A Really Mediocre President

On nearly every major issue, the president's policy has proved unpopular once it has been explained clearly. This is why Obama so often engages in secrecy and obfuscation. It is why his party in Congress conducts secret negotiations and passes major legislation on Thanksgiving or just before Santa's arrival on Christmas Eve. It is why bills are passed without having been read even by their sponsors. Obama's party is legislating in the dark because it does not want the American people to know what it is doing.

Read it all here.

Just wondering

This Obama train wreck has me wondering how long it will be until Hillary resigns from the State Department and starts making trips to Iowa.

John Edwards

It is surprising and disappointing to me that anyone could watch John Edwards for 5 minutes and not realize he is the biggest phony on earth.

This makes Bush look good.

Believe it or not, our President used teleprompters to speak to a class of 6th graders. This photo has been authenticated.

Be worried, be very, very worried

With the liberals in Congress running up massive deficits and debt, they are going to be forced to find money wherever they can. Keep going to the Chinese? That is looking iffy since the Chinese seem to be coming to the realization that our T-bonds and the dollar backing them is getting shakier and shakier. Raising taxes? Of course, they will do that and it will hit everyone--even those whom Obama swore would not be affected by tax increases. What else? One fear is they will look at our retirement savings (401k and IRA accounts) and make some excuse to tap into this huge reservoir of funds. One plan is to simply tax all of them 15% to "protect" social security. This is fallacious, of course since once money hits Washington, it gets spent and social security gets an IOU.
Another idea is to force all of us to cash out a portion of our savings (and pay taxes on the withdrawal) and then invest the residue in government bonds where the money would have to stay.
We need to hope and pray that the results of the Massachusetts election will stave off the thieves.

Read a more complete and better account of this here.

This looks promising

CARACAS, Venezuela — Tens of thousands of Venezuelans opposed to President Hugo Chavez took to the streets Saturday, blaming him for rolling blackouts, water rationing, widespread crime and other problems they say are making daily life increasingly difficult.

Maybe Massachusetts is not alone in being fed up with socialism. Old Hugo will probably follow Obama and blame Bush, however.

Mark Steyn's Obama Appraisal

The most striking aspect of his performance was how unhappy he looked, as if he doesn’t enjoy the job. You can understand why. He ran as something he’s not, and never has been: a post-partisan, centrist, transformative healer. That’d be a difficult trick to pull off even for somebody with any prior executive experience, someone who’d actually run something, like a state, or even a town, or even a commercial fishing operation, like that poor chillbilly boob Sarah Palin. At one point late in the 2008 campaign, when someone suggested that if Governor Palin was “unqualified” then surely he was too, Obama pointed out as evidence to the contrary his ability to run such an effective campaign. In other words, running for president was his main qualification for being president.

Read it all here. It is all good and spot on.

Ouch!

The president has three principal problems. He is well to the left of the public and of what he promised the voters in 2008, and it is an old, passe leftism, that is authoritarian, deviously presented and was discredited in this country decades ago; the sort of nostrums that caused Bill Clinton and others to become 'New Democrats.' He is increasingly perceived as having credibility problems and of being cold, cocksure, narcissistic and intoxicated by what he modestly called 'the gift' of his own articulation. And as president, he has been quite, and quite surprisingly, incompetent.

Read it all unless you drank the liberal Kool-Aid.

Liberals on the attack

While the nation was suffering through the worst economy since the Depression, the Democrats wasted a year squabbling like unruly toddlers over health insurance legislation. No one in his or her right mind could have believed that a workable, efficient, cost-effective system could come out of the monstrously ugly plan that finally emerged from the Senate after long months of shady alliances, disgraceful back-room deals, outlandish payoffs and abject capitulation to the insurance companies and giant pharmaceutical outfits.

This is from an op-ed in the New York Times by the uber-liberal Bob Herbert. Read it all here.

Mixed Message?

Barack Obama’s former Senate seat is on the line and the leading Democratic contender is a 33-year-old who spent almost all of his adult life working for the bank that his family owns. Perhaps the president forgot that last week when he told Massachusetts voters that “bankers don’t need another vote in the Senate.”

Obama takes on banks

Reform of health insurance proved too tough so BO is now going to take on the banks and big investment houses. He says we need to limit their activities so the tax payers will no longer be on the hook for their failed investments. Even us conservatives can agree with some of that, but our man, the anointed one, may look back on the good old days when he was trying to take over our health care system. Just wait until he goes up against the New York money fronted by Chuck Schumer, Mayor Bloomberg, and the fat cats who are associated with all his advisers and cabinet members like Geithner.
Fact of the matter is our dear leader is in way over his head and doesn't look like he can swim very well.

More Climate Lies from U.N.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N. body tasked with scaring us to death about global warming, has admitted that the claim in its 2007 report about the Himalayan glaciers disappearing was not based on any scientific study or research. It was instead based on one scientist's speculation in a telephone interview with a reporter.

The IPCC claimed: "Glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of their disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the earth keeps warming at the current rate."

As it turns out, the earth hasn't been warming at all, at least not in the last decade, and reputable scientists have said it may continue to cool for decades to come. Even if it was warming, glaciologists insist, the sheer mass of Himalayan glaciers made such a prediction laughable.

Professor Julian Dowdeswell, director of the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University, notes: "Even a small glacier, such as the Dokriani glacier, is up to 120 meters (394 feet) thick. A big one would be several hundred meters thick and tens of kilometers long."

Read it all here.

They just won't ever get it!!!

Over at the Boston Globe, which was the only organization to have a worse showing in the election than the Coakley campaign, editorial writers pretended that Republican Scott Brown’s election had been a certainty for some time. If they thought so, they certainly hadn’t shared it with their readers.

If you relied only on the Globe for your news, the last poll you read about before Election Day was the one from Jan. 6 from the paper and the University of New Hampshire that showed Coakley winning in a 17-point walk over Republican Scott Brown.

Pelosi can't cut it

"If you’re wondering why Speaker Pelosi, who currently has something like a seventy vote majority in the House, is incapable of shepherding through a bill deemed critical to her caucus - well, one could go into great detail in describing why, but really: “not very good at her job” will do just fine."

Read it all here.

Just wondering

Isn't it interesting how perfectly Haiti and its problems with nature are reflected in California with its fires, floods, mud slides, and even earth quakes? Both are also financial basket cases with no obvious, functional government.

Or What????

The United Nations will hold President Obama to his promise that the United States will reduce carbon emissions even if the Senate cannot pass climate legislation, U.N. climate chief Yvo de Boer said this morning.

In his first public comments since the Copenhagen climate summit last month that produced a nonbinding promise from major-emitting countries to cut greenhouse gases, de Boer noted that Obama vowed the United States will slash carbon about 17 percent below 2005 levels in the coming decade.

"Whatever route is taken, the president of the United States committed to a 17 percent emissions reduction in Copenhagen," de Boer said. "The president of the United States committed to more ambitious emissions reductions for 2030 and 2050. And it is those statements to which the international community will hold the government of the United States accountable

How sweet it is

Just read that Obama will go to Nevada next month to support the re-election of Harry Reid. Maybe old Harry ought to ask how that worked out in Copenhagen, Virginia, New Jersey and Massachussets.

This about sums it up

From NRO

We went from a Republican “culture of corruption” to a liberal cesspool of corruption. Sen. Chris Dodd lectures Wall Street while he gets sweetheart loans and vacation-home deals. Few could make up a story that the nation’s top tax lawmaker, House Ways and Means Chairman Charles Rangel, is a tax dodger, and the nation’s top tax enforcer, Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, is an even more egregious tax dodger. When the Democratic Senate leadership started buying health-care votes at $300 million a clip, our Congress became little more than the praetorian guard, auctioning off its support to any wannabe late Roman emperor. The idea of a muckraking Obama nominating Tom Daschle as his Health Secretary — the liberal populist who skips out of thousands of dollars in taxes on his free corporate limousine service — was the stuff of satire.

More New York Times Claptrap

Senator Lisa Murkowski’s home state of Alaska is ever so slowly melting away, courtesy of a warming planet. Yet few elected officials seem more determined than she to throw sand in the Obama administration’s efforts to do something about climate change.

This is the lead paragraph of an editorial today in the New York Times complaining about a senator who has not bought into their climate change nonsense. It is almost laughable that Alaska would melt away, but the idea that Alaskans would be upset if it were warmer up there is...... Amazing.

Read it all here.

Regarding the Health Care Reform Legislation

"When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty"
-Thomas Jefferson

The Kennedy Seat

The left wants the voters to speak of the contested Senate race in Massachusetts as the "Kennedy Seat". As someone said on the internet, if this were Kennedy's seat, it would be up-side down and underwater.

Don't say "I do".

From the Senate version of Health Insurance reform: Read it all here.

Take two low-wage workers who are considering marriage. In 2016, if each has an income $11,800, they would each have to pay $248 as singles for government-approved health insurance. Married, their joint income climbs to $23,600 and they would have to pay $1,109 -- a ding of more than $600 annually.

Middle-class workers could get hit even harder. According to the Congressional Budget Office, a single individual earning $35,400 -- three times the poverty rate -- would be obligated to pay $3,611 for mandatory health insurance. But two such individuals, if married, would lose their eligibility for government subsidies and their mandatory health insurance payments would rise to $13,100 -- a whopping $5,878 annual marriage penalty.

This makes you wonder what gays find so attractive about marriage.

Just Wondering

Is it possible some suicidal jihadist will one day discover that if he wants to inflict maximum damage and disruption to the airline industry, the better way to do it, rather than blow up an airliner, would be to explode a back-pack in the airport's line where travelers wait to go through security?

Just Wondering

I haven't done much research on this, but the recent news report that Gilbert Arenas, who plays basketball for the Washington Wizards, has been suspended for bringing guns to work got me to thinking about the frequency of such incidents in the black athletic community. An NFL player named Henry died recently after falling out of a pickup during a fight with his live-in girlfriend. An NFL receiver playing for the New York Giants is in prison for shooting himself in a night club a year or so ago. Steve McNair, a former NFL quarterback was shot and killed recently by his live-in girlfriend (even though he was still married). A college football player at U. Conn died after being stabbed during a fight outside a nightclub this year. A couple of years ago another NFL player was shot in his home in Florida. Some idiot NFL player who went by the name of Packman had to be thrown out of the league because of so many run-ins with the law. Michael Vick went to prison for dog fighting and killing. Mike Tyson went to jail for rape and has had several other close calls with law enforcement which might well have sent him back to prison. Then there is O.J. Simpson.

Somebody needs to wake up.

A peaceful religion

Arsonists struck three churches and a convent school early Sunday and splashed black paint on another church. This followed the firebombing of four churches on Friday and Saturday. No injuries were reported, and only one of the churches, Metro Tabernacle in the capital, Kuala Lumpur, suffered extensive damage.

The attacks, unlike anything Malaysia has seen before, have shaken a country where many Muslims are angry over a Dec. 31 court ruling that overturned a government ban on the use of the word Allah to denote the Christian God.

Though that usage is common in many countries, where Arabic- and Malay-language Bibles describe Jesus as the “son of Allah,” many Muslims here insist that the word belongs exclusively to them and say that its use by other faiths could confuse Muslim worshipers.

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi last month said Democrats will measure their success by "jobs, jobs, jobs." So far, things aren't working out. It may be, as some economists believe, that job growth will resume soon. But the bar is a bit higher than many suppose.

Each month, the U.S. adds 110,000 to 140,000 new employees to the work force. Monthly job growth, therefore, must average more than 100,000 just to stay even. And even at that pace, it'll take six years just to get back to the number of jobs the U.S. had in 2007.

Last February, after the Congress and President Obama triumphantly passed their $787 billion stimulus program, we were told it would mean 3.5 million new jobs over two years. Unless something unforeseeably dramatic happens, there's no way that will occur.

Yet there was Obama on Friday, doubling down, getting serious one more time about jobs, jobs, jobs. His answer? More stimulus funding for clean technology manufacturing.

That might be funny if people weren't hurting so much already from the administration's focus on government make-work. For the record, every program the government put in place in 2009 has failed. Yet, we keep doing the same thing, at a cost of literally trillions of dollars. This is madness to the nth power.

Read it all on IBD

Climategate

From Dana Loesch: Read the others, also.

Al Gore needs something to sustain him and his big pimpin’ life down at his ginormous, energy-sucking mansion in Tennessee. Thus the green market was born, a made-up market chock full of products like carbon credits and other Willy Wonka (but not as cool) ish items for people to buy as a way to feel good about themselves and their contribution to the planet without having to actually do anything. They don’t need a God! They need a Prius!

Celebrities Botoxed within an inch of their lives began popping up in PSA’s about global warming, about how we need to drive inefficient clown cars that run on electricity (which is still produced in coal-powered plants but hey, whatever) to save the planet. Musicians like Sheryl Crow crowed about using just a square of toilet paper to remove waste that has a greater street value than her latest album. All the hubris manifested in regulations handed down from Congress upon the automobile industry, the coal industry, et al., until finally! Cap’n Trade appeared in the House.

Cap’n Trade will rape and pillage your energy bills and even boss you around when it comes to remodeling or rehabbing a home. It’s almost like … congress has nothing better to do.

Then … there was Climategate. Russian hackers revealed emails from a British university (whose edicts on global warming are included in the U.N.’s decision-making process on climate) which showed that the scientists basically had no idea what they hell they were talking about but they did know that their original assessment of increased global temperatures was unsupported by data, thus, “hide the decline.”