Real Men of Genius - Bud Lite ad saluting Obama fans



'Former Secretary of State, likes American Idol, would like to meet...': How Condoleezza Rice is now looking for love

Daily Mail
Former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has revealed she's looking for love.

With masses of free time suddenly on her hands, President Bush's former ally says she plans to focus more on finding romance.

Like so many women in high-flying careers, Ms Rice found herself having to choose between her personal life and her demanding role as Bush's right-hand woman.

For four years, her personal life had to come a distant second - but she is now ready to concentrate on herself.
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GOP elects first black national party chairman

LIZ SIDOTI
Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) - Michael Steele was elected Republican National Committee chairman on Friday, defeating the incumbent party chief and three other challengers over six rounds of voting to become the first black to lead the GOP.

The former Maryland lieutenant governor takes over a beleaguered GOP as Republicans seek to rebound from back-to-back defeats in national elections that gave Democrats control of Congress and the White House.

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Arrogant at home, naive abroad. America is already suffering 'buyer's regret' over Obama

Mail Online

Yesterday, just eight days after the inauguration, President Obama had his £576bn so-called stimulus bill passed by the House of Representatives - but without a single vote from any Republican.

All 177 House Republicans opposed the bill. None of them fell for that 'bi-partisan' tripe, which is Democrat code for 'do it our way.'

Which gives me hope for the Republican Congressmen. Forget about 'change.' They know an old-style, Democrat pork-barrel piece of legislation - that is, a Bill designed to pay off or buy votes from vested interests - when they see one, and they aren't going to back it.

Congressman Eric Cantor, one of the leading House Republicans, says an analysis of the Bill shows it is mostly pork: just 12 cents of every dollar in the spending will go to any genuine economic stimulus, such as creating jobs.

Yet Obama was keen to have support from the Republicans. He didn't get it, because what he really wanted was submission from the Republicans.

Clearly the Republicans on the Hill don't reckon they are going to get any backlash from the voters in their districts because they have given a No to The One. They understand that already their voters don't like what Obama is doing, or indeed the arrogance with which he is doing it.

Just two days after the inauguration, when Republican legislators told the president they objected to the massive spending bill, Obama dismissed them with two words: 'I won.'

That was a particularly stupid mistake by the new president. Hard-left Democrats may cheer at such gloating, but most Americans don't like that kind of contempt being shown to Congress.

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Names Emerge in Synagro Scandal

WXYZ

A sludge-hauling executive's account of greed and bribery has linked former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, his father, Bernard Kilpatrick, and City Council President Monica Conyers as the major figures in the Synagro scandal, according to a story on the Detroit Free Press web site.

The three have not been charged with wrongdoing in the case, but their names emerged along with others as the government's investigation into city corruption widens.

In addition to the Kilpatricks and Monica Conyers, the Free Press has identified five other people who were cited -- but not named -- in plea records Monday.

Those five have been identified by sources as onetime mayoral aides Michael Tardif and Derrick Miller; Detroit developer and Synagro consultant Rayford Jackson; Akunna Olumba, a business associate and former girlfriend of Bernard Kilpatrick; and former Conyers aide Sam Riddle.

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Toys saying Islam is the light



Mexico on Edge of Chaos

Jonathan Adam-Christian Science Monitor
NEWSMAX

Relatives of missing persons in Mexico pressed officials for help in finding their loved ones' remains after a man last week admitted to helping a drug gang dispose of more than 300 bodies using corrosive chemicals.

The macabre admission is just the latest indication of the depth of Mexico's drug violence. Some US observers say the cartels now pose a direct threat to the Mexican government's survival, and, by extension, a growing security threat to the US. But Mexican officials and analysts say such views are overly alarmist.

Reuters reported that more than 5,700 people were killed in drug violence last year in Mexico, "nearly double the number of 2007."

The wire service reported that dozens of families had approached officials for help in finding their relatives after the arrest of Santiago Meza Lopez last week.

News of Meza's arrest prompted dozens of families to come forward seeking news of missing loved ones. The state prosecutors' office said it was looking into more than 450 missing persons' cases from the past eight years.

"We have hope that some of the victims are our relatives. I'll be at peace when I know where my son's body is," Fernando Oseguera, whose son disappeared in 2007, told a news conference.

The Mexican newspaper Prensa reported details of the case. Mr. Lopez, alias "El Pozolero [the stew maker]," said he was paid $600 per month to help the Arellano Pelix drug cartel dispose of bodies.

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Obama Pledges to Fund Pro-Abortion UNFPA After Killing Mexico City Policy

Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- Now that President Barack Obama has fulfilled his promise to overturn the Mexico City Policy and fund groups that promote and perform abortions in other countries, he is laying out additional pro-abortion plans. In his statement accompanying his executive order, Obama says UNFPA funding is next.

Funding United Nations Population Fund has long been a controversial topic and President Bush annually withheld the $40 million in taxpayer dollars the UN group had typically received.

He did so because a State Department investigation found the agency was working hand-in-hand with Chinese officials who instituted its one-child population control policy.

The Chinese policy prohibits couples from having more than one child and violators are punished with forced abortions, sterilizations, and are subjected to numerous human rights abuses.

"I look forward to working with Congress to restore U.S. financial support for the U.N. Population Fund," Obama said Saturday.

"By resuming funding to UNFPA, the U.S. will be joining 180 other donor nations working collaboratively to reduce poverty, improve the health of women and children, prevent HIV/AIDS and provide family planning assistance to women in 154 countries," he added.

However, President Obama ignored the connection between the UNFPA and the Chinese forced-abortion program.

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RUSH LIMBAUGH FIRES BACK AT OBAMA

New York Post

President Obama's call for Republicans to ignore Rush Limbaugh if they want to "get things done" with the new Democratic majority, featured in today's Post, sparked a war of words between the new commander-in-chief and the talk show host.

"One prong of the Great Unifier's plan is to isolate elected Republicans from their voters and supporters by making the argument about me and not about his plan," Limbaugh shot back in a statement to the National Review.

"He is hoping that these Republicans will also publicly denounce me and thus marginalize me."

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White House promoting 'anti-Christian' policies?

Jim Brown
OneNewsNow

A leading conservative activist says President Obama has already signaled, during his first days in office, that his administration will be the most "extreme, left-wing, and discriminatory" in American history.

President Obama's plans to cater to the priorities of homosexual activists are laid out under a section called "Civil Rights" on the website WhiteHouse.gov. (See earlier story)

The website makes clear Obama's intention to expand federal hate crimes statutes to include extra punishment for crimes that are deemed to be motivated by bias against one's sexual orientation or gender identity. The site also stresses Obama's support for homosexual civil unions and expanded adoption rights for homosexuals, as well as his desire to repeal the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy and the federal Defense of Marriage Act (a.k.a., DOMA).

Matt Barber, director of cultural affairs with Liberty Counsel, believes many Americans will be shocked to find out just how radical some of Obama's positions are on social issues.

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Woman bites driver over non-hybrid bus

DAILY NEWS WRITERS

Going green was a cause she could really sink her teeth into.
The frantic passenger who bit a veteran driver's arm was upset that his bus wasn't a hybrid, he said Thursday.

"She came on the bus, and she said she waited more than an hour for a hybrid," said MTA driver Peter Williams, 42. "I said, 'I'm not in control of what bus is assigned to me.'"

Williams, a dad of two who is in the Navy Reserves, plans to take a little time off after Wednesday's bizarre attack on an uptown M104 bus.

The woman, Shelia Bolar, 49, started hollering at Williams soon after she boarded the Broadway bus on the upper West Side.

When her rant was done, she she grabbed his arm.

"Miss, don't touch me while I'm operating the bus," Williams warned Bolar.

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Prank Calls made with the Obama Soundboard

Barack Obama inauguration: this Emperor has no clothes, it will all end in tears

Telegrapth.co.uk

This will end in tears. The Obama hysteria is not merely embarrassing to witness, it is itself contributory to the scale of the disaster that is coming. What we are experiencing, in the deepening days of a global depression, is the desperate suspension of disbelief by people of intelligence - la trahison des clercs - in a pathetic effort to hypnotise themselves into the delusion that it will be all right on the night. It will not be all right.

We have been here before. In the spring of 1997, to be precise, when a charismatic, young prime minister entered Downing Street, cheered by children bussed in for the occasion waving plastic Union Jacks. A very few of us at that time incurred searing reproaches for denouncing the Great Charlatan (as I have always denominated Tony Blair) and dissenting from the public hysteria. Three times a deluded Britain elected that transparent fraud. Yesterday, when national bankruptcy became a formal reality, we reaped the bitter harvest of the Blair/Brown imposture.

The burnt child, contrary to conventional wisdom, does not fear the fire. After the Blair experience there is no excuse for anybody in Britain falling for Obama. Yet today, in this country, even some of those who remained sane during the emotional spasm of the Diana aberration are pumping the air for Princess Barack. At a time of gross economic and geopolitical instability throughout the Western world, this is beyond irresponsibility.

To anyone who kept his head, the string of Christmas cracker mottoes booming through the public address system on Washington's National Mall can only excite scepticism. It is crucial to recall the reality that lies behind the rhetoric. Denouncing "those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents" comes ill from a man whose flagship legislation, the Freedom of Choice Act, will impose abortion, including partial-birth abortion, on every state in the Union. It seems the era of Hope is to be inaugurated with a slaughter of the innocents.

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One Hundred Tons of Garbage Collected After Obama Inauguration

One-hundred tons of trash were collected by city and federal sanitation workers after President Obama's Jan. 20 inauguration in Washington, D.C.

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Obama to Lift Ban on Overseas Abortion Funding

President Obama is expected to sign the executive order one day after the 36th anniversary of the landmark Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion in all 50 states.

President Obama on Friday is expected to lift a ban on federal funding for international groups that promote or perform abortions, reversing a policy of his predecessor, George W. Bush.

Obama will sign the executive order one day after the 36th anniversary of the landmark Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion in all 50 states.

The move, long expected in the Democratic president's first week in office, will be welcomed by liberals and criticized by abortion rights foes.

The so-called Mexico City policy requires any non-governmental organization to agree before receiving U.S. funds that they will "neither perform nor actively promote abortion as a method of family planning in other nations."

It is also known as the "global gag rule," because it prohibits taxpayer funding for groups that even talk about abortion if there is an unplanned pregnancy.

The policy was first instituted by President Ronald Reagan in 1984 and continued by President George H.W. Bush. The policy was reversed by President Bill Clinton in 1993, and re-instated by President George W. Bush in 2001.

Both Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who will oversee foreign aid, had promised to do away with the gag rule during the presidential campaign. Clinton is to visit the U.S. Agency for International Development, through which much U.S. foreign aid is disbursed, later on Friday.

Organizations that had pressed Obama to make the abortion-ban change were jubilant.

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Stephanopoulos Cried On Inauguration Day

Ali Wentworth (husband of ABC News' George Stephanopoulos) on "Oprah":

We watched everything and George was still doing all the anchoring for ABC and as soon Beyonce said "At Last..." George called me at home and he went, "Honey?" and I said "I know!" and we both started crying.

Pro-Gazan Iranian demonstrators carrying a British flag, burn a photo of US President-elect Barack Obama, during an anti-Israeli, anti-US and anti-British protest in front of the former US Embassy in Tehran, Iran, Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2009

Judge Obama on Performance Alone

Juan Williams
The Wall Street Journal

With the noon sun high over the U.S. Capitol, Barack Obama yesterday took the oath of office to become president of the United States. On one level, it was a simple matter of political process -- the symbolic transfer of power. Yet words alone cannot convey its meaning.

The calloused hands of slaves, the voices of abolitionists, the hearts of generations who trusted in the naïve promise that any child can become president, will find some reward in a moment that was hard to imagine last year, much less 50 years ago. Our history, so marred by the sin of slavery, has come to the day when a man that an old segregationist would have described as "tea-colored" -- the child of a white woman and an African immigrant, who identifies as a member of the long oppressed and despised black minority -- was chosen by a mostly white nation as the personification of America's best sense of self as a nation of power and virtue.

At the end of the 1965 march calling for passage of the Voting Rights Act, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said politics held the potential to reflect the brilliance of the American creed of justice for all, and a "society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience." Years of hard work lay ahead to shift racist attitudes born of political power being limited to white Americans, he said, then added that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. How long? Not long. Because mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!"

It is neither overweening emotion nor partisanship to see King's moral universe bending toward justice in the act of the first non-white man taking the oath of the presidency. But now that this moment has arrived, there is a question: How shall we judge our new leader?

If his presidency is to represent the full power of the idea that black Americans are just like everyone else -- fully human and fully capable of intellect, courage and patriotism -- then Barack Obama has to be subject to the same rough and tumble of political criticism experienced by his predecessors. To treat the first black president as if he is a fragile flower is certain to hobble him. It is also to waste a tremendous opportunity for improving race relations by doing away with stereotypes and seeing the potential in all Americans.

Yet there is fear, especially among black people, that criticism of him or any of his failures might be twisted into evidence that people of color cannot effectively lead. That amounts to wasting time and energy reacting to hateful stereotypes. It also leads to treating all criticism of Mr. Obama, whether legitimate, wrong-headed or even mean-spirited, as racist.

This is patronizing. Worse, it carries an implicit presumption of inferiority. Every American president must be held to the highest standard. No president of any color should be given a free pass for screw-ups, lies or failure to keep a promise.

During the Democrats' primaries and caucuses, candidate Obama often got affectionate if not fawning treatment from the American media. Editors, news anchors, columnists and commentators, both white and black but especially those on the political left, too often acted as if they were in a hurry to claim their role in history as supporters of the first black president.

For example, Mr. Obama was forced to give a speech on race as a result of revelations that he'd long attended a church led by a demagogue. It was an ordinary speech. At best it was successful at minimizing a political problem. Yet some in the media equated it to the Gettysburg Address.

The importance of a proud, adversarial press speaking truth about a powerful politician and offering impartial accounts of his actions was frequently and embarrassingly lost. When Mr. Obama's opponents, such as the Clintons, challenged his lack of experience, or pointed out that he was not in the U.S. Senate when he expressed early opposition to the war in Iraq, they were depicted as petty.

Bill Clinton got hit hard when he called Mr. Obama's claims to be a long-standing opponent of the Iraq war "the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen." The former president accurately said that there was no difference in actual Senate votes on the war between his wife and Mr. Obama. But his comments were not treated by the press as legitimate, hard-ball political fighting. They were cast as possibly racist.

This led to Saturday Night Live's mocking skit -- where the debate moderator was busy hammering the other Democratic nominees with tough questions while inquiring if Mr. Obama was comfortable and needed more water.

When fellow Democrats contending for the nomination rightly pointed to Mr. Obama's thin proposals for dealing with terrorism and extricating the U.S. from Iraq, they were drowned out by loud if often vacuous shouts for change. Yet in the general election campaign and during the transition period, Mr. Obama steadily moved to his former opponents' positions. In fact, he approached Bush-Cheney stands on immunity for telecommunications companies that cooperate in warrantless surveillance.

There is a dangerous trap being set here. The same media people invested in boosting a black man to the White House as a matter of history have set very high expectations for him. When he disappoints, as presidents and other human beings inevitably do, the backlash may be extreme.

Several seasons ago, when Philadelphia Eagle's black quarterback Donovan McNabb was struggling, radio commentator Rush Limbaugh said the media wanted a black quarterback to do well and gave Mr. McNabb "a lot of credit for the performance of this team that he didn't deserve." Mr. Limbaugh's sin was saying out loud what others had said privately.

There is a lot more at stake now, and to allow criticism of Mr. Obama only behind closed doors does no honor to the dreams and prayers of generations past: that race be put aside, and all people be judged honestly, openly, and on the basis of their performance.

President Obama deserves no less.

U.S. Treasury Secretary nominee Geithner Apologizes Over Taxes

A WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE

U.S. Treasury Secretary nominee Timothy Geithner apologized Wednesday to members of the Senate Finance Committee for tax errors he committed earlier this decade that came to light during his nomination process. Mr. Geithner called the mistakes "careless" and "avoidable." He told the panel he was sorry that his past transgressions were now an issue in his confirmation at a time of deepening economic crisis. He urged Congress to act quickly and forcefully to deal with the crisis. A top administration priority is to foster economic recovery and "get credit flowing again," Mr. Geithner testified. As to his failure to pay the payroll taxes from 2001 to 2004 while he worked for the International Monetary Fund, Mr. Geithner said the errors were unintentional. "I should have been more careful," he said.

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Social Security readies for onslaught

BY JIM ABRAMS
Associated Press

WASHINGTON — The Social Security Administration, envisioning the near-future prospect of 10,000 baby boomers applying for benefits every day, has put together a new online service that will allow people to get their benefits without ever traveling to a Social Security field office.

The agency, in introducing the program Tuesday, said most people will be able to apply for their retirement or disability benefits in 15 minutes or less.

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Banks rescue suicide billionaire's interests

Two days after the suicide of one of Germany's richest men -- who was apparently despondent over financial troubles -- banks agreed to rescue his business holdings, the companies said in a statement.

Adolf Merckle, 74, was hit by a train in the southwestern town of Ulm Monday. Details of the incident were unclear, but Ulm police said Merckle was apparently dragged for some time after being struck, as they found blood some distance away from the body.

Merckle's family said that he had been "broken" by the global economic crisis.

But on Wednesday, Merckle's VEM Group said it had reached a rescue agreement with German banks. The business empire includes interests as diverse as cement-maker HeidelbergCement and generic drug-maker Ratiopharm. Under the agreement, VEM Group said, Ratiopharm will be sold.

"Management will do everything in its power to represent the interests of company employees during the sales process," Oliver Windholz, CEO of Ratiopharm, said in a statement.

Merckle was No. 94 on the Forbes list of the world's richest people, after having been listed at No. 44 with a fortune of $12.8 billion. But he lost hundreds of millions of dollars, including company capital, betting against Volkswagen stock last year and his worth was listed at $9.2 billion in 2008.

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