On March 30, 2008, at a townhall meeting in Johnstown, PA, Barck Obama made the following statement:

“When it comes specifically to HIV/AIDS, the most important prevention is education, which should include — which should include abstinence education and teaching the children — teaching children, you know, that sex is not something casual. But it should also include — it should also include other, you know, information about contraception because, look, I’ve got two daughters. 9 years old and 6 years old. I am going to teach them first of all about values and morals. But if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby. I don’t want them punished with an STD at the age of 16. You know, so it doesn’t make sense to not give them information.”

At the time I wrote about the callousness Barack Obama had towards a life and how there was a difference between “punishment” and “consequences” of our actions and decisions.

Since the Saddleback Civil Forum, Barack Obama has had to reexplain his position on abortion, especially late term abortion. Since Saturday, I’ve counted at least 3 different explanations for Barack’s inability to support a bill in the Illinois legislature that would require doctors to provide medical care for babies who survived abortions. At different times I have heard:

• The bill didn’t have the federal language that preempted this from impacting existing abortion law (it did)
• His committee didn’t have time to act on it (they did and passed it out of his committee unanimously)
• It was unnecessary as IL law already covered the issue (so why did other legislators pass it overwhelmingly?)

The Obama campaign has continued to try to obfuscate the issue, dancing from one excuse to the other.   All along Obama has claimed “as he has repeatedly said” that the claim that he supports infanticide is a lie and ridiculous to even consider.

Um, yeah.

I can’t vouch for this audio clip but it has been placed on Redstate and if it passes their muster, it works here.   Here is Barack Obama on the Illinois floor explaining why he is against the bill:

In the audio Obama claims that having two doctors help the baby after a botched abortion would be a “BURDEN!”

When Obama made his March comment about “punishment” his sycophants (of which a couple chimed in on my post) tried to argue that he wasn’t talking about the baby as punishment but the subsequent effort to raise and provide for it. Nice Try!

Anyone, subsequent to the corroboration of this audio, who wants to argue that Barack Obama does not advocate the most self centered, arrogant positions on the issue of infant life may as well be arguing that the Bigfoot recently “discovered” wasn’t really a rubber gorilla suit but a uniquely mummified specimen.

If this audio is corroborated, Obama is toast. In fact, if this audio is corroborated, keep a close eye on the Democrats convention. With my apologies to Mad Max:

Two Dems enter, One Dem leaves. Two Dems enter, One Dem leaves.

Be careful as to who you assume will be the one leaving!

H/T Erick

It’s been a while since I added anybody, so I may as well add somebody I should have a long time ago – RightwingSparkle.

I never really understood how people who were at opposite ends of the beauty scale, could ever find themselves as a “couple.”   With the exception of my marriage to Mrs. Shoe which was of course, due to the fact that she felt an obligation to  man kind and sacrificed herself so that other women could live without fear of me stalking them, I never saw why attractive women would marry schlubs of a husband.  

Now however, through the wonders of modern science, we have the answer.   The results of two new studies:

The Pill may put you off smell of your man and ruin your relationship

with

Beer goggles really do work, new research suggests
 
suddenly provides all the information you need to understand even the most extreme of relationships.

Julia Roberts with Lyle Lovett used to really bother me. I’m looking forward to my first good night’s sleep in about 15 years!

And what was Silent E doing on his last night in charge?

You’ve probably heard about the Burger King employee in Xenia, Ohio who took a bath in the restaurant’s washing sink. He filmed the event to be used for a viral video. You may also have heard that he and other employees who watched this event have been fired.

What you may not have heard is that the bather refers to himself as “Mr. Unstable” and he insists that the Burger King where he bathed is a “totally a safe place to eat.”

I believe him!

What I’m trying to figure out is how it could have been a safe place to eat while he was working there?

The Pill may put you off smell of your man and ruin your relationship

According to this article, women who are on the pill get their olfactory scrambled. The result is that they don’t follow nature’s preprogramming for choosing a mate that is genetically compatible. Instead they pick “Mr. Wrong.”

We’ll have to await the (if ever taken) paternity test. However, it would appear Rielle Hunter can’t even blame her “bad choice” on drugs!

In 2002, well known leftest whacko, Harry Belafonte, accused Colin Powell  of being a house slave as he pushed the Bush administration’s policies regarding Iraq.   In an interview, Belafonte said:

“There’s an old saying,” Belafonte said in that interview. “In the days of slavery, there were those slaves who lived on the plantation and there were those slaves that lived in the house. You got the privilege of living in the house if you served the master … exactly the way the master intended to have you serve him.”

Belafonte refused to apologize or adjust his position during an interview with Larry King.

Now comes the story that Colin Powell may endorse Barack Obama and explain his endorsement at a speech during the DNC convention:

Sources say former Secretary of State Colin Powell will endorse Barack Obama at the Democratic National Convention, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol told FOX News exclusively on Wednesday.

"He may well give a speech at the Democratic convention explaining his endorsement of Obama," Kristol, a FOX News contributor, said, citing inside sources.

If you’re African American and don’t toe the leftist line you’re labeled an “Uncle Tom.” Would Belafonte now call Powell “Spartacus?”
What are the odds on a Belafonte apology if Powell does endorse Obama?

This is the Emergency Blogging System. It has been activated because the head Moron’s passed out on a lake in Minnesota on vacation.

Drinking Right is tonight; usual time (7 pm), usual place (Papa’s Social Club, 7718 W Burleigh in Milwaukee). Steve wants to come back to news of a new attendance record, and since he won’t be there, that means you should be.

This concludes this message from the Emergency Blogging System.

Huh, a company that is more successful when gas companies are successful doesn’t want to run ads that says we should use less gas….go figure!

Obama’s ‘Gas Pump TV’ ads pre-empted

“Once again, the oil companies and their friends are standing with Sen. McCain, the candidate for president who is proposing to offer them a $4 billion tax cut,” said Mark Bubriski, communications director for the Obama campaign in Florida. “It looks like Gas Station TV doesn’t want the American people to know about Sen. Obama’s plan to offer working families a $1,000 energy rebate that would be funded by a tax on oil company profits.

“The oil companies have taken sides in this race, and they are standing with John McCain, because they know he’s been in Washington for 26 years and can be counted on to pursue for another four years of the Bush energy policy that’s made them billions of dollars.”

The article goes on to debate whether the company and the campaign had earlier come to an agreement or not…it’s really moot.

If the company had agreed to run the ad, they were just plain stupid. Obama asking to run the ad, well that’s even stupider! Maybe they could get Pfizer to run an ad telling people that they are paying too much for drugs. Maybe the Obama campaign could get Wells Fargo to run ads saying that home mortgages are coercive contracts set up to drain you of all your wealth!

In the world of Barack, all change that tells you capitalism is evil, is good change. When someone objects to blindly apeing Barack’s call for change, well then they are “puppets”, unless the Obama campaign can find a way to paint them as a racist.

This is the Emergency Blogging System. Please enjoy the writings of Shoebox and the guest-bloggers (Aaron, Fred, Leslie, Patrick, and silent E). Steve will return on 8/15, so try not to leave too much of a mess.

That is all.

I noticed this evening that a lot of the sites I have in my feed reader, like Hot Air and Townhall’s main blog (as well as the user blogs, including my little corner hole in the wall) have suddenly popped up with “Unable to load site – Operation Aborted” errors. That’s very annoying as both my feed readers use the IE API to open up websites that offer limited feeds. After a bit of searching, I found out that Microsoft threw up Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1.

There’s some good news and some bad news:

– It gets rid of the “Operation Aborted” errors that have plagued the last few versions of IE.
– A LOT of sites are going to look ugly in IE8. A very-quick example is Haloscan; the Gravatars pop outside the pop-up box.
– However, there’s good news; we can choose to emulate IE7’s look.

Normally, I wouldn’t recommend a beta. However, if you do run into the “Operation Aborted” problem and cannot for whatever reason completely supplant IE with Firefox, get it and activate the IE7 emulation.

Revisions/extensions (7:42 am 8/2/2008) – The Lizards tracked the trigger of Microsoft’s IE 5.5-7 (inclusive) fuck-up to a fuck-up by Sitemeter. Boy am I glad I dumped those bastiches.

R&E part 2 (10:14 am 8/2/2008) – IE8(B1) doesn’t quite squash the underlying bug, as Sitemeter’s site doesn’t render properly due to it. It does, however, ignore it if a third-party site causes the glitch.

Tonight – Smog ‘n Blog (‘n Grog), Nice Ash, 327 W. Main in Waukesha, 8 pm. Do note the time and location change. I won’t be there long as I don’t participate in the Smog portion, but Nice Ash does have a bar, so I’ll be there.

Thursday – John McCain townhall meeting, Racine Civic Centre Memorial Hall, 5 Fifth St., Racine, 10 am. I wonder if they have wi-fi.

In an interview with Kerrang! radio, former Apollo astronaut and one of the few earthlings to have walked on the moon, Dr. Edgar Mitchell, said that aliens had visited earth and that soon, the details of these visits would be known.

And he says extra-terrestrials have visited Earth on several occasions – but the alien contact has been repeatedly covered up by governments for six decades.

Dr Mitchell, 77, said during a radio interview that sources at the space agency who had had contact with aliens described the beings as ‘little people who look strange to us.’

Later in the interview, Dr. Mitchell made an ominous observation about our ability as a race to defend ourselves:

Chillingly, he claimed our technology is “not nearly as sophisticated” as theirs and “had they been hostile”, he warned “we would be been gone by now”.

Upon hearing Dr. Mitchell’s description that the aliens had “the traditional image of a small frame, large eyes and head,” Barack Obama said “I mean think about it, they’re tiny beings. They don’t pose a serious threat to Earth!” Which he quickly followed by saying, “Even so, upon their arrival, I will meet with them without preconditions.”

So rapper Nas has collected over 600,000 signatures on a petition saying that FOX news is racist and not fair to Obama.

Nas’ evidence of Fox’s racism is Bill O’Reilly defending negative comments about Michelle Obama by saying “I don’t want to go on a lynching party against Michelle Obama unless there is evidence.” Also put into evidence was O’Reilly referring to Michelle Obama as “Barack’s baby mama.”

Um, 0 for 2 NAS.

In the first instance, any thinking and hearing person knows that O’Reilly’s words were in defense of Michelle Obama. I’m not even sure that his words were an unfortunate choice, as the phrase “lynching party” was not one that only applied to African Americans…does anyone remember how cattle rustlers were dealt with?

In the second, Michelle Obama was the one that got this issue started. The following clip is from Michelle’s infamous introduction of Barack.

O’Reilly and Michelle Malkin merely picking up on a turn of phrase that Michelle used. If it was racist for O’Reilly, why wasn’t it for Michelle Obama?

Finally, Yup, it took me all of 30 seconds to grab the first “song” I could find and grab Nas’ lyrics. If you want to read disrespect to women, which is what Nas seemed to be all hopped up about, just look below the fold…I refuse to show these without a warning that they are offensive!
(more…)

I can’t sleep, so I may as well let this (relatively-) small Scramble fly…

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZiDME3bajU[/youtube]

• Jim Geraghty found the official Palestinian artist of the Obama campaign. Let’s play, “What doesn’t belong?”
• Before we play that, however, Sister Toldjah is running a caption contest on the photo Jim linked to. While you’re there, she could use some prayers.
• Bridget Johnson declares Barack Obama “no Henry Kissinger”. Cyrus Roberts Vance is more like it.
• Professor Stephen Bainbridge begins the education of the future entrepeneurs who for unfathomable reasons support Obama.
• More Geraghty – he found an Obama quote that would have made the presstitutes all looney had President Bush said it.
• Rich Horton dug up a speech Obama would have given in 1948 had he been around 60 years earlier.
• Dad29 notes the Afghan “surge” that Obama and John McCain are calling for is already happening, and has in all likelyhood been planned since at least the beginning of this year.
• Amanda Carpenter is shocked, SHOCKED that the party of higher gas taxes is refusing to pay gas tax on its fleet of convention vehicles.
• Slublog notes that they’re also getting Denver-taxpayer-paid car washes.
• Bill Quick corrects NBC “News”‘ David Gregory’s definition of a “revolution” in the TV “news” business.
• William Teach calls Vanity Fair out on strikes for trying to ape its downstairs neighbor.
• Alan Steinberg praises the “weaponization” of space. Without items like GPS, weather satellites, and communications satellites, we would still be conducting war like we did in World War II, with the attendant increased civilian and military casualties.
• Matt Moon continues to explore netroots versus grassroots.
• Deb Jordahl explores why Madison is no longer the “Camelot of the Midwest”. I guess liberal paradises are self-collapsing.
• Peter found Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac continuing to prop up the race-hustle of the Reverend Jesse Jackson even as they lobbied for a taxpayer bailout.
• Michelle Malkin notes pro-Mexican invasion Wachovia posted a massive loss. Shamnesty – not just for ruining political parties anymore.
• Mary Lazich sounds the clarion call on the exploding Wisconsin debt service. Guess raiding all those funds and putting IOUs in their place does have consequences after all.
• Dave in Texas lists Venezuela’s Sovi…er, Russian shopping list. Don’t miss the quote from “Dr. Strangelove”.
• Genghis exposes the next step in the ‘Rat Gas Price Hike Scheme – more welfare in the form of gas stamps.
• Sean Hackbarth is still looking for some underwriting of his trip to St. Paul at the beginning of September. I’ve chipped in; have you?

I’ll probably go to the mailbag for another edition of Ask Egg sometime today, when it’s just the effects of Claritin-D affecting me and not that plus sleeplessness.

Katie Favazza, the managing editor of Townhall Magazine, has decided to take her blog to WordPress. Please adjust your rolls to http://www.katiefavazza.com, and fix your readers accordingly.

Tony Snow passed away this morning. Fox News (his former employer before he was White House Press Secretary), CNN (his curent employer), and Ed Morrissey (where I found this out; I hadn’t turned on the computer or TV until a short while ago) all have great tributes.

In addition, Brit Hume provides a video tribute:

I again filled all 10 slots.   Like Steve, I had a few others on the “Honorable Mention” list but tried not to violate the desire of the poll.   Here it is:

Chuck Hagel
Olympia Snowe
Susan Collins
Ted Stevens
Wayne Gilchrist
Christopher Shays
Michael Castle
Jim Ramstad (a MN Congresscritter who is retiring this year!)
Arlen Specter
Charlie Crist

Today is a good day to be a fan of beer:

– George Will declared beer to be essential for civilization.
– The Brewers won, and the Cubs and Cardinals lost. We’re now only 4 games behind the Cubs for the NL Central, and we’re a half-game ahead of the Cards for the wild card.
– Corey Hart is going to “The City”.

HOORAY BEER!

As reported yesterday here on RedState, Congressional Democratic leaders, who promised in 2006 to create a more “open” government, are now proposing a new rule that would prevent Members of Congress from using the Internet to communicate with the American people unless the Web site they are using has been “approved” by a panel responsible for creating internal House rules.

Millions of Americans, and hundreds of Representatives — including myself — use video-sharing Web sites like YouTube, personal blogs, and online community sites like Red State to keep track of what is going on in Congress, to provide constituents with information and insight, and to build and foster communication between elected representatives and the American people.

The Internet and the New Media have made Congress more transparent, sometimes against its will, and have better empowered Americans to hold elected officials accountable for their actions, statements, decisions, and votes. Instead of embracing and working to further this new level of openness and transparency, as they promised when they were candidates for office, Democratic leaders are fighting to close the new lines of communication between politicians and the people that the Internet has opened.

Please read on.

As the Directors said yesterday, "Congressmen should be able to decide for themselves where and how they interact with their constituents and the American people." Using such Orwellian tactics to limit our contact with you the people, and vice versa, only serves to make government more secretive and less transparent – which is the exact opposite of what the Democratic leadership promised to do when elected.

Please take a moment and sign the petition on my Web site. Tell the Democratic Congressional leadership that preventing elected representatives from communicating with the American people will not stand.

The post was written by Congressman Mike Conaway on the Redstate.com site. He’s working to make sure that the “new media” remains available for Congress to use for communications. I don’t typically do direct copy and pastes of articles but this one is important. Click the link and sign the petition. The Dems have done some stupid stuff and this ranks up amongst the worst!

Here was my list.   I went with the full boat of 10.   In no particular order…

Bobby Jindal
Sarah Palin
John Kline (My CongressCritter)
Michelle Bachmann (the only other solid MN CongressCritter
Jeff Sessions
James Inhofe
Jeff Flake
Jim DeMint
Tom Coburn
Mike Pence

In another strike of the blinding obvious, the SEC has finally determinedthat the large credit rating agencies responsible for assigning credit ratings for the bundled subprime loans, had conflicts of interest in determining those ratings.

Pause

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.

Deep breath.

Back in March I gave you information about  what the typical subprime loan and “bond” (actually bundled loans) looked like.   It wasn’t a pretty description!  I stated at the time:

On the one hand I’m mad. Over 75% of the subprime loans reviewed in this study received the highest bond rating of AAA. How stupid is that when you look at the make up of the borrowers. With real interest rates nearly 5% above the norm, it was clear that there was significant risk in this package. I hate the government involved in business but someone needs to step in and change the way that bond rating agencies do their rating.

Beyond the “irrational exuberance” of ever increasing real estate prices, a big piece of shame for the subprime debacle needs to go to the rating agencies.

The rating that the agency gives the various debt instruments has a large impact on the market’s appetite for that debt. Under “normal” market circumstances, if the agency were to give a rating that was lower than expected, the market would expect higher risk and respond by demanding a higher interest rate thereby increasing the overall costs for the issuer. The impact would be that mortgage providers would have charged higher interest rates to the borrowers and that would have allowed fewer of the mortgages and less of the debt to come on the market. If the rating came back with an unexpectedly low rating (which it should have in at least some of these loans), it could have prevented the issuer from finding a buyer at all and that would have cut short future issuance of subprime loans.

The reason why “normal” market forces didn’t work properly is due to the conflict of interest that the SEC “found” but has really existed for years. Rating agencies get compensated for providing their rating on a particular debt or bond issuance. The payment comes from the entity trying to sell or place the bond. If the rating agency gives a poor rating causing either higher interest costs or an inability to sell debt, they get no future business. If they make the debt easy to sell in the market, the rating agencies could expect to see additional business from the folks trying to sell the debt.

2005, 2006 and early 2007 were very heady days for the stock prices of the large agencies. Note any patterns?

So the agencies were getting paid by their customers, so what? Isn’t that how the market works? The answer is yes except when the incentive is so great that it skews your ability to provide an allegedly unbiased answer.

You may remember the name of a little accounting firm called Arthur Andersen. They used to do the audit for another company you may remember, Enron. At the time it was not unusual for large accounting firms to perform financial audits at a loss. They did this because they also typically had a relationship with the client to perform various consulting services. The consulting services were always higher margin and were what many accounting firms made much of their revenue from…in the day. After Enron’s collapse the SEC figured out that if you made a whole lot of money off of consulting services and virtually no money off of an audit, your client had the ability to hold the consulting services over your head to ensure an acceptable opinion on thier audit….even if they were doing things that weren’t exactly kosher…at least that’s what I’ve heard.

When an entity that holds itself out as independent, like CPA firm or a rating agency, has financial entanglement, it has the potential to destroy that entities independence. My opinion is that the rating agencies were completely focused on generating revenues and never thought that providing an “encouraging rating” would ever matter to anyone. They were wrong and we’re all being impacted by their unintended consequences.

This is the Emergency Blogging System. This is not a drill; drills go “Black-and-Decker Black-and-Decker Black-and-Decker.”

The July edition of Drinking Right begins in one hour over at Papa’s Social Club, 7718 W. Burleigh in Milwaukee. The usual crew will be there, along with James Wigderson and the lovely Doreen from Waukesha. So, if you’re not one of the lucky 42,000 or so who are headed to Miller Park to watch the debut of CC Sabathia (and if you’re reading this and aren’t in walking distance of the stadium, you’re already too late), head on down. Dickie’s got room for you.

No, this isn’t a joke, this is actually happening.   The Minneapolis Park and Rec. Board has raised their rent for a tent from $20-$60 in 2007 to $50 – $10,000 in 2008.   Oh, and the $10,000 level  gets implemented just in time for  the RNC convention.

I heard an interview with the Park Superintendent on TV this evening. If there is a silver lining to this story, it appears no one from the Republican Convention has contacted the Park and Rec. Board to book their lavish tent. Good! I hope they don’t book an event. It will be very interesting to see what the Board’s rates are next year for events like the Gay Pride Festival! I hope that canvas rots in a corner unused!