The birth of Jesus as reported by the NY Times

H/T Gerard VanderLeun

Election 2012: Romney 45%, Obama 39%

Rasmussen: 

Mitt Romney has now jumped to his biggest lead ever over President Obama in a hypothetical Election 2012 matchup. It’s also the biggest lead a named Republican candidate has held over the incumbent in Rasmussen Reports surveying to date.


The latest national telephone survey finds that 45% of Likely U.S. Voters favor the former Massachusetts governor, while 39% prefer the president. Ten percent (10%) like some other candidate in the race, and six percent (6%) are undecided.

The Ron Paul surge is bigger trouble for Barack Obama than Mitt Romney.

Conventional wisdom has the Ron Paul boomlet in Iowa spelling trouble for Republicans. I suggest that it’s actually more trouble for Obama. Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal seems to have a glimpse of the reasons behind this, but swerves back to looking at it only from the perspective of the Republican field. Here is part of his article:

The first [problem] is a cranky congressman from Texas named Ron Paul who won't disown a third-party spoiler candidacy. The second problem is the Ron Paul vote, which as we'll see has little to do with Ron Paul.

Exactly.

The Ron Paul vote is a separate matter. In June, polling put the familiar Mr. Paul at about 5.5% for the Iowa caucus and 8% nationally. That would be his normal ceiling. Suddenly, Ron Paul is the Iowa front-runner at over 22.5% and is up to 12% nationally. Why?


Is this surge a vote for the congressman named Ron Paul? Impossible. It's in fact the Republican Party protest vote. Since summer, this block of votes has jumped from one candidate to another, desperate for an anti-Obama champion whose anti-Washington intensity matches its own….


The Paul candidacy is of course doomed. But the Paul vote won't die. This vote has been building in the depths of the American political ocean since the spending spree of the second Bush term. These people see the upward spending trend in annual outlays and accumulated commitments not as a "problem," as the Beltway prefers, but as a threat to their well-being.

Here’s the point that I believe Henninger misses. “These people” who are fuelling the Paul boomlet, and before that the Bachman/Perry/Cain/Gingrich boomlets, are not just the Republican protest vote. Since Obama has no Democrat rivals, there’s no real opportunity for a Democrat protest vote. The only way for Republicans and the unaffiliated middle-of-the-roader who voted for Obama in 2008 to show their opposition to Washington policies is the Republican primary. And who are they? They are the broad middle class who are unemployed or have family members, neighbors and friends who are losing their homes, their jobs and their hope for a better future while Washington lives it up on their dime.

They read stories on the Internet - stories their newspapers won’t print - about billions lost on “green energy” boondoggles while they pay $40 to $50 dollars for a tank of gas. They are losing their houses to foreclosure after Obama promised to fix that problem. They see trillion dollar deficits while their living standards erode and are demanding to know where the money’s going.

They are that virtual mob with pitchforks that are desperate to anoint someone as their leader who will help them storm the castle and evict the ogre holed up there. Mitt Romney doesn’t look like the kind of guy who is comfortable handling a pitchfork, but if he’s the last man standing after all the others fail, he’ll be appointed to that role.

In 2008 the people went to the polls before the full impact of the financial melt-down had sunk in. They voted for Mr. HopeN’Change because they thought Obama didn’t really mean it when he promised to fundamentally change America. They though that they were electing a President who would fix the problems and set the country back on its accustomed course. The Three Years of Obama taught them just how wrong they were. HopeN'Change is now replaced by Change it Back.  Obama is now viewed with fear and loathing. Those who did not like him now despise him and those who were on the fence are joining the opposition. Many see Obama as the ogre in the castle who has taken America hostage. The middle class is in danger of losing its grip on their part of the American Dream, and this time the mob with pitchforks is for real.  That is the real meaning of the Paul vote.

UPDATE:  Thanks Glenn, Ace, and others.

Obama promised to cut spending.

Bob Shieffer once thought that Barack Obama would add $200 billion to the deficit ... over his term in office.  It would really be interesting to see how he excuses Obama for making $200 billion a rounding error.  Is there anyone who thinks that he would not?

Barack Obama :  "I will go though the Federal budget line by line, page by page."

How's that working out for you?




H/T Instapundit

Obama once thought that adding to the national debt was unpatriotic.

H/T Instapundit

Corzine; the smartest guy that Biden knows.

H/T Instapundit

Gun Owners Against Illegal Mayors

A link to all the criminals who occupy the mayors offices and joined Bloomberg when he formed Mayors Against Illegal Guns.

Gun Owners Against Illegal Mayors represents Americans united to fight the Bloomberg Gang, a band of organized criminal politicians. Originating in New York City, the Gang has recruited criminal mayors across the United States.

Some of the Gang's members have been convicted of assaulting officers and constituents, corruption, extortion, theft, obstruction of justice, bribery, perjury, tax evasion, child porn, battery, and child molestation. They have attacked constituents and police officers, destroyed houses with sledge hammers, and even stolen gift cards donated for the poor. No crime is beneath them and no enormity beyond them.

Warning, if you see these mayors, don't try to apprehend them yourself, call the police and flee the area.

Rich Statists Exposed as Complete Hypocrites

I'm a cow... and sometimes I write about cow related things.

I don't think EBL likes Althouse.

Get a job!

What’s wrong with this picture?

The Republican House and the Democrat Senate recently had a fight over taxes. The House wanted to extend the social security tax “holiday” for a year, the Senate bill ended the tax holiday after two months. When the House declined to go along with the two month holiday in favor of the 12 month holiday, the Democrats accused to Republicans of wanting to raise taxes. The MSM, the print and broadcast arm of the Democrat Party, trumpeted the charge that lowering taxes for two months was better for hard pressed workers than a 12 month cut. Let me repeat that: a two month cut in the payroll tax means that you are a tax cutter and love the working class, a 12 month cut in the payroll tax means that you are a tax raiser and hate the working class. Rarely has George Orwell’s “Newspeak” been so evident.

All of this obscures the fact that the payroll tax holiday is a bad idea. It’s bad for two reasons. First, the “payroll tax” is actually a worker’s contribution to the Social Security system. It’s what the government collects to pay current social security recipients. Social Security was designed to be self-funding. It’s what distinguishes it from a welfare system. It has a “trust fund” invested in government bonds that are theoretically there to pay recipients when social security pays out more than it takes in. That time has arrived, and the system is going broke. The “payroll tax holiday” brings the collapse of the social security system closer.

Second, the “payroll tax holiday” was sold last year as a jobs program. The theory was that leaving more money in the pockets of workers would stimulate the economy and lead to job growth. It didn’t work; job growth did not occur. Why? One theory is that the average family is deleveraging, which is a fancy word for paying off its debts and saving for a rainy day. Or perhaps the extra $20 per week went into the family car's gas tank, thanks to the rise in fuel prices.  Whatever the reason, it’s foolish to pursue a failed strategy while accelerating the collapse of social security.

The motivations of actors in this farce are only to be guessed. They probably run the gamut from economic illiteracy to partisan blindness to cynicism all the way to a desire to create a crisis (the Cloward Piven approach). Which brings me to my original point: by what mechanism did the Republicans manage to get portrayed as tax raisers? Is it solely the fault of Republican leadership incapable of providing its side of the argument? Is the MSM so far in the tank for the Democrats that it is willing to tell people that a two month tax holiday is better for them than a 12 month holiday? The answers are not mutually exclusive.

Christians are collateral damage

Richard Fernandez argues that the Nigerian Christians killed in the latest attack are part of the Marxist attack on Western culture. Why does the Pope speak out but the press, after the obligatory article on page 8, move on. A house fire in Connecticut got more and better coverage.

The bombings in Nigeria are not isolated incidents. If they were, perhaps they could be noted and passed over as atrocities that happen in faraway places with strange sounding names. But they are daily occurrences. In America, atheists feel emboldened to act as jerks, not just on the internet, but in public. In Muslim countries, Jews have already left and Christians are planning to leave. Meanwhile the masters of the culture are protecting their allies while demonizing Western culture and Christians and Jews.

Frankly, Western Marxism has entered into an alliance with Islamism everywhere. Under the banner of multiculturalism, under the cover of “hate speech”, under the constant apologia of political correctness, it hopes to use Islam as a battering ram to destroy the last remnants of its domestic opposition. They are in a “united front” with Islam to destroy the Near Enemy.

In this calculus, the Far Friends — if friends they be — count for little. Middle Eastern and African Christians are collateral damage. Not just Christians, one might add, but animists and Buddhists and Hindus, and Jains — you name it — as well.

It makes a good deal of tactical sense from the Marxist viewpoint to regard the “enemy of the enemy is my friend”. But there is no advantage whatsoever among those in the crosshairs of Marxism not to recognize this. The “I am caring” routine just suppresses the gag reaction to the poisoned Kool-Aid. Through this process of speaking on your behalf the caring and concerned they smoothed the way for a Victory Mosque at Manhattan’s Ground Zero; turned an Islamist attack on soldiers at Fort Hood into a “workplace” incident; how they have made it a hate speech crime everywhere to offend certain cultural sensitivities. They did it in the name of being friend to “Christian” and the advocate of caring beliefs.

And while people may have no choice about getting it rammed down their throats by main force they owe it to themselves to recognize it for the scam that it is. Just the latest version of Jim Jones’ magic potion.

It’s an interesting phenomenon that when Christians speak about being persecuted, the Left responds with a “ suuure you are,” (inset eye roll here) relying on the fact that an estimated 75% of Americans profess to be Christians. That may be true, but professing Christians are under-represented in the media, in Hollywood, in academia: places where the broad “culture” is manufactured. Mention a Muslim atrocity and we’re told that the ones who are driving the Copts out of Egypt or plant the bombs in Nigeria are not representative of Muslims in general. Then they bring up Christian Dominionists: the all-purpose boogy-man that’s supposed to be the offset to the Islamic bombers. I don’t know about you but I have been a Christian all my life and I have yet to meet a Christian Dominionist. The term was invented by Leftists like Sara Diamond as a smear term to label Christian Conservatives as dangerous conspirators. If the imaginary Dominionist were the analog of the fanatical Muslims that are killing Christians, there would be a wave of Mosque bombings in the US, and around the world, and Muslims would be afraid to gather in groups. Unfortunately for the Left, the bombs at Mosques are set by other Muslims – you know, the practitioners of the Religion of Peace™.

The Birth of the Christ

The world is about to be changed.

"No one is suspecting anything. It would not be easy for the world to be making less reference to God than it was making then. No one was on the look-out for a divine interference, unless it were that here and there some truth-stammering oracle perturbed a narrow circle, whose superstition was the thing likest religion of all things in the heathen world. In the palace of the Csesars, who suspected that unborn Caesar in His Cave?"

Organ harvesting of political prisoners

This is a chilling tale.  The Chinese government is not only executing political prisoners by the thousands, it is harvesting their organs in an incredible way.  They are shooting them in the chest, and while they are still alive, taking out their organs in medical vans driven to the killing grounds.

Right after the first shots the van door was thrust open and two men with white surgical coats thrown over their uniforms carried a body in, the head and feet still twitching slightly. The young doctor noted that the wound was on the right side of the chest as he had expected. When body #3 was laid down, he went to work.

Male, 40-ish, Han Chinese. While the other retail organs in the van were slated for the profitable foreigner market, the doctor had seen the paperwork indicating this kidney was tissue-matched for transplant into a 50-year-old Chinese man. Without the transplant, that man would die. With it, the same man would rise miraculously from his hospital bed and go on to have a normal life for 25 years or so. By 2016, given all the anti-tissue-rejection drug advances in China, they could theoretically replace the liver, lungs, or heart—maybe buy that man another 10 to 15 years.

Body #3 had no special characteristics save an angry purple line on the neck. The doctor recognized the forensics. Sometimes the police would twist a wire around a prisoner’s throat to prevent him from speaking up in court. The doctor thought it through methodically. Maybe the police didn’t want this prisoner to talk because he had been a deranged killer, a thug, or mentally unstable. After all, the Chinese penal system was a daily sausage grinder, executing hardcore criminals on a massive scale. Yes, the young doctor knew the harvesting was wrong. Whatever crime had been committed, it would be nice if the prisoner’s body were allowed to rest forever. Yet was his surgical task that different from an obstetrician’s? Harvesting was rebirth, harvesting was life, as revolutionary an advance as antibiotics or steroids. Or maybe, he thought, they didn’t want this man to talk because he was a political prisoner.

They call it the Xingjiang Procedure.  Read the whole thing.

Admirers of the Chinese like Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, Jeff Immelt and Barack Obama were not available for comment.   

The MSM averts its eyes and - when those who escaped try to tell their tale - hurry past, mentally preparing the next glowing story about the wonders of China's economic miracle.  Just as they did in the 1920s and 1930s in reports from Europe and Russia.   When reality and the narrative collide, the narrative always wins. 

Three Years Under Obama

Bill Whittle

Argentine government wins control of newsprint

Argentina's senate, which is controlled by Fernandez's allies, voted 41-26 to control newsprint's manufacture, sale and distribution to media friends and foes alike.

It brings to mind this quotation by Vaclav Havel:

The post-totalitarian system touches people at every step, but it does so with its ideological gloves on. This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance. Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.

Does Obama look like a skinny ghetto crackhead?

Via Daily Caller

This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies.

The recent editorial in the Virginian Pilot Pointless fight over light bulbs is a great example of ideological lying. In seeking to deny people the ability to buy incandescent light bulbs, the editors turn reason inside out and truth upside down.

The initiative to outlaw the incandescent light bulb was both a bald faced example of crony capitalism and an act of cheap grace on the part of lawmakers.  But it turned out not to sit well with most people.  The old light bulb was a commodity that cost less than a dollar and could be made cheaply. Light bulb makers like GE, Philips and Osram Sylvania could not make much profit, so why not lobby to have the old light bulb outlawed so they could sell us bulbs that cost 5 to 50 times more? Legislators, in turn could line their pockets with campaign contributions while pretending to be champions of the environment.

It turns out that the new, more expensive, replacement bulbs were neither as long lasting, much more hazardous and gave off a harsher light than the bulbs we were used to.   But “the people who know better” at the Pilot once again tell us to shut up, sit down and do as we’re told. And then they tell us that repealing the incandescent bulb ban is like mandating buggy whips or coal shuttles.

That much of an inversion of logic could not possibly be attributed to stupidity. It brings to mind this quotation by Vaclav Havel:

The post-totalitarian system touches people at every step, but it does so with its ideological gloves on. This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance. Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.

The editors of the Virginian Pilot would be right at home in any totalitarian regime where truth is a lie. This editorial is not even the worst example of stretching truth past the breaking point, it’s a typical example of lying in what these people believe to be the “greater truth.”  The Virginian Pilot is not just one of the major polluters of the earth via tons of newsprint discarded daily, but it pollutes the civic discourse.   And it does not even have the excuse of government imposed censorship.  Like a cancer, it kills reason because it can.

UPDATE:  Thanks for the link Glenn.

Perjury in the "Justice" Department

Admitted perjurer viewed as hero.

Holder must go.

Raiding the Social Security Trust Fund

The so-call "payroll tax holiday" is really a raid on the Social Security trust fund. 

All of the money from this "tax" is what funds Social Security.  The one-year $120 billion (or two month $33 billion) extension of this reduction of contributions to Social Security will have absolutely no effect on the number one issue facing the American people today: jobs.

To repeat, it failed last year and it will fail this year.  What it is certain to do is bring the collapse of the Social Security system very much closer.  Is this what Obama is aiming for?  The end of Social Security?

Is this what the Democrats are aiming for?  The collapse of Social Security?

Is this what the members of the House and the Senate are aiming for?  No Social Security checks going out because the system has run out of money?

Is the political establishment in Washington DC so reckless and so insane to actually hasten the demise of the Social Security system on which so many people depend?