GSA chief resigns amid reports of excessive spending

The chief of the General Services Administration resigned, two of her top deputies were fired and four managers were placed on leave Monday amid reports of lavish spending at a conference off the Las Vegas Strip that featured a clown, a mind reader and a $31,208 reception.

Administrator Martha N. Johnson, in her resignation letter, acknowledged a “significant misstep” at the agency that manages real estate for the federal government. “Taxpayer dollars were squandered,” she wrote. At the start of her tenure in February 2010 she called ethics “a big issue for me.”

…and this from the agency that is supposedly the watchdog to prevent inappropriate use of government funds and resources. Yeah. Right. (Refer again to the Latin tag.)

Visualizing this “conference” brings to mind part of the trailer I saw for the current film The Death Games.

The 90-year-old Alameda preacher who convinced hundreds of followers that the world was going to end last May now acknowledges he was wrong.

“Events in the last year have proved that no man can be fully trusted,” Harold Camping wrote in a letter Thursday to listeners of his evangelical Family Radio program. “Even the most zealous of us can be mistaken.”

Camping went on to state:
“We have learned the very painful lesson that all of creation is in God’s hands and he will end time in his time, not ours!
Maybe he should have read his Bible a bit more…in Matthew 24 Jesus Christ talks at some length of future dire apocalyptic events, but in v.39 warns us “But of the day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.”
Seems pretty simple and clear to me.

Subject: Irony

The food stamp program, part of the Department of Agriculture, is pleased to be distributing the greatest amount of food stamps ever.

Meanwhile, the Park Service, also part of the Department of Agriculture, asks us to “please do not feed the animals” because the animals may grow dependent and not learn to take care of themselves.

This is just too obvious!

An effort to free whales from SeaWorld by claiming they were enslaved made a splash in the news but flopped in court Wednesday….A federal judge in San Diego dismissed an unprecedented lawsuit seeking to grant constitutional protection against slavery to a group of orcas that perform at SeaWorld parks, saying the 13th amendment applies only to humans.

What? What sort of logic did he use that was apparently something that PETA was/is unable to comprehend.

“As ‘slavery’ and ‘involuntary servitude’ are uniquely human activities, as those terms have been historically and contemporaneously applied, there is simply no basis to construe the Thirteenth Amendment as applying to non-humans,” Miller wrote in his ruling.

A big “DUH!” for PETA.

Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995

The bullet point highlights:
* Data for vital ‘hockey stick graph’ has gone missing
* There has been no global warming since 1995
* Warming periods have happened before – but NOT due to man-made changes

The academic at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble ‘keeping track’ of the information.

Dr. P.J. should note that it’s easier to do this when telling the truth…that way one only has to remember the ACTUAL facts, not the always more complex web of phony “facts”.

Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers.

This must be the upper academic version of the traditional “My dog ate my homework!” excuse

Professor Jones told the BBC yesterday there was truth in the observations of colleagues that he lacked organisational skills, that his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’.

But…he can pull together “data”, supposedly going back thousands of years in some cases, and use it to project global climate patterns for hundreds of years into the future…but we can’t accurately predict climatic conditions for this year or the next.

The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory.

The Glowbull Warmists need to use that hockey stick to make like a goalie and “Get the puck out!”

Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.

Wonder what his first clue was…no doubt the discovery that medieval times was deficient in SUV’s.

And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

This gives a whole new perspective on the term “junk science”!.
Of course the boneheads in the Baraq Hussein administration are still genuflecting at the Great Gaean Altar, and proclaiming their determination to pursue “cap and tax” by hook or by crook.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid took his GOP-blasting rhetoric to a new level Monday, comparing Republicans who oppose health care reform to lawmakers who clung to the institution of slavery more than a century ago….

Senate Republicans on Monday called Reid’s comments “offensive” and “unbelievable.”

But Reid argued that Republicans are using the same stalling tactics employed in the pre-Civil War era.

“Instead of joining us on the right side of history, all the Republicans can come up with is, ‘slow down, stop everything, let’s start over.’ If you think you’ve heard these same excuses before, you’re right,” Reid said Monday. “When this country belatedly recognized the wrongs of slavery, there were those who dug in their heels and said ‘slow down, it’s too early, things aren’t bad enough.'”

There were some who said these things – Abraham Lincoln was one. He plainly and repeatedly spoke against the institution of slavery before the Civil War, and unashamedly based his view on the principles of the Declaration of Independence, that under the “Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” slavery was demonstrably evil. Lincoln’s goals were (1) preserving the right of free elections, (2) preserving the Union, and (3) pacing slavery in the course of ultimate extinction. In spite of this, in his first inaugural he stated “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” He based this statement on the lack of any Constitutional provision that gave the federal government the right to intervene, without a Consititutional amendment, in the internal order of the states. Was President Lincoln then, one of those condemned by Mr. Reid? One would logically conclude that this is the case, especially as Lincoln’s stance was based on the trivial (to modern as well as to antebellum Democrats) matter of Constitutional limits to federal power. The REAL opponents of limiting slavery in the day were…the Democrats.

He continued: “When women spoke up for the right to speak up, they wanted to vote, some insisted they simply, slow down, there will be a better day to do that, today isn’t quite right.

Of course many of those who said that themselves were women, even some of the founding activists of the women’s suffrage movement. Their stand wasn’t due to opposition, but due to their recognition that from where they were, it would take a long process of education and involvement to change political and social conditions. What finally tipped the scale was the recognition of the siginificant contributions of women workers in the efforts of war production during WW-I. Political opposition prior to this time was pretty much across the board…members of both parties were largely opposed to suffrage on a national level until after the war. Curiously, Utah, and Wyoming Territories were both early adopters…but were forced by Congress to cancel women’s suffrage as conditions to gain admission to the Union!

“When this body was on the verge of guaranteeing equal civil rights to everyone regardless of the color of their skin, some senators resorted to the same filibuster threats that we hear today.”

Yep!  Sure did happen.   Southern Democrats (again).  The Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1964 could only be passed by the Democratic congresses of the day due to Republican support to overcome the Democrat “Solid South”.

To turn Reid’s rhetorical strategy back on him, one COULD note that Mussolini’s Italy, The Third Reich, and the USSR used “single payer” type government health care as a wedge to inject the state into all aspects of the people’s lives.

Of course Reid, Pelosi, and the libs today have no such motives…do they?

White House Communications Director Anita Dunn told high school students in May 2009 that one of her favorite political philosophers was Mao Tse Tung, the Communist dictator responsible for the death of millions of people, and she explained why his philosophy was important for achieving personal and political goals.

When questioned last week after a video of her speech surfaced, however, Dunn said she was using “irony” in reference to Mao. A leading expert on China told CNSNews.com that Dunn’s remarks were “pathetic,” given the human rights atrocities committed under Mao’s reign.

Yeah – Mao is cool.  Never mind about those 65,000,000 dead people…they were only Chinese, anyway.

According to the MSM this is nothing worth commenting on.  Could you imagine their outcry if a Republican said something like this about Hitler?

These people in the White House are truly bereft of reason.

…er…not quite, unfortunately.

Democrats are trying yet another name change in their quest to cripple the American economy with greenhouse gas regulations.

Sen. John Kerry announced last week that the Senate climate bill due out this week will be a “pollution reduction” bill not a “cap-and-trade” bill. According to E&E Daily, Kerry said,

SHAZAM! Call it something different, and hope the rubes step up to the table for another try at finding what cup the bean is hidden under:

So the Democrats have gone from “global warming” to “climate change” to “clean energy” because the public doesn’t buy what they’re selling. Now they’re jettisoning “cap-and-trade” hoping that some other name will stick to the wall.

While Democrats can call economically disastrous carbon caps whatever they want, they can’t buff the cap-and-trade turd or any other carbon cap regime into a public policy popsicle.

Reminds once again that there were good reasons Kerry didn’t get elected to the White House.

Vice President Joe Biden told people attending an AARP town hall meeting that unless the Democrat-supported health care plan becomes law the nation will go bankrupt and that the only way to avoid that fate is for the government to spend more money….

“We’re going to go bankrupt as a nation,” Biden said.

“Now, people when I say that look at me and say, ‘What are you talking about, Joe? You’re telling me we have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt?’” Biden said. “The answer is yes, that’s what I’m telling you.”

The VEEP’s mind is certainly not troubled by the presence of logic and reason.

Even for the B.O. administration, at first this looked like a joke…but sadly, it’s not.

President Obama’s science advisor John Holdren has suggested that we consider blotting out sunlight to reduce global warming, according to an Associated Press report.

Holdren would shoot particles into the atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays back into space– I sure hope plants and people don’t need those rays for say, photosynthesis or vitamin D production, respectively. And what would be the other unintended consequences?

What IF this really was done, and really screwed things up…how would they undo it? Remember all the concern about a possible “nuclear winter”? This is exactly the same thing…(supposedly) without the war. You don’t want to imagine the results….worse than Bismarck, ND in January!

Holdren, of course, is a people-hating population control fanatic, anyway, so perhaps he’s hoping to killing two birds (or half the population) with one stone.

Oh… and what about all those solar power projects Obama keeps talking about? Don’t they need as much sunlight as they can get?

So many questions, so few brain cells for Holdren to work with.

The arrogant hubris here is breathtaking.