I’m At Superior Truck Lines (G…

I’m at Superior Truck Lines (Greig Street, Cnty rd 7, Newark) http://4sq.com/fCgYzk

Crying Clyburn, James Clyburn is hearing voices, yet again, from Michael O’Brien, Hill:

Clyburn said that Palin didn’t grasp why such rhetoric was so troubling, regardless of the motivations of the alleged shooter. The No. 3 House Democrat referenced the civil rights era and said that some of the shrill rhetoric in modern politics is reminiscent of that time.

“I have some experiences that maybe she does not have,” he said. “When I see and hear things today that are reminiscent of that period of time, I am very, very concerned about it, because I know what it led to back then, and I know what it can lead to again.”

Grasp this Jimmy, nobody called you nigger that fateful day you walked through the tea party crowd to vote for Obama Care.   The experience Clyburn has that Palin does not, is telling outright lies on the public stage.

Rising Cain? From Christian Boone, Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Atlanta businessman and conservative activist Herman Cain announced Wednesday he was launching a presidential exploratory committee, bringing him one step closer to a bid for the GOP nomination in 2012.

“We are now going to test the waters for voter support and financial support,” Cain told Fox News’ Mario Cavuto Wednesday afternoon

KKK sinking, the death throes of the former Kennedy Congressional Klan, from Robert Kennedy, Jr, Puffinogton Post:

The Dallas, Texas, airwaves were particularly radioactive; preachers and political leaders and local businessmen spewed extremist vitriol on the city’s radio and TV stations, inflaming the passions of the city’s legions of unhinged fanatics. There was something about the city — a rage or craziness, that, whether sensible or not, seemed to have set the stage for Jack’s murder. The Voice of America, half an hour after the assassination, described Dallas as “the center of extreme right wing.” The Texas town was such a seething cauldron of right-wing depravity that historian William Manchester portrayed it as recalling the final days of the Weimar Republic. “Mad things happened,” reported Manchester. “Huge billboards screamed ‘Impeach Earl Warren.'” Jewish stores were smeared with crude swastikas. Fanatical young matrons swayed in public to the chant “Stevenson’s going to die — his heart will stop stop stop and he will burn burn burn!” The mercantile elite that ruled the city carefully cultivated the seeds of hate. Radical-right broadsides were distributed in public schools; the Kennedy name was booed in classrooms; junior executives who refused to attend radical seminars were blackballed and fired. Manchester continued

What ever was, or was not, on the Dallas, Texas airwaves in November 1963 did not kill President John F.  Kennedy.     A bullet from a communist sympathizer, named Lee Harvey Oswald did.    I’d say t that Bobby Jr. forget, but when you learn your history at the Kennedy family dinner table,  you probably never knew in the first place.

Lurch Left, John Kerry lurchs to the left, from Pete Kasperowicz, Hill:

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) warned incoming Republicans Tuesday morning against cutting back the size of government so much that it cannot contribute to U.S. productivity.

“Do they want a government too limited to have invented the Internet, now a vital part of our commerce and communications?” he asked at one point.

Lurch does his best to defend big bloated government, and the best he can do is to cite a forty-five years old invention.   Better luck next time.

Not that there is anything wr0ng with Mark Halperin, video:

Hat tip and more: Mary Katherine Ham, Daily Caller.

During a discussion on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Tuesday, the panel conceded that conservatives and Tea Party activists were unfairly scapegoated in the wake of Jared Lee Loughner’s shooting spree in Tucson, Ariz., which killed six and left Rep. Gabrielle Giffords fighting for her life after a gunshot wound to the head. Mark Halperin of Time just thinks conservatives shouldn’t bother defending themselves, so as to avoid further political escalation.

“Obviously, the initial reaction was so offensive to conservatives it has united everybody from Rush Limbaugh to David Brooks this morning, who wrote a very, very compelling piece that the scapegoating was an offensive act,” Joe Scarborough said during a discussion about the politicization of the tragedy.

Rush has standard talking point that liberal have owned the media for so long that they have lost, or have never developed the ability to make an intelligent rebuttal.  Halperin wanted a tragedy so that Dumbo, b/k/a Barack Obama, could connect with the people like B.J. Clinton did after Oklahoma City.   Alas, sadly for Halperin, B.J. can talk without the aid of teleprompter.

The mass murder of Christina Green and five other was just what Halperin wanted.   The media reax, just like in OK City, of  blaming the murders on the right wing was the play Halperin diagrammed    And now that the media is running Halperin’;s play, and getting shoved back down their throats, Halperin is trying to call a time out.    We  have the contemporary version of the gun fight at OK Corral and all Halperin brings is a knife.

More, Glenn Reynolds , Ed Morrissey

Richard Cohen on Guns.    Try this for fit.

Nail statistics are nothing less than astonishing. According to the Jesus was a Carpenter Campaign, an advocacy group, “more nails were driven with hammers in the 18-year period between 1979 and 1997 (651,697) than cheeseburgers were eaten in McDonalls since 1775 (650,858).” Even assuming that some of those naiils were rusty , the hammer is what did it. Had it not been handy, then a nails might not have been driven.

Pretty darn stupid.  Even a liberal knows that it a carpenter which drives the nail, and not the hammer.  It is the Norm Abrams whom build the houses and not the Stanley hammers.  Yet compare this to what Cohen did actually write, from the RCP:

Gun statistics are nothing less than astonishing. According to the Brady Campaign, an advocacy group, “more Americans were killed with guns in the 18-year period between 1979 and 1997 (651,697) than were killed in battle in all wars since 1775 (650,858).” Even assuming that some of those deaths were suicides or accidents, the gun is what did it. Had it not been handy, then a death might have been avoided.

Just has hammers don not swing themselves, neither do guns fire themselves.  Maybe one day, Cohen can figure that out.  But I kind of doubt it.

What to do about so-called climate change, from Doug L. Hoffman, Climate Change Dispatch:

Time after time, the public has been harangued by climate change “experts” predicting all form of devastation due to anthropogenic global warming. The Greenland and Antarctic glaciers will melt, as will the sea ice covering the Arctic Ocean. Temperatures will rise by 2-6°C, perhaps more in higher latitudes. Weather patterns will shift, there will be droughts and torrential monsoon rains, cyclones will increase in intensity—where will it all end? Here’s a thought, we might find the world a nicer place after a bit of global warming. In fact, given the general cooling trend seen over the Holocene (the period since the last glacial period ended around 14,000 years ago) and the Cenozoic (the time since the dinosaurs died, around 65 million years) human CO2 may be in some small way the only thing delaying another devastating ice age

Nothing.

Slapping down the left, the leftosphere since the murder of Cristina Green and others have been trying to push the idea that hate some exclusive province of the right.  There have been several notable rebuttals.  However the tour de force is from Michelle:

The Tucson massacre ghouls who are now trying to criminalize conservatism have forced our hand.

They need to be reminded. You need to be reminded.

Confront them. Don’t be cowed into silence.

And don’t let the media whitewash the sins of the hypocritical Left in their naked attempt to suppress the law-abiding, constitutionally-protected, peaceful, vigorous political speech of the Right.

They want to play tu quo que in the middle of a national tragedy?  They asked for it. They got it

Don’t pick a fight with Big Jim.  Don’t step on Superman’s cape and don’t challenge Michelle.

Who is going to watch Jim Clyburn (SC – 6) from Post and Courier Charleston,. SC:

COLUMBIA — U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn, the third-ranking Democrat in Congress, said Sunday the deadly shooting in Arizona should get the country thinking about what’s acceptable to say publicly and when people should keep their mouths shut.

Clyburn said he thinks vitriol in public discourse led to a 22-year-old suspect opening fire Saturday at an event Democratic U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords held for her constituents in Tucson, Ariz. Six people were killed and 14 others were injured, including Giffords.

If Clyburn is an honest man, and I am not alleging that he is, then Clyburn should hire a minder to watch over what he says.    Clyburn is noted for have claimed to have the n word uttered at him, despite considerable evidence that it was never said and not evidence that it ever was.   Now Clyburn is imagining some connection between political speech and murder of Christina Green and others.

Nick Baumann,  traces Jared Lee Loughner anger at Representative Giffords back to a 2007 Campaign event, from Mother Jones:

Giffords was the target of Loughner’s rampage, prosecutors say, and the sworn affidavit accompanying the charges mentions that Loughner attended a Giffords “Congress in Your Corner” event in 2007. The affidavit also mentions that police searching a safe in Loughner’s home found a letter from Giffords’ office thanking the alleged shooter for attending an August 25, 2007 event.*

Tierney, who’s also 22, recalls Loughner complaining about a Giffords event he attended during that period. He’s unsure whether it was the same one mentioned in the charges—Loughner “might have gone to some other rallies,” he says—but Tierney notes it was a significant moment for Loughner: “He told me that she opened up the floor for questions and he asked a question. The question was, ‘What is government if words have no meaning?'”

As  Congressman Clyburn can not seem to open his mouth without putting his foot into it, I humbly suggest that the Congressman can improve both the tone and the veracity of the nation’s political speech, by staying out of it.     That is, if the Congressman can’t say thing that is accurate,  then it would best if he said nothing at all.

Pima County sheriff complicit in Green murder, from Cholla Jumps:

This is the report that Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik has been dreading since the tragic event on Saturday January 8.

The sheriff has been editorializing and politicizing the event since he took the podium to report on the incident. His blaming of radio personalities and bloggers is a pre-emptive strike because Mr. Dupnik knows this tragedy lays at his feet and his office. Six people died on his watch and he could have prevented it.  He needs to step up and start apologizing to the families of the victims instead of spinning this event to serve his own political agenda.

[…]

Jared Loughner has been making death threats by phone to many people in Pima County including staff of Pima Community College, radio personalities and local bloggers. When Pima County Sheriff’s Office was informed, his deputies assured the victims that he was being well managed by the mental health system. It was also suggested that further pressing of charges would be unnecessary and probably cause more problems than it solved as Jared Loughner has a family member that works for Pima County. Amy Loughner is a Natural Resource specialist for the Pima County Parks and Recreation. My sympathies and my heart goes out to her and the rest of Mr. Loughner’s family. This tragedy must be tearing them up inside wondering if they had done the right things in trying to manage Jared’s obvious mental instability.

Jared Loughner is deranged mental nut case.   Not only did the Pima County sheriff’s department know about Loughner, the department actively protected Loughner.   The murders of Christina Green and other was not the result of lax laws.   Rather the murders results from the Pima County sheriff department failure to do their duty.

Joan Walsh in Salon:

We won’t know for a while exactly why the gunman identified as Jared Lee Loughner, 22, shot 18 people, including Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, and we may never know why. From the shards of maybe-evidence he left behind – to my knowledge it’s unconfirmed whether any of the MySpace, YouTube or Facebook posts being cited were created by the suspect – people can find reason to call him a right-wing nut-job or a left-wing fanatic. He supposedly railed against the government like Tea Partiers do, he was a gold-fanatic like Glenn Beck, but he also listed the Communist Manifesto as a favorite book on his alleged MySpace page.

Joan. would you feel any better about Loughner six murders in Tuscon if you just thought of them as very late term abortions.   Walsh, 21 May last, Salon:

There were several witnesses to Tiller’s murder, and reportedly police even have the license plate of the car he drove away in, so it seems likely he’ll be caught. It’s safe to assume the killer was a so-called pro-life wingnut, because Tiller has been the victim of an organized crusade against his doing his job: providing abortion and other reproductive health services in Wichita. He was one of the nation’s few late-term abortion providers. (A smart reader reminded me that Fox’s Bill O’Reilly crusaded against Tiller for years.)

I mean it not like you had some moral objection to the killing of innocent human beings.   I could think of servral description for the late George Tiller.  Victim would not e one.  Butcher would.

Your Navy on drugs, from Eve Tahmincioglu,  MSNBC:

When Navy Capt. Owen Honors was relieved of his command last week over raunchy videos he made and showed to his crew, thousands of people rushed to his defense, claiming political correctness had gone too far.

Others said Honors deserved his fate, despite a long and distinguished military record, but the issue raises questions: When does sexually explicit language or behavior rise to the level of harassment? Is it ever acceptable in the workplace? The answers are not always easy.

Honors, who was commander of the aircraft carrier USS. Enterprise, was relieved of his command over videos he made nearly five years ago, when he was the executive officer of the ship. The videos in question, apparently produced to boost morale in a combat theater, were part of pre-movie entertainment and included scenes of sailors showering; masturbation and sexist jokes; gays slurs; and a lot of cursing (particularly the “F bomb”).

In with officers like Captain Owens, and out with the REMF’s who back stabbed him.

Christina-Taylor Green, from Stephanie Innes, Arizona Daily Star:

Aspiring politician Christina-Taylor Green was born in the midst of tragedy on Sept. 11, 2001, and died Saturday morning while trying to meet Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.

The strong-willed 9-year-old third-grader had gone to meet Giffords with a neighbor when she was shot. She died later at University Medical Center

The kid had spunk.

The Lame Stream Media, from Byron York, Washington Examiner:

On November 5, 2009, Maj. Nidal Hasan opened fire at a troop readiness center in Ft. Hood, Texas, killing 13 people.  Within hours of the killings, the world knew that Hasan reportedly shouted “Allahu Akbar!” before he began shooting, visited websites associated with Islamist violence, wrote Internet postings justifying Muslim suicide bombings, considered U.S. forces his enemy, opposed American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as wars on Islam, and told a neighbor shortly before the shootings that he was going “to do good work for God.”  There was ample evidence, in other words, that the Ft. Hood attack was an act of Islamist violence.

Nevertheless, public officials, journalists, and commentators were quick to caution that the public should not “jump to conclusions” about Hasan’s motive.  CNN, in particular, became a forum for repeated warnings that the subject should be discussed with particular care.

[…]

Fast forward a little more than a year, to January 8, 2011.  In Tucson, Arizona, a 22 year-old man named Jared Lee Loughner opened fire at a political event, gravely wounding Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, killing a federal judge and five others, and wounding 18.  In the hours after the attack, little was known about Loughner beyond some bizarre and largely incomprehensible YouTube postings that, if anything, suggested he was mentally ill.  Yet the network that had shown such caution in discussing the Ft. Hood shootings openly discussed the possibility that Loughner was inspired to violence by…Sarah Palin.  Although there is no evidence that Loughner was in any way influenced by Palin, CNN was filled with speculation about the former Alaska governor

Speaking of spunk, the lams stream media certainly has none.    How can you tell the media is dead certain the right wing,  tea party and Sarah Palin had nothing to do with the murder of Green et al and are not prone to violence?   It is simple, the media is not afraid to insult and impugn the right wing.  Whereas the same media is scared shat less to offend Islamists, lest one of the towel heads blow their tiny heads off.    The media is only willing to insult those who would not threaten their lives.

Hillbuzz smacks Fred Phelps, from Kevin Dujan0, Hillbuzz:

The Left does some truly despicable things in this world, but this is a new low for Democrats.

Former three-time Democrat gubernatorial candidate Fred Phelps Jr. (commonly called just “Fred Phelps”) and his Westboro Hate Group have announced plans to disrupt the funeral of 9 year-old shooting victim Christina Greene.

Christina was murdered by Jared Lee Loughner yesterday in his assassination attempt on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.  The little girl was born on September 11th, 2001, so her parents have been cursed with a horrific trifecta of high profile trauma:

Amusing, very amusing.  Phelps is not a serious person.   His theological rantings are totally impossible to either prove or disprove.   You can merely believe or disbelieve them.     Phelps does seem to be trying to corner the market in bad taste.

Pardon Fausta’s French, link:

“Global term” my foot. I’m a mother, dammit.

Yes, you are a parental unit, at least according to the State Department,‘Mother,’ ‘Father’ Changing to ‘Parent One,’ ‘Parent Two’ on Passport Applications

Well French is a Latin (Romantic) language.   However, just between you and me, I think Fausta got her body parts mixed up.

Evan Thomas: “The health care bill is a disaster”, from Daily Caller.

“The health care bill is a disaster,” Thomas continued. “We’re sort of slowly learning – it’s not working. It’s interesting – they’re implementing it and it’s not working out at all as people anticipated. There’s all sorts of wildly wrong projections. As it’s being practiced – it’s failed.”

Hat tip: Nice Deb

Revolution cometh, the coming war between public employee labor unions and the public, from Economist:

“Industrial relations” are back at the heart of politics—not as an old-fashioned clash between capital and labour, fought out so brutally in the Thatcherite 1980s, but as one between taxpayers and what William Cobbett, one of the great British liberals, used to refer to as “tax eaters”. People in the private sector are only just beginning to understand how much of a banquet public-sector unions have been having at everybody else’s expense (see article). In many rich countries wages are on average higher in the state sector, pensions hugely better and jobs far more secure. Even if many individual state workers do magnificent jobs, their unions have blocked reform at every turn. In both America and Europe it is almost as hard to reward an outstanding teacher as it is to sack a useless one.

‘Pubs kill Pelosi’s climate change panel, from Sarah Jones, Politicus USA:

Republicans have already killed the 2007 Pelosi-created Select Committee for Energy Independence and Global Warming. Yes, that would be a committee to deal with nonsense like the inter-related issues of energy independence, national security, America’s economic future and global warming. Things the 112th Congress has little use for.

The committee passed such legislation as the Energy Independence and Security Act that increased our use of bio-fuel, increased investment in clean energy technologies to the tune of 90 billion in clean energy per the stimulus, and carbon reduction targets were set by the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act along with a plan for clean energy jobs. Pfft

Off to a good start.  Corn liquor a/k/a ethanol is best saved for drinking not driving.  It cost about a much energy, estimates vary, to make ethanol and you get energy from ethanol.   Plus  using foodstuffs for motor fuels only increases the price of food.   As if we didn’t already have emough problems.

Inclusion? From Gwendolyn Ann Smith, Pride Source:

Meanwhile, the volume was raised within our community. Transgender people pitted themselves against our gay and lesbian siblings in an increasingly vocal war of words. People fought over inclusion, over the still dead Employment Non-Discrimination Act, over ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ and – more than anything – over a single six letter word – tranny – and who could use it when. The latter fight seems to be a battle not yet truly over

A community is a population with shared values.   I find it ironic that a population sets themselves apart, and then clamors for inclusion.  Make up your mind.

‘Pubs to Holder: It is the jobs stupid, from Byron York, Washington Examiner:

There are many areas in which Republicans and [Attorney General Eric] Holder are likely to disagree, but the most contentious could be immigration, starting with the enforcement of federal laws to prevent the employment of illegal immigrants. Ask Smith what he’ll be investigating, and it’s the first thing he mentions. “One initial hearing will be on work site enforcement,” he says. “We want to find out why the administration is not doing more to enforce current laws. Workplace enforcement has dropped 70 percent under the Obama administration.”

To Smith, that’s a bad idea at any time, but particularly so in a period of 9.8 percent unemployment. “We need every available job in America to go to legal workers, to citizens and legal immigrants,” he says.

Good sign that the ‘pubs are going after the inane Obama Administration anti-jobs policies.  Every illegal, put out of a job, means one more job for honest, hardworking, tax paying United States citizens.

Death in the City:

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork/AP) – Archbishop Timothy Dolan is calling for efforts to make abortions in New York City “rare.”

Dolan gathered with other religious leaders on Thursday to draw attention to the city’s high abortion rate. The city health department last month released statistics that showed 39 percent of pregnancies ended with induced termination in 2009

Hat tip and More,  Blog Prof:

Uh – isn’t that what Democrats have been saying forever now? Safe and rare?  Well, abortion is neither. Every abortion kills a life, so it’s not safe. And certainly Democrats don’t want it to be rare either. Their vote for ObamaCare proved that fact decisively

Run Rudy (not), Rudy Giuliani feigns interest in yet another presidential run, from New York Post:

Confident that he’d have a chance to win, Rudy Giuliani is rounding up his top political advisers for a possible 2012 presidential run, sources tell Page Six.

Sources say the tough-talking former mayor “thinks the Republican race will be populated with far-right candidates like Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee, and there’s opportunity for a moderate candidate with a background in national security.”

Giuliani has even scheduled a trip to New Hampshire for next month to meet with constituents in the state that failed him in January 2008, when he placed fourth in the Republican presidential primary.

Despite a ‘pubs surge last year in New York State, the ‘rats retained all state wide office.  What Senator Chucky Schumer, Kristen Gillibrand  and Andrew “Maior IV”  Cuomo   all have in common is Giuliani was unwilling to challenge any one of them.    So New York is left with a strutting egotist,  and wet eared rookie in the Senate and a recycled never was in the statehouse.   Sorry Rudy, but when opportunity came knocking, you ducked out.

Dumb chick, Ann Woolner is upset because Justice Antonin Scalia
believe the Fourteenth means what it meant when it was ratified, from Bloomberg:

When the Amendment was written, “Nobody ever thought that that’s what it meant,” Scalia said.

Here we have a perfect example of what’s so very wrong about so-called originalism, the theory Scalia claims to follow. The idea is that the Constitution should be interpreted according to its authors’ original intent, no changes allowed.

The 14th Amendment wasn’t meant to protect women, religious minorities, ethnic groups, and certainly not homosexuals. Written after the Civil War, its single aim was legal rights for newly freed slaves.

The founders didn’t envision the Constitution as vehicle to allow for sharia law.   Would Woolner willing don the burka if five of the nine perverts in black robes, b/k/a the  Supreme Court ruled in favor of sharia.   I hardly think not.

And hypocritical chick as well, while in 2011 Woolner moans falsely about women not being considered  persons, in 2009 was more than willing to consider real women to be non-person,  just so long as they had not yet been born from Bloomberg:

That’s one of the ways many birth-control pills and intrauterine devices work. And if that’s abortion, millions of women who didn’t know they were pregnant — who medically weren’t pregnant — have killed their unborn children.

No joke.

Folks within the federal health bureaucracy have drafted a rule that would give “human being in utero” status to the itty bitty zygote.

Not quite half as big as a grain of salt, the zygote is the cluster of cells formed after sperm penetrates egg. It travels toward the uterus and either keeps going, leaving the woman’s body, or attaches itself to her uterine wall some five to 10 days after fertilization.

If it latches on, the zygote becomes an embryo. Eight weeks later the embryo becomes a fetus and, eventually, a baby.

That mere fertilized egg is also a person, and no less real and no less deserving of protection by our laws merely because he can’t post an article on a blog,yet.

Maybe all those injections into her lips, or the pressure of being Speaker of the House but allow me to suggest that it is time to call those nice men to with the special jackets.  You know the ones with the long sleeves that tie in the back? Nancy Pelosi has gone wacko.  We’re not talking about a little crazy, she has gone stark, raving, foaming from the mouth MAD.

Jeff Dunetz, Yid with a Lid

Personally, I don’t think Mrs. has suddenly gone mad.  I believe she has been as mad as a hatter for years.   I mean remarks that we have to pass the bill so that we find out what is in the bill, are just not the comments of a sane woman.

Robert Reich comes up short, from Puffington Post:

Public servants are convenient scapegoats. Republicans would rather deflect attention from corporate executive pay that continues to rise as corporate profits soar, even as corporations refuse to hire more workers. They don’t want stories about Wall Street bonuses, now higher than before taxpayers bailed out the Street. And they’d like to avoid a spotlight on the billions raked in by hedge-fund and private-equity managers whose income is treated as capital gains and subject to only a 15 percent tax, due to a loophole in the tax laws designed specifically for them.

Two points, one being on the public payroll does not equate to being a public servant.   Two, if you think the CEO of say Ford makes too much money, then don’t buy a Ford.   It is just that simple.   On the other head  if  you think your local sewer department stinks,  refusing to pay their salaries will sand the state’s thugs after you.    Paying a private sector CEO is strictly voluntary.   Whereas you forced by law to pay the salaries of public employees.

Autism study:  Hoax:

(CNN) — A now-retracted British study that linked autism to childhood vaccines was an “elaborate fraud” that has done long-lasting damage to public health, a leading medical publication reported Wednesday.

An investigation published by the British medical journal BMJ concludes the study’s author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, misrepresented or altered the medical histories of all 12 of the patients whose cases formed the basis of the 1998 study — and that there was “no doubt” Wakefield was responsible.

More, Jill,  Pundit & Pundette:

But even if there was never a hint of fraud, isn’t it remarkable that one tiny study, involving only 12 children, and never replicated by anyone else, could have had such an impact? Someone somewhere is surely writing a book about how this came about, and our scientific illiteracy will be a big part of the story. We need to teach our children to look closely at the studies behind the claims, the questions behind the poll numbers, the original sources behind the history texts. It takes a lot of time and effort, but the lazy way isn’t working.

These jokers are killing people.   Scaring parents into not having their children immunized leads to disease and death.

Speaker Tablecloth’s Promise, Nancy Pelosi’s predictions were about as good as her fashion sense, to wit poor, from Fredrickburg.com:

FAMOUS LAST WORDS: “After years of historic deficits, this 110th Congress will commit itself to a higher standard: Pay as you go, no new deficit spending. Our new America will provide unlimited opportunity for future generations, not burden them with mountains of debt.”

Thus spake House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in her inaugural address on Jan. 4, 2007. And how did Mrs. Speaker do with her vow? Poorly. Abysmally.

The 110th Congress racked up a whopping $1.957 trillion in new debt, according to the U.S. Treasury. Not to be outdone, the 111th Congress exceeded that amount by 65 percent, adding $3.22 trillion in indebtedness.

Speaker Tablecloth’s lie, Mrs Pelosi  may have been naive when she assumed the gavel.  However she left a liar, from Fox News:

At her final press conference as House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said, “Deficit reduction has been a high priority for us. It is our mantra, pay-as-you-go.”

The numbers tell a different story.

When the Pelosi Democrats took control of Congress on January 4, 2007, the national debt stood at $8,670,596,242,973.04. The last day of the 111th Congress and Pelosi’s Speakership on December 22, 2010 the national debt was $13,858,529,371,601.09 – a roughly $5.2 trillion increase in just four years. Furthermore, the year over year federal deficit has roughly quadrupled during Pelosi’s four years as speaker, from $342 billion in fiscal year 2007 to an estimated $1.6 trillion at the end of fiscal year 2010.

Hat tip:  Fausta.

‘Rate in deep Dumbo Care poop, from Michael Tanner, RCP:

Given that the latest Rasmussen poll shows that 60 percent of likely voters support repeal, Democrats might have an only slightly harder time convincing the public to pardon Osama bin Laden, and they continue to labor under the delusion that the problem with health-care reform isn’t policy, but public relations.  Americans oppose the health-care program because they don’t understand it.  Sooner or later, the thinking goes, they will find the magic words that will convince the public of how right the Democrats have been all along.

But given two years of almost continuous debate on the issue, it is far more likely that the public really does understand the bill. They know, for example, that, despite the president’s reassurances, they are not going to be able to keep their current health insurance, even if they like it. They understand that outside experts now predict that Obamacare will cost at least $2.7 trillion over its first ten years of actual operation, not the $950 billion originally predicted, adding more than $350 billion to the deficit over that period, despite massive new taxes.

The more the public finds out what is in Obama Care, the less they like it.

To Kill a constitution, one does not have to truly brain dead to post for the Puffington Post, but it seems to help.  Amanda Terkel, link:

WASHINGTON — The equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution does not protect against discrimination on the basis of gender or sexual orientation, according to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia

[…]

For the record, the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause states: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Marcia Greenberger, founder and co-president of the National Women’s Law Center, called the justice’s comments “shocking” and said he was essentially saying that if the government sanctions discrimination against women, the judiciary offers no recourse

If the Fourteenth was taken to apply to discrimination on the basis of sex, we would have not have to bother with adopting the Nineteenth Amendment to extend the vote to women, nor would the nags have felt the urge push the ill-fated Equal Rights Amendment.   Further, the all male draft would have surely been unconstitutional.

Fifty three percent of the nation is female.  Will the nags simply shut up and quit acting like an unempowered minority.

To Kill a classic, from Mark Schultz, Publishers Weekly:

Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a classic by most any measure—T.S. Eliot called it a masterpiece, and Ernest Hemingway pronounced it the source of “all modern American literature.” Yet, for decades, it has been disappearing from grade school curricula across the country, relegated to optional reading lists, or banned outright, appearing again and again on lists of the nation’s most challenged books, and all for its repeated use of a single, singularly offensive word: “nigger.”

Twain himself defined a “classic” as “a book which people praise and don’t read.” Rather than see Twain’s most important work succumb to that fate, Twain scholar Alan Gribben and NewSouth Books plan to release a version of Huckleberry Finn, in a single volume with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, that does away with the “n” word (as well as the “in” word, “Injun”) by replacing it with the word “slave.”

from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 32, via Literature.org:

I didn’t rightly know what to say, because I didn’t know whether the boat would be coming up the river or down. But I go a good deal on instinct; and my instinct said she would be coming up — from down towards Orleans. That didn’t help me much, though; for I didn’t know the names of bars down that way. I see I’d got to invent a bar, or forget the name of the one we got aground on — or — Now I struck an idea, and fetched it out:

“It warn’t the grounding — that didn’t keep us back but a little. We blowed out a cylinder-head.”

“Good gracious! anybody hurt?”

“No’m. Killed a nigger.”

“Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt. Two years ago last Christmas your uncle Silas was coming up from Newrleans on the old Lally Rook, and she blowed out a cylinder-head and crippled a man. And I think he died afterwards. He was a Baptist. Your uncle Silas knowed a family in Baton Rouge that knowed his people very well. Yes, I remember now, he DID die

Sure the word nigger is offensive, and to use it is to identify the speaker as a racist.   Which is exactly the author’s intent, to tag both Huck and Aunt Sally as racists.   After all Huck Finn is not about a raft trip down the Mississippi.   It is an anal examination of a racist culture.   We can never learn our history by disneyfying iit.

More, Johnathan Turley:

Would we rewrite Faulkner as well? How about all of the modern movies and books using this term as part of modern urban speech? Authors write to capture characters who are often racist or living in racist times. This publisher may billed itself as the “NewSouth” but this book was written about the Old South.  To sanitize history or literature is an act of violence against the artistic work of these authors.

Tho those who would censor the likes of Clemens, or Faulkner:  Literature, you can’t handle literature.  Best stick to the Disney Channel.

The United States Navy screws up, from Steve Szkotak:

If Captain Honors had not been doing an excellent job, he would not have been selected for command twice since the videos were aired, some four years.

From USNI:

There can only be three answers by the Navy concerning these videos. “We” refers to the Flag Officer Community that leads our Navy – just to be clear.

1. We had no idea.
2. We knew and didn’t care.
3. We disaproved, counseled our Shipmate, corrective action taken with remediation, and we moved forward.

Captain Honors produced his videos with the knowledge and consent o his superior officers and was twice selected for command since the release of the videos.  All of a sudden, the same Navy which approved of Captain Honors’ videos, now finds them unacceptable.   Gentlemen, your actions are not acceptable.

The KKK is gone, the Kennedy Kongressional Klan is gone.  Free at last, free at last.

Class envy, from James Carroll, Boston Globe:

If a just society is defined by the relationship between the well off and the very poor, we have big trouble. US Census data for 2010 show the widest rich-poor income gap on record. In 1968, the top 20 percent of Americans had about 7 times the income of those living below the poverty line. By 2008, that disparity had grown to about 13. By 2010, it had grown even further, to more than 14. The poverty level in 2010 was put at $21,954 for a family of four. In 2010, the percentage of Americans living below half of the poverty line (or about $11,000) had grown from 5.7 percent in 2008 to 6.3 percent. That the rich get richer while the poor get poorer can seem a timeless cliché, yet something is steadily corroding America. The mythic land of equality has the largest income disparity of any Western nation. How can that be?

I am not buying Carroll’s concept of a just society.    We have had societies based on a supposed fair distribution of material wealth,  like the former Soviet Union, where they stood in line for toilet paper.

In contrast, when Americans stand in like it is to see the latest Harry Potter movie or buy s flat screen television from Wally World.    Carroll may prefer standing in line for TP, as for me, I’ll take TV.  And you?

WaPo lauds ‘pubs, kind of, sort of, from E.J. Dionne, RCP:

But on reflection, I offer the Republicans two cheers for their fealty to their professed ideals. We badly need a full-scale debate over what the Constitution is, means and allows — and how Americans have argued about these questions since the beginning of the republic. This provision should be the springboard for a discussion all of us should join.

From its inception, the tea party movement has treated the nation’s great founding document not as the collection of shrewd political compromises that it is, but as the equivalent of sacred scripture.

Octo-Mom does Disneyland, and where are the childrens’ fathers?  From Tod Akuaba:

Nadya Suleman did what any responsible mom of 14 would do when her house is foreclosed on and she has no place to live, she took her brood to Disneyland and spent loads of money she doesn’t have! The..

The children have a fathers.  Find them.
.

US Navy does raunchy:

NORFOLK, Va. (AP) — The Navy said Sunday it will investigate “clearly inappropriate” videos broadcast to the crew of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier in which a top officer of the ship used gay slurs, mimicked masturbation and opened the shower curtain on women pretending to bathe together.

The star of the videos, made in 2006 and 2007, is a former Top Gun pilot who now commands the same ship, the Norfolk-based USS Enterprise, which was deployed in the Middle East at the time and is weeks from deploying again.

The Virginian-Pilot newspaper reported on the videos in its Saturday editions and posted an edited version of one video on its website.

Did the video improve or degrade the Enterprise’s combat effectiveness?  No other question   matters.   Operating a sailing airfield the size of a postage stamp is stressful enough in peace time and the Enterprise was not on a training cruise    Memo, to the rear echelon, find a real problem and leave the warriors alone.

New York Times does envy, from Nicholas D. Kristof,  New York Times:

John Steinbeck observed that “a sad soul can kill you quicker, far quicker, than a germ.”

That insight, now confirmed by epidemiological studies, is worth bearing in mind at a time of such polarizing inequality that the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans possess a greater collective net worth than the bottom 90 percent.

There’s growing evidence that the toll of our stunning inequality is not just economic but also is a melancholy of the soul.

I suggest that what Kristof calls inequity would be better called green eyed envy and for Kristof to get over it.   The sooner the better.

More, Darleen Click, Protein Wisdom:

People who shop Walmart, Target or Costco are just as apt to have a flatscreen TV, personal computer, cell phone and a refrigerator full of food as people who frequent Whole Foods or Neiman-Marcus.

Indeed, plant yourself on a bench at any high-end mall and I would assert you would have a hard time picking out the income bracket of any random shopper based solely on how they dressed

All those flat screen television bought at Wally World would not exist, had those poor sap rich folks bought the first expensive over priced models first.  Kristof would have believe that is better to live on world with no flat screen televisions at all.

Dream the impossible dream,  from, N. Gregory Mankiw,  New York Times:

STOP TRYING TO SPREAD THE WEALTH Ever since your famous exchange with Joe the Plumber, it has been clear that you believe that the redistribution of income is a crucial function of government. A long philosophical tradition supports your view. It includes John Rawls’s treatise “A Theory of Justice,” which concludes that the main goal of public policy should be to transfer resources to those at the bottom of the economic ladder.

Many Republicans, however, reject this view of the state. From their perspective, it is not the proper role of government to fix the income distribution in an attempt to achieve some utopian vision of fairness. They believe, instead, that in a free society, people make money when they produce goods and services that others value, and that, as a result, what they earn is rightfully theirs.

This view also has a long intellectual tradition. The libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick has suggested revising the old leftist slogan “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” to “From each as they choose, to each as they are chosen.”

Might as well tell Dumbo, b/k/a Barack Obama, to fly.   If Obama is anything, he is dyed in the wool class warfare warrior.    No Obama is more important to insure that nobody has more than his due  share, than for any poor slob to have anything.    In Cuba nobody has anything,  but then nothing is equally distributed, and that is al that really matters.

Mario IV, some states just never learn.  Mario Cuomo sworn in for fourth term as governor, from Nick Reisman, Politics on the Hudson:

But Gov. Andrew Cuomo did take some time to enjoy being back in an old family house.

“This was a whole great, explore the mansion thing,” Cuomo said. “You know, it’s amazing, my mother put together a historical preservation society. It’s amazing how all the changes she made are still there. The changes that are still there are like stepping back into time in many ways.”

Cuomo, a Democrat, spent his first night in the Executive Mansion on Eagle Street Friday night following a gathering of about 80 people at a reception. He was sworn in after 10 p.m. and officially became the state’s 56th governor at midnight.

Personally, I think that three terms of Mario, were about four too many.  Oh well.

Latina I:

SANTA FE, N.M., Jan. 1 (UPI) — Susana Martinez is New Mexico’s first female governor and the nation’s first Hispanic female governor, officials said

Tricky, Ticky, Jill notes the Mother Nature refuses to conform to social political ideology, from Pundit & Pundette:

They want babies. Some are single and some are married to men who don’t see the upside to fatherhood. (What’s in it for them?)

But the female of the species still retains at least a vestigial desire to reproduce (reflexively expressed as the “need to experience motherhood”) and that deep, human desire trumps the marriage bond.

Tick tock goes the biological clock. No doubt this story would be even sadder if it included data on the number of children these peri-peri-menopausal ladies discarded when the ticking wasn’t so loud.

If gender feminist theory were in fact true, the human race would soon become extinct.

As the womb ticks, from Daily Mail (UK):

Britain’s top maternity doctor has called for school children to be taught that the best age for a woman to have a baby is between 20 to 35.

Dr Tony Falconer, the new president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, says women must be ‘better at resolving the conflict’ between their careers and family life.

I don’t think the gender feminists are going to like Dr. Falconer’s message.  Such is life.