Bread upon the Waters

Get in Line, Brother -- Flatt & Scruggs

2012-01-29T11:31:00.000-05:00

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Just Hold On -- The Sensational Nightingales

2012-01-22T13:36:00.003-05:00

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Georgia Judge Subpoenas Obama to Prove His Natural Born Citizenship

2012-01-20T22:03:00.001-05:00

Eight plaintiffs have joined a lawsuit challenging Barack Obama's legitimacy to appear on the Georgia ballot, based on the admitted non-citizenship of his father. The U.S. Constitution requires that the chief executive be a "natural born citizen" free of divided loyalties. As the son of a British subject, Barack Obama Jr. was born a citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies (UKC), affording him dual Kenyan/US citizenship.

Georgia election law specifically requires certified candidates for federal office to meet the constitutional qualifications for the office being sought. A Georgia court has agreed to hear the complaint and has ordered Obama to attend the hearing on next Thursday, January 26, 2012.

Via the Washington Post:

A judge has ordered President Barack Obama to appear in court in Atlanta for a hearing on a complaint that says Obama isn’t a natural-born citizen and can’t be president. . . .

The hearing is set for Thursday before an administrative judge. Deputy Chief Judge Michael Malihi on Friday denied a motion by the president’s lawyer to quash a subpoena that requires Obama to show up.

In denying the motion to quash the subpoena, the court found that defendant Obama "is a candidate for federal office who has been certified by the state executive committee of a political party, and therefore must, under Code Section 21-2-5, meet the constitutional and statutory qualifications for holding the office being sought.”

The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine.
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The Keystone Pipeline: Everything You Never Wanted to Know

2012-01-20T20:00:00.000-05:00

Passing on this fantastic Ezra Levant rant (via Big Fur Hat at I Own the World).

Obama's thumbs-down of the Keystone Pipeline isn't all (or even much) about the Leftie Green Coalition, as the optimists among us would have us believe.

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Everything That Looks Like Charity and Tolerance--Isn't

2012-01-19T08:30:00.000-05:00

I accidentally deleted today's post, which pointed out that 54% of American Catholics voted for Obama in 2008, despite his previous support of a bill that mandated infanticide for premature newborns who survived induced birth abortions, even horribly depriving those little ones of the barest comforts customarily afforded to the suffering dying. It is being reported that, as the economy tanks under Obama's policies, abortions are rising, mainly because so many pregnant women think they can't afford the children they are carrying.

I'm hoping that, unlike in 2008, the word will spread among Catholics, who represent about 25% of American voters, that Obama is not the charitable good guy that so many of them thought (without doing the requisite research) that he was three years ago.

To that end, a group called Catholic Vote has been putting together videos endorsing Rick Santorum, like the one below:

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New York Taxpayers "Work for All People," Governor Cuomo Says

2012-01-17T21:13:00.000-05:00

Well, maybe not "all."

If you are an (ahem) "immigrant" who hasn't been in this country long enough to speak the little bit of English needed to apply for a driver's license, sign up for unemployment checks, get government-subsidized housing, or apply for 24 other types of New York State services or benefits, Governor Andrew Cuomo has vowed to "somehow find the money" to hire an interpreter/translator to take care of that little problem for you. You don't even need to endure the outrageous inconvenience of bringing along a bilingual friend or relative to help. Mind you, New York's legislature didn't vote through this new benefit. Cuomo ordered innumerable state employees to "make it so" via executive order.

Our state works for all people, regardless of where you were born or what language you speak,” Cuomo said. “We are proud that people from all around the world call New York home, making our state a beacon of diversity and tolerance.

Unless, of course, you were born in New York State and speak (horrors!) English as your native language.

If, say, you are a poor and bedridden elderly man or woman who has been a resident of New York State for your entire life, paying New York's exorbitantly high taxes in peacetime and putting your life on the line in wartime, Cuomo isn't inclined to "somehow find the money" to enable you to get some assistance with that bedpan. Ask any health care professional in the state.

I don't know how many bedridden elderly people manage to send in an absentee ballot, but I do know that in New York and at least 24 other states, the inability to speak English is no more a barrier to casting a vote than having a tombstone over your head. Federal law requires states with high "don't bother me with English" populations to provide bilingual voting information, materials, and ballots in 68 covered languages where bilingual census takers indicated that census respondents think they don't speak English "very well."

Cuomo's intention demonstrates the real meaning of "transparency in government." Anyone can see through it.
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Obama Has a Dream . . .

2012-01-16T08:30:00.000-05:00

And, of course, he intends them to be. After all, they are growing up on $4 million vacations.
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It Is No Secret What God Can Do -- Jim Reeves

2012-01-15T17:57:00.000-05:00

No Shariah Law in OK Courts? Appeals Court Sides with CAIR

2012-01-10T18:34:00.001-05:00

Seventy percent of Oklahoma voters approved a referendum (State Question 755) to require their courts to uphold U.S. law without consideration of international law or Shariah law. It took CAIR only two days to sue on the grounds that Muslims' constitutional rights were being violated.

Today, a federal appeals court pat CAIR on the head and sent Oklahoma voters to the corner.

(CNN) – A federal appeals court has blocked an Oklahoma voter-approved measure barring state judges from considering Islamic and international law in their decisions.

The three-judge panel at the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an earlier injunction preventing State Question 755 from being certified until the free speech questions are resolved. The decision Tuesday allows a lawsuit brought by Islamic-American groups to move ahead to a bench trial.

“The proposed amendment discriminates among religions,” said the judges. “The Oklahoma amendment specifically names the target of its discrimination. The only religious law mentioned in the amendment is Sharia law.”

A federal judge last summer had issued a temporary restraining order in favor of the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which had sued to nullify the law completely.

The amendment would require Oklahoma courts to “rely on federal and state law when deciding cases” and “forbids courts from considering or using” either international law or Islamic religious law, known as Sharia, which the amendment defined as being based on the Quran and the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed.

In bringing suit, CAIR argued that the amendment violates the establishment and free-exercise clauses of the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom. The group’s local leader, Muneer Awad, has said the amendment passed in November 2010 under a campaign of fear and misinformation about Islam.
(H/t Weasel Zippers)

Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth, the lawyer of a German Muslim who opened fire on a group of U.S. soldiers at the Frankfort airport, killing two of them and wounding two others, is being defended because he is "well meaning." It is worth noting that Shariah law has made inroads in

to the legal system of Germany, where, for example, Jordanian immigrants are married and divorced in accordance with Jordanian law, and polygamous marriages are recognized.

Arid Uka, 21, who was born in Kosovo but grew up in Frankfurt, “wanted to make his personal contribution to the holy war” but not knowing how to get to Afghanistan to fight alongside the Taliban, opted to act closer to home, the federal prosecutor told the court.

He should serve at least the usual maximum sentence in Germany of 15 years, argued prosecutor Jochen Weingarten, saying the case involving two charges of murder and three of attempted murder was a particularly severe one.

Defence lawyer Michaela Roth did not contest Uka’s guilt but argued extenuating circumstances, describing the difficult background of the “shy, quiet and well meaning” young man who had never previously been aggressive and was “without future prospects.”

The March 2 attack took place at Frankfurt airport, where Uka allegedly opened fire on a group of US soldiers on their way to fight in Afghanistan. Airmen Nicholas Jerome Alden, 25, and Zachary Ryan Cuddeback, 21, were killed. Two more soldiers were wounded. (H/t: @fuzislippers)

A little closer to home on Planet Earth, a judge found that a woman has no legal protection from frequent beatings and rapes by her husband in New Jersey as long as he thinks that beating and raping her is, uh, A-Okay according to Shariah law.

And now a New Jersey judge sees no evidence that a Muslim committed sexual assault of his wife -- not because he didn't do it, but because he was acting on his Islamic beliefs: "This court does not feel that, under the circumstances, that this defendant had a criminal desire to or intent to sexually assault or to sexually contact the plaintiff when he did. The court believes that he was operating under his belief that it is, as the husband, his desire to have sex when and whether he wanted to, was something that was consistent with his practices and it was something that was not prohibited."

Rick Santorum on Shariah law and the U.S. Constitution:

“Jihadism is evil and we need to say what it is,” Santorum said last March [3/2011]. “We need to define it and say what it is. And it is evil. Sharia law is incompatible with American jurisprudence and our Constitution.” He added correctly, and in sharp contrast to the prevailing view, that “Sharia law is not just a religious code. It is also a governmental code. It happens to be both religious in nature and origin, but it is a civil code. And it is incompatible with the civil code of the United States.”

That's a view that gets my vote.

Santorum speaking last October:

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Obama's Defense Policy: Ramirez Sums It Up

2012-01-10T14:18:00.001-05:00

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The Fiery Badge of Zilla

2012-01-08T16:33:00.000-05:00

It isn't every day that this blogger gets credited with "awesomeness," but . . .

In her First Annual Zilla Awards for Awesomeness in the Dextrosphere, the indefatigable Zilla of the Resistance has included yours truly under the category, "Nicest Bloggers," in some very classy company, including Adrienne at Adrienne's Corner, DaTechGuy at DaTechguy's Blog, Jimmie at The Sundries Shack, Jill at Pundit & Pundette, and The Lonely Conservative.

This is one awesome experience!

Thanks, Zilla.

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I Know Who Holds Tomorrow -- Gospel Ukelele by Ken Middleton

2012-01-08T11:01:00.000-05:00

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Obama and the I-Word

2012-01-06T18:41:00.000-05:00

For once, the I-word appearing in the same headline as Obama's name is not the narcissistic I that Obama usually uses to decorate his limp oratory. Nor is it the word Imperial, Immigration, Idiot, Illegal, Islam, or any other of a number of other words usually associated with Obama's name.

This time, it's the word Impeach, as in: Obama's Recess Appointments: An Impeachable Offense?

I personally do not see the current House of Representatives as capable of sufficient force of character to impeach Obama for crossing "from socialistic extremism into lawlessness" by making recess appointments when Congress is not legally recessed. Judging from past experience, Obama has every reason to rely on an irresolute House (where impeachment proceedings must lawfully begin) to permit his "subjective whim" to override the "clearly written" constitutional power of Congress to determine whether and when they is in session.

Slighted Democrats hoping to even the score by
demanding the impeachment of a Republican,
G.W. Bush, after Ceegar Willie escaped impeachment
convictions for perjury and obstruction of justice.

If the legislative apathy continues, this Molotov cocktail aimed at the U.S. Constitution will have found its mark, and the debris of what once was the Senate's role of "advise and consent" will soon be reincorporated to mean "rubber & stamp."

But, say, patriotic conviction (or even jealous guarding of Congressional or personal power) favorably inclines the ears of House members to the murmurs of impeachment abroad in the land.

That would produce for Obama the victim label that might suit a crafty president--and his political party--quite well in their efforts to revive the passions of their lethargic fans. If there's anything a Democrat likes, it's an underdog--real or imagined.

And then again, a huge fight over whether Obama is guilty of an impeachable offense might be just what Dr. Soros ordered to replace Obama with a more palatable candidate on the Democrat ticket.

The one thing that Americans can count on, it seems obvious, is that whatever the Socialist Democrats and their top guy are up to, they are up to no good.
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A Patriot Speaks: Bachmann's Magnificent Withdrawal Speech

2012-01-04T14:27:00.004-05:00

Howard Chandler Christy's Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States

But make no mistake: I'll continue to be a strong voice. I'll continue to stand and fight for the country and for the American people, and for our freedom because Mr. Franklin and all the founders, all the men, all the women, who have given their last full measure of devotion, and our military, our veterans, are watching us. They're expecting us to stand up and protect what they fought to give us, and so we owe it to them and to our posterity and to the God that we serve Who created us, Who gave us life in our very being, to keep our Republic free.

~ Michelle Bachman, 1/4/12

Words worth hearing:

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Obama Trying to Earn that Nobel Prize by Freeing Taliban Held in Gitmo?

2012-01-03T18:11:00.000-05:00

Hot off the press via Weasel Zippers:

(Guardian) — The US has agreed in principle to release high-ranking Taliban officials from Guantánamo Bay in return for the Afghan insurgents’ agreement to open a political office for peace negotiations in Qatar, the Guardian has learned.

According to sources familiar with the talks in the US and in Afghanistan, the handful of Taliban figures will include Mullah Khair Khowa, a former interior minister, and Noorullah Noori, a former governor in northern Afghanistan.

More controversially, the Taliban are demanding the release of the former army commander Mullah Fazl Akhund. Washington is reported to be considering formally handing him over to the custody of another country, possibly Qatar.

The releases would be to reciprocate for Tuesday’s announcement from the Taliban that they are prepared to open a political office in Qatar to conduct peace negotiations “with the international community” – the most significant political breakthrough in ten years of the Afghan conflict.

The Taliban are holding just one American soldier, Bowe Bergdahl, a 25-year-old sergeant captured in June 2009, but it is not clear whether he would be freed as part of the deal.

“To take this step, the [Obama] administration have to have sufficient confidence that the Taliban are going to reciprocate,” said Vali Nasr, who was an Obama administration adviser on the Afghan peace process until last year. “It is going to be really risky. Guantánamo is a very sensitive issue politically.”

Nasr, now a professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, said the Taliban announcement on the opening of an office in Qatar was a dramatic breakthrough.

Read the whole thing here. Lowlights:

"The next phase will need concessions on both sides."
"Even if all five of these people they release went straight back to Quetta [the Taliban stronghold in Pakistan] to rejoin a fight, it wouldn't make any real difference."

Words fail.
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Obama's Night Cap

2012-01-03T16:49:00.000-05:00

Remember when Obama wondered whether he could "mobilize the citizenry" into accepting "skyrocketing" electrical rates and bankrupted coal-burning power plants?

The problem is, uh, can you get the American people to say, “This is really important,” and force their representatives to do the right thing? That requires mobilizing a citizenry. That requires them understanding what is at stake. Uh, and climate change is a great example.
You know, when I was asked earlier about the issue of coal, uh, you know — Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket

Obama made that statement in an interview with The San Francisco Chronicle as the nation moved into January of the last presidential election year.

Here in Progressive Paradise, even Obama's most ardent supporters never did get entirely "mobilized" into the "really important" desire to suffer from the cold all winter because they couldn't afford to pay for heat.

Regulatory chicanery via unelected czars being what it is, however, Obama did manage to mobilize the owner of my local coal-fired power plant into bankruptcy, and he did mobilize the folks who sell electricity and natural gas to the people in our area to include the following friendly note with our December energy bills. Read it and weep.

Help Avoid Hypothermia

Cold Weather Can Put You at Risk of Hypothermia, a dangerous condition caused by a lowering of body temperature. Symptoms include feeling very cold, tired and weak; shivering and confusion. To help avoid hypothermia:
Wear a hat indoors, outdoors and even in bed. Half of our body heat is lost through the head and neck.

It used to be that the power company focused on selling energy to consumers. Now, it seems, they are worried that those customers might freeze to death.

Reality check:

Current temperature here in Progressive Paradise: 12F.

Current temperature in Obama's ~~vacation paradise~~ hometown, Honolulu: 79F.

Current temperature in the White House: 80F.

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Turning the Table in 2012

2012-01-02T11:36:00.000-05:00

For three long, painful years, the blogosphere has provided evidence aplenty that an increasing multitude of Americans have been longing for the arrival of 2012 to signal the start of our opportunity to remove from office the current president of the United States.

Starting with a trickle of the economically alert and the politically astute whose numbers were soon bolstered by the newly unemployed, underemployed, and the nervous, for at least the past three years Americans have been hoarding money and supplies against the deepening economic winter, even as our stores of faith in the survival of our political system grow thin (along with, ironically, the celebrated "hope" for our future pleasure and prosperity).

Americans greeting 2012 as the opportunity to reclaim our eroding liberties are a special blend: we are a motley crew of descendents of the hardiest and bravest escapees of some of history's most villainous political and economic oppression. It is more than likely that your parents, your grandparents, yourself--or whoever it was in your family who first set foot on American soil--arrived here in the face of incredible odds against them. And, if you look over your shoulder at your family's past, you cannot escape noticing that a whole lot of surviving has been accomplished since then.

In our wait for 2012, those of us who have refused to be partisans of Barack H. Obama have been carrying on a defensive strategy: we have contested and annoyed Obamatons and we have gathered together as TEA partiers to study, entrench, and build and fortify our own networks. Lacking a leader in the executive office and a majority in the Senate, we have resolutely maintained our defensive position, but we are itching to climb of the trenches.

Now is the moment for us to oblige Obama to take full ownership of his gains, not merely in the luxurious privacy of whatever vacation resort he happens to be occupying at the moment, but far less comfortably in the eyes of the Americans on whose suffering he has built those gains.

The songs of schoolchildren establishing Obama as a juvenile superhero have quietened. Nobody believes that Obama is a deity anymore. His fingerprints are on so many of America's current problems that even formerly fierce supporters of Hope and Change have gone AWOL. In conversations in which former Obama supporters complain about their difficulties paying the most recent jump in their utility or food bill or finding a doctor who takes Medicare, a few well placed words can plant seeds of awareness.

Convincing Americans that a gain for Republicans is a loss for America is a game that Democrats have been playing for a long, long, time, using every kind of chicanery at their disposal.

The time is ripe to turn the table on them--but all we need to use is the truth. It is Democrats who ought to be fearing their own legislative or judicial victory because it will cost them the votes of people who recognize that, for them, that Democrat victory creates a real, tangible loss.

Our opportunities are everywhere. 2012 is a year in which I plan to make use of those opportunities.

Happy New Year to All!
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Psalm 67 -- Lionel Valdellon

2012-01-01T09:24:00.000-05:00

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A New Year's Resolution We Can All Share

2011-12-30T13:32:00.001-05:00

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A Snow Globe in My Pocket

2011-12-28T12:22:00.001-05:00

Back at my desk today, transitioning from my Christmas interlude, a time of shutting out the world and taking up the pleasures of showering family and friends with tokens of love and care and receiving same.

A shower of love trapped in a holiday, like a snowstorm trapped in a snow globe.

How difficult it is to open the door to the world again.

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Oh Holy Night -- Mahalia Jackson

2011-12-24T17:00:00.000-05:00

Merry Christmas, Dear Friends.

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And a Tax on My Christmas Tree . . .

2011-12-22T21:47:00.000-05:00

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Taxpayers pay $257,000 for each Chevy Volt

2011-12-22T00:16:00.001-05:00

At more than $250K a pop, it's really the U.S. taxpayer who's being charged.

This article, linked by William Jacobson, caught my attention today:

If you’ve been revolted by the fact that every $40,000 electric Chevy Volt sold by Government Motors enjoys a $7,500 rebate at the expense of taxpayers, then better have some Dramamine before you read any further. James Hohman of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy has calculated that the total subsidies—direct and indirect, federal and state—poured into this white elephant could add up to $3 billion or $250,000 for every Volt sold to date. And this is not counting the 26 percent ownership that Uncle Sam still has in the company.

Nor does it count the subsidies that taxpayers like you and I provide to the manufacturers of the batteries used in the Volt. Add on an additional nearly $7,000 for that.

I say, if you want to drive a "green car," you should pay for it yourself.

This government swindle of the rest of us has got to stop.
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A Baroque Magnificat -- Ensemble européen William Byrd

2011-12-18T09:30:00.000-05:00

This astonishing composition by Polish composer Mikolaj Zielenski was published in Venice in 1611, four-hundred years ago. Here it is performed by the Ensemble européen William Byrd under the direction of Graham O'Reilly.

The Magnificat, also known as the Canticle of Mary, is one of the oldest hymns in Christendom, recording the words used by the Mother of God as she announced her pregnancy to her cousin Elizabeth, who was also pregnant with a son who would grow to become John the Baptist.

Luke 1:46-55

And Mary said, "My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for He has regarded the low estate of His handmaiden. For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed; for He who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is His Name. And His mercy is upon those who fear Him from generation to generation. He has shown strength with His arm, He has scattered the proud in his imagination of their hearts, He has put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of low degree; He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich He has sent away empty. He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of His mercy, as he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and to his posterity forever."

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I Sure Do Like Those Christmas Cookies -- George Strait

2011-12-17T11:32:00.004-05:00

An annual favorite about those annual favorites!

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Money Money Money Money: The Candidates Address Global Warming

2011-12-12T14:45:00.000-05:00

Global warming alarmists fail to mention that the up-and-down trends of Earth's climate made the planet much warmer than today when the Ancient Egyptians built their pyramids, the Romans built their empire, and Medieval British Islanders made wine from grapes they grew in their gardens.

Blaming a temporary warming trend (that has since reversed to a cooling trend) on a trace gas that is conveniently impossible to remove from the atmosphere, Europeans developed "emissions trading" schemes that Obama, his Obamatons, and the founders of fledgling "climate science" recognized as extremely lucrative to the "right" people, and I do not mean conservatives.

How has emissions trading been working out for Europe? According to a study by the Swiss bank, UBS:

The EU's emissions trading regime . . . has already cost European consumers $283 billion....

And what did Europe get for that money? "Limited benefits and embarrassing consequences," according to the report.

Anything Europe can do, the US can do better:

In a separate study, the U.S. Energy Department said the domestic cost could reach as much as $570 billion a year. And it would kill nearly 5 million jobs here.

So what kind of climate policy leadership can the American people expect from the various presidential candidates?

The following quotes, I think, pretty fairly sum up the expressed views of the people who hope to be in charge of U.S. policies on climate spending beginning in 2012.

Purveyors of Climate Alarm

Barack Hussein Obama: Not only is [climate change] real, it's here, and its effects are giving rise to a frighteningly new global phenomenon: the man-made natural disaster.
Obama wants to cut carbon emissions by 80% through governmental regulations that sidestep Congress and thus the voters who are required to pay for the "hope and change" through higher taxes; lost jobs and individual freedoms; more expensive energy, goods, and services; more highway fatalities in "greener" (smaller and lighter) cars.
Newt Gingrich: Our country must take action to address climate change.
Gingrich has made numerous public statements supporting cap and trade legislation, if it were to include bi-partisan incentives for "development of new technologies . . . to achieve significant reductions in carbon loading." Read: money, money, money, money for "green" energy producers, even if they don't actually produce energy or produce it much more inefficiently at much higher cost.
Mitt Romney: I can't prove that, but I believe based on what I read that the world is getting warmer . . . ." "[I]t's important for us to reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases that may be significant contributors.
Under Romney, Massachusetts set strict state limitations on CO2 emissions from power plants, but Romney has opposed cap and trade.

Jon Huntsman, Jr.: To be clear, I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.

Huntsman is named after his billionaire father, Jon Huntsman, Sr., who made his fortune manufacturing chemicals. Huntsman Corporation holds global leadership positions in, among a number of other chemicals, ethylene and propylene carbonates. which are used in the production of lithium batteries.

Call me crazy, but I can think of certain financial benefits accruing to Huntsman Corporation from massive increases in the use of lithium batteries resulting from government subsidies for "green" automobiles, windmills, and solar devices and government restrictions on conventional energy production.

Climate Realists

Rick Perry: [The climate change scare] is all one contrived phony mess that is falling apart under its own weight.

Last year, Perry sued the Environmental Protection Agency in an attempt to prevent their regulation of CO2.

Michele Bachmann: The big thing we are working on now is the global warming hoax. It's all voodoo, nonsense, hokum, a hoax.

Bachmann has called the cap-and-trade bill "tyranny, and the EPA "the job-killing organization of America."

Ron Paul: Washington bureaucrats have classified the very air we exhale as a pollutant and have gone unchallenged in this incredible assertion.
Paul sponsored or cosponsored legislation that would allow drilling in U.S. waters and ANWR, increase tax incentives for investing in oil refineries, streamline federal approval for oil refinery construction, and suspend the federal gas tax when retail gasoline prices hit $3 pr gallon.

Rick Santorum: [The climate change scare is] just an excuse for more government control of your life, and I've never been for any scheme or even accepted the junk science behind the whole narrative.

As a representative of a coal mining state who believes that "coal is not a dirty word," Santorum has vowed to reverse Obama's goal of "shutting down 60 coal fired power plants" and to "open up energy in America."

Although CO2 levels have been gradually rising, global warming stopped 12 years ago. Isn't it time we stopped paying for it?
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Come, Let Us Go Back to God -- Sam Cooke & the Soul Stirrers

2011-12-11T08:00:00.000-05:00

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Sunset & Vine Shooter More "Workplace Violence"?

2011-12-10T11:18:00.001-05:00

Uh huh.

According to a recent determination by the Defense Department, the Fort Hood Massacre of 14 people (including one unborn child) and the wounding of 29 others, was "workplace violence," not terrorism.

By that standard, the gunman who stood on the corner of Sunset and Vine in Hollywood, picking out motorists to shoot at, was an irate worker too: both he and Nidal Malik Hasan were reported by eyewitnesses to have shouted out their rationale for the shootings as "Allahu Akbar!"

Not that the mainstream media or the Obama administration want you to know that.

I imagine word will get around Hollywood, though, thus testing the Hollywood crowd's capacity for denial.

In the following video, an on-the-scene reporter makes much of the fact that the shooter was shouting, but shows little curiosity about the content of those shouts. One of the eyewitnesses sets him straight (around 2:40).

The names of the shooter's two victims, one of whom is in critical condition after being shot in the neck, the other of whom suffered a minor gunshot wound in the leg, have been made public.

The name of the gunman, who was killed by police fire, has not yet been released. (UPDATE: The shooter's name has now been released. It is Tyler Brehm, age 26.)

Zilla of the Resistance reminds us that, since September 11, 2001, nearly EIGHTEEN THOUSAND incidences of ~~workplace violence~~ "deadly islamic jihad terrorist attacks have transpired."

The long list of the Obama administration's aggressive support of Islam includes Eric Holder's lawsuits supporting Shariah law, Janet Napolitano's cleansing of mention of Islam and jihad from counterterror materials (via Zilla), and Tim Geitner's use of taxpayer funds to help Muslim religious authorities collect religious taxes.

The 2012 Republican primaries will soon be at hand, and it is of utmost importance that the Republican nominee who will challenge Obama for the Presidency is not only cognizant of, but willing to fearlessly fight against the ever increasing force of islamic supremacist infiltration of the United States and the global threat presented by islamic supremacist conquest to freedom loving people everywhere.

Zilla offers a very convincing argument that Rick Santorum understands the threat of jihad and should be that nominee. Read her endorsement here.

Want more convincing? Start at The Other McCain's Santorum Sunday Express, which I found via Santorum supporter teresamerica.
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Global Warming Scare Dying Death of 1,000 Cuts

2011-12-07T20:55:00.001-05:00

This December I'm following up on some of the news stories I've covered in this blog in 2011.

One of my pet peeves has been the Progressive War on CO2 as an agent of global warming, a fiction used to bolster countless money-grabbing schemes through the simple method of frightening schoolchildren and their parents with the supposedly evil specter of CO2, which is in fact a rare gas essential to life on Earth.

Here's an interesting climate reality check from Climate Depot via Watts Up With That:

The global warming movement is suffering the scientific death of a thousand cuts. . . .

The Antarctic sea ice extent has been at or near record extent in the past few summers and the ice is expanding, the Arctic has rebounded in recent years since the low point in 2007, polar bears are thriving, sea level is not showing acceleration and is actually dropping, Cholera and Malaria are failing to follow global warming predictions, Mount Kilimanjaro melt fears are being made a mockery by gains in snow cover, global temperatures have been holding steady for a decade or more and many scientists are predicting global cooling is ahead, deaths due to extreme weather are radically declining, global tropical cyclone activity is near historic lows, the frequency of major U.S. hurricanes has declined, the oceans are missing their predicted heat content, big tornados have dramatically declined since the 1970s, droughts are not historically unusual nor caused by mankind, there is no evidence we are currently having unusual weather, scandals continue to rock the climate fear movement, the UN IPCC has been exposed as being a hotbed of environmental activists, former Vice President Al Gore is now under siege by his fellow global warming activists for attempting to link every bad weather event to man-made global warming and scientists from around the world continue to dissent from man-made climate fears at a rapid pace.

Reality Calls: The Antarctic Summer Ice Melt Actually is at the Lowest Levels in the Satellite Era

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On December 7, 2011 and Rewriting American History

2011-12-07T10:23:00.001-05:00

A Japanese photo taken during the aerial torpedo attack on "Battleship Row" on the far side of Ford Island. A torpedo has just struck USS West Virginia (center). Also seen are (from left) Nevada, Arizona, Tennessee, Oklahoma (torpedoed and listing) alongside Maryland, and California. (Courtesy: The History Place)

On December 7, 1941, the Imperial Japanese Navy drew the U.S. into World War II by conducting a surprise attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Oahu, Hawaii, killing 2,335 servicemen and 68 civilians and wounding 1,178 others. The U.S. president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, called that day "a date that will live in infamy."

Indeed it was. By the time the Pacific War was over, Japan's killing rampage had taken the lives of about 30 million other people, including more than 100,000 U.S. military personnel.

Chinese man being used for bayonet practice.

Imperialist Japan was a militarist aggressor nation allied with fascist Germany and Italy that had already invaded and enslaved Korea (not yet divided into North and South); invaded China and conducted the Rape of Nanking, in which 50,000 Japanese soldiers murdered half of the Chinese capital city's 600,000 unarmed residents by stabbing, shooting, beheading, disemboweling, burning alive, or burying alive. All of these activities were photographed by Japanese military photographers. Among the dead were an estimated 20,000 - 60,000 females (including small girls and old women) who were first gang raped by Japanese soldiers. Japan had also invaded and taken over Manchuria and unsuccessfully tried to extend Japan's territory into the Soviet Union.

Three of Japan's prisoners of war

World War II, the product of the militarist ambitions of Japan, Germany, and Italy, disrupted the entire world. The war took the lives of somewhere between 62 and 78 million people, most of whom were civilians. In all, WWII killed about 3 of every 100 people alive on the planet at the time.

Today I am thinking about a conversation I had with a young historian who expressed his impatience for the opportunity to rewrite the history of WWII--after all the eyewitnesses and participants, who have written the current history, are dead. His goal is to demonstrate the failures of America and Americans during that war; the trespasses of soldiers in the heat of battle, the failure of American society to fight for our survival as a free nation in a manner that meets today's standards of political correctness.

His chance will come soon enough. The attack on Pearl Harbor was 70 years ago. No more than I can fully understand what it was like to grow up in a Victorian household with a set of Victorian ideals and standards, this young historian, raised in an atmosphere of moral equivalency and schooled ad nauseam in the supposed failures and evils of the American system, cannot understand that many of those who fought that war were men of honor and dignity.

I've known many of them. I have had the privilege of being introduced to the ideals of honor and dignity held by so many who sacrificed for liberty during World War II. I have known many men whose conduct, both during the war and until the end of their days, well reflected George S. Patton's admonition, "Duty is the essence of manhood."

This self-congratulatory young historian has almost no idea of what constituted the ideals of duty, honor, and dignity for Americans during World War II, and he doesn't want to know. But, by the looks of it, in today's educational system where duty, honor, and dignity are such conspicuously old-fashioned anachronisms that they are seldom if ever mentioned, he has in front of him every hope for a successful career furthering the cause of Blame America First.

If the truth were told, many more of those who today hold the U.S. in contempt would realize that they would not even be alive if it were not for the sacrifices made by Americans during WWII.

Are the lives they are living worthy of the sacrifices made to preserve them?

This is a question, I am convinced, that many Blame America First-ers do not dare to ask themselves.

If the cost is to weaken the U.S. by minimalizing the actual contributions of Americans to human liberties, the true history of World War II, however painful to today's sensibilities, should not be forgotten.

Update: You may toss your cookies when you read this post by Marooned in Marin: Obama Daughters' School Has Japanese Lunch for Pearl Harbor Day; He Uses Dec 7 To Push Class Warfare.

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Lord, Let Us See Your Kindness -- Sunday Psalm

2011-12-04T08:00:00.000-05:00

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Occupy SF Starts Bank, Will Hire Homeless & Students

2011-12-03T12:07:00.001-05:00

Of course, the occupiers are not calling their financial institution a bank. They are calling it a credit union: the People's Reserve Credit Union.

The occupiers plan to accumulate capital assets of $7 million or more through "investments" by organizations and individuals.

Each of the credit union's two planned branches will include a cafe and a commercial kitchen "available to rent."

The occupiers plan to employ homeless people and students to handle their members' sensitive information and money and to loan that money to other homeless people and students (the 2010 Obama takeover of the student loan industry notwithstanding).

Occupy SF already has filed the paperwork to make their financial institution a reality, they say.

America knows by now that government agencies have gone out of their way to "bend the law" to accommodate lawless occupiers in cities all over the country and have permitted occupiers to ignore laws and local regulations with impunity.

With that kind of "experience" under their belts, the SF occupiers have reason to believe that banking regulations for anti-capitalists will be just a little (shall we say) less stringent than for other financial institutions.

This should be interesting to watch. From afar.

It surely will be less interesting when the final bill is delivered to taxpayers--in one form or another.

Ht: PJ Tatler via Mad Minerva.
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What Ever Happened to the Wisconsin "Sick Note" Doctors and their "Patients"?

2011-12-02T12:14:00.001-05:00

This December, I'll be looking around to see how events have played out, so far, for some of 2011's newsmakers.

I'm starting out with the Wisconsin "sick note" doctors who, last February, cavalierly and shamelessly supplied hundreds of Wisconsin teachers with bogus sick notes so that those teachers could collect sick pay for days during which they were in fact healthy enough to attend a political rally at the state capitol. More than a thousand teachers skipped school to protest Governor Scott Walker's attempt to help balance Wisconsin's budget by requiring them and others paid from the public coffer to chip in a bit more for their own benefits and pensions.

Except for one doctor who works in a clinic, the "sick note" doctors were mostly faculty of the University of Wisconsin--Madison's Department of Family Medicine, where the healing arts curriculum apparently included how to perform the "public health and community outreach" of writing bogus sick notes to enable government employees to accomplish fraud.

Copies of the bogus sick notes and photos and on-the-scene video interviews of the doctors were quick to hit the blogosphere. Under pressure from this highly publicized breach of public trust in the medical profession by their own medical faculty and residents, the University "reviewed" 22 UW doctors said to have been involved in the sick note scam. By early July, most of the reviews (and appeals) had been (secretly) "resolved." Doctors found to be involved in the sick note scam reportedly received written reprimands or suffered some loss of pay and leadership position.

Starting in April, Wisconsin's Department of Safety and Professional Services investigated 11 of the doctors and eventually referred the names of 9 licensed physicians to the state's Medical Examining Board, which is responsible for licensing and disciplining physicians in Wisconsin. The Department suspected the doctors of failure to meet state standards for medical recordkeeping at their "get your free doctor's excuse table" at the Wisconsin Capitol protest.

In a closed session on November 16, the Medical Board decided to place letters of reprimand for the infraction of insufficient recordkeeping in the files of 7 of the doctors, 6 of whom teach at the University. Those seven are: Adam H. Balin, 51; Mark B. Beamsley, 41; Hannah M. Keevil, 50; Bernard F. Micke, 67; Kathleen A. Oriel, 47; James H. Shropshire, 50; and Louis A. Sanner, 59.

The Board is requiring the doctors to take a few hours of a continuing education course on medical record keeping, at their own expense, and to pay the cost of the Board proceedings against them.

The Board issued administrative warnings to the 2 remaining doctors, Patrick A. McKenna and Ronni L. Hayon, not to try "insufficient record keeping" again.

As the doctors' attorneys were quick to point out, the Medical Examining Board issued "no finding" that the doctors had "issued any fake sick notes or engaged in fraudulent behavior," a distinction that was not entirely lost on the Board's chairwoman, Dr. Sujatha Kailas, who opined:

"There may be other issues but, at this point, we felt disciplining them on the medical records would be enough to prevent such behavior in the future and send a message."

That message was received loud and clear by Republican Senator Glenn Grothman:

"This confirms my suspicion that the Medical Examining Board is a joke. Their goal is not to look after the public at large but to protect their buddies from an undue interruption in their careers," Grothman said.

The doctors, however, are not without numerous supporters among their fellow protestors. As one commenter at the Madison Journal Sentinal observed:

"I don't know why they are being disciplined, I was physically ill when I was there in February. Prove that I wasn't. Being around hardcore Republicans makes me ill."

Apparently, being around "hardcore Republicans" also makes that commenter more financially secure. As RB at The Right Sphere pointed out:

[P]assage of Governor Scott Walker’s budget repair bill . . . has led to a reduction in school tax levies across the Wisconsin, among other benefits (aka a healthy budget).

What happened to the Madison teachers who wanted to be paid by taxpayers to attend a political protest at the Wisconsin State Capitol?

Despite the brouhaha, 84 Madison teachers reportedly persisted in submitting "fraudulent sick notes that appeared to come from doctors at the protests." Those teachers were given until April 15 to "rescind" their submission of the fraudulent notes. The 38 teachers who clung to the swindle had "letters of suspension" placed in their personnel files. At least 1,000 other Madison teachers handed in sick notes from other doctors. Those sick notes were all deemed "legitimate" by the Madison School District. Nevertheless, two thirds of Madison teachers lost at least one day's pay for participating in the protest.
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Kaboom! Iranian Nuclear Facility Explodes

2011-12-01T08:00:00.000-05:00

From The Australian via Jihad Watch :

Satellite imagery seen by The Times confirmed that a blast that rocked the city of Isfahan on Monday struck the uranium enrichment facility there, despite denials by Tehran.

The images clearly showed billowing smoke and destruction, negating Iranian claims yesterday that no such explosion had taken place. Israeli intelligence officials told The Times that there was "no doubt" that the blast struck the nuclear facilities at Isfahan and that it was "no accident".

That uranium enrichment facility used to look like this:

Courtesy AP

Now, not so much.

But that's not all:

The explosion at Iran's third-largest city came as satellite images emerged of the damage caused by one at a military base outside Tehran two weeks ago that killed about 30 members of the Revolutionary Guard, including General Hassan Moghaddam, the head of the Iranian missile defence program.

Iran claimed that the Tehran explosion occurred during testing on a new weapons system designed to strike at Israel. But several Israeli officials have confirmed that the blast was intentional and part of an effort to target Iran's nuclear weapons program.

Here's a view of that military base before the November 12 explosion:

Courtesy ISIS: Institute for Science and International Security

Here it is after the explosion:

Courtesy ISIS: Institute for Science and International Securit

Major-General Giora Eiland, Israel's former director of national security, told Israel's army radio that the Isfahan blast was no accident. "There aren't many coincidences, and when there are so many events there is probably some sort of guiding hand, though perhaps it's the hand of God," he said....

Linked by Chris at Wyblog, who also reports the good news that the solar energy boondoggle is fizzling out and that Mark Steyn reads our dear Pundette (being the smart fellow that he is). Thanks for spreading the word, Chris.
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Goodbye Barney Frank -- Hello Maxine Waters

2011-11-28T13:14:00.001-05:00

That's right. Just when you thought you had something to really celebrate--the retirement of that Great National Impoverisher, Barney Frank, from his 16-term Congressional seat in Massachusetts, comes the gut-wrenching reminder that Maxine Waters is next in line to take over over ol' Barney's enormously powerful ranking Democrat position on the House Committee on Financial Services.

Even though Barney's retirement won't begin until the end of next year, his retirement announcement still sounds like a tune a long-suffering country could dance to. Frank left his thumbprints all over the subprime mortgage crisis that's still reverberating through our suffering economy, and he's remained up to mischief ever since.

But consider a few items on the track record of his presumed successor as lead Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee. Maxine Waters, who has had 11 terms in which to sink her tentacles deep into Congress, managed to get one of those tentacles so deeply embedded in the government cookie jar that even Nancy Pelosi felt the need to call for an ethics examination.

Nancy's concern about Maxine's ethics was, of course, mainly (or perhaps solely) for show. The ethics trial of Maxine Waters was set to begin in November of 2010,

But the Democrat leadership has delayed Waters' trial by blocking subpoenas and firing the lead lawyer working on the two-year investigation. Also, the ranking Democrat on the House Ethics panel reportedly is holding up the hiring of a new staff director.

The ever-creative Maxine had pressured bank examiners into bailing out her husband's bank, OneUnited, with $12 million of TARP money and then had gotten OneUnited "a unique exemption from the FDIC's accounting rules." Not so difficult a task, apparently, for a member of House Oversight and Investigations subcommittee.

OneUnited Bank certainly was in trouble: Its CEO had recently been busted for cocaine possession, and the FDIC had ordered it to cease and desist operations due to its "unsafe banking practices." "Of the 700 banks receiving TARP funds, OneUnited was the weakest."

More to the point, however, is that the $12 million of TARP money saved Maxine's husband, one of the bank's directors, in excess of $350,000: the value of the his OneUnited stocks that, without the bailout using public funds, would have been worthless.

The frosting on Maxine's $12 million cookie was this:

While under investigation, Waters got a provision added to the Dodd-Frank Act exempting minority owned banks [including OneUnited] from the new oversight.

What else would you expect from a legislator sitting on the House Oversight and Investigations subcommittee?

Maybe this: giving ACORN oversight of CFPA, Obama's Consumer Financial Protection Agency? Maxine Waters introduced the amendment, and the Democrats on the House Financial Services Committee (including herself and Barney) voted to pass it.

Today, Maxine Waters, who is the House Chief Deputy Whip, also "serves" as the Ranking Member of the Subcommittee on Capital Markets and Government Sponsored Enterprises and on the Subcommittee on Insurance, Housing and Community Opportunity; the Committee on the Judiciary; the Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, Competition, and the Internet; the Subcommittee on Immigration Policy and Enforcement; and the Committee on Steering and Policy.

Scared yet?

Whomever Maxine Waters is serving, it's a safe bet that she's not serving you.

Let the ethics trial begin.
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Neurosurgeon Talks about ObamaCare: Over 70? Die.

2011-11-25T08:00:00.000-05:00

How many "units" over age 70 will have to die before the people of this country get rid of ObamaCare?

Uh, so far, nobody is talking about what the Obamatons have in mind for "units" under age 4.

Addendum 1/10/12: This post is still getting a lot of traffic, so I am adding this chart to clarify why I fear that ObamaCare could put children under the age of 4 at risk of facing health care rationing similar to that imposed on the elderly? Check out the health rationing curve published by Obama's health care advisor, Ezekiel Emanuel:

Hat tip: Adrienne.
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Thanksgiving Song -- David Campbell

2011-11-24T08:00:00.000-05:00

I hope you are enjoying a Happy and Blessed Thanksgiving, Friends.

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Cryin' Holy Unto My Lord -- Bill Monroe

2011-11-20T08:00:00.000-05:00

Linked by Backyard Conservative, who wonders, "Where's waldObama?" when the U.S. could use some leadership. (A rhetorical question, that.) Thank you, Anne.

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Date Night

2011-11-19T21:33:00.000-05:00

Ya gotta love it . . . .

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Obama's Promises, Meet Obama's Results

2011-11-18T14:22:00.001-05:00

John E. over at Ace of Spades compared some of Barack Obama's promises during his 2008 campaign and at his inauguration to today's reality and then turned the results into a compelling graph.

The comparisons cover income, jobs, unemployment, and poverty; cost of gas and health insurance, and federal debt.

Here's one that particularly sticks in my craw:

View the rest.

Thanks to Mind Numbed Robot.
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#OWS Therapy: Watching Occupy Harvard Embarrass Themselves

2011-11-16T14:07:00.001-05:00

Photo: Maryam Monalisa Gharavi

Mocking Harvard has become a very satisfying sport, particularly since that university has aroused so much ire in the last few years for its contributions to the breakdown of the body politic, starting with awarding law degrees to Barack and Michelle and supporting their advance to the White House.

Other contributions include race-card beer summits at the White House, promotion of such public health propaganda items as you have no right to your own body parts (and you know who does), partial birth abortion is a nifty thing (don't listen to what actual physicians have to say), and gov't should decide who gets what health care and when (you get to pay for it, whether you want to or not). Another Harvard-brew progressive nightmare that keeps people around the globe awake at night is "global warming is a man-caused global disaster" (i.e., hide opposing evidence).

Time and again, Harvard has proven themselves soooo easy to mock, it is embarrassing. All one needs do is repeat facts, such as:

On Wednesday, November 9, Occupy Harvard began. The university is frequently accused of being an “academic gatekeeper,” but the administration and police response to the nascent protest movement has made this gatekeeping uncomfortably literal: Harvard Yard has been placed on indefinite “lockdown,” meaning two-level ID-checks at every entrance.

That's rich. Pun intended. Howie Carr at the Boston Herald is among those who are appalled:

So let me get this straight: Harvard students are “occupying” the Yard to protest how the 1 percent keep the 99 percent in economic servitude. But the Crimson protest against capitalist oppression is by invitation only, and all the gates on campus have been locked, chained and padlocked to keep out the real 99 percent?

Harvard's lockdown is that university's way of saying, "Tough luck" to extension students, visiting scholars, tourists, members of the press, and in general the folks in Cambridge who pay the property taxes that Harvard would have to pay if it paid taxes, which it does not.

By the way, this is the first time Harvard has ever been on full lockdown. Which is another way of Harvard saying that it is far more frightened of the 2011 "occupiers" than it ever was of the 1969 Vietnam War protesters. Think of that.

More from Carr:

The pampered pukes are saying their faux encampment of Eddie Bauer and L.L. Bean tents is “symbolic.” It sure is — symbolic of the breathtaking hypocrisy of these limousine liberals.

They’re in solidarity with the rabble ... as long as the riff-raff stay on their side of the wall.

One certainly can empathize with Harvard for not wanting to scrape human excrement off its lawns and having tuberculosis and lice spread to its faculty and students. But Harvard is not too eager to grant other people the right to protect their property.

Now nobody can walk across the Yard unless he has a Harvard ID. They tried something like this in Arizona, and as I recall everyone at Harvard denounced SB 1070 as racism, as in, “They’re checking papers in Arizona!”

Now the moonbats are checking papers in Harvard Square. . . .

When political correctness comes in one of Harvard's gates, rationality flies out the window.

But what if an illegal alien wants to cross the Yard? Remember, when an illegal falsified his application to get into Harvard, they gave him a scholarship. When an American kid from Delaware tried to pull the same stunt, they gave him six months at Billerica House of Correction.

And what if Skippy Gates tries to take a shortcut across campus and he doesn’t have his ID with him? Will Barack say the campus cops “acted stupidly?” Will there be a sushi summit at the White House?

Carr tells it like it is:

Occupy Harvard Yard is like when you were 6 years old, and you went camping ... in your backyard, with your father. If you got scared, you could just run back in the house to get a hug from Mommy.

Which is the atmosphere one might reasonably expect Harvard to provide for their immature students new to the ways of the real world.

Harvard Yard is not altogether pink just yet. "Some freshmen from balcony dorms," those apparently still capable of rational thought, "yelled 'We are the 1 percent! We are the 1 percent!'” It is unclear whether those students were referring to their own incomes, their family incomes, or Harvard's income, which is not unsubstantial.

In 2008, Harvard's endowment was $37 billion, making it the second-wealthiest non-profit in the world, after the Catholic Church. When comparing the two institutions, it is useful to note that the Catholic Church has existed since the time of Christ and has acquired property in every location in the world in which Catholics have built a church during the last two millennia, whereas Harvard was founded less than 400 years ago and is pretty much confined, physically, to Cambridge, Massachussetts. When referring to Harvard, the term "non-profit" is most accurately defined as "pays zero taxes on its enormous investments and holdings, which circumstance does not stand in the way of it receiving enormous amounts of tax money collected from people locked out of Harvard Yard."

Sadly, any mocking of Harvard University is done through tears of woe. In just a few years, Harvard's students, rational or not, like the cadre of Harvard professors "serving" in the Obama administration, are going to be making decisions--big decisions--about your future and mine.

Because Big Nanny knows best.
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NYC Locates a Sane Judge to Rule against 24/7 #OWS Campout

2011-11-15T17:18:00.001-05:00

The "occupiers" can stay in Zuccotti Park, but their camping gear cannot.

From the Wall Street Journal:

A judge ruled against Occupy Wall Street protesters, upholding a move by New York City and the landlord of the privately owned plaza to clear tents from Zuccotti Park and prevent protesters from bringing equipment back in.

Hours after police cleared the last protester from their encampment Tuesday, lawyers for the city and Brookfield Office Properties faced off with Occupy Wall Street representatives inside a courtroom.

Supreme Court Justice Michael Stallman weighed whether to extend a temporary restraining order that bars the city from enforcing park rules against tents and other camping equipment. The original ruling came after police and sanitation workers had already swept all personal belongings from the two-month-old encampment, with more than 200 people arrested in the raid.

Lice, tuberculosis, scabies, garbage, trash, illicit drugs, human waste, and wireless technology still welcome. Not sure about the drums and rats. Update: The occupiers say they will be subject to search before entering Zuccotti Park, which might (maybe) perhaps (possibly) mean that illicit drugs are not (entirely) welcome.

Live link to the Zuccotti Park "occupation" here.
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Livestream of Occupy Wall Street after "Eviction"

2011-11-15T15:41:00.001-05:00

The link is here.
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Take the High Road through the Valley -- Blind Boys of Alabama

2011-11-13T11:18:00.000-05:00

Featuring the Oak Ridge Boys . . .

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Keeping one's friends close?

2011-11-12T08:44:00.001-05:00

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"Reach your hand out to your vets"

2011-11-11T09:58:00.001-05:00

". . . because they need it today."

Especially in my thoughts today are the veterans who care for their fellow veterans, particularly those who care for our wounded vets in VA facilities around the nation.

Thank you, and God bless you.

This video comes courtesy of molinelobo, whose father, a sailor and former tailor, was called upon in January of 1943 to hurriedly help make Franklin Delano Roosevelt's flag, featured in the video. This flag was flown by the USS Memphis, the cruiser that transported Franklin D. Roosevelt to the Casablanca Conference, where FDR and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill outlined plans for the invasion of Sicily and Italy and met with representatives of the Free French Forces. The flag now resides in the Roosevelt Presidential Library.
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Geitner Gives Cheap $$$ to Ford, Tesla, & Nissan

2011-11-09T13:29:00.000-05:00

In the age-old game of "follow the money," it's always interesting to see where government is spending our hard-earned (or expensively borrowed) cash. Over at Business Insider, Bruce Krasting has invited us to take a look at who is getting cheap money from the government.

As of September 30, 2011, the Federal Financing Bank, which is owned by the U.S. Treasury and operated by Tim Geitner, had lent, sold, or guaranteed $58 billion to business enterprises.

This past September, the bank made loans of money that U.S. taxpayers can expect never to see again, from a hefty $1.5 billion to the U.S. Postal Service (that will be broke by summer) to a piddling (by federal standards) $214 thousand to Beacon Power Corporation (they are already bankrupt).

Don't let the size of those numbers fool you though. The U.S. Postal Service owes the American people a total of $13 billion, and Beacon Power (another green whitewash by the Obama administration) owes a us a total of $40 million. Kiss all of that good-bye. Various and sundry solar companies, over time, have racked up bills totaling $4.9 billion, about a quarter of which is already toast.

But lookee here:

Ford Motor Company got $364.5 million in long-term loans at 1.4% interest. In just the month of September.

Tesla Motors got 90.8 million in long-term loans at 1% interest and 1.4% interest. That's not their first gov't loan, of course.

Nissan North America got $33.6 million in long-term loans at 1% interest, 1.8% interest, and 2.5% interest. Nissan gets your money without ever having sold you a car?

A couple of years ago, so much money was transferred from the public coffers to General Motors that it earned the new moniker, Government Motors. Around the same time, half a billion in taxpayer dollars went to Fisker Automotive to build electric cars in Finland. That's also when Tesla Motors was approved for almost half a billion dollars in federal loans on an "as needed" basis.

For the Obama administration's extension of their tentacles into the automobile industry, it looks like GM, Tesla, and Fisker were just a start.
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Would it be too much to demand that students study LOGIC?

2011-11-03T19:56:00.000-04:00

Judge Judy and Baliff Byrd meet recipients of their tax payments and are not too happy:

H/t: teaparty.org
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If These Were Global Warming Graphs, We'd All Be Vaporized

2011-11-01T17:50:00.001-04:00

A 375% increase of a nice, comfortable 72°F would be 270°F HOT, a temperature certain to be noticed by global warmists if they had not already been reduced to soup. (Apologies for yesterday's incorrect calculation, oops.)

However, when it comes to a 375% increase in spending on education over the last 40 years--with NO associated increase in reading, math, or science scores--Lefties like this Palestine-sympathizing #OWSer [video 2] think that people who want to get rid of the Department of Education are fools.

They seem to have forgotten that old adage about a fool and his money.

H/t: teresamerica.
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The Invisible Man

2011-10-31T19:08:00.001-04:00

Let's hope we can't find him in the White House in 2013.
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Quote of the Day: Poetic Justice (with Irony Update)

2011-10-30T09:17:00.000-04:00

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

2011-10-30T08:00:00.000-04:00

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Halloween Nightmare: White & Wild Weather for the Northeast

2011-10-28T15:26:00.000-04:00

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

2011-10-28T10:50:00.000-04:00

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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Three #OWS Undead Vie for Darwin Award

2011-10-25T17:38:00.001-04:00

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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What Ever Happened to Shame?

2011-10-24T19:03:00.000-04:00

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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No Tears in Heaven -- Skeeter Davis

2011-10-23T11:06:00.000-04:00

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

2011-10-21T11:19:00.002-04:00

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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Not #OWS: The Silent Marches in Communist Cuba

2011-10-19T21:47:00.003-04:00

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.

Pollán's mourners marching past St. Rita's Church

Can you hear the sounds of silence in Havana, #OWS?
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Best View Yet of the Occupiers, Denver Issue

2011-10-17T18:26:00.001-04:00

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
Order of the Double-Cross, made famous in the Charlie Chaplin movie, The Great Dictator.

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

2011-10-16T15:33:00.001-04:00

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

2011-10-16T08:00:00.000-04:00

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Friday Document Drop: Too Big to Fail . . .

2011-10-15T12:11:00.000-04:00

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

2011-10-12T08:45:00.000-04:00


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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A Laugh a Minute: #OWSPickUpLines

2011-10-10T21:53:00.000-04:00

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!

2011-10-10T14:15:00.002-04:00

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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People Get Ready -- The Impressions

2011-10-09T08:00:00.001-04:00

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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Vacation Resort for Wall Street Occupiers

2011-10-08T21:40:00.000-04:00

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?

2011-10-08T14:04:00.001-04:00

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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Take the High Road -- Blind Boys of Alabama

2011-10-07T23:17:00.002-04:00

Featuring the Oak Ridge Boys:

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Will the Real Obama Supporters Please Raise Your Hands?

2011-10-06T14:35:00.001-04:00

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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Greenies Take Note: Farmers Murdered for Carbon Credits

2011-10-05T13:08:00.002-04:00

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.

You Are My Hiding Place - Selah

2011-10-02T09:55:00.000-04:00

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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How Many Nobel Laureates Did It Take to Give Solyndra $1/2 Billion?

2011-09-30T09:56:00.001-04:00

Add Steven Chu to the list.

Energy Secretary Chu is really, really good at cooling atoms with laser light, for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1997.

It doesn't look like he is doing quite so well making his brother Nobel Laureate, Barack Obama, look like the coolest president ever.

From The Washington Post:

Energy Secretary Steven Chu acknowledged Thursday making the final decision to allow a struggling solar company to continue receiving taxpayer money after it had technically defaulted on a $535 million federal loan guaranteed by his agency.

Solyndra's loan default might have been a red flag to an Energy Secretary out to protect taxpayer money, but Chu hadn't made that his first priority. In fact he "restructured Solyndra’s loan to put taxpayers behind a group of private investors to be repaid if the company went bankrupt."

What's a mere $1/2 billion among friends?

Don't ever let anyone tell you that money isn't energy, at least at the U.S. Department of Energy.
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Yemen Says Anwar al-Awlaki Is Dead

2011-09-30T08:51:00.002-04:00

h/t: I Own the World
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On Golf Shoes, Bedroom Slippers, Inmate Footwear, and Barn Boots

2011-09-26T15:13:00.000-04:00

Saturday evening, as Herman Cain and his supporters were celebrating his massive victory in the Florida GOP candidate straw poll, the President of the United States was trying to stir up an Alynsky-ite racial divide by rousing the 41st Congressional Black Caucus, a group which in which membership depends on a pigment test, to take off their bedroom slippers and get people marching in the streets "for equality":

One can't help noticing that Obama didn't tell the Congressional Black Caucus to remove their golf shoes. That would have been too obvious a case of the pot calling the kettle, well, you know.

According to a recent editorial in Investors Business Daily:

Federal tax records show the caucus' charitable wing spent more money catering its 2008 dinner — $700,000 — than it spent giving out scholarships. The nonprofit is supposed to help "disadvantaged African-Americans," yet it also sank donations into its $4 million Embassy Row digs, golf outings and an annual visit to a Mississippi casino resort. It spends as much decorating its Beltway gala as it does on internships.

Mississippi casino visits don't quite equal vacationing on the coasts of Spain, Honolulu, or Martha's Vineyard, but these undeniably are steps in the Obama presidency's direction.

The same editorial hinted that a fair number of the 42 members of the Caucus might look better in inmate slippers. That list includes:

The latest in inmate footwear.

Maxine Waters, D-Cal., [who] stands accused of improperly lobbying Treasury officials to bail out a black bank, OneUnited, where her husband owned stock and served on the board. . . .

Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., convicted last year of 12 ethics violations. Among other things, the former Ways and Means Committee chair accepted gifts from donors with business before the tax-writing body. He also failed to pay taxes on rental income, and filed bad financial disclosure papers.

Rep. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., a Rangel confidant caught up in an ongoing Justice corruption probe into prominent Queens Democrats.

Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, D-Texas, who admitted improperly steering $31,000 in Black Caucus Foundation scholarships to relatives and children of an aide.

Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., D-Ill., who has come under Justice investigation for his role in former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich's influence-peddling scandal.

Other caucus members who have found themselves in ethics or legal trouble in recent years include: Rep. Laura Richardson, D-Calif.; Rep. Melvin Watt, D-N.C.; Rep. Corrine Brown, D-Fla.; ex-Sen. Roland Burris, D-Ill.; ex-Rep. Frank Ballance, D-N.C.; ex-Rep. Earl Hilliard Jr., D-Ala., and ex-Rep. William Jefferson, D-La.

When Jefferson refused to step down after FBI agents caught him red-handed with $90,000 of bribery cash in his office freezer, the caucus thoroughly shamed itself by supporting the crook. He's now serving 13 years — in the federal pen.

None-too-cleverly buried in Obama's speech is his--and the Caucus's--plan to burden the country with more debt in a futile but vote collecting plan to deliver jobs to the black community, jobs that the president and the Caucus will never mention were lost because of Democrat policies and regulations to guarantee home ownership to minorities who couldn't pay their mortgage bills.

What kind of footwear would be best for selling the U.S. another trillion dollars worth of debt for that cause, as Maxine Waters has suggested? Barn boots?

Available in all sizes.

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I'm On My Way to Canaan's Land - Flatt and Scruggs

2011-09-25T10:22:00.000-04:00

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Solyndra Execs Plead Fifth

2011-09-23T15:02:00.001-04:00

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
~ Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

From the statements made by Solyndra execs Brian Harrison and W.G. Stover (above) to the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, you'd never guess that people invoke the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution specifically when faced with questions that might cause them to testify against themselves in a criminal case.

You'd think the Fifth Amendment protects the Solendra execs from answering any old question, for no particular reason, rather than protecting their reticence to discuss any actions on their part that might land them in the slammer after it came to the Oversight Subcommittee's attention that the company led by Harrison and Stover managed to skip off with more than half a billion dollars provided by U.S. taxpayers.

The two execs had like responses to every question posed to them: "On advice of my counsel, I invoke the privilege afforded by the fifth amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and I respectfully decline to answer any questions."

Libs may regard the Second Amendment as a dangerous anacronism, but they sure like that old Fifth Amendment (with the obvious exception, of course, of that part about taking private property for public use--that's called "spreading the wealth around" because "there is no one in this country who got rich on their own").

Actually, it's looking more and more like someone at Solyndra didn't get rich on their own.

"We will get to the bottom of this," said the Rep. Cliff Stearns, the Florida republican who heads the Subcommittee.

But not before hearing more invocations of the Fifth Amendment, I'm thinking.
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He's not a narcissist, really!

2011-09-21T16:45:00.003-04:00

Courtesy GettyImages

Thanks to Just a Conservative Girl, Weasel Zippers, and PJ Tatler, who reports that the head of state standing behind the hand of "the smartest guy in the room" is Tsakhia Elbegdorj, the president of Mongolia.

Obama doesn't believe the US is exceptional, but the president of the US? That's another story.

Either this photo is a fake, or Obama is running on autopilot.
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Guess Who Else Doesn't Pay Taxes?

2011-09-20T16:01:00.000-04:00

General Electric paid zero federal income taxes for 2010. Master of hypocrisy, Warren Buffett, infamously owes the federal gov't $1 billion in federal taxes.

Another stranger to the tax man is the largest union in the country, the conspicuously wealthy National Education Union.

From Larry Sand, writing for Union Watch:

The NEA, which has an annual budget of $371 million, spent more than $56.3 million in the 2007-2008 election cycle on state and federal campaigns, political parties, and ballot measures, $12.5 million ahead of the second-place group. And yet, NEA doesn’t think it should pay income tax and rarely does.

The law says you must pay income tax unless you are a tax exempt entity, and if you are accorded that status, you cannot be involved with politicking. The Landmark Legal Foundation has been on to the NEA and its tax evasion for years now, and has gained some traction. In 2006, the Wisconsin Education Association, a NEA affiliate “realized it needed to pay $171,000 in federal taxes after LLF asked if the organization had paid taxes on $430,000 it gave to the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee. Stan Johnson, the WEAC’s president, admitted the organization should have paid taxes on the expenditures.”
Alinsky's Rules for Radicals is an NEA recommended read.

If NEA ever stopped blathering about the rich not paying their “fair share” and actually started paying its own (and were dinged for past years’ payments with appropriate penalties), it would certainly help to solve the budgetary problems it claims are inhibiting our education process.

The NEA, which is part of the world's second-largest international union, has 3.2 million members and more than 550 employees. Whatever it may say on Obama's teleprompter screen, it is the collection of the financial contributions of such "friends" as these that constitutes the Democrat Party's real "green agenda."

Through the efforts of the NEA, that "green agenda" comes with its own insidious insurance policy: through daily indoctrination of American school children with the Democrat "vision," the NEA faithfully delivers to the Democrat Party each year a new crop of Democrat voters, supporters, and donors.
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Top Ten AttackWatch Tweets

2011-09-19T14:54:00.000-04:00

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Waivers: Solyndra Didn't Pay Sales Tax, Either

2011-09-18T21:36:00.000-04:00

Breaking ground for the half-billion-dollar Solyndra solar-panel plant that Joe Biden said would produce 500 MV of solar power each year, not to mention 3,000 construction jobs and 1,000 permanent jobs. Instead, Solyndra fired its 1,100 employees with no notice or pay.

As reported in the Los Angeles Times, Solyndra didn't merely rush away with $535 in loan money as it slid down greased skids into bankruptcy--it picked up another $27 million from California in sales tax breaks.

Like for the federal loan, California largesse with taxpayer dollars wasn't experienced by just one "green" company. No, the California state tax waiver granted to Solyndra was (and remains) available to other "special" businesses, that is, the "clean-energy" companies you hear so much about, those that can't stay in business unless you work extra hours to support them.

Separately, lawmakers in Sacramento questioned a $27-million tax break given to Solyndra under a state law intended to encourage clean-energy companies to do business in California.

State Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Pacoima), who co-wrote the bill, said he planned to examine the tax break at a hearing this fall.

Uh-huh.

"We're certainly revisiting the due diligence that was done before an award was given," he said.

I wonder where State Senator Padilla thinks he's going to find the "due diligence" to "revisit" the prior "due diligence."

Assemblyman Brian Nestande (R-Palm Desert) said he intended to ask Treasurer Bill Lockyer's staff to explain "what their vetting process was."

Go ahead, Treasurer Lockyer. Tell the nice gentleman what you are really thinking: "Vetting process? State treasurers in charge of taxpayer dollars don't need no stinkin' vetting process."

The law, which was approved unanimously by the state Senate and Assembly and signed by then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in March 2010, exempts qualified clean-technology companies from paying sales tax when buying manufacturing equipment.

The law established a committee to review applications from companies that sought the tax breaks. In November, Solyndra applied for a credit that would allow it to avoid paying nearly $35 million in sales tax on the purchase of more than $380 million of equipment.

The request was granted, but the company used only $27 million of the credit before it went out of business, said Joe DeAnda, a Lockyer spokesman.

Gee. $35 million minus $27 million: That's $8 million of taxpayer earnings that Solyndra sloppily let slip from its grasp. Doubtless the California Legislature will remedy that situation promptly, likely with other "indirect benefits from state agencies" to other so-called "green" companies cast in the Solyndra mold:

Under the California Solar Initiative, a program created by Schwarzenegger and the Legislature, customers that bought Solyndra-manufactured solar-power modules received about $4.9 million in state subsidies, according to Terrie Prosper, a spokeswoman for the California Public Utilities Commission.

Hold onto the dollars you saved in subsidies, Solyndra customers. Something tells me that those warranties of Solyndra products you were counting on will not be honored.

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Have a Little Talk with Jesus -- Heavenly Gospel Singers

2011-09-18T08:00:00.000-04:00

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The Perfect Thing to Wear to an Event Marking the Murder of 3,000 Americans?

2011-09-12T13:41:00.001-04:00

Yes, indeedy. Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama actually wore this little number yesterday to a Washington DC event marking the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The event was "A Concert For Hope" held at the Kennedy Center.

I'm thinking exactly what the woman on the right is thinking.

Thanks to Adrienne at Adrienne's Corner. Go to her post to learn more about the oratorical genius of the man who is so smart he has voluntarily chosen to escort Michelle to public events.

Linked at And So it Goes in Shreveport, where Pat Austin is preparing for Oktoberfest at Barksdale Air Force Base. Thank you, Pat!

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Project 2,996: A Tribute to William J. Meehan

2011-09-11T17:11:00.000-04:00

I wrote this tribute to William J. Meehan in 2009 as part of Project 2,996, in which bloggers volunteer to remember the valuable lives of the people we lost on September 11, 2001. Earlier today, I posted a remembrance of the Hanson family, who also were murdered that day.

Bill Meehan was a 49-year-old husband and father of three who lived in Darien, Connecticut, and who had had just moved his office to the World Trade Center in late August of 2001 because he was being asked more and more frequently to share his views of Wall Street on CNBC. Bill was chief market analyst for Cantor Fitzgerald, the country's largest bond firm, with more than 1,000 people working in four floors of the north tower.

I never knew Bill Meehan, but Amy Langfield did, and she wrote about him in a letter to her parents on September 18, the day she learned of his death. Amy had just returned to New York, where she reported on Wall Street matters for Reuters. Later, Amy published that letter in her blog, Amy's New York Notebook, on June 24, 2002, in a post entitled, "There's No Forgetting."

Here's some of what Amy wrote:

I used to talk to Bill Meehan nearly every morning when I was writing the market curtain-raiser for Reuters. He was often the first person I talked to in the mornings and always helped me get my bearings for the day. Super nice guy, always helpful, and had a good grasp of overall market conditions. I had to call analysts about 7:20 a.m. and find out what they thought the most important factors in the market would be that day -- there weren't that many people already in the office and on the ball by then, but Meehan was, and was [one of] only about five guys we knew who would bother to talk to reporters that early.

The New York Times had a few things to say about Bill Meeham too:

William J. Meehan liked to say he had the ideal job. "All he had to do was give an opinion," said his wife, Maureen. But when Mr. Meehan opined, Wall Street listened: he was chief market analyst for Cantor Fitzgerald.
The job was ideal if you did not mind rising at 4:30 a.m., which Mr. Meehan, 49, did to write his column for The Cantor Morning News, an online newsletter. He was a fixture on the proliferating financial shows and got to banter with Louis Rukeyser on "Wall Street Week."
A Meehan opinion was grounded in books. "He would read everything and anything," his wife recalled, "not just financial but also biographies and Harry Potter, too." He bought the early Potter books for his daughter, Katie -- and ended up reading them himself. But for a man who spent many a vacation day between hard covers, Mr. Meehan was also big on the Internet. "He was the first guy I knew to buy his Christmas tree online," said Steven Montano, The Morning News's managing editor.
Mr. Meehan initially worked for Cantor in Darien, Conn., where he lived, getting home in time to coach his three children in Little League, flag football and basketball. But in August, as his TV appearances became more frequent, he shifted to the World Trade Center.

In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Alkaban, a book that Bill Meehan might have read if he had lived, Dumbledore tells Harry, “‘You think the dead we loved ever truly leave us? You think we don’t recall them more clearly than ever in times of great trouble? Your father is alive in you, Harry, and shows himself most plainly when you have need of him."

September 11, 2001, is a date that has been made sacred by the passing of so many. Every day since, many of us have been in need of somebody who died that day. In the days to come, America will continue to have much need of those we have lost, and we will profit much if we look inside ourselves to capture the lessons they would impart.
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Project 2,996: Remembering the Hanson Family: Peter, Sue, and Christine

2011-09-11T11:12:00.001-04:00

I wrote this post as part of Project 2,996, in which bloggers remember the precious lives of those we lost on 9/11/01. On the morning of that day, the Hanson family, Peter, his wife Sue Kim, and their little daughter, Christine Lee, just 2 1/2 years old, were flying from Boston to Los Angeles to visit Sue Kim's grandmother and brothers in California. They were also anticipating Christine's first visit to Disneyland.

They never made it to their destination: terrorists hijacked their flight and crashed the United Airlines airliner into the South Tower of the World Trade Center.

Peter Burton Hanson, a successful software salesman and enthusiastic Grateful Dead fan, had recently taken up gardening. The previous spring, in his typically passionate way, he had planted not only roses and lilacs outside the young family's two-story white colonial house in Groton, Massachusetts, but he had also planted at least 30 trees on the property as well.

Christine loved to help her father in the garden. "After they were all done planting," recalls Peter's mother, Eunice Hanson of Easton, Connecticut, "Christine would say to a tree or plant: `I bet you are thirsty. Let me feed you and give you a hug." Christine liked to visit the playground behind the Groton, Massachusetts, Public Library, where a plaque bearing her image now stands.

Peter and Sue Kim had been married for eight years. After they met, Sue, the practical one, persuaded Peter to give up his hippie lifestyle and earn his MBA at Boston University, where she would later became a doctoral candidate in micro-biology immunology. After completing his studies, Peter become vice president of marketing at TimeTrade, a software developer in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Peter's forebears had been Greek immigrants; Sue’s parents had emigrated from Korea. Although born in Los Angeles, Sue had spent her earliest years in Korea. She lost her mother when she was just 15, and Sue appreciated the closeness and structure of Peter's family, who loved her deeply.

Peter was one of the few people who managed to reach someone on the ground as his plane was hijacked. The person he reached was his father, Lee Hanson. An audiotape of Peter's parents talking about their experience is available here.

It is worth remembering today, as the Grateful Dead reminded us in their song, "Ripple," that "there is a fountain not made by the hands of men." Surely Peter, Sue, and Christine Hanson have gone to a place where they are enjoying the water flowing from that sacred fountain.

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Hostias from Mozart's Requiem -- Leipzig Radio Choir & the Staatskapelle Dresden Orchestra

2011-09-11T05:00:00.000-04:00

On this infinitely sorrowful day, the Offertorium from Mozart's Requiem:

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Photo of Terrorist Believed Plotting 9/11 Attack Tomorrow

2011-09-10T11:45:00.001-04:00

From the UK Daily Mail, via Atlas Shrugs, via vinienco:

This is believed to be one of the men counter terrorism chiefs say are plotting a terrorist attack in America on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11.

Jude Kenan Mohammad, American born Muslim
An image of American-born 22-year-old Jude Kenan Mohammad has been posted on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list.

He has been linked to what officials have called a credible but unconfirmed al-Qaeda threat to set off a car bomb on bridges or tunnels in New York City or Washington.

The Wall Street Journal reported Mohammad is among three al-Qaeda leaders that investigators believe pose a particular threat because they have lived in the U.S.
Should that mission prove impossible, the attackers have been told to simply cause as much destruction as they can.

Mohammad, who was born in Florida, dropped out of North Carolina's Fuquay-Varina High School in 2006 and left the U.S. two years later to visit Pakistan, his father's homeland.

A federal grand jury in North Carolina indicted him and seven other men in 2009 on charges that they conspired to carry out terrorist activities around the world. Two of the men have pleaded guilty, and the trial of four others is set for September 19 in New Bern.

Federal authorities have never arrested Mohammad in the case, saying that they believe he has been in Pakistan since the indictment was issued.

Why are Americans again having to pick up their information from a UK media outlet?

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Bloomberg: "Don't Call Ground Zero, "Ground Zero"

2011-09-08T12:40:00.002-04:00

Via Angel at Woman Honor Thyself: Mayor Bloomberg the Dhimmi:

‘Don’t call it Ground Zero anymore’: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg urges Americans to move past the moniker linked to twin towers’ destruction

People should stop calling the site of the September 11 attacks ‘Ground Zero,’ New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said today, urging Americans to move past a term long linked with the World Trade Center’s twin towers destruction.

Angel takes exception to Bloomberg's admonition:

I WORKED AT “GROUND ZERO” at the pit, for months and months and months. And guess what Libturds…

Ground Zero in NYC was made into a mass grave, (courtesy your new pals..the IzlamoNazis…. ) where the World Trade Center used to stand.

I'm pausing for a moment of silence. My thoughts are with those of Angel, brave Angel.

And they are also with those of my friend whose daughter was among those murdered where "the World Trade Center used to stand."

My friend's daughter was on Floor 92 of the North Tower of the World Trade Center when an American Airlines Boeing 767 carrying 92 people and 15,000 gallons of jet fuel--and going 500 miles per hour-- was deliberately crashed by Islamic terrorists into Floors 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, and 98 above her. No one on Floor 92 or on any of the floors above it--a total of 1,344 souls--survived. At least 37--and perhaps twice that many--people jumped to their deaths, "apparently to escape agonizing deaths from smoke inhalation."

Here is a frame from a videotape of the murder of my friend's daughter and the other 1,343 souls who happened to be above Floor 91 of the WTC's North Tower at 8:46 a.m. on September 11, ten years ago:

The only known image of the impact of the Boeing 747 on the North Tower

Below is an aerial view of what was left of the neighborhood by the time the IslamoNazis were finished with this particular foul deed. The red box indicates the planned location of the Ground Zero mosque, just one building away from total destruction:

Aerial view of the area that Mayor Michael Bloomberg thinks should not be called "Ground Zero." The red box outlines a building whose roof was destroyed by the fuselage of the jet that was deliberately crashed by Islamic terrorists into the WTC's South Tower, together with the dust of thousands of incinerated bodies.

Perhaps Mayor Bloomberg thinks that if he can browbeat Americans into calling Ground Zero something else, we will be deterred from calling his pet religious project, the Ground Zero mosque, "The Ground Zero mosque." The mosque then will be referred to in the New York Times and all other NYC government and private propaganda media as the "National Day of Service Mosque," the "United We Serve" ~~mosque~~ Community Center and National Minaret, or some other term preferred by his wealthy partners in the Islamic Shariah finance market.

God help us.

Linked as a Backyard Pick by the BackyardConservative, who keeps us informed about the insidious creep of Chicago politics. Thank you, Anne!

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Time Out for a Quote-of-the-Day Chuckle

2011-09-07T16:35:00.000-04:00

From the comment section in It Don't Make Sense: One If By Land And Two If By Unions:

Dear Siggie,

I am a middle-aged Tea Party supporter. Jimmy Hoffa has just threatened to take me out. What should I wear? Casual or something slinky?

Exfoliating in Seattle

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So Glad to Find Out that I'm Not A Worker . . .

2011-09-07T10:50:00.000-04:00

For longer than I care to mention, this Tea Party member has been under the illusion that the activity I have been performing for 6 or 7 days a week since I was a teenager to produce money to pay village, city, county, state, and federal taxes was work. Lucky I've got Jimmy Hoffa, Jr. to explain the error of my ways.

Hey Jimmy, pass me that box of bonbons and order me another pink champagne cocktail. I've got to do my nails.

Recommended read at Pundit & Pundette, where Pundette notes that Obama's Washington Post Love Boat has sailed without him. Thanks, Jill!
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As 9/11 Approaches: Laudate Pueri Dominum -- The Manhasset High School Kinsmen

2011-09-04T05:00:00.000-04:00

Over 40 people from the Long Island hamlet of Manhasset died in the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Here, the Manhasset High School Kinsmen dedicated their touching rendition of Felix Mendelssohn's Laudate Pueri Dominum (Praise the Lord, Ye Children) in memory of those who perished.

Latin:

Laudate pueri Dominum:
laudate nomen Domini.

Sit nomen Domini benedictum:
ex hoc nunc et usque in sæculum.

English:

Praise the Lord, ye children:
praise the name of the Lord.

Blessed be the name of the Lord:
from henceforth now and for ever.

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Sad: Israel Philharmonic hounded off BBC by Palestinian "hooligans"

2011-09-03T10:57:00.008-04:00

"Hooligans." That's putting it politely. Even more politely, and much more accurately, they are called the "Palestine Solidarity Campaign."

From the Globe Theatre Arts Desk, via Gates of Vienna:

Police. Placards. Protests. And bag checks. It meant only one thing. Jews were performing at the Proms. Here we were in the Royal Albert Hall in London in 2011 witnessing a stage of musicians being barracked [jeered at] and abused for having the gall to be Jewish. . . . No, not a portrait of Europe in the early 20th century, but Britain in the 21st. I wonder. In a few years, will Jews be able to make music publicly in Britain at all?
. . . A few minutes into a fuzzily luxuriant performance (even the triangle was being vibbed) of Webern's Passacaglia, Op 1, a bunch of protesters in the choir stands got to their feet and began to barrack. To the strains of Beethoven's Ode to Joy, they sang their anti-Israeli chants. I imagine a few of the audience and orchestral members would have been familiar with this sort of public abuse, from when they were children in mainland Europe.
They made it difficult to concentrate on the Webern, though Mehta made sure some of their fortissimos sliced through the taunts. They returned to dog the start of the Bruch Violin Concerto in G minor. Zubin Mehta, the Israel Philharmonic and Gil Shaham . . . stood still, silent and calm, while the ushers and security swept out the protest. Amid this maelstrom, Mehta and Shaham, their patience wearing thin, tore into the opening bars. The work achieved a level of meaning and fury that no one will ever witness the like of again.

But while it was all sparks and springs in the outer movements, in the slow, both soloist and orchestra bowed to the softest, gentlest, most tender sound imaginable, as if they were reaching down to plant a kiss on a baby's crown. Not even the Neanderthals dared break this spell. Nor dared they interrupt Shaham's elegantly sculpted performance of the Preludio from Bach's Third Partita.
The BBC had by now switched off their live Radio 3 broadcast after the audience began barracking the barrackers at the beginning of the Bruch. [Listen to the BBC broadcast here.] It was understandable - no point giving the protesters publicity - but disappointing, considering that, if the listeners had been given an opportunity to hear the whole Prom, they would have heard the Prommers shouting down the protests, and the Israeli Phil[harmonic] ploughing on valiantly through their programme, to repeated standing ovations. That is, they would have heard us win.
Was it because of the feeling that the BBC had deserted him and his orchestra that Mehta and his musicians came out on stage looking deflated? The continued protests must have demoralised them. It did me. They never quite recovered the responsive vim of the first half. There was another moment of comedy among the PSC disrupters - before the depressingly repetitive boredom of it all set in - as two whiskery old men started to hound the orchestra from a box and a lady next door hooked one of their necks with her walking stick [emphasis mine].
. . . What do we do now? What can we do now? The protesters have all now walked free to hound some more Jews. The recorded concert - what's left of it - will be salvaged and aired next week. One thing we do know: the Israel Phil[harmonic] won't be coming back to these shores in a hurry.

I wish I had a photo of that bearded Palestinian "sympathizer" with that brave music lover's walking stick around his neck. That's one woman who knows what to do now.

Western governments, take notice.

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The Real Reason O's College Transcripts Are Kept Secret

2011-09-02T21:51:00.006-04:00

By Jove, I think that Jill the Pundette has divined the real reason we're intended never to see the college transcripts of the smartest president ever to prove totally incapable of delivering a large enough crumb of hope to the American population to inspire the creation of a single job:

No one has laid eyes on Obama's college transcripts but I'll bet they're littered with I's for Incomplete.

That's because they don't give I's for Incompetent.

Read the post: "Obama: Bo ate my jobs plan."

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Obama's Illegal Alien Uncle Omar Busted for Drunk Driving in Massachusetts

2011-08-28T17:16:00.003-04:00

No word yet from Uncle Omar's younger sister and fellow resident of Massachusetts, Auntie Zeituni Onyango, or from his brothers, Yusuf Obama and Said Obama.

When Omar Obama, aged 67, who now calls himself Onyango Obama, was booked last Wednesday near the Chicken Bone Saloon in Framingham, Massachusetts, on charges of DUI and driving to endanger, he "was asked if he wanted to make a telephone call to arrange for bail." In typical Obamalike bravado, the Kenyan illegal alien who is wanted by ICE, replied: "I think I will call the White House."

Uncle Omar came to the attention of police when he cut off a police car and a civilian vehicle with his Mitsubishi SUV, nearly hitting the police vehicle, and then kept going, right through a stop sign, to make a left turn without bothering to use a turn signal. The drivers of the two other vehicles involved avoided being hit by slamming on their brakes.

That's not exactly what happened according to Uncle Omar, who failed his Breathalyzer test, registering a .14 in a state where the legal limit is .08. He protested that, if the other vehicles had really slammed on their brakes, their tires would have squealed.

According to Obama relatives back in Kenya, and as reported in Barack Obama's book, "Dreams from My Father, Uncle Omar moved to the Boston area in the 1960s. Like Auntie Zeituni, who lived in a Boston homeless shelter for a couple of years, Uncle Omar's life in the U.S. has not been a bowl of cherries. As reported by The Sunday Times, records reveal that a man believed to be Uncle Omar "was beaten by armed robbers with a “sawed-off rifle” while working in a corner shop in the Dorchester area of the city [Boston]. He was later evicted from his one-bedroom flat for failing to pay $2,324.20 (£1,488) arrears, according to the Boston Housing Court."

Nevertheless, neither Omar nor Zeituni are in any hurry to head back to Kenya.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement have been holding a warrant for Uncle Omar's arrest, and he has previously been ordered to be deported back to Kenya.

The judge ordered Uncle Omar held on the ICE warrant.

Auntie Zeituni, who came to the U.S. from Kenya in 2000, lived here illegally on taxpayer-provided benefits until late last year, when she was granted legal residency by a judge who said "she could be in danger if she returned to her homeland." She still lives in public housing and receives disability payments, but not from the nephew who vacations with his immediate family and extensive entourage on Martha's Vineyard on money earned by U.S. taxpayers. That's okay by her. In an interview televized on WBZ-TV last September, Auntie Zeituni went on record, "If I come as an immigrant, you have the obligation to make me a citizen."

Linked at And So It Goes In Shreveport, where the Big Zero's true concern about Americans' joblessness is captured. Thank you, Pat!
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A Shelter in the Time of Storm - George Banton

2011-08-28T08:00:00.002-04:00

In the late 19th century, this was a favorite hymn of fisherman on the north coast of England, and they were often heard singing it as they approached their harbors in the time of storm.

Lyrics:

The Lord’s our Rock, in Him we hide, 
A Shelter in the time of storm; 
Secure whatever ill betide, 
A Shelter in the time of storm.

(Refrain) Jesus is a Rock in the weary land, 
In the weary land, in the weary land;
Oh, Jesus is a Rock in the weary land,
A Shelter in the time of storm.

A shade by day, defense by night, 
A Shelter in the time of storm; 
No fears alarm, no foes afright, 
A Shelter in the time of storm.

Refrain

O Rock divine,
O Refuge dear, 
A Shelter in the time of storm; 
Be Thou our Helper ever near, 
A Shelter in the time of storm.

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Bloomberg Bans Clergy from 9/11 Ceremony

2011-08-25T11:58:00.007-04:00

Father John Romas, pastor of the church destroyed by terrorists on 9/11

Add religious leaders to the list of people deleted from the 9/11 ceremony this year. (First responders have already been told they will be denied entry to the ceremony.)

From Fox Nation:

Religious leaders are calling on Mayor Michael Bloomberg to reverse course and offer clergy a role in the ceremony commemorating the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.

Banning any kind of reference to God at memorial services and burial rituals is the new thing for the Obama administration and Obama clingers like Mayor Bloomberg. The Veteran's Administration has been doing it at the Houston (TX) National Cemetery for a while now. In fact, "U.S. Attorneys will be going to court to forbid Christian soldiers being buried as the names of God or Jesus are invoked."

Except if you are a Muslim terrorist, of course, like Osama bin Ladin, the al-Qaeda founder/unimaginable monster responsible for the 9/11 attacks that killed 2,977 innocent people on 9/11 alone. Interestingly, when Osama bin Ladin was buried at sea, US forces administered Muslim religious rites for him, remember that?

From ABC World News:

Officials said that, in accordance with Muslim law, bin Laden's burial at sea was conducted by a Muslim seaman, who recited the prayers and ensured that the body was washed and wrapped appropriately in cloth.

According to a Boston religion scholar, Stephen Prothero, the traditional funerary prayers that are recited "ask God for forgiveness and mercy for the deceased."

Yet, as Bloomberg will have it, there will be no prayer for the nearly 3,000 innocent people murdered by bin Laden on 9/11 alone, nor for their bereaved, nor for the many first responders and others sickened and suffering as a result. Not even a prayer by the pastor of the Greek Orthodox church destroyed by terrorists that day.

From Chris at Wyblog:

No prayer, just the looming presence of Iman Rauf's Ground Zero Death to America Victory Mosque overshadowing the solemnity of the remembrance ceremonies. And of course no acknowledgement of the void where Saint Nicholas Church ought to stand. Destroyed in the attacks, it's rebirth languishes beneath NYC and Port Authority red tape. Red tape which magically fails to impede construction of a new house of worship, one that is dedicated to the ideology which spawned 9/11 in the first place.

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Founders Rolling Over in their Graves Cause 5.9 Magnitude Quake in DC

2011-08-23T14:23:00.009-04:00

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

From Fox11 WLUK-TV:

The U.S. Geological Survey said the earthquake was 3.7 miles deep. Shaking was felt at the White House and all over the East Coast, as far south as Chapel Hill, N.C. Parts of the Pentagon, White House and Capitol were evacuated. The quake was in Miner, Va., in Louisa County.

Another quake was felt in the DC area a little over a year ago on July 16, 2010. That one was 3.7 on the Richter scale.

Hoping everyone is okay.

Added: There's a "Did you feel it?" intensity map here. You can add to it if you like. (H/t: Eruptions)

Honored to be linked at What Planet Am I On?
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Be Thou My Vision - David Summerford on His Mountain Dulcimer

2011-08-21T08:00:00.008-04:00

The old Irish hymn:

Lyrics:

Be Thou my vision, oh Lord of my heart
Nought be all else to me, save that Thou art
Thou my best thought by day or by night
Waking or sleeping, Thy presence my light

Be Thou my wisdom, and Thou my true word
I ever with Thee and Thou with me Lord
Thou my great Father and I Thy true son
Thou in me dwelling and I with Thee one

Riches I need not, nor man's empty praise
Thou mine inheritance now and always
Thou and Thou only first in my heart
High king of heaven my treasure Thou art

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I've heard of separate bedrooms, but separate Presidential Jets?

2011-08-19T20:59:00.005-04:00

From White House Dossier by way of Weasel Zippers via Tom Nelson, who asks, "Why are the Obamas acting so very much like they don't really believe in the global warming hoax?":

Michelle Obama and President Obama traveled to Martha’s Vineyard just hours apart, costing taxpayers thousands in additional expenses so she could have just a bit of extra vacation time.

That's what they think. I think Michelle's hairdresser and personal trainer needed to hitch a ride.

Mrs. Obama and her daughters arrived just before 2 pm Thursday on a U.S. government jet, according to the Martha’s Vineyard Times, which got its information from the local airport. The first lady’s office has been silent on her travel. President Obama arrived in the evening along with the family dog Bo.

Bo knows more than he's telling.

Part of a convoy of helicopters escorting Obama and his dog, Bo, from Air Force One on Cape Cod to Martha's Vineyard via Marine One (photo: Reuters).

The extra costs related to Mrs. Obama’s solo trip mainly include the flight on a specially designed military aircraft she took instead of Air Force One, as well as any extra staff and Secret Service that had to be enlisted to go with her. She would also have had her own motorcade from the airport to her vacation residence.

The Obama Martha's Vineyard motorcade:

(photo: Reuters)

Mrs. Obama’s separate jet travel sends the wrong message on a host of issues, from global warming to the budget deficit to the economy – in which currently so many people can’t afford to take a vacation at all.

This is not the first time Michelle has gone on vacation ahead of the president on the taxpayers’ tab. Last December, she racked up what was likely more than $100,000 in expenses leaving early for their Hawaii vacation.

Obama has assured us that he wants to see Americans working and, to make certain that one of his daughters was working very hard on her homework while he golfed a foursome at the Vineyard Golf Club this afternoon, Obama dropped into Vineyard Haven to buy her $32 worth of books, which he conspicuously charged to his own credit card, telling the cashier he only uses it about three times a year. Which I believe.

Here is Obama with his daughters on their book-buying mission. The kids look really happy, don't they?

(photo: Reuters)

What Obama didn't use his credit card for was to gas up the motorcade (see above) that escorted the First Trio to the bookstore to buy that $32 worth of books and then delivered the president to the Vineyard Golf Club for that pressing presidential business.

Thank you for the link to Jill the Pundette, who wondered:

Is there a candidate out there who is willing to view the presidency as something akin to military service, or even to the Peace Corps, as an obligation that will require personal sacrifice, to the point of [gasp] giving up dinners out?

I think there is. And she eats pizza with a fork.
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