An unanswerable attack – and if this ends up being the way the immigration issue is framed in November, then the GOP will win it handily.

Townhall has constructed the list and you can view it here in PDF. I have to say, it hurts a bit – I figure that I’m hated more than Michael Barone (#100), and who the heck has even heard of Philip Anschutz (#89)? I mean, has anyone ever advocated having Barone beaten up, or suggested that Anschutz be strung up from a lamp post with a meat hook? I might not be as famed as some, but I really do get the lefty hate-juices flowing!

I pledge this to you, my fellow Americans, I will do all I can to make the list next year!

From the BBC:

US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has told the BBC that the world “cannot depend as much on the US as it did in the past”.

He said that other major economies would have to grow more for the global economy to prosper.

Geithner, you sniveling, little coward – what you are really saying is that because your tax and spend liberalism can’t fix America, America can’t be fixed. The world can depend on America – we just can’t depend on you and your boss.

Just another example of the spinelessness of liberals – and their willingness to consign average Americans to destruction, as long at rich, powerful liberals can remain rich and powerful. Geithner doesn’t care – he’s got his pile of money and once he’s out of DC, he fully expects to be re-hired in the corporate world where he can pile up even more money – and then cheat on his taxes some more, because taxes are for the little people to pay.

Have you had enough of these weak, worthless liberals?

Which wouldn’t be a bad thing, normally, but it stems from all the grim news for the United States – from the Wall Street Journal:

Americans are more pessimistic about the state of the country and less confident in President Barack Obama’s leadership than at any point since Mr. Obama entered the White House, according to a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.

The survey also shows grave and growing concerns about the Gulf oil spill, with overwhelming majorities of adults favoring stronger regulation of the oil industry and believing that the spill will affect the nation’s economy and environment.

Sixty-two percent of adults in the survey feel the country is on the wrong track, the highest level since before the 2008 election. Just one-third think the economy will get better over the next year, a 7-point drop from a month ago and the low point of Mr. Obama’s tenure…

The real kicker for the Democrats is that 57% prefer to have someone else in Congress come next year. Polls are polls, of course, and there is a long way from here to November, but it is abundantly clear that without a major game-changer, Obama and his Democrats are in for a long election night.

A couple days ago I was up talking with the Mrs about the overall state of the world and we agreed that it seems like we’re all holding our breath, waiting for a plunge in to disaster. Being a bit impoverished these days, we don’t get out of Las Vegas as much as we used to, so I can’t speak much from first hand experience outside of my town but what I can see here indicates spreading disaster. This manifests itself in large and small ways.

The largest thing we see is that “Space Available” seems to be our booming industry. That sign is popping up with great regularity in business parks, malls and commercial properties. Among the smaller things are the fact that I used to get annoyed by regularly getting stuck behind slow moving cement trucks on my way to work – the other day I was startled to see one on the road…the first in about a year, I guess.

Other things are seeing signs for new homes starting in “the low 100s” when four years ago you couldn’t find anything for less than “the high 200s”. The Mrs’ hairdresser is very stressed by her collapsed cash flow. You can go to the mall and get a parking place steps from the entrance.

I don’t care how much happy talk the banksters and bureaucrats put out – the economy just isn’t happening. Couple this with the abject failure of Obama’s leadership and the rank, nauseating corruption emanating from Congress, and you get a powerful political stew. The sort of thing which ushers in generational change.

We’ll have to see how it all comes out. Keep faith in God; say your prayers. Do the right thing, day by day – and don’t worry about the rest. But, my friends, I do believe we are doomed to live in interesting times for at least some years.

HAT TIP: Mish’s

On the House Democrats criminal refusal to pass a budget for Fiscal Year 2011 – from NRO’s The Corner:

…Without a budget, “Americans will not know the consequences of the spending spree,” Ryan says. “They won’t know what the tradeoffs down the road will be. They won’t see how this will make us borrow more money overseas, how it will push up interest rates, how it will lead to inflation problems, and how it will demand much, much higher taxes in the future.”

What’s left is a weak promise on paper. The Democrats’ draft for 2011, The Economist notes, lacks any “substantial cuts.” Instead of making actual cuts, Ryan says House Democrats are simply “talking up” spending limits without committing to any real budget guidelines. “It’s the new convenient out for the Democrats,” Ryan says. “If you want something to happen, but you don’t want to take responsibility, then you just deem it — no budget, no priorities, and no restraint. It’s just turning on the spending spigot and ignoring everything else.” …

This is Congress’ primary responsibility – producing a budget for the United States government. Believe it or not, they are not there primarily to pass the Obama agenda…they are there, first and foremost, to decide national spending priorities for the coming year. And they are refusing to do it.

Why? Because they will be either forced to make massive cuts in spending, or reveal a gigantic deficit for FY 2011 and they simply don’t want to do that until after the election, if even then. America can fall apart and die for all they care – their only concern is their power, perks and wealth. All is to be subordinated to keeping Pelosi in the Speaker’s chair and keeping the grafting heads of committees in possession of their gavels.

Now I don’t just want these people defeated in November – I want them jailed for the complete crooks that they are.

UPDATE: Over at Zero Hedge an article on the Fed’s possible plan to massively print up more fake money in one last Keynesian spasm of idiocy. Things are about to tip over in to recession, but it won’t show up until the fourth quarter, at the earliest – so look for any such move to happen after October 1st (ZH thinks after the mid-terms).

I’m sure that everyone has heard by now of the accusations leveled against Al Gore by a masseuse. On the face of it, there’s something definitely there. I don’t know about the rest of you, but if I had a masseuse come to my hotel room without my wife around, I’d be in quite a jam with the Mrs over it – even if nothing really did happen. Additionally, it wouldn’t occur to me to call in a masseuse while I’m staying at a hotel – that is the sort of thing done by someone who’s got cheating on his mind.

So, it seems that our Al Gore got off the ranch a bit – and that, perhaps, lets us know why Tipper is looking for new digs. But that isn’t what I’m on about – Gore is a private citizen and his sexual proclivities are his business. What I’m fired up about is this from Politico:

Portland’s Oregonian today printed a police report echoing a National Enquirer story that a masseuse accused Al Gore of sexual harassment in 2006.

The woman did not wind up pursuing her complaint, for reasons unclear. It’s also worth noting that the Portland Tribune had the story two years ago, and writes that it “chose at that time not to publish a story.”(emphasis added)

Two years ago! If Gore were a Republican, this thing would have led the national news coverage. Can you imagine what would happen if Dick Cheney were caught in such a scrape? Do you think the MSM would be at all reticent with running the story? That they’d wait until they had an air tight case before publishing?

Next question: what else is the MSM hiding in order to protect Democrats? I think we should all subscribe to the National Enquirer – it does seem to be the only outfit which is willing to run true stories about Democrat corruption.

There might be more danger between November and January than we can suspect – from Neo-Neocon at Pajamas Media:

Think cap and trade is dead? Think again: Politico’s Mike Allen reports that Obama and the Democratic congressional leadership have a plan, a continuation and deepening of the disregard for the American public they so amply demonstrated through the process by which they passed the despised HCR bill:

Phil Schiliro, the White House congressional liaison, has told the Senate to aim to take up an energy bill the week of July 12, after the July 4 break (and after the scheduled final passage of Wall Street reform). Kagan confirmation will follow, ahead of the summer break, scheduled to begin Aug. 9. The plan is to conference the new Senate bill with the already-passed House bill IN A LAME-DUCK SESSION AFTER THE ELECTION, so House members don’t have to take another tough vote ahead of midterms.

I’ll bet they’ll try – but I also bet it won’t be as easy as they think. If 2010 is a debacle, the very large class of Senate Democrats up in 2012 will be looking over their shoulders and trying to figure the best means of survival. Passing an unpopular legislative agenda at the behest of an ousted Congressional leadership might not appeal to them.

But the fact that they are thinking along these lines tells us two things:

1. They know things are looking increasingly grim for them. The polls don’t even offer a glimmer of hope. While there is still happy talk on the economy, it is beginning to come home to people that the second half of 2010 will be, at best, flat in economic activity and may see a return to outright recession by the 4th quarter. The campaign in Afghanistan goes badly and plenty of other foreign and military problems are coming up – while the Gulf spill just erodes Obama’s credibility as a leader day by day. While they’ll keep up brave talk of winning in November and they’ll try their best to make it happen, they know they teeter on brink of defeat.

2. They don’t care about the American people or what we think. They’re primary goal, now, is just to cement as much power and money in their hands as possible so that no matter what the despised people do, they still hold the levers of power. Congressmen facing defeat might be convinced to go along with the depredations against the Constitution in return for a sinecure in the government organizations to be created for ObamaCare, Cap and Trade and other boondoggles.

Our task, should we win and should the Democrats go through with this, is to use every legislative trick in the book to force Obama to sign off on 100% repeal of everything enacted between November and January. The people will back us on this, and as 2012 comes closer, we’ll gain great leverage over an Obama trying to triangulate himself back to the center for the election.

Just happened across this report at Iraq Body Count from May of 2010 – remember back when Bush was President our liberals were on fire about the Lancet report which alleged a million civilian deaths in Iraq because of Bush’s criminal war for Halliburton/Likud/Oil/WhatHaveYou? Well, time has gone on and there is now a liberal Democrat in the White House, so the truth can be told:

…Iraq Body Count (IBC) applied an early and so far unanswered set of reality checks2 to the Johns Hopkins survey published in the Lancet in October 2006, a paper which has recently been comprehensively discredited in a new study by Prof. Michael Spagat of Royal Holloway University. Even among the generally inexact survey results for deaths in Iraq the “Lancet estimate” was an extreme outlier, asserting 450,000 more deaths from violence than the much larger WHO-funded study that estimated 151,000 such deaths by July 2006. The only evidence that appeared to support the Lancet finding was published by a polling company, Opinion Research Business (ORB), which estimated 1 million violent Iraqi deaths by August 2007.

In a meticulous and detailed analysis of ORB’s survey, IBC researcher Josh Dougherty and Spagat have laid to rest any notion that ORB’s massive estimate is even nominally sound, let alone capable of providing validation for another outlier…

Tip of the hat to the people at IBC for looking in to the data and debunking a rather horrific myth about Iraq. Of course, any deaths in war are terrible and 1 or 100,000 is bad – but it was a dis-service to the people and to the truth to have crazed announcements on the left about the cost of the war which were not based upon facts. All that was accomplished was to feed enemy propaganda.

Some who pressed the story, no doubt, did so for malicious reasons – most probably just passed it along because it fit the pre-conceived notion. That there might have been some sincere motives about it doesn’t help the soldiers and civilians killed in the heavy fighting which followed on such propaganda victories for the enemy. The lesson to be learned here is to not jump to conclusions – and mostly not to assume that numbers of dead or other bad things greatly exceed US military estimates. Remember, the only people under orders not to lie in Iraq were the soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines…taking one thing with another, it was more likely they were telling the truth than anyone else on the ground.

War is a nasty, dangerous business and it isn’t helped at all that some people will outright lie about what is going on. Next time, liberals, have a little more respect for your military and your country. It’ll make the blood cost lower.

And, no, its not in Pakistan – its in Dearborn, MI:

I can understand what the cops thought they were trying to do – they thought they were avoiding trouble. But what they’ve done is make matters worse.

The Thomas More Law Center has entered the fray for the defense and it is hoped that the Dearborn police will be compelled to use both better judgment. One thing is certain: we must stop this truckling to Islam.

One should not think that changing horses mid stream is really all that bad in military terms. It happens fairly frequently in history, and very often with good results. It has been clear that General McChrystal had to go and, on his record, General Petraeus is clearly the most suitable man for the post.

But, can he pull it off?

In Iraq, General Petraeus had the 100% backing of President Bush to obtain whatever he needed and take as much time as required. In Afghanistan, there is a time clock already running out and while more has been sent, it seems pretty clear that the military did not get all it requested (which, by the way, is not necessarily decisive – generals tend to ask for more than they know they’ll get; sort of taking out insurance against politics, as it were). The real question is whether or not General Petraeus has the time and resources to secure victory?

I hope he does – losing in Afghanistan would be a catastrophe for us. But the clock on the wall continues to worry me. I’d feel much better if, taking advantage of the fracas, Obama were to set aside his self-imposed time limit. Unfortunately, I don’t see Obama as a man who remotely understands military reality, and thus the opportunity to re-commit ourselves to victory might be lost.

I wish luck and offer my prayers for General Petraeus and his command. He has been given the hardest job in the world, I have faith in his courage and capability – and now we’ll see what he can do.