More Democrats acting like Democrats

From Front Page Magazine:

News broke last week that Rahm Emanuel, now White House chief of staff, lived rent- free for years in the home of Rep. Rosa De Lauro (D-Conn.) - and failed to disclose the gift, as congressional ethics rules mandate. But this is only the tip of Emanuel's previously undisclosed ethics problems.

One issue is the work Emanuel tossed the way of De Lauro's husband. But the bigger one goes back to Emanuel's days on the board of now-bankrupt mortgage giant Freddie Mac.

Emanuel is a multimillionaire, but lived for the last five years for free in the tony Capitol Hill townhouse owned by De Lauro and her husband, Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg.

During that time, he also served as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee - which gave Greenberg huge polling contracts. It paid Greenberg's firm $239,996 in 2006 and $317,775 in 2008. (Emanuel's own campaign committee has also paid Greenberg more than $50,000 since 2004.)

To be fair, Greenberg had polling contracts with the DCCC before - but each new election cycle brings its own set of consultants. And Emanuel was certainly generous with his roommate.

Emanuel never declared the substantial gift of free rent on any of his financial-disclosure forms. He and De Lauro claim that it was just allowable "hospitality" between colleagues. Hospitality - for five years?

Some experts suggest that it was also taxable income: Over five years, the free rent could easily add up to more than $100,000.

Nor is this all that seems to have been missed in the Obama team's vetting process. Consider: Emanuel served on the Freddie Mac board of directors during the time that the government-backed lender lied about its earnings, a leading contributor to the current economic meltdown.

The Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight Agency later singled out the Freddie Mac board as contributing to the fraud in 2000 and 2001 for "failing in its duty to follow up on matters brought to its attention." In other words, board members ignored the red flags waving in their faces.

The SEC later fined Freddie $50 million for its deliberate fraud in 2000, 2001 and 2002.

Meanwhile, Emanuel was paid more than $260,000 for his Freddie "service." Plus, after he resigned from the board to run for Congress in 2002, the troubled agency's PAC gave his campaign $25,000 - its largest single gift to a House candidate.

That's what friends are for, isn't it?

Now Rahm Emanuel is in the White House helping President Obama dig out of the mess that Freddie Mac helped start.

The president's chief of staff isn't subject to Senate confirmation, but his ethics still matter. Is this the change that we can depend on?

It is tempting to lay this at the feet of the fact that Emanuel crawled out of the same sewer of Illinois Democrat party machine politics as impeached governor Blagojevich and Obama himself. However this is a problem which is common to the entire Democrat party. After all Obama'a Treasury Secretary who refused to pay his income taxes for some years and lied on his returns in other years is not a Chicago native nor or any of the other Obama appointees who have had to withdraw their names because of tax or other ethical problems.

And Bill Clinton, the most corrupt president in US history, was not from Chicago (although the Little Rock/Hot Springs axis in Arkansas gives Cook County a run for its money). No, the reason why this kind of corruption and criminality is the rule in the Democrat party (unlike the Republican party where it exists but is the exception) flows from the mindset of the kind of person who is attracted to the Democrat party.

The average Democrat who seeks political power is, in his own mind, and elite who is better and smarter than the average citizen. Because the Democrat politician views him or herself as an elite they feel that the rules which apply to everyone else should not apply to them. Rank, after all, should have its privileges.

Democrats also tend to reject the authority of traditional religion-based morality. Observe the way in which his fellow Democrats rushed to defend Bill Clinton after he was caught committing adultery in the Oval Office or the way in which Democrats who claim to be Christian or observant Jews nevertheless still defend practices like abortion.

If you deny the authority of God and hold yourself above the laws of man then what exactly is there to restrain you? Nothing but the fear of legal consequences and public relations problems if you are caught.

And how much fear do those things still inspire? After all Bill Clinton committed perjury in federal court and his only "punishment" was having his law license temporarily suspended and a fine which he could pay with bribe money collected from Red Chinese spies. And he left office with a 60% approval rating despite the fact that both the adultery and the Red Chinese spies were common knowledge by that time.

In the bubble inhabited by the left-wing establishment (Democrat politicians, the mainstream media and academics) the judge of a politician's character is not to be found in how he behaves when no one is looking or in how he handles his own money or how he treats those over whom he personally wields power but in the public positions he takes on a shopping list of liberal litmus test issues. Issues such as abortion, the minimum wage and racial preferences.

Again I point to the example of Bill Clinton who was credibly accused of forcibly raping a woman and was still defended by feminists, one of which said that she would gladly suck him off to "thank him for keeping abortion legal" (she did not, however, indicate whether she would swallow).

In a world in which "virtue" is nothing more than publicly upholding a set of political positions then privately anything goes. Nancy Pelosi can support sweat shops in American Samoa, B. Hussein Obama can engage in corrupt land deals with a felonious Chicago developer and spend 20 years in a church whose pastor screams "God Damn America!" from the pulpit and preaches sermons about how the CIA created AIDS to exterminate black people and befriend an unrepentant communist terrorist bomber like Bill Ayers. Bill Clinton can rape and molest women and rake in hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal contributions from hostile foreign governments and terror-supporting Arab potentates. Barny Frank can allow his "partner" to run a gay prostitution ring out of his apartment and Ted Kennedy can kill a young woman then attempt to bribe someone else to take the blame for it.

Elected Democrats can do all of this which ranges from disgusting hypocrisy to outright criminality and still be welcome in and be defended by their party because they want to "keep abortion legal". Is there anything so terrible that a Democrat, even one who supports abortion, can be expelled from that party? As a matter of fact there is. Joe Lieberman - supporter of partial birth abortion - was kicked out of the Democrat party for the monstrous crime of taking a principled stand in support of the war against Islamofascism.

So a Democrat will lose the support of his party if he comes out in favor of making war on people who do things like plan and execute the 9/11 attacks, stone homosexuals to death and behead or hang young girls for the "crime" of "allowing" themselves to be raped and thereby bringing shame upon their father and brothers. Provided that the war was begun under the leadership of a Republican president.

Of course a political party which offers unconditional support to any elected official who will simply support a particular legislative agenda and oppose anything supported by Republicans will be attractive not only to left-wing ideologues but to another class of people commonly known as sociopaths.

Which answers the oft asked question of "what the hell's wrong with that damned party anyway?" You fill a political party's leadership with people who are either true-believers who will do anything to further their ideological agenda or are sociopaths willing to do anything to further their personal agenda, neither of which believe that the rules which govern normal mortals apply to them, and you get exactly what you see running Washington today.

Tonight's Music

Altan performing There's a Fair Tonight.

Miss Ann is talking

That means that YOU are listening!

Being gracious winners, this week, liberals howled with delight at George Bush for coming in seventh-to-last in a historians' ranking of the presidents from best to worst.

This was pretty shocking. Most liberals can't even name seven U.S. presidents.

Being ranked one of the worst presidents by "historians" is like being called "anti-American" by the Nation magazine. And by "historian," I mean a former member of the Weather Underground, who is subsidized by the taxpayer to engage in left-wing political activism in a cushy university job.

So congratulations, George Bush! Whenever history professors rank you as one of the "worst" presidents, it's a good bet you were one of America's greatest.

Six months after America's all-time greatest president left office in 1989, historians ranked him as only a middling president. (I would rank George Washington as America's greatest president, but he only had to defeat what was then the world's greatest military power with a ragtag group of irregulars and some squirrel guns, whereas Ronald Reagan had to defeat liberals.)

At the time, historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. dismissed Reagan as "a nice, old uncle, who comes in and all the kids are glad to see him. He sits around telling stories, and they're all fond of him, but they don't take him too seriously" -- and then Schlesinger fell asleep in his soup.

Even liberal historian Richard Reeves blanched at Reagan's low ranking in 1989, saying, "I was no fan of Reagan, but I think I know a leader when I see one."

Reagan changed the country, Reeves said, and some would say "he changed the world, making communism irrelevant and the globe safe for the new imperialism of free-market capitalism." In Reeves' most inspiring line, he says Reagan "was a man of conservative principle and he damned near destroyed American liberalism."

By 1996 things hadn't gotten much better for Reagan in the historians' view. A poll of historians placed Reagan 26th of 42 presidents -- below George H.W. Bush, his boob of a vice president who raised taxes and ended Republican hegemony under Reagan. Four of the 32 historians called Reagan a "failure."

I guess it depends on your definition of "failure." To me a failure is someone who aspired to be a legitimate scholar but ends up as an obscure lecturer at Colorado College.

Speaking of which, Colorado College political scientist Thomas Cronin explained Reagan's low ranking, saying Reagan "was insensitive to women's rights, civil rights, oblivious to what was going on in his own Administration -- the procurement scandal, HUD, Iran-Contra."

Soon after he took office, President Reagan famously hung a portrait of President Calvin Coolidge in the Cabinet Room -- another (Republican) president considered a failure by historians.

Coolidge cut taxes, didn't get the country in any wars, cut the national debt almost in half, and presided over a calm, scandal-free administration, a period of peace, 17.5 percent growth in the gross national product, low inflation (.4 percent) and low unemployment (3.6 percent).

Unlike some recent presidents with Islamic middle names, he didn't run around comparing himself to Lincoln constantly.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. ridiculed President Calvin Coolidge as a hayseed who slept too much and took decisive action only once in his life. Schlesinger never tired of pointing out that Coolidge slept 11 hours a day, as if hours of sleep is the true measure of presidential greatness.

Perhaps Schlesinger's venom toward Coolidge was meant as penance for his once mistakenly admitting that Eisenhower was a good president -- another hated (Republican) president among historians.

Under President Dwight Eisenhower the gross national product grew by over 25 percent and inflation averaged 1.4 percent. George Meany, then AFL-CIO president, said that the American worker had "never had it so good." Like Coolidge and Reagan, Eisenhower was enormously popular with the American people.

In a poll of "leading scholars" taken soon after Eisenhower left office, he was named one of the 10 worst presidents. The distinguished scholars -- none of whose names anyone remembers today -- called him dumb, dismissing the five-star general who smashed the Nazi war machine as "Old Bubble Head." As Patton said, these "bilious bastards ... don't know anything more about real battle than they do about fornicating."

It's as if geologists took a poll and announced their opinion that lead was heavier than gold.

Reagan and Eisenhower have recently started to move up in the presidential rankings -- for the same reason George Washington is always ranked one of the best. Historians ought to detest Washington, but his exclusion from the top ranks of these pompous historian polls would expose the absurdity of their rankings.

Putting preposterously overrated presidents like John F. Kennedy or FDR in the same category as Reagan or Washington is like a teenage girl ranking the Jonas Brothers with the Rolling Stones and the Beatles as the three greatest bands of all time.

Liberals may call him a "war criminal," but historians have inadvertently paid Bush a great tribute this week by ranking him as a "below average" president. I can only dream that, someday, no-name, left-wing historians will rank me as one of the all-time worst columnists.

Once again Miss Ann gets it entirely right. There are few better compliments than being disliked by a bunch of left-wing college professors.

George W Bush was far from perfect, but he will be remembered as a great president because of the forceful way he responded to the attack of 9/11. Thanks to him America was kept safe from another such attack during the entire rest of his term in office and thanks to him two nations ruled by poisonous theocratic dictatorships have been freed. The fact is that things have come so far in Iraq that not even B. Hussein Obama is going to be able to engineer a return to tyranny for that nation.

I'm sure that Mr. Bush understands this. And I'm sure that he has not and will never lose a second's sleep over the opinion of such contemptible lightweights.

Jindal looks to 2012

From CBS:

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, a potential 2012 GOP presidential candidate, has suggested his state may not be interested in all of the roughly $4 billion allotted to it in the economic stimulus package to be signed by President Obama today.

"We'll have to review each program, each new dollar to make sure that we understand what are the conditions, what are the strings and see whether it's beneficial for Louisiana to use those dollars," Jindal said, according to CBS affiliate WWLTV.

Jindal is scheduled to give the response to the president’s not-exactly-a-state-of-the-union address next Tuesday.

Louisiana reportedly faces a possible $2 billion budget shortfall next year. It has been allocated $538,575,876 for infrastructure spending in the stimulus package, and the White House predicts the bill will create 50,000 jobs in the state.

Governor Jindal is doing the right thing politically for a man who is looking toward a possible 2012 or 2016 presidential run but the right thing for the state of Louisiana (funny isn't it how what is good for Republicans is generally good for the country while the opposite is usually true for Democrats).

The "strings" which will come attached to this money will have the effect of rendering state governments more powerless and concentrating more power in Washington. States which wish to retain whatever sovereignty they have left after over a hundred years of power grabs by Washington should say "no thanks" to any "gifts" from D.C. especially as long as this administration is in power.

In order to be "fair and balanced" CBS decided to balance the wisdom from Mr. Jindal, who is intelligent courageous and a true leader, with a statement from someone who is the governor's polar opposite:

As WWLTV notes, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin has said he’ll take any money that Louisiana turns down.

I simply remind everyone of the calm and competent way that Governor Jindal dealt with the first hurricane to threaten Louisiana during his administration with the panic and incompetence which were the best that Nagin could do in the face of Katrina (remember also Nagin's massive sense of entitlement as he went about whining that someone should come in and do his job for him).

But back to our discussion of an actual man.

Gov. Jindal is taking advantage of not only the unity of Republicans in opposition to the massive and misnamed "stimulus bill" but of the fact that a majority of independents and a large minority of Democrats also oppose the legislation.

If Governor Palin of Alaska wishes to capitalise on her popularity with a 2012 run of her own she needs to climb on board and reject Obama's Trojan horse. She should point out that developing Alaska's oil reserves would provide ample tax revenue for the state and provide thousands of jobs, as well as moving America toward energy independecne, if she were only allowed to proceed with plans to extract the oil in an environementally safe way.

The GOP lacks the power in the federal legislature to stop any of the left's destructive programs however every legislative battle which is fought represents a teachable moment for the public. Republican governors like Palin and Jindal represent the "bench" from which Republicans should draw their next presidential candidate (please G-d, no more Senators!). Those governors who have White House ambitions need to take the lead in explaining to the public why the left's program is bad for the nation.

It really is an ill wind that blows no good. Carter gave us Reagan and Clinton gave us a Republican legislature. Obama may well give us a House and Senate under control of not just the GOP but the conservative wing of the GOP after 2010 and Palin/Jindal or Jindal/Palin in the White House in 2012.

Another Chimpanzee shows its true colors

From The Daily News:

The chilling screams of a crazed chimp mauling a Connecticut woman were captured on a 911 tape - along with the animal's owner begging, "Send police with guns!"

The 15-minute recording captures the bizarre horror of Monday's attack, which left a 55-year-old woman critically injured and the 200-pound ape dead in a hail of police gunfire.

"Hurry, please! He ripped her face off," the ape's frantic owner, Sandy Herold, 70, is heard telling the dispatcher on the tapes released Tuesday night.

"Listen to me, you have to shoot him."

The terrifying screeches of Travis the chimpanzee are heard as he mercilessly pounces on Herold's pal, Charla Nash.

"He killed her!" Herold told the dispatcher. "He ripped her apart. He tried attacking me. How fast can you get here?"

The dispatcher sounds incredulous as Herold describes how she had to stab the burly ape and only aggravated him.

"He's eating her," Herold screamed. "Please have them go faster."

When cops arrived at Herold's Stamford home, she can be heard yelling for them to "Shoot him!"

Nash was so disfigured that a cop on the scene mistook her for a man, telling the dispatcher, "He's got no face."

Fighting back tears Tuesday, Herold mourned the death of her beloved chimp and expressed concern for her friend.

"He was all I had," Herold said outside her home.

She painfully recounted how she stabbed her 15-year-old chimp with a butcher's knife, trying to stop the attack.

Cops shot and killed the rampaging primate when he cornered them in a squad car.

People see chimps on TV acting cute and they think that it would be cool to have one for a pet. However the chimpanzee is an extremely dangerous wild animal. They possess near human intelligence and enormous physical strength.

They have violent natures and at the very core of their being they harbor a deep hatred for humanity based on bitter resentment that our species was the one which got the fully functional thumb and advanced verbal skills.

This feeling that only an accident of nature kept them from being the apex of evolution influences every aspect of chimpanzee psychology and society. Think of the sullen resentment that Western Europe feels toward the United States and multiply that by 1000 times and you begin to approach the depth of hatred that chimpkind have for mankind.

Right now chimpanzees are celebrating the "heroism" of Travis and mourning his death. But they are also very worried. The fact that Travis was able to surf the Internet was something they would have preferred not come out. Right now in chimpanzee chat rooms (don't bother trying to find one, they are heavily encrypted and membership is by invitation only) they are trying to come up with a damage control strategy in case people begin to inquire into what Travis was doing on the computer.

Chimpanologists (people who study chimpanzees and catalog their crimes) urge members of the general public to maintain a heightened state of alertness. People should not leave the house without a firearm and any chimpanzee exhibiting any kind of aggressive behavior whatsoever should be shot. Do not wait for them to attack. The Travis incident shows that they can take enormous amounts of damage and remain lethal so keep shooting them until they go down and stay down.

Any other kind of suspicious behavior by chimpanzees should be reported at once to local law enforcement authorities or the Department of Homeland Security.

Remember, better safe than sorry.

Tonight's Music

An old favorite of mine.

This tells you everything you need to know

From Human Events.com:

Democratic staffers released the final version of the stimulus bill at about 11 pm last night after delaying the release for hours to put it into a format which people cannot “search” on their home computers.

Instead of publishing the bill as a regular internet document -- which people can search by “key words” and otherwise, the Dems took hours to convert the final bill from the regular searchable format into “pdf” files, which can be read but not searched.

Three of the four .pdf files had no text embedded, just images of the text, which did not permit text searches of the bill. That move to conceal the bill’s provisions had not been remedied this morning at the time of publication of this article. (You can find the entire bill on the House Appropriations [http://appropriations.house.gov] website.)

So, what are they hiding? A lot.

We searched the bill randomly -- the only way possible -- to see what’s being hidden from the public and the members of Congress who will be voting on the bill today. We found one provision that may be a good example of why the Democrats are desperate to stop any exposure of what is in this bill. Like this gem:

SEC. 1607. (a) CERTIFICATION BY GOVERNOR -- Not later than 45 days after the date of enactment of this Act, for funds provided to any State or agency thereof, the Governor of the State shall certify that: 1) the State request and use funds provided by this Act , and; 2) funds be used to create jobs and promote economic growth.

(b) ACCEPTANCE BY STATE LEGISLATURE -- If funds provided to any State in any division of this Act are not accepted for use by the Governor, then acceptance by the State legislature, by means of the adoption of a concurrent resolution, shall be sufficient to provide funding to such State.

This provision --– apparently aimed at conservative governors such as South Carolina’s Mark Sanford who does not want the federal money -- would overturn state laws and constitutions, intervening directly in the state’s government to give the legislature the power to overturn a government’s decision.

This provision probably violates the US Constitution, a matter which will be of no concern to Congressional Democrats.

This act -- to strong-arm state governments and a governor’s ability to control the state budget -- is Chicago-style bipartisanship.

This bill is so bad that even the Associated Press analyst report today concludes that the bill will not jump-start the economy.

The example that Human Events found is bad, but it is far from the worst this festering turd of a bill has to offer. Like the undoing of welfare reform and socialized medicine, to name just two examples.

Human Events does report one bright spot, however:

Roll Call is reporting that Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) will likely not be able to travel to Washington for the vote. This causes a conundrum for Reid, as it would bring the vote total down to 60 -- the number needed -- but no Republican wants to go on record as the 60th vote. Reid may try to get around Senate rules to enable Specter, Snowe and Collins to avoid being Vote #60 for the stimulus bill.

Would it not be supremely satisfying if this steaming bucket of legislative sewage failed to make it into law because old Ted was too busy getting ready for his appointment with Satan's backyard barbecue to show up for the vote?

Might it possibly be that the one true act of service to his country this murdering old drunk will ever perform involves dying a painful death?

Would that all left-liberals would render such service to their nation.

A RINO grows a pair

WASHINGTON -- New Hampshire Republican Sen. Judd Gregg withdrew from consideration as Commerce secretary Thursday, saying his differences with the Democratic White House ran too deep.

The announcement was a fresh embarrassment for an administration rocked by a number of setbacks. While his recent predecessors each lost one or two early cabinet nominees, Mr. Obama has lost three less than a month into his term. And Mr. Gregg's withdrawal comes two days after a bank rescue plan was widely panned by financial markets and lawmakers from both parties, partly because of its lack of detail.

Mr. Obama was able to celebrate this week a victory with a congressional agreement over his economic-stimulus plan, but his goal of attracting widespread bipartisan support has faltered, and the Gregg move means his cabinet can no longer claim a trio of Republicans.

It is a mark of just how destructive and far left-liberal (sorry, redundant) that Mr. Obama's ideas are that he can't even get the usual RINO suspects to sign on to them. Yes, the two Senators from Maine and Pennsylvania's Arlen Specter voted for the giant "fund-the-left pork bill" but those three are special cases, being so stupid that they don't realize that they are members of the Communist Party of the USA.

And speaking of RINO's we note with some amazement that even Crazy John McCain and his detestable little butt-boy Lindsey Graham aren't busy assembling one of their "gangs" to aid the left in passing their "let's turn America into Venezuela" bill.

Too loony-left for John McCain to stomach? That's like getting kicked out of the SS for being too antisemitic.

The three RINO's in the Senate who voted for the Socialism Bill sealed their fates. The Democrats in their states will prefer to have real, as opposed to faux, Democrats representing them and Republicans will not turn out to save the jobs of people who use their position as a platform from which to stab them in the back.

And the Republicans who managed to maintain party discipline and stand together on principle have fired the first shot in both the 2010 congressional elections and the 2012 presidential race. By remembering who they were and what they were sent to Washington to do (hint, it wasn't "reach across the aisle" and be "bi-partisan") they have taken the first step down the road to recovering their credibility with conservative voters.

The next step for them will be resisting the Orwellian "Fairness Doctrine" which the left longs to reimpose on talk radio in order to silence the one portion of the mass media which hasn't gone beyond mere bias and become a voluntary extension of the White House press office.

The GOP has its work cut out for it over the next two years. We need to support them when they do the right thing and beat them without pity when they drift off the reservation. Only by standing together on firm conservative ideas can we hope to drag the nation back from the edge of the cliff which Obama and his minions are determined to push it over.

Tonight's Music

Clandestine at the Cactus Cafe on the University of Texas campus.

The door has been opened

Here is an editorial from the Washington Times on the socialized health care measures which are embedded in the "stimulus bill".

Secreted in the House version of the stimulus bill the President is trying to rush through Congress is the germ of a major overhaul of the American health care system. One provision causing increasing concern is the future role of the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, who will be in charge of collecting and monitoring the health care being provided to every American.

Think of it, a centralized, federal database tracking your every visit to a health care provider - where you went, who you saw, what was diagnosed and what care was provided. Chilling. The immediate concern is privacy - traditionally these matters are between a doctor and patient, but now the federal bureaucracy will interpose itself into that relationship. The bill contains some boilerplate, assuring everyone that the records will be held in strictest confidence, but given the weakness of database security these days, that can be considered more a hope than a guarantee.

The purpose of the database is to help increase health care "quality, safety and efficiency." The first two goals are commendable, but what does efficiency mean?

The word is omnipresent in that section of the bill, but not defined. For guidance one can consult tax-impaired former HHS nominee Tom Daschle's 2008 book Critical: What We Can Do About the Health Care Crisis, which seems to have inspired that section of the legislation.

In it he discusses various approaches to reducing the costs of health care, including restricting the types of expensive treatments available to seniors and people with severe maladies. According to Daschle, Americans consume too much expensive health care. Thus one way to drive down costs is to limit the availability of or access to certain costly services. To many this sounds like denying care. But therein lie the efficiencies, making sure that providing health care is tied to a return on investment for society. If it costs too much to treat you, and you are nearing the end of your life anyway, you may have to do with less, or with nothing. You just aren't worth the cost.

Daschle's book recommends, and the bill appears to institutionalize, a body free of political influence to make the hard choices regarding how these efficiencies will be realized - what care will be limited, and who will be denied what services. Naturally politicians would prefer to stay clear of these critical decisions, but do the American people really want questions this important to be free of oversight?

One would think that the hard questions are the ones most in need of transparency and accountability, and not be buried in bureaucratic secrecy. It brings to mind Hannah Arendt's observation about the banality of evil. What nondescript GS-11 will be cutting care from Aunt Sophie after her sudden relapse before he or she heads to the food court for some stir fry?

There is no telling what metrics will be used to define the efficiencies, but it is clear who will bear the brunt of these decisions. Those suffering the infirmities of age, surely, and also the physically and mentally disabled, whose health costs are great and whose ability to work productively in the future are low. And how will premature babies fare under the utilitarian gaze of Washington's health efficiency experts? Will our severely wounded warriors be forced to forgo treatments and therapies based on their inability to be as productive as they once might have been? And will the love between a parent and child have a column on the health bureaucrats' spreadsheets?

Consider the following statement: "It must be made clear to anyone suffering from an incurable disease that the useless dissipation of costly medications drawn from the public store cannot be justified."

This notion is fully in the spirit of the partisans of efficiency but came from a program instituted in Hitler's Germany called . Under this program, elderly people with incurable diseases, young children who were critically disabled, and others who were deemed non-productive, were euthanized. This was the Nazi version of efficiency, a pitiless expulsion of the "unproductive" members of society in the most expeditious way possible. The program was publicly denounced in 1941 by Clemens Galen, the Catholic Bishop of Muenster, who said in a sermon, "Here we are dealing with human beings, with our neighbors, brothers and sisters, the poor and invalids...unproductive - perhaps! But have they, therefore, lost the right to live?"

The efficiency-based approach to health care reform is a betrayal of the compact between those who are most capable of work and those who are least capable of defending themselves. And we have come a long way from what was supposed to be a "targeted, timely and temporary" stimulus bill.

It is, or should be, a well known fact that the first state mandated murders in Nazi Germany were not committed against Jews. The victims were the sick and disabled.

There came a point after the machinery of the Holocaust began to operate at full speed when Germany could be declared judenrein (cleansed of Jews), but not before it had been "cleansed" of people had lost limbs in combat during the First World War.

The road which begins with rationed medical care can only end with a physician administered lethal injection.

Those nations with socialized medicine who do not routinely euthanize those considered "too expensive to treat" have not avoided the charnel house, they simply haven't gotten there yet.

In the meantime they practice euthanasia by neglect by withholding treatment outright or by maintaining waiting lists which are so long that people die while standing in line.

Time to think about buying that vacation home in the mountains

WASHINGTON (AP) - Economic stimulus legislation at the heart of President Barack Obama's recovery plan is on track for final votes in the House and Senate after a dizzying final round of bargaining that yielded agreement on tax cuts and spending totaling $789 billion.

Obama, who has campaigned energetically for the legislation, welcomed the agreement, saying it would "save or create more than 3.5 million jobs and get our economy back on track."

The $500-per-worker credit for lower- and middle-income taxpayers that Obama outlined during his presidential campaign was scaled back to $400 during bargaining by the Democratic-controlled Congress and White House. Couples would receive $800 instead of $1,000. Over two years, that move would pump about $25 billion less into the economy than had been previously planned.

Officials estimated it would mean about $13 a week more in people's paychecks when withholding tables are adjusted in late spring. Critics say that's unlikely to do much to boost consumption.

A thousand words

Red Planet accompanies this cartoon with an essay by James Lewis. Here is an excerpt:

Like famished swine shoving each other aside to get to the trough, self-proclaimed scientists and real politicians are again launching headline upon headline to claim yet another disaster in the name of utterly unproven global warming. Did you know that the flock of geese that flew into US Airways jet engines this month in New York City were put there by global warming? And that London fogs, or rather their absence, are making global warming worse?

Yep. It’s right there in the paper, Maud.

As scientific skeptics are finally discovering the courage to speak out, the hype machine is faltering just a little.

But President Obama just appointed a True Believer to be science czar in the White House. So we can expect the politicians to keep hammering on this little piggy bank until the last golden coin drops out. You’ll be paying for the biggest false alarm in history for years to come.

But what worries me most is that the credibility of science may never recover — and perhaps it shouldn’t. Credibility has to be earned, and once it’s squandered may never be recovered. By now far too many scientists have knowingly colluded in an historic fraud, one that would put Bernie Madoff to shame. We are seeing political larceny here on a truly planetary scale.

Why should scientists who’ve gambled their own reputations on this fakery ever be trusted again? They shouldn’t. Would you entrust your life savings to Bernie Madoff? Right.

Go read the rest and check out the other cartoons at Red Planet.

Miss Ann is talking

That means that YOU are listening!

It's bad enough when illiterate jurors issue damages awards in the billions of dollars because they don't grasp the difference between a million and a billion. Now it turns out the Democrats don't know the difference between a million and a trillion.

Why not make the "stimulus bill" a kazillion dollars?

All Americans who work for a living, or who plan to work for a living sometime in the next century, are about to be stuck with a trillion-dollar bill to fund yet more oppressive government bureaucracies. Or as I call it, a trillion dollars and change.

The stimulus bill isn't as bad as we had expected -- it's much worse. Instead of merely creating useless, make-work jobs digging ditches -- or "shovel-ready," in the Democrats' felicitous phrase -- the "stimulus" bill will create an endless army of government bureaucrats aggressively intervening in our lives. Instead of digging ditches, American taxpayers will be digging our own graves.

There are hundreds of examples in the 800-page "stimulus" bill, but here are just two.

First, the welfare bureaucrats are coming back.

For half a century, the welfare establishment had the bright idea to pay women to have children out of wedlock. Following the iron laws of economics -- subsidize something, you get more of it; tax it, you get less of it -- the number of children being born out of wedlock skyrocketed.

The 1996 Welfare Reform bill marked the first time any government entitlement had ever been rolled back. Despite liberal howling and foot-stomping, not subsidizing illegitimacy led, like night into day, to less illegitimacy.

Welfare recipients got jobs, as the hard-core unemployables were coaxed away from their TV sets and into the workforce. For the first time in decades, the ever-increasing illegitimacy rate stopped spiraling upward.

As proof that that welfare reform was a smashing success, a few years later, Bill Clinton started claiming full credit for the bill.

Well, that's over. The stimulus bill goes a long way toward repealing the work requirement of the 1996 Republican Welfare Reform bill and rewards states that increase their welfare caseloads by paying unwed mothers to sit home doing nothing.

Second, bureaucrats at Health and Human Services will electronically collect every citizen's complete medical records and determine appropriate medical care.

Judging by the care that the State Department took with private visa records last year, that the Ohio government took with Joe the Plumber's government records, that the Pentagon took with Linda Tripp's employment records in 1998, and that the FBI took with thousands of top secret "raw" background files in President Clinton's first term, the bright side is: We'll finally be able to find out if Bill Clinton has syphilis -- all thanks to the stimulus bill!

HHS bureaucrats will soon be empowered to overrule your doctor. Doctors who don't comply with the government's treatment protocols will be fined. That's right: Instead of your treatment being determined by your doctor, it will be settled on by some narcoleptic half-wit in Washington who couldn't get a job in the private sector.

And a brand-new set of bureaucrats in the newly created office of "National Coordinator of Health Information Technology" will be empowered to cut off treatments that merely prolong life. Sorry, Mom and Pop, Big Brother said it's time to go.

At every other workplace in the nation -- even Wal-Mart! -- workers are being laid off. But no one at any of the bloated government bureaucracies ever need fear receiving a pink slip. All 64,750 employees at the department of Health and Human Services are apparently absolutely crucial to the smooth functioning of the department.

With the stimulus bill, liberals plan to move unfirable government workers into every activity in America, where they will superintend all aspects of our lives.

Also, thanks to the stimulus bill, the private sector will gradually shrivel and die. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the cost of servicing the bill's nearly trillion-dollar debt will shrink the economy within a decade.

Robert Kennedy famously said: "There are those who look at things the way they are and ask, 'Why?' I dream of things that never were and ask, 'Why not?'"

The new liberal version is: There are those who look at things and ask, "Why on earth should the government be paying for that?" I dream of things that never were funded by the government and ask, "Why not?"

Miss Ann sees the same thing in the "stimulus bill" as I and so many others do.

The sad fact is that this hideous piece of legislation has nothing to do with reviving the economy. What it represents is the far left's attempt to gain back all the ground they have lost since the GOP took control of the legislature in 1994.

The last I heard calls coming in the the congressional switchboard were running several hundred to one against passage of this monstrosity. If congress disregards the will of the American people and passes this - as they certainly will - the people will not forget or forgive.

Not what she signed up for

Dick Morris writes in The Hill:

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is finding that her job description is dissolving under her feet, leaving her with only a vestige of the power she must have thought she acquired when she signed on to be President Obama’s chief Cabinet officer.

Since her designation:

• Vice President Biden has moved vigorously to stake out foreign policy as his turf. His visit to Afghanistan, right before the Inauguration, could not but send a signal to Hillary that he would conduct foreign policy in the new administration, leaving Hillary in the role of backup.

• Richard Holbrooke, the former Balkan negotiator and U.N. ambassador, has been named special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. He insisted on direct access to the president, a privilege he was denied during much of the Clinton years.

• Former Sen. George Mitchell (D-Maine), negotiator of the Irish Peace Accords, was appointed to be the administration’s point man on Arab-Israeli negotiations.

• Samantha Power, Obama’s former campaign aide, who once called Hillary a “monster,” has been appointed to the National Security Council (NSC) as director of “multilateral affairs.”

• Gen. James L. Jones, Obama’s new national security adviser, has announced an expansion of the membership and role of the NSC. He pledges to eliminate “back channels” to the president and wants to grow the NSC’s role to accommodate the “dramatically different” challenges of the current world situation.

• Susan Rice, Obama’s new United Nations ambassador, insisted upon and got Cabinet rank for her portfolio, and she will presumably also have the same kind of access to Obama that she had as his chief foreign policy adviser during the campaign.

So where does all this leave Secretary of State Clinton?

While sympathy for Mrs. Clinton is outside the normal fare of these columns, one cannot help but feel that she is surrounded by people who are, at best, strangers and, at worst, enemies. The competition that has historically occupied secretaries of State and national security advisers seems poised to ratchet up to a new level in the current administration.

Hillary’s essential problem is that she is an outsider in the current mix. She was the adversary in the campaign, and Rice and Powers — at the very least — know it well, having helped to run the campaign that dethroned her. Can they — and she — be devoid of bitterness or at least of normal human trepidation? Not very likely.

The fact is that the power of the secretary of State is not statutory, nor does it flow from the prestige of the post’s occupant. Former Gen. Al Haig, once supreme commander of NATO and chief of staff to President Nixon, found that out when he was undercut as secretary by the White House troika of Mike Deaver, James Baker and Ed Meese. Bill Rogers, Eisenhower’s attorney general and Nixon’s California confidant, found himself on the outs from the moment he became secretary of State, with Henry Kissinger soaking up all the power through his direct access to Nixon as national security adviser.

The power of the secretary of State flows directly from the president. But Hillary does not have the inside track with Obama. Rice and Powers, close advisers in the campaign, and Gen. Jones — whose office is in the White House — all may have superior access. Holbrooke and Mitchell will have more immediate information about the world’s trouble spots.

So what is Hillary’s mandate? Of what is she secretary of State? If you take the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan out of the equation, what is left? One would have to assume that the old North Korea hands in the government would monopolize that theater of action. What, precisely, is it that Hillary is to do? The question lingers.

And for this she gave up a Senate seat?

Mr. Obama obviously heeded the ancient wisdom of "keep your friends close and your enemies closer" in offering Hillary the post of Secretary of State.

I have no doubt that he was very much aware that of all the people who have a vested interest in seeing him fail Hillary stands at the head of the list. If his performance is so dismal in his first term that he chooses not to humiliate himself by waging an unwinnable campaign for reelection he knows that she is the most likely Democrat to pick up the baton and run in 2012.

By taking Hillary into the administration he denies her an independent platform from which to criticize him and makes it impossible for her to organize any kind of public effort to gain support for a 2012 run.

However I am also certain that Mr. Obama is very much aware of the way in which a treasonous shadow government consisting of elements of the Pentagon, State Department and CIA worked behind the scenes to undermine the Bush administration.

With such a clear and recent example of how dangerous it is to have enemies working against you from within your own administration even someone with much duller political instincts than Mr. Obama could hardly fail to learn the lesson.

Thus the president has sought to transfer most of the important duties of the Secretary of State to other, more reliable, members of his administration. This leaves the Secretary of State's job a mostly ceremonial one. Mrs. Clinton will find herself spending the next four years having tea and dumplings with various heads of state while other men and women do the actual heavy lifting of America's foreign policy.

As for why Hillary would give up a Senate seat for the job I can only guess that she also learned the lessons of what happened to George W Bush and wished to have a position which would allow her to operate against Obama from behind the scenes. I imagine that she thought that if she could sufficiently damage him in his first two years in office that he would have little or no chance of reelection that she could resign early in the third year. This would disassociate herself from the Obama debacle and give herself plenty of time for a 2012 or 2016 run.

I think she also assumed that the large number of Clinton administration veterans in the Obama administration would make her the primary object of their allegiance rather than Mr. Obama. I doubt that she thought it necessary to have an office in the White House when Rahm Emanuel, once a senior adviser to her husband, was going to be his chief of staff with an office right next to the Oval Office.

I would imagine that the fact that Mr. Emanuel is not going to be her spy and surrogate in the White House came as something of a nasty shock to her - just as the knowledge that all the other Clinton administration retreads have transferred their loyalty to the new guy must have.

The lesson here is that payback is a bitch especially when you are being paid back for being a bitch. Hillary spent her eight years in the White House calling the Secret Service agents who were sworn to lay down their lives protecting her and her family as "trained pigs" and flying into a rage if any low level employee committed the gross offense of simply looking directly at her.

Because Hillary genuinely believes herself to be a special breed, truly better than her fellow citizens it will never occur to her that this kind of behavior does not attract loyalty. Like Hitler raging at his generals for betraying him by losing the war when they had only followed his orders, given against their advice, Hillary will feel herself knifed in the back by a pack of ungrateful Judases.

How all this will affect her conduct in office and the behavior of her ex-president husband, who already has a severe impulse control problem, remains to be seen.

Expect hijinks.

Tonight's Music

Capercaillie performing "Fosgail an dorus" / "Nighean Bhuidhe-ruadh" (Open the Door / Russet-Haired Daughter.) sung at Nairn Harbourfest 1992 and available on their DVD "Two Nights of Delerium".

Teach your children well

Our friend the White Trash Republican left a comment on my post about the current state of affairs which contained this thought:

One bright spot- Everyday has now become "a teachable moment" for my younguns, but so sad they are having to witness this.

I agree, but we must be careful to learn all the lessons the past has to teach us or we risk falling into the same errors again.

Let us never forget that the "Greatest Generation" who survived the Great Depression and defeated Hitler and the Empire of Japan also made colossal and ruinously expensive mistakes, some of which are with us to this very day.

Let us remember that it was this very generation which elected FDR and demanded the passage of his New Deal which turned a serious recession into a Great Depression. It was the "Greatest Generation" who gave us the Social Security Ponzi scheme which will bankrupt the federal government within the lifetime of most of the people reading this post (if it isn't already bankrupt).

We should also keep in mind that the Greatest Generation's determination to stay out of another European war led America to stand passively on the sidelines while Hitler rose to power. It caused America to join England and France in inaction when Hitler broke the Treaty of Versailles, which America was a signatory to and had as much right and responsibility to enforce as any other nation, and rearmed the Rhineland. This cowardly determination to avoid another war caused the civilized nations of the world to throw away their last chance to stop the Nazis while it could still be done easily and cheaply and set up every grim and terrible event to follow.

America's current situation has some striking similarities to its circumstances in the years preceding WWII. The nation is facing economic hard times and the government's solution is to ram through a massive program which will do almost nothing to solve our economic troubles but will push the nation hard and far to the left. It seems that not an hour goes by without someone discovering some new bit of stealth socialism which has been crammed into this massive piece of legislation. The latest being socialized medicine (full story here) which will ration health care in the US and bring us to the point of practicing euthanasia by neglect by denying treatment to those deemed "too old" or who otherwise fail a cost/benefit analysis designed to determine whether their lives are worth the cost of treating them.

[Note to any young diabetic. Make sure you go to college and study something the state will consider to be an essential skill so that you can earn enough National Ministry of Health "life value points" to justify your insulin ration.]

We are currently fighting a war in Iraq which the majority of the population feels was a mistake and which the current president campaigned against. This once again sets the nation up to stand by while madmen (in this case the Iranian mullahs) become an international threat (in this case by acquiring nuclear bombs).

It does seem that we are poised to repeat the dreadful errors of the past. Once again the government is responding to economic difficulty by legislation which will make the economy worse but will grow the size and scope of the federal government. Once again we are experiencing an upsurge of isolationist sentiment at exactly the point in history when interventionism would prevent a future holocaust. Once again American politics at the highest level has degenerated into a sordid personality cult which has accorded semi-divine status to a demagogue whose only real talent is telling the people want they want to hear.

It would seem that too many of the current generation of adults have failed to learn from the errors of the past and are therefore doomed to repeat them in the present. Perhaps if we are diligent to explain to our young ones what mistakes are currently being made, and exactly why they are mistakes, while the tragedy is unfolding before their eyes they will truly learn the lessons.

And then, perhaps, they will be able to construct something enduring upon the rubble of America's first failed experiment in self government.

Tonight's Music

Here is some music to help you get in the mood for what is coming.

The handbasket is nearing its destination

Feb. 9 (Bloomberg) -- The stimulus package the U.S. Congress is completing would raise the government’s commitment to solving the financial crisis to $9.7 trillion, enough to pay off more than 90 percent of the nation’s home mortgages.

The Federal Reserve, Treasury Department and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation have lent or spent almost $3 trillion over the past two years and pledged to provide up to $5.7 trillion more if needed. The total already tapped has decreased about 1 percent since November, mostly because foreign central banks are using fewer dollars in currency-exchange agreements called swaps. The Senate is to vote early this week on a stimulus package totaling at least $780 billion that President Barack Obama says is needed to avert a deeper recession. That measure would need to be reconciled with an $819 billion plan the House approved last month.

If you've ever been curious about why I don't blog nearly as much as I used to just read the story excerpted above.

It takes a psychic toll to comment upon news which is so relentlessly grim. Imagine that someone you love dearly were dying a slow and painful death from cancer. Would you be eager to describe their symptoms and catalog their suffering in a daily blog?

The nation has already come so far down the road to socialism that it would be difficult to avoid completing the journey under the best of circumstances. The fear and despair caused by another Great Depression would, I fear, be the catalyst the left needs to take America beyond the "soft socialism" of Western Europe and into the kind of totalitarian socialism seen in the Cuba of the Castro brothers or that which is taking shape in the Venezuela under Chavez.

If the Administration and the congressional Democrats keep to their present course we are headed for the absolute collapse of the American economic system, hyperinflation and an unemployment rate which will reach, or even exceed, 20 percent.

Such wreckage would be the perfect opportunity for the left to declare the idea of free minds and free markets upon which the American experiment in Republican self government is based a failure and institute a planned and directed economy for a planned and directed population.

The tools which the tyrant will use have already been forged and embedded within our law and custom. Our legislature no longer allows the unconstitutionality of a bill to act as any obstacle to its passage, nor the executive to its signing. Large segments of the judiciary feel free to simply invent law out of thin air, using if necessary foreign law as a framework for its rulings.

The groundwork for disarming the population has already been laid in the network of gun control laws which infest our nation at the federal, state and local level. And the government is now promising to take up the issue of censorship of the one media in which a voice of opposition can still reach a mass audience, broadcast radio (fear not bloggers, they'll come for the Internet next).

And the nation's law enforcers have already given ample evidence that they will not stand with their fellow citizens and refuse to enforce unjust and unconstitutional laws by their past refusal to stand with their fellow citizens and refuse to enforce unjust and unconstitutional laws. Unless I was asleep the day that every uniformed officer on the NYPD called in sick and said that he wouldn't feel well enough to come back to work until the Sullivan Act was repealed.

The only wild card is the US military and I strongly suspect that the most they will do in resistance to the new order will be to quietly let it be known to the regime that it would be "counterproductive" to attempt to use military personnel in preforming gun confiscation sweeps or to track down and destroy underground radio transmitters (and those who are transmitting on them).

I do not believe that the nation must go down this path, but I do think that there is a good chance that it will.

The handbasket is nearing its destination

Tonight's Music

Saturday morning cartoon

This is my favorite Daffy Duck cartoon.

And here are some classic toy commercials:

Tonight's Music

This is Lunasa performing at Celtic Connections 2009, Scotland's winter music festival.

Miss Ann is talking

That means that YOU are listening!

It's been weeks since the last one, so on Sunday, The New York Times Magazine featured yet another cheery, upbeat article on single mothers. As with all its other promotional pieces on single motherhood over the years, the Times followed a specific formula to make this social disaster sound normal, blameless and harmless -- even brave.

These single motherhood advertisements include lots of conclusory statements to the effect that this is simply the way things are -- so get used to it, bourgeois America! "(A)n increasing number of unmarried mothers," the article explained, "look a lot more like Fran McElhill and Nancy Clark -- they are college-educated, and they are in their 30s, 40s and 50s."

Why isn't the number of smokers treated as a fait accompli that the rest of us just have to accept? Smoking causes a lot less damage and the harm befalls the person who chooses to smoke, not innocent children.

The Times' single motherhood endorsements always describe single mothers as the very picture of middle-class normality: "She grew up in blue-collar Chester County, Pa., outside Philadelphia, and talks like a local girl (long O's). Her father was a World War II vet who worked for a union and took his kids to Mass most Sundays." Even as a girl she dreamed of raising a baby with a 50 percent greater chance of growing up in poverty.

How about some articles on all the nice middle-class smokers whose fathers served in World War II and took them to Mass? Only when describing aberrant social behavior do Times writers even recognize what normality is, much less speak of it admiringly.

According to hysterical anti-smoking zealots at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, smoking costs the nation $92 billion a year in "lost productivity." (Obviously these conclusions were produced by people who not only have never smoked, but also don't know any smokers, who could have told them smoking makes us 10 times more productive.)

Meanwhile, single motherhood costs taxpayers about $112 billion every year, according to a 2008 study by Georgia State University economist Benjamin Scafidi.

Smoking has no causal relationship to crime, has little effect on others and -- let's be honest -- looks cool. Controlling for income, education and occupation, it causes about 200,000 deaths per year, mostly of people in their 70s.

Single motherhood, by contrast, directly harms children, occurs at a rate of about 1.5 million a year and has a causal relationship to criminal behavior, substance abuse, juvenile delinquency, sexual victimization and almost every other social disorder.

If a pregnant woman smokes or drinks, we blame her. But if a woman decides to have a fatherless child, we praise her as brave -- even though the outcome for the child is much worse.

Thus, the Times writes warmly of single mothers, always including an innocent explanation: "Many of these women followed a similar and familiar pattern in having their first child: They planned to marry, found they hadn't by their 30s, looked some more and then decided to have a child without a husband." At which point, a stork showed up with their babies.

So apparently, single motherhood could happen to anyone!

How about: These smokers followed a similar and familiar pattern, they planned never to start smoking, found themselves working long nights at the law firm and then decided to have a cigarette to stay alert.

Then there is the Times' reversal of cause and effect, which manages to exonerate the single mother while turning her into a victim: "The biggest reason that children born to unmarried mothers tend to have problems -- they're more likely to drop out of school and commit crimes -- is that they tend to grow up poor."

First, the reason the children "tend to grow up poor" is that their mothers considered it unnecessary to have a primary bread-earner in the family.

Second, the Times simply made up the fact that poverty, rather than single motherhood, causes anti-social behavior in children. Poverty doesn't cause crime -- single mothers do. If poverty caused crime, how did we get Bernie Madoff?

Studies -- including one by the liberal Progressive Policy Institute -- have shown that controlling for factors such as poverty and socioeconomic status, single motherhood accounts for the entire difference in black and white crime rates.

The Times' claim that poverty is the "biggest reason" for the problems of illegitimate children is on the order of claiming that the biggest reason that smokers develop heart disease and lung cancer is not because they smoke, but because they tend to work so hard. It's a half-baked, wishful-thinking theory contradicted by all known evidence. Other than that, it holds up pretty well.

Finally, the Times produced an imaginary statistic that is valid only in the sense that no study has specifically disproved it yet. "No one has shown," the Times triumphantly announced, "that there are similar risks for the children of college-educated single mothers by choice."

No one has shown that there are similar risks for smokers who run marathons, either. There are probably about as many college graduate single mothers by choice (7 percent) as there are smokers who run marathons. And, unlike single mothers, smokers who run marathons look really cool.

If the establishment media wrote about smoking the way they write about unwed motherhood, I think people would notice that they seem oddly hellbent on destroying as many lives as possible.

Miss Ann once again takes apart an article in the New York Times. This is why we love her - her unflinching willingness to speak truth to stupidity.

Of course not all children brought up in single parent families turn out to be junkies or criminals and not all single mothers are so by choice (some women's husbands up and die on them) but why tempt fate by choosing to put yourself and your child in a position which has a very good chance of having a very bad outcome?

Basically there are two reasons that women do this. One is colossal irresponsibility coupled with the perverse incentives created by the welfare state. A young woman or girl can receive housing, food, medical care and spending money from the state if she simply gets pregnant without the benefit of marriage. She may even allow the father of her child/children (or any other man) to live with her in her state subsidized apartment and eat her state subsidized food and take her state provided money and spend it on drugs or alcohol or other women without the slightest fear of being removed from the dole. And every time she squirts out another bastard child the amount of money (in cash and subsidized services) she receives from the government increases.

That the girls born into such circumstances will almost certainly repeat their mothers' behavior when they come of age (meaning when they start menstruating) and that the boys will most likely live short brutal ugly lives full of violence are simply as eggs to omelets to these ignorant single mothers and to the government employees who enable them and glory in the wreckage of human lives they create because such misery justifies higher budgets and gives them greater job security.

The second reason that women chose the path of single parenthood is massive selfishness and narcissism. This kind of woman is not a ghetto dweller but a member of the middle class (like the woman whose father fought in WWII and took her to mass). These women never grew out of their little-girl fantasies of being a mommy but were never willing to make the sacrifices and compromises necessary to create a stable and enduring marriage (like settling for a man who is an actual human being with actual human faults rather than the perfect Prince Charming of their little girl-marriage fantasies). So they procure a sperm donor (with the help of either a doctor or a bottle of Johnny Walker and a wonder bra) and launch themselves into single motherhood secure in the knowledge that if things get too tough they can always appeal to their parents or the state for help (or sue the father for child support).

Again it is eggs to omelets to them that their children will have much less chance of having successful lives than the children of their sisters who got and stayed married. Because, after all, the child is to them not so much a separate human being whom they have the responsibility to nurture and educate into a fully functional adult but is really a pet. The fulfillment of those little-girl dreams of mommyhood.

I must say that I have much more sympathy for the first kind of woman. The third-generation Welfare Queen is living the only kind of life that she has ever been exposed to. She genuinely doesn't know that there are other ways to live. However the women who were brought up in two parent families who choose single motherhood because they see women on TV doing it and because the New York Times says that it is cool have no excuse and deserve little or no pity. They have chosen to direct their lives according to the advice of a source (the liberal media) which is guarenteed to give bad advice and their own life experiences should cause them to know better.

Tonight's Music

Here is another Capercaillie concert video.

Tonight's Music

This is Capercaillie performing Alasdair Mhic Cholla Ghasda, which means Allister, son of Cholla, the brave. The slide show is of various locations in Scotland.

Now we see the strings

WASHINGTON (AP) - Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC) (WFC) abruptly canceled Tuesday a pricey Las Vegas casino junket for employees after a torrent of criticism that it was misusing $25 billion in taxpayer bailout money.

The company initially defended the trip after The Associated Press reported it had booked 12 nights beginning Friday at the Wynn Las Vegas and the Encore Las Vegas. But within hours, investigators and lawmakers on Capitol Hill had scorned the bank, and the company canceled.

The conference is a Wells Fargo tradition. Previous all-expense-paid trips have included helicopter rides, wine tasting, horseback riding in Puerto Rico and a private Jimmy Buffett concert in the Bahamas for more than 1,000 of the company's top employees and guests.

"In light of the current environment, we have now decided to cancel this event as well," the company said Tuesday night in a news release that also said the it had never planned to use taxpayer bailout money for the trip.

A little History lesson is in order. Remember back when the bailout money was first being handed out? Wells Fargo never asked for a dime of taxpayer money. They didn't need it. That bank had been well managed and had avoided the kind of toxic lending practices which the federal government had been encouraging for years in the name of driving up poor/minority home ownership.

Yet in the meeting called in Washington which the Wells Fargo CEO was required to attend he was told that his bank would not be able to opt out of the bailout. He was bullied and browbeaten and told that it was essentially his "patriotic duty" to accept a large chunk of taxpayer cash that his bank did not want or need (think of Czechoslovakia "negotiating" with Nazi Germany over the Sudetenland - hint, Wells Fargo is Czechoslovakia).

At the time many of us wondered why the government would be so keen to waste bailout money by forcing it on a well managed bank that was begging not to have to take it.

Now we know the reason.

As long as Wells Fargo or any other bank took one dime of bailout money, willingly or unwillingly, they opened the door to the government sitting in judgment on every aspect of their business practices.

This is what the left wants for all American businesses and all American citizens. To make us all dependent in some way or other upon government largess so that dictate to all of us the terms under which we will be allowed to live our lives and earn our livings.

Is that what the American people really intended when they went to the polls last November; to turn the USA into an Obama/Pelosi "worker's paradise"?

Tonight's Music

I just saw this video on YouTube this morning. This is Karen Matheson singing.

Terrorist training camps in America

And I'm not talking about DNC "leadership" seminars.

Here is an interview with Martin Mawyer about the documentary Homegrown Jihad which is being released this month.



Part 1



Part 2

Here are portions of an interview with Ryan Mauro about the documentary that appears in today's Front Page Magazine:

“Homegrown Jihad” documents the networks of Jamaat ul-Fuqra, a terrorist group run by a radical Muslim leader in Lahore, Pakistan named Sheikh Mubarak Ali Gilani, an individual who, as I said in my last interview, does us the favor of not hiding his true colors. While he casts himself as a peace-loving Muslim, his actions and the actions of his network are anything but. In the documentary, we show a secret videotape, one which Gilani strictly instructs his followers to keep hidden, where he personally engages in terrorist training, from killing guards to hijacking vehicles to setting off explosives. On this tape, he says that those seeking to “join one of the most advanced training courses in Islamic military warfare” can contact any of his “Muslims of America” compounds in the United States, almost all of which still operate today.

“Muslims of America” is a group set up by Gilani to act as a thinly-veiled front for Jamaat ul-Fuqra. There are at least 35 “Muslims of America” compounds in the U.S. alone, along with at least 3,000 members, many of which have criminal backgrounds. The websites of these compounds do not hide the fact that they are devoted to, and are led by, Sheikh Gilani. The compound at Red House, Virginia, even has a street named after him. With Gilani saying things like “We are fighting to destroy the enemy. We are dealing with evil at its roots and its roots are in America”, “Jews are an example of human Satans,” and “Act like you are a friend, then kill him”, we need to question the motives and beliefs of those who live in and are educated in his communities and take action to stop them from acting upon these beliefs.

Members of this group continue to be arrested and convicted for involvement in terrorism and all sorts of criminal activity. Members are also required to make a pledge: “I shall always hear and obey, and whenever given the command, I shall readily fight for Allah’s sake.” They continue to recruit members, build and expand compounds, and operate in isolation, away from the eyes of the public.

Perhaps the most riveting part of the documentary is when CAN travels to several of these compounds in an attempt to get members of the group to view the terrorist training videotape and get a reaction. Before joining CAN, I personally visited the 70-acre large headquarters in Hancock, New York. Although the residents were friendly, almost immediately after greeting the man who I spoke to, he said with a disarming smile, “Are you Jewish? It’s clear that the anti-Semitism and overall beliefs of Sheikh Gilani are present at these compounds.

I would urge everyone to go over to ChristianAction.org and get a copy. When and if it is seralized on YouTube I will post it here.

Another one bites the dust

WASHINGTON (AP) - Nancy Killefer, who failed for a year and a half to pay employment taxes on household help, has withdrawn her candidacy to be the first chief performance officer for the federal government, the White House said Tuesday.

Killefer was the second major Obama administration nominee to withdraw and the third to have tax problems complicate their nomination after President Barack Obama announced their selection.

Democrat administrations are always going to have these problems because leftists think that the rules should apply to everyone except themselves. You see they're special because they care so much and they're so smart and they work so hard to grow government and limit average people's personal liberty (because ordinary people in flyover country really can't be trusted to make the proper decisions on their own).

The little messiah's numbers, so far

The Jan. 30-Feb. 1 USA Today/Gallup poll asked Americans to say whether they approve or disapprove of seven specific actions Obama has taken as president. Americans' general support for most of these is in line with Obama's initial overall job approval ratings.

The public is most supportive of his decisions to name special envoys to oversee the administration's efforts in the Middle East, and Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to tighten rules on people working as lobbyists either before or after serving in his administration. Both of these moves are favored by 76% of Americans.

It doesn't matter so much who he picks but what he tells them to do.

I wonder if the Gallup question about ethics rules included the information that Obama feels perfectly free to waive those rules whenever he feels like it. After all if the man simply grants himself an exception to the rules any time the urge strikes him are the rules really anything but hypocritical window dressing?

Americans are nearly as supportive of Obama's actions to limit the interrogation methods that can be used on military prisoners -- actions designed to ensure the United States does not resort to torture to find out information from prisoners. Seventy-four percent of Americans favor that decision, the same percentage who favor his executive order to institute higher fuel efficiency standards.

Ask them this again five minutes after a dirty bomb goes off in Boston and they find out that someone we had in custody knew about the plan but wouldn't talk because we could no longer use techniques like waterboarding.

Same thing for the higher fuel efficiency standards. Ask them again five minutes after they learn that their husband or wife and children have all died in a car accident because they were driving a tinfoil roller skate that gets great gas millage but offers little protection in a crash.

Two in three Americans approve of his signing a bill to make it easier for workers to sue for pay discrimination, the first legislation he has signed into law as president.

Ask them this again after the company they work for goes bankrupt because they get hit with a flood of decades-old discrimination claims that they have no chance of disproving because witnesses are dead and records have been lost. This is why there is a statute of limitations in the first place. Because after a certain amount of time passes it is almost impossible to give the defendant a fair trial.

This is the problem with all left-liberalism. It can sound good when discussed in the abstract and only one side of the argument is presented but in the real world you soon find that things called consequences start rearing their ugly heads.

The public does not agree with everything Obama has done, however. For example, more Americans say they disapprove (50%) than approve (44%) of his decision to order the closing of the Guantanamo Bay prison for terrorist suspects in Cuba within a year.

It's nice to know that the public hasn't gone completely crazy. Doubtless the public's unease about closing Club Gitmo has been fed by the fact that the mainstream media has screwed up and allowed the fact that most of the people we have locked up down there are the worst of the worst. The fact that many of those we have released in the past have gone right back to terrorism must have also made an impression.

Further, Obama's decision to reverse the prohibition on funding for overseas family-planning providers may be the least popular thing he has done so far. This was an executive order that forbade federal government money from going to overseas family-planning groups that provide abortions or offer abortion counseling. Fifty-eight percent of Americans disapprove of Obama's decision to lift this ban, while only 35% approve of it. The ban on federal funds to these groups was put in place by Ronald Reagan, but lifted by Bill Clinton. George W. Bush re-instituted the ban after taking office in 2001, but Obama has once again lifted it.

This should give a great deal of hope to the pro-life community. The fact is the days of unrestricted legal abortion are numbered in this country. The majority of Americans now believe that an unborn child is a human being and that killing it without a very compelling reason is a profoundly immoral act. The fact that a majority still do not favor an outright overturn of Roe vs. Wade only means that the public is still struggling with exactly where the lines should be drawn.

The abortion and Guantanamo Bay prison decisions are especially unpopular among Republicans; only 8% approve of the former and 11% of the latter. But these are also the least popular decisions among independents and Democrats as well, though a majority of Democrats still approve of both.

This is no great surprise. As Rush points out liberalism is a religion and abortion is its sacrament (racism is its original sin and global warming is its Apocalypse).