Archive for March, 2009
Heaven help the fools who legislate our rights away…
The Tea Party spirit continues to spread — and now, to people who can sing.
The video above is marvelous (h/t MichelleMalkin).
Our favorite part is when it calls Chris Dodd out for helping to rip up the Constitution every afternoon.
Just watching this, it further reminds us, especially at the end, how much Democrats continue to set the stage for a patriotic conservative from somewhere out west to roar onto the national stage in 2012 to answer Obama/Carter with a new Reagan.
A Reagan who could very well look like this:
Is Chelsea Clinton getting married this summer?
Go ahead and laugh at the National Enquirer, but it gets things right more often than not.
The Enquirer believes Chelsea Clinton is planning her wedding for this summer, to Wall Street trader Marc Mezvinsky – and apparently it will take place on a hill somewhere overlooking the ocean.
We have to say, Chelsea Clinton is one of the nicest, smartest, most personable people we ever met on the campaign trail. Without a doubt, she is the greatest accomplishment of her parents. What a wonderful daughter, who worked so hard for her mother’s campaign, and was ALWAYS so kind to and appreciative of all of her mother’s supporters and volunteers.
We can’t say enough nice things about Chelsea, and always wish her happiness in everything she does.
So, if a wedding is coming, it would be a wonderful blessing this summer.
Chelsea certainly deserves a beautiful, happy occasion — so if she’s planning one, we hope she gets it.
Her general incompetence, not her stance on abortion, should keep Kathleen Sebelius from becoming Secretary of Health and Human Services
Kathleen Sebelius is one of the worst Governors in the nation.
There are only two things she excels at: incompetence, and zombieism.
And zombieism isn’t even (technically) a real thing, but it’s the best description we can come up with for her appearance on television, whenever she has tried to plead the case for anything important (or when she embarrassed herself in January 2008 by turning the Democrats’ State of the Union rebuttal into an Obama campaign commercial — and a poorly delivered, sleep-inducing one at that).
The MSM is intent on skirting the issue of Sebelius’ incompetence and lack of all the necessary tools and skills to make healthcare reform in this country a reality. Instead, the MSM claims Sebelius will be attacked because of her stance on abortion.
Abortion and “Gay Marriage” are the two Pavlovian bells the MSM rings when it wants to distract the public from something else, and to derail a substantive argument with zealotry and emotional terrorism.
The sad thing is, it works like a charm every time.
For Republicans, Sebelius might actually be an ideal Obama H&HS Secretary, as she will not accomplish a single thing in her tenure. Because of her lack of general intelligence, political ability, common sense, or charisma, she will fail at every initiative she attempts, and will most likely become so discouraged by her own performance that after attempting three or four things, she’ll just start coming into the office every day to hold meetings that don’t matter and make objects d’art from the paper clips and staples on her clutter-free, accomplishments-bare desk.
Sounds a lot like her time as Governor of Kansas.
For Democrats who actually want to see healthcare reformed, Sebelius is a terrible choice.
As much as we don’t like him, Howard Dean would have been a better pick. As much as the people of Michigan don’t like her, Jennifer Granholm would have been better than Sebelius. We are stunned we are about to say this, but even CLAIRE McCASKILL, the absolute worst member of the United States Senate, could have done a better job as H&HS Secretary than Sebelius (McCaskill, though proven unable to think for herself or make good decisions, at least has a fire inside her that pushes for the causes her children bug her to believe in).
Sebelius is as fired up and ready to fight as a soggy cucumber sandwich on moldy Wonder bread.
Ed Rendell would have been a wonderful H&HS Secretary — because he’d kick ass and take names, which is what’s needed at one of the most Soviet of all of our government departments. When something is as broken as Health and Human Services, and is so riddled with chaos and ineptitude, a milquetoast incompetent like Sebelius is the last thing that Department needs, since it’s filled to capacity with just that to begin with.
The abortion business could be the MSM looking for a story, or it could be an ingenious circumvention of the real flaw in Sebelius’ candidacy: her own lack of ability, energy, or capacity to actually do the job that’s being put in front of her. If people are all fired up along the usual abortion battle lines, perhaps the thinking is that no one will notice Sebelius is the wrong person for the position — because in the default battle mode everyone’s fallen into for 30 years, everything else becomes irrelevant.
And that works to great advantage for someone as irrelevant as Kathleen Sebelius.
Tuesday Open Thread
What’s on your mind today?
A few things we are thinking about this morning:
(1) Chris Dodd looks like he is in serious trouble in Connecticut. Democrats here in Chicago think he will retire and not seek re-election, because he could be defeated in a primary challenge. Good riddance, we say. And in two years, he can take Claire McCaskill with him.
(2) Sarah Palin has a huge opportunity in front of her: it looks like the Left is in full attack mode on her, trying to make her the great villain of the Republican party that Democrats can rally against, now that everyone admits the assault on Rush Limbaugh was an enormous failure. Here in Boystown, misogynistic attacks against Sarah Palin have never really stopped — but we stopped going to our formerly favorite bar here, Sidetrack, because they keep playing videos that mock Palin. The Left watched Milk too many times and think they can resurrect Anita Bryant’s brand of Cruella de villainy and repackage it with Palin, but it’s not going to work. Rush’s ratings SOARED once Obama personally lowered the office of the President to attack a radio talk show host. If Palin talks policy effectively, and stands tall with good humor, wit, and her natural grace, she could capitalize on these attacks…if Democrats want to make her the face of the Republican party, they better be prepared for what they get.
(3) We’re still waiting for the other shoe to drop with the Obama Trillion Dollar Spending Bill, in terms of the true scope of the graft and corruption stuffed into that bill revealing itself. By June, we bet a better picture of what’s happening with the infrastructure projects will become clear. That’s where most of the money is going to be stolen or wasted — anything having to do with construction, especially in states like Illinois or Ohio.
(4) Did you hear that the New York Times killed a story it was going to run on ACORN in October because it knew it would hurt Obama? That’s not surprising — it was a story about Obama giving money to ACORN, as well as providing ACORN with substantive support in terms of large donor lists. We’ve told you before that we personally know of two stories Ben Smith at Politico sat on because he didn’t want to hurt Obama. This kind of stuff needs to be remembered as Nancy Pelosi talks about bailouts for the media. Why should American taxpayers foot the bill to save partisan propaganda machines? If the shoe was on the other foot and the National Review or the Wall Street Journal was in trouble, Democrats wouldn’t come running to save them. Tax dollars should be nonpartisan, as they’re collected from all of us (except Obama Cabinet nominees), and shouldn’t be spent on partisan ventures like the New York Times.
What’s on your mind today?
Just a quick note
Just a little note that the next few days are going to be light with postings. Our dear friend Lionel has taken a turn for the worse — he is battling prostate cancer and doesn’t seem to be catching any breaks. We’re going to be seeing him later this week, and so we’re putting most of our effort into making something special for him: a big photomosaic with pictures of all of his friends. So, it’s Arts & Crafts time around here, which means less time on the keyboard in front of the computer screen.
If you’ve been praying for Lionel, we really appreciate it, and ask that you send him another round of good vibes. At this point, it doesn’t seem like there’s much any of us can do but make Lionel as happy as possible, and to keep letting him know how much we all care about him.
Why do sex scandals keep happening at Oprah's school in South Africa?
Less than two years old, Oprah’s school for girls in South Africa has already been rocked by two sex scandals.
Obviously, this was not Oprah’s intent when setting up the school.
Being Oprah, the intent was most likely eating a large amount of candy, and the school itself is some sort of elaborate Rube Goldberg scheme to do just that, the intricacies of which we couldn’t begin to fathom, but surely involve gooey marshmallow centers at some point down the line.
But, it is another example of what happens when someone with an awful lot of money and great media fanfare, but who doesn’t really know what they are doing, is let loose upon something bureaucratic and deceptively complex.
A school is more than the sum of its physical parts: books, a campus, students, teachers, computers, whatever else Oprah bought.
Administering the school, creating a culture of respect and support, installing measures to make sure abuse doesn’t happen: you can’t buy these things. You cannot wish for them, or hope they will happen, or shout CHANGE! and they’ll magically appear.
It’s much, much, much more complex than that.
Since this is the second time a sex scandal broke out at her school, we wonder how seriously Oprah took the first instance, and what she did to make sure a second episode didn’t happen. Evidently, she didn’t do enough.
The children in that school deserve better. Oprah was generous in providing such a wonderful environment for learning; it’s too bad she can’t ensure the children who attend her school aren’t abused like this.
Monday Open Thread
What’s on your mind today?
Are you keeping track of the G20 protests in London this week?
What else in the news are you watching?
Why does it matter that the Vice President's daughter does cocaine, when no one cared how much cocaine Obama did?
It’s ridiculous that anyone cares what Joe Biden’s daughter is up to — or how much cocaine she does — when the MSM never cared a fig about how much cocaine Obama did through the years – and that’s something he wrote about in his books.
Most people aren’t aware Biden even has a daughter, since the focus is usually on his two sons, Beau and Hunter. Whatever she does to occupy herself through the course of a day HAS to be better and more productive than anything HRH Princess Caroline of Kennedy is up to, so we say leave Ashley Biden alone.
She isn’t running for anything, she doesn’t surrogate speak for her father, and she’s never been a poster child for anti-drug efforts (unlike someone like Michael Phelps, whose drug use is newsworthy because of his hypocritical involvement in Just Say No campaigns).
Until such time as the MSM feels compelled to ask Obama questions about his New York dealer, how much cocaine he did through the years, and whether or not those habits followed him to Illinois from New York, Biden’s daughter’s antics shouldn’t be an issue.
Sadly, we’ve found through the years that the people we know who are most likely to abuse drugs are those whose parents either have a lot of money and solve all their problems for them, or they’re in the medical or legal professions. For some reason, people who’ve gone to law or med school feel laws that apply to others don’t apply to them – especially the young lawyers we know in New York and Chicago, who definitely believe drug laws aren’t applicable to them (because they went to Harvard, University of Chicago, or NYU). It seems like these people believe those diplomas either give them status high enough to avoid prosecution, or that they know enough of the right people to keep themselves out of jail no matter what they do.
And none of these people have famous parents. We can only imagine what they would be like if that was the case.
Sad, but true.
Welcome to the Olympics! Rio builds walls around two of its slums
Rio is the only city that could beat Chicago for the 2016 Olympics.
Here in Chicago, people pretty much consider it a done deal that we’ll win the Olympics (we also consider it a done deal that the city will go bankrupt putting these games on, and that they will be much, much, much more trouble than they are worth). The only way Rio can beat Chicago is if Rio get ahold of its crime problem.
Large parts of the city are in perpetual anarchy. Sporadically, the police occupy whole neighborhoods, get them under control, but then have to regroup to occupy and control new areas that have flared up. We don’t see how Rio controls these problems enough to host the Olympics.
Rio’s latest strategy is to just wall off whole sections of town that are difficult to control.
And they are doing this just in time for the IOC’s latest round of visits to Olympics hopeful cities. Chicago’s visit will be in April, and our Mayor is pulling out all the stops to beautify and repair all areas IOC officials will be taken to (this is done at the expense of repair work and beautification of other parts of town, since the Olympics have come first for the last several years in Chicago).
At least we’re not building any walls around anthing here in Chicago, though.
Hooray! Louisiana is more corrupt than Illinois!
Bad news for New Orleans, good news for Chicago.
Louisiana is ranked as a more vile and terrible place than Illinois.
Hooray!
We may be a cesspool of graft and corruption, but the Pelican State’s a big, festering swamp.
Hooray!
