Where Will They Hide Them?

clipped from www.jihadwatch.org And then you learn what Jacques Chirac -- who now has a Muslim grandchild himself -- and Dominique de Villepin, do not wish you to learn. For if you did, you might be very angry. You discover that 1 out of every 3 babies born in France today is a Muslim baby. And that means, in 20 years, one of every three 20-year-olds in France will be a Muslim twenty-year-old. And that means, twenty years after that, at present rates of reproduction, France will have a majority Muslim population. Where shall we hide the statues from Marly-le-roi? And the Venus de Milo? And what about all those paintings of animated life -- all those portraits in the Louvre, and the Grand Palais, and the Musée Guimet down there in linden-lined Aix, and everywhere else in art-filled artful France, mère des arts, des armes, et des loix -- that are absolutely forbidden according to the immutable strictures of the Qur'an. Should they be sent for safekeeping to those Americans across the seas?

D*mn It Feels Good To Be A Victim

clipped from gatewaypundit.firstthings.com

WTWT.

Deafening

clipped from www.washingtonpost.com Although he has traveled to New England often and speaks about health care virtually every week, Obama has not held a single event focused on the Massachusetts experiment. By contrast, the White House has staged presidential appearances in Wisconsin, Ohio and Minnesota to spotlight innovative models. "The president's silence about the Massachusetts health plan is deafening," Cannon said. Some speculated that Obama has been reluctant to tout the Massachusetts model because it merely underscores how difficult it will be to deliver on his pledge to reduce the average family's health costs by $2,500 a year. "People want to hear about cost savings, not coverage, so it dilutes the message a bit," Cutler said.

Unintended Consequences (Part 83,390)

clipped from www.riehlworldview.com The Cash for Clunkers program has now officially caused problems from beginning to end. By law, clunkers must be recycled within 6 months. But the cars flooding into junkyards have created a backlog. The only way to comply with the law is to crush good parts and limit the recycling involved. Another solid steel Obama Big Government mess. "I've got a parking lot of almost 4,000 vehicles right now," said Harry Haluptzok, chief executive of John's Auto Parts in Blaine, Minn., near Minneapolis. His business typically dismantles 100 vehicles per week, but the workload has now more than doubled, and Haluptzok hired 10 more workers to keep up with all the extra vehicles.

On Avoiding Hesitation

clipped from www.davidwarrenonline.com Events spiralled out of Chamberlain's control so fast that the Nobel committee in Oslo were never able to offer him their peace prize It is also perhaps worth exculpating Alfred Nobel, for the farce his peace prize has become. The man took various precautions in his will to make sure it would not be cheaply politicized, and specifically that it would never be used as a means to influence current events. It was to be a retrospective award, for specific accomplishments universally acknowledged, and thus the opposite of a partisan statement. There is broad speculation, among the sort of people I hang out with, that it was offered to Obama on the understanding that he would "do a Le Duc Tho," and decline it The left-wing, pacifist committee wanted to saddle the new U.S. president with their little "hope diamond," in case he got any ideas about killing more jihadis in Afghanistan. Or hesitated to do to Israel what Neville Chamberlain did to Czechoslovakia.

A Parody Several Times Removed

clipped from www.davidwarrenonline.com Yet his regime was the parody of a parody of western ideas, several times removed: a Chinese "peasant" adaptation of Lenin's murderous Soviet interpretation of Marx's narrowly socialist recasting of false Enlightenment doctrines that were themselves a parody of naive millenarian and utopian tendencies within earlier Christian heresies. It was a regime that murdered history as well as men, a regime that from its first triumph eradicated everything that remained of China's old order with puritanical zeal, including the highest received moral and spiritual attitudes of her people. No Imperial power could ever have dreamed of wreaking destruction on the Maoist scale. This Maoist heritage was saluted Thursday, in the baldly fascist choreography of a vast lock-step parade, with military hardware, through a Beijing locked down against civil disturbance. Yet not as wealthy as Taiwan, which effected a proportionally greater transformation with no help from Communist tyranny.

The Roof Will Continue To Hover In The Air?

clipped from www.davidwarrenonline.com On the other hand, some interesting comparisons could be made between the thuggish party machine of Chicago, which raised Obama as its golden boy; and the thuggish party machine of Moscow, which presented Gorbachev as it's most attractive face. Yet they do have one major thing in common, and that is the belief that, regardless of what the ruler does, the polity he rules must necessarily continue. This is perhaps the most essential, if seldom acknowledged, insight of the post-modern "liberal" mind: that if you take the pillars away, the roof will continue to hover in the air. Very small children, the mad, and certain extinct primitive tribes, have shared in this belief system, but only the fully college-educated liberal has the vocabulary to make it sound plausible.

Diseased II

clipped from www.davidwarrenonline.com As a man who lived in Bangkok, for more years than he can comfortably admit, I have often suspected that sexually-transmitted disease plays a larger part in human events than the prim could ever imagine. In considering politics more generally, the phenomena of "madness" are difficult to chart. There are too many forms of it. In the world today we have several obvious madmen ruling states -- Ahmadinejad of Iran, Gadhafi of Libya, Chavez of Venezuela. The problem, for the "common people," with the sometimes arduous task of living under unhinged rulers, or with the conditions of life they create, is broader than can ever first appear. The lust for power itself is a moral failing, a beginning to madness. My near-hatred of politics on the big scale -- of large central administrations, with ambitions to "advance history" -- is founded in the scope they give to men like Lenin. For syphilis was just a disease, until it found him in some Paris brothel.

Diseased

clipped from www.davidwarrenonline.com We learned this week that, as one of my military correspondents delicately put it, "Lenin was a syphilitic whore-monger who sampled the delights of Paris and died raving mad." In fact this news item, arriving about a century too late to be acted upon effectively, is not in itself new. The Soviet Communists went to some length to destroy Lenin's medical records, and kill an unknown number of persons who might be aware of them. Yet as ever happens, they missed some bits, and diary scraps remain from Soviet doctors who treated him, and rather more from doctors who had treated him in Europe. Historians seemed previously hesitant to investigate this "little fact," woven into the background of the great tapestry of mass murder and unspeakable tyranny Diagnoses of syphilis have previously been made for several other of the great monsters of history, including Lenin's predecessor Ivan the Terrible, Henry VIII of England, Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler.

Pray India And China Don't Cave

clipped from ace.mu.nu A few days ago Dave in Texas blogged this bit of a speech from Lord Christopher Monckton. If you haven't seen it, I heartily encourage you to follow the link and check it out. It's short but poignant. Lord Monckton is desperately worried that Obama will be a signatory at the Copenhagen conference, where a new and scarier climate change treaty is to be crafted. Fortunately, plans for global wealth redistribution (enrobed in phony environmentalism) are foundering on the objections of India and China. So it looks like there won't be anything for Obama to sign, anyway. Apparently, the Indians and Chinese recognize the direct connection between carbon emissions and standard of living. Having had more recent experience in that condition, they understand how living in a less-industrialized state is major suckage and misery. Not some Rousseauian fantasy that persists among the Birkenstocked crowd.

The Truth Comes Out

clipped from hotair.com I’ll trust that you’ve watched it and point to this passage as the best part of the rant: It’s impossible for this legislature to reform the pension system, and if we don’t, we bankrupt the state. And I don’t think anybody can do it here, because of who elected you. … You’re just captive of the current environment — I don’t see any way out! Translation: Democrats are too far into the pockets of the unions to effectively govern California.  That is what created the Golden State debacle, and the marriage to the unions keeps the Democrats from making the budgetary decisions necessary to rescue California from ruin. However, even if Bill Lockyer can’t see any way out, I see one: stop electing Democrats to the Legislature.  If the state GOP doesn’t have this clip in ads by the end of next week, maybe California needs better GOP leadership, too.

Song Of The Jackass' Stinking Pal

clipped from www.telegraph.co.uk The left-wing leader said they should attempt to wash in less than three minutes and breaking into song distract them. "Some people sing in the shower, in the shower half an hour. No kids, three minutes is more than enough. I've counted, three minutes, and I don't stink," he said during a televised Cabinet meeting. Getting into his stride, he went on to label baths and jacuzzis anti-communist. "If you are going to lie back, in the bath, with the soap and you turn on the what's it called, the Jacuzzi... imagine that, what kind of communism is that? We're not in times of Jacuzzi," he said, to laughter from his ministers. Venezuela has suffered several serious blackouts in the past year because of rapidly growing demand and underinvestment. It has been aggravated by a drop in water levels in hydroelectric dams that provide most of its energy. Mr Chavez said he would create a ministry to deal with the electricity shortages, which have affected the image of his socialist revolution.

The Struggle Against Reality

clipped from neoneocon.com

It's A Socialist Mop

clipped from patterico.com

The Definition Of Insanity

clipped from wattsupwiththat.com But what can we expect such conditions to do to our daily life? While doing research 12 or 13 years ago, I met Jim Hansen, the scientist who in 1988 predicted the greenhouse effect before Congress. I went over to the window with him and looked out on Broadway in New York City and said, “If what you’re saying about the greenhouse effect is true, is anything going to look different down there in 20 years?” He looked for a while and was quiet and didn’t say anything for a couple seconds. Then he said, “Well, there will be more traffic.” I, of course, didn’t think he heard the question right. Then he explained, “The West Side Highway [which runs along the Hudson River] will be under water. And there will be tape across the windows across the street because of high winds. And the same birds won’t be there. The trees in the median strip will change.” Then he said, “There will be more police cars.” Why? “Well, you know what happens to crime when the heat goes up.”

pOlar idiOcy

clipped from gatewaypundit.firstthings.com What NO ONE is this article is talking about is ‘why the Chukchi Sea’. While ANWR is closed to oil development because of the Feds, the oil companies started looking in the opposite direction several years ago….in the Chukchi Sea area. WELL guess what they found……..OIL, NATURAL GAS, and more OIL speculated to be equal in the amount of output as Prudhoe Bay. And even better it was in areas that they could drill without Federal intervention. As soon as the discovery was announced here came the environmentalists screaming ‘migratory birds’, ‘arctic foxes’, ‘owls’….they pushed it all. At the same time they lost on all merits. It wasn’t until recently the Feds got on board to work with environmentalists to label the Polar Bear endangered, and now ‘LAND GRAB’ of oil producing area. LET NO ONE BE MIS-INFORMED, this is about stopping oil production, THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH POLAR BEARS, polar bear populations are skyrocketing in this area.

How Very Special

clipped from ace.mu.nu In his 256-page report to Congress, Barofsky notes that the Treasury Department's failure to implement anti-fraud measures, or even to require TARP recipients to report how they used the billions Congress and the Treasury Department gave them, makes it highly unlikely that the $317 billion outstanding -- nearly half the TARP total -- will ever be returned to taxpayers. So there you have it: Treasury officials lied to Congress and the public, and refused to demand even a basic level of accountability from TARP recipients while borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars that taxpayers will eventually have to pay back, plus billions in interest. Incidentally, Obama ally General Electric, owner of Obama-approved media organizations NBC and MSNBC, lobbied for special rules to get TARP money despite having almost nothing at all to do with banking. (They have a finance arm, but their "banking" presence derives from the ownership of two small banks.)

When Even The "Sane Alternative" Is Lunatic

clipped from www.nytimes.com The only viable solution, in the Volcker view, is to break up the giants. JPMorgan Chase would have to give up the trading operations acquired from Bear Stearns. Bank of America and Merrill Lynch would go back to being separate companies. Goldman Sachs could no longer be a bank holding company. It’s a tall order, and to achieve it Congress would have to enact a modern-day version of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, which mandated separation. “People say I’m old-fashioned and banks can no longer be separated from nonbank activity,” Mr. Volcker said, acknowledging criticism that he is nostalgic for an earlier era. “That argument,” he added ruefully, “brought us to where we are today.”

From Cloward-Piven With Love And Ruin

clipped from www.moonbattery.com

Barry Bounced

clipped from www.newmajority.com Maybe an analogy helps. Suppose we discovered that during the tense days of September and October 2008, executives at the big banks were ordering lavished catered dinners for themselves at their offices. We’d all disapprove. Those executives should have been eating sandwiches at their desks! But would it be OK for the government to order the banks to refuse the invoices from the catering company? The service was contracted by the people who had the legal authority to make the contract. The contract must be paid, unless the company goes into bankruptcy - at which point all creditors would have to be treated equally, without the government picking and choosing its favorites to be paid first. What’s happening with these executive contracts is the equivalent of bouncing the bills from some disfavored suppliers. It’s lawless and it’s wrong. And the consequences of this wrong action will reverberate through a whole economy.

Hard To Keep Up

clipped from www.realclearpolitics.com With fakery everywhere--some of it amusing, some of it not funny--people's ability to know where things fall on the spectrum between fact and falsity becomes so compromised that they retreat into a shell of cynicism about everything. And there is a lot to process: 9/11 deniers, Iranian Holocaust deniers, Obama birthers. Lily Tomlin provided the epigraph for our age: "I try to be cynical, but it's hard to keep up." Now, with more people decked out in protective coats of cynicism, it's gotten harder for the pols to sell their grand schemes. Ask President Obama. The current president seems taken aback that so many could doubt his good intentions. But politicians trying to sell big things, whether ObamaCare or privatized Social Security or even wars, need to get better at what they do. We are all balloon boys now, learning every day how to make sure the clever people don't take us for a ride.

O-blivious

clipped from financialsense.com My sole purpose one and a half years ago when I started writing about what I saw happening in this country was to convince enough people that the fiscal and foreign policies of our politician leaders would lead to disaster, so that we could change our path and I could leave my three sons a future brighter than my own. I have come to the conclusion that less than 1% of Americans or 3 million people really care about the path of destruction we are on. Approximately 1% of the population owns 90% of the wealth in the country. The actual number of people in control of the country is quite small. There are maybe a couple thousand people who control the reins of power (100 people in the White House, 535 Congressmen, 50 bankers, 20 people in the Federal Reserve, 9 Supreme Court justices, 100 people in power at governmental agencies, 50 media titans, 100 corporate CEOs, and maybe 200 rich influential people such as Gates, Soros and Buffett). The majority of Americans are oblivious

O on O

clipped from www.moonbattery.com

Problem? What Problem?

clipped from austriantimes.at Police are investigating after a British nuclear energy expert involved in negotiations with Iran over its nuclear programme fell 40 metres to his death from a UN building in Vienna. Officials announced today (Weds) that the man – named as Timothy Hampton – died on the spot yesterday after a fall from the 17th floor at Vienna International Centre (VIC), one of the United Nations’ (UN) main headquarters along with New York, Nairobi and Geneva. Authorities said the 47-year-old man – a member of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) – had joined the UN’s current talks with Iran over its nuclear programme.

Today's Shocka

clipped from www.qando.net The Copenhagen summit is in December and yesterday UN climate chief Yvo de Boer said he didn’t expect a binding agreement to come out of the meeting, dashing the hopes of environmental extremists that the nations of the world would agree to binding reductions of so-called greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Today India, apparently speaking for, or speaking with the approval of, the world’s developing nations (of which China considers itself one): Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said Thursday that the world’s poor nations will not sacrifice their development in negotiations for a new climate change deal. The issue of how to share the burden of fighting global warming has divided the developing and industrialized worlds as they prepare to negotiate a replacement to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol at a December summit in Copenhagen. “Developing countries cannot and will not compromise on development,” Singh told an international conference on technology and climate change.

All I Got

clipped from ace.mu.nu A top White House economist says spending from the $787 billion economic stimulus has already had its biggest impact on economic growth and will likely not contribute to significant expansion next year. Let's take a look at the results vs. predictions via Geoff. Well, that was money well spent. Someone should get Obama a shirt that says, "I Spent 787 BILLION Dollars and All I Got Was a T-Shirt and 9.8% Funemployment"

Che With Lipstick And A Daley T-Shirt

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com Michael Barone locates Barack Obama squarely in the brass-knuckle Chicago style of politics: That's governance, Chicago style. The head of government is friends with the heads of every big business, lobby and union, and together they make decisions on how everyone else will live. Those on the inside get what they want. Those on the outside -- well, they get what the big guys want them to have. That's life in the big city. ... [I]t appears to be the way that Barack Obama, who once aspired to be mayor of Chicago, has decided to run his administration. We can see that nowhere better than on the health care issue. Over the spring and summer, the White House door has been wide open to lobbyists from health care businesses. The doctors' lobby has gotten promises that physician payments won't be knocked down too much. In return, they are expected to lobby for whatever bill the congressional Democrats come up with.

Don't Worry, The Snail Darter Will Find A Way To Stop This

clipped from www.technologyreview.com Indeed, some geologists believe that gas supplies in the Marcellus and other shale deposits might be even more abundant than the PGC estimates. In January 2008, Lash and Terry Engelder, a colleague at Pennsylvania State University, calculated the amount of recoverable gas in the Marcellus deposit at 50 TCF. But initial drilling efforts in the region have gone so well that Engelder now puts the recoverable supply of gas at 489 TCF. If that's correct, it makes the Marcellus the second-largest natural-gas field in the world; only a massive offshore reserve shared by Iran and Qatar is larger. And using natural gas to replace gasoline and diesel fuel in vehicles could reduce the country's reliance on foreign oil.

10-289 Watch

clipped from pajamasmedia.com AFTER THE HUGE PAY CUTS: “Will the Administration Then Order People Back to Work?” The good news is, this will encourage companies to avoid getting into bed with the government in the future. I have some more thoughts on this as part of the discussion over at The Hill.

COTD: History Lesson

clipped from www.enduserblog.com Let's see--- 1985: MS-DOS 3-good 1987: MS-DOS 4-unusable 1989: MS-DOS 5-good 1990: Windows 3.11-OK 1995: Win95-acceptable after SP2 a year later 1998: Win98-Dog 1999: Win98SE-the Service Pack you had to buy 2000: Win ME-Dog, couldn't multitask to save its life 2001: Win NT 4-OK 2003: Win XP-OK; after SP 2, pretty good 2005: Vista-Dog 2009: Win 7 -?????

About That Death Panel (Bumped)

One of the great deceptions carried off by O Duce so far is the feigned removal of the "death panels" from the health "care" bills. The death panel was funded by the "stimulus" bill and already exists by the innocuous sounding name of the "Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research". Follow the link and scroll down to the bottom to see Ezekiel Emmanuel's picture. Yes that's right, he's already on it even while complaining that he has been slimed. Feeling dirtied yet?

O Aristocracy II: The Barbarian Is In The Gates

clipped from www.stumbleupon.com In part, the future President blames this on the current economic system: "There are many who will defend the 'free market.' But who will defend the single mother of four working three jobs. When a system is allowed to be free at the expense of its citizens, then it is tyranny." However, the President also singled out the American Constitution: "... the Constitution allows for many things, but what it does not allow is the most revealing. The so-called Founders did not allow for economic freedom. While political freedom is supposedly a cornerstone of the document, the distribution of wealth is not even mentioned. While many believed that the new Constitution gave them liberty, it instead fitted them with the shackles of hypocrisy." It is yet unknown if more of this thesis will be released. It was also noted that the President received an A- for the paper, which later led to his graduation. UPDATE: This has turned out to be a hoax. But as Ray points out, there's plenty of non-hoax evidence that we shouldn't be surprised to find that the real thing reads just like this.

O Aristocracy

clipped from www.stumbleupon.com Obama was required to write a 'senior seminar' paper in order to graduate from Columbia. The subject of this paper, which totaled 44 pages, was American government. Entitled Aristocracy Reborn, this paper chronicled the long struggle of the working class against, as Obama put it, "plutocratic thugs with one hand on the money and the other on the government." In the paper, in which only the first ten pages were given to the general media, Obama decries the plight of the poor: "I see poverty in every place I walk. In Los Angeles and New York, the poor reach to me with bleary eyes and all I can do is sigh." In part, the future President blames this on the current economic system: "There are many who will defend the 'free market.' But who will defend the single mother of four working three jobs. When a system is allowed to be free at the expense of its citizens, then it is tyranny."

Know No Net Neut

clipped from reason.com But the truth is that there are big corporations, and big corporate interests, on both sides. On the pro-neutrality side are the companies whose businesses operate at the edge of the web: Silicon Valley Web services like Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Twitter. On the other side are the companies who manage the Internet's core: ISPs like Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon. Much of the debate comes down to a power struggle between these two interests: Will network owners and administrators be allowed to determine access rules, prices, and traffic-management mechanisms on the networks they control? Or will the government step in and regulate those networks, forcing them to operate more or less as dumb pipes, thus shielding the edge-network, web-service companies whose business models rely on those networks from  management practices that they don't like? With the installation of Julius Genachowski in the top spot at the FCC, it increasingly looks like the answer will be the latter.

Unnerved

clipped from www.commentarymagazine.com So when strong, female, and conservative women — with children no less, and lots of them! — come along, the dogma is unsettled and the stereotype is challenged. Feminism is not the province of the Left, these conservative women assert, if feminism is meant to be the empowerment of women and the opening of opportunities. And it certainly doesn’t require acceptance of a pastel agenda of nanny-state domestic policies and pacifism abroad. So Liz Cheney, just like Palin, unnerves and upsets the Left, not simply because she might run for something and win, and not only because she is one of the most effective conservative spokeswomen on national security. She threatens their claim to the moral high ground and their assertion that women voters belong to the Left. That’s reason enough to send them into fits of rage. And you can bet they’re only getting warmed up.

Smaller

clipped from reason.com Take taxation: Taxes simply transfer resources from consumers to government, displacing private spending and investment. There are high costs to the other options as well. If the government borrows money, that leaves less capital for the private sector to borrow for its own consumption. If the government prints new money, it will create inflation, which reduces the value of the money we own and decreases everyone’s purchasing power. Overall, government spending doesn’t boost national income or standard of living. It merely redistributes it—minus the share it spends on the bureaucracy that collects and spends our tax dollars. The pie is sliced differently, but it’s not any bigger. In fact, it’s smaller.

Hit The Road Jackasses

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee have been pressing for an investigation of Countrywide Mortgage's "VIP Program," under which powerful Democrats like Kent Conrad and Chris Dodd received sweetheart mortgages, apparently as bribes. So what did the Democrats do? To a man (or woman), they hid. The Republicans made this entertaining video of the incident: That's not quite the end of the story. The Democrats, led by committee chairman Edolphus Towns, were stung by ridicule that resulted from Thursday's debacle. So now they've locked the committee room: Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.) locked Republicans out of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee room to keep them from meeting when Democrats aren't present.

Don't Hold Your Breath

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com The Iranian mullahs continue their crackdown on those who demonstrated against their fraudulent election. Today they announced that Kian Tajbakhsh, an Iranian-American scholar and an American citizen, has been sentenced to 12 years in prison: Iran ignored appeals by Hillary Rodham Clinton and even rock star Sting and sentenced an Iranian-American academic to 12 years in prison Tuesday for his alleged role in anti-government protests after the country's disputed presidential election. Even rock star Sting? Wow, that's amazing. Until now, has Mr. Sumner had great success in springing dissidents from Islamist prisons? Maybe I missed those news stories. Can the administration work up a similar level of concern for an apparently innocent American citizen who has been made a pawn by Iran's extremist leaders? We'll see. It would be a departure for Obama's administration to actually try to advance American interests or defend American citizens.

Atheism 3.0 II

clipped from www.usatoday.com Atheists are "God's whistle-blowers," who keep believers honest and focused on the here-and-now, Selmanovic said. "Atheism at its best grabs us by the collar and throws us to the ground, demanding to see lives well lived, forcing us to dig deeper and live up to the best of our own religions," he writes. While no one expects the God debate to end any time soon, in the meantime, perhaps people can agree to disagree a little more agreeably, the new New Atheists argue. "There was a moment when atheist books were selling," Dacey said. "But people like objectivity, they like the feeling of balance. So after this wave of atheist books and the criticism that they are extremist, people are trying to find a happy medium."