Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Miss Ann is talking

That means that YOU are listening!

A STATISTICAL REGRESSION ANALYSIS OF MARITIME UNEMPLOYMENT RATES, 1946-1948.

JUST KIDDING -- MORE LIBERAL LIES ABOUT NATIONAL HEALTH CARE!


by Ann Coulter
September 30, 2009

(17) America's low ranking on international comparisons of infant mortality proves other countries' socialist health care systems are better than ours.

America has had a comparatively high infant mortality rate since we've been measuring these things, going back to at least the '20s. This was the case long before European countries adopted their cradle-to-grave welfare schemes and all while the U.S. was the wealthiest country on Earth.

One factor contributing to the U.S.'s infant mortality rate is that blacks have intractably high infant mortality rates -- irrespective of age, education, socioeconomic status and so on. No one knows why.

Neither medical care nor discrimination can explain it: Hispanics in the U.S. have lower infant mortality rates than either blacks or whites. Give Switzerland or Japan our ethnically diverse population and see how they stack up on infant mortality rates.

Even with a higher-risk population, the alleged differences in infant mortality are negligible. We're talking about 7 infant deaths per 1,000 live births in the U.S. compared to 5 deaths per 1,000 for Britain and Canada. This is a rounding error -- perhaps literally when you consider that the U.S. tabulates every birth, even in poor, small and remote areas, while other countries are not always so meticulous.

But the international comparisons in "infant mortality" rates aren't comparing the same thing, anyway. We also count every baby who shows any sign of life, irrespective of size or weight at birth.

By contrast, in much of Europe, babies born before 26 weeks' gestation are not considered "live births." Switzerland only counts babies who are at least 30 centimeters long (11.8 inches) as being born alive. In Canada, Austria and Germany, only babies weighing at least a pound are considered live births.

And of course, in Milan it's not considered living if the baby isn't born within driving distance of the Côte d'Azur.

By excluding the little guys, these countries have simply redefined about one-third of what we call "infant deaths" in America as "miscarriages."

Moreover, many industrialized nations, such as France, Hong Kong and Japan -- the infant mortality champion -- don't count infant deaths that occur in the 24 hours after birth. Almost half of infant deaths in the U.S. occur in the first day.

Also contributing to the higher mortality rate of U.S. newborns: Peter Singer lives here.

But members of Congress, such as Reps. Dennis Kucinich, Jim Moran and John Olver, have all cited the U.S.'s relatively poor ranking in infant mortality among developed nations as proof that our medical care sucks. This is despite the fact that in many countries a baby born the size of Dennis Kucinich would not be considered a live birth.

Apart from the fact that we count -- and try to save -- all our babies, infant mortality is among the worst measures of a nation's medical care because so much of it is tied to lifestyle choices, such as the choice to have children out of wedlock, as teenagers or while addicted to crack.

The main causes of infant mortality -- aside from major birth defects -- are prematurity and low birth-weight. And the main causes of low birth-weight are: smoking, illegitimacy and teenage births. Americans lead most of the developed world in all three categories. Oh, and thank you for that, Britney Spears.

Although we have a lot more low birth-weight and premature babies for both demographic and lifestyle reasons, at-risk newborns are more likely to survive in America than anywhere else in the world. Japan, Norway and the other countries with better infant mortality rates would see them go through the roof if they had to deal with the same pregnancies that American doctors do.

As Nicholas Eberstadt demonstrates in his book "The Tyranny of Numbers: Mismeasurement and Misrule," American hospitals do so well with low birth-weight babies that if Japan had our medical care with their low birth-weight babies, another third of their babies would survive, making it even harder for an American kid to get into MIT.

But I think it's terrific that liberals are finally willing to start looking at outcomes to judge a system. I say we start right away with the public schools!

In international comparisons, American 12th-graders rank in the 14th percentile in math and the 29th percentile in science. The U.S. outperformed only Cyprus and South Africa in general math and science knowledge. Worse, Asian countries didn't participate in the last 12th-grade assessment tests.

Imagine how much worse our public schools would look -- assuming that were possible -- if we allowed other countries to exclude one-half of their worst performers!

That's exactly what liberals are doing when they tout America's rotten infant mortality rate compared to other countries. They look for any category that makes our medical care look worse than the rest of the world -- and then neglect to tell us that the rest of the world counts our premature and low birth-weight babies as "miscarriages."

As long as American liberals are going to keep announcing that they're embarrassed for their country, how about being embarrassed by our public schools or by our ridiculous trial lawyer culture that other countries find laughable?

Don't be discouraged, liberals -- when it comes to utterly frivolous lawsuits against obstetricians presented to illiterate jurors so that John and Elizabeth Edwards can live in an 80-room house, we're still No. 1!

Again, thank you Miss Ann.

Somebody needed to tell the truth about our supposedly high infant mortality rates.

The fact is that we do better than any other nation in the world at helping women with troubled pregnancies get to a point where they can deliver a baby with some chance of living.

About half of these children die, but we save the other half. Which is more than most other nations even try to do.

If you control for all the factors that Miss Ann mentions our infant mortality rate is actually the best in the world.

But it will not remain so if we go down the rat-hole of socialized medicine.

AND the left knows all of this. Barny Frank and Henry Waxman and Nancy Pelosi and Charles Schumer know every bit of this.

They know it and they don't give a rat's ass. All that matters to them is growing government and increasing the dependence of the American people.

They are not "misguided", "misinformed" or "well-meaning but wrong". They are evil. Pure Satanic evil. That is the only explanation for why they would try to destroy the health care system that provides the best care to the most people of any on the surface of the earth.

They deserve to burn in hell and they deserve to be regarded as the blood enemy of every decent civilized person in this nation.

See you later

I have to run off to work early today in order to finish all September work before the start of October. However I promise to post tomorrow or Friday about the curious case of Charles Johnson or how conservative blog Little Green Footballs became indistinguishable from Moveon.org.

Swan song of the loon

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A New York state appeals court on Tuesday dismissed former TV newsman Dan Rather's lawsuit against CBS Corp in which Rather claimed he was made a scapegoat in a scandal over a 2004 report on then-President George W. Bush's military record.

The ruling on Tuesday by a panel of judges of the New York State Supreme Court Appellate Division said Rather's $70 million complaint should be dismissed in its entirety and that a lower court erred in denying CBS's motion to throw out the lawsuit.

Rather says CBS breached his contract by not giving him enough on-air assignments after he was removed as anchor of the "CBS Evening News" in March 2005.

The appeals court ruled he failed to sufficiently support his claim that he lost business opportunities due to CBS's failure to release him to seek other employment.

Rather sued CBS, parent of the CBS television network, Viacom and others in September 2007, claiming he had been made a scapegoat to "pacify the White House." CBS was part of Viacom until the companies split in 2006.

Perhaps Rather will now go quietly into that good night. . .

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Isn't it amazing

That left-liberals who would fall to the ground in paroxysms of foaming madness at the thought of public school children being made (0r even allowed) to sing a hymn of praise to Jesus Christ have absolutely no problem with those children being instructed to sing the praises of B. Hussein Obama?

Mumm, mumm, mumm. . .



Their flag is fluttering before them.

Today's Music

I haven't posted music in a while so here are three nice videos:



Altan - Dúlamán. The nicest song ever about seaweed.



Rathlestair - Dragonfly



And finally Poor Man's Fortune performing at the North Texas Irish Festival. Yes, that is E.J. Jones sitting in.

Who the enemy fears

Mark Steyn offers the GOP some truly excellent advice:

This piece by Lloyd Marcus, a black conservative, is called "Stop Allowing The Left To Set The Rules", and deals with the alleged racism of the anti-Obama opposition. As Mr Marcus notes:

The Left published a cartoon depicting former black Secretary of State Condolezza Rice as an Aunt Jemima; another depicted Rice as a huge-lipped parrot for her Massa Bush. Neither were considered racist by their creators or publishers, or even widely condemned on the Left.

In opposition to black Republican Michael Steele's campaign torun for U.S. Senate, a liberal blogger published a doctored photo of Steele in black face and big red lips made to look like a minstrel. The caption read, "Simple Sambo wants to move to the big house". Not one Democrat denounced these racist portrayals of black conservatives.

True. Nobody minds liberal commentators expressing the hope that Clarence Thomas "will die early from heart disease like many black men", etc. Contemporary identity-group politics are prototype one-party states: If you're a black Republican Secretary of State, you're not really black. If you're a female Republican vice-presidential nominee, you're not really a woman. What's racist and sexist here is the notion that, if you're black or female, your politics is determined by your group membership.

But, if we're talking about letting the left "set the rules", Mr Marcus' column reminded me of a larger point: Don't take your opponents at face value; listen to what they're really saying. What does the frenzy unleashed on Sarah Palin last fall tell us? What does Newsweek's "Mad Man" cover on Glenn Beck mean? Why have "civility" drones like Joe Klein so eagerly adopted Anderson Cooper's scrotal "teabagging" slur and characterized as "racists" and "terrorists" what are (certainly by comparison with the anti-G20 crowd) the best behaved and tidiest street agitators in modern history?

They're telling you who they really fear. Whom the media gods would destroy they first make into "mad men". Liz Cheney should be due for the treatment any day now.

Sad to say, many who should know better go along with it. Our old comrade David Frum wrote a piece called "Whose Side Is Glenn Beck On?" Well, in the space of a week Beck claimed the scalps of Van Jones, Acorn and that Yosi Sergant guy at the NEA, none of whom should ever have been anywhere near the corridors of power but who'd still be there if it weren't for Beck. So whoever's side he is on, it seems pretty clear he's not on the Obama Administration's. Hence, Media Matters' sudden obsession with such pressing concerns as Glenn's mom's three decade-old suicide.

The media would like the American right to be represented by the likes of Bob Dole and John McCain, decent old sticks who know how to give dignified concession speeches. Last time round, we went along with their recommendation. If you want to get rave reviews for losing gracefully, that's the way to go. If you want to win, look at whom the Democrats and their media chums are so frantic to destroy: That's the better guide to what they're really worried about.

I've been saying the same thing for years.

The left's attacks on Sarah Palin are an infallible sign that she is the one they most fear.

And as for David Frum he is just another "me-too" Republican who wants so desperately to be liked and accepted by the left. You'll also remember that he was a major cheerleader for amnesty a couple of years ago.

The Republican party listens to men like that at its own peril.

More on the debunking of global warming

From NRO:

Imagine if there were no reliable records of global surface temperature. Raucous policy debates such as cap-and-trade would have no scientific basis, Al Gore would at this point be little more than a historical footnote, and President Obama would not be spending this U.N. session talking up a (likely unattainable) international climate deal in Copenhagen in December.

Steel yourself for the new reality, because the data needed to verify the gloom-and-doom warming forecasts have disappeared.

Or so it seems. Apparently, they were either lost or purged from some discarded computer. Only a very few people know what really happened, and they aren’t talking much. And what little they are saying makes no sense.

In the early 1980s, with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, scientists at the United Kingdom’s University of East Anglia established the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) to produce the world’s first comprehensive history of surface temperature. It’s known in the trade as the “Jones and Wigley” record for its authors, Phil Jones and Tom Wigley, and it served as the primary reference standard for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) until 2007. It was this record that prompted the IPCC to claim a “discernible human influence on global climate.”

Putting together such a record isn’t at all easy. Weather stations weren’t really designed to monitor global climate. Long-standing ones were usually established at points of commerce, which tend to grow into cities that induce spurious warming trends in their records. Trees grow up around thermometers and lower the afternoon temperature. Further, as documented by the University of Colorado’s Roger Pielke Sr., many of the stations themselves are placed in locations, such as in parking lots or near heat vents, where artificially high temperatures are bound to be recorded.

So the weather data that go into the historical climate records that are required to verify models of global warming aren’t the original records at all. Jones and Wigley, however, weren’t specific about what was done to which station in order to produce their record, which, according to the IPCC, showed a warming of 0.6° +/– 0.2°C in the 20th century.

Now begins the fun. Warwick Hughes, an Australian scientist, wondered where that “+/–” came from, so he politely wrote Phil Jones in early 2005, asking for the original data. Jones’s response to a fellow scientist attempting to replicate his work was, “We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”

Reread that statement, for it is breathtaking in its anti-scientific thrust. In fact, the entire purpose of replication is to “try and find something wrong.” The ultimate objective of science is to do things so well that, indeed, nothing is wrong.

Then the story changed. In June 2009, Georgia Tech’s Peter Webster told Canadian researcher Stephen McIntyre that he had requested raw data, and Jones freely gave it to him. So McIntyre promptly filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the same data. Despite having been invited by the National Academy of Sciences to present his analyses of millennial temperatures, McIntyre was told that he couldn’t have the data because he wasn’t an “academic.” So his colleague Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph, asked for the data. He was turned down, too.

Faced with a growing number of such requests, Jones refused them all, saying that there were “confidentiality” agreements regarding the data between CRU and nations that supplied the data. McIntyre’s blog readers then requested those agreements, country by country, but only a handful turned out to exist, mainly from Third World countries and written in very vague language.

It’s worth noting that McKitrick and I had published papers demonstrating that the quality of land-based records is so poor that the warming trend estimated since 1979 (the first year for which we could compare those records to independent data from satellites) may have been overestimated by 50 percent. Webster, who received the CRU data, published studies linking changes in hurricane patterns to warming (while others have found otherwise).

Enter the dog that ate global warming.

Roger Pielke Jr., an esteemed professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, then requested the raw data from Jones. Jones responded:

Since the 1980s, we have merged the data we have received into existing series or begun new ones, so it is impossible to say if all stations within a particular country or if all of an individual record should be freely available. Data storage availability in the 1980s meant that we were not able to keep the multiple sources for some sites, only the station series after adjustment for homogeneity issues. We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (i.e., quality controlled and homogenized) data.

The statement about “data storage” is balderdash. They got the records from somewhere. The files went onto a computer. All of the original data could easily fit on the 9-inch tape drives common in the mid-1980s. I had all of the world’s surface barometric pressure data on one such tape in 1979.

If we are to believe Jones’s note to the younger Pielke, CRU adjusted the original data and then lost or destroyed them over twenty years ago. The letter to Warwick Hughes may have been an outright lie. After all, Peter Webster received some of the data this year. So the question remains: What was destroyed or lost, when was it destroyed or lost, and why?

All of this is much more than an academic spat. It now appears likely that the U.S. Senate will drop cap-and-trade climate legislation from its docket this fall — whereupon the Obama Environmental Protection Agency is going to step in and issue regulations on carbon-dioxide emissions. Unlike a law, which can’t be challenged on a scientific basis, a regulation can. If there are no data, there’s no science. U.S. taxpayers deserve to know the answer to the question posed above.

— Patrick J. Michaels is a senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and author of Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science They Don’t Want You to Know.

No real surprise here to anyone who already knows that man-caused global warming is a hoax perpetrated by the left for the purpose of separating the Western World, principally the United States, from its liberty and wealth.

Real scientists share their data openly. When a researcher refuses to share the source data upon which he based his conclusion you can be almost certain that there is some kind of fraud involved.

A murder in Clay County

From the American Spectator:

MANCHESTER, Kentucky -- Rodney Miller has lived nearly all his 56 years in Clay County, the only exception being when, as a young man, he moved to Indianapolis. He lived in the big city for two year without ever knowing his neighbors' names.

"The best people in the world live here," says Miller, sitting in the office of the Manchester Enterprise, where he directs advertising sales. "Down here, everybody knows everybody else."

Bill Sparkman was not from Clay County. A 51-year-old Florida native, Sparkman lived in neighboring Laurel County. Yet when Sparkman's body was found hanging Sept. 12 in a cemetery a dozen miles west of Manchester, the media seems to have placed blame for the apparent murder on Clay County.

The community has suffered plenty of bad publicity in recent years, with a long-running federal corruption investigation that has resulted in charges against eight local officials on vote-rigging. The county also has a reputation for growing marijuana and producing illegal methamphetamine. And on top of these local P.R. problems, the murder also gave national media a chance to recycle stereotypes of rural Kentuckians, much to the annoyance of Clay County residents like Miller.

"Ignorant, backwards hillbillies," he says, recalling a recent cable-news report about Sparkman's death in which the reporter evidently sought out his network's idea of the perfect interview subject for any news story from Kentucky: A toothless, ill-shaven man in overalls.

Yet the Sparkman murder provided liberal bloggers chance to create an entirely new stereotype of Kentuckians as violent right-wingers. Sparkman was employed part-time by the Census Bureau. When his nude body was found hanged from a tree, his federal identification card was taped his shoulder and the word "FED" had been scrawled on his chest.

An Associated Press report said the FBI was "investigating whether anti-government sentiment" played a role in Sparkman's death. Law enforcement officials criticized that story, but the liberal blogosphere seized on it as proving that conservatives had fomented a killing rage among the yokels.

"Send the body to Glenn Beck," Internet pundit Rick Ungar proclaimed Thursday, also indicting Minnesota Rep. Michelle Bachmann (a Republican who had warned that census date could be abused) among right-wingers presumed complicit in Sparkman's murder.

Saturday, the Atlantic Monthly's Andrew Sullivan fretted over "the most worrying possibility," namely that Sparkman's death was "Southern populist terrorism whipped up by the GOP and its Fox and talk radio cohorts."

Rodney Miller dismisses such speculation with blunt language -- bovine excrement, so to speak -- and explains that "fed" as an epithet has a specific localized meaning in Clay County. "Half our public officials are in jail and the other half have been indicted," he says, somewhat exaggerating the result of the federal corruption probe. "So, yeah, there are a lot of a people here who don't like 'feds.'"

Federal agents are also often involved in busting eastern Kentucky's marijuana growers, who are known to plant their crops in the Daniel Boone National Forest, which encompasses much of Clay County. And the success of law enforcement efforts against local drug traffickers -- last month a multi-agency undercover investigation called "Operation Borrowed Time" resulted in more than 50 drug arrests in the county -- may have heightened the animosity toward government officials snooping around, as Sparkman's Census job would have required.

The FBI and Kentucky State Police, who are leading the Sparkman investigation, refuse to discuss possible motives for his murder. Asked about the theories being discussed on the Internet, KSP spokesman Don Trosper said, "It's just speculation and rumors.…We concern ourselves with facts."

Local folks have their own speculation and rumors about the case, most of it centered on the possibility that Sparkman somehow fell afoul of local drug dealers, who may have mistaken his federal identification for proof that he was an undercover informant. One man who lives in London offered a variation on that theory: Perhaps Sparkman actually did report on suspected drug-related activity, and his murder was an act of revenge by associates of someone arrested as the result of a tip from Sparkman.

Go read the rest.

I've been following this story on the news since it happened but since I don't swim in the cesspool of left-wing blogs I have been spared most of the speculation about how this murder could be laid at the feet of those who tell the truth about the little tin messiah.

When I first heard that the area where the body was found was known for marijuana growing and meth labs I was satisfied that the answer had been found.

I mean that it is possible that the killing was done by right-wing zealots protesting the census - possible in the sense that it wouldn't violate the laws of physics - but it just isn't likely. While drug dealers/producers use violence, or the threat of it, to protect their operations every day.

As the old saying goes, "when you hear hoof-beats think horses not zebras".

For more on this you can visit The Other McCain where blogger Robert Stacy McCain has actually traveled to Clay County to conduct his own investigation.

Mmmm, mmmm, mmmm


From our friends at Red Planet by way of the American Spectator.

Monday, September 28, 2009

Good News!

From Rasmussen Reports:

Just 41% of voters nationwide now favor the health care reform proposed by President Obama and congressional Democrats. That’s down two points from a week ago and the lowest level of support yet measured.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 56% are opposed to the plan.

Senior citizens are less supportive of the plan than younger voters. In the latest survey, just 33% of seniors favor the plan while 59% are opposed. The intensity gap among seniors is significant. Only 16% of the over-65 crowd Strongly Favors the legislation while 46% are Strongly Opposed.

For the first time ever, a slight plurality of voters now express doubt that the legislation will become law this year. Forty-six percent (46%) say passage is likely while 47% say it is not. Those figures include 18% who say passage is Very Likely and 15% who say it is Not at All Likely. Sixty percent (60%) are less certain.

Sixty-eight percent (68%) of Democrats say the plan is at least somewhat likely to become law. Sixty-one percent (61%) of Republicans disagree. Among those not affiliated with either major party, 34% say passage is at least somewhat likely while 58% say it is not.

This is why Obama was in such a tearing hurry to get congress to pass the legislation before the August recess despite the fact that it would not go into effect for years.

He, and/or his handlers knew, that once people got the chance to see exactly what Obama meant by "health care reform" the less they would like it.

The fact that support continues to fall while opposition continues to rise makes it far less likely that enough Representatives and Senators will be willing to defy public sentiment and vote for this legislative turd.

Another good thing about this is that as Obama keeps going out and pushing a plan which the majority of the public has already made up it's mind is bad he keeps losing credibility with the voters. This is reflected in his falling job approval and personal popularity numbers.

Keep it up Barry you're rapidly becoming the GOP's best friend.

Global Warming debunked - again

John McLaughlin has an excellent piece on American Thinker demolishing the global warming "consensus" being pushed by the political left. Here is a sample:

It seems reasonable to ask, therefore, how can a seriously flawed -- if not actually fraudulent --mathematical model linking production of the relatively minuscule amount of an atmospheric trace gas be used to blame mankind for major planetary climate change? The answer lies in the intense public relations campaign launched by environmentalists worldwide following publication of the 1997 IPCC report. The entire debate has been framed by presenting only one side to the maximum extent possible while demeaning any skeptics. The worldwide distribution in 2006 of the Al Gore movie An Inconvenient Truth added to the simplistic polarization and politicization of debate.

One cannot ignore how the IPCC report initiated within the United Nations played into an anti-Capitalism agenda. The report became justification to launch a major campaign throughout much of the late 1990s beginning with the 1997 Kyoto protocol and incorporating numerous U.N. special sessions and other international conferences during the following decade. All focused on accusing the world's richest countries of being long-standing polluters who must bear the burden for cutting greenhouse gases. A special 2007 UN conference, dominated by third world countries, demanded that rich industrial nations curtail their economic growth by reducing CO2 emissions and use their wealth to cuts in emissions in other countries. As British Prime Minister Gordon Brown put it, the effort involved "making the issue of climate change one of justice as much as economic development."

Given these multinational political forces seeking worldwide redistribution of wealth, it also becomes clear why throughout much of the 1990s only that scientific work promoting the concept of manmade global warming received serious financial support from government sources. This led to the perception of a scientific "consensus." Numerous scientists and mathematicians complained that serious debate on climate change was being suppressed by the lack of for skeptical research and the systematic criticism of such skeptics as just "tools" of energy companies or paid servants of Corporate America

However, as the work of McIntyre, McKitrick, Wegman, Carter and others has spread, scientific "consensus" in recent years has begun collapsing. A detailed review of 539 technical papers about climate change published between 2004 and 2007 found no evidence -- none --supporting specific "catastrophic" climate change due to man. In March 2009, a petition signed by over 31,000 scientists stated in part: "There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate."

And this from the conclusion:

What is becoming clearer is that the concept of "manmade global warming" may be one of the greatest hoaxes in world history. How soon this will become generally known will depend on how forcefully the political effort seeking both national and international control of industry and wealth redistribution can keep the hoax hidden by intimidation and forcefully amplified rhetoric while systematically jeopardizing the economies of America and other developed nations.

Conservatives (that is people who are both sane and of at least average intelligence) were deeply skeptical about human caused global warming from the beginning. I remember calling in to a radio talk show back at the very beginning of the effort to ramp up hysteria about warming and asking one of the leading proponents of AGW (at that time anyway) why warmer temperatures would be bad.

After all, I pointed out, warmer weather would increase growing seasons and make land which is currently useless for farming productive. This would seem to be a good thing in a world which is always experiencing a famine in one place or another.

The guy told me that global warming would produce a "unique type of heat" which would surround the plants and kill them thus decreasing rather than increasing the world's food supply.

At that point I realized that global warming proponents were either idiots or else beleived that the public were idiots.

It seems to be a bit of both.

Go read the whole article, it is very much worth your time.

Friday, September 25, 2009

ACORN fights back

If you've been wondering how ACORN and its mainstream media allies were going to try to rescue the criminal community organization from the avalanche of trouble that two young conservative investigative journalists and their hidden camera have brought upon it here is your answer:

LOS ANGELES (AP) - Much of America discovered James O'Keefe III and Hannah Giles through their hidden-camera, make-believe pimp and prostitute videos of ACORN employees giving advice about establishing a brothel with underage hookers.

But as far back as 2006 - well before the videos became a national sensation and conservative rallying cry - the fresh-faced O'Keefe and Giles connected with a pair of Washington conservative institutions that boast programs training ideological journalists.

Now, due to coordinated promotion of the undercover sting footage by influential players in the conservative media, Giles and O'Keefe have gone from part of the pack to movement superstars.

Giles, a 20-year-old sophomore at Florida International University, spent the summer on a $1,200-a-month internship with the National Journalism Center, a training organization whose alumni include conservative commentator Ann Coulter. Immediately after graduating Rutgers University in 2006, O'Keefe, 25, was paid to set up magazines and newspapers on university campuses for the Leadership Institute, which recruits potential conservative public policy and media stars.

Each has other credentials that place them squarely in the network of activists who believe liberal-leaning mainstream media willfully ignore stories that illustrate the failings of the political left and its leaders.

. . . On Wednesday it [ACORN] sued O'Keefe, Giles and Breitbart over the Baltimore video, saying Maryland law requires consent to create sound recordings.Brian Kettenring, deputy director of national operations for ACORN, contended that conservative media , including Fox, was behind the project.

"O'Keefe and Giles try to make it sound as if they concocted their sordid video scheme on a whim - as if they had no major backers," Kettenring said. "ACORN's lawsuit will smoke out the true motives and conservative money behind these attacks on a community organization that works to better the lives of ordinary Americans every day."

First of all what is so "sordid" about a couple of journalists checking up on an organization which has received millions and is slated to receive billions of dollars of taxpayer money?

Especially when that organization already has a long history of criminal activity?

Those of you who are old enough may remember those days when the CBS television show 60 Minutes sometimes acted as something other than a propaganda tool for the far left. In that vanished bygone age they would do things exactly like this to expose corruption and inform the public.

But back to ACORN's pathetic attempt to deflect attention from the essentially criminal nature of their organization.

ACORN's contention is that if it can be demonstrated that Giles and O'Keefe have ever in their lives spoken to anyone who knows Glenn Beck or anyone else who works at FOX News or if they have in the past ever had any contact with any kind of conservative organization then their project is illegitimate.

First of all the issue is what the video tapes reveal about the mindset and operating principles of ACORN and its employees NOT who originally thought up the sting.

Second, ACORN and its allies have not provided one shred of evidence that the project did not begin exactly as Ms. Giles describes it. The fact that she and Mr. O'Keefe spoke with some members of the media about how to best reveal the results of their investigation means nothing other than the fact that they are intelligent.

Giles and O'Keefe knew that the mainstream media and all of the cable news channels except FOX have become nothing more than the propaganda organs of the far left. They knew that if they released all of the video tapes they shot in various ACORN offices at the same time that while the conservative media would make a big deal of it for a couple of days but the mainstream media would ignore it. The news cycle would move on and the story would be effectively buried.

By rolling out the tapes one after another over a period of days the MSM's willful ignorance became both manifest and embarrassing and the Democrat controlled congress, which would have loved to pretend that this story did not exist, was forced to take action.

Now both the Census Bureau and the IRS have severed their ties to the corrupt organization and congress has stripped them of federal funds (goodbye billions of stimulus dollars).

ACORN as an organization is so far to the political left that from where they are standing Barack Obama looks mainstream. The fact that ACORN believes that its salvation lies in proving that Giles and O'Keefe had some kind of conservative backing is very revealing. It would seem that to them the truth of an accusation has absolutely no relevance. The only thing that matters is who is making the charge, what are their motives and who do they associate with.

It isn't going to work. When ACORN employees didn't bat an eye at the prospect of helping a pimp bring 13-year-old girls into the country to use as sex slaves they removed themselves so far beyond the pale that they will never be able to find their way back.

Thursday, September 24, 2009

Miss Ann is talking

That means that YOU are listening!

LIBERAL LIES ABOUT NATIONAL HEALTH CARE, PART 5
by Ann Coulter
September 23, 2009

(15) Democrats lost Congress in 1994 because President Clinton failed to pass national health care.

I'm not sure if this is another example of the left's wishful-thinking method of analysis or if they're seriously trying to trick the Blue Dog Democrats into believing it. But I gather liberals consider the 1994 argument an important point because it was on the front page of The New York Times a few weeks ago in place of a story about Van Jones or ACORN.

According to a news story by Jackie Calmes: "In 1994, Democrats' dysfunction over fulfilling a new president's campaign promise contributed to the party's loss of its 40-year dominance of Congress."

That's not the way I remember it. The way I remember it, Republicans swept Congress in 1994 not because Clinton failed to nationalize health care, but because he tried to nationalize health care. HillaryCare failed because most Americans didn't want it. (For more on this, see "ObamaCare.")

Bill Clinton had run as an old-school, moderate Democrat and then, as soon as he got elected, immediately became Che Guevara. (What is it with all our black presidents and these bait-and-switch tactics?)

Instead of pursuing "mend it, don't end it" on welfare and no "middle-class tax hike" -- as Clinton promised during the campaign -- he raised taxes, signed ridiculous gun restrictions into law, enacted "midnight basketball" as the solution to urban crime, announced that he was putting gays in the military and let Hillary run riot over health care.

But just to check my recollection, I looked up the Times' own coverage of the 1994 congressional races.

Republicans won a landslide election in 1994 based largely on the "Contract With America," which, according to the Times, promised "tax cuts, more military spending and a balanced-budget amendment." Far from complaining about Clinton incompetently failing to pass health care, the Times reported that Republicans were "unabashedly claiming credit for tying Congress up in knots."

These claims were immediately followed by ... oh, what was that word again? Now I remember ...

LANDSLIDE!

It was almost as if the voters agreed with the Republicans in opposing Clinton's risky health care scheme, then voted accordingly.

The Times' own polling showed that two-thirds of voters believed that "government should be less involved in solving national problems" -- which doesn't sound to me like voters being huffy with Clinton for failing to stage a government takeover of one-sixth of the economy.

In a Hail Mary pass just before the election, President Clinton pulled Hillary off the health care beat. CNN's repository of liberal cliches, Bill Schneider, reported that Clinton was trying to calm voters by "removing the most visible symbol of the liberal tilt of the last two years, which is the first lady."

And what a morale boost for the Democrats that must have been! Kind of like firing the manager of a losing baseball team in the last week of the season.

Too late. Shouldn't have tried to socialize health care.

(16) America's relatively low life expectancy compared to countries with socialist health care proves welfare-state health care is better.

The life expectancy argument is so stupid even The New York Times hasn't made it -- except in news stories quoting others or in the ramblings of the Times' more gullible op-ed columnists. You mostly hear the life expectancy argument from Hollywood actresses and profoundly dumb Democrats, such as Sen. Ben Cardin of Maryland.

Trying to evaluate the quality of a nation's health care by looking at life expectancy is like trying to estimate the birthrate by counting the number of flowers bought on Valentine's Day. (Or estimating future pregnancies of women with low self-esteem by adding up the total number of U.S. cities on a Bobby Brown tour and then multiplying by 2.)

There are lots of ways to get pregnant that don't require flowers or a backstage pass to a Bobby Brown concert, just as there are lots of ways to die that don't require setting foot inside a doctor's offfice.

For example, more Americans are murdered with guns than in any other industrialized country. (And it would be even more without concealed-carry laws! See John Lott, "More Guns, Less Crime.") According to a 1997 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the homicide rate with firearms alone was 16 times higher in the U.S. than in 25 other industrialized countries combined.

That will tend to reduce the U.S.'s "life expectancy" numbers, while telling us absolutely nothing about the country's medical care. (I promise that if you make it to a hospital alive, you are more likely to survive a gunshot wound in the U.S. than any place else in the world.)

It's comparing apples and oranges to talk about life expectancy as if it tracks with a country's health care system. What matters is the survival rate from the same starting line, to wit, the same medical condition. Not surprisingly, in the apples-to-apples comparisons, the U.S. medical system crushes the welfare-state countries.

For the glorious details, see next week's column.

Thank you Miss Ann.

As real Americans continue their struggle to beat back this latest attempt to drag down their beloved nation I've been trying to identify the single worst aspect of Obama's national socialist healthcare scheme.

I think I've got it.

The absolute worst thing about socialized medicine in the US is that it will slow the advancement of of medical science in the whole world to a glacial pace.

Right now the vast majority of new medical techniques, drugs and technology are discovered in the United States. This is because America still has a thriving free market health care system. For-profit companies which develop and manufacture drugs and medical equipment are free to pour their profits into research and development to bring new medications and medical equipment to market. All in pursuit of profit.

Because our doctors are not employees of any kind of National Health Service they are not required to see X number of patients per week and to choose only from a government approved list of treatment options (approved more for reasons of cost than effectiveness). Doctors in the US are free to innovate and experiment.

The fact that in America we attempt to keep our elderly people alive as long as possible and give them the best quality of life possible (in addition to proving our moral superiority to other nations) provides a test bed for methods of managing, treating and even curing chronic conditions which are associated with (but by no means exclusive to) aging. You can see that this is far more conducive to creating an upward spiral of medical knowledge than the "give granny morphine until she stops breathing" approach taken by nations with government run health care.

Let me tell you a true story about Mother Calhoon, who is 76. Earlier this year she broke her leg. In 1950 the doctor would have set the bone and put her leg in a cast. The bone would have taken the better part of a year to heal and would have never been the same. During this time her mobility would have been so severely restricted that she would have not been able to live at home alone. So mom would have gone to a nursing home where she would probably have spent the rest of her life. But the doctor's bill for setting the leg and applying the cast would have only been a few hundred dollars.

Today mom was taken to an excellent hospital where a doctor operated on her leg installing a metal rod to support the bone so that it would not break again. She was given a battery of tests which determined that she had mild osteoporosis and was put on medication to treat the condition. After a few days in the hospital she was sent home where a nurse looked in on her three times a week for the next three months. The cast on her leg was designed to allow her to walk and she was encouraged to do so (with the aid of a walker, then a cane). As time went by she was instructed to put more and more weight on the leg until now, less than a year later, she has no cast and no longer needs walker or cane (unless she is going to walk for more than two miles or so, then she brings along the cane). The cost of the entire episode came to around $40,000.00 - which comes to $4500.00 in 1950 dollars.

Assuming that we do not plunge down Barack Obama's rat hole of socialized medicine and freeze the advancement of medical science what can a 76-year-0ld woman with a broken leg expect in 2050?

With the proviso that no one can predict the future with absolute accuracy I would assume based on current trends in medical science that it would go something like this:

The ambulance brings the patient to the emergency room where a doctor scans her leg building a detailed three dimensional picture of the injury, including damage to tissue and blood vessels caused by the broken bone. The doctor then looks over the computer's recommended course of action and signs off on it. The patient is then sent to surgery where the surgeon adds a few refinements to the computer generated plan.

In the operating room the woman is sedated and her leg is immobilized. A robot surgeon will then set the bone and repair any other damage to the leg - while a human doctor and nurse observe ready to step in if required. The leg will then be placed in a rigid cast and the woman will spend the next few days in a hospital room while bone regenerators heal the fracture.

A few days later she leaves the hospital with her leg as strong or stronger than it was before. While it is impossible to estimate the dollar amount of the bill for this treatment I very much doubt that it will be more, in 1950 dollars, than the 2009 bill. But look at how much better the outcome for the patient!

But what if we adopt Obama's plan for government run health care? What will a 76-year-0ld woman with a broken leg face in 2050?

The doctor will set the bone and put her leg in a cast. The bone will take the better part of a year to heal and will never be the same. During this time her mobility will be so severely restricted that she will not be able to live at home alone. So she will have to go to a nursing home where she will probably spend the rest of her life. But the doctor's bill for setting the leg and applying the cast would have only been a few hundred dollars - in 1950 dollars.

This assumes that the hospital's rationing panel (we won't call it the "death panel") doesn't decide that at her age she (who will never again pay income taxes) simply isn't worth the money to treat. Then she will be put in a bed and given morphine until she stops breathing. The bill for that will be under a hundred bucks.

The problem with a government solution to anything is that government is a piss-poor innovator. Let the government decide that something is so important that the private sector cannot be trusted to run it and whatever "it" is becomes frozen in time. It cannot be otherwise when a powerful entrenched bureaucracy has a massive vested interest in keeping things exactly as they are.

Someone suggested this thought experiment. Imagine that some visionary in government had looked at Henry Ford's Model T and realized how important the automobile would be to America's future. Suppose that this visionary had been able to convince the legislature and the president that the development and manufacture of cars was too important to be left to the profit-seeking private sector.

You don't have to imagine what the result would have been. All you need do is look back to East Germany before the Wall fell and remember how an East German could spend his fifteen years on the waiting list dreaming about what he would do when he took possession of his new Trabant.

Some things are too critically important to be taken out of the hands of the private sector. Our health care is one of them.

Choir practice for the Obama Youth



This is why so many people went ballistic when they heard about Obama's plan to address all the nation's children in a televised speech in the captive environment of the public schools.

The culture of the public school system is dominated by the National Education Association which is one of the primary pillars supporting the Democrat party and the political far left. Teachers belonging to the NEA have a history of doing things like requiring as a for-credit class assignment the children in their charge to write letters to congress advocating some left-wing position. They have also used paid teacher "work days" to travel to state capitals or even Washington to participate in demonstrations supporting left-wing causes.

At least one school that was planning to require students to watch Obama's speech was also going to show the children a video in which various celebrities urged the children to pledge to, among other bits of left-wing moonbattery, "serve President Obama".

Michelle Malkin tells us of a class where children were required to watch Obama's address to the joint session of congress and then given a quiz in which all of Obama's claims about his health care plan were treated as facts.

This tendency of Obama's supporters to recreate Germany's Hitler Youth or the USSR's Young Pioneers is both sickening and dangerous. Brainwashing children into giving unthinking support to a leader/party/philosophy which will leave the nation which they are to inherit weaker, poorer and less free constitutes child abuse as far as I'm concerned.

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Still clueless

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras (AP) - The daring return of deposed President Manuel Zelaya has thrust Honduras back onto the world stage and posed a sharp challenge to interim leaders determined to hold new elections without him after a June coup.

Thousands of Zelaya supporters defied a curfew and spent the night surrounding Brazil's embassy, where the leader remained holed up Tuesday, a day after slipping back into the country. In exile since June 28, Zelaya said he had traveled for 15 hours overland in a series of vehicles to pull off the stealth homecoming.

All you really need to know about the quality of the coverage you are reading is contained in the first two paragraphs.

One, Zelaya was not "deposed" in a "coup". He was lawfully removed by the legislature with the concurrence of the nation's highest court. The Honduran military acted to carry out the legal orders of the nations legitimate government.

The legislature, Court and Army acted to prevent Zelaya from establishing himself as Latin America's next Marxist president-for-life in the tradition of Castro and Chavez.

Two, Zelaya's "thousands" of supporters have to be placed in the context (something the AP never does) of Honduras population of nearly eight million, the vast majority of whom have always rejected the political left.

This consistent rejection of radical left-wing politics and politicians is why the American left holds a grudge against Honduras.

Creatures like Nancy Pelosi, B. Hussein Obama, Henry Waxman and Barny Frank assume that the natural yearning of the human heart is to be ruled over by Marxist thugs. Any nation or group who gives the lie to that fantasy is regarded by them as an enemy. This is why Obama just flipped off our allies in Eastern Europe. The Poles and others in that region just came off of more than 70 years of oppression by leftists and they want no more of it. This is also explains the paroxysms of foaming madness the left falls into whenever the topic of Sarah Palin comes up.

A woman whose entire life is a monument to liberty and individuality is bound to be anathema to people whose idea of Utopia is where everyone puts on their Outer-Party overalls and shuffles off to work under the watchful eye of Big Brother.

I'd like to offer a bit of advice to the legitimate government of Honduras. The minute you can get your hands on Zelaya put a bullet through his head. Then when that small portion of the population who actually wants to live in a totalitarian hell-hole takes to the streets to protest machine gun every last one of them.

If you do this you will be giving your society a badly needed enema and you will save yourself a world of trouble in coming years.

This Zelaya business has given you an opportunity to easily identify that segment of your population who are nothing more than a social malignancy. Avail yourselves of the chance to be rid of them once and for all.

Monday, September 21, 2009

Hello shoe, meet the other foot

From NewsBusters:

They say you shouldn't bite the hand that feeds you. But the 44th President of the United States doesn't seem to be worried about that.

President Barack Obama, still with no fear of being overexposed, made the rounds on five Sunday morning talk shows on Sept. 20 to make another attempt at winning the hearts and minds over on his vague health care proposal.

According to Obama, alleging he wasn't doing any "media-bashing," mentioned the three major cable news networks by name, and said they were the ones enabling the "rude" behavior that some of their on-air voices have decried by giving it so much attention.

"I think it's important for the media, you know - not to do any media-bashing here - to recognize that right now, in this 24-hour news cycle, the easiest way to get on CNN is or Fox or any of the other stations, MSNBC is to say something rude and outrageous," Obama said on CNN's Sept. 20 "State of the Union." "If you're civil and polite and you're sensible and you don't exaggerate the-bad things about your opponent and you know, you might get on one of the Sunday shows. But you're not going to be on the loop. And, you know, part of what I'd like to see is all of us reward decency and civility in our political discourse."

And this was a theme in his other appearances. He made a similar statement about being "rude" on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos."

"I think, that frankly, the media encourages some of the outliers in behavior, because, let's face it - the easiest way to get on television right now is to be really rude," Obama said on ABC's Sept. 20 "This Week with George Stephanopoulos." "If you're just being sensible and giving people the benefit of the doubt and you're making your arguments, you don't, you don't get time on the nightly news."

Interestingly, Obama seemed to have no problem yucking it up at the White House Correspondents' Dinner with comedian Wanda Sykes, who said she hoped conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh's kidneys failed. But the Commander-in-Chief urged those in Washington to "disagree without being disagreeable" and thus falling victim to the 24-hour news cycle.

"Well, look - I think that we have an obligation in Washington, as leaders, to make sure that we are sending a strong message that we can disagree without being disagreeable, without, you know, questioning each other's motives," Obama said on NBC's Sept. 20 "Meet the Press." "When we start caricaturing the other side, I think that's a problem. And unfortunately, we've got, as I've said before, a 24-hour news cycle where what gets you on the news is controversy. What gets you on the news is the extreme statement. The easiest way to get 15 minutes on the news, or your 15 minutes of fame, is to be rude."

Obama called the coverage of conflict "catnip to the media," which includes cable television and blogs.

"One last point I've got to make, Bob and that is I do think part of what's different today is that the 24-hour news cycle and cable television and blogs and all this, they focus on the most extreme elements on both sides," Obama said on CBS's Sept. 20 "Face the Nation." "They can't get enough of conflict. It's catnip to the media right now. And so the easiest way to get 15 minutes of fame is to be rude to somebody. In that environment I think it makes it more difficult for us to solve the problems that the American people sent us here to solve."

Whether or not the media, or at least the media that is most sympathetic to the president's policies, will follow his advice remains to be seen.

I would think Obama was less of a hypocrite if there was any evidence that he had ever used the platform of his political office, either the Illinois state legislature of the US Senate, to publicly condemn the outrageous attacks on President Bush.

The fact is that the Democrats began the modern era of nasty politics with Ted Kennedy's attacks on Robert Bork in the floor of the Senate. Rather than distance themselves from old Ted the rest of the Jackass party rushed to adopt his tactics.

Ronald Reagan was accused of wanting to deliberately starve senior citizens. Newt Gingrich got his picture on the cover of Time Magazine as "The Gingrich Who Stole Christmas" and we won't even bring up the treatment of Sarah Palin.

But now that the little tin messiah is getting a rather watered down dose of what his colleagues have been dishing out (with the added exception that what is being said about Obama is actually true) these many years suddenly the "politics of personal destruction" are a threat to the survival of the Republic.

Well cry me a frakin' river. Listen up, anyone who will still associate themselves with the Democrat party after its conduct in recent decades loses any standing to complain about the conduct of others.

You got that? If you have not separated yourself from the Democrat party in protest of its conduct since the Reagan administration then you have, by your choice to associate with it, made yourself a partner in its actions and you have thereby removed yourself from the normal protections and considerations granted to participants in the civil society.

No Democrat possesses any rights which any decent and civilized person has any moral duty to respect.

Of course Democrats still (unfortunately) have certain legal rights which civilized persons must respect but when it comes to our discourse it is absolutely open season on them.

In fact I would argue that it is the moral duty of every decent person (defined as that majority of the population who identify themselves as conservative) to hold the left up to every kind of mockery and vilification. Force them to pay a heavy social price for their destructive and evil philosophy.

Add "political liberal" or "progressive" or "statist" or whatever you want to call them to the list of people like Klu Klux Klansmen and members of NAMBLA who are utterly beyond the pale and have no part with civilized company.

Sunday, September 20, 2009

We can only hope

(CNSNews.com) - House Minority Leader John Boehner (R.-Ohio) said today that the health-care plan that President Barack Obama is pushing in Congress is now dead and will not pass.

Boehner made the observation in an interview this morning on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” where he appeared after President Obama.

“There’s been no bipartisan conversation on Capitol Hill about health care,” Boehner said in an interview with "Meet the Press" host David Gregory. “At some point when these big government plans fail—and they will, the Congress will not pass this—it’s really time for the president to hit the reset button, just stop all of this and let’s sit down and start over in a bipartisan way to build a plan that Americans will support.”

“So you think the plan is dead?” asked Gregory.

“I think it is,” said Boehner.

I'm not ready to count Obama's Marxist socialized medicine scheme out just yet. After all he has made his ability to inflict this takeover of around one sixth of the American economy upon us the make-0r-break issue of his presidency. If he is seen to suffer defeat on this he is all but guaranteed to be a one-term wonder like Jimmy Carter (who he often seems to be channeling).

Obama is still the president and radical left-wing Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid still run the House and Senate so the totalitarian communists in everything but name still exercise enormous power to move their agenda.

However most congressmen are not ideologues who are willing to sacrifice their careers for "the cause". The outpouring of rage against the policy agenda of Obama, who can't seem to make up his mind whether he wants to be Benito Mussolini or Fidel Castro has many members of the Jackass party deeply terrified. They remember 1994 when the Clintons' attempt to transform us into the USSA caused a congressional bloodletting unlike anything seen since the post-Watergate midterm election of 1974.

The question that those in the legislature, especially the House, must ask themselves is this. Are they willing to risk their seats to prop up a presidency which is already showing strong signs of being an historic failure?

Saturday, September 19, 2009

Charges filed in school bus beating

From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's website:

BELLEVILLE -- Two Belleville West High School students were charged under the juvenile code today with felony counts of aggravated battery stemming from the violent beating of a 17-year-old student on a school bus earlier this week.

The incident grabbed national headlines and incited a heated debate about race when police said the incident, involving a white victim and black assailants, may have been racially motivated. They later recanted that claim.

The two teenagers—who are 14 and 15 years-old—were charged as juveniles because they are under the age of 17. Illinois law shields the disclosure of their names because they are minors.

Juvenile courts are more informal and private than adult courts. Juvenile court records are not available to the general public.

Robert Haida, the St. Clair County state's attorney, said Illinois law does not permit him to charge the teens in adult court. The law mandates that a minor can be charged in adult court only if the case involves certain crimes, such as murder, aggravated criminal sexual assault, or armed robbery with a firearm.

Warrants were issued for the defendants' immediate arrest. They had been in custody earlier but released pending investigation.

On the issue of a hate crime, Haida said: “No evidence is present to suggest that the motive for the conduct was the race of the victim. Illinois law requires such evidence in order to support that charge. Illinois law is clear that the fact that a defendant and a victim are of different races is insufficient without more evidence to support a hate crime.”

Both students have been suspended from school and could face expulsion.

Belleville police released video of the Monday morning incident and labeled it “racially motivated.” Later, a department spokesman said his initial comments were “personal and emotional” and not accurate.

"The incident appears now to be more about a couple of bullies on a bus dictating where people sit,” said Capt. Don Sax.

The video depicted a violent attack after a 17-year-old student walked onto the bus and looked for a seat, but was apparently refused. He then took a seat next to one of his attackers, who lashed out with a series of punches to the victim's head. At one point, the attacker held the victim by the neck with one hand, while he punched his face with the other.

Another attack ensued a few minutes later, and was eventually halted by another student.

As someone who believes that criminals should be judged on what they have done rather than what they were thinking about when they did it I could care less why these two thugs beat another student who had done nothing to provoke their aggression.

However since the political left has done everything in its power - and largely been successful - in turning America into a race obsessed nation and since I know that if it had been a black student beaten by whites that there is no way that the race industry would ever acknowledge any other motive than racism (regardless of any conceivable proof that it wasn't) I feel compelled to ask a couple of questions.

One, why didn't bully no. 1 want the white student sitting next to him? Could it have had anything to do with the fact that he was white?

Two, why does it seem that the other black students on the bus are so happy to see the white student being beaten? Could it be that fact that he is white? If not then what other reason, do they simply enjoy seeing innocent people attacked?

Again I really don't care what their motives were. They committed a crime of violence and they should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. But I do find it interesting that the police and the mainstream media are so quick to move heaven and earth to assure everyone that the attack had no racial component when I know that if it had been white on black violence that would not be happening.

Thursday, September 17, 2009

Obama surrenders to our enemies

Once again we have to go to the foreign press to get the truth about the Obama regime. Nile Gardiner writes in the Telegraph:

I blogged a couple of weeks ago that the Obama administration was about to abandon its plans for Third Site missile defence installations in Poland and the Czech Republic. I wrote then that “if enacted, this would represent a huge turnaround in American strategic thinking on a global missile defence system, and a massive betrayal of two key US allies in eastern and central Europe. Such a move would significantly weaken America’s ability to combat the growing threat posed by Iran’s ballistic missile program, and would hand a major propaganda victory to the Russians.”

It now looks as though the president has surrendered to Russian demands to kill off Third Site. Michael Goldfarb at The Weekly Standard is reporting that:

“According to reliable sources, Obama administration officials are on their way to Poland and the Czech Republic to deliver very bad news. The administration intends to cancel completely the missile defense sites that had been promised to these governments by the previous administration.”

Goldfarb also links to a post by leading defence expert Gary Schmitt, who writes:

“Guess who’s coming to dinner (in Warsaw)? Four senior Obama officials, including Under Secretary of State for Arms Control Ellen Tauscher and Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security “Sandy” Vershbow, are apparently in the air right now on their way to Poland. Why? If the Washington hot rumor mill is right, to deliver the news to the Poles and then the Czechs that the administration has decided not to go forward with a missile defense system for Europe and the United States against the budding missile threat from Iran.”

This is bad news for all who care about the US commitment to the transatlantic alliance and the defence of Europe as well as the United States. It represents the appalling appeasement of Russian aggression and a willingness to sacrifice American allies on the altar of political expediency. A deal with the Russians to cancel missile defence installations sends a clear message that even Washington can be intimidated by the Russian bear.

What signal does this send to Ukraine, Georgia and a host of other former Soviet satellites who look to America and NATO for protection from their powerful neighbour? The impending cancellation of Third Site is a shameful abandonment of America’s friends in eastern and central Europe, and a slap in the face for those who actually believed a key agreement with Washington was worth the paper it was written on.

These missile sites are designed for defense. Why is Russia so dead set against these Eastern European nations being able to defend themselves against a missile attack?

I mean if Russia (read Putin) has no ill intent toward these former Soviet client states then why not give them the means to defend themselves?

And what about Obama? It is hard to believe that a man who has no problem running up multi-trillion dollar deficits is doing this, or anything else, to save money. So what is his reason for this?

At a time when Iran is building nuclear weapons why is he doing nothing to stop them and everything in his power to keep anyone else, like Israel, from stopping them? And why is he preventing our allies from having the means to defend themselves from them?

Is Obama's hatred of the United States so great that he cannot restrain himself from kissing the ass of every current and former enemy of this nation? Must he piss in the face of every nation that looks to the United States as a friend and ally?

It would seem so.

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Miss Ann is talking

That means that YOU are listening!

LIBERAL LIES ABOUT NATIONAL HEALTH CARE: BONUS JOE WILSON EDITION!
by Ann Coulter
September 16, 2009

I'm trying to get to the next installment of my Pulitzer Prize-deserving series on liberal lies about national health care, but apparently liberals have decided to torture us by neurotically fixating on one lie.

After President Barack Obama gave a speech to a joint session of Congress last week passionately defending his national health care plan, the Democrats were agog at the brilliance of the speech. Nancy Pelosi was so thrilled, her expression almost changed.

But as Obama ticked off one demonstrably false claim after another -- eliciting 37 standing ovations from the Democrats in the audience -- America's greatest living statesman, Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., yelled out, "You lie!" in response to Obama's claim that the bill will not cover illegal aliens.

There are a number of theories about why America's greatest living statesman shouted "You lie!" at that juncture, but mine is that Wilson said it because Obama told a big, fat stinking lie.

Every single American knows it's a lie. But liberals take pleasure in repeating it -- and then condescendingly accusing anyone who doesn't accept their lie of being a toothless, illiterate racist.

Our politicians, media and courts have done everything they can to encourage illegal immigration, including obstinately refusing to enforce the border. While illegals streaming across the border generally aren't prosecuted, U.S. border patrol agents who naively try to guard the border often are.

Wise (and pregnant) Latinas dash across the border just in time to give birth at American hospitals -- medical services paid for by U.S. taxpayers -- gaining instant citizenship for their children, thereby entitling them to the entire Chinese menu of American welfare programs.

In 2004, 42.6 percent of all babies born at taxpayer expense in California were born to illegal aliens, according to a state report on Medi-Cal-funded deliveries. In hospitals close to the Mexican border, the figure is closer to 80 percent. Remember: This is before health care becomes "free" to every U.S. resident.

Hospitals across the country are going bankrupt because the federal government forces them to provide free services to illegals. This situation appears to have angered some segment of the population, in particular, American citizens who pay taxes to support the hospitals, but then are forced to spend hours writhing in pain in hospital waiting rooms.

With Americans in a boiling cauldron of rage about the government's impotent response to the tsunami of illegal immigrants, last year, both political parties ran candidates for president who favor amnesty for illegal immigrants.

And now Democrats have the audacity to tell us to our faces that national health care won't cover illegals. Not only that, but they tell us we must not be able to read if we think it does.

The crystalline example of this sneering liberal pomposity came from MSNBC's Rachel Maddow on Monday night:

"Reading the House health care bill would show you that (the bill does not cover illegal aliens). But you know, sometimes reading is hard. Fortunately, in the case of the health reform bill, there is a way to get all of the information that's in it without any of that pesky reading.

"It's called HearTheBill.org. Volunteer voiceover actors have donated their time to read all 1,017 pages of the house health care reform bill, HR-3200, the America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009.

"So if you don't want to tire out your eyes, you could just listen to the thing that disproves (Rep. Wilson)."


Maddow then played an audio clip of Section 246 from the bill. This section, which liberals keep brandishing like a DNA-stained dress, states: "Nothing in this subtitle shall allow federal payments for affordability credits on behalf of individuals who are not lawfully present in the United States."

In other words, illegal aliens are excluded from precisely one section of the thousand-page, goodie-laden health care bill: Section 246, which distributes taxpayer-funded "affordability credits" to people who can't afford to pay for their own health care.

Even this minor restriction on taxpayer largesse to illegals will immediately be overturned by the courts. But the point is: Except for vouchers, the bill does not even pretend to exclude illegals from any part of national health care -- including the taxpayer-funded health insurance plan.

Moreover, liberals won't have to wait for some court to find that the words "nothing in this subtitle shall allow" means "this bill allows," because the bill contains no mechanism to ensure that the health care vouchers aren't going to illegal aliens. Nor does the bill prohibit the states from providing taxpayer-funded health care vouchers to illegals.

Democrats keep voting down Republican amendments that would insert these restrictions -- just before dashing to a TV studio to denounce anyone who says the health care bill covers illegal aliens.

It's as if we have a relative who shows up at every holiday gathering, gets bombed and totals the family car. At the 18th Christmas celebration, he's not only demanding a drink, but also calling us liars for saying he's already totaled 17 family cars. Gimme a gin and tonic and the car keys, you lying racist!

I think that's why America's greatest living statesman erupted with rage when Obama retailed this particular lie during his speech on health care.

It's bad enough to be lied to, but to be lied to by people who accuse us of not being able to read when the problem is that we can read -- and also can remember what happened at the last 17 family Christmases -- is more than even Mother Teresa could bear without a quick heckle.

Once again Miss Ann knocks it out of the park.

Wilson condemned

The House of Representatives voted to censure Joe Wilson for daring to speak the truth about B. Hussein Obama.

This is my response.

The highest complement is the condemnation of detestable people.

-Sir. Winston Churchill.

The ACORNs don't fall far from the tree

From Fox News (what other major news outlet is covering this?):

A fourth video by an independent filmmaker posing as a pimp along with a purported prostitute has surfaced depicting an ACORN staffer in California assisting the couple in their quest to obtain housing for their illegal sex business.

Much like in their previous undercover stings at the group's offices in Baltimore, Washington and Brooklyn, N.Y., filmmaker James O'Keefe, 25, and his 20-year-old partner Hannah Giles, who posed as a prostitute named "Eden," were given assistance on Aug. 17 from a staffer at ACORN's office in San Bernardino on how to avoid detection by law enforcement. The couple even tell ACORN staffer Tresa Kaelke — who admits on the videotape to previously having sex for money — that they plan on bringing in 12 girls from El Salvador to work in a home they hope to acquire via the community organization.

Do you suppose that our Justice Dept. might take a few minutes off from prosecuting CIA officers whose only crime is keeping the nation safe from another 9/11 style attack in order to open a RICO investigation into ACORN?

Of course to ask the question is to answer it. The Obama administration is not going to do anything that might result in the records of a corrupt criminal radical left-wing organization that has such close ties to Obama himself being brought to light.

This is why ACORN will not carry through on its threat to sue O'Keefe and Giles. There is no way that they are going to create a situation in which these two investigative journalists, who have proven that they know exactly what ACORN is, will have carte blanche to subpoena their records and depose their employees.

ACORN is going to bluff and bluster and spin and depend upon their allies in the mainstream media and the Democrat party to cover for them and try to ride this out.

They will fail.