Random Thoughts

Pause, reflect

I am really looking forward to the day when this woman will be out of a job.

It’s one thing to be a hypocrite. It’s one thing to lie. But to be a lying, in your face, serious as a heart attack hypocrite takes some kind of evil skill I can’t even fathom.

“We’re not in a big rush” on health care, Pelosi said. “Pause, reflect.”

I read that, and I almost had an out-of-body experience. Like I was suddenly set down on another planet. Because this is the woman who has been shoving universal health care down America’s collective throat like there is no tomorrow.

August 2009:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi vowed on Wednesday to push through the government-sponsored health care program that the late Ted Kennedy characterized as his life’s work. “Ted Kennedy’s dream of quality health care for all Americans will be made real this year because of his leadership and his inspiration,” Pelosi said in a statement.

October 2009

“Leaders of all political parties starting over a century ago with President Theodore Roosevelt have called and fought for health care reform and health insurance reform,” Pelosi said. “Today we are about to deliver on the promise.”

December 2009

“We would do almost anything if it meant we would pass health care for all Americans (by) the Christmas holidays,” Pelosi told reporters Thursday. “Maybe we can’t,” she said, in which case Congress could deliver “a New Year’s present for the American people.”

6 January 2010

Lawmakers are “very close” to resolving differences between the House and Senate health care bills and sending a final version to President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Wednesday.

And now she says “not a big rush,” and “pause, reflect.” I suppose the stunning failure of Democrats to hang on to Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat wouldn’t have anything to do with Ms. Pelosi’s dramatic change of attitude. Not that she’s capable of understanding what Massachusetts’ voters decision represents,

“Massachusetts has health care and so the rest of the country would like to have that too,” Pelosi said, referring to the state’s health care program. “So we don’t [think] a state that already has health care should determine whether the rest of the country should.”

It’s not complicated, Ms. Pelosi. Americans simply don’t want to pay for universal health care.

We can only hope that this is an epic fail for what has to be the worst bill in the history of US government.

Right voices thinks it could be the beginning of the end for Pelosi.

Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit calls it a quagmire.

And Instapundit…oh jeeze, it hurts to laugh this hard.

Could we Californians hope for a Barbara Boxer reelection loss? American Power thinks so. Oh, be still my heart.

He didn’t know what he was signing

You can’t make this stuff up.

President Obama’s “green jobs” adviser is distancing himself from the “9/11 truthers” — Americans who say the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks may have been an inside job — releasing a statement late Thursday that says he didn’t read carefully a petition he signed in 2004 calling for an investigation into the Bush administration’s knowledge of an impending attack.

In the statement, Van Jones also apologized again for several inflammatory remarks he made prior to joining the Obama administration. It was his second apology in two days.

An aide to Jones told FOX News on Thursday night that the green jobs czar “did not carefully review the language in the petition.” The aide did not say when Jones signed the petition or when he became aware of the controversy…

Jones’ second mea culpa comes after a Wednesday apology in which Jones said he uttered “offensive words” in February when he called Republicans “assholes.” He said the remarks “do not reflect the views of this administration” and its bipartisan aims.

But such statements just scratch the surface of Jones’ past commentary, and could present a dilemma for the Obama administration as it struggles to pass health care reforms and other priorities, including a climate change bill championed by Jones.

Jones has consistently leaned on racially charged language, pointing the finger at “white polluters and the white environmentalists” for “steering poison” to minority communities, as he makes the case for lifting up low-income and minority communities with better environmental policy.

A declared “communist” during the 1990s, Jones once associated with a group that looked to Mao Zedong as an inspiration.

Jones’ exceptional past is reminiscent of associations noted during the presidential campaign, when then-Sen. Barack Obama doggedly fended off claims that he was tied to radicals and overzealous activists.

But with now-President Obama entering the perhaps trickiest phase of his young presidency — building the kind of consensus around health care reform that President Clinton could not — a divisive figure could prove disfiguring.

You think?

Everyone knows congressmen don’t read bills before they sign them. So why should Jones be responsible for signing a nutjob petition? I mean, really, do we expect people in Obama’s administration to be conscientious and diligent, ethical and honest? Of course not! Remember, this is the president who put a tax cheat in charge of the IRS, the first of a string of nominated tax evaders including Tom Daschle, Ron Kirk, and Nancy Killefer.

Given how willing Obama is to take on people with all kinds of unsavory past political and financial baggage, it’s amazing that he’s way behind in hiring for key administration positions (H/T The Moderate Voice)

While career employees or holdovers fill many posts on a temporary basis, Mr. Obama does not have his own people enacting programs central to his mission. He is trying to fix the financial markets but does not have an assistant treasury secretary for financial markets. He is spending more money on transportation than anyone since Dwight D. Eisenhower but does not have his own inspector general watching how the dollars are used. He is fighting two wars but does not have an Army secretary…He has invited major powers to a summit on nuclear nonproliferation but does not have an assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation.

Honestly, it’s better than the Marx Brothers. Heck, put Joe Biden at a microphone and it’s darned close to a Marx Brother’s movie (as envisioned by Moneyrunner at The Virginian)…

Gateway Pundit reveals even more of Van Jones’ wacked background.

And Michelle Malkin describes the pattern we are seeing as

…a leitmotif that runs through my czar, cabinet, and nominee withdrawal chapters of Culture of Corruption: Obama czardom is the deliberate end-run around transparency. Van Jones did not just accidentally slip through the cracks of the Obama vetters. They knew what he espoused before they installed him.

If only it was all simply a movie, and the well being of our country was not at stake.

Comets, Climate Change and Congress

My inner science geek (usually deeply buried) has surfaced:

“The evidence is pretty strong that the Earth was hit by a comet in 1908.”

Ever since something generated a huge explosion over Siberia in 1908, flattening an area as big as a large city, scientists have been trying to figure out what caused it.

Among the enduring mysteries: Following the explosion, the night skies shone brightly for several nights across Europe all the way to London, 3,000 miles away…

The explosion on June 30, 1908, flattened some 500,000 acres (2,000 square kilometers) of Siberian forest. Estimates are the Tunguska Event was as strong as at least 10 megatons of TNT and perhaps a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.Just last year, many experts were figuring it was an asteroid.

But Kelley’s team thinks a comet fits better, since comets are loaded with water ice (asteroids are mostly rock and metals). The comet would have started to break up at about the same altitude as the release of the exhaust plume from the space shuttle following launch, they calculate. In both cases, water vapor was injected into the atmosphere.

But how did the water vapor travel so far?

“There is a mean transport of this material for tens of thousands of kilometers in a very short time, and there is no model that predicts that,” Kelley said. “It’s totally new and unexpected physics.”

Cool.

The Tunguska Event and its cause create serious ramifications for the global climate change theory. Never say it; the concept that *gasp* nature itself could be behind climate change is unthinkable. Can’t get any tax money from evaporated comets, can we.

I may throw up on you…

Sometimes I think we’re living in an alternate universe. Or maybe it’s like the new Star Trek movie…someone accidentally sucked the US into a black hole, and now we’re living out a reality where everything that had meaning, everything of substance, has been tweaked and twisted, and things just are wacked.

Like maybe Ronald Reagan was never President.

And Lee Iacocca never resurrected Chrysler. In the new reality Iacocca doesn’t even get to keep his company car.

And the French President and US President, having determined that Britain is irrelevant, are sucking up to one another so hard it makes my Miele vacuum look like a tired old broom.

And the US Government has decided that significant donors to the GOP can no longer own American car dealerships. Doug Ross offers an eye-opening breakdown of what dealerships are being targeted for closure.

If that’s not enough, some brilliant DC policymakers are considering implementing a nationwide VAT (value added tax). Just what we need with rising unemployment, sinking home values and the tax burden we already carry.

A VAT is a tax on the transfer of goods and services that ultimately is borne by the consumer. Highly visible, it would increase the cost of just about everything, from a carton of eggs to a visit with a lawyer. It is also hugely regressive, falling heavily on the poor. But VAT advocates say those negatives could be offset by using the proceeds to pay for health care for every American — a tangible benefit that would be highly valuable to low-income families.

…Orszag has hired a prominent VAT advocate to advise him on health care: Ezekiel Emanuel, brother of White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and author of the 2008 book “Health Care, Guaranteed.” Meanwhile, former Federal Reserve chairman Paul A. Volcker, chairman of a task force Obama assigned to study the tax system, has expressed at least tentative support for a VAT.

My head might just implode. All that’s left is to find out that the past 29 years never happened.

Meanwhile, Obama’s Energy Secretary wants us to paint our roofs white.

Speaking at the opening of the St. James’s Palace Nobel Laureate Symposium, for which The Times is media partner, Professor Chu said that this approach could have a vast impact.

By lightening paved surfaces and roofs to the color of cement, it would be possible to cut carbon emissions by as much as taking all the world’s cars off the roads for 11 years, he said.

Dude. Seriously. Feel free to come paint every single one of my roof’s bazillion concrete tiles white. And be sure to replace any you break in the process.

How the crap they’d begin to pay to repave the roads in my state–a state which is so deep in the red it’s hemorrhaging–I have no idea. Probably via some sort of Global Warming/Road Resurfacing tax.

Good luck with that.

Dear IRS…

If I was twenty years younger, I’d want to marry Ed Barnett and have his babies.

Dear IRS,

I am sorry to inform you that I will not be able to pay taxes owed April 15, but all is not lost.

I have paid these taxes: accounts receivable tax, building permit tax, CDL tax, cigarette tax, corporate income tax, dog licence tax, federal income tax, unemployment tax, gasoline tax, hunting licence tax, fishing licence tax, waterfowl stamp tax, inheritance tax, inventory tax, liquor tax, luxury tax, medicare tax, city, school and county property tax (up 33 percent last 4 years), real estate tax, social security tax, road usage tax, toll road tax, state and city sales tax, recreational vehicle tax, state franchise tax, state unemployment tax, telephone federal excise tax, telephone federal state and local surcharge tax, telephone minimum usage surcharge tax, telephone state and local tax, utility tax, vehicle licence registration tax, capitol gains tax, lease severance tax, oil and gas assessment tax, Colorado property tax, Texas, Colorado, Wyoming, Oklahoma and New Mexico sales tax, and many more that I can’t recall but I have run out of space and money.

When you do not receive my check April 15, just know that it is an honest mistake. Please treat me the same way you treated Congressmen Charles Rangle, Chris Dodd, Barney Frank and ex-Congressman Tom Dashelle and, of course, your boss Timothy Geithner. No penalties and no interest.

P.S. I will make at least a partial payment as soon as I get my stimulus check.

Ed Barnett

Wichita Falls

H/T Ace of Spades.

As a future educator, there’s something very satisfying in giving Obama an F. However meaningless it might be.