Thanks to the reporting of the Sun-Times:

A $100,000 state grant for a botanic garden in Englewood that then-state Sen. Barack Obama awarded in 2001 to a group headed by a onetime campaign volunteer is now under investigation by the Illinois attorney general amid new questions, prompted by Chicago Sun-Times reports, about whether the money might have been misspent.

The garden was never built. And now state records obtained by the Sun-Times show $65,000 of the grant money went to the wife of Kenny B. Smith, the Obama 2000 congressional campaign volunteer who heads the Chicago Better Housing Association, which was in charge of the project for the blighted South Side neighborhood.

Smith wrote another $20,000 in grant-related checks to K.D. Contractors, a construction company that his wife, Karen D. Smith, created five months after work on the garden was supposed to have begun, records show. K.D. is no longer in business.

Attorney General Lisa Madigan -- a Democrat who is supporting Obama's presidential bid -- is investigating "whether this charitable organization properly used its charitable assets, including the state funds it received," Cara Smith, Madigan's deputy chief of staff, said Wednesday.

In addition to the 2001 grant that Obama directed to the housing association as a "member initiative," the not-for-profit group got a separate $20,000 state grant in 2006.

Questions about the grant, though, come as spending on local pet projects has become an issue in Obama's campaign against John McCain.

Obama and Kenny Smith announced the "Englewood Botanic Garden Project" at a January 2000 news conference at Englewood High School. Obama was in the midst of a failed bid to oust South Side Democratic Rep. Bobby Rush for a seat in Congress. The garden -- planned near and under L tracks between 59th Place and 62nd Place -- fell outside of Obama's Illinois Senate district but within the congressional district's borders.

Obama vowed to "work tirelessly" to raise $1.1 million to help Smith's organization turn the City of Chicago-owned lot into an oasis of trees and paths. But Obama lost the congressional race, no more money was raised, and today the garden site is a mess of weeds, chunks of concrete and garbage. The only noticeable improvement is a gazebo.

In a previous interview, Smith said the state grant money was legitimately spent, mostly on underground site preparation.

But no one ever took out construction permits required for such work, city records show.

How soon before this story is labeled as an "over the top, racist smear by the McCain campaign?" With all of the well deserved scorn that we heap on the Holy One, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that Obama is a corrupt politician in the Chicago tradition.

A Google News search shows exactly ONE other news outlet (LegalNewsLine.com) carrying this story at the moment. The silence is deafening.

Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post has an excellent article about the Palin/Ahmadinejad protest story:

LIBERAL AMERICAN Jews, like liberal Americans in general, and indeed like their fellow leftists in Israel and throughout the West, uphold themselves as champions of human rights. They claim that they care about the underdog, the wretched of the earth. They care about the environment. They care about securing American women's unfettered access to abortions. They care about keeping Christianity and God out of the public sphere. They care about offering peace to those who are actively seeking their destruction so that they can applaud themselves for their open-mindedness and tell themselves how much better they are than savage conservatives.

Those horrible, war-mongering, Bambi killing, unborn baby defending, God-believing conservatives, who think that there are things worth going to war to protect, must be defeated at all costs. They must intimidate, attack, demonize and defeat those conservatives who think that the free women of the West should be standing shoulder to shoulder not with Planned Parenthood, but with the women of the Islamic world who are enslaved by a misogynist Shari'a legal code that treats them as slaves and deprives them of control not simply of their wombs, but of their faces, their hair, their arms, their legs, their minds and their hearts.

The lives of 6 million Jews in Israel are today tied to the fortunes of those women, to the fortunes of American forces in Iraq, to the willingness of Americans across the political and ideological spectrum to recognize that there is more that unifies them than divides them and to act on that knowledge to defeat the forces of genocide, oppression, hatred and destruction that are led today by the Iranian regime and personified in the brutal personality of Ahmadinejad. But Jewish Democrats chose to ignore this basic truth in order to silence Palin.

They should be ashamed. The Democratic Party should be ashamed. And Jewish American voters should consider carefully whether opposing a woman who opposes the abortion of fetuses is really more important than standing up for the right of already born Jews to continue to live and for the Jewish state to continue to exist. Because this week it came to that.

 

Read it all here...

Dustin Hawkins at the Canada Free Press tears the Messiah a new one...

Last week, Barack Obama challenged a crowd of supporters to approach Republicans and Independents and to “argue with them and get in their face.” And then do what? Lie? He immediately asked his supporters to talk about what a gun-toting, anti-tax nut he is. Let’s take a moment to note the irony of having the biggest liberal in the Senate tell a liberal crowd to argue non-liberal positions on his behalf.

[snip]

The Fauxbama Doctrine is simple: Tell the “average people” what they want to hear and hope they are stupid enough to fall for it. Barack is for gun rights! And tax cuts! And is “personally” pro-life! And wanted to join the military! And is post-racial! And had trouble paying student loans too! And wants to increase energy supplies! And wants to win the war! In 2004, liberals were counting on normal Americans to fall for the bait-and-switch. They were hoping that they could trick the “dumb people” into voting for their liberal-no-wait-conservative candidate. And this year, they are hoping they can pull it off for once.

Read the whole thing here...

... that our brains are in danger of falling out.

Don't forget, the Left believes that the ends justifies the means. There is no loyal opposition. There is no marketplace of ideas. All conservative thought has been branded evil.

We have let the Left neuter our language. We speak of "pro-life/pro-choice" when we should be speaking of "anti-abortion/pro-abortion". A late-term "fetus" is actually an "unborn baby". "Entitlements" are actually "welfare" which is really "handouts".

Paying taxes is patriotic? Hello? Up is down? Black is white? American Revolution anybody? We all know all about the whole taxation without representation schtick, but why wasn't Biden pilloried with it? Instead it's debated as if it's a concept worthy of serious discussion.

We're all too easily cowed by the threat of being called insensitive, racist, misogynist, homophobic, etc.

As a conservative you are not considered a decent person. If you qualify a statement, "I'm not a <fill in the blank>, BUT...", you are just confirming the preexisting bad opinions that others have of you.

Speak your mind unreservedly. Don't hesitate to mercilessly criticize the politically correct. If we don't advocate for our own beliefs, then who will?

Gore urges civil disobedience to stop coal plants...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Nobel Peace Prize winner and environmental crusader Al Gore urged young people on Wednesday to engage in civil disobedience to stop the construction of coal plants without the ability to store carbon.

Wow. I am humbled by Saint Al's commitment  to serve humanity. It's not enough that he is "Nobel Peace Prize winner" and "environmental crusader". Al Gore has now entered the holiest of holy professions, "community organizer".

The former U.S. vice president, whose climate change documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" won an Academy Award, told a philanthropic meeting in New York City that "the world has lost ground to the climate crisis."

Did I miss a memo? Saint Al is now a philanthropist too? Last time I checked, His Holiness had gotten filthy, stinking rich peddling his global warming nonsense.

"I believe for a carbon company to spend money convincing the stock-buying public that the risk from the global climate crisis is not that great represents a form of stock fraud because they are misrepresenting a material fact," he said. "I hope these state attorney generals around the country will take some action on that."

Stock fraud? There are those who think Al Gore should be sued for peddling the outright fraud of Global Warming.

Scientists say carbon gases from burning fossil fuel for power and transport are a key factor in global warming.

Um, yeah... Scientists say whatever will get them more grant money. The list of things that supposedly cause global warming and things supposedly caused by global warming is quite absurd. Apparently even Global Cooling causes Global Warming.

The reality is that the planet has been hotter in the past, and the planet has been cooler in the past. The carbon dioxide levels have been lower in the past, and the levels have been much higher in the past. Temperatures and carbon dioxide levels simply don't correlate. Global warming exists only in flawed and limited computer models. These models can't even predict the past.

Carbon capture and storage could give coal power an extended lease on life by keeping power plants' greenhouse gas emissions out of the atmosphere and easing climate change.

But no commercial-scale project exists anywhere to demonstrate the technology, partly because it is expected to increase up-front capital costs by an additional 50 percent.

At a time when America needs to develop every feasible energy source, Al Gore urges civil disobedience to stop coal plants. He proposes expensive solutions to non-existent problems - solutions that will line his pockets with money.

PETA Urges BEN & JERRY's To Use Human Milk...

VERMONT -- People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals sent a letter to Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, cofounders of Ben & Jerry's Homemade Inc., urging them to replace cow's milk they use in their ice cream products with human breast milk, according to a statement recently released by a PETA spokeswoman.

• Ad-table: class storyAd"PETA's request comes in the wake of news reports that a Swiss restaurant owner will begin purchasing breast milk from nursing mothers and substituting breast milk for 75 percent of the cow's milk in the food he serves," the statement says.

PETA officials say a move to human breast milk would lessen the suffering of dairy cows and their babies on factory farms and benefit human health.

"The fact that human adults consume huge quantities of dairy products made from milk that was meant for a baby cow just doesn't make sense," says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. "Everyone knows that 'the breast is best,' so Ben & Jerry's could do consumers and cows a big favor by making the switch to breast milk."

A few (not so serious) questions spring to mind:

• Is today April 1st?
  
  
• How can even the stridently PC crowd pretend to take PETA seriously after this?
  
  
• Where/how does one get enough breast milk to run an ice cream business?
  
  
• Is there even a market for breast milk ice cream?
  
  
• How long before the granola eating hippies, Ben & Jerry, get labeled as animal abusing, corporate fascists?

What is the Community Reinvestment Act?

The origin of this act dates back to the Carter administration in 1977. The motivation as stated by Democratic Senator William Proxmire on the Senate floor in 1977, was "to eliminate the practice of redlining by lending institutions."

What is redlining?

Redlining is really a description of a normal business practice. Banks in low-income areas take local deposits and, as banks do, lend the money to sound credit risks in the expectation that the loans will be paid back with interest. Unfortunately, poor and minority communities tend to have a dearth of people who are sound credit risks. As a result capital from these low-income areas is lent to more well-to-do neighborhoods which leaves poor and minority communities starved of housing and capital.

Is this a discriminatory practice? Yes, it is. It is not, however, discriminatory by race or class. It is a practice that discriminates between providing a service and making a profit or making money-losing decisions and going out of business. Nevertheless, redlining was widely seen as the cause of housing disparities between white and black Americans.

Would have been better for those banks to have avoided providing any services in communities to which it could not reasonably lend? I’d say no. Your mileage may vary.

The 1977 Community Reinvestment Act followed on the heels of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974. It appeared to be a way to increase the level of home ownership among black Americans. On its face it’s a laudable goal.

Initially, the CRA was supposed to lend to poor and minority areas in a way "consistent with safe and sound lending practices." That latter key proviso was ignored as CRA was implemented, and the CRA forced banks and savings institutions to make loans to poor, often un-creditworthy minority borrowers. Good intentions or not, there’s still no such thing as a free lunch.

As stated in Investors’ Business Daily:

Banks were required to keep extensive records of their minority lending practices. Those that didn't pass muster could be denied the right to expand their branches, merge with other banks, or boost lending in new markets.

Regulators didn't need to do much policing; they let that job fall to radical community groups, such as ACORN and NACA, which siphoned literally billions of dollars from banks and lent the money in poor communities.

It wasn't entirely altruistic.

The community groups booked thousands of dollars in fees for every loan. And loans often required recipients to become active in radical causes — what's today called "community organizing."

If a community group decided a bank was operating in bad faith, it could affect the bank's "CRA rating" — the scorecard for how well it was doing as a minority lender.

Banks became pliable, easy targets. No bank CEO wanted to be mau-maued as an enemy of the poor. They became shakedown targets, channeling billions of dollars to groups that had, at best, meager results to show for it.

That's how it began. Later, in the Clinton era, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac got involved — buying up bad loans from banks, and securitizing them for sale on world markets. The seeds of the subprime meltdown were planted.

The CRA led to a housing boom based on shoddy loan practices. Once the bubble inevitably burst, the entire house of cards collapsed. Now the American economy is staring into an abyss.

The American economy is you and me, and the road to Hell is still paved with good intentions.

• How can loaning money to people who are incapable of paying it back be called risky? Where's the risk? Does not the term risk imply that there is some uncertainty about whether the money will repaid? It seems to me that there was a certainty that the money would not be paid back.
  
  
• How can risk be spread with complex financial instruments when there is no risk? It seems to me that all of these arcane financial arrangements boil down to divvying up sure losses.
  
  
• How can anybody be deluded enough to believe financial obfuscation would insulate them the mounting, certain losses? It seems to me to be wishful thinking at best.
  
  
• If the allegedly intelligent, financial "masters of the universe" did understand that they weren't getting the money back, was the plan all along to stick the taxpayers with tab? It seems to me that that would be fraud.
  
  
• Is Barney Frank really serious about this crisis? It seems to me that by "making sure that no one loses their house" he plans on providing free houses to those who aren't paying their mortgage.
  

• Student Forced to Remove American Flag T-Shirt
  

  Officials at the Merced County school confirmed Thursday that Jake Shelly was forced to take off a red, white and blue tie-dyed American flag T-shirt on Tuesday. The shirt said nothing offensive, just: “United States of America, Washington, D.C.”

  The school’s assistant principal issued Shelly a bright yellow T-shirt that read “DCV: Dress Code Violator” to wear for the rest of the day. He was given his shirt back after classes ended.

  “It was really embarrassing and humiliating to have to wear that all day — and just for supporting your country,” his sister Kaycee Shelly said.

  Kaycee Shelly told members of the media at lunchtime that her brother was overwhelmed and did not want to do any more interviews.

  Earlier in the day, he was speaking with a local news station when an unidentified teacher walked up to him, ripped off the microphone clipped to his shirt and told him he was not allowed to talk to the media.
  

• MCAS foes renew call to scrap test
  

  BOSTON - Dozens of education professors in the state’s public college system are calling on Gov. Deval Patrick to scrap the MCAS test.

  The teachers point to preliminary data showing that half the state’s public schools have failed to make adequate progress toward meeting federal No Child Left Behind standards for at least two years in a row.

  That’s up from 37 percent a year ago.
  
  

• Fifth Grader Suspended For Wearing Anti-Obama Shirt
  

  An 11-year-old boy in Colorado was suspended from school after he refused to take off a shirt that read, “Obama is a terrorist’s best friend.” His father says that the school is violating his son’s First Amendment rights.

  Daxx Dalton, a fifth grader at Aurora Frontier K-8 School in Aurora, Colo., wore the homemade shirt on a day when students were asked to show their patriotism by wearing red, white and blue, according to MyFOXColorado.com.

  When he was given the choice of turning the shirt inside out or being suspended, Dalton chose suspension.
  

  Dann Dalton, the boy’s father — a “proud conservative” who has taken part in anti-abortion protests — told MyFOXColorado.com that the school is making a mistake by suspending his son.

  “It’s the public school system,” he said. “Let’s be honest, it’s full of liberal loons.”
  

• Why is everyone complaining about deregulation when it was regulations forcing banks to lend to financially unqualified minorities that caused this mess? The, the, the, um, uh regulations that, you know, uh, threatened banks with uh, uh penalties if they didn't make enough, uh, loans to minorities.
  
  
• Are the "affirmative action" lending regulations going to be rescinded? If not, how soon before we have to bail out the financial system again?
  
  
• Barney Frank has said that the majority of bad mortgages belong to people who have no intention of paying or have no ability to pay. He also wants to make sure that "homeowners" are not kicked out of their homes. Does that mean that these people get to keep their homes for free? Won't the American taxpayers' money essentially be used to purchase homes for the poor?
  
  
• How is it even legal for quasi-private entity to donate any money to politicians?
  
  
• When are we going to stop pretending that there's plenty of blame to go around? Enough of the moral relativity already, this is a Democrat operation/slush fund/fiasco from top to bottom. They initiated it. They stonewalled reforms when flags were raised by Republicans, and they are benefiting from it now.
  

• Since "rare" has been stricken from the "safe, legal, and rare" language regarding abortion, exactly what is the approximate annual target number of abortions that an Obama administration would like to see?

• Could we also get a breakdown of the target numbers of abortions for minority groups? Will there need to be an affirmative action program to make sure that those groups get their fair share of abortions?
  
  
• What are the Obama administration's target numbers for partial birth abortions?
  
  
• Since abortion is a now apparently a right "regardless of ability to pay", how much money will the Obama administration budget to ensure that American women have enough abortions?
  
  
• Is abortion now patriotic like paying taxes? If so, how many abortions should my family have to be sure that we are doing our fair share?
  
  
• Will you support a "No Fetus Left Intact Act"?