The best thing about all these stories about the Democrat Party and their idiocy is that it gives the chance for me to post a new bumper sticker idea I have. It’s after the jump below.
Let’s get started with the vapid chowder-heads from California:
‘We don’t look at either of these gubernatorial races . . . as something that portends a lot for our legislative efforts,” insisted White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs on Tuesday, as New Jersey and Virginia voters gave Democrats a thumping. Unfortunately for the White House, its opinion no longer counts.
First thought on Tuesday’s elections: There’s a lot of firing going on in America, and now that includes politicians. Seems only fair and will likely continue. I don’t think voters in New Jersey and Virginia were saying, “Oh the Democrats are awful, and we hate them,” nor were they saying, “Republicans are wonderful, and we love them.” The voters were being practical, and thinking policy: “Will he raise my taxes?” In Jersey, they fired the incumbent governor because they couldn’t imagine the state getting off its current trajectory (high unemployment, high taxes, high spending) with him there. And they’re certain they have to get off their current trajectory or they’re sunk.
Both states hired new governors. The good news for the GOP is that they hired Republicans. The bad news is that if the Republicans don’t make progress, they’ll fire them too.
Second, it’s too simple to say this was a vote against Obama. Yes, he went to Jersey three times and draped himself like a shawl around the Democratic incumbent. But the crowds showed and nobody booed and everyone had a good time. What happened actually is more interesting. They just didn’t listen to him. Mr. Obama told Jersey to vote for Jon Corzine, and they didn’t. They don’t hate him, they’re just not hearing him. That’s new. They’re warning him: Hey you with the health-care obsession, shape up or you’ll get shipped out!
President Obama came into office insisting that his administration would press hard and fast to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But after nine months, analysts and diplomats say, the administration’s efforts have faltered in part because of its own missteps.
click for larger
And finally we have this comment from the president regarding the crazed man who killed and injured dozens while yelling ‘ALLAHU AKBAR’ at Fort Hood yesterday:
“We don’t know all the answers yet. And I would caution against jumping to conclusions until we have all the facts,” Obama said in a Rose Garden statement otherwise devoted to the economy.
I feel so much better with this guy leading our nation.
So, in closing, remember when voting in the next few years, we can begin to fix all our nation’s problems by remembering to do the following… (more…)
Senate Democrats have blocked a GOP attempt to require next year’s census forms to ask people whether they are a U.S. citizen.
The proposal by Louisiana Republican Sen. David Vitter was aimed at excluding immigrants from the population totals that are used to figure the number of congressional representatives for each state. Critics said Vitter’s plan would discourage immigrants from responding to the census and would be hugely expensive. They also said that it’s long been settled law that the apportionment of congressional seats is determined by the number of people living in each state, regardless of whether they are citizens. A separate survey already collects the data.
The plan fell after a 60-39 procedural vote made it ineligible for attachment to a bill funding the census.
It is pretty clear to me that you have a voting record of 60 casting a vote that violates their oath of office or at the least, encourages us not to enforce the law they swore to support and defend:
I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.
There’s a reason we call them “illegals” isn’t there?
The credibility of the Obama administration on stimulus accountability continues to crash today, this time in Wisconsin. The state’s largest newspaper calls the numbers of jobs “saved or created” not just inaccurate, but “wildly inflated.” The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel picks up the trail blazed by the Associated Press and discovers that the numbers exist only as a product of an artificial White House calculus…
The White House says that Republican wins in two governors’ races were not referendums on the president.
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters Wednesday that voters went to the polls in Virginia and New Jersey to work through “very local issues that didn’t involve the president.” The presidential spokesman said voters were concerned about the economy.
“I don’t think the president needed an election or an exit poll to come to that conclusion,” Gibbs said.
Hundreds of tons of weaponry, ten times the size of the Karine A shipment of 2002, were seized in an overnight raid Tuesday by the Israeli navy, some 100 nautical miles west of Israel, officials said. The ship seized was sailing under an Antiguan flag.
The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama’s administration refused to disclose due to “national security” concerns, has leaked. It’s bad. It says…
Big Hollywood has already posted a couple disturbing videos of young school children singing/speaking praises to President Obama, but when eleven more dropped in our email box it came as quite a shock. What seemed like an aberration now appears to be a troubling pattern.
“X Factor judge Simon Cowell showed his more generous side [yesterday] when he gave £100,000 [about $160,000] to help save the life of a cancer-stricken youngster,” reports London’s Daily Mail:
The pop Svengali donated the money for 18-month-old Sophie Atay–from Birtley, Gateshead–to fly to the US for pioneering treatment at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital in New York.
He acted after learning the youngster’s family launched a last-ditch appeal for £500,000 to pay for the treatment last week after they were told Sophie was suffering from a rare form of neuroblastoma and needed treatment within days.
Alexandra Burke, last year’s X Factor winner, broke the news to Sophie’s mum Karine, 33, on the telephone today that Simon had now dipped into his own pocket to top up the total to the necessary amount.
Wait, we’re confused! Why does a little English girl have to come all the way to the U.S. to get medical care, and why does this Cowell fellow have to pay for it? We thought Britain had free medical care!
But wait, another Daily Mail story reports on what happens to older people who get cancer in Britain:
Alarming research is showing that elderly cancer patients are missing out on the breakthroughs in chemotherapy and surgery that have dramatically improved the outcome of younger patients.
In fact, up to 15,000 elderly people with cancer in the UK are dying prematurely every year when compared to the rest of Europe and the U.S., according to a report published by the North West Cancer Intelligence Service (NWCIS) which compiles cancer statistics. . . .
A major concern is that the NHS Cancer Plan, introduced in 2000 to improve cancer survival in the UK, has a cut-off point at 70. This results in hospitals having less interest in the elderly. “Yet half of all those diagnosed with cancer are over 70,” says Dr Tony Moran, NWCIS research director. “It’s an area that has been grossly neglected. . . .”
Yet according to former Enron adviser Paul Krugman, “In Britain, the government itself runs the hospitals and employs the doctors. We’ve all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories are false.”
I knew that there is a manifest, marked distinction, which ill men with ill designs, or weak men incapable of any design, will constantly be confounding, that is, a marked distinction between change and reformation. The former alters the substance of the objects themselves; and gets rid of all their essential good, as well as of all the accidental evil, annexed to them. Change is novelty; and whether it is to operate any one of the effects of reformation at all, or whether it may not contradict the very principle upon which reformation is desired, cannot be certainly known beforehand. Reform is, not a change in the substance, or in the primary modification, of the object, but, a direct application of a remedy to the grievance complained of. So far as that is removed, all is sure. It stops there; and, if it fails, the substance which underwent the operation, at the very worst, is but where it was. – Edmund Burke
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage. – Alexander Tyler
American taxpayers paid a lot of cash for those clunkers: $24,000 for each new car sold, according to a study released Wednesday.
That’s a lot of money, especially when the so-called “cash for clunker” stimulus program offered only a maximum $4,500 in cash for each person who traded in an old gas-guzzler and bought a new car.
The government could have done almost as well by just giving away cars for free, instead of creating an elaborate incentive program…
The Troubled Asset Relief Program will expire on December 31, unless Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner exercises his authority to extend it to next October. We hope he doesn’t. Historians will debate TARP’s role in ending the financial panic of 2008, but today there is little evidence that the government needs or can prudently manage what has evolved into a $700 billion all-purpose political bailout fund.
We supported TARP to deal with toxic bank assets and resolve failing banks as a resolution agency of the kind that worked with savings and loans in the 1980s. Some taxpayer money was needed beyond what the FDIC’s shrinking insurance fund had available. But TARP quickly became a Treasury tool to save failing institutions without imposing discipline (Citigroup) and even to force public capital onto banks that didn’t need it. This stigmatized all banks as taxpayer supplicants and is now evolving into an excuse for the Federal Reserve to micromanage compensation.
TARP was then redirected well beyond the financial system into $80 billion in “investments” for auto companies. These may never be repaid but served as a lever to abuse creditors and favor auto unions. TARP also bought preferred stock in struggling insurers Lincoln and Hartford, though insurance companies are not subject to bank runs and pose no “systemic risk.” They erode slowly as customers stop renewing policies.
TARP also became another fund for Congress to pay off the already heavily subsidized housing industry by financing home mortgage modifications. Not one cent of the $50 billion in TARP funds earmarked to modify home mortgages will be returned to the Treasury, says the Congressional Budget Office.
To make matters tougher for Mr Reid, there is a tension between his two jobs: shepherding Barack Obama’s agenda through the Senate and representing his home state. He wants to avert climate change, but stymies the expansion of nuclear power by blocking plans to store nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain, Nevada. He wants to mend the budget, but also needs to shower Nevadans with pork. Mindful of the legions of old people in Nevada, he describes Social Security as “the greatest social programme since the fishes and the loaves”—when in fact it is stumbling towards bankruptcy. He wants to make health care universal—unsurprisingly, after seeing his father pull his own teeth rather than pay a dentist’s bill. But heaven forbid that more coverage for the young should mean cuts in Medicare, the health scheme for the elderly. And Mr Reid is insisting on a special deal whereby an expansion of Medicaid (health care for the poor) in Nevada will be paid for by the federal government, not Nevadans, for five years. But if Nevadans don’t like Mr Obama’s health-care reforms, they will blame Mr Reid; along with Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, he is now running the process that should eventually meld the various reform bills into a single version.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said that the individual health insurance mandates included in every health reform bill, which require Americans to have insurance, were “like paying taxes.” He added that Congress has “broad authority” to force Americans to purchase other things as well, so long as it was trying to promote “the general welfare.”
[...]
David B. Rivkin, a constitutional lawyer with Baker & Hostetler, told CNSNews.com that Hoyer’s argument was “silly,” adding that if the general welfare clause was that elastic, then nothing would be outside of Congress’ powers.
“Congressman Hoyer is wrong,” Rivkin said. “The notion that the general welfare language is a basis for a specific legislative exercise is all silly because if that’s true, because general welfare language is inherently limitless, then the federal government can do anything.
Then for the “general welfare” maybe we should re-elect no one for the next two or three elections. I am pretty sure that exactly the opposite of what the authors of the Constitution meant.
The Obama administration will order seven companies that received the most government assistance to cut salaries of top executives by 90 percent on average, a person familiar with the situation said.
The Treasury Department’s announcement will come this week, the person said on condition of anonymity. Total compensation, including bonuses and other benefits, for the 25 highest-paid executives must be reduced by about 50 percent, the person said.
Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee have been pressing for an investigation of Countrywide Mortgage’s “VIP Program,” under which powerful Democrats like Kent Conrad and Chris Dodd received sweetheart mortgages, apparently as bribes. On Thursday of last week, as the committee was about to meet, the Republicans said that they wanted a vote on whether to subpoena Countrywide’s records on the VIP program. The Democrats were between a rock and a hard place: the last thing they want to do is investigate their own party’s corruption, but at the same time, they don’t want to be seen voting to cover up the Countrywide scandal.
So what did the Democrats do? To a man (or woman), they hid. They failed to show up for the scheduled committee mark-up, leaving the Republicans sitting there by themselves in the committee room. The Democrats claimed that they didn’t show up because of a conflict with a Finance Committee hearing, but in fact they were there, and were caught on video sneaking out a back door of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s offices.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is prepared to run a sharply negative campaign if that’s what it takes to win reelection next year, with a top adviser predicting that the Nevada Democrat will “vaporize” his Republican challengers with attack ads.
Trailing in the polls and under constant attack from the GOP, Reid’s campaign has just launched a warm-and-fuzzy million-dollar ad campaign to reintroduce the veteran senator to his constituents. But Reid’s team also wants to be the one that introduces lesser-known opponents to the electorate — and will be ready, when the time comes, to unleash a torrent of ads branding challengers as untested and unprepared for the job.
Now in the campaign’s sites: Sue Lowden, a wealthy gaming executive, former state senator and former chairwoman of the Nevada Republican Party, and Danny Tarkanian, a Las Vegas businessman and the son of legendary basketball coach Jerry Tarkanian.
“I expect him to vaporize Lowden or Tarkanian or whoever is the opponent,” said a Reid adviser, speaking on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss campaign strategy.
The Reid adviser said the campaign’s oppo files on Lowden and Tarkanian are “growing by the day” — and that the only question for the campaign is when to start using them: Wait until the GOP has a nominee, or start tearing the candidates down in advance of the Republican primary.
He has to do this because he cannot defend his record, his votes, his statements, nor his ignorance of what the people of Nevada want.
Reid, his advisers say, has learned his lesson from Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader who lost his seat in 2004 after failing to push back hard enough against intense GOP criticism.
We’ve long criticized the Obama administration measure of jobs “saved or created” by their economic policies as ridiculously ambiguous. That seemed confirmed when the White House announced last month that a million jobs had been “saved or created” by the stimulus package, without any supporting data. This week, the administration finally supplied the data, and the number came to less than 1/30th of their September claim
Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner is trying to lead the U.S. economy out of its doldrums with – figuratively – one arm tied behind his back: Almost nine months after the Obama administration took power, more than half of the 33 highest-level Treasury Department posts are still vacant.
The most ridiculous of the statements falsely attributed to Rush was this one:
Slavery built the South. I’m not saying we should bring it back; I’m just saying it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark.
Anyone who has ever listened to Limbaugh would immediately recognize this as a hoax; in fact, it was made up out of whole cloth by a little-known left-wing blogger. But it was reported as fact by news outlets that didn’t bother to verify their facts. CNN was especially blameworthy in this regard; it vouched for the blogger-fabrication [after fact checking an SNL skit of all things!!! - ed.]:
The irony runs deep: Keith Olbermann, who unlike Limbaugh is actually a hatemonger, is employed as an NFL commentator…
A final observation, perhaps too obvious to require saying: It’s no coincidence that Democratic Party outlets like CNN had to dredge up fake quotes to make their case. Nothing Rush actually said would do the trick, even though he’s been on the radio three hours a day, five days a week, for more than twenty years. That really tells you all you need to know.
Senators diverted $2.6 billion in funds in a defense spending bill to pet projects largely at the expense of accounts that pay for fuel, ammunition and training for U.S. troops, including those fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to an analysis.
Among the 778 such projects, known as earmarks, packed into the bill: $25 million for a new World War II museum at the University of New Orleans and $20 million to launch an educational institute named after the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat.
While earmarks are hardly new in Washington, “in 30 years on Capitol Hill, I never saw Congress mangle the defense budget as badly as this year,” said Winslow Wheeler, a former Senate staffer who worked on defense funding and oversight for both Republicans and Democrats. He is now a senior fellow at the Center for Defense Information, an independent research organization.
Despite concerted government-led and lender-supported efforts to prevent foreclosures, the number of filings hit a record high in the third quarter, according to a report issued Thursday.
“They were the worst three months of all time,” said Rick Sharga, spokesman for RealtyTrac, an online marketer of foreclosed homes.
During that time, 937,840 homes received a foreclosure letter — whether a default notice, auction notice or bank repossession, the RealtyTrac report said. That means one in every 136 U.S. homes were in foreclosure, which is a 5% increase from the second quarter and a 23% jump over the third quarter of 2008.
On his radio show, Limbaugh said Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) was “spreading lies” when she delivered a speech on the House floor on Tuesday.
Jackson Lee said Limbaugh is “divisive” and should not be allowed to impugn the integrity of the NFL. She also highlighted Limbaugh’s controversial comments about Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb in 2003.
Limbaugh, who has expressed interest in buying the Rams, said, “I wonder if Ms. Jackson Lee to have any regard for the truth. Does she have any regard for hoping, desiring to sound intelligent and knowledgeable, or is she content to be happy and proud to go the floor of the House of Representatives and make a fool of herself?
“What makes [Jackson Lee] a sports expert?” Limbaugh asked.
Limbaugh asserted that the media and Democrats are spreading “lies and fabrications and misstatements” about him, suggesting that his comments on McNabb have been distorted.
He added, “She can say what she wants. These are the people who have power over us … I don’t have any power over Sheila Jackson Lee and I don’t seek any power over Sheila Jackson Lee. She, on the other hand, is the opposite. She wants power over not just me, but of as many people she can get.”
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." - The 10th Amendment of the United States Constitution
Next, let’s admire our Community-Organizer-in-Chief’s and Team Obama’s stellar work:
