Ron Paul's Seat In Jeopardy

He seems to have contracted a case of Ted Kennedy entitlement syndrome. Hey buddy! It's not your seat. It's the people's seat.

Pelosi Losing Obamacare Votes

She might not be able to get anything through the House.

“The concern among Democrats right now is that there are more yes votes reconsidering than no votes,” said David Wasserman, who tracks House races for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. “My sense is that for Democrats to pass this bill, they would have to convince several members who are already in serious jeopardy, even after voting no on the first health care bill, to put passage of the bill ahead of their own chances of being competitive in the fall.”

But politicians do not want to be martyrs. They want to hold onto their seats.

Ms. Pelosi is facing resistance from some of her most senior members, like Representative Ike Skelton, Democrat of Missouri and chairman of the Armed Services Committee. He has been in office since 1977, but is facing his toughest re-election challenge in years.

Mr. Skelton says he does not see any improvements in the measure that would cause him to vote in favor of it; like Mr. Kratovil, he favors a smaller, less ambitious bill. “It would be a lot easier,” he said, “if we cut this back to basics — take two or three or four issues on which everyone agrees and build on it.”

Can Obama Tell The Truth About Anything?

This reminds me of two of Slick Willie's more extravagant whoppers. Once Bill Clinton claimed that the had been troubled in his youth by black churches being burned in Arkansas. Didn't happen. In another he claimed that a friend of his had sold a gun to a man who used it in a mass murder.

And now Barack Hussein Obama is telling a story about an experience he had with his automobile insurance company that is frankly, impossible.

Obama: "You know, when I was -- when I was young, just got out of college, I had to buy auto insurance. I had a beat-up old car. And I won't name the name of the insurance company, but there was a company, let's call it Acme Insurance in -- in Illinois. And I was paying my premiums every month. After about six months I got rear-ended, and I called up Acme and said, "You know, I'd like to see if I can get my car repaired." And they laughed at me over the phone.

Because really, this was set up not to actually provide insurance, what it was set up was to meet the legal requirements. But it really wasn't serious insurance.

Now, it's one thing if you got an old beat-up car that you can't get fixed. It's another thing if your kid is sick or you've got breast cancer."

How Smart Do You Have To Be To Rise High In The Democratic Party?

Not very.


Watch CBS News Videos Online

Get Ready For Anthropogenic Plate Tectonics

The network of Obama is trying to make the case that earthquakes are getting more powerful and more frequent.

I expect Nancy Pelosi to announce a new tax scheme to save the planet.

It's All About The O

Or, President Zero if you prefer.

TEA Party Held To Unreasonable Standards

Dianne Capps’ story should be a cautionary tale for all TEA Party activists. At the Asotin TEA party rally a couple of weeks ago, Ms Capps made what she believed was a clever allusion to the movie Lonesome Dove. She laughingly said that US Senator Patty Murray should be hung. It was clumsy, but no reasonable person seeing the video could seriously believe that Ms Capps was actually trying to incite a lynch mob. But that’s the impression that those who feel threatened by the TEA party are trying to promote.

If you have 10,000 TEA partiers at a demonstration and one person shows up with a sign that might be interpreted as racist, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times and the Washington Post will all highlight that one sign and use it to smear the entire movement. It’s not hard to imagine media-savvy leftists infiltrating a rally with just such a sign knowing full well the prominence it will be given. And so what happened to Dianne Capps should have been predictable.

To gain a sense for just how threatening elite opinion finds the TEA party, one need only look at the news media treatment of Joe Stack, the anti-IRS kamikaze pilot who rammed his plane into an IRS office in Austin, Texas. Even though he left behind as a suicide note a manifesto that could have been plagiarized from a Nancy Pelosi speech, he was assumed to be a TEA Partier. According to New York Magazine, “a lot of his rhetoric could have been taken directly from a handwritten sign at a Tea Party rally.” The Washington Post’s Jonathon Capehart said that he was “struck by how [Stack's] alienation is similar to that we’re hearing from the extreme elements of the Tea Party movement.”

This stuff sticks. One of the dimmer bulbs in the Washington State Legislature is Geoff Simpson (D-47th District). He cited both of the above news stories when he claimed that Joe Stack was a TEA Party activist: “I don't think it's patriotic to fly airplanes into buildings as one of your tea party members recently did.”

This is how elite opinion works. When Gregory Girard was arrested on explosives charges in Massachusetts, it quickly got out that he was a TEA party member and a Sarah Palin fan. Amy Bishop, the woman arrested for shooting up a faculty meeting at the University of Alabama at Huntsville was reportedly a fanatical Barack Obama fan. But I’ve not yet seen her described in a headline as “Obama Supporter Amy Bishop.”

Until it was conclusively proven to be a suicide, TEA Partiers were accused of responsibility for the death of a census worker in Tennessee. He wrote the word “FED” on his own chest and hanged himself. That was enough for TEA Party enemies to attack the whole movement.

This is not an evenly applied standard. There are Democratic members of Congress who believe that Ronald Reagan peddled crack cocaine in black neighborhoods to raise money for the anti-communist insurgency in Nicaragua. Members of Congress accused Ronald Reagan of creating the AIDS virus in a laboratory for the specific purpose of exterminating African-Americans and homosexuals. A former Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives initiated an investigation into the crackpot accusation that George Bush the Elder had, in 1980 while Jimmy Carter was still president, boarded a CIA-operated SR-71 spy plane and flown to Iran to convince the mullahs to hold American hostages prisoner until after the 1980 election. The last two series of Democratic primary presidential debates featured a congressman whose agenda includes outlawing space based mind control weapons. A former frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination and the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee once said that it was entirely reasonable for people to suspect that George Bush the Younger was complicit in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Every single one of the people mentioned above either holds or did hold a prominent position in the Democratic Party. And yet not one of these idiots is ever held up as an example of what a collection of nutcases composes the Democratic Party.

Dianne Capps’ faux pas is already being exploited by the Senator she would like to retire. Murray’s campaign is using video of Capps’ comments to raise campaign cash. Don’t give ammunition to your enemy.

Divide, Conquer, and Bankrupt

Obama's plan for America.

Sen. Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican and personal friend of President Obama’s, on Saturday took a highly public stand against the president’s health care plan and against his intentions to “ram” a bill through Congress, warning that such a move will “divide and bankrupt America.”

Coburn, chosen as the Republican lawmaker to deliver the party’s regular weekend address to the nation, cautioned Obama against supporting the use of “reconciliation,” a legislative maneuver Democrats could execute to pass a bill through the Senate with 51 votes instead of the 60 usually required to overcome a filibuster.

Krugman's Wife Writes His Entire Column

When Paul Krugman's rhetoric is insufficiently hateful and bitter, his wife corrects his column and adds her own vitriol.

When he has a draft, he gives it to Wells to edit. Early on, she edited a lot--she had, they felt, a better sense than he did of how to communicate economics to the layperson. (She is also an economist—they met when she was a postdoc at M.I.T. and he was teaching there.) But he's much better at that now, and these days she focusses on making him less dry, less abstract, angrier. Recently, he gave her a draft of an article he'd done for Rolling Stone. He had written, "As Obama tries to deal with the crisis, he will get no help from Republican leaders," and after this she inserted the sentence "Worse yet, he'll get obstruction and lies." . .

She must have written every word of this column.

If we’re lucky, Thursday’s summit will turn out to have been the last act in the great health reform debate, the prologue to passage of an imperfect but nonetheless history-making bill. If so, the debate will have ended as it began: with Democrats offering moderate plans that draw heavily on past Republican ideas, and Republicans responding with slander and misdirection.

Nobody really expected anything different. But what was nonetheless revealing about the meeting was the fact that Republicans — who had weeks to prepare for this particular event, and have been campaigning against reform for a year — didn’t bother making a case that could withstand even minimal fact-checking.

Krugman (or his wife) seems determined to embarrass the Nobel Committee that bestowed a prize on this nitwit.

It was obvious how things would go as soon as the first Republican speaker, Senator Lamar Alexander, delivered his remarks. He was presumably chosen because he’s folksy and likable and could make his party’s position sound reasonable. But right off the bat he delivered a whopper, asserting that under the Democratic plan, “for millions of Americans, premiums will go up.”

The problem with Kruman's' story is that nothing was made up. Alexander was reading from the Congressional Budget Office report.

David Paterson - A Scandal Too Far

Had he known what was good for him, he would have taken Obama's advice to get out early. Instead, the Chicago thugocracy went for the kneecaps.

Howard Dean Calls The TEA Party Racist

Has this man ever had an original thought in his life?

In a speech Wednesday night at the George Washington University, Howard Dean told College Democrats that “the Tea Party is about a generation who grew up in an America where everyone looked like them” and implied that the movement is hostile to President Obama because of his race.

Dean, a former governor of Vermont and chairman of the Democratic National Committee from 2005 to 2009, is not the first Democrat to make such a claim. Former President Jimmy Carter told students at Emory University last year: “I think people who are guilty of that kind of personal attack against Obama have been influenced to a major degree by a belief that he should not be president because he happens to be African American.” Actress and activist Janeane Garofalo put it more bluntly: “The functionally retarded adults, the racists — with their cries of, ‘I want my country back’ … you know what they’re really saying is, ‘I want my white guy back.’”

Obamacare Is A Ponzi Scheme We Can't Afford

The look on Obama's face tells me that he wasn't expecting a substantive conversation. This is what's is known as "staring daggers."

Joe Biden And The Peter Principle

The Peter Principle states that an individual will rise in an organization until he reaches his level of incompetence. Joe Biden has found his comfort zone.

“It’s easy being vice president — you don’t have to do anything.”

And, you don't have to know anything either.

Phony Growth Not Likely Sustainable

Last quarter's growth spurt is not expected to last.

The economy rocketed ahead at a 5.9 percent pace at the end of 2009, stronger than first estimated. But the growth spurt isn't expected to carry over into this year.

The Commerce Department's new reading was better than its initial estimate of 5.7 percent growth. Economists had predicted the updated reading would stay the same.

Still, the upgrade didn't change the expectation of slower economic activity in the current quarter.

Most of the fourth quarter's growth came from a burst of manufacturing—but not because consumer demand was especially strong. In fact, consumer spending weakened.

Charlie Rangel's A Crook

Not even his own party could gag down his behavior.

Facing potential midterm election losses and a stuck-in-the-mud legislative program, Democrats can now add to their worries the ethics problems of chief House tax writer Rep. Charles Rangel.

The House ethics committee accused Rangel on Thursday of accepting corporate money for trips to Caribbean conferences in violation of House rules. The committee said it couldn’t determine whether Rangel knew about the financing, but found that his staff did — and concluded Rangel was responsible for learning the truth.

Ironically, as the ethics committee was finalizing its report, the New York Democrat was attending President Barack Obama’s bipartisan summit in an attempt to rescue the party’s health care bill.

Rangel’s case is certain to raise questions of whether the 20-term lawmaker, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, can retain his post in an election year.

The Ways and Means chairmanship is especially important this year, when Democrats are trying to overhaul the nation’s health care system and Congress has to decide what to do about billions of dollars in tax cuts Americans at every income level have enjoyed for a decade — but are due to expire in December.

If this was Rangel’s only ethics problem, it might not be crippling to Democrats. But still looming is a much larger ethics investigation. That one is focusing in part on Rangel’s use of official stationery to raise money for a college center in his name; and his belated financial disclosure of hundreds of thousands of dollars in previously unreported assets and income.

The unreported assets included a federal credit union account worth between $250,001 and $500,000; a Merrill Lynch account valued between $250,000 and $500,000; tens of thousands of dollars in municipal bonds and $30,000 to $100,000 in rent from a multifamily brownstone building in New York.

Global Warm Mongerers Under Scrutiny

The Global Warming Industrial Complex will now have its data independently reviewed.

World weather agencies agreed this week to enhance data-gathering significantly and allow independent scrutiny of raw figures used in assessing climate change amid charges by critics that global warming scientific data were skewed.

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) made the concession after an outcry over e-mails revealing that researchers in Britain had suppressed certain data to bolster claims of global warming. Critics also said some of the manipulated data were included in a 2007 U.N. report on the subject.

Unless this means that all raw data is available to everybody, without editing, massaging or selection, it's not enough. Data should be made available in real time to anybody, not just selected "experts."

Obama Supporter Amy Bishop's Earlier Killing To Be Reinvestigated

Amy Bishop has a history of killing people. She killed her brother in 1986. But her politically connected mother convinced the district attorney to quash the investigation and Amy dearest walked. That district attorney in now a congressman, William Delahunt (D) of Massachusetts. And now,that earlier killing is being re-investigated. No wonder Delahunt is pondering retirement.

A Massachusetts prosecutor ordered an inquest Thursday into the fatal shooting of Amy Bishop’s brother, saying there are new questions about whether it was the accident that investigators concluded at the time.

The handling of the case has been under scrutiny since Dr. Bishop, a neuroscientist, was accused of killing three faculty colleagues on Feb. 12 in a shooting at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

In announcing the inquest, William R. Keating, the Norfolk district attorney, revealed that investigators recently examined a photograph taken of Dr. Bishop’s bedroom shortly after her brother’s death in 1986 and enlarged it. They found a newspaper article that described someone killing a relative with a shotgun and then stealing a getaway car from a car dealership.

Dr. Bishop, then 21, shot and killed her brother, Seth, 18, with her father’s 12-gauge shotgun at their Braintree home. She then went to a car dealership and tried to commandeer a car, the police said. After her arrest, she told the police that the weapon had accidentally discharged.

I find it interesting that nowhere in the New York Times story does the name of that earlier district attorney appear.

Harry Reid's Math Worse Than Obama's

Obama continues to cling bitterly to his clearly ridiculous claim of having "created or saved" a couple of million jobs. But even his exaggerations pale in comparison to Harry Reid's.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has promised the $15 billion jobs bill the Senate passed yesterday will create or save more than 1 million jobs. If Senator Reid’s math is correct, the $500 billion stimulus package the Democrats passed last January should have created or saved more than 25 millions jobs. But not even the White House, which is hardly shy about touting the success of the Recovery Act, would dare float such an ambitious projection.

Once again, the senator from Dimlight, Nevada embarrasses his party.

Obama Stabs Great Britain In The Back

Is this what Hillary calls "smart diplomacy?"

Washington refused to endorse British claims to sovereignty over the Falkland Islands yesterday as the diplomatic row over oil drilling in the South Atlantic intensified in London, Buenos Aires and at the UN.

Despite Britain’s close alliance with the US, the Obama Administration is determined not to be drawn into the issue. It has also declined to back Britain’s claim that oil exploration near the islands is sanctioned by international law, saying that the dispute is strictly a bilateral issue.

Republicans Know More About Obamacare Than Obama

Obamacare The Chicago Way

Bipartisanship?



"I won."

Olbermann Calls Obama A Ghoul, A Fiend, A Subhuman

And damns him to hell.

Here is Obama describing how his death panels would be composed.

"I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place. It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that’s part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance."

Obama Rewards Another Donor

With $150 million of your money.

The Obama administration has steered up to $150 million in federal funding for the development and production of an anthrax vaccine to a bio-defense firm with strong Democratic Party ties, Fox News has learned.

The move comes in spite of President Obama’s long history of pledges to crack down on the awarding of federal contracts without competitive bidding, and just as a federal commission led by two former U.S. senators has given the Obama administration a failing grade on shoring up the nation’s bio-defenses.

Obama Supporter Amy Bishop Planned Biological Weapon

Did Amy Bishop plant a herpes bomb?

News reports suggest that Amy Bishop, the biology professor who shot six of her colleagues at the University of Alabama-Huntsville on Feb. 12, may also have planted a "herpes bomb" in the building where she worked.

Those Obama supporters are dangerous people.

Arlen Specter's Brilliant Foreign Policy Initiative

A beer summit with Israelis and Syrians.

At a Capitol Hill hearing on Wednesday, Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) suggested that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad be invited to the White House for a meeting with President Barack Obama and the Israeli leadership. Specter also suggested that such a “nudge” might entice the Syrian dictator to return to peace negotiations with Israel.

Sure. Why not? Obama's arts of persuasian have worked so well with climate summits, Olympic committees and such

Obama Stops Pretending On Health Care Cost Containment

Wasn't that what it was supposed to be all about - curve bending and all that happy horse crap?

At Thursday’s health summit, President Barack Obama is almost certain to highlight the importance of reining in skyrocketing health care costs.

But in his own health care bill, it’s a different story.

Obama has put off a tax on high-cost health plans until 2018 — long after he’s out of office, even if he’s a two-termer. And in doing so, he’s essentially neutered the last significant Democratic push to control health costs.

When Obama launched his health care project, the case for reform rested on two pillars. One was helping people who had no insurance or were otherwise struggling with the current system. The other was taking dramatic steps to halt the growth in costs. As the debate lurches toward a close, the emphasis in Obama’s plan now rests overwhelmingly on the first pillar — with only the most modest and preliminary measures being embraced for cost control.

“They thought [the tax] was a major part of their ability to slow the growth in private-sector premiums. And now, at least until after 2017, it doesn’t look like they will bend the cost curve,” said Ken Thorpe, an Emory University professor and Democratic health policy adviser.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0210/33468.html#ixzz0gYeD1grD

Only 25% Of Americans Want Obamacare

Cratering.

Americans seem to know something that Democrats don't.

A recent CBS News/New York Times Poll, conducted February 5-10, finds that Americans may be running out of patience when it comes to reforming health care – a sentiment President Obama hopes to change with a bipartisan health care summit on Thursday.

The poll, taken before the president unveiled his health care proposal earlier this week, gives the president his lowest marks on handling health care to date. Nearly half (48 percent) of Americans say he has spent too much time on the issue, and increased economic concerns have led to a majority (53 percent) that now say the U.S. cannot afford to fix health care at this time.

How Stupid Do You Have To Be To Work For MSNBC?

I used to think that you had to be as stupid as Keith Olbermann. But David Schuster is setting a new standard that might be out of Keith Olbermann's reach.

Bipartisanship!

Anthony Weiner sets the tone for Obama bipartisan healthcare show.

Suddenly, The Patriot Act Is A Good Idea

The overwhelmingly Democrat senate extended it without even a debate.

The Senate voted Wednesday to extend for a year key provisions of the nation's counterterrorism surveillance law that are scheduled to expire at the end of the month. In agreeing to pass the bill, Senate Democrats retreated from adding new privacy protections to the USA Patriot Act.

The Senate approved the bill on a voice vote with no debate. It now goes to the House.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2010/02/24/national/w162532S62.DTL&tsp=1#ixzz0gYZ0RZEC

John McCain Doesn't Understand Why Reid Attacks Him

John McCain is a muddle headed old man. This is pathetic.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Wednesday he is confused about his relationship with Harry Reid (D-Nev.), noting that the majority leader has a habit of lambasting him one day and praising him the next.

In an interview with The Hill, McCain said, “It’s very confusing because he was very personal in his attacks on me during the [2008 presidential] campaign, and then occasionally he’ll stand up on the floor of the Senate and say, ‘Oh, this good guy McCain.’ I don’t understand this. I don’t understand it.”

Maybe it's because Harry Reid is a left wing partisan asshole? Ya think?

Obama Cutting Homeland Security

Is cutting the Coast Guard really all that smart?

President Barack Obama's pick to lead the Coast Guard wants to make major cuts to the agency's counterterrorism mission over the next five years.

An internal memo from Vice Admiral Robert J. Papp Jr., Obama's nominee to become Coast Guard commandant, says that starting in 2012, he would slash funding for programs in the agency's homeland security plan, including patrols and training exercises.

The memo, marked "sensitive — for internal Coast Guard use only," was obtained by The Associated Press.

Papp's outline is significant because it could mean major changes for the more than 200-year-old agency that took on substantial homeland security duties after Sept. 11, 2001. Obama's 2011 proposed budget cuts for the Coast Guard have already caused outrage from some lawmakers.

Plus, there are plans to reduce anti-drug smuggling operations.

The Obama plan. More drugs. More smuggling. Open shores for terrorists.

Are Congressional Democrats Just UAW Sock Puppets?

Yep.

Democrats have been telling us for decades that special interest money corrupts politics, and that is why we must have the federal government regulating campaign finance through the Federal Election Commission. I guess money corrupts politics, unless its Democratic recipients of the money from special interests like the UAW.

More here.

What Really Has Democrats Pissed Off At Evan Bayh

He told the truth.

In explaining his decision not to seek reelection, the Indiana Democrat has complained publicly about legislative gridlock, saying that Congress hasn’t done enough to prop up the economy and hasn’t created a single private-sector job in the past six months.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0210/33406.html#ixzz0gV5dnoo9

Keith Olberman - Coward

No surprise. Most bullies are cowards.

Keith Olbermann's Commitment To Diversity

Some of his best friends....

Joe Biden Versus The Arrogance of Power

That was then, this is now.

“I pray God when the Democrats take back control we don’t make the kind of naked power grab you are doing.”

Worst. Congress. Ever.

10% approval.

John Yoo's Gift To Barack Obama

John Yoo says, "you're welcome."

Plus, John Yoo gets to do a touchdown dance in Eric Holder's face.

OPR's investigation was so biased, so flawed, and so beneath the Justice Department's own standards that last week the department's ranking civil servant and senior ethicist, David Margolis, completely rejected its recommendations.

Attorney General Holder could have stopped this sorry mess earlier, just as his predecessor had tried to do. OPR slow-rolled Attorney General Michael Mukasey by refusing to deliver a draft of its report until the 2008 Christmas and New Year holidays. OPR informed Mr. Mukasey of its intention to release the report on Jan. 12, 2009, without giving me or Judge Bybee the chance to see it—as was our right and as we'd been promised.

Mr. Mukasey and Deputy Attorney General Mark Filip found so many errors in the report that they told OPR that the entire enterprise should be abandoned. OPR decided to run out the clock and push the investigation into the lap of the Obama administration. It would have been easy for Mr. Holder to concur with his predecessors—in fact, it was critical that he do so to preserve the Justice Department's impartiality. Instead the new attorney general let OPR's investigators run wild. Only Mr. Margolis's rejection of the OPR report last week forced the Obama administration to drop its ethics charges against Bush legal advisers.

Why bother fighting off an administration hell-bent on finding scapegoats for its policy disagreements with the last president? I could have easily decided to hide out, as others have. Instead, I wrote numerous articles (several published in this newspaper) and three books explaining and defending presidential control of national security policy. I gave dozens of speeches and media appearances, where I confronted critics of the administration's terrorism policies. And, most importantly, I was lucky to receive the outstanding legal counsel of Miguel Estrada, one of the nation's finest defense attorneys, to attack head-on and without reservation, each and every one of OPR's mistakes, misdeeds and acts of malfeasance.

Maybe the Chicago thugocracy thought they could just steamroll John Yoo because one of those mild mannered Asians?

Obama's Billion Dollar Embassy

A shovel ready project? Well, it does have a moat.

Beside being cool looking this baby come in at one billion dollars. That’s right, with a ‘b.’ The US Ambassador to Britain Louis Susman maintains that the current residence, the Mayfair mansion, is outdated and becoming harder to maintain, not to mention fails to meet security standards, and cites this as one of the main reasons for the upgrade.

ACORN Rebranding, Not Disbanding

You really didn't think that the Democrats would allow their favorite thugs to disappear did you.

ACORN is not dissolving. But some of its local affiliates, in an effort to suggest they’re cutting ties with the organization, are giving themselves new names. The reason is money: ACORN cites a string of “vicious right-wing attacks” — and here I doff the purple pimp hat to James O’Keefe — that have made it hard for them to shake down their usual banker benefactors and nonprofit patrons.

Obama Getting His Smear Machine Ready

The Chicago thugocracy is polishing its brass knuckles, getting ready for 2012.

The DNC sees Republican challengers ramping up earlier than ever and has decided to begin defining potential opponents early. Operatives are already assembling research and drafting unflattering narratives to push about the leading possible 2012 candidates.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0210/33411.html#ixzz0gSlwiivR

Global Warming Ain't Cool No More

The world cools toward global warming.

Climategate data-fudger Michael Mann, the scientist at Penn State University known for the "hockey stick" temperature chart, which rewrote history by eliminating the Medieval Warm Period, last week bemoaned this new discourse on global warming. In an interview with the Web site the Benshi, he whined about "an organized, well-funded effort to discredit" the "scientific community," which he said was driven by the fossil-fuel industry. He accused climate realists of conducting "smear campaigns run against scientists for the sole purpose of discrediting them, so as to discredit the science."

Michael should Mann up. Whatever smudges appear on the reputations of warmism-promoting scientists have been applied by themselves. After all, the skeptics aren't the ones who made up, fudged or twisted data or who employed dubious and biased sources as the foundation for their predictions of calamity. And the alarmists had (and still do) a massive funding advantage, amplified by their colleagues at the major news organizations, which helped keep the messaging winds at their backs. Grammies, Oscars and Nobels were part of their rewards.

Come one Dr. Mann. Well-funded? How many millions have you received to cook up this bullshit?

Canadian Premier Defends US Trip For Health Care

"This was my heart, my choice and my health."

Good point. It's not his heart in Canada.

"I did not sign away my right to get the best possible health care for myself when I entered politics."

The 60-year-old Williams said doctors detected a heart murmur last spring and told him that one of his heart valves wasn't closing properly, creating a leakage.

He said he was told at the time that the problem was "moderate" and that he should come back for a checkup in six months.

Eight months later, in December, his doctors told him the problem had become severe and urged him to get his valve repaired immediately or risk heart failure, he said.

His doctors in Canada presented him with two options - a full or partial sternotomy, both of which would've required breaking bones, he said.

He said he spoke with and provided his medical information to a leading cardiac surgeon in New Jersey who is also from Newfoundland and Labrador. He advised him to seek treatment at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami.

Phil Harris's Son Arrested For DUI And Hit and Run

Jake Harris not ready to function fatherless.

State troopers have released aerial video of the minutes leading up to the arrest of Jake Harris on suspicion of DUI and hit-and-run.

Jake Harris is the son of the late Phil Harris, the well-known "Deadliest Catch" fishing boat captain who recently died.

The 24-year-old man was arrested last Thursday night after he was spotted driving erratically down Interstate 5 by a Washington State Patrol plane, said WSP Trooper Dan McDonald.

A motorist called 911 to report an aggressive driver headed south on I-5 near the King-Snohomish county line at about 9 p.m.

"He's really all over the place, sir," said the caller. "When he went by me, I tried to look. His license plate is either too dirty, or the light's out or something."

A driver followed Harris for eight or nine miles on the ground, directing state patrol in the air. Airborne troopers spotted the BMW 3 Series and guided highway-based troopers to it at the Mercer Street exit off I-5, where the vehicle was pulled over.

Troopers identified the driver as Jake Harris and determined that he was impaired. He had driven under the influence from Shoreline to Seattle in his father's BMW, investigators said.

Troopers said Harris refused a breathalyzer test, then failed a sobriety test. He said he was on his way to a Discovery Channel dinner meeting when he was arrested.

Investigators said Harris, who was driving on a suspended license, was involved in a hit-and-run crash just four hours before being arrested on northbound I-5 near Highway 520.

Reid To Republicans - Reconciliation, Get Used To It

Harry Reid has clearly stepped off the deep end.

Reid answered questions about health care following the Democratic weekly policy luncheon, and seemed particularly irked by the question over whether reconciliation was the only way forward on getting a health care bill passed.

"The answer to that is no," Reid said abruptly. "But I have been told that my Republican friends are lamenting reconciliation. I would recommend to them to go back and look at history. Since 1981, reconciliation has been used 21 times—the vast majority of those reconciliation efforts have been by republicans. So nothing's off the table. We'll have to take a look at that.

"But realistically, they should stop crying about reconciliation as if it's never been done before. It's been done by almost every Congress, and they're the ones who have used it more than anyone else. Contract for America was done with reconciliation. Tax cuts, done with reconciliation. Medicare, done with reconciliation," Reid continued.

Harry Reid is either a bald faced liar or he's gone completely mad.

SEIU To Have A Role In Deficit Reduction Panel

Somehow, I don't think that this is going to be helpful.

Here are a couple of reasons why. Since Obama took office, the federal civilian workforce has grown to 2.15 million and nearly one in five makes at least $100,000 per year. Somehow I don't think Andy Stern will want to address that.

Here's more on how public sector unions are bleeding the economy white.

Public-sector unionism is a very different animal from private-sector unionism. It is not adversarial but collusive. Public-sector unions strive to elect their management, which in turn can extract money from taxpayers to increase wages and benefits -- and can promise pensions that future taxpayers will have to fund.

The results are plain to see. States such as New York, New Jersey and California, where public-sector unions are strong, now face enormous budget deficits and pension liabilities. In such states, the public sector has become a parasite sucking the life out of the private-sector economy. Not surprisingly, Americans have been steadily migrating out of such states and into states like Texas, where public-sector unions are weak and taxes are much lower.

Barack Obama is probably the most union-friendly president since Lyndon Johnson. He has obviously been unable to stop the decline of private-sector unionism. But he is doing his best to increase the power -- and dues income -- of public-sector unions.

One-third of last year's $787 billion stimulus package was aid to state and local governments -- an obvious attempt to bolster public-sector unions. And a successful one: While the private sector has lost 7 million jobs, the number of public-sector jobs has risen. The number of federal government jobs has been increasing by 10,000 a month, and the percentage of federal employees earning over $100,000 has jumped to 19 percent during the recession.

Obama Polling Sinks Deeper

He's going down. He's going down, down, down down, down.

A new poll from Iowa-based Selzer and Company shows that since November, Obama’s approval rating among Iowa independents dropped sharply from 48 to 38 percent — reaching its lowest level yet.

Similarly, Rasmussen Reports’ latest release of its nightly automated tracking poll yesterday showed that the number of people who “strongly approve” of the president’s performance reached an all-time low of 22 percent, down from a high of 45 at the beginning of his presidency. At the same time 41 percent “strongly disapprove” of his performance, with remaining voters falling in between.

“Overall the president’s numbers have been between the mid and upper 40s since around Thanksgiving — they tend to get a little lower when health care becomes the primary focus, as it is now,” said Scott Rasmussen, founder of Rasmussen Reports. “The health-care debate has overall captured a lot of people’s frustration … I think people are concerned that the president would like the government to assume an even greater role in the economy than now, and it’s firing up voters.”

Aliens May Be Staring Us In The Face

So says Lord Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society and astronomer to the Queen of England.

“They could be staring us in the face and we just don’t recognise them. The problem is that we’re looking for something very much like us, assuming that they at least have something like the same mathematics and technology,” he said.

“I suspect there could be life and intelligence out there in forms we can’t conceive. Just as a chimpanzee can’t understand quantum theory, it could be there as aspects of reality that are beyond the capacity of our brains.”

The Worst Of Both Worlds

Obama's health care plan combines socialism and fascism. Some compromise.

ACORN No More

ACORN has dissolved as a national organization.

The embattled liberal group ACORN is in the process of dissolving its national structure, with state and local-chapters splitting off from the underfunded, controversial national group, an official close to the group confirmed.

"ACORN has dissolved as a national structure of state organizations," said a senior official close to the group, who declined to be identified by name because of the fierce conservative attacks on the group that began when a conservative filmmaker caught some staffers of its tax advisory arms on tape appearing to offer advice on incorporating a prostitution business.

I believe that we'll see them again with a new name and just as corrupt.

America Needs More Barack Obama!

Team Obama has come to the conclusion that you can't get enough of him.

A close adviser said Obama plans to increase his travel in the country, including minicampaigns built around “a series of small but highly visible policy debates that clearly put the Democrats on the side of middle-class families, with lobbies for special interests on the other side.” Two likely targets: student-loan servicing organizations and banks.

Terminally Ill Lockerbie Bomber Alive And Well

Another triumph of British socialized medicine. The death panels got it wrong.

The man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing is living with his family in a luxury villa in Libya six months after he was released from jail on compassionate grounds because he had less than three months to live.

Apparently, Libyan medicine is better than Britain's.

Once A Thug, Always A Thug

Make nice for the cameras, then....

It is now clear that the “summit” the president has called for February 25 is not intended to consider different approaches to health care financing, but rather to create an illusion of momentum that might just lull disoriented congressional Democrats into ramming the health care bill through the budget reconciliation process…

The timing of this move (just after a congressional recess, when members of Congress won’t be spending much time at home again until Easter), the nature of the health care summit (a public relations spectacle intended to generate buzz in the political press more than to appeal to the public), and the character of the legislative plan (a quick hard push through reconciliation to avoid debate, amendments, and too much time to think) all seem designed to bamboozle rank and file Democratic members of Congress into taking a suicidal vote. But they are also aimed to slip the bill past the public, not yet alert to the danger. This stratagem is the perfect finale to a yearlong circus that has exposed the ugliest side of our politics.

Climate Scientists Take Back That Rising Seas Thing Too

What's left?

Scientists have been forced to withdraw a study on projected sea level rise due to global warming after finding mistakes that undermined the findings.

The study, published in 2009 in Nature Geoscience, one of the top journals in its field, confirmed the conclusions of the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It used data over the last 22,000 years to predict that sea level would rise by between 7cm and 82cm by the end of the century.

Although, if you read on you'll find that maybe they're planning to double down.

Evan Bayh's Moral Exhibitionist BS

While the mainstream media mourns Evan Bayh's departure from the Senate, George Will pronounces BS on Bayh.

TERRY MORAN, HOST: There’s a sense that something is broken in Washington summed up this week by Senator Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) who announced his retirement. I think it’s fair to say he’s leaving in disgust. Here’s what he had to say.

SENATOR EVAN BAYH, (D-IND.): I have had a growing conviction that Congress is not operating as it should. There is much too much partisanship, and not enough progress. Too much narrow ideology, and not enough practical problem solving. Even at a time of enormous national challenge, the people’s business is not getting done.

MORAN: Is he right, George?

GEORGE WILL: Well, it’s hard to take a lecture on bipartisanship from a man who voted against the confirmation of Chief Justice Roberts, the confirmation of Justice Alito, the confirmation of Attorney General Ashcroft, the confirmation of Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State. Far from being a rebel against his Party’s lockstep movement, Mr. Bayh voted for the Detroit bailout, for the stimulus, for the public option in the healthcare bill. I don’t know quite what his complaint is, but, Terry, with metronomic regularity, we go through these moments in Washington where we complain about the government being broken. These moments have one thing in common: The Left is having trouble enacting its agenda. No one when George W. Bush had trouble reforming Social Security said, “Oh, that’s terrible – the government’s broken.”

Deep Thinking From Arriana Huffington

"The American people are with this president, the problem is that the American people don't know where this president is."

ACORN And SEIU: Criminal Conspiracies?

That's what a new Congressional report says.

Republicans on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, led by Rep. Darrell Issa, have issued a scalding report on ACORN and the SEIU. The main thesis — that ACORN and SEIU are, operationally, in effect the same organization, an organization that illegally channels restricted money into political activity — is argued persuasively, but the authors slopped the report up with tangential complaints and grossly exaggerated claims about ACORN’s role in the housing bubble.

Don't Believe That Global Warming Skepticism You Haven't Read Here

People who rely upon the Washington Post as their primary news source have no idea what this editorial is about.

THE EARTH is warming. A chief cause is the increase in greenhouse gases accumulating in the atmosphere. Humans are at least in part responsible, because the oil, gas and coal that we burn releases these gases. If current trends persist, it's likely that in coming decades the globe's climate will change with potentially devastating effects for billions of people.

Contrary to what you may have read lately, there are few reputable scientists who would disagree with anything in that first paragraph. Yet suddenly we're hearing that climate change is in doubt and that action to combat it is unlikely. What's going on?

Blame Bush for - Toyota Recalls?

Is there anything that Democrats will not blame on George Bush? Apparently not.

Diversity Kills

Despite clear signs of radicalization, the Army kept the incompetent Major Nidal Malik Hasan because they valued the diversity of having a Muslim psychiatrist.

Obama Administration "Not Industry Friendly"

Gee! Ya think?

Internal Toyota documents derided the Obama administration and Democratic Congress as “activist” and “not industry friendly," a revelation that comes days before the giant automaker's top executives testify on Capitol Hill amid a giant recall.

According to a presentation obtained under subpoena by the House Oversight and Government Relations committee, Toyota referred to the “changing political environment” as one of its main challenges and anticipated a "more challenging regulatory" environment under the Obama administration's purview.

Plus, there's the fact that Barack Obama owns two of Toyota's competitors.

86% Of Americans Say Government Is Broken

But %100 of Democrats still say that we should entrust every aspect of our lives to government.

Results here.

Americans overwhelmingly think that the government in this country is broken, according to a new national poll. But the CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey, released Sunday morning, also indicates that the public overwhelmingly holds out hope that what's broken can be fixed.

Eighty-six percent of people questioned in the poll say that our system of government is broken, with 14 percent saying no. Of that 86 percent, 81 percent say that the government can be fixed, with 5 percent saying it's beyond repair.

Is General Motors the New Fannie Mae?

For years Fannie Mae served to enrich favored Democrats. Franklin Raines, Rahm Emmanuel, Jamie Gorelick and Janet Reno, among many others, extracted many millions from Fannie Mae while running it to destruction. Now we learn that GM's new Obama appointed CEO will be getting a $9 million bonus even as the taxpayer is forced to funnel tax payer money into the bailout.

Why Obama Is Always Behind The Curve

Not only is he loathe to second guess himself, he has poor intuition in the first place.

[O]n what he identified as the biggest foreign and domestic issues, Obama's intuition has proved to be faulty. Things have not worked out as he hoped. And, though a president cannot micromanage everything, his deference to congressional Democratic leaders in determining the details of the stimulus, health care and cap-and-trade bills has proven politically disastrous.

Obama's two predecessors also suffered from failures of intuition. Bill Clinton recovered and got deserved credit for the 1996 welfare reform and the 1997 balanced-budget deal. George W. Bush recovered and deserves credit (though Joe Biden is claiming it now) for the success of the Iraq surge strategy.

Obama too may develop better intuition than he has shown so far. But first he has to acknowledge that a successful presidency requires more than the confidence conferred by a high IQ and fancy degrees.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/Obama-lacks-one-crucial-ingredient----intuition-84808412.html#ixzz0gBCxWVWL

Mainstream Media Getting Behind Democrats

Last year the mainstream media had a little fun pointing out the foolishness behind Obama's job creation claims. But now it's getting too close to the mid term elections and the media are circling their wagons around the endangered Democrats.

THE NUMBERS are in, and there can no longer be any doubt that President Obama’s stimulus bill, passed just over a year ago, helped pull America from the brink of economic catastrophe, in part by creating millions of jobs that would not otherwise have existed. All of the major economic research firms that have studied the stimulus’ effect have come to this conclusion. The specific estimates vary, but it’s clear that the stimulus created somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.6 million jobs so far, and will generate around 2.5 million in the long run. (The administration’s generous estimate is 3.5 million.

They've adopted Obama's extravagant "everybody says so" style.

Global Warming Snow Job

Warm mongers were busy derided anyone who pointed to 2010's severe winter as evidence that global warming is a hoax. But wait! Wasn't Hurricane Katrina evidence of global warming? Here's a quick summary of the rules.

(1) North of the 49th parallel ­­— global warming explains the lack of snow.

(2) South of the 49th parallel — global warming explains the snow.

Plus:

(1) Warmists can use single weather events to prove global warming.

(2) Opponents can’t use single weather events to disprove global warming.

Global Warming And Disproportionate Response

What will do more damage: Global warming or government policies?

Any risks of global warming need to be weighed against the risks of global warming policies. Policymakers must have accurate information on both sides of the equation in order to avoid measures that do more harm than good. Most of the recent proposals — the Senate’s Boxer-Kerry cap-and-trade bill, a new UN treaty, EPA’s regulatory scheme — fail to accurately weigh the risks because they are based on the false premise that climate change is a dire threat.

Simply put, global warming is not a crisis and should not be addressed as one. The recent wave of climate science scandals — climategate, glaciergate, hurricanegate, amazongate, others — have exposed a number of efforts initially crafted to hype the issue into something far scarier than the underlying science actually shows. Climategate — the release of internal emails from scientists with key roles in the UN’s 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report — largely centered around the strained attempt to portray temperatures in recent decades as unprecedented throughout recorded history. The researchers had to go to extreme lengths to create this impression — grafting one data set onto another to manufacture the desired “hockey stick” effect, using computer programs that add warming to the underlying temperature data and then destroying that data before others could see it — which speaks volumes about the weakness of their case.

But this would not be good for Saint Al Gore's portfolio.

Chicago's Long Legacy Of Corruption

141 years worth.

Cook County has been a "dark pool of political corruption" for more than a century, a new study by the University of Illinois at Chicago says.

Nearly 150 employees, politicians and contractors in the nation's second-largest county have been convicted on corruption charges since 1957, according to a report released Thursday by the university and the Better Government Association.

And those are the ones who were caught. And I'm betting that these were little fish thrown to keep the alligators fed so that they didn't go after the juicier targets. Honest people do not prosper or succeed in the Chicago machine.

Obama Lied About ACORN Affiliation

Who knew? Answer: Everyone but the mainstream media. Actually I believe they did know, but simply choose not to report.

The Perils Of Politicized Science

Newsweek breaks the wall of silence? Sort of.

One of the most impressive visuals in Al Gore's now famous slide show on global warming is a graph known as the "hockey stick." It shows temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere rising slowly for most of the last thousand years and turning steeply upward in the last half of the 20th century. As evidence of the alarming rate of global warming, it tells a simple and compelling story. That's one reason the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change included the graph in the summary of its 2001 report. But is it true?

The question occurred to Steven McIntyre when he opened his newspaper one morning in 2002 and there it was—the hockey stick. It was published with an article on the debate over whether Canada should ratify the Kyoto agreement to curb greenhouse-gas emissions. McIntyre had little knowledge of the intricate science of climate change; he didn't even have a Ph.D. He did have a passion for numbers, however. He also had some experience in the minerals business, where, he says, people tend to use hockey-stick graphs when they are trying to pull one over on you. "Reality usually isn't so tidy."

Read it all and you should have this question in your heart: How can Newsweek simultaneously confess that the science is corrupt, but the conclusions are correct? Only a leftist could manage that.

Imams In Space

Obama orders NASA to reach out to Muslim countries.

NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden said Tuesday that President Barack Obama has asked him to “find ways to reach out to dominantly Muslim countries” as the White House pushes the space agency to become a tool of international diplomacy.

“In addition to the nations that most of you usually hear about when you think about the International Space Station, we now have expanded our efforts to reach out to non-traditional partners,” said Bolden, speaking to a lecture hall of young engineering students.

I'd like to shoot them all into space myself.

Democrats in Deep Doodoo

So says Democrat pollster Stanley Greenberg.

Greenberg compares the Democrats’ plight with their situation in 1994. I believe it’s actually worse. Back in 1994 I wrote the first column that appeared anywhere outside of explicitly Republican media arguing that Republicans had a serious chance of winning a majority in the House. It appeared in the U.S. News issue dated July 18, which was published (in line with magazine custom) on July 11. That was almost five months later in the 1994 cycle than we are in the 2010 cycle today. That means that Democrats have more time to recover than they did that year, but it also means that they are in far more trouble at this stage in the current cycle than they were 16 years ago.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/Stan-Greenberg-agrees-with-me--84707562.html#ixzz0g5juDRZB

Nine Department of Justice Lawyers Defended Terrorists

No surprise here. Unless you're surprised that there are only nine.

Attorney General Eric Holder says nine Obama appointees in the Justice Department have represented or advocated for terrorist detainees before joining the Justice Department. But he does not reveal any names beyond the two officials whose work has already been publicly reported. And all the lawyers, according to Holder, are eligible to work on general detainee matters, even if there are specific parts of some cases they cannot be involved in.

Black Republican Woman Running For Congress In Arkansas

If an African-American conservative runs for Congress, will Keith Olbermann notice? My guess is that he'll stick to his narrative.

Princella Smith, 26, will announce on Saturday that she is running for Congress in Arkansas’s 1st District. Some would say she is too young. Others might point to other potential hurdles: She’s running in eastern Arkansas, a district that hasn’t elected a Republican since 1872 in a Southern state that has never elected a black person to a congressional or state-wide office.

“I think I’m the person to do this,” Smith said. “I’m going to tell people to come on board with me, listen to these ideas, and that we can get people excited again about the Republican Party.”

If Smith wins, she will be the first black Republican female in Congress.

The Final Nail In The Global Warm Mongers' Coffin?

Now even the emperor admits that he has no clothes. It’s only the mainstream news media and the disciples of big government who are still insisting that he is robed.

Phil Jones is the director of the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University and, more importantly, he is the author of those climate models that the United Nations, Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama have relied upon to justify massive new taxes and intrusive regulations.

Phil Jones admitted to a BBC interviewer that since 1995 there has been no significant global warming. He also admitted that warming of the sort used to create the climate of hysteria that warm mongers have feasted upon has occurred previously. From 1975 (the end of the global cooling panic by the way) to 1998, the temperature has risen 0.166 Celsius. This is very similar to the rise seen from 1860 to 1880. In those 21 years the earth’s temperature rose by 0.163 C. And from 1910-1940 the temperature rose 0.150C.

I’m pretty well versed in history and I can report with considerable confidence that there were no SUV’s during those earlier warming episodes and that there was not a single coal-fired electrical power plant anywhere in the world in the 19th century.

Furthermore, Jones confessed that the Medieval Warm Period was significantly warmer than it is now. There were vineyards in Greenland after all. And that was long before the industrial revolution.

And even the data that warm mongers collected supporting the 1975 – 1998 period is suspect. John Christy is a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and, at least as importantly, he is a former lead author on the IPCC report on global warming. He’s now a skeptic, what Al Gore would derisively slur as a “denier.”

“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” he said. The sites used to collect temperature data are contaminated by urbanization and other changes in land use.

“The story is the same for each one,” he said. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”

In addition he found that some recording sites had actually been moved. In all cases, he found that the changes had introduced biases in favor of higher temperatures.

More than two years ago, Christopher Horner filed a perfectly legitimate Freedom of Information request for information related to an apparent anomaly in NASA’s climate data collected since 2000. These anomalies appeared to inflate temperatures. Horner wanted the raw data examined by an expert with a proven record of exposing faulty data. He brought in Steve McIntyre, who had previously revealed the errors that had created the famous “hockey stick” chart that predicted a rapid rise in global temperatures. It’s no wonder NASA didn’t want to comply. Only when Horner threatened to sue did NASA comply with the request.

There was once a time when journalists would have reacted with curiosity when a government agency so flagrantly stonewalled. Now they are primarily interested in advancing a narrative. But, I digress.

And now that the information has been released, it reveals that NASA did indeed engage in data scrubbing. The information shows that NASA biased its presentations of data in support of the greatest regulatory intrusion in history – carbon emission control.

The warm mongers are losing control of the message. Just over a week ago, the New York Times joined other mainstream transcription services in reciting the official Gorewellian mantra that the severe cold and snow storms plaguing the Midwest and Middle Atlantic states were manifestations of global warming. These stories were met with predictable derision. The Times responded by asking psychologists and sociologists to probe the pathology that prevents the American mind from grasping such complicated concepts such as cold equals hot.

As Groucho Marx once asked: “Who are going to believe – me or your own lying eyes.”

Meanwhile, a recent Rasmussen Reports poll shows that global warm mongers are losing the argument. Only 35% of Americans believe in man made global warming. That’s about the same percentage who told an earlier Fox News poll that they believed in ghosts and UFO’s , showing that global warming advocacy belongs on the pages of supermarket tabloids.

Obama Can't Even Stand Up To Union Goons

And it's costing us dearly.

There's a bunch of money in Obama's "stimulus package" that was supposed to pay for weatherization. But the government can't disperse it because it has to be handed out in compliance with the Davis-Bacon act that is a pure payoff to union bosses.

According to the GAO report, the Department of Labor spent most of last year trying to determine the prevailing wage is for weatherization work, a determination that had to be made for each of the more than 3,000 counties in the United States. [E.A.]

As a result, the Department of Energy apparently weatherized only 22,000 homes under the program. Another pre-existing program, which doesn't have to comply with Davis-Bacon, appears to have weatherized about 100,000 homes, if my math is right.

That's OK. It's not as if speed was important last year in terms of putting people to work. ... Oh wait, it was. [Insert now-embarrassing Obama quote here]

"If you allocate money to weatherize homes, the homeowner gets the benefit of lower energy bills. You right away put people back to work, many of whom in the construction industry and in the housing industry are out of work right now. They are immediately put to work doing something," [E.A.]

What happened to that guy who had "steel in his spine?"

INSIDE STORY: The Brave Last Days of Deadliest Catch's Capt. Phil Harris - Tributes, Deadliest Catch : People.com

The inside story of Captain Phil Harris's last days.

Harris talked to younger son Jake, 24, whom he told PEOPLE in 2008 "has fishing in his blood," about the business. "I'm going to be looking at that [captain's] chair in a different way," Jake says. "We definitely talked about it, but I just didn't expect this to happen so soon. That's definitely something where I would take over and take the responsibility."

As for his older son, "he told me to get out of fishing," Josh says. "I do love fishing, don't get me wrong, but it was one of those deals where he wanted to see me do something better. He gave me the encouragement. My life goal was to show him I could be a man, you know, and I could fish, and I did the best job that I could, and he recognized that as being a good job and gave me kudos."

But on Feb. 9, after walking for a bit and working on physical therapy, Phil Harris sat down in his bed next to best friend Dan Mittman to take a break. "He said, 'Danny, I don't feel as good as I did yesterday,' " Mittman recalls. "They rolled about five doctors through there and they said, 'You can stay here,' but, I understood, though."

Later that day, Phil died with his closest family and friends surrounding him.

More here.

Obama Blows A Bunch Of Cash In Las Vegas

But it's not his money, so that makes it responsible I suppose.

President Obama said in New Hampshire earlier this month: “You don’t blow a bunch of cash on Vegas when you’re trying to save for college.”

This followed a statement from last year: “You can’t take a trip to Las Vegas or down to the Super Bowl on the taxpayers’ dime.”

So how does he make amends?

By giving $1.5 billion to Las Vegas.

Not from his pocket.

Oh, no, no, no. Every one of his many trips to Las Vegas as president has been on the public dime.

That $1.5 billion comes out of the public’s hide.

NYT Accuses Conservatives Of Racism

How original!

Baby Redistribution

A lefty writer for the New Republic comes up with a new plan to achieve fairness - baby redistribution.

Since it is a matter of sheer luck whether one is born into a rich family and then, as a birth-right, is entitled to first-class housing, top-flight health insurance, excellent schools, and, if need be, the best attorneys money can buy, or whether one is born into a poor or middle-class family and not be assured of getting any of these amenities, why not give rational order to what has been a wildly haphazard and obviously unjust state of affairs? A public program implementing the big baby lottery would at last make official what has in truth been the unspoken ethos of our government policy for decades and is in accord with the casino way of life--the stock market, the housing market, the state lotteries--to which so many Americans are wholeheartedly committed.”

She's kidding - I hope. But you can never be certain with leftists.

Cheney Versus Biden Smackdown

If anymore evidence was needed to prove that the Obamatons are delusional, it was their decision to send Biden out to go one on one with Dick Cheney.

So whom does the White House send out against this formidable foreign policy advocate? The administration sends the gaffable Joe Biden, the most gaffe-prone figure in public life. If you are like me, you tune him in simply for a hearty laugh. Moreover, the White House puts Biden in an absurd position. He is scheduled for two Sunday morning rebuttals of Cheney's Sunday morning appearance on ABC's "This Week," one on CBS' "Face the Nation" and the other on NBC's "Meet the Press." But his NBC rebuttal was taped Saturday night from the Winter Olympics, before Biden had anything to rebut. It would be perhaps 12 hours before Biden even heard Cheney's criticism. Amusingly, "a senior White House official" told The Washington Post that the administration had chosen Biden for his ability to "hold the former vice president accountable to the facts in real time." Yes, this fantasist said the "facts."

Biden's unhappy experiences with the facts are legendary. I cherish his early autumn string of blunders committed during the 2008 campaign. Do you recall? During an interview with CBS' Katie Couric, Biden claimed that Franklin Roosevelt was president during the 1929 crash of the stock market and that Roosevelt immediately "got on television" to reassure the American people. Incidentally, when Biden uttered this preposterosity, Couric's face betrayed no hint she recognized that Herbert Hoover was president in 1929 or that there was no national television audience in existence; journalistic mediocrity meets political mediocrity.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/R-Emmett-Tyrrell-Jr-84768847.html#ixzz0fzW9SYzb

ACORN's A Criminal Enterprise?

Among other things, I'm pretty sure that extortion is illegal.

Muscle for the Money involves using non-profit corporations for electioneering activities and an SEIU strategy to threaten corporations and banks into brokering deals for ACORN’s financial benefit. SEIU and Project Vote used litigation to force demands from government officials. ACORN, through Project Vote, threatened State Secretary of State offices with lawsuits, thus forcing political compromises at the expense of taxpayers.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/New-ACORN-report-highlights-dormant-controversy-84769567.html#ixzz0fzV5e6Nd

Obama To Vote Present On Tax Increases

Now we know why Obama wanted to appoint a commission on budget deficits - so he can have someone to blame.

President Obama on Thursday indicated that tax increases on people who make less than $250,000 a year will be on the table when a deficit commission makes its recommendations later this year on how to resolve the nation’s fiscal imbalances.

“Everything’s on the table. That’s how this thing is going to work,” Obama said Thursday, moments after signing an executive order creating the 18-member commission.

But the White House has already begun to lay the groundwork for their argument that such a recommendation by the panel should not be blamed on the president, who vowed during his campaign not to raise taxes on Americans earning less than $250,000.

“The president will not sit on the commission and the options they present will not necessarily reflect administration policy,” a White House official told The Daily Caller.

Did Obama Try To Buy Joe Sestak Off?

Joe Sestak says so.

As is often the case with primary challengers, party officials attempt to convince the upstart to drop out of the race to avoid a politically costly battle in the run up to the general election. Sestak revealed Thursday, possibly by accident, that the Obama White House engaged in a little quid pro quo offering him a federal position if he would do them the small favor of dropping out of the race. More from the Philadelphia Inquirer:

The disclosure came during an afternoon taping of Larry Kane: Voice of Reason, a Sunday news-analysis show on the Comcast Network. Sestak would not elaborate on the circumstances and seemed chagrined after blurting out “yes” to veteran news anchor Kane’s direct question.

“Was it secretary of the Navy?” Kane asked.

“No comment,” Sestak said.

The admission sheds light on a process that usually remains behind closed doors and this revelation will almost certainly not be well received by Specter’s campaign or the Obama White House.