The Spendulus, In a Nutshell

From Senator Lamar Alexander, via Post Politics:

This bill will give American workers $8 a week in their paychecks in exchange for passing along a $1 trillion debt to our grandchildren. The entire New Deal in today’s dollars cost only half of what this bill costs.

The wife and I are eagerly anticipating what we’ll do with that extra $8 a week, each…me, personally, I figure we go heavy into canned goods, and spend the tax return on the shotguns. Meanwhile, we drain out the 401k and buy gold.

Its going to be a very long four years, and we’re going to emerge out of it a great deal poorer than we are today – but, hopefully, we’ll be wiser in a lot of ways and especially in that way which makes people positively retch at the mere thought of another liberal, Democratic Administration.

The Problem With Darwinists

There is, of course, nothing wrong with the theory of evolution as a means of explaining how life developed on this Earth – but there is a problem when people take that theory and attempt to apply it in a universal sense and turn it into a political ideology masking as a scientific theory:

Father Marc Leclerc, professor of Natural Philosophy at the Gregorian Pontifical University of Rome, explained in a recent article for L’Osservatore Romano that there is no problem with the theory of evolution. The problem, he said, lies in the ideology that is created as part of the theory.

In his article, the Jesuit priest said that in the past, and much more so in the present, “many, whether they are fans and foes of Darwin, have confused his scientific theory of evolution—which should be discussed at a scientific level by competent persons—with the reduction of it to an ideological system, a vision of the world that forcibly falls upon on all men.”

Father Leclerc underscored that “as then Cardinal Ratzinger rightly wrote, the controversy has not come from the theory of evolution as such, but from the turning some of its elements into a universal philosophy, in order to explain all of reality’.”

Darwin, he noted, “applied his theory of natural selection to how our species emerged, but not to the functioning of current human societies, underscoring instead as a beneficial aspect for the species the acquisition of moral and religious faculties that lead man to protect the weakest, contrary to the absurd pretentions of social Darwinism.”

“Evolution and creation pose no opposition to each other, but rather they show themselves to be complementary,” the priest added.

He went on to say, “Reflection on the place of man in evolution and in creation” is of particular importance. Man, as a living being, can find his own place in the evolution of species which, when read post factum, had prepared for his coming for a long time. But man cannot reduce himself to a pure product of the evolution of species without contradictions: in other words, man is not reducible to mere animality.”

But the Darwinists insist we are mere animals – accidental results of accidental evolution which has no meaning and no point. Such assertions fly in the face of easily observable facts – such as the fact that there is no way to predict what I’ll think next, and if you can’t predict what I think next, then a purely evolutionary view of the development of life is utter nonsense. But Darwinism – as differentiated from Darwin’s theory – isn’t about science or truth; it is about an anti-religious worldview which some people insist we adhere to.

What is the reason for opposing Intelligent Design as a theory of how life developed? Not anything in Darwin’s theories. In fact, ID does an excellent job of filling in the rather large holes which have developed in Darwin’s theory since he first proposed it more than a century and a half ago. The reason for being opposed to ID is because if you have a Designer, then you’re open to the whole gamut of thought regarding God, and the Darwinists don’t want the kiddies to hear about God, because – in their absurd view – belief in God is at the root of all or most of our societal problems.

It is fine and dandy for someone to believe that the net effect of religious belief is negative – but it is quite another when such a person desires to impose that view on everyone else. By hijacking Darwin’s theory and pretending that it explains all and also disposes of any need for a Creator, the anti-religious Darwinists are seeking to impose their worldview on us.

We must fight this – in the name of liberty and, very importantly, in the name of science. It is anti-science to hold that a theory cannot be questioned – Darwin has a theory and it is actually our duty to question it, and accept no dogmas which have built up around it unless such things are verifiable in a laboratory setting. For all the carping that ID can’t be proved, the fact remains that Darwin’s theory can’t be proved, either and thus mere rational discourse requires that we allow the free play of ideas in the matter of the origin and development of life.

Senator Feinstein Reveals CIA Drones Operating From Within Pakistan

It appears that Senator Dianne Feinstein revealed secret information yesterday which complicates the war on terror…. 

A senior U.S. lawmaker said Thursday that unmanned CIA Predator aircraft operating in Pakistan are flown from an airbase inside that country, a revelation likely to embarrass the Pakistani government and complicate its counterterrorism collaboration with the United States.

The disclosure by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, marked the first time a U.S. official had publicly commented on where the Predator aircraft patrolling Pakistan take off and land.

At a hearing, Feinstein expressed surprise at Pakistani opposition to the ongoing campaign of Predator-launched CIA missile strikes against Al Qaeda targets along Pakistan’s northwest border.

“As I understand it, these are flown out of a Pakistani base,” she said of the planes.

The basing of the pilotless aircraft in Pakistan suggests a much deeper relationship with the United States on counterterrorism matters than has been publicly acknowledged. Such an arrangement would be at odds with protests lodged by officials in Islamabad and could inflame anti-American sentiment in the country.

Feinstein said through a spokesman that her statement “was based solely on previous news reports that Predators were operated from bases near Islamabad.” But, that doesn’t seem likely.

“If accurate, what this says is that Pakistani involvement, or at least acquiescence, has been much more extensive than has previously been known,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University. “It puts the Pakistani government in a far more difficult position [in terms of] its credibility with its own people. Unfortunately it also has the potential to threaten Pakistani-American relations.”

Nice going, Dianne.

Forgive Them, Because They Know Not What They Do

Meaning, in this instance, our Democrats and their Obama-Pelosi-Ried Hot-Dang-We-Gonna-Spend-Us-Some-Money Porkenstien “Stimulus” Bill – no one can possibly read it prior to the upcoming vote – from The Sundries Shack:

It is now 7 PM and the Democrats in Congress have yet to give their Republican counterparts a copy of the final Stimulus Bill for them to read. Steny Hoyer says that the House is going to move toward a vote starting at 9 AM tomorrow.

Today’s version of the bill clocks in at 1,434 pages and that’s not the final version. What Congress will likely vote on tomorrow (because President Obama has practically demanded that he sign it on Monday) is likely going to be larger.

There is no chance in the world that any member of Congress is going to be able to read the bill by morning unless they are a trained speed reader. Even then, they’re not going to know the full ramifications of what the bill contains. I’ll do some back of the envelope calculations to prove it.

Let’s start with two generous assumptions: that the bill remains at 1,434 pages, and it gets in the hands of your member of Congress at 8 PM. Let’s also assume that there are about 350 words on each page

In order for anyone to read the entire bill in 13 hours, they’d have to start the very minute they got it and read over 1.8 pages a minute every minute, without a break. They’ll be clocking in at a reading speed of 640.5 words per minute at that rate. If anyone needs a potty break, they’d better take the bill with them. Forget eating.

As noted later in that linked entry, even if by some miracle some Congresscritter did manage to read the whole thing, that doesn’t mean said critter would be able to understand all the ramifications of the bill, as a lot of the bill is couched in “amendment to sub-section 3C” legalese. At the end of the day, Obama and his Democrats are passing a bill of which they are ignorant of its provisions as well as how it will fit in with all other programs carried on by the United States government – its just a bunch of sh** shoved through the legislative process as fast as possible, with low level Congressional aides and Obama Administration officials to be left to apply it to the American people after passage.

Liberals, do you fully realize just how monumentally stupid this is? And this is the action of the man you swear up and down is a vast improvement over President Bush. Let me tell you – for the sake of argument, lets say that Bush was just as bad as you say he was. Obama is worse. By far.

Obama's Stimulus Fizzle

Entirely unsurprising:

President Obama today repeated the claim we asked about yesterday at the press briefing that Jim Owens, the CEO of Caterpillar, Inc., “said that if Congress passes our plan, this company will be able to rehire some of the folks who were just laid off.”

Caterpillar announced 22,000 layoffs last month.

But after the president left the event, Owens said the exact opposite.

Asked if the stimulus package would be able to stop the 22,000 layoffs or not, Owens said, “I think realistically no. The truth is we’re going to have more layoffs before we start hiring again”

“It is going to take some time before that stimulus bill” means re-hiring, he said.

The wonder remains whether or not Obama actually believes his Porkenstein will do good, or whether he’s just scamming us…he’s either a fool, or a con artist. Neither of which makes for a good President.

Liberals: Just please file this sort of post for later reference. When your Obamessiah completely flunks the test and Democrats are crushed in 2010 and 2012, you just remember that we told you before it was passed that the stimulus bill not only would not work, but would actually make things worse.

Democrats Lie, Again

Yaaawn…some day this won’t be routine:

In a press conference Thursday, the House Republican leadership spoke candidly about being kept out of the House-Senate conference on the Obama-Pelosi-Reid so-called “economic stimulus” bill. They confirmed they had not yet seen the text of the bill as of 4 p.m.

Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) said he was unsure how many Democrats would vote with Republicans again on this bill but that he thought Republicans “may get a few” Democrats to side with them. The fact that the Demos have now broken their promise to have the public able to see the bill for 48 hours may drive more Dems into the Republican camp.

“[I] don’t know, ‘cause they haven’t seen the bill either,” Boehner said.

“The American people have a right to know what’s in this bill,” Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind) told HUMAN EVENTS after the press conference. “Every member of Congress — Republicans and Democrats — voted to post this bill on the internet for 48 hours, 48 hours ago. We’ll see if the Democrats keep their word.”

Actually — as of 5:15 pm, the Democrats had broken their word.

One wonders why Democrats even bother making promises – everyone just has to know by now that anything a Democrat says is merely for temporary expediency and the actual event will be some sort of corrupt, screw-the-people boondoggle designed to enhance the power and wealth of senior Democrats. But they keep at it, and they keep breaking their promises.

UPDATE: Now that the Democrats have graciously placed the bill on the House website, lets see how they are going to keep things above-board for us:

SEC. 1221. ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ACCOUNTABILITY AND TRANSPARENCY BOARD.

There is established a board to be known as the `Recovery Act Accountability and Transparency Board’ (hereafter in this subtitle referred to as the `Board’) to coordinate and conduct oversight of Federal spending under this Act to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse.

SEC. 1222. COMPOSITION OF BOARD.

(a) Membership- The Board shall be composed of seven members as follows:

(1) The Chief Performance Officer of the President, who shall chair the Board.

(2) Six members designated by the President from the inspectors general and deputy secretaries of the Departments of Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Transportation, and other Federal departments and agencies to which funds are made available in this Act.

(b) Terms- Each member of the Board shall serve for a term to be determined by the President.

The President will have his guy running a board staffed by more of the President’s guys to keep an eye on what the President’s guys are doing. Yeah, I’m confident – feel absolutely certain that these watchdogs will keep close tabs on how the people’s money is spent.

And we get this all for a measly $14,000,000.00….

Gregg Withdraws

There are some things which can’t be tolerated – and the growing absurdity known as the Obama Administration is one of them:

President Obama’s choice for Commerce Secretary, Senator Judd Gregg, withdrew his nomination on Thursday. He said there were “irresolvable conflicts” between him and the administration.

“It has become apparent during this process that this will not work for me as I have found that on issues such as the stimulus package and the Census, there are irresolvable conflicts for me,” Mr. Gregg said in a statement. “Prior to accepting this post, we had discussed these and other potential differences, but unfortunately we did not adequately focus on these concerns. We are functioning from a different set of views on many critical items of policy.”

The withdrawal comes one week after Mr. Gregg was named to become the third Republican member of the Obama Cabinet. It is the second time that the commerce secretary position has been vacant within the last month.

The conflicts, I imagine, revolve around the fact that the so-called “stimulus” bill is a con job, while the census going under direct White House control means that liberals are going to try and gerrymander the United States, likely by trying to manage the count so that liberal areas of the country lose fewer House seats than expected. Disaster is coming, and no one with any sense really wants to be part of the train wreck, except Gates at Defense who is doing a patriot’s job of protecting the military as best he can against the liberals.

Homegrown Jihad

Below is a a newly released terrorist training video by Sheik Muburak Gilani. He trains members of Muslims of America how to kill Americans, use guns effectively, betray Americans by gaining their trust, etc. They have 35 compounds throughout the U.S.

The video is part of Homegrown Jihad: The Terrorist Camps Around the U.S., a documentary that aired in DC this week.

The American public was never supposed to see Sheik Muburak Gilani’s terrorist training video, but the Christian Action Network managed to get a copy and reveal this shocking video in their documentary.

Copies of the documentary can be obtained at www.christianaction.org.

GOP Rises

Keep fighting, House GOP, keep fighting:

Are Republicans winning the public relations battle over spending in the $800-billion-plus economic stimulus package? Democrats and Republicans are nearly even in this week’s edition of the Generic Congressional Ballot.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone surveys found that the Democrats’ lead is down to just one percentage point. Forty percent (40%) of voters said they would vote for their district’s Democratic candidate while 39% said they would choose the Republican (see crosstabs).

This marks the lowest level of support for the Democrats in tracking history and is the closest the two parties have been on the generic ballot.

The thing about the “generic ballot” is that it always tends to over-state Democrat support. Generally, if the GOP is sitting three or four points back in the “generic ballot”, then GOPers are doing well…to be one point back means that if the election were held today, the GOP would utterly crush the Democrats.

Trouble is, the election isn’t until a year from November…

On the other hand, after more than a year of Obamunism, we might have the GOP up by ten in the generic ballot…

What this shows is that when we fight on conservative principle, we win – people want to vote for something, and right now the GOP is once again becoming the watchdog of the people in Washington, DC. The only thing which could harm us now (other than the impossible: ie, Obamunism working) is a failure on our part to keep fighting. Tooth and nail, toe to toe – lets have at them with gusto and give them not a moment’s rest. They are corrupt, they are dishonest, and they are destroying our nation – the harder we fight them, the better things will be.