WhackyNation

Can’t make this stuff up.

You global warmers are just idiots.

I must admit that when I first heard then California Governor Ronald Reagan say “Taxes should hurt” I was taken aback and misunderstood the Great Communicator’s message.  But he’s right.  He was commenting at the time about the withholding tax which he felt lulled the middle class into not noticing the huge tax bite of the federal government.

I have an update some 35 years later:

It involves a soccer mom — a traditional Hillary-loving liberal — who was bragging to me about the Bellevue School District’s levy proposition and how she was so gung-ho supportive because we have to help those children and all those teachers, you know.

So I helped her through the math.  The impact for her property tax bill for her Clyde Hill home the next year was about $3,500.  She was happy with that.  She could afford that.  Then, I asked her, “how many years was the levy good for?”  She said, “20″.  So, I said, “You’re willing to pay $70,000 over 20 years to make the school buildings look better?”  This time, she thought.  $70,000 started to sound like real money.

The point is, our spend-aholic politicans manage to disguise taxes.  Maybe the school levy is worthwhile … but as taxpayers we are sucked into accepting taxes without really understanding the true cost.

And now, the state Democrats, who have built in a $2.4 billion dollar shortfall in the next biennium budget are saying new taxes might be necessary.  But we don’t mind, because we have to help the children.

It get’s better.  According to ABC News almost a year ago:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said he had no idea longtime friend and now-indicted fundraiser Antoin “Tony” Rezko was behind problem buildings in the South Side district that Obama once represented as a state senator.

“Should I have known these buildings were in a state of disrepair? My answer would be that it wasn’t brought to my attention,” Obama told newspapers Monday. 

Rezko’s Rezmar Corp. obtained millions in government funds to rehab apartment buildings for the needy.

Court and city documents show 30 of the apartment buildings owned and managed by Rezmar have since been subject to foreclosures, code violations and lawsuits filed by the city, the Chicago Sun-Times reported in its Monday editions. About a third of those 30 buildings were in Obama’s Illinois Senate district.

I bet the story gets better.  Anyone want to faint yet?

Gee, and here I thought it was going to be Michelle’s big mouth that would sink the Obama campaign as black segregationists, but it’s a simple corruption story.

ABC News website headlines:

Reformer: Trial Will Reveal ‘Cesspool’ of Obama’s Allies

Here are some graphs from the story:

With the corruption trial of one of Sen. Barack Obama’s longtime friends and supporters set to begin Monday in Chicago, Ill., reform watchdogs say it will reveal the “cesspool” of Illinois politics in which Obama came of age and has said little about in his campaign for president.  

“We have a sick political culture,” said Jay Stewart, the executive director of the Chicago Better Government Association, “and that’s the environment that Barack Obama came from.”

Stewart says he does not understand why Obama has lectured others about corruption in Washington and Kenya but “been noticeably silent on the issue of corruption here in his home state, including at this point, mostly Democratic politicians.”

There was no immediate comment from the Obama campaign.

I miss the news business on days like this.

The story of Barack Obama’s shady dealings with Antoin “Tony” Rezko over the the purchase of Obama’s Chicago mansion and the lot next door may be breaking fast enough to save Hillary Clinton in Texas and Ohio Tuesday.

Even though the story was first reported in 2006 and the Chicago papers have been re-working the story the past few weeks, the liberal drive-by media throughout America has given it little play.  If it weren’t for conservative bloggers, Obama might have gotten his party’s nomination before the truth about his corruption became public.

 According the Chicago Tribune:

Weeks after saying he’d answered all questions about his controversial dealings with the now-indicted Rezko, Obama released new details about their purchase of adjacent lots from the same seller on the same day. But the disclosures by Obama’s presidential campaign left unanswered questions and raised new ones.

Apparently the seller of Obama’s mansion also sold the vacant lot next door to Rezko’s wife on the very same day in 2006 as the house was sold to the Obamas.  Here’s the deal: Rezko’s wife paid the full $625,000 asking prize for the undeveloped lot and Barack and Michelle got $300,000 off the asking price for the mansion.  The Obamas only paid $1.65 million.  And it get’s better: the “vacant lot” has been turned into a garden and is only accessible today from Obama’s lot.

Obama has been reticent to discuss Rezko since the Tribune in 2006 revealed their property transactions. He has called their financial dealings “boneheaded” because, at the time, Rezko was reported to be under grand jury investigation. Rezko is set to go on trial next month on corruption and fraud charges.

Looks like the Democrats are close to nominating not only the next McGovern-Dukakis, but a corrupt one at that.  2008 is going to be a great year for Republicans!

The tremendous reception North Koreans gave the concert played earlier this week in Pyongyang by one of America’s finest symphony orchestras, the New York Philharmonic, should alert the U.S. and the rest of the world to the importance of the arts and culture in the ongoing and much needed goal of bringing the world together and finding a permanent peace.

Diplomats and national political leaders have failed throughout history to achieve even a beginning to forging a peaceful world. I can say without fear of contradiction that I have been a lifelong proponent of utilizing all the arts, as well as the most prominent pro-sports figures, in that pursuit.

First, with regard to the appeal of the arts, all segments of the performing and visual arts contain a universal language everyone on the globe can understand and cherish. The New York Philharmonic was not the first American representative to use that language in charming the North Koreans, as it will in performances in Seoul, Shanghai, and Beijing.

We and all other Western Powers should consider a great increase in sharing their visual and performance arts with all other nations — as well as inviting the other nations to do the same with their artistic riches. Some exchanges have already been experienced, but there is room for a great deal more.

The exchange should be expanded particularly in the performing arts, such as appearances by the New York Philharmonic and other major musical organizations. Our share of the exchange should include our most notable jazz performers, our classical and modern ballet groups, our finest operatic groups and their lead singers, our best choirs, and all the rest.

Instead of relying upon the failed attempts of diplomats to seek peace treaties, we should concentrate much more on those universal traits all the world’s people can understand and enjoy. A Beethoven or Gershwin masterpiece needs no rhetoric to find its mark on a man or woman in North Korea, South Africa, China, India, or Brazil, etc.

I feel the same way about the instant appeal of our top-grade athletes and those of other countries. Note how many foreign athletes have recently come to the U.S. to join the ranks of pro baseball, football, basketball, and other teams. In fact, I have proposed many times the value of World Leagues in all major sports.

Why shouldn’t there be World Leagues in all the major sports so that talented athletes wouldn’t have to leave their home country to participate in those sports? The World Leagues would be in addition to our present teams in the American and National Baseball Leagues, the National and American Football Leagues, the National Basketball Association, and the leagues in other sports.

The arts and sports performers are miles apart in terms of talent and appeal, but they share one most important feature — they “speak” a language that is immediately understood by people everywhere in the world. What are we waiting for?

Friends studying the proposed budgets in Olympia tell me that although the Senate Dem’s funded all day kindergarten, the House D’s did not and instead are using the money to give the teachers an extra one percent raise.

Doesn’t this expose the hypocrisy of the D’s?  Screw the children and pay off labor’s support!

Once again another scientist has published a paper proving global warmers like Ron Sims just don’t know what they’re talking about.

Håkan Grudd says tree-ring data

show generally higher temperature estimates than previous reconstructions based on Torneträsk tree-ring data. The late-twentieth century, however, is not exceptionally warm in the new record: On decadal-to-centennial timescales, periods around ad 750, 1000, 1400, and 1750 were equally warm, or warmer. The 200-year long warm period centered on ad 1000 was significantly warmer than the late-twentieth century (p < 0.05) and is supported by other local and regional paleoclimate data. The new tree-ring evidence from Torneträsk suggests that this “Medieval Warm Period” in northern Fennoscandia was much warmer than previously recognized.

When are the global warmers going to admit that temperatures fluctuate normally over the years and that current temperature trends are nothing to be scared of?

Barack Obama wants “change” in America and his cultists cheer.

I’ve been looking at YouTube videos of Obama’s recent visit to Seattle where Governor $pendmore endorsed him for president.  Then it hit me: Obama and his followers talk “change” and signs wave everywhere “change” and here is $pendmore and Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels sitting in front of all these signs that say “change.”

Change after 24 years of Democrat governors and Democrat control of government in Washington State?  Damn right!  I urge you all to heed Obama’s message and help re-elect Dino Rossi and elect Republicans across the board.

Here’s a video from the event a few weeks ago.  See if clever adpeople could take clips and say it’s time to change Democrat control of Washington State.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the two candidates for the Democratic nomination in the presidential race, have both made statements in their campaigns that would increase Big Government’s expenditures in health care immensely — and simultaneously increase the tax load on all Americans.

If either one of them succeeds in becoming the next President, the nation will be in for a debt that could bankrupt the US. As if to underline that tragic potential, the Associated Press has just reported that the federal government has projected that “by 2017, health-care spending will double to more than $4 trillion a year.”

According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, “the 6.7 percent annual increase in spending — nearly three times the rate of inflation — will be largely driven by higher prices and an increased demand for care. Other factors in the mix include a growing and aging population. The first wave of baby boomers becomes eligible for Medicare beginning in 2011.”

If that forecast doesn’t scare the hell out of the nation’s taxpayers, nothing will. Big government has been primarily responsible for the ballooning cost of health care, particularly in the field of health services for seniors, but not limited to the elderly population.

In case you haven’t noticed, here’s how the present predicament and the ever-increasing cost of health care has come about in all phases of health care, not for seniors alone. By usurping the authority and administration of private medical practice, as well as clinics and hospitals, the federal government has dictated the cost of all medical services/

As a result, doctors, dentists, pharmacies, clinics, and hospitals have routinely padded their bills for services because they know the feds will meet the increasingly high costs without complaint. After all, why should the doctors and all the others in the medical field protest? Whatever they charge will be paid and has been paid by the government.

That’s why all medical services and particularly those for seniors have multiplied without control over the years. And that’s why I have proposed so many times that health care should be under the control of America’s doctors — and specifically under the control of the American Medical Association.

Does that sound like a contradiction? Of course not. If doctors and hospitals could no longer charge exorbitant amounts because Big Government will guarantee them, they would instantly bring down the cost of medical services. Without doubt, if your doctor or hospital had to send you a bill you had to pay directly, instead of relying on Uncle Sam’s bureaucracy to do so, that bill would be reasonable and much lower than it is now under government controls.

We can be sure that Senators Clinton and Obama would not initiate legislation to get Big Government out of health care. Only a “health revolution” motivated by an angry public can force Congress to get the feds out of the health-care field. It’s one of the important reasons the next President should be a Republican who believes in returning health care and many other services to the private field.

Washington State spending has increased 33 percent ($8.4 billion) in only four years.

Because of the fiscal irresponsibility of Governor $pendmore and her Democrat Legislature, the projected shortfall in revenue to fund all their new liberal programs is projected to be $2.4 billion for the 2009-11 state budget.

The Democrats are hoping to keep a lid on this until after the next election.  If they succeed, they will create a fiscal crisis …  and they are only one seat away in the senate from having a super majority that can pass major legislation including Constitutional amendments such as a state income tax to solve the “revenue crisis.”

Is anyone awake out here in the so-called objective media?  We don’t have a revenue problem.  We have a spending problem.  And the Democrats are out of control.

The Democratically controlled Washington Legislature and Democratic Governor Christine Gregoire are not only playing strange games with the state budget and failing to find ways to curb spending and the growing pressure on taxpayers. Now they also are proposing to soak the state’s citizens with the millions needed to support a terribly misguided and unscientific approach to non-existent global warming.

One wonders if the state’s citizens are aware of the skullduggery being hatched in the minds of the Demo leaders. They certainly are not getting the dangerous message from the Liberals in the state’s print and broadcast news media. The media’s Liberals seem to be quite satisfied with the errant plans of Gregoire and the Democratic Party.

In recent days, for example, the House gave its OK to the governor’s proposal to create limits on greenhouse-gas emissions. The Associated Press characterized it as “another step in the state’s long-term drive to curb the causes of climate change.” In case you weren’t aware of it, the term, “climate change,” is the Liberals’ motif to soften what they are really talking about — global warming.

Like the Left-leaning news media, the Democrats have completely ignored the other side of the global-warming issue — the side represented by the great majority of honest and reputable climatologists, who have been trying to warn the public that global warming and climate change are a hoax and that it would be folly to damage the nation’s economy severely by spending billions trying to check a danger that doesn’t exist.

Whatever happened to the news-gathering tradition I remember so well and practiced constantly as a reporter, columnist, and, eventually, as managing editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer? That tradition required the presentation of both sides on every issue and total objectivity in reporting the news.

If the news media, as well as the Liberal Democrats, were interested in seeking the truth about global warming, they could find it quickly and emphatically just a short distance south of Washington State’s southern border in a small town called Cave Junction, Oregon.

There resides one of the finest, most intelligent scientists of America, Dr. Arthur B. Robinson, president and research professor of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine. In an effort to find the truth about the global warming or climate-change issue, he sent out a petition a few years ago to thousands of bonafide scientists in the U.S. and abroad.

At last count, more than 22,000 of the respondents, most of them acclaimed climatologists, signed the petition, saying that global warming was a hoax, that stratospheric warming conditions have come and gone from the time the earth was born, and, specifically, that mankind was not responsible for the occasional warming.

Nevertheless, Governor Gregoire and the Democrats prefer to believe the unscientific, idiotic bleatings of a global warmer like former Vice President Al Gore — as well as the Europen contingent of misguided global warmers, including the Nobel board members who voted to give Gore a Peace Prize.

In the meantime, the flawed global-warming bill passed by the House resides in the State Senate, where it will most assuredly be passed by the Demos, who aren’t interested in determining the truth about a major worldwide hoax called global warming.

An abominable bill that is now rolling through the spend-and-spend Democratically controlled Congress is going to cost American taxpayers close to a trillion dollars, and, unfortunately, it has the support of several Republican members of Congress, who certainly should know better.

Of course, one has to hope that President Bush retains his common sense and vetoes the bill when it reaches his desk. That bill is the brainchild of an ultraliberal congressman from our very own Washington delegation, Representative Adam Smith of Tacoma, and it is called the Global Poverty Act.

Smith’s measure has already been passed by the House with some Republican support, and it es expected to pass through the Senate, as well, thanks to the Democratic majority there. According to the McClatchy News Syndicate, the bill “would require the President to develop and implement a comprehensive strategy to help reduce extreme global poverty.”

Sounds like a worthy cause, doesn’t it? It does — until one realizes what a tremendous waste of American tax dollars it would represent and the fact that so many other U.S. foreign-aid measures have simply lined the pockets of dictators and theocrats in foreign nations and never reached the poverty-stricken people.

Those Conservatives who have tried to call the public’s attention to the wasteful nature of the Global Poverty Act say Smith’s bill “would tie the U.S. to the United Nations Millennium Declaration, which, among other things, calls for banning small arms and light weapons and ratifying the Kyoto global-warming treaty, the International Criminal Court Treaty, and the Convention on Biological Diversity.”

That’s quite a lineup of wasteful measures, but it is typical of the programs the “Useless Nations” has foisted on the world. Imagine the folly of routing billions of American tax dollars into the international global-warming hoax and another measure that would disarm U.S. forces and endanger our security!

It is also noteworthy that Congressman Smith recruited Senator Barack Obama, the front-runner in the Democrats’ presidential race, to take over the roll of chief sponsor of the measure in the Senate. It’s no surprise that Smith, trying to defend himself and his expensive bill, insists that his detractors, who include Rush Limbaugh, the Conservative radio host, and Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, are really aiming their arrows at Obama and not Smith. What hooey!

The Global Poverty Act must be derailed by a Bush veto. Instead, the U.S. should junk all foreign-aid programs and adopt the program I have been proposing for many years — a Foster Nation plan. That plan, detailed in my book, F!D!F! (Fire! Dammit! Fire!) A Feast of New Ideas, would entail sending our best minds to Third World nations one at a time to help them raise their standard of living.

Our representatives would help poor nations build their food-producing agricultural programs, develop all their natural resources, create new industries, elevate their educational systems, and adopt other programs that would boost their economy and bring their standards of living closer to those in the Western World.

That’s the best way to bring all nations eventually up to First World stature, eliminate world poverty, and, at the same time, end internal conflicts and wars.

Come on, Michelle, tell me how much you hate me and America.

Lorne Gunter of the National Post reports:

Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.

The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January “was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average.”

China is surviving its most brutal winter in a century. Temperatures in the normally balmy south were so low for so long that some middle-sized cities went days and even weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled it was too cold or too icy to repair them.

There have been so many snow and ice storms in Ontario and Quebec in the past two months that the real estate market has felt the pinch as home buyers have stayed home rather than venturing out looking for new houses.

In just the first two weeks of February, Toronto received 70 cm of snow, smashing the record of 66.6 cm for the entire month set back in the pre-SUV, pre-Kyoto, pre-carbon footprint days of 1950.

And remember the Arctic Sea ice? The ice we were told so hysterically last fall had melted to its “lowest levels on record? Never mind that those records only date back as far as 1972 and that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past.

The ice is back.

This is so good.  Read more, you global warmers!

Pray tell, what is a person worth for an honest day’s work? Not too long ago, the C.E.O. of Boeing left the aircraft firm to take over as the new C.E.O. at the Ford Motor Company, and it was announced a few days later that his annual pay would begin at about $25 million or so, with stock and other goodies added on. Presumably, he will stand to draw close to $40 or $50 million each year.

Something new? Hardly. Way back in the late 1980s, I remember doing a commentary asking the same question (what’s a person worth?) when it was announced that Lee Iacocca was receiving $23 million annually as his base salary and a few million more in bonuses as the new boss at Chrysler. At the time, I said: “Wow! Twenty-three million big ones!”

In subsequent years, that has become “peanuts” for a variety of moguls in American industry or even some of the professions. For example, Bill Gates, the wealthiest of all bosses in the world, was reportedly drawing an annual salary of just a few million bucks, but his accumulated wealth is over the $50 billion mark. I can’t even gather enough breath to say, “Wow! Fifty billion big ones!”

Returning to the Lee Iacocca era, Iacocca at the time was drawing more than 11,000 bucks an hour for a 40-hour week — and he wasn’t then, and certainly wouldn’t be now, the highest paid executive in the U.S. or in the world. In that context, it’s almost a joke to get excited over proposals to increase the minimum wage in the U.S. to $9 or $10 an hour.

Fortune magazine’s list of the biggest companies each year indicates many salaries ranging from $3 million a year and up — without counting the multimillion-dollar salaries in pro sports. Now, that’s another topic that I will be taking up at another time. But I have to ask once more: Is anybody really worth that much money, particularly in view of the fact that the most important man in the world, the President of the United States, gets a salary of less than half a million bucks a year?

Is Lee Iacocca, Bill Gates, or any other director of a large corporation worth that much more than you or I can collect each year? Do they contribute that much more to the community in which they live or in our society than the rest of us do? Is Iacocca, Gates, or any other executive worth millions or even billions more than the President?

I’m as strong a believer in the capitalist, free-enterprise system as anyone. But I think there is a great danger brewing in a free society when the gap between the very rich and the very poor or even the middle-income citizen gets as wide as it is today. And the gap is growing even wider by the year.

Just a few years ago, Congress passed what it called a “tax-reform act.” But the result was that it actually worked to the advantage of the ultra-rich — while socking it to middle-income America, the largest group of citizens in the U.S. and the hope and lifeblood of this unbelievably generous nation.

It goes without saying that there ought to be a law to correct all this, but I must be honest and say I’m not sure what that law should be, nor how it can correct the lopsided nature of American incomes. We must find a fair way to close the gap between the wealthy few and the many middle-income wage earners in the U.S. — before revolutionaries scrap the best democratic republic ever conceived.

I can’t make this stuff up.  Here he is pictured in a 2006 trip to Kenya.  Full Muslim garb.  This is better than the picture of Dukakis in the tank.  Bye-bye Democrats.  You have lost the election.