From an ABC affiliate:

Former President Jimmy Carter has been taken to the hospital after landing at Cleveland Hopkins Airport Tuesday morning.

NewsChannel5 crews at MetroHealth Medical Center said an ambulance arrived with Secret Service crews and an Ohio State Highway Patrol cruiser following it. People in the emergency room at the hospital told our crew they were kicked out because they were told “President Carter is coming.”…

Our prayers for President Carter’s health and swift recovery from whatever ails him.

Goodness, its like they have a death wish – from Indystar:

Turned down by union workers Monday, Illinois businessman Justin Norman won’t come back with a sweeter bid to buy GM’s huge Indianapolis metal plant.

“We are withdrawing from pursuing the plant any further,” JD Norman Industries announced after autoworkers voted 457-96 against a concession contract that would have cleared the way for Norman to buy the plant and cut wages by nearly half.

Although the vote marks a victory for defiant leaders of United Auto Workers Local 23 trying to resist wage cuts, it brings a quick end to attempts to spare the old riverside landmark from a shutdown that will widen the hole in the city’s industrial tax base…

Rather than take a pay cut to keep everyone working, the union decided to commit economic suicide. And not just for themselves but for their families and their local community. We’re in a deep recession and things simply cannot be as they were – the overly-generous pay and benefits packages built up by unions and complacent management over the past few decades simply cannot stand while unemployment is officially nearly 10%, and more realistically is closer to 20%.

The offer they rejected was for a base pay of $15.50 per hour, plus a bonus over the next two years of up to $35,000.00. You bring that opportunity here to Las Vegas, and you’d have 10,000 people lining up to apply. But, not good enough for the unions – rather kill the entire goose, if it can only lay silver eggs rather than golden.

A lot of people say that the decline of unions has been the cause of the decline of the middle class – not so: more accurately it has been unions which have made it progressively impossible to have a large, industrial base…not just in the absurd union contracts, but in union support for liberal Democrats who enact policies which make inhuman dictatorships like China’s appear business friendly.

We do need unions, but not the unions we have today – I hope that eventually the union workers will wake and realize that they’re being sold down the river. New unions with leadership geared towards the needs of the workers would be a boon to the United States – the current crop is part of the problem, and they must go.

HAT TIP: Mish’s

Via Powerline from Breitbart:

A small-town mayor and an aide were found stoned to death Monday in a drug-plagued western state, the fifth city leader to be slain in Mexico since mid-August.

Michoacan state Attorney General Jesus Montejano said the bodies of Tancitaro Mayor Gustavo Sanchez and city adviser Rafael Equihua were discovered in a pickup truck abandoned on a dirt road near the city of Uruapan.

Montejano’s spokesman, Jonathan Arredondo, said initially that the victims were hacked to death with a machete, but the attorney general said they were killed with stones…

Poor Mexico! I really don’t see how they get out of this – I don’t think the government has the authority or the power to really clamp down. Our problem is that the drug cartels control the border because we have abdicated our authority along the border.

It is going to get very grim, I think, for Mexico over the next couple years.

Rahmbo next to exit? From ABC News:

Although no final decision has been made because of family considerations, ABC News has learned that White House officials are preparing for Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel to announce on Friday — as Congress adjourns for recess — that he is leaving his post to explore a run for mayor of Chicago…

I really wasn’t expecting it this soon – I thought they’d start to abandon Obama in January or February. The “other shoe to drop” here would be a Hillary resignation…she does that before January, then we can put it 50/50 that she’ll be challenging Obama in 2012, unless there is a massive turn around in his fortunes.

This is what comes of nominating a nobody for President. Everyone was able to project on him whatever they pleased, and thus he got 53% or so of the vote…but the problem is in the fact that he doesn’t know anything and has no experience in running anything, let alone something as large and complex as the US government. The majority was suckered and is now getting angry over it…and the cynics who helped it along for personal gain are bailing out.

Very sorry she got caught:

Democratic Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez says she didn’t intend to offend anyone when she told a reporter that “the Vietnamese” and Republicans were trying to take her seat representing California’s Orange County.

Sanchez said Friday she “used a poor choice of words that some people have taken as offensive” in a Spanish-language interview with Jorge Ramos on Univision’s Sunday morning show, “Al Punto.” She said she apologizes if she offended anyone…

Uh, Ms. Sanchez, we didn’t “take” them as offensive – they were offensive. We’re angry that you gave offense – that you essentially called on people of one ethnic group to do battle against members of another. We’re also sick to death of the racial politics from your side of the aisle.

But what can we expect? They don’t have ideas. They don’t have a sense of honor. All they have is a sense of entitlement – they deserve power because they are such wonderful people who believe all the right things and who kowtow to all the right groups. When caught out, they simply don’t understand what happened – after all, Ms. Sanchez probably didn’t say anything her side hasn’t said a thousand times before…just a pity it was recorded and someone took the time to translate.

We do need an end to division in this nation. We are all Americans – but just as long as we have people like Ms. Sanchez in position of power and authority, so we’ll continue to have bitter, ethnic divides.

As Instapundit frequently puts it – “they told me if I voted for McCain, we’d have the FBI going after anti-war activists; and, they were right!”.

FBI agents in Chicago took a laptop and documents from the home of a Palestinian-American anti-war activist in an attempt to silence his advocacy, an attorney said Sunday.

The FBI on Friday searched eight addresses in Minneapolis and Chicago, including the home of Hatem Abudayyeh, who is the executive director of the Arab American Action Network, attorney Jim Fennerty told The Associated Press.

“The government’s trying to quiet activists,” Fennerty said. “This case is really scary.”…

Which may or may not be true – not much of a step from “anti-war” to “pro-terrorist” activism, as we on the right frequently pointed out during the previous Administration. There were these differences, however:

1. We on our side were very wary of any government action which could be construed as silencing dissent. Annoyed as we were (and remain) by the bone heads in the so-called “anti-war” movement, they have an absolute right to be as stupid as they want to be.

2. If President Bush’s FBI had done this, the Democrats and the larger political left would have exploded with indignation…bunch of crickets chirping is the response that I can see, so far.

Liberals, of course, are not interested in liberty. To them, “freedom” means “abortion” and “free access to sex and pornography”. The concept that people you disagree with should be left alone to speak their minds is alien to the left. As is, indeed, any sort of intellectual independence (one need only note that on the left it took orders from on high to try and create counter-parts to the TEA Party for proof of this). For the anti-war movement it works like this:

Orders were to be anti-war while President Bush was in office; now that Obama is in office, orders are to not be anti-war (at least not to the extent of taking to the streets about it). Thus this investigation is being passed over mostly in silence. There are no orders to be outraged, and thus no outrage.

What will become of this case remains to be seen. If these people were in cahoots with the terrorists, then they should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. If, on the other hand, they were just causing problems for the Administration, then there will have to be a high price to pay for those in the Administration who set this afoot. We will watch and wait – and we can be sure that on the right a genuine concern for liberty will be brought to bear.

From the Jerusalem Post:

…MKs close to Netanyahu went further and specifically ruled out Netanyahu accepting a single Palestinian refugee or giving the Palestinians or any foreign entity control over Jerusalem’s Holy Basin, singling out the Temple Mount and Western Wall.

When asked whether they thought they could make peace without paying the price that Olmert was willing to pay, Netanyahu’s confidants would only say that this was what the current negotiations were intended to determine.

“There is no situation in which Netanyahu or any Likud leader could offer the Palestinians what Olmert offered, especially regarding Jerusalem,” said Likud faction chairman Ze’ev Elkin…

Which is just the nature of things – would we offer the Washington Monument to our most deadly enemies in return for peace?

The trouble with making peace between Israel and the Palestinians is that the Palestinians want things they cannot have, and have no conceivable right to have. The modern Jewish settlement of Israel came via gift of the British, who by right of conquest in defensive war had gained dispositive control over Palestine in 1918. Once established, the Jewish people of Israel then gained control over the whole of Jerusalem by right of conquest in defensive war. Jerusalem is an Israeli city – a Jewish city; any Palestinians who live there do by sufferance of the Israelis. To demand all or part of it as a price for peace is simply absurd.

The trouble here is that our current leadership doesn’t understand what the fuss is all about. Not having much discernible religious belief, nor much of a sense of patriotism, they simply don’t understand the emotion behind Jewish access to the Temple Mount. It can’t be given away.

For the Palestinians to have peace they are going to have to give up their silly dreams of Jerusalem as their capitol city – but they won’t give up the dream as long as they are encouraged to think that by a combination of violence and stubbornness they’ll eventually get their way. And so, peace is currently impossible – it can’t be made as the sides have no means of reaching an agreement.

The Palestinians have to be confronted with a harsh either/or decision – either accept a peace treaty with Jerusalem as the undivided capitol of Israel, or face being walled off in whatever territory Israel decides to leave them, along with a cut off of all foreign aid for the Palestinian State. In either case, Israel will have peace – what the Palestinians would have if they don’t accept the offer won’t be much, but they’ll have no one to blame but themselves.

Just an astounding bit of news from Zero Hedge:

Ever wonder how China can endlessly generate goal-seeked GDP of precisely 8.00001% year after year? Or how it can constantly find use for the massive and ever-larger surplus of warehoused commodities? Simple – never stop building. Which, apparently means blowing up empty building before they are even finished and rebuilding them. Rinse. Repeat. After all gotta keep all those construction workers from rioting, and all those USD reserves redirected into Brazilian and OZ commodities, now that China is not really buying US debt anymore. China Hush has some stunning pictures confirming that in its search of the great home bubble perpetual engine, the politbureau comrades may have stumbled onto the bricks and mortar equivalent of Shangri La…

It seems that China is demolishing buildings only a few years old in order to make room for even newer, larger buildings. This is sheer madness – but a strong indicator that I’m right in thinking that China’s economy is Potemkin. Shiny and bright on the surface (at least those parts of the surface the Chinese government presents to foreign governments and investors), not so pretty underneath. It must never be forgotten – though it has been quite ruthlessly forgotten by the money men of the West – that China is governed by an inhuman dictatorship. It is corrupt, it is cruel – and it is heading for a fall.

Draft Cain, 2012?

Mudslinging is all the Democrats have left…well, more accurately, its all they really had to begin with.

Obama’s policies just made things worse. Some people, believe it or not, are just figuring this out.

What to do when your church starts rejecting everything you believe in.

Wonder if the Czech Republic would consider swapping Presidents with us?

Independents are as angry as Republicans; meaning only Democrats are even remotely satisfied with things as they are. Guess how that will work out on November 2nd?

From the AP:

President Barack Obama’s $30 billion small community business lending program faces one big challenge: many of the community banks and businesses it’s supposed to help don’t want it.

The lending program is part of a bill that passed the House of Representatives on Thursday and now awaits the president’s signature. The legislation contains a mix of tax cuts and credits aimed at helping small businesses. The centerpiece of the bill is an effort to make billions of dollars available to community banks for loans to small businesses…

…Bank executives say their customers don’t want loans, even at low interest rates, because the sluggish economy has chilled expansion plans. Some say the federal money isn’t worth it because they fear it will come with too much regulatory oversight.

“We have taken a strategic decision not to have our primary regulator, the government, also be a partner in our bank,” said William Chase Jr., CEO of Triumph Bank in Memphis…

That is the first intelligent statement I’ve seen from a banker in quite a long while. Mr. Chase seems to have learned the lesson – when Uncle Sam comes bearing gifts, think “Trojan Horse”.

The flaw in the Obama plan is that it is geared toward identifying what Obama and Co think should be done. The trouble is that no one in DC can really know what should be done. The US economy is 300 million people all doing things day by day which no one can track. The smartest people in the world in possession of the most detailed analysis of the economy can’t figure it out – its simply impossible. Too many variables.

This is why if you’re going to cut taxes, at all, they should be cut across the board. When you do that, you simply allow people an easier time of doing whatever it is they prefer. The economy is not some esoteric thing separate from the people – it is, simply, the people living their lives. Right now, the people are laboring under straightened finances and this has caused economic growth to grind to a halt – and we may, indeed, slip back in to full blown recession (with the caveat that, federal number crunchers aside, we may never have really left it).

Leave more money with the people and they’ll immediately gain greater flexibility as well as greater ability to make long term plans – recovery is automatic under such circumstances because the people don’t just sit around waiting for government permission to create wealth. They just do it, unless the government prevents them (which is, essentially, what government has been doing these past two years).

Outside of the financial straight jacket we’ve got on, the biggest threat to the economy is our debt – and investors can perceive that we’re fast approaching a fiscal brick wall. So in addition to across the board tax cuts to get things moving again, we need to seriously and deeply cut government spending. If we do this – cut taxes and spending – then we’ll be in a real recovery in less than a year, and on the road to returned prosperity in two or three years.

Obama’s little program is just more of the same economic idiocy – it not only won’t fix things, it will make them worse. And people see this.

HAT TIP: Mish’s