O Chickensh*t

clipped from ace.mu.nu Speaking to law students at the University of Alabama, Roberts said he had "no problems" with criticism in general. "On the other hand, there is the issue of the setting, the circumstances and the decorum," said the Chief Justice. "The image of having the members of one branch of government standing up, literally surrounding the Supreme Court, cheering and hollering while the court — according the requirements of protocol — has to sit there expressionless, I think is very troubling." Exactly. I have no problem a President going after the Supreme Court, I wish Bush did more of it back in the day. What I have a tremendous problem with was the punk way in which Obama did it. He knew that his attack on the Citizen's United decision was a clapper line that would get the Democrats up on their feet. He also very well knew there was nothing the members of the Court could do but sit there and take it. It was a chickenshit way to score some cheap points and beneath the dignity of the office.

Disgust

clipped from alhambrainvestments.com Like other members, Ms. Kilpatrick told investigators she did not know that corporations had paid the travel bills. But she is quoted in the report as having thanked the corporate sponsors at the 2008 conference. The report includes photographs taken at the conferences of the House members in front of the sponsors’ corporate logos. I don’t know about you but I’ve had about all the ethical lapses I can take from the politicians who claim to represent the people of this country. Before all my Democratic readers get up in arms, let me just add that the only bipartisan success in Washington, D.C. over the years has been in the corruption department. Before the current crop of scandals - and the above just scratches the surface by the way - the Republicans managed to disgust the electorate every bit as much as the current crop of Democrats and were turned out of office in 2006 primarily for that reason.

Suborbital + COTD

clipped from www.zerohedge.com The ravenous algo has just sniffed out AIG. Because now that the firm has no relevant core assets to sell, it surely merits a 10% spike in several minutes. Or is there merely a rumor that there is a rumor. Hopefully the government isn't back to its old trick of rolling buy-ins in financial firms. All's fair in love and getting the market higher, higher, higher. Update: 15% up now by deadhead on Tue, 03/09/2010 - 13:51 #259338 the fed and the propaganda machine are out of their minds on meth.

Rahm?

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com

Rewiring Toyota's Truth

clipped from www.popularmechanics.com The question is: What would make an engineering professor stick his neck out so far? We can't answer that, but we do know that Gilbert was paid $1800 for his engineering study by Sean Kane, a safety consultant. Kane's for-profit firm Safety Research & Strategies Inc. works with lawyers who are currently suing Toyota over the sudden acceleration issue. He blames Toyota for making the fail-safes and redundancies in the accelerator system too easy to circumvent, arguing that Toyota should have engineered the system to be more robust. My take on it is this: You can engineer around any safety system if you try hard enough. I had a car come to my repair shop years ago with the throttle stuck open partway. The cause was easy to find—the driver had used a coat hanger to hold the carburetor throttle blades partway open, because the throttle cable had snapped and he had no way to drive the vehicle with the engine at idle. Sort of the same thing as Gilbert's demonstration.

Toyota Takedown Timeline

clipped from biggovernment.com August 2009: The fatal Santee CA crash A Lexus (Toyota product) on loan from a dealership crashes outside of Santee, CA, killing a California Highway Patrol Officer, his wife and two children.  Accident investigators later determine the pedal became entrapped beneath a mismatched floor mat in the vehicle, causing sudden unintended acceleration.  (Contracted safety consultants trying to bolster litigators’ cases are trying to force Toyota into prematurely stating that it is an electrical or other problem). September 3, 2009: SEIU and  Justice for Toyota Janitors Picket Toyota Dealers Like the UAW and Teamsters will do shortly after them, the SEIU and friends start picketing at Toyota dealerships, demanding that Americans stop buying Toyota cars unless the company keeps their members’ jobs.  They picket again on September 23rd and other dates as well.

Save The Humans

clipped from sports.espn.go.com The Obama administration will accept no more public input for a federal strategy that could prohibit U.S. citizens from fishing the nation's oceans, coastal areas, Great Lakes, and even inland waters. AP/Luis M. AlvarezOne sign at the United We Fish rally at the Capital summed up the feelings of recreational and commercial fishermen. Morlock, a member of the CSF board, added, "There are over one million jobs in America supported coast to coast by recreational fishing. The task force has not included any accountability requirements in their reports for evaluating or mitigating how the new policies they are drafting will impact the fishing industry or related economies. "Given that the scope of this process appears to include a new set of policies for all coastal and inland waters of the United States, the omission of economic considerations is inexcusable." "Every angler needs to be aware because if it's not happening in your backyard today or tomorrow, it will be eventually.

O Hemming And Hawing

clipped from www.qando.net Jackson Diehl has a theory: I recently asked several senior administration officials, separately, to name a foreign leader with whom Barack Obama has forged a strong personal relationship during his first year in office. A lot of hemming and hawing ensued. The hemming and hawing which ensued points to the fact that this president has done nothing to forge those sorts of “strong personal relationship[s]” that are so necessary to moving a country’s foreign policy forward. Diehl points to a few suggestions from the administration officials of foreign leaders with whom Obama may have a “strong personal relationship”. Diehl’s examination of each finds the claim to be unlikely. Unsurprisingly one who isn’t suggested is Britain’s Gordon Brown.

COTD: Pure Evil

clipped from pajamasmedia.com We in Israel know two things for sure – we are on our own re defanging the Iranian Hitlerite regime, and we have NO choice but to pre-empt- at the time of our choosing. The notion that the Iranian leadership does not understand their imminent demise, if they lob a nuke at Israel, is an incentive ! for them, not a deterrant. One cannot deter a regime which lives to die, even on a macro state level. Since our leftist leaders also understand this zero sum game calculus, they realize that NOT striking will be the end of our homeland-NO doubt about it. The heretofore Samson Option, which may deter other Arab regimes, absolutley does NOT apply with Iran. Therefore, in a not so veiled way, even the leftist, appeasing Barak internalizes that at this moment in our history NOT striking is simply unthinkable. By the way, the left in America is pure evil, no ifs, ands or buts.

D Redux

clipped from www.msnbc.msn.com "When a T cell is exposed to a foreign pathogen, it extends a signaling device or 'antenna' known as a vitamin D receptor, with which it searches for vitamin D," said Carsten Geisler of Copenhagen University's department of international health, immunology and microbiology, who led the study. "This means the T cell must have vitamin D or activation of the cell will cease. If the T cells cannot find enough vitamin D in the blood, they won't even begin to mobilize." "What we didn't realize is how crucial vitamin D is for actually activating the immune system — which we know now," Geisler wrote in the study in the journal Nature Immunology. Most Vitamin D is made by the body as a natural by-product of the skin's exposure to sunlight. It can also be found in fish liver oil, eggs and fatty fish such as salmon, herring and mackerel, or taken as a supplement. Almost half of the world's population has lower than optimal levels of vitamin D and scientists say the problem is getting worse

The Keystone Corps(e)

clipped from gatewaypundit.firstthings.com “Would socialized medicine lead to socialization of other phases of life? Lenin thought so. He declared socialized medicine is the keystone to the arch of the socialist state.” 1945 AMA Pamphlet Warning The Communist Workers Party published an article recently in defense of state-run medicine like the proposal that democrats are wanting to ram through in the next 10 days. Now, back in 1927, an American socialist, Norman Thomas, six times candidate for president on the Socialist Party ticket, said the American people would never vote for socialism. But he said under the name of liberalism, the American people would adopt every fragment of the socialist program… One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project…

The State-Run Devil's Spawn

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com This audio clip contains a portion of Massa's radio interview, in which he calls Rahm Emanuel, the President's chief of staff, "the son of the Devil's spawn," What to say about all of this? A plague on all their houses, I suppose. Here is what seems remarkable: driving home from work tonight, I heard the news a couple of times on different networks. There was no reference to the Massa story. Is that astonishing, or what? Here is a thought experiment: imagine that it is 2006; for Eric Massa, substitute the name of any Republican Congressman; for Rahm Emanuel, substitute Karl Rove; and imagine that a Republican Congressman called Rove "the son of the Devil's spawn," while accusing Rove and the Bush White House of conspiring to force him out of Congress--sometimes, while naked--because he opposed the war in Iraq. Do you think that might have made the evening news? I think so, too.

Experience

clipped from ace.mu.nu Is Obama a Legal Phony? Well he has never released his law school transcripts, he was Editor of the Harvard Law review yet never published any papers, and after graduating he seems to have never tried a case. And now it turns out that his vaunted Professor of Constitution Law gig was really a patronage sham and he was nothing but a politically appointed part-time lecturer. The other professors hated him because he was lazy, unqualified, never attended any of the faculty meetings, and it was clear that the position was nothing more than a political stepping stool. According to my professor friend, he had the lowest intellectual capacity in the building. So given his recent public mistakes about Constitutional law, you start to wonder how much does he really knows about the law and whether his entire career has been a successful con. Oh and it seems like he also phoned it in during his brief term as Senator:

You Mean Like Democrats?

clipped from www.youtube.com

Bugs And People

clipped from www.youtube.com

Textbook Economics

clipped from justoneminute.typepad.com "What Democrats believe," he says "is what textbook economics says": But that's not how Republicans see it. Here's what Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, had to say when defending Mr. Bunning's position (although not joining his blockade): unemployment relief "doesn't create new jobs. In fact, if anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work." Krugman scoffs: "To me, that's a bizarre point of view--but then, I don't live in Mr. Kyl's universe." What does textbook economics have to say about this question? Here is a passage from a textbook called "Macroeconomics": Public policy designed to help workers who lose their jobs can lead to structural unemployment as an unintended side effect. So it turns out that what Krugman calls Sen. Kyl's "bizarre point of view" is, in fact, textbook economics. The authors of that textbook are Paul Krugman and Robin Wells. Pretty funny.

Dopes

clipped from newsbusters.org GEORGE WILL, ABC: A, you say they have huge profits. As you know, confiscate all the profits of all the health insurance companies, with those profits you could finance our healthcare for 48 hours. What you do for the next 363 days I don't know. Second, you say there's not enough competition? Fine, let them compete in a national market across state lines. REICH: Yes, let them compete across state lines, fine. But not a race to the bottom. Set minimum federal standards because we've seen over and over again that the recipients of health insurance don't know what they are buying very often. Until there are common standards, minimal standards, then people are going to be taken. And that is what's happened over and over again. WILL: There you have the premise of this legislation and the core of today's liberalism: the American people are such dopes they can't be counted upon to buy their own insurance.

Never Too Many Elephants

clipped from www.moonbattery.com

Saving The Price Of A Coffin

clipped from www.moonbattery.com The stylish Smart car: Among it's many features: the entire vehicle is a crumple zone. If enough people were "smart" enough to drive these moonbatmobiles, the alleged population problem would be solved. Update: According to Snopes, this isn't a Smart car, which would explain why it wasn't crushed thinner than a dime.

A Communist Living In The White House

clipped from www.moonbattery.com Amazingly enough, the same Saturday Night Live that brought us obnoxious moonbats like Al Franken and Chevy Chase also produced the patriot Victoria Jackson, who has noticed that there's a communist living in the White House and wants to know what we propose to do about it.

Misconception

clipped from drhelen.blogspot.com The idea that the human mind ought "consciously" to control its own development confuses individual reason, which alone can "consciously control" anything, with the interpersonal process to which its growth is due. By attempting to control it, we are merely setting bounds to its development and must sooner or later produce a stagnation of thought and a decline of reason. The tragedy of collectivist thought is that, while it starts out to make reason supreme, it ends by destroying reason because it misconceives the process on which the growth of reason depends.

Deep Schlitz

clipped from www.washingtonexaminer.com That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government But now things are looking a bit dicey. According to a recent Rasmussen Poll , only 21 percent of American voters believe that the federal government enjoys the consent of the governed. Even among the rulers, only 63 percent -- triple the fraction of the general populace but still less than two-thirds of the political class -- regard the federal government as legitimate by the standards of America's founding document. The remainder, presumably, are comfortable being tyrants. In fact, when I think of the federal government's brand now, I think of Schlitz beer. Schlitz was once a top national brew. But, in search of short-term gains, it began gradually reducing its quality in tiny increments to save money Because when a great beer dies, it's sad. But when a great nation dies, it's tragic.

True Believers

clipped from pajamasmedia.com If Mosab had been a US Army Major who converted to Islamism and shot his fellows, or a West Point Chaplain who has found Allah, or a Cambridge Apostle who became a KGB agent the literate public would have no problem lionizing him. But going the other way?  A Western cafe leftist is often psychologically incapable of accepting any that any form of religious belief can be genuine, unless it suits his prejudices. Ironically Sheikh Yousef himself is probably more aware of the of the central role that belief plays in a revolutionary organization and hence not only the possibility of converting to another cause but the impossibility of living without it. Among the terror operators there always exists a leaven of dreamers for whom the point of life is faith.  When a true believer becomes unable to adhere to one cause he generally finds another.  This may have happened to Mosab who discovered in prison not that the Jews were perfect, but more subversively, that Muslims were no better.

Economic Decline Is A Choice

clipped from davidwarrenonline.com Yet when we speak of "entitlements," or more precisely, against them, the first thing we face is public sector entitlements -- in Canada as in every other western or quasi-western country. The troubles the Greeks are now experiencing with their civil service, which is in a position to bring the country to a halt, is a warning for the road ahead. And forget Greece, look at California. There one may see in clear North American daylight what a vast unspeakable public bankruptcy looks like. It was not an inevitable thing. Gentle reader need only compare, candidly, California with Texas -- which is flourishing, and whose voters know why. Economic decline is a choice, not a fate, and it has everything to do with big, intrusive government.

Sitting

clipped from www.smartmoney.com Consider stocks priced not in money, but in gold. Gold is a symbol for all the things you might want to buy. Let's say stocks double, measured in dollars. Terrific, right? Not necessarily. Suppose the price of gold doubles, too. Not so terrific. You can't afford to buy anymore gold now than you could have before your stocks doubled. Today, with stocks and gold each having risen over the last year — but with stocks rising more — one "unit" of the S&P can buy 99% of an ounce of gold. All we have to do is compare 73% a year ago to 99% now, and we can see that stocks, priced in gold, have risen 34.9%. Here's a chart showing the S&P 500 priced in gold over the last year. Here's the most troubling part. The entire 34.9% gain made by stocks — priced in gold, that is — was achieved in just the first five weeks of rallying from the March 2009 bottom. in reality they've just been sitting there. All risk, no reward.

FDR II

clipped from www.investors.com Take that "only 36,000" figure. The real number is actually 51,000 jobs lost, because the government counts 15,000 temporary workers hired by the Census as new jobs. But these jobs aren't, in any meaningful sense, real full-time jobs. Would things have been better without all the snow? Undoubtedly. But we still would have lost jobs. Then of course there's the very definition of unemployment. If you count those who are discouraged or working part-time when they want a full-time job, the jobless rate soars to 16.8%. Private sector employment gauges pretty much show the same thing. For instance, the pollsters at Gallup each month ask Americans questions about their employment. In February, the Gallup report shows, some 19.8% of Americans reported that they were underemployed or not employed at all. That's one out of five workers — and even more than the 15 million unemployed estimated by the government.

The Winner Is...

clipped from www.moonbattery.com A Fox News poll asks, "What State Is Capital of Political Scandal?" The results so far: It looks like even with the stuff that's been hitting the fan lately, the Dems running New York have a ways to go to catch up with the Dems running Illinois. Next question: the notoriously septic political machine of which state produced the ham-fisted socialist currently occupying the White House?

Kurzweil On Subtleties

clipped from pajamasmedia.com The ending (spoiler alert) was a complete throwaway. The Na’vi defeat the immoral machines and their masters in a big battle, but if this mineral the evil corporation was mining is indeed worth a fortune per ounce, they would presumably come back with a more capable commander. Yet we hear Jake’s voice at the end saying that the mineral is no longer needed. If that’s true, then what was the point of the entire battle? The Na’vi are presented as the ideal society, but consider how they treat their women. The men get to “pick” their women, and Jake is offered to take his choice once he earns his place in the society. Jake makes the heroine his wife, knowing full well that his life as a Na’vi could be cut off at any moment. And what kind of child would they have? Well, perhaps these complications are too subtle for the simplistic Avatar plot.

Criminals

clipped from biggovernment.com Not enough people know about the Tides Foundation, which is one of the original “philanthropic” donation launderers for donors who don’t want to be tied to fringe activist groups. Frankly, there’s too much to tell, but they’re the sugar daddy for ACORN (whose founder, Wade Rathke, is intricately linked within Tides official leadership). A look at their 2008 tax return, 160-plus pages, reads like a directory of the New Left. I’ve pulled out the donations to ACORN groups and Big Labor’s Working America Education Fund (not many people know unions take in ostensibly charitable donations) and one theme is clear: “general support” seems to be a popular phrase. Another theme: notice that states receiving money are critical to election-year success for Democrats. And finally, notice just how much money is being thrown around.

Containment II: The Mother Of All Moral Hazard

clipped from www.zerohedge.com 8. The government can reasonably rely on debt ratings when it forms programs to lend money to buyers of otherwise unattractive debt instruments. 9. The government can indefinitely control both short-term and long-term interest rates. 10. The government can always rescue the markets or interfere with contract law whenever it deems convenient with little or no apparent cost. (Investors believe this now and, worse still, the government believes it as well. We are probably doomed to a lasting legacy of government tampering with financial markets and the economy, which is likely to create the mother of all moral hazards. The government is blissfully unaware of the wisdom of Friedrich Hayek: “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”)

Containment

clipped from www.zerohedge.com 18. When a government official says a problem has been “contained,” pay no attention. 19. The government – the ultimate short- term-oriented player – cannot with- stand much pain in the economy or the financial markets. Bailouts and rescues are likely to occur, though not with sufficient predictability for investors to comfortably take advantage. The government will take enormous risks in such interventions, especially if the expenses can be conveniently deferred to the future. Some of the price-tag is in the form of back- stops and guarantees, whose cost is almost impossible to determine. 20. Almost no one will accept responsibility for his or her role in precipitating a crisis: not leveraged speculators, not willfully blind leaders of financial institutions, and certainly not regulators, government officials, ratings agencies or politicians.

Stopped Clock Watch

clipped from www.zerohedge.com Joseph Stiglitz - former head economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and a nobel-prize winner - said yesterday that the very structure of the Federal Reserve system is so fraught with conflicts that it is "corrupt" and undermines democracy. Stiglitz said: If we [i.e. the IMF] had seen a governance structure that corresponds to our Federal Reserve system, we would have been yelling and screaming and saying that country does not deserve any assistance, this is a corrupt governing structure. Stiglitz pointed out that - if another country had presented a plan to reform its financial system, and included a regulatory regime that copied the makeup of the Federal Reserve system - "it would have been a big signal that something is wrong."

Not Enough

clipped from www.moonbattery.com A whistleblower has stepped forward in the largest and most corrupt enterprise in our country's history. The enterprise is the federal government; the whistleblower is South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, who warns that the monstrous cancer metastasizing out of DC plans to place American citizens below animals in an appallingly greedy land grab: A secret administration memo has surfaced revealing plans for the federal government to seize more than 10 million acres from Montana to New Mexico, halting job-creating activities like ranching, forestry, mining and energy development. As for that pre-Hopey Change concept of consent of the governed: President Obama could enact the plans in this memo with just the stroke of a pen, without any input from the communities affected by it. The progressive authoritarians controlling the federal government are quite literally stealing our country away from us. But it's still not enough. Via Knowledge Is Power.

Obviously Racist Whitey Democrat Wants To Impeach O Duce

clipped from jammiewearingfool.blogspot.com Oh my, this one is the total package. The victory in the 22nd Congressional District yesterday by LaRouche Democrat Kesha Rogers sent an unmistakable message to the White House, and its British imperial controllers: Your days are numbered. Kesha's campaign hit relentlessly at a single theme, that President Obama must go, that his attacks on this nation – with his dismantling of the manned space program, his efforts to ram through a fascist, killer “health care” policy, his endless bailouts for Wall Street swindlers, while demanding budget cuts which will increase the death rates among the poor, the sick, the elderly and the unemployed – are not acceptable, and will not be tolerated.

Umm. Maybe not so whitey.

Du'O (Part 86,933)

clipped from hotair.com Don’t look surprised. The left has been remarkably candid about this over the past year or two. Again and again and again and again and again and again and again they’ve warned people that the dream is bigger than universal coverage or even the public option. Memo from The One to progressives: Keep the dream alive. Obama argued to the group of progressive members that his health care reform bill should be looked at as the foundation of reform, that can be built on in the future. He asked them to help gather votes for the final health care battle and promised that as soon as the bill was signed into law, he’d continue to push to make it stronger. Obama pointed Kucinich toward single-payer language that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) was able to get into the bill. Kucinich fought for an amendment that would allow states to adopt single-payer systems without getting sued by insurance companies. Obama told Kucinich that Sanders’s measure was similar but doesn’t kick in for several years.

Warming

clipped from wattsupwiththat.com The title is from Columbia, and I should point out that this discovery on the Pacific Antarctic Ridge is 2800 miles from tip of the Antarctic peninsula, where volcanic activity is already well known. Examples are found at Deception Island and within the Bransfield strait. These two images I’ve prepared below (click to enlarge them) will give you a “lay of the land” so to speak. A vent spews chemical fluids from the East Pacific Rise, about 5,600 miles from newly suspected vents on the Pacific Antarctic Ridge. Credit: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Scientists at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory have found evidence of hydrothermal vents on the seafloor near Antarctica, formerly a blank spot on the map for researchers wanting to learn more about seafloor formation and the bizarre life forms drawn to these extreme environments.