Obama Fatigue: One Marine's View
— Ace

I'm tired.

I'm tired of being told that I have to "spread the wealth around" to people who don't have my work ethic. I'm tired of being told the government will take the money I earned, by force if necessary, and give it to people too lazy or stupid to earn it.

I'm tired of being told that I have to pay more taxes to "keep people in their homes.” Sure, if they lost their jobs or got sick, I'm willing to help. But if they bought McMansions at three times the price of our paid-off, $250,000 condo, on one-third of my salary, then let the left-wing Congress-critters who passed Fannie and Freddie and the Community Reinvestment Act that created the bubble help them-with their own money.

I'm tired of being told how bad America is by left-wing millionaires like Michael Moore, George Soros, and Hollywood entertainers who live in luxury because of the opportunities America offers. In thirty years, if they get their way, the United States will have the religious freedom and women's rights of Saudi Arabia , the economy of Zimbabwe, the freedom of the press of China , the crime, and violence of Mexico, the tolerance for Gay people of Iran , and the freedom of speech of Venezuela . Won't multiculturalism be beautiful?

Thanks to Mom.

Posted by: Ace at 09:22 AM | Comments (2)
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Phil Spector Murder Finally Goes to Jury
— Ace

Oh, did I say murder? That hasn't been proven. Spector claims that the woman in question took his gun after she slept with him at his house to commit suicide.

Who knows, maybe it's even true. Who would want to admit that a woman ate a bullet after sleeping with you?

Spector's defense maintains that Clarkson was depressed and turned his .38 Special on herself. Prosecutors allege that he shot her in the mouth after she tried to leave his Alhambra mansion.

In a final argument before the panelists filed into the jury room, a prosecutor seized on the actress' chance meeting with Spector three hours before her death at a Sunset Strip Club where she was a VIP room hostess.

As he had in the 2007 trial that ended in a hung jury, Deputy Dist. Atty. Alan Jackson asked jurors to imagine they could speak one sentence to the actress before she got in Spector's chauffeured Mercedes-Benz.

"You are all thinking the same thing," Jackson said. Dropping his voice to a whisper, he continued, "You'd say, 'Lana, whatever you do, don't go.' "

He said the impulse to warn Clarkson came from jurors' knowledge of "the real Phil Spector" -- a "demon" with a history of menacing women with guns.

Spector, dressed in a black suit and chartreuse tie, remained stoic, even when the prosecutor pointed an accusing finger at him.

"The reality is that Phil Spector had his hand on that gun and Lana Clarkson ended up dead," he said.

Posted by: Ace at 09:16 AM | Comments (2)
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Suicide Bomber Kills 50 in Pakistan Mosque
— Ace

There is a very good chance the country will blow up.

A suicide bomber detonated his explosives Friday in a crowded mosque in northwest Pakistan, killing at least 50 people and leaving more bodies buried in the rubble of the building, officials said.

The attack came just hours before President Obama in Washington introduced a new strategy to fight terror and extremism in both Pakistan and Afghanistan. The blast hit in the Khyber tribal agency, a semi-autonomous zone near the Afghan border that has been plagued by Islamist insurgents, criminal gangs and tribal conflicts. It is a busy cross-border corridor and was a major avenue for U.S. military supplies into Afghanistan until a series of armed attacks on convoys and truck depots last year made the route too dangerous to navigate.

The death toll is expected to rise to 70 by the time they finish pulling out the bodies and the gravely injured succumb to their wounds.

Posted by: Ace at 08:27 AM | Add Comment
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The New Kyoto: Trillions of in Costs for, um, Global Warming or Something
— Ace

And Obama supports it as an "effective framework."

Note the UN blandly predicts that industry and jobs will flow from more regulated countries (that would be us) to less regulated countries (that would be China and other developing countries).

A United Nations document on "climate change" that will be distributed to a major environmental conclave next week envisions a huge reordering of the world economy, likely involving trillions of dollars in wealth transfer, millions of job losses and gains, new taxes, industrial relocations, new tariffs and subsidies, and complicated payments for greenhouse gas abatement schemes and carbon taxes — all under the supervision of the world body.

Those and other results are blandly discussed in a discretely worded United Nations "information note" on potential consequences of the measures that industrialized countries will likely have to take to implement the Copenhagen Accord, the successor to the Kyoto Treaty, after it is negotiated and signed by December 2009. The Obama administration has said it supports the treaty process if, in the words of a U.S. State Department spokesman, it can come up with an "effective framework" for dealing with global warming.

...

In the stultifying language that is normal for important U.N. conclaves, the negotiators are known as the "Ad Hoc Working Group On Further Commitments For Annex I Parties Under the Kyoto Protocol." Yet the consequences of their negotiations, if enacted, would be nothing short of world-changing.

...

The paper makes no effort to calculate the magnitude of the costs and disruption involved, but despite the discreet presentation, makes clear that they will reverberate across the entire global economic system.

...

In the same bland manner, the note informs negotiators without going into details that cap-and-trade schemes "may induce some industrial relocation" to "less regulated host countries." Cap-and-trade functions by creating decreasing numbers of pollution-emission permits to be traded by industrial users, and thus pay more for each unit of carbon-based pollution, a market-driven system that aims to drive manufacturers toward less polluting technologies.

The note adds only that industrial relocation "would involve negative consequences for the implementing country, which loses employment and investment." But at the same time it "would involve indeterminate consequences for the countries that would host the relocated industries."

There are also entirely new kinds of tariffs and trade protectionist barriers such as those termed in the note as "border carbon adjustment"— which, the note says, can impose "a levy on imported goods equal to that which would have been imposed had they been produced domestically" under more strict environmental regimes.

Another form of "adjustment" would require exporters to "buy [carbon] offsets at the border equal to that which the producer would have been forced to purchase had the good been produced domestically."

It's not clear to me to whom these new taxes will flow. The article suggests they'll flow to the UN, or a body created by the UN, but I didn't see specific language indicating that.

Posted by: Ace at 08:02 AM | Comments (1)
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The "Obama to Release Gitmo Prisoners" Story Gets Worse
— Slublog

Not only does the US get to play host to those former detainees, you and I get to pay their living expenses.

President Barack Obama's intelligence chief confirmed Thursday that some Guantanamo inmates may be released on US soil and receive assistance to return to society.

"If we are to release them in the United States, we need some sort of assistance for them to start a new life," said National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair at his first press conference.

"You can't just put them on the street," he added. "All that is work in progress."

Hope. Change. Welfare for suspected terrorists. (H/t: Tammy Bruce)

Update - Just who are we going to be hosting? The Weekly Standard has the troubling details. Thus the reason for the strikethrough in the original post.

Posted by: Slublog at 07:59 AM | Comments (3)
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NY-20 Congressional Race: Democrat Murphy Leads By 4 Points
— DrewM

You can make a lot of arguments against polls in general and ones in special elections specifically but the trend isn't good for Republican Jim Tedisco.

Democrat Scott Murphy has reversed a four-point deficit and now leads Republican Jim Tedisco by 4 points, according to the latest poll from the Siena Research Institute.

Murphy now leads Tedisco 47-43 percent, with 7 percent undecided and 2 percent for Eric Sundwall, who was removed from the ballot this week. This is within the pollÂ’s +/- 3.2 percent margin of error.

Two weeks ago, Tedisco led 45-41 percent.

I still think given the nature of the district, Tedisco will win on Tuesday and succeed now Senator Gillibrand but it's going to be a near run thing.

Posted by: DrewM at 05:54 AM | Add Comment
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John McCain, Vindicated
— Slublog

Got to give the guy credit...he called it. Too bad so many guzzled the hopeychangey flavored kool-aid thinking they were one of the 95% that was going to get a tax cut.

Orszag at first dodged the question, saying he was sure the final Obama budget will "reflect a fiscally sustainable path." But the questioner persisted: Are those deficits sustainable? Relenting, Orszag said such deficits, in the range of five percent of the Gross Domestic Product, "would lead to rising debt-to-GDP ratios in a manner that would ultimately not be sustainable."

The simple version of that is: If the Congressional Budget Office projections are correct, we're headed for hell in a handbasket.

I asked McCain what might happen if Obama and Orszag get their way. First, the U.S. could have to print a lot of new money, "running the huge risk of inflation and returning to the situation of the 1970s, only far worse," McCain said. The second option is to raise taxes.

Just this week, former Clinton budget director Alice Rivlin conceded that Obama's budget could present a "scary scenario" that would "raise deficits to unsustainable levels well after the economy recovers." The solution, she wrote, is higher taxes, and not just for the richest of the rich.

Of course, that's what McCain said during the campaign. And it's what the much-maligned Joe the Plumber said, too. Remember when he took so much flak for objecting to Obama's plan to raise taxes only on those Americans making more than $250,000 a year? Joe didn't make anything near that, the critics said, so why was he worrying?

This is, of course, exactly what Clinton did in his first term: promised tax cuts for the middle class and raised them on everyone. The ad practically writes itself. Just show clips of Obama promising a tax cut for 95% of Americans - shouldn't be too hard to find since he repeated that claim lie every day. After playing a few of those clips, toss a few quotes from Peter Orszag onto the screen, and maybe include some of Obama's fumbling at the news conference about how "we already had [the tax cut] in the recovery."

This is the second time a Democrat president has promised tax cuts on the campaign trail and then broken the promise. You'd think voters would have learned a simple truth by now: you aren't going to get tax cuts out of Democrats.

Update - In the comments, FireHorse corrects the record:

To be fair, President Clinton didn't renege on his pledge of a middle-class tax cut. President-elect Clinton did that. He couldn't even wait until he took office to make bad on his word.

(My source, by the way, is Bob Rubin's memoir -- hardly a Clinton detractor -- and, of course, he didn't phrase it like I just did.)

Happy to be corrected on this point. more...

Posted by: Slublog at 04:20 AM | Add Comment
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Top Headline Comments 03-27-09
— Gabriel Malor

I can haz friday?

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 04:06 AM | Add Comment
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Overnight Open Thread (genghis)
— Open Blog

Your online source for premium lace wigs and stimulating overnight commentary. But mostly wigs.

“Jubal Early Anderson” provides us with a short video/trailer of the soon-to-be-released remake of the ‘80s talkie “Red Dawn.” It’s utterly NSFW and not safe for your keyboard if you’re drinking any kind of beverage.

It's so wrong, in so many ways, and will haunt your dreams for a long time, if not forever. You're welcome. more...

Posted by: Open Blog at 06:56 PM | Add Comment
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Mickey Kaus Posts "JournoList" Thread
— Ace

Moe Lane with the link and some observations.

Eh. Like many secret societies, it's really retarded and gay once you get a glimpse behind the black curtains.

Posted by: Ace at 04:26 PM | Add Comment
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