Speaking of “shared sacrifice”, Obama could learn a few things from this guy. You know, maybe playing at the local Putt Putt Golf course, or ordering a McDonalds’s double cheeseburger, Domino’s pizza or buying lettuce at the local Safeway. Or taking Michelle clothes shipping at Target. (God knows, it could only improve her sense of style)

From Sky News:

For the first time on a major official visit, the Premier turned down chartering his own plane to make the two-day trip to Washington DC.

And he even spurned First Class tickets to travel in the far cheaper Business Class. The move saved 200,000 in costs, Downing Street officials said.

Passengers were aghast when Mr Cameron and his team of officials boarded the plane to Dulles airport and took seats beside them.

In the past, PMs travelling on long overseas trips have always chartered a Boeing 747 or 767 – at a cost of 300,000 – or used RAF jets.

It is Mr Cameron’s latest attempt to lead from the front on sweeping spending cuts across government to pay off Britain’s crippling 155 billion deficit.

Of course, when it comes to the Man-Child Emperor Wannabe, I am reminded of David Hartman’s quote from “San Francisco International”, “that nose wheel feels mushy”.

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You know things are bad when you have to start having a yard sale to pay for your overspending ways.

From the UK Guardian:

There’s little that shouts “seriously rich” as much as a little island in the sun to call your own. For Sir Richard Branson it is Neckar in the Caribbean, the billionaire Barclay brothers prefer Brecqhou in the Channel Islands, while Aristotle Onassis married Jackie Kennedy on Skorpios, his Greek hideway.

Now Greece is making it easier for the rich and famous to fulfill their dreams by preparing to sell, or offering long-term leases on, some of its 6,000 sunkissed islands in a desperate attempt to repay its mountainous debts.

The Guardian has learned that an area in Mykonos, one of Greece’s top tourist destinations, is one of the sites for sale. The area is one-third owned by the government, which is looking for a buyer willing to inject capital and develop a luxury tourism complex, according to a source close to the negotiations.

Potential investors also looking at property on the island of Rhodes, are mostly Russian and Chinese. Investors in both countries are looking for a little bit of the Mediterranean as holiday destinations for their increasingly affluent populations. Roman Abramovich, the billionaire owner of Chelsea football club, is among those understood to be interested, although a spokesman denied he was about to invest.

Greece has embarked on the desperate measures after being pushed into a €110bn (£90bn) bailout by the EU and the IMF last month, following a decade of overspending and after jittery investors raised borrowing costs to unbearable levels.

Wow, even parts of Mykonos are on the block. That would about the same as putting parts of the Hawaiian islands on CraigsList. Granted, with the way this President and Congress are pissing away the entire national treasury, the only thing left here will be one of John Kerry’s mansions and a ham sandwich.

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I slept in today and just went over to my favorite forums/blogs and saw the tragic news about the plane crash in Smolensk that claimed the President of Poland, the first lady, the head of their four military branches among many other high level Polish government officials.

From CNN (Hat Tip: Hot Air)

Polish President Lech Kaczynski was killed early Saturday when the plane he was traveling in with his wife and a Polish delegation crashed at a western Russian airport, according to the Russian regional governor.

“There are no survivors,” said Smolensk Governor Sergey Antufyev, according to his spokesman. …

The plane was approaching the airport at Smolensk, Russia — just a few miles east of Katyn — and probably hit some trees at the end of the runway, Paszkowski said.

The Investigation Committee of the Russian prosecutor’s office said the plane, a Tupolev-154, was trying to land in heavy fog.

From The New York Times: (Hat Tip: ASPF and Michelle Malkin)

The crash came as a staggering blow to Poland, wiping out a large swath of the country’s leadership, including the commanders of all four branches of the military, the head of the central bank, the president and many of his top advisors. In the numb hours after the crash, leaders in Warsaw evoked the horror of the massacre at Katyn, which stood for decades as a symbol of Russian domination.

“It is a damned place,” former president Aleksander Kwasniewski told TVN24. “It sends shivers down my spine. First the flower of the Second Polish Republic is murdered in the forests around Smolensk, now the intellectual elite of the Third Polish Republic die in this tragic plane crash when approaching Smolensk airport.”

It is such a gruesome coincidence that this happens when the Polish delegation was heading to a ceremony ceremony marking the slaughter of more than 20,000 Polish officers by the Soviet secret police in the Katyn Forest after the Red Army invaded Poland.

The Economist:

Polish historical sensitivies about Russia mean that many see the coincidence as sinister rather than tragic. But the plane tried to land four times, in bad weather. Accident is the overwhelmingly likely cause.

Yet like Katyn, which eliminated the flower of the pre-war Polish elite, the plane crash also seems like a decapitation of Polish society. Among the 96 people who died were the chief of the Polish general staff, the head of the central bank, the director of the Institute of National Remembrance (which investigates and documents crimes such as Katyn) and many other of the country’s top public figures. Many politicians from the opposition Law and Justice Party, which is led by Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the late president’s twin brother, were among the delegation.

A growing pile of flowers outside the presidential palace in Warsaw attested to the public’s stunning sense of loss. Radek Sikorski, the foreign minister, who broke the news to the prime minister Donald Tusk this morning and said that the head of government wept on hearing it. Both men had been at Katyn earlier in the week, at a ceremony attended by the Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin. The hawkish Mr Kaczynski did not attend that ceremony, instead insisting on his own visit three days later.

Say a prayer for the Polish people today, as they have now have to endure yet another searing, tragic experience.

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It does not get any bigger than this.

To actually get the endorsement of the Western Hemisphere’s great butcher must be setting every Democrat and White House staffer into a buzz. Viva Fidel!

Via The L.A. Times: (Hat Tips to BabaluBlog and Michelle Malkin)

It perhaps was not the endorsement President Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress were looking for.

Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro on Thursday declared passage of American health care reform “a miracle” and a major victory for Obama’s presidency, but couldn’t help chide the United States for taking so long to enact what communist Cuba achieved decades ago.

“We consider health reform to have been an important battle and a success of his (Obama’s) government,” Castro wrote in an essay published in state media, adding that it would strengthen the president’s hand against lobbyists and “mercenaries.”

But the Cuban leader also used the lengthy piece to criticize the American president for his lack of leadership on climate change and immigration reform, and for his decision to send more troops to Afghanistan, among many other things.

And he said it was remarkable that the most powerful country on earth took more than two centuries from its founding to approve something as basic as health benefits for all.

“It is really incredible that 234 years after the Declaration of Independence … the government of that country has approved medical attention for the majority of its citizens, something that Cuba was able to do half a century ago,” Castro wrote.

Hey, Michael Moore. You wanna lose some of that hippo weight that you have been carrying around for the last 40 years? Fidel has a hospital bed just waiting for you!

Sorry for the image folks, but I do not play PC games when it comes to such things. The Left has long used rhetoric and imagery to further their aims, so I have always felt that in order to counter, you need to do to the same.

I do not call it MengeleCare for nothing.

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This is how you have to deal with the Left. Use their language, arguments and most of all, their policies, against them. In spades. No questions. No kidding.

I was reading this over at Legal Insurrection yesterday and was going to post on it, but got distracted by 100 other things. But, now that the (as my old social studies teacher used to say) Jell-O has hit the fan, it is too juicy and ironic to pass up.

From Michelle Malkin

Ann Coulter’s stirring up stuff in Canada!

Coulter is provocative, and she’s not afraid to say things–true things–she knows will generate a media backlash.

The “[i]nflammatory right-wing pundit” spoke at the University of Western Ontario yesterday. In a move that has to be tongue-in-cheek, Coulter said she will file a human rights complaint alleging that University of Ottawa vice-president academic and provost Francois Houle’s e-mail to her constituted “hate speech.”

Houle urged that Coulter exercise “restraint, respect and consideration” in her speech to the students. Houle added, “Our domestic laws, both provincial and federal, delineate freedom of expression (or ‘free speech’) in a manner that is somewhat different than the approach taken in the United States. I therefore encourage you to educate yourself, if need be, as to what is acceptable in Canada and to do so before your planned visit here…Promoting hatred against any identifiable group would not only be considered inappropriate, but could in fact lead to criminal charges.”

To read the entire email, go over to Mark Steyn’s site. It is a hoot and a half.

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Being England and all, it should be the Afternoon Tea Party.

In any case, good to see that the disaffection with the usual budget busting, irresponsible Leftist policy is starting to bubble up from under the surface even in Old Blighty.

From Daniel Hannan’s Telegraph Blog – Hat Tip: ASPF)

The inaugural British Tea Party will take place on Saturday in my home town of Brighton, and I’ll be speaking. Do try to come: here are the details.

Labour has raised more than a trillion pounds in additional taxation since 1997. Yet, unbelievably, Gordon Brown has still managed to run up a deficit of 12.6 per cent of GDP (Greece’s is 12.7 per cent). A far lower level of taxation brought Americans out in spontaneous protest last year.

If you happen to be coming to the Conservative Spring Conference, do please pop in: the Tea Party is five minutes’ walk from the conference venue. It is, however, outside the security zone, and anyone is welcome to come. Oh, and this being England, we’ll be serving actual, you know, tea. I hope to see some of this blog’s readers there.

Comments seem rather divided. However, here is one that could have been written by one of Pelosi’s 14 year old interns:

LOL! I expect about 5 people will turn up – all the usual swivel-eyed, frothing Europhobes, public sector-hating Thatcherites.

The deficit is under control. Why do you persist in talking down our economy, thereby undermining confidence?

Here is a sample of the text from a call to action from Hannan.

Simon Jenkins raises a question that has been nagging at me for some time. Why is there no British Tea Party?

Where are the crowds of revenue slaves flocking to London to demand redress for the squandering of their money? Marginal tax is rising to 50%, VAT to 17.5% and state spending towards half the national product. The Treasury has lost control of public finance. So why no furious blue-rinses, bail-out ­haters, bonus-bleaters and embittered VAT victims storming Parliament?

Yeah: why? Some of my US readers believe that anti-tax rebellions are an American speciality, but we’ve had plenty of them in this country, from the Poll Tax Riots of 1381 (the Peasants’ Revolt) to the Poll Tax Riots of 1990. The doctrines that inspired the Boston mutineers – above all, the idea that taxes should not be levied without parliamentary process – were borrowed from English political theory.

Indeed, as Hugh Brogan drily observed in his History of the United States, the taxpayers’ revolt which sparked the American Revolution began on this side of the Atlantic: the Seven Years War had pushed taxes up to 25 shillings a year for the average Englishman as against sixpence for the average colonist, and MPs were determined to export part of that cost to North America.

More power to you, Mr. Hannan. The Dems are absolutely doomed here in 2010. Hopefully we can say the same about Labour soon enough.

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What have Haitians done to deserve this? Isn’t one earthquake enough?

From USA Today: (Hat Tip: Michelle Malkin)

Pelosi leads bipartisan delegation to Haiti

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced she is leading a 12-member congressional delegation to Haiti today.

She said the trip is designed to “demonstrate the ongoing American commitment to the Haitian people – that they will not be forsaken or forgotten.”

Others are on the trip include Sens. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa; Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J.; Bill Nelson, D-Fla.; Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.; and George LeMieux, R-Fla. The House delegation includes Reps. John Conyers, D-Mich.; Charles Rangel, D-N.Y.; Jim Oberstar, D-Minn.; Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas; Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore.; Donna Christensen, D-V.I.

Indeed, about as “bi-partisan” as a score of termites bringing along a 2×4 to a picnic.

I assume their itinerary looks like this:

1) Drink several bottles of champagne on the 777 on the way to the island
2) Debark and give instructions to the camera crew. Make sure starving babies are tagged for later photo ops.
3) While holding said babies, blame Bush, Haliburton and Global Warming for the quake.
4) Scurry back to their hotel rooms and empty the shrimp and caviar bars. Wash down with Dom Perignon.
5) Depart. Give interviews to slobbering reporters and call the trip one of the “great accomplishments of the Obama administration and the Democrat-led Congress”
6) Return home, go to the microphone and accuse the GOP of being heartless and wanting to throw Haitians out in the street

Best comment:

From AlohaGuy:

…every MRE she’s bringing has an absentee ballot attached filled out with her name…

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