Wow! NYT Takes Palin Seriously.

Some of Sarah Palin's Ideas Cross the Political Divide
A surprisingly balanced article compared to the outright lies and hyperventilating from the NYT (and others) about Palin in the past. She is a very smart and independent woman who has some really good ideas and it was refreshing to see the New York Times take off its blinkers and take a serious look at her.

DoJ is still Dept. of Injustice.

Under Investigation by DOJ for Using Banned Wood, Gibson Guitar CEO Will Attend Obama's Job Speech

Gibson chief Henry Juszkiewicz denies the charges and is attending as the guest of Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.). The company was raided on similar grounds back in 2009 (that case is still pending). One of the major twists in the story? Juskiewicz is on the record as saying the DOJ told him that if they outsourced labor, there wouldn't be any issue

Details at the link below. This is, truly, outrageous.

DoJ is still Dept. of Injustice.

Under Investigation by DOJ for Using Banned Wood, Gibson Guitar CEO Will Attend Obama's Job Speech

Gibson chief Henry Juszkiewicz denies the charges and is attending as the guest of Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.). The company was raided on similar grounds back in 2009 (that case is still pending). One of the major twists in the story? Juskiewicz is on the record as saying the DOJ told him that if they outsourced labor, there wouldn't be any issue

Details at the link below. This is, truly, outrageous.

No Interest In Any More Speeches

I do not want to hear another speech from Obama. I just don't. I was completely unswayed by his rhetoric in 2008 and I still don't like it now.

This is nothing less than abuse of the Office of the Presidency by using it for campaigning for re-election. Nothing in this speech will be worth hearing because it will be nothing but a thinly disguised campaign speech.

Ugh!

Fast & Furious Investigations Continued

ATF Death Watch 73: Phoenix U.S. Attorney’s Office Implodes Over Gunwalker Why this hasn't been extensive covered by the media nor deeply investigated is a mystery. Oh, wait. Obama.

Fast & Furious Investigations Continued

ATF Death Watch 73: Phoenix U.S. Attorney’s Office Implodes Over Gunwalker Why this hasn't been extensive covered by the media nor deeply investigated is a mystery. Oh, wait. Obama.

Straight Shooting From Palin To Unions

Again, without mincing words or being derogatory, former Govenor Palin has written an excellent message to Union Members on her facebook page. Read it for yourself ...

Welcome, Union Brothers and Sisters

What I say now, I say as a proud former union member and the wife, daughter, and sister of union members. So, as a former card-carrying IBEW sister married to a proud former Laborers, IBEW, and later USW member, please hear me out. What I have to say is for the hard working, patriotic, selfless union brothers and sisters in Michigan and throughout our country: Please don’t be taken in by union bosses’ thuggery like Jim Hoffa represented yesterday. Union bosses like this do not have your best interests at heart. What they care about is their own power and re-electing their friend Barack Obama so he will take care of them to the detriment of everyone else.

Obamacare Raises Costs (aka Dog Bites Man)

Despite my snarky title for this post, this article from Reason below is well worth reading as it explores a recent report "ordered and authored by true-blue ObamaCare backers" which explains precisely how Obamacare is going to make a significant percentage of Americans' lives more expensive.

Whoops! ObamaCare Backers in Wisconsin Produce Report Showing That the Health Care Overhaul Will Make Health Insurance More Expensive

Eugenics Raises It's Ugly Head

Targeting Down Syndrome by Regulation

Perhaps the HHS is not purposefully trying to sneak in a modern-day eugenics program to eliminate Down syndrome by regulation. It is likely that the IOM report relied on professional guidelines that recommend the offering of prenatal testing for Down syndrome. Actual experience, however, has shown that such tests do not “improve wellbeing”—certainly not for the aborted child, but also not for the expecting parents.

Read the whole thing.

California Blues

The Golden State Is Crumbling
This article orginially appeared in The Daily Beast so it's critic of liberal California is all the more telling. With 12% unemployment and the idiocy of the man-made Central Valley drought along with needless and harmful over-regulation, California is imploding. Sad really, that such a once-powerful state now ranks 50th in new job creation. All of which is a terrible example of the wrongness of Liberal economic policies.

California's pain is not restricted to farming towns. The state's regulatory vigilantes have erected a labyrinth of rules that increasingly makes doing almost anything that might contribute to increased carbon emissions—manufacturing, conventional energy, home construction—extraordinarily onerous. Not surprisingly, the state has not gained middle-skilled jobs (those requiring two years of college or more) for a decade, while the nation boosted them by 5 percent and archrival Texas by a stunning 16 percent over the same time period.

There is little chance that the jobs lost in these fields will ever be recovered under the current regime. As decent blue-collar and midlevel jobs disappear, California has gone from a rate of inequality about the national average in 1970, to among the most unequal in terms of income. The supposed solution to this—Gov. Jerry Brown's promise of 500,000 "green jobs"—is being shown for what it really is, the kind of fantasy you tell young children so they will go to sleep.

Many Californians who aren't slumbering are moving out of the state—and not only the pathetic remains of the old Reaganite majority. According to the most recent census, those leaving the state include old boomers, middle-aged families, and increasingly, many Latinos as well. Outmigration rates from places like Los Angeles and the Bay Area now rival those of such cities as Detroit. In the last decade, California’s population grew only 10 percent, about the national average, largely due to immigrants and their offspring. Population increases in the Bay Area were less than half that rate, while the City of Los Angeles gained fewer new residents—less than 100,000—than in any decade since the turn of the last century!

Increasingly, California no longer beckons ambitious newcomers, except for a handful of the most affluent, best educated, and well connected. Through the 1980s and even through the late '90s, the aspirational classes came to California. Now they head to other, more opportunity-friendly places like Austin, Houston, Dallas, Raleigh-Durham, even former “dust bowl” burghs like Des Moines, Omaha, and Oklahoma City. Meanwhile, Golden California, particularly its expensive, ultragreen coast, gets older and older. Marin County, the onetime home of the Grateful Dead and countless former hippies, is now one of the grayest urban counties in the country, with a median age of 44.

Read the whole thing.

US Debt Up 59% Thanks to Hope & Change

U.S. Debt Held by Public Tops $10T for 1st Time—Up 59 Percent Under Obama According to the US Treasury.

During Obama's presidency, debt held by the public has now increased by $3.71694 trillion--or almost 59 percent from the $6.3073 trillion in debt held by the public that the government owed to its creditors on Jan. 20, 2009, when Obama was inaugurated.

Read the whole thing and weep.

Also I should point out that Corruption Queen Maxine Waters wants to "tax banks out of business." That's a nice bit of hope and change that wouldn't destroy America. WTF! Maxine Waters Threatens to 'Tax Banks Out of Business'

Zo's Back - Hooray!

Democrat Windbags Do As Much Damage As Hurricane


Go AlfonZo Go! He is awesome

Delusional Unions

Labor unions adjust to new reality under Obama
Interesting how unions are blaming Obama for not reversing the decades-long trend of union irrelevancy. Unions own bad behavior is to blame. That said, it was this quote from the article above that made me do a spit-take with my morning coffee.

"Obama campaigned big, but he's governing small," said Larry Hanley, president of the Amalgamated Transit Union.

But it looks like Obama wants to keep the illusion alive. Obama to spend Labor Day at Detroit AFL-CIO rally

History and Hopefully TEA Partiers Repeating Themselves

My take-away with the article below is that its author and democrats who are "gleeful" when a candidate is aligned with the TEA Party are clearly forgetting the 2010 elections and the massive spanking they received from TEA Partiers then.

Tea party forcefully shaping 2012 GOP race

Why The UN Needs To Be Abolished

Or at least defunded by the United States and kicked out of New York City.

The U.N. Sex for Food Scandal

The United Nations should be really proud of this one. A new WikiLeaks cable shows U.N. "peacekeepers" were holding food hostage from starving, underaged girls in the Ivory Coast, until sexual acts were performed to as "payment" for food.

Plus this documentary U.N. Me...


Horrifying!

But wait, there's more here - The U.N.’s worst enemy

No Recession With A Government Job

This is the sad thing about the DC area in general and working for the federal government in particular. Government workers are rarely impacted by recessions which means they don't fully grasp what's happening in the rest of the country.

An example of this is Fairfax County which is on the Virginia side of DC and chockablock with federal workers or government contract workers. Not only is it one of the wealthiest counties in the country it is also flush with cash. Fairfax County ends year with $100M surplus

There could be many reasons for this plenty but given it's low unemployment rate of 4.5%, I'm fairly certain it is the reasons state above. It's a crying shame that some of the root causes of America's current economic problems can be laid at the feet of the very people benefiting the most from this crisis.

Polanski's Carnage

Child-Rapist Roman Polanski's film "Carnage" is being released soon and has appeared at the Venice Film Festival.

Needless to say, as I've either linked to articles or blogged about Polanski's shameful behavior here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, I am not a Polanski fan nor am I a fan of actors who are willing to work with or defend Polanski.

The cast list of "Carnage" is below, complete cast and crew list is here.

Jodie Foster
Kate Winslet
Christoph Waltz
John C. Reilly

Freedom of Speech being a value I uphold requires me to allow for differing opinions but it also allows me to judge those opinions and values and speak out against them. Roman Polanski is a child-rapist and anyone who supports him is a tool who does not deserve my financial support by viewing their films.

Obama’s Ozone Action Shows Internal Conflicts

Below is an article my husband posted over at National Review Online (link here):

The president today told the EPA not to continue with action on new ozone standards until 2013 (January 19, perhaps?). An outright cancellation of the rule-making would have been better, but this illustrates that the president is trying to juggle the certainty of destroying many thousands of jobs with the demands of Big Green (who would rather like to see those jobs destroyed). In fact, the main implication of this delay is that the president clearly rejects Lisa Jackson’s outrageous claims that environmental regulations lead to more jobs. If they did create jobs he wouldn’t have taken this action.

My colleague Myron Ebell spells out the political calculations:

What is shameful about the President’s decision to delay the new ozone rule is that it’s all about improving his chances of being re-elected and has nothing to do with the economic damage that the rule would do. The fact that the President still wants to go ahead after he gets re-elected with a regulation that has been estimated to cost $1 trillion a year shows that he could care less about the U. S. economy and the millions of people who have lost their jobs.

In other words, he wants to wait until the economy recovers before he starts destroying it again.

— Iain Murray is the author of Stealing You Blind: How Government Fatcats Are Getting Rich Off of You.

Fast & Furious Round-Up - ATF's Criminal Actions 09-02

ATF Death Watch 66: Obama Fires Acting ATF Director Melson More here

The ATF is having a party (more here) to celebrate successfully breaking the law. (More here, scroll down to "month")

Meet the New Boss... Melson is out, only to be replaced by B.Todd Jones.

New warning bells in Operation Fast and Furious probe (More here from Washington Examiner)

Gunwalker: Details of Coverup Revealed. Emails reveal attempts to hide that Gunwalker guns were present at Brian Terry's murder — within hours of Terry's death.

In a letter, Grassley and Issa say the lead prosecutor on Fast and Furious, Assistant U.S. Attorney Emory Hurley, learned almost immediately that guns allowed onto the street in his case, had been recovered at Terry’s murder. “(I)n the hours after Agent Terry’s death,” says the letter from Grassley and Issa, Hurley apparently “contemplated the connection between the two cases and sought to prevent the connection from being disclosed.” The Justice Department recently transferred Hurley out of the criminal division into the civil division.

An internal ATF email dated the day after Terry’s death reveals the quick decision to not disclose the source of the weapons found at the murder scene: “… this way we do not divulge our current case (Fast and Furious) or the Border Patrol shooting case.”

Another ATF email indicates that the justification both offices used to not charge the suspect with crimes related to the murder scene “was to not ‘complicate’ the FBI’s investigation.”

ATF whistleblowers revealed the link between the two cases to Congressional investigators and CBS News, saying their supervisors were attempting to cover it up.

TEA Party Debt Commission & One of the Four Freedoms

From Instapundit comes the following reporting -

TEA PARTY DEBT COMMISSION UPDATE: David Kirkham of the Utah Tea Party emails: “We are about to start the Tea Party Debt Commission meeting. Standing room only. There must be 200 people crammed in here. I am one of 12 national members on the commission (to mirror the 12 congressional members). Our kick off meeting is in Salt Lake City tonight. The people are suggesting solutions to our nation’s debt problem. This is exciting.”

To coin a phrase, this is what democracy looks like.

UPDATE: A followup email: “The line to speak is out the door. There is a lot of passion in this room. The politicians don’t see us rallying in the streets because we are rallying in meetings and on campaign staffs. Our greatest hope is they underestimate our resolve to get our government spending under control.” Indeed. Another photo below.

And reader Tom Brosz emails: “The second photo immediately reminded me of Norman Rockwell’s ‘Freedom of Speech’ painting, part of his ‘Four Freedoms’ series.”

For your reference, this is the picture Mr. Brosz is refering to -

Employee Salaries

--- Salary of retired US Presidents .............$180,000 FOR LIFE

Salary of House/Senate .......................$174,000 FOR LIFE

Salary of Speaker of the House ............$223,500 FOR LIFE

Salary of Majority/Minority Leaders ...... $193,400 FOR LIFE

Average Salary of a teacher ................ $40,065

Average Salary of Soldier DEPLOYED IN AFGHANISTAN $38,000

I think we found where the cuts should be made

Sounds Reasonable To Me

From My In-Box.

This woman is 51 Karan Diwan is a TV health guru advocating a holistic approach to nutrition and health, promoting exercise, a vegetarian diet of organic fruits and vegetables. She recommends detox diets, colonic irrigation and supplements, also states that yeast is harmful, that the color of food is nutritionally significant, and the futility of fecal examination.



This woman is 50 Nigella Lawson is a TV cook in Great Britian, who eats nothing but meat, butter and desserts.

I rest my case...

Actually Nigella is one of my heros!

Threats from the Weathermen

Do We Really Need a National Weather Service? My husband wrote this article over the weekend and he has gotten threats and insults for this article including a call to our home at 10:30pm on a Sunday which is unacceptable.

By the way, I name and shame. The call appears to be from a man named Bill Martin from Wilmington, DE according to call-back information and an Internet search.

But the important thing about this article and the reaction too it is if the National Weather Service were abolished, these meteorologists could get far better jobs without it.

Right now there is just one service which all industries use. Imagine the job competition among industries like insurance and airlines, oil exploration and construction companies if they all had to hire their own meteorologists.

Take the archeology. It is easy to think of an archeologist's job as one for professors and museum public-sector folks. But there are good archaeologist jobs out there working for private sector development companies and the cell phone industry. I know this because certain of my family members did. So why can't meteorologists?

In short, my husband's recommendation opens up the playing field for meteorologists to specialize or generalize as much as they wish. There would be certain advantageous cross-pollination of thinking and a real requirement for both accuracy and a better understanding of how humans interact with the climate.

And yet, these close-minded weathermen think it is okay to insult, threaten and disrupt the man who dared suggest these ideas. For shame.

For the record, we are now going to trace and record all our phone calls from unlisted or unknown numbers. If we are threatened or harassed in any way (and I have a very broad definition of harassment), I will call the police and file charges.

Random Round-Up 08-25

Attorney General of N.Y. Is Said to Face Pressure on Bank Foreclosure Deal The pressure being from the Obama administration asking the NYAG to not investigate the possibility of criminal behavior on the part of several big banks and their role in the mortgage crisis/fraud.

Another "rube" wakes up - Obama and the 'Competency Crisis' Mort Zuckerman longs for the days of '08 as he recites the long, long list of Obama's failures.

Fewer Americans are working full-time today than when Mr. Obama took office. We have lost over 900,000 full-time jobs in the last four months alone, and long-term unemployment is at a post-World War II high. The public's faith in his ability to deal with the economy has plunged. As Doyle McManus of the L.A. Times put it, "Can this president persuade voters to let him keep his job when so many have lost theirs?" Even Jimmy Carter didn't plumb the depths of national dissatisfaction revealed in the stunning Gallup poll taken Aug. 11-13. The president's approval rating was only 39% with a mere 26% approving of his handling of the economy.

There's lots more in this article, read the whole thing. His ending is laughable however.

U.S. initial jobless claims rise unexpectedly. I'm thisclose to demanding that "unexpectedly" be removed from all references to this administration's job performance. Ever single economic crisis that has occurred under Obama was entirely expected by those of us who try not to repeat history repeatedly. Initial Claims Surge Far Higher Than Consensus, 1.2 Million Americans Have Dropped Off Extended Benefits Claim In Past Year

White House sources today claimed that the First Lady has spent $10million of U.S. taxpayers' money on vacations alone in the past year I have no words. Well actually I have quite a few choice words but I don't wish to use them here.

What I've Been Up To The Last Few Weeks