Jonah on Obama's Failure

Beautiful and on the mark! Excerpt:

Consider his signature domestic priority: healthcare reform. After a year of working on it, his progressive base is either profoundly disappointed with him or seethingly angry. His Republican and conservative opponents are not only furious, they are emboldened. And independents -- who've been deserting the Democrats in polls and off-year elections -- are simply disgusted with the whole spectacle. Most important, an administration that once preened over its people-power roots, can't even claim that Americans like what he's doing.

The bill does have its supporters: inside-the-Beltway pundits and Capitol Hill deal-makers, the pharmaceutical industry and the supposedly rapacious insurance companies (don't take my word for it, just ask Howard Dean -- or your stockbroker).

Under the Clintonian paradigm of governance, Nebraska Democrat Ben Nelson's parlaying of his pro-life objections to the Senate bill into a windfall for his state and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders' leveraging of his socialist principles for billions in special deals would be dramatic twists in a conventional story of LBJ-style arm-twisting.

Here's another great line: "He promised the oceans would stop rising but delivered a nonbinding something-or-other in Copenhagen." That's what I ask my wife to give me each year for Christmas. A something-or-other with a twist of lemon and an ice-cube.

Then we end with the devastating conclusion:

Obama's rhetorical audacity breeds cynicism, because utopianism always comes up short. Obama has many victories ahead of him, but his cause is already lost.

Well said, mate.

Ollie North: Obama is "Man of the Fear"

Here's a good rundown of Barack Obama's historic fear-mongering in his first year as President. Excerpt:

Nine days after his Inaugural address, the President said: “These urgent dangers to our national and economic security are compounded by the long-term threat of climate change, which, if left unchecked, could result in violent conflict, terrible storms, shrinking coastlines, and irreversible catastrophe.”

On February 4, 2009, speaking of the urgent need to “stimulate” the economy through massive government spending and debt, Obama told us, “We know that even if we do everything we should, this crisis was years in the making, and it will take more than weeks or months to turn things around. But make no mistake: A failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe and guarantee a longer recession, a less robust recovery, and a more uncertain future. Millions more jobs will be lost. More businesses will be shuttered. More dreams will be deferred.”

Five days later, in Elkhart, Indiana, he warned of dire damage if he was not given “the tools” he needs to “fix” our problems: “Economists from across the spectrum have warned that if we don't act immediately, millions of more jobs will be lost. The national unemployment rates will approach double digits not just here in Elkhart, all across the country. More people will lose their homes and their health care. And our nation will sink into a crisis that at some point we may be unable to reverse.”

By June 17, the President was hyping the catastrophic consequences of failing to enact more onerous government controls on the U.S. economy: “millions of people have had their lives profoundly disrupted by developments in the financial system, most severely in our recent crisis. These aren't just numbers on a ledger. This is a child's chance to get an education. This is a family's ability to pay their bills or stay in their homes. This is the right of our seniors to retire with dignity and security and respect. These are American dreams, and we should not accept a system that consistently puts them in danger.”

The presidential fright-mongering continues unabated. On September 9, he boldly promised a Joint Session of Congress, “I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits.” He then threatened, “if we do nothing…our deficit will grow. More families will go bankrupt. More businesses will close. More Americans will lose their coverage when they are sick and need it the most. And more will die as a result.”

Along the same lines, I've been thinking about how the vague and lofty Obama campaign promise to unite everybody in the country and be "post-partisan" will be served by passing his small "s" single-payer health care system. After all, pro-lifers like me will get to finance abortions across the not-so-fruited plain and the radical envirofreaks will get to finance healthcare for my family of seven while we devour resources like bulemic locusts. Everyone will have so much to be happy about, and we'll all give the Big Guy an A minus during his next appearance on an Oprah-clone show.

Lux Lex

Something bright on the longest night
I met this little guy--
Alexander Maria Fry
Yeah, another guy--
Number five.

That's a short bit of poultry for you. Not quite Shelley, but he was a vegetarian. Anyway, he was born this morning at 5:40am and weighed in at 7 pounds 10 ounces. Nineteen inches. Mom and baby are doing fine, sleeping, sleeping. The other four are over at our friends spreading their germs around. I'm strung out on adrenaline.

Mitch McConnell on Obamacare

From the Washington Examiner:

As Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said, "They want us to vote on a bill that no one outside the majority leader's conference room has even seen. That's right. The final bill we'll vote on isn't even the one we've had on the floor. It's the deal Democrat leaders have been trying to work out in private. That's what they intend to bring to the floor and force a vote on before Christmas. So this entire process is essentially a charade."

So for a Republican, voting on this would be sort of like giving up and letting the arranged marriage just go through. I advise running away.

GW on GW

Gerald Warner on Global Warming, that is. Rush Limbaugh is reading this on the air currently and I'm dying laughing. Excerpt:

When your attempt at recreating the Congress of Vienna with a third-rate cast of extras turns into a shambles, when the data with which you have tried to terrify the world is daily exposed as ever more phoney, when the blatant greed and self-interest of the participants has become obvious to all beholders, when those pesky polar bears just keep increasing and multiplying – what do you do?

No contest: stop issuing three rainforests of press releases every day, change the heading to James Bond-style “Do not distribute” and “leak” a single copy, in the knowledge that human nature is programmed to interest itself in anything it imagines it is not supposed to see, whereas it would bin the same document unread if it were distributed openly.

After that, get some unbiased, neutral observer, such as the executive director of Greenpeace, to say: “This is the single most important piece of paper in the world today.” Unfortunately, the response of all intelligent people will be to fall about laughing; but it was worth a try – everybody loves a tryer – and the climate alarmists are no longer in a position to pick and choose their tactics.

But boy! Was this crass, or what? The apocalyptic document revealing that even if the Western leaders hand over all the climate Danegeld demanded of them, appropriately at the venue of Copenhagen, the earth will still fry on a 3C temperature rise is the latest transparent scare tactic to extort more cash from taxpayers. The danger of this ploy, of course, is that people might say “If we are going to be chargrilled anyway, what is the point of handing over billions – better to get some serious conspicuous consumption in before the ski slopes turn into saunas.”

This “single most important piece of paper in the world” comes, presumably, from an authoritative and totally neutral source? Yes, of course. It’s from the – er – UN Framework Committee on Climate Change that is – er – running the Danegeld Summit. Some people might be small-minded enough to suggest this paper has as much authority as a “leaked” document from Number 10 revealing that life would be hell under the Tories.

Kind of long, I know, but it's hard picking a best part.

Nature is a language -- can't you read?

How many songs mention Luxembourg? Or buck-toothed girls?

Engrish meets spam scams

This appeared in my inbox today from tangwong.yu@yahoo.com.hk. I don't know why he thought my name was "Acknowledge". But maybe we'll consider that as a boy's name for our child just in case we can't think of one.

Acknowledge,

An Iraqi made a fixed deposit of $6.5m usd in
my bank branch (Hang Seng Bank, Hong Kong) where
am a director and he died with his entire family
in the war leaving behind no next of kin, I'm ready
to share 50/50 with you if you choose to stand as my
deceased client next of kin. If interested mail me at
the address below.

Email Contact: tang.yu@livemail.tw

Yours Truly,
Wong Tang

Well, Tang Yu very much! But no tangs....


Seriously, anyone want to "stand as [his] deceased client next of kin"? Do deceased people stand? All the ones I've seen are lying down.

As Tweety Bird would say, "Dealing with scammers is the wong tang to do!"

Black on black crime

From the Catholic League:

Catholic League president Bill Donohue speaks to the Omnibus Spending Bill just passed by the Senate:

The Congress is now officially on record approving a bill that tells mothers in Washington, D.C. that if they decide to take their baby to term, and elect to send their child to a private school—just like the one that President Obama and his wife have chosen for their own children—they can do it on their own dime: the successful voucher scholarship program that 1,700 poor kids were enrolled in is now dead. But if these same mothers decide to abort their babies, the same government will rush to pay their bills.

Most of those affected are black. The bill will soon be signed into law by America’s first black president. Is there anyone so stupid not to understand what is going on?