Olympics Are Over (cartoon)

by Will Durst

Dear Canada. Way to go, you hosers. Did yourself proud and put on one heck of an Olympics. Congratulations for providing an incredible 17 days of thrills and spills on the ice and snow and in the slush and fog. That was a winter games for the ages, except for that excruciatingly obvious lack of winter thing. As it turns out, Washington, D.C. might have been a better host city, but who knew? Although, a quick call to Al Gore might have been worth the international toll-call charges.

May I also offer up a big old heaping pile of thanks for keeping Celine Dion out of the Opening Ceremonies. I’m sure it was under the direction of Prime Minister Harper, counseled by a group of high-powered Ottawa lawyers to comply with certain articles of the Geneva Convention, but still, please accept the grateful indebtedness of an entire planet. Then again, no Neil Young? I think you missed a slam-dunk there, eh?

And good on you for winning the most golds. You may not have owned the whole podium but you certainly did hog that center platform, didn’t you? You really deserve to go out and celebrate. Use a pocket full of loonies and buy yourself some extra gravy to pour over your poutine.

Not to mention, could Bob & Doug McKenzie have asked for a more exciting conclusion? Yes, I’m talking the hockey final. At the arena you call The Hockey Place. Which I love. “What should we call that place where they play the hockey there? Oh, I know. The Hockey Place.” That is so you.

Of course, you must be aware we allowed you win. Yeah. We did. Threw the match. Let the red and white triumph over the red, white and blue. I mean, come on, it’s hockey. It just seemed to mean so much more to you. And you were the hosts and it being your national sport and all. And you know what, it just felt like the right thing to do. Now, the Russians in ‘80, that was a different matter. And, by the way, where were you in that? Oh, that’s right, you missed the medal round. See, you let us win on our home ice. We did the same for you. Don’t you always take a dive when it comes to Olympic baseball? Quid pro Zamboni.

You know that phrase, “We really couldn’t care less.” Nailed it. Have you seen the ratings for the Stanley Cup down here? Regularly gets beat out by “Murder, She Wrote” reruns on the Hallmark Channel. We wouldn’t know a blue line from fuchsia linen pillow cases. For U.S. sports fans, hockey ranks right behind the women’s NCAA Sweet 16 for water polo.

Not trying to hork your excitement here, but I mean, come on. You Canuckleheads must have had known something was up. A notion. A glimmer of a suspicion. A slight case of dubiosity. Telltale signs were everywhere. Remember we wiped the ice with you in the prelims. Huh? All part of the script. Then, who’s the hero? Nova Scotian Sidney Crosby, old number 87, scores the winning goal in overtime? You telling me you didn’t know it was a set-up? How bout this: you don’t say nothing, we don’t say nothing. No need to thank us; what are neighbors for? Anyhow, once again, well done on the great games, and oh yeah, love your bacon. But you know what, it tastes a lot like ham.

Will Durst is a San Francisco-based political comic who writes sometimes. This is an example. Copyright ©2010, Will Durst, distributed by the Cagle Cartoons Inc. syndicate.

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags: ,

Health Care Reform 2010: Obamacare, Bribes and All

:bribe: Take it I Dare ya By Dick Morris & Eileen McGann

All aspects of President Obama’s Chicago-style tactics are on display as he cajoles, bullies, and bribes the House to pass his health care proposals despite the overwhelming public rejection with which they have been met.

To some, he offers bribes.  Congressman Jim Matheson, endangered species – a Utah Democrat – succeeded in getting his brother Scott appointed to a federal judgeship.  Matheson voted against Obamacare when it first passed the House.  With his new-found winnings in his pocket, he now professes to be undecided.  He faces a clear conflict between his district and his conscience on the one hand and the bribe to his brother on the other.   The conscience will probably lose.

Matheson supports his party 91% of the time according to the Washington Post even though McCain got 58% of the vote in his district in 2008.  But Matheson got re-elected – by professing independence from the Democratic Party’s liberal line – with 63% of the vote, so he probably figures he can sneak in a vote for health care and still con his district into re-electing him.  After all, he’s not heavy.  He’s my brother.

Even as Matheson basks in the glow of presidential bribery, Eric Massa, a renegade Democrat from the Southern Tier of New York State faces his wrath.  Massa’s sin was to vote against Obamacare.  So Pelosi and the ethically-challenged House Ethics Committee are investigating him for “verbally abusing” a male member of his staff.  In this age of more serious offenses, using “salty language” to express his displeasure with staff work would not seem to rank high on the list of indictable offenses.  If it were, Lyndon Johnson would have been impeached.  But Massa is being hung out to dry as an example to other would-be independent minded Democrats.  The attacks on him have gotten so bad that Massa has announced his retirement after only one term in office.

But there is a reward waiting for House members who ignore the wishes and interests of their constituents and vote for Obama’s health care proposals.  Alan Mollohan has had a pesky FBI investigation hanging over his head for a few years.  Now, presto, right before the health care vote, it went away.  The Justice Department, headed by Attorney General Eric Holder, announced that the FBI was closing the inquiry.

Mollohan’s sin?  He pushed for earmarks for nonprofit enterprises in his district and then went into a real estate deal in Florida with the head of the company under financial terms that were distinctly favorable to the Congressman.  But Mollohan toes the party line and is now getting his unjust reward.

With health care reform coming up for a vote in the next few days, such tactics send a message to the House where Pelosi is having trouble lining up her votes:  That Obama will do anything – anything at all – to pass this bill.

For those of us without judgeships or the FBI at our disposal, we can only call and write the swing Congressmen (go to DickMorris.com for a list and their phone numbers) or donate to the League of American Voters to step up its fierce media offensive in their districts to urge them to vote no.

Call these swing Congressmen. Let them hear from you! Here’s the list:

PLEASE CALL! DC OFFICE LOCAL OFFICE
Harry Mitchell (202) 225-2190 (480) 946-2411
Gabrielle Giffords (202) 225-2542 (520) 881-3588
Ann Kirkpatrick (202) 225-2315 (928) 226-6914
Jerry McNerney (202) 225-1947 925-833-0643
John Salazar 202-225-4761 970-245-7107
Jim Hines (202) 225-5541 (866) 453-0028
Alan Grayson (202) 225-2176 (407) 841-1757
Bill Foster (202) 225-2976 630-406-1145
Baron Hill 202 225 5315 812 288 3999
Mark Schauer (202) 225-6276 (517) 780-9075
Gary Peters (202) 225-5802 (248) 273-4227
Dina Titus (202) 225-3252 702-256-DINA (3462)
Carol Shea-Porter (202) 225-5456 (603) 743-4813
Tim Bishop (202) 225-3826 (631) 696-6500
John Hall (202) 225-5441 (845) 225-3641 x49371
Bill Owens (202) 225-4611 (315) 782-3150
Mike Arcuri (202)225-3665 (315)793-8146
Dan Maffei (202) 225-3701 (315) 423-5657
Earl Pomneroy (202) 225-2611 (701) 224-0355
Steven Driehaus (202) 225-2216 (513) 684-2723
Mary Jo Kilroy (202) 225-2015 (614) 294-2196
Zach Space (202) 225-6265 (330) 364-4300
Kathy Dahlkemper (202) 225-5406 (814) 456-2038
Patrick Murphy (202) 225-4276 (215) 826-1963
Christopher Carney (202) 225-3731 (570) 585-9988
Paul Kanjorski (202) 225-6511 (570) 825-2200
John Spratt (202) 225-5501 (803)327-1114
Tom Perriello (202) 225-4711 (276) 656-2291
Alan Mollohan (202) 225-4172 (304) 623-4422
Nick Rahall (202) 225-3452 (304) 252-5000
Steve Kagen (202) 225-5665 (920) 437-1954
  • Share/Bookmark

Tags: ,

Nonpartisan CBO: Obama’s Budget Produces Soaring Debt by 2020

waa, no money“President Obama’s proposed budget would add more than $9.7 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, congressional budget analysts said Friday. Proposed tax cuts for the middle class account for nearly a third of that shortfall.

The 10-year outlook released by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office is somewhat gloomier than White House projections, which found that Obama’s budget request would produce deficits that would add about $8.5 trillion to the national debt by 2020.

The CBO and the White House are in relative agreement about the short-term budget picture, with both predicting a deficit of about $1.5 trillion this year — a post-World War II record at 10.3 percent of the overall economy — and $1.3 trillion in 2011. But the CBO is considerably less optimistic about future years, predicting that deficits would never fall below 4 percent of the economy under Obama’s policies and would begin to grow rapidly after 2015.

Deficits of that magnitude would force the Treasury to continue borrowing at prodigious rates, sending the national debt soaring to 90 percent of the economy by 2020, the CBO said. Interest payments on the debt would also skyrocket by $800 billion over the same period.” ….

Read more HERE

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags: ,

Kid Air Controllers (cartoon)

NEW YORK (AP) — “As planes waited to take off from Kennedy Airport, the jargon-packed radio chatter between controllers and pilots was interrupted by a young boy’s voice: ‘JetBlue 171, cleared for takeoff.”

An air traffic controller who brought his son to work let the youngster read a few routine messages to pilots — and then brought in another child the next day — in an incident that amused pilots but not the Federal Aviation Administr-ation.

Authorities suspended the controller and a supervisor Wednesday after a recording of the radio calls was posted on the Internet, then reported by a Boston television station. ” … READ MORE HERE

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags:

New Research: The Earth Was Once a “Snowball”

ScienceDaily (Mar. 5, 2010) —” Geologists have found evidence that sea ice extended to the equator 716.5 million years ago, bringing new precision to a “snowball Earth” event long suspected to have taken place around that time.

Led by scientists at Harvard University, the team reports on its work in the journal Science. The new findings — based on an analysis of ancient tropical rocks that are now found in remote northwestern Canada — bolster the theory that our planet has, at times in the past, been ice-covered at all latitudes.

“This is the first time that the Sturtian glaciation has been shown to have occurred at tropical latitudes, providing direct evidence that this particular glaciation was a ’snowball Earth’ event,” says lead author Francis A. Macdonald, an assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard. “Our data also suggests that the Sturtian glaciation lasted a minimum of 5 million years.”….

Read more HERE

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags:

Global Warming 2010: Bad Science, So Lets Become Political !!

Global warming...

“Undaunted by a rash of scandals over the science underpinning climate change, top climate researchers are plotting to respond with what one scientist involved said needs to be “an outlandishly aggressively partisan approach” to gut the credibility of skeptics.

In private e-mails obtained by The Washington Times, climate scientists at the National Academy of Sciences say they are tired of “being treated like political pawns” and need to fight back in kind. Their strategy includes forming a nonprofit group to organize researchers and use their donations to challenge critics by running a back-page ad in the New York Times.

“Most of our colleagues don’t seem to grasp that we’re not in a gentlepersons’ debate, we’re in a street fight against well-funded, merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules,” Paul R. Ehrlich, a Stanford University researcher, said in one of the e-mails.

Some scientists question the tactic and say they should focus instead on perfecting their science, but the researchers who are organizing the effort say the political battle is eroding confidence in their work.” …

UNBELIEVABLE !!!
Source: HERE

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags:

The Difference If You Marry a Chicago Girl (tasteful joke)

Three friends married women from different parts of the country…..

The first man married a woman from Utah . He told her that she was to do the dishes and house cleaning. It took a couple of days, but on the third day, he came home to see a clean houseand dishes washed and put away.

The second man married a woman from California . He gave his wife orders that she was to do all the cleaning, dishes and the cooking. The first day he didn’t see any results, but the next day he saw it was better. By the third day, he saw his house was clean, the dishes were done, and there was a huge dinner on the table.

The third man married a girl from Chicago . He ordered her to keep the house cleaned, dishes washed, lawn mowed, laundry washed, and hot meals on the table for every meal. He said the first day he didn’t see anything, the second day he didn’t see anything but by the third day, some of the swelling had gone down and he could see a little out of his left eye, and his arm was healed enough that he could fix himself a sandwich and load the dishwasher. He still has some difficulty when he pees.

Submitted by Tony S

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags:

Obama Health Care Plan (cartoon)

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags:

Health Care Reform 2010: “Plan L for Loser”

:loser: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try, try again.

With Plans A, B and C hav ing failed miserably, President Obama yesterday unveiled his latest “new and improved” version of health-care reform. He says that this incarnation “incorporates the best ideas from Democrats and Republicans — including some of the ideas that Republicans offered during the health-care summit.” Unfortunately, its fundamental premise remains exactly the same — a government takeover of the health-care system.

Start with those “Republican ideas”: Though mostly not bad, they’re hardly game changing.

* Increase the financial incentives for states to experiment with malpractice reform by $50 million. Wow — a million dollars per state! That undoubtedly has the trial lawyers quaking in their boots.

* Undercover stings to help root out Medicare and Medicaid fraud. Fine — but when fighting fraud in government programs becomes a major concession, it shows just how out of touch Washington has become.

* Increase Medicare reimbursements. OK, higher spending for a program that’s already going broke may well be a Republican idea, but it doesn’t exactly make Obama’s better.

…All in all, saying that these changes represent a “compromise” with Republicans is a bit like saying that Yankee speedster Brett Gardner is a home-run hitter. It’s technically true (he hit three dingers last year), but no one’s going to mistake him for Babe Ruth.

The president has also touted the new plan as “smaller” and “leaner.” Smaller and leaner than what? This version may actually cost more than the last one — breaking the $1 trillion mark even under the White House’s rosy assumptions.

At its heart, ObamaCare hasn’t changed. It still represents a top-down, centralized, command-and-control approach to reform.

The government would require everyone to have health insurance, would determine what benefits that insurance must include, would regulate insurance prices and physician reimbursement and would micromanage how medicine is practiced.

All this would be accompanied by higher taxes and, most likely, higher insurance premiums.

It is a plan that says the government knows best — when it comes to a sixth of the US economy and some of the most important, personal and private decisions in people’s lives. A few cosmetic concessions can’t fix that basic premise.

…Reportedly, as many as nine House Democrats who once voted against ObamaCare, including Rep. Scott Murphy of upstate New York, are now open to supporting the latest version. If they do, in the face of overwhelming public opposition, this new version of health reform could turn out to be Plan L — for “loser.”

Source: HERE

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags: ,

Assassination Plot Right Out of a Mystery Thriller

Mystery Men Emote Movie Poster “The assassination of senior Hamas militant leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh on Jan. 19 is still generating a tremendous amount of discussion and speculation some six weeks after the fact. Dubai’s police force has been steadily releasing new information almost on a daily basis, which has been driving the news cycle and keeping the story in the media spotlight. The most astounding release so far has been nearly 30 minutes of surveillance camera footage that depicts portions of a period spanning the arrival of the assassination team in Dubai, surveillance of al-Mabhouh, and the killing and the exfiltration of the team some 22 hours later.

By last count, Dubai police claim to have identified some 30 people suspected of involvement in the assassination; approximately 17 have been convincingly tied to the operation through video footage either as surveillants, managers or assassins, with the rest having only tenuous connections based on information released by the Dubai police. In any case, the operation certainly was elaborate and required the resources and planning of a highly organized agency, one most likely working for a nation-state.” ….

Read more HERE

(This report is republished with permission of  STRATFOR”

  • Share/Bookmark

Earth Montages (photos)

These spectacular ‘blue marble’ images are the most detailed views of Earth to date.

Using a collection of satellite images, scientists painstakingly stitched together months of observations to create these montages which show the surface of the continents and oceans in stunning detail.

Earth

Earth

  • Share/Bookmark

Health Care Reform 2010 “An Abuse of Power”

STOP All Abuse“A string of electoral defeats and the great unpopularity of ObamaCare can’t stop Democrats from their self-appointed rendezvous with liberal destiny—ramming a bill through Congress on a narrow partisan vote. What we are about to witness is an extraordinary abuse of traditional Senate rules to pass a bill merely because they think it’s good for the rest of us, and because they fear their chance to build a European welfare state may never come again.

The vehicle is “reconciliation,” a parliamentary process that fast-tracks budget measures and was created in 1974 as a deficit-reduction tool. Limited to 20 hours of debate, reconciliation bills need a mere 50 votes in the Senate, with the Vice President as tie-breaker, thus circumventing the filibuster. Both Democrats and Republicans have frequently used reconciliation on budget bills, so Democrats are now claiming that using it to pass ObamaCare is no big deal.

Yet this shortcut has never been used for anything approaching the enormity of a national health-care entitlement. Democrats are only resorting to it now because their plan is in so much political trouble—within their own party, and even more among the general public—and because they’ve failed to make their case through persuasion.

…Leave aside the irony of invoking “the American people” on behalf of a bill that consistently has been 10 to 15 points underwater in every poll since the fall, and is getting more unpopular by the day, particularly among independents.

…Regrets, they’ve got a few. Yet these Democratic Sinatras will still do it their way. President Obama is expected to endorse reconciliation in remarks this morning.

The goal is to permanently expand the American entitlement state with a vast apparatus of subsidies and regulations while the political window is still (barely) open, regardless of the consequences or the overwhelming popular condemnation. As Mr. Obama fatalistically said after his health summit, if voters don’t like it, “then that’s what elections are for.”

In other words, he’s volunteering Democrats in Congress to march into the fixed bayonets so he can claim an LBJ-level legacy like the Great Society that will be nearly impossible to repeal. This would be an unprecedented act of partisan arrogance that would further mark Democrats as the party of liberal extremism. If they think political passions are bitter now, wait until they pass ObamaCare.”

Source: WSJ

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags: ,

Obama Smokes (cartoon)

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags: ,

The Housing Market – “Expert” Advice

Urban warfareBy Tom Purcell

It’s frightening, if you want to know the truth.

I speak of the reversal of fortunes in the housing market.

Research firm First American CoreLogic reported last week that 24 percent of all homes with mortgages — some 11.3 million — are “underwater,” worth less than what their owners owe on them.

Home sales are tanking, too. New home sales plummeted unexpectedly in January to their lowest level in 50 years.

I witnessed — and successfully avoided — the housing bubble firsthand. In 2001, before the 9/11 tragedy, I nearly bought a half-duplex just outside Old Town, Alexandria, Va., for $165,000.

The owner was eager to sell — there were no lines of people outbidding each other yet — but I wasn’t sure if I’d be staying in the D.C. area, so I passed.

I had no idea that just a few years later, interest rates would rocket downward — that the Federal Reserve would pump an unimaginable amount of dough into the economy to stave off recession.

I had no idea that aggressive mortgage firms would use interest-only gimmicks and all kinds of tricks to qualify anyone for a massive loan.

Boy, did the easy money cause housing prices to soar. A property nearly identical to the one I almost bought for $165,000 in 2001 sold for $465,000 in 2005 — an increase of $300,000 in only four years!

The Washington Post reported on a new phenomenon that year: housing envy.

Suddenly, people who worked side by side, making the same incomes, became envious of those who had bought homes early in the bubble. Suddenly, one person was $300,000 richer — on paper, anyhow — than his co-worker who’d bought at the peak of the bubble or was still renting.

Pretty soon, all kinds of “smart,” educated people were jumping into the housing market. I knew one couple of modest means who borrowed $400,000 to buy a dump of a home in a rough area, convinced they’d make a $100,000 profit in only one year.

My gut told me the end of the boom was near. I knew this because I’d done some research into the D.C. housing market.

Much to my surprise, I discovered a bubble had formed and burst there only one decade before.

I spoke with one retired fellow who’d been burned in that 1980s frenzy. He saw the cost of condos soaring at the time. In 1987, he and his wife tapped their life savings to take out mortgages on five units.

He paid $115,000 for each — unaware he’d bought at the bubble’s peak. In 1999, years after the bubble had burst, each unit was worth only $90,000. More than a decade after his initial investment, he was underwater by some $125,000 on all five mortgages.

I decided to flee the insanity of the D.C. market and head back to Pittsburgh, a much smaller, slower-growing market that was not experiencing an irrational housing boom.

I bought a modest condo, my second property here, for less than it was worth. I knew it would make a good rental unit in time. I took on a mortgage I could comfortably pay off in 15 years.

A few years later, I rented it out and bought a third property, applying the same strategy.

When the housing bubble burst in D.C. and across the country, I was sitting pretty in Pittsburgh. All three properties were worth more than I owed on them.

And I am well-poised now to weather an inflationary cycle that will likely be brought on by out-of-control government spending, as inflation will cause property to “increase” in value, while my mortgages remain fixed.

In any event, if my story doesn’t frighten you, it should.

If I, a lousy English major, anticipated the housing bust well before most experts did, what does that tell you about our experts?

©2010 Tom Purcell. Tom Purcell, a humor columnist for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, is nationally syndicated exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags: ,

Global Warming 2010: “Only A Few Marginal Mistakes”

Global warming...Christopher Booker has written a fascinating article in the Telegraph entitled: “A Perfect Storm Is Brewing For The IPCC“.  Here, in part, is an enticement to have you read the entire article:

… “The chief defence offered by the warmists to all those revelations centred on the IPCC’s last 2007 report is that they were only a few marginal mistakes scattered through a vast, 3,000-page document. OK, they say, it might have been wrong to predict that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035; that global warming was about to destroy 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest and cut African crop yields by 50 per cent; that sea levels were rising dangerously; that hurricanes, droughts and other “extreme weather events” were getting worse. These were a handful of isolated errors in a massive report; behind them the mighty edifice of global warming orthodoxy remains unscathed. The “science is settled”, the “consensus” is intact.

But this completely misses the point. Put the errors together and it can be seen that one after another they tick off all the central, iconic issues of the entire global warming saga. Apart from those non-vanishing polar bears, no fears of climate change have been played on more insistently than these: the destruction of Himalayan glaciers and Amazonian rainforest; famine in Africa; fast-rising sea levels; the threat of hurricanes, droughts, floods and heatwaves all becoming more frequent.

All these alarms were given special prominence in the IPCC’s 2007 report and each of them has now been shown to be based, not on hard evidence, but on scare stories, derived not from proper scientists but from environmental activists. Those glaciers are not vanishing; the damage to the rainforest is not from climate change but logging and agriculture; African crop yields are more likely to increase than diminish; the modest rise in sea levels is slowing not accelerating; hurricane activity is lower than it was 60 years ago; droughts were more frequent in the past; there has been no increase in floods or heatwaves.

Furthermore, it has also emerged in almost every case that the decision to include these scare stories rather than hard scientific evidence was deliberate. As several IPCC scientists have pointed out about the scare over Himalayan glaciers, for instance, those responsible for including it were well aware that proper science said something quite different. But it was inserted nevertheless – because that was the story wanted by those in charge.

In addition, we can now read in shocking detail the truth of the outrageous efforts made to ensure that the same 2007 report was able to keep on board IPCC’s most shameless stunt of all – the notorious “hockey stick” graph purporting to show that in the late 20th century, temperatures had been hurtling up to unprecedented levels. This was deemed necessary because, after the graph was made the centrepiece of the IPCC’s 2001 report, it had been exposed as no more than a statistical illusion. (For a full account see Andrew Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion, and also my own book The Real Global Warming Disaster.) …

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags: