Barack the Mechanic

"If you buy a car from Chrysler or GM, you will be able to get your car serviced and repaired. Your warranty will be safe."

"Because, starting today, the US government will stand behind your warranty."

Is there anything great or small, spectacular or mundane, that this president is not afraid to promise the masses? Healing the people of disease has been an aim of presidents for decades, but this is the first time that I know of that any head honcho has stepped to the plate determined to keep my Buick's "check engine" light from flickering.

After all, what good is an auto executive that cannot walk on water?

The Genius of the French Worker

The geniuses in France know exactly what is needed to turn around that nation's economy: a nationwide strike!

Apparently it is believed that one of the least productive countries on Earth would be better able to survive economically if the minimum wage was raised, if unneeded workers were guaranteed jobs, and if everyone else received an increase in social benefits. Which is, come to think of it, the forever Democrat Party's political strategy in this country.

Guantanamo is Just So Icky

Or so was the argument hoisted upon the shoulders of an unpopular President Bush (and his evil henchman Cheney) for the creation of the terrorist detention camp.

Within its walls detainees were routinely tortured, their holy books flushed down apparently the world's most efficient toilets, denied their most basic human rights, were otherwise demoralized, and were kept from receiving legal counsel. Rumor has it that bomb making wasn't even offered in the vocational career center, and the lemon pilaf sucked!

The outrage!

America would have none of it, and Barack Obama was swept to victory on an anti Bush platform--if Bush did it, it was stupid at best, and evil at worst. Guantanamo fell within the latter category. One of Obama's campaign promises was to close Gitmo in an effort to solidify the anti-war, anti-government, anti-imperialist, and anti-American crowd. They voted for him in a monolithic bloc being joined in the booth by snot nosed kids, socialist union members, and watchers of The View and Oprah.

Shortly after becoming elected, Obama, to the sound of great applause, tossed his favorite constituency a bone (well, third favorite behind racists and Marxists) and pledged to close the camp within one year, an act that could go far in cementing his name in the history books as the dumbest president since Jimmy Carter.

Now, the deed is done. Sure, now after some countries have balked at accepting the prisoners, and some of the released have successfully joined the jihad, our illustrious administration has announced that some detainees could be released into the United States.

Because a terrorist freed on Main Street with access to our malls, airports, and schools is better than having one locked away behind bars.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Some of the Guantanamo Bay prisoners could be released into the United States while others could be put on trial in the American court system, Attorney General Eric Holder said on Wednesday.

Holder, who was chosen by President Barack Obama to lead the administration's efforts to close the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba within a year, said the review of what to do with each of the prisoners had begun.

About 240 terrorism suspects, including suspected planners of the September 11 attacks, are being held in the prison. Many have been detained for seven years without charges and some were subjected to interrogation techniques denounced by critics as torture.

The administration faces intense political resistance to the idea of bringing the prisoners to the United States as part of closing the detention camp. The administration seeks to transfer some detainees to Europe or other countries while freeing others.

Holder told reporters at the Justice Department that the administration's review, made on a case-by-case basis, would determine whether the prisoners need to be put on trial or whether they can be released.

"For those who are in that second category, who can be released, there are a variety of options that we have. Among them is the possibility that we could release them into this country," he said.

Nice.

h/t Little Green Footballs

EU Bans the Words 'Miss' and 'Mrs'

The EU has once again proven it is a club of idiots.

The European Parliament has banned the terms 'Miss' and 'Mrs' in case they offend female MEPs.

The politically correct rules also mean a ban on Continental titles, such as Madame and Mademoiselle, Frau and Fraulein and Senora and Senorita.

Guidance issued in a new 'Gender-Neutral Language' pamphlet instead orders politicians to address female members by their full name only.

Officials have also ordered that 'sportsmen' be called 'athletes', 'statesmen' be referred to as 'political leaders' and even that 'synthetic' or 'artificial' be used instead of 'man-made'.

The guidance lists banned terms for describing professions, including fireman, air hostess, headmaster, policeman, salesman, manageress, cinema usherette and male nurse.

However MEPs are still allowed to refer to 'midwives' as there is no accepted male version of the job description.

The booklet also admits that "no gender-neutral term has been successfully proposed" to replace 'waiter' and 'waitress', allowing parliamentarians to use these words in a restaurant or café.

How much time and money do you suppose was spent in the production of such a pamphlet? How many bureaucrat hours were spent divining every engendered word and then determining an appropriate substitution? How much time and money will be spent on properly training the rest of bureaucracy in order to avoid the potential offense of some ill-tempered Miss or Mrs? What will it cost to set up additional commissions to monitor the behavior of bureaucrats and to process the necessary litigations against those who offend?

Look to Europe people, because this is exactly the place where Barack Obama and his progressive minions want us to land both emotionally and financially--prostrate to an all-powerful government excited to regulate all facets of our personal lives from the language we utter out of our mouths to the methane we exhaust out the other end.

h/t Protein Wisdom

AIG hearts Guevara

Could it be any wonder that AIG has managed to fritter away over $100,000,000,000.00 in the past few months when we find at its head a prat so ignorant of history and economics that he feels comfortable sporting around in a Che Guevara t-shirt?

I suppose we should consider ourselves lucky that AIG leadership decided it only wanted to ruin the finances of millions of people through financial malfeasance rather than just killing Americans outright like Che would have preferred.

Lets hope at Russian days he accidentally leaves his Lenin shirt in the wash.

h/t Little Green Footballs

Martha Reeves vs. Jay Leno

The fastest way to lose the sympathy of even the most sympathetic is for the unfortunate downtrodden to indignantly demand charity. "Hey jerk, look how pathetic I am, give me something!" is not the most clever of sales pitches.

Yet, this is the attitude that Martha Reeves displayed as she chattered on with her nose to the sky like an immature featherless bird sensing the benevolence of Jay Leno performing a free concert in southeast Michigan to benefit the unemployed.

Who does Jay Leno think he is to bestow his charity on someone else when WE ARE RIGHT HERE!

As for the controversy stirred by Reeves, [Leno friend and event organizer Jeff] Bouchard said Leno was "sort of stunned by the territorial nature of that."

Really Jay? The sad thing is that you might be dealing with the clearest thinking member of the council. For your sake, Jay, I hope you don't run into Monica Conyers after the event.

Arpaio Targeted By Feds

I would like to know of one public servant anywhere else in this country that has stretched the tax dollar as far as Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona has. He houses thousands of inmates at a fraction of the cost that is typical in other counties around the country.

He has done this through ideas and innovation.

Arpaio has been the target of criticism for years for his methods in dealing with crime and criminals.

Jails too expensive to build? His answer is to house prisoners in tents. Meals too expensive? Give them bologna. Prisoners able to easily walk off of work detail into the population at large without being identified? Dress them up in pink t-shirts and boxers. Cable television is a right for the incarcerated? Let them watch the Disney Channel, 24/7. Tents too hot in the summer? Arpaio tells his guests that US soldiers suffer worse in Iraq and to "shut up."

So, is it any wonder that the Obama administration is targeting Arpaio for possible civil rights violations?

Peace in Islam

While Saudi Arabia has proven to be largely impotent (and unconcerned) when it comes to reeling in the international terrorism caused by its export of Wahibi Islam, it has found a criminal element it is more than willing to strike down, elderly women in need of bread.

Saudi Arabia has sentenced a widow to 40 lashes and four months in prison after two men who were not her blood relatives were caught in her home.

Khamisa Sawadi, who is Syrian but was married to a Saudi, was convicted and sentenced last week after the men were caught bringing her five loaves of bread. She is to be deported after serving the sentence.

The two men - one of whom is her late husband's nephew - were also found guilty and sentenced to prison terms and lashes.

Islam is the Religion of Peace.

Jeff Goldstein Lays It Out

One of the best posts in the history of Al Gore's internet can be found over at Hot Air.

Jeff Goldstein wants us to take our language back from progressives that intentionally misinterpret our meanings in order to attack us.

Experience Matters

Ok, really, things are now starting to get embarrassing.

The voters went to the polls and elected an individual inexperienced in managing anything other than his campaign for election. In fact, when pressed on his lack of experience, it was his skill at managing his large campaign staff that he raised to refute the accusation. Campaigning, it would seem, was his best qualification for office.

What mattered to most was Obama's skill behind the teleprompter, his voice, his persona, hope, and change. And to 52% of the American voting public, it was good enough.

And the last six weeks are now history. A six weeks that could prove to be the worst six weeks of any presidency ever, and given Jimmy Carter's abysmal record, that is saying something.

There is not one component of Obama's administration that is firing on all cylinders. The failures began early on with cabinet choice after cabinet choice being exposed as a tax cheat. Even his choice to rein in tax cheats was a tax cheat.

His handling of the economy has been a mishmash of blame casting on others (for policies enacted that he was in full support of) and of reiterating to the public that things are simply horrible. The market, in full sympathy, has tanked to levels not seen in many years. When pressed on accusations being aimed at him and his penchant for socialism, Obama stuttered and stammered in a way rarely seen in a high school speech class. The impromptu interview was such a disaster that Obama saw fit in the aftermath to contact the reporter to clarify on his stammering. That teleprompter, so it seems, is a way good invention.

His foreign policy has amounted to a global apology tour that has done nothing but given despots like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez golden opportunities to promote their legitimacy amongst America's enemies and their own controlled masses. Our allies are snubbed while our enemies are pleadingly presented with 'I'm sorry' notes with the presidential seal.

Domestic policy has been little more than machine gun payoffs for his most valued constituencies, pro-abortionists, unions, environmentalists, and today, his beloved advocates of embryonic stem cell research.

There is no doubt that the media carried Barack's water during the campaign doing everything that it could to present Obama as the great healer. Rather than explore Obama's lack of experience, they instead attacked Sarah Palin, a woman with exponentially more experience in administration and management than Obama had.

He was, to the media, the man that could. He could transcend politics as normal. He could get things done. As Chris Matthews' leg gyrated, Brian Williams waxed poetic. As the New York Times covered for him, the crones at The View wanted him under the covers.

Obama is little more than six weeks in to his first (and probably last) term, and he is already too tired to properly greet his closest foreign ally properly. He has not had enough time or energy to properly screen his highest political appointments, but has had plenty of time to orchestrate personal attacks against Rush Limbaugh. Priorities.

Too many packs of smokes, I suppose, have sucked the stamina out of a man that many believed could carry the whole of the world on his shoulders.

And it took all of six weeks.

Experience matters.

Another Reason to Homeschool

The parents of over 30 pupils in East London are facing possible court action for removing their children from a school hell-bent on teaching lessons in celebration of Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender History Month. Many of the children exposed to the lessons are under 10 years of age.

One story covered in a lesson was King and King, a fairytale about a prince who turns down three princesses before falling in love with one of their brothers.

Another book, And Tango Makes Three, features two male penguins, Roy and Silo, who fall in love at a New York zoo.

Sarah Saeed, 40, took her eight-year-old daughter out of school during the week.

She said: ‘It is not an appropriate age for the children to be learning such matters. We have our own way of explaining things to them and they should not be subjected to this.

‘I was aware they were going to be learning about homosexual relationships through stories.

‘If the council takes action against me I will tell them that I told the school beforehand I would be taking my child away if they did not change their policy.

‘She has a 100 per cent attendance record otherwise. This is the only time and this is the only choice I had.’

So, without this particular history month, the school would be promoting homosexuals as somehow inferior?

It is time for the multi-culti supporters to stop trying to use schools as bludgeons for their progressive causes. Children are in school to learn history, and math, and science, and reading, and writing; they are not in school to have progressive educators meld the coming generations into monolithic parroters of all things progressive.

As the parent of children, I believe there are things that are too important to abdicate to the state. Self esteem and morality are tops on that list.

Shame on the generations of parents that have allowed this idiocy to manifest itself in Britain and those parents that welcome the state's intrusion into their parenting here in America. Do you really want to slough off these responsibilities?

If there was ever a reason to home school, aside from the near impossibility of getting rid of crappy teachers in the modern classroom run by unions as mere jobs programs, and that it takes an act of God to rid the schools of disruptive students, it is the progressive curriculum being hoisted onto the backs of parents who would simply prefer that their children be taught lessons of morality at home, rather than in the classroom by a coupled pair of confused flightless birds at the nodding approval of some interventionist git.

Other than that, public schools are just great.

You Can Call Me MARVIN

'Welcome to Michigan's Automated Response Voice Interactive Network, you can call me Marvin.'

Never have more depressing words been received by a guy that grew up Mennonite, a guy taught to work for a living, and a guy that had it beaten into his head that charity was something to be provided to others, and not something to be accepted for one's self. (I was also told not to talk in the pews while sitting with my friends. Many of you saw how that turned out.)

So this morning, pride swallowed and a coffee induced caffeine rush streaming through my veins, I gave MARVIN my first call of this benefit year, my job a casualty of an assault orchestrated by Christopher Dodd and Barney Frank, et. al., on the economic mores that were driven into my skull as a youth. I am no longer a contributer to the system, but a taker.

MARVIN, for those of you fortunate enough to have dodged his monotone dronings, is the computerized system that all eligible unemployed Michiganders must report to by phone every two weeks to claim weeks of unemployment. After a series of prompts and warnings, the caller is led, pride in hand, through an obstacle course of yes and no responses that should result in the issuing of an unemployment check, payable to the lucky caller, by our most benevolent nanny, the state of Michigan.

Now, I am aware as to how unemployment works, and I understand that insurance premiums have been paid to the government to provide me with this compensation. I understand that the percentage of payroll that my employer pays for me and all his other employees for this insurance, goes up and down with the amounts paid to his out of work employees. Knowing this does not make me feel any better. Regardless of the mechanizations in place that allow me to receive this money, I am being non-productive and being paid for it. Ain't America great?

Menno Simons, had he not been such a pacifist (and dead a few hundred years) would be inclined to beat my lazy butt blue.

'Press one for yes, and nine for no.'

MARVIN wants to know if I am claiming both weeks.

I am.

Was I available for work?

Sure.

Did I look for work?

Yep.

Did I turn down any work, receive any cash payments, start attending school, etc., etc., etc. No, no, no, and so forth.

MARVIN comfortingly tells me that a check will be mailed to me on the next business day for I have apparently received a perfect score on his bi-weekly quiz.

Thanks, MARVIN, but will my money be accompanied with any self-esteem that I might tuck snugly inside my soul as easily as I can place a check in my wallet?

He curtly hangs up after a monotone "goodbye," my question unanswered. It seems as if I have been ignored entirely. There was no one for yes, no nine for no. I'll just go out on a limb here and assume nine.

How Poor is Michigan?

Pretty poor, it would seem. Poor enough to be forced to close prisons, release prisoners, cut aid to schools, and scar the childhoods of countless youth as it yanks its support away from the state fair. There simply is no other way in which to cut spending in this state that doesn't hurt potential helpless crime victims or innocent children.

Woe that there can never be other solutions!

Oscoda County then must be thanking its lucky, benevolent Lansing star, as six little used stretches of county roads will be receiving first time guard rails this spring at the bargain price of $110,000, 80% of which will come from cash-strapped Lansing.


In the grand scheme of things, how much is $110,000 in a state where the budget routinely falls a billion dollars short? It is a pittance, certainly, and not worthy of any real scrutiny.

But, Oscoda County is the least populated county in all of Michigan's lower peninsula. How many other pittances exist out there in all of Michigan's counties, those with larger populations, those that are larger in geographic size, and those where politicians actually visit on occasion to woo masses of affluent campaign contributing donors?

The fact is, if these roads have ever needed guardrails they needed them long before this financial crisis occurred. Why build them now at a time when Lansing is as financially poor as Jennifer Granholm is economically naive? (Perhaps the answer to the second part of that question answered the first.)

As I have asked many times before, if government leaders are unwilling to make even the easiest of decisions necessary to cut spending and waste, how can we ever expect them to make the truly hard ones?

Conyers Looks Beyond MLK

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

It would appear as if Monica Conyers, at least judging by her steamy commentary at a Detroit City Council meeting last week, has dispensed with all that Martin Luther King idealistic crap.

What matters most is how you look.

Speakers advocating for the deal were taunted by the crowd and cut short by Council President Monica Conyers, who presided over the hearing like an angry bulldog; whites were advised by the citizens to, "Go home."

Opponents were allowed to rant and ramble on uninterrupted about "those people" who want to steal Detroit's assets and profit from the city's labors.

A pitiful Teamster official who practically crawled to the table on his knees expressing profuse respect for this disrespectful body was battered by both the crowd and the council.

When he dared suggest that an improved Cobo Center would create more good-paying jobs for union workers, Conyers reminded him, "Those workers look like you; they don't look like me."

Monica, are you referring to skin color, or are you referring to that rabid foam at the corner of your mouth? Seriously, this is the individual entrusted to head the city council? This is the best person to be found for the job in a city with nearly a million people inside its borders? Good grief, wasn't Kwame Kilpatrick available?

How will Detroit ever woo significant businesses to the city with this sort of blatant idiocy bubbling out of the mouths of its leaders? All a competing city would ever have to do to get Detroit out of the picture is to show a taped session of a Detroit City Council meeting. Cleveland never looked so good.

And yet, this is who the voters of Detroit have chosen to lead them into the land of milk and honey, a gaggle of cacophonous malcontents who hate simply because the sensation feels so good and natural to them.

Martin Luther King had a dream all right, and Monica Conyers was not in it.

h/t Michelle Malkin

Hoping For Failure

America voted for hope and change and the change is coming. Says Paul Mirengoff at Power Line:

We now know for certain that Obama is an out-and-out statist bent on redistributing income and clamping down on free markets. He desires, as Charles Krauthammer has shown, to convert our free and vibrant economy into a European-style nanny state.

Conservatives must be equally single-minded in the defense of our country's way of life. There is no cooperating with Obama on domestic issues, and to the extent that Republican Senators like Arlen Specter cooperate, conservatives must do whatever we can to end their public careers.

I want Barack Obama to fail, and I want him to fail miserably. For clarity's sake, this is not to say I want our country to fail out of spite for the Messiah, it means, simply, that I believe in my brain and my heart that Eurosocialism is a failed economic system that sucks the wealth, life and goodness out of people. (As has much progressive meandering already done here.)

As the socialists muscle individuals and charities out of the way in an attempt to provide for the people, charities and individuals become victims of the huge tax requirements necessary to project the inefficient government's foray into areas where it simply is incapable of providing adequate concern.

If you want to see what national health care looks like, you should have been paying attention to the reports of conditions at Walter Reed Hospital a year or so ago when it splashed across the newspaper headlines in an attempt to smear George Bush.

If you want to see what government provided housing looks like, look to the public housing projects in Dallas and Chicago, in New York and St. Louis.

If you want to see the vision of public school education, look to socialist Detroit where barely 25% of public school students achieve graduation, and where many of those that do graduate are unable to compete at the university level.

If you want to see the government operate a business, look to the USPS and Amtrak. Both have been awash in red ink for years.

And yet, these are the models of industriousness and efficiency that we will have to accept if we envision our economy in the hands of benevolent government bureaucrats who ride to and from work in the back seats of their taxpayer provided limousines.

So yeah, I want Barack Obama to fail. And, I want his failure attached firmly to people like Arlen Specter and Susan Collins who pine for the day when Washington DC makes every decision for the rest of us, from the breakfast cereal we choose in the morning, to the cars we drive, to the medicines we take, to the weapons we own, and even to the radio programs we listen to.

God did not create free people, as even recognized by our founding fathers, so that they would meekly herd themselves inside a corral to be lorded over by a bunch of dirty socialist babysitters.

Count me out.