I Almost Vomited

clipped from www.moonbattery.com When Comrade Obama recently blew off his duties so as to attend a ritzy fundraiser for Barbara Boxer in San Francisco, he was greeted by two kinds of protestors: Tea Party patriots and members of his base who are impatient because he hasn't shoved us into communism quickly enough. Some of the former have experience with Hopey Change, having lived in the kind of country where there is no brake on the power of people like Obama. They have even more reason than the rest of us to be sickened by what the radical left is trying to do to this country:

10 Questions

clipped from www.moonbattery.com If you thought the Moonbat Messiah's first press conference in 308 days was a disaster, imagine how badly it would have gone for our historic First Adolescent President if Rush Limbaugh had been on hand to ask questions:

Distractions

clipped from www.zerohedge.com In his May 28th interview with Bloomberg's Mark Crumpton and Lori Rothman, Matt Simmons of energy investment bank Simmons & Company, provides some stunning revelations on what is really occurring in the Gulf of Mexico, and proposes that the only effective way to contain the leak is to relieve BP, bring in the military, and do what the Russians have done on comparable occasions, namely explode nuclear weapons within the wellbore. Simmons knows what he is talking about. As Jim Bianco points out: "Matt Simmons gained fame with his book 2005 Twilight in the Desert where he claimed that the Saudis were overstating their oil output because they hit “peak oil.” Right or wrong Simmons claimed the price of oil was going to skyrocket and three years after the book’s release the crude oil hit $147/Barrel. In January 2009 the WSJ called Simmons one of the five most important voices in the oil industry.

The "Process"

clipped from www.rollingstone.com That same day the GOP amendment failed, the derivatives expert Adam White was at his home in Georgia, poring over a "redline" version of the Lincoln amendment, in which changes to the bill are tracked in bold. When he came to a key passage on page 570, he saw that it had a single line through it, meaning it had been removed. The line read, "Except as provided in paragraph (3), it shall be unlawful to enter into a swap that is required to be cleared unless such swap shall be submitted for clearing." Translation: It was no longer illegal to trade many uncleared swaps. Wall Street would be free to go on trading these monstrosities by the gazillions, largely in the dark. "Regulators can't say any longer if you don't clear it, it's illegal," says White. Once he noticed that giant loophole, White went back and found a host of other curlicues in the text that collectively cut the balls out of the Lincoln amendment.

wOw

clipped from wattsupwiththat.com Via NASA’s spaceweather.com Here’s something you don’t see every day, in fact it has only been seen once before by the volcano researchers that got the photo. The diameter of the ring must be huge to be visible at the photo distance. I’m estimating about 1-2km in diameter. On May 1, 2010, 4:17 Pm Volcano Photographers Steve & Donna O’Meara were stunned when they photographed a perfectly shaped Volcanic Smoke Ring blown out by Eyjafjallajokull Volcano in Southern Iceland. Here’s the close up view: “This is a rare phenomenon,” say Steve and Donna. “We’ve only seen it one other time at Italy’s Stromboli volcano in 2001.”

Walter E. Williams, Gracious And Generous Grantor

clipped from www.moonbattery.com Whereas, Europeans kept my forebears in bondage some three centuries toiling without pay, Whereas, Europeans ignored the human rights pledges of the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution, Whereas, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments meant little more than empty words, Therefore, Americans of European ancestry are guilty of great crimes against my ancestors and their progeny. But, in the recognition Europeans themselves have been victims of various and sundry human rights violations to wit: the Norman Conquest, the Irish Potato Famine, Decline of the Hapsburg Dynasty, Napoleonic and Czarist adventurism, and gratuitous insults and speculations about the intelligence of Europeans of Polish descent, I, Walter E. Williams, do declare full and general amnesty and pardon to all persons of European ancestry, for both their own grievances, and those of their forebears, against my people.

Heh.

The Pretend O

clipped from ace.mu.nu Let's all stand on the beach together lookin' like we're large and in charge. President Obama pauses after burning away an acre of oil slick with his heat-ray vision. Perhaps you saw news footage of President Obama in Grand Isle, La., on Friday and thought things didn't look all that bad. Well, there may have been a reason for that: The town was evidently swarmed by an army of temp workers to spruce it up for the president and the national news crews following him. Jefferson Parish Councilman Chris Roberts, whose district encompasses Grand Isle, told Yahoo! News that BP bused in "hundreds" of temporary workers to clean up local beaches. And as soon as the president was en route back to Washington, the workers were clearing out of Grand Isle too, Roberts said. A pretend army for a pretend president.

COTD: Du'O

clipped from hotair.com OH MY HECK! They cleaned the beaches for the photo ops? If that isn’t Orwellian I don’t know what is. Tapper gave the story and through the last part in… that is huge. Every single thing this administration does is a complete and utter lie. No wonder those people were so disillusioned. They saw first hand the deception. Sickening. petunia on May 28, 2010 at 9:53 PM

Are You Kidding Me?

clipped from hotair.com He finally finds a federal agency whose budget he’s willing to cut, and guess what. Three months before the massive BP oil spill erupted in the Gulf of Mexico, the Obama administration proposed downsizing the Coast Guard national coordination center for oil spill responses, prompting its senior officers to warn that the agency’s readiness for catastrophic events would be weakened… Accidents happen, “but what you’re seeing here is the government is not properly set up to deal with this kind of issue,” said Robbin Laird, a defense consultant who has worked on Coast Guard issues. “The idea that you would even think about getting rid of catastrophic environmental spill equipment or expertise at the Department of Homeland Security, are you kidding me?”

Smackdown

clipped from www.zerohedge.com BBC Newsnight held another great financial round table discussion (why do these occur only in Canada and across the Atlantic? Is it so difficult to have 20 minutes of commercial free debate here in the US where people can actually tell the truth?) which brought together Hugh Hdenry, Gillian Tett and Jeffrey Sachs. As usual, Hendry takes it odd with a bang: "I would recommend you panic. The European banking system is in a crisis." He continues: "Let's purge this system of its rottenness. Let's take on a recession. It's going to be tough, people are gonna lose their jobs. They are going to lose their jobs anyway. We can spread this over 20 years, or we can get rid of it over 3 years." Of course, the Columbia professor, is completely against purging the system: how else can US higher "educators" continue to indoctrinate generation after generation with the flawed principles of a bankrupt ideology, and continue getting getting paid handsomely if there is an global reset?

BenFX

clipped from www.zerohedge.com The German Economics Minister Rainer Bruederle has just confirmed precisely what many have known and said for years, namely that the US Federal Reserve is active in the secondary markets, in this particular case in FX. While not so much of a secret for some of the fringe players such as a the SNB, BOE and BOJ, the Fed has never had a formal statement on currency intervention, as, of course, it would have been seen as a sign of weakness (and allegedly could be considered an unconstitutional activity). And why would anybody dream of manipulating the world's strongest currency. Of course, if Bernanke manipulates currencies, as has now been confirmed, it is more than clear that he directly buys and sells stocks in the secondary market, and/or Treasuries in the primary. We wonder what other juicy disclosure Bernanke's trans-Atlantic CB colleagues will announce once they are cornered about their recent market manipulative conduct.

The Other Shoe

clipped from www2.macleans.ca Our very lifestyle demands penitence: Americans have easily accessible oil reserves, but it would be wrong to touch them, so poor old BP have to do the “environmentally responsible” thing and be out in the middle of the Gulf a mile underwater. If you’re rich enough to be that stupid, what won’t you subsidize? The green jobs, the gay parades, the jihadist welfare queens, the Greek public sector unions, all have to be paid for by a shrinking base of contributing workers whose children and grandchildren will lead poorer and meaner lives because of the fecklessness of government. The social compact of the postwar era cannot hold. Across the developed world, a beleaguered middle class is beginning to understand that it’s no longer that rich. At some point, it will look at the sheer waste of government spending, the other shoe will drop, and it will decide that it no longer wishes to be that stupid.

Stupid With The Very Heavens

clipped from www2.macleans.ca Even so, why would you stick a commie in the White House and put him in charge of anything to do with jobs, even “green jobs”? Well, because “green jobs” is just another of those rich-enough-to-be-stupid scams. The Spanish government pays over $800,000 for every “green job” on a solar-panel assembly line. This money is taken from real workers with real jobs at real businesses whose growth is being squashed to divert funds to endeavours that have no rationale other than their government subsidies—and which would collapse as soon as the subsidies end. Yet Tim Flannery, the Aussie climate-alarmist who chaired the Copenhagen racket, says we need to redouble our efforts. “We’re trying to act as a species,” he says, “to regulate the atmosphere.” Er, “regulate the atmosphere”? Why not? We’re rich enough to be stupid with the very heavens.

Plenty Of Its Own Money

clipped from www2.macleans.ca By the way, where does the government get the money to fund all these immensely useful programs? According to a Fox News poll earlier this year, 65 per cent of Americans understand that the government gets its money from taxpayers, but 24 per cent think the government has “plenty of its own money without using taxpayer dollars.” You can hardly blame them for getting that impression in an age in which there is almost nothing the state won’t pay for. I confess I warmed to that much-mocked mayor in Doncaster, England, who announced a year or two back that he wanted to stop funding for the Gay Pride parade on the grounds that, if they’re so damn proud of it, why can’t they pay for it? Outside Palestine House in Toronto the other week, the young Muslim men were caught on tape making explicitly eliminationist threats about Jews, but c’mon, everything else in Canada is taxpayer-funded, why not genocidal incitement?

Affording Stupid

clipped from www2.macleans.ca Back in 2008, when I was fulminating against multiculturalism on a more or less weekly basis, a reader wrote to advise me to lighten up, on the grounds that “we’re rich enough to afford to be stupid.” Two years later, we’re a lot less rich. In fact, many Western nations are, in any objective sense, insolvent. Hence last week’s column, on the EU’s decision to toss a trillion dollars into the great sucking maw of Greece’s public-sector kleptocracy. It no longer matters whether you’re intellectually in favour of European-style social democracy: simply as a practical matter, it’s unaffordable. How did the Western world reach this point? Well, as my correspondent put it, we assumed that we were rich enough that we could afford to be stupid.

Thugs

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com Flynn introduces his comments with the observation that Bank of America is SEIU's largest creditor: "Under the leadership of Andy Stern, SEIU leveraged itself to the hilt, largely to support Democrat campaign efforts, and now owes the bank around $100 million. The loan payments are likely playing havoc with the union's finances." Flynn concludes with an explanation of the inherent interest of this story: "it is the small story that illuminates the overall narrative. Let's dispense with all the semantics and timelines and legalese. Last week, 500 union thugs descended on a private home and terrorized a teenage boy. They violated someone's most personal space, their home. And they attacked their most precious gift, their child. The police in two jurisdictions knew about this. They did nothing." In the words of the song, something's happening here. I'm not exactly clear on what it is, but I am clear that this is a story deserving our serious attention.

Du'O (Part 86,935)

clipped from hotair.com Don’t color Veronique de Rugy shocked, shocked to find that government spending crowds out private investment, but the results of the new study by Harvard Business School will certainly shock some Keynesian academics — and high-ranking government officials.  Instead of providing a stimulating effect to the economy, government spending creates pressures on private industry to reduce staff and investment.  The study’s authors count themselves as among the shocked: Recent research at Harvard Business School began with the premise that as a state’s congressional delegation grew in stature and power in Washington, D.C., local businesses would benefit from the increased federal spending sure to come their way. It turned out quite the opposite. In fact, professors Lauren Cohen, Joshua Coval, and Christopher Malloy discovered to their surprise that companies experienced lower sales and retrenched by cutting payroll, R&D, and other expenses.

Exploitation Pure And Simple

clipped from www.wnd.com "If you doubt this, it's been six weeks. We now have Democrat commentators all suggesting that we know President Obama cares, but he's gonna have to do something to show it. He's gonna have to use a little emotion out there. The cool, calm Obama is not what we want." "These are not things that you can fake," Limbaugh continued. "[If] you care about something, you care about it. If it really angers you, you get angry about it. When you're a leader and things like this happen and you think people are being lackadaisical in fixing it, then you step in and you see to it that everybody heels to. There hasn't been any of that. There's been the usual political posturing. ... "We don't have a leader. Obama's not a leader. He's an exploiter. He creates problems. He exacerbates them for the express purpose of taking advantage of them, pure and simple, folks."

O Jack*ss(es)

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com President Obama has a remarkable relationship with the White House press corps. He gives fewer press conferences than any President in memory, seldom answers questions, and treats reporters with contempt. He does this, in part, because he knows that the White House press corps loves him. Some would call this an abusive relationship. Byron York writes, "Fawning press now gets cold shoulder from Obama." Will Barack Obama go an entire year without holding a formal news conference? He's getting close: The president's last full-scale session with the press was on July 22, 2009, which was 307 days ago. When Obama last held a big news conference, there had not yet been terrorist attacks at Fort Hood, Detroit, and Times Square. Scott Brown was an unknown Massachusetts state senator. There was no national health care bill, much less national health care law. Tiger Woods appeared to be a model family man. "All of you voted for me."

Where's Geraldo?

clipped from www.qando.net Peter Daou has a piece in the Huffington Post discussing the on-going oil spill disaster and asking: Where is the outrage? Where are the millions marching in the streets, where is the round-the-clock roadblock coverage tracking every moment of the crisis, every effort to plug the leak, every desperate attempt to mitigate the damage? Where is the White House? Where are Republicans? Where are Democrats? Where is the left? Where is the right? Where is the “fierce urgency of now?” Where’s Geraldo Rivera on a boat in the Gulf holding up an oily pelican and weeping in his whiskers? Where’s CNN and MSNBC covering every drop of oil gushing from the blown casing with ominous sounding music and an intro that says “Oil Catastrophe, Day 36 of the underwater BP disaster”? And, where is the government? Of course they’re right where I figured they’d be, but then I don’t have the faith in the magic competence of government that others do seem to have.

Murder, They Did

clipped from pajamasmedia.com THE ANCHORESS ON TOM FRIEDMAN: “Every murderous totalitarian government of the 20th century began with some insulated group of faux-intellectuals congratulating each other on how smart they are, and fantasizing about how, if they could just install a dictatorship-for-a-day, they could right all the wrongs in the world. It is the ultimate fantasy of the narcissist. And we’ve got whole generations of them, in control of our media and our government, all intent on ‘remaking America.’” Posted by Glenn Reynolds at 11:13 pm

Broken Wings, Eggs And Rancid Omelettes

clipped from www.moonbattery.com While paving the way for Comrade Obama's imposition of socialism, George W. Bush declared, "I've abandoned free market principles to save the free market system." Taking a similar approach, the moonbats running Denmark are saving the earth from the nonexistent climate crisis by clear-cutting forests. Even some environmentalists are alarmed by the absolute insanity: The Danish government plans to clear forests and destroy unique nature for the benefit of industry. The Danish environment minister Troels Lund Poulsen decided, on behalf of the government, on 30th September 2009, that the clearing of 15 km2 of forest in the north west of Denmark will take place. A test centre for the development of offshore windmills is planned to take up 30 km2 of land in the Thy region, near Østerild. This deforestation will create an increase of 400,000 tonnes of CO2 emission, the equivalent of the CO2 emission of 100,000 people per year. …

Heh

clipped from ace.mu.nu Les Phillips snaps his glasses off mid-sentence there, like Clark Kent becoming Superman.

Stark

clipped from ace.mu.nu There's the political class, then there's everyone else. ...An overwhelming majority (88%) of the Political Class are confident in members of Congress to handle current economic problems. Nine-two percent (92%) of Mainstream voters don't share that confidence... Ever wonder who THEY are? The ones who are always out to get us - the dark shadowy cabals plotting to keep their jackboot heels on the necks of the common man? I'm starting to get a sense of who THEY are.

You just RTWT. You can pick your eyeballs back up off the floor now...

Past 50?

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com The refrain of a popular country song goes, "God is great, beer is good, and people are crazy." I'm not sure that all people are crazy, but the Europeans certainly are, or have been for the last few decades, anyway. The New York Times reports, "Crisis Imperils Liberal Benefits Long Expected by Europeans." No surprise there. But this particular fact was news to me: In Sweden and Switzerland, 7 of 10 people work past 50. In France, only half do. Past 50? That assumes that the average worker (not the average person) will work for approximately 30 years, which these days is barely more than one-third of his or her life expectancy. Whatever possessed the French, and other Europeans, to think that a person can support a lifetime's consumption with a third of a lifetime's work? Haven't the Europeans heard of the curse of Adam?

A Mere 15,000 Years

clipped from wattsupwiththat.com Scott Luthcke weighs Greenland — every 10 days. And the island has been losing weight, an average of 183 gigatons (or 200 cubic kilometers) — in ice — annually during the past six years. That’s one third the volume of water in Lake Erie every year. Greenland’s shrinking ice sheet offers some of the most powerful evidence of global warming. Now, that sounds pretty scary, it’s losing a third of the volume of Lake Erie every year. Can’t have that. To understand what it means, there is only one thing to which we should compare the ice loss, and that is the ice volume of the Greenland Ice Cap itself. So how many cubic kilometres of ice are sitting up there on Greenland? And when we do so, we find that the annual loss is around 200 km^3 lost annually out of some 3,000,000 km^3 total. This means that Greenland is losing about 0.007% of its total mass every year … seven thousandths of one percent lost annually, be still, my beating heart … it will all be gone in a mere 15,000 years.