Hanson captures it in a paragraph:

It is quite surreal to see a U.S. president — after borrowing nearly $2 trillion this year, with a scheduled aggregate increase in the national debt of $8-9 trillion during his tenure alone — talk about borrowing more money to enact cap-and-trade transfers, as his secretary of state promises a $100 billion cash grant to poorer nations. And all this takes place in the aftermath of Climategate, at a summit whose attendees give the thuggish Hugo Chávez a rousing ovation, get lectured by the murderer Robert Mugabe, and also hear from multi-millionaire global-warming capitalist Al Gore.

Honestly, liberals, is this really what you want to be remembered for? Doesn’t it, at least a little, creep you out to have something as stupid as this going on in your name? Are you proud of Obama going to the same podium as Chavez to pledge money we don’t have to solve a problem which, if it were real, can’t be solved because China won’t agree?

A century of liberal lies and here we are…

Geesh:

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.), prone for throwing his own political bombs at Republicans, has threatened a local critic with five years in jail for creating the website “mycongressmanisnuts.com,”

The Orlando Sentinel reports that Grayson wrote a letter this week to Attorney General Eric Holder demanding that the federal government imprison Republican activist Angie Langley for five years because of her website criticizing him.

The website, designed to raise money against Grayson, catalogues videos and news clippings that portray the provocative congressman in an unfavorable light. It courts donors to donate money to help elect his Republican challenger next year – collecting $3,725 to date.

Grayson’s contention is that the owner of the site is not a constituent and presents herself as such. Presumptively, it is the “mycongressman” part of the title which offends Grayson, as the website doesn’t say “I, Jane Doe, am Graysons constituent and I think he’s nuts”. To Grayson, only people who he directly represents can call him nuts, I guess.

But, the fact remains, Grayson is nuts and thus the website is accurate – and Grayson has now become an insane fascist over it. I recommend that someone else set up http://www.mycongressmanisafascist.com to complement this fine website.

Click on the above photo, taken in May, 2008, in Bozeman, MT, to view it in full size. Pay special attention to Obama’s book of choice in the inset. The name of the book is “The Post-American World,” by Fareed Zakaria, who also happens to be the editor for Newsweek International (of the fatal Koran Flushing Non-Incident Incident fame).

And what, pray tell, is the subject matter of the “Post American World?” In part,

Zakaria describes with equal prescience a world in which the United States will no longer dominate the global economy, orchestrate geopolitics, or overwhelm cultures. He sees the “rise of the rest”—the growth of countries like China, India, Brazil,…

Is Obama’s choice of reading material in the picture any coincidence, given that Barack Obama is the only president in my lifetime who has never spoken of America’s greatness, nor advanced the ideal of American exceptionalism? Is the choice any coincidence, given that Barack Hussein Obama chose for two decades to attend a church whose pastor regularly engaged in anti-American rants?

Is his reading material of choice truly a mere happenstance, given that in his lifetime Obama chose to associate himself with terrorists who loved their country so much they decided it was best to literally blow up its institutions with impunity?

Most important of all, is our President’s choice of reading material in the photo really any coincidence, in light of Barack Obama’s perpetual apology tours, a domestic spending agenda and a “climate change” agenda that will surely bankrupt us for generations to come, not to mention the recently proposed windfall transfer of wealth to third world tinhorn dictatorships? For that matter, Obama’s feckless, half-hearted attempts to de-nuclearize Tehran speaks volumes, especially given his declaration in his much vaunted Cairo speech that “…No single nation should pick and choose which nation holds nuclear weapons.”

In summary, one could certainly argue that the President’s agenda, nay, his very upbringing, breadth of experience and associations have rendered him a tailor-made instrument that would bring Zakaria’s vision of a “Post American World” into reality. As a matter of fact, given his choice of reading material, it’s not that much of a stretch to infer that it is Obama’s very intention that Zakaria’s vision of a neutered, feckless America, no longer a leader on the world stage, is nothing less than a foregone conclusion.

The result of the new diplomacy:

Iranian forces took control of a southern Iraqi oil well on a disputed section of the border on Friday, US and Iraqi officials told AFP.

“There has been no violence related to this incident and we trust this will be resolved through peaceful diplomacy between the governments of Iraq and Iran,” a US military spokesman told AFP at Contingency Operating Base Adder, just outside the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriyah.

There is no risk for Iran, here. They know Obama will not react with any force. They know the Iraqis are not in a position to act on their own. Meanwhile, this will spike oil prices helping Iran make money and, of course, it can be used as a blind in order to confuse the issue of Iran’s nuclear program. The Iranian mullahs perceive our weakness and are acting accordingly.

We can expect more and more of this as time goes on.

Naturally:

A new analysis of the $157 billion distributed by the American Reinvestment and Recovery act, popularly known as the stimulus bill, shows that the funds were distributed without regard for what states were most in need of jobs.

“You would think that if the stimulus money was actually spent to create jobs, there would be more stimulus money spent in high unemployment states,” said Veronique de Rugy, a scholar at the Mercatus Center who produced the analysis. “But we don’t find any correlation.”…

…The Mercatus Center analysis also found that Democratic congressional districts received on average almost double the funding of Republican congressional districts. Republican congressional districts received on average $232 million in stimulus funds while Democratic districts received $439 million on average.

“We found that there is a correlation [relating to the partisanship of congressional districts],” de Rugy said. Her regression analysis found that stimulus funds are expected to decrease by 24.19 percent if a district is represented by a Republican.

This is not at all surprising because the whole point of the stimulus was to make it appear that government was doing something while masking the real point: massive, new funding for Democrats to buy votes back home.

Our government is hopelessly corrupt under the current, liberal regime and only a complete overturning of the party in power will give us a chance of real reform.

Health care coming to a crunch. Democrats getting nervous. Lots to talk about. Check out this over at Mish’s on the economy.

Have at it, boys and girls.

…like homosexuality and religion:

A California mayor’s comments saying that homosexuals are committing sin that will keep them out of heaven have caused uproar among activists…

…In a Nov. 16 interview with the New York Times, Mayor Osby Davis of Vallejo, California discussed issues of religion and politics in the Bay Area city of 120,000 people, the California Catholic Daily reports.

Discussion turned to the school board candidate Bishop Lou A. Bordisso, an openly homosexual prelate in the American Catholic Church, a church not in communion with Rome…

…Asked by the New York Times whether there are some faith communities “where gay people are not welcome,” Davis replied that God loves “anyone who is gay and anyone who is not gay.”

“The sins that keep you out of heaven are not the just those sins of being gay, those are sins of lying, murdering, unforgiving, all kinds of sins… So when you look at someone who is gay, you see them as someone Christ died for and you look at them as if they are in fact committing sin and that sin will keep them out of heaven.”

So, what is happening? Well, some people in the gay rights community and sympathizers are demanding the mayor resign or that the city recognize “gay pride” day…which is, in the end, a way of saying that the city should honor some people for speaking up about their sexual views while condemning the mayor – and, by extension, all Christians – for speaking up about their sexual views. Thus the weird world of the Age of Lies we live in.

Of course, all the mayor is saying is basic, Christian truth – it is not what you are which keeps you out of heaven, but what you do. You can be gay until the cows come home and get in to heaven – what will keep you out, if you are to be kept out, is your actions…the things you consciously choose to do knowing as you do them that they are wrong, and then you never seek forgiveness…never have a contrite heart over your errors. This isn’t hate, as some gay activists might put it – its the old, old Christian ideal of hating the sin, loving the sinner. If you don’t like this worldview, then you’ve got a major malfunction of your own to deal with.

There is a great simplicity in Christianity – Christ died for the remission of our sins and all those who believe in Christ will be redeemed. But what, exactly, constitutes belief in Christ? Who has really accepted Christ? While we can make some solid assumptions about some people who are likely in heaven – we call them Saints in the Catholic faith; thus St. Francis is someone we are as certain as any human can be that he’s in heaven – we can’t really say for certain if any particular person is in hell. Even the very worst sinners may have had an act of genuine contrition before death and even at the last moment have accepted the salvation Jesus offers to all of us. We can see lots of indicators that a person has rejected salvation, but we don’t know if they really have.

The problem here is that some people, it would seem, want us to say that what we know is bad – sexual relations outside of marriage and cut off from the gift of life – are good and won’t in any way risk a person’s salvation. Or, failing our public assertion of this, we are to keep silent about our views. This is un-American – and, also, counter-productive. Everyone must know what everyone else is about – if you are gay, you must know that I, as a Christian, condemn utterly homosexual relations. It wouldn’t be fair for me to hide such a view from you – and it would be unfair to the gay person to not have the alternative view placed in front of him…because unless there is a multiple of things to choose, there is no choice.

Just can’t get away from them, I guess:

President Obama’s recent nominee for ambassador to El Salvador was forced to withdraw her nomination to another diplomatic post a decade ago following concerns about ties to Cuba, raising red flags as her name heads to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee once again for approval.

The White House announced the nomination of Mari Carmen Aponte last Wednesday along with a handful of other appointments. The selection has started to draw some attention given that former President Clinton nominated her for ambassador to the Dominican Republic in 1998, only to see the nomination fizzle after the foreign relations panel questioned her over her past relationship with someone who had apparently caught the attention of the FBI.

One former official with knowledge of that nomination said the committee started scrutinizing Aponte after learning that she had attended a party at the Cuban mission to the United Nations in New York City, and that she had a relationship with someone, Roberto Tamayo, who had raised concern at the FBI over “possible ties to the Cuban government” and “repeated trips there.”

Is there anyone in the Obama Administration who isn’t a communist, connected to terrorists or a crook? Other than Gates at Defense, I can’t think of any…

Latest over at Pajamas Media:

As James Delingpole, in the Telegraph, noted Wednesday:

Climategate just got much, much bigger. And all thanks to the Russians who, with perfect timing, dropped this bombshell just as the world’s leaders are gathering in Copenhagen to discuss ways of carbon-taxing us all back to the dark ages.

On Tuesday, we heard via the Ria Novosti agency that the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change had probably tampered with Russian-climate data:

The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming theory. Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country’s territory, and that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports. Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations.

With all the money at stake for the left and liberal fat cats, this will not go away soon – but, honestly, anyone with any sense at all realizes by now, at the minimum, that the data used by the UN and other government agencies to set “global warming” policy is tainted beyond redemption. If you still wish to hold to the theory of anthropogenic global warming, you’re going to have to go back and re-do the data from scratch and see what shows up.

My bet is that it won’t show that man is the cause of whatever warming we had in the late 20th century.

And this, finally, should put the nail in the coffin for the environmentalist movement – there never has been anything out of that movement besides lies, slanders and, at their best moments, half-truths. It is time to return to conservation and leave environmentalism in the dustbin of history.

Here’s the news:

Morgan Stanley, the securities firm that spent more than $8 billion on commercial property in 2007, plans to relinquish five San Francisco office buildings to its lender two years after purchasing them from Blackstone Group LP near the top of the market.

The bank has been negotiating an “orderly transfer” of the towers since earlier this year, Alyson Barnes, a Morgan Stanley spokeswoman, said yesterday in a telephone interview. AREA Property Partners will take over the buildings. Barnes declined to say when the transfer will occur.

“This isn’t a default or foreclosure situation,” Barnes said. “We are going to give them the properties to get out of the loan obligation.”

This is what we’re told – over and over and over again – not to do. We, the people, dare not walk away from our mortgages! That would be evil! Wrong! Deadbeat! The horrors of it all!

Which, of course, is all just so much nonsense. It is what the bankers and the bureaucrats want us to believe. It is, indeed, what plenty of regular folks who are not “underwater” believe. But its simply not true – when you borrow money to buy a house, you have a secured loan. What is it secured by? The house. You can either pay back the loan, or give up the house. You and the bank are both betting that the house will maintain or increase value and that, of course, over a 30 year period you’ll continue to be in the financial shape necessary to make the payments. There is no guarantee, here. Its not like laying money on a blackjack table in Vegas, but its not like putting money in your piggy bank, either.

The moral obligation of the debtor is to render his payments as agreed or give up the house. The only thing which would be morally wrong is for the debtor to not pay and keep the house – and not in terms of missing a few payments, but in having the house for life and being able to sell it without having paid off the loan secured by the house. That would be wrong. But giving up the house? Its a six of one, half a dozen of the other proposition – with the only caveat being that banks don’t like it when you don’t pay up, so they will report you to the credit bureaus and, in some jurisdictions, they can attempt to recover any difference between the sale price and mortgage value (though this is harder to do than one might think, and a person can always go through bankruptcy to avoid such a thing – and if you are thinking of walking on your mortgage, do consult a lawyer before you do it). All of this becomes even more true if the homeowner has lost income since the start of the loan via unemployment, illness or death of a breadwinner.

Morgan Stanley is just doing the logical thing when faced with property which not only has lost value, but probably won’t recover that value in any reasonable amount of time (and this, by the way, should be taken as major indicator of our economy, at the moment). But we’re still bombarded with a “you must pay your mortgage, no matter what” bit of Bankster/Bureaucrat propaganda. I’m not having any of that – if you’re “underwater”, consult with an attorney and do what works best given your overall economic circumstances.