As I sit back and listen to more and more evangelical Christians join the AGW bandwagon, I am moved to speak to them about their decision. On the scientific side there is still much to be learned about whether AGW even exists, as many climatologists are not convinced that any undue warming is even happening today, but the theological underpinnings of this for evangelicals is shaky at best.

While I understand that we are to be good stewards of the earth and all of creation, I flatly reject the notion that we should be joining forces with the environmental left in trying to stem the tide of AGW. There is no scriptural basis for the belief that man is powerful enough to destroy this creation of God, and in my view is borderline blasphemy. We are not, I repeat NOT, able to destroy this earth no matter what we do.

Many have searched the Scriptures and have hung their claims on the words of Revelation 7:3 which reads, “…Do not harm the earth, the sea, or the trees…” but that is totally divorced from the Scriptural context. This entire passage is actually the words of the angel that is about to seal the foreheads of the 144,000 from the tribes of Israel; it has absolutely nothing to do with man not harming the environment. In fact the Bible in several places makes clear that this earth is going to last until Jesus returns. Jesus is going to return to Israel, to the very place that he ascended to Heaven and no amount of alleged global warming is going to change that fact. Psalm 24:1-2 tells us that the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness it holds is His. How can we destroy the thing that belongs to God Himself? Further, Ecclesiastes 1:1-11 tells us that the earth abides forever, the sun will rise and set, and there is nothing new found under the sun; in the face of that, the belief by Christians that we can destroy what God has said will abide forever is blasphemy. It is saying that we do not believe what God has told us through his Holy Word, and that we are more powerful than God Himself in that we are convinced that we can destroy His creation.

Correct me if I am wrong, but wasn’t the last election held in this country over on November 4, 2008? After that election the next national elections are not slated until 2010, correct? So could someone please, please tell me why there is such a furor over the losing vice presidential candidate from the last election!?! The way many on both sides of the political spectrum act, you would think that Sarah Palin was responsible for Global Warming, bitter beer face, and I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here!

Somewhere along the campaign trail, people decided that Sarah Palin was the bane of the McCain campaign, the scourge if the Republican Party, and the least qualified vice presidential candidate ever…as if that mattered when she was on a ticket opposing the most radical, leftist, inexperienced presidential candidate EVER!!! Somehow the inexperience of Palin as veep overshadowed the inexperience of Obama, although one was running to remake the Republic in his image, while the other was trying to help a flawed warhorse ascend to the White House.

What was amazing was to hear the same attacks that the left launched, as was their place as the opposition, coming from people who ostensibly stood on the same side of the issues as Palin. The leadership of the GOP looked down on her with their studied patrician arrogance for many of the same reasons she was savaged from the left; she only went to a state school for college; she was from Alaska, for goodness sakes!; she had a veritable tribe of children; she was not polished enough for the national stage, and by God she could not best Katie Couric in an interview on CBS News! Take her to the guillotine and take off her political head, because she is finished as a political player in national politics for all time!

That was to be expected from the Republican leadership, which has always seen itself as an exclusive country club an only tolerates those not to the manor born out of the necessity of garnering their votes come election time. The country-clubbers have never had any real use for those conservatives not located along the Boston-DC-Manhattan corridor; they hated Nixon, they hated Reagan, and they only liked George Bush because he had the right bloodline to be a member in good standing. But what I never expected was to see the “rank and file” conservatives turn on Governor Palin the way she did, especially after she decided to resign as governor of Alaska.

When Palin stepped down, many in the rank and file exploded in anger. To them the move just seemed to confirm the bad things being said about the governor in the media; she was ‘erratic’, unpredictable, and just plain strange. Why, oh why, would she just quit on the people of Alaska? No reason that the governor cited was good enough to assuage their anger, even if they were not actually her constituents. Neither the frivolous ethics complaints, nor the massive FOIA requests, nor the vicious attacks on her family were reason enough for the governor to step down. No, it was somehow felt that she owed it to the state of Alaska, the people of America, the Republican Party, and the conservative movement to bear those slings and arrows, no matter how much they impeded her ability to govern, or how personally hurtful the attacks on her family were. And when Governor Palin decided that she had a responsibility to do right by her family first and foremost, and that meant stepping down as governor, she became persona non grata to many people who had supported her in the presidential campaign.

Then came the insistence that resigning as governor meant that Sarah Palin was doomed as a political entity for all time; why the anti-Palin commercials calling her a quitter were already being written. Yet for someone that is a political non-entity, there is certainly a great deal of attention paid to her. If she were so politically radioactive, why do there continue to be hit pieces written about her**cough**Kathleen Parker and Peggy Noonan**cough**? If she’s so over, why does anyone care what she has to say about the current healthcare debate? I mean, she is finished…right?

People constantly come back to one theme with Sarah Palin that I would like to take a little time to address. One of the things people both left and right ask about Governor Palin is, “Why do you like her?” According to many she is just…well…simple. She isn’t polished like most people in politics; she doesn’t come off like she knows everything, and she doesn’t seem like the usual professional office seeker. And those are just the qualities that draw so many people to her. She is a genuine person, not a prepackaged product that is sold to us at election time. She has faults that she doesn’t spend her whole life attempting to cover up; she makes mistakes; she gets knocked around and pulls herself together, and she stands by what she believes in no matter the political costs. People like that about her; heck, I like that about her. In a world where politicians are commodities to be sold to potential voters, Sarah Palin stands out as different type of politician; namely the kind that doesn’t need to be in the political spotlight to be happy. Nowadays that is truly a rarity, and many people appreciate that about her.

None of knows what the future holds for Sarah Palin as a political player, and I’m not going to speculate about it. But I wouldn’t write her political epitaph quite yet; you never know what Sarah from Wasilla has in store for the future!

“Waving the bloody shirt” is a timeworn political ploy first used by the venerable Republican Party in the aftermath of the Civil War. After the war, in order to get controversial legislation passed through the Congress the Republican Party would not so subtly remind the public in general, and the Democratic Party in particular, just who had fought first to preserve, and later to reunite the Union…and whom had worked to tear it asunder. By using such rhetoric, and by sometimes literally waving a shirt allegedly stained with the blood of Union soldiers spilled in the War Between the States, the Republicans were able to silence Democratic opposition to all manner of policies. “Waving the bloody shirt” was used in part to give us the so-called Reconstruction Amendments that outlawed slavery, made the former slaves citizens of the United States, and granted them the right to vote. The tactic was also used to help in the passage of the first civil rights legislation in the history of the Republic in the years of 1866, 1872, and 1875.

In the decade of the 1960s the Democratic Party brought the tactic back with a vengeance after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Nearly every major piece of legislation that Lyndon Johnson wanted passed was foisted onto a mourning public as one of Kennedy’s major legislative priorities, which allowed Johnson to get just about anything through the Congress and onto his desk. It seemed that everything from the Job Corps, to Operation Head Start, to Medicare were packaged by the wheeling-dealing Johnson as one of Jack Kennedy’s most cherished ideas, and in the shocking aftermath of Kennedy’s murder no one wanted to be seen as thwarting the last wishes of King John of Camelot, so several trillion dollars later we are still stuck with LBJ’s Great Society schemes.

Since then, politicians have used some variation of the bloody shirt in nearly every decade, especially when there is a war being fought. John Kerry and his band of lying miscreants used it in the fraudulent Winter Soldier hearings; George H. W. Bush did it when he campaigned in 1988 with the badge of a slain New York City police officer as a symbol of why we needed to fight the War on Drugs; and various politicians use the tactic when they stage photo ops with wounded servicemen to show their support for the troops. The bloody shirt will occasionally recede into the political closet, but it never truly gets retired.

With the death of Edward “Teddy” Kennedy, the Democrats have decided to dust off the bloody shirt again and wave it wildly in a last desperate attempt to resurrect a healthcare bill that seems to be dead on arrival. Senator Robert Byrd (Klan-WV) has proposed that the bill (or bills) winding through the Senate be named in honor of Senator Kennedy, whom everyone recognizes as a staunch supporter of a nationalized healthcare bill in a last ditch attempt at getting the sympathy vote for a bill that the majority of the people of America simply do not want. The line of thinking seems to be that Kennedy’s death should be used as a catalyzing agent to bring any recalcitrant Democrats around on the issue, and to stir up some much needed public support for the failing plan. What this line of thinking ignores is the most obvious point in the whole debate: The people do not support this idea! No matter whom the bill is named for, or said to be in memoriam of, the American people have spoken in poll after poll and the conclusion is always the same: We don’t want government run healthcare or government issued health insurance.

What is really appalling about this idea is the base motives involved in even making the proposal. The vast majority of the members of the United States Senate publicly claim to have been friends and admirers of Senator Kennedy, but before his body could get cold or his family could properly mourn his passing, his “friends” in the Democratic Party began plotting to use his passing as a political tool to pass their beloved healthcare legislation. They had barely begun rewriting the history of his life to make him into some type of tragic/heroic figure before they struck upon the idea to use his death as the bloody shirt they hoped would get them  power over one-sixth of the American economy. Alas, I should not have been surprised with this after the way the memorial for Senator Paul Wellstone was hijacked and turned into an impromptu anti-Bush political rally; yet it is just as unseemly now as it was then, and I had hoped they would avoid exploiting the death of their treasured “friend” for naked political gain.

However, no matter how enthusiastically they wave this bloody shirt, it will probably not have its intended effect. Even if the American people were united in their love and admiration of Teddy Kennedy, it probably would still not be enough to shake them from their fears of the federal government doing to American healthcare and health insurance what they have done with the postal service and Social Security. The American people will not fall for such a shameless ploy, and the Democrats should be embarrassed by their attempts at exploiting the death of one of their own in the pursuit of political power. Alas, we know that they won’t because liberal Democrats may feel your pain, but they feel no shame.

Liberals come in all shapes and sizes, from the anti-nuclear power protestors to the Code Pink crowd. They have many individual concerns that fire their political passions, but there is always an underlying philosophy that unites them, no matter their personal political projects. Because at heart, liberals all believe in the same thing; government should strive to meet al of the needs of the people from cradle to grave, no matter whether or not there is any actual authority for the government to do so. And when push comes to shove liberals recognize that they all need one another in order to achieve the big government goals they have set for the nation. It is rare to see liberals divided over matters of ideology and even rarer to see even the most contrarian liberals culled from the left wing flock.

Conservatives like to look on liberals and say that they are disjointed, or just a loose amalgam of different pressure groups seeking political power in order to serve their specific ends. That is very true of the Democratic Party in general, as well as the GOP, but what we often miss is the fact that liberals almost always unite when the need arises. Look at the current healthcare debate as a prime example; nearly any plan that is passed will eventually have negative impacts on union members and their healthcare plans. Yet the unions have set aside, for the most part, their individual concerns to push for President Obama’s plan in a show of liberal unity. And it is this type of unity that allows the liberals to carry the day on so many important political and policy fights in the country; they will stick together through thick and thin.

On the conservative side, however, that unity does not seem to exist. When people look at the conservative side of the aisle, they do not see a movement made up of people pulling together to reach a single destination. What they see instead is a much fractured group that can hardly stop bickering long enough to even make a show of opposing the left wing agenda being promulgated by the current presidential administration. “National defense conservatives” are at odds with “paleoconservatives” over national defense strategy, while “border security conservatives” clash with “free market conservatives” over whether we need secure borders or a steady stream of sla…uh…cheap labor. And it seems that every other conservative faction seems to have a bone to pick with the “religious conservatives”, who by the way, seem to always bear the blame for the electoral failures of the GOP. The ultimate unity of purpose that is found on the liberal side of the spectrum just seems to be missing from the conservative side.

What I have noticed among conservatives is that whenever conservatives start adding qualifiers to their ideological leanings, there is going to be some internecine battles about to be fought. It seems that many people that want to identify as conservatives also want to claim the mantle of “true conservatives” and wrap themselves in it, while diminishing their fellow conservatives. Case in point: After the 2006 midterm elections when the GOP lost control of the Congress, what was the loudest complaint from many conservatives? The complaint, which as echoed in some quarters after McCain was beaten by Obama, was that the “religious conservatives” or “social conservatives” had cost the GOP the elections, and that they should be jettisoned from the movement. Little time was spent on figuring out what conservatives could do to win back public trust, while finger pointing inside the conservative movement ran rampant. Many conservatives were more concerned with attacking other conservatives that they did not agree with than opposing the massive government intrusions into the financial life of the country.

What conservatives of every stripe should be doing is what the liberals always do when it counts: Focus on the unifying characteristics of their ideology instead of picking fights within the group. There are certain characteristics that should be part of the political DNA of every conservative: smaller government, fiscal restraint, strong defense, secure borders, judges who actually respect the Constitution, and a fair chance for everyone to succeed or fail on his own merits. Whether your particular passion is national defense or fiscal policy, all of the other conservative characteristics are there in you as well. If we can learn to put aside our petty fights and differences when big issues are on the table, we can stall the list to port of our ship of state, and maybe even bring her back to starboard. But we have to be unified to do it, because we are facing an adversary that is relentless, aggressive, and above all else, unified. Only with a similar unity from conservatives can the slide towards socialism be arrested; to continue on a fractured path is to condemn the country to the continued ravages of the left and its ideas.

So to borrow a phrase from the left: Conservatives of the world unite! Because as one of the Founders so succinctly phrased it, “Either we all hang together, or we will all hang separately.”

I understand that with a voice like that of President Obama on his side, Dr. Henry Louis Gates doesn't need the voice of a lowly conservative on his side, but he's going to get it. I understand exactly where Dr. Gates and his defenders are coming from, because I have been there. As a black man in the South, I have been pulled over by the police simply for driving through the "wrong" town at night after work, had the officers block me in like I was a bank robber, approach my car with guns drawn, and all to inform me that my tags had just expired. And this with my wife and toddler son in the car. My mother was pulled over in the same town coming from another town where she had been visiting her boyfriend and his mother, with the cops demanding to know where she was coming from and where she was headed. In addition, my father was once pulled over by a state trooper on a lonely stretch of NC 64 between Morganton and his hometown, was insulted with a racial epithet, and wasn't even given a ticket! I had a friend who was harassed constantly by the police in my former hometown, mainly because he was Lebanese.

However, with all that said, I still have great respect for the police and the job they have to do. Moreover, in all reality, I would in no way try to defend Dr. Gates, because even if the police overreacted...which I don't think they did...he was out of line in the way he acted. A neighbor of Dr. Gates who saw what she believed were two people trying to break into the Gates home, which apparently had been vandalized recently, called the police. The police responded to the scene, found two men in the residence, attempted to ascertain who the people were, and were responded to by a belligerent man who refused to produce any identification to prove that he lived in the home. What were the police supposed to do in that instance? Take it on faith that the unidentified man actually lived there, simply because he said so?

The completely dramatic episode could have been avoided if Dr. Gates had handed over some identification, instead of trying to threaten the police officer by claiming to want to contact the chief of police, or by using the time he spent braying about how poorly black men are treated in America in showing them that he actually lived there. If Dr. Gates had acted like a professional, instead of like a professional victim and accusing the police officers on the scene racists, there would have been no problem at all. All that Dr. Gates had to do was something like this: "Officer, I live here. Here is my driver's license, with my home address; I was just having some trouble with the locks on the front door and allowed my frustrations to boil over a little bit. But I would like to thank you for your quick response to the scene, and appreciate the fact that the police are on the job." Would that have been so hard to do? Instead we get baseless accusations of racism, of racial profiling, and demands that the officer apologize for doing his job!

Personally, I think that Dr. Gates and bigmouthed Obama owe an apology to the officers involved for accusing them of racism, and to the entire police department for saying they acted "stupidly". Moreover, black folks in general should distance themselves from this foolish conversation, because it accomplishes nothing in the end. No one was racially profiled, no one in uniform did anything untoward, and none of the officers reacted in an unprofessional manner. They did what we claim we want the cops to do; they responded to a possible B&E with no idea of who lived there, showed no favoritism, and attempted to protect the rights and property of the person who lived in the home. Unfortunately, the person who lived there acted like a jerk and caused a public uproar, when none of the drama was needed.

As for the stories that I related in the opening paragraph, they were all true. However, even with that said, I never held those actions against the entire police forces...just the people involved. The same police force that pulled my mother over, and harassed my Lebanese friend also responded quickly to my sister's home when she needed them, and acted in a very professional manner. In addition, the same highway patrol that treated my father so badly has officers that have allowed me and my late brother skate on several speeding offenses with warnings when tickets were really in order. The actions of a few bad officers do not taint the entire profession, and the totally professional attitude of the officers in the Gates case are what we should want in police officers; namely, men and women who enforce the laws without any respect to persons, professions, race, color, creed, religion, or socioeconomic status. The police have nothing to be ashamed of, or sorry for; the embarrassment should fall on Dr. Gates and the clueless Obama, for respectively accusing good officers of racism and impugning the reputation of an entire police force...simply for attempting to enforce the law. Shame on the race baiting Dr. Henry Louis Gates, and shame on the clueless buttinski President Obama.

What is the deal with the idea that the GOP is finished in 2012 because Sen. John Ensign and Gov. Mark Sanford were caught having extramarital affairs? What has surprised me the most is the number of commentators and pundits of all stripes who are looking at the failures of these two men as the fall of the GOP and the end of GOP opposition to Obama in 2012? The truth is that as much as people may have admired the stances the two men took on a variety of issues, such as illegal immigration and financial responsibility; neither man was much of a serious contender for the GOP nomination process that takes place…in three years! Ensign was not particularly well known on the national political scene, notwithstanding his position as a US Senator, and until the dustup Sanford had over attempting to refuse federal stimulus money for South Carolina not many people outside the state and his region had heard of him. Yet as soon as the two men were caught in their sex scandals, they suddenly became the two GOP frontrunners for the next presidential cycle. Is that because they actually were, or is it because they fell down and can be used to dump on the GOP and their future electoral chances?

I was watching the news today and saw the giddiness of people at the sentence of 150 years for convicted swindler Bernie Madoff, and had to wonder what is wrong with people. Yeah, Madoff deserved some serious jail time for his Ponzi scheme, but 150 years for stealing money seems extreme to me. We give mass murderers less time than this for killing people, yet we go to the mat to slam a thief! My problem here is two-fold: I don’t like judges using a defendant’s sentence to “send a message” to others, and I think that this slamming of Madoff lets his “victims” off the hook for their roles in his scheme. First, I thought a judge was supposed to look at each case before him individually, weigh the merits of that case, and hand down an appropriate sentence. Instead, this judge has done what so many others have done in the past; he has decided that it is his job to make an example of one man in order to scare potential miscreants. Now, if Madoff deserved 150 years in prison…cool; give him 150 years. However, do not sentence him out of anger or public outrage, because that is not justice. Second, most of the “victims” of Madoff’s schemes were willing participants in the scheme. These people saw a deal that was offering too good to be true returns on their investments, and they ignored the ages old warnings about things that are too good to be true and caved into their greed. They gave him their money to play with hoping that they would get a better return than other investors would and instead were burned for being greedy. They, in most cases, bear the burden of their losses since they willingly signed up with a swindler.

I also saw today that the SCOTUS has struck down Judge Sonya Sotomayor’s ruling in the Ricci case. Good for them! The 5-4 majority has decided that discrimination based on race, even if you’re white, is not going to stand in America. Well, I say it is about damned time that the courts recognized that if we are to live in a society that is not based on race then we cannot discriminate against any race for any reason. We would not stand by and allow it if a woman, and Asian, Latino, or black was denied an earned promotion for no real reason, so we cannot let it stand against white men either. Moreover, if the GOP has any sense (which is debatable) they will ignore Patrick Leahy’s statements about this not being an issue and put it right out there for all to see. Being repudiated by the SCOTUS in such a public manner on such a highly charged case is very relevant, and must be stressed in the upcoming confirmation debate.

Finally, this has been a long weekend for the entertainment community. It started with the death of Ed McMahon and ended with the sudden death of ubiquitous television pitchman Billy Mays. But of course, the two biggest names were Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson. For men of a certain age, Farrah Fawcett was the “It girl”, and her 1970s poster was one that helped many a young boy move to young manhood. She was a talented actress, and frankly one of the best-looking women we have ever seen in the entertainment industry. Her battle with cancer was in all respects courageous, and it was sad to hear that she ultimately was unable to beat the disease. The death of Michael Jackson was a total shock to the system, and in my household, a few tears were shed at the news of his death. Heck, even I had a lump in my throat when I heard the news. For me, Michael Jackson’s music and videos were a huge part of the soundtrack of my life, and the idea of speaking of Jackson in the past tense still takes an effort. What is even sadder is that it seems that he died in some respects a broken man, allegedly hooked on prescription pain medications, and in increasingly poor health. Nevertheless, I prefer to remember him as the man who wowed me with the “Smooth Criminal” and “Remember the Time” videos; made me smile with songs like “The Way You Make Me Feel” and “Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough”; and touched me with songs like “You Are Not Alone” and “We Are the World”. RIP to Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, Ed McMahon, and Billy Mays. My prayers go out to all their families, and they will all be missed.

When Bill and Hillary Clinton were in the White House bringing the office of President into disrepute with their myriad scandals and illegalities, I am pretty sure that we all thought it would be a long time before we saw the likes of that again in the Oval Office. Bimbo eruptions, getting blown on federal time, semen stained dresses, purloined FBI files, and perjury were just the lowlights of the Clinton administration, and it was a relief when George W. Bush took over as POTUS because an adult had finally returned to the White House. And for eight years the only scandals emanating from the Bush administration were basically created by the media, who became sworn enemies of Bush and company when the Goracle managed to blow the election by not even managing to win his home state of Tennessee. And the scandals the media attempted to blow up were all minor league issues that involved no scandal at all; the ‘outing’ of Valerie Plame, the firing of the USA’s, and the constant mantra of “no-bid Halliburton contracts” were all media stories that led nowhere…except in the trumped up perjury charges against Lewis Libby.

So we come to the 2008 presidential campaign and we are treated to Barack Obama assailing the Bush administration and GOP led Congress on their alleged culture of corruption, and his claims that he was going to restore ethics to the executive branch. Gone would be the days of former lobbyists holding high positions in the administration, and gone too would be the days of ethical lapses emanating from the White House. Indeed, Obama promised to deliver on Bill Clinton’s pledge to run the “most ethical administration in history.” Yes, these were to be heady days indeed, if you are a fan of highly ethical government and were wishing to see government cleaned up and straightened out.

But the reality is far different from the rhetoric; instead of an ethical paradise the Obama administration seems more like Chicago-on-the-Potomac. In just the first six months of the Obama reign we have seen a plethora of unethical and/or illegal conduct. Here’s just a quick rundown of the stench emanating from the Hope & Change Express:

·         Instead of locking out all lobbyists the Obama White House began carving out exceptions to the very rules they instituted. While there is nothing wrong with former lobbyists working in the government to begin with, the Obama Bunch promised that any lobbyists hired would not work in areas that they had lobbied in recent months. Yet we have an assistant secretary at the Defense Department whose last job was…wait for it…lobbying for a defense contractor! That’s not the change we had hoped for!

·         The Obama Bunch has openly ignored the established rules of bankruptcy in the cases of General Motors and Daimler-Chrysler in order to reward its political patrons. The Obama Bunch (and the federal courts) allowed the secured creditors of the two companies to be paid pennies on the dollar for their interests in the companies, while the UAW was paid up to twice as much as the secured creditors. And all the while, the Obama Bunch was also threatening the secured creditors with serious repercussions, including setting the White House press corps on them to destroy their reputations, for having the temerity to oppose the hosing they were about to get.

·         The Obama Bunch also continued the illegal policy of the Bush administration in giving money from the TARP to the auto industry in blatant violation of the statute that created the program. The money was specifically appropriated for the purpose of bailing out troubled financial institutions in order to keep the entire system from crashing, yet both the Bush administration and the Obama Bunch misused those funds to prop up failing auto companies. Neither group attempted to even hide their illegal actions, no one from Congress stood up to oppose it, and the media cheered the move (probably the second time they cheered any Bush era move). So Obama took the ball and ran with, dumping even more money down the GM/Chrysler rat holes until he could successfully nationalize the companies.

·         The Obama Bunch has also caused severe tensions between the US and UK after bribing the Bermudans to take some of the Uighur terrorists (yes, they’re terrorists…why else would they have been caught in an al-Qaeda camp?) off our hands. The problem with that little action is that Bermuda, as a British protectorate, has no ability to make those types of foreign policy decisions; all of Bermuda’s foreign policy is supposed to run through No. 10 Downing Street in London. The Obama Bunch had to know this, yet they willingly circumvented the system in order to score some cheap political points by relocating some of the “harmless” terrorist suspects still housed at Gitmo. This may not be illegal, but is sure as hell is hot an unethical move…and they damned well had to know it was unethical. And they did it anyway. That should tell you a lot about the people we have in charge for the next three-plus years.

·         Finally, the Hope & Change Express decided to fire Inspector General Gerald Walpin for having the gall to actually do his job. He discovered that Sacramento mayor Kevin Johnson had misused federal money allocated as a grant to his St. HOPE charity, including using the money for attempting to influence the outcome of the local school board election. When Walpin blew the whistle on the whole mess the Obama administration went Chicago style politics on him; they demanded that he either quit or be fired. To his credit Mr. Walpin took the honorable way out and forced Obama to fire him, and fired he was…in violation of a law cosponsored by then Senator Obama that mandated a 30 day notice before termination, and for having a cause for the termination. When challenged, the Obama Bunch opted not to really defend their illegal action; instead they tried to paint Walpin as on the verge of senility by releasing a report that claimed he was “confused” and “disoriented” during one of the meetings he conducted. The first act was blatantly illegal, while the subsequent actions all smack of the “politics of personal destruction” that liberals always scream about…while being the main practitioners of said tactic.

Instead of the super-ethical administration we were promised, we are seeing some of the dirtiest politics we have run across in a long time. I mean, even the Clinton’s made it longer than six months before they were caught up this many scandals! Yet Obama continues to act like he’s as pure as the wind driven snow and that his crap doesn’t stink. But if we are lucky, the people are watching and the new media will be able to keep a running account of what is going on leading up to next year’s congressional races. Maybe by then the GOP leadership will pull their heads out of their collective bung-holes (that means you Mike Steele!) and can use this to make some hay on election day. Because not even the most fervent followers of the O-bomination thought they were signing up for an administration that looks to put even the Clintons to shame when it comes to ethical obtuseness.