clipped from www.townhall.com

D'OH-bama's Mortgage Industry Mess

If you're going to promise "new politics," it would probably be wise to eschew the same old Beltway cronies and insiders who have served presidential nominees of yore.

And if you're going to attack political opponents for playing "textbook Washington games," it would probably be best not to play them yourself. If you do, you'll end up tongue-tied in front of the cameras, hung by your own holier-than-thou rhetoric and faced once again with the decision to throw another bad choice under the bus.

Yes, Barack Obama, we're talking about you. Again. It's getting mighty crowded under that bus, isn't it?

Last week, D'Oh-bama announced the appointment of D.C. denizens Jim Johnson and Eric Holder to head his veep search committee -- along with a Kennedy (Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg) thrown in for glamorous good measure. John McCain supporters rightly jumped on Johnson and Holder as shady Washington operators.

behind the #'s

"It wasn't Bush, it wasn't greedy corporations, or free trade, or
history's most over-predicted recession. It was not the oil companies,
income inequality, or the excesses of cowboy capitalism. None of these
things caused the unemployment rate to jump a half a percentage point in
one month. Ask yourself a few questions: Why did unemployment surge at a
time when unemployment compensation claims are historically low? More to the
point, how could unemployment spike this much without a coinciding spike in
corporate lay-offs? The answer to all of these questions is same: because
very few people lost jobs last month. This huge jump in the size of the
unemployed comes from new entrants to the economy---hundreds of thousands
of them. In short, well over 600,000 people who were not job seekers in
April became job seekers in May. And who starts looking for work at the
end of Spring? That's right---students. Hundreds of thousands of students
are looking for work right now, and they're not finding it. Congress is to
blame. Last year Congressional Democrats (along with some Stockholm-Syndromed
Republicans) passed the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007, which started a phased
hike of the minimum wage from $5.15 an hour to $7.25. Free market economists
warned them that this would increase unemployment---that rapid increases
in unemployment compensation hit teens and minorities the hardest. But the
class-warriors are running the people's house now, and they would hear none
of that, so they took to the floor, let loose the dogs of demagoguery, and
saddled America's pizza parlors, municipal swimming pools, house painting
businesses and lawn mowing services with a huge cost increase. Now, we see
the perfectly logical outcome of wage controls---rising unemployment among
the most economically vulnerable." ---Jerry Bowyer

Love the Noonan!

clipped from www.nypost.com

SHE STILL THINKS IT'S ABOUT HER

Washington -She was as gracious as she could be. I mean that literally. It was the closest she could come to grace. It was all about her – I, me, me, I – and not about the man who needs her support. When she referred to Obama it was all poker-face and passive-voice.

When Mrs. Clinton speaks and wants you to believe she means something she gestures with her hands and arms, and attempts inflection.

But here, in praising the presumptive Democratic nominee, she used the same voice she had used on the trail to attack him. When she got to the parts of the speech in which she endorsed Obama, she seemed to be making a point of reading.

She lowered her eyes to the text and read with a comparatively flattened voice, and with little expression.

When she spoke of her own campaign, her own "challenges", her own supporters – there her voice warmed

Congress Fiddled With Warming While Earth Cooled

clipped from www.americanthinker.com

Last week Democrats tried to kill the economy in the name of a solving a problem that doesn't exist. Republicans should hang this bill around their necks in every district where an incumbent voted for the woefully misnamed and deservedly DOA Climate Security Act, technically S.3036.

Asking Americans to pony up even more at the pump with already record gasoline prices creeping higher almost daily seems offensive enough. But compelling such burden under the guise of moral imperative to curb global warming at a time when the planet is actually cooling rings downright obscene.

And that’s why last week’s cavalcade of Senators opposing the Act -- which would have directed the EPA to decrease emissions of greenhouse gases -- entirely on economic grounds was so confounding.

Don't get me wrong -- the fiscal arguments against the bill's draconian business regulations were inexorable -- its massive consequent spike in energy costs would be nothing short of ruinous to the nation

clipped from www.theonion.com

Ünited Stätes Toughens Image With Umlauts

April 30, 1997 | Issue 31•16

WASHINGTON, DC—In a move designed to make the United States seem more "bad-assed and scary in a quasi-heavy-metal manner," Congress officially changed the nation's name to the Ünited Stätes of Ämerica Monday. "Much like Mötley Crüe and Motörhead, the Ünited Stätes is not to be messed with," said Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK). An upcoming redesign of the Ämerican flag will feature the new name in burnished silver wrought in a jagged, gothic font and bolted to a black background. A new national anthem is also in the works by composer Glenn Danzig, tentatively titled "Howl Of The She-Demon."