Saturday, July 12, 2008
Another one bites the bus
This time it's Bernie Mac....
Toward the end of a 10-minute standup routine at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in downtown Chicago, the 50-year-old star of "The Bernie Mac Show" joked about menopause, sexual infidelity and promiscuity, and used occasional crude language."My little nephew came to me and he said, 'Uncle, what's the difference between a hypothetical question and a realistic question?'" Mac said. "I said, I don't know, but I said, 'Go upstairs and ask your mother if she'd make love to the mailman for $50,000.'"
As the joke continued, the punchline evoked an angry response from at least one person in the audience, who said it was offensive to women.
"It's not funny. Let's get Barack on," a man shouted from the crowd, which paid $2,300 each to support the Illinois senator.
Al Queda hires a consultant
A memo to Al-queda staff
The "Q" is for "Quality"
A Message from the Director
Ayman al Zawahiri
Director of Change Management
Al Qaeda Industries Worldwide, Inc.Hello, valued Al Qaeda associate! Welcome to the inaugural issue of Vistas, the new electronic newsletter designed to keep you informed on all the fast-paced comings and goings within our Total Quality Jihad family.
In a dynamic marketplace characterized by rapid change and unexpected missiles, even the most disciplined adaptive organizations can find it challenging to keep the lines of communication open. Without understanding the strategic "big picture," associates will sometimes be confused by misleading rumors they read on unreliable infidel blogs and websites like "F*cked Insurgency" and "Jihad Deadpool." With Vistas, you will learn the real story -- of how we are attacking the competitive casualty gap with a paradigm-changing tactical adaptive strategy focused on paradise value optimization. Yes, there will be some changes, but our core leadership mission remains the same one established by Chairman Emeritus Osama Bin Laden when he founded Al Qaeda in his family goat shed nearly 15 years ago: to create a robust, cave-centric, best-of-breed strategic organization for global caliphate management solution services. If we all pull together as accountable subteams, we are on-track to rebuild momentum after the Q4 Infidel elections!
INTRODUCING QAEDANT
As a commitment to our spirit of goal-oriented adaptive martyrdom innovation, I am proud to announce the launch of Qaedant, our new corporate branding identity.
Developed in conjunction with our strategic branding agency FDB&D-Medina, this handsome new organizational logo will help us maintain consumer mindshare and let the world know that we continue on the cutting edge of advanced Jihad technology. Show your team pride by buying official Qaedant logo merchandise from the attached electronic catalog -- including mugs, keffiyas and semtex belts!
PERSONNEL PERSPECTIVES
As you have possibly heard by now, Team Satan and their subsidiary Iraqi Security Forces have made several key market acquisitions in the last few months. In order to meet Q3 Return-on-Mayhem targets and maximize stakeholder value, we need to refocus our client-facing resource model. As we are currently seeking a 17th round of venture funding, budgets are extremely tight, and this will require reducing our internal work team payroll load through adaptive right-sizing on a go-forward basis. Accounting estimates indicate that much of this will be achieved via natural attrition and Apache Hellfire missiles. Still, in order to achieve costing targets, we will need to engage in involuntary outboarding.
The Communications department will be most directly affected by this initiative, as we continue transitioning of our day-to-day public relations efforts to low-cost offshore service providers like Huffington Post, DailyKos, and Democratic Underground.
Read the rest....
I wonder if there are Islamic Dilberts on the payroll?
Who will she vote for? #20
Meet Joelle Fishman. Who is Ms. Fishman?
According to her tagline in the People's Weekly World, a communist publication, she "chairs the Communist Party USA Political Action Commission and is also chair of the Connecticut Communist Party."
So who will Ms Fishman vote for this fall? Let's just use her words.....
The choice is clear — stay with the Bush-McCain race to the bottom or come together and raise up the whole country with a landslide defeat of the Republican ultra-right.
Sounding like Grover Norquist, McCain speaks of never-ending war and shrinking government, privatizing services and cutting funds for human needs. In sharp contrast, Obama speaks of strengthening government to provide health care and jobs, address global warming and end the war in Iraq.
Obama’s program is not radical. Left and progressive voters will push for a stronger break from corporate control. This should not be cause for pulling back, but rather for greater involvement.
A landslide vote that is organized to stay in motion after the elections can challenge the demands that Wall Street and military interests will make on the new administration. Obama has shown he is ready to listen.
Big political shifts are under way. When Democracy Corps surveyed 45 congressional districts that voted Republican with big margins in 2004 and 2006, they found the majority of voters now plan to vote Democratic. Like the whole country, these voters are beleaguered by rising prices, rising death tolls in the war, rising unemployment and the inability of their state and local governments to maintain basic services due to federal budget cuts.
The big battles in Congress on war funding, Iran, children’s health care, extending unemployment benefits and immigration are connected to the elections. If the pressure is kept on, vulnerable Republicans and some conservative Democrats may be forced to change their votes or lose re-election.
But the business community has raised record sums and is also mobilizing with divisive messages against workers’ rights and civil rights.
During the primaries unions made different endorsements. The labor movement now has a pivotal role to unify and mobilize working families and their communities for November.
Thousands of grassroots union volunteers are already in motion as part of the largest-in-history labor mobilization, visiting co-workers to talk about the issues with the “McCain Revealed” program.
The Obama campaign, drawing upon the candidate’s community organizing experience, is also looking toward the grassroots. Unity for Change house parties across the country on June 28 will bring neighbors together for voter registration and getting out the vote.
Once again, I ask the question to all those Obamamaniacs. If Obama is no communist or marxist, why are so many supporting him? I don't remember all these people popping up when Kerry, Gore, or Clinton ran. There were no Che posters in the Biden, Richardson or Clinton campaign offices. What do these people believe that we should know?
There's going to be a new movie coming out this fall titled "Something about Obama".
Tony Snow RIP
A true loss for the American public.
Friday, July 11, 2008
Odell L. Thurman
Odell L. Thurman, 24, of Cincinnati, was indicted this week by Erie County grand jurors on a felonious assault charge.
On May 27, Thurman was involved in an altercation at Kalahari Waterpark Resort where he punched another man in the face, breaking his jaw, said Erie County Sheriff’s office Det. Bob Lippert.
More...
The Obamamania Judgment
As a state senator, Barack Obama gave $100,000 in state money to a campaign volunteer who failed to deliver on a plan to create a botanic garden in one of Chicago's most blighted neighborhoods.Obama -- who was running for Congress when he announced the project in 2000 -- said the green space in Englewood would build ''a sense of neighborhood pride."
Instead, what was supposed to be a six-block stretch of trees and paths is now a field of unfulfilled dreams, strewn with weeds, garbage and broken pavement.
That's a nice little metaphor for what the country will look like once he imparts some more of his judgment on the nation.
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Drink Beer
What is the problem with road signs?
Public Works officials are replacing 50 "Men Working" with signs that say "Workers Ahead." It will cost $22 to cover over some of the old signs and $144 to buy new signs, said Public Works spokeswoman Valerie Bell-Smith said.
I can see the problem with the old signs.... they imply someone is actually working.
Global Warming Challenge Update
Warm - 188
Cool - 202
T. Boone Pickens
The brilliance is in his simplicity.
Blog of the week
It has the look and feel of the Drudge Report for Ohio news.
Let's follow Michigan's lead
For a moment, forget that this is a state sanctioned theft of money from poor dumb asses which puts pay day loans to shame. But this is what really caught my eye in this article.
The new games is expected to rake in $73 million in profits for Ohio schools. Sales projections, the number of Keno retailers and other factors are modeled after Michigan's success with the game, Metelsky said. "We're not re-inventing the wheel here. We're looking at best practices and what has worked."
I know that's what we've been missing in this state..... great ideas from Michigan. That wonderful state with what? a 10% unemployment rate?
I'll say it over and over again. I'm not the smartest guy in the world so I make up for it by imitating what the smart guys are doing. Conversely, if Michigan's doing something, I think I'd pass on it. They're not the model of what I would call "success".
This is how a "progressive" defines "success"
Sens. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) told Cybercast News Service on Tuesday that they would support raising taxes to pay the $36.3 trillion needed to pay for promised Medicare benefits over the next 75 years.Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.), however, told Cybercast News Service that he thinks the level of health care provided to Americans through Medicare can be improved without raising taxes.
“We are going to have to pay for it, and there is no question that raising taxes is certainly one way,” Rockefeller said. “There is no way, if we continue on the current path, that we can pay for these services – and to prove that, they (Medicare services) are falling off rapidly on all fronts.”
Rockefeller continued by calling the Bush tax cuts an “obscenity” that benefits only the rich.
Bond, however, opposes a tax increase to pay for the projected shortfall in revenue to cover the people promised Medicare coverage, as detailed in the 2008 Medicare Trustees Report.
“I think we can provide better service without raising taxes,” he told Cybercast News Service.
Bond added that he thinks the Medicare program needs major renovation. “I think we need to reform the Medicare system,” he said. “It has worked well, but it will not work when we don’t have 16 people supporting each recipient. We need to make major changes.”
This makes the Enron scandal look like a pimple on an elephant's butt.
Wednesday, July 09, 2008
Who Will He Vote For? #28
Who will they vote for? #18
As a sort of pre-Independence Day festivity, local residents celebrated the right to freedom of speech with their fourth annual Old Time American Flag Burn at Seabright Beach on July 3.
The ceremony was organized by Brent Adams and Sha Lar, both of Santa Cruz, who say the idea started in 2004 as a response to proposed constitutional amendments to ban flag-burning, including one in 2006 that fell one vote short of the two-thirds majority needed to pass in the Senate.
"We never wanted to burn a flag before," Adams said. "But when we heard that they were trying to pass an amendment... we always felt that the fact that we can burn the flag in this country is one of the things that can make this country great."
I know that's one of the first things I do when I'm thinking about how great our country is.
Regardless, who do Brent and Sha vote for this November?
A) Community Organizer, Barack Obama
B) Libertarian, Bob Barr
C) Consumer Activist, Ralph Nader
D) John McCainHow compassionate are "progressives"?
Last week, I posted a piece on the preemptive closing of a check cashing operation near me.
This week, I have a story about a nearby deli that recently closed as a result of the smoking ban and minimum wage increase.
My understanding of the situation is this. This deli owner had been scrapping by for at least as long as I have been operating at my current location (about 11 years). He was basically making a small but decent living.
When the minimum wage increased, it did hurt his profits but he was able to get by and squeeze out a smaller income.
When the smoking law kicked in, it wiped him out. The irony is that his place was non smoking. Unfortunately, a big chunk of his business came from the bar next door. He catered their small bar menu (chicken wings, burgers, sandwiches, etc.). The smoking ban hurt the bar business just enough to put him out of business.
So how sympathetic do you think our garden variety "progressive" is about the loss of this business. Based on a quote from a comment on this post, I'd say, not very....
The jobs that will be lost (payday lenders should be able to operate just fine at 28% APR) aren't value added jobs. They simply serve to assist and industry in pilfering hardworking Ohioans of their hard earned dollars. Payday loans provide no net tangible benefit for consumers or Ohio's struggling economy.
So the question to Mr. "Progressive". Were these jobs "value added"? Is a bagger at a grocery store doing a "value added" job? What exactly makes a job "value added" versus one that isn't?
Was this business "pilfering hardworking Ohioans of their hard earned dollars". Afterall, you could probably get chicken salad a lot cheaper at Kroger's than this little place.
Do delicatessens provide any "net tangible benefit for consumers or Ohio's struggling economy"? Let's face it. The people who worked here help contribute to the country's obesity problem. I mean, how many jobs were lost here; 4 or 5 part time low wage jobs? What's the big deal? Right.
Maybe the reason for Ohio's struggling economy is that we have too much of this type of thinking from our state's "progressives".
What the hell is so "progressive" about unemployment?
Make the speculators pay
Congressional attacks on speculation do not alter the oil market's fundamental demand and supply conditions. What would lower the long-term price of oil is for Congress to permit exploration for the estimated billions upon billions of barrels of oil domestically available, not to mention the estimated trillion-plus barrels of shale oil in Wyoming, Colorado and Utah.Some politicians pooh-pooh calls for drilling, saying it would take five or 10 years to recover the oil. I guarantee you we would begin to see a reduction in today's prices even if it took five to 10 years for us to get the first barrel.
Put yourself in the place of an OPEC member knowing there would be a greater supply of U.S. oil in five or 10 years, hence maybe driving oil prices lower to, say, $40 a barrel. What will you want to do now while oil is $130 a barrel?
You would want to sell as much oil now, and OPEC's collective efforts to do so would put downward pressures on current oil prices. Right now, the U.S. Congress is OPEC's staunchest ally.
Tuesday, July 08, 2008
Londonistan
If we didn't know better, we'd say the news out of England suggests the British are hell-bent on killing their civilization. But, of course, we do know better — don't we?Last month, we lamented the emergence of "another sign that much of England has given up on being England." The cause of our grief were reports that Christian preachers in England had been warned by a police community support officer that trying to spread the gospel in a Muslim neighborhood is a hate crime.
While it's shocking at how far the West will go to avoid offending Muslims, it's downright discouraging to see how weakly it defends its own culture. It's as if the developed world is ashamed of its progress and the institutions that formed the foundation of its development.
Worse than a fear of offending a religious group is what appears to be an eagerness to simply give up and accept the fact that Islam is overrunning the West and we can't do anything about it because it would be intolerant, arrogant, hegemonic, racist and just plain mean to try to preserve our culture.
The fact is there is a world war brewing between three world views. Those opposing factions are
1) Judeo Christian, free market, American republics.
2) Atheistic, socialist, European style democracies.
3) Islamic, totalitarian, dictatorships.
Trust me. If your community/culture/country falls into second category, like much of Europe, you're going to be number three in a few generations.
B.O.'s Move to the Center - Catch It!
How low can you go?
The percentage of voters who give Congress good or excellent ratings has fallen to single digits for the first time in Rasmussen Reports tracking history. This month, just 9% say Congress is doing a good or excellent job. Most voters (52%) say Congress is doing a poor job, which ties the record high in that dubious category.Last month, 11% of voters gave the legislature good or excellent ratings. Congress has not received higher than a 15% approval rating since the beginning of 2008.
The percentage of Democrats who give Congress positive ratings fell from 17% last month to 13% this month. The number of Democrats who give Congress a poor rating remained unchanged. Among Republicans, 8% give Congress good or excellent ratings, up just a point from last month. Sixty-five percent (65%) of GOP voters say Congress is doing a poor job, down a single point from last month.
Wow, that's lower than the dog poop I scraped off my shoe yesterday. That's even lower than Bob Taft.
Let's pull out of the "War on Poverty"
One war fatality in eight days. You'd get at least double that on a warm Saturday night in any "Progressive" City USA.
| Period | US | UK | Other | Total | DayCount | Avg | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total | 4115 | 176 | 138 | 4429 | 1938 | 2.29 | |
| 7-2008 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 8 | 0.25 | |
| 6-2008 | 29 | 0 | 2 | 31 | 30 | 1.03 | |
| 5-2008 | 19 | 0 | 2 | 21 | 31 | 0.68 | |
| 4-2008 | 52 | 0 | 0 | 52 | 30 | 1.73 | |
| 3-2008 | 39 | 1 | 0 | 40 | 31 | 1.29 | |
| 2-2008 | 29 | 1 | 0 | 30 | 29 | 1.03 | |
| 1-2008 | 40 | 0 | 0 | 40 | 31 | 1.29 |
When are we going to withdraw from the "war on poverty"? If we're going strictly on dollars and body count, the Iraqi War is a tremendous success in comparison.
Now that's "community organizing"
A must read.
More "progressive" projection
Another "progressive" out there is slamming me for my bigotry.
He's upset that I've chosen to place a doctored "work of art" by Shepard Fairey on my blog.
I can’t remember the last politician to inspire artists to make great art. Shepard Fairey’s posters of Barack Obama, which indeed are art, have taken on a life of their own. And one perversion of them from the right has been catching my eye lately, because it’s popping up all over wingnut blogs. This one.
It wasn’t long ago in America that a black man striking such a pose, in just the wrong place, however fake this one may be, would end up hung from a tree. Which is why it’s no wonder the Republican blogosphere has made this one of their favorite hit pieces. How dare a black man be smarter than us. How dare a black man get educated. How dare a black man run for president.
Let address this racist's issues one by one.
First, I'm giving Obamamania the same irreverent treatment that I gave The Billary, and John "Gee my Hair Smells Terrific" Edwards. If he would ever read this blog, he would also read lots of snob reference to one John Kerry. To do something different to Obamamania because of his race would be racist.
Second, I noticed that this ding dong failed to mention some of the other works by Mr. Fairey mentioned on this blog in March. Those of other Communist/ Marxist leaders Stalin, Lenin and Mao. The Snobama picture is total satire on the whole cult of personality profile of Mr. Fairey's work.
Third, snobbery is not confined to socio-economic status. In fact, being a "progressive" makes you a snob by definition. You don't know a damn thing about me, so you frame me as a racist. You don't know a damn thing about my business, yet you tell me how much to pay my employees. You don't know a damn thing about my neighbors business, yet you know how many sick days he should offer his employees. As Ronald Reagan would say, "liberals know so much, they just know so much about what isn't so."
Fourth, Obama is a snob. Now pass me the arugula.
A Third Bush Term
You might ask: What's wrong with that? A commander in chief willing to adjust his view to facts and realities should be a refreshing idea.But when news reports suggested Obama was backing away from his commitment to withdrawing troops from Iraq in 16 months, Obama's lieutenants no doubt heard echoes of those cries of "flip-flop" that rocked the 2004 Republican National Convention and proved devastating to John Kerry.
So out Obama came again to reiterate his timeline. "Apparently, I wasn't clear enough this morning on my position with respect to the war in Iraq," he said. "I intend to end this war. My first day in office I will bring the Joint Chiefs of Staff in, and I will give them a new mission, and that is to end this war -- responsibly, deliberately, but decisively."
I hate to clue in Obamamania on a little secret but Bush already did that. It's called winning.
But really, when you look at Obamamania these past few weeks you get a lot of Bush. Backing the FISA law, gun backer, faith based initiatives is starting to look a lot like a third Bush term.
Monday, July 07, 2008
Another Obamamania endorsement
Barack Obama’s patriotic tour has run into a snag. More evidence of communist backing for the candidate has surfaced. The latest to emerge publicly in Obama’s camp is Joelle Fishman, the chairman of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) Political Action Commission. In a column titled, “Big political shifts are underway,” Fishman says that Obama could lead “a landslide defeat of the Republican ultra-right” this November and that he is “ready to listen” to the “left and progressive voters” backing him. Fishman makes it clear that the CPUSA is part of this coalition.
What's Wrong with Ohio?
Money Quote
THEN IT ALL CAME crashing down. In the 2006 elections, Democrats won every statewide executive office except for auditor, including the governorship by a margin of 60 percent to 37 percent. The Democrats picked up a U.S. Senate seat, a congressional seat -- with near-pickups in three others -- a net gain of seven state house seats, and one state senate seat. Republicans still control both chambers of the state legislature, won a December 2007 special election to fill an empty House seat, and have even increased their majority on the supreme court to all seven seats, but most trends aren't in their favor.
Republicans lost Ohio for the same reasons they lost the country: corruption, inability to cope with voter anxiety about the war or the economy, and reluctance to embrace a reform agenda. "Half our elected officials are just Democrat-lite," groused a Medina County GOP Lincoln Day reveler. "What's the point of being a Republican anymore?" The conservative, reformist wing of the state party was never dominant, not even at the height of 1994's revolutionary rhetoric.
More typical of Ohio Republicanism is George Voinovich, who was elected governor with 56 percent of the vote at the beginning of the GOP resurgence in 1990. Voinovich is a cautious moderate, somewhat more conservative on social issues -- he defended the state motto "With God, all things are possible" and says his pro-life position on abortion "is a matter of my immortal soul" -- than on fiscal policy. Consequently, he frequently held the more conservative Republicans in Columbus at bay while muddling the party's image as the taxpayer's best friend.
In addition to some tax cuts, Voinovich supported approximately twenty tax increases while governor. When the state supreme court ruled that Ohio's funding mechanism for the public schools was unconstitutional, Voinovich dutifully backed a $1 billion sales tax increase to mollify his black-robed betters. His record on spending wasn't much better: Between 1991 and 1999, the state budget more than doubled despite anemic population growth. Only six states increased spending more rapidly during this time period. At a 1998 speech at which Voinovich was touting what he claimed was his record fiscal restraint, a Republican activist turned to me and whispered, "I'm a moderate, but c'mon. Cut spending, George!"
Who needs republicans when we already have democrats.
Terrorist sympathizers aka Human Rights Groups
I am reminded of President Álvaro Uribe's 2003 statement that some "human rights" organizations in his country were fronts for terrorists. Connecticut Sen. Christopher Dodd got his back up over Mr. Uribe's statement, and piously lectured the Colombian president about "the importance of democratic values."
But as the helicopter story suggests, Mr. Uribe seems to have been right. How else to explain the fact that the FARC swallowed the line without batting an eye?
This warrants attention because it adds to the already robust evidence that left-wing NGOs and other so-called human rights defenders, including Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and Colombian Sen. Piedad Cordoba, are nothing more than propagandists for terrorists.
Is he even an American?
NRO has some information on the issue and a blog Israeli Insider.
In a rambling interview with the Daily Kos -- the blog site that published the supposedly authentic Barack Hussein Obama birth certificate and his own birth certificate manipulations in the same June 12 post, Jay McKinnon, aka opendna, says he manipulated the Obama birth certificate to create a blank Hawaii birth certificate as a "template," supposedly for a John McCain birth certificate. But he says it was not an attempt at deception but a "lame joke" that he now regrets.
But in trying to avoid legal trouble by diminished the significance of manipulating electronic images, he further undermines the explicit claims of the Barack Obama campaign and the Daily Kos itself that the posted images of his purported birth certificate prove that the candidate was Hawaii-born. McKinnon, who says he was trained in document analysis by the Department of Homeland Security, says it's impossible to assess the authenticity of a birth certificate from image files rather than paper documents. "It should be self-evident that a JPEG [image file] of a scanned official document cannot be valid."
While that conclusion echoes and strengthens the calls of those who have been demanding that Obama provide paper proof, McKinnon undermines his own credibility from the get-go when he claims that he first encountered the Obama birth certificate issue "around June 12, 2008" when "As I recall, someone sent me an email containing two images. One of the Decosta birth certificate and the other from Fight The Smears. The subject line was 'Birth Certificate Appears to be "Invalid."
The only trouble with that statement is that McKinnon had already created the blank Hawaii birth certificate template for John McCain and the "Ahphorgerie" joke on June 12 before Fight the Smears had even published the birth certificate. Kos had published it that morning, about four hours earlier. Patricia DeCosta's birth certificate surfaced in the blogosphere only a week later, on June 19. So how did he compare the documents? And why would he say it was the first he'd heard of the birth certificate controversy when he had already posted his own patently fake certificates.
Judge for yourself.
They used to call that Slavery
So when I'm President, I will set a goal for all American middle and high school students to perform 50 hours of service a year, and for all college students to perform 100 hours of service a year. This means that by the time you graduate college, you'll have done 17 weeks of service.
We'll reach this goal in several ways. At the middle and high school level, we'll make federal assistance conditional on school districts developing service programs, and give schools resources to offer new service opportunities. At the community level, we'll develop public-private partnerships so students can serve more outside the classroom.
So you are required to perform services for your community, without compensation, and if you do not the government will penalize you somehow.
In the early, 1800's they called that slavery. In today's world we call it being called by the Messiah Obama.
A few week ago, Walter Williams had a column titled Are Americans Pro Slavery?
Let's do a thought experiment asking whether Americans are for or against slavery. You might say, "What are you talking about, Williams? We fought a war that cost over 600,000 lives to end slavery!" To get started, we might find a description that captures the essence of slavery. A good working description is: slavery is a set of circumstances whereby one person is forcibly used to serve the purposes of another person and has no legal claim to the fruits of his labor.
The average American worker toils from January 1st to the end of April, and has no legal claim to the fruits of his labor for that period. Federal, state and local governments, through the tax code, take what he produces. A small portion of the fruits of his labor is used to provide for the constitutional functions of government. Most of what's taken, up to two-thirds, is given to some other American in the forms of farm and business subsidies, Social Security, Medicare, welfare and hundreds of other government handout programs. As in slavery, one person is being forcibly used to serve the purposes of another person.
The fact of the matter is this. When you are forced to work for another's benefit, it's slavery but somehow we've manipulated the language enough so that the slave rulers (aka senators) can call it "doing for the common good".
Iraq's Yellowcake
Here's a story you may have missed over the long holiday weekend: 550 metric tons of yellowcake uranium worth tens of millions of dollars were shipped out of Iraq to Canada. The material was transported in 37 military flights in 3,500 secure barrels, according to the Associated Press.
That just continues the democrat's streak of being on the wrong side of history 100% of the time.
No special interests
What's this?
So, whom do lobbyists represent? Special interests—various industries and associations wanting something from government. Here, from the Center's OpenSecrets.org, are some of the industries that have given Obama money: lawyers, $17.8 million; securities and investments, $7.9 million; education, $7 million; real estate, business services, miscellaneous businesses, health professionals and TV/movies/music, more than $4 million each. Computers/Internet, finance, civil servants and public officials, printing and publishing, commercial banks, hospitals and nursing homes, construction services, all ranging from almost $1 million to more than $3 million.I guess their interests aren't special.....
Biggest donors? Goldman, Sachs & Co., UBS, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, National Amusements, Lehman Brothers, Google, Sidley Austin, Skadden Arps, Time Warner, Morgan Stanley, Exelon, Latham & Watkins, Microsoft and GE are among the biggest corporate contributors.
How can this be? Didn't Obama say he doesn't accept money from lobbyists and PACs? Well, that means he still can accept money from "spouses of lobbyists, non-lobbying partners who work for lobbying firms or for law firms that do lobbying, ex-lobbyists and state lobbyists," said the Center. "Because of contribution limits, organizations that bundle together many individual contributions are often among the top donors to presidential candidates. These contributions can come from the organization's members or employees [and their families]."
Congratulations
Payne made the team with a third place finish in the 110 hurdles making the team by .02 of a second.
Wineberg qualified with a second place in the women's 400 meters.
To give this some perspective. I ran track at UC in the early '80's. The track was in such bad condition, we never had a home meet, let alone an Olympic hopeful. Bill Schnier has been the coach since those days and he's built the program up to where Olympic qualifiers is no longer just a dream for athletes going to school there.
So congrats to Wineberg, Payne and Schnier for a job well done. You made us old track alums proud.
Sunday, July 06, 2008
Obama's sub prime mortgage part 3
Apparently, the savior, also got a nice juicy interest rate....
Another Democrat gets caught taking a sweetheart mortgage, and the Democrat, his bank and the left again insist: Nothing to see here. Only this time, the Democrat is presidential nominee Barack Obama, who scant months after his election to the Senate secured with his wife a $1.32 million mortgage, discounted by three-eighths of a point, from Northern Trust Bank of Illinois.Riiiiight.
The cut-rate mortgage on their $1.65 million mansion in Chicago will save them at least $108,000, which is more than just chump change they can believe in. As first-time Northern Trust customers, they paid no fees or points as people without "U.S. Sen." before their names must. (A one-point fee would have cost them $13,200.) Northern Trust, which the Center for Responsive Politics reports donated $71,000 to Sen. Obama's campaigns, says it has no formal loan-discount program for public officials, but it ordinarily doesn't do business with people who don't have at least $1 million in investable assets, reports The Chicago Tribune. In 2006, however, the Obamas reported investments of just $715,000, according to Money Magazine.
An Obama spokesman said the couple got the lower rate via hard bargaining and comparison shopping. Not very original. That's the same flimsy explanation Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, an Obama supporter, offered last month before admitting he got VIP treatment from Countrywide Financial in 2003 when he and his wife refinanced their mortgages, saving $75,000. Also implicated in that scandal was James Johnson, who got $1.7 million in VIP loans from Countrywide and was head of the Obama vice-presidential search committee when the scandal broke. Yeah, nothing to see here.
I'm back
The Gekko's just got back from a brief vacation in Hocking Hills and a weekend in Marietta for a wedding.
My new brother in law is a sculptor and a art professor at WVU Parkersburg. You can see his stuff at this website.
The Gekko's welcome Zac to the family.
I was hoping to have some internet access while I was gone but we didn't even have a cell signal in Hocking Hills. I think I needed a break as it was.
I'll be back up, full throttle tomorrow.
Thanks to Midas for filling in. That post on one Ms. Renee started quite a discussion.
By the way the best part of being in South Eastern Ohio? People have common sense.
The bumper sticker says it all.