Kangaroo Court?

If you bring a terrorist to trial in a U.S. court and promise that he will be convicted and executed, does that lend credibility to your claim that the world will look with favor on our system of jurisprudence or does it suggest to the world that we have a President and Attorney General who openly advocate kangaroo courts?

Jobs according to Obama

More evidence we need them in charge of our health care:

In Arizona's 9th Congressional District, 30 jobs have been saved or created with just $761,420 in federal stimulus spending. At least that's what the website set up by the Obama Administration to track the $787 billion stimulus says.

There's one problem, though: There is no 9th Congressional District in Arizona; the state has only eight Congressional Districts.

There's no 86th Congressional District in Arizona either, but the government's recovery.gov Web site says $34 million in stimulus money has been spent there.

In fact, Recovery.gov lists hundreds of millions spent and hundreds of jobs created in Congressional districts that don't exist.

In Oklahoma, for example, the site lists more than $19 million in spending -- and 15 jobs created -- on Congressional districts that don't exist. In Iowa, it shows $10.6 million spent  and 39 jobs created -- in non-existent districts.

In Connecticut's 42nd District (which also does not exist), the website claims 25 jobs created with zero stimulus dollars.

New infection?

As a former practicing microbiologist, the following caught my eye and I'll be following it.

Read the whole article here.

A cocktail of three flu viruses are reported to have mutated into a single pneumonic plague, which it is believed may be far more dangerous than swine flu. The death toll has reached 189 and more than 1 million people have been infected, most of them in the nine regions of Western Ukraine.

President of Ukraine Viktor Yushchenko has called in the World Health Organisation and a team of nine specialists are carrying out tests in Kiev and Lviv to identify the virus. Samples have been sent to London for analysis.

President Yushchenko said: “People are dying. The epidemic is killing doctors. This is absolutely inconceivable in the 21st Century.”

In a TV interview, the President added: “Unlike similar epidemics in other countries, three causes of serious viral infections came together simultaneously in Ukraine – two seasonal flus and the Californian flu

“Virologists conclude that this combination of infections may produce an even more aggressive new virus as a result of mutation.”

Disgraceful

Guess the party affiliation

From the Washington Post:

The jury of nine women and three men chosen for Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon's trial on theft charges will begin work Thursday, but first a judge will weigh new allegations involving another batch of gift cards said to have been donated by a developer not previously named in the case.

Read the whole article here and see if you can find where the good mayor was identified as a democrat.

Wrong Again

In 2005, global warming worriers warned, as they tend to do after all adverse or anomalous environmental events, that Hurricane Katrina was caused by global warming and foreshadowed an increase in the number and destructiveness of hurricanes.

As this year's Atlantic hurricane season ends, only three hurricanes have formed — half the average of the last 50 years — and none has hit the United States.

Read the entire George Will column here.

Upshot of the Kelo Decision by liberal Supreme Court

From the Wall Street Journal:

The Supreme Court's 2005 decision in Kelo v. City of New London stands as one of the worst in recent years, handing local governments carte blanche to seize private property in the name of economic development. Now, four years after that decision gave Susette Kelo's land to private developers for a project including a hotel and offices intended to enhance Pfizer Inc.'s nearby corporate facility, the pharmaceutical giant has announced it will close its research and development headquarters in New London, Connecticut.

The aftermath of Kelo is the latest example of the futility of using eminent domain as corporate welfare. While Ms. Kelo and her neighbors lost their homes, the city and the state spent some $78 million to bulldoze private property for high-end condos and other "desirable" elements. Instead, the wrecked and condemned neighborhood still stands vacant, without any of the touted tax benefits or job creation.

That's especially galling because the five Supreme Court Justices cited the development plan as a major factor in rationalizing their Kelo decision. Justice Anthony Kennedy called the plan "comprehensive," while Justice John Paul Stevens insisted that "The city has carefully formulated a development plan that it believes will provide appreciable benefits to the community, including, but not limited to, new jobs and increased tax revenue." So much for that.

If Sowell is worried we should all be

Even if this country can survive intact and unharmed after the Obama administration-- or, heaven help us, two terms of Obama-- the gullibility that led to his being elected in the first place will still be there for some other slick demagogue to come along and get the power to put the American way of life, and even our physical safety, at risk again.

Read it all here.

Liberal Speak

One must work hard to keep up with changes in the way liberals refer to their cherished notions that the world at large has rejected. When it became obvious that the worry over global warming was bunk since the world is actually getting colder, they started to worry about climate change as if the climate has ever done anything else. The latest is a liberal demand that the tax payers cough up their tax money for reproductive health care. They are certain this sounds better than subsidizing the woman's ability to abort a living baby.

Health Reform

Misplaced worries?

From the Washington Post

Law enforcement officials also faced questions about whether they had missed possible warning signs. Six months ago, investigators came across Internet postings, allegedly by Hasan, that indicated sympathy for suicide bombers and empathized with the plight of Muslim civilians killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a federal official briefed on the situation. The official, and another source, said investigators never confirmed whether Hasan was the author of the postings and did not pursue the matter.

The postings were among a handful of possible red flags that preceded Thursday's rampage, in which 13 people were killed and 38 were wounded in the deadliest mass shooting on a U.S. military installation to date. Friends and acquaintances said Hasan had been increasingly agitated over the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he reportedly said the U.S. "war on terror" was a "war on Muslims." Officials have seized Hasan's computer to determine his role in the blog posts and other writings.

Cynics are saying ( and BestView agrees) the Obama administration was too worried about Glenn Beck and the Tea Party protesters to pay attention to an islamic time bomb in the military.

Pelosi's way or jail

Today, Ranking Member of the House Ways and Means Committee Dave Camp (R-MI) released a letter from the non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) confirming that the failure to comply with the individual mandate to buy health insurance contained in the Pelosi health care bill (H.R. 3962, as amended) could land people in jail. The JCT letter makes clear that Americans who do not maintain “acceptable health insurance coverage” and who choose not to pay the bill’s new individual mandate tax (generally 2.5% of income), are subject to numerous civil and criminal penalties, including criminal fines of up to $250,000 and imprisonment of up to five years.

BestView suggests many should go to jail where you get the health care, free room and board and don't have to work a job you can't find anyway. If you make a lot of money, you should just pay the fine ($2,500 maximum) and when you get sick, get insurance which can't be denied and save some $12,500 per year.

No scientific debate

Last month, President Obama gave a somewhat chilling, if somewhat ignored, speech on climate change at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He stated that any scientific debate about the magnitude of global warming is unscrupulous, decrying “those who . . . make cynical claims that contradict the overwhelming scientific evidence when it comes to climate change, whose only purpose is to defeat or delay the change that we know is necessary.”

Then, the president talked tough, saying, “We’ll just have to deal with those people,” language familiar to anyone who knows the vagaries of Chicago politics.

More jobs according to Obama

From the Wall Street Journal online:

"President Barack Obama's economic recovery program saved 935 jobs at the Southwest Georgia Community Action Council, an impressive success story for the stimulus plan," the Associated Press reports.

Hey, great news! Just one little problem: "Only 508 people work there." The story continues:

The Georgia nonprofit's inflated job count is among persisting errors in the government's latest effort to measure the effect of the $787 billion stimulus plan despite White House promises last week that the new data would undergo an "extensive review" to root out errors discovered in an earlier report.

About two-thirds of the 14,506 jobs claimed to be saved under one federal office, the Administration for Children and Families at Health and Human Services, actually weren't saved at all, according to a review of the latest data by The Associated Press. Instead, that figure includes more than 9,300 existing employees in hundreds of local agencies who received pay raises and benefits and whose jobs weren't saved.

You read that right: Civil servants got pay raises, and the Obama administration claims credit for "saving" their jobs:

Officials defended the practice of counting raises as saved jobs.

"If I give you a raise, it is going to save a portion of your job," HHS spokesman Luis Rosero said.

Aren't you excited to think that these people may soon be in charge of your health care?

Jobs according to Obama

In an effort to justify the spending of $780 billion on a stimulus package that was supposed to create jobs the Obama boys have begun talking about how many jobs the stimulus money has "saved". So far, they are claiming some 640,000 jobs were saved. Nobody believes this, but now we are reading some things behind the numbers. What they did was send a form to everyone who got stimulus money and asked them to send back an indication of how many jobs were created or saved. One shoe store got about $900 to send some boots to the Army Corps of Engineers. They claimed this order for some 9 pairs of boots saved some 9 jobs.

Other specious examples are given in the Wall Street Journal.

This is just the start

“Gold prices on Tuesday surged to an all-time high after India’s central bank bought 200 tonnes of the precious metal, swapping dollars for bullion as the country’s finance minister warned the economies of the US and Europe had ‘collapsed’. India’s decision to exchange $6.7bn for gold equivalent to 8 per cent of world annual mine production sent the strongest signal yet that Asian countries were moving away from the US currency.”

Iran messing with Israel?

What does this mean in terms of an Israel response?

JERUSALEM — Hamas militants in Gaza have successfully test-fired an Iranian rocket able to reach Israel's largest urban center, the country's military intelligence chief said Tuesday.

Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin told parliament's foreign affairs and defense committee that the rocket could fly 37 miles (60 kilometers), and strike metropolitan Tel Aviv, Israeli media reported.

Until now, rockets fired from Gaza have reached up to 25 miles (40 kilometers), putting one-eighth of Israel's population within rocket range.

Could America go Broke?

Of course. Read the scenario here.

Kerry and Graham

If you vote in South Carolina you already know that your Senator Graham is best known for throwing in with the liberals to support legislation that just boggles your mind. Now he is in bed with John Kerry to support the cap and trade energy taxes which are too extreme for even this dem controlled Senate. Read it here.

Newt advice vs. Palin advice

Newt Gingrich was upset with those of us who agreed with Sarah Palin and prefer voting for a conservative independent than a liberal republican. We are doomed to the wilderness unless we elect anyone who calls themselves a Republican according to Newt. Now that Dede Scozzafava has dropped out of the race for Congress and endorsed the Democrat in the race ( who believes in the same liberal nonsense that she does ) we are left with these comments:

SCOZZAFAVA says: "I have been a Republican my entire life, I will be a Republican until I die. I believe in the Republican party that stands for less government interference in the lives of individuals. I believe in self-sufficiency versus government dependence. I believe in lower taxes, less government regulation, I believe in less government spending."