While Obama bows, scrapes and apologizes.

No Apologies Accepted 

At a time when our president and other politicians tend to apologize for our country`s prior actions,here`s a refresher on how some of our former patriots handled negative comments about our country.
These are good
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JFK'S Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, was in France in the early 60's when DeGaule decided to pull out of NATO.  DeGaule said he wanted all US military out of France as soon as possible.
Rusk responded "does that include those who are buried here? You could have heard a pin drop; DeGuale did not respond.
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When in England , at a fairly large conference, Colin Powell was asked by the Archbishop of Canterbury if our plans for Iraq were just an example of empire building by George Bush. He answered by saying, 'Over the years, the United States has sent many of its fine young men and women into great peril to fight for freedom beyond our borders.  The only amount of land we have ever asked for in return is enough to bury those that did not return.'
You could have heard a pin drop.
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There was a conference in France where a number of international engineers were taking part, including French and American.  During a break, one of the French engineers came back into the room saying 'Have you heard the latest dumb stunt Bush has done? He has sent an aircraft carrier to Indonesia to help the tsunami victims.  What does he intended to do, bomb them?'
A Boeing engineer stood up and replied quietly: 'Our carriers have three hospitals on board that can treat several hundred people; they are nuclear powered and can supply emergency  electrical power to shore facilities; they have three  cafeterias with the capacity to feed 3,000 people three meals a day, they can produce several thousand gallons of fresh water from sea water each day, and they carry half a dozen helicopters for use in transporting victims and injured to and from their flight deck.  We have eleven such ships; how many does France have?'
You could have heard a pin drop.
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A U.S. Navy Admiral was attending a naval conference that included Admirals from the U.S. , English, Canadian, Australian and French Navies. At a cocktail reception, he found himself standing with a large group of Officers that included personnel from most of those countries. Everyone was chatting away in English as they sipped their drinks but a French admiral suddenly complained that, whereas Europeans learn many languages, Americans learn only English. He then asked, 'Why is it that we always have to speak English in these conferences rather than speaking French?'
Without hesitating, the American Admiral replied, 'Maybe it's because the Brit's, Canadians, Aussie's and Americans arranged it so you wouldn't have to speak German.'
You could have heard a pin drop.
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AND THIS STORY FITS RIGHT IN WITH THE ABOVE...
Robert Whiting , an elderly gentleman of 83, arrived in Paris by plane. At French Customs, he took a few minutes to locate his passport in his carry on.
"You have been to France before, monsieur?" the customs officer asked  sarcastically. Mr. Whiting admitted that he had been to France previously. "Then you should know enough to have your passport ready."
The American said, 'The last time I was here, I didn't have to show it."

"Impossible. Americans always have to show your passports on arrival in France !

The American senior gave the Frenchman a long hard  look.  Then he quietly explained, ''Well, when I came ashore at Omaha Beach on D-Day in 1944 to help liberate this country, I couldn't find a single Frenchmen to show a passport to."
You could have heard a pin drop.
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Heritage Foundation’s Top 10 Charts Of 2009

  These are not pretty pictures here.

Defacing democracy. Thomas Sowell on Obamacare

“The only thing healthy about Congress’s health-insurance legislation is the healthy skepticism about it shown by most of the public, as revealed by polls. What is most unhealthy about this legislation is the raw arrogance in the way it was conceived and passed.”

* * *

“What does calling this medical-care legislation “historic” mean? It means that previous administrations gave up the idea when it became clear that the voting public did not want government control of medical care. What is historic is that this will be the first administration to show that it doesn’t care one bit what the public wants or doesn’t want.”

Thomas Sowell on the Obama and Democrat arrogance. Read it here.

Money talks in global warming alarmism

You see,when someone receives money from an energy company and speaks out against global warming alarmism, the eco-fascists and other left-wingers always point to that as evidence of corruption.
But when a "scientist" who supports global warming tyranny gets money from an energy company - $2 million in one year in this case - there is silence.
Hypocrisy.
"Socolow's research institute at Princeton has received well over $20 million in grants dealing with climate change and carbon reduction, plus an additional $2 million a year from BP and still more from the federal government."

Full story here.

Global warming a total hoax

So-called scientists throw away temperature data so no one can check the accuracy of their calculations.

“SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years. “

The (UK) Timesonline has the details here. And Roger Simon has good commentary here.

Wonder why Obama seems so clueless about economic matters?

Help Wanted, No Private Sector Experience Required

By Nick Schulz

November 25, 2009, 8:19 am

A friend sends along the following chart from a J.P. Morgan research report. It examines the prior private sector experience of the cabinet officials since 1900 that one might expect a president to turn to in seeking advice about helping the economy. It includes secretaries of State, Commerce, Treasury, Agriculture, Interior, Labor, Transportation, Energy, and Housing & Urban Development, and excludes Postmaster General, Navy, War, Health, Education & Welfare, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security—432 cabinet members in all.

When one considers that public sector employment has ranged since the 1950s at between 15 percent and 19 percent of the population, the makeup of the current cabinet—over 90 percent of its prior experience was in the public sector—is remarkable.

Thanks to the American Enterprise Institute for bringing this to light.

Thomas Sowell on terrorists, civilian trials and the ineffable stupidity of Obama.

  Thomas Sowell sums it all up beautifully:

“The mindset of the left behind such thinking was spelled out in an editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle, which said that "Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the professed mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, will be tried the right way-- the American way, in a federal courtroom where the world will see both his guilt and the nation's adherence to the rule of law."

This is not the rule of law but the application of laws to situations for which they were not designed.

How many Americans may pay with their lives for the intelligence secrets and methods that can forced to be disclosed to Al Qaeda was not mentioned. Nor was there mention of how many foreign nations and individuals whose cooperation with us in the war on terror have been involved in countering Al Qaeda-- nor how many foreign nations and individuals will have to think twice now, before cooperating with us again, when their role can be revealed in court to our enemies, who can exact revenge on them.

Behind this decision and others is the notion that we have to demonstrate our good faith to other nations, sometimes called "world opinion." Just who are these saintly nations whose favor we must curry, at the risk of American lives and the national security of the United States?”

Read it all here.

If Bush lied like this, the media would be screaming.

  More and more of the Obama lies are being uncovered. Good grief! Even the Los Angeles Times, heretofore a reliable a source of endless falsehoods about and cover-ups of Obama talks about the fibs Obama is making about how many jobs were created by the so-called stimulus program.

 

“Good news: Obama creates 30 new jobs in one congressional district. Bad news: No such district”

Read it all here.

Just imagine if it had been Bush . . . Obama flubs without his teleprompter

  Take away Obama’s teleprompter for even a moment:

“OBAMA: Please, everybody, have a seat. Let me first of all just thank Ken and the entire Department of the Interior staff for organizing just an extraordinary conference.

I want to thank my Cabinet members and senior administration officials who participated today. I hear that Dr. Joe Medicine Crow (ph) was around, and so I want to give a shout out to that Congressional Medal of Honor winner. It's good to see you.

Ah, the dangers of giving shout outs without a teleprompter.  Crow is not a Medal of Honor recipient.”

  Now just imagine if George W. Bush had done this. The mainstream press and blogosphere with would be crackling with insults and snark. But not when The One does it.

  Read it here.

Obama planning end-run around First Amendment?

“Bert Gall and Robert Frommer of the Institute for Justice have made a compelling case that the Obama administration's word choice is quite significant. They think that by branding Fox as something other than a "legitimate news organization," the White House is actually setting up a more brutal attack using campaign finance laws. News media organizations are exempt from campaign-finance laws' speech regulations. But if Fox is not a "legitimate news organization," then federal election authorities might be able to argue that its political speech can be regulated like that of any other non-news corporation.

The implications would be far-reaching. Messrs. Gall and Frommer write on PajamasMedia.com: "Of course, if the media's speech becomes illegitimate—and thus subject to restriction—when it turns critical, then the same is true for everyone else, including ordinary citizens." Imagine if the administration applied disclosure laws not just to Fox, but to groups like the tea-party protestors. Faced with this restrictive bureaucracy, such groups would probably be paralyzed.”

  Is Obama attempting an end-run around First Amendment? Gee, do you really think Obama would do something like that?

  Read about it here.

Blacks in Congress claim ethics inquiries are racially based

  The propensity of blacks (and many left-wing whites) to scream “racism” when any black is investigated is old-hat. But it not only isn’t stopping, the practice is increasing:

““Is there concern whether someone is trying to set up [Congressional Black Caucus] members? Yeah, there is,” a black House Democrat said. “It looks as if there is somebody out there who understands what the rules [are] and sends names to the ethics committee with the goal of going after the [CBC].”

African-American politicians have long complained that they’re treated unfairly when ethical issues arise. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus are still fuming over Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to oust then-Rep. William Jefferson (D-La.) from the House Ways and Means Committee in 2006, and some have argued that race plays a role in the ongoing efforts to remove Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) from his chairmanship of that committee.”

  Jefferson as you may recall was found with $90,000 in cold cash in the freezer compartment of his refrigerator and was later convicted on numerous criminal charges. Rangel’s involvement in various lawbreaking and tax avoidance schemes is literally public  record. Decent people caught red-handed in such illegal shenanigans would have been embarrassed  and resigned. Not Democrats. Not black Democrats.

  Instead they claim racism.

  Enough of this nonsense. If those blacks can convincingly prove that the ethics investigation mechanism created by their own Party is somehow flawed, let them prove it. But screaming racism whenever a black is investigated is not very convincing.

  Read it all here.

Mark Steyn on climate fascists

“At their Monday night poker game in hell, I’ll bet Stalin, Hitler and Mao are kicking themselves: “ ‘It’s about leaving a better planet to our children?’ Why didn’t I think of that?” This is Two-Ply Totalitarianism—no jackboots, no goose steps, just soft and gentle all the way. Nevertheless, occasionally the mask drops and the totalitarian underpinnings become explicit. Take Elizabeth May’s latest promotional poster: “Your parents f*cked up the planet. It’s time to do something about it. Live Green. Vote Green.” As Saskatchewan blogger Kate McMillan pointed out, the tactic of “convincing youth to reject their parents in favour of The Party” is a time-honoured tradition.

The problem, alas, is that, for the moment, there’s still more than one party. But why? Last year, David Suzuki suggested that denialist politicians should be thrown in jail. And only last month the New York Times’s Great Thinker Thomas Friedman channelled his inner Walter Duranty and decided that democracy has f*cked up the planet. Why, in Beijing, where they don’t have that disadvantage, they banned the environmentally destructive plastic bag! In one day! Just like that! “One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks,” wrote Friedman. “But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.””

  Poor Mark Steyn. He is so on-target that you know it won’t be long before the powers that be trump up some charges to throw him in jail.

  Read it all here.

Left-wing churches want to curtail freedom of speech

Thank Michelle Malkin for this one:

“The war on conservative speech has moved from the White House to your neighborhood pews. Left-wing church leaders want the Federal Communications Commission to crack down on "hate speech" over cable TV and right-leaning talk-radio airwaves. President Obama's speech-stifling bureaucrats seem all too happy to oblige.

Over the past week, an outfit called "So We Might See" has conducted a nationwide fast to protest "media violence" - specifically, "anti-immigrant hate speech, which employs flawed arguments to appeal to fears rather than facts." Their ire is currently aimed at Fox News and conservative talk-show giants. But how long before they target ordinary citizens who call in to complain about the government's systemic refusal to enforce federal sanctions against employers of illegal immigrants or the bloody consequences of lax deportation policies?

The "interfaith coalition for media justice" is led by the United Church of Christ. Yes, that's the same church of Mr. Obama's race-baiting, Jew-bashing ex-pastor Jeremiah Wright. Other members include the Presbyterian News Service, the Evangelical Lutheran Church and the National Council of Churches. These religious liberals have partnered with the National Hispanic Media Coalition, which filed a petition in January demanding that the FCC collect data, seek public comment and "explore options" for combating "hate speech" from staunch critics of illegal immigration. “

These people truly hate America and its Constitution. Read it all here.

Victor Davis Hanson on Obama, Hillary and the general evil

  Victor Davis Hanson summarizes the pain so many of us feel with this administration, ponders how the media is able to maintain its silence – or worse yet, praise these destroyers and bumblers – and hopes for better days. Well worth reading here.

Even nothing is too much for these parasites.

  Detroit attempted to auction off tax delinquent properties. Even though the minimum bid was $500, many Detroiters had a real problem with the idea that the properties were sold to the highest bidder. In other words, the very concept of “auction” where the highest bid wins, is foreign to them and evil.

They want these homes for nothing. Just like they want everything else for nothing. A couple of weeks ago, it was “free” money from Obama that had them lining up. When asked how Obama got the money to give to them, a couple of women interviewed just didn’t know. All they wanted was the “free” money and now free houses.

Well this is what the still free people of the United States are up against: people who think it should all be “free” – for them.

Read the sad story here.

Also see Michael Barone’s column here.

Sowell warns on Obama’s desire to dismantle America.

This is one of the most remarkable columns Thomas Sowell has written. He dissects Obama's dismantling of America. Well worth emailing to your friendss, passign out printed copies. Sowell captures the danger of Obama and his cohort.

"Those who say that the Obama administration should have investigated those people more thoroughly before appointing them are missing the point completely.

Why should we assume that Barack Obama didn't know what such people were like, when he has been associating with precisely these kinds of people for decades before he reached the White House?

Nothing is more consistent with his lifelong patterns than putting such people in government-- people who reject American values, resent Americans in general and successful Americans in particular, as well as resenting America's influence in the world. Any miscalculation on his part would be in not thinking that others would discover what these stealth appointees were like. Had it not been for the Fox News Channel, these stealth appointees might have remained unexposed for what they are. Fox News is now high on the administration's enemies list.

Nothing so epitomizes President Obama's own contempt for American values and traditions like trying to ram two bills through Congress in his first year-- each bill more than a thousand pages long-- too fast for either of them to be read, much less discussed. That he succeeded only the first time says that some people are starting to wake up.

Whether enough people will wake up in time to keep America from being dismantled, piece by piece, is another question-- and the biggest question for this generation."

Read it all here.

http://townhall.com/Common/PrintPage.aspx?g=443af515-de21-412f-aefb-e469598465bc&t=c

Obama continues to get a pass

  Lots of time spent playing golf? Attempting to intimidate the media? Making secret deals with big business? Spending public money to jet off to more than 24 fundraisers in 9 months?

  If George Bush had done it, the media and interest groups would have been screaming. But when it’s Obama, all is well.

  Politico (surprisingly) looks at how gently the media is treating Obama.

A study in social progress: Joe Biden moves up from publicly funded transit to public housing.

The AP reports that Amtrak loses $42 per passenger. Joe Biden used to brag about taking Amtrak to work everyday. I wonder how much it cost taxpayers to get Joe to work? Now he’s moved up to public housing.

“U.S. taxpayers spent about $32 subsidizing the cost of the typical Amtrak passenger in 2008, about four times the rail operator's estimate, according to a private study.

Amtrak operates a nationwide rail network, serving more than 500 destinations in 46 states. Forty-one of Amtrak's 44 routes lost money in 2008, said the study by Subsidyscope, an arm of the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Stephen Van Beek, president of the Eno Transportation Foundation, a think tank, said the analysis could help guide decisions on how to spend $8 billion set aside for high-speed and intercity rail in a $787 billion economic stimulus bill. Rail planners may decide that spending the funds on high-speed rail makes more sense than slower intercity rail, which the Amtrak numbers show need higher subsidies.”

Read it here.

You must stop eating meat – but your masters don’t need to.

  Enviro wackos are ramping up their ranting on imaginary “climate change” in anticipation of a great meeting in Copenhagen where fascists and socialists will make another attempt to gain control of the world and every person living and to be born.

  Now the widely debunked British Lord Stern is trying again:

“People will need to consider turning vegetarian if the world is to conquer climate change, according to a leading authority on global warming.

In an interview with The Times, Lord Stern of Brentford said: “Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is better.”

Direct emissions of methane from cows and pigs is a significant source of greenhouse gases. Methane is 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a global warming gas.

Lord Stern, the author of the influential 2006 Stern Review on the cost of tackling global warming, said that a successful deal at the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December would lead to soaring costs for meat and other foods that generate large quantities of greenhouse gases.”

  You shouldn’t have children so people in third world countries may, said another Britisher. Now you can’t eat meat. Read down and you’ll see the restriction doesn’t apply to him.

   Read the entire disgusting fear mongering here.

Don’t you be viewing, listening to or viewing any purported news if it don’t have this Seal of Approval (White House Grammar Approved)

 

Obama ignores 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. What does that tell you?

“Barack Obama, who found time to go on a 24-hour jaunt to Copenhagen on Oct. 2 to seek the 2016 Olympics games for Chicago, apparently cannot find the time for a 24-hour trip to Berlin on Nov. 9 for a celebration of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.”

  Barack Obama found the time and the money to stage a meaningless campaign stunt in Berlin, puffing up the crowd with a rock concert beforehand.

  The fall of the Berlin Wall was a significant event in world history, a major event. It signified a victory for the spread of democracy and freedom. But Obama can’t find the time to commemorate this great event.

  Of course, Obama couldn’t find the courage to energetically support the Iranians protesting the theft of their votes or the invasion of Georgia. Obama is simply not excited by democracy or freedom.

   Every day it becomes clearer that Obama is not a small “d” democrat. In fact, he may indeed by a big “A” Autocrat at heart and should be carefully watched and feared.

  See Michael Barone’s thoughtful column here. (How long before Obama declares that Barone should not be read?)

Great take on the passing of the Obama hysteria

  Victor Davis Hanson has written a great column on the unraveling of the Obama trance:

“For 30 months the nation has been in the grip of a certain Obama obsession, immune to countervailing facts, unwilling to face reality, and loath to break the spell. But like all trances, the fit is passing, and we the patient are beginning to appreciate how the stupor came upon us, why it lifted, and what its consequences have been.”

  Hanson is a thoughtful man and his analysis here is excellent.

  Read it here.

Cheney: "We cannot protect this country by putting politics over security, and turning the guns on our own guys."

I truly regret that Dick Cheney chose not to run for President.
Here is his speech in which he lambastes Obama and his crew.
Very much worth reading.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/10/21/raw-data-dick-cheneys-remarks-center-security-policy/

Obama says preventive medicine is the answer, not tests. Uh, now they’re going after the tests that are part of preventive health care.

“But finding those insignificant cancers is the reason the breast and prostate cancer rates soared when screening was introduced, Dr. Kramer said. And those cancers, he said, are the reason screening has the problem called overdiagnosis — labeling innocuous tumors cancer and treating them as though they could be lethal when in fact they are not dangerous.

“Overdiagnosis is pure, unadulterated harm,” he said.

Dr. Peter Albertsen, chief and program director of the urology division at the University of Connecticut Health Center, said that had not been an easy message to get across. “Politically, it’s almost unacceptable,” Dr. Albertsen said. “If you question overdiagnosis in breast cancer, you are against women. If you question overdiagnosis in prostate cancer, you are against men.”

Dr. Esserman hopes that as research continues on how to advance beyond screening, distinguishing innocuous tumors from dangerous ones, people will be more realistic about what screening can do.

“Someone may say, ‘I don’t want to be screened’ ” she said. “Another person may say, ‘Of course I want to be screened.’ Just like everything in medicine, there is no free lunch. For every intervention, there are complications and problems.””

  Wait. Didn’t Obama tell us that preventive medicine would solve health care cost problems? It’s those “needless” tests that run up costs, says Obama. And now the American Cancer Society is telling us, ever so conveniently, that we really don’t need those pesky tests.

  Maybe I should test my BS sniffer because something smells here.

Read it all here.

Barone on Obama’s “Chicago brass knuckles”

  Michael Barone provides the details of the Chicago thug political style being deployed by the Obama White House.

  Terrific reading here.

Christopher Hitchens sobers up to ask why not disarm Iran now?

“It is as if there could be a worse outcome than the nuclear armament of a lawless messianic state that tore up every agreement it signed even as it bought further time while signing it. “

  Despite my snarkiness, I generally respect Hitchens and his opinions. Not always, not even nearly always, but often enough.

  And on the issue of the need to disarm Iran of its capacity to develop nuclear weapons, I couldn’t agree more.

  Read it all here.

Another lousy cap-and-tax bill in the Senate

“Like Waxman-Markey, Boxer-Kerry would expand the control the government has over the American economy, businesses, and individuals. It would have little impact on reducing global warming but would significantly depress our economy.”

  Cap-and-tax programs must be defeated.

Pete Du Pont makes the case well in few words here.

Michael Barone thoughtfully explains why Obama’s European approach is failing

“The late political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset, who wrote a book on American exceptionalism, long noted that Americans are more individualistic and less collectivist than Western Europeans (or Canadians). The election of a president who in many ways seeks to push America in a European direction seems to have increased rather than decreased those differences.

Why? My explanation is that until November 2008 Americans did not have any reason to contemplate what a more European approach would mean in real-life terms. Now, with Obama in the White House and a heavily Democratic Congress, they do. And they mostly don't like it.

Hence the embarrassment of liberal commentators and, it seems, the president himself when five Norwegian lawmakers tendered him the Nobel Peace Prize. European elites are delighted with Obama's European approach. Most American voters aren't.”

  Michael Barone explains why Comrade Obama’s European socialism is falling flat in the United States.

  Read it here.

CNN tries to cover for Mao-loving Obama official. Another day, another lie.

  It is no secret that CNN is in the tank for Obama. Today, CNN kind of, sort of admitted they peddled absolute lies about Rush Limbaugh in order to keep him from participating in a deal to buy a football team.

  White House communications director Anita Dunn told a class of graduating high school seniors that Mao Tse-dung was one of her two “favorite philosophers”. Mao is credibly said to have been responsible for the death of as many as 70 million people. Dunn’s comment about Mao referred to the war he waged on the Chinese government. It was a brutal war that killed millions.

  Dunn issued a press release claiming she got the story from something Lee Atwater, a legendary Republican campaign consultant wrote or said somewhere. No reference associating Atwater with Mao could be found on Google.

  They then try to gild the lily by claiming that Newt Gingrich quoted Mao and that Karl Rove said that George W. Bush recommended he read a biography of Mao. This is cover for Dunn. People quote Hitler all the time, but they do not refer to him as one of their favorite philosophers.

The idea of a person in government claiming a mass murderer as one of their favorite philosophers is stomach churning. That they bragged of their affection to a group of high school students is sick.

  That the White House and CNN attempt to cover for the obviously vile Anita Dunn is frightening.

  Read the CNN cover up here.

Would Obama fib about “jobs created or saved”?

“Michigan received $3.7 billion is stimulus money, of which $620 million was to be used to "create and save" jobs, while the remainder will be used by Granholm to backfill the budget deficit that she has created with her overspending so that she doesn't have to make any substantial cuts before she leaves office. When she walks away, she will have lost more than 1,000,000 jobs in a state with a population of only 10 million. A few days ago, Granholm claimed that stimulus money "created or saved" 19,500 jobs (Enron accounting: Stimulus saved or created 19,500 jobs in Michigan). Turns out, the number is an utter fabrication, as I suspected when I wrote that prior post. Fact is, that $620 million "created or saved" 397 jobs.”

  Golly, you don’t really believe that Obama and crew would misrepresent, do you?

  This blog post is truly hilarious. Read it here.

Obama says a tax isn’t a tax.

“Remember when health-care reform was supposed to make life better for the middle class? That dream began to unravel this past summer when Congress proposed a bill that failed to include any competition-based reforms that would actually bend the curve of health-care costs. It fell apart completely when Democrats began papering over the gaping holes their plan would rip in the federal budget.

As it now stands, the plan proposed by Democrats and the Obama administration would not only fail to reduce the cost burden on middle-class families, it would make that burden significantly worse. “

  Remember candidate Obama promising no tax increases for anyone earning less than $250,000?

  Now Obama argues that taxes aren’t taxes, much as Clinton postulated that it depends on what the “meaning of is is”.

   Douglas Holtz-Eakin demonstrates that the current Senate proposal does indeed raise taxes on just about everybody.

  Read it all here.

Dems steal First Amendment

Object and the government may decide to prosecute you for hate crimes.

"In the past, Democrats knew they couldn't get away with a trick like stuffing a hate crimes bill into a defense measure because there was a Republican president to threaten a veto. But now, President Obama says he'll proudly approve the improbable combination of national defense and hate crimes.
"I will sign it into law," the president told a cheering crowd at the gay activist group Human Rights Campaign on Saturday. "Together we will have moved closer to that day when no one has to be afraid to be gay in America."
Actually, we will have moved closer to that day when lawmakers use stealthy, behind-closed-doors maneuvers to chip away at fundamental constitutional rights. Ask Republicans how it happened, and they say simply, "Elections have consequences." They're right."

This is very scary. Read it all here.

Another reason public education needs to be thoroughly reformed.

“Finding character witnesses when you are 6 years old is not easy. But there was Zachary Christie last week at a school disciplinary committee hearing with his karate instructor and his mother’s fiancé by his side to vouch for him.

Zachary’s offense? Taking a camping utensil that can serve as a knife, fork and spoon to school. He was so excited about recently joining the Cub Scouts that he wanted to use it at lunch. School officials concluded that he had violated their zero-tolerance policy on weapons, and Zachary was suspended and now faces 45 days in the district’s reform school.”

    Public education can’t teach children to read, but it can certainly engage in meaningless gestures.

  Read all of this pathetic story here.

Obama: the perfect Nobel Peace Prize pick

“ . . . if you're among those who think Mr. Obama's Nobel was misjudged and premature, not to say absurd, then you really know nothing about the values and thinking that have informed a century of prize giving. Far from being an aberrant choice, President Obama was the ideal one, Scandinavianally speaking.’

  Bret Stephens in The Wall Street Journal explains why Obama is a more typical than not Nobel Peace Prize winner.

  Read it all here.

Obama surrenders American freedom of speech

  If you doubted that Obama and crew are dedicated to the destruction of American freedom, here’s something that may – actually should – change your mind:

“The Obama administration has marked its first foray into the UN human rights establishment by backing calls for limits on freedom of expression. The newly-minted American policy was rolled out at the latest session of the UN Human Rights Council, which ended in Geneva on Friday. American diplomats were there for the first time as full Council members and intent on making friends.

= = = = =

The Obama administration's debut at the Human Rights Council laid bare its very different priorities. Threatening freedom of expression is a price for engagement with the Islamic world that it is evidently prepared to pay.”

  This US sponsored UN resolution would actually forbid the criticism of Islam. Amazing. Astounding. Frightening.

  Read about it here.

Obama declines faster than Carter on foreign policy

  Writing in Commentary, Jennifer Rubin comments that:

“Obama has already achieved what it took Jimmy Carter an entire term to attain: the conviction of a large majority of the American people that he is not protecting our interests or performing adequately as commander in chief.”

  Not much hope for change in that. See it all here.

Michael Barone exposes some Obama lies, this time on Afghanistan.

  Remember Obama and his Afghanistan is the war we should be fighting rhetoric? My how things change in only a few months. Now with his hand-picked general calling for more troops, Obama seems to be relying more heavily on real experts like Joe Biden.

“The rethinking looks a lot like a rejection of his general's recommendations. McChrystal said last week that he had spoken to Obama exactly once since he was appointed. But many people, notably Vice President Biden, seemed to be speaking against his recommendation in a three-hour meeting Obama held with advisers on Thursday, Oct. 1.

According to The Washington Post, "senior advisers" challenged some of McChrystal's key assumptions. "One senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the meeting, said, 'A lot of assumptions -- and I don't want to say myths, but a lot of assumptions -- were exposed to the light of day.' " Sounds just a bit condescending, doesn't it?

Among the assumptions, wrote the Post reporters, is "that the return to power of the Taliban would automatically mean a new sanctuary for al Qaeda." That's the same assumption Obama made in his speech to the VFW 44 days before.”

  I wonder if people who voted for Obama are questioning their judgment?

  Barone’s column is here.

Jew-hating Iranian President is, uh, Jewish

  Fascinating article in the UK Telegraph:

“A photograph of the Iranian president holding up his identity card during elections in March 2008 clearly shows his family has Jewish roots.

A close-up of the document reveals he was previously known as Sabourjian – a Jewish name meaning cloth weaver.

The short note scrawled on the card suggests his family changed its name to Ahmadinejad when they converted to embrace Islam after his birth.

The Sabourjians traditionally hail from Aradan, Mr Ahmadinejad's birthplace, and the name derives from "weaver of the Sabour", the name for the Jewish Tallit shawl in Persia. The name is even on the list of reserved names for Iranian Jews compiled by Iran's Ministry of the Interior.

Experts last night suggested Mr Ahmadinejad's track record for hate-filled attacks on Jews could be an overcompensation to hide his past.”

  Absolutely fascinating. Read it all here.

Sarkozy's Contempt for Obama

  Jack Kelly explains in detail why French President Nicholas Sarkozy holds Obama in contempt:

“The extent of President Obama's naivete - or duplicity - was on display Friday at the G20 summit when the president, flanked by Mr. Sarkozy and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, revealed to the American public that Iran had a second nuclear weapons site on a military base near the holy city of Qom.

News reports indicated Mr. Obama had been briefed on the site before his inauguration. But he's been conducting his foreign policy as if the mullahs could be trusted.”

  There’s much more here.

The left-wing targets Hannah Giles

  Talk about a laugh track: left-wingers are desperately searching for naughty photos of Hannah Giles, the brave young woman who posed as a prostitute to expose taxpayer-funded ACORN’s willingness to suborn not only prostitution, but child prostitution as well.

  Gotta love those “tolerant” left-wingers who are so opposed to exploitation of women – except when the woman is a fake prostitute exposing ACORN.

“It’s gross to know that a bunch of crusty, old, pee-paw Democratic operatives are, at this second, scouring the web for nudie Giles shots as a way to discredit her and O’Keefe’s work.

The reasoning of these ACORN supporters is that the message is only as valid as the messenger is pure. By that “logic,” nothing is reasonable, including that statement.

Thankfully, fellow conservative bloggers like RS McCain, Little Miss Attila and others recognized early on and by way of SEO made sure that their mentions of search terms involving Giles and bikinis brought searchers to their blogs, effectively lampooning those of ill will.”

  Read it all here.

Sarkozy mocks Obama

  French President Nicholas Sarkozy demonstrates intelligence while criticizing the terribly naive Obama:

“Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, came close to mocking his American counterpart for the good intentions, which Mr Obama had heralded as an "historic" step towards nuclear abolition, even though it set no specific targets or fresh mandates.

"We live in a real world not a virtual world," the Frenchman told the 15-member council. "And the real world expects us to take decisions.

"President Obama dreams of a world without weapons ... but right in front of us two countries are doing the exact opposite.

"Iran since 2005 has flouted five security council resolutions. North Korea has been defying council resolutions since 1993.

"I support the extended hand of the Americans, but what good has proposals for dialogue brought the international community? More uranium enrichment and declarations by the leaders of Iran to wipe a UN member state off the map," he continued, referring to Israel.

The sharp-tongued French leader even implied that Mr Obama's resolution 1887 had used up valuable diplomatic energy.

"If we have courage to impose sanctions together it will lend viability to our commitment to reduce our own weapons and to making a world without nuke weapons," he said.

Mr Sarkozy has previously called the US president's disarmament crusade "naïve".”

  Read it all here.

Surprise: Obama lied.

“

Congress' chief budget officer is contradicting President Barack Obama's oft-stated claim that seniors wouldn't see their Medicare benefits cut under a health care overhaul.

The head of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, Douglas Elmendorf, told senators Tuesday that seniors in Medicare's managed care plans would see reduced benefits under a bill in the Finance Committee.”

Read it all here.

Comrade Obama attempts to enlist taxpayer funded artists

  Obama tried to use the NEA to recruit taxpayer funded “artists” to support his health care program. This guy has no respect for Americans or American law.

  Read the first installment of thsi explosive story here.

Simple way to see if you’re a racist.

Simple way to determine if you are a racist. Click to enlarge.

Madeline Albright: US is a “has been” nation.

  Madeline Albright tells us what the left-wing really thinks of the United States:

Former Secretary of State Madeline Albright spoke at a forum in Omsk, Siberia. Pravda reported that her speech "surprised the audience." No wonder. The Russians in attendance must have wondered how they managed to lose the cold war:

Madeleine Albright said during the meeting that America no longer had the intention of being the first nation of the world.

Ms. Albright started her speech in Russian. "Hello and thank you! It's a pleasure for me to be here," she said in Russian. Albright wrote in her autobiography that she was trying to learn some Russian during the 1960s.

The former US Secretary of State surprised the audience with her speech. She particularly said that democracy was not the perfect system. "It can be contradictory, corrupt and may have security problems," Albright said.

America has been having hard times recently, Albright said.

"We have been talking about our exceptionalism during the recent eight years. Now, an average American wants to stay at home - they do not need any overseas adventures. We do not need new enemies," Albright said adding that Beijing, London and Delhi became a serious competition for Washington and New York.

"My generation has made many mistakes. We give the future into the hands of the young. Your prime goal is to overcome the gap between the poor and the rich,' the former head of the US foreign political department said.

There you have it. And Albright was Secretary of State during the relatively moderate Clinton administration. I'm afraid she speaks for most Democratic foreign policy "experts." Promoting American weakness: it's not a bug, it's a feature.

Read it all here.

Obama doesn’t lie - he merely elides, gliding from one dubious assertion to another

  Charles Krauthammer is brilliant – and he provides evidence of that quality once again in his analysis of Obama’s deceptiveness:

Obama doesn’t lie. He merely elides, gliding from one dubious assertion to another. This has been the story throughout his whole health-care crusade. Its original premise was that our current financial crisis was rooted in neglect of three things — energy, education, and health care. That transparent attempt to exploit Emanuel’s Law — a crisis is a terrible thing to waste — failed for health care because no one is stupid enough to believe that the 2008 financial collapse was caused by a lack of universal health care.

So on to the next gambit: selling health-care reform as a cure for the deficit. When that was exploded by the Congressional Budget Office’s demonstration of staggering Obamacare deficits, Obama tried a new tack: selling his plan as revenue-neutral insurance reform — until the revenue neutrality is exposed as phony future cuts and chimerical waste and fraud.

Obama doesn’t lie. He implies, he misdirects, he misleads — so fluidly and incessantly that he risks transmuting eloquence into mere slickness.

Read it all here.

Is Obama the new Ross Perot?

  Steve Chapman offers an interesting perspective on Obama as the new Ross Perot in terms of drawing public attention to increasing deficits:

For years, I've been wishing for another Ross Perot—a leader who would awaken the American people to the dangers of living beyond our national means through huge federal budget deficits. Now, at last, we have that leader. His name is Barack Obama.

  Read it all here.

45% Of Doctors Would Consider Quitting If Congress Passes Health Care Overhaul

Investors Business Daily did a survey of physicians. Looks like the AMA doesn’t speak for all doctors – and perhaps not even a bare majority.

Two of every three practicing physicians oppose the medical overhaul plan under consideration in Washington, and hundreds of thousands would think about shutting down their practices or retiring early if it were adopted, a new IBD/TIPP Poll has found.

The poll contradicts the claims of not only the White House, but also doctors' own lobby — the powerful American Medical Association — both of which suggest the medical profession is behind the proposed overhaul.

It also calls into question whether an overhaul is even doable; 72% of the doctors polled disagree with the administration's claim that the government can cover 47 million more people with better-quality care at lower cost.

  Read all of it here.

George Will explains how Obama is helping Republicans.

  George Will explains how Obama is helping the Republicans:

On the 233rd day of his presidency, Barack Obama grabbed the country's lapels for the 263rd time—that was, as of last Wednesday, the count of his speeches, press conferences, town halls, interviews, and other public remarks. His speech to Congress was the 122nd time he had publicly discussed health care. Just 14 hours would pass before the 123rd, on Thursday morning. His incessant talking cannot combat what it has caused: An increasing number of Americans do not believe that he believes what he says.

He says America's health-care system is going to wrack and ruin and requires root-and-branch reform—but that if you like your health care (as a large majority of Americans do), nothing will change for you. His slippery new formulation is that nothing in his plan will "require" anyone to change coverage. He used to say, "If you like your health-care plan, you'll be able to keep your health-care plan, period." He had to stop saying that because various disinterested analysts agree that his plan will give many employers incentives to stop providing coverage for employees.

He deplores "scare tactics" but says that unless he gets his way, people will die. He praises temperate discourse but says many of his opponents are liars. He says Medicare is an exemplary program that validates government's prowess at running health systems. But he also says Medicare is unsustainable and going broke, and that he will pay for much of his reforms by eliminating the hundreds of billions of dollars of waste and fraud in this paragon of a program, and in Medicaid. He says Congress will cut Medicare (it will not) by $500 billion—without affecting benefits.

He says the nation's economic health depends on controlling health-care costs. Yet so important is the trial bar in financing the Democratic Party, he says not a syllable in significant and specific support of tort reforms that could save hundreds of billions of dollars by reducing "defensive medicine" intended to protect not patients from illnesses but doctors from lawyers. He has said he will not add a dime to the deficit when bringing 47 million people into government-guaranteed health care. But Wednesday night, 17 million went missing: "There are now more than 30 million American citizens who cannot get coverage." Almost 10 million of the uninsured are not citizens, and most of them are illegal immigrants. Presumably the other 7 million could get insurance but chose not to. Democrats propose fines to eliminate that choice. He suggests health-insurance companies are making excessive profits. But since 1996, profits of the six such companies in the S&P 500 have been below the 500's average. He says a "public option"—a government insurance program—would not be subsidized to enable it to compete unfairly with private insurers. (The post office and the government's transportation -"public option," Amtrak, devour subsidies.) He says the public option is vital for keeping health insurers "honest"—but that it is only a wee "sliver" of reform.

  Well worth reading the whole article here.

Clean Conservatives vs. Dirty Liberals

  From Gateway Pundit:

Sunday, September 13, 2009

CLEAN Conservatives vs FILTHY Liberals-- A Photographic Essay

After the 2 million strong conservative freedom rally on 9-12:

And, here is the filth left for someone else to clean up after the Inauguration of Barack Obama:



Via Prisca

First, the left-wing makes you afraid. Very afraid.

  The New York Times never really gets to the guts of just who and what made parents frightened to let their children walk to school. But I bet you can figure it out.

But when these constraints are mixed with anxiety over transferring children from the private world of family to the public world of school, the new normal can look increasingly baroque. Now, in some suburbs, parents and children sit in their cars at the end of driveways, waiting for the bus. Some school buses now have been fitted with surveillance cameras, watching for beatings and bullying.

Children are driven to schools two blocks away. At some schools, parents drive up with their children’s names displayed on their dashboards, a school official radios to the building, and each child is escorted out.

When to detach the parental leash? The trip to and from school has become emblematic of the conflict parents feel between teaching children autonomy and keeping them safe. In parenting blogs and books, the school-bus stop itself is shorthand for the turmoil of contemporary parents over when to relinquish control.

Parents’ worst nightmares were inflamed recently by the re-emergence of Jaycee Dugard, the 11-year-old girl who was kidnapped on her way to the school bus 18 years ago in northern California.

The fear of abduction by strangers “has become a norm within middle-class parental circles,” said Paula S. Fass, a history professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of “Kidnapped: Child Abduction in America.” “We try to control our fears to the nth degree, so we drop our children off right at school. It’s a confirmation that ‘I’m a good parent.’ ”

  Read, pathetic story here.

Ralph Peters: Betraying out dead.

  Worth taking the risk of quoting in full from the New York Post:

“Eight years ago today, our homeland was attacked by fanatical Muslims inspired by Saudi Arabian bigotry. Three thousand American citizens and residents died.

We resolved that we, the People, would never forget. Then we forgot.

We've learned nothing.

Instead of cracking down on Islamist extremism, we've excused it.

Instead of killing terrorists, we free them.

Instead of relentlessly hunting Islamist madmen, we seek to appease them.

Instead of acknowledging that radical Islam is the problem, we elected a president who blames America, whose idea of freedom is the right for women to suffer in silence behind a veil -- and who counts among his mentors and friends those who damn our country or believe that our own government staged the tragedy of September 11, 2001.

Instead of insisting that freedom will not be infringed by terrorist threats, we censor works that might offend mass murderers. Radical Muslims around the world can indulge in viral lies about us, but we dare not even publish cartoons mocking them.

Instead of protecting law-abiding Americans, we reject profiling to avoid offending terrorists. So we confiscate granny's shampoo at the airport because the half-empty container could hold 3.5 ounces of liquid. “

  You really want to read – and maybe even memorize – all of it here.

Why are Jews liberal?

  Norman Podhoretz poses the question of why Jews have voted against their own self-interest.

“One of the most extraordinary features of Barack Obama's victory over John McCain was his capture of 78% of the Jewish vote. To be sure, there was nothing extraordinary about the number itself. Since 1928, the average Jewish vote for the Democrat in presidential elections has been an amazing 75%—far higher than that of any other ethno-religious group.

Yet there were reasons to think that it would be different in 2008. The main one was Israel. Despite some slippage in concern for Israel among American Jews, most of them were still telling pollsters that their votes would be strongly influenced by the positions of the two candidates on the Jewish state. This being the case, Mr. McCain's long history of sympathy with Israel should have given him a distinct advantage over Mr. Obama, whose own history consisted of associating with outright enemies of the Jewish state like the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and the historian Rashid Khalidi.

Associated Press

Hebrew campaign buttons for Barack Obama.

Nevertheless, Mr. Obama beat Mr. McCain among Jewish voters by a staggering 57 points. Except for African Americans, who gave him 95% of their vote, Mr. Obama did far better with Jews than with any other ethnic or religious group. Thus the Jewish vote for him was 25 points higher than the 53% he scored with the electorate as a whole; 35 points higher than the 43% he scored with whites; 11 points higher than the 67% he scored with Hispanics; 33 points higher than the 45% he scored with Protestants; and 24 points higher than the 54% he scored with Catholics.””

  Very much worth reading here.

“The Lamentations Of The Elite”

  Victor Davis Hanson comments on the spate of racism occasioned by the inauguration of what was supposed to be the “post-racial” era. Of course, those screaming racism are a rather odd lot:

What we are seeing is a very unfortunate turn of events in which racism is now the guaranteed retreat position once many prominent African-American elites find  themselves in controversy. The problem is that the rest of the population of all races and classes looks at this privileged cohort and does not really detect evidence of bias or ill treatment, but rather of remarkable tolerance and race-blind attitudes.

  Read it all here.

John Bolton explains why sanctions against Iran won’t work.

  Discouraging Op-Ed in the Wall St. Journal by John Bolton on why sanctions against Iran won’t work even if they could be agreed upon:

First, the U.N. Security Council is no more likely now to approve strict sanctions against Iran than in the past. The prospects for Russian and Chinese support are between slim and none, since endorsing sanctions would harm their own economic and political interests in Iran. The most to expect from the council is a fourth sanctions resolution, as weak and ineffective as its predecessors, and only after weeks or months of agonizing negotiations.

Second, for those who understand the Security Council reality, most talk of enhanced sanctions envisages a coalition of the willing, consisting essentially of America, Japan and the European Union. But the EU's record to date, and Japan's likely policy under its new government (soon to be run by the Democratic Party of Japan), are hardly likely to produce a stiff, serious and sustained effort. Iran itself will offer countless reasons why sanctions should be suspended, reduced or ignored, and a disquieting amalgam of Western governments, businesses and commentators will agree at every step. It is very likely that EU resolve will fracture and Japan will follow suit. Moreover, many other countries will use the lack of a Security Council imprimatur to conduct business with Tehran, shredding the coalition's sanctions, and thereby weakening EU resolve still further.

Third, Iran is hardly standing idly by while sanctions that target its refined petroleum products are debated by the U.S. and other countries. Tehran's leaders are acutely aware of their vulnerability and are moving to address it. Iran, with extensive Chinese involvement, has already begun building new refineries and expanding existing facilities with the aim of approximately doubling domestic capacity by 2012. This will more than compensate for its current refining shortfall. Whether Iran can complete these projects on schedule remains to be seen, but the level of effort is intense and serious.

  Read the whole sad story here.

Environmentally correct lightbulbs leave you in the dark

Soon they will be the only kind of light bulb allowed, but now officials in Brussels have admitted that energy-saving bulbs are not as bright as the old-fashioned kind they are replacing.

From tomorrow a Europe-wide ban on traditional incandescent bulbs will begin to be rolled out, with a ban on 100W bulbs and old-style frosted or pearled bulbs.

Buyers of the main type of energy-saving bulb, compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs), are told on the packaging that they shine as brightly as an old-fashioned bulb. For example, an 11W CFL is labelled as being the equivalent of a 60W incandescent bulb.

  Who would ever believe that the environmentally correct would lie?

  Full story here.

Obama and Holder: destroying American intelligence capability. Why?

This was the murky world in which these interrogators operated. No jury in America would have convicted them at the time they were being investigated. Not even close. Mr. Holder’s decision, then, raises fundamental questions of fairness. Once the Justice Department declined to prosecute five years ago, the misconduct cases were sent back to the Central Intelligence Agency to handle. The agency decided to take internal disciplinary action. The employees and contractors in question — having been assured by their employer that they would no longer be facing prosecution — presumably accepted the administrative sanctions, relying on the Justice Department decision to end the criminal inquiry.

For the government now to turn around and prosecute them without any significant new facts coming to light would be, legal experts tell me, a violation of the principle of estoppel. To a nonlawyer, it sure seems wrong. And you can be sure that any decent defense lawyer is going to raise this issue if there is a trial — particularly if the government decides to use admissions that might have been made during the agency’s administrative hearings.

  Why are Barack Obama and Eric Holder working so hard to destroy the capabilities of the CIA? While I don’t think all that highly of the CIA, it is a large part of what we have.

  Joseph Finder makes some very interesting points in his New York Times Op-Ed. Read it all here. Still, it doesn’t explain why Obama and Holder are so intent on destroying America’s intelligence capabilities.

Mark Steyn on the dead Kennedy

  Mark Steyn delivers an appropriate eulogy for the dead Kennedy in the Orange County Register:

We are enjoined not to speak ill of the dead. But, when an entire nation – or, at any rate, its "mainstream" media culture – declines to speak the truth about the dead, we are certainly entitled to speak ill of such false eulogists. In its coverage of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's passing, America's TV networks are creepily reminiscent of those plays Sam Shepard used to write about some dysfunctional inbred hardscrabble Appalachian household where there's a baby buried in the backyard but everyone agreed years ago never to mention it.

In this case, the unmentionable corpse is Mary Jo Kopechne, 1940-1969. If you have to bring up the, ah, circumstances of that year of decease, keep it general, keep it vague. As Kennedy flack Ted Sorensen put it in Time magazine:

"Both a plane crash in Massachusetts in 1964 and the ugly automobile accident on Chappaquiddick Island in 1969 almost cost him his life …"

That's the way to do it! An "accident," "ugly" in some unspecified way, just happened to happen – and only to him, nobody else. Ted's the star, and there's no room to namecheck the bit players. What befell him was … a thing, a place. As Joan Vennochi wrote in The Boston Globe:

"Like all figures in history – and like those in the Bible, for that matter – Kennedy came with flaws. Moses had a temper. Peter betrayed Jesus. Kennedy had Chappaquiddick, a moment of tremendous moral collapse."

Oh oh. The Washington Post says Cheney is right.

After enduring the CIA's harshest interrogation methods and spending more than a year in the agency's secret prisons, Khalid Sheik Mohammed stood before U.S. intelligence officers in a makeshift lecture hall, leading what they called "terrorist tutorials."

In 2005 and 2006, the bearded, pudgy man who calls himself the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks discussed a wide variety of subjects, including Greek philosophy and al-Qaeda dogma. In one instance, he scolded a listener for poor note-taking and his inability to recall details of an earlier lecture.

Speaking in English, Mohammed "seemed to relish the opportunity, sometimes for hours on end, to discuss the inner workings of al-Qaeda and the group's plans, ideology and operatives," said one of two sources who described the sessions, speaking on the condition of anonymity because much information about detainee confinement remains classified. "He'd even use a chalkboard at times."

These scenes provide previously unpublicized details about the transformation of the man known to U.S. officials as KSM from an avowed and truculent enemy of the United States into what the CIA called its "preeminent source" on al-Qaeda. This reversal occurred after Mohammed was subjected to simulated drowning and prolonged sleep deprivation, among other harsh interrogation techniques.

  Good grief: the Washington Post is saying that Dick Cheney is right – enhanced interrogation techniques work.

  Read it all here.

Mark Steyn: do not read with food or liquid in mouth.

The other day CTV reported the astonishing statistic that in the whole of Canada there are just 33 sperm donors. That seems awfully low for a nation of 30 million people. Three sperm donors per province plus one per territory? Surely we can do better than that. All hands on deck!

Ah, but it’s not as simple as that. Apparently, the 2004 Assisted Human Reproduction Act makes it illegal to pay donors for sperm. I mean, it wasn’t even the usual Canadian Wheat Board-type racket whereby you’d only be able to sell your seed to the Canadian Sperm Board at a price agreed upon by representatives of the federal-provincial Semen Commissions. Instead, they just nixed the whole deal, and, once Johnny Canuck found out he wasn’t going to be remunerated, virtually the entire supply dried up.

As a result, this once proud Dominion now has to import sperm. According to CTV, 80 per cent of Canadian women who conceive through donor sperm are getting it from the United States, mainly from men in Georgia and northern Florida. Canada’s future is now in American hands.

You know how it is: you wait ages for a good sperm story and then they all come at once. It seems there’s also a shortage of the stuff in Sweden. But, in contrast to Canada, this is caused not by government intervention in supply but by a surge in demand, from Swedish lesbian couples anxious to conceive. Inga and Britta had been trying for a child for ages but nothing seemed to work. Then it occurred to them this might be because they’re both women. So they headed off to the sperm clinic, whereupon the Sapphic demand ran into the problem of male inability to satisfy it. There appear to be higher than usual levels of non-functioning sperm.

Don’t worry, I’m not being Swedophobic in mocking the watery emissions of Nordic manhood. It’s a widespread problem: “Concern As Sperm Count Falls By A Third In UK Men” (the Daily Mail, 2004). Don’t ask me why: I’d blame Tony Blair’s cozying up to Bush were it not for “Sperm Count Drops 25 Per Cent In Younger Men” (the Independent, 1996), so maybe it was John Major pulling out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. Still, even for a demographic doom-monger such as myself, you could hardly ask for a more poignant fin de civilisation image than a stampede of broody lesbians stymied only by defective semen, like some strange dystopian collaboration between Robert Heinlein and Russ Meyer set in a world divided into muff divers and duff donors.

Mark Steyn: funniest man in the Western Hemisphere. Read it all here.

Charlie Rangel: scandal ignored by Dems and mainstream media

Rep. Charles Rangel failed to report as much as $1.3 million in outside income -- including up to $1 million for a Harlem building sale -- on financial-disclosure forms he filed between 2002 and 2006, according to newly amended records.

  The corruption in Washington is epidemic. Yet the Democrats, the left-wing and mainstream media just don’t care.

  But if a conservative jaywalks . . . well.

  Read about Rangel’s latest fraud on the public here.

Killing off the old

Uh, guess what? Obama and the Democrats do plan on cutting Medicare, which means more old people dying sooner and reducing costs (except for the trial lawyers who will sue the doctors). "Death Pane's" are real, not as tribunals that sit in judgment, but as policies that effectively deny medical care to the elderly.

"Democratic Rep. Betsy Markey gave credence to seniors' worries with this comment at a Colorado town hall Wednesday:

"There's going to be some people who are going to have to give up some things, honestly, for all of this to work," Markey said at a Congress on Your Corner event at CSU. "But we have to do this because we're Americans.""

http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2009/08/rep_betsy_markey_yep_medicare.asp

Eric Holder: paragon of corruption

“When Al Gore clearly violated the law, Eric Holder found no controlling legal authority and shut down the case. Now, when the controlling legal authority clearly shows no violation of law, Holder has unleashed the prosecutors to go after the nation’s most crucial line of defense against terror. That is shameful.’”

  It was Eric Holder who was instrumental in the paid for pardon of Marc Rich. It was Eric Holder who helped Hillary Clinton by conveniently ignoring established procedures when unrepentant FALN terrorists were released to help her New York senate campaign. It is Eric Holder whose Justice Department underlings dropped charges against New Black Panther Party thugs who intimidated voters and hurled racist insults at whites. It is Eric Holder who declined to pursue Al Gore for blatant violations of federal law.

  It is Eric Holder who is now persecuting – not prosecuting, but persecuting – CIA employees.

  Holder and Obama. Nothing is too low for them. Just watch – this witch hunt is aimed at Dick Cheney.

  Read Andrew McCarthy’s excellent article here.

The victims are barely mentioned.

  What is the appropriate penalty for murdering two innocent people? Is 30 years in prison enough? Too much? What is the goal of punishing a murderer?

  Is there anyone speaking for the victims? Or just the criminals?

During the 40 years convicted murderer James LeRoy Iverson watched from his prison cell window, he saw a field transform from a nesting ground for geese to a Walmart Supercenter site.

A week after being paroled as North Dakota's longest-serving inmate, the 70-year-old got his first look inside the Bismarck store.

"I'd never been to a Walmart before — they have oodles and oodles of stuff in there," said Iverson, dressed in a crisp new blue jeans and shirt purchased from the retail giant. "It took me three hours to walk all the way around that place."

Four decades after his 1969 conviction for strangling two women in Grand Forks, Iverson is among a growing number of senior parolees returning to communities nationwide.

The AP story sounds like boosterism for the put the criminals back on street movement. Read it here.

The lies of Democrats about Obamacare.

  An excellent article from PowerLine:

By now, of course, everyone - apart from those so partisan that they believe every lie foisted upon them by the party apparat and those who flack for it at CNN, ABC, MSNBC, and the like - understands as much. They recognize that all of the talk, dripping with compassion, about the supposed health care crisis and the need to cover the uninsured was a cover for an attempt to do

* * *

If we are to understand fully what is going on when we see generally mild-mannered, older people showing up in coats and ties to shout at their Congressman, we must keep in mind that for 44 years working Americans in their generation have been paying in to Medicare. They expect, when they retire, to receive the level of medical care that they were promised, that they paid for, that was provided over the last 44 years to those who paid in for a shorter time or paid in not at all. Obama's attempt to renege on the commitment to them has them hopping mad, for they know a broken promise when they see one.

Read it all here.

Any of these “spies” on IRC

A New Jersey blogger facing charges in two states for allegedly making threats against lawmakers and judges was trained by the FBI on how to be deliberately provocative, his attorney said Tuesday.

Hal Turner worked for the FBI from 2002 to 2007 as an "agent provocateur" and was taught by the agency "what he could say that wouldn't be crossing the line," defense attorney Michael Orozco said.

"His job was basically to publish information which would cause other parties to act in a manner which would lead to their arrest," Orozco said.

Prosecutors have acknowledged that Turner was an informant who spied on radical right-wing organizations, but the defense has said Turner was not working for the FBI when he allegedly made threats against Connecticut legislators and wrote that three federal judges in Illinois deserved to die.

I wonder how many of the wannabe Nazis and other fruitcakes on IRC fall into this category?

  Read the whole story here.

Sotomayor shows her leftist, racist pedigree

Ed Whelan reports that Sonia Sotomayor's first vote as a Supreme Court Justice was to stay the execution of an unquestionably guilty hitman. According to Ed, even Ohio's liberal Democratic governor wanted the execution to go forward, and it did. Is this the "tough-on-crime" former prosecutor we kept reading about during the confirmation process?

Ed also reports that New Haven mayor John DeStefano Jr. was among the guests invited by the White House to attend last week's party celebrating Justice Sotomayor's appointment to the Court. DeStefano was the named defendant in Ricci v. DeStefano, the New Haven firefighters case. He is also, as Ed notes (citing Justice Alito's concurring opinion in that case), "the driving force--in collusion with a local racebaiter who is his longtime ally--behind the racial discrimination against the firefighters."

Sotomayor's efforts to ratify DeStefano's racial discrimination, and to keep the matter under the radar screen, were unsuccessful. But at least DeStefano got to go to a White House party.

From Powerline.

Fascinating science news: amino acid found in comet dust

An amino acid has been found on a comet for the first time, a new analysis of samples from NASA's Stardust mission reveals. The discovery confirms that some of the building blocks of life were delivered to the early Earth from space.

Amino acids are crucial to life because they form the basis of proteins, the molecules that run cells. The acids form when organic, carbon-containing compounds and water are zapped with a source of energy, such as photons – a process that can take place on Earth or in space.

Previously, researchers have found amino acids in space rocks that fell to Earth as meteorites, and tentative evidence for the compounds has been detected in interstellar space. Now, an amino acid called glycine has been definitively traced to an icy comet for the first time.

  Full story in NewScientist here.

The hypocrisy of the left

  Remember when the left-wing marched in the streets demanding an end to US military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan? Remember when every left-wing talking head and pundit demanded Bush, the war-monger, and his crony, the evil Cheney be hanged for war crimes? And who can forget the breathless left-wing media camped in the middle of nowhere to record the activities of Cindy Sheehan and her handful of followers?

  With 130,000 American troops in Iraq and more than 60,000 in Afghanistan and Obama in office, the left no longer cares about war. Casualties are increasing in Iraq, but the left-wing says nothing as the caskets return home.

  Just what was the left-wing against? A war? Or George W. Bush?

  Byron York has a thoughtful column here.

No surprise: Human Rights Watch has Jew-hater writing reports on Israeli “war crimes”

He [Joe Stork] is, of course, the author of last week's Human Rights Watch report, which claimed that IDF soldiers murdered white-flag-waving Palestinian civilians in cold blood. He is also the deputy director of HRW's Middle East and North Africa programs. We already knew from NGO Monitor that he has—to put it politely—a rather extremist history on all matters Israel.

But now there is a better accounting. Ben-Dror Yemini of the Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv has a blockbuster article laying out the ugly truth of Stork's history. The Hebrew is available here; below is a complete English translation. That HRW would place in a senior position someone who has written in explicit support of terrorism against Israel, lauded the murder of Israeli athletes at Munich in 1972 as providing "an important boost in morale among Palestinians," and stated that "Zionism may be defeated only by fighting imperialism"—this should be the final verdict on a cretinous organization's already tattered credibility.

  Why is it no surprise that the Human Rights Watch staffer who wrote a report condemning Israeli for heinous war crimes that no reputable source has alleged is a confirmed Jew-hater? Someone who actually cheered the massacre of Israeli athletes in Munich?

  The left-wing, of course, will be waving Stork’s war crimes report around – not the expose of his background.

  Read it all here.

No death panels in our future? Guess again.

 

  There’s nothing like facts to derail the lies of politicians. Obama and his henchmen (and women) claim they don’t plan to eliminate the elderly as “useless eaters”.

  But how to cover up the reality of Obama advisors who cold bloodily point out that the elderly consume too many medical resources?

  This article by Obama advisor (and brother of Obama’s Chief Of Staff) Ezekiel Emmanuel is difficult to dispute. Other Obama advisors such as John Holdren have reached the same conclusion. Of course, you can bet that it will be your mom and dad who are condemned for being old, not theirs.

  A blog posting describing the article in easier to read terms is located here.

Eric Holder preps scapegoats as Obama polls decline

  Obama’s poll ratings are declining. His bid to quickly convert the United States from a capitalist economy to a socialist (actually a fascist) state is running into resistance. What is a wannabe tyrant to do?

  Creating scapegoats is the time-honored way. Lenin did it. Trotsky did it. Hitler and Mao did it.

  Obama is doing it. He is already setting up the Israelis and, in their turn, all Jews, for not reaching a “peace” with Muslim terrorists. This will allow a nuclear-armed Iran and its dependencies Hamas and Hizbollah to wreak havoc on Israelis while campus Muslims step up their attacks on Jews. Anti-Semitism, if you haven’t noticed it, has become very fashionable among the left-wing.

  Now Obama’s corrupt Attorney General Eric Holder, of Marc Rich and other scandals fame, is preparing to do what Obama claimed he didn’t want to do: set a special prosecutor loose to harry Bush appointees and CIA employees about “torture” allegations. Of course the goal is to nail Dick Cheney and other higher-ups.

  The truth, of course, is that Obama and his “gangster government”, as Michael Barone so aptly puts it, need scapegoats to take attention from what they are actually doing.

  Read it all in the New York Post.

Obama strips government website visitors of privacy

  Funny. I don’t see any outrage over this in the mainstream media. In fact, I am surprised that The Washington Post has even run this story, complete with criticism from the ACLU. Is the honeymoon over?

The Obama administration is proposing to scale back a long-standing ban on tracking how people use government Internet sites with "cookies" and other technologies, raising alarms among privacy groups.

A two-week public comment period ended Monday on a proposal by the White House Office of Management and Budget to end a ban on federal Internet sites using such technologies and replace it with other privacy safeguards. The current prohibition, in place since 2000, can be waived if an agency head cites a "compelling need."

Supporters of a change say social networking and similar services, which often take advantage of the tracking technologies, have transformed how people communicate over the Internet, and Obama's aides say those services can make government more transparent and increase public involvement.

Some privacy groups say the proposal amounts to a "massive" and unexplained shift in government policy. In a statement Monday, American Civil Liberties Union spokesman Michael Macleod-Ball said the move could "allow the mass collection of personal information of every user of a federal government website."

Even groups that support updating the policy question whether the administration is seeking changes at the request of private companies, such as online search giant Google, as the industry's economic clout and influence in Washington have grown rapidly.

Two prominent technology policy advocacy groups, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and Electronic Frontier Foundation, cited the terms of a Feb. 19 contract with Google, in which a unnamed federal agency explicitly carved out an exemption from the ban so that the agency could use Google's YouTube video player.

Obama: mobocracy in the making?

SEIU Recruits Obamacare Supporters to 'Drown Out Voices' in Conn. (Pelosi Will Be Appalled at the 'Un-Americanness')

Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer decided to double down on some pretty distasteful messaging today, calling some of the opposition to health care reform, "un-American" in a USA Today op-ed. Specifically, this is what the Speaker finds so unpatriotic:

    These disruptions are occurring because opponents are afraid not just of differing views — but of the facts themselves. Drowning out opposing views is simply un-American. Drowning out the facts is how we failed at this task for decades.

Town halls have indeed been rowdy (although instances of documented aggression have all gone one way: Obamacare supporter to protester), and sometimes not ideal for discussion of the ins and outs of health care reform. But Democrats and liberals have largely used one memo from a libertarian activist in Connecticut to claim a national, nefarious campaign of conservative disruption by mischaracterizing the memo and fibbing about its provenance and distribution.

On the other hand, I have a memo from SEIU Local 2001 (the same Conn. district where the original MacGuffie memo originated), which cannot be misunderstood. It was issued this week in preparation for Rep. Jim Himes' town hall in Stamford, Conn.

  Obama seeks a mobocracy.

  Read it all here.

Cartoonist takes a skeptical view of the Community Organizer In Chief

Seen in The Washington Examiner.

Where was Pelosi when the Nazis roamed the streets?

  Nancy Pelosi recently accused those opposed to Obama’s plan to murder the elderly health care program as carrying swastikas to rallies. John Leo asks where Pelosi was and what she said when this was happening on a daily basis:

Nancy Pelosi is shocked by the presence of some swastikas at protests against Obamacare. Who ever heard of such a thing? Well, any mildly alert American old enough to remember the anti-war protests of 2003-2007. Images of George Bush with a Hitler mustache and a Nazi uniform was everywhere at swastika-choked marches and rallies. "Stop the Fourth Reich-Visualize Nuremburg," said one sign at a Hollywood march. "The Fuhrer already in his bunker," said another. Lots of Nazi regalia appeared at protests in Pelosi's San Francisco as well.

On far-left Internet sites, where basic Bush-Is-Hitler commentary became too familiar to attract attention, Bush aides were quickly assigned Nazi roles; Tom Ridge was the new Himmler and Colin Powell became Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop; Ari Fleisher, Karen Hughes and Karl Rove were all Josef Goebbels figures. Some thought Vice President Cheney was the most important Hitler figure - he commands "storm-trooper legions," said famous crackpot Lyndon LaRouche.

What will Obama do with the reports about the traitors?

  There’s an interesting debate going on at the Volokh Conspiracy about Obama’s “report traitors” program. Here’s a glimpse into the discussion of what value the Obama speech police can get from the email they collect.

"A system of records is a group of records under the control of an agency from which information is retrieved by the name of the individual or by some identifier assigned to the individual." So, if Wikipedia is correct, unless the WH has created a spreadsheet sortable by name/email, no Privacy Act violation exists."

Wrong.

  By its very nature, an email server such as Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus Notes or any other is a fully searchable database. So are email clients such as Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird.

  Thus, as soon as the email is received at turnthetraitorsin@whitehouse.gov, the message becomes an integral element in a "system of records" both in its major and minor definitions.

  Moreover, all emails (and other electronic records) received by the Office of the Executive must be preserved in their entirety.

  Once the loyal American has turned you in, you are in the permanent records.

  What could be done with this information? Plenty. A little datamining, for example, would identify the people the White House has said it wants to uncover: the people below the surface. They don't have thousands of Facebook Friends or Twitter Followers. But they have a somewhat sizeable group they communicate with. Doesn't take much to link names to IP addresses and, in many cases, uncover the true identities of these subversives - dispatch T-shirt clad operatives to beat the crap out of them.

  Think I'm paranoid? Ask the guy the union guys beat up a couple of days ago for exercising his (former) First Amendment freedom. You know: the one that has been declared inoperative by the Obama White House.