AP Notices BO Re-Write

Obama Web site removes `surge' from Iraq problem - Yahoo! News

So what is so different about BO? He takes a position that is popular to get votes and when it turns out that he is wrong, he just changes his story and claims he never said what he said before.

This is "new"?

Fictional Yellowcake Sold to Canada

Iraq's nuclear 'yellowcake' moved to Canada | Philadelphia Inquirer | 07/06/2008


The ability of the MSM to keep even things reported by the AP a secret is way amazing. Our high risk, devil may care neighbors to the North are going to use some of Saddams old "WMD in waiting" to make ELECTRICITY!! Wow, them and the French who get like 75% from nuke.

Good thing we have smart Democrats in this country that know that Saddam never had any WMD designs, Iraq is "lost", nuclear power is too dangerous, drilling for oil is too dangerous, using oil shale is too dangerous, coal is too dirty and refining petroleum is too dirty!! If we didn't have those smartie Democrats, we might end up taking grave risks like Canada, although it seems like a really bad deal to buy fictitious yellowcake.

The Case for Large Magazines

Power Line: Argument for Armed Citizenry


Lots of lefty victims in waiting like to argue that "nobody needs magazines over 10 rounds" (or even less). Sometimes there are no shortage of worthy targets and even a couple 16 round mags might be "shy" with say 9mm.

When you have 8 of the very flower of humanity that think that stomping a father trying to protect his 12 year old daughter is a great idea, it is a shame that any get to leave the scene "unbagged". How many fathers out there MIGHT be willing to try to protect their 12 year old daughter? Seems like it would be rare. Shows a lot of "courage" to call your "homes" into action when you are taking on one unarmed guy and a couple of women. Attacking a family leaving an amusement park on the 4th of July. This really DOES seem to be the beginning of some sort of "change" in America.

Why does one need an assault weapon? Because if they get your name, they might want to hunt you down to avoid your testifying against them (at least that is what the police are worried about, but I'm sure they are just paranoid). Saying "welcome to my house" with a 45 round AR magazine makes certain that even a nice size group of very limited discernment will "feel the love". The .223 in large quantity has that certain degree of unrelenting snap crackle and pop that sends the sort of pointed message that may provide a couple seconds of near comprehension of "bad idea" even to such limited minds. What a shame that full-auto isn't a legal option. We live in a day when folks have short attention spans and they may get bored waiting for all that manual trigger work to erase all their worries about being testified against.

This is off PowerLine, but the Strib FINALLY minimally covered it. They don't like to cover this kind of thing, folks may "generalize". So, if 8 whites had executed a similar attack on a black family, would that pretty much be a local news story with delayed and limited coverage (this happened on the 4th!!!)? I think the only real question would be how many "shakedown blacks" we had in town. Just the Jesse "cut the N**s nuts off" Jackson posse or Al Sharpton and the whole NAACP road show? I think it would be the complete circus -- these days you can get that group out for a doll hanging in a tree.

Dowd on "Mock Barack"

Op-Ed Columnist - May We Mock, Barack? - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

The navel gazing left is fast on the path to making satire off limits after that HORRIBLE New Yorker cover. Imagine, SATIRE of a politician! As Maureen points out:

Many of the late-night comics and their writers — nearly all white — now admit to The New York Times’s Bill Carter that because of race and because there is nothing “buffoonish” about Obama — and because many in their audiences are intoxicated by him and resistant to seeing him skewered — he has not been flayed by the sort of ridicule that diminished Dukakis, Gore and Kerry.

Hey, of course, there is NOTHING "buffoonish" about him! My opinion would be that there isn't a human yet minted with "nothing buffoonish" about them!!! The very idea that any such thing could exist shows a level of worshipfullness for a perspective leader that is extraordinarily dangerous in at least what USED to be a democracy!

Have these folks somehow missed his ears? That he is a closet smoker? How much fun have they had with "Dubya" (W) for an initial? Bush/shrub/women's anatomy? So we are REALLY going to ignore the whole "BO, Hussein, Osama" deal? He has never misspelled anything in his life??? Did you know that Dan Quayle misspelled "potato"???? That was HUGE hoot!!! Now BO "Hit 57 states with 2 more to go" ... but of course that is NOT funny!!

Wow, the navel gaze is truly amazing-but what is Dowd worried about? Gee, the Messiah might not seem like a "regular enough guy" if they can't figure out a good enough way to poke a little "appropriate humor" at their deity? I wonder if once the Fascist Prince is President if those of us that have no trouble at all seeing "a couple of flaws" will need to be "re-educated"?

The Change Has Already Begun!

Price jump worst since '91 on record gas, higher food - Jul. 16, 2008

The Democrats roared back into Congress in '06 promising "change", and BO is on the stump pushing it now. One of the Democrats favorite pieces of "change" is called INFLATION, and they love it for many reasons:

• It devalues savings, and Democrats HATE savings. Savings indicate personal responsibility and can end up being invested, which causes people to believe in the market economy, which Democrats REALLY hate.
• It increases dependency on government - savings, pensions, dividends, etc are devalued and only things that are "cost of living indexed" supposedly "keep up". Since only the government can hope to "keep up" when chasing it's own tail, government programs SEEM like a "good deal". Naturally, the downside is that they are like throwing gasoline on a roaring fire since the rising programs fuel more inflation and keep the cycle growing.
• It allows the government to pay back it's expensive debt with cheaper money.
• It allows them to present non-inflation adjusted figures for income, education, tax revenues, etc against figures from a Republican era (lower inflation) and act like "things are better". When the MSM loves you, that tends to work to convince the sheep for a good long while.
  
• Providing they can get the indexing that Reagan did removed (likely a first 100 days BO deal), at least over some income level), it gives them "autopilot tax increases" and people creep up the brackets.

The Democrats have been throwing 100's of billions at things for a couple years now, claiming "recession", and Bush with no popularity left has been signing them. Of course they have been trying to increase energy prices since '69 by prohibiting drilling, refining, nuclear, oil shale, coal ... and even wind, (unless it blocks Teddy Kennedy's view!) They have been all for subsidizing ethanol with government dollars, but now have decided that consumes too many corn flakes ... I THINK they are OK with human labor as long as we follow a low flatulence diet to try to help our poor feverish planet, otherwise I guess it is back to the Jimmuh, "turn off your lights, turn down the thermostat, put on a sweater and shiver away ... America has entered the cold dark slide to the death that the left believes it has always deserved".

ah yes, "change".

The BO Approach on Iraq

Power Line: Obama's Dishonest Op-Ed

I think we will all be amazed at just how big the whoppers can be as BO rolls on. For Bush, the MSM decided that the truth was a lie even if it required proving a negative--Saddam never had WMD even though everyone was sure he did, because we didn't find them. Therefore, Bush is a liar. For BO, no matter how many times he has said the opposite in the past, he is going to get a pass on whatever he says now and in the future. The MSM has decided that there has been too much Republican success since '80, the it is going to stop here, and there isn't going to be any concern about "bias". They have had some experience with this-Slick Willie said that "The budget could not be balanced", then after the Republicans took the heat for cutting the rate of growth in medicare and balancing it, he took the credit. The MSM found that to be a nice exchange.

BO gets all the campaign funds he can raise, plus 24x7 on NPR, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, NYT, etc.

I wonder if he will win? Maybe if he raped and tortured a reporter to death? Well, maybe one from the list above it may be viewed as a "flaw", but if they were from Fox it would be a postive!

Wishful Reality on Iraq

Caught Between Iraq and a Hard Base

If only the US electorate would look at things this rationally. Nice to read, but I don't buy it.

Boxing their candidate in is, of course, what the Democratic base wants and insists on. So far, the line has been that the surge is a success but the war is a failure--"whipped cream on a pile of fertilizer," as Time's Joe Klein puts it, "a regional policy unprecedented in its stupidity and squalor." But even this hasn't quite caught up with events. Saddam is gone, Al Qaeda in Iraq is on the run, the Sunnis are with us, the Shia are turning against their militias, and the Washington Post is suggesting that "Iraq, a country with the world's second largest oil reserves and a strategic linchpin of the Middle East, just might emerge from the last five years of war and turmoil as an American ally, even if its relations with Iran remain warm." In other words, the operation was a failure, but the patient has survived, and is somehow becoming healthier by the day. Seldom has failure appeared quite so good.

Katrina, Valerie Plame, "Bush lied about WMD", the "recession", Global Warming and a whole host of other items have proven to me that we are in a new phase-"reality optional". The Democrats and MSM are not currently tethered to any realities, they are able to make up their own realities.

It is certainly true that there has been over a year of tremendous progress in Iraq, but most of the MSM sheep haven't seen it. The technique of "report failure / fail to report progress" in Iraq has been as good as "report hot weather/hurricanes, fail to report cold weather/no hurricanes", or "report only bad economic news, fail to report good". For most Americans, what they believe is what they repeatedly hear, and I think until some major piece of reality bites them in the posterior and they realize that they have ACTUALLY been faked out (rather than being faked out that they were faked out by Bush), we will go on in dream mode.

Supposedly, the 80's were that "dream we would wake up from", but we have had 28 years of unprecedented growth in that "dream" with only very short hiccups in '91 and in the 2K-2001 internet bubble burst and 9-11 aftermath. This "dream" is a completely new form though where many realities (economic/income growth, progress in Iraq, tempratures cooling, N Korea dismantling weapons programs, etc) are forcibly ingnored, while "false reality" gets all the news ( "failure" in Iraq, "recession" (with GDP growth), "global warming" (even it may cool for a decade or more), etc)

Rangle on Housing

Harlem Congressman Rents 4 Apartments at Below-Market Rates - NYTimes.com

Another Democrat "champion of the poor", a fixture in congress-and apparently this rent controlled building since 1970. The old kind of graft has lived for a long time as long was one is a Black Democrat-but we haven't had one of those in the WH before, the future may be be truly special.

Pretty nice to be getting something excess of $4K in benefits a month for having that elected power. Ah yes, the good life. He gets it the OLDER way, "elected" to it ... of course in a gerrymandered district where the odds of him ever being defeated are slim and none. How HORRIBLE that some CEOs and others get there by earning it in the market. That is the kind of thing BO will be working hard to put a stop to for sure. The Rangel kind of life may become much more of a fixture in the government controlled fixture.

Hats off to NYT for publishing this at all, even in the local pages. No doubt it is a "one day wonder" so they can claim (correctly) that they "reported it". Thanks to the internet it is POSSIBLE to find it, but certainly not EASY for the masses.

Regretting BO

Obama's frequent regrets may make us sorry | ajc.com

I think this article points out a big difference with between much of the left and "folks that actually do stuff". People that do things know that all decisions are imperfect with up and down sides and always mixed results. If it doesn't seem that way at the moment, just hang around. "Those that do" discover the logic of "you don't have to beat the bear, just the other guy". In fact, you really don't have to "beat" anyone at all, just keep moving, learning, and trying to make a better decision next time. "Regret" is pretty useless-if you made the best decision that you could make with the information you had, even if it went bad, regret just isn't going to do anyone any good. It is non-productive, and people that do things worry about that a lot.

BO on the other hand has never been a person that does things. He does a lot of complaining "professionally", and in the rare cases that he does make some personal decisions, he tends to regret a lot of them. He hasn't ever really been in any decision making or leadership role, so he hasn't learned the uselessness of "regret". From the current MSM "Obasm" state of affairs, anything he does is fantastic, and seems just peachy to them. Even his "regrets" are a sign of greatness. (No doubt his fecal material smells great to the MSM as well!)

"Viagra Question Flusters McCain"

That was one of the side headlines out on CNN today. What was the "story" about?

He was asked if it was "fair" (on his bus, not at an event) that many insurance companies covered Viagra for men, but not birth control for women and it was asserted that he had voted in the Senate in such a way to indicate that he thought it WAS fair. To the extent he was "flustered" it was because he was obviously caught off guard on the issue and wanted to go figure out how he had voted and what he really thought of the issue. "Flustered" is even a REAL stretch -- he didn't have an immediate answer.

So, do you suppose that a headline about a 72 year old guy with a decade or more younger wife that is "flustered" about a Viagra question is intended to convey a problem with consistency on Senate votes?

Sure it is.

Senate Bows to Bush on FISA

Senate bows to Bush, approves surveillance bill - Yahoo! News

Wow, he must sort of be the Sith Lord from Star Wars, huh? "Bows to Bush ... ah, 69-28 with even his Holiness BO voting in favor? You mean the Lord god BO BOWED to the evil Bush??? That really IS a news story!!

My guess is that BO figures he is going to be President and if companies that did exactly what they were told by the US Government are prosecuted by the US Government, then one would expect a certain "chilling effect". I suppose this is sort of like a heavenly idea for the Democrats... Hmmm, we could prosecute companies for NOT doing what we tell them to do, and then, on the other hand, if the DO what we tell them, we can prosecute them for doing it!! Cool, the lawyers lobby is really going to get their money on this! What a GREAT idea!!

I'd also guess that once BO gets a few briefings and gets to ask something like "Gee Mr President, why IS it that the US hasn't been attacked since 9-11, and in fact has been safer than it was during the wonderful Slick Willie Administration?" That is one of those questions that the MSM has no curiosity on, and it is one that Bush hasn't been very interested in providing any information on. Suppose it has anything to do with gathering intelligence? Nah, couldn't be THAT!!!

Maybe the Terrorists are "Bowing to Bush" just like the Democrat Senate? I suppose they are doing that because ???

How Taxes Actually Work

Political Diary - WSJ.com

This is VERY short and VERY important to read. In case you are REALLY lazy:

New data from the IRS will be out in a few weeks on who pays how much
in taxes. My contacts at the Treasury Department tell me that for the
first time in decades, and perhaps ever, the richest 1% of tax filers
will have paid more than 40% of the income tax burden. The top 50% will
account for 97% of all federal income taxes, while the bottom 50% will
have paid just 3%.

Any questions? The top 50% pay 97% of taxes. BO wants them to pay MORE?? Nice idea, but how likely is that really? How did they get to be in the top 50%? By being idiots? They MIGHT be there because they understand the time value of money and the value of their own time and will make different decisions if you increase their tax burden. Gee, didn't tax rates used to be higher? Let's go back and look at some historical data:

Economist Glenn Hubbard of Columbia University has shown that in 1970,
when the highest tax rate was 70%, the top 1% shouldered 16.7% of the
income tax burden. Today the top tax rate is 35% and the same class of
taxpayers pays a whopping 39% of the burden. The worst way to "soak the
rich," Mr. Hubbard finds, is to raise tax rates.

Hmm, people of some level of intelligence CHANGE THEIR BEHAVIOR due to the environment!! That is nearly impossible for lefty's like BO to figure out, since they don't believe in merit (other than their own of course!). They think that the folks with money either just "got lucky", or "took it from someone else". In that sort of a model, there is a fixed amount of "wealth" to be moved around and it can't be grown and it can't be shrunk. That is an interesting model, but it is completely wrong. It is VERY easy to destroy the economy, and "reasonably possible" to grow it -- we know enough of how it works to have a 100% chance of being able to slow it down or stop it, and a better than 50/50 chance of making it grow.

Looks like BO doesn't understand any of the above. Guess he just isn't "a numbers guy".

The Maliki Withdrawal Demands

Maliki's Demands

Commentary has this great little coverage of the obvious on the Maliki demands. The summary that would be no surprise to the rational, but probably "shocking" to your average lefty:

1). Democracy breeds "politicians", and now Iraq has them as well. The lefts favorite kind of government, Dictatorship, has a few of them too (one guy can't really do EVERYTHING, and he may even realize he is mortal and will have a successor someday). News for the leftys-politicians say things to get votes! (shocking revelation though that may be)

2). Since Iraq now has politicians and elections, they say things that have to be taken politically. Bill Clinton; "The age of big government is over", Billy C again; "We need to have regime change in Iraq". MOST times the politician doesn't really mean what he says, he just wants votes! Politicians sometimes like results too, but only when those results can be translated into votes!

3). Our media these days isn't interested in much beyond making Bush look bad and getting BO elected, so they take statements that DIDN'T include a "timetable" in any sense other than the US would be "out at some point in the future" and translate them very disingenuously into "Maliki Calls For Timetable'. That would be the equivalent of getting married with the "Until death do us part" in the ceremony and the headline reads "Groom Calls for Marriage Timetable". There is misleading and downright lying-I'd put this one in the lie category, but I'm sure the MSM would make the claim it is just a good head fake for the good of the sheep. (gotta defeat that horrible Bush!!)

Naturally, this works really well with the MSMs bleating lefty sheep ... Bush "isn't hearing the calls"!! One of the other clues that can help when evaluating our MSM is this. When they state something like this that "seems so obvious", then it only lasts for a short time and the Democrats never pick it up, that probably means something. They don't WANT it dug into, because then the stupidity of their headlines would be obvious and they would eventually be exposed as biased quacks. Whereas by doing it the way they do, even some reasonable people are caused to "wonder". "Gee, I saw a headline that said that the Maliki government wants US troops out on a timetable, and then I didn't hear anymore-I wonder what is up with that? Maybe there IS something to that Bush incompetence!" Of course for the lefties it is; "Biased right wing media, won't even hammer away on the obvious story that the Maliki government is working their tails off trying to get the US troops out just as fast as they can and stupid Bush is dragging his feet ... shucky darn, guess I'll go read the Daily Kos".

The nice thing about the MSM is that if one is too exposed to them, they manage to make EVERYONE stupider ... and waste a ton of time just getting to the bottom of their head fakes!

Who Pays the Taxes?

Political Diary - WSJ.com

So the top 50% of earners pay 97% of the taxes, and the bottom 50% pay just 3%. BUT, according to BO and the Democrats, it STILL "isn't fair". By god, that goose had better give us more golden eggs RIGHT NOW!!

New data from the IRS will be out in a few weeks on who pays how much in taxes. My contacts at the Treasury Department tell me that for the first time in decades, and perhaps ever, the richest 1% of tax filers will have paid more than 40% of the income tax burden. The top 50% will account for 97% of all federal income taxes, while the bottom 50% will have paid just 3%.

But hey, maybe it will work! Maybe we CAN get those golden eggs faster and that lower 50% can get even MORE benefits ... after all, we know it is ONLY those higher income earners that are "greedy". But wait, didn't we do high taxes before? How did that work?

Economist Glenn Hubbard of Columbia University has shown that in 1970, when the highest tax rate was 70%, the top 1% shouldered 16.7% of the income tax burden. Today the top tax rate is 35% and the same class of taxpayers pays a whopping 39% of the burden. The worst way to "soak the rich," Mr. Hubbard finds, is to raise tax rates.

News at 11, people that only get .30 cents out of every $ they make will find a way to "not make that $" ... they may defer it, they may plow it back into their business, or they may just go fishing, but they aren't going to take it as income. They didn't GET to be high income by being stupid!!!

So current tax policies are "soaking the rich" for over DOUBLE what they were in '70, PLUS, the economy is MUCH larger and those "rich" are making far more money, so the overall revenue is MUCH higher! One would think it couldn't get much better than that, but of course that would assume that taxation was actually about "funding the government".

Much like rape not being about sex, taxation has never been about funds. Both are about the same thing-POWER! BO and the Democrats don't like to see people be motivated and carry through on moving to higher income brackets by earning saving and investment. Those activities tend to breed INDEPENDENCE, and it is DEPENDENCE that BO and company want!! Now it is true that killing that off is likely to make EVERYONE worse off, but that is not their concern. They have NEVER actually cared about the people that they claim to care about, and could care less if they all die of starvation, national health care or AIDs.

Their purpose is to use their power to destroy independence in any form they can. High taxes and inflation are two very good levers to help them meet their goals.

Bad Day for the Captain