February 8, 2010
ObaMarx
Posted by The MaryHunter at 6:39 PM | Comments (17)
No, not that Marx. Obama is actually channeling Groucho, as noted by Jihad Kitty and Granny Jan.
Graucho MarxB. Hussein Obama
Buy an Audi or Else
Posted by Van Helsing at 6:06 PM | Comments (7)
Despite the annual hype, yesterday's Super Bowl ads were mostly lame yet again. But at least this one offered a precautionary glimpse of our near future:
It's reassuring to know that if we drive the car we're told to drive, the authorities won't arrest us for existing — just yet.
On tips from Shayne and Jimbo.
The Obama Touch Continues
Posted by Van Helsing at 2:22 PM | Comments (18)
I doubt Peyton Manning appreciates Obama having picked the Colts to win.
Compliments of RMartin.
Open Thread
Posted by Van Helsing at 1:52 PM | Comments (18)
Democrat-Led Congress Losing Support among Democrats
Posted by The MaryHunter at 1:05 PM | Comments (8)
Gallup's latest numbers on congressional approval (because we love polls):
PRINCETON, NJ -- Congress' job approval rating from Americans fell six points in the past month, from 24% to 18% -- the lowest reading in more than a year. Nearly 8 in 10 (78%) now disapprove.
This decline in congressional approval is largely explained by a sharp drop in approval among rank-and-file Democrats, from 45% in January to 30% today. The slight changes in approval among Republicans and independents are not statistically significant.
In a related finding, among ideological groups, approval of Congress is down mainly among liberals (from 40% in January to 24% today). Support from moderates was already fairly low, at 28%, and is now 21%. There has been no change in approval among conservatives, at 14%.
Just how many of the Democrats/liberals who now despise the Democrat-led congress do so because they haven't gotten enough hand-outs in the form of ObamaCare and more Cash-for-Clunkers-type programs isn't clear from the polling. Or, maybe it's just another dimension of buyer's remorse, moving beyond Obama to focus on Capitol Hill.
Bureaucrats Live Large as Collapse Impends
Posted by Van Helsing at 1:01 PM | Comments (7)
Here's another indication as to just where all the money is going as our liberal kakistocracy spends us into inevitable economic collapse:
The number of federal workers earning six-figure salaries has exploded during the recession, according to a USA TODAY analysis of federal salary data.
Federal employees making salaries of $100,000 or more jumped from 14% to 19% of civil servants during the recession's first 18 months — and that's before overtime pay and bonuses are counted.
Federal workers are enjoying an extraordinary boom time — in pay and hiring — during a recession that has cost 7.3 million jobs [and that was back in early December] in the private sector.
That was back in December. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, payroll employment has now fallen by 8.4 million since the economic crisis Obama has been milking began.
Not outraged yet? Try this:
When the recession started, the Transportation Department had only one person earning a salary of $170,000 or more. Eighteen months later, 1,690 employees had salaries above $170,000.
The trend to six-figure salaries is occurring throughout the federal government, in agencies big and small, high-tech and low-tech. The primary cause: substantial pay raises and new salary rules. …
The growth in six-figure salaries has pushed the average federal worker's pay to $71,206, compared with $40,331 in the private sector.
It won't stop until we stop it — or until the entire house of cards collapses like Zimbabwe.
Mark Stein comments on our rulers' unsustainable spending:
Testifying to the House Budget Committee, Director Elmendorf attempted to pull back from the wilder shores of "unsustainable": "I think most observers expect that the government will act, that the unsustainability will be resolved through action, not through witnessing some collapse down the road," he said. "If literally nothing is done, then eventually something very, very bad happens. But I think the widespread view is that you and your colleagues will take action."
Dream on, you kinky fantasist. The one thing that can be guaranteed is that a political class led by Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, a handful of reach-across-the-aisle Republican accommodationists, and an economically illiterate narcissist in the Oval Office is never going to rein in unsustainable spending in any meaningful sense. That leaves Director Elmendorf's alternative scenario. What was it again? Oh, yeah: "Some collapse down the road." …
It's not the "debt" or the "deficit," it's the spending. And the only way to reduce that is with fewer government agencies, fewer government programs, fewer government employees, lower government salaries.
Instead, all four are rocketing up: We are incentivizing unsustainability, and, when it comes to "some collapse down the road," you'll be surprised how short that road is.
If we don't get the keys to the liquor cabinet away from our drunken kakistocracy, it will literally destroy America within the next decade.
On tips from Edward and Lyle. Hat tip: Death by 1000 Paper Cuts.
Crib Notes
Posted by Van Helsing at 11:50 AM | Comments (39)
Maybe Comrade Obama is a stuttering dunce without his teleprompter, but — falling back once again on the bogus equivalency liberals apply to every conceivable situation — HuffPo observes that Sarah Palin had notes written on her palm for her uplifting speech at the Tea Party Convention.
In the future, moonbats won't be so quick to denounce crib notes, in light of these revealing pictures:
Via iOwnTheWorld.com. On tips from TED.
Penn State Whitewashes Michael Mann
Posted by Van Helsing at 11:18 AM | Comments (13)
As predicted, Penn State's investigation into con man Michael Mann — who has brought the university a fortune in taxpayer money with his provably false efforts to prop up the global warming hoax — has been nothing but a whitewash.
Penn State ended a two-month probe into the work of Michael Mann, a top climate scientist whose "hockey stick" graph of climbing world temperature helped galvanize support for the climate change movement, on Wednesday.
The probe stemmed from the release of thousands of hacked e-mails from a server at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England that showed the internal debate and, some say, the manipulation of data, to support the scientific underpinnings of the case for global, man-made warming of the planet. Mann's e-mails were among those released and critics charged that he used "tricks" to make his data match studies that confirmed warming trends.
A three-person board of inquiry cleared Mann of three of four charges brought by the university that he falsified or tried to destroy data, and recommended further study on the fourth charge that his methods "deviated from accepted practices" of the scientific community.
They wrote in their report that "that there exists no credible evidence that Dr. Mann had ever engaged in, or participated in, directly or indirectly, any actions with intent to delete, conceal or otherwise destroy e-mails, information and/or data."
Does this mean the Nittany Liar isn't a crook after all? Hardly.
But the findings and, more importantly, the focus have set off a wave of criticism accusing the university panel of failing to interview key people, neglecting to conduct more than a cursory review of allegations and structuring the inquiry so that the outcome — exoneration — was a foregone conclusion.
Here's why even a pig like Mann could be predicted to come up smelling like roses, according to the educrats:
Mann, according to published reports, has gotten a grant almost $550,000 in stimulus money to study climate change and is part of a nearly $2 million grant to Penn State to study the impact of climate change on various diseases.
Liberal ideology is doing to science what it does to everything else it touches: rotting it into a corrupt lie.
On a tip from Oiao.
US Taxpayer Money Bestowed Upon Hamas Terrorists
Posted by Van Helsing at 10:47 AM | Comments (12)
As Obama et al. spend their way through our country's future, here's an example of where the money is going:
The United States announced on Thursday that it will donate $40 million to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Arabs in the Palestinian Authority-assigned areas, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria who fled when Israel was established in 1948. About a quarter of the package is supposed to be designated for food and the creation of jobs. The rest is for maintaining basic services provided by the agency.
The American funding comes despite a report commissioned by the European parliament, which showed that Hamas terrorists have been chosen by the agency's labor union to oversee its Gaza facilities, which was part of a Canadian decision last month to stop its UNRWA funding.
Apparently payback continues for the enthusiastic support Hamas offered Obama before his catastrophic election. Not to worry, no doubt most of the Americans killed by Hamas deserved it for supporting the racist state of Israel.
On a tip from Wiggins.
Still More IPCC Junk Science Passing as "Settled Science"
Posted by The MaryHunter at 10:09 AM | Comments (5)
New factual errors were revealed yesterday in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007 landmark "scientific" report. The latest crop, published in the Telegraph, include:
* The publication of inaccurate data on the potential of wave power to produce electricity around the world, which was wrongly attributed to the website of a commercial wave-energy company.
* Claims based on information in press releases and newsletters.
* New examples of statements based on student dissertations, two of which were unpublished.
* More claims which were based on reports produced by environmental pressure groups.
* The IPCC also made use of a report by US conservation group Defenders of Wildlife to state that salmon in US streams have been affected by rising temperatures. The panel has already come under fire for using information in reports by conservation charity the WWF.
* Estimates of carbon-dioxide emissions from nuclear power stations and claims that suggested they were cheaper than coal or gas power stations were also taken from the website of the World Nuclear Association, rather than using independent scientific calculations.
If this wasn't such a serious matter affecting the economies of the industrialized world and the lives of countless poor in developing countries, it would be gut-busting hysterical. But don't expect Michael Moore to make a documentary about this hoax anytime soon -- unless, of course, the socialist hypocrite could get another tax write-off for it.
When will the lies in the name of global warming/climate change end? And how will it affect Al Gore's and Rajendra Pachauri's net worth? Inquiring minds want to know.
Hat tip: Hot Air, on a chilly tip from J.
Congress May Pull Us Back From Brink of Ecototalitarianism
Posted by Van Helsing at 9:10 AM | Comments (11)
With the insane ruling that the harmless carbon dioxide humans generate with every activity is a pollutant and therefore subject to control by the leftists running the EPA, the Supreme Court has brought us to the edge of a totalitarianism unprecedented in human history. If the EPA is given time to implement the authority it has already been granted, there is absolutely nothing it cannot proscribe, literally including breathing. Fortunately, alarmed by the rising tide of public outrage against Obama's radical agenda, even some Democrats are pulling back from the abyss.
The Obama Administration has been moving full-speed ahead on anticarbon regulation, never mind waiting for Congress to pass a bill. But now opposition is building among senior Democrats, with two powerful committee Chairmen introducing a bill last week to bar the Environmental Protection Agency from declaring that carbon is a dangerous pollutant.
EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson is busy writing new rules that would let her drive a tax-and-regulation bulldozer through the U.S. economy under laws never meant to apply to greenhouse gases. Ms. Jackson is expected to issue new anticarbon regulations for cars and trucks next month before moving on to power plants and other industries.
This is all too much for Missouri's Ike Skelton and Minnesota's Collin Peterson, the Chairmen of the House Armed Services and Agriculture Committees, respectively. Along with Missouri Republican Jo Ann Emerson, they are pushing a two-page bill that would amend the Clean Air Act to restore Congress's original intent and strip CO2 and other greenhouse gases from the statutory language.
The stakes couldn't be higher. With Obama's encouragement, the EPA is poised to attach itself to every aspect of our lives like a Facehugger from the movie Alien. Liberty wouldn't be the only casualty; the primary objective is to impose an economic depression, recreating the Democrat heyday of the 1930s.
But despite Hopey Change, some want this to remain a democracy, not an oligarchy run by shadowy watermelons in Priuses.
"If Congress doesn't do something soon, the EPA is going to cram these regulations through all on their own," Mr. Peterson said. "I have no confidence that EPA can regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act without severe harm to all taxpayers."
Added Mr. Skelton: "Simply put, we cannot tolerate turning over the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions to unelected bureaucrats at EPA. America's energy and environmental policies should be set by Congress."
Maybe some relatively moderate Dems who disgraced themselves by climbing into bed with the Marxist in the White House will use this issue to redeem themselves.
The Skelton-Peterson-Emerson bill follows a similar effort by North Dakota Democrat Earl Pomeroy, not to mention Alaska Republican Lisa Murkowski's coming "disapproval resolution" in the Senate that has the support of Democrats Mary Landrieu, Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln.
Or maybe, being Democrats, they can only be right by accident.
Skelton and Peterson are doing the right thing for the wrong reason — specifically, to defend the ethanol industry. Their bill includes provisions that would expand the definition of renewable fuels and make it easier for corn ethanol and soy biodiesel to qualify for federal tax credits. This is despite the growing shelf of studies that common crop-based fuels increase carbon emissions because of land-use changes and deforestation.
The ethanol boondoggle is a colossal waste of taxpayer money, but as the WSJ notes,
If the power of farm-state politicians ends up stopping the EPA's global-warming power grab, it would be the first good thing ethanol has done for the country.
Before Big Government was allowed to metastasize out of control, the path forward was determined by what made economic sense, rather than by corrupt bureaucrats with zero interest in our well-being.
On a tip from Varla.
What, More Unfunded Mandates?
Posted by The MaryHunter at 8:00 AM | Comments (6)
We all know by now that the federal workforce is ballooning as the private-sector workforce is shrinking -- even during the recession. This shift to government workers also exacerbates yet another unfunded mandate our nation is saddled with:
A report by Robert Novy-Marx and Joshua D. Rauh found that government pension funds are unfunded by about $3.2 trillion. That's an extra $27,000 that each American household will need to pony up in the decades ahead.
The price tag is so large because more than 80 percent of government workers are still eligible for old- fashioned defined-benefit retirement programs. State and local governments are making massive spending promises, and taxpayers will have to pick up the tab. By contrast, such pension funds are available to just 20 percent of private-sector workers.
Add that to the multi-trillion dollars in unfunded mandates for Medicare and Social Security, plus whatever may still happen with ObamaCare, and think seriously about encouraging young Jane and John to start working right now. Ultimately they will have to pay someone else's medical care and retirement. In fact, don't be surprised if we see the Obama administration propose new child labor laws to lower the legal working age -- cloaked, of course, as some "Empower the Youth" initiative. More warm bodies means more tax money for the older generations.
America to Washington: What Would the Founders Say?
Posted by The MaryHunter at 7:30 AM | Comments (9)
The fourth significant global warming event this season has put a 2-foot damper on Washington D.C. (near to which your humble correspondent resides). In fact, there is a chance that somewhat less "work" will be done by the Federal Government -- meaning, somewhat less insult may be inflicted upon our nation, the Constitution, and the memory of its Founding Fathers. At least, that's how the rest of America will see it:
An overwhelming majority of American voters agree on at least one thing -- the Founding Fathers would be unhappy with the way things are going in Washington these days. So says a whopping 84 percent of voters, including a large majorities of Democrats (77 percent), Republicans (92 percent) and independents (81 percent).
Now, maybe if we can encourage Al Gore to reside here and stimulate some Gore Effect storms. I'd gladly shovel until November 2010, if it kept the current Congress immobilized.
February 7, 2010
Open Thread
Posted by Van Helsing at 11:40 AM | Comments (121)
Obama Gaffathon
Posted by Van Helsing at 10:51 AM | Comments (37)
Not much gets read off the Moonbat Messiah's teleprompter that isn't easy to debunk.
Without his teleprompter, Chairman Zero doesn't tell as many lies … or form as many complete sentences:
On tips from J. Dedicated to Lao.
February 6, 2010
Will Spew Moonbattery for Food
Posted by Van Helsing at 4:22 PM | Comments (20)
These are getting to be tough times for a certain yapping Chihuahua on the liberal media's leftmost lunatic fringe.
Compliments of Air2air.
ObamaCare Is Down but by No Means Out
Posted by The MaryHunter at 1:45 PM | Comments (27)
Regardless of the loud-and-clear message sent by America, and especially by Massachusetts, to President Obama and Congress, don't doubt for a minute that the Democrats will do everything they can to resurrect and pass ObamaCare before next November. Their Holy Grail: a socialized, government-run health care system.
To remind, here are a few good reasons why this effort must be unequivocally stopped, courtesy of Conservatives for Patients' Rights.
Olbermann Reveals Conspiracy Against Himself
Posted by Van Helsing at 11:13 AM | Comments (28)
Did you think MSNBC's amazing talking cockroach Keith Olbermann's ratings were tanking as people figure out that the Marxist community activist he promotes is destroying the country? If so, you've been duped by an elaborate conspiracy involving the New York Post, Daily Finance, and even the liberal Los Angeles Times, as Doberman himself reveals:
Queef is bent out of shape about this:
Olbermann's network president, Phil Griffin, is publicly praising him, always an ominous sign in television. While referring to his host almost in the past tense. "Keith has been our tentpole," Griffin says, adding later, "I'm pleased with where we are."
Where they are, as Jeff Bercovici points out over at Daily Finance, is way behind the big boys over at Fox News, Bill O'Reilly and gang. In fact, Keith is so far behind Bill, he can't even make out the state of the license plate, let alone the numbers. Bercovici thinks Americans may be outgrowing Olbermann's schtick.
In the most desirable TV demographic of 25-54, which Keith will soon outgrow himself, "Countdown" lost 44% of its audience from the beginning of President Obama's term until this year.
But now we know it's all part of the conspiracy against America's least lovable yapping Chihuahua. This must be fake too:
We'll miss you Keith. Or at least, we'll miss laughing at you.
Hat tip: The DC. On a tip from Air2air.
Separated at Birth?
Posted by Van Helsing at 10:50 AM | Comments (28)
A little Saturday creature feature:
Compliments of Cons.underground.
Ronaldus on the Uncommon Man
Posted by The MaryHunter at 6:50 AM | Comments (25)
Adapted from Reagan, In His Own Hand: The Writings of Ronald Reagan that Reveal His Revolutionary Vision for America:
Right now ... I'm looking down on a busy city at rush hour. The streets below are twin ribbons of sparkling red and white.
I wonder about the people in those cars, who they are, what they do, what they are thinking about as they head for the warmth of home and family. Come to think of it, I've met them - oh, maybe not those particular individuals, but still I feel I know them. Some of our social planners refer to them as "the masses" which only proves they don't know them. I've been privileged to meet people all over this land in the special kind of way you meet them when you are campaigning. They are not "the masses," or as the elitists would have it - "the common man." They are very uncommon. Individuals each with his or her own hopes and dreams, plans and problems, and the kind of quiet courage that makes this whole country run better than just about any other place on earth.
January 27, 1978
Happy Birthday, President Reagan.
