Daschle’s Tax Troubles, And Why Obama Likes Cheats And Liars In His Cabinent

Let’s see Obama’s checklist for cabinet positions.  “Liberal as a loon.”  Check.  “Supports radical socialist agenda.”  Check.  “Believes New Deal didn’t go nearly far enough.”  Check.  “Wants to surrender to terrorists.”  Check.  “Cheated on taxes.”  Check.

There is little question that Timothy Geithner – our newly confirmed Treasury Secretary and IRS chief – knows more about evading taxes than enforcing tax law.  It is amazing that we are putting a man in charge of our economy who apparently can’t even figure out how to use Turbo Tax.

Add Tom Daschle to Obama’s tax cheating cabinet officers.

WASHINGTON – Former Sen. Tom Daschle, picked by President Barack Obama to lead his health reform efforts, recently filed amended tax returns to report $128,203 in back taxes and $11,964 in interest, according to a Senate document obtained by The Associated Press.

The White House acknowledged Friday that “some tax issues” had emerged in connection with the nomination, but a spokesman said the president is confident the former Senate Democratic leader will be confirmed as the new health secretary.

Daschle filed amended tax returns for 2005, 2006 and 2007 to reflect additional income for consulting work, the use of a car service and reduced deductions for charitable contributions. He filed the returns after Obama announced he intended to nominate Daschle to head the Health and Human Services Department.

What’s that saying: “Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me”?

Shame on all of us for voting for these people to ruin our country.

As with the case of Geithner, it took Daschle several years for it to occur to him that he might not be paying his taxes.  And it’s just a coincidence that this realization occured only immediately after being nominated.  Kind of like the only time I mind walking around in my underwear is when the neighbor sees me while I’m getting the paper – only with taxes.

Of course, there’s also Bill Richardson, who was Obama’s pick for Commerce Secretary before it was revealed that he likes to play the same “pay for play” game that got Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich (whom Obama TWICE endorsed) got impeached for playing.

We’ve got Obama’s choice for Attorney General, Eric Holder, who arranged the pardon of fugitive slimebag Marc Rich in exchange for a juicy contribution to his boss; who arranged the pardons of terrorists; who (along with our new Director of Central Intelligence Leon Panetta) in 1995 helped erect the information wall between the CIA and FBI that led to the communication failure that caused 9/11.  Holder isn’t considered a criminal, but he ought to be.

Holder will be a good company man, who will dependably do the President’s dirty work, protect crooks, and dismantle our intelligence system.  He’s already done it before.

In any event, with Obama and his ship of fools, frauds and felons, what do you expect of his “American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan” that features hundreds of millions of dollars in outright pork and $5.2 billion in fraud just to Obama-voter-fraud group ACORN.

Looking at the Obama bailout deal that is far more geared toward rewarding political patronage than it is toward stimulating anything but waste and fraud, you can see why Obama wants liars and cheats around him.  Honest people wouldn’t stand for it.

“No He Can’t” by Prof. Anne Wortham

Anne Wortham is Associate Professor of Sociology at Illinois State University and continuing Visiting Scholar at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. She is a member of the American Sociological Association and the American Philosophical Association. She has been a John M. Olin Foundation Faculty Fellow, and honored as a Distinguished Alumni of the Year by the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education. In fall 1988 she was one of a select group of intellectuals who were featured in Bill Moyer’s television series, “A World of Ideas.” The transcript of her conversation with Moyers has been published in his book, A World of Ideas. Dr. Wortham is author of The Other Side of Racism: A Philosophical Study of Black Race Consciousness which analyzes how race consciousness is transformed into political strategies and policy issues. She has published numerous articles on the implications of individual rights for civil rights policy, and is currently writing a book on theories of social and cultural marginality. Recently, she has published articles on the significance of multiculturalism and Afro-centricism in education, the politics of victimization and the social and political impact of political correctness. Shortly after an interview in 2004 she was awarded tenure.

No He Can’t
by Anne Wortham

Fellow Americans,

Please know: I am black; I grew up in the segregated South. I did not vote for Barack Obama; I wrote in Ron Paul’s name as my choice for president.

Most importantly, I am not race conscious. I do not require a black president to know that I am a person of worth, and that life is
worth living. I do not require a black president to love the ideal of America.

I cannot join you in your celebration. I feel no elation. There is no smile on my face. I am not jumping with joy. There are no tears of triumph in my eyes. For such emotions and behavior to come from me, I would have to deny all that I know about the requirements of human flourishing and survival, – all that I know about the history of the United States of America, all that I know about American race relations, and all that I know about Barack Obama as a politician. I would have to deny the nature of the “change” that Obama asserts has come to America.

Most importantly, I would have to abnegate my certain understanding that you have chosen to sprint down the road to serfdom that we have been on for over a century. I would have to pretend that individual liberty has no value for the success of a human life. I would have to evade your rejection of the slender reed of capitalism on which your success and mine depend. I would have to think it somehow rational that 94 percent of the 12 million blacks in this country voted for a man because he looks like them (that blacks are permitted to play the race card), and that they were joined by self-declared “progressive” whites who voted for him because he doesn’t look like them. I would have to wipe my mind clean of all that I know about the kind of people who have advised and taught Barack Obama and will fill posts in his administration, – political intellectuals like my former colleagues at the Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

I would have to believe that “fairness” is the equivalent of justice. I would have to believe that man who asks me to “go forward in a new spirit of service, in a new service of sacrifice” is speaking in my interest. I would have to accept the premise of a man that economic prosperity comes from the “bottom up,” and who arrogantly believes that he can will it into existence by the use of government force. I would have to admire a man who thinks the standard of living of the masses can be improved by destroying the most productive and the generators of wealth.

Finally, Americans, I would have to erase from my consciousness the scene of 125,000 screaming, crying, cheering people in Grant Park, Chicago irrationally chanting “Yes We Can!” Finally, I would have to wipe all memory of all the times I have heard politicians, pundits, journalists, editorialists, bloggers and intellectuals declare that capitalism is dead – and no one, including especially Alan Greenspan, objected to their assumption that the particular version of the anti-capitalistic mentality that they want to replace with their own version of anti-capitalism is anything remotely equivalent to capitalism.

So you have made history, Americans. You and your children have elected a black man to the office of the president of the United States , the wounded giant of the world. The battle between John Wayne and Jane Fonda is over – and that Fonda won. Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern must be very happy men. Jimmie Carter, too. And the Kennedys have at last gotten their Kennedy look-a-like. The self-righteous welfare statists in the suburbs can feel warm moments of satisfaction for having elected a black person. So, toast yourselves: 60s countercultural radicals, 80s yuppies and 90s bourgeois bohemians. Toast yourselves, Black America . Shout your glee Harvard, Princeton , Yale, Duke, Stanford, and Berkeley. You have elected not an individual who is qualified to be president, but a black man who, like the pragmatist Franklin Roosevelt, promises to – Do Something! You now have someone who has picked up the baton of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. But you have also foolishly traded your freedom and mine, – what little there is left, – for the chance to feel good. There is nothing in me that can share your happy obliviousness.

November 6, 2008

Voice of Conservtive America, which has the article, also has this note:

“Dr. Wortham is a brilliant woman who believes strongly in the teachings of Ayn Rand. Very fascinating is how she describes that liberal colleges will not hire her because she refuses to tow the line of teaching Black students to be victims. Instead she believes in teaching them to be independent and pull themselves up from their bootstraps. How incredibly sad it is that people like her are ostracized, yet Permanent Victim preachers like Barack Obama and Al Sharpton are held up to high esteem. How incredibly sad indeed.”

Personally, I have never understood what is so attractive about Ayn Rand’s ideas.  She essentially argued that rational self-interest is the true standard of morality, and that altruism is not only stupid, but even profoundly immoral.  And there’s nothing in her personal life that I find admirable, either.  That said, this professor is right on target in her analysis of Barack Obama, of his ideas and agenda, of the people who voted for him, and of the consequences his presidency will have for the nation.

“Going Postal”? How About “Going Juror”?

I’ve been on jury duty this week. Had to call in every day, not knowing whether I’d have to throw away my schedule to satisfy the court or not. Of course, Thursday evening I was told I needed to call in at 10:00 Friday morning. And then at 10:00 Friday morning I was told I’d have to call in again at 1:30 in the afternoon.

And, of course – after a week of calling in – when I called in at 1:30 I was told I’d have to come in at 3:15. On a Friday. So I can pretty much be guaranteed to have to come back Monday.

Just in case I didn’t realize that the government owns me whenever it wants to.

Now, I thought if Obama got elected, we’d be free at last of our indentured servitude of the white master. But here we are, just 10 days into his presidency, and I’m already in even worse bondage than I was before.

So after reporting in at the assembly room, I was told to go with the rest of the herd to court room 3R. As our names were called, we were to say our names as we filed out. “Mooo – I mean – Michael Eden,” I said.

I don’t know how that line went over in your cavern, but it killed in the assembly room.

I got a chance to slay ’em again in the elevator, as the same people who laughed at my “cattle impersonation” crammed into the elevator.  I said, “This just takes me right back to that whole,  ‘feeling like cattle’ thing.”

The judge displayed quite a sense of humor when he showed up, too.  I suppose “gallows humor” includes the people who have to show up and decide which necks get stretched in the gallows.

There were 58 of us in our herd (I counted) waiting to go into the court room and be culled into a smaller herd of 12 + 1. And what were we all there for?

To hear a misdemeanor case involving a man charged with driving under the influence, with a blood alcohol content of .08 or higher.

The judge explained that the accused decided he wanted a jury trial, and by law today was the last day to schedule a trial to hear the case of a man who was arrested in March of 2008.

Kind of infuriating. I mean, all of us sitting there because of this turkey. It’s not like he’s some poor innocent schmuck who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He knows he drank booze and drove. And now I’ve got to sit there – wasting at least two days of a relatively productive life – because this jerk is trying to weasel his way out of admitting he did what he did.

And, of course, the same damn California court system that is imposing the harshest global warming agenda in the damn country is making me and 57 other people drive back and forth. I had a 29-mile one-way drive. And I drove my gas-guzzling and smog-spewing ’71 455 HO-engined Pontiac to make it even worse. I only drove her today because she needed a good drive after spending too much time as “garage queen.” But as my act of civil protest, I’ll drive it to court every day.

Is it just me, or is jury duty becoming a annual rite? It used to be I’d go several years at a time and not even get a summons. And if I GOT a summons, I’d just call in every day for a week and complete my service. But now it’s every damn year. And every damn year I’m stuck on a damn jury. Some guy driving around like a drunk slob. Some societal reject who can’t even make it down the block without having drugs in his possession. Some total loser beating his wife or girlfriend so he can pretend he’s a man. There are way too many losers now, and apparently way too few normal people to waste their lives hearing their sorry cases.

Man, is our society going to hell. According to the judge, the Riverside Superior Court isn’t even hearing civil cases anymore because the backlog of criminal cases is so high. We can’t build enough jails to house all our losers, vermin, and predators. And one out of every twenty Americans is now expected to do serious jail time in his life, with 1 in every 100 Americans actually in prison right now.

Of course, the nice thing about being a criminal going to court is that they at least take care of your transportation and your meals.

Michael Steele Wins RNC Chairmanship

Just in case anyone thought that Republicans were racist and wouldn’t elect an African-American, think again.

We’ve never had a problem with electing conservative black leaders in the Republican Party.  Given the fact that Republicans are the Party of Lincoln; given the fact the Republican Party formed as a reaction against slavery while Democrats were pro-slavery; and given the fact that the Ku Klux Klan came into being as a Democrat organization to stop both blacks AND whites from voting for Republicans, it is stunning how little credit Republicans get.

And I’ll add to that the fact that I would have voted for Colin Powell in 1988, and I was hoping that Steele would win.

And the fact of the matter is, it is DEMOCRATS who are all to willing to blatantly use racism to advance themselves.  Think of Bobby Rush’s racist diatribe against Democrats over the tainted appointment of Roland Burris by Blagojevich.  We had to support Burris for no other reason than because he was black, and we were racists if we didn’t.  Think of John Lewis’ incredible racist charges against John McCain, comparing him to George Wallace and charging him with “sowing the seeds of hatred and division” when HE was the one sowing those seeds.  Think of Bill Clinton’s outrage when he said, “They played the race card on me.”

Republicans aren’t the ones with the problem of racism.

Michael Steele is a nice man, a gracious man, a pleasant man.  And he has a fairly moderate reputation.

My hope is that he continues being nice, gracious, and pleasant – even as he truly stands up for conservative principles.

It is a great day when men and women whose ancestors used to toil under the bondage of slavery are now representing this nation as leaders.  But leadership is not about “race,” but experience, character, values, and competence.  If the best candidates – regardless of the color of their skins or their genders – don’t win office, the country will suffer.

I’ve always liked Michael Steele and admired him for his intelligence and pleasant manner.  I just hope he signed up to be ready to take the gloves off and brawl with the Democrats and their agenda.

Crisis Of Ignorance: From “Global Warming” To “Climate Change”

Former VP Gore won both an Oscar and a Nobel Prize for his documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.”  He advanced the theory that greenhouse gasses were responsible for global warming, and that global warming is both real and caused by man.  But an inconvenient truth is that global warming is no longer a science, but an industry worth tens of billions of dollars (with a chunk of that “industry” based on outright fraud).

A few months ago Lewis Pugh and the Polar Defense Project set out on a much-media-hyped journey to paddle a kayak to an ice-free North Pole to show how bad global warming was.  Unfortunately for Pugh, he was stopped by ice 600 miles from his destination, with the accompanying ship in real danger in getting stuck in the congested ice floes which “covered the sea” – and to make it even worse for global warming theorists – he was 100 miles south from the point that a canoeist had reached a CENTURY earlier.  There was 9% more ice in the arctic last autumn than the year before.

But Pugh – who truly deserves a Darwin award if anyone ever did – still believes he’s right.  The Peter Pan story is replayed: if you really, really believe you can fly, you can!  You really, really can!

UK Telegraph writer Gerald Warner comments on this morbid stupidity in his piece, “Global Warming: Al Gore’s convenient untruth freezes over.”  He writes:

You have to wrap up well against this global warming. Over the past 48 hours the temperature has fallen as low as -12C in Dorset, with the sea at Poole Harbour frozen up to 20 yards from shore, and parts of Britain colder than Greenland. Phew, what a scorcher! Might be a good idea to start up the car (if it will start) and pump some more CO2 into the atmosphere before we freeze to death. What did the media warn us about climate change?

“There is very important climatic change going on right now, and it’s not merely something of academic interest. It is something that, if it continues, will affect the whole human occupation of the earth – like a billion people starving. The effects are already showing up in a rather drastic way.”

That apocalyptic warning came from Fortune magazine – in 1974, when it was alerting readers to an imminent new Ice Age. By 2006 it had conformed to the latest fashion and had revised its doomsday scenario to: “The media agrees with the majority of scientists: global warming is here. Now, what to do about it?” So much for the media as climatic arbiter.

In the current climate, Fortune’s earlier scenario seems more plausible. A few months ago, Lewis Pugh set off on a much-hyped journey paddling a kayak to an “ice-free” North Pole: he was stopped by ice 600 miles from his destination and 100 miles south of where a canoeist had reached a century earlier. As this egg-on-face setback for climate alarmists illustrated, there was 9 per cent more ice at the Arctic last autumn than the year before. After a record ice melting there was a record freeze.

Although Arctic sea ice last summer reached the lowest level recorded since satellite observation began (an important qualification), Antarctic ice reached the highest, but Al Gore was not shouting about that. Global average temperatures hit a peak in 1998, but have been declining since. Now, to the further embarrassment of alarmists, Kerry Emanuel, professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, who first advanced the thesis of a connection between global warming and hurricanes, has rejected his own theory after further research.

Bad luck for Al Gore, who used the image of a hurricane emerging from a smoke stack to promote his fantasy extravaganza An Inconvenient Truth. The core ice samples featured in Gore’s film actually proved that increased CO2 emissions have historically followed 800 years after warm periods – but what the hell, this ain’t science, it’s politics. Just how we are supposed to influence carbon emissions when mankind is only responsible for 3.5 per cent of them is unclear.

But the cash from UN grants, wind farms, carbon trading and all the billions squandered on a politically useful (to totalitarians) superstition is very clear indeed: this is big bucks. “Man-made” global warming is the new sub-prime commerce of the planet. Meantime, wrap up well.

Global average temperatures hit a peak in 1998, but have been in general decline ever since.  Ironically, after all the demonization that President George W. Bush was forced to endure at the hands of demagogues during his eight years in office, he has left the planet in better shape – global-warming wise – than he found it.  Not that the left would EVER acknowledge that reality in spite of all the evidence.  Global warming is real, no matter what the facts say.  Facts are merely “an inconvenient truth.”

When you are completely and entirely wrong, send in the psychologists and have your opposition declared mentally defective.  It worked for Stalin, after all.  Mind you, we’re going to need a lot of straitjackets: most people think global warming is B.S.

A new Pew Research Center poll shows that global warming is at the bottom of the list — when it comes to the public’s top priorities in 2009. Nineteen other topics trump climate change in the pew poll identifying the top 20 issues. Just 30-percent say global warming is a major concern.

Not surprisingly — the economy is the number one issue. Eighty-five percent said it was a top priority — followed by jobs, terrorism, Social Security and education.

Global warming was dead last behind topics such as moral decline, lobbyists and trade policy.

Wow.  70% of the world locked up in straitjackets.

And a lot of the people who would have to be locked up are scientists.

More than 650 scientists who took part in the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), publicly disputed the IPCC’s conclusions.  And even the IPCC – which was actually the prime recipient of the Nobel Prize that Gore shared in – was far less drastic in any of its conclusions than propagandist Al Gore.

Here are some choice excerpts from the report:

• “I am a skeptic … . Global warming has become a new religion.” — Nobel Prize Winner for Physics, Ivar Giaever.

• “Since I am no longer affiliated with any organization nor receiving any funding, I can speak quite frankly … . As a scientist I remain skeptical.” — Atmospheric Scientist Dr. Joanne Simpson, the first woman in the world to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology  and formerly of NASA who has authored more than 190 studies and has been called “among the most pre-eminent scientists of the last 100 years.”

• Warming fears are the “worst scientific scandal in the history … . When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists.” — U.N. IPCC Japanese Scientist Dr. Kiminori Itoh, an award-winning Ph.D. environmental physical chemist.

• “The IPCC has actually become a closed circuit; it doesn’t listen to others. It doesn’t have open minds … . I am really amazed that the Nobel Peace Prize has been given on scientifically incorrect conclusions by people who are not geologists.” — Indian geologist Dr. Arun D. Ahluwalia at Punjab University and a board member of the U.N.-supported International Year of the Planet.

• “The models and forecasts of the U.N. IPCC “are incorrect because they only are based on mathematical models and presented results at scenarios that do not include, for example, solar activity.” — Victor Manuel Velasco Herrera, a researcher at the Institute of Geophysics of the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

• “It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don’t buy into anthropogenic global warming.” — U.S. Government Atmospheric Scientist Stanley B. Goldenberg of the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

• “Even doubling or tripling the amount of carbon dioxide will virtually have little impact, as water vapor and water condensed on particles as clouds dominate the worldwide scene and always will.” — Geoffrey G. Duffy, a professor in the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering of the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

• “After reading [U.N. IPCC chairman] Pachauri’s asinine comment [comparing skeptics to] Flat Earthers, it’s hard to remain quiet.” — Climate statistician Dr. William M. Briggs, who specializes in the statistics of forecast evaluation, serves on the American Meteorological Society’s Probability and Statistics Committee and is an associate editor of Monthly Weather Review.

• “For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming? For how many years must cooling go on?” — Geologist Dr. David Gee, the chairman of the science committee of the 2008 International Geological Congress who has authored 130 plus peer-reviewed papers, and is currently at Uppsala University in Sweden.

• “Gore prompted me to start delving into the science again and I quickly found myself solidly in the skeptic camp … . Climate models can at best be useful for explaining climate changes after the fact.” — Meteorologist Hajo Smit of Holland, who reversed his belief in man-made warming to become a skeptic, is a former member of the Dutch U.N. IPCC committee.

• “Many [scientists] are now searching for a way to back out quietly (from promoting warming fears), without having their professional careers ruined.” — Atmospheric physicist James A. Peden, formerly of the Space Research and Coordination Center in Pittsburgh, Pa.

• “Creating an ideology pegged to carbon dioxide is a dangerous nonsense … . The present alarm on climate change is an instrument of social control, a pretext for major businesses and political battle. It became an ideology, which is concerning.” — Environmental Scientist Professor Delgado Domingos of Portugal, the founder of the Numerical Weather Forecast group, has more than 150 published articles.

• “CO2 emissions make absolutely no difference one way or another … . Every scientist knows this, but it doesn’t pay to say so … . Global warming, as a political vehicle, keeps Europeans in the driver’s seat and developing nations walking barefoot.” — Dr. Takeda Kunihiko, vice-chancellor of the Institute of Science and Technology Research at Chubu University in Japan.

• “The [global warming] scaremongering has its justification in the fact that it is something that generates funds.” — Award-winning Paleontologist Dr. Eduardo Tonni, of the Committee for Scientific Research in Buenos Aires and head of the Paleontology Department at the University of La Plata.

The report also includes new peer-reviewed scientific studies and analyses refuting man-made warming fears and a climate developments that contradict the theory.

It turns out that the “consensus” of scientific opinion concerning global warming – and in particular man-caused global warming – is itself the result of academic fraud.

So what really IS going on with all this “Ice age, no, global warming, no ice age” hysteria?

Well, the first thing we’re seeing is a movement away from the now largely debunked phrase global warming and an embrace of the new politically correct climate change.  See, by calling the same idiotic theory a different name, you can keep fooling the ignorant.  It’s like that card that reads, “How do you keep a moron occupied?  Turn over.”  Only now, instead of the same exact message, the other side of the card says, “How do you keep a moron occupied?  See other side.”

No matter what you call it, it’s largely bogus, based on bogus ideology in the name of “science,” and human beings have virtually no control over the climate of the planet.  Whether you call it “global warming” or “climate change,” it is the same nonsense of global socialistic redistributionism imposed on Western Civilization in the name of “science.”  China, India, Russia, and other major competitors benefit from pushing ahead with cheap energy and regulation-free industry while we cripple ourselves to solve a nonexistent problem.

S. Fred Singer’s (U. of Virginia) and Dennis Avery’s (Hudson Institute) book Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1,500 Years, details powerful evidence that – surprise, surprise – the warming (and the cooling, which really amounts to less warming) comes from the sun.  Bet you never would have thought of that on your own in a million years.

According to a National Geographic article, “Even the sun appears headed for a recession.”  I can only assume that Republicans will get the blame for that, too.  But the sun – which HAD been in a very active phase during the 1990s to generate all the liberal hysteria – has since entered a phase of declining activity.  Hence the cooling.

During the solar maximum in the 1990s, global warming peaked.  As solar activity decreased, so did global warming.  Last September, data from the Ulysses Space Probe detected the lowest solar activity seen in the last 50 years.  The probe detected fewer sunspots, decreased solar winds, and a weakening magnetic field.

David J. McComas of the Southwest Research Institute (SWRI) – who leads the Ulysses Project – says that researches have been “surprised to find that the solar wind is much less powerful than it had been in the previous solar minimum.  This is a whole-sun phenomenon.  The entire sun is blowing significantly less hard than it was 10 to 15 years ago.  Over the entire record of sun observations, this is the longest prolonged low pressure that we’ve observed.”

Al Gore puts no stock in the fact that the sun causes global warming.  If the sun causes it, after all, then there’s no money to be made selling all those carbon credits.  And there’s no reason for a global government to administer climate change laws.

President Obama’s climate and energy czar, Carol Browner, is a documented socialist and a strong proponent for a global regime for climate change regulation.  In the past, she has proposed that rich countries shrink their economies to deal with climate change, and has advocated that the United States should surrender its sovereignty to a world organization set up to deal with the various economies of global warming.

After 20 years of screaming about global warming – more and more scientists are now actually warning of a coming ice age.  They acknowledge that we have been preparing for warmer temperatures are frighteningly unprepared for colder temperatures.  In reality, global warming has always been good for human civilization, and the warmer its been, the more the human race has thrived.  Ice ages, on the other hand, have always resulted in a difficult struggle for survival.

The funniest thing of all is that even as it is being revealed that global warming has nothing to do with human CO2 levels, the United States is going to demolish its economy trying to stop something that has little or nothing to do with our activity in the first place.  We are going to spend trillions of dollars developing incredibly expensive and inefficient “alternative energies” while key competitors such as China and India surge ahead of us using cheap oil and coal.  And they will continue to surge ahead of us because the less oil and coal we use, the more they will have available and the less it will cost them.  Mind you, after the elections in November, I have personally concluded that the United States deserves the decline that it voted for.

The second funniest thing is that – even as global warming alarmists are increasingly being forced to abandon the term “global warming” because they look like fools when they say it, they are doing the old bait-and-switch with their new term “climate change.”  They are proven fools, frauds, and failures.  But that moral and intellectual idiots that we have become, we’ll fall for their trick all over again.

For further facts on the myth of man-caused global warming, see:

What the Science REALLY Says About Global Warming

What You Never Hear About Global Warming

Republicans Grow Spine After Being SHUT OUT Of $825 Billion Bailout

In public – and eagerly devoured by an Obama-worshiping press – Barack Obama and his team of advisers have framed the process of crafting a stimulus package as one that will be inclusive and bipartisan in nature.

But in private – and now happily increasingly in public as well – Democrats are telling Republicans where they can stick their objections to Democrats acting like money grows on trees and that the government can dig the economy out of a hole by digging deeper and faster.

Obama had the pretension of talking about his plan passing with 80 votes in the Senate.  How about 178 forks in your eye instead?  Obama talked about going through the budget “line by line” to cut out waste, but can’t even do that with his own spending initiative.

The Republicans may actually grow a spine as Democrats shut them out of a room so they can craft a bill featuring little actual stimulus but massive spending to fund projects that Democrats have always wanted.

“There was no Republican input at all involved in what House Democrats outlined today,” Boehner, R-Ohio, said at a news conference at the Capitol. “I just took a moment to look over the draft from Chairman [David] Obey and the draft or outline from Chairman [Charlie] Rangel. Oh, my God.

“I just can’t tell you how shocked I am at what we’re seeing. You know, it’s clear that they’re moving on this path along the flawed notion that we can borrow and spend our way back to prosperity.”

Boehner also said:

“We expressed our concerns about some of the spending that’s being proposed in the House bill,” House Minority Leader John Boehner said after meeting with Obama.

“How can you spend hundreds of millions of dollars on contraceptives?” Boehner asked. “How does that stimulate the economy?”

And would that the hundreds of millions of dollars on contraceptives was the only issue.  This spending bill (i.e. NOT a “stimulus” package) features $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts so they can finance more insults to Jesus displayed in jars of urine.  It features $400 million to throw away on “climate change” research.  But the “mother of all pork” is the $4.19 BILLION that will go to Obama front group ACORN.  This package is more about instilling old socialist-welfare packages than it is about stimulating the economy.

“Stimulus”?  The Congressional Budget Office has said that at least 25% of the Obama bailout would not even be spent before 2011.  GOP Whip Eric Cantor has compiled a sizable list of media sources reporting just that fact. That won’t help our economy when we need it – which is RIGHT NOW.  And only about 12% of the spending can even be construed as “stimulus.”  The Wall Street Journal rightly states that the massive socialist pork package has nothing to do with the economy.

Nancy Pelosi expressed the bi-partisan spirit of Democrats:

“Yes, we wrote the bill. Yes, we won the election,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told reporters yesterday, saying Republicans were not being realistic in their expectations.

Meanwhile, Pelosi all but predicts that the $825 billion figure is going to continue to balloon higher:

Pelosi suggested that the package, currently at $825 billion, could become even larger.

“It has grown,” Pelosi said, “and we’re still in the process.”

Barack Obama put his feelings about bi-partisanship this way:

“I won,” Obama noted matter-of-factly, according to sources familiar with the conversation.

Obama met with Republicans to tell them all how wonderful he was, assuring them how open he was to bipartisan compromise.  Nice gesture undermined by its sheer showy meaninglessness.   Obama talked about compromise, but the bill stayed the same hard-core partisan waste of money.

To those of you who believe that Obama was the king of the fairies, and that happiness and fluttering butterflies would follow him wherever he went, he is already presiding over the same-old, same-old:

The GOP’s shrunken numbers, particularly in the Senate, will make it difficult for Republicans to stop the stimulus bill, but the growing GOP doubts mean that Obama’s first major initiative could be passed on a largely party-line vote — little different from the past 16 years of partisan sniping in the Clinton and Bush eras.

To their credit, not a single Republican supported the Obama bailout and social spending package.  All 178 Republicans in the House of Representatives turned it down.  But Nancy has her vote.  American wanted Demcorats to run the country, and how they get to see what that will mean for them.  As of right now (there’s time for it to mushroom even more yet), it means an additional $350 billion in interest payments over the next ten years.  CNN reports that the plan with interest will be $1.2 trillion.

Why does Barack Obama want “bipartisan support”?  If this massive spending program would really “stimulate” an economic  turnaround, why would he even want Republicans horning in on his credit?  Why not pass it, and crush the Republicans for good for failing to support this wonderful legislation?  Because he wants cover, that’s why.  When this mother of all pork fiascos fails, he doesn’t want Democrats absorbing all the blame for it.

Personally, I feel this way: let the Democrats ram it through on a highly partisan and ideologically-driven vote.  Let them pile it as high as they can with all the lavish pork their greedy little brains can imagine.  Let them imperiously shove all kinds of liberal socialist spending onto the country.  And let Republicans stand against it, vote against it, predict it will fail horribly, and then hang it around Democrats’ necks like a giant, dead, rotting albatross in the coming months and years ahead.

Democrats don’t need Republicans to transform our market based economy into a socialist government-run economy.  Fine.  Just as long as they don’t have the naked chutzpah to even ask for it, much less expect it.

Don’t ask us for a kiss while you’re trying to rape us, Democrats.  Expect to get your eyes gouged out, your nose broken, and as much other damage as we can possibly do to you.

Media-DNC Complex “Tilting” Us Toward Cliff

The media are doing everything they can to insulate Obama from the charge of “partisanship.”  They know Americans want to see both sides come together.  So they are making sure in advance to excoriate Republicans for any “not coming together.” If Republicans don’t embrace Obama and the Democrat agenda, the media intend to do everything in their power to make sure they pay dearly for it.

Basically, there’s the Democrats, and then there’s the “divisive, partisan, ideological Republicans.”  And, of course, obviously the former are better than the latter.  It doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not, because we live in a world in which appearances – shaped and distorted by the media as they are – have become more important than reality.

Bias is easier to immediately identify in the small things than in the big issues, because the big issues are invariably more complex, and the media can conceal its bias in all the subtle details by choosing which issues to cover and which specific aspects of which issues, which subject or expert to interview and which questions to ask them.  So let’s look at the small matter of presidential fitness and see if the media treats Republican and Democrat presidents the same way.  Britt Hume reported on how the media marveled over how “fabulously fit” Obama is due to his exercise regime; but how the media used words like “obsession,” “indulgence, ” and even “creepy” to describe Bush’s exercise.

Look at this presentation of Obama as some Greek ideal of the demi-god come down from Olympus by The Washington Post:

Between workouts during his Hawaii vacation this week, he was photographed looking like the paradigm of a new kind of presidential fitness, one geared less toward preventing heart attacks than winning swimsuit competitions. The sun glinted off chiseled pectorals sculpted during four weightlifting sessions each week, and a body toned by regular treadmill runs and basketball games.

And contrast that with the links about Bush compiled by Newsbusters:

–Reuters from August 2005:  “But some of his critics view his exercise obsession as an indulgence that takes time away from other priorities.”

– The Los Angeles Times from July 2005: “….. Bush has an obsession with exercise that borders on the creepy.

Given the importance of his job, it is astonishing how much time Bush has to exercise.”

Let’s get something straight: if the media can’t even be trusted to be objective in the small things – but demonstrate snide, smarmy, vindictive and unrelenting bias and prejudice that provides the climate of propaganda – then how on earth can you trust the same people to show objectivity in the big matters?  If you can’t even trust a guy to pay you back the buck he borrowed for you to feed the vending machine, are you going to front him the money to buy a damn house?

The media is constantly and on every imaginable level tilting the playing field to favor liberals and Democrats and hurt conservatives and Republicans.  It is simply unrelenting.  They keep coming at us with naked bias again and again on every single issue under the sun.  And they often do this by means of presenting the key political differences in terms that favor “their side.’

Let me provide a concrete example that has been going on both before and since the election. Take gay marriage.  There has never been such a thing as “gay marriage.”  There has never been such thing legally, culturally, socially or linguistically as a marriage that has NOT been between a man and a woman.  The very phrase “gay marriage” is an oxymoron.  But do you get to hear that in news coverage?  No.  What you hear about all the time is oppressed homosexuals trying to get the right to marry, and you hear about people depicted as religious bigots who refuse to wake up and smell reality trying to keep a discriminated-against minority from having their basic rights.  A gay man denied the right to marry another man and move next door to your family is tantamount to a naked black man toiling under the taskmaster’s lash in the abject bonds of slavery.  And it’s just an unfortunate detail that over 70% of African-American Californians voted against gay marriage.

All the while, the liberals who are attempting to impose the radical, unprecedented agenda of homosexual marriage by force of judicial-activist fiat – even against the clearly expressed will of the people in state after state (30 out of 30 now) – are routinely depicted by the media as “inclusive”, “broad-minded” and “tolerant” while those who stand behind 2,000 years of solid Western Civilization and 389 years of American civilization are routinely portrayed as “divisive”, “narrow-minded” and “intolerant.”

And the media does the same thing with other social or political issues such as abortion, or gun control, or Intelligent Design, or income redistributionism, or Iraq, or Iran, or absolutely anything.

The media is not merely tilting the playing field in a direction that favors Democrats over Republicans.  They are employing the tactics of liberalism to redefine the playing field and the permanently alter the rules of the game.  They are using their power over the airwaves and the printing presses – the power to shape opinion and to literally shape how we view the world – to define the debate in liberal partisan terms.

A blogger named Taffy posted to my article, “For Obama, Only His Opponents Can Be Capable Of Partisianship,” and says:

I have come to understand that when one looks up ‘liberal’ in the dictionary, definition #1 should be ‘hypocrite.’  I say this because, as you point out, every liberal I have ever known demonstrated their perceived “tolerance” by telling me some version of, ‘If you don’t think what I think, your views are intolerant.’  They say this every time, and the sheer gall and hypocrisy of their statement eludes them.  On the occasions I tried to demonstrate the fallacy of their perspective, I discovered there is no explanation that works.  They are so busy thinking they are right that no opposing information can be digested.

The media plays this game all the time.  But no one ever gets to stick the microphone in their faces and force them to question their own presuppositions.

The result is a degree of bias that excludes even the chance of a fair debate.

Wes Vernon of Newsmax says of journalists:

Many of them don’t consider that they’re leaning in any political direction. They really think they are simply mainstream. There is no other side of the argument except what you hear from a few right-wing nut cases. In their world, mainstream conservatism doesn’t exist.

As one Washington news correspondent once said to me, “There is no left wing.” There’s just normal goodness, as opposed to the extremists.

Bernard Goldberg, who wrote the explosive book Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News, said in an interview:

These guys, media elites, live in an elite, comfortable, liberal bubble, in places like Manhattan in New York. They can go for a week, a day, a month, a year, they can practically go a whole lifetime and never run into anybody who has a different point of view than they have on all the big social issues, whether its gay marriage or affirmative action or abortion or other race issues or feminist issues. After a while, a kind of group think takes over. They think everything to the right is conservative, which it is, and everything to the left is middle of the road. They don’t even notice. These people are so in the dark they don’t even know that their views on these controversial subjects are liberal. They think they are just reasonable and civilized because all their pals inside the bubble have these same views.

He went on to say:

I think the nature of bias, any kind of bias, is a preconceived notion about something, whether it’s racial bias or media bias or any kind of bias — bias toward a certain kind of car. It’s like you go into it with your mind pretty much made up. So when they call and they want a sound bite and you say that they are not even listening to what you are saying, you’re right. It’s because they have already made their mind up about what they are calling you about, and they just need you to fill in some blank.

So when reporters go out and cover stories on these big hot social issues, they don’t go out to learn what this side thinks and what that side thinks. They already have their take on these issues, and their take is overwhelmingly a liberal take on these issues. And then they go out and they interview somebody and they put that person in and, well, let’s put it this way, the conservative point of view is very often the other side of the argument. There is a main side and an other side. The main side in affirmative action, for instance, is that affirmative action is a wonderful thing. The main side in gay marriage is who would be against gay marriage except some bigot. And then they go out and they find that other side. Because otherwise it would be so blatantly biased that they couldn’t get away with it.

But they do go into these stories with their minds, if not totally made up, tilting in a sort of leftward direction.

Bernard Goldberg – winner of 7 Emmy Awards, by the way – wrote his book in 2002.  The problem is that in the six years since, the “tilting” he described has approached the point of being a vertical slope toward hard-core Kool-Aid propaganda.

Barack Obama, in mandating tax-payer federal funding on abortion, said:

“For too long, international family planning assistance has been used as a political wedge issue, the subject of a back and forth debate that has served only to divide us,” Obama said in a statement released by the White House. “I have no desire to continue this stale and fruitless debate.”

Yet he is completely oblivious to the obvious fact that he is merely flipping the “political wedge issue” to the other side of the same card.  And he’s able to get away with this baloney because the media – which shares both his ideological goals and his partisan tactics – is phrasing the political debate in the same exact terms.

With this, let me pick up with Taffy’s comment, in which she continues:

They are so busy thinking they are right that no opposing information can be digested.  I think this may be because, in truth, their position is built on a faulty house of cards, and deep down they know it. If they have to acknowledge that even ONE card may have another side to it, their house of cards will start to wobble.  Once that sucker is wobbling, they might have no choice but to see that ALL the cards have flip sides, at which point their whole world would come crashing down around them.  So, liberals spend a lot of energy keeping their house of cards intact, looking only at one side of every card, which of course is the right side, and insisting either that there is nothing on the flip sides of their cards or that if there is something on the flip side of any card that side is wrong. And, not to put to fine a point on it, belittling someone else’s perspective, acts, behavior and beliefs is just one of their favorite techniques for minimizing the crumbling of their house of cards. It’s a sad way for them to live, and it’s even sadder for those of us who choose not to live that way when we get caught in the fallout of their folly.

We are seeing a frightening convergence of “lock-step liberalism” between the Democratic Party – now in total control of government in the most critical time in our nation’s history – and the mainstream media which has rapidly become the propaganda wing of the Democratic Party.  Some have used the term “media-industrial complex” (i.e., “military-industrial” complex).  I prefer to call it “the media-DNC complex.”  In their mutual commitment to the liberal secular humanist worldview as the only view that should be considered or treated as ‘rational,’ the two entities are becoming a complex which feed one another, draw upon one another for strength, and protect one another.

Already, we are seeing what amounts to a Democrat-controlled show-trial-like “truth commission” to investigate the Bush Administration and essentially criminalize political differences.  We have House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi changing rules that have been in place for a 100 years in order to streamline hyperpartisan politics.  And meanwhile – as Nancy Pelosi contemplates re-imposing the Fairness Doctrine that would shut conservatives out of the media altogether – we have the beginings of a process that may well transform our market-based economy to a government-based economy, with literally trillions of dollars of government money that is already clearly flowing into political special interests.

Meanwhile, Obama is “too big to fail.”  He has been shaped into a glowing figure who strides above us, who leaves those who have encountered him basking in the shekinah glory.  Chris Matthews of MSNBC has literally put the phenomenon of Obama on epic biblical terms, telling the NY Observer that “I’ve been following politics since I was about 5.  I’ve never seen anything like this. This is bigger than Kennedy.  [Obama] comes along, and he seems to have the answers. This is the New Testament. This is surprising.”  When the media is literally talking about their new President in terms of worship, you have a crisis of journalism.

I would argue that we have seen the death of journalism, and the rebirth of 1930s-style propaganda.

I see this nation sliding – or “tilting” if you will – right off a cliff with no one willing or able to warn us of the impending disaster because they will all be on the same page and all dissension will have been purged from the lock-stepping ranks of those who should have warned us but would not.

Media Praise Obama For His Wonderfulness

I came across an Associated Press headline that left me racing to the toilet to hurl: Obama breaks from Bush, avoids divisive stands

Let me play the first few bars of this article for you, so I can explain what is so profoundly wrong with it:

WASHINGTON – Barack Obama opened his presidency by breaking sharply from George W. Bush’s unpopular administration, but he mostly avoided divisive partisan and ideological stands. He focused instead on fixing the economy, repairing a battered world image and cleaning up government.

“What an opportunity we have to change this country,” the Democrat told his senior staff after his inauguration. “The American people are really counting on us now. Let’s make sure we take advantage of it.”

I have two reactions.  In no particular order: 1) Wow.  That Obama.  So wonderfully bi-partisan and non-divisive.  I hope they come out with an Obama teddy bear so I can hug him all night long.  2) It is truly frightening that a newspaper as large and as important as the Associated Press would print something so blatantly untrue and so nakedly partisan in its presentation.

Let’s see a couple of titles that should serve to contradict the paper’s thesis that Obama is avoiding partisan political stands:

Barack Obama to end US army’s ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy towards gays

Obama reverses Bush abortion-funds policy

Our Socialist Energy Czar

Obama to GOP: ‘I Won’

Support for the LGBT Community (Obama’s own website detailing his radical plans to advance the political goals of Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, and Transgenders, accessed January 25, 2009).

And, of course:

Bush’s “War On Terror” Comes To Sudden End (detailing Obama’s closure of Gitmo and his dismantling of Bush’s successful intelligence/security measures).

Way to avoid those “divisive stands,” Barry.  With such a reporter as this telling the story, Obama might well be able to chop off the heads of every evangelical Christian in the country and still be “avoiding divisive partisan and ideological stands.”

I wonder.  Before the author praised Obama for his “avoiding divisive partisan and ideological stands,” while simultaneously comparing him favorably to that “unpopular Bush,” did she bother to check President Bush’s first week to compare/contrast how “divisive”, “partisan”, or “ideological” Bush actually was in relation to Obama?  I mean, doesn’t the comparison completely fall apart if it turns out that Bush wasn’t any of those things his first week, either?

You’ve got to love liberals for their constant blatant hypocrisy.  At least they’re consistent.  Here’s the game: if you don’t submit to their extremely radical liberal ideology, you are “divisive.”  Think just like us, or we’ll brand you as “divisive” and then start throwing in other terms such as “partisan” and “ideological” as pile-ons.

Eating Popcorn, Watching Democrats Make Fools Of Themselves

I’m sure a lot of Republican politicians are asking themselves this question: “How on earth can these chumps have beaten us in November?”

Look at the last couple of months since the election.  The very worst, most hilarious, most ridiculous, most asinine behavior of Laurel and Hardy and the Three Stooges – combined – looks downright competent compared to the Democrats.

First we had the pee-in-your-pants-funny meltdown over corrupt Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich’s appointment of  pompous blowhard Rolland Burris to fill Barack Obama’s vacated Senate seat.  Democrats – who initially called for a special election until it occurred to them that they might lose in the environment of anger over the exposure of Democrat corruption – could have called for that election and avoided any problems or crises.  But they were too hyper-partisan, dishonest, and incompetent to do that, so Blagojevich rubbed their noses in their own feces.

By the way, Barack Obama TWICE endorsed corrupt slimeball Blagojevich.

Anyway, the drama just kept getting better and better.  Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid recognized just how “tainted” (his words, not mine) Blagojevich’s appointment of Burris was.  But then he joined in the Keystone Cops liberal lunacy by reducing himself to the childish prank of trying to lock Rolland Burris out of the building.

Meanwhile, former Black Panther-turned racist Representative Bobby Rush was out clogging the airwaves at every turn with the charge that not seating Burris was tantamount to putting every black in America back into the chains of slavery.  He compared the Democrat-controlled Senate to the last plantation and pleaded with the white Master Majority Leader not to “hang and lynch” the poor black appointee.

Not to mention that for all of Rush’s hysterical vitriole, the blatant hypocrite (a characteristic malady of liberalism) had said BEFORE Blagojevich appointed an African-American, “He has no moral basis for appointing the next senator from the state of Illinois. … That person would be as tainted as they could be.”

It was nice to watch Democrats suffer the fallout from their own lunatic racist rantings for a change.

The one thing that we can apparently all agree upon is that Democrat Governor Rod Blagojevich “obviously is a corrupt individual” (again, Harry Reid’s words, not mine), and that Democrat Illinois Senator Roland Burris is “tainted.”

What anyone with the IQ over a chicken would agree upon is that Democrats revealed themselves to be utter fools throughout the process.

And Barack Obama – who couldn’t have displayed less courage throughout the controversy if he’d knocked down women and children to run out of a burning building – kept his distance and his silence.

Thank God these guys are leading the country.  We need professional and courageous non-partisan leadership to get through this crisis.

Then we had the case of almost-Commerce Secretary-and-soon-to-be-felon Democrat New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson withdrawing his name from Obama’s cabinent.  We can now bookened the two most important economic positions in the government – Commerce Secretary and Treasury Secretary – to find “pay to play” and “tax cheat.”

I hope your confidence in the integrity of your government is as strong as mine.

Barack Obama – who most certainly couldn’t have passed his own security check – turned out to have a pretty pathetic vetting system, in spite of all his hoopla about it.  Maybe if he’d actually had a decent system, he wouldn’t have ended up with gaffe-a-matic Joe Biden as his Vice President.

Dick Cheney was portrayed by the media as machevellian; Biden is portrayed as moronic.  I personally portray him as “Ruprecht, the Monkey-Boy.”

But I digress.

Just when you think, I can’t take anymore of this idiotic nonesense over cabinent picks and appointments and Senate seat vacancies, we got to watch yet another Democrat Governor making a complete circus side-show mockery of yet another Democrt Senate seat.

It is best to find out from fellow Democrats just how much of a mockery of rationality Governor David Patterson made of the appointment process:

A Democratic operative familiar with the selection process summed it up like this: “The governor’s handling – or rather, mishandling – of the selection process has been a circus from start to finish. With his dithering, leaks and abrupt 180s, he’s managed to demean the candidates, the office and himself in the process.”

All Paterson had to do was vet candidates and make a call. Instead, he talked up candidates and talked them down, sometimes on the same day.

He made up his mind and changed it, and then made it up again within the span of a single press conference. He got offended when candidates openly campaigned for the job and then demanded that they be more assertive.

“Paterson was jerking them around in ways that were shocking. It’s not the way to operate. His actions were erratic,” one well-known Democratic Albany insider told me.

“There’s a growing feeling that Paterson will say whatever he feels is convenient at the moment. There’s no consistency.”

And:

Yet in two months politics in New York devolved from dysfunctional to chaotic, tarnishing every major player involved. And sometimes it seemed that David Paterson wanted it exactly that way. His style of governance, a dizzy mix of ingratiation and trickeration, has turned what could have been a moment of triumph—a powerful new ally in the Senate, a relationship with President Obama—into a slapstick fiasco, a fitting sequel to the way Paterson got the job in the first place. Politics is often a contest of half-truths, where the winner is the best bullshitter. But thanks to Paterson and a cast of dozens, the fight to become the next senator became instead a world-class festival of lies.

And:

For his part, Mr. Paterson has conducted the selection process much like a business owner placing a want ad. He has encouraged people to reach out to him, invited them in for interviews and asked candidates to fill out a lengthy questionnaire that asked things like whether they had ever been fired from a job or had employed illegal immigrants as household help.

It defies my imagination how the Democrats could have screwed up more.  And the fact that they are now in total control of the country leaves me shaking my head in wonder and thanking God that the American voter wasn’t also presented the opportunity to vote for a team of monkeys to run the country.  Then again, how much worse could the monkeys have done?

I have popped my popcorn.  Now it is time to sit back and watch Democrats completely ruin the country while the media come up with ever more and more fanciful ways to blame Republicans for all the disasters.

“Angels At Work”: Obama Outperformed By Jackhammer

Obama Inauguration Speech Ruined By Incessant Jackhammering

January 21, 2009 | Issue 45•04

WASHINGTON—President Barack Obama’s Inauguration Day address—a speech that many believed would jumpstart the healing process of an ailing nation, foster hope and goodwill across the world, and serve as the ultimate stamp on the Democrat’s historic win—was ruined Tuesday by nearly two hours of nonstop jackhammering.

Obama paid tribute to those brave Americans who paved the something for something something faith something history.

According to D.C. officials, the jackhammering interrupted the landmark address on 30 separate occasions and came from the nearby U.S. Botanic Garden, where it was being used to break up pavement for a new Heroes of Horticulture exhibit.

“My fellow—,” began Obama, who then stopped when he and the 2.5 million citizens present, some of whom had traveled thousands of miles to experience the once-in-a-lifetime event, were startled by loud, metal-on-concrete banging. “My fell…my fell…my—.”

“Is that a jackhammer?” Obama added.

Though Obama first acknowledged the incessant jackhammering with an impromptu joke, saying, “Well, I know one guy who doesn’t need a job,” the typically poised orator grew gradually more annoyed as it became clear that the shrill thumping was not going to stop.

Obama appeared most frustrated about halfway through the address when reverberations from the pneumatic drill set off several dozen nearby car alarms, drowning out the new president’s attempt to describe his vision for America’s future in a changing world.

“If the person currently operating the jackhammer can hear me, please stop,” Obama said at approximately the eight-minute mark of his speech. “Seriously, please. Stop it now.”

The unremitting pounding caused the first African-American president to sigh or roll his eyes a combined 17 times, most notably during an apparently eloquent passage conveying his “lifelong desire to [unify or commit] the United States to a [common goal, higher purpose, or challenge] by 2012.”

During a particularly loud spell of thuds, Obama muttered, “Oh, come on.”

Footage of the event shows that when the president tried to explain how perseverence and pride could help rebuild a better society for all, he was interrupted not only by the jackhammer, but by several audience members who shouted, “Speak up,” “Louder,” and “I can’t hear you over all this jackhammering.”

At one point during the address, Obama stopped talking entirely and walked off the stage for nearly five minutes. When he returned, he asked the restless crowd for calm and understanding.

“Okay, so, it looks like they’re not going to stop jackhammering. We’re just going to have to keep going, I guess,” Obama told the massive group, many of whom had already begun walking to their cars. “I’ll try to speed through it.”

A transcript released by his campaign prior to the address revealed that Obama ultimately cut the speech short by six pages, omitting a section about the conflict in Afghanistan and a point-by-point explanation of his economic recovery plan.

According to historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, one of the lasting images of the 2009 presidential inauguration will be Vice President Joe Biden, seated just 20 feet behind Obama, cupping his right ear in a desperate attempt to hear what the 44th president was saying.

“Inauguration addresses have always brought us inspirational and defining moments,” Goodwin said. “FDR reminded Americans that all they had to fear was fear itself. John F. Kennedy encouraged citizens to ask what they could do for their country.”

“And now President Barack Obama offers his own stirring message,” Goodwin continued. “‘Bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang.'”

Those in attendance agreed that it was nearly impossible to make out a single sentence of the historic address.

“I wanted to leave the speech with a feeling that this man was a beacon of hope, that he was going to lead us out of the doldrums and into a bold new beginning,” said Nathaniel Washburn, a 72-year-old African-American who brought his grandchildren to the inauguration. “But I couldn’t hear a goddamn thing.”

“I thought it was really, really cool,” said Washburn’s 7-year-old grandson, Gregory. “When I grow up, I want to be a jackhammer operator.”

———————————————–

That kid Gregory and I have something in common: a new hero.