Some Liberals Free Thinkers are all excited over this video.

While it does seem bad a first that Sarah has supporters that don’t have specific reasons to support her, it does need to be put into perspective. Some were able to come up with specific reasons they like her. She isn’t running for anything right now.  It’s a book signing not a voting booth. And lets not forget these….

hope everyone tooting the giant stimulus plan and health care reform horns will take a moment to consider some reality. Things aren’t good.

Jobs are being created and saved in places that don’t even exist . Does anyone even now where all the money is going and what it’s effects are?Recovery.org makes me think not.

"Some recipients clearly don’t know what congressional district they live in, so they appear to be just throwing in any number. We expected all along that recipients would make mistakes on their congressional districts, on jobs numbers, on award amounts, and so on. Human beings make mistakes," Pound said.

Why are we relying on recipients to tell us things like this? Shouldn’t the government know how much money went where and the results? I expect better from an organization working with an $18 million grant.

I think this boils down to the fact that jobs saves and created numbers aren’t exactly accurate.

Add to that the unemployment rate (17.5% when you include people who are partially employed or have given up). If so many jobs are being saved and created then why is unemployment continuing to rise? Yeah, I know this kind of thing takes time, but how many people still believe spending your way out of debt is the way to go? Looks like even Obama might be having second thoughts.

"It is important though to recognize if we keep on adding to the debt, even in the midst of this recovery, that at some point, people could lose confidence in the U.S. economy in a way that could actually lead to a double-dip recession," he said.

Isn’t it cute how he uses phrases like "if we keep on adding to the debt", "people could lose confidence int the US economy" — like we haven’t already added too much and people haven’t already lost confidence. Sheesh! Better late than never? Sometimes late is too late.

But hey, lets just go ahead and add more debt with all these lovely health care reform ideas. After all medicare and medicaid really cut costs .

I’m convinced the Republican Party has shot itself in the foot so many times they don’t even feel it anymore. Embarrassing:

The Republican National Committee will no longer offer employees an insurance plan that covers abortion after POLITICO reported Thursday that the anti-abortion RNC’s policy has covered the procedure since 1991.

“Money from our loyal donors should not be used for this purpose,” Chairman Michael Steele said in a statement. “I don’t know why this policy existed in the past, but it will not exist under my administration. Consider this issue settled.”

Steele has told the committee’s director of administration to opt out of coverage for elective abortion in the policy it uses from Cigna.

I doubt the current RNC leadership knew about it, but you’d think someone would’ve paid attention at the time to that sort of thing. Indeed, CIGNA says clients are given the option of opting out…which the RNC in 1991 did not do. It is nice to hear Steele put his foot down, but I understand several people were needed to help him remove it from his mouth first.

Of course this idiocy simply distracts from the more important abortion drama unfolding on Capitol Hill, which I’m sure was a consideration in breaking this story. Make no mistake, the Democrats have their share of problems.

…what, then, is the remedy? I personally do not view it as such; slavery really was almost a secondary issue when the Civil War started, as it became much more about state sovereignty. It is not as if what was left of the United States at the time embraced African-Americans, either; the more industrial North moved away from slavery simply as their economy became less dependent on agriculture. Institutionalized racism was still rampant; Lincoln didn’t even sign the first part of the Emancipation Proclamation until 1862, and even then it was limited (i.e. it did not apply to slaves in the border states). Also, the Colonial flag represents an early America that had mistreated Native Americans, saw no problem with slavery, and viewed women as not even worthy of the right to vote. Is that a hate symbol, too?

Regardless, for the sake of argument let us agree that displays of the Confederate flag are indeed a form of hate speech. What ought to be done about it, then? I’m not referring to how that school should proceed; from what I understand schools have long had the ability to restrict a student’s freedom of speech and expression via a dress code and so forth. I’m wondering what people want on a larger scale. Do you want laws on the books that criminalize offensive or discriminatory speech and/or expression? If so, how do you determine what qualifies and where do you draw the line? If you’re fine with codifying political correctness, OK…but trying to be politically correct can have serious consequences.

I have no use for the Confederate flag myself and no desire to offend anyone. But, I am very wary of restricting speech and expression.

Jimmy Carter just emailed to remind everyone to keep your sweaters handy:

People were gloomier about the direction of the country than in October. They disapproved of Obama’s handling of the economy a bit more than before. And, perhaps most striking for the commander in chief, more people have lost confidence in Obama on Iraq and Afghanistan over the last month. Overall, there’s a malaise about the state of the nation.

Cheer up, gloomy guses (sic?). There are plenty of reasons to turn those frowns upside down. I can’t think of any, but I’m sure the fine folks in DC are hard at work on your behalf to ensure there are brighter days ahead.

Via the WSJ, a liberal advocate for health care reform unmasks the truth behind the effort:

What is really unfolding, I suspect, is the scenario that many conservatives feared. The Obama Administration, like the Bush Administration before it (and many other Administrations before that) is creating a new entitlement program, which, once established, will be virtually impossible to rescind. At some point in the future, the fiscal consequences of the reform will have to be dealt with in a more meaningful way, but by then the principle of (near) universal coverage will be well established…

Both in terms of the political calculus of the Democratic Party, and in terms of making the United States a more equitable society, expanding health-care coverage now and worrying later about its long-term consequences is an eminently defensible strategy. Putting on my amateur historian’s cap, I might even claim that some subterfuge is historically necessary to get great reforms enacted.

I encourage you to take the time to read his entire piece, because it is quite rare for a proponent of ObamaCare to be so honest regarding the true aim of the legislation. It isn’t about fixing the “crisis” or helping the uninsured. The real goal here is to ’spread the wealth’, make people more reliant on the federal government and, by extension, the Democrat Party. And, if they’ve got to lie about it along the way so be it, fiscal consequences and otherwise be damned. (Or, just what I said yesterday in a comment on this very topic.)

I’m sure many who support feel-good “reforms” such as this have the best of intentions and truly want to see a better system. But, let’s not pretend that is really what the Democrat Party leadership is after.

You know, he’s right…that’s always a bad idea. So who are the extremists the President of the United States is referring to? Quiz time! Are they:

a) Apparent Muslim fanatics like Fort Hood shooter Major Nidal Malik Hasan, who before murdering 13 of his fellow brothers-in-arms apparently tried to contact Al-Qaeda and, years earlier, attended the same radical mosque as a couple of the 9/11 hijackers;

b) Iranian leaders, who continue to ignore the peace prize winner’s overtures just months after violent crackdowns on their own citizens;

c) Tea Party attendees, guilty of the ghastly sin of protesting the One’s reckless spending and health care proposals

Answer- C:

According to Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, who supports the health care bill, the president asked, “Does anybody think that the teabag, anti-government people are going to support them if they bring down health care? All it will do is confuse and dispirit” Democratic voters “and it will encourage the extremists.”

I’m sure they all got a good laugh out of the ‘tea bag’ reference, too. We’ve always known Obama looked down his nose at large segments of the population, those who “bitterly” cling to religion and guns, but now we see how he feels about those exercising their right to criticize his administration’s actions and policies. Nothing presidential about that in the slightest. If only he displayed as much fervor when referring to America’s enemies as he does when assailing his domestic critics, huh?

Oh, speaking of fanatics, House Democrat abortion zealots promise to strip restrictions on covering abortions from a final health care bill, stabbing their fellow pro-Life Democrat colleagues in the back and proving once more that snuffing out the unborn remains a key priority in today’s Democrat Party.

The vote was a razor-thin 220-215 (218 was the minimum needed); 39 very bright Democrats voted no, while one lone Republican voted Yea (Joseph Cao-LA, who has virtually no chance of holding onto his seat next fall anyway in his strongly Democrat district). Of course, his vote will mean the Left and the media-but I repeat myself-will herald it as some incredible bipartisan achievement. This really is anything but. The large Democrat majority barely mustered enough votes for passage, and their confidence in this stinker is so high that they hold the vote late on a Saturday night. Not exactly the height of the news cycle, you know? The Senate will be much tougher, but as a cynic I expect this boondoggle to be passed and signed by the giver of light and rainbows sometime in the next couple of months.

I’m sure many on the Left joined the Democrat lawmakers in cheering last night, but for those of us who are skeptical of $2.6 trillion “reform” establishing new taxes and mandates, all the while ensuring higher premiums and probably lower quality of care without a reduction in healthcare costs, consider the poor chocolate bunny in the montage here as representative of all that you appreciated about our current system, and what the Democrats will do to it:

Chocolate Bunny Kill

Tiffany | MySpace Video
Read the rest of this entry »

Rising a mere .4% from last month as the economy shed more jobs than expected:

Counting those who have settled for part-time jobs or stopped looking for work, the unemployment rate would be 17.5 percent, the highest on records dating from 1994 .

The jobless rate rose from 9.8 percent in September…One sign of how hard it still is to find a job: the number of Americans who have been out of work for six months or longer rose to 5.6 million, a record. They comprise 35.6 percent of the unemployed population, matching a record set last month.

The stimulus doesn’t appear to be, er, stimulating as the White House predicted, huh? They’ll continue the “created or saved” shell game, which basically amounts to saying hey, look at this shiny object over here, but their credibility is increasingly shaky.

If you thought red-state Democrats were worried before, well…