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DUBOB 11- more tales from the Dark UnderBelly Of the Beast...
various links and websites
| 01-31-03
| The Heavy Equipment Guy
Posted on 01/31/2003 5:07:21 PM PST by backhoe
At the request of members, I am restarting those "Tales from the Dark UnderBelly Of the Beast"-- the stories and issues that the press and media either ignore, won't even talk about, or will mention once and forevermore claim "it's old news..."
Naturally, some will be stories which interest me, or things I think we all need to be aware of.
I am experimenting with a minor change in presentation- when I can, I will cut to
-GoogleNewsBeta--
with a keyword or two and see what kind of links to "mainstream" stories I can find in contrast to what we see here and on other sites.
May I remind you of a couple of points to bear in mind?
Each link usually has many other links within- follow them all to get "the rest of the story."
Don't forget the "open multiple browsers" trick with control-n -- this allows you to hold your place with one, and use the others to follow links, run searches, etc.
Rather than go back and rehash old links, I'll give you links to the original posts here:
-DUBOB 10- the *best of* the Dark Underbelly Series--
-DUBOB 9-- even *more* tales from the Dark Underbelly of the Beast..... --
DUBOB 8-- still *more* tales from the Underbelly***
DUBOB 7-- even *more* tales from the Dark Underbelly of the Beast.....
DUBOB 6-- yet *more* tales from the Dark Underbelly of the Beast.....
DUBOB 5-- even *more* tales from the Dark Underbelly of the Beast.....
DUBOB IV- yet more Tales from the Dark Underbelly of the Beast-
DUBOB III -- "Tales from the Dark Underbelly of the Beast"
DUBOB 2-- more tales from The Dark Underbelly of the Beast-- thread II
-The Dark Underbelly of the Beast- Stories the Media won't Discuss...--
TOPICS:
KEYWORDS: americans4prosperity; davidharsanyi; dubob; erichoffer; kochbrothers; lamestreammedia; oldmedia; thetruth
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To: All
AMERICA
RISING. This video doesnt exactly represent our point of viewwe never fell for Obamas hope and change scambut it does speak for many millions of Americans. Its nicely done. Well see a lot more of this kind of populist calling of Democrats to account between now and November.
Related: If They Wanted Your Opinion, Theyd Ask.
Democrats Arent Really Dropping Like Flies. It just looks that way.
Read the Comments: "...a huge part of movement conservatism and the appeal of the Republican Party to angry white men..." Jeez, you have to kick the MoonBats out of the way, they are so thick... obviously, the commenters don't come from "flyover country..."
NINE CONGRESSWOMEN WRITE: Dear Mr. President: Your Policies Are Damaging Women the Most.
UPDATE: Conor Friedersdorf is immune to irony.
OUCH: Illinois Panel Votes in Favor of Gitmo Plan On Same Day That 3 Federal Prisoners Escape Illinois Prison.
The countrys in the very best of hands.
THIS PRE-ELECTION REPORT FROM RON FOURNIER OF AP, which Ive referenced before, looks pretty prophetic now:
Arrogance is a common vice in presidential politics. A person must be more than a little self-important to wake up one day and say, I belong in the Oval Office.
But theres a line smart politicians dont cross somewhere between Im qualified to be president and Im born to be president. Wherever it lies, Barack Obama better watch his step.
Hes bordering on arrogance. . . . both Obama and his wife, Michelle, ooze a sense of entitlement.
Barack is one of the smartest people you will ever encounter who will deign to enter this messy thing called politics, his wife said a few weeks ago, adding that Americans will get only one chance to elect him.
Obamas cool self-confidence got him into trouble in New Hampshire when he said Clinton was likable enough, faint praise that grated on female votes who didnt appreciate him condescending to the former first lady. . . .
It may be that he has just the right mix of confidence and humility to lead the nation (Obama likes to say, Im reminded every day that Im not a perfect man). But if the young senator wins the nomination, even the smallest trace of arrogance will be an issue with voters who still consider him a blank slate. . . .
Voters wont cut Obama as much slack on the humility test because hes sold himself as something different. While rejecting the me-centric status quo and promising a new era of post-partisan reform, Obama has said the movement he has created is not about him; its about what Americans can do together if their faith in government is restored.
So hows that going? And Paul Rahe wonders what happens next.
UPDATE: What are a few broken promises between friends?
Chris Matthews Is A Bigoted Liar And We Have The Proof.
Bob Parks has a post up at Big Government taking Chris Matthews to task over his racist comments denigrating teabaggers
DECONSTRUCTING THOSE Coexist bumper stickers.
Youve seen these, right? They make me mad. Why? Because they dont really mean what they say...
"How is it anything less than suicidal to countenance acceptance of a religion that has at its root the refusal to accept, or even tolerate, any other religion?"
Read
The
Anchoress:
Use
The
Links
Dag
Nab
It:
Wednesday, January 6, 2010, 3:39 PM
The_Anchoress
Neoneocon rouses me from my couch that I may link to her fascinating post, one that seems relevant to our day. She offers a quote from a book (written by an American man of the left) recounting the attitudes of his interviewees regarding a certain moment in the history of Germany:
National Socialism was a repulsion of my friends against parliamentary politics, parliamentary debate, parliamentary governmentagainst all the higgling and the haggling of the parties and the splinter parties, their coalitions, their confusions, and their conniving. It was the final fruit of the common mans repudiation of the rascals. Its motif was throw them all out. My friends, in the 1920s, were like spectators at a wrestling match who suspect that beneath all the grunts and groans, the struggle and the sweat, the match is fixed, that the performers are only pretending to put on a fight. The scandals that rocked the country, as one party or cabal exposed another, dismayed and then disgusted my friends
While the ship of the German State was being shivered, the officers, who alone had life preservers, disputed their prerogatives on the bridge. My friends observed that none of the non-Communist, non-Nazi leaders objected to the 35,000 Reichsmark salaries of the cabinet ministers, only the Communists and the Nazis objected. And the bitterest single disappointment of Nazism
was the fact that Hitler had promised that no official would get more than 1,000 Reichsmarks a month and did not keep his promise.
Fascinating stuff read it all over at Neos. Seems pretty timely to me, whether youre thinking about the 08 elections or the 10.
I know some might easily think that the election of the deft and dishonest Barack Obama mirrors the rise of Hitler, but it seems to me that in 08 we were not quite as utterly fed up with the leadership of both parties as we are, in 10. I dont know about anyone else, but hearing Nancy Pelosi say there has never been a more open process than the one surrounding their backroom-written-bribe-supported-GOP-locked-out Obamacare bill made me feel like I was living in bizarro world, and confirmed to me that Our Demented Lady of the Perpetually Angry Little Fist really believes that reality is created on her very breath.
She speaks a word, and it is so! Harry Reid, Obama, and too many on the right as well, are convinced (not without reason) that they can say any damn thing they want, and history will become malleable, and reality will adjust itself accordingly.
Under these circumstances, and with the Imperial president signing some very curious (and far-from-transparent) Executive Orders at an amazing clip, who the hell knows what will happen? I dont. But as the center continues to break down because it cannot hold and things begin to resemble the wobbly, widening gyre of Yeats Second Coming it does seem to me that someone who claims to be even more above it all than the melodramatic Obama pretended to be, would find many welcoming him or her into the public arena.
I still have a fever, and am a little out of it, so I may not be reasoning rightly, but here is what I say to Neo:
Its funny you wrote this. I was just thinking this morning -seriously, as I showered- that we are ripe for the arrival of someone on the political scene who is not a career politician, who can say he or she is untainted, and can then exploit the tumult were currently embroiled in.
I am very disturbed by these high integrity dems running from the ship. I note a few things:
1) (Cantor aside) Theyre all going to vote in this health bill and then skip town.
2) They wouldnt end their political careers for nothing; book deals and gigs as lobbyists are small compensation for the loss of power, title, access, so they all must have gotten something else that induced them to vote-and-run-for-it. Perhaps that is where the stimulus money sent to fake congressional districts and fake zip codes has actually gone into their pockets.
3) The names Im seeing (Ed freaking Schultz?) being bandied about to take the place of these dems are names of farther to the left, not more centrist.
4) Look up: Universal Voter Registration. As I have said before, the dems are not concerned about polls or representative government anymore, because they dont actually believe theyre ever going to have to deal with real elections again.
5) Those conservatives who are gloating about how theyre going to win in 2010! and who think these Dem resignations are evidence of a coming bloodbath, are thinking precisely what the dems want them to think. Americans may not be loving the land of liberalism, but Obama is still the self-esteem president; he still has the bully pulpit (and the Obama-do-me press), and hes proven that he knows how to pivot for expediencys sake.
Back to my invalid couch. Sorry if this sounds a bit disjointed. Or more disjointed than usual.
Related:
Ed Morrissey: Panic at the Dem Disco
Bookworm: When no one is an enemy, everyone is an enemy
Malkin: The Death of Deliberative Democracy
Gateway: has more
O/T:
Last of Saddams Uranium finally brought out of Iraq.
BIG Journalism launched
Melissa Clouthier: America is now A Dependent Society
11,721
posted on
01/07/2010 2:05:36 AM PST
by
backhoe
(All Across America, the Lights are being relit again...)
To: All
Election 2010: The back-to-back Senate retirements of Byron Dorgan and Chris Dodd may be just the beginning. The people have seen the future of health care reform and found it doesn't work. Apres moi, le deluge.
We don't know what the Mayan calendar says about 2010, but it's starting to look like the end of the world for Democratic electoral prospects. Americans who watched in shock as government tried to step between them and their doctors, may have the last laugh. The tea party isn't over until the angry mob votes.
As rage grew over the attempt to nationalize one-sixth of the economy, Democratic prospects faded. Americans were not amused that the best health care in the world would be replaced with rationing. They were appalled at the secret deals and outright bribes to get the votes of Louisiana's Mary Landrieu and Nebraska's Ben Nelson.
Polls showed they liked their doctors and their insurance and could not understand why a program intended to insure everybody didn't do what it promised and was costly to boot. They could not understand the need for government bureaucrats and not their doctors to decide on the method of and necessity for their treatment.
So the political body count begins.
Dorgan, the junior senator from North Dakota, was the first Democratic incumbent to get out of Dodge, as early polls showed him 20 points behind popular GOP Gov. John Hoeven in a possible match-up.
He wouldn't be the last. Connecticut's senior senator, Chris Dodd, dubbed by critics "the senator from Countrywide Financial" for his sweetheart real estate deals, opted to retire to that famous Irish cottage of his.
(Excerpt) Read more at investors.com ...
OK...
In my lifetime the acceptable terms have been re-branded a few times... every decade there will be a new term at this rate and if you use the old accepted brand, you are a racist... unless you are:
black
colored
a negro
an afro-american
an African-American
a person of color.
Hope I got that right - wouldn't want to be branded a racist.
I'm just wondering - did the "United Negro College Fund" change it's name?
What about the NAACP "National Association for the Advancement of Colored People"?
So does this mean ol' Internet-Al will be reversing his bright idea of tearing up all the nations RR Tracks to turn them into 'Bike Trails' campaign.
Any chance we could get him to say he was sorry for that bad idea?
Mr. Riadys influence peddling and political-favor bartering paid off in 1996 when President Clinton designated 1.7 million acres of southern Utah as the Grand-Escalante National Monument.
Yup:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/724170/posts
That Trillion-Dollar Ripoff Clintons Utah Coal Deal
various websites | 7-29-02 | The Heavy Equipment Guy
And I can make a firm pledge: under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 will see their taxes increase not your income taxes, not your payroll taxes, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes. My opponent cant make that pledge, and heres why: for the first time in American history, he wants to tax your health benefits Apparently, Senator McCain doesnt think its enough that your health premiums have doubled, he thinks you should have to pay taxes on them too. Thats a $3.6 trillion tax increase on middle class families. That will eventually leave tens of millions of you paying higher taxes. Thats his idea of change, Obama said.
http://www.politicususa.com/en/Obama-healthcare-taxes-mccain
11,722
posted on
01/07/2010 3:46:33 AM PST
by
backhoe
(All Across America, the Lights are being relit again...)
To: All
We elected you on a promise of hope and change. Youve disappointed us. In 2010, we are taking the country back. Blue collar democrats, independents, and conservatives. We love our country. We are proud of our founders. And we will fight to protect our traditions. We dont want your revolution.
Posted by: Emperor Misha I5:47 pm
and this one courtesy of our friends at HillBuzz.
( hillbuzz guys.
As a former Chicagoan if I read your blog correctly(between the lines) Obamas career of a drug dealing, gay, bi pimp, panderer, slum landlord and much etc.is hidden but common knowledge in your neck of the woods, which makes him a great big fat hypocrite etc. Now the obots are paranoid about a video, this isnt the first by a long shot that they have removed.)
You remember, dont you? The PUMAs. The ones that True Conservatives were warning us about supporting back in 08.
Well
Once again theyve come out with something that reaffirms His Majesty in his decision back then to work with them, regardless of whether or not we had disagreements on other issues.
In THIS fight, were on the same side, and were not about to throw friends and allies under the bus because of perceived ideological impurity.
As a matter of fact, we could use some Republicans capable of putting out a message as powerful as this:
Video at Link! Or: http://angry.net/blog2/?p=1381
94 Comments »
Generally I never cover the crazy hate and incitement to violence that the now officially insane left projectile vomits on a daily basis.
But this is so over the line ............ time to invade Israel.
This is not the brain child of Sullivan, as he doesn't have a thinking organ - he is a knee jerk step and fetishist boy for the left. No, he is propagating the Jew hatred rhetoric of the left, giving legs to this radical, wild, fanatical strategy.
This call for an invasion of Israel is pure evil. America is under some terrible spell. And while it's easy to dismiss such crazy talk as ugly fringe, Sullivan is a leading lefturd blogger. Clearly, this intensely unhappy misery wishes to spread his pathetic unhappiness to unsuspecting dimbulbs.
We heard this disturbing nazi rhetoric from Obama's close confidante Samantha Power back in 2002 where she was calling for a military invasion of Israel. I suspect that Power is more Secretary of State than Hillary.
Jews in America have a lot to answer for. The Jewish lay leadership should be thrown out in the street. We need Jabotinsky. Seriously. The flock is lost.
Daniel F sent this over via Noah Pollak:
Andrew Sullivan: Its Time to Invade Israel
Click here to visit crazy town:
My own view is moving toward supporting a direct American military imposition of a two-state solution, with NATO troops on the borders of the new states of Palestine and Israel. Im sick of having a great power like the US being dictated to in the conduct of its own foreign policy.
Presumably the direct American military imposition of a two-state solution would involve the Marines going house to house in Gaza City. Talk about American soldiers dying for Israel! For someone who has spent the past few years denouncing the hubris of American military intervention in the Middle East, this is heady stuff.
What is about that Jews defending themselves that makes Jew haters froth at the mouth? Sullivan is a rabid dog melting down right in front of our eyes. Hard not to rubberneck.
11,723
posted on
01/07/2010 6:59:10 AM PST
by
backhoe
(All Across America, the Lights are being relit again...)
To: All
Yes, unfortunately, we are indeed Michiganders Detroiters now.
I sure "HØpe" you like that "Change" you thought you voted for...
What can Brown do for you?
He takes away Harrys 60th vote, he will, STOP Obama care STOP Cap and trade STOP Amnesty for illegal aliens STOP the Socialist/Marxist agenda of the looney left Etc, Etc, Etc 12 days to the election Donate as much as you can today
https://www.icontribute.us/scottbrown
================================================
11,724
posted on
01/07/2010 12:35:03 PM PST
by
backhoe
(All Across America, the Lights are being relit again...)
To: All
Obama Terrorism Statement UPDATE: "We are war. We are at war with al Qaeda" UPDATE x2: US Gov't Had Enough Information To Have Potentially Stopped Attack
DrewM.
Above the fold update:
Gabe sends along a link to the White House review (pdf).
Bottom line is on page 2 of the file they had enough information to have stopped this guy from getting on the plane and they simply didn't.
Right now Brennan and Napolitano are going through the report.
I will say in all honesty, this is an almost impossible task. The old story is the terrorists only have to succeed once while the defenders have to be right all the time. That's a hell of a task.
Still, in this case they seem to have pretty much have had as much information and leads as they are likely to get (the guys dad, the fact he'd been to Yemen, the one way ticket paid for in cash, no luggage, etc). If they didn't flag this guy, I'm not sure who they are getting.
Ordering people to do more of what they are doing or to do it better is simply political spin. There's always going to be a danger or even likelihood that given the amount of information that comes in and the size of the bureaucracy things are likely to fall through the cracks.
Brennan says the most shocking thing he learned is that AQAP is an off shoot of AQ main body in Pakistan and wanted to and was able to attack the US. Really? That shocked him?
Helen Thomas wants to know if the screening in Amsterdam was done by contractors and what was his motivation? Dumbest woman in the world.
Brennan says religion is at the heart of what AQ does but of course, it's a perversion of Islam.
Awesome...TSA was set to chat with the bomber when they landed.
Brennan says he gave Leiter permission to go on leave with his kid.
He also says AQAP was 'aspirational' in its desire to attack us. See, thing is when people say they are coming to kill you, it's best to assume they are and they can. Alas, that's not the Obama way. For the opposing (and correct) view, see Cheney's 1% Doctrine.
Unrelated...NBC's Savannah Gutherie is hot.
I'm sorry but why was Brennan so surprised that AQAP could get a guy on plane with a bomb? Seriously, how can this be a surprise? This is a group that got a guy in close enough to attack the head of Saudi intelligence. Getting on a plane is not a stretch from there.
Just a reminder...two weeks ago this was "a lone extremist" and now he's the leading edge of a dangerous and surprising new source of attacks. Why the hell did Obama pop off back in Hawaii? No one will call him on this but it shows you what his first and true instincts are...minimize the danger of Islamic attacks.
Original Post:
Continue reading
Right now on all the nets.
The NSC adviser says people will be shocked by what we hear.
Obama says we had the information but failed to connect it.
So far it sounds like he's saying, "I've directed we do things better". Ah well, if only we had thought of that sooner.
He says he's going to hold people accountable when they screw up but this time no one was directly responsible but the system failed. So, um, no one is held accountable if everyone is at fault? Ok.
"We are war. We are at war with al Qaeda". Well, that's new from this guy. Now goes on to say Muslims mostly reject al Qaeda.
Oh now is not the time for partisanship when it comes to national security. Apparently at one point it was a time for that but not now.
Actually, not a bad speech for Obama. Problem is his actions in treating this as a law enforcement problem doesn't track with his words.
BTW-if we are at war with al Qaeda as Obama just said, why are we sending them to civilian courts?
Again, better rhetoric but simply not matched by the actions of his administration. Close it up
237Already mentioned, but now with linkage: http://tiny.cc/GZghM
"I am proud of my husband. He carried out a great operation in this war. I hope Allah will accept his martyrdom, if he has become a martyr," Defne Bayrak told reporters in Istanbul, where she lives.
"I am not ashamed. He did this against the American occupation" of Afghanistan, she said, the Turkish news agency Anatolia reported.
She needs to be killed, as does everyone that publicly supports Al Qaeda or any terrorist attacks against the U.S..
261 So bambi gets an intelligence briefing that says basically; only a couple of days after pissing off the Yemani jihadists they were able to put a ready, willing, and able jihadist over the city of Detroit with a couple hundred passengers with (possibly) enough explosive to tear the plane apart and rain debris over a couple mile stretch of the city.
I wonder if/when he'll ever wake up and realize these aren't the same muslins he went to grade school with in Indonesia? Realize it actually is a war that make take a hundred, possibly longer, years to fight?
"And so American journalism began to look, sound and read more like European journalism, frankly partisan and often untrustworthy,"
All that has to be done to make the American public aware of exactly what they are voting for is to do ads with the video of the Gay Pride Day in San Francisco. The images are absolutely shocking
.
January 7th, 2010
From the stoically unfazed warmers at LiveScience:
White areas show where snow covers the ground completely as of Jan. 5, 2010.
RecordBreaking Snow and Cold Reminiscent of the Late 70s
By Robert Roy Britt, Editorial Director
06 January 2010
If this winters record-breaking snowfalls and bitter cold remind you of your childhood, perhaps you grew up when disco was alive and well.
"People who were around in late 70s remember several winters similar to this," said Deke Arndt, who was a child of the 70s and now makes his living by monitoring climate data for the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC).
For those who dont recall those years, this winter may seem unprecedented. Its not.
"This is unusual, significant, and certainly a real pain, but its not unprecedented," said Arndt, speaking of the snow and cold across the nation so far this winter.
One significant modern record did fall, in December: The average extent of snowfall cover for North America the footprint of snow was the largest ever seen, Arndt told LiveScience. However, that measurement dates back just 40 years, to the advent of satellite observations.
Otherwise, while many daily records have been set for specific locations, not much is totally off the charts this year, and what may seem extreme is actually part of Mother Natures normal long-term climate variations. Meteorologists also are quick to point out that reliable U.S. weather data goes back only to the late 1800s, so its normal for records of various types to be broken every year, somewhere, when dealing with such a relatively brief data set.
Yes, however, its cold, and that cold is very persistent.
In Tampa, Fla., this week, daily highs have been below the normal daily low temperatures. Thursday will likely be the fifth day in a row with the low temperature dipping below 40 degrees Fahrenheit (4 degrees Celsius). But the record consecutive string of such cold days was eight, set in 1980, according to the National Weather Service.
While Tampa set a daily record low of 27 degrees F this morning, the all-time record low is 18 degrees, set on Dec. 13, 1962. That record is not expected to be broken this week. In during incredible cold snap, Tallahassee, Fla. sank to minus 2 F on Feb. 13, 1899.
Floridas chill is of course nothing compared to Chicago, where the thermometer has not gotten above freezing since Christmas Day.
And yes, its been snowy.
Buffalo, NY has seen snow 11 of the past 12 days, according to Weather.com, and Cleveland has had 10 straight days with at least some snow. Yet while this winter has brought big storms, in New York City nothing has matched the 25.5 inches of snow that fell on Dec. 26, 1947, nor has Boston seen anything like the 23.6-inch event of Feb. 17, 2003.
Isnt it odd that when we have record cold temperatures the reports are also quick to point out that our weather records only go back to the late 1800s?
We are also reassured that these extremes are well within Mother Natures normal long-term climate variations.
And yet when we have record high temperatures, it is portrayed as a sure sign that man is destroying the planet with his global warming emissions.
By the way, as we recall the scientists back in the 1970s were singing a very different tune.
From the now notorious April 28, 1975 issue of Newsweek:
(Click to enlarge)
Isnt it funny how quickly settled science changes?
Indeed, Mr. Deke Arndt seems to be spreading his profound insights everywhere.
From the easily convinced Associated Press:
Experts: Cold snap doesnt disprove global warming
By Malcolm Ritter, AP Science Writer Wed Jan 6
Beijing had its coldest morning in almost 40 years and its biggest snowfall since 1951. Britain is suffering through its longest cold snap since 1981. And freezing weather is gripping the Deep South, including Floridas orange groves and beaches.
Whatever happened to global warming?
Such weather doesnt seem to fit with warnings from scientists that the Earth is warming because of greenhouse gases. But experts say the cold snap doesnt disprove global warming at all its just a blip in the long-term heating trend.
"Its part of natural variability," said Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. With global warming, he said, "well still have record cold temperatures. Well just have fewer of them."
Deke Arndt of the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., noted that 2009 will rank among the 10 warmest years for Earth since 1880.
Scientists say man-made climate change does have the potential to cause more frequent and more severe weather extremes, such as heat waves, storms, floods, droughts and even cold spells. But experts interviewed by The Associated Press did not connect the current frigid blast to climate change.
So what is going on?
"We basically have seen just a big outbreak of Arctic air" over populated areas of the Northern Hemisphere, Arndt said. "The Arctic air has really turned itself loose on us."
In the atmosphere, large rivers of air travel roughly west to east around the globe between the Arctic and the tropics. This air flow acts like a fence to keep Arctic air confined.
But recently, this air flow has become bent into a pronounced zigzag pattern, meandering north and south. If you live in a place where it brings air up from the south, you get warm weather. In fact, record highs were reported this week in Washington state and Alaska.
But in the eastern United States, like some other unlucky parts of the globe, Arctic air is swooping down from the north. And thats how you get a temperature of 3 degrees in Beijing, a reading of minus-42 in mainland Norway, and 18 inches of snow in parts of Britain, where a member of Parliament who said the snow "clearly indicates a cooling trend" was jeered by colleagues.
The zigzag pattern arises naturally from time to time, but it is not clear why its so strong right now, said Michelle LHeureux, a meteorologist at the Climate Prediction Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The center says the pattern should begin to weaken in a week or two
So the jet stream affects temperatures?
Who knew?
Next they will point out the influence of sun spots on the weather.
(Just kidding.)
9 Comments »
7 01 2010
Back on December 12th 2009 I posted an article titled:
Solar geomagnetic activity is at an all time low what does this mean for climate?
We then had a string of sunspots in December that marked what many saw as a rejuvenation of solar cycle 24 after a long period of inactivity. See December sunspots on the rise
It even prompted people like Joe Romm to claim:
The hottest decade ends and since theres no Maunder mininum sorry deniers! the hottest decade begins
But what Joe doesnt understand is that sunspots are just one proxy, the simplest and most easily observed, for magnetic activity of the sun. It is the magnetic activity of the sun which is central to Svensmarks theory of galactic cosmic ray modulation, which may affect cloud cover formation on earth, thus affecting global temperatures. As the theory goes, lower magnetic activity of the sun lets more GCRs into our solar system, which produce microscopic cloud seed trails (like in a Wilson cloud chamber) in our atmosphere, resulting in more cloud cover, resulting in a cooler planet. Ric Werme has a nice pictorial here.
When I saw the SWPC Ap geomagnetic index for Dec 2009 posted yesterday, my heart sank. With the sunspot activity in December, I thought surely the Ap index would go up. Instead, it crashed.
Annotated version above Source: http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ftpdir/weekly/Ap.gif
Source data: http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ftpdir/weekly/RecentIndices.txt
When you look at the Ap index on a larger scale, all the way back to 1844 when measurements first started, the significance of this value of 1″ becomes evident. This graph from Dr. Leif Svalgaard shows where we are today in relation to the past 165 years.
Read the rest of this entry »
Comments : 152 Comments »
11,725
posted on
01/07/2010 3:46:45 PM PST
by
backhoe
(All Across America, the Lights are being relit again...)
To: All
January 7, 2010 05:26 PM by Michelle Malkin58 Comments
"And the BS spewed by our now known liar president doesnt change a thing. The plane came within an inch of its life of being destroyed and the people on it
All you need know is what would have happened if the Bush administration had the exact same thing happen on Bush watch."
"The reason Israel takes this seriously and we dont is because theyve experienced the reality of people wanting to kill you and killing you based solely on your race and religion. We still find it hard to fathom. When these fanatics start killing our children in our schools, well see it differently."
"...if we are at war as the president said then why isnt the bomber being treated as a prisoner of war instead of being afforded all the rights of a common criminal?? And why didnt any reporter ask this?"
6. sirius_sir:
Process is all. Isnt that the lesson of the Arab-Israeli peace process? Peace isnt really the goal, after all, only maintaining the process.
Updated here: Lead Story
By Michelle Malkin January 8, 2010 03:02 AM
Photoshop credit: Registered
As I mentioned yesterday, my syndicated column today spotlights the abysmally lax visa issuance policies at Hillary Clintons State Department a problem that festered before 9/11 under GOP and Democrat administrations alike and continues now (hello, James Riady). Take a look again at what the White House 6-page summary report says about Foggy Bottoms foul-up: The focus on visa revocation completely (and deliberately) misses the point about who bears responsibility for approving the visa in the first place. And that responsibility rests entirely with U.S. consular officials gambling on our national security. I asked the State Department for more information about the Crotch Bombers visa application and approval. The first thing I got back was chapter and verse citing federal law prohibiting disclosure of info on who, if anyone, interviewed Abdulmutallab; why he was approved for the full, two-year, multiple-entry visa instead of a limited, two-week visa to cover his trip to the shady Al Maghrib Institute in Houston, Texas; and how the State Department bureaucrats ignored the law, the red flags, and common sense to open the front door for Abdulmuttalab. Why is Hillarys State Department getting UndyBomber pass? by Michelle Malkin Creators Syndicate Copyright 2010 Forget about no-fly lists, full-body scanners, and air marshals. All the loud recriminations about who should have done what to stop the UndyBomber from boarding a plane to Detroit on Christmas Day miss a more fundamental point: Young, single, rootless foreign Muslim Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab should never, ever have received a temporary visa into our country in the first place. No visa, no plane ticket. No ticket, no passage to airline jihad. Even absent the intelligence we had on this al Qaeda-trained operative before his fateful trip, Hillary Clintons State Department was required to know better than to issue a coveted entrance pass to a globe-trotting, Nigerian-born nomad. Under federal law (section 214[b] of the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act to be precise), State Department consular officials must determine that foreigners applying for temporary visas (students, tourists, and businessmen) will in fact return to their home countries as required and will not abuse their visa privileges. This means making sure that the temporary visa applicant has strong ties to his native land. Its supposed to be a tough burden to overcome. Yet, Abdulmutallab showed no such propensities at the time he applied for his temporary visa at the U.S. Embassy in London in June 2008. He was a twenty-something student who had flitted from Nigeria to Yemen to Togo to England without a family or job. He was, in other words, a textbook itinerant waving more red flags than a bullfighter. Question: How much due diligence did the State Department consular official on the front line who interviewed Abdulmutallab actually show? Reports say it took just four days for his visa to be approved. Barely two months later, Abdulmutallab turned up in Houston for a two-week seminar at Al Maghrib Institute, a Muslim Brotherhood-tied Islamic education center that has been dubbed Jihad U by veteran terrorism analysts. Now, Im presuming that a consular official did in fact interview Abdulmutallab before rubber-stamping his visa. Before the September 11 attacks, countless visa applicants including 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers skipped personal appearance requirements and bypassed the interview process as a convenience provided by Foggy Bottom panderers. This was supposed to change. I asked the State Department Thursday for more information about the presumed consular office interview and hasty approval of Abdulmutallabs visa. Spokeswoman Megan Mattson invoked confidentiality rules protecting his visa form. But there is an overriding public interest in what his application might reveal about our atrociously lax consulate practices. The General Accounting Office obtained and released the 9/11 hijackers temporary visa forms, which showed that basic information about where they were headed (two hijackers wrote Wasantwn) and what business they claimed to be doing (one wrote teater as his occupation) was suspiciously shoddy. Like Abulmutallab, not a single one of the unmarried, rootless, Muslim male nomads who secured student and business visas to commit mass murder on American soil should have ever obtained a temporary visa in the first place. But the reckless customer-service mentality prevails under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The department continues to operate the dangerous Diversity Visa Lottery program handing out permanent residency visas (green cards) randomly to some 50,000 foreigners from underrepresented regions. The bipartisan visa lottery was championed by the late Democrat Sen. Ted Kennedy and signed into law by Republican President George H. W. Bush in 1990. Although originally intended to give a leg up to Irish immigrants, most of the winners are now from non-Western countries including several terrorist-sponsoring and terrorist-friendly nations such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Nigeria, and Yemen. State Department flacks are busy pointing fingers at other homeland security bureaucracies, namely the National Counterrerrorism Center, for failing to revoke the UndyBombers visa. Foggy Bottom held a press conference earlier this week to boast that it had finally taken responsibility and stripped Abdulmutallab of his golden entrance ticket. But where does the buck stop for granting the visa in the first place? Ominously, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley revealed that other suspected jihadi visas have been revoked. Its more than one, he said. But I dont think its fruitful to get into a scoreboard. Of course not. Keeping score would mean accountability for negligent consular officials and their bosses. This administration would rather let sleeping bureaucrats lie.
VACATIONS ALL I EVER WANTED: CBS: Panetta didnt interrupt his vacation either after Flight 253 plot. UPDATE: Reader C.J. Burch writes: These people dont think they have any skin in the game. Send in the Clown Car: White House: Hey, We Told Counterterror Chief to Go Skiing. IM PRETTY SURE THE FEELING IS MUTUAL: GOP Insiders Sour On Palin. "Governor Palin is exactly right to distance herself from the GOP establishment. These are the same people who thought John Mccain was a serious candidate and who hired Michael Steele to run the RNC. If Palin hadn't been running with him, Mccain would undoubtedly have lost to Obama by 16 points instead of 6. Assuming she wants the job..." MORE SIGNS OF Coakley trouble. Boston Globe: that Martha Coakley is kind of a slippery crapweasle who doesn't want you MA voters to know too much about her and you might just want to consider what that implies
Purple Avenger
Wow. This is going to leave a mark. They really mopped the floor with her and didn't say a single bad thing about Brown in the piece. ...This is all part of a Coakley pattern. When she ran for attorney general, she didn't allow even the Republican candidate on a debate stage. In fact, she refused to debate at all...
That's just one little tidbit I quoted. The whole piece is chock full of chocolaty ball dipping goodness. Go read the whole thing. You won't be disappointed. Don't forget - The Globe is saying this, not that festering cesspool of reactionary ReichWing neo-Nazi teabaggers at the Herald. H/T CY Posted by Purple Avenger at 12:42 AM New Comments Thingy
SCOTT BROWN NEEDS HELP THAT DOESNT COST MONEY. Plus, more from that one-woman electoral army, Sissy Willis. UPDATE: Steele, RNC raising money for Scott Brown. ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Josh Dunn writes: Heres betting that a lot of Democrats in the House and Senate secretly want Brown to win so Obamacare can be euthanized. Yeah, it would get a lot of folks off the hook. Strange Populist Omens. 'When I ventured home to northern New Jersey for Christmas, I happened to cross paths with a long-time family friend. She and I used to talk politics on a regular basis, differing in opinion nine times out of ten... Her best line? Just because I dont want my kids paying off national debts for their entire lives doesnt mean Im a racist. ' ...it was a spectacular development: A real-life, first-hand example of the conservative re-awakening America is experiencing, and anecdotal confirmation of the polling data energized conservatives have been poring over for months. |
You betcha... ever hear of Taqiyya?
http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/taqiyya/index
Let's do a search...
http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/neda/index?tab=articles
First appearance of this spin?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2296313/posts
Iran video - faked!
Posted on Sunday, July 19, 2009 8:54:37 PM by gentilehassid
Why are they recycling it?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2279078/posts
"THIS WHOLE situation is reminiscent of the Taliban in Afghanistan. For years before 9/11, women's groups were circulating articles, e-mails and any kind of visible validation demonstrating the horror that women lived with under the Taliban. Stories of women professors being arrested if they left their homes, videos of women being shot in public stadiums for daring to have a job, petitions, statistics, testimonials - they all got around. Well, at least among women. Yet, despite the extreme suffering of women throughout Taliban rule, the United States did not intervene, nor did anyone else - that is, until 9/11 happened. When the Taliban attacked the United States, suddenly America woke up and unanimously said, "Hey, those Taliban! Theyre really bad! We should stop them!"
And ALL the feminist and women's group then conveniently forgot about the women living under islam...because it might help Prez Bush. "
That nails it!
So why arent the genderfemmies speaking out NOW, since Dubyas gone back to the ranch?
Because it might hurt Prez Obama."
Well, she shore looked dead to me...
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2276069/posts
Girl Shot Dead by Police/Basij militia in Tehran June 20 2009 (WARNING. GRAPHIC.)
Yoo Tube ^ | June 20, 2009 | Yoo Tube
BlogWarZ!
When you've lost Glenn Reynolds, you've lost it all:
CHARLES JOHNSON OWES ME A CORRECTION. Well, yeah. But cheap and bogus charges of racism are so common nowadays, that they dont matter like they used to. And Im not just talking about the ones from Charles.
UPDATE: Charles now updates, several days late, and says:
Reynolds updated his post again to say he does think the picture is racist, despite the appearance that he was excusing it (and I wasnt the only one to think so). According to Glenn Reynolds, he was reacting against cheap and bogus charges of racism.
Except that isnt what I said at all. I said that I thought the pic was racist, but was trying to be fair to the Democrat who sent it around when someone (Tom Maguire, hardly some white supremacist) suggested things might be otherwise. The cheap and bogus charges of racism bit is above. This is just as misleading as his original characterization of my post. In the past, Ive relied on Charles assessments of other blogs and bloggers, and its now clear that was a mistake on my part.
Charles, I wish you well, but . . . well, I dont really have much else I want to say right now.
Posted at 6:06 pm by Glenn Reynolds
41
There's an interesting snit brewing between the ex-PJM Jack-Off Jenkins Pedophile Peddler and Instapundit. PJM Glenn is bringing the class; Chas is bringing the late-night backstabbing and slobbering sycophants.
Read
The
Anchoress
Use
The
Links
Dammit
Thursday, January 7, 2010, 9:18 PM
The_Anchoress
Collected in my tab-bar since I started feeling cruddy might as well share with you all the things I have either read or been meaning to get to reading
All submitted mostly without comment, because Im still not 100%.
We are at war
:
The president went on to say that while America will strengthen its defenses, we will not succumb to a siege mentality that sacrifices the open society and liberties and values that we cherish as Americans, because great and proud nations dont hunker down and hide behind walls of suspicion and mistrust.
That is exactly what our adversaries want, he said. And so long as I am president, we will never hand them that victory.
Yeah
thats one of the reasons Bush said, after 9/11, go shopping, go on vacation. And its one of the reasons Bush put into place all those Imperialist and constitution-shredding measures that Obama has kept in place.
Who is the Real Enemy?
Apparently, the Obama administration came into office in January 2009 thinking that the notion of a war on terror was archaic and largely had been an excuse for the Bush-Cheney nexus to scare the nation for partisan political purposes. Given the long period of calm after 9/11, the somnolent good war in Afghanistan, and the sudden quiet in the bad Iraq theater, Obama preferred to focus on Bushs constitution-shredding rather than on national security. What vestigial danger remained could be changed by the charisma of Barack Obama, the obvious appeal of his ancestry to the Muslim world, and the ritual demonization of George Bush.
But Obama has discovered that there really are radical Islamic threats; that Bushs record of seven years of security was no accident; and that the good war is heating up. Obama has been forced by events to quietly find ways of emulating Bushs successful anti-terrorism formula, while making loud but empty declarations to mollify his liberal base (which so far seems pacified that Guantanamo is virtually closed, and that KSM is virtually facing an ACLU dream trial).
Radical Islamists sense, fairly or not, that this administration is angrier at prior officials who kept us safe than it is at those who wish to destroy us for who we are. Given his adoption of the Bush protocols, Obama might show the same magnanimity toward his predecessor that he does toward the Muslim world.
The Message Filters Down
We are at war; we are at war against Al Qaeda
Reality Strikes Home.
Live Blogged Excerpts.
Drew wonders: . . .if we are at war with al Qaeda as Obama just said, why are we sending them to civilian courts? Im glad the president is less interested in passing out blame
Perhaps, a year into his presidency, the daily Bush-blaming will end.
No Specific Mention of Terrorism in Undie-bomber Indictment
Further Limitations on Civil Liberties:
Many of us said during the days of the Bush administration that restrictions on civil liberties motivated by the conflict with Al Qaeda would be maintained during any subsequent administration, whether Democratic or Republican, as long as the terrorist threat remained. This prediction has been amply confirmed. The most recent example is the implementation of an explicit profiling program for airline passengers. The ACLU aside, there has not been much criticism of this initiative. (Maybe because some of the most prominent critics of the Bush administrations counterterror policies are now members of the Obama administration.)
The persistence of policies across ideologically divided administrations is good evidence that those policies are now mainstream rather than partisan and ideological. Of course, many people will continue to disagree with them, just as many people continue to object to a standing army and a central bank; but these people are now officially on the fringes. There will also continue to be arguments about interrogation practices and the like, but a wide range of Bush administration policiesindefinite detention without charges, trials by military commission, the use of military force against suspected terrorists in foreign countries, secrecy privileges that undermine litigation against government officials responsible for terrorism policies, profiling on the basis of nationality, and much elseare now politically entrenched.
Is Obama raising a mustache?
Buck Stops With Me; Ace Not Having It
What Does the Detroit Bomber Know and is the US interested in finding out?
Year One W/ President at War with Reality
Profiles of the CIAs Dead
All Major Taliban Leaders are Former Gitmo Prisoners
Gitmo Prisoners want to stay in Cuba. Damn straight. Its warmer, there.
Christian Conservatism as Myth
Waking Up God
Here is What Really Worries the Pentagon
Spending is Up Over 23% Under Obama
A Pop Quiz
Threats Watch Daily Briefings
Terror Recruiting Tools?
Connecting Really Big Dots
Mass in Slow Motion:
it always ends in this or a similar manner: and so with angels and archangels and the whole company of heaven we sing the unending hymn of your praise: Holy, Holy, Holy
. And thus we are reminded that our worship is caught up into the heavenly liturgy where our voices join innumerable angels and saints in the glorious act of praise. We are in heaven! Our hearts (our very selves) are aloft! . . . Until recently Churches were designed to remind us that we were entering heaven. As we walk into older churches we are surrounded by windows and paintings that depict the angels and saints. Christ is at the center in the tabernacle. And all the elements that scripture speaks of as in the heavenly liturgy are on display not only in the building but in the celebration of the liturgy: Candles, incense, an altar, the hymns that are sung, the Holy Holy Holy, the scroll is brought forward in the Book of Gospels, the lamb on the throne-like altar, , the prostrations and kneelings of the saints before the Lord. All these things are described in the Book of Revelation descriptions of the heavenly liturgy. None of these things are in our churches or the liturgy for arbitrary reasons. We are in the heavenly realms and the heavenly liturgy and so we see and experience heavenly things. Hearts aloft!
400 Years Ago Today
2009 Study Confirms Abortion/Breast Cancer Link. Wrote about this from an intuitive standpoint, ages ago.
Behind Closed Doors
A Surge of Air Marshalls
Geithners Fed Told AIG to Limit Swaps Disclosure
Obama Used Us as A Political Football!
Why Are Empires Buried Under Afghanistan?
Newtie Not Lovin the Obama Machine
Letterman Offends Gays, Transgendered. Hmmm, that reminds me of this anecdote:
Louise Casselman, who was at that White House Yale reunion with her husband, Kirk Casselman and a Bay Area contingent, says that although Yale was still all-male in 1968, one alum has since had a sex-change operation. You might remember me as Peter when we left Yale, said the woman upon coming face to face with the president. George W. didnt pause for a moment, reports Casselman, grabbed the alumnas hand, and said Now youve come back as yourself.
Who are the intolerant morons, again?
The Social Security Deficit.
Britain faces coldest night yet and The UK Has 8 Days of Gas Left. Better be nice to Putin.
Worldwide Cold Not Seen since 70s Ice Age Scare
Climategate and the Migrating Arctic Tree Line
What Happened to the Republicans I used to Know?
Michael Totten Excellent Interview w/ Christopher Hitchens
Alicia Colon: Compares her chest pains to Rush Limbaughs
WH: Hey, we told our counterterror chief to keep skiing after the Christmas bomber
. Panetta stayed on vacation too. Come on! Terrorism was not supposed to be real or serious, anymore!
One Hour of Obamacare Negotiations
Constitutional Crisis and Security Crisis
A Triumph for Al Qaeda?
All 3 Domestic Terror Attacks of 2009 were Enabled by WH Reverse Profiling Orders
King James Bible, Catholic Edition
Do Only Radical Pacifists Oppose Torture?
Pro-Abortion Women and the US Army
The Ongoing Evolution of Secular Messianic Jesus
An anti-inflammatory drug that can prevent skin cancer?
Your Feel-Good Read of the Day
The Eucharist, Mary and Redemptive Suffering
=================================================
PATRICK COX: Sunshine, Vitamin D, and Death by Scientific Consensus. As was the (now corrected) case with omega-3 fats, the consensus on sunlight exposure has badly misled us towards massive vitamin D deficiencies.
CELLPHONES protect against Alzheimers disease? Of course, given evidence for an Alzheimers / Cancer tradeoff, does this make the claim that cellphones cause cancer more plausible?
11,726
posted on
01/08/2010 2:11:36 AM PST
by
backhoe
(All Across America, the Lights are being relit again...)
To: All
Nigerian opposition politicians are demanding visual proof that the countrys president is still alive and fit to govern, six weeks after he left the country for medical treatment. My question, Mark, are Nigerians better off than Americans where we do not get six minutes without seeing our president on TV?
MS: (laughing) Yeah, I would love to have six weeks without Barack Obama. In fact, you know, people complain that he had nothing to say about the Christmas Day pantybomber until whatever it was, the 27th or the 28th or the 29th. I mean, that three days, I think, was the longest hes been off TV since he took office. So Im up for the Nigerian option, six months without seeing the head of state.
But, but...
they told us it was just a bumper sticker...
===============================================
A million Dead Worlds away, trailing behind me...
As Greil Marcus would say, he has become something other than he would have been had he not been whatever he was when Greil Marcus was trying to figure it out. His most passionate recording - bitter even - is Long Black Limousine: the story of a country girl who sets off to make it big in the city, sells her soul and returns home, as promised, in a swanky car - which turns out to be a hearse. After 33 years, Elvis hearse cruises on unstoppably.
11,727
posted on
01/08/2010 3:31:17 AM PST
by
backhoe
(All Across America, the Lights are being relit again...)
To: All
Maggie (of Maggie's Notebook) has a lengthy post connecting the many times we could have killed Osama bin Laden during the 1990s to the recent attack in Afghanistan that killed several CIA agents, including the top al Qaeda expert on the ground...the most important piece of info comes from former head man in charge of hunting bin Laden, Michael Scheuer. The guy is no Bush partisan. In fact you may recall him from his outspoken criticism of how The war in Iraq diverted resources away from Tora Bora -- yet another time (maybe) that bin Laden got away. He's also been fairly critical of US foreign policy in general. But here's the big takeaway:
...one of the officers who got killed had arranged an operation in 1998 that would have killed or captured Osama bin Laden. And Mr. Brennan was instrumental in preventing that operation from occurring. Instead he said the Americans should trust the Saudis to take care of bin Laden.
So it's a painful-- it's a painful death, but more importantly it's a death that didn't need to occur had Mr. Clinton -- Mr. Brennan, George Tenet, and Mr. Berger had the courage to try to defend Americans.
And now the guy is Obama's chief advisor on terrorism. Don't you feel so much safer now that Chimpy McHaliburton is out of office.
Just a reminder from the past?
The Second Coming
Is there nothing that Obama can't do?
"I cried all night. Im going to be crying for the next four years," he said. "What Barack Obama has accomplished is the single most extraordinary event that has occurred in the 232 years of the nations political history. ...The event itself is so extraordinary that another chapter could be added to the Bible to chronicle its significance."
Posted by Kate at
12:08 AM |
Comments (18)
Yes, the Kooks are coming out of the woodwork:
June 8, 2008 12:17 AM by see-dubya
UPDATE: After you read this, if youre wondering where this Lightworker snake oil came from, go check out Mrs. Peel who may have found the secret fount of Morfords theology. Its good for a laugh.
Short answer: video games. H/T to Doubleplusundead, who has more.
____________________
The unnerving adoration of the Obamessiah has reached a revolting new depth with Mark Morfords SF Chronicle column. I wont even link it.
Ordinarily Morford is a voice of such petulant, venomous bitchiness that he doesnt bear a response. I had seen a couple of blog posts about Morfords latest, in which he calls Obama a Lightworker. At first I just snorted, because it just sounds like a clunker of a phraselike hes inadvertently calling Obama some sort of new-age electrician or something.
But reading the column, I get a little chill: Morford is careful to disclose he doesnt consider Obama to be a Messiah, so let me preface this by pointing out that I dont think hes Satan. But the Lightworker thing sounded suspiciously like Lightbearer to me.
Though I may be coweringly religious, I could not help but remember the last time one such Lightbearer helped us evolve.
And this Lightworker is helping us evolve already: one of his few legislative accomplishments is a series of unbroken pro-abortion votes that makes even some pro-choicers squirmincluding support for the barbaric practice of partial-birth abortion:29 Comments
8,594 posted on
Sunday, June 08, 2008 5:48:40 AM by
backhoe (Just an old keyboard cowboy, ridin' the Trakball in to the Sunset...)
I want to make the point that this article makes a great suggestion. Right now, the Democrats from Obama to Reid to Pelosi are the party of We dont listen to you, because WE know better. The GOP should reform itself into the party of We listen to you, we respect you. Then go on to explain what their hearing and what they are going to do about it.
These kids don't realize our energy needs and the consequence of not using our own resources. When they flip on their video games, computers, and TV remotes and nothing happens because the power's been shut off because coal-fired power plants have been shut down (courtesy of cap and trade) and the wind's not blowing, I wonder how those eco-brainwashed kids will react ...
11,728
posted on
01/08/2010 9:38:11 AM PST
by
backhoe
(All Across America, the Lights are being relit again...)
To: All
by Rodan ( 168 Comments )
Filed under Barack Obama, Economy at January 8th, 2010 - 7:30 am
The great Obama Economic Boom continues to chug along. 85,000 jobs were lost in December. More than expected. The media was hyping that todays numbers would prove Obamas policies are working. Although some blame can be put on Obama, I feel something else is going on here. We are witnessing the end of America as a 1st rate economic power. Like Argentina, which was once a great economic nation, we are on a downward slide that could be permanent. Our tax code and regulatory structure is inadequate to compete in a globalized economy. In other words, America is getting its butt handed to it by our competitors!
WASHINGTON (AP) The economy lost more jobs than expected in December while the unemployment rate held steady at 10 percent, as a sluggish economic recovery has yet to revive hiring among the nations employers.
The Labor Department said Friday that employers cut 85,000 jobs last month, worse than the 8,000 drop analysts expected.
A sharp drop in the labor force, a sign more of the jobless are giving up on their search for work, kept the unemployment rate at the same rate as in November. Once people stop looking for jobs, they are no longer counted among the unemployed.
When discouraged workers and part-time workers who would prefer full-time jobs are included, the so-called underemployment rate in December rose to 17.3 percent, from 17.2 percent in October. Thats just below a revised figure of 17.4 percent in October, the highest on records dating from 1994.
Read the rest.
Clearly something is fundamentally wrong with Americas economy. It has been this way since the early 2000s when the last expansion occurred in which job growth and wage gains were anemic compared to the 80sand 90s expansions. Obamas policies of accumulating debt are not helping and making things worse. Even the Bush Tax Cuts only helped marginally when compared to the Kennedy and Reagan Tax Cuts. What is needed is major tax and regulatory reform so America begins to win economically. We need to be an economic predator by taking away jobs, businesses and capital from other nations. We must be like a corporation and view other nations as economic rivals, not economic partners.
America must play to win, not play to lose as is the case now. Lets have a Blogmocracy discussion on what is needed to make us a Global Economic Predator.
Tags: Jobs
168 Comments »
"Wait
You mean the 0-man didnt fix the ecnomy yet? But I thought the earth started healing and the oceans started receeding and the polar bears are now living on joy. Could this be all a lie
"
"Too many on the Right think this is just temporary, its not. This is something very serious. "
"In order for this country to move forward, it needs to fire every single member of the Nomenklatura currently infesting DC. Before the economy and society can recover the government needs to be beaten back to a manageable, tiny size."
I read MANY threads last November about this. Here are 2 examples:
Who Are the White House Party Crashers?
41 posts - 29 authors - Last post: Nov 28, 2009
In light of that, and of Salahi's pro-Palestinian leanings, who is to say ... Tareq Salahi and wife, Michaele Salahi crashed the White House Dinner. .... This guy is on the Board of The American Task Force on Palestine. ...
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2395143/posts
The White House Gatecrashers: Reality TV hopefuls crash Obama ...
50 posts - 25 authors - Last post: Nov 26, 2009
But the stars were aligned for Tareq and Michaele Salahi on Tuesday night. ... turns out they are Palestinian. Yes, more and more interesting. ..... +Force+for +Palestine+tareq+salahi+board+directors&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl ...
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2394908/posts?page=67
OK Ill ask: Whos publc Policy Polling and how Liberal are they??
********************************************************
PPP is a Democrat-affiliated polling group. I dont know how liberal they are, but the firms clients are almost exclusively Democrats.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Policy_Polling
I dont normally reference Wikipedia, but this entry was interesting (read the last sentence).
The Barbarian Tea Horde...
11,729
posted on
01/08/2010 1:10:30 PM PST
by
backhoe
(All Across America, the Lights are being relit again...)
To: All
THOUGHTS ON
WHY JACK CAFFERTY IS MAD AT OBAMA NOW: Its not just that Obama lied, its the obviousness of the mendacity. Theres no wriggle room on this one; anyone whos been paying any attention for the last two years knows its a bald-faced lie. And in addition, theres been no explanation for it, and no excuses. The administration is simply ignoring the lie as though it doesnt matter, and insulting the press in the bargain. This makes pundits who liked and supported Obama look foolish, and they dont like to look that way. Thus, the angerits personal now. RACIST:
Jon Stewart Bashes Obamas Broken Campaign Promises.
January 8, 2010 12:09 PM by Michelle Malkin
32 Comments
Michelle, Thanks for keeping this race on the front burner!
As a Massachusetts resident I cant say more strongly that every vote is crucial and all support is appreciated and will help push us over the top!
http://www.brownforussenate.com/
His Democrat opponent is a Reid/Pelosi rubber stamper. Her support is only lukewarm while Browns is red hot imagine who will get to the polls if it snows on Jan 19th!
POLL: 45% WOULD REPLACE CONGRESS WITH NAMES DRAWN RANDOMLY FROM PHONE BOOK. Only 45%?
UPDATE: From the comments: Preferably the Yellow Pages!!! At least they can run a business. Heh.
PROLONGING THE RECESSION. What we are seeing, in other words, is Barack Obamas economythe foreseeable consequence of the terrible economic policies that he, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have imposed or threatened to impose on the nation. There will of course be a recovery, as always; but that recovery will be much stronger and faster if Congress makes clear that it will block any further assaults on the economy in the form of cap and trade, massive tax increases, and so on. Unexpectedly, AP hammers Obama administration on jobless report. Unemployment has not gotten better; it has gotten worse, and the statistics have hidden the real decline in 2009. Until now, only a few media outlets bothered to highlight the problem. The AP has finally made it clear and that will mean a lot more attention in 2010 to the failed Porkulus legislation and the fumbled economic strategies of the Obama administration. Comparing Obama Administration promises with performance.
Prominent Voice In Health Care Debate Took Money From The Administration.
by Rodan ( 198 Comments )
Filed under Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Election 2008, Elections, Elections 2010, George W. Bush, John McCain, Politics, Progressives, Republican Party at January 8th, 2010 - 12:30 pm
I have often criticize the Republican Party for being too Progressive. During the Bush Years, they became the Democratic Party of the Woodrow Wilson Era. Deficit Spending, Out of touch with Economic reality, Hypocrisy on Social Issues and Wars for Muslim Democracy. They moved away from the Raegan philosophy of Free Markets, Individual responsibility, Personal freedom and Defending Americas interest. In other words they screwed up big time. Voters punished them in 2006 and 2008 and rejected the Progressive based Compassionate Conservatism. They voted in Real Progressives and are now regretting it. The Republicans have an opportunity to come back, but many including myself dont trust them.
Jonah Goldberg who besides Glenn Beck has helped influence my political thinking has some great advise for the Republican Party.
This is one of those rare moments when the conventional wisdom in Washington is right. The Democrats are poised to have a bad year; the only argument is over how bad it will be. And that question rests on whether or not the Republican party crafts an agenda voters will support.
So far the GOP has shrewdly been the party of no. Since I disagree with so much of the Obama-Pelosi-Reid agenda, I happen to think that no is the correct position on the merits. But thats not the point. Saying no has worked because thats what most Americans say, too.
The trick for the GOP is to figure out what it will say yes to. Republicans are a bit like the Democrats in 2006 and 2008. Americans were sick of Bush and the Republicans back then, so they threw their support behind the Democrats by default. The Democrats over-read this support as a sweeping mandate for their agenda.
Read the Rest.
Jonah hits a home run with his article, The GOP cant just be the Party of no, it must stand for something. The solution is not Reagan 1980 or Gingrich 1994, instead he makes a great point, look to Dominos Pizza!
Id look to Dominos in 2010.
You may have seen the commercials or the YouTube video touting the iconic pizza-delivery chains reinvention. But if you havent, Dominos new campaign can be summed up easily enough: We blew it.
The Republicans should come clean and apologize to Americans for not keeping to their philosophy when they ruled Washington. Americans love honesty and would respect it if the GOP came clean with their mistakes. Jonah further points out, Compassionate Conservatism must be publicly rejected.
As a conservative who cares more about policies than partisan success, I would hate to see the GOP abandon conservative policies in order to be more popular. That would be like Dominos listening to critics and then deciding to get into the Chinese-food business. Indeed, by my lights, thats what George W. Bush tried to do with his compassionate conservatism. He surrendered to liberal arguments about the role, size, and scope of government on too many fronts. In effect, he said you can have your pizza and Kung Pao chicken all in the same dish. Thats not a good meal, its a bad mess.
Amen to Jonah for saying what I have been writing on this blog. The Compassionate Conservative Gang with their Hypocritical Social agenda, Big Government spending and Wars for Muslim democracy were pied pipers who lead the Right to near death. Barack Hussein Obama and his Totalitarian Progressive agenda has given us a chance to resurrect. By admitting past mistakes and promising to stay true to a Libertarian-Conservative philosophy, the American public will gain respect and vote the Progressives out. Just saying No is not enough, The GOP just needs to promise they will stay true to their ideas this time.
Jonah Goldberg is an Intellectual genius and I really respect his analysis!
198 Comments »
No Surprise: Judge Tosses Out Bulk of Evidence Against Terrorist/Former Gitmo Detainee Now On Trial in Civilian Court
Ace
No surprise. Either the courts must accept -- and bless as Constitutional -- the extraordinary treatment due to these vile monsters, and thus bless such treatment for all criminal suspects in the United States (plainly a hateful conclusion), or they must toss out all the evidence against them and set terrorists free.
It is the left's hateful agitation against all things Bush, plus Obama's delicately theoretical comprehension of the real-life flesh-and-blood world, that has brought us to this point.
And it will get worse.
A federal judge has tossed out most of the government's evidence against a tarrorism detainee on grounds his confessions were coerced, allegedly by U.S. forces, before he became a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay. In a ruling this week, U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan also said the government failed to establish that 23 statements the detainee made to interrogators at Guantanamo Bay were untainted by the earlier coerced statements made while he was held under harsh conditions in Afghanistan.
However, the judge said statements he made during two military administrative hearings at the U.S. detention center in Cuba, where he was assisted by a personal representative, were reliable and sufficient to justify holding the detainee.
Musa'ab Omar Al Madhwani allegedly engaged in a 2 1/2-hour firefight with Pakistani authorities before his capture in a Karachi apartment in 2002.
The detainee says that after five days in a Pakistani prison, he was handed over to U.S. forces and flown to a pitch-black prison he believes was in Afghanistan. He says he was suspended in his cell by his left hand and that guards blasted his cell with music 24 hours a day.
He said that he confessed to whatever allegations his interrogators made and that harassment and threats continued after he was moved to a different prison in Afghanistan.
Al Madhwani said that interrogators at Guantanamo Bay on multiple occasions threatened him when he tried to retract what he now claims was a false confession.
The judge said he was particularly concerned that interrogators at Guantanamo Bay relied on or had access to the coerced confessions from Afghanistan made by Al Madhwani.
Military tribunals were created to square this circle, and to ensure basic fairness and reliability while still recognizing the difference between illegal combatants and run of the mill criminals (and also to keep US civilian courts untainted, to keep them from having to bless extraordinary measures as perfectly Constitutional as regards regular criminal citizens), but of course the left and their champion Obama has rejected them as insufficiently prissy and pristine.
So here we go.
I don't know what the Jackass In Chief will do. I know he doesn't dare risk his poll numbers crashing further after one after another terrorist is sprung by his moronic decisions. I guess I expect him to just hold these fellers indefinitely, or to... put them right back into the military tribunal system.
If that's possible. Which I don't know it is. Once someone enters the US criminal justice system, courts will not usually approve their transfer to a system that affords them a lesser standard of rights. Once they've got all the standard US criminal rights, courts do not strip them of such.
Thanks to Evil Bun-Bun.
We are already close to depression level unemployment, if you remove the governments changes to the calculation formula as a means to keep us in the dark.
BIG JOURNALISM: As Climategate Becomes Pressgate, Questions for the Media.
The Bottle Genie
Works her magic....
The auto industrys green efforts to meet strict new mpg rules are the dominant theme inside this years Detroit Auto Show. But outside Cobo Convention Center, its not just the frigid winter temperatures that have cast doubt on the global warming science driving the biggest regulatory challenge to the industry in a generation. E-mails leaked from the worlds top climatology center have put the environmental community in turmoil with allegations that scientific data has been doctored and debate suppressed. The uproar has provoked calls for a congressional investigation and cast doubt on auto mpg rules. Scandal? Or sideshow?
The issue cries out for debate at the worlds largest auto gathering, and The Detroit News-WJR Radio have assembled a world-class panel representing the automotive, scientific, and political communities to argue the facts and discuss its impact on the auto market...
It's open to the public. Details at the link.
Related - "Not entirely the death of global warming as many have claimed what happened with Climategate is much more nuanced and exponentially more interesting than the headlines convey. What was triggered at this blog was the death of unconditional trust in the scientific peer review process, and the maturing of a new movement that of peer-to-peer review."
h/t James
Posted by Kate at
1:10 PM|
Comments (6)
Y2Kyoto: You Don't Need No Stinking Coal Generation
Stories from ice-bound Britain....
Michael Dukes, the forecast manager at Meteogroup, says the Nasa satellite image of Britain shows snow over almost the entire country. He says that the swirl of cloud over East Anglia is the cumulus cloud system that caused snow showers today.
Meanwhile... wind speed as measured over the last 48 hours at Hilbre Island weather station.
Preeevious....
Posted by Kate at
9:57 AM|
Comments (28)
And at Accuweather a poll of meteorologists reveals the majority skeptical of man made global warming and fully a third believing it's a scam:
http://www.accuweather.com/global-warming/headline-earth.asp?partner=accuweather&traveler=0
Climategate, in short, is making quite a difference. But much more courage is needed."
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/08/more-scientists-begin-to-speak-out-in-the-wake-of-climategate/#comments
Friday, January 8, 2010, 5:59 AM
Jim Hoft
It might be minus 45 in the upper Midwest today but that wont stop the state-run media from pushing their leftist propaganda.
The Associated Press is out pushing their leftist propaganda this week despite the obvious evidence to the contrary. They dont want anyone to be fooled by the snow, ice, and record cold
Manmade global warming is real.
Beijing had its coldest morning in almost 40 years and its biggest snowfall since 1951. Britain is suffering through its longest cold snap since 1981. And freezing weather is gripping the Deep South, including Floridas orange groves and beaches.
Whatever happened to global warming?
Such weather doesnt seem to fit with warnings from scientists that the Earth is warming because of greenhouse gases. But experts say the cold snap doesnt disprove global warming at all its just a blip in the long-term heating trend.
Its part of natural variability, said Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. With global warming, he said, well still have record cold temperatures. Well just have fewer of them.
Icicles hang from an orange tree after it was sprayed with water throughout the night in Plant City, Florida January 6, 2010. The water was sprayed to protect the other plants in the nursery from the cold weather. (REUTERS/Scott Audette)
11,730
posted on
01/08/2010 4:05:00 PM PST
by
backhoe
(All Across America, the Lights are being relit again...)
To: All
To: All
So, Bam-Bam... where are the
Already there:
Hes well on his way to the destruction of America.Rush had an interesting observation about Obama's "Security Breach" speech the other day ... Obama informs the world that they DID NOT catch the undie-bomber's name since it was INCORRECTLY spelled on the list ... Rush pointed out that NOW all a person who IS on the list needs to do is get documents with a few extra vowels in their name and they WON'T be flagged from the list ...
It's painfully obvious the American people don't want ObamaCare and equally obvious that the Democrats, especially President Obama, don't particularly care. The Democrats feel inoculated against voter dissatisfaction because they've bought into their own wishful narrative: that voters punished them in 1994 because they failed to pass HillaryCare, not because they tried. Thus, the thinking goes, the way to get voters to forgive them for ObamaCare is to pass it. They better hope they're right, because there are an abundance of Democrats occupying red-state seats in Congress who appear to be living on borrowed time. But the surprise announcements by Sens. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota that they won't seek reelection suggest that even Democrats are starting to doubt their own rosy claims about 1994 with good reason. To examine what really happened in 1994, we separated the congressional Democrats into ideological thirds (more conservative, typical, and most liberal), using American Conservative Union (ACU) ratings. We then analyzed how each group fared in seeking reelection over the last 20 years. In most years, the more conservative Democrats who generally run in the most competitive districts fared the worst. The more conservative Democrats lost 56% more often than typical (middle third) Democrats except in 1994. That year, the typical Democrats lost 67% more often than their more conservative Democratic colleagues. So, voters clearly went comparatively easy on the Democrats who with pressure from Republicans didn't support HillaryCare and led to its defeat. And that was even without a congressional floor vote on HillaryCare.
(Excerpt) Read more at investors.com ...
For Islam, a Religion of Peace®? The Most Damning links-- click the picture:
( And, Yep! I'll keep posting this one until you all read all of it... and wake up and smell the -Taqiyya... ) A QUESTION: Has Anybody Seen A Lefty Pundit Praise Obama For His Performance Yesterday? I really wanted to go off on what I thought was Obamas piss poor performance yesterday and hook it to some idiotic liberal praise but not even Andrew Sullivan has taken the bait. The NY Times tried halfheartedly in an editorial but it wasnt what weve come to expect. Hey, it got a good review from John Ziegler. But, technically, hes not a lefty pundit. And lefty pundits probably wouldnt consider Obama sounded like Cheney to be praise . . . Gee, color me surprised...HOT AIR: A concerted attempt to discredit and marginalize the Tea Party movement has developed with equally amazing speed. The Tea Parties became impossible to dismiss after the massive demonstration in Washington, following the 9/11 commemoration. It therefore became necessary to slander them. The original strategy was to portray them as violent lunatics, a bit of intellectual crabgrass planted as far back as the infamous Defense Intelligence Estimate released by the politicized Department of Homeland Security last April. SCOTT BROWN SAYS HELL BE THE 41ST VOTE AGAINST OBAMACARE. But Massachusetts pols may have other plans.
Intro to push polling, Mass.-style
So. Would it worry you at all to know that in voting for Scott Brown, youd likely be supporting the lynchings of blacks and gays and maybe even helping to put Jews and Papists into ovens
? And dont even get us started on what might happen to kittens, which gives a whole new meaning to gettin some pussy
*
Heh. Gets better and better. Even if Brown doesnt win its a squeaker, (ACORN & SEIU being the six sided die). In friggin Massachusetts. Its their bastion. That state is like Pavlovs dog when it comes to pulling the Democrat lever (I know its a button now, but politics always seemed like a slot machine to me). If its even close, thats cold fusion people. Thats cats and dogs living together...
UPDATE: Boston Herald: Scott Brown swearing-in would be stalled so health-care reform could pass. Thats kinda cheesy . . . but on the other hand, it suggests they think Brown has a serious chance. Guess theyre not entirely confident that the push-polling will do the job. He Won't Need No Stinking Personal Wardrobe
Finally! Police make arrest in Canadian pipeline bombingsPolice arrested a man Friday in connection with a series of oil and gas pipeline bombings in northeastern British Columbia. Royal Canadian Mounted Police Inspector Tim Shields said a man in his 50s or 60s was taken into custody on a farm in the western Alberta town of Hythe. Police did not release the suspect's name pending the filing of formal charges. About a dozen officers conducted a search of the farm, Shield said.
Oh, why it's Wiebo Ludwig, again. Ford owners can follow developments here.
h/t Dave H.
Posted by Kate at 2:35 PM| Comments (42)
"In 1999 he, or one of his charges, killed a young girl. Shot her dead. A crime for which no charges have ever been laid. Most in town would prefer to see the arrogant prick hang....Her name was Karman. She was murdered by that c**ks*cker. The Encana bombings are important but pale in comparison to the murder of a sweet young lady"
BlogWarZ!
Now,
with more
idiocy...
by savage ( 155 Comments ) Filed under LGF at January 8th, 2010 - 8:00 pm
And them birds have a nice target, right here! According to James Rainey of the Times:
In Johnsons mind, he has not really changed but merely shifted his focus. Where once he was preoccupied with national security, staking out a hawkish, pro-military position, he now spends more time focusing on his liberal social views, and gripes with conservatives who disagree. I like to think, he told me this week, I am pretty independent of [the] political winds. But not totally immune. As I talked to Johnson in his office, an alert flashed on one of his two giant computer monitors. An angry screed targeting him on another website concluded: I think a visit to Mr. Johnsons home might be warranted. Anybody got his address? Such veiled threats are at least one reason why Johnson, 56, relocated not long ago. He remains in the Los Angeles area, but now is in a gated community. The man who once decried vitriol spread on liberal websites now says: The kinds of hate mail and the kinds of attacks I am getting from the right wing are way beyond anything I got when I was criticizing the left or even radical Islam.
Gee, do you think it might be cause he is a complete lunatic? You decide
155 Comments » 'Gated community describes his blog.' Look what I found when I bought the LA Times this morning... Have a nice life, Charles. You align yourself with serious, passionate people and then stick knives in their backs when it suits your purpose. Now you spin in wide-eyed wonderment at the just hatred directed your way.
Friday, January 8, 2010, 11:38 PM
Jim Hoft
Let the sideshow begin
A federal judge tossed out most of the evidence against Gitmo terrorist Musaab Omar Al Madhwani. The AP reported:
A federal judge has tossed out most of the governments evidence against a terrorism detainee on grounds his confessions were coerced, allegedly by U.S. forces, before he became a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay. In a ruling this week, U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan also said the government failed to establish that 23 statements the detainee made to interrogators at Guantanamo Bay were untainted by the earlier coerced statements made while he was held under harsh conditions in Afghanistan. However, the judge said statements he made during two military administrative hearings at the U.S. detention center in Cuba, where he was assisted by a personal representative, were reliable and sufficient to justify holding the detainee. Musaab Omar Al Madhwani allegedly engaged in a 2 1/2-hour firefight with Pakistani authorities before his capture in a Karachi apartment in 2002.
JWF says this on todays decision: This ruling, of course, will now be used by future defense attorneys to get even more evidence against their clients thrown out. And Atlas has this from former Muslim and author Nonie Darwish:
It was said that Obama decision to hold a trial in New York of the confessed mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, and the rest of the Guantanamo detainees, is proof of the USs just legal system. But the Muslim world already knows that. Not one Muslim country demanded such a trial or claimed the KSM was innocent. To the contrary, the Muslim public, in general, think that Americans are stupid for opening their country to such terrorists and giving visas to terrorists while often denying it to legitimate travelers. Recently, my daughter innocently asked, why is America trying to tame untamable terrorists, it is like having a pet shark.
January 7, 2010 02:02 PM by Michelle Malkin As if you needed more evidence of the boondoggle-ishness of the Green Jobs racket, two items for your file: 1) Via Inside Charm City, Marylands Democrat Senators dole out green job funding to an SEIU partnership
2) Via Morgen at Verum Serum, a closer look at the latest round of Big Labors green pork grant recipients: Just a reminder: Fight the SEIU & Demcare corruption: Support Scott Brown for Senate. *** In other SEIU news, the Purple Shirts may be coming to a church near you to preach the wonders of Demcare (h/t Gary Kirk):43 Comments
"Good Ole Babs Mikulski and Sen. Bootlicker Cardin are using all the key words to get their lemming constituents all wee-weed upped. Green Jobs Job Training Jobs for tomorrow..blah blah blah" The term: Green Healthcare is meaningless. I bet this is just another slush fund where taxpayer money is being diverted. Another posiblity is that this is a scam website set up to take money from good intentioned idiots. I am not sure if there is all that much of a difference between these two choices. See for yourself: http://www.globalhealthandsafety.org/press/releases/2009/feb/pr2009-02-02.php
Glow Bull Varming, err, The Coming Ice Age... BRR: On Sunday, forecasters are anticipating the ninth consecutive day when high temperatures wont get above the freezing mark making the current cold spell the longest since a 10-day stretch in February 1895. If it werent for the fireplace, itd be chilly in my study . . . . At least there are no frozen iguanas falling from the trees. UPDATE: Nobody tell Prince Charles.
Germany braces for blizzard as Europe freezes
Possible snow was predicted for Orlando on Saturday night. But look what is happening right now. Ski Florida !
The story of manmade global warming is over. In reality it never existed except in the minds and hearts of grant-seeking scientists and academics, ratings-obsessed television networks and their misinformed viewers and opportunistic eco-activists.
Posted on 01/09/2010 2:26:52 AM PST by backhoe (All Across America, the Lights are being relit again...)
|
11,731
posted on
01/09/2010 2:28:46 AM PST
by
backhoe
(All Across America, the Lights are being relit again...)
To: All
Universal Voter Registration-the Next Big Dem Scam
John Fund of the Wall Street Journal warns America on the next trick from the Obama administration.
According to Fund, the Democrats aim to pass a Federal mandate to force all states to register everybody to vote-welfare beneficiaries, illegal aliens, convicted felons-everybody.
ACORN will be by-passed, the Federal Government will do their corrupt work for them.
In January, Chuck Schumer and Barney Frank will propose universal voter registration. What is universal voter registration? It means all of the state laws on elections will be overriden by a federal mandate. The feds will tell the states: 'take everyone on every list of welfare that you have, take everyone on every list of unemployed you have, take everyone on every list of property owners, take everyone on every list of driver's license holders and register them to vote regardless of whether they want to be...'
The Dems know that the wider the franchise, the better chance they have in 2010 and 2012. Damn' the long term consequences to the country.
James Simpson of the Examiner.com has an excellent analysis of the issue
here
America Rising
A warning to the Democratic Party.
Working video at link!
posted by Trevor Loudon at
11,732
posted on
01/09/2010 3:40:51 AM PST
by
backhoe
(All Across America, the Lights are being relit again...)
To: All
These guys are good- read the Whole Thing
At The Link, dagnabbit!
Read the comments, gol-durnit!
Heres the absolute stupidest thing weve heard in a great while, an article on Real Clear Politics talking about how much GOP insiders want Mitt Romney to be the Republican 2012 nominee. Its more of the same its his turn suicidal garbage that nominated Bob Dole in 1996 and John McCain in 2008.
And remember, in both cases, the MSM worked hard to get the Republicans to run the candidate they wanted pitted against the Democrat.
We had no complaint with that whatsoever back in 1996, because we wanted the Clintons to have a second term, so we thought it was just great the MSM pushed elder statesman Dole to the Republican nomination, and thought it was even more wonderful Republicans didnt stop to think whether its his turn is a good enough reason to nominate someone. As much as we respect Senator Dole, and wish him and his wife Elizabeth the very best, were so happy Republicans were dumb enough to give us the exact candidate we wanted to run against to ensure the Clintons their second term...
...Governor Palin, feel free to take us up on that any time you want. You have our email. We are just waiting to work for you. For free if we have to. You really are our only hope.
GOP insiders are fools...The reason the MSM and GOP insiders keep working the its his turn game is because Republicans spend too much time at those cocktail parties with their eyes off the game
we are telling you this and we hope you listen that the MSM and GOP will work together to stab her in the back the way the MSM and DNC colluded to do the same thing to Hillary Clinton.
so right on HillBuzz!
I saw that coordinated effort by the UN-DNC and LSM, saying Hillary dropped out, when she hadnt to make sure this would suppress votes.
Palintes
listen up, ROMNEY WILL LOSE!!!!! WE are telling you this as democrats!!!!!!!!!!!
Palin will win
no one believes the LSM now anyways, this is comning from someone who would only watch CNN or MSNBS 2 years ago.
tea party is NOT a republican thing, its a conservative-COUNTRY-FIRST type thing, which is why so many centerist dems, independents and conservatives support it.
We are sick of BOTH parties!
On Wednesday the Obama administration took its first major step in a plan to ban all firearms in the United States. The Obama administration intends to force gun control and a complete ban on all weapons for US citizens through the signing of international treaties with foreign nations. By signing international treaties on gun control, the Obama administration can use the US State Department to bypass the normal legislative process in Congress.
"Elections matter......and 6 months ago the 3rd rails of politics seemed to be fading. The outright feces-in-your-face attitudes of Pelosi and Reid have awakeneded a once sleeping electorate."
See above, then read this:
Why the cold weather?
|
================================================
11,733
posted on
01/09/2010 11:24:17 AM PST
by
backhoe
(All Across America, the Lights are being relit again...)
To: All
http://ferfal.blogspot.com/
We're heading where he's been and is. He's written a great deal about the experience, how to prepare for and cope with it. Read it all, it's well worth the time.
How did I miss this story?
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid apologized Saturday following reports he had privately described then-candidate Barack Obama during the presidential campaign as a black candidate who could be successful thanks in part to his light-skinned appearance and speaking patterns "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one." Journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann reported the remarks in their new book Game Change, which was purchased by CNN Saturday at a Washington-area bookstore. The book is slated for official release next Tuesday.
Convenient that this will be forgotten by Monday, though.
Musing: I guess the shock value here is the use of the term "negro." That's a big no-no, even for a 70 year old like Reid who, well...I view with some suspicion just because I figure everyone from generations older than mine are carrying around all this race baggage. (I know, sounds like I've got some age-ism baggage of my own.)
The negro thing compounds Reid's problem, but isn't the whole picture. Folks also objected when then-candidate Joe Biden called Obama "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy." I mean, Biden even used the much more PC hyphenated-American and he had pretty much everyone from the Right and the Left jump all over him.
Will Reid get the same treatment? Doubt it. They're not gearing up for a contentious primary and the Democrats have closed ranks, particularly when it comes to congressional "leaders" like Reid and Pelosi.
Here's what Joshua Micah Mickey Pacey Paisley Marshall wrote about Biden back in 2007, right about the time Reid was remarking on Obama's lack of accent:
Biden suffers from what one might with real generosity call chronic racial grandpaism. That is to say, the penchant for making comments that are not only racially offensive but also extremely silly and the sort of things that are sometimes excused or at least passed over from men, say, over 80 on the reasoning that they're from a different era and why get into it.
Excused?
Posted by Gabriel Malor at
02:14 PM New Comments Thingy
24 With the dems it is seemingly all about the color of your skin, not the content of your character. Voting for a bi-racial candidate became more important than voting for a qualified candidate. Chanting meaningless, "Yes we can!" slogans became more important than discovering what the candidate had actually done. That Obama was "clean cut and articulate" (code for "not a ghetto gang banger threatening black criminal") was discussed by more than just Reid.
41 Mighty white of him to apologize though.
I denounce mysef'
11. lp:
As other posters have pointed out the Big 0s credibility is about zero. His promises have a shelf-life of 24 hours or less. Then he simply reneges on them.
Here a few links for those interested. You should be, because besides the growing enemy within, these threats that are world wide (and soon are coming to a town near you) are the most important to your family and yourself.
You are being forewarned, dont ignore it.
Prepare yourselves-NONE of this is going to go away.
http://tinyurl.com/yfw6stl
http://tinyurl.com/yz6×4v8
http://tinyurl.com/yeu5xka
http://tinyurl.com/y85eyb8
http://tinyurl.com/5sc6ua
http://tinyurl.com/yc9j87o
http://tinyurl.com/lfezrx
http://tinyurl.com/ybvl5jo
http://tinyurl.com/kqv2kr
http://tinyurl.com/c7jtsj
http://tinyurl.com/lnharx
http://tinyurl.com/yh4w7at
Papa Ray
Via a blog called Wiser Time, wise stuff indeed:
You've seen these, right? They make me mad. Why? Because they don't really mean what they say.
Let's break it down. We'll call each worldview by the letter it's supposed to represent. So:
- C = Islam
- O = Pacifism
- E = "Gender equality" (=the LGBT agenda)
- X = Judaism
- I = Wicca / Pagan / Bah'ai
- S =Taoism / Confucianism
- T = Christianity
And let's assume a very broad definition of "coexist": living together without calling for the destruction of each other. Here are the problems with that:
- C wants to kill E, X, T, and (by implication) O. If they achieved the world they wanted, I and S would also no longer exist.
- O doesn't allow for effective resistance or defeat of C.
- E stands in direct opposition to C, X, and T, and accuses those who speak against them of hate speech. Also, they're trying to edge X and T out of public schools in favor of their own agenda. (They're afraid C will be offended, so they get less trouble.) E is actually very, very intolerant.
- X's existence is threatened not only by C but also by O, who invariably supports C over X.
- I and S are statistically insignificant and are mainly on there to complete the bumper sticker.
- T is who the bumper sticker is really arguing against, but poses no physical threat to any of the others.
Historically, T has brought about more tolerance- "coexistence" if you will- than any other movement. But the kind of "coexistence" the people who make this sticker envision is one where at least X and T are completely marginalized.
When I see one of these bumper stickers, I can't help but think... there goes yet another non-thinking, mindless drone. Pretty much what I think when I see an Obama sticker.
Sue me.
H/T Larwyn via email.
Crossposted(*).
You would be wrong:
One of the defining features of Islam is its obsession with sex. Every rule regarding women is based upon a driving need to control their sexuality. They are married off as children, sequestered, dressed in clothes that rob them of any hint of femininity, deprived of any opportunities to function outside the reproductive sphere, and fearfully abused, with stonings, hangings, beheadings and beatings if they transgress in any way Islamic rules regarding their sexual or even merely feminine behavior.
A large part of the Islamic world's hatred for America specifically, and the West generally, is premised upon the fact that the West gives women sexual freedom. And by sexual freedom, I don't simply mean the freedom to have sex. I mean the freedom to be feminine in public.
...
Now, word is coming out of Afghanistan that an Af/Pak warlord, both to feed his lust (which includes both pedophilia and rape) and to fund his war chest, arranged to have local women raped, with the rapes filmed and distributed for profit. When word leaked out that he was involved, he responded by murdering the participants, both the men who carried out the raping and filming, and the innocent young girls who were brutalized. He also destroyed all the videos, or so he thought. In fact, a video landed in the hands of one Imam who actually has a conscience and prepared a video speaking out against these loathsome moral transgressions. Author Brad Thor got a hold of the video, and you can now read the whole sordid story and see the video at The Jawa Report. I should warn you that the video is very graphic, and that's despite the fact that much of it is edited out.
Because the video and the story behind it so perfectly illustrate the dangerous pathologies that drive radical Islam, Rusty would like his post to go viral. (He actually asked that the video go viral, but I think his post is a sufficiently important backdrop that you really shouldn't have one without the other.) So, I'm doing my bit, and I hope that you do yours.
I've done my part... you do yours by passing this on... and on... and on...
Especially to those who claim to care about women.
Crossposted(*).
========================================================
11,734
posted on
01/09/2010 3:22:20 PM PST
by
backhoe
(All Across America, the Lights are being relit again...)
To: All
SEEMS THE FIRST QUESTION SHOULD BE SECRET INTERNATIONAL AGREEMENT? WTF?
Legislators Worldwide Asking Questions About ACTA. Legislators around the world are demanding more information on the secret Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.
Obama Cant Say Who Were At War With."For two weeks, the government of the United States has made itself a global laughingstock."
Daily Kos Claims Rush Limbaugh Called for Violent Revolutio
Well, any site that celebrated the deaths of Americans ( google it ) is, shall we say, "tainted" in my opinion when making such claims...
Rush is right- he usually is.
The question is, what do we do about it?
Ballot box.
Jury box. ( citizen nullification- google that one, too )
Cartridge box. I'd rather not go there.
But...
If placing the Looters & Pillagers & Plunderers "in charge" is an aberration, maybe it can be fixed.
If not, when they "run out of other people's money," it is going to "get interesting..."
Very "interesting."
Barack Obama Musical to Kick off in Frankfurt
$60-$216, eh?
If you paid me that, I wouldn't go to see this tripe, but leave it to a bunch of Europeans to get America so wrong-- like this idiotic campaign-era float:
Pam Says:
Another Copy Posted:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ud9Jdh_sOMM
So you can understand what hes talking about, heres the photo:
This is a Photoshop, created by someone else, of the photographers original photo, which you may view at this link.
I posted the Photoshop in this post, to comment effectively on a controversy regarding whether the photo was racist, and whether Charles Johnson was correct to allege that it was an example of right-wing racism. My posting of the photo was fair use.
THE LORDS OF TOLERANCE BEHIND CLOSED DOORS: Bill Clinton 2008 on Obama: A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee.
FOLLOWING IN TRENT LOTTS FOOTSTEPS: Harry Reid apologizes for light skinned remark about Obama.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) apologized today for referring to President Barack Obama as light skinned and with no Negro dialect in private conversations during the 2008 presidential campaign.
I deeply regret using such a poor choice of words, said Reid in a statement. I sincerely apologize for offending any and all Americans, especially African Americans for my improper comments.
President Obama said in a statement that he and Reid had spoken about the matter on Saturday afternoon. I accepted Harrys apology without question because Ive known him for years, Ive seen the passionate leadership hes shown on issues of social justice and I know whats in his heart, said Obama. As far as I am concerned, the book is closed.
Also, he needs him for health care. Heres more coverage from CNN.
Dan Riehl comments: Thank God Reid isnt a Republican, or hed be being savaged as a racist. We all know thats not true. They arent racists. They simply dont believe blacks can be successful without being helped by a white person. That isnt racism, silly. Its compassion, or so were told.
And Robert George is not kind.
UPDATE: Speaking Stupid All The Time. I dont really think Reid will follow too far in Trent Lotts footsteps, though. Obama wants him to stay and, I suspect, so do the Republicans . . . .
Meanwhile, on Facebook, Bruce Bartlett posts some other racial statements by Democrats, from his book Wrong On Race: The Democratic Partys Buried Past.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Drudge has fun:
Meanwhile, a reader emails: There went his chance at owning a football team. Heh.
MORE: Over at Talking Points Memo, where Trent Lott came in for plenty of criticism, reader Brian Torrez notes that theres currently . . . nothing about Reids remarks at all. Well, people blog about what they find interesting and apparently this doesnt interest em. Ill note that I was on the Lott story, though . . . . (Bumped).
BlogWarZ!
http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2010/01/another-one-bites-his-tongue.html#readfurther
Glenn Reynolds continues:
- - - - - - - - -
UPDATE: Reader Rollory writes:
The most amazing thing about Charles Johnson is how he did the same thing to multiple people, one after another, over the course of two years, and in every case, everybody who might have had some impact by speaking out about it and pointing out what a dishonest liar the man is, stayed quiet and either said nothing or empty platitudes like I dont know all the details and deliberately ignored the repeated and clear pattern of behavior. Until, that is, he gets around to them, and all of a sudden theyre shocked and surprised that he could be such a dishonest liar.
It was worse than that, Reader Rollory, at least for us...but how about this time you read the damn documentation about Chazzers villainy?
January 9, 2010 09:05 PM by Michelle Malkin44 Comments
"Good news, but remember one thing with these socialist/marxist states, its not who votes, its who counts the votes."
We only need one slogun to win in 2010: Got Work?
Massachusetts Senate Race Now A Toss-Up. I had noticed that the powers-that-be in Massachusetts were acting kinda nervous, so maybe their own polls say something similar. It must be troubling when your push-pollers ask people if it would affect their vote if the guy was a Nazi and the respondents say Nope, hed still be better than Coakley.
UPDATE: Reportedly, the Boston Herald poll is a toss-up, too.
"They want to kill every Christian, every Jew, every Hindu who won`t convert."
CAVUTO: You`re okay with, in this case, profiling?
KOCH: Absolutely. All I care about is that, when I get on that plane, I want to have a reasonable assurance that I`m going to land safely....
CAVUTO: And you also mentioned about the message we`re sending the world when we try to step back from calling this for what it is-
KOCH: Right.
CAVUTO: -a war. Now, the administration`s tried to avoid that to have better relations and to reach out--
KOCH: Has it helped?
CAVUTO--to those 1.4 billion Muslims.
KOCH: Has it helped?
CAVUTO: Well, his approval and America`s regard has gone up in those countries. He says and they say--
KOCH: Isn`t that nice? Did they stop trying to kill us?
Posted by Kate at
1:01 AM|
Comments (6)
Local Economies Matter
Via Eric Anderson
Posted by Kate at
12:20 AM|
Comments (2)
by snork ( 92 Comments )
Filed under Economy at January 9th, 2010 - 8:00 pm
In the Atlantic, Megan McArdle writes about the next wave in the real estate bubble. The bubble in commercial real estate.
Yet when MetLife spruced up the complex and put it on the market in 2006, real-estate moguls jetted in for the sale. A joint venture put together by Tishman Speyer and BlackRock carried the day through its willingness to, as The New York Times noted, pay upway upto unlock future profits in the sprawling Manhattan properties. At $5.4billion, their winning bid made the sale the most expensive real-estate deal of all time.
Three years later, however, those profits were still securely locked inside the propertys 11,232 apartmentsmany of which remained rent-controlled, despite strenuous efforts to convert them to upscale market-rate rentals. With net income well under projections, the partnership started spending down its reserves. Then, in October 2009, a court ruled that the partnership had improperly decontrolled the rent for thousands of apartments, and would have to return them to their original status. As of this writing, analysts are predicting default in a matter of months unless the partnerships debt of $4.4billion can be restructureda shaky prospect, given that the owners may owe tenants of formerly rent-stabilized apartments as much as $200million in rent overcharges and damages. Stuyvesant Town might soon set another record: the biggest real-estate default in history.
It seems that it wasnt just poor single moms in the inner city who were being hard sold mortgages that they couldnt afford. A lot of rich, sophisticated investors with Ivy degrees got sold a bill of goods.
That default would be one of the first tremors of an earthquake about to roil financial markets: a commercial real-estate crisis mirroring the catastrophe in the residential market. October brought both the Stuy Town deals first death rattle and the bankruptcy of the real-estate financier Capmark. As annual bank failures topped 100 for the first time in almost two decades, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Chair Sheila Bair fretted over the threat posed to lenders by losses linked to hotels, malls, and condominiums. But even as this new impending crisis unsettles commercial lenders and borrowers, the story of its origins can shed new light on how we got into this larger financial mess in the first place.
So if you think the green shoots are coming up any time soon, think again. Theres another bubble thats in the process of collapsing, and its got almost as much pain in its wake as the first one (which isnt over, btw).
But given how experienced those investors were, why are our problems now as bad as they are? Fraud aside, Gyourko notes that at the height of its bubble, the commercial real-estate market displayed most of the pathologies that characterized the residential side. Only 50percent of the increase in prices between 2003 and 2008 resulted from rising rents, he says; the rest was just inflated optimism about the rents landlords would be able to charge sometime in the future. And just as in housing, banks joined the folly, increasing the LTVs and requiring less amortization over the life of the loan.
Is this multiple choice, or essay? I can think of several things. Both bubbles involved greed on the part of the lender (which is a trivial observation; greed makes markets work), but both also involved greed on the part of the borrower. In both cases, the borrowers got drunk on the rapidly rising prices, and threw the worst-case scenario away. In both cases, the predatory lender ended up taking it in the shorts, although the government ended up stepping in and transferred their liability for their screw-up to the taxpayers.
And in this particular case, the screwy rent regulation systems in NY State and NYC contributed to the market distortions that make real estate seem like a win-win proposition.
But the narrative of the predatory lender exploiting the naive borrower doesnt fit the commercial bubble, and probably doesnt fit the residential bubble, either. The borrowers who are walking away from their bad purchases did it because they were flipping out of greed, and when the music stopped, they just dumped the sucker lenders, who in turn dumped the sucker taxpayers.
So who are the real victims? All of you who are continuing to faithfully pay your taxes and mortgages, thats who. You know who you are. Youre the chumps who didnt get greedy, and who honor your obligations. Suckers.
92 Comments »
mjazz wrote:
I think the powers that be want two classes: Rich and poor.
They are sucking the lifeblood out of the middle class.
Which brings us back to comment 1. On the one hand the donkeys seem to be thrashing about aimlessly some times, but on the other hand, the elimination of the middle class is exactly what they want. They want a ruling class (them) and an endentured client class (the rest of us). Just like in old Europe.
I read this piece earlier about the implosion of John Edwards political career. Mind you, I take stories like this with a massive dose of salt as the reporting may be shoddy and the political operatives quoted all have axes to grind, nonetheless it is fascinating political gossip: http://nymag.com/news/politics/63045/
No, Edwards said. Why didnt you come to me like a effing man and tell me to stop effing her?
35 I just read the whole thing and though none of it about John and Elizabeth Edwards was surprising based on what we already knew about the situation, I felt disgusted reading it.
Let me just say that there is something wrong in this country and its citizens when such a pile of crap like Edwards can nearly become President or VP. The same is true of guys that are currently the President and VP, too, but for slightly different reasons than Edwards.
9 01 2010
Posted by Patrick Courrielche Jan 8th 2010 at bigjournalism.com
How a tiny blog and a collective of climate enthusiasts broke the biggest story in the history of global warming science but not without a gatekeeper of the climate establishment trying to halt its proliferation.
It was triggered at the most unlikely of places. Not in the pages of a prominent science publication, or by an experienced muckraker. It was triggered at a tiny blog a bit down the list of popular skeptic sites. With a small group of followers, a blog of this size could only start a media firestorm if seeded with just the right morsel of information, and found by just the right people. Yet it was at this location that the most lethal weapon against the global warming establishment was unleashed.
The blog was the Air Vent. The information was a link to a Russian server that contained 61 MB of files now known as Climategate. Within two weeks of the files introduction, the story appeared on 28,400,000 web pages.
Read the rest of this entry »
Comments : 96 Comments »Categories : Climategate, Science
The Sound Of Settled Journalism
It's not a profession. It's a tribe.
So, climate change denial is widely rumored to have been the last straw. Perhaps sensing the loquacious Newfoundlander would prompt unneeded bad PR if sacked; Im told [Globe and Mail Editor in Chief John] Stackhouse offered to move him to Mondays. As evidenced by the quick decampment to the National Post, it seems that went over like a tonne of bricks with Murphy.
The move was announced this past Thursday by Peter Mansbridge on CBCs the National, where Murphy still resides as one of the few opinion columnists left on television.
I was going to write something about how the mainstream media were once in the business of investigating cover-ups, while today they're unindicted co-conspirators, or some other blah-blah-nonsense like that.
But to tell you the truth - that's not entirely correct. The media powers of decades past were just as dedicated to the complete and utter concealment of inconvenient truth as they are today.
Ask yourself - if Nixon had been a Democrat, would East Anglia have a "gate"?
I don't think so, either. The only thing that's really changed is their success at pulling it off - along with their success at selling the product.
I call that progress on two fronts.
(h/t Gord Tulk)
Posted by Kate at
2:55 PM|
Comments (35)
================================================
Use
The
Link
Look
At
The
Dead World... pictures, ads, famous people...
11,735
posted on
01/10/2010 3:38:19 AM PST
by
backhoe
(All Across America, the Lights are being relit again...)
To: All
Techincally, Obama is a mulatto, but negro is a sufficient description, if not PC.
F*ing liberals have crippled the English language and race relations at the same time with hypersensitive political correctness.
In Brasil I was taught so many names for the shades of skin people had it was like relearning the colors of the rainbow. My friend "Carlao" was preta (coal black.) Couldn't see anything but his teeth when he smiled in the dark. What a great guy, too many stories from carnaval. My wife is morena, the color of my "cafe com leite" as are my kids. When you have an abundance of variety for a given thing in some cultures, you need more words to really define the difference. There was also had 8 or 9 words I recall to describe the sway of a woman when she walks as if to a light samba. I may start playing one and ask my wife to walk around shortly. Mmmmmmm....
The big difference of course, is that most folks in Brasil were acclimated as "Brasilians". We have too many cultural divisions and the racial ones seem to follow along the same lines. Can't promote unity if people don't want to be Americans to begin with.
But yeah, "negro" is fine. Don't care if it offends the rest of the pansies.
12 posted on
Saturday, January 09, 2010 8:58:28 PM by
Caipirabob
Im one year shy of 30 years as a general contractor in the Lower Florida Keys. Ive got 1/4 the employees today as compared to end of year 2008. I still have work, but its all backlog from late 2007 when things were still pretty good here. Im fortunate that I saw the downturn coming and lowered prices in order to lock in a large workload, most of my competition did not and they are in rough shape. Id expect that by April or so, Ill be closing out the last two big projects Ive got and theres nothing in the pipeline ahead.
Its been a good 30 year run, made it through tough times like the housing downturn in the late 80s/early 90s, but came out stronger on the other side. Its not hard to see the writing on the wall, though. This time is different. No recovery is apparent and my industry is dying a slow death.
Im thankful for the many years Ive had as a business owner and thankful that Ive had work longer than my competition as the last year or so has given me the opportunity to squirrel away every spare dollar I could earn.
Anecdotally, business sucks for many, many hard working folks here in far South Florida. I was shocked on a drive to Miami a few days before Christmas. Shocked at the number of closed businesses and empty parking lots on US1.
Tourist season should be in full swing down here by now, but there just isnt one this year. I know lots of business people who have been struggling to get by, but they dont think theyll make it much longer. As this winter progresses, I expect things are going to get downright ugly.
For years Ive watched as government local, state and national, have killed one industry after another through insane over regulation, ever increasing fees and taxation and hostile, inept bureaucrats.
I wont let them kill my spirit, though. They better watch what more they try to steal from me and like minded folks.
God Bless to you all, give em hell in November.
5 posted on
Sunday, January 10, 2010 7:08:43 AM by
jsh3180
With a "Popular Vote", all politians would have to do is win New York, California, Florida, and one other populous state, to win the "Popular Vote". With the Electoral College, it gives each state a vote and a voice. Our founding fathers knew what they were doing.
Unfortunatly, so do those who want to destroy our nation.
11,736
posted on
01/10/2010 5:52:11 AM PST
by
backhoe
(All Across America, the Lights are being relit again...)
To: All
Former Senator and Member of 9/11 Commission Slade Gorton: Panty-Bomber Was "Singing Like a Canary" Until Read His Miranda Rights
Ace
Wonderful.
"He was singing like a canary, then we charged him in civilian proceedings, he got a lawyer and shut up," Slade Gorton, a member of the 9/11 Commission that investigated the Sept 2001 terror attacks on the US, told The Sunday Telegraph. "I find it incomprehensible that this administration is treating terrorism as a law enforcement issue. The president has finally said that we are at war with al-Qaeda. Well, if this is a war, then Abdulmutallab should be treated as a combatant not a criminal."
I hope, for Obama's sake, he's really personally committed to this proposition, because it's going to 1) kill several hundred innocent Americans and 2) cost him his presidency.
I hope he really has a high level of personal conviction on this, to assuage himself as a private citizen in 2013.
The American people will not, under any circumstances, stand for this.
Via Consigliere5.
Why didn't you come to me like a f*cking man and tell me terrorists are trying to kill us?
I've said it before, and I'll say it again--
Kommander ZerØ's "_residency" is a laughable mixture of:
And "Movin' On Up!"
Unfortunately,
Sunday, January 10, 2010, 11:44 AM
Jim Hoft
White House economic advisor Christina Romer announced today that the jobs picture is still terrible.
No kidding.
The unemployment rate has spiked to 10% since President Obama took office despite his promise that it would not rise about 8%.
FOX News reported:
A top White House economic adviser said Sunday youll get no argument from her on the need to improve the miserable jobs picture.
Council of Economic Advisers chief Christina Romer said its devastating that some workers have been unemployed for two years and that job losses were continuing nearly a year after passage of the so-called stimulus bill.
The jobless rate remained at 10 percent in December as 660,000 people said they had left the workforce. But Romer couched the news by saying the siphoning of jobs from the market has slowed.
In the first quarter of 2009, when we first came in, we were losing on average 691,000 jobs per month. With these new numbers in the fourth quarter, we were losing 69,000 jobs, she said. Its still terrible. Were still losing jobs, and we absolutely have to go from losing any jobs at all to adding them at a robust rate.
UPDATE: Barack Obama is subdued and disappointed that his economic plan is failing.
1. Generators (Good ones cost. Gas storage, risky. Noisy; target of thieves; maintenance etc.)
2. Water Filters/Purifiers
3. Portable Toilets
4. Seasoned Firewood. Wood takes about 6 - 12 months to become dried, for home uses.
5. Lamp Oil, Wicks, Lamps (First Choice: Buy CLEAR oil. If scarce, stockpile ANY!)
6. Coleman Fuel. Impossible to stockpile too much.
7. Guns, Ammunition, Pepper Spray, Knives, Clubs, Bats & Slingshots.
8. Hand-can openers, & hand egg beaters, whisks.
9. Honey/Syrups/white, brown sugar
10. Rice - Beans - Wheat
11. Vegetable Oil (for cooking) Without it food burns/must be boiled etc.,)
12. Charcoal, Lighter Fluid (Will become scarce suddenly)
13. Water Containers (Urgent Item to obtain.) Any size. Small: HARD CLEAR OR WHITE PLASTIC ONLY - note - food grade if for drinking.
14. Mini Heater head (Propane) (Without this item, propane won't heat a room.)
15. Grain Grinder (Non-electric)
Read them all at the link...
The Sound Of Settled Science
Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
December, 2009...
January, 2010...
Climate science faces a new controversy after the Met Office denounced research from the Copenhagen summit which suggested that global warming could raise sea levels by 6ft by 2100...
Sunday, January 10, 2010, 12:40 PM
Jim Hoft
Great Britain suffered through its worst winter snow storm in 40 years this past week.
This image of the UK taken from NASAs multi-national Terra satellite on Thursday shows the extent of the freezing weather. (Daily Mail)
Climate scientists warned this week that a mini ice age is likely to last for the next 20 to 30 years.
The Daily Mail reported:
The bitter winter afflicting much of the Northern Hemisphere is only the start of a global trend towards cooler weather that is likely to last for 20 or 30 years, say some of the worlds most eminent climate scientists.
Their predictions based on an analysis of natural cycles in water temperatures in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans challenge some of the global warming orthodoxys most deeply cherished beliefs, such as the claim that the North Pole will be free of ice in summer by 2013.
According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado, Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 per cent, since 2007 and even the most committed global warming activists do not dispute this.
The scientists predictions also undermine the standard climate computer models, which assert that the warming of the Earth since 1900 has been driven solely by man-made greenhouse gas emissions and will continue as long as carbon dioxide levels rise.
Hat Tip Gini O.
And just think
It was less than a month ago that Barack Obama was in Denmark pushing international legislation on global warming junk science. Thank goodness he failed.
Previously:
Brrrr
Antarctica Records Record High Ice Cap Growth
Brrrr
South America Has Coldest Winter in a 90 Years
Brrrr
Iraqis See First Snow in 100 Years As Sign of Peace
Brrrr
Worst Snowstorms in a Decade in China Cause Rioting
Brrrr
Jerusalem Grinds to a Halt As Rare Snowstorm Blasts City
Brrrr
Worst Snowstorms in 50 Years Continue to Cripple China
Brrrr
China Suffers Coldest Winter in 100 Years
Brrrr
Pakistan Suffers Lowest Temps in 70 Years 260 Dead
Brrrr
Record Cold Hits Central Asia 654 Dead in Afghanistan
Brrrr
Severe Weather Kills Dozens in Kashmir
Brrrr
Tajikistan Crisis!! Coldest Winter in 25 Years!
Brrrr
Record Cold Wave Blasts Mumbai, India
Brrrr
Snow and Ice in San Diego?
Brrrr
Wisconsin Snowfall Record Shattered
Brrrr
The Disappearing Arctic Ice Is Back And Its Thick
Brrrr
Turkeys snowiest winter continues.
Brrrr
Record Cold & Snow Blankets Acropolis in Greece (Video)
Brrrr
Longest Ever Cold Spell Kills Cattle & Rice in Vietnam
Brrrr
Most Snow Cover Over North America Since 1966
Brrrr
Australia Suffers Through Coldest Summer in 50 Years
Brrrr
Record Snowfall Slams Ohio River Valley
Brrrr
New Data Gives Global Warming the Cold Shoulder
Brrrr
Global Cooling Causes Armed Clashes in Canada
Brrrr
Snake Oil Salesman Admits to Ca$hing In on Global Warming Hysteria
Brrrr
New Research Claims Earth Sliding Into an Ice Age
Brrrr
Blizzard Blasts South Dakota 4 Feet of Snow Reported
Brrrr
An Inconvenient Debate- Czech Pres. Challenges Gore
Brrrr
Record Snow Blankets Spokane, Washington In June!
Brrrr
Peru Declares Emergency Cold Kills 61 Children & 5,000 Alpacas
Brrrr
Arctic Sea Ice Levels Are Up By 1,000,000 Square Kilometers
Brrrr
Denver Breaks 118 Year-Old Cold Record Arctic Ice Refuses to Melt
Brrrr
NASA Reports Bogus Global Warming Numbers- Again
Brrrr
Goracle: Mayan Civilization Collapsed Because of Climate Change, Too
Brrrr
Global Warming Predictions Overestimated Its a Hoax
Brrrr
Its Snowing in the Desert But Gore Warns the North Pole Is Melting
Brrrr
CNN Meteorologist Says GW Theory Arrogant (Video)
Brrrr
Ice Comes Early to Lake Superior For First Time in 17 Years
Brrrr
Sea Ice Ends Year At Same Level As 1979
Brrrr
Goofy Hillary Says Global Warming May Incite New Wars
Brrrr
Shivering Al Gore Gets Put on Ice
Brrrr
Snow Falls in UAE For 2nd Time In Recorded History
Brrrr
Al Gore Braves Snow & Ice to Testify to Congress on Global Warming
Brrrr
Record Storm Dumps Foot of Snow on DC Global Warming Protesters
Brrrr
Its Snowing in North Dakota In June!
Brrrr
Rep. Broun Gets Cold Shoulder After Confronting Global Warming Hoaxers
Brrrr
Record Low Temps in 31 States 256 New Records
Brrrr
Global Temperatures Continue to Drop Green Peace Caught in a Lie
Brrrr
Antarctic Ice Melt at Lowest Level in Recorded History
11,737
posted on
01/10/2010 1:29:34 PM PST
by
backhoe
(All Across America, the Lights are being relit again...)
To: All
This chart from Calculated Risk shows the decline in jobs as a percentage of the work force at the peak.
To date in this recession, we've lost more than 8 million jobs. The decline as a percentage of the workforce is the worst since the Great Depression, matching the sharp but short drop in 1948, as the war machine wound down.
Equally important, the duration of these job losses, as well as the lack of a sharp recovery (at least so far), suggests that the problem will be with us for a long while. We're now 24 months into this decline, and we're still at the bottom. By this point in most previous recessions, we had already recovered all of the lost jobs.
Here's Calculated Risk:
This graph shows the job losses from the start of the employment recession, in percentage terms (as opposed to the number of jobs lost). The current employment recession is the worst recession since WWII in percentage terms, and 2nd worst in terms of the unemployment rate (only early '80s recession with a peak of 10.8 percent was worse).
[snip]
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
If we still calculated unemployement the way we did in th 1980's:
DEMS
WORRIED ABOUT COAKLEY: When senior Democratic strategists are anonymously moaning to the WaPo, you know that all is not well in Charlestown (Coakley HQ). Yeah, shades of
Creigh Deeds. The Democratic Party as a bruised brand?
Sunday, January 10, 2010, 9:48 PM
Jim Hoft
After Al Sharpton went on for five minutes about how he forgave Harry Reid for his Obama negro comments, Ann Coulter asked, Did he ask you to stop using your negro dialect too?
Ann Coulter nailed Sharpton on the Democrats racial double standards.
Even Geraldo Rivera pointed out the obvious double standards.
Coutler ate his lunch.
Final remark by Coulter: I think despite Reid apologizing to all African-Americans- light skinned, medium skinned, dark skinned -I still think he will lose.
Its weekends like this that make it harder and harder for democrats to play their political race card when its become obvious that it has little to do with race and everything to do with politics.
MAUREEN DOWD LOSING INTEREST IN OBAMA? Dowd and her colleagues complain now but he was their kind of guy.
UPDATE: Why Obama Is Faltering. "Obama, an individual who has admitted to being bored by suburbs and with no real claim to having experienced... America very much."
"
HOPE: White House Economic Adviser: Jobs Picture is Still Terrible. Council of Economic Advisers chief Christina Romer said its devastating... ( I "Hope" you like all that "change" you dumb "F's" got conned in to voting for-- because "you ain't seen nuthin', yet... suckahs!" )
Like this: SO, HOWS THAT SIGNING-STATEMENT PROMISE WORKING OUT?
They make you turn off your telephone, so I didnt get any pictures
"I, like most frequent flyers nowadays, am mentally ready to hurl myself at some guy with a weapon or who acts like a terrorist. But I was totally paralyzed by the naked man. It was like watching a silent movie that might turn out to be hard core porn. But then again maybe it was a comedy. You couldnt tell..."
by Speranza ( 11 Comments )
Filed under Democratic Party, Progressives, Socialism at January 10th, 2010 - 10:00 pm
I am not much of a fan of George Wills any more. He reminds me too much of alleged conservatives who prefer to be in the minority status as long as they get invited to the best Georgetown parties. He also does not know nearly as much about baseball as he thinks he does (but I digress). Here though he hits the target. California which went for Nixon in 1968 and Reagan in 1984 has gone way to the left and for many obvious reasons. First because of the great weather it tends to attract whackos, second because of all the illegal aliens who have become amnestied it has a large class of citizens who are government dependent and third its municipal and state unions are all too powerful which leads to crushing taxes on private industry and even more stifling regulations. Posters here from California probably can come up with more reasons.
By George F. Will
Dalton Trumbo (1905-76) was a hero to the American left, partly because of his 1939 antiwar novel Johnny Got His Gun. Trumbos title modified the lyric Johnny, get your gun from the World War I song Over There. Trumbos Johnny is horribly maimed in that war. Now we need a novel titled Berkeley Got Its Liberalism. Pending that, we have Tad Friends report, in the Jan. 4 New Yorker, on maimed Berkeley.
California, a laboratory of liberalism, is spiraling downward, driven by a huge budget deficit. So the University of California systems budget was cut 20 percent. Then the system increased in-state student fees 32 percent to . . . $10,302. But that is still 70 percent below student costs at Stanford and other private institutions in California that Berkeley considers no better than it is.
It took years for liberalisms redistributive itch to create an income tax so steeply progressive that it prompts the flight from the state of wealth-creators: Between 1990 and 2007, Voegeli writes, some 3.4 million more Americans moved from California to one of the other 49 states than moved to California from another state.
It took years for compassionate liberalism to make Californias welfare menu contribute to the state becoming an importer of Mexicos poverty. It took years for servile liberalism to turn the state into what Voegeli calls a unionocracy, run by and for unionized public employees, such as public safety employees who can retire at 50 and receive 90 percent of the final years pay for life.
Read the rest.
Tags: California, George F. Will, Progressivism
11 Comments »
by snork ( 26 Comments )
Filed under Politics, Polls, Republican Party at January 10th, 2010 - 7:30 pm
In the dept. of NSS*, Rasmussen asks an obvious question: is there a gulf between the GOP rank-and-file and their insider class? The results are shocking, at least to the insider class:
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 75% of Republicans voters still believe Republicans in Congress have lost touch with GOP voters throughout the nation over the past several years. Just 21% of GOP voters think their legislators have done a good job representing party values.
Well, knock me over with a feather. And they go on:
Fifty-four percent (54%) of GOP voters say the average Republican congressman is more liberal than they are, while 23% say their views are about the same. Just 20% believe the average GOP representative in Congress is more conservative than the average Republican voter.
Well, golly. A highly respected blogger in Southern California told me that the GOP is too far to the right, and a tiny but highly organized minority is to the right of them, and theres no such thing as a RINO. It even says so in this survey:
The survey also shows that Democrats dont understand how the GOP base sees things. A solid plurality of Democrats (42%) believes that the average Republican in Congress is more conservative than the average GOP voter.
Well, I guess that means that that blogger must be one of them there donkeys.
Now comes the part that matters; what the average non-partisan voter thinks:
Among all voters, 27% say the average Republican in Congress is more conservative than the average GOP voter. Thirty-eight percent (38%) believe the average GOP congressman is more liberal than the typical Republican voter. Twenty-five percent (25%) say the two are about the same.
Fifty-three percent (53%) of all voters say it is more important for the Republican Party to stand for what it believes in than to work with President Obama. Forty-two percent (42%) think it is more important for the party to work with the Democratic president.
Thats what the public overall thinks, when you mix it all up. Thats what a successful GOP candidate will look like. You can slice it and dice it all you want, but thats the bottom line right there.
_______
*No S***, Sherlock
26 Comments »
by Speranza ( 156 Comments )
Filed under Europe, Multiculturalism, Political Correctness at January 10th, 2010 - 5:30 pm
I am posting this not only because it is an excellent analytical article, but it will also enrage an increasingly bitter, middle aged, once respectable blogger due to the fact that the author is one Pamela Geller. The Euro-Mediterranean Partnership is political correctness run amok. Basically it is Obamaism with its apologizing and genuflecting before the totalitarian ideology which is Islam. Why once proud civilization need to grovel before barbarians is a question for political psychiatrists yet the many no go areas in England, France, Belgium and Germany bodes ill for Europe. We have seen the future and it does not work.
By Pamela Geller
Because of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership between the European Union and Islamic states in the Middle East, by the year 2050, the Islamic population of Europe will be 25% to 30% of the total population. There will be perhaps over 100 million Muslims in Europe.
Partnership? More like a suicide pact. Fifty million laborers with families. The effects on European civilization, and on Europes relationship with the United States, are all too easy to imagine. And the U.S.-Muslim engagement document, the blueprint for the Obama administrations relationship with Muslim countries, parallels these plans. It contains the same cross-culturalization plans that are discussed and recommended in the Euro-Med partnership. In other words, its a charter for our dhimmitude, our subservience to Islamic law.
Cultural cooperation: Thats where the rubber meets the road on immigration and related issues. It means Europe will conform to Islamic norms and not attempt to challenge them. And one main arena of this cultural cooperation was formally launched on June 9, 2008 in Slovenia: a new Euro-Med University. Based in Piran on the Adriatic coast, the university invites established European universities to become partner institutions in Britain, the Universities of Westminister, Cambridge, and Bristol have shown interest in such a partnership.
Its all parsed out in a series of Association Agreements, which delineate the concrete terms of the new relationships between the E.U. and the Islamic countries involved in the Euro-Med Partnership. One Euro-Med webpage explains that there are certain common aspects to all these agreements, including political dialogue, respect for human rights and democracy, establishment of WTO-compatible free trade over a transitional period of up to 12 years, provisions relating to intellectual property, services, public procurement, competition rules, state aids and monopolies, economic cooperation, and most significantly, cooperation relating to social affairs and migration and cultural cooperation.
Read the rest.
156 Comments »
Blagojevich: 'I'm blacker than Barack Obama'
Blagojevich: 'I'm blacker than Barack Obama'
By Bridget Johnson - 01/11/10 01:19 AM ET
Let's just dive straight into some of the excerpts from a long, colorful interview that ousted Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich gave to Esquire magazine. First, on the Democrats' alleged optimism about his future, circa 2004:
"David Axelrod called me the day after John Kerry lost to Bush Wednesday and he said, You need to think about running for president in 2008. A new face from the Midwest to challenge Hillary Clinton. He used to work for me. He had Obama in his stable already he's a consultant, so he's just gathering potential talents. That's what these guys do it's all about picking winners."
And then onto showing the writer Rahm Emanuel's house:
"That house with the flag, and then there's the lot right next door he bought that. When he left the [Clinton] White House, he got into some deal where he made a quick $15 million through his connections with Exelon ComEd amazing. Fifteen million it's that white-collar stuff people do. He's using his connections in the White House, but I'm the guy facing what I'm facing. And I'm broke."
And finally on President Barack Obama, whose Senate seat Blago -- who has pleaded not guilty to corruption charges -- allegedly tried to sell:
"It's such a cynical business, and most of the people in the business are full of s**t and phonies, but I was real, man and am real. This guy, he was catapulted in on hope and change, what we hope the guy is. What the f**k? Everything he's saying's on the teleprompter. I'm blacker than Barack Obama. I shined shoes. I grew up in a five-room apartment. My father had a little laundromat in a black community not far from where we lived. I saw it all growing up."
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/75121-blagojevich-im-blacker-than-barack-obama
Cold wars
The weather is cold and snowy in Britain just now - even, now, in central London - but people like Richard North are actually quite enjoying this:
It is global warming here again, and it is getting serious. It is not so much the depth, as the repeated falls. Each layer compacts and freezes which, with fresh global warming on top becomes lethally slippery.
Time was, what with the AGW crowd pretty much completely controlling the agenda, when this kind of elegant mockery would be dismissed as the ignorance of the uninitiated. But the fact is that the present wintry weather is extremely significant in this debate. True, the weather today is not the climate for the next century, but sooner or later weather does turn into climate, and the weather has, from the AGW point of view, been misbehaving for a decade. Their precious Hockey Stick said that the temperature of the globe would disappear off the top right hand corner of the page, right about now. Well it hasn't, has it?
As John Redwood recently asked Ed Miliband in the House of Commons, concerning the present very cold weather:
... which of the climate models had predicted this?
None, it quickly became clear from Mr Miliband's faltering reply, that Mr Miliband has been paying any attention to (although other sorts of models have predicted cold winters rather successfully).
But this is not just about looking out of the window and seeing if global warming is to be observed or not (as Richard North well understands). The other point here is the authority of the people upon whom people like Ed Miliband have been relying. Not only have none of Miliband's "experts" (sneer quotes entirely deliberate) been able to predict the recent succession of colder winters; it goes way beyond that. The point is: these experts assured the world, or allowed their more ignorant followers to assure the world, that these cold winters would not happen, and despite all their protestations now about how weather is not climate, well, shouldn't they have born this in mind when saying, only a few short years ago, and repeating ever since, that winter snow in places like Britain would be a thing of the past? Should they not have been more careful about seizing upon any bursts of warm weather, any bursts of weather of any kind, come to that, as evidence of the truth of global warming? Had they truly understood the point that they have been reduced to making now, they would have been a lot more modest in their recent, and in Britain economically disastrous, medium range predictions. See also, John Redwood's follow up posting. Redwood is now talking more sense about the world's climate than the British Met Office.
"It is imperative that the major part of the debate now shift to addressing the many usurpations and proposed legal repressions which the AGW alarmists have attempted, and are attempting, to foist upon the still uncomprehending public across the western world. Much of this legislation is downplayed and camouflaged by the same complicit media outlets which have been proselytizing for the AGW agenda all along. "
"If we win this fight, and it is by no means certain that we will, Richard North will be one of the, (probably unsung), heroes. It has been his persistence in pushing the story that this isn't some red/green alliance that is threatening to send us all back to the dark ages, but a corporatist/fascist push, (putsch?), to transfer power and wealth to an unelected elite that may well prove the tipping point."
"So keep pushing the 'science is far from settled' meme and the 'legislators are stealing power and money' meme, but also hammer the facts surrounding the Chairman of the IPCC and his links to business and politicians..."
=================================================
PROGRESS: John Scalzi finds an old floppy disk and
observes: The real irony of this disc is that the amount of memory you can write to it (1.44 MB, if memory heh serves) isnt enough to store the jpeg of the picture of it which came out of my camera (1.49 MB). Thats progress for you.
Let me be the first "intolerant" right-winger to say it- "Big effing deal!"
No, she shouldn't have done it... but... this is not a unique story. Men & women have been screwing since the dawn of time...
Our intertubes friend Right Wing Prof died on Thursday. He invited us to post this piece from him (which we did) in 2007 because he didn't think it fit the tone or purpose of his site -
Almost heaven, West Virginia
Blue Ridge Mountains
Shenandoah River -
Life is old there
Older than the trees
Younger than the mountains
Growin like a breeze
Country roads, take me home
To the place I belong
West Virginia, mountain momma
Take me home, country roads
Our friend Right Wing Prof at Right Wing Nation is a guest author today. His reminiscence is about West Virginia, clans, ancestors, his youth, and snake-handling preachers.
You've probably never heard of the Big Sandy River,
the tributary of the Ohio River that separates eastern Kentucky from western West Virginia. It's even less likely that you've heard of the Twelvepole Creek,
also a tributary (well, if you can call a creek a tributary) of the Ohio, in the mountains of West Virginia, or Wayne, the largest town in Wayne County.
So let me take you there.
I assume you've been through West Virginia on the interstate. If not, you're missing perhaps the most beautiful state in the United States. The license plates say Wild, Wonderful West Virginia, and a drive across the state on I-64 shows you how wild and how wonderful the state is. But to really see West Virginia, you have to get off the interstate and drive into the mountains.
If you take WV-152 from I-64 in Huntington, the state highway rapidly becomes a narrow, two-lane road that winds like a snake up and down the mountains and twists through the valleys, only a few miles, incidentally, from where the Hatfields and McCoys live. You are in Wayne County, and the beauty of the landscape contrasts sharply with the early twentieth-century shacks. Suddenly, you begin to climb the side of a mountain, and you realize you're driving into a town. The buildings are well-kept and much nicer and larger than the small shacks and rundown farms you were seeing along 152. The crest of the mountain is downtown Wayne, an attractive town with several large churches and local shops.
As the road takes you down the other side, though, you feel as if you are in a different community: The buildings on the back side of the mountain, deeper into Wayne County, are ramshackle, falling apart, very unlike the buildings on the front side and the top. Wayne feels almost like a movie set, presenting its best side to visitors from the city, and hiding its worst side behind the mountain.
Wayne is the county seat, with a little over 1,100 people. Our destination is
East Lynn. Turn on 37, and the road gets even narrower as it takes you further into the mountains. You will suddenly see the steep, narrow valley widen in front of you as the road makes a sharp right turn, and before you is the Twelvepole. Just down the road is East Lynn, somewhat larger than Wayne, but noticeably poorer.
I have before gotten nasty cracks from people when they asked where my family was from and I told them. Let me say it now: I am not ashamed of these people. These are Scots-Irish, deeply religious, and fiercely proud, too proud to take government handouts, preferring instead to get along as best they can, people who work hard all their lives and live in poverty, yet give to their families and communities and do well by their families, not white trash sitting around on the front porch smoking corncob pipes and collecting welfare.
My great-grandfather, Laban, was born here in East Lynn, three days before Jefferson Davis was elected president of the CSA. Laban was from a poor branch of a prestigious family (my great-great-great-grandfather was Henry Clay's first cousin), and he married Nancy Ellen, from a land-wealthy local family (the wealthier branches of the Clay family live in Kentucky). My great-grandfather was a schoolteacher (mathematics), but had been afflicted all his life with some sort of stomach problem. Somehow, he managed to talk his wife into leaving not only the clan, but the state, and moved his family to southern Indiana, where he believed the sulfur water springs would help his health problems.
Continue reading "Clay Bond, aka Right Wing Prof, RIP: Country roads, take me home"
11,738
posted on
01/11/2010 2:34:20 AM PST
by
backhoe
(All Across America, the Lights are being relit again...)
To: All
Well, if you had wondered why THEG became a Silent Key?
The increasingly unreliable, laughingly misnomered "high speed cable internet" conked out on the morning of the 11th.
"Priority repair" was supposed to occur the next day, but when the last hour approached, I called Comcast, and Lo! They couldn't locate any record of it.
So they rescheduled it for Wednesday morning.
Meanwhile, Miss Emily poached a neighbor's signal long enough to check her email.
Makes you long for dialup- although since we canceled the landline, that's ruled out for now.
If the satellite dish companies didn't load their packages up with so much junk we neither want or need, I'd be tempted.
...recommended reading for fans and students of the SHTF or CW2 genre.
I learned that when something appears wrong and a person could straighten it with very little effort, that something is wrong. If Obama could produce a birth certificate and prove he is eligible, he would have a long time ago. There is nobody in the media or either party that doesnt realize this.
How do they say this stuff and not get laughed out of the room?
This photo accompanied the story in the print addition...note the bluetooth, cellular phone, & obvious hair treatments, etc.......and they are complaining about standing in line for food stamps for 3 hours......
Stuff from 1-11:
The only people being fooled by this are people who are in steady, government jobs. And they will probably vote for these fools anyway.
We are boots on the ground in the FL construction industry. The press is not turning this industrys heads, believe me. People know if they have jobs or not.
I spoke to someone yesterday who is getting one day a week at a formerly busy firm. Most firms I know are down to 5 or 10 workers from 50 or more - if they even still exist.
An obamabot we know called us on the phone the other day, and was amazed to find my son at home. She said, But things are getting better, arent they?
It was fun to educate her.
11,739
posted on
01/13/2010 1:24:15 PM PST
by
backhoe
(All Across America, the Lights are being relit again...)
To: All
She saw the whole damn thing:
Note the shirt he was wearing, (purple) wonder what that might represent?
PANIC IN MASSACHUSETTS? Or Massachussettes, whatever.
"Among the beliefs Sunstein would ban is advocating that the theory of global warming is a deliberate fraud. "
Lead Story
By Michelle Malkin January 13, 2010 12:22 AM
Raise your hand if you stand for Business as Usual.
My column today shines light on Democrat Mass. Attorney General/Senate candidate Martha Coakleys career tolerance for the culture of corruption.
While she cracks down on little gardening clubs, she has turned a blind eye to far bigger, dirtier, rotten scoundrels. The Big Labor spigots are flowing. And Big Pharmas got her back. Shell be a reliable rubber-stamper for Harry Reids Demcare bribery schemes, the SEIUs power grabs, and Chicago-on-the-Potomac.
No wonder shes lost the votes of the rank-and-file union workers being paid to hold up her signs.
Coakley: She treats ladies gardening clubs like crooks and crooks like ladies gardening clubs.
One more item: Last night, I linked to the photo of Weekly Standard reporter John McCormack on the ground after being pushed by one of Coakleys thugs. Where was Martha? Standing on the sidelines, doing nothing. As usual. McCormack has more.
***
Martha Coakley: The voice for Fat Cats and Corruptocrats
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2010
Democrat Martha Coakley is the voice of the little people the way Ted Kennedy was the voice of sobriety. If Massachusetts voters want another privileged liberal who talks a good social justice game while ignoring public corruption, pocketing gobs of money from Beltway fat cats, and pandering to corporate special interests, Coakleys the one.
Coakley, the Bay States attorney general, has campaigned to replace the late Sen. Kennedy on a law-and-order platform. But she has consistently turned a blind eye to both. When a top aide to Boston Mayor Tom Menino was caught deleting thousands of e-mails in violation of public records law last fall, Coakley punted. Democrat Menino was in the middle of a re-election bid; Coakley was wrapped up in her own senatorial bid.
Instead of expressing any concern about the City Hall information black hole, Coakley refused to investigate. She accused her critics of playing politics: [W]e get lots of complaints from folks who are adversaries who have a particular agenda.
But whos got the agenda? After undertaking Herculean technical efforts to recover the trashed e-mails, Boston city officials discovered e-mail fragments related to an ongoing federal probe of former state senator Dianne Wilkerson. Wilkerson attained national infamy as the lawmaker caught on film stuffing thousands of dollars of bribes from an FBI informant down her bra in exchange for her help securing a liquor license for a nightclub. She is currently awaiting federal trial.
Coakley cut a blanket immunity deal with Wilkerson last year protecting her from prosecution for campaign finance violations. But according to the Boston Herald, the state Office of Campaign and Political Finance reported last month that Wilkerson had failed to comply or only partially complied with 11 of 51 conditions. Coakley allowed Wilkerson to pay a measly $10,000 fine to avoid any legal action. She has failed to make those payments, failed to file ordered paperwork, and failed to answer information requests from state campaign finance officials.
Coakleys response? Meh. Instead, she used the power of her office to herald her new, taxpayer-funded $750,000 cybercrime lab initiative a picture-perfect, campaign-ready moment without an ironic pause and has launched a crackdown on ladies gardening clubs for failing to file financial disclosure forms related to their dues and plant sales.
Perhaps if they were in the lingerie business, they might have gotten a pass. Or if they had volunteered for Coakleys campaign. While shes a stickler with the gardeners, Coakley has been mighty sloppy practicing what she selectively enforces. She has siphoned $25,000 out of her state campaign fund for a poll on her federal Senate bid; used another $24,000 from her state account to pay Beltway political consultants advising her on the Senate campaign; and reportedly used a secret asset sale pact between her state and federal campaign committees to use state campaign funds to purchase a fundraising database, redesign her website, and obtain $6,000 worth of campaign paraphernalia with her Senate logo. Her senatorial ambitions have been almost pornographically transparent but not her campaign finance operations.
Then theres Coakleys relationship with Massachusetts corrupt former House Speaker Sal DiMasi. Bay State records show that Coakley sent annual donations to the beleaguered Democrat over the past three years worth just under $1,000. But the obeisance Coakley has paid to the Democrat machine has been priceless. Last June, di Masi was indicted on seven counts of mail and wire fraud related to pay-for-play schemes worth tens of thousands of dollars in monthly payments. Wheres Martha? asked Republican lawmakers.
Coakley let the feds take on the powerful di Masi. Only after months of foot-dragging did Coakleys AG office initiate an investigation into and indictments of one of di Masis top cronies, Richard Vitale, on lobbying and campaign finance crimes.
More recently, Coakleys GOP opponent Scott Brown blew the whistle on campaign finance shenanigans involving her deep-pocketed supporters at the SEIU. The radical labor organization, saddled with nationwide embezzlement scandals and political thuggery, is pulling out all the stops for Coakley and has dumped more than $200,000 into her campaign for radio ads (plus another $685,000 on the way for TV ads). In mid-December, SEIU Local 509, which represents public employees, sent two e-mails to 7,500 state government employee at their government e-mail address over public computers endorsing Coakley and urging union members to vote for her. The use of state resources for politicking is forbidden under state ethics laws and subject to both civil and criminal penalties.
Coakleys office has not responded to the complaint. Shes probably too busy writing thank-you notes to all the fatcat lobbyists and donors who threw her a high-priced fundraiser in Washington, D.C. this week. Host committee members raised $10,000 or more for her coffers. They included representatives from drug companies, health insurers, and hospitals who joined the Demcare protection racket. (And Coakley has the nerve to attack shadowy out-of-state organizations for running ads supporting Brown.)
Washington is already teeming with Democrat foxes guarding the Cash for Corruptocrats henhouse. Isnt there a nice gardening club in Massachusetts that can take Coakley in?
Do any Google search on Martha Coakley and Gerald Amirault and youll find out how despicable this woman really is.
RADLEY BALKO ON
MARTHA COAKLEYS TROUBLING CAREER AS A PROSECUTOR: "Coakley found herself in the midst of another high-profile child abuse case, the Fells Acres day care convictions.
'Wall Street Journal reporter Dorothy Rabinowitz, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her coverage of bogus sex abuse cases, recently told The Boston Globe of the Amirault case, Martha Coakley was a very, very good soldier who showed she would do anything to preserve this horrendous assault on justice. '
MORE ON THE COAKLEY REPORTER ASSAULT, from Dana Loesch.
UPDATE: More here. The fact that people who work either for or with the states Attorney General feel free to commit assault and battery on a reporter should tell Massachusetts voters all they need to know about Coakley and her views on public accountability. . . . You know, a state Attorney General should be the person to enforce the law especially, as this photo shows, she witnessed the assault and battery . . . .
ANOTHER UPDATE: Two questions for Coakley.
MORE: Coakley blames phantom stalkers. And I love this: Coakley said she is not privy to the facts surrounding the incident involving reporter John McCormack last night, who wrote about the episode outside the Sonoma restaurant in Washington, D.C. in an online dispatch titled: We Report, We Get Pushed. The Wall Street Journal reported the Coakley fund-raiser at the Sonoma restaurant in Washington, D.C. was put on by health care industry lobbyists.
Not privy to the facts? Theres a picture of her standing right over McCormack. This kind of talk puts me in mind of an entirely different sort of privy . . . .
STILL MORE: Assailant Was a Coakley Staffer on Loan from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee?
WHY ITS WORSE THAN THE ARMSTRONG WILLIAMS SCANDAL: How The White House Used Grubers Work To Create The Appearance of a Broad Healthcare Consensus.
UPDATE: Reader Matthew Tanner writes: That Gruber piece you linked to is quite compelling, all the more so coming from Jane Hamsher. Shes not ordinarily my cup of tea, but shes really done her homework here and shown, beyond any real doubt, that the Administration willfully portrayed a hired gun as a disinterested expert.
ANGER WITH OBAMA REGIME RE-IGNITES SECESSION TALK in Vermont.
A BRITISH PERSPECTIVE ON AMERICA. (Via John Bohstedt on Facebook).
DAVY JONES LOCKER: Full Of Oil?
GAS PRICES zip to new highs.
THE PRESCIENCE OF Victor Davis Hanson.
January 13, 2010 12:49 PM by Michelle Malkin45 Comments | 2 Trackbacks
by snork ( 110 Comments )
Filed under Barack Obama, Leftists, Progressives, Tranzis at January 12th, 2010 - 4:00 pm
For those who have never ventured to the Pajamas Media site, its become vastly better since a certain Mr. Johnson left the management. Some of the regular contributors, such as VDH, and Roger Kimball, and Michael Ladeen are brilliant. Even the lesser known contributors are frequently brilliant. One such contributor is Kim R. Holmes, of the Heritage Foundation. This relatively short essay describes just exactly what it is about Barack Obama that makes him different from all of the leftists who preceded him, and why the publics guard was down:
When he promises a world with no nuclear weapons, he invites you to suspend belief regarding whether it is even possible. The real agenda may be as mundane as simply reducing the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, but that limited goal is presented as a step toward fulfilling some future dream which will never be tested by reality. When he promises an America in which no one will die because they dont have health care or no one is poor, he is invoking an image of a world that simply cannot exist. But this matters little because in the world of imagination, anything is possible, and truth and reality spoil the mood.
This is a time-worn practice of liberal politicians. Obama is not the first nor will he be the last to promise the end of poverty, a world without nuclear weapons, or some other hopelessly unachievable goal.
But Obama raises the politics of liberal imagination to a whole new level. Much of his rhetoric about hope and change expresses hyperbolic expectations of an imaginary world. To get people to suspend rational thinking to buy into it, he must engage their emotions. And to engage their emotions he must pretend to appeal to our better natures as idealists.
So far, this is just old-fashioned liberal-left politics. But Obama adds a secret ingredient that none of his predicessors was able to add:
As the very first African-American president, he transcends mere liberalism and ascends into the realm of potential redemption for all of Americas past sins.
This is powerful stuff. It mixes the futuristic agenda of leftist idealism with the emotional power of national redemption, which is apolitical (or at least nonpartisan). We can, the narrative goes, redeem American history from the sins of slavery and other evil things by making sure this man succeeds as a president. Obama integrates the old progressive agenda with his personal story of redemption, supposedly rising above partisanship and thereby cleansing leftist politics of its sectarian and divisive agendas.
Hes been called the American Messiah, and the Black Messiah. Theres a reason why this imagery comes to mind among his supporters. Hes leveraging the Christian idea, so deeply embedded in Western culture, of Jesus the redeemer. Just as Jesus is the only redemption for the Original Sin of Eve, Obama positioned himself as the redeemer from Original Sin of slavery that some whites have psychologically burdened themselves with.
The deal was simple: elect Obama, and redemption ensues. No need to discuss agenda or ideology. In fact, that would be blasphemous. That would be like asking Jesus if he was qualified to be the son of God. The very idea of democracy is irrelevant and contemptible when a savior and redeemer is being graciously sent by the higher powers of Columbia and Harvard.
And even though this is very specifically a Christian idea, its so deeply embedded in Western culture, that non-Christians and even devout atheists arent beyond the emotional and psychological pull; in fact they seem to be even more intoxicated by it than people who are well grounded in their own religions.
So the story of Obama was supposed to be a perfect analog of the New Testament, with America finally being redeemed from our original sin of slavery by this black messiah. Except the narrative doesnt fit. It doesnt fit for a number of reasons. First, Obama is the decedent of a white mother and a free African. He has no slaves in his family tree. Secondly, he hasnt suffered, as Jesus did. There is a man who fits that description much more closely. His name is Martin Luther King, Jr. If there was ever an analog to Jesus for American slavery, its King.
No matter. Were in a zone where facts are contemptible. This is pure pathos, and the passion of the Obama is intoxicating to Americans, indeed all Western people, who arent actively resisting the narrative. This is a narrative that causes people to suspend all disbelief, because disbelief itself is considered rude and ungracious.
But theres more. Along with redemption from the Original Sin of slavery, since were already well into fantasy space, we can imagine that this magical messiah can also restructure society to be any way we wish.
When the president talks about the America he wants to create, he envisions some futuristic ideal community in which all good things exist, but only if the people in John Lennon-esque fashionfirst imagine it will be so and then act to make it happen regardless of whether it is possible.
And now were off on another myth embedded into Western culture that human nature is a social construct, and can be perfected. I dont have time to deal with the entirety of that issue here, but Thomas Sowells A Conflict of Visions deals with why thats a powerful but preposterous fantasy.
Bottom line: Weve been sold a ruling class wrapped up in social fantasy wrapped up in the fundamental narrative of Christianity. Beware false messiahs.
Extra: Also from PJM, Forgetting Communisms Evils by Mary Grabar.
The zeitgeist that rocked the vote ushered in a president who told a plumber that we should spread the wealth; in Stalinist fashion an Obama supporter / government official then used her powers to persecute him. A Rasmussen poll in April showed that only 37% of those under 30 favored capitalism over socialism; 33% favored socialism and the rest were undecided.
Such invincible ignorance masquerading as erudition isnt helping. However, I think that under 30 demographic is about to get a snoutful of ammonia if they pass this health insurance mandate with penalties for uninsurance. If they only understood that they were the ones damaged the most by all of this.
Tags: PJM, Rousseau
110 Comments »
by Speranza ( 93 Comments )
Filed under Barack Obama, United Nations at January 13th, 2010 - 10:00 am
Our first post-American president does not have the inner toughness or world vision to confront our enemies abroad. He is still after all merely a community organizer who is now operating on a larger more important stage. His actions in the lat 12 months have confirmed my worst fears about him, his naiveté, his ideological dogma, and his almost complete lack of knowledge about World history (particularly 20th century diplomacy and military strategy). Sooner rather then later some nation (North Korea, Iran, China, Russia, Pakistan is going to spit in his eye and most likely he will say that it is raining. I cannot imagine how disastrous the West would have found itself if Obama were president during the Cold War years and had to confront someone such as Leonid Brezhnev. John Bolton rightly points out that Obama is not interested in world problems that preceded his presidency (he feels that he inherited them and that is not fair!). On another note, the fact that George W. Bush did not fight the way he should have in order to have Bolton confirmed as U.N. ambassador was a disgrace.
by John Bolton
Where is Barack Obamas foreign policy headed? In answering, one must accept a measure of humility. Predicting American policy makes more fools than sages. That goes double for foreign policy, as analysts must anticipate not only the actions of the United States but of foreign provocateurs as well.
In the case of Barack Obama, there is an additional caveat: the high-profile concerns that have monopolized his efforts abroad are seen by the president himself as little more than Bush-era loose ends, not the defining transactions of his own foreign policy. All new presidents encounter irritating constraints on their aspirations, but Obama is more irritated than most at having to endure any sense of continuity with his predecessor. His criticism of Bush continues unabated even as he fares no better in the same stubborn terrain.
Obama is not looking to build his foreign-policy legacy on top of disputes that predate his arrival. He is working to move past these, toward the day when he can implement his own foreign policy and national-security agendas. Accordingly, the best way to predict Obamas foreign policy in the next three years lies not in examining how he deals with the accumulated baggage of Iraq, Afghanistan, Middle East peace, and the Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs. Important as those are, they constitute what Obama has had to confront. We should ask instead what he will attempt to establish once he has become less encumbered by the inherited issues. Here, the record shows three critical characteristics.
First, Obama has no particular interest in foreign and national-security policy. That is not what he has spent his professional and political career, such as it is, doing, and it is not where his passions lie. There can be no question that the challenges of remaking Americas health-care, financial, and energy-production systems claim the bulk of Obamas attention.
Second, Obama does not see the rest of the world as dangerous or threatening to America. He has made it clear by his actions as president that he does not want to engage in a global war against terrorism. The rising power of other nations, creeds, and ideologies, however unsavory, pose no grievous challenge to which the United States must rise. We are not at a Dean Achesonstyle, postWorld War II present at the creation moment. Therefore, Obama reasons, why behave in reactive, outmoded ways when there are many more interesting and pressing domestic projects to nurture?
Obamas America need only be restrained, patient, and deferential.
Read the rest.
Tags: John Bolton
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Wednesday, January 13, 2010, 5:33 AM
Jim Hoft
Obama says Americans have a right to feel inflated.
After nearly destroying the US economy, tripling the national deficit, almost doubling unemployment, lying about openness, pushing radical legislation and constantly bashing his predecessor
Barack Obama told People Magazine that he will focus on uniting the country around common values this coming year.
Puh-leeze.
Barack Obama managed to triple the US deficit in 2009, an achievement most thought impossible.
Now he says he wants to bring the country together.
The AP reported:
President Barack Obama says he has not succeeded in bringing the country together, acknowledging an atmosphere of divisiveness that has washed away the lofty national feeling surrounding his inauguration a year ago.
Thats whats been lost this year
that whole sense of changing how Washington works, Obama said in an interview with People magazine.
The president said his second-year agenda will be refocused on uniting the country around common values, whether were Democrats or Republicans.
The presidents comments came as Republican leaders rallied against the core items of his agenda, from his economic stimulus plan to health care. The mood of the country has remained in a sustained slump, too, as double-digit unemployment followed a campaign built upon hope and change.
Obama said people have every right to feel deflated, because the economy was far worse than any of us expected. But he insisted that his governments economic steps in 2009 are paying off and that people should have confidence in this new year.
So when the president says common values is this some code word for socialism, too?
Wednesday, January 13, 2010, 5:23 AM
Jim Hoft
Its not just Scott Rasmussen, today Quinnipiac reported that Barack Obamas approval rating has slid to 45% among registered voters dead and alive.
Via HotAir:
American voters are split 45 45 percent on whether Barack Obamas first year in office is a success or failure and split 35 37 percent on whether the U.S. would be better off if John McCain had won the 2008 election, according to a new Quinnipiac University poll released today. As he marks the first anniversary of his inauguration, President Obamas approval has slipped slightly into an even 45 45 percent split for the first time.
By a 47 40 percent margin, independent voters rate Obamas first year in office as mainly a failure; 81 percent of Democrats say its a success and 75 percent of Republicans say its a failure. Men say failure 50 40 percent, while women say success 49 40 percent. White voters say failure 54 37 percent, while black voters say success 82 7 percent.
Obama already had the lowest approval of any president at this point in their administration. Now this. It looks like the blind hopey-changers are in for a bumpy ride in the months ahead.
In related news, the White House said their policies strengthened America this past year.
How, by tripling the deficit?
===============================================
Laugh, and he'll club you to death with it...HARD TIMES: Dude With Biggest Penis In The World Is Unemployed.
11,740
posted on
01/14/2010 4:35:18 AM PST
by
backhoe
(All Across America, the Lights are being relit again...)
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