Shock and Aw, $%&#!
The 700 billion dollar rescue plan, proposed by Henry Paulson, endorsed by the Bush Administration, and written by Congress, has been voted down by the House of Representatives.
The Republicans blame the Democrats:
Several Republican aides said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., had torpedoed any spirit of bipartisanship that surrounded the bill with her scathing speech near the close of the debate that blamed Bush’s policies for the economic turmoil.
Without mentioning her by name, Rep. Adam Putnam, R-Fla., No. 3 Republican, said: “The partisan tone at the end of the debate today I think did impact the votes on our side.”
“We could have gotten there today had it not been for the partisan speech that the speaker gave on the floor of the House,” House Minority Leader John Boehner said. Pelosi’s words, the Ohio Republican said, “poisoned our conference, caused a number of members that we thought we could get, to go south.”
The Democrats blame the Republicans:
Rep. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., the whip, estimated that Pelosi’s speech changed the minds of a dozen Republicans who might otherwise have supported the plan.
Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., scoffed at the explanation.
“Well if that stopped people from voting, then shame on them,” he said. “If people’s feelings were hurt because of a speech and that led them to vote differently than what they thought the national interest (requires), then they really don’t belong here. They’re not tough enough.”
More than a repudiation of Democrats, Frank said, Republicans’ refusal to vote for the bailout was a rejection of their own president.
“The Republicans don’t trust the administration,” he said. “It’s a Republican revolt against George Bush and John McCain.”
…And we all fall down:
Source: Matt Drudge, www.drudgereport.com
Muslims Ban More Books Than The GOP Vice-Presidential Nominee
Remember the courageous British book publisher I mentioned two weeks ago, in this post? You know, the publisher who published a book that fictionalized the story of Mohammed and his child bride, Aisha, a book rejected by Random House? And then, this publisher went on record saying that they believed in intellectual diversity, even in the face of fear?
Well, three men set the publisher’s building on fire, possibly using a gas bomb slipped in through the mail slot. Although the article mentions no specifics, I am 100% confident in projecting exactly what religious sect the arsonists belonged to.
My inner bookworm is weeping.
It takes a sick, sad, cowardly person to commit this act. Make no mistake: Muslim extremists are just that- sick, sad, cowardly.
I haven’t heard of a single Christian burning atheist Richard Dawkins’ books. Not a single Jew protesting The Passion of the Christ. Not a single Hindu ripping pictures of Vishnu out of history books. Why, then, must anyone give a pass to the Muslims for this destructive, murderous, obscene behavior?
Tolerance is a two-way street. NO exceptions.
Obamatron Watch: Expect a Threatening Invasion of Your Personal Space
In light of liberal shenanigans at the RNC, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Take heart: The next time you meet an Obamatron, be careful: They’ve just been given marching orders to “argue” with you, and “get in [your] face.”
Exact words:
In Elko, Obama tried to anticipate his critics and called on the crowd of about 1,500 to sharpen their elbows, too.
“I need you to go out and talk to your friends and talk to your neighbors. I want you to talk to them whether they are independent or whether they are Republican. I want you to argue with them and get in their face,” he said.
(Tip: You can’t get in Obamatrons’ faces, because they’ll call you names. And some of them cry.)
Can I get an Amen for the “politics of hope and change”?
Anyone?
Democrat Drops Pants, Part 1
Have you noticed that in recent remarks, Barack Obama is starting to sound more like a Republican? He now cautiously supports oil exploration, refuses to take any option “off the table” in Russia or Iran, and has advertised a new plan that he claims will “cut the taxes of 95% of Americans”?
How very conservative of him!
This sea change boils down to the fact that liberals simply can’t win a major general election running like liberals. There are just too many Americans out there drawing paychecks, living honestly, and working hard to be enticed by a liberal economic plan (and don’t doubt for a moment that the economy single-handedly trumps social issues on a voter concern poll in national elections).
But every once in a while, a Democrat will reveal what’s under all that good ol’ Red-White-and-What-Color-Again? clothing. Count on loose cannon Joe Biden to expose his liberal undies, and, sure enough, while talking about higher taxes for wealthy Americans, he does:
Biden said: “It’s time to be patriotic … time to jump in, time to be part of the deal, time to help get America out of the rut.”
(Translation: Tax the rich! Paying higher taxes is your patriotic duty! Tax the rich! What’s my next talking point? I don’t have one? Er… tax the rich!)
I am so very tired of this.
To once and for all kill the twin liberal canards that the rich are (1) greedily hoarding their billions and purposefully starving people on the street, and (2) they are an endless well of untapped cash flow, consider these statistics, put out by our very own U.S. government:
In 2006, the top 5% of U.S. taxpayers, those with gross annual incomes of at least $153,500, paid about 60% of all income tax collected. In contrast, the 50% of taxpayers with incomes under $32,000, paid less than 3% of the total taxes collected. Taxpayers in the top 1%, those with incomes of $388,800 or more, paid almost 40% of all taxes collected.
The 40% of all federal taxes paid by the wealthiest 1% of Americans represents the highest percentage of all taxes they have paid since 1986, according to a July 21, 2008 report (.pdf) issued by the Joint Economic Committee (JEC).
So can we please, please, stop yammering about taxing something that doesn’t exist? Please?
This Just In: Congress Doesn’t Know What To Do
I haven’t blogged in a bit, I know. I’m pretty sure it’s because I’ve been staring openmouthed at the DJIA ticker for the past three days. I feel like I’ve been watching an EKG, or a game of Pong.
But good news! Congress has no idea what to do either!
One reason, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said yesterday, is that “no one knows what to do” at the moment.
“When you rush to judgment, you usually make mistakes,” said Sherwood Boehlert, a former Republican congressman from New York. “This is something you can’t go on forever without addressing, but Congress in a short span of time is best served by going home.”
On the bright side, it seems that Congress has had some time for navel-gazing and has finally stumbled upon the inescapable fact that they are indeed useless for handling civil matters in a bipartisan way.
This information is especially interesting in light of the recent report that McCain is far more bipartisan than Obama:
Whether looking at bills they have led on or bills they have signed onto, Mr. McCain has reached across the aisle far more frequently and with more members than Mr. Obama since the latter came to the Senate in 2005.
So Henry Paulson is doing something about it. At least somebody is.
I demand sensitivity training!
What if I found an IC Democrats poster and scribbled verbal obscenities and various other defacements over it? Cries of “You racist, fascist pig!” would be sent up all over the Ithaca College Campus, probably through those ever-so-unintelligible emergency warning loudspeakers. God, I might even incense another pointless Erase the Hate rally.
But if a liberal scrawls obscenities all over an IC Republicans poster, he’s just exercising his right to free speech, isn’t he?
In case you need a closer look:
I demand a long-overdue session (for faculty AND students) in “Political Sensitivity Training.”
In fact, since I’m so concerned for the Ithaca College budget, I’ll run the classes, which should be mandatory for the first week of the semester. In these classes I’ll feature topics such as:
Day 1: How to play nicely with your moderate and conservative friends
Topics: “Feminists Don’t Know What Fascism Is, So Shut Up About It”
“Grading papers based on academic and grammatical merit, not your own biased political ideology”
“The Iraq War Was Not For Oil, So Stop Letting Your Students Get Away With Saying It Was Without Supporting Their Arguments”
Day 2: How to Argue Like a Human Being and Not a Crap-Slinging Primate
Topics: “Debate Without Name-Calling”
“Facts: Get to Know Them”
But, for the record… Look, kids, I know not everyone out there LOVES McCain. (Count me among them.) But grow up and quit being an embarrassment to your college, your peers, yourself, and everyone else’s intellect. Your immaturity (and, frankly, lack of imagination) causes me to seriously question what purpose you serve in attending college. Go be a homeless graffiti artist who flips hamburgers for bus fare, you worthless waste of the First Amendment.
Do you remember what today is?
On a day when the biggest media storm is over whether or not Barack Obama called Sarah Palin a “pig,” when Joe Biden is musing that Hillary Clinton would have been a better pick than he, when bikini-clad photos of the VP nominee are circulating the Internet, when the top story on the AOL newsreel is how much Rosie O’Donnell hates Elizabeth Hasselbeck, I have to ask the question:
Do you remember what today is? I do.
I remember that today is the day when 3,000 citizens, most of them American, lost their lives to 19 terrorists from the Middle East. I remember it as an ice-crystal-blue day, a cloudless sky. I remember walking out onto the beach near my hometown on the Jersey Shore, and seeing billowing clouds of ash and steel and burnt human flesh drifting toward the sea. I remember the smell of that southwestern wind, hotly electric and full of sadness.
I remember the lives lost in the attacks the American government refused to avenge; the USS Cole, the 1993 WTC bombing, the bombing of various US embassies around the world. All of those people died in vain when a hole was carved in the Pentagon, when a fiery grave was dug in Pennsylvania, when the towers imploded and took down the heart of New York. I remember the worldwide howl of grief sent up in their absence.
It seems the media has forgotten.
But I remember. Do you?
Fresh from vacation, House Dems deign to allow drilling vote.
Probably suffering from a case of, as Redstate.com points out, “running scared”-itis, Democrats have graciously decided to re-enfranchise Americans and allow a vote on drilling.
“The move is a dramatic departure from Democrats’ pre-August recess strategy, in which they brought up each of their energy bills under suspension of the rules and, in doing so, avoided having any votes on Republican measures calling for offshore drilling. But by embracing this strategy, Democrats also failed to get the two-thirds majority necessary to pass the majority of their energy bills.”
Hoora- wait, aren’t Americans supposed to have a say in what their representatives do?
Over 2/3 of Americans support increased continental drilling, and the House Democrats are just getting around to it now?
These are rhetorical questions. The only answer they require is, “Of course I won’t vote for Democrats on November 4th.”
This Just In: The New Chevy Volt Is Ugly, House Democrats Decide To Allow Drilling Vote
Yesterday a “human error” “accidentally” leaked pictures of the new, environmentally-friendly, beloved-by-all-Democrats Chevy Volt, and it’s.. well, it’s not much like the original.
Guess which is which. (Hint: the ugly one is the one we get to buy!)
The guts are the same: the Volt, scheduled for production in 2010, will get 40 miles on a single battery charge (which, GM asserts, is more than or equal to the daily commute for 78% of working Americans), and will get up to 150 miles to the gallon. Did I mention it runs on anything from gasoline to garbage?
However, GM seems to have decided that electric cars don’t deserve the edgy, sexy, Camaro-esque styling of the concept Volt.
They’ve also decided that, well, anything is a step up from the massively ugly Toyota Prius (although Honda apparently doesn’t think so), so Chevy gave us a car that, from the front, looks like the love child of a 2008 Toyota Camry and a 2007 Chevy Malibu, a side profile vaguely reminiscent of the discontinued Chrysler Crossfire, and a rear that echoes the Mazda 3 coupe.
The entire concept of the Volt, and other electric chargeable cars, is utter hypocrisy. And it’s not GM’s fault. GM is making a much more economical, affordable, practically-no-gas-use car. The problem is: charging the Volt’s celerated battery takes 21st century transportation back to the 19th century. Ask yourself, what powers electric power?
Answer: 76% of electric power is derived from fossil fuels, including the worst environmental offender: coal (which accounts for about 58% of electric production by itself). The rest of it is natural gas and — you guessed it — oil!
Even the largest contributor of renewable energy is of a type environmentalists love to screech about: hydroelectricity, which provides something like 17% of all electricity. However, environmentalists love to talk about how dams ruin ecosystems. So much for that.
The Chevy Volt: one step forward for man, one giant leap backward for mankind.
That is, unless we go nuclear…
The Real Enemy of Feminism
So, if we could, as a group, quit picking on Sarah Palin for a moment, let’s take a look at one of the realest enemies of women everywhere: the disgusting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, and his effect to “re-Islamicize” Iranian women.
Amir Taheri of the New York Post sums it up this way:
Last month, Ahmadinejad presented a draft bill designed to “re-Islamicize” the status of women. He claimed that the shah had used laws inspired by “Zionist-Crusaders” to deal with women’s issues.
His new law would restore men’s Islamic right to divorce their wives without even informing them. Men would also be absolved from paying alimony.
In exchange, they’d be required to pay a mahrieh (a severance payment, whose amount is set in the marriage contract) to a wife they wish to divorce. But the draft law also plans a hefty government tax on the mahrieh. So a divorced woman left with no alimony and no resources except her mahrieh could end up losing most of that to the government. “This text is designed to return women to the dark ages,” says Sousan Tahmaspi, a spokesperson for the campaign against the law.
This outrage, which would leave women destitute and homeless in a country wheren no woman may be seen in public without an escort, isn’t the last of it. The bill also removes a woman’s right to “veto” her husband’s decision to marry more than one wife (besides her, of course).
Compounded with the already-abominable state of womens’ lives in Iran, Ahmadenijad’s quest to rout women from education and the public square is cowardly, base, and disgusting. There are many things in this world that trump religious diversity, and the quiet moral laissez-faire given to radical Muslims who treat others and their own women in deplorable, subhuman ways deserves our contempt as much as those tumors on the behind of the human race themselves do.
Consider Taheri’s last thoughts:
And at least five women’s-rights advocates have gone missing. One, Solmaz Igdar, was abducted on her way home in Tehran, her family says.
“Free people everywhere should speak out in support of Iranian women,” says Tehran feminist Haydeh Karimi. “The proposed law is the thin end of a wedge. Ahmadinejad wants women out of universities and public life. He thinks he can curb mass unemployment by forcing women out of work, giving their jobs to men.”
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