THE ANT AND THE GRASSHOPPER

This one is a little different... . Two Different Versions....

....  Two Different Morals

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OLD VERSION

The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter.
The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away..
Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed.
The grasshopper has no food or shelter, so he dies out in the cold.

MORAL OF THE STORY: Be responsible for yourself!

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MODERN VERSION

The ant works hard in the withering heat and the rain all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter.
The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.
Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while he is cold and starving.
CBS, NBC , PBS, CNN, and ABC show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to a video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food.

America is stunned by the sharp contrast.

How can this be, that in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?

Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper and everybody cries when they sing, 'It's Not Easy Being Green.'
ACORN stages a demonstration in front of the ant's house where the news stations film the group singing, “We shall overcome.” Then Rev. Jeremiah Wright has the group kneel down to pray to God for the grasshopper's  sake.   
President Obama condemns the ant and blames President Bush, President Reagan, Christopher Columbus, and the Pope for the grasshopper's plight.
Nancy Pelosi & Harry Reid exclaim in an interview with Larry King that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and both call for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his fair share.
Finally, the EEOC drafts the Economic Equity & Anti-Grasshopper Act retroactive to the beginning of the summer.
The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, his home is confiscated by the Government Green Czar and given to the grasshopper.

The story ends as we see the grasshopper and his free-loading friends finishing up the last bits of the ant’s food while the government house he is in, which, as you recall, just happens to be the ant's old house, crumbles around them because the grasshopper doesn't maintain it.
The ant has disappeared in the snow, never to be seen again.
The grasshopper is found dead in a drug related incident, and the house, now abandoned, is taken over by a gang of spiders who terrorize the ramshackle, once prosperous and once peaceful, neighborhood.
The entire Nation collapses bringing the rest of the free world with it.

MORAL OF THE STORY: Be careful how you vote in 2010.

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Paul Rahe: Can Obama save his presidency?

Another great post from PowerLine

By Scott

Hillsdale College Professor Paul Rahe writes:

On the face of it, the question I pose is absurd -- not, of course, because Jacob Weisberg is right in supposing 2009 "Obama's Brilliant First Year." For the piece in which Weisberg argues this implausible case, he should be given the Steven Clemons Award, which is reserved each month for the author of a deadly serious post that is most likely to be misread as a parody.

No, as I tried to show in my post this past Sunday, Obama is in deep trouble, as is his party, and virtually everyone in our political class, apart from Weisberg, senses.

If the question I pose is absurd, it is because Barack Obama has three years left in which to rescue his Presidency, and a lot can and will happen in those three years.

None of it will help President Obama one iota, however, if he does not dramatically reposition himself. Tonight, in some measure, he may do so -- by the simple expedient of putting some distance between himself and those in his party (Joe Biden included) who think it possible for the United States to withdraw from Afghanistan with its tail between its legs and nonetheless prosper.

Next week, President Obama will have another, even more important opportunity to reposition himself. He will be once again in Copenhagen -- where some weeks back he made a colossal fool out of himself (and us) while seeking to persuade the International Olympic Committee to hold the next Olympics in Chicago.

This time, however, if our President wanted to, he could present himself as a paragon of principle and strength.

In his inaugural address, President Obama pledged to "roll back the specter of a warming planet" and "restore science to its rightful place," implying -- graceless as always -- that the administration of George W. Bush has suppressed scientific truth in the interests of ideology.

In Copenhagen, President Obama can show us that -- however unjust he may have been to his predecessor -- he is as good as his word, and then he can regain in some measure the trust that he has lost by his involvement in the lying, the wholesale bribery, and the other shenanigans associated with the "stimulus" scam and the proposed health care reform.

In the last few days, we have learned that what has long been suspected is all too true: that the work done by the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, which formed the basis for the four reports issued by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is a sham -- that the data were doctored, that the computer simulation was a fraud, and that systematic efforts were made by the most prominent climate scientists to corrupt the peer-review process and suppress legitimate criticism: all for the purpose of imposing a straitjacket on the world economy.

As radical climate alarmist George Monbiot has acknowledged on his blog, "Pretending that this isn't a real crisis isn't going to make it go away . . . I know that opaqueness and secrecy are the enemies of science. There is a word for the apparent repeated attempts to prevent disclosure revealed in these emails: unscientific . . . No one has been as badly let down by the revelations in these emails as those of us who have championed the science. We should be the first to demand that" climate research be "unimpeachable, not the last."

This is precisely what President Obama could say in Copenhagen -- that some of the most prominent climate scientists have betrayed their calling, that the global-warming hypothesis remains, in fact, unproven, and that the reports issued by the IPCC provide no basis for the making of public policy.

In this fashion -- mindful that a specter is "an apparition inspiring dread" and that one of the principal functions of science is to dispel illusions of this very sort -- he really could "roll back the specter of a warming planet" and "restore science to its rightful place."

In such a situation, it would be appropriate that President Obama recommend that there be further study, that the raw data collected and the computer code written be available for inspection by all, and that research funds be apportioned equally between those who assert and those who deny that we are threatened by anthropogenic global warming.

In short, he could rise above the fray, as presidents are supposed to do. And, at the same time, he could get out from under the economically destructive and politically suicidal cap-and-trade bill that Nancy Pelosi jammed through the House and that he endorsed.

He would infuriate the true believers that make up much of his party's base, to be sure. His science czar John Holdren -- a radical socialist who was an alarmist regarding global cooling back in the early 1970s before he became an alarmist regarding global warming -- might resign. Al Gore, who has made something like $100 million in the course of peddling junk science, would rise up in high dudgeon.

But the President of the United States would win the hearts of his countrymen. Climategate could be for Barack Obama what Sister Souljah was for William Jefferson Clinton.

Alternatively, of course, President Obama could hunker down, embrace "the specter of a warming planet," and disgrace himself by telling us what anyone who pays the slightest attention to developments knows to be untrue, as he has done so often in the health care debates. If he does so, however -- if he really is, as I suspect, a one-trick pony, an empty suit with a golden tongue -- he will only accelerate his precipitous decline and that of his party in the polls.