Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Friday, April 9, 2010
Friday, March 12, 2010
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Snow White, Revisited
Phony fruits in the Obama White House garden
Michelle Malkin - Syndicated Columnist
Hold on to your hoe. It turns out that the fruits and veggies used in a special edition of the popular Food Network TV show Iron Chef America featuring first lady Michelle Obama did not, in fact, come from the White House garden. Could there be a more deliciously fitting symbol of Obama White House fakery than Garden-Gate?
Some may shrug at this tempest in a colander. But as we approach the one-year anniversary of the Hope and Change inauguration, the first lady's little horticultural hoax serves as a handy metaphor for a cornucopia of Obama fraud. They've stocked healthcare town halls with partisan goons and benefactors.
They've provided lab coats to doctor donors to make their healthcare lobbying look more authentic. And they've treated soldiers, in President Obama's own words, as "pretty good photo ops." Ringers are what's for breakfast, lunch and dinner at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. East Wing apologists are whirling like KitchenAid salad spinners over the Iron Chef-fuffle: "Due to the production delay between the shoot at the White House and the shoot at Food Network, the produce used in Kitchen Stadium during the 'Super Chef Battle' was not actually from the White House garden," admitted a Food Network spokeswoman.
But, they stress, the replacement produce consisted of the exact same types of sweet potatoes, tomatillos, broccoli and fennel purportedly picked from the White House garden. It's the haute cuisine version of disgraced CBS News fabricator Dan Rather's fake-but-accurate card. But this is just the latest Potemkin produce from a Potemkin presidency. To wit: White House number-crunchers and Democratic fuzzy mathematicians have been cooking the books on stimulus jobs numbers and government healthcare takeover costs. They desperately ditched the "jobs saved or created" recipe for a jobs-funded concoction to salvage the illusion of economic recovery
(see related article).
They've inflated deficit reduction estimates and downplayed doctor reimbursement cuts. And they've done so behind a locked kitchen door. Candidate Obama whipped up a nutritious package of transparency pledges that has fallen flatter than a one-egg soufflé. Open government, he told us, was good for Washington and good for America -- and the president promised to give us heaping doses of it on C-SPAN. But not a camera was in sight for the past week's backroom healthcare negotiations among the White House, Democratic leaders, and left-wing special interests.
Now, President Obama is poised to deliver juicy tax exemptions for unions while squeezing middle-class taxpayers, employers, investors and drugmakers to subsidize expanded government healthcare. The liberal press became unhinged when former President George W. Bush posed with an artificial turkey on a surprise Thanksgiving trip to Baghdad in 2003.
But on Thursday, when Obama served up a fake populist turkey of a $90 billion bank tax -- dubbed the "financial crisis responsibility fee" -- much of the press corps dutifully chewed and swallowed. Feigning outrage at the very financial sector that loaded his campaign coffers and provided him with crony Treasury appointees, Obama demanded "our money" back. But the tax will not apply to the Enron-rivaling financial black holes of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (it would "not be productive," says a White House filled with Fannie- and Freddie-enriched advisers). Or to the bailed-out auto companies. Or to the bevy of non-banks that have soaked up taxpayer bailout money. Gobble, gobble, gobble.
Nor will any of the incompetent or complicit financial regulators who practiced self-admittedly "inadequate" oversight before the meltdown and during the government bailout structuring be fined or penalized. (We're looking at you, Tim Geithner.) With Year Two of the Obama administration barely under way, even its most loyal subjects are beginning to realize that Hope and Change were phony fruits. He promised new politics. We got the same old crony capitalism. He promised public accountability. We got the back of the hand. How ya like them rotten apples now?
Michelle Malkin - Syndicated Columnist
Hold on to your hoe. It turns out that the fruits and veggies used in a special edition of the popular Food Network TV show Iron Chef America featuring first lady Michelle Obama did not, in fact, come from the White House garden. Could there be a more deliciously fitting symbol of Obama White House fakery than Garden-Gate?
Some may shrug at this tempest in a colander. But as we approach the one-year anniversary of the Hope and Change inauguration, the first lady's little horticultural hoax serves as a handy metaphor for a cornucopia of Obama fraud. They've stocked healthcare town halls with partisan goons and benefactors.
They've provided lab coats to doctor donors to make their healthcare lobbying look more authentic. And they've treated soldiers, in President Obama's own words, as "pretty good photo ops." Ringers are what's for breakfast, lunch and dinner at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. East Wing apologists are whirling like KitchenAid salad spinners over the Iron Chef-fuffle: "Due to the production delay between the shoot at the White House and the shoot at Food Network, the produce used in Kitchen Stadium during the 'Super Chef Battle' was not actually from the White House garden," admitted a Food Network spokeswoman.
But, they stress, the replacement produce consisted of the exact same types of sweet potatoes, tomatillos, broccoli and fennel purportedly picked from the White House garden. It's the haute cuisine version of disgraced CBS News fabricator Dan Rather's fake-but-accurate card. But this is just the latest Potemkin produce from a Potemkin presidency. To wit: White House number-crunchers and Democratic fuzzy mathematicians have been cooking the books on stimulus jobs numbers and government healthcare takeover costs. They desperately ditched the "jobs saved or created" recipe for a jobs-funded concoction to salvage the illusion of economic recovery
(see related article).
They've inflated deficit reduction estimates and downplayed doctor reimbursement cuts. And they've done so behind a locked kitchen door. Candidate Obama whipped up a nutritious package of transparency pledges that has fallen flatter than a one-egg soufflé. Open government, he told us, was good for Washington and good for America -- and the president promised to give us heaping doses of it on C-SPAN. But not a camera was in sight for the past week's backroom healthcare negotiations among the White House, Democratic leaders, and left-wing special interests.
Now, President Obama is poised to deliver juicy tax exemptions for unions while squeezing middle-class taxpayers, employers, investors and drugmakers to subsidize expanded government healthcare. The liberal press became unhinged when former President George W. Bush posed with an artificial turkey on a surprise Thanksgiving trip to Baghdad in 2003.
But on Thursday, when Obama served up a fake populist turkey of a $90 billion bank tax -- dubbed the "financial crisis responsibility fee" -- much of the press corps dutifully chewed and swallowed. Feigning outrage at the very financial sector that loaded his campaign coffers and provided him with crony Treasury appointees, Obama demanded "our money" back. But the tax will not apply to the Enron-rivaling financial black holes of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (it would "not be productive," says a White House filled with Fannie- and Freddie-enriched advisers). Or to the bailed-out auto companies. Or to the bevy of non-banks that have soaked up taxpayer bailout money. Gobble, gobble, gobble.
Nor will any of the incompetent or complicit financial regulators who practiced self-admittedly "inadequate" oversight before the meltdown and during the government bailout structuring be fined or penalized. (We're looking at you, Tim Geithner.) With Year Two of the Obama administration barely under way, even its most loyal subjects are beginning to realize that Hope and Change were phony fruits. He promised new politics. We got the same old crony capitalism. He promised public accountability. We got the back of the hand. How ya like them rotten apples now?
Friday, January 15, 2010
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
ANYONE ELSE NOTICE IT'S GETTING COLDER?
THE MINI ICE AGE ON THE WAY!
The bitter winter afflicting much of the Northern Hemisphere is only the start of a global trend towards cooler weather that is likely to last for 20 or 30 years, say some of the world's most eminent climate scientists.
Their predictions -- based on an analysis of natural cycles in water temperatures in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans -- challenge some of the global warming orthodoxy's most deeply cherished beliefs, such as the claim that the North Pole will be free of ice in su
mmer by 2013.
According to the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado, Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 per cent, since 2007 -- and even the most committed global warming activists do not dispute this.
The scientists' predictions also undermine the standard climate computer models, which assert that the warming of the Earth since 1900 has been driven solely by man-made greenhouse gas emissions and will continue as long as carbon dioxide levels rise.
They say that their research shows that much of the warming was caused by oceanic cycles when they were in a "warm mode" as opposed to the present "cold mode."
This challenge to the widespread view that the planet is on the brink of an irreversible catastrophe is all the greater because the scientists could never be described as global warming "deniers" or skeptics.
Source: David Rose, "The mini ice age starts here," Daily Mail, January 10, 2010.
For text:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1242011/DAVID-ROSE-The-mini-ice-age-starts-here.html#
For more on Global Warming:
http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_Category=32
The bitter winter afflicting much of the Northern Hemisphere is only the start of a global trend towards cooler weather that is likely to last for 20 or 30 years, say some of the world's most eminent climate scientists.
Their predictions -- based on an analysis of natural cycles in water temperatures in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans -- challenge some of the global warming orthodoxy's most deeply cherished beliefs, such as the claim that the North Pole will be free of ice in su
mmer by 2013.According to the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado, Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 per cent, since 2007 -- and even the most committed global warming activists do not dispute this.
The scientists' predictions also undermine the standard climate computer models, which assert that the warming of the Earth since 1900 has been driven solely by man-made greenhouse gas emissions and will continue as long as carbon dioxide levels rise.
They say that their research shows that much of the warming was caused by oceanic cycles when they were in a "warm mode" as opposed to the present "cold mode."
This challenge to the widespread view that the planet is on the brink of an irreversible catastrophe is all the greater because the scientists could never be described as global warming "deniers" or skeptics.
Source: David Rose, "The mini ice age starts here," Daily Mail, January 10, 2010.
For text:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1242011/DAVID-ROSE-The-mini-ice-age-starts-here.html#
For more on Global Warming:
http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_Category=32
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Saturday, January 9, 2010
The Frontman -- Overexposed?
An article from American Thinker
by Geoffrey P. Hunt
Anatomy of a Failing Presidency
Barack Obama is on track to have the most spectacularly failed presidency since Woodrow Wilson. In the modern era, we've seen several failed presidencies--led by Jimmy Carter and LBJ.. Failed presidents have one strong common trait-- they are repudiated, in the vernacular, spat out. Of course, LBJ wisely took the exit ramp early, avoiding a shove into oncoming traffic by his own party. Richard Nixon indeed resigned in disgrace, yet his reputation as a statesman has been partially restored by his triumphant overture to China 20.
But, Barack Obama is failing. Failing big. Failing fast. And failing everywhere: foreign policy, domestic initiatives, and most importantly, in forging connections with the American people. The incomparable Dorothy Rabinowitz in the Wall Street Journal put her finger on it: He is failing because he has no understanding of the American people, and may indeed loathe them. Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard says he is failing because he has lost control of his message, and is overexposed. Clarice Feldman of American Thinker produced a dispositive commentary showing that Obama is failing because fundamentally he is neither smart nor articulate; his intellectual dishonesty is conspicuous by its audacity and lack of shame.
But, there is something more seriously wrong: How could a new president riding in on a wave of unprecedented promise and goodwill have forfeited his tenure and become a lame duck in six months? His poll ratings are in free fall. In generic balloting, the Republicans have now seized a five point advantage. This truly is unbelievable. What's going on?
No narrative. Obama doesn't have a narrative. No, not a narrative about himself. He has a self-narrative, much of it fabricated, cleverly disguised or written by someone else. But this self-narrative is isolated and doesn't connect with us. He doesn't have an American narrative that draws upon the rest of us. All successful presidents have a narrative about the American character that intersects with their own where they display a command of history and reveal an authenticity at the core of their personality that resonates in a positive endearing way with the majority of Americans. We admire those presidents whose narratives not only touch our own, but who seem stronger, wiser, and smarter than we are. Presidents we admire are aspirational peers, even those whose politics don't align exactly with our own: Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, Harry Truman, Ike, and Reagan.
But not this president. It's not so much that he's a phony, knows nothing about economics, and is historically illiterate and woefully small minded for the size of the task--all contributory of course. It's that he's not one of us. And whatever he is, his profile is fuzzy and devoid of content, like a cardboard cutout made from delaminated corrugated paper. Moreover, he doesn't command our respect and is unable to appeal to our own common sense. His notions of right and wrong are repugnant and how things work just don't add up. They are not existential. His descriptions of the world we live in don't make sense and don't correspond with our experience.
In the meantime, while we've been struggling to take a measurement of this man, he's dissed just about every one of us--financiers, energy producers, banks, insurance executives, police officers, doctors, nurses, hospital administrators, post office workers, and anybody else who has a non-green job. Expect Obama to lament at his last press conference in 2012: "For those of you I offended, I apologize. For those of you who were not offended, you just didn't give me enough time; if only I'd had a second term, I could have offended you too."
Mercifully, the Founders at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 devised a useful remedy for such a desperate state--staggered terms for both houses of the legislature and the executive. An equally abominable Congress can get voted out next year. With a new Congress, there's always hope of legislative gridlock until we vote for president again two short years after that.
Yes, small presidents do fail, Barack Obama among them. The coyotes howl but the wagon train keeps rolling along..
Margaret Thatcher: "The trouble with Socialism is, sooner or later you run out of other people's money."
"When you subsidize poverty and failure, you get more of both." - James Dale Davidson, National Taxpayers Union
"The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates." - Tacitus
"A Liberal is a person who will give away everything he doesn't own." - Unknown
Anatomy of a Failing Presidency
Barack Obama is on track to have the most spectacularly failed presidency since Woodrow Wilson. In the modern era, we've seen several failed presidencies--led by Jimmy Carter and LBJ.. Failed presidents have one strong common trait-- they are repudiated, in the vernacular, spat out. Of course, LBJ wisely took the exit ramp early, avoiding a shove into oncoming traffic by his own party. Richard Nixon indeed resigned in disgrace, yet his reputation as a statesman has been partially restored by his triumphant overture to China 20.
But, Barack Obama is failing. Failing big. Failing fast. And failing everywhere: foreign policy, domestic initiatives, and most importantly, in forging connections with the American people. The incomparable Dorothy Rabinowitz in the Wall Street Journal put her finger on it: He is failing because he has no understanding of the American people, and may indeed loathe them. Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard says he is failing because he has lost control of his message, and is overexposed. Clarice Feldman of American Thinker produced a dispositive commentary showing that Obama is failing because fundamentally he is neither smart nor articulate; his intellectual dishonesty is conspicuous by its audacity and lack of shame.
But, there is something more seriously wrong: How could a new president riding in on a wave of unprecedented promise and goodwill have forfeited his tenure and become a lame duck in six months? His poll ratings are in free fall. In generic balloting, the Republicans have now seized a five point advantage. This truly is unbelievable. What's going on?
No narrative. Obama doesn't have a narrative. No, not a narrative about himself. He has a self-narrative, much of it fabricated, cleverly disguised or written by someone else. But this self-narrative is isolated and doesn't connect with us. He doesn't have an American narrative that draws upon the rest of us. All successful presidents have a narrative about the American character that intersects with their own where they display a command of history and reveal an authenticity at the core of their personality that resonates in a positive endearing way with the majority of Americans. We admire those presidents whose narratives not only touch our own, but who seem stronger, wiser, and smarter than we are. Presidents we admire are aspirational peers, even those whose politics don't align exactly with our own: Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, Harry Truman, Ike, and Reagan.
But not this president. It's not so much that he's a phony, knows nothing about economics, and is historically illiterate and woefully small minded for the size of the task--all contributory of course. It's that he's not one of us. And whatever he is, his profile is fuzzy and devoid of content, like a cardboard cutout made from delaminated corrugated paper. Moreover, he doesn't command our respect and is unable to appeal to our own common sense. His notions of right and wrong are repugnant and how things work just don't add up. They are not existential. His descriptions of the world we live in don't make sense and don't correspond with our experience.
In the meantime, while we've been struggling to take a measurement of this man, he's dissed just about every one of us--financiers, energy producers, banks, insurance executives, police officers, doctors, nurses, hospital administrators, post office workers, and anybody else who has a non-green job. Expect Obama to lament at his last press conference in 2012: "For those of you I offended, I apologize. For those of you who were not offended, you just didn't give me enough time; if only I'd had a second term, I could have offended you too."
Mercifully, the Founders at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 devised a useful remedy for such a desperate state--staggered terms for both houses of the legislature and the executive. An equally abominable Congress can get voted out next year. With a new Congress, there's always hope of legislative gridlock until we vote for president again two short years after that.
Yes, small presidents do fail, Barack Obama among them. The coyotes howl but the wagon train keeps rolling along..
Margaret Thatcher: "The trouble with Socialism is, sooner or later you run out of other people's money."
"When you subsidize poverty and failure, you get more of both." - James Dale Davidson, National Taxpayers Union
"The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates." - Tacitus
"A Liberal is a person who will give away everything he doesn't own." - Unknown
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
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