Kathleen Sebelius: Tax Cheat

Barack Obama's Health and Human Services Secretary designate Kathleen Sebelius joins the long list of Democrat tax cheats nominated to high office.

Health and Human Services nominee Kathleen Sebelius has corrected three years worth of tax returns after finding "unintentional errors."

Jon Stewart has new material for his show tonight. No wait! I forgot. The One cannot be the butt of jokes. As he showed last night, he plans to keep finding new ways to blame Bush for everything indefinitely.

Snowiest Winter Ever In Spokane

When Earth Hour arrived Saturday night, a winter storm was raging outside. So, I did not dim my lights and sit around the house in the dark to fight global warming. It turns out that the storm was a record breaker. This is the snowiest winter ever in Spokane, Washington.

Winter season: Snowfall total

* 2008-2009: 93.6 inches

* 1949-1950: 93.5 inches

* 2007-2008: 92.6 inches

* 1974-1975: 89.0 inches

* 1992-1993: 87.3 inches

It turns out that not even Al Gore thought it necessary to dim his own lights.

I have no doubt that Al Gore paid someone else to turn off his lights.

Maxine Waters Exposes The International Jew Banker Conspiracy

AIG And The Democrats' Cheap Populism

I fear that Americans are about to learn to their sorrow that moral exhibitionism and cheap populism make a miserable brew. In its permanent campaign, Team Obama picks a villain of the week and initiates a campaign of outrage and vilification against that target of opportunity, hoping to create the illusion of Obama as a dragon slayer defending ordinary Americans against some domestic evil doer. Last week it was Rush Limbaugh. This week it’s AIG. But these brouhahas are pure smokescreen.

The bonuses that provoked so much chest pounding were announced more than a year ago, long before AIG took a cent of bailout money. The man who wrote the legislation granting AIG its no-strings-attached bailout was Timothy Geithner, the tax cheat whom Obama judged as so indispensible to his Treasury Department that Geithner’s tax evasion was overlooked. One of the outraged is Senator Christopher Dodd (D-Waitress Sandwich), who inserted an amendment into Obama’s porkulus bill that explicitly exempted bonuses from limitations on executive pay. Dodd was the only senator to attract more Wall Street campaign contributions than Barack Obama. And Dodd has been rewarded with extra special low interest rate mortgages from the scandal-ridden Countrywide Financial. He also traded his influence for a sweet deal on an Irish vacation home.

Unfortunately, populist demagoguery sells. And when it’s combined with moral vanity, it traps its users. Honest men would have admitted that those bonuses were AIG’s inescapable contractual obligation. But morally vain men who leap to the podium and run their mouths before informing their grandstanding cannot admit error. And this moral vanity is actually hobbling our government.

During the campaign, Barack Obama harvested a great deal of populist hay by bashing lobbyists. (Disclosure: I have actually been a lobbyist.) Lobbyists are often the only people who actually read the laws and are smart enough to interpret the gibberish for those who vote. Excluding lobbyists from executive appointments deprives government of the most talented and informed candidates.

According to insiders, including Barney Frank (D-Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) who chairs the House Financial Services Committee, Obama’s Treasury Department is terribly understaffed due to the inability of the administration to find even minimally qualified candidates who have paid their taxes for fear that the media will actually report these ethical lapses.

“I think it's a problem, although I will say this - for the media to blame that entirely on the Senate seems to me a little bit self serving,” Frank said. “I mean, the media is the problem here, in part. It is the over-focus on part of people in the media to relatively minor infractions that causes this. I guarantee you my colleagues would not, on their own, be doing this. So I do think we are in a culture now where a lack of perfection exacts too strong a toll, but that's the politicians reacting to the media.”

NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, actually agreed that the media were to blame. “I take your point, Mr. Frank, Mr. Chairman,” she said. "You're right and we plead guilty because this is, this culture right now of ‘gotcha’ has gotten completely out of control.”

When I try to picture any reporter confessing to overzealous scrutiny of a Republican administration, somehow, I can’t. I just lack the imagination.

The same Barack Obama who had pundits swooning for admitting he screwed up with his appointment of Tom Daschle as Secretary of Health and Human Services, now cannot bring himself to confess that his populist campaign proscription against lobbyists left him with too small a talent pool to allow him to staff his administration. An ignorant compulsion for moral exhibitionism drove his demagoguery and now his vanity prevents him from admitting his error and making a correction that would greatly increase the talent pool he can draw on. He might even be able to find someone who pays his taxes.

Democrats invested a great deal into their demonization of the firm Dick Cheney presided over before returning to public service. The oil services giant Halliburton eventually took the hint that it was not welcome in the United States and moved its operations to Dubai. Dubai has made it clear that it would like to become the world’s financial capital. If The One adheres to his populist agenda of limiting Wall Street pay, that talent will take their skills to where they are rewarded.

If A Republican Said Something This Stupid, He'd Be Vice President By Now

No! Wait!

More here.

The first appearance by a sitting president on "The Tonight Show" may well end up being the last.

President Obama, in his taping with Jay Leno Thursday afternoon, attempted to yuk it up with the funnyman, and ended up insulting the disabled.

Towards the end of his approximately 40-minute appearance, the president talked about how he's gotten better at bowling and has been practicing in the White House bowling alley.

He bowled a 129, the president said.

"That's very good, Mr. President," Leno said sarcastically.

It's "like the Special Olympics or something," the president said.

He's just not such a great communicator without his teleprompter telling him what to say.

ACORN's Leftist Thugs At Work For Democrats

The organization that Barack Obama once worked for, and which Obama intends to award much of the census work, and who will be receiving economic "stimulus" money is being exposed for the organized crime outfit that it is. How are these people different from Hitler's blackshirts?

A lawyer for a whistleblower on the activist group ACORN is prepared to tell a House panel Thursday that the group provided liberal causes with protest-for-hire services and coerced donations from the targets of demonstrations through a mob-style "protection" racket.

ACORN called it the "muscle for the money" program, according to prepared testimony Pittsburgh lawyer Heather Heidelbaugh plans to deliver at a hearing of the House Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution, civil rights and civil liberties.

Will the MSM report this?

Christopher Dodd: Liar, Liar, Pants On Fire

Yesterday, Christopher Dodd insisted that he had not inserted an amendment into the porkulus bill that permitted the AIG amendments. Today, he had to confess that he did.

Too bad we can't call him before a tribunal.

P.J. O'Rourke Slices and Dices Barack Hussein Obama On Stem Cells

Essential reading.

" Mr. President, you make a piss poor argument in favor of embarking on what you yourself admit is an uncertain course of action. You say, "At this moment, the full promise of stem cell research remains unknown, and it should not be overstated." And you find it necessary to say, "I can also promise you that we will never undertake this research lightly."

As your reasons for this research--which we are to perform with heavy hearts--you name a few misty hopes: "to regenerate a severed spinal cord," "lift someone from a wheelchair," "spare a child from a lifetime of needles." Then you undercut yourself by introducing a whole new fear. "And we will ensure that our government never opens the door to the use of cloning for human reproduction. It is dangerous, profoundly wrong, and has no place in our society." Because cloning cells to make a human life is so much worse than cloning cells from a human life that's already been destroyed. Why, it's as dangerous, as profoundly wrong, and has as little place in our society as being pro-life.

Mr. President, any high school debate team could do better. Even debate teams from those terrible inner-city public high schools that your ideology demands that you champion no matter how little knowledge they provide. And I particularly enjoyed the part of your speech where you said that "we make decisions based on facts, not ideology."

If The Post-Intelligencer Dies, Will Anyone Notice?

Any day now, the 146 year-old Seattle Post-Intelligencer will close its doors and turn its ink-stained wretches out onto the street with hand lettered signs reading “will transcribe propaganda for food.” On January 9th of this year, the P-I’s parent company, Hearst Corporation, set a 60-day deadline to find a buyer for the paper. If no buyer came forward, the P-I would either shut down or convert to an online only publication. The sand ran out of that hourglass Monday and with no suitors, employees learned that their jobs would end sometime between March 18 and April 1. They were told to submit expense claims and to start cleaning out their desks.

So what doomed this iconic Seattle fish wrap? The Seattle P-I’s ultra leftwing columnist Joel Connelly unintentionally and unknowingly sideswiped the answer when he used his column to ask this ironic question: Once the P-I shuts down its presses, “who will speak truth to power?”

I had to laugh. If there is one reason why the P-I is shuttering its doors, it is precisely because it would not speak truth to power. The Seattle P-I never strayed from the mainstream media orthodoxy. To speak truth to power the P-I would have had to take issue with itself.

Whether it is newspapers, television news, news magazines, Hollywood movies or late night television comedians, there exists a herd mentality that the the P-I blended into seamlessly. The P-I almost never reported news or composed an opinion that strayed from leftwing orthodoxy. When the P-I shuts down, Seattle will become a one-newspaper town with only the Seattle Times littering porches.

The Seattle Times and the Seattle P-I shared online resources. When one does a story search on their servers, unless specified, the search returns results from both papers. When one searches for news stories that put Democrats in an unfavorable light, such as the numerous ethical scandals swirling around a number of top Congressional Democrats, one will always get more hits returned from the Seattle Times than from the Seattle P-I. Often no hits are returned from the P-I. Trust me.

No one would mistake the Seattle Times as a right wing publication. But its contrast with the P-I is startling. And the Seattle Times seems to be doing just fine. I’ve heard nothing about the Times being in financial difficulty. Could it be that the Times out-competed the P-I because it distinguished itself, however slightly, from the herd mentality that the P-I ran with?

Just this past week, there were a number of fairly important stories that the P-I did not find fit for its subscribers to read. For example, P-I readers know nothing of the appointment and withdrawal of Charles Freeman as chairman of Barack Obama’s National Intelligence Council. Charles Freeman is both an anti-Semite and an apologist for the brutal communist Chinese regime. In 2006, in reference to the bloody Chinese crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square 20 years ago, Freeman wrote that, “The truly unforgivable mistake of the Chinese authorities was the failure to intervene on a timely basis to nip the demonstrations in the bud.” After all, it was not, “acceptable for any country to allow the heart of its national capital to be occupied by dissidents intent on disrupting the normal functions of government, however appealing to foreigners their propaganda may be.”

Oh really? What does Freeman think about demonstrations in the US capital?

When he withdrew his nomination, he dipped deep into the anti-Israel propaganda that the Saudis paid him to spread when he blamed the Jews. In his view the Israel lobby has enforced “an inability of the American public to discuss, or the government to consider, any option for U.S. policies in the Middle East opposed by the ruling faction in Israeli politics.”

Would the P-I have found column space in its pages if a Republican administration had nominated someone with such extreme views to serve as the intelligence gatekeeper to the president?

We all know the answer to that. And we all know the reason why. Rather than exhibit the courage to distinguish itself, the P-I sought the shelter and comfort that comes with traveling in a herd. In the end, the P-I was nothing more than the print edition of MSNBC.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer will not be missed. Its passing will barely be noticed because rarely did anything appear in the P-I that could not be found just about everywhere else in the mainstream news media.

International Jew Banker Conspiracy Claims Another

Charles Freeman blames the Joos for his downfall.

What's striking about the charges by Mr. Freeman and like-minded conspiracy theorists is their blatant disregard for such established facts. Mr. Freeman darkly claims that "it is not permitted for anyone in the United States" to describe Israel's nefarious influence. But several of his allies have made themselves famous (and advanced their careers) by making such charges -- and no doubt Mr. Freeman himself will now win plenty of admiring attention. Crackpot tirades such as his have always had an eager audience here and around the world. The real question is why an administration that says it aims to depoliticize U.S. intelligence estimates would have chosen such a man to oversee them.

Of course, in the interest of being fair and balance, the Post's Walter Pincus seems to think that there is some merit to Freeman's paranoia.

The withdrawal of a senior intelligence adviser after an online campaign to prevent him from taking office has ignited a debate over whether powerful pro-Israel lobbying interests are exercising outsize influence over who serves in the Obama administration.

Scientists Bioengineer Giant Sentient Crabs

What could go wrong?

Experts Agree Giant, Razor-Clawed Bioengineered Crabs Pose No Threat

Who's Really To Blame For the Mortgage Meltdown

Democrats can blame parties and derivatives all they want, and the mainstream news media will do all they can to facilitate the lies. And so, since the news media won't tell the truth, I'll let the Democrats hang themselves.

Democrat Opponents Of Scientific Inquiry

Geologist Dr. David Gee, chairman of the science committee of the 2008 International Geological Congress, asked a very pertinent question recently: “For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming? For how many years must cooling go on?”
The mainstream media narrative, as dictated to them by such luminaries as Al Gore and Roseanne Barr, dictates that anthropogenic global warming is “settled science,” and that no serious scientist disagrees. As CNN’s ever vigilant and unbiased reporter Miles O’Brian phrased it, “The scientific debate is over,” and that skeptics “are bought and paid for by the fossil fuel industry, usually.” That’s only true if you cover your ears, your eyes and your mouth like the little monkeys who hear, see and speak no evil. There’s a reason why Al Gore will only take the stage alone and refuses debate invitations.
According to atmospheric scientist Stanley B, Goldenberg, the debate isn’t over. “It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don’t buy into anthropogenic global warming,” he said. Goldenberg serves in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Hurricane Research Division.
Time Magazine perhaps summed up the mainstream news media’s narrative that Democrats are guided by science while Republicans are anti-scientific: “By picking Steven Chu — who shared the 1997 prize in physics for his work trapping atoms with lasers — as his candidate for energy secretary, Barack Obama looks to turn the tide on a government bureaucracy that under the Bush Administration often minimized the importance of scientific expertise.”
But this is pure bunk. The ideological left is virulently anti-science when it comes to such matters as nuclear energy, genetically modified crops and, of course, the dismal science of economics.
Ivar Giaever can match Stephen Chu’s scientific credentials. Like Dr. Chu, Ivar Giaever is a Nobel Laureate in physics. He recently insisted that, “Global warming has become a new religion,” and declared himself, “a skeptic” of the new faith. He has company. In 2008 a Senate minority report cited 650 fully credentialed atmospheric scientists who disagreed with the pop culture’s scientific certainty. Anti-science?
And there are a great many other highly credentialed physicists and scientists who dissent from global warming orthodoxy. The often-cited United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) did not reach its conclusion unanimously. And it’s worth noting that it was an intergovernmental panel, with its scientific representatives chosen by governments. If there is one principle that most governments agree upon, it is that they should exert ever more power over their subjects. And the only anthropogenic global warming solutions seriously considered by these governments all have the effect of tightening governments’ grip on their people. It’s reasonable to suspect that IPCC scientists were chosen to represent government interests rather than scientific integrity.
It’s ironic that the supposedly scientifically grounded left embraces global warming models that fail to predict atmospheric behavior and ignore models that demonstrate the economic non-viability of such nonsensical alternative energy solutions as wind power and corn ethanol.
The disappearance of global warming finally caught the attention of the Discovery Channel. Climate modeler Kyle Swanson, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison notes: “This is nothing like anything we've seen since 1950. Cooling events since then had firm causes, like eruptions or large-magnitude La Ninas. This current cooling doesn't have one.”
Those of us with more than a few tree rings recall that 1950 ushered in a period of global cooling that atmospheric scientists insisted was the imminent herald of an ice age.
A report issued by the Japanese Society of Energy and Resources (JSER) ridiculed the pop science conventional wisdom regarding anthropogenic global warming in remarkably harsh terms. The JSER is a panel of scientists that advises the Japanese government on issues of energy and resources. Panelist Kanya Kusano, Program Director and Group Leader for the Earth Simulator at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science & Technology, dismisses anthropogenic global warming models as the modern day equivalent of “ancient astrology.”
I have spent my entire adult life as a scientist. A central scientific principle states that, when data conflicts with a hypothesis, it is the hypothesis that is at fault. To argue otherwise, or to stifle debate, is quintessential anti-science.

Obama Really Could Save Millions of Jobs

Barack Obama boasts that his economic programs will create or save 4 million jobs. He could accomplish that by simply dropping one item off his agenda - card check.

Card check would allow union thugs to intimidate workers and force them to join trade unions. According to this study, if unions get their way, millions of jobs will be lost.

America’s unemployment rate could top 10 percent under the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), if it boosts union membership as much as some supporters have predicted, according to a new economic study.

Every three percentage point gain in union membership would be accompanied by a one percentage point increase in the unemployment rate the following year, said Dr. Anne Layne-Farrar , who conducted the study.

She is an economist with LECG, a non-partisan Chicago-based economic consulting group.

Proponents of EFCA say union membership would grow by 1.5 million members every year over the next 10 to 15 years under EFCA.

But EFCA opponents point to the new study to back their argument that EFCA will hurt the economy.

“Job losses attributable to the passage of the employee free choice act in that respect would be equal to the entire population of the city of Boston,” said Phil Miscamarra, a legal counsel with the Alliance to Save Main Street Jobs.

A 1.5 million member increase would “lead to the loss of 600,000 jobs by the end of the following year,” he said.