Okay, well, first off, James Taranto got me started earlier while I was reading Best Of The Web Today.

Who says President Obama hasn’t accomplished anything since taking office? To his Nobel Peace Prize and two Grammys, we can add a sports record, Politico reports:

Obama has only been in office for just over nine months, but he’s already hit the links as much as President Bush did in over two years.

CBS’ Mark Knoller–an unofficial documentarian and statistician of all things White House-related–wrote on his Twitter feed [Saturday] that, “Today - Obama ties Pres. Bush in the number of rounds of golf played in office: 24. Took Bush 2 yrs & 10 months.”

Yes, we can!

Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports from Kabul that “eight American troops were killed in two separate bomb attacks Tuesday in southern Afghanistan, making October the deadliest month of the war for U.S. forces since the 2001 invasion to oust the Taliban.”

We know what you’re thinking, but this is not Obama’s fault.

Afghanistan is someone else’s mess, so why don’t you grab a mop? As White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel told CNN last week:

It’s clear that basically we had a war for eight years that was going on, that’s adrift. That we’re beginning at scratch, and just from the starting point, after eight years. . . . Before you commit troops, which is–not irreversible, but puts you down a certain path–before you make that decision, there’s a set of questions that have to have answers that have never been asked. And it’s clear after eight years of war, that’s basically starting from the beginning, and those questions never got asked. And what I find interesting and just intriguing from this debate in Washington, is that a lot of people who all of a sudden say, this is now the epicenter of the war on terror, you must do this now, immediately approve what the general said–where, before, it never even got on the radar screen for them.

Hang on a second. It has now been 51 weeks since Obama was elected president, and more than nine months since he took office, and he’s just now getting around to asking the “questions . . . that have never been asked”?

But that’s not really fair to Obama. After all, he has a busy schedule, what with golf games and pitching the International Olympic Committee and date nights and Democratic fund-raisers and health care and the U.N. Security Council and Sunday morning talk shows and saving the planet from global warming and celebrating the dog’s birthday and defending himself against Fox News and all.

Remember how the lefties used to rail at George W. Bush every time he took a break at his ranch, played a round of golf or spent a weekend at Camp David as though he were goofing off, knowing fully well that he was, like any POTUS, “on duty” 24/7?

At least Dubya addressed problems directly and did what he had to do with neither procrastination nor the blatant indecision we see festering in the Oval Office today.

Next!

Thomas Sowell talks about what amounts to the dismantling of America by the Obama Administration.

Just one year ago, would you have believed that an unelected government official — not even a Cabinet member confirmed by the Senate, but simply one of the many “czars” appointed by the President — could arbitrarily cut the pay of executives in private businesses by 50 percent or 90 percent?

Did you think that another “czar” would be talking about restricting talk radio? That there would be plans afloat to subsidize newspapers — that is, to create a situation where some newspapers’ survival would depend on the government liking what they publish?

Did you imagine that anyone would even be talking about having a panel of so-called “experts” deciding who could and could not get life-saving medical treatments?

Scary as that is from a medical standpoint, it is also chilling from the standpoint of freedom. If you have a mother who needs a heart operation or a child with some dire medical condition, how free would you feel to speak out against an administration that has the power to make life and death decisions about your loved ones?

Does any of this sound like America?

How about a federal agency giving school children material to enlist them on the side of the president? Merely being assigned to sing his praises in class is apparently not enough.

How much of America would be left if the federal government continued on this path? President Obama has already floated the idea of a national police force, something we have done without for more than two centuries.

Read the entire Thomas Sowell column here.

Yep, that’s what millions of irresponsible Americans placed at the helm of the United States last November, and may they pay twice as much for their stupidity as the rest of us.

Shame on them!

…a few minutes to check my email before being obligated for the rest of the day, and right off the bat, ran across a perfect example of a liberal elitist in action can be found here.

Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Michael Moore told CNSNews.com “it’s absolutely a good thing” for government to drive private health insurance companies out of business and replace them with a single-payer system.

President Obama, Moore said, should stop trying to sneak a single-payer health care system through the “backdoor” and come straight at it instead. Moore said he would advise the president to tell the American people: “Look, we should be like every other Western Democracy and have a single-payer health care system. Pure and simple.”

Do you think that extreme leftist, disgusting, fat tub of treasonous combination of lard and excrement Michael Moore will, if the “single payer” system is passed, victimize himself with it as he is so determined to see the unwashed masses© so victimized?

Of course not!

A corpulent human balloon like that would no doubt be terrified, given his certain future of heart problems and other obesity related ailments, of subjecting himself to the government controlled healthcare he wishes on the rest of us, and I’d bet that if he wasn’t a very rich man (wealth “earned” by means that only a traitor could lay claim to), we wouldn’t hear a peep from the blimp-like son-of-a-bitch about this.

Later.

…from today’s Washington Times Online. I’m somewhat pressed for time this morning, I have some people to meet, but figured I’d share them.

Here we have a fine example of the term, “haste makes waste” in action, in this case mongers of political agendas in such a hurry to blow our hard earned tax money that they misinformed the public, largely through failure to do their homework and largely to get their itinerary pushed through in a hurry, in an un-thought-out, unconstitutional, just plain stupid act, part of the idiotic and ill advised TARP program.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and former Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. misled the public about the financial weakness of Bank of America and other early recipients of the government’s $700 billion Wall Street bailout, creating “unrealistic expectations” about the companies and damaging the program’s credibility, according to a report by the program’s independent watchdog.

The federal government last October loaned Bank of America and eight other “healthy” financial institutions a total of $125 billion - the initial payout from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP - in an attempt to avoid a series of major bank collapses that would push the sputtering economy into a free fall or depression.

The rationale for giving money to stable banks and not failing ones, regulators said, was that such institutions would be better able to lend money and thus unfreeze tight credit markets - a major factor in last year’s Wall Street losses.

Right. Now the American taxpayer gets to pay the price for the blatant miscalculations due to political agendas and faulty thinking of a number of general purpose assholes.

Moving right along, we have the messiah Barack Hussein, whose military expertise evidently outshines that of his generals, coming up with excuses as to why he’d rather allow U.S. servicemen and woman to die than to commit more troops where General McChrystal says they are needed. What does McChrystal know, anyway, right? He’s just a general, whereas Obama, the guy who once, for campaign reasons, said the war in Afghanistan is justified in order to compare it to Iraq (according to his excellency, unjustified) is so much more knowledgeable about warfare that, well,

One day after an attack in Afghanistan killed eight American soldiers, President Obama’s national security adviser downplayed both the importance of U.S. troop levels and the possibility of a Taliban return to power.

National security adviser James L. Jones suggested that Gen. McChrystal’s call for more troops must be tempered by diplomatic considerations as the president weighs how to deal with the 8-year-old war.

“Well, I think the end is much more complex than just about adding ‘X’ number of troops. Afghanistan is a country that’s quite large and that swallows up a lot of people,” the retired Marine general said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Right, let’s here more, Jones. What else did Obama instruct you to say, and being an ex-military man yourself, how does it feel to be a party to it?

The rest of the story can be found here.

…at the taxpayer’s expense, wherein the Democrats are misleading the American people (not a bad deal, bullshit people and make them pay for it!) about how the “Stimulus” is working.

They’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars to stimulate the economy, so Senate Democrats said Wednesday they might as well spend millions putting up signs to highlight where the money is being spent.

The road signs, which let motorists know the paving and construction projects they see are being paid for by the $787 billion economic stimulus program, have popped up across the country. In a 52-45 vote, the Senate decided the signs should stay.

Sure, why not? It’s just the taxpayer’s money, right? “Spend, spend, spend!” as the liberal credo goes.

“Why on earth would you want to hide from the American people the fact that the recovery package we passed is putting people to work?” asked Sen. Barbara Boxer, California Democrat, who took the lead in defending the expenditure. She said stimulus spending is beginning to improve the economy and charged that Republicans and Democrats who voted to strip out the funds are angry about that success.

“It’s my sense that there’s a frustration by the people who voted ‘no’ on the economic recovery act, the stimulus bill, there’s a frustration that it’s working. They predicted gloom and doom,” Mrs. Boxer said.

Campaigning at the expense of working Americans seems to be an institution that has really gained traction among Democrats of late, but then, it seems that the Obama Administration has set the stage for a new kind of government — kind of like one that can bill us for their spam and junk mail, a “we will like it!”

But Sen. Judd Gregg, the New Hampshire Republican who tried to excise the funds, called his amendment a no-brainer. He said it’s common sense to get rid of tens of millions of dollars in spending.

“These are self-congratulatory signs; they’re political signs. They’re so that lawmakers can pat themselves on the back,” he said. “But these signs cost money. Actually, when you add them all up, they cost a lot of money.”

Some localities have objected to the signs, arguing that they would rather spend the money on more projects. But Mr. Gregg said one community in New Hampshire was told no sign, no money for their original project.

Emphasis mine.

In the states’ rights department,

Also Wednesday, senators voted against allowing states to determine their own transportation funding priorities, such as repairing deficient bridges. A day earlier, the Senate voted against an effort by Sen. John McCain, Arizona Republican, to drop all of the pork-barrel earmark projects from the $67.7 billion transportation and housing spending bill and use the $1.7 billion slated for earmarks to modernize the nation’s air traffic control system instead.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, thanks largely to the liberals on the Hill, this country has come full circle, back to the same state of affairs good men died kicking out of here back in the 1770s.

Bummer.

Mr. Gregg acknowledged that this effort was as much a message as a cost-saving move. His amendment to the annual transportation spending bill would have banned putting up physical signs to tout stimulus transportation projects.

Five Democrats — Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and Charles E. Schumer of New York — voted with all 40 Republicans to try to strip the money, but their support was not enough.

With typical dumbass, idiotic, mares-eat-oats, shallowbrained, downright stupid, aimed-at-the-gullible liberal reasoning,

Mrs. Boxer called the effort “anti-jobs” and said the signs are an example of government transparency.

Methinks this is time, once again, to recall a quote by a commenter at a blog I used to visit about 6 years ago: “Arguing with a liberal is like standing in a bucket and trying to pick yourself up by the handle.”

That’s right.

Columnist Mona Charen (also an author I love to read) tells it spot on:

Arguably violating its embed agreement, the near universal press practice since 9/11, and the expressed wishes of the family, the Associated Press went ahead and published a photograph of mortally wounded Marine Lance Corporal Joshua “Bernie” Bernard, killed in action in Afghanistan. The AP also ignored the pleas of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who had implored the press agency as a “matter of judgment and common decency” not to publish the photo.

This is one of the reasons I have always had a bad taste in my mouth at the idea of “embedding” these lefty “journalists” among our brave troops in combat zones.

They are nothing but a bunch of feckless assholes with a political agenda that takes the place of things like good sense, tastful sensibilities and patriotism.

Bernard, 21, a devout Christian and Iraq War veteran from Maine, was described by his squad leader as “a true-heartedly very good guy . . . probably one of the best guys I’ve known in my entire life.” Bernard served as his unit’s point man and navigator. He lost his life on August 14 when he was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade that blew off one leg and badly mangled the other. The AP photo captured Bernard lying on the ground, two buddies attempting to help — a splash of red where one leg had been.

The AP’s justification of its decision is both pompous and dubious. “Images of U.S. soldiers fallen in combat have been rare in Iraq and Afghanistan, partly because it is unusual for journalists to witness them and partly because military guidelines have barred the showing of photographs until after families have been notified.” AP says it waited until after Bernard’s funeral to publish the photo, but the same could have been done before. There must have been hundreds of mortal injuries and deaths captured on camera by war correspondents since 2001.

Arguably violating its embed agreement, the near-universal press practice since 9/11, and the express wishes of the family, the Associated Press went ahead and published a photograph of mortally wounded Marine Lance Corporal Joshua “Bernie” Bernard, killed in action in Afghanistan. The AP also ignored the pleas of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who had implored the press agency as a “matter of judgment and common decency” not to publish the photo.

Bernard, 21, a devout Christian and Iraq War veteran from Maine, was described by his squad leader as “a true-heartedly very good guy . . . probably one of the best guys I’ve known in my entire life.” Bernard served as his unit’s point man and navigator. He lost his life on August 14 when he was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade that blew off one leg and badly mangled the other. The AP photo captured Bernard lying on the ground, two buddies attempting to help — a splash of red where one leg had been.

The AP’s justification of its decision is both pompous and dubious. “Images of U.S. soldiers fallen in combat have been rare in Iraq and Afghanistan, partly because it is unusual for journalists to witness them and partly because military guidelines have barred the showing of photographs until after families have been notified.” AP says it waited until after Bernard’s funeral to publish the photo, but the same could have been done before. There must have been hundreds of mortal injuries and deaths captured on camera by war correspondents since 2001.

The AP contends on the one hand that “the stories and photos” of Lance Corporal Bernard “conform with military regulations surrounding journalists embedded with U.S. forces” but then reminds us that “Critics . . . maintain some of the rules are aimed at sanitizing the war, minimizing the sacrifice and cruelty which were graphically depicted by images from the Civil War to Vietnam where such restrictions were not in place.” Which is it? Is the AP defying the embed agreement because they are no longer willing to “sanitize” the war, or are they simply publishing the first dead Marine photo they’ve ever laid hands on?

“AP journalists document world events every day,” the statement continued. “Afghanistan is no exception. We feel it is our journalistic duty to show the reality of the war there, however unpleasant and brutal that sometimes is.”

Right, sure. These mainstream media pukes are so transparent when they bullshit that all it does is help you realize how little they respect our intelligence.

There is something else that the AP perhaps did not consider. While for them a photo of a mortally wounded Marine is testimony to the brutality of war; and while for the family it is “disrespectful” (the father’s word); to America’s enemies it is a triumph. There are no universal standards. Our enemies are known to carry videos of the beheading of Nicholas Berg on their cell phones. And for those who’ve forgotten, Nick Berg was a completely innocent American noncombatant. Joshua Bernard would want to be remembered as he lived and served. Instead, the photo of his last moments will doubtless go viral on Islamist websites, where his suffering will be exulted over.

Why should that worry the AP? They are far left liberals, so anything that will help the enemy that they can explain away as “legal and acceptable” is all they need.

Like the NYT, AP, the alphabet networks, L.A.T., WaPO, CNN and the rest of that crowd are the nearest thing to traitors any news media can get without being prosecuted for treason.

‘Nough said, my blood’s boiling more than it needs to!

Read the column in its entirety.

…There’s no way I would want my children to be subjected to anything like this, not an organized address aimed at school children by a socialist, anti-Israel, anti-U.S. Constitution president like Barack Hussein Obama. I mean, one that’s actually providing advance instructions for how teachers should prep students for the event?

Look, we all know how the Democrats, under liberal control, have adapted the same indoctrination procedures as so many totalitarian governments, working through the classroom to program future adults.

When I was a kid and teachers/schools were more conservative and dedicated to teaching rather than forcing political indoctrination on their pupils, we were taught how to think, encouraged to analyse the facts of a matter and draw our own conclusions. Today, they teach students what to think.

Here we have a president who managed to get himself elected by millions of idiots by speaking for months without saying a damn thing of substance, a president who even now is trying to push a healthcare bill down our throats without saying what he means when he “explains” himself, and seeing as he’s running more and more into right thinking people who are asking questions he doesn’t want to answer (if he told the truth, something B. Hussein Obama finds repulsive, always has, always will, Americans would laugh his healthcare bill out of existence as they realized what an anti-America, anti-freedom entity we’ve (well, not me, not anyone with all their facilities intact) ushered into the White House, insulting our intelligence as he does.

But, he figures, if I work through the children, like we liberals have been doing with our gay rights and global warming agendas, at least I may be able to help program future generations.

On September 8, in what the Department of Education is touting as a “historic” speech, President Obama will be talking directly to students across the U.S., live on the White House website. But some parents and conservatives are blasting the president, calling the speech an excuse to brainwash American children.

Last month, in an interview with 11-year-old student reporter Damon Weaver, the president announced his big back-to-school plan:

“I’m going to be making a big speech to young people all across the country about the importance of education; about the importance of staying in school; how we want to improve our education system and why it’s so important for the country. So I hope everybody tunes in.”

Yeah, everybody tune in. Where liberals are concerned, communist indoctrination education needn’t concern itself with accurate history, the three Rs or anything else that might cloud the mindsof potential future Democrat voters.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan sent a letter to the nation’s principals, inviting schools to watch the speech and included suggested classroom activities. But Jim Greer, the chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, came out swinging against the planned speech. An excerpt from his statement:

“The address scheduled for September 8, 2009, does not allow for healthy debate on the President’s agenda, but rather obligates the youngest children in our public school system to agree with our President’s initiatives or be ostracized by their teachers and classmates.”

NBC spoke with Katie Gordon, a spokeswoman for the Florida Republican Party, who said the party’s “beef” is with the accompanying lesson plans. The guide for pre-K through grade 6 suggests questions students think about during the speech, such as “What is the President trying to tell me? What is the President asking me to do?”

The plan for grades 7-12 includes a “guided discussion,” with suggested topics: “What resonated with you from President Obama’s speech? What is President Obama inspiring you to do?”

“Guided discussion”, indeed.

The Cato Institute, a public-policy research foundation, issued a press release entitled “Hey Obama, Leave Those Kids Alone,” criticizing the “troubling buzzwords” in the lesson plans:

“It’s one thing for a president to encourage all kids to work hard and stay in school – that’s a reasonable use of the bully pulpit. It’s another thing entirely, however, to have the U.S. Department of Education send detailed instructions to public schools nationwide on how to glorify the president and the presidency, and push them to drive social change.”

That sounds about Obama’s speed, him bein’ a left winger an’ all.

…has been the provision within our legal system that allows conscienceless scumbags with law degrees to victimize anyone they please via frivolous, fraudulent and/or overstated lawsuits. I say “victimize” because our legal system compels people who are subjected to these lawsuits to hire attorneys to defend them and, win or lose, they are out the cost of their defense. Some of us can weather these costs, others can’t: The latter lose businesses, homes and sometimes the very money needed to survive.

John Stossel has a column up at today’s Jewish World Review that tells it like it is.

“We cannot use force.”

That was my response last week when a lawyer shouted at me, “You media types are bullies, too!”

We were arguing about my Wall Street Journal op-ed that called class-action and securities lawyers bullies and parasites who enrich themselves through extortion. It’s legal extortion, but extortion nonetheless.

These aggressive lawyers and their Naderite defenders don’t get it. Or they pretend they don’t.

Oh, they get it all right, they simply suffer from any lack of morals — can anybody say “parasite”?

Hmmmm, for some inexplicable reason, John Edwards comes to mind…

There are only two ways to do things in life: voluntarily or forced. We reporters may be obnoxious, intrusive, stupid, rude, etc., but we cannot force anyone to do anything. All our work is in the voluntary sector.

But litigation is force. When a plaintiff sues, a defendant is forced to mount a defense. If he settles or loses, he’s forced to pay. Government is the enforcer.

Exactly.

Just look at organizations like CAIR (Council on American Islamic Relations) in the aftermath of the Flying Imams debacle, where they opted to intimidate anyone who reported suspicious activity on the part of Muslims on airplanes by suing the people, causing them to have to spend money they couldn’t afford to spend on defense council (thankfully, Congress established the John Doe clause, nipping that one in the bud), or any ever-hungry, rank & file liberal trial lawyer.

Our legal system invites lawyers to act like bullies. Only in America can I sue you for dubious reasons, force you to spend thousands of dollars on lawyers (not to mention the psychic costs — the anxiety and lost sleep that lawsuits create), and when a judge rules that my claim is bunk, I don’t even have to say “sorry.” I can blithely move on to sue someone else. In other countries, I would have to pay your legal fees to at least compensate you for some of the financial damage I caused. “Loser pays,” it’s called.

As Shoprat pointed out in a comment on one of my recent posts, this is a result of our electing lawyers (and in context, since the post was a rant about complicated tax laws, accountants) to Congress — they can always be counted upon to enact laws that generate profitable work for their colleagues, and for them as well, should they lose an election and have to go back to work in the private sector.

“Loser Pays” is an excellent concept, and while I’ve never been an advocate of applying foreign law to our own, I think this is something we ought to emulate. Remember when SCOTUS applied Euro-law to their deliberations re GITMO/Camp Delta? Well….

“Loser Pays” would definitely put a damper on frivolous lawsuits!

However,

The trial lawyers have even gamed the language. They call “loser pays” the “English Rule,” as if it’s some weird British law. But it’s not. It’s really the Rest of the World Rule. America is the odd man out because we rarely punish litigators who misuse force.

Litigators fight for a living, day after day. Practice makes perfect. They get good at winning. Because of their clout, “loser pays” never gets though the legislature.

Which just goes to show that “justice” and “the law” are nowhere near synonymous in many cases. Like Arlo Guthrie said in Alice’s Restaurant, “…and Officer Obie realized that this was a typical case of American blind justice, and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it!”

An example John Stossel cites, a response to the airing of the issue on 20/20,

“After a real estate deal fell through, the owner of the property, a lawyer, sued me for $25,000 in damages. After two years, I won a summary judgment, which he immediately appealed. We are still in litigation over this, and there is nothing I can do to stop the process. I have offered settlements all along the way, but at this point I have paid more for my mandatory defense than the entire case was worth. If that’s not bullying, I don’t know what is. He continues to do everything in his power to prolong the case, knowing full well what it is costing me. By the time this is all over and I ‘win,’ I will have spent $35,000 and dealt with the stress of the case for more than five years. We are a modest, middle-class family. What was once the hope of being able to pay for my children’s college education now lines a lawyer’s pockets. I have had no recourse but to take it.”

Great, some litigation “professional”, in demonstration of the remorseless greed of his ilk, lines his pockets at the expense of some childrens’ futures. Bravo, Mr. Lawyer! Use the money to put a jacuzzi in your condo! Buy a new Porsche! Put hotels on Boardwalk and Park Place!

Scumbag!

America needs judges willing to say no to the lawyer bullies. America also needs “loser pays.” Otherwise, the parasites will bully away your money and your choices.

Amen to that, brother John! I always knew there was a reason you number among my personal Top 5 columnists!

…and his retinue are apparently encountering some degree of resistance, at long last.

British environmental analyst Christopher Monckton says Al Gore’s latest attack on global warming skeptics shows the former vice president and other climate alarmists are “panicking.”

And well they should be.

On Sunday, CBS News correspondent Leslie Stahl asked Al Gore on the television show 60 Minutes what he thinks of people like Vice President Dick Cheney who doubt that global warming is caused by human activity.

“I think that those people are in such a tiny, tiny minority now with their point of view, they’re almost like the ones who still believe that the moon landing was staged in a movie lot in Arizona, and those who believe the earth is flat,” replied Gore. “That demeans them a little bit, but it’s not that far off.”

However, Lord Christopher Monckton, a policy advisor for former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher during the 1980s, says the former vice president can enjoy his “flat earth fantasies” for a few months, but in the end, the world will be laughing at him.

“The alarmists are alarmed, the panic mongers are panicking, the scare mongers are scared; the Gores are gored. Why? Because global warming stopped ten years ago; it hasn’t got warmer since 1998,” he points out. “And in fact in the last seven years, there has been a downturn in global temperatures equivalent on average to about [or] very close to one degree Fahrenheit per decade. We’re actually in a period … of global cooling.”

Hmmm…

Mr. Monckton, my hat is off to you!

Monckton contends Gore is now “panicking” because he has staked his reputation as a former American VP on “telling the world that we’re all doomed unless we shut down 90 percent of the Western economies.” He also contends that Gore is the largest “global-warming profiteer.”

It’s pitiful that Algore, a typical modern Democrat, is willing to screw the rest of us, using a typical liberal agenda, in order to make megabucks for himself. Nancy Pelosi, another leftist hypocrite, is probably foaming at the mouth in anger that she didn’t think of this racket first.

Gore’s group The Alliance for Climate Protection is currently launching a new $300 million ad campaign that demands reforms in environmental law to help reduce the supposed “climate crisis.” But Monckton points out that in the U.K., Gore is not allowed to speak in public about his “green investment company” because to do so would violate racketeering laws by “peddling a false prospectus.” He says that fact came about after a British high court found Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, riddled with errors.

Emphasis mine, and speaking of emphasis, bravo, U.K.!

It’s good to see that someone, somewhere, has exposed Algore for the opportunitic fraud he really is. Now let’s see some prosecution for same: After all, an individual who commits fraud on a bank or other business to the tune of a few hundred bucks gets a felony sentence. Gore has swindled the world at large for millions, yet he’s still walking around free.

What’s wrong with this picture?

…of New York Governor Eliot SPITzer’s liberal do as I say, not as I do moment. Or, I should say, many do as I say, not as I do moments.

ALBANY, N.Y. - Gov. Eliot Spitzer has decided to resign, completing a stunning fall from power after he was nationally disgraced by links to a high-priced prostitution ring, a top state official said Wednesday.

I posted about one or two of the witch hunts in which he engaged as the Empire State’s attorney general a couple or so years back, all in the name of furthering his political career at the expense of any company or individual he could find to prosecute, guilty or not. His most high profile targets were Wall Street based, though he also added to his resume by crusading against organized prostitution.

The recurring theme of his campaigns has been ethics “enforcement”, and, well…

The scandal erupted Monday when allegations surfaced that Spitzer, a 48-year-old married man with three teenage daughters, spent thousands of dollars on a call girl named Kristen at a swanky Washington hotel on the night before Valentine’s Day.

Client 9 apologizes:

“I have acted in a way that violates my obligations to my family and violates my — or any — sense of right and wrong,” the governor said at a news conference with his wife, Silda, at his side. “I apologize to the public, whom I promised better.”

Yes, you have, Eliot, you weasel. Now be a good chap and see if you can arrange pardons for all those you successfully prosecuted for the same thing and volunteer to do all their time for them.

Calls for his resignation came immediately. Republicans began talking impeachment if he didn’t step aside. Meanwhile, Spitzer stayed holed up in his Manhattan apartment, where he was reportedly weighing his options, including waiting to use resignation as a bargaining chip with federal prosecutors to avoid indictment.

Laying low, huh? Good luck with that! I hope the federal prosecutors indict you to hell and back, your inevitable resignation notwithstanding. Leaving office isn’t an option for you, resignation is simply a less messy way of arriving at that destination than having to be kicked out.

Since your wife’s not seeking a political career and yours is at its end, Eliot, what do the future prospects of your marriage look like? I only ask this because your wife’s name isn’t Hillary. What have your three daughters had to say about all this, knowing that their father not only cheats on their mother (paying tens of thousands of dollars to prostitutes, no less!), but is also a hypocrite of the first order?

Of course, Eliot has long been a hemhorroid on the political landscape, anyway. His anti-family policies and his aborted attempt to issue driver’s licenses to criminal aliens were in anything but the best interests of his constituency.

So, as they say, the riddance will be good.

Bye bye, you schmuck!

…and the rest of their kind, like the MSM and your general purpose liberal, as we know are still actively campaigning against the big Dubya, despite the fact that he’s not running for anything.

This is pretty much a mainstay of the liberal mindset. That is, they substitute platitudinal input for proactive tangible action — they have to know that their efforts to do whatever it is they want to do to George W. Bush is undoable, that they are merely making foolish noise in the process of burning up the contributions gleaned from their faithful followers, and more often than not making preadolescent style spectacles of themselves at the same time. I entertain no doubts as to the resentment the Three Stooges would feel had they been able to see these folks attempting to upstage them in the lunacy department.

When the Berkeley kerfuffle commenced (the peoples’ and city government’s war on the Marines recruiters there), I received a bunch of emails from Move America Forward on the issue and on their response to it, and have of course read of it in numerous other places. The backlash from around the country was sufficiently intense as to cause a couple of the Kommie San Francisco suburb’s city legislators to back pedal somewhat.

They say they support the troops but oppose Bush policies. In the same breath that they tell us they have nothing against the Marines, they tell us that the same Marines are murderers and torturers who mercenary themselves to Big Oil.

The U.S. Marines, meanwhile, are but one of several elements that comprise a community whose mission is to insure that those dizzy people in Berkeley remain free to speak out against the government and even…even against the Marines!

Please pardon me, but when the issue hit the news, and when I received the outraged emails from MAF, I hardly raised an eyebrow. I mean, this is Berkeley we’re talking about. These are the same varmints who, before the fires had even been put out on 9/11, were declaring that our country had deserved the terrorist attack. That we’d earned it. That it was our fault. How could anybody actually be shocked at anything of a treasonous nature that comes out of that lefty hell-hole?

If I were suddenly appointed king of America, I would certainly deny any voter in Berkeley, the city government included, even a dime of federal funds for anything, anything at all — this would be right before I had a large, unbroken “keep ‘em in” wall built around that leftist hell hole and then had it declared a nuclear waste dump. From then on, all people convicted of treason would be sentenced to life in Berkeley.

Radioactive Cows? In Berkeley? Mooooo!

However, I didn’t come here to talk about Berkeley. Screw Berkeley. Knock knock knockin’ on treason’s door…

A projected nine inches of snow is in the process of being dumped on Chicago, even as we speak (they’re so lucky in the Burbs, where the snow will stick, covering trees, rooftops and everything else, making for a beautiful morning after), so I’ve spent the day at home, catching up on professional stuff.

There’s a deli here called Ashkenaz that delivers a pleasing variety of Jewish fare, though I have to say that their knishes wouldn’t sell in New York — they lack every single attribute of a genuine knish, from seasoning to filling. But then, Chicago isn’t called the Second City for nothing. However, they do produce lox in all its glory, belly lox, Nova (Nova Scotia lox), etc, and deliver by the pound. They’re rather costly in this endeavor, but as far as I’m concerned, the quality of the product inspires the overlooking of their $40.00+ per pound price for cut lox. To me, salmon rules in its every form from smoked to poached in the seafood category, surpassed only by those big, meaty langostas one finds in the Caribbean.

So I’m spending this particular segment of my evening munching, in leisurely fashion, on lox and cream cheese sandwiches with ultra-thin sliced red onion and, having blown the dust off my old Enya albums (just kidding, I actually downloaded them from Yahoo! Music Jukebox), am listening to Watermark and Shepherd Moons. Celtic music with New Age overtones, good stuff.

However, I actually came here to make reference to yet another portside idiocy, one which, excluding all the above, will not take up all that much of your time. That is, the Waterboarding thing.

The left has villified it on a mega-scale, even the RINO, John McCain, has opposed it, and the tone of the arguments against it has been one that suggests it to be one of many horrible, unconscionable tortures our government employs to wrench, brutally and unmercifully, for days on end, even the most trivial, useless information from captured terrorists. It is business as usual for the fascistic, nazi Bush regime, etc, etc…

And the liberal media plays it up conjure nightmarish thoughts of the torture chambers at Prinz Albrechtstrasse or 2 Dzerzhinski Square.

Meanwhile, only three prisoners, major terrorists all, have been subjected to the actually non-harmful interrogation technique, and the longest duration involved was that of Sheikh Khalid Mohammed, a terrible minute and a half! All three subjects revealed information that saved a lot of innocent lives while leading to the neutralization of a large number of terrorists and their plans for further butchery of Americans and others.

Our intelligence pros aren’t electrocuting the functionality out of their testicles, beating them to a bloody pulp or decimating their minds with lysergic acid and amatol, they’re merely creating non-damaging discomfort for what amounts to mere seconds (while SKM, an abnormally tough customer, held out for some 90 seconds, the average is 1/3 of that time).

Yet our political left, who have just as much access to information as the rest of us, have chosen to ignore the facts and use waterboarding as an anti-Bush soap box, transforming the truth into exaggerations and bald faced lies in order to promote their false doctrines — in truth, given their desperation to strip us of our Constitutional system of government and quagmire us in socialism, I can’t say as I blame them: if you want to screw an entire electorate, you have to lie to them in a convincing manner. You have to promote your intended back-door entry as a pleasurable experience, one the entire family will enjoy, knowing that once they’ve let you in, the merciless shishkabobbing, weeping and gnashing of teeth will be beyond their control.

It doesn’t matter whether the sodomist is John McCain, Barak Hussein Obama or Hillary Klinton, the results will be the same.

Speaking for myself, when it comes to interrogating terrorists, I’d just as soon we refer to the Jack Bauer manual. Our misplaced sympathy for “ill-treated” terrorists is well defined in the old song about the gentle woman (for goodness sake) who saved the snake.

We’ve watched our politicians, justices and media intentionally misinterpret the Geneva Convention to “humanize” and redefine the status of the inmates at GITMO, and heard “certain parties” strongly suggest that we bring these terrorists into the American legal system for prosecution.

What it all boils down to, I think, is that these misguided souls are so secure in their illusion that certain bizarre things could never happen to them that they are confident that they’ll be safe, even if they eliminate the very safeguards that keep them safe.

What a bunch of maroons!