No surprise to hear this about a shill for the old Saddamite regime:

A former chief United Nations weapons inspector is accused of contacting what he thought was a 15-year-old girl in an Internet chat room, engaging in a sexual conversation and showing himself masturbating on a Web camera.

Scott Ritter of Delmar, N.Y., who served as chief U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991-98 and who was an outspoken critic of the second Bush administration in the run-up to the war in Iraq, is accused of contacting what turned out to be a Barrett Township police officer posing undercover as a teen girl.

Guess he’s got too much time on his hands now that he can’t undermine US victory in Iraq….

Even the dimmest of Democrats should start to understand this:

A new Quinnipiac University poll finds 67 percent of Americans oppose funding abortions with government funds under the government-run health care bill pending in Congress. This is the latest of several recent polls all showing a majority of Americans oppose tax-funded abortions.

The new survey asked: “Do you support or oppose allowing abortions to be paid for by public funds under a health care reform bill?”

Some 67 percent of respondents said no while just 27 percent sided with President Barack Obama and pro-abortion groups favoring abortion funding.

Republicans were opposed to funding on a 87-10 percent margin as were independent voters on a 67-26 percent margin. Democrats were split 47-47 percent on abortion funding in the health care reform legislation.

Even the President’s own party is not with him on the abortion issue – if the Democrats do ram through anything which in any way, shape or form can be classed as federal funds for abortions, then the effect will be devastating on them in November. Normally, I be confident that abortion funding is a dead letter – but our Democrats do seem bent on political suicide this year. We’ll have to see how it comes out.

As for me – go ahead, Democrats, make my day.

We are gonna win this one folks!

UPDATE, by Mark Noonan: And in an effort to completely blow her chances, Coakley manages to grossly insult Catholics over the conscience issue vis a vis “emergency contraceptives” (ie, abortion pills).

God bless these poor people:

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The tiny bodies of children lay in piles next to the ruins of their collapsed school. People with faces covered by white dust and the blood of open wounds roamed the streets. Frantic doctors wrapped heads and stitched up sliced limbs in a hotel parking lot.

The poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, still struggling to recover from the relentless strikes of four catastrophic storms in 2008, was a picture of heartbreaking devastation Wednesday after a magnitude-7 earthquake.

Tuesday’s quake left a landscape of collapsed buildings — hospitals, schools, churches, ramshackle homes, even the gleaming national palace — the rubble sending up a white cloud that shrouded the entire capital.

All we can do, now, is pray – and rush to help.

UPDATE: Archbishiop Serge Miot among the dead.

UPDATE II: Missionaries of the Poor has people in Haiti, and their organization suffered no loss in the quake. I’ve donated to this excellent organization for quite a while, now, and highly recommend it.

UPDATE III: Food for the Poor is also an excellent group and is sending help to Haiti.

UPDATE IV: Archbishop Dolan talks about the tragedy in Haiti (video) – “Haiti is the broken Body of Christ”…

UPDATE V: Anchoress receives reports:

3:24 PM It’s a nightmare here. They are starting to dig mass graves for the many unclaimed bodies. Some areas,the smell is unbearable. We still are having tremors. Just now in fact.

UPDATE VI: Looks like Haiti will become a de-facto American protectorate over the next few days as Haiti’s government is essentially collapsed and non-functional. If we’re going to do it, might as well be in for a dime, in for a dollar…get a UN resolution putting Haiti into trusteeship under American protection. We’re going to end up spending billions, anyway, and we might as well do something permanently useful. And here’s where Obama can come in really handy – he’s probably the only American President who could ever get the international community behind such a move. But, keep in mind, if we do this, its for 50 years.

Can you see me smile?

A year into his tenure, a majority of Americans would already vote against Pres. Obama if the ’12 elections were held today, according to a new survey.

The Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor poll shows 50% say they would probably or definitely vote for someone else. Fully 37% say they would definitely cast a ballot against Obama. Meanwhile, just 39% would vote to re-elect the pres. to a 2nd term, and only 23% say they definitely would do so.

Obama’s first year in office has been marked by an unemployment rate that surged to 10%, an increased commitment of troops to Afghanistan and a health care battle that has taken a serious political toll on the WH.

A year ago, I would have never guessed that the Obamabots who put that dumbass in office would come to their senses so quickly. There is hope. Obama is on the road to being a one-termer.

How can I be so confident? Well, the good faith some had in Obama, once lost, is either lost for good, or will be so hard to get back, I don’t see Barry being able to win it back, given his arrogance.

Noemie Emery explains:

…In a sense, Obama has never been more than his education (Columbia, Harvard), which for some people was more than enough. When Brooks met Obama in 2005, the new senator had no experience and no accomplishments, but he was perfectly briefed in the requisite talking points.

“As they chewed over the finer points of Edmund Burke, it didn’t take long for the two men to click,” Gabriel Sherman wrote in the New Republic. On the basis of this, Brooks decided Obama was “dazzling,” would one day become “a very good president” and should run for that office as quickly as possible. He compared him to Burke in his subtle complexity.

“Run, Barack, Run,” he wrote a year later, on the grounds that crisis required his talents. “I divide people into people who talk like us and who don’t talk like us,” he admitted to Sherman. He then paid Obama the ultimate compliment, by saying he could write for the New Republic himself…

The bloom is off the rose – but not for the elite. In spite of all evidence, the elite will continue to assert that Obama is a great President. Why? Because the hardest thing for even the most saintly person to admit is personal error…and for self-absorbed elites, its next to impossible. For the elite to turn on Obama they would have to admit that having a prestige education isn’t sufficient for success…and that would wreck their world view.

They chewed over the finer points of Edmund Burke? One wonders, then, at the quality of education in the Ivy League if you can chew over Burke and still be like Brooks – or Obama. One of the finer points of Burke is …

Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.

And Obama lives by lies – lies he was instructed to hold by the elite which educated him, embraced him and elevated him to the White House. And the elite is going to stick by him, right to the end.

Mish explains.

As I’ve said – the “recovery” is all smoke and mirrors. It is trillions of dollars borrowed from the grand-children temporarily boosted GDP numbers. Its all going to come crashing down – now, next month, six months from now, a year from now. I’m still picking March, but it could be any time. The only thing I am certain about – it will happen.

All that transparency Obama promised, huh?

After an unusual day-long negotiating session, President Barack Obama and top Democratic congressional leaders said late Wednesday that they were making “significant progress” towards reconciling the House and Senate health care reform bills.

Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Harry Reid issued a statement at the close of more than eight hours of White House talks – by far the most significant, high-level negotiations undertaken during the yearlong push for health care reform.

“Today we made significant progress in bridging the remaining gaps between the two health insurance reform bills,” according to the statement. “We’re encouraged and energized, and we’re resolved to deliver reform legislation that provides more stability and security for those with insurance, extends coverage to those who don’t have coverage, and lowers costs for families, businesses, and governments.”

All of which is utter BS – if they were really doing the people’s business, they’d happily have the cameras in the room. The fact that they are hiding it from us means with 100% certainty that they are conspiring against the American people.

Corrupt and incompetent – that is all the Democrats are.

From the US Chamber of Commerce:

U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue warned the U.S. faces a double-dip recession because of the taxes and regulations under consideration by the Democratic Congress and President Barack Obama.

“Congress, the administration and states must recognize that our weak economy simply could not sustain all the new taxes, regulations and mandates now under consideration. It’s a sure-fire recipe for a double-dip recession, or worse,” Donohue said in a speech providing the Chamber’s outlook for 2010.

It is my contention, of course, that we haven’t really emerged from the recession. GDP numbers don’t impress me – its all smoke and mirrors fueled by fiat money and accounting which makes Enron look honest. Be that as it may, the facts are ever more clear – Obama’s policies not only aren’t helping,they are making things worse.

The big hits to come this year – ARM mortgages, commercial real estate collapse, likely stock market bubble burst, etc – will be capped off by the fact that the Bush Administration tax cuts will expire at the end of the year. Unless Obama and the Democrats decide to renew the cuts, we’re in for a massive tax increase on what is, at best, an economy in weak recovery. Even the most dyed-in-the-wool Keynsians will tell you this is bad policy – but Democrats are unlikely to move on it because they love the idea of a tax hike they don’t have to actually vote on (though we GOPers simply must find a way to hang this on them – there’s no excuse for inaction).

We need policies which will encourage wealth creation. What that means is not just tax cuts, but regulatory reform to make it easier for people to start or expand farms, factories and mines. We can’t build our economy on windmills, road maintenance and government bureaucrats. We need to actually make money – and that means making, mining and growing things.

Here’s just one idea to get things rolling – in Detroit, there are vast swaths of city land unused. Using eminent domain, the federal government should seize the land (thus taking it out of Detroit’s impossible tax and regulatory environment) and offer it, as it were, under a form of “Homestead Act” to anyone who will start a business on the land – and tax free for the first ten years. This would cost only a trivial amount (the land to be seized in Detroit is largely abandoned and those parts which have an identifiable owner would be compensated at, let’s face it, fire sale prices); it would not require the destruction of any farm or wild lands; it would encourage business formation and expansion right here in the United States (perhaps even with foreign money coming in to open up business which will be non-union and temporarily tax free, ya dig?) and it would provide jobs in one of the worst hit areas of the United States. And it would create wealth where none exists today – and thus, in the long run, provide far more tax revenue than the land is currently generating.

Is this idea the cure-all for what ails us? By no means – its just something I thought of. The point is that we have to think anew and act anew. The tired, old statist policies of liberalism won’t work. And we need leaders who are willing to try any idea provided the cost is little or nothing and the driving force would be the creative effort of regular folks. Do this, and we can get out of our economic mess – do otherwise, and we’ll be sitting here 10 and 20 years from now in the same condition.

E mailed over to NRO’s The Corner:

Let’s break this down: Brown raises $1.3 million in a day. Average donation $77.00

Coakley goes to a fundraiser with her “bundlers” raising at least $10,000 per person, and the party is full of registered lobbyists.

And who’s selling out to proverbial devils?

Its just a pity our rank-and-file liberals refuse to believe they’ve been had. As long as you say the right words, our liberals will remain slavishly devoted…