Obamacare Declared Void in its Entirety by US District Judge in Florida

"Because the individual mandate [requiring Americans to buy health insurance on pain of fine] is unconstitutional and not severable, the entire act must be declared void."

-- US District Judge Roger Vinson (reported here)

The judge sided with the 26 (!) states which brought suit. His ruling will be appealed by the Obama regime.

President Pothead Meant Iraq, not Afghanistan

“As I said, we will be out of Afghanistan by the end of this year,” Obama said, a fairly significant misstatement of his administration’s Afghanistan policy, which doesn’t call for a troop withdrawal until 2014.

Politico.com did not attribute the mental lapse to damage caused by prolonged exposure to THC.

Preliminary Report of GDP for Q4 2010 at 3.2 Percent

Up from 2.6 percent in Q3.

This according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis here, which issued the customary caution:

The Bureau emphasized that the fourth-quarter advance estimate released today is based on source data that are incomplete or subject to further revision by the source agency . . .. The "second" estimate for the fourth quarter, based on more complete data, will be released on February 25, 2011.

When you consider that for all of 2010 GDP is estimated in some quarters at about only 2.9 percent overall, the economy is barely treading water seeing that GDP was negative 2.6 percent in the previous year, 2009. And to get it there it's been thrown a life preserver in the form of extreme government spending, loans and guarantees worth trillions upon trillions of dollars. We're not working on our third consecutive trillion-dollar-plus deficit for nothing. 

Applying these paddles and shots to the heart of the American economy has the patient out of intensive care, but its condition is still serious.

It's still a sham GDP for a sham economy. 

WhiteHouseDossier.com Says Obama Parties While Cairo Burns

The key point being the American journalism profession a bunch of hacks had nothing better to do than fete the president's political adviser while a real crisis, unlike the kind they usually spend their time manufacturing, was staring them in the face.

When oil hits $200 a barrel will anyone remember the Energy Secretary was there instead of planning how to contain the damage?

Feckless bastards one and all, but especially one Barack Hussein Obama.

Here's the link to the post at the left.

To the Left, Enforcing the Law is Right Wing Extremism

As in this from Conor Williams for The Washington Post:

Yet [the ex-governor's] views are hardly moderate at all: [Tim] Pawlenty has advocated fining or jailing business owners who employ undocumented immigrants. He's even suggested amending the Constitution to repeal birthright citizenship.

This approach to immigration policy could be disastrous for a region already suffering from economic hardship. The Midwest needs more immigrants - not fewer.

What the Midwest needs is fewer coastal pricks telling fly-over country what's what, and a vigorous emigration policy for liberals, from wherever they hail, including the Michigan governor's residence.

TSA's Pistole Pulls Plug on Private Screener Program

"It's unimaginable that TSA would suspend the most successfully performing passenger screening program we've had over the last decade," [Rep. John] Mica [R-FL] said Friday night.


"The agency should concentrate on cutting some of the more than 3,700 administrative personnel in Washington who concocted this decision, and reduce the army of TSA employees that has ballooned to more than 62,000."


More here.

AP News Frash: Rush Rimbaugh Must Aporogize, Right Now!

"Threats to minority lawmakers are not new," according to Judy Lin here.

Yeah, especially if you're a Republican lawmaker.


Is there a Caucasian American Journalists Association? 

Rush Imitates Hu Jintao

Ching Chong! Ching Chong Cha!

Stories here and here.

Proof That Education Improves Neither Character Nor Intelligence

As reported here in The San Francisco Chronicle:

A California university professor has been charged with peeing on a colleague's campus office door. ... Investigators say a dispute between Petrov and another math professor was the motive.

He did it twice. They caught him on tape on the second go, so to speak.

Sarah Palin Jumps Down in the Gutter with the Rest of Them

What a disappointment, in a string of disappointments:

His theme last night in the State of the Union was the "WTF," you know, "Winning the Future." And I thought, "OK, that acronym, spot on." There were a lot of "WTF" moments throughout that speech, namely, when he made the statement, Greta, that he believed that we can't allow ourselves to, I guess, eventually become buried under a mountain of debt. ...

That was another one of those WTF moments, when he so often repeated this Sputnik moment that he would aspire [sic] Americans to celebrate. ...

-- Sarah Palin, January 26, 2011, quoted here

Leadership seeks to elevate the discourse, to model the good that people may follow it. And this isn't it.

Obamacare Waivers Explode to 729 from 222 Since December 2010

Can we still say "explode"?

We've gone from 1.5 million to 2.2 million Americans on waivers in under two months.

The new health care law applies to fewer and fewer Americans because specially privileged groups seek and get waivers from the requirements. Which is to say that healthcare inequality under Obamacare is a growing problem.

How much you wanna bet under Obamacare the specially privileged never reach 85%, the proportion of Americans who had private health insurance before the law was passed and wanted to keep it? Which is to say that more Americans will lack "desirable" coverage because of Obamacare than will have lacked it before it (15%).

View the burgeoning list here.

Hu Jintao Embraces Lang Lang for White House Propaganda Coup

From Nicholas Eberstadt for The American, here:

But what, exactly, is this “gorgeous” and “beautiful” (Hu’s words) tune that so entranced China’s visiting leadership?

“My Motherland” is not a “Chinese song” in any ordinary meaning of the term. Instead, it is a Mao-era propaganda classic: the theme from "Triangle Hill" (Shangganling), a film in which heroic Chinese forces fight, kill, and eventually beat Americans in pitched battle during the Korean War.

“My Motherland” epitomizes the “Resist America, Aid [North] Korea” campaign that Beijing embraced during and after the Korean War. It celebrates Sino-American enmity.

Wikipedia Lang Lang Article Softened 'Jackal' to 'Wolves' for Political Reasons

Here's a screen shot of the Wikipedia discussion of the Lang Lang article between Arilang and Jim101 late on the night of January 23.

Arilang initiates the discussion saying he thinks the article will contribute to a "political storm" for Obama.

He immediately focuses on the word translated "jackal" from the song Lang Lang played at the White House state dinner for Hu. He seems to accept it as the natural translation (as do most unbiased observers), but he notices the new change of the translation in various places to "wolves" and asks Jim101 about it, obviously because he thinks Jim101 is responsible.

Jim101 admits he uses sources for posting which conform to translations which are guided by "the Chinese perception" of the US:  

Jim101 appears to have foreign loyalties, and a political axe to grind as heavy as the one he thinks Glenn Beck carries.

Lang Lang and "Jackals": Famous 1951 North Korean Novella by Han Sorya Vilifying USA, Celebrates Unpredictable Spontaneous Outbursts and Fits of Rage

According to BR Myers for The New York Times in May 2003, reproduced here:

In North Korea, the people's spontaneity is seen as one of the country's greatest strengths.

North Korean novels and movies often show the hero casting off the restraints of his book learning in a fit of wild, sometimes suicidal rage against the Japanese or American enemy. This political culture induces officials to tolerate a high level of violence in daily life; North Korean refugees attest that fistfights are the accepted way for men and women to settle even minor differences. While communism was always an internationalist movement, juche (literally, self-reliance) sees the world in ethnic terms. North Korean propaganda makes no distinction between American capitalists and American workers; the entire "Yankee" race is presented as inherently evil, degenerate and ugly. Dictionaries and textbooks suggest that Americans be described with bestial attributes ("snout" for nose, for example).

The central villain of Han Sorya's novella "Jackals" (1951), the country's most enduring work of fiction, tells of an American child who beats a Korean boy so brutally that he ends up in a hospital -- where he is murdered by the American's missionary parents. Since the South Korean government began pursuing its policy of rapprochement, the North's ethnocentric world view has become even more stark; the United States is now presented as being exclusively responsible for all tensions on the peninsula.

This propaganda appears to be effective even among North Koreans opposed to the rule of Kim Jong Il. When I visited a resettlement center for refugees near Seoul last year, many of those to whom I was introduced as an American recoiled in terror or glared at me in hatred.

Yeah, that song that Lang Lang played for Obama, with the lyrics about the jackal, that's just a complete coincidence! And totally innocuous and lacking in any cultural specificity whatsoever!

Han Sorya's 1951 'Jackals' is about an American missionary who deliberately kills a Korean boy by injecting him with germs.

(image source here)

Super Bowl "Unmanned Helicopters" is Code for DHS Spy Drones

The NBC DFW affiliate reports here:

Arlington Police have acquired some new equipment with homeland security grants including unmanned helicopters to watch over the stadium site [for the Super Bowl].

That's code for DraganFlyers, provided by DraganFly Innovations, Inc., teeny tiny little spy drones which look like little remote control toy helicopters but have sophisticated camera capabilities, as described here:

These Colors Don't Run: Reload!

The "America is a Jackal/Wolf" Metaphor is a Popular North Korean Trope

(source here)

Lang Lang Strikes a Chord: "Do Not Forget the American Jackals!"

North Korean War Propaganda

Lang Lang's choice of music at the White House state dinner for Chinese Paramount Leader Hu Jintao included an extremely popular Chinese patriotic song with these lyrics, in which "jackal" refers to America, which would be recognized by most every Chinese:

Great mountains, great rivers and an amazing place

Every road is flat and wide

When friends are here, there is fine wine

But if the jackal comes

What greets it is the hunting rifle

(source for poster above)

Lang Lang's Double Insult: Double Because We Didn't Know It

From The Epoch Times, here:

At the White House State dinner on Jan. 19, about six minutes into his set, Lang Lang began tapping out a famous anti-American propaganda melody from the Korean War: the theme song to the movie “Battle on Shangganling Mountain.” ... “In the eyes of all Chinese, this will not be seen as anything other than a big insult to the US,” says Yang Jingduan, a Chinese psychiatrist now living in Philadelphia who had in China been a doctor in the Chinese military. “It’s like insulting you in your face and you don’t know it, it’s humiliating.”

Here's a screenshot of the Wikipedia entry, before someone changes it:

Let's send Lang Lang back back to China where he belongs. The president can go with him.

Police in Colorado Use Draganflyer Spy Drone

According to The Washington Post, here:

"Not since the Taser has a technology promised so much for law enforcement," said Ben Miller of the Mesa County Sheriff's Office, which has used its drone, called a Draganflyer, to search for missing persons after receiving emergency authorization from the FAA.

From the company website here:

Carried in a backpack, ready for flight in minutes.

"At hover the Draganflyer X6 produces less than (approx.) 65dB of sound at one meter (3 feet), and less than (approx.) 60dB at three meters (9 feet)."

Used under very cold conditions at accident scene.

This unit was made ready for deployment under very cold conditions in the front seat of a police car.