Entertaining.  And educational.

1. As the First Lady spoke to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender delegate back in 2008 before Barack Obama was elected to office, she proved that once again the truth may be right in front of us.

When we took our trip to Africa and visited his home country in Kenya….

Is it just slightly possible the birthers have a point?  Is it slightly possible Barack O. has a reason to spend so much time and money to hide parts of his past?

2. Polls and polling data can be manipulated to provide a desired outcome.  Many polls are simply false, but wrap themselves in a garment of non-partisanship legitimacy in order to sway public opinion, not report it.  I call this a lie.  Here a recent article from The Politico describing a couple of spring special elections for congress and problems for the Democratic party.

According to sources familiar with the effort, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has already assembled teams of top party operatives — including veteran pollster John Anzalone and longtime ad man Saul Shorr

So much for pollster neutrality.

3. We were told Obamacare was about providing quality health care to the uninsured.  Now that it is law we find out that maybe we were lied to about the intent of this legislation.  Commenting on issues raised by the Tea Party movement, Reid said,

They want things to be the way they used to be. They will never be the way they used to be.

Is it just possible this so-called health care bill was about much more than helping the uninsured?

Funny how an off-handed truth can slip past the lie like a small dog through a picket fence.  But if you don’t pay attention you might miss it.  That’s what the liars are counting on!

We all know how Rep. Bart Stupak caved the day of the passage of the government takeover of health care. But we don’t know why.

Well, we do know why. We’ve known all along that Stupak supported ObamaCare. After getting his amendment passed to the original public option health care bill that passed the House in November, he voted for the final bill. But it is baffling to pro-lifers why he, who had the power to singlehandedly make or break health care reform, would give up all that power in the last minute for a worthless scrap of paper.

An executive order cannot change current law. They can easily be overruled by the courts, which have done so in the past. Legislation from Congress supersedes them. And an executive order can be rescinded at any time. President Obama could sign the order then revoke it 60 seconds later. If the new health care system withstands legal challenges and a possible repeal, this executive order will just become another Mexico City Policy, rescinded and reinstated whenever a new president takes office.

Stupak’s move pleases neither side of the abortion debate. The pro-life side thinks the order doesn’t go nearly far enough, and the pro-abortion side thinks it goes too far. The SBA List rescinded the Defender of Life award we were supposed to give Stupak at our gala two days ago. Other pro-life groups across the country have condemned him and are now working to defeat him instead of supporting him. Pro-abortion groups are doing the same. NARAL Pro-Choice America PAC and the Planned Parenthood Action Fund are now backing Stupak’s primary challenger.

In an editorial to be published Saturday in the Washington Post, Stupak says, “The pro-life groups rallied behind me – many without my knowledge or consent – not necessarily because they shared my goals of ensuring protections for life and passing health-care reform but because they viewed me as their best chance to kill health-care legislation.”

Oh, yeah? Then why did pro-lifers in Congress vote in favor of the Stupak Amendment in November, thus opening the door for your group to vote for the bill and therefore pass it? And if you didn’t want pro-life groups rallying behind you, why did you accept their money and support?

Mr. Stupak, we trusted you. We thought we had found a hero, someone who was standing up for Life when it looked hopeless. And then we found out you’re just like any other politician, lying to the people to get your way. You broke our heart. And now pro-lifers are not rallying around you, but around your opponent. We’re going to do everything we can to ensure you get defeated with everyone else in November.

Actually, I think the Left is quite happy with Stupak. They got what they wanted from him, and he provided cover for Democrats from pro-life districts. In the end, he sold out to Obama and the Democrats for less than a mess of pottage.

The definition of a pro-life Democrat is someone who wants to say they are pro-life but vote for pro-abortion candidates and policies.  That’s because they think many other things are more important than ending legal abortion.  But you can’t be seriously pro-life and think that there is all that much that matters more than ending legal abortion.    So another way to describe a “pro-life” Democrat is as someone who is vaguely uncomfortable with legal abortion-on-demand, but doesn’t think it matters enough to do anything really significant about it, and certainly not enough to take any political risks for it, or risk losing on any other issue that matters more.

These days, pro-life Democrats always fold in the end, which is predictable by the fact that they caucus with Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi.

The latest oxymoron:  pro-life Democrat. 

Add it to the list of species that went extinct in the 20th century.

The Supreme Court on Thursday opened wide the gates to allow more corporate and union money to finance political campaigns – and potentially influence politicians and lawmaking.

That’s unfortunate, and means that the role of watchdogs tracking the money trail will be more important than ever.

It’s not as if corporations and unions have so far had their wallets glued shut. They can fund issue ads that are important to their interests. And they’re allowed to form political action committees that directly support candidates, as long as the donations are collected voluntarily from employees and union members.

But even members of Congress, whose energy is increasingly diverted to fundraising, have long recognized the potentially corrupting effect that big money can have on them. More than 100 years ago they banned corporations from donating directly to federal candidates.

Thankfully, the justices upheld that ban Thursday, as well as disclosure rules about contributors. But in a divisive 5-to-4 ruling, they overturned other important restrictions.

In time for this year’s midterm elections, corporations and unions can now spend directly from their treasuries on ads to support or defeat candidates – as long as those ads are produced independently and not coordinated with a campaign. They may also run ads right up until election day, instead of pulling them 30 days before a primary and 60 days before a general election.

Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy grounded the ruling in First Amendment rights. Corporations and unions – like individuals – have a right to free speech, the majority reasoned. “The censorship we now confront is vast in its reach,” he wrote.

But Justice John Paul Stevens said in his dissent, “The court’s ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions around the nation.” Indeed, when voters say they want “change” in Washington, the influence of money on politics is the kind of thing they’re talking about.

Some facts do intrude.

There were plenty of rich people in America in 1850. They spent very little money trying to get candidates of their choice elected. The reason? Taxes were low. There was no income tax. The federal government didn’t spend all that much, and did not fund lucrative contracts. A government that doesn’t take much of your money, and can’t give you much, is not a government whose makeup matters enough to very many rich people, or groups, to bother to spend much money on.

Fast forward.  In the modern USA, the government has the ability to take your money, regulate everything you do, and spend lots of money buying various goods and services from the private sector.

The Christian Science Monitor suggests that the people who are affected most by government power, the people who have the most to lose, should not have a commensurate ability to affect the decision making process.

Shame on them.

And the CSM seems to think that a government that spends enormous sums of money is one that the people whose money the government took should not be trying to influence, or at least not very much.

That’s just ridiculously naive.

A couple of recent experiences of large corporations in relation to government are instructive.  Not so long ago, Microsoft Corp gave almost no money to political groups or candidates.  But ever since the Clinton justice department essentially attacked Microsoft under “anti-monopoly” law, Microsoft has become a large donor to BOTH parties, out of sheer self-defense.  Something similar has happened with Walmart, which was previously mostly uninterested in politics, until many legislators got the idea that they should force Walmart to change its employment policies in various ways, at which point Walmart began giving money to both parties.

Does someone think that Microsoft and Walmart should not have the right to try to influence the outcome of political processes that are going to affect them in a very big way?  Yes.  But those people fundamentally want the public, including the people who are most productive among us, to be unable to defend themselves from government.

There is no way to “get the money out of politics” and still have a free nation.  The best way to ensure some kind of balance and fairness is simple: require complete and total disclosure of every donation, donor and recipient, to the electorate.  Print it everywhere.  Then let everyone make their case, in the open, about who is influencing whom in a way that is against the interests of the public.

Then let the public decide at the ballot box, instead of letting judges and congressman decide who gets to fund what communication to whom, and when.

The REAL corruption is elected politicians drafting legislation to shut up people and groups who want to exercise their free speech rights.

Here’s another viewpoint on the Supreme Court decision.

Russians still consider the dissolution of the Soviet Union as negative and they think this process could have been avoided, studies by sociologists show. As Vladimir Putin put it, it was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th Century. Over the last two years, the number of Russians who regret that the former Soviet Union broke up has not been declining.

This opinion is now shared by 60 per cent of respondents, Interfax was told at the Yuriy Levada Analytical Centre. This sentiment peaked in December 2000 with 75 percent.

Regret for the break-up of the Soviet Union is mostly shared by pensioners (85 per cent), women of all ages (63 per cent), 40-55 year-olds (67 per cent) and older respondents (83 per cent), those with less than average education (68 per cent), lower income (79 per cent), and rural residents (66 per cent). So it seems that those who actually lived in Soviet times feel that way. This is a significant fact.

“I think everyone has a certain nostalgia for the Soviet Union,” said Zhanna Sribnaya, 37, a Moscow writer. “It’s trendy because people my age, they can buy what they see, and they want to see their happy childhoods. We remember when ice cream cost 7 kopeks and we remember Pioneer camps [similar to Scouts and Brownies] when everyone could go to the Black Sea for summer vacations. Now, only people with money can take those vacations.”

Bring back those gulags! Reopen the torture and execution chambers in the Lubyanka! Drive over some more Eastern Europeans in tanks!

While you’re at it, find another 30 million or so people who are wasting oxygen and starve them out… those you don’t just shoot outright, that is. 

Then see how close you can come to provoking a nice nuclear holocaust, and still live to tell the tale.

A $100 million item for construction of a university hospital was inserted in the Senate health care bill at the request of Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., who faces a difficult re-election campaign, his office said Sunday night.

The legislation leaves it up to the Health and Human Services Department to decide where the money should be spent, although spokesman Bryan DeAngelis said Dodd hopes to claim it for the University of Connecticut.

The provision is included in a 383-page series of changes to the health care bill that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., outlined Saturday. Scattered throughout are numerous items sought by individual lawmakers, many of them directing money explicitly to programs or projects in their home states.

The one sought by Dodd provides $100 million for “a health care facility that provides research, inpatient tertiary care, or outpatient clinical services.” It must be affiliated with an academic health center at a public research university in the United States “that contains a State’s sole public academic medical and dental school.”

This health care bill is so laden with sweetheart deals and outright corruption in the form of direct vote buying that it may set a new high for sheer quantity and brazenness.

I’m sure that Connecticut needs a new hospital worse than anywhere else in the USA.

I haven’t heard much about this from other sources…. I’m trying to get more information about it.  But if this fellow isn’t exaggerating, this is looking really ugly.

More info here and here and some especially scary nonsense from Gordon Brown, British Prime Minister.

Timothy Geitner, Obama nominee to be Secretary of the Treasury says he is sorry for failing to pay $30,000 dollars in back taxes.

I lost track – did Eric Holder, Obama nominee for Attorney General, ever apologize for enabling the pardon of Marc Rich, multimillion dollar tax evader?  Not that it matters, since Democratic President Bill Clinton granted Marc Rich a full Presidential pardon.  But it was ol’ Eric who made it all happen.

(click here to read more about Eric Holder and the Marc Rich pardon)

Now, imagine a nominee from a Republican President showing up on Capitol Hill for confirmation hearings, carrying baggage like this.  They’d be crucified in the hearings, and they’d be crucified again in the media.

But here we have THREE nominees put forth by Obama who have serious blemishes on their records. There is virtual silence in the media and the confirmation hearings are little more than posturing and formality.

If you were seriously delinquent in paying your taxes would you want to face the IRS with nothing more than an “I’m sorry”?  You know what would happen to you, right?

Can there be ANY doubt the media is nothing more than a Democratic lap dog?

There is really only ONE thing these cheaters are sorry about, and it’s not the “errors of judgment”. They are only sorry they got caught.

I’m sorry too.  I’m sorry so many of my fellow citizens, in their zeal to find hope and change have embraced a radical liberal leftist without moral compass who intends to surround himself with others who have similar bents.  These people will be making policies, rules and laws about you and me, after having already demonstrated the fact they think those same laws don’t apply to themselves.

So to all you who voted for Obama I have a question: Is this OK with you?

As a result of the recent election three U.S. Senate seats are now vacant; one each in Delaware, New York and Illinois. Current law allows for the governors of those states to appoint individuals who will fill the seats being vacated by Obama, Clinton, and Biden.  For a moment, if you can, set aside your political affiliation and think about this. This means that 32,578,952 citizens of the United States are about to be represented by individuals who were not elected but rather selected for them by one person.

I seem to remember a lot of people were very upset after the 2000 presidential race when the Supreme Court had to intervene in the tallying of election results in Florida.  Even today you can find many of the liberal persuasion who claim President Bush was “selected, not elected”.  This has been one of the cornerstones of the “Hate Bush” crowd for eight years.  While the circumstances of 2000 are clearly subject to interpretation depending on your political leaning, this current situation is not.  Yet the silence is deafening.  Why don’t those same accusers raise their voices of protest in this case when “selection” is indisputable?  The answer, of course, is obvious.

What’s tragic for our country is that the selection process in each of the 3 current cases has shown itself to be entirely corrupt.  Apparently the seat in Illinois was up for the highest bidder, The Delaware selection process seems to be nepotism at it’s best and the New York seat is about to become a coronation more reminiscent of the British House of Lords than anything resembling our democratic process.  And in all three cases the issue of qualification is given little more than lip service.  Does ANYONE want to try and make the case that Carolyn Kennedy Schlossberg is actually qualified to be a U.S. senator?

Watching the way theses 3 senate seats are being filled should make us all demand a change in the law requiring a special election to fill all vacated seats.  Instead watching the news recently has made me feel like I’m watching “The Fall Of The Roman Empire“.  In case you are unfamiliar with the admittedly mediocre 1964 film, it ends with the hero, Livius, (Stephen Boyd), besting the evil Caesar Commodus in gladiator combat.  Immediately afterward he is offered the throne by the recently-deceased leader’s hirelings.  His (excellent) reply is, “You would not find me very suitable, because my first official act would be to have you all crucified.”  He then walks away with his true love on his arm while in the background a spontaneous auction begins for the throne of Rome.

I hope it does not need to be said that I do not advocate for crucifixion of political enemies.  But I do think there are many qualified men and women who simply refuse to participate in our political process either as candidates or even voters because they see the degree to which our political process has become corrupted.  Much of the corruption, not surprisingly, is tied to money.  Influence and access to political office has become the domain of the wealthy.  As more highly qualified, moral, intelligent, and knowledgeable individuals abdicate the election process, and as more political positions are gained by means other than that process, more of us will continue to ask:

Why bother to vote?

Incoming White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel pushed Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich to appoint longtime Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett to fill Barack Obama’s Senate seat, and even gave Blagojevich’s staff a deadline by which an appointment was expected, according to a report in today’s Chicago Sun-Times.

Citing sources “with the Obama camp,” the Sun-Times report says Emanuel began to push for Jarrett to fill Obama’s seat “just days” after the Nov. 4 election.

That story also cites a source close to Emanuel admitting it is “possible” Emanuel discussed the appointment with Blagojevich chief of staff John Harris, and that a specific date for the appointment was given.

The Sun-Times’ revelations suggest that Emanuel was more deeply involved in discussions with Blagojevich and his staff than previously reported, and was more assertive in promoting a specific candidate.

Those conversations could have contributed to Blagojevich’s apparent belief that the Senate appointment held great political value.

It is only if there was some deal to compensate Blagojevich personally that we have a problem. And, of course, if Blagojevich twisted Emmanuel’s arm to offer some kind of bribe (essentially a form of criminal conspiracy), then Emmanuel was obliged to report that, even if he didn’t take the offer.  We can only hope that it turns out that Emmanuel is the one who tipped the FBI that something was imminent.  It will not help achieve a successful Obama presidency to begin it by having a Chief of Staff resign in disgrace.