Confederate Yankee

March 10, 2010

The Punk White House

Having a sense of decorum and has never been a requirement for the Presidency. It is a pesky, almost irrelevant detail the Founders wisely chose not to include becuase it could be abused to exclude otherwise qualified candidates from seeking the office. That said, having a President without a sense of decency and respect for the Office is painfully embarrassing for the nation, both domestically, and in the eyes of the world.

Barack Obama's presidency has been an unending trainwreck this far, from serial protocol gaffes that disrespected foreign heads of state, to attacks against the media that debase the office, to his recent and embarrassing attack against the Supreme Court that overshadowed his first State of the Union address. Justices are required by protocol and tradition to sit stoically throughout the Address. Obama's assault on them over an unconstitutional law they overturned was the equivalent of kicking a defenseless dog on a chain.

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts diplomatically attempted to answer questions about the breach of decorum by simply calling it "very troubling."

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, a perfect representative for the most thin-skinned of presidents, did not have the grace to let even that innocuous comment slip by without going into attack mode. Instead, Gibbs magnified the breach of decency and it's measured response by launching into an attack on the court yet again:


"What is troubling is that this decision opened the floodgates for corporations and special interests to pour money into elections - drowning out the voices of average Americans," Gibbs said. "The President has long been committed to reducing the undue influence of special interests and their lobbyists over government. That is why he spoke out to condemn the decision and is working with Congress on a legislative response."

The push back against the Supreme Court header from the White House seems almost unprecedented in its directness, though White House officials claim previous administrations expressed equally public criticisms of the court. Undoubtedly, it's bound to spur another round of debates over what constitutes proper decorum between the two branches.

Gibbs' answer is filled with lies and hypocrisy—the White House has appointed lobbyists with reckless abandon and allows the special interests they represent to write policy on everything from education, to climate change, to recreational fishing—but what is most troubling is the inability of this President and his staff to respectfully represent the Office of the Presidency that they temporarily inhabit.

Perhaps Obama is simply lacking in class and decency. Perhaps his thuggish mentors and allies did not adequately teach him to respect his position or his nation. Whatever the excuse, Barack Obama and his closest allies are an international embarrassment as the continue to engage in the petty and banal.

This behavior is beneath the Office, and if Obama and his lackey's can't respect that, one can hope they develop the political sense to at least go mute.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 01:28 PM | Comments (13) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Comical: NAACP Calls for Resignation of School Board Head Who Called People "Animals"... For The Way The Crowd Treated a Black Speaker

Perhaps the most obvious thing about the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the decades since the Civil Rights era is that "advancement" doesn't seem to be their goal in many instances. Instead, they often tend to fall back into a defensive mode, circling the wagons to defend ineffective or even destructive situations in the name of political expediency and patronage politics.

We have a perfect example of that idiocy developing here in central North Carolina, after a slate of candidates swept into office on a reform platform began to attempt to fix the faltering Wake County schools.

One of the proposals supported by voters and the new school board they sent to shake things up was the return to a community schools model. The proposal is simple. Instead of busing students all over the county to enforce diversity artificially, most parents and the school board desire to limit the amount of time students spend commuting. The hope is to send students no further than five miles away from their homes to school.

As the parent of a child that faces a 45-minute one-way commute every day (admittedly by choice to a centralized magnet school), I can certainly understand why parent would like to have their kids closer to home.

But North Carolina NAACP head Rev. William Barber did what the NAACP always does. Instead of debating the philosophy or statistics of the change, he instead immediately attempted to cry that the attempt to change a broken system was designed to hurt minorities.

To try to bolster his weak cries of racism, he has attacked (and continues to attack) Wake County School Board Chairman Ron Margiotta for comments he made in a meeting earlier this month.

After U.S.House candidate Bill Randall spoke in favor of ending the current busing policy—a speech that was consistently interrupted by outbursts by supporters of a failed status quo—Margiotta growled "Here come the animals out of their cages, " as he braced for an onslaught of opposition to the plan that was based on politically and racially-motivated fear-mongering instead of facts.

Despite the fact the crowd was indeed mob-like and disruptive, Margiotta was probably out of line to speak of opponents so dismissively. But he simply wasn't singling out one group or entity. He was responding to a contentious, diverse, and disorderly crowd.

Rev. Barber—a defender of patronage politics designed to infuse people such as himself with power—is using his position as the President of the state NAACP to bring the national organization to bear against Margiotta, trying to get him to step down by misrepresenting his non-racial comment.

Barber's goal is clear: use false charges of racism to undermine the clear will of the majority of Wake County voters.

But is is clear that there was no racism in Margiotta's outburst, even if he was in a foul temper by that point. Congressional Candidate Randall was trying to make a speech, and opponents tried to drown him out.

Barber and the NAACP are welcome to debate the merits of various approaches to education policy, and they are welcome to file lawsuits if the feel they the new policy will negatively impact children in Wake County schools.

But trying to claim there is racism when it clearly does not exist is the petty act of an organization that has long outlived its originally function and utility, and the state and national leaders that stoop to this level are the leaders that desperately need to be replaced.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:18 AM | Comments (24) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

March 09, 2010

Good News: Obama's Eco-Nazis A Threat to a Million Sport-Fishing Jobs

That this is even a possibility is incredibly absurd:


"In spite of what we hear daily in the press about the President's concern for jobs and the economy and contrary to what he stated in the June order creating this process, we have seen no evidence from NOAA or the task force that recreational fishing and related jobs are receiving any priority."

Consequently, unless anglers speak up and convince their Congressional representatives to stop this bureaucratic freight train, it appears that the task force will issue a final report for "marine spatial planning" by late March, with President Barack Obama then issuing an Executive Order to implement its recommendations — whatever they may be.

Led by NOAA's Jane Lubchenco, the task force has shown no overt dislike of recreational angling, but its indifference to the economic, social and biological value of the sport has been deafening.

Additionally, Lubchenco and others in the administration have close ties to environmental groups who would like nothing better than to ban recreational angling. And evidence suggests that these organizations have been the engine behind the task force since before Obama issued a memo creating it last June.

As noted later in the article, policies based on junk science are being pushed by anti-use environmental extremists friendly to the Administration could be a threat to a multi-billion dollar industry employing over a million people.

I'd think this was a parody, if this wasn't the exact path Obama's energy policy has already taken.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:54 AM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Not Too Bright

The Brady Campaign apparently thinks the best way to convince their fellow citizens to disarm themselves is to make penis jokes in the captions of their photos. The anti-gun group has since removed the captions entirely, but not before the damage was done.

I'd simply like Brady, the Violence Policy Center, and related anti-gun groups to make fact-based arguments for their positions, instead of resorting to cheap emotionalism.

Or is that too much to ask?

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:00 AM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Agents of Incompetence, Part II

U.S. Customs inspectors and BATF agents claim that a shipment of Airsoft guns are machine guns, because of a BATF determination that claims that these toys can easily be modified into automatic weapons.

In the second installment of Agents of Incompetence, two teams of experts take the BATF determination apart:


In short, the gunsmith determined that the entire upper receiver would have to be replaced by an upper from a real M4/M6 type rifle to have a hope of functioning, and a trigger pack from a real M4 would have to undergo extensive modification to even fit. And even when modified to fit, it wouldn't fire. If this gunsmith is correct, then all the effort to take a $400 toy and $600-plus of real gun parts — plus significant labor from a proficient gunsmith — would result in a thousand-dollar club less functional than the original toy...

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:17 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

March 08, 2010

And Bush Was The Idiot?

A year ago, Barack Obama had strong personal favorability ratings and very good poll numbers, a supermajority in the Senate, and an overwhelming majority in the House of Representatives.

In the course of little more than a year, he's destroyed his favorability ratings and illusion of competence, has abdicated his role as leader and ripped apart the Democratic Party and the House and Senate to the point no one trusts anyone. Now, the biggest story of the day on the eve of yet another push to pass his health care rationing bill is a claim by a Democrat that he was framed by House leaders in a gay sex scandal so that he would resign and not be a vote against the bill, a bill in which Obama has unwisely invested all of his political capital.

He's now reduced to stump speeches attacking American businesses in the feeble hope of salvaging his wounded pride.

How far he has fallen, and how little he has to show for his zealotry.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 03:52 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

The Lazy Unemployed

Steve Benen writes that THE GOP STILL JUST DOESN'T LIKE THE UNEMPLOYED....

My immediate response to the headline was the snarky thought, "...as opposed to the Democrats, who are doing everything in their power to make everyone unemployed."

But I clicked through anyway, to see Benen trying to set up his argument by citing Tom DeLay:


It's astounding, but in the midst of an unemployment crisis, prominent Republicans continue to castigate those struggling to find jobs.

Yesterday, for example, disgraced former Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) argued that unemployment benefits are a bad idea, because, as he sees it, they discourage people from entering the work force.

"You know," DeLay said, "there is an argument to be made that these extensions of these unemployment benefits keeps people from going and finding jobs." When CNN's Candy Crowley described his argument as "a hard sell" to the public, DeLay replied, "It's the truth."

Crowley followed up, asking, "People are unemployed because they want to be?" DeLay again said, "Well, it is the truth."

After citing other examples of no-doubt evil Republicans making similar comments, Benen then concludes:


As a matter of conscience, having prominent Republicans chastise those struggling to find work during an unemployment crisis is just callous and cruel.

And as a matter of politics, who, exactly, is going to be impressed by Republicans attacking the unemployed as lazy? Since when is "screw struggling families, let's worry about corporate tax cuts and the estate tax" an effective election-year message during difficult economic times?

I can only assume Benen chooses to turn a blind eye to the phenomena of funemployment, the breezy, recreational abuse of unemployment benefits that has a become a lifestyle of its own, with Web sites and blogs dedicated to it.

This is the kind of abuse that DeLay and other Republicans are targeting, and I cannot see how any sane person can defend making unemployment benefits to those who choose to abuse the system instead of finding a way to become a contributing member of society.

Then there are the purposefully underemployed, those that could be working full time jobs—often with benefits—but at lower salaries that they previously made. They choose to remain unemployed because they are arrogant and feel entitled and would rather be unemployed than take a position they feel is beneath them.

These people, again, are those that continue to sponge off the taxpayer as they sit on their plump backsides watching The View because they system is broken and allows them to live a life without accountability (or at least with reduced accountability) for their inaction.

Unemployment should be a safety net, not a plush feather bed or even a futon.

It's a simple concept: If you don't work because you won't work, you don't eat.

It's so simple, even a liberal can grasp it.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:55 AM | Comments (12) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Lazy and Unqualified

Surely, they can't be serious.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:35 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Agents of Incompetence

Don't you think that U.S. Customs and the ATF should be able to tell shipments Airsoft guns from machine guns? And if they did determine that such toys could be converted into real weapons, that they should stop all imports of the toys, and not just the imports to a single store?

In the first article of a three part series at Pajamas Media, I tackle what can only be descried as Agents of Incompetence.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:10 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

March 05, 2010

Obama To Dems: It's All About Me

For the first time in his life since the last time, Barack Obama reminds America that his Presidency isn't about leading America, but about satisfying his ego:


President Obama's message to progressives who are dissatisfied with the Senate health care bill is two fold: First: Don't forget about the uninsured. Second: Don't forget what failure to pass this bill would do to the party and my presidency.

Wow. ...and my presidency.

I want to ask a simple question: are there still citizens that believe that Barack Obama cares more about the uninsured than he does about how he will be remembered?

And are there still Democrats who think he won't hang them out to dry in his raw pursuit of self-glorification?

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 11:41 AM | Comments (27) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Global Warming Scientists Scramble to Find Way To Blame Man for Earth's Methane Release

I can only imagine that Phil Jones, Algore, and the rest of the anthropogenic global warming fetishists are wracking their brains to find a way to blame mankind for this discovery:


Vast amounts of methane are bubbling up from the East Siberian sea, raising fears of a massive hike in global warming.

Permafrost in the seabed has been previously assumed to act as an effective cap for the enormous amount of methane in the area.

But researchers at the Russian Academy of Sciences, the University of Alaska and Stockholm University have found that eight million tonnes of methane are currently leaking into the atmosphere every year.

"The amount of methane currently coming out of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is comparable to the amount coming out of the entire world's oceans," said Shakhova, a researcher at UAF's International Arctic Research Center. "Subsea permafrost is losing its ability to be an impermeable cap."

The problem with this discovery is two-fold for the AGW Truthers.

First, the role of methane release in triggering previous warming periods is well documented, and the continuing release would seem to provide a far more likely explanation for any warming that may have occurred or which may occur in the near future than the anthropogenic argument.

Second, the release of the discovery comes at a time when the anthropogenic warming supporter are reeling under a continuous stream of revelations that have undermined the credibility of the "settled science" itself and many of the scientists/officials involved.

The great fear for anthropogenic warming supporters isn't that the world may be warming, but that they won't be able to find a way to profit from it, financially, or politically.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:16 AM | Comments (10) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Pentagon Attacked by Anti-Bush Nut/ 9/11 Truther

Patterico has the details.

Two police officers were wounded in the attack. The shooter was fatally shot during the attack. His name was John Patrick Bedell of Hollister, CA. According to MSNBC, he had prior arrests for cultivating marijuana and assaulting cops.

Update: The shooter was a registered Democrat, not that the fact will keep dishonest, ideologically-driven propagandists such as Peter Grier from attempting to smear those on the center right..

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 06:18 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

March 04, 2010

Trash Sues For Cash

Give me a freakin' break:


VICTIMS of Hurricane Katrina from Mississippi are seeking to sue carbon gas-emitting multinationals for helping fuel global warming and boosting the devastating 2005 storm, legal documents showed.

The class action suit brought by residents from southern Mississippi, which was ravaged by hurricane-force winds and driving rains, was first filed just weeks after the August 2005 storm hit.

"The plaintiffs allege that defendants' operation of energy, fossil fuels, and chemical industries in the United States caused the emission of greenhouse gasses that contributed to global warming," say the documents, seen by AFP.

The increase in global surface air and water temperatures "in turn caused a rise in sea levels and added to the ferocity of Hurricane Katrina, which combined to destroy the plaintiffs' private property, as well as public property useful to them".

Every single person taking part in this lawsuit emits carbon dioxide with every breath they take. Hopefully someone will countersue to keep these idiots from breeding.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 03:11 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

More Incompetence From Obama

Despite the headline, Barack Obama is almost certainly not selling judgeships to secure heath care votes.

For starters, holding on to the appointment until after the vote would have been Obama's power play, and it is also rather difficult to claim that Scott Matheson isn't a good candidate for the position.

But any politician—even a neophyte city councilman—simply has to know how bad the optics of this appointment are at this time. While the appointment is probably perfectly legitimate, even amateurs know better than to create the appearance of possible bribery, especially leading into a close-run and controversial vote on a high-profile piece of legislation with little public support.

Supporters claim that Barack Obama is refreshingly smart and cerebral compared to our last President.

How much longer do we have to wait until he shows it?

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 11:29 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Domestic Violence Lobbyist Guns Down Husband After Five Day Marriage

While it is far from always being the case, most of us tend to think of domestic violence as a crime that typically occurs within the home, not blocks away:


Witnesses told police that Bridges was wearing a nightgown and a shower cap as she argued with Rankins on the sidewalk on North Avenue near West Peachtree Street around 10:45 p.m. Monday.

And moments later, witnesses said, they heard shots. They said she then "calmly walked away."

A MARTA police officer stopped her as she was getting into her car, perhaps to return to her home nearby on Centennial Olympic Park Drive.

Arelisha Bridges apparently chased down her new husband in her car and then shot him down on the street after an argument.

Bridges is registered as a lobbyist for the little-known National Declaration for Domestic Violence Order, but seems to have been almost inactive in that role.

Seems she should have been a lobbyist for Orderly Domestic Violence.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:38 AM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

March 03, 2010

The Kind Of Leadership We Need...

...can't be found in Washington, DC.

People always want something for nothing, and politicians, being the craven creatures they are, always try to provide it even when their actions create crushing debt on future generations. They trade long-term prosperity for temporary power, and the political class we've been cursed with has abused the system's holding capacity for such incompetencies to its quite generous limits.

We live in a time where we see states and entire nations on the verge of bankruptcy, and yet the people who have caused this problem think the proper response is not just to continue a pattern of chronic spending abuse, but to make it worse. They'll go so far as to completely ignore the pleas of those they swore to serve, threatening the solvency of the very union they should protect and defend with their lives.

As others have noted, it's all about ego for a generation of elected representatives that has convinced themselves they are something akin to a ruling class. November cannot come fast enough.

We must purge ourselves of those politicians that revel in their own sense of importance and believe that they, not the American people, are the source of this nation's greatness.

We've suffered these condescending fools and their scheming for too long. We can only hope they don't cause irreparable damage before they are dragged or driven out.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 12:03 PM | Comments (11) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

SPLC's Interesting Ideas of "Right Wing Hate"

I'll let others dissect liberal Mark Potok's increasingly irrelevant claims about the growth of right wing hate, and instead focus on what the group claims about my home state of North Carolina.

My first observation is that our typically "red" state that many urban liberals like to mock for being part of the Old South has less than half the listed hate groups (29) of "tolerant" California. Bigots.

But what I find especially interesting is that in their report on right wing hate, they link to their so-called "hate map" as if to imply all groups listed are right wing.

They most certainly are not.

Of the 29 hate groups the SPLC lists in North Carolina, 8 are black separatist groups, including chapters of the Nation of Islam, the New Black Panther Party, and two branches of The Israelite Church of God in Jesus Christ.

While I'm not at all familiar with the last group, the Nation of Islam and New Black Panther Party both tie themselves closely to the Democratic Party and many left-wing initiatives, including advocating the Presidency of Barack Obama. The Nation of Islam's leader was and is openly praised and accepted at Obama's church and among his closest mentors in Chicago.

By the SPLC's standards of guilt by loose association, the Obama Administration should clearly be listed as a black separatist hate group operating with branches in Chicago and Washington, DC, if not nationwide. Of course, this same loose standard was applied and Obama-supporting groups were documented, then Potok would have to explain the explosive growth of left wing hate groups... and Potok is not about to document that.

Certainly, most sensible people would view the way the SPLC pigeonholes groups on vague and arbitrary standards as absurd.

But then, people with sense don't fund the SPLC.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:29 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

March 02, 2010

Tea Party Knockoffs: Watered Down, Bitter

It looks like our friends at the NY Times and Washington Post are thrilled to jump on the bandwagon of the left-wing Coffee Party.

Too bad their articles cheerleading the group just happened to come out on the day Pajamas Media published my article exposing them as the front-end of a left-wing astroturfing campaign.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 12:07 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Climate Change Cultists Don't Believe in Peer-Reviewed Science, Unless Reviewed By Like-Minded Believers

Two interesting ways of telling the same, sad story.

Via Breitbart:


A British climate researcher at the centre of a row over global warming science has admitted he wrote some "pretty awful" emails to sceptics when he was refusing their requests for data.

But Phil Jones, of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, defended Monday his decision not to release the data about temperatures from around the world, saying it was not "standard practice" to do so.

"I have obviously written some pretty awful emails," Jones told British lawmakers in response to a question about a message he sent to a sceptic in which he refused to release data saying he believed it would be misused.

And from the UK Daily Mail:


Giving evidence to a Science and Technology Committee inquiry, the Institute of Physics said: 'Unless the disclosed emails are proved to be forgeries or adaptations, worrying implications arise for the integrity of scientific research and for the credibility of the scientific method.

'The principle that scientists should be willing to expose their results to independent testing and replication by others, which requires the open exchange of data, procedures and materials, is vital.'

Last month, the Information Commissioner ruled the CRU had broken Freedom of Information rules by refusing to hand over raw data.

But yesterday Professor Jones - in his first public appearance since the scandal broke - denied manipulating the figures.

Looking pale and clasping his shaking hands in front of him, he told MPs: 'I have obviously written some pretty awful emails.'

He admitted withholding data about global temperatures but said the information was publicly available from American websites.

And he claimed it was not 'standard practice' to release data and computer models so other scientists could check and challenge research.


Uh, how is that scientific method supposed to function again? This is from Wikipedia, but I think they still have this mostly correct (my emphasis below):


Scientific method refers to a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on gathering observable, empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning.[1] A scientific method consists of the collection of data through observation and experimentation, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses.[2]

Although procedures vary from one field of inquiry to another, identifiable features distinguish scientific inquiry from other methodologies of knowledge. Scientific researchers propose hypotheses as explanations of phenomena, and design experimental studies to test these hypotheses. These steps must be repeatable in order to dependably predict any future results. Theories that encompass wider domains of inquiry may bind many independently-derived hypotheses together in a coherent, supportive structure. This in turn may help form new hypotheses or place groups of hypotheses into context.

Among other facets shared by the various fields of inquiry is the conviction that the process be objective to reduce biased interpretations of the results. Another basic expectation is to document, archive and share all data and methodology so they are available for careful scrutiny by other scientists, thereby allowing other researchers the opportunity to verify results by attempting to reproduce them. This practice, called full disclosure, also allows statistical measures of the reliability of these data to be established.

A core principle of the scientific method is the full-disclosure of all relevant documentation. Dr. Jones, along with many of his peers damned in the Climategate emails, have decided to completely abandon the scientific method for faith-based beliefs.

There seems to be very little separating climate change cultists from the evolutionists creationists they love to mock, except that they don't have the self-awareness to know their beliefs are based on faith.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 11:23 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

March 01, 2010

Obama is Not a Drunk

The Guardian made it appear that President Obama was told to moderate his drinking (suggesting he drinks too much), a story that quite a few bloggers have reported on.

Unfortunately, a copy of Obama's medical exam released to the press confirms that he cannot blame alcohol abuse for his Presidency.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 05:03 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

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