Cheney's on a roll

Perhaps Dick Cheney is looking at his health issues and wants to make sure he has not left anything undone in his life. It seems what drives him now is vindication of the Bush Administration and the United States before the American People. And most probably anger at the fecklessness of Democrats while this country has been at war.  TD

Cheney Slams McCain  "Over at Politico, Jonathan Martin has written a “political junkie’s guide” to Dick Cheney’s memoir, In My Time. During the 2008 presidential race, Martin notes, the veep was unimpressed with Sen. John McCain’s campaign:"

POLITICO's guide to Cheney's book  "He shares little about the 2004 re-election, but does recall Democratic vice-presidential nominee John Edwards  bringing up Mary Cheney’s sexuality at their lone debate.

“I was furious with his response,” Cheney writes. What gave him the right to make pronouncements about my family? But you never want to let the other guy get under your skin, so I kept my anger in check.”

"After Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry brought up Mary Cheney at a debate a week later, Cheney writes: “Now it was obvious that there was a concerted effort by the Kerry-Edwards campaign to remind viewers that my daughter Mary was gay, to bring her into the debate and into the campaign.”"

Powell: Cheney's Book Is Full of 'Cheap Shots'

Newsweek Reporter's Weird Complaint: Cheney Memoir Doesn't 'Look Forward'   I had that same problem with The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich; it just looked back at old stuff. TD.

Prepare for the Obama speech

Victor Davis Hanson:  The Old ‘Not Enough’ Excuse   "As we witness the financial insolvency of blue-state America, the monetary meltdown in southern Europe, and the criminality breaking out among some members of the Western underclass, logic suggests that massive state deficits not only did not bring a promised utopia, but ensured chaos.

"But for those who are invested materially and psychologically in the religion of never-ending government borrowing and spending, there is always the true believers’ excuse of “not quite enough.”"

http://townhall.com/political-cartoons/michaelramirez

Obama’s Next Economic Advisor is a Labor Economist and Proponent of Big Government Solutions

LA Times

The New Ledger

Obama to nominate Alan Krueger to chair Council of Economic Advisors  "Krueger, a labor economist and member of Princeton’s faculty, served as assistant Treasury secretary for economic policy during the first two years of the Obama administration. He favors “a future consumption tax to fix today’s economy,” as well as a higher minimum wage, which his research purports to demonstrate does not depress employment. He was also one of the minds behind the Cash for Clunkers program."

Labor Economist to Fill Key Post . "If confirmed by the Senate, Mr. Krueger, a labor economist, is likely to provide a voice inside the administration for more-aggressive government action to bring down unemployment and, particularly, to address long-term joblessness."

You call this 'regulatory reform'?

James W. Lucas    "Another way to measure the gross impact of federal regulation is to count the pages in the official publication of all federal regulations, the Federal Register. This is a bit crude as a measure, because a very long regulation may be fairly innocuous whereas a short one could have a massive cost imprint, but it is a decent rough gauge of the extent of the totality of federal regulation. The Federal Register for 2010 is over 81,000 pages long, a 19% increase in one year. We do not have a page count on the regulations to be repealed, perhaps because many of the revisions have yet to actually go into effect, but it is safe to assume that they will come nowhere near to matching the voluminous regulations still to be issued under the new Obamacare and Dodd-Frank laws. And there are also the numerous ongoing rule-makings by President Obama's hyperactive regulators at the EPA, NLRB, and the rest of the seemingly endless alphabet soup of federal regulatory bodies."

http://townhall.com/political-cartoons/brianfarrington

“Tell me again why Barack Obama has been such a bad president?” Jonathan Alter writes in his column.    "Consider the mission accepted."....

"I agree. And it is on the common ground of facts that we can declare–in a calm, specific, reasonable, rational and empirical manner–Obama to be an utter failure."

911 Whitewashing the War: "Never Forget" Morphs into "Forget it"

Atlas Shrugs  "The firefighters and police officers and innocent Americans were heroes, great Americans. We must pay them and their brothers tribute. Honor them on September 11th at West Broadway and Park Place at our 911 Freedom Rally. Stand for freedom and against the deception and lies being used to subdue us. Join us, Robert Spencer and me, on September 11th at West Broadway and Park Place and protest this cultural obscenity at our 911 Freedom Rally. Remember last year?"....

"Members of the clergy (banned from the official ceremonies) will be there for our invocation. And first responders, who were not invited to to the official ceremonies, will speak and are welcomed at our Freedom rally of remembrance.

"And that evening, we will host a special screening screening of the groundbreaking film, The Ground Zero Mosque: The Second Wave of the 911 Attacks ..."

Ground Zero Mosque Imam Calls For Integrating Sharia Law Into American And British Legal Systems

Want Stimulus? Reduce Regulation

Heritage  "The President has publicly stated his intent to roll out a new expensive stimulus plan this fall. That plan is expected to contain hundreds of billions in new debt obligations to you, the taxpayer.

"Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) has a better idea. He wrote a letter today to President Obama that identifies an effective means to stimulate growth. Reduce regulations that are a hidden tax on all Americans and killing private enterprise. Reducing the regulatory burden on the economy will spur economic growth."  Boehner's letter to Obama:

Last year, on August 16, 2010, I wrote you about my concern that the Administration’s published regulatory agenda included a total of 191 planned new regulations, each of which had an estimated annual cost of $100 million or more, with some involving billions of dollars annually. In my letter, I noted that at public forums, private sector job creators were citing this regulatory agenda as one of the primary impediments to job creation, especially for small businesses. 

This assessment of Mr. Obama sums it up rather well, I think:

Where Next for Obama? Magic can turn failure into a resume enhancement.

http://terrellaftermath.com/

David Solway  " My suspicions deepened as his candidacy soared and by the time he gave his Denver coronation speech I knew beyond the slightest hesitation that he was as fake as the classical columns he spoke before and as artificial as the teleprompters that accompanied him everywhere. From whatever angle one examined him, the man was unmitigated bad news for a country swept up in a protracted seizure of idolatrous frenzy. The ensuing years only confirmed the fact that, in electing him to the presidency, America had done itself megaharm."

David Solway is a Canadian poet and essayist. He is the author of The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and Identity, and is currently working on a sequel, Living in the Valley of Shmoon. His new book on Jewish and Israeli themes, Hear, O Israel!, has just been released by Mantua Books.

Norman Podhoretz:  What Happened to Obama? Absolutely Nothing. "...nothing happened to him. He is still the same anti-American leftist he was before becoming our president, and it is this rather than inexperience or incompetence or weakness or stupidity that accounts for the richly deserved failure both at home and abroad of the policies stemming from that reprehensible cast of mind."

Manmade Global Warming: Researchers identify 26 past scares analogous to the global warming alarm.

Pajamas Media  "Polls show that roughly one person in two is concerned about manmade global warming. Why? Because vivid, alarming forecasts, even those based on weak foundations, are persuasive."....

...."Rachel Carson raised alarm over the insecticide DDT ... There was no good evidence for this assertion, and there still isn’t. The EPA nevertheless banned DDT in 1972, ... The main consequence of the ban is that millions of people have died needlessly from mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria.....

....."We hope that this phenomenon of false environmental alarms will become widely recognized so that in the future we can avoid the very real costs that they impose on the most vulnerable people, and then on all of us."

Forecasting expert Dr. Kesten Green is a researcher at the University of South Australia in Adelaide . Tom Harris is the Executive Director of the International Climate Science Coalition.

http://scottthong.wordpress.com/2007/04/20/global-warming-editorial-cartoons-pt-2/

Victor Davis Hanson: The False WWII Analogy

Victor Davis Hanson  "In the immediate postwar years, only a capitalist, self-confident America was poised to supply foreigners with much-needed manufactured goods, expertise, and capital to raise the world from ruin. And from the profits, we were able to pay down our own staggering and unsupportable wartime-incurred debt. Note as well that in 1946 a self-sufficient oil-producing America was not guzzling down a half-trillion dollars’ worth of imported oil each year."

Prominent Syrian cartoonist beaten; Gunmen break both his hands, ‘send message’

Ali Farzat

From 2002:  Favoured by Syria's new president, Ali Farzat, leading cartoonist and popular newspaper publisher, seemed to have a licence to mock. Can it last?

"Until better communication exists between the rulers and the ruled, Syrians must rely on intuitive skills honed through long years of exposure to Farzat cartoons. For the decipherers and code-breakers on either side of the political fence, his humour has been like a divining rod."

Political Cartoons of an Arab master

Syrian sense of humor failure  ..."Another shows Mr Assad flexing in uniform in front of a mirror that reflects back a dominant, muscular image, overshadowing his puny figure."  Bad career move.

"His beating-up by security forces shows that he has hit home and that the authorities' tolerance for dissent is touching zero.""

UK Guardian

"Assad is a Reformer"  Hillary Clinton.

NY Times  "Masked gunmen severely beat Syria’s best-known political cartoonist on Thursday, breaking his hand and leaving him to bleed on the side of a road in Damascus, activists said."

The cartoon that really did it:  Right side.

Can We Get Rid of the Butcher of Damascus?

Gaia's Church of the Holy Windfarm



http://www.diversitylane.com/



Who's Gaia?  "Gaia or Gaea, known as Earth or Mother Earth (the Greek common noun for "land" is ge or ga). She was an early earth goddess and it is written that Gaia was born from Chaos, the great void of emptiness within the universe, and with her came Eros."....More here if you really have to know.

A Lesson from Egypt for American Politics: A wise president puts into effect policies that work. A smart president sees his policies aren’t working and changes them

Barry Rubin

An Egyptian president says the Israelis ate my homework

This American president says that the Japanese earthquake ate my economy

...."If external saboteurs are responsible for a problem, nothing has to be done to fix it. In other words, all you have to do is wipe the offenders’ country off the map and the problem would go away. You don’t need to improve agricultural inspections or to teach Egyptian Muslims to respect Christians; you just have to make a speech denouncing the “real enemy.”"

....

"This American president says that the Japanese earthquake ate my economy. And he blames the local equivalent of Zionist imperialist running dogs such as Bush, the Republican minority in Congress, ATMs, Arab revolts, the Japanese earthquake, the Internet, workers manufacturing too many corporate jets, taxes being too low, bad luck, and “headwinds” because his policies aren’t working and then doubles down on the aforementioned policies. Then his supporters call critics greedy racists for not supporting the failed policies.

"As I said earlier, when a country is unable to discuss its problems honestly and intelligently, it is unable to fix its problems." Emphasis added.
....

"And this most anti-liberal form of scapegoating and bigotry against the “other” is now supposed to be what liberalism is? No, it has more in common with how Arab dictatorships are governed."