I always wanted a Retro-Encabulator, but never thought I could afford one.
Feb 14 2009
The “Victims”????
Suspected US missile strike kills 27 in Pakistan
Intelligence officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media, said the victims included about 15 ethnic Uzbek militants and several Afghans.
Ah, The AP “Islamist Front” news sees dead terrorists as “victims.” Interesting.
Feb 13 2009
Stimulus to bad behavior
What gets rewarded is repeated. Everyone knows it, from parents to teachers to employers.
And disguised as a stimulus bill, the Stimulus Bill Abolishes Welfare Reform and Adds New Welfare Spending
Both the Senate and House stimulus bills are Trojan horses that deliberately exploit anxiety about the current recession to conceal their destruction of the foundation of welfare reform and a massive expansion of the welfare system. Since its enactment in the mid-1990s, such reform has proven to be a very successful policy that dramatically reduced welfare dependency and child poverty. The fact that the stimulus proponents seek to conceal the bill’s massive permanent changes in welfare is a clear indication that they understand how unpopular these changes would be if the public became aware of them. Far from an exercise in “unprecedented transparency”–as President Obama claims–the stimulus bills are an example of unprecedented deception.
There is much more at the link above, including a brief review of the history of welfare reform, and an account of its successes. There is also a description of what the changes to welfare spending will be in the “stimulus bill”, and the Trojan Horse method Democrats have used to sneak it in.
Well worth reading.
Then check this out, and ask yourself why people who claim to be concerned about “social justice” don’t seem especially worried about creating conditions that encourage the proliferation of fatherless children, surely the single biggest predictor of everything from poverty to criminal behavior.
Feb 12 2009
I give up. We’re doomed.
Just to put really large numbers in perspective, it’s only about 25 trillion miles to the next STAR system, the Centauri system.
U.S. Taxpayers Risk $9.7 Trillion on Bailout Programs – Yahoo! News
The stimulus package the U.S. Congress is completing would raise the government’s commitment to solving the financial crisis to $9.7 trillion, enough to pay off more than 90 percent of the nation’s home mortgages.
The Federal Reserve, Treasury Department and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation have lent or spent almost $3 trillion over the past two years and pledged up to $5.7 trillion more. The Senate is to vote this week on an economic-stimulus measure of at least $780 billion. It would need to be reconciled with an $819 billion plan the House approved last month.
Only the stimulus bill to be approved this week, the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program passed four months ago and $168 billion in tax cuts and rebates enacted in 2008 have been voted on by lawmakers. The remaining $8 trillion is in lending programs and guarantees, almost all under the Fed and FDIC. Recipients’ names have not been disclosed.
Store food. Store water. Heck, DRILL for water. PLANT food…. it may be all you have. Lay in a lifetime stock of antibiotics and pain meds, and anything else you need to stay alive. Consider purchasing large amounts of clothing from the Salvation Army local store. Enough to last the rest of your life. Store gasoline. Store fertilizer and diesel fuel. Store AMMO. Decide which of your neighbors look edible…. they’re doing the same for you. Buy a nice stock of books on wilderness survival, farming the old fashioned way, medical care, lots and lots of medical supplies, and a nice commentary on the Bible. Get a good old fashioned encyclopedia in book form. And some basic educational texts in math, English, history, science, etc., so you can teach your children and grand children what the world used to be like. Get a piano, and extra strings, and tuning gear. And a guitar. And more strings for it.
Oh, and a copy of the US Constitution you can waive in the air as the tanks roll over you.
Where is Mad Max when you need him?
Feb 11 2009
The Freedom of Choice Act: trying to put lipstick on the pig
There has been an increase in the number of articles by “experts” claiming that the Freedom of Choice Act, invalidating all state laws regulating any aspect of abortion at a stroke, is not really going to change things that much. (Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.) Outside of the observation that if this were true the pro-abortion forces wouldn’t be pushing it so hard, this isn’t even what its supporters claim about it, such as Planned Parenthood and NARAL, who are quite open about what its effects would be. Here is a great, sober accounting for The Legal Consequences of the Freedom of Choice Act. Much more at the link.
First, by banning state laws that in any way “interfere with” the choice of abortion before viability – a more abortion-protective standard than exists under present law and a central feature of the bill – FOCA would materially expand abortion rights in several ways. It would invalidate state laws that attempt to persuade women to choose not to have abortions by providing them with information about alternatives to abortion, about the ability of pregnant women to receive state assistance for support of their child, and about the condition and stage of development of the child at the point in pregnancy at which the abortion is sought. FOCA would also likely invalidate “informed consent” laws and 24-hour waiting requirements, on the ground that they “interfere with” the abortion choice. So too, almost certainly, would FOCA void the laws of many states that provide for parental involvement in minors’ abortion decisions. Finally, FOCA’s ban likely would eviscerate state “conscience” laws protecting the right of medical providers and individuals not to provide or assist in providing abortions. FOCA would also invalidate state constitutional provisions (including state constitutional protections of the freedom of speech or the free exercise of religion) protecting pro-life conscience in such fashion.
Second, FOCA also likely would invalidate state law bans on particular methods of abortion, like “partial birth” abortion, that sometimes may be prohibited under current law.
Third, FOCA appears to provide a new federal statutory right to equal state government funding of abortion, where a state provides resources or benefits that support the alternative choice of childbirth and child care and education.
Fourth, and perhaps most significantly, FOCA would serve to entrench abortion rights, in two ways. First, FOCA would provide a federal statutory right to abortion that protects legal abortion at least as much as (indeed, more than) the Supreme Court’s constitutional abortion doctrine under Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. In the event the Court were to overrule, limit, or cut back on those decisions, FOCA would provide equivalent or greater legal abortion rights. Second, by so doing, FOCA likely would prevent the Court from ever having the occasion to reconsider (and thus overrule or modify) Roe and Casey in the first place, by rendering such reconsideration unnecessary and pointless. Because a federal statute would in any event protect the abortion right to an equal or greater degree, it would never be necessary for the Supreme Court to “reach” the question of whether the Constitution protected such a right, under usual principles of judicial restraint and avoidance of decision of constitutional questions.
Feb 10 2009
Hope and Change, part 2
Obama has appointed a committed “freedom of porn” advocate to the DOJ as Deputy Attorney General. This man’s track record is full of lovely highlights, detailed here, but here’s the gist:
…there’s another nominee with bigger disqualifiers than unpaid taxes.
Imagine. A veteran pornography defense attorney takes a top spot at the agency charged with enforcing the nation’s child pornography and obscenity laws.
And that’s what will happen if David G. Ogden is confirmed as Deputy Attorney General, the second in command at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), the nation’s top law enforcement agency.
……..
Ogden isn’t just a lawyer who’s had a few unsavory clients. He’s devoted a substantial part of his career in defense of pornography for more than 20 years.
The last thing the Department of Justice needs is a deputy attorney general with a track record on behalf of those who’ve deluged America with pornography and against the federal laws he would be sworn to enforce.
Read it all at the link. It’s simply chilling, and more than a bit repellent.
Feb 09 2009
Bush’s AIDS initiative, for which he doesn’t get enough credit
Even Obama admits that Bush did more to fight AIDS in Africa than any other US president, by a very large margin. But that isn’t enough to keep Obama from firing the man Bush tapped to lead the charge.
Bush HIV/AIDS Czar Canned in Political Blunder | Politics | Christianity Today
Late last week, while pro-life evangelicals and other conservatives were rightly watching the moves of the Obama administration regarding the so-called Mexico City policy, other events were unfolding at the State Department, where Ambassador Mark Dybul, head of PEPFAR, the much lauded program to fight HIV in Africa, was given one day to clean out his office.
More at the link, including pointing out that part of the reason may be because Bush’s approach included teaching abstinence as an AIDS prevention measure.
Can’t have that, don’t you know.
Feb 08 2009
Words that rhyme with stimulus… sort of
Words and phrases that rhyme with stimulus (well… sort of).
under the bus — Where Obama has thrown all his big talk about new energy investment making the USA energy independent in ten years. No nuclear. No exploration. No drilling. No tens or hundreds of billions for research into alternate energy sources. No “Manhattan project” for energy. (If not now, when?) Nothing but overpriced “green” cars for the government that no one else can buy, or wants to.
incubus — Don’t open your door to strangers, whether or not they claim to be elected.
succubus — Ditto.
upper crust — What all the congress critters think they are
full of pus — Well, the “stimulus” does stink, to put it politely.
makes me cuss — when I think about how much my kids and grandkids will spend paying back this payoff to Democrat-supporting special interest groups.
In God We Trust — But for some folks, not lately.
money lust — ’nuff said
no muss no fuss — Obama’s idea of “bi-partisanship” is “give me what I want because I won the election.”
tremulous — The feeling I have when I think about how disastrous the “stimulus” plan is for our future.
C++ — The object oriented computer programming language that will be used to calculate how much money the stimulus will REALLY cost. Consider: when you buy a house over thirty years you may pay as much as three times the actual cost of the house when you include interest on the loan, at common interest rates. More, much more, if the rates go up. The stimulus package is going to cost two or three times its face value before it’s paid back. In essence, we’re “borrowing” (well, stealing) a couple trillion from our kids and grandkids so we can have congress give away a trillion today.
There’s no rush — to pay it back. So they want us to believe.
minibus — what I’ll have left to live in when it’s all over. I call shotgun.
moondust — the street name for the substance some of our congress creeps have been ingesting?
necklace — The very latest in multicultural jewelry. But you have to buy extra carbon credits to wear it…. or give it as a gift.
Feb 07 2009
“Troopergate,” having died some time ago, is unceremoniously buried
After nine paragraphs essentially admitting that there was nothing to the “troopergate” allegations against Sarah Palin, but without quite coming out and saying so, we finally get this in paragraph number ten from the AP:
Palin herself initiated a separate investigation by the Alaska State Personnel Board and said she would abide by it instead. This investigation found there was no probable cause to believe Palin or any other state official violated the Alaska Executive Ethics Act. [emphasis mine]
The fact that the state legislature found a few witnesses “in contempt” because they failed to appear when subpoenaed but later gave written statements instead, following advice on their options from the state attorney general (who was busy challenging the subpoenas in court), hardly seems worth a comment even from the AP, but of course the media can’t resist any opportunity to throw mud at Palin, however miniscule that opportunity actually is, and regardless of the thin gruel making up the mud.
Let’s not kid around. The Alaska legislature had all kinds of options if it wanted to take the matter seriously, none of which it took, because the whole thing was a witch-hunt from the get-go.
“Media Malpractice: How Obama Got Elected and Palin Was Targeted” is going to tell the whole story on the media in the last election cycle, coming out soon.
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