Indonesians Expell Obama from Public Park

Thank goodness the Indonesians aren’t putting up with Obama’s cultish sycophants:

"As Shiva is my witness, with this butterfly, I shall destroy America!!!"

Obama Statue to Leave Indonesian Park

By NORIMITSU ONISHI
Published: February 5, 2010 – NYTimes

JAKARTA, Indonesia — A recently-erected statue of President Obama as a 10-year-old boy will be removed from a public park here, city officials said Friday, bowing to vociferous criticism on Facebook just a month before Mr. Obama is scheduled to visit Indonesia.

The statue will be relocated as soon as possible to an elementary school that Mr. Obama attended during the four years he spent as a child here, the governor of Jakarta, Fauzi Bowo, told reporters.

In December, the city unveiled the 43-inch tall bronze statue in a park in Menteng, the neighborhood where Mr. Obama lived with his divorced mother and Indonesian stepfather in the late 1960s. Financed by $10,000 from Mr. Obama’s supporters here, it depicts the boy known at the time as Barry in shorts and a T-shirt, smiling as a butterfly lands on his left thumb.

But the statue of Mr. Obama — who successfully exploited the potential of social networking sites during the 2008 presidential campaign — soon became the target of intense ire by critics who said Mr. Obama had done nothing for Indonesia and said the public park should be reserved to honor an Indonesian.

[…]

Climategate Fallout: Penn State Whitewashing Michael Mann’s Junk Science

No surprise there.  Or, did Penn State think we were all stupid enough to think they would actually admit to Mann’s manipulation of data when they first announced their intent to investigate him a couple of months ago in the aftermath of Climategate?

Penn State Probe into Mann’s Wrongdoing a ‘Total Whitewash’
By Ed Barnes – FOXNews.com

Penn State’s probe that mostly cleared climate change scientist Michael Mann for any wrongdoing doesn’t begin to scratch the surface, say critics.

How thoroughly did Penn State University investigate a top climate scientist who brought hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants to the school? A growing number of critics say they hardly looked at all.

Penn State ended a two-month probe into the work of Michael Mann, a top climate scientist whose “hockey stick” graph of climbing world temperature helped galvanize support for the climate change movement, on Wednesday.

The probe stemmed from the release of thousands of hacked e-mails from a server at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England that showed the internal debate and, some say, the manipulation of data, to support the scientific underpinnings of the case for global, man-made warming of the planet. Mann’s e-mails were among those released and critics charged that he used “tricks” to make his data match studies that confirmed warming trends.

A three-person board of inquiry cleared Mann of three of four charges brought by the university that he falsified or tried to destroy data, and recommended further study on the fourth charge that his methods “deviated from accepted practices” of the scientific community.

They wrote in their report that “that there exists no credible evidence that Dr. Mann had ever engaged in, or participated in, directly or indirectly, any actions with intent to delete, conceal or otherwise destroy e-mails, information and/or data.”

But the findings and, more importantly, the focus have set off a wave of criticism accusing the university panel of failing to interview key people, neglecting to conduct more than a cursory review of allegations and structuring the inquiry so that the outcome — exoneration — was a foregone conclusion.

On Friday, Rep. Darrell Issa, the ranking Republican on the House Investigations Committee, charged that the Penn State’s failure to settle all the charges and called into question professor Mann’s work. He is demanding that all grants to the noted scientist be frozen.

Mann, according to published reports, has gotten a grant almost $550,000 in stimulus money to study climate change and is part of a nearly $2 million grant to Penn State to study the impact of climate change on various diseases.

“Until the investigation is completed,” Issa said, “the National Science Foundation should immediately freeze all grants and funding, including the $541,184 stimulus grant, to Professor Mann.”

Criticism directed at the conduct of the investigation is being spearheaded by Steven Milloy, a former Fox News contributor and publisher of Junk Science, a Web site dedicated to debunking global warming research.

“It was set up to be a total whitewash and the panel made no effort to investigate,” Milloy said. “They didn’t even interview the recipients of the e-mails. It is ridiculous.”

Looks Like the Senate Will Have a New Majority Leader…

Good riddance!

Harry Reid Languishes Near the 40 Percent Mark, Trailing All GOP Hopefuls
02/5/10 – Politics Daily

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid continues to languish at about the 40 percent mark in terms of support for his re-election, putting him behind four potential GOP rivals, according to a Rasmussen Reports poll conducted Feb. 2.

Former state GOP chair Sue Lowden leads Reid 45 percent to 39 percent with 8 percent preferring another candidate and 8 percent undecided.

Businessman and former college basketball star Danny Tarkanian leads Reid 47 percent to 39 percent with 8 percent preferring someone else and 6 percent undecided.

Assemblywoman Sharron Angle leads Reid 44 percent to 40 percent with 7 percent preferring someone else and 8 percent undecided.

Reid now may draw a fourth challenger in Lt. Gov. Brian Krolicki who is being urged by some Republicans in Washington to get in the race because they see the current field of candidates as “second tier,” according to the Las Vegas Sun. Krolicki had been indicted in 2008 on charges of misusing funds when he was state Treasurer, but the indictment was dismissed.

[That tells me that the Republicans still haven’t gotten the Tea Party’s message.]

However, at this point, Krolicki has the smallest lead on Reid, running ahead of him by 44 percent to 41 percent with 7 percent preferring someone else and 8 percent undecided.

Surveying the field, Rasmussen notes that while Reid’s numbers are weak, the Republican hopefuls “are not doing as well this month, down slightly from the 50 percent high they’ve hit in the previous surveys. This continues to suggest that the race is still about Reid and not about them.”

Reid is viewed unfavorably by 55 percent of voters with 46 percent viewing him “very” unfavorably, which is more than the percentage of all those who regard him very or somewhat favorably.

The poll’s margin of error is 4.5 points.

36 Percent of Americans Fatuously View Socialism in a Positive Light

And, it gets worse:  A full 53 percent of Democrats think socialism is “the bomb.”  I blame the “No-Child Left Un-indoctrinated” policies of the Commies in Government and the brain-dead professors at the Indoctrinate-U’s.

Socialism Viewed Positively by 36% of Americans
Majority of Americans positive on capitalism, entrepreneurs, free enterprise, and small business
by Frank Newport – Gallup

PRINCETON, NJ — More than one-third of Americans (36%) have a positive image of “socialism,” while 58% have a negative image. Views differ by party and ideology, with a majority of Democrats and liberals saying they have a positive view of socialism, compared to a minority of Republicans and conservatives.

CLICK HERE to read the full report at Gallup.

A Little Dry Humor

Saw this floating around a couple of websites and thought you all might get a kick out of  it as much as I did:

Good News: Obama Needs to Get Permission Before He Kills You.

Okay, well…  Maybe that’s not such good news…  Just knowing that he can order the assassination of U.S. citizens is a little unnerving, considering that Janet Nappylatino has a penchant for labeling patriotic Americans as “terrorists,” all-the-while sucking up to CAIR and other terrorist organizations…

‘Permission’ needed to kill U.S. terrorists
By Eli Lake – The Washington Times

The U.S. intelligence community policy on killing American citizens who have joined al Qaeda requires first obtaining high-level government approval, a senior official disclosed to Congress on Wednesday.

Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair said in each case a decision to use lethal force against a U.S. citizen must get special permission.

“We take direct actions against terrorists in the intelligence community,” he said. “If we think that direct action will involve killing an American, we get specific permission to do that.”

He also said there are criteria that must be met to authorize the killing of a U.S. citizen that include “whether that American is involved in a group that is trying to attack us, whether that American is a threat to other Americans. Those are the factors involved.”

Rep. Peter Hoekstra, Michigan Republican and ranking member of the House intelligence committee, asked Mr. Blair about the policy of targeting American citizens at a hearing. It was the first time there was public discussion about one of the most sensitive U.S. counterterrorism policies.

[…]

Mr. Blair responded that he would rather not discuss the details of this criteria in open session, but he assured: “We don’t target people for free speech. We target them for taking action that threatens Americans or has resulted in it.”

[…]

Uhm, yeah, right.  I don’t know about you, but I don’t trust our current government enough to believe that they can accurately distinguish between “free speech” and “taking action that threatens Americans.”  Case in point?—The recent Supreme Court ruling on the 1st Amendment that struck down the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform legislation.  If you read the dissenting opinion in that ruling, you will come across Justice Steven’s comments: “The court’s ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the nation.” Call me paranoid, but with 4 out of 5 Supreme Court justices on the cusp of insanity regarding something so basic as free speech and their inability to accurately assess what constitutes a real threat to the nation, I’m not trusting anyone with powers that are better left to God.  Sure, if some freak has a bunch of hostages and a sniper has a clear shot and takes it, that’s acceptable.  But, to have the government deciding to pro-actively assassinate a U.S. citizen?  No thanks!  Not until all the Commies and Libtards are completely out of Our government.

The Long Liberal Tradition of Condescension

This article was so good, I read it three times!

Why are liberals so condescending?
By Gerard Alexander
WaPo

Every political community includes some members who insist that their side has all the answers and that their adversaries are idiots. But American liberals, to a degree far surpassing conservatives, appear committed to the proposition that their views are correct, self-evident, and based on fact and reason, while conservative positions are not just wrong but illegitimate, ideological and unworthy of serious consideration. Indeed, all the appeals to bipartisanship notwithstanding, President Obama and other leading liberal voices have joined in a chorus of intellectual condescension.

It’s an odd time for liberals to feel smug. But even with Democratic fortunes on the wane, leading liberals insist that they have almost nothing to learn from conservatives. Many Democrats describe their troubles simply as a PR challenge, a combination of conservative misinformation — as when Obama charges that critics of health-care reform are peddling fake fears of a “Bolshevik plot” — and the country’s failure to grasp great liberal accomplishments. “We were so busy just getting stuff done . . . that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are,” the president told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in a recent interview. The benighted public is either uncomprehending or deliberately misinformed (by conservatives).

This condescension is part of a long liberal tradition that for generations has impoverished American debates over the economy, social issues and the functions of government — and threatens to do so again today, when dialogue would be more valuable than ever.

Liberals have dismissed conservative thinking for decades, a tendency encapsulated by Lionel Trilling’s 1950 remark that conservatives do not “express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” During the 1950s and ’60s, liberals trivialized the nascent conservative movement. Prominent studies and journalistic accounts of right-wing politics at the time stressed paranoia, intolerance and insecurity, rendering conservative thought more a psychiatric disorder than a rival. In 1962, Richard Hofstadter referred to “the Manichaean style of thought, the apocalyptic tendencies, the love of mystification, the intolerance of compromise that are observable in the right-wing mind.”

This sense of liberal intellectual superiority dropped off during the economic woes of the 1970s and the Reagan boom of the 1980s. (Jimmy Carter’s presidency, buffeted by economic and national security challenges, generated perhaps the clearest episode of liberal self-doubt.) But these days, liberal confidence and its companion disdain for conservative thinking are back with a vengeance, finding energetic expression in politicians’ speeches, top-selling books, historical works and the blogosphere. This attitude comes in the form of four major narratives about who conservatives are and how they think and function.

The first is the “vast right-wing conspiracy,” a narrative made famous by Hillary Rodham Clinton but hardly limited to her. This vision maintains that conservatives win elections and policy debates not because they triumph in the open battle of ideas but because they deploy brilliant and sinister campaign tactics. A dense network of professional political strategists such as Karl Rove, think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and industry groups allegedly manipulate information and mislead the public. Democratic strategist Rob Stein crafted a celebrated PowerPoint presentation during George W. Bush’s presidency that traced conservative success to such organizational factors.

This liberal vision emphasizes the dissemination of ideologically driven views from sympathetic media such as the Fox News Channel. For example, Chris Mooney’s book “The Republican War on Science” argues that policy debates in the scientific arena are distorted by conservatives who disregard evidence and reflect the biases of industry-backed Republican politicians or of evangelicals aimlessly shielding the world from modernity. In this interpretation, conservative arguments are invariably false and deployed only cynically. Evidence of the costs of cap-and-trade carbon rationing is waved away as corporate propaganda; arguments against health-care reform are written off as hype orchestrated by insurance companies.

9.7 Jobless Rate? The Government is Lying its Ass Off!

“Reading out the figures in a shrill, rapid voice, he proved to them in detail that they had more oats, more hay, more turnips than they had had in Jones’s day, that they worked shorter hours, that their drinking water was of better quality, that they lived longer, that a larger proportion of their young ones survived infancy, and that they had more straw in their stalls and suffered less from fleas.”

– George Orwell, Animal Farm, Ch. 9

Alright, I’ve been tracking the weekly jobless claims numbers all last month.   We were hemorrhaging jobs.  Now, the monthly report comes out and it dropped to 9.7 percent?  Give me a break!

I just knew this was going to happen the moment I had read, the other day ,that the Labor Department was going to “adjust” their jobless rate report.

This report is about as accurate as using a crayon to write the bible on a grain of rice!  Be sure to check out all the fudging of numbers and jumping through hoops they had to do to get it down to a still whopping 9.7 percent:

January unemployment rate drops unexpectedly to 9.7 percent; employers cut 20,000 jobs

By Christopher S. Rugaber, AP Economics Writer , February 5, 2010
via YahooNews

WASHINGTON (AP) — The unemployment rate dropped unexpectedly in January to 9.7 percent, while employers shed 20,000 jobs, according to a report that offered hope the economy will add jobs soon.

The unemployment rate dropped from 10 percent because a survey of households found the number of employed Americans rose by 541,000, the Labor Department said Friday. The job losses are calculated from a separate survey of employers.

[Hey, Labor Department, here’s a news flash for you;  Homeless people don’t have telephones, nor do they have households!!!  Therefore, you survey is useless! ]

Excluding the beleagured construction industry, which shed 75,000 jobs, the private sector added 63,000 positions.

The unemployment rate fell to its lowest level since August. John Silvia, chief economist at Wells Fargo, said the decline wasn’t a result of a shrinking labor force, which has held the rate down in previous months.

“It simply was, people found jobs,” he said. The report is “consistent with continued improvement in the labor market.”

The department also revised its past employment estimates to show that job losses from the Great Recession have been much worse than previously stated. The economy has shed 8.4 million jobs since the downturn began in December 2007, up from a previous figure of 7.2 million.

That’s the most jobs lost in any recession, as a percent of total employment, since World War II.

The figure for November was revised higher, however, to show a gain of 64,000 jobs. That was initially reported as a gain of 4,000.

[…]

So, there you have it.  We had a net loss of 20,000 jobs last month and the unemployment rate magically dropped 0.3 percent.   Well, that’s good news, actually,  because now we know for sure that  Obama can magically lower the unemployment rate without another one of those trillion dollar stimulus packages.  Therefore, the new stimulus package…err…”jobs bill” is definitely not needed anymore, am I right?