LIVE AT FIVE – 1.20.11

TOP NEWS
House Votes To Repeal Obamacare

Speaker of the House John Boehner

Three Democrats cross the aisle to vote with GOP. Bipartisanship! 😉

PRC Promises Action On Software Piracy, Protectionism
Hu concedes “a lot needs to be done” to improve human rights in the PRC


DA: Philadelphia Abortionist Killed Seven Babies With Scissors
300-page grand jury report “filled with ghastly, stomach-turning detail”



POLITICS
Rep. Giffords Moving To Houston For Rehab

Rep. Gabrielle Giffords

Stood up and looked out the window of her hospital room today

Concerns Raised About  Troops Using Psych Drugs In Combat Zones

Local Religious Leaders React To Bentley Controversy

Michigan Lawmakers Like Governor Snyder’s General Plan, Await Details

Hu Visit Sees Giant Deal Inked – On Pandas

AFL-CIO’s Trumka Faults “Pro-Business” Obama, Criticizes Rules Review



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Banks, Tech Send Wall Street To Worst Drop In Two Months
PRC Growth Hits 9.8% In Fourth Quarter
Swiss Banker Convicted Of Handing Bank Documents To Wikileaks
Uncensored ¨Playboy¨Coming To IPad – But No App For That
First Look At Nintendo 3DS (Video)
HP “Palm Pad” May Ship In February



SPORTS
Pavano Re-signs With Twins For Two Years, $16.5 Million

The 'Stache returns to a reloaded Twins squad

Pirates never really in the running

Carmelo Deal Is Dead, Nyets Owner Says

Brady Booked For Foot Surgery

Rockets Clamp Down On Knicks For Third Straight Win

Venerable Hope Golf Classic Needs Revamp

NFL Players Take Lobbying Effort To Capitol Hill

Dooling Scores Season-High 23 As Bucks Extend Wizards’ Road Skid

Panthers Choke, Lose To Blue Jackets In OT



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Drunk Christina Aguilera Passes Out In Jeremy Renner’s Bed

Jeremy Renner, Christina Aguilera

Nothing like showing up uninvited, then getting wasted and passing out at someone’s 40th

Anne Hathaway Cast As Catwoman In “Dark Knight Rises“

Ricky Gervais To Cameo On U.S. “Office”

Star: Hilary Duff Is Pregnant!

Hilary: No, I’m Not!

Charlie Sheen: Coke And Hookers In Las Vegas

Selina Gomez: The Topless Photo Is FAKE!

Brooklyn Decker Lightens The Burden Of Living In This World



FOREIGNERS
Tunisian Demonstrators Demand Purge Of RCD Party From Government
Baby Doc: “I Have No Presidential Ambitions”
Suicide Bomber Kills 15 Iraqi Police In Diyala Province
One-Third Of Vietnam’s Politburo Steps Down; Losing Touch With Youth?
Towns Isolated As Floods Sweep Victoria



BLOGS & STUFF
Michelle Malkin: Civility Watch – Nazis And Crosshairs And Killer, Oh My!
Protein Wisdom: Hawaii Governor Can’t Find Obama Birth Certificate
Jammie Wearing Fool: Like Rats Deserting A Sinking Ship
Pirate’s Cove: Wacky Sheila Jackson Lee; Also, 200 Economists Call For Repeal Of Obamacare
Megan McArdle: The Rise And Fall Of The Labor Force
Gateway Pundit: Rep. Paul Ryan Eviscerates The Obamacare Fiscal House Of Cards (Video)
WSJ: The New Light Bulbs Lose A Little Shine
RedState: The Winning Statistic In The Same-Sex Marriage Debate

— compiled by Wombat-socho

ObamaCare Repeal Bill Gets 245 Votes; ObamaCare Passage Only Got 219 Votes

Philip Klein points out this fact at The American Spectator. As an indicator of majoritarian sentiment, I’d say that’s a pretty good argument for Republicans to push for a vote in the Senate.

Also: Three House Democrats — Dan Boren of Oklahoma, Mike Ross of Arkansas and Mike McIntyre of North Carolina — joined all 242 Republicans in voting to repeal ObamaCare. We’re waiting for Steve Cohen to denounce these Democrats as Nazi stooges. Maybe DailyKos can target them in next year’s primaries.

Strangely enough, 10 Democrats who voted “no” on passage in 2009 also voted against repeal, which gives the GOP ammunition against them in the next election cycle: If you wouldn’t vote to pass it, why won’t you vote to repeal it?

Democrats: ‘Civility’ Means It’s OK for Us to Start Calling Republicans Nazis Again

Disagree with them and you’re a brownshirt:

In an extraordinary outburst on the House floor, Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) invoked the Holocaust to attack Republicans on health care and compared rhetoric on the issue to the work of infamous Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.
“They say it’s a government takeover of health care, a big lie just like Goebbels,” Cohen said. “You say it enough, you repeat the lie, you repeat the lie, and eventually, people believe it. Like blood libel. That’s the same kind of thing. And Congressman Cohen didn’t stop there.
“The Germans said enough about the Jews and people believed it–believed it and you have the Holocaust. We heard on this floor, government takeover of health care. Politifact said the biggest lie of 2010 was a government takeover of health care because there is no government takeover,” Cohen said.

Meanwhile, it appears that Sheila Jackson-Lee has shared her “health-care-is-a-right” talking points with John Lewis:

“Well, when you start off with the Preamble of the Constitution, you talk about the pursuit of happiness,” said Lewis. “You go to the 14th Amendment–it’s equal protection under the law and we have not repealed the 14th Amendment. People have a right to have health care. It’s not a privilege but a right.”

 

In all sincerity, Congressman: To assert that some people have a “right” to goods and services that other people must work to produce — well, there is a phrase for that and indeed, it is mentioned in the Constitution.

Check the 13th Amendment, which abolished involuntary servitude.

UPDATE: Cohen wants to repeal Godwin’s Law or something. Kudos to CNN’s John King for calling him to account for that . . . uh, “blood libel.”

Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher Star in Pre-Marital Divorce Training Video

Here, see for yourself:

The story is, evidently, a romantic comedy for the post-marriage generation:

The calling card of “No Strings” is its cavalier attitude toward casual sex, and how members of the opposite sex have precious few boundaries talking about or engaging in the practice of making love. . . .
“I think holding the door for the girl that you are having casual sex with is very romantic,” Kutcher told me during a recent one-on-one interview we had in Los Angeles. . . .
“I think this movie does point out, though, that we have to stop acting like casual sex isn’t happening, and start to be realistic about what a modern courting relationship is like,” Kutcher went on to say.

Realistic? You want to be realistic, Ashton? Realistically, that story doesn’t end “happily ever after.” At best, it ends with an efficiency apartment, child-support payments, visitation every other weekend and your kids being raised by Mommy’s New Boyfriend. A little further down the scale of optimal results, and maybe it ends with a restraining order. It can (and often does) get much, much worse.

Pre-marital promiscuity is like spring training for adultery. You may have noticed Charlie Sheen isn’t exactly living out the happily-ever-after romantic fantasy. Old habits die hard, and the  most perverse behaviors can seem “normal” if you do them often enough.

Much of American society has become so hopelessly decadent that not only are some kids accustomed to the whole blended-family carnival– step-mom and half-siblings and Mommy’s New Boyfriend — but even their grandparents are divorced and remarried, so that their “family tree” is an utterly confusing thicket of attenuated semi-relationships.

Among those raised in such a scrambled domestic environment, this dysfunctional pattern replicates itself in their own lives, because they lack any role models for sustained monogamy.

Naturally, the offspring this of twisted culture seek reassurance that everything’s going to turn out OK for them. They find a falsely flattering reflection in the warped funhouse mirror of Hollywood, which tells them a fairy tale in which habitual promsicuity somehow magically transforms itself into romance.

Good luck with that, kids.

This isn’t a “romantic comedy.” It’s really a tragedy.

Abortion Is Murder, and Sometimes We Are Brutally Reminded of That Fact

Even the Associated Press can’t ignore this story:

A doctor who provided abortions for minorities, immigrants and poor women in a “house of horrors” clinic has been charged with eight counts of murder in the deaths of a patient and seven babies who were born alive . . .

(Via Memeorandum.)

UPDATE: John Hayward at Human Events on Philadelphia abortionist Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s ghastly practice:

He’s been doing it for thirty years, and raked in millions of dollars. . . .
Since our media is obsessed with “climates” and “dangerous language” these days, maybe it’s time to review the antiseptic language that helped Gosnell carry on his grim trade for decades, while his heinous deeds were described as simple outpatient surgery to remove “unviable tissue masses.” . . .

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE II: Lisa Graas reminds us that Dr. Gosnell is not a random point off on the edge of the scatter-chart. Planned Parenthood is also apparently willing to cross the line between “choice” and infanticide:

“The news coming out of Philadelphia is disgusting. Infanticide continues to happen in America and only certain cases are coming to light. SFLA has been on top of this since 2008 when we released an undercover video of a Planned Parenthood worker, at a federally funded Planned Parenthood facility, openly admitting to practicing infanticide as a form of an abortion procedure. These are newborn babies who are being left to die or are being killed because they are supposedly ‘unwanted.’ America needs to put a stop to this barbaric and inhumane practice and Congress must defund Planned Parenthood immediately.”
— Kristan Hawkins, Students for Life of America

UPDATE III: “How does a man murder an innocent child in cold blood and then go about his business?”

UPDATE IV: Guess who said this?

“People who know the history of Margaret Sanger, who started Planned Parenthood, they know that the intention was not to help young women who get pregnant to plan their parenthood. No — it was a sham to be able to kill black babies . . . 75 percent of all Planned Parenthood facilities are located in black neighborhoods. . . . I believe that life begins at conception, period.”

Herman Cain said that.

UPDATE V: Ed Morrissey:

My guess is that few people will rush to defend Gosnell’s alleged actions, apart from the fringe like Peter Singer who argue that parents should have the option of terminating an infant’s life past a live birth. But this revelation will certainly linger in the minds of everyone else, and have people asking how many more Gosnells may be making their own fortunes through similar means.

Ericka Andersen on Twitter: “Abortion is abortion is abortion. This guy just made it obvious. Wake up people. Early term, late term. Its all murder.”

UPDATE VI: “All this should reveal the intellectual dishonesty and moral vacuousness of acting as if the line between ‘a woman’s choice’ and ‘infanticide’ is located somewhere around the cervix.”

UPDATE VII: News video via Anglican Samizdat:

Rush Limbaugh on Zeitgeist

“If the movies you go see tell you that your government was behind the downing of the trade center and the Pentagon in 9/11 — as the movie Zeitgeist did, a documentary — if you were told by Michael Moore that all of this was done on purpose, if you’re told that the rich have taken what’s rightfully yours, if you’re bombarded with this every day as part of a political message, what would you be capable of doing? . . .
“You take people who are unbalanced, weak, susceptible, impressionable and you bombard ’em with that message in the Democrat Party and their willing accomplices in the media every day, and what the hell kind of person or people are you going to create running around out there? Then you show ’em the Michael Moore movie or show ’em the Zeitgeist movie, their government — led by a Republican — lied, took us into war in Afghanistan, lied to take us into war in Iraq, lied about weapons of mass destruction, lied about being responsible for 9/11, purposely wired those buildings to blow up and blamed it on some innocent Muslims, what are you gonna think? Are you not gonna run around confused and filled with hatred?”

— Rush Limbaugh, Tuesday, Jan. 18, 2010

This is my 14th post about Jared Loughner’s Zeitgeist obsession and, as I remarked on Andrea Shea King’s show Monday night, I’m afraid I’m nearly as obsessed with it as Loughner was — but don’t worry, I’m not going to go crazy. However, I’m not going to stop blogging about this so long as those whom Limbaugh calls the Democratic Party’s “willing accomplices in the media” continue to ignore this crucial evidence that the Tucson shooter was suffering from an acute case of Bush Derangment Syndrome. The absurd claim that Loughner’s was suffering from right-wing paranoia is completely debunked once you begin digging into Zeitgeist’s worldview as a progressive New Age phenomenon.

Ed Driscoll jokes, “Funny, I don’t recall seeing that film running during the last National Review Cruise,” but it’s no joke. Maggie’s Notebook has watched the whole movie and yesterday pointed out that the Artivist Film Festival — which gave its 2007 “Best Feature” award to Zeitgeist — is funded by the Brazilian petroleum company Petrobras, in which George Soros held a major stake until that became politcally controversial.

The producers of Zeitgeist have put a transcript of the film online and, while it isn’t actually complete — there are parts of the narration missing — it’s important to look at what Zeitgeist actually claimed:

“September 11th was the jump start for what is now an accelerating agenda by the ruthless elite. It was a staged war pretext, no different than the sinking of the Lusitania, the provoking of Pearl Harbor and the Gulf of Tonkin lie. In fact, if 9/11 wasn’t a planned war pretext, it would be an exception to the rule. It has been used to launch two unprovoked illegal wars, one against Iraq and one against Afghanistan. However, 9/11 was a pretext for another war as well. The war against you. The Patriot Act, Homeland Security, the Military Tribunals Act and other legislations are all completely and entirely designed to destroy your civil liberties and limit your ability to fight back against what is coming. . . .
“[L]et’s recognize how history repeats itself. In February 1933, Hitler staged a false flag attack burning down his own German Parliament building, the Reichstag and blamed it on communist terrorists. Within the next few weeks he passed the Enabling Act which completely eradicated the German Constitution, destroying people’s liberties. He then led a series of pre-emptive wars all justified in German people as necessary to maintaining “homeland security.”

Yeah: 9/11 was the Reichstag Fire. Remember that Zeitgeist was released in 2007. How many “Bush = Hitler” posters did we see at left-wing anti-war rallies back then, when 18-year-old Jared Lee Loughner was becoming obsessed with Zeitgeist?

Liberals who tried to blame Sarah Palin, Fox News, talk radio and the Tea Party movement for Loughner’s crime cannot be permitted to ignore the progressive roots of the killer’s insane rage.

ObamaCare: Bad for Your Health

Sally Pipes in the New York Post:

Repeal of ObamaCare can’t come soon enough — as several damaging provisions are set to take effect this year.
For starters, it has effectively stopped the construction of physician-owned hospitals throughout the country.
Section 6001 of the health-care law required physician-owned hospitals to obtain their Medicare certification by the end of last year. Without it, they can’t treat Medicare patients. And the facilities needed to be open to get that certification.
So construction halted at 45 hospitals as the New Year arrived. Work on countless others will never start, having been effectively banned by ObamaCare. This will limit competition in the health-care marketplace, driving up costs for patients.

ObamaCare is causing a pandemic of political insanity and Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-Texas) is Patient Zero:

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a Democrat from Texas, said on Tuesday afternoon that repealing the national health care law would violate the Constitution.
Arguing that the Commerce Clause provides the constitutional basis for ObamaCare, Jackson Lee said repealing the law by passing Republicans’ H.R. 2 violates both the Fifth Amendment’s right to due process and the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause.
“The Fifth Amendment speaks specifically to denying someone their life and liberty without due process,” she said in a speech on the House floor moments ago. “That is what H.R. 2 does and I rise in opposition to it. And I rise in opposition because it is important that we preserve lives and we recognize that 40 million-plus are uninsured.
She continued, “Can you tell me what’s more unconstitutional than taking away from the people of America their Fifth Amendment rights, their Fourteenth Amendment rights, and the right to equal protection under the law?”

Allahpundit has a link to the C-SPAN video. When you begin to think you have the “right” to goods and services that others must work to produce, clearly you have descended into hopeless madness.

Or you’re a liberal Democrat. Six of one, half-dozen of the other . . .

(Via Memeorandum.)