Gay Patriot reports on the election in Houston of a conservative lesbian to be mayor:

When the LA Times called Annise Parker, Houston’s Mayor-Elect “conservative,” I thought that maybe this lesbian is a Republican, but, alas, she is not. In the Space City’s mayoral runoff yesterday, she “defeated former City Attorney Gene Locke on an austere platform, convincing voters that her financial bona fides and restrained promises would be best suited in trying financial times.”…

…She wasn’t running as the lesbian candidate for Mayor, but as a prudent manager of the city’s finances who happened to be lesbian. Her victory seems to be emblematic of the changing attitudes toward gays, that if gay and lesbian candidates run for office on issues of concern to voters in their jurisdiction, where their sexuality is incidental to their political philosophy and campaign platform, voters will look past their sexuality and consider the merits of their person and their policy proposals.

With Mayor-Elect Parker’s background in financial management and commitment to sound budgetary policies, it looks like, come January 1, the City of Houston will be in good hands.

Gay Patriot does note that she was opposed by some in the religious right, but I find nothing from the largest groups (Catholic League, Focus on the Family, Christian Coalition, eg) about the election – so, I’ll put down the opposition to her from Christian groups as a minor issue, and it certainly didn’t sway the electorate. The bone of contention for the Christian groups in opposition was a worry that Parker might revive an old battle about domestic partnership benefits. She might, for all I know, but she didn’t campaign on it – and if she’s got any sense at all, she’ll leave that sleeping dog to lie, at least through her first term. Continue reading →

Sorry boys and girls, was out with the step-daughter and son-in-law for dinner this evening and just don’t have the “oomph” to write something good for the AM. Have at it.

A possible subject for discussion is just how thrilled we all are that the Chargers have come back strong and look to take the AFC West, again…only trouble is they’ll probably have to go through Indianapolis to the Super Bowl.

Why is our White House just so entirely political?

On the eve of the first election of the Obama era, the Washington Post ran a long profile Monday of the White House’s “low-profile” political director, Patrick Gaspard. It was an unremarkable story filled with unremarkable tidbits about how the unassuming Gaspard has thrived in a West Wing filled with political heavies–save for one quote from Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina that caught my eye. Explaining what sets Gaspard apart from his White House peers, Messina said, “We are all campaign hacks. Patrick is a movement guy. He really came up through the movement and the grassroots.”

This was meant to be an innocuous bit of inside baseball touting Gaspard’s labor roots and progressive bona fides. But it wound up revealing the Obama White House’s biggest weakness: The president’s top advisers are not just overly political, they are almost totally political. Indeed, this West Wing is stacked with “hacks”–campaign professionals who are acculturated to think, act and win in the hothouse environments of elections, not to govern a bitterly divided country in extremely difficult times.

And so they continue to blame Bush and declare war on Rush Limbaugh and Fox News – its not that they think its the best thing to do, but that its the only thing they know how to do. Past masters at the art of spinning a news cycle, they fail at everything else because campaigning and governing are two very different skill sets – and thus Presidents usually have clearly delineated political and government staffs.

You see, all that campaign rhetoric about bringing us all together was just that – campaign rhetoric. And when the time comes for Obama to become the uniter, these people won’t skip a beat and Obama will suddenly start talking about bridging our differences and working together. Right now, that’s not on the political agenda because it doesn’t fit in with the current need to placate the leftwing base prior to shutting them up in the run-up to 2010.

A horrible government run by people who create and hammer home talking points – that is all we’ve got.

Remember, yesterday, when I pointed out an anti-human article advocating that the whole world go on China’s evil “one child” policy? Well, here’s the kicker:

Wang Weijia and her husband grew up surrounded by propaganda posters lecturing them that “Mother Earth is too tired to sustain more children” and “One more baby means one more tomb.”

They learned the lesson so well that when Shanghai government officials, alarmed by their city’s low birthrate and aging population, abruptly changed course this summer and began encouraging young couples to have more than one child, their reaction was instant and firm: No way.

“We have already given all our time and energy for just one child. We have none left for a second,” said Wang, 31, a human resources administrator with an 8-month-old son.

More than 30 years after China’s one-child policy was introduced, creating two generations of notoriously chubby, spoiled only children affectionately nicknamed “little emperors,” a population crisis is looming in the country.

The average birthrate has plummeted to 1.8 children per couple as compared with six when the policy went into effect, according to the U.N. Population Division, while the number of residents 60 and older is predicted to explode from 16.7 percent of the population in 2020 to 31.1 percent by 2050. That is far above the global average of about 20 percent.

And not only that, there is the imbalance between men and women. Chinese culture, as in the case of a lot of non-western culture, highly values male children – and, so, as one-child became the rule, more and more couples would abort female babies in favor of male children. The Culture of Death is just like that – everything about it is wrong, and all of its effects are bad.

It is high time that we stopped thinking that we can get justice out of injustice – that right will emerge from wrong. Doing the right thing almost invariably seems to be more difficult, but as facts come in, it is always revealed that it was the best thing to do. Life is a wonderful thing – even at its worst, it is still sublime. We’re always doing the wrong thing, these days. Faced with teen pregnancy, we teach them how to have sex. Faced with a growing underclass, we subsidize it. Faced with historic injustice, we apply further injustice. Perhaps we should just try to do the right thing, from now on?

This has to make all environmentalists proud:

Iranian Prime Minister Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe plan to address negotiators at international climate talks in Copenhagen next week.

After all, the intellectual ability and good sense of these three men is right up there with such AGW luminaries as Al Gore, right?

The whole thing is a sick joke – but one which could be quite expensive as it seems a lot of people, Obama included, want to shake down the United States for billions of dollars to fight the phony effects of bogus global warming.

UPDATE: To believe in AGW, you have to ignore facts.

Please read the whole article over at Mish’s and play the video “Mish: Nov. Jobs Report ‘Looks Fabricated’. Expect Harder Times in 2010”.

Its not like they are necessarily making up numbers out of whole cloth – they don’t have to. The very way the jobs are calculated allows Obama and his liberals to pretend things are better and try to sell us on that notion. Remember – the reason we lost “only” 11,000 jobs in November is because of factors like the BLS believing “X” number of jobs were created, when there is no indication any jobs were created at all, outside government, in November. Additionally, participation in the labor force continues to decline as people lose their unemployment benefits and/or just give up on job hunting – meaning that even as more people have been losing their jobs, the unemployment rate can go down.

But even if the jobs numbers are correct, the economic prospects are still bleak because we’re still losing jobs in manufacturing, construction and other wealth-creating businesses. While GDP is forced up by printing and borrowing money and then spending it like gangbusters, the actual wealth of the country continues to decline. How long can Obama and the Fed keep the magic going? I don’t know – but eventually, everything has to be paid for. I figure its months before it all comes crashing down – but it could be a year or two. But crash it will – and not just here, but all around the world where there are economic bubbles upon bubbles (China’s stock market and the European bond market, for instance).

Save as much as you can and get ready for the worst – it is still to come.

The story:

The number of federal workers earning six-figure salaries has exploded during the recession, according to a USA TODAY analysis of federal salary data.

Federal employees making salaries of $100,000 or more jumped from 14% to 19% of civil servants during the recession’s first 18 months — and that’s before overtime pay and bonuses are counted.

Federal workers are enjoying an extraordinary boom time — in pay and hiring — during a recession that has cost 7.3 million jobs in the private sector.

This is horribly wrong – if anything, the federal workforce should be undergoing reductions in order to control spending. But what do Obama and the liberals propose? Much, much more of the same. This is insane! We need more people creating wealth, not more draining of our economic lifeblood to boost up AFSCME Union numbers, and donations to the Democrat party.

Message to everyone hired since January 20th: don’t get too comfy. You’ll be forced out soon – and that isn’t a threat, its a promise.

HAT TIP: Mish’s

Yes, you read that right – now, go read this and see how low the West has fallen.

Never again? Not if some people get their way…

Come together in this amazingly anti-human article:

The “inconvenient truth” overhanging the UN’s Copenhagen conference is not that the climate is warming or cooling, but that humans are overpopulating the world.

A planetary law, such as China’s one-child policy, is the only way to reverse the disastrous global birthrate currently, which is one million births every four days…

…The fix is simple. It’s dramatic. And yet the world’s leaders don’t even have this on their agenda in Copenhagen. Instead there will be photo ops, posturing, optics, blah-blah-blah about climate science and climate fraud, announcements of giant wind farms, then cap-and-trade subsidies.

None will work unless a China one-child policy is imposed…

What is the “one child” policy? It is a policy which mandates forced abortions and sterilization once you’ve had one child per couple. It would “work”; there would be a lot less people around. But are there really too many of us?

The author notes that we’ll reach 9 billion people by 2050 – and “unsustainable” number, in her view. Left out – because it doesn’t fit with a hate-filled, anti-human screed – is the fact that population growth rates, currently about 1.22%, are expected to fall to 0.33% by 2050. Also left out is the fact that some estimates have global population at 7.4 billion in 2050…this if the reduction in the birth rate continues on as current (and there’s no indication of a change in this pattern). Further left out is the projection that population could be 500 million less in 2100 than it was in 2000.

The truth about human population is that the Culture of Death has already seized hold of us – birth rates are dropping like a rock all around the world and most of Europe already has a birth rate lower than replacement. But voluntary suicide isn’t enough – when you really, really hate yourself and the human race, you want more positive measures. So, a one-child policy naturally commends itself.

All of this is, of course, utter nonsense. We’re not overpopulated now. We won’t be overpopulated in 2050. We can never actually overpopulate the world. Breed like mad and without any sense at all and we’ll still not be able to overcome the amount of land and resources available. Current global population density for the land area of the world is about 118 per mile. Japan’s is 874; and Japan is not exactly and environmental basket case. Put 42 billion people on earth and we still won’t have the population density of Japan. Anyone out there think that we’re ever going to reach 42 billion? 20 billion? Heck, even 10 billion? My bet is on the low end of population projections, given that even a here to for fertile nation like Mexico is only an ace away from being below replacement in fertility.

Some of the nations which are already below replacement level include Tunisia (just in case you think all Moslem nations breed like rabbits), China, Germany, Brazil, Japan, Poland (just in case you think Catholic countries are immune), New Zealand and Puerto Rico. Among the nations which will probably shortly fall in to the negative are Iran, United States, Vietnam, Turkey and Indonesia. The most fertile nation on earth is Niger – one of the three nations which have a birth rate of 7 or more per child. My great-grandparents had 14, and that wasn’t unusual a century ago; so, 7 really isn’t all that much in the grand scheme of things. Keep in mind that each nation which falls below 2.1 children per couple can only maintain its current population by immigration – but even the nations which supply the immigrants are drying up.

Our problem is no longer how to deal with growing population, but how to prepare ourselves for a world which will have a declining population. Don’t tell this to the Culture of Death people, however, because it would upset them – if they can’t promulgate new ways to murder the innocent, their whole day is wrecked.

Heritage explains:

This “personal responsibility” provision of the legislation, more accurately known as the “individual mandate” because it commands all individuals to enter into a contractual relationship with a private insurance company, takes congressional power and control to a striking new level. Its defenders have struggled to justify the mandate by analogizing it to existing federal laws and court decisions, but their efforts do not withstand serious scrutiny. An individual mandate to enter into a contract with or buy a particular product from a private party, with tax penalties to enforce it, is unprecedented– not just in scope but in kind–and unconstitutional as a matter of first principles and under any reasonable reading of judicial precedents.

If a health care bill is passed with an individual mandate, I will not participate – and I will welcome any legal sanctions as step one in a legal challenge to any such law. I’m certain that millions of other Americans would gladly join me in such an effort – in fact, we should start thinking of setting in motion a pre-commitment on this. Have people state, in public, that they will not adhere to any law which requires a citizen to engage in an economic activity – its bad enough that we’re required to buy car insurance, but at least there’s the “out” of not driving a car. Under ObamaCare, there would be no way out – save by popular revolt.

I’m not having any of this – I hold fast to my liberty and say, “thus far, but no further” to government attempts to control my life.