The Great Dodge challenge update

Quick backdrop: Both the President and the miserable hack that currently runs our Justice Department have with grand theatrical flourish granted a civilian trial in NYC for 9-11 mastermind and war criminal, KSM…. yet, have reassured all of us that regardless of the outcome, he will remain locked up.

Nothing. Nada. Zip. Still have not read a single piece by anyone out there in Big Media or in the comment section of this blog who supports the decision to try KSM in civilian court but who have either a) demanded an explanation from the President and the Attorney General for this glaring hypocrisy or b) attempted to rationalize it.

C’mon! We dare you. The very fate of this blog is in your hands*

Quote of the Day

Johnny Isakson (R-Georgia) was on Hedgecock’s show yesterday and he was asked to give a reason why we should oppose healthcare.


Isakson: “Because you will start paying for it in 18 days but won’t see any benefits from it for it for 1,112 days”



We question the legitimacy of the term "benefits" but, yeah, we get what the Senator was trying to say.

Falling on the grenade

A doctor from Indianapolis, who should be awarded a medal for his valor in reading the entire Senate health care bill, penned a letter to his Senator, Evan Bayh, documenting all the little goodies contained therein.

Sparing you and our elected representatives any further pain, Teresa has the letter, here.

Great moments in the history of statism Pt. VII

A reporter from the Clevand Plain Dealer got out from behind his desk, did a little digging and found that the city of Cleveland was handing out home loans via HUD’s Afford-A-Home program to homeless and jobless people with the entirely predictable results.

The city of Cleveland has aggravated its vexing foreclosure problems and has lost millions in tax dollars by helping people buy homes they could not afford, a Plain Dealer investigation has found.

The city provided mostly low-income buyers with down payment loans of up to $20,000 through the federally funded Afford-A-Home program, but did little to determine whether the people could actually afford to keep their homes.

That lack of oversight persisted for years, even as hundreds of loan recipients defaulted on mortgages, many within two years, the newspaper found by analyzing property and loan records covering the period between 2000 and 2007.

In other completely unrelated news today….

First, it was S.W.A.T teams and then naughty and nice lists published by Treasury Dept. and now what is going to be affected to spur banks to lend to homeowners and businesses? How about more arm-twisting by the President?

Meeting with top executives from 12 financial institutions, Mr. Obama sent a clear message that the industry had a responsibility to help nurse the economy back to health and do more to create jobs in return for the huge federal bailout last year that kept Wall Street and the banking system afloat.

But Mr. Obama also confronted the limits of his power to jawbone the industry as banking companies continued to repay government money received in the bailout. Citigroup and Wells Fargo, two of the biggest, announced on Monday that they were doing precisely that.

President Obama pressured the heads of the nation’s biggest banks on Monday to take “extraordinary” steps to revive lending for small businesses and homeowners, prompting assurances from some financial institutions that they would do more even as they continued to shed their supplicant status in Washington.

Don’t think it was coincidence that both Citigroup and Wells made this announcement when they did. They want to eliminate as much bully pulpit leverage from the government as fast as humanly possible.

For their part, a few of the banks, did make some specific pledges to increase lending to small businesses. No such pledges were reported as being made for the housing sector, though.

The banking executives promised Mr. Obama that they would take second looks at loans they had denied over the last year. Richard K. Davis, the chief executive of US Bancorp, told reporters after the meeting that the executives were aware of the public perception that they were profiting with hefty bonuses at taxpayer expense, and that they realized they were “under a microscope” and needed to align themselves more closely with the needs of consumers.

Call us crazy but perhaps the loans were denied the first time around because they were bad risks. One would think that the banks might have some expertise in that area. But forgive our lack of populist outrage regarding bank executive compensation when we stand dumbfounded observing an alignment of circumstances that look eerily similar to that which caused this meltdown in the first place.

But as we've said all along, the statist solution to failed statist policies is just more statism.


More "Great moments..." can be found here.

The Friday evening dump

(one in a (semi)weekly series intended to shine some light on unsavory news being jettisoned from the White House or Capitol Hill right before the weekend)


What do you call a healthcare plan that will turn out to be be even more expensive than simply doing nothing, will most likely lead to a rationing of Medicare services and will still leave 16 million people uninsured? Well, you would call that the Senate healthcare bill in its current form.

And who did the scoring this time? Those nags at the CBO or some biased right-wing think-tank. No and no. It was the economic analysts in the administration's own Health and Human Services Department, a department, we might add, that stands to gain the most in terms of power and control if Obamacare passes. This bill is so horrible even the HHS is giving it the stink-eye.

Democrats trying to push President Barack Obama's health care overhaul plan through the Senate got a sober warning Friday that costs will keep going up and proposed Medicare savings may harm the program.

A new report from government economic analysts at the Health and Human Services Department found that the nation's $2.5 trillion annual health care tab won't shrink under the Democratic blueprint that senators are debating. Instead, it would grow somewhat more rapidly than if Congress does nothing.

More troubling was the report's assessment that the Democrats' plan to squeeze Medicare for $493 billion over 10 years in savings relies on specific policy changes that "may be unrealistic" and could lead to cuts in services. The Medicare savings are expected to cover about half the nearly $1 trillion, 10-year cost of expanding coverage to the uninsured.

The report warned that a new long-term care insurance plan (read: cradle-to-grave universal health care) could "face a significant risk of failure" as it would attract people in poor health which, of course, would drive up premiums eventually triggering an "insurance death spiral".

You gotta love the AP, though. Right after the death spiral paragraph they follow up with this:

The one bright note: The bill would provide coverage to 93 percent of U.S. residents, reducing the number of uninsured people by about 33 million, the report said.

Hey, gang - good news. 93% of the country will be swallowed up in this death spiral.

Again, that HHS doesn't have nice things to say about Obamacare speaks volumes.

Making adjustments for one's faith

We’ve been advised by the faith-based AGW zealots to ignore Climategate as it doesn’t definitively disprove global warming and that all the huffing and puffing over it is a distraction. They’re exactly right as there is plenty of other stuff they will need to start answering for beyond beating Climategate to death.
Willis Eschenbach takes a look at the raw temperature data from NOAA/GHCN (Global Historical Climate Network) (one of the 3 main global temperature datasets), throws out the “homogenization” adjustments and finds some very interesting results.



Story here.

H/T: The Scratching Post

With apologies to Uncle Joe...

Check out Irvine, California city councilman, Steven Choi protesting headline speaker Nancy Pelosi at the Democratic Party of Orange County’s 15th Annual Harry Truman Awards last Friday.



That’s Pelosi on Choi’s cocktail napkin, hoisting aloft a young fair-headed commie enthusiast which is a photo-chop of the iconic Joseph Stalin image below.



The San Francisco Chronicle duly notes in reporting this that Stalin was a Soviet dictator “who killed millions under his Great Terror campaign.”

And local area blogger Dan Chmielewski in a post at The LiberalOC had this to say:

To portray Pelosi as Stalin, a mass murderer of millions during his reign of power, is nothing short of outrageous. Choi owes the Speaker an apology. He owes his fellow city council members an apology. He owes the residents of this city an apology for his embarassing antics.

Resign your position Dr. Choi; you are not fit to serve as an elected official in Irvine. Your offensive behavior is a black eye on Irvine’s place as a city of tolerance and influence.

(italics, ours)

We're just marveling at the fact that it takes a Republican congressman and his ham-fisted "protest" to cause some people to suddenly snap out of decades-long Murderous Tyrant Denial Syndrome.

Hey, it's a start and we'll take it!

Harry Reid on the transparency of healthcare reform

Hey, do you remember when they told us if we voted for McCain it would represent a vote for continuing the secrecy of the Bush years? Well, they were right.

Recall how we’ve been challenging proponents of Obamacare to divulge some of the specifics contained in the legislation as reasons to support the same. With even major points of the Obamacare bill appearing, disappearing and then reappearing, it’s a fool’s errand for supporters of the Senate bill.

But it’s not just us John Q. Publics out here in fly-over country that aren’t in the loop with the Senate version of the bill, the #2 Democrat in Senate has nary a clue regarding what’s in the bill.

Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin admitted Friday that he is "in the dark" about the national health care bill currently under construction by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. In an exchange on the Senate floor, Republican Sen. John McCain asked Durbin, "Should we not at least be informed as to what the proposal is that the Senate Majority Leader is going to propose to the entire Senate?" Durbin's answer: "I would say to the senator from Arizona that I am in the dark almost as much as he is, and I am in the leadership." Durbin explained that during a Democratic caucus, Reid and the small group of senators involved in crafting the bill turned to their fellow Democrats and "basically stood and said, 'We are sorry, we can't tell you in detail what was involved.'"

You see, we’re all supposed to just trust Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, who with his staff and health care lobbyists are writing and re-writing this legislation in the secrecy of his office.

Durbin claims that Reid is not to blame for the secrecy rather the Congressional Budget Office which Reid has asked to do a cost estimate on the bill. (Insert jaw-drop face, here).

That damn CBO and their rather inconvenient scoring of the various permutations of Obamacare has been a thorn in Congress’ side since they took up their task late in the spring of this year. CBO can’t score what CBO can’t see. Brilliant strategy, Harry.

Keeping the mills humming

Hey, gang – looks like we’re implementing some of those “mandatory conservation measures” at the end of a pink slip right here in America.

The Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) has filed a lawsuit on behalf of a Catholic nurse who was forced to participate in an abortion, despite voicing her moral objections.

Catherina Cenzon-DeCarlo, a nurse at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, was instructed to assist in a late second-trimester abortion for a woman 22 weeks into her pregnancy.

The hospital had known of the nurse’s religious objections to abortion since she was hired in 2004.

Cenzon-DeCarlo reminded her supervisors of her religious objections, but was told that if she did not participate, she would be charged with “insubordination and patient abandonment,” which could result in disciplinary action and the possible loss of her job and nursing license.

The hospital trys to explain this away by saying it was an “emergency” but the hospital itself categorized this case as “Category II” which means the operation needed to take place within six hours, surely enough time to find a nurse who has no moral qualms about assisting with an abortion.

One would think that even a pro-choice advocate would be outraged by this as this action is the antithesis of “choice”. Don’t count on it, though, as the abortion-industrial complex makes fundamentalist evangelicals and Catholics look as soft as a bag of wet mice when it comes to advancing an agenda.

Cassy Fiano, blogging at Hot Air, rightly likens this to cruel and unusual punishment as the hospital has known of Cenzo-DeCarlo’s position on this for years.

Stand by for more of this trampling of conscience provisions put in place by President Bush but since stripped by a man who voted three times against the Born Alive Infant Protection Act.

Can we Van Jones Kevin Jennings?

Discuss or teach sexual fetish techniques to a 14 yr. old who isn’t related to you and you will get yourself some jail time and a flag on your home on the sex offender map. Approve the same as workshop curriculum when your name is Kevin Jennings and you get named as the Safe Schools Czar.

We linked to this story in our Quickies a few days ago but decided to liberate it as a dedicated post because of the sheer appalling nature of it.

Seriously? Safe Schools Czar? That’s not ironic, that’s just sick.

Is the White House really that inept with their vetting or do they just not care. After nationalizing the domestic auto industry (which included firing the CEO of Chrysler and shafting the secured creditors in favor of the unions), attempting to nationalize the health care industry, regulating by fiat the very breath we exhale which renders moot the legislative efforts to do the same for carbon emissions and unprecedented intervention into the housing and financial sectors in order to "save it", we suspect it’s a basketball-sized set of the latter.

How quickly can we 'cap this guy's tenure at the White House and why is it that we have to depend on blogs to discover this stuff?

College football Saturday open thread

In what we think is a pretty shrewd move, Army-Navy will go down today, one week later than their usual first-Saturday-in-December time slot (which, up until 20 yrs. ago, was one week later than its traditional Saturday-after-Thanksgiving time slot) in order to be the only Div. I game on the docket today.

Navy has dominated of late, winning the last seven by an average of 29 points, but Army has been running some smack and with a victory, they will qualify for something called the EagleBank Bowl. Navy at 8-4 is slated to play Missouri in the Texas Bowl on New Year's Eve.

Also, later this evening, some intrigue in a ceremony that traditionally has sealed NFL fate of its winner – the Heisman Trophy will be awarded. Intrigue, we say, because the winner may not be doomed to the irrelevance that has seemed to have plagued winners of recent vintage.

That and the fact that there will be a defensive lineman, Ndamukong Suh of Nebraska, as one of the five finalists. Suh, last Saturday in the Big 12 championship game against Texas, had the most dominating defensive performance we’ve seen since Chris Spielman of Ohio State racked up 29 tackles against Michigan back in 1987.

Tim Tebow of Florida, Colt McCoy of Texas and running backs Toby Gerhart and Mark Ingram of Stanford and Alabama, respectively, round out the list of finalists.

We've got some other stuff to get to but short of that please enjoy the rest of your college football Saturday.

Go Navy!