And I Thought I Was a Comedian

The Hill — Democratic strategists Wednesday asserted President Barack Obama “has been far more aggressive in fighting al Qaeda” than the previous administration…

Unbelievable.

Call This A B-Plus?

Eco-Snoop: Report Your Neighbors with a Free iPhone App!

Apparently, they’re legit; because this is their website <EcoSnoop.com>. Snork, who posted this video to 2.0, commented:

I’m not a fan of Apple, and while I suspect their senior management would think this is great as long as it’s not aimed at them, this isn’t their work. [emphasis mine] But this shows you the totalitarian mind of the radical environmentalist. Big Brother is here, and he’s green.

Apple and only Apple gets to decide what apps will run on the iPhone (and they reserve the right to change their minds and delete apps from your iPhone at any time – this is reason enough for me to never want one of the things); and, according to the video, EcoSnoop is carried as a free download in their iTunes store. So while Apple Computer may not have actually created this monstrosity, they both approved it and they’re distributing it.

BTW, aren’t these the same proggies who insist that a constitutional right to privacy emanates from some penumbra somewhere? And as Anthony Watts points out, this could backfire if someone catches Michael Mann leaving his Escalade idling or if Gavin Schmidt is reported having an affair with a ton of coal.

Like free speech, the attitude of progressives toward privacy is “it’s for me, not for thee”. And I can’t even boycott Apple over this, because I already stopped giving them any money many years ago. I already have no intention of ever owning an iPhone, and the last time I owned a Macintosh was in the 90s.

In any event, I hope Al Gore’s “visible from space” mansion ends up on there.

Addendum: JCM at C² reminded me that Al “ManBearPig” Gore is on the Board of Directors at Apple Computer, Inc.

Addendum II: I’m told by Pi Guy (C²) that it’s getting trashed in the reviews in iTunes; but I can’t open that link because I don’t have iTunes installed. I’ve had bad luck with Apple software in Windows in the past and don’t have any of it. (Not even Quicktime; you can get compatible QT drivers that don’t stick memory-resident apps in your taskbar on startup whether you want them there or not.) He also provided this PJTV short: Silencing Dissent? There’s an App for That.

Dissent on the State Government Level

Nevada Governor (and former Congressman) Jim Gibbons (R): “Harry Reid is wishing Nevadans a Merry Christmas with a smirk on his face and a knife in our backs.” The states don’t want the health plan or the millions of unfunded mandates that go with it (not to mention the many, many other issues).

The final money quote: “If you’ve got to pay off every Senator to get a vote for it, something’s wrong inherently with the bill.” (H/T: Running Bare, C²)

The Cost of Selling Out

Senator Ben Nelson (D-NE), the last Democrat holdout in the Senate who finally provided the sixtieth vote for ObamaCare after giving in to bribery and extortion from the Chicago thugs, is not reaping the rewards he expected for the special gifts he obtained for his state in exchange for selling his  soul  vote to the White House. Apparently his attempt to “bring home the bacon” was just as well received in Nebraska as bacon would have been received at your local mosque. According to Rasmussen:

The good news for Senator Ben Nelson is that he doesn’t have to face Nebraska voters until 2012. If Governor Dave Heineman challenges Nelson for the Senate job, a new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey shows the Republican would get 61% of the vote while Nelson would get just 30%. Nelson was reelected to a second Senate term in 2006 with 64% of the vote. Nelson’s health care vote is clearly dragging his numbers down. Just 17% of Nebraska voters approve of the deal their senator made on Medicaid in exchange for his vote in support of the plan. Overall, 64% oppose the health care legislation, including 53% who are Strongly Opposed. In Nebraska, opposition is even stronger than it is nationally. Fifty-six percent (56%) of voters in the state believe that passage of the legislation will hurt the quality of care, and 62% say it will raise costs.

That’s gotta sting. It also has to remind Nelson (and a whole lot of other Democrats) that they risk losing their seats to support this abomination (which still isn’t law yet, until the ginormous mutant consolidated bill comes out of the House/Senate reconciliation committee). There’s still one more vote to go…

The House and Senate have passed different versions of the health care legislation and now will try to agree on a plan to pass early in 2010. Because every Democratic vote is required to pass the legislation in the Senate, Nelson’s vote is essential. If Nelson votes to block final passage of the health care plan, he would still trail Heineman but would be in a much more competitive situation. When survey respondents were asked how they would vote if Nelson blocks health care reform, 47% still pick Heneman while 37% would vote to keep the incumbent in office. Twenty percent (20%) of those who initially said they’d vote for Heineman say they’d switch to supporting Nelson. Another six percent (6%) of Heineman supporters say they’re not sure what they’d do if Nelson stops the health care plan from becoming law.

It’s still not too late for Nelson (and/or other Democrats) to turn coat and vote against the final bill. Sure, the Democrat Party leadership will be pissed off at them, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t survive with their jobs intact. Look at Joe Lieberman – the far Left wing of the Democratic Party (also known as “the Democratic Party”) pulled out all the stops to defeat him… But he’s still in the Senate, and they still need him to reach that magical filibuster-proof sixty, so he’s still doing fine. Ben and the others need to look at Joe: they can serve their party and damn the country and their consciences, or they can do what’s right and tell Obama, Reid, and Pelosi exactly where to stick 1764 unread sheets of paper.

Nelson is also one of the key players in the discussion about how abortion should be handled in the health care plan. Sixty-five percent (65%) of Nebraska voters say that coverage of abortion should be prohibited in any plan that receives government subsidies. Only six percent (6%) want coverage mandated, while 22% want no requirements either way. Obama earned 42% of the Nebraska vote in 2008, and 38% continue to approve of his job performance. Sixty-one percent (61%) of Nebraska voters disapprove of how the president is performing.

These are the people you’re supposed to be representing, Senator Nelson.

2012 Dreaming

“Kneel before Zod!” He could hardly be worse than what we have now, can he?

As If Taking Corn From Starving Africans To Make Biodiesel Wasn’t Enough…

Washington Times — Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has ordered his staff to revise a computerized forecasting model that showed that climate legislation supported by President Obama would make planting trees more lucrative than producing food. The latest Agriculture Department economic-impact study of the climate bill, which passed the House this summer, found that the legislation would profit farmers in the long term. But those profits would come mostly from higher crop prices as a result of the legislation’s incentives to plant more forests and thus reduce the amount of land devoted to food-producing agriculture. According to the economic model used by the department and the Environmental Protection Agency, the legislation would give landowners incentives to convert up to 59 million acres of farmland into forests over the next 40 years. The reason: Trees clean the air of heat-trapping gases better than farming does. …

Convert farmland into forests, making food more scarce and more expensive? What could possibly go wrong? (What it is with socialists deliberately causing famine and starvation?)

… Allison Specht, an economist at the American Farm Bureau Federation, said other studies have largely confirmed the results of the EPA and Agriculture Department analysis. “That’s one of the realities of cap-and-trade legislation. The biggest bang for your buck for carbon credits is planting trees,” she said.

Fortunately, the Cap-and-Trade bill doesn’t seem to be going anywhere in the Senate, as the blizzard in Copenhagen and the ill wind blowing in their direction from next year’s elections are giving the Democrats in the Senate some serious cold feet.

Times Online (UK) — Less than ten days after claiming a breakthrough on climate change in Copenhagen President Obama is facing a mutiny from senior Democrats who are imploring him to postpone or even abandon his cap-and-trade Bill. Democratic Senators, fearful of a drubbing in the mid-term elections next year, are lining up to argue for alternatives to the scheme that is the centrepiece of the carbon reduction proposals that Mr Obama hopes to sign into law. With the Congressional battles over Mr Obama’s healthcare reforms fresh in their memory senior Democrats are asking the Administration to postpone the next big climate change push until at least 2011. … Asked if she has urged the White House to abandon cap and trade – at least until after the mid-terms – Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana told the Politico website yesterday: “I am communicating that in every way I know how.”

Cap-and-Trade will never pass if any of the Democrat Senators opposing it stand firm, or if it’s postponed to 2011 and a major turnover occurs in November of 2010. We have to hope for the latter, because the Health Care vote has already established what kind of people the Senators are, in Winton Churchill’s immortal jibe; it’s just up to Obama to haggle with them over the price.

Churchill:	Madam, would you sleep with me for five million pounds?
Socialite:	My goodness, Mr. Churchill… Well, I suppose… we would have to discuss terms, of course…
Churchill:	Would you sleep with me for five pounds?
Socialite:	Mr. Churchill, what kind of woman do you think I am?!
Churchill:	Madam, we’ve already established that. Now we are haggling about the price.

Ah, If Only

“You’re Not Gonna Get Re-elected!”

“Bizarre Baucus behavior on Senate floor ignored by MSM,” reports Newsbusters.org:

How can one explain this incredibly bizarre performance by Max Baucus on the Senate floor? Was Baucus so intoxicated by the sound of his own voice that he went off the deep end? Or perhaps he was so drunk with power over shaping the Senate health care bill that it explains his strange rant. In any event, if a conservative such as Jim DeMint or Jeff Sessions had acted this way in the Senate, the mainstream media would have featured the video over and over and over again. Instead, since this was Democrat Max Baucus, this video was almost completely ignored by the MSM.

On his Facebook page, former Representative Mark Foley (R-FL) commented:

“This is the senator that hired his staffer and then took her on trips … and divorced his wife … and they had me run out of town.”

Well, with any luck, Senator Bacchus will be one of many getting run out on a rail in the not-to-distant future. (Unfortunately, he’s not up for re-election until 2014, which may be why he thinks he can say and do anything without paying the consequences.) Another that needs to go is Chris Dodd (D-CT) who just returned home “in triumph”. While being interviewed on his “historic vote” to reform health care, a constituent heckled him with “You’re not gonna get re-elected!” Democrats are already avoiding town hall meetings; apparently the next step is to avoid any and every other location where they might actually have to hear common citizens speak their minds…

Tori Amos Will Run as a Republican if Sarah Palin Does

Apparently starved for attention, singer-songwriter-victim-of-society Tori Amos, who needs  no  quite a bit of introduction to the C&sup2; regulars discussing this, announced:

(ANI) “If Palin runs again, I’m going to run on a Republican ticket. What I know about Middle Eastern policy could fit on a thumbnail, but I still know more than she does. …”

At least she’s honest about her own ignorance, even if she’s bought into the common if completely inaccurate Palin-as-moron MSM meme. Good luck for her even getting onto a Republican ticket, mind you; but if she ever did, then she’d just split the leftist vote with whoever was running on the Democratic ticket, leaving the way clear for a conservative third-party candidate. She’s certainly a stranger to irony, as she continued with “You have to ask, how could a nation nearly vote in somebody who isn’t qualified for the job?” before singing (if such a verb can be applied to her warbling) the praises of Failure-in-Chief Barack “I’ll give myself a B+ even if no one else will” Obama…

The Spark hitmaker insists she feels more positive about the future of the country with US President Barack Obama. “I’m a lot more hopeful. The [George W.] Bush years were really difficult times if you were an American who loved your country,” she said.

Whereas the current year has just been hunky-dory for all of those Americans who have lost their jobs, and the rest of us who are looking forward to a drastic rise in the withholdings from our paychecks at the expiration of the Bush tax cuts as well as the massive hit we’ll all incur over ObamaCare and all of the other redistribute-the-wealth schemes of the kleptocrats currently running the USA. Still, it’s not like yet another well-paid performer with no contact with the real world has to worry about such trivialities; that’s for the proles to concern themselves with.

“Having someone now that so many people respect doesn’t mean there aren’t going to be problems, but so many problems have been left behind,” she added.

Seems like she hasn’t been paying any attention to the polls either, wrapped up in her fact-free liberal cocoon. Miz Amos is but the latest, and certainly not the last, who needs “Just shut up and sing” tattooed across her body somewhere.

And Now, For Something Completely Different

After including/plugging Day By Day and Diversity Lane in previous blog entries, I decided to add a separate block of links over on the right sidebar (under the “Blogroll” section) with different comics (normal daily or otherwise regular ongoing comic strips, and also political cartoons) which are both amusing and well-written (the most important thing) but also support (or, at least, fail to offend) conservative sensibilities. The example above is by Jerry Holbert at The Boston Herald. Feel free to peruse these links when you need a laugh (which happens more and more often lately), or bookmark them on your system if you want to follow them regularly.

Suggestions are always welcome if you’ve got a strip/cartoonist you think I’ll enjoy/include. (I already have a long list of comics I real daily to go through, though I don’t think most of them will make the cut to appear here.)

And Iran, Iran So Far Away

For the first time ever, Israel has called ALL of its ambassadors and consuls home for meetings this week in Jerusalem. The meetings opened today. (H/T Gateway Pundit)

Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) — The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, headed by Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Avigdor Liberman, will host a conference next week (27-31 December) for Israeli Heads of Missions. At the conference, Israel’s ambassadors and consuls general serving throughout the world will discuss broad diplomatic and strategic issues. This is the first time a conference for all of Israel’s Heads of Missions has been held. The idea is to facilitate direct dialogue with the country’s leaders, mutual updates on major diplomatic issues, and a discussion of action plans to deal with the challenges awaiting the State of Israel in the international arena in the coming year, including the Iranian threat. … [emphasis added]

Oh please oh please oh please and about frickin’ time? Israel has known since before Bozo was inaugurated that he would protest strenuously any unilateral action on Israel’s part to impose bunker-busting “sanctions” on Obama’s buddies in Iran; perhaps by now Israel has realized how completely toothless any response Obama makes will be. He certainly hasn’t reacted with any decisiveness against the actions of any other country on Earth (apart from the one he’s trying to disassemble in North America); see his latest response to current events in Iran.

Foreign Minister Liberman will open the conference. Other officials invited to attend include Prime Minister Benyamin Natanyahu, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Minister of Intelligence and Atomic Energy Dan Meridor, Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer, and senior officials of Israel’s diplomatic and security community.

You’d better not be getting our hopes up.