If You're a Democrat, When You've Lost the UAW Auto Worker, You're Well and Truly Lost.

From American Digest:

I urge the new Republicans who are now running to reach out to the unions. We are weary. We know we are a big part of the problem and we are ready to compromise and work together.

Hell, I used to buy all of the spin. I am guilty of doing too little research and just toeing the party line because I was too busy. I’ve got plenty of time now. I’ve got plenty of will now. To say I regret all of the above doesn’t do it justice.

However, as a penance for the error of my ways, I am willing to take any kind of pay cut, benefit cut, furlough, whatever just to be able to feed my family and not have to worry about the bills and the roof over our heads. I am willing to cut whatever corners are necessary, learn whatever new skill is required to just get people working again.

If I never have to hear the words GREEN JOBS from my governor’s mouth again I would fall on my knees in gratitude. Fancy ideas, cotton candy spun dreams do not materialize into real paying jobs.

Our entire state of Michigan was sacrificed to the green job pie in the sky promise. Michigan now resembles a third world country. Whatever it takes, with whatever party candidate who has a realistic, adult answer will get our union votes.

The rose colored glasses are gone, I am turning accusing eyes at my so called “advocates” and I am bringing a hell of a lot of people with me.

I am an adult. Speak to me as an adult. Do not whine and point a finger of blame at a minority party for your own failure. ADULTS admit when they have made a mistake.

It is becoming clear to me who the irresponsible children are who go on a crazy “who cares” spending spree, and then become irritated when the people aren’t appreciative of their irresponsibility. And it is apparent who the adults are who are standing up screaming: “NO! STOP! YOU IDIOTS!” We will soon see which side the majority of the electorate is on.

I only regret I have one vote to cast. It is a dog eat dog world out there and the Democrat party wrote their own obituary with their utter foolishness. I played a part in that foolishness. I regret it utterly, but thankfully a tragic and deep lesson has been learned. If nothing else, I am grateful to be awake, thinking on my own, and seeing the light for the first time. It is a miniscule silver lining to a very dark cloud.

There's more there, click on the link.

How's That Blank Slate Doing for YOU?

Fouad Ajami in the Wall Street Journal on the meteoric rise and fall of Barack Hussein Obama.

Mr. Obama could protest that his swift and sudden fall from grace is no fault of his. He had been a blank slate, and the devotees had projected onto him their hopes and dreams. His victory had not been the triumph of policies he had enunciated in great detail. He had never run anything in his entire life. He had a scant public record, but oddly this worked to his advantage. If he was going to begin the world anew, it was better that he knew little about the machinery of government.

He pronounced on the American condition with stark, unalloyed confidence. He had little if any regard for precedents. He could be forgiven the thought that America's faith in economic freedom had given way and that he had the popular writ to move the nation toward a super-regulated command economy. An "economic emergency" was upon us, and this would be the New New Deal.

Compared to Reagan who rescued America ... successfully.

It was canonical to this administration and its functionaries that they were handed a broken nation, that it was theirs to repair, that it was theirs to tax and reshape to their preferences. Yet there was, in 1980, after another landmark election, a leader who had stepped forth in a time of "malaise" at home and weakness abroad: Ronald Reagan. His program was different from Mr. Obama's. His faith in the country was boundless. What he sought was to restore the nation's faith in itself, in its political and economic vitality.

Big as Reagan's mandate was, in two elections, the man was never bigger than his county. There was never narcissism or a bloated sense of personal destiny in him. He gloried in the country, and drew sustenance from its heroic deeds and its capacity for recovery. No political class rode with him to power anxious to lay its hands on the nation's treasure, eager to supplant the forces of the market with its own economic preferences.

To be sure, Reagan faltered midway through his second term—the arms-for-hostages trade, the Iran-Contra affair, nearly wrecked his presidency. But he recovered, the nation rallied around him and carried him across the finish line, his bond with the electorate deep and true.

We have two more years of Obama who, because of his character, cannot change course. It will be two years of irrelevance and embarrassment.  I still see an occasional Obama bumper sticker.  Dreams die hard, and loyalty endures especially if tribe, race and culture is involved.

There is a widespread sense of unstated embarrassment that a political majority, if only for a moment, fell for the promise of an untested redeemer—a belief alien to the temperament of this so practical and sober a nation.

Less than 90 days to elections.

Image of the Sun

The incredible violence that takes place moment by moment on the Sun. And certain men actually believe that they are the supreme being in the universe, capable of destroying the earth. What incredible hubris.

More Images of God's Creation

Attacking the motives of those who disagree with elite opinion has become all too common

It seems that the Ruling Class are much more tolerant of Jihadists who murder in the name of Allah than American citizens who are concerned about those who attacked us.

When in 1983 Ronald Reagan characterized the Soviet Union as an "evil empire," the reaction from his betters was swift. Writing in the New York Times, Anthony Lewis called it "primitive"—and wondered (naturally) what the Europeans would think. A headline in Time referred derisively to "The Right Rev. Ronald Reagan." All agreed on one thing: this kind of black-and-white moralizing had no place in American politics.

Now cut to today, where moralizing about the ugly motives of the American people has become common. Whether it's a federal judge declaring there exists no rational opposition to same-sex marriage, a mayor railing against those who would like a mosque moved a few blocks from Ground Zero, a Speaker of the House effectively likening the majority of her countrymen who did not want her health-care bill to Nazis, or a State Department official who brings up the Arizona law on immigration in a human-rights discussion with a Chinese delegation, the chorus is the same: You can't trust ordinary Americans.

In his ruling on California's Proposition 8, federal district court Judge Vaughn Walker gives us the most dressed-up version. Not only does he find the state initiative upholding traditional marriage unconstitutional, his opinion maintains that those who disagree—the majority of California voters—can be motivated only by bigotry. ...

...Yet it is striking that the language and examples here do not emanate from the activist fringe. They come from those representing some of our leading institutions.

When asked about the legitimacy of grass-roots opposition to the health-care bill, for example, Nancy Pelosi dismissed protestors as people "carrying swastikas." Her counterpart in the Senate called them "evil mongers." How convenient. If turning up to protest a health-care bill makes someone a Nazi or an evil monger, there's no point to having a real debate, is there?

These kinds of remarks, moreover, tend to be amplified by a press corps that seems to share many of the same prejudices. Look at Internet listserv JournoList. In this group, participants felt free to urge various outrages—notably, manufacturing a charge of racism for purely political purposes. They did so, moreover, comfortable that no one would find such suggestions beyond the pale.

....Does it not say something when the hometown paper of our nation's capital cannot seem to find a reporter who can control his contempt for beliefs held by millions of ordinary Americans?

...

As the controversy over the planned Islamic Center near Ground Zero escalates, we have had many secular sermons on the need to recognize that the vast majority of Muslims should not be confused with the terrorists. No argument there. But how much more fruitful our own debates might be if the Judge Walkers, Mayor Bloombergs and Speaker Pelosis could extend that same presumption of decency to the American people.

The expressions of contempt by the ruling class has until recently been expressed openly in forums such as the Internet where like minded people gathered.  Now the mainstream rulers in Liberaland are emboldened to openly dismiss the people they view as their inferiors.  It's as if they no longer had to worry about elections.

We'll see.

Who does she think she is to sell unlicensed lemonade?

Frank J. Fleming points out the hazards of just anybody selling lemonade ...

What is America coming to when a seven-year-old girl can flout the law and defy the government?

If life gives you lemons, make lemonade. At least that’s what anarchists say. And sociopathic capitalists.

In a civilized society, if you somehow legally obtain lemons, that in no way gives you a right to make lemonade. And it certainly doesn’t allow you to sell it.

I would think that’s obvious, but look at the brouhaha over a county health inspector in Oregon quite properly shutting down a seven-year-old girl’s lemonade stand. Everyone is like, “Look at the poor little girl! Why did the government make her cry? Why are those mindless bureaucrats so mean?”

Idiots.

I know you all grew up watching movies about the Wild West and think everybody can just strap a shootin’ iron to his hip and sell unlicensed lemonade willy-nilly, but this is reality. In a society facing threats like bird flu, obesity, and Glenn Beck, we can’t let people just run around doing whatever they want. This is a society of constitutional law, not ape law. And the only relevant part of the Constitution remaining clearly mentions something or other about commerce, which clearly means the government has unlimited power to regulate everything that has to do with selling goods. And for good reason.

Read the whole thing.

CAIR Goes After Robert Spencer

By Roger Simon ...

Speaking personally, I have always learned from Robert, whom I know slightly, and never found him to be racist or anything close, even though his style and mine are far from the same. To some I may seem confrontational, but compared to Spencer, I’m a shrinking violet. He is one of the ideological point men in the global war on terror. He keeps telling us what a lot of us — including me — don’t always want to hear, reminding us that there are real issues at stake. Is he always right? I don’t know. Is anybody?

But I am hardly surprised to hear he is the subject of a new campaign from CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations. CAIR is evidently tremendously upset that a few weeks ago Spencer gave a lecture on jihadism to the FBI’s Tidewater Joint Terrorism Task Force, a group the brings FBI agents together with local law enforcement officials.

Frankly, I was pleased to hear the FBI was welcoming the likes of Spencer, especially since our Department of Justice (as has been reported at PJM and elsewhere) has gone out of its way to ignore radical Islam as a motivation for terrorism even when it couldn’t be more obviously so. From Ft. Hood to Times Square, it hasn’t been just the thousand pound gorilla in the room, it has been every gorilla in every room from here to Beijing and back.

But not to Eric Holder and Company. To them, “Allahu Akbar” — the words shouted by Major Hasan as he murdered 12 of his fellow soldiers — evidently translates not as “God is Great!” but as “I’m unemployed, I’m discriminated against and I can’t find a girl on eHarmony who will date a nice Pakistani guy who already has three wives and six children back in Islamabad. So I think I’ll kill a few people.” Or something like that.

...

CAIR, not surprisingly, doesn’t see it my way. To them, Spencer — and all of those who are trying to educate us about the dangers of jihadism — is anathema. They have written FBI Director Robert Mueller to demand an explanation why such a man — the member of a “hate group” — had been allowed to speak to FBI agents and to receive the director’s assurance that such a horrible thing would never happen again. In keeping with our contemporary fixation, they want Mueller to apologize. CAIR has even enlisted that noted expert on Islamic studies, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, in their cause. (I know. You’re shocked.)

The Bursting Higher Education Bubble

I have been fortunate in life. I was able to go to college when my parents could not afford it with a full scholarship. When my two children were ready to go to college I was fortunate to be able to afford to send them without going into debt or taking out any loans. My children and grandchildren – at the current rate of college expense inflation – will not be that fortunate.

But as Glenn Reynolds remarks - "something that can’t go on forever, won’t." Colleges and universities are pricing themselves out of the reach of middle America. Even today, college graduates are finding no jobs available to them while facing the need to pay off hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.

The fault on the part of the students – and their indulgent parents - is failing to graduate in four years with a degree that employers can use. Who needs another cinema and photography major earning less than $25,000 per year with $130,000 in debt? In fact, who needs another lawyer?

Reynolds:

Back at the beginning of the summer, I had a column in this space in which I predicted that higher education is in a bubble, one soon to burst with considerable consequences for students, faculty, employers, and society at large.

My reasoning was simple enough: Something that can’t go on forever, won’t. And the past decades’ history of tuition growing much faster than the rate of inflation, with students and parents making up the difference via easy credit, is something that can’t go on forever. Thus my prediction that it won’t.

But then what? Assume that I’m right, and that higher education - both undergraduate and graduate, and including professional education like the law schools in which I teach - is heading for a major correction. What will that mean? What should people do?

Well, advice number one - good for pretty much all bubbles, in fact - is this: Don’t go into debt. In bubbles, people borrow heavily because they expect the value of what they’re borrowing against to increase.

In a booming market, it makes sense to buy a house you can’t quite afford, because it will increase in value enough to make the debt seem trivial, or at least manageable - so long as the market continues to boom.

But there’s a catch. Once the boom is over, of course, all that debt is still there, but the return thereon is much diminished. And since the boom is based on expectations, things can go south with amazing speed, once those expectations start to shift.

Right now, people are still borrowing heavily to pay the steadily increasing tuitions levied by higher education. But that borrowing is based on the expectation that students will earn enough to pay off their loans with a portion of the extra income their educations generate. Once people doubt that, the bubble will burst.

So my advice to students faced with choosing colleges (and graduate schools, and law schools) this coming year is simple: Don’t go to colleges or schools that will require you to borrow a lot of money to attend. There’s a good chance you’ll find yourself deep in debt to no purpose. And maybe you should rethink college entirely.

Many people with college educations are already jumping the tracks to become skilled manual laborers: plumbers, electricians, and the like. And the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that seven of the ten fastest-growing jobs in the next decade will be based on on-the-job training rather than higher education. (And they’ll be hands-on jobs hard to outsource to foreigners). If this is right, a bursting of the bubble is growing likelier.

What about higher education folks? What should they (er, we?) do? Well, once again, what can’t go on forever, won’t.

For the past several decades, colleges and universities have built endowments, played moneyball-style faculty hiring games, and constructed grand new buildings, while jacking up tuitions to pay for things (and, in the case of state schools, to make up for gradually diminishing public support).

That has been made possible by an ocean of money borrowed by students -- often with the encouragement and assistance of the universities. Business plans that are based on this continuing are likely to fare poorly.

Just as I advised students not to go into debt, my advice to universities is similar: Don’t go on spending binges now that you expect to pay for with tuition revenues later. Those may not be there as expected.

Post-bubble, students are likely to be far more concerned about getting actual value for their educational dollars. Faced with straitened circumstances, colleges and universities will have to look at cutting costs.

Online education, and programs focused more on things that can help students earn more than on what faculty want to teach, will help to deliver more value for the dollar. In some areas, we may even see a move to apprenticeship models, or other approaches that provide more genuine skills upon graduation.

Meanwhile, for the states, and big donors, who fund those portions of higher education that the students don’t, a post-bubble world will bring some changes, too. Many states have been cutting aid to higher education, content to let higher tuition pick up the slack.

Some may choose to change that (if they can afford it) but regardless I expect more direct oversight of state institutions from those who fund them. Universities’ priorities will be brought closer to states’ priorities

Read more at the Washington Examiner

"Surf's Up in the Summer of Recovery"

This isn't the way it was planned.
From the Washington Examiner.

"The Federal Employee's Deserved Vacation"

Regarding Michelle Obama's half-million dollar vacations: 

The problem with Michelle Obama’s Marabella-to-Martha’s-Vineyard August is not that the first family doesn’t deserve time off but that Michelle, in the past, has gone on the record that the country’s elite (of which she claimed not to be a part) had created one nation for themselves and quite a different for most others — at least that’s how I interpreted “downright mean country,” “raise the bar,” and never having been proud of her country until the rise of hope and change. 

 Victor Davis Hanson notes that the American media has decided that

Of course, all this puts a terrible burden on a sycophantic media with a long tradition of trashing the slightest hint of aristocratic enjoyment on the part of first ladies (e.g., Nancy Reagan’s china). So, just as golf, around winter 2009, ceased to be an aristocratic distraction from the nation’s pressing problems, so too luxury on the Mediterranean must be a sort of federal employee’s deserved state vacation.

Of course if you call them on it, they will claim that they have not commented one way or another. Which is the MFM's primary way of lying; spiking the news that doesn't fit the narrative.

Lemon

Yet another example of crony capitalism rolls off the assembly line soon, in the form of the GM Volt — an electric hybrid that’s absurdly overpriced and woefully underperforms.

It’s set to sell for $41,000, and travels an underwhelming 40 miles before needing a charge (340 miles when the gas engine is invoked, defeating the basic purpose). It seats four, uncomfortably (thanks to the battery pack down the middle).

But there’s more to the story than just a poorly designed, expensive car subsidized with taxpayer money.....

One of the chief characteristics of fascism is this sort of public-private “partnership.” A business is still nominally private, but its fortunes are controlled lock, stock, and executive compensation barrel by the government. In essence, under that arrangement, there’s no important difference between public and private; executives become civil servants in disguise. And that’s a fundamental shift — just the sort Obama had in mind during the campaign — from the normal way of doing business even in mixed-economy America.

Onerous regulations that distort market signals are impractical. Putting a heavy thumb on the scale in favor of unions is wrong. Both lead to bad business outcomes and large-scale injustices; both violate the right of voluntary trade and hobble efficiency. But unfair and costly as those are, they don’t amount to a wholesale blending of government and private enterprise. That is what the semi-nationalization of the auto industry has done, and the Volt is how badly that scheme always turns out.

Jeff Perren at Pajamas Media.  Read the whole thing.  Fascism is not a new concept, and it's often hailed by the ruling class.

The DOJ Department of Civil Rights Wants Prisoners to Get AIDS

J. Christian Adams at the Washington Examiner.

Two unpleasant topics of conversation most of us avoid are the epidemic of HIV/AIDS among prison inmates and a variety of sometimes violent events resulting in transmission of the disease. Some states long ago implemented policies to protect the uninfected part of the prison population while providing exceptional medical treatment and counseling to the infected population.

In South Carolina, it has worked so well since 1998 that there has only been a single transmission of HIV/AIDS to a noninfected prisoner. All that may change, however, thanks to a threat from Eric Holder's Justice Department.

South Carolina received a letter from the now-infamous Civil Rights Division that the policy of keeping infected inmates at a designated facility, instead of scattered across the state in the general prison population, may unfairly stigmatize infected prisoners. To the Obama political appointees in the Civil Rights Division, this constitutes discrimination under the Americans With Disabilities Act.

Aug 3, 2010 Primary Election - Missouri on Obama Care

Click on the link and see the map.

How Pension for Public Workers are Bankrupting Cities and States

From the NY Daily News:

He did nothing illegal. At 44, Hugo Tassone retired from the Yonkers police force with an annual pension of $101,333 - thanks to overtime pay he tacked on to his $74,000 salary. Tassone told The New York Times it was the pension he could collect after 20 years of service that attracted him to the job in the first place.

The Obama presidency increasingly resembles a modern-day Ancien Régime: extravagant and out of touch with the American people

From the UK Telegraph:

What the great French historian Alexis de Tocqueville would make of today’s Obama administration were he alive today is anyone’s guess. But I would wager that the author of L’Ancien Régime and Democracy in America would be less than impressed with the extravagance and arrogance on display among the White House elites that rule America as though they had been handed some divine right to govern with impunity.

obama message booed at the boy scout national jamboree 2010

Celebrating Chris Christie: "The Scourge of Trenton"

From National Review:

It was supposed to have been the biggest fight of Chris Christie’s young administration: a May showdown over what Democrats in Trenton were calling the “millionaires’ tax,” designed, like each of the 115 statewide tax increases of the last decade, to paper over a small part of a yawning structural deficit by soaking the rich, one last time. Never mind that half the filings and a third of the revenue from the tax were to come from New Jersey’s business community, already battered by a perfect storm of overtaxation, capital flight, and recession. The Democrats were loaded for bear, and had the legislative majorities in place to pass the measure, having spent all winter threatening a government shutdown should Christie use his veto pen.

Democratic senate president Stephen Sweeney had even admonished, in a turn of phrase eminently Trentonian in its sheer backwardness, that “to give up $1 billion to the wealthy during this crisis is just wrong.” He promised that the millionaires’ tax was where the Democrats would “make our stand.”

The tax passed on party-line votes in the assembly and senate on May 20. Sweeney then certified the bill and walked it across the statehouse to Christie’s office, where the governor — who had vowed to balance the budget without raising taxes, and who’d developed a bewildering habit of keeping his promises — vetoed it. The whole thing took about two minutes.

“We’ll be back, governor,” Sweeney told Christie on being dispatched with the dead letter.

“All right, we’ll see,” came the reply.

And just like that, the biggest obstacle standing between Christie and the realization of his sea-changing, fiscally conservative first-year agenda was gone.

“We have not found our footing,” Democratic state senator Loretta Weinberg later said, still reeling from the decisive defeat. “I think a lot of people underestimated Chris Christie.”

Read the whole thing.

"Stimulus aside, Obama vows future budget restraint."

And let's face it, Obama was never credible, even when he first took office and started yammering on about how "Tomorrow We Scrimp, But Tonight We Spend Like There's No Tomorrow." Bonus memory from January 2009: The great Wash Post headline, "Stimulus aside, Obama vows future budget restraint."

If only. I like to look toward the future, but one thing that seems to have gone missing from even the recent past (much less prehistoric Bedrock) is the sense that, with apologies to Spider-man, with great debt comes great responsibility to pay it back. Or even any responsibility to pay it back. Jesus H. Christ, the whole point of flop sweat when you sign a housing contract or a car loan or a student loan is that you know you're signing on for a potential world of hurt. The minute you stop thinking about that is the minute you start making really goddamned stupid decisions.

Reporters vs. Conservative Black Leaders at Tea Party Express New Conference

The Press, Bush and Obama

Victor Davis Hanson ...

The obsequious media have been left scrambling to explain this new Orwellian barn wall: Bush’s aristocratic golf is now Obama’s needed relaxation; Bush’s bumbling press conferences might explain why Obama wisely doesn’t hold many at all; Republican congressional corruption simply led to a “They all do it, even Democrats” narrative; Bush’s failure to articulate how and why we would win in Iraq suddenly morphs into Afghanistan as a baffling experience that confuses all of us. Obviously, even the most adept public-relations-minded journalist could not pull all that off, and so we are left with media now as discredited as they are loathed.

"Loathed" does not do it justice..

Further Travels Of Imam Feisal

Claudia Rosett seems to be the only journalist who's remotely interested in Imam Feisel, the Muslim who is the head of the Cordoba Mosque slated to be built near Ground Zero.  The last time the press showed such diffidence was when Obama was running for President and people wondered about his history and his associates.  When the press is this incurious, you can be virtually certain they know - or suspect - something that they don't want you to know.

While debate rages over plans for an Islamic center in Lower Manhattan, the imam behind this project, Feisal Abdul Rauf, is not available to answer questions in New York. Since locating the absent Rauf last week in Malaysia, I have now discovered that he's about to embark on a nearly month-long swing through the Middle East, with plans to visit Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain and Qatar.

In case you have forgotten ...

Ground Zero is the both the geographic and symbolic heart of the attacks in which Islamist terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001, murdered almost 3,000 Americans. Of those 19 terrorists, 15 were from Saudi Arabia and two were from the United Arab Emirates; the others were Egyptian and Lebanese.

THE GREAT IVY LEAGUE NUDE POSTURE PHOTO SCANDAL

It turns out that for several decades all freshmen students at the Ivy League colleges were photographed in the nude.

ONE AFTERNOON IN THE LATE 1970's, deep in the labyrinthine interior of a massive Gothic tower in New Haven, an unsuspecting employee of Yale University opened a long-locked room in the Payne Whitney Gymnasium and stumbled upon something shocking and disturbing.

Shocking, because what he found was an enormous cache of nude photographs, thousands and thousands of photographs of young men in front, side and rear poses. Disturbing, because on closer inspection the photos looked like the record of a bizarre body-piercing ritual: sticking out from the spine of each and every body was a row of sharp metal pins.

The employee who found them was mystified. The athletic director at the time, Frank Ryan, a former Cleveland Browns quarterback new to Yale, was mystified. But after making some discreet inquiries, he found out what they were -- and took swift action to burn them. He called in a professional, a document-disposal expert, who initiated a two-step torching procedure. First, every single one of the many thousands of photographs was fed into a shredder, and then each of the shreds was fed to the flames, thereby insuring that not a single intact or recognizable image of the nude Yale students -- some of whom had gone on to assume positions of importance in government and society -- would survive.

It was the Bonfire of the Best and the Brightest, and the assumption was that the last embarrassing reminders of a peculiar practice, which masqueraded as science and now looked like a kind of kinky voodoo ritual, had gone up in smoke. The assumption was wrong. Thousands upon thousands of photos from Yale and other elite schools survive to this day.

When I first embarked on my quest for the lost nude "posture photos," I could not decide whether to think of the phenomenon as a scandal or as an extreme example of academic folly -- of what happens when well-intentioned institutions allow their reverence for the reigning conjectures of scientific orthodoxy to persuade them to do things that seem silly or scandalous in retrospect. And now that I've found them, I'm still not sure whether outrage or laughter is the more appropriate reaction. Your response, dear reader, may depend on whether your nude photograph is among them. And if you attended Yale, Mount Holyoke, Vassar, Smith or Princeton -- to name a few of the schools involved -- from the 1940's through the 1960's, there's a chance that yours may be.

Very interesting. Read the whole thing.

The GM "Volt:" Subsidized Vanity for the Wealthy Paid for By the Middle Class.

Jonah Goldberg:

At $41,000, about as much as the average American makes in a year, this is no people’s car. GM, owned by the government and the labor unions, is pitching it to affluent hipsters who don’t need a lot of space for a family. Deloitte Consulting says that the demand for such cars is from “young, very high income individuals” from households that make more than $200,000 a year, which is why the Volt will be rolled out in upscale, trendy urban markets. (Meanwhile the Chevy Cruze, the gas-only version of the Volt, has more room inside and is a mere $17,000.)

Because the Volt’s sticker price might be too high for even that crowd, the government is offering a federal subsidy of up to $7,500 (Californians have a state subsidy, too), which means that working-class people will be helping to pay for playthings for upper-income people.

“Like the EV1 that GM tried to peddle in the California market,” Kenneth Green, an environmental scientist at the American Enterprise Institute, says, “the Volt is a vanity car for the well-off that will be subsidized by less well-off taxpayers at all stages, from R&D to sales and to the construction of charging stations.”

Indeed, the Volt’s price is $41,000, but the cost is much higher. “Government Motors” is already selling the car at a loss. According to the blogger Doctor Zero, if you apply the subsidies that have gone directly into the car to just the first 10,000 vehicles, the cost is more like $81,000 per car.

Read the whole thing.

Anger mounts over Michelle Obama's £150k Spanish holiday bill... footed by U.S. taxpayer

The UK's Daily Mail notes that Americans are not thrilled to have the couple that lectures us about "shared sacrifice" fail spectacularly to stifle their impulse to lead lives like African dictators or Arab Princes.

Here is where Michelle "my belle" Obama is sacrificing today, the Hotel Villa Padierna in Marbella, Spain.

Here's the hotel as you drive up:

Enter the lobby with your security detail and admire the view:

The living room of your suite:

Check out the bedroom:

There's your private pool in case you want to take a dip:

Then there's your terrace for dining; while your security detail keeps the riffraff away:

You have to admit, ruling America has its perks.

These are the people we've been waiting for?

Hope N' Change is for the little people. Barack and Michelle have "arrived."

Living like kings and emperors is not what a country like the United States is all about, even for our leaders.  Richard Nixon (remember him) was accused of having accepted money for a fur coat for his wife.  Those were simpler times when ostentatious lifestyles were not in vogue, at least in the White House or Congress.  How times have changed.  No one expects the Obamas to wear sackcloth and ashes even as the American people fear for their jobs, their homes and their savings.  But we are seeing just a little too much of the Obamas living the good life, vacationing, golfing, vacationing, golfing, vacationing, golfing, having a date night, and vacationing again at the watering holes of the rich and famous.  But that's what the Ruling Class does.

UPDATE: When I visted Marbella nobody shut off a section of the beach for me.

Spanish police cleared off a stretch of beach for U.S. first lady Michelle Obama and daughter Sasha to relax by the Mediterranean Friday after a busy day of sightseeing.

UPDATE 2: Michelle Obama today faced a fresh wave of attacks over her lavish break in Spain with 40 friends, which could easily cost U.S. taxpayers a staggering £50,000 a day.
The First Lady has been lambasted for her extravagance at a time when the economy is still struggling. One blogger went so far as to brand her a modern-day Marie Antoinette.
And her critics will be further annoyed when they learn that the president's wife had a Spanish beach closed off today so that she, her daughter and their entourage could go for a swim.

Now where's that cake we should eat?

UPDATE 3:  Roger Simon wonders if Obama really doesn't want to be President. 

If I were still a member of the Democratic Party, I would be most concerned. What is going on in the White House seems to be so disconnected from the reality of our country — with some indicating real unemployment at a staggering 22% — as to be teetering on the brink of a pyschological disorder. And in this case that disorder would be a folie a deux of some sort because Barack and Michelle appear to be colluding in it in some way, whatever the state of their relationship. And that disconnect — between them and the American people — is growing.

Simon thinks that the answer may be psychological and that Obama is pathologically narcissistic.  Does this sound like the Obama we are getting to know?

...there is a weak correlation between the narcissist’s behaviour and his professed or proclaimed emotions. The reason is that his emotions are merely professed or proclaimed – but not felt. The narcissist fakes feelings and their outer expression in order to impress others, to gain their sympathy or to motivate them to act in a manner benefiting the narcissist and promoting his interests.

In this — as in many other simulated behaviour patterns — the narcissist seeks to manipulate his human environment. Inside, he is barren, devoid of any inkling of true feeling, and disdainful of emotions and emotional people. He looks down upon those who succumb to the weakness of sentiment and holds them in contempt. He berates and debases them.

This is the heartless mechanism of “simulated affect”. It lies at the core of the narcissist’s inability to empathise with his fellow human beings.

Via Instapundit.

Lies the media tells us

Lies are often said in silence.  Crimes are most often committed in secret.  Often what is not said is more important than what is said.

Every so often we are reminded of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Richard Fernandez "The Foundations of Our World" reminds us that these were not the most devastating attacks in the Pacific.  They are remembered for a reason.

As the New York Times remembers Hiroshima, try this quiz. Name the two greatest losses of civilian life in the Pacific war. Hint. In both cases the civilian casualties were greater Hiroshima’s. In one case the event took place on American soil.

Casualties

Hiroshima 70,000–80,000

Battle of Manila 100,000

Nanjing 300,000

Hiroshima, Manila and Nanjing are tragic in their own ways. But one tragedy that continues even to this day is the selective memory in the capitals of nations who the inhabitants of Manila and Nanjing once called their Allies. Bravery and sacrifice is fine; but politics is finer. Hiroshima is remembered not only because of the suffering and loss that took place there but because it renews an ongoing narrative, and those Japanese dead can still march in its cause. Manila and Nanjing, which hold the graves of nearly 400,000 people who once fought on the side of the democracies, are forgotten. But that is no matter. After the first death, there is no other.

I live to spit on peole who lie through silence.

The ObamaCare Flow Chart

If you have not seen it yet, Go here.

Material girl Michelle Obama is a modern-day Marie Antoinette on a glitzy Spanish vacation

Instead, Michelle Obama seems more like a modern-day Marie Antoinette - the French queen who spent extravagantly on clothes and jewels without a thought for her subjects' plight - than an average mother of two. While she's spent her time in the White House telling parents they should relieve their chubby kids' dependency on sugar and stressing the importance of an organic veggie garden, hopping a jet to Europe to meet with Spanish royalty isn't the visual the White House probably wants to project. Perhaps they've forgotten the damning image of John Kerry, on the eve of the 2004 election, windsurfing off the coast of Nantucket?

I don't begrudge anyone rest and relaxation when they work hard. We all need downtime - the First Family included. It's the extravagance of Michelle Obama's trip and glitzy destination contrasted with President

I have commented more than once about the Obama's "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous." That "shared sacrifice" that they told us we would have to make. That's "we" and not "they."

Reports are calling the lodgings of Obama's Spanish fiesta, the Hotel Villa Padierna in Marbella, "luxurious," "posh" and "a millionaires' playground." Estimated room rate per night? Up to a staggering $2,500. Method of transportation? Air Force Two.

To be clear, what the Obamas do with their money is one thing; what they do with ours is another.

...

Obama's demonization of the rich that smacks of hypocrisy and perpetuates a disconnect between the country and its leaders. Toning down the flash would humanize the Obamas and signify that they sympathize with the setbacks of the people they were elected to serve.

In January, President Obama insisted that "everybody in the country is going to have to sacrifice something, accept change for the greater good. Everybody is going to have to give. Everybody is going to have to have some skin in the game."

If sacrifice is the precursor to change, what will the family that ran on change offer up? Elitist doublespeak won't cut it.

Let's cut the crap. The Obama's are reputed to be worth a couple of million bucks, based on the sales of his books. A trip like this on large aircraft and 40 rooms in a luxury resort with 70 security agents costs at least a couple of million dollars. There is no way in hell that this trip is coming out of the Obama's checkbook; they can't afford it.

Clinton pushes flood relief for Pakistan, donates $10

Perhaps after paying for this hideous dress as "mother-of-the-bride" $10 was all she had left.

Obama the great bamboozler

From neo-neocon.

They say that you learn something every day. Not being conversant with Black dog-whistles I never associated "bamboozled" with an appeal to racial hatred. Now I know better.  Learn with me.

Here's something else I learned today about the 14th Amendment and "anchor babies."

Katie Couric might be the best journalist ever

From the Daily Caller's Jim Treacher



Click on the link to see the rest.

Marcela Hoeven Bikini Scandal?

Via "The Other McCain" ... we need more scandals like this.

Ann Coulter and the 14th Amendment

She sets the stage:

Democrats act as if the right to run across the border when you're 8 1/2 months pregnant, give birth in a U.S. hospital and then immediately start collecting welfare was exactly what our forebears had in mind, a sacred constitutional right, as old as the 14th Amendment itself.

And, even as a news junkie, the impression I got from what I had seen, heard and read about this subject, was that being born in the US automatically made you a citizen; and that's the way it's always been. But that's not true at all.

The 14th Amendment was added after the Civil War in order to overrule the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision, which had held that black slaves were not citizens of the United States. The precise purpose of the amendment was to stop sleazy Southern states from denying citizenship rights to newly freed slaves -- many of whom had roots in this country longer than a lot of white people.

And when this amendment was drafted, exactly what did it mean ... and not mean.

The drafters of the 14th amendment had no intention of conferring citizenship on the children of aliens who happened to be born in the U.S. ... it's amazing the drafters even considered the amendment's effect on the children of aliens.

...

The very author of the citizenship clause, Sen. Jacob Howard of Michigan, expressly said: "This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers."

So how did we end up with the present situation?

For a hundred years, that was how it stood, with only one case adding the caveat that children born to legal permanent residents of the U.S., gainfully employed, and who were not employed by a foreign government would also be deemed citizens under the 14th Amendment. (United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 1898.)

And then, out of the blue in 1982, Justice Brennan slipped a footnote into his 5-4 opinion in Plyler v. Doe, asserting that "no plausible distinction with respect to Fourteenth Amendment 'jurisdiction' can be drawn between resident aliens whose entry into the United States was lawful, and resident aliens whose entry was unlawful." (Other than the part about one being lawful and the other not.)

Brennan's authority for this lunatic statement was that it appeared in a 1912 book written by Clement L. Bouve. (Yes, the Clement L. Bouve -- the one you've heard so much about over the years.) Bouve was not a senator, not an elected official, certainly not a judge -- just some guy who wrote a book.

So it appears that the granting of automatic citizenship to babies of people who slip across the bord3er to deliver was not the intent or even the meaning of the 14th amendment until 1982. This "right" is exactly 28 years old based on a footnote by a single Supreme Court Justice who based his "argument" on a book no one had ever heard of.

And what is the practical effect?

"Cristobal Silverio came illegally from Oxtotilan, Mexico, in 1997 and brought his wife Felipa, plus three children aged 19, 12 and 8. Felipa ... gave birth to a new daughter, her anchor baby, named Flor. Flor was premature, spent three months in the neonatal incubator, and cost San Joaquin Hospital more than $300,000. Meanwhile, (Felipa's 19-year-old daughter) Lourdes plus her illegal alien husband produced their own anchor baby, Esmeralda. Grandma Felipa created a second anchor baby, Cristian. ... The two Silverio anchor babies generate $1,000 per month in public welfare funding. Flor gets $600 per month for asthma. Healthy Cristian gets $400. Cristobal and Felipa last year earned $18,000 picking fruit. Flor and Cristian were paid $12,000 for being anchor babies."

In the Silverios' munificent new hometown of Stockton, Calif., 70 percent of the 2,300 babies born in 2003 in the San Joaquin General Hospital were anchor babies. As of this month, Stockton is $23 million in the hole.

Ann Coulter is hated by the Left and derided by much of the Right as a wild bomb thrower who is only a polemicist and not to be taken seriously. But she is a lawyer with impressive credentials. She attended Cornell University, helped found The Cornell Review,and was a member of the Delta Gamma national women's fraternity. She graduated cum laude from Cornell in 1984 with a B.A. in history, and received her J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School, where she was an editor of the Michigan Law Review.

After law school, Coulter served as a law clerk, in Kansas City, for Pasco Bowman II of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. After a short time working in New York City in private practice, where she specialized in corporate law, Coulter left to work for the United States Senate Judiciary Committee after the Republican Party took control of Congress in 1994. She handled crime and immigration issues for Senator Spencer Abraham of Michigan and helped craft legislation designed to expedite the deportation of aliens convicted of felonies. She later became a litigator with the Center for Individual Rights.

It is indicative of the low state of reporting in the US today that we should learn basic facts about the legal history of the issue of "anchor babies" from a polemicist, rather than from people who are paid big bucks to find out and tell us these thing.

Screw You, We're from Texas

From Belmont Club:

In a letter to the EPA the Texas Attorney General and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality refused to “pledge their fealty to the Environmental Protection Agency”. Yes folks, you read the language right. And there’s more.

On behalf of the State of Texas, we write to inform you that Texas has neither the authority nor the intention of interpreting, ignoring, or amending its laws in order to compel the permitting of greenhouse gas emissions. … You have declared that EPA’s decision … renders such gases immediately “subject to regulation” … simultaneously, however, you recognize that permitting greenhouse gases under the Act is “absurd” …


In order to avoid the absurd results of EPA’s own creation, you have developed a “tailoring rule” in which you have substituted your own judgement for Congress’s … the State of Texas does not believe that EPA’s “suggested” approach comports with the rule of law. The United States and Texas Constitutions, United States and Texas statutes, and EPA and TCEQ rules all preclude …


We start with the constitutional difficulties … each of these objections to EPA’s demand for a loyalty oath from the State of Texas would suffice to justify our refusal to make one. Indeed, it is an affront …”

Anti-Incumbancy Triumps

Tuesday was not a good day for the Ruling Class. In Missouri voters rejected Obama Care by a margin of 3 to 1.

In Michigan, a political novice, Rick Snyder, beat two veteran lawmakers, Representative Pete Hoeksta and State Attorney General Mike Cox for the Republican nomination for Governor.

Also in Michigan, Representative Carolyn Kilpatrick lost her bid to retain her seat to Hansen Clarke, a state senator. The Kilpatrick Clan ran Detroit for years.

In Kansas, Representative Jerry Moran barely beat out Tea Party backed Todd Tiahrt for the Republican Senate nomination.

Silence out of fear.

Dorothy Rabinowitz is an exceptionally clear headed and courageous writer for the Wall Street Journal. Her subject today is the controversy over the Ground Zero Mosque. It seems that every politically correct member of the Ruling Class is in favor of it. Only the people of the Country Class are opposed and for this they are being accused of being anti-American religious bigots.

The purpose of these denunciations is to instill fear. On the one hand the Country Class fear the threat posed by radical Islam – the version of Islam that seems to be supported by Arab governments. On the other hand, there’s the fear of being labeled a bigot or worse.

It’s this second fear the allowed Major Hasan to murder his fellow soldiers.

Such values ["higher values" than the safety of the American people] were the rationale for the official will to ignore the highly suspicious behavior of Maj. Nidal Hasan, who went on to murder 13 Americans at Fort Hood. A silence maintained despite all his commanders and colleagues knew about his raging hostility to the U.S. military and his strident advocacy on behalf of political Islam.

Those who knew—and they were many—chose silence out of fear of seeming insensitive to a Muslim. As one who had said nothing in the interest of this higher good later explained, Maj. Hasan was, after all, one of the few top-ranking Muslim officers the army had.

After the Times Square bomber was stopped, Mayor Bloomberg tried to find any reason, any at all - except for the obvious one - for the attempted bombing.

It's hard to know the sort of rabble the mayor had in mind when he told a television interviewer, prior to Shahzad's identification, that it "could be anything," someone mentally disturbed, or "somebody with a political agenda who doesn't like the health-care bill." Nowhere in the range of colorful possibilities the mayor raised was there any mention of the most likely explanation—another terrorist attempt by a soldier of radical Islam, the one that occurred to virtually every American who had heard the reports.

The last two years have seen what happens when the Ruling Class holds all the reins of power.  They are ready and willing to impose any and all of their personal wants and desires on the American people without any regard for their assent. 

In a way, it's a useful lesson.  This is the world ruled by the people who write the editorial pages of the NY Times, the Washington Post and the Virginian Pilot.  They are shaping a world much more to their liking, and to hell with the wishes of the people who they consider an ignorant rabble. 

Now that we, the Country Class, can see their desires more clearly, there is the inevitable reaction.

Rabinowitz ends:

The center may be built where planned. But it will not go easy or without consequence to the politicians intent on jamming the project down the public throat, in the name of principle. Liberal piety may have met its match in the raw memory of 9/11, and in citizens who have come to know pure demagoguery when they hear it. They have had, of late, plenty of practice.

Amen.

Newt Gingrich: Victory or death.

The Biggest Lie About U.S. Companies

From Market Watch:


Healthy balance sheets? They owe $7.2 trillion, the most ever


You may have heard recently that U.S. companies have emerged from the financial crisis in robust health, that they've paid down their debts, rebuilt their balance sheets and are sitting on growing piles of cash they are ready to invest in the economy.


You could hear this great news pretty much anywhere — maybe from Bloomberg, which this spring hailed the "surprising strength" of corporate balance sheets. Or perhaps in the Washington Post, where Fareed Zakaria reported that top companies "have accumulated an astonishing $1.8 trillion of cash," leaving them in the best shape, by some measures, "in almost half a century."


Or you heard it from Dallas Federal Reserve President Richard Fisher, who recently said companies were "hoarding cash" but were afraid to start investing. Or on CNBC, where experts have been debating what these corporations are going to do with all their surplus loot. Will they raise dividends? Buy back shares? Launch a new wave of mergers and acquisitions?


It all sounds wonderful for investors and the U.S. economy. There's just one problem: It's a crock.


American companies are not in robust financial shape. Federal Reserve data show that their debts have been rising, not falling. By some measures, they are now more leveraged than at any time since the Great Depression.


You'd think someone might have noticed something amiss. After all, we were simultaneously being told that companies (a) had more money than they know what to do with; (b) had even more money coming in due to a surge in profits; yet (c) they have been out in the bond market borrowing as fast as they can.


Does that sound a little odd to you?


A look at the facts shows that companies only have "record amounts of cash" in the way that Subprime Suzy was flush with cash after that big refi back in 2005. So long as you don't look at the liabilities, the picture looks great. Hey, why not buy a Jacuzzi?


According to the Federal Reserve, nonfinancial firms borrowed another $289 billion in the first quarter, taking their total domestic debts to $7.2 trillion, the highest level ever. That's up by $1.1 trillion since the first quarter of 2007; it's twice the level seen in the late 1990s.


...


Remember that these are the debts for the nonfinancials — the part of the economy that's supposed to be in better shape. The banks? Everybody knows half of them are the walking dead.

Central bank and Commerce Department data reveal that gross domestic debts of nonfinancial corporations now amount to 50% of GDP. That's a postwar record. In 1945, it was just 20%. Even at the credit-bubble peaks in the late 1980s and 2005-06, it was only around 45%.


...


...But why is this line being spun about healthy balance sheets? For the same reason we're told other lies, myths and half-truths: Too many people have a vested interest in spinning, and too few have an interest in the actual picture.


Journalists, for example, seek safety in numbers; there's a herd mentality. Once a line starts to get repeated, others just assume it's correct and join in.


... people on the left have an interest in making businesses sound really healthy too: If greedy companies are hoarding cash instead of hiring people, they can cry "Shame on them! Vote Democratic!"


As ever, the truth is someone else's problem and no one's responsibility.
If you read or hear economic statistics in the MSM or TV, know that you have been lied to.  It's what they do.

Press here to hear a brief comment from the President

"When you've lost the hand dryers..."

Maxine Waters denounced Newt Gingrich over ethics charges

Irony.  "It's about time.  The American people do not appreciate double standards." 

Yeah!

The Other Side of Shirley Sherrod

The "sainted" Shirley Sherrod was once the Simon Legree of her own 6000 acre plantation exploiting black farm workers, paying them a pittance and throwing them out of their homes if they complained.

Ron Wilkins was once a black farmworker on her plantation.

Imagine farm workers doing back breaking labor in the sweltering sun, sprayed with pesticides and paid less than minimum wage. Imagine the United Farm Workers called in to defend these laborers against such exploitation by management. Now imagine that the farm workers are black children and adults and that the managers are Shirley Sherrod, her husband Rev. Charles Sherrod, and a host of others. But it’s no illusion; this is fact.
...
Shirley Sherrod was New Communities Inc. store manager during the 1970s. As such, Mrs. Sherrod was a key member of the NCI administrative team, which exploited and abused the workforce in the field. The 6,000 acre New Communities Inc. in Lee County promoted itself during the latter part of the 1960s and throughout the 70s as a land trust committed to improving the lives of the rural black poor. Underneath this facade, the young and old worked long hours with few breaks, the pay averaged sixty-seven cents an hour, fieldwork behind equipment spraying pesticides was commonplace and workers expressing dissatisfaction were fired without recourse.

Counterpunch is not a right wing blog; in fact, anything but.  So it's a surprise that at least one of its writers knows her personally and is willing to tell the truth.

Slanting the story ... in pictures.

It's the little things that count.

Ever notice that the images of people accompanying their stories are a reflection of the way the story is slanted?

Here's a picture of the City Manager of Bell, CA, who was pushed out of office after earning nearly $800,000 per year in this small, poor community.
I'm sure that this man, with his 800 grand salary owns a suit and there's probably a picture of him wearing it, but that would not illustrate the contempt for this crook nearly as well.

Then there's the vendetta the Virginian Pilot has against Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli. Cuccinelli is everything the Pilot's editorial staff hates about Conservatives: he's an activist in an area where the only permissible activism - in the Gospel according to the Pilot - is Liberal. So there is some subtle, but critical things that the Pilot does with Cuccinelli's official picture. It crops it and lightens it. It makes him look ever so subtly like a washed out nerd.

Pilot photo]
[Official photo from the state government website]

Why show more of his necktie and less of his hair? Why lighten the image? The picture forms part of the Virginian Pilot narrative.

The reason I raise this point is that I have never personally met Cuccinelli. But I saw him on TV yesterday being interviewed standing on the Capital steps. He's an impressive looking man. But people who get an image of Cuccinelli from Pilot would never know it.

Electric Car Subsidies As Handouts For the Rich

Let's see ... who can afford a $41,000 electic car with range of 20 miles?  If you guessed rich Yuppies, you would be right.

"Charles Lane, writing for Slate, argues that subsidies for electric cars are an example of 'limousine liberalism' — a lavish gift for well-off Americans to buy expensive cars for the sake of appearing green. From the article: 'How rarefied is the electric-car demographic? When Deloitte Consulting interviewed industry experts and 2,000 potential buyers, it found that from now until 2020, only "young, very high income individuals" — from households making more than $200,000 a year — would even be interested in plug-in hybrids or all-electric cars.' Lane also takes issue with the billions of dollars in subsidies offered to automakers for the manufacture of batteries, arguing that research (warning, PDF) concludes that the money will not help in jump-starting the economies of scale that will drive down prices. At least, not as much or as quickly as the President has argued."

Microsoft Quashed Effort to Boost Online Privacy

From the Wall Street Journal:

In early 2008, Microsoft Corp.'s product planners for the Internet Explorer 8.0 browser intended to give users a simple, effective way to avoid being tracked online. They wanted to design the software to automatically thwart common tracking tools, unless a user deliberately switched to settings affording less privacy.

That triggered heated debate inside Microsoft. As the leading maker of Web browsers, the gateway software to the Internet, Microsoft must balance conflicting interests: helping people surf the Web with its browser to keep their mouse clicks private, and helping advertisers who want to see those clicks.

In the end, the product planners lost a key part of the debate. The winners: executives who argued that giving automatic privacy to consumers would make it tougher for Microsoft to profit from selling online ads. Microsoft built its browser so that users must deliberately turn on privacy settings every time they start up the software.

I did not know this.

Help Us Identify This Man; Glenn Beck Exposes Phony Racist Charge

Space station cooling system fails

According to NASA figures, without thermal controls the ISS's sun-facing side would roast at 250 degrees Fahrenheit (121 Celsius), while the outpost's dark side would plunge to some minus 250 degrees Fahrenheit (-157 Celsius).

A statement posted some years ago on NASA's website suggested: "There might be a comfortable spot somewhere in the middle of the Station, but searching for it wouldn't be much fun!"

Congressman at Town Hall: ‘The Federal Government Can Do Most Anything in This Country’

Fortney "Pete" Stark says the Government can do anything it wants to you.

“Breitbart at Uni-Tea Philadelphia: Lambastes Media For Ignoring Truth Behind ‘N Word’ Story.”

Ed Driscoll on Frank Rich of the NY Slimes still trying to press the lie:

Times Watch reads Frank Rich so you don’t have to, and catches him repeating the canard that Rep. John Lews (D-GA) was “pelted with racial epithets while walking past protesters” on the Sunday that ObamaCare was rammed through Congress:

“Even the civil rights hero John Lewis has been slimed by these vigilantes. Lewis was nearly beaten to death by state troopers bearing nightsticks and whips in Selma, Ala., just three weeks before Sherrod’s father was murdered 200 miles away in 1965. This year, as a member of Congress, he was pelted with racial epithets while walking past protesters on the Capitol grounds during the final weekend of the health care debate. Breitbart charged Lewis with lying — never mind that the melee had hundreds of eyewitnesses — and tried to prove it with a video so manifestly bogus that even Fox didn’t push it.”

Frank must be exceptionally well-paid as a Timesman, because there’s $100,000 on the table to verify this claim. Otherwise, one might say Rich is being…Stalinist, to coin a phrase.

Here's Andrew Breitbart on the subject.

Noonan for all to see

Tom Smith at the Right Coast does one of the most effective demolitions of Peggy Noonan that I have ever read.

Oh Peggy, Peggy. What is to be done with her? She writes in the WSJ to distance herself from the Tea Party, those enthusiastic women with large breasts in tight T-shirts and more alarmingly those men with large breasts in tight T-shirts, waving signs that say "Taxed Enuf!" or "We The People!" America is such a hard place to be an aspiring to be upper class Republican. If you were really upper class, you would be living off your great grandfather's buttonhook fortune and working on remodeling your barn for your darling Arabians. But poor Peggy like so many of us was not to the manor born and so has to convince her true audience that she is absolutely nothing like those white people waving signs. This is not all bad. The ferocious desire of the upper middle class to be truly upper class is one of the engines of American greatness. It's just too bad we don't have a Queen who could make her Lady Patricia of Potomac so she could just go away and be quiet and stop troubling us with her confusions. Peggy, my advice is, just give yourself permission to be a Democrat. It's OK. We understand. You think we're grubby, noisy, ill educated and don't know our place, and we think you're a pompous, posing RINO who wishes she were Patricia Harriman and isn't. So let's just agree to disagree.

And furthermore, as to Lee Harris, the Tea Party does not need new ideas. The last thing we need is new ideas. The problem with ideas is, most of them are terrible. They're like recipes -- how many great, really new recipes do you know of. The Tea Party, if it works out as one should hope, has some old ideas that have the great advantage of being true. Ideas like, limited government; fiscal responsibility, even conservatism; strong state and local government; accountability by elected officials to the voters, even those of us who fly coach and buy our clothes at Target (Yes, I draw the line at WalMart. I guess that makes me a snob.) There's this meme of disgust lately -- well, aren't we right to feel disgusted? I mean, Nancy Pelosi really does spend millions of our money flying her private Air Force jet back and forth to San Francisco because first class in a 747 isn't good enough for her. That's a perfectly fine symbol of a political class that is drinking deep of the life blood the rest of us could be using to send kids to college, give mom a few more days off, get the car fixed, or buy a big screen TV, and why shouldn't we? The way federal and state governments spend our money is disgusting and would be even if we could afford it, which we manifestly cannot.

Back to Lady Peggy and her assertion that politics should be about love. I'm sorry but what a bunch of utter cant. Love? Ronald Reagan may have been a very nice man and a genuine patriot but there was not a lot of love in the air in the 1980s. Love may be in there somewhere but far ahead are emotions such as vigilance, fear, jealousy and suspicion. Any politician who first stirs up love amongst you is trying to steal something from you. Government is a necessary evil. Love on the other hand may be necessary but it's not evil or at least need not be. So Noonan doesn't like the Tea Party because they appear to be inspired not by love but by anger, fear, resentment, and desire not to be fleeced by their government. They're baaaaaaaaaad sheep! Why can't they just feel the love of all those cozy sweaters they will make for the Noonan grandchildren as they sit around their spectacularly decorated 18 foot Noble Spruce which gracefully adorns the atrium of an exquisitely decorated manor house in the very best part of Maryland?

Noonan is a graceful writer and does a good job when someone does her thinking for her.  She is riding on her reputation as one of Reagan's speech writers.  But Reagan is dead and he's no longer around to tell her what to think.  So she tries to do it on her own ... and fails.

Poll question: “Which would you rather have, a tax increase or a depression so deep that makes the Great Depression look like good times?”

John Hinderaker at Powerline makes the point that some poll questions make sense only if you are a member of the Ruling Class (or as he puts it, the "Political Class") .  Can we tell the pollsters that their questions are stupid?  Can we suggest that the choices are not alternatives?  Can we just hang up in disgust?

This divide [between the ruling class and the country class]comes into sharp focus when Americans are asked whether more government spending is good for the economy. Scott Rasmussen reports:

In official Washington, there appears to be a belief that policy makers must choose between helping the economy or reducing spending and deficits. A number of polling companies have even asked questions on the trade-off.

However, a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 28% of voters believe increased government spending is good for the economy. Fifty-two percent (52%) believe increased government spending is bad for the economy, while 12% say it has no impact. Eight percent (8%) are not sure.

This suggests that for 72% of voters, asking about a trade-off between cutting spending and helping the economy doesn't make sense. A look at the demographics shows that the trade-off makes sense for only one group-- the Political Class. Among that group, 67% believe increased government spending would be good for the economy.

Here in Virginia the ruling class has been beating the drums for a tax increase to build more roads. The Republican Governor and many in the General Assembly have been fighting a rearguard action against tax increases while the ruling class and their shills in the media, the overage hippies who never want to grow up, only want to talk about what taxes to increase.

The Commonwealth of Virginia anticipates revenues of $76.5 billion dollars over the next two years. The pro-taxers are proposing tax increases – their favorite is a gas tax – that are expected to raise $1 billion annually to spend on roads. Who among us, if we had income of, say $76,000 annually could not find a way to save $1000 a year if we really had to? To suggest that Virginia cannot find an extra billion dollars a year for roads boggles my mind. At a time when people are losing their jobs, their homes and their savings, the ruling political class can only find reasons to tax the country more.

If we keep criticizing Obama how can he succeed?

Look what he’s already accomplished; his handicap is down from 22 to 6. Can you do that in just 19 months?

Stolen verbatim from Consultofactus at Yahoo.com

I have noticed that many posters are critical of President Obama! Aren't we all in this together? If the President succeeds don't we all win? Well then, don't you think your constant complaining might just be holding him back from a historic first term achievement??? Have you thought of that? Did you know that Mr. Obama is about to do what no other American President has ever done? Yes, when Mr. Obama was sworn into office his golf handicap was an unimpressive +22! Now, in just 19 short months he's a +6 AND IS LIKELY TO BE THE FIRST PRESIDENT TO BREAK 80 AT PEBBLE BEACH! But how can he "keep his head in the game" if whiners like YOU are always b1tching???!!! "OHHH Mr. President the illegals are killing us! OOOH Mr. President Unemployment in my state is 14% and I haven't worked for a year!! Mr. President, Mr. President your policies are bankrupting the country!!! Have YOU ever tried to line-up a 30 foot putt with Gov. Bobby Jindal harping about some oil leak thingy??? Huh?? And how's the President going to enjoy his summer concert series when deadbeats like you are crying about having your home foreclosed?? Why should he care?