CNN freaks out--can't believe their own Shelly and President Pantywaist were so humiliated

• To the media: YOU FAILED. WAY BEFORE THE OBAMA'S FAILED. YOU PICKED THEM AND YOU PICKED WRONG. (framus) video via Hot Air

Proof of Obama failure abundant before election: mice, sewage

• 6/27/08, The Boston Globe: By Binyamin Appelbaum Globe Staff / June 27, 2008

CHICAGO - "The squat brick buildings of Grove Parc Plaza, in a dense neighborhood that Barack Obama represented

• for eight years as a state senator,
  

hold 504 apartments subsidized by the federal government for people who can't afford to live anywhere else.

• But it's not safe to live here.

About 99 of the units are vacant, many rendered uninhabitable by unfixed problems, such as collapsed roofs and fire damage.

• Mice scamper through the halls.

Battered mailboxes hang open.

• Sewage backs up into kitchen sinks.
  

In 2006, federal inspectors graded the condition of the complex an 11 on a 100-point scale - a score so bad the

• buildings now face demolition.

Grove Parc has become a symbol for some in Chicago of the broader failures of giving public subsidies to private companies to build and manage affordable housing -

• an approach strongly backed by Obama as the best replacement for public housing.

As a state senator, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee coauthored an Illinois law creating a new pool of tax credits for developers. As a US senator, he pressed for increased federal subsidies. And as a presidential candidate, he has campaigned on a promise to create an Affordable Housing Trust Fund that could give developers an estimated $500 million a year.

But a Globe review found that thousands of apartments across Chicago that had been built with local, state, and federal subsidies -

• including several hundred in Obama's former district

• deteriorated so completely that they were no longer habitable."...

"Grim Proving Ground for Obama's Housing Policy," via Lucianne.com

Canadian Waiting List for Medical Care

data from Timely Medical Services
via Gateway Pundit. Why not just give us the health plan Obama has?

Trial Lawyers Lobby $6 million in debt-Obama keeps feeding them terrorists to defend as US citizens so no worry

9/28/09: "The trial lawyers lobby has been awash in debt and bleeding members - just as it embarks on a national campaign to block any clampdown on medical malpractice lawsuits as part of President Obama's health care overhaul.

• The American Association for Justice, the most prominent group representing plaintiffs' attorneys, has seen
  
• a shake-up in its executive suite and has struggled to deal with what appears to be a mounting
  
• budget shortfall. To help it fight congressional efforts to make it harder for patients to sue doctors and lawyers,
  
• it recently sent out an extra solicitation to its members, asking them to fork over money for a lobbying campaign.

The most striking evidence of its financial woes is a

• swift decline in income, which resulted in a more than $6.2 million deficit in its operating budget for the fiscal year ending July 31, 2008, the most recent year for which data are available.
  

The biggest hit to its books was in membership dues, which dropped from $28.6 million in 2005 to $19.2 million in 2008, according to the annual AAJ financial report for that fiscal year filed with the Internal Revenue Service.

• "That is our number-one priority: to strengthen our membership," said Joey Diaz, a member of the AAJ executive committee, speaking by phone from his law office in Madison, Miss. "We have a number of people working on membership and we have reversed that [downward] trend and are starting to move forward again."...

AAJ asked members for extra money to pay for the lobbying campaign in a solicitation last week." Washington Times, via Lucianne.com, 9/28/09, "Trial Lawyers Lobby Sinks $6.2 million in debt"

• (Any Obama appearance to reign in medical malpractice suits will be just that).
  

Silent Majority no more-September 12, 2009 march against government waste

Top photo from Vodkapundit, bottom photo from Capitalist Coffee. All due to
the complete failure of elected republicans going back to George Bush the first.

Brits targeted wrong 'Savage,' US media silence deafening

8/31/09, Matt Towery: "I won't go into it again about my years as a student in England and how much I love that country.

• It is irrelevant to the "Alice in Wonderland" situation that just keeps getting more bizarre -
  

• Britain's banning of American conservative talk radio host Michael Savage from entering their country.

Savage, the third-most-listened-to radio talk show host in the United States, was lumped together on a list of "undesirables"

• with terrorists and murderers.

The list was compiled by the British home secretary, a woman who has since resigned her post. There's little doubt that Savage was grouped with the others because

• the British government needed some "balance" on its list -
  

• most of the others were Islamic extremists." (including murderers)
  

"Savage is, shall we say, "savagely" opinionated sometimes on his broadcasts. That's about as close to a crime as he comes.

• Now I am astonished as the hypocrisy of banning Savage has played itself out for the entire world to see.

Last week, Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill allowed the release of Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the man convicted of bombing Pan Am flight 103 near Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.

• Two hundred and seventy people died.

MacAskill released the Libyan spy from jail because he reportedly had terminal cancer and his release was deemed by MacAskill

• as "compassionate."

This true "savage" in our story, the man who killed so many innocent people, returned to Libya

• to a hero's welcome and to the news that
  

• his cancer might not be so imminently terminal after all.

A less obvious outrage through all of this is that the American government and

• the U.S. media don't seem to care.

Why do the mainstream media in the U.S. keep acting as if there is even a shred of justification for this absurd measure against Savage? They act as if they don't know about the ban of Savage, or at least as if they don't consider it a news story.

You can bet the same silent media would have their megaphones of outrage out and active had

• the banned media personality been, for example, Bill Maher or Michael Moore, both of
  

• left-leaning persuasion. Then the outrage would be endless (and justified).

So I pose this question to the British government: Do the words uttered by a talk show host in America - words regulated by a very strict Federal Communications Commission - justify banning the man from your country?

• Where is the "compassion" for a man who has harmed no one?

Or do you reserve your compassion for bona fide "savages" - the kind that wreak or would like to wreak murder and mayhem?"

• "British take a tough stand on the wrong 'savage'" Jacksonville.com, 8/31/09, via Lucianne.com
  

UK New Era Keystone Cops trip on own e-mails in pathetic case v Michael Savage

• Gordon Brown and David Miliband shamed:

Executive Editor, Radio Free Europe, John O'Sullivan: "THE latest twist in the saga of how the

• British government banned talk-radio host Michael Savage from entering Britain is straight out of the sitcom "Yes, Prime Minister,"

in which a Machiavellian civil servant, Sir Humphrey, repeatedly manipulates PM Jim Hacker into foolish decisions with subtle arguments that Jim never quite grasps.

Jim: "So we're banning this fellow Savage from Britain because he's a dangerous Islamic terrorist, are we?"

Sir H: "Not quite, PM. We're banning him because he isn't a dangerous Islamic terrorist."

Jim: "I see -- No, I don't."

Sir H: "Well, there are a lot of dangerous Islamic terrorists on the list already. It might give the impression we don't approve of them. So we're adding other names to, well, balance them out and, er, reassure them."

Jim: "Balance, eh? So this Savage is dangerous in other ways."

Sir H: "Indubitably, PM. He's a conservative shock-jock radio broadcaster."

Jim: "I don't know what that is, but it doesn't sound especially dangerous. Why do we say we're keeping him out?"

• Sir H (consults document): "I think the phrase is 'likely to cause community tension,' PM."

• Jim: "Is Savage likely to cause community tension?"

• Sir H: "Not really, sir. Nobody in the community has ever heard of him." (Both laugh.)

• Jim: "Well, they'll hear of him once we ban him." (They laugh again.)
  

• Sir H: "But it will be for the one and only time." (They fall over laughing.)

So it would've been if a shrewd old mandarin like Sir Humphrey were still running the Home Office in Whitehall.

• He'd never have made the elementary error of putting the real reasons for banning Savage in a confidential e-mail. He'd know that the final destination of confidential Labor government mail is the front page of the conservative Daily Mail.

Which is where the internal Home Office e-mails relating to Savage's exclusion from Britain ended up this week.

• Savage himself is owed most of the credit for exposing this latest farce: He decided to fight his exclusion by launching a slander suit against the home secretary (the hapless Jacqui Smith, who has since resigned amid an avalanche of gaffes),
• and then obtained his own list of incriminating e-mails as part of the legal process.

These e-mails are fully as silly -- and damaging -- as anything in "Yes, Prime Minister." One makes it explicit that Savage is being named as an excluded person

• "to ensure that the names disclosed . . . are not all Islamic extremists." Another reveals that the Prime Minister Gordon Brown and the
  
• 
  
• Foreign Secretary David Miliband are "firmly behind" this "naming and shaming."

A third e-mail (from a civil servant who seems a potential Sir Humphrey) prudently warns his bosses that all this sounds too much like "duplicity."

Indeed, it does.

• The list of "named and shamed" included not only Islamic "extremists" but also two Russian skinheads imprisoned for 20 racial murders. What had Savage done to justify including him in such company?

The worst that the cautious Home Office official could cite was that he was "homophobic" -- which isn't a crime even in San Francisco, the birthplace of Savage's show.

• And why proclaim his exclusion when he'd shown absolutely no sign of wanting to enter Britain?
  

The answer is that naming and shaming Savage was a low exercise in cheap politics all too characteristic of the Brown government. Its methodology is similar to the recent scandal wherein a Gordon Brown aide had to resign on being found spreading false rumors (also via e-mail) that opposition Tory leaders and their families were mired in various sexual sins.

• It had another low political motive as well as that of appeasing radical Islamism -- namely,

• attempting to discredit conservatives by associating them with extremists
  

• and political criminals.
  

Exactly the same tactics --

• "guilt by association" and "guilt by exclusion" --
  

were later used against Geert Wilders, the anti-immigration Dutch politician. Whatever flaws of taste or opinion they may have committed, neither man posed any threat to security, the British way of life

• or even community tension.

Home secretaries, either Smith or her successor, would be well advised not even to attempt the "robust" defense their department promises in response to Savage's slander suit.

• They are condemned by their own laptops.

All the same, it would be fun to see Savage being cross-examined by one of those clever British barristers." "Condemned by Their Own Laptops," NY Post, 7/29/09

• "John O'Sullivan, a former Post editorial- page editor, is executive editor of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Prague."