Politico has a fun list of some of the allegedly “unprecedented” things that Obama has claimed for his administration. Fairly amusing…
Samples :
The White House’s announcement of its unprecedented — “a first by an American president visiting China” — town hall meeting with students in Beijing, for instance, drew a collective eye roll in certain circles back home, namely among former aides to President George W. Bush, who had already been grumbling about Obama’s carefree application of “unprecedented.”
“I think I attended a town hall with President Bush in China,” former Bush adviser Karen Hughes quipped with a laugh, recalling a 2002 Bush speech in Beijing at which he took questions from the audience. “I thought: Were they asleep? Or were they dreaming? I remember standing and watching President Bush engage in a town hall that I believe was televised.”
President Bill Clinton also took questions from Chinese students at an event during a trip to the country in 1998, then did a radio call-in show in Shanghai the next day.
The White House’s characterization of Obama’s Beijing town hall mirrored the description staff gave Obama’s address to students on the first day of school, which the Education Department called “historic.” Yet President George H.W. Bush delivered an address to students, as did President Ronald Reagan. Maybe it was the streaming online video of Obama’s speech to students that was unprecedented?
I fun video for those “clued in” to this huge scandal. (When last I checked, the big Tee Vee networks were not broadcasting it. Sigh. CBS at least reported it online, so look there.)
A hacker-or possibly a disillusioned insider-has gathered thousands of e-mails and data from the CRU and made them available on the Web. Officials at the CRU have verified the breach of their system and acknowledged that the e-mails appear to be genuine.
Yes, this is a theft of data-but the purpose of the theft was to blow the whistle on a much bigger, more brazen crime. The CRU has already called in the police to investigate the hacker. But now someone needs to call in the cops to investigate the CRU.
Australian journalist Andrew Bolt has a good overview of the story, with a selection of incriminating e-mails that have already been discovered in the hacked data. Note that these e-mails reveal more than just what it going on at the CRU, since they involve numerous leading British and American climate scientists outside of the CRU.
These e-mails show, among many other things, private admissions of doubt or scientific weakness in the global warming theory. In acknowledging that global temperatures have actually declined for the past decade, one scientist asks, “where the heck is global warming?… The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.” They still can’t account for it; see a new article in Der Spiegel: “Climatologists Baffled by Global Warming Time-Out.” I don’t know where these people got their scientific education, but where I come from, if your theory can’t predict or explain the observed facts, it’s wrong.
Yesterday, I linked the story about Michelle Obama’s toxic garden… and the very next day I see a story in the Times of London, that says that the Obamas will be serving the toxic veggies at a State dinner. I can’t believe that many people still can’t see that the Obama Administration is an endless fount of comedy…
When First Lady Michelle Obama planted an organic vegetable garden on the White House lawn in March 2009, she hoped to both set an example of healthy eating and to grow tasty edibles for her daughters and husband. But Michelle’s organic dream has been dashed by a nasty toxic legacy lurking in the soils of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It turns out that a previous Presidential gardening team had used sewage sludge for fertilizer.
This is a fairly common practice with one huge problem. Sewage sludge tends to be laced with anything that people pour down the drain and often contains heavy metals. Not surprisingly, the National Park Service tested the dirt beneath Michelle’s garden and found the plot has highly elevated levels of lead averaging 93 parts per million. That’s below the 400 ppm that the Environmental Protection Agency says is a threat to human health. But I’d wager that Sasha, Malia and Barack won’t be getting arugula or tomatoes from this garden any time soon. – More
Kinda ironic that decades of a “green” practice are mucking up Obama’s current bit of symbolic gesture…
A recently released music video for “Popular Demand” by the Clipsefeatured the awning of the infamous Obama Fried Chicken joint in Brownsville, Brooklyn. But in comparing versions of the video airing on MTV and elsewhere, it looks like the TV channel completely erased the restaurant’s name from the awning in the video’s opening shot.” – more
Back when I lived a in “The City,” I seem to recall the local booksellers proudly proclaiming that they would stock “unpopular” and “controversial” books, as a matter of principle. I guess this no longer applies. Sample quote :
“Our customers are thinking people,” said Nathan Embretson, a bookseller at Pendragon Books in Oakland. “They’re not into reading drivel.”
There’s not a single copy on the shelf. Embretson said no one has asked for it except for one guy, who was kidding.
“He said he wanted to look at it but he also said he didn’t really want to read it,” Embretson said. “Anyway, he certainly didn’t want to buy it. I think he regarded looking at it as a kind of punishment.”
The idea that the mark of a “thinking person” is closing one’s mind to the Other weirds me out. It should weird you out, too. (BTW, Pendragon Books lists a full selection of non-drivel Harlequin Romances, for all you thinkin’ fellers out there.)
The Illinois Policy Institute concluded that “taxpayers are in essence funding a study that will likely call for even higher taxes on the products we consume every day. This isn’t change we can believe in.” And the Club for Growth’s Andy Roth tells Whispers, “The stimulus-financed study about fat taxes proves that the fat cats in Washington show no restraint when it comes to spending our hard-earned tax dollars. Is there any project that would fail to meet Congress’s unbelievably low standards? I doubt it.”
After the House adopted the Pelosi Plan for ObamaCare with the Stupak amendment barring any federal funds for abortion coverage, Democrats attempted to assuage pro-abortion advocates by committing to changing the language in conference committee. Even the White House got in on the act, with David Axelrod promising that Bart Stupak’s language would be “adjusted” before any bill came to the Oval Office. Today on Fox News, Stupak threatened to kill the bill entirely if Democrats “adjusted” his amendment — and took a shot at David Axelrod as well:
Hydar Blog, v2.0 