Inside the Asylum

Who says Trekies don't have any influence? Huh? There's a Treky in power at the UN, elected by acclaim!

Image source here.

Not that kind of Treky.

Libyan diplomat Ali Treky was elected on Wednesday as president of the 64th session of the UN General Assembly... Treky's candidacy was supported by the 53-nation African Union, which was currently chaired by Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi

Who knew that Gaddafi is a Treky?

Talk about living in the future. Japan has just launched an unprovoked attack on the moon, casualties unknown.
It seems as though they had been spying on our close neighbor for some time, looking for strategic resources, and mapping their territory, before this vicious act of aggression.
Should we brace for reprisals? The story is developing ...

Australian Senator Steve Fielding joins the ranks of the skeptics.

"Like most Australians, I've just believed that man-made carbon emissions are the major cause of global warming and up until now have not really looked at it in great detail," Senator Fielding told ABC radio yesterday. "Then all of a sudden someone said, 'Steve, do you know that over the last decade carbon emissions are rising but global temperature isn't rising?' " Senator Fielding said he wanted to find the real cause of climate change.

Mind you, the blithering idiot of a journalist who presents the story, Stephanie Peatling, tries to turn the story into a hit piece.

Fielding has challenged the work of thousands of the world's top scientists

How dare he! Heretic! As Obama should know (but obviously doesn't) when he was going on about his Muslim father, a person who has turned his back on the true faith is far worse than even the follower of another creed. (See quote below for more on this.) Peatling wasn't done. She had to say it again.

The intergovernmental panel, set up by the United Nations Environment Program, represents thousands of the world's top scientists who have spent years examining climate change

Burn heretic, burn! The College of Cardinals has decreed the Truth. No debate is permitted! But it's even worse than that! Fielding is in league with the Devil himself!

Senator Fielding's newfound scepticism is a result of his trip to the US to listen to the Heartland Institute of Chicago, an organisation that is funded by the fossil-fuel industry.

The Heartland Institute is responsible for crop failures, illnesses, and that wart on Peatling's rear end.

The organisation also believes public health campaigns against smoking are based on "junk science".

See! Minions of the Devil!

And this passes for journalism?

Here's something Obama should know before he spouts on about his common ground with the Muslim World.

Referencing his Muslim father and ancenstry is tricky, tricky ground. He is calling himself out as an apostate under the more extreme sharia jurisprudence, worse than an infidel. Even more moderate Arab Muslims will be very much discomfited by the idea of a son who does not follow his father's religion. This is an issue of Arab culture, whether Christian or Muslim. When Iraqi soldiers would ask me why I was not a Muslim, the simple answer "because my father is not a Muslim" was always a fully satisfactory explanation. Saying "I am not a Muslim, but my father was" will not score you any points with Muslims.

In Rome, it was the Senate that conferred divinity upon the Emperor; for modern America, it seems to be news magazine editors. In an exchange between Chris Matthews of MSNBC (a cable news channel, at least in theory) and Editor-at-Large Evan Thomas of Newsweek (which used to be a news magazine)... Well, read it for yourself, and watch a clip if you can't believe what you're reading. Let's ignore, for now, the claim that the U.S. crossed over to the Dark Side at some point after 1984.

EVAN THOMAS: Well, we were the good guys in 1984, it felt that way. It hasn't felt that way in recent years. So Obama’s had, really, a different task. We're seen too often as the bad guys. And he – he has a very different job from – Reagan was all about America, and you talked about it. Obama is ‘we are above that now.’ We're not just parochial, we're not just chauvinistic, we're not just provincial. We stand for something – I mean in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above – above the world, he’s sort of God. He’s-

MATTHEWS: Yeah.

THOMAS: He's going to bring all different sides together. It's a very different-

Transcript from Kyle Drennan of Newsbusters

I'm not sure if Rev. Wright ever found time to mention Acts Chapter 12 in any of his sermons, but Caesar Obama might want to repudiate these comments rather quickly. It wouldn't do to have the Dear Leader succumb to the fate of Herod Agrippa, after all... I mean, how would that look when it came time to write the Res Gestae Divi Obamae? (Or would "Magni Obamae" be safer?)

And please, no bad jokes from the peanut gallery using out-of-context quotations from Shakespeare about worms turning and from the Declaration of Independence about "eat[ing] out their substance." That would be inappropriate, so don't do it. Besides, I've already tried to tie those together myself, and I don't think it can be done with any sort of a funny result.

Hey, the BBC did it, so why can't CNBC? If you've been reading the Asylum lately, you'll recall my "emperor has no clothes" (repeated three times) jibe at Obama (a comment I put into the mouths of the Taliban, but that's beside the point). Well, what should I see on TV this evening (just before 6pm) than an anti-Obama rant (already a surprise) from Dennis Kneale with his "Parting Shot." He mocked the president's insincerity in championing a "pay as you go" scheme all the while pouring money down the toilet by the trillion. There were choice words such as "bare faced hypocrisy." Kneale said that Obama was lucky he wasn't laughed off the stage, and that he was also lucky there were no children present, because they would have pointed out that the emperor has no clothes. Well, Obama has been making pretenses at royalty lately. I can't seem to embed the CNBC clip without screwing up the Asylum's formatting. See it here.

Today Obama had the chutzpah to (again) try to sell himself as the champion of fiscal responsibility with his "pay as you" political theater. I've been trying to find his exact words, but what do you know, I can't find a transcript of Obama's exact words anywhere. I saw it and heard it with my own eyes on CNBC today, so I'll do my best to faithfully reproduce it, with the proviso it is from memory.

Obama: "We're in a deep fiscal hole, and it's going to take a long time to dig our way out."

Ummmm ... President Obama, if you're in a hole, and you start digging, what happens? If you dig downward, the hole gets deeper. If you dig sideways (a strategy that may eventually work) the hole gets one heck of a lot bigger before you accomplish anything. At least it was truth in advertising. We're in a hole, and Obama is digging.

Here we find the message Obama was (presumably) meant to convey, but it sure wasn't what he said.

“Pay as you go embodies the common-sense principle that you shouldn’t dig the hole any deeper,” Peter Orszag, Mr. Obama’s budget director, told reporters Tuesday.

Isn't it funny how I could find this quote everywhere in the MSN, but nowhere could I find Obama's hole digging gaff? Well, not funny at all really.

[Update] My goodness. It wasn't a gaff, and he's said it before during the election campaign!

"Bush has dug a deep hole. It's going to take some time to dig us out. We're all going to need to tighten our belts a little bit. We're all going to need to sacrifice," the senator says.

I guess this has to go down as an election promise that's been kept: we're in a hole, and if you vote for me I promise to start digging. Who voted for this person? I mean, seriously?

While China races ahead with its space program, aiming not only at the moon but also at Mars, the United States House of Representatives has announced (and I quote) a "time out" in NASA funding.

Ummm ... what happens when you're in a race, and one side takes a time out. Doesn't anyone remember the story of the tortoise and the hare?