Good for Kucinich to actually be paying attention:

The New Ledger titles its coverage of two interviews with the uber-progressive Ohio Congressman using a distinct understatement: “Kucinich Shreds Democrats for ‘Selling Out’.”

Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) is not happy with the direction of his own party and he is telling them to wake up. In an interview with Rawstory.com, Congressman Kucinich blasted away verbally and shredded his fellow Democrats with his words for failing to follow through on the change they promised in Washington…

…He went as far as to mention the Tea Party movement in a separate interview, warning fellow Dems on the Ed Schultz Show not to ignore financial issues.

“I met with people who were, you know, unfairly ridiculed as being just a bunch of teabaggers and frankly they had basic economic concerns just like everyone else, they felt that government wasn’t listening to them, and this is where the Democratic Party better wake up,” he told the radio audience.

As I’ve said before, there is a chance that even a liberal Democrat can tap in to TEA Party support – it wouldn’t be easy, but it could be done. All that it requires is a realization that the TEA Party people are patriots acting from love of country, and then address at least some of their concerns. I don’t know if Kucinich is actively seeking such support, but he’s just put himself miles ahead of any other Democrat on this – and given that Democrats are in for a rough November, that will just work to Kucinich’s advantage (though now Kucinich may come to seriously regret dumping a lifetime’s pro-life activism in order to make his quixotic run for the White House).

Its nothing new that people are angry over government – what is new is that people can swiftly find out they are not alone in this, and then set up events to publicize their concerns. And this can all be done on a shoe string and with no establishment leadership. The people are furious with government – its just disgusting to watch Obama, Pelosi and Reid actively lying to us and screwing over America while they tell us, with a straight face, that they are doing nothing of the kind. This fury is building, and it will carry to November – even if the economy gets better.

Anyone can hop on this revolutionary bus – anyone who cares about America; anyone who wants more local control; anyone who wants the crooks in DC and Wall Street sent to jail…there is no room on this bus, however, for anyone who lies or who tries to sell the concept that our grossly incompetent government can make things better for us.

We’ll see how this all plays out – but when a kook leftist like Kucinich breaks ranks with the Democrat leadership, you know that the times are, indeed, a-changing.

The whole thing is falling apart rapidly, now:

The London Times continues to follow the glaciergate story–and it keeps getting worse.

The latest disclosure: Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN’s (formerly) prestigious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (known as the IPCC), may have raised millions of dollars for his New Delhi institute on the basis of the totally bogus ‘glaciergate’ claim by the IPCC that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035.

According the the London Times, Pachauri’s institute got money from the European Union and the US-based Carnegie Corporation to investigate a prediction that never had any scientific backing whatever, and one which all serious glacier scientists instantly recognized as impossible. The bogus claim was frequently repeated in the fundraising efforts — and reiterated as recently as January 15 when the IPCC was already under intense pressure to admit it had blundered.

This is now more than an example of eye-popping incompetence and gross neglect of elementary scientific standards by a body on whose authority the world is expected to make multi-trillion dollar decisions affecting every business and every person on the planet.

It is now, potentially, a criminal issue.

It certainly is – and we need to start investigating, from Gore on down, for possible fraud. These people have been running a confidence game…maybe they didn’t start out, and maybe some of them were bamboozled in to it, but we need to know. And those who knew it was false from the start and/or became aware of its falsehood and failed to expose it, need to go to jail.

How much money have we spent on this scam? Money which could have been used for other, much better purposes? If it can be shown that people died for lack of support because money was diverted to the bogus claims of global warming, then we might have manslaughter cases to make against the hucksters.

Just burns me up that they got away with it for so long – and are still trying to defend their fantasy, at least long enough to rake in some more billions of dollars. This must be stopped and the guilty must be made an example of in order to keep people honest on these issues in the future.

This is pathetic:

Obama has suspicious number of letter-writing fans named ‘Ellie Light’

By Sabrina Eaton, The Plain Dealer

In recent weeks, Light has published virtually identical “Letters to the Editor” in support of President Barack Obama in more than a dozen newspapers.Every letter claimed a different residence for Light that happened to be in the newspaper’s circulation area.

“It’s time for Americans to realize that governing is hard work, and that a president can’t just wave a magic wand and fix everything,” said a letter from alleged Philadelphian Ellie Light, that was published in the Jan. 19 edition of The Philadelphia Daily News.

A letter from Light in the Jan. 20 edition of the San Francisco Examiner concluded with an identical sentence, but with an address for Light all the way across the country in Daly City, California.

Variations of Light’s letter ran in Ohio’s Mansfield News Journal on Jan. 13, with Light claiming an address in Mansfield; in New Mexico’s Ruidoso News on Jan. 12, claiming an address in Three Rivers; in South Carolina’s The Sun News on Jan. 18, claiming an address in Myrtle Beach; and in the Daily News Leader of Staunton, Virginia on Jan. 15, claiming an address in Waynesboro. Her publications list includes other papers in Ohio, West Virginia, Maine, Michigan, Iowa, Pennsylvania and California, all claiming separate addresses.

We here at Blogs for Victory have been wondering where our liberal commenters have gone. Especially since the Brown victory, we haven’t heard much of them. Have they been re-tasked? Has the liberal noise machine decided to eschew the blogosphere for a while and concentrate on the dinosaur media? Trying to buck up the MSMers – make them think that there still is popular support for their man?

Whatever it is, this is just pathetic – its like having someone write you fan mail.

And off we go:

Regulators shut down banks Friday in Florida, Missouri, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington, bringing to nine the number of bank failures so far in 2010, following 140 closures last year in the toughest economic environment since the Great Depression.

I’ll bet we’ll exceed 140 this year. The banks are insolvent – from large to small. Their assets are based upon things done prior to the collapse. The note on my house is listed somewhere, I’m sure, as an asset – that the value of my house has dropped 58% since 2005 isn’t factored in…if I were to die or lose my job, reality would come pouring in. But, meanwhile, my loan is an “asset” which allows a bank to pretend its not insolvent. And so it is around the nation…a lot of smoke and mirrors hiding a stark, hideous financial reality.

Via Mish’s:

Inquiring minds are asking “Why Is California Broke?” It’s a good question. Please consider …

* California has the 3rd highest state income tax in the nation: 9.55% tax bracket at $47,055 and 10.55% at $1,000,000…

* California has the highest state sales tax rate in the nation by far at 8.25%. Indiana is next highest at 7%.

* California corporate income tax rate is 3rd worst in the nation with a rate of 8.84%…

* California ranks 13th in property taxes.

* California has the fourth highest capital gains tax 9.55%.

* California has the highest gasoline tax as of January 2010, averaging 65 cents/gallon. The national average is 47.4%…

* California has one of the highest state vehicle license car taxes, 1.15% per year on value of vehicle, up from 0.65% in 2008.

So where’s the money going?

* 1 in 5 in LA County receiving public aid, nearly 2.2 million people as of February 2009. 20% in Los Angeles County receive public aid

* California has 12% of the nation’s population, but 36% of the country’s TANF (“Temporary” Assistance for Needy Families) welfare recipients – more than the next 8 states combined. Unlike other states, this “temporary” assistance becomes much more permanent in CA…

* California prison guards highest paid in the nation. The maximum pay of California’s prison guards is nearly 40 percent higher than that of the highest-paid guards in 10 other states and the federal government, according to a study by the California Department of Personnel Administration. Cal-Taxletter

* California teachers easily the highest paid in the nation…

* California now has the lowest bond ratings of any state, two steps above junk. The new rating affects about $72 billion of general obligation and lease-supported bonds…

* California ranks 44th worst in “2008 lawsuit climate.”

* California, a destitute state, still gives away college education at fire sale prices. California community college tuition is by far the lowest in the nation. Nationwide, the average community college tuition is 4.5 times higher than California CC’s. This ridiculously low tuition devalues education to students – resulting in a 30+% drop rate for class completion. Moreover, 2/3 of California CC students pay no tuition at all – filling out a simple unverified “hardship” form that exempts them from any tuition payment, or receiving grants and tax credits for their full tuition.

* California offers thousands of absolutely free adult continuing education classes. In San Diego, over 1,400 classes for everything from baking pastries to ballroom dancing are offered totally at taxpayer expense…

* California residential electricity costs 13.81 cents per kilowatthour. The national average is 6.99-8.49…

* It costs 38% more to build solar panels in California than in Tennessee – which is why European corporations have invested $2.3 billion in two Tennessee manufacturing plants to build solar panels for our state…

The above lists reformatted and reordered from a list compiled by Richard Rider, Chairman, San Diego Tax Fighters.

Too much taxing, too much regulating, too much spending. In other words – California has applied the liberal dream of economics, and done so for decades, and now California is broke. Just thank goodness the Founders forbade States to create currency because if they hadn’t, California would be even broker than it is now – the only thing which applies a bit of discipline to the liberals in California is the fact that California can’t print money (though I’ll bet a full audit would show accounting practices which would make Enron look honest in comparison).

The party is over – though, of course, State level liberals are hoping that Obama will swoop in with bags of new-printed money to allow them to paper over the fiscal cracks. He might well do that, but it just puts off the day of reckoning. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Everything in this world has to be paid for – and so when you provide “free” education to another kid in community college, you are actually taking money out of someone else’s pocket to do it. You have a net loss – the kid is not being productive, the person who pays for it has less resources.

The fundamental economic flaw of liberalism (to differentiate from the underlying moral flaw – that of the perfectibility of Man) is that it sees the transient present as written in stone. This holds that if you are poor now then you must have been poor yesterday and you will certainly be poor tomorrow unless liberals come in and rescue you. This is utter nonsense – yesterday I was talking with a real estate agent and she described this man whom she did a lot of business with; He’s snatching up properties here in Las Vegas for a song and holding them as investments. Oooh, go the liberals – what a cruel, greedy man taking advantage of the sufferings of others! We must tax him and regulate him to prevent him from stealing. Trouble is, he came to America some years ago as a penniless immigrant and by sheer hard work and guts on the part of himself and his wife, he has risen to great wealth…and he’s not being cruel, he’s just buying properties which are at a discount through no fault of his own. He was poor, he became rich – probably the only thing which could have prevented him from becoming rich would have been a government attempt to “help him”.

So it is with the poor kid from the disadvantaged background – he is poor, but he’s no poorer than the penniless immigrant who just got to America and, perhaps, doesn’t even speak the language when he gets here. Whether or not the poor American and the poor immigrant will be rich in 20 years depends entirely up what each of them are prepared to do. Work hard and sacrifice immediate gratification in favor of future prosperity, and wealth will almost certainly result – head off to community college to get a “free” education while living with the parents and, in practical terms, neither learning about life nor contributing to society and what you might have 20 years later is a modestly prosperous school teacher or government bureaucrat – or, perhaps, a permanent student sucking up grants and loans which allow him to indefinitely put off the end of adolescence. Liberals do not understand this.

And so we get all this spending – designed to “even the playing field” and make “the rich” pay their “fair share”. They are “investing” in the future. What they are doing is spending other people’s money – which makes the recipient an ingrate and the forced-donor angry while at the same time preventing reality from forcing wise decisions upon all concerned.

It is time we consigned liberalism to the ash heap of history.

Heard some clips of this, but didn’t realize the totality was this bad:

Earlier this week, during a radio interview, I had said that Obama’s appearance for Martha Coakley on Sunday was the least effective stump appearances I had seen from a president. A lot of factors contributed to that – Coakley’s literally yawn-inducing speech, the decision to use the president as an attack dog in the race, the president (or his speechwriter’s) odd fixation on Scott Brown’s truck, and so on.

But perhaps Obama is in a “stump slump.” Maybe it’s me; maybe I can’t see any Obama speech as a good one these days. But today in Ohio, it seemed like the president was way off his game. But I thought he was defensive, prickly, almost indignant that he’s found himself in the tough spot that he’s in.

He began by talking about how much he didn’t like being in Washington, and apparently said something about the job being stifling. Sir, you spent two years trying to get this job.

One of his rallying cries as, “This is not about me!” Yes, Mr. President, but it’s about the decisions you make and the policies you’re trying to enact.

He made a reference to bankers who “click their heels and watch their stocks skyrocket.” Was he going with a Dorothy in Oz metaphor? Do bankers click their heels?

“I won’t stop fighting to bring back jobs here,” worked as an applause line, but I wondered how it worked outside the venue. That insinuates he’s been doing it for the first year, as unemployment has steadily increased. He’s calling on Congress to “pass a jobs bill.” I thought the stimulus was supposed to do that.

The few clips I’ve heard tended to indicate to me that Obama will never be a populist – he hasn’t the nack for it. Someone said he’s like Woodrow Wilson, and that I that apt. Highly educated, lacking any practical experience but quite certain of moral rectitude while leading a party corrupt as the day is long. That is Wilson, that is Obama.

Trouble is, Wilson was a miserable failure as President and stored up an endless about of woe for the United States in later years. Could be that Obama wants to be the populist leader, but can’t do it – it helps, if you wish to be populist, to have lived a bit like the people have. Growing up a rich stoner in Hawaii and then heading to elite eduction and then in to politics doesn’t allow you to do this. Teddy Roosevelt got over his elite upbringing by volunteering to live and work with regular folks – and not as a “community organizer” but by actually getting out there and doing some work (TR failed as a rancher, but the lessons he learned by working with ranch hands proved invaluable). As an aside, don’t think I’m hammering Obama on the stoner thing – while I only smoked marijuana a few times and never tried anything harder than that, I lived the basic stoner lifestyle and had bags of stoner friends – not casting stones but, rather, pointing out that hitting the bong doesn’t give a person a lot of real world experience as a youth. I corrected this deficit by joining the Navy – Obama has yet to find a corrective.

Anyways – Now that the bloom is off the rose and Obama has to lead, he’s proving incapable of doing so. He was elected, it must be kept in mind, because he kept himself largely a blank slate in 2008 and allowed everyone to apply whatever they wished to him. He became the un-named Democrat incarnate. Liberals saw a true-blue liberal, because that is what they wanted him to be. Some conservatives saw a liberal with a pragmatic streak, because that is what they wanted him to be. Centrist saw a post-partisan, post-racial uniter, because that is what they wanted him to be. Trouble is, he was none of things things – in large measure, he is nothing. He’s whatever people pour in to him – I can’t identify a core set of ideals which can be described as Obamanism.

He was going to close Gitmo in a year – now it looks as though it’ll still be open for an indefinite period of time. He was going to win in Afghanistan – then he dithered for months before sending less force to Afghanistan than the military said was necessary. He was going to keep unemployment below 8% – now its above 8% and he saying he’ll start working on jobs right away. On and on it goes – with the insistence on health care being the only thing he’s been consistent and, indeed, ferocious in pushing. Everything else is flash and glitz and then forgotten.

President Obama really needs to sit down with people who can help him – a long weekend with President Bush with some actual listening going on would do wonders. President Bush soared even higher than Obama ever did and has, thus far, sunk lower than Obama has. He knows, for real, the ups and downs of being President – most importantly, he knows how to get things done even when a popular majority is wary and Congress is being uncooperative. There’s a gold mine down in Texas for Obama, if he’ll just go get it. And if he can’t stomach a lecture on leadership from Bush, he could at least try Bill Clinton – not as good as Bush, but vastly better than Obama.

We’ll see how this all comes out, but I think we’re rapidly developing towards a completely failed Presidency – and thus an hour of grave danger for the whole world.

Certainly a vital duty of all those who love our nation – Bernanke being the man who presided over our economic collapse, worked out much of the asinine response to same and is thus, naturally, desired for another term by President Obama.

Mish has the goods on Bernanke, and lists the means by which we, the people, can pressure the Senate to no confirm Bernanke for another term.

Andrew Coulson over at Pajamas Media on Head Start:

“Head Start,” the flagship pre-kindergarten program introduced in 1965, has been a $166 billion failure. That’s the upshot of a sophisticated multi-year study just released by the Department of Health and Human Services.

An earlier iteration of the study, published in 2005, had found a few modest improvements in the language skills of participating students while they were enrolled in the program. But by the end of the first grade, even those few effects have disappeared, according to the follow-up released this month. Out of 44 separate cognitive tests given to former Head Start students at the end of the first grade, only two showed even marginally significant effects. The other 42 showed no statistically significant effect at all.

But even that overstates the case for Head Start. That’s because, on each of the 44 separate tests, there is a 1 in 10 chance of a false positive…After controlling for the likelihood of false positives, the study’s authors found no “socio-emotional” benefits and no “parenting practice” benefits either. No benefits to Head Start of any kind at the end of first grade. None.

Cheerleaders for the program has this mealy-mouthed response to the study:

…This study demonstrates that Head Start programs are of good or better quality (Ed. Note: compared to what?) and finds favorable cognitive, socio-emotional, and health impacts for children who attended Head Start and positive impacts on parenting practices. Yet the study indicates that many of the early gains made in Head Start prior to kindergarten might be lost at the end of first grade…

…Head Start has a 45-year history of continuous improvement. This study was conducted from 2002 to 2006. Two years ago, Head Start reauthorization included many significant improvements to the program which are currently in the process of implementation.

Translation: “Ok, so the program doesn’t work, but its been in place for 45 years and we started to improve things right after the study ceased collecting data. Trust us – in another 45 years, it’ll be swell. Can we have a budget increase?”

Here is the mission statement of Head Start:

Head Start is a national program that promotes school readiness by enhancing the social and cognitive development of children through the provision of educational, health, nutritional, social and other services to enrolled children and families.

As the first linked article goes on to note, Candidate Obama promised us that he would terminate any program found to be a failure. Given the mission statement of Head Start and the results of the study, Head Start should be on the President’s “cut” list. Naturally, there is no move to cut Head Start – if anything, we’re likely to see increased funding for it. Why? Because its a program which spends a lot of money in a way which pleases liberals and, of course, funds ever more AFSCME union dues and thus campaign donations to the Democrat party. There isn’t a chance in heck that Obama will cut even a dime, no matter how much a failure the program is.

In the grand scheme of things, $166 billion over more than 40 years is not that big a deal – but it has been money entirely wasted. It is money which could be used henceforth on the one program which has demonstrated ability to improve education outcomes for disadvantaged children: school choice. Liberals still find this hard to believe, but the fact is that when you give parents the choice and the power, things work out better for kids. Flabbergasting as it seems, parents are better judges of the needs of the child than Head Start bureaucrats. I know – very weird, but there it is.

We need to completely reform our government – go through it with no pre-conceived notions and from top to bottom decide if what we’re doing is actually worth the cost of doing it. It’ll take a very brave President backed up by a very brave Congress – both happily willing to lose office at the next election – to do this.

NRO reports:

Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.), the ranking member of the House Budget Committee, tells National Review Online that House Democrats are planning to use the budget-reconciliation process in order to pass Obamacare. “They’re meeting with each other this weekend to pursue it,” says Ryan. “I’ve spoken with many Democrats and the message is this: They’re not ready to give up. They’ve waited their entire adult lives for this moment, and they aren’t ready to let 100,000 pesky votes in Massachusetts get in the way of fulfilling their destiny. They’ll look at every option and spend the next four or five days figuring it out.”

If the Democrats pass a health-care bill through reconciliation, it means they would need only 51 votes in the Senate for final passage. To start the process, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) would need to bring a new health-care bill to the House Budget Committee with reconciliation instructions, with the Senate doing the same.

Well, go ahead, make my day.

Nothing like having opponents bent on political suicide. If they so much as try it, the impression will be not just of a party out of touch, but determined to hold the people – and their views – in contempt.

Interesting:

Folks at Public Citizen, the Ralph Nader group that has supported litigation to limit freedom of speech through campaign finance laws, are so outraged by today’s Citizens United Supreme Court decision that they are calling for a constitutional amendment to limit freedom of speech.

In their statement responding to the decision, Public Citizen demanded public financing of congressional elections, then added its call for an amendment, saying:

“Public Citizen will aggressively work in support of a constitutional amendment specifying that for-profit corporations are not entitled to First Amendment protections, except for freedom of the press. We do not lightly call for a constitutional amendment. But today’s decision so imperils our democratic well-being, and so severely distorts the rightful purpose of the First Amendment, that a constitutional corrective is demanded.

“We are formulating language for possible amendments, asking members of the public to sign a petition to affirm their support for the idea of constitutional change, and planning to convene leading thinkers in the areas of constitutional law and corporate accountability to begin a series of in-depth conversations about winning a constitutional amendment.”

This is just all too typical of liberal-fascism. You see, what they are doing is identifying an enemy who has no rights (in their view), in this case “for profit corporations”, and demanding that the laws be changed to reflect their view on whom the enemy is. Why do they do this? Because they believe that the enemy may deceive the people and thus prevent the electoral victory of liberalism, which always has the public interest at heart, in their view.

Now, I ask: anyone out there want to differentiate between the morality of the Big Three auto makers donating to politics and the UAW doing ditto? To the liberals, its ok for the UAW to donate – they are not “for profit”, and thus their purity cannot be questioned…the regular indictments and sundry corruptions we see in unions notwithstanding. This is one of the most monumentally stupid ways to look at the world imaginable – but it is based in the fundamental flaw of liberalism: that Man is perfectible by the actions of men.

Because liberals believe that we can fix ourselves, they believe they have been fixed – by being liberals, they have proven themselves to be rescued from the benighted bigotry of the non-liberals. Not-for-profit organizations, run by liberals, are thus organizations which simply cannot get it wrong. They’ve been cured, you see? The UAW, a not-for-profit organization, not only can get involved in politics, but must do so because liberals must be able to propagandize for their views in a relentless manner in order to get those hill-ape morons, the non-liberals, to vote the right way. Allowing wicked, evil for-profit organizations to do so might confuse the liberal message, and thus can’t be allowed (of course, those wicked, evil, smelly corporations can donate zillions of dollars to other liberal organizations to use in politics – that is ok: once the money is filtered through liberal hands, it ceases to be blood money sweated from the poor).

But, of course, liberals haven’t been fixed – they are just as apt to greed, lust, laziness, etc as the rest of us. A union boss can look at the pension fund as a personal piggy bank and live as swank a life as a CEO – and be just as indifferent to the lives of the workers as the CEO is. To forbid one person to donate because he is for-profit and to allow another to do so because he’s non-profit is to allow one sinner an unfair advantage over another. Such a action is both immoral and, of course, un-American.

Thus it commends itself to liberal-fascists.