You are here

Politics

Error message

  • Deprecated function: Optional parameter $decorators_applied declared before required parameter $app is implicitly treated as a required parameter in include_once() (line 3532 of /home/ethepmkq/public_html/drupal7core/includes/bootstrap.inc).
  • Deprecated function: Optional parameter $relations declared before required parameter $app is implicitly treated as a required parameter in include_once() (line 3532 of /home/ethepmkq/public_html/drupal7core/includes/bootstrap.inc).

Global Warming is Freezing Children to Death

While pseudo-intellectual elites are wringing their hands about globalistical warmening threatening to drown worthless places like Tuvalu, the actual climate is freezing people off Peruvian mountaintops:

For alpaca farmer Ignacio Beneto Huamani and his young family, life in the Peruvian Andes, at almost 4,700m above sea level, has always been a struggle against the elements. His village of Pichccahuasi, in Peru's Huancavelica region, is little more than a collection of small thatched shelters and herds of alpaca surrounded by beautiful, yet bleakly inhospitable, mountain terrain.

Places: 

Landlord Stifles Bill of Rights

Citizens in the U.S. are supposed to be protected from the government interfering with peaceable assemblies. We’re also supposed to be able to petition our government for redress. But a crafty landlord can use property law to nullify those principles:

The Jefferson Area Tea Party has been officially banned from the area around Congressman Tom Perriello’s office. The landlord of the building where Perriello’s office is located, Lisa Murphy, has convince the local officials that recent protests outside the office is negatively affecting the other tenants in the building.

Topic: 
Places: 

Here’s $4 Trillion, Just to Tide You Over

The headlines say the worst is over. The $700B TARP program, for example, stabilized the financial industry.

How does this square with that picture?

Hunkering down by the fire, I snuggled up with H.R. 4173, the financial-reform legislation passed earlier this month by the House of Representatives.

It authorizes Federal Reserve banks to provide as much as $4 trillion in emergency funding the next time Wall Street crashes. So much for “no-more-bailouts” talk.

Places: 

Counting Backward from Sixty

I’ve read much speculation about Senator Reid’s motivation to rush voting on the health bill by Christmas. One idea I haven’t seen was that the lefties’ 60-vote majority could vanish on January 19th, 2010. That’s when Massachusetts votes to fill Ted Kennedy’s former Senate seat.

If the Republican candidate pulls off an upset, righty filibusters will stand (until Reid buys off one of the Maine ladies again, anyway). Congress reconvenes on the 5th of January. There would be procedural delays associated with reconvening, and the righties’ parliamentary delaying tactics would start with a fresh clock.

Topic: 
Places: 

Who Will Pray for Gary?

Governments at all levels are in financial trouble. Colonel Obama says the Federal government is facing a wall. The Governator has been zig-zagging California toward a cliff. Visits to Detroit’s decay are a regular feature on NRR. But the City of the Century may beat them all in the race to failure:

Abandoned Church in Gary, Indiana

Topic: 
Places: 
Organizations: 

To Arms!

It is no longer a fringe view, I think, to say that Congress prefers to ignore both the Constitution and the will of the people. And if executive over-reach is a fringe view, it is found on every edge of the political cloth, dependent on which team occupies the Oval Office.

Topic: 
Places: 
Organizations: 

Where Unicorns Grow

Lefties, Greenies, and the current President tout a new “green” economy as a solution to today’s dysfunction. Escaping the carbon cycle will save the polar bears. Eliminating fossil fuels will clear the air and cut the legs out from under “evil regimes” that “don’t like us very much”.

We’re being manipulated and coerced into spending huge sums of borrowed money on a raft of unproven ideas aimed at taking the U.S. toward a vision of blue skies and unicorns.

It sounds beautiful. Until you look into the details behind the technology that will drive the Clean Energy Economy:

Places: 
People: 

Power to the Palmetto!

South Carolina is again leading the fight for State sovereignty:

Looks like the steadily growing list of constitutional, ethical and political outrages that constitute the Harry Reid version of Obamacare is sparking a rebellion in the states, as AP reports South Carolina's attorney general plans to investigate the vote-buying that surrounded the proposal in the Senate majority leader's office.

Topic: 
Places: 

Thousands Gather to Demand More Global Cooling

Hundreds of angry snowmen
 

H/T: Maggie’s Farm

Topic: 

One of Us Must Be Crazy

Most Leftists of my acquaintance, or whose words I have read, seem to live in a world entirely made of emotional images, not facts, not reality, not reason, and whatever the loudest or most alluring emotional images is that persists in their brains, that is how they deem reality (to them, a flexible and plaint substance, like clay) can be molded.

The act is symbolic: none of them have read the bill, not even the people who voted for it. I suspect each part was written by a lobbyist in the pay of the Insurance company concerned with whatever particular advantaged them--and even they did not read the entirety. Passing this bill is merely voodoo, like sticking a pin in a wax doll, an action done to satisfy an emotional image, nor a reasoned response to an alleged political economic inequity.

Topic: 
Places: 
Organizations: 

Unicorn Care

Senate lefties have passed their first major hurdle toward enacting a health bill. It is 2,733 pages, including 383 pages of last-minute payoffs amendments. There is simply no way anyone who is voting knows what the bill dictates.

So what are they voting on? Wishes and platitudes:

"Today we are closer than we've ever been to making Senator Ted Kennedy's dream of universal health insurance coverage a reality," Sen. Tom Harkin said ahead of the vote, alluding to the late Massachusetts senator who died of brain cancer in August. 

Topic: 
Places: 
Organizations: 

Working the System

Betsy Newmark identifies the essential lawlessness of the health bill now before the Senate:

What amazes me is how this bill was crafted to treat some states, in perpetuity, differently from other states simply because those states had senators who were more powerful or more canny when it came to bargaining for their support. Politico has some of these details. Of course, we know about Ben Nelson's price for his vote. It is now being called the "Cornhusker kickback."

Nelson’s might be the most blatant – a deal carved out for a single state, a permanent exemption from the state share of Medicaid expansion for Nebraska, meaning federal taxpayers have to kick in an additional $45 million in the first decade.

Topic: 
Places: 
Organizations: 

Life in the Pasture

Cobb on golf:

The game? A splendid waste of time and space, if not energy. An exercise in frustration with few rivals in any organized activity.

Actually, Cobb was writing about Tiger Woods and the small sphere of celebrity that shepherds our culture.

And thus the entire consciousness of average Americans are almost never more than a car bomb away from total destruction.

Which seems a variation the The Revolver Law. Destruction or salvation, dependent on who the car bomb eliminates.

Places: 

No Tears for Tuvalu

From the center ring at the Globalistical Warmening circus in Copenhagen:

Tuvalu, a Pacific island state politically and financially close to Australia, proposed a new protocol which would have the advantage of potentially forcing deeper global emission cuts, but could lead to other developing countries - rather than rich nations - having to make those cuts.

Many developing nations cherish the legally binding commitments that Kyoto places on industrialised nations and fiercely oppose proposals that would change this.

Places: 

Somehow Relevant

It ain’t stealin’ if you do it fast.

Quoted from: Moe Szyslak

Post Style: 

TANSTAAFU

In a Washington Post editorial, Sarah Palin distances herself from politics as usual:

Our representatives in Copenhagen should remember that good environmental policymaking is about weighing real-world costs and benefits -- not pursuing a political agenda.

What? Government policy has costs? All I’ve been hearing about are benefits. Who is this dimwit telling us that there ain’t no such thing as a free unicorn!

And, in the paragraph prior that outrage, Caribou Barbie seems to suggest that executives should act within the letter and spirit of the law:

Topic: 
Places: 
People: 

City Council Deliberates on Cops vs. Carrots

The Minneapolis City Council is hashing out a 2010 budget that will include both tax increases and cuts to core services. The latest compromise includes laying off 25 cops, but keeping 27 civilian Crime Prevention Specialists (CPS):

The budget writers dipped into funding for some of [Mayor] Rybak's favored programs to keep civilian crime prevention specialists working in neighborhoods. Money was taken away from such programs as high school career centers, micro grants to encourage homegrown food, and foreclosure prevention efforts.

Topic: 
Places: 
Organizations: 

Shadow Unemployment

The headline-making unemployment figure (currently 10.0%) is only one of several measures for unemployment. What we hear is called the U3 statistic. There is also a U6 statistic:

This isn’t a third-rate tribute band, it’s the underemployment rate, and it tracks people who work part-time, and people who’ve given up looking for work altogether. This rate is currently at 17.5%.

Places: 

Liberation Day

Hopefully you’ve heard that global warming/climate change has been exposed as a colossal fraud. They made it up.

Cobb wins my award for Best Metaphor Describing the End of Globalistical Warmening:

The swastika has been blown off the Reichstag.

Enjoy your Thanksgiving. Drive the biggest, safest vehicle you can afford, and turn up the thermostat. Gaia doesn’t mind.

Topic: 
Places: 

Free-Market Regulation

Before the government became our collective nanny, insurance companies were primary defenders of our health and safety.

A house built to low standards, for example, would either be uninsurable or face premium surcharges. One might still build the shoddy house, but in case of fire, the loss would fall totally on the owner. And that owner would have to finance construction out-of-pocket, as no lender would make a loan against an uninsurable building.

Places: 

Pages

Subscribe to RSS - Politics