"Abortion IS healthcare!" -- Your Abortion Industry at work

Hat tip: Jim Fox

More pictures fron the "One Nation" event

From Doug Ross@Journal, via Fred Gregory.









Gives new meaning to the phrase "Take out the trash", doesn't it?

Obama's "new and improved" nuclear policy: More endangerment for America

(HT: Dr. Sanity)

Linda Chavez:

"While anti-nuclear fanatics warned of an apocalypse
if the U.S. continued to expand and improve its nuclear arsenal during the Cold
War, the reality was that our superiority over our enemy and our unwillingness
to foreswear the use of nuclear weapons prevented the conflagration many feared.
Now, President Barack Obama is determined to abandon six decades of proven
nuclear deterrent policy in favor of a fantasy that he can rid the world of
these dangerous weapons by tying America's hands behind our
backs."

What's next?

Providing actual nuclear technology to North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, the Palestinians, and Al Qaeda, based on their agreement to abide by a "Don't Be Evil" policy?

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Watch out, North Carolina Dem Blue Dogs: SEIU is coming to get YOU!

Talk about shooting themselves in the foot:

"The SEIU says it will do so via a third party – North Carolina First – which, of course, bypasses the whole primary gig. That means those Blue Dogs they’ve targeted (Dem. Reps Heath Shuler, Mike McIntyre,
and Larry Kissell) will face the SEIU candidates in the general elections in traditionally red districts, thereby reliably splitting whatever blue vote there might be and ensuring a GOP victory."

Obama's pursuit of "peace": All fluff, no substance

But it DOES make American and European lefties "feel better" about America, doesn't it?

Wow, what a deal!

Let's go a little deeper than the incessant babble and drool of the Cheerleaders goes:

"The committee said today that he had 'captured the world’s attention'. It is certainly true that his energy and aspirations have dazzled many of his supporters. Sadly, it seems they have so bedazzled the Norwegians that they can no longer separate hopes from achievement. The achievements of all previous winners have been diminished."

The new and improved way to handle legal obstacles at the federal level

"With respect to the two words 'general welfare,' I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators."

--James Madison

From the Patriot Post U.S.

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More Cambridge police officers speak out

We continue to hear the "progressive" sources' desperate attempts to distract attention away from Gates' bad behavior by coming up with any little distraction that will focus attention on Sgt. Crowley.

And still no apology to Crowley from Gates, Obama, Patrick, and Cambridge Mayor Simmons.

Why is it that the "raaaaaaaacism" and "hate crime" thing only works one way?

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Here's a LONG list of what's wrong about the noxious Cap 'n Trade bill

Or as NRO calls it, "Garden of Piggish Delights".

Read all 50 points.

Noteworthy:

"Two main things to understand about Waxman-Markey:

First, it will not reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, at least not at any point in the near future. The inclusion of carbon offsets, which can be manufactured out of thin air and political imagination, will eliminate most of the demands that the legislation puts on industry, though in doing so it will manage to drive up the prices consumers pay for every product that requires energy for its manufacture — which is to say, for everything.

Second, it represents a worse abuse of the public trust and purse than the stimulus and the bailouts put together. Waxman-Markey creates a permanent new regime in which environmental romanticism and corporate welfare are mixed together to form political poison. From comic bureaucratic power grabs (check out the section of the bill on candelabras) to the creation of new welfare programs for Democratic constituencies to, above all, massive giveaways for every financial, industrial, and political lobby imaginable, this bill would permanently deform American politics and economic life."

The nightmare-ish quagmire and gross misuse of authority and money created by this monstrosity needs to be put to a permanent death.

As the article suggests, this thing will have a more deleterious effect on our nation than virtually all the Obamanation nonsense so far combined.

We can't say we haven't been warned.

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'Lifeboat Ethics': Why Seniors should fear Obamacare

You think that scenario wouldn't be a valid concern for Seniors under Obamacare, when private insurance is inevitably forced out of existence?

You probably have a firm belief in the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and Santa Claus, too.

This might change your mind about the possible outcomes under Obamacare:

"But not everyone agrees with my view that Lifeboat Ethics cases are best used to discuss exceptions to general moral guidelines rather than to set the guidelines themselves. And since Obama has insisted on many occasions in the past, especially when running in the primaries against Hillary Clinton, that it is his health care plan we are considering when we discuss the plan soon to be presented to Congress, it is I think reasonable to now ask relative to some important situations, whether Obama would let you into his lifeboat.

Situation One: Are you over 70 years old? If so, then you have real reason to worry about whether he will let you in. Developers of his plan understand that the bulk of the nation’s health care resources are used by senior citizens and they are looking for ways to ration care to the elderly.

In our last article we looked at an argument they favor which would ration care to the elderly and terminally ill based on a Cost-Benefit Analysis. Another plan now being seriously considered here and in Great Britain is to set an arbitrary age cap on receiving health benefits. This hearkens back to an idea originally espoused as far back as 1987 by Daniel Callahan, that humans have an average expected life span (figures of 70 yrs. to 85 yrs. have been mentioned in discussions of this point) and persons who have lived up to this age have no right to expect that we extend them medical care beyond it.

In other words, we are not here talking about a situation where, for example, if two patients, a 75 year old and a 25 year old were competing for the same donated liver, then the relative age of the patients would be one factor health care workers could take into account when making the decision as to who gets the organ. This proposed policy would instead use age alone as the sole criterion for denial of care. And it would not be health care workers but government who would exclude the 75 year old by setting a standard which would deny him/her from receiving health benefits on the basis of age alone!"

On the other hand, your mind might be so numbed from all the babble, dribble, drool, and spew used to implant the Dem/Lefty/"Progressive" agenda indoctrination through government schools and the Tank Media all these years, you may not have an operative mind left to change.

And don't even think about mumbling something about "scare tactics", particularly regarding anything in reference to a disastrous Obamanation policy.

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Obama's dem-agouguery on credit cards

John Stossel, at Patriot Post US:

" 'Rate hikes and late fee traps have to end. No more fine print, no more confusing terms and conditions' (http://tinyurl.com/dcvbqm), said President Obama last week when advocating another big-government solution -- this time to evils committed by credit-card companies.

Credit cards are a demagogue's dream come true. What better way to win public affection than to rail against banks for their harsh terms? In the politicians' morality play, creditors are the villains and debtors their helpless victims.

A little context first: No one has a natural right to a credit card. Someone has to be willing to undertake the risk in issuing it. Banks issue cards in their quest for profits. Nothing wrong with that.

Think about what a credit card is. It's convenient access to unsecured loans, permitting consumers to buy things large and small -- not to mention emergency services -- without cash. Pay the bill promptly, and you enjoy a fantastic service for virtually nothing. If circumstances prevent you from paying the bill in full, you can set your own payment schedule, realizing there is a minimum payment and that you will be charged interest on the unpaid balance. No surprise there.

To appreciate credit cards, it is worth recalling that before they came along, people got personal loans from banks, finance companies, pawnshops and loan sharks. Such loans were less convenient, and repayment was less flexible. Some people bought things on layaway, which meant they didn't take the goods home until they were paid for. Loan sharks sometimes broke people's legs.

Credit cards didn't create consumer debt -- they are merely a superior alternative to older methods.

As President Obama and other politicians demagogue this issue, keep two things in mind: Life would be more difficult without credit cards, and banks don't have to keep issuing them. Be careful what you ask for.

Politicians are too short-sighted and vote-hungry to say such things. They want a credit card holders' 'bill of rights' (http://tinyurl.com/b5bpew) that would prohibit certain billing practices, like raising interest rates on existing balances. The House could approve the 'bill of rights' this week.

Understandably, these billing practices endear themselves to no one, but competition makes the worst of them far less common. And as for raising rates, revolving credit means that a balance is a fresh loan each month; as the terms state, the rate can change. If issuers can never raise rates on existing balances, even when economic conditions change, they will be likely to charge everyone a higher rate to make up for the risk.

Todd Zywicki, a professor at George Mason University Law School and an expert on consumer credit, points out that the credit-card industry is highly competitive (http://tinyurl.com/dzqffs). The web is full of sites that permit easy comparison shopping (http://www.cardhub.com/). Competition has driven banks to more precisely match consumer costs to individual risk.

In earlier days, every cardholder paid higher interest rates than today and an annual fee (a way around usury laws). Now, annual fees are largely gone. Rates are lower. Late and over-the-limit fees are unpleasant, but they aren't charged until a cardholder's conduct triggers them. This is not to say credit-card companies never abuse customers, but as Zywicki notes, '[T]here are ample tools for courts and regulators to attack deceptive and fraudulent practices on a case-by-case basis.'

Politicians assume we are ignorant about credit-card terms. However, Zywicki points to evidence that people who carry credit-card balances are aware of the interest rate they're paying, and 'those who carry larger balances are even more likely to ... comparison shop.'

The 'bill of rights' seems designed to prevent people from getting themselves in over their heads. That motive is honorable, but government has never been very good at such protection. The law of unintended consequences cannot be repealed, and what government gives with one hand, it inadvertently takes away with the other. Increasing the banks' costs will make it harder for poorer people to get credit cards, and that will only push them into costlier forms of debt, like payday lenders.

I've never understood how the poor are helped by limiting their choices."

I've never understood why Dems/Lefties/"Progressives" constantly get free passes on their grandstanding they issues like this.

The noise produced on this issue is similar in nature to what we hear hysterically historically about payday lending and ATM fees

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Obama's policy on highway safety? MADD

This was predictable.

Obama's choice to thread the NHTSA is an unqualified MADD zealot, who is bound to cause disaster in this public policy area.

Details:

"With Hurley in charge, MADD’s goals will become NHTSA’s goals. That's troubling because at heart, MADD is an activist organization. The groups once-admirable goal of raising public awareness about drunk driving has over the last several years morphed into a zealous, evangelical teetotaling campaign. When a coalition of college presidents recently asked for nothing more than a new debate over the federal drinking age last year, for example, MADD called on parents to boycott the presidents' schools.

MADD has supported prison sentences for parents who allow alcohol consumption at chaperoned parties for underage teens, and fought efforts to allow underage veterans to have a beer on base after returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Even MADD's founder, Candace Lightner, has renounced the group, calling them 'neo-prohibitionists.' "

....and:

"Hurley would take NHTSA in a much more activist direction. States could expect to see more federal mandates about how they manage their roads, and motorists could expect expensive new mandatory safety add-ons to new vehicles; more reasons for to get pulled over; and lots more red light and speed cameras.

NHTSA needs a director who will balance safety with freedom, who will look at data dispassionately, and who will consider unintended consequences before ushering in sweeping new policies."

From the Eric Peters link:

"Hurley, CEO of the public nuisance group Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), may well be the most zealous enemy of individual liberty and the free-market at NHTSA since Joan Claybrook ruled during the Carter Administration.

His nomination on Tuesday sent shudders down the spines of everyone who considers motoring a special part of the joy of being American.

If his prior record is any indication, we can expect more in the way of arbitrary interference with the way the car companies do business at a moment when they can least afford the burden of bureaucratic meddling.

And drivers can expect a ratcheting up of the low-grade harassment they already endure on a daily basis — in the form of more obnoxious regulations, pullover 'safety' checks and very possibly lowered speed limits, ala Claybrook’s 55-mph national limit on federal interstates.

All of this will be imposed on states in the time-honored Washington way: Those that fail to comply will lose vitally needed highway funds."

These types of policies will only serve to enrichen the coffers of municipalities in their never ending thirst for more money, and will enable more shenanigans by those insurance companies that issue automobile insurance policies.

It won't improve our highways, nor will it improve "highway safety".

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Your fair and balanced non-partisan media at work

No, there's no problem with that little piece, is there?

Let's see what that particular little dirtbag of journalistic integrity had to say three years ago:



(hat tip: Newsbusters)

She wasn't alone in the pushback, however. There were many other news outlets and lefty bloggers who were threatened by what happened yesterday.

"'Cheered on by Fox News and talk radio, the hundreds of tea parties to', Dan Harris explained on ABC before asserting: 'But critics on the left say this is not a real grassroots phenomenon at all, that it's actually largely orchestrated by people fronting for corporate interests.'"

Too funny!

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Today's lesson at Indoctrinate U: Revised Constitutional History

Well, in Zero's opinion, they SHOULD have written it that way, cribbing from Jefferson.

HT: Dr. Sanity.

Regarding those 'Polar Ice Is Melting' scare stories

...such as this nonsense last week from the AP.

It's just more "global warming" "climate change" alarmism at its best (worse), as this article so concisely points out.

Key point:

"So, from now on I will be very careful not to be frightened, at face value by reports of massive ice loss from Antarctica and Greenland. There really is a lot of ice at these two places."

A wise choice, indeed.

When will the intellectual and academic fraud that is the "scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change" finally die?

James Hansen, 'global warming', statistical manipulation, and outright lies

Setting the record straight about Algore's partner in crime.


"That James Hansen has a private fame-seeking agenda and is using NASA to peddle it as he makes predictive blunder after predictive blunder in their name is patently clear. Which begs the question: Why is James Hansen - a publicity-seeking leftwing political activist, responsible for issuing false climate data to the detriment of NASA's reputation and against the public good - still picking up a pay check in a top public sector job?

And just how much are Hansen's headline grabbing, ultimately false, pronouncements helping to propel governments towards hugely expensive precipitous climate action?"


More, from Hansen's boss at NASA , John Theon:

As Chief of several NASA Hq. Programs (1982-94), an SES position, I was responsible for all weather and climate research in the entire agency, including the research work by James Hansen, Roy Spencer, Joanne Simpson, and several hundred other scientists at NASA field centers, in academia, and in the private sector who worked on climate research. ...

[James Hansen] was never muzzled even though he violated NASA's official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind's effect on it). He thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress.

My own belief concerning anthropogenic climate change is that the models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit. Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results.

In doing so, they neither explain what they have modified in the observations, nor explain how they did it. They have resisted making their work transparent so that it can be replicated independently by other scientists. This is clearly contrary to how science should be done. Thus there is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy."

In other words, the whole alarmist modeling nonsense, and those who drumbeat for policy based on such nonsense, deserve absolutely no respect academically and intellectually.

Blocking irresponsible healthcare 'reform' from Team 'Hope 'n Change'

Let's make sure the health care Looney Tooners are denied the ability to act like spoiled little brats, whining and moaning if they don't get everything they want to satisfy their political, social, and economic agenda regarding health care.

Noteworthy:

"As an example of those conflicting priorities, (Victor) Fuchs himself writes,

'If the current health care reform initiative is limited to questions of coverage, without serious attention to cost control and coordination of care, the "crisis"in health care will continue to plague us for years to come.'

(Almost sounds like something a member of the Anti-Universal Coverage Club would say.) I would add that conflicts between delivery-system reforms and financing reforms (e.g., covering the uninsured) only arise when dealing with command-and-control approaches to reform.

Neither Fuchs nor Altman intended their articles to be used as a guide to block health care reform. But since Messrs. Obama, Baucus, Daschle, and Wyden have already given us a fairly clear picture of the shape their proposed reforms will take, free-market advocates should scour both articles in their entirety for useful tips on how to beat back the next great leap toward socialized medicine."

Regarding "Patriotic Grace"

During this presidential transition, should we act like the Dems/Lefties/"Progressives" did during the transition eight years ago, and continued to act (with about a week's exception after 9-11, and about a month after the invasion of Iraq) throughout the Bush presidency?

No.

I say we act like adults, instead.

But we prepare ourselves to counter the stupidity, arrogance, and wrong-headed action we are sure to encounter, based upon what we know from past experience.

And we will counter these things with an intensity not yet imagined from past political experience, accompanied by none of the self destructive namby pamby-ness that played so great a role in the cumulative damage we inflicted upon ourselves in the last four years.

As the editorial so accurately states, and despite of what some are want you to believe, this country is STILL a right-center nation.

The Tuesday results do not change that.

Here's what the Left REALLY wants

Dennis Prager hits it exactly right:

"...calls for a unity among Americans that transcends left and right are either naive or disingenuous. America will be united only when one of them prevails over the other. The left knows this. Most on the right do not."

Read the whole thing.

Why are we willingly allowing them to inflict their entire agenda upon us?

Here's how Obama can steal the election this November

Repeal the 19th Amendment.

Noteworthy:

"Yes, it's rather moonlight and self-pity in Democratic circles now that the prospect of an Obama administration may not be the certainty it seemed only weeks ago. 'There is a growing sense of doom among Democrats I have spoken to,"'the Financial Times quotes a party fundraiser who formerly supported Hillary Clinton. 'People are going crazy, telling the campaign "you've got to do something".' Evidently, even congressional candidates from Obama's party have taken to distancing themselves from him and declined also to attack John McCain."

....and:

"As to the foreign policy issue that got him(Obama) nominated, where'd that go? I can't remember the last time we heard those dire and willfully misconstrued words about '100 years' in Iraq. (Instead, there's been lots of fact-checking on a Bridge to Nowhere.) Come to that, we hardly even hear him speak the word 'Iraq' these days unless it's to concede to that the troop surge, which he opposed and which was championed most loudly by his opponent, has succeeded beyond 'our wildest dreams.' Next up: Admitting that it wasn't such a bad idea to remove Saddam Hussein, after all..."

(hat tip: Confederate Yankee)

Misrepresentations, distortions, and outright lies about the economy

Donald Luskin, in tomorrow's WaPo, does an excellent job in setting the record straight regarding the whining, moaning, falsehoods, and general stupidity of which our Usual Suspects have been guilty.

Noteworthy:

"In the past two months, this newspaper alone has written no fewer than nine times, in news stories, columns and op-eds, that key elements of the economy are the worst they've been 'since the Great Depression.' That diagnosis has been applied twice to the housing 'slump' and once to the housing 'crisis,' to the 'severe' decline in home prices, to the 'spike' in mortgage foreclosures, to the "change" in the mortgage market and the 'turmoil' in debt markets, and to the 'crisis' or 'meltdown' in financial markets.

It's a virus -- and it's spreading. Do a Google News search for 'since the Great Depression,' and you come up with more than 4,500 examples of the phrase's use in just the past month.

But that doesn't make any of it true. Things today just aren't that bad."

This over-the-top negativity is just an extension of the political and social nonsense that our Dem/Lefty/"Progressive" blowhards and their willing media accomplices have been jabbering about for the last eight years.

In other words, it's just our Usual Suspects' usual babble, this time with the focus on the economy, with the volume turned up because this is a presidential year.