The Stern report on climate change is being published and has been seized upon by the government to continue its alarmist campaign for government expansion. Stern lists the usual disasters and argues that humanity must take action now to avoid impoverishment, although it was commissioned for an international audience. In Britain, the main impact is taxation, with the media concentrating on new charges and levies.

As the electorate are already sceptical about further tax increases, the self-appointed prophets are latching onto the paradigm of climate change to justify their onerous theft. Taxes on cars, aviation and other carbon generating activities will weigh more heavily upon the poor and lead to lower living standards now rather than the hypothetical poverty projected for the future.

The Letter from David Miliband, the appointment of the political failure Al Gore and the report by Stern are all designed to provide the intellectual ballast for continued government expansion. These taxes are politically unpalatable and would be rejected by the electorate, if levied without green cover. Therefore, climate change and catastrophism are the reasons for a 'greener than thou' ratchet effect, where politicians use Britain and our money to puff themselves up as a moral example for others.

Since the science and the scenarios are still so uncertain, climate change has been adopted as the vanguard for further taxation and a curb on British consumerism. Using the expansion of the state and taxes, rather than market mechanisms, our politicians will dampen our economic growth, steal our wealth, and wrap us in their parasitical hairshirt. The only light in this gloom is that the British electorate may reject such alarmism and the example of our political stupidity will lead India and other nations to seek technological and free-market solutions that do not curb their march away from poverty.

"The Grand Rapids Press announced its endorsement of Mike Bouchard’s candidacy Sunday, writing “Although solidly Republican, Mr. Bouchard has a track record of working well with others of contrasting views — finding common ground and moving projects forward. In his eight years in Lansing, he saw 83 of his bills signed into law.”

The Kalamazoo Gazette also endorsed Bouchard today striking on a similar theme."

"Instead of giving any major coverage to these four black Republican candidates [Ken Blackwell of Ohio, Keith Butler of Michigan, Michael Steele of Maryland, and Lynn Swann of Pennsylvania], the liberal media has used a great deal of expensive airtime talking about Barrack Obama’s 2008 “potential” presidential candidacy and Harold Ford’s senatorial race in Tennessee. Both of these men’s faces have graced the covers of major news magazines this fall. The message that this sends to the black electorate is that the only legitimate black political voices that the media receives are Democrats; but you can change this.

On our way to the polls, let’s take our families, our friends and the members of our churches. We must show up and vote. We must vote with purpose because we are not just fighting an ideological battle with the liberals. We are fighting both the Democratic machine and the media. Unfortunately for us, the media voted early!"

So how is it that the Democrats seem to be leading in so many recent polls? They have recruited a new partner to help them fight for power--- the liberal media. The bias of the media sounds like such a trite excuse for conservative lack of campaign trail performance. Yet this time, I believe there is much truth to the concept that conservatives are fighting both the media and the Democrats.

And sometimes you close your eyes
And see the place where you used to live
When you were young

"Democrats may say what they please and do as they please - Republican speech must be carefully scrutinized for any hint of inappropriateness - and all Republicans be immediately called on to disavow anything anywhere done with less than perfect gentlemanliness & elegance.

Democrats may strike in any way they like - and may go sobbing to the media if they get back any portion of what they dish out.

And it works, because after all: in this game, the ref wears their jersey."

"Ours is a nation of immigrants. We're also a nation of law. Unfortunately, the United States has not been in complete control of its borders for decades and, therefore, illegal immigration has been on the rise. We have a responsibility to address these challenges. We have a responsibility to enforce our laws. We have a responsibility to secure our borders. We take this responsibility seriously."

"For all the White House's faults, however, there is no doubt in my mind that Republicans as a group are better informed, better equipped and better able to lead this country in a time of war than the Democrats. The donkey party is led by thumb-sucking demagogues in prominent positions who equate Bush with Hitler and Jim Crow, call him a liar in front of high school students and the world, fantasize about impeachment and fetishize the human rights of terrorists who want to kill me.

Put simply: There are no grown-ups in the Democrat Party."

Read more...

"The media haven’t been able to conceal their rooting interest in this election. They visibly pant over the prospect of a big Democratic night on November 7, and if there is any doubt about its happening (they often portray it as a foregone conclusion), they are willing to help push Democrats over the top."

Source

"The race is over as far as a lot of the punditry goes. They've got it all figured out. And they just -- as I said, they're dancing in the end zone. They just haven't scored the touchdown, Mark, you know, there's a lot of time left. And these candidates are working hard out there. And my message to them is, keep talking about the security of the United States and keeping taxes low, and you'll come back here."

Source

In the frenzy which followed the Foley resignation, the news media went after Rep. Jim Kolbe - an openly Gay Republican from Arizona - for having gone on a camping trip with FORMER Pages; the implication being he might have been preying on them.

Let's get this straight: Gay does not equal pedophile. Perfectly OK to have a Gay Scoutmaster. But Jim Kolbe - one of the true gentlemen in the US House, by the way - must have had wicked intentions when he took that camping trip.

I had to come back and add the fall out from the sexual McCarthyism issue, which might not make it out of the political echo chamber, but is certain to impact across people who follow politics the most. And those people are the people who always vote.

Not long ago I was thinking that a Democratic majority in Congress wouldn't be so bad; but the sexual McCarthyism from the pro-outing crowd, coupled with the Dems' steadfast refusal to offer anything useful on national security, has convnced me that they just don't deserve a victory with those tactics.

"What truly defines the civil rights challenge today isn't whether you can get a seat at the lunch counter, it's whether you can own that lunch counter to create legacy wealth for your children."

"You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by encouraging class hatred. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot build character and courage by taking away man's initiative and incentive. And you cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they should do for themselves."

"Now, at the Democratic convention, we heard one word over and over again: hope. But there's a problem, my friends. Hope is not a strategy. Hope doesn't protect your kids from terrorism. Hope doesn't lower your taxes. Hope doesn't help you buy a home. And hope doesn't ensure quality education for your children."

The Unvarnished Truth

Listening to Rush today I heard him quote CNN's reason for running the Iraq sniper video as a desire to show the "unvarnished truth." I wish that CNN was as concerned with showing us the unvarnished truth about many other subjects.

One subject that came to mind was abortion. If CNN finds it newsworthy to show U.S. troops being shot down by snipers so the public can see the unvarnished truth about the war, then why not show us the unvarnished truth about abortion. Let's see a partial birth abortion being performed before the election so that voters will know whether or not they want to vote for those in Congress who oppose a ban on it. Planned Parenthood's 90th birthday would be a perfect time to air it.

This "unvarnished truth" doesn't always have to be that shocking though. The same standard could be applied in countless ways. Maybe we could see video of some of those liberal politicians claiming to be men and women of the people walking out the front doors of their million dollar homes. Or maybe we could watch some radical environmentalist liberals flying around in their private jets and limousines. The problem with CNN's attempt at the "unvarnished truth" is that they never show the whole truth.

The Democrats have not elected congressional majorities in 12 years, and they've occupied the White House in only eight of the last 26 years. The left's current unruliness seems a way of scapegoating others for a more elemental frustration - that they can't gain a national majority based on their core beliefs. More entitlements, higher taxes to pay for them, gay marriage, de facto quotas in affirmative action, open borders, abortion on demand, and radical secularism - these liberal issues don't tend to resonate with most Americans.

To compensate, leftist pundits, billionaire philanthropists and politicians, from current officeholders to ex-presidents, work to ensure that isolated moments of Republican ineptness (George Bush strutting on a carrier deck in his flight suit) and wrongdoing (repulsive e-mails from a perverted Congressman Mark Foley) blare out as the only issues of the day. This distracting drumbeat, not their own agenda, is the only strategy for success in the next election.

True, reactionaries in the 1990s expressed a Neanderthal hatred of Bill Clinton. But now shouting leftists have lowered the bar. The danger, of course, is that by emulating the rhetoric of a Cindy Sheehan or Michael Moore, the feral Democrats - when they come back into power again as tamed leaders who must govern - will have created Frankensteins. And, as we know, such monsters always turn on their creators.

- Victor Davis Hanson

"But if the Dems take the House, they will rake the Bush admin over the coals daily for the next 2 yrs. They will 'investigate' everyone and everything. I'm talkin hot-pokers-up-the-ass investigations."

"To execute the strategy of the Global Jihad October Surprise, America’s enemies have enlisted the useful idiots of the MSM, who appear all too willing to cooperate in the anti-American venture, if it serves their political agenda."

It’s easy for Democrats, the far-left, not to mention media luminaries, to dismiss conservative concerns about a biased media, despite overwhelming evidence. Their agendas mostly benefit from it – at least short term.

Economic hypochondria, a derangement associated with affluence, is a byproduct of the welfare state: An entitlement mentality gives Americans a low pain threshold -- witness their recurring hysteria about nominal rather than real gasoline prices -- and a sense of being entitled to economic dynamism without the frictions and "creative destruction" that must accompany dynamism. Economic hypochondria is also bred by news media that consider the phrase "good news" an oxymoron, even as the U.S. economy, which has performed better than any other major industrial economy since 2001, drives the Dow to record highs.

“None of these tax cuts is affordable. None of them creates jobs, and they are not fair. All of them do damage to our long-term economic growth and contribute to the national deficit.”
-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA); May 09, 2003

Me: I wish someone would commission a study on why trolls do what they do...I’ve never gone to DU or KOS to gloat. I’ve never tried to engage in debate over there either because it’s impossible. I guess they troll for attention?

Fellow Blogger: It is indeed a matter for psychological study, Winston, perhaps a case for Dr. Freud if he is around.

Libs crave and require external validation, apparently because they have no internal moorings. It’s why they are always intent on cramming their views down your throat, and why they plaster obnoxious bumper stickers on their rusty Volvos.

"And what are the new ideas that Democrats are campaigning on? They've had a hard time coming up with a list. At the top, usually, is raising the minimum wage.

As for the macroeconomy, the Democrats offer few policies except to refuse to extend the Bush tax cuts, which in important cases don't expire till 2010. On foreign policy, their stands tend to be incoherent: We should be more multilateral in Iraq and less multilateral on North Korea. "Redeployment" of troops from Iraq to Okinawa (John Murtha) or Kuwait."

"Have you ever wondered why religious conservatives get lambasted for “imposing their values on others” and secretly harboring plans to establish a “theocracy” while the religious left is never challenged for basing its policy preferences on Scripture? I have."

"The elephant in the newsroom is our narrowness. Too often, we wear liberalism on our sleeve and are intolerant of other lifestyles and opinions....We’re not very subtle about it at this paper: If you work here, you must be one of us. You must be liberal, progressive, a Democrat. I’ve been in communal gatherings in The Post, watching election returns, and have been flabbergasted to see my colleagues cheer unabashedly for the Democrats."

— Marie Arana, Washington Post

I'm satisfied that a GOP minority will do its best to block just about anything the Democratic majority wants to do — just for the sake of blocking, growth or no growth.

"But don't forget, men - we're gonna get ‘em on the run, we're gonna go, go, go, go! - and we aren't going to stop until we go over that goal line! And don't forget, men - today is the day we're gonna win. They can't lick us - and that's how it goes... The first platoon men - go in there and fight, fight, fight, fight, fight! What do you say, men!"

"I know the speaker didn't go over a bridge and leave a young person in the water, and then have a press conference the next day. Dennis Hastert didn't kill anybody."

"The waves of paranoia currently sweeping through America could be seen as the democratization of intellectual dementia. Criticisms of President Bush, Christians, the right wing, the Patriot Act, whatever: These are all fine. But presumably, such large claims against America should come with ample evidence to back them up. Instead, we get the opposite. The smaller the example, the greater its significance. And that trick is the intellectual class’s gift to America."

"Good column, but what always makes my head spin isn’t so much the paranoia but the insouciance when reality bears it all out. Liberals always talk of jack-booted thugs of the Federal Government kicking in doors of innocent people in the middle of the night, but then they didn’t give a hoot when Bill Clinton did precisely that in Miami. Liberal paranoia goes haywire about the Federal Government shutting down free speech on the airwaves, but then they were all elated when Bill Clinton attempted to shut down free speech on the airwaves via the Fairness Doctrine. And so on, and so on.

How they can do this without suffering cognitive dissonance is beyond me."

This boom in employment started in August of 2003, roughly coincident with the economy's growth acceleration in the wake of the Bush Administration's 2003 tax cuts on dividends, capital gains and in the top marginal income rate on the highest earners. Yet on the same day that the Labor Department discovered 810,000 new jobs, Nancy Pelosi promised that if she becomes Madam Speaker next year, within 100 hours of taking the gavel the House will vote to repeal those tax cuts and raise the minimum wage. Never underestimate the ways that Washington politicians can do economic harm.

"Politics became deadly serious for Zucker on Sept. 11; he was disturbed by liberals who, he said, blamed America or spoke of root causes. Zucker said he found himself supporting Bush's robust response to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. As time passed, he tired of listening to calls for "talk, talk, talk" and the United Nations to solve the world's most tangled problems, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Despite his continued pro-choice, anti-nuclear power, pro-environmental beliefs, he found himself drawn to Republican national security policies. In 2004, he re-registered, made the anti-Kerry ad, appeared on a few talk shows to discuss his political conversion and "fell in with the dark side," quipped his brother Jerry Zucker, director of "Ghost" and "Rat Race," among other films."

The federal budget deficit estimate for the fiscal year just completed has dropped to $250 billion, congressional estimators said Friday, as the economy continued to fuel impressive tax revenues.

The improving deficit picture - Bush predicted a $423 billion deficit in his February budget - has been driven by better-than-expected tax receipts, especially from corporate profits, CBO said.

Source: Forbes via AP

The main cause of the deficit decline - 90% of it, says White House budget director Rob Portman - is a tidal wave of tax revenue. Tax collections have increased by $521 billion in the last two fiscal years, the largest two-year revenue increase - even after adjusting for inflation - in American history.

Souce: WSJ

In a preliminary estimate, the department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics announced it will be revising payroll numbers for the 12 months ended in March 2006 by 810,000, an average of 68,000 new jobs a month. That’s up 45 percent from the 1.8 million jobs that the BLS currently estimated were created during that period.

Source: US NEWS

The unemployment rate fell to 4.6 percent.

Source: Forbes

Tom Wolfe says a jarring scene he recently witnessed in Tennessee convinced him that writers who live in New York and on the Left Coast are out of touch with the rest of the country. In the upcoming book, "Telling True Stories," the "Bonfire of the Vanities" novelist says he watched in amazement at a NASCAR race last month as a National Rifle Association honcho got a rousing standing ovation, and was followed by a minister who "asked the Lord to look out for these brave drivers and these loyal fans... in the name of Thy Only Son, Christ Jesus." Writes Wolfe: "Anyone who introduced an event that way in San Francisco or New York would risk arrest for a hate crime. New York writers really must cross the Hudson River, and writers in Los Angeles really must go as far as the San Joaquin Valley. Most of the meaning of America lies in between the coasts, I'm afraid."

Since mm.com came into existence, I've been attacked regularly as a whore and a c**t and a puppet and a dupe and a sellout, etc. etc. etc. It comes with the territory--particularly when you happen to be a woman, a minority, and a conservative. The extensive arguments and blog posts and columns and books I've written are reduced to bumper-sticker putdowns by critics and their fellow travelers who couldn't be bothered to actually read what I've written day in and day out for the last two years on the blog and the past 14 years in my books and columns. I poked fun at this pathology in my last book. I think what drives a lot of the haters crazy is that despite their ceaseless sniping, they can't shut me up.

Billionaire liberal financier George Soros, who spent millions of his fortune trying to oust President Bush in 2004, yesterday said he hopes to stay out of politics from now on.