The decision is a blow not only to Deeds, who has struggled to attract support from some leaders in the black community, but potentially for Obama, who is facing the first electoral test of his presidency in the race between Deeds and Republican Robert F. McDonnell. SNIP Wilder is the second prominent black Virginia resident to snub Deeds. In July, Sheila Johnson, the wealthy co-founder of Black Entertainment Television and a major Democratic donor from Middleburg, stunned the political establishment by endorsing McDonnell and his plans to revive the economy.
Thamail Morgan took the kickoff and headed up the field.Read on and get a little teary eyed.
He was at the 20 ... 30 ... 40
He had been avoiding, dodging or just simply running through tacklers on the way. Football always had come easily for Morgan. This game was no different. By the time he hit midfield, only open space was ahead of him. The two-time Arkansas all-state selection was headed for a touchdown.
40 ... 30 ... 20
He glanced at the clock and saw the final seconds ticking away. He realized his team, Cave City, was on the way to a victory over Yellville-Summit, comfortably ahead, 34-16. He also realized two other things: This wasn't an ordinary game. And he wasn't the same Thamail Morgan.
When he reached the 2, he stopped. He took a few steps back and took a knee at the 5-yard line.
"So for those who question the character and cause of my nation, I ask you to look at the concrete actions that we have taken in just nine months." That's from President Obama's speech to the U.N. yesterday. Has he ever uttered a more revealing sentence? Could his speechwriters turn down the administration's self-love just a notch?
I just worry that as our own Narcissus is so entranced by his own reflection in the pond of the media that he is going to take us all down with him.
Even before U.S. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis was sworn in, Big Labor insiders like AFL-CIO lawyer and Obama appointee Deborah Greenfield were busily dismantling useful union financial disclosures produced by former Labor Secretary Elaine Chao. It’s another Big Government – Big Labor partnership aimed at keeping individual workers, whom they claim to represent, in the dark.Go to the actual BigGovernment.com website and follow all the nauseating links.
Why the hurry? Perhaps Union Bosses wanted to prevent the Virginia GOP and inquisitive people like Patrick Semmens from visiting DOL’s UnionReports.gov website that clearly reveals the Big Labor-ACORN collusion. Semmens discovered that teachers’ union bosses gave about $500,000 to the same Brooklyn ACORN office exposed on BigGovernment.com. Both the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) awarded ACORN service contracts.
That’s right; union bosses gave teachers’ forced union dues to the same ACORN that appeared to have no problem facilitating child prostitution. No wonder Solis’ Big Labor friends want to shutdown financial disclosure!
The governor's appointee will serve until a special election is held Jan. 19, and will give President Obama the critical 60th U.S. Senate vote he needs to pass a health care overhaul this year.And yes, this is the guy the Kennedy family asked for.
Critics say Kevin Jennings is too radical for the job of director of the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools, citing what they say is his promotion of homosexuality in schools, his writings about his past drug abuse and his onetime contempt for religion.
Palin is an authentic, powerful voice of the populist right and in the speech she implicitly connects its call for limited government and sensible fiscal policy with America's role as a world power. Palin can play a very important role in channeling the inchoate populist anger out there in a responsible direction, which makes it all the more important that she engage on the issues in a serious way and avoid rhetorical over-kill. The speech, judging from what we've seen of it so far, is a big step in the right direction.
Senate votes against an attempt by Republicans to keep in place a plan by the Bush administration to allow oil and gas drilling along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.Idiots.
The embarrassing revelation in a recent Washington Post story that Attorney General Eric Holder “did not read detailed memos that prosecutors drafted and placed in files to explain their decision to decline prosecution” of CIA interrogators is just another example of a seriously flawed decision-making process in the Obama Justice Department.
If you've been following President Obama's speeches on climate recently (if you could pick them out from all the others), you may have noticed a new turn of phrase. From yesterday's effort:I am proud to say that the United States has done more to promote clean energy and reduce carbon pollution in the last eight months than at any other time in our history. . . . We’re investing billions to capture carbon pollution so that we can clean up our coal plants.In the administration's newspeak, "carbon pollution" has replaced "greenhouse gases." Presumably floods will henceforth be referred to as "water pollution" and heatwaves as "solar pollution."
Marlo Lewis has more at Openmarket.
President Obama's diversity czar at the Federal Communications Commission has spoken publicly of getting white media executives to "step down" in favor of minorities, prescribed policies to make liberal talk radio more successful, and described Hugo Chavez's rise to power in Venezuela "an incredible revolution."
Barack Obama has a history of belittling his adversaries in just such a fashion. In April, 2008, he was caught on tape during a debate with Hillary Clinton, rubbing his hand across the right side of his face and extending his middle finger in an obscene gesture that many in the audience could see it but she could not, and when this provoked laughter on the part of his supporters he responded with a knowing smile. Later, after accepting his party's nomination, he did precisely the same thing during a debate with John McCain; and, after Sarah Palin remarked at the Republican National Convention that the only difference between a pit bull and a soccer mom was lipstick, he observed at a rally that a pig with lipstick is still a pig. Again, many in the audience caught the dig and they, too, were rewarded with a knowing smile.This is not a good thing.
Obama is, in fact, a master of the insulting gesture.
Last night Esquire threw a party for Michael Moore's new documentary Capitalism: A Love Story, which all about the vulgar displays of income inequality in this country and how Americans are suffering as a result of the recession. Then according to one person who attended the premiere, this happened:I do not understand why anyone would be in the same room as such a vile hypocrite as Michael Moore. Too ugly and untalented to actually act, he makes his error-ridden (if not outright lying) documentaries centered around him. Basically, watching a Micheal Moore film is watching a narcessitic man intellectually masterbate. His false outrage, his demeaning of values and culture, and his mendancy towards the subjects of his celluloid delusions deserve nothing but avoidence and comdemnation.Following the Premiere, Esquire shuttles many of the attendees straight down to SoHo to the opening of The Esquire Apartment – a fully decadent penthouse where every square inch is paid for by a luxury sponsor. Hot tub, $120k pool table, $60k home theater, fine food. The only thing lacking was a doormat saying “Welcome To Capitalism.”
I had fun….But ooooh the irony. Everyone I talked to was like, “man, this is the most bizarre combination. I bet Michael Moore would freak out if he saw that this was happening.”….And then he showed up. And was eating it up. And then one of the families from the film came.
Eighteen months after being laid off, Judith Lederman, a 50-year-old divorcee who lives in Scarsdale, N.Y., is ready to consider jobs paying half the $120,000 she earned as a publicity manager at Lord & Taylor. That's mostly because she's desperate, but it also makes sense when you consider how this country punishes work effort. While the first $60,000 of her income would be lightly taxed, the next $60,000 would be hit with what is in effect a 79% tax rate. [emphasis mine] Given a choice between a part-time or easy job paying $60,000 and a demanding, stress-ridden job paying $120,000, Lederman would be wise to take the former. In the tougher job she would be contributing twice as much to the economy. But she wouldn't be doing herself much good. It would make more sense to take it easy and spend more time with her high school senior daughter, Casey.
What the economists found (free but complicated download for researchers) was:With per vehicle environmental benefits at $596 and the costs at $2,600 per vehicle, the clunker program is a net drain on society of roughly $2,000 per vehicle. Given the approximately 700,000 vehicles in the program, we estimate the total welfare loss to be about $1.4 billion. The welfare loss would be even greater if we fine tuned our estimate of the social cost per gallon to account for the spatial mix of clunkers. Clunkers, especially the trucks that comprise a large percentage of the traded-in vehicles, may have been retired disproportionately from rural locations where the social costs of pollutants are significantly lower. Also, if the average value of clunkers exceeds our conservative figure of $1000, then cost of the program would be higher. Even if the environmental gains were double our estimate, the net drain would still be close to $1 billion. While a more rigorous analysis would no doubt adjust these figures, we doubt that the basic conclusion would change.It is plausible that a much smaller, very well-designed program might have been a net benefit, but this verdict seems unassailable to me. I imagine that the costs to society in terms of damage to the used-car and spare-parts industries caused by the destruction of the vehicles concerned may result in the actual value of clunkers being more than $1,000.
Nearly 150,000 same-sex couples reported being in marriage relationships last year, many more than the number of actual weddings and civil unions, according to the first U.S. census figures released on same-sex marriages.
About 27 percent of the estimated 564,743 total gay couples in the United States said they were in a relationship akin to "husband" and "wife," according to the Census Bureau tally provided to The Associated Press. That's compared with 91 percent of the 61.3 million total opposite-sex couples who reported being married.
A consultant to the Census Bureau estimated there were roughly 100,000 official same-sex weddings, civil unions and domestic partnerships in 2008.
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