I found the following current event quotes on The Patriot Post.

Insane The New Sane: "The same politicians who spent $1.7 trillion more than they collected, in just this year alone, say the problem is that private citizens are not paying enough. … [B]ecause the political class has made the national debt so high, it is able to insist that taking a chance on the power of liberty is an irresponsible gamble. Because the government lives so far beyond its means, it would be irresponsible to provide it with reduced means. This is how we have reached the madness of a moment when the national debt is used as an argument against spending reductions, or growth-oriented tax and regulatory policies. The insane problem becomes a weapon against rational solutions." –columnist John Hayward

There's nothing for me to add to that. Well said.

Moron Of The Week: "Isn't the Tea Party — I'm not trying to call them names or anything. I just want to ask a very serious question: Aren't they exactly what the Founding Fathers feared most? Which is people who are ignorant about the way the world works come to power. That is what the Founding Fathers hated the most. They were not for direct democracy" –HBO's Bill Maher

I'm still trying to figure out why Bill Maher has a political television show on HBO. His neverending ignorance on political matters is astounding. In the above quote, Maher not only demonstrates a cluelessness about the Founding Fathers and the original Boston Tea Party (it was about TAXES, Mr. Maher), he also doesn't seem to understand that today's Tea Party is not a direct democracy, it's a protest movement and only one of many political forces in this country. The Tea Party does not govern. Our elected representatives perform that function. That is and always has been a representative democracy. The "serious question" Bill Maher asks here is a complete joke.

Leadership Failure: "Meanwhile, the World's Greatest Orator bemoans the 'intransigence' of Republicans. OK, what's your plan? Give us one actual program you're willing to cut, right now. Oh, don't worry, says Barack Obluffer. To demonstrate how serious he is, he's offered to put on the table for fiscal year 2012 spending cuts of (stand well back now) $2 billion. That would be a lot in, say, Iceland or even Australia. Once upon a time it would have been a lot even in Washington. But today $2 billion is what the Brokest Nation in History borrows every 10 hours. In other words, in less time than he spends sitting across the table negotiating his $2 billion cut, he's already borrowed it all back. A negotiation with Obama is literally not worth the time." –columnist Mark Steyn

The extent of Obama's leadership on the debt limit has been to say he wants revenues raised along with spending cuts, and he didn't even care about spending cuts until the Republicans forced him to care. That's how this President leads…by following.

Hijacking The Tax And Spend Crowd: "Here's the thing about Obama. He ran as a transformational president. He sees himself as transformational. He always has. What occurred between 2008 and 2010 is the Tea Party. And the Tea Party has stopped that kind of transformation from occurring because it has hijacked the Republican Party and the John Boehners of the world who would have cut a deal with the president of the United States. It has hijacked the Republican Party and it has now become substantially just a no-tax party as opposed to a party that cares about the deficit. I think no tax trumps their caring and concern about the deficit." –CNN's Gloria Borger

Poor Obama. His transformational dreams were crushed by the Tea Party. Sniff, sniff. Cry me a river. In reality, it was, well, reality that crushed Obama's unrealistic dreams. Plus, if any party NEEDED hijacking after the big spending, debt accumulating Bush years, it was the Republican party. Thank goodness the Tea Party arrived on the scene and changed the discussion, because without it we wouldn't even be talking about reining in the sole cause of our fiscal unsustainability – big government.

Speaking of which…

The Left Calls It 'The Plan': "Forget all the numbers being tossed around in Washington — the millions and billions and trillions of dollars being taxed, borrowed, printed and spent as the country approaches the Aug. 2 debt-ceiling deadline. … Forget the fact that such 'entitlements' as Social Security and Medicare — social-insurance programs that the public long thought to be actuarially sound — have been exposed as little more than legal Ponzi schemes, paying today's benefits out of tomorrow's borrowed receipts. Instead, just ask yourself this simple question: When did it become the primary function of the federal government to send millions of Americans checks? For this, in essence, is what the debt-ceiling fight is all about — the inexorable and ultimately fatal growth of the welfare state." –columnist Michael Walsh

This reminds me of a USA Today article from a few months ago, titled "Americans Depend More On Federal Aid Than Ever". Here's a piece of it:

Americans depended more on government assistance in 2010 than at any other time in the nation's history, a USA TODAY analysis of federal data finds. The trend shows few signs of easing, even though the economic recovery is nearly 2 years old.

A record 18.3% of the nation's total personal income was a payment from the government for Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, unemployment benefits and other programs in 2010. Wages accounted for the lowest share of income — 51.0% — since the government began keeping track in 1929.

Americans got an average of $7,427 in benefits each in 2010, up from an inflation-adjusted $4,763 in 2000 and $3,686 in 1990. The federal government pays about 90% of the benefits.

"What's frightening is the Baby Boomers haven't really started to retire," says University of Michigan economist Donald Grimes of the 77 million people born from 1946 through 1964 whose oldest wave turns 65 this year. "That's when the cost of Medicare will start to explode."

If you think things are bad now, America, prepare yourselves. You ain't seen nuthin' yet. Unless we change course dramatically, in a decade we'll be looking back at these times as the good old days.

The political left in this country wants the citizenry to be dependent, and, btw, disarmed. A passive and helpless population is more easily controlled.

My closing quote comes from our "transformational" President himself, though it sounds more like politics as usual to me.

Blaming Bush: "We don't need a constitutional amendment to do our jobs. The Constitution already tells us to do our jobs — and to make sure that the government is living within its means and making responsible choices. … We don't need a balanced budget amendment. We simply need to make these tough choices and be willing to take on our bases. And everybody knows it. … It turns out that our problem is we cut taxes without paying for them over the last decade; we ended up instituting new programs like a prescription drug program for seniors that was not paid for; we fought two wars, we didn't pay for them; we had a bad recession that required a Recovery Act and stimulus spending and helping states — and all that accumulated and there's interest on top of that." –Barack Obama

Maybe we wouldn't need a balanced budget constitutional amendment if the government showed any indication it could live within it's means or discipline itself, but it has not done that. When I hear Obama whining about a balanced budget amendment, all I hear is him thinking, 'but how will I spend and borrow more money ? How will I play politics and buy votes ?'

A left-wing enviro-nut armed with a gun and metal canisters looking like bombs strapped to his chest entered the Discovery Channel headquarters outside Washington D.C. yesterday. The gunman, James J. Lee, took three hostages, and was eventually killed by the police. Fortunately, nobody else was hurt.

Lee was mad at the Discovery Channel because he felt Discovery wasn't featuring enough left-wing enviro-nut programming. He was a regular protester of Discovery, and following a 2008 arrest for disorderly conduct, Lee said he was "awakened" to his true enviro-nut calling after watching Al Gore's global warming scare film "An Inconvenient Truth," (which is filled with inaccuracies, btw).

Mr. Lee has a manifesto published on the internet. The news media has been categorizing his beliefs as radical, but to me they sound like standard lefty schlock that you might hear promoted by educated liberal elitists on college campuses. The only difference is that the educated liberal elitists aren't as direct in their lunacy as Lee. They use more esoteric rhetoric. Lee's beliefs are a litany of the beliefs of the left, as follows:

Overpopulation:

- Focus must be given on how people can live WITHOUT giving birth to more filthy human children since those new additions continue pollution and are pollution. A game show format contest would be in order. Perhaps also forums of leading scientists who understand and agree with the Malthus-Darwin science and the problem of human overpopulation. Do both. Do all until something WORKS and the natural world starts improving and human civilization building STOPS and is reversed!

- All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants and the false heroics behind those actions. In those programs' places, programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed

Anti-war:

- All programs promoting War and the technology behind those must cease. There is no sense in advertising weapons of mass-destruction anymore. Instead, talk about ways to disassemble civilization and concentrate the message in finding SOLUTIONS to solving global military mechanized conflict. Again, solutions solutions instead of just repeating the same old wars with newer weapons.

Anti-religion, Anti-oil, anti-expansion of civilization:

- Civilization must be exposed for the filth it is. That, and all its disgusting religious-cultural roots and greed. Broadcast this message until the pollution in the planet is reversed and the human population goes down! This is your obligation. If you think it isn't, then get hell off the planet! Breathe Oil! It is the moral obligation of everyone living otherwise what good are they??

Anti-capitalism:

- Develop shows that will correct and dismantle the dangerous US world economy. Find solutions for their disasterous Ponzi-Casino economy before they take the world to another nuclear war.

Humans are wrecking the planet:

- Humans are the most destructive, filthy, pollutive creatures around and are wrecking what's left of the planet with their false morals and breeding culture.

Save the wildlife:

- Saving the environment and the remaning species diversity of the planet is now your mindset. Nothing is more important than saving them. The Lions, Tigers, Giraffes, Elephants, Froggies, Turtles, Apes, Raccoons, Beetles, Ants, Sharks, Bears, and, of course, the Squirrels.

Well, yes, OF COURSE, the squirrels. That goes without saying.

But humans are dispensable:

- The humans? The planet does not need humans. You MUST KNOW the human population is behind all the pollution and problems in the world

Anti…..food ? Okay, these may be a bit extreme even for the left:

- Develop shows that mention the Malthusian sciences about how food production leads to the overpopulation of the Human race. Talk about Evolution. Talk about Malthus and Darwin until it sinks into the stupid people's brains until they get it!!

- All human procreation and farming must cease!

Except for that last bit about 'farming must cease,' I find Lee's beliefs entirely in the mainstream of lefty thought. There is one part in Lee's manifesto where he rails against immigration as part of his overall anti-human creed, which leads me to wonder whether MSNBC and Media Matters are calling Lee a right-wing extremist inspired by Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement. I haven't bothered to check.

As for the title of this post, I really DON'T blame Al Gore. My title was just a shot at my demented blogger counterpart, the Reverend at the Blog Of Mass Destruction. The Reverend recently blamed a Sarah Palin tweet about the Ground Zero mosque for a protest against a mosque being built in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. He called his nutty post, 'What Palin Has Wrought,' even though Palin had nothing to do with the Murfreesboro protest and had not commented on it. I figured turnabout was fair play, though I can't truly blame Al Gore for the actions of a nut. Unlike the left, I can't be so disingenuous and still live with myself. I believe in free speech.

The title of my post is also a shot at all the left-wing media in this country that has intentionally and falsely stirred up fears of right-wing violence in this country over the Tea Party movement. My friend the Reverend's over-top lunacy doesn't really originate from him. It originates with the propaganda he laps up on the internet.

Al Gore is free to say what he wants without being blamed for the actions of a nutball like James J. Lee. What the left needs to learn is…Glenn Beck, Fox News, etc. have that same freedom of speech without being blamed for the actions of any nut who might be listening to their broadcasts. Thus far, the left has not learned the lesson. Not even close.

On the bright side, James J. Lee got his wish. He wanted less humans on the planet, and now that the police have taken him out, there is one less. Mission accomplished, Mr. Lee.

P.S. – Has ANY mainstream media outlet called Lee a "left-wing" radical yet ? The media never fails to use the term "right-wing" or "conservative" whenever possible, so it'll be interesting to observe.

Pictured above is 7-year old Julie Murphy from Oregon. Though it may not seem apparent at first glance, she is a dangerous scofflaw, a serious public health threat. Why?, you might ask. Well, I'll tell you why.

This little criminal was guilty of….of….this is going to be shocking, so I hope you're sitting down….this diminutive desperado was…oh, the horror….running a lemonade stand without a license.

RIGHT HERE IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

Yeah. Can you believe it ? Don't be fooled by that sweet angelic face. This kid is T-R-O-U-B-L-E. Thank goodness we have government bureaucrats in place to protect the public from such profiteering predators as 7-year old Julie Murphy.

Here are the details of her rampage of lawlessness:

It's hardly unusual to hear small-business owners gripe about licensing requirements or complain that heavy-handed regulations are driving them into the red.

So when Multnomah County shut down an enterprise last week for operating without a license, you might just sigh and say, there they go again.

Except this entrepreneur was a 7-year-old named Julie Murphy. Her business was a lemonade stand at the Last Thursday monthly art fair in Northeast Portland. The government regulation she violated? Failing to get a $120 temporary restaurant license.

Turns out that kids' lemonade stands — those constants of summertime — are supposed to get a permit in Oregon, particularly at big events that happen to be patrolled regularly by county health inspectors.

Julie Murphy was illegally making lemonade with packets of Kool-Aid and gallons of bottled water, WITHOUT paying tribute to the government first. The sheer audacity of this little tyke. Fortunately for the endangered public, the G-Men nabbed her in the nick of time. Here's a quote from one of the intrepid protectors of the public weal:

"I understand the reason behind what they're doing and it's a neighborhood event, and they're trying to generate revenue," said Jon Kawaguchi, environmental health supervisor for the Multnomah County Health Department. "But we still need to put the public's health first."

Darn right, Mr. Environmental Health Supervisor ! We can't have little girls running around making lemonade without a license. Lord almighty. That would lead to absolute chaos ! A complete breakdown of the social order ! Anarchy, I tell you. Why, if we let little girls start making unauthorized lemonade, the next thing you know, they'll be making, like, fruit punch, iced tea, and other stuff like that ! It's a slippery slope, ladies and gentlemen. As Deputy Barney Fife from Mayberry used to say, we have to nip it, nip it in the bud.

The story gets worse. It turns out that little Julie was aided and abetted in her illegal activity by her own mother. Here's how the mother/daugher criminal conspiracy con went down:

Fife [Julie's mother, not Deputy Barney] had just attended Last Thursday along Portland's Northeast Alberta Street for the first time and loved the friendly feel and the diversity of the grass-roots event. She put the two things together and promised to take her daughter in July.

The girl worked on a sign, coloring in the letters and decorating it with a drawing of a person saying "Yummy." She made a list of supplies.

Then, with gallons of bottled water and packets of Kool-Aid, they drove up last Thursday with a friend and her daughter. They loaded a wheelbarrow that Julie steered to the corner of Northeast 26th and Alberta and settled into a space between a painter and a couple who sold handmade bags and kids' clothing.

It was an ingenious little plot, but the government was ON THE JOB. Next comes the heroic bust of little Julie's mobster racketeering scam:

After 20 minutes, a "lady with a clipboard" came over and asked for their license. When Fife explained they didn't have one, the woman told them they would need to leave or possibly face a $500 fine.

Surprised, Fife started to pack up. The people staffing the booths next to them encouraged the two to stay, telling them the inspectors had no right to kick them out of the neighborhood gathering. They also suggested that they give away the lemonade and accept donations instead and one of them made an announcement to the crowd to support the lemonade stand.

That's when business really picked up — and two inspectors came back, Fife said. Julie started crying, while her mother packed up and others confronted the inspectors. "It was a very big scene," Fife said.

Technically, any lemonade stand — even one on your front lawn — must be licensed under state law, said Eric Pippert, the food-borne illness prevention program manager for the state's public health division. But county inspectors are unlikely to go after kids selling lemonade on their front lawn unless, he conceded, their front lawn happens to be on Alberta Street during Last Thursday.

"When you go to a public event and set up shop, you're suddenly engaging in commerce," he said. "The fact that you're small-scale I don't think is relevant."

Whew. A public health catastrophe narrowly averted. Good job, bureaucrats. This bust should appear on the television program Cops any week now. You won't want to miss it.

Still…I can't help but wonder…

Is it just me, or does it seem like EVERYTHING in America is gradually becoming legislated, regulated, licensed, interfered with, regimented, inspected, shrink wrapped, tamper-proofed, banned, taxed, controlled, videotaped, and bureaucratized into submission ? How did we let this happen here in the alleged land of the free ? Of what are we so afraid ? 7-year olds running lemonade stands ? Have we lost our flipping minds ?

Or maybe I just need to go to the Ministry Of Truth for a little "re-education." I'll have to ask Big Brother.

When Shirley Sherrod, a black woman, was fired by the government (not by Fox News or Andrew Breitbart), I thought she got a raw deal. She was fired because the cowardly government feared what was contained in Breitbart's initial video, which allegedly showed Sherrod making racist statements to an NAACP crowd. The government feared what Fox News would say about that video, coming on the heels of the NAACP's grandstanding resolution condemning alleged racism in the Tea Party movement. The NAACP's resolution was itself racist, because it attempted to paint a grassroots movement of millions of Americans seeking fiscal sanity and Constitutional liberty as nothing more than a bunch of bigots. The cowardly NAACP also condemned Sherrod initially, even though Sherrod's allegedly racist comments were made IN FRONT OF THE NAACP. Go figure that one out.

When Sherrod was fired by the government. she was forced to pull her car off the road and resign over the phone immediately, without being able to offer any defense of her actions. That conversation went as follows:

Sherrod told CNN that the White House urged her to resign Monday afternoon after the video clip surfaced.

"They harassed me," she said. "I got three calls from the White House. At one point they asked me to pull over to the side of the road and do it because you are going to be on Glenn Beck tonight."

Sherrod said the White House calls came from Cheryl Cook, USDA deputy undersecretary for rural development. "The administration was not interested in hearing the truth. They didn't want to hear the truth."

Sherrod wasn't on Glenn Beck that night. The first segment Fox News did on her was on The O'Reilly Factor at 8pm EST. By the time that segment aired (though it was taped a few hours earlier), Sherrod had already been canned. In that segment, Fox host Bill O'Reilly did say Sherrod should be fired for her racist statements. He has since apologized, after discovering the full context of Sherrod's NAACP speech, which showed Sherrod redemptively saying she came to realize she should not judge people by the color of their skin. The first segment Glenn Beck did on Sherrod was on tuesday, when Beck SUPPORTED her and came out against her being fired without being able to tell her side of the story.

So, who was to blame here ?…

Breitbart ? Yes. He aired a video without knowing the full context, which started this whole thing.

Government ? Hell yes. They are the ones who fired Sherrod without cause and without a hearing.

Fox News ? Yes. They aired the Breitbart video without properly vetting it, and some of their hosts jumped to conclusions (others, like Beck, did not).

NAACP ? Yes. They had the same knee-jerk reaction to the Breitbart video as the government and Fox News did.

Now, everybody has recanted and apologized for jumping to conclusions about Shirley Sherrod (though I'm not sure if Breitbart the instigator has apologized), and she is getting her job back, or getting a new job.

So, all is well now, correct ? The wrong has been righted.

No, it's never that simple. Not when politics is involved. When politics is involved, an edge must be gained. The nature of that edge, from the liberal perspective, is that Fox News must be cast as racists, which by extension casts all conservatives as racists in liberal minds. That edge is illustrated in the recent words of none other than Shirley Sherrod, the black woman who was fired without cause or a hearing by a DEMOCRATIC administration. Here's Sherrod talking to Media Matters:

“When you look at their reporting, this is just another way of seeing that they are (racist),” Sherrod told me about Fox in a lengthy interview Tuesday night. “But I have seen that before now. I saw their reporting as biased during the Bush Administration and the Clinton Administration.”

She said Fox showed no professionalism in continuing to bother her for an interview, but failing to correct their coverage.

“I think they should but they won’t. They intended exactly what they did. They were looking for the result they got yesterday,” she said of Fox. “I am just a pawn. I was just here. They are after a bigger thing, they would love to take us back to where we were many years ago. Back to where black people were looking down, not looking white folks in the face, not being able to compete for a job out there and not be a whole person.”

Still, Fox continued to push for an interview with her, Sherrod said.

“It was unbelievable. I am refusing to be on there. They have been calling me and calling me. I have refused to do an interview because they are biased,” she explained. “I don’t think Fox News does it fairly. It is worse so now. I have sat and listened to the way they cover the news even before this administration and I saw what was going on.”

Sherrod said this situation has worsened her view of racism in media coverage.

“I think it is race. You think we have come a long way in terms of race relations in this country, but we keep going backwards,” she said. “We have become more racist. This was their doing, Breitbart put that together misrepresenting what I was saying and Fox carried it.”

Think about this. Sherrod says she won't talk to Fox News, who has made numerous requests to interview her, but at the same time she says Fox has it's facts wrong (which was true initially, just as the NAACP and the government had the facts wrong). Isn't that the whole reason she SHOULD have gone on Fox, to set the record straight ??? Not to mention that Sherrod did decide to talk to Media Matters, a known left-wing propaganda outfit. For Sherrod to say "we have become more racist" is obviously false, and for her to say Fox News "would love to take us back to where we were many years ago. Back to where black people were looking down, not looking white folks in the face, not being able to compete for a job out there and not be a whole person,” is just totally, off-the-wall, batshit crazy and outrageous. It's actually far worse than anything Fox News said about her.

Thus, we've come full circle back to the left-wing agenda, which is to cast conservatives as racists, whether they be in the Tea Party movement, at Fox News, or wherever. And now Shirley Sherrod, who thinks Fox News wants to re-institute slavery, Jim Crow laws, or some other claptrap, is a part of it. Sorry Shirley, but being treated unfairly for a day or two doesn't explain away statements like this. You are now engaging in the same kind of tactics the NAACP engaged in when it cast the Tea Party movement as racist (I still haven't heard an apology for THAT yet, btw. Fox News DID apologize for their mistake).

Being a white male fiscal conservative, I have no street cred in liberal eyes, because wild-eyed liberals all suspect I'm a big fat old racist too (they don't really think that. They just have to pretend they do. It's for the greater good, you see. Alinsky outlined the strategy long ago). So, instead of offering my opinion on the race card games being played by left wingers, I'm going to defer to Tea Party speaker Katrina Pierson, a black woman. This was her response to the NAACP's lousy resolution against the Tea Party movement:

The NAACP should only propose resolutions that they have exercised themselves. The Tea Party, having only been active for a year and half, is the only group being singled out for racism in today's society. There are races committed to the destruction of our entire nation and the Tea Party is being targeted as a threat. Perhaps it is a threat. Could it be that the 2008 election served a greater purpose? The existence of the NAACP, and others like it, are threatened by the existence of the Tea Party. The reality is that we colored people no longer require the assistance from other Negros for advancement in 2010. These groups run to the rescue of distressed brown people only when the media deems it newsworthy. Meanwhile, there are inner city black children who continue to grow up fatherless while sharing a neighborhood with stray bullets, drugs and a plethora of liquor stores on every corner. To my understanding of the "I Have a Dream" speech, Dr. King's intention was far from gang-banging and gangster rap. I don't believe that the true meaning of this nation's creed was to move black people from one form of slavery to another. The NAACP has been completely ineffective in my lifetime, and the lack of leadership in the black community has contributed to the ability of these groups to speak on behalf of the rest of us. The ignored and forgotten society that lives among the projects has been abandoned by the likes of NAACP. As well as with other groups and individuals that rode in the coat-tails of MLK, they are irrelevant but continue to feed off of the codependence that they have created among blacks for validation. They are Democrats who bow to a Democrat master today as they once did two hundred years ago. Once this is realized by the forgotten society, race in this country will be as irrelevant as those who thrive off of it. -Katrina Pierson

Thanks, Katrina. I think race is irrelevant too. It's a non-issue within the Tea Party movement, but the left wants to continue playing that race card forever. We aren't a "nation of cowards" on racial matters, as Attorney General Eric Holder once said. What we are is a nation divided along lines of people who either think – A) race does not matter (all men are created equal), or B) race should be used as a political weapon for advantage. I choose option A. I'll leave it for others to decide who the racists are.

There are some things I just can't take. One of those things is being preached to about the lack of media ethics by the most unethical, lying, pompous, arrogant, smarmy jerk-off ever to grace the boob tube. I'm referring, of course, to MSNBC's propagandistic hack toad, Keith Olbermann (Ubermoron). Watching five minutes of Olby's hate-filled, hypocritical, and imperious over-the-top smack makes me feel dirty. I feel the need to shower in order to remove his foul stench.

Ubermoron, who evidently has not an iota of self-awareness or shame, doesn't even realize that in his "special comment" rants against Fox News (or whichever conservatives he is calling evil racist terrorists that day), he could just as easily be talking about himself. He has engaged in absolutely every unethical act of which he accuses others.

This is glaringly apparent in his latest spew about the Shirley Sherrod situation. The hambone Ubermoron returned from his vacation (hopefully, he was resting comfortably at a mental hospital with a thorazine drip) to make the following exaggerated condemnations against those who rushed to judgement about Sherrod.

(I don't blame you if you can't stomach the entire clip. Three or four minutes of it should give you the bomb-throwing gist).

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Absolutely everything Ubermoron said about a lack of media ethics in this clip could also be said of Keith Ubermoron.

Let's cut directly to the chase. Has Ubermoron ever taken any conservative words out of context and twisted them into meaning something other than what was actually intended ??? You're damn skippy. He does it routinely, and he does it intentionally. Here's but one small example out of a boatload. Google 'Olbermann lies' and you will find PLENTY more examples:

Keith Olbermann IS what Keith Olbermann condemns.

At the same time he condemns the right wingers, the ThinkProgress phony Tea Party racism tape has been exposed, and the Journolist reporters have been exposed (see my previous post). The lying scum assasin known as Ubermoron doesn't even MENTION these example of unethical media actions (and tellingly, neither does the rest of the mainstream media, speaking of ethics). No, no. That would be inconvenient to the phony partisan bilge he's trying to shove down the gullible throats of his lemming audience (which, fortunately, is relatively small). Instead, he uses Breitbart to condemn everything the conservative media has ever said, everything they have ever done. He takes everything way too far, as he always does. Ubermoron has been calling the Tea Party racist since it's inception. He calls them fascists, compares them to the KKK, Al Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah. He phonies up charges of Tea Party violence. I'd compare Olbermann to a DailyKos diarist, but he actually IS a Kos diarist, which should clue you into his game right there.

The egoistic turd known as Keith Olbermann is no panacea for the media's lack of ethics. He is the embodiment of that lack of ethics.

And that's my "special comment." Good night, and good luck. You'll need it if you believe in Keith Olbermann.

Word is, BP Obama has capped the oil well and the Gulf oil leak has stopped. Let's all pray that is true. It may have taken BP Obama 86 days to do it, but better late than never. Way to go, BP Obama. And damn Dubya for causing the leak in the first place.

I'd also like to congratulate President Obama for passing the $862 billion stimulus package in February 2009. Without it, the oil spill would have been MUCH worse, and we got the added benefit of the stimulus creating 3.5 million jobs, according to the White House's latest bullshit estimate. Now, I know what you're thinking. You're probably saying to yourself, 'wait a minute. Haven't we actually LOST 2.4 million jobs since the stimulus package passed ?' Yes, we have, but that's only true if you look at the actual job numbers from the Bureau Of Labor Statistics (and I have it on good authority that there may be a Republican obstructionist or two working over at the BLS, if you catch my drift). The White House has a much better way of counting jobs created (or saved !) than looking at the actual numbers. They have this thing called the Keynesian economic multiplier calculator, that says for every $1.00 the government spends, GDP grows by $1.50. I'd explain to you why this is true, but it's waaay too made up techinical. Top economic experts at the White House feed the amount of stimulus money spent into the Keynesian thingy, and it spits out the number of jobs that were created (or saved !). Therefore, you can trust the White House Ministry Of Information far more than your own lying eyes. If that isn't convincing enough, we have President Obama's reassuring 'things could always be worse' speeches. Here's Big Brother in Racine, Wisconsin a couple weeks ago, when the stimulus package had only created (or saved !) 2.8 million jobs, according to Obama. Just think, it has created (or saved !) 700,000 more jobs in the last 14-15 days ! Isn't it wonderful ?!?!:

Mr. Obama said recently in Racine, Wisconsin that the economy "would have been a lot worse" and the unemployment rate would have gone to "12 or 13, or 15 [percent]" if government hadn't spent all of that money.

There you go. It "would have been a lot worse." Disprove that, you right-wingers. You can't, and that's the beauty of Obama's rhetoric. It's entirely theoretical. I don't know why Obama doesn't just say unemployment would have been 50% without the stimulus. That would be even more persuasive, especially when he's just pulling numbers out of his ass. What the hell, go the whole nine yards. Oh, btw, at the time Obama made the above statement in Racine, Racine's unemployment rate was 14.2%, falling on the high end of Obama's "a lot worse" category. That's up from Racine's 10.4% unemployment rate in February 2009 when the stimulus package passed, but I'm sure the Keynesian thingy says it's much lower than that, so not to worry. In fact, overall American unemployment was about 7.5% before the stimulus. Now, it's 9.5%, which translates in Obama-ese to the stimulus being a great success.

Having a calculator of my own, a non-Keynesian model, I did a little cipherin' myself. I took the $862 billion in stimulus money and divided it by the imaginary 3.5 million jobs created (or saved !), and that came out to….$246,285.71 spent per job created (or saved !), even if the 3.5 million jobs did exist. Whee-doggies ! Talk about efficient. Wouldn't we have been better off just giving, like, $50,000 to 3.5 million people ? That only would've cost 1/5th the amount of the stimulus package. Then again, if we'd done that, we wouldn't have all those nifty, Obama-praising highway road signs to look at. Check it out:

Cool, eh ? I hear we've only spent between $5-20 million on those babies, and they have that round Obama-like logo and everything. Just one more small example of how the federal government is such a wise caretaker of our taxpayer dollars.

Update – Since I started writing this blog post, I heard the stimulus has now created (or saved !) 3.6 million imaginary jobs. Wow. The news keeps getting better and better. By next week, we could be up to 4 or 5 million, and by, say, early november, it'll probably be a gazillion.

I don't know why I'm even surprised anymore at the outrageous actions of this White House. It seems each new day brings a new outrage. They came down against Constitutional freedom of speech in the Citizens United ruling. They came down against the Constitutional right to bear arms in the McDonald ruling. They took 71 days to accept foreign help with the Gulf oil spill. They interfered and hindered local efforts to clean up the oil spill. They dropped a voter intimidation case they had already won against the New Black Panthers because it didn't fit their race-based agenda, according to a DOJ official who resigned over it. The one time this administration does cite the Constitution, they use the Supremacy Clause to sue the state of Arizona for enforcing existing federal law, coming down firmly against the rule of law to favor the illegal immigrants, again because of their agenda. We have a White House who somehow claims to have created 2 million jobs since the stimulus package was implemented, when the actual job numbers show 2.8 million jobs lost since the stimulus went into effect. We have VP Joe Biden and President Obama hypocritically taking credit for the successes in the Iraq War, when Biden and Obama were against the very Surge tactics that created those successes.

These are only a few of the things that have happened recently with the Obama Disinformation Machine. I have some more disinformation to add to the list.
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President Obama announced the recess appointment of Donald Berwick to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), thus bypassing Senate confirmation hearings for his man. While recess appointments are not unusual, the reasoning of the White House was. White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer said, "Republicans in Congress have made it clear in recent weeks that they were going to stall the nomination as long as they could, solely to score political points. But with the agency facing new responsibilities to protect seniors’ care under the Affordable Care Act, there’s no time to waste with Washington game-playing."

"Washington game-playing" is what this White House now calls Senate confirmation hearings. As for stalling the nomination, the Republicans haven't stalled anything. They can't, because the Democrats never even scheduled a hearing for Berwick. This is nothing more than the President bypassing the process to appoint a man who will oversee more than $800 billion of federal spending. The real reason Obama is bypassing the hearings is because of controversial remarks made by Berwick, remarks he knows the GOP will exploit:

In an interview last year with Biotechnology Healthcare, Berwick said society makes decisions about rationing all the time, and that the "decision is not whether or not we will ration care — the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open. And right now, we are doing it blindly."

He has also praised the UK's National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), which he said had "developed very good and very disciplined, scientifically grounded, policy-connected models for the evaluation of medical treatments from which we ought to learn."

Said Berwick, "You can say, 'Well, we shouldn’t even look.' But that would be irrational. The social budget is limited — we have a limited resource pool. It makes terribly good sense to at least know the price of an added benefit, and at some point we might say nationally, regionally, or locally that we wish we could afford it, but we can’t. We have to be realistic about the knowledge base."

Berwick said the degree to which the knowledge base is "linked directly to policy and decision is a matter of choice. You could make it advisory, or you could make it mandatory, or you could make it a policy rule. But to remain ignorant of the cost implications of a drug that is marginally better than what is already out there is simply bad policy."

Sarah Palin received a great deal of ridicule from the liberal media for using the words "death panels" to describe how the government would make life and death decisions under ObamaCare. Now that Obama is appointing Mr. Death Panel to head CMS, it could prove a bit embarrassing. So the Prez chose to skip the embarrassment altogether, and go with the disinformation instead.
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I mentioned how the Obama administration wasn't too keen on freedom of speech earlier. Well, it seems they aren't enamored with another tenet of the First Amendment either, freedom of the press. The administration has finally figured out a way to control the oil spill, or at least the reporting of it. They are keeping the reporters away:

In addition, a Congressional report showed that the Obama administration lied about the oil spill cleanup, and after Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser went public with his frustrations over the lack of federal response, two White House officials visited him and asked "What do we have to do to keep you off TV ?" It seems what this administration is really worried about is not the oil spill cleanup, just the bad publicity they might get from it. This is leadership ?

In closing, Obama is staying on top of the nation's largest environmental disaster ever by jetting to Las Vegas to raise funds for Harry "the war is lost" Reid's Senate campaign. The President will be staying at Caesar's Palace. He will leave no stone unturned until this crisis is over, people.
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BONUS VIDEO: Here's a video of the nice young man from the New Black Panther Party who was charged with voter intimidation. This is the guy Attorney General Eric Holder let off due to an alleged lack of evidence (except for a video of the man wielding a club in front of the polling place, and several witnesses testifying that he hurled racial epithets at them). You'll see from the video that the Panther was probably just misunderstood:

Good thing that guy isn't in the Tea Party movement, or Obama would probably have to declare martial law.

Just when I thought the Democratic party couldn't possibly alienate me any more than they already have, they proved me wrong and alienated me further.

Near the fifteenth anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, former President Bill Clinton couldn't help himself. He just had to politicize it. Bubba joined into the Democrats non-stop version of the Willie Horton ad by warning that those scary Tea Partiers could inspire another Timothy McVeigh. In typical Dem fashion, Clinton also lashed out at other conservative speech, including the internet and talk radio.

Lions, and tigers, and bears. Oh my. Could this possibly be any more tired ?

There are a couple critical differences between the Republicans Willie Horton ad and the current Democrat version trying to scare the country over the Tea Party movement.

First is that Willie Horton was actually a criminal. He raped, robbed, and killed people. The Tea Party has done nothing but protest out-of-control government spending, excessive government instrusion, and spiraling deficits and debt, which threaten the future of this country.

Second is that then-presidential candidate Michael Dukakis DID release Willie Horton from prison. While serving a life sentence for murder, Dukakis granted Horton a furlough. Horton never returned, and subsequently committed assault, armed robbery, and rape.

Democrats were outraged that the Republicans used Willie Horton to illustrate that Dukakis was soft on crime, but they have no problem at all with turning peaceful protesters at the Tea Parties into scary boogeymen who will bring about domestic terrorism. Can you say 'hypocrites' ? Also evident is that Democrats don't remember their own heated rhetoric during Dubya's administration. Is there a word that means 'more than hypocrites' ? If not, there should be. The Democrats fit the requirements.

I'm also left to wonder why Democrats never blame themselves for the violence. What inspired Timothy McVeigh was the Waco tragedy, where seventy-six died (including 19 children) in a fire during a siege by the Clinton administration ATF/FBI. But of course, the Democrats don't blame themselves. Instead, they blame a book McVeigh read. I guess being a Democrat means never having to say you're sorry.

There has been so much fearmongering by the Democratic violence pimps that I'm beginning to think they WANT something bad to happen, so they can point and say 'see, we told you so.' There is even a group of left-wing nuts called CrashTheTeaParty who want to create phony Tea Party incidents. These folks are PRAYING for real examples of violence by the Tea Party movement, and if they can't find any, they'll just make some up. Such integrity.

While I'm on the subject of the Tea Parties (which the media never lets us get too far away from), here is someone the media tells us doesn't exist, a black Tea Party member. Politico actually has the nerve to ask him if he's nervous being at a Tea Party event. His answer, already known to any of us who have been involved in the movement, will only surprise Kool-Aid drinking liberals who ignorantly believe the Tea Parties are about racism:

Btw, conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart's $10,000 reward for proof of previous Tea Party racism has grown to $100,000. It still has not been collected. Hmmm. Imagine that in this day and age, when most people carry videocameras around in their cell phones, and every notable event is filmed.

The only thing I can conclude is, Democrats are VERY worried, and it has driven them and their pet media insane (more insane than usual, I mean).

Let me start by saying I agree with several things Obama has done recently – instituting an effort to secure loose nukes is great. Probably the single greatest threat to the USA and the world is a nuke falling into terrorist hands. Obama's move to start offshore oil drilling is a step forward. I supported his surge in Afghanistan (though I'm having second thoughts after Afghan President Hamid Karzai criticized American efforts. We can't possibly succeed without the support of the Afghan government). Obama took a small step forward on gay rights by requiring hospitals to allow patients to designate who can visit them during crucial moments. It no longer has to be a family member. The former policy discriminated against unmarried couples and gay couples who are not allowed to marry, and are therefore not recognized as family. Allowing unmarried and gay partners to visit their loved ones in the hospital is simply the right and humane thing to do. Kudos to the President for changing this longstanding and unfair policy.

But thursday, the President returned to what I termed "full-blown economic retard" mode a couple posts back. At a Democratic fundraiser in Miami, Obama said the following about the tax day Tea Party protests. From the Associated Press:

President Barack Obama said Thursday he's amused by the anti-tax tea party protests that have been taking place around Tax Day. Obama told a fundraiser in Miami that he's cut taxes, contrary to the claims of protesters.

"You would think they'd be saying thank you," he said.

At that, many in the crowd at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts stood and yelled, "Thank you!"

The Democrats at Obama's fundraiser may have bought into this schlock, but anyone with an ounce of intelligence knows better. This was Obama at his worst.

First of all, the Tea Party protests aren't really about current levels of taxation. They are primarily about out-of-control government spending and growth, along with the resulting massive deficits and debt increases. It doesn't take too many brain cells to figure out that higher taxation HAS to follow such fiscal irresponsibility eventually, even if Obama is throwing a populist bone to the taxpayers now. The Democrats who are saying "thank you" to Obama's program of cut taxes/increase spending certainly didn't feel the same way about George W. Bush's same program of cut taxes/increase spending. The Democrats were right about Bush, but they've become incredible hypocrites now that their man is in charge, and in little more than a year in office, their man has increased spending more than Bush ever dreamed. Federal spending in 2011 is scheduled to be nearly a trillion dollars more than it was in 2008. That is astounding, and remember, after that the huge spending increases for ObamaCare start to kick in.

Second, Obama is a tax RAISER, not a tax cutter. He broke his pledge not to raise taxes on anyone making under $200,000 about two weeks after he took office, when he implemented a regressive cigarette tax. Obama's health care reform will implement a slew of new taxes, far more than the TEMPORARY tax cuts he instituted for 95% of Americans last year. Obama's wants to end his middle class tax cuts after 2010. Then he wants to reverse the Bush tax cuts for those making over $200,000. Several of the health care reform taxes will hit the middle class, further violating his pledge not to raise taxes on those making under $200,000 per year. Coming up on Obama's agenda is another huge regressive tax scam known as Cap And Trade, which will drive up everyone's energy costs while doing virtually nothing to decrease CO2 emissions. Obama's economic advisors are contemplating several other tax increases, among them a VAT tax, which would also be regressive.

Yet, Obama wants us to say "thank you" for the temporary tax cuts. I don't think so. The American public has to be smarter than to fall for this bait-and-switch crapola. How our President thinks he can control the economic narrative with such fatuous nonsense is beyond me. Oh wait, I do know how. The mainstream media seldom calls him on his lies. Instead, they are complicit in pushing them. That's how.

I don't really want to write about this subject, but the media has been obsessed with it for days, so I guess I should. If you have been near a tv news program, you already know there has been some ugly language directed toward members of Congress, there have been a few instances of vandalism (broken windows) at Democratic party headquarters around the nation, and a bullet hit the window of Republican Eric Cantor's campaign headquarters.

Naturally, we all condemn this type of behavior. Democrats and Republicans both condemn it. Certainly, every member of Congress condemns it. That should go without saying, but because it appears more of the bad behavior is coming from right-wingers than from left-wingers (this time), the media and Democrats have to pretend like this is somehow representative of the entire conservative movement. The left-wingers have to pretend Republican speech is responsible for it, or the entire Tea Party movement is responsible for it, or Fox News is responsible for it, or talk radio is responsible for it. Instead of calling it what it is, a few fringe nuts acting up, which exists all across the political spectrum, we have to pretend that conservative speech is somehow inciting people to violence, and it is a huge powderkeg about to explode.

I have to note, the same narrative NEVER seems to exist when left-wingers are engaging in vandalism, violence, threats, and ugly speech. For example, at the recent G20 summit in Pittsburgh, left-wing anarchists and other left-wing protesters smashed store windows, threw bottles at the police, set trash cans on fire, etc, but you NEVER heard the media warn about the dangers of left-wing violence. You never heard anyone tell the left to tone down THEIR rhetoric, and you never heard Republicans in Congress tell Democrats to get their people under control, as Democrats are telling Republicans now. In fact, you probably didn't even know the anarchists are left-wingers, because the media never told you. As another example, when the previous President, Republican George W. Bush, was hung in effigy, had a film and a book released about assassinating him, had Air America running skits about assassinating him, and even had the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, John Kerry, talk about killing him, you NEVER heard any warnings about left-wing extremism from the mainstream media. Evidently, that kind of left-wing incitement to violence isn't worth reporting. It doesn't fit the mainstream media narrative. But when left-wing nuts like Janeane Garofalo or Keith Olbermann call the Tea Party movement racist, the media laps it up and repeats it ad nauseum.

Unfortunately, threats against public officials is nothing new. They are always despicable and cowardly acts, and far more common than we know, because usually, the public officials don't make them public. Such acts should be condemned whether they are coming from the left, the right, or the center. They should not be exploited to fan the flames of partisan anger, which will only raise the possibility of more threats and/or increasing violence. Republican Eric Cantor talked about those who would fan the flames, and said it best in the following video:

Even more unfortunately, I don't have to look very far to find someone who will fan the flames of partisan anger. My blogger pal, the Reverend at the Blog Of Mass Destruction, wrote about the recent threats and vandalism on his blog. The Reverend has a way of starting out with a valid point and then taking off on an extreme tangent into sheer insanity. The linked blog piece was no exception. He attempted to falsely characterize words by Republicans Michelle Bachmann, Sarah Palin, and John Boehner as calls to violence, when in reality they were nothing but calls for conservative political action. The Reverend ended his hysterical rant by saying everyone on Fox News (except Shep Smith) and the conservative radio talkers should be charged with crimes. CRIMES. I guess their crime is what most of us would call freedom of speech. I can't help but feel a little sorry for the Reverend, who is sounding more and more like Hugo Chavez as time goes on. Chavez just arrested the owner of a television station in Venezuela because the owner criticized Chavez' government. This is how the Reverend thinks we should treat conservatives in America. He thinks we should arrest them for their political opinions. Pitiful. Like most crazy people, the Reverend is unable to recognize his own craziness.

Welcome To The Machine - On the same day President Obama invited Rep. Jim Matheson (D-UT) to the White House to pressure him to switch his vote on health care reform, Obama appointed Matheson's brother, Scott Matheson, to a judgeship on the 10th Circuit Court Of Appeals. I'm sure that was an entirely random, coincidental event with absolutely no underlying political calculations whatsoever…not at all similar to the way things are done in Obama's old stomping grounds…not at all similar to the Chicago way….not at all. This is the most ethical administration ever…especially when they aren't lying about everything.
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Global Warming Kettle Calls Pot Black – "First of all, we just got five feet of snow in Washington and so everybody is like — a lot of the people who are opponents of climate change, they say, see, look at that, there’s all this snow on the ground, this doesn’t mean anything. I want to just be clear that the science of climate change doesn’t mean that every place is getting warmer; it means the planet as a whole is getting warmer. But what it may mean is, for example, Vancouver, which is supposed to be getting snow during the Olympics, suddenly is at 55 degrees, and Dallas suddenly is getting seven inches of snow." – Barack "The Weatherman" Obama.

The glaring problem with Obama's "everything is climate change now" rhetoric is that Vancouver doesn't usually get much snow in February. The average temperature there in February is 48 degrees Fahrenheit. Not exactly snow weather, and a temp of 55 degrees is just an example of normal weather variation. Exit questions – What if Sarah Palin said something this dumb ? How many months would it be before the media stopped talking about it ?
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Nominee For Idiot Of The Year - The following video shows MSNBC talker Dylan Ratigan "interviewing" a Tea Party representative, and hijacking his own interview by refusing to allow the Tea Party guy to answer the questions put to him. Ratigan instead used the segment as a transparent ploy to parrot the constant MSNBC propaganda point that the Tea Party movement is a racist movement.

This might be a new low in what passes for journalism. Either that, or Ratigan fancies himself the next Keith Olbermann, a dubious aspiration at best.

While I'm on the subject of the Tea Party movement…I keep hearing from liberals that the Tea Parties are chock full of racist signs, and having attended Tea Parties, I haven't seen any. Not one. I have seen a couple signs on the internet that COULD be interpreted as racist (and could also be liberal plants), out of the hundreds of thousands of signs from which to choose at Tea Party events. Can some liberal please show me all these racist Tea Party signs ??? I really want to see what all the fuss is about.
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A Good Day To Die – "Today is a big day in America. Only 36,000 people lost their jobs today, which is really good." – Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) link

I've heard of the bigotry of soft expectations, but this is ridiculous. By Reid's standard, if only 20,000 people lost their jobs next month, that would be, as Tony the Tiger used to say, "GRRREEAAT !"

Time for a new Senate Majority Leader. This one's broken.
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Rules ? We Don't Need No Stinking Rules - From NBC News:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said today the American people ought to know more about what she called "total obstruction" by the Republican Party in the Senate. Referring to Sen. Jim Bunning's hold-up of unemployment benefits earlier this week, Pelosi said, "It's not about rules, it's about a decision they've made to obstruct."

Here we have Pelosi admitting that the Pay-Go rules passed by the Democrats a couple weeks ago are basically meaningless. They bypassed them the first time they had the opportunity to enforce them, and then they have the gall to portray the one Senator who called the Dems on their dishonesty an obstructionist. Wow. Words fail me.

Time for a new Congress. This one's broken.
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Obama As The New Bush - Students in Jakarta, Indonesia are protesting President Obama's upcoming visit to that country. Obama previously has been very popular in Indonesia, having spent part of his childhood in Jakarta. From the Associated Press:

Scores of Islamic students staged protests outside Jakarta's parliament and in at least three other major Indonesian cities on Friday against President Barack Obama's upcoming visit to this predominantly Muslim country.

The students carried banners branding Obama as an enemy of Islam and an imperialist in downtown Jakarta as well as in the provincial capitals Padang, Yogyakarta and Surabaya.

They also threw shoes at large pictures of Obama's head. An Iraqi journalist was sentenced to a year in prison for throwing his shoes at U.S. President George W. Bush during a news conference in Baghdad in 2008.

Protest organizer Ahmad Irhamul Fikri, spokesman for the Coordinating Board for Campus Proselytizing Institute, said bigger rallies will be staged next Friday in more Indonesian cities ahead of Obama's March 20-22 visit.

If there's a bright side here…maybe this will shut up some of the fringe element nuts known as the Birthers, who think Obama is a foreign-born Muslim who wants to establish a Caliphate here in America, or something.

Democrats have been telling us that Harry Reid's comments about President Barack Obama were NOT racist. Reid said Obama could become President because he was "light skinned" and had "no Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one." Dems also tell us that Bill Clinton's remarks about Barack Obama were NOT racist. Clinton told Ted Kennedy that "a few years ago, this guy [Obama] would have been getting us coffee." Dems also tell us that VP Joe Biden's comments about Obama were NOT racist. Biden said Obama was "clean" and "articulate." In trying to make sense of these new standards for non-racism the Democrats have created, it suddenly hit me…..I am light skinned with no Negro dialect unless I want to have one (aka, white). I'm also clean, articulate enough, and I know how to make coffee……………..OMG ! I'm qualified to be President Of The United States ! Plus, I have a few qualities our current Prez does not have. I have worked extensively in the private sector and have run a successful business. Holy cats ! Maybe I'm OVER-qualified.
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For anyone who did not see John Stossel's program about crony capitalism on the Fox Business Network last night, you really missed something. The program will air again on friday. Don't miss it, even though the depravity of our federal government, exposed by Stossel, might make you ill. You will see how big government works hand-in-hand with big business to distort the free market, discourage innovation, beat down the little guy, and rape the taxpayers in the process. You will see how the government picks winners and losers in business. Some of the winners are – big tobacco, big pharma, big health insurance, one window company over all the others, big toy companies. See how big business writes the government regulations that benefit themselves. It is absolutely perverse, and as always, the ONLY solution is to limit government power over our lives.
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Related to Stossel's story about crony capitalism, some people might want to rethink labeling President Obama as a socialist, or at least amend it. In light of how Obama and company are either taking over or micromanaging business and the market, consider the following definition (which doesn't apply only to Obama and the Democrats, not by a long shot. That party called the Republicans does it too).

Fascism – a radical and authoritarian nationalist political ideology and a corporatist economic ideology.

Sound familiar ?
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After the government bailed out every big business in sight over the last 16 months or so (see – fascism and crony capitalism), President Demagogue Obama gave a speech last night where he pretended to be a friend to the people (lol) by calling for a new tax on the banks. Here's President Demagogue Obama:

"We want our money bank and we are going to get it," [Obama] said, surrounded by members of his economic team.

Obama said his commitment is to "recover every single dime the American people are owed. And my determination to achieve this goal is only heightened when I see reports of massive profits and obscene bonuses at some of the very firms who owe their continued existence to the American people."

Sounds good, right ? After all, we're only punishing those mean old bankers. How can that not be good ?

Here's how. First, most of the large banks have already paid back those TARP funds with interest, resulting in a net profit for the taxpayers, yet they will still be hit with Obama's new tax. Second, don't forget that many banks were forced to accept TARP funds from the government, even when they didn't want them. They will be hit with Obama's new tax too. Third, the ones who will really pay the bank tax are THE CUSTOMERS OF THE BANKS, in other words, the taxpayers themselves. Obama will be getting our money back by TAXING US more. Fourth, it wasn't only banks that received bailout funds. There's GM, GE, Fannie Mae, etc. Where is their tax ? Thanks, President Demagogue, but no thanks.

Obama continued:

"Our country has endured the deepest recession we've faced in generations, and much of the turmoil was caused by irresponsibility on the part of banks and financial institutions,"

Yes, much of the turmoil was caused by irresponsible lending on the part of banks and financial institutions…………….but why can't anyone on Capitol Hill ever fess up to the fact that THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT WANTED AND ENCOURAGED THEM TO DO IT ? The entire financial house of cards surrounding the housing market and the credit crisis was legislated into existence by the freaking Congress of the United States, starting all the way back in the Carter administration and never stopping. Prior to Congress manipulating the market, we had usury laws. We didn't have subprime mortgages. We didn't have Fannie Mae securitizing, bundling, and selling half the loans in the country. We didn't have commercial banks in the mortgage market. We didn't have Congress fining banks and denying mergers for not making enough loans to poor people. When is a presidential administration or a Congress going to admit that they brought the whole recession into existence with their boneheaded policies to "help" people ? Damn, they must think we're stupid.

Btw, President Demagogue. The country is $12 trillion in debt, and you are on target to add another $9-10 trillion to that number. WE WANT OUR MONEY BACK. So do our children, whose futures you are mortgaging. You can start by not spending all our money in the first place, you phony populist mouthbreather.
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Maybe we need a dark-skinned black person for President. One with a Negro dialect who can add two plus two and come up with four. That would be a great improvement.

This column is dedicated to the folks who believe ObamaCare, with it's alleged 31 million more people being covered by health insurance, and with it's 2,500 pages of myriad rules, regulations, and taxes being implemented on business and the citizenry by Congress…..will somehow make health care LESS expensive. To all such folks, I bestow upon you the Reality Deniers Of The Year award.

The ObamaCare debacle is so massive and will ravage such a huge slice of our economy that I should have bestowed the Reality Deniers Of The Decade award on the aforementioned people, especially when the previous decade ended only a few days ago, right ?

Except the previous decade didn't end a few days ago, no matter how often we hear the news media say it did. That's something we believe that just isn't so. Because there was no year zero on our calendar, the first year A.D. was year one. That means means a new decade doesn't start until year 11. Our next decade starts on january 1, 2011, not 2010.

That's a small thing, but columnist Walter Williams mentioned it in his latest article, in which he tackled another thing we believe is true but just isn't so. I've even bought into this false belief myself, more than I should have. The belief is that America doesn't make anything anymore, that we've lost our manufacturing sector. This belief comes from all the losses of manufacturing jobs in this country over the last thiry years. The job loss is true, but much of that loss is due to technological advances in industry that make manufacturing less labor intensive. From the Williams piece:

According to the Federal Reserve, the dollar value of U.S. manufacturing output in November was $2.72 trillion (in 2000 dollars). Today's manufacturing worker is so productive that the value of his average output is $234,220. Output per worker is three times as high as it was in 1980 and twice as high as it was in 1990. For the year 2008, the Federal Reserve estimates that the value of U.S. manufacturing output was about $3.7 trillion (in 2008 dollars). If the U.S. manufacturing sector were a separate economy, with its own GDP, it would be tied with Germany as the world's fourth richest economy. The GDPs are: U.S. ($14.2 trillion), Japan ($4.9 trillion), China ($4.3 trillion), U.S. manufacturing ($3.7 trillion), Germany ($3.7 trillion), France ($2.9 trillion) and the United Kingdom ($2.7 trillion).

With a manufacturing sector that produces more revenue than the entire GDP of all but two other countries, it sure seems we still make things here in the U.S., lots of things. It just doesn't take as many people to make them. Are we to roll back our technological advances just so we can employ more people ? I don't think so. Such a move WOULD sound the death knell for our manufacturing sector. Just as advances in the agricultural industry over the last century made farming far less labor intensive, so it is with manufacturing today. We could go the China route and pay manufacturing workers slave wages to produce cheap goods, but that isn't a desirable solution either. What we must do is adapt to a changing world. That is always going to be what we have to do to succeed. Instead of saying 'America doesn't make anything anymore,' it would be more accurate to say 'America doesn't make everything anymore.'

The next belief some hold that just isn't true is about the Guantanamo Bay prison. Even President Obama believes closing Gitmo will lessen the fervor of terrorists to attack us. Obama says Gitmo is a key recruiting tool of the jihadist movement. This is absolute nonsense. In order to share Obama's feeling, you have to believe that the simple act of moving the terrorists from Cuba to Illinois will somehow make the terrorists respond, "okay, things are alright now." This is absurdity taken to the nth degree. We'll still be holding the terrorists in prison, it'll just be in a different place. The idea that this will somehow appease the Islamic jihadists is inane. Do you really think they care WHERE Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and his like-minded brethren are being held by the U.S. ??? It's the fact WE ARE HOLDING THEM that they care about. The fact we are fighting them in the first place is what they care about. The closing of Gitmo will have zero effect on the recruitment of jihadists. ZERO. ZILCH. NADA. Of course, we could always release more terrorists to Yemen or some other country sympathetic to the jihadists, as we've been doing, in the hopes it will appease the terrorists. That WOULD have an effect on terrorist recruitment. It would go UP by the number of terrorists we released, and it already has. Our lax policies have already resulted in over 70 terrorists going back to the jihadist fight against us. Brilliant policy, eh ? Let's try to appease ruthless murdering religious extremists who wish to establish dominance over the entire world. I'm certain that will work (NOT).

My final belief that just isn't so is about enacting more government entitlements in a country already $12 trillion in debt, that can't pay for all the unfunded entitlements already in existence, and with a government that invariably robs us blind, as it has with Social Security. That is completely insane thinking, but liberals think it's the right way to go, because they somehow believe it's "compassionate." (to bankrupt the entire nation).

But you've all heard me rant on about that enough already, so I'll spare you the details this time. Peace out.

When Kentucky census worker Bill Sparkman's body was found hanging from a tree in september with the letters 'FED' scrawled across his chest, left wing moonbats went, well, moonbatty. They instantly leapt to the conclusion that conservatives were to blame, without knowing the facts of the case. They blamed everything they could label as conservative – Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, Michelle Malkin, Michelle Bachmann (R-MN), all the conservatives on talk radio, Fox News, the Tea Party movement, Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC), etc, etc, etc, etc. The moonbats went hissy-fit crazy, spreading their irrational fears of a Great Right-Wing Murderous Rampage all across the land. Our local liberal loon here at Ohio.com, the Reverend at the Blog Of Mass Destruction, wrote a piece called 'Has The War Begun ?', which contained such pearls of hate-filled non-wisdom as this:

Now, it would be easy for me to attribute this heinous act as part and parcel of the larger conservative hate-Obama-government movement. A result of endless conservative gasbag rhetoric over ACORN and the upcoming Census in 2010….or the frenzy of anti-government emotions witnessed in the incoherent TeaBagger and 9-12'er movements.

Make no mistake…..this murder looks like a political assassination, much like the Dr. George Tiller assassination a few months ago by the conservative culture warrior Scott Roeder. If, in the end, that proves to be the case….the hanging of Bill Sparkman, a very nice man who worked as a substitute teacher in Kentucky public schools and part time for the Census, may come to be known as one of the earliest victims in America's new domestic war of the 21st century.

And in the comments section of that blog article, the Reverend went on:

if anyone has read this year's Blog of Mass Destruction offerings, I have been warning against upcoming violence by unhinged right wingers,….violence, which I suggested was being drummed up by ultra-conservative hatemongers in conservative media.

If this hanging is shown to be a political murder, then what I've been warning about is now happening, and most likely, will continue to happen. When will the Becks and Limbaughs stop inciting violence?

And:

And now we know that Sparkman was, indeed, murdered…..with his Census ID duct taped to his neck. We also know that the word "fed" was written on his chest with a felt-tipped pen.

Nothing revealed so far discredits my post in any way. You may not like that….but it is what it is.

If it seems like I'm picking on the poor unhinged Reverend, I'm really not. I could have cited liberal bloggers from any number of left-wing websites who were saying the same things, and even worse, but the Rev's words came first to my mind, due to our ongoing political blogging conversations.

Now, the facts of the Sparkman case have come out. We know Bill Sparkman's death was ruled a suicide, staged by Sparkman himself:

…investigators noticed the foot-tall letters scrawled in black felt-tip pen looked like they could have been written by the victim himself, and they soon found out that he believed he had cancer, had two insurance policies worth $600,000, and had an adult son in need of money.

Investigators said Tuesday what they had been hinting at for weeks, that Bill Sparkman's hanging was a ruse to mask his suicide for a big insurance payout.

The key clue was the lack of defense wounds — the only visible marks on his body were a furrow around his neck and insect bites.

"Underneath the tape there was no trauma, and that's what I always want to look for," said Dr. Cristin Rolf, deputy state medical examiner. "If there is ever a homicide, a healthy person would put up a good fight and you would see injury and trauma to the neck and to the arms."

On Sept. 12, the Kentucky resident drove his Chevy pickup — packed with a rope, a roll of duct tape and some red rags — deep into the Kentucky woods, where outsiders are mostly treated with distrust and apprehension. He stripped down to his socks and walked to a nearby cemetery.

He taped his ankles and wrists, but his wrists were bound so loosely that he had considerable mobility, leaving investigators to believe he could have done the taping himself, authorities said. He scrawled the word "fed" upside down on his chest, taped his Census Bureau ID to his head, stuck a red cloth into his mouth and placed another piece of tape over it.

Sparkman then strung a rope from a tree, placed a noose around his neck, and leaned forward, using his own body weight to cut off oxygen to his brain, investigators said.

There was no homicide, and certainly no beginnings of some imaginary right-wing war. There were just a bunch of left-wing moonbats trying to politicize one poor man's death in order to demonize conservative free speech. It's a familiar tactic of the left, and it's become quite tired and dishonest.

The elephant-sized irony of this is, when there is an actual act of movement-inspired violence in America, such as the Fort Hood jihadist attack (or the number of other jihad-related attacks or attempted attacks on America), the very same moonbats who attempted to falsely paint Sparkman's suicide as conservative movement violence are the ones who DENY the jihadist motives for violence. The moonbats condemn conservatives for even saying the words 'jihadist' or 'terrorist.' Go figure. This leads me to conclude that maybe the war HAS begun. It's just not the one the moonbats are creating with their fevered conspiracy theories. Maybe the war that has begun is the Moonbat War On Sanity. Or maybe I've just read one Reverend blog post too many. One of his latest efforts tries to equate Catholics denying some parishioners communion to the slaughter of the Fort Hood mass murderer. That's crazy on steroids. Maybe I should just opt out.

Here's President Obama doing his best Judge Roy Bean impersonation during an NBC interview:

NBC: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — can you understand why it is offensive to some for this terrorist to get all the legal privileges of any American citizen?
Obama: I don’t think it will be offensive at all when he’s convicted and when the death penalty is applied to him.

Vintage Bean – we'll give him a fair trial, and then we'll hang him. What a shining example of American justice.

I'm still waiting for any reporter to ask the obvious followup question…what if KSM is found not guilty ? Will we let him go free ?
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In a related event, the group Organizing For America, formerly known as Obama For America, formerly known as Soiled Panties For America, has identified a true danger to our country. No, it's not KSM coming to New York City to espouse his jihadist hate, or homegrown jihadist Nidal Hasan shooting 40 people at Fort Hood (Obama tried to delay the Congressional investigation into Hasan's massacre. Kudos to Joe Lieberman and others for having none of that). No, those things aren't dangers to America. The REAL danger to America is, wait for it………Sarah Palin's book tour.

"It's dangerous," Organizing for America Director Mitch Stewart said of Palin's book tour. He continued:
"Remember, this is the person who coined the term 'Death Panels' — and opened the flood gates for months of false attacks by special interests and partisan extremists. Whatever lie comes next will be widely covered by the media, then constantly echoed by right-wing attack groups and others who are trying to defeat reform."

Stewart asks supporters to help raise $500,000 to "push back against Sarah Palin and her allies."

Remember, Palin's book isn't even a political tract. It's just a memoir, yet the libs are still going batty over it. I guess free speech IS dangerous to the Soiled Panties For America group, but I'm thinking that's THEIR problem. Btw, the Death Panels will be trying to figure out how to cut half a trillion bucks out of Medicare if the health care reform bill passes, in order that it doesn't "add a dime to the deficit."
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Next up is Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) telling one lie after another about passing the health care reform bill that Americans are against:

Let's review.

Reid said, "everyone agrees we must move forward (with the health care reform bill)."

The truth – a recent CNN poll showed that 72% of Americans are against the Democrats health care bill. Only 26% support it.

Reid said, "our plan saves lives, saves money, and saves Medicare."

The truth – the bill cuts nearly $500 billion from Medicare, and will cost $849 billion. The $849 billion figure isn't even accurate, because the benefits don't kick in until 2014. If the bill is scored from when the benefits start, it costs more like $1.5-2 trillion. More lies and number fudging from the Democrats. Even individual health care premiums rise with this bill.

Reid said, "They'll see the Republican alternative, which I'm sorry to say is non-existent, so obviously it keeps our broken system just the way it is, and let's it get even worse."

The truth – Republicans have offered an alternative, and it drives down costs and insurance premiums, which was supposed to be one of the primary goals of health care reform. The obvious shortfall of the GOP plan is that it doesn't cover as many of the uninsured as the Democrats plan does, but it's actually the Dems plan that makes health care costs rise.

Harry "the Iraq war is lost" Reid never tells the truth about anything. If any Senator loses his seat in the 2010 elections, I hope it's Reid.
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Back when the stimulus package was passed, President Obama claimed that 90% of the jobs created or saved would be in the private sector, and that unemployment would not go past 8%. Both of those claims are demonstrably false, and the administration's claim that 650,000 or a million jobs have been created or saved (the number changes depending on which administration official you talk to) have been exposed as wild exaggerations. Still, I thought the recent attacks by Republican Congressmen on Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner were over-the-top and politically motivated. You can't expect jobs to turn around this quickly during a recession this serious, and there are some encouraging signs that the recession has bottomed out (for now. The real recession/depression is coming a few years down the road, due to our continued exploding debt). Another problem going forward is our loose fiscal policy, and here's an exchange between Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) and Geithner that delves into that issue:

Hang on, America. It's going to be a bumpy ride. Anyone who thinks our problems have been solved by merely printing or borrowing tons more money, as our government has done, is in for a very rude awakening.

Here's Valerie Jarrett, senior advisor to President Barack Obama, speaking to CNN about Fox News:

I don't know how a clip could illustrated the dishonesty of politics any more than this clip does. When Jarrett is asked if Fox News is biased, she immediately answers "Of course they are biased. Of course they are." When CNN interviewer Campbell Brown follows up immediately by asking if MSNBC is also biased, Jarrett starts backtracking and deflecting, never answering the question (correct answer – Of course MSNBC is biased. Of course they are). Jarrett said, "Actually, I don't want to generalize all of Fox is biased or that another station is biased. I think what we want to do is look at it on a case-by-case basis. When we see a pattern of distortion, we're going to be honest about that pattern of distortion….We're actually calling everybody out. So this isn't anything that's simply directed at Fox. We just want the American people to have a really clear understanding."

Well, that's funny. I haven't heard the Obama administration call out any other network than Fox News. In fact, MSNBC's opinion show anchors were invited to the White House for a cozy little chat with Obama. Liar, liar, pants of fire, Ms. Jarrett.

And did you get a load of Jarrett saying on the video that the White House is "going to speak truth to power" ????? Um, correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure the White House IS THE POWER.

Valerie Jarrett admitted what this was really about. It's about health care reform, and the fact that Obama is having a difficult go of it. The majority of the American people are against it, and the majority of the American people are turning against Obama on the issues in general. It has become a disturbing trend of this administration to demonize anyone and everyone who gets in it's way. The insurance companies, the drug companies, the Chamber of Commerce, doctors, whomever. Obama even sank so low as to say doctors were cutting people's feet off for profit, for chrissakes. If you have to resort to demonizing people whose job is literally to save other people's lives, then you have a problem.

Politicians are professional liars by trade. You can choose to believe in the current bunch of liars if you wish, but I sure don't. You may think it's fine for the government to force all Americans to buy health insurance as a condition of residency, but I don't. I guess we better change that old saying about death and taxes to death, taxes, and health insurance. The current bunch of professional liars is also bankrupting the country faster than any other. This administration also seems more partisan than any other in memory. I don't hear Obama talk about a problem that he doesn't blame on someone else first. To hear Obama talk, it seems there was no America prior to George W. Bush, because all the problems seem to have originated from that one man.

And do any of you really believe that ObamaCare won't add one dime to the deficit ??? Really ??? Do you really believe Congress will cut $400-500 billion from Medicare to make that happen ? Really ???

If you are naive enough to believe that, check out this article on the "doctor fix" for Medicare, which would have added $247 billion to the deficit if the Republicans and thirteen Democrats hadn't voted it down. The Democrats tried to separate that $247 billion in debt out of ObamaCare and pass it as a standalone measure, so that ObamaCare "wouldn't add a dime to the deficit." (except for the $247 billion, of course).

Like I said, politicians are professional liars. The current group of liars isn't even particularly good at lying. It's just that the media has, to date, let them get away with it. It's time for that to stop. It's time for the press to be the ones speaking truth to power, as is their job. The White House is only speaking THEIR truth. That's not necessarily THE truth.

Earlier this week, I posted about the White House Enemies List, which consists mainly of Fox News and conservative talk radio. I assume ABC's Jake Tapper is also now on that list for daring to question the Great And Powerful Oz-bama team about bashing any media that isn't in Oz-bama's back pocket.

In that earlier post, my major complaint with Oz-bama's selective media bashing was this:

What really gets my goat about this is that Team Obama doesn't mind one bit when the media furiously spins things in Obama's favor. Everything the White House is saying about Fox News is true in reverse about MSNBC, who ceaselessly bashes the right, but no complaints from the administration about MSNBC's opinion journalism. No sir. They're perfectly fine with that. The White House is alright with opinion journalism when it represents the opinion of the White House.

Now it has come to light that not only is Oz-bama perfectly fine with HIS opinion journalists operating on news stations, he even calls them in for, let me make sure I quote this correctly, "two-and-a-half-hour off-the-record chats" to tell them what to say:

On Monday, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow were among several people who attended an off-the-record briefing with Pres. Obama at the White House. Sources tell us other attendees at the two-and-a-half hour chat included Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post, Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, Gwen Ifill of PBS and Gloria Borger of CNN. Perhaps not surprisingly, no one from Fox News was in the room.

Here's the full list of opinion journalist attendees at Oz-bama's "chat."

The White House has sent TVNewser the complete list of those who attended the off-the-record briefing Monday: Eugene Robinson, E.J. Dionne, Ron Brownstein, John Dickerson, Rachel Maddow, Frank Rich, Jerry Seib, Maureen Dowd, Keith Olbermann, Bob Herbert, Gloria Borger, and Gwen Ifill. Several members of the staff also attended.

The hypocrisy of the White House is off the charts. Notice that Oz-bama's off-the-record briefing with liberal opinion journalists came ONE DAY after Oz-bama's apparatchiks made the rounds demonizing Fox News on the sunday political talk shows. Team Oz-bama is so tuned in to MSNBC (the official White House news network), that it even e-mails corrections to MSNBC while it's talking heads are on-air. Un-be-liev-able. Meanwhile, Glenn Beck has been asking daily on his program for the White House to call and correct any errors Beck might be making. So far, nada.

On the heels of his "chat" with liberal opinion journalists, Oz-bama had this to say in an NBC exclusive interview, when asked if it was appropriate for the White House to determine what is or isn't a news organization:

"we are going to take media as it comes, and if media is operating basically as a talk radio format, that's one thing, and if it's operating as a news outlet, that's another. But it's not something I'm losing a lot of sleep over."

Sorry, Mr. President. That simply isn't credible. The man behind the curtain has been exposed. The President doesn't send out his flying monkeys to demonize one news outlet and then have two-and-a-half-hour meetings with friendly opinion media unless it's part of a media control strategy. If the prez wasn't losing sleep over Fox News, he could have spent that two-and-a-half-hours in more productive fashion…like, say, coming up with a strategy for the Afghanistan War or fixing the economy.

To prove further how much the White House DOESN'T "take the media as it comes," as if any further proof is needed, the White House tried to exclude Fox News from this week's interview with the Pay Czar, until the rest of the media objected. Even Oz-bama's media pals are objecting to his exclusionary tactics now, knowing what an outrageous and horrible precedent this would set:

Team Oz-bama. Creepier and creepier. Let's click our heels together three times and say "there's no place like America," where freedom of the press is considered a Constitutional right. I don't like this strange new land of Oz.

The Nixon administration is back. Team Obama has identified the enemies, and found most of them working for Fox News. First, White House communications director Anita Dunn opined that Fox News was "opinion journalism masquerading as news." I took Dunn's initial criticism with a grain of salt, because this is a woman also cited the mass murderer Mao Tse-Tung as one of "my favorite political philosophers." Dunn ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow, but unfortunately, it has now become clear that Dunn wasn't just expressing her opinion. It has become clear that her words are part of the Nixon Obama administration's orchestrated attempt to marginalize and shut out a single media outlet, one that coincidentally happens to be more critical of the Obama administration than the rest. When asked about Dunn's comment, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said of Fox News, "I have watched many stories on that network that I have found not to be true." It would have been helpful if Gibbs named even one of those news stories, but he did not. On sunday, more White House officials joined the Team Obama 'Blackball Fox News' movement. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel lectured CNN, telling it that President Obama does not want "the CNNs and the others in the world [to] basically be led in following Fox." White House senior advisor David Axelrod urged other media outlets not to recognize Fox News as a news organization, by telling ABC's George Stephanopoulos, "Other news organizations like yours ought not to treat them that way. We're not going to treat them that way."

The Obama administration's blackball of Fox started in August. As Chris Wallace of Fox News Sunday said on his show, "We wanted to ask Dunn about her criticism, but, as they've done every week since August, the White House refused to make any administration officials available to 'FOX News Sunday' to talk about this or anything else." The White House stopped making itself available to Fox News Sunday, (which, for the record, is not a right-wing show), after Wallace had the audacity to act like a journalist by fact-checking statements made by Tammy Duckworth, the assistant secretary of the Department of Veteran Affairs. Anita Dunn said fact-checking an administration official was "something I've never seen a Sunday show do." I can only assume Dunn never watched Meet The Press or any number of other sunday political shows in her entire Mao-worshipping life, because they fact-check politicians routinely. Tim Russert made a career out of it. Chris Wallace added, "They didn't say that our fact-checking was wrong. They just said that we had dared to fact-check."

Yes, how DARE Fox News question the great and powerful Obama administration. The last thing we need in this country are media outlets questioning the politicians in charge. What we need is a complacent and non-questioning media that blindly follows the party line disseminated by the Obamans. That's how Mao did it, and that's how almost every dictatorial government does it. They try to suppress and intimidate the media. Stalin, Castro, Chavez, and on down the line. It's standard operating procedure for practically every propaganda-spewing banana republic tyrant.

What really gets my goat about this is that Team Obama doesn't mind one bit when the media furiously spins things in Obama's favor. Everything the White House is saying about Fox News is true in reverse about MSNBC, who ceaselessly bashes the right, but no complaints from the administration about MSNBC's opinion journalism. No sir. They're perfectly fine with that. The White House is alright with opinion journalism when it represents the opinion of the White House.

Of course, the Duckworth fact-checking isn't really the issue. The Obama team isn't going to blackball an entire news organization over a couple statements by Wallace that contradict statements from a Veterans Affairs representative. The other phony excuse for blackballing Fox News is that they didn't carry one Obama speech (even though Obama has been on television more than any President in history, by far) . Democratic operative Terry Mcauliffe, who said he had spoken to White House officials, used that lame excuse on this week's Fox News Sunday program, but in fact, Fox News DID carry that Obama speech. It was the Fox network affiliate that didn't carry it. Mcauliffe also brought up Glenn Beck calling Obama a racist. I didn't like it when Beck said that, but think about this for a second. The left routinely calls people on the right racist, from the Tea Party protesters, to Rush Limbaugh (by attributing false quotes to Limbaugh), to a number of southern politicians, and on and on. Playing the race card is one of the left's standard political tactics. If it's reprehensible when Glenn Beck does it, it's reprehensible when liberals do it too, and liberals do it far, far, far more often. Even Obama did it. His operatives played the race card against both Bill and Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primaries. Obama spouted that "typical white person" remark, not to mention this almost universally ignored comment from Obama, "Are some voters not going to vote for me because I’m African-American ? Those are the same voters who probably wouldn’t vote for me because of my politics.” What is that, but Obama calling conservatives racists ??? And I'm not even going to go into Obama's Pastor, Reverend Wright, who Obama said was "like a member of my family" (until he became a political liability, after which Obama removed him from the family).

In retrospect, perhaps my Nixon administration reference is incorrect. Nixon had an enemies list, but I don't recall him or any other American president blackballing a major news organization before. I'm not saying it never happened. I'm just saying I don't remember it happening. This makes the Obama administration appear petty and small at best.

Oh, and guess who's NOT on the White House enemies list any longer ? The indicted war criminal Omar al-Bashir, the Sudanese leader who has engineered genocide and slavery in Darfur. Obama has dramatically softened his previous position on the Sudan. Maybe Fox News should slaughter huge numbers of people like al-Bashir or Mao to get Obama to push the reset button with them too. I don't know. I can't figure out the formula. The One pursues diplomatic relations with Iran and a genocidal beast, but those Fox News conservatives right here in America…nope, can't handle them. They must be blackballed.

The creepy factor with this administration continues to rise.

After months of liberals quaking in their Birkenstocks about non-existent violence at peaceful Tea Party protests across the country, it bears pointing out what actual violent protest looks like. We just witnessed that at the G-20 protests in Pittsburgh, where anti-capitalist (read: left-wing, socialist) protesters hurled rocks at police and vandalized private property. Police responded by firing tear gas canisters and using pepper spray. Nearly 200 people were arrested.

I'm sure the condemnations of the violent G-20 protesters will be forthcoming from our media and politicos, any day now. It's funny though, because I had a very difficult time sourcing this post. There are so very few stories about the G-20 violence on the web. Hmmm. Maybe our media have all gone on holiday. That's probably it. I can't blame them. They are probably worn out from trying to invent violence at all the Tea Parties over the last six months. It's gotta be hard work trying to invent something out of nothing. It's like alchemy, trying to turn lead into gold. Exhausting and time-consuming work, and after all the effort, you still have lead. The media deserves a rest. I hear Havana is lovely this time of year.

I'm sure that Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and company will be calling the G-20 protesters "extremists," "mobsters," "fearmongers," and "racists," any day now. I'm sure that they will castigate those protesters for inciting other left-wingers to violence. While they are at it, they can throw in some stuff about how filmmaker Michael Moore is calling people to violence and assassination with his new anti-capitalist movie, Capitalism, A Love Story (fun quote from Moore – "Capitalism is an evil, and you cannot regulate evil."). After all, I know how concerned liberals are about this stuff. I've been hearing about it for most of the year.

Oddly enough, when I did some web searches about what happened in Pittsburgh, liberal bloggers, after months of nail-biting about violence breaking out at protests, were not very concerned when actual violence did break out at the G-20 (because THEY were the ones perpetrating the violence). No, no. The liberal bloggers were only concerned about the POLICE BRUTALITY used to stop the protestor violence. I kid you not. Never mind that the police were motivated by the protesters breaking windows out of a dozen businesses. I assume the police weren't overy thrilled with having rocks hurled at them either.

Reading through various braindead comments at a liberal blog called the Democratic Underground (DU), now it seems the far lefties are bitching about the police state we have in America. If only I could find a bottle with a genie in it, so I could make a wish and transport all those clueless libs from their parent's basements to an actual police state for awhile (like any of the socialist utopias liberals dream about), so they could see what it's really like. That would shut them up.

My favorite liberal blog comment at DU came from a guy named Big Dan, who asked plaintively, "Why do only liberal protestors get tear gassed, why don't the Teabaggers ever get it ?"

Gee, I don't know Dan. Maybe it has something to do with the rocks and vandalism. I'm sure you can figure it out if you think REAL hard, for once.

"For those who question the character and cause of my nation, I ask you to look at the concrete actions we have taken in just nine months." - President Barack Hussein Obama, narcissist, addressing the United Nations, September, 2009.

I'm sure glad Barry came along and fixed the character and cause of this nation after 232 years of American villainy, aren't you ? On the bright side, at least he didn't call pre-Obama America "The Great Satan." And our President spoke these words in front of an audience that included the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chavez, Moammar Gadhafi, and a slew of other human rights violators (many of whom are on the Orwellian UN Human Rights Council).
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"Since Americans can only be prodded into doing something with money, we need to tax crappy foods that make us sick like we do with cigarettes, and alcohol." - pot-smoking comedian Bill Maher, September, 2009.

Unbelievably, Maher calls himself a Libertarian. In reality, he's just another authoritarian left-winger. Someone should familiarize Maher with the words "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." It's none of Bill Maher's business who smokes, drinks, or eats what, which Maher would quickly realize if someone took his weed away. Maher's "libertarianism" extends only to his desire to get high. What a hypocrite.
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"Is capitalism a sin ?" - Leni Riefenstahl Award-winning, Castro-loving filmmaker Michael Moore, in a trailer from his forthcoming movie, Capitalism, A Love Story.

The answer from Moore's questionee is "yes," by the way, capitalism IS a sin. Hugo Chavez couldn't have said it better.
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"President Obama didn't make much news on his round of five Sunday talk shows … with one notable exception. The President revealed a great deal about his philosophy of government and how he defines a tax increase. It turns out the President thinks a health-care tax is not a tax if he thinks the tax is for your own good. … Mr. Obama was asked by [ABC] host George Stephanopoulos about the 'individual mandate.' Under Max Baucus's Senate bill that Mr. Obama supports, everyone would be required to buy health insurance or else pay a penalty as high as $3,800 a year. Mr. Stephanopoulos posed the obvious question about this kind of coercion when 'the government is forcing people to spend money, fining you if you don't [buy insurance]. … How is that not a tax?' 'Well, hold on a second, George,' Mr. Obama replied. 'Here's what's happening. You and I are both paying $900, on average — our families — in higher premiums because of uncompensated care. Now what I've said is that if you can't afford health insurance, you certainly shouldn't be punished for that. That's just piling on. If, on the other hand, we're giving tax credits, we've set up an exchange, you are now part of a big pool, we've driven down the costs, we've done everything we can and you actually can afford health insurance, but you've just decided, you know what, I want to take my chances. And then you get hit by a bus and you and I have to pay for the emergency room care, that's…' 'That may be,' Mr. Stephanopoulos responded, 'but it's still a tax increase.' (In fact, uncompensated care accounts for about only 2.2% of national health spending today, but that's another subject.) Mr. Obama: 'No. That's not true, George. The — for us to say that you've got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase. What it's saying is, is that we're not going to have other people carrying your burdens for you anymore…' In other words, like parents talking to their children, this levy — don't call it a tax — is for your own good. … Mr. Obama complains that 'My critics say everything is a tax increase,' as if that is his political problem. His real problem is that the individual mandate really is a tax, but the President doesn't want voters to think of it that way, because taxes are unpopular." –The Wall Street Journal, September, 2009.

Yes, of course, Obama's penalty for not having health insurance is a tax, no matter what he wants to call it. Obama probably wouldn't consider his cap-and-trade proposal a tax either, but that's exactly what it is. The creative subterfuge being engaged in by Democrats these days is to pass tax increases without calling them tax increases. Instead, they are called penalties, mandates, fees, carbon allowances, etc. Does this stuff actually fool anyone ? (except for liberals, that is). I hope not. Obama isn't "helping the little guy" one bit, in case anyone hasn't noticed (and the media sure hasn't). He's only raising the little guy's expenses, through both direct and indirect means. This brings to mind Ronald Reagan's quote about the most terrifying words in the english language – "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help."
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"We understand the gravity of the climate threat. We are determined to act. And we will meet our responsibility to future generations." - Barack Obama, speaking at the UN climate change conference, September, 2009.

"Responsibility to future generations," eh ? More than a tad ironic, coming from the President who is running up the debt faster than every other administration in history combined, thereby irresponsibly ruining the prospects of future generations.
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"It doesn't smell of sulfur here anymore. It smells of something else. It smells of hope." - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, addressing the UN, September, 2009.

The "sulfur" smell was Bush, whom Chavez called "the devil" at last year's UN meeting. The "hope" smell is Obama. It's sure nice that we've won over Chavez, don't you think ? Yes, he may be a tyrannical nut who nationalizes industries, shuts down opposition media, and puts opposition political figures in jail, but that's the socialist way. Because Chavez's version of "hope" would be hope of a worldwide socialist revolution, I wonder what it is he likes so much about Obama ??? I can agree with Chavez on this much – something smells alright.

One of the most disturbing things about Barack Obama is not Obama himself, but rather some of the people around him, including several people he has put into positions of authority. I've already detailed the radical nature of a couple Obama administration personnel, Science Czar John Holdren and FCC Diversity Officer Mark Lloyd. Holdren has a number of crazy beliefs, among them being the idea that the U.S. Constitution doesn't entitle people to have children. Holdren declared “neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution mentions a right to reproduce" in his 1977 book, Ecoscience. Evidently, Holdren missed the second sentence in the Declaration of Independence – "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." In Holdren's defense, he only attended MIT and Stanford. Maybe they don't teach the basics at those elite schools. I don't know. I could only afford to go to Podunk University in Backwater, USA (so I am oppressed and demand reparations ! Just kidding. My inner whiny liberal took over for a second there). Yet, somehow I know the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution better than Holdren does. I must have read about it on a bathroom wall somewhere, or maybe at a gun show.

Mark Lloyd is another elite. He was a professor at Georgetown and a visiting lecturer at MIT prior to becoming a Hugo Chavez-loving Nazi hell-bent on destroying free speech on America's airwaves. Here's a quote from the well-educated Professor Lloyd:

“It should be clear by now that my focus here is not freedom of speech or the press. . . . This freedom is all too often an exaggeration. . . . At the very least, blind references to freedom of speech or the press serve as a distraction from the critical examination of other communications policies.”

Yes, Mr. Lloyd, it certainly IS clear that your focus is not free speech. That's why you should take the Che poster down from the wall of your office, clean out your desk, and go peddle your commie crap someplace like Cuba or Venezuela, but not here. Not in this country. We still call this the land of the free, not the land of government diktat.

Another Communist in the Obama administration is the eminent Van Jones, the Green Jobs Czar. Mr. Jones went to Yale, so he's a real smart fellow, just like the other radical nutjobs I've mentioned. Jones claims to have been radicalized by the Rodney King verdict. By his own words, that drove him to embrace Marxism. I can't say I follow Mr. Jones' logic there, but like I said, I'm not one of the elite. To me, embracing communism because of a perceived American civil rights injustice is like jumping out of an airplane in flight because you don't like your seat. It's a hysterical and moronic overreaction. Maybe Jones doesn't realize that, under Communism, YOU DON'T HAVE ANY CIVIL RIGHTS to begin with. What a boob, er, I mean, deep thinker. Liberal groups have been claiming that Jones radical Communist days are behind him, but here's Van Jones in April, 2009:

"This [green] movement is deeper than a solar panel! Deeper than a solar panel! Don't stop there! Don't stop there! We're gonna change the whole system! We're gonna change the whole thing. We're not gonna put a new battery in a broken system. We want a new system. We want a new system!…And our Native American sisters and brothers who were pushed and bullied and mistreated and shoved into all the land we didn't want, where it was all hot and windy. Well, guess what? Renewable energy? Guess what, solar industry? Guess what wind industry? They now own and control 80 percent of the renewable energy resources. No more broken treaties. No more broken treaties. Give them the wealth! Give them the wealth! Give them the dignity. Give them the respect that they deserve. No justice on stolen land. We owe them a debt…What about our immigrant sisters and brothers? What about our immigrant sisters and brothers? What about people who come here from all around the world who we're willing to have out in the field, with poison being sprayed on them, poison being sprayed on them because we have the wrong agricultural system. And we're willing to poison them and poison the earth to put food on our table, but we don't want to give them rights and we don't want to give them dignity and we don't want to give them respect?…We're really entering a third wave of environmentalism in the United States. The white polluters and the white environmentalists are essentially steering poison into the people of color communities."

Sounds to me like Jones is still a radical, and a race-baiter to boot. Whitey is poisoning people of color ????? We need to change the whole system ? Into what, Mr. Marxist ? Glenn Beck has been on a tirade against Van Jones for awhile now, and a group Van Jones founded, Color Of Change, has been trying to get Beck kicked off the air (which kinda proves Jones is a Communist. That's what Communists do, silence the opposition. They aren't about the free and open exchange of ideas, in case anyone hasn't figured that out yet).

The next commie-loving race-baiter on the radical hit parade isn't a member of Obama's administration, but her stupidity merits recognition. Her name is Diane Watson, Democratic Congresswoman from California. This woman LOVES her some Fidel Castro, and is so lost in identity politics that she can't even think straight. Dig it:

"You might have heard their philosophical leader. I think his name is Rush Limbaugh. And he said early on, “I hope that he fails.”…And remember: They are spreading fear and they are trying to see that the first president that looks likes me fails [Watson is black]…. just want you to know: People look at the United States as a country that has changed its way and has elected someone from Kenya and Kansas, I’ll put it like that. And they’re saying, “We thought you would never do that.” So we don’t want to have this young man, and he just turned 48 — we want him to succeed, because when he succeeds, we regain our status. We regain our status….

It was just mentioned to me by our esteemed speaker, “Did anyone say anything about the Cuban health system?”

And lemme tell ya, before you say “Oh, it’s a commu–”, you need to go down there and see what Fidel Castro put in place. And I want you to know, now, you can think whatever you want to about Fidel Castro, but he was one of the brightest leaders I have ever met. [APPLAUSE]

And you know, the Cuban revolution that kicked out the wealthy, Che Guevara did that, and then, after they took over, they went out among the population to find someone who could lead this new nation, and they found…well, just leave it there (laughs), an attorney by the name of Fidel Castro…"

First of all, Ms. Watson, we are allowed to oppose Obama's policies, even though he looks like you. His skin color is completely irrelevant, except to those like yourself who are too blind to see anything else. These race-based comments are really just attempts at thought suppression. There's no other way to view them.

About Cuba, yes, please, let's "go down there and see what Fidel Castro put in place." I believe the generally accepted term for it is OPPRESSION, along with a health dose of POVERTY, as happens with all Communist states. Cuba is a police state. Fortunately, the Democratic primary challenger for Watson's congressional seat doesn't share Watson's myopic view of Cuban health care. Let's vote him into office.

The final person on today's list is Cass Sunstein, Obama's Regulatory Czar. This guy is an intellectual heavyweight. He's a former Harvard Law Professor, and an expert in constitutional law, environmental law, and behavioral economics. I'm not certain how radical he is, because he's a complex man, but he has at least some very confused ideas. Here are a few of his elite ramblings:

“Much of the time, the United States seems to have embraced a confused and pernicious form of individualism. This approach endorses rights of private property and freedom of contract, and respects political liberty, but claims to distrust ‘government intervention’ and insists that people must fend for themselves. This form of so-called individualism is incoherent, a tangle of confusions"

This is quite the straw man argument. I don't know of a single person who doesn't think the government has a legitimate role to play. Government is uniquely qualified for certain roles, and those were laid out in the very beginning by the Constitution. What I distrust is GOVERNMENT INTRUDING INTO EVERY ASPECT OF SOCIETY, as it has been doing by gradual degree for my entire lifetime. And Mr. Sunstein, individualism is not "pernicious." Railing against it is.

"A system of limitless individual choices, with respect to communications, is not necessarily in the interest of citizenship and self-government"

This is Sunstein endorsing the Fairness Doctrine in order to control political speech. Looks like we have another nut who doesn't believe in free speech.

I just LOVE this next Sunstein quote. Love it.

“In what sense is the money in our pockets and bank accounts fully ‘ours’? Did we earn it by our own autonomous efforts? Could we have inherited it without the assistance of probate courts? Do we save it without the support of bank regulators? Could we spend it if there were no public officials to coordinate the efforts and pool the resources of the community in which we live?… Without taxes there would be no liberty. Without taxes there would be no property. Without taxes, few of us would have any assets worth defending. [It is] a dim fiction that some people enjoy and exercise their rights without placing any burden whatsoever on the public fisc. … There is no liberty without dependency. That is why we should celebrate tax day …”

Did we earn our own money ? Um, YES.
Did we earn it by our own efforts ? YES.
Could we have inherited it without probate courts ? YES.
Could we save it without bank regulators ? YES. (We could even save it without banks).
Could we spend it without public officials ? YES.

Sunstein sounds like the typical government drone, who thinks absolutely everything is derived from government. Wrong.

"Without taxes there would be no liberty," says Sunstein. To an extent, this is true, because taxation supports the government, which exists to secure our liberties. As George Washington said, "Freedom is not free." I think everyone agrees with that much. But should we "celebrate tax day" when our resources are stripped from us to pay for everything under the sun that the government can dream up, waaay beyond securing our liberty ? I think not. Should we celebrate pork barrel spending, special interest handouts, bailouts of the big corporations, the ripoff of our own Social Security system, private jets for congresspersons, trillions of dollars in unfunded liabilities ? That would be NO. "Celebrate tax day," indeed. I'd almost as soon celebrate the day burglars broke into my home and stole my television, stereo, and my wife's jewelry. I never once thanked those burglars for helping to redistribute my wealth, nor will I thank the government for stealing my paycheck for unconstitutional purposes. Government exists to secure our liberties, not to rip them away.

1. Japanese officials were executed for waterboarding prisoners during World War II.

Wrong. Japanese officials were executed primarily for mass murder and for waging war against other countries. Torture was among the charges, and among the numerous torture charges was Japanese water torture (aka, water cure), not waterboarding. The two are not the same thing. Water torture involved putting a hose down a prisoner's throat and pumping water into him until his insides burst or nearly burst, often resulting in death. In addition, the Japanese usually executed the prisoners following water torture and/or other forms of torture. Even without water torture, those Japanese officials would have been executed.

2. Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge was pressured by the Bush White House to raise the terror alert level prior to the 2004 elections for political reasons.

This one is debunked by Tom Ridge himself, who said he was never pressured to change the terror alert level.

"There was no pressure at all. There was a judgment call on their part and on my part," Ridge, 64, a former Pennsylvania governor and an Erie native, told the [Erie-Times News] newspaper.

In addition, there was a threat made by Bin Laden prior to the 2004 election, which Ridge himself thought might be to disrupt our presidential elections, just as Al Qaeda bombed trains in Madrid three days before Spain's elections.

Not to mention that the terror alert level was NOT raised (and it probably SHOULD have been). The charge made for a nice phony left wing attack du jour, however.

3. George W. Bush is a chickenhawk who went into the Air National Guard to avoid going to Vietnam.

The truth is, Bush volunteered to go to Vietnam, but he didn't have enough flying hours, so other pilots were sent instead. In addition, CBS producer Mary Mapes, who did the phony partisan hit piece on Bush with anchorman Dan Rather, which was based upon forged documents, KNEW Bush had volunteered, but never mentioned it. Remember, the thrust of the CBS Rather/Mapes hit piece was that Bush was a coward who was trying to avoid combat. And it was THIS NEWS STORY that attempted to influence an election, coming shortly after the 2004 Republican convention.

4. The federal government is efficient.

This one doesn't really require an explanation, but what follows is a letter to the federal government from an irate citizen that has been making it's way around the internet. I have no idea if the letter is authentic, but it sure is funny, and it sure does illustrate exactly how efficient our federal government isn't. That would be the same federal government to whom we are about to hand over our entire health care system, not that anything could possibly go wrong there.

Warning – there is profanity.

Dear Sirs,

I’m in the process of renewing my passport, and still cannot believe this. How is it that Radio Shack has my address and telephone number and knows that I bought a cable t.v. from them back in 1987, and yet, the Federal Government is still asking me where I was born and on what date.

For gosh sakes, do you guys do this by hand? My birth date you have on my social security card, and it is on all the income tax forms I’ve filed for the past 30 years. It is on my health insurance card, my driver’s license, on the last eight damn passports I’ve had, on all those stupid customs declaration forms I’ve had to fill out before being allowed off the plane over the last 30 years, and all those insufferable census forms that are done at election times.

Would somebody please take note, once and for all, that my mother’s name is Maryanne, my father’s name is Robert and I’d be absolutely astounded if that ever changed between now and when I die!

I apologize, I’m really pissed off this morning. Between you an’ me, I’ve had enough of this bullshit! You send the application to my house, then you ask me for my address!

What is going on? You have a gang of Neanderthal asses workin’ there! Look at my damn picture. Do I look like Bin Laden? I don’t want to dig up Yasser Arafat, for crying out loud! I just want to go and park my ass on a sandy beach.

And would someone please tell me, why would you give a shit whether I plan on visiting a farm in the next 15 days? If I ever got the urge to do something weird to a chicken or a goat, believe you me, I’d sure as hell not want to tell anyone!

Well, I have to go now, ’cause I have to go to the other end of the city and get another blasted copy of my birth certificate, to the tune of $60. Would it be so complicated to have all the services in the same spot to assist in the issuance of a new passport the same day? Nooooo, that’d be to damn easy and maybe makes sense. You’d rather have us running all over the place like chickens with our heads cut off, then find some ass to confirm that it’s really me on the damn picture – you know, the one where we’re not allowed to smile (bureaucratic ignorant morons)! Hey, you know why we can’t smile? We’re totally pissed off!

Signed
An Irate Citizen.

P.S. Remember what I said above about the picture and getting someone to confirm that it’s me? Well, my family has been in this country since 1776, I have served in the military for something over 30 years and have had security clearances up the ying yang. However, I have to get someone ‘important’ to verify who I am – you know, someone like my doctor WHO WAS BORN AND RAISED IN INDIA!

Sincerely,
You Sure In The Hell Should Know Who.

Do you believe our federal government is competent ? Do you think it's doing a good job of solving our problems ? Are we getting our money's worth ? Let's run through a checklist.

The government declared a war on poverty about 45 years ago. How'd that work out ? We may not have an exit strategy from Afghanistan yet, but you'd think we'd have one for the war on poverty after all these years. Nope.

What about the war on drugs ? We've put a lot of American citizens in prison on drug charges, giving us the highest incarceration rate in the world here in the land of the free, but drugs are still everywhere. If you want to find illegal drugs in America, you don't have to look very hard.

How about the problem of illegal immigration ? I bet you didn't know that the government fixed that problem back in 1986 with the Immigration Reform And Control Act. Listen to this excerpt from the signing statement from that Act, and tell me if it sounds at all familiar to any discussions of the issue we are having today:

In 1981 this administration asked the Congress to pass a comprehensive legislative package, including employer sanctions, other measures to increase enforcement of the immigration laws, and legalization. The act provides these three essential components. The employer sanctions program is the keystone and major element. It will remove the incentive for illegal immigration by eliminating the job opportunities which draw illegal aliens here. We have consistently supported a legalization program which is both generous to the alien and fair to the countless thousands of people throughout the world who seek legally to come to America. The legalization provisions in this act will go far to improve the lives of a class of individuals who now must hide in the shadows, without access to many of the benefits of a free and open society. Very soon many of these men and women will be able to step into the sunlight and, ultimately, if they choose, they may become Americans.

In 1986, we had approximately 2.7 million illegal immigrants. Now the estimate is around 13 million, and we're having the exact same discussions about illegal immigration that we had 23 years ago. Good job, government.

Maybe I'm being too harsh. Some of you might be thinking of all the super neato government programs that have been put in place to help us, like the Social Security ponzi scam, or Medicare, which is going broke. Plus, Social Security and Medicare comprise the lion's share of our unfunded liabilities, which, when added to our stated national debt of $11.7 trillion, make the real national debt around $56.4 trillion (note – the national debt figures are outdated as soon as they are printed because the debt is rising so fast. The real national debt might be over $58 trillion by now).

FYI – If you want to see the startling truth behind the U.S. economy, check out the U.S. Debt Clock. We are becoming a hollowed out shell of an economic power. It can't last. America, as it stands, is not sustainable (and our idiotic mainstream media wonders what all the protesting is about. "It must be racism," they say. Why do they call those media types "the elite" anyway ? They sound like a bunch of imbeciles to me).

Our government has done a bang up job of not eliminating poverty, drugs, and illegal immigration. It has also done a fine job of living beyond it's means and selling us down the river with massive debt that will destroy the hopes of future generations. It was also instrumental in creating the housing bubble that led to the current recession.

So, obviously, the correct path to follow now is to hand another 17% of our economy over to that same government to "fix" health care, right ? I mean, the government has such an excellent track record of solving economic problems (NOT). Much better than that miserable failure known as the free market (that made us the wealthiest country in the history of the world). After all, the free market has failed to rein in health care costs, right ? Wrong. The government has inserted itself into health care to such an extent that the free market isn't really functioning in health care. The government got into health care in a big way in 1965, and it's influence has grown ever since. This is also the same time period that health care costs have spiraled out of control.

I was listening to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) yesterday on television talking about how there isn't enough competition among private health care insurers, how some states are dominated by only a few insurance companies. What Schumer didn't bother to mention was that insurers are limited by law from competing on a national level, across state lines. So, we have the government restricting private health insurance choice on the one hand, and then complaining that there isn't enough choice on the other hand. I don't know how some of these politicians peddle this nonsense with a straight face. Schumer, of course, wasn't advocating to open up competition on a national level among diverse insurance companies. No, because that would make sense. We can't have that. Instead, Schumer was advocating for a public health insurance option, where the government competes directly against the private sector, as if that's even possible. It isn't. Schumer kept saying that government competing with private industry is fine, as long as there's "a level playing field." Schumer said that with a straight face too, somehow. The idea that there could ever be a level playing field between the federal government and the private sector is absurd on it's face, as is Chuck Schumer. A private industry trying to compete with the federal government in health care insurance would be like trying to play a football game against a government team, where the government got to pick the players on both teams, got to pick the referees, got to change the rules of the game after every play, and made your team pay the expenses of it's team. There's little doubt who would win the game with such a "level playing field."

I'd have much more respect for the politicians peddling the public health care option if they'd just tell the truth about it. It's not about "keeping the insurance companies honest" any more than Medicare was about "giving Seniors a choice" in 1965. It's about government control. Don't lie to me and tell me anything different.

January 11, 2032.

6:00am – The alarm in my microchip brain implant goes off, awakening me to the tune of the new Pan American national anthem, Yes We Can. The song is a reworking of an old hit from the 1960's, Hooked On A Feeling, by B. J. Thomas. As I open the lid of my GE Sleep Maximization Bed, the last of the bed's nighttime submlinal messaging echos through my mind – "Service, Acceptance, Duty…" I arise and make myself a cup of Government approved tea, an organic Ginseng-Noni blend. "This is putrid," I think to myself. The brain chip delivers a mild electrical shock for my IT (Inconvenient Thought).

6:20am – The 84" GE Television/Scanner that dominates an entire wall of my one room apartment here at the Social Security Serenity Complex switches on automatically. The super fit looking Exercise Czar, who is the favored Pan American blend of 1/3rd Caucasian, 1/3rd African American, and 1/3rd Mexican heritage, instructs me to do 25 jumping jacks, 50 situps, and 20 push ups. This time, the IT escapes my lips. "I'm 78 years old, you flippin' Nazi. I don't feel like exercising today." The Television/Scanner instructs me to stand 12 inches in front of it for an auto-health checkup scan. I comply. Following the checkup, a pleasant female voice informs me, "Patient 212-54-3268, you have signs of potential prostate cancer. Please report to Room 4209 of the Serenity Complex at 9:15am on June 15th, 2032 for further examination. At this time, resume your exercise program. A healthy body is a happy body. Thank you for your cooperation. Have a nice day."

"June 15th is over 5 months from now," I yell at the Television/Scanner. "I could be dead by then, you moron." The implant chip delivers another mild electric shock, a dose of Tranquilinium is released into my body, and the implant chip begins softly playing Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata inside my head. The Television/Scanner informs me that because I'm close to the mandatory termination age of 80, my cancer concern is only a Department of Health Priority Level 4, thus the wait.

7:00am – The Television/Scanner announces that my breakfast has arrived. I walk to the Meal Delivery Chute to find the Government approved organic juice and oatmeal, along with a Proto-powder drink to supply my daily essential vitamins and minerals. The drink tastes like a mixture of chalk and decaying leaves. I long for the days when I had actual money I could use to buy my own food, like bacon, scrambled eggs with cheese, and buttered toast (ah!), but I try hard to suppress the thought. I don't need any more shocks. Old folks like me are often classified as RRI (Reconditioning Resistant Individuals) by the Deparment of Internal Affairs. We lived so many years in the old USA that we are difficult to rehabilitate.

8:00am – President For Life Obama appears on the Television/Scanner to deliver his daily inspirational message. The President is flanked on his left by the Vice President, Michelle Obama. Sitting behind him are the National Legislative Overseer, Malia Obama, and the National Judicial Overseer, Sasha Obama. During the Great Awakening of 2016, it was found that one or a few persons could decide matters of national importance much more effectively than many (known as the old Tower Of Babel way), so Congress and the Supreme Court were eliminated in order to produce a more cost-efficient and responsive government for the citizenry. That's when the National Overseers appointed Obama President For Life, to avoid what they called a "discontinuity of planned government services." I guess it makes sense. My GE Sleep Maximization Bed certainly thinks so. Back when we had political parties and elections, the government was changing every 2-4 years, and we had to start things all over from scratch. This way, we don't have to worry about that. The Tower of Babel has been silenced, and now the government can do what's good for us, in perpetuity and without resistance. How can that not be good ? Still, I frequently miss the ability to choose what I want to do, when I want to do it. We used to call that "liberty." Owww! That shock was a big one. The Television/Scanner has ordered me to sing the National Anthem. Aw, crap. Owww ! Alright, already !

"I-I-I-I-I, I'm hooked on a feelin',
High on believin',
That's your in love with me,
Pan America, Yes We Cannnnn !"

“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.