Is there a Double Standard?

Think there is a double standard in Washington?

Here are the 13 allegations against Charlie Rangel, here.

Rangels response: "a little sloppiness in my paperwork"

Yeah, tax evasion and controlled rent violations in New York City and campaign solicitation violations.

On just the tax evasion alone, how do you think you and I would fair with that charge? Can we say "hello Leavenworth?????"


Double Standard: the Ruling Class and the rest of us "unwashed"

Will Washington's Failures Lead To Second American Revolution?

Where did that headline come from? Some far-right minuteman blog somewhere up in the mountains out west?

No, actually from staid, buttoned-up, Investors Business Daily!

The article makes a pretty good case that we may be closer to 1776 than we think:

The Internet is a large-scale version of the "Committees of Correspondence" that led to the first American Revolution — and with Washington's failings now so obvious and awful, it may lead to another.

Too many overreaching laws give the president too much discretion to make too many open-ended rules controlling too many aspects of our lives. There's no end to the harm an out-of-control president can do.

Fear and uncertainty stalk the land. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke says America's financial future is "unusually uncertain."

Obama is building an imperium of public debt and crushing taxes, contrary to George Washington's wise farewell admonition: "cherish public credit ... use it as sparingly as possible ... avoiding likewise the accumulation of debt ... bear in mind, that towards the payment of debts there must be Revenue, that to have Revenue there must be taxes; that no taxes can be devised, which are not ... inconvenient and unpleasant ... ."

And most telling..........A wounded rampaging president can do much damage — and, like Caesar, the evil he does will live long after he leaves office, whenever that may be.

The overgrown, un-pruned power of the presidency to reward, punish and intimidate may now be so overwhelming that his re-election in 2012 is already assured — Chicago-style.

Nancy! Turn on the Pump, the Swamp is getting Deeper!

Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House once declared that she was going to "drain the swamp of corruption", speaking to persistent ethics violations in the House.

Well this week we have seen the Charlie Rangle ethics charges go public and a different committee is working toward a similar outcome for Maxine Waters who just happened to lobby the Govt for a bank that her husband owned stock in.

Read it all here.

The Wizards of Central Planning

Question: it's campaign time. How do you make your anti-business appear to be pro-business for campaign purposes?

Well, you fly all over the country touting your new Small Business Loan Program. People clap, cheer and go home.

The small business folks you supposedly are trying to help (actually you are trying only to help yourself) take a look at your program and say "no way!". Why is that?

Read it all here.

And if you've been paying attention over the last 18 months, you're probably asking, what's the catch?

Glad you asked: most of the tax cuts are so narrowly targeted as to be economically trivial. The list includes bonus depreciation, small business expensing and a temporary zero capital gains tax rate for small business start-ups. These would be in place for a year or two and then vanish, which means they'll do little to change business behavior.

The bill authorizes Treasury to purchase up to $30 billion of stock in small, community banks across the country. The banks in turn would agree to issue as much as $300 billion in loans to small businesses that they wouldn't otherwise lend to.

Here's the best part: The whiz kids at the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation estimate that this program will raise $1.1 billion for the federal government. So there really is a free lunch.

The false assumption here is that banks are reluctant to lend because they lack the capital. This ignores that small business lending is also down because the business demand for loans is weak. Businesses don't typically expand when Washington is raising dividend, capital gains and personal income tax rates while piling on the new costs of ObamaCare and other regulations.

So what is the bottom line for all t his bureaucratic sleight of hand?

The tax cut in this bill will provide $12 billion in relief over 10 years. The tax increase that Mr. Obama favors for 2011 would raise what the Joint Committee on Taxation figures will be $600 billion of revenues, about half of which comes from the coffers of small business. So the tax hikes, which are permanent, are about 50 times larger than the tax cuts, which are temporary. And the Obama Administration wonders why some people think this President is antibusiness.

More Hope than Change.............

Campaigner in Chief: Auto Bailouts a Good Thing

Now that he has done his appearance on "The View" to bolster his support among women, he is heading to Michigan to fuel up his Union buddies by explaining again how the Government Motors bailout was so good for America, without saying how it was sooooo much better for the Unions that poured hundreds of millions into his election.

He also probably won't say anything about all the Chrysler creditors and autodealers who got robbed by his heavy handed bailout of Chrysler either.

Gotta put some lipstick on those Pigs! Read it all here.

Warren Buffet: Kindly old gentleman? Or not?

Warren Buffet has the kindly looking face and slow demeanor that we might associate with our own grandfathers. He has made billions investing in industries that make real products as well as in the service industry, eg, insurance.

We have read stories about how he has given away billions of his amassed fortune to good causes. What we have not read is that Warren Buffet is among one of the most prolific funders of abortion in this country! Read it all here.

IN 1999, UTA LANDY, a former director of the National Abortion Federation, and Philip Darney, her husband and an OB-GYN professor at U.C.S.F., created the Kenneth J. Ryan Residency Training Program. The program gives medical schools two or three years of seed money for abortion training for OB-GYN residents. Through it, 58 campuses in the U.S. and Canada have received financing. Landy also directs the Family Planning Fellowship, with Jody Steinauer as the associate director.

The money for the Ryan and the Family Planning Fellowship comes from one foundation and from one family. The donor has chosen to remain anonymous, which helps to explain why there’s been so little publicity about the pro-choice strategy of bringing abortion into academic medicine. It has been covered by a veil of semisecrecy.

At the same time, as the Ryan and the fellowship have expanded to dozens of institutions, many people have come to know about the source of funding. In the course of my reporting, two doctors who had not done the fellowship themselves, but who work in universities, volunteered to me that the money for the programs comes from the Buffett Foundation. They meant the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation.

Susan Thompson Buffett was married to Warren Buffett and served as president of the foundation that bears her name. She died in 2004. Two years later, Warren Buffett gave the foundation about $3 billion. He said that he expected the gift to increase the foundation’s annual expenditures by $150 million. And in fact, total giving by the foundation, where two of the Buffetts’ children sit on the board, increased from $202 million in 2007 to $347 million in 2008, according to tax returns.

The tax records also show that most of the foundation’s spending goes to abortion and contraception advocacy and research. According to Access Philanthropy, a research institute that focuses on the giving preferences of foundations and corporate donors, family planning is one of the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation’s main purposes. The foundation’s nonprofit 990 tax form shows that in 2008, Planned Parenthood and its affiliates in the U.S. received about $45 million; the international arm of the organization got about $8 million. There is no line item for the Ryan program or the Family Planning Fellowship. But the foundation paid out around $50 million to universities with one or both of the programs.

Puts a little different light on the kindly old image of Warren Buffet.

President Obama is set to make history this week: with the Boy Scouts?

Nope, he will appear on "The View", an innane morning talk show that is worth the air time it burns up, but attracts viewers who can't resist watching a "cat fight".

And what about the Scouts? Oh, nothing much. Just marking their Hundreth Anniversary at their summer Jamboree. Nothing that a President who didn't grow up in America could care much about. Read it all here.

White House Backed Release of Lockerbie Bomber

The iconic picture above defines the anger and fear that terrorism can strike anywhere and at anytime and is perpatrated by slimy characters who will not put on a uniform and fight conventional wars.

As noted here, we now find out that our own President Obama agreed with releasing the Lockerbie bomber on grounds of "compassion" rather than having him locked up in a Libyan prison.

Compassion? What about the hundreds that died on that plane? What compassion did they get from Abdel Baset al-Megrahi?

The intervention, which has angered US relatives of those who died in the attack, was made by Richard LeBaron, deputy head of the US embassy in London, a week before Megrahi was freed in August last year on grounds that he had terminal cancer.

The document, acquired by a well-placed US source, threatens to undermine US President Barack Obama's claim last week that all Americans were "surprised, disappointed and angry" to learn of Megrahi's release.

In the letter, sent on August 12 last year to Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond and justice officials, Mr LeBaron wrote that the US wanted Megrahi to remain imprisoned in view of the nature of the crime.

The note added: "Nevertheless, if Scottish authorities come to the conclusion that Megrahi must be released from Scottish custody, the US position is that conditional release on compassionate grounds would be a far preferable alternative to prisoner transfer, which we strongly oppose."

Which is more sad: that we aided the release of this monster or that our President lied to us about his official position on it? With this outfit, that's a tough choice indeed.

Stunning Imagery of Gulf Oil Slick!

Hat Tip: Wima R

John Kerry not doing his Patriotic Duty?

Remember Joe Biden told us it was our "patriotic duty" to pay taxes. Maybe John Kerry did not get the memo?

Seems Kerry's new $7million yacht is tucked away in Rhode Island instead of Kerry's homestate of Massachuesetts.

Now why might that be?

Well there are no boat taxes in RI and in MA one gets hit with 6.25%.........so the Kerry's save a whopping $500,000 by keeping it down the road a bit in RI.

But what about that patriotic duty thing?

Let's wait and hear John Kerry speak for himself.

Off Topic: Seen in Texas

Hat Tip: Susan R

Off Topic: it's a race!

Hat Tip: Wilma R

One Reason we hate +2000 page bills no one reads

Remember the famous Pelosi quote? "We have to pass the bill in order to find out what is in it"!

Well, read here something that is in the bill which has not a darn thing to do with healthcare!

Those already outraged by the president's health care legislation now have a new bone of contention -- a scarcely noticed tack-on provision to the law that puts gold coin buyers and sellers under closer government scrutiny.

If you buy or sell gold coins, the Government wants to know all about it and will tax you in the process.

Starting Jan. 1, 2012, Form 1099s will become a means of reporting to the Internal Revenue Service the purchases of all goods and services by small businesses and self-employed people that exceed $600 during a calendar year. Precious metals such as coins and bullion fall into this category and coin dealers have been among those most rankled by the change.

So every time a member of the public sells more than $600 worth of gold to a dealer, Piret said, the transaction will have to be reported to the government by the buyer.

And somewhere in that vast Federal database, it will be recorded what you bought or sold and presumbably what you are holding on to.

Remember when FDR confiscated gold in the 1930's?????

Flashback 2007: Greatest Threat to Obama Campaign?

It's 2007 again: The Obama campaign is rolling full steam ahead; the Clinton campaign is on the ropes. Then potential disastor rises up in the form of Rev Jerimiah Wright, none other than Obama's spiritual advisor.

His anti-American, anti-white rhetoric threatens the Obama's carefully crafted, pleasing, innocent to whites, persona. What to do?

Read it all here.

It was the moment of greatest peril for then-Sen. Barack Obama’s political career. In the heat of the presidential campaign, videos surfaced of Obama’s pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, angrily denouncing whites, the U.S. government and America itself. Obama had once bragged of his closeness to Wright. Now the black nationalist preacher’s rhetoric was threatening to torpedo Obama’s campaign.

The crisis reached a howling pitch in mid-April, 2008, at an ABC News debate moderated by Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos. Gibson asked Obama why it had taken him so long – nearly a year since Wright’s remarks became public – to dissociate himself from them. Stephanopoulos asked, “Do you think Reverend Wright loves America as much as you do?”

According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.

In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”

And so, in what used to be called "the media", what we really have is nothing but a bunch of Pravda-like propogandists for the far left liberal Progressives in this country.

What will a Hurricane do to the Gulf Oil?

For nearly a hundred days we have watched as oil pours into the Gulf of Mexico because of the Deepwater Horizon accident.

Now we are in Hurricane Season. So, we might wonder......what would/could happen if all that oil got sucked up into a hurricane.

Here is what Dr. Jeff Masters, the founder of WeatherUnderground.com thinks about that.

NAACP: clean thy own house........

Last week we posted here on an NAACP resolution about TEA Parties being racist.

Well, well, look what a difference a week can make: see here.

This is a video about a Georgia USDA executive explaining how she would not help a white farmer who was losing his land. So, she sent him off to "one of his own", a white lawyer, for help.

If you listen carefully to the video you can hear that the audience loves the presentation and finds it very amusing.

Which just proves once again: we are all sinners. If you see someone acting truly racist, you need to try and right that wrong.

But to point to a whole collection of people and call them racists simply shows the lack of humility which YOU possess.

Required Reading: America's Ruling Class

This brilliant article from the American Spectator makes the case that Americans have become captive to a professional ruling class; irregardless of what political party is in power or sharing power.

The key objective of the ruling class is to........continue to rule! They care not for their "subjects" nor the Constitution. Many have bluntly said so!

Please read this in detail. We will talk about it more later.

Veep Biden: The gift that keeps on giving......

In this story from Fox News, VP Biden tried to reverse the claim made by press secretary Robert Gibbs last week.

Democrats going up the chain all the way to Vice President Biden tried feverishly on Sunday to reverse Robert Gibbs' prediction that Republicans could seize the House in November, as GOP lawmakers claimed Washington indeed was on the verge of a power shift.

And here is the punch line from Biden: .......Biden made a confident prediction about his party's chances in November. He said voters don't yet grasp the benefits of Democrat-passed policies but that they will begin to crystallize in time for the midterm elections.

Oh but Joe, we DO realize the "benefits" and we realize what they are and will be doing to this country for a hell of a long time. And that's why we are going to cut as many of you Progressive Democrats to the ditch as possible so we can take this country back and repeal as much of this socialistic crap as we can.

Lessons from Nature.....

This article from National Review Online provides some interesting things humans ought to pay attention to in nature.

Westchester County, in the suburbs of New York City, was home to Hillary Clinton when she pretended to represent New York in the U.S. Senate, and its voters gave Barack Obama 63 percent of their ballots in 2008. It’s the sort of place that causes heavy breathing among the liberal faithful de­voutly awaiting the coming of the New Democratic Majority.

But Westchester County has a prob­lem more often seen in rural, Republican-leaning jurisdictions: coyotes. These ca­nine predators are a real menace, a fact that was dramatically illustrated in late June by the case of young Emily Hod­u­­lik, age six, who was attacked by a pair of coyotes on a leafy suburban street in the quaint town of Rye. The coyotes’ offensive proceeded along classically predatory lines as the canines ignored the other children in the group and targeted the smallest, weakest child. Miss Hodulik suffered serious bite wounds but escaped without life-threatening injuries.

Coyotes like to attack the little ones, human or otherwise. That was the case for one unfortunate coyote that attacked a puppy out for a jog with his master in Travis County, Texas, in the suburbs of Austin, where coyotes have it a little rougher than they do in suburban New York. That particular coyote had the bad luck to set his gaze on a puppy owned by Gov. Rick Perry, who produced a laser-sighted .380-caliber automatic pistol, loaded with hollowpoints, and sent it to the Happy Hunting Grounds.

People have a visceral reaction to guns, which is why the reactions to the Supreme Court’s recent decision in McDonald v. City of Chicago have been so emotional. One extraordinarily telling reaction came from David Ignatius of the Washington Post, whose response was headlined: “The Supreme Court Gun Decision Moves Us Toward Anarchy.” Mr. Ignatius wrote: “My biggest worry with Monday’s Supreme Court decision is that by ruling, in effect, that every American can apply for a gun license, the justices will make gun ownership much more pervasive in a society that already has too many guns. After all, if I know that my neighbor is armed and preparing for Armageddon situations where law and order break down (as so many are — just read the right-wing blogs) then I have to think about protecting my family, too. That’s the state-of-nature, everyone for himself logic that prevails in places such as Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Mr. Ignatius here is remarkably forthcoming: He is not worried about guns in the hands of criminals, but about guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens, people who are willing to apply for a permit and jump through the bureaucratic hoops re­quired of gun buyers

That is the essence of 21st-century progressivism: In matters ranging from financial derivatives to education to gun control, the Left believes that we face a choice between a masterful state and a Hobbesian war of all against all. For all of the smart set’s vaunted and self-congratulatory nu­ance, it is this absolutist vision, this Manichean horror, that forms the foun­dation of progressivism.

But the idea that individuals might use firearms lawfully to defend themselves is either anathema to progressives or inconceivable to them. President Obama’s reaction to the Heller decision, the predecessor to McDonald v. Chicago, suffered the in­evitable lacunae: “I have always believed that the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals to bear arms, but I also identify with the need for crime-ravaged communities to save their children from the violence that plagues our streets through commonsense, effective safety measures,” he said, unable to consider the possibility that citizens’ arming themselves against criminals is one potentially effective safety measure.

To use lethal force in self-defense is the ultimate declaration of independence, a kind of momentary secession from the authority of the government whose laws and prisons and police officers have, in that moment, failed the citizen.

Read it all; it basically records the horror of Progressives who find real life to be, well, "so very messy"!

Beware the Myth of Collective Salvation

From a recent article I wrote:

Beware the Myth of Collective Salvation: The subject of Collective Salvation probably had its last great stand in the 1970's thru early 1990's under the guise of Liberation Theology, which primarily came out of the horror and suffering of South American civil wars. But here in the United States, we are now hearing it more and more and more. And unlike South America, where it sprang up from a synthesis between the communists and the Roman Catholic clergy, we are seeing it coming straight at us from our own Federal Government. That, in and of itself, should be very troubling to all faithful Christians.

First let me be very very clear. In Christianity and Christian Theology, salavation is an individual issue. Our salvation depends on Jesus Christ and our faith in Him as our Lord and Savior. Period, end of story, no ifs, no buts, and no add-ons, period!

Collective Salvation posits that there can be no wealth, unless all have wealth. There can be no successful people, unless all are successful. There can be no salvation until all achieve equality in all dimensions of humanity. The most sneaky formulation is that the grace of Jesus Christ has to be the same grace for everyone (more on that later).

Where wealth is mal-distributed (in someone's opinion), where some achieve worldly success but others don't (in somone's opinion), and where we all don't have all the same things (in someone's opinion), the priesthood of Collective Salvation demands that there must be sacrifices. In the theology of Collective Salvation, the poor and oppressed have a special duty to bring the wealthy oppressors to salvation by taking their wealth from them. The poor and oppressed cannot achieve salvation until they bring the wealthy to redemption by redistributing their wealth; hence the term "collective" salvation.

Please notice that in the previous paragraph there is no mention of Jesus! The arbitrars of equality are self-appointed judges who not only decide how wealth and success are to be portioned out, but also decide who will make sacrifices for the "Collective Salvation" of the whole.

Jesus told us a much different story of salvation. He told us (see the Gospel of John), "I am the truth, the way, and the life.........the path to the Father is through me". We each are personally responsible for our salvation through our devotion, worship, and faith in Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. As we recently heard in the Gospel of Luke, we are to love our neighbors as ourselves, but that brotherly, Christian love is not to be confused with the Christian Theology of our own personal salvation. Everyone can partake of the grace of Jesus Christ through faith. But that in no way shape or form suggests that all will achieve equal outcomes in their earthly existance. You might say, that is what heaven is for!

Does this seem confusing? There are those who try to make it that way. Please talk to your clergy if this confusion troubles you.