Hillary's birth bonds

I can't find a link to it yet, but earlier today, I caught a clip on TV in which Hillary Clinton discussed a $5,000 government endowment (for lack of a better term) for each child born. Theoretically, the money would be held in some type of account until the child reached the age of 18, when the money (plus 18 years of interest, presumably) could be used for the child's higher educational needs.

Based on facts from the CIA's world fact book on America's birth rates, I put this at around $21.3 billion (the news report on TV said $20 billion...close enough).

On the surface, $21.3 billion annually sounds like a reasonable amount to invest in our nation's educational future. But that just covers the actual hard dollars to be paid out by the taxpayers to fund the program. Do you really think that a Democrat-controlled government would just give every new parent $5,000 of THEIR money to hold in escrow until their kid turned 18? You silly peon...you can't be trusted with that!

No, this would require a whole new bureaucracy be created, probably under the already dysfunctional and incompetent Department of Education. Then, additional funds would have to be flowed to every state's department of education to manage the program. Figure on something closer to $100 billion. Annually.

Back to the drawing board, Comrade Hillary.

Update: Finally found a link...there are plenty of them if one just uses the right search words.

When parody becomes reality

The following could have been pulled from today's news pages covering a San Francisco street fair, an advertisement for which parodies Da Vinci's last supper painting:

"I'd always thought gays were regular people, just like you and me, and that the stereotype of homosexuals as hedonistic, sex-crazed deviants was just a destructive myth," said mother of four Hannah Jarrett, 41, mortified at the sight of 17 tanned and oiled boys cavorting in jock straps to a throbbing techno beat on a float shaped like an enormous phallus. "Boy, oh, boy, was I wrong."

But it's not. It's from a 2001 article in The Onion, a parody news site, entitled Gay-Pride Parade Sets Mainstream Acceptance Of Gays Back 50 Years.

Is the gay community that tone deaf, or do they just not care?

George Soros' tentacles

I knew that George Soros was a big financial backer of MoveOn.org, but I really had no idea just how influential and widespread his reach is until I read this series of articles in Investor's Business Daily. Here are a few excerpts to whet your appetite:

From The Soros Threat to Democracy

George Soros is known for funding groups such as MoveOn.org that seek to manipulate public opinion. So why is the billionaire's backing of what he believes in problematic? In a word: transparency.

How many people, for instance, know that James Hansen, a man billed as a lonely "NASA whistleblower" standing up to the mighty U.S. government, was really funded by Soros' Open Society Institute , which gave him "legal and media advice"?

[ ... ]

That's not the only case. Didn't the mainstream media report that 2006's vast immigration rallies across the country began as a spontaneous uprising of 2 million angry Mexican-flag waving illegal immigrants demanding U.S. citizenship in Los Angeles, egged on only by a local Spanish-language radio announcer?

Turns out that wasn't what happened, either. Soros' OSI had money-muscle there, too, through its $17 million Justice Fund. The fund lists 19 projects in 2006. One was vaguely described involvement in the immigration rallies. Another project funded illegal immigrant activist groups for subsequent court cases.

[ ... ]

Soros' "shaping public policies," as OSI calls it, is not illegal. But it's a problem for democracy because it drives issues with cash and then only lets the public know about it after it's old news.

That means the public makes decisions about issues without understanding the special agendas of groups behind them.

From George Soros: The Man, The Mind And The Money Behind MoveOn

Soros says he gives away about $400 million annually.

It's an admirable picture, but "philanthropy" may be the wrong word. Unlike, say, Bill Gates, who really does put the bulk of his charity into helping the world's poor through medical services, Soros tends to fund pressure groups and foundations he misleadingly characterizes as promoting "civil society" and "democracy."

The image gives him moral cover to manipulate democracies whose voter verdicts he opposes.

The first groups Soros supported back in the 1980s did play a role in undercutting the rickety communist regimes of Eastern Europe. But his motives seemed less than idealistic. All Soros groups tend to tear down tyrannies rather than build up democracies.

And since 2003, tearing down what he views as the "fascist" tyranny of the United States, as he has put it, is "the central focus of my life."

From A Party Bought And Paid For

MoveOn.org once crowed that it had bought and owned the Democratic Party. With the Senate now blasting its tactics, that's an open question. But not, apparently, for Democrats running for president.

The Senate voted 72-25 on Wednesday to stand up for the integrity of America's leading military field commander, Gen. David Petraeus.

[ ... ]

The Senate's nonbinding resolution was simple enough: It expressed "full support" for the general returning from the field of battle and "strongly" condemned "personal attacks on the honor and integrity of General Petraeus and all members of the United States Armed Forces." Given that they voted 81-0 to confirm him less than a year earlier, it was a reasonable gesture.

MoveOn's ad disgusted average Americans across the country. Even the Democrat-dominated Senate couldn't halt a vote to condemn it. A quarter of the Senate, however, did refuse to condemn the attacks, and curiously, that included all Senate Democrats who seek to become the military's next commander in chief.

Sens. Hillary Clinton and Christopher Dodd voted against the symbolic measure. Sens. Joe Biden and Barack Obama had other things to do that day and abstained from voting.

Read 'em all.

Did Saddam offer to go quietly for $1B?

A report in the Daily Mail claims that shortly before the invasion of Iraq, Saddam Hussein offered to go quietly into exile...in exchange for a billion dollars.

The extraordinary offer was revealed yesterday in a transcript of talks in February 2003 between George Bush and the then Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar at the President's Texas ranch.

The White House refused to comment on the report last night.

But, if verified, it is certain to raise questions in Washington and London over whether the costly four-year war could have been averted.

The possibilities are mind-boggling, but only under certain conditions. For example, what did Saddam offer as a replacement? Uday and Qusay? Would he have simply left a vacuum, resulting in the very same mess we're trying to clean up now?

It's an interesting game of what-if. But that's all it is...and even then, only if it's true.

Update: I don't know how I missed this the first time around, but this paragraph would seem to bolster intelligence estimates on Iraq's WMD programs before the war:

"It seems he's indicated he would be prepared to go into exile if he's allowed to take $1billion and all the information he wants about weapons of mass destruction."

The dog with the big dick strikes back

In an effort to "stimulate debate about religion and freedom of expression" after the Mohammed-as-a-dog fiasco in Sweden, artist Stig Ramsing has produced a sculpture depicting Jesus as a dog with huge schwanz.

The artwork showed Jesus as a dog with a bloodstained head under a crown of thorns and an "enormous sexual organ", according to Swedish press agency TT.

I simply must find a picture of this.

Is it the profession, or those that are attracted to it?

Yet another study, this time in Sweden, blows the lid off the shocking secret that journalists lean farther to the left than the public forced to consume their drivel.

The Green Party, Left Party and Liberal Party were more favoured by journalists than the Moderates and Social Democrats, the largest parties in the country as a whole. The large parties have been under-represented since journalists' political views were first canvassed in Sweden in 1989.

But there's one key difference between Swedish journalists and their American counterparts...

Perhaps unsurprisingly, talking politics is a favourite pastime. 68 percent of the nation's scribes have a conversation about politics at least once a week, compared to 25 percent of the population as a whole. Journalists also have greater trust in politicians than the general public.

Voter ID laws: What's the big deal?

I was at the Marriott Hotel in Alpharetta, Georgia a few years back ordering a beer at the lobby bar. Upon being asked for proof of age, I produced my driver's license and with a smirk, said "I've been 21 twice now." The bartender smiled apologetically and explained that it was a local law, and every customer had to show proof of age regardless of how old he looked. I shrugged it off. No big deal.

Today the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case of Indiana's voter ID law, which requires anyone showing up to vote to present positive identification. The law has already been upheld by a federal judge and the 7th US Circuit Court of Appeals.

Now to me, a law requiring a prospective voter to show identification seems perfectly reasonable, in fact, I find it somewhat shocking that it's not a universal practice. I mean, c'mon...ensuring the integrity of our elections is just a tad more important than getting a beer in Alpharetta. But sadly the Democrats don't see it that way.

The state Democratic party and civil rights groups complained that the law unfairly targets poor and minority voters, without any evidence that in-person voter fraud exists in Indiana. The party argued that those voters tend to be Democrats.

The point isn't (or at least, shouldn't be) whether voter fraud exists in Indiana. The point is to make sure that it doesn't. But where's the evidence that poor and minority voters lack proper identification in such numbers that this is really a problem for them? Why is this seen as such an onerous burden on these groups that the requirement disenfranchises them in significant numbers?

This is like Russia's protests over the planned European missile defense system. If you don't plan on launching missiles against Europe, what's the big deal? Likewise with the Dems...if you don't plan on committing mass voter fraud by hauling a bunch of proxies to the polls, what's the big deal?

The Democrats doth protest too much, methinks.

Red Sox watch

Magic Number: 5

How did it come to this? We've clinched a playoff spot, but the division title should have been sewn up at least a week ago.

Between their September collapse and Ahmadinejad's visit to the US, I'm gonna have to go on blood pressure medication.

Pelley's '60 Minutes' interview with Ahmadinejad has left seething

I posted that link yesterday to the dKos reader who was stricken with a case of the vapors over Scott Pelley's rough handling of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on 60 Minutes Sunday night. Now it seems "Richard Cranium" (but you can call him "Dick Head") isn't the only one who thinks Scott Pelley is a dummy for Dick Cheney's ventriloquism.

A visitor to this blog last night arrived by way of a Google search. What were the search words? Take a look:

So it seems that either there's an Internet petition circulating demanding that Scott Pelley be fired, or this visitor was hoping to find one. It's a safe bet that if such a petition doesn't exist now, it will soon. Expect the grounds to be propagandizing for the White House, journalistic malfeasance or something along those lines, when in reality all Pelley did was break with mainstream journalism and try to corner Ahmadinejad with some tough questions.

These days, the left isn't happy if a reporter does anything less than perform journalistic fellatio when interviewing the world's worst dictators.

It's Mahmoud Monday

Today's the day America's Democrats, barking moonbats, leftist whackademics and Islamist Freakazoids have been eagerly anticipating: Iran's president and terror mastermind Mahmoud Ahmadinejad takes New York City by storm.

I'm too demoralized to link all the articles I've seen, but this Daily Kos post (courtesy of LGF) just stands out as a shining example of what's wrong with the Democrats and how completely unhinged they've become.

I am sitting here absolutely stunned after watching the 60 Minutes interview with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Reporter Scott Pelley was unbelievably scary in asking the questions he asked.

At the moment, I’m at a loss for words, but if you watched it, and were as stunned as I was, please let me know. I need a sanity check.

I’m going to have to wait for a transcript, but here’s what immediately scared me:

* Pelley’s “questions” (allegedly from George Bush) [Alleged by WHOM?? --ed.]
* Pelley’s declarations that the U.S. had “proof of Iran firing missiles at Americans in Iraq”
* Pelley’s assertations [sic] that “Iran is providing material support to Iraq insurgents. We have proof. What do you say?” ... or something like that. Very close.

It was a masterful Goebel-esque performance by 60 Minutes on behalf of Dick Cheney.

I’m telling you, it was scary beyond belief.

I've got visions of this idiot sitting at his computer, quivering and weeping over poor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad being bullied by CBS reporter Scott Pelley. But all snickering aside, what can be so profoundly wrong with an entire group of people that they would deny all evidence to the contrary and believe a terrorist leader over independently verified US reports of Iran's meddling in Iraq?

It would be easy to dismiss this as lunatic fringe raving if it wasn't for the fact that the dKos community has become the face of the Democratic party. Knowing this, who in their right mind could possibly vote for a Democrat?

Seasonal philosophical bullshit

As summer gives way to fall, I thought I'd offer up a passage from Chinese author and inventor Lin Yutang. I've taken the liberty of subtly modifying it, though. See if you can find the change...it's very subtle.

I like spring, but it is too young. I like summer, but it is too proud. So I like best of all autumn, because its tone is mellower, its colors are richer, and it is tinged with a little sorrow. Its golden richness speaks not of the innocence of spring, nor the power of summer, but of the mellowness and kindly wisdom of approaching age. It knows the limitations of life and it is content. But winter just sucks.

Photo of the year

What can one say about this that the photo doesn't already? This is American airport security today: A Catholic nun being frisked at the airport by a Muslim.

Hat tip: Hot Air headlines

The conquest of Europe

While the growing number of Europeans concerned over the Islamization of Europe are smeared as bigots, the Islamization continues at breakneck speed. All the following news items came from expatica.com today.

Belgium:
VB: "Stop Islamisation"
1,000 "holy war veterans" in Belgium

France:
Zawahiri calls for 'cleansing' Maghreb of France

Germany:
Call for imams to undergo integration course

Spain:
Asians wait in Guinea to sail to Spain