When it’s a Republican, it’s all fine and dandy, but when it’s one of their guys, why, suddenly they’re outraged by it. I swear, if you look up the definitions of the words “hypocrite” or “crybaby”, it HAS to say “liberal Democrat” in there somewhere, and if it doesn’t, then it SHOULD.

As for what Joe Wilson called the President a liar over, well…he’s right. Obama was lying. Nothing new, of course, because that’s all he does. That, and talk about himself.

Update: Talk about the pot and the kettle:

Democrats said it showed lack of respect for the office of the presidency and was reminiscent of Republican disruptions at recent public forums on health care.

“I was embarrassed for the chamber and a Congress I love,” Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said Thursday on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “It demeaned the institution.”

Democrats are all of a sudden concerned about demeaning the institution and showing respect for the office of the President? PUH-LEASE!!! Remember how these guys behaved over the last eight years when they go on television and say that stuff. It’s remarkable how these guys can stand there and lie with a straight face.

Also, this is interesting:

After the speech, Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff who sat a few rows in front of Mr. Wilson, said he immediately approached senior Republican lawmakers to encourage them to identify the heckler and urge him to issue an apology quickly.

“No president has ever been treated like that. Ever,” Mr. Emanuel said.

I dealt with that in the pre-update section. Mr. Emanuel is as big a liar as his boss (but we already knew that). The interesting part is how he immediately went looking for the source of the outburst and pressured Republicans to tell him who did it (as if the liberal media wouldn’t do that for him). Because he was concerned about showing respect for the office, you know. Pfft.

President Barack Obama’s treasury secretary said Sunday he cannot rule out higher taxes to help tame an exploding budget deficit, and his chief economic adviser would not dismiss raising them on middle-class Americans as part of a health care overhaul.

…

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and National Economic Council Director Larry Summers both sidestepped questions on Obama’s intentions about taxes. Geithner said the White House was not ready to rule out a tax hike to lower the federal deficit; Summers said Obama’s proposed health care overhaul needs funding from somewhere.

“There is a lot that can happen over time,” Summers said, adding that the administration believes “it is never a good idea to absolutely rule things out, no matter what.”

During his presidential campaign, Obama repeatedly vowed “you will not see any of your taxes increase one single dime.” But the simple reality remains that his ambitious overhaul of how Americans receive health care — promised without increasing the federal deficit — must be paid for.

“If we want an economy that’s going to grow in the future, people have to understand we have to bring those deficits down. And it’s going to be difficult, hard for us to do. And the path to that is through health care reform,” Geithner said. “We’re not at the point yet where we’re going to make a judgment about what it’s going to take.”

Obama claimed he wasn’t going to raise taxes on the middle class. I called him a liar. We’ll see how this plays out, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that within a year, two at the very most, we’ll have a middle class tax increase, or at least an attempt to increase them.

Why am I so sure about this? Democrats — esp. liberal democrats — love higher taxes and higher spending. It’s in their DNA or something.

Remember back in 1992-1993, when Clinton ran for office and won? He ran largely on a middle class tax cut. He announced it in the New Hampshire primaries, if I’m not mistaken, and kept talking about it. When he took office, he brazenly said no such thing was being contemplated and how on earth people got that impression was beyond him. A few weeks into his presidency, he gave a nationally televised speech saying he had hoped he wouldn’t have to raise taxes on the middle class but, darn it, he had to.

So you see, nothing is new with these people. When they say “X”, count on it being a lie. Then watch as they brazenly lie about the lie, saying that they never promised “X” in the first place. You can better believe that when they come for this middle class tax increase in a year or so, they’re going to do an in-your-face lie and say they never promised a tax cut to you folks. In the old days, before the blogosphere and before FOX News came along, they could get away with this. They can’t anymore, and it’s going to make for some interesting blog material.

As always, liberals never understand that it’s not the level of taxation that determines whether or not we have a deficit, it’s the level of spending. You want to balance the budget? Then cut the spending. I said that in 2005 (when I first started to blog), and I’ll say it until the day I die, no matter what Party is in control. It’s not that Washington doesn’t have enough money to do the things it wants to do, it’s that it spends it on crap they shouldn’t be spending it on in the first place!

U.S. service sector employees who receive tips have been excluded from the latest hike in the federal minimum wage that kicked in on Friday, leaving the public to cover the cost of their healthcare, according to economists and advocates.

The federal minimum wage on Friday rose to $7.25 from $6.55. But only seven states guarantee tipped workers the minimum wage, according to a report by the National Employment Law Project, a New York-based advocacy group for low-income workers.

The minimum wage for so-called “tipped” workers has been frozen at $2.13 an hour since 1991, the report found.

Waitresses and waiters, who comprise the majority of tip-receiving workers, have nearly three times the poverty rate of the nation’s workforce, it said.

Wait staff are twice as likely to go without health insurance, partly because few employers help them pay for a health plan.

Can we be just a little more deceptive here, please? I mean, let’s not let any facts get in the way of pushing a meme, shall we?

I’m not going to sit here and rehash the entire minimum wage debate (I’ve been there and done that so many times, it makes my head hurt, esp. when the left simply won’t acknowledge that they’re wrong about it), but I will say that I have plenty of real-world experience dealing with this stuff. I know what I’m talking about, here.

For example, despite making less than the minimum wage, officially, on their pay checks, they do get tips. If they’re even halfway competent, they get a lot of them (esp. if it’s a busy place). I worked for twenty-plus years as a manager in these places, and it wasn’t unusual for the servers to make far more per year than everyone in the place, management included. And that’s just with the tips they claimed (next time you go out to eat, ask your server about the unspoken “eight percent rule” that servers follow…you’ll be surprised). Imagine how much they really make!

So the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill. In political terms, it was a remarkable achievement.

But 212 representatives voted no. A handful of these no votes came from representatives who considered the bill too weak, but most rejected the bill because they rejected the whole notion that we have to do something about greenhouse gases.

And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.

Isn’t it funny that one can commit treason against the planet, but not the United States? I mean, the same paper that carries this insanity-laced column is the same paper that violated national security by publishing secret information in the war against terror. That’s all fine and dandy, I guess, but we dare not oppose global warming, because that’s serious business! Pfft.

Look, Krugman points out the usual “facts” that watermelon* environmentalists like Gore keep repeating, and have been repeating, since they first realized that the environment was their ticket to power and wealth. There’s no truth to any of it. They’ve been wrong on everything they’ve ever said about the environment! They’ve never been correct on a single thing! And yet they want us to just blindly hand over our liberties and our money to them simply because they think they are good people.

They bully people who dare to disagree with them, yet claim that they are the true victims. It’s unbelievably. It’d be funny if it weren’t so serious. Global warming (or climate change, whatever the nuts wanna call it) is just a giant hoax so that people like Gore can get rich and have power. That’s all it is, that’s all it ever was, and that’s all it ever will be. Mankind simply does not have it within his power, short of a global nuclear war, to change the climate of this planet.

(*Watermelon = “green on the outside, red [commie] in the middle”)

Former Vice President Al Gore will meet with House Democrats Thursday to appeal to reluctant lawmakers to approve the controversial climate change bill on Friday

You know, if we could harness just half the amount of gas coming from this fat, bloviating idiot, we could power half the cars in the United States.

There is no global warming. There may be climate change, but it’s got nothing to do with mankind. It’s the friggin’ sun. The ONLY reason people on the left are carping on this is because a) it’ll lead to higher taxes, b) it’ll reduce our standard of living (maybe to third-world status, depending on how far they can go with this), c) it’ll make people like Gore rich (he buys and sells “carbon offsets”), and d) it’s the ultimate big government scheme, i.e., you dictate to people how to live, what to eat, what to drive, what they can and cannot own, etc. It’s a sham, the greatest hoax in the modern age, and the hippies believe it!

I hate to rehash the old debate, but back in the seventies (and yes, I’m old enough to remember this) they were warning about a coming ice age. We were going to freeze to death if we didn’t stop running our air conditioners and driving our cars to work (the SUV wasn’t invented yet). Then sometime in the 1980s, Mother Nature kicked the “Ice Age Alarmists” in the balls and warmed up the planet a smidge. Never fear, they just changed the wording on their memes to adapt. Just a simple matter of replacing “ice age” and “global cooling” for something else, like “melting ice caps” and “global warming”.

Well, as you know, here we are in the first decade of the 21st century, and the planet is cooling off again. Another kick in the coinpurse for the eco-nazis. Well, they hate wasting paper, so instead of changing back to the “ice age” meme (some already have), they instead think to themselves, “Let’s just call it ‘climate change’, that way we cover ALL the bases!” So simple, yet so brilliant. Now, anytime some freak weather phenomenon comes along, Algore can get out his pointy had and laser-pointer and go on a campus speaking tour, telling our youth how we’re destroying the planet and all that. Lord knows he won’t go face-to-face with any skeptics.

They can dress it up and call it whatever they want, it’s still first-class socialism. And with the track record these people have on predicting what the earth is going to do, it’s amazing they even have the nerve to stand up there at all, let alone have the gall to continue to lecture to us on how we should live.

Update: Algore cancelled his plans. Never fear, though, the Democrats are hell-bent on going forward with this thing, even though they more than likely haven’t read it, probably don’t understand the implications of it, and possibly don’t have the votes to pass it.

I must have missed the Post’s conservative slant. I must have missed the endless op-eds in support of McCain. Or either Bush 41 or 43. Or Reagan. I must have dreamt that part when the Post’s two star reporters went after Nixon. I must have imagined all of those “We support Kerry, Clinton, Carter, and Obama” fap-fests the Post printed over the years. Yeah, that must be it.

Listen up, hippies. The man was fired for saying bad things about The Chosen One (that is, he actually dared to disagree with Obama). You can’t do that in liberal Washington, you know, and get away with it.

Isn’t it funny how the left thinks a paper or a reporter is conservative when it’s patently obvious they’re liberal? Take Sheppard Smith of FOX, for example. When he dared to disagree with them on some things, they labeled him a partisan and a conservative (even though he’s not). Now that he’s jumped over to their side on some things, now they like him. The exact opposite has happened with ABC’s Jake Tapper. When he was reporting on Bush, the left looooved him. Now that he’s reporting on Obama, they despise him. See how that works?

The left doesn’t want honesty in reporters or news outlets, they want pure propaganda. They want reporters and news sources reporting only the good stuff about liberals and their policies. That’s why they hate FOX News and talk radio. For the first time in generations, people are getting more than one side to the story, and that simply cannot be allowed. These so-called champions of free speech are big on censorship, trust me. They want freedom for THEIR speech, but nobody else.

Update: Anybody wanna bet that Dana Milbank will be labeled a “right-winger” after this post? I mean, forget about the endless appearances on Olbermann’s show and his endless rants about Bush and Cheney, this guy is daring to speak against Obama and, as I said, that won’t be tolerated by the left.

If you read the comments, you’ll see the backlash in all its glory. And, if you follow it on Memeorandum, you can see what liberal blogs have begun to cry about it (I love it when they say “corporate media”, like that means anything).

Update #2: Froomkin, in his own words:

Obama is nowhere in Bush’s league when it comes to issues of credibility, but his every action nevertheless needs to be carefully scrutinized by the media, and he must be held accountable. We should be holding him to the highest standards – and there are plenty of places where we should be pushing back. Just for starters, there are a lot of hugely important but unanswered questions about his Afghanistan policy, his financial rescue plans, and his turnaround on transparency.

And there you have the reason. He goes on just fine for years as a Bush-basher, but the minute he starts in on Obama, he’s off like a prom dress (for you tea-smokers, that means he was fired). You don’t think that’s just a little too coincidental, esp. with the way the press has fawned over and protected Obama to date?

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was briefed on the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” on terrorist suspect Abu Zubaydah in September 2002, according to a report prepared by the Director of National Intelligence’s office and obtained by ABC News.

The report, submitted to the Senate Intelligence Committee and other Capitol Hill officials Wednesday, appears to contradict Pelosi’s statement last month that she was never told about the use of waterboarding or other special interrogation tactics. Instead, she has said, she was told only that the Bush administration had legal opinions that would have supported the use of such techniques.

The report details a Sept. 4, 2002 meeting between intelligence officials and Pelosi, then-House intelligence committee chairman Porter Goss, and two aides. At the time, Pelosi was the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee.

The meeting is described as a “Briefing on EITs including use of EITs on Abu Zubaydah, background on authorities, and a description of particular EITs that had been employed.”

EITs stand for “enhanced interrogation techniques,” a classification of special interrogation tactics that includes waterboarding.

Only an idiot would think the Democrat leadership wasn’t informed of this back when it first happened. Democrats surely knew what was going on, but only after they realized they had a political issue they could exploit did they start to object. They played dumb (I know, not a stretch for them) about it for several years, claiming they didn’t know or didn’t approve, just like they did with the Iraqi war. Remember, virtually ALL of them at some point in time wanted to go into Iraq like Bush finally did, but only after it was done did they suddenly have a problem with it. It wasn’t because they thought it was the wrong thing to do, but because their base (the far-left kooks at Daily Kos and the like) were against it. That’s pandering you can believe in.

Others commenting:

Hot Air
Stop The ACLU
Gateway Pundit
Don Surber

Instead of grim warnings about global warming, the firm advises, talk about “our deteriorating atmosphere.” Drop discussions of carbon dioxide and bring up “moving away from the dirty fuels of the past.” Don’t confuse people with cap and trade; use terms like “cap and cash back” or “pollution reduction refund.”

No matter what they dress it up as, it’s still a scam that’s designed to confiscate people’s money, dictate how they’ll live, and advance liberalism/socialism in this country. That’s all it ever was about, and all it ever will be about.

I noted, several years ago, that they weren’t calling it global warming any more, they were instead referring to it as “climate change”. That was so they could point to virtually any weird weather phenomenon and claim we were at fault for it. More hurricanes = climate change. Fewer hurricanes = climate change. Cooler temps = climate change. Hotter temps = climate change. Less rain = climate change. More rain = climate change.

You get the idea. No matter what happens, if it’s out of the ordinary or a fluke, you better believe that some soil-munching, tree-hugging druid from the left will be on MSNBC the next day crying into his soy milk about how we’re killing the planet. These people demand that we all cast off our standard of living and go back to the pre-industrial age. But don’t you dare suggest that they lead by example. Regardless of what they say or what they believe, they will continue to live in their big houses, drive their SUVs, fly private jets, and run their air conditioners. When they say “we”, they actually mean “you”. That alone should tell you that even they know this is a fraud.

People on the left know they cannot win a fact-based debate, so they lie. They twist poll results to show what they want it to show. They pump up a phony, liberal-invented crisis and then propose liberal-benefiting solutions. They run as “new Democrats”, only to reveal — after safely elected — that they’re actually to the far left. Liberals know that if the people realize what they are and what they believe in, they’ll be sent packing, so they try and hide it as much as they can. Thus, the need for new terms and new definitions. Whatever they dress it up as, it’s still the same ol’ liberalism/socialism underneath.

Well, Lord knows someone in the family has to capitalize on John’s failed candidacy, so why not her?

Money quote:

Even when Edwards confessed to his wife, he lied, claiming he had slipped up just once, Elizabeth writes. His original version of the story “left most of the truth out,” she writes.

While Elizabeth still hasn’t fully come to terms with her man’s roaming, the memoir is laced with a powerful dose of forgiveness.

“I lie in bed, circles under my eyes, my sparse hair sticking in too many directions, and he looks at me as if I am the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. It matters,” she writes.

Couple of things: First, how could she be surprised, or even offended, that he would lie to her? He’s a Democrat, they do it all the time, especially to their spouses.

Second, the way he looks at her. He’s a lawyer, my dear. And a Democrat (did I mention that already? Good, because it matters). Which means he’s used to acting and putting on a show. He knows how to fake sympathetic looks (all Democrats know how to do it).

Finally, the only person who can ultimately forgive him is her. So if she honestly says and believes in her heart that she forgives him, that’s fine by me. But she shouldn’t for a moment fall for this stuff.

For the first time in years, more Americans than not say the country is headed in the right direction, a sign that Barack Obama has used the first 100 days of his presidency to lift the public’s mood and inspire hopes for a brighter future.

Intensely worried about their personal finances and medical expenses, Americans nonetheless appear realistic about the time Obama might need to turn things around, according to an Associated Press-GfK poll. It shows most Americans consider their new president to be a strong, ethical and empathetic leader who is working to change Washington.

Nobody knows how long the honeymoon will last, but Obama has clearly transformed the yes-we-can spirit of his candidacy into a tool of governance. His ability to inspire confidence — Obama’s second book is titled “The Audacity of Hope” — has thus far buffered the president against the harsh political realities of two wars, a global economic meltdown and countless domestic challenges.

Even the title of the article — “Americans high on Obama, direction of US” — suggests that everyone is having one, giant Obamagasm. But read down further, you’ll see that’s not the case:

_While there is evidence that people feel more optimistic about the economy, 65 percent said it’s difficult for them and their families to get ahead. More than one-third know of a family member who recently lost a job.

_More than 90 percent of Americans consider the economy an important issue, the highest ever in AP polling.

_Nearly 80 percent believe that the rising federal debt will hurt future generations, and Obama is getting mixed reviews at best for his handling of the issue.

And yet, the percentage of Americans saying the country is headed in the right direction rose to 48 percent, up from 40 percent in February. Forty-four percent say the nation is on the wrong track.

So 48 percent (assuming that’s the real number) translates into some kind of mandate, while 44 percent is nothing to worry about? On what planet are they living? The moment Bush’s approval ratings dipped below 50 percent, that’s all we heard about, was how he was losing support and how we were going in the wrong direction. Yet Obama pulls in a 48 and all of a sudden he’s just the greatest thing since sliced bread. Un-freakin’-believable.

The poll results are here (PDF file). As you might expect, it’s totally slanted (page 21).

Another poll carrying the Chosen One’s water was done by Pew, if you’re interested.