Before he laid the groundwork for a "slow bleed" of U.S. troops in Iraq, Rep. Jack Murtha (D-PA) agreed to do business with a fictitious Arab sheik whom Murtha thought was trying to bribe him. Murtha avoided prosecution for his role in the ABSCAM scandal by testifying against other Democrat Congressmen who'd taken the bribes.
Monday, February 08, 2010
YouTube - Murtha's ABSCAM video - the BEST of Murtha ABSCAM
Andrew Cuomo v. Bank of America: Prosecutor, Charge Thyself - WSJ.com
HUD's Web visitors learn that in 1999 "Secretary Cuomo established new Affordable Housing Goals requiring Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—two government sponsored enterprises involved in housing finance—to buy $2.4 trillion in mortgages in the next 10 years. This will mean new affordable housing for about 28.1 million low- and moderate-income families. The historic action raised the required percentage of mortgage loans for low- and moderate-income families that the companies must buy from the current 42 percent of their total purchases to a new high of 50 percent—a 19 percent increase—in the year 2001."
It's a sign of Washington's continuing failure to examine its own failures that HUD still views such a policy as an "accomplishment." It's as if the Pentagon described Pearl Harbor as a victory.
American Thinker: The Lawyers' Party
The Lawyers' Party sees these sorts of people, who provide goods and services that people want, as the enemies of America. And so we have seen the procession of official enemies in the eyes of the Lawyers' Party grow. Against whom do Hillary and Obama rail? Pharmaceutical companies, oil companies, hospitals, manufacturers, fast food restaurant chains, large retail businesses, bankers and anyone producing anything of value in our nation.
This is the natural consequence of viewing everything through the eyes of lawyers. Lawyers solve problems by successfully representing their clients, in this case the American people. Lawyers seek to have new laws passed, they seek to win lawsuits, they press appellate courts to overturn precedent, and lawyers always parse language to favor their side.
Confined to the narrow practice of law, that is fine. But it is an awful way to govern a great nation. When politicians as lawyers begin to view some Americans as clients and other Americans as opposing parties, then the role of the legal system in our life becomes all consuming. Some Americans become "adverse parties" of our very government. We are not all litigants in some vast social class action suit. We are citizens of a republic which promises us a great deal of freedom from laws, from courts, and from lawyers.
Recession chugs on, except in government | Washington Examiner
Third, among the few sectors of the economy showing net employment growth over the past year is the federal government. The federal civil service is rapidly expanding as Obama increases the size of government, with 33,000 new positions being added in January alone. Only 9,000 of those new slots were for temporary census jobs. In other words, what we are seeing is good times for the public sector and the growing prospect of a continuing and perhaps even deepening recession for everybody else.
Sunday, February 07, 2010
Who is this guy and why haven't I heard of him?
“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried” – G. K. Chesterton
Another good one from here:
The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types -- the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution.
Friday, February 05, 2010
Census Bureau Obscured Personal Data—Too Well, Some Say - WSJ.com
Feds: DUH. Again.
Flawed software programming appears to be at fault. Laura Zayatz, chair of the Census Bureau's disclosure-review board, says code designed to add the statistical noise to the subset of older respondents should have offset those changes with opposite adjustments made elsewhere in the data sample. This didn't happen as it should have, so that ages and other attributes were skewed.
Before the data were released in 2003, the Census Bureau's diagnostic tools flagged the problem, but it "didn't seem large enough in the judgment of our analysts to stop the release," says Dr. Groves, the Census Bureau director.
American Thinker Blog: Lech Walesa stumps for conservative IL candidate for governor
While at the fundraising luncheon, Walesa spoke about the U.S. in relationship to the world."The U.S. is a superpower. Nobody doubts that. Today they lead the world-militarily. They also lead economically, but they are weak.
They don't lead morally and politically any more. The world has no leadership. The U.S. was the last resort and hope for all the nations. Today we have lost the hope."
TelePrompter lets Commander-in-Chief Down as He Mispronounces ‘Corpsman,’ Mangles French - Big Journalism
Isn’t this the same man who said that more Americans should learn a foreign language — even though he doesn’t speak any himself?
Washington vs. Common Sense - WSJ.com
Americans know what's wrong: Government has taken on a life of its own, dragging our country down to some horrible pit of quicksand where, increasingly, no one can make sensible choices.
Washington is broken. So are most state governments. The reason is the same. Government is out of control, schools are out of control, health-care costs are out of control, lawsuits are out of control—because law has supplanted the responsibility of people needed to keep them in control.
Thursday, February 04, 2010
The Obama Economy - Conrad Black - National Review Online
Adam Smith was absolutely correct that there should be an efficient division of work, and that production should be aimed to please the consumer rather than to express the whim of the producer. He recognized that mercantilism was essentially a command economy that was certain to be much less productive, less satisfying to consumers, and less likely to grow and flourish and generate wealth, jobs, and incomes, than a free-market economy. He recognized the need for alleviation of the conditions of the indigent, and, as someone who was more a moral philosopher than an economist, he expected that economic restraint, frugality, and altruistic desires would be stronger than, in practice, they are.
Smith could not have foreseen that the U.S. in particular, which was just grasping for its independence in his time, would become such a center of Babylonian decadence and philistine vulgarity as it has, in addition to having many more admirable traits. No one could have foreseen that in advanced countries such as the U.S., cultural factors and not economic policies would be the chief cause of poverty and that obesity would be the greatest public-health problem.
Justice Thomas Defends Campaign Finance Ruling - NYTimes.com
Justice Thomas said the First Amendment’s protections applied regardless of how people chose to assemble to participate in the political process.
“If 10 of you got together and decided to speak, just as a group, you’d say you have First Amendment rights to speak and the First Amendment right of association,” he said. “If you all then formed a partnership to speak, you’d say we still have that First Amendment right to speak and of association.”
“But what if you put yourself in a corporate form?” Justice Thomas asked, suggesting that the answer must be the same.
ESA Portal - Live long and prosper, Xanthoria elegans
The fact that living organisms do survive in open space seems to support the idea of panspermia – life spreading from planet to another, or even between solar systems. “The loose end in this theory is now arrival at a planet, because no living thing can survive the fiery entry through an atmosphere,” Demets says. “But possibly deep inside a space rock the conditions are better. Therefore we’re now thinking of an astrobiology experiment involving a return to Earth”.
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