I don’t really know what to make of this.

According to emails obtained by WikiLeaks, which is led by the embattled Julian Assange, Republican Senator John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign staff allegedly had evidence that Democrats stuffed ballot boxes in Pennsylvania and Ohio on election night. However, the candidate chose not to pursue voter fraud, according to internal emails obtained from the private intelligence and analysis firm, Stratfor.

We all have to draw our own conclusions on this one, or wait to see what, if anything, happens next.

My guess is, truth or fiction, nothing will happen as the teflon coated Democratic Party seems to get away with whatever they like these days while the mainstream media runs interference for them.

At Conservative Byte…

Although the national debt under President Barack Obama has increased $4 trillion since he took office in 2009, as a presidential candidate in 2008 Obama criticized then-President George W. Bush for adding $4 trillion to the national debt, saying it was “unpatriotic” and also “irresponsible” to saddle future generations with such a large national debt.

Hmmmmm…

The flashback video is here.

Kind of reminds me of one president recalling a certain other president’s “misery index” to point out that it far exceeded that of a president Mr. Misery Index had used it to criticize.

That Obama character sure does put his foot in his mouth an awful lot, doen’t he, before the fact.

Just when I thought I was done posting for the day, I ran across this one at Yahoo! News.

Here was President Obama having an “aside” with Russia’s President Medvedev, apparently unaware that there was a live mic present.

President Obama: On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved but it’s important for him to give me space.

President Medvedev: Yeah, I understand. I understand your message about space. Space for you…

President Obama: This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility.

President Medvedev: I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir.

The video is here.

And here I thought Mayor Bloomberg’s despotic administration in New York was beyond the pale.

Well, it appears that KingImamHis Excellency President — that’s it, President (or unrerasonable facsimile thereof) Obama has outdone Bloomberg the Weasel by bestowing upon himself the power to enact an all-encompassing martial law over we, the people and all our assets as he sees fit.

From the Washington Times:

President Obama has given himself the powers to declare martial law — especially in the event of a war with Iran. It is a sweeping power grab that should worry every American.

On March 16, the White House released an executive order, “National Defense Resources Preparedness.” The document is stunning in its audacity and a flagrant violation of the Constitution. It states that, in case of a war or national emergency, the federal government has the authority to take over almost every aspect of American society. Food, livestock, farming equipment, manufacturing, industry, energy, transportation, hospitals, health care facilities, water resources, defense and construction — all of it could fall under the full control of Mr. Obama. The order empowers the president to dispense these vast resources as he sees fit during a national crisis.

{Emphasis mine, contempt for the Constitution Mr. Obama’s}

More:

In short, the order gives Mr. Obama the ability to impose martial law. He now possesses the potential powers of a dictator. The order is a direct assault on individual liberties, private property rights and the rule of law. It is blatantly unconstitutional. The executive branch is arrogating responsibilities precluded by the Constitution without even asking the permission of Congress. The order gives Mr. Obama a blank check to erect a centralized authoritarian state. This is a law one would expect to find in Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela or Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Sure, His Majesty uses the possibility of looming conflict with Iran (over their nukes) as a reason to somehow justify this extreme measure, but that is just an excuse, like his moratorium on deep water oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico in response to the BP oil spill or his and his fellow leftists’ use of any firearm incident as an excuse to pursue their anti-2nd Amendment agenda.

Would that tempt Mr. Obama to claim a state of emergency and thereby implement his executive order? No one knows the answer. And we shouldn’t have to find out. The president does not — and should not - have the authority to subordinate the entire private economy to the government, especially without the consent of Congress and the American people. It is national socialism masquerading as military security.

Amen to that!

Read the entire article here.

Ah, New Yawk City.

First, there’s this:

Nothing beats the New York Daily News headline here: “Her agony of de-feet!” Ah, puns.

Anyway, Brooklyn woman Kate Wilson is fighting a $50 summons she got for putting her injured leg up on the subway seats next to her. During rush hour, this would be a different issue, but Wilson insists there were empty seats all over the car. Also, her leg really hurt.

As one cop began to write her a summons for obstructing seating, Wilson tried to reason with the officers and told them she ran 4 miles through Prospect Park the day before.

It’s unclear if Wilson cares about the fine, or is just concerned with the principle of the matter. Either way, she did her best to talk her way out of the summons — and failed.

“I asked them if they had bigger fish to fry,” she recalled. “The police officer said, ‘Yeah, but we’re frying this one now.’ ”

Wilson, who works as an administrative assistant in the city, said she finally just bit her lip.

“It was a waste of resources,” she said. “I can’t help but believe this is happening to other people, but nobody comes forward.”

There’s a lot of this kind of thing going around under the auspices of the Bloomberg Administration, whose first priority seems to be to wrest every dime posible from the grip of the New York resident-at-large through penalties, fines, taxes, permit fees, etc.

Personally, I think any cop who would enforce a law such as that described in the above linked article under those circumstances (an almost empty subway car in which the “victim” is interfering with no one by putting her foot up) would be well suited to serve a more totalitarian regime, such as that of Fidel, or maybe Chavez. Such fascistic policemen certainly don’t belong in a free country, but I suppose that’s just one gal’s opinion.

************

Recently, a friend and I, out for dinner in Manhattan, were strolling past Carnegie Hall and, near a corner, we espied a homeless person bundled beneath a heavy coat and a hat against the cold with a large cup in front of him/her for “donations”.

The figure was so pitiful, I couldn’t help but drop a ten dollar bill into the cup.

As we walked on, my friend remarked that between the hat and coat, we couldn’t even see the homeless person underneath, and amused by a sudden thought whose zaniness probably comes from too many years, on and off, of exposure to Seth’s peculiar sense of humor.

“There’s a way we could make a pile of easy money,” I quipped, “we could buy a whole bunch of hats and large baggy coats at a thrift store and set them up around Manhattan, to look just like our undomiciled friend back there, each with a “homeless & hungry” sign and a cup in front of it. Passersby will assume there’s a needy person underneath each one and put money in the cups, and all we’d have to do is go around periodically and collect the money from each cup!”

************

And then there’s this one from the N.Y. Post:

It’s the job that keeps on giving.

Area longshoremen — including as many as 10 relatives of the late Vincent “The Chin” Gigante — pocket huge bonuses on top of their already overtime-bloated paychecks, according to Waterfront Commission records.

Those bonuses are guaranteed by union contracts — and were as high as $20,000 per worker last year, the commission said.

Ralph Gigante — The Chin’s highly paid dockworker nephew — somehow scored a deal with his employer to get an annual bonus worth 8 percent of his previous year’s gross pay, according to his testimony to the commission in 2010.

Not bad for a guy who — in another back-door dream deal reported by The Post yesterday — is paid pretty much 24 hours a day, seven days a week, all year long.

Gigante, whose hourly rate is $36, made $406,659 in 2011, including bonuses.

He’s not the only Gigante getting paid handsomely to work on the New York waterfront, which receives billions in public money for infrastructure upgrades from the Port Authority.

Nice work if you can get it.

….Included in that number is Robert Fyfe, one of The Chin’s sons-in-law.

Like Ralph Gigante — one of the highest-paid employees at the port — Fyfe is a union shop steward, according to testimony in commission hearings.

Fyfe’s wife — The Chin’s daughter — Yolanda insisted to The Post her husband makes an honest living.

“Like everyone else, we are living paycheck to paycheck,” she said. “It’s not like we have any connection to anything.”

Right, of course.

There are similar stories on an almost regular basis of such “quite fortunate” individuals in New York in a wide variety of areas in both the public and private sectors.

Paycheck to paycheck, honest living, heh heh heh…

1. From the latest Ann Coulter column:

One theory for why Barack Obama pushed the contraception mandate right now is that it helps Rick Santorum. Others theorize it’s because Obama is an anti-religious bigot with a left-wing agenda. Reasonable minds can disagree on this.

But it may end up helping Mitt Romney by reminding people that the “individual mandate” is the least of the problems with ObamaCare. (The “individual mandate” is simply the legal argument for why ObamaCare is unconstitutional in a country that has accepted Social Security and Medicare as constitutional.)

This isn’t a Catholic issue or even a religious issue. Conservatives are falling into the Democrats’ trap by denouncing it as such. It’s a freedom issue. (Or, as Democrats call it, “the F-word.”)

If liberals like it, it’s subsidized; if they don’t, it’s prohibited. And now they can impose their left-wing authoritarianism on the entire country by calling their mandates and prohibitions “insurance.”

Well put!

The column here.

2. ON ANOTHER NOTE

As I’ve said previously, the big bad Wolf and I don’t have a computer at home, in fact our cell phones are of the basic variety used to hold telephone conversations, not text or surf the web. We do our best, for the most part, to live an analog life.

I’ve been spending a lot more time than usual in Manhattan of late, where there are Apple stores (4 of them!) and of course computers in the New York Public Library — hence, more posting.

I don’t know how it is elsewhere, but here in NYC, aside from the overcrowding and the blatantly rude attitudes of most of the locals, it’s getting more and more like something out of Logan’s Run or some other decades-old SciFi saga every day.

Take the subway, there are recorded voices warning of everything from stepping in the gap between the train and the platform when you exit or enter, about safeguarding your possessions and keeping an eye out for abandoned luggage (if you see something, say something). There are recorded voices advocating safety on escalators, others extoling the virtues of substance sniffing K-9s while warning you not to pet them nor get too close.

There’s even a recording you hear at 59th Street and Madison Avenue: “The walk sign is on to cross Madison Avenue…”

Between all the people on the sidewalks and (dangerously) in their cars texting with others and proper conversation seemingly on the way out (who needs to talk to, say, his or her spouse on arriving home when they’ve been running a text dialogue all day long, detailing their every respective movement, what they had for lunch and their every thought from their A.M. goodbye to their evening commute?), we have all but become a race of high-technology dependent mutants.

Maybe that last bit explains the apparent increase we hear on the streets in couples arguing with a “you haven’t listened to a word I’ve said!” theme…

Meanwhile, in the Nanny State millieu.

Yes,

Conservative Christian groups are outraged that a school decided a lunch a preschooler’s mother prepared was not healthy enough and replaced it with chicken nuggets.

The elementary school in Raeford, North Carolina, decided the four-year-old’s lunch — which consisted of a turkey-and-cheese sandwich, banana, potato chips, and apple juice — did not meet nutritional standards established by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Why? Because it did not contain a vegetable.

The USDA guidelines say lunches, even those brought from home, must consist of one serving each of meat, milk, and grain, and two servings of fruit or vegetables. Those guidelines — introduced last month as “historic improvements” by the federal government — spring from the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act championed by First Lady Michelle Obama as part of her Let’s Move! Campaign and signed into law by President Barack Obama.

HELP!!!! This is just going too far!!!!

It’s little surprise that: …spring from the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act championed by First Lady Michelle Obama as part of her Let’s Move! Campaign…

Dr. Janice Crouse, senior fellow for the Beverly LaHaye Institute at Concerned Women for America, sees the incident at the North Carolina school as historic in another sense. She says it is just another way government intrudes on the rights of parents.

“It’s another way that the government says it knows best, another way to waste taxpayer dollars, quite frankly, and to really irritate parents,” Crouse tells OneNewsNow.

Ooooh, if these commie-bamas had been around when Wolf and I were raising our two sons and had tried that same garbage!

At this point, had I been a drinking woman, I would no doubt be reaching, hands trembling with anger, for a bottle of something suitably strong… Instead, I’m being “good” and merely gnashing my teeth with rage that this country, founded in the name of freedom, is gradually becoming anything but as the left slowly and inexorably advances toward a takeover as it has in so many other countries where, like here, those of right thinking persuation increasingly sit by and allow those who would deprive us, from within, of liberty to have their way…

At last, a scientific explanation may have been discovered for the existence of “progressives”.

Liberals may owe their political outlook partly to their genetic make-up, according to new research from the University of California, San Diego, and Harvard University. Ideology is affected not just by social factors, but also by a dopamine receptor gene called DRD4. The study’s authors say this is the first research to identify a specific gene that predisposes people to certain political views.

Imagine that!

Read the rest here.

…couldn’t blame George W. Bush enough for the federal response to Katrina, expending so much hot air that one has to wonder if perhaps that’s where they discovered what they thought was evidence of global warming, yet here we learn that Osama Ooops, sorry, Mohammed Damn! Sorry again, wait, I got it…Saddam Whoops, okay, B. Hussein Obama, Janet Napolitano and their Khoir of Kommunism aren’t even bothering to adequately fund and staff what is arguably the most effective (when staffed and funded to the point of operational status) search & rescue/ maritime emergency response organization in this nation.

I’m talking about the U.S. Coast Guard.

The Coast Guard’s plans to cut 1,100 uniformed personnel in 2011 and reduce some of its missions at a time it must respond to an enormous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico certainly highlight the stark choices Coasties face over the next few years. Meanwhile, the Navy is moving into the littoral and increasing its focus on anti-drug and anti-piracy operations, raising questions about just what the Coastie’s future roles and missions will be. Robbin Laird, a defense consultant who has been working on Coast Guard issues, penned the following commentary about the Coast Guard and its future.

The Coast Guard is being starved of resources just when the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico seems to demonstrate again just how important the service’s expertise is in responding to such events.

The Obama administration is not fully funding for catastrophic spill equipment for the Coast Guard. And with elimination of the Coast Guard’s national strike fleet coordination center at Elizabeth City, North Carolina next year, the nation will lose a vital organization that manages all Coast Guard responses, and is also the key player for inter-agency coordination and leadership of scores of state and local, commercial and NGO responders.

Those groups play vital roles in preventing and responding to spills. Success requires the authorities possessed by the Coast Guard, highly competent people to run it and adequate equipment. The Coast Guard is the only maritime organization that can do these jobs on the vital waterways of our country and it does not have enough assets to do the job in the Gulf of Mexico, where a BP oil rig exploded last week, killing 11 and creating an enormous oil spill that threatens the Gulf Coast.

As a senior Coast Guard official commented in a New Orleans interview 10 days before the explosion that “we have not enough inspectors and inadequate numbers of ships and helos to secure the emerging deep water oil enterprise being built off of the Gulf Coast. This enterprise will be further and deeper than the current offshore oil drilling.

These facilitates will not only drill oil, but will process oil at sea. We must go further than we normally do to regulate and work with the private sector in this area.”

The Coast Guard has worked within its limits to deal with the crisis. The Department of Homeland Security’s leadership has not responded to the crisis by trying to get the USCG more deployed assets. Instead, the Administration has deployed Navy assets and has scurried to find private inspectors they can hire on a temporary basis to deal with the crisis.

The men and women of the Coast Guard are highly capable, brave and dedicated people, but like most services, they need to be properly equipped and their units realistically manned in order to do their job.

At this rate, it’ll be late January, 2013 before our government has its priorities straight!

…and as a result, I’m not all that surprised.

Here is how the press release reads : “The Department of Justice will work tirelessly to determine the full involvement of any and all actors in this horrible crime, and to ensure that anyone who played a role in the offense is prosecuted to the full extent of federal law,” said Loretta King, Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division. “We will conduct a thorough investigation that will complement and build upon the fine work of the Sedgwick County District Attorney and other state and local law enforcement agencies.”

The Justice department’s announcement also states ” The federal probe will consist of a thorough review of the evidence and an assessment of any potential violations of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE Act) or other federal statutes. The FACE Act was enacted by Congress in 1994 to establish federal criminal penalties and civil remedies for violent, obstructionist or damaging conduct affecting reproductive health care providers and recipients.”

In the wake of the Tiller murder, the U.S. Attorney General, Eric Holder, ordered the U.S. Marshals Service to “offer protection to appropriate people and facilities around the country.” The directive was given in the apparent belief that other violent incidents might take place.

Meanwhile,

Some conservatives have questioned the extent of the reaction to the Tiller killing by the Justice department. They have pointed to an incident in Little Rock, Arkansas, on Monday of this week when a Muslim convert opened fire at a military recruiting center, killing one young man and wounding another. The conservatives have noted that there was no indication from the Obama administration that it feared there might be similar incidents at other military recruiting facilities or any attempt to link the Muslim man’s actions to a possible larger Muslim campaign against U.S. military personnel or facilities.

And while President Barack Obama issued a statement saying he was “shocked and outraged” by the Tiller murder, he has made no public statements about the death of the young recruit in Little Rock.

Hmmm.

Not that it pertains to the above, but I was reading somewhere today that while the New York Times condemned, in no uncertain terms, references to Obama’s middle name during campaign season, they were more than happy to flaunt it while he was over there kissing up to the Egyptians.

Yes, Hmmm.

…to Great Britain? The English! The Brits!???

England has got to be the single most globally streetwise nation on earth — in the history of their great country, they have had colonies all over the world, learning first-hand of copious diverse cultures, religious customs, governance systems, ethnic mindsets and so forth and Englishmen travel the globe as easily and familiarly as most others move about their own countries, yet their government sits by and not only allows Islam to transition her gradually into the realm of the Sha’aria, but also prosecutes those who protest this disgraceful surrender.

This is unacceptable.

The Brits need to have an aggressive chat with their politicians, pronto!