2008 - the year the myth of global warming died?

Christmas vacation is over and it's time to go back to work, and to resume blogging.

I hope that everyone had a wonderful holiday and to those who were able to spend the holiday in the bosom of their extended family - you have my deepest sympathy.

I won't have time to put anything other than this up today due to some end-of-year work issues, but I couldn't let this go by without sharing it. This is from the Telegraph and is by Christopher Booker:

Looking back over my columns of the past 12 months, one of their major themes was neatly encapsulated by two recent items from The Daily Telegraph.

The first, on May 21, headed "Climate change threat to Alpine ski resorts" , reported that the entire Alpine "winter sports industry" could soon "grind to a halt for lack of snow". The second, on December 19, headed "The Alps have best snow conditions in a generation" , reported that this winter's Alpine snowfalls "look set to beat all records by New Year's Day".

Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.

First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flatlining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century.

Ever shriller and more frantic has become the insistence of the warmists, cheered on by their army of media groupies such as the BBC, that the last 10 years have been the "hottest in history" and that the North Pole would soon be ice-free – as the poles remain defiantly icebound and those polar bears fail to drown. All those hysterical predictions that we are seeing more droughts and hurricanes than ever before have infuriatingly failed to materialise.

Even the more cautious scientific acolytes of the official orthodoxy now admit that, thanks to "natural factors" such as ocean currents, temperatures have failed to rise as predicted (although they plaintively assure us that this cooling effect is merely "masking the underlying warming trend", and that the temperature rise will resume worse than ever by the middle of the next decade).

Secondly, 2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a "scientific consensus" in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. At long last, as in the Manhattan Declaration last March, hundreds of proper scientists, including many of the world's most eminent climate experts, have been rallying to pour scorn on that "consensus" which was only a politically engineered artefact, based on ever more blatantly manipulated data and computer models programmed to produce no more than convenient fictions.

Thirdly, as banks collapsed and the global economy plunged into its worst recession for decades, harsh reality at last began to break in on those self-deluding dreams which have for so long possessed almost every politician in the western world. As we saw in this month's Poznan conference, when 10,000 politicians, officials and "environmentalists" gathered to plan next year's "son of Kyoto" treaty in Copenhagen, panicking politicians are waking up to the fact that the world can no longer afford all those quixotic schemes for "combating climate change" with which they were so happy to indulge themselves in more comfortable times.

Suddenly it has become rather less appealing that we should divert trillions of dollars, pounds and euros into the fantasy that we could reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by 80 per cent. All those grandiose projects for "emissions trading", "carbon capture", building tens of thousands more useless wind turbines, switching vast areas of farmland from producing food to "biofuels", are being exposed as no more than enormously damaging and futile gestures, costing astronomic sums we no longer possess.

As 2009 dawns, it is time we in Britain faced up to the genuine crisis now fast approaching from the fact that – unless we get on very soon with building enough proper power stations to fill our looming "energy gap" - within a few years our lights will go out and what remains of our economy will judder to a halt. After years of infantile displacement activity, it is high time our politicians – along with those of the EU and President Obama's US – were brought back with a mighty jolt into contact with the real world.

I have said before that global warming is the most effective hobgoblin that the left has ever invented to terrorize the masses into surrendering their wealth and liberty. I have gone on to say that it will not be abandoned, no matter what the actual science says, until a new hobgoblin is contrived.

It is possible that our politicians will see the current global recession as just that hobgoblin and we will soon see the increasingly fragile global warming house of cards collapse once and for all.

This would be a very good thing since the earth is probably entering a protracted cooling period which will see shorter growing seasons and a reduction in arable land. This will result in food shortages and increasing prices for agricultural products and sharp increases in the demand for energy as people try to keep warm.

The measures which were/are being proposed to combat the fantasy of global warming would dramatically increase the cost of energy while just as dramatically decreasing its supply. This would be a recipe for disaster on a global scale. Famine weakens the population's resistance to disease and creates a fertile ground for pandemics (Black Plague got a foothold in Europe only after lower temperatures reduced the food supply and led to widespread hunger).

A few moments thought will reveal what a dangerous mix this is even for the advanced nations of the West. How hard will it be for the Unites States to control its southern border when Mexicans see the US as not a good job or a welfare check but as the only refuge from starvation and plague?

How will Europe, which is already being overrun by Muslim immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East, cope with even greater numbers of even more destitute - and radical - and possibly diseased - refugees? Will the EU be able to refuse them entrance when so many European nations are already infested with so many of their brethren who have already demonstrated a propensity for violent rioting when denied any whim?

It would be a marvelous example of the providence of God if the current financial troubles hit us at exactly the right time to derail the global warming juggernaut before it could send the world into another dark age.

Today's lesson

White Trash Republican passed this along on her blog and I thought it needed even wider exposure. She says that the author is a Dr. Rossi from somewhere in Florida.

"Once upon a time there was a very happy couple. Their names were Freedom and Capitalism. They married and had many wonderful children. Their names were Independence, Self-worth, Hard Work, Dignity, Charity, Faith and Hope. They all lived happily for many years and the children respected their parents and loved them both very much.

But Freedom and Capitalism later had several naughty children; very naughty. They weren't so respectful and never appreciated their parents. Their names were Wealth Envy, Environmentalism, Animal Rights Activism, Racism, Feminism,and Liberalism. These evil children blamed their parents for everything and hated their parents, Freedom and Capitalism.

In fact, these unappreciative children began to despise their parents since they didn't realize their parents gave them everything they had and didn't realize that they wouldn't even exist without their parents. They hated their parents so much, they began to plot with their neighbors to kill their parents and to keep their home.

Their neighbors' names were Socialism and Communism, who on the outside were a very lovely couple, but inside they were very, very ugly. They and their children, whose names were Despair, Poverty, Suffering, and Repression had been welcomed into every neighborhood they had lived in. But then thrown out after years of suffering and the loss of many lives.

So late one night in total darkness (because Socialism and Communism did everything in darkness and away from the light of the truth,) while everyone was asleep, Wealth Envy, Environmentalism, Feminism, and Animal Rights, with the help of their younger obnoxious brother, Hollywood, disguised Socialism and Communism and all went into the house of Freedom and Capitalism. It wasn't hard because the two parents, Freedom and Capitalism, always left their gates and their door open for everyone. Wealth Envy led the way because he knew the house oh, so well. The evil children led Socialism and Communism throughout the house, one room at a time. And one at a time they killed Hard Work, then Dignity, then Independence, Self-worth, Charity and Faith.

They finally found the room of Freedom and Capitalism and killed them as well. It wasn't hard to do, since Freedom and Capitalism always left their door unlocked and open for everyone. Only Hope survived. Hope survived hiding in the closet. She ran out during the ensuing celebration. After Socialism and Communism moved in, things went well for a while but then they decided they didn't like Freedom and Capitalism's evil children, either. They wanted their own children to have the rooms in their new house. So late one night in total darkness (because Socialism and Communism did everything in darkness and away from the light of the truth,) they sent their children to kill Freedom and Capitalism's remaining evil children.

Poverty and Suffering killed Environmentalism and Animal Rights first, for they were so hungry, they had to kill all the animals for food and the trees for their wood. And besides, why should animals have rights if people don't? Hopelessness killed Liberalism. Then Poverty, Suffering, and Repression killed Feminism. And Hollywood, the young obnoxious son of Freedom and Capitalism, was also killed. Finally, Wealth Envy, who led the attack on his parents, died at the hands of Poverty since there was nothing left to envy.

So Socialism and Communism and their children, Poverty, Despair, Hopelessness, Suffering, and Repression lived in the once beautiful home of Freedom and Capitalism which was now in great disrepair and they all lived sadly ever after.

All that was left of the family of Freedom and Capitalism was Hope who was quietly hiding in the woods."

If Hope's first cousin, Second Amendment, had been visiting from the country things might have turned out differently.

Today's Music

We couldn't let the first day of Winter pass without welcoming it with Enya's On My Way Home.

Tonight's Music

Here is Trans-Siberian Orchestra performing Faith Noel.

Truth, from an unlikely source

CNN, of all things, tells the truth about global warming:

Unprecedented snow in Las Vegas has some scratching their heads – how can there be global warming with this unusual cold and snowy weather?

CNN Meteorologist Chad Myers had never bought into the notion that man can alter the climate and the Vegas snowstorm didn’t impact his opinion. Myers, an American Meteorological Society certified meteorologist, explained on CNN’s Dec. 18 “Lou Dobbs Tonight” that the whole idea is arrogant and mankind was in danger of dying from other natural events more so than global warming.

“You know, to think that we could affect weather all that much is pretty arrogant,” Myers said. “Mother Nature is so big, the world is so big, the oceans are so big – I think we’re going to die from a lack of fresh water or we’re going to die from ocean acidification before we die from global warming, for sure.

Myers is the second CNN meteorologist to challenge the global warming conventions common in the media. He also said trying to determine patterns occurring in the climate would be difficult based on such a short span.

“But this is like, you know you said – in your career – my career has been 22 years long,” Myers said. “That’s a good career in TV, but talking about climate – it’s like having a car for three days and saying, ‘This is a great car.’ Well, yeah – it was for three days, but maybe in days five, six and seven it won’t be so good. And that’s what we’re doing here.”

“We have 100 years worth of data, not millions of years that the world’s been around,” Myers continued.

Dr. Jay Lehr, an expert on environmental policy, told “Lou Dobbs Tonight” viewers you can detect subtle patterns over recorded history, but that dates back to the 13^th Century.

“If we go back really, in recorded human history, in the 13^th Century, we were probably 7 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than we are now and it was a very prosperous time for mankind,” Lehr said. “If go back to the Revolutionary War 300 years ago, it was very, very cold. We’ve been warming out of that cold spell from the Revolutionary War period and now we’re back into a cooling cycle.”

Lehr suggested the earth is presently entering a cooling cycle – a result of nature, not man.

“The last 10 years have been quite cool,” Lehr continued. “And right now, I think we’re going into cooling rather than warming and that should be a much greater concern for humankind. But, all we can do is adapt. It is the sun that does it, not man.”

Lehr is a senior fellow and science director of The Heartland Institute, an organization that will be holding the 2009 International Conference on Climate Change in New York March 8-10.

Like I said, off all the places to hear the truth about the official religion of the modern politically correct left - CNN!

But it is the truth. The Earth is entering into a cooling period and that it going to have a far more profound impact on the climate than any imaginary global warming.

It was a cooling period like the one we are entering now which caused a famine in the Meideval period and that famine weakened the population enough that the Black Plague could gain a foothold.

The end result was about a third of the population of Europe dead.

Modern science and technology won't allow things to be that bad this time around, at least in the developed world, but it can still be very bad.

And consider this. Just as the world is entering a cooling period which will shorten growing seasons and lower the world food supply while placing environmental stresses on populations already weakened by poor diet and lack of access to modern medicine the world enters a global economic downturn.

And just as the world enters this global economic downturn the United States, the world's primary economic engine, is taken over by socialists whose ideas for how to fix the economy and bring about a return of prosperity are guaranteed to do the exact opposite.

Just as FDR's "New Deal" lengthened and deepened a serious recession into a Great Depression Obama's plans, if enacted, have the potential to send the US, and the world with it, into a steep downward spiral. All this at the exact time that Mother Nature is conspiring to send us food shortages and global pandemics.

It would seem that we may be standing in the path of a perfect storm of natural, political and economic factors not seen since the fall of Rome. Especially if you add in the possible responses of rogue states with nuclear arms like North Korea and (soon) Iran.

It would seem that we've been cursed by an ancient Chinaman.

Tonight's Music

Here is another Celtic Woman video. The song is O Holy Night.

Cry me a fraking river

CINCINNATI – An Ohio agency director resigned Wednesday in the wake of a finding that she improperly used state computers to access personal information on the man who became known as "Joe the Plumber" during the presidential campaign.

Two other officials who were suspended from their positions for their role in the computer search will not be returning to their jobs, an agency spokeswoman said.

Department of Job and Family Services Director Helen Jones-Kelley said in a statement accompanying her resignation that she won't allow her reputation to be disparaged and that she is concerned for her family's safety.

This woman abused her authority in allowing a fishing expedition through the private information of a private citizen because he dared to stand up and ask a real question of a political candidate.

This is an actual crime and she ought to do some time in the Ohio state womens' prison but she will escape justice and is being allowed to frame her departure in disgrace as though she were reluctantly being forced to leave in order to protect her family from the death threats of the evil right-wing hit machine.

Ever notice how when members of the Party of Grotesque Corruption get caught they always start crying like sniveling little girls about the death threats they supposedly get? What's next, will she claim to find a noose tied to her doorknob?

I'll say it again. This woman should be sitting in a jail cell awaiting trial. The fact that she is not is a perversion of justice and she should just shut up and be glad that she's not going to spend the next few years showering in groups.

Tonight's Music

Here is Celtic Woman performing Carol of the Bells live at the Helix Center in Dublin.

A minister to bless the Obamanation

From CBN.com:

Pro-life pastor Rick Warren will give the invocation at President-Elect Barack Obama’s inauguration. It makes a whole lot of sense. Even though Warren and Obama disagree on the life issue, they do see eye to eye on many social justice issues.

I'm not surprised. Warren is well meaning, I have no doubt of that, but his movement is ultimately not good for Christianity so the fact that he would have such poor judgment is simply par for the course.

Naturally elements of the hard left, in this case gay activists, are livid:

“Your invitation to Reverend Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at your inauguration is a genuine blow to LGBT Americans,” the president of Human Rights Campaign, Joe Solomonese, wrote Obama Wednesday. “[W]e feel a deep level of disrespect when one of architects and promoters of an anti-gay agenda is given the prominence and the pulpit of your historic nomination.”

Mr. Solomonese and his co-sodomites need to have a martini and relax. Rick Warren's movement will, in time and if it succeeds, lead to a watered down "Christianity" which will have no power to resist the gay agenda.

Warren is what could be termed a spiritual freeloader. He has been the beneficiary of a good Christian education but rather than transmitting that knowledge to a new generation of believers he has chosen to fill his pews (and collection plates) with large numbers of nominal "Christians" who are attracted by a variety of services and entertainments which have little or nothing to do with the transmission of the Gospel.

Because Warren does have that good grounding in Christian truth he knows that homosexual acts are sinful and that he should oppose granting homosexual unions the legal status of marriage. However by refusing to transmit the hard and unpopular elements of Christian teaching to his congregants he, and the copycat churches who follow his model, is creating a new generation of Christians who will lack the fundamental understanding of God's Word necessary to inspire them to mount a principled opposition to things like homosexual marriage, plural marriage, interspecies marriage and any other perversion that one might imagine.

The story of Media, the Whitehouse lapdog

The geniuses at The People's Cube have outdone themselves with this one. Follow the link for the next and upcoming episodes.

Miss Ann is talking

That means that YOU are listening!

It's bad enough that the Republican Party can't prevent Democrats from voting in its primaries and saddling us with The New York Times' favorite Republican as our presidential nominee. If the Republican Party can't protect an election won by the incumbent U.S. senator in Minnesota, there is no point in donating to the Republican Party.

The day after the November election, Republican Sen. Norm Coleman had won his re-election to the U.S. Senate, beating challenger Al Franken by 725 votes.

Then one heavily Democratic town miraculously discovered 100 missing ballots. And, in another marvel, they were all for Al Franken! It was like a completely evil version of a Christmas miracle.

As strange as it was that all 100 post-election, "discovered" ballots would be for one candidate, it was even stranger that the official time stamp for the miracle ballots printed out by the voting machine on the miracle ballots showed that the votes had been cast on Nov. 2 -- two days before the election.

Democratic election officials in the miracle-ballot county simply announced that their voting machine must have been broken. Don't worry about it -- they were sure those 100 votes for Franken were legit.

Then another 400-odd statistically improbable "corrections" were made in other Democratic strongholds until -- by the end of election week -- Coleman's lead had been whittled down to a mere 215 votes.

Since then, highly irregular counting methods have added to Franken's total bit by bit, to the point that Coleman is now ahead by only 188 votes.

As long as Coleman maintains any lead at all, Republicans don't seem to care that Coleman's advantage is being shrunk by laughable ballot "discoveries" and disreputable standard-switching from precinct to precinct -- depending on which method of counting ballots is most advantageous to Franken.

Consider a few other chilling examples of Democrats thieving their way to victory over the years.

In 1974, Republican Louis Wyman won his race for U.S. Senate in New Hampshire, beating Democrat John Durkin by 355 votes. Durkin demanded a recount -- which went back and forth by a handful of votes until the state's Ballot Law Commission concluded that Wyman had indeed won by (at least) two votes.

Wyman was certified the winner by the New Hampshire secretary of state and was on his way to Washington when ... the overwhelmingly Democratic U.S. Senate refused to seat Wyman.

Despite New Hampshire's certification of Wyman as the winner of the election, this was the post-Watergate Senate, when Democrats could get away with anything -- up to and including a prank known as "President Jimmy Carter."

The U.S. Senate spent months examining disputed ballots from the New Hampshire election. Unable to come up with a method to declare the Democrat the winner that didn't require a guillotine, the Senate forced New Hampshire to hold another election.

It was a breathtaking abuse of power. New Hampshire had certified a winner of its Senate election, but it was a Republican, so the Democratic Senate simply ordered a new election.

Demoralized Republicans stayed away from the race and, this time, the Democrat won the re-vote.

Even more egregious was the Indiana House race in 1984. On election night, the incumbent Democrat Frank McCloskey appeared to have won a narrow victory of 72 votes. But after a correction was made in one county, it turned out his Republican opponent, Richard McIntyre, had won by 34 votes.

McIntyre was certified the winner -- which is when the trouble usually starts for a Republican.

Again, a majority Democrat House refused to seat the certified winner in a close election. I'm sure it was just a coincidence that the winner was a Republican.

Consequently, Indiana performed yet another recount of the entire district, which again showed that Republican McIntyre was the winner -- this time by 418 votes. Now he was really asking for it. The nerve of this guy! Hey, buddy, do you mind? We're trying to throw an election over here!

As The Washington Post reported at the time: There were "no allegations of fraud" in the recount and 90 percent of ballot disqualifications had been agreed to "by election commissions dominated by Democrats."

So naturally the House refused to seat the Republican even though he had received the most votes (hereinafter referred to as "the winner"). The House proceeded to conduct its own recount. (If you haven't detected a pattern by this point, please ask your doctor if Prilosec is right for you.)

This time, instead of ordering the district to hold another election, the Democratic House saved all concerned a lot of time and money by simply declaring Democrat Frank McCloskey the winner by four votes.

The vote-theft most like Minnesota this year was the infamous 2004 gubernatorial election in Washington State. The Republican won the race on election night, but ballots favoring the Democrat kept being "discovered" until the Democrat finally eked out a majority. At that point, the recount was immediately halted and the Democrat declared the victor.

You would have to go back to Reconstruction to find an election that was stolen by the Republicans this way, but it's all in a day's work for the Democrats.

That's why they were so testy about the 2000 Florida election. It was the one time in the last century Republicans wouldn't let Democrats steal an election they lost by less than a thousand votes.

No matter how many times Democrats steal elections, Republicans keep thinking the next time will be different. Minnesota is famously clean, isn't it? It must be different. It's not different. It's still the Democrats.

I'm glad that Miss Ann is keeping an eye on events in Minnesota for us. The Democrats keep stealing a few votes at a time from Mr. Coleman in the hopes that we'll get so tired of the whole thing that we'll just fall asleep and when we wake up the failed comedian, actor, talk show host Al Franken will be a United States Senator.

I have known for some time that Franken was a scumbag leftist but I never realized until now just how low he would go.

I guess that Joe Lieberman was the last person with any integrity whatsoever left in the Democrat party.

They ought to just declare the whole thing an ongoing criminal enterprise under RICO and send the whole lot of them to federal prison.

But then we'd have to feed them, clothe them and give them at least rudimentary medical care.

Anybody know where we can get a lot of Zyclon-B cheap?

Today's Music

Mannheim Steamroller performs 'Joy To The World' live in concert.

Church burnings begin again

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) - Federal investigators in Alaska say an accelerant was poured around the exterior of Gov. Sarah Palin's home church before it was heavily damaged by a fire.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said Monday that the accelerant was poured at several locations around the church, including entrances.

Federal Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Special Agent Nick Starcevic says laboratory tests will determine what the accelerant was.

The blaze was set at the main entrance of the Wasilla Bible Church on Friday evening while a small group, including two children, were inside. No one was injured.

Palin, the former Republican vice presidential candidate, was not at the church at the time of the fire but visited on Saturday.

"If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you. Remember the words I spoke to you: 'No servant is greater than his master.' If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also. . .

John 15:18-20a

And in hell Ponzi turns green with envy

From the New York Post:

He's the Grinch who stole . . . everything.

Accused mega-swindler Bernard Madoff yesterday skulked out of his Upper East Side penthouse and went into hiding as scores more charities, banks and individual investors revealed that they face financial ruin from his alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme.

"He's an evil person. It's morally disgraceful," said Rep. Peter King (R-LI), who yesterday called for a congressional probe of the scam.

King said he recently attended several Christmas parties where guests included people who lost tens of millions of dollars in investments entrusted to Madoff, 70, who was busted by federal authorities last week.

One party guest pointed around a room, saying, "That guy lost $10 million, and that guy lost so many millions," King recalled.

Madoff seemed maniacal about keeping his scam going to the end.

As recently as Thanksgiving, he was pushing pals to invest more money with him, telling them he could work wonders in the volatile market, a source told The Post.

They say that it's hard to con an honest man, but I'll cut the individual investors some slack here. However there is no excuse for banks and major charities to fall for this kind of scam.

Institutions like that are supposed to be managed by professionals who are expected to do their due diligence before investing other people's money. Clearly this didn't happen.

On the bright side most of the individual investors in places like Manhattan and Palm Beach are left-wing limousine liberals. Now there will be millions fewer to donate to left-wing causes and political candidates.

Murder, suicide, accident?

From AOL Sports:

Billey Joe Johnson was considered one of the top high school football recruits in Mississippi, as well as the country, until his shocking death early Monday morning.

Johnson, hailing from Jackson, Miss., rushed for more than 1,500 yards his last season, totaling over 4,000 for his career, and received scholarship offers from a number of major schools including Alabama, LSU and Mississippi as a top-rated recruit by both Scout and Rivals.

Johnson died of a (possibly self-inflicted) gun wound early Monday after being pulled by a sheriff's deputy.

It's not clear why 17-year-old Billey Joe Johnson was stopped in Lucedale, but authorities say the junior tailback shot himself with a shotgun after the deputy walked back to the patrol car to run a license check.

"The deputy was sitting in his patrol vehicle ... when he heard a gunshot and saw the victim laying on the ground by the driver's side door of the vehicle that Johnson was driving. A shotgun was lying on the victim," according to a statement from the George County Sheriff's Department.

Authorities would not immediately say whether they believed the shooting was a suicide or an accident.

The last portion of that quote is particularly perplexing, because it is hard to believe that Johnson would have attempted to pull a shotgun on police officers ...although equally confounding is the notion that Johnson would kill himself at what, according to all current reports, appears to be a basic traffic stop.

Nothing is ever certain, but this story appears to be so odd, at least in the manner of death, that it would be even more shocking if further details didn't at least emerge as to why the young man apparently panicked and pulled a gun that resulted in the tragic and early end to his life.

If you follow the link to this story and read the comments you will see that there are three theories as to what happened. One, he was murdered by the cop. Two, he accidentally shot himself while pulling the gun out of the car in order to shoot the cop. Three, he committed suicide because he feared that the cop would discover something that would ruin his chances of playing college ball, like drugs or other contraband. A variation on this last theory is that the stress of having all the expectations of family and friends (and himself) that he live up to his potential was weighing him down and he took the easy way out.

First, if the deputy had found any kind of contraband in the kid's car he would have cuffed him and put him in the back of the patrol car, not left him alone. Second, it is unlikely that the cop murdered the young man. There certainly are police out there who are capable of doing such a thing but it would have been hard to get an young athlete in superb physical condition to cooperate in administering a contact shotgun wound. There simply would be too many signs of a struggle.

However there is a problem with the theory that he shot himself, either intentionally or otherwise. When a person shoots himself the gun is seldom found still in his hand or on his body. The recoil coupled with the bodies reaction to being shot generally propels the gun away from the body.

Of course the fact that he was standing in contact or nearly in contact with the car could have limited how the body could have reacted to the gunshot.

I have little doubt that the investigation will paint a much clearer picture of what happened, in time. Until then I counsel against forming conclusions.

Today's Music

Here is some more Trans-Siberian Orchestra. This is Christmas Cannon. The music is from Johann Pachelbel's Canon in D, which is believed by many to be the most beautiful piece of music ever written.

This video is from TSO's DVD, The Ghosts of Christmas Eve and is available in a boxed set with three of their Christmas CD's called Christmas Trilogy. It would make a perfect gift for a music lover.

The only thing missing was Al Gore giving a global warming lecture

For the first time in nearly four years, snow fell across the New Orleans region this morning, with flurries reported on the north shore and in the city, Metairie, Kenner, LaPlace and other parts of the south shore. By around 10 a.m., the snow had mostly stopped, replaced by freezing rain in many places, making driving treacherous. By noon, the precipitation had mostly ceased altogether.

By mid-morning, enough snow had accumulated on the ground in some areas to lure children and adults onto their front lawns to build snowmen or have snowball fights. In the city, neutral grounds remained blanketed in white, though the streets generally remained clear as the wet stuff melted upon hitting the pavement.

In Mandeville, where the snow was heavier, lawns were covered with thicker blankets of white fluff as school buses filled with squealing students made the rounds. Children, most seeing snow for the first time Christmas Day 2004, tried to catch flakes in their hands as the buses rumbled along.

Snow in New Orleans is rare and it has never snowed this early in the city before in recorded history.

Damn that global warming! We're all going to burn alive!

The RINO's continue to spin

(CNN) — The Republican party must stop "shouting at the world" and start listening to minority groups if it is to win elections in the 21st century, former Secretary of State Colin Powell said Thursday.

In an interview with CNN's Fareed Zakaria for Sunday's "GPS" program, President Bush's former secretary of state said his party's attempt "to use polarization for political advantage" backfired last month.

"I think the party has to take a hard look at itself," Powell said in the interview, which was taped Wednesday. "There is nothing wrong with being conservative. There is nothing wrong with having socially conservative views — I don't object to that. But if the party wants to have a future in this country, it has to face some realities. In another 20 years, the majority in this country will be the minority."

Powell, who crossed party lines and endorsed President-elect Barack Obama just weeks before the election, said the GOP must see what is in the "hearts and minds" of African-American, Hispanic and Asian voters "and not just try to influence them by… the principles and dogma."

"I think the party has to stop shouting at the world and at the country,"Powell said. "I think that the party has to take a hard look at itself, and I've talked to a number of leaders in recent weeks and they understand that." Powell, who says he still considers himself a Republican, said his party should also stop listening to conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh.

"Can we continue to listen to Rush Limbaugh?" Powell asked. "Is this really the kind of party that we want to be when these kinds of spokespersons seem to appeal to our lesser instincts rather than our better instincts?"

Zakaria's full interview with Powell will air Sunday at 1 p.m. ET on CNN.

Mr. Powell what Republican better embodied your brand of moderate non-confrontational "reach-across-the-aisle Republicanism" than John McCain?

The fact is that RINO's like you got exactly the candidate that you wanted in McCain. John McCain was the "only Republican candidate who could win", at least that is what you spent the last four years telling anyone who would listen.

Well we all saw how that worked out didn't we?

The only reason that McCain's four point loss wasn't a 14 point loss was the presence of genuine conservative Sarah Palin on the ticket.

Mr. Powell are you and your fellow RINO's so stupid, so blind, so caught up in your delusions that you can't open your eyes and see simple reality. We tried it your way and we got exactly what your way will always bring - defeat.

When you were at West Point or the War College did they teach you to repeat losing strategies over and over again in the forlorn hope that they would somehow become winners?

Mr. Powell if you can't stand to be in the same political party as people like Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, the memory of Ronald Reagan (and myself, bty) then leave it and become a Democrat.

Become a Democrat and attempt to use your influence to drag that party back from the lunatic fringe of extreme leftism where it finds itself now.

And what is it exactly that is "in the hearts and minds of African-American, Hispanic and Asian voters"?

Asians want an end to affirmative action in college admissions so that their children stop losing places to less qualified black, Hispanic and white applicants. I stand behind them 100% in this. If the student bodies of Stanford and Berkley and Harvard and other elite schools become 98% Asian it will give the rest of us a wakeup call and cause us to see to our own childrens' education.

Hispanics want unlimited immigration from south of the border and amnesty and easy citizenship for those illegals already here. That would have the effect of turning America into a virtual carbon-copy of Mexico. Is that what you really want Gen. Powell? Really?

And blacks seem to want (on issues not involving race) many of the same things that real Republicans want. Things like school choice and no gay "marriage". It's just that they have been brainwashed to believe that all Republicans are genocidal racists who want to send them back to the cotton patch in chains.

Well, Mr. Powell, the fact that you are at least nominally a Republican seems to argue that you don't buy into that fantasy so why don't you use your influence with your fellow African-Americans to educate them about the fact that the only form of slavery in force in America today is the enslavement of those who depend upon some form of government handout.

Oh, wait. If you did that you might not get asked to all the right Gerogetown cocktail parties and you might get so many interview requests from the mainstream media, at least not for friendly interviews.

Never mind.

Tonight's Music

This is Trans-Siberian Orchestra's video for Christmas Eve Sarajevo. The tune is the traditional Christmas carol Carol of the Bells.

Miss Ann is talking

That means that YOU are listening!

What is the point of having a hand recount of ballots in the Minnesota Senate race if the Democratic secretary of state is going to use the election night totals in precincts where it will benefit Democrat Al Franken?

Either the hand recount produces a better, more accurate count, or there was no point to the state spending roughly $100,000 to conduct the hand recount in the first place.

But that is exactly what the George Soros-supported secretary of state has agreed to do in the case of a Dinkytown precinct near the University of Minnesota. The hand recount of the liberal precinct produced 133 fewer ballots than the original count on election night and, more important, 46 fewer votes for Franken.

So he's proposing to defer to the election night total over the recount tally.

There are no "missing" ballots in Dinkytown. Ballots were run through the voting machines twice on election night. Last week, Minneapolis elections director Cindy Reichert explained they already knew for a fact that 129 ballots had been run through machines twice on election night, which pretty closely matched the 133 allegedly "missing" ballots.

As Reichert said, "There are human errors that are made on Election Day." According to an article in the Dec. 2, 2008, St. Paul Pioneer Press, Reichert was "confident that that's what happened" and that "we have all the ballot envelopes here."

But after relentless badgering by the Franken campaign, now Reichert isn't so sure anymore. So the new plan is for Minneapolis to submit both the election night total from Dinkytown -- which gives Franken an extra 46 votes -- and the meticulous hand recount total, which does not, and allow the canvassing board to decide which to use.

The 129 ballots that Reichert said were run through the machines twice on election night could end up being counted twice.

In all other precincts, the initial tallies from election night are treated as highly unreliable rough approximations of the actual vote, while the results from the hand recount are regarded as the absolute truth.

Only in the Dinkytown precinct, where the election night total gave Franken an additional 46 votes, does the state treat the hand recount as an error-prone joke compared to the highly accurate election night vote.

The Soros-supported Secretary of State Mark Ritchie explains that there is "precedent" for counting election night totals rather than the recount totals. If so, how about using the election night tally from some of the precincts that gave Coleman more votes on election night?

Highly implausible, post-election "corrections" in just three Democratic precincts -- Two Harbors, Mountain Iron and Partridge Township -- cost Coleman 446 votes. But I note that Ritchie doesn't propose deferring to the election night totals there.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune attributed the 436-vote "correction" in Franken's favor to "exhausted county officials." Were they more exhausted in those three precincts than in Dinkytown?

Either the post-election tally is better than the election night tally or it isn't. Cherry-picking only those election night results Ritchie likes isn't an attempt to get an accurate vote-count; it's an attempt to get a Democrat in the U.S. Senate.

If Minnesota is going to accept the election night tally from Dinkytown, why not from any of these precincts where Coleman lost votes under far more suspicious circumstances? And why are guys named "Al" always caught trying to steal elections?

Wholly apart from the outrageous inconsistency of deciding that some election night tallies trump the hand recount and some don't, Franken's miraculous acquisition of more than 500 votes from heavily Democratic precincts in post-election "corrections" wasn't believable on its face -- and that's even accounting for the fact that Franken voters tend to be stupider than average and therefore more likely to fill out their ballots incorrectly.

Corrections in all other 2008 races combined led to only 482 changes in the entire state of Minnesota. The idea that typo "corrections" in one single contest from only three precincts, out of more than 4,000 precincts, could lead to 436 "corrections" benefiting Franken is manifestly absurd.

Ritchie's proposal to accept the election night count from one precinct is a stunning admission that even he doesn't believe a hand recount is any more accurate than the original election night tally.

To be sure, endlessly recounting ballots doesn't yield more accurate results, it just creates different results. There is no reason to think a tabulation is more accurate because it occurred later in time.

But then why have a recount at all? If the state of Minnesota is going to spend $100,000 and endless man-hours to conduct a meticulous hand recount on the grounds that it is more accurate, the state ought to at least pretend to believe in its own recount.

Election recounts are never intended to get more accurate results. They are simply opportunities for Democrats to manufacture new votes and steal elections.

And once again, Republicans are asleep at the wheel while another close election is being openly stolen by the man whose contributions to western civilization include the "Planet of The Enormous Hooters" sketch on "SNL."

Everything Miss Ann says here is true, but it simply doesn't seem that the Democrat machine in Minnesota is going to be able to manufacture enough extra Franken votes to push him over the top.

But I could be wrong. After all there might be another bag full of ballots marked for Franken in the men's room of the International Falls Greyhound station and they might be just enough to put him over the top.

Still I'll bet that Miss Ann is gnashing her teeth over the fact that editorial delay has kept her from commenting on the Great Illinois Senate Auction of 2008 in this week's column.

Flacking for evil

From Front Page Magazine:

“I’d like to dedicate this to the man himself, Che Guevara!” announced Benicio del Toro this May, as he received a “best actor” award for his starring role in Che, a reverent new film about the communist revolutionary. As the crowd at the Cannes Film Festival erupted in thunderous ovation, the Puerto Rico-born actor gushed that “I wouldn't be here without Che Guevara, and through all the awards the movie gets you'll have to pay your respects to the man!"

But some stubbornly refuse to pay their respects. Thus, the actor received a much cooler reception when Che, directed by Oscar-winner Steven Soderbergh, had a private screening in Miami Beach this past Thursday. Cuban-Americans, including the mayor of Miami Beach, protested the 4-and-a-half hour glorification of the man they consider a Stalinist mass-murderer.

Miami's media proved equally unwelcoming. At a press conference after the screening in Miami Beach's Byron Carlyle Theater, Marlene Gonzalez of the Spanish language America TeVe network asked del Toro about some glaring omissions in the movie. What of Che’s role in ordering the executions of ordinary Cubans? And why no mention of the forced-labor camps established on the guerilla fighter’s orders? A suddenly hurried Del Toro denied that Che bore any culpability for these horrors. He refused even to admit Che’s bitter falling out with Fidel Castro, claiming that, to the contrary, the two always got along splendidly and that Castro was genuinely heartbroken when Che was captured and killed after fighting to his last bullet.

The contrast made for a moving scene. As protestors outside the Carlyle Theater brandished pictures of relatives murdered by Che Guevara, del Toro paid tribute to their murderer. Questions about Che’s brutalities – meticulously recorded in books like Exposing the Real Che Guevara – he brushed aside as the embittered fabrications of Cuban exiles.

The following day, del Toro flew to Havana to present his film at the Havana Film Festival and hob-knob with Castro regime officials. Che was billed as the highlight of the festival and the Stalinist regime rolled out the carpet for their honored guest. “It's a privilege to be here!” effused del Toro. “I'm grateful that the Cuban people can see this movie!”

And why shouldn't Castro's subjects be allowed to view his movie? Weren't Stalin's subjects allowed to watch The Battleship Potemkin? Weren't Hitler's subjects allowed to watch Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of Will? Both were produced at the direction of the propaganda ministries of totalitarian regimes, to be sure, but then the same might well be said of Che. The screenplay was based on Che Guevara's diaries, which were published by Cuba's propaganda ministry; the diaries’ forward was written by Fidel Castro himself. The film includes several Communist Cuban actors, while other Latin American actors spent months in Cuba being prepped for their roles by members of Cuba's “Che Guevara Institute.”

The Cuban Film Institute is an arm of Stalinist Cuba's propaganda ministry. On December 7, Castro’s own press ministry announced that “Actor Benicio del Toro presented the film (at Havana’s Karl Marx Theater) as he thanked the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC) for its assistance during the shooting of the film, which was the result of a seven-year research work in Cuba.”

That del Toro considers the Cuban regime a reliable source for the film is telling. Consider that the Castro government has jailed more political prisoners as a percentage of population than Stalin's and executed more people (out of a population of 6.4 million) in its first three years in power than Hitler's executed (out of a population of 70 million) in it's first six. These figures come from the human rights group Freedom House and from the Black Book of Communism, authored by French scholars and translated into English by Harvard University Press, not exactly headquarters for the vast-right wing conspiracy.

The irony is that del Toro himself is a noted advocate of artistic freedom and an outspoken opponent of the “armed struggle” that Che Guevara led, to such disastrous effect, in Cuba. But not only has he starred in a film glorifying the communist killer, but he has just deigned to be feted as guest of honor at Havana's Film Festival by a totalitarian regime that, for half a century, has jailed and tortured any Cuban movie director who strayed from Stalinist dictator's party line. Del Toro needn’t look to Cuban exiles to undermine his convictions. He has done well enough on his own.

Put simply most actors are idiots. It comes from being in a profession in which one must sublimate one's intellect to one's emotions. It is much easier to do if that is how you live your life when not working so the best actors tend to be people who are functionally mindless.

It really isn't necessary to do any more analysis than that. This little boy sees "cool" people walking around wearing those cool Che t-shirts and he heard all about how cool Che and Castro were in college and the political culture of Hollywood, where he lives and works, is extreme left-wing so of course he made this movie and is proud of it.

Like I said, an idiot.

The first of many upcoming Clinton flashbacks

WASHINGTON (AP) - President-elect Barack Obama hasn't even stepped into office and already a scandal is threatening to dog him.

Obama isn't accused of anything. But the fact that Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, a fellow Democrat, has been charged with trying to sell Obama's now-vacant Senate post gives political opponents an opening to try to link him to the scandal. A slew of questions remain. The investigation is still under way. And the ultimate impact on Obama is far from certain.

He pointedly distanced himself from the case Tuesday, saying, "I had no contact with the governor or his office, and so I was not aware of what was happening" concerning any possible dealing about Blagojevich's appointment of a successor.

Asked what contact he'd had with the governor's office about his replacement in the Senate, President-elect Obama today said "I had no contact with the governor or his office and so we were not, I was not aware of what was happening."


Except that the little messiah's campaign manager, David Axelrod, told a different story - back before they knew that Blagojevich was about to be indicted. This from ABC News:

But on November 23, 2008, his senior adviser David Axelrod appeared on Fox News Chicago and said something quite different.

While insisting that the President-elect had not expressed a favorite to replace him, and his inclination was to avoid being a "kingmaker," Axelrod said, "I know he's talked to the governor and there are a whole range of names many of which have surfaced, and I think he has a fondness for a lot of them."

Of course now that it is at least embarrassing and possibly criminal to admit that you were taking part in the great Illinois Senate Auction of 2008 Axelrod has changed his story and said that he "misspoke".

The mainstream media is circling the wagons around the little messiah and are doing everything humanly possible to cement in the public's mind that "there is no evidence linking Obama to the scandal". However they are deliberately ignoring the extremely precise wording of US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald's statement in which he said that this indictment contained no accusations against the president-elect and that he couldn't say more at this time.

Clearly Mr. Fitzgerlad if leaving his options open as to what Mr. Obama might be charged with in the future.

Those who have predicted that an Obama presidency will be like a third term for Bill Clinton may be more right than they could have suspected.

Illinois Governor arrested, it's about damn time

CHICAGO (CBS) ― Full release from U.S. Attorney's Office:

Illinois Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich and his Chief of Staff, John Harris, were arrested today by FBI agents on federal corruption charges alleging that they and others are engaging in ongoing criminal activity: conspiring to obtain personal financial benefits for Blagojevich by leveraging his sole authority to appoint a United States Senator; threatening to withhold substantial state assistance to the Tribune Company in connection with the sale of Wrigley Field to induce the firing of Chicago Tribune editorial board members sharply critical of Blagojevich; and to obtain campaign contributions in exchange for official actions – both historically and now in a push before a new state ethics law takes effect January 1, 2009.

In other words typical Chicago/Illinois type politics. And it is from this sewer that our esteemed [cough] president-elect, none other than the little messiah himself - B. Hussein Obama, crawled.

And the stink of that corruption surrounds Hussein, it hovers around him like the stench of rotting garbage and taints everything with which he comes in contact.

The reason that his fellow Democrats didn't notice during the campaign was that their sense of smell was burned out by the stink of political purification which filled Washington during the eight years of the Clinton administration.

I could spin a wonderful fantasy about Obama stretching out his hand to put it on the Bible or Koran or whatever at his inauguration only to have an FBI agent snap a pair of handcuffs on it because a fearless US Attorney had followed the trail all the way back to the little messiah, but I won't.

One, because it will never happen. It's not that Obama isn't a criminal and doesn't deserve to go to jail, he does. An honest man or woman simply cannot be elected to office in Chicago today any more than a black woman could have been elected President of the United States in 1830. Sorry if anyone doesn't like the sound of that but it is absolutely and undeniably true.

Two, because if it did it would leave us with President Joe Biden and the less said about that the better.

The cost of doing business

CHICAGO (CBS) ― As the sit-in at the Republic Windows & Doors plant enters its fifth day, company leaders, union leaders and Bank of America are all vowing to go back to the bargaining table to end the stalemate. CBS 2's Joanie Lum reports that they talked for a few hours Monday and say they will come back to resume the discussions Tuesday afternoon.

Hundreds of employees have occupied the Republic Windows & Doors factory since last Friday when the company shut down. Their plight to win severance and vacation pay owed to them made them a national symbol of the economy.

The company said it had to fold after Bank of America canceled its credit.

On Monday, union officials met with Bank of America representatives and local politicians to try to resolve the issue.

"The tone that the bank officials took and the discussion really wasn't a debate between the members of the union and my office and others," said Congressman Luis Gutierrez. "It was a tone of reconciliations, a tone of wanting to find an end to this situation."

Governor Rod Blagojevich visited the factory Monday and announced the state would stop doing business with Bank of America. Aldermen urged the city to do the same thing, since the bank received $25 billion as part of the federal bailout.

The laid-off workers continue to guard the assets inside their Goose Island plant in around the clock shifts to make sure the items are not removed. They say the remaining doors, windows, and machinery are the only collateral they have left in their fight to get what they feel they are owed.

The standoff has also come to embody mounting anger over the government's willingness to bail out deep-pocketed corporations but not average people.

If I were Bank of America here is how I would handle the situation.

1. Find out how much the company needs to pay the workers their severance and vacation pay.

2. Write the union a check for that amount and tell then to handle the distribution. Make it clear that this is a gift, not a loan.

3. Record the transaction on the companies books as "Bribe paid to congressional leftists in order to secure massive handout of taxpayer funds".

That would, after all, be nothing more than the truth.

Obama fatigue is setting in and he isn't even president yet

Viewership for President-elect Barack Obama's weekly YouTube "fireside chats" has tanked, dropping more than 50 percent since his initial video three weeks ago.

"I've heard a lot of puffed-up rhetoric about how this is going to change the face of politics and how it's going to be FDR's fireside chats. The data doesn't back it up," said David Burch, marketing manager for TubeMogul, which tracks YouTube video views.

The first video address, released four weekends ago, drew 789,868 viewers over its first three days and is nearing 1 million total, according to TubeMogul's figures. But the second video was viewed 451,077 times in three days, Thanksgiving weekend's video garnered 152,222 views, and this weekend's fourth installment had about 370,000 views as of Monday evening.

Interest in Mr. Obama's postelection YouTube channel, ChangeDotGov, is down substantially overall compared with the heady days of his campaign, when BarackObama.com regularly cracked the top 10 channels and some of his videos drew more than 5 million views.

You'll remember that during the campaign the little messiah was very short of specifics only promising that there would be change and a new way of doing politics. Remember how he promised to populate his administration with fresh faces from outside of Washington and how he said that you couldn't solve any of our problems by playing "musical chairs" by shuffling the same people into different jobs?

Well now that he's president-elect and is filling his administration with Clinton administration retreads folks are starting to wonder if they haven't been swindled by a giant Chicago-style street hustle.

Add to this the fact that the little messiah seems to be backing off of his promise to raise taxes on "the rich". That he seems to be preparing to keep troops in Iraq until the war is won and that he may not even close Guantanamo Bay (and he's even hinting that there will NOT be any push for new gun control laws) and the insane left-wing moonbats who were his most fanatical supporters (you know, people like Mr. Tingles and Keith Olbermann) have to be scratching their heads.

You also have to consider the fact that American tend to be very turned off by little men with giant egos and virtually everything Obama has done since the election seems calculated to show off just how small a man he is and just how very much he thinks of himself.

Will it go down in history as "The January Revolution"?

WASHINGTON: When President-elect Barack Obama talked on Sunday about realigning the American automobile industry he was quick to offer a caution, lest he sound more like the incoming leader of France, or perhaps Japan.

"We don't want government to run companies," Obama told Tom Brokaw on "Meet the Press." "Generally, government historically hasn't done that very well."

But what Obama went on to describe was a long-term government bailout that would be conditioned on government oversight. It could mean that the government would mandate, or at least heavily influence, what kind of cars companies make, what mileage and environmental standards they must meet and what large investments they are permitted to make — to recreate an industry that Obama said "actually works, that actually functions."

It all sounds perilously close to a word that no one in Obama's camp wants to be caught uttering: nationalization.

They may not want to say it out loud but that is certainly what they want to do. The left lays awake at night dreaming and scheming of how they might accomplish the complete takeover of American economy. They lust after socialized medicine despite its failure to provide a level of care anywhere in the world which comes close to matching that which the free market provides in the United States. They have used the bailouts of the financial markets to effectively nationalize banking and mortgage lending and they are attempting to silence even the voice of dissent through their Orwellian "Fairness Doctrine".

Make no mistake the left wants totalitarian power and they are going to use the current economic recession to grab as much of that power as they can.

Then and now

Here are a couple of political cartoons from Red Planet which put thing into perspective very nicely. They call this series the Primer for New Voters:



What a horrible, horrible mistake we have made as a nation.

The first indication of what 2012 is going to be like?

NEW ORLEANS (AP) - In a year when national Republican fortunes took a turn for the worse, Louisiana delivered the GOP two seats in Congress in elections delayed by Hurricane Gustav.

Indicted Democratic U.S. Rep. William Jefferson was ousted Saturday from his New Orleans area district, while Republicans narrowly held on to the seat vacated by a retiring incumbent.

The wins followed Republicans' reconquest of another House seat earlier this fall that had been lost to Democrats.

In the 2nd Congressional District, which includes most of New Orleans, Republican attorney Anh "Joseph" Cao won 50 percent of the vote to Jefferson's 47 percent and will become the first Vietnamese-American in Congress. His only previous political experience was an unsuccessful 2007 bid for a seat in the state legislature.

We may be seeing a trend here. Yes the Democrats made significant gains in both houses of congress and won the presidency but in the runoff election in Georgia Saxby Chambliss beat his Democrat opponent in a landslide (and Chambliss and most observers credit Sarah Palin's crossing the state campaigning for him with a large share of the credit for the victory). Now in Louisiana the GOP holds a vulnerable seat and topples a Democrat from what should have been a safe seat (yes, I know Jefferson was under indictment but that shouldn't have mattered in New Orleans).

The public may be experiencing a bit of buyers remorse over handing the keys to the nation over to the jackass party. Especially since the little messiah (Mr. "Hope and Change" - you cant fix the problem by playing musical chairs and shuffling the same people into different offices) is shaping his administration into a third Clinton term by populating the most important posts with Clinton era retreads.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that our new president is simply going to preen for the television cameras while the nation is actually run by the same people who would have run it if Hillary had won the election.

AND people are waking up to the fact that the congress which they gave a single digit job approval number was controlled by DEMOCRATS (a majority of the voting public thought that the Republicans were in control of both houses of congress before the election) and that they just gave them a BIGGER majority!

Last month's election was a public reaction to years of the most dishonestly negative press coverage the nation has ever seen directed against the war in Iraq and President Bush in general. The electorate is beginning to realize that in politics a temper tantrum can have a very high cost.

Some good news

ATLANTA (AP) - Georgia Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss handed the GOP a firewall against Democrats eager to flex their newfound political muscle in Washington, winning a bruising runoff battle Tuesday night that had captured the national limelight.

Chambliss' victory thwarted Democrats' hopes of winning a 60 seat filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. It came after a bitter month long runoff against Democrat Jim Martin that drew political luminaries from both parties to the state and flooded the airwaves with fresh attack ads weeks after campaigns elsewhere had ended.

This is good news indeed. Although Sen. Chambliss faltered earlier this year by joining a Lindsey Graham/John McCain "gang of" in order to gut Republican efforts to lift the ban on offshore drilling his record in Washington has been much more good than bad. The fact that Democrats will not now have an automatic veto-proof majority in the Senate is cause to celebrate.

This is especially welcome news because the failed comedian, failed radio talk show host and now failed political candidate Al Frankin is refusing to accept his loss to Norm Coleman in Minnesota. Frankin is seeking to have the Senate step in and declare the will of the Minnesota voters null and void and have himself installed in the seat that Coleman won fair and square.

If Frankin were the magical "60th vote" I have no doubt that Harry Reid, with the full backing of the little messiah, would do whatever it took to decree that he was the new Senator from Minnesota, and the expressed will of the voters be damned. But with Frankin's presence in the Senate not being so critical it is doubtful that they will risk the firestorm that would result in another blatantly stolen election.

It has just become a little eaiser to block the worst of the Democrat's plans to screw the nation into the ground so deeply that it can never crawl its way back into sunlight.

Some days the tiger gets you, but some days you do get the tiger.