Oh Who Am I Kidding - I'm Gone

Well, who am I kidding. I can't blog today.

I'm too excited about our trip tomorrow to Jamaica!!! We're going to FDR Pebbles for the third time.

It is a fabulous, locally-owned, small, green-certifid all-inclusive resort that assigns a Vacation Nanny to every family. Your Nanny is included and will help with your children for your entire stay.

We've requested our nanny from our last visit (Hooray Ms. Ty) and are making plans to have lunch with our first nanny (Hooray Ms. Shafay). Both ladies are wonderful and the kids love them.

Best of all, they will babysit the kids at night for a nominal fee so my husband and I can have dates.

So I'm outta here and will come back at the end of July.

Obama's Game

We're just a game to these politicians.

Going Soon

Can't wait for Jamaica

I Wonder Why NARAL Has No Comment

(Originally posted by Mark Hemingway at NRO)

From The Washington Times:

Fetuses found to have memories

by Jennifer Harper

They weigh less than 3 pounds, usually, and are perhaps 15 inches long. But they can remember.

The unborn have memories, according to medical researchers who used sound and vibration stimulation, combined with sonography, to reveal that the human fetus displays short-term memory from at least 30 weeks gestation - or about two months before they are born.

"In addition, results indicated that 34-week-old fetuses are able to store information and retrieve it four weeks later," said the research, which was released Wednesday.

Scientists from the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Maastricht University Medical Centre and the University Medical Centre St. Radboud, both in the Netherlands, based their findings on a study of 100 healthy pregnant women and their fetuses with the help of some gentle but precise sensory stimulation.

[SNIP]

The team also found that the tiny test subjects actually improved these skills as they grew older, with those who were 34- or 36-weeks old clearly showing that they had become familiar with the hum outside the womb.

"The fetus 'remembers' the stimulus and the number of stimuli needed
for the fetus to habituate is then much smaller," the study said.

"It seems like every day we find out marvelous new things about the development of unborn children. We hope that this latest information helps people realize more clearly that the unborn are members of the human family with amazing capabilities and capacities like these built in from the moment of conception," said Randall K. O'Bannon, director of education and research for the National Right to Life Educational Trust Fund.

A call to NARAL Pro-Choice America for comment on the implications of the research were not returned.

This makes abortion, especially late term abortion, all the more immoral and repugnant.

Funny But Still Scary

When SNL was funny (now its scary that Franken is in the Senate.)



Hat Tip: Michael Warren

Haggling Over the Price

(Has my husband called Rockefeller a whore over at NRO - the Corner? Looks like it. My hubby is a good and honest man.)

So Sen. Jay Rockefeller is wavering on the electricity tax bill now, is he? Despite this posturing, I have no doubt that the West Virginia senator is looking to sell out his constituents by doing what his president wants and bankrupting the West Virginia coal industry. He's voted for every energy-rationing measure ever to come up before him. All he's doing is holding out for a higher price, and we know that the going rate for a yes vote on this bill is a pretty generous one already: $3.5 billion of taxpayer money.

As someone once said, a blue dog is just a yellow dog holding its breath.

World's Fastest Everything

You do not need the volume on for this one.

MythBusters Quote of the Day

"We won't run out of material until people stop believing stupid sh*t"

Well worth the watch - see it here.

Obama Over-Reach?

Just which US Constitution is Obama working off of?

PJTV answers that question here. Enjoy.

Who's In Your Wallet?

Sonja Schmidt makes the Obama Credit Card just for YOU.

Fois Gras Jelly Donuts

I know where I'm going if I ever get to visit my sister out West - to Le Pigeon in Portland OR to eat a Fois Gras Jelly Donut.

Mmmm, donuts. Mmmmm, fois gras. Oh the highs! Oh the lows!

I am so there.

Pro-Eugenics Science Czar

Obama sure can pick 'em. This time Mr. Abortion selected a Doctor of Science-Fiction to be the new director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (aka Science Czar).

John Holdren has has a long distasteful history of advocating eugenics (like all good liberal fascists) and...

"has been a longtime prophet of environmental catastrophes. Never discouraged but never right.

And thanks to resourceful bloggers, you can read excerpts from a hard-to-find book co-authored by Holdren in the late 1970s, called Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment, online.

In it, you will find the czar wading into some unpleasant talk about mass sterilizations and abortions."

According to this article from Cato's Reason, here.

So Obama, a man who believes babies born alive after an abortion can be left to die, has selected a "scientist" who has regularly been proven wrong and stated in his book Ecoscience in 1977, "population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution."

What does it say about Obama's executive abilities that his nominations are either tax cheats, failures, or idiots advocating eugenics?

Hope for change.

A New European Leader

(Originally posted by my husband at NRO)

Internet megastar Daniel Hannan MEP writes for ConservativeHome about the new leader of a recognizably conservative group in the European Parliament, Poland's Michal Kaminsky:

Every day, he lived with the moral shabbiness, the material squalor, the thousand petty lies of Jaruzelski-era Poland. When Michal was small, his father defected to Canada. They met once, in Michal’s teenage years, in Cuba – the only state to which they could both get visas. Michal’s father urged him to defect, but Michal replied that he wanted one day to sit as a conservative in a free Polish Sejm. A few years later, he did, although his father was sadly no longer alive to see it.

That such a man, having led such a life, should now lead our Group, does more for European unity than any number of federalist declarations. The Europe that Michal and I believe in is one united by the spread of freedom and democracy, by commerce, by the actions of independent citizens. This is a world away from the Europe they want in Brussels, united by rules and regulations, by institutions and bureaucracies, by anthems and flags.

When Michal made his first speech as an MEP, he hymned the praises of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, to the unfeigned horror of the EPP. He is, in short, the closest thing to a British Tory outside the Carlton Club.

Daniel's explanation of how Mr. Kaminsky came to lead the group is also edifying, and a reminder that there are still some gentlemen left in politics.

Warming Continues . . . at Airports

(Originally published by my husband at NRO)

According to NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (whose boss was arrested last week), this June was the second warmest June ever. That's not what the other measures of global temperature say, so I'll hand you over to Anthony Watts for an explanation of how this could be.

House Members Being Hammered Over Waxman-Markey

(Originally posted by my husband at NRO-The Corner)

I'm hearing that the popular reaction to the passage of the Waxman-Markey electricity tax bill in the House has blown House members away. The public outrage is really hurting those who voted for it, and that's why the bill has been "parked" (as the Blair government used to say) in the Senate. Very good sign. We need that sort of public pressure to defeat this monstrosity, and similarly for the health-care plans. If these two overreaches go down, Obama's political capital will be spent. How often has a president become a lame duck by his own actions within a year of taking office?

Melt the phone lines, my friends or you will be paying and paying and paying.

While you're calling your Senators here and your Representatives here, may I also suggest that you let the jokers know you completely reject the 52% Tax Rate that Obamacare would require to fund that particular nonsense.

"Free" healthcare resulting in one of the highest tax rates in the OECD, household energy costs skyrocketing, and job losses due to companies escaping these horrendous tax and cost burdens, what are these liberal idiots thinking?

And don't believe the democrats when they say only the rich will be hit as Dan Mitchell explains below.

Obamacare/Dem Flowchard Hell

Click here and if you can follow this flowchart to a place where the Democrats' healthcare plan/Obamacare leads to reduced healthcare costs, then God Bless you.

Why The Secrecy?

First, during the election, we got no access to important and typically released documentation from Obama. Documents still unreleased are:

WND has reported that among the documentation not yet available for Obama includes his kindergarten records, his Punahou school records, his Occidental College records, his Columbia University records, his Columbia thesis, his Harvard Law School records, his Harvard Law Review articles, his scholarly articles from the University of Chicago, his passport, his medical records, his files from his years as an Illinois state senator, his Illinois State Bar Association records, any baptism records, and his adoption records.

Now WND (WorldNetDaily) is reporting that "A U.S. Army Reserve major from Florida scheduled to report for deployment to Afghanistan within days has had his military orders revoked after arguing he should not be required to serve under a president who has not proven his eligibility for office."

This soldier's case is all about whether or not Obama is a natural-born citizen of the United States and if not, then he is ineligible to command the US military, let alone be president.

To date, Obama has not released the long-form birth certificate. Why the secrecy? And why in the face of a civilian court hearing has the military suddenly revoked this soldier's deployment orders?

If the truth sets your free, Obama's secrecy is caging him.

An Offer You Can't Refuse

(Because NRO doesn't let me link to webposts separately, below is Mark Steyn's post in full on Obama's "Chicago-style" handling of dissent. Not very goo AT ALL.]

This seems, at the very least, somewhat heavy-handed, as well as a not altogether appropriate use of cabinet officials' time. Sen. Jon Kyl (Republican of Arizona) has the temerity to suggest the stimulus is a bust, and immediately the Big O dispatches half the cabinet to write letters to his governor:

The White House on Tuesday released letters from four cabinet secretaries to Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, a Republican, citing Kyl’s comments and outlining transportation, housing, Indian education and other projects in his home state they said would be eliminated if the senator has his way...

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, one of two Republicans in Obama’s cabinet, made no attempt to conceal his needling.

Kyl “publicly questioned whether the stimulus is working and stated that he wants to cancel projects that aren’t presently under way,” LaHood wrote Brewer. “If you prefer to forfeit the money we are making available to your state, as Senator Kyl suggests, please let me know.”

Why not just break his legs in the Senate parking lot? Kyl "publicly questioned" the stimulus? We can't have that, can we? The "Dissent Is The Highest Form Of Patriotism" bumper sticker was canceled by executive order on January 20th.

In other news:

Obama Calls Economic Crisis Transformative

Hey, "transformative" is my word. And it's not a compliment.

Meet Me in St. Booie!

(Andy McCarthy piece on NRO-The Corner about Presidential Throws)

Though it's not a widely appreciated fact, we right-winger sports nuts have long known that the sports press is among the media's leftiest precincts. So I suppose we shouldn't be surprised at how little was said (as in nothing at all) about the reception President Obama received last night when he came out on the field to throw out the ceremonial first pitch at the baseball all-star game in St. Louis. It was a packed house (over 50,000 in attendance), and the jeers were easily discernible.

Don't get me wrong: there was more cheering than booing. But that's to be expected: It was a festive national occasion, and most of us who disagree intensely with Obama's policies would be more apt to stand and cheer our president respectfully. That's what made the booing all the more noticeable to anyone — other than a sports journalist — who heard it.

The media fawning really is so shameless it's become self-parody. Take ESPN, for example.

Put aside the unacknowledged booing for a moment. The other embarrassing fact is that my six-year-old throws a baseball better (far better, in fact) than Obama. Yet the media went out of its way to obscure that, too — no doubt wishing to avoid unfavorable comparisons to the strike President Bush famously fired from the mound at Yankee Stadium at the 2001 World Series. In its live broadcast, Fox (and remember, this is Fox Sports, not Fox News) covered Obama's first pitch at a very weird angle that conveyed his spastic motion but didn't do justice to how pathetic the toss was. But that's nothing compared to ESPN's laughable coverage. Here's the clip. Besides reporting only that there was a "standing ovation for the commander-in-chief," the announcer made a point of noting that Obama's pitch "didn't bounce" before reaching home-plate (though the announcer did cop to the "horrible camera work that made the trajectory of the pitch impossible to see).

Now, take a look at this clip from MLB.com, about 24 seconds in. It's the only decent footage I've seen, and it shows that Obama's first pitch did bounce. In fact, the pitch did not even reach home-plate — and they evidently knew it wouldn't. The player who was sent out to catch Obama's pitch (more on that in a moment) was crouching on top of home plate, not behind it where catchers always set up. And even so, he had to reach out a couple of feet in order to short-hop the ball, which otherwise might have bounced all the way to the backstop.

Now, about that player who caught Obama's pitch: It was none other than the Cardinals' great first-baseman, Albert Pujols. What does that matter? Well, the tradition is that the first pitch is tossed to the catcher, not the first-baseman — and, in fact, the starting catcher for the National League last night was the Cardinals' own Yadier Molina. But while Molina is popular, Pujols is like God in St. Louis (in fact, a fan in the stands either last night or the night before was holding a banner that said, "In Albert We Trust").

I think Obama's people knew he would get a very mixed reaction last night. His entrance was shrewdly orchestrated. The cheers and boos started as soon as he came onto the field, but he was steered immediately over to shake hands with Stan Musial — the most beloved player in the history of the Cardinals. No true St. Louis fan would boo Satan if he was shaking hands with Stan the Man. The president then went straight to the mound, where today's Stan the Man, the great Pujols, took good care of him — quickly embracing Obama right after making sure his heave looked borderline respectable ... with a little help from the cameras. Finally, Obama moved was ushered quickly over to the third-base line, where Cardinal legends Bob Gibson, Ozzie Smith, and Lou Brock (among others) were there to share warm-handshakes.

In the box score, as reported by the Obamedia/Sports Division, it will read like a standing-O for The One as he hurled a bull's-eye before strutting off to warm waves of adulation. If you were watching, though, Obama looked like the guy who bowled a 37.

Perils of Obamacare revealed by CandaCare

Steven Crowder at PJTV exposes why nationalized healthcare is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Watch it here!

Look under the video to see the follow-up stories on this travety called "free" healthcare.

0% Tax Proposal

Peter Ferrara has an interesting op-ed in The Wall Street Journal proposing a 0% tax rate for 60% of Americans, here.

I think I'd be more in favor of a %5 flat tax on all working Americans instead but Mr. Ferrara does make some good points.

Whither Islam?

Ali A. Allawi has written an article titled "Islamic Civilization in Peril" for The Chronicle of Higher Education here.

An important take on the future of Islam from an important muslim.

Driving the Debt Car

So good I had to repost it!

Can Cats Control Humans?

Ummm, apparently YES. Here is the study.

This comes as no surprise to pet owners but I do find it amusing that for all our very human hubris of being the most advanced animal on planet Earth, we can still be bossed around by 16 pounds of fur and purr.

The Benefits of Stopping Illegal Immigration

Here is a recently released case study of the ICE raid of a Smithfield Ham factory in North Carolina and how the removal of 1,000 illegal immigrants impacted the workers.

Some key points and timeline below:

The sequence of events includes:

The Smithfield Plant, represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW), failed to unionize in both 1994 and 1997. An administrative law judge found that the company committed “egregious and pervasive violations of labor law” during the 1997 effort when it used the employees’ illegal status to threaten them.

After the initial attempts at unionizing, Smithfield and the UFCW engaged in a bitter dispute. The union launched a public relations campaign and picketed Smithfield customers. Smithfield, in return, filed a federal racketeering lawsuit against the union.

The ICE raid, which took place in January 2007, both purged the plant of illegal workers and forced the management to set procedures to check immigration status of future hires.

The raid opened the door for an American and legal immigrant workforce. After the raid, the Hispanic workforce dropped by approximately 1,000 workers and was replaced by mostly African American workers. Less than two years later, in December 2008, the new workforce voted for unionization.

Given Smithfield's history with unions, it's not surprising that they hired so many illegal immigrants. But this plant is in Tar Heel, NC and a 1,000 illegal hispanics does not reflect the local demographics. Smithfield only hired them out of greed and their illegal status prevented the plant from unionizing.

It is this sort of behavior by unscrupulous companies that keeps native Americans (especially African-Americans) unemployed. And however you feel about unions, it can be argued they form a need in the face of such behavior.

Slow News Day

Sorry. I got nothin'.

Could tell you that in five days I'm going to Jamaica.

FDR Pebbles. It will be our third time going in four years.

Here is my Tripadvisor.com review from 2006. I LOVE THIS PLACE.

And I love my Vacation Nanny. I still keep in touch with them. Can't wait to see her on Sat.

Nope. And he doesn't walk on water either

An Ode To Billy Mays

The inestimable Sonja Schmidt gives Mr. Mays his well-deserved eulogy.

Obama's Weak Op-Ed

Stephen Spruiell dissects with Obama's Washington Post op-ed with an extraordinarily well-linked webpost, here.

You know MacBeth is another well-known fictional character who creates terrible mixed metaphors - just like Obama.

Victor Davis Hanson puts his view out here.

And Keith Hennessey gives Obama's op-ed a good old-fashioned Fisking, here.

Eek Gay People

PJTV's Take here.

AlfonZo tells You What's Up

The Doctor is in.