Pew Joins Gallup and Rasmussen in Polls That Show Obama Sliding Southward

Last Sunday I had a blog with Rasmussen's polls showing Obama's strong DISapproval ratings 11% higher than his strong approval ratings. Imagine my surprise when Monday night, NBC State Controlled Late Night Host Jimmy Fallon had a be-bop due with his chief bandolier of Roots about Rasmussen's being an "outlier" in a hilarious skit about people dissing the porcelain god Obama.

Click on the link to note that Pew is the latest to join the cavalcade of negative polls, which started to cascade after the [Witless] Won went off teleprompter and called the Cambridge police "stupid" adverbially.

As Forrest Gump noted famously, "stupid is as stupid does" and when BarackHussein-O said that Sgt. Crowley acted "stupidly," he was projecting his own behavior and racist thinking onto the policeman, in a vain effort to support the academic fraud Gates, who was simply trying to boost his speaking fees by causing a ruckus that would get him arrested and get a lot of press.

I'll bet he'll get the last laugh with six-figure speakers' fees to victims of academicide across the country, from sea to shining sea.
Not to mention, those humanist humanitarians who are busy trying to tell the rest of us how they mean to guide us from our ignorance to their planet-saving wisdom.

Thank God The First Amendment is still free from their "Fairness Doctrine."

Annals of State Dept. Imbecility, Update

The State Dept. is a place chock full of enemies of American interests, including US traditional support of constitutional government. When State had a Counselor appointed who regards international courts above US courts, it fit into the business as usual at Foggy Bottom, where Alger Hiss types are the rule, not the exception.

The Wall Street Journal highlights the latest abomination from the pin-striped cookie-pushers of indeterminate gender and nationality who seem to be running our foreign policy. Simple-minded Leftist Humanoid Obama seems still under the Cagliostro spell of Latino caciques of the Chavez, Ortega, and Morales variety. Maybe they supply BarackHussein-O with his Bolivian Marching Powder.

Contestant No. 2 No Druze Nor Arabs Need Apply

PBS's Wide Angle had the story of a beautiful Druze girl who was prevented from participating in the Miss Israel Pageant when the Druze Elders ruled that the swimsuit contest would dishonor her family and the entire Druze community. A very moving portrayal of a young woman's quandary when caught in an ancient cultural vise while living in the 21st century. I have Druze relatives and there was a young friend of my daughters who spoke Hebrew while I watched the Arabic/Hebrew dialogue [my Arabic is rusty, but serviceable].

Sadly, while the Israeli Arab female cineaste kept her emotions from exploding onto the film and her editing taste was impeccable, I could not help remembering The UN Arab Human Development Report which among other deficiencies, points out the following:

Responding to a sense of urgency among Arabs about the precariousness of Arab countries at the start of the new Millennium, the first series of the AHDR (2002 – 2005) brought prominent teams of Arab intellectuals and practitioners together to analyze the three most pressing human development deficits in the region: knowledge, freedom, and women’s empowerment.

[my emphasis]
Wonen everywhere should realize that their individuality is suppressed in many cultures to an extent that Ms. Duah Fares received threats and a group of three Druze men were arrested for planning to kill her---for a beauty pageant!

Perez Hilton, move over. There's even bigger assholes out there than you!

UPDATE The Fifth UN Human Development Report since 2002 has just hit the reading public. :
The Economist comments:

WHAT ails the Arabs? The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) this week published the fifth in a series of hard-hitting reports on the state of the Arab world. It makes depressing reading. The Arabs are a dynamic and inventive people whose long and proud history includes fabulous contributions to art, culture, science and, of course, religion. The score of modern Arab states, on the other hand, have been impressive mainly for their consistent record of failure.

They have, for a start, failed to make their people free: six Arab countries have an outright ban on political parties and the rest restrict them slyly. They have failed to make their people rich: despite their oil, the UN reports that about two out of five people in the Arab world live on $2 or less a day. They have failed to keep their people safe: the report argues that overpowerful internal security forces often turn the Arab state into a menace to its own people. And they are about to fail their young people. The UNDP reckons the Arab world must create 50m new jobs by 2020 to accommodate a growing, youthful workforce—virtually impossible on present trends.

I would quibble on the Arab contributions to science, as many of the math and other discoveries were made by El-Ghawarizm, a Persian who invented logorithms [the bastardized Western version of the eponymous homeland in northwest Iran of the math genius, etc.].

But as far as wife-beating and persecuting their own populations, Arab males and military have no equal on the planet.

Wilful Ignorance or Malicious Race-Baiting? Obama is at least Ignorant.

Heather Mac Donald asks the question, at least implicitly, how Obama was foolish enough to attack police activity when he defended race-baiter Gates in his recent news conference.

President Obama’s ignorant attack on the police during his July 22 press conference for picking up blacks and Hispanics “more frequently and often time for no cause” jeopardizes the public-safety gains in every city where the police have brought crime down since the early 1990s. When activists and politicians, not to mention the President of the United States, accuse the police of bias, some officers decide that proactive policing is not worth the risk to their jobs and reputations. It’s easier to wait for someone to be shot than to try to get that gun off the street before it is used. No government welfare program has come close to effective policing in reviving inner-city neighborhoods. If President Obama wants to continue that urban success story, he should acknowledge the value of policing and the hard work of the countless inner-city officers who tell themselves every day they go out on patrol: “I work for the good people of this neighborhood.”

Maybe that's one of the reasons that even the liberal-biased Gallup Poll has Obama's approval rating plunging to just over 50% while his disapproval rating is almost at 40%.
Harry Stein puts the lie to the absurdity called a "Teachable Moment," which in reality is used by black racists to promote their divisive agenda. Stein elaborates:

it’s no surprise that the Henry Louis Gates affair, like last year’s revelation that Barack Obama’s spiritual mentor spouts the vilest kind of hateful tripe, has been cast as “a teachable moment.” What are we meant to be taught? Well, what else? That for all of the progress we seem to have made on race, black people understand, in ways whites can never fathom, that racism is alive and well in America.

With each such incident, however, fewer and fewer of us are playing along. This time, more than ever, we’re learning other lessons. One of them: for all the talk from his starry-eyed acolytes, in the media and elsewhere, about Obama’s being “post-racial,” the president clings to the discredited and deeply damaging view of America as fundamentally racist, seeing his fellow blacks as perpetual victims justifiably suspicious of cops and other establishment authority figures. So when it comes to race, it’s facts be damned. Indeed, while Obama is so famously cautious and deliberative it took him months to decide on the family dog, his now-infamous off-the-cuff comment on the stupidity of the Cambridge police made it clear that on this issue, the former community organizer wholeheartedly embraces the black victim/racist cop trope.

We’re also learning that race hustlers come in all kinds of packages. Henry Louis Gates, notwithstanding his success and prestige, is every bit as ready as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton to wield the race card, and even less apt to take responsibility for his own mistakes and shortcomings. Lest we forget, the supposed Bull Connor he reflexively pegged as a racist operates in the politically correct wonderland of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Gates and his fans would tell you that the incident just proves that racism can rear its ugly head anywhere. By contrast, any rational soul would tell you that instantly jumping to such a conclusion is prima facie evidence of a distorted worldview.

In Gates' case probably to raise his speakers' fees at liberal "academicide" institutions from perhaps $20K to $100K a pop. Surely that was going through the mind of this opportunistic race baiter as he refused to id himself and instead did his moronic rant in his kitchen. Stein continues to elaborate on the completely unqualified ignorance Gates brings as the Chair of a Bogus Department in a bogus university environment, the pathetic arrogant institution that spawns impostors like Gates by the dozens, in ersatz fields such as Women's and African Studies, the refuge of affirmative-action low-IQ slackers who got into Harvard because of what they are ethnically rather than any other qualifications:

We’ve learned, too, that a professorship at Harvard isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. As a scholar in the trendy field of black studies, Gates has built a career on being deferred to by cowed liberal colleagues, and he’s obviously unaccustomed to anyone’s calling him out on anything. In the midst of the current episode, the estimable Mark Steyn recalled Gates’s courtroom appearance some time back on behalf of the rap group 2 Live Crew, in which the professor testified that one of the group’s lyrics was similar to Shakespeare’s “My love is like a red, red rose.” “As it happens,” noted Steyn, “‘My luv’s like a red, red rose’ was written by Robbie Burns, a couple of centuries after Shakespeare. Oh, well. Sixteenth-century English playwright, 18th-century Scottish poet: What’s the diff? Evidently being within the same quarter-millennium and right general patch of the North-East Atlantic is close enough for a professor of English and Afro-American Studies appearing as an expert witness in a court case. Certainly no journalist reporting Gates’s testimony was boorish enough to point out the misattribution.” As one anonymous online commentator observed about the current controversy: “Why wouldn’t Gates expect preferential treatment? He’s been getting it his whole life.”

Stein finally brings in the egregious state-controlled media by the soon to be bankrupt NYT and the book-shill Gwen Ifill on NPR who are predisposed to peddle racist twaddle at the drop of an incident, especially if it involves one of their own elitist statist fake academics::

We’ve also been reminded, once again, that the media are to be trusted even less on race than on other contentious issues. The New York Times, for one, seems always to have a racial-profiling feature prewritten and ready to slap onto the front page. Yet somehow these features never seem to include the vast store of documentary evidence contradicting the fervently held view of minorities as victims of racist cops. Perhaps the most telling media moment during the Gates brouhaha was the observation by an NPR anchor—only slight paraphrasing here—that opinion was divided over whether the police were to blame or there was fault on both sides.

Ifill isn't a journalist and the NYT isn't a newspaper when it comes to race issues. Both are agitprop impostors selling race hatred to advance a racist agenda---a black racist agenda.

AGW a Con Game Played by Environmental Scientists?

An Australian scientist/professor is the subject of a positive article in a Canadian newspaper:

Ian Plimer has outraged the ayatollahs of purist environmentalism, the Torquemadas of the doctrine of global warming, and he seems to relish the damnation they heap on him.

Plimer is a geologist, professor of mining geology at Adelaide University, and he may well be Australia's best-known and most notorious academic.

Plimer, you see, is an unremitting critic of "anthropogenic global warming" -- man-made climate change to you and me -- and the current environmental orthodoxy that if we change our polluting ways, global warming can be reversed.

It is, of course, not new to have a highly qualified scientist saying that global warming is an entirely natural phenomenon with many precedents in history. Many have made the argument, too, that it is rubbish to contend human behaviour is causing the current climate change. And it has often been well argued that it is totally ridiculous to suppose that changes in human behaviour -- cleaning up our act through expensive slight-of-hand taxation tricks -- can reverse the trend.

But most of these scientific and academic voices have fallen silent in the face of environmental Jacobinism. Purging humankind of its supposed sins of environmental degradation has become a religion with a fanatical and often intolerant priesthood, especially among the First World urban elites.

But Plimer shows no sign of giving way to this orthodoxy and has just published the latest of his six books and 60 academic papers on the subject of global warming. This book, Heaven and Earth -- Global Warming: The Missing Science, draws together much of his previous work. It springs especially from A Short History of Plant Earth, which was based on a decade of radio broadcasts in Australia.

That book, published in 2001, was a best-seller and won several prizes. But Plimer found it hard to find anyone willing to publish this latest book, so intimidating has the environmental lobby become.

Quelle surprise! The froth-mouthed leftist academicide elites admit no heretical science and unadulterated facts to interfere with their autocratic apodictic apothegms [sorry for the Greek vocabulary, but such opaque twaddle is how the fake environmentalist "scientists" get their hysterical "sky is falling" religious diktats accepted as common "knowledge" among the MSM nitwits]. The Vancouver Sun continues:

Plimer presents the proposition that anthropogenic global warming is little more than a con trick on the public perpetrated by fundamentalist environmentalists and callously adopted by politicians and government officials who love nothing more than an issue that causes public anxiety.

Not to mention causing a reason to tax carbon dioxide and other "pollutants" which are omnipresent. AGW is a convenient pathway to the statist monstrosity that has ruined societies in the Old World [USSR, Mao's China, et al.] and that Jacobins everywhere wish to implant in the USA. But Plimer's ire is stoked by the short-term ADD of environmental con men:

While environmentalists for the most part draw their conclusions based on climate information gathered in the last few hundred years, geologists, Plimer says, have a time frame stretching back many thousands of millions of years. The dynamic and changing character of the Earth's climate has always been known by geologists. These changes are cyclical and random, he says. They are not caused or significantly affected by human behavior. Polar ice, for example, has been present on the Earth for less than 20 per cent of geological time, Plimer writes. Plus, animal extinctions are an entirely normal part of the Earth's evolution.

Plimer is against all apodictic "believe it or not" belief systems:

(Plimer, by the way, is also a vehement anti-creationist and has been hauled into court for disrupting meetings by religious leaders and evangelists who claim the Bible is literal truth.)

Plimer is livid when the fake politicized environmentalists go haywire on CO2 and other common gases that are up for taxation by the Stalin-wannabes:

Plimer gets especially upset about carbon dioxide, its role in Earth's daily life and the supposed effects on climate of human manufacture of the gas. He says atmospheric carbon dioxide is now at the lowest levels it has been for 500 million years, and that atmospheric carbon dioxide is only 0.001 per cent of the total amount of the chemical held in the oceans, surface rocks, soils and various life forms. Indeed, Plimer says carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, but a plant food. Plants eat carbon dioxide and excrete oxygen. Human activity, he says, contributes only the tiniest fraction to even the atmospheric presence of carbon dioxide.

Plimer declines to blame sunspots or other extraterrestrial phenomena, but his argument about Global Warming is that more of it is better:

There is no problem with global warming, Plimer says repeatedly. He points out that for humans periods of global warming have been times of abundance when civilization made leaps forward. Ice ages, in contrast, have been times when human development slowed or even declined. So global warming, says Plimer, is something humans should welcome and embrace as a harbinger of good times to come.

Don't look for Ian to be invited on any American talk shows of the cable TV or network variety any time soon.

The religious nuts posing as "humanitarians" trying to save the planet brook no commerce with discourse and dialogue---it's accept their word as Gospel or you're part of the much-scorned "wingnut" right.

Biden Makes a "Good Gaffe"

Joe Biden always had a knack for overreach, but this time it is common sense that is threatening to do him in with the corporatist MSM enthralled [or enslaved] by its adoration of The Chosen Won. The WSJ has the pertinent questions:

In an interview with the Journal Saturday, Mr. Biden pointed out that the U.S. and Russia aren’t strategic equals. “I think we vastly underestimate the hand that we hold,” he said, noting that Russia’s economy and population are “withering.” “They’re in a situation where the world is changing before them and they’re clinging to something in the past that is not sustainable.” As for the arsenal Russia inherited from the U.S.S.R., Mr. Biden said, “They can’t sustain it.”

No wonder the Kremlin flipped out, calling the comments “perplexing.” Or that the Administration sent Secretary of State Hillary Clinton out on “Meet the Press” Sunday with reassurances that, “We view Russia as a great power.” Mr. Biden’s common sense observations undermine President Obama’s rationale for a “reset” with Russia built on arms control and a softening of U.S. support for Eurasia’s democracies.

For example, why lock in lower numbers of U.S. nuclear warheads and delivery vehicles such as bombers and missiles in a new arms deal if Russia can’t afford to maintain its stockpile of either? Why indulge Russia’s illusions about its “privileged interest” in Eastern Europe, by signalling a desire to abandon missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic, when as the Vice President notes Moscow’s current regime lives “in the past” and dreams of reclaiming the Imperium? And what, precisely, does the U.S. expect to get in return for these concessions to a “withering” partner?

Every once in a while, the foreign policy expert peeks out from behind the inept political hack in Biden and emits a stunning "truthhood."
Perhaps Dick Cheney was reviled by the toadies and suckups in the MSM because his truthhood quotient far exceeded their delusional hallucinatory outlalalandish enthrallment [enslavement?] to outworn libtard bromides. Although these anodyne statist dirigiste versions of socialism never worked in Europe or elsewhere, they are now being legislated stateside by a collection of zany moonbats in Congress.

Led by a swarthy Cagliostro lost without a teleprompter to keep him on message.

Is Joe Biden The Next Dick Cheney?

Biden characteristically spares no verbiage in his recent interview in the WSJ about his recent trip to Ukraine and Georgia, shortly after Obama's Moscow visit:

“The reality is the Russians are where they are,” Mr. Biden told The Wall Street Journal, according to excerpts posted on the newspaper’s Web site. “They have a shrinking population base, they have a withering economy, they have a banking sector and structure that is not likely to be able to withstand the next 15 years, they’re in a situation where the world is changing before them and they’re clinging to something in the past that is not sustainable.”

Putin's [or rather his hand-puppet Medvedev's] chief foreign policy adviser Sergei Prikhodko had his own view of Biden's straightforward assertions:

The Russian retort had [a] reference to the previous administration, albeit an oblique one. After noting the ambiguity of who was shaping policy for the administration, the president or his deputy, Mr. Prikhodko said, “We have been there already.”

Foreign Policy mag guru Daniel W. Drezner called Biden's observations "dumbass" and referred to Joe's boss B. Hussein-O thusly:

The word "stupid" has been thrown around a lot this week, but I think it applies pretty well to Biden's language.

Methinks the slavishly adorational media honeymoon for Obama and his acolytes might be finite and while the Andrea Mitchells of the MSM still follow Sarah Palin's spoor like dyke-groupies, perhaps they could soon revert to their administration-bashing of the previous eight years.

And given the lack of spontaneous prowess of BHO when he goes off-teleprompter, even the male altar boys for Heresiarch Obama, like Tweety-Bird Mathews and the CNN/MSNBC choirboy castrati might alter pitch and grow stones. Nah!! Too much to hope for....

Oops! Obama's Approval Ratings at Minus-11 & Heading Southward

Obama's witless off-teleprompter response about an agitpreppie Harvard Perfesser playing the race card has accelerated the trend southward of his public approval.

UPDATE Mark Steyn has his usual piercing analysis of this tenured Harvard moron and among the juiciest tidbits:

As to the differences between the professor's and the cops' version of events, I confess I've been wary of taking Henry Louis Gates at his word ever since, almost two decades back, the literary scholar compared the lyrics of the rap group 2 Live Crew to those of the Bard of Avon. "It's like Shakespeare's 'My love is like a red, red rose,'" he declared, authoritatively, to a court in Fort Lauderdale.
As it happens, "My luv's like a red, red rose" was written by Robbie Burns, a couple of centuries after Shakespeare. Oh, well. 16th century English playwright, 18th century Scottish poet: What's the diff? Evidently being within the same quarter-millennium and right general patch of the North-East Atlantic is close enough for a professor of English and Afro-American Studies appearing as an expert witness in a court case. Certainly no journalist reporting Gates' testimony was boorish enough to point out the misattribution.

And Mark recounts his own hilarious encounter with a Vermont state trooper, then finishes his article with a resounding coda:

Gates then told him, "I'll speak with your mama outside." Outside, Sgt. Crowley's mama failed to show. But among his colleagues were a black officer and a Hispanic officer. Which is an odd kind of posse for what the Rev. Al Sharpton calls, inevitably, "the highest example of racial profiling I have seen." But what of our post-racial president? After noting that "'Skip' Gates is a friend" of his, President Obama said that "there is a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately." But, if they're being "disproportionately" stopped by African American and Latino cops, does that really fall under the category of systemic racism? Short of dispatching one of those Uighur Muslims from China recently liberated from Gitmo by Obama to frolic and gambol on the beaches of Bermuda, the assembled officers were a veritable rainbow coalition. The photograph of the arrest shows a bullet-headed black cop – Sgt. Leon Lashley, I believe – standing in front of the porch while behind him a handcuffed Gates yells accusations of racism. This is the pitiful state the Bull Connors of the 21st century are reduced to, forced to take along a squad recruited from the nearest Benetton ad when they go out to whup some uppity Negro boy.
As professor Gates jeered at the officers, "You don't know who you're messin' with." Did Sgt. Crowley have to arrest him? Probably not. Did he allow himself to be provoked by an obnoxious buffoon? Maybe. I dunno. I wasn't there. Neither was the president of the United States, or the governor of Massachusetts or the mayor of Cambridge. All of whom have declared themselves firmly on the side of the Ivy League bigshot. And all of whom, as it happens, are African American. A black president, a black governor and a black mayor all agree with a black Harvard professor that he was racially profiled by a white-Latino-black police team, headed by a cop who teaches courses in how to avoid racial profiling. The boundless elasticity of such endemic racism suggests that the "post-racial America" will be living with blowhard grievance-mongers like professor Gates unto the end of time.
In a fairly typical "he said/VIP said" incident, the VIP was the author of his own misfortune but, with characteristic arrogance, chose to ascribe it to systemic racism, Jim Crow, lynchings, the Klan, slavery, Jefferson impregnating Sally Hemmings, etc. And so it goes, now and forever. My advice to professor Gates for future incidents would be to establish his authority early. Quote Shakespeare, from his early days with Hallmark:
"Roses are red
Violets are blue
Victims are black
Like 2 Live Crew."

Thank God for the Sgt. Crowleys and the Mark Steyns of America. Even Mayor Daley of Chicago upbraided Obama for his mindless elitist dickheaded press conference remarks:

Daley said Obama — who has admitted he used a poor choice of words when he said Cambridge police acted “stupidly” by arresting Gates — should have known “you always have to have the facts” before responding to media questions.

A completely political animal like Richard Daley of Obama's hometown would not make that remark if the Rasmussen chart at the top of this piece wasnt' an accurate snapshot of the country's attitude toward Obama's elitist posturing.

Crazy N-word Arrested After Refusing to ID Self & Shouting Racist Nonsense

The Boston Globe took this police report when the clueless BG figured out that the facts of the case merited this pompous buffoon into custody, if only for his own mental health. This Gates clown reminds us of the wisdom of William Buckley Jr. when he said that he'd rather choose 2000 names randomly from the Boston phone book as members of the US Govt than the Harvard faculty.

Of course, it didn't take long for the clueless Co-Incitor in Chief to add his tincture of racialist BS at a national news conference last night, but I'm sure Al Sharpton will do the followup work. And a note to Al Sharpton:

Henry Gates is a black racist.

And note to America:

Obama spoke "stupidly" at his news conference.

I'm sure Gates acted like a silly old Aunt Jemima on crack to boost his speakers' fees among the gullible libtard academic phalanxes across the USA.

As usual, The American Thinker deserves to have the last word. It quotes Obama and then notes Forrest Gump's famous observation:

STUPID IS AS STUPID DOES!

And judging from his news conference last nite, when he didn't know the relevant parts of the House Legislation on Health Care, Obama is STUCK ON STUPID!!!

George Will Channels Mark Steyn: AGW Loses.

George Will has long been one of the Dutch uncles of conservative writing, emitting urbane and recondite twaddle and common sense wisdom in equal dollops over the decades in the WaPo, often one of its few sane commentators in a political environment where the inmates have taken over the asylum.

Will dissects Obama and his daffy insistence that climate change legislation is "urgent," without noting the cardinal fact that Mark Steyn brings forward in his July 4th salute to the Cap-and-Trade nonsense that Pelosi & Nosewax pounded through the House of Reps. Will looks at it as an international shell game whereas Steyn points out the effect that the AGW Kyoto silliness has had in nations already committed to it:

...most of the developed world has already gone down the paved road of good intentions and is now frantically trying to pedal up out of it. New Zealand was one of the few western nations to sign on to Kyoto and then attempt to abide by it — until they realized they could only do so by destroying their economy. They introduced a Dem-style cap-and-trade regime — and last year they suspended it. In Australia, the Labor government postponed implementation of its emissions-reduction program until 2011, and the Aussie Senate may scuttle it entirely. The Obama administration has gotten to the climate-change hop just as the glitterball’s stopped whirling and the band’s packing up its instruments.

But it's not that Obama's the only retardo, as Canada continues to march steadfastly in "carbon credits" as its IOU scripts based on its declining currency. The biggest nutjobs, predictably, are in Congress, led by a hysterical Madam with an army of pimps.

The Congressional cap-and-trade shtick would be tired even if it weren’t the familiar boondoggle of tax hikes, big-government micro-regulation, and pork-a-palooza pay-offs to preferred clients of the Democratic party. Granted that carbon credits were already a dubious racket equivalent to the sale of “indulgences” in medieval Europe, the decision by Congressional power-brokers to give away credits to well-connected Democratic party interests surely represents the environmental movement’s formal Jumping of the Endangered Great White Shark.

Then Steyn goes on to dissect the rotund philosophe from Minnesota, that southern adjunct of Canuckistan, the tottering and doddering Tom Friedman:

Back at the New York Times, Thomas Friedman agreed the bill “stinks” and says “it’s a mess” and he “detests” it, but nevertheless says we need to pass it because his “gut” tells him to. Maybe his gut’s really telling him the New York Times canteen’s daily specials have been adversely affected by the company’s collapsing share price. Who knows? At any rate, for reasons not entirely obvious from his prose style, the eminent columnist believes himself to have a special influence on the youth of today and so directed the grand finale of his gut’s analysis to them especially: “Attention all young Americans,” he proclaimed. “You want to make a difference? Then get out of Facebook and into somebody’s face. Get a million people on the Washington Mall calling for a price on carbon.”

Perhaps it’ll work. Getting into Thomas Friedman’s face, I see the ruddy bloom of late middle-age has not yet faded from it, so maybe, as his command of the lingo shows, he’s hep to the scene. Maybe the kids’ll abandon their Tweet cred for street cred. Maybe they’ll get outta MySpace and into Sen. Robert C. Byrd’s parking space.

I don’t know how Mr. Friedman defines “young” but let’s be generous: If you’re 29, there has been no global warming for your entire adult life. If you’re graduating high school, there has been no global warming since you entered first grade. There has been no global warming this century. None. Admittedly the 21st century is only one century out of the many centuries of planetary existence, but it happens to be the one you’re stuck living in. Alan Carlin, in a report for the Environmental Protection Racket — whoops, Environmental Protection Agency — that they attempted to suppress, says:

Fossil fuel and cement emissions increased by 3.3 percent per year during 2000-2006, compared to 1.3 percent per year in the 1990s. Similarly, atmospheric C02 concentrations increased by 1.93 parts per million per year during 2000-2006, compared to 1.58 ppm in the 1990s. And yet, despite accelerating emission rates and concentrations, there’s been no net warming in the 21st century, and more accurately, a decline.

[Ed. note: The 11-Year Sunspot cycle from 1998-2009 had few sunspots from the Primary Global Warmer, so that might be a clew.... The two previous 11-year cycles had a lot of "solar weather." The 23rd Round of 11-year cycles since observation began in the mid-18th c. begins this year & could either be sunspotless or a real SGW sunspot epidemic].

And in the final coda to Steyn's glitterball metaphor, George Will takes the Carlin conclusion one better and puts the Waxboy/Nancyfancy style/hoax in its place:

Which could explain why the Mall does not reverberate with youthful clamors about carbon. And why, regarding climate change, the U.S. government, rushing to impose unilateral cap-and-trade burdens on the sagging U.S. economy, looks increasingly like someone who bought a closetful of platform shoes and bell-bottom slacks just as disco was dying.

But Mark gets the very last laugh, as he defrocks and depants and de-dishdashas the hopeless retardos temporarily disturbing the republic:

The Europeans have figured out you can be too European for your own good, and are trying to re-acquaint themselves with the real world. But not Obama. Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead! Male unemployment has hit ten percent? The stimulus is a bust? It’s stimulating nothing but non-jobs like Executive Stimulus Coordinator for Community Organization Stimulus Assistance Programs? Hey, let’s spend even more, even faster, even less stimulatingly!

President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, and their chums are spending at a rate that threatens American stability. And, except for the scale and the dollar figure, it’s all been tried before, and it’s all failed before. There’s nothing cool about Obama. He’s a non-stop square dance, swinging us around till we’re dozy and he’s got all the dough. Happy Independence Day.

Obambi Quiet on Iran, Noisy on Honduras: Welcome Back, Carter?

Obama seems to have taken sides with illegality both in Iran & Honduras, reflecting his Chicago political roots. His rapid and fulsome support of Zelaya, a supporter of criminals like Ortega, who got the message when he lectured Obama on the US evil empire for an hour while Obama looked contrite and took his licks at an OAS meeting. The message: this little fawn is ready to be rolled, and his youthful adoration of Saul Alinsky and his legal support for ACORN, a rent-a-mob crime spree seeking to overturn the electoral process in chosen states, makes Obama susceptible to left-wing mob action against legal institutions.

Zelaya, of course, is no left-winger by heritage, but a narco-trafficker dad, who was a cowboy mega-rancher in the Honduran "wild west," bankrolled him after daddy amassed a fortune by kicking indigenous people off rain forest lands, dumping their bodies if they resisted in wells where they were only recently recovered, chopping down trees and raising cattle and cocoa leaf, which he flew from small airports to Medillin back when Carlos & other drug lords ruled that part of Colombia. Like father, like son.

Now this crime lord tries to overthrow the Constitution and is legally evicted, but Obama, true to his mestizo [oops, "mulatto"] and Chicago roots, sides with the half-breed and with crime in politics.

I guess that also holds true in South America, where Obambi seems cozy with Chavez and Correa and Morales, all half-breed half-wits trying to become caciques in their respective countries. Sadly, the Latin Americans hold true to their political backwardness and economic third-world status.

I can remember when they, not East Asia, were supposed to be the next group of developing nations to attain economic modernity. Silk purse, sow's ear, i guess.

Democrat Overreach---2010 Around the Corner

Ex-Sen. John Kerrey is an outspoken fellow and frankly predicted Obama's current situation:

Five days before Barack Obama was elected president, for example, Mr. Kerrey, a Clinton-turned-Obama supporter, warned of the following in the Daily News: "By my lights the primary threat to the success of a President Obama will come from some Democrats who, emboldened by the size of their congressional majority, may try to kill trade agreements, raise taxes in ways that will destroy jobs, repeal the Patriot Act and spend and regulate to high heaven." Has this come true, I ask? "Well, we'll find out in November 2010," he quips.

If anyone doesn't learn from history, it is the fuzzy-minded soft-tyrants on the Left who believe perpetually that a new day is dawning when the USG raises taxes and increases regulations on the average citizen---1994 is a convenient example.

Big government isn't the cure, it's the illness that prevents the cure.

Texas Makes California Its Cowgirl

The Economist has an article boosting Texas over the bankruptcy-teetering disasters of New York and California.

Texas now hosts more Fortune 500 companies than any other American state. They include AT&T, Dell and Texas Instruments; oil giants such as Exxon Mobil, ConocoPhillips and Valero; American, Continental and Southwest Airlines; Fluor, a huge construction firm (recently lured from California); J.C. Penney; Halliburton; and 52 others. Texas claims to have been responsible for 70% of all the net new jobs created last year in America’s 50 states, though since only a few states created any jobs at all that is not quite as astonishing as it sounds.


True, the film tactfully ignores the recession. Texas followed America into the downturn in September last year, almost a year after the rest. In May it shed a worrying 24,700 jobs, and the Dallas Federal Reserve now forecasts that between 315,000 and 350,000 jobs will go in 2009. But proportionately the May figure was still lower than for the nation as a whole, and Texas’s unemployment rate, at 7.1%, was 2.3 points below the American average. Housing repossessions are still very rare; the state budget is still in surplus even as California and New York teeter on the edge of bankruptcy. Unlike those fellow states with large populations, Texas levies no personal income tax, and with almost unlimited space on which to build, its houses are big and affordable.

All this has brought people flooding in and made Texas America’s fastest-growing state. Net domestic inflows have been running at around 150,000 people in recent years, whereas California and New York have seen net outflows. Next year’s national census is expected to show that flourishing Houston has replaced struggling Chicago as America’s third city. Of the ten largest cities in America, three are in Texas.

Not only does Texas create more jobs, it has the highest relative standing in the area of urban prosperity:

Joel Kotkin, an urbanologist based in California, recently compiled a list for Forbes magazine of the best cities for job creation over the past decade. Among those with more than 450,000 jobs, the top five spots went to the five main Texaplex cities—and the winner of the small-cities category was Odessa, Texas. A study by the Brookings Institution in June came up with very similar results. Mr Kotkin particularly admires Houston, which he calls a perfect example of an “opportunity city”—a place with lots of jobs, lots of cheap housing and a welcoming attitude to newcomers.

He is certainly right about the last point: not too many other cities could have absorbed 100,000 refugees, bigheartedly and fairly painlessly, as Houston did after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. With vibrant Asian communities alongside its balanced Hispanic, white and black mix, with no discernible racial tensions, and with more foreign consulates than any American city except New York and Los Angeles, Houston is arguably America’s most enthusiastically cosmopolitan city, a place where the future has already arrived.

The article goes on to dampen the enthusiasm just a bit, but it is comforting to see one state respond to the worst recession since Jimmy Carter [double-digit inflation, interest rates, et cetera----the mantra of "worst since the Great Depression" is simply an outright fabrication.

Why Meghan McCain Gets Air & Blogosphere Time

I am still scratching my head, wondering how and why this woman all of the sudden just appeares everywhere. Has she actually accomplished anything that merits having such a voice in the media?
Meghan is another in a long line of "Repub" defectors to the Left [remember when Arianna H was ranting about Dem tomfoolery?] who are instantly accorded extraordinary publicity and vaulted to the top of Memeorandum and other Leftish sites. When the opposite occurs, the MSM is completely silent.

Meghan is, of course, a clueless ditz with looks that pass muster in a dark crowded bar after a few hits. But the Left dangles the conceit that Meghan somehow represents the INNER CHILD that her ancient father cannot expose and that she is channeling John's real political fellings.

This pattern will continue as long as American media are in complete thrall to statist elites who wish to overthrow the Contstitution using "soft tyranny" and employing useful idiots like Meghan. In other words, expect more doucherinas like Meghan in the future.

Bad Cop Putin Murders Another Female Journalist, Medvedyev Grins and Simpers....

Poison Wasn't Necessary in Vlad The Empoisoner's "Near Abroad" and esteemed journalist Natalia Estimirova's killers merely kidnapped her and dumped the body in the woods---unlike Estimorova's close friend and murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya who was shot in the face several times in a Moscow elevatpr. Estimirova worked for the human rights organization Memorial in the Chechen capital Grozny and documented abuses by law enforcement agencies.

You can bet that the cowardly, craven US & Eurotard MSMs will ignore this blatant murder, as will Obambi, though for a different reason. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan had a nptorious rule that Western journalists dare not complain about the murder of their colleagues, lest they appear on a death list themselves.....

German PM Andrea Merkel is man enough to demand an investigation, but butt-boy puppet Gerhard SChroeder will predictably bleat in unison with his fellow Eurocowards. They don't want the Russian Bear to come after them....

Could "We" Have Been Wrong on Anthropogenic GW?

To Which I respond: "Keemo Sabe," What do you mean "We" when you are USA Today?

Attentive lay readers of scientific literature have long ago dismissed the publicity about AGW put out by Lyin' Al Gore as politicized rubbish. The UN IRCC had to "discredit" or ignore literally millions of pieces of historical evidence that a Middle Age Warming Period kept Northern Europe cozy warm over several hundred years starting around 1000AD for almost 500 years. Wine was cultivated in England and Germany for centuries. The switch from vine-based cuisine switched to barley-based beer and sauerkraut/pretzels began when the Earth gradually cooled until a lack of sunspots during The Mulder Minimum of the 17-18th century in N. Europe caused massive political and social unrest, including long famines leading to The French Revolution and the "Road to Serfdom" which the IRCC on climate hopes to cement into government policy on a planetary basis. The frauds and room-temp IQs among Gore's army of nitwits "overlook" climate events like the Mulder Minimum when the Thames froze over annually for decades and the Dutch invented ice-skating to cavort and do business on their intricate canal systems during the long winters, these anecdotal historical facts were "overlooked" in the IRCC rush to impose a political carapace over recent 11-year solar cycles full of sunspots.

Any weather climatologist who takes part in Gore's massive UN scam gets rewarded with grants and scholarly emoluments. The goal is world climate control by the serially dysfunctional UN, guided by "politicized gurus" like the Gore-bot. Along with Cap-and-Trade, AGW puts legal authority in the hands of power-grabbing petty functionaries who were unable to work in real jobs outside the bureaucratic ladders.

Moral lepers like Waxman and Frank push the witless Nancy down the path to groupthink and the "soft tyranny" of nanny states like Canada, whose Health system is a total wreck [ask the thousands of Canucks who fled to Boca to avoid dying while waiting in a freezing queue north of the 49th parallel!

Ecopolypse 96 Months From Now, More or Less

Jug-Eared Prince Chucky who still pines for George III, that much maligned historical symbol for the rights of hereditary powers, has ventured to set a date five years AFTER the Mayan end of days, but the red squirrel [I was bitten by one after knocking it from a tree David-like with a stone in northern Wisconsin] may have two more years before vanishing, according to the PoW's calendar of doom. Prince Chucky's giant otological appendages may have picked up some of those noises that dogs hear, but we citified humans cannot. Or perhaps like Siegfried, his German Cousin, he can understand the language of birds. More likely, he is a spokesboy for his American Cousin in the ear department, the formidable Teleprompter Kid, and given geneological charts, Obama's slave-holding Kansas ancestors may have some of Sang-Royal which a short trip through the Almanach de Gotha could solve.

Mark Stein has a lot of fun with all this, including some particularly witless noises from a SF guru:

I always enjoy it when the masks slip and the warm-mongers explicitly demand we adopt a massive Poverty Expansion Program to save the planet. “I don’t think a lot of electricity is a good thing,” said Gar Smith of San Francisco’s Earth Island Institute a few years back. “I have seen villages in Africa that had vibrant culture and great communities that were disrupted and destroyed by the introduction of electricity,” he continued, regretting that African peasants “who used to spend their days and evenings in the streets playing music on their own instruments and sewing clothing for their neighbors on foot-pedal powered sewing machines” are now slumped in front of Desperate Housewives reruns all day long.

One assumes Gar Smith is sincere in his fetishization of bucolic African poverty, with its vibrantly rampant disease and charmingly unspoilt life expectancy in the mid-forties. But when a hereditary prince starts attacking capitalism and pining for the days when a benign sovereign knew what was best for the masses, he gives the real game away. Capitalism is liberating: You’re born a peasant but you don’t have to die one.

Of course, Mark omits the endemic civil wars and socialist chicanery which blotches the entire Dark Continent, but conditions of space and the necessity to insert knife into hereditary prince's ribcage [besides the USA, PoW Chucky thinks that modern architecture is a mistake---too many elevators and escalators for those peasant masses] hamper Mark's emasculation by character assassination. [And PoW Chucky IS a character!] Mark goes on in an amusing and instructive toney rant on how the ecopolypse is simply Al Gore's way of gaining control of the planet by other means than election fraud [just kidding]. Anyway, here's Mark's divagation from political correctness:

You can work hard and get a nice place in the suburbs. If you were a 19th-century Russian peasant and you got to Ellis Island, you’d be living in a tenement on the Lower East Side, but your kids would get an education and move uptown, and your grandkids would be doctors and accountants in Westchester County. And your great-grandchild would be a Harvard-educated environmental activist demanding an end to all this electricity and indoor toilets.

Environmentalism opposes that kind of mobility. It seeks to return us to the age of kings, when the masses are restrained by a privileged elite. Sometimes they will be hereditary monarchs, such as the Prince of Wales. Sometimes they will be merely the gilded princelings of the government apparatus — Barack Obama, Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi. In the old days, they were endowed with absolute authority by God. Today, they’re endowed by Mother Nature, empowered by Gaia to act on her behalf. But the object remains control — to constrain you in a million ways, most of which would never have occurred to Henry VIII, who, unlike the new cap-and-trade bill, was entirely indifferent as to whether your hovel was “energy efficient.” The old rationale for absolute monarchy — Divine Right — is a tough sell in a democratic age. But the new rationale — Gaia’s Right — has proved surprisingly plausible.

The Young are Killing their Ancestors, and Civilization and its Discontents is engendering The Future of An Illusion, to get all Freudian about it. Mother Earth is swallowing her children rather than the nasty old Titan Dad Cronus [Time], but the effect is the same. Mark defines a deeper agenda at work beneath the PoW's false-prophet ravings:

Beginning with FDR, wily statists justified the massive expansion of federal power under ever more elastic definitions of the commerce clause. For Obama-era control freaks, the environment and health care are the commerce clause supersized. They establish the pretext for the regulation of everything: If the government is obligated to cure you of illness, it has an interest in preventing you from getting ill in the first place — by regulating what you eat, how you live, the choices you make from the moment you get up in the morning. Likewise, if everything you do impacts “the environment,” then the environment is an all-purpose umbrella for regulating everything you do. It’s the most convenient and romantic justification for what the title of Paul Rahe’s new book rightly identifies as “soft despotism.”

Taxing everything means controlling everything, and that's the inexorable fate of failed Republics, which defines the current starte of American politics. Norman Thomas was the candidate on the Socialist ticket [his scion Evan is a Beltway pundito] and famously opined that America would become socialist without the word ever being employed. At the moment, a silent majority still sucks its collective thumb as the slap-happy Dems pass otherworldly laws against imaginary climate & health emergencies. Mark finishes them off verbally, the Dems, with his good news that Europe is the US's canary-in-the-coal-mine:
T

he good news is that, at this week’s G8 summit, America’s allies would commit only to the fuzziest and most meaningless of environmental goals. Europe has been hit far harder by the economic downturn. When your unemployment rate is 17 percent (as in Spain), “unsustainable growth” is no longer your most pressing problem. The environmental cult is itself a product of what the prince calls the “Age of Convenience”: It’s what you worry about it when you don’t have to worry about jobs or falling house prices or collapsed retirement accounts. Today, as European prime ministers are beginning to figure out, a strategic goal of making things worse when they’re already worse is a much tougher sell.

Though no longer a Republic, the USA is still a democracy, much to Prince Jug-Ears chagrin, and the ex-colonists might take a tip from the former imperial power that the UK might go Tory soon and then follow by evicting the squatters in DC in 2010.

Wonder Where Obama's Columbia Thesis Went? Hmmm.....

Slate has been assiduously beavering into all and every document concerning Dick Cheney and the Bush Administration, even Cheney's daughter Elizabeth's thesis at Colorado College.

But of course, Obama's original birth certificate, Columbia U. thesis, and various other documents have "disappeared" and no media Stakhanovites are willing to dig and search for those missing pieces of the puzzle that Obama is turning out to be.

His support for an illegal usurpation of powers by a Marxist fossil, a clown named Zelaya trying to illegally engender a referendum without the Constitutional necessity of Legislative agreement, is supported by Hugo Chavez, Daniel Ortega [who lectured a lying-on-his-back-like-a-spaniel pliant Obama during a recent OAS meeting for over an hour], and Evo Morales, who may be supplying the fourth major supporter of the Marxist coup de pouce PotHR named Barry Hussein Obama with white powder that ain't anthrax.

What else could justify such mindless obsequious compliance with Marxist dictator-candidates? Perhaps that "missing" Columbia thesis could give us a clue or two?

Just asking....

UPDATEAnd so is The American Thinker, which astutely ponders how a dude so self-absorbed that he wrote his first autobiography in his early 20's could lose his Columbia thesis on Soviet Nuclear Disarmament, all his "records" as an Illinois State Senator, and somehow his GPAs have also gone into a 1984 Memory Hole.

The American Thinker is more concerned with Cass Sunstein's new book, which has this little teaser alert from The New York Post:

Advance copies of Sunstein's new book, "On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done," have gone out to reviewers ahead of its September publication date, but considering the prominence with which Sunstein is about to be endowed, his worrying views are fair game now. Sunstein is President Obama's choice to head the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. It's the bland titles that should scare you the most.

In "On Rumors," Sunstein reviews how views get cemented in one camp even when people are presented with persuasive evidence to the contrary. He worries that we are headed for a future in which "people's beliefs are a product of social networks working as echo chambers in which false rumors spread like wildfire." That future, though, is already here, according to Sunstein. "We hardly need to imagine a world, however, in which people and institutions are being harmed by the rapid spread of damaging falsehoods via the Internet," he writes. "We live in that world. What might be done to reduce the harm?"

Can you imagine the hurt that civilization might suffer if an insignificant blogger like myself used his twaddle about "people's beliefs are a product of social networks working as echo chambers in which false rumors spread like wildfire." to castigate Anthropogenic Global Warming, the hoax and "product of social networks" now perpetuated by Democrat fantasists like Barbara Boxer into law? This U. of Chicago Law Prof is going to be appointed White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs and will predictably try to employ intimidation against the non-MSM sources like blogs & radio because "Democrats know that criticism over their conduct often emerges from the web and talk radio since traditional media is so reliably in their corner."

Bye bye First Amendment Rights and Greetings to Doublethink and 1984 all over again---this time as non-fiction.

Christian Science Monitor Now Reduced to Imaginative Headlines Online

The Christian Science Monitor used to be a beacon of light in the mindfog journalism of Middle East politics, but now has descended all the way to the bottom rung of the moral ladder. Headlining its article "Risking Israel's Ire..." in a piece about Palestinian refugees getting immigration visas to the US, it gets that trope from an anonymous diplomat in the area who noted that the US in the past has scaled back its quotas on Pals [possibly because of terrorism concerns, but the CSM refuses to admit terrorism exists]. Also it cites conservative opposition, but only quotes Mark Krikorian who rightfully complains that the State Dept. uses small-town USA as a dumping ground for political undesirables in Iraq... Why not grant Iraqi translators the same immigration rights that Palestinians persecuted by Shi'ites? Or what about relocating the Palestinians in Jordan, perish the thought, where so many Christian Palestinians have emigrated to the USA from?

After dissecting the cadaver-article mentioned above, James Taranto asks:

In any case, the notion that America is "risking Israel's ire" by admitting Palestinians from Iraq seems to be a figment of the imagination of whoever wrote the Monitor's headline.

Of course, imagination rather than journalism now appears the beacon guiding CSM's new non-dead-tree existence.

Blow a Whistle? Joe The Plumber and Mr. Ricci Learn the Left Smears Big on Whistleblowers

McClatchy is a news agency which up to now has served as a mellifluous choir lofting paeans of delight and praise toward Obamania and its spendthrift ways. No journalism, but lots of PR imagination at work...

But wait! Suddenly McClatchy blows the whistle on People For The American Way, which when my wife worked for it two decades ago was Norman Lear's Rolodex [remember them?] of celebritards who "wanted to make a difference." My spouse and I marveled at the "absolutely fabulous" types and actually did advance work in Chicago for an event which Norman himself, a stand-up guy very interested in my Wisconsin family get-together we were attending right before the Chicago get-together. Norman and Tony Podesta were in my car as Tony showed us his First Ward digs back when he and brother John were half-Italian, half-Greek [my wife is full Greek] kids growing up on Chicago's mean streets. I had been John's boss back in Bay Ridge two decades previous in NYC Brooklyn during the McCarthy campaign where John cut his political teeth.
[Please excuse geezer wandering...]

Flash forward to now and the PFTAW is up to its original mission, which is to prepare America for a fight against Christian Fascism [Lear's confided to me that his original motivation for starting up PFTAW was fear about the rising popularity of John Robertson],,,,

Oops! It now is trying to undermine a whistleblower named Ricci who has been involved in several lawsuits, including a couple concerning dyslexia and safety issues, making Ricci a chronic complainer. Or so Dahlia Lithwick would appear to contend in Slate after answering the PFTAW's e-mail calling for a three-alarm response to the New Haven firefighter's upcoming testimony at Sotomayor's Senate Judiciary Committee hearings. I wonder if John Podesta has any thoughts about the Democrats' sliming working-class schlub firefighters in order to promote an elitist New Haven educated [at Yale] member of one of their double elite affirmative corps [female Hispanic] to the SCOTUS?

I think Willie Loman or another character from the same playwright [The Crucible] would find much irony on how the Party of the underdog now trashes any and all working-class schlubs who stand in the way of their statist agenda. McCarthy of Wisconsin was demonized for "The Big Smear" & exceeded all rational boundaries in his quest for his goals.

I wonder if the PFTAW or cheap-date Dahlia have such qualms about appearing to be Tail-Gunner Joe's Doppelgaenger on the left?

Teachers' Unions' Insanity Finally Reaches Tipping Point of Moral Outrage

Mickey Kaus notes that when libtard Fr. Hesburgh and Roger Wilkins, plus Eleanor Holmes Norton [who had not paid taxes for a decade when elected as a non-voting DC member of Congress, thus making her a stereotypical libtard] & a couple of other home-team umps all agree that:

resistance to reforms designed to hold schools accountable has hurt "disadvantaged students" and led to "calcified systems in which talented people are deterred from applying or staying as teachers ..."

But wait, there's more!

The unions have battled against the principle that schools and education agencies should be held accountable for the academic progress of their students. They have sought to water down the standards adopted by states to reflect what students should know and be able to do. They have attacked assessments designed to measure the progress of schools, seeking to localize decisions about test content so that the performance of students in one school or community cannot be compared with others. They have resisted innovative ways-such as growth models-to assess student performance.

In their attack on education reform, the national unions have often been unconstrained by considerations of propriety and fairness. They have sought to inject weakening amendments in appropriations bills, hoping that they would prevail if no hearings were held and the public was unaware of their efforts. They have used the courts to launch an attack on education reform, employing arguments that could imperil many federal assistance programs going back to the New Deal. They have failed to inform their own members of the content of federal reform laws.

Sounds like AFTA and the NEA have to clean up their acts, which aren't even selling to the peanut gallery....

Noonan Nitwittery Continues, This Time on Palin

Peggy Noonan tries to make a serious case out of Sarah Palin's resignation from office, but only displays her own serious lack of caring about what a large percentage of the social conservative, religious church-going wing of the GOP base still regards as very important.

Noonan switches from condescending to downright bitchy in her reductionist analysis of Palin's shortcomings, displaying all her East Side Lace Curtain Irish snobbery about Palin's education [putting down the U. of Idaho while exalting Eureka and the U. of Delaware by comparison!] Noonan clearly has an almost personal animus, as do many other faux conservative females, about Palin's family life. The ridiculous attacks on Palin's family [even Conan O'B ridicules the MSM for their savagery] are somewhat dismissed by Noonan and Palin's legal fees not even commented on.

And while ignoring more or less the vicious MSM assaults on her personal and family issues, it is interesting that Noonan derides Palin's personal shortcomings in the foreign policy area while ignoring Biden's ridiculous statements [Hezbollah "kicked out" of Lebanon, Israel on many different sides of the question, other egregious gaffes that thirty-years of "foreign policy experience" have not been enough to avoid]. Biden is becoming the household sick joke that Noonan seems to blame Palin somehow for having become, while sick perverts like Andrew Sullivan and Perez Hilton feast on obsessively speculating about Palin's family woes. Since these two won't ever and perhaps never have experienced a real and loving family atmosphere, it is strange that Noonan sides with their attitude rather than that of a mature and compassionate onlooker [Noonan herself is a divorcee & perhaps this personal failure of her own sparks a strong dislike of Palin, who chose to have a large family AND a political career].

I believe it is time for Noonan to do an examination of conscience and then, upon reflection, unmask herself publically for the left-centrist fellow-traveler and budding apologist for Obamism and its gigantic statist dirigiste socialist project that she has morphed into, perhaps unbeknowst to herself.

UPDATE Slate Slut Lithwick is a bit winded from being a shill for People for the American Way [see above], but still has time to batter Sarah Palin for inarticulate fact-free off-the-cuff verbiage. Strange that Marxist Cadre-Candidate Lithwick doesn't see the same buffoonery in Vice President Biden, or even the Anointed One when he is away from his teleprompter. And no need to bring up Al Gore, whose hallucinatory religious beliefs on global climate and world government are evidently off Slate Slut's list of unintentional political comedy.

ANOTHER BETTER UPDATE! DOCTOR ZERO waxes positively Homeric on how condescending bitch Noonan should be shown the door at the WSJ and shuffled off to HuffPostVille, where she can vie with Arianna and Sklar for most martyred refugee from Republicanism [Remember Ms. H nee Stassinopolis was a big GWHB booster until the GOP refused to allow her the social status a diva demands, and she went off in a Huff [!] to libtard pastures, where her Oxford Masters in Economics makes her smarter than loons like Krugman and failed Broadway critic [and political wit] Frank Rich were manuring the lawns with fecal matter. Arianna's ESL is better than the two Jewish semi-gays in the previous sentence and she occasionally reflects that people like Biden & the self-referential Teleprompter Kid are not presiding over a Roman Triumph, but possibly a Last Supper...

Noonan already dwells spiritually on the Upper Left Side. Might as well move there physically.

House "Intelligence" Committee Disgraces Itself in Spat with CIA

Silvestre Reyes is walking proof that brainpower or the ability to understand complex foreign policy or cultural situations is not a qualification for the Democrats in elevating a Chair from its ranks. Of course, Jane Harman was in line to succeed Nancy Pelosi, the previous ranking member, but San Fran Nan had a long-term dislike for Jane because of JH's IQ which was way into three figures while Nan, despite her De Medici political wiliness, was more like room temperature in the IQ department. Plus Jane is better looking, and even though a fellow Californian, was passed over by the dodissima Speaker of the House for a total ESL dullard from the Texas border---Silvestre is axiomatic of the old saw of politics making strange bedfellows.

When Pelosi stupidly lied and continues to lie about being badly briefed about extreme interrogation techniques when she was ranking Dem member in '03, the moral lepers [and borderline traitors] in the Select Committee on Intelligence were instructed to continue to contend that they were midled and that the CIA intentionally did not inform them of techniques which became politically unpopular after the Abu Gharaib scandal two years later. Now with Star Chamber righteous cynicism, they are even calling for CIA DCI Panetta, a former California Congressman like Pelosi, and unlike her, a man of some moral and intellectual stature.

Panetta refuses [so far] to play their sick games, which makes US foreign policy even less regarded in any light other than misguided since the Carter years when Jimmy was busy giving away all sorts of high ground based on fuzzy shallow bromides concocted in the peanut-sized thought apparatus he was using to get the Shah [and other American allies] replaced by enemies of the USA. [With the Shah, it was James Earl's feminized State Dept, with a little old lady in tennis shoes named Pat Derian in charge of Human Rights, which denied the Shah's police rubber bullets, which in turn caused the death of over 400 students in 1978 during the events leading to the Ayatollah's usurpation of power.]

Now the US is plagued by a rogue legislative process also led by a numbnut female in the House, whose hatred of a smarter female and friendship with silly Silvestre now threatens the CIA as an effective organization. If Panetta folds his cards and is buffaloed, the US will have lost another foreign policy arm in the Dem's frenetic agenda to make America into a banana republic, using the same incompetent and cowardly methods employed by Carter thirty years ago.

Welcome back, Carter....