Freedom of Press is limited to those who own one - H.L. Mencken

Wednesday, September 01, 2010

Miss him yet?

Monday, August 23, 2010

I just got back from a week of vacation where I played US government - I spent way too much money on feel good stuff that yield no actual benefits - and am now because of the time off, busier than a one legged man at an arse kicking contest now at work. But I felt I had to address something that came up during a conversation I had, with a bunch of obvious liberal morons defending the disastrous collectivist policies of the last decade that have reached new limits under demcorat and Obama control, when they blamed Bush and the Iraqi war for anything from $3-$5 trillion in deficits spending. The numbers widely varied apparently even for them, but I was stumped as to why they would be pulling these ridiculous numbers up until I realized the left still wants to make believe that the deficit spending is because of the Iraq wars and defense spending, and not because of the massive growth in wasteful collectivist spending by government. 

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

One of the more interesting stories to go on this week, and obviously completely ignored or misreported on by the Lame Stream Media, is the story of Omar Khadr, a terrorist that was captured in Afghanistan at the age of 15, and whom had murdered a US Special Forces servicemen with a grenade, amongst other things. This kid, now 23, was a media darling, and even juicier, one of the many cases of “inhumane treatment and torture” the left accused the Bush Administration and our servicemen of being involved with at Gitmo. Even now they are haranguing the Obama administration for the fact this poor an innocent torture victim ended up in a military tribunal!

Yep, this week Omar Khadr’s trial, a military one and not the much promised civilian ones from the campaign trail, started. Funny that. Evil Bush was demonized for holding military tribunals and the evils of Gitmo. Obama ran and won on evil Bush, and especially the wars we were fighting in 2008, and yet today we have Obama not just continuing those, but expanding them. Oh yeah, before the usual libtard brings it up, let me point out that you should not be fooled by the claims Obama is pulling troops out of Iraq. First off, this isn’t Obama’s doing because his pullout was part of the Bush Administration’s time table, and we are leaving some 50K troops behind. And we all know Obama, to his credit, has stepped stuff up in Afghanistan. Even more telling is the fact that Gitmo is still open and in business. Guess being a bunch of holier-than-thou leftist twits that accused the Bush Administration of being an evil bunch of torturers that only concocted Club Gitmo to avoid scrutiny and be able to torture at their leisure and demanded/promised its closure, completely ignoring the reality on the ground, suddenly isn’t so easy when you have to deal with the problems, huh libtards?

And now that we are on the subject of Gitmo and torture, let me give you a piece of information I doubt you will get from the MSM. Remember those torture charges filed by the usual scumbag lawyers – no, these lawyers aren’t just doing their jobs, they want to screw over the US and are hoping to demonize our troops and country, so they are scumbags - defending these evil bastards? Well, the attempt to use them to suppress Khadr’s confession because they were obtained through torture have they have been summarily dismissed:

The decision by army Colonel Patrick Parrish came shortly after Mr. Khadr pleaded not guilty through his Pentagon-appointed defence lawyer to the five war crimes charges he faces. The ruling is a major blow to Mr. Khadr, who claimed in a February 2008 affidavit he was abused during interrogations after his capture at the end of a 2002 firefight with U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. The judge ruled a video apparently showing the suspect making and planting land mines is admissible, rejecting the defence argument it was obtained based on information coerced from him.

Oh the evil military judge screwed Khadr over! Well, no, because the video is damning:

In a video shown at the hearing yesterday, Mr. Khadr was seen telling Guantanamo Bay guards trying to weigh him for the International Red Cross “God will take ... revenge” on the United States. “I am here in prison, but there are millions of people outside,” he says in the May 2006 clip. “What’s happening to you is not for nothing.” In the February 2008 affidavit, Mr. Khadr, 23, alleged guards mistreated him during the weighing session, claiming they “pressed on my pressure points.”

The clip appears to show the guards acting with restraint as they push him toward the scale and point out all his “brothers”—a reference to other detainees—had been weighed without protest. “Come on man, it’s not that bad,” says one after Mr. Khadr claimed the treatment was a “very small example of what’s really going on” at the facility. “We’re not doing this to hurt you, torture you,” adds another, amid explanations his weight was needed for his health records. Although Mr. Khadr spent about 20 minutes resisting the guards, the tape hinted he had been playing to the camera as he switched from the English he used to speak to the guards to Arabic to speak to fellow detainees in nearby cells.

So the “torture” these libtard accused our troops of committing under direction from evil Bush? Yeah, weighing this bastard - while he was threatening our troops with murder and our country with destruction - so we can have accurate medical records to please the libturds that will try to turn everything and anything into an argument about the evils of America and its military.

And surprise, surprise! This bastard is obviously been coached on how to play to the camera to help the libturds do the dirty job of helping the Jihadists and their cause. Don’t expect the left to admit they where used – my take is that it is more complicity than used despite the claims from the lot of them to the contrary – yet again, and that the facts bear out quite a different narrative than the rampant torture stories we constantly are subjected to by them, though.

What’s the odds we are going to continue to hear from the usual suspects that they are ignoring the torture or white washing it – and even more important that it is happening under Obama’s reign (are we no longer an evil empire?) – going forward, despite yet more evidence there was no torture, and that these people will rethink their stance on Gitmo or the Bush Administration’s efforts to fight a vile and evil murderous bunch? Yeah, I know. Zilch.

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Remember that journolist where liberals came together to define strategy and determine what would be news so many here told me I was making a big deal about? Well they are in the news yet again as we find out they were part of the conspiracy to kill stories about Rev. Wright to protect Barack Obama during the 2008 campaign.

It was the moment of greatest peril for then-Sen. Barack Obama’s political career. In the heat of the presidential campaign, videos surfaced of Obama’s pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, angrily denouncing whites, the U.S. government and America itself. Obama had once bragged of his closeness to Wright. Now the black nationalist preacher’s rhetoric was threatening to torpedo Obama’s campaign. The crisis reached a howling pitch in mid-April, 2008, at an ABC News debate moderated by Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos. Gibson asked Obama why it had taken him so long – nearly a year since Wright’s remarks became public – to dissociate himself from them. Stephanopoulos asked, “Do you think Reverend Wright loves America as much as you do?”

Watching this all at home were members of Journolist, a listserv comprised of several hundred liberal journalists, as well as like-minded professors and activists. The tough questioning from the ABC anchors left many of them outraged. “George [Stephanopoulos],” fumed Richard Kim of the Nation, is “being a disgusting little rat snake.” Others went further. According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.

Can’t say I am surprised as this was as obvious to anyone that wasn’t a tool to see. Obama was the least vetted politician ever to run for any kind of high office. It was like the MSM circled the wagon and made sure nothing about this guy went public. So it was no surprise to find out that part & parcel of the strategy was to… well, lets go to the article.

In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”

RACIALISTS! Now be quiet. Seems to be the way every lefty argues, and with Obama they really seem to think this line of arguing was going to do wonders for them. I mean can it be more obvious that these people are in the pocket of one political party? They even employ and rely on the same tactics! Don’t let the facts and the truth drown out the “Hope and Change”, just throw shit at the walls until it stinks to high heaven and nobody is focused on what you want to hide anymore. And then we get some Journolisting.

Michael Tomasky, a writer for the Guardian, also tried to rally his fellow members of Journolist: “Listen folks–in my opinion, we all have to do what we can to kill ABC and this idiocy in whatever venues we have. This isn’t about defending Obama. This is about how the [mainstream media] kills any chance of discourse that actually serves the people.

We don’t need a state run media. We already have a one party media. And the ones that came together to collude about what would be allowed to be the message of the day, are screwing us over.

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Hmmm:

The six-month election recount that turned former “Saturday Night Live” comedian Al Franken into a U.S. senator may have been decided by convicted felons who voted illegally in Minnesota’s Twin Cities.

That’s the finding of an 18-month study conducted by Minnesota Majority, a conservative watchdog group, which found that at least 341 convicted felons in largely Democratic Minneapolis-St. Paul voted illegally in the 2008 Senate race between Franken, a Democrat, and his Republican opponent, then-incumbent Sen. Norm Coleman.

The final recount vote in the race, determined six months after Election Day, showed Franken beat Coleman by 312 votes—fewer votes than the number of felons whose illegal ballots were counted, according to Minnesota Majority’s newly released study, which matched publicly available conviction lists with voting records.

MM has done their homework here.  Their first study was ignored and they’ve gone through records by hand to identify people who should not have voted.  Hennepin County is silent but Ramsey County is expressing concern and hiring investigators.  My reading is that this would not overturn the election but would result in charges against those who voted.

I’m a little hesitant to screaming “I told you so” just yet.  For one thing, this is a conservative organization.  We’ll see what an objective investigation yields.  For another, it plays to my biases.  I feel very strongly that the 2008 Minnesota Senate election was stolen and I’m wary of immediately embracing studies that say so because I’m not thinking about it objectively.

The other reason is more difficult to explain and dates back to the 2000 election.  During the recount debacle, liberals were constantly bombarding me with stories about butterfly ballots and strike lists and irregularities.  My response was that no election can be perfect.  Every voter tally has a margin of error—a few hundred to a few thousands votes—that represents mismanaged districts, felons voting, screwing up ballots and hanging chads. It’s easy to pick out one irregularity and claim it cost the election.  But that’s cherry-picking.  For every butterfly ballot, there’s a district in the panhandle where people left the polls because of the early call of the state.  For every felon voting, there’s someone registered in two states. Most of them time, the election is not close enough to matter or the bullshit balances out.  But every now and then, an exception occurs.

The only way to run elections with anything approaching fairness is to set the rules in advance and follow them.  That’s why I was on Bush’s side in the 2000 election.  Florida did a mandated recount, did a requested recount, that was what the law required and fork should have been put in it.  I’m not familiar enough with Minnesota law to know if that’s what happened here.  But if the law was followed ... well, we knew the rules going in.

All that having been said, I am confident that MM’s results will be born out.  We know that a lot of felons vote who shouldn’t and we know they vote overwhelmingly Democrat.  And that just scrapes the surface of what went on in the recount.  In my opinion, the “margin of error”, as I called it, was skewed heavily toward Franken.

In the end, none of this will get back the Senate seat.  But I hope that it will motivate some people to actually enforce the damned law so that this doesn’t happen again.  Fat chance of that, but I can dream, can’t I?

Wednesday, July 07, 2010

The democrats are in a world of hurt come the November elections. They won huge in 2008 by having the MSM help them overinflate the fact Bush was a wet noodle and that republicans were somehow fiscally less responsible than them. As if the Carter years and the demcorat controlled congress tripling spending while the Reagan tax cuts doubled revenue, never happened. Of course, as soon as they won they proceeded to make sure everyone knew that demcorats being fiscally responsible or able to actually lead us into any kind of prosperity was a myth, on par with the one about demcorats caring about individual freedoms. They took the low bar the stupid republicans let the demcorats set for them, and plunged it to new lows.

For a while there they were able to blame Bush for everything they did wrong. We passed a nearly trillion dollar stimulus patronage bill that served to only “stimulate” the growth of government, fill our campaign coffers and the wallets of our donors, operatives, lobbyists, and friends, at the expense of those working in the private sector? Bush’s fault! A democrat controlled congress first pushed TARP up to $750 billion, despite objections from the not insane during an election campaign nevertheless – and so they could blame “you know who” – and then when they won, literally made TARP a no limit slush fund for all things collectivist government expansion related. Blame Bush! Cap and Tax was not popular and temporarily had to be put on the back burner. But PB, a top Obama donor and well connected to their WH and green efforts, blows a well out in the Gulf, and the same people that accused Bush of conjuring up Katrina to kill blacks in NO, now have let months go bye without doing anything of significance – can’t piss off the unions or let this crisis go bye without taking advantage of it and all that – because now they can bring this economy killer back again. Blame Bush! Passed the most intrusive and massive government expansion program ever, masquerading as healthcare reform, but really intended to recreate something like the Cuban healthcare system over here, against the will of the American people, nevertheless, guaranteeing that the massive cost of this boondoggle will fiscally bankrupt the nation. Blame Bush! Can’t pass a budget because it would show that demcorats lied about being fiscally responsible and have already broken last years record deficit spending and debt growing budget busting shenanigans? Blame Bush! We are being overrun by an invasion from our “neighbor” to the south? Blame Bush! Ok yeah, Bush was a moron on this one too, so he does deserve some blame. Of course, he didn’t succeed at his amnesty attempt, and the ones trying now aren’t doing it because Bush is making them, for sure. The surge worked in Iraq? Blame Bush! Oh wait. Biden says Obama, whom I should remind people because the MSM won’t, was against the surge, gets credit for that one now.

You get the picture right? Everything bad they do is Bush’s fault. Of course, that has now worn thin, and is falling on deaf ears, as the polls showing a massacre come November make clear. Remember the collectivists telling us that it was the end of the age of American greed – because making money and wanting prosperity for yourself, is you know, evil – was dead and the right was gone for the next 50 years? Took them less than 18 months to squander away the support their well orchestrated campaign of lies garnered them, by actually doing what they believe in! As many of us predicted: once the left showed what they were all about, the American people would turn on them. Yeah, I am rubbing it in. Anyway, back to the point of this post: the demcorats are desperate. So what’s the new tactic they hope will help show the American people that they are better suited to be in charge?
More of the same:

The Democratic Party is moving faster and more aggressively than in previous election years to dig up unflattering details about Republican challengers. In House races from New Jersey to Ohio to California, Democratic operatives are seizing on evidence of GOP candidates’ unpaid income taxes, property tax breaks and ties to financial firms that received taxpayer bailout money.

Sounds solid. When you have zero successes to campaing on, all you are left with is demonizing the opposition, and hoping the people are too stupid to figure out that’s all you have. You aren’t fit to lead anyone, fiscally irresponsible, drowning the country in debt, destroying the economy, healthcare system, and the lives of millions, and looking like you are going to be hammered in the election for it – all because people have wised up and no longer buy the “Blame Bush!” meme, dang it! – so what you do isn’t square this stuff away. Nah, you go dig up dirt on those that are going to have you for breakfast, hoping the American people are stupid enough to leave you in charge. After all, as this WaPO post does, the MSM will repeat the talking points you want to get out there even as it is pretending to tut-tut at you for doing this idiotic stuff.

And if you can’t find enough dirt? Well, go make some up:

Democratic officials are advising campaigns to hire trackers to follow their Republican opponents to public events with video cameras, ready to catch any gaffe or misstatement. And the Democratic National Committee last week issued a call to the public to submit any embarrassing audio or video of Republicans, as well as copies of their direct-mail advertisements.

Party officials would not say how many staffers are working on opposition research. Such work used to be farmed out to campaign consultants, but the DCCC brought research operations in-house in 2008 to be more nimble. “It may appear to be more aggressive this cycle because what we’re finding on Republicans is so rich,” Vogel said.

Good luck you morons. If these bastards put in a fraction of the time they would doing this kind of stuff in actually doing their jobs to benefit the American people instead of themselves, I guarantee you they would not need to do this stuff. Like I said: I can’t wait for November.

Monday, June 28, 2010

Read em, and weep. If you can filter out the MSM attempt to make this bumbling moron appear as an intellectual, what you see here is Joe either setting the stage for the Obama administration to come out and say GWB still is holding us back so we can’t deliver on the promises we made, but lets flush another few trillions down the debt hole in a pretend attempt that will funnel the bulk of that cash to our buddies, or Joe is telling the truth by accident, and we yet again see Obama and the donkeys for the inept morons they are.

Vice President Joe Biden gave a stark assessment of the economy today, telling an audience of supporters, “there’s no possibility to restore 8 million jobs lost in the Great Recession.” Appearing at a fundraiser with Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.) in Milwaukee, the vice president remarked that by the time he and President Obama took office in 2008, the gross domestic product had shrunk and hundreds of thousands of jobs had been lost. “We inherited a godawful mess,” he said, adding there was “no way to regenerate $3 trillion that was lost. Not misplaced, lost.”

The only thing missing in that “inherited” quote of Joe’s is the fact that this goes straight back to the ideologues on the left forcing lending institutions to give loans to terrible people that were risks, then using Freddie & Fannie to launder those crappy loans and create CDAs that the morons on Wall Street went along and traded in despite the obvious.

Here is some reality for you: as long as these “only government can save us” morons are calling the shot, the economy will stay bad or get worse.

Last week the White House put out a Recovery and Reinvestment Act update claiming that between 2.2 million and 2.8 million jobs were either saved or created because of the stimulus as of March 2010. In signing the Recovery Act into law on Feb 17, 2009, Mr. Obama said the measure “will create or save 3-and-a-half million jobs over the next two years.”

Oh, please! The only jobs they created or saved were government jobs, as private pay shrinks while government workers make out like bandits, never the less, and the private sector contracts as the public one expands. And that 2-3 million number is a joke. At best we have 400K temporary census workers that will be out of work come November, hopefully like most of these demcorats, whom will swell the ranks of those needing to feed at the government’s teat because the collectivists are trashing and robbing blind those that create jobs. The only thing old Joe left out was some “Hope & Change”, but I guess as many of us predicted what we are getting is hope that we are left with some of our own change after these bandits rob us.

Update: Editted to add missing stuff.

Sunday, June 13, 2010

That’s what I am. Those of us that pointed out that there had to be some dirty and politically motivated directive for the dismissal by Obama DOJ of the Black Panther voter intimidation case that was reported during the 2008 elections at a Philadelphia polling station, seem to be vindicated. My only surprise is that the so many of the incriminating underlying details and facts are coming out so early. Let’s set this up.

Monday, March 22, 2010

Want to see what kind of disservice the MSM is doing the American people? Check out how this this ridiculous and factually challenged AP article reports the demcorats screwing us over and passing one of the most unpopular bills ever.

WASHINGTON – A transformative health care bill is headed to President Barack Obama for his signature as Congress takes the final steps in Democrats’ improbable and history-making push for near-universal medical coverage. On the cusp of succeeding where numerous past congresses and administrations have failed, jubilant House Democrats voted 219-212 late Sunday to send legislation to Obama that would extend coverage to 32 million uninsured Americans, reduce deficits and ban insurance company practices such as denying coverage to people with pre-existing medical conditions.

Thursday, March 18, 2010

Obama has finally been given something other than the usual fluff stuff interview he has been getting away from the MSM for the past 2 years, and it is no surprise it happened to be done by Fox News (video1, video2). He finally sat down with a reporter that was interested in the facts, and Bret Baier grilled his ass. We finally got to see the great orator at work when he wasn’t being handed some softballs by people that get tingles in their legs about him, and Obama, in addition to getting pissed he was not being allowed to just skirt questions with stupid and meaningless talking points, scored, as I expected, a clear F- with his idiotic answers.

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Democrats ran and won in 2006, and then again in 2008, on the bad behavior of republicans. Republicans were successfully and correctly painted as having lost their fiscal sanity for the deficit spending prior to 2006, only to have democrats gain control of congress and the spending purse after the 2006 elections, and set new spending records they then blamed Bush for. The leftwing machine’s manipulations of the facts, with big-time help from a complicit media that didn’t point out democrats were always worse at that stuff anyway when in charge, allowed them to run on the lack of fiscal responsibility of the republicans in 2008 again, using the crisis of their own making that they then blamed on Bush yet again, to win big, only to then proceed to set new deficit spending records. Here is the graph for those of you that want to dispute the deficit spending facts, so spare us the bull:

As this projection showed Obama’s deficit spending in his first year ended up being more than all 8 years of Bush. Oh sure, as I already pointed out Obama is blaming Bush for having to do so. Democrats have successfully convinced so many that the financial crisis we are in isn’t tied to those idiotic collectivist economic lending practices they forced upon the market in the last 3 decades. Even worse, they successfully have covered up the rigged games Franks and Dodd set up with Fannie and Freddie to keep those faulty economic policies afloat, and how those trading scams then led to the implosion of the housing market and then the financial sector. But that “It’s Bush’s fault” excuse is wearing thin as people are slowly seeing the truth. Almost $2 trillion of the tax payer’s dollars has been funneled to democrats and their friends, through one collectivist economic scam or another promising salvation, but delivering nothing but a drastically growing government bureaucracy, while the private sector continues to bleed jobs and contract. And the WH remains focused on tacking on trillions more in new taxes and debt so they can give government control of healthcare moneys and decisions, with a scam which purports to reign in costs and be fiscally responsible by of all things taxing us for 10 years to provide 5 or 6 years of coverage, while ignoring the economic disaster they are leaving in their wake. And the one thing they should be addressing, the lack of jobs, gets nothing but some meaningless political play. In the mean time the hole is growing deeper and the spending of money we simply don’t have continues to rise. This year is looking like it will set even higher and wasteful deficit spending records as this February’s $220.9 billion single month record is showing. This seems to be our economic future thanks to the democrats and their economics. But the fact that democrats are destroying our economy, and are trying hard to destroy healthcare, is not the thing I want to address here. I want to talk a bit about one of the other lies they told to get themselves elected.

If you have been following the whole Eric Massa fiasco, you know this stuff has turned into a soap opera writ large. Frankly I do not know if Massa is telling the truth. He is a democrat after all, and lying is second nature for them. However, I do not put it past this WH to do what Massa has accused them of doing either. Based on what I have seen them do in just this first year, I have no doubt that this bunch is probably the most corrupt crew I have ever seen. We are dealing with Chicago politics here, and this – hope & change! - is SOP for these people. My bet is that since Obama wants this monster passed, his team is going to make it happen. Even if they have to do what Massa has accused them of. In fact I do not put it past them to resort to openly committing felonies to do so considering the vested interest they have in making this the law of the lad. After all, they control the levers of power and the press, so whose gonna be able to do anything about anything bad they do? If the stuff that has been going on so far hasn’t made the case yet, I doubt anything they do will.

And that brings me to my point about this whole Massa thing. If you don’t remember Nancy promising to drain the republican swamp and end the culture of corruption back in 2006, here is just one of the instances the sympathetic press gave her words play. Unfortunately, as case after case proves – Chris Dodd, Barney Franks, Charley Rangel, and a plethora of others – Nancy lied, and the corruption and criminal behavior, like the deficit spending and the fiscal irresponsibility I talked about before, is also setting new records. Don’t take my word for it. The case with Massa is more of the same. Even more important is the fact that while Pelosi is now claiming ignorance that’s a blatant lie because Nancy knew months ago about Massa’s behavior. And while Nancy is playing dumb, just a little research would have made it all obvious from records going back to Massa’s NAVY days showing that Massa was a time bomb waiting to explode.

As is the case in all these other stories of corruption that the MSM is ignoring or down playing, we are being lied to by these democrats that want to pretend real criminal activity and serious ethics violations, stuff that makes what happens when the republicans were in charge look tame, isn’t their modus operandi. And keep in mind that it is this scandal driven congress which is ignoring the will of the people and pushing forward with an unpopular government takeover of healthcare. Why isn’t the MSM up in arms about all this corruption and the will of the people being ignored? I guess that’s more of that hope and change for you.

Tuesday, February 02, 2010

The CATO institute has this very intersting post about the direction of 5 decades of federal spending. Of particular interest was this graph below.Look at that spike in 2009. Look at it hard. Then compare it to anything you see during the eight years before that.

The most intersting part is that the leftists want to pretend we are in our current fniancial predicament because of defense spending - which clearly keeps dropping - while non-defense spending, that’s code for most of the collectivist pap, has grown bigtime. With this kind of crazy spending, it’s no wonder that another campaign promise has gone out the window. Hope and change indeed.

Sunday, August 23, 2009

I am worried that everyone here, including myself got way too focused on the first part dealing with the credit card issue, in my post below, and either ignored or missed the real big point in my post: that the collectivists screwed our economy up, even worse than usual, policy wise, and that it is going to get worse if they keep at it.

I used the example of how they rammed through the stimulus patronage bill, but everyone of their big policy pushed through was disastrous for the economy. Let me enumerate them for you. I hope for the day that we do not need to go into the details and the consequences of the left’s response to the economic crisis of their own making either, but the truth, facts, and logic, never seem to be things the left cares for, so I guess I need to quantify that again. Despite their best efforts, the truth has come out. Those that want to know the facts know that we are where we are today because of ideological policy. It was ideology that drove these politicians to legislate the conditions that resulted in the economic collapse we experienced. Lending institutions were forced by law into giving money to seriously unqualified people. Then when this still was not working the same politicians legislated a hokey and completely opaque trading scheme for those securities based on toxic assets, and used Freddie and Fannie to showcase government backing of these dangerous schemes and legitimize them. Finally they decided to bring down the house of cards, right before an election – so they could score on the political perception, one I never quite understood, that democrats are better for the economy – to win the presidency and big gains. Now their solution to an economic slump that I am certain they did not predict or expect to be this big, is for them to meddle even more but keep the underlying fundamental and illogical problem in place. That’s going to work well.

That above brings us to the government takeover of the banking and lending industry, and the consequences of that. While they demonized the TARP program as corporate bailouts with tax payer money, these leftists not only saw the $700 billion that the Bush people put up, but raised it to over $3 trillion, and are even floating the idea government might have to buy out the entire system fro some $29 trillion. Many of those institutions that lined up to drink at the trough of public cash, now regret the deal, but the real and frightening danger is this concept that government should micromanage the private sector and directly work against market influences collectivists don’t like or approve of. The same ideologues in control of government that created the problem in the first place, I should add. As I already said: this is going to work out well.

I won’t waste too much time on the government take over of two out of three American car manufacturing companies. There is no way of defending the tax payer funded takeover of these companies. Even more disgraceful is how that tax payer money was not used to pay off those people that put their own money on the line as investments in GM or Chrysler, but to prop up unions as majority stake holders. Yes, the same unions that are the fundamental underlying problem which made these companies unable to compete and cranked out the low quality wares that turned people off. Talk about your mob style pay-offs. And now the politicians in DC can tell both Chrysler and GM to make cars nobody really wants too.  I am sure that once other companies, but especially Ford, all start running circles around these two, that the politicians will use the power of government to rig the system in favor of their new holdings. At the tax payer’s expense, of course. What do you think the “Cash for Clunkers” program was all about anyway? How well has that worked?

We also got graced by the watermelons – the collectivists masquerading as environmentalists – with the “Cap & Tax” bill: the largest and most massive single tax increase passed ever by our politicians. The average American family of four will now get to pay anywhere from $1000 to $4000, depending at whom is talking and how they come up with their umbers, in extra costs and fees tied to their energy use every year. Since they are “costs and fees” I guess we could all tongue in cheek try to defend Obama’s blatant lie that he would not raise taxes on anyone making less than $250K. Don’t worry this going back on his promises, especially about taxes and who will pay them, is going to happen so often we will soon be numb to it. It is all going to work out well!

Every one of these moves was intended to bring in some huge section of the private sector, and more importantly the money in it, under control of the federal government. But no plan was as ambitious, or deceptive, as the healthcare insurance government take over, attempt. Oh, sure they guarantee us that’s not the plan, but only the dumb or the propagandists in the MSM fall for that blatant and obvious lie. The left wants to take the 1/5th of our economy tied to healthcare and put it in the hands of the politicians. To cut costs and improve it, they tell us. Except for the obvious fact that if they really wanted to cut costs and improve anything, they would avoid as much government meddling as possible. Not increase it. Want healthcare reform donkeys? Give us less government and tort reform. Neither of those are part of the plan however, because the plan is not about fixing anything healthcare related, now is it. The collectivist lies don’t seem to be working so well, though.

The only place that these leftists have felt spending needs to be cut is in defense. I am sure that it will be these same people telling us the next time that we need to send our troops into harms way that we should not because they lack equipment. Kind of like when we had to go deal with Iraq and they tried to blame Bush for the defense cuts of the Clinton years. Defense jobs I guess are the types of jobs collectivists think are bad, I guess. How long before the democrats undo the sacrifices of the last 7 years and guarantee us a future war in the ME that will cost us 10 times as much as what we already paid? That’s coming, and I can’t wait to see how well it works for us..

There are many more examples of this. It has not been more than what, 9 months, since they have taken over, and foreign and economic policy decisions have all been disastrous. While the rest of the world looks to be moving out of the recession, we are going deeper into it. Don’t believe the constant MSM propaganda saying otherwise. These people are covering for the incompetent ideologues in DC because they have a vested interest. About the only thing that the Obama people have gotten right is the Bush GWoT policies the left used – notice I say used to – get totally crazy about. Funny that huh? I think Obama’s actions are working well to vindicate Bush.

Cross posted at Wasting time with Alex

Saturday, January 03, 2009

He found enough.  He stole enough.  And doggone it, he’s a senator:

Norm Coleman’s term as a U.S. senator ended at noon Washington time on Saturday, and by evening his hopes of winning a second term had been dealt an expected but serious setback as state officials counted previously rejected absentee ballots in St. Paul.

DFLer Al Franken held an unofficial lead of 225 votes over Coleman, according to a newspaper tally of the officials’ count of the absentee ballots. Franken had led unofficially by 49 votes going into the day and gained a net 176 votes from the new ballots.

With the recount complete, focus immediately shifted to the Minnesota Supreme Court, which continued to consider a request from the Coleman campaign to alter the process and add more absentee ballots to be reconsidered. But by early evening there was no word from the state’s highest court as to when it would rule or hear arguments.

At this point, any court challenge is purely perfunctory.  Coleman should show the honor Franken never would and concede.  And that’s ... OK.

With Franken and Caroline Kennedy in the Senate, late night comedians are not going to lack for stupid quotes.

Wednesday, December 31, 2008

And the Bumbler of the Year Award goes to:

...Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York. Her name is unlikely to appear in any other sentence in the coming weeks with the word inaugural, although it didn’t have to be that way.
....

How she lost the nomination and her shot at becoming the nation’s first female president will go down in political history as one of the great campaign screw-ups of all time.

To be fair, President-elect Obama’s campaign was extremely well-run and better funded than anyone could have possibly imagined. He smartly saw that the caucus states offered him a special opportunity for convention delegates that did not exist in the primaries where Sen. Clinton’s name recognition and support of the party establishment was a much bigger plus.

But if the Clinton campaign had done sufficient planning and staffing for the states that voted in the three weeks after the Feb. 5 “Super Duper Tuesday” primaries and caucuses, all of his work probably would have gone for naught.

The Clinton strategy had been to clinch the nomination on Feb. 5, when 22 states held Democratic primaries and caucuses. And that day, like most of the other Tuesdays during the winter and spring, they basically wrote off the caucus states.

Fighting to a Virtual Draw

Sen. Clinton - and basically everyone else - expected her strong name identification and favorable image among Democratic activists, combined with a presumed (incorrectly it turned out) money advantage would deliver her the nomination that day. But Mr. Obama fought her to a virtual draw on Feb. 5, when almost 40% of the delegates were decided. He took the more numerous smaller primaries and caucus states, while she was winning the handful of big prizes — New York, New Jersey and California.

He, however, had planned and budgeted for the 11 contests during the rest of February. She had not - a victim of her campaign believing its own hype about inevitability.

President-elect Obama won all 11 primaries and caucuses by big margins the rest of the month and rolled up a 125-delegate advantage during that period. But just as important as the delegate numbers was that his winning streak made him the favorite. That, as much as anything, prevented a Clinton comeback.

By then the Democratic delegate allocation rules that govern the primaries and caucuses took over. They are much more generous to second-place finishers than in the Republican process; that allowed him to stay ahead even though Sen. Clinton won major contests in March and April, including Ohio and Pennsylvania.

In the end, President-elect Obama won the nomination by more than 125 delegates, but that was only after all those “superdelegates” who could support whomever they wanted did the math and realized he could not be stopped.

If Sen. Clinton had just broken even in those 11 post-Feb. 5 contests, she very likely would have won the nomination. Her primary victory would have come in a year when the Wall Street meltdown meant that most any Democratic nominee would win the November election.

Outside of John McCain, I can’t think of anyone else who could have gotten the brass ring and blew it so badly. She was worse than Al Gore or John Kerry-they at least won their respective nominations despite being enormous horse’s asses. As it is, she’ll now be fourth in the line of succession. So congratulations Hillary, for what it’s worth.