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.

Getting old? Obama is getting ready to kill you.

  Even a Washington Post writer admits that the Dear Leader and his cronies want old people to stop breathing a bit earlier than they otherwise might:

The doctor "shall" discuss "advanced care planning, including key questions and considerations, important steps, and suggested people to talk to"; "an explanation of . . . living wills and durable powers of attorney, and their uses" (even though these are legal, not medical, instruments); and "a list of national and State-specific resources to assist consumers and their families." The doctor "shall" explain that Medicare pays for hospice care (hint, hint).

Read it in the Washington Post. (It must be bad if the mainstream press is writing about it.)

New poster released by Obama

Obey!

Congress lives like the super-rich on our tax dollars.

  Congress people ride like rich Saudi Arabians on their own Boeing 737s and Gulfstream 550s. And all we get are the tax bills.

  How arrogant this Congress is, spending $550 million on luxury jets for its own use.

  Read it here.

You are commanded to print and post the following in your home, workplace and neighborhood under penalty of law.

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKsg6iAPFMGEL_8Q39aUVzIViaZXc4Zxt2bTVxnrMvksBaOnK30oTr5cjfj82Cqclh1C90jvY1wRSpCymEn7tBJTVCkUw2gwr_Xk015T39GpodwGTYdEs4XM4hCt0UarkWfbmTdNygN2o/s1600-h/poster87358048.jpg

Review this blog posting and report to the traitor to the White House

Was Pelosi So Wrong About Swastikas?

As you may have heard by now, the United States Speaker of the House, the number two most powerful elected federal official, Nancy Pelosi, has accused the protesters at Democrat healthcare town halls of carrying swastikas:

Interviewer: Do you think there’s legitimate grassroot opposition going on here?

Pelosi: "I think they’re Astroturf… You be the judge. "They’re carrying swastikas and symbols like that to a town meeting on healthcare."

Of course her mistake may be understandable, especially in view of Mr. Obama’s latest logo for his healthcare program:

And it has been suggested that receiving Botox injections can cause blurry vision.

Of course given that she was talking about Democrat town halls, her confusion is even more understandable given the overlap between Nazi programs and Democrats’ pet issues anyway, as we all know.

The Nazis being: against big banks and capitalism in general, against big department stores, against pollution, for two years mandatory voluntary service to the country, for make-work projects (such as the autobahn), against vivisection and cruelty and to animals, against smoking and all tobacco products, for abortion and euthanasia of the infirm and undesirable – and, of course, for cradle-to-grave nationalized healthcare.

In fact, if you look really hard, you can sometimes even find a hint of anti-Semitism in the Democrat Party.

http://sweetness-light.com/archive/was-pelosi-so-wrong-about-swastikas

Our New Emperors live grandly at our expense:

  From CQ Politics:

“House Orders Three Jets
Last year, lawmakers excoriated the CEOs of the Big Three automakers for traveling to Washington, D.C., by private jet to attend a hearing about a possible bailout of their companies," Roll Call reports.

"But apparently Congress is not philosophically averse to private air travel: At the end of July, the House approved nearly $200 million for the Air Force to buy three elite Gulfstream jets for ferrying top government officials and Members of Congress."

The Air Force had asked for one jet as part of an upgrade program, but the House Appropriations Committee added two more at its own discretion.”

  Of course, the mainstream media will probably not comment on this.

Killing the elderly. Obama and the left-wing plot to rid the nation of “useless eaters”.

In addition to being fiscally unsustainable, the health-care-reform plan emerging from Democrats in Congress raises disturbing questions for our nation's seniors. If President Obama pushes through proposed "reforms," seniors could very well face rationed care as the result of a raid on the coffers of a Medicare program that's already nearly bankrupt.

One particular provision in the Democratic bill has seniors worried, and rightly so. A new "Center for Health Outcomes Research and Evaluation" could ration access to medicines and treatments based on the government's assessment of the value of a human life and the "cost-effectiveness" of treatment.

This became abundantly clear when Senator Mike Enzi (R., Wyo.) introduced an amendment designed to ensure that the new center could not put a value on life-saving treatment by using "quality of life" and "cost-effectiveness" measures "for the denial of Medicare benefits to patients against their wishes." Because Democrats rejected the amendment in a party-line vote, the proposed new entity would be able to impose restrictions on access to treatment, as is common in European countries with socialized medicine. Elderly, disabled, and medically dependent patients would be at greatest risk of being denied necessary care.

From the National Review.

Putting the US at risk: Obama and the left-wing at work.

Despite all his initial talk of bipartisanship and putting aside the stale arguments of the past, President Obama is revealing himself with each passing day to be a traditional, doctrinaire liberal.

And although it has received little coverage, Obama's liberal instincts are influencing the direction of America's defense posture. True, Obama has not cut and run in Iraq and Afghanistan, as many feared he would, and for this, he deserves the praise he has received from conservatives. But the longer-term defense policies the Obama administration is establishing are troubling and will be very difficult for a future president to reverse.

The core policies mapped out in President Obama's defense budget are not the result of an internal Pentagon review. They originated inside the Center for American Progress (CAP), a liberal think tank headed by former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta, and were openly, if quietly, laid out during his campaign. CAP's website features "a progressive 'Quadrennial Defense Review'" and other papers laying out defense policies "progressives" would like to see in a Democratic administration. The center boasts that President Obama's recent defense cuts "reflect the overall thrust of CAP's recommendations over the last four years, and [the administration's] specific recommendations clearly embrace our suggestions."

Read it in the National Review.

Media bias in the Birthers/Truthers affairs

  So good it deserves to be quoted in full:

Birthers? Why didn't the Truthers get all this attention?

By: David Freddoso
Commentary Staff Writer
07/31/09 7:09 PM EDT

Twenty-eight percent of Republicans believe President Obama is not a natural-born citizen of the United States, and 30 percent are "not sure," according to this poll.

But before liberals begin to smirk, here's a poll from 2007, in which 35 percent of Democrats said that President Bush knew in advance about the 9/11 attacks, and 26 percent were not sure.

So if 58 percent of Republicans are living in a delusional fantasy world because they are out of power, then 61 percent of Democrats were doing the same thing until just recently (perhaps they still are). It's a clean, apples-to-apples comparison with a clear lesson: People get a bit kooky when they're out of power, Democrats about 3 points kookier -- which is probably within the margin of error.

I bring this up because I did a short mid-afternoon segment today on MSNBC with Tamryn Hall and Donnie Deutsch, in which I was asked about hte Birther poll. I brought up the Truther poll and wondered aloud whether MSNBC had ever brought as much attention to the Truthers.

The Birthers are getting so much coverage, and that's great news for a White House desperate for distractions. President Obama is losing the public opinion battle over health care and putting his foot in his mouth over Henry Gates. His only major legislative accomplishment so far -- the stimulus package -- is widely perceived as a costly and ineffective boondoggle.

I was also asked about a video shot by the thoroughly disreputable Mike Stark, whose selective editing and misidentification of members of Congress contributes to the appearance, at least, that a significant number of Republican members of Congress are "Birthers" -- or at least that they won't say they're not Birthers. Stark, you may recall, is the man who made a scene during a 2006 Senate race by shouting repeatedly while cameras were rolling in order to start an unsubstantiated rumor that then-Sen. George Allen, R-Va., spat on his first wife.

Tamryn then asked a good question: Back in the Bush Era, did any Democratic members of Congress avoid questions about whether "Bush Knew?" On the spot, I couldn't remember. But the truth is, they didn't just avoid the question -- they stoked the flames of conspiracy theories and in some cases embraced them.

A few names: Hillary Clinton (the famous Bush Knew" speech of May 16, 2002), Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, and then-Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D, Ga.). When I covered Congress for Human Events, I asked Rep. William Lacy Clay, D,Mo., about McKinney's suggestion that Bush might have withheld knowledge of the attack. His reply: "I'm curious as to whether it will reveal what Congresswoman McKinney has stated. I'm interested. I'm interested in an investigation."

So who's kooky now?

  The Washington Examiner is doing some really good work.

The health care system Obama, Pelosi, Reid and the left-wing want to destroy.

From Hoover's Scott Atlas (who's also the head of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical School:

1. Americans have better survival rates than Europeans for common cancers. Breast cancer mortality is 52 percent higher in Germany than in the United States and 88 percent higher in the United Kingdom. Prostate cancer mortality is 604 percent higher in the United Kingdom and 457 percent higher in Norway. The mortality rate for colorectal cancer among British men and women is about 40 percent higher.
2. Americans have lower cancer mortality rates than Canadians. Breast cancer mortality in Canada is 9 percent higher than in the United States, prostate cancer is 184 percent higher, and colon cancer among men is about 10 percent higher.
3. Americans have better access to treatment for chronic diseases than patients in other developed countries. Some 56 percent of Americans who could benefit from statin drugs, which reduce cholesterol and protect against heart disease, are taking them. By comparison, of those patients who could benefit from these drugs, only 36 percent of the Dutch, 29 percent of the Swiss, 26 percent of Germans, 23 percent of Britons, and 17 percent of Italians receive them.
4. Americans have better access to preventive cancer screening than Canadians. Take the proportion of the appropriate-age population groups who have received recommended tests for breast, cervical, prostate, and colon cancer:
Nine out of ten middle-aged American women (89 percent) have had a mammogram, compared to fewer than three-fourths of Canadians (72 percent).
Nearly all American women (96 percent) have had a Pap smear, compared to fewer than 90 percent of Canadians.
More than half of American men (54 percent) have had a prostatespecific antigen (PSA) test, compared to fewer than one in six Canadians (16 percent).
Nearly one-third of Americans (30 percent) have had a colonoscopy, compared with fewer than one in twenty Canadians (5 percent).

5. Lower-income Americans are in better health than comparable Canadians. Twice as many American seniors with below-median incomes self-report “excellent” health (11.7 percent) compared to Canadian seniors (5.8 percent). Conversely, white, young Canadian adults with below-median incomes are 20 percent more likely than lower-income Americans to describe their health as “fair or poor.”

Hat tip to Jonah Goldberg at National Review.

The painful process of revealing Obama

  Andrew McCarthy has a fascinating article on Obama’s personal history, which he has consistently lied about and tried to hide.

  Very much worth reading here.