Billoblog ®

We don’t need a stimulus package.  We just need Democrats to pay their taxes!   No wonder the Dems, particularly those Obama is appointing to cabinet positions, like other people to pay taxes.  They don’t believe in doing it themselves.

H/T Instapundit

Obama has decided to allow the terrorists at GTMO to lawyer up and stop talking.  He has decided to give them all the rights of US citizens.  He criticized Bush for not being willing to talk to terrorists without preconditions.  Bush responded that giving in to people who hate us on a religious basis and whose goal is the destruction of our civilization will not make them like us, but will simply be seen as a sign of weakness and failure.  We *should* have learned that from Munich.

But no.  Obama is the messiah.  He *knows* that Islamic radicals are *just* *like* *us*, and if only we give them what they want, they will behave.  Bush was *silly* to think that playing nicey nicey would just be seen as a sign of weakness.  Hope and Change.

The only question is *how far* down the Munich path Obama is willing to go.  Will, as the Dems seem to wish, Israel be Obama’s Czechoslovakia?  How many dead Jews is Obama willing to swallow, I wonder.  Of course, Israel is no Czechoslovakia, and the US betrayal of her only ally in the Middle East will be accompanied by a massive war before the West allows the next Holocaust.  I wonder which side Obama will be in that debacle.  Well, unfortunately, I don’t wonder at all.  I know.

The most amusing thing is that the secular libs hated Bush because of his conservative Christianity, saying he was hoping for the Apocalypse in spite of his efforts to stop it.  They do not, however, have any problem with Obama’s racist liberal Identity Christianity, and his wide-eyed stumbling towards it.

Of course the Dems will never understand why one leads to the other.  It wouldn’t fit their model of men-should-be-sheep utopia.

It turns out that for every 1 acre of rainforest cut down by evil exploiters, 55 acres grows because of that exploitation. The rainforest is expanding, not contracting.

This has been a repeated pattern in history — once again ignored by liberals who care only about their agenda and nothing about the truth.  When I was a boy in Oklahoma, I noticed that almost all the trees were about the same age.  Why?  Because the grasses of the great tall grass prarie grew so fast that saplings could not shoot up fast enough to compete for light.  When the evil white man came and replaced the tall grass with short grass (wheat) and contained the tall grass (maize) to fields, the trees started growing.  By the time I was a kid, there were hardwood forests all over the place.

When my wife and I were looking for a weekend/retirement place, we found 62 acres in Virginia on a small tidal river.  It is all forest transitioning from southern pine to hardwood.  I noticed that there were a couple of old dirt roads that ran through the area,.  They were reduced to a line of slightly raised dirt slightly more hard-packed than the rest of the land and were completely grown over.  I asked the local USDA extension agent about it.  He told me that this used to be farmed and had been cleared up until the 1940s, but  this area of ravines, wetland, and irregular land was unsuitable for highly mechanized agriculture.  So it was left fallow and grew up as forest. It grew up in pine forest.  Southern pine have a life span of about 60 years;  my land was full of dying old pine waiting for the next hurricane to blow them down, and slightly younger hardwoods straining for the light.

Evil “big agriculture” was creating forest right and left.

Needless to say, this doesn’t change the attitude of the envirofascists one bit. It has never been about the environment.  It has always been about destroying individual liberty.

H/T Instapundit.

… because it worked so well the first time. 

The interesting question is whether these people are like so many Democrats and choose complete and willful ignorance of history and economics, or whether their desire to destroy the free market is such that they consider thowing us into a multigenerational depression a small price to pay.  And, of course, part and parcel of that is destroying one of the few achievements of the Clinton years, welfare reform.  Welfare was an expensive failure in the 70s, but “expensive failure” is what Obama and the Dems view as national success. Who *will* the Dems blame when they have destroyed the productive portion of the US economy, and there are no more evil productive people to fund them?

H/T Daily Pundit

The Obama future.

H/T Norma 

The Democrat’s decision to destroy the economy in order to finance its socialization it reminds me of a similar approach taken by Joseph, related in the book of Genesis.  Joseph, in this story, is one of the sons of Israel who, because of jealousy, is sold into slavery by his brothers.  In Egypt as a slave, he comes into prominence with the Egyptian ruler and eventually becomes a primary advisor.  Joseph knows by means of a dream given to the ruler of Egypt that there will be seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine.  So, he tells the ruler to raise taxes early on, and he lays aside grain.  Then, when the famine hits, the people come to the ruler for relief.  The ruler gives the relief, but at the cost of their liberty:

There was no food, however, in the whole region because the famine was severe; both Egypt and Canaan wasted away because of the famine. Joseph collected all the money that was to be found in Egypt and Canaan in payment for the grain they were buying, and he brought it to Pharaoh’s palace. When the money of the people of Egypt and Canaan was gone, all Egypt came to Joseph and said, “Give us food. Why should we die before your eyes? Our money is used up.”

“Then bring your livestock,” said Joseph. “I will sell you food in exchange for your livestock, since your money is gone.” So they brought their livestock to Joseph, and he gave them food in exchange for their horses, their sheep and goats, their cattle and donkeys. And he brought them through that year with food in exchange for all their livestock.

When that year was over, they came to him the following year and said, “We cannot hide from our lord the fact that since our money is gone and our livestock belongs to you, there is nothing left for our lord except our bodies and our land. Why should we perish before your eyes—we and our land as well? Buy us and our land in exchange for food, and we with our land will be in bondage to Pharaoh. Give us seed so that we may live and not die, and that the land may not become desolate.”

So Joseph bought all the land in Egypt for Pharaoh. The Egyptians, one and all, sold their fields, because the famine was too severe for them. The land became Pharaoh’s, and Joseph reduced the people to servitude, from one end of Egypt to the other. (Genesis 47, NIV)

So it goes in the United States. The new stimulus package clearly has nothing to do with stimulus.  The idiocy of Nancy Pelosi claiming that spending millions on condoms is a “stimulus” was even more than the Obamessiah media could sell with a straight face. The Democrat’s profligacy will not help the economy, but it will accomplish the two goals of the Democratic Party.  The first is that the money will be used to socialize multiple industries and extend the fingers of the government into every nook and cranny of our society.  In order to pay for this, however, they will bankrupt the next five generations of Americans, decreasing the likelihood that we can reverse the slide into servitude.  We can look forward to the economic miracle that is Zimbabwe and the liberty of Cuba.  And, like the Egyptians, we will sell ourselves, and our children to the seventh generation, thoughlessly.  The only big difference is that the crisis for the Egyptians was real, while the Democrats are hyping a false sense of crisis about a problem they cannot solve using their socialization policies, but, as with the Depression, can only make worse.  But, like the environmental “crisis” and the energy “crisis,” the goal is not solution; it is the destruction of individual rights in the name of socialism.

It has been the policy of previous administrations not to allow long-term third party cookies to be dumped on visitors to whitehouse.gov sites.  This basically means that under the Bush administration, once you left the whitehouse.gov site, your further browsing would not be monitored.  The Obama team has decided that traking visitors to whitehouse.gov may not be such a bad thing, and are now allowing persistent third party cookies for YouTube videos.  That means that after visiting whitehouse.gov, your browser will report to the Obama team whenever you visit a web page with an embedded YouTube video.  You do not have to play or open the video.

This is not at this point an attempt to exploit visitors by the Obama team, but is a policy of YouTube, and the team has decided to use YouTube to host its videos.  However, it is a change from previous policies, which did not exempt YouTube from the White House commitment to privacy, and as with all such things, it will eventually be abused.  Be aware that, unlike the previous Republican Administration, the Obama whitehouse.gov site has now established a mechanism and *will* be traking you through YouTube.

It is possible to refuse to accept cookies, but you have to set your browser to do that.

For the first time since its inception 56 years, or 14 inaugurations, ago a President has snubbed the Medal of Honor recipents ball.  Obama decided to tell those heroes who risked all for their country to go f**k themselves in order to honor those he really cares about at the BET (Black Entertainment Television) and RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) events.

Keep it classy, Obama.  Of course, I’m not surprised he decided to snub the heroes of our nation.  They are everything he is not.

We can expect some of this in the US in the next four years as we adopt enlightened leftist ethical viewpoints.  It’s 1938 all over again.

Update:  And it starts.