Yes We Can!

Or Yes We Did?

A revolt is afoot in the nation. The media and the political class might not understand the appeal of the Ron Pauls and Glenn Becks of the world. But even many of those who disagree with Paul and Beck on the specifics understand the draw. Something is resurfacing. Americans are increasingly unafraid to say the word "liberty". Politicians who don't share that trait may want to start updating their résumés.

Obama and Energy

Our Dear Leader’s views on energy are, to be blunt, just a little fucked up. They show many of the hallmarks of anti-growth ideology mixed with incompetence. For example, his FERC (a little known but massively influential federal regulatory agency) nominee Jon Wellinghoff demonstrated this by not understanding a concept as simple as baseload power supply.

Our Dear Leader campaigned on creating "good jobs" especially for the beleaguered blue collar job markets. In order to win swingstate Ohio, Obama promised to secure loan guarantees for a retooling project at the Piketon enrichment plant. A loan guarantee would be a win-win on so many levels: provide good blue and white collar technical jobs, maintain the nation's nuclear capacity and not cost the government a dime if the project worked out (as it was most likely going to).

So what happened to Obama's promise:

The Obama administration's rejection is a turnaround from the stance of candidate Barack Obama, who pledged while campaigning in southern Ohio in August to "work with the Department of Energy to help make loan guarantees available for this (the Piketon enrichment plant) and other advanced-energy programs that reduce carbon emissions and break the tie to high-cost, foreign energy sources."

Overall, the project would have employed 5,700 directly or indirectly in eight states, the company says. In Piketon, more than 600 already are working. A fully operating plant, which USEC wanted to begin operating in 2011, would employ about 400 for years to come.

I know, $2billion is a lot of money but the administration rolled up it sleevs, sharpened its pencils and made an unexpected move to provide $2billion in loan guarantees for offshore oil production .. in fucking Brazil.

The U.S. is going to lend billions of dollars to Brazil's state-owned oil company, Petrobras, to finance exploration of the huge offshore discovery in Brazil's Tupi oil field in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro. Brazil's planning minister confirmed that White House National Security Adviser James Jones met this month with Brazilian officials to talk about the loan.

After all, Petrobras has shown itself capability to pull off large scale offshore energy projects in the past haven’t they?

Compare and Contrast

Robert Novak’s recent passing has brought out the usual bile that is typical when someone like Novak dies. Nearly every obituary castigates Novak for his role making it publicly know that Joe Wilson’s wife Valerie was responsible for him going to Africa to investigate potential sales of uranium ore to Iraq.

After all, some people who out the identity of CIA agents are actually celebrated as heroes. Compare and contrast the Novak post mortem with The Nation Magazine's eulogy of Philip Agee, CIA turncoat and KGB agent:

We mourn the passing of Philip Agee, the courageous former CIA officer who, in his 1975 book Inside the Company: CIA Diary, exposed the agency's subversion of democracy and its practices of torture and murder, naming hundreds of officers, agents and companies involved with the crimes. Agee was motivated, he said, by the CIA's support for "the worst imaginable horrors" in Latin America. Agee paid a high price for his courage. Perhaps the best way to remember Agee is to support others who find the courage to expose criminal misconduct by their own governments

Agee's high price was spending the last 30 years of his life living in relative comfort in Cuba running a travel agency when he should have gotten a bullet in the back of his head.

But like most things with the left, its all about politics in the end.

Something that really caught my eye in John Nichol’s obituary was this line.

Some of us also recall--and have a hard time forgiving--Novak's role in what Saul Landau correctly described as the "organized right wing attack" on the memory of murdered Chilean diplomat and dissident Orlando Letelier.

Nichols is referring to a mostly forgotten incident where Novak used his contacts and his column to take the “meme of the day” and turn it completely on its head.

Orlando Letelier was former Chilean diplomat who spent his time lobbying against Pinochet’s government after the coup in 1973. He was a minor celebrity among the leftwing glitterati/literati activist community when he was working out of the Washington DC based Institute for Policy Studies in the mid 70’s until his car was blown up, an assassination that was most likely organized in Chile.

While Letelier’s liberal allies were busy crucifying the Chilean government and the CIA (they must have been involved after all) over this peaceful souls death, Robert Novak and Rowland Evans were leaked the contents of Letelier’s briefcase recovered by the FBI during the course of its investigation into the murder. The contents, not surprisingly, showed that Letelier was part of a coordinated effort to manipulate and coordinate liberals in the United States (where have we heard that before) to lobby against the Chilean government and return a more Soviet friendly government back to Santiago. This coordination, not surprisingly, was being spearheaded by East Block intelligence agencies and its proxies in Cuba, who also not surprisingly were subsidizing Letelier work with cash remittances from the Cuban government. He also had contact information for dozens of suspected and known East Block and Cuban intelligence agents.
Novak didn’t sit idly by with this, went to press with it and was stymied and attacked every step of the way. Only the Washington Post printed his articles, with other outlets (most notably the NY Times) either ignoring it completely or posting attack pieces on Novak.

And this was the sin that Nichols and his pals were referring to: using ones talent and access to sources to spoil a perfectly good narrative about a left wing icon.

We lost a good journalist.

Max the Heckler

Looks like someone on our side has been reading up on his Saul Alinsky:



If we could only do this at every bullshit photo op.

Mitchell Paige and why Hollywood Sucks

Mitchell Paige, the Real GI Joe

For extraordinary heroism and conspicuous gallantry in action above and beyond the call of duty while serving with a company of marines in combat against enemy Japanese forces in the Solomon Islands on 26 October 1942. When the enemy broke through the line directly in front of his position, P/Sgt. Paige, commanding a machinegun section with fearless determination, continued to direct the fire of his gunners until all his men were either killed or wounded. Alone, against the deadly hail of Japanese shells, he fought with his gun and when it was destroyed, took over another, moving from gun to gun, never ceasing his withering fire against the advancing hordes until reinforcements finally arrived. Then, forming a new line, he dauntlessly and aggressively led a bayonet charge, driving the enemy back and preventing a breakthrough in our lines. His great personal valor and unyielding devotion to duty were in keeping with the highest traditions of the U.S. Naval Service.

With this in mind, I hope everyone will join me in not seeing the newest piece of shit out of Hollywood "Global Integrated Joint Operating Entity" also known as GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra.

Director Stephen Sommers, wary of international audiences, says that GI Joe will be in the mold of the Adventure Team 1970s. “This is not a George Bush movie,” Sommers explains. “[I]t’s an Obama world. Right from the writing stage we said to ourselves, this can’t be about beefy guys on steroids who all met each other in the Vietnam War, but an elite organization that’s made up of the best of the best from around the world.”

So GI Joe isn’t a Real American Hero - he’s a UN peacekeeper. This is reminiscent of the determinedly unpatriotic Superman Returns, which deliberately refused to state that Superman was fighting for “truth, justice and the American way.” Even GI Joe is now subject to the dictates of political correctness. We wouldn’t want Europeans thinking that we idolize the men and women of the American military. That would be uncouth.

What makes this even shittier is that Paige spent his retirement working on patriotic education.

Well at least the douchebags at Media Matters for America think its appropriate to piss on a dead hero's grave ... just so long as they can score some points on Glen Beck.

NPR's On the Media

NPR's on the Media is one of those cosmopolitan "smarter than thou" media watchdog shows on NPR. Its host, Bob Garfield, is a fairly reliable lefty .... sort of a walking stereotype of media bias and East Coast intelligencia.

This week Garfield was putting in work on another one of the administration’s obaminations (cute pun huh) debunking not only the birthers (more on that another day) but taking on some of those dastardly right wing radio hosts on the latest right wing lie concerning the health care debate.

BOB GARFIELD: Chief among those 10,000 issues is health care reform. But if Gibbs somehow believed the gravity of that matter guaranteed honest debate, he was sadly mistaken. It too was mired this week in a trumped up controversy over a nonexistent provision in the White House plan. Here on Fred Thompson’s radio show is supposed health care expert, Betsy McCaughey.

BETSY McCAUGHEY: One of the most shocking things I found in this bill, and there were many, is on page 425, where the Congress would make it mandatory, absolutely require, that every five years, people in Medicare have a required counseling session that will tell them how to end their life sooner.

BOB GARFIELD: Whoa! The Feds culling the population of those burdensome elderly? That is shocking — also, utterly untrue. The bill would simply allow seniors who do wish for professional advice on end of life issues, from will writing to hospice care, to get the government to pick up the tab.Yet, the euthanasia canard was parroted by House Republican Leader John Boehner and at least referenced by FOX News, CNN, The New York Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.

Unfortunately for "Bob" he should have waited a week to run with this story ... it seems that those dastardly right wingers may have been onto something:

We knew it would come to this when Oregon insisted on passing its assisted-suicide laws. It doesn’t take much for assisted suicide to go from a humane option to a cost-saving device, especially when the state pays for the medical care. One patient in Oregon got a letter that made this all too clear, when in the same letter rejecting her request for life-extending chemotherapy, Oregon offered her “physician-aid-in-dying”. In other words, Oregon offered their customer a heapin’ helping of death: