A familiar McCain back on old stomping ground
The Hill
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), fresh off his disappointing bid for the White House, returned to a familiar role in the Senate on Wednesday, shaking up his own party and reaching across the aisle to Democrats.
In a span of hours, McCain told Republicans in a closed-door meeting they needed to tone down the party’s anti-immigration rhetoric, then appeared at a news conference with his old friend Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) to lead a bipartisan call to crack down on earmarks.
McCain also unveiled a new political action committee, Country First, a grassroots organization that borrows from his campaign slogan and promises to “strengthen our party [and] better define our Republican ideals and message,” according to a letter he sent to supporters. The group’s website went online Wednesday. It was a symbolic day for the senator who is often called a “maverick,” as McCain signaled that the direction he intends to take after suffering a major blow on the national stage is straight out of his old playbook.
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McCain is a loser and a punk. I agree he should’ve been sent packing out of the GOP long ago, long before the MSM appointed him to be Hussein’s opponent so Hussein would be assured of victory. He’s not any more Republican than Pelousy, Kennedy, Reid, Hussein. After his debacle in 2008, why would ANY Republican even listen to a single word he as to say about anything? Kick him out so he go all the way over to the other side and join his buddies in the Dimocrap Party and good riddance.
GOP lays down marker on Holder
By LARRY MARGASAK
Associated Press
January 8, 2009
WASHINGTON (AP) — Eric Holder Jr., President-elect Barack Obama’s pick for attorney general, brings to his confirmation hearing next week a dream resume and a bull’s-eye target with his picture in the middle.
Holder will get a Republican grilling before the Senate Judiciary Committee Jan. 15. Critics challenge his role in Clinton administration pardons while the No. 2 Justice Department official, as well as his failure to recommend an independent investigation of fundraising by then-Vice President Al Gore.
To conservative Republicans, there’s an even bigger reason to challenge Holder: He’s the liberal face of nominees to come as Obama remakes the federal judiciary, and possibly the Supreme Court.
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We’ll see how effective they are at exposing Hussein’s choices for what they are. At this point in time, I am not very optimistic with what we have in the Senate. Too many RINO’s and moderates, not enough backbone or true conservatives.
Cheney says Obama should keep terror policies
By AP STAFF
Associated Press
January 8, 2009
WASHINGTON (AP) — Vice President Dick Cheney said Wednesday it would be a mistake for President-elect Barack Obama to scrap the Bush administration’s terrorist-fighting policies designed to prevent future attacks on the U.S.
“It would be a tragedy if they threw over those policies simply because they had campaigned against them,” Cheney said in an interview with CBS Radio’s Mark Knoller. “I think they need to proceed very cautiously before they begin to change the policies that are in place. They need to know what they’re doing.”
Obama has criticized practices that he says amount to torturing detainees during interrogations and has promised to close the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
This is the old adage ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ Regardless of what anyone can say about Bush, everyone would have to admit he, and his policies, kept us safe from terror for the last 8 years, and it wasn’t easy with the mad dog liberal Dimocraps he had to deal with.
But I have the feeling, Hussein will dismantle everything Bush did, whether it works or not, just because Bush did it.
Paulson says changes needed at Fannie, Freddie
By MARTIN CRUTSINGER
Associated Press
January 8, 2009
WASHINGTON (AP) — Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson on Wednesday said the best option for the future of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could be for the mortgage giants to be run like public utilities.
In what could be his last speech as Treasury secretary, Paulson said that allowing the two companies to return to their previous operating approach was not an option.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were taken over by the government in September and placed in a conservatorship after mounting mortgage losses put them in operating distress that was a prelude to the broader financial crisis that hit Wall Street last year.
Under Paulson’s proposal, Congress would replace Fannie and Freddie with one or two private sector entities that would purchase and securitize mortgages with a credit guarantee backed by the federal government. The new companies would be privately owned but governed by a rate-setting commission that would establish a targeted rate of return, he said.
In my opinion, these quasi-governmental bureaucracies never should have been incorporated in the first place. If it was up to me, I would permanently put them out of business before they cause any more damage to the economy or the federal deficit.
Can anybody say ‘Socialism?’
Reagan: Stimulating Bankruptcy And Chaos
By Michael Reagan
January 8, 2008
Like millions of my fellow Americans I want Barack Obama to succeed in governing America and reviving the economy, despite my opposition to his candidacy.
I had hoped that being the cautious man he appears to be, President-elect Obama would avoid taking extreme positions and policies vis-à-vis the economy and settle for the tried-and-true approaches to economic stability.
It appears that I was wrong. In an era when it is essential for out-of-control government spending to be halted and drastically cut back, Barack Obama wants to spend at least $800 billion on a so-called stimulus package which many predict will soar past a trillion dollars.
You have to wonder if Team Obama has any idea of what they’re doing.
The obvious answer to that would be an unequivocal NO!
Hussein has no knowledge of even the basic tenets of economics or security and intelligence. In short, he is unfit to the President of the United States in any way, shape, or form. Yet we are stuck with him and his idiotic appointments and policies for at least the next four years.
To add insult to injury, we also have Pelousy and Reid in charge of Congress.
This is the coming of a long, dark night.
Will the country survive? That question is up for grabs.
Adamo: The Global Warming Crescendo Has Passed
By Christopher G. Adamo
January 8, 2009
As the cold of winter settles in on the northern hemisphere, all of the hysteria of “global warming,” or its less specific alternative “climate change,” rings increasingly hollow to the general public. Weather patterns of the past decade indicate that the planet has been in an undeniable cooling trend since prior to the new millennium. So the panicked prophesies of cataclysmic upturns in the earth’s average temperature simply do not carry the emotional impact that they once held.
Specifically, the “global warming” debate has now advanced out of its dire predictions phase. It is no longer sufficient for celebrated professional alarmists to get in front of news cameras and prognosticate as to how quickly the world will incinerate. Such discussions are entering the observable evidence stage, in which those melting icecaps had better start inundating Manhattan or else people will begin to suspect they were being hoodwinked. To date, the scientifically quantifiable data show nothing but the normal warming and cooling cycles, easily attributable to the fluctuations in solar activity that have been the fate of the planet since its creation.
Global Warming was and is the biggest scam ever perpetuated world wide. Its purveyors are nothing but opportunists and profiteers doing their best to gain power and money through scare tactics with the vocal and strenuous support of just about everybody else – the UN, the media, every liberal and radical on the planet, and so on.
At least I am somewhat heartened to hear that the momentum of the chicken-little, scare-tactics crowd is beginning to abate a little. Maybe there is hope for the future after all, if more people are able to peer through the darkness and perceive the light.
Fabrizio: Non Compos Mentis
By Lisa Fabrizio
January 8, 2008
Now that the new year is officially upon us, the time for reflection is over and it behooves us to look ahead. Normally, human nature bids us to do this with hope in our hearts, but to no one’s surprise, 2009 finds us in a position where international events make it nearly impossible to do so. To put it mildly, the world has gone mad.
In a sane world, one faced with a religious cult that has been responsible for countless incidents of brutality and monstrous assaults on innocent life all over the world, we might see that world unite to rid itself of those responsible for these atrocities. As in WWII or the Gulf War, the civilized nations would put aside their differences and come together in the name of decency to defend the decent.
Excellent article that accurately reflects my own feelings exactly. We truly do live in a world turned upside down, and world gone mad.
Somewhere, sometime in the last several decades the world went through an axis or polar change where good became evil, evil became good, madness became wisdom, wisdom became madness, right became wrong, wrong became right, what was unacceptable became embraced, and what was acceptable became condemned and hated.
I don’t understand it unless this madness affects a good portion of the entire human race, where murderous scum like Hamas can be portrayed as victims and heroes, while Israelis only trying to defend themselves from the murderous scum, as any nation would do, becomes the villains and murderers.
Even in our own country the criminals get more sympathy, support, and rights than the victims.
In a world gone made, what happens to the sane ones who are left?
Hostetter: Recession – What To Do?
By E. Ralph Hostetter
January 8, 2008
The recession is here. Some say it arrived in August of 2007. All admit that it is causing job losses by the tens of thousands weekly. Suggestions range from public works projects, particularly highway bridges, to other areas of the Nation’s infrastructure.
Few remember the days of the Great Depression, when Public Works Projects were created. One such project was the Works Progress Administration or WPA. Before long a caricature was invented for cartoons. It was a man leaning on a shovel and the new meaning of WPA became “We poke along.” The program lacked proper supervision. The one project that proved successful was the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC).
This proposal makes WAY too much sense to even be considered by Hussein and the Dimocraps in power.
U.S. plans ’surge’ if Mexican bloodshed crosses border
AP
The soaring level of violence in Mexico resulting from the drug wars there has led the United States to develop plans for a “surge” of civilian and perhaps even military law enforcement should the bloodshed spread across the border, Michael Chertoff, the secretary of Homeland Security, said Wednesday.
Chertoff said the criminal activity in Mexico, which has caused more than 5,300 deaths in the last year, had long troubled American authorities. But it reached a point last summer, he said, where he ordered specific plans to confront in this country the kind of shootouts and other mayhem that in Mexico have killed members of warring drug cartels, law enforcement officials and bystanders, often not far from the border.
“We completed a contingency plan for border violence, so if we did get a significant spillover, we have a surge — if I may use that word — capability to bring in not only our own assets but even to work with” the Defense Department, Chertoff said in a telephone interview.
Whatever plans the Bush administration had made will be thrown out with the garbage when Hussein moves into the White House and cleans house. Being the amnesty-promoting, open-borders, and illegal alien-loving nutjob that he is Hussein will only exacerbate the situation.
To anyone of even limited intelligence the only obvious answer would be to completely seal off the borders, halt all immigration legal and otherwise, and enforce the laws as they are. Then you would have very little problems compared to what we already have now. As some of us in the anti-immigration crowd have been preaching for years, attrition is the only answer.
But nobody listens, not even those with all the power in the GOP.
I doubt they will even listen when the border cities are running thick with blood and the cancer spreads northward to mid-America and beyond. I doubt they will listen when violence spilt from the border occurs on their own doorstep, so blinded are they by their asinine liberal views.
God help us, especially if we live on the Border.
LATimes Prints Hamas Terrorist’s Op Ed
NewsBusters
Amazingly, on January 6, the L. A. Times gave ample space to a Hamas terrorist to “explain” how the current Gaza action is all Israel’s fault. Mousa Abu Marzook the purported “deputy of the political bureau of Hamas,” the group called an “Islamic Resistance Movement,” shamefacedly claims that Israel’s actions shattered “any incentive by Palestinian leaders to enforce the moratorium on rocket fire.”
First of all, these Palestinian “leaders” have for the last seven years now expended little effort to stop the incessant rocket fire into Israel to which he so blithely refers. So I don’t know who this Marzook fellow is trying to kid? I suppose he’s trying to kid the L.A.Times and it seems they have fallen for it.
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I just had to laugh when I read this headline. I suppose they had to abide by the liberal doctrine of equal time (used at their own convenience for their own purposes to advance their own causes, of course) due to Netanyahu’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal of yesterday. The LA Times is just as much a comic book of liberal idiocy as the New York Times.
Anuzis, Dawson favored to head RNC
Washington Times
Incumbent Mike Duncan probably will get the most first-ballot votes for election as Republican National Committee chairman, but eventual victory likely will go to one of the other two RNC members running for the post in the election scheduled for Jan. 30.
Several members attending a first-ever special meeting of the national committee on Wednesday told The Washington Times that they expect either Michigan party Chairman Saul Anuzis or South Carolina party Chairman Katon Dawson to emerge as the party’s top national official.
“I think Duncan wins the first-ballot plurality, but not the next ballots,” said Maryland RNC member Joyce Lyons Tehres, who supports former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele, an accomplished public speaker, for national party chairman. She said she thought Mr. Steele continued to lead the field after the Wednesday meeting, but others saw a trend.
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I have been overwhelming convinced to support Ken Blackwell myself due to his very conservative endorsements, both fiscally and socially. I don’t know much about Saul Anuzis or Katon Dawson, how conservative are they or are they merely more moderate and RINO retreads of the dismal failures we have had the last several years?
Pelosi’s Hometown Wants $2 Billion in Federal Stimulus Funds
(CNSNews.com) – San Francisco, home to the congressional district of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), has requested nearly $2.2 billion in federal money as part of the U.S. Conference of Mayors’ Main Street Economic Recovery Plan. The plan outlines the requests of 641 individual cities and carries a total cost of $96.6 billion to U.S. taxpayers.
The funds, according to the report, would go toward public works and infrastructure projects that are supposed to be “shovel ready” – a term used to describe projects that are ready to begin but lack necessary funding.
So after the bailouts of billionaire, corrupt, crooked bankers and bloated, corrupt unions, now comes the bailout of morally bankrupt socialist-governed cities who could not live within their means due to their liberal and socialist policies. Next will come the bailout of the socialist and liberal states who could not balance their budgets while daubing in socialism.
Remember this is the outlaw city which proclaimed itself a safe haven for criminals in our country illegally and the criminal mayor who married gay couples in outright defiance of current state law at the time.
A long, long time ago, like back in the 70’s, I heard everything bad in America starts in California and everything bad in California starts in San Francisco, the city of perversion and evil. The Church of Satan is headquartered there and the entire world knows its reputation for being the gayest city in the universe. If it was up to me I would blow San Francisco off the map, and while I was at it, a good chunk of the state of California, too. I keep hoping for the Big One to finally come and send them all sliding into a watery grave in the Pacific Ocean. I of course, don’t really mean that because there are a lot of good people there among the evil, but it is fun to think about sometimes when I think of all the evil centered around SF.
Anybody want to bet money Fruit Town (to substitute a more PC word) will get exactly what they want since Pelousy is in charge here? I wouldn’t take that bet in a million years, of course they will get it.
Rove: President Bush Tried to Rein In Fan and Fred
By KARL ROVE
Mythmaking is in full swing as the Bush administration prepares to leave town. Among the more prominent is the assertion that the housing meltdown resulted from unbridled capitalism under a president opposed to all regulation.
Like most myths, this is entertaining but fictional. In reality, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were among the principal culprits of the housing crisis, and Mr. Bush wanted to rein them in before things got out of hand.
Rather than a failure of capitalism, the housing meltdown shows what’s likely to happen when government grants special privileges to favored private entities that facilitate bad actors and lousy practices.
Of course you would never, ever, ever read this truth as a news story only, in an op-ed. They MSM are too much in the backpocket of the liberal, socialist elite and the mythmaking Dimocrap Party. In fact there are probably very few papers who would even consider running this column, even though every word is true, and I would defy any Dimocrap or liberal to deny it.
The blame for the housing meltdown and collapse of the economy should undeniably be squarely laid on the shoulders of the Dimocraps such as Dodd, Frank, Schumer, etc., all of them crooks in their own right. But that is another truth you would never, ever, ever read as fact in an American newspaper. They are way too busy printing lies put out by the Dimocraps, liberals, and their own too creative writers and publishers.
How can people ever know the truth if all they ever hear is lies? Sadly, too many do not even want to know the truth as long as they are getting what they want for free or are too lazy to go looking for it.
Chicago Public Schools’ cappuccino bill: $67,000
Chicago Sun-Times
Chicago public school bureaucrats skirted competitive bidding rules to buy 30 cappuccino/espresso machines for $67,000, with most of the machines going unused because the schools they were ordered for had not asked for them, according to a report by the CPS Office of Inspector General.
That was just one example of questionable CPS actions detailed in the inspector general’s 2008 annual report. Others included high school staffers changing grades to pump up transcripts of student athletes and workers at a restricted-enrollment grade school falsifying addresses to get relatives admitted.
In the case of the cappuccino machines, central office administrators split the order among 21 vocational schools to avoid competitive bidding required for purchases over $10,000. As a result CPS paid about $12,000 too much, according to Inspector General James Sullivan. “We were able to find the same machines cheaper online,” he said.
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And all this and more was done under the leadership, control, and guidance of Hussein’s pick to be US Secretary of Education. Again his perfect record of picking exactly the wrong person for the wrong job continues. Way to go, Hussein.
U.S. debt is losing its appeal in China
HONG KONG: China has bought more than $1 trillion in American debt, but as the global downturn has intensified, Beijing is starting to keep more of its money at home – a shift that could pose some challenges to the U.S. government in the near future but eventually may even produce salutary effects on the world economy.
At first glance, the declining Chinese appetite for U.S. debt – apparent in a series of hints from Chinese policy makers over the past two weeks, with official statistics due for release in the next few days – comes at an inopportune time. On Tuesday, the U.S. president-elect, Barack Obama, said Americans should get used to the prospect of “trillion-dollar deficits for years to come” as he seeks to finance an $800 billion economic stimulus package.
Normally, China would be the most avid taker of the debt required to pay for those deficits, mainly short-term Treasury securities. In the past five years, China has spent as much as one-seventh of its entire economic output on the purchase of foreign debt – largely U.S. Treasury bonds and American mortgage-backed securities.
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Apparently the formerly Communist but still authoritarian Chinese are smarter than we are, at least when it comes to dollars.
Joe the Plumber to become war correspondent
By AP STAFF
Associated Press
January 8, 2009
TOLEDO, Ohio (AP) — Joe The Plumber is putting down his wrenches and picking up a reporter’s notebook.
The Ohio man who became a household name during the presidential campaign says he is heading to Israel as a war correspondent for the conservative Web site pjtv.com.
Samuel J. Wurzelbacher (WUR’-zuhl-bah-kur) says he’ll spend 10 days covering the fighting.
He tells WNWO-TV in Toledo that he wants to let Israel’s “‘Average Joes’ share their story.”
Good for him. I hope he stays safe.
When I read the headline my first thought was a reporter in the War between the Right and the Left or between Liberal and Conservative.
Military Medical Facilities, I Pray My Children Never Need Them
By Stephen A. Castleton
January 8, 2008
Life Insurance is something we all never wish to use, but one day our family is thankful we had it. The same can be said about Brooke Army Medical Center. I have two sons in the U.S. Army, both of whom were deployed, and pray every single night for their safety and that they never have need of the facilities at Brooke.
Over the last few years we have all seen photos and heard horror stories about the Veterans Administration and Military Medical facilities. We have heard about the mold, rodent droppings, outdated equipment and more. We have also heard many political figures blame the VA and our military leaders for their shortcomings. We are led to believe it is like this everywhere. Well, after visiting Brooke Army Medical Center, I came away with the fervent hope that neither of my sons will ever have to use their facilities.
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I am sad and outraged at the same time that these few obvious, glaring items of waste are just the tip of the iceberg, a very, very small taste, when it comes to federal government irresponsibility and mismanagement of money. Is nobody minding the store so that every cheat, crook, and swindler can get his fill of tax money? Granted most of that category include our Senators and Representatives as well as their cronies and those they are beholden to.
No wonder we have trillion dollar deficits that will only grow under the new regime. I am sure money will be cut from programs like Brooke which help those who defend our freedom and country and diverted to the welfare dogs, abortion merchants, and so on, favored by Hussein, the Dimocraps, and the liberal socialists in general.
