The Lord Of The Flies movement takes baby steps…

All Animals Are Equal, But Some Are More Equal Than Others: “We need to limit the amount of food we’re putting out to curb the influx of derelicts.” – OWS kitchen volunteer Rafael Moreno

All Animals Are Equal, But Some Are More Equal Than Others, Part II: "If you’re going to come here and get our food, bedding and clothing, have books and medical supplies for no charge, they need to give back. There’s a lot of takers here and they feel entitled. – OWS protestor Lauren Digiola (link)

Yes, we certainly can't have any entitlement-seekers infecting the Occupy movement of…um…entitlement-seekers. Gotta keep those losers out. The stuff the Occupiers have is THEIRS, dammit !!! They can't be expected to redistribute THEIR wealth to the less fortunate !!! We Are The 99%…except for those homeless derelicts !!!
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Robbing Peter To Pay Paul: "With nine days to go before the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) faces default, a Senate committee on Wednesday is expected to vote on a new plan to address the crisis. … The legislation would … provide USPS billions in cash from taxpayers. Specifically, it would hand over some $7 billion in supposedly 'surplus' contributions the government has made to the Federal Employees Retirement System. Such temporary surpluses, however, are common and are typically erased by normal financial swings or amortization over time. Transfer of the entire pot to USPS leaves taxpayers vulnerable if USPS later falls behind (which, given its condition, is not unlikely) while allowing needed structural reforms to be delayed. … USPS, and mail delivery itself, faces an uncertain future. Comprehensive change is needed to prevent massive losses and virtual bankruptcy. The reforms being considered by the Senate, however, fall short — while putting taxpayers even more at risk for the consequences of failure." –The Heritage Foundation's James Gattuso

I call this the Social Security financial oversight model. When the government sees a pile of money, it can't keep it's grubby mitts off of it. Btw, there is about $17.5 trillion sitting in the retirement funds of Americans if you add all of them together. How much do you think the government money-grubbers would love to gain control of that pile of cash ??? You'd have to subtract the $2.5 trillion sitting in the Social Security Trust Fund from the $17.5 trillion amount, because those SS funds don't really exist (the government already "borrowed" that money), but still, that leaves $15 trillion in our retirement funds, which is almost the exact amount of the national debt. When the cash-strapped government is already thinking about "borrowing" money from the pensions of federal employees, how long will it be until your IRA's and 401K's are taken over ? Lest you think I'm engaging in some fanciful paranoid delusion…the Obama administration already has plans to takeover your 401K's, which it could then "borrow" from. Beware.
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National Debate Loser: And what can we say about Rick Perry ? Trying to list the federal departments he would eliminate, Perry had an epic debate brain fart instead…

"Commerce, Education and the, uh, what's the third one there? Let's see…The third agency of government I would — I would do away with, Education, uh, the, uh, Commerce and, let's see,…I can't. The third one, I can't. Sorry. Oops."

Doh !!!! I think the third government department Perry was going for there is Lingerie, or maybe Junior Miss. Commodore Perry's presidential battleship may have just sunk.
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When Life Gets Tough, Make Things Up: "From a policy standpoint I think it's really important to know that President Obama was a job creator from day one. Now, was the ditch that we were in so deep that when you're talking to people and they still don't have a job, that's any consolation to them? No. But I'll tell you this: If President Obama and the House congressional Democrats had not acted, we would be at 15 percent unemployment." –House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)

For the record, under Obama, the alleged "job creator from day one", we have lost about 2.4 million jobs, and nobody outside Pelosi's vivid imagination believes unemployment would have been at 15 percent without Obama's failed stimulus package. Pelosi is a perpetual brain fart.
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Top 1% Denier: Here's an exchange between left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore and a CBS reporter…

Reporter: How are you helping these [Occupy protesters]?
Moore: Because I do well, I want taxes raised on people who do well, including mine.
Reporter: How are you helping these people with your $50 million?
Moore: I don't have $50 million.
Reporter: That's what it's rumored you are worth.
Moore: Well, really. Is that what you do is sell rumors?
Reporter: We're asking you for the truth.
Moore: You're just punk media is all you are. You lie. You lie to people. Stop lying to people. Stop lying.
Reporter: Are you not part of the 1 percent?
Moore: Just don't lie, okay?

I'm still waiting for the FIRST left-wing multi-millionaire like Moore to give their own personal riches away for the "cause". When they start doing that, I'll start taking them more seriously, and not a moment before. Before the wealth redistributors start spending other people's money, how about they spend their own ???
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Unitary Executive Back In Style: "If the Republican Congress won't join us, we're going to continue to act on our own to make the changes that we can to bring relief to middle-class families and those aspiring to get in the middle class". – VP Joe Biden

Whatever you say, Joe, but what about those 15 jobs-producing bills the Republican House has already passed that are sitting in the Senate waiting for the Democrats to bring them up ? In addition, why does every Democrat "jobs package" have to end up costing the taxpayers between $450 billion and $1 trillion ? Do Democrats simply not know our national debt is about to pass $15 trillion any day now ? Maybe their entire party has had a brain fart. The Democrats idea of stimulus is to take a bucket of water out of one end of the pool and pour it into the other end. They seem to believe they can fill up the pool this way. It won't ever work, because it CAN'T work. The real answer is to take money out of the government's hands and put it back into the hands of the private sector where it can do some good. The private sector is where growth comes from, not the government.
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And To Think, THIS Is the Guy They Call The Father Of The Democratic Party: "We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt." – Thomas Jefferson

While I'm quoting Jefferson, who in today's society believes these words ?…

"Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition". – Thomas Jefferson

Not the political left, I can tell you that for sure.

"Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this Presidency" – Barack Obama.

In March 2011, President Obama was given a "transparency award" from five different open government advocate groups. The award was presented to Obama in a private White House ceremony closed off from reporters and the public. Ironically, Obama received his transparency award in secret, because it could have proved very embarrassing to the President if reporters had brought up any of the following information at his TRANSPARENCY award celebration:

• President Obama has not decreased, but has dramatically increased governmental secrecy. According to a new report to the president by the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO) – the federal agency that provides oversight of the government's security classification system – the cost of classification for 2010 has reached over $10.17bn. That's a 15% jump from the previous year, and the first time ever that secrecy costs have surpassed $10bn. Last month, ISOO reported that the number of original classification decisions generated by the Obama administration in 2010 was 224,734 – a 22.6% jump from the previous year (see The Price of Secrecy, Obama Edition).

• There were 544,360 requests for information last year under the Freedom of Information Act to the 35 biggest federal agencies – 41,000 requests more than the year before. Yet the bureaucracy responded to 12,400 fewer requests than the prior year, according to an analysis by the Associated Press.

• Obama has invoked baseless and unconstitutional executive secrecy to quash legal inquiries into secret illegalities more often than any predecessor. The list of this president's invocations of the "state secrets privilege" has already resulted in shutting down lawsuits involving the National Security Agency's illegal wiretapping – Jewel v NSA and Shubert v Obama; extraordinary rendition and assassination – Anwar al-Awlaki; and illegal torture – Binyam Mohamed.

• Ignoring his campaign promise to protect government whistleblowers, Obama's presidency has amassed the worst record in US history for persecuting, prosecuting and jailing government whistleblowers and truth-tellers. President Obama's behaviour has been in stark contrast to his campaign promises, which included live-streaming meetings online and rewarding whistleblowers. Obama's department of justice is twisting the 1917 Espionage Act to press criminal charges in five alleged instances of national security leaks – more such prosecutions than have occurred in all previous administrations combined.

• The Obama justice department's prosecution of former NSA official Thomas Drake, who, up till 9 June, faced 35 years in prison for having blown the whistle on the NSA's costly and unlawful warrantless monitoring of American citizens, typifies the abusive practices made possible through expansive secrecy agreements and threats of prosecution.

• President Obama has set a powerful and chilling example for potential whistleblowers through the abuse and torture of Bradley Manning, whose guilt he has also publicly stated prior to any trial by his, Obama's, military subordinates.

• Obama is the only president who has reenacted Fahrenheit 451 by actually having his agency collect and burn a book due to a never-justified classification excuse: Lt Col Tony Shaffer's Operation Dark Heart.

• Under President Obama, the FBI has launched a series of raids and issued grand jury subpoenas targeting nearly two dozen antiwar activists. Over 2,600 arrests of protesters in the US have been made while Obama has been president, further encroaching on the exercise of first amendment rights.

• President Obama has initiated a secret assassination programme, has publicly announced that he has given himself the power to include Americans on the list of people to be assassinated, and has attempted to assassinate at least one, Anwar al-Awlaki.

• President Obama has maintained the power to secretly kidnap, imprison, rendition, or torture, and he has formalised the power to lawlessly imprison in an executive order. This also means the power to secretly imprison. There are some 1,700 prisoners outside the rule of law in Bagram alone.

• The Obama administration is also busy going after reporters to discover their sources and convening grand juries in order to target journalists and news publishers.

• President Obama promised to reveal White House visitors' logs. He didn't. In response to outrage over his refusal to reveal the names of health insurance CEOs he had met with and cut deals with on the health insurance reform bill, he announced that he would release the names going forward, but not those in the past. And going forward, he would withhold names he chose to withhold. White House staff then began regularly meeting lobbyists just off White House grounds in order to avoid the visitors' logs.

• President Obama has sent representatives to aggressively pressure Spain, England and Germany to shut down investigations that could have exposed the crimes of the Bush era, just as he has instructed the US justice department to avoid such matters. This includes his refusal to allow prosecutions of the CIA for torture, following a public letter from eight previous heads of the CIA informing him that he had better not enforce those laws.

While I don't agree with all the aforementioned accusations against Obama, this President deserved a transparency award about as much as he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize while he was fighting two wars and attacking people in other countries with Predator drones. It doesn't get more ironic than that. Btw, Obama just announced he's sending U.S. combat troops to Uganda ! Sigh. I think the U.S. now has troops everywhere except Antarctica. No, strike that. It turns out we DO have troops in Antarctica. Must be those insurgent penguin factions.

In a related transparency story, one of the names on the White House visitors' log in 2009 was one Malik Shabazz. You may remember a fellow named Malik Shabazz is a leader of the New Black Panther Party. You may also remember Malik Shabazz was one of the New Black Panthers who stood in front of a Philadelphia voting booth with nightsticks and intimidated voters. That is a federal crime, but Obama's Attorney General Eric Holder inexplicably dismissed the case. Two months later, someone named 'Malik Shabazz' visited the White House. Big Government's Andrew Breitbart has been asking the White House for over a year if the Malik Shabazz who visited the White House in 2009 was the New Black Panther Malik Shabazz (Panther Shabazz says it was), but the "transparent" White House has not answered his requests. Perhaps the White House wants to keep quiet the fact that then-candidate Obama appeared on the same podium with the New Black Panthers, a hate group, in 2007. It seems our mainstream media can't be bothered with such a story when it involves Obama, a Democrat. No, the media is too busy talking about an offensive word that was written on a rock 27 years ago on some hunting land Rick Perry's family once leased, a word that neither Perry nor his family placed on the rock, and that Perry's family painted over. THAT is somehow news when it involves a Republican. But Obama appearing onstage with a hate group in 2007 while he was running for President….nah, nothing to see here, says the illustrious mainstream media.

And speaking of Attorney General Holder…how many different stories are we going to get from him regarding the Fast And Furious incident ? When Holder was asked by Congress in May 2011 when he first heard of Fast And Furious, he said "I'm not sure of the exact date but I probably heard about Fast and Furious for the first time over the last few weeks." Later he told reporters, "The notion that this reaches into the upper levels of the Justice Department is something that at this point I don't think is supported by the facts and I think once we examine it and once the facts are revealed we'll see that's not the case." Unfortunately, none of what Holder said was true. E-mails revealed Holder knew about Fast And Furious since at least July 2010. Holder either lied to Congress, a federal crime, or he conveniently forgot all about an ATF program (the ATF works for Holder as head of Justice) in which thousands of American-made guns were purposely put into the hands of Mexican drug cartels, resulting in the deaths of at least two U.S. agents and countless Mexicans. After Holder's falsehoods were revealed, the DOJ lamely claimed Holder doesn't read his e-mails, adding possible dereliction of duty charges to Holder's other problems. Then the Justice Dept. told CBS News that Holder thought the congressional inquirers were talking about some OTHER case (ah yes, the OTHER Fast And Furious operation ! That explains it. NOT !). Then they told CBS that Holder misunderstood the question, and that he DID know about the Fast And Furious case, just not the details…I assume Holder's next excuse will be, 'the dog ate my Fast And Furious notes'. This thing practically screams "coverup". The DOJ has not been cooperating with the investigation, and this week Congressman Issa (R-CA) subpoenaed all DOJ documents regarding Fast And Furious.

Can't you just smell the transparency ???

Btw, the White House just refused to turn over documents related to the Solyndra debacle, in which over a half billion taxpayer dollars were flushed down the toilet.

Maybe we should give Obama another transparency award. What the heck ? After all, he is a Democrat.

I keep hearing the Republicans are "The Party Of No", but it's the Democrats who keep rejecting legislation passed by the Republican-led House. Earlier this year, the Democrat-led Senate rejected the House budget proposal. In August, the Senate rejected the House's Cut, Cap, And Balance plan to raise the debt limit and balance the budget. Now, the real Party Of No is at it again. It has rejected a House Continuing Resolution (CR) to fund the government and provide relief for victims of Hurricane Irene and other disasters. Thus, we face ANOTHER possible government shutdown, because the real Party Of No, the Democrats, can never seem to agree on a budget. They haven't passed one in 2 1/2 years. They didn't even agree to pass Obama's budget. They rejected it unanimously.

The reason the Party Of No gave for its rejection this time is it's usual reason – Democrats don't want to cut spending, even though federal spending is far higher than usual and our deficit is astronomical.

The Senate on Friday rejected the GOP-led House's bill to avert a government shutdown, intensifying a partisan standoff that many in Congress hoped to avoid. The vote was 59-36.

Democrats in the Senate, who are in the majority, oppose Republican efforts to roll back "green" energy programs to pay for aid for victims of Hurricane Irene and other disasters. They say disaster aid, usually a bipartisan issue, should not require cuts elsewhere — especially to programs creating green jobs — as the GOP majority in the House now demands.

The two sides are racing the clock, as the Federal Emergency Management Agency is expected to run out of disaster money Monday.

It's deja vu all over again. This also makes me wonder how in the world Democrats are ever going to agree to the $1.5 trillion in spending cuts the Super Committee is supposed to recommend as part of the debt ceiling deal.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), ever the double-talking politician, had stressed the urgency of passing the CR on wednesday, but after the House passed a bill on friday, which Reid and company rejected, he changed his tune:

Earlier this week Mr. Reid was adamant that FEMA’s account was on the brink.

“The agency that rushes to help when disaster strikes will run out of money on Monday. I repeat, Monday,” he said Wednesday as he was pushing for quick action.

But by Friday he said he had been assured there was more time.

Sen. Mitch McConnell, Republicans’ leader in the chamber, tried to speed the vote up to Friday afternoon, but Mr. Reid objected, saying he wanted the cooling-off period.

“Cool off a little bit. Work this through. There’s a compromise here,” Mr. Reid said Friday, minutes after the Senate blocked back a bill drafted by House Republicans that would have replenished the disaster fund accounts through Nov. 18.

The CR would have kept the government running until 2012 had the Dems not rejected it:

The disaster money fight is tied to a broader bill that would keep the government open into fiscal year 2012, which begins Oct. 1. Congress has not passed any of the dozen spending bills required to fund basic operations, and without a stop-gap bill much of the government would shut down after Sept. 30.

In other words, we could have avoided this entire mess in the first place had Senate Democrats not rejected every budget placed before it while not offering any budget of it's own. The Senate has been in dereliction of it's basic duty for years.

In typical fashion, the fiscally irresponsible Democrats want the FEMA funds to be added to the deficit rather than display any shred of responsibility, which might harm their re-election chances:

Mr. Reid has called for a Monday vote on a new bill he wrote to accept the House-passed FEMA funding level, but to tack the additional spending onto the deficit rather than find cuts elsewhere.

Anybody remember the PAYGO legislation the Democrats passed a couple years ago, where the Dems proudly crowed about how federal spending would all be paid for now ??? The Democrats forgot all about that legislation the moment after it was passed. They scammed the American people. We've added $4 trillion to the debt in the 2 1/2 years Obummer has been President. The Democrats consistently vote for more fiscal irresponsibility, as they are doing here. They aren't just The Party Of No. They are The Party Of No Honor. Their lies flow like a river.

There's another reason Harry Reid wants a "cooling-off period" over the weekend:

Senate Democrats also have a major campaign event to raise money from high-dollar donors at the luxurious Kiawah Island in South Carolina this weekend.

Party on, Democrats. We know whose money you really care about…your own. While the Democrats wine and dine their well-heeled cronies (like the green entrepreneurs who funded Solyndra) on paradise island this weekend, I guess the business of the people can wait. Who cares if FEMA runs out of money on monday ? If that happens, I'm sure the Democrats can spin things to make it seem like the GOP's fault. That should be easy for a political party that has spent the last three years blaming everything on Bush, while it simultaneously destroys the economic future of this country.

Speaking of Solyndra, Barry's pals from Solyndra testified before Congress yesterday, if you can call pleading the 5th testifying. Here's a small example of the transparency and forthright honesty displayed by the Solyndra boys:

"Was the White House duped by Solyndra, or did they ignore the information to put green energy in a better light, or for more onerous reasons," asked Nebraska Rep. Lee Terry, a Republican.

One of Solyndra's main financial backers was also a big fundraiser for Obama in 2008 and lawmakers have questioned whether that played a part in the loan guarantee.

Lawmakers wanted to know the nature of several meetings between the Solyndra executives and White House aids over the last couple of years.

"On advice of my counsel, I invoke the privilege afforded by the fifth amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and I respectfully decline to answer any questions," was the response from each executive to every question.

Peachy. I guess the Solyndra boys had two choices – either plead the Fifth or say "I don't recall" like Hillary Clinton and the other Clintonistas did when asked about their scandals. The faulty memories of all those smart Clinton folk was known as Arkansas Alzheimer's back in the day.

I'll end with one comment about the Republican Fox/Google debate the other night. I'd vote for anybody on that stage over Barack Obama in 2012. Democrats keep talking about how Republicans would rather defeat Obama than help the American people. In my view, defeating Obama and helping the American people are the exact same thing. There is no distinction between the two.

My PC crashed the day before Obama's "jobs" speech, where we discovered that our spendthrift President wants to fork over another $450 billion in hard-earned taxpayer cash for Stimulus II, the American Jobs Act. Because the federal government doesn't actually pay for anything anymore, the bill for Obama's latest spend-o-rama will come due on some future date, to be paid by some future put-upon taxpaying schlub, assuming there are any taxpayers left by then. Oh wait. I nearly forgot. Obama said every penny of Stimulus II is paid for. It's easy to forget that, mainly because Obama didn't say how it will be paid for. He just waved his magic future spending cut wand and commanded the congressional Super Committee to add another $450 billion to the $1.5 trillion in spending cuts the bipartisan committee will never agree upon. No problem. Heck, I don't know why Obama didn't just order that committee to cut $14.6 trillion from future spending and payoff the entire national debt. That would really solve our problems…but only if you believe in magic like Obama does. Using Obama's "it's all paid for because I told them to pay for it later" (ill) logic, everything the federal government has ever done is paid for, because it all will be paid by someone, somehow, someday. The two trillion dollar question is HOW, but our President can't be bothered with such trivialities, not when there's an election to win.

While I was off the grid, our feckless President urged Congress to pass his jobs bill immediately. He took to the campaign trail, leading his shrinking base in choruses of "pass the bill", even though the bill hadn't even been presented to Congress yet. The Prez ain't much of a details guy. We are seeing more evidence of that as we learn the White House pressured the OMB to approve the Solyndra deal in time for VP Biden's photo op, despite the OMB's objections, and despite a credit agency's estimate that Solyndra would run out of money in September 2011, which is exactly what did happen. That cost the put-upon taxpaying schlubs another half billion bucks, but it almost seems like we're talking about Monopoly money these days, the numbers are so large. I remember a time when a half billion dollars seemed like a lot of money, but that was before the Great Fiscal Insanity descended on America like a plague of locusts. Nowadays, a half billion dollars sounds almost like spare change. I'm sure all you put-upon taxpaying schlubs out there can cough up that much dough, can't you ? After all, you are the backstop for every collosal waste of money that any politician in Washington D.C. can dream up.

The Prez is out on the trail, talking about all those infrastructure jobs again, all those roads and bridges that are falling apart. I wonder how that can be the case after Obama's $817 billion Stimulus I allegedly addressed that very same problem over the last two years. I mean, the Department Of Transportation's entire 2011 budget is only $79 billion. After Stimulus I, those "shovel-ready projects" should have fixed us up, no ? The President's words today say otherwise, but I guess y'all aren't supposed to remember what Obama said last year or the year before. If you do remember, the White House will call it a smear, which you can report to Obama's internet snitch line. When I'm finished with this post, maybe I'll report myself. Then again, I don't want the Feds raiding my house like I was some kind of Gibson wood-buying desperado. Perhaps I'll make a donation to the Re-elect Clueless Obama campaign instead. A very small donation.

If I do report myself to Obama's snitch line, I guess I better have some advice for the President, so here it is….Mr. President, we don't need another $450 billion in temporary stimulus measures that will wear off a year from now. That will change nothing over the long haul. All it will do is put us put-upon taxpaying schlubs even deeper in debt. What we need are permanent changes to help our businesses thrive and succeed in today's world. Nothing else will work. Get some new economists. The ones you have don't seem to get it, just like you don't get it. Our jobs don't come from the government. Our jobs come from the business sector. Stop treating business like it's your enemy. It isn't. It's the golden goose, and killing it is never a good idea.

Anyone still wondering who is the forgotten man ? If so, it's you, the taxpayers. You are the people who must pay for all this spending madness. The big spenders in Washington D.C. care not a whit for you. They are abusing you at every turn. They take your hard-earned dollars and hand it over to their cronies without a thought given to how it will affect you, the people. Your government isn't serving you. It's robbing you blind. Future generations will suffer because of it, and the big spenders don't care anything about them either. The people are being sold down the river so the big government types can throw your money at any constituency it thinks will garner them some votes. They have divided the nation against itself for the same purpose. Things have deteriorated to a point where everybody in this country has their hand out, looking for the government to bail them out. It's pathetic. It's not the America I love, and it sure isn't just the so-called welfare queens doing it. It's everyone. It's all the corporate CEO's, Wall Street, banks, foreign governments, the United Nations, unions, the military-industrial complex, farmers, health-care hucksters, etc. It's all the lobbyists, lawyers, activist groups, cronies, campaign donators, even the government bailing out itself at taxpayer expense. It's Democrats and Republicans doing it. Everyone expects to be subsidized by the American taxpayer. It's endemic. It's everyone. And we have stood by and let it all happen. It's time to wake up, America, because our time is running out.

In former Vice President Dick Cheney's memoir, titled 'In My Time', Cheney accurately stated that Richard Armitage of the State Deparment was the person who originally leaked the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame to reporter Bob Novak. Novak subsequently published that information, outing Plame's identity. Armitage's boss at the time was Secretary Of State, Colin Powell.

Colin Powell said Cheney was taking "cheap shots" at him, and responded with the following:

"Then he goes on to talk about the Valerie Plame affair, and tries to lay it all off on Mister Rich Armitage in the State Department and me. But the fact of the matter is when Mister Armitage realized that he was the source for Bob Novak’s column that caused all the difficulty and he called me immediately, two days after the President launched the investigation and what we did was we called the Justice Department. They sent it over the FBI. The FBI had all the information that Mister Armitage’s participation in this immediately. And we called Al Gonzalez, the President’s counsel, and told him that we had information. The FBI asked us not to share any of this with anyone else, as did Mister Gonzalez. And so, if the White House operatives had come forward as readily as Mister Armitage had done, then we wouldn’t have gone on for two more months with the FBI trying to find out what happened in the White House. There wouldn’t have been special counsel appointed by the Justice Department who spent two years trying to get to the bottom of it. And we wouldn’t have the mess that we subsequently had. And so if the White House and the operatives in the White House and Mister Cheney’s staff and elsewhere in the White House had been as forthcoming with the FBI as Mister Armitage was, this problem would not have reached the dimensions that it reached".

Powell conveniently omits the critical information here. As Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post points out, the first and most critical piece of information Powell left out is this – Powell and Armitage never told President Bush what Armitage had done. Instead, they remained silent as the Plame investigation built and was splashed all over the front pages of newspapers across the country, and the White House became embroiled in controversy.

Here's what really happened after Armitage told Powell he had leaked Plame's name, as reported by Michael Isikoff:

The next day, a team of FBI agents and Justice prosecutors investigating the leak questioned the deputy secretary. Armitage acknowledged that he had passed along to Novak information contained in a classified State Department memo: that [ Joe] Wilson’s wife worked on weapons-of-mass-destruction issues at the CIA… [William Howard Taft IV, the State Department’s legal adviser] felt obligated to inform White House counsel Alberto Gonzales. But Powell and his aides feared the White House would then leak that Armitage had been Novak’s source — possibly to embarrass State Department officials who had been unenthusiastic about Bush’s Iraq policy. So Taft told Gonzales the bare minimum: that the State Department had passed some information about the case to Justice. He didn’t mention Armitage. Taft asked if Gonzales wanted to know the details. The president’s lawyer, playing the case by the book, said no, and Taft told him nothing more. Armitage’s role thus remained that rarest of Washington phenomena: a hot secret that never leaked.

Here we have Colin Powell keeping the truth from President Bush because he didn't want the State Dept. to be "embarrassed", never mind that the entire Bush administration came under a cloud of scandal due to Powell's silence. As Bush told reporters he wanted to know the truth of the matter, Powell, knowing the truth of the matter, sat right next to Bush and said nothing. With friends like Powell, who needs enemies ?

For anyone who still might believe that Armitage somehow wasn't the leaker, or that Armitage's leak was inadvertent (I used to believe this myself until I found out differently), here's the video of reporter Bob Woodward's interview with Armitage. Armitage leaked Plame's name to more than one reporter:

As a result of this, we've had a fictional narrative woven by the media and Hollywood that the Bush administration outed Plame as payback for Joe Wilson's op-ed criticizing the Iraq War, and Scooter Libby was convicted of a crime (Libby never mentioned Plame in Libby's interview with Woodward like Armitage did, btw. Nor did Libby tell Novak about Plame. Novak testified at trial that Armitage was his source). Libby was convicted of making false statements based on differences between the way Libby remembered events compared to the way reporter Tim Russert remembered events. Libby was later pardoned by Bush. In the bullsh*t Hollywood movie about the Plame affair, Libby was cast as the bad guy. Armitage was omitted from the movie completely. The director said he omitted Armitage and made Libby the heavy for "efficiences of storytelling". Sure, whatever, Mr. Hollywood. How about a little truth in storytelling ?, especially when you're making a movie about the President Of The United States, you scumball.

And Colin Powell could have prevented it all from happening.

"God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion.
The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is
wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts
they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions,
it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. …
And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not
warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of
resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as
to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost
in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from
time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
It is its natural manure." – Thomas Jefferson

Yesterday, I mentioned how the more power we cede to the government, the more corrupt that government becomes.

Today, I have a prime example of it with one of the latest government power grabs, known colloquially as ObamaCare. Contained in ObamaCare is a $5 billion slush fund (thanks, taxpayers !) known as the Early Retirement Reissuance Program (EERP), which is supposed to help companies pay the costs of health care for their early retirees. The Obama administration has already spent $1.7 billion of the money, and the recipients read like a list of Obama's biggest supporters and top campaign donors, with labor unions and deep-pocketed favored companies like General Electric and General Motors getting the money. The money isn't going to companies with a financial need, it's going to cronies. In other words, it's another giant taxpayer ripoff, coming to you courtesy of the Democrats. Six of the top ten recipients were labor unions.

Recipients of ERRP funding include the United Auto Workers union, which secured $206,798,086 in taxpayer money, AT&T, which took in $140,022,949, and General Electric (GE), which raked in $36,607,818. GE has made headlines recently for not paying any U.S. taxes last year. IBM got $12,989,690 in taxpayer money.

Verizon pulled $91,702,538 in taxpayer cash, too, and General Motors received $19,002,669. More than $6 million went to different Teamsters groups nationwide, and millions more went to the United Mine Workers, United Food and Commercial Workers, the AFL-CIO and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME).

Let's look a little closer at some of these ObamaCare ERRP recipients.

The most money, nearly $207 million, went to the United Auto Workers, who already got a $3.4 billion sweetheart deal from Obama's General Motors bailout. GM itself, which was previously bailed out by the taxpayers to the tune of $50 billion, just got $19 million more from the taxpayers via ERRP. GM recently announced a 2010 profit of $4.7 billion, but somehow they still needed the taxpayers to cover that $19 million for ERRP. Thanks, Obama. In related news, the sales of Obama's favorite car, the GM Chevy Volt, stink (what a shocker), and GM is looking for yet another government handout to assist with that in addition to the government handout they already got for the Volt, a $7,500 tax credit per vehicle.

That struggling small business startup company known as AT&T was the second biggest ERRP recipient, raking in a little over $140 million for it's $15.4 million in lobbying efforts in 2010. I'm sure AT&T needed that money from the taxpayers, seeing as how AT&T only made a little over $19.8 billion in net profits in 2010, and only around $55.5 billion over the last four years. You may not know it, but AT&T is the biggest political campaign donor since 1990. They work hard for their taxpayer cash.

President Obama's buddies at General Electric got over $36 million in ERRP funding from the taxpayers. As I mentioned yesterday, GE made $14 billion in profit in 2010 and paid no income taxes on that money. GE was a top Obama campaign donor during the 2008 election, coughing up nearly $500 million in campaign cash for our ethical President with the change you can believe in. Clearly, that was money well spent by GE. You may remember that the government (that's the taxpayers again) guaranteed $340 billion of the debt of GE's financial services arm a couple years ago.

Verizon was the third largest ERRP recipient, getting a little over $91 million in taxpayer cash. Verizon spent $16.75 million lobbying our politicians in Washington D.C. in 2010. Verizon clearly needed it's $91 million in taxpayer ERRP cash, because Verizon's $106.6 billion in 2010 revenues only generated net cash just north of $33 billion.

See how this works ? Government takes over a segment of our society, in this case health care, and then government gives preferential treatment to it's friends at taxpayer expense. That's how it's supposed to work, right ? The government is supposed to be for sale to the highest bidder, right ? Isn't that how every banana republic operates ? The government is supposed to treat the taxpayers like it's personal ATM, and hand out taxpayer cash like candy to it's rich cronies, right ? And we're supposed to bend over and take it up the tailpipe every time we turn around, right ? We're even supposed to listen to one political party tell us that the resultant $14 trillion in debt and $1.6 trillion in annual deficit is no big deal, as they keep right on bending us over and extracting more cash from us and our children, because it will help the bottom line of Obama's jobs advisor Jeff Immelt, who heads up GE.

No, I don't think so. This is so sick and twisted, and it has to stop, by any…means…necessary. The government's corruption is right out in the open for all to see. Thomas Jefferson is starting to make a whole lot of sense to me right now.

Oh, and guess what else. That $5 billion slush fund that Obama and company are handing out like candy to their rich friends was supposed to last until 2014, but at the current rate of expenditures, it will run out in 2012. Then the Obamas will no doubt come back for more. Bend over, America ! Here it comes again ! Feel the CHANGE !!! That didn't hurt too awful much, did it ? Quit cryin', ya baby ! Who's your daddy now ??? Let me hear you say it…O-bam-a, O-bam-a, O-bam-a….

When the new Congress convenes, the GOP-led House is planning to move on several fronts.

1. They are going to try to repeal ObamaCare:

The new Republican-controlled House plans to schedule a vote to repeal the sweeping health care overhaul before President Barack Obama delivers his annual State of the Union address late this month, incoming House Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) said Sunday.

“We have 242 Republicans,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.” He added, “There will be a significant number of Democrats, I think, that will join us. You will remember when that vote passed in the House last March, it only passed by seven votes.”

Upton, whose committee will play a key role in the GOP's effort to roll back the law, said that he believes the House may be near the two-thirds majority required to override a presidential veto.

Regardless of how the repeal vote turns out, the GOP will go after pieces of ObamaCare:

Upton specifically called out the requirement for businesses to complete 1099 tax forms, the individual mandate and the amendment on abortion introduced by Michigan Democratic Rep. Bart Stupak. "We will look at these individual pieces to see if we can't have the thing crumble," he said.

This should cause quite a stir. Democrats will fight back:

Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine, appearing on CNN, said “health care reform is going to go down in history as one of the great achievements of this president.”

And Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) said repeal is a lost cause for Republicans.

“We cut prescription drug bills for senior citizens by 50 percent,” she told CBS. “We've already made sure that young adults up until they're 26 can be on their parents' insurance. A constituent in my district came up to me a few weeks ago and thanked me for saving her $3,000 a year because she could put her two adult children back on her insurance," she said.

"That's what the Republicans are going to be proposing to repeal this week," Wasserman Schultz added. "It's not going to happen. If it's about jobs and the economy and reducing the deficit, wasting time and money and adding to the deficit by repealing health care reform or on the attempt is irresponsible.”

In order for the Republicans to successfully repeal ObamaCare, I believe they will have to come up with a REPLACEMENT for it, a better idea. If the GOP forgets all about that part of it, they might be doing themselves more harm than good. I'm all for repealing ObamaCare, as long as something better takes it's place. We can't just stick our heads in the sand and pretend spiraling health care costs are not a problem.

2. Rep. Darrell Issa plans to go after wasteful government spending by the Obama administration:

The Republican congressman who is taking over responsibility for congressional oversight called President Obama's administration "one of the most corrupt administrations" on Sunday and predicted that the investigations he is planning over the next two years could result in about $200 billion in savings for U.S. taxpayers.

Issa, who as chairman will have subpoena power, said he will seek to ferret out waste across the federal bureaucracy. While he used fiery rhetoric in describing the Obama administration in a series of television interviews Sunday, he said he will focus on wasteful spending, not the prosecution of White House officials.

Asked on "Fox News Sunday" about reports that the White House is staffing up on lawyers to prepare for his oversight hearings, Issa said: "They're going to need more accountants.

"It's more of an accounting function than legal function," Issa said. "It's more about the inspector generals than it is about lawyers in the White House. And the sooner the administration figures out that the enemy is the bureaucracy and the wasteful spending, not the other party, the better off we'll be."

Issa said he plans to lead bipartisan investigations on food and drug safety, as well as Medicare fraud.

"We can save $125 billion in simply not giving out money to Medicare recipients that don't exist for procedures that didn't happen," Issa said on CBS's "Face the Nation." "These are real dollars. Ten percent of the deficit goes out in wasted money – money that doesn't get one person health care in Medicare."

On the CNN show, Issa said: "When I look at waste, fraud and abuse in the bureaucracy and in the government, this is like steroids to pump up the muscles of waste."

Here is a list of investigations Issa has planned:

As the replacement for outgoing Democrat Henry Waxman, Issa is aiming to launch investigations on everything from WikiLeaks to Fannie Mae to corruption in Afghanistan in the first few months of what promises to be a high profile chairmanship of the top oversight committee in Congress.

According to an outline of the committee’s hearing topics obtained by POLITICO, the House Oversight and Government Reform is also planning to investigate how regulation impacts job creation, the role of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the foreclosure crisis; recalls at the Food and Drug Administration and the failure of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission to agree on the causes of the market meltdown.

A look at the preliminary hearing schedule illustrates that Issa plans to stay away from hurling subpoenas at the White House.

In investigating the impact of regulation on job creation, the committee plans to ask why the economy hasn’t “created the private sector jobs the president has promised,” and he’s calling in business leaders to explain “about the government regulations that are doing the most harm to job creation efforts.”

“The committee will examine how overregulation has hurt job creation and whether the administration intends to try and abuse the regulatory process to implement regulations that Congress would reject,” according to an outline of committee hearing topics.

Issa also wants to study why the financial crisis commission couldn’t reach consensus last year. He’d like to call Phil Angelides and former Rep. Bill Thomas (R-Calif.), the chair and ranking member of the committee, to determine if there was any agreement on the panel in relation to the cause of the meltdown.

Thar's a new sheriff in town, and his name is Darrell Issa.

3. The Republicans might demand budget cuts in exchange for raising the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling:

Austan Goolsbee, chairman of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers, said if Congress fails to raise the debt ceiling, the “impact on the economy would be catastrophic.”

“I don’t see why anybody’s playing chicken with the debt ceiling,” Goolsbee said today on ABC’s “This Week” program. “If we get to the point where we damage the full faith and credit of the United States, that would be the first default in history caused purely by insanity.”

The government is slated to hit the legal limit on borrowing, $14.3 trillion, early this year. Congress must agree to raise that ceiling or the U.S. could be forced to default on its obligations.

After candidates supported by anti-deficit Tea Party activists were elected on pledges to rein in government spending, some lawmakers have said they would demand budget cuts in exchange for voting to raise the debt ceiling.

The U.S. has a $1.3 trillion federal budget deficit. President Barack Obama’s debt-reduction panel failed last month to agree on its chairmen’s recommendations for ways to reduce the annual deficit to about $400 billion in 2015.

The plan would have increased taxes by $1 trillion by 2020 by scaling back or eliminating hundreds of deductions, exclusions or credits such as those allowing homeowners to write off interest on their mortgage payments. It would also have cut individual and corporate income tax rates.

Goolsbee said he anticipates Obama will find common ground with Republicans on legislation to benefit the economy, citing investment incentives and tax cuts for workers and small businesses, and warned against cutting back on spending needed for economic growth.

“The reason the deficit is big this year is because we’re coming out of the worst recession since 1929,” Goolsbee said. “That’s the reason. The longer-run fiscal challenge facing the country is important.”

Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, said failing to raise the debt ceiling “would be very bad for the position of the United States in the world at large.” Still, he wouldn’t vote to raise it “until a plan is in place” to deal with debt, Graham said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

If the GOP was paying attention to the last election, they definitely SHOULD demand some budget cuts in exchange for raising the debt ceiling. How else will the runaway freight train of government spending ever slow down ? The federal government has been kicking the fiscal responsibility can down the road for a long, long time now. It has to stop.

The Tenth Commandment – "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that [is] thy neighbour's."

It seems God thought this anti-coveting thing was pretty important. After all, he only gave Moses ten rules for the people to follow, and the rule against coveting made the cut. Why ? Well, for one thing, if everybody was running around coveting the possessions of everyone else, it could lead to some pretty bad outcomes. Coveting, aka envy, is one of the Seven Deadly Sins for a reason. A world full of coveters is a world full of resentment, and that eats at a person like a cancer. God's anti-coveting Commandment goes a long way toward preventing the breaking of other Commandments, such as – Thou Shalt Not Steal and Thou Shalt Not Murder. It also keeps your neighbor's hands off your wife, the No Adultery Commandment. In the world of criminology, coveting is known as THE MOTIVE.

Because criminology instantly brings politics to mind, I should note that the covetous in politics are easily identifiable. They are the ones always pouting about things not being fair, much like six-year-old children do when you tell them they can't have any more ice cream. "That's not fair," the child cries. "Billy's daddy lets him eat two Klondike bars !" The parent's invariable answer to this is either, "then maybe you should go live at Billy's house," or the more old-school "life's not fair, get used to it" philosophical gem. I'm not sure if the "life's not fair" lesson is used so much these days, with all the emphasis we put on promoting unearned feelings of self-esteem among our glorious little tykes, but to my way of thinking, "life's not fair" is right up there with the Golden Rule in the pantheon of great advice. If you go through life thinking it's supposed to be fair, you're going to be one greatly disappointed and resentful little coveter. You will never be happy, because life can never be fair. It's an impossible standard, and therefore unattainable.

Promoting covetousness does, however, make for some damn fine political hay. The art of politics isn't really about governing the nation. The nation doesn't need THAT much governing, just a little law and order and some basic common sense. The people can handle the rest. The art of politics is really about dividing people into warring camps and then whipping them up into an angry frenzy. If the Democrats can drum up the most frenzied anger, they win. If the Republican do, then they win. Right now, it looks like the Republicans are the angriest. That's bad news for the Democrats in this election cycle. In 2006 and 2008, it was just the opposite. The Democrats had the anger working in their favor, so they won. Usually, the angriest party is the one that's out of power, which is due to it's coveting FOR power, along with the fact that whichever party is IN power fails miserably most of the time. It's not a matter of IF a political party will fail, it's a matter of WHEN. The country usually continues on IN SPITE of the politicians, not because of them, though the politicians certainly don't want you to know that. It would ruin everything.

I have to digress a moment to plug my main political tribe with a quote from political satirist P.J. O'Rourke:

"Think about how we use the word “politics.” Are office politics ever a good thing? When somebody plays politics to get a promotion, does he deserve it? When we call a coworker a “real politician,” is that a compliment? Politics stink. And to my mind, libertarianism is a room deodorizer. It’s trying to keep that bad smell of politics out of home, school, and office."

Indeed. That government is best which governs least, according to founding father Thomas Paine. Given the slimy, dishonest nature of politics, why would we ever want more of it than is absolutely necessary ? Heck, if the government got too big and powerful, we might get 2,000 page long unconstitutional bills that nobody ever read or could comprehend if they did read them, bills that gave the already powerful government much MORE power over us. I mean, you know, that COULD happen, um, in theory. It hasn't happened yet THIS week.

Getting back to covetousness, politicians promote it as if it's their lifeblood, probably because it is their lifeblood. The goal of covetous politicians, as I stated previously, is to divide the public by almost any means necessary in order to acquire power. They lie, cheat, and manipulate the public in the attempt to make their army larger than the opposing army when election time rolls around. Covetous politicians pit rich against poor, black against white, blue collar against white collar, union against non-union, religious against non-religious, young against old, government against business, etc.,….in other words, promoting covetousness is the actual game plan of liberal Democrats and other left-wing groups. Their covetousness leads them to constantly cry "that's not fair !", and causes them to embrace immoral beliefs like theft (though they don't call it theft. That wouldn't fly, so they call it 'redistribution of wealth.' I'm waiting for liberals to redefine armed robbers as 'individual wealth redistributors'). They embrace illegality (though they don't call it illegality. That wouldn't fly, so they use terms like 'undocumented workers'). They embrace discrimination (though they don't call it discrimination. That wouldn't fly, so they call it 'affirmative action'). They embrace unconstitutionality (though they don't call it unconstitutionality. That wouldn't fly, so they call it the 'ObamaCare insurance mandate'). They embrace irrationality (like bitching about Bush's debt runup while making excuses for Obama's much larger debt runup). They even embrace murder (check out how many millions of people were slaughtered by left-wingers in the 20th century, not to mention that being "pro-choice" is about a little more than merely women's rights. It's also about the right to life, an idea important enough to be included in the most famous sentence in the founding document of this country. "We hold these truths to be self-evident…").

When the public is walled off into their own little interest groups, and every group is resentful and blaming the other group, that's when liberal Democrats do their best. If you don't believe me, just watch their campaign ads. The Democrats actively promote hatred. They know it works for them. They're calling Republicans racists, fascists, sellouts to the rich, anti-worker, anti-middle class, haters of the poor, religious fanatics, etc. They'll say ANYTHING to keep us divided. They LOOK for ways to keep us divided (i.e., illegal immigration isn't about illegality to them. Instead, they make it about bigotry to keep the hate fires burning). To put a spin on Rev. Jesse Jackson's old slogan, the liberal motto is Keep Hate Alive. It sure as hell ain't about Hope And Change, or, heaven forbid, post-partisanship. None of the politicians really want that. They want hyper-partisanship. Listen to Obama. See how post-partisan he sounds now. His post-partisan jive is gone with the wind, not that it ever existed in the first place. He just used the idea to get elected. To a liberal Democrat like Obama, 'post-partisan' is synonymous with 'do what I want.' You don't have to take my word for it, just listen to Obama complaining repeatedly about how the "party of no" is "blocking progress." All that means is, Republicans disagree with Obama. In Obama's mind, post-partisanship would be when they don't. If you believe in democracy, you better hope that day never comes.

The kicker is, after all these different methods liberals use to divide the country, guess what they say about a grassroots conservative movement like the Tea Party ??? Why, they call it DIVISIVE, of course. Kettle meet tea pot.

If it seems like I'm singling out liberals here, that's only because I am. They are not only covetous and filled with hate, they are smug and condescending as well, a bad combination of traits for what is rapidly becoming a raving pagan horde of false idol worshippers (and I'm not talking about religion here). All I request is a little courtesy while they go about their business of tearing apart the fabric of American society and replacing it with top-down government tyranny, led by liberals, of course. That shouldn't be too much to ask.

I guarantee every liberal reading this is thinking I'm off my rocker. Liberals know the Republicans are really the divisive ones, not them. Heavens no. Liberals think they are the good people, and it's the Republicans who are the bad ones………while it never dawns on liberals that such thinking proves my point exactly.

P.S. – See you all at the end of next week when I get back in town. I'm going to Vegas to do some gambling,…like…a…covetous…pagan. Aw, rats. There goes my moralizing high ground. Oh well. Just do as I say, not as I do…like I'm Al Gore.

Congressman Paul Kanjorski (D-PA) is a great guy. He really likes to use taxpayer dollars to help people…especially if those people are members of the Kanjorski family. Some years ago, Rep. Kanjorski secured earmarks of $9 million in federal grants for an energy company called Cornerstone Technologies LLC. Cornerstone was run by members of the Kanjorski family, including the Congressman's nephew, Russell Kanjorski (remember his name). Sweet deal for the Kanjorski's. It's good to have friends in high places. Even sweeter, Cornerstone ran it's company out of a building owned by Congressman Paul Kanjorski, so all the rent paid by Cornerstone (which was really paid by the taxpayers) went into the Congressman's pocket.

Unfortunately, the Cornerstone Kanjorski's didn't know how to run an energy company. It went bust in 2003. The $9 million in taxpayer funds went down the drain. Here's a Fox News video recounting the entire sordid tale. Try not to throw up on your computer screen as you watch this, because it is sickening:

I especially liked the part where Congressman Kanjorski tried to blame hiw own self-serving corrupt activities on "the Republican machine." Evidently, Kanjorski has a sense of humor in addition to being a crook.

Somehow, Congressman Kanjorski is still in office instead of in prison where he belongs for bilking the taxpayers. Way to go, Pennsylvania voters. I wonder if anyone outside Fox News even reported Rep. Kanjorski's corruption. It's good to be a Democrat, I guess. Things didn't go quite so well for, say, Duke Cunningham.

Now we fast forward to today. President Obama recently announced $2 billion in guaranteed government loans to two energy companies. For those who don't know, a "guaranteed government loan" means if the companies go belly up, the taxpayers are on the hook for the dough. Nice deal for the companies receiving the funds, not so nice deal for the taxpayers.

One of the companies receiving guaranteed government loot is Abound Solar, a startup company that just began ramping up to produce solar panels in 2008. Abound Solar is getting $400 million from Obama. Well, technically, Obama is borrowing the $400 million, because the U.S. government is on it's ass, dead broke.

Now for the trivia question – Guess who is the Vice President Of Marketing for Abound Solar ?

(Cue the theme song from Jeopardy)

De-de-de-de, de-de-de, de-de-de-de-deep, de-de-de-de-de……

If you said, Alex, who is Russell Kanjorski ?, you would be absolutely correct. After bilking the taxpayers with Cornerstone, Russ Kanjorski landed another plum top management job with another company being financed by the taxpayers. Don't that beat all !

The CEO of the Abound Solar startup is Tom Tiller, who previously headed up a company that produced recreational vehicles and atv's. Tiller was made the CEO of Abound about three months ago. He has no experience with solar technology, but he is a Harvard MBA. Abound Solar has other investors besides the American taxpayers. A hedge fund company, an asset management company, former Goldman-Sachs persons, former Lehman Brothers persons, other Harvard grads, etc. have invested $150 million in Abound. The company is also aligned with BP on some biofuels projects. BP used to call itself the "world's first green petroleum company," if you remember, but I doubt anyone living on the Gulf Of Mexico would agree with that description.

The other company receiving big Obamabucks is a Spanish company called Abengoa, who will receive $1.45 billion. Former Democratic VP Al Gore has an investment in that company, though the amount is unknown. It's that transparency thing again. The $1.45 billion investment in Abengoa is to build a concentrated solar plant outside Phoenix, Arizona. The plant is supposed to provide energy for 77,000 homes once it reaches full capacity (there are about 500,000 homes in Phoenix). It will create 85 permanent jobs. That's not a typo. 85 jobs for the $1.45 billion investment.

Speaking of Spain, that country made a big committment to solar power, with heavy subsidies from the Spanish government. What Spain has found is that the solar panels don't pay for themselves. They cost far too much, and require massive ongoing government subsidies. Now Spain wants to cut back on solar power.

But I'm sure that could never happen here. I bet Russ Kanjorski would agree.

Here's a video of the Mexican President, Felipe Calderon, addressing the U.S. Congress and condemning the Arizona immigration law (which, btw, is the same as federal immigration law). Take notice of the reaction of our Congresspersons. See who gives Calderon a standing ovation and who doesn't.

Yes, that was the Democrats applauding and giving Calderon a standing ovation, in support of illegality. Unbelievable.

Let's be clear. The problem of illegal immigrants flooding across the border from Mexico into the United States is MEXICO'S PROBLEM. The illegals are jumping our borders to escape MEXICO'S PROBLEMS. The escalating drug wars along the Mexican border is a crime problem IN MEXICO. It is spilling over into our country. 90% of the illegal drugs coming into our country are coming from MEXICO.

Yet, here is the Mexican President blaming the United States for attempting to deal with result of MEXICO'S PROBLEMS. I repeat, unbelievable. Calderon should look at the beam in his own eye before he complains about the mote in ours.

And the Blame America First crowd, aka, the Democrats, buy right into this misdirection. Even the President of the United States, Barack Jose Obama, agrees. Our own President offers no pushback, no defense of his own country. The President also offers no direction and no leadership to counter the divisive Boycott Arizona movement taking place in California. You don't hear Obama calling the Boycott Arizona movement "misguided," as he has called the Arizona immigration law. No sir.

If we are going to boycott anyone, how about we boycott Mexico until that country steps up to deal with it's own problems, instead of Mexico exporting it's problems to the USA in the form of illegal immigrants and gang turf wars over illegal drugs ? Have we become so immersed in simple-minded political correctness that we can't even speak the truth any longer ? It seems so.

To further illustrate the hypocrisy of the Mexican President, let's take a look at Mexico's immigration laws. From Fox News:

Mexico repeatedly has been cited by human rights groups for abusing or turning a blind eye to the abuse of migrants from Central America. Until recently, Mexican law made illegal immigration a criminal offense — anyone arrested for the violation could be fined, imprisoned for up to two years and deported. Mexican lawmakers changed that in 2008 to make illegal immigration a civil violation like it is in the United States, but their law still reads an awful lot like Arizona's.

[Calderon's] comments [to Congress] came just weeks after Amnesty International issued a report claiming illegal immigrants in Mexico — typically from Central America — face abuse, rape and kidnappings, and that Mexican police do little to stop it. When illegal immigration was a criminal offense in Mexico, officials were known to seek bribes from suspects to keep them out of jail.

And Mexico is lecturing us ???? I don't think so, even if our Apologizer-In-Chief and his fellow Congressional weaklings see fit to applaud it.

Viva le Estados Unidos.

I haven't had time to generate a new post for nearly a week now, so I have a few different topics I want to comment upon briefly.
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The other day I heard NBC news bemoaning the fact that Rep. David Obey (D-WI) will not seek re-election. NBC practically deified the guy in it's failed attempt at accurate reportage. I assume the rest of the non-Fox News teevee media did the same, being that the rest really ARE the same (Democrats). I'd like to add my two cents about Obey. He is the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, and is therefore more responsible than any other Congressperson for the explosion in federal spending over the last years. He wrote the stimulus bill boondoggle, and was instrumental in constructing and passing ObamaCare, which will raise everyone's health insurance premiums, raise spending further, raise taxes, create a massive new entitlement, and insert the federal government between doctor and patient.

Btw, Obey said his only regret about the stimulus bill was that it wasn't LARGER. I'm not kidding.

People like Obey are the problem with Congress. Good riddance.
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Barack Obama's presidential election victory has two definite positive aspects. First, it showed that African-Americans can win major elections in the United States, and second, 32 African Americans are running for Congress this year…as Republicans, according to the New York times. The Times claims this is the biggest black Republican surge since Reconstruction. I seriously doubt that, but I'm sure all liberal groups will come out publicly to celebrate the new-found diversity within the Republican party (that was sarcasm, in case my left-leaning readers missed it).
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Speaking of Congress, guess who's ba-a-ack and running for Congress in Ohio ? Former Democrat James Traficant from Youngstown, who served nine terms in Congress before serving seven years in prison for bribery, tax evasion, and obstruction. This is just one more example of the "most ethical Congress in history," as Nancy Pelosi called her Democrat cronies after they took over from the "culture of corruption," which is how Nan described the former Republican-led Congress. Being a felon doesn't prohibit one from running for Congress. I guess the thinking is – without criminals being eligible, how could they possible fill all those Congressional seats ?
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Here's the funniest thing I heard about all week.

The Phoenix Suns NBA basketball team donned jerseys emblazoned with the words 'Los Suns' to protest the new Arizona law targeting illegal immigrants. In addition to the incorrect grammar (the correct English-to-Spanish translation of 'The Suns' is 'Los Soles,') and in addition to the fact that Suns owner Robert Tarver, who supports the Suns protest, owns a number of banks which received $140 million in TARP bailout funds (if he really needed the money, maybe he should have sold the basketball team before grabbing taxpayer cash), the Washington Times made a great suggestion:

"[W]hile millionaire athletes become walking billboards for a political cause, the state of Arizona might want to review the terms of its relationship with the Suns. If Mr. Sarver wants to use his team to push a political agenda, perhaps citizens can push back. Imagine Phoenix residents channeling the spirits of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. by turning up en masse to Suns games, sneaking in without tickets, demanding special services like free food and access to box seats, overtaxing arena security and ruining the game for the people with tickets. They can call it a celebration of diversity."

I love it. Let's see how the Suns owner would react to people crashing HIS gate. I'm certain his reaction would be quite different. I'm also wondering when Prez Obama, an NBA fan, is going to weigh in on how greedy those professional athletes are for making so much money. Maybe the Los Suns should redistribute THEIR wealth to the illegals. Let's see how long their protest lasts then.
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I know how disappointed the Leftmedia was when the Times Square bomber turned out to be yet another Muslim jihadist, rather than the violent right-wing Tea Party nut the left has been dreaming about and masturbating over for better than a year now. NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Fox News Democrat Bob Beckel, MSNBC's Contessa Brewer, and even Geraldo Rivera all salivated over the prospect of a potential white male Tea party Times Square bomber. A Daily Kos poll had 8% thinking it was a jihadist, and about 80% thinking it was a Tea Partier or a right-wing anti-Obama nut of some kind. That is some serious wishful thinking.

I commisserate, lefties. Your thin-skinned political correctness nerves must be getting very frayed by now with the complete absence of Tea Party violence, especially when we are witnessing one violent left-wing protest after another, both here and around the world. I wish the Left better luck in the future. Hopefully, an unhinged Tea Party affiliate will blow up an IRS building soon and kill hundreds of people so you left-wing pr*cks can feel all happy and righteous again (and yes, that was sarcasm too, mixed in with a heaping tablespoon of disgust).

I do commend our brilliant Homeland Security Secretary, Janet Napolitano, who made the following statement immediately after the Times Square bombing attempt. "We're treating it as if it could be a potential terrorist attack," said Secretary Master Of The Obvious. Gee, ya think ?

Finally, when Rep. Andre Carson (D-IN) was asked about the Tea Party movement, Carson, unfazed by reality, chose to fixate upon the "real" threat:

"I worked in homeland security. I'm from intelligence, and I'll tell you, one of the largest threats to our internal security — I mean terrorism has an Islamic face — but it really comes from racial supremacist groups. Its the kind of thing we keep a threat assessment on record [for]."

Notice how Carson sickeningly equates the Tea Party movement with white supremacist groups. Could he be a former….Reverend ? Also of interest is how Carson says the "real" threat doesn't come from jihadists. It's white people we need to worry about. This dude needs PC-ectomy surgery very, very soon.

(Note to liberals – I'm not saying true white supremacist groups don't need to be watched. They do, but the Tea Party movement is NOT one of those groups. Andre Carson is being racist by pretending it is).

After listening to President Obama whine about the Supreme Court's ruling on the Citizens United v. FEC case, where the Supremes struck down an unconstituional McCain-Feingold prohibition on campaign ads, I wondered, exactly how big of a hypocrite is Obama ? Apparently, his hypocrisy knows no bounds. Remember, Obama is the one who broke his word on taking public campaign financing so he could raise $600 million to defeat John McCain, who did take public campaign financing. LOTS of that money came from special interests, running the gamut from Wall Street to the unions. Obama also spouted quite a lot of anti-lobbyist rhetoric on the campaign trail in 2008, and then turned around and had several lobbyists on his White House team (another broken Obama campaign promise), including John Podesta, who headed Obama's transition team.

As it turns out, 2009 was a very, very good year for lobbyists, and guess which lobbying firm increased it's revenue the most ? If you said, 'John Podesta's lobbying group,' you win the grand prize. The revenue of the Podesta Group jumped 60 percent in 2009. Some grand coincidence, eh ?

Next, consider Obama's health care bill, which catered to practically every medical special interest in sight – the health insurance companies, the pharmaceutical companies, AARP, AMA, the unions, etc. Then consider the bribes to Senators Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and Ben Nelson (D-NE) to get their health care votes. ObamaCare has been a special interest bonanza, and partly responsible for the lobbying boom in 2009, a boom that happened in the midst of a recession, no less.

Lobbying, in and of itself, is perfectly legal and constitutional, just as is running political ads on television. Those activities are part and parcel of the First Amendment to the Constitution. Here's the text of that Amendment, which I'll repeat here because many liberals seem unaware of it, judging by their recent reactions to events:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Lobbying IS petitioning the government. The massive increases in the number of lobbyists over the past decade (they've doubled in number) isn't really the problem. It's only a symptom of the real problem, which is – the massive expansion in the size, scope, and power of the federal government itself. This has gone on regardless of which party was running things. The lobbyists grew during the Bush administration's huge expansion of government, and the lobbyists are growing during Obama's all-time record expansion of government. Btw, I heard Obama say the other day that he wasn't for big government, he was for smart government. That's another of Obama's titanic lies. He is for BIG GOVERNMENT, period. And that leads inexorably to more lobbyists, more special interest catering, and more corruption, just as it has this year. When the government is trying to remake the entire health care system, is granting subsidies to everyone and everything the government deems wise and appropriate, is disseminating $800 billion in stimulus money to whomever it deems wise and appropriate, is bailing out every industry it deems wise and appropriate, is contemplating how to raise taxes to pay for it all, what else COULD happen, other than every special interest in the country flocking to Washington D.C. to get their share of the taxpayer-funded bounty ??? There is no other possible reality.

The problem certainly is not McCain-Feingold. The problem is every big government advocate everywhere. The answer to the problem is contained in the very U.S. Constitution the left wants to blissfully ignore. The Constitution was designed with the intent of the government being limited. The founding fathers designed it that way on purpose. The founders didn't want the state to be all-powerful. They'd seen enough of that in the monarchies and dictators of their own time. The Constitution is a description of the powers and limitations on the government, and the political power brokers in Washington D.C. are shredding it article by article, page by page. Thus, the solution to all the corruption and favor-buying in Washington D.C. is the same as it's always been – limited government. This is best expressed by the Libertarian/Conservative key phrase – limited government, lower taxes, liberty. It is the ONLY way.

Obama is hardly the solution to the problem. He and those like him ARE THE PROBLEM. The only reason Obama dislikes the Citizens United v. FEC ruling is because he fears much of that corporate advertising won't be in his favor. He fears that money might favor his pro-business opponents, the very ones Obama would like to keep quiet. Obama is perfectly fine with special interests, as long as those special interests are in his corner, as long as he can use them to advance his agenda, and as long as he can use them to consolidate his power.

The bottom line is, if government weren't so all-powerful, if it wasn't handing out favors to everyone in sight, then there wouldn't be so many standing in line jostling for those favors. And if we start cutting government spending, there'd be a nice little side benefit – we could move off the path to bankruptcy that we're on now. We might start righting our financial ship.

But I'm sure our President would consider all this crazy talk. It makes too much sense, and in addition, it doesn't leave the President free to redistribute everyone's wealth (aka, thievery).

Republican Scott Brown's improbable Senate victory in the bluest of all blue states, Massachusetts, has sent the Democrats reeling. Their reflective navel-gazing has begun. I look at this as a wakeup call for the Democratic party. Will they now "get" it, or will they remain in denial ? Will they continue pushing policies the American people do not want ? If so, they will continue to isolate themselves, and they will continue to lose, as they have in Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Virginia this year.

It's too soon to make that call, but early indications are not promising. This morning I heard Robert Gibbs, Obama's press secretary, say the Dems just need to "retool their message." Wrong. That's not it. The people understand the message of the Democrats all too well. That's not the problem. The problem is, the people don't agree with the Democrats message. I heard MS-NBC's Norah O'Donnell blame the loss on Coakley not taking the campaign seriously enough. That's waaay wrong. Nobody takes a Senate seat lightly, and Martha Coakley certainly didn't. O'Donnell then said Coakley lost due to anti-incumbent sentiment. That's a pretty bizarre statement, considering Coakley wasn't the incumbent.

The excuses will continue, but Coakley lost because the American people are turning against all the divisiveness, the catering to special interests, the corruption, the partisan business as usual, and the wasteful big government arrogance of Washington D.C. Scott Brown tapped into America's dissatisfaction, and the silent majority (independents) went with him, overcoming the Democrats 3-1 voter advantage over Republicans in Massachusetts. Nowhere is the dissatisfaction of the American people more evident than in the Tea Party protest movement (which the Democratic party has arrogantly denigrated to the nth degree), and Scott Brown got that support, by saying things like this, from his victory speech:

Most of all, I will remember that while the honor is mine, this Senate seat belongs to no one person and no political party – and as I have said before, and you said loud and clear today, it is the people’s seat…When I first started running, I asked for a lot of help, because I knew it was going to be me against the machine. I was wrong, it was all of us against the machine… I go to Washington as the representative of no faction or interest, answering only to my conscience and to the people.

I certainly hope Scott Brown means it when he says he will represent no faction or interest, but rather the American people. We shall see. He's certainly right that it is all of us against the machine. This government is, after all, supposed to be of the people, by the people, and for the people. It's not supposed to be for Goldman Sachs, the health insurance companies, the lawyers, the unions, or any other particular special interest. We are all in this together. We should pursue policies that are responsible for the nation as a whole. That means, first – national security. Second – fiscal responsibility.

Brown also tapped into the disagreement the American people have with some of the policies of the Democrats, and to this, the Democrats SHOULD take heed (and the Republicans too, for that matter):

In every corner of our state, I met with people, looked them in the eye, shook their hand, and asked them for their vote. I didn’t worry about their party affiliation, and they didn’t worry about mine. It was simply shared conviction that brought us all together.

One thing is clear, voters do not want the trillion-dollar health care bill that is being forced on the American people.

This bill is not being debated openly and fairly. It will raise taxes, hurt Medicare, destroy jobs, and run our nation deeper into debt. It is not in the interest of our state or country – we can do better.

When in Washington, I will work in the Senate with Democrats and Republicans to reform health care in an open and honest way. No more closed-door meetings or back room deals by an out of touch party leadership. No more hiding costs, concealing taxes, collaborating with special interests, and leaving more trillions in debt for our children to pay.

In health care, we need to start fresh, work together, and do the job right. Once again, we can do better.

I will work in the Senate to put government back on the side of people who create jobs, and the millions of people who need jobs – and as President John F. Kennedy taught us, that starts with an across the board tax cut for individuals and businesses that will create jobs and stimulate the economy. It's that simple!

I will work in the Senate to defend our nation’s interests and to keep our military second to none. As a lieutenant colonel and 30-year member of the Army National Guard, I will keep faith with all who serve, and get our veterans all the benefits they deserve.

And let me say this, with respect to those who wish to harm us, I believe that our Constitution and laws exist to protect this nation – they do not grant rights and privileges to enemies in wartime. In dealing with terrorists, our tax dollars should pay for weapons to stop them, not lawyers to defend them.

Raising taxes, taking over our health care, and giving new rights to terrorists is the wrong agenda for our country. What I've heard again and again on the campaign trail, is that our political leaders have grown aloof from the people, impatient with dissent, and comfortable in the back room making deals. And we can do better.

They thought you were on board with all of their ambitions. They thought they owned your vote. They thought they couldn’t lose. But tonight, you and you and you have set them straight.

Dissent is the lifeblood of any democracy, which the Democrats should pause to consider before they viciously and falsely attack the Tea Party movement, and last night in Massachusetts, dissent won. Big time.

This morning on the Blog Of Mass Destruction, my friend the Reverend, a liberal by anyone's standard, reminded me that Thomas Jefferson was the founder of the Democratic party……..as if the current Democratic party bears any resemblance whatsoever to the one Jefferson represented. It certainly does not, and I'll leave you with the following Jefferson quote to explain exactly why not:

"A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned – this is the sum of good government." – Thomas Jefferson

Does that sound like any current Democrat you know ? Not by a country mile. The current Democrats see almost no bounds for the government (except maybe in granting terrorists the full civil rights of American citizenship). They want the government to intrude on everything and everyone. THAT is the problem, and that is the Massachusetts and Tea Party message.

We hope the Democrats are listening.

Here's the world-class left-wing dunderhead Hugo Chavez, the socialist President of Venezuela, describing America's relief efforts in earthquake-ravaged Haiti :

"I read that 3,000 soldiers are arriving, Marines armed as if they were going to war. There is not a shortage of guns there, my God. Doctors, medicine, fuel, field hospitals, that's what the United States should send," Chavez said on his weekly television show. "They are occupying Haiti undercover. On top of that, you don't see them in the streets. Are they picking up bodies? … Are they looking for the injured? You don't see them. I haven't seen them. Where are they?"

Any questions about the sanity of Hugo Chavez ? I hope not. America will be the biggest contributor to Haitian relef, by far.
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Here's the world-class left-wing dunderhead Keith Olbermann, describing Massachusetts Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown on last night's episode of Fictional Narratives From Loon Central, aka, Countdown With Keith Olbermann, on MS-NBC:

“In short in Scott Brown we have an irresponsible homophobic racist reactionary ex-nude-model tea-bagging supporter of violence against women and against politicians with whom he disagrees. In any other time in our history this man would have been laughed off the stage as an unqualified and disaster in the making by the most conservative of conservatives. Instead the commonwealth of Massachusetts is close to sending this bad joke to the Senate of the United States.”

The short translation of Olby's words is 'oh no, Scott Brown might win in Massachusetts ! Let's make up a bunch of phony crapola about him !' For a longer explanation of the Olby-hate, I'll have to pull out my Liberal-To-Sanity translation manual. Where did I put that thing ? Ah, here it is.

1. Scott Brown is "irresponsible" because – well, who knows. Maybe because he drives a truck. Not, you know, "green" enough. Olby doesn't drive due to a head injury he suffered running for the subway. He slammed his head into the top of a subway car door and doesn't have any depth perception, which could explain a lot. Lack of perception is one of Olby's biggest problems.
2. Scott Brown is "homophobic" because – he's against gay marriage. I'm in favor of gay marriage, but, not being a world-class left-wing dunderhead, I'd never call all anti-gay marriage folks "homophobic." After all, marriage has been defined as being between a man and woman for all of recorded history. That's the standard we've always had. Change will come slow.
3. Scott Brown is "racist" because – Ubermorons like Keith Ubermoron think the entire Tea Party movement is racist because – well, they don't have a reason. They just think the race card works for them, because Obama is black. They're liars, that's all.
4. Scott Brown is a "reactionary" because – Olbermann thinks using the word "reactionary" makes him sound intelligent.
5. Scott Brown is a "teabagging supporter of violence against women" because – like an immature twelve-year old, Olbermann gets a cheap thrill out of using the nasty sexual innuendo of the word "teabagging," and the "supporter of violence against women" part comes from a vicious smear from the Coakley campaign. Coakley reportedly put out a flier that says “1,736 women were raped in Massachusetts in 2008. Scott Brown wants hospitals to turn them all away." Not only is the charge blatantly false, but Scott Brown is filing a criminal complaint against Coakley for her slander. Still, Olbermann repeats the slur, because slurs are what Olbermann does.
6. Scott Brown endorses violence against "other politicians" because – someone in the crowd at a Brown event made a tasteless comment about Coakley that was caught on tape. Now, Brown didn't say it, it came from the crowd. Brown said he didn't even hear the remark, but that's all the lie-master Olbermann needs to attribute the comment to Scott Brown and falsely claim Brown advocates violence. Unbelievable.

In summary, Keith Olbermann is a low-down filthy lying scumbag snake. I hate to be so harsh, but there's no way to sugar-coat it. It shouldn't be sugar-coated. Olbermann is vermin, and beneath contempt. The next time he does his Worst Person In The World schtick, he should look in the mirror. That person will be staring back.
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The next world-class left-wing dunderhead is Hanoi John Kerry. Here is what the desperate Kerry said about Scott Brown:

"I'm no stranger to hard fought campaigns, but what we've seen in the past few days is way over the line and reminiscent of the dangerous atmosphere of Sarah Palin's 2008 campaign rallies. This is not how democracy works in Massachusetts," Kerry said this afternoon in a statement. "Scott Brown needs to speak up and get his out of state tea party supporters under control. In Massachusetts, we fight hard and win elections on the issues and on our differences, not with bullying and threats," Kerry said.

The "dangerous atmosphere of Sarah Palin's 2008 campaign rallies ?" Uh, what dangerous atmosphere ? The grand total of violent episodes at 2008 Palin campaign rallies was – ZERO. Ditto for the Tea Party protests. For an explanation of Hanoi John's remarks, see that Liberal-To-Sanity translation manual again. Brown campaign spokesman Felix Browne responded, "People are tired of John Kerry's partisan politics. His baseless accusations reflect the desperate last gasps of a flailing campaign." Sounds about right.
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The final world-class left-wing dunderhead is another MS-NBC cretin, Ed Schultz. Here's Schultz advocating criminal action in the Massachusetts election in order to defeat Scott Brown:

"If I lived in Massachusetts, I'd try to vote ten times," Schultz said on his radio show, The Ed Schultz Show. "Yeah that's right," he went on. "I'd cheat to keep these bastards out. I would. Because that's exactly what they are."

Gotta love those democratic principles embraced by Schultz, no ? What a guy. He fits right in with the political mainstream – in Iran. Which is where I wish he'd go.
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There ain't no freak-out like a left-wing freak-out, eh ? These people are coming apart at the seams. That's the great thing about insane hatred. It always reveals itself eventually. The left-wing dunderheads are revealed for what they are – hate-filled lying morons.

Here's the distinguished gentleman from Montana, Democratic Senator Max Baucus, excoriating Republicans for not going along with ObamaCare, and sounding like he just got back from a long lunch with the Jagermeister Girls.

It appears Democrats weren't kidding when they said health care reform was done in the spirit(s) of Ted Kennedy.

Next up on the Dem agenda – Universal Bar Tab Coverage.

Maybe Baucus is drowning his sorrows over the heat he's taking for giving his girlfriend a $14,000 raise, taking her on a taxpayer-funded trip to Southeast Asia, and nominating her for a U.S. attorney job.

And always remember, Dems define bipartisanship as – the Democratic agenda is implemented and Republican ideas are ignored, just as it was with health care reform, which was crafted in Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's (D-NV) office with only Baucus and a couple other Democrats knowing what was in it until just before the Senate vote. Reid even bribed several Democratic Senators with taxpayer funds to obtain the needed 60 votes. Then when Senator Jim Demint (R-SC) introduced an amendment to stop using earmarks to buy votes on other legislation, guess who opposed it and shot it down ??? That would be the DEMOCRATS, who voted instead to continue the culture of corruption.

No wonder Baucus had to get a buzz on to make that speech on the Senate floor. His conscience, if he has one, would have prevented him from making it sober.

One of the most useful strategies known to politicians is some variation on the CHANGE theme, one of the keywords in President Obama's 2008 campaign. The electorate almost always desires CHANGE, because politicians almost always foul things up, making CHANGE almost always sound great. I'm hard-pressed to think of a politician who ran on an "I'll keep things exactly the same" platform. If there ever was one, he/she probably lost the election. Here are a few of the CHANGE-based campaign slogans used by politicians through the years:

- Are You Better Off Than You Were Four Years Ago ? – Ronald Reagan, 1984, (CHANGE from Jimmy Carter).
- A Chicken In Every Pot. A Car In Every Garage - Herbert Hoover, 1928, (CHANGE that will get you more stuff).
- Back To Normalcy - Warren G. Harding, 1920 (CHANGE from WWI).
- A Time For Greatness - John F. Kennedy, 1960 (CHANGE for the better).
- It's Time To CHANGE America - Bill Clinton, 1992 (general CHANGE)
- To Begin Anew - Eugene McCarthy, 1968 (start the CHANGE all over again)
- CHANGE We Can Believe In - Barack Obama, 2008 (CHANGE, and this time we mean it !)

The CHANGE theme isn't unique to the USA. In 1957, Nikiti Kruschev's CHANGE vision for the Soviet economy was called Catch Up And Overtake America (take heed, leftists. If Marxism was so great, the Soviets wouldn't have needed to "catch up." They never did, btw. They collapsed instead).

CHANGE works with the voters, and obviously, it worked for Obama. He was more CHANGE-believable than John McCain (one of McCain's campaign slogans was also CHANGED-based – Reform. Prosperity. Peace). McCain was a Republican following a Republican administration, and there was also that awkward photo of McCain hugging President George W. Bush. McCain didn't seem as CHANGE-ey as Obama, plus Obama is half-black, giving him many CHANGE bonus points. Clearly, the CHANGE guy who would "fundamentally transform America" and "CHANGE the way Washington D.C does business" was Obama. Our new prez was going to get rid of the lobbyists and special interests, and all that.

But something funny happens after the elections are over. The new President actually has to run things, and CHANGE becomes nothing more than a word. That is illustrated quite well by the way President Obama has conducted health care reform. Listen to this description of how Obama handled the health care discussions, and then tell me how CHANGE-ey it sounds to you. From the Associated Press:

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama's top aides met frequently with lobbyists and health care industry heavyweights as his administration pieced together a national health care overhaul, according to White House visitor records obtained by The Associated Press.

The records, obtained Wednesday, disclose visits by a broad cross-section of the people most involved in the health care debate, weighted heavily toward those who want to overhaul the system.

The list includes George Halvorson, chairman and CEO of Kaiser Health Plans; Scott Serota, president and CEO of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association; Kenneth Kies, a Washington lobbyist who represents Blue Cross/Blue Shield, among other clients; Billy Tauzin, head of PhRMA, the drug industry lobby; Richard Umbdenstock, chief of the American Hospital Association, and numerous lobbyists.

The AP in early August asked the White House to produce records identifying communications that top Obama aides…The records list the kinds of people usually involved in Washington policymaking: business, union and trade association executives, lobbyists and political strategists. Wednesday's disclosure was significant because of Obama's campaign promise to change business as usual in Washington, and because he voluntarily released records showing the access of special interests as the administration crafted national health care policy.

Earlier this year, the White House announced agreements under which hospitals and the drug industry promised cost savings in return for the overhaul's expected expansion in the number of insured patients. The arrangements were hammered out in private meetings, drawing comparisons to Vice President Dick Cheney's secret talks with the energy industry as he helped President George W. Bush draft a national energy policy.

White House officials met repeatedly with the American Medical Association, which has pushed hard — over the objections of some physicians — for the health overhaul and a corresponding pay hike for doctors.

It pretty much sounds like the same old, same old to me. The Obama administration gets a couple points for releasing the records of these private meetings (Bush fought against such releases during energy policy discussions), but remember that Obama promised to hold the health care hearings on C-SPAN, which he did not do. Another broken promise.

This special interest catering is why we have health care bills that raise costs instead of lowering them, that mandate coverage for Americans to vastly increase the business of the insurance companies, that don't allow the negotiation of significantly lower drug prices, that guts Medicare Advantage in order to increase AARP's Medi-Gap insurance sales, that allows Medicaid prices to be negotiated with the AMA, and that don't include tort reform (to benefit trial lawyers).

Congressional health care votes are even being bought outright, as in the $100 million bribe to get the vote of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA). Conservative talker Glenn Beck drew some heat for calling Landrieu a prostitute following that little bit of D.C. quid pro quo. I agree with Beck's criticizers. Why did Beck single out Landrieu ? There are a slew of whores operating inside the D.C. Beltway. Landrieu is but one of many. That's how they do business in D.C. They rob the johns taxpayers blind in order to please the special interests. That's standard operating procedure. The part that gets me steamed is when they call that CHANGE.

Also, I've mentioned this before, but the whores in Washington, D.C. are lying their dishonest fannies off about how much health care reform is really going to cost.

I favor health care reform, but I cannot favor this. Back to the drawing board. It's time for a CHANGE. As usual.

When two 20-year olds posing as a pimp and a prostitute were able to bring down ACORN by getting multiple ACORN offices to assist them in setting up a would-be prostitution ring for underage girls from El Salvador, I thought to myself, 'wouldn't it be nice if we had professional organizations in this country that could root out corruption like that ?' Then we wouldn't have to depend upon college kids to do it. We could call such professionals, say, journalists. But, alas, all we have is the Lame Stream Media. You can find the audios, videos, and transcripts of ACORN's prosititution facilitating at biggovernment.com.

ACORN, btw, is an acronym. I think it stands for Association of Criminal Organizations for statutory Rape Now. Or something like that.

Until the Senate and the House of Representatives both voted overwhelmingly to cut off ACORN's federal funding, our Lame Stream Media was never interested in ACORN's shenanigans. As ACORN was being investigated across the country for voter registration fraud, as ACORN was breaking into houses they didn't own and taking them over, and as ACORN falsely poses as a non-partisan organization to get federal funding in the first place, our media pretended not to notice. Nothing to see here. Now, however, even the execrable, er, I mean, venerable New York Times has taken notice.

If you want to find out how extensive ACORN's voter registration fraud is, google 'ACORN voter registration fraud,' and then peruse a few of the 194,000 hits you get back from the search. The internet has been on the case, even if the Lame Stream Media has not. Nearly one-third of the over 1.3 million ballots ACORN registered for the 2008 election were rejected. Nothing newsworthy there, according to the Lames.

The Senate voted 83-7 to stop funding ACORN. The House voted 345-75 to stop funding ACORN. ALL votes to keep funding ACORN came from Democrats (further illustrating exactly how non-partisan ACORN is NOT).

ACORN has also been removed from participating in the 2010 Census.

ACORN has put out a laughable variety of ever-changing excuses for the actions of their employees on the prosititution videos. ACORN said the videos were fake, and then ACORN fired some of the employees on those "fake" videos, as if that makes any sense whatsoever. That would be firing them for something they didn't do. Later, ACORN claimed their employees were just playing along. Then, as sure as night follows day, ACORN blamed it on RACISM (will liberals EVER stop this ?). Here's ACORN Chief Organizer, Bertha Lewis:

The relentless attacks on ACORN’s members, its staff and the policies and positions we promote are unprecedented. An international entertainment conglomerate, disguising itself as a “news” agency (Fox), has expended millions, if not tens of millions of dollars, in their attempt to destroy the largest community organization of Black, Latino, poor and working class people in the country. It is not coincidence that the most recent attacks have been launched just when health care reform is gaining traction. It is clear they’ve had these tapes for months.

We are their Willy Horton for 2009. We are the boogeyman for the right-wing and its echo chambers. If ACORN did not exist, the right-wing would have needed to create us in order to achieve their agenda, their missions, their ideal, retrograde America. This recent scam, which was attempted in San Diego, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia to name a few places, had failed for months before the results we’ve all recently seen. I am appalled and angry; I cannot and I will not defend the actions of the workers depicted in the video, who have since been terminated. But it is clear that the videos are doctored, edited, and in no way the result of the fabricated story being portrayed by conservative activist “filmmaker” O’Keefe and his partner in crime. And, in fact, a crime it was – our lawyers believe a felony – and we will be taking legal action against Fox and their co-conspirators.

For the record, millions of dollars were not spent to bring down ACORN. The two 20-year olds who shot the prosititution videos spent $1,300 total (according to them), and they didn't work for Fox News either. The real story here is why the rest of the Lame Stream Media DIDN'T cover ACORN's ongoing corrupt and criminal activities for all this time. Btw, Bertha Lewis didn't sound very non-partisan there, did she ? The right-wing's desire for an " ideal, retrograde America" ?? I'm not even sure what that means, but it doesn't sound very nice.

FYI – You can listen to the full audio of the ACORN prostitution tapes at the previous biggovernment.com link. There was no doctoring of the videos, as Lewis claims. The videos portrayed the situation accurately. Lewis is literally saying, 'who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes ?' It would be funny if it wasn't so sad.

"We spent a fortune to elect Barack Obama" – Andy Stern, President of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).

"I owe these unions." – Barack Obama

Obama hasn't forgotten he owes the unions, who were instrumental in getting him elected President. In his first two weeks in office, Obama issued three pro-union executive orders. In his third week in office, he issued a fourth pro-union executive order. The fortune spent spent by the SEIU to elect Obama ($60 million, according to the SEIU) has gained the union access to power. A number of SEIU officials have been named to the Obama team. Anna Burger, SEIU secretary-treasurer, was appointed to Obama's economic recovery board. White House political director Patrick Gaspard is a former SEIU executive. The unions also scored big when one of the most pro-union voices in the House of Representatives, Hilda Solis (D-CA), was named as Obama's Labor Secretary. The aforementioned SEIU President, Mr. Stern, says he visits the White House weekly, and has influence over issues from the stimulus package to health care reform to immigration. "We get heard," boasted Stern.

Vice President Joe Biden made no secret of the fact that Obama's stimulus package was aimed at boosting union jobs.

“We're going to make sure that in every policy, every decision, we don't lose sight of the folks that brought us to the dance,” [Biden] said — a reference to organized labor’s support of the Obama-Biden ticket. “And toward that end, we have to make sure that the jobs we're creating come with fair wages and decent benefits.”

Biden focused on the stimulus package, noting it will send taxpayer money through the pipeline to union jobs and specifically those in the building trades unions. "The focus of this administration the first month has been to rebuild American roads, bridges, waterways — jobs for the building trades union,” he said.

The stimulus package producing union jobs doesn't sound so bad, until you realize that only 12.5% of Americans workers are unionized. Where does that leave the other 87.5% of Americans ? Out in the cold. In addition, 84% of construction jobs are non-union. They aren't getting any help from Obama/Biden either. And those higher union wages for "shovel-ready" stimulus projects come directly from the pockets of the American taxpayers, not that our federal government ever gives a whit about them.

Btw, Obama has just announced that he's seeking a 2% pay raise for federal employees in 2010. That would be the federal employees unions, the teachers union, etc. That will cost the taxpayers roughly $20 billion more. While the rest of the workforce is losing jobs, getting their hours cut, and getting their paychecks reduced due to the recession, government employees roll merrily along and get their pay hikes, just as Congress did back in january (a $4,700 annual pay increase). The federal government spits directly in the face of the taxpayers at virtually every turn, and we just sit back and take it.

Now, it has come to light that the House health care bill, H.R. 3200, contains $10 billion to fund union retirees.

Greg Mourad of the National Right to Work Committee called it "a shameless case of political payback," saying Democrats and President Barack Obama are trying "to force the rest of us to pay billions to cover those unions' health care."

Big labor, primarily the UAW, thinks they didn't get ENOUGH taxpayer dollars from H.R. 3200. Incredible. Like we haven't bailed out the UAW enough already. With the taxpayer tab for the auto company bailouts running near $100 billion, Big Labor wants yet more and more, even after the unions emerged with large ownership stakes in GM and Chrysler following those companies highly politicized bankruptcy proceedings that rewarded the unions far in excess of investors. The unions will own 39% of GM, and 55% of Chrysler.

The upshot of all this is crystal clear – If you want something from the federal government, just buy the politicians. Same as it ever was.

Change You Can Believe In……..my butt.

"When special interests put their thumb on the scale, and distort the free market, the people who compete by the rules come in last." – Barack Obama, August 2008.

I guess we can throw that quote out in the trash with the others.

- One nice thing about Bill Clinton's presidency was that you could oppose his policies without being called a racist (mostly).

- People who think Bush went into Iraq to enrich Halliburton have no right to complain about the Birthers.

- When you go looking for "code words" for racism, aren't you just making stuff up ?

- When I talk about Obama's huge first year deficit ($1.8 trillion) on this blog, why do liberals always bring up Bush's deficits to excuse Obama's ? (Note to libs – By doing that, you aren't countering my argument. You are only making the argument that Obama is worse than Bush).

- Obama can offer health insurance to 30-45 million more people with health care reform, or he can reduce health care costs, but he can't do both at the same time.

- Obama's health care reform offers less choice, not more choice.

- Only Democrats think Rush Limbaugh is the head of the Republican party.

- Why is it that when liberals call conservatives racists nearly non-stop, nothing ever happens to those liberals, but when Glenn Beck calls Obama a racist one time, 20 advertisers are pressured into dropping their ads from Beck's show ?

- The only point being made by those people who are carrying guns outside events at which the President is speaking is that the gun carriers are oblivious morons.

- Is there any doubt at all that House Democrats are seeking the financial records of health insurance companies in order to demonize those companies ?

- Why is it okay for Congress to buy private jets with taxpayer dollars, but it's not okay for CEO's to fly private jets to Washington D.C. after being bailed out with taxpayer dollars ?

- Why would we want the federal government, an organization that is nearly $12 trillion in debt (and counting), to run our health care system, which represents 17% of our economy ?

- The "Obama is Hitler" signs must stop, because Obama is not like Hitler – he's much more like a combination of Saul Alinsky and P.T. Barnum. (Note to liberal media – that Obama-Hitler "I've Changed" sign you idiots at MSNBC, NBC, and CNN keep attributing to right wingers came from a Lyndon Larouche group, a communist group. Is even a tiny bit of journalistic integrity too much to ask ?)

- Speaking of Saul Alinsky, doesn't Obama's playbook seem awfully close to Alinsky's Rules For Radicals (pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it) ?

- MSNBC is such a biased organization that they actually edited out the fact that it was a black man who was carrying the AR-15 outside an Obama event, so MSNBC could peddle it's racist angle to the story.

- In the interesting political poll of the week, Gallup polling showed that conservatives outnumber liberals almost two to one when it comes to political ideology, yet Democrats have a sizeable lead over Republicans in party affiliation. (In other words, conservative doesn't always equate to Republican. I can identify with that).

- If you want to know why the health care public option was in, then it was out, then it was back in again….it's because up to 100 House Democrats said it better be back in again.

Barney Frank (D-VT) wants the federal government to decide how much Wall Street executives (and all other executives of private companies) are paid. Barney also wants the government to decide how they are paid. Legislation to ban incentive-based pay for private corporations has been approved by the House Financial Services Committee.

I don't know where in the U.S. Constitution the federal government thinks it obtains the authority to do this, but, hey, we don't use that musty old Constitution thingy anymore anyway. The notion of limiting centralized governmental power (federalism) envisioned by the founding fathers is as outdated as bell bottomed jeans. These days, we seem to be climbing all over ourselves to give the federal government all the power it wants (totalitarianism). The statists are on the march, making all the same false promises the statists always make, the false promises that never quite seem to materialize (FYI – health care reform = forcing all Americans to buy health care insurance and then having the government determine what medical procedures you are allowed to have, in case you haven't figured that out yet).

Here is Barney's rationale for limiting executive pay:

"The problem with executive compensation is essentially, from the systemic standpoint, that it gives perverse incentives," said Frank, a Democrat. Without penalties for bad bets, the system means "heads you win, tails you break even," he said.

Perverse incentives. That means people shouldn't be rewarded for driving their companies into the ground. They should be held accountable instead. I think we can all agree with that, if not with the idea that the federal government should dictate people's salaries. That is so……Soviet.

Let's continue with these ideas of accountability and perverse incentives. As of July 31st, 2009, the federal debt stood at $11,617,400,889,464.57. That's over $11.6 trillion. As soon as I write these words, they are outdated, because the national debt is now higher. The debt has increased by $3.89 billion PER DAY since September 2007. In addition, the federal government is projected to run nearly a $2 trillion deficit in 2009. We paid $451 billion in interest on the federal debt in 2008. This year it will be much higher. The interest on the debt is money flushed down the toilet (or sent to a foreign government, like China) that could easily pay for any imaginable health care reform we could dream up. Instead, our federal government has burdened every American citizen with roughly $38,000 in debt. The federal government is the poster child for incompetence.

This means the federal government, if viewed as a corporation (FedCorp), would be the worst run corporation in the entire history of the world (with the possible exception of those defunct Soviets we're trying to emulate). So, how are we holding FedCorp accountable ? Why, we're about to hand the entire health care system over to them !!! We're going to reward the worst company ever, FedCorp, by handing it control over 16% more of our economy. Talk about perverse incentives. This is equivalent to handing the entire energy sector over to Enron. FedCorp has shown NO ability to be responsible managers of taxpayer dollars, so, naturally, let's keep giving them ever more and more. That's the ticket. And never mind that the part of health care FedCorp already controls, Medicare/Medicaid, has such massive unfunded liabilities that it is threatening to destroy our economy down the road. If not addressed, the unfunded entitlement liabilities will hit our economy with such an economic tidal wave that the current recession will look like a ripple in a pond by comparison.

While we're on the subject of salaries, FedCorp is holding itself accountable for it's putrid mismanagement by…..giving all FedCorp's civilian employees a 2.9% pay raise in 2010. This is after Congress voted itself a 2.8% pay raise in January 2009, with the country in the depths of the recession. Apparently, accountability and perverse incentives don't apply to FedCorp, only to that horribly greedy entity known as the private sector (the sector that produces all our goods and services). FedCorp is spitting directly in your faces, Mr. and Mrs. Taxpayer. YOU tighten your belts. THEY get raises.

There are so many examples of the federal government throwing away taxpayer dollars that I could never list them all. This post would be a thousand pages long if I tried. Go to the website YouDontKnowJack to see some examples of how just one Congressman, Jack Murtha (D-PA), aka, the King Of Pork, throws YOUR money around to his cronies and special interests. It's disgusting.

And it wasn't that much better when the Republicans were in charge. During the Bush years, with Republicans controlling Congress, government spending STILL skyrocketed. Federal spending went from $2 trillion to $3 trillion per year during Bush's tenure (and those guys were supposed to be conservatives ??? I don't think so). The only way the Bushies were conservative is if you compare them to Obama and the Democrats, who are trying to match Bush's 8-year federal spending increase total ($1 trillion) in their FIRST YEAR. If Bush was the frying pan, Obama is the fire. I find myself longing for the return of Bill Clinton and his Republican Congress. At least those guys realized the economy was EVERYTHING. Those guys look like geniuses compared to Bush and Barry, and even Clinton ran net deficits and added $1.5 trillion to the debt. Things have been so bad since then that Clinton and his GOP'ers seem like the good old days.

Our federal government is so far out of control that I barely know where to start. This post is only a drop in the bucket in trying to describe it. FedCorp is like a bunch of crack addicts with our money. They can never get enough. With an addict, there's only one cure. You have to MAKE them stop. WE have to make them stop. WE have to get rid of the whole bunch of them. WE have to vote them all out of office and start over. That's the only way WE can make a difference, the only way WE can make the federal crackheads stop. Barring that, WE are screwed. Barring that, America, the land of the free, will very soon be OVER. There is only so much money that FedCorp can spend. There are only so much taxes that FedCorp can take from us. We're on the express train to poverty as long as this continues. Wake up, America. Your country is disappearing before your very eyes.

Everyone I know thinks the federal government is corrupt, that it is overly influenced by lobbyists, big campaign contributors, and other pay-to-play arrangements. Yet, inexplicably, about half of the folks who complain about these things, we'll call them Democrats for lack of a better word, want to see ever more and more power concentrated in the hands of that same corrupt federal government. This is roughly equivalent to saying "I know cigarettes will kill me. I think I'll smoke twice as much from now on." The same Democrats who thought President Bush's warrantless wiretapping of international phone calls from suspected terrorists following 9/11 was the most egregious overstep of governmental authority since the Russian Revolution now think it's perfectly fine that the government takes over vast sectors of private industry, from health care to energy to automobile companies to finance to everything else. The same Democrats who thought Bush's annual deficit spending was horribly irresponsible (it was) now think it's perfectly fine that President Obama is doubling those Bush deficits (it isn't). I will never understand.

And the same Democrats who complained about the previous Republican "culture of corruption" under Bush are now openly courting corruption, pay-to-play, influence peddling, government meddling, and cronyism. Don't believe me ? Let's start with a how-to on buying a government position. Consider this report from opensecrets.org titled 'Barack Obama's Obscure Ambassadors Bring Experience, Campaign Cash':

To date, President Barack Obama has tapped 19 individuals to serve as ambassadors…Seventeen of these 19 ambassadors…along with their immediate family members — have contributed about $323,900 to federal candidates, committees and parties since 1989, the Center for Responsive Politics has found.

Moreover, both of the Cabinet-level ambassadors — Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and Ron Kirk, the U.S. trade representative — bundled between $50,000 and $100,000 for Obama's presidential campaign, according to CRP's analysis.

Deputy U.S. Trade Representative Miriam Sapiro, who also has the rank of ambassador, bundled at least $100,000 for Obama's campaign — and another $290,000 for his inauguration, according to Public Citizen.

Here's another job handed to a crony, from an opensecrets.org report titled 'Philip Berg, New Ambassador To Germany, Gave Big To Democrats':

Murphy and his "homemaker" wife, Tammy, have contributed nearly $1.5 million to federal candidates, committees and parties since 1989, with 94 percent of that sum going to Democrats, according to a Center for Responsive Politics analysis. They also contributed an additional $100,000 to Obama's inauguration committee.

While other ambassador picks have steered more money Obama's way as bundlers, Murphy, who was not among Obama's bundlers, takes the title of being the largest personal giver to all federal candidates among nominees to date.

It's crystal clear. Want a nice cushy ambassadorship with great perks ? Cough up the cash to the right people. If you don't pony up the cash, talk to the hand.

Or consider this opensecrets.org report titled 'Newly Appointed Wall Street Investigators Are Big Campaign Contributors.' This one shows how those appointed to a bipartisan investigation of the financial crisis are big political contributors. This goes for both Democratic and Republican appointees. The "investigators" are government cronies. Do you think just maybe the investigation will conclude that the housing/financial meltdown and resulting recession was NOT THE GOVERNMENT'S FAULT ? Call me cynical, but I believe that's precisely what will happen (though because this is ObamaTime, they'll probably find something to blame Bush for, maybe all that "Bush deregulation of the financial industry" liberals are always going on about, even though that never happened).

And don't lose sight of the fact that all the cronyism I've described so far is LEGAL. So is the behavior described in this next video, in which Representative Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) talks about Gangster Government, about how who you know in government makes the difference in whether your auto dealership was closed down or allowed to stay in business during the restructing of the car companies. Pay particular attention to the first few minutes:

Rep. Bachmann mentioned all Obama's Czars. He has appointed them to oversee…well, almost everything. We have more Czar's than the Russian Empire had. Nearly three dozen by some accounts. Nobody seems to know the exact number. These Czars are non-elected officials given the tools and authority to do the bidding of the White House. They are accountable to no one except the President. They circumvent Congress. They go through no Congressional confirmation hearings, even though in some cases they oversee confirmed officials. They just…wield power. There is no transparency. Don Obama's capos.

Now, let's turn to companies buying influence in Washington D.C. It's a common misperception that the big boys contribute primarily to Republican coffers, but that isn't quite accurate. From 1989-2008, of the top twenty biggest groups donating to politicians, only three gave more to Republicans than Democrats. Fourteen gave more to Democrats than Republicans, and most gave heavily in favor of the Democrats. Three gave nearly equally to both parties. The Democratic edge comes mostly from the big unions. Corporate donors slightly favor Republicans, but most of the big corporations give to both sides, to buy influence regardless of who runs the show in D.C. They aren't stupid. They know how the game is played.

Does all that money lavished on the politicians by big business interests pay off ? You bet it does. If it didn't, they wouldn't do it. For example, here we are in the middle of the worst recession in 70 years, resulting in a meltdown of the financial industry, and the fourth biggest government donator, Goldman Sachs (over $31 million donated, mostly to Democrats) just turned a nifty $1.8 billion profit for the first quarter of 2009, and an even niftier $3.4 billion profit for the second quarter. Goldman Sachs expects to have record breaking profits this year. Number thirteen on the big donor list is Citigroup, Inc. (over $26.4 million donated, split among Dems and Republicans). They made a $4.3 billion profit for the second quarter. Number forty on the top donor list is Bank of America ($16.4 million donated, split between Dems and Repubs). They made a $2.4 billion profit in the second quarter. You may remember Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and Bank of America as being recipients of huge bailouts from the federal government. They were "too big to fail." If they went down, so would our entire financial system, allegedly.

Is YOUR business doing as well ? Did YOUR business get bailed out ? Does the government give a tinker's damn if YOUR business fails ? Didn't think so.

Maybe John Edwards was right about there being two Americas. He just had his definitions wrong.

The first America is the gangster government/financial giant class. They are one and the same, but the financial giants must pay protection money to the gangster government, or they risk being cut out of the scam.

The second America is everyone else. The marks. The ones who pay for it all.

Soooo, again, why is it that about half of Americans, we'll call them Democrats for lack of a better word, are in favor of ever MORE and MORE of this corrupt government ???? Are they just hoping to get initiated into the gang, or what ?

“Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends – life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government.” – Thomas Jefferson

Allow me to construct a hypothetical set of circumstances. Let's say our country was in the midst of a severe recession, that unemployment was rising rapidly as millions of jobs were being lost, that average people were having an increasingly difficult time getting by, that our industries were having a difficult time competing, that the value of the dollar was dropping, that we were up to our ears in debt……

Okay, that isn't hypothetical at all. That's what is actually happening.

Now, in response to this not-so-hypothetical set of crisis circumstances, what would you think of our government if it passed legislation that would bring about massive tax increases, that would make it even more difficult for our industries to compete, that would cause more job losses, that would raise energy costs dramatically, that would increase the price of practically every product consumers purchase, that would put the average person much further in the hole, and that wouldn't even provide the desired benefit of said legislation ???? (link)

I'd call that government destructive to the ends of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I'd want that government replaced for working against the interests of the American people. That's what I'm thinking today after the House of Representatives passed Cap-And-Trade legislation by a narrow vote of 219-212.

The Cap-and-Trade bill, also known as Waxman-Markey, also known as The American Clean Energy And Security Act, also known as the Let Them Eat Cake Act, is a 1,200 page monstrosity that nobody in the House had time to read, because the final version of the bill wasn't posted until the night before friday's vote, and a 300 page amendment was added at 3:00am on the day of the vote. I seem to remember President Obama saying something about having the most transparent administration EVAH !…….I guess Congress didn't get the memo on that, because they are operating like cat burglars in the dead of night.

Here's a quick rundown of the bad guys and the good guys in the House. The bad guys voting FOR the destruction of America included 211 Democrats and 8 Republicans. The good guys voting AGAINST destruction included 44 Democrats and 168 Republicans. You can find a complete vote tally here. I'd like to single out Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) for praise for standing against this bill. I've maligned Mr. Kucinich in the past, but I'm beginning to think I was wrong about him. He seems to be one of the few in the House who actually stands on his principles. That's noteworthy to me, even if I often disagree with him. The fact that 44 Democrats voted against this bill shows us that the Dems know Cap-And-Trade is a really bad idea, but lots of Democrats caved to pressure from the White House. El Presidente badly wants more control over all aspects of America, and this bill puts him in the express lane toward acquiring that control (but he believe in free markets ! lol).

"We've seen the example in Spain, it's a colossal mistake there, a political and an economic error. This could be the most colossal mistake ever made in the history of the United State Congress." – Congressman Steve King (R-IOWA).

I picked the above quote not only because a guy named King must be right, but because he mentioned Spain. What happened in Spain ?

Spain already implemented cap-and-trade, and has the most far-reaching renewable energy agenda in the European Union. The result ? Unemployment is at 18% in Spain (double the EU average), and there have been 2.2 jobs lost for every green job created. In addition, tons of subsidies are required for green energy initiatives to be competitive. The wind industry jobs created in Spain have come at a cost of $1.4 million PER JOB. (link)

Gee, who wouldn't want to emulate such "success" ???

But my favorite comment on the cap-and-trade legislation came from Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), who when asked why he spent an hour reading portions of the bill aloud on the House floor, said, "Hey, people deserve to know what's in this pile of s–t." (link)

Even those who are in favor of restricting carbon emissions know that this cap-and-trade bill is, um, crap. Here's one such person, billionaire Warren Buffet of Berkshire Hathaway:

"I think if you get into the way it was written, it's a huge tax and there's no sense calling it anything else. I mean, it is a tax. And it's a fairly regressive tax. If we buy permits, essentially, at our utilities, that goes right into the bills of the utility customers, and an awful lot of people in Iowa, in Oregon, and Utah, and places where we are, very poor people are going to pay a lot more money for electricity. So I think that can be improved." (link)

Speaking of restricting carbon emissions, which is the stated purpose of cap-and-trade (all it's negative and destructive effects are just icing on the cake), exactly how much of an effect on global warming will this cap-and-trade bill have ? (for the sake of brevity, I'm assuming here that man-made carbon emissions are a significant cause of global warming, an assumption that is itself a source of controversy).

Washington Post writer Martin Feldstein lays it out in an article called Cap-And-Trade: All Cost, No Benefit.

The Congressional Budget Office recently estimated that the resulting increases in consumer prices needed to achieve a 15 percent CO2 reduction — slightly less than the Waxman-Markey target — would raise the cost of living of a typical household by $1,600 a year. Some expert studies estimate that the cost to households could be substantially higher. The future cost to the typical household would rise significantly as the government reduces the total allowable amount of CO2.

Americans should ask themselves whether this annual tax of $1,600-plus per family is justified by the very small resulting decline in global CO2. Since the U.S. share of global CO2 production is now less than 25 percent (and is projected to decline as China and other developing nations grow), a 15 percent fall in U.S. CO2 output would lower global CO2 output by less than 4 percent. Its impact on global warming would be virtually unnoticeable. The U.S. should wait until there is a global agreement on CO2 that includes China and India before committing to costly reductions in the United States.

Waxman-Markey will have NO EFFECT on global warming, but it will have the "benefit" of further destroying our country.

In spite of all this, there are many American corporations ready to jump on the green bandwagon and profit from the carbon credit trading frenzy that El Presidente is trying to unleash on us. You're even familiar with some of these corporations – AIG, General Motors, Goldman Sachs, General Electric…you know, the GOOD corporations that we've all come to know and love so much during the recession. They are ready to jump on the manufactured energy bubble and rake in the big bucks. That these same companies are all recipients of government bailouts is just a big old coincidence, I'm sure. Too bad Enron isn't around any longer. Those guys knew how to run an energy bubble. I bet most of you didn't even know that General Electric got a bailout. Somehow, that hasn't been mentioned by the mainstream media very much. Not only did GE get a bailout, they got a $139 billion bailout, second in size to AIG's bailout. Yet somehow, the enormous GE bailout hasn't been mentioned or condemned by major television networks like……NBC, nor by NBC's retarded cable stepchildren over at MSNBC (aka, The Obama Channel). I'm sure that has nothing to do with the fact that General Electric OWNS NBC, or the fact that GE is deeply in bed with the Obama administration. I'm sure that can't be it. Everyone knows MSNBC is a group of highly dedicated professional journalists who would never compromise their integrity or ideals for…….LOL. Oh, man. I can't finish this sentence. Sometime I even crack myself up.

But make sure you contact GE for all your carbon credit trading needs. They are primed and ready for all their cap-and-trade lobbying to start paying dividends.

As for you, America, I hope you like cake, because if you don't rise up and stop this Cap-And-Trade disaster in the Senate, cake is all you'll have left. And maybe some government cheese to go with it, if you're lucky.

This is a follow-up to the original blog piece I wrote about President Obama's firing of Gerald Walpin, the Inspector General of the CNCS, the watchdog over Americorps and other national service groups.

It's looking more and more like a political hit job.

From the Washington Examiner:

Walpin had certainly displeased the board by his aggressive investigation into the misuse of AmeriCorps funds by Kevin Johnson, the former NBA star who is now mayor of Sacramento, California and a prominent supporter of President Obama. Prior to his election as mayor, Johnson ran an educational organization called St. HOPE, which received $850,000 in AmeriCorps money. Walpin discovered that Johnson and St. HOPE had failed to use the federal money for the purposes specified in the grant and had also used federally-funded AmeriCorps staff for, among other things, "driving [Johnson] to personal appointments, washing his car, and running personal errands."

Walpin recommended that Johnson be banned from ever receiving any more federal funds. But after the passage of the $787 billion stimulus bill, amid worries that such a ban on the mayor would keep Sacramento from receiving its share of the stimulus cash, the board of the Corporation for National and Community Service reached an agreement with the acting U.S. attorney in Sacramento under which Johnson would repay some of the mis-spent money and also be eligible to receive new federal grants in the future. Walpin strongly objected to the agreement. (Knowing his opposition, the board excluded him from the negotiations.)

Walpin's objections were the subject of a now-controversial May 20 meeting in which Walpin, to use his term, "lectured" the board on what he believed was its mistake in approving the Johnson settlement. On the morning of the meeting, the Sacramento Bee reported that a man named Rick Maya, who worked with Kevin Johnson in the St. HOPE project, claimed that Johnson's emails had been deleted during the time of Walpin's investigation. The Maya news suggested that there might have been obstruction of justice in the St. HOPE affair, and Walpin used it to drive home his point that the board should have let his investigation stand.

It appears the discussion of the St. HOPE matter was a turning point not only in the May 20 meeting but in Walpin's tenure at the Corporation. In a recent interview, a Republican member of the Corporation board told me that Walpin told board members at the meeting that he wanted to issue some sort of public statement to the effect that there should be more investigation of the St. HOPE matter. "He said, 'I feel so strongly about this that today I am going to issue a statement to the press calling for further investigation,'" the member said, recalling Walpin's words. "The board members all caught that. Several of us wrote down that he was going to be issuing a statement to the press that afternoon."

It was a distressing scenario for the board. As a favorite program of Barack and Michelle Obama, AmeriCorps was enjoying a higher profile than ever before. The Corporation also stood to receive vast amounts of new funding from the $5.7 billion Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act, which would triple the size of AmeriCorps. And in the midst of that, here was the agency's inspector general saying he might re-open an investigation into an embarrassing episode involving hundreds of thousands of mis-spent dollars and a politically prominent supporter of the president.

"Right now, when there is such a great emphasis on service, we did not need any press out there on this St. HOPE matter, which was already settled," the board member told me. "We thought he was going to use the press…He had an issue with the fact that a settlement was reached…and he was doing everything he could to continue to keep the issue at the forefront."

Later in the meeting, members questioned Walpin about his intentions. It was at that point that they say Walpin became confused and disoriented. But whatever Walpin's demeanor, it appears that board members, of both parties, were worried about the possibility of embarrassing new revelations involving a sensational case they thought had been closed. After the meeting, the board began an accelerated effort to remove Walpin, compiling an informal list of grievances against him — he could be difficult, he telecommuted, he was somehow disabled — that the White House would ultimately cite as cause for his firing. But there is no doubt that, whatever the other reasons, the board feared that a revival of a scandal they thought was in the past would be embarrassing to the newly-prominent AmeriCorps.

Sounds like the board might have gotten together to manufacture some reasons to get Walpin fired because they were afraid he'd go to the press, and that's when they decided Walpin was "confused" and "disoriented," among other things. They wanted to dump him because he was a thorn in their side and was going to expose the St. Hope "settlement" (free pass).

As further evidence, 147 people, both Democrats and Republicans, have signed a letter to Congress attesting to the soundness of Walpin's mental state. Here's an excerpt from that letter:

We have known Gerald Walpin as a leading member of the New York Bar for many years. Many of us have seen him and heard him speak, including at this month's meeting of the Second Circuit Judicial Conference and last week's meeting of the Board of the Federal Bar Council.

We have never seen Mr. Walpin to be "confused, disoriented, [or] unable to answer questions." While none of us was present at the meeting referred to in Mr. Eisen's letter, we can report only that such an allegation is totally inconsistent with our personal knowledge of Mr. Walpin who has always, through the present day, exhibited a quick mind and a command of the facts (whether we agree with him or not) and eloquence – essentially the opposite of someone who is "confused, disoriented, unable to answer questions."

We note that the signers of this letter include both Democrats and Republicans, voters for both President Obama and Senator McCain, and many who do not agree with Mr. Walpin's personal political views. But all of us are unanimous in affirming Mr. Walpin's integrity and competence.

If it matters, and it shouldn't, Mr. Walpin calls himself a conservative.

Message to Geral Walpin – don't mess with the President's pet projects and friends, peon, or you'll be crushed under the wheels of the Hopenchange Express.

P.S. – As of this writing, the twelve questions Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IOWA) wanted answered by June 24th about Walpin's firing have NOT been answered by the White House.

P.P.S – The FBI is investigating St. Hope and Kevin Johnson for obstructing the investigation into the misappropriation of funds (the obstruction was one of Walpin's biggest objections to the settlement).

In 2006, President Bush fired eight U.S. Attorneys. It was within the rights of the executive branch to fire those attorneys, who serve at the pleasure of the President. Bush did not have to give a reason or provide cause to fire them. Following those firings, there have been 2 1/2 years of accusations, scandal, and investigations of the Bush administration. The investigations continue to this day.

Then the great CHANGE occurred, and Barack Obama became President Of The United States. Things would be different now. No longer would people be hired or fired for political reasons.

And then Obama fired Gerald Walpin, the Inspector General Of The Corporation For National And Community Sevice (he was the watchdog over Americorps and other national service organizations). It was Mr. Walpin's job to root out waste, fraud, and abuse, and that's what he did. Among other mishandlings of taxpayer funds he ferreted out, in 2008 Walpin discovered that St. Hope Academy had misused a large share of over $800,000 it had received in taxpayer funds. The CEO of St. Hope Academy was Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, a former NBA star and big-time Obama supporter. Johnson and St. Hope were barred from receving further federal funds. So far so good. Things were working as they should. You defraud the taxpayers, you pay the price. Walpin was doing his job.

Then, on April 9, 2009, the Acting U.S. Attorney for California's Eastern District, Lawrence G. Brown, cut Kevin Johnson a deal. Here are some of the details:

Acting United States Attorney Lawrence G. Brown announced today that St. HOPE Academy has agreed to pay $423,836.50 to settle allegations that St. HOPE did not appropriately spend AmeriCorps grant awards and education awards in accordance with the terms of grant requirements and did not adequately document its expenditures of grant awards. The amount of the civil settlement represents one-half of the $847,673 in AmeriCorps grant funds received by St. HOPE Academy…The lifting of the suspension against all parties, including Mayor Johnson, removes any cloud whether the City of Sacramento will be prevented from receiving much-needed federal stimulus funds,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Brown…St. HOPE will make an initial payment of $73,836.50 by electronic transfer within five business days from today…Kevin Johnson will pay $72,836.50 of the initial payment by St. HOPE, with possible repayment to Johnson by St. HOPE when it is financially able to do so…St. HOPE has entered into a stipulated judgment for $350,000.00, plus five percent annual interest, payable at $35,000 annually for 10 years.

Let's put this into perspective. Kevin Johnson and St. Hope Academy bilked the taxpayers out of over $400,000. Their penalty ? Pay it back, and they get 10 years to do it. That's it. No further punishment, and their right to receive more taxpayer money is restored. Do any readers out there think they'd get a similar deal for defrauding over $400,000 ? No, me neither. It's good to have friends in high places, and Kevin Johnson certainly has them. And if you noticed, Kevin Johnson ends up paying NOTHING out of his pocket. He gets reimbursed for the money he pays back, even though the original misspent Americorps funds included personal services performed for Kevin Johnson. Even worse, St. Hope Academy is a NON-PROFIT organization, so their future funding, the money they will use to PAY BACK the money they defrauded the taxpayers out of, will come from FUTURE TAXPAYER MONEY endowed upon them by Barack Obama (who, btw, increased Americorps funding by $5 billion, because, you know, the American economic situation is SO GOOD right now. That's Obama's idea of fiscal responsibility).

When Gerald Walpin found out about the sweet deal that Kevin Johnson and St. Hope Academy received for their criminal behavior, he objected in a May 13, 2009 letter to Congress that the settlment reeked of impropriety. Walpin urged Congress to act.

It appears Walpin ruffled the wrong feathers, the feathers of power, because Walpin was fired. He received a phone call from Norman Eisen, the Special Counsel to the President on Ethics and Reform, notifying him that he had one hour to resign or be canned. Walpin, who had not only finished a report on misuse of funds by St. Hope, but who had also just finished a report of misuse of funds by the City University Of New York, Americorps biggest program, told Eisen he thought the timing of his firing was "very interesting." Eisien replied that is was a "pure coincidence." Sure.

Here's the problem. Gerald Walpin didn't serve at the pleasure of the President, as did those U.S. Attorneys who were fired by George W. Bush. According to the 2008 Inspectors General Reform Act (that Senator Obama CO-SPONSORED), the President must give Congress 30 days notice and a sufficient cause to fire an Inspector General. Obama had done neither, and was in violation for firing Walpin. Obama's intial explanation was that he lost confidence in Walpin, which, as Walpin himself noted "is a conclusion, not a cause."

Some members of Congress, including Democrat Claire McCaskill, objected. So did members of the conservative media. That prompted a second explanation from President Obama of why Walpin was fired, so Obama would be within the law. Eisen wrote a letter to Congress as follows:

“Mr. Walpin was removed after a review was unanimously requested by the bi-partisan Board of the Corporation ,” Obama ethics counsel Norm Eisen wrote in a letter to senators Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Susan Collins (R-Me.), with a copy directed to McCaskill. “The Board’s action was precipitated by a May 20, 2009 Board meeting at which Mr. Walpin was confused, disoriented, unable to answer questions and exhibited other behavior that led the Board to question his capacity to serve.”

They are practically saying the 77-year old Walpin is senile. But if you read Walpin's letter to Congress in May, or his other reports on St. Hope or CUNY, he hardly seems senile. He seems quite clear and precise. He also didn't sound at all senile during a Fox News roundtable discussion on the issue.

And even if Walpin had some kind of medical problem during that May 20th meeting that affected his mental abilities, how EMPATHETIC is it for Obama to fire him over it ? Not at all. It's cold-hearted as hell. How about they recommend that Walpin go see a doctor instead ? Of course, they didn't do that, because they didn't fire Walpin for cause, they just made up a cause. They fired him for political reasons, because Walpin the watchdog was blowing the whistle in places the Obama administration didn't want it to be blown – on Obama's cronies, on Obama's pet projects. That's sure how it looks to me.

Walpin is fighting back. He refused to resign and has described Obama's alleged "cause" for firing him as "outrageous," "smears," and "total lies." Good for him.

How long do you think the investigation into the Walpin firing will be ? 2 1/2 years and counting, like the Bush attorney investigation, or ZIP ? I'm going with zip, because, you know, Obama is a Democrat, and we don't really want to waste our time investigating Democrats these days. That's "non-productive," just like it was when Congress decided there shouldn't be any investigation into Nancy Pelosi's accusation that the CIA lies to Congress all the time. Who cares if the CIA is lying ? Much ado about nothing. It's only our national security at stake. But Bush firing those attorneys, which he had every legal right to do, well, that's BIG. Somehow.

The biggest reason Nancy Pelosi's lies matter is – she's third in line to be the President of the United States. If President Obama were to become unable to serve, Vice President and Gaffemaster General Joe Biden would succeed him. After Biden, the job falls to the Speaker of the House, and that's Pelosi. After Pelosi, it goes to the President pro tempore of the Senate, 91-year old former Klansman Robert Byrd. Following Byrd is the Secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Yikes. Biden, Pelosi, Byrd. What a cast of miscreants.

(Note to self – Contact Congressional representatives and urge them to introduce legislation to make the Secretary of State second in line to the presidency, asap.)

I have no idea how someone of Nancy Pelosi's caliber rose to such dizzying heights of power (though the 'dizzy' part fits), but I'm now a firm believer in the Peter Principle. Exhibit A – Pelosi's press conference from two days ago, where she attempts to rehab all her previous contradictory statements about waterboarding into one big contradictory statement, and also accuses the CIA of misleading Congress about enhanced interrogation techniques (EIT's):

Let's review Nancy Pelosi's many different positions on waterboarding, in chronological order:

1) She was never briefed on waterboarding.
2) She was briefed about it, but was told it wasn't being used.
3) After being confronted with information that she was briefed about the waterboarding being used against Abu Zubaydah, Pelosi said she was told the methods were legal.
4) She was told it was being used, and was against it, but there was nothing she could do about it.

Those were her positions before the above press conference. Now we can add:

5) The CIA misled her about waterboarding.

And after CIA chief Leon Panetta contradicted Pelosi by saying the CIA didn't mislead Congress and the briefers were truthful, Pelosi added:

6) She respects the CIA. It was the Bush administration that misled Congress.

And this is the same woman who wants to convene a "Truth Commission" about EIT's. How can someone as highly partisan and dishonest as Pelosi, who wouldn't know the truth if it bit her in the butt, who even threw in "we're creating jobs" in the middle of a press conference about waterboarding, call for a TRUTH commission ? In the same breath Pelosi calls for a Truth Commission, she states that the CIA was lying and the Bush Administration was lying. This reveals there is another name for what Pelosi wants. It's not a Truth Commission at all. It's commonly referred to as a Witch Hunt.

In addition to Pelosi, let's look at some of the other Democrats calling for a "Truth Commission." I couldn't make this up if I wanted to. Leading the charge for a Truth Commission on the Senate side are: Pat Leahy, the treasonous Senator from Vermont, and Diane Feinstein, the corrupt Senator from California.

Wonderful. A Truth Commission By Known Treasonous Corrupt Liars.

What's next ? Maybe a discussion of fiscal responsibility by the President who is running up federal deficits and debt faster than any other administration in history ??? Oh, wait, I almost forgot. That was my last post.