Picture Fun

Stolen from Theo Spark:

How true.....

News Flash....Detroit Broken

From Motorcitytimes comes the latest update:

When a city depends on governmental agencies as three of its top five employers, there is a serious problem. When you drill further into Detroit’s employment data, you find that 47.8% of employees at the city’s top 25 employers work for a tax payer supported (governmental) agency. In other words, a very large (and expensive) percentage of Detroit’s work force does not add anything to the economic growth of the city whatsoever.

Full post can be found HERE.

Hat tip to Theo Spark for the pointer.

More Steyn

The brave middle-aged schoolgirl had the courage to stand up in public and demand that someone else pay for her sex life….

No taxation without rubberization, as the Minutemen said. The shot heard round the world, and all that….

No, the most basic issue here is not religious morality, individual liberty, or fiscal responsibility. It’s that a society in which middle-aged children of privilege testify before the most powerful figures in the land to demand state-enforced funding for their sex lives at a time when their government owes more money than anyone has ever owed in the history of the planet is quite simply nuts.

From NRO. Hat tip for the pointer to Legal Insurrection.

Quote of the Day

The transformation of “human rights” from restraints upon state power into a pretext for state power is nicely encapsulated in the language of Article 14 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, which states that everyone has the right “to receive free compulsory education.” Got that? You have the human right to be forced to do something by the government.

From Mark Steyn at NRO.  Hat tip for the pointer to Proof Positive.

Real world example

Of the liberal mindset.  Of "We know better than you how to run your life".

From the folks at Small Dead Animals:

Leftists the world over love to blather on & on about how "conservatives want to control your life". In reality though, its the underlying notion of the Leftist mindset to shape everything around them into their view of Nirvana. This is done, at first, through a never-ending series of Rules & Regulations and Penalties. Here's an example of the "Welcome" sign that greets visitors to the beaches of Santa Monica, California:

How welcoming. No this, no that. My favorite is on the bottom, where you are told you can't walk on the bilk path. And it's the VEHICLE CODE that bans walking.

I see that this is promulgated by the "Open Space Management Division".  Only open space I can see is in that large hole in their heads.

More on the stimulus

The Washington Times reports:

Despite receiving more than $885 million in federal economic stimulus funds since 2009, the D.C. government — whose residents face one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation — cannot say how many jobs it actually created for those who live in the District.

Most of the money has been spent, and data suggest that overall regional job growth did occur as a result of the massive infusion of capital. But a review by The Washington Times of figures provided by D.C. officials shows that the city spent hundreds of millions of dollars without being able to demonstrate any significant improvement in the city’s jobs outlook.

If anything, the employment picture has worsened in the District. At the end of 2011, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the city’s unemployment rate was 10.4 percent, ahead of only three states: Nevada (12.6 percent), California (11.1 percent) and Rhode Island (10.8 percent).

In the District, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate has increased by 8 percent since 2009, as the D.C. government was receiving historic levels of federal stimulus funding via contracts, grants, loans, tax benefits and entitlements.

My bet is that it is not that they can't say, but don't want to.  Better to have no number than some pitiful excuse for a jobs creation plan.

Hey, but it's the thought that counts.  Let's multiply that $885 million by all the other "constituencies" that got cash and you can see that this was cronyism on a grand scale.

Hat tip to Weasel Zippers.

The Stimulus

Remember how the Obama stimulus was supposed to provide jobs for Americans?

From KVAL-TV in Eugene, OR comes this story:

Federal Stimulus money went to hire foreign workers before Americans as KVAL-TV (Eugene, OR) reports.

Reportedly, four companies in Oregon used nearly $7 million in taxpayer-funded stimulus money for a job that hired 250 foreign workers. The companies were able to exploit a loophole that allowed them to hire workers using the H-2B visa system.

Logging jobs in Oregon that went to foreigners.  Loans to cronies in the "green energy" market.  Payoffs to unions for campaign support.  Does the public know how much of a boondoggle it all was?

Video of the story available here.

Obamacare and money

Remember....this is the person in charge of your healthcare.

Health and Human Services Sec. Kathleen Sebelius appeared flummoxed by questioning from Sen. Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) at a hearing on the new health care law Wednesday.

Johnson challenged Sebelius over a number of the Obama administration’s claims about the new health care law, namely that it will reduce the deficit and allow individuals to keep their current healthcare plans.

On several occasions, Sebelius professed to have “no idea” what Johnson was talking about.

Full story over at Free Beacon.

Unions and CPAC

Who you gonna believe, Richard Trumka or the unemployed dude??



Hat tip to Moonbattery for the video from the Daily Caller.

Netanyahu at AIPAC

Whether you agree or not, he lays it out in very stark, clear terms.



THIS is a man who does not bluff.

Your tax dollars

Hard at work in the Motor City:

DETROIT (WWJ/AP) - An audit has found that a portion of an $11 million federal grant intended to provide business attire to 400 low-income job-seekers in Detroit helped only two people.

The audit of the city’s Department of Human Services found the department failed to control the operations and finances of a boutique that was to provide clothes, the Detroit News reported. The city’s auditor general conducted the review for the period from July 2009 to September 2011.

The center, at 1970 Larned, included the Customer Choice Pantry, the New Beginnings Clothing Boutique and a call center that had the capacity to service 60,000 families in need. The boutique was to provide business attire for low-income residents for job interviews.

To receive clothing, residents were required to have a job interview scheduled. According to the audit, the DHS was supposed to help 400 people between October 2010 and September 2011 but instead served only two.

Must have been all those shovel-ready jobs - folks didn't need to go to interviews.  That's it.

When will people learn that government merely takes the citizenry's money and distributes it to their favored subjects?  Government doesn't create anything, it merely takes and redistributes.

A simple question

Michael Ramirez of Investors Business Daily has it nailed:

John Hinderaker of Powerline adds his own take:

My own interpretation of this cartoon is broader than Ramirez perhaps intended. It is not just forcing religious institutions to pay for contraception, etc., that is unconstitutional under the First Amendment. Rather, for the federal government to dictate any coverages that must be included in private insurance policies is well beyond any enumerated power in the Constitution, and therefore is invalid.

I think that John and Michael are actually on the same wavelength.

Dennis Miller on Breitbart

Miller writes:

I do know this though, Rockne just crashed in a wheat field a few days ago and the rest of us are going to all have to do our job just a little better if we are to balance out the loss of this truly consequential man.

Yes...we must do our jobs better. Thank you for the jolt of courage, Andrew.

Frozen brains?

In Duluth, Minnesota, a group of non-profits, including four colleges, are posting billboards with the theme "It's hard to see racism when you're white".

John Hinderaker at Powerline sums it up well:

I am guessing that these billboards were paid for, overwhelmingly, with taxpayer money; i.e, yours and mine. A considerable amount of that money, if you trace it back, was no doubt borrowed from Asian banks and governments. So, consider this: Chinese peasants are saving their money so that their banks can lend many billions of dollars to the Obama administration, which in turn passes some of those dollars on to universities and other non-profits so that they can spend millions to erect billboards accusing white Americans of being racists. Is this a great country, or what?

Still a great country in spite of the efforts by the left to make it less so.

Will it happen?

There's an old line that says that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged.

Maybe we'll get that on the Supreme Court?

WASHINGTON –  Justice Stephen Breyer was robbed last week by a machete-wielding intruder at his vacation home in the West Indies, a Supreme Court spokeswoman said Monday.

The 73-year-old Breyer, wife Joanna and guests were confronted by the robber around 9 p.m. EST Thursday in the home Breyer owns on the Caribbean island of Nevis, spokeswoman Kathy Arberg said. The intruder took about $1,000 in cash and no one was hurt, Arberg said.

One can hope, can't they?

About contraception

Again, from the wonderful Iowahawk:

Found at The Last Refuge.

Ted Nugent - Advocate

Here's a video of Ted taking apart the sanctimonious Piers Morgan:



What an advocate.

All that glitters is not gold

From the comment section on Ann Althouse's blog:

When are these courageous white gays going to glitter bomb the anti-gay marriage black bigot in the White House? Or is he too scary because he's black?

Excellent observation.

Religion of Peace

ROP my ass.

MALE — At the Maldives' National Museum, smashed Buddhist statues are testament to the rise of Islamic extremism and Taliban-style intolerance in a country famous as a laid-back holiday destination.

On Tuesday, as protesters backed by mutinous police toppled president Mohamed Nasheed, a handful of men stormed the Chinese-built museum and destroyed its display of priceless artefacts from the nation's pre-Islamic era.

"They have effectively erased all evidence of our Buddhist past," a senior museum official told AFP at the now shuttered building in the capital Male, asking not to be named out of fear for his own safety.

"We lost all our 12th century statues. They were made of coral stone and limestone. They are very brittle and there is no way we can restore them," he explained.

"I wept when I heard that the entire display had gone. We are good Muslims and we treated these statues only as part of our heritage. It is not against Islam to display these exhibits," he said.

Five people have since been arrested after they returned the following day to smash the CCTV cameras, he said.

The authorities have banned photography of the damage, conscious that vandalism of this kind which echoes the 2001 destruction of the Bamiyan Buddha statues in Afghanistan by the Taliban is damaging for the nation's image.

Read the whole disgusting story from AFP at THIS LINK.

The Nanny at the Beach

No, not Fran Drescher.  It's the Big Nanny called "Government".

If you haven't heard, Los Angeles County has now banned the throwing of Frisbees and footballs (and other balls) at beaches in the county.  Guess that having fun is too much for the government to stand.

Adam Carolla  is a podcast wonder, cranking out great material time and time again.  Here he expressed what most of us truly believe deep down:

The beach is a great little microcosm of what’s going on with this country. We’re gonna save everybody because God forbid some kid could get hit with a Frisbee or someone could take in second hand smoke or some dog could run across their beach towel. Yes, its true we’ve eliminated every possibility of someone being concussed by a Nerf football, but we’ve also eliminated all possibility of fun.

The beach, which used to be six pack, couple of cigarettes, a Frisbee, your dog and some tunes cranked up … is now, turn the radio down, put the cigarette out, pour the beer out in the sand, put the dog back on the leash, put the Frisbee away and here’s a thousand dollar fine. Better or worse? Is this fucking progress to you?

We should have a fucking beach jam … we all go out to the beach armed with our cigarettes, our beer, our dogs, and our Frisbees … a million strong….

Who decided it was the government’s job to protect us from ourselves? The government fucks everything up they touch. Please stop looking to them to help you. Hope and change?

Stop looking to them to help you.  So true.

Is this "Racist"? You tell me.

Actor Samuel L. Jackson explains his vote for Barack Obama in 2008:

In an interview with Ebony magazine, Jackson explained, "I voted for Barack because he was black. 'Cuz that's why other folks vote for other people — because they look like them ... That's American politics, pure and simple. [Obama's] message didn't mean [bleep] to me."

Jackson then went on to drop the N-word several times when discussing Obama, telling the mag, "When it comes down to it, they wouldn't have elected a [bleep]. Because, what's a [bleep]? A [bleep] is scary. Obama ain't scary at all. [Bleeps] don't have beers at the White House. [Bleeps] don't let some white dude, while you in the middle of a speech, call [him] a liar. A [bleep] would have stopped the meeting right there and said, ‘Who the [bleep] said that?' I hope Obama gets scary in the next four years, 'cuz he ain't gotta worry about getting re-elected."

What would have been the uproar had a white actor said: "I voted for McCain because he was white"?  You already know that answer.

This all goes along well with the Obama campaign group "African Americans for Obama" which started up last week. (Sorry I missed posting that during my short absence).  What would the media say about "White Americans for (insert the candidate de jour)"??

Sauce for goose AND gander?  Not in today's America.

Hat tip to Big Hollywood.

The Sunday Morning Lies

From Mike Flynn over at Big Government:

There simply is no other way to explain the statements of White House Chief of Staff Jacob Lew this morning on CNN’s State of the Union. Lew was asked by Candy Crawley about a recent statement by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid indicating he would not be bringing a vote on the budget to the Senate floor.

CROWLEY: “I want to read for our viewers something that Sen. Harry Reid, the Democrat Majority Leader in the U.S. Senate, who said, ‘We do not need to bring a budget to the floor this year. It’s done, we don’t need to do it.’”

LEW: “He’s not saying that they shouldn’t pass a budget. But we also need to be honest. You can’t pass a budget in the Senate of the United States without 60 votes and you can’t get 60 votes without bipartisan support. So unless… unless Republicans are willing to work with Democrats in the Senate, Harry Reid is not going to be able to get a budget passed.”

This is patently false.

You can’t filibuster the budget. The Congressional Budget Act of 1974 stipulates that debate is automatically cut off after 50 hours of debate. At that point, a budget can be passed by a simple majority, 51 votes. Democrats currently hold 53 seats in the Senate. They can pass a budget on a simple party-line vote.

Lew, a former director of the Office of Management and Budget, surely knows this. While the Obama Administration has regularly plumbed the depths of managerial incompetence, even they can’t be this incompetent.

That Lew prefaced this whopper with the tell-tale “let’s be honest” canard only highlights the cynical political maneuvering that is at the heart of the Administration.

So, let’s really be honest here. The latest Obama budget contains what virtually every proposed Democrat budget has for the past few decades; tax hikes, increased spending now and illusory budget “savings” some time in the ill-defined future. The Senate could pass Obama’s proposed budget within a couple weeks. The White House’s real problem is that Democrats don’t want to vote on his proposed budget.

Couldn't have said it better myself.  So I quoted it verbatim.  Simple truth:  The Democrats will lie rather than govern.  Will put staying in office above the needs of our people.  I won't say that Republicans don't care about power, but given a choice between the two, it's an easy pick.

CPAC

Daniel Hannan delivered a very timely and important speech at CPAC this week.  Though it is long, it's worth the time if you care about America.  Which this Englishman obviously does.



It is getting close to the time when it will be too late.  Remember that in November - and before.

Super Bowl Ads & Politics

From the folks at Powerline comes this flashback:

Courtesy of The Hill (and an Instapundit link), the following ad from MoveOn.org was rejected for the 2004 Super Bowl because it was “too political.”  But they miss the obvious irony here: watch it all the way to the end (it’s only 30 seconds long), and ask yourself if MoveOn.Org would run this ad today.  (In fact, it looks a lot like one of the runners-up in the Power Line video contest).  Interesting how things change.

Change just ONE word, and you have the situation today. Actually, you need to increase the numbers as well, but you get my point.

Hypocrisy, thy name is liberalism.

All animals are equal

The famous line from George Orwell's Animal Farm sums it up pretty well.

Just in case you still thought that Congress was just a bunch of folks representing, and representative of, the public at large, the Associated Press reminds us of seven major laws that Congress has exempted itself from.

While Congress is moving to explicitly apply insider trading laws to its members, lawmakers are exempt from provisions of other federal laws.

In 1995, the House and Senate passed the Congressional Accountability Act, which did apply many civil rights, labor and workplace safety statutes to the legislative branch.

Specifically, members of Congress are exempt from:

• The Freedom of Information Act.
• Investigatory subpoenas to obtain information for safety and health probes.
• Protections against retaliation for whistleblowers.
• Having to post notices of worker rights in offices.
• Prosecution for retaliating against employees who report safety and health hazards.
• Having to train employees about workplace rights and legal remedies.
• Record-keeping requirements for workplace injuries and illnesses.

This list seems to focus on workplace and OSHA issues, and is just a start. Remember the big one - Congress exempted itself from Obamacare.  Guess that some really are more equal than others.

Hat tip to Big Government.

Encouraging the dole

News that our nanny government wants even more people on the public dole.

Over the last three years, the number of Americans on food stamps has skyrocketed by two-thirds and stands at a record-high 46 million citizens, or one out of every seven people in the United States. Despite the historic rise in food stamp use, however, the Obama Administration believes not enough people are receiving food stamps who should be and is offering $75,000 grants to groups who devise “effective strategies” to “increase program participation” among those who have yet to sign up.

So, lets' get this straight.  Our government, which can't pay it's bills without borrowing even more and more money, is paying groups to find even more people to put into subsidized programs.  Rather than encouraging the citizenry to be productive members of society, it wants to put more and more of the population into dependency on Washington.  With the resultant election behavior of rewarding their benefactors.

Read the whole story by Wynton Hall at Big Government.

The mirror never lies

From Michelle Obama's Mirror.

College education and the Feds

News from Michigan:

President Barack Obama Friday told an enthusiastic crowd of students at the University of Michigan that extra taxes on millionaires should help subsidize their futures.

Without mentioning Gov. Mitt Romney by name, Obama used his campaign-style event to urge higher taxes on the nation’s most prosperous to reduce student loan-payments, increase student grants, fund universities and pay for high-tech research.

Excellent commentary from Sundancecracker:

This argument has frustrated me for years. The reason colleges are able to raise tuition costs is specifically because the federal government underwrite student loans and guarantees payment. There is no supply/demand equation in the pricing process. The colleges can charge whatever rates they want. The student goes to the federal government and gets loans for the cost. The loans are determined by the cost of the education. If the free market was allowed to work, colleges would immediately have to lower tuition costs in order to attract students. Alas, POTUS would never be honest about that. It is the subsidization of tuition that raises the rates. 

Who says this isn't all about class warfare?

What a dfference three years makes

From Howie Carr:

How profoundly America has changed since January 2009. 

I was pondering this the other night during the State of the Union address. Did you know that our elite military units like the Navy SEALs are now examples of America at its absolute finest? Why, wasn’t it just a few years ago that Sen. Dick Durbin was comparing these very same troops to the Khmer Rouge and Joe Stalin’s Red Army?

What used to be Dick Cheney’s hit squad is now a beacon of freedom.

But now of course the president is a Democrat. When Durbin spoke a Republican resided in the White House.

Remember when Theo Epstein snubbed Republican George W. Bush when the rest of the Red Sox went to the White House after the 2007 World Series? Nobody said boo. Now Bruins goalie Tim Thomas does the same thing to our PC president and — hey, somebody get a rope!

Since January 2009, natural disasters are no longer the personal fault of the president.

Now that Obama is president, Gen. “Betrayus” is once again Gen. Petraeus, the greatest American military genius since MacArthur, no make that U.S. Grant.

George W. Bush played 30 rounds of golf in eight years and it was dereliction of duty. Obama’s played 80 in three years and it’s a well-deserved rest from his terrible burden of world leadership.

On Jan. 20, 2009, all the homeless people went home. Inflation ended that same day. No longer do dying Americans have to travel to Canada to buy affordable prescription drugs.

The Tea Party — violent rhetoric. Occupy Wall Street and the publicly defecating hippies — in the finest tradition of our Founding Fathers.

Bush mispronounces nuclear — idiot. Obama butchers corpsman — misspoke.

Raising the debt ceiling under Bush — the worst kind of fiscal irresponsibility. Raising the debt ceiling under Obama — a valiant effort by our young president to save the world economy.

 McDonald’s jobs under Bush — “burger flipping.” McDonald’s jobs under Obama — entry-level jobs with one of America’s noblest public corporations.

Unemployment rate of 4.5 percent under Bush — “jobless recovery.” Unemployment rate of 8.5 percent under Obama — the new normal.

The Patriot Act under Bush — incipient fascism. The Patriot Act under Obama — yawn.

Words and phrases you haven’t heard since January 2009:  no blood for oil ... Cindy Sheehan ... not one more dime ... quagmire ... atrocities ... candlelight vigils ... not on our watch ... waterboarding ... Abu Ghraib...

Ah yes, the amazing way media perception turns on a dime.

Via The Feral Irishman.

What we are

From the Plumb Bob Blog:

The fact is that conservatives are not “stupid, racist, greedy and unfair.” We’re thoughtful, compassionate, ordinate in our desires, and stand for truth and liberty. It is Progressives who have lost their minds, who represent the worst of seething hatred, avarice, envy, lust, arrogance, self-righteousness, and dishonesty, while pretending to stand for the opposite. The contrast between the Tea Party and #Occupy demonstrates this amply. We’re looking for public champions to say so credibly.

Yes, where are those public champions that we need??