Michelle Malkin: The Bankrupt Party Of Porkulus
Malkin:
Let there be no doubt: Democrats are the party with two ideas: borrow and spend. The only vigorous internal debate on the left revolves around two questions: How much and how much more?
Even as the first trillion-dollar stimulus craters, the debt-o-crats are floating yet another grand act of generational theft to create the illusion of jumpstarting the economy.
Call it Spawn of Spendulus. Return of the Porkulus Beast. Crap Sandwich Redux. White House economic adviser Laura D'Andrea Tyson told an international economic conference: "We should be planning on a contingency basis for a second round of stimulus."
Team Obama flack Robert Gibbs says the president isn't "ruling anything out, but at the same time he's not ruling anything in." Despite the inconvenient fact that less than 10% of the initial stimulus has been spent (or misspent), congressional Democrats remain "open" to the idea of digging a deeper fiscal hole for your children and grandchildren.
Tags: borrow and spend
Politico: Health care deadline unlikely to be met
Politico:
Health care reform proponents are growing pessimistic that they can meet President Barack Obama's August target for passing a bill – saying the next four weeks must fall together perfectly, without a hitch or a hiccup.
The number of weeks that's happened recently? Zero.
A series of setbacks has made the task of completing floor votes in both chambers virtually insurmountable, given the plodding pace of the Senate. The official line from the White House and the congressional leadership is it's possible, but privately, there are a dwindling number of aides who would put money on it.
Tags: White House
Robert Samuelson: The Consequences of Big Government
Samuelson:
The question that President Obama ought to be asking — that we all should be asking — is this: How big a government do we want? Without anyone much noticing, our national government is on the verge of a permanent expansion that would endure long after the present economic crisis has (presumably) passed and that would exceed anything ever experienced in peacetime. This expansion may not be good for us, but we are not contemplating the adverse consequences or how we might minimize them.
Tags: President Obama
Republican Pat Toomey raises $1.55 million toward Senate race
Pittsburgh Tribune Review:
Republican Senate candidate Pat Toomey has raised $1.55 million since announcing his candidacy in April, according to campaign finance figures he plans to release today.
Toomey, a former congressman from the Lehigh Valley, has about $1.05 million left in the bank. That compares to $1.8 million Sen. Bob Casey had raised by this point in his 2006 race against Rick Santorum, according to Toomey's campaign.
"I'm thrilled at with the response we've gotten here in the first couple months of the campaign," Toomey said. More than 15,000 people contributed to the campaign, he said. "I'm grateful, and I'm thrilled."
Tags: Lehigh Valley, Sen. Bob Casey
Reuters: Swearing can make you feel better, lessen pain
LONDON (Reuters Life!) – Cut your finger? Hurt your leg? Start swearing. It might lessen the pain.
Researchers from the school of psychology at Britain's Keele University have found swearing can make you feel better as it can have a "pain-lessening effect," according to a study published in the journal NeuroReport.
Colleagues Richard Stephens, John Atkins and Andrew Kingston, set out to establish if there was any link between swearing and physical pain.
"Swearing has been around for centuries and is an almost universal human linguistic phenomenon," says Stephens.
"It taps into emotional brain centers and appears to arise in the right brain, whereas most language production occurs in the left cerebral hemisphere of the brain. Our research shows one potential reason why swearing developed and why it persists."
Tags: Britain's Keele University
BCS doesn't need Congress, it just needs one more game: Bill Livingston
Cleveland.com:
CLEVELAND, Ohio — Everybody is unhappy with the Bowl Championship Series these days, including the Republicans, the party that considers government a big buttinski.
"Down the Hatch," as the Wall Street Journal put it, went that philosophy when Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) held a second round of Antitrust Subcommittee hearings these week, designed to paint the BCS leaders as the most class-conscious group since the English wore powdered wigs.
Actually, the BCS has done a decent job. Its mandate was to identify the top two college teams for a national championship game. It has run into resistance because of the rising parity in college football and because of its built-in caste system.
Tags: Bowl Championship Series
Posted in Sports | No Comments »
Debra Saunders on climate change: Faith. Mystery. Promises to engage in pious acts. Global warming is a religion
Saunders:
For its next act, the G8 can part the Red Sea. The worst part is: These are the brainy swells who think of themselves as — all bow — Men of Science.
The funny part is: G8 leaders can't even decide the year from which emissions must be reduced. 1990? 2005? "This question is a mystery for everyone," an aide to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said.
And while President Obama led the charge for the G8 nations to agree to an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in industrial nations by 2050, the same Russian aide dissed the standard as "likely unattainable."
No worries, the language was non-binding. Global-warming believers say that they are all about science, but their emphasis is not on results so much as declarations of belief.
Faith. Mystery. Promises to engage in pious acts. Global warming is a religion. While Obama was in Italy preaching big cuts in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, he was losing some of his flock in Washington. The House may have passed the 1,200-page cap-and-trade bill largely unread, but Senate Democrats are combing the fine print and not liking what they see. As Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., said of the bill, "We need to be a leader in the world but we don't want to be a sucker."
Tags: greenhouse-gas emissions
Opinion: Palin's Resignation
by Christopher D. Berger
UnvarnishedOpinion.com
As most of you reading this are no doubt aware, Sarah Palin has resigned the governorship of Alaska, sparking a media firestorm in the process. The questions that remain are what her continuing political aspirations may be, and whether she has effectively taken herself out of the running for the Republican 2012 presidential nomination.
My analysis begins with why she left in the first place. Being a governor can't be an easy position, much less when you're targeted with a political 'scorched earth' campaign by a party whose political scruples and ethics went out the window with Teddy Kennedy at Chappaquiddick. Her children are the butts of horrifying jokes on syndicated television, her oldest daughter is now an unwed teenage mother herself, and her youngest son has Down's Syndrome. As governor, the state has spent more than $2 million investigating her for a series of specious ethics violations, another of which drops literally every two weeks, and she's accumulated $500,000 in legal bills defending herself against these charges.
She is reviled and despised by so many left-leaning groups it's hard to count them all. (more…)
Tags: 2012, 2016, alaska, obama, palin, president, resignation
Posted in National, Opinion, Editorial, and Analysis | No Comments »
Star: KC to consider stimulus-funded streetcar line
Kansas City is about to dive back into the rail issue, this time with a shorter, less-expensive plan to build a streetcar line with stimulus money.
City Councilman Russ Johnson's office announced Friday that his transportation committee will hear a plan for a streetcar line from Crown Center to the River Market area.
Johnson was out of town and couldn't be reached for comment about the 2½-mile route, which will be detailed Thursday morning by planners from the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority.
Tags: Kansas City Area Transportation Authority
Posted in Johnson County | No Comments »
The Star: Bob Dole to get skin graft surgery Monday
The Star.
Forbes: Baseball's Most Overpaid Players
Is Derek Jeter an All Star? Absolutely. Is he overpaid? You better believe it. With a batting average above .300 and an on-base percentage pushing .400, Jeter definitely earned his slot at Tuesday's game, but with a salary of $21.6 million, he's also pro baseball's most overpaid player by a wide margin.
Consider: The average 2009 salary for a starting shortstop in the American League is $2.7 million. The second highest paid after Jeter, Oakland's Orlando Cabrera, makes $4 million. That Jeter rakes in eight times what an average starting shortstop does, while putting up only marginally better numbers, is the biggest disparity between a player and his positional peers in major league baseball. Intangibles like leadership qualities, a big part of Jeter's popularity, are fine, but it's tough to argue they should push a players' salary off the charts.
Tags: Derek Jeter
TIME: Can Community Colleges Save the U.S. Economy?
Many politicians and their well-heeled constituents may be under the impression that a community college – as described in a promo for NBC's upcoming comedy Community – is a "loser college for remedial teens, 20-something dropouts, middle-aged divorcées and old people keeping their minds active as they circle the drain of eternity." But there's at least one Ivy Leaguer who is trying to help Americans get past the stereotypes and start thinking about community college not as a dumping ground but as one of the best tools the U.S. has to dig itself out of the current economic hole. His name: Barack Obama.
Posted in Education | No Comments »
McClatchy: California Sen. Boxer says without Democrat climate bill, will be "droughts, floods, fires, loss of species, damage to agriculture, worsening air pollution and more"
McClatchy:
WASHINGTON – If the Senate doesn't pass a bill to cut global warming, Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer says, there will be dire results: droughts, floods, fires, loss of species, damage to agriculture, worsening air pollution and more.
She says there's a huge upside, however, if the Senate does act: millions of clean-energy jobs, reduced reliance on foreign oil and less pollution for the nation's children.
Boxer is engaged in her biggest sales job ever. The stakes couldn't be higher as she faces one of the toughest high-profile acts of her lengthy career: getting Congress to sign off on historic legislation to lower greenhouse-gas emissions.
Jack Cashill: Governor Schwarzenegger, Rape is Rape
Cashill column:
A female sailor, 18 years-old, leaves her ship in the East Bay and takes the BART into San Francisco. She meets up with a friend, and they go to the Palladium, a co-ed dance club for the under-25 set.
Like many sailors before her, male and female, this one has had too much to drink. She has gotten separated from her friend so she sits at a table by herself and watches the dancers.
An older gentleman, mid-50s with a charming Spanish accent, sits down at the same table. He is with two women. They leave, and he sidles over next to her.
The man's interest in her seems entirely fatherly. And she, away from home for the first time, naïve and a little lonely, welcomes his conversation.
She checks her watch. Realizing the last BART will soon be heading back, she excuses herself to leave. He tells her that he is driving out that way and would be happy to drop her off. Trusting, and still a little drunk, she accepts. (more…)
Kansas school boards association targets backers of school supplies tax breaks — Kansas Liberty
Liberty:
Most Kansans want to do what they can to help poor families educate their children, and legislators do their best to try to find a way to ease the burden.
So when the Kansas Association of School Boards joined with the Kansas chapter of the National Education Association, the state's teachers' union, to block a bill giving tax breaks for a limited period of time to families who had to purchaseschool supplies for their kids, the lawmaker who proposed the break was "surprised" and amazed."
Tags: Kansas Association of School Boards
Posted in Education, Local and Regional | No Comments »
Politico: More Democrats call for investigating the CIA
Politico:Calls for an investigation into the Central Intelligence Agency intensified this weekend amid revelations that former Vice President Dick Cheney ordered the concealment of a covert agency spy program from Congress.
Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said that the Senate Intelligence Committee should "absolutely" investigate the program.
"The executive branch of government should not create programs like these programs and keep Congress in the dark," Durbin said on ABC's "This Week". "To have a massive program that was concealed from the leaders in Congress is not only inappropriate, it could be illegal."
Tags: Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin
Woman admits staging sex assault in bid to get bigger payout on harassment suit: The Star
The Star:
A Kansas woman Friday admitted in federal court that she and another woman staged a sexual assault in hopes of getting a bigger payout in a sexual harassment lawsuit.
Julie R. Bernet, 40, of Bucyrus, Kan., pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Bernet acknowledged that she and Lindsey D. Crawford, 23, had hoped to convince police that the assault at Crawford's Waldo area garage was in retaliation for a harassment lawsuit that they had filed against an automobile dealership where both formerly worked.
Crawford, 23, pleaded guilty last week to a conspiracy count. Another defendant, Gordon F. Reabe Jr., 51, of Lee's Summit, could go to trial in August.