Take That, David Brock

You remember David Brock, right? The guy who used to work for the right side of the aisle until he chickened out under social pressure and switched to the hard left. Well, he's at it again, once again for the other side, and once again up to their sleazy tactics via the dreadful "Media Matters" lie shop he's currently running with Soros money.

This time, sleazemaster Brock's trying to smear Sarah Palin for defending Alaska Senate Candidate Joe Miller against a planned smear against him by Alaska CBS media elites. They, in turn, got caught red-handed via a mis-transmitted phonemail message. Ooops. Another black mark for the Journolista types. Typically, Brock demands "evidence" he knows simply doesn't exist, creating a phony "scandal" in the process.

But Professor William Jacobson calls him on this, and then goes Brock one better, issuing him a challenge of his own:

"Legal Insurrection Blog challenges David Brock to refuse to accept donations to Media Matters from currency manipulators and speculators who want to undermine our national sovereignty."

 Heh.

Let's put Jacobson's blog on our "Good Guys" list right now.

Washington's Arena Stage Returns

Leaving politics for a moment, Washington's venerable Arena Stage, dark for over 30 months due to a massive renovation, has reopened as the magnificant new Mead Center for the Performing Arts. Still at its old locale in the little-known SW quadrant of the nation's capital, this is one magnificent new facility whose structure actually contains within it Arena's original pair of theaters along with a third performance space.

Check out my article describing the new space in my home away from the Washington Times, DC Theatrescene. Here's a photo of the Center (credit: Nic Lehoux, courtesy of Bing Thom Architects), Washington's newest monument and certainly its most visually interesting.

Mad Dem Dash to Steal Ohio Election

Just incredible what lefties and their minions are up to in their last-minute attempt to thwart the Republican-leaning landslide in my old home state of Ohio. Right Ohio has all the details.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, President Obama, on the final lap of his Ohio Losers' Tour, can't even fill a Cleveland auditorium during a personal appearance. Click here for details. If you read this link to the now-desperate New York Times, the fun part is in the comments section, where left-leaning Democrat lefties try to make excuses for themselves and for The One's pitiful showings, claiming that the media is in the bag for the Repubs due to "bad reporting." You gotta laugh. I guess "good reporting" is the kind that trashes Bush. These are some of the most puerile observations I've ever had the misfortune to read.

Less than 48 hours to go. Time to be on alert for massive, last-ditch voter fraud by the leftists, all of whom believe in free speech, of course. For themselves alone.

SEIU in violation of RICO statute?

Answer: of course. These union thugs have been violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute for years. Whenever this topic comes up, I wonder aloud why these clowns haven't been prosecuted yet (a rhetorical question) for their consistent history of voter fraud and intimidation efforts, always on the part of far-left Democrats. I usually get a shrug, even from Republicans--one of the reason that ingrained corruption is so difficult to root out.

Now we get a coredump of specific info via a post on RedState. Here are just a few tidbits:

• In Milwaukee, a SEIU lobbyist brags about a hatchet job the union is planning on Republican Scott Walker on behalf of Democrat Tom Barrett, with media cooperation.
• In Washington state, an SEIU member was arrested for allegedly forging signatures on petitions
• In Harris County, TX a group run by a former SEIU staffer allegedly turned in over 23,000 fraudulent voter registrations [Video of said former SEIU staffer here.]
  • Note: The situation seems to have deteriorated further as actual voting has begun.

Maybe if the Repubs take the House next week, we'll start getting some hearings on the malign influence of the astoundingly corrupt SEIU.

Shout-out to the Great Unwashed

The Great Unwashed. That's what Amerikkka's favorite pixie newscaster, Katie Couric thinks of you, according to this report from Howard Kurtz (who recently left the Washington Post for The Daily Beast):

....Couric has spent recent weeks in Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and New Brunswick, New Jersey. She is touring what she calls “this great unwashed middle of the country” in an effort to divine the mood of the midterms.

Yeah, that's you, dear reader, if you just happen to live somewhere in America that's between slightly west of the DC Beltway and slightly Ease of Nancy Pelosi's safely-gerrymandered Congressional district in the People's Republic of San Francisco. It's amazing that we used this very phrase in a recent HazZzmat post--in a satirical way, of course, describing exactly what the media elite thinks of you and me. Now, amazingly, Couric actually deploys the phrase in the elitist's casual, comfortable, offhandedly contemptuous manner.

This clip created a lot of buzz this morning when Drudge linked to it. Oddly, when I first accessed it, the page was there but the post was missing--just a lot of white space. As of this writing, the post is back with all the appearances of having been quickly redacted edited, although the damning phrase is still there.

The most interesting thing about the Obama Years to date is that after the 2008 election, the Democrat party nationwide dropped all pretense that they were not a pack of Marxists bent on ignoring the will of the people. This simple fact is what is really ignited the Tea Party as well as next week's promising electoral tsunami. Yet most Dems still don't have a clue.

But Couric's casual gesture of contempt for Middle America--the real America--tells us, quite eloquently, all we need to know. The clearly intentional disenfranchising of the military vote in New York and Chicago is yet another.

Election Break: So you want to be an English professor, eh?

I thought I'd take a break from the politics of meaning and re-post here a most amusing video cartoon that pretty much says it all when it comes to aspiring to a teaching career as a professor in the humanities--specifically in English. That's where I started out years ago. Needless to say, I ain't there now, nor have I been for a long, long time. Just run the video and you'll hear what I wish I'd heard, more decades ago than I'd care to admit. (BTW, audio is a pretty good flavor of "robo-talk.")

Hat tip, Instapundit. Enjoy.

Palin stupidity on Tea Party date--NOT!

As we promised you in our previous entry, here's another swell example of the alleged intelletual prowess of the coastal elites via the excellent NewsBusters:

Sarah Palin at Monday's Tea Party rally in Reno, Nevada, told attendees, "Don't be thinking that we've got victory for America in the bag yet...We can't party like it's 1773."

Clearly not understanding that was the year of the famed Boston Tea Party, history challenged media members, including PBS's Gwen Ifill and Daily Kos's Markos Moulitsas, mocked Palin via their twitter accounts (screencaps follow with video of Palin's remarks courtesy Right Scoop, h/t Perfunction).

But wait--there's more:

Maybe even more humorous, the Huffington Post actually reprinted Moulitsas's tweet as "News Broken on Twitter."

Of course, all these geniuses needed to do was a simple Google search of "historical events of 1773." The first response would have helped them identify that the Boston Tea Party happened on December 16th of that year.

Links above will get you more details, but be sure you read NewsBusters' whole story. 

Over many years now, I've never quite been able to determine what bugs me about these clowns more: their their socialism, their sheer ignorance and lack of any discernible intellectual heft, or their superciliousness and condescension towards the Great Unwashed (i.e., you and me).

Buy a Gadsden Flag

Down here in Virginia, home to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, Patrick Henry, George Mason, and God knows how many other patriots, most of us (except for inside the Beltway) are in a Tea Party mood this month. Even though we know the actual Tea Party was held in Boston in 1773. (See our next post on this item.)

After we put the Tea Party's official unofficial emblem--the Gadsden "Don't Tread on Me" flag--up on our website in solidarity with right thinkers everywhere, we began to wonder. Is there a place where you can find these things. And if so, can you buy one?

In the words of our current President, YES WE CAN!

The Gadsden and Culpeper American Heritage Shoppe Ltd. website is right here, and I'm about to pull out my credit card. The yellow flag will look swell flying outside of my house on November 2. How about yours? Extra added bonus: the top of the line flags, at least, are made right here in the USA, not in the People's Republic like everything else. Double bonus. This place is in the state of New York. How counter-intuitively subversive is that?

There's no time like the present for the Silent Majority to make its presence known. Let's party on November 2. (And let's also not forget to go to the polls first.)

Moving Day for a "Good Guy"

Longtime readers are aware of our "Good Guys" and our "Enemies List," both of which appear in the right column in our new design right after current news links. Nomenclature is obvious. The Good Guys are bloggers who use their noggins and aren't deterred by leftist doublespeak and bafflegab. The Enemies List (with a hat tip to Tricky Dick) are the far left pond scum who collectively observe the diktat that the "truth" is whatever the Party says it is.

We try to keep this list and the links up to date. For example, we removed the once-admired "Little Green Footballs" from the Good Guy list once it was obvious that the writer had degenerated into a strangely garbled lefty incoherence. Links change, sites come and go, so we do check once in awhile.

But we missed a recent change. I've just been informed by "The Interface" himself (a veteran Good Guy) that his blog has relocated to a new site. Link's been corrected accordingly. If you're not familiar with the site, check out what's currently the latest entry (October 8) here. It's on one of our favorite topix: "global warming" climate change.

PS: FYI, we've also added Sissy Willis to the Good Guys list even though she's a Good Gal. (I'm from Ohio where both genders are guys anyway.) I discovered Sissy's blog through Instapundit and she's quite insightful and interesting. And also the only one besides moi in the blogosphere, apparently, who recognizes Antonio Gramsci's controlling interest in the great Alinsky-Obama food chain of World Socialism. 

Austan Goolsbee. Who is this idiot?

From CNN online:

Americans can help the recovery along by saving more than in the past, but also by spending responsibly in proportion to income, one of President Obama's top economic advisers said Tuesday.

In a wide-ranging interview based on questions from CNNMoney.com readers, Council of Economic Advisers chairman Austan Goolsbee said the nation can't simply spend its way out of this economic downturn, adding "we need a different style of recovery."

How do these people get jobs in Washington? Americans can "help the recovery" by "spending responsibly in proportion to income"? Are you kidding me? Two questions:

1. What recovery?
2. Should we spend in proportion to our income the way the Federal government does under this administration?

Herein, we observe the primary problem with both this administration and the current Congress: neither has a clue as to how things work or as to how a BUDGET works for the average American. Why bother with a budget when you can just steal money from the taxpayers and then claim it as an "accomplishment" for your constituents? In fact, that's probably why the current Congress didn't bother to pass an FY 2011 budget before adjourning. They wouldn't have adhered a budget anyway, so there wasn't really a need to have one.

The problem is that most current legislators and administration figures are either failed lawyers or lousy academics, most of whom have neither held a real job nor run a real company. I am wondering here if Goolsbee actually comprehends the unintentional irony in his ridiculous statements. Well, wait a minute. No, I'm not wondering. Here are three of the concluding grafs of the CNN piece with my comments interspersed as bullet items:

[Goolsbee] disagreed that the president focused so much on health care reform in late 2009 instead of on policies that would have spurred more job growth.

• What a whopper!

"The president has been absolutely non-stop focused on creating jobs," Goolsbee said. "But that doesn't mean that should be to the exclusion of everything else."

• The first sentence is a lie. The second sentence is an absolute falsehood. 

"I disagree with the premise that (the president) prioritized health care above jobs," Goolsbee said.

• You can disagree all you want, Austan. But that's precisely what your Fearless leader did. It's not a "premise." It's a verifiable fact.

Goolsbee and his pals are the Marxists people who are currently running the country into the ground. Remember this on the first Tuesday of November. And once again in November 2012.

Fisher, Fed Agree with HazZzMat

How's that for prescience? We published a blog entry yesterday criticizing people for trashing the Fed's QE2 stimulus scheme, arguing that like it or not, the Fed is getting absolutely no help from elected officials in waging the battle against the Great Recession and its effects--namely, unemployment and apparent deflation. So what do we see this morning? A comment from Dallas Federal Reserve President Richard Fisher that corroborates our observation:

Dallas Federal Reserve President Richard Fisher said on CNBC that the Fed can't help the economy alone, and that there is "ample liquidity"  in the market that hasn't been put to work.

Fisher also said the Federal Reserve needs the help of fiscal and regulatory authorities if it is to help the US economy grow at a faster pace.

That's pretty much what we said. There really is money out there. Companies just won't spend it to hire people, fearful that this will backfire on their bottom line when the unpredictable but expensive effects of Obamacare start creeping into their collective bottom lines. Government is just sitting there in Washington imposing ridiculous mandates and expenditures while millions of Americans are sitting home unemployed.

The Fed is doing what it can, but it could use a little help from its alleged friends. That's what both Fisher and we are saying. You can say it too this November by voting the socialists out.

QE2: Fed Rowing in the Wrong Direction?

QE2, for those not familiar with current market terminology, refers not to the soon-to-be-mothballed British cruise ship Queen Elizabeth II, but to the Federal Reserve's almost certain-to-happen effort to increase the velocity of money into the economy to stave off incipient deflation and a second round of the Great Recession. In other words, for lack of a more precise description, they're going to run the printing presses overtime and inflate until someone, somewhere, starts hiring people again to get the US economy off its collective ass.

But "critics" have happily taken the floor to question what the Fed is doing. Here's an example:

“The Fed is trying to achieve too much,” said Mickey D. Levy, chief economist at Bank of America. “They want to stimulate demand, but there are a lot of nonmonetary factors that are inhibiting the economy, including distressed mortgages and foreclosures, the need for households to save, and a whole array of factors deterring businesses from hiring.” 

There are plenty of others.

What I've never seen mentioned, though, is this: why get on Bernanke's case when he is getting absolutely zero help from the elected Democrat politicians (including the President) who are currently steering the US economy in the direction of socialism and ignoring job creation altogether? Used to be that the Federal Reserve could count on a little help and a little support from the US government for its efforts to revive the economy in tough times. In this case, it would seem that the Congress and the Administration are doing precisely the opposite.

As a result, businesses are sitting on enormous piles of cash, in the trillions of $$, both here and abroad. And they're not going to bloody well put it to work inventing new things and hiring people to build them if they can't get any clarity whatsoever as to what the Feds plan to do to them over the next 4-8 years.

So, with the politicians effectively forcing American business to go on a massive capital sitdown strike, the only weapon remaining to the Fed is--inflation! And so my question is to the pundits, and in fact to many economic conservatives, is this: What the hell else is the Fed supposed to do when they're getting no help? Just sit there and watch the economy tank?

Think about it. Can you come up with any other solution with the current crowd in power?

Valerie Sez: "Stay the course."

Brilliant advice to President Obama from deep administration insider Valerie Jarrett. What does the Prez need to do?

"To stay the course and to know that it will get better," she said in an interview Friday. "He's a student of history, so he knows that it's in times of great challenges when our country has been the most innovative and creative, and we look for new solutions and new opportunity. 

Yep, new solutions. From Das Kapital and the Saul Alinsky Playbook. Keep it up, Valerie. You go, girl!

(PS: "Stay the course." Hmmm. Was that line original with Jarrett?)

The Empire Strikes Back. (Which one?)

This just in via RealClear Politics:

President Obama, with a coarse voice, warned a crowd in Ohio: "They're fighting back. The empire is striking back. To win this election, they are plowing ten's of millions of dollars into front groups. They are running misleading negative ads all across the country."

Gee, Barry, you mean George Soros, the Tides foundation, and all the unions are plowing tens of millions of dollars into front groups to spam the airwaves with negative ads right?? The horror! The horror!

Oh, sorry. Guess he was referring to the Republicans. Honestly, you can't make this stuff up. I never thought anyone could make Jimmy Carter look like an effective president. Looks like I was wrong.

Video of the speech at the link above.

Barack Obama: Narcissist-in-Chief

This just in from Bluegrass Pundit. In a video taken at an Obama-Democrat rally in Maryland (where else but the bluest of the Blue states?), Barack Obama gives his remaining enthusiasts the real reason why they need to go to the polls and vote for the Evil Party this November. The money quote appears in a longer piece in Democrat house organ, Politico:

BOWIE, Md. - President Barack Obama’s message to thousands of African Americans who came to see the man they voted for two years ago was simple: Get out and vote for the Democratic ticket in next month’s mid-term elections, even though he’s not on the ballot.

“Don’t make me look bad, now,” he quipped.

Apparently, it's still all about him. Let's all do the POTUS a favor this fall. Let's show him the predictable results of narcissism and hubris. The ancient Greeks taught these lessons over two millennia ago. But apparently America's scholar-and-narcissist-in-chief never encountered them in college.

Tracking the Continuing Great Recession

In spite of economists' proclamations that the Great Recession concluded last June, it's increasingly obvious that these dinosaurs are academics whose theoretical metrics have little if any connection to reality.

For a huge number of unemployed and/or underemployed Americans, including yours truly, the Great Recession is still on and not getting any better, courtesy of the current administration which is deep on Marxist ideals and a little short of how business and evil capitalism actually work. (Hint: they don't work at all when you call businessmen names 24/7 while creating monstrous unpaid-for programs and terminal uncertainty that undermines the confidence to invest.)

We found a nifty, interactive chart that shows you just where the major trouble spots are today in terms of economic recovery, or lack thereof. Stories, links, and the chart itself are all available here. Check it out.

In the meantime, try to ignore the increasing number of MSM stories being put out via Son of Journolist, meant to chart a nonexistent political resurgence by the Democrats. It's a voter-suppression attempt (aimed at Republicans). Nothing less, as in this feeble attempt by WaPostie lefty Chris Cilliza, who operates at Ground Zero for the "former" Journolistas. He sneeringly minimizes current polling results, confidently implying that Pelosi's majority will be diminished but still intact after the first Tuesday in November.

Nice try, Chris, but we know how you guys operate now. By all lights, people are furious at the Democrats for completely ignoring them. And an awful lot of those who did do the ignoring are going to pay for it very shortly at the polls. All the fact twisting in the world is not going to get around this reality. If not coming to an exact end this fall, our current lefty reign of terror is about to start getting curtailed.

70 "Germans" trained to terrorize Europe

This just in from the AP:

An American missile strike killed five German militants Monday in the rugged Pakistan border area where a cell of Germans and Britons at the heart of the U.S. terror alert for Europe — a plot U.S. officials link to al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden — were believed in hiding.

The attack, part of a recent spike in American drone strikes on Pakistan, came as Germany said it has "concrete evidence" that at least 70 Germans have undergone paramilitary training in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and about a third have returned to Germany.

 The Daily Telegraph roughly corroborates this but adds a chilling detail:

...the German police agency responsible for terrorism investigations, the Federal Criminal Police Office, said as many as 220 people have travelled from Germany to Pakistan and Afghanistan for paramilitary training,  and at least 70 have received it. [Italics ours.]

Five down, 65 to go. Nobody will miss any of them. At least not in HazZzmat Territory.

California's Supremes tell public employees to take a hike

This just in from the Governator:

The California Supreme Court Monday handed down a unanimous opinion to uphold Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's furlough of state employees during the budget impasse. 

Overruling lower court judge-idiotarians, I might add.

About time. You know, looking back myself on a long work-life, I'd have to say that I've worked for my fair share of idiots over the years. Nonetheless, some of them provided me with the opportunity to earn a pretty decent living over all. And of course, had I hated things enough around any given workplace, I could have simply taken a hike. No one was keeping me there.

And so it is now for most of the public employees of California. Union or no, they too can experience what their own arrogance and greed has wrought. They too can sustain an effective pay cut, just like most worker bees in the private sector have--at least those who haven't already lost their jobs and their benefits. Benefits they had to pay a good deal of $$ for anyway, I might add, unlike some people.

Time to wake up, public employees. Who the hell do you think is paying your overly rich salaries? And how do you think they can pay for your luxurious benefits packages when they themselves often have none at all?

Another Nail in the "Global Warming" Coffin

This from Power Line:

Global warming alarmism is not science. It is a toxic combination of pseudo-religion and totalitarian politics. To the extent that there is any debate over climate science--the alarmists run from debate like vampires fleeing garlic--the "skeptics" always win. If you want to follow climate science controversies in a rigorous but accessible fashion, check out the Science and Environmental Policy Project's web site. Among other things, it features a weekly update on matters relating to the global warming debate.

This week's SEPP newsletter includes an excellent piece by Dr. Harrison "Jack" Schmitt, a former United States Senator from New Mexico as well as a geologist and former Apollo astronaut who currently is an aerospace consultant. Dr. Schmitt reviews some of the basic evidence that the alarmists try to wish away. You really should read it all; here are some excerpts:

Policy makers at the head of government in the United States and elsewhere apparently want to believe, and to have others believe, that human use of fossil fuels accelerates global warming. They pursue this quest in order to impose ever greater and clearly unconstitutional control on the economy and personal liberty in the name of a hypothetically omnipotent government. There exists no true concern by the President or Congressional Leadership about the true effects of climate change - only a poorly concealed, ideologically driven attempt to use conjured up threats of catastrophic consequences as a lever to gain authoritarian control of society.

These elitist busibodies are costing us our jobs, our livelihoods, and our futures. Next thing you know, these self-important, sour-faced bastards will be criticizing us for the kind of showers we like to take.

Commie "Progressives" Party Hearty in DC

Via MarketWatch:

Van Jones, a former Obama Administration environmental official, spoke at a labor and civil rights rally Saturday in Washington billed as the Democratic response to a Tea Party rally held there in August. 

I read yesterday where this bought-and-paid-for astroturf One Nation Working Together "rally," sponsored as an antidote to the Glenn Beck fest a few weeks back, expects to boast an attendance of "over 100,000." The MSM tried to obscure the substantial attendance figures for the Beck rally. I wonder how this one will play. So far, I can't find posted (and/or altered) pix, but I'll keep trying.

As you might expect, the "rally," fronted by the notoriously corrupt SEIU and others, has apparently been funded by the highly secretive, George Soros-funded Tides Foundation, according to RightPundits. I have been wondering for at least a decade why no one on our political side of the fence, particularly during the Bush Administration, has ever bothered to investigate Tides, Soros, and the countless left-wing front groups like the Sierra Club, all of which are almost certainly in violation of American laws regarding the use of nonprofit organizations.

Actually, I'm glad to see this "rally" taking place. It'll provide even more reasons for Americans to vote for real "hope and change" just over a month from now. I hope the "community organizers" waste a lot of money on it.

UPDATE: The usually left-sympathetic AP reports that today's rally attendance did not measure up to Beck's, although they're a little coy about providing an estimate:

Organizers claimed they had as many participants as Beck's rally. But Saturday's crowds were less dense and didn't reach as far to the edges as they did during Beck's rally. The National Park Service stopped providing official crowd estimates in the 1990s.

Mexican "Pirates" Gun Down American

This from Fox News:

Texas officials renewed warnings Friday about pirates marauding on a U.S.-Mexico border lake after a Colorado tourist was gunned down in Mexican waters while his wife dodged bullets and raced her Jet Ski back to American soil.

The incident happened near Laredo. The reservoir-lake straddles the U.S.-Mexican border although the demarcation line is not always clear. It's the second such incident in the past several months. The remains of the tourist have yet to be recovered. The Fox piece details how these "pirates" are almost certainly in the employ of Mexican drug cartels.

We've said this before and we'll say it again. Already on the increase, this kind of border violence is only going to get worse.

The Obama Administration's current solution: Sue Arizona.