Beautiful People

All aboard the Dear Leader Express, complimentary Kool-Aid and peanuts will be served for all on board. Amazing.

Michelle Obama, who has achieved celebrity status and has wowed the world as a fashion icon, made the list for the first time.

"I had a father and a brother who thought I was beautiful, and they made me feel that way every single day," Obama told the magazine.

Also included in a "Barack's Beauties" section were White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and others.

I dont want you and I dont need you
Dont bother to resist, Ill beat you
Its not your fault that youre always wrong
The weak ones are there to justify the strong

Have we ceded too much?

Old news, but Carrie Prejean, Miss California, lost the Miss USA pageant because some snotty little queer named Mario Lavandeira (aka Perez Hilton) sandbagged her with a question on gay marriage and didn’t like her answer.

To further add insult to injury Lavandeira then went on to call her a “dumb bitch” for her answer.

So my question is have we ceded too much to these people in the name of “tolerance”?

Not so long ago if a man (which chromosomally Lavandeira qualifies as) called a woman a “dumb bitch” over something like this there would be hell to pay. He would be shunned by respectable people at the very least and at worst his pimple ridden face would be used as a concrete paintbrush.

So what the fuck has happened?

Why are people like Lavandeira allowed to disrespect anyone like this, let alone someone as genuine as Prejean?

Have we as a society collectively lost our spine?

Why is it so expensive to build a nuclear plant?

That’s not really a fair statement. It was expensive to build a nuclear plant and the costs thrown around are based on historical figures.

But its like those guys on TV say, past performance is no guarantee on future returns.

In order to understand what went wrong in the US nuclear industry, you really have to take a look at the past to see how some of the conditions that made them as expensive to build as they were no longer exist.

Back in the day, every utility in the country functioned as a regulated monopoly. The utility had every major decision ran past a regulatory body that would either approve or reject the decision as well as tell the utility how much more it could charge for its power. While this meant that reliable power was available to nearly everyone who needed it or wanted it, it removed any kinds of incentives for efficiency or risk management on the utilities end because every capital infrastructure request made by a utility was approved and the regulators gave the utility permission to increase their prices to cover the construction costs, including cost overruns. This increase also included the utilities predetermined profit rate. Even if they made a mistake, they still profited off of it.

Management did not have a good understanding of what they were getting themselves into when thy initially went seeking approval for the plants. They were basing their budgetary estimates off of a scope of work that was 20-25% defined because they were rushing themselves to get these projects up and running and did not fully appreciate the risks involved in this kind of heavily regulated work.

Think about that for a moment …. only 20-25% of the project could be categorized as a “known”. That means any contractor bidding on it knows with certainty only ¼ of his scope, and he is then expected to provide a fixed price bid for the entire project .. doesn’t work like that.

And since only 25% of the scope was defined that meant only 25% of the engineering was complete, so all permitting for the plant had to be done on an incomplete design, and regulators at the NRC didn’t care for that either.

On a project like this you perform detailed engineering, seek permits, take bids, procure, construct and operate. When the big nuclear projects of the 70’s were in full swing, utilities were half assing this creed of good project management, hoping that things would just work themselves out but also not caring too much if they didn’t because there was no real financial risk.

So when work began on the plants and engineering tried to catch up, the NRC would invariably reject part of the design (because naturally it would make too much God damn sense to have a standardized pre-approved design instead of reinventing the wheel every project). The design would then have to go back to engineering; subcontractors would have to stop what they were working on, idling hundreds of tradesmen or worse reworking what they had done. Delays would ensue, schedules would slip and the project’s margin sheet would begin to bleed like a stuck pig.

Do this 70 or 100 times during the course of a project and its no wonder why costs spiral out of control and 4 years projects turn into 20 year projects.

Sure, the ever changing NRC rules and the Ralph Nader’s and Jane Fonda’s of the world certainly didn’t help, but all the missteps the utilities were making made them more vulnerable in the courts and with the regulators.

So what is different now?

Well, for one, manufacturers (Westinghouse and GE-Hitachi for example) are pushing for standardized packages that once given NRC approval would take the permitting issue out of the equation.

Utilities now have to go onto the market and get funds the old fashioned way and private investors have to weigh the ability of the utilities to control costs, meaning you damn well have better know what you are doing before we lend you billions of dollars.

Material and labor costs are at the lowest they have been in over a decade. High material and labor costs was actually a reason that asshole extraordinaire Joe Romm said that nuclear was doomed for a comeback:

In fact, from 2000 through October 2007, nuclear power plant construction costs -- mainly materials, labor and engineering -- have gone up 185 percent! That means a nuclear power plant that would have cost $4 billion to build in 2000 would have cost more than $11 billion to build last October.

Looks like his ability to predict the future isn’t quite as good as he would like the rest of us to believe it is.

Most importantly though public sentiment is now behind nuclear power.

If the utilities and their subcontractors can demonstrate the ability to manage a project well, nuclear will see a revival.

Joe Romm is a fucking hack

Romm was on NPR a couple weeks ago commenting on a NY Magazine article on Freeman Dyson. The article, amongst other things, focused on Dyson’s contrarian views on man made global warming.

Romm seem to be most pissed that since Dyson wasn’t a climate scientist he shouldn’t have been given any room to air his views and that the media needs to act as a “filter” to make sure we Lilliputians cant have our thought polluted with heretical ideas like Dyson’s.

It got better though:

“If he were a Holocaust denier or if he said cigarettes were good for you, then
Dawidoff would not be writing this favorable extensive profile of his life and
times”

I find it truly disgusting that Romm has the nerve to compare one of the most distinguished scientist of his generation to a holocaust denier.

“Scientists” like Joe Romm remind me of those who threw charges of heresy at Galileo Galilei. Fact is Dyson is eminently more credible than Romm on what does and does not constitute good science and scientific method and the unreliable nature of scientific theories when they are still in their infancy.

I doubt Romm would last more than 30 minuets in a face to face debate with Dyson, but a coward like Romm wouldn’t take that challenge in the first place.

Joe Romm is a fucking coward

After reading another half assed posting from Joe Romm at ClimateProgress, I figured I would post a comment. It was quickly removed.

It's Romm's prerogative to be sure, but it really does speak volumes on what a complete and total fucking coward he is.

I have posted the comment below.

[JR]Everybody knows that wind and solar have a 30 to 40 percent capacity factor. It is no big secret as this paragraph seems to imply, assuming anyone can figure out what the authors actually meant. It has no impact on their carbon dioxide reduction.

Your hero Jon Wellinghoff, the new head of FERC hasn’t figured that out. He just said that the installed cost of a KW of solar and wind was less than nuclear. That would have been true if you didn’t include capacity factors into that number. When included into that figure, Nuclear is still cheaper than solar or wind when spinning reserve construction is taken into account.

[JR]The fact is that countries have integrated into their grids a fraction of wind that is 10 times what we have today.

Interesting that you neglected to mention that renewable heavy nations like Denmark and Spain rely on Nuclear heavy nations like France to provide all the spinning reserve they need when the wind slows down. Who are we supposed to rely on … Canada and Mexico?

[JR]And the fact is that this country is already reducing the fraction of all electricity produced by coal, thanks part to renewable.

Ehhh .. wrong again Joe. The fraction of all electricity produced by coal has dropped only in relative terms and only by a fraction of a %. And the part played by renewables is insignificant … the largest generation growth has come from natural gas. While the year to year % increase of wind is big, its still a pittance when compared to the actual year to year increases in gas, or even coal.

[JR]The authors and the Post also seem to be unaware that the fossil fuel power most often paired with renewables to firm up the power — natural gas power — has substantially lower greenhouse gas emissions per kiloWatt-hour than the gird as a whole. So a wind-gas or solar-gas hybrid still represents a very sharp reductions in carbon emissions.

And at only 5 times the cost and with 75% of the reliability .. that’s one hell of a tradeoff.

Welcome to the reality based community.

In short Joseph Romm is a fucking retard and a coward to boot. Oh, sure, he got his fancy PhD degree in physics, making him a self professed "physicist and climate expert", but he doesn’t have a fucking clue when it comes to channeling electrons in useful work and the technical and managerial challenges that go along with that let alone a thick enough hide to handle some dissenting views at his website.

Jimmy Carter

Look-e here ... more words of wisdom from the ex-president who just cant seem to keep his face out of the news.

But none of us wants to own an assault weapon, because we have no desire to kill policemen or go to a school or workplace to see how many victims we can accumulate before we are finally shot or take our own lives.

Naturally, that’s why I own them (groan).

Heavily influenced and supported by the firearms industry, N.R.A. leaders have misled many gullible people into believing that our weapons are going to be taken away from us, and that homeowners will be deprived of the right to protect ourselves and our families.

And where would the NRA get that idea from? They must have made it up considering how friendly to the Second Amendment both Eric Holder and Barack Obama are.

Here's one for Jimmy.

Earth Day

I don’t know what you all did for earth day but I hope you had fun. I spent the afternoon polishing my 1963 Cadillac Sedan Deville with harp seal skin interior and optional 28 barrel carburetor. I then sat my family down for some frittata made with endangered condor eggs and we capped the evening off with a redwood bonfire.

In light of the festivities I though I would post a reminder of all the preditcions made during th efrist earth day.

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” -Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half.” -Life Magazine, January 1970

“By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’” - Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

Read the rest here.

Its not to say that we shouldn’t be good stewards, I personally think it is a virtue to be a good steward … its just a gentile reminder that people have used their positions in the scientific elite to push their personal political agenda which was thinly wrapped in environmental gobbledygook.

How Pop Culture Indoctrinates Us to Hate America

Kyle Smith at PJM reviews “The Soloist” and this line really hit me.

The Soloist has more American flags than Rocky IV, and each is there to tell us that we, as a country, have failed our least fortunate citizens. Ayers sleeps on a filthy, ragged American-flag pillow. He wears an American-flag top hat. In several nightmare sequences set in a community center on Skid Row, American flags pop up everywhere — nasty, dirty ones.

It hit me because it made me think of American History X, especially the dinner scene.



Aside from the fact that I just cannot stand Ed Norton in general, this particular scene is a very not so subtle connect the dot allegory that anyone who questions the hard pressed left wing version of racial issues in this country is a skinhead neo-nazi or close kin. Couple this with the constant intermingling of Ed Norton’s Nazi character early in the movie and the American flag and the point is very clear, real racists and Nazi’s are the heart and soul of this country.

On Natural Living

I don’t remember who I stole this from .. so props to anonymous.

Jim Carrey, America's Scientitian

This is the definition of whooped, so under the thumb of ones partner that you begin to regurgitate the same inane rantings.

I've also heard it said that no evidence of a link between vaccines and autism has ever been found. That statement is only true for the CDC, the AAP and the vaccine makers who've been ignoring mountains of scientific information and testimony. There's no evidence of the Lincoln Memorial if you look the other way and refuse to turn around.

Here's an thought for you Jim, maybe its not the vaccines that caused your girlfriends’ sons autism but the 8 bazillion lines of coke she did in the bathroom of Reilly's Daughter back home in Chicago.

IF Stone = Treacherous Commie Rat Bastard

You may just think I am a red Jew son-of-a-bitch, but I'm keeping Thomas Jefferson alive." – IF Stone

If you don’t know who I.F. (Isidor Feinstein) Stone is dotn be suprised. He’s a relatively obscure figure in American journalistic history, although he has quite a wide following in left wing circles.

Stone was one of those New Deal leftists who worked closely with the Communists during the 30’s and 40’s. After being caught up by the House Un-American Activity Committees in the 50’s he spent the next few decades writing for a weekly he started.

There had always been rumors and allegations, some fairly credible, that Stone had worked directly for the Soviet NKVD (precursor to the KGB) or at least seriously entertained the idea, but nothing truly concrete and bullet proof was ever presented demonstrating that he was actively groomed by and accepted a position working for a Soviet intelligence organization.

That is until now.

The preeminent scholars of WWII/early Cold War Soviet espionage in the United States John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr have unearthed archival information from the former Soviet Union that would seem to confirm the worst suspicions about Stone.

Stone assisted Soviet intelligence on a number of such tasks: talent spotting, acting as a courier by relaying information to other agents, and providing private journalistic tidbits and data the KGB found interesting. In May 1936, for example, the KGB New York station told Moscow:

Pancake (Stone) reported that Karl Von Wiegand works in Berlin as a correspondent for the Hearst agency “Universal Service.” He had been ordered to maintain friendly relations with Hitler, which was supposedly dictated by the fact that the German press was buying the agency’s information. Hearst is in a deal with German industry to supply the latter with a large consignment of copper. Wiegand does not agree with Hearst’s policy. He turned to Pancake’s boss for advice.

Commenting on Stone’s work as a KGB talent spotter and recruiter, the KGB New York station reported, “Pancake established contact with Dodd. We wanted to recruit him [Dodd] and put him to work on the State Dep. line. Pancake should tell Dodd that he has the means to connect him with an anti-Fascist organization in Berlin.” William A. Dodd, Jr., was the son of the U.S. ambassador to Germany and an aspiring Popular Front activist with political ambitions. The KGB did recruit him, and Stone briefly functioned as Dodd’s intermediary with the KGB, providing him with a contact in Berlin when he went to join his father at the embassy. Stone also passed on to the KGB some information Dodd picked up from the American military attaché in Berlin about possible German military moves against the USSR and the name of a suspected pro-Nazi embassy employee.

Naturally this information hasn’t gone over well with Stone’s accolades including Eric Alterman (and Alterman’s propaganda organ FAIR) who worked with stone and considers himself an understudy and acolyte.

So what do we have? I think the following: A man of avowed anti-Fascist sympathies, and to my mind, still-foolishly naïve about Stalin and the Soviet Union, agreed on a couple of occasions to help those whom he believed to be actually fighting fascism, while his own country, still mired in childish isolationism, preferred to look away.

Alterman is very careful to parse his words in his article; he never directly comes out and says that Stone didn’t work for the Soviets, only that he wasn’t a “spy” and did it for the best of intentions. See, Stone only did to help America and freedome, not to undermine it. He also continually mentions the fact that the documents Klehr and Haynes’ rely on are only copies and we haven’t seen the originals … not that Alterman would directly cast doubt on their accuracy, rather he just throws it out so a "discriminating reader" can connect the dots on their own. It’s a pretty common tactic, one that Klehr and Haynes wrote about in their book “In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage” about academia’s unwillingness to accept just how rampant Soviet espionage was in the US and just how involved the Communist Party was in it.

Unfortunately, even The New Republic’s Marty Perez seems convinced.

Something tells me Thomas Jefferson wouldn’t approve of an American journalist working for a hostile collectivist totalitarian foreign entity.

How’s this one going to end ....

Obama releases the “Torture memos” detailing the cruel and hideous pink belly and death by caterpillar and ladybug technique used on the individuals who planned 9/11, but throws the caveat in there that there will be no prosecutions even though these acts were despicable and didn’t accomplish anything.

Hayden and Gates call Obama a jackass for doing this and say that it will make his job much harder

Then Cheney comes out swinging and says why not release them all including all the actionable intelligence we got from them and the attacks they stopped.

Now Obama says “on second thought, I might just be open to prosecuting individuals from the former administration on this”

So, how does this one end? Does Obama back down or does Cheney? Cheney certainly has nothing to lose as Obama has upped the ante by reversing his prior decision, now being “open” to prosecution of former administration officials.

Cleary Obama wasnt prepared for a response like this, or perhaps he was ... after all with 100's of billions flowing out the door at the Treasury, this makes for a nice distraction.

The left is just dying for its pound of flesh but will Obama spend his energy here, especially if Cheney is correct. What does he have to gain aside from throwing some red meat to the left?

My prediction

Option A: there is no release of the documents Cheney wants made public, Obama quietly backs away from his threat, Cheney quiets down and the Left seethes.

Option B: Cheney doesn’t drop it, Obama still wont release them but they get leaked, Obama loks like a schmuck and the left accuses Cheney’s “stay behind army” of running a shadow government and leaking the material.

Ashton Kutcher – douchebag extraordinaire

Amazing, a docuhebag celebrity won a popularity contest against a cable news network! Amazing!

I used to like Kutcher back in the day. He seemed real, just a small town guy
(engineering major to boot) who got a lucky break and made it big.

But the past couple years his ego has just exploded .. and I just don’t go for that.

Take his attention grabbing rant about his “dickwad neighbor” who made to much noise with his home improvement project, waking him at the wee hour of 7:30am, and was gonna blast him with his paintball gun .... ohh .... tough guy.

I guess Ashton must have forgotten his Midwest roots and neigbors, because if he tried that shit back home, someone would put a .375 H&H Magnum through the engine block of his Prius.

Tea Party Protesters Hate Veterans ... or Something

Wife beating drunk and all around asshole extrodinare Neil Steinberg manages to jam his foot in his mouth twice in article.

What did you make of the big protest against the U.S. military and our veterans Wednesday?

Because after all, if you hate trillion fucking dollar deficits for the indefinite future, you must despise the armed forces.

It gets better though, because after his little straw man on the Tea Parties, he takes a ham handed swipe at critics of trust fund revolutionary Bill Ayers and his cop killing terrorist bitch wife Bernadine Dohrn … you know people who show their admiration and respect of our armed forces by packing pipes full of nails and explosives and planting them at officers clubs (oh yeah, and killing police too)

I observed to Madden that hosting a performance with Ayers and Dohrn, tweedy academics whose long-ago stint as radicals make them permanent fetish fear objects for the vengeful right, was sure to stir protest.

Ironic no? I suppose that Steinberg must not have put 2 + 2 together when he threw these two seemingly unrelated items in the same article.

Tea Part Parting Shots

Now that the media "elites" over at NPR and the Colombia Journalism review (whose director Victor Navasky I am currently writing an post on) are coming in to bayonet the wounded (or what they see as the wounded), I am reminded of something I read from Jonah Goldberg the other day. His whole post is worth the read, but this was the best.

3. These protests are unpatriotic astroturfing by plutocrats.

So much for "dissent is the highest form of patriotism"!

I find it sort of amazing that when groups like ANSWER, a Mos Eisley cantina of America-hating nut cases, take to the streets it's a full-flowering of democracy in action. When ACORN pays their ragamuffins to protest, or when Rainbow/PUSH shakes down businesses through racial extortion, it's the sort of direct democratic action Thomas Paine dreamed of. And when labor unions pay people to protest, it's populist. But when a bunch of independent Americans, talk-show hosts, and email campaigners organize hundreds of protests around the country, it's astroturfing.

Good stuff.

Inter-American arms treaty

The inter-American arms treaty looks like it is going to be offered up and pushed as a fig leaf to Latin America during the upcoming Organization of American States summit. It was initially drafted by the OAS in 1997 as a smaller scale UN Small Arms Treaty but never went anywhere in the Senate when Clinton submitted it.

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Administration officials say President Barack Obama will push for Senate ratification of a Latin American arms trafficking treaty.

The regional treaty, adopted by the Organization of American States, was signed by former President Bill Clinton in 1997 but never ratified by the Senate.

Officials say the inter-American arms trafficking treaty would curb guns and ammunition trafficking that threatens regional security. Officials say the move is meant to show the United States is serious about confronting a security threat on its doorstep.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone. As I noted a few weeks back, the amount of press coverage concerning the Mexican cartel violence and that 90% of the gun used by the cartel were supposedly coming from the US led me to believe something bigger was in the works and I suppose the resurrection of this “Inter-American arms treaty” was it .

There will be blood

I saw this over at the Jawa Report, and I just couldnt pass it up.

Evidently a poster at Daily Kos thinks that there will be a bloody civil war in America, all becasue fo the Tea Parties.

I am very afraid that the Coming "Rise Again" in our own land will not be so free of violence.

We are a nation of gun owners with more and more being sold every day amid the poor economic situation... and a denied undercurrent of racial hatred.

How did Governor Rick Perry of Texas help this already bad situation, with his pronouncement?

He didn't. Not at all.

This is NOT over, folks.

Write me nasty comments, that this could not happen here, that there couldn't possibly be another Civil War in the United States... and that I am crazy for thinking so. Do and say whatever you want.

Then keep your television turned on... to see the slow craziness suddenly snowball into right wing open rebellion.

And I can tell you of a certainty how the whole thing will end, or at least part of it.

There will be blood.

A lot of it.

More than you ever dreamed of.

The best part is this guy is named Beavis (yeah I know its pelled a bit differently but its still pretty God damned funny).

The comment section is just precious .... every left winger's wet dream fullfileld.

Speaking of Teabagging and Homosexuals

As sure as I am that a closeted homosexual like Anderson Cooper is an expert about what can and cant be done with another dude's balls in his mouth, I cant even begin to fathom how MSNBC's she-boy Rachel Maddow knows what its like.

Dana Milbank

You can always count on the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank to carry the water for the DNC.

Back during the 2008 presidential campaign Milbank made several, later discredited attempts to characterize Sarah Palin’s campaign rallies as gussied up Klan rallies where reporters were routinely roughed up with the help of the Secret Service:

Worse, Palin's routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric's questions for her "less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media." At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, "Sit down, boy."

Looks like Milbank showed up Rahm Emanuel’s strategy session this week, because he has reached into his bag of tricks to smear the Tea Party rallies.

Organizers of the conservative protest were told at the last minute that they didn't have a permit to dump a million tea bags in the square, as they had planned.

Instead, they served up a rather noxious brew.

"Hey Big Brother: Show us Your Real Birth Certificate," said one sign in the rain-soaked crowd.

"Blackbeard Obama, King of the Tax Pirates," said another.

A third showed the president dressed up as Steve Urkel, the nerdy black kid with big glasses and suspenders from "Family Matters." "Did I do that?" the sign said, showing a graph of the economy plunging.

Closeted racists and crakpots, that’s the Rahm Emanuel’s meme for the day, and you’d better play along lest you get a talking to by the CEO of GE.

Anderson Cooper on Teabagging

It makes sense when you think about it ...... after all, being one of the most well known closeted queers around, Cooper probably has a perspective on what can and cant be done with another guys balls in his mouth that most people lack.

Lisle Illinois Tax Day Tea Party

To be honest, I had no idea what to expect. I am not exactly the protesting type ... this was my first foray to an event like this. All my exposure to “protests” have been images on TV and the web of the Code Pink burnout hippie type, college aged “my mommy and daddy made sure my Visa was paid off so I can come to this” and the professional trustafarian Block Blockers who frequent G8 meetings.

Needless to say, what I saw in Lisle was nothing like this.

Mostly it was people like me who took a long lunch to see what all the hubbub was about with some stay at home parents (kiddies in tow) and some retirees sprinkled in. There were a dozen or so speakers ... no one whose name I recognized but they all received an enthusiastic welcome from the crowd. There was talk that ACORN had notified the organizers that they would be coming for a counter demonstration, but I hadn’t seen anything like that by the time I left.

I am no professional at crowd estimation, but when I got there at 12:00pm on the dot (I am a stickler for promptness) there looked to be around 500 people present.

By 1:30 (when I had to go back to work) that number had easily doubled.

Now 1000 people isn’t a lot, but this is Lisle, not downtown Chicago and there were half a dozen other rallies within 20 miles of this, so yeah, I think its safe to say that this was pretty significant.

Naturally, NPR (like the NY Times yesterday) did its part to marginalize whats going on with a half assed hit piece and a lot of dismissive commentary on "Talk of the Nation" this afternoon but Glenn Beck put alot of this into context:

"The mainstream media doesn't get it. They'll report on the tea parties just as a -- you know, oh, they're just a bunch of whack job Republicans who only care about taxes on the rich. Where were they with George Bush? . . . But the tea parties are not about taxes. They are about the reason for the taxes, which is an out-of-control government that cannot control its own spending."

He’s right, this isn’t about taxes or spending so much (from my perspctive) as its about a government out of control, and I think the press is certainly doing a disservice to the country by ignoring and minimizing this.

Beware the Polls

Great comment about the partisan use of polling from the National Review:

There is an effort afoot to marginalize and demoralize people who refuse to hop aboard the Good Ship Obama. Dishonest polling is one of many tools in the Left's arsenal, but it's especially effective because these surveys can actually warp how people perceive the nation's mood. If a conservative were to catch in passing banner headlines proclaiming that 2/3 of the country approves of Obama's job performance and nearly 3/4 find him strong on national security, he may understandably feel isolated and powerless. That's the entire message implicit in these tactics—from the attack Rush strategy to DHS' outrageous "Right-Wing" threat assessment: Pipe down, conservatives. You're isolated, part of a hopelessly tiny minority, and possibly even dangerous. For the good of the country, keep your thoughts to yourselves.

NY Times Rides to The Dear Leader's Rescue (yet again)

Our new political overlords never have to look too far for cover when inconvenient truths raise their ugly heads. Take a look see at the latest from the Times on the Tea Party Protests tomorrow: Hold the Tea: Americans Fine With Taxes.

In news that will be bad for activists hoping to start another American Revolution with a series of protests modeled on the Boston Tea Party, a new Gallup Poll finds that a solid majority of American say the income tax they pay is “fair,” and that slightly more than half classify their own tax burden as either “about right” or “too low.”

Not that the hacks from the Times actually bother to ask anyone involved what their beef is, after all, its much easier to construct a straw man and bash it for a while. As an interesting side note, the percentage of people who think they pay a "fair" amount of incomes taxes is eerily close to the percentage that pays no federal income tax at all.

What the real beef is, or mine at any rate, is not what the marginal tax rates are today, but what they are going to be in 5 or 10 years after the bill for our Dear Leader's "First of the Month economic development plan" comes in.



This is the problem, trillion dollar deficits financed by China for as long as the eye can see.

People are tired of being ignored, and worse they hate being kicked and mocked by assholes like the Time's Robert Mackey.

Andrew Breitbart gets it

On pop culture and how influential it is.

Yes, Andrew’s one of the few guys who gets it. Conservative artists are waiting for ground cover: money and employers who will re-hire them even when the New York Times says their movie stinks. Because the Times does that, you know. They don’t say: oh, we disagree with this movie’s politics. They say, this film is terrible, don’t waste your money. Or they don’t review it at all. Since I started speaking out, my novels have gone from getting raves in over 200 venues, to being savaged in one or two. Conservative artists are waiting for an infra-structure of praise and awards and love to support them. Except for me. I’m just blazing away because I know I’m right, I know I’m good, and when it comes to the love of leftist elites, frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.

-Andrew Klavan

If I Only Had a Gun

“If I Only Had a Gun” is the latest ham handed effort from Diane Sawyer on 20/20 to convince Americans (evidently the rest of the work already knows this) that guns are bad. Sawyer was quite explicit at the beginning of the show to remind the viewers that this was in no way an attempt to talk about the politics of gun control (wink wink nudge nudge), but it was an honest and refreshing talk about the American gun culture.

The show had several segments focusing on things like gun violence in the ghetto, how easy it to buy at gunshows (tugging on our heartstrings and fogging the mind by using the brother or a Virginia Tech victim to make the purchases) and how dangerous a gun can be when found by an inexperienced adolescent. These were all sideshows, because the main point of the special, as evident by the title, is that having a gun doesn’t help in situations where you might be a victim of a mass shooting.

In one scenario, they placed an “armed” individual in a classroom and then had a gunman burst in. In nearly every incident the armed student failed to adequately stop the attacker and was shot. The scenarios outcome was almost a guarantee because only one of the students had any firearm training (basically going to a range) and the aggressor always shot the student first after walking in and was a highly trained police officer to boot. There was then an analysis of the event, stressing how the people who hid and took cover were better off than the one who tired to fight back and that the student with the gun made so many mistakes that they wouldn’t have stopped anything.

The message was clear: despite what think guns won’t save you in a situation like this, and can be more harmful than good.

By that logic I cant wait for the 20/20 segments that present the following arguments

Why use condoms to stop AIDS, they are not 100% effective?
Why wear a seat belt, it doesn’t always prevent automobile deaths?
Why use birth control, its not 100% effective?
Why build levees, they don’t always stop floods?
Why stop smoking, there is no guarantee that you will die from lung cancer or heart disease?

You don’t have to be a Navy SEAL to protect yourself against an armed criminal and I would take an amateur with a pistol who was right next to me over the best trained SWAT team that was 10 minuets away any day of the week.

80’s Liberal Agitprop

Considering that we will be running (damn near) an annual $2Trillion deficit, I am now taking bets on how soon it will be until Ridley Scott produces another commercial like this indicting the Dear Leader.

I am giving 10,000:1, because remember, when someone gives you 10,000:1 odds you take them!

From Hotair.

Rule Five Applied to Glen Beck

Now I don’t watch Glen Beck regularly (I hate how so many posts of this kind have to start out that way), but for the 2 years I had XM, I listened to him every morning on the drive into work and I do catch his You-Tube highlight reels, so I have been familiar with his shtick for quite a while and think he’s pretty entertaining and somewhat informative.

Looks like the gatekeepers of pop-culture have taken notice too now that his ratings are taking off, and they just cant have that, now can they?

Starting with a less than sympathetic profile in the NY Times, (ugh, where else) pop-culture intellectual wannabes like Bill Maher, John Stewart and Steven Colbert have all taken the opportunity to apply Saul Alinsky’s most effective rule for radicals, #5:

RULE 5: "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon." There is no defense. It's irrational. It's infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions

Beck did address Maher’s near libelous comment that guys like Beck are responsible for the OKC bombing, but h needs to stay on top of these people. If he doesn’t stay on top of people like this, they will destroy and marginalize him just like good ol’ Uncle Saul would have them do.

And Now For a Joke

Since the comedy community has decided to focus their daily two minutes of hate against people like Sarah Palin, Glen Beck and Rick Santelli, POTUS jokes are certainly on the decline.

Nature abhors a vacuum, so Barack Obama Jokes was born.

President Obama took some banking and insurance executives out to dinner and told them, "Order whatever you want to drink, order whatever you want to eat, order some to take home, order some for your neighbors and make sure you all also get some dessert."

One of the executives exclaimed, "Mr. President, that's going to cost a fortune!" Obama replied, "Don't worry about it. We won’t be here when the check comes."

Gun Control in the Name of Good Diplomatic Relations: Why the Numbers Just Aren’t Adding Up - Fox Is on It

Looks like Fox was looking into the "90% of all guns in Mexico" bull and came to a similar conlcusion as myself.

You've heard this shocking "fact" before -- on TV and radio, in newspapers, on the Internet and from the highest politicians in the land: 90 percent of the weapons used to commit crimes in Mexico come from the United States...... What's true, an ATF spokeswoman told FOXNews.com, in a clarification of the statistic used by her own agency's assistant director, "is that over 90 percent of the traced firearms originate from the U.S."

The View

My God its easy to hate Joy Behar.

Its like they say ...

When you point a finger be carefull because there are three pointed back at you.