It's not just illegal. And it's not just forcing a greater reliance on Middle East oil.

It's also costing us tax revenue.

Posted by: Ace at 12:06 PM | Comments (68)
Post contains 40 words, total size 1 kb.

Where's the money? "Save our children, give up the buck, where's the cash?, we need it fast."

Somehow, when she's rubbing her fingers in that cash-money way, I don't think she's really thinking about the children at all.

The right needs to make this go viral.

BTW, this is officially old -- from last April. Still, she got what she wanted, eh? more...

Posted by: Ace at 11:11 AM | Comments (130)
Post contains 90 words, total size 1 kb.

Very cool video by Whittle noting the genuine innovations going on in commercial space flight.

I have to note that when people dream of science fiction, this is what they're dreaming of. Not government spaceflight, which is nice, but it's an unsustainable gimmick, if you know what I mean. Real sci-fi thinking isn't just going to the moon a few times. It's conceiving of a future in which spaceflight isn't extraordinary -- the result only of a national push to put people on the moon just to put people on the moon, and then, having done that, stop putting people on the moon -- but somewhat mundane. Like, just something that happens. Like, where you just buy a ticket.

We really do not have a space program until it's commercial. For profit. Repeatable and sustainable. Routine. With schedules and marketing and brochures and even commercial jingles.

Iowahawk: Joe "Choo Choo" Biden announces plan to jump Grand Canyon in UAW-built Amtrak train. The train will rocket to speeds approaching 80 mph.

Eighty. Why I never thought I'd live to see the day a train could go as fast as an 83 Ford Taurus.

Posted by: Ace at 10:23 AM | Comments (137)
Post contains 216 words, total size 1 kb.

An unexpected bit of win from the Tea Party. Conrad will make his case at a Democratic retreat.

Conrad is arguing that both parties must embrace Obama's debt commission plan as a starting point for seriously reducing the budget deficit. He has met with ObamaÂ’s budget director, Jack Lew, who was a key player in the tax deal reached between the White House and Senate Republicans in December, to discuss the budget.

Meanwhile the GOP is hoping for presidential leadership, for a change, on this issue.

“We need to deal with the entire budget, and we can’t do that unless the president himself says, ‘All right, I’m ready to bite the bullet, and I need some of you to go with me,’ and some of us are,” Alexander told reporters. “In fact, there’s a lot of us [that] are. A Congress of 535 people can’t speak with a single voice. The president can.”…

Among the entitlement programs up for cuts, Alexander said that Social Security was a “good place to start.”

Start but not end.

What are the odds that Obama will take him up on that? As close to zero as you can get. Obama is a coward and furthermore does not want to be the guy who starts to rollback and rationalize the Liberal Welfare Superstate.

He will continue putting out new spending initiatives and defending the liberal welfare superstate to his last breath.

Posted by: Ace at 10:01 AM | Comments (46)
Post contains 271 words, total size 2 kb.

He defended his property against trespassers. A jury found he should pay the illegal trespassers $78,000. The Ninth Circus, which earns its nickname for being the most lawless liberal appellate court, getting overturned all the time because they don't even try to apply current constitutional law, upheld the verdict.

There's a complicating twist here -- the judge who presided over that case was Judge Roll, who got death threats after it, and was killed by degenerate loser Jared Loughner when he attempted to kill Gabby Giffords. I say that's complicating because the courts might not want to disturb the ruling of an assassinated judge, and may have an institutional interest in signaling that you can't overturn a case by killing a judge.

But, of course, Jared Loughner wasn't even shooting to kill Judge Roll.

Here's a little background.

Got that? He couldn't be found to have violated their civil rights, as he was acting lawfully in defending his property, so they just claimed he was responsible for "infliction of emotional distress" and assault in doing what the law permits him to do.

$78,000. Nice.

Barrett is asking the Circus for an en banc rehearing (all judges rehearing the case, instead of the three assigned to it), which will probably not be granted, and then we can expect him to appeal to the Supreme Court.

Posted by: Ace at 09:25 AM | Comments (144)
Post contains 256 words, total size 2 kb.

This happened in 2010. I have to admit I didn't even hear about it.

Another firing of an IG who committed the crime of doing his job.

In June 2009, longtime veteran Amtrak inspector general Fred Weiderhold was abruptly “retired” — just as the government-subsidized rail service faced mounting complaints about its meddling in financial audits and probes. Weiderhold had blown the whistle on overzealous intrusions by the agency’s law department into his investigations of $1.3 billion in rail stimulus money and exposed how Amtrak’s legal counsel had usurped the watchdog’s $5 million portion of federal stimulus dollars to hamstring his probes. Even more threatening to the Democratic attorneys’ cabal, Weiderhold discovered that the federal rail bureaucracy was retaining outside law firms beyond the independent watchdog’s reach and obstructing subpoenas issued to an outside financial adviser.

In September 2010, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) and Rep. Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) released a report concluding that the Amtrak board removed the agency’s inspector general without required prior notice to Congress and despite the inspector general’s effective track record of “exposing waste, fraud and abuse at the highest levels within Amtrak.”

The Transportation DepartmentÂ’s inspector general is now conducting its own independent probe of WeiderholdÂ’s removal.

That IG had better come up with the "right" conclusion (nothing to see here, folks, investigation over) or he's going to be retired by the lawless Obama administration too.

Posted by: Ace at 08:51 AM | Comments (73)
Post contains 261 words, total size 2 kb.

New Junior Senator from Connecticut, Richard Blumenthal, creates more facepalm moments than your drunken Mom sassing a traffic cop.

Shows up late for work.

Blumenthal got a stern talking to from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid after showing up five minutes late to preside over the session, according to the Washington Times.

Misstates his personal history yet again.

"I'm new to the Senate but I'm not new to this battle. Since the days of Roe v. Wade, when I clerked for Justice Blackmun, as a state legislator, as attorney general, I have fought this battle," Blumenthal said. CT Mirror points out that Blumenthal actually clerked for Blackmun in 1974, a year after the decision.

Makes a poor choice for his chief of staff.

"This is a very unfair route you are going down," she said. "We'll remember this."

That's right. Laurie Rubiner (former Planned Parenthood exec) threatened the CT Mirror about reporting Blumenthal's misstatement.

Reporters love that. They loved it so much, they wanted to share it with the world, and printed it.

There's something in the psyche of certain fabulously wealthy fops that demands they create fantasy-memories of gallantry and glory for themselves.

And something in us that demands we point at them and laugh.

Posted by: LauraW at 08:40 AM | Comments (47)
Post contains 220 words, total size 2 kb.

Nice. I wish these two weren't the dissenters but the majority, but at least we have them.

An earlier report said that the GOP proposed to merely trim $32 billion from the budget, down even from their $100 billion is $60 billion pro rata for the rest of this year trial balloon. However, the new proposal is near $60 billion...

The proposal will cut about $58 billion in non-defense spending compared to President ObamaÂ’s 2011 budget request.

But note that is cut from Obama's 2011 budget request, which is of course a very high and bloated request. When we were talking about cuts, I assumed (and the GOP allowed us to imagine) we were talking about cuts from current spending, not cuts from current spending + Obama's new spending requests. The latter is like a store marking up a dress from $100 to $150 so they can put it on sale for $75 the next week and claim "50% off!"

Not enough. It may be time for a Malkin-led* effort to burn up the phone lines at Appropriations and in the general leadership.

* Not to put it on her, but she seems to get results and get the whole dextrosphere involved.

If anyone has the phone numbers and email addresses for these scoundrels, please pass it to me. I have the list of names but not their contact info.

Posted by: Ace at 07:53 AM | Comments (105)
Post contains 266 words, total size 2 kb.

Not necessarily a Republican pick-up with Virginia annoyingly purplish lately, but this boosts our odds.

Downside: Jim Webb will not feel any pressure to vote moderately. On the other hand, supposedly he's a moderate anyway. Political pressure may have tended to push him to the left (as on the ObamaCare vote) so maybe his being free to vote his leanings might be a good thing too.

Posted by: Ace at 07:40 AM | Comments (80)
Post contains 86 words, total size 1 kb.

We believe that Progs are anti-business because they really do react in pain when they find out that someone, somewhere, is making an honest buck that hasn't been processed first through the digestive system of an obese bureaucracy.

But not always. Some professions are more Godly than others and deserve a little referral now and again, especially if they belong to professional organizations that donate a lot of money to a certain political party.

In an unprecedented and controversial move, the White House has launched a new program at the Department of Labor which will refer workers who have complaints about their bosses to a toll free number at the American Bar Association, where they can get a lawyer to work on their case on a contingency fee basis.

More than 40,000 workers annually contact the Department of Labor with complaints about their bosses. But Labor canÂ’t get to all of them, an estimated 10%, because of budget constraints, the White House says.

Unprecedented. As always.

Sheriff Joe says the attorneys' fees for suing your employer will not harm you since they will be “contingency on the back end.”
And if you own a small business, you can figure out for yourself whose back end he's talking about.

I guess the Dems don't mind 'privatizing' certain functions of government when there's a little political incest to be had. And there is.

Obama-appointee M. Patricia Smith is Solicitor General at the Labor Department, and was previously Commissioner of the NY State Dept. of Labor.

While there, Smith devised the heavily criticized “Wage Watch.” Initiative....

...The program basically enlisted private entities to act as labor market watchdogs over businesses in “formal partnerships” with the state.
-------------------------------snip-------------

But union activists and community organizers were deputized in the program, giving a way for unions to target unorganized companies, and businesses cried foul, arguing that union activists could cook up false labor violations in order to strong arm businesses into unionizing, says James Sherk of the Heritage Foundation.

A union local at that time also wrote down its plan to use wage watch in “all of our organizing campaigns,” reports Sherk. New York state business associations voiced their concerns in a letter to Smith in February 2009.

Emphasis me.
Everything is screw-business-all-the-time with these lefties, and they use our own damn money to do it to us.
This entire presidency- the whole thing, from one end of it to the other- is only about transferring money and power from the host (the People) to the parasite (the political class).

Thanks to Spongeworthy.

Posted by: LauraW at 06:44 AM | Comments (98)
Post contains 443 words, total size 3 kb.