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CNBC just cut to Barack Obama talking extemporaneously following the failure of the Bailout Bill to pass congress. What a great example of the "empty suit"... I can only paraphrase "Let's remember how we got here! Greed... Failure of the regulators!"

Things are supposed to be looking rosy for Democrats this November. But in case Barack Obama loses the Presidency, an excuse is all ready to go: America's too racist to elect a black man. Not even, in his Vice Presidential pick Joe Biden's inimitable description, one so "articulate and bright and clean." This narrative has gained traction with the Democratic Presidential candidate's recent setbacks in the polls. We hear it from the convention crowd in Denver and liberals in the press. The older, poorer, white, often Hillary voter who sounds ambivalent about the Obama coronation is an enticing scapegoat. "Call...

There are several kinds of Washington memoirs: “I Reveal the Honest Truth,” a kiss-up-and-tell designed to settle scores (nod to honesty optional). “I Was There at the Start,” designed to make the author appear to be the linchpin of history. And, most tedious: “I Knew It Was a Terrible Mistake, but I Didn’t Mention It Until I Got a Book Contract.” Scott McClellan’s memoir is the latest entry in the latter genre. Among his far-too-late admissions, President Bush’s former spokesman reveals that he knew the war in Iraq was “a serious strategic blunder,” but the White House decided the best...

Stigma can be a powerful force in changing behavior. Just ask smokers, whose once accepted habit is now so marginalized that the prevalence of smoking has dropped to about 19 percent of U.S. adults from nearly 24 percent just a decade ago. A lot of factors figured into the decline since smoking's mid-20th-century peak, but the sense that smoking is disgusting as well as unhealthful and socially costly has certainly contributed to many people's decision to quit. Now that smokers have been taken care of, the obese are the new scapegoats for a lot of our ills. Last week, a...

Jim Wilson/New York Times A cleanup crew collects oil-fouled sand Monday on Rodeo Beach in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area in San Francisco. As oil spill cleanup continued Monday on the San Francisco Bay, state Senate Leader Don Perata rebuked Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for undermining the state agency charged with spill response. Perata, D-Oakland, seized upon a 2005 state audit that determined the Office of Spill Prevention and Response, or OSPR, was understaffed despite having a funding surplus. He said the situation has hindered the agency's ability to deter oil spills in advance and react quickly when disasters...

High winds and bureaucratic wrangling kept much needed firefighting aircraft on the ground this week, but whom to blame seemed murkier Thursday than the skies above Southern California. Some legislators accused federal fire officials and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of making a slow-footed response followed by fast dancing and photo ops. Schwarzenegger called the criticism "a bunch of nonsense." But one federal legislator was poised to call for congressional hearings. "We'll wait until the smoke clears until I start raising hell," said Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Huntington Beach. "We need to put people under oath to find out whether a lack of...

...On Tuesday evening, MSNBC's Don Abrams set up an interview with California Congressman Duncan Hunter (R-Cal.) thusly: But the fire storms in California`s raising tough questions about what the National Guard is extended too much to handle emergencies at home. Back in May, before the fire started, "The San Francisco Chronicle" reported that the California National Guard was down a billion dollars worth of equipment. Two hundred and nine vehicles in Iraq, including 110 humvees and 63 military trucks. According to report the California guard should have had 39 diesel generators on hand. They say it had none. The Kansas...

In a withering critique of his fellow Republicans, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan says in his memoir that the party to which he has belonged all his life deserved to lose power last year for forsaking its small-government principles. In "The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World," published by Penguin Press, Mr. Greenspan criticizes both congressional Republicans and President George W. Bush for abandoning fiscal discipline. The book is scheduled for public release Monday. The Wall Street Journal bought a copy at a bookstore in the New York area. Mr. Greenspan, who calls himself a "lifelong libertarian...

The most important thing to remember about the drowning of New Orleans is that it wasn't a natural disaster. It was a man-made disaster, created by lousy engineering, misplaced priorities and pork-barrel politics. Katrina was not the Category 5 killer the Big Easy had always feared; it was a Category 3 storm that missed New Orleans, where it was at worst a weak 2. The city's defenses should have withstood its surges, and if they had we never would have seen the squalor in the Superdome, the desperation on the rooftops, the shocking tableau of the Mardi Gras city underwater...

"How long will it take," I thought, as I watched the coverage of the collapsed bridge outside of Minneapolis, "before someone blames President George W. Bush?" It turns out, not long. As divers attempted to locate possible victims submerged in the murky waters of the Mississippi, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.) said, "I think we should look at this tragedy that occurred as a wake-up call for us. We have -- all over the country -- crumbling infrastructure, highways, bridges, dams, and we really need to take a hard look at this." Calling it "the right thing to...

In three weeks, a coast attorney will walk into the Gulfport federal courthouse and argue that since his research indicates oil companies contributed to global warming, they contributed to Katrina's devastation. The class action lawsuit was filed by Gerald Maples. In the past, Maples successfully took on asbestos producers. Now, the coast attorney is suing 26 oil companies for what he contends was their role in fueling Hurricane Katrina's wicked punch.

MINNEAPOLIS (Reuters) - Politicians trying to account for one of the worst bridge collapses in U.S. history cast blame ranging from engineering faults to the Iraq war on Friday, while divers tried to reach the bodies of more victims in the Mississippi River's treacherous waters. As investigators probed Wednesday's collapse that killed at least five people, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty said outside experts would review the decisions of state engineers to shore up problems with the heavily-traveled 40-year-old bridge in central Minneapolis. Engineers had decided to periodically inspect the steel superstructure beneath the Interstate 35W bridge and bolt on reinforcing...

The media waited less than 17 hours after the tragic bridge collapse before pointing fingers. At least one U.S. Senator, Patty Murray, seemed to blame Bush when she said yesterday that the Bush Administration has not supported Democrat efforts to increase spending on critical infrastructure. One of the problems here is that in so many instances a Democrat demand for infrastructure spending is merely a thinly disguised attempt to funnel money to construction unions as thanks for electoral and financial support. Nick Coleman at the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune says that this collapse never would have happened if it wasn't...

THE BLAME GAME BEGINS The media waited less than 17 hours after the tragic bridge collapse before pointing fingers. At least one U.S. Senator, Patty Murray, seemed to blame Bush when she said yesterday that the Bush Administration has not supported Democrat efforts to increase spending on critical infrastructure. One of the problems here is that in so many instances a Democrat demand for infrastructure spending is merely a thinly disguised attempt to funnel money to construction unions as thanks for electoral and financial support. Nick Coleman at the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune says that this collapse never would have...

Government: Bodies hadn't even been pulled out of the river in the Minneapolis bridge collapse before President Bush was being blamed. But sticking it to Bush is infantile. Civic priorities are what need re-examination. As a matter of fact, the president cannot repair every pothole or monitor the soundness of every bridge in the U.S. at the federal, state and local level. Would anyone really want a federal government that was that all-powerful and controlling? But that doesn't seem to matter when a failure occurs, as horrifically happened with the Interstate 35W bridge collapse in urban Minneapolis on Wednesday. Already...

The Senate's No. 2 Democrat says he knew that the American public was being misled into the Iraq war but remained silent because he was sworn to secrecy as a member of the intelligence committee.

The "Palestinian" Contributions to Humanity 1) Commit the crimes on your own kids (human bombs, human shields) and always blame the Zionist victim. 2) How to united the Arab world, bring about "Dead Arab kids", Hezbollah picked up on that very fast. 3) The bastion of (fake) excuse for Islamists' crimes against humanity. 4) The phenomenon of "brown" Arabs Kissing up to "white" Hitler, Hitlerists, never mind what one wishes the other. 5) Inventing big drama words, such as "apartheid", "racism" for those daring to stand up against Racist, Fascist terrorists. 6) The lucky invention of the 1960's, One of the 21...

Arizona Builds Moonbat 9/11 Memorial Have Your Duct Tape Handy Before Reading this Story By Leon H Wolf Posted in Liberals — Comments (0) / Email this page » / Leave a comment » This is one of those stories that is so outrageous that you almost assume it's fake - but in this case, there are pictures, so I'm going to go ahead and operate on the assumption that it's true. First things first, I came across this story at the indispensible Ace of Spades HQ (be advised: Ace does not have a no-profanity policy), and he's got...

China and WHO play blame game over bird flu by Cindy Sui 2 hours, 1 minute ago China's agriculture ministry has said the United States was to blame for the fact that it had not yet shared bird flu virus samples, but the WHO put the blame squarely on the ministry. The samples could potentially save lives by helping global scientists study how the deadly avian influenza virus is changing, so they can come up with drugs and vaccines and prepare for a pandemic. Samples are usually given to a laboratory designated by the World Health Organization, which does research...

Stop blaming everything on the president, OK? BY JONAH GOLDBERG JonahsColumn@aol.com Lord knows I have my problems with President Bush. He taps the federal coffers like a monkey smacking the bar for another cocaine pellet in an addiction study. Some of his sentences give me the same sensation as falling backward in one of those ''trust'' exercises, in which you just have to hope things work out. Yes, the Iraq invasion has gone badly, and to deny this is to suggest that Bush meant for things to turn out this way, which is even crueler than saying he failed to...