Secular Apostate

Naturally, Obama sides with lunatics like Chavez, Castro, and Ortega. But here are the Honduran people, in a series of photos from El Heraldo:

Street scene showing Obama's lawbreakers

Hear our side of the story

Jail for Mel [Zelaya, deposed leftist Queso Grande

(H/T: Maggie)

“Retired” Congresswoman, former Green Party presidential candidate and Loon Without Portfolio Cynthia McKinney has been arrested and jailed by the Israeli Government:

In a press release from the Green Party, McKinney said the form states that the Spirit of Humanity, a Greek-flagged relief boat carrying 21 activists, medical supplies, cement, olive trees and children’s toys en route to Gaza, was violating the Israeli blockade and trespassing the country’s territorial waters.

Since the Green Party in the US is, basically, Cynthia McKinney, we can assume she approved that message.

The Israeli government, of course, is required by law to adhere to reality. Their take on the situation was, given extant legal requirements, necessarily different:

The Israeli military issued a statement Tuesday saying that the boat had attempted to break a blockade of Gaza and was forced to sail to an Israeli port after ignoring a radio message to stay out of waters around Gaza.

Observing the highest possible standards for diplomatic refinement, however, Israeli Foreign Minister spokesman Yigal Palmor said:

Nobody wants to keep them here.

But Sir, we don’t want them back, either.

Perhaps, based on our many years of mutual interests and close ties, we could come to some sort of accommodation or compromise.

May I gently suggest, Sir, that a favorable combination of international deep waters, a rogue torpedo, and a glitchy radio would leave everyone involved perfectly satisfied and resolve the problem once and for all. I’m sure we could find a torpedo with the necessary malfunctions laying around somewhere if cost becomes an issue.

In the No Matter How Depraved You Think They Are, They Are More Depraved Than You Think category, the Taliban (which translates as “students”) has managed to reach a new low – or high, depending on how you see it – and presents evermore challenging goals for new verbiage and better hot dogs from the Obama administration:

Pakistan’s top Taliban leader, Baitullah Mehsud, is buying children as young as 7 to serve as suicide bombers in the growing spate of attacks against Pakistani, Afghan and U.S. targets, U.S. Defense Department and Pakistani officials say.

A Pakistani official, who spoke on the condition that he not be named because of the sensitive nature of the topic, said the going price for child bombers was $7,000 to $14,000 – huge sums in Pakistan, where per-capita income is about $2,600 a year.

Meanwhile, in its continuing efforts to break the diplomatic logjam with extreme Islamic governments in the Middle East,

Hot dog image courtesy AFP

WASHINGTON (AFP) — The United States said Monday its invitations were still standing for Iranian diplomats to attend July 4 celebrations at US embassies despite the crackdown on opposition supporters.

President Barack Obama’s administration said earlier this month it would invite Iran to US embassy barbecues for the national holiday for the first time since the two nations severed relations following the 1979 Islamic revolution.

A source close to the Psychotic Ruling Council of Iran says that the mullahs are incensed because these hotdogs have no relish. Which, he maintains, is a perfect metaphor for the way the Persian people have been treated through the centuries since the Spartans ruined a simple beachfront cookout and greekroast by kicking sand in the face of Xerxes. Allegedly, the too-clever-by-half Spartans trapped Xerxes’ Immortals in a vast wet paper bag, which they couldn’t fight their way out of because it was dark in there. But soon, the Persian people will have the Islamic Bomb and everything is going to change.

Anonymous DOD sources allege that the Obama Administration is issuing a call for K-3 teachers in case any of the tiny bomb belts fail to detonate. Which is certainly possible, since Crusaders stole microprocessor technology from the Sultan of Swat in 700 AD and haven’t returned it yet. Not only did they steal and reverse engineer the glorious Islamic microprocessors, peace be upon them, they stole the Sultan’s name, Swat, and awarded it to the foreign devil known as Swat, Babe Ruth, Sultan of. Who, by the way, loved hot dogs. With relish. So it all comes full circle. However, I digress.

More to the point, should the Islamomunchkins fail to properly detonate and are captured and transferred to Gitmo, there’s no word yet on whether they will be denied nap time and a consolation virginal nanny.

The columns were the first clue that an Obama Administration was going to be little more than a celebrity tour to hawk the hard left policies of the Flower Power Caucus elected during the era of Haight-Ashbury, frustrated by a New(ish) Democrat and a series of Republican Presidents, and itching to stick it to an atavistic populace.

Their front man was in a fine fettle yesterday, holding a “Town Hall” with a hand-picked audience in Potemkin VIllage Annandale, Virginia.

Exhibit A – yes, that was Obama’s term for this poor, misguided woman – was a victim of kidney cancer and, conveniently, a Volunteer for Organizing America whose ticket was issued through the White House. If she only knew that a fellow victim, Rocky Fernandez, is not quite so happy with his socialzed care:

LONDON (4/8/2009) – In October, Rocky Fernandez was told he might not live to Christmas.Suffering from kidney cancer that had spread to his lungs, his doctor wanted to prescribe him Sutent, a relatively new cancer drug. But Fernandez hit a roadblock.

The agency that tells the British government which treatments are worth paying for had decided last year that Sutent — at 3,500 pounds ($5,160) a month — was too costly to be offered free under the national health care system….

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the organization largely responsible for California’s new issuance of IOUs instead of tax refund checks, were out in force, fresh from a Capitol Hill socialized medicine rally last week. The Sacramento Bee reported last month that, during last year’s campaign, the

SEIU’s political action committee, SEIU Committee on Political Education, has given $13.53 million to Barack Obama’s Democratic presidential campaign and another $3.16 million to oppose Republican John McCain’s campaign, according to federal disclosure reports.

The SEIU will not only be at all the Potemkin Town Halls, you can rest assured their voices are being heard in the hallways and conference rooms of the White House. The video here shows just the kind of hardball they play.

I predict this this event is a harbinger of more to come. Obama is well liked, but…

• only 41% give him positive ratings on economic issues
• 56% don’t want to pay more to fight global warming
• only 41% favor Obama’s public health care plan
• only 37% think his SCOTUS nominee, Sotomayor, should be confirmed
• only 37% think the country is headed in the right direction
• the Republicans lead in the generic Congressional ballot
• and the Republicans are trusted more on six of ten economic issues and tied with the Democrats on abortion!

The Magic 40%. Who are they? Basically, the 40 or so percent that support him on the economic, climate, health care, and judicial issues are his core constituency of unions, welfare recipients, greens, celebrities, and MoveOn.org leftists. And he’s only been in office six months.

Remember this: on any given day, look about you on the sidewalk of a bustling city and roughly 50% of the random collection of folks you see about you will have an IQ below 100. By definition. The 40th percentile – the lowest 40% – is approximately an IQ of 95 or below, which sounds about right.

So look for more of this sort of thing as the results of Obama’s policies start to roll in and become apparent even in nether regions of the left tail of the Bell Curve.

The personality cult is all the Democrats have got going for them right now, so they will surely be exploiting it.

Reporters muscled and bulldozed their way through throngs of devoted Biden supporters chanting “Bi-Den! Bi-Den! Bi-Den!” as they vainly strove to gain a glimpse of the articulate and gifted Vice…

No, wait!

I misread that.

It actually says:

Wattsburg, Pa. — Vice President Joe Biden visited a small town on the outskirts of Erie today to talk to rural folks about federal stimulus money that can be used to expand broadband access to the Internet for rural areas that typically have poor connections.

Apparently stimulus money and broadband are not all that interesting to the local folk here: Only around 100 or so people have showed up so far to hear Biden talk at noon at Seneca High School off Route 8 in Wattsburg.

The room looked so sparse that about 30 or so chairs were removed by volunteers to give the illusion of a full house. [emphasis added]

The effect didn’t exactly work…

Your 15 minutes is up, Joe. Sorry.

If you want a crowd, you’ll have to send Sarah.

WASHINGTON (AP) – Obama says country must ’stop clinging to’ an unworkable and costly health care system.

The citizens must do as they are told. This absurd clinging to freedom of choice and self-direction must come to an end.

Fellow Americans, when I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways. This you must do also.

Barack I has spoken.

And so it is written.

No. It’s fake grass from Pier One.

The Wall St. Journal reports:

The California Association of Realtors expects to make sharp downward revisions in its recent monthly reports of soaring home sales in the San Diego area, Robert Kleinhenz, deputy chief economist of the trade group, said in an interview…

The California Realtors have reported that San Diego sales in April were up about 63% from a year earlier. Mr. Kleinhenz said that is expected to be revised downward to a gain of about 20%.

For May, the group reported an 89% increase in sales in San Diego; that will be slashed to about 6.5%, the economist said.

Ummmm, yes. That was a downward revision. And the writer is correct; one might even characterize it as sharply downward.

(H/T: Zero Hedge)

Oh. Sorry. For a minute I thought that was a breakfast cereal. I meant Cap and Trade. Aka the Tax on Everything That Didn’t Already Exist Yesterday.

Well, at least some Senators are having second thoughts, despite the arrival of Senator Buffoon (D-MN) and the New and Improved Democrat Supermajority…

(Charleston WV) Aides to Sen. Robert C. Byrd issued a statement Monday that said Byrd “cannot support” the American Clean Energy and Security Act “in its present form.”

Sen. Jay Rockefeller’s office also issued a statement that said Rockefeller “continues to have serious concerns about the House bill.”

Byrd and Rockefeller are both Democrats…

Now why, oh why, might these two experienced and partisan Democratic Senators oppose Cap’n Trade??

WV coal train

Each one of those coal hopper cars contains 100 tons of carbon footprints and 2 billion BTUs of energy. And several coal mining, railroad, grocery store, beauty shop, liquor store, car dealer, Wal-Mart, gas station, bait shop, and Home Depot jobs.

And that’s why Sens Rockefeller and Byrd oppose the bill. And that’s why Reps. Rahall and Mollohan (D-WV) voted no. It’s not the handwriting on the wall, it’s the ballots in the box.

That train will creak and groan and hiss and whistle its way out of West Virginia with its hoppers full of Black Light, possibly to a power plant near you, to keep Americans warm in the winter and cool in the summer. To power trauma centers and schoolhouses. Police stations and 911 call centers. None of those things run on batteries, solar panels, or giant fans. Almost two-thirds of the electricity generated in America comes from coal-fired plants.

And Mr Gore already has his millions.

Maybe you should talk to your Senators, too. Tell ‘em you’re not quite sold on Cap’n Trade.

it’s yours now. Man up.

Michael Ramirez - Investor's Business Daily

As lugubrious as most financial commentators are about the state of the economy, I did see a green shoot today:

Private for-profit clinics are a booming business in Canada — a country often touted as a successful example of a universal health system.

Facing long waits and substandard care, private clinics are proving that Canadians are willing to pay for treatment.

Now I see why Obama is pushing health care legislation. Once everybody is enrolled in Government Medicine, the private health care sector will boom and people will stop their endless bitching about the outrageous, unconscionable, nakedly greedy expense of a $10 copayment for a $200 prescription.

“No question, it was worth the money,” said [Christine] Crossman, [a Canadian who injured her hip in aerobics class and] who paid several hundred dollars and waited just a few days.

I gotta hand it to you, Mr President. That’s subtle.

That Change you were Hoping for? Well, it’s here. The Obama Administration gathered together all its economic and financial expertise and came up with the Hope for Homeowners Program. Remember that?

Well, if you were a distressed homeowner and you were Hoping for Change, you just hit the lottery:

After eight months, the program, known as Hope for Homeowners, has helped just one borrower secure a more affordable loan.

Publisher’s Clearing House has a better record than that, and you will be able to pay off your mortgage. So fill out that card and hope. But I digress.

The Hope for Homeowners Program does provide a great 2012 campaign slogan:

Bringing Hope To America, One Citizen At A Time

I can see it now. Stay with me here. They could have an ACORN worker – no, it has to be a group of ACORN workers with one black, one white, one Latino, one Asian, and one Native American, three of whom are women and two of whom are openly gay – bring a big cardboard check to a squatter’s door. Oops, I forgot the Pacific Islander. So make that three women, two openly gay people, and a flamboyant transvestite.

A little elbow grease and a dead voter here and there, and the election’s in the bag!

Anyway, the Hope for Homeowners Program has now been revised to add another homeowner and more Hope:

President Obama signed legislation last week simplifying and lowering the cost of the program for lenders and borrowers.

They should be careful not to oversell the revised program, though, because the Obama Administration estimated that the original Hope for Homeowners package would help 400,000 homeowners.

They didn’t do too bad, though, considering. They achieved an 0.00025% success rate. It’s not, well, Six Sigma, but hey, they’re leftists. Their little hearts were in the right place. The intentions were good. To quote the old Animals song:

I’m just a soul whose intentions are good
Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood

Obama, singing harmony with leftist dictators Hugo Chavez and Daniel Ortega, denounced the removal of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya from office:

“We believe that the coup was not legal and that President Zelaya remains the president of Honduras, the democratically elected president there,” Obama told reporters after an Oval Office meeting with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe.

While marinating in the irony of Obama just having met with one of America’s strongest Latin American democratic, anti-terrorist, and anti-narcotraficante allies when making his announcement, you might want to read the Honduras News’ reporting on former President Zelaya:

Honduran president Manuel Zelaya is calling for a new constitution in his Central American nation, following the path of his leftist allies in the region.

Zelaya announced late Monday that he wants a national vote by June 24 on whether to convoke an assembly that would write a new constitution adapted to “substantial and significant changes” that Honduras has experienced since its current constitution was adopted in 1982 as the country was emerging from military rule.

He did not give details about what changes a new constitution might include, but similar recent reforms promoted by other Latin American leaders have expanded president powers and eased bans on re-election. Zelaya’s four year term ends in 2010 and current law bans re-election…

Zelaya’s proposal met immediate opposition. Government human rights ombudsman Ramon Custodio said the plan was “foolishness” and Congressional President Roberto Micheletti said the plan would violate the current constitution.

Normally, I don’t make too much of Joe Biden’s inane commentary. Fish, barrel, cheap thrills.

However, a some what rarer gem from the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not collection was put on display last Thursday in the Detroit Free Press… A Biden Hat Trick:

At a town hall meeting this week in Perrysburg, Ohio, on the middle class and manufacturing, the vice president told the crowd that “the Buick LeSabre is made in Ontario, Canada,” and that “the UAW worker in Canada makes the same wage as the UAW worker in the U.S.” [...]

Had Biden’s staff better briefed him, he might have known that the LeSabre was discontinued in 2005, that model was made in the United States, not Canada, and workers in Ontario are members of the Canadian Auto Workers which broke off from the UAW in 1985 and became an independent union.

Other than that, the statement was essentially correct.

(H/T: Tim)

If you visited here yesterday, you probably saw the post on Waxman-Markey/Smoot-Hawley. It’s here.

Today, Investor’s Business Daily picks up the theme and reports a few comments from Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA):

Waxman-Markey Is Our Smoot-Hawley

[...] When you discuss the folly of the Hoover administration — how it turned the recession of 1929 into the depression of the 1930s, the first thing that economists point to is the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act that imposed new taxes on more than 20,000 imported products.

Waxman-Markey is our generation’s Smoot-Hawley. In fact, it’s worse, because it imposes new taxes on an infinitely larger number of domestic products on a scale that utterly dwarfs Smoot-Hawley.

Click over there and read the entire article, which has an interesting discussion about the timing and likely impact of California’s Assembly Bill 32 – initially called the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 – on unemployment and the fiscal crisis they are now experiencing.

Until that bill took effect, California’s unemployment numbers tracked very closely with the national unemployment rate. But then, in January of 2007, California’s unemployment rate began a steady upward divergence from the national jobless figures. Today, California’s unemployment rate is more than two points above the national rate, and at its highest point since 1941.

What is it that happened in January 2007? AB 32 took effect and began shutting down entire segments of California’s economy.

The only question in my mind is: three years from now, will they still be able to blame Bush? What was easy last February will beome increasingly more difficult as time goes by.

Because one way of looking at AB 32 is as a Federalist-enabled experiment in global warming legislation. One of the points of Federalism is to permit states to serve as laboratories for social change. And we know, or we should know, that not all laboratory experiments are successful. The data on global warming legislation are just coming in and are being ignored. Just as the data on Massachusetts’ health care experiment are being ignored.

President Obama said: “Science is more essential for our prosperity, our security, our health, our environment, and our quality of life than it has ever been.”

Aside from the usual Obamanistic narcisso-solipsistic trope (viz., science is obviously no more – or less – important now than it was in the 19th century), it’s the scientific method that offers our society prosperity, security, health, and a hospitable environment. Not gizmos like iPods and hydrogen-powered micro-cars that emit only water vapor (a greenhouse gas). And California and Massachusetts are running experiments as we speak, Mr. President. Are you listening to the data? Or looking at the lobbyists’ marketing slides?

I will cut investments in unproven missile defense systems… I will slow our development of future combat systems. (Barack Obama, 2008)

After deploying these unproven systems to his home state to defend against a possible N. Korean missile launch, President Obama is selling this wasteful, unproven junk to an ally, South Korea!

SEOUL (Reuters) – South Korea is acquiring 40 U.S.-made missiles for an Aegis destroyer this month to boost its defences amid reports North Korea may soon test-fire missiles, Yonhap news agency on Sunday quoted a military source as saying.

The Apostate Consumer Testing Bureau has looked carefully into this matter, and advises the wise consumer not to buy a new car, insurance policy, or mortgage from this man:

CEO, Government Motors Finance Corporation

Despite his annoying infomercials claiming to run the most open, transparent, and ethical organization in history, our background research has discovered a bankrupt organization deeply in debt and beholden to an unsavory street gang known as ACORN. Among the many products they attempt to hustle are tiny battery-powered plastic automobiles, giant fans, so-called “health insurance” plans, and dodgy mortgages. Now they are attempting to enter the shadowy international arms market with the so-called “Star Wars” collectible space paraphernalia.

Caveat emptor.

Lurch in Space

John “Lurch” Kerry recently make a joke about Sarah Palin from a hat store in Cambodia… no, wait. I’m mixed up. The Cambodia trip was a while ago. Kerry was speaking in Boston a few days ago and roused a meeting with business/civic leaders with a joke about Sarah Palin. Referring to the Mark Sanford bimbo eruption, Kerry said:

“Too bad. If a governor had to go missing it couldn’t have been the governor of Alaska. You know, Sarah Palin.

Sarah Palin, when asked to comment about Kerry’s joke, offered the following:

“He looked quite frustrated and he looked so sad,” she said. “I just wanted to reach out to the TV and say ‘John Kerry, why the long face?’,” she concluded.