Nothing

John Murtha is dead.

Follow Me!

Into the Valley of the Little Bighorn:

President Barack Obama is planning to host a televised meeting with Republican and Democratic congressional leaders on health care reform.

The Feb. 25 meeting is an attempt to reach across the aisle but not a signal that the president plans to start over, as Republicans have demanded, a White House official said.

“I want to come back [after the Presidents Day congressional recess] and have a large meeting — Republicans and Democrats — to go through, systematically, all the best ideas that are out there and move it forward,” Obama said in an interview with Katie Couric during CBS’s Super Bowl pre-game show Sunday.

Obama said he wants to “look at the Republican ideas that are out there.”

“If we can go, step by step, through a series of these issues and arrive at some agreements, then, procedurally, there’s no reason why we can’t do it a lot faster the process took last year,” he said.

In a statement, the official said, “What the president will not do is let this moment slip away. He hopes to have Republican support in doing so — but he is going to move forward on health reform.”

In other words, join Obama in the televised auto de fe, but he will do what he intends regardless.

Republicans would be crazy to rise to this bait. A big photo-op for Obama with zero chance for any meaningful changes to a bill that steals liberty from American citizens. Kill the bill(s) and start over from scratch.

Do not walk into this, Republicans. Standing strong against this abomination has worked so far and the American public is grateful. (Need proof? Look to Massachusetts, Virginia and New Jersey.)

You really do not want to follow George Armstrong Obama to the place he is leading his cavalry. This is really shaping up to be a throw the bums out election.

Bad time to join the bums.

Side note: The increasingly cartoonish Obama administration is crumbling rather quickly. Only a huge, probably pathological, ego could come up with this plan. Obama really appears to believe that the sheer awesome awesomeness of his awesome intellect will overawe every obstacle in his path.

What an awful little man with an over-sized head we have in the White House.

Via Memeorandum.

1066 + 944

It’s like 1066AD all over again, only this time instead of swinging swords, the invaders are flaunting cash. The French are about to invade Dover:

For generations the White Cliffs of Dover have stood as a symbol of indomitable British pride.

But now Dover is up for sale and the leading bidder has been revealed to be an age-old enemy – France.

The Port of Dover is one of a string of publicly owned assets which have been earmarked for privatisation as the Government battles with a record £830billion of national debt.

Its advisers have recommended selling Dover to France as ‘a very logical move’, but the plan has prompted outrage.

Conservative Party prospective MP for Dover Charles Elphicke said: ‘In trying to sell off our port and the White Cliffs, it’s clear Gordon Brown has no sense of the history of our nation or the pride of our town.

‘How dare he consider selling it all off to the French? Dover is the English border. We stood proud in defending our nation in times past.

(William did not land at Dover, of course, he landed at Pevensey.) Nonetheless, this is instructive for Americans. It should show everyone what happens when government – and government debt – spirals out of control for generations. How long until the US is forced to sell public assets due to the out of control deficit? What will it be here? Will Yellowstone be on the block? Mount Rushmore?

Fort Dix?

Which ones will China buy? Which ones will go to Saudi Arabia?

Think it can’t happen? Ask the folks in Dover.

Tragedy In Connecticut

There has been a horrific explosion at a new power plant under construction in Connecticut:

MIDDLETOWN, Conn. – Early reports were that a natural gas leak could have caused a devastating explosion Sunday morning that killed two and injured as many as 100 at a power plant being built south of the city on the Connecticut River.

Homeowners more than 10 miles away said the 11 a.m. explosion at the Kleen Energy Systems power plant on River Road created a shock wave so intense they mistakenly thought the central part of the state had experienced an earthquake.

Medical rescue personnel said two were dead at the site and, of 100 so injured, four were in critical condition.

“There are bodies everywhere,” a witness said. Another witness said many victims may be buried in rubble.

I have seen some video taken from a great distance that appears to show that the main building of the complex (probably the turbine hall) has been blasted apart. I’m making an educated guess that the plant’s control room was in that building as well as the turbines and associated equipment. There may be significant casualties although only two are reported dead at the moment. There were construction crews on site at the time of the explosion.

I can’t find much detail on the plant itself, other than a very short entry from the company building it, here.

My heart goes out to the families of those killed or injured today.

Ice Work If You Can Get It

Mark Steyn on the collapsing bandwagon of global warming:

But where did all these experts get the data from? Well, NASA’s assertion that Himalayan glaciers “may disappear altogether” by 2030 rests on one footnote, citing the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report from 2007.

In fact, the Fourth Assessment Report suggests 2035 as the likely arrival of Armageddon, but what’s half a decade between scaremongers? They rate the likelihood of the glaciers disappearing as “very high”—i.e., more than 90 per cent. And the IPCC was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for that report, so it must be kosher, right? Well, yes, its Himalayan claims rest on a 2005 World Wildlife Fund report called “An Overview of Glaciers.”

WWF? Aren’t they something to do with pandas and the Duke of Edinburgh? True. But they wouldn’t be saying this stuff if they hadn’t got the science nailed down, would they? The WWF report relies on an article published in the New Scientist in 1999 by Fred Pearce.

That’s it? One article from 12 years ago in a pop-science mag? Oh, but don’t worry, back in 1999 Fred did a quickie telephone interview with a chap called Syed Hasnain of Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. And this Syed Hasnain cove presumably knows a thing or two about glaciers.

Well, yes. But he now says he was just idly “speculating”; he didn’t do any research or anything like that.

But so what? His musings were wafted upwards through the New Scientist to the World Wildlife Fund to the IPCC to a global fait accompli: the glaciers are disappearing. Everyone knows that. You’re not a denier, are you? India’s environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, says there was not “an iota of scienti?c evidence” to support the 2035 claim. Yet that proved no obstacle to its progress through the alarmist establishment. Dr. Murari Lal, the “scientist” who included the 2035 glacier apocalypse in the IPCC report, told Britain’s Mail on Sunday that he knew it wasn’t based on “peer-reviewed science” but “we thought we should put it in”—for political reasons.

In other words the science wasn’t settled. Rather, the propaganda was settled on. And that propaganda took on a life of its own and was repeated over and over and over, in ever more shrill bits of propaganda masquerading as science. (Go read the entire piece, Steyn is at his best when slapping around the easily led.)

If the news corpse exercised even a small amount of basic curiosity, they would be noticing odd little things, such as the vast wealth apparently acquired by Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, head of the IPCC. Or the vast wealth acquired by Al Gore. And if the news corpse was even modestly endowed with a kindergarten level ability to connect the dots, they would have smelled a rat long ago. Several rats.

Instead, they hopped onto the bandwagon along with thousands upon thousands other useful idiots and began hyping the fraud.

And it is fraud, writ large.

What ought to be settled on is how to bring the fraudsters to justice for what they have done and are still attempting to do.

The bandwagon is collapsing under the weight of the lies piled onto it.

Paranoia Desperation Strikes Deep

The Wizard of 0 is down to desperately praying that Republicans will willingly join his column as he heads into the valley of the Little Bighorn:

Speaking to members of the Democratic National Committee on Thursday night, Obama vowed to continue his year-long quest to overhaul the nation’s health-care system, to curb rising costs and extend coverage to millions of families and individuals who don’t have it.

But he suggested a different way forward than the partisan, closed-door dealmaking underway between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.).

“What I’d like to do is have a meeting whereby I’m sitting with the Republicans, sitting with the Democrats, sitting with health-care experts, and let’s just go through these bills — their ideas, our ideas — let’s walk through them in a methodical way so that the American people can see and compare what makes the most sense,” Obama told DNC members.

There is a little fly in the Wizard’s ointment:

But given the public’s dim view of health-care reform, lining up 51 Senate Democrats even to approve fairly uncontroversial fixes could prove impossible. “We are not picking up votes. We are losing votes,” said a senior Senate Democratic aide.

Maybe you can get Arlen Specter to join you for a chorus of Kumbaya! Oh wait, you did. How did that work out for Benedict Arlen?

Seriously, I would have loved to have been in that room when the super-genius Wizard delivered his new strategy to the Democratic National Committee. The looks of sheer disbelief exchanged between members must have been hysterically funny – well, if you were not a member of that organization, that is.

Because this is, without a doubt, the most sophomoric understanding of how politics works that I have ever seen reported in the Washington press corpse. If this is an example of the advice he is getting from the “best and the brightest” he surrounded himself with, you can surely see why he is in the spot that he is.

Any Republican who sits down with the Wizard right now is going to the Little Bighorn with Barry. Any who do not know that deserve to.

Any of the Wizard’s maladroit munchkins who do not are quite a lot less than the best and more than several notches below the brightest.

You’re All Stupid

Object to the Obama agenda – you’re stupid. Object to government takeover of a huge chunk of the American economy – you’re stupid. Worry about skyrocketing taxes and unsustainable debt – you’re stupid. Have legitimate concerns about the direction the country is taking – you’re stupid.

So sayeth the left.

Go read what McQ sayeth in response. It is too good to excerpt and too true not to click over and read.

America is its people – it is not the government. We do not work for Washington. They work for us. They forget that at their peril. Yes, the voters can turn on a dime and savage a politician who lets them down or tries to sell them snake oil – or just to plain sell them.

That is how it was meant to work. Because we the people are America.

America is not the state. America is the people cooperating to act as a state.

Via Memeorandum.

Oh. The…. Humanity?

For the love of all that is holy, is there no safety for the White House Press corps?

Reporters ventured out to cover the speech amid a massive snowstorm in Washington that could dump up to three feet of snow on the region.

According to the White House pool report, as the motorcade drove back to the White House after the president’s speech, a medium-size tree branch snapped under the weight of the snow and fell on top of an SUV carrying photographers.

The windshield of the vehicle was reportedly covered in snow and the driver brought it to a stop. The limb was dragged off the roof and the vehicle returned safely to the White House.

The post is – I am not making this up – “Snowstorm puts W.H. press corps in danger”. Let’s see, government SUV piloted by professional driver in an official motorcade. Doubtless traveling at a safe speed given the conditions.

Oh. My. See how these professionals risk their very lives to bring you all the talking points that the White House sees fit to regurgitate for them? My heavens! One of them must have spilled their free mocha lattes!

Out here in flyover country, I drove 50 miles one way to work yesterday – drove myself, mind you – through several inches of newly fallen wet snow over ice. I didn’t file a pool report, however. I did do my bit to keep the lights on.Today, I shoveled wet, sloppy ice and snow from my walkway and driveway.

Nobody will ever file a pool report about the average person who simply copes with the world as it really is from day-to-day. We get to work even when the roads are badly plowed and full of a gazillion potholes – some large enough to swallow a Buick. We don’t travel in motorcades, we drive ourselves. We shovel our driveways and sidewalks, nurse our tired backs and get up the next day and do it again.

Do go read the entire post over at The Hill. Feel free to add to the already contemptuous comments about the heroic press corps.

Exit question: Should we all adopt The Wizard’s phrasing and begin to call them the White House Press Corpse? That actually seems rather apt.

UPDATE: Good. Lord. CNN is also hyping the dire danger the press corpse was in as they bravely flew through the snow. At the blistering pace of 15mph. At least CNN appears to be a little less breathless than The Hill about it, but seriously, this is news you can use?

One wonders how many of the brave press corpse had to change their underwear after their brush with death.

The Bonfire Of Mr. Vanity

Mark Steyn:

But, since Obama’s mispronunciation is a pithier summation of the State of the Union than any of the dreary 90-minute sludge he paid his speechwriters for, let us consider it: Is America a Corpseman walking?

Well, we’re getting there. National Review’s Jim Geraghty sums up Obama’s America thus: “Unsustainable is the new normal.” Indeed. The other day, Douglas Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office, described current deficits as “unsustainable.” So let’s make them even more so. The president tells us, with a straight face, that his grossly irresponsible profligate wastrel of a predecessor took the federal budget on an eight-year joyride, so the only way his sober, fiscally prudent successor can get things under control is to grab the throttle and crank it up to what Mel Brooks in “Spaceballs” (which seems the appropriate comparison) called “Ludicrous Speed.”

Obama’s spending proposes to take the average Bush deficit for the years 2001-08, and double it, all the way to 2020. To get out of the Bush hole, we need to dig a hole twice as deep for one-and-a-half times as long. And that’s according to the official projections of his Economics Czar, Ms. Rose Colored-Glasses. By 2015, the actual hole may be so deep that even if you toss every Obama speech down it on double-spaced paper you still won’t be able to fill it up. In the spendthrift Bush days, federal spending as a proportion of GDP averaged 19.6 percent. Obama proposes to crank it up to 25 percent as a permanent feature of life.

Sit back and think about that “strategy” for a moment. Would it work for you with your personal finances? You’re deeply in debt so you spend more to get out of it? Let me know how that works out for you.

Obama is paying lip service to creating jobs, but he is sucking the capital right out of the markets with his psychopathic spending spree. What’s left for small business? A proposed one-shot tax credit, paid for with borrowed money that the businesses are almost certainly going to be taxed to pay for at a future date.

Such a deal!

How stupid does Obama think those small business owners are?

The economy is burning down around us and Obama is feeding the flames.

Do go read all of Steyn’s column. As always, it is worth the read.

Ashes

Kimberly Strassel:

No one pushed harder than Mr. Kindler. The CEO made no fewer than five trips to the White House last year. He was the man prodding Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers of America head Billy Tauzin every step. He wrote an op-ed with the SEIU’s Mr. Stern demanding reform. He pressed the industry’s $150 million ad campaign promoting ObamaCare, rolled out with liberal activist groups.

Critics warned the legislation would lead to a government takeover and price controls. They warned Democrats would take the money and double-cross them. None of it fazed the industry, right up until ObamaCare imploded.

Mr. Kindler and Co. are left with the ashes. Having got this far (with Big Pharma’s help), Democrats are more desperate than ever to pass “something.” It won’t include any upside for drug companies. There is talk instead of “popular” stand-alone legislation, including reimportation, Medicare price controls, and slashing the industry’s 12-year exclusivity on biologics.

You really, really have to go read the entire piece. It is an object lesson in how to make a bad bet. A lot of the medical industry made a bad bet on this one. The drug companies – led by Pfizer and Kindler – really made a really bad one. He was never the one.

Free market supporters now have a heaven-sent opportunity to make some real changes – if they are smart, fast and willing to push their ideas. Corporations that supported the won stand a real chance of finding out that they backed the loser instead of the one. Or won, as may be.

Limit lawsuits, allow insurance sales across state lines, allow drug reimportation – allow the free market to work. Will this lead to lower profits for companies like Pfizer who backed a losing horse? Probably. No, certainly.

Gosh, I feel bad about that. Don’t you?

Oh, Mama, Can This Really Be The End?

Could this be the end of the Kennedy political dynasty?

Nearly 6 in 10 registered voters in the First Congressional District would consider another candidate or vote to replace Loughlin’s opponent, U.S. Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy, according to a WPRI-TV, Channel 12 survey released Thursday night.

The poll offers a snapshot of an abysmal political climate for Democrats that could present serious problems for the eight-term incumbent Kennedy, according to pollster Joseph Fleming.

“It looks like it could be a very competitive race, which we haven’t seen in many years,” Fleming said, noting that Election Day is still nine months away. “I think people, right now, are really looking at who’s in office, and they’re considering somebody else.”

Kennedy’s office declined to respond to the WPRI poll, in which 28 percent of respondents from his district said they’d vote to replace the congressman if the election were held today; 31 percent said they’d consider another candidate; while 35 percent said they’d vote to reelect him.

Does not look good for Kennedy – if – a big if – there is a strong challenger and if things continue from now until election day as they are now.

But the political atmosphere is deathly toxic for Democrats, bordering on lethal. Americans – including a large number of self-identified Democrats – are rejecting the basic economic paradigm that has been a driver for Democrats. Voters are resoundingly anti-Keynesian.

While influential 20th Century economist John Maynard Keynes would say it’s best to increase deficit spending in tough economic times, only 11% of American adults agree and think the nation needs to increase its deficit spending at this time. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 70% disagree and say it would be better to cut the deficit.

In fact, 59% think Keynes had it backwards and that increasing the deficit at this time would hurt the economy rather than help.

To help the economy, most Americans (56%) believe that cutting the deficit is the way to go.

Eighty-three percent (83%) of Americans, in fact, say the size of the federal budget deficit is due more to the unwillingness of politicians to cut government spending than to the reluctance of taxpayers to pay more in taxes.

Maybe the voters have had enough because the only growth sector of the economy is the number of Federal bureaucrats making six figure salaries while the masses face unemployment. Maybe it’s because the Democrat “grown-ups” in charge of taking care of the country fiddle around obsessively with health care “reform” while the economy burns down around America. Maybe it’s because average Americans understand that spending your way out of an economic hole has always been idiotic.

Regardless, the “throw the bums out” election looms, driven by the voter’s rejection of spend and tax and tax and tax policies. Every incumbent is in danger. Only those who get the message are safe. Those who assume they are safe because they are in “safe” seats – or who rely on a family name for protection – might want to think about what the election of Scott Brown really meant.

There are no safe seats.

Pheasant Uprising

The pheasants are restless, sire:

As a tale of avian savagery it’s starting to have echoes of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.

For months, the rural North Yorkshire village of Newsham has been terrorised by a very unpleasant pheasant – and no one has been spared.

Men, women, children, prams, bikes, dogs and even cars have all fallen victim to the psychopathic fowl, which some believe is out to avenge its dead relatives.

Victims have spoken of how the bird hides silently in bushes before leaping out and advancing on its terrified prey.

It has even chased village children after watching them get off the school bus.

There have been attempts to catch the predator but so far to no avail.

Expert advice for dealing with the foul-tempered fowl? Move it:

Mr Waddell said best way to deal with the bird would be to humanely capture it and relocate it away from the village.

Just think, they could box it up and ship it to another village that they don’t like! That village could box it up and ship it to another and so on.

It would be like a feathered fruitcake that just gets re-gifted.

All Campaign, All The Time

Nolan Finley:

Obama isn’t missing a chance to spank the GOP. How this fits into his professed objective of ending the destructive rancor in Washington is difficult to see.

More likely, the president is hardening partisan lines and confirming the public’s view that Washington is a broken place.

Not only that, but Obama’s assertions fail the accuracy test. To suggest Republicans blocked him is laughable. Until Scott Brown is seated as the new Republican U.S. senator from Massachusetts — which could happen as early as today — Republicans can’t block anything.

The president has to accept responsibility for stubbornly pressing an ideological agenda that was out of sync with the public’s priorities and then not effectively advocating for his own proposals.

For a solid year, Democrats held a rare super-majority in Congress. Had Obama been a better politician and a more forceful leader, he could have passed his entire wish list. He squandered his advantage, and now he wants to place the blame elsewhere.

Distortions, acrimonious partisanship and diversion of all blame. There’s some change you can believe in, right? I’ve heard a non-stop stream of calls for Republicans to start governing now on the notoriously left-leaning NPR. Which is, of course, ludicrous. They still only have one vote with which to put the brakes on Obama’s schemes. Pray the foot doesn’t slip off the brake between now and November.

Obama is campaigning, all right. He’s campaigning to sucker the Republicans into getting onto his train to take a little ride with him.

Republicans must refuse to rise to Obama’s bait. They are not obligated to now yield to this autocratic man who cut them out entirely from the legislative process and was so incompetent as to let his super-majority dither or do little more than harm for a full year.

There’s a trainwreck coming, Republicans would be wise not to climb on the Obama express right now. This is rapidly shaping up as a throw the bums out election.

Bad time to decide to be a bum.

The Really, Really Slow Learner

Go over and look at the disturbing graph that David Boaz has posted at the Cato@Liberty blog. It ain’t pretty, folks. As Boaz puts it:

Let’s hope the Obama administration soon learns that higher taxes, more regulation, a larger share of GDP shifted to government, fears of Fed monetization of soaring debt — not to mention newspaper reports of Obama budgeteers “flipp[ing] through the tax code, looking for ideas” — can only discourage employers, investors, and entrepreneurs. Robert Higgs has cited the role of “regime uncertainty” in prolonging the Great Depression, as investors worried about what FDR might do next. Will Wilkinson points to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s saying “businesses want certainty. They need certainty so they can make long-term plans today.” Unfortunately, Will says, “Creating completely irresponsible, economically chilling regime uncertainty would appear to be the basic modus operandi of the Obama administration.”

In other words, Obama does not get it. His mendacious, maladroit munchkins do not get it. The Democrats controlling Congress do not get it.

So we’re gonna get it.

More insane spending by the utterly clueproof, greater debt, more economic uncertainty and even higher unemployment (ahem). Insanity. Doing more of the same and expecting different outcomes.

Insanity.

Guess What? It’s Worse.

I do not think unexpectedly means what they think it means. Because every time jobless claims rise it surprises the heck out of the media elite.

More Americans unexpectedly filed first-time claims for unemployment insurance last week, indicating companies lack confidence the economic recovery will be sustained.

Initial jobless applications increased to 480,000 in the week ended Jan. 30, the most in seven weeks, from 472,000 the prior week, Labor Department figures showed today in Washington. The number of people receiving unemployment insurance was little changed and those receiving extended benefits increased.

Well, if a climb of 8,000 made them drop their lattes, what do you think a correction of 800,000 is going to do. As in an additional 800,000 jobs lost – because they were cooking the books:

Job losses during the recession may have been underestimated by close to a million jobs. So instead of employers cutting just over 7 million jobs from their payrolls since the economic downturn began in December 2007, it’s expected that the Labor Department’s new estimate will be a loss of 8 million jobs.

“It’s an enormous understatement of the severity of the crisis,” said Heidi Shierholz, labor economist with the Economic Policy Institute, a union-supported think tank. “It confirms that things were actually worse on the ground than what the reports suggested.”

The new reading will come when the economists at the department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics release their annual revision of U.S. payrolls from April 2008 through March of 2009 Friday, using data that wasn’t available as the monthly readings were being estimated and reported.

The thesaurus must be smoking right now as they madly thumb through it to find a superlative to describe the situation. One is simply breathless with anticipation. Apparently, the keepers of the stats have just been blithely assuming that a whole bunch of new businesses have been opening their doors – despite the evidence of their own lying eyes – and have been “adjusting” the job loss data to count nonexistent new jobs.

So we have lost far more jobs than they have admitted up until March of 2009. That’s right, this adjustment does not include the past year. So we can look forward to another bleak downward revision a year from now. They can’t imagine or invent enough jobs to cover all we have lost.

So they want to spend even more. We can’t wait to see the math on these latest proposals. Let’s see, all the jobs they have invented or imagined so far are less than the negative correction – and they haven’t even corrected (downward) the 2009 numbers yet.

We just didn’t understand the nuance, apparently. They were stimulating unemployment.

And doing an amazingly effective job of it.

(Please remember that the Democrats have been in control of both houses of Congress since 2007. They own this mess. They’ll try to blame Bush and cry that it’s not Obama’s fault. But it is their fault.)