June 22nd 2009

The Bitter Hatred That Keeps On Giving

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ush hatred runs deep, burns bright and lasts long; it pumps up the American Left like the taste of blood enrages a pitt bull.  Witness the latest coldhearted hatred, from that sump of leftist hate, Salon:

In May, the U.S. economy lost 345,000 nonfarm jobs, pushing the unemployment rate from 8.9 percent to 9.4 percent. According to official statistics, 14.5 million Americans are now looking for work and, as a recent headline at Time.com put it, “The jobs aren’t coming back anytime soon.” In fact, a team of economists at the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank recently reported that “the level of labor market slack could be higher by the end of 2009 than at any other time in the post-World War Two period.”

The news, however, is not altogether grim. While times are especially tough for teenagers (22.7 percent jobless rate) and blacks (14.9 percent jobless rate), one group is doing remarkably well. I’m talking about former members of the Bush administration who are taking up prestigious academic posts, inking lucrative book deals, signing up with speakers bureaus, joining big-time law firms and top public relations agencies and grabbing spots on corporate boards of directors.

What a shock! The free market economy still exists despite all Obama has done in the last six months to destroy it, and the very best of the last eight years have found a market for their skills. America should be ashamed!

The author, appropriately monikered Nick Turse, sums up the Bush years, and the efforts of those around the president for those years, as “high-priced wars, ruinous economic policies and shredding of economic safety nets.” Obama has spent more and committed us to more in six months that Iraq cost us through the Bush years. His economic policies have taken the ruin Bush started to new catastrophic levels. And I have no idea what Turse even means by shredding safety nets. Are people starving in the street? Unable to get health care?

I guess when the president you worship is performing disasterously, the best cover is to go back and attack the Bush administration. It keeps the ol’ heart pumping, maintains the vitality of all those dark insults, and distracts one’s attention from the running fiasco that is Obama’s Washington.

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April 21st 2009

As Spies Attack Us, Dems Go After Spymasters

“There’s never been anything like this,” a former Pentagon official told the WSJ about spy attacks on computers holding top secret weapons development information, along with national infrastructure control systems. “[They've attacking] everything that keeps this country going.”

The most recent revelation reveals spy hackers going after F-35 fighter secrets, says the WSJ:

Computer spies have broken into the Pentagon’s $300 billion Joint Strike Fighter project — the Defense Department’s costliest weapons program ever — according to current and former government officials familiar with the attacks.

Similar incidents have also breached the Air Force’s air-traffic-control system in recent months, these people say. In the case of the fighter-jet program, the intruders were able to copy and siphon off several terabytes of data related to design and electronics systems, officials say, potentially making it easier to defend against the craft.

The latest intrusions provide new evidence that a battle is heating up between the U.S. and potential adversaries over the data networks that tie the world together.

Someone is after us, big time.  So what are the Dems doing?   Attacking Bushl  Natch.

Obama stepped up the campaign against foreign spies the Bush admin this week by releasing memos detailing torture harsh but fitting interrogation techniques, which is sure to offend the Spanish, who, BTW, have never gotten around to ratifying the Council of Europe’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture and the UN Committee Against Torture.  It certainly has incensed the Dems:

Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat and chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, wrote Mr. Obama asking him not to rule out prosecutions until her panel completed an investigation over the next six to eight months. (NYT)

Meanwhile, Obama did one of his classic “go talk to the people you just screwed” stints, reminiscent of his chat with USS Cole families, to the CIA, telling them to ignore the folks from his admin who are intent on knocking the agency down, and reassuring them that they’re all his good friends in Obama Happy Land. All the while, the president’s staff was refusing to rule out legal sanctions against the lawyers who developed the legal basis for the use of the interrogation methods.

And to ice this particularly untasty cake, we learned from Dick Cheney last night that memos exist detailing in explicit detail the intelligence gained from the interrogations - memos that so far the Obama admin has refused to release, despite the president’s CIA-directed hyperbole:

“Don’t be discouraged by what’s happened in the last few weeks,” he told employees. “Don’t be discouraged that we have to acknowledge potentially we’ve made some mistakes. That’s how we learn. But the fact that we are willing to acknowledge them and then move forward, that is precisely why I am proud to be president of the United States and that’s why you should be proud to be members of the C.I.A.” (NYT)

The NYT buried the Cheney demands deep in its story, after detailing all the yahoos that want to get their  hands on the Bushies.

If the president didn’t want them to be discouraged, if he’s really interested in learning from the past, if he wants to acknowledge history, he will give us history, not just one side of it.

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December 21st 2008

Sunday Scan: Pre-Christmas Edition

How You Gonna Grow The Middle Class, Joe?

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ecent news reports tell us that Joe Biden’s big job in the Obama administration will be to increase the size of his much-loved middle class.  Just one question, Joe:

How much are you going to do that by lifting the poor up to the middle class, and  how much are you going to do it by taxing the wealthy down to it?

Just wondering …

Peanut Nutty

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ecently a school bus in an unnamed U.S. school district has hastily evacuated, then fully decontaminated. Why? Sarin gas? Smallpox pores? No, a peanut was seen on the floor. What hope do we have that our children will get a sensible education if education is in the hands of people who evacuate and decontaminate school buses because of a peanut?

As I usually do when confronted with a story I like, I turn to Stats Blog, where I found another example:

At this time of year many municipal elementary schools in the United States, including the one attended by my children, raise money by selling wrapping paper and candy. This year parents in our school were told that they could no longer pick up their purchases from their children’s classrooms. Instead they had to pick up their orders from a loading dock at specified times, to avoid a danger to the children.

The danger? Some of the orders contained sealed tins of festive nuts. Out of an overabundance of caution the school decided not to allow any of the items on the premises.

Sealed containers!  In the hands of adults!  What are they afraid of, that a child with a peanut allergy and utterly no self-control will beat a teacher paralyzed by fear of physically restraining a child, rip the tin open, and commit suicide by nut?

“This allergy is just nuts,” by Nicholas A. Christakis, professor of medical sociology, Harvard Medical School, in the latest issue of the British Medical Journal, which is excerpted above.  Christakis goes on to say:

About 3.3 million Americans are allergic to nuts, and even more - 6.9 million - are allergic to seafood. However, all told, serious allergic reactions to foods cause just 2,000 hospitalisations a year (out of more than 30 million hospitalisations nationwide). And only 150 people (children and adults) die each year from all food allergies combined.

That’s about the same as the number of people in the U.S. killed by lightening each year. Should we ban thunderstorms?

Continue reading “Sunday Scan: Pre-Christmas Edition”

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With Obama winning the presidency by seven percent, we can't blame the media. Their laudatory coverage and refusal to extensively probe into Obama's background and [lack of] experience was at best responsible for five percent of his vote, the pundits tell us. Here is a compilation of over 100 significant instances of pro-Obama/anti-McCain bias during the 2008 campaign.

For all 'Media Bias 2008' – Click Here