Monday, October 31, 2011

The Invisible Man

Let's hope we can't find him in the White House in 2013.
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Sunday, October 30, 2011

Quote of the Day: Poetic Justice (with Irony Update)

Reversing global warming at Zuccotti Park (h/t Woman Honor Thyself)

They really should have known that the moment they planned an unhinged event such as Climate Justice Day, it would snow.
~William Teach at Pirates Cove







Here's the IRONY UPDATE courtesy the National Weather Service via Watts Up With That?:


Three times the total snowfall for the entire month since at least 1869 falling on Zuccotti Park on Climate Justice Day does count as irony, doesn't it?

Heh, heh, heh.
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His Eye Is On the Sparrow -- Mahalia Jackson

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Friday, October 28, 2011

Halloween Nightmare: White & Wild Weather for the Northeast

Where the wild winds will blow
From AccuWeather:
A storm set to dump heavy, wet snow on millions of people in the Northeast will also scream with high winds in coastal and some inland areas this weekend.

While far from the worst windstorm ever, this screamer will knock out power, down trees and cause damage in New England, New York, New Jersey, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia....
That's no joke: One reason that trees have evolved to lose their leaves in the winter is to reduce their surface area to protect them from the weight of snow. Snow settling on tree leaves enormously increases the weight of trees, causing branches and tree trunks to break and shallow-rooted trees to topple.
Even in areas that receive little or no snow, the force of the wind on fully leafed trees standing in saturated soil will lead to falling timber. 
This could end up being worse than Irene in terms of downed trees and power outages, because winds will be stronger over a larger area.

Trees and limbs can crash down on power lines, houses, vehicles and passing pedestrians. Avoid wooded areas and tree-lined streets during this storm.
Sadly, at the very least, this storm will be a trial for people in affected areas, most especially those barely beginning to recover from recent severe flooding.

And then, as Ace has sagely noted, in certain East Coast "occupation zones," such as Zuccotti Park, it "looks like some faith in Global Warming™ is about to be tested." (H/t: Fishersville Mike) Reality is a hard teacher.
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Richmond ♥ Occupiers, Faces $$$ Liability

We followed the rules, we followed the law, we got all the permits, we paid all the fees, we had to jump through all the hoops that they asked us to.
                                         ~Colleen Owens, spokeswoman, Richmond TEA Party


Richmond Tea Party
Capitalism or Anarchy? The Occupy movement--and its supporters upstairs in the Democrat Party--have really been shoving that question in the faces of local government.

Now one Tea Party group is shoving back, politely and within the law, of course.

From the PJ Tatler, via The Camp of the Saints.
Like other Tea Party groups, the Richmond (VA) Tea Party has played by the rules. They paid permit fees to hold their rallies, they paid for the extra police and portajohns that such rallies demand. In all, they’ve paid $10,000 for their rallies to the local government.
Colleen Owens, spokeswoman for the Richmond TEA Party, has pointed out, "the Occupy Richmond protesters are not being asked to pay for the park they are camped out in, nor are they paying for police or portable toilets. Not only that, the Occupy protesters reportedly have not paid for permits nor are they being required to pay for emergency personnel."

"If that’s how they’re going to run the city," Owens says, "then they owe us our fees back."

So the Richmond TEA Party plans to invoice the City of Richmond for the $10,000 they shelled out to conduct their demonstrations according to the law.

Good move, Richmond Tea Party! This kind of action puts the lie to local government claims that they don't exert huge discretionary power when deciding who must obey the law--and who doesn't need to bother.

"It’s not fair," said Owens, "the City of Richmond’s picking and choosing whose First Amendment rights trump someone else’s First Amendment rights." Nor is it fair that the TEA Party is being "punished for following the law."

So, how will the City of Richmond respond?

Bruce W. Tyler, a Richmond City Councilman, had some thoughts on the subject. "I guess we'll be writing a check to the tea party people. . . . You can't treat one group different from the other. It's unfair."
For the tea party to request the "same consideration, I believe, is fair and just," Tyler added. "We've now hit the slippery slope that we never should have found ourselves on."

Tyler went on to say that by not enforcing city ordinances, Richmond is "clearly advocating what's going on down there." 
Occupy Richmond
The Tea Party also purchased a required $1 million insurance policy, but--you guessed it--Occupy Richmond did not. Tyler has gotten that particular message loud and clear:
[B]y not enforcing ordinances already in place, the city is "clearly advocating what's going on down there" and putting itself in a position of potential liability if one of the protesters gets injured or worse, Tyler said.
At least one person already has been injured at the plaza. 
Meanwhile, Richmond's mayor's office remains quiet as the Mummy's tomb, waiting for the Richmond Tea Party's invoice for $10,000 to arrive in the mail--and, no doubt, waiting for a return call from the city attorney.
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Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Three #OWS Undead Vie for Darwin Award

Winners of the tongue-in-cheek Darwin Awards "eliminate themselves from the human gene pool in an extraordinarily idiotic manner, thereby improving our species' chances of long-term survival."

The three #OWStreeters featured in this short video seem natural candidates for future Darwin Awards, possibly earned after they emigrate to North Korea to enjoy their new jobs and great benefit packages.

There is a catch, though. According to Darwin Award rules, candidates are disqualified if "innocent bystanders," who might have contributed positively to the gene pool, are killed in the process. That rule disqualifies every Commie-lovin' #Occupier. If there's any single outstanding feature shared by communist governments worldwide, it is the production of millions upon millions of innocent bystanders.


H/t RedState via Common Cents
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Monday, October 24, 2011

What Ever Happened to Shame?



And, while I'm on the subject, what ever happened to disapproval?

The idiot carrying this sign ought to be standing in an empty space, knowing that he or she is completely alone and unsupported.

Instead, this idiot gets to share membership in a group from which he or she feels some level of approval and partnership.

The #OWS group that this idiot has joined is so desperate for membership that they will accept anyone, no matter how demented.

Shame on you, #OWS. Shame on you.










 
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Sunday, October 23, 2011

No Tears in Heaven -- Skeeter Davis

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Friday, October 21, 2011

Fri. Flashback: Sending Your Green $$$ to Finland


Waaay back in June of 2009, Barack Hussein Obama made the following statement:
I want to see our companies remain the most competitive in the world. But the way to make sure that happens is not to reward our companies for moving jobs off our shores . . . .
Employed workers in Uusikaupunki, Finland
Obama made that statement four months before his administration loaned half a billion hard-earned American dollars to Fisker Automotive, a start-up "green" car manufacturer, so that Fisker could build electric cars in Uusikaupunki, Finland, which apparently is the Obama administration's idea of the place to be if you want a job subsidized by American taxpayers.

Not to worry, though. Just like some animals are more equal than other animals, some companies are more equal than other companies.

Fisker has cultivated friends--really, really "equal" friends. Former vice president Al Gore has signed on as one of Fisker's partners. Two more of Fisker's biggest fans are Senators Nancy Pelosi and Diane Feinstein. Then there's Joe (if you're so smart why ain't you rich?) Biden, who has a little something cooking with Fisker in his home state of Delaware. And Fisker has been able to count on our green-jobs-lovin' president, Barack Obama.

Don't be concerned that Fisker isn't good for the money. No. No. No. No. No.

Leonardo DiCaprio hops into his very own $100,000 Karma.
Fisker is only just a little "more than a year behind" rolling out its first vehicle, which will cost $100 grand, a price that is sure to make it a best seller in Hollywood.

Even though you'd be tempted to think that, as a start-up, Fisker has very little experience compared to other car manufacturers, the truth is it that has already built 40 of its groovy electric cars. And two people actually own one. One of them is a movie star. That's worth half a billion taxpayer bucks, surely.

Did I mention the name of Fisker's cute little buggy? 

It's called the Karma.

In other words, What goes around, comes around.

That's a little piece of advice that the Fisker and its best buddies might want to keep in mind as the American people become more and more aware of where this Democrat administration is squandering their hard-earned cash and the debt of America's children and grandchildren.
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Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Not #OWS: The Silent Marches in Communist Cuba

Compare the marches of the Ladies in White to #OWS. These women walk in silence on Havana's Fifth Avenue to draw attention to the plight of political prisoners in Cuba. Their marches take place on Sundays after Mass at the Church of Saint Rita, who is venerated as the patron saint of desperate, seemingly impossible causes. Many of the Ladies are wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters of the 75 men imprisoned in 2003 for writing or speaking about the lack of basic rights in Cuba. The Ladies dress in white and carry gladiolas to signal the purity of their intentions.

Despite their silence, the Ladies in White suffer ongoing insults, beatings, and de facto house arrest by pro-Communist mobs supporting the Cuban government. To torment them into submission, the Communist government moved their men to prisons far from their homes.

Last Friday, a founder and leader of the Ladies in White, Laura Pollán, died in a Cuban hospital. She was 63 years old and a high school teacher. Eight years ago, her journalist husband, Héctor Maseda, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for "the sole crime of speaking his mind about the lack of basic human rights on the island."

In 2005, the European Parliament honored Pollán with the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, an award named after the Soviet scientist and dissident, Andrei Sakharov, who compared the Soviet version of communism to a cancer cell. Pollán was not allowed to leave Cuba to accept the award, but the international attention offered the Ladies in White a small measure of protection.

Shortly before her death, Pollán's husband and many of the other imprisoned dissidents imprisoned in 2003 were released, but many dissidents remained unjustly imprisoned. After Maseda's release, Pollán kept on marching, dressed in white, flower in hand.

The hospital in which Laura Pollán spent her last hours was not the clean, orderly treatment center for elites featured in Michael Moore's movie, Sicko, which has become an oft-quoted chapter of the Liberal gospel. Moore's so-called "documentary" dishonestly portrays healthcare in Cuba as greatly superior to that in the U.S., in contrast to many disturbing videos smuggled out of Cuba at great risk that reveal the true state of Cuban healthcare available to non-elites.

After Pollán's death, police surrounded her Havana neighborhood to prevent members and supporters of the Ladies in White from meeting at her home. Police blocked off the street on which she lived and detained twenty people.

That didn't stop 60 very brave Ladies in White from marching on Sunday, each carrying a single gladiola stem. This time they were joined by men mourning the loss of a heroic fighter against communist repression.

 

Members of dissident group "Ladies in White" march in front of Santa Rita church in Havana, Cuba, Sunday Oct. 16, 2011. Cuba's Ladies in White have vowed to keep protesting against the island's communist-run government despite the death of their founder and spiritual leader, Laura Pollan, but the loss presents new challenges for a dissident group already struggling to be visible and influential among islanders.
Pollán's mourners marching past St. Rita's Church
Can you hear the sounds of silence in Havana, #OWS?
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Monday, October 17, 2011

Best View Yet of the Occupiers, Denver Issue

Master photo-journalist El Marco has published another of his incisive not-to-be-missed photo-essays, this one entitled: "Neo-Cannibals, Deadbeats, Dopers and Democrats Occupy Denver."

A taste:
The crowd, which later distilled into a hot-headed mob battling police, included an odd mixture of leftists dominated by organized communist, trade union and anarchist groups, as well as a large presence of Ron Paul libertarians. Tie-dyed psychedelic geezers from the ’60s tottered about amongst more recent generations of drug-users, and the smell of medical marijuana mingled in the air with the sounds of the zombie-like chanting made famous by the Occupy Wall Street leftists in New York.


An Occupy Denver community organizer leads the bizarre chanting ritual. Never have I seen anything that comes as close to a mind-control exercise in a free society. The orange tape insignia on this woman’s arm indicates that she is a leader. I was told that any questions I had could be addressed to someone with this type of insignia. When I first saw this militant-looking marking, it reminded me of  the



Charlie Chaplin, complete with fist pumping, comically portrays a famous mid-20th century socialist dictator speaking out against Jewish bankers and capitalists in general.

Make sure you see the rest here.
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Sunday, October 16, 2011

Guess Who Just Got a Big Loan from Obama? Hint: OWS . . .

None other than the owners of Zuccotti Park, the current NYC digs of Occupy Wall Street, where the "occupiers," according to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, are welcome to stay as long as they want, eating food that "just appears."

MAD is correct: the occupiers think they can spell. They even think they can count. As products of a university system informed by socialism, what they mostly can do is spout anarcho-commie slogans. Otherwise, they would have to face the inconvenient truth that their universities need capitalism to survive.
H/t: It Don't Make Sense
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How Beautiful Heaven Must Be -- Skeeter Davis


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Saturday, October 15, 2011

Friday Document Drop: Too Big to Fail . . .


Yesterday, Obama managed to pull himself away from the basketball court long enough to inform Congress, by letter, that he has decided to send U.S. troops to four African nations. In point of fact, some American warriors already have arrived in Uganda. U.S. troops will soon be arriving in South Sudan, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Obama says they were sent to "advise" the Africans how to combat one of the most wicked terrorist groups on the planet, not do the fighting themselves, unless they are attacked.  

We also got to learn that Obama is dropping a key component of Obamacare -- a long-term care insurance plan called CLASS (Community Living Assistance Services and Supports). The idea of the program was for people to pay insurance payments and collect benefits if they became disabled.

According to Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius:
Despite our best analytical efforts, I do not see a viable path forward for CLASS implementation at this time.
Excuse me while I roll on the floor laughing. Does Sebelius actually think America is going to believe that the Obamaniacs actually analyzed the Obamacare design?



I doubt that even OWS believes that. Stilton Jarlsberg has deconstructed the complex logical system used by the Obamaniacs to "analyze" the CLASS program (a particular pet project of Ted Kennedy):
[I}t turns out that if EVERY American worker (healthy or sick) had signed up for the plan, it still wouldn't have had enough participants to break even. Apparently, the government never actually stopped to think about how many people actually exist. . . 
Keep in mind, this is the same braintrust that cobbled together all of the other numbers which supposedly show that Obamacare can work.
This is a case of closing the barn door after a pony named Tragic Consequences has raced through all 57 states leaving behind a steaming trail of toxic road apples.
[I]f Obamacare collapses (as it is predicted to) after eliminating private health insurance companies, it will be impossible for our nation's healthcare system to ever recover.


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Wednesday, October 12, 2011

It's Time for Hazmat Suits on Wall Street: What Would Jane Addams Say? (UPDATED)

Trust-fund baby Jane Addams
cleaned up and built up.


Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to be always a child. If no use is made of the labors of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge.
                                                             ~Marcus Tullius Cicero
 
Over at her Corner, Adrienne has published links to on-the-scene reports, photos, and videos of the public health disaster that the Wall Street "occupation" in New York City has become. One look makes one wonder why men in hazmat suits have not yet been called in. Eventually, they will be.

If Zuccotti Square were a foreign country, the U.S. would require entering visitors to first receive inoculations against a variety of diseases. If Zuccotti Square were a detention facility for terrorists, the International Red Cross would be demanding entry and the U.N. would be holding emergency hearings.

In their haste to "give" (as Commie pot stirrer, Van Jones, has ecstatically exhorted the occupiers to redefine the word "take"), these useful idiots have, sadly, displayed an ignorance of the history of the "social justice" movement that would cause their peace-lovin' progressive forebears to disown them.

Back in the day, proponents of "social justice" like Chicago's Jane Addams didn't produce squalor, they fought it. This basic goal is one that their history-scorning, Wall Street-occupying heirs in the progressive "social justice" movement have utterly abandoned.

Addams and others like her fought battles getting fat ward bosses to institute such simple measures as regular garbage pickup and proper sewage disposal to rid neighborhoods of infestations of rats, mice, flies, and other disease-carrying pests.

Addams's generation of progressives fought additional battles to get people access to plenty of clean water because, then, as now, water and soap were humankind's chief weapons against the torments of lice, scabies, fleas, tapeworms, ringworm, and Nature's limitless host of infectious diseases.

Wall Street's old park used to get power washed every evening to clean away each day's gunk. Now that it's been taken over by progressives, it has become a breeding ground for all things unclean. 

Today's arrogant progressive "givers" think they have outgrown the need for such basic lessons of survival as their progressive ancestors taught in their lead-painted--but quaintly clean-swept and scrubbed--settlement houses like Jane Addams's Hull House.

Planning a month-long slumber party for, say, 3,000 people, Tweeter? How to dispose of their bodily wastes is not a virtual problem. And neither is how you are going to get all those biodegradable pizza boxes, compostable plates, and plant-starch cutlery to an actual composting facility for real-life rotting.

The fact that the enfant terrible supporters of Occupy Wall Street never stopped to consider such basic lessons of survival (never mind good manners) should give them pause for thought.

It is time the occupiers asked themselves, "What else have we forgotten?"

Update: 

Linked By Brian J. Dunn at The Dignified Rant, who suggests that the occupiers "live with the consequences of their disgusting personal hygiene and stewardship of their local environment." 

That's no problem for the occupiers, it seems, because even now, they are celebrating having turned down the park owners' generous offer to clean up after them (as a stand-in for Big Mommy) and then let them return to "spreading the filth around." 

Go to the Rant to watch Monty Python's hilarious commentary on the subject. Thank you Brian.

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Monday, October 10, 2011

A Laugh a Minute: #OWSPickUpLines

Occupy Wall Street Pick-up Lines. There's always time for a little fun:
  •  I must have died and gone to heaven, because I'm talking to Engels. (TheRightDuff)
  • Want some granola from the communal hubcap? (DjWeiderman)
  • You must be other people's money. Because I just can't take my eyes off of you! (proteinwisdom)
And then, there's:
  • You remind me of a female Janeane Garafelo (DonnaBonnell)
Added: And this:
  • What time do you get off not working?
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Green Recycling Company Goes Bankrupt on Taxpayers' $$$ -- Twice!

And they were pretty efficient about it too, the second time around: Genesis Poly Recycling went bankrupt only two months after making millions of greenbacks on that old 99% sacred cow: green technology.

But then, practice makes perfect.

In 2008, the first incarnation of Genesis Poly Recycling, originally called AGSI Recycling, collected a mere $57,000 from the City of Mankato, Minnesota, then promptly dumped 8 million pounds of unrecycled plastic they had collected into a landfill.

They must have hit the "that was easy" button after that little stunt because, only 2 years later, with the same idea and the same investors, but a considerably sexier name, the same company collected slightly more cash from taxpayers before going bankrupt:
  • $5,100,000 in unrepaid loans;
  • $500,000 in equipment;
  • an $850,000 building.
In the process, these sure-footed paperwork pushers managed to hit up for cash not only Obama's Stimulus Stash, but also the Department of Agriculture, the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, and the City of Mankato, Minnesota.

Wow, recycling one $57,000 dumb idea into a $6.5 million dumb idea!

Wall Street Occupiers take note: You might want to think twice before dismantling green capitalism. There might be something in it for you.
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Sunday, October 9, 2011

People Get Ready -- The Impressions


Written by the great Curtis Mayfield, and sung by him and fellow members of The Impressions:
People get ready, there's a train a comin'
You don't need no baggage, you just get on board
All you need is faith to hear the diesels hummin'
Don't need no ticket, you just thank the Lord

People get ready for the train to Jordan
It's picking up passengers from coast to coast
Faith is the key, open the doors and board 'em
There's hope for all among those loved the most.

There ain't no room for the hopeless sinner
Who would hurt all mankind just to save his own
Have pity on those whose chances grow thinner
For there's no hiding place against the Kingdom's throne

So people get ready, there's a train a comin'
You don't need no baggage, you just get on board
All you need is faith to hear the diesels hummin'
Don't need no ticket, you just thank the Lord
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Saturday, October 8, 2011

Vacation Resort for Wall Street Occupiers

Quote of the Day:
What these luddites need is a chance to live in the reality they so crave.  Lucky for them there is a place where there are no corporations, banks, consumer debt; where education and healthcare are "free;" and the rich were executed long ago - North Korea.
                ~  davimcg, Commenter at American Thinker

Added:

North Korea also has cleverly met the first part of Occupy Wall Street Demand #5, which reads:
Begin a fast track process to bring the fossil fuel economy to an end. . .
simply by reducing "energy demand" to the capabilities of the non-fossil fuel economy.


The 99% ought to enjoy that.

Added: Comparing the Occupiers' demands with the North Korean reality, item by item.
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1. Occupy Wall Street 2. Nationalize Banks?

Something's stinking at the Occupy Wall Street, and it isn't just the occupiers.

I've been wondering about Michael Bloomberg's role in the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. He's a billionaire who made (and continues to make) his bucks in the financial world so hated by the "occupation forces," and he's also the mayor of a city whose economy is dependent on financial services and investing.

On the other hand, obviously, Bloomie could not have been elected mayor of New York City (not once, but three times) without having a très cosy relationship with the union supporters of the occupiers and (if you know anything about NYC politics) with ACORN's Working Families Party, whose staff, as The Blaze is reporting, are cheerfully taking bows for organizing the demonstrations.

So is Bloomie just another cog in the Alinsky machine rolling over the Constitution and the American Dream? Is he stuck between a rock and a hard place as pressure cracks crumble the Democrat Party? Or--what I consider the most likely scenario--is Occupy Wall Street just another opportunity for Bloomberg to make another bundle?

What would you expect from a Democrat billionaire?

Bloomie with his live-in girlfriend, Diana Taylor.
Luckily for Bloomie, (and luckily only if you believe in coincidence in Alinskyite planning), the NYPD says Bloomie can't kick fellow Lefties out of their "occupied zone," mainly because the occupiers have conveniently decided to take over an area, known as Zuccotti Park, that is privately owned. Technically speaking, the "occupiers" spend the night there at the grace of the park's owners, Brookfield Properties, who could ask the NYPD to remove them at night as trespassers.

Question: Who is giving this tacit permission for the occupiers to hold a piece of Brookfield Properties? Answer: The directors responsible for Brookfield's decisions include Bloomie's very own live-in girlfriend, Diana Taylor, investment banker.

Cute, huh?

Taylor is up to her neck in the supposedly despised banking industry, and not in a quiet corner hidden away from Obama and his Obamatons. She also sits on the board of Citigroup, which, following the mortgage crisis, got bailed out with $25 billion of TARP funds, at which time the government also took over half the board of directors. At one time, Obama considered "dissolving" Citigroup altogether. In a past life, Taylor was the NY State Superintendent of Banks. Today, her day job is at the Wolfensohn investment firm, which is run by the former head of the World Bank.

As an editorialist at Investor's Business Daily points out,
So-called progressives like Obama have always sought to control the economy — to make it impossible for entrepreneurs and businesspeople to operate without government permission or guidance.

Banks are key to this. Not surprisingly, it's an idea progressives seem to have cribbed from Karl Marx's "Communist Manifesto," a central tenet of which is "centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly."
Sound familiar? Fannie and Freddie together control nearly half of U.S. mortgages. Now Democrats want a U.S. "infrastructure bank" to do for our roads, bridges and ports what Fannie and Freddie did for housing.
And, of course, Democrats wanted federal takeover of the college student-loan business, which they achieved as a footnote in their midnight passage of the Obamacare legislation.
 That was a double victory producing not only profits to fund future trips to Martha's Vineyard, but also the fun of exerting enormous control over the curricula that produces future "occupiers."

Somebody's about to make an enormous bundle, and it isn't the useful idiots sleeping on concrete in Zuccotti Park.

Linked at Adrienne's Corner, where you can view how thin a veneer is civilization when Communist theory collides with brains of mush.
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Friday, October 7, 2011

Take the High Road -- Blind Boys of Alabama

Featuring the Oak Ridge Boys:
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Thursday, October 6, 2011

Will the Real Obama Supporters Please Raise Your Hands?

News from a Quinnipiac University poll released today:
  • Since July, one in eleven American voters have decided they no longer like Barack Obama's job performance. [Added: That's a thumbs-down from about one in five of the voters who gave his job performance a thumbs-up in July.]
  • That change brings the percentage of Americans who don't like Obama's performance to an all-time high: 55%. 
  • Four out of five American voters have noticed that the economy is in recession. Half of those figure the economy is heading downhill.
Nevertheless:
  • Two out of every five American voters still cling to the belief that Obama is doing an okay job.
  • And three out of ten think the economy will improve if Obama gets four more years.
The 2012 stampede for hope and change isn't going to look quite the same as the 2008 version. I won't be surprised if the Dems start insisting on installing voting booths in soup kitchens.


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Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Greenies Take Note: Farmers Murdered for Carbon Credits


It can't happen here. Or something.

Before carbon trading
However, in Honduras, 23 peasant farmers, among them a 15-year-old boy, were murdered for trying to recover land seized from them for use in the EU's carbon-trading system, the ETS (Emissions Trading Scheme). Those 23 farmers, plus a journalist and his partner, were shot, run over by automobiles, or simply "disappeared." 

Over at the United Nations, members of the CDM (Clean Development Mechanism), were so "personally distressed" that they washed their hands of "the situation."
After carbon trading
We had to take judgements within our rules – however regretful that may be – and there was not much scope for us to refuse the project. All the consultation procedures precisely had been obeyed.
They were just "following orders"--get it?

Similarly "following orders" are the 1200 Honduran police and military reportedly being moved into the murdered farmers' home region, Bajo Aguán in northern Honduras, where the rights of UN-accredited palm oil plantations to take over peasants' land are being disputed.

No doubt it is even more difficult to assess "climate projects" for human rights abuses in Uganda, where several children are reported to have been horribly tortured and killed by Ugandan troops busy following orders to "evict" (i.e., burn out and beat) villagers to facilitate potential trading of carbon credits by the "New Forests Company, "a British outfit backed by the World Bank that seizes land in Africa to grow trees then sells the 'carbon credits' on to transnational corporations" considered "polluters" for emitting carbon into the atmosphere.

From Prison Planet
An Oxfam report documents how the British outfit has worked with the Ugandan government to forcibly expel over 20,000 people from their homes using terror and violence as part of a lucrative scramble for arable land that can be used to satisfy the multi-billion dollar carbon trading ponzi scheme, which is worth $1.8 million a year to the company.
From the UK Guardian:
Before carbon trading
Francis Longoli, a small farmer from Kiboga district of central Uganda, is tearful: "I remember my land, three acres of coffee, many trees – mangoes and avocados. I had five acres of bananas, 10 beehives, two beautiful permanent houses. My land gave me everything. People used to call me 'omataka' – someone who owns land. Now that is no more. I am one of the poorest now," he says.
More from Prison Planet:
Villagers told of how armed “security forces” stormed their village and torched houses, burning an eight-year-child to death as they threatened to murder anyone who resisted while beating others.
“We were in church,” recalled Jean-Marie Tushabe, 26, a father of two. “I heard bullets being shot into the air.”
“Cars were coming with police,” Mr. Tushabe said, sitting among the ruins of his old home. “They headed straight to the houses. They took our plates, cups, mattresses, bed, pillows. Then we saw them getting a matchbox out of their pockets.”
After carbon trading
It's worth considering that--dead or alive--both the perpetrators and the victims of the carbon-trading fiasco are, even now, emitting carbon into the earth and atmosphere. That's what carbon-based life forms do.
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Sunday, October 2, 2011

You Are My Hiding Place - Selah


Two years ago, Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani was arrested by the Iranian government on charges of protesting "the government's decision to force all children, including his own Christian children, to read the Quran." Later, the charges were changed to apostasy and evangelism to Muslims. Last year, Pastor Nadarkhani was sentenced to death for refusing to renounce his Christian faith. This year, the Supreme Court of Iran upheld the ruling.

A final written verdict is expected within a matter of days.

Where is the international protest to this crime?

Yesterday, Franklin Graham, son of evangelist Billy Graham, said it well:
A man is sentenced to be killed for the 'crime' of a sincere belief in Jesus Christ – a sentence in clear violation of international law. So where is the international outrage? We, as U.S. citizens, must join our voices to continue to press world leaders to take action.
Contact your Congressional Representative here and your Senator here.



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