The Mansourian Candidate (Part 83,937)

clipped from www.moonbattery.com This letter has been around the internet for about a year and is attributed to Lou Pritchett, a former Procter & Gamble vice president and recognized leader in "change management." (If that's what you need after Hopeychange ruins a nation, maybe this guy should be elected in 2012.) Whether or not you're seeing it for the first time or the twentieth, it rings phenomenally true. AN OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT OBAMA Dear President Obama: You are the thirteenth President under whom I have lived and unlike any of the others, you truly scare me. You scare me because after months of exposure, I know nothing about you. You scare me because I do not know how you paid for your expensive Ivy League education and your upscale lifestyle and housing with no visible signs of support. You scare me because you did not spend the formative years of youth growing up in America and culturally you are not an American.

Beyonce Caring

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com Mark Steyn brilliantly juxtaposes federal policy at the Canadian border, where millions of dollars in "stimulus" money are being spent to ensure security at border crossings no one uses, with the southern border, where Arizona ranchers lie awake at night listening to illegals in their yards: Of course, the world that Barack Obama and his cronies inhabit is far removed from that of the frightened Arizona ranchers. Byron York notes the extraordinary glitz of the Obama White House; here, the President parties with Mexico's President Calderon at a gala event--they erected an enormous structure on the White House lawn--at which Beyonce entertained: So, your family's physical security is threatened by illegal immigration? Sorry to break the news, but I don't think Barack Obama cares.

Juxtapochutzpah

clipped from pajamasmedia.com NOW IS THE TIME AT INSTAPUNDIT WHEN WE JUXTAPOSE: “Second grader to Michelle Obama: My mom doesn’t have her papers.” – Hot Air, May 19th. “Chutzpah! Obama Requires MI High School Seniors Have Papers to Shake His Hand.” – PJM, today. (Headline concept via SDA.)

Se Habla Hezbollah?

clipped from us4palin.com

Lawless

clipped from gatewaypundit.firstthings.com Charles Krauthammer on the Administration’s refusal to process illegal immigrants referred by Arizona: I think its a perfect example of the arrogance and near lawlessness of this administration. Look, the Constitution requires that the federal government ensures that every state has republic form of government. Last time I checked Arizona does. There is no allegation that the immigration law in Arizona was passed in any way but legally… If the president doesn’t like he has an option. He can instruct the Department of Justice to go and have a judge strike it down. And, if likes he can get an injunction. In the meantime that will suspend it until its Constitutionality is ruled upon. In the meantime it’s as legal of law as any law in the land. For the executive (branch) to say that we’re going to ignore it or we’re going to un-enforce immigration in this state on account of this is lawless.

Run Away!

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com

Sing Along With Me Now...

clipped from ace.mu.nu

If You Fall Down, Try Again

clipped from ace.mu.nu

Du'O (Part 86,934)

clipped from pajamasmedia.com “ALL OF THE PEOPLE WHO USED TO BE OPPOSED to the idea of unlimited executive power during the Bush administration … now seem to have embraced it during this administration.” Oh! The disillusionment, as Obama wins a case about detainees.

Mayor Daley With Lipstick And A Mao T-Shirt

clipped from pajamasmedia.com IS CHICAGO CHINA? Roger L. Simon writes: Now Chicago is not as brutal as China, obviously, but in some ways it’s worse. Someone named Daley has been the city’s mayor since somewhere in the Early Paleolithic Age. Chairman Mao didn’t last as long. Being a Daley in Chicago is equivalent to being a Medici in Florence – with less danger of a violent death. The patronage system seems to extend from somewhere a few miles south of Canada to the northern reaches of Kentucky. Everyone here appears to accept this as part of the game. Last weekend the Wall Street Journal had an interesting article about the three hundred people who rule China and are connected by their own special super private line of “red phones.” That could be Chicago. In fact, they should adopt it here. Obama and Rahm Emanuel could be linked in with David Axelrod and Bill Ayers. Maybe it should be red Blackberrys. Now I’m being sarcastic here, but I think this is indicative of the serious problem we’re facing now.

Wild, Wild Windmill

clipped from www.moonbattery.com

Corruption Is Blowin' O The Wind

clipped from wattsupwiththat.com Christopher Horner reports that Pajamas Media has received a leaked internal document confirming Spain realizes its green failures, just as Obama pushes the American Power Act based on Spain’s program. Pajamas Media has received a leaked internal assessment produced by Spain’s Zapatero administration. The assessment confirms the key charges previously made by non-governmental Spanish experts in a damning report exposing the catastrophic economic failure of Spain’s “green economy” initiatives. On eight separate occasions, President Barack Obama has referred to the “green economy” policies enacted by Spain as being the model for what he envisioned for America. Later came the revelation that Obama administration senior Energy Department official Cathy Zoi — someone with serious publicized conflict of interest issues — demanded an urgent U.S. response to the damaging report from the non-governmental Spanish experts so as to protect the Obama administration’s plans.

Government Motors: Not The 52 Billion

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com Whitacre's Wall Street Journal column was, in short, a fraud. But it was a fraud of a special kind. It was a fraud committed with the assistance and probably at the urging of the Obama administration. It was not, in short, the kind of fraud that congressional Democrats will be holding hearings on any time soon. GM also produced an advertisement starring Whitacre and committing the same fraud that Whitacre had perpetrated in his Journal column. Some inspired soul has finally gotten Whitacre to spill the beans on GM's subsistence at taxpayers' expense. It can't have been easy to have gotten the truth out of this character or his masters in the Obama administration.

94 Again

clipped from hotair.com

The Toe Of God

clipped from www.nytimes.com Physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory are reporting that they have discovered a new clue that could help unravel one of the biggest mysteries of cosmology: why the universe is composed of matter and not its evil-twin opposite, antimatter. If confirmed, the finding portends fundamental discoveries at the new Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva, as well as a possible explanation for our own existence. Dr. Brooijmans said that the most likely explanations were some new particle not predicted by the Standard Model or some new kind of interaction between particles. Luckily, he said, “this is something we should be able to poke at with the Large Hadron Collider.” Neal Weiner of New York University said, “If this holds up, the L.H.C. is going to be producing some fantastic results.” Joe Lykken, a theorist at Fermilab, said, “So I would not say that this announcement is the equivalent of seeing the face of God, but it might turn out to be the toe of God.”

Whackjob Overlords

clipped from gatewaypundit.firstthings.com Obama Administration officials apologized early and often to the Communist Chinese regime for Arizona’s ID check law during last week’s talks. For the record… The communist regime they apologized to has slaughtered millions of its own citizens and has a record of harvesting body organs from political prisoners. He said U.S. officials did not whitewash the American record and in fact raised on its [sic] own a new immigration law in Arizona that requires police to ask about a person’s immigration status if there is suspicion the person is in the country illegally. Someone should ask these kooks if they even read the Arizona immigration law. The Corner adds, via Instapundit, “Do you ever get the idea that our government is a bunch of left-wing undergraduates come to power?”

The Solution To Every Problem

clipped from pajamasmedia.com BUT REMEMBER, THE SOLUTION TO EVERY PROBLEM IS MORE REGULATION: “The federal agency responsible for ensuring that the Deepwater Horizon was operating safely before it exploded last month fell well short of its own policy that the rig be inspected at least once per month, an Associated Press investigation shows. In fact, the agency’s inspection frequency on the Deepwater Horizon fell dramatically over the past five years, according to federal Minerals Management Service records. . . . In fact, last year MMS awarded the rig an award for its safety history.”

Smarter Than You And Me

clipped from beldar.blogs.com "Libertarian paternalism" is an oxymoron. What Sunstein and Obama are doing is just arrogant paternalism, period. Instead of anything remotely resembling real libertarianism, Sunstein is promoting the notion of government regulation so subtle, so perceptive, so ... well, just so damned clever that it won't really seem like much of a bother to do what Sunstein and Obama and the government want you to do. You'll think it's your own idea! 'Cause they're smarter than you and me, see? Get it? If you don't, then just keep clinging to your guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like you or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment. Something. You moron, why do you think you're even remotely qualified to run your own life? Sheesh. [/sarcasm off] Seriously, folks, this article will tell you everything you need to know about why Cass Sunstein is my worst dread as a potential Obama SCOTUS nominee. I am so, so very glad that he's a pasty white guy!

COTD: (Bad Language Alert)

clipped from www.qando.net Actually in 1977 Frank Church and Jimmy Carter got together with the result of EO 12036 which brought to an end the Hunter-Killer anti-terrorist teams formed shortly after the 1972 Olympics and then the appointment of Stansfield Turner which gutted our HumInt capabilities. The military concluded that sending those teams after specific targets (those whose names we knew) fit the new definition of assassination and thus were no longer allowed. At that time I was an M-21 operator out of Bad Toltz and decided ot to re-enlist. I was not suprised when I walked out of a hastily canceled Zurich Insurance seminar in the Atlanta Marriott  to see the view of the burning twin towers on every TV screen in the  lobby and concourse. I drove home cursing the peanut farmer, the techno-admiral and that grandstanding fat fuck from Idaho.

Settled At Last

clipped from www.qando.net Matt Yglesias does the inevitable and expected and blames the current oil spill on George Bush.  Here’s his reasoning: By 2009, of course, Barack Obama was already in the White House. But it takes time to staff an administration and take charge of an agency. Current MMS director Liz Birnbaum didn’t take office until July 2009, months after the exclusion was granted. More to the point, the dysfunctional attitude of MMS managers reflected problems that were deeply ingrained under the previous administration. So I guess one can infer, given the Yglesias logic,  that 9/11 was “Clinton’s disaster”.  After all, the necessary changes in the intelligence community made under the Bush administration were a result of its failure to prevent 9/11. They were found to  be “dysfunctional” in post 9/11 investigations.  And the fact that it “takes time to take charge of an agency”, we can conclude – based on the excuse making above – that 9/11 was all Clinton’s fault. Right? Glad we’ve finally settled that

Blackout

clipped from www.qando.net I just can’t help it – not that this is surprising or unexpected. Venezuela’s economy is in trouble despite the country’s huge oil reserves. Blackouts plague major cities. Its inflation rate is among the world’s highest. Private enterprise has been so hammered, the World Bank says, that Venezuela is forced to import almost everything it needs. This is socialism working again. Yes, yes, we’ll hear the naysayers claim that it “really isn’t socialism”, but of course, it is and, like all other attempts throughout the world and history, it is a dismal failure which has made the lives of the citizens of Venezuela worse, not better. Venezuela’s economy has contracted 3.3% in the past year. Jose Guerra, a former Central Bank economist, says state intervention in private businesses is hitting the economy hard. And, as expected, the government is badly mismanaging what it confiscates and nationalizes. Cities endure 4 hour blackouts daily, many during business hours.

Dragged Into Hell

clipped from www.moonbattery.com

Ideologies Of Force

clipped from rayharvey.org Communism is a species of the genus socialism; it is one of the many variations on that tired theme. Communism explicitly calls for the violent overthrow of government. In theory, it is an anarchist ideology, believing that the state will one day magically “wither away,” as Karl Marx famously phrased it, though only after an unspecified period of gigantic bureaucratic control. Of course, in the long and blood-soaked history of communism, the state has never withered away Democratic socialism, on the other hand, doesn’t advocate the violent overthrow of government but intends to use force peacefully. By definition, by its very nature, socialism must resort to force because it must expropriate people’s money and other property in order to redistribute it. That is the distinguishing characteristic of any and all forms of socialism: government control of property and the means of production (which is one of the reasons so-called corporatism is another variation on socialism).

Slender Distinctions

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com Last week, the American Association of Pediatricians noted that certain, ahem, "immigrant communities" were shipping their daughters overseas to undergo "female genital mutilation." So, in a spirit of multicultural compromise, they decided to amend their previous opposition to the practice: They're not (for the moment) advocating full-scale clitoridectomies, but they are suggesting federal and state laws be changed to permit them to give a "ritual nick" to young girls. A few years back, I thought even fainthearted Western liberals might draw the line at "FGM." After all, it's a key pillar of institutional misogyny in Islam: Its entire purpose is to deny women sexual pleasure. True, many of us hapless Western men find we deny women sexual pleasure without even trying, but we don't demand genital mutilation to guarantee it. On such slender distinctions does civilization rest.

Now That's A Picture

clipped from www.lucianne.com HELP IS ON THE WAY!

Kagan Coddles

clipped from www.moonbattery.com But Kagan, acting as President Obama's Solicitor General, argued that the case should not be heard even if evidence proved that the Saudis helped underwrite al Qaeda, because it would interfere with US foreign policy with the oil-rich nation. She posited "that the princes are immune from petitioners' claims" because of "the potentially significant foreign relations consequences of subjecting another sovereign state to suit." In an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer published Tuesday, the mother of a man who was killed on United Flight 93 in Pennsylvania said he didn't know why Kagan argued that the case not even be heard. By keeping the case off the dockets, the Saudis were spared scrutiny of their finances. Even Benedict Arlen Specter was enraged, proposing an amendment to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act that would prevent the ultra-Left's answer to Harriet Miers from hiding behind it. "She wants to coddle the Saudis," he said. The bad guys control our government.

Crumble

clipped from pajamasmedia.com PEW POLL: “Fully 73% say they approve of requiring people to produce documents verifying their legal status if police ask for them.” Ann Althouse asks: “I wonder what those percentages would be if the President and the political elite had not pressured us to think the Arizona law was outrageously racist.” From the comments: “We’re seeing a crumbling of the left’s dogma and an end to the average person’s fear of an inquisition. This as a result of how ridiculous the left has become.”

Consequences

clipped from www.qando.net Some job applicants are asking to be paid in cash so they can collect unemployment illegally, said Gayle Younglove, vice president at Outdoor Experts Inc. in Romulus. “Unfortunately, we feel the economy is promoting more and more people and companies to play the system and get paid or collect cash money so they don’t have to pay taxes,” Younglove said. Heh … ya think?! Michigan offers unemployment benefits for up to 26 weeks (6 months). When those benefits run out, unemployed can apply for extended federal benefits up to a maximum of 99 additional weeks. The federal jobless benefits extension “is the most generous safety net we’ve ever offered nationally,” said David Littmann, senior economist of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a free-market-oriented research group in Midland. The extra protection reduces the incentive to find work, he said.

QOTD: Sowell Again

clipped from www.redstate.com Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it. Thomas Sowell

All Of A Sudden

clipped from pajamasmedia.com REPORT: Mullah Omar captured. So would this explain the Administration’s sudden interest in broader interrogation tactics?

If Only It Were Bizarre

clipped from pajamasmedia.com BIZARRE FACT OF THE DAY: Media Take Note: In Arizona County, Of 64 Highway Chases Last Month, Not One Perp a U.S. Citizen.

Chinese Racists Or Something

clipped from pajamasmedia.com WHAT’S NEXT? A CHINESE TEA PARTY MOVEMENT? In front of a roomful of government officials, businessman Zhou Jusheng took the mic and made a simple demand: finish paving and landscaping the industrial park that houses his drill-bit factory. His request at a public hearing was modest by Western standards. But in China, where the communist government muscularly guards its political monopoly and where people mostly defer to authority, Zhou’s assertiveness points to a telling change. “You could say that I was just wasting my breath,” he said later at his factory. “But as a citizen, I should speak out.” “Ordinary people have the right to ask, how are you spending my money? Are you spending it on me? What are you doing with it?” said Li Fan, who runs a private think tank in Beijing that promotes political reform and is advising Wenling officials. Obviously, they must be racists or something.

O Budget

clipped from www.qando.net A few days after Freddie Mac requested $10.6 billion, Fannie Mae has asked for $8.4 billion: Fannie Mae requested another $8.4 billion from the federal government on Monday, saying that due to trends in the housing and financial markets, the company expects its deficits to continue. The government-controlled mortgage giant announced Monday that it lost $13.1 billion applicable to common shareholders in the first quarter of 2010. The request cames just four days after Fannie’s twin Freddie Mac also asked for a handout – to the tune of $10.6 billion – after posting an $8 billion quarterly loss. Don’t forget, this is off budget money – even though it adds to the deficit, its not counted – yeah, you figure it out. Also remember that while Democrats rail against Wall Street and it’s culpability in the financial collapse, it was Freddie and Fannie which were implementing the policy of the US Government

Do You Know Who This Is?

clipped from www.youtube.com

That's right. This "racist" would be Clarence Thomas' wife. LOL

Choices

clipped from www.youtube.com

Rise Up

clipped from www.moonbattery.com Jeremy Hoop made this contribution to the soundtrack:

Pinned By Pr*cks

clipped from www.moonbattery.com Due to their officiousness and profound need to boss everyone else around, moonbats usually end up controlling professional associations. Consequently, the American Academy of Pediatrics now advocates genital mutilation for little girls, otherwise known as the quaint Islamic world practice of clitoridectomy. The spin is that performing "pinprick" clitoridectomies could prevent Muslim parents from going back to the enlightened lands of Allah to have the whole thing chopped out. As Backyard Conservative points out, this is reminiscent of the policy of advising Muslim men to beat their wives "lightly," in the spirit of multicultural compromise. Pinprick or not, the door is now open to officially sanctioned sexual mutilation of children, compliments of political correctness. On tips from Brian and Vanessa. Hat tip: Monkey in the Middle.

Bracing For Impact

clipped from wattsupwiththat.com Another eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull Volcano in Iceland, another round of air traffic closures. As Joe D’Aleo at ICECAP notes, a major eruption in Iceland, especially from Eyjafjallajokull’s larger neighbor, Katla, could impact the climate in the Northern Hemisphere. “ICECAP NOTE: It is true that tropical volcanism has more global impact as the ash and aerosols travel north and south and affect most of the globe while high latitude volcanoes find ash and gases limited more to the higher latitudes and tend to have effects that don’t last as long. But research by Oman (2005) showed northern hemispheric high latitude volcanoes influence the Arctic and North Atlantic Oscillations which can have a profound effect on the climate In the polar regions a 30,000-40,000 foot ash and aerosol cloud can have impact. Some of the biggest eruptions in April and again May 6th reached above 30,000 feet.

President Braniac

clipped from www.moonbattery.com In the course of throwing a hissy-fit over how the new media criticize him, our super-genius president admits he's too dumb to work an iPod or other electronic devices routinely mastered by ten-year-olds. "With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations, -- none of which I know how to work -- information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation," Obama said. One of our trolls asserted a few weeks ago that "Obama is smarter than you." Evidence is still wanting. I can work all of those things, *and* program a TiVo. Also, I know how many states there are, how to pronounce "corpsman," and that there is no such language as "Austrian."

The Humble #2

clipped from hplusmagazine.com All of these properties make graphene a very important material for the future of electronics. It has already been used to create field effect transistors, the primary component of a computer processor. When you combine this with the other features above, you have a single material that could be used for the majority of the components in every electronic device we currently have… with one major difference: speed. Current silicon based chips have a limited speed at which they can run at room temperature without overheating and malfunctioning. Go much over 3GHz without some major cooling and chips melt down. But replace those chips with graphene equivalents — without having made any other changes to the circuits -—and you can raise that limit much higher. Potentially 100 to 1000 times higher.    Let’s think about that for a moment. That’s 300GHz to 3000GHz or 3Terahertz.

Hey Rube! (Part 89,493)

clipped from pajamasmedia.com THEY TOLD ME THAT IF I VOTED FOR MCCAIN, we’d get an Attorney General who’d want to curtail Miranda rights. And they were right! Attorney General Eric Holder said that Congress should “give serious consideration” to updating the Miranda warning which requires law enforcement officials to inform suspects of their rights – including the right to remain silent. In an interview on “This Week,” Holder said that the U.S. needs to exam whether the current rules regarding Miranda warnings give law enforcement agents the “necessary flexibility” when dealing with terrorism cases. Ah, remember all that talk about the “lawless Bush Administration” trampling civil rights, and the fierce moral urgency of change? Well, if you believed that stuff when they were peddling it. . . hey, rube! Meanwhile, Christopher Fountain writes: “If only we had elected Obama, we wouldn’t have this travesty of justice.”