have dental surgery without anesthesia.

The Politics of Frivolity, Revisited

2010-03-22T13:15:00.000-07:00

NRO's Planet Gore blog has a story today that perfectly illustrates the theme of my "Politics of Frivolity" piece from a couple of weeks ago. Here is an excerpt:

My old stomping grounds for about 15 years (Alexandria, Virginia) is insisting on moving forward with a project to spend 173,000 scarce taxpayer dollars in these lean times — even as taxpaying families are setting aside the frivolous and even what they consider basics — on a new "green roof" to replace a 13-year-old roof with no history of problems and a 25-year life expectancy. The other $200,000 is being paid for by all taxpayers through the EPA. OK, mostly by future taxpayers.

If Alexandria doesn't spend the $173,000 they don't have, you see, they won't qualify for EPA giving them $200,000 the federal government doesn't have. So they have to do it. They won't get that bag of money from the federal government if they don't undertake this expenditure.

Healthcare Nationalization - A Post Mortem

2010-03-22T07:06:00.000-07:00

Ok, so what do we know in the wake of the healthcare nationalization vote that took place in the House of Representatives on Sunday? Here are a few things:

We know there is no such thing as a "pro-life" Democrat in Washington anymore. Michigan Rep. Bart Stupak and a few others in the Democrat caucus like to put up the pretense of caring about unborn children in order to retain their seats representing borderline Republican districts, but at the end of the day, they abandoned their "stand on principle" (as Stupak put it) for a toothless, meaningless executive order that will be thrown out of the first federal court that considers it.

We already knew the so-called "moderate" Blue Dog" Democrats were as useless as you-know-whats on a boar hog, and they proved it yet again, happily providing Nancy Pelosi the number of votes she needed to ram this atrocity of a bill through the House. They have now played this kabuki dance in which the Speaker counts Blue Dog heads until she has the necessary number of votes (they probably draw straws, or play "rock/scissors/paper to see who has to vote with her), and then lets the remainder vote against whatever disgra ce happens to be on the floor at the time for more than a decade now. It will all come to an end in November, as pretty much all the members of this worthless fake caucus will face defeat in their bids for re-election. Their constituents have figured out the game. The nation has never seen a group of politicians more deserving of defeat than this particular bunch of frauds.

We know that, at the end of the day, Speaker Pelosi could get 216 votes in favor of a bill that would fill the Potomac River with raw sewage if that became a top priority on President Obama's fascist agenda.

We know that the President has no clue what is actually in this bill. He demonstrated that very clearly in his interview with Fox News Anchor Brett Baier last Wednesday.

We know that the Democrats as a Party have no regard for the Constitution of the United States. Rep. Alcee Hastings of Florida stated this loud and clear for all to hear when, during a meeting of the House Rules Committee, he proudly stated "Rules? There ain't no rules here! We make 'em up as we go along." Rep. Hastings, by the way, is one of just six federal judges to have been impeached from office, having been convicted of fraud and bribery charges in the 1980s. That this criminal now sits as one of the senior Democrats on the House Rules Committee is perhaps the most appropriate committee assignment in congressional history.

And so we go on, a nation forever changed. The United States of America is now destined to become a socialist welfare state on the model of failing Western European nations like France and Spain. This has been the goal of socialists/fascists masquerading as Democrats for decades, and Sunday was the biggest leap they have yet take down that road. They know that, in the long run, a government that controls the people's healthcare decisions controls their lives. Attaining that goal was, in their view, well worth the electoral Armageddon they will face at the polls this November, and in 2012.

The truly interesting part of this whole process to me is listening to the President and his supporters in congress and the news media speculate about what a political disaster it would be for him and the Democrat Party in general had they failed to implement healthcare nationalization legislation. I find this whole discussion fascinating, if irrelevant, because the reality is that, for proponents of this stain upon American democracy, the outcome was ultimately of no consequence at all – the damage to their political futures had already been done long before Sunday, and there is no going back.

They have now allowed this corrupt, disgraceful process of bullying, lying and vote purchasing to remain on public display for almost a full year now. I cannot remember a time in my life when such a high percentage of ordinary Americans were so tuned in and appalled by the machinations of congress. There will be no recovery from that for leftist Democrats in Washington.

This November will be a political slaughter. November 2012 will most likely be more of the same, and Barack Obama will probably be a one-term President as a result. It's what will inevitably follow as the government steadily gains control of every aspect of our daily lives that should make us all cry for the futures of our children and their children.

American Fascism was born on Sunday. President Obama and Nancy Pelosi took a giant leap towards their goal of turning this great nation into just another banana republic. Somewhere, Hugo Chavez is smiling.

A Nation on the Brink of Fascism

2010-03-20T09:45:00.000-07:00

So here we sit on Saturday morning, seemingly a day away from President Obama realizing his dream of destroying our constitutional democracy and replacing with a sort of fascist, benevolent strongman banana republic form of government. The President obviously dreams of ruling over America in the same fashion in which Hugo Chavez has ruled over Venezuela for the last decade, putting in place a socialist/fascist utopia without having the suffer the inconvenience of answering to a free and curious news media, or of legitimately moving his policy preferences through a complex and difficult legislative process.

After all, He, Obama, is The One, and The One is right, The One is all-knowing, and The One and should have his way.

Certainly, the President has already achieved his dream of not having to answer to a free and curious news media, as all the major leftist news organs who dominate this nation's media long ago dove into the Obama tank of Kool-aid and have been swimming around in it with blank, timid smiles on their faces ever since.

The lone exception to this happy circumstance for The One came on Thursday, when Fox News anchor Brett Baier conducted the first legitimate media interview the President has ever been subjected to in his entire political life. Baier was everything a real news reporter is supposed to be: He asked tough questions, he followed up when the President obfuscated or tried to shift focus, he interrupted when the President tried to filibuster, he repeated questions Mr. Obama tried to avoid until the President was forced to give something resembling a real answer or admit he had no idea what the answer was.

In other words, unlike every other member of the nation’s news media who has interviewed the President since he became a candidate back in 2007, Baier conducted himself like a real news reporter who had attended a real journalism school. Sadly, he will almost certainly remain the lone exception to rule in today’s lapdog media, and the President will almost certainly never take another interview on the Fox News Channel.

So the major media having long been completely co-opted to tell the Obama tale the way The One wants it told, the President was left only to find a way to circumvent the Constitution and the legislative process it envisions. That desire was satisfied for The One by one Louise Slaughter, the Chairman of the House Rules Committee, who last week presented The One with the now famous “deem and pass” solution to his quandary. This would allow members of the House who are reluctant to vote in favor of the atrocity of a bill the Senate passed last December to “deem” it having passed without having to actually vote on it.

But that wasn’t all – the President and his gang of Chicago thugs helped move the Democrat Party’s fake “deficit hawks” along by strong-arming the Congressional Budget Office to issue a fake score on the bill that pretends to show it actually cuts the deficit! No one really believes that to be the case, of course – I mean, if they did, why not just multiply every provision in the bill by, say 8, and thus cut the deficit 8 times more than it already does? – but the fake score allowed fake “conservative” Democrats to claim to their constituents back home that they voted for the bill on the grounds that it is fiscally responsible. Oh wait, silly me – I just said “voted”. Obviously, that’s wrong, since they’re not “voting” on the bill at all.

See how elegant this all is? The One has, through all this procedural chicanery, essentially installed himself as the nation’s de facto dictator, with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid serving as his congressional enablers. If he can get healthcare nationalization done without a real congressional vote, who is to say he can’t do the same with cap and trade, amnesty for illegal immigrants, and anything else on his radical fascist agenda?

Of course, the problem The One now faces is that his term as de facto dictator expires this November, when Republicans will make huge gains in congress as a direct result of the extra-constitutional actions he has taken during his first year in office. That is, of course, unless The One and his gang of Chicago thugs figure out a way to subvert the electoral process in the same way they’ve subverted the legislative process.

Don’t kid yourself into thinking that those efforts are not already underway.

The Runaway Scrape

2010-03-13T06:06:00.000-08:00

March 13 is a little-noted date in Texas history - the date in 1836 when General Sam Houston, his 400 man army and hundreds of terrorized Texas citizens began their retreat from General Santa Anna's Mexican Army. This strategic retreat lasted more than five weeks, until Houston decided to camp his army near Lynch's ferry on the San Jacinto River on April 19.

Two days later, after Santa Anna had assembled his own army of more than 1,000 across the plain that is now known as the San Jacinto Battleground, Houston led his men in a mid-afternoon siesta time surprise attack, routed the Mexican army, and secured independence for the nation of Texas from Mexico.

The Runaway Scrape is the equivalent in Texas history to the winter at Valley Forge endured by Washington's Revolutionary Army. The spring of 1836 was miserable in Texas - unusually cold, fraught with heavy rains that turned roads into almost impassable mud, and rivers into boiling cauldrons. The Texian army lacked proper equipment and clothing, and moving any amount of men across the Texas terrain during that season was a near-impossibility.

The Scrape began at Gonzales, Texas, where Houston had chosen to asseble his rag-tag army, and await news of the battle of the Alamo. Interestingly, although Gonzales lies only about 80 miles from San Antonio, it took a full week after the Alamo fell on March 6 for the news to travel to Gonzales in the person of Susanna Dickenson, one of a handful of Alamo occupants who was spared by Santa Anna's 'no quarter' doctrine. By that time, Santa Anna had divided his army with his cousin, General Martin' Perfecto de Cos, sending Cos south with about 500 men, and taking the remainder with him to the east, towards the Texas border with Louisiana. Immediately upon hearing from Mrs. Dickenson, Houston began moving his own army east, staying just ahead of Santa Anna until he and his war council decided to make a stand at San Jacinto.

Houston has been often derided as a poor general and even a borderline coward in some quarters for mounting such a long and miserable retreat in the face of an enemy. But the reality is that the Texian Army would have lacked any element of surprise had it chosen to stay and fight in Gonzales, and that the Runaway Scrape, at the end, became one of the great enablers of Texas Independence.

So, for a Texan, March 13 is a day well worth remembering. God Bless Texas.

Some Stuff to Consider

2010-03-11T03:55:00.000-08:00

First a disclaimer: In my entire adult life, I have never engaged in a birthday party ticklefest with other full-grown men. Just in case anybody was wondering.

Seriously, you almost have to feel sorry for Congressman Massa. He is obviously a very confused individual who cannot bring himself to publicly admit to his sexual orientation. His interview with Glenn Beck is one of the most skin-crawlingly uncomfortable episodes I can remember witnessing. The reality that Mr. Massa actually thinks anyone believes a word he said is a very sad indicator of his utter lack of fitness for serving in congress. Then again, being abjectly out of touch with reality appears to place him right in the mainstream of Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives.

But enough of that sad and sorry spectacle. On to more important matters...

Professor Mark J. Perry, at his excellent Carpe Diem blog, contrasts the economic performance of California and Texas. One state is heavily unionized and dominated in government by mindless leftist cretins. The other is a right to work state dominated in government by low tax conservatives.

Guess which state has a vastly more healthy economy? The only drawback to this is that many of the cretins fleeing California for greener pastures are coming to Texas, which is seeing more than 1,000 people move within its borders every day. Shit, they've already ruined formerly wonderful places like Montana, New Mexico and Colorado - can't they leave the Lone Star State alone?

We have been saying for some time that this Administration and Democrat congressional leaders are attempting to transform America from a constitutional democracy to a strong-arm fascist form of government. Nowhere has this reality been more starkly borne out than in this morning's report by Mark Tapscott at the Washington Examiner that San Fran Nan is now planning to create a "rule" that will allow her to "deem" the senate healthcare bill to have been "approved" by the House without first requiring the House members to actually take a vote on the bill!

This is an extraordinary perversion of the legislative process, even for a shameless creep like Pelosi, who has made a career out of perverting the process in the House. These people - Pelosi, Obama, Reid, et al - are literally a threat to the very existence of this country. Wake up, folks, before it's too late.

On the Great Climate Fraud front, it should come as a surprise to no one that the reliable fellow travelers in the tired, dying, dinosaur leftist news media are beginning to rally to one final push in defense of Pope Al Gore and his minions in the Church of Global Warming. See this USA Today puff piece as today's prime case in point.

These people will not go down without a fight, and their bones will continue to rattle long after they are buried.

A Nation Recoiling From the Politics of Frivolity

2010-03-09T05:19:00.000-08:00

Is America rinally recoiling from the politics of frivolity?

We’ve written a great deal about the Great Climate Fraud in recent months, as the cultish Church of Global Warming (CGW) has entered its inevitable decline in credibility with the scientific community, policymakers and the public at large. The revelation last fall of hundreds of emails detailing an organized commission of outright fraud by some of the leading fake “scientists” who have promoted the Warmist religion has had the same effect on the CGW as the revelation of emails detailing an organized effort to manipulate U.S. natural gas markets had on Enron a decade ago.

Citizens in the United States, Great Britain and across the free world have begun recoiling at the idea that they’ve been had by a bunch of two-bit charlatans. Ok, make that a bunch of trillion dollar charlatans, but charlatans they are. In the most recent Pew survey on public attitudes towards major issues, the percentage of Americans who believe human activity is the cause of climate change fell to an all-time low 34 percent. Climate change ranked 21st out of 21 issues surveyed in terms of public concern, with just 28 percent still laboring under the belief the matter is cause for major congressional action.

Politicians with those kinds of numbers keep themselves busy looking for other lines of work. Public policy issues with that low level of public concern seldom become the subject of successful legislation to address them. Thus we have simultaneously seen over the last few months the collapse of leftist efforts to enact cap and trade legislation targeting carbon dioxide, as well as growing bipartisan congressional opposition to efforts by the Environmental Protection Agency to severely hamstring the economy by implementing command and control regulation over carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases”.

What is happening here is that the public is beginning the process of rejecting the politics of frivolity. And frivolity is exactly what the CGW and really environmentalism in general have become.

Over the past 30 to 40 years in America, many good and positive things have been accomplished in the name of environmentalism, since the implementation of major pieces of legislation like the Clean Air Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Endangered Species Act. Automobiles no longer belch out plumes of black smoke as they run down the road; the emissions from coal-fired power plants have been dramatically reduced, although they are still the dirtiest things around; emissions from oil refineries have been cut by a factor of 9 and more; cities no longer are allowed to flow their sewage into the nation’s waterways; important and significant animal species like the Whooping Crane and the Bald Eagle have been brought back from the brink of extinction. All of these and more were good and worthy goals that were worth taking on, and the nation is a much cleaner and safer place as a result.

But, with the fall of the Soviet Union and the resulting de-legitimizing of world socialism, the worthiness of the environmental movement in general began to change, as leftist activists of all stripes came to the conclusion that the best way to advance their radical agenda was under the guise of “environmentalism”. Suddenly, beginning in the early 1990s, proposals for listing species under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) moved away from species, like the Whooping Crane, whose very existence was truly threatened, to animals like the Sage Grouse native to Wyoming and Colorado, which literally exist in the millions (and even have an open hunting season dedicated to them), but whose listing under the ESA on the grounds of decreasing habitat would result in massive economic and societal disruption.

Environmentalist activities under the Clean Air Act (CAA), the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA), and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) began to take on a similar profile of proposing “solutions” designed to cause maximum cost and economic disruption possible. Under NEPA, the EPA can require the conduct of hugely costly environmental impact studies whenever a citizen raises concerns about almost any potential environmental impact that could allegedly result from some economic activity. Such studies typically cost millions of dollars and can take years to complete. These NEPA provisions have been systematically used by radicals around the country to delay and increase the cost of all manner of infrastructure projects. In Texas these tactics have been used to dramatically increase the time and cost of major highway project on I-35 north of Waco and I-45 north of Houston. One seven mile stretch of road on I-35 has now taken more than 14 years to reconstruct, and is still unfinished.

Examples of this sort of abuse of the provisions of these major federal acts are legion, and the public invariably becomes incensed once the abuses are revealed, despite the best efforts of the leftist news media to cover them up. This has never been more true than the last two years, as a nation mired in a major recession begins to realize that it can no longer afford to tolerate such mindless frivolity in the name of “environmentalism”.

Of course, there has never been a more frivolous environmental policy proposal than the current efforts by congress and the EPA to either legislate or regulate control of carbon dioxide emissions. To understand exactly how frivolous such proposals are, all you really need to know is that carbon dioxide makes up only about 4% of all so-called “greenhouse gas” emissions. Of that 4%, human-based emissions amount to around 3.4%, meaning that, in the now-failed Waxman-Markey legislation, congress proposed to cost the U.S. economy more than $2 trillion over 8 years to attempt to marginally reduce what currently amounts to around 13/100ths of 1% of greenhouse gas emissions. Now that the Waxman-Markey bill has failed, the EPA now proposes to cost the economy even more than that under its heavy-handed, Soviet-style regulatory system.

This is rank frivolity that a nation mired with trillion dollar-plus annual budget deficits as far as the eye can see simply cannot afford or tolerate. The recent polling data indicate that most citizens outside of the hard-core radical left have come to that realization. You can expect that shift in attitudes to show up in a big way in this November’s congressional elections.

The frivolity of the liberal zoo has fallen into a state of unrecoverable ill repute.

Al Gore: The Ken Lay of Global Warming

2010-02-28T04:05:00.000-08:00

Predictably, the NY Times has today ceded 1/4th of its op/ed page to a guest opinion piece by Al Gore, Pope of the Church of Global Warming. It's title? "We Can't Wish Away Climate Change".

[sigh]

The first paragraph is a thing of climate-hysteric beauty: "It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it."

You have to love the chutzpah, coming from a guy whose every pronouncement of impending doom to mankind made over the last 20 years has been demonstrated false in just the last few months. Since last November, we learned that a) hurricanes are not becoming either stronger or more numerous than in the past, b) the Himalyan glaciers are not melting, c) the Amazon rain forests are not endangered by global warming, d) arctic sea ice is not disappearing, e) antarctic sea ice is actually expanding, f) Greenland is not melting, g) polar bears are not in any way an endangered species, h) sea levels are not rising, period, i) crop production in Africa is not decreasing, j) global warming is not a threat to water resources to 3/4ths of the globe, and k) there has been no global warming at all since 1995.

But it gets even better, as Pope Al continues talking himself into a corner: "...what a burden would be lifted! We would no longer have to worry that our grandchildren would one day look back on us as a criminal generation that had selfishly and blithely ignored clear warnings that their fate was in our hands. We could instead celebrate the naysayers who had doggedly persisted in proving that every major National Academy of Sciences report on climate change had simply made a huge mistake."

The irony of Pope Al pointing fingers at anyone else and accusing them of criminal behavior is stunning in light of what we know today about the utter and complete fraud he has attempted to perpetrate on the world community. This is a man who was given a Nobel Peace Prize and an Academy Award for the production of a fake documentary - An Inconvenient Truth - every element of whose narrative was designed to convince the people of the world to spend trillions of dollars in establishing a global carbon trading scheme. At the same time, Gore was secretly setting himself up in the carbon credit trading business, massively enriching himself in the process.

Now we know that every element of the narrative to An Inconvenient Truth is a lie, the foundation of the most expensive fraud ever perpetrated on mankind. And we know that Pope Al has been one of the main beneficiaries of that fraud.

When similar fraud-based houses of cards come tumbling down in the corporate world, as happened with Enron, Arthur Anderson and others, the United States Justice Department conducts formal investigations and people go to jail. The proper analogy here is to think of Pope Al as the Ken Lay of the Global Warming fraud.

But it doesn't end with Pope Al - you also have to consider the fake "scientists" who have since November been revealed to have intentionally falsified their data in order to produce fake "science" in support of the global warming fraud scheme. Again, when corporate emails revealing systematic fraudulent behavior are made public, the U.S. Justice Department conducts formal investigations, issues indictments, and throws people in jail. Given that the emails revealed since last November reveal exactly such fraudulent intent, similar investigations from U.S. and European law enforcement officials are in order.

If future generations want to find criminal behavior in the current generation, they need look no further than Mr. Gore himself, and the fake scientists who dummied up the data to support his criminal endeavor.

Pope Al sums up his op/ed piece with the following breathtaking assertion: "We have overcome existential threats before. Winston Churchill is widely quoted as having said, “Sometimes doing your best is not good enough. Sometimes, you must do what is required.” Now is that time. Public officials must rise to this challenge by doing what is required; and the public must demand that they do so — or must replace them."

This is the one true thing he writes in the entire piece, and I fully agree. It is time for public officials at the U.S. Justice Department and law enforcement agencies around the world to rise to the challenge and do what is required here: Investigate and prosecute Pope Al, the fake scientists who dummied up the data, the officials at the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change, and anyone else who has had a knowing hand in the perpetration of this massive, unprecedented fraud against humanity.

If these public officials fail to perform their obvious duty in this case, then the public must replace them. It was probably not Pope Al's intent, but in this piece he has made the best possible argument for returning both houses of congress to Republican control this November. We know the Obama Administration will never act to correct this fraud so long as they are able to avoid it. Congressional pressure from a new majority will be the only way to force it, and if that fails, then the President himself must be replaced in 2012.

Pope Al had better make all the millions he can as quickly as he can. Time is growing short, and the editorial board at the NY Times will not be able to provide him cover forever.

Obama Approval Continues to Tank

2010-02-27T06:59:00.000-08:00

morning's Rasmussen survey has him at -21 in the "strongly approve/strongly disapprove" measurement:

...and, for the first time, his overall approval rating has fallen to 43% in this poll:

If he continues down his path of radical leftism, he will be in the 30s by summer.

It's morning in America. Have a great Saturday.

Post-Summit Stuff

2010-02-26T05:07:00.000-08:00

Ronald Reagan would have been proud of congressional Republicans yesterday. The healthcare summit was a draw according to MSNBC, which means the Republicans won, and won big.

Some thoughts, in no particular order:

The President was petulant, condescending and tense. His idea of "bi-partisanship" appears to be to tell any given Republican who was speaking "those are all good points", and then to immediately dismiss them and move on. He diminished his office by playing emcee to the room, and made himself look a little silly by singlehandedly talking longer than all the Democrats combined, and all the Republicans combined.
The comparisons of President Obama to Ronald Reagan as a "Great Communicator" need to end, and end now. Obama is very literate, and speaks well. Reagan was a little less smooth as a speaker, but he was convincing whenever he spoke, and able to persuade others to his point of view. Obama has zero ability to convince others, which is why he fails whenever he tries. From last year's trips to Copenhagen to try to win the 2016 Olympics for Chicago, to try to get a deal on global warming, to his campaigning for Democrat candidates in races in New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts, Obama is on a losing streak of epic proportions in terms of personal persuasion. He may be a great talker, but he is far from being a great communicator.
Harry Reid looked as if he was chewing on a lemon and had a grassburr in the seat of his pants all day. But then, that's pretty much how he always looks. Nancy Pelosi is a worthless, lying sack of horse dung, and I literally celebrate every time her party is stupid enough to put her in front of television cameras.
The Republicans, much to my surprise, showed up well-prepared with factual information and real ideas for real reforms that would actually improve healthcare delivery in the U.S. while lowering costs. Naturally, each and every one of those ideas were rejected out of hand by the President and the other Democrats in the room, given that their goal here is to create a new, massive dependent class of Americans, not to in any way improve the system.
Paul Ryan was especially impressive, easily the most serious and best-prepared person in the room. His critique of the budgetary shenanigans contained in the Democrat plan were utterly understandable to the average person and thus devastating to the Democrat cause.
It didn't hurt anything at all that the Rs were also able to bring real medical doctors to the table in the form of Senators John Barrasso of Wyoming and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma. These two guys debating nitwits like Turban Durbin and San Fran Nan just is not a fair fight.
The sad thing about all of this is that there really is a need for real, good faith reforms in the U.S. system of healthcare delivery. Unfortunately, such reforms cannot happen at the federal level so long as radical leftist ideologues occupy the White House and the majority in congress. And so we are left with the current stalemate. Any real reforms must continue to happen at the state level on a piecemeal basis. Obamacare is dead - Democrats will not be able to force the monstrosity through on a "reconciliation" strategy.

It is dead. RIP.

Have a great Friday.

Some Stuff To Consider

2010-02-25T05:27:00.000-08:00

The latest Rasmussen survey on the Texas gubernatorial race shows incumbent Rick Perry running away from Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison by a 48-27 margin. 9/11 truther candidate Debra Medina has slipped since her revelation on the Glenn Beck Radio Program a couple of weeks ago, now coming in at 16%. This is too bad, since for a while there she was providing some actual suspense in this race, with everyone wondering if Sen. Hutchison could manage to even finish second after the horrid and ridiculously stupid campaign she has run.

Disclaimer: I have long been a fan of Sen. Hutchison for a variety of reasons I will not go into here. But I have lost pretty much all respect for her and the morons who are running her campaign after the nit-witted campaign she has presented to Texans this year. In fact, I really find myself at this point rooting for Medina to make a comeback and edge her out for second place.

Seriously, Sen. Hutchison has for the last few weeks been running radio ads featuring a guy with a folksy Texas drawl (I think it's the guy who does the Whataburger commercials) complaining about Gov. Perry's "fancy roadside parks". I swear I am not making this up - Sen. Hutchison and her campaign's "brain trust" (Pictured at the beginning of this piece) think they're going to defeat a 10-year incumbent Governor who has never in his life lost a race for elected office by complaining about roadside parks.

In light of all of that, no magnitide of defeat will be too much for Sen. Hutchison to suffer in this election. She gets what she deserves.

Elsewhere, the news is all about today's Healthcare Summit, at which President Obama will get a 3 hour photo-op while ignoring any suggestions for real, sensible reform offered by the Republicans who are stupid enough to actually show up.

George Will has a very nice op-ed piece about it all today. His opening paragraph is right on point:

Today's health policy "summit" comes at a moment when, as happens with metronomic regularity, Washington is reverberating with lamentations about government being "broken." Such talk occurs only when the left's agenda is stalled. Do you remember mournful editorials and somber seminars about "dysfunctional" government when liberals defeated George W. Bush's Social Security reforms?

Meanwhile, our favorite simpering half-wit com-symp op/ed writer, E.J. Dionne apparently woke up yesterday and realized that the liberals are in the process of losing a large swath of young people exactly as they did in the 1980s. This comes as a surprise only to E.J. Pity him an his existence.

I love this story , in a tragic sort of way. So let me get this straight: a killer whale has already killed two people, and we're somehow supposed to be surprised when it kills a third? In a sane world, this whale would have long ago either been put out to sea or put down. Instead, our frivolous, simpleton-minded society somehow believes the beast is just misunderstood, and should be protected. Even this woman's own sister is quoted as saying the victim “would not want anything done to that whale” because she loved the animals like children.

Well, guess what, sis? Killer Whales aren't children, and they're called "killer" whales for a reason.

Idiot.

Have a great Thursday.

So Much for the "Pivot to Jobs"

2010-02-21T05:31:00.000-08:00

Y’all remember way back in January – yes, a whole month ago – when the word out of the White House was that President Barack Obama was going to finally, at long last, really, truly get serious about dealing with the economy and implementing policies designed to create jobs? He was, according to his army of professional prevaricators – otherwise known as the mainstream news media – going to perform a “pivot to jobs”, a fancy dance move that would promenade away from his single-minded focus on the frivolity of cap and trade and healthcare nationalization, and dosey-doe to a new (for him) pursuit of policies designed to create real jobs.

So what has changed in the President’s behavior since that barrage of White House talking point parroting by the lapdog media?

Nothing.

If you got up early on Sunday morning and logged onto RealClearPolitics.com as I did, the very first headline you saw was a link to a transcript of the President’s Saturday morning YouTube address, demonstrating what he is clearly focused on today. The headline read “It’s Time to Move Forward on Healthcare”. Huh? Beg pardon? Say what?

Did I misread that? Is it a typo? Did it really say “It’s Time to Move Forward on Jobs”, or “It’s Time to Finally, at Long Last, to Focus on the Economy”, or “It’s Time For Me To Get Serious About Doing My Job”, or “It’s Time For Me To Drop My neo-Fascist Dreams”?

No, I had it right – it really does say “It’s Time to Move Forward on Healthcare”. Hooboy.

So I clicked on the piece to see if the headline was misleading. I thought, you know, the address might have been more focused on jobs and the economy, with just a passing mention about healthcare that was latched onto by a headline writer at RealClearPolitics. But no, the entire piece is about healthcare nationalization. I mean that literally – every word of the speech is solely focused on socializing 1/6th of the U.S. economy. It reads like a speech the President would have made last July – chock full of the ad hominem attacks on and demonization of healthcare providers we have so come to know and love from this President. We’re right back to boogeyman politics. Ok, really, we never left.

So much for the “pivot to jobs”.

Seriously, this should not come as a surprise to anyone – we’ve said all along this guy is not going to change. He has no clue what to do about the economy, and doesn’t much care. He has no clue how to go about creating jobs, and why would anyone expect otherwise? This is a man who has never been involved in a job-creating endeavor in his entire life – he has spent his entire adult life as a political agitator and a politician. His mentors in life have all, without exception, been men of the radical left. He is constitutionally incapable of changing his behavior, and has no desire to change it in any event – he is what he is, a man seeking the creation of a neo-fascist American state.

Oh, well, it could’ve been worse – the President’s Saturday address could have been all about cap and trade. Hmmm, why do I suspect that will be his topic in the coming weeks?

So the White House and the Democrats in congress remain focused on healthcare nationalization. They’re holding a summit on February 25th dedicated to healthcare nationalization. They’ve invited Republicans to attend, and will no doubt reject out of hand any Republican idea that would not lead directly to nationalization of 1/6th of the economy. The White House, after leaving it entirely up to congress to write various healthcare nationalization bills over the last 14 months, is going to post its own healthcare plan on its website on Monday. An anonymous source tells Fox News that the White House plan will be based on – guess what? – the current Senate bill, only without the bribes to Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Ben Nelson of Nebraska in exchange for their votes.

Yeah, that’s the ticket! The White House obviously believes that the only reason why the overwhelmingly liberal voters of Massachusetts elected a Republican last month to fill that state’s vacant senate seat was due to the backroom deals surrounding the senate healthcare negotiations, and that all those polls taken since showing upwards of 60% of Americans opposing healthcare nationalization are meaningless.

So, you might ask, why does this President remain myopically focused on what is so obviously a political loser of a policy? Because healthcare nationalization is not about “fixing” the healthcare system, it’s about creating the most massive new dependent class of Americans since FDR’s New Deal.

This President has not abandoned his goal of “transforming America”, which he repeated hundreds of times throughout his presidential campaign. He wasn’t kidding when he said that, nor was he resorting to hyperbole. His true, undying goal is to transform this country into a neo-fascist state, and the only way to make that happen is to render as many Americans as possible dependent on the federal government for their livelihoods and their healthcare. This is why the only “jobs” he has even attempted to create are government jobs, why his regulatory agencies focus on making it harder and costlier for anyone to create a private sector job, and why he refuses to abandon his unpopular plan to nationalize healthcare.

There is no mystery here, folks. This President is extremely transparent, and he has been telling us for a couple of years now what he really plans to do to this country. It’s time everyone started taking him at his word.

The 6 Step Cycle of Leftist Rationalization

2010-02-20T07:44:00.000-08:00

In a column last week, E.J. Dionne, our favorite whiney, slobbering leftist nitwit columnist, complained that the Obama/Pelosi fake stimulus bill was “if anything, too small”. This is invariably the final rationalization of those on the left when their programs turn out to be unmitigated disasters for the nation – they would have been successful had they just been larger, and if anything, they were just too small.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal? If anything, just too small. Thus, over the decades, Democrat-dominated congresses enacted constant expansions of the benefits of Social Security without enacting corresponding expansions of worker contributions, leaving the system today basically bankrupt.

Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society? If anything, just too small. Trillions of wasted dollars later, the poverty rate today is higher than it was in 1965, the African American family has been decimated by the perverse incentives contained in Great Society programs, and liberals continue to contend it all would have worked if only we’d have spent more.

Johnson looked at John F. Kennedy’s minimal interventionist policy in Vietnam and said it was “if anything, just too small.” Out of that keen observation, the U.S. presence in that country soon grew from a few hundred advisors to more than half a million handcuffed-by-political-considerations troops, and the mother of all quagmires was born.

FDR, at Yalta, looked at Stalin’s plans for annexing much of Eastern Europe into his growing communist bloc and said it was “if anything, just too small.” Ok, he really didn’t do that, but he might as well have, as Stalin got everything he wanted out of that conference, ensuring communist domination of Eastern Europe for half a century.

Last year’s $100 billion 2-year increase in the budget of the soviet-style Department of Education? If anything, just too small. The result of this and the other enormous increases in the baseline budgets of a vast array of wasteful socialist federal programs is that the nation now faces a structural annual deficit in excess of $1 trillion as far as the eye can see.

A cap and trade bill that would waste $2 trillion taxpayer dollars over the next decade to marginally decrease man-made carbon dioxide emissions? If anything, just too small. With the failure of this human atrocity of an idea, the Obama Administration now pursues the wrecking of the U.S. economy by seeking soviet-style command-and-control regulation of “greenhouse gases” by the Environmental Protection Agency under the auspices of the Clean Air Act.

A bill to socialize the finest system of healthcare delivery in the world? If anything, just too small. Most of those on the political left will tell you that the bills currently before congress are too timid, and achieve their goal of a federal takeover of 1/6th of the economy over too long a period of time. They’d much prefer that their Democrat heroes in congress and the President commit outright political suicide by passing an outright, immediate single payer system into law and telling an adamantly opposed public to shut up and take it.

Harry Truman at least was correct when he looked at the bombs that were used in the fire-bombing of Dresden and said “if anything, they’re just too small.” Hiroshima and Nagasaki followed shortly thereafter, and a world war was ended. Then again, Truman may have been a Democrat, but he wasn’t a leftist.

We could go on and on here, but the point is obvious: liberals will never admit to the failure of their consistently failed policy ideas. In their minds, the only reason for the failure of their socialist experiments is that they just weren’t well-funded enough. In other words, if anything, they were just too small.

And so, we invariably end up with the same 6-step cycle of rationalization we have seen from President Obama and his lapdogs in the media like Mr. Dionne.

Step 1: Pass a hideously ill-considered, shamefully wasteful program into law. This step is known as Abject Stupidity. Step 2: Stand idly by as the program utterly and completely fails to produce the results you misled the public into believing it would produce. This step is known as Inevitability of Outcome. Step 3: Look on as the people slowly wake up to the reality of what is happening in Step 2, and public opinion turns radically against you. This step is known as Uh-Ohhhh. Step 4: Begin the process of pointing fingers of blame at anyone else who happens to be standing nearby in order to deflect attention away from yourself. This step is known as Desperate Responsibility Avoidance. Step 5: When Step 4 doesn’t work, team up with your fellow liberals to develop a common set of lies to try to convince the public that they simply misunderstood what the program was intended to do, and that it is really producing exactly the intended results. This step is known as Joe Biden Will Say Literally Anything.

Step 6: Finally, when all else fails, and your party is now facing an enormous repudiation of everything it stands for at the polls next November, try to shift blame to the Republicans, painting them as obstructionists and blaming them for making your program, “if anything, just too small.” This step is known as The Last Refuge of a Leftist Nitwit, and is ably personified by E.J. Dionne.

So, to summarize, here is the 6-Step Cycle of Leftist Rationalization:

Step 1: Abject Stupidity

Step 2: Inevitability of Outcome

Step 3: Uh-Ohhhhh

Step 4: Desperate Responsibility Avoidance

Step 5: Joe Biden Will Say Literally Anything

Step 6: The Last Refuge of a Leftist Nitwit

A sincere word of thanks to Mr. Dionne for playing the role of this week’s Poster Child for the slow-motion suicide of the tired, dying, dinosaur leftist news media.

Hobnobbing With Tex!

2010-02-16T02:41:00.000-08:00

Welcome to yet another incredibly enlightening edition of the only op/ed column in America that has been telling you there has been no global warming since 1995 since…well, since 1995, Hobnobbing With Tex!

Item: Dr. Phil is a phraud.

No, not that Dr. Phil (although he’s a fraud as well) – we’re talking about Dr. Phil Jones of London’s East Anglia University. After years of trying to convince the world that the last 50 years constitute the warmest climate period in recorded history, Dr. Phil turned the world of the Church of Global Warming on its collective head over the weekend when he publicly admitted for the first time that the so-called Medieval Warm Period may well have been warmer than current times, and that there has likely been no global warming at all since 1995.

Dr. Jones, of course, is the very same fake “scientist” who for the last decade falsified data in what has now been rendered a failed attempt to literally erase the 500 year Medieval Warm Period from history in his now-infamous “hockey stick” graph that purported to show steadily and moderately fluctuating temperatures for 2000 years leading to a rapid spike upwards since 1950. Real scientists have over the last seven years repeatedly demonstrated not only that the Medieval Warm Period did indeed exist, but also that Dr. Jones’s claim of a recent spike in global temperatures in excess of ordinary historic fluctuations is a fantasy.

But still, Jones was able to persist in propping up his fraud – which formed the very foundation of Church of Global Warming religious dogma – with the help of a compliant, lapdog media until thousands of emails exchanged between himself and a group of fellow fake “scientists” were made public last November. These emails clearly demonstrated a cooperative effort among the global warming alarmist fake scientist community to include fabricated data in their studies, hide real data from the public, and smear real scientists who attempted to publish studies refuting the alarmist claims.

Since then, Jones has found himself under increasing fire from the British news media, and under intensifying scrutiny from his bosses at East Anglia for his obvious academic fraud, and from the British government for his blatant violations of the British Freedom of Information Act. It appears the warmest place in London these days is Dr. Jones’s office, and he’s attempting to cool things off by finally weaving a little reality into the fantasy world he has made millions of dollars concocting.

One can only hope this latest ruse by Dr. Jones will not have the effect of convincing his bosses and the British government to call off the dogs. Dr. Jones has, along with Al Gore and many others, played a major role in the execution of the most massive fraud in the history of mankind, a fraud that has convinced developed nations around the world to implement wasteful, enormously expensive policies that have cost taxpayers billions upon billions of dollars, and led directly to millions of deaths due to starvation, malaria and other needless causes.

Prison is where such people belong, and the sooner sanity arrives and governments begin the process of putting them there, the better.

Item: Bayh, Bayh, Evan.

It's like deja vu all over again: The similarities between the first two years of the Barack Obama Administration and the first two years of the Bill Clinton Administration continue to accumulate. Throughout late 1993 and early 1994, the country witnessed a rash of retirements by Democrat members of congress, as those members began to wake up to the mess Slick Willie had made of his first year in office, and realized that Clinton’s then-fading public approval rating was going to harm their own chances at re-election.

Fast forward to late 2009, and over the last five months or so, we have seen the same phenomenon rising among current congressional Democrats, and for the same reason: President Obama, by dramatically misreading the results of the 2008 elections and pursuing a radical leftist policy agenda, has made a hash of his first year in office, and shows no signs of any willingness to moderate his worst impulses. This has placed the Democrats’ significant congressional majorities in real peril, and many of these senators and congressmen, seeing the handwriting on the wall, are opting for retirement rather than defeat the polls.

Last Friday, Rhode Island congressman Patrick Kennedy announced he would not seek re-election in the wake of polls showing his potential for success in November increasingly unlikely. Liberals across the country and in the media engaged in hand-wringing that this would leave congress without a single Kennedy for the first time in half a century. The rest of the country realized that, given the horrid performance of congress over the last 50 years, this can only be a good thing.
But the latest, and highest-profile retirement came on Monday, when Indiana Senator and former presidential candidate Evan Bayh announced he would not seek re-election to his senate seat this year. Bayh couched his decision in personal terms, claiming it was not motivated by any fear of losing in November. But the truth is that he has been running behind in recent polls to a couple of potential Republican challengers, and has had a difficult time raising campaign funds. With the President obviously intent upon continuing to pursue his radical agenda, it’s pretty apparent that Senator Bayh read the handwriting on the wall and decided to try to preserve his viability for a future presidential run rather than end his career with a loss this November.

Thus proving that, even in the Liberal Zoo, discretion often remains the better part of valor.

Tuesday: This is Funny, Funny Stuff

2010-02-16T01:24:00.000-08:00

Hitler weighs in on the climate scandals here. Close the door to your office if you don't want your co-workers to wonder what in the hell you're laughing out loud about.

The Sunday Morning Sensation

2010-02-14T09:49:00.000-08:00

Well, Professor Phil Jones has apparently finally decided to begin weaving some level of actual truth into his global warming fantasy tales. His admissions this week that a) the earth may well have really been warmer during the medieval warming period than it has been over the last 20 years, and b) there has been no global warming since at least 1995 amount to a concession that his infamous "hockey stick" chart was in fact a fraud - as it has repeatedly been demonstrated to be over the last 5 years - rendering the entire foundation for global warming theory suspect at best, more likely the complete and utter sham we've long suspected it to be.

Gawd, it's great being right.

Meanwhile, Howard Dean continues to be the raving lunatic we've all come to know and love, and Al Gore, the Pope of the Church of Global Warming, remains sequestered away from the public eye, as he has been since the abject failure of his Copenhagen global warming confab back in December.

But the complete collapse of the Church of Global Warming fairy tale and its full reporting in the European and Asian news media has done nothing to stop the leftist parrots in the American news media from robotically blubbering its talking points. Reliable liberals Ceci Connoly and Juan Williams dutifully repeated the CGW-approved lines on the Fox News Sunday roundtable, even as host Chris Wallace and the other roundtable participants no doubt had to strain to hide their snickering. The whole Climategate scandal has yet be really reported in any meaningful way on any of the major network news broadcasts, or in reliably leftist newspapers like the NY Times.

Of course, the radical leftist government employee James Hansen , continuing his unfettered violation of several federal statutes with apparent impunity, continues to spew his fright scenarios, although this week he likely had to do it from his living room given that the record snowfall in Washington DC likely had him shut in.

And nothing, short of congressional action or a court order, can stop the Environmental Protection Agency from making every effort to destroy what little is left of the U.S. economy by continuing to pursue its mad goal of regulating carbon dioxide, one of the key staples of life on earth, under the Clean Air Act. While all the attention of the public and the media has been focused on the Obama Administration's efforts to destroy the U.S. economy through massive new socialist legislative proposals, little attention has thus far been paid to the backdoor efforts to accomplish the same goal via soviet-style command and control regulation of every aspect of our daily lives.

Now that the voters have stopped the Obama legislative agenda dead in its tracks, we'll see more attention paid to the administration's regulatory agenda. One can only hope the courts will come to their senses before it's too late and the EPA has been allowed to go too far down this road.

The nine months left until the November mid-term elections are possibly the most critical nine months in this nation's history. We must somehow survive the belligerent Obama surge until the voters get their next opportunity to continuing to correct the horrible error they made in 2008.

The Friday Fix

2010-02-12T04:44:00.000-08:00

After November, there will be one less chronic drug abuser in the House of Representatives. Patrick Kennedy has announced he will not seek re-election. The fewer Kennedys around abusing everything and everyone in sight, the better.

John Mayer, after bragging in an interview with Playboy Magazine about his "racist penis", and using the vaunted "n-word" in the process, obviously decided a simple apology was not enough , and that crying was in fact required here. I have to admit I had no idea until this morning that it was even possible for a penis to possess racist thought. Go figure.

The erstwhile liberals over at the Politico assure us that, all the mountain of evidence to the contrary aside, the leftists in the mainstream media love Sarah Palin, they really, really do. Whew.

As if the poor folks in Haiti didn't have it bad enough, this morning they must frantically hide their women, children and wallets, because Nancy Pelosi is coming to town along with a contingent of her fellow leftist thieves. God help Haiti.

You know it's getting bad for President Obama when even the fake polls conducted by CBS and the NY Times feel the need to accurately show his public approval rating diving below 50% into the mid-40s. They dummied it up just enough to keep the 46% approval hovering 1 percentage point above the 45% disapproval, but nobody's really buying that nonsense anymore. This guy is on a free fall into the high 30s by summer.

Finally, I leave you today with a link to the the coolest of all the cool webites in the Internet: this site chronicles everything that was ever blamed on "global warming". It's well worth taking a little time to browse through some of the most absurd claims. Of course, we now know that most of those claims were thrown into the IPCC report without any fact-checking at all.

Have a great Friday, folks.

Al Gore Brainwashed Idiot of the Week Award...

2010-02-10T15:23:00.000-08:00

...goes to MSNBC's Contessa Brewer, for her claim that the record setting blizzards pounding the Northeast United States this week are evidence of more "global warming", or something like that. Seriously, you have to see it to believe it.

The Wednesday Wail

2010-02-10T05:12:00.000-08:00

If you engage in public speaking with any frequency, there has almost certainly been at least one time when you, at the last minute before going on stage, scribbled a few notes on the palm of one of your hands to use as a reminder to make some key points that you had not included in your original slides or script. I do this almost every time I give a presentation or speech. Once, while waiting to give testimony before a legislative committee, I realized that the witness just before me was making pretty much all of the points I had intended to make, and, lacking any paper, ended up scribbling an entire set of new notes on both palms in the few moments before I had to take the witness table. Ironically, it ended up being probably the most effective testimony I've ever offered.

And so we get to the leftist media's latest obsession with Sarah Palin. It seems that, when offering her speech to the Tea Party convention in Nashville on Saturday, the former Alaska Governor had scribbled a few notes on the palm of her left hand, and this showed up on the cameras. Immediatly, the neo-fascist goon squads that make up the regular contributors to the Huffington Post, Daily Kos and other far-left nut site went berserk, spending all day Sunday making the wholely illogical analogy between President Obama's inability to speak to a class of 6th graders without his Teleprompter crutch, and Ms. Palin scribbling a few reference notes on the palm of one hand.

Here I sit on Wednesday morning, for some reason watching Morning Joe on MSNBC, and the liberal pea brains who host this program are still obsessing about this, four days after Ms. Palin delivered her speech. The context has changed a bit, with much of the focus now on the pathetic White House spokesman, Robert "I'm almost as utterly incompetent in this job as Scott McClellan" Gibbs, who mocked Ms. Palin at Tuesday's press briefing by showing the assembled reporters notes he had scribble on his own fatty palm.

The lefties in the media all thought that was very cute, but the reality is that it amounts to just one more clear indicator that this President and his staff simply have no understanding of how ordinary Americans actually function in life. Every time they and their unflinching allies in the press manufacture some new fake excuse to mock Ms. Palin, they make her a more sympathetic character to millions of Americans, and show themselves for the arrogant pinheads they truly are.

Of course, the best news of this week is that the repeated record snowstorms in the DC area have forced the House of Representatives and much of the federal government to shut down for the entire week. If we could get another six months of this, the budget deficit would be cut in half.

But there's no shutting down Barack Obama's mouth, or the smarmy mouth of Robert Gibbs.

A couple of other things: John Murtha, one of the very worst, most unethical people to ever serve in the U.S. congress, died on Monday. He is, in my opinion, a truly tragic figure: A real, genuine American hero in his early life, who became a real, genuine, unabashed scumbag in his later life. One of the most mixed legacies I've ever seen.

Finally, the U.S. Senate should be applauded: the effort to invoke cloture on the nomination of communist Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board failed on a vote of 52-33. Becker was hand-picked by Obama's benefactors in the SEIU, which funneled tens of millions in illegal contributions into the Obama campaign, to fill the post.

That made Tuesday a great day for America. Let's see what we can do about Wednesday.

The Monday Morning Mass Hysteria

2010-02-08T04:30:00.000-08:00

All you need to know about Barack Obama, part 6,593: When speaking to a military audience, he does not know how to pronounce the word "corpsman". Either that, or he thinks everyone in the navy is a zombie (for all you humorless liberals, that would be a walking corpse).

After spending an entire year killing any chance of passing a healthcare nationalization bill by holding all negotiations in secret and shutting Republicans out of the process completely, the White House has decided to actually hold a public meeting on the subject - right out in the open, with TV cameras in the room! - and even invite some evil Rs to attend. I'm sure it'll be a fabulous success.

Yeesh.

Some guy who writes for the Nashville Post is whining that Sarah Palin has somehow "hijacked" the Tea Party. What a terrible way for a writer to waste his one shot at national exposure. Somebody give this clown a Kleenex.

If you hate your local TV weather guy, just be glad you don't live in Baltimore. I think this may be the same guy who wrote the silly piece about Palin and the Tea Party. He has a long commute.

Our favorite liberal bed-wetting columnist, E.J. Dionne, has written something completely senseless about about how passing a healthcare bill is like renovating a kitchen. Or something like that.

Finally, just in case you live under a rock and missed it, WHO DAT????

Sarah Palin: Doing Everything Right

2010-02-07T07:23:00.000-08:00

Sarah Palin is doing everything right. What do I mean by that? Well, let’s go back to a conversation I had last November with a group of Washington insiders. By “insiders”, I mean that this group of four men and one woman make their livings working in the political process in the nation’s capital: Three are lobbyists, one a pollster, and one an executive at a trade association. While I live in Houston and visit DC on work assignments 12 to 14 times a year, all of the others spend their entire lives living and working inside the Washington echo chamber.

It was a fascinating conversation – at least to me – and I was at the time the odd man out. You’ll see what I mean by ‘at the time’ in a moment.

We were having a wide-ranging political conversation over dinner, and one of the lobbyists posed this question: “Sarah Palin: is she a viable future candidate for national office, or is she done?” I sat silently as, one by one, the five political pros at the table knee-jerked to the “she’s done” posture.

The reasons thrown out for their dismissive posture towards Gov. Palin were predictable: “Too ditzy”, “doesn’t speak well”, “inexperienced”, “knows nothing about foreign policy”, “shouldn’t have resigned her job as governor”, and perhaps most fascinating of all, “doesn’t fit in around here”. This came from the lone female at the table, a lovely woman who grew up in New York state, educated in private schools and Yale, and who worked her entire life in one government job or another before becoming a lobbyist a few years back. Despite that background, she still possesses some modicum of common sense, although she displays all the lack of understanding of middle America you’d expect from a person of her background.

I asked her what she meant by “doesn’t fit in around here”, and again, her reply was predictable. “Look at her education – some mediocre college in Idaho? And that was after she moved around to several other second-rate schools. You’re seriously going to put someone like that in the White House? Plus, what does she know about Washington? Has she ever spent any real time here? The people in this town would eat her alive.” Heads around the table nodded their agreement, and then they all looked at me for my thoughts on the subject.

“First of all,” I said, “the greatest president in any of our lifetimes did not attend an Ivy League university – he had a bachelor’s degree from someplace called Eureka College. So that whole argument carries no weight with me at all – and I would submit to all of you that it carries no weight with 90% of Americans who don’t live in Washington, DC, California, or in the large northeastern cities. Second, that same percentage of Americans could not care less whether or not a presidential or vice presidential candidate has spent any real time in Washington. In fact, I’d suggest that, for millions and millions of ordinary people in this country, the less time a candidate has spent in DC, the better. Third, the current President spend all of 1 year in the U.S. Senate before declaring his candidacy for the Democrat nomination, so experience is obviously not a factor here at all.” They all looked at me like I’d just stepped off a spaceship – again, a very predictable reaction, given the audience.

But I plowed on, pointing out that Palin has three full years to learn about policy, foreign and domestic, and no doubt had already established a network of advisors to serve as de facto tutors. That’s if she wants to run in 2012, of course. But the reality is that she is very young in political terms, and could wait until 2016, 2020 or even 2024, and still not be considered too old to serve. There will no doubt be many windows of opportunity for her to re-establish some political viability during all that time. Yes, she has what DC insiders consider to be a funny accent, and yes, the political establishment has collectively labeled her as a dim bulb. But remember, George W. Bush suffered from the same labeling by the same establishment, and managed to serve eight full years in the White House.

I went on to point out that the Obama Administration was moving into a full meltdown stage – which caused chuckles and raised eyebrows around the table – and that, along with what I then saw as the inevitable failure of the Democrats’ cap and trade and healthcare reform agenda would help raise the credibility and approval ratings of Palin specifically and Republicans in general in the public eye. At the time, Palin’s public approval ratings hovered in the mid-30s. Today, they’re in the mid-40s, basically equal to the “brilliant”, Ivy League educated POTUS.

Now, I bring this up not to brag about any prescience on my part – everything I said that night was a simple matter of common sense after all – but to point out that Palin is currently doing everything right, if her goal is to become a viable presidential candidate in the future. She is staying in the public eye, but picking her spots in a way that avoids becoming over-exposed. She regularly weighs in on important issues, and does so in a way that is consistent with conservative principles. And as mentioned above, she reportedly has established a network of key policy advisors who are helping her get better up to speed on foreign and domestic policy matters.

Why do I think these are the right things for her to be doing? Because these are the things Ronald Reagan did to raise his own political viability throughout the 1970s. Reagan’s appeal as a candidate was not to Washington insiders, or those with Ivy League educations: His appeal was to the millions and millions of ordinary Americans who make up the great preponderance of the national electorate. Americans who work hard, teach their kids the difference between right and wrong, and just want the federal government to leave them alone.

People who live in the DC echo chamber tend to forget about such people when engaging in exercises in political calculus such as the one the six of us held that early November evening. They have little understanding of such people, and little desire to learn. The Obama Administration is almost entirely populated with DC insiders, and given that reality, no one should be at all surprised by this President’s precipitous fall from grace in the public’s eye.

Sarah Palin, on the other hand, truly understands such people, because she is one of them. Interestingly, three of the five people who were at our table that night have sent me emails over the last couple of weeks, acknowledging that they just might have underestimated the former Alaska Governor.

Personally, I don’t know if I’ll ever cast a vote for Gov. Palin in the future. A lot can happen between now and 2012, much less 2016, 2020 or 2024. What I do know is that right now, she is doing everything right, and that it’s a real mistake to underestimate her.

Keith Olberman Agonisties

2010-02-06T05:54:00.000-08:00

Poor Keith Olberman. Ok, wait, let me back up. Keith Olberman can kiss my burnt orange Texas a**. He epitomizes everything that is bad about the political left in America: hopelessly ignorant yet cocksure; consistently wrong yet condescending; unable to make the simplest argument based on logic or facts yet smarmy and dismissive when engaging anyone who disagrees; completely unaccomplished in any real-world endeavor yet self-justified in lecturing others.

For exhibiting such a horrid set of personal behaviors, he is of course awarded an hour-long, prime time show on cable television's most biased "news" channel, just as similar oafs like Janeane Garafalo and Al Franken were initially given their own radio talk shows on the now-bankrupt and deceased Air America. The American left always awards the dimmest bulbs among them - that's how Al Gore became Pope of the Church of Global Warming, after all.

And as always happens when the American left puts one of its most pathological dimwits on full display to the public in the media, the ratings go to hell. It happened with Air America, it happened with Chris Matthews, who currently hosts the single lowest-rated prime time show on any cable "news" network, it has happened with every leftist radio talk show host who has ever been given a national stage, and it is now happening to Keith Olberman, Rachel Maddow and the rest of the uniformly left-wing prime time contingent at MSNBC.

It has been obvious for years now that MSNBC cannot hope to compete in any meaningful way with Fox News - Fox now out-draws MSNBC consistently by about a 4 to 1 margin in both total audience and the 18-49 demographic that is so critical to advertisers - so obvious in fact that no one even really bothers to list Fox among MSNBC's ratings rivals anymore, choosing to focus instead on the race for a very distant second place between MSNBC, CNN and even CNN Headline News. It has been widely reported this week that MSNBC's uniformly leftist prime time lineup has now fallen behind a more balanced CNNHN, an incredible feat of incompetent management rivaled in modern times only by CNN's dramatic fall from grace, and Toyota's quality control process.

The numbers are well-documented and undeniable, yet Olberman, on his program Friday night, did what he always does when faced with an embarrassing truth: he lied about it, pretending that his ratings had in fact increased, and viciously attacking everyone who had reported otherwise. This never fails. Lacking the slightest ability to engage any opponent on a factual, rational basis, he simply lashes out with personal attacks, apparently clinging to the Jack Bauer theory that if he just yells louder, he will be believed. You can find a clip of it here - I'm not going to waste time quoting the moron.

This phenomenon of left-wing programs on television and radio losing their ratings once their hate-filled, beligerent, logic-and-truth-devoid message becomes clear is not limited to talk shows. It also happens in comedies and dramas on network and cable TV that decide they have to start including preachy liberal messaging in their scripts. The landscape of TV history is littered with shows that started out popular and garnering huge ratings but then failed when they decided to become "socially relevant".

You look at the most popular, longest-running shows in recent TV history, and you find that they have consistently stuck to their original formulas, and refused to go down this preachy leftist path. CSI is the most obvious one that comes to mind, but you can also look at NCIS, Lost, The Sopranos, and many others.

The most obvious current show that is destined for the ash heap of preachy leftist history? Bones. I really enjoy this show, but it has in the last two seasons become extremely blatant in its anti-religious, pro-liberal biases, going out of its way to have its main characters treat anyone who expresses any sort of religious thought as blithering, superstitious boobs. This is a formula for a steady decline in ratings and ultimate cancellation at some point in the near future in a country in which around 90% of the population expresses a belief in God, and more than 50% regularly attend church.

But back to Olberman and the cable news wars. The reality here is that there is now really only one cable news network that is in any way relevant, and that is Fox News. Fox now regularly out-draws its three "competing" networks combined, both in total audience and in the critical demographic. The reason for this is obvious: Fox truly is fair and balanced. Americans crave balanced news reporting, and continue to flock to Fox in increasing numbers every year.

Liberals squeal like stuck pigs when they hear someone say that, but it's a true statement. Fox, in its news reporting, goes out of its way to give its viewers boths sides of each issue, providing a breath of fresh air from the tired, old, consistently liberal network news operations. Even in its talk show lineup, Fox always strives for balance in its guest bookings, although those on the left are increasingly reluctant to participate, given that they invariably look like senseless morons when attempting to debate an issue with any competent conservative.

Early on, MSNBC made an effort to emulate the balance that Fox has now provided its viewers for almost two decades, but the liberal bias of its on-air talent continued to bleed through in their reporting. As it and CNN consistently began to lose to Fox in the ratings, lefties at these networks and across the country began to lash out at Fox as being nothing but a right-wing operation. Management at MSNBC finally so convinced itself that this was the case that they decided the only way to compete with a right-wing operation was to establish a pure left-wing operation.

We've all seen the results of this self-deceiving decision: a massive ratings decline as viewers flee in droves away from the hate-filled leftist screeds delivered nightly by Olberman, Madow, et al.

The great thing about Olberman's dishonest, delusional self-defense last night where conservatives are concerned is that it is a clear indication that he and his management at MSNBC still do not grasp the real nature of their problem, and are thus doomed to slide further and further into utter and complete irrelevancy. The reality is that the people who run MSNBC are no different than the management at any other liberal news organ in this country, all of which continue to see steady declines in their ability to attract viewers, listeners or readers: They are so liberally biased in their own minds that they would rather run a failed, leftist news operation than try to survive by presenting a more balanced product.

At the end of the day, what Keith Olberman really is is the poster child for the slow-motion suicide of this country's left-leaning news media. It's a role he was truly born to play.

The Friday Morning Fright Fest

2010-02-05T05:34:00.000-08:00

Let's dig right in with one of my favorite pet peeves, the worthless, feckless, wimped-out, pretend-to-be-conservative Democrat "Blue Dog" Caucus in the House of Representatives. These 42 or so members of the House constitute the most over-hyped and under-accomplished caucus in the history of American government.

Take a look at this story. Yesterday, the Democrats raised the U.S. debt ceiling by a whopping $1.9 trillion, the largest such hike in U.S. history, by far. The story really plays up the role the Blue Dogs played in ensuring the bill also invoked "pay as you go" budgeting rules in the house for 2010, making them seem to be these intrepid protectors of taxpayer dollars. Well, bullshit, as we like to say down here in Texas.

First of all, these "pay as you go" rules have been in effect for the vast majority of the last 12 years, as the federal debt has literally exploded. This Blue Dog caucus has been in existence since the mid-1990s, as the federal debt has literally exploded. Am I repeating myself here? Well, sorry, I'm a little pissed.

The Blue Dog caucus has been in existence since around 1995, and has yet to take a single vote as a group against any huge spending bill proposed by their Party's leadership. They caved on the fake stimulus bill last year, most of them caved on a cap and trade bill that would have added yet another $2 trillion to the national debt, and most of them have been feverishly negotiating special deals for their districts in exchange for their votes on the healthcare nationalization bill.

The only way this worthless collection of fake fiscal conservatives could ever make themselves a truly relevant caucus would be to oppose some huge spending bill - any huge spending bill - favored by their leadership as a bloc. But because they are fake fiscal conservatives who only assume that posture as a means of getting elected in what are otherwise Republican districts, they never do that. These are the very worst people in the U.S. House of Representatives, because they give the Democrat Party a patina of ideological diversity it does not in fact possess. A pox on all their Blue dog houses.

Ok, let me take a deep breath here before moving on...

Far be it from me to become a big defender of the Supreme Court, whose decisions have been the direct cause of so much human misery and loss of freedom over the years, but everyone should read this piece about why Justice Clarence Thomas chose to skip the State of the Union speech. Just another example of the inability of leftist Democrats to behave in a civil manner, and a very sad commentary for the nation.

How would you like to be David Axelrod these days, getting balled out by a bad comedian and failed radio talk show host who literally stole an election in Minnesota to get a seat in the Senate. It must feel kind of like being lectured by a 5th-tier Mafioso.

Cong. Patrick Kennedy, son of Ted, is already lashing out at newly-seated Senator Scott Brown. Brown's perceived crime? Why, voting with the - gasp! - Republicans, of course. Here's the money quote: "This is where he shows that when they need him, he's in the tank for the Republicans," Kennedy said.

Hey, Patrick: Scott's a REPUBLICAN. Get used to it.

Have a great Friday!

The Thursday Morning Thrill Ride

2010-02-04T03:22:00.000-08:00

Wow. You miss a couple of days blogging and all hell has broken loose. Where to begin...

How about here. Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln, after having spent the last year desperately attempting to set herself up as the 60th vote for the Obama healthcare nationalization plan, suddenly finds herself down by 23 points to a Republican opponent in her bid for re-election. So now she gets religion, and asks the President when he's going to start fighting back against those evil liberals in his own Party. This would be comical if it weren't so damned pathetic.

Back in December, I wrote in my newspaper column that it was very clear to me at that time that, unless the President radically shifted his legislative and regulatory agenda back from the far left to the center of the political spectrum, both houses of congress would clearly be in play and subject to a GOP takeover this November. I also admitted I was out on a limb with that projection, and that the national punditry would take a little while to reach a similar conclusion. That realization among the pundit class has now begun in earnest, with this piece from an AP writer being the latest evidence of this transitional thought process. If the AP, which has been firmly in the Obama tank for the last 2 years, has writers coming very reluctantly to this conclusion, you now the polling data is very, very compelling.

This is important news - Democrat Collin Peterson, Chairman of the House Ag Committee, has now introduced a bill that would deny EPA the ability to move to regulate "greenhouse" gases under its entirely fraudulent "endangerment finding" published in late 2009. Rep. Peterson is extremely influential among farm state Democrats, who make up about 40 votes in the House, enough to get a bill passed with solid Republican support. We continue to see rising support in the Senate for similar legislation among "moderate" Democrats who, like Sen. Lincoln, see their polling numbers fading rapidly under the steady leftwards assault on the economy and our freedoms by the Obama Administration.

This one actually surprises me a little bit. The President actually had a pretty good day last Thursday when he went to a GOP caucus retreat and had a semi-free flowing Q and A session with members of the loyal opposition. And he did well - I mean, the man is not competent at much, but he can debate when he's been properly schooled beforehand. So when I saw early yesterday that a group of pundits and bloggers from across the political spectrum had sent a petition to the White House to make these kinds of sessions a regular periodic event, I half expected the Administration to at least give lip service to wanting to explore the possibility. But these guys are clearly the most inept and clueless bunch we've had ensconced at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue since at least the Carter Administration, so I suppose it should not surprise me that they are choosing to forego an opportunity to make their guy look good on TV 2 or 3 times a year.

I know you will all be shocked to hear this, but the Obama Commerce Department has been dummying up fake unemployment numbers in an obvious effort to prevent the published rate of unemployment from rising above 10%. As we mentioned on Monday, the Administration has already demonstrate its willingness to fake these economic indicators by having to revise its third quarter GDP estimate downwards twice, ultimately taking it all the way down to 2.2% from an initial estimate of 4.6%. I'm laying odds that the 5.7% 4th quarter GDP estimate published last week will ultimately be revised downwards to somewhere south of 3.5%.

And then I came across this. This does not bode well for any of us. Maybe we all ought to consider taking up golf.

Have a great Thursday.

The Monday Morning Mind Meld

2010-02-01T04:26:00.000-08:00

Are you sitting down? If not, you might want to before reading the next sentence...

The Barack (the Hussien is silent) Obama Administration will release its 5 year budget plan today. It projects a budget deficit of $5.08 trillion during that time period, which is 35% higher than the administration's previous projection. The Politico story I've linked you to makes a fetid effort to blame it all on higher than anticipated war spending, but that is just a very small portion of the increase in spending. You should also understand that this budget anticipates something over $600 billion in revenues related to the mind-boggling stupid cap and trade plan that everyone in Washington knows is not going to be passed into law.

The most dishonest, least transparent administration in American history continues its deceitful ways.

The folks over at Weazelzippers.net show us that this President will surrender his dignity to pretty much anyone. The Mayor of Tampa? Seriously?

If you still wonder why Newsweek continues to teeter on the brink of bankruptcy, all you need to do is read this insipid piece by the terminally irrelevant Anna Quindlen. This nitwit is still making the "we won, so just get in line" argument that Obama himself quit making along about March of 2009. Unreal.

That's all I can stand for today - y'all have a great week.

Global Warming: The Great Unravelling

2010-01-31T11:19:00.000-08:00

The unravelling of the greatest, most massive fraud in the history of mankind is beginning to happen now at an increasingly rapid pace. New revelations of data manipulation, falsifying of findings, and the serial baselessness for the spectacular fright claims contained in the UN IPCC report and the messaging of Pope Al Gore are now flying at us on almost a daily basis. I've long predicted this would all come about, and that Pope Al would ultiimately go down in history as the P.T. Barnum of the 21st century, but it is now happening at a pace I never envisioned.

Here is a terrific piece by British Professor Philip Stott describing the breathtaking disintigration of the grand narrative. A few key exerpts:

Moreover, the collapse has been quicker than any might have predicted. The humiliating exclusion of Britain and the EU at the end of the Copenhagen débâcle was partially to be expected, but it was brutal in its final execution. The swing of power to the BASIC group of countries (Brazil, South Africa, India, China) had likewise been signified for some time, but, again, it came with precipitate ease, leaving even the American President, Barack Obama, with no doubts as to where the political agenda on climate change was now heading, namely to the developing world, but especially to the East, and to the Pacific Rim. The dirigiste tropes of ‘Old Europe’, with its love of meaningless targets and carbon capping, will no longer carry weight, while Obama himself has been straitjacketed by the voters of Massachusetts, by the rust-belt Democrats, by a truculent Congress, by an increasingly-sceptical and disillusioned American public, but, above all, by the financial crisis. Nothing will now be effected that for a single moment curbs economic development, from China to Connecticut, from Africa to Alaska.

...

I have long predicted, and in public too, that the Copenhagen Conference could prove to be the beginning of the end for the Global Warming Grand Narrative. It appears that I may well have been right, and, indeed, I may have considerably underestimated the speed, and the dramatic nature, of the demise.

You and me both, Professor, you and me both.

Let "Washington" Do It

2010-01-31T06:05:00.000-08:00

One of the most fascinating parts of watching President Barack Obama deliver his State of the Union Address to congress last week was hearing his repeated derogation of Washington DC, and its failure to address what ails the nation. It seemed that the President blamed “Washington” for all the bad stuff going on even more than he blamed George W. Bush.

He went on and on, slamming the “pettiness” of “partisan politics”, derogating the “Washington gimmicks” that do nothing but make problems worse. He said we have to “move beyond” the “same tired battles” that have defined national politics in recent years, and even said that the evil boogeyman “Washington” is “unable or unwilling to solve any of our problems”.

Now, you can imagine that all of this anti-“Washington” rhetoric left me feeling a bit whiplashed. After all, we have spent the last 12 months looking on as our young and inexperienced President has done nothing but seek “Washington” solutions to everything that ails us as a country.

Got a recession going on? Hey, let ol’ “Washington” waste $787 billion of your dollars on a fake “stimulus” bill that was really nothing more than a means of dramatically raising the baseline for all sorts of wasteful discretionary federal programs. Oops – we’ve got a $1.4 trillion deficit? Why, we’ll get “Washington” to put a “freeze” on those discretionary programs whose baseline budgets we’ve just increased by about 40% - we can afford it now. General Motors is about to go bankrupt? How about letting “Washington” take over and run the company – he can do it! It’ll only cost $50 billion or so, the first year.

All the fraud global warming “scientists” are claiming that there’s just too much gosh darn carbon dioxide in the air? Shoot, let’s get our good buddy “Washington” to implement a cap and trade program that will spend about $2 trillion of your dollars to marginally limit what amounts to 12/100ths of 1 percent of annual greenhouse gas emissions. There are problems in the nation’s healthcare delivery system? Why, let’s get “Washington” to nationalize the whole mess, and increase the national debt by a couple of trillion bucks in the process.

Too many conservative radio talk show hosts on the air for any liberal’s comfort level? “Washington” can fix that – we’ll just appoint the right (wink, wink) people to the FCC and gradually re-implement the old “fairness” doctrine requiring equal time for the leftwing hosts for whom the recent bankruptcy filing of Air America demonstrates clearly there is no audience. All of Obama’s far-left supporters want to grant citizenship rights to non-American terrorist enemy combatants? No problem – we’ll let “Washington”, in the form of our idiot Attorney General Eric Holder, read Khalid Sheikh Mohammed his rights, get him a team of taxpayer-funded lawyers, and spend about a billion dollars giving him a trial in a civilian court in lower Manhattan.

On and on and on it has gone for the first year of this guy’s term in office. If a problem exists, no matter how large, no matter how trivial, Barack Obama has proposed a “Washington” solution to it.

It is a measure of just exactly how utterly and pathologically dishonest this man is that he spent most of last week’s speech pretending to detest the very means of governance that he has unerringly pursued throughout his first year in office, and which he will undoubtedly continue to unerringly pursue for the next three years. This complete dishonesty about who he is of course does not make him in any way exceptional among leftist politicians – they pretty much all have to lie to the voters about their true nature and intentions in order to have any hope of being elected to office. The only real exceptions to this are members of congress who represent districts filled with far-left voters – think Nancy Pelosi in downtown San Francisco and Barney Frank in Boston. Otherwise, they all, like the President, campaign as “moderates” who want to seek “bipartisan solutions” to the nation’s problems.

In other words, as I have told you repeatedly, liberal politicians think you’re stupid.

The problem President Obama has in this regard is that the public has by and large caught onto the misdirection at this point. A solid year spent attempting to govern from the far, far left after having campaigned as a centrist is enough to wake up even many of the dimmest bulbs among us.

The truth is that the President’s speech last week, and the Democrat Party’s decision to “double-down” on pursuit of the same big government, “Washington” solutions to issues that have already led them to the loss of the “Kennedy” senate seat in Massachusetts, only shows what a tin ear this guy has when it comes his own increasingly-negative public perception.

This State of the Union message will no doubt lead to a short-term rise in the President’s polling numbers. That is almost always the case with these things. But once the increasingly-skeptical public sees that nothing real is going to change, and that the President and his minions are going to just continue to plow down the same far left path, we will see a collapse of his public approval ratings into the low 40s or even the high 30s by the time summer rolls around. If congressional Democrats who are up for re-election this November are worried about their prospects right now, just wait until the President and Speaker Pelosi have given their voters another six months of the same old leftist nonsense.

In the liberal zoo that America has become, the natives are getting restless.

The Saturday Situation

2010-01-30T07:15:00.000-08:00

I swear, this presidency just becomes more and more absurd with each passing day. Wait, did I say "passing"? That's a football term, right? How appropo, as they say in all the right cocktail parties in the nation's capital.

The big news this morning is that your President, Barack (the Hussein is silent) Obama, has his Justice Department studying ways to tinker with major college football's means of determining a national champion. That's right: In the middle of the Great Recession, with a 10% rate of unemployment and a 17% rate of underemployment, with foreign policiy crises popping up all over the world and Islamic terrorists bringing incendiary devices onto our jetliners in their underpants, your President continues to have a laser-like focus on the trivial and the absurd. This guy is quickly making me long for the days of the Carter Administration.

In Church of Global Warming news, it now turns out that the head of the UN's IPCC knew the information regarding melting Himalayan glaciers contained in his organization's "scholarly" report was false before December's climate summit in Copenhagen, but chose to wait two months before releasing the information. Golly, a Global Warmist is a liar? Man, that is shocking.

But it gets worse for the IPCC: Two days ago, we learned that Greenpeace was the sole source of information for the IPCC claims that the world's coral reefs would be negatively impacted by "global warming". The day before that, we learned that the ultra-leftist World Wildlife Federation was the sole source for IPCC claims of negative impacts to South American rain forests. And on Friday, NASA and NOAA released a study that shows that much of the "global warming" experienced in the 1990s was attributable not to human emissions or cattle farts, but to a natural rise in water vapor.

All of which would lead any thoughtful person to wonder if any part of the IPCC report - and by extension, the sensationalist claims of Pope Al Gore, who used the IPCC report as the basis for his film - is actually true in any way, shape or form? Of course, thoughtful people were already skeptical of this nonsense - now we have to figure out a way to work on members of congress and the news media and our educators. Good luck with that.

There was actually, believe it or not, some good economic news released yesterday: The Commerce Department estimates that the economy grew at a rate of 5.7% in the 4th quarter of 2009. Now, before you go out and buy a new BMW, realize that the initial Commerce Dept. estimate of growth for the 3rd quarter of 2009 was a healthy 4.6%. That was revised downwards not once, but twice, ultimately to a very anemic 2.2%. So this Administration has already proved it really cannot be trusted where these initial growth estimates are concerned.

Get back to me in a few weeks and we'll see what the number really was.

Barack Obama - The Teleprompter Presidency

2010-01-29T15:23:00.000-08:00

Further proof the man is purely an empty suit - he has to bring his teleprompter with him to speak to his Middle Class Task Force:

Friday Morning State of Play

2010-01-29T04:05:00.000-08:00

Biggest story of the day: the White House has instructed the Justice Department to find another venue for the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed trial. Seems New York Mayor Bloomberg, who initially supported the idiotic decision to try KSM in lower Manhattan, has figured out how many NY small businesses would be killed by two years of ultra-high security and the media frenzy it would produce. Gee, what a freaking brain surgeon this guy is.

My prediction: KSM will never stand trial in a U.S. civilian court. Gitmo will never be closed. The congress will stop both from taking place.

Megan McCain says Sarah Palin could win the presidency in 2012. She's not crazy. I'll be writing more on this subject over the weekend.

George Will tells you why Sam Alito was right and the President was wrong about the Court's decision to allow limited corporate contributions to issue-related political advertising. I know it's shocking this President could be wrong, of course...

In a related story, Senate Democrats, desperate to deflect public attention from their own abject failure to govern, have decided to try vilifying Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts for a few days. These clowns are like a bunch of Italian chefs at this point, tossing spaghetti up against the wall just to see if it will stick. It won't.

On the subject of the Breck Girl, Jeanne Francios Kerry, the haughty, French-looking Democrat presidential nominee of 2004 (who, by the way, served in Vietnam), says the John Edwards we see today is not the man he knew way back then. Uh-huh. Yeah. Ok. Sure. Whatever you say, Jeanne.

Wednesday Morning Roundup

2010-01-27T06:21:00.000-08:00

Posting this from Austin, my favorite city in the world...

Bob Herbert, who works for a newspaper, the NY Times, which never once bothered to ask who Barack Obama really was during the 2008 presidential campaign, this morning is asking who is Barack Obama, really? And (sniff) he's so goshdarn (sniff, sniff) disappointed in his hero, the President (sniff). Of course, had the NY Times bothered to actually report on who Barack Obama really is back in 2007 and 2008, we would probably have avoided this feckless, incompetent and utterly disastrous presidency.

All of which leads me to the conclusion that Bob Herbert and everyone else at the near-bankrupt NY Times can go (bleep) themselves.

You won't see much reporting on this in our hopelessly dishonest mainstream, leftist news media, but this is a big deal. Terrance Corcoran is one of the lead authors of the original IPCC report, and a long-time high-visibility proponent of man-made global warming theory. When guys like this start calling for investigations and resignations, you know the whole house of cards is getting ready to come tumbling down. Yay.

Politico this morning has an excellent piece on how the leaders in the neo-Fascist Democrat Party are beginning to eat one another. This is so ugly, it's beeeyutyful.

Also from Politico, the President's unbelievably inept spokesman, Robert Gibbs, tells us to expect "a more hopeful Obama" in tonight's State of the Union speech. Why, yes, Bob, that's really the ticket, isn't it? After all, the public didn't get nearly enough of Obama's "hope and change" rhetoric during the campaign - now that folks are beginning to realize what an utter fraud they put into the White House, all you need to do to turn it all around is to feed the masses more meaningless pablum. Way to go!

But wait, I can't end this without commenting on the last quote in that story: "The president's going to explain why he thinks the American people are angry and frustrated."

I'll tell you why they're angry Bob:

The American people are angry because the first thing you clowns did upon taking office was to give Nancy Pelosi free reign to waste $787 billion of their money on a completely fraudulent and failed "stimulus" bill;
They're angry because more than 7 million jobs have been lost since you nitwits took office, and you've been focused on other friviolous matters, like cap and trade and nationalizing the country's healthcare system;
They're angry because the President sat by and sanction Harry Reid's outright bribes of several U.S. senators to get their votes on the Senate version of the healthcare atrocity;
They're angry because the President has utterly reneged on his promises of moderation, bipartisanship, fiscal responsibility, and transparency;
And they're getting angrier and angrier with each passing day, as you and the other evil Obama minions - and the President himself - lie to them about why they're angry.

Keep up the great work.

Have a nice Wednesday, folks.

Tuesday Morning Roundup

2010-01-26T04:30:00.000-08:00

Interesting stuff out there this morning, especially if you want more insight into the President's thought process regarding his policy priorities. I've told you for a year now that this guy is a true believer radical leftist, and unlike Bill Clinton, getting re-elected is not his first priority.

If you need confirmation of that from the horse's mouth check out this video. "I'd rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president." To a Saul Alinsky (the real spiritual head of today's Democrat Party, pictured at left) disciple, that means he'd rather keep trying to institutionalize as much neo-fascist policy as he possibly can over the next three years, whether via legislation or regulation (like the EPA's move to regulate carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act), than worry about moderating himself in order to improve his public standing and increase his chances for re-election.

This is a very, very dangerous man.

He is also increasingly becoming a laughingstock with the public. The latest guffaw-inducing move coming from this keystone cops White House was announced last night: The President will propose a discretionary spending freeze which his spokesperson claims will "save" $250 billion. The linked story does not mention the reality that this number is a 10 year projection, and that the actual "savings" in the first year will amount to $15 billion.

The President and his evil gang of Chicago thugs may not have noticed, but the CBO projected deficit for FY 2010 is $1.9 TRILLION, with a "T". Yet, this is apparently going to be the White House's major deficit reduction effort for this year. Lovely.

You'll love this: The President is so inept at contemporaneous speaking that he even needs his teleprompter for a speech to 6th graders. And we're supposed to believe this guy is some sort of brilliant mind. Whew.

If you're wondering what the Democrats plan is for avoiding an electoral disaster next November, search no more - DSCC Chairman Robert Menendez reveals this morning that the plan is to drive a wedge between the "moderate" Republicans and "Tea Party Conservatives". Proving yet again that a) the Democrats have no desire to win votes by actually pursuing positive, helpful policies that the public might favor, and b) the Democrats have zero understanding still who the Tea Party faithful are.

If this is the Democrats' big plan for this election, a GOP takeover of one or both houses of congress only seems more likely. Go, Bob, go!

Have a great Tuesday.

Monday Morning Roundup

2010-01-25T05:07:00.000-08:00

The panic that has set in amongst our friends in the Democrat Party continues to produce sage advice from the party's "wise men" on what the President needs to do to turn the thing around.

Former Clinton Advisor James Carville (pictured at left) says all the Democrats need to do is spend more time blaming George W. Bush. Yeah, that's the ticket!

Seriously, that may well be the stupidest advice anyone could possibly give President Obama at this point. The whole "blame Bush" paradigm, which Obama has pulled out of his pocket at every conceivable opportunity for the last 12 months, is one of the main reasons why the public has come to find this man so damned tiresome. The public is longing for someone, anyone, who will take national office in Washington and take responsbility for getting things right.

Carville's article only further convinces me that Hillary Clinton has not abandoned her presidential ambitions, and has her evil minions out there in the media doing everything they can to ensure Obama becomes an utterly failed president. Not that Obama needs any help in accomplishing that, of course.

The White House has become so desperate in its efforts to halt the President's consistent drop in the polls that it has now apparently organized a campaign to write phony letters to the editor from fake people pretending to support the President's failed policies. Seriously, you can't make this stuff up.

Meanwhile, the inside-the-beltway intelligentsia is slowly beginning to figure out that not only is the House of Representatives in play this year, the Senate is, too. Even John Zogby, who last Monday predicted that Scott Brown would lose the senate election to ol' what's her name, will figure this out sooner or later, most likely later.

Michael Kinsley, the guy who never won a single argument with Pat Buchannan on Crossfire, then naturally landed the job as Editor of the LA Times, says the reason why newspapers are failing is that their articles are too damn long. Hey, that makes as much sense as anything else Kinsley has said in his entire adult life.

From now on, my newspaper columns will run no more than 20 words. Promise.

Have a great Monday.

The Church of Global Warming Meltdown Continues

2010-01-24T06:53:00.000-08:00

The fraud-based bust-up of the Church of Global Warming continued apace last week, even as Scott Brown’s senate election in Massachusetts was grabbing all of the big news headlines.

Early last week, the United Nations’ International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was forced to admit that its longstanding contention that the Himalayan glaciers would be melted away by 2035 was not, as previously claimed, based on a peer-reviewed scientific study. Rather, it was based solely on a single published article, the author of which admitted that his theory was entirely speculative in nature, and which did not in fact include any sort of date by when the glaciers would disappear.

Several months after this outright fraudulent claim was brought to its attention by a group of real climate scientists, the head of the IPCC, Raj Pachauri, in making his admission, claimed that the IPCC did not know the flimsy nature of this information when the decision was made to include it in its own “authoritative” report.

But wait, the story gets better.

Mr. Pachauri’s claim was itself rendered fraudulent on Sunday morning when Dr. Murari Lal, the coordinating lead author of the section of the IPCC report dealing with Asia, admitted he knew the melting glacier claim was flimsy at best, entirely baseless at worst, when he made the decision to include it in his report. To make matters even worse than that, Dr. Lal went on to admit that he made that decision solely for political reasons, to wit:

“It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action. It had importance for our region, so we thought we should put it in.”

So, to summarize, the initial report on the melting glaciers was without any real scientific underpinning; the authors of the IPCC report made the decision to include it knowing it was without any scientific merit, adding in a fake date certain in order to render it more sensational and attention-grabbing; the main author of the IPCC report now admits he did so purely for political reasons; and the current head of the IPCC lied about the reasons why the fake information was included in the report when he was forced to admit that the information was fake to begin with.

But wait! There’s more!

On Saturday, it was revealed that the famous Al Gore/IPCC claim that the mythical man-caused global warming would lead to an increase in the number and severity of hurricanes, earthquakes, tornados and natural disasters was also based on a single unpublished study that also had not been peer-reviewed at the time of its inclusion in the IPCC report and Gore’s famous fictitious film, “An Inconvenient Truth”. The study has since been subjected to the peer-review process, and the peers obviously had a problem with its “findings”, given that they insisted upon including the following caveat: "We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses."

Oops.

Now, that caveat along with the entire peer-reviewed report was published way back in 2008, but the UN/IPCC is just now getting around to admitting there’s a problem with their sensationalistic claims – doing so only when forced by real climate scientists – issuing the following statement on Saturday: "We are reassessing the evidence and will publish a report on natural disasters and extreme weather with the latest findings. Despite recent events the IPCC process is still very rigorous and scientific."

Yeah. Uh-huh. Sure it is. We all believe that, right?

The author of the paper himself, Dr. Robert Muir-Wood, stated that "The idea that catastrophes are rising in cost partly because of climate change is completely misleading.” Hooboy, Dr. Muir-Wood will obviously be excluded from the invitation lists for future Church of Global Warming cocktail parties after making that admission. Honesty obviously has no place where the IPCC and its reports are concerned, and purveyors of such must be socially shunned as a penalty for their bad behavior.

One IPCC scientist, Prof. Christopher Field of California’s Carnegie Institute, protected his own status on the invitation list while unwittingly pointing to the real problem with IPCC including baseless, sensationalized claims in its reports purely for political reasons when he said, “Science is progressive. If something turns out to be wrong we can fix it next time around.”

Of course, the unadmitted problem with that statement by Dr. Field is that the IPCC has made great use of these and other most likely false claims in its full court press effort to convince the governments of the developed world to spend trillions of dollars and destroy their own economies in a Quixotic effort to address a problem that most likely does not even exist. If we wait until the "next time around" to fix such fraudulent claims, the damage might already have been done. Look at how close the U.S. congress came to using the IPCC fraud as a basis for implementing a senseless cap and trade system on carbon dioxide in 2009, a move that would rob more than $2 trillion from the U.S. economy over the next ten years.

The false façade of Pope Al, the IPCC and the Church of Global Warming is being steadily chipped away, dying the proverbial death of a thousand cuts. Such a fate could not possibly happen to a nicer and more deserving bunch of people.

How Leftist Elitists View the Electorate Now

2010-01-23T17:17:00.000-08:00

Some fascinating screeching coming from elitist thought leaders and policymakers on the American Left in the wake of the Scott Brown Mass-acre of Martha Coakley last Tuesday:

Charles Blow, one of the stable of leftist nitwits who populate the NY Times Op/Ed page, says you're all just a mindless, destructive, angry mob.

Massachusetts Congressman and Barney Frank laments that the GOP is too timid to stand up to the "Teabaggers" on healthcare. BTW, if you'd like to know the actual definition of the term "Teabagger", here is how the Urban Dictionary defines it: "a man that squats on top of a womens face and lowers his genitals into her mouth during sex,". Lovely people, these liberals.

President Obama his ownself, as Mark Steyn points out in his own linked earlier on this site, thinks the American people are just too dimwitted to understand from the 442 speeches he's already delivered that his agenda to turn this country into a socialist/fascist state is the answer to all our problems.

Folks, the Democrats think you're stupid. Their entire agenda is based on decieving you into accepting policies that are destructive to the very foundation of this nation. If you vote for them, they are right about you.

Want to Know What Obamatons Really Think?

2010-01-23T11:56:00.000-08:00

Read this piece by New Yorker commun...er, columnist Hendrik Hertzberg (pictured at left with his date, the lovely Ms. Frankenstein):

One Year: Beware of Sudden Downdrafts

Read some key exerpts after the break...

That Obama let the “outside game” part of the health-care drama get away from him, so focussed was he on the “inside game” of trying to force the legislative elephant through the Congressional keyhole, can no longer be denied. He and his team can also be faulted for the political (and perhaps substantive) inattention that has allowed the right to profit handsomely from the economic disaster that their policies, not Obama’s, brought about.
==============================
Whether yesterday’s upset in Massachusetts turns out to be a catastrophe or merely a setback now depends largely on the grown-upness, or lack of it, of liberals in the House of Representatives. I don’t see any way out of the darkness right now other than for the House to tighten its stomach muscles, pass the Senate version of the health-care bill A.S.A.P.

==============================
Thanks to my longstanding obsession with the obsolescence of our eighteenth-century political and electoral hydraulics (such as the separation of powers and the lack of a single government accountable to a national electorate) and this sclerotic system’s sadomasochistic twentieth-century refinements (such as the institutionalization of the filibuster), I am not astonished that Obama has had trouble “getting things done.” Absent only the filibuster—even while leaving untouched all the other monkey wrenches (committee chairs, corrupt campaign money, safe districts, Republicans, etc.)—Obama by now would have signed landmark bills addressing health care, global warming, and financial regulation, and a larger, better-designed stimulus package, too.

==============================

Be sure and read the whole piece - it is a clear view into the real mindset of the Northeastern elitist leftist set that dominates the thought processes of the national Democrat party. Truly frightening to think what this kind of neo-fascist mindset would lead to if given unchecked power to pursue their goals.

Another Brilliant Piece Today From Mark Steyn

2010-01-23T08:48:00.000-08:00

So what went wrong? According to Barack Obama, the problem is that he overestimated you dumb rubes' ability to appreciate what he's been doing for you. "That I do think is a mistake of mine," the president told ABC's George Stephanopoulos. "I think the assumption was if I just focus on policy, if I just focus on this provision or that law or if we're making a good rational decision here, then people will get it."

But you schlubs aren't that smart. You didn't get it. And Barack Obama is determined to see that you do. So the president has decided that he needs to start "speaking directly to the American people."

Wait, wait! Come back! Don't all stampede for the hills! He gave only (according to CBS News' Mark Knoller) 158 interviews and 411 speeches in his first year. That's more than any previous president – and maybe more than all of them put together. But there may still be some show out there that didn't get its exclusive Obama interview – I believe the top-rated "Grain & Livestock Prices Report – 4 a.m. Update with Herb Torpormeister" on WZZZ-AM Dead Buzzard Gulch Junction's Newstalk Leader is still waiting to hear back from the White House.

Link:
The President Thinks We Need More Speeches

A Dozen Things to Get About the Scott Brown Win

2010-01-23T07:15:00.000-08:00

12 things you have to understand about the Mass-acre, and what it portends for the rest of this year:

1. The Democrats completely misread the results of the 2008 elections. In that election – and in the 2006 election before it – the public voted against “Republicanism”, not conservatism. Voters booted the Republicans out because they acted like a bunch of drunken Democrats the last 6 years they controlled congress. The Democrats, meanwhile, interpreted the election results as an endorsement of leftism, and are now being disabused of that notion the hard way.

2. This remains a center/right country – average Americans are frugal by nature and always frightened by profligate government spending is always a product of liberal domestic policies. The 2008 elections did nothing to change that.

3. Like every liberal who wants to get elected, the then–Senator Obama lied about who he was during the 2008 campaign, pretending to be a moderate, and promising to pursue moderate, bi-partisan solutions to the big issues facing the country once elected. He then immediately moved radically and unapologetically left once assuming office. The Mass-acre, and the victories by Republicans in gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey in November, is in large part the public’s way of telling Democrats they do not appreciate being lied to.

4. The tea party people are important. Liberal Democrats made a huge mistake deciding to vilify them rather than engage them and treat them seriously. The whole Democrat dominance of the national debate really began to break down in earnest last summer, when the leadership of the Party and smarmy leftists all over the country decided to slander the thousands of ordinary citizens who showed up at congressional townhall meetings to protest the manner in which policy was being made in the nation’s capitol.

5. Liberal portrayal of all tea party participants as white redneck racists betrays their fundamental lack of understanding of average, breadbasket Americans who do not live in the Northeast or the West Coast. Because most high-profile liberal thought leaders are elitists who hail from the Northeast or California, liberals in general have no ability to relate to the vast majority of average Americans, no understanding of how they think, and feel such contempt for such Americans that they have no desire to learn. Thus, the leaders of the Democrat Party in Washington, and the leftwing nut jobs who make up the Party’s base of support truly do not get why most Americans oppose idiotic, wasteful proposals like cap and trade and healthcare destruction.

6. Barack Obama is not Bill Clinton. He does not have a pragmatic bone in his body. Clinton got elected in order to be re-elected. That was his first priority. Obama truly believes he was elected to transform America from a representative democracy into a socialist/fascist state. Where Clinton happily decided to adopt conservative positions on a variety of major issues in order to be re-elected, Obama would much rather be relegated to a one-term presidency if being re-elected means he would have to abandon his radical leftist goals.

7. And therein lies the Democrats’ current conundrum. They find themselves today, one year into the Obama presidency, in exactly the same position they found themselves one year into the Clinton presidency. They have gone mad with power, pursued leftwing policies the public does not support, and focused on frivolous matters while failing to address huge issues the public finds more pressing. As a result, they face a coming massive repudiation at the polls this November, and the only possible way to avoid a disastrous outcome in the midterm elections would be for President Obama to stand up and admit his and his Party’s mistakes in a forthright and honest manner, abandon these nutty leftist policy proposals, and begin co-opting conservative positions on the big issues of the day. Not even Bill Clinton could bring himself to do that until after his party had lost both houses of congress in the 1994 midterm elections. The thought that a true-believer leftist radical like President Obama can do it is absurd on its face.
8. Widely respected political analyst Larry Sabato announced on Wednesday his analysis showing that, if the midterm elections were held today, the Democrats would lose 52 net seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Lacking an amazing transformation of the Obama Agenda, those numbers will only get worse for the Democrats over the next 10 months. In the Senate, four Democrats in danger of losing races have already announced their retirements, and four others find themselves either behind or barely ahead in early polling. Again, those numbers will only get worse for the Democrats unless the President changes his priorities.

9. The lesson for the Republicans of the last 2 election cycles still hold – the GOP was demolished at the polls in 2006 and 2008 because it lost its “brand” as the party of conservative ideas – the brand Ronald Reagan gave them and which they retained for 20 years. They have to go back to that brand on spending, taxing, and foreign policy issues. But they also have to be careful not to get back too far to the right on social issues, or they will quickly alienate many of the independent and under-30 voters who voted for Scott Brown last Tuesday.

10. And obviously, they have to be smart about picking candidates whose positions on issues are winnable positions within their states and congressional districts. While the next GOP presidential candidate must be unambiguously conservative on pretty much every issue, you’re not going to get Jesse Helms elected in Maine, nor Olympia Snow elected in North Carolina. There is not a one size fits all set of policy positions that will work everywhere in the nation – that is obvious.

11. Just as the Democrats severely misread the results of the 2008 elections, the Republicans are in danger of doing the same with this election if they come to believe it is somehow an endorsement of a “just say no” position on everything. The public wants ideas on how to address issues like healthcare, but they want ideas that don’t bankrupt the country or destroy their ability to see the doctor of their choice. And they want ideas that don’t amount to a government takeover of the entire system.

12. Conservative ideas – that’s what the Republicans need to start getting out there. That’s what the public is craving to see. And if the Republicans don’t produce them, then the Tea Party will become a very influential entity in the November elections, much the same as Ross Perot became in 1992. This would split the conservative vote, and result in continued Democrat control of all levers of government.

Right now, the GOP finds itself on the precipice of repeating the stunning congressional takeover of 1994. But if they misread the meaning of the Mass-acre to the same extent that the Obama Democrats misread the results of the 2008 elections, they will find themselves on the outside of power looking in for many years to come

Bad Week for the Obama-Nation

2010-01-23T07:14:00.000-08:00

January 21, 2010

It’s really got to be tough being an Obamaton these days. I mean, it’s gotten to the point where even I almost feel sorry for them – with emphasis on the “almost”.

Think about it: Barely a year ago today, this nation was flooded with an enormous army of cocksure, self-absorbed, unthinking, obnoxious leftists who really believed they were about to embark upon a glorious, permanent era of socialist/fascist governance in the United States. Coming off the near-landslide electoral victories of November, 2008, they were about to install the first true radical leftist in the White House, a young, charismatic and energetic true believer who would have huge majorities in both houses of congress to work with to enact socialist/fascist policies related to everything from healthcare to global warming to nationalization of major industries, to control of content over the airwaves and Internet. The hated Republicans were in utter, dispirited disarray, marginalized to the point of irrelevance and teetering on the brink of political extinction.

Those were heady days for the Obamaton Nation, and they were not shy about letting everyone around them know about it.
While the incoming President went around offering false talk about how he was planning to unify the nation behind a set of moderate, bipartisan policies, the minions of the Obamaton Army gave the truth away, bragging about all the leftwing policies their New Messiah would pursue on their behalf, and picking fights, both literal and verbal, with anyone who dared disagree. Anyone who questioned the One’s agenda was derided in print, over the airwaves, or on the Internet as stupid, rednecks, or most commonly, racists. After all, according to the nitwittery that dominates the “thought” processes of the Obamaton Army, the only possible reason anyone could be opposed to the utter destruction of the U.S. economy, the massive new tax on utility bills represented by Obama’s cap and trade fiasco, and the crippling of the finest healthcare system in the world must be racism.

Twelve months later, here is the status of what the Obamaton Army and their benefactors in Washington have wrought:

· Their completely phony and failed $787 billion “stimulus” bill has by all reliable reports yet to produce a single permanent job anywhere in the country;

· Their hair-brained scheme to create a “cap and trade” system to regulate carbon output lies dead in the water;

· Their mindless obsession with nationalizing the nation’s healthcare system by hook or crook (mostly by crook) is hanging by a thread in the wake of Tuesday’s senate election in Massachusetts;

· They have managed to lose governorships in Virginia, a state President Obama won easily in 2008, and in the traditionally Democrat-dominated state of New Jersey;

· They have seen 17 incumbent Democrat members of congress read the tea leaves and initial polling data on their re-election campaigns, and announce their retirement rather than face almost certain defeat the polls next November;

· They see their Senate Majority Leader, Dingy Harry Reid, trailing potential opponents by double-digits in recent polls;

· The steadily rising unpopularity of the Obama healthcare destruction plan, and the socialist/fascist Obama agenda in general has directly caused the loss of even the U.S. senate seat in Massachusetts held for 46 years by Ted Kennedy.

Meanwhile, their hero, the One himself, the New Messiah who was going to transform the nation’s politics and bring forth a permanent leftist majority, has lost his mojo. His speeches have become rote and mundane, no longer inspiring an increasingly skeptical public that is rapidly tiring of the false rhetoric and broken campaign promises of transparency, moderation and bipartisanship. The President has begun to receive semi-tough questions even from the lapdog leftist news media, and as a result has refused to hold a press conference since last July. His public approval ratings, which sat near 70% on his inauguration day, have now fallen below 50%, with no hope in sight of halting the decline.

In the wake of the loss of the Massachusetts Senate seat to a hated Republican, the Obamaton Army now finds itself lacking the filibuster-proof majority it had enjoyed in that body since the ACORN/Democrat Party organized crime ring managed to steal the Minnesota seat for bad comedian Al Franken. This places the socialist takeover and destruction of the nation’s healthcare system at risk, and leaves the Obamaton Army with a stark and distasteful choice. They can either force the bill to the President’s desk via procedural bullying, bribery and chicanery, thus ensuring a massive electoral disaster for the Democrat Party in November of this year, or they can allow the atrocity to die, thus rendering the New Messiah a failed, lame duck President barely a year into his first term in office.

It’s a bad and distasteful choice, but one that the smarmy Obamaton Army richly deserves. No political group in history has gone so far out of its way to engender so much bad will from the public as these folks have for the last year. They asked for this fight, and they are getting it.

There is still justice in the liberal zoo after all.

24

2010-01-23T06:55:00.000-08:00

First, a confession: I am a HUGE fan of this show. Got hooked on the first episode of the first season, and have never missed one since. But there is a trick to the long-term enjoyment of “24″ – if you try to just take it at face value, you will quickly lose the ability to take it seriously and become disaffected. I realized this along about midway through the show’s second season, when Jack Bauer’s daughter was kidnapped out of CTU custody for about the tenth time.

When will Kim be kidnapped this season?

The key to enjoying this show is to view it like a kind of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 deal. This show, if you don’t take it seriously, is one of the funniest programs on television. It is so filled with patently absurd plot devices that it defies any credibility whatsoever, but if you recognize that reality, the show quickly becomes one of the best laugh-fests around.
If you really want to have fun, make up drinking games to the various repetitive plot devices.

Take a shot of your favorite liquor every time:

* – the CTU Director says it will take either 15 or 20 minutes for a CTU tactical team to get from any point A to any point B, regardless of their method of transporation. No matter where they are, and no matter where they are going, and no matter how they are getting there, it ALWAYS takes a CTU tactical squad either 15 or 20 minutes to make the trip;

* – anyone either taken prisoner or into protective custody by CTU is kidnapped. If they are killed (they are ALL either kidnapped or killed – CTU, the nation’s premier terrorism-fighting agency, is utterly incapable of securing its own facility and keeping a prisoner in custody), take 2 shots;

* – Jack Bauer fails to get his point across the first time he says something to either an enemy or a friend, but gets his point made the second time by SCREAMING REAL LOUD!!!

This is Jack, making his point.

* – Jack Bauer is either beaten up, stabbed or even shot, and two hours later shows no sign of having been injured. I call this Jack’s “Wile E. Coyote” superpower.

This is Jack, two hours after having been shot 3 times in the chest.

* – every time a member of Jack Bauer’s family is murdered or kidnapped. This happened much more often in the early years, but Jack has begun to run out of family members since then. This season, I truly fear for his baby granddaughter’s safety. I’m just sayin’…* – the real terrorist turns out NOT to be a Muslim male between the ages of 19 and 35. Each season’s real terrorist always turns out to be some form of anglo agent of the military industrial complex. It is the formula – Hollywood political correctness run amok. The only exception to this was season three, when the real terrorist turned out to be a Mexican. No kidding.

* – every time Chloe frowns, snorts, or speaks condescendingly when conversing with her peers or bosses at CTU. This one alone will have you falling down drunk halfway through each hour. Chloe is without question the most entertaining character on the show, and maybe on all of network television.

The Greatness that is Chloe.

There you have it - a proper mode of viewing truly is the key to long-term enjoyment of this program. Taken seriousy, it’s a wholely implausible, badly-acted disaster. But viewed as an unintential comedy, it is one of the great masterworks in the history of television.