Monthly Archives: December 2009
Real or Fake?
Is this headline real, or fake?
Government issues rubber band recall. Cites child safety hazard…
When you are ready to find out, head over to Hack Wilson, a new blog just added to our blogroll, for the answer
Al Gore is an intellectual coward
Gore can talk, lie through his teeth about climte change, but when he is challenged? Well, it is cut and run time
The Messiah of anthropogenic global warming, Al Gore, appears above questioning. A journalist, Phelim McAleer, tried to ask the Goracle if he would correct his blatantly false statements claiming all the Climategate emails are at least ten years old. Not only did Gore refuse to answer, but UN Security pulled his microphone cord after he asked Al Gore that “Inconvenient Question.”
What is wrong Al? Why can’t you answer honest questions about this “settled” science?
Bluegrass Pundit also has Leftist hypocrisy
Teen Runs Up Dad’s Cell Bill To Nearly $22,000 – AP
A 13-year-old teen was probably in hot water with his father after running up a cell phone bill of nearly $22,000.
Ted Estarija said he was expecting his bill to be higher this month after adding his son to his plan, but wasn’t expecting a bill of $21,917 in data usage charges. The Hayward man said his Verizon Wireless bill soared after his son apparently downloaded about 1.4 million kilobytes of data last month.
His plan didn’t cover data usage, so he was charged by the megabyte.
Estarija said after the first media reports, Verizon said they would credit his account for the entire amount.
He has also suspended his son’s account.
A spokeswoman for Verizon said the company investigates cases with exceptionally large bills.
Rasmussen: Rubio And Crist Now Tied In Florida
2010 Florida GOP Senate Primary: Crist 43%, Rubio 43%
Governor Charlie Crist and former state House Speaker Marco Rubio are now tied in the 2010 race for the Republican Senate nomination in Florida.
A new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of likely GOP Primary voters finds Crist and Rubio each with 43% of the vote. Five percent (5%) prefer another candidate, and nine percent (9%) are undecided.
Crist’s support has fallen from 53% in August to 49% in October. Rasmussen Reports noted at the time, “The fact that Crist has fallen below 50% in a primary against a lesser known opponent suggests potential vulnerability.”
Rubio’s name recognition has grown in recent months and he is now viewed Very Favorably by 34% of Likely Primary Voters. That’s up from 18% in August. As his name recognition increased, Rubio’s support in the polls has jumped from 31% in August to 43% today.
Leftist Senator Chooses To Withdraw Healthcare Amendment Rather Than Have It Read Aloud
Sanders Withdraws Single-Payer Amendment – The Hill
Sen. Bernie Sanders (Communist-Vt.) on Wednesday withdrew his single-payer healthcare amendment after Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) initiated a procedural maneuver to shipwreck the measure.
Coburn earlier in the day forced the Senate clerk to read aloud on Sanders’ 767-page amendment to the Senate healthcare bill in an effort to halt the healthcare debate.
Sanders, a self-described “democratic socialist,” spoke on the Senate floor to announce the withdrawal of the measure.
“The day will come, although I recognize it’s not today, when the U.S. Congress will have to vote to stand up to… all those who profit every single year off of human sickness,” Sanders said. “That day will come.”
The amendment would have extended Medicare coverage to all who wanted it. The program currently serves people from the ages of 65 and up.
Senate aides estimated that the bill reading would have taken eight to 10 hours, which would have sidelined the healthcare debate as Democratic leaders are attempting to pass the overhaul by Christmas.
*VIDEO* Copenhagen Climate Summit Chaos: Conference President Resigns As Violent Protests Continue
Notice how CNN anchor Tony Harris tries to downplay the chaos in this video, saying “I don’t want to suggest that things seem to be falling into disarray here, so I’ll ask a different question…“
Later he repeats this asinine remark after just being told by his own on-sight reporter that the talks have “ground to a halt.” This doesn’t seem to phase Harris, however, nor does the fact that, as he is speaking, the right side of the split-screen shows protesters being beaten by riot police.
Robbed West Newton Bank Receives Stolen Money By Mail – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Veteran agents at the FBI office in Pittsburgh say they’ve never seen a case like this: a robbed bank receiving its money back in the mail.
“Several of us were talking about it and between us we had about 110 years of experience, and we couldn’t recall a similar case,” said Jeff Killeen, chief counsel for the office and a former street agent in Minneapolis.
Five days after a man in a Steelers shirt robbed the PNC branch in West Newton, Westmoreland County, on Dec. 9, a manila envelope arrived at the bank on Monday. Inside were stacks of bills, each encased in bubble wrap, probably from the robber who stole it, the FBI said.
The bank turned it over to agents.
About 20 percent of the money is still missing.
Agent Killeen said the suspect mailed it from a post office in Pittsburgh. The address of the bank was handwritten, and postage was paid with five neatly arranged Liberty Bell Forever stamps.
Agents are examining the package for fingerprints.
Bank surveillance images show the suspect to be about six feet or taller, white, thin and in his 30s, with dark hair and a mustache that extends below his lips. He wore a yellow and gray jacket over a yellow Steelers shirt.
Agent Killeen said the man made no attempt to hide his face. He did not show a weapon. As is typical of most bank robberies, he stole a few thousand dollars, although the FBI does not reveal exact amounts.
The fact that part of the money was returned presents an unusual legal scenario should the FBI catch the suspect. The robber will be prosecuted as any bank robber would be.
“A federal crime was still committed,” said Agent Killeen.
But a judge would likely take into consideration the return as a mitigating factor in determining a sentence. It’s also possible that someone else close to the suspect with knowledge of the robbery returned the money.
Anyone with information is asked to call the FBI at 412-432-4000.
Your Daley Gator Liberal Elitist Dirtbag Of The Week
Schumer Calls Flight Attendant Who Told Him To Turn Off Cell Phone ‘Bitch’ – New York Post
Sen. Chuck Schumer had harsh words for a flight attendant who told him to turn off his phone for takeoff.
“Bitch!” the senior senator was overheard Sunday saying to his hand-picked seat-mate Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand after arguing with a flight attendant that he should not have to obey Federal Aviation Administration rules.
Schumer’s office later admitted to Politico.com that he said it — but the poll-challenged Gillibrand, who has been strongly backed by Schumer against potential rivals, declined to confirm it and even called his behavior “polite.”
The altercation, reported by Politico’s Anne Schroeder Mullins, occurred Sunday on the US Airways shuttle from NY to Washington.
Schumer and Gillibrand were chatting on their phones when the captain told people to shut them off, as required under FAA rules.
The two senators ignored the captain and kept talking, which prompted a flight attendant to ask them to comply, according to a House Republican aide sitting nearby.
Schumer asked if he could finish his conversation and the flight attendant “no,” that the entire plane was waiting for him to wrap up his conversation.
Schumer ended his call but launched into an argument with the flight attendant saying that he was entitled to continue talking until the cabin door was closed. The flight attendant pointed out that he is supposed to turn his phone off when told.
“He argued with her about the rule,” Politico quotes the aide as saying. “She said she doesn’t make the rules, she just follows them.”
When the flight attendant walked away, Schumer turned to his junior senator and called the flight attendant a “bitch.”
Schumer office didn’t respond to requests for comment from The Post.
His aide, Brian Fallon, told Politico, “The senator made an off-the-cuff comment under his breath that he shouldn’t have made, and he regrets it.”
Gillibrand’s office defended Schumer’s use of the word, saying the senior senator was “polite” and that he “turned off his phone when asked to.”
Moments later after the flight attendant ordered Schumer’s phone off, it rang again.
Unfazed that he had been caught once again disobeying FAA rules, the entitled senator looked at the caller ID and said: “It’s Harry Reid calling. I guess health care will have to wait until we land.”
And They Didn’t Even Kiss You First
U.S. Gave Up Billions In Tax Money In Deal For Citigroup’s Bailout Repayment – Washington Post
The federal government quietly agreed to forgo billions of dollars in potential tax payments from Citigroup as part of the deal announced this week to wean the company from the massive taxpayer bailout that helped it survive the financial crisis.
The Internal Revenue Service on Friday issued an exception to long-standing tax rules for the benefit of Citigroup and a few other companies partially owned by the government. As a result, Citigroup will be allowed to retain billions of dollars worth of tax breaks that otherwise would decline in value when the government sells its stake to private investors.
While the Obama administration has said taxpayers are likely to profit from the sale of the Citigroup shares, accounting experts said the lost tax revenue could easily outstrip those profits.
The IRS, an arm of the Treasury Department, has changed a number of rules during the financial crisis to reduce the tax burden on financial firms. The rule changed Friday also was altered last fall by the Bush administration to encourage mergers, letting Wells Fargo cut billions of dollars from its tax bill by buying the ailing Wachovia.
“The government is consciously forfeiting future tax revenues. It’s another form of assistance, maybe not as obvious as direct assistance but certainly another form,” said Robert Willens, an expert on tax accounting who runs a firm of the same name. “I’ve been doing taxes for almost 40 years, and I’ve never seen anything like this, where the IRS and Treasury acted unilaterally on so many fronts.”
*VIDEOS* “Kill The Bill” Code Red Healthcare Rally – December 15, 2009
Laura Ingraham
Laura Ingraham (continued)
Michelle Bachman
Dick Armey
Gulf Petro-Powers To Launch Currency In Latest Threat To Dollar Hegemony – Telegraph UK
“The Gulf monetary union pact has come into effect,” said Kuwait’s finance minister, Mustafa al-Shamali, speaking at a Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) summit in Kuwait.
The move will give the hyper-rich club of oil exporters a petro-currency of their own, greatly increasing their influence in the global exchange and capital markets and potentially displacing the US dollar as the pricing currency for oil contracts. Between them they amount to regional superpower with a GDP of $1.2 trillion (£739bn), some 40pc of the world’s proven oil reserves, and financial clout equal to that of China.
Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar are to launch the first phase next year, creating a Gulf Monetary Council that will evolve quickly into a full-fledged central bank.
The Emirates are staying out for now – irked that the bank will be located in Riyadh at the insistence of Saudi King Abdullah rather than in Abu Dhabi. They are expected join later, along with Oman.
The Gulf states remain divided over the wisdom of anchoring their economies to the US dollar. The Gulf currency – dubbed “Gulfo” – is likely to track a global exchange basket and may ultimately float as a regional reserve currency in its own right. “The US dollar has failed. We need to delink,” said Nahed Taher, chief executive of Bahrain’s Gulf One Investment Bank.
The project is inspired by Europe’s monetary union, seen as a huge success in the Arab world. But there are concerns that the region is trying to run before it can walk.
Europe took 40 years to reach the point where it felt ready to launch a currency. It began with the creation of the Iron & Steel Community in the 1950s, moving by steps towards a single market enforced by powerful Commission and European Court. The EMU timetable was fixed at the Masstricht in 1991 but it took another 11 for euro notes and coins to reach the streets.
White House Threatens To Shut Down US Strategic Command Headquarters If Senator Nelson Doesn’t Vote Yes On Healthcare Bill
Source: Dems Threaten Nelson In Pursuit Of 60 – Weekly Standard
While the Democrats (Communists) appease Senator Lieberman, they still have to worry about other recalcitrant Democrats (Communists) including Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson. Though Lieberman has been out front in the fight against the public option and the Medicare buy-in, Nelson was critical of both. Now that those provisions appear to have been stripped from the bill, Lieberman may get on board, but Nelson’s demand that taxpayer money not be used to fund abortion has still not been met. According to a Senate aide, the White House is now threatening to put Nebraska’s Offutt Air Force Base on the BRAC list if Nelson doesn’t fall into line.
Offutt Air Force Base employs some 10,000 military and federal employees in Southeastern Nebraska. As our source put it, this is a “naked effort by Rahm Emanuel and the White House to extort Nelson’s vote.” They are “threatening to close a base vital to national security for what?” asked the Senate staffer.
Indeed, Offutt is the headquarters for US Strategic Command, the successor to Strategic Air Command, and not by accident. STRATCOM was located in the middle of the country for strategic reasons. Its closure would be a massive blow to the economy of the state of Nebraska, but it would also be another example of this administration playing politics with our national security.
Today’s best blog headline goes to
Lance “My Legs are Crazier than Chris Matthews Legs” Burri for this gem
What a freaking douchebag
Today’s Daley Douchebag is this whiny little girly man! Seriously dude, grow a set at some point in your life!
Your quote of the Day
Comes to us from Robert Stacy McCain
Tuesday’s column was the most idiotic of David Brooks’ week, but the week’s not over yet.
Much more fun to be had at the link.
Marxist Moron of the Day UPDATED!
What in the Hell is wrong with our public schools? Well, they are so damned hypersensitive, so deathly afraid of lawsuits, so consumed with PC, and so freaking dumbed down, they keep pulling moronic stunts like this!
In the eyes of the public school administrators in Taunton, MA this drawing of Jesus on the Cross is an incitement to violence. The 8 year old student who drew it was suspended and required to undergo a psychological evaluation before being allowed back in the classroom. (h/t Memeorandum)
A Taunton father is outraged after his 8-year-old son was sent home from school and required to undergo a psychological evaluation after drawing a stick-figure picture of Jesus Christ on the cross.
The father said he got a call earlier this month from Maxham Elementary School informing him that his son, a second-grade student, had created a violent drawing. The image in question depicted a crucified Jesus with Xs covering his eyes to signify that he had died on the cross. The boy wrote his name above the cross.
The student drew the picture shortly after taking a family trip to see the Christmas display at the National Shrine of Our Lady of La Salette, a Christian retreat site in Attleboro. He made the drawing in class after his teacher asked the children to sketch something that reminded them of Christmas, the father said.
Superintendent Julie Hackett said district policy prevents her from discussing a “confidential matter regarding a student.”
“Generally speaking, we have safety protocols in place,” Hackett said. “If a situation warrants it, we ask for outside safety evaluations if we have particular concerns about a child’s safety. We followed all the protocols in our system.”
This pisses me off worse than possibly any other crap the Left has somehow managed to hamstring our society with. How stupid, how incredibly, unbelievably, head up your ass stupid do you have to be to think this is “violent” behavior worthy of any action?
The idiots making such decisions should be required, by law, to come nowhere near any child! Yes, I am completely serious about that. They are nothing more than a child abuser. They are not fit to educate anyone or anything! They should not be allowed to brush their teeth without adult supervision.
This is just another casualty caused by the “dumb everyone down” attitude that is so prevelant in our society. This inane attempt to make everything so ultra-simple, so thinking-free, is destroying our society. No one thinks anymore! No one uses common sense! We become more freaking robotic every day! We have become so obsessed with NEVER EVER doing or saying the wrong thing, that we end up NEVER doing the right things! And it is exacting a hell of a cost on all of us.
Fox News reports that the school denies ever suspending the boy.
Now, let’s say the school, this school anyway, did not do anything like the father accused them of doing. If that is the case then the father should be ashamed of himself. And, if the school is not at fault, then I certainly apologize for accusing them of abusing this child.
However, we all know of the dozens of stories of schools suspending, expelling, or disciplining children for things like-
Playing Cops and Robbers, drawing pictures of soldiers with guns, talking about hunting, pointing chicken tenders at each other and saying “bang”, and many other completely innocent acts. In other words kids being punished for being kids.
For those schools, every word I wrote stands!
Climate Change Is Natural: 100 Reasons Why – Daily Express
Here are the 100 reasons, released in a dossier issued by the European Foundation, why climate change is natural and not man-made:
1.) There is “no real scientific proof” that the current warming is caused by the rise of greenhouse gases from man’s activity.
2.) Man-made carbon dioxide emissions throughout human history constitute less than 0.00022 percent of the total naturally emitted from the mantle of the earth during geological history.
3.) Warmer periods of the Earth’s history came around 800 years before rises in CO2 levels.
4.) After World War II, there was a huge surge in recorded CO2 emissions but global temperatures fell for four decades after 1940.
5.) Throughout the Earth’s history, temperatures have often been warmer than now and CO2 levels have often been higher – more than ten times as high.
6.) Significant changes in climate have continually occurred throughout geologic time.
7.) The 0.7C increase in the average global temperature over the last hundred years is entirely consistent with well-established, long-term, natural climate trends.
8.) The IPCC theory is driven by just 60 scientists and favourable reviewers not the 4,000 usually cited.
9.) Leaked e-mails from British climate scientists – in a scandal known as “Climate-gate” – suggest that that has been manipulated to exaggerate global warming.
10.) A large body of scientific research suggests that the sun is responsible for the greater share of climate change during the past hundred years.
11.) Politicians and activiists claim rising sea levels are a direct cause of global warming but sea levels rates have been increasing steadily since the last ice age 10,000 ago.
12.) Philip Stott, Emeritus Professor of Biogeography at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London says climate change is too complicated to be caused by just one factor, whether CO2 or clouds.
13.) Peter Lilley MP said last month that “fewer people in Britain than in any other country believe in the importance of global warming. That is despite the fact that our Government and our political class—predominantly—are more committed to it than their counterparts in any other country in the world”.
14.) In pursuit of the global warming rhetoric, wind farms will do very little to nothing to reduce CO2 emissions.
15.) Professor Plimer, Professor of Geology and Earth Sciences at the University of Adelaide, stated that the idea of taking a single trace gas in the atmosphere, accusing it and finding it guilty of total responsibility for climate change, is an “absurdity.”
16.) A Harvard University astrophysicist and geophysicist, Willie Soon, said he is “embarrassed and puzzled” by the shallow science in papers that support the proposition that the earth faces a climate crisis caused by global warming.
17.) The science of what determines the earth’s temperature is in fact far from settled or understood.
18.) Despite activist concerns over CO2 levels, CO2 is a minor greenhouse gas, unlike water vapour which is tied to climate concerns, and which we can’t even pretend to control.
19.) A petition by scientists trying to tell the world that the political and media portrayal of global warming is false was put forward in the Heidelberg Appeal in 1992. Today, more than 4,000 signatories, including 72 Nobel Prize winners, from 106 countries have signed it.
20.) It is claimed the average global temperature increased at a dangerously fast rate in the 20th century but the recent rate of average global temperature rise has been between 1 and 2 degrees C per century – within natural rates.
Gatordoug
darcprynce
Dave C
