Second Quarter GDP Growth Rate Revised to 3.3%

You know that Barack and his fellow socialists are unhappy about this:

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. economy was much stronger in the spring than first thought because of better exports and less inventory liquidation by businesses, according to a government report that surprised economists.

Gross domestic product rose at a seasonally adjusted 3.3% annual rate April through June, the Commerce Department said Thursday in a new, revised estimate of second-quarter GDP.
Originally, the government had estimated second-quarter 2008 GDP climbed 1.9%. First-quarter GDP increased 0.9%.

Democrats want the economy to falter, so they can increase their government intervention and make it even worse.

O'Bama Attempting to Stifle Criticism

As I have often previously asserted, the left do not believe in free speech. They will use whatever methods they can to stiffle dissent. That is why O'Bama is trying to shut up Stanley Kurtz on WGN radio:

In a surprising attempt to stifle broadcast criticism of its candidate, the presidential campaign of freshman Illinois senator Barack Obama is organizing supporters to confront Chicago's WGN radio station for having a critic of the Illinois Democrat on its main evening discussion program.

"WGN radio is giving right-wing hatchet man Stanley Kurtz a forum to air his baseless, fear-mongering terrorist smears," Obama's campaign wrote in an e-mail sent to supporters. "He's currently scheduled to spend a solid two-hour block from 9:00 to 11:00 p.m. (Wednesday night) pushing lies, distortions, and manipulations about Barack and University of Illinois professor William Ayers."

But WGN offered to let the O'Bama campaign have their say:

Christenson also stressed that the Obama campaign was invited to send a representative to appear on the show to balance the discussion of the newly-opened documents. But the campaign headquarters just down Michigan Avenue from the station refused the request. This is not the first time Obama's organization has sought to steer supporters to influence a broadcast outlet airing criticism.

So why didn't you send someone to answer these 'lies, distortions, and manipulations', Barack? There is a whiff of fascism coming from your direction.

Hey Barack... Is there some reason you don't want people to be able to see this?

Bias Tobias

I shouldn't be surprised at all by this, but the brazenness of the leftwing media bias still has me floored. I was watching Bill Clinton's speech at the Democrat convention and then listened to Keith Olberman, Tom Brokaw and Chris Matthews comment on it.

They made no reference at all to the numerous lies, hallf-truths, distortions, and hypocrisy in the speech. All they had for Bill was the strongest type of sycophantic ass-kissing I have ever heard from a journalist.

Brokaw et al are not journalists at all. Merely court jesters for the Democrat party.

The Oinkubus Speaks!

Her Thighness is due to speak at the Democrat convention one hour from now. I located an advance copy of her speech:

I I I I I I I I I

Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me

I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I Me Me Me Myself

Universal Healthcare

I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me

I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I

Me and bill

Me Me Me Me Me Me Me

chelsea

I I I I I I I I I I I I

Anybody want some tips on trading cattle futures?

I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I

Oh, I almost forgot... vote for obama.....

Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me

Housing Prices Still Falling....Will They Fall More?

We are constantly hearing wailing and gnashing of teeth from the left coast, Florida, Arizona, Nevada, and the northeast about how far housing prices have fallen and their fears that they may fall further

According to the indices, home prices in 10 major metropolitan areas fell by a record 17% from a year earlier. In 20 major metropolitan areas, home prices dropped 16% from a year earlier — another record drop.

The article goes on to say how far prices have dropped in some of the markets that were the hottest just a few years ago. Las Vegas dropped 28% from June 2007 to June 2008. Los Angeles 25%. Miami 28%. San Diego 24%. San Francisco 23%. Will they drop more?

I should hope so. It is not healthy for a city's housing prices to be so high that middle income people and young people cannot afford decent housing. When that happens, it turns the community into a third-world type of situation with an upper class and a lower class, but not much in between.

And the young people will be forced to move to the red states like Oklahoma where they might....*gasp*.... end up voting Republican. We can't have that, can we?

Race-Baiting Rears Its Ugly Head

I knew it wouldn't take long before the leftwing race-baiters began to rationalize O'Bama's inevitable defeat in November as racism. Anyone who says anything negative about any leftwing black person is, in the twisted logic of the left, a racist. Jacob Weisberg, writing in Slate, has fulfilled my expectations:

If it makes you feel better, you can rationalize Obama's missing 10-point lead on the basis of Clintonite sulkiness, his slowness in responding to attacks, or the concern that Obama may be too handsome, brilliant, and cool to be elected. But let's be honest: If you break the numbers down, the reason Obama isn't ahead right now is that he trails badly among one group, older white voters. He does so for a simple reason: the color of his skin.

And of course, the fact that O'Bama's political ideas place him at the very far left of the Democrat party, or the fact that he has accomplished very little in his short political career do not figure into Weisberg's analysis.

It's too bad that the first black candidate for president from one of the two main parties isn't someone like Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell, or Michael Steele. Then it would be clear to any thinking person that these "older white voters" are not racist towards blacks. But of course, idiots like Weisberg would find a way to rationalize it as racism anyway.

Biden Plagiarized a Paper in Law School

Leftwing politicians are, by definition, frauds and crooks. It is not surprising that their dishonesty should become apparent at an early age. Teddy Kennedy hired a man to take an exxam for him at Harvard. Joe Biden plagiarized a paper in law school that should have resulted in his expulsion:

Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., fighting to salvage his Presidential campaign, today acknowledged ''a mistake'' in his youth, when he plagiarized a law review article for a paper he wrote in his first year at law school.

The file distributed by the Senator included a law school faculty report, dated Dec. 1, 1965, that concluded that Mr. Biden had ''used five pages from a published law review article without quotation or attribution'' and that he ought to be failed in the legal methods course for which he had submitted the 15-page paper.

The joker was given an F for the course but he was allowed to repeat it and then have the F removed from his transcript. As a result he felt confident about plagiarizing Kinnock's speech. If you allow someone to get away with something, they will often continue to do it.

Vice-Presidential Candidate Biden's Speechwriter

O'Bama Picks a Plagiarist

Joe Biden ran for president in 1988 and during one of the debates leading up to the election, he started off by saying "I was just thinking as I was driving up here tonight..." and then he said:

"Why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go a university? Why is it that my wife... is the first in her family to ever go to college? Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright? ...Is it because they didn't work hard? My ancestors who worked in the coal mines of northeast Pennsylvania and would come after 12 hours and play football for four hours? It's because they didn't have a platform on which to stand."

Neil Kinnock, the former leader of the British Labour Party said earlier in 1987:

"Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Was it because our predecessors were thick? Does anybody really think that they didn't get what we had because they didn't have the talent or the strength or the endurance or the commitment? Of course not. It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand"

Biden is a first-class jackass. He will be quite vulnerable in the upcoming campaign. O'Bama was a fool to pick him.

It's About Time

The International Olympic Committee is just now realizing what most of us recognized quite easily: He Kexin and other members of the Chinese Women's gymnastics team are under the minimum age of 16:

The International Olympic Committee has ordered an investigation into mounting allegations that Chinese authorities covered up the true age of their gold-medal winning gymnastics star because she was too young to compete.
An IOC official told The Times that because of "discrepancies" that have come to light about the age of He Kexin, the host nation’s darling who won gold in both team and individual events, an official inquiry has been launched that could result in the gymnast being stripped of her medals.
The investigation was triggered as a US computer expert claimed today to have uncovered Chinese government documents that he says prove she is only 14 - making her ineligible to compete in the Olympics - rather than 16, as officials in Beijing insist is her age.

So what tipped you off, IOC? Was it the fact that the girls still have their baby teeth? Or was it because they brought their Barbies with them to the gym?

Tell Ya What I Want, What I Really Really Want

Oklahoma Taxpayers Forced to Pay Because Father Scalded His Own Son to Death

It's bad enough when people commit horrific crimes like scalding their own son to death. It's even worse when the taxpayers, who had nothing to do with the crime, have to pay for it:

TULSA — A lawsuit against the Department of Human Services has been settled.

The lawsuit accused the state agency of negligence in the way it monitored the care of a 2-year-old Tulsa boy who was later scalded to death has been settled.
A federal judge late Friday approved a $160,000 settlement in the lawsuit filed after the 2005 scalding death of 2-year-old Keenan Taylor.
The child died on June 9, 2005, a day after being burned by hot water over more than 50 percent of his body.
His father, Carlis Anthony Ball, is in prison awaiting resentencing after being convicted of murdering and neglecting the boy. The 26-year-old Ball has claimed the boy was burned accidentally.
The lawsuit was filed by Archie James Taylor, Keenan's maternal grandfather. It alleged that DHS was negligent for failing to remove the boy from his father's care despite previous reports of suspected abuse.

Why should we pay $160,000 to Archie Taylor? That will not bring his grandson back to life. It is clear that the responsibility lays with the deceased boy's family. Only those who believe in the nanny state would agree to this ridiculous settlement.

IRA Terrorist Violence Increases Further In Northern Ireland

IRA/Sinn Fein, whose goal is an Ireland united under a marxist dictatorship, have intensified their reign of terror:

Paramilitaries have stepped up their efforts across Northern Ireland to control the communities they live among through brutal beatings and shootings.
And republican paramilitaries in particular are bringing guns out more frequently to enforce their influence and drive people from their homes, according to figures compiled by the PSNI.
The escalation in so-called punishment attacks coincides with renewed efforts by the Real and Continuity IRA elements to kill Catholic police officers and a political impasse between Sinn Fein and the DUP which has paralysed the Stormont Executive.
PSNI figures show that between April and June this year the number of paramilitary attacks trebled compared to the same period in 2007 and reported attacks last month show that the bid to exert control in nationalist areas in particular is continuing unabated.

IRA Terrorist Attacks Continue in Northern Ireland

This type of stuff was supposed to come to an end when the law-abiding people of Northern Ireland agreed to share power with IRA terrorists like Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams. That was apparently too much to expect:

Police in Northern Ireland narrowly avoided injury when a dissident republican rocket-propelled grenade failed to explode.
Three officers were on foot patrol in Main Street, Lisnaskea, shortly after 11pm last night and two were taken to hospital with severe shock and minor injuries.
Renegade republicans have been blamed for at least five other murder attempts on officers in the last year and Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) chief constable Sir Hugh Orde has warned the threat is at its highest level for many years.
Friday saw the tenth anniversary of the Real IRA Omagh bombing, which killed 29 people and two unborn twins in the conflict's bloodiest massacre.

So what happens when you take a rattlesnake to bed with you? Does he turn into a nice fluffy teddy bear and cuddle up with you and keep you warm?

Op-Ed from Harry Bruce

The Op-Ed from John Feffer that I linked to a while ago was such an outstanding work of leftwing flatulence that I doubted it would be topped any time soon. I was wrong. Now, from Nova Scotia, we have a brainfart of a transcendant order coming from one Harry Bruce. The quality of his leftist psychobabble is so excellent that I have made him Socialist of the Week!

MILLIONS OF working-class Americans are fat, sweaty and white. They are addicted to beer and junk food, and have never wanted to read a book, go to university or visit Europe. Can they bring themselves to vote for a presidential candidate who is thin, trim and black, and who is addicted to exercise, turns down desserts, drinks Black Forest Berry Honest Tea and eats organically grown health food?

Well I got news for you Harry. When we're not too busy swilling Pabst Blue Ribbon and munching on fried pork rinds, us fat sweaty white guys are waddling into college at the rate of 35% of the population in the USA, versus only 28% in Canada. As for why someone might not want to vote for O'Bama, do you think there might be some reason other than the fact that he is skinny and eats organically grown arugula?

More than 200,000 Berliners rapturously greeted Obama last month, but as Henrik Hertzberg points out in the New Yorker, "Berliners are Germans and Germans are foreigners, and since well before John Kerry was demonized for knowing how to speak French, it has been axiomatic that heartland Americans don’t like foreigners piping up about our elections."

Harry, is there some reason why American voters could care one way or another whether or not the Germans like him? I suspect for most it is irrelevant.

If being slim and impressing foreigners weren’t doing Obama much good politically, neither was the phenomenon that the Washington Post calls "the Dumbing of America."
People in the U.S. have long been so abysmally ignorant about the rest of the world that an old joke in Europe says, "God invented war to teach Americans about geography."
Today, however, most Americans can’t even find Iraq on a map. In 2006, half the Americans who participated in one poll could name two or more members of the Simpsons cartoon family, but only one-quarter could name more than one of the five freedoms that the First Amendment of their own constitution upholds.
In the most Christian nation in the industrialized world, most adults can’t name the four Gospels or the first book of the Bible. In the most scientifically advanced nation, one in five adults thinks the sun revolves around the earth.

Wow, aren't we stupid?! I'll bet that most Americans don't even know that human CO2 emissions are causing global warming and that high taxes are good for the economy.

The Left's Love Affair with Castro

Mary Anastasia O'Grady has an interesting article about Armando Valladares, a cuban dissident who refused to give in to Castro even after being imprisoned and tortured for 22 years.

Valladares certainly had a great deal of difficulty with the Castro regime. But he and his wife and other Cuban dissidents have had more problems trying to convince the world outside of Cuba of what was going on in the country:

When Mrs. Valladares was allowed to leave Cuba in 1972 with her father -- who had also been a political prisoner -- and began an international effort to bring attention to the Cuban prisoners, the brutality of the regime was already well established. But as she found out, the facts weren't much help. "It was very difficult," she tells me, slowly and deliberately with more than a touch of sadness.
As an example, she describes her encounter with Seán MacBride, who was the former Amnesty International Chairman, at a human-rights conference in Venezuela in 1977. "He was very nice to me at first because he didn't realize who I was. But when I tried to speak about the Cuban prisoners of conscience, he began banging on the microphone and screaming, 'Don't translate that! Don't translate that!' The journalists covering the event asked me, 'Why is this man telling you to shut up?'"
The next day in the Venezuelan press there was a story titled "Human rights violated in a human-rights conference." That same year MacBride was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize given by the Soviet Union.
Mr. Valladares says that as amazing as it sounds, it took Amnesty International until 1978 to "discover" that there were political prisoners in Cuba. "Eighteen years after I was jailed! There were already thousands murdered, tortured, Boitel had already died."

MacBride was also an IRA terrorist. It's no wonder that Amnesty International has no credibility.

Valladares also had trouble trying to convince the government of Spain that Castro was up to no good:

Still AI has been downright progressive compared to some European governments. Mr. Valladares says that in 1988 the Spanish government of Felipe González was especially disingenuous, when its foreign minister told Mr. Valladares that Spain had no evidence of human-rights violations in Cuba. Only weeks later, he says, the Spanish embassy in Havana produced a report documenting the atrocities of the Cuban regime, but opted to bury it so as to give cover to Fidel.
When the report was leaked to the press, Mr. Valladares says he brought dozens of the Spanish newspapers to the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva and distributed them. "I told the Spanish ambassador, 'Congratulations, your report is very good. It is as good as the CIA report.'"
Mr. Valladares was giving the Spaniard a dig, but not without provocation. Both he and Mrs. Valladares say that over the years European government officials (Spain and Sweden to name but two) repeatedly acknowledged privately the regime's unacceptable brutality. But the same officials also said that to come out against it publicly would be to admit that the U.S. was right about Castro. And nobody wanted to do that.
"Castro is still there because the world envies the U.S., and all that hatred for the U.S. has gone to support Fidel Castro," Mr. Valladares says. As a result, the Cuban people have been left to fend for themselves against the jackboots and East German spy techniques of Cuban state security. Thousands have died trying to flee.

Castro and his supporters in democratic countries have long used the United States as a red herring to justify the abuse of the Cuban people. Its kind of like Charles Manson saying "those awful black people are out to get me. I think I'll have Sharon Tate murdered to retaliate".

And above all, it shows what the left want the USA to be like. A police state with no individual rights whatsoever.

Warp Drive: Coming to a Starship Near You

I have always wanted to visit the M-31 galaxy in Andromeda. But the thought of taking 2 million years or more at sublight speeds makes the idea rather boresome. I mean, how many times can you replay your Led Zeppelin IV CD?

That is why I am heartened to hear of two physicists who have conceived of a workable warp drive:

Now Dr Gerald Cleaver, associate professor of physics at Baylor, and Richard Obousy have come up with a new twist on an existing idea to produce a warp drive that they believe can travel faster than the speed of light, without breaking the laws of physics.
In their scheme, in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, a starship could "warp" space so that it shrinks ahead of the vessel and expands behind it.
By pushing the departure point many light years backwards while simultaneously bringing distant stars and other destinations closer, the warp drive effectively transports the starship from place to place at faster-than-light speeds.

All this extraordinary feat requires, says the new study, is for scientists to harness a mysterious and poorly understood cosmic antigravity force, called dark energy.
Dark energy is thought responsible for speeding up the expansion rate of our universe as time moves on, just like it did after the Big Bang, when the universe expanded much faster than the speed of light for a very brief time.
This may come as a surprise since, according to relativity theory, matter cannot move through space faster than the speed of light, which is almost 300,000,000 metres per second. But that theory applies only to unwarped 'flat' space.

Whoever gets the first patent on warp drive will make a fortune.