Moving aside for a moment from Blago, Obama and sundry Illinois issues, we still have Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-Tax Evasion) to concern ourselves with:

The House ethics committee is expanding an investigation of Rep. Charles Rangel, chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee. The ethics panel issued a statement Tuesday saying it had voted to expand an already far-ranging probe into the New York Democrat to examine whether he protected an oil drilling company from a big tax bill when the head of that company pledged a $1 million donation to a college center named after the congressman.

The move means the Rangel inquiry will likely stretch well past early January, when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., had previously said she expected the matter to be resolved.

Republicans have called for Rangel to step down from his chairmanship of the powerful Ways and Means panel during the investigation. The expanding investigation means the ethics cloud hanging over Rangel is likely to follow him and Democratic leaders into the next Congress as they seek to pass major stimulus legislation and buoy the sinking economy.

Naturally, Rangel should step down – and just as naturally, he won’t. Not unless his fellow Democrats start to feel that his continuing as Chairman harms their chances in 2010. And given how convinced the Democrats are that they’ve won a new 60-year stretch of power, my guess is that the reality of the situation will escape the Democrats for a while, and perhaps right on in to the 2010 mid-terms.

Remember, Democrats, the ball is entirely in your court – we’ve got a semi-ability to filibuster a bit in the Senate, but for at least the next two years, America will dance to your tune. Now, you have a chance to really cement your victory and do some good things for America…but you’re first going to have to ditch your corrupt members. Your problem is that your corrupt members are at or near the top – its not like Pelosi is pure as wind-driven snow here, ya know? I know, its rather hard – some of the most corrupt members (Rangel, eg) have been your most reliably liberal votes…but honesty is the best policy. On the other hand, the best thing for the GOP is for you Democrats to just keep being Democrats – the people were mighty turned off by us, and we deserved our defeat…but unless you’ve got a radical makeover in your plans, the people will swiftly get even more turned off by you.

The news story:

As gun sales shoot up around the country, President-elect Barack Obama said Sunday that gun-owning Americans do not need to rush out and stock up before he is sworn in next month.

“I believe in common-sense gun safety laws, and I believe in the second amendment,” Obama said at a news conference. “Lawful gun owners have nothing to fear. I said that throughout the campaign. I haven’t indicated anything different during the transition. I think people can take me at my word.”

But National Rifle Association spokesman Andrew Arulanandam said it’s not Obama’s words — but his legislative track record — that has gun-buyers flocking to the stores.

“Prior to his campaign for president, his record as a state legislator and as a U.S. Senator shows he voted for the most stringent forms of gun control, the most Draconian legislation, gun bans, ammunition bans and even an increase in federal excise taxes up to 500 percent for every gun and firearm sold,” Arulanandam said.

Obama answered “yes” in 1996 to a questionnaire from an Illinois group on whether he supported a handgun ban. But he later said a staffer filled out that answer and he did not support a ban.

I’ve never owned a gun, but there still is that nagging feeling that I should have a closet full of guns by January 20th, just in case. I won’t, of course – but I’m not exactly prepared to take Obama at his word. This doesn’t mean I don’t think he’s telling the truth – could be that Obama realizes that the issue is a loser and that the only people who ever cared strongly about gun control laws were rich, white liberals who could usually obtain concealed carry permits if they felt the need. On the other hand, when Obama says “lawful”, you want clarification – realizing that he’s a lawyer who has had some difficulty with the truth (such as his claim that an aide incorrectly filled out the gun control question).

There is really nothing Obama can say which will make gun owners feel confident that there isn’t a gun control ordinance up his sleeve somewhere, just waiting for the exploitable tragedy in order for it to be rammed home in a fit of national emotion. The proof, here, really will be in the pudding – if Obama refrains from trying to push gun control, then at the end of his four or eight years, we’ll be able to assert stoutly that he can be taken at his word on gun control, but until such time eternal vigilance will the price of liberty, and the right to bear arms.

And the really sad thing is that while she helps kill babies – including disproportionate numbers of female babies – she’ll think she’s advancing human rights:

President-elect Barack Obama’s selection of Sen. Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State has caused concern among pro-life leaders due to her past international advocacy for permissive abortion laws. Her appointment could foreshadow changes in U.S. policy at the U.N. concerning the rights of the unborn.

According to the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-FAM), Critics claim that Sen. Clinton, who was First Lady during her husband Bill Clinton’s presidency, had a major voice in the U.N. social policy of the Clinton administration. Her influence, encompassing several major U.N. conferences, included her participation at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995.

There, Sen. Clinton coined the phrase “women’s rights are human rights and human rights are women’s rights.” The slogan became a rallying cry for a right to abortion.

Sen. Clinton’s work with former U.S. Sen. Tim Wirth, the Undersecretary for Global Affairs in the Clinton State Department, sought to broaden access to abortion.

It does still flabbergast – the knowledge that some people think that death is a rational answer to a pregnancy. I mean, think about it – Hillary Clinton (and Barack Obama, for that matter) are decent people; wouldn’t harm a fly, either of them. But in service of leftwing political goals they likely only dimly understand, they’ll push hard – in the aggregate – for abortion around the globe. Birth rates are falling around the world, there is a huge imbalance between men and women in China and India due to sex-selection abortion, Europe’s population is dying out…and still we kill our unborn children.

This is the sad result of the GOP not getting solidly behind John McCain – sure, he wasn’t the perfect candidate, but he wouldn’t advance the culture of death as Obama will. Elections do have consequences, and one of the consequences of this election is that the United States will assist in procuring abortions.

I guess that helping Obama win might be the last damage the MSM does:

Tribune Co., the owner of the Los Angeles Times, KTLA Channel 5 and dozens of other daily newspapers and television stations across the country, filed Monday for bankruptcy protection from creditors, in the latest indication of deteriorating economics for the news business.

The company’s ills, which stem principally from declining advertising revenues…

Pity it can’t be made to die off faster – the sooner these liberal dinosaurs pass from the scene the sooner truth will dominate lies.

A match made in the nether regions:

Academic departments at leading universities in Northern California, including UC Berkeley and Santa Clara University, have recently begun co-sponsoring events with South Bay Mobilization (SBM), a group associated with Hamas.

While South Bay Mobilization is not the only organization in the Bay Area that has ties to Hamas through the activities of some of its leaders and/or members, it has taken a leading role on university campuses throughout the Bay Area. Members of South Bay have had luncheons with Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas, and have accepted medals from him in a highly propagandistic manner.

Members of South Bay Mobilization have also been linked to the Free Gaza Movement, which sailed to the Gaza Strip from Cyprus in August 2008. Therefore, South Bay Mobilization’s support for the Free Gaza Movement also constitutes support of Hamas and its aims, and is equivalent to an endorsement of terror, murder, and genocide.

The Free Gaza group had been invited to the Gaza Strip by Bassem Naim, the minister of youth and sport of the genocidal terrorist group Hamas. Naim had recently been denied entry into Europe because of his terrorist affiliation. Furthermore, Hamas is responsible for the murders of hundreds of innocent civilians…

…According to the U.S. State Department, it is unlawful for a person in the United States or subject to the jurisdiction of the United States to knowingly provide “material support or resources” to a designated foreign terrorist organization. Representatives and members of a designated foreign terrorist organization, if they are non-citizens, are barred from the country. In certain circumstances, individuals may even be removed from the United States.

In addition to potentially violating U.S. laws which forbid contact with terrorist organizations — Hamas being among the world’s most notorious — Free Gaza members also may have violated the U.S. Neutrality Act by illegally raising money in California to bankroll two boats which they sailed into Gaza. This incident was known as the “Gaza boat incident.”

Lenin had it that the capitalists would sell the communists the rope necessary to hang them – our lefties are going a step further: they will donate the rope to the Islamists who will hang them. To be as blind as these American academics takes an act of will – I mean, they must really have to work at it to be so entirely ignorant of what is going on with Hamas in Gaza. Its not like you can’t look up “hamas kill” on Google, ya know? The search comes back with 2.9 million entries – certainly somewhere in there is sufficient data, even if one is anti-Israel, to come to the conclusion that Hamas is a criminal conspiracy to rob and murder.

And yet, there they go – inviting Hamas criminals to speak, donating to Hamas, helping Hamas to undermine not only Israel, but all those elements in the Palestinian population which would prefer a peace with Israel to Israel’s destruction (the goal of Hamas – and all you have to do is look it up to find this out, too…they aren’t coy about it at all). Murder, robbery and desecration of Christian and Jewish holy sites aside, Hamas is of the opinion that it is the duty of the non-Moslem to be servile to Moslems. We’re supposed to be their slaves, or convert to their ways – one or the other, Hamas has no middle ground between Slave and Islamist.

What profit is there in having such people around? To hear their point of view? What for? Does anyone want to hear the position of other bloodthirsty criminal conspiracies? All points of view are not of equal worth – but as Hamas’ point of view is anti-Semitic and anti-American (as well as anti-European, anti-Christian, anti-You Name It), leftists in America hold their point of view to be uniquely valuable.

Monumentally stupid – and the saddest part about it is that we who are on the right will have to expend our blood and treasure to defend the right of these fools to undermine those who defend them.

The horrific murder of Jews during the Mumbai Massacre illustrates the continuing problem of murderous anti-Semitism, but I think it necessary to also point out that day by day, around the world, Christians are suffering persecution for their faith:

Samuel Masih was a simple street cleaner. One day, while cleaning a garden in Lahore, the twenty-seven-year-old Pakistani Catholic was accused of deliberately piling garbage against the wall of a mosque. He was arrested and thrown in jail, where he was repeatedly tortured for his faith. While being treated for tuberculosis, which he contracted in prison, a police constable decided to earn a place in Janna’ (Paradise) by killing him with a brick-cutting hammer.

Thousands of miles away, on a beautiful mid-August day, thirty-two-year-old Fr. Jesus Adrian Sanchez was giving religious instruction at a school in the rural area of Chaparral (Tolima), Colombia. An armed man burst into the classroom, ordered him outside, and shot him dead.

Deep in the Brazilian rainforest, a seventy-three-year-old Sister of Notre Dame, Dorothy Stang, was used to living among people who wanted her dead. She had long been trying to protect peasant laborers from exploitation by logging firms and ranchers. One day, while walking to a meeting of poor farmers near the town of Anapu in the western Brazilian state of Parà, two armed men intercepted her on the path. She knew what they were there to do. Taking out her Bible, she began reading to them and, for a precious few minutes, they listened before opening fire. Sr. Stang was shot six times in the head, throat, and body.

These are only three of the more than 100 Catholics who bear the unique distinction of being the first martyrs of the twenty-first century.

According to the Vatican’s Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, the official martyrology contains the names of 132 Catholics who have died for the faith since 2001. But this is not a complete list. Its 2005 report acknowledges that there are “many more possible ‘unknown soldiers of the faith’ in remote corners of the planet whose deaths may never be reported.”

Dying for Christ seems almost surreal to most Westerners. We live in a part of the world where Christianity rarely makes the news unless it is to be mocked or defamed. Otherwise, the media is strangely silent about modern Christian martyrdom. “Three things distinguish anti-Christian persecution and discrimination around the world,” said Denver’s Archbishop Charles Chaput to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. “First, it’s ugly. Second, it’s growing. And third, the mass media generally ignore or downplay its gravity.”

And that, also, doesn’t seem to count the large number of Protestant Christians who also suffer, and at times die, for their faith. While anti-Christians in the West concentrate on the crimes of Christians past (real and imagined), the fact that Christians are dying all the time merely for being Christian escapes notice. It is also, as noted above, something outside our frame of reference – we don’t know what to do with such information. Young liberals in the United States like to play at being rebels – tattoo’d and pierced and shouting obscenities, they think of themselves as being in the mold of Thomas Jefferson…the truth, of course, is that most of these youngsters would instantly kneel if someone really put them to the test of their convictions. A real rebel is someone who obeys the laws and is, indeed, a model citizen – but one who will not surrender on the crucial matters. For a martyr, you can take his money, take his property, take his physical freedom and degrade him in any manner you like – a true Christian will endure this with good cheer…but the moment you try to make a Christian abjure his faith, that is when the martyr kindly and politely and with love in his heart, refuses.

Fools in the west also like to think of Christians as being the weak – weak minded and weak willed people who use God as a crutch to mask their own failures and insecurities. The reality is that it is the non-believers who are weak – weak in mind and weak in will. Go tell the Christians of Darfur, Iraq, Pakistan, Vietnam, China, North Korea, etc that they are weak and you are strong, as you sit safe and secure in the United States.

In this Christmas season, we must keep in mind those among us who don’t break faith – be they the soldier on patrol in Afghanistan or the humble missionary bringing a bit of food to an unknown village in the backwaters of the world. It is these people who refuse to be broken and who refuse to follow the siren song of the modern world with its greed, cruelty, inanity and moral flabbiness who keep our society going. One missionary working among the poor of Liberia is worth 1,000 latte-sipping slackers coordinating the next anti-globalization protest in terms of what use they are to the world.

It is also important for those who would try to make Christmas non-Christian – those who war upon the deeply religious nature of Christmas – to understand what they are trifling with. You are not just messing with a holiday, but with the fundamental aspect of a faith which still commands enough love and loyalty to convince people that death is better than apostasy. We’re not mad that someone wants to tear down the Nativity scene – we’re mad that someone would have so little respect for those of faith that they’d gratuitously insult the faithful in such a manner.

A little respect goes a long way – and so the next time you run down your list of denigrations of Christianity, perhaps you could also run down the list of those who have died this year and in the past in service of God and their fellow man through their faith.

‘Cause the spending spree we’ve been on has worked out so well, ya see?

President-elect Barack Obama said he’ll make the “single largest new investment” in roads, bridges and public buildings since the Eisenhower Administration to lift the sagging economy and create jobs.

Obama, in his weekly radio speech today, said his plan to create or preserve 2.5 million jobs will also include making public buildings more energy efficient, repairing schools and modernizing health care with electronic medical records.

“We won’t just throw money at the problem,” he said. “We’ll measure progress by the reforms we make and the results we achieve — by the jobs we create, by the energy we save, by whether America is more competitive in the world.”

And, of course, the only people allowed to bid on these jobs will be the well-connected, unionized contractors who are already in business and who will use the very same people who are already being used to build bridges, roads, etc. There might be a bit of new hiring, but there’s just so much to do with building a road…and the other day I watched a “work” crew on a road project…one man operating the backhoe, three guys watching him operate it. Our tax dollars and work – and Obama just wants more of it.

What is needed, of course, is brand new businesses in economically distressed areas – and while Obama is the smartest man who ever lived, he’s not smart enough to figure out what poor people around the nation are able to do, nor what the people in the poor areas might want done. The end result of Obama’s plan will be a lot of money thrown at a lot of things which will not do anything to repair the structural issues which are currently burdening our economy – it won’t fix the things broken in corporate America; it won’t fix the things broken in the unions; it won’t fix the social problems in the poorest areas of America…it will just spend money with the primary beneficiaries of the spending being those who are already well off.

Government cannot create wealth – it is not capable of doing it. Any money spent by Obama is money which can’t be spent by other people – and, more importantly, is money which can’t be spent by the people who created the money Obama is spending. Its a worthless circle of money, and it will not only not make things better, but will actually make them worse.

Welcome back, tax and spend liberals – we didn’t miss you, but we’ve got you back.

From Hot Air:

New UAW ad: You people aren’t going to put us out of work, are you?

A poignant message from the folks who helped steer American automotives into a ditch. Too bad they mentioned cars in the voiceover; otherwise this could be recycled as is, replete with the “not a banker” class resentment element, by any industry demanding a future bailout. I’m going to file it away for redubbing just in case blog advertising dries up. That would never happen, would it?

Geraghty wonders who’ll be buying cars next year or the year after with the economy in the toilet, but I think he’s only saying that because he loves bankers. Meanwhile, NRO claims that Congress has stalled on a comprehensive bailout but that a bridge loan to punt the issue to Obama is possible. A final deal reportedly could involve a “big role” for government in restructuring the companies with even a “car czar” appointed for oversight — which has worked out super for TARP thus far. What could go wrong?

Of course none of us want the auto workers to lose their jobs – we’re just wary of using taxes on our $20 an hour or so salaries to be used to subsidize $50 an hour auto workers who’s union dues go to support the very same Democratic politicians who got us into this mess in the first place. Call us cruel, if you like, but most Americans figure that if the Big Three go bankrupt then they’ll be able to restructure under new management with new labor contracts paying auto workers for the actual worth of the effort they put out.

It does appear that the grandiose plan for an auto bail out are dead, at least for now – but I hope that President Bush refuses to even provide a bridge loan. Let them go into bankruptcy – don’t put a GOP stamp on this scheme to protect the Union bosses from their own greed and idiocy; nor put a GOP stamp on giving a new lease on life to the corporate bosses who were so intent on their golden parachutes that they failed to notice that their industry was sliding into collapse.

From NRO’s The Corner:

Today on Uncommon Knowledge, Peter Thiel, captain of capitalism, on the current state of the political economy.

Peter Thiel: The timing for Obama is not as good as it was for FDR in the 1930s. Roosevelt took office in March 1933, the point where unemployment peaked. Things were going to get better anyway. He got all the credit.

I do not think that unemployment will peak in January 2009 [when Obama takes office]. It will be as if FDR got elected in the fall of 1930. Something like this happened in the UK. The Labour Party won in late 1929, but it was thrown out in mid-1931 and the Conservative Party ran the UK for the next fifteen years.

Peter Robinson: But you wouldn’t expect Republicans to win control of either chamber of Congress two years from now, would you?

Peter Thiel: No, but I think they will make very big gains and will most likely win in 2012.

This is a very likely scenario – Obama is going to have to make things work, and his problem is that he’s a liberal and everything he’s likely to try will probably make things worse. I figure the GOP at a 50/50 shot for control of the House in 2010 under any circumstances…and if unemployment is at, say, 7 or 8 percent come September of 2010, then just watch out.

The news story:

A majority of both Republican and Democratic voters oppose The Employee Free Choice Act, according to a new poll by Public Opinion Strategies of 800 general election voters.

Better known as the “card check bill,” the proposed act would give workers the right to unionize if a majority of employees publicly sign cards in favor of forming a union. Because it does away with the secret ballot, employers fear that such a law would allow unions to identify and coerce workers who otherwise would not vote to unionize.

“Across the ideological spectrum and across battleground states, significant majorities of Americans from every walk of life oppose this legislation,” said Katie Packer of the Workforce Fairness Institute.

When presented with neutral language describing the key provisions of the bill, voters surveyed opposed both facets. They strongly oppose a card check system and instead support the secret ballot process and they oppose changing the bargaining process. The poll found that 59 percent of all voters oppose the elimination of the secret ballot in union organizing elections and 53 percent oppose binding arbitration in contract negotiations.

In fact, when asked their preference if a union tried to organize in their workplace: 81 percent preferred a secret ballot, with only 14 percent preferring the card-check process.

The problem for Obama and his Democrats is that they promised this in return for the Union bosses donating massive amounts of money to their election efforts. But with 41 or 42 GOP Senators and a high level of unpopularity, it will be hard to get this un-American proposal through Congress.

I expect Obama and his Democrats will still try to push it – the Union bosses won’t let them off the hook, and that will work out to an excellent campaign issue for the GOP.