Mrs. Pelosi’s Swamp

Mrs. Pelosi, the inspiration for Swamp Stompers,  promised to “Drain the Swamp.”   Yet all Mrs. Pelosi has managed has to further infest the swamp.

Via, Memeorandum.David Broder, Washington Post, compares Pelosi’s over inflated claims of achievement versus her actual accomplishments:

While surveys by The Post and other news organizations show that the public believes little or nothing of value has been accomplished in a year of bitter partisan wrangling on Capitol Hill, Pelosi claims that “the House has had a remarkable level of achievement over the first year, passing 130 key measures — with nearly 70 percent passing with significant bipartisan support.”

More, Gaius, Blue Crab Boulevard.

David Broder looks at the actual achievements of the Democrat’s first year in control of Congress and judges them against the claimsof those achievements being made by Nancy Pelosi. He finds more than a bit of illusion in the press releases.

I happened to notice that the Sun came up this morning.  Wonder when Mrs. Pelosi will clam credit for that as well?

Keith B. Richburg, Washington Post, fights to keep his Rolodex relevant, and explores the issue of the Reverend Al Sharpton’s relevance:

Sharpton has “been eclipsed, because Obama puts guys like Sharpton in the shadow,” said Fred Siegel, a historian of New York City at the Cooper Union college in Manhattan. “Suppose Obama is elected president. He’s terrible for Sharpton, because that takes away Sharpton’s job. He’s a kind of racial ambulance chaser. It’s hard to engage in that game if there’s another powerful African American politician.”

But Sharpton has thrived this year with his high-decibel microphone-to-megaphone activism, even in the face of a federal investigation of his 2004 campaign finances. In an interview punctuated by interruptions from his cellphone, he scoffed at the notion that he is being overshadowed or is any less relevant.

The Reverend Sharpton argues that he is still relevant.   Then Mrs. Clinton argues that she has relevant experience at something besides baking cookies.   Better than argument, we need evidence.

Let us look at what Richburg  presents as evidence of the Reverend Sharpton’s relevance.

• Sharpton is still organizing protests. That and three dollars and fifty cents will get the good Reverend a cup of coffee at Starbucks.
• ISharpt0n got Don Imus fired.  So after a brief vacation, Imus is back on the air, and dwarfs Sharpton in the ratings.
• Sharpton protested the treatment of the Jena Six.   They are still in jail.
• Politicians still seek Sharpton’s endorsement.   Any politician actually accepting any endorsement from Sharpton should be made to explain what role, if any, Sharpton will have in their administration.

Sharpton gets media attention because editors have not forced their lazy reporters to update their Rolodexs.

Michelle comments, “Just what we needed to close out the year: Another Al Sharpton suck-up piece by the MSM.”

Hat Tips: article, Memeorandum; photo, Michelle Malkin.

Addenudum and Bump: 

Meryl Yourish accuses Richburg of posting a “sanitized Cliff Notes”  story:

Keith Richburg has a front page report Not Relevant? Sharpton Scoffs at the Idea in yesterday’s Washington Post. Clearly the reporter scoffs too. There’s a sub-head line
“Activist’s Busy Calendar and Ringing Phone Speak to His Role in Civil Rights” which would have been more correct if it read “… His Role in Self-Promotion.” The article is a highly selective view of Sharpton’s career until now.

 It is time for Sharpton to leave the public stage.

[Ron] Paul blames Lincoln for the Civil War rather than blaming the South for starting a war to preserve slavery. Does he love liberty? Or does he merely loathe the federal government?

James Taranto:  Opinion Journal.

Addendum: (Bit)

Heh… he doesn’t think Lincoln should have fought a war to save the Union… the one he wants to be President over. Work on that one for a while and explain to me why anyone takes Ron Paul seriously.

Addendum:  (David L)

I will not bill myself as a student of the Civil War.  However it is a subject of interest to me.   Have read Shelby Foote’s trilogy and other books.   I do feel I have better grasp of the war than does Ron Paul.

Paul is right that slavery was abolished without the need for a civil war in most countries and would have been abolished here as well.  I’d say circa 1900 with the invention of the mechanical cotton picker.

However the alternative to the Civil War was not either a nation with slavery or without slavery, but rather whether we would continue to be one nation, or just a collection of separate countries inhabiting the same continent.    One road led the the United States of America, and the other, Paul’s, a Balkanized States of America.

Paul also misses, or wishes to ignore, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments which made blacks citizens and established civil rights as a constitutional concept.    Sure the slaves would have been emancipated without the need for a civil war, but there would been no movement to make former slaves, or descendants, citizens with, at least in theory, equal legal rights.

RAWALPINDI, Pakistan —Fox News- Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was assassinated Thursday in a homicide attack that also killed at least 20 others at a campaign rally.Bhutto was shot in the neck and chest as she was entering her vehicle, and then the bomber blew himself up, FOX News has confirmed.The former prime minister died in Rawalpindi General Hospital, where she had been rushed to surgery. She was 54.”At 6:16 p.m. she expired,” said Wasif Ali Khan, a member of Bhutto’s party who was at the hospital.Her supporters at the hospital began chanting “Dog, Musharraf, dog,” referring to Pakistan’s president, Pervez Musharraf.

Well, that certainly didn’t take long.

In spite of the crowd, I’m not convinced Musharraf is responsible, or even wanted this….though I suspect and suppose there are a number who would like the world to think he was at the root of the attack.

And isn’t it interesting that this is being called a ‘murder’ and not a ‘suicide bomber’, as when they attack our troops, for example? The difference is, of course, that Musharraf has been at least marginally, a freind of the US, and therefore can be changed with Murder by the press with impunity. Charging Al Quieda with Murder, when they kill US troops,  is another matter, seemingly.

Ya’ever get the feeling there was some manipulation in the press?

Addendum:  (David L)

Folded in my tardy response.

Breaking. via Memorandum : 

RAWALPINDI, Pakistan (CNN)— Pakistan former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto has died after a suicide bombing that killed at least 14 of her supporters, ex-government spokesman Tariq Azim Khan and Pakistan’s primary television networks said.

Bhutto suffered bullet wounds in the aftermath of the bomb attack, TV networks report.

While Gallup’s most recent poll… and the “reporting” thereof… centered on the idea that Hillary Clinton has passed Oprah Winfrey as the most admired woman…. (Nobody asked me…)   Ron Coleman over at Right Wing News reports there’s a little mentioned other side to the report…

Gallup reports — utterly buried in an article about how Hillary Clinton is America’s most admired woman (not the subject of this post) — that none other than President George W. Bush is America’s most admired man. (Via Instapundit.)

That is the same George W. Bush who lives on Pennsylvania Avenue. Not his father, the mythical super-president invoked by Bill Clinton and others, who used to live there. No; it is that fellow who is such a poor extemporaneous speaker; who is so inclined to cronysim; who has done such a poor job of marketing to the American public his one historic and courageous policy, the Iraq War — that same one.

So, while for the last cycle or so we were inundated with the news that Hillary Clinton had passed Oprah Winfrey in the popularity department, all our press utterly ignored the idea that George W Bush was more popular than either of them.  Now, why do you suppose that would be?

Also, the timing strikes me as interesting, as is the comparison of Hillary Clinton and Oprah Winfrey, in light of the latter’s tossing her support behind Hillary Clinton’s biggest rival for the Democrat party nomination for POTUS.

Bias? Nah… couldn’t be.

The links are already piling up at Memeorandum.

Nice to hear from the Conservative Reader (The Iowa Swamp Stomper). Apparently 1040/WHO is going to be running an Immigration Reform talk show, today. C. R.  has the links.

Via Memeorandum, I find this.. which I take as evidence that the left is still engaged in anti-Jewish knee-jerking. No wonder they like Ron Paul.

And yes, Miss Mannered, I mean you.

And no, this wasn’t your fisrt time hating Jews… it’s just the first time you’ve admitted it to yourself. Your words have spoken plainly of the hate you just now have gotten around to admitting.

And if you think it’s just her, read the comments… these slimy slugs begging the anti-semite to stay, and agreeing with her.

LGF has some added details, if you need more.

I’m going to go take a shower.

Steve LeBlanc reports on the end of fifteen billion dollar hole in the gronnd.

BOSTON (AP) – When the clock runs out on 2007, Boston will quietly mark the end of one of the most tumultuous eras in the city’s history: The Big Dig, the nation’s most complex and costliest highway project, will officially come to an end.

More:  JammieWearingFool. “Only $12.2 Billion Over Budget ”

Why don’t you send Senator Kennedy a thank-you note?

Michael S. Barr in The New York Times, today:

WHILE the causes of the mortgage crisis are myriad, a central problem was that many borrowers took out loans that they did not understand and could not afford.

Yep. But what set up that situation?

Instead of blaming ‘sales tactics’ how about we blame the real problem?

Pressure on banks to establish lending to the ‘poor’,  a practice which  was established during the Clinton years… The government, in short WANTED those loans to happen, and pressured the banks into creating them. Of course, it’s not the government’s fault when these best laid plans cause the degree of collapse that’s occurred, right?

 So much for ‘helping the poor’.  Governmental pressure on banks got ’em the loans, but they were not able to handle them, because of a lack of education.

Government schools, again.

 BBCT: Memeorandum

Last week, we mentioned a number of TV stations in the Scranton PA area that were knocked off the air by the ice storm that blanketed that area.  Scott Fybush over at the Northeast Radio Watch advises us that things are getting back to normal down there. Apparently, the one station whose analouge transmitter was crushed by the falling tower, will be replaced. Interesting, given that they only have another year to operate that signal.

Photo is from WNEP, whose tower this is… err was.

What a jolly mess.

Economically speaking, this Christmas season wasn’t bad.

Glenn notes today:

CHRISTMAS RETAIL SALES UP, BUT BY A MODEST 3.6% — but online sales were up 22.4%. The New York Times calls those numbers “bleak,” a term that’s more accurately used in reference to its stock prices . . . .

Heh…

That snark aside, what happened to the forecasts of financial gloom and doom by the press?  Where’s the poor economy that George Bush supposedly destroyed?  It’s been proven as lies, of course.

However, the lies are for a purpose, I think. Glenn notes that in an update:

UPDATE: Reader, and hedge-fund manager, George Zachar emails:

Investors now have to gauge not only the reality of economic data, but its predictable willful misrepresentation by the press. We therefore have to speculate not only on underlying conditions, but on the effectiveness of the effort to scupper Main Street confidence.

On another matter, tech unfriendliness is a big driver in NYC commercial real estate, and the conversion of many older buildings into residential lofts.

Yeah, the press reports have consequences besides their intended one, of swinging the elections.

There was never any doubt in my mind, Glenn that this was one of their purposes.  And since you mention it, the New York Times in particular… the DNC Mouthpeice of Record. Now, what has to happen, of course is the rest of us need to keep banging n the fact that the press got the forecast so very wrong, and willingly so…

And keep in mind, this is only the start of the election season… If there such things are really limited to a season, anymore. But think;  if the lies are this fast and furious from the press NOW, imagine what it’s going to be for the next 11 months…

Michelle, today:

Environmental busybodies never take a vacation. The lead letter on Christmas day at the San Francisco Chronicle echoed dim bulb Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels’ recent “Stop global warming and buy CFLs or Santa will DIEDIEDIE!” threat:

Change our lifestyle to save Santa’s home

Editor – Santa is deeply concerned with the rapid shrinking of the North Pole. For generations, he has depended on swift, reliable and environmentally friendly reindeer power.

If we do not change our lifestyle soon and seek alternative energy sources, future generations will not experience the thrill of seeing Santa flying over the rooftops on Christmas Eve, and the only happy soul will be the Grinch, who wants to see a Christmas meltdown.

GEORGE EVANS
Novato

She offers up a few other similar letters, that have popped up around the country.

Ya know, maybe we should create a law prohibiting liberloons from marketing their harmful, noxious nonsense to kids.

Update: Also noted on Memeorandum

The World’s most powerfull on-line army just got bigger.     Charles opened, and closed, his registration door.    More Lizards just in time for the primary season.   

Flim flam artists are always trying to seperate a fool from his money.  

Case one, I ran with with this story on 28 October, but it bears repeating:

When Nomatter Tagarira, a spirit medium, claimed that she could conjure refined diesel out of a rock by striking it with her staff, ministers in Robert Mugabe’s Government believed that they might have found the solution to Zimbabwe’s perennial fuel shortage.

After witnessing her apparently miraculous gift they gave her five billion Zimbabwean dollars in cash (worth £1.7 million at the start of the year but now worth one seven-hundredth of that) in return for the fuel. Ms Tagarira was also given a farm, said to have been seized from its white owner during Mr Mugabe’s lawless land grab, as well as food and services that included a round-the-clock armed guard on the rock in the district of Chinhoyi 60 miles (100km) from Harare, the capital.

Case two, and with this one on Monday, December 24:

MANCHESTER, N.H. – Hillary Clinton predicted Saturday that just electing her President will cut the price of oil.

When the world hears her commitment at her inauguration about ending American dependence on foreign fuel, Clinton says, oil-pumping countries will lower prices to stifle America’s incentive to develop alternative energy.

“I predict to you, the oil-producing countries will drop the price of oil,” Clinton said, speaking at the Manchester YWCA. “They will once again assume, once the cost pressure is off, Americans and our political process will recede.”

So question, who,  Tagarira or Mrs. Clinton, is the biggest, liar, fraud, charlatan?  Neither claim was ever remotely credible or plausible.  Yet Robert Mugabe’s was naive enough to fall, somewhat, for Targara’s scheme.   Will the voters of Iowa be as naive as Mugabe and fall for Mrs. Clinton’s scam?

Mrs. Clinton claims to have experience, in something besides baking cookies.  Yet her claims of experience are more akin to fish stories.   On Townhall, Dick Morris and Eileen McGann, are calling B.J. and Mrs. Clinton liars, “Hillary Had No Role in Irish Peace, Despite Bill’s Claims:”

Recently, as only Hillary can do, she claimed that she was “deeply involved in the Irish peace process.” Bill has also picked up the theme, citing her “independent” role in resolving the century-old conflict as “experience” with which to justify a White House run.How odd that Hillary forgot to mention her pivotal role in Ireland just four years ago, when she wrote her $8 million memoir, Living History. There, she told a very different story.

Funny, my memory seems to get worse with age.  Just the opposite with the Clinton’s.  Their collective memories seem to improve with age.   The Clinton’s are desperate to rewrite history even to the point of inventing it.

Hat Tip:  Lucianne.