further | newslinks | articles | opinion

2011-04-07T18:40:00.000-07:00

What does one TRILLION dollars look like?

All this talk about "stimulus packages" and "bailouts"...

A billion dollars...

A hundred billion dollars...

Eight hundred billion dollars...

One TRILLION dollars...

What does that look like? I mean, these various numbers are tossed around like so many doggie treats, so I thought I'd take Google Sketchup out for a test drive and try to get a sense of what exactly a trillion dollars looks like.

We'll start with a $100 dollar bill. Currently the largest U.S. denomination in general circulation. Most everyone has seen them, slighty fewer have owned them. Guaranteed to make friends wherever they go.

$100

A packet of one hundred $100 bills is less than 1/2" thick and contains $10,000. Fits in your pocket easily and is more than enough for week or two of shamefully decadent fun.

$10,000

Believe it or not, this next little pile is $1 million dollars (100 packets of $10,000). You could stuff that into a grocery bag and walk around with it.

$1,000,000 (one million dollars)

While a measly $1 million looked a little unimpressive, $100 million is a little more respectable. It fits neatly on a standard pallet...

$100,000,000 (one hundred million dollars)

And $1 BILLION dollars... now we're really getting somewhere...

$1,000,000,000 (one billion dollars)

Next we'll look at ONE TRILLION dollars. This is that number we've been hearing so much about. What is a trillion dollars? Well, it's a million million. It's a thousand billion. It's a one followed by 12 zeros.

You ready for this?

It's pretty surprising.

Go ahead...

Scroll down...

Ladies and gentlemen... I give you $1 trillion dollars...

$1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion dollars)

[click image for full view]

Notice those pallets are double stacked.
...and remember those are $100 bills.

So the next time you hear someone toss around the phrase "trillion dollars"... that's what they're talking about.

[via]
* Step by step calculations & dimensions are [here] for those who may be interested.
* You may also be interested to see the U.S. National Debt in $100 dollar bills.

2009-2010 NHL Hockey PlayOffs

2010-04-14T17:38:00.000-07:00

2009-10 NHL Hockey PlayOffs

Chicago Blackhawks Win The Stanley Cup : 09-2010 Season

[cbc] [...] The Chicago Blackhawks ended a 49-year dry spell on Wednesday night by beating the underdog Philadelphia Flyers 4-3 in overtime to take the 2010 Stanley Cup final in six games.

In a bizarre goal that only Patrick Kane, the overtime hero, seemed to know went in, the Blackhawks celebrated 4:10 into the extra period.

For captain Jonathan Toews, Duncan Keith and Brent Seabrook it meant their second grand celebration in three months.

They became the fourth, fifth and sixth players to win both Olympic gold and an NHL championship in the same season.

Ken Morrow, Steve Yzerman and Brendan Shanahan were the first three.

::::

Stanley Cup

OK. Colour us surprised. Our old Hawks in the final? Wow. The playoffs have been entirely surprising, for most everyone it would seem and given that the home team, after a win last year in The Internal, well...we've been sucking bad and have been blown out by, oh, 20 points. Usually the points separating the participants is from 1-5 maybe. Ouch. We'll probably call for a recount, but even a couple of counting errors can't help our dismal and worst season on record.

Anyway, Go Hawks! We're flying the colours.

From an Entertainment post of some years back: 'In fact, the Blackhawks do hold the esteem of "longest cup drought."

The last time Chicago drank from the prize was 1961 after defeating the Detroit Red Wings. The title of "second longest cup drought" is held by the Toronto Maple Leafs with their last win coming in 1967.'

Chicago
6-2-3-3-7-4
vs.
~~Philadelphia~~
5-1-4-5-4-3

STANLEY CUP FINAL - GAME 6 - BLACKHAWKS WIN SERIES 4-2

____________________________________

Finals
Wow again. Boston blows it. Unbelievable. You can't say that this year's playoffs have been predictable, that's for sure.

At this point, I guess we're hoping for an original six matching - like always, really - Chicago / Montreal but realistically, doubt the Hawks will move past the Sharks. Blood is with the Hawks, but secretly, something is making us pull for Sharks to win it all, most def. if they pull past the Hawks. Our child days of being Montreal fans are loong behind us, but hat's off to them for pulling this off as long as they have. can they go all the way? Why not? Hey, we'll even say that it's nice to see the old Broad St. Bullies in there again. Good stuff. Good playoff season, no matter what happens now.

Western Conference

~~San Jose~~
1-2-2-2
vs.
Chicago
2-4-3-4

BLACKHAWKS WIN SERIES 4-0

Blackhawks in Cup finals for first time since '92

____________________________________

Eastern Conference

~~Montreal~~
0-0-5-0-2
vs.
Philadelphia
6-3-1-3-4

FLYERS WIN SERIES 4-1

____________________________________

Semi Finals

Wow @ the Canadiens taking out Washington. The upset of the season, without a doubt. We hate Washington....sort of anyway. They've burnt us too often in seasonal wagering, but dayam. It was all but a given, many thought.

The Grand Poobah should have been tossing the coins elsewhere too considering the wins they have been taking in from long shot, jam situations. A quick glance at the sheets shows that TGP is gaining ground on TQM.

**(May 2010) In a sad and unexpected turn of events, its seems that TQM has decided to leave all of his picks up to the coin flip. What a shame since he stands to win this years games, and the fact that this is probably the last time we do it. Oh well.

Western Conference

San Jose
4-4-4-1-2
vs.
~~Detroit~~
3-3-3-7-1

SHARKS WIN SERIES 4-1

::

Chicago
1-4-5-7-1-5
vs.
~~Vancouver~~
5-2-2-4-4-1

BLACKHAWKS WIN SERIES 4-2

____________________________________

Eastern Conference

~~Boston~~
5-3-4-4-0-1-3
vs.
Philadelphia
4-2-1-5-4-2-4

FLYERS WIN SERIES 4-3

::

~~Pittsburgh~~
6-1-2-2-2-3-2
vs.
Montreal
3-3-0-3-1-4-5-

CANADIENS WIN SERIES 4-3

_________________________________________________________________________________

Here we go, the tradition continues with this years NHL playoffs.

As any of the ardent Vegas followers know, 2/3 of the main Gallery are Detroit fans, but we can also include our old loves and smatterings of hope for the likes of Chicago, Boston and even enjoy the Canucks to a lesser degree of sentimentality. We're looking for the Wings as always, but as realists, well...clearly, Boston seems settled in nicely for the money and 'ship and the Capitals are sitting strong - but personally, they've burned me too often and I can't forgive them. Is hate too strong a word?

Game On!

::

Quarter Finals

Western Conference

San Jose
1-6-0-2-5-5
vs.
~~Colorado~~
2-5-1-1-0-2

SHARKS WIN SERIES 4-2

::

Chicago
1-2-1-3-5-5
vs.
~~Nashville~~
4-0-4-0-4-3

BLACKHAWKS WIN SERIES 4-2

::

Vancouver
3-2-3-6-7-4
vs.
~~Los Angeles~~
2-3-5-4-2-2

CANUCKS WIN SERIES 4-2

::

~~Phoenix~~
3-4-4-0-1-5-1
vs.
Detroit
2-7-2-3-4-2-6

RED WINGS WIN SERIES 4-3

____________________________________

Eastern Conference

Montreal
3-5-1-3-2-4-2
vs.
~~Washington~~
2-6-5-6-1-1-1

CANADIENS WIN SERIES 4-3

::

~~New Jersey~~
1-5-2-1-0
vs.
Philadelphia
2-3-3-4-3

FLYERS WIN SERIES 4-1

::

~~Buffalo~~
2-3-1-2-4-3
vs.
Boston
1-5-2-3-1-4

BRUINS WIN SERIES 4-2

::

Pittsburgh
4-2-4-7-3-4
vs.
~~Ottawa~~
5-1-2-4-4-3

PENGUINS WIN SERIES 4-2

::

||||

2010-03-01T16:54:00.000-08:00

:: March 2010 :: newslinks | articles | opinion

::::

::::

Chavez Arrests President of Globovision Television

[c] Today, the Venezuelan government arrested Guillermo Zuloaga, president of Globovision Television, the only remaining television on public airwaves critical of Hugo Chavez. According to the government, Zuloaga made offensive comments about Chavez (which is against the law in Venezuela) while speaking at a conference of the Inter-American Press Association (IAPA) in Aruba, where media representatives criticized the Venezuelan regime’s crackdown on freedom of speech.

Globovision and Zuloaga have been under constant harassment from the government, and Chavez has promised to close the station. Last July, Cato held a forum in Washington on “Venezuela’s Assault on Freedom of the Press and Other Liberties,” which was to feature Zuloaga. After the event was announced, however, a politically directed court prohibited him from leaving the country. So Zuloaga taped this 3 minute video address to the Cato audience and sent his son and vice president of Globovision, Carlos, to take his place. [see link for video]

::::

Best Of : Ann in Canada

OK...since this has become such an entertainment value and no doubt promises to do so further - at least until Ann's Calgary stint is over - it seems the best thing to do here is to dedicate this bit of space to The Best of Ann in Canada. For the duration, world, if you might, cease any other 'newsworthy' events, if you would be so kind.

Various Related

Unsurprisingly, all manner of summations of the Ottawa cancellation have cropped up, many from those that were attending, so they might as well be contained together for reference, but don't be surprised if when some of them are scrubbed or removed and sent down the memory hole.

We select a few:

Video

Pre - Ottawa Speech Cancellation

[ctv-p1]
[ctv-p2]
[ctv-p3]

[cbc]

Websites

[link] A better collection of various links than we'll no doubt get around to.

[link] What happened last night was shameful, frightening and profoundly sad.

Shameful that an institution that should encourage debate instead incites censorship and bully tactics.

Frightening that a generation is being educated to think that free speech does not need to be protected.

Sad that one day my grandchildren may not have the right to say what they want no matter how right, wrong, stupid or brilliant.

A dear friend who called me to find out just what happened reminded me of a profoundly apropos quote from Ronald Reagan: "Freedom is only one generation away from extinction."

Before I left I took my copy of "Guilty" and approached Ezra to ask if he would sign it. When I got home, I opened the cover to find that he had written the perfect message.

Freedom!

::

Steyn :

[so] [...] As I wrote in The National Post eight years ago - August 5th 2002:

The aim of a large swathe of the left is not to win the debate but to get it cancelled before it starts. You can do that in any number of ways -- busting up campus appearances by conservatives, "hate crimes" laws, Canada's ghastly human-rights commissions, the more "enlightened" court judgments, the EU's recent decision to criminalize "xenophobia," or merely, as the Times does, by declaring your side of every issue to be the "moderate" and "nonideological" position...

The quality of your argument is only important if you want to win by persuasion. But it’s irrelevant if you want to win by intimidation. I’m personally very happy to defend my columns in robust debate, but, if Canada believed in robust debate, we wouldn't have these "human rights" commissions or university administrators like the wretched M Houle in the first place. The morons who shut down Ann Coulter last night don't care that they made her point for her, anymore than those Muslim agitators in the streets of London fretted about the internal contradictions of threatening to kill anyone who says they're violent.

Freedom of speech is in grave peril in Canada. In the Coulter fracas, almost all the major societal institutions behaved poorly:

1) François Houle symbolizes a decadent academy that is the very antithesis of honest enquiry and intellectual debate that the university is supposed to represent.

2) The Ottawa Police have declared that there is no equality before the law. If you belong to certain groups, they'll stand by as the mob shuts you down.

3) The dinosaur media are vast lumbering eunuchs too cowed by political correctness to do even elementary research. Fatima Al Dhaher, the poor wee thing traumatized by Ann Coulter's camel joke, turns out to be a Jew-hater who wants to eliminate the State of Israel, and belongs to a group who regard Jews as "subhuman" "zionazis/kikeroaches". But that's too complicated for the media to fit into their Sesame Street narratives.

Between them, the media, the law and the education system are actively shriveling Canada's liberties. It doesn't lead anywhere good: Ghost of a Flea's title - "Fascist Canada" - is no exaggeration. If you say, "Oh, c'mon, if you're not a troublemaker like Coulter or Levant or Guy Earle or Douglas McCue, Canada's very pleasant", well, so were large parts of Mussolini's Italy and Franco's Spain. But they were not free, and few pre-Trudeau Canadians would have entertained trading ancient liberties for soft totalitarianism euphemized as "diversity".

The saddest aspect of this sad day is the number of people who've sent e-mails denouncing the Ottawa bullies but ending with the words "If you print this, please don't mention my name." Don't you realize that that's part of the problem? In a sane world, it would be François Houle and Fatima Al Dhaher and Susan Cole who would be ashamed to have their names mentioned. But they're not. They're proud to nail their colours to the masts of state censorship, Israeli eliminationism, and mob violence - while your support for free speech and other traditional liberties can only be expressed sotto voce and anonymously. That right there tells you how much of Canada you've already lost.

::

Ann Coulter prepares human-rights complaint

[g&m] [...] She said she’s hired Canadian conservative activist Ezra Levant to prepare a human-rights complaint that will test how equitably these hate-crime laws are applied.

In an interview with The Globe, Ms. Coulter suggested the University of Ottawa’s provost, Francois Houle, is partly responsible for the angry crowds that opposed her speaking Tuesday night. He is the official who warned her in advance to watch what she said lest she incur criminal charges for hate speech.

The tribunal should take her complaint seriously, she said, “because either Francois [Houle] has created a climate of hate against me based on my membership in an identifiable group – or the whole human rights commission is complete horseshit.” [...]

“I would like to know if any Muslim has been treated this badly, at least since the Reformation, because I am drawing a blank,” Ms. Coulter told The Globe.

She also took a swipe at Canadians, saying this country has lost its edge.

“You guys used to be so cool. You were smokers. You had epic hockey fights. We had half our comedians from Canada. Now you’re all a bunch of girls named Francois.”

*Emphasis ours.

::

Even Infamous Sock-Puppet Gets It :
"The creepy tyranny of Canada's hate speech laws"

[s] I've written many times before about the evils of "hate speech" laws that are prevalent in Canada and Europe -- people being fined, prosecuted and hauled before official tribunals for expressing political opinions which the State has prohibited and criminalized. I won't rehash those arguments here, but I do want to note a particularly creepy illustration of how these laws manifest. [...]

Personally, I think threatening someone with criminal prosecution for the political views they might express is quite "hateful." So, too, is anointing oneself the arbiter of what is and is not sufficiently "civilized discussion" to the point of using the force of criminal law to enforce it. If I were administering Canada's intrinsically subjective "hate speech" laws (and I never would), I'd consider prosecuting Provost Houle for this letter. The hubris required to believe that you can declare certain views so objectively hateful that they should be criminalized is astronomical; in so many eras, views that were most scorned by majorities ended up emerging as truth.

For as long as I'll live, I'll never understand how people want to vest in the Government the power to criminalize particular viewpoints it dislikes, will never understand the view that it's better to try to suppress adverse beliefs than to air them, and will especially never understand people's failure to realize that endorsing this power will, one day, very likely result in their own views being criminalized when their political enemies (rather than allies) are empowered. Who would ever want to empower officious technocrats to issue warnings along the lines of: be forewarned: if you express certain political views, you may be committing a crime; guide and restrict yourself accordingly?

::

...We Have a Bingo!

[nrb] [...] Understand: Establishment Canada hates America, but paradoxically, cares desperately about what America says about our country, and seeks secondhand validation from any meager attention we might get from you; consider the thirty-years-worth of boilerplate Canadian puff pieces, bragging about how many now-famous comedians we’ve “given” to Hollywood, and how we built the arm (the arm!) on the Space Shuttle like, 500 years ago, to take two of the more pathetic examples. The “look at us! Pleeeeeze!!” b.s. surrounding the supposed wonderfulness of the recent Vancouver Winter Olympics (yawn) is another.

So for us, the Ann Coulter Riot is A. Very. Big. Deal. I expect lawsuits galore, questions about the pathetic security apparatus that “protects” our nation’s capital, criminal charges and countercharges, commemorative tee shirts (the “Coulter in Canada” one pictured above is now selling fast), magazine cover ~~stories~~ story — I forgot: we only have one magazine — and much more.

::

Coulter talk cancelled for security reasons
[np] After protesters at the University of Ottawa prevented Ann Coulter from giving a speech on Tuesday night, the American conservative writer said it proved the point she came to make - free speech in Canada leaves much to be desired.

Then she said what she really thought of the student protesters who surrounded Marion Hall, making it to unsafe, in the view of her bodyguard, for the pundit to attempt entry.

"The University of Ottawa is really easy to get into, isn't it?" she said in an interview after the cancelled event. "I never get any trouble at the Ivy League schools. It's always the bush league schools."

Ms. Coulter said she has been speaking regularly at university campuses for a decade. While she has certainly been heckled, she said this is the first time an engagement has been cancelled because of protesters. [...]

"Since I've arrived in Canada, I've been denounced on the floor of Parliament - which, by the way, is on my bucket list - my posters have been banned, I've been accused of committing a crime in a speech that I have not yet given, I was banned by the student council, so welcome to Canada!"

COMMENTS FROM THE INTERNET

It is a special brand of intellect (apparently in flourish and taught with regularity at most modern universities these days) that suggests that "free speech" equals the squelching of another person espousing their opinion and done so not with reasoned, return speech but, rather, intimidation.

One need not agree with the views of Ann Coulter (or anyone else - nor are any forced to listen to or attend function of same) to understand that the best recourse to subjectively disagreeable speech is rationale, counter-speech.

Realize that it's not unthinkable that the next speech silenced by whim of a changeable government might be your own. The endorsement of such a thing is the domain of the fool.

Herald this as a triumph, idiotic, programmed charlatans. Yours is disgrace.
- Dr.Zen

"Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear."
— Harry S. Truman

"If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed."
— Benjamin Franklin

"All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship."
— George Bernard Shaw

"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist."
— Salman Rushdie

"Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?"
— Kurt Vonnegut

::

"Coulter is not an anti Semite--the Semites being a linguistic group extending from the Caucasus to North Africa and Malta---she is a fervent Christian which is, as you know, a Jewish heresy which believes that the Rabbi Jesus is the Messiah---it is quite consistent to her belief system that the Jewish people accept Jesus as the true Messiah.

Not being a theist I stay away from the theological infighting that characterizes the bronze age Abrahamic tradition with its warring off shoots ---the Jewish stem and the Christian and Islamic offshoots---she has as much right to express her opinion on theological matters as do followers of the other two.

I certainly hope that her threat to go to the HRC is carried out---it would be very entertaining to see that entity full of politically correct intellectually mediocre pedants who focus their attention to only one side of the political spectrum whilst turning a blind eye to the maliciousness of the other twisting and turning to avoid her rapier thrusts.

Intelligence is merely neuronal speed---and Coulter is faster than most---when one is verbally fencing of course one has to use guile to put the other debater off balance---and she's as shrewd and as sharp as any of her opponents with her opponents constantly off balance---watching her debate is absolute fun---and there is only one way for her inferiors to counter her---they cannot use logic or reason or facts so they abuse her and insult her in the hope of putting her off balance---which is exactly what they won't be able to do because she was expecting it and had planned for it.

'Reactionary' refers to any political or social movement or ideology or belief system that seeks to return to a previous state---usually aimed at the ultra conservatives it can also apply to Marxists who wish to return to a mythical era in the distant past where everyone was equally poor with no filthy capitalists around to spoil their equality as they lived in a state of nature---our Islamofascist reactionaries wish to return to that glorious golden era somewhere around the seventh century---many others however wish to return to a culture dominated by the philosophy of reason---as occurred in Ancient Greece, the Renaissance and the nineteenth century---many modern day conservatives yearn for a return to the age of reason---many Marxist reactionaries in the guise of the 'green' movement want to go all the way back to the garden of Eden and then get rid of the humans who they think spoiled it all."

::

"The antics of those "socially conscious" activists who prevented Coulter from speaking in Ottawa University today reflects badly on the whole of Canada and in particular on those involved at the university and its officials.

Freedom of speech includes the freedom not to agree---it also includes the freedom not to listen---the goons were free to not to attend the lecture and free to cover their own ears during the lecture---but a line has to be drawn when physical force and violence [including the pulling of the fire alarm which surely was an offence] is used to prevent others from attending or hearing the speech.

One wonders what punitive steps the University will take against those who deprived the audience from hearing Ms Coulter's speech, no matter its content?

One suspects that they'll do nothing, marking it down as one more victory for their version of unidirectional politically correct 'free speech'.

Surely Ms Coulter has enough ammunition now to go the the HRC---let's hope that she does." - by Ascalepius

::
“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.

"In other words, we don’t really have freedom of speech, just Pre-approved rhetoric. Guess what else you don’t have now, Canadians- Good healthcare just across the border." -SpeakEasy

::

"I so love reading these Canadian analysis of American politics. I'm one of those fringe, Christian, American (you left out "apple pie") conservatives to which you lob such enlightened, melba-toast opinion and of whom you write off as losers. Ah! But you're thinking godless, cowardly Canada, mon chéri! This is habanero eating USA, and you're in for a surprise (like the extortionist abortionist perv's, or rather Liberal elite) and will have to really eat some crow when we grab out country back. By the by, I teach at a college here and you blokes can come speak any time, though I don't think I can talk any students into attending some Canadian chinwag." -Profvolkswagen

::

Some good comments there, but...I think this one has 'best of the month' locked in...

"Just out of curiousity, is that Ron Wood from the Rolling Stones over Pelosi’s left shoulder? Just wonderin’" -Dopenstrange

::

[bg] Ann Coulter: "I was hoping for a fruit basket, not a threat to prosecute:"

The 'Letter To Ann'

::

Steyn on The 'Letter to Ann'

[s] [...] What a sad and embarrassing letter, even by the standards of the Canadian academy. Does M Houle write to all University of Ottawa speakers like this? Or does he reserve his telekinetic powers to detect "pre-crime" only for the ideologically suspect?

I've no idea what Ann Coulter's reaction to this letter is, but I suspect it's "Go ahead, Princess Fairy Pants, make my day." M Houle would have a very hard time persuading the Ottawa police or the RCMP to lay criminal charges over an Ann Coulter speech because they realize, even if he doesn't, that Canada doesn't need to become even more of an international laughingstock in this area. More likely is a complaint to the Canadian and/or Ontario "Human Rights" Commissions. But you know something? I don't get the feeling they'd be eager to re-ignite the free speech wars on a nuclear scale. Think of Ezra's and my appearance in the House of Commons, and then imagine the scene when Miss Coulter testifies. So the threat is an empty one and M Houle seems to be being - oh, what's the "respectful and civil" way of putting it? - a posturing wanker.

This is the pitiful state one of the oldest free societies on the planet has been reduced to, and this is why our free speech campaign matters - because those who preside over what should be arenas of honest debate and open inquiry instead wish to imprison public discourse within ever narrower bounds - and in this case aren't above threatening legal action against those who dissent from the orthodoxies. Lots of Americans loathe Ann Coulter but it takes a Canadian like François Houle to criminalize her. The strictures he attempts to place around her, despite his appeal to "Canadian law", are at odds with the eight centuries of Canada's legal inheritance. Canadians should point that out to him politely, and explain that, although he lives high off the hog courtesy of the Canadian taxpayer, he does not speak for them.

Furthermore: A collection of [Letters To Houle] :

::::

::::

Pony Up

[bh] [...] I wanna show you a graph from Nick Gillespie’s great piece at Reason.com.

CLICK FOR FULL SIZE

Check out the estimated cost of Medicare. 12 billion. Now check out its actual cost. 110 billion. They were only off by 900 percent.

Welcome to Greece, people. Jump in, the water’s warm.

Let’s look at all arguments for health care. First they tried to sell the thing on moral grounds. Didn’t work. Then on efficiency grounds. Still didn’t work. Then they switched to saving money. Thirty million new people to insure, and somehow they convinced themselves it’ll save us money! Using the same logic, we should insure Canada too! We’d really be saving cash then!

Look – universal health care is a beautiful idea. But so is getting a pony for your fifth birthday.

When daddy argues with little Susie over that pony, she doesn’t care about how they’re going to afford the pony. She doesn’t care if they have to mortgage the house to pay for the pony. She just wants that pony.

But see, daddy is supposed to know that. And daddy isn’t supposed to actually buy the pony! And, most of all, he isn’t supposed to tell everyone in earshot that it’s cheaper having that pony – than having a car.

But he just did. And the media, and the Dems – fell in line like a classroom of five year old girls.

They didn’t just buy the pony. They just bought the whole damn farm.

::::

Judge Napolitano Weighs In: How Solid is Stupak’s ‘Executive Order’ Compromise?

::::

The Enlightened and Tolerant 'Liberal' University Students : Canada
Coulter Comes To Canada

[oc] The president of the Student Federation of the University of Ottawa has barred a volunteer organizer from putting up posters advertising the upcoming appearance of American right-wing columnist and political commentator Ann Coulter.

She is to talk about political correctness, media bias and freedom of speech Tuesday night at Marion Hall as part of a Canadian lecture tour. Canadian conservative political activist Ezra Levant will also speak at the event and introduce Coulter.

"The federation does not support Ann Coulter speaking on our campus," said student president Seamus Wolfe. "We're trying to work with the administration to see if we can ask her to do her speaking event somewhere else."

[ifp] American conservative firebrand Ann Coulter won't be in London until Monday but already the dust is flying.

Local activist and one-time NDP candidate Megan Walker says of Coulter, "She's venomous . . . She crosses the line and promotes hatred and violence."

Walker's comments provoked a response from a woman instrumental in bringing Coulter to London, Mary Lou Ambrogio, whose group, the International Free Press Society, is paying $10,000 for the appearance, the balance of Coulter's fee coming from an American group that promotes conservatism in young women, the Claire Boothe Luce Policy Institute.

Coulter couldn't be reached by phone. In a brief e-mail, Coulter offered to comment, but hadn't done so by Friday.

Ambrogio said Coulter was chosen to test the tolerance of Londoners for free speech, a test she says Walker has flunked.

"She pays lip service to free speech," Ambrogio said.

While Coulter pushes peoples' buttons, she doesn't incite criminal activity nor hatred, she said.

::::

Ryan Is Not Ready to Give Up on Health Care

[nro] ‘This is the closing of the first chapter of America’s health-care saga,” Rep. Paul Ryan says from his office, which is adorned with reminders of contests of the non-political kind: hunting mementos and a Green Bay Packers helmet. “We are witnessing the beginning of a whole new kind of health-care politics, the likes of which we have never seen before.”

Ryan, a 40-year-old Wisconsin Republican, says Republicans have a fight on their hands, and he is ready for combat. As Democrats scrambled this past week for votes, he’s been listening to Metallica on his iPod and strategizing about how best to counteract Obamacare. Sunday night’s passage, he says, “was a rude awakening and a big wake-up call,” but also a call to action for Americans — and, especially, for the GOP.

“We need to establish a set of metrics and benchmarks to measure the sector going forward, keeping a close eye on all of the Democrats’ claims,” Ryan says. “From cost to quality, we will need to be vigilant in making sure that their assertions are actually substantiated with facts, and I have every reason to believe they won’t be.” [...]

“Health care is really the issue that speaks to the relationship between the citizen and the government in America,” he says. “It shapes the fiscal trajectory and the economic trajectory. This whole debate has been a proxy fight about what kind of country America will be — whether we’ll become a cradle-to-grave welfare state or stay a free-market democracy. The Democrats who are being told that the worse is over should know that the battle has not even begun. It’s up to us to now bring the case to the American people — a real moral, philosophical, and economic case — asking about our values, our founding principles, and if we really want to move toward a Western European–style system.”

“Just look across the pond at how terrible things have become,” Ryan says. In Britain, even Conservative leader David Cameron is politically unable or unwilling to criticize the National Health Service, and Ryan calls that “a pretty pitiful thing to watch.” President Obama knows this, Ryan says, and wants government health care to achieve the same level of entrenchment here at home. “What’s really happening here is the president is saying to the American people that you’re stuck in your current station in life, you’re frozen, and the government is here to help you cope with it. But that’s not who we are. We are a dynamic society where people have the will and incentive to make the most of their lives, to reach their potential. With this bill, that whole mindset, the American idea is upended.”

What about the practical consequences of Obamacare? “Soon, we’ll see individual-market insurance companies go out of business and dump their people,” Ryan says. “Tax increases on capital are going to hurt the economy in 2011. These arbitrary Medicare cuts will adversely affect the providers and therefore their beneficiaries. You’ll have the Internal Revenue Service beefing up its enforcement of this new mandate, which people have no clue is coming. And you’re going to have employers dump employees in this exchange once it’s up and running — funneling everyone into a government-run rationing system. Then we’ll see a big spike in insurance rates, and the Democrats are going to wager that they can just blame the insurers for that, and therefore that means they will need to institute insurance price controls or have a public option. [...]

“We need to become the party of liberty and freedom,” Ryan argues. “We’re not doing enough. We can do better, and we will — because we have no choice. If we’re going to offer the country a completely different vision, we can’t be Democratic-lite or resign ourselves to be slightly more efficient managers and tax-collectors for the welfare state. We have to break with that and give people a clear and distinct difference.”

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Anderson Cooper : Jeopardy

Cooper came in last (tied with Aisha Tyler, both with zero cash at the end), losing to Cheech Marin. Yea, we know that Cooper won once in this seemingly lowered-bar version of the program. CNN Buddies, Wolf Blitzer and Soledad O'Brien have also finished in the last place position on the show.

[g] Tonight brought us another edition of celebrity Jeopardy!, with Cheech Marin, Aisha Tyler, and the Silver Fox himself, Anderson Cooper. Well, Cooper kind of sucked. Actually, he really sucked. Are CNN anchors incapable of playing Jeopardy! well? Inside, video highlights.

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Ann Coulter : Strictly Right Radio : [link]

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The Failure of RomneyCare

[wsj] Former Massachusetts governor and likely 2012 presidential aspirant Mitt Romney has been on the wrong side of the defining political battle of our time.

Mr. Romney claimed earlier this month on "Fox News Sunday" that the Massachusetts health reform plan he signed into law in 2006 is "the ultimate conservative plan." But there are many similarities between it and the ObamaCare loathed by conservative voters.

Both have an individual mandate requiring most residents to have health insurance or pay a penalty. Most businesses are required to participate or pay a fine. Both rely on government-designed purchasing exchanges that also provide a platform to control private health insurance. Many of the uninsured are covered through Medicaid expansion and others receive subsidies for highly-prescriptive policies. And the apparatus requires a plethora of new government boards and agencies.

While it's true that the liberal Massachusetts legislature did turn Mr. Romney's plan to the left, his claims that his plan is "entirely different" will not stand up to the intense scrutiny of a presidential campaign, especially a primary challenge. Mr. Romney needs to be more honest about his Massachusetts experiment and its failings. [...]

Mr. Romney's promise that getting everyone covered would force costs down also is far from being realized. One third of state residents polled by Harvard researchers in a study published in "Health Affairs" in 2008 said that their health costs had gone up as a result of the 2006 reforms. A typical family of four today faces total annual health costs of nearly $13,788, the highest in the country. Per capita spending is 27% higher than the national average.

The state's stubbornly high health costs are partly the result of intrusive government regulations that stifle competition in the insurance market and strict mandates on what services insurance must cover. A 2008 study by the Massachusetts Division of Health Care Finance and Policy found that the state's most expensive insurance mandates cost patients more than $1 billion between July 2004 and July 2005. The Massachusetts health reform law left all of them in place.

Further, insurance companies are required to sell "just-in-time" policies even if people wait until they are sick to buy coverage. That's just like the Obama plan. There is growing evidence that many people are gaming the system by purchasing health insurance when they need surgery or other expensive medical care, then dropping it a few months later.

Some Massachusetts safety-net hospitals that treat a disproportionate number of lower-income and uninsured patients are threatening bankruptcy. They still are treating a large number of people without health insurance, but the payments they receive for uncompensated care have been cut under the reform deal.

The Bay State is also suffering from what the Massachusetts Medical Society calls a "critical shortage" of primary-care physicians. As one would expect, expanded insurance has caused an increase in demand for medical services. But there hasn't been a corresponding increase in the number of doctors. As a result, many patients are insured in name only: They have health coverage but can't find a doctor.

Fifty-six percent of Massachusetts internal medicine physicians no longer are accepting new patients, according to a 2009 physician work-force study conducted by the Massachusetts Medical Society. For new patients who do get an appointment with a primary-care doctor, the average waiting time is 44 days, the Medical Society found.

As Dr. Sandra Schneider, the vice president of the American College of Emergency Physicians, told the Boston Globe last April, "Just because you have insurance doesn't mean there's a [primary care] physician who can see you."

The difficulties in getting primary care have led to an increasing number of patients who rely on emergency rooms for basic medical services. Emergency room visits jumped 7% between 2005 and 2007. Officials have determined that half of those added ER visits didn't actually require immediate treatment and could have been dealt with at a doctor's office—if patients could have found one.

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State Treasurer Tim Cahill slams Barack Obama, Dems on health care

[bh] State Treasurer Tim Cahill, taking swipes at both Gov. Deval Patrick and President Obama, boosted his bipartisan chops yesterday, telling Herald columnist Howie Carr on WRKO, “I voted for John McCain, believe it or not.”

Cahill, saying he was barred from the 2008 Democratic National Convention because he wouldn’t endorse either Obama or Hillary Clinton, said, “My own party basically voted me out.”

“I was afraid of what we had already been getting in Massachusetts, and at that point in 2008, I was aware that it wasn’t working,” he said. Separately yesterday, Cahill accused Obama of “propping up” the Bay State’s health plan with federal aid in order to help push the Democrats’ plan through Congress.

“The real problem is that this . . . sucking sound of money has been going into this health-care reform,” Cahill said. “And I would argue that it’s being propped up so that the federal government and the Obama administration can drive it through.”

Gov. Deval Patrick argues the state’s universal health care program has added 1 percent to the budget, but Cahill said the real impact is buffered by federal dollars.

Meanwhile, Republican Charles Baker’s campaign said Patrick “has consistently failed to address rising health-care costs in Massachusetts.” Baker, the former Harvard Pilgrim CEO, advocated for years for greater transparency on the part of medical service providers.

Cahill called on congressional Democrats yesterday to go “back to the drawing board,” saying he fears they will “bankrupt” the country.

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Is Tom Hanks Unhinged?

[pm] Much has been written of the recent Tom Hanks remarks to Douglas Brinkley in a Time magazine interview about his upcoming HBO series on World War II in the Pacific. Here is the explosive excerpt that is making the rounds today.

“Back in World War II, we viewed the Japanese as ‘yellow, slant-eyed dogs’ that believed in different gods. They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different. Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what’s going on today?”

Hanks may not have been quoted correctly; and his remarks may have been impromptu and poorly expressed; and we should give due consideration to the tremendous support Hanks has given in the past both to veterans and to commemoration of World War II; and his new HBO series could well be a fine bookend to Band of Brothers. All that said, Hanks’ comments were sadly infantile pop philosophizing offered by, well, an ignoramus.

Hanks thinks he is trying to explain the multifaceted Pacific theater in terms of a war brought on by and fought through racial animosity. That is ludicrous. Consider:

1) In earlier times, we had good relations with Japan (an ally during World War I, that played an important naval role in defeating imperial Germany at sea) and had stayed neutral in its disputes with Russia (Teddy Roosevelt won a 1906 Nobel Peace Prize for his intermediary role). The crisis that led to Pearl Harbor was not innately with the Japanese people per se (tens of thousands of whom had emigrated to the United States on word of mouth reports of opportunity for Japanese immigrants), but with Japanese militarism and its creed of Bushido that had hijacked, violently so in many cases, the government and put an entire society on a fascistic footing. We no more wished to annihilate Japanese because of racial hatred than we wished to ally with their Chinese enemies because of racial affinity. In terms of geo-strategy, race was not the real catalyst for war other than its role among Japanese militarists in energizing expansive Japanese militarism.

2) How would Hanks explain the brutal Pacific wars between Japanese and Chinese, Japanese and Koreans, Japanese and Filipinos, and Japanese and Pacific Islanders, in which not hundreds of thousands perished, but many millions? In each of these theaters, the United States was allied with Asians against an Asian Japan, whose racially-hyped “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” aimed at freeing supposedly kindred Asians from European and white imperialism, flopped at its inauguration (primarily because of high-handed Japanese feelings of superiority and entitlement, which, in their emphasis on racial purity, were antithetical to the allied democracies, but quite in tune with kindred Axis power, Nazi Germany.) [...]

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Atty. Gen. Holder failed to disclose legal briefs to senators

[lat] Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. gave more ammunition to his critics Friday, admitting he had failed to tell a Senate committee about half a dozen briefs to the Supreme Court that he had signed, including two involving a terrorism dispute.

Holder's aides said the failure to mention the briefs last year before his confirmation was an oversight and a mistake.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, called it an "extremely serious matter" that would trigger sharp criticism when Holder is due to be questioned March 23.

"The attorney general, as with all nominees, has a duty of candor. . . . It is simply unacceptable that briefs in such significant cases were not provided to the committee so they could be discussed during his confirmation hearing," Sessions said. [...]

Holder's aides said the failure to mention the briefs last year before his confirmation was an oversight and a mistake.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, called it an "extremely serious matter" that would trigger sharp criticism when Holder is due to be questioned March 23.

"The attorney general, as with all nominees, has a duty of candor. . . . It is simply unacceptable that briefs in such significant cases were not provided to the committee so they could be discussed during his confirmation hearing," Sessions said.

Holder has run into a drumbeat of Republican criticism since he announced in November that he had decided to move the admitted Sept. 11 plotters, including self-proclaimed mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, from military custody at Guantanamo Bay to be tried in a federal civilian court in Manhattan. The attorney general said this trial would demonstrate the nation's commitment to the rule of law.

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States may hold onto tax refunds for months

[usat] Residents eager to get their state tax refunds may have a long wait this year: The recession has tied up cash and caused officials in half a dozen states to consider freezing refunds, in one case for as long as five months.

States from New York to Hawaii that have been hard-hit by the economic downturn say they have either delayed refunds or are considering doing so because of budget shortfalls.

"It's an indicator of how bad it is," says Scott Pattison, executive director of the National Association of State Budget Officers. "You know things are bad when you have to do that."

New York, hit with a $9 billion deficit, may delay $500 million in refunds to keep the state from running out of cash, says Gov. David Paterson.

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[bg] Based on the Recovery.gov data, more than two third of the 594,754.3 jobs “created or saved” with the stimulus funds were “created or saved” in the Department of Education. Basically, what the administration meant by shovel ready projects was funding for your next door teacher.

Now, let’s recap some of findings and news of the previous weeks.

1. Most jobs are created in the Department of Education

2. In 2009, for the first time ever, more public-sector employees (7.9 million) belonged to a union than did private-sector employees (7.4 million) despite there being five times more wage and salary workers in the private sector.

3. A third of all union jobs are in Education

4. 33 percent of the education industry is unionized

5. The union boss, Andy Stern, was appointed to be on the president’s debt commission.

It all makes sense, doesn’t it?

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Record Monthly Deficit Of $220 Billion in February

[abc] The government racked up a record-high monthly budget deficit of $220.9 billion in February, the Treasury Department announced today.

The latest flood of red ink brings the total deficit for the first five months of the current fiscal year to $651 billion, far exceeding the $589 billion shortfall for the same timeframe in the last fiscal year.

The government ended the 2009 fiscal year with a record $1.4 trillion shortfall. The Obama administration has forecast a $1.56 trillion deficit for this year.

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Lying About Bush's Tax Cuts

[at] [...] Two of the most oft-cited objections to the Bush tax cuts by the left are that it helped only the rich and it was largely responsible for the federal deficit at the end of the Bush presidency. Instead, it is true that if the current administration allows any or all of the Bush tax cuts to expire, economic growth will be slowed and tax revenue could actually decrease, perpetuating our deficit dilemma.

The Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 and the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 broadly lowered income, capital gains, dividends, and estate taxes. Fanning the lie that only the rich benefited, liberal economists Peter Orszag and William Gale described the Bush tax cuts as reverse-government redistribution of wealth, "[shifting] the burden of taxation away from upper-income, capital-owning households and toward the wage-earning households of the lower and middle classes." This criticism stuck so well that it is difficult to find a liberal today who doesn't believe that these tax relief measures were anything more than "tax cuts for the rich."

But the data does not support this conclusion. According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the Bush tax cuts actually shifted the total tax burden farther toward the rich so that in 2000-2004, total income tax paid by the top 40% of income-earners grew by 4.6% to 99.1% of the total. [...]

The second major misconception spread by the left about the Bush tax cuts is that the lower tax rates caused the federal deficit woes we face today. Keeping with the party line of blaming the previous administration for all of today's problems, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) quipped in a news conference on January 8 of this year: "Let me just say that the tax cuts at the high end ... have been the biggest contributor to the budget deficit." Of course, the Speaker would have us believe that overspending has nothing to do with our deficit.

In fact, the Bush tax cuts actually increased government revenue. According to economist Brian Reidl of the Heritage Foundation, The Laffer Curve (upon which much of the supply-side theory is based) merely formalizes the common sense observations that

* 1. Tax revenues depend on the tax base as well as the tax rate,
* 2. Raising tax rates discourages the taxed behavior and therefore shrinks the tax base, offsetting some of the revenue gains, and
* 3. Lowering tax rates encourages the taxed behavior and expands the tax base, offsetting some of the revenue loss. [...]

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CNN Ratings : In The Toilet

It's been a steady ride of churning out garbage for CNN. We've been saying it for so long now that we're tired of it. The programming on the network is one long loop of essentially crap. It's unwatchable.

And another thing, and this applies to all of the networks/news programs - why even bother having an anchor or host when you simply let guests avoid answering what you've asked them? So blatantly? It's chronic and it's a waste of time and money. You might as well just have people on by themselves to have their message churned out.

Sure, occasionally someone may say, "That wasn't the question, that was not what I asked you." Once. Then they let it slide. Keep asking the question until it is answered or you waste time and render yourselves useless.

Anchor: "Senator, is that sky not blue?"
Senator: "I arrived by car this morning."
Anchor: "In fairness, I asked you if the sky was not blue? You didn't answer the question."
Senator: "The ride was pleasant and smooth."
Anchor: "Moving on,what did you have for breakfast this morning?"

And on it goes...complete waste of time.

[rcp] Get out the defibrillator quick: CNN is dying. What other conclusion can be drawn from the Nielsen ratings from February, which showed the once dominant news network finishing in fifth place for the first time ever- and now trailing CNBC and Headline News as well as its main competitors, FOX and MSNBC?

The numbers are, as you can imagine, pretty stark. Wolf Blitzer's show, The Situation Room, was down 44% in total viewers in February. Campbell Brown, Larry King, and Anderson Cooper all posted their lowest ratings ever in February among total viewers, declining 50%, 55%, and 59%, respectively.

The numbers are equally grim among the coveted 25-54 demographic. CNN's share of the market with this group during prime time declined from 21% last February to just 10% this year. Even worse, its market share among viewers 25-54 in day time - what's been seen as the network's bread and butter - declined nine percent in the last year to 14%.

After a good year in 2008 fueled by sharp election coverage, CNN President Jon Klein has stubbornly refused to change course despite the network's epic slide over the last 15 months. The loss of Lou Dobbs last year obviously made things worse. But as CNN continues to fade, the question is whether anything less than a radical makeover can save this once proud, but deeply humbled network.

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Long Overdue : Sorry Charlie : Rangel Takes Leave of Absence

I guess Chuckles figures if he sleeps in and stays away for a little while everyone will just forget his personal manner and ways and means. Sorry Charlie, not going to happen.

[ap] The investigation of Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., is looking into whether he:

_Violated House rules by using his official position to raise money for the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service at City College of New York.

_Had his committee consider legislation that would benefit donors to the center at the same time the congressman solicited donations or pledges.

_Preserved a tax shelter for an oil drilling company, Nabors Industries, which has a chief executive who donated money to the center while Rangel's committee considered the loophole legislation.

_Used four rent-controlled apartment units in New York City, when the city's rent stabilization program is supposed to apply to one's primary residence. This raises the question of how all the units could be primary residences.

_Disclosed information on the financing of his ownership interest in a guest unit within the Punta Cana Yacht Club in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic.

_Intentionally failed to report — when required — hundreds of thousands of dollars or more in assets. The amended disclosure reports added a credit union IRA, mutual fund accounts and stock.

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Something Fishy : Representatives ditching Rangel's hot dirty money

[nyd] At least three Democratic congressmen have given to charities $26,000 in campaign contributions they received from embattled House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel of New York following inquiries by this newspaper.

Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., appeared Feb. 23 in The Washington Examiner's "Dirty Money Watch" but had declined to say what he would do with $2,000 he'd received from Rangel for the 2010 campaign cycle.

Two days later, the Connecticut Post published a letter citing The Examiner and calling on Himes to return the Rangel contribution. The same day, Himes' prospective Republican opponent, Rob Russo, also called on Himes to return the money.

The next day, Rangel was admonished by the House ethics committee for accepting trips to the Caribbean that were paid for by a nonprofit foundation funded in part by corporations with business before Rangel's committee.

And Himes announced that he was giving the $2,000 to a charity.

Rangel is under investigation for multiple allegations of ethical improprieties, including failure to pay income taxes, misuse of official property in fundraising and getting tax advantages for favored donors.

On Monday, Rep. Bill Foster, D-Ill., announced that he is giving $14,000 he received from Rangel to an Illinois food bank. Foster's announcement came after The Examiner's query earlier in the day.

Also on Monday, Rep. Jerry McNerney, D-Calif., told The Examiner that he is giving $10,000 he received from Rangel to charity.

Following Rangel's admonishment by the ethics panel, The Examiner recontacted dozens of senators and representatives featured in "Dirty Money Watch" since last November who either had declined to comment or said they would not return the money.

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Obama Flashback on 50-Plus-1 Vote Strategy : Like Everything Else He Says : Apparently Meaningless

COMMENTS FROM THE INTERNET

"Where is the honor in violating everything you promised on the campaign trail once in office? I would rather resign than force health care through on reconciliation, and have this video go viral for the next hundred years as an example of the total and complete violation of my campaign promises. Once someone has achieved enough financial success to provide for one’s family, as Obama obviously had by the time he reached the US senate, then the only remaining issue for the rest of one’s career is, can you conduct yourself with honor? Apparently a commitment to the socialist agenda IS the only matter of honor for him. That’s the only conclusion to draw. He should have been honest with the American people on the campaign trail that this is who he is. What a liar." - RNel; Nreitbart.tv

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Obama Fatigue

[pjm] Every President starts to wear on the public. But the omnipresent Obama has become wearisome in record time. Why?

1) Money: There is none. Every time the president talks of another billion for this, and trillion for that, the people sigh: “We don’t have it; he’s going to borrow it.” Unemployment is near 10%, so borrowing nearly $2 trillion each year makes more sense to Keynesian economists than to voters who don’t find hope by maxing out their credit cards when they lose their jobs.

Obama is weirdly oblivious to number crunching — as is true of many who have never been self-employed or had to scramble without a public salary. Yet even Hillary is now whining that her foreign policy is frozen by the fact of mounting American debt. Obama is the stereotypical great-aunt that sweeps into the Christmas dinner casually boasting about what she is going to do for this niece and that nephew, while most roll their eyes with the understanding that her credit cards are long ago maxed out — and more likely she will be hitting up relatives for loans. Americans don’t like magnanimity with other people’s money.

2) Style: Great orators get better in their rhetoric, not worse. It turns out that the people risked a blank slate in Obama in part because in his teleprompted hope and change orations, he sounded fresh and mellifluous. Voters assumed he would wear well. But in nonstop interviews, press conferences, and conversations, the impromptu president seems no more comfortable than was an ad hoc George Bush. And just as liberals were turned off by Bush’s cowboyisms, so too conservatives are tired of Obama’s professorial, condescending sermons. After a year, the people are tired of all the “let me be perfectly clear” psycho-drama, the “make no mistake about” pseudo-tough man pose, the straw man “I reject the false choice that some would…,” and the narcissistic “I have ordered…..my team…to.” The boilerplate is now recognizable even to the Washington press corps. But as important, it dovetails with more disturbing propensities: there are the periodic signs of inanity like “Cinco de Cuatro” and “corpse-man;” the constant fudging on the truth of multibillion dollar new programs really “saving” money; and the surreal bowing to dictators and emperors, with the relish of turning our misdemeanors into felonies and our enemies’ felonies into benefactions.

3) Laureate Warmaking: [...]

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I Told You So

[] [...] Back in September 2008, as a lifelong Democratic Party loyalist and activist, I backed John McCain; I told The New York Times, “I love my country more than my party.” Supporting a Republican was the last thing I expected to be doing in the fall of 2008. But I knew it was my only choice, given the decision by the Democratic Party establishment to reject 18 million voters in favor of the inexperienced and ideological Barack Obama.

The health-care summit vividly demonstrated Mr. Obama’s fake bipartisanship. When he was a candidate, we celebrated when he said, “We are not red or blue states. We are the United States of America.” But candidate Obama had no record of bipartisan behavior. Ironically, the one time that Obama entered into a bipartisan effort was with, of all people, John McCain. He reached across the aisle to draft ethics reform legislation with Senator McCain. But when Obama returned to the Democratic establishment with a bill that did not meet their favor, he backed away fast. It was candidate McCain who had worked productively and regularly with Democrats, like with Russ Feingold on campaign-finance reform and Ted Kennedy on immigration. The record told me more than the rhetoric about which candidate would honestly respect the other side and reach across the aisle to find the best solutions for America.

Perhaps the biggest fabrication of the Obama candidacy was his claim of being a centrist. Sure, he made promises during the campaign that pleased moderates. He promised “the elimination of capital gains taxes for small business,” a $3,000 refundable tax credit to existing businesses for every additional employee hired through 2010, removal of penalties for early withdrawal of 401(k) savings during the recession, and no administration jobs for lobbyists. Perhaps the best of all was the promise he made in the Mississippi presidential debate when he said, “We need earmark reform. And when I’m president, I will go line by line to make sure that we are not spending money unwisely.” They were specific, sensible promises—ones that enabled him to mislead the electorate about his real plans for America.

Again, I chose to look beyond the rhetoric to the record. At the time, it was obvious that a candidate who won the primary because of the left would be beholden to the left, no matter what promises he made to get elected. It was also obvious to ask what kind of president would have voted “present” on 129 difficult votes while in the Illinois State Senate. He was always thinking about how to keep every constituency happy; how to maintain his viability for the White House. In The Audacity of Hope, he criticized Bill Clinton for giving too much respect to Ronald Reagan. He asked the Democratic Leadership Council, the centrist Democratic group, to remove his name from their lists.

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2010-01-28T08:29:00.000-08:00

:: February 2010 ::

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House Reauthorizes Patriot Act

[f] The House of Representatives reauthorized the Patriot Act for one year Thursday.

The vote was 315-97.

Many liberals in the House opposed the controversial act, saying it tramps Constitutional protections and civil liberties. Congress adopted the Patriot Act shortly after September 11th. Many lawmakers wanted to rewrite or even kill some of the most controversial provisions in the act. But Congressional leaders didn’t have the appetite for a major battle with the economy and health care reform swinging in the balance.

Many of the renewed provisions involve wiretaps and eavesdropping measures.

The Senate okayed the package earlier this week. President Obama is expected to sign the bill into law.

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CNN legal eagle Jeffrey Toobin : Paternity Issue

[nydn] One of the media elite's most whispered-about scandals went public Wednesday when married CNN correspondent Jeffrey Toobin squared off with a woman who says he's the father of her baby.

Yale-educated lawyer Casey Greenfield - the daughter of eminent CBS News analyst Jeff Greenfield - had a chilly faceoff with Toobin in Manhattan Family Court.

The ex-lovers barely spoke in the waiting area before joining their lawyers behind closed doors with a court referee to hash out custody and money issues.

Toobin, who glumly sat several rows away from Casey Greenfield before the hearing, is said to have privately admitted to fathering the child, believed to have been born last summer, sources said.

A friend of Greenfield's said the outspoken Toobin has resisted putting his name on the infant's birth certificate and hasn't given his former lover the child support she's requested.

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Wall Street shifting political contributions to Republicans

[wapo] Commercial banks and high-flying investment firms have shifted their political contributions toward Republicans in recent months amid harsh rhetoric from Democrats about fat bank profits, generous bonuses and stingy lending policies on Wall Street.

The wealthy securities and investment industry, for example, went from giving 2 to 1 to Democrats at the start of 2009 to providing almost half of its donations to Republicans by the end of the year, according to new data compiled for The Washington Post by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Commercial banks and their employees also returned to their traditional tilt in favor of the GOP after a brief dalliance with Democrats, giving nearly twice as much to Republicans during the last three months of 2009, the data show. At the same time, total political donations by the major banks and investment houses alike dropped in the waning months of that year.

The nascent shift came even before the White House announced proposals for a new tax on banks and a curb on some of their riskiest trading activities.

The proposals, offered last month, particularly alarmed Wall Street and have triggered renewed industry efforts to work with Democrats as well as Republicans on regulatory reform legislation that the bankers can live with, according to industry and government officials. Wall Street executives would prefer to engage with Democratic leaders now rather than face prolonged uncertainty about the rules to govern the industry, the sources said.

The new campaign contributions data underscore the political quandary facing Democrats, who want Wall Street donations to help fend off a GOP resurgence in congressional elections this fall but hope to distance themselves from an industry vilified by the public as greedy and ungrateful. President Obama has sought to strike a balance, calling outsize Wall Street bonuses "shameful" and "obscene" while also assuring business executives that he does not "begrudge people success or wealth."

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Politician Makes Controversial Statement

[nro] If I were minded to make a health-care TV ad, I'd rustle up the premier of Newfoundland's interview on NTV last night. Justifying his decision to eschew the pleasures of the monopoly government health-care system he presides over for heart surgery in a Florida hospital, Danny Williams told his fellow Newfs:

It's my health, it's my choice.

As Scaramouche points out, there's your slogan.

By the way, the Canadian state does not accept that proposition, which is why, if a Canadian such as Mr. Williams wishes to exercise his choice he is obliged to leave the country.

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George Will Responds to Donna Brazille : "Party of No" on the ABC network's "This Week"

::

DONNA BRAZILE: I think President Obama is leading. But unfortunately, you have a Republican Party that has decided that by saying no, they can, you know, perhaps gain more at the polls this coming fall. Look, one tenth of the Republican caucus in the House has announced a retirement. Okay? On thirteen Democrats in the House. We have more Republicans retiring in the United States Senate than Democrats. We know from 1994 as well as 2008, when you look at two volatile periods, if you have to defend open seats, it's very difficult. So for Democrats right now, the game is to hold as many seats as possible and to not retire. For Republicans, they still have to come up with some ideas to go out there and galvanize the electorate. One third of the country is still with the President. One third is against the President. There's 30% of the American people that is still up for grabs. If this president leads, he will be able to capture those people.

GEORGE WILL: I want to say something in defense, particularly to Donna, of being the Party of No. The Republican Party elected its first president because he said no to a bright idea a Democratic Senator had which was, "I'll solve the problem," said, Stephen A. Douglas, "of expansion of slavery into the territories. Let's have popular sovereignty. People can vote it up or vote it down." A lawyer from Springfield, Illinois, named Lincoln, said, "No. That's bad. That's a bad idea. We're going to stop that idea." Now, was the Republican Party the Party of No? You bet they were. And it's a good thing.

[newsbusters]

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Max Blumenthal confronted by Andrew Breitbart

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Editor of Nature forced to resign from climate review panel

[link] Within hours of the launch of an independent panel to investigate claims that climate scientists covered up flawed data on temperature rises, one member has been forced to resign after sceptics questioned his impartiality.

// In an interview last year with Chinese State Radio, enquiry panel member Philip Campbell, editor-in-chief of Nature said: “The scientists have not hidden the data. If you look at the emails there is one or two bits of language that are jargon used between professionals that suggest something to outsiders that is wrong.”

He went on: “In fact the only problem there has been is on some official restrictions on their ability to disseminate data otherwise they have behaved as researchers should.”

Dr Campbell, was invited to sit on the enquiry panel because of his expertise in the peer review process as editor of one of the world’s leading science journals.

The journal has published some of the leading papers on climate change research, including those supporting the now famous “hockey stick” graph, the subject of intense criticism by climate sceptics.

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Dramatic images of World Trade Centre collapse on 9/11 released for first time

[d] We have seen the Twin Towers collapse hundreds of times on TV. The steel and glass skyscrapers exploding like a bag of flour, the dust and smoke pluming out across Manhattan. But never like this, from above.

Nine years after the defining moment of the 21st century, a stunning set of photographs taken by New York Police helicopters forces us to look afresh at a catastrophe we assumed we knew so well.

CLICK FOR FULL SIZE

SO WHY ARE WE SEEING THEM NOW?

After 9/11 the U.S.'s National Institute of Standards and Technology collected images from amateur, professional and freelance photographers as part of its investigation into the collapse of the World Trade Centre. It completed its research in 2005. In the summer of last year, ABC saw that NIST was asking the photographers' permission to release the images and filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act to get access to them. The images seen here are ones taken by NYPD helicopters and come from the 2,779 pictures supplied on nine CDs to the news organisation.

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The Agnostic Messiah....Take Hike? You Think?

[bw] President Barack Obama said he is “agnostic” about raising taxes on households making less than $250,000 as part of a broad effort to rein in the budget deficit.

Obama, in a Feb. 9 Oval Office interview, said that a presidential commission on the budget needs to consider all options for reducing the deficit, including tax increases and cuts in spending on entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

“The whole point of it is to make sure that all ideas are on the table,” the president said in the interview with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which will appear on newsstands Friday. “So what I want to do is to be completely agnostic, in terms of solutions.”

Obama repeatedly vowed during the 2008 presidential election campaign that he would not raise taxes on individuals making less than $200,000 and households earning less than $250,000 a year. When senior White House economic adviser Lawrence H. Summers and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner suggested in August that the administration might be open to going back on that pledge, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs quickly reiterated the president’s promise.

[nyp] Remember Joe the Plumber?

He was the blue-collar dude who confronted Barack Obama late in the 2008 campaign with this challenge: "Your new tax plan's going to tax me more, isn't it?"

Nonsense, replied the candidate: "From 250 [thousand dollars a year] down, your taxes are going to stay the same."

Indeed, he insisted, 95 percent of "working people" would see their taxes go down in his administration.

Well, think again.

A year into his presidency, Obama now says he's "agnostic" on what was the principal plank in his economic platform: No tax hikes for individuals making $200,000 a year or less -- or for households with a combined annual income under $250,000.

The president is about to appoint a task force (not another one!) to study reining in the national deficit -- and, he says, "what I want to do is to be completely agnostic in terms of solutions."

Meaning, says Obama, that he "can't set the whole thing up where a whole bunch of things are off the table."

Including his once-sacred tax pledge.

This, just six months after White House spokesman Robert Gibbs flatly rejected a suggestion by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and senior economic adviser Lawrence Summers that Obama might be willing to go back on that pledge.

Now, it seems, he's willing to consider anything -- including tax hikes on the middle class -- in order to deal with the massive deficit ($1.56 trillion projected for 2010) he helped create.

Everything, that is, but what he and the Congress should be moving toward -- spending restraint.

Seriously. Just get the @#%$! out of here already. -The Cynical Bastard

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Obama : The Second Coming.....of Jimmy Carter

[b] President Barack Obama is starting to look like the second coming of Jimmy Carter. If he’s going to avoid that fate, the president had better take radical action -- and fast.

That means doing more than offering belated talk about jobs, or waging ineffectual on-again, off-again bank warfare. What, after all, is the point of bashing Wall Street only to then blow bonus kisses to JPMorgan Chase & Co. chief Jamie Dimon and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. head Lloyd Blankfein?

Obama needs to ditch his professorial, community-organizer mien and start cracking some heads. Unless, that is, he is intent on paving the way for a Palin presidency in 2013.

Supporters are crying out for Obama to pull out of his tailspin. In an article in Politico, Douglas Wilder, the nation’s first African-American governor and an early Obama supporter, urged the president to get his act together.

“The need is becoming more obvious by the day,” Wilder wrote. “Getting elected and getting things done for the people are two different jobs.”

Obama’s lack of resolve even makes comparisons to Carter seem charitable. Financial blogger Eric Salzman argued that we haven’t seen such a lack of leadership “in the White House since our 15th president, James Buchanan, stood by and let the country dissolve into Civil War while trying to appease ever>Calling Out The Kettyonbe.”

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Calling Out The Kettle

[pjm] In the latest manifestation of the long-running phenomenon known as Palin-hatred, several liberal and left sites have excoriated her for wearing what they assumed was a black memorial bracelet meant to commemorate a member of the military killed in action, but bearing the name of her very-much-alive son Track who has served in Iraq.

The venom unleashed was of the usual variety:

[Wearing such a bracelet] demonstrates a horrifying contempt for those who gave their last full measure of devotion or an almost unbelievable ignorance of the importance of symbols in American history.

But it turns out it was actually the Palin-haters who demonstrated the horrifying contempt and the almost unbelievable ignorance — or at the very least, a failure to use Google. In fact, Palin was wearing something known as a Deployed HeroBracelet, meant to honor the service of a loved one who is still living. Palin’s bracelet was not even black but bronze, and was given her as a gift by the makers, who also presented one to Joe Biden in his son’s name.

The author of the original piece about the bracelet, Eric Robinson, at least had the grace to apologize. But not before a torrent of contemptuous hatred had already been displayed in the comments sections of several left-wing blogs.

It is hardly surprising, however, that many of Palin’s detractors jumped at the chance to blast her for the bracelet without even bothering to confirm the basic facts. It was a case of assuming the worst, seeing what they expected to see. They considered the incident to be only one more piece of evidence confirming what they believed they already knew, and what they feel should be self-evident to any thinking person: Sarah Palin is a stupid, lying, child-exploiting, shameless, opportunistic right-wing nut. That there might be a more benign explanation for any of her behavior does not even occur to them, and therefore no further fact-checking would be needed.

This rush to judgment is not the exception but rather the rule when criticizing Sarah. Palin-hatred is as old — and as persistent — as her presence on the national scene (that’s “hatred,” as distinguished from mere disagreement on issues). There have been countless explanations for it. If anything, the phenomenon is over-determined, representing a toxic brew of class warfare, misogyny, envy (much of this coming from women), and elitism.

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Stop The Presses! Controversy Abounds!

Tea Party Convention Speech

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Teach The Children

[at] [...] Howard Zinn, who just gave up the ghost, was the Barack Hussein Obama of American historians, at least in the Audacity of his Mendacity. His book has been assigned to tens of millions of students, making him a wealthy man.

Once upon a time, historians used to try to tell the truth. Professor Zinn was more the medieval kind of moral fabulist, whose self-appointed role it was to collect the mortal sins of the people -- or at least the American people -- and turn the entire history of America into one long catechism of grievances. Oh, well...whatever floats your boat.

The trouble is not so much the existence of obsessive grievance-mongers like Howard Zinn as it is his enormous popularity among the towering intellects of the Left and the enthusiastic adoption of him by thousands of mind-molding pseudo-historians on the campuses of America in order to crank out even more thousands of P.C.-washed young minds ready to be guilt-tripped by the national Organs of Propaganda for the rest of their lives. The Democrats then give more money to the campus indoctrination machine so that even more tenured professors can cut and paste more prefab Lefty fantasies onto the brains of their helpless subjects. It's a sort of perpetual motion scheme, except that nothing productive comes out. Howard Zinn industrialized the anti-American propaganda machine, like some colony of national brain parasites living off its host.

The result is visible on all our campuses, where free speech has now gone up in smoke. If you are caught saying a politically incorrect thought out loud, you may find yourself witch-hunted and fired -- just as Larry Summers was driven out of his job by the harridans of Harvard University before Obama picked him up. If they can destroy the president of Harvard for saying an Evil Thought out loud, they can get anybody. That's why they did it -- to scare all the other Incorrect Thinkers at Harvard.

I sometimes talk with friends who teach in such places, and rumor has it that the well-oiled P.C. apparatus is bigger today than ever. Every once in a while, there is another public witch-hunt; the evil non-P.C. meanies are punished or humiliated, or they just leave. Everybody is now thoroughly guilt-tripped, far more than any old-fashioned Catholic peasant going to weekly confession with the parish priest. At least Catholics would receive absolution for their sins. There is no absolution for the sins of whiteness, or maleness, or heterosexuality -- just a lifetime of taxes and mental drudgery.

The Indoctrination Campus is a reactionary and regressive institution, something the Saudi King would love. That is why Islamism is making such strides on the P.C. Campus -- it has exactly the same sort of dogmatic medieval outlook, it's just as historically ignorant, it's just as self-indulgent, and above all, it blames the same "enemy" -- America and the West, which are directly responsible for the prosperity and well-being of their reactionary parasites.

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The Wizard of Intellect Performs

What an sad and embarrassing example.

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Dem nominee for lt. gov was once accused of holding knife to woman’s neck

[ct] Scott Lee Cohen -- a pawnbroker who shocked state Democratic leaders Tuesday night by winning the party's nomination for lieutenant governor -- was arrested about four-and-a-half years ago and accused of holding a knife to a former live-in girlfriend's neck, newly obtained court records show.

The misdemeanor charge against Cohen was dropped weeks later when the woman -- who had just been found guilty of prostitution -- failed to show up to testify, according to those records. [...]

Cohen's Oct. 14, 2005, arrest came five months after his wife filed for divorce and convinced a judge to give her a temporary order of protection, records show. A status hearing in the divorce case took place Wednesday, hours after Cohen's election-night triumph.

Cohen -- who records show also had federal tax troubles that he says he has settled -- denied in a written statement that he ever hurt the ex-girlfriend or his family. Cohen disclosed his domestic violence arrest when he announced his candidacy, but the details about the knife and prostitution case didn't surface in the campaign, as Cohen was considered a longshot.

Illinois lieutenant governor nominee Scott Lee Cohen withdraws

[p] Illinois Democratic Lieutenant Governor nominee Scott Lee Cohen announced Sunday evening that he is withdrawing from the race amid revelations about his personal history.

Cohen, a millionaire pawnbroker and cleaning supplies company executive who emerged the victor in last week’s primary, had been accused of holding a knife to the neck of his ex-girlfriend, a prostitute, in 2005.

It has also been revealed in recent days that Cohen had once been accused of abusing an ex-wife. Cohen has also acknowledged using steroids for a period of time.

Cohen announced his decision to drop out of the race this evening at a Chicago bar.

"I'm someone who made mistakes in my life. And look where I am. If I let you down I'm sorry," Cohen told the crowd in attendance, NBC’s Chicago affiliate reports.

Cohen has faced mounting pressure to drop his bid amid concerns that he would prove damaging to other Democrats on the ballot in November, with Gov. Pat Quinn and state House Speaker Michael Madigan urging him to step aside.

Democrats have said the embarrassing revelations caught them by surprise, with top state officials first learning of the developments after reading about them in the newspaper last week.

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COMMENTS FROM THE INTERNET

I'm glad someone mentioned the "War on Poverty" which was in actuality a way to keep the poor in poverty. It also ruined the American family by making single pregnant woman slaves of the government hand out. Men didn't need to marry the mother's of their children, the governement is the father, providing health care, rent, food, utilities, etc for the " family". We have and continue to invest BILLIONS in those programs and it has caused worse problems for all involved.
Isn't it interesting that men who are either wealthy or brought up in socialist leaning families push these horrible policies on the American people and these policies make things worse rather than better? Think of FDR, Ted Kennedy, Barak Obama; these people never actually worked, but sure know how to fix the world. Sadly it's always with other people's money, not their own. -KrisLepine
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All individuals have a right to live for their own sake, and not for the sake of others. The nature of Government is "force". Health Care is an economic set of goods and services provided by individuals who know how. For their choice of career, do they deserve to be enslaved because some people claim that their NEED trumps a health care providers ABILITY, and Individual Rights? -americanegoist

[americanthinker]

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Expectedly, Media Uses Term "Unexpectedly" yet Again Re: Jobless Claim Rise

[y] The number of newly laid-off workers filing initial claims for jobless benefits rose unexpectedly last week, evidence that layoffs are continuing and jobs remain scarce.

The rise is the fourth in the past five weeks. Most economists hoped that claims would resume a downward trend that was evident in the fall and early winter.

The Labor Department said Thursday that new claims for unemployment insurance rose by 8,000 to a seasonally adjusted 480,000. Wall Street economists had expected a drop to 460,000, according to Thomson Reuters.

The four-week average, which smooths fluctuations, rose for the third straight week to 468,750.

The figure is the highest in the past two months. Initial claims dropped sharply in late December, raising hopes among economists that layoffs were nearing an end and the economy would soon start generating net gains in jobs.

The figures come a day before the Labor Department is scheduled to report the January employment figures, which are expected to show a tiny gain in jobs. The unemployment rate is forecast to rise to 10.1 percent.

The number of people continuing to claim benefits was unchanged at 4.6 million. That data lags initial claims by a week.

But the so-called continuing claims do not include millions of people who have used up the regular 26 weeks of benefits typically provided by states, and are receiving extended benefits for up to 73 additional weeks, paid for by the federal government.

More than 5.8 million people were receiving extended benefits in the week ended Jan. 16, the latest data available, up from about 5.6 million the previous week. The extended benefit data isn't seasonally adjusted and is volatile from week to week.

Still, the increasing number of people claiming extended unemployment insurance indicates hiring hasn't picked up. That leaves people out of work for longer and longer periods of time.

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Taxpayers to Fork Out $2.5 Million for Single Census Ad During Super Bowl

[f] Taxpayers might want to pay close attention to this Sunday's Super Bowl broadcast or they'll miss Uncle Sam's 30-second, $2.5-million reminder to stand up and be counted.

That's what the Census Bureau paid CBS to get their message notched somewhere between a National Lampoon reprisal, a weird dude with big glasses, a beer-can house and men without pants.

And, that's just a fraction of what the bureau plans to spend this year to get Americans to answer a simple, 10-question survey.

The bureau is spending $133 million between January and May -- or, more than $13 million for each of 10 questions, one of which reads: What is your telephone number? -- to publicize the national head-count. Part of that effort is the Super Bowl ad, which Kendall Johnson, a spokeswoman for the bureau, confirmed Wednesday to FoxNews.com cost $2.5 million to air. The ad, produced by actor and director Christopher Guest, also will appear in other media, Johnson said.

"We have rotations across all kinds of cable properties on network and cable TV," she said, adding that the bureau plans to advertise in 28 languages, including some as obscure as Hmong, a southeast Asian dialect.

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Trace of Thought Is Found in ‘Vegetative’ Patient

[nyt] He emerged from the car accident alive but alone, there and not there: a young man whose eyes opened yet whose brain seemed shut down. For five years he lay mute and immobile beneath a diagnosis — “vegetative state” — that all but ruled out the possibility of thought, much less recovery.

But in recent months at a clinic in Liège, Belgium, the patient, now 29, showed traces of brain activity in response to commands from doctors. Now, according to a new report, he has begun to communicate: in response to simple questions, like “Do you have any brothers?,” he showed distinct traces of activity on a brain imaging machine that represented either “yes” or “no.”

Experts said Wednesday that the finding could alter the way some severe head injuries were diagnosed — and could raise troubling ethical questions about whether to consult severely disabled patients on their care.

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Master Orator Speaks To Elementray Students

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The President's GOP Outreach Comes Too Late

[wsj] Last Friday, President Obama met with House Republicans in Baltimore. He took questions, parried criticisms, and allowed all of it to be put on television.

Framed as an opportunity for the president to hear from the other side, Mr. Obama's real aim was to portray Republicans as obstructionist and boost his own public standing in the process.

Afterward, Gallup found that Mr. Obama's approval hit 51%, up from 47% after the State of the Union address two days earlier. But in winning that small victory, Mr. Obama also further poisoned his relationship with Republicans by repeatedly saying things that are demonstrably not true.

For example, when Texas Rep. Jeb Hensarling asked if the president's new budget would, "like your old budget, triple the national debt" and increase "the cost of government to almost 25% of the economy," Mr. Obama denied it. But that's exactly what Mr. Obama proposed doing in his budget framework that Congress passed last April, according to both Congressional Budget Office and White House documents.

In Baltimore, Mr. Obama criticized the GOP's response to last year's $787 billion stimulus package saying, "I don't understand . . . why we got opposition . . . before we had a chance to actually meet and exchange ideas."

In truth, the president met with congressional Republicans to talk about the stimulus package the day before the press said Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey completed drafting the 1,073-page bill. What occurred was a photo-op, not an exchange of ideas. Democrats at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue were scornful of Republican input.

When Georgia Republican Rep. Tom Price complained in Baltimore that the president kept saying "that Republicans have offered no ideas and no solutions," Mr. Obama shot back, "I don't think I said that."

But of course Mr. Obama and his people have said that repeatedly. They did so starting in April, when White House aides swarmed Sunday talk programs to label the GOP the "party of no" and say that the party lacked both constructive ideas and vision.

Republicans did score a small victory in Baltimore. They got Mr. Obama to admit that the GOP has offered ideas on health-care reform, economic growth and spending restraint. But that doesn't mean the president will now draw on any of those ideas.

The next battle brewing in Washington is over the president's proposed budget, released earlier this week. Under Mr. Obama's blueprint, federal spending would rise to $3.8 trillion in the next fiscal year, up from $3.6 trillion this year. The budget is filled with gimmicks.

For example, the president is calling for a domestic, nonsecurity, discretionary spending freeze. But that freeze doesn't apply to a $282 billion proposed second stimulus package. It also doesn't apply to the $519 billion that has yet to be spent from the first stimulus bill. The federal civilian work force is also not frozen. It is projected to rise to 1.43 million employees in 2010, up from 1.2 million in 2008.

As Mr. Obama's approval ratings have dropped, the White House has been consoled by the Republican Party's poor image. But that's changing. Since last October, Democrats dropped from a 30-point net favorability to a one-point advantage over the GOP today, according to a recent CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll.

The fall of support for Democrats is also reflected in the generic ballot. Since October, Democrats have gone from six points up (49%-43%) to three-points behind (45%-48%) according to Gallup. The GOP has a seven-point (45%-38%) lead in the latest Rasmussen generic ballot survey.

Every week, it seems, more bad news accrues for Mr. Obama's party—whether it is a bad poll, a lost election, or a new retirement of a House Democrat in a competitive district. Democrats are in the midst of the painful realization: Mr. Obama's words cannot save them from the power of bad ideas.

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The most important story you didn't see last week (and probably won't ever see)

[at] A Senate hearing last week confirmed the public's worst concern about Barack Obama: That when it comes to national security Obama hasn't just been asleep at the switch, he hasn't even bothered to find the switch.

"I do not think he (Obama) has a firm grasp yet on the intelligence community," 9/11 Commission Vice-Chairman and former Democrat congressman Lee Hamilton told the Senate Homeland Security Committee.

This, even though Obama has been in office for over a year now.

"We were not paying close attention in this area," commission Chairman Thomas Kean testified at the hearing into intelligence lapses prior to the Christmas Day attempted airliner bombing. Kean noted that Obama has instead been focused on such issues as health care and cap-and-trade.

The two men have historically been circumspect about making politically charged statements, but they painted a portrait of an intelligence community, America's first line of defense against its jihadi enemies, that is devolving into disarray under Obama's leadership--or lack thereof.

"It's my impression that the intelligence community is new, relatively new to the president," Hamilton said, adding, "I'm pretty strong in my thought that he has to step in pretty hard here. Or some of these tensions that have surfaced will exacerbate."

"He's gotta stay on top of this," Kean pleaded. He also called the Christmas Day attempted attack, "a wakeup call." [...]

The picture that emerged from the hearing was of a president disinterested in national security, more concerned about health scare and cap-and-tax than in preventing what his Homeland Security chief infamously called "man-caused disasters"; of an administration more busy fighting turf wars than waging the real war against Islamic terrorists--whom Obama refuses to even call by that name; of a Commander in Chief who doesn't take seriously his most essential job of protecting this country's citizens, more focused on extending terrorists these citizens' rights than he is on gathering the intelligence needed to keep Americans safe.

The Obamedia all but ignored the hearing, of course.

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Climate Chief Knew False Glacier Claims For Two Months before Reporting

[tuk] The chairman of the leading climate change watchdog was informed that claims about melting Himalayan glaciers were false before the Copenhagen summit, The Times has learnt.

Rajendra Pachauri was told that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment that the glaciers would disappear by 2035 was wrong, but he waited two months to correct it. He failed to act despite learning that the claim had been refuted by several leading glaciologists.

The IPCC’s report underpinned the proposals at Copenhagen for drastic cuts in global emissions.

Dr Pachauri, who played a leading role at the summit, corrected the error last week after coming under media pressure. He told The Times on January 22 that he had only known about the error for a few days. He said: “I became aware of this when it was reported in the media about ten days ago. Before that, it was really not made known. Nobody brought it to my attention. There were statements, but we never looked at this 2035 number.”

Asked whether he had deliberately kept silent about the error to avoid embarrassment at Copenhagen, he said: “That’s ridiculous. It never came to my attention before the Copenhagen summit. It wasn’t in the public sphere.”

However, a prominent science journalist said that he had asked Dr Pachauri about the 2035 error last November. Pallava Bagla, who writes for Science journal, said he had asked Dr Pachauri about the error. He said that Dr Pachauri had replied: “I don’t have anything to add on glaciers.”

The Himalayan glaciers are so thick and at such high altitude that most glaciologists believe they would take several hundred years to melt at the present rate. Some are growing and many show little sign of change.

Dr Pachauri had previously dismissed a report by the Indian Government which said that glaciers might not be melting as much as had been feared. He described the report, which did not mention the 2035 error, as “voodoo science”.

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One Note Obama : More Washington

[nro] [...] Simply as a matter of internal logic, this is somewhat perplexing. After all, when he isn’t blaming Bush, Obama blames “Washington” — a Washington mired in “partisanship” and “pettiness” and “the same tired battles” and “Washington gimmicks” that do nothing but ensure that our “problems have grown worse.” Washington, Obama tells us, is “unable or unwilling to solve any of our problems.”

So let’s have more Washington! In our schools, in our hospitals, in our cars, in everything!

Which raises the question: Does even Obama listen to Obama’s speeches? The public does — at least to this extent: They understand that, when he’s attacking the tired old Washington games, he’s just playing the tired old Washington games. But, when he’s proposing the tired old Washington solutions, he means it; that’s the real Obama, the only Obama on offer. And everything the president proposes means more debt, which at the level this guy’s spending means, at some point down the road, either higher taxes or total societal collapse.

Functioning societies depend on agreed rules. If you want to open a business, you do it in Singapore or Ireland, because the rules are known to all parties. You don’t go to Sudan or Zimbabwe, where the rules are whatever the state’s whims happen to be that morning.

That’s why Obama is such a job-killer. Why would a small business take on a new employee? The president’s proposing a soak-the-banks tax that could impact your access to credit. The House has passed a cap-and-trade bill that could impose potentially unlimited regulatory costs. The Senate is in favor of “health” “care” “reform” that will allow the IRS to seize your assets if you and your employees’ health arrangements do not meet the approval of the federal government. Some of these things will pass into law, some of them won’t. But all of them send a consistent, cumulative message: that there are no rules, that they’re being made up as they go along — and that some of them might even be retroactive, as happened this week with Oregon’s new corporate tax.

In such an environment, would you hire anyone? Or would you hunker down and sit things out? Obama can bury it in half a ton of leaden telepromptered sludge but the world has got the message: More Washington, more micro-regulation of every aspect of your life, more multi-trillion-dollar spending, and no agreed rules in a game ever more rigged against you. [...]

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REFRESHER

[wnd] [...] According to the New York Sun, university spokesman Brian Connolly confirmed that Obama graduated in 1983 with a major in political science but without honors.

In the age of affirmative action and grade inflation, a minority in a relatively easy major like political science had to under-perform dramatically to avoid minimal honors. Obama apparently did just that.

The specifics we may never know. As the New York Times concedes, Obama "declined repeated requests to talk about his New York years, release his Columbia transcript or identify even a single fellow student, co-worker, roommate or friend from those years."

Would that Bristol Palin could get off so easily!

There are any number of possible reasons for Obama's reticence about Columbia: his grades, the courses he took, his writing samples and, of course, his associations.

At that time, for instance, both Bill Ayers and Obama fell within the orbit of left-wing Columbia superstar Edward Said. Just recently out of hiding, Ayers was attending the Bank Street College of Education, which adjoins the Columbia campus.

Five years after leaving Columbia, Obama decided on law school. His lack of resources did not deter him from thinking big. Nor did his B-minus effort at his Hawaii prep school or his equally indifferent grades at Columbia.

As Obama relates in "Dreams From My Father," he limited his choices to only three law schools – "Harvard, Yale, Stanford." (It must be nice to be Obama.) He does not mention his connections.

Harvard Law School is notoriously difficult to get into. Annually, some 7,000 applications apply for some 500 seats. Applicant LSAT scores generally chart in the 98 to 99 percentile range, and GPAs average between 3.80 and 3.95.

If Obama's LSAT scores merited admission, we would know about them. We don't. The Obama camp guards those scores, like his SAT scores, more tightly that Iran does its nuclear secrets.

We know enough about Obama's Columbia grades to know how far they fall below the Harvard norm, likely even below the affirmative action-adjusted black norm at Harvard.

As far back as 1988, however, Obama had serious pull. He would need it. As previously reported, Khalid al-Mansour, principle adviser to Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, lobbied friends like Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton to intervene at Harvard on Obama's behalf.

An orthodox Muslim, al-Mansour has not met the crackpot anti-Semitic theory he could not embrace. As for bin Talal, in October 2001, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani sent his $10 million relief check back un-cashed after the Saudi billionaire blamed 9/11 on America.

For an insight into the Khalid al-Mansour connection, see see this video.

These are not connections that Obama would like to see broadcast, which further explains his shyness about the Harvard experience.

There is more. Obama did not make the Harvard Law Review (HLR) the old-fashioned way, the way HLR's first black editor, Charles Houston, did 70 years prior.

To Obama's good fortune, the HLR had replaced a meritocracy in which editors were elected based on grades – the president being the student with the highest academic rank – with one in which half the editors were chosen through a writing competition.

This competition, the New York Times reported in 1990, was "meant to help insure that minority students became editors of The Law Review."

It did just that. At the end of his first year, Obama was named, along with 40 or so of his classmates, an editor of the HLR.

Unlike most editors, and likely all its presidents, Obama was not a writer. During his tenure at Harvard, he wrote only one heavily edited, unsigned note. [...]

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2010-01-04T15:41:00.000-08:00

:: January 2010 ::

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[nro] Osama vs. Global Warming [Jonah Goldberg]

I love this story about Bin Laden denouncing global warming :

[link] Bin Laden blasts US for climate change

Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden has called for the world to boycott American goods and the U.S. dollar, blaming the United States and other industrialized countries for global warming, according to a new audiotape released Friday.

In the tape, broadcast in part on Al-Jazeera television, bin Laden warned of the dangers of climate change and says that the way to stop it is to bring "the wheels of the American economy" to a halt.

He blamed Western industrialized nations for hunger, desertification and floods across the globe, and called for "drastic solutions" to global warming, and "not solutions that partially reduce the effect of climate change."

Bin Laden has mentioned climate change and global warning in past messages, but the latest tape was his first dedicated to the topic. The speech, which included almost no religious rhetoric, could be an attempt by the terror leader to give his message an appeal beyond Islamic militants.

Will he come out in favor of beheading carbon emitters? Can I get 72 virgins if I promise to weatherstrip my house? How about if I install solar panels?

Also is Bin Laden now refusing "blood money" from the climate criminals in Saudi Arabia who fund his operation?

Of course, any minute now we're going to hear from someone — any predictions who? — that the real reason "they" hate "us" is climate change. It ain't freedom, it ain't American empire, or licentiousness, or Israel. All of these jihadi nutters are blowing themselves up to save the polar bear.

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Campaign finance: a 'reform' wisely struck down

[w] Last week's Supreme Court decision that substantially deregulates political speech has provoked an edifying torrent of hyperbole. Critics' dismay reveals their conviction: Speech about the elections that determine the government's composition is not a constitutional right but a mere privilege that exists at the sufferance of government.

How regulated did political speech become during the decades when the court was derelict in its duty to actively defend the Constitution? The Federal Election Commission, which administers the law that rations the quantity and regulates the content and timing of political speech, identifies 33 types of political speech and 71 kinds of "speakers." The underlying statute and FEC regulations cover more than 800 pages, and FEC explanations of its decisions have filled more than 1,200 pages. The First Amendment requires 10 words for a sufficient stipulation: "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech."

Extending the logic of a 1976 decision, the court has now held that the dissemination of political speech requires money, so restricting money restricts speech. Bringing law into conformity with this 1976 precedent, the court has struck down only federal and state laws that forbid independent expenditures (those not made directly to, or coordinated with, candidates' campaigns) by corporations and labor unions. Under the censorship regime the court has overturned, corporations were even forbidden to send political communications to all of their employees.

The New York Times calls the court's decision, which enables political advocacy by (other) corporations, a "blow to democracy." The Times, a corporate entity, can engage in political advocacy because Congress has granted "media corporations" an exemption from limits.

The Washington Post, also exempt, says the court's decision, which overturned a previous ruling upholding restrictions on spending for political speech, shows insufficient "respect for precedent." Does The Post think the court incorrectly overturned precedents that upheld racial segregation and warrantless wiretaps? Are the only sacrosanct precedents those that abridge (others') right to speak?

Alarmists say the court's ruling will mean torrential spending by large for-profit corporations. Anna Burger, secretary-treasurer of the Service Employees International Union -- it has spent $20 million on politics in the past five election cycles -- says a corporation will "funnel their shareholders' money straight to a campaign's coffers." Wrong. Corporate contributions to candidates' campaigns remain proscribed.

Cleta Mitchell, Washington's preeminent campaign finance attorney, rightly says that few for-profit corporations will jeopardize their commercial interests by engaging in partisan politics: Republicans, Democrats and independents buy Microsoft's and Pepsi's products. If for-profit corporations do plunge into politics, disclosure of their spending will enable voters to draw appropriate conclusions. Of course, political speech regulations radiate distrust of voters' abilities to assess unfettered political advocacy.

Mitchell says the court's decision primarily liberates nonprofit advocacy groups, such as the Sierra Club, which the FEC fined $28,000 in 2006. The club's sin was to distribute pamphlets in Florida contrasting the environmental views of the presidential and senatorial candidates, to the intended advantage of Democrats. FEC censors deemed this an illegal corporate contribution.

Barack "Pitchfork" Obama, in his post-Massachusetts populist mode, called the court's ruling a victory for, among others, "big oil" and "Wall Street banks." But OpenSecrets.org reports that in 2008 lawyers gave more money than either of them, and gave 78 percent of the donations to Democrats, who also received 64 percent of contributions from the financial sector.

Even if it were Congress's business to decide that there is "too much" money in politics, that decision would be odd: In the 2007-08 election cycle, spending in all campaigns, for city council members up to the presidency, was $8.6 billion, about what Americans spend annually on potato chips.

Critics say raising such sums requires too much of candidates' time. Well, then, let candidates receive unlimited -- but fully disclosed -- contributions, and trust voters to make appropriate inferences about the candidates.

Undaunted, advocates of government control of political speech want Congress to enact public financing of congressional campaigns, and to ban individuals from participating in politics through contributions. Fortunately, this idea -- "food stamps for politicians" -- is wildly unpopular. Public financing of presidential campaigns has collapsed. Obama disdained it in 2008; the public always has. Voluntary, cost-free participation, using the checkoff on the income tax form, peaked at a paltry 28.7 percent in 1980 and by 2008 had sagged to 8.3 percent.

This is redundant proof that the premise of campaign finance "reform" is false. The premise is that easily befuddled Americans need to be swaddled in regulations of political speech.

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State Of The Union :

second hand telegram lip service legal love
second hand out of town telegram lip service legal love
so you're the lawyer's wife how's life on lakeshore road
furs and boats caviar and moats and your fat kitten
is teasing your aunt in the hall with the liver hors d'oeuvres
she gives her guests when on call...

- PDubois(?)

Claim vs. Fact

[s] [...] ome of his ideas for moving ahead skirted the complex political circumstances standing in his way.

A look at some of Obama's claims and how they compare with the facts:

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State of the Union: Obama's reality problem

[w] [...] Obama has a reality problem.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated this week that unemployment will average more than 10 percent for the first half of this year, before declining at a slower pace than in past recoveries. On this economic path, Obama’s presidency will fail. Many Democrats in the House chamber tonight will lose their jobs. And the nation will enter a Carter-like period of stagnation and self-doubt.

Every element of the president’s speech tonight should be considered in this light.

* Health Care. On this issue, elected Democrats are desperate for leadership. They want to avoid total defeat on last year’s highest legislative priority, while pivoting swiftly to the economy. Obama gave no indication of how this feat will be accomplished. Instead, he called attention to his own virtue, foresight and tenacity in pursuing the issue. His approach was entirely self-centered. Democrats in tough races can only conclude that the president is indifferent to their political needs. On health care, it is every Democrat for himself.

* The Deficit. The president’s trial balloon of a limited, discretionary spending freeze has quickly deflated. Conservatives dismiss it as pathetic symbolism. Liberals attack it as Hooverism. And the policy conflicts with Obama’s campaign criticism of spending freezes. It is a policy disaster.

A spending commission might be a good idea, if it had fast-track authority that forced Congress to vote on a package of serious cuts. But, as the president noted, the Senate defeated a similar measure earlier this week, and his executive order is weak version of this concept.

* Middle Class Relief. These are the type of proposals that work for politicians in normal economic times. In bad economic times, the middle class (and others) do not want symbolism and sympathy. They want economic growth and jobs.

* Economic Growth and Jobs. Tonight the president had one main task: to make a credible case that his policies will help reduce unemployment. For the most part, he failed. His proposal to cut the capital gains tax for small business investment seems positive. His other ideas -- taking money from some bankers and giving it to other bankers and a temporary hiring tax credit -- are a caricature of job-creation policy. For the most part, Obama defended a continuation and expansion of the stimulus package, which promises to bring prosperity on high-speed trains. Compare Obama's speech to John Kennedy’s State of the Union in 1963, which called for permanent tax cuts that would allow America to move toward full employment. Some Democratic presidents have actually understood how the economy works.

After a series of political humiliations, Obama called on Republicans to change their course. Facing a general revolt against Washington, he proudly took credit for posting the names of White House visitors online. Promising to change the tone in Washington, he managed to be petty, backward looking, defiant and self-justifying.

Barack Obama has lost his promise. He has lost his momentum. He has lost his touch. He has lost his filibuster-proof Senate majority. He has lost his first year in office.

Tonight, he lost his grip on reality.

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President Wrong

[nro] [...] The president's statement is false.

The Court held that 2 U.S.C. Section 441a, which prohibits all corporate political spending, is unconstitutional. Foreign nationals, specifically defined to include foreign corporations, are prohibiting from making "a contribution or donation of money or ather thing of value, or to make an express or implied promise to make a contribution or donation, in connection with a Federal, State or local election" under 2 U.S.C. Section 441e, which was not at issue in the case. Foreign corporations are also prohibited, under 2 U.S.C. 441e, from making any contribution or donation to any committee of any political party, and they prohibited from making any "expenditure, independent expenditure, or disbursement for an electioneering communication."

This is either blithering ignorance of the law or demagoguery of the worst kind.

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[p] In the history of the State of the Union has any President ever called out the Supreme Court by name, and egged on the Congress to jeer a Supreme Court decision, while the Justices were seated politely before him surrounded by hundreds Congressmen?

To call upon the Congress to countermand (somehow) by statute a constitutional decision, indeed a decision applying the First Amendment? What can this possibly accomplish besides alienating Justice Kennedy who wrote the opinion being attacked. Contrary to what we heard during the last administration, the Court may certainly be the object of presidential criticism without posing any threat to its independence.

But this was a truly shocking lack of decorum and disrespect towards the Supreme Court for which an apology is in order. A new tone indeed.

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A Study In Contrasts

[tdc] John Boehner rolled his eyes repeatedly and laughed. Michelle Obama glowered at Republicans. A Supreme Court justice shook his head in disagreement with the president.

The House chamber was a study in contrasts and reactions Wednesday night during President Obama’s State of the Union address.

Republicans appeared far more buoyant than Democrats, feeling a sense of renewal after the Democrats defeat in Massachusetts. Almost to a man, the GOP lawmakers were standing in anticipation of Obama’s entrance into the hall. They joked, they laughed. Almost all of the Senate Democrats were seated. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid saw a House lawmaker walk past with his suit jacket pocket askew. Reid reached up from his seat and pulled the pocket flap out.

Many of the Democrats looked shell-shocked, still, after Massachusetts, and the near demise of health-care reform.

The most animated of the Republicans was the House leadership: Boehner, Eric Cantor, Thad McCotter and Paul Ryan. Their emotions and opinions were on full display throughout the president’s speech. They looked cocky and eager for a fight, in contrast to the more reserved Senate Republicans.

The House GOP leaders reacted to the president’s words with a mixture of disbelief and barely disguised scorn. Their first applause came several minutes into the speech, when the president mentioned jobs. They rose as a group and roared in quasi-mocking approval, appearing to taunt the president and Democratic lawmakers for spending the last year on health care reform.

Moments earlier, Obama acted surprised that Republicans had not applauded his talk of tax cuts.

“I thought I’d get some applause,” Obama said.

Boehner lifted up his hands palms up, raised his eyebrows, and shrugged, as if to say, “Better luck next time.”

When the president came to health care, he said he was open to ideas other than those that have so far been on the table.

“If anyone from either party has a better approach that will bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen Medicare for seniors, and stop insurance company abuses, let me know,” Obama said.

Boehner raised his right hand above his shoulder. [...]

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Uh,uh, uh...Oh, Yeah : A Solid B+

[tdc] What a difference a year makes.

Tuesday’s historic election of Republican Scott Brown over Democrat Martha Coakley to the represent the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts makes Democrats and President Obama 0-for-3 in statewide contests since his election. Obama carried all of three of those states by more than 50 points combined.

It is accepted wisdom that President Obama’s approval rating has tumbled during his first year in office. What is dramatic, however, is the width and depth of the disenchantment. According to Gallup, the president’s approval rating has dropped among 39 out of 40 demographic and geographic groups studied. Both genders and every age, income, education, region, marital status, ideology and party affiliation measure view him less favorably than they did last January.

This naturally includes constituencies that helped deliver victory to Mr. Obama in 2008. Among women, his approvals have dipped 15 percentage points; young people, 17 points; and the big story, his base among Independents—52% of whom voted for him—has evaporated (down 17 points).

What’s more, the public has soured on Mr. Obama’s handling of specific issues, both foreign and domestic. On every economic measure—taxes, budget deficit, creating jobs, general economy, and that bête noir, health care, which is viewed through an economic prism—the president has upside down approval ratings, meaning more people are negative than positive about his performance.

Perhaps the greatest indictment of the president’s challenges is revealed in the “attributes testing” performed routinely by pollsters. According to CNN data, the number of Americans who think Mr. Obama “inspires confidence” is down 12 percentage points since he took office; “has a clear plan for the solving this country’s problem”—down 19 points; “is a strong and decisive leader”—down 18 points; “will united the country and not divide it”—down 26 points since December 2008. Executive orders, 30-plus czars, and one-party, closed-door dealings on health care can have that effect.

Promises of post-partisanship have not materialized, but the president has managed to cobble tri-partisan agreement on one simple thing: his first year has been a disappointment. Even liberal talking head Rachel Maddow has observed, “Change we can believe in, as long as we pay attention to the disappointing asterisk on the word ‘change.’”

In a revealing question that shows the deflation of expectation that the Marist Poll found last month that 42% of Americans surveyed said that President Obama had “fallen below their expectations” in his first year in office. Even among self-identified Democrats, just 17% said Mr. Obama had “exceeded expectations.”

The president, of course, remains personally popular and has time to recover. But that will require an understanding of what his election mandated—and what it did not. He won on a message of “Change you can believe in,” but the first year is more “Revolution you must pay for.” Compelling messengers win elections; compelling messages win public support for governance. Excesses on spending helped the Republicans lose their majority in 2006 and continue to bleed seats in 2008. That same type of overreach and lurch leftward has cost the President precious political capital in 2009 and his party stinging defeats on Capitol Hill and at the ballot box.

Majorities of Americans oppose the bailouts of Detroit, Wall Street, mortgages, and believe the stimulus has not worked. A 10%-plus unemployment figure nationwide confirms their opinions. Eye-popping numbers reject taxpayer-funded abortions at home (71%) (a staple of the health care reform currently being considered) and abroad (89%), (the law of almost a year, when the Mexico City policy was reversed by executive order). [...]

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More BS From Obama : Obama Administration Steers Lucrative No-Bid Contract for Afghan Work to Dem Donor

[f] Despite President Obama's long history of criticizing the Bush administration for "sweetheart deals" with favored contractors, the Obama administration this month awarded a $25 million federal contract for work in Afghanistan to a company owned by a Democratic campaign contributor without entertaining competitive bids, Fox News has learned.

The contract, awarded on Jan. 4 to Checchi & Company Consulting, Inc., a Washington-based firm owned by economist and Democratic donor Vincent V. Checchi, will pay the firm $24,673,427 to provide "rule of law stabilization services" in war-torn Afghanistan.

Remember? : Obama promises to limit no-bid contracts

[b] Says $40 billion could be saved every year.

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Too Much of a Bad Thing

[nro] So what went wrong? According to Barack Obama, the problem is he overestimated you dumb rubes’ ability to appreciate what he’s been doing for you. “That I do think is a mistake of mine,” the president told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “I think the assumption was if I just focus on policy, if I just focus on this provision or that law or if we’re making a good rational decision here, then people will get it.”

But you schlubs aren’t that smart. You didn’t get it. And Barack Obama is determined to see that you do. So the president has decided that he needs to start “speaking directly to the American people.”

Wait, wait! Come back! Don’t all stampede for the hills! He only gave (according to CBS News’s Mark Knoller) 158 interviews and 411 speeches in his first year. That’s more than any previous president — and maybe more than all of them put together. But there may still be some show out there that didn’t get its exclusive Obama interview — I believe the top-rated Grain & Livestock Prices Report — 4 a.m. Update with Herb Torpormeister on WZZZ-AM Dead Buzzard Gulch Junction’s Newstalk Leader is still waiting to hear back from the White House.

But what will the president be saying in all these extra interviews? In that interview about how he hadn’t given enough interviews, he also explained to George Stephanopoulos what that wacky Massachusetts election was all about:

“The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office,” said Obama. “People are angry and they’re frustrated, not just because of what’s happened in the last year or two years but what’s happened over the last eight years.”

Got it. People are so angry and frustrated at George W. Bush that they’re voting for Republicans. In Massachusetts. Boy, I can’t wait for that 159th interview.

Presumably, the president isn’t stupid enough actually to believe what he said. But it’s dispiriting to discover he’s stupid enough to think we’re stupid enough to believe it. [...]

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Shrieking Hypocrisy From Glass House

[ha] A couple of hilarious points of hypocrisy erupted this week in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down limits on contributions and advertising during political campaigns, especially those applicable to “corporations.” The most hypocritical came from Barack Obama himself, who angrily pledged in a statement and his weekly radio address to counter this decision through legislation : [...]

It’s worth pointing out that Barack Obama had an opportunity to limit that influence in the 2008 election simply by remaining in the public matching fund program that every major Presidential candidate had used since Watergate. In fact, Obama himself pledged to do just that in 2007 and again in early 2008, but changed his mind in June when he discovered that he could raise a lot more money than his opponent — by currying favor with Wall Street and the unions, as well as ethanol companies and a host of corporate-sponsored, lobbyist-run PACs. Obama raised over $600 million in 2008 for his eventual victory.

Now he wants to limit the power of politicians to raise that kind of money, which is mighty convenient for incumbents such as himself — and his Democratic allies on Capitol Hill.

Oh, and those lobbyists in Washington were doing quite well before the decision on Citizens United v FEC, certainly better than the country as a whole. The power of lobbyists come from the expansion of government. Campaign contributions from lobbyists exist only because expanded government gives lobbyists more cash to donate.

Meanwhile, the New York Times Corporation complained about being returned to the 19th-century robber baron environment : [...]

As opposed to what — corporations buying newspapers and endorsing political candidates in the final days before an election? Corporations buying newspapers and printing last-minute attacks against their political bêtes noirs? The ban on corporations was always very selectively enforced, because newspapers managed to lobby for and receive an exemption for newspapers and other media outlets. But they’re also corporations, which should have come under the same restrictions — and as the Court pointed out in its questioning during oral arguments, any printed or broadcast message that explicitly said “Vote for Candidate X” or “Don’t vote for Candidate Y” would have run afoul of the law, including books released in the final days of an election.

Besides, we’ve had these laws since Watergate (not since the 19th century, as the Gray Lady shrieks). Has corporate money evaporated from the political process? Absolutely not. It has simply gotten funneled into arcane and confusing legal entities and types: soft money, hard money, 501(c)3s, 527s, PACs, etc. It hasn’t disappeared; it just has become much harder to trace. Obama didn’t skip the matching-fund program because he thought he could raise $600 million from $20 campaign contributions.

And what about influence? Well, those same laws restricted unions, which can also now spend its money in the open. Did that mean that unions had diminished influence before this week? Er, no. The week before this decision, union leaders attended backr0om-deal meetings on ObamaCare, demanding (and getting) a five-year exemption on the “Cadillac tax” on health-plan benefits. That would have saved them $90 billion over ten years, far more than what they’ve spent in the previous decade to buy their way into the halls of power.

The Supreme Court just leveled the playing field, and Democrats don’t like it one bit.

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[fp] Can the government suppress free speech critical of elected politicians? In the home of the First Amendment, that may seem an unusual question to pose. But that was the question before the Supreme Court this week, as it handed down a landmark ruling in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.

In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court struck down a ban on corporations and labor unions using money from their general funds to produce and air campaign ads in races for Congressional and presidential races. Also overturned was a ban on corporations and unions airing campaign ads 30 days before primary or 60 days before general election.

The case in question dates back to January 2008, when the conservative non-profit group Citizens United produced a documentary critical of then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton titled Hillary: The Movie. When the Federal Election commission used the McCain Feingold campaign finance law to limit Citizen United’s ability to advertise the film during the 2008 presidential primaries, the group sued to protest the restriction on free speech.

This week, the Supreme Court ruled in Citizen United’s favor. In so doing, it won approval from free-speech advocates and strident criticism from many on the political Left. To discuss the case and its political implications, Front Page turned to Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute and editor-in-chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review.

FP: The Supreme Court’s decision has certainly stirred its share of controversy. How do you view the Court’s ruling?

Shapiro: This is a big win for free speech. It is the most significant ruling on campaign finance since [the 1976 case] Buckley vs. Valeo and it continued the trend of this court of allowing greater speech in the political arena. It’s a victory for the marketplace of ideas and it’s a victory for democracy. [...]

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Furthermore...

[vc] One of the standard arguments put forward by critics of the Supreme Court’s decision protecting corporate political speech in Citizens United is that people aren’t entitled to constitutional rights when they use corporate resources because corporations are “state-created entities.” If the state can create an entity, it supposedly also has the power to define its rights any way it pleases. This is slightly different from the argument that people using corporate resources don’t deserve constitutional protection because corporations aren’t “real people.” But it has many of the same weaknesses, and some additional ones as well. [...]

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Asia stocks slide on Obama plan, commodities fall

[y] Asian stock markets tumbled on Friday as commodity prices fell and the dollar weakened after U.S. President Barack Obama proposed tough new restrictions on banks, curbing investors' appetite for riskier assets.

Japanese stocks (Osaka:^N225 - News) fell almost 3 percent as the yen surged against the dollar and the euro and as falling metal and oil prices weighed on shares of resource-related firms.

Other Asian markets were also badly hit by the U.S. proposal, which would squeeze banks' profits. South Korea's KOSPI (KSE:^KS11 - News) was down 1.87 percent while Hong Kong (HKSE:^HSI - News) was down over 2.5 percent. Banks have a heavy weighting in many global benchmark share indexes.

The MSCI Asia-Pacific index excluding Japan was down 2.4 percent and looked set for a loss of 5.2 percent on the week.

"Of course, any sort of market regulation isn't good for the market, and if you start limiting hedge funds that hurts overall market flexibility," said Kenichi Hirano, operating officer at Tachibana Securities in Tokyo.

"I don't think the proposal is very realistic and it's hard to know if it'll ever come to pass, but investors want to wait and see. Today's response is largely just a shock reaction."

Commodity prices fell because the proposed U.S. regulations were seen as diminishing capital flows from banks, which have provided liquidity for investors.

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NYT: Free speech is “a blow to democracy”

[d] The gutting of the McCain-Feingold Act of 2002 — which President Bush signed into law — went ape. The writers at the New York Times were the most entertaining.

“The founders of this nation warned about the dangers of corporate influence. The Constitution they wrote mentions many things and assigns them rights and protections — the people, militias, the press, religions. But it does not mention corporations,” the New York Times editorial said.

I am curious. How does one warn “about the dangers of corporate influence” and “not mention corporations”?

“Congress and members of the public who care about fair elections and clean government need to mobilize right away, a cause President Obama has said he would join. Congress should repair the presidential public finance system and create another one for Congressional elections to help ordinary Americans contribute to campaigns. It should also enact a law requiring publicly traded corporations to get the approval of their shareholders before spending on political campaigns,” the New York Times said.

Let us see. Obama took more money from corporate executives and the like — at least $500 million of his booty in 2008 came from the rich — and the New York Times is a corporation.

The contradiction is hilarious.

Regulating free speech in a democracy is impossible. When the founding fathers said no law, they meant it — and they did Congress a favor.

The New York Times, an ironic opponent of free speech, has had its hat handed to it and is whining.

But the only way to fix this is by a constitutional amendment.

Good luck on getting the people to cede their free speech to the likes of Washington.

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Beware of McCain Regression Syndrome

[c] Pay attention: In the afterglow of the Massachusetts Miracle, there are flickers of peril for the right. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but like Paul Revere's midnight message, consider this warning “a cry of defiance, and not of fear.” Conservatives have worked hard to rebuild after Big Government Republican John McCain's defeat. But McCain isn't going gently into that good night.

Red Flag No. One: A reader from Arizona informed me the day after the Bay State Bombshell that he had received a robo-call from Massachusetts GOP Sen.-elect Scott Brown. “He basically wanted me to vote for John McCain in November,” the reader said in his description of the automated campaign call supporting the four-term Sen. McCain's re-election bid. “No wonder [Brown] said he hadn't had any sleep. … He was busy recording phone messages!”

Red Flag No. Two: Also in the wake of the Massachusetts special election, the nation's most popular conservative political figure Sarah Palin announced she would be campaigning for her former running mate in Arizona in March. Palin told Facebook followers that she's going to “ride the tide with commonsense candidates” and help “heroes and statesmen” like McCain.

Facing mounting conservative opposition in his home state and polls showing him virtually tied with possible GOP challenger and former Rep. J.D. Hayworth, McCain welcomed the boost: "Sarah energized our nation and remains a leading voice in the Republican Party."

Savor the irony: After a career spent bashing the right flank of the party, McCain is now clinging to its coattails to save his incumbent hide.

And pay attention to the hidden, more troubling irony: While he runs to the right to protect his seat, McCain's political machine is working across the country to install liberal and establishment Republicans to secure his legacy. [...]

With all due respect to McCain's noble war service, it's time to head to the pasture. As the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday, he was wrong on the constitutionality of the free-speech-stifling McCain-Feingold campaign finance regulations. He was wrong to side with the junk-science global warming activists in pushing onerous carbon caps on America. He was on the wrong side of every Chicken Little-driven bailout. He was wrong in opposing enhanced CIA interrogation methods that have saved countless American lives and averted jihadi plots. And he was spectacularly wrong in teaming with the open-borders lobby to push a dangerous illegal alien amnesty.

Tea Party activists are rightly outraged by Palin's decision to campaign for McCain, whose entrenched incumbency and progressive views are anathema to the movement. At least she has an excuse: She's caught between a loyalty rock and a partisan hard place. The conservative base has no such obligations — and it is imperative that they get in the game (as they did in Massachusetts) before it's too late. The movement to restore limited government in Washington has come too far, against all odds, to succumb to McCain Regression Syndrome now.

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Copenhagen Accord on Climate Change Collapsing?

[r] The nonbinding Copenhagen Accord was hastily cobbled together at President Barack Obama's insistence as the United Nations' Copenhagen climate change conference whimpered to its end in December. Under the Accord, countries are supposed to make their commitments to cut greenhouse gases official by January 31. It now appears that most countries will miss that deadline. It now appears that most countries will miss that deadline. As the New York Times reports:

Facing a Jan. 31 deadline, major countries have yet to submit their plans for reducing emissions of climate-altering gases, one of the major provisions of the agreement, according to Yvo de Boer, the Dutch official who is executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which organized the climate meeting.

Fewer than two dozen countries have even submitted letters saying they agree to the terms of the three-page accord. And there has been virtually no progress on spelling out the terms of nearly $30 billion in short-term financial assistance promised to those countries expected to be hardest hit by climate change. Still unresolved are such basic questions as who will donate how much, where the money will go and who will oversee the spending.

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Hugo Chavez: Circling the Drain?

[pjm] President Obama, whom lots of folks are disappointed in and who many now think is no better than his predecessor, has problems beyond Massachusetts. However, “El Presidente” Hugo Chávez of Venezuela has far worse problems, at least for now. And so does Venezuela.

This gets it about right:

Like the emperor in the fairy tale, the Chávez administration now stands naked before the world and is finding it increasingly difficult to cover up the disaster it has created with its ill-named 21st century socialism.

There is a trend in Latin America, and it favors free market capitalism rather than “Bolivarian socialism.” As suggested in previous articles (here, here, here, and here), Chávez’s ship is on the rocks, getting clobbered by twin storms, and may soon be crushed.

On January 8, Chavez announced a substantial devaluation of the Venezuelan currency (the bolivar fuerte). His stated purpose was to reduce Venezuelan reliance on imported goods, and thereby to stimulate the economy. As with so many of his schemes, the effects will be counterproductive and very unpleasant for most of the people living in Venezuela.

Venezuela’s official exchange rate had been 2.15 bolivars to the dollar. Due to the January 11 devaluation, the bolivar trades at 2.6 to the dollar for priority transactions and 4.3 to the dollar for other transactions:

The higher rate doubles the paper value of oil earnings when converted to local currency. Oil accounts for about half the budget, but that income has been squeezed by lower world oil prices and declines in output in the past year.

The president … said the adjusted currency rates aimed to boost the economy by encouraging local manufacturing of items such as clothing and shoes, which Venezuela mostly imports.

“This is going to generate greater productivity in Venezuela!” Chávez said in his televised speech.

Chávez also stated:

Last year we imported 90-million pairs of shoes, for the love of God. … We can make all of that ourselves!

That certainly is a lot of shoes for a poor country with a population of 26,814,843 — roughly 3.4 pair for each man, woman, and child, imported in one year. Imelda Marcos must be living incognito and very happily in Venezuela. [...]

“High economic growth?” Not in Venezuela. [...]

Desiring that his countrymen not be distracted by these domestic problems, El Presidente continues to strengthen Venezuela’s military presence on the border with Colombia:

Chávez secured a $2.2 [billion] loan from Russia during his visit to Moscow last September for the purchase of 92 T-72 main battle tanks, an undisclosed number of Smerch multiple launch rocket systems (MLRS), and a variety of air defense systems, including the advanced S-300 complexes.

All of this is said to be necessary because the United States is preparing to attack Venezuela to steal its oil. Still, Chávez recently indicated that he would like to have a dialogue with the United States, which may take him up on it. Chávez accused the U.S. on January 17 of occupying Haiti on the pretext of delivering aid (France made a similar claim). Chavez claims that on January 8, Venezuelan fighter jets drove a U.S. observation aircraft from Venezuelan airspace back to the Netherlands’ Caribbean islands. Now, the Netherlands is in on the scheme along with the United States and Colombia (where, unlike in Venezuela, oil production is now the highest in a decade). “The perceived threat of U.S. intervention has become a central element of Mr. Chávez’s political discourse and a rallying cry for his supporters.”

What does all this mean? Venezuela is spiraling at an accelerating pace down the toilet under el Presidente Chávez, with all the drama of a “capitalist” soap opera. His ties with Iran are unlikely to do Venezuela any real good, the situations in Argentina and in Chile can’t be to his liking, and his reverses in Honduras have probably weakened him as well. His influence in Latin America is fading and he rather clearly needs to do something — just about anything — on the domestic front to avoid even a minor victory by the opposition parties. However, the domestic problems are out of control and despite the disorganized state of the opposition parties it seems unlikely that Chávez will succeed.

As Chávez put it in an article on January 18, “Homeland, Socialism, or Death!”

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It Must Be The Economy : Air America Ceases Live Programming, Will File for Bankruptcy

[bj] It is with the greatest regret, on behalf of our Board, that we must announce that Air America Media is ceasing its live programming operations as of this afternoon, and that the Company will file soon under Chapter 7 of the Bankruptcy Code to carry out an orderly winding-down of the business.

The very difficult economic environment has had a significant impact on Air America’s business. This past year has seen a “perfect storm” in the media industry generally. National and local advertising revenues have fallen drastically, causing many media companies nationwide to fold or seek bankruptcy protection. From large to small, recent bankruptcies like Citadel Broadcasting and closures like that of the industry’s long-time trade publication Radio and Records have signaled that these are very difficult and rapidly changing times.

Those companies that remain are facing audience fragmentation as a result of new media technologies, are often saddled with crushing debt, and have generally found it difficult to obtain operating or investment capital from traditional sources of funding. In this climate, our painstaking search for new investors has come close several times right up into this week, but ultimately fell short of success.

With radio industry ad revenues down for 10 consecutive quarters, and reportedly off 21% in 2009, signs of improvement have consisted of hoping things will be less bad. And though Internet/new media revenues are projected to grow, our expanding online efforts face the same monetization and profitability challenges in the short term confronting the Web operations of most media companies

When Air America Radio launched in April, 2004 with already-known personalities like Al Franken and then-unknown future stars like Rachel Maddow, it was the only full-time progressive voice in the mainstream broadcast media world. At a critical time in our nation’s history — when dissent on issues such as the Iraq war were often denounced as “un-American” — Air America and its talented team helped millions of Americans remember the importance of compelling discussion about the most pivotal events and decisions of our generation. [...]

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"A year ago President George W. Bush left the White House. Since that time the unemployment has nearly doubled, the national deficit has tripled, government has grown in leaps and bounds, and the current president has blamed his predecessor for every problem he has encountered. President Obama even blamed George Bush for the Coakley loss yesterday in Massachusetts." - [GP]

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Specter tells Bachmann to "act like a lady"

[p] The deeply odd couple of Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Penn.) and Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) appeared together on a Philly radio station yesterday -- and things got ugly in short order.

The exchange, broadcast on 1210 AM's Dom Giordano Show [but not archived on the station's site], began when Specter challenged Bachmann to articulate what, exactly, she stands for, according to a readout on the clash published by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's lively Early Returns blog.

Bachmann first laid out her agenda -- cutting taxes and killing President Obama's health reform bill -- at considerable length.

When Specter tried to counter, Bachmann, darling of the Tea Party movement, kept on talking, which didn't sit well with the one-time Philadelphia DA, who is a stickler for politeness and protocol.

"I'm going to treat you like a lady," Mr. Specter shot back. "Now act like one."

Ms. Bachmann replied, "I am a lady."

Things went on along this line for a while -- with Specter later asking Bachmann to "act like a lady," according to the PPG's Daniel Malloy.

Count your days Mr. Specter. No one cares. Soon enough you'll be nothing but a bad after taste and then a faded, sour memory until ultimately completely forgotten.

::

Jumping Johnny Edwards comes clean and admits that he is the father of the mystery love child!? Revelation! What a class act. Atta boy Johnson, go hang around in Haiti and spin your bullshit. Take a flying leapinto the dustbin with the rest of the frauds.

::

Loving the results of the Mass. election. The people's seat indeed. Nice try on the spin too talking heads. Uh, yeah, it's a tough one to fathom and understand. For you.

::

So the irrational left-wing lip flappers have begun the search for info on the family of Scott Brown. Surprised? I didn't think so. In what has become termed as "Palinization," they've managed to dig up an '80's music video that his wife was in and horror of horrors, a family picture of the man and his daughters (wearing swimwear!) standing on a beach!

Oh yes, such is the hypocritical nature of the "party of family values" they scream. This from the clowns that contain in their numbers and endless list of offensive types ala Olberman? It's laughable and sad. Edwards? Champion. Wait a minute, this Scott Brown posed in the reviled smut rag Cosmo!

Does the idiocy and petty nonsense ever cease? Not a chance. It's so foolish.

Certainly some leftist policy minded people find this trumpeting of nothing childish, banal and a serious waste of time.

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White House's Gibbs has mastered art of speaking with his hand

[wp] For Democrats, the only good thing to come from Tuesday's loss of the Senate election in Massachusetts is this: It could wipe the grin off Robert Gibbs's face.

The Democrats' failed struggle to hold onto Ted Kennedy's seat in the liberal state showed how badly the party's brand had been damaged over the past year. But as the White House press corps challenged President Obama's press secretary on Tuesday afternoon about the anticipated loss, Gibbs answered with his usual mix of wisecracks and insults.

"Broadly speaking, can you talk about the difference between 59 and 60 votes in the Senate and what that means for the president's agenda this year?"

"Broadly, it's one," Gibbs answered.

Will Obama hold a news conference Wednesday to discuss the results?

"Be here around 10 a.m. If we're not here, start without us." [...]

Gibbs acts as though he's playing himself in the movie version of his job. In this imaginary film, he is the smart-alecky press secretary, offering zippy comebacks and cracking jokes to make his questioners look ridiculous. It's no great feat to make reporters look bad, but this act also sends a televised image of a cocksure White House to ordinary Americans watching at home.

This is the most visible manifestation of a larger problem the Obama White House has. Many Obama loyalists from the 2008 race still seem, after a year on the job, to be having trouble exiting campaign mode. They sometimes appear to be running a taxpayer-funded rapid-response operation.

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Oh, Nevermind

[] [...] On Jan. 8, just 11 days before the election, The New York Times reported: "A Brown win remains improbable, given that Democrats outnumber Republicans by 3 to 1 in the state and that Ms. Coakley, the state's attorney general, has far more name recognition, money and organizational support."

It was in that article that the Times said a narrow Coakley win would be an augury for the entire Democratic Party. But now she's being hung out to dry so that Democrats don't have to face the possibility that Obama's left-wing policies are to blame.

Alternatively, Democrats are trying to write off Brown's colossal victory as the standard seesawing of public sentiment that hits both Republicans and Democrats from time to time. As MSNBC's Chris Matthews explained, it was just the voters saying "no" generally, but not to anything in particular.

Except when Republicans win political power, they hold onto it long enough to govern. The Democrats keep being smacked down by the voters immediately after being elected and revealing their heinous agenda.

As a result, for the past four decades, American politics has consisted of Republicans controlling Washington for eight to 14 years -- either from the White House or Capitol Hill -- thus allowing Americans to forget what it was they didn't like about Democrats, whom they then carelessly vote back in. The Democrats immediately remind Americans what they didn't like about Democrats, and their power is revoked at the voters' first possible opportunity.

Obama has cut the remembering-what-we-don't-like-about-Democrats stage of this process down from two to four years to about 10 months. Folks, I'm convinced that if we all work really hard, we can get it down to three months.

Four years of Jimmy Carter gave us two titanic Reagan landslides, peace and prosperity for eight blessed years -- and even a third term for his feckless vice president, George H.W. Bush.

Two years of Bill Clinton gave us a historic Republican sweep of Congress, which killed the entire Clinton agenda (with the exception of partial-birth abortion and felony obstruction of justice) -- and also gave us two terms for George W. Bush.

And now, merely one year of Obama and a Democratic Congress has given us the first Republican senator from Massachusetts in 31 years.

In other recent news, last November, New Jersey voters, who haven't voted for a Republican for president since 1988, threw out their incumbent Democratic governor, Jon Corzine. In Virginia, which Obama carried by 6 points a year earlier, a religious-right Republican won the governor's office by 17 points.

Sen. Ben Nelson, Democrat of Nebraska, won his last election in 2006 by 28 points -- the largest margin for a Democratic Senate candidate in that state in a quarter-century.

Since voting for the Senate health care bill last Christmas, the once-bulletproof Sen. Nelson not only gets booed out of Omaha pizzerias, but he has also seen his job approval rating fall to 42 percent and his disapproval rating soar to 48 percent. (Meanwhile, the junior senator from Nebraska, Mike Johanns, who voted against the bill, has a job approval rating of 63 percent.)

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COMMENTS FROM THE INTERNET

"I heard Obama is going out 1st thing in the AM and get him a truck too." -MARCUS

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Boston Globe calls election for Martha Coakley : 6 Hours Before Poll Closing

[tdc] Boston.com briefly put up this map of the final results of today’s election — some 8 hours before polls closed!

As you can see, over 2 million people voted, with Coakley eking out a 50-49 victory.

The map was fully interactive, so you could roll over and get town-by-town results [...]

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“Let Me Be Perfectly Not Clear” and “Make Lots of Mistakes About It”

[pjm] “Lie” is a rather harsh word; the noun and its verb form leave little to context or extenuating circumstances. So I use it sparingly.

But I know no other word for President Obama’s long string of “misstatements,” especially the blatant ones about closing Guantanamo within a year of his inauguration or serially declaring that he would insist on health care debate airing live on C-SPAN.

How odd that the liberal block is quiet that once coined “Bush lied, thousands died” (even when the CIA and Defense intelligence was accepted by both parties and in sync with what the Arab world and Europe were insisting upon [recall the charge of a supposed naïve Bush taking us to war against a nut who would gas our troops marshalling in Kuwait.]). In any case, not telling the truth has a lot to do with sinking polls

So I don’t quite buy the liberal lament that the people will support Obama when the economy improves. [...]

Let us count the ways

But almost immediately, Obama, again, in Platonic fashion, began to say things that could not be possibly true. Remember the categories.... [...]

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The hidden agenda of unionized media

[tdc] One cardinal rule of journalism is that reporters shouldn’t give or receive money, favors or services from anyone or any organization connected to stories they report on. In fact, many news organizations require their reporters to sign “pay for play” agreements that expressly prohibit such arrangements. Crossing that line is a firing offense in many news organizations.

So, can someone please explain this? The e-mail below was sent recently by the performers’ union–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA)–to its membership. Its membership includes most network correspondents and anchors, as well as almost all reporters and anchors in the nation’s top markets–the very people who are trying to “objectively” report on the evening news, the health care debate in Congress.

The e-mail in its entirety reads:

As the two health care reform bills merge, it’s important to join the labor movement in letting your Representatives know a final bill must include the best pieces of the House bill, which includes a public option to keep insurance companies accountable and does more to make health insurance affordable.

The Senate bill includes a 40% tax on many middle class families’ insurance benefits instead, which would result in higher premiums for some workers and higher out-of-pocket costs. Join millions of your fellow union members in letting your Representatives know that taxing middle-class Americans’ health benefits is not the way to pay for reform.

The AFL-CIO is mobilizing working Americans to let our voices be heard today by joining in the National Call-In Blitz for Health Care Reform.

Call 1-877-3-AFLCIO (1-877-323-5246) toll-free and urge your Representatives to support working families by voting for health care reform that:

. Does NOT tax our health care benefits;

. Requires employers to pay their fair share; and

. Reduces health care costs -the best way to do this is with a public health insurance option.

Thank you!

Visit the web address below to tell your friends about this.

If that bothers you, you should also know that your “objective” network correspondent, roaming the halls of Congress right now trying to ferret out the “truth,” probably pays hundreds, or even thousands of dollars in union dues to AFTRA every year. He or she, in all likelihood, depends on AFTRA for one of those “Cadillac” health insurance plans that is the subject of so much debate. He or she also will receive a nice little AFTRA pension come retirement time, and perhaps most importantly, will depend on AFTRA to help defend, protect or advise them in any serious conflicts, demotions, firings or legal issues with management at their TV station or network.

Now, do you really think your friendly network correspondent is gonna criticize the Senate Democrats’ bill? I got an offer you can’t refuse…

::

COMMENTS FROM THE INTERNET

I choose not to be anonymous but would like my voice heard loud and clear. I’ve been a ‘working journalist’ for over 50 years and have always been amazed, dismayed and terrified of ‘journalists’ or others in media that effect what is in print or on radio or TV that are members of unions.

How can they be true to the basic tenets of responsible journalism while paying dues and supporting a union? I suggest they cannot and any reporting they do on unions should have them publish or air a disclaimer indicated their prejudice, whoops, preference.

Own a media property, newspaper, radio, TV station or even now cable news operation and explain to me how you can pay allegiance to a union, or even support a union with your dues. [...] -stogtv

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Poll shows growing disappointment, polarization over Obama's performance

[wapo] A year into his presidency, President Obama faces a polarized nation and souring public assessments of his efforts to change Washington, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Nearly half of all Americans say Obama is not delivering on his major campaign promises, and a narrow majority have just some or no confidence that he will make the right decisions for the country's future.

More than a third see the president as falling short of their expectations, about double the proportion saying so at the 100-day mark of Obama's presidency in April. At the time, 63 percent said the president had accomplished a "great deal" or a "good amount." Now, the portion saying so has dropped to 47 percent.

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Majority Would Vote Against Obama

[h] A year into his tenure, a majority of Americans would already vote against Pres. Obama if the '12 elections were held today, according to a new survey.

The Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor poll shows 50% say they would probably or definitely vote for someone else. Fully 37% say they would definitely cast a ballot against Obama. Meanwhile, just 39% would vote to re-elect the pres. to a 2nd term, and only 23% say they definitely would do so.

Obama's first year in office has been marked by an unemployment rate that surged to 10%, an increased commitment of troops to Afghanistan and a health care battle that has taken a serious political toll on the WH.

Obama's approval rating is down to 47%, the poll showed, a 14-point drop since the April survey. 45% disapprove, up 17 points from April. Only 41% say they trust Obama more than Congressional GOPers, while 33% pick the GOP over the WH. That 8-point gap is down from a 21-point edge Obama sported as recently as Sept.

Just 34% say the country is moving in the right direction, down 13 points since April, and 55% say it is off on the wrong track, up 13 points over the same period.

But as GOPers focus on taxes and spending, that message seems to be causing Obama the most harm. Among those who believe Obama's policies have moved the country in the wrong direction, 45% cite spending and government regulation as a top cause for their opposition.

Meanwhile, those who think Obama's policies are moving the country down the right track largely cite long-term benefits of his initiatives.

In the meantime, health care legislation is by no means popular, but a majority of Americans don't oppose the legislation yet. 44% said they support the legislation under consideration, down 5 points from the last poll in Sept., while 46% oppose it.

The poll, conducted by Financial Dynamics, surveyed 1,200 adults between Jan. 3-7 for a margin of error of +/- 2.8%.

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Palin adds 1 million viewers for O’Reilly

[dm] [...] Her first appearance on Fox News pushed Bill O’Reilly’s ratings by 22% or so.

The night before, The O’Reilly Factor drew 3,499,000 viewers — including 932,000 in the 25-54 demo. His repeat at 11 PM drew 1,371,000 viewers — more than any non-Fox News show on cable news.

On Tuesday, with Palin, The O’Reilly Factor drew 3,954,000 viewers — including 993,000 in the 25-54 demo. His repeat at 11 PM was interrupted by Haitian news, but it drew 1,986,000 viewers at 11:30 PM.

UPDATE: Let’s see, Monday, 4,870,000 viewers (combining times). Tuesday, 5,940,000. So he was up 450,000 in the first hour but up 1,070,000 altogether — a 22% gain. Word of mouth likely goosed that 11 PM (well, 11:30 PM) showing.

Originally I wrote a gain of 450,000 viewers based only on the 8 O’Clock airing.

Part of that may be the usual Monday-to-Tuesday bump but the 11 PM goose tells me that it was more than that.

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Media does matter for America

[tdc] [...] Over the last fifteen years, the Internet has become the battlefield, where the mostly false notion of “objective” and “bias-neutral” journalism clashes with those of us on the right who believe that media bias is the central issue facing our nation, and even the world.

The fact that the mainstream media’s existence is built on this false premise of objectivity serves as a suicide pact, as their ever-dwindling audience – one viewer, one reader at a time – perceives the obviously subjective “news” they are being served. Our competition in the so-called mainstream media claims that our admitted biases render it impossible for us to report stories truthfully. I couldn’t disagree more.

Those in the media who proclaim neutrality while reporting slanted, one-sided information represent the core reason why subscribership is down in most newspapers (The Wall Street Journal notwithstanding) and why ratings are down for news networks (Fox News notwithstanding.)

While I am not clever enough to understand whether true objective neutrality in journalism can be reached, I know that there are some in the profession who strive for that ideal, but those newsroom anomalies are becoming an ever-rarer breed, as new media makes its mark on old media. Except for a few network and newspaper closet cases, who we all know suffer grave consequences for voicing their dissent, the original content news drivers, those that craft the daily narratives from their sheltered offices on 6th Avenue and near Times Square remain protected by this grand inside joke of objectivity. “Our reporting doesn’t show any ideological slant” they will say, with a knowing wink to each other. But remember, they also say they are thrilled with Anderson Cooper’s ratings in the same breath. You decide.

From its inception, the Internet has stood for the free-flow of information, unfiltered by a small handful of influential “deciders,” dolling out news like the miser, Ebenezer Scrooge, with a stack of gold coins. As more news and more information found its way to consumers, an amazing thing happened: The market for this information grew.

The consumer of news and information now has a clear and distinct choice between two approaches in delivering this valuable commodity:

On one side you have the New York-based intelligentsia, driving the narratives of our times with the guidance of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Anyone who knows this crowd knows them to be neither “objective” or “bias-neutral,” yet that line is propagated on television news and in print media and we are supposed to accept it. They have built walls between themselves and their customers, disdainfully and grudgingly accepting their criticisms only when forced to acknowledge their egregious errors (are you still out there, Mr. Rather?).

On the other side you have writers, researchers and pundits from every corner of our land, proudly disclosing their true core principles for all to see. They present the stories that move them and respond in real time to the interactive feedback of their consumers. They lose credibility (and audience) not for their opinions, but for journalistic errors and, more importantly, how they handle those errors. The fact is this: they are actually held to a higher journalistic standard because of the frank and honest disclosure of their point of view. When they mess up, they make their own side look bad. This ends up being a much tougher code of ethics than something dreamed up by a J-School panel of advisors.

When you look at the two sides it becomes pretty clear that it isn’t really a choice at all, is it? One side represents an outdated mode of operation borne of necessity due to the limited technology of a by-gone age, perpetuated by a self-congratulatory graduate-school culture that rewards and protects its own while simultaneously denying the legitimacy of the opposition. The other side is based on freedom, liberty and market forces, using reason, logic and a reliance upon the reader’s own wisdom and common sense to form his or her own conclusions after receiving all of the unfiltered information available. Which would any normal person instinctively choose? [...]

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Ruled by Legalistic Minds

[rcp] First, let's kill all the lawyers. I hasten to specify, this is a quote. And to add that some of my best friends are lawyers. And moreover, even after exempting them individually, and despite my very personal experiences with such monstrous stuff as Ontario family law, I do not recommend killing all the lawyers. Such are my religious convictions that I will insist: not even one lawyer should be harmed. In any physical way.

The quote is from Shakespeare. Take him to the hate crimes tribunal! [...]

His plays are crawling with remarks, the political incorrectitude of which would be the more apparent to Canada's "human rights" commissioners, were they not, as a class, such drooling, humourless, subliterate twits.

But fortunately for old Will, he never entered a Canadian jurisdiction. [...]

an amusing item a friend forwarded this week, comparing Democrat to Republican party in the United States. The Democrat leadership is all lawyers, and has been for some time. Barack Obama, lawyer; Michelle Obama, lawyer; Hillary Clinton, lawyer; Bill Clinton, lawyer; Bill Reid, lawyer; Nancy Pelosi, lawyer; and so forth. All Democrat presidential candidates since 1984, lawyers -- except Al Gore, who somehow failed to graduate from law school.

Compare, if you will, the Republican leadership over the last while, in White House and Congress. The last Republican lawyer to make president was Gerald Ford. Instead: movie actor, spy chief, businessman, successively. Last election: an old soldier, and a PTA lady. Look back at the leaders of the so-called "Republican revolution" in Congress: Newt Gingrich, history professor; Tom Delay, pest exterminator; Dick Armey, economist; Bill Frist, heart surgeon. (And note what the Democrat lawyers did to get rid of them.)

Alas, when I turn to Canada, I see all-party government by lawyers; and the interminable legacy of the extremely lawyerly Liberal Party under that lawyer Pierre Trudeau. Moreover, beyond legislative politics (both here and in the U.S.), I review a continuous social revolution achieved by such lawyerly "reforms" as the Omnibus Bill of 1970; or Santa's 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Our lawyers never nationalized banks. In every case, it seems to me, they changed the laws in order to change the people. (The precise opposite of democracy.)

People foolishly voted in Trudeau the same way they voted in Obama: "Hope and Change." From lawyers.

And this is the wisdom of all the policy czars that President Obama has appointed -- his commando team of lawyers, many with highly controversial, radical left pasts. Superficially, they could be removed from office tomorrow. But if they can rewrite enough laws and regulations, in the smoke and confusion of brief moments in power, they will, in a deeper sense, remain in office for generations to come.

I was writing last Sunday in general opposition to the concept of "reform." It is a lawyerly concept, which has narrowed in our time to the tactics of "legislation by litigation," and should be profoundly anathematic to a free society. By increments, the need for lawyers has been extended to every aspect of human life, and the law schools themselves have metastatically expanded.

In a sense, our entire society has been criminalized, by lawyers adding to myriad laws that impinge not only on criminals, but on everybody. And by increments, we must find some way to reverse that parasitical growth, which threatens to choke even our humanity.

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The mini ice age starts here

[dm] The bitter winter afflicting much of the Northern Hemisphere is only the start of a global trend towards cooler weather that is likely to last for 20 or 30 years, say some of the world’s most eminent climate scientists.

Their predictions – based on an analysis of natural cycles in water temperatures in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans – challenge some of the global warming orthodoxy’s most deeply cherished beliefs, such as the claim that the North Pole will be free of ice in
summer by 2013.

According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado, Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 per cent, since 2007 – and even the most committed global warming activists do not dispute this.

The scientists’ predictions also undermine the standard climate computer models, which assert that the warming of the Earth since 1900 has been driven solely by man-made greenhouse gas emissions and will continue as long as carbon dioxide levels rise.

They say that their research shows that much of the warming was caused by oceanic cycles when they were in a ‘warm mode’ as opposed to the present ‘cold mode’.

This challenge to the widespread view that the planet is on the brink of an irreversible catastrophe is all the greater because the scientists could never be described as global warming ‘deniers’ or sceptics.

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Fiscal liberalism has tarnished California gold

[wp] [...] California, a laboratory of liberalism, is spiraling downward, driven by a huge budget deficit. So the University of California system's budget was cut 20 percent. Then the system increased in-state student fees 32 percent to . . . $10,302. But that is still 70 percent below student costs at Stanford and other private institutions in California that Berkeley considers no better than it is. [...]

It took years for liberalism's redistributive itch to create an income tax so steeply progressive that it prompts the flight from the state of wealth-creators: "Between 1990 and 2007," Voegeli writes, "some 3.4 million more Americans moved from California to one of the other 49 states than moved to California from another state."

And the state's income tax -- liberalism codified -- intensifies the effects of business cycles on the state's revenue stream: During booms, the stream surges and stimulates government spending; during contractions, revenue dwindles, but the new government spending continues. Voegeli says that if California's spending had grown no faster than population growth and inflation from 1992 to 2006, it would have been $65 billion less in 2006, and per capita government outlays then would have equaled not those of Somalia or Mississippi but of Oregon, which is hardly "a hellish paradigm of Social Darwinism."

It took years for liberalism's mania for micromanaging life with entangling regulations to make California's once-creative economy resemble Gulliver immobilized by the Lilliputians' many threads. The state, which between 1990 and 2007 lost 26 percent of its factory jobs and 35 percent of its high-tech manufacturing jobs, ranks behind only New York, another of liberalism's laboratories, in the number of outward-bound moving vans.

It took years for compassionate liberalism to make California's welfare menu contribute to the state becoming an importer of Mexico's poverty. It took years for servile liberalism to turn the state into what Voegeli calls a "unionocracy," run by and for unionized public employees, such as public safety employees who can retire at 50 and receive 90 percent of the final year's pay for life.

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Economy loses 85K jobs

[y] Lack of confidence in the economic recovery led employers to shed a more-than-expected 85,000 net jobs in December even as the unemployment rate held at 10 percent. The rate would have been higher if more people had been looking for work instead of leaving the labor force because they can't find jobs.

The sharp drop in the work force — 661,000 fewer people — showed that more of the jobless are giving up. Once people stop looking for jobs, they're no longer counted among the unemployed.

When discouraged workers and part-time workers who would prefer full-time jobs are included, the so-called "underemployment" rate in December rose to 17.3 percent, from 17.2 percent in November. That's just below a revised figure of 17.4 percent in October, the highest on records dating from 1994.

Many analysts had hoped Friday's report would show the economy gained jobs for the first time in two years. While the revised figures found an increase in November, it was tiny.

"One word sums it up: Disappointment," said Jonathan Basile, an economist at Credit Suisse.

The drop in the labor force, Basile said, "tells me that Main Street doesn't believe there's a recovery yet, because they're not out looking for jobs yet."

Revisions to the previous two months' data showed the economy actually generated 4,000 jobs in November, the first gain in nearly two years. But the revisions showed it also lost 16,000 more jobs than previously estimated in October. [...]

Friday's report caps a disastrous year for U.S. workers. Employers cut 4.2 million jobs in 2009. And the unemployment rate averaged 9.3 percent. That compares with an average of 5.8 percent in 2008 and 4.6 percent in 2007. Nearly 15.3 million people are unemployed, an increase of 3.9 million during 2009.

The Democrats’ Job Standard

After Attacking Bush During Periods Of Job Growth, And Pledging Their Stimulus Would Create Millions Of Jobs, Where’s The Dems’ Outrage?

[gopf] [...] In 2003, Over 87,000 Jobs Were Created. (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, www.bls.gov, Accessed 1/6/10)

* But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) Criticized 2003 Job Creation As “Far From Enough.” “The slight increase in jobs last month is wonderful news for 57,000 Americans. But the 2.1 million Americans who have been actively looking for work for more than two years … know that it is far from enough …” (Rep. Nancy Pelosi, “Pelosi: ‘Slight Jobs Increase Far From Enough -- We Must Do More to Create Jobs and Growth,’” Press Release, 10/3/03)

In 2004, Over 2 Million Jobs Were Created. (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, www.bls.gov, Accessed 1/6/10)

* But In 2004, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) Claimed Bush “Created A Climate … Where The Number of Jobs Is Not Growing.” “This President has created a climate in this country where the number of jobs is not growing. It did not have to be that way.” (Sen. Dick Durbin, Congressional Record, 10/08/04, p. S10764)

In 2005, Over 2.5 Million Jobs Were Created. (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, www.bls.gov, Accessed 1/6/10)

* But Pelosi Called 2005 Job Creation Numbers “Anemic.” “Today’s anemic jobs numbers confirm that President Bush has still failed to create a single new private-sector job since he became President.” (Rep. Nancy Pelosi, “Pelosi: ‘Today’s Anemic Jobs Numbers Confirm the Administration Has Failed to Create a Single New Private-Sector Job,’” Press Release, 6/3/05)

In 2006, Over 2.1 Million Jobs Were Created. (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, www.bls.gov, Accessed 1/6/10)

* But Pelosi Claimed Bush Policies “Favored The Privileged Few At The Expense Of America’s Working Families.” (Rep. Nancy Pelosi, “Democrats Will Restore the Economic Security of America’s Working Families,” Press Release, 9/22/06)

By 2007, 5.7 Million Jobs Had Been Created Under Bush. (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, www.bls.gov, Accessed 1/6/10)

* But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) Claimed Bush Had “Shameful History Of Losing American Jobs.” (Sen. Harry Reid, “Reid: As Unemployment Reaches Two-year High, American Jobs Are The Latest Casualty Of Bush’s Failed Economic Policies,” Press Release, 1/4/08)

THEN PROMISED THEIR $787 BILLION STIMULUS WOULD CREATE MILLIONS OF JOBS

In February, Obama Signed $787 Billion Stimulus Bill, Claiming It Would “Fix The Economy.” “President Obama on Tuesday signed the $787 billion stimulus package ... ‘We have begun the essential work of keeping the American dream alive in our time,’ Obama said, calling the legislation ‘the beginning of the end’ of what needed to be done to fix the economy.” (Michael A. Fletcher, “Obama Leaves D.C. To Sign Stimulus Bill,” The Washington Post, 2/18/09)

And Obama Pledged That Stimulus Would Create 3.5 Million Jobs By End Of 2010. “[W]hat makes this recovery plan so important is not just that it will create or save 3.5 million jobs over the next two years ...” (President Barack Obama, Remarks At The Signing Of The American Recovery And Reinvestment Act, Denver, CO, 2/17/09)

SO DEMS NEED TO CREATE 6.3 MILLION JOBS IN 2010 TO MEET THEIR OWN STANDARD, A LEVEL OF JOB GROWTH THAT HAS NEVER BEEN ACHIEVED

2.8 MILLION Jobs Lost Since Obama’s Signed His $787 Billion Stimulus In February 2009. (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, www.bls.gov, Accessed 12/10/09)

* Including 85,000 More Jobs Lost Last Month. (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, www.bls.gov, Accessed 1/8/09)

[...]

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Obama's Fiscal Fantasy World
Spending is up nearly 24% since Bush's last full budget year

[wsj] After President Obama devoted much of 2009 to health care and global warming—two issues far down Americans' list of concerns—the White House says he will pivot to jobs and deficit reduction in his State of the Union speech in a few weeks. The White House is considering dramatic gestures, perhaps announcing a spending freeze or even a 2% or 3% reduction in nondefense spending.

But Americans shouldn't be misled by the election year ploy: Mr. Obama rigged the game by giving himself plenty of room to look tough on spending. He did that by increasing discretionary domestic spending for the last half of fiscal year 2009 by 8% and then increasing it another 12% for fiscal year 2010.

So discretionary domestic spending now stands at $536 billion, up nearly 24% from President George W. Bush's last full year budget in fiscal 2008 of $433.6 billion. That's a huge spending surge, even for a profligate liberal like Mr. Obama. The $102 billion spending increase doesn't even count the $787 billion stimulus package, of which $534 billion remains unspent. [...]

Mr. Obama is thinking of tapping another pocket of cash. Now that the banks are repaying—with interest and dividends—the $240 billion the Bush administration lent them, the Obama administration is considering recycling those dollars into new spending on "green" technology and more stimulus, despite provisions Congress wrote into the law creating the Troubled Asset Relief Program that requires that repaid TARP funds be used exclusively for deficit reduction.

Meanwhile, defense spending is being flattened: Between 2009 and 2010, military outlays will rise 3.6% while nondefense discretionary spending climbs 12%.

All this leaves Mr. Obama in the enviable position of appearing tough on spending while growing the federal government's share of GDP from its historic post-World War II average of roughly 20% to the target Mr. Obama laid out in his budget blueprint last February of 24%.

There are also those pesky entitlements. This mandatory spending has grown to 66% of the budget, up from 29% in 1965. Serious budgeters understand spending cannot be brought under control unless these mandatory outlays are part of the mix. [...]

At the beginning of his term, Americans believed Mr. Obama would follow through on his campaign promises about "cutting wasteful spending" and going "through the federal budget, line-by-line, ending programs that we don't need" and putting "an end to the run-away spending the record deficits."

After a year of living in his fiscal fantasy world, Americans realize they have a record deficit-setting, budget-busting spender on their hands. Voters are now reading the fine print on all that Mr. Obama proposes and as they do, his credibility, already badly damaged, suffers.

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Steele Keeps Digging The Hole

[as] Michael Steele, who has been under fire for his string of idiotic statements, poor fundraising numbers, shameless self promotion, and telling Republican donors who disagree with him to "shut up" and "get with the program" -- now says that he didn't actually seek the chairmanship of the RNC in the first place.

In a fawning radio interview with Dennis Miller, Steele speaks of himself as a modern day George Washington, who reluctantly answered the call to serve.

"I didn’t ask for, I didn’t seek this job, I didn’t ask for it," Steele said. "It wasn’t part of my, you know, charted course in life to wind up as chairman of the RNC. You know, there was a convergence of moments here."

Now, perhaps Steele's right and I'm mistaken. Perhaps I completely imagined covering the RNC chairman's race, going to watch him debate other candidates, or attending the RNC election last January. Maybe I imagined receiving emails on behalf of his candidacy, and maybe this video in which Steele announces his candidacy by saying, "I want the gig. I'm ready, I'm ready to lead this party" is an elaborate fabrication.

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Obama just doesn’t get it

[nro] After watching President Obama’s remarks on national security this afternoon, John Lehman, the secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration and a member of the 9/11 Commission, tells National Review Online that, “frankly, I’m pissed off.”

“President Obama just doesn’t get it,” says Lehman. “I don’t think he has a clue. It’s all pure spin. He’s ignoring key issues and taking respectable professionals like John Brennan and turning them into hacks and shills. It’s beyond contempt.”

“The president has ignored the 9/11 Commission’s report,” says Lehman. “This whole idea that we can fix things by jumping higher and faster is ridiculous. The fact is that the system worked just like we said it would work if the president failed to give the Director of National Intelligence the tools he needs: it’s bloated, bureaucratic, layered, and stultified.”

“President Obama continues to totally ignore one of the important thrusts of our 9/11 recommendations, which is that you have to approach counterterrorism as a multiagency intelligence issue, and not as a law-enforcement issue. He’s made a lot of commission’s members angry for dismissing our report and ignoring key recommendations.” Obama, he adds, has taken a “lawyer-like, politically-correct approach” to national security issues like terrorist watchlists and no-fly lists. “You got to blame the president for enforcing the politically-correct and legalistic policies that led to these failures.”

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Jack-asshat Cafferty, CNN hack mouth piece seems to feel suddenly wronged in his love affair with the O's recent manuevering. No kidding, Jack? Just tuning in, are we?

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Geithner’s Fed Told AIG to Limit Swaps Disclosure

[b] The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, then led by Timothy Geithner, told American International Group Inc. to withhold details from the public about the bailed-out insurer’s payments to banks during the depths of the financial crisis, e-mails between the company and its regulator show.

AIG said in a draft of a regulatory filing that the insurer paid banks, which included Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Societe Generale SA, 100 cents on the dollar for credit-default swaps they bought from the firm. The New York Fed crossed out the reference, according to the e-mails, and AIG excluded the language when the filing was made public on Dec. 24, 2008. The e-mails were obtained by Representative Darrell Issa, ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

The New York Fed took over negotiations between AIG and the banks in November 2008 as losses on the swaps, which were contracts tied to subprime home loans, threatened to swamp the insurer weeks after its taxpayer-funded rescue. The regulator decided that Goldman Sachs and more than a dozen banks would be fully repaid for $62.1 billion of the swaps, prompting lawmakers to call the AIG rescue a “backdoor bailout” of financial firms.

“It appears that the New York Fed deliberately pressured AIG to restrict and delay the disclosure of important information,” said Issa, a California Republican. Taxpayers “deserve full and complete disclosure under our nation’s securities laws, not the withholding of politically inconvenient information.” President Barack Obama selected Geithner as Treasury secretary, a post he took last year.

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Security for 9/11 Trials in NYC Will Cost More Than $400M
Cost of Trying 9/11 Terrorists Could Go as High as $600 Million

[abc] New York City projects it will cost more than $400 million to provide security if the pre-trial preparation and trial of the suspects in the Sept. 11 terror attacks takes two years, which insiders say is virtually certain, according to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

It will cost another $206 million annually if the trial runs beyond two years, which some fear is possible, the mayor's office estimates.

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Clown Show Continues : Guantanamo Prisoners May Sue to stay in Guantanamo

[we] Buried in a blog item by Newsweek's ace reporter Michael Isikoff is a bombshell. Appararently lawyers for Guantanamo detainees want to keep their clients in Guantanamo, rather than transfer them to the Obama administration's proposed new prison in Illinois:

But the final irony is that many of the detainees may not even want to be transferred to Thomson and could conceivably even raise their own legal roadblocks to allow them to stay at Gitmo.

Falkoff notes that many of his clients, while they clearly want to go home, are at least being held under Geneva Convention conditions in Guantánamo. At Thomson, he notes, the plans call for them to be thrown into the equivalent of a "supermax" security prison under near-lockdown conditions.

"As far as our clients are concerned, it's probably preferable for them to remain at Guantánamo," he says.

The strident left-wing critiques of the Guantanamo facility have all centered around the fact that detainees there are horribly mistreated and conditions unbearable. But when push comes to shove, it would seem concerns about Guantanamo are overblown, and the prisoners there know that being held under the Geneva conventions outside the U.S. is much preferable to a maximum security prison in the U.S.

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You Lie!

The C-SPAN Lie? See Eight Clips of Obama Promising Televised Healthcare Negotiations

Nothing new here for anyone that pays an iota of attention or that doesn't have their deluded head blindly rammed up some orifice. As I've said before, I didn't expect to feel this way about the guy - the blatant lies, yes, well...he was spouting those even before being elected, so that's not a surprise. The amount of them, perhaps, but I figured the guy would have a shred of dignity. Fool me.

So many terms that I hadn't thought of for some time come to mind - charlatan, carpetbagger, nincompoop, jackass and on and on. Phony outrage, phony consideration, phony speaker. The dullest drone-on, shuck and jive, manufactured actor since John Kerry. Yammers on and on with rhetoric and imaginary, wish-wash nonsense, yet never actually says anything and when it is an important issue, he's can't even feign skill or ability.

All these paid lip flappers that were able to, with straight face, make pronouncements such as "Great speech" "Smouldering," (ya, Gergen, he was 'smouldering' alright...crash and burn in artificial poise) and such, come on. The Bombo came across as almost disinterested in the near occurrence of a "man-made-disaster" and appeared like it was just a little bothersome. Weak tea champ.

This administration has become, in an astonishingly short time, a sad joke. One has to wonder how long the majority of the apology media can continue to play along.

The routine is sad, yet quickly became rote; an issue arises, blurb out some wind up doll, nonsense statement and then on the next day when it's mocked and derided, spin out the "taken out of context" or " what I meant to say was" lines and bumble along with the highest of incompetency as the glaring inadequacy glows ever brighter.

The guy blows serious. Fraud. And I couldn't give a damn about his birth certificate. - The Cynical Bastard

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Nancy Pelosi takes swipe at President Obama's campaign promises

[p] House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, piqued with White House pressure to accept the Senate health reform bill, threw a rare rhetorical elbow Tuesday at President Barack Obama, questioning his commitment to his 2008 campaign promises.

A leadership aide said it was no accident.

Pelosi emerged from a meeting with her leadership team and committee chairs in the Capitol to face an aggressive throng of reporters who immediately hit her with C-SPAN’s request that she permit closed-door final talks on the bill to be televised.

A reporter reminded the San Francisco Democrat that in 2008, then-candidate Obama opined that all such negotiations be open to C-SPAN cameras.

“There are a number of things he was for on the campaign trail,” quipped Pelosi, who has no intention of making the deliberations public.
People familiar with Pelosi's thinking wasted little time in explaining precisely what she meant by a “number of things” — saying it reflected weeks of simmering tension on health care between two Democratic power players who have functioned largely in lock step during Obama’s first year in office.

Senior House Democratic leadership aides say Pelosi was pointedly referring to Obama’s ’08 pledge not to raise taxes on the middle class, which she interprets to include a tax on so-called Cadillac health care plans that offer lavish benefit packages to many union members.

The House aides, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Pelosi has been miffed with Obama’s tilt toward the Senate plan and his expectation that the House would simply go along with the Senate bill out of political necessity.

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Good Riddance : Dodd won't seek reelection, will retire at end of term

[wp] Embattled Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) has scheduled a news conference for Wednesday at which he is expected to announce he will not seek reelection, sources familiar with his plans said Tuesday night.

Word of Dodd's retirement plans comes after months of speculation about his political future, his faltering poll numbers and a growing sense among the Democratic establishment that he could not win a sixth term in the Senate. The news also came on the same day Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.) announced he would not seek reelection.

Once among the safest of incumbents, Dodd's political star fell over a two-year period, during which he moved his family to Iowa to pursue the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination and was linked to a VIP mortgage loan program overseen by a controversial Wall Street financier. He also drew harsh questions about his oversight of Wall Street, as chair of the Senate Banking Committee, in the years when the nation's financial system was heading toward near collapse.

Dodd's poll numbers plummeted last spring before rebounding somewhat over the summer. But another dive in the polls late last year led to widespread concern that Dodd needed to vacate the seat for Democrats to have a chance at retaining it in the 2010 elections.

[...]it was reported that Dodd had received special treatment in his acquisition of a mortgage loan from Countrywide Financial, through a program that labeled him and others as friends of Countrywide chief executive Angelo Mozilo. Dodd insisted he was unaware of his inclusion in the program, and he was cleared of any wrongdoing by the Senate Ethics Committee, but the political damage was done.

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It’s War, not a Crime Spree

[sp] [...] It simply makes no sense to treat an al Qaeda-trained operative willing to die in the course of massacring hundreds of people as a common criminal. Reports indicate that Abdulmutallab stated there were many more like him in Yemen but that he stopped talking once he was read his Miranda rights. President Obama’s advisers lamely claim Abdulmutallab might be willing to agree to a plea bargain – pretty doubtful you can cut a deal with a suicide bomber. John Brennan, the President’s top counterterrorism adviser, bizarrely claimed “there are no downsides or upsides” to treating terrorists as enemy combatants. That is absurd. There is a very serious downside to treating them as criminals: terrorists invoke their “right” to remain silent and stop talking. Terrorists don’t tell us where they were trained, what they were trained in, who they were trained by, and who they were trained with. Giving foreign-born, foreign-trained terrorists the right to remain silent does nothing to keep Americans safe from terrorist threats. It only gives our enemies access to courtrooms where they can publicly grandstand, and to defense attorneys who can manipulate the legal process to gain access to classified information. [...]

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Hollow Words on Terrorism

[rcp] [...] The reason the country is uneasy about the Obama administration's response to this attack is a distinct sense of not just incompetence but incomprehension. From the very beginning, President Obama has relentlessly tried to downplay and deny the nature of the terrorist threat we continue to face. Napolitano renames terrorism "man-caused disasters." Obama goes abroad and pledges to cleanse America of its post-9/11 counterterrorist sins. Hence, Guantanamo will close, CIA interrogators will face a special prosecutor, and Khalid Sheik Mohammed will bask in a civilian trial in New York -- a trifecta of political correctness and image management.

And just to make sure even the dimmest understand, Obama banishes the term "war on terror." It's over -- that is, if it ever existed.

Obama may have declared the war over. Unfortunately al-Qaeda has not. Which gives new meaning to the term "asymmetric warfare."

And produces linguistic -- and logical -- oddities that littered Obama's public pronouncements following the Christmas Day attack. In his first statement, Obama referred to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as "an isolated extremist." This is the same president who, after the Ford Hood shooting, warned us "against jumping to conclusions" -- code for daring to associate Nidal Hasan's mass murder with his Islamist ideology. Yet, with Abdulmutallab, Obama jumped immediately to the conclusion, against all existing evidence, that the bomber acted alone. [...]

Obama reassured the nation that this "suspect" had been charged. Reassurance? The president should be saying: We have captured an enemy combatant -- an illegal combatant under the laws of war: no uniform, direct attack on civilians -- and now to prevent future attacks, he is being interrogated regarding information he may have about al-Qaeda in Yemen.

Instead, Abdulmutallab is dispatched to some Detroit-area jail and immediately lawyered up. At which point -- surprise! -- he stops talking.

This absurdity renders hollow Obama's declaration that "we will not rest until we find all who were involved." Once we've given Abdulmutallab the right to remain silent, we have gratuitously forfeited our right to find out from him precisely who else was involved, namely those who trained, instructed, armed and sent him.

This is all quite mad even in Obama's terms. He sends 30,000 troops to fight terror overseas, yet if any terrorists come to attack us here, they are magically transformed from enemy into defendant.

The logic is perverse. If we find Abdulmutallab in an al-Qaeda training camp in Yemen, where he is merely preparing for a terror attack, we snuff him out with a Predator -- no judge, no jury, no qualms. But if we catch him in the United States in the very act of mass murder, he instantly acquires protection not just from execution by drone but even from interrogation.

The president said that this incident highlights "the nature of those who threaten our homeland." But the president is constantly denying the nature of those who threaten our homeland. On Tuesday, he referred five times to Abdulmutallab (and his terrorist ilk) as "extremist(s)."

A man who shoots abortion doctors is an extremist. An eco-fanatic who torches logging sites is an extremist. Abdulmutallab is not one of these. He is a jihadist. And unlike the guys who shoot abortion doctors, jihadists have cells all over the world; they blow up trains in London, nightclubs in Bali and airplanes over Detroit (if they can); and are openly pledged to war on America.

Any government can through laxity let someone slip through the cracks. But a government that refuses to admit that we are at war, indeed, refuses even to name the enemy -- jihadist is a word banished from the Obama lexicon -- turns laxity into a governing philosophy.

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The NYT 'Conservative' Finds Something Strange

[nyt] [...] Every single idea associated with the educated class has grown more unpopular over the past year.

The educated class believes in global warming, so public skepticism about global warming is on the rise. The educated class supports abortion rights, so public opinion is shifting against them. The educated class supports gun control, so opposition to gun control is mounting.

The story is the same in foreign affairs. The educated class is internationalist, so isolationist sentiment is now at an all-time high, according to a Pew Research Center survey. The educated class believes in multilateral action, so the number of Americans who believe we should “go our own way” has risen sharply. [...]

The tea party movement is a large, fractious confederation of Americans who are defined by what they are against. They are against the concentrated power of the educated class. They believe big government, big business, big media and the affluent professionals are merging to form self-serving oligarchy — with bloated government, unsustainable deficits, high taxes and intrusive regulation. [...]

In the near term, the tea party tendency will dominate the Republican Party. It could be the ruin of the party, pulling it in an angry direction that suburban voters will not tolerate. But don’t underestimate the deep reservoirs of public disgust. If there is a double-dip recession, a long period of stagnation, a fiscal crisis, a terrorist attack or some other major scandal or event, the country could demand total change, creating a vacuum that only the tea party movement and its inheritors would be in a position to fill.

Personally, I’m not a fan of this movement. But I can certainly see its potential to shape the coming decade.

It's hardly unknown or news to suggest that this guy is another of the numerous fraud foisted by some media organ as their 'conservative voice'. It's little wonder why so many tune out the masquerade offered by similar - even if so much of the media continue to churn it out. Just keep to the tact of repeating nonsense and some has to stick.

Of course, the self proclaimed smart person clique suggests that, well, yes, they are the smart ones. They do tell you so. After all, glancing at the various situations can any find reason to disagree? Hmm...

That 0bama - he's just so damn intelligent. How so or why? Uh, well, because someone said so. The evidence is certainly, uhh....Oh. So brilliant that no one is able to see his college transcripts.

Newsflash, Brooks. There's absolutely nothing new about the issues of 'public opinion' you mention, just as there's nothing new about an attitude that considers the seemingly never-ending growth of government a foolish and woeful path. Only, perhaps in your bubble.

Thank goodness that even many of the comments to this article call out and show that some do not buy into this "intellectual" bilge.

David, thank you for being honest in the last paragraph and admitting that you are not fond of what you call the tea party movement. Republican like you and Democrats like Obama are the same to most of us. You really think that your superior credentials grants you social wisdom and intelligfence. It doesn't.

People like you and Obama have been the mainstream since the 1960's. While you pretend to rail and fight against "the man", you really are, and always have been " the man". There is no real difference between Bush and Obama. They have the same credentials. And, though we were promised that Obama was intellectually more curious than Bush, I have yet to see the proof.

We want what the country always stood for before the tripe of the 60's generation decided to be so eurocentric in their view points. We want " Freedom ". We want " Liberty ". Those qwuaint notions are still of the highest importance to most of us in the real America. If your banker friends ( who are the same people as Obama's banker friends) want to pretend they rule the world ferom their roach nest in NYC, we don't care --- as long as you leave us alone, to leave as free as we please. The problem is that all of you want to make a thousand restrictions, rules and regulations, for the rest of us.

Get the federal government back to where it only does what the Constitution demands -- and nothing more. Get the government out of our lives. Keep your bankers, and the politicians they own, in your cities. Leave us alone and the rest of you republicrats and demopublicans can continue to pretend among yourselves that you matter to the rest of us.

If you don't leave us alone, if you do continue to bother us; we will remove you from power and replace you with those who don't have your credentials. I can hardly see where Sarah Palin or Dennis Kucinich or Ralph Nader can do worse than you have done. And, we don't really care whether they wear the proper school ties. We really don't care.

You restrict our freedoms and regulate our liberties -- about that, we do care. Go to what is simple -- The Constitution. Instead of ridiculing the tea party people, The Sarah Palin people, The Ron Paul People, and the Dennis Kucinich people; look at yourselves. You are in charge. You have been in charge. The mistakes have been made by the credentialed mainstream people like you.

Leave us alone. - d.johnson

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Freed Guantánamo inmates are heading for Yemen to join al-Qaeda fight

[tuk] At least a dozen former Guantánamo Bay inmates have rejoined al-Qaeda to fight in Yemen, The Times has learnt, amid growing concern over the ability of the country’s Government to accept almost 100 more former inmates from the detention centre.

The Obama Administration promised to close the Guantánamo facility by January 22, a deadline that it will be unable to meet. The 91 Yemeni prisoners in Guantánamo make up the largest national contingent among the 198 being held.

Six prisoners were returned to Yemen last month. After the Christmas Day bomb plot in Detroit, US officials are increasingly concerned that the country is becoming a hot-bed of terrorism. Eleven of the former inmates known to have rejoined al-Qaeda in Yemen were born in Saudi Arabia. The organisation merged its Saudi and Yemeni offshoots last year.

The country’s mountainous terrain, poverty and lawless tribal society make it, in the opinion of many analysts, a close match for Afghanistan as a new terrorist haven.

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The States and the Stimulus

How a supposed boon has become a fiscal burden.
[wsj] Remember how $200 billion in federal stimulus cash was supposed to save the states from fiscal calamity? Well, hold on to your paychecks, because a big story of 2010 will be how all that free money has set the states up for an even bigger mess this year and into the future.

The combined deficits of the states for 2010 and 2011 could hit $260 billion, according to a survey by the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Ten states have a deficit, relative to the size of their expenditures, as bleak as that of near-bankrupt California. The Golden State starts the year another $6 billion in arrears despite a large income and sales tax hike last year. New York is literally down to its last dollar. Revenues are down, to be sure, but in several ways the stimulus has also made things worse. [...]

These spending requirements come when state revenues are on a downward spiral. State revenues declined by more than 10% in 2009, and tax collections are expected to be flat at best in 2010. In Indiana, nominal revenues in 2011 may be lower than in 2006. Arizona's revenues are expected to be lower this year than they were in 2004. Some states don't expect to regain their 2007 revenue peak until 2012.

So when states should be reducing outlays to match a new normal of lower revenue collections, federal stimulus rules mean many states will have little choice but to raise taxes to meet their constitutional balanced budget requirements. Thank you, Nancy Pelosi.

This is the opposite of what the White House and Congress claimed when they said the stimulus funds would prevent economically harmful state tax increases. In 2009, 10 states raised income or sales taxes, and another 15 introduced new fees on everything from beer to cellphone ringers to hunting and fishing. The states pocketed the federal money and raised taxes anyway.

Now, in an election year, Congress wants to pass another $100 billion aid package for ailing states to sustain the mess the first stimulus helped to create. Governors would be smarter to unite and tell Congress to keep the money and mandates, and let the states adjust to the new reality of lower revenues. Meanwhile, Mr. Perry and other governors who warned that the stimulus would have precisely this effect can consider themselves vindicated.

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Science Daily : No Rise of Airborne Fraction of Carbon Dioxide in Past 150 Years, New Research Finds

[sd] Most of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activity does not remain in the atmosphere, but is instead absorbed by the oceans and terrestrial ecosystems. In fact, only about 45 percent of emitted carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere.

However, some studies have suggested that the ability of oceans and plants to absorb carbon dioxide recently may have begun to decline and that the airborne fraction of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions is therefore beginning to increase.

Many climate models also assume that the airborne fraction will increase. Because understanding of the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide is important for predicting future climate change, it is essential to have accurate knowledge of whether that fraction is changing or will change as emissions increase.

To assess whether the airborne fraction is indeed increasing, Wolfgang Knorr of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol reanalyzed available atmospheric carbon dioxide and emissions data since 1850 and considers the uncertainties in the data.

In contradiction to some recent studies, he finds that the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide has not increased either during the past 150 years or during the most recent five decades.

The research is published in Geophysical Research Letters.

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The Joke’s on Us

[nro] On Christmas Day, a gentleman from Nigeria succeeded (effortlessly) in boarding a flight to Detroit with a bomb in his underwear. Pretty funny, huh?

But the Pantybomber wasn’t the big joke. The real laugh was the United States government. The global hyperpower spent the next week making itself a laughingstock to the entire planet. First, the bureaucrats at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) swung into action with a whole new range of restrictions.

Against radical Yemen-trained Muslims wearing weaponized briefs? Of course not. That would be too obvious. So instead they imposed a slew of constraints against you. At Heathrow last week, they were permitting only one item of carry-on on U.S. flights. In Toronto, no large purses.

Um, the Pantybomber didn’t have a purse. He brought the bomb on board under his private parts, and his private parts weren’t part of his carry-on (although, if reports of injuries sustained in his failed mission are correct, they may well have been part of his carry-off). But no matter. If in doubt, blame the victim. The TSA announced that for the last hour of the flight no passenger can use the toilets or have anything on his lap — not a laptop, not a blanket, not a stewardess, not even a paperback book. I can’t wait for the first lawsuit after an infidel flight attendant confiscates a litigious imam’s Koran as they’re coming into LAX.

You’re still free to read a paperback if you’re flying from Paris to Sydney, or Stockholm to Beijing, or Kuala Lumpur to Heathrow. But not to LAX or JFK. The TSA were responding as bonehead bureaucracies do: Don’t just stand there, do something. And every time the TSA does something, you’ll have to stand there, longer and longer, suffering ever more pointless indignities. Last week, guest-hosting The Rush Limbaugh Show, I took a call from a lady who said that, if it helps keep her safe, she’s happy to get to the airport “four, five, whatever hours” before the flight. Try to put a figure on “whatever” and you’ll get a sense of where America’s transportation system is headed. Ten years ago, you got to the airport 45 minutes, an hour before the flight. Now, thanks to the ever more demanding choreographers of the homeland-security kabuki, it’s two, three, four, whatever. Look at O’Hare and imagine the size of airport we’ll need. And by then the Pantybomber won’t even need to get on the plane; he can kill more people blowing up the check-in line.

And remember, this was a bombing mission that “failed.” With failures like this, who needs victories? [...]

The real message was conveyed by Fouad Ajami, discussing the new administration’s foreign policy in the Wall Street Journal: “No despot fears Mr. Obama, and no blogger in Cairo or Damascus or Tehran, no demonstrator in those cruel Iranian streets, expects Mr. Obama to ride to the rescue.” True. Another Iranian deadline passed on New Year’s Eve, but the United States will set a new one for Groundhog Day or whenever.

And, just as the thug states understand they now have the run of the planet, so do the terror cells. A thwarted terror attack at Christmas is bad enough. Spending the following week making yourself a global joke is worse. Every A-list despot and dimestore jihadist got that message loud and clear — and so did American allies already feeling semi-abandoned by this most parochial of presidents. Expect a bumpy twelve months ahead. Happy New Year.

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The Life-Long Challenge of Differentiating Between Truth, Paradigms, Truisms and Plain Lies

Your paradigm is so intrinsic to your mental process that you are hardly aware of its existence, until you try to communicate with someone with a different paradigm. - Donella Meadows

[tdb] Things are not always what they seem; the first appearance can be deceiving; and, matters accepted as factual realities all our life may in fact not stand the test of simple logic when questioned properly by someone with another point of view. This is a reality we all have to live with and do our best to deal with honestly and openly. It´s one of the great challenges in life. It requires a flexible mind and mindset. And at times, it requires your admitting to be wrong.

We are all molded by the information kit we are fed as we grow up and as we grow old. And, unless we actively take the effort and find the energy to question all the commonly shared "truisms", the spoon-fed "facts" of others, the things that "everyone knows" and that all take for granted, we are easy prey for those in possession of the means for mass propaganda.

As George Bernard Shaw once stated, "The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it." We are all guilty of this sort of skewed perception and complacency. It is hard work to keep asking and SECOND-GUESSING. But, it is important to keep at it all the same!

I like the term ‘second-guessing´, because, ultimately, an educated guess is all we will generally be able to achieve. This certainly applies to financial markets and investing, as it applies to life in general.

This past year, we have certainly been fed with A LOT OF PROPAGANDA worth second-guessing:

* Everyone seems to take for granted that money equals wealth...

* Most believe that central banks and governments are working feverishly to protect us all...

* A considerable part of humanity has pretty much accepted the necessity of mass vaccinations against the Swine Flu and other diseases. They appear to think that the pharmaceutical companies and their side-kicks act fully in the interest of our health...

* The media is currently full of demands for more government "protection": "We need more and stricter regulation. And regulators need to be given more power to ensure that another financial crisis is avoided." They really think that is what we need. And, they are convinced it will work...

* Another frequently heard piece of ‘wisdom´: Capitalism has failed...

* Oh yes, it is clear to most that natural, unprocessed milk is unhealthy, if not even life-threatening...

* etc. etc. etc.

As we move toward the surely very interesting year of 2010, I would like to invite all readers to second-guess the common "wisdom" above. If you are fully committed to any of these viewpoints, I challenge you to step back and reconsider. Chances are that you are falling prey to the steady beat of that global propaganda machine.

Of course, it could be me that is on the wrong side of the story. Possibly, your Mountain Guides and Sherpas have it all wrong. Maybe, but at least we can credit ourselves with continuously probing and questioning.

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Mayo Clinic in Arizona to Stop Treating Some Medicare Patients

[b] The Mayo Clinic, praised by President Barack Obama as a national model for efficient health care, will stop accepting Medicare patients as of tomorrow at one of its primary-care clinics in Arizona, saying the U.S. government pays too little.

More than 3,000 patients eligible for Medicare, the government’s largest health-insurance program, will be forced to pay cash if they want to continue seeing their doctors at a Mayo family clinic in Glendale, northwest of Phoenix, said Michael Yardley, a Mayo spokesman. The decision, which Yardley called a two-year pilot project, won’t affect other Mayo facilities in Arizona, Florida and Minnesota.

Obama in June cited the nonprofit Rochester, Minnesota-based Mayo Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio for offering “the highest quality care at costs well below the national norm.” Mayo’s move to drop Medicare patients may be copied by family doctors, some of whom have stopped accepting new patients from the program, said Lori Heim, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians, in a telephone interview yesterday.

“Many physicians have said, ‘I simply cannot afford to keep taking care of Medicare patients,’” said Heim, a family doctor who practices in Laurinburg, North Carolina. “If you truly know your business costs and you are losing money, it doesn’t make sense to do more of it.”

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Democrats Officially Kill Successful DC Voucher Program

[bg] This is big government at its finest hour. The Democrats have officially killed a successful private school voucher program banishing more than 3,300 low-income children back to the DC schools they so desperately wanted to escape.

The Democrats have effectively ended the voucher program. Obama only extended it into the 2009-2010 school year. He could have done more. He didn’t. Underpriveleged children–whom the Democrats oppress “protect” from the greed and injustices of the Right had a chance to gain the social justice and fairness Obama continuously touts in his speeches.

The Democrats have spent trillions of our tax dollars so carelessly with failed stimulus pork payouts, cash for clunkers, auto bailouts, bank bailouts, and additional Fannie and Freddie bailouts, you would think they could spare an extra $50 million over five years to continue to educate poor children–especially minority children.

For the record, it was the Republicans in 2004 who started the voucher program and Republican Senator John Ensign (R-NV) who introduced an amendment to the omnibus appropriations bill to extend the voucher program. Democrats voted down the amendment 50-39.

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Media blunders of 2009

[p] Upheaval in the media world continued in 2009, with 15,000 newspaper jobs lost, some glossy magazines killed and Washington bureaus either cut back or shuttered completely. And yet, online outlets sprouted — a few beefing up the ranks in D.C. — while more journalists embraced Twitter, blogs and platforms that don’t require ink on paper. While a number of this year’s more noticeable media blunders occurred through simple carelessness, some could be also considered growing pains in adjusting to changes in the media, such as reporters jumping the gun on Twitter, experimenting in video, cutting-and-pasting text from a blog or getting caught when homemade video surfaces on YouTube.

Top 10 Media Blunders

1) CNN mistakes Coast Guard drill for attack: On Sept. 11, of all days, CNN blasted the following via Twitter: “BREAKING NEWS: Suspicious boat in river near Obama in DC. Police scanner reports of shots fired. Circumstances unclear." As it turns out: very unclear. What the CNN reporter actually heard over the scanner were conversation about a training exercise taking place on the Potomac. But the false alarm spread quickly over Twitter, and the network quickly corrected the report on-air shortly thereafter. Still, the White House wasn’t amused. Press secretary Robert Gibbs slapped CNN on the wrist, saying that “before we report things like this, checking would be good.”

2) The Washington Post’s “Salongate”: It’s understandable that newspapers are seeking new revenue streams, but the Post took things to another level this summer. The newspaper sent a flier to lobbyists and potential corporate backers promising an off-the-record, nonconfrontational sit-down with editors and reporters in the home of publisher Katharine Weymouth. The price per salon: $25,000. Shortly after the news broke of what smelled like a pay-to-play operation, the paper canceled the series. But the Post’s top brass continued dealing with questions on how the salons were organized and promoted for months to come.

3) Fox’s tea party trifecta: Fox News had a banner ratings year, and throughout 2009, it gave extensive coverage of Obama administration opponents, especially the so-called tea party movement’s events on April 15 and Sept. 12. But coverage of that latter event led to a couple of apologies later on. Video surfaced of a Fox News producer rallying protesters for a live shot, while Sean Hannity mistakenly used the 9/12 footage in describing a smaller rally on Capitol Hill later in the fall. (Hannity owned up to the error, apologizing to of all people, Jon Stewart!). Ironically, Fox News had actually criticized other networks in a full page newspaper ad claiming they “miss[ed] the story” of the 9/12 rally.

4) ABC correspondent tweets Obama’s OTR “jackass” swipe: While a tweet is at most 140 characters, one blasted to more than a million followers can ping-pong around the Internet within seconds. That’s what happened when ABC correspondent Terry Moran tweeted some preliminary, off-the-record chatter between President Barack Obama and CNBC’s John Harwood. He wrote: "Pres. Obama just called Kanye West a ‘jackass.’” Moran’s apology for publishing the off-the-record banter didn’t end the matter, as audio, and later video, of the exchange made its way online. Harwood thought that Moran erred in tweeting the comment, but took things in stride, calling the ABC reporter "a class act and a good journalist.”

5) MSM misses Van Jones, ACORN stories: The resignation of an environmental adviser in the White House may not be Watergate, but the Van Jones controversy — propelled by conservative blogs and right-wing talkers like Glenn Beck — showed the potential for partisan media to move the news cycle even as most mainstream outlets ignored the story. Similarly, Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com conducted an undercover investigation of ACORN that prompted follow-up in the press and calls for investigations from public officials. The New York Times, for one, took notice, with top editor Bill Keller even assigning an editor afterward to start monitoring the budding controversies in the opinion media.

6) NY Post’s Obama/chimp cartoon: The New York tabloid thrives off attention-grabbing tabloid covers and some of the best headlines on the planet. But the paper can also go too far when it comes to attracting eyeballs, such as publishing a cartoon showing two police officers shooting a monkey, with the text reading: "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.” The cartoon immediately struck some as a racially motivated slight against the president and resulted in apologies from the paper and, a few days later, from the man on top: Rupert Murdoch.

[...]

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CNN Falls Behind MSNBC in Annual Prime-Time Ratings

[nyt] CNN will finish 2009 behind MSNBC in prime-time ratings, the first time CNN has ever trailed a competitor other than the Fox News Channel over a full calendar year.

That finish had been expected. In recent months, CNN, which continues to stand behind its policy of steering clear of the opinion-based shows that draw large prime-time audiences for its competitors, has also trailed its own sister network, HLN (formerly Headline News). CNN has frequently finished fourth in the news channel category.

CNN will finish the fourth quarter of 2009 in fourth place — another first — and with two weeks left has been fourth on more than 100 nights this year.

But the end-of-the-year ratings for the news networks — which were being presented this week because nothing is likely to change by Jan. 1 — are bringing some other, less expected, results. One is the ability of Fox News, which had the biggest ratings year in its history, to grow even against the heavily viewed election year of 2008. (Both CNN and MSNBC were down sharply from last year.)

Another surprise has been the steady growth, up 9 percent in prime time, of HLN, where hosts do offer opinions.

Perhaps most surprising is the overall growth in viewing for all the news networks over the last several years. For example, even with its competitive problems in prime time, CNN has had more viewers on average this year than it did in 2006 or 2007. So has MSNBC. But they both have been left in the dust by Fox News.

Fox has averaged 699,000 viewers for the year, up 10 percent, in the weeknight prime-time hours. (All figures cited here are for viewers ages 25 to 54, the audience that determines success among news networks because that is the group sought by news advertisers.) MSNBC was second with 307,000 viewers, while CNN averaged 297,000.

But CNN remained much stronger than MSNBC everywhere but in those prime-time hours. CNN’s morning show, “American Morning,” beat “Morning Joe” on MSNBC for the year, 161,000 viewers to 136,000. (HLN’s “Morning Express” even beat “Joe” with 158,000.) And from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. CNN beat MSNBC, 185,000 viewers to 101,000. (In all cases both networks were again far behind Fox News.)

MSNBC’s daytime problems are also illustrated by the puny totals for daytime hosts like Andrea Mitchell and Dr. Nancy Snyderman, which on Tuesday attracted only 17,000 viewers and 23,000 viewers respectively.

In ratings for the total day, Fox, which was up 16 percent, averaged 320,000 viewers for the year, while CNN was down 24 percent, to 185,000, and MSNBC was down 21 percent, to 149,000 viewers.

CNN also continues to demonstrate the strength of its news brand in terms of digital usage, where it surpassed both Fox and MSNBC.

But CNN staff members are increasingly expressing concern about the competitive trend in prime time, which is by far the biggest center of profits for the news networks. In recent months, CNN, with one of its strongest anchors, Anderson Cooper, has fallen behind even a repeat of MSNBC’s leading show, with host Keith Olbermann, at 10 p.m. weekdays, though Mr. Olbermann’s show is down 13 percent for the year.

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2009-11-30T16:36:00.000-08:00

:: December 2009 ::

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Dick Cheney: Barack Obama 'trying to pretend'

[p] Former Vice President Dick Cheney accused President Barack Obama on Tuesday of “trying to pretend we are not at war” with terrorists, pointing to the White House response to the attempted sky bombing as reflecting a pattern that includes banishing the term “war on terror” and attempting to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center.

“[W]e are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren’t, it makes us less safe,” Cheney said in a statement to POLITICO. “Why doesn’t he want to admit we’re at war? It doesn’t fit with the view of the world he brought with him to the Oval Office. It doesn’t fit with what seems to be the goal of his presidency — social transformation — the restructuring of American society.” [...]

Here is Cheney’s full statement:

"As I’ve watched the events of the last few days it is clear once again that President Obama is trying to pretend we are not at war. He seems to think if he has a low-key response to an attempt to blow up an airliner and kill hundreds of people, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gives terrorists the rights of Americans, lets them lawyer up and reads them their Miranda rights, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if we bring the mastermind of Sept. 11 to New York, give him a lawyer and trial in civilian court, we won’t be at war.

“He seems to think if he closes Guantanamo and releases the hard-core Al Qaeda-trained terrorists still there, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gets rid of the words, ‘war on terror,’ we won’t be at war. But we are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren’t, it makes us less safe. Why doesn’t he want to admit we’re at war? It doesn’t fit with the view of the world he brought with him to the Oval Office. It doesn’t fit with what seems to be the goal of his presidency — social transformation — the restructuring of American society. President Obama’s first object and his highest responsibility must be to defend us against an enemy that knows we are at war."

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New Sophistication Problem

[wsj] America still has a race problem, though not the one that conventional wisdom would suggest: the racism of whites toward blacks. Old fashioned white racism has lost its legitimacy in the world and become an almost universal disgrace.

The essence of our new "post-modern" race problem can be seen in the parable of the emperor's new clothes. The emperor was told by his swindling tailors that people who could not see his new clothes were stupid and incompetent. So when his new clothes arrived and he could not see them, he put them on anyway so that no one would think him stupid and incompetent. And when he appeared before his people in these new clothes, they too—not wanting to appear stupid and incompetent—exclaimed the beauty of his wardrobe. It was finally a mere child who said, "The emperor has no clothes."

The lie of seeing clothes where there were none amounted to a sophistication—joining oneself to an obvious falsehood in order to achieve social acceptance. In such a sophistication there is an unspoken agreement not to see what one clearly sees—in this case the emperor's flagrant nakedness.

America's primary race problem today is our new "sophistication" around racial matters. Political correctness is a compendium of sophistications in which we join ourselves to obvious falsehoods ("diversity") and refuse to see obvious realities (the irrelevance of diversity to minority development). I would argue further that Barack Obama's election to the presidency of the United States was essentially an American sophistication, a national exercise in seeing what was not there and a refusal to see what was there—all to escape the stigma not of stupidity but of racism.

Barack Obama, elegant and professorially articulate, was an invitation to sophistication that America simply could not bring itself to turn down. If "hope and change" was an empty political slogan, it was also beautiful clothing that people could passionately describe without ever having seen.

Mr. Obama won the presidency by achieving a symbiotic bond with the American people: He would labor not to show himself, and Americans would labor not to see him. As providence would have it, this was a very effective symbiosis politically. And yet, without self-disclosure on the one hand or cross-examination on the other, Mr. Obama became arguably the least known man ever to step into the American presidency.

Our new race problem—the sophistication of seeing what isn't there rather than what is—has surprised us with a president who hides his lack of economic understanding behind a drama of scale. Hundreds of billions moving into trillions. Dramatic, history-making numbers. But where is the economic logic behind a stimulus package that doesn't fully click in for a number of years? How is every stimulus dollar spent actually going to stimulate? Why bailouts to institutions that only hoard the money? How is vast government spending simultaneously a kind of prudence that will not "add to the deficit?" How can such spending not trigger smothering levels of taxation?

Mr. Obama's economic thinking (or lack thereof) adds up to a kind of rudderless cowboyism combined with wishful thinking. You would think that in the two solid years of daily campaigning leading up to his election this nakedness would have been seen.

On the foreign front he has been given much credit for his new policy on the Afghan war, and especially for the "rational" and "earnest" way he went about arriving at the decision to surge 30,000 new troops into battle. But here also were three months of presidential equivocation for all the world to see, only to end up essentially where he started out.

And here again was the lack of a larger framework of meaning. How is this surge of a piece with America's role in the world? Are we the world's exceptional power and thereby charged with enforcing a certain balance of power, or are we now embracing European self-effacement and nonengagement? Where is the clear center in all this?

I think that Mr. Obama is not just inexperienced; he is also hampered by a distinct inner emptiness—not an emptiness that comes from stupidity or a lack of ability but an emptiness that has been actually nurtured and developed as an adaptation to the political world. [...]

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Former head of El Al on why Christmas Day terrorism attempt would never have happened on the famously safe airline.

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Obama's initial reaction to recent terrorist act lacked urgency, decisive leadership

[nyd] The attempt to blow Northwest Flight 253 out of the air was planned as an attack on the United States and very nearly succeeded in accomplishing that horrific goal. The moment demanded inspiring, decisive presidential leadership.

America waited four days for a glimmer.

President Obama's initial response Monday was too long in coming, too cool in delivery and too removed from the extreme gravity of the plot.

Tuesday, he spoke more assertively, acknowledging what everyone else had long ago concluded: that unacceptable security failures had enabled 23-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to smuggle high explosives onto a Detroit-bound jet.

Before his first remarks on Monday, Obama had left a vacuum, and into that 76-hour empty space rushed Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, whose ineptitude made a mockery of her position and threw millions of fliers into continuing states of confusion.

What the public was left with was a never-to-be-repeated case study in crisis mismanagement. It's time to get a grip, Mr. President. [...]

Obama's description of Abdulmutallab as an "isolated extremist" was remarkable and disturbing. This radicalized young Nigerian is nothing of the sort. He operated, in fact, as an Al Qaeda-recruited, Al Qaeda-supplied, Al Qaeda-directed foot soldier - as, to put it directly, an enemy combatant, and not as the criminal "suspect" of Obama's description.

In similarly distant fashion, the President ordered up a "review" of how Abdulmutallab smuggled explosives onto the jet and a "review" of how he slipped through the government's various terror watch lists despite signals of clear and present danger.

Missing then was a statement about those obvious and unacceptable security cracks; the name, rank and serial number of the officials who would conduct the inquiries, and a deadline for completion and a report to the public. Tuesday, Obama filled in those rather basic blanks.

His seeming initial lack of urgency was uncharacteristic in a leader who calls himself a "deadline" executive for his practice of setting same in order to get things done. Most famously, Obama has established a deadline, albeit a slipping one, for closing the Guantanamo Bay detention center. [...]

Obama is, however, accountable for his own anti-terror appointees and policies.

Among them, his costly and wrongheaded order to try key Guantanamo detainees in civilian courts, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, architect of 9/11, in Manhattan Federal.

Among them, his determination to release selected detainees into foreign hands and hope for the best, as President George W. Bush did with two Yemenites who wound up leading the Al Qaeda offshoot that sponsored Abdulmutallab.

Among them, Napolitano, who will never live down her declaration that "the system has worked really very, very smoothly over the course of the past several days." Or her previous clanger that the 9/11 hijackers had entered the U.S. through Canada. Or her euphemistic airbrushing of terrorism as a "man-caused" disaster.

Ultimately, Obama will be measured by a single, unforgiving standard of accountability. It will not be that he affords constitutional rights to terrorists. It will not be that he distinguishes himself by 180 degrees from his predecessor. It will not be that he extends a hand to the Muslim world and refrains from speaking of Islamist terror. It will be whether, on his watch, America suffers a terror attack from abroad, as almost happened on Christmas.

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Handling problems the Obama way

[p] There is a sense of déjà vu in the Obama administration’s response to the attempted terrorist attack on Christmas Day. A by-now familiar pattern has been established for dealing with unexpected problems.

First, White House aides downplay the notion that something may have gone wrong on their part. While staying out of the spotlight, the president conveys his efforts to address the situation and his feelings about it through administration officials. After a few days, the White House concedes on the issue, and perhaps Barack Obama even steps out to address it.

That same scenario unfolded over the summer, when Obama said Sgt. James Crowley, a white Cambridge, Mass., police officer, “acted stupidly” when he arrested Henry Louis Gates Jr., a black Harvard professor, in his own home. It happened in March when the public was outraged over AIG dishing out hefty bonuses. More recently the public witnessed the dynamic after a security breach at President Barack Obama’s first state dinner.

But the fact that the issue now is a terrorist incident — albeit an unsuccessful one — makes the stakes much higher, and the White House’s usual approach more questionable. That this test of his leadership comes while he’s on vacation in tropical Hawaii further complicates things.

After delivering his first public remarks Monday about a Nigerian man’s attempt to blow up a Northwest Airlines jetliner over Detroit, the president motorcaded to the golf course at a nearby country club. Optics aside, it had taken Obama three days to issue a statement on the incident, and the administration was left struggling to control the message.

By the time Obama addressed the public with a brief televised statement, his critics had made such headway that the White House was left with this lede in the New York Times: “President Obama emerged from Hawaiian seclusion on Monday to try to quell gathering criticism of his administration’s handling of the thwarted Christmas Day bombing of an American airliner as a branch of Al Qaeda claimed responsibility.”

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A Solid B+ ! : Vladimir Putin threatens Barack Obama's nuclear stockpile cuts

[ukt] President Barack Obama's drive for the US and Russia to agree cuts in nuclear weapons is under threat after Vladimir Putin insisted the US abandons its missile shield before a final deal can be reached.

The Russian prime minister threatened to scupper one of Mr Obama's key foreign policy successes following his initial agreement with President Dmitry Medvedev at the G20 summit in London in April.

In a notable toughening of rhetoric, Mr Putin insisted his country would develop new "offensive" weapons systems before it considered cutting nuclear warheads. He said the new weapons were necessary to prevent America's leaders from thinking they can "do whatever they want". [...]

One of Mr Obama's signature foreign policy initiatives has been to declare that he wants "a world without nuclear weapons" and he has made plain his hope for rapprochement with Moscow. He said in April: "As a nuclear power - as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon - the United States has a moral responsibility to act."

In July, he declared his intention to "reset" troubled relations between the United States and Russia.

Two months later, he dismayed US allies in Europe by ditching Bush-era plans to set up a missile defence shield in Poland and the Czech Republic, which were previously behind the Iron Curtain.

Moscow had been bitterly opposed to those plans and at first welcomed Washington's decision.

But the olive branch has yielded little if anything in return. Instead, Moscow has used Mr Obama's intention to instead build a "smarter, stronger and swifter" system involving both sea-based and land-based mobile interceptors as a justification for continued tensions.

Mr Putin's comments are a blow to the prospects of a successor to the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), which was due to expire three weeks ago.

He said Washington should share its missile defence plans with Moscow if it wanted to move forward on arms reduction talks, which could see stoickpiles fall by over 1,000 warheads, leaving the countries with about 1,500 each. "Let the Americans hand over all their information on missile defence and we are ready to hand over all the information on offensive weapons systems," he said.

The US State Department rejected Mr Putin's call, stating that the START successor treaty would only deal with strategic offensive arms.

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A Solid B+ ! : President Obama's year of failure

[we] President Obama's year of blunders is ending with the worst failure yet by the president and his team: An Islamist terrorist penetrated the United States and came very close to perpetrating the greatest mass-casualty attack within the U.S. since 9/11.

The president's first year in office has been marked by a string of pratfalls.

President Obama's massive stimulus didn't.

His hasty takeover of GM didn't restore confidence in the brand or faith in the company's executive team or future.

Obamacare has failed to persuade even 40 percent of the American people of its merits and depends upon the enthusiasm of such brilliant lights as Barbara Boxer, Al Franken and Bernie Sanders to pass.

The president's rhetoric about restraining spending has been washed away in a flood of red ink far vaster than all that has gone before it. And despite this profligate hemorrhaging of money the country doesn't have, unemployment is in the double digits and key industries like home building remain moribund.

His repeated appeals to the radical mullahs of Iran have not only failed to initiate any sort of constructive engagement, but a year into his "new diplomacy" the radical Islamists atop the power structure in Tehran are mowing down dissidents in the streets.

And now at least one foreign-born terrorist has breached American security -- despite a specific warning given by the terrorist's father to American officials six months ago -- only weeks after the worst act of a domestic Islamist terror since the war began.

The president is abandoning Iraq, and his dithering on Afghanistan has started a necessary surge but attached an expiration date to it.

Perhaps the close call over the approach to Detroit will wake up the responsible members of the president's party, and perhaps they will ask for a meeting in which they can lay out the obvious truths:

The president should spend more time and effort helping the CIA stop terrorists abroad than pursuing investigations into CIA personnel who have kept us safe in the past.

The president should stop spending so much time and effort to remove terrorists from Gitmo and to arranging their trial in New York and their imprisonment in Illinois and spend much more time arranging for more terrorists to spend more time in Gitmo's secure confines.

The president should spend less time in Copenhagen seeking Olympic games and global warming fame and more time at home demanding more vigilance from his woeful Homeland Security staff.

And the president should spend more time encouraging and consulting with our allies like Great Britain and Israel than pleading with our enemies in Iran and North Korea for breakthroughs that will not come.

2009 is the worst year for a president since 1978, which began with Jimmy Carter standing by paralyzed as the Ayatollah Khomeini seized power in Iran and ended as Jimmy Carter stood paralyzed as the Soviets invaded Afghanistan.

The tale of this president's and his team's incompetence must have come completely into focus even for the MSM when Homeland Security Chief Janet Napolitano declared to CNN's Candy Crowley that the attack on Detroit that failed to kill hundreds only because of the incompetence of the terrorist and the courage of a foreign filmmaker demonstrated that "the system worked."

This must strike even the president's network cheerleaders as Orwellian. And chilling.

Obama has proved himself remarkably skilled for the role of celebrity talking head and woefully ill-prepared for the job of leader of the free world and defender of American security. He campaigned as the opposite of George W. Bush and he has delivered, as the attack on Detroit demonstrates.

The country cannot afford two years in a row of such incompetence and close calls. Let us hope that senior statesmen in the president's party summon the courage to demand the changes in staff and policies that halt this accelerating parade of fiascos.

And let's hope they begin with the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, where change must come soon, before less incompetent terrorists make their way into the airspace above America's great cities.

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Judicial Watch Announces List of Washington’s “Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians” for 2009

[jw] Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, today released its 2009 list of Washington’s “Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians.” The list, in alphabetical order, includes:

1. Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT)
2. Senator John Ensign (R-NV)
3. Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA)
4. Secretary of Treasury Timothy Geithner
5. Attorney General Eric Holder
6. Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-IL)/ Senator Roland Burris (D-IL)
7. President Barack Obama
8. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)
9. Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) and the rest of the PMA Seven
10. Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY)

*Follow the link for reasoning and summation.

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Sad Sack POTUS

[mc] He cannot be serious. Unfortunately for us, he is.

The President interrupted his busy schedule of working out while on vacation to make a statement about the attempted terror attack aboard a Detroit-bound airplane on Christmas Day. The foiled attack happened 4 days ago. The Commander-in-Chief just got around to making some comments about it today, because, you know, boogie boarding is time-consuming.

And what comments they were. In his wimpiest voice, Obama said that "we will not rest until we find all who were involved and hold them accountable." Al Qaeda is shaking in their boots, no? He also said that this was an isolated event, when we know it was not: it was a coordinated al Qaeda terrorist attempt. Further, he called the attempted attack "a serious reminder of the dangers we face."

No mention of "war." No mention of "jihad." No mention of "Islamic terror." And that's because Obama doesn't believe we're in a war against Islamic terrorists who are engaged in a jihad against us. But they certainly believe it.

Meanwhile, the Commander-in-Chief makes his one statement about an attempt that could have killed 300 people on or above U.S. soil--4 days after the fact, and while not wearing a tie.

This latest presidential fiasco comes a day after his Homeland Security Secretary, Janet Napolitano, said about the foiled attempt, "The system worked." When even fellow Democrats expressed outrage, she backtracked the next day: "The system did not work."

Feel safe and secure with these incompetent boobs in charge?

The al Qaeda attempt to blow up an airplane was not the only national security emergency he spoke about today. The terrorist regime of Iran continues its brutal slaughter of its citizens, as fresh protests challenging the government erupt. This is a moment the United States has been waiting for for 30 years: the Iranian people want to be rid of the terrorist thugs who rule them with an iron Islamic fist, and they are willing to risk jail, torture, and even death to see it happen.

Where is the administration? Gone fishin'. In Hawaii. Here's what Obama said: "We will continue to bear witness to the extraordinary events that are taking place there. And I'm confident that history will be on the side of those who seek justice."

Only he's not one of them. Since the Iranian people began protesting in June, Obama has given them only the mildest words of support, and certainly no material support. He repeated the "bear witness" line again today, as if the President of the United States is a passive observer and not able to influence events. The Iranian people are pro-American and determined to have a responsive, decent government instead of the gang of terrorist murderers currently killing them. And our President is out body-surfing.

This dangerous lack of presidential leadership on national security can be summed up with an event last week. On Christmas Eve, Obama made a statement to the press about the "historic" health care reform that the Democrats had just rammed through the Senate. When he finished speaking, he started to walk away. A member of the press asked if he had a message for the troops for Christmas. Startled, he padded back to the podium and said weakly that he was going to call some of them.

They were an afterthought, mentioned after he talked about his own health care "triumph" and only after he was prompted to say something about them.

After all, he needed to bust outta town, get to Hawaii, and pump iron. Nothing--not al Qaeda, not a new Iranian revolution--would stop the gym rat.

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Napolitano On Failed Terror Attempt: "The System Worked"

[p] Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Sunday that the thwarting of the attempt to blow up an Amsterdam-Detroit airline flight Christmas Day demonstrated that "the system worked."

Asked by CNN's Candy Crowley on "State of the Union" how that could be possible when the young Nigerian who has been charged with trying to set off the bomb was able to smuggle explosive liquid onto the jet, Napolitano responded: "We're asking the same questions.

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Peter King rebukes Napolitano
[p] Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) rebuked Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano Sunday for saying that the botched terrorist attempt to blow up an Amsterdam-Detroit airline flight Friday demonstrated that "the system worked."

“The fact is the system did not work, and we have to find a bipartisan way to fix it. He made it on the plane with explosives and detonated the explosive," King said on CBS's "Face the Nation." "If that had been successful, the plane would have come down and we would have had a Christmas Day massacre with almost 300 people murdered."

King, the ranking Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, also said that the Obama administration hasn’t done enough in raising awareness of the risks of Islamic terrorism – a point echoed by his House Republican colleague, Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.).

“It’s important for the president or the secretary to be more out there and reminding people just how real this threat was and how deadly it is," Kind said. "For the first three months of this administration, they refused to use the word terrorism."

“This is a teaching moment," he went on. "And I believe that he or the secretary or the vice president or the attorney general should be out there reminding the American people that this shows how deadly this enemy is, this shows how real this threat is, and how we have to do whatever we can to protect the American people.”

Let's face it. Maintaining safety - air travel and otherwise - is not a simple task. The sad reality is that balancing liberty and privacy against safety measures is quickly becoming impossible, if not moot in some circumstances. Travel will ultimately pay the price. We said this a decade ago, but thought it would be well realized by now. Will another major attack drive the point home and keep people awake longer? Eventually.

That is what it is and the future remains unwritten, but this Napolitano woman is yet another prime example of the delusional left - who had confidence in her in the first place? Oh, that's right, probably the same that thought Obama was somehow a good presidential selection - one, amongst the entire line of Democrat politicians that feel as long as you say it, no matter how outlandish, that's good enough. Those are of the same mindset that proposes cookies and candy floss will assuage they that are intent on committing crime and visiting harm upon others.

Such pathetic incompetence, unbelievably lame spin and delusion. The system worked? Her own mother wouldn't buy that one.

Where's the Zero? Lounging in Hawaii. You'd think he might have taken a moment and made an actual statement rather than offer some aid written, cliche comment. I mean, given that he sticks his face on television each day for some BS. This? Na.

Feel how you might about the Republicans, but in order to have faith in or back the clown car that comes loaded with the likes of Barry, Pelosi, Reid, Durbin, Boxer, Dodd, Rangel, Murtha, etc. etc. you better line up for some 'free' health care with a thorough head examining being the priority.

To think that this masquerade has gone on for only one year thus far...

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'Most Transparent Administration Ever' Continues to Foist BS Under Cover of Darkness and Holidays :

U.S. Move to Cover Fannie, Freddie Losses

[wsj] The Obama administration's decision to cover an unlimited amount of losses at the mortgage-finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac over the next three years stirred controversy over the holiday.

The Treasury announced Thursday it was removing the caps that limited the amount of available capital to the companies to $200 billion each.

Unlimited access to bailout funds through 2012 was "necessary for preserving the continued strength and stability of the mortgage market," the Treasury said. Fannie and Freddie purchase or guarantee most U.S. home mortgages and have run up huge losses stemming from the worst wave of defaults since the 1930s.

"The timing of this executive order giving Fannie and Freddie a blank check is no coincidence," said Rep. Spencer Bachus of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the House Financial Services Committee. He said the Christmas Eve announcement was designed "to prevent the general public from taking note."

Treasury officials couldn't be reached for comment Friday.

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Here's The Secret Reason We Eliminated The Bailout Caps On Fannie And Freddie

[tbi] On Christmas Eve, when the news was assured of getting no coverage whatsoever, The White House announced that it had eliminated the maximum bailout cap for Fannie Mae (FNM) and Freddie (FRE).

As some observers have pointed out, all the move really did was formalize what everyone has figured for decades, that the two zombie GSEs were truly organs of the federal government, and that their debts would be backed up ad infinitum.

So, why the move, and why then?

Credit analyst Edwart Pinto shares his theories.

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What the Treasury’s lifting of the bailout caps on Fannie and Freddie might portend for 2010

Might Treasury be taking these steps in anticipation of the following?

1. Revisions to the flagging Homeowner Affordable Housing Program (HAMP). Any changes will likely increase near term bailout costs to Fannie and Freddie if HAMP’s current reliance on interest reduction is replaced in part by principal reduction. The losses associated with a modification of a loan using an interest rate reduction are spread out over time while a modification using principal reduction results in taking a more immediate loss.

2. Fannie and Freddie taking on a greater role in the near term to support their own mortgage backed securities (MBS). Now that the Treasury’s and the Federal Reserve’s own support programs are in the process of winding down, the administration’s actions may be preparing Fannie and Freddie as the vehicles for continuing this support. The Treasury’s December 24, 2009 announcement raises the portfolio limits to $900 billion each, thereby providing Fannie and Freddie with the ability on a combined basis to increase their portfolios by a total of $275 billion. At the current rate of the Fed’s MBS purchases, this new capacity would last about 4-5 months.

3. Fannie and Freddie growing their portfolios on a long term basis to provide continued support to the MBS market. Given the recent uptick in mortgage rates due to increasing Treasury rates, the lifting of the bailout caps may be designed to reassure investors in an effort to keep MBS spreads from widening relative to Treasury rates. By providing a more open ended capital commitment, along with the greater portfolio capacity now, Fannie and Freddie are in a position to grow their portfolios early in 2010. If the market accepts their purchases without wider spreads, then even higher portfolio dollar limits can be created with the stroke of a pen;

4. The administration’s announcement in February regarding the future role of Fannie and Freddie. In a separate press release also issued on December 24, 2009 it was revealed that the executive pay packages at Fannie and Freddie do not include a common stock component. This fact, along with the lifting of the bailout caps and the expanded portfolio capacity, may well indicate an intention to formalize Fannie and Freddie’s continued status as government agencies. If this were to happen, Fannie and Freddie’s outstanding common stock likely becomes worthless, making it of no use as an employee incentive. . This action would be justified by stating that Fannie and Freddie are just too important to the economic recovery to re-privatize.

5. Increasing the demand for Fannie and Freddie’s MBS by reducing the multiplier for bank risk based capital requirements from 20% to 10%. This action would help serve to keep spreads to treasuries narrow. Banks would only need 0.8% risk based capital to support their holdings of Fannie Freddie MBS versus the 1.6% needed today. The earlier noted lifting of Treasury’s capital support caps could provide the justification for this reduction in capital requirements, since it signals an increase in the government’s commitment to Fannie and Freddie..

The above actions would preserve and strengthen the government’s involvement and control over the country’s housing finance system and make it harder to reintroduce substantial private sector involvement later on. They would also continue distortions in the marketplace leading to who knows what unintended consequences. Finally these steps would do nothing to deleverage the housing finance system, a key step in returning it to any degree of normality.

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Senator Max Baucus Inebriated on Senate Floor : Tax Dollars At Work

Embarrassing, offensive and pathetic. One expects him to start weeping at any moment.

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Saying No to ObamaThe U.S. : president is popular, but world leaders are finding it easy to defy his wishes

[s] [...] It isn't just that that no one has cut Obama any slack. World leaders seem to be taking pleasure in rebuffing him, disappointing him, even, in some cases, mocking him. French President Nicolas Sarkozy famously called Obama an "inexperienced, ill-prepared" leader.

Praising and admiring Obama are still common, but raising doubts about him, even scoffing at him, is now becoming fashionable. Although he is still popular among Europeans and more popular with Muslims than his despised predecessor, Obama is being tagged with the unflattering label John Quincy Adams earned before he lost the 1828 election: "Adams can write, Jackson can fight." [...]

In fact, no world leader has paid a price for disappointing Obama. With Obama so nice and so conciliatory, risking retaliation by the White House doesn't seem all that dangerous. If resisting Bush's policies was a political necessity, encouraged and driven by the anger of the masses (ask Britain's Tony Blair about that), resisting Obama has become trendy, almost cool, because it gives world leaders the chance to stand taller, to be an equal member of the club of the clashing rock stars. Imagine the most popular boy in class asking a girl out. Imagine that after much consideration the girl says no. Not even you are good enough for me.

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Obama The Great Orator : Rocks His First Year : Sets Record Low For 12 Month Approval Rating

We knew you could do it. Nice job.

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Obama the party crasher

[wt] Barack Obama is not used to being the guy not invited to a party. At the Copenhagen global warming conference, however, he found that not everyone wanted to hang with him. Our president can't take a hint.

After Mr. Obama's bilateral meeting with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, the Chinese began sending lower-level functionaries to the multilateral meetings. A frustrated Mr. Obama pressed for another bilateral meeting, which was scheduled for Friday at 6:15 p.m. Other leaders of the countries known as the "BASIC" bloc were harder to pin down.

The Obama team tried to schedule a meeting with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and was told he was at the airport readying to leave. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva also was unavailable. South African President Jacob Zuma said there was no point meeting without India and Brazil. Then the Chinese pushed the bilateral meeting back to 7 p.m.

"We were told they were at the airport," a senior administration official said. "We were told delegations were split up. We were told they weren't going to meet." So imagine Mr. Obama's surprise when he arrived for the bilateral powwow and found all four leaders in the room already in deep discussion. "Are you ready for me?" he said with an "uncharacteristic edge" to his voice, according to a CBS News report.

"We weren't crashing a meeting," an Obama flack later explained defensively. "We were going for our bilateral meeting." But that didn't stop him from walking in where he wasn't invited. Clearly, Mr. Obama learned a few things from his own White House party crashers.

There was no chair at the table for Mr. Obama so he announced he would sit next to his "friend Lula," whose staff had to scramble to make room for the president and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. On Monday, Mr. da Silva used his weekly radio program to rebuke the United States for its stance at Copenhagen.

After Mr. Obama arrived, the BASIC group was basically held hostage. They had tried politely to keep Mr. Obama at arms length, but since he showed up, decorum mandated that they find a way to save face.

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Questions over business deals of UN climate change guru Dr Rajendra Pachauri

The head of the UN's climate change panel - Dr Rajendra Pachauri - is accused of making a fortune from his links with 'carbon trading' companies, Christopher Booker and Richard North write.

[ukt] No one in the world exercised more influence on the events leading up to the Copenhagen conference on global warming than Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and mastermind of its latest report in 2007.

Although Dr Pachauri is often presented as a scientist (he was even once described by the BBC as “the world’s top climate scientist”), as a former railway engineer with a PhD in economics he has no qualifications in climate science at all.

What has also almost entirely escaped attention, however, is how Dr Pachauri has established an astonishing worldwide portfolio of business interests with bodies which have been investing billions of dollars in organisations dependent on the IPCC’s policy recommendations.

These outfits include banks, oil and energy companies and investment funds heavily involved in ‘carbon trading’ and ‘sustainable technologies’, which together make up the fastest-growing commodity market in the world, estimated soon to be worth trillions of dollars a year.

Today, in addition to his role as chairman of the IPCC, Dr Pachauri occupies more than a score of such posts, acting as director or adviser to many of the bodies which play a leading role in what has become known as the international ‘climate industry’.

It is remarkable how only very recently has the staggering scale of Dr Pachauri’s links to so many of these concerns come to light, inevitably raising questions as to how the world’s leading ‘climate official’ can also be personally involved in so many organisations which stand to benefit from the IPCC’s recommendations.

The issue of Dr Pachauri’s potential conflict of interest was first publicly raised last Tuesday when, after giving a lecture at Copenhagen University, he was handed a letter by two eminent ‘climate sceptics’. One was the Stephen Fielding, the Australian Senator who sparked the revolt which recently led to the defeat of his government’s ‘cap and trade scheme’. The other, from Britain, was Lord Monckton, a longtime critic of the IPCC’s science, who has recently played a key part in stiffening opposition to a cap and trade bill in the US Senate.

Their open letter first challenged the scientific honesty of a graph prominently used in the IPCC’s 2007 report, and shown again by Pachauri in his lecture, demanding that he should withdraw it. But they went on to question why the report had not declared Pachauri’s personal interest in so many organisations which seemingly stood to profit from its findings.

The letter, which included information first disclosed in last week’s Sunday Telegraph, was circulated to all the 192 national conference delegations, calling on them to dismiss Dr Pachauri as IPCC chairman because of recent revelations of his conflicting interests.

The original power base from which Dr Pachauri has built up his worldwide network of influence over the past decade is the Delhi-based Tata Energy Research Institute, of which he became director in 1981 and director-general in 2001. Now renamed The Energy Research Institute, TERI was set up in 1974 by India’s largest privately-owned business empire, the Tata Group, with interests ranging from steel, cars and energy to chemicals, telecommunications and insurance (and now best-known in the UK as the owner of Jaguar, Land Rover, Tetley Tea and Corus, Britain’s largest steel company).

Although TERI has extended its sponsorship since the name change, the two concerns are still closely linked. [...]

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A Whodunit: The $100 million mystery hospital

[abc] The health reform Christmas gifts for Sens. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Ben Nelson of Nebraska are well known . But somewhere out there is another good little legislator who got funding for a hospital in their state.

But which senator? Which hospital? It is a health care whodunit.

Somewhere out there in the United States is a “Health Care Facility” “at a public research university in the United States that contains a State’s sole public academic medical and dental school.”

We know this because in the bill Democrats released Saturday morning is a $100,000,000 check for that hospital (presumably there is only one).

Republicans poring over the bill Democrats released Saturday found this on page 328:

“(a) APPROPRIATION.—There are authorized to be appropriated, and there are appropriated to the Department of Health and Human Services, $100,000,000 for fiscal year 2010, to remain available for obligation until September 30, 2011, to be used for debt service on, or direct construction or renovation of, a health care facility that provides research, inpatient tertiary care, or outpatient clinical services. Such facility shall be affiliated with an academic health center at a public research university in the United States that contains a State’s sole public academic medical and dental school.” (Manager’s Amendment To H.R. 3590, Pg. 328)

We have asked for some clarification from Democrats.

Meantime, one Republican quipped: “If taxpayers are going to be expected to sign the check, Democrats should at least let them know who to make it out to.”

Update:

Democratic staffers say there are 11 states with medical schools that could qualify for the funding (we’re still waiting for the list). The Secretary of HHS would decide who gets a piece of the $100,000,000 pie.

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Clown Show

Obama gives himself a "solid B+" and Arnie gives him an "A for effort." No wonder the school system is blowing so much chalk dust. Left wing minds and institutions certainly do love to dole out the congratulations to themselves and each other, no matter how completely unwarranted.

Peace Prize = Obama.

ABBA = into Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. KISS (and a host of other actual rock bands over the years)...uh, no. Never mind that they actually are a rock band and irrespective of whether a fan of the band or not, have sold and entertained uncountable numbers.

The list is without end....

...and this ramming of the health care bill via cloture vote bribery should offend any thinking person. For that matter, most of the actions or lack thereof from the current administration should be offending, if only for the base disregard for the voters shown. Pathetic. Here's to hoping that all of these self important thieves pay big time.

Merry Christmas.

Change Nobody Believes In
A bill so reckless that it has to be rammed through on a partisan vote on Christmas eve.

[wsj] And tidings of comfort and joy from Harry Reid too. The Senate Majority Leader has decided that the last few days before Christmas are the opportune moment for a narrow majority of Democrats to stuff ObamaCare through the Senate to meet an arbitrary White House deadline. Barring some extraordinary reversal, it now seems as if they have the 60 votes they need to jump off this cliff, with one-seventh of the economy in tow.

Mr. Obama promised a new era of transparent good government, yet on Saturday morning Mr. Reid threw out the 2,100-page bill that the world's greatest deliberative body spent just 17 days debating and replaced it with a new "manager's amendment" that was stapled together in covert partisan negotiations. Democrats are barely even bothering to pretend to care what's in it, not that any Senator had the chance to digest it in the 38 hours before the first cloture vote at 1 a.m. this morning. After procedural motions that allow for no amendments, the final vote could come at 9 p.m. on December 24.

Even in World War I there was a Christmas truce.

The rushed, secretive way that a bill this destructive and unpopular is being forced on the country shows that "reform" has devolved into the raw exercise of political power for the single purpose of permanently expanding the American entitlement state. An increasing roll of leaders in health care and business are looking on aghast at a bill that is so large and convoluted that no one can truly understand it, as Finance Chairman Max Baucus admitted on the floor last week. The only goal is to ram it into law while the political window is still open, and clean up the mess later.

***

• Health costs. From the outset, the White House's core claim was that reform would reduce health costs for individuals and businesses, and they're sticking to that story. "Anyone who says otherwise simply hasn't read the bills," Mr. Obama said over the weekend. This is so utterly disingenuous that we doubt the President really believes it.

The best and most rigorous cost analysis was recently released by the insurer WellPoint, which mined its actuarial data in various regional markets to model the Senate bill. WellPoint found that a healthy 25-year-old in Milwaukee buying coverage on the individual market will see his costs rise by 178%. A small business based in Richmond with eight employees in average health will see a 23% increase. Insurance costs for a 40-year-old family with two kids living in Indianapolis will pay 106% more. And on and on.

These increases are solely the result of ObamaCare—above and far beyond the status quo—because its strict restrictions on underwriting and risk-pooling would distort insurance markets. All but a handful of states have rejected regulations like "community rating" because they encourage younger and healthier buyers to wait until they need expensive care, increasing costs for everyone. Benefits and pricing will now be determined by politics.

As for the White House's line about cutting costs by eliminating supposed "waste," even Victor Fuchs, an eminent economist generally supportive of ObamaCare, warned last week that these political theories are overly simplistic. "The oft-heard promise 'we will find out what works and what does not' scarcely does justice to the complexity of medical practice," the Stanford professor wrote.

• Steep declines in choice and quality. This is all of a piece with the hubris of an Administration that thinks it can substitute government planning for market forces in determining where the $33 trillion the U.S. will spend on medicine over the next decade should go.

This centralized system means above all fewer choices; what works for the political class must work for everyone. With formerly private insurers converted into public utilities, for instance, they'll inevitably be banned from selling products like health savings accounts that encourage more cost-conscious decisions.

Unnoticed by the press corps, the Congressional Budget Office argued recently that the Senate bill would so "substantially reduce flexibility in terms of the types, prices, and number of private sellers of health insurance" that companies like WellPoint might need to "be considered part of the federal budget."

With so large a chunk of the economy and medical practice itself in Washington's hands, quality will decline. Ultimately, "our capacity to innovate and develop new therapies would suffer most of all," as Harvard Medical School Dean Jeffrey Flier recently wrote in our pages. Take the $2 billion annual tax—rising to $3 billion in 2018—that will be leveled against medical device makers, among the most innovative U.S. industries. Democrats believe that more advanced health technologies like MRI machines and drug-coated stents are driving costs too high, though patients and their physicians might disagree.

"The Senate isn't hearing those of us who are closest to the patient and work in the system every day," Brent Eastman, the chairman of the American College of Surgeons, said in a statement for his organization and 18 other speciality societies opposing ObamaCare. For no other reason than ideological animus, doctor-owned hospitals will face harsh new limits on their growth and who they're allowed to treat. Physician Hospitals of America says that ObamaCare will "destroy over 200 of America's best and safest hospitals."

• Blowing up the federal fisc. Even though Medicare's unfunded liabilities are already about 2.6 times larger than the entire U.S. economy in 2008, Democrats are crowing that ObamaCare will cost "only" $871 billion over the next decade while fantastically reducing the deficit by $132 billion, according to CBO.

Yet some 98% of the total cost comes after 2014—remind us why there must absolutely be a vote this week—and most of the taxes start in 2010. That includes the payroll tax increase for individuals earning more than $200,000 that rose to 0.9 from 0.5 percentage points in Mr. Reid's final machinations. Job creation, here we come.

Other deceptions include a new entitlement for long-term care that starts collecting premiums tomorrow but doesn't start paying benefits until late in the decade. But the worst is not accounting for a formula that automatically slashes Medicare payments to doctors by 21.5% next year and deeper after that. Everyone knows the payment cuts won't happen but they remain in the bill to make the cost look lower. The American Medical Association's priority was eliminating this "sustainable growth rate" but all they got in return for their year of ObamaCare cheerleading was a two-month patch snuck into the defense bill that passed over the weekend.

The truth is that no one really knows how much ObamaCare will cost because its assumptions on paper are so unrealistic. To hide the cost increases created by other parts of the bill and transfer them onto the federal balance sheet, the Senate sets up government-run "exchanges" that will subsidize insurance for those earning up to 400% of the poverty level, or $96,000 for a family of four in 2016. Supposedly they would only be offered to those whose employers don't provide insurance or work for small businesses.

As Eugene Steuerle of the left-leaning Urban Institute points out, this system would treat two workers with the same total compensation—whatever the mix of cash wages and benefits—very differently. Under the Senate bill, someone who earned $42,000 would get $5,749 from the current tax exclusion for employer-sponsored coverage but $12,750 in the exchange. A worker making $60,000 would get $8,310 in the exchanges but only $3,758 in the current system.

For this reason Mr. Steuerle concludes that the Senate bill is not just a new health system but also "a new welfare and tax system" that will warp the labor market. Given the incentives of these two-tier subsidies, employers with large numbers of lower-wage workers like Wal-Mart may well convert them into "contractors" or do more outsourcing. As more and more people flood into "free" health care, taxpayer costs will explode.

• Political intimidation. The experts who have pointed out such complications have been ignored or dismissed as "ideologues" by the White House. Those parts of the health-care industry that couldn't be bribed outright, like Big Pharma, were coerced into acceding to this agenda. The White House was able to, er, persuade the likes of the AMA and the hospital lobbies because the federal government will control 55% of total U.S. health spending under ObamaCare, according to the Administration's own Medicare actuaries.

Others got hush money, namely Nebraska's Ben Nelson. Even liberal Governors have been howling for months about ObamaCare's unfunded spending mandates: Other budget priorities like education will be crowded out when about 21% of the U.S. population is on Medicaid, the joint state-federal program intended for the poor. Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman calculates that ObamaCare will result in $2.5 billion in new costs for his state that "will be passed on to citizens through direct or indirect taxes and fees," as he put it in a letter to his state's junior Senator.

So in addition to abortion restrictions, Mr. Nelson won the concession that Congress will pay for 100% of Nebraska Medicaid expansions into perpetuity. His capitulation ought to cost him his political career, but more to the point, what about the other states that don't have a Senator who's the 60th vote for ObamaCare?
***

"After a nearly century-long struggle we are on the cusp of making health-care reform a reality in the United States of America," Mr. Obama said on Saturday. He's forced to claim the mandate of "history" because he can't claim the mandate of voters. Some 51% of the public is now opposed, according to National Journal's composite of all health polling. The more people know about ObamaCare, the more unpopular it becomes.

The tragedy is that Mr. Obama inherited a consensus that the health-care status quo needs serious reform, and a popular President might have crafted a durable compromise that blended the best ideas from both parties. A more honest and more thoughtful approach might have even done some good. But as Mr. Obama suggested, the Democratic old guard sees this plan as the culmination of 20th-century liberalism.

So instead we have this vast expansion of federal control. Never in our memory has so unpopular a bill been on the verge of passing Congress, never has social and economic legislation of this magnitude been forced through on a purely partisan vote, and never has a party exhibited more sheer political willfulness that is reckless even for Washington or had more warning about the consequences of its actions.

These 60 Democrats are creating a future of epic increases in spending, taxes and command-and-control regulation, in which bureaucracy trumps innovation and transfer payments are more important than private investment and individual decisions. In short, the Obama Democrats have chosen change nobody believes in—outside of themselves—and when it passes America will be paying for it for decades to come.

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Sharp Dressed Man

[ad] [...] My father was a car salesman and a good one. He was a sharp salesman; one that was always looking for what the customer actually wanted as well as what the customer could really afford. For every minute selling, he spent five qualifying. He didn’t boast about being the top salesman at the lot, although he usually was. He did boast that he had the fewest repos of all the salesmen, and the most repeat customers. He liked to sell people cars that he knew they could afford. His most repeated instruction to me was, “Never try to profit off of another’s misfortune.”

My father hated smooth. He liked plain talk and despised euphemism and manipulation, especially among salesmen. He’d fire car salesmen working under him if he caught them lying or even shading the truth to make a sale. He looked at every deal brought to him for approval that the buyer didn’t have the credit for as a failed sale and wouldn’t approve them. “A man that will lie to a customer will lie to you,” he’d say. “Bad for the buyer and worse for the business,” he’d say. “If you let a man buy what he can’t afford on credit, you’re going to be taking the car back and making an enemy. We’re here to get cars off the lot, not see them come back after repossession. A man who can’t make his car payments is a man who can’t maintain his car. A salesman who’s so smooth he’s selling people cars bigger than they can afford is a salesman who’s taking a kickback from the repoman.” [...]

My father was a life-long Democrat, and despised Richard Nixon for his five-o’clock shadow and his smooth palaver. He felt the same way about Kennedy. “He looks sharp but when you listen to him he’s just too smooth a talker.”

What would my father think about a President who was a both a sharp-dressed man and was smoothly talking the country into buying trillions of dollars in deficits and entitlements?

“A salesman who’s so smooth he’s selling people cars bigger than they can afford is a salesman who’s taking a kickback from the repoman.”

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It's settled; climate circus was a fairy tale

[ocr] The best summation of the UN climate circus in Denmark comes from Andrew Bolt of Australia's Herald Sun: "Nothing is real in Copenhagen – not the temperature record, not the predictions, not the agenda, not the 'solution'.

Just so. Reuters, for example, carried a moving account of the speech by Ian Fry, lead negotiator for Tuvalu, the beleaguered Pacific island nation soon to be under water because of a planet-devastating combination of your SUV and unsustainable bovine flatulence from Vermont farms. "The fate of my country rests in your hands," Fry told the meeting. "I make this as a strong and impassioned plea ... I woke this morning and I was crying and that was not easy for a grown man to admit," he continued, "his voice choking with emotion," in the Reuters reporter's words. Who could fail to be moved?

"My country, 'tis of thee

Sweet land near rising sea

Of thee I choke!"

Alas, nowhere in this emotionally harrowing dispatch was there room to mention that Ian Fry's country is not Tuvalu but Australia, where he lives relatively safe from rising sea levels given that he's a hundred miles inland. A career doom-monger, he's resided in Queanbeyan, New South Wales for over a decade while working his way, in the revealing phrase of his neighbor Michelle Ormay, to being "very high up in climate change." As to whether the emotion-choked lachrymose pleader has ever lived in "his" endangered country of Tuvalu, his wife told Samantha Maiden of The Australian that she would "rather not comment." Like his fellow Copenhagen delegate Brad Pitt, Ian Fry is an actor: He's not a Tuvaluan, but he plays one on the world stage.

Whether he's an Aussie or a Tuvaluan, Fry's future king is Welsh, since under the British Commonwealth's environmentally responsible king-share program, the Prince of Wales is simultaneously heir to the thrones of Britain, Australian, Tuvalu and a bunch of other countries. His Royal Highness was also in Copenhagen last week, telling delegates that there were now only seven years left to save the planet. Prince Charles is so famously concerned about the environment that he's known as the Green Prince. Just for the record, his annual carbon footprint is 2,601 tons. The carbon footprint of an average Briton (i.e., all those wasteful, consumerist, environmentally unsustainable deadbeats) is 11 tons. To get him to Copenhagen to deliver his speech, His Highness was flown in by one of the Royal Air Force's fleet of VIP jets from the Royal Squadron. Total carbon emissions: 6.4 tons. In other words, the Green Prince used up seven months' of an average Brit's annual carbon footprint on one short flight to give one mediocre speech of alarmist boilerplate.

But relax, it's all cool, because he offsets! According to The Sydney Morning Herald, the Prince will be investing in exciting new green initiatives. "Investing" as in "using your own money", you mean? Not exactly. Apparently, it will be taxpayers' money. So he'll "offset" the cost of using up seven months of an average peasant's carbon footprint on one flight by taking the peasant's money and tossing it down some sinkhole. No wonder he feels so virtuous. Oh, don't worry, though. He does have to pay a personal penalty for the sin of flying by private jet: Seventy pounds. Which is the cost of about six new trees, or rather less than the bill for parking at Heathrow would have been.

So just to recap: The Prince of Wales, a man who has never drawn his own curtains, ramps up a carbon footprint of 2,601 tons while telling us that western capitalist excess is destroying the planet. Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the railroad engineer who heads the International Panel on Climate Change and has demanded that "hefty aviation taxes should be introduced to deter people from flying," flew 443,226 miles on "IPCC business" in the year and a half before the Copenhagen summit. And Al Gore is a carbon billionaire: He makes more money buying offsets from himself than his dad did from investing in Occidental Petroleum.

All of the above are, as that ersatz Tuvaluan delegate's neighbor would say, "very high up in climate change". But what about all the non-high-ups? Not just the low-level toadies like Associated Press "science" reporter Seth Borenstein, who dutifully pooh-poohed the idea that the leaked Climategate e-mails were of any significance and for his pains was rewarded by having to stand in line with thousands of other no-name warm-mongers for seven hours in the freezing streets of Copenhagen. All because the IPCC accredited 45,000 delegates to a space that accommodates 15,000 – but don't worry, when it comes to recalibrating the planet's climate, I'm sure they'll run the numbers more carefully.

But forget Borenstein and other hangers-on. Even making allowances for the stupidity of youthful idealism, the protesters in the streets of Copenhagen seem especially obtuse. Far from sticking it to the Man, they're cheerleading for the biggest Man of all: they're supporting a new globalized feudalism in which Prince Charles, Prince Al, Prince Rajendra and others "very high up in climate change" jet around the world at public expense telling the rest of us we need to stay put. A British parliamentarian recently proposed that everyone be issued with an annual "carbon allowance" that would be drawn down every time he booked a flight, or filled up his car, or bought a washer and dryer instead of beating his laundry on the rocks down by the river with the village women every week. You think the Prince of Wales or any other member of the new global elite will be subject to that "allowance"?

If you're young and you fall for this, you're a sap. Indeed, you're oozing so much sap the settled scientists should be measuring your tree rings. Remember that story a couple of weeks ago about how Danish prostitutes were offering free sex to Copenhagen delegates for the duration of the conference? I initially assumed it was just an amusing marketing cash-in by savvy Nordic strumpets. But no, the local "sex workers' union" Sexarbejdernes Interesseorganisation was responding to the municipal government's campaign to discourage attendees from partaking of prostitutes. The City of Copenhagen distributed cards to every hotel room showing a lady of the evening at a seedy street corner over the slogan "BE SUSTAINABLE: Don't Buy Sex."

"Be sustainable"? Prostitution happens to be legal in Copenhagen, and the "sex workers" were understandably peeved at being lumped into the same category of planet-wreckers as Big Oil, car manufacturers, travel agents and other notorious pariahs. So Big Sex decided they weren't going to take it lying down. Yet, in an odd way, that municipal postcard gets to the heart of what's going on: Government can – and will – use a "sustainable" environment as a pretext for anything that tickles its fancy. All ambitious projects – Communism, the new Caliphate – have global ambitions, but, when the globe itself is the cover for those ambitions, freeborn citizens should beware. Nico Little, a Canadian leftie at the Rabble Web site, distilled the logic into a single headline:

"Hookers Are Killing Polar Bears And Now You Can't Water Your Lawn."

Write that down. And next time the Prince of Wales, Al Gore, Dr. Pachauri or the delegation from Tuvalu give an "impassioned" speech, keep it handy as a useful précis.

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Smart money is on Hillary Clinton for 2016

[ukt] [...] Obama's popularity is the lowest of any American president at the end of his first year in office since polling began. Yet as his approval ratings have nose-dived, those of his Secretary of State have curved elegantly upwards.

A recent poll by the Clarus Research Group found that Hillary Clinton had a 75 per cent approval rating compared to 51 per cent for the man who defeated her in their epic battle for the Democratic nomination.

These are very early days to handicap 2016 but it's already clear that she has gone from being the supposedly inevitable 2008 nominee who had blown her one big chance as odds-on favourite to be the next Democratic president.

When Mrs Clinton accepted the job of Secretary of State many of her supporters feared she was falling into a trap. Fearing that she could be a rival source of power from Capitol Hill, Obama calculated she would be less of a threat if he brought her inside his tent.

The downsides for the former First Lady were obvious. She would give up her cherished seat as Senator for New York, which gave her an independent power base. Her voice on domestic policy would be silenced.

And her fortunes would inevitably be linked to the man whom she fervently believed was not up to the top job.

It is a sign of Mrs Clinton's astuteness that she said yes and now finds herself ideally placed to succeed Mr Obama or, in the increasingly plausible scenario that he becomes a one-term president, the Republican who ousts him in 2012.

During the past year, Mrs Clinton has done just what she did when she entered the Senate in 2001 - knuckled down to the hard grind of policy while building relationships with wary sceptics.

The woman who was one of the most polarising figures in American politics now has a glowing 65 per cent approval rating among Independents and healthy 57 per cent among Republicans.

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Under Obama, the Left feels left out

[p] The outrage among some of America’s most vocal liberals at President Barack Obama’s failure to expand government-run health care caps a year of disappointments for Obama’s allies on the left and raises worrying questions for Democrats in the 2010 midterm elections.

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The Real Gitmo
What I saw at America's best detention facility for terrorists.

[tws] Guantánamo Bay, Cuba

Shortly after 5 A.M., a detainee with an uneven voice sings the call to prayer. After a few bars, a second detainee joins in by sounding out another hymn.

"That's unusual," a tower guard who looks bored after a few months on the job remarks. "Usually, just one of them does it."

Detainees assemble in a corner of the camp and begin praying. Others pace back and forth in front of their cells with prayer beads in hand. For several minutes all is quiet--eerily so. Some of the world's most dangerous terrorists lurk just a short distance from our perch atop a guard tower, but you would never know it.

Welcome to Camp 4 at the Guantánamo Bay detention facility in Cuba.

The iconic images of Gitmo are not photos of Camp 4, however. The pictures that have captured the world's imagination are of detainees shackled on bended knee in bright orange jumpsuits with their eyes and ears covered. Those pictures were taken more than seven and a half years ago at Camp X-Ray, in the long corridor that runs down the middle of the camp.

Today that corridor is overrun with weeds and unruly grass, and the rest of the camp is in no better state of repair. Camp X-Ray housed "war on terror" detainees for just four months, from January to April 2002. It has long since been abandoned.

Banana rats, which look like some mutant combination of possum and rat, now hang from the cages that once housed the detainees. Gone, too, are the orange jumpsuits. They have been replaced by tan, white, and other neutral-colored clothing. During my multi-day tour of Guantánamo Bay, one official tells me that some journalists from Turkey wanted to take pictures of the detainees in their bright orange jumpsuits. When this official explained the detainees no longer wear those outfits, the Turkish reporters asked if a detainee could be dressed up in one for the photos as that is what their readers expect to see.

The story is emblematic of the disconnect between life at Guantánamo as it is today, and the Guantánamo of popular mythology. It is the latter that is the basis for the Obama administration's decision to close the detention facilities there.

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Inconvenient truth for Al Gore as his North Pole sums don't add up

[t] There are many kinds of truth. Al Gore was poleaxed by an inconvenient one yesterday. [...]

Mr Gore, speaking at the Copenhagen climate change summit, stated the latest research showed that the Arctic could be completely ice-free in five years.

In his speech, Mr Gore told the conference: “These figures are fresh. Some of the models suggest to Dr [Wieslav] Maslowski that there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.”

However, the climatologist whose work Mr Gore was relying upon dropped the former Vice-President in the water with an icy blast.

“It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at,” Dr Maslowski said. “I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.”

Mr Gore’s office later admitted that the 75 per cent figure was one used by Dr Maslowksi as a “ballpark figure” several years ago in a conversation with Mr Gore.

The embarrassing error cast another shadow over the conference after the controversy over the hacked e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, which appeared to suggest that scientists had manipulated data to strengthen their argument that human activities were causing global warming.

Perhaps Mr Gore had felt the need to gild the lily to buttress resolve. But his speech was roundly criticised by members of the climate science community. “This is an exaggeration that opens the science up to criticism from sceptics,” Professor Jim Overland, a leading oceanographer at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.

“You really don’t need to exaggerate the changes in the Arctic.”

Others said that, even if quoted correctly, Dr Maslowski’s six-year projection for near-ice-free conditions is at the extreme end of the scale. Most climate scientists agree that a 20 to 30-year timescale is more likely for the near-disappearance of sea ice.

“Maslowski’s work is very well respected, but he’s a bit out on a limb,” said Professor Peter Wadhams, a specialist in ocean physics at the University of Cambridge.

Dr Maslowki, who works at the US Naval Postgraduate School in California, said that his latest results give a six-year projection for the melting of 80 per cent of the ice, but he said he expects some ice to remain beyond 2020.

He added: “I was very explicit that we were talking about near-ice-free conditions and not completely ice-free conditions in the northern ocean. I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this,” he said. “It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at, based on the information I provided to Al Gore’s office.”

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Russians confirm that UK climate scientists manipulated data to exaggerate global warming

[t] Climategate just got much, much bigger. And all thanks to the Russians who, with perfect timing, dropped this bombshell just as the world’s leaders are gathering in Copenhagen to discuss ways of carbon-taxing us all back to the dark ages.

Feast your eyes on this news release from Rionovosta, via the Ria Novosti agency, posted on Icecap.

[...] On Tuesday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data.

The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming theory. Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country’s territory, and that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports. Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations.

The data of stations located in areas not listed in the Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature UK (HadCRUT) survey often does not show any substantial warming in the late 20th century and the early 21st century. [...]

What the Russians are suggesting here, in other words, is that the entire global temperature record used by the IPCC to inform world government policy is a crock.

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Surprise : Lockerbie bomber goes missing from home and hospital

[t] Mystery surrounded the Lockerbie bomber last night after he could not be reached at his home or in hospital.

Libyan officials could say nothing about the whereabouts of Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi, and his Scottish monitors could not contact him by telephone. They will try again to speak to him today but if they fail to reach him, the Scottish government could face a new crisis.

Under the terms of his release from jail, the bomber cannot change his address or leave Tripoli, and must keep in regular communication with East Renfrewshire Council.

Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic and relatives of the 270 people who died in the 1988 bombing expressed anger about al-Megrahi’s disappearance. Richard Baker, Labour’s justice spokesman in the Scottish Parliament, said the whole affair was turning into a shambles and putting Scotland’s reputation at risk. “This flags up just how ludicrous it is that East Renfrewshire Council, a local council thousands of miles away from Libya, is responsible for supervising al-Megrahi’s conditions of licence,” he said.

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The Worst-Run Big City in the U.S.

[sf] Spend more. Get less. We’re the city that knows how.

Despite its good intentions, San Francisco is not leading the country in gay marriage. Despite its good intentions, it is not stopping wars. Despite its spending more money per capita on homelessness than any comparable city, its homeless problem is worse than any comparable city's. Despite its spending more money per capita, period, than almost any city in the nation, San Francisco has poorly managed, budget-busting capital projects, overlapping social programs no one is certain are working, and a transportation system where the only thing running ahead of schedule is the size of its deficit.

It's time to face facts: San Francisco is spectacularly mismanaged and arguably the worst-run big city in America. This year's city budget is an astonishing $6.6 billion — more than twice the budget for the entire state of Idaho — for roughly 800,000 residents. Yet despite that stratospheric amount, San Francisco can't point to progress on many of the social issues it spends liberally to tackle — and no one is made to answer when the city comes up short.

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Arnie Should Think Twice

We kind of like Arnie and have stuck up for him here and there, albeit infrequently. That aside he's rounded out to be a bit of a run-of-the-mill political blowhard, all shtick, hot air and promises. With his stogie chomping carnival aspect and idiotic self-quotes, his latest spouting reveals a high grade foolishness.

[p]California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is delivering his big speech in Copenhagen right now -- but before he took the stage he offered an opening salvo -- a whack at fellow Republican Sarah Palin who has expressed skepticism about global warming.

The California governor has become an environmental standard bearer for the Republican party, which is split on the merits of curbing emissions. Sarah Palin, John McCain’s running mate in the 2008 presidential election, has attacked cap and trade and questioned any link between man-made emissions and global warming.

“You have to ask: what was she trying to accomplish?” said Mr Schwarzenegger. “Is she really interested in this subject or is she interested in her career and in winning the [Republican] nomination [for president]? You have to take all these things with a grain of salt.”

You got that? The show-boat governor of the chronically distressed state of Kaleefornia is all suited up for the Copenhagen ball and has the temerity to suggest that Sarah Palin might be just making commentary for the personal interest of her political career. Is this guy looking in the mirror?

Little matter, precious few give a damn about what Arnie says - within his state or elsewhere - and it's a solid bet that he'll be fading away soon enough from the political limelight. Maybe he can try acting in film or something.

Sarah, as has become her method, replied all but immediately on her Facebook page, taking only a simple paragraph (of course, she doesn't write any of her own stuff! such an idiot!) to play Arnie out as the fool:

Greener Than Thou?

[sp] Why is Governor Schwarzenegger pushing for the same sorts of policies in Copenhagen that have helped drive his state into record deficits and unemployment? Perhaps he will recall that I live in our nation’s only Arctic state and that I was among the first governors to create a sub-cabinet to deal specifically with climate change. While I and all Alaskans witness the impacts of changes in weather patterns firsthand, I have repeatedly said that we can’t primarily blame man’s activities for those changes. And while I did look for practical responses to those changes, what I didn’t do was hamstring Alaska’s job creators with burdensome regulations so that I could act “greener than thou” when talking to reporters.

- Sarah Palin

And that is why people like her. She call it as she sees it.

Arnold = Terminated.

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Copenhagen summit carbon footprint biggest ever: report

[r] Delegates, journalists, activists and observers from almost 200 countries have gathered at the Dec 7-18 summit and their travel and work will create 46,200 tonnes of carbon dioxide, most of it from their flights.

This would fill nearly 10,000 Olympic swimming pools, and is the same amount produced each year by 2,300 Americans or 660,000 Ethiopians -- the vast difference is due to the huge gap in consumption patterns in the two countries -- according to U.S. government statistics about per person emissions in 2006.

Despite efforts by the Danish government to reduce the conference's carbon footprint, around 5,700 tonnes of carbon dioxide will be created by the summit and a further 40,500 tonnes created by attendees' flights to Copenhagen.

The figure for the flights was calculated by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), while the domestic carbon footprint from the summit was calculated by accountants Deloitte, said Deloitte consultant Stine Balslev.

"This is much bigger than the last talks because there are many more people here," she said, adding that 18,000 people were expected to pass through the conference center every day.

"These are preliminary figures but we expect that when we do the final calculations after the conference is over, the carbon footprint will be about the same."

Deloitte included in their calculations emissions caused by accommodation, local transport, electricity and heating of the conference center, paper, security, transport of goods and services as well as energy used by computers, kitchens, photocopiers and printers inside the conference center.

Accommodation accounted for 23 percent of the summit's greenhouse gas emissions in Copenhagen, while transport caused 7 percent. Seventy percent came from activities inside the conference center, she said.

"We have been forced to put up some temporary buildings in order to provide the delegation rooms because the number of participants is so much larger than expected," said Balslev.

"For instance the U.S. delegation has ordered an area that's five times as big as last year."

The temporary buildings housing delegation offices are not well insulated and are warmed by oil heaters, so this area is the most energy-wasteful, she said.

The researchers assumed that 60 percent of conference participants would catch public transport to and from the conference but Balslev said that was probably optimistic.

Balslev said most of the energy used by the conference was from coal fired power stations that power the electricity grid, but some was from wind power.

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Obama gives himself B+ for first months in office

How sadly pathetic. First off, you'd think the guy would show a scintilla of wisdom and class and suggest that it is not his place to judge himself - no surprise this was missed - but to laughably suggest a B+ (higher "if I hadpassed HealthCare!) in the face of across the board suckage and approval ratings, is truly stupendous. I'll give you an A+, champ. Get yourself a new clown nose for the dance, naked emperor, it seems you've even outgrown your current one.

[afp] US President Barack Obama, in remarks aired late Sunday, awarded himself a B plus for his first 11 months in office, stressing in an interview with talk show queen Oprah Winfrey that there was still much to be done.

"A good solid B plus," Obama said during an hour-long, intimate soft-focus ABC network Christmas at the White House special, when Winfrey asked what grade he would give himself.

Explaining why he wouldn't give himself top marks, the president said his administration had "inherited the biggest set of challenges of any president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt" which they were still working on.

He had earned good points for helping to stabilize the economy, setting a path out of Iraq and restoring America's international image, but the job was not yet finished.

"B plus because of the things that are undone. Health care is not yet signed. If I get health care passed, we tip into A minus," Obama said, his hair visibly grayer than when he took office on January 2.

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6-figure salaries increase : for government bureaucrats : change you can believe in

[usat] The number of federal workers earning six-figure salaries has exploded during the recession, according to a USA TODAY analysis of federal salary data.

Federal employees making salaries of $100,000 or more jumped from 14% to 19% of civil servants during the recession's first 18 months — and that's before overtime pay and bonuses are counted.

The highest-paid federal employees are doing best of all on salary increases. Defense Department civilian employees earning $150,000 or more increased from 1,868 in December 2007 to 10,100 in June 2009, the most recent figure available.

When the recession started, the Transportation Department had only one person earning a salary of $170,000 or more. Eighteen months later, 1,690 employees had salaries above $170,000.

The trend to six-figure salaries is occurring throughout the federal government, in agencies big and small, high-tech and low-tech. The primary cause: substantial pay raises and new salary rules.

"There's no way to justify this to the American people. It's ridiculous," says Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, a first-term lawmaker who is on the House's federal workforce subcommittee.

Federal workers are enjoying an extraordinary boom time — in pay and hiring — during a recession that has cost 7.3 million jobs in the private sector.

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Can't Hide the Decline: Obama Hits New Polling Lows

The only surprise this brings us is the rapidity of reaching the numbers that he has.

[rcp] Excluding the Rasmussen and Gallup overnight tracking polls, there have been seven major national surveys released this week. President Obama has recorded an all-time low job approval rating in six of the seven:

Quinnipiac 46%
Marist 46%
CNN/Opinion Research 48%
Ipsos/McClatchy 49%
CBS News/NY Times 50%
Bloomberg* 54%

Only one poll - FOX News/Opinion Dynamics - showed in increase in President Obama's job approval rating over the last month. In the current survey, FOX has Obama at 50% approval, up from his all-time low of 46% recorded in last month's poll.

The net result, of course, is that Obama has also reached an all-time low approval rating in the RCP National Average at 48.9%. Obama initially dropped under the 50% for the first time over Thanksgiving - he spent three days at 49.9% between November 25 and November 28. After ticking up back over 50% right after the holiday break, Obama went under 50% again on December 4th and has remained there for seven straight days.

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[nyt] David Letterman has been all but begging Sarah Palin to grace his couch with a visit, but it was his competition, Conan O’Brien, that was granted the favor of a drop-in from the former vice-presidential candidate Friday night.

Ms. Palin made a surprise walk-on appearance with Mr. O’Brien on NBC’s “Tonight” show, as a counterpoint to a dramatic reading — complete with bongos — by the actor William Shatner, from her autobiography, “Going Rogue.”

The former Alaska governor walked out in front of a stunned and delighted audience and performed a dramatic reading of her own — also accompanied by bongos — from Mr. Shatner’s autobiography, “Up Till Now.”

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Seven tricks a con-artist will use on you

[t] Frank Stajano and Paul Wilson are interested in the recurring behavioral patterns con-artists use to exploit their victims.

The former is lecturer at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory and the latter is a writer and producer of TV show The Real Hustle.

Together they've produced a formidable study on the subject. In much, much condensed form, the principles they identify are these...

1) The Distraction principle: While you are distracted by what retains your interest, hustlers can so anything to you and you won’t notice

2) The Social Compliance principle: Society trains people not to question authority. Hustlers exploit this “suspension of suspiciousness” to make you do what they want

3) The Herd principle: Even suspicious marks will let their guard down when everyone next to them appears to share the same risks. Safety in numbers? Not if they’re all conspiring against you

4) The Dishonestly principle: Anything illegal you do will be used against you by the fraudster, making it harder for you to seek help once you realise you’ve been had

5) The Deception principle: Things and people are not what they seem. Hustlers know how to manipulate you to make you believe that they are

6) The Need and Greed principle: Your needs and desires make you vulnerable. Once hustlers know that you really want, they can easily manipulate you

7) The Time principle: When you are under time pressure to make an important choice, you use a different decision strategy. Hustlers steer you towards a strategy involving less reasoning

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The West's goals in Copenhagen are tantamount to suicide

[f] Whatever the results of the Copenhagen conference on climate change, one thing is for sure: Draconian reductions on carbon emissions will be tacitly accepted by the most developed economies and sloughed off by many developing ones. In essence, emerging economies get to cut their "carbon" intensity--a natural product of their economic evolution--while we get to cut our throats.

The logic behind this prediction goes something like this. Since the West created the industrial revolution and the greenhouse gases that supposedly caused this "crisis," it's our obligation to take much of the burden for cleaning them up.

Plagued by self-doubt and even self-loathing, many in the West will no doubt consider this an appropriate mea culpa. Our leaders will dutifully accept cuts in our carbon emissions--up to 80% by 2050--while developing countries increasetheirs, albeit at a lower rate. Oh, we also pledge to send billions in aid to help them achieve this goal.

The media shills, scientists, bureaucrats and corporate rent-seekers gathered at Copenhagen won't give much thought to what this means to the industrialized world's middle and working class. For many of them the new carbon regime means a gradual decline in living standards. Huge increases in energy costs, taxes and a spate of regulatory mandates will restrict their access to everything from single-family housing and personal mobility to employment in carbon-intensive industries like construction, manufacturing, warehousing and agriculture.

You can get a glimpse of this future in high-unemployment California. Here a burgeoning regulatory regime tied to global warming threatens to turn the state into a total "no go" economic development zone. Not only do companies have to deal with high taxes, cascading energy prices and regulations, they now face audits of their impact on global warming. Far easier to move your project to Texas--or if necessary, China.

The notion that the hoi polloi must be sacrificed to save the earth is not a new one. Paul Ehrlich, who was the mentor of President Obama's science advisor, John Holdren, laid out the defining logic in his 1968 best-seller, The Population Bomb. In this influential work, Ehrlich predicted mass starvation by the 1970s and "an age of scarcity" in key metals by the mid-1980s. Similar views were echoed by a 1972 "Limits to Growth" report issued by the Club of Rome, a global confab that enjoyed a cache similar to that of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

To deal with this looming crisis, Holdren in the 1977 book Ecoscience (co-authored with Anne and Paul Ehrlich) developed the notion of "de-development." According to Holdren, poorer countries like India and China could not be expected to work their way out of poverty since they were "foredoomed by enormous if not insurmountable economic and environmental obstacles." The only way to close "the prosperity gap" was to lower the living standards of what he labeled "over-developed" nations.

These predictions were less than accurate. World-wide systemic mass starvation did not take place as population escalated. Rather those many millions wallowing in poverty in the developing world, particularly in Asia, lifted themselves into the global middle class. Far more efficient ways to use energy have been developed, and unexpected caches new resources continue to be discovered all over the planet.

Yet however wrong-headed, Holdren's world view now has jumped from the dustbin of history into the craniums of presidents and prime ministers. President Obama's pledge to "restore science to its rightful place" has morphed into state-sponsored scientific ideology. [...]

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Big Fat Government Takeover :Rule by the best and the brightest

[wsj Some mistakes are so big that only smart people are tempted to make them. One is the faith in Big Government.

We'll see that in full force today, when Barack Obama gives another major address on the economy. On the generalities, there won't be much real disagreement. But at a time when many claim to see no difference between the two political parties, President Obama and his Democratic allies are making one distinction paramount: their operating assumption that bigger government is better government.

Many of the people in the Obama administration, the president included, enjoy all the credentials we associate with the best and the brightest: the right schools, the good grades, the successful careers. Alas, whether it be allocating health care or defining the kind of jobs the economy ought to create, the policies they favor suggest a strong belief that they know what's best not just for themselves, but for everyone else too.

Of course, the kind of people who are apt to push for government-imposed solutions are those who are also apt to believe they will be the ones imposing decisions, not the ones who have to live with decisions imposed by others. Sometimes that's because they enjoy the wealth that gives them escape hatches unavailable to the less affluent, such as their ability to ensure that their own children never have to set foot in a public school. Mostly, however, their trust in government reflects their confidence that they have all the answers and that it's government's job to enforce them.

What about conservatives? Don't we have confidence in our judgment and abilities? Of course we do. The difference is that we trust free citizens to make decisions about themselves—and are skeptical about government. As someone who worked inside a White House, I say you really believe government should be small when you see your friends running it.

Now, I know there are people who believe that George W. Bush was a Big Government Republican. And you can make arguments about spending and so forth. Even so, however, there's simply no comparison with the Obama administration.

That's because conservatives believe that even our smartest friend is no match for the collective wisdom of the marketplace. If we were to wake up and find that someone we knew well had been given control over some important part of the economy, the conservative would not likely think, "Everything will be fine now that Harry's in charge." Far more likely we'd be saying to ourselves, "If it weren't for his wife, Harry would be wearing red and purple socks every day—and we're giving him that kind of power?"

Mr. Obama and his team appear to be unburdened by such modesty.

Detroit is in decline because its automotive giants no longer build the kind of cars Americans want to buy? Let's have the president sack the CEO of General Motors, and then use the bailout money as leverage to appoint a car czar and get GM and Chrysler to build the kind of cars that Washington wants.

Wall Street execs are getting sweet bonuses at a time when millions of other Americans are unemployed? Well, instead of encouraging these financial concerns to pay back the Troubled Asset Relief Program monies and get the taxpayers off the hook, send in Ken Feinberg to set their salaries.

Health-care spending is inefficient? The answer is obvious: Expand the Department of Health and Human Services and give its secretary more power. Under the bill now before the Senate, for example, Kathleen Sebelius would have the authority to decide what care insurance companies could offer, who could get an abortion under a government-run plan, what prices were fair, and so on.

Of course we shouldn't draw any conclusions from an advisory task force that recently created a stir when it suggested women get fewer mammograms—and Ms. Sebelius's disavowal in the face of public heat. She pointed out that the task force does not set government policy. But at some point some government task force will—and there will be fewer ways around it.

That's government by the smart. The good news is that it doesn't seem to be selling. According to a recent poll, 57% of Americans believe government is doing things that should be left to business and individuals. Not only do most Americans object, Gallup says the opposition is the "highest such reading in more than a decade."

Today Mr. Obama is going to give us more details about the wonderful things all those smart people in Washington are going to do to help us on the economy. Maybe he would do well to take another look at all those bright lights around him. For the more he proposes government will do, the more skeptical Americans seem to be.

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It is to Laugh : Government of Transparency : Holds a Closed Meeting on Openness

[y] It's hardly the image of transparency the Obama administration wants to project: A workshop on government openness is closed to the public.

The event Monday for federal employees is a fitting symbol of President Barack Obama's uneven record so far on the Freedom of Information Act, a big part of keeping his campaign promise to make his administration the most transparent ever. As Obama's first year in office ends, the government's actions when the public and press seek information are not yet matching up with the president's words.

"The Freedom of Information Act should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails," Obama told government offices on his first full day as president. "The government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears."

Obama scored points on his pledge by requiring the release of detailed information about $787 billion in economic stimulus spending. It's now available on a Web site, http://www.recovery.gov. Other notable disclosures include waivers that the White House has granted from Obama's conflict-of-interest rules and reports detailing Obama's and top appointees' personal finances.

Yet on some important issues, his administration produced information only after government watchdogs and reporters spent weeks or months pressing, in some cases suing.

Those include what cars people were buying using the $3 billion Cash for Clunkers program (it turned out the most frequent trades involved pickups for pickups with only slightly better gas mileage); how many times airplanes have collided with birds (a lot); whether lobbyists and donors meet with the Obama White House (they do); rules about the interrogation of terror suspects (the FBI and CIA disagreed over what was permitted); and who was speaking in private with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner (he has close relationships with a cadre of Wall Street executives whose multibillion-dollar companies survived the economic crisis with his help).

The administration has refused to turn over important records. Obama signed a law that let the Pentagon refuse to release photographs showing U.S. troops abusing detainees, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates then did so. The Obama administration, like the Bush administration before it, has refused to release details about the CIA's "black site" rendition program. The Federal Aviation Administration wouldn't turn over letters and e-mails among FAA officials about reporters' efforts to learn more about planes that crash into birds.

Just last week, a State Department deputy assistant secretary, Llewellyn Hedgbeth, said at a public conference that "as much as we want to promote transparency," her agency will work just as hard to protect classified materials or information that would put the United States in a bad light.

People who routinely request government records said they don't see much progress on Obama's transparency pledge.

"It's either smoke and mirrors or it was done for the media," said Jeff Stachewicz, founder of Washington-based FOIA Group Inc., which files hundreds of requests every month across the government on behalf of companies, law firms and news organizations. "This administration, when it wants something done, there are no excuses. You just don't see a big movement toward transparency."

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Copenhagen climate summit: 1,200 limos, 140 private planes and caviar wedges

[t] Copenhagen is preparing for the climate change summit that will produce as much carbon dioxide as a town the size of Middlesbrough.

Ms Jorgensen reckons that between her and her rivals the total number of limos in Copenhagen next week has already broken the 1,200 barrier. The French alone rang up on Thursday and ordered another 42. "We haven't got enough limos in the country to fulfil the demand," she says. "We're having to drive them in hundreds of miles from Germany and Sweden."

And the total number of electric cars or hybrids among that number? "Five," says Ms Jorgensen. "The government has some alternative fuel cars but the rest will be petrol or diesel. We don't have any hybrids in Denmark, unfortunately, due to the extreme taxes on those cars. It makes no sense at all, but it's very Danish."

The airport says it is expecting up to 140 extra private jets during the peak period alone, so far over its capacity that the planes will have to fly off to regional airports – or to Sweden – to park, returning to Copenhagen to pick up their VIP passengers.

As well 15,000 delegates and officials, 5,000 journalists and 98 world leaders, the Danish capital will be blessed by the presence of Leonardo DiCaprio, Daryl Hannah, Helena Christensen, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Prince Charles. A Republican US senator, Jim Inhofe, is jetting in at the head of an anti-climate-change "Truth Squad." The top hotels – all fully booked at £650 a night – are readying their Climate Convention menus of (no doubt sustainable) scallops, foie gras and sculpted caviar wedges. [...]

The temptation, then, is to dismiss the whole thing as a ridiculous circus. Many of the participants do not really need to be here. And far from “saving the world,” the world’s leaders have already agreed that this conference will not produce any kind of binding deal, merely an interim statement of intent.

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Girlfriends and Double Standards

Before Max Baucus there was Paul Wolfowitz. Will the ethical uproar be the same?

[wsj] Here's a poser: Suppose a public official is accused of recommending his girlfriend for a promotion, though he was the one who first flagged the potential conflict of interest and officials had refused to let him recuse himself from decisions about the woman. Should he lose his job?

That's precisely what happened in 2007 to Paul Wolfowitz, who was run out of the World Bank on the pretext that he had given his girlfriend a raise. In fact, Mr. Wolfowitz had made bank officials aware that his girlfriend already worked at the bank before he accepted the job as president, and bank officials had raised no objection to the job change that removed his girlfriend from any direct reporting to Mr. Wolfowitz. The ethical uproar was a politically convenient excuse, fanned by the media, to oust Mr. Wolfowitz when his real offense was that he was too hard on corruption.

So it's going to be fascinating to see how the press corps and political class react to the news that Montana Senator Max Baucus recommended a staff member who was his girlfriend for the plum job of U.S. Attorney. Mr. Baucus disclosed the attempted sweetheart deal early Saturday after media inquiries made clear the story was breaking. The 67-year-old Senator disclosed that he had recommended Melodee Hanes and two others earlier this year for the U.S. Attorney post in Montana. While Presidents appoint U.S. attorneys, by tradition home-state Senators have significant influence in the selection, especially Senators from the same party as the President. [...]

As Senate Finance Chairman, Mr. Baucus is a crucial player in health-care reform, and our guess is that neither Democrats nor their media allies will want to explore this nepotistic near-miss lest it interfere with that greater political goal. But if they don't, we will learn a good deal about workplace ethics and political double standards.

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The Goracle cancels personal appearance in Copenhagen

[wt] Former Vice President Al Gore on Thursday abruptly canceled a Dec. 16 personal appearance that was to be staged during the United Nations' Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, which begins next week.

As described in The Washington Times' Inside the Beltway column Tuesday, the multimedia public event to promote Mr. Gore's new book, "Our Choice," included $1,209 VIP tickets that granted the holder a photo opportunity with Mr. Gore and a "light snack."

Berlingkse Media, a Danish group coordinating ticket sales and publicity for the event, said that "great annoyance" was a factor in the cancellation, along with unforeseen changes in Mr. Gore's program for the climate summit. The decision affected 3,000 ticket holders.

"We have had a clear-cut agreement, and it is unusual with great disappointment that we have to announce that Al Gore cancels. We had a huge expectation for the event. . . . We do not yet know the detailed reasons for the cancellation," said Lisbeth Knudsen, CEO of Berlingske Media, in a statement posted by the company.

The ClimateDepot,com, an online news aggregator that tracks global-warming news reports, referred to the situation as "Nopenhagen," and evidence that popular momentum for the Copenhagen conference "is fading."

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Boxer: Hackers should face criminal probe over 'Climategate'

[h] Boxer, the top Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said that the recently released e-mails, showing scientists allegedly overstating the case for climate change, should be treated as a crime.

"You call it 'Climategate'; I call it 'E-mail-theft-gate,'" she said during a committee meeting. "Whatever it is, the main issue is, Are we facing global warming or are we not? I'm looking at these e-mails, that, even though they were stolen, are now out in the public."
The e-mails, from scientists at the University of East Anglia, were obtained through hacking. The messages showed the director of the university's Climate Research Unit discussing ways to strengthen the unit's case for global warming. Climate change skeptics have seized on the e-mails, arguing that they demonstrate manipulation in environmental science.

Boxer said her committee may hold hearings into the matter as its top Republican, Sen. James Inhofe (Okla.), has asked for, but that a criminal probe would be part of any such hearings.

"We may well have a hearing on this, we may not. We may have a briefing for senators, we may not," Boxer said. "Part of our looking at this will be looking at a criminal activity which could have well been coordinated.

"This is a crime," Boxer said.

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Obama Magicman : Magic Disappeared : The Waking

[ds] Never before has a speech by President Barack Obama felt as false as his Tuesday address announcing America's new strategy for Afghanistan. It seemed like a campaign speech combined with Bush rhetoric -- and left both dreamers and realists feeling distraught. [...]

Just in Time for the Campaign

For each troop movement, Obama had a number to match. US strength in Afghanistan will be tripled relative to the Bush years, a fact that is sure to impress hawks in America. But just 18 months later, just in time for Obama's re-election campaign, the horror of war is to end and the draw down will begin. The doves of peace will be let free.

The speech continued in that vein. It was as though Obama had taken one of his old campaign speeches and merged it with a text from the library of ex-President George W. Bush. Extremists kill in the name of Islam, he said, before adding that it is one of the "world's great religions." He promised that responsibility for the country's security would soon be transferred to the government of President Hamid Karzai -- a government which he said was "corrupt." The Taliban is dangerous and growing stronger. But "America will have to show our strength in the way that we end wars," he added.

It was a dizzying combination of surge and withdrawal, of marching to and fro. The fast pace was reminiscent of plays about the French revolution: Troops enter from the right to loud cannon fire and then they exit to the left. And at the end, the dead are left on stage.

Obama's Magic No Longer Works

But in this case, the public was more disturbed than entertained. Indeed, one could see the phenomenon in a number of places in recent weeks: Obama's magic no longer works. The allure of his words has grown weaker.

It is not he himself who has changed, but rather the benchmark used to evaluate him. For a president, the unit of measurement is real life. A leader is seen by citizens through the prism of their lives -- their job, their household budget, where they live and suffer. And, in the case of the war on terror, where they sometimes die.

Political dreams and yearnings for the future belong elsewhere. That was where the political charmer Obama was able to successfully capture the imaginations of millions of voters. It is a place where campaigners -- particularly those with a talent for oration -- are fond of taking refuge. It is also where Obama set up his campaign headquarters, in an enormous tent called "Hope."

In his speech on America's new Afghanistan strategy, Obama tried to speak to both places. It was two speeches in one. That is why it felt so false. Both dreamers and realists were left feeling distraught.

The American president doesn't need any opponents at the moment. He's already got himself.

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Belches
Uh...Tiger Woods? Who gives a damn. Ya, as predictable as nightfall, he has again come out, this time to apologize. For what? To who? Stfu. It's obvious the tale being foisted is a bundled batch of manure. Granted and unsurprising. Why is this worth more than a sentence? Bring on the apology ad nauseum and stfu media.

Of course the example underscores the reality that life is a multi-tiered system. Some can tell the police that they are not available and others cannot. This crosses the gamut of life. Deal with it. Everyone will never be equally rich, equally skilled, equally beautiful - regardless of the class warfare politicos that pander and profess and promise. Fantasists. Stfu.

Larry King - Stfu. Get your head examined. It's clearly in need of diagnostics if you think that gathering Michael Moore's opinion of Afghanistan (or anything else, for that matter) is of any worth or the bother of the stupid expressions you perform. Stfu CNN in general. You are an embarrassment. Merry Christmas.

- The Cynical Bastard

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Climategate: Follow the Money

[wsj] [...] Climategate, as readers of these pages know, concerns some of the world's leading climate scientists working in tandem to block freedom of information requests, blackball dissenting scientists, manipulate the peer-review process, and obscure, destroy or massage inconvenient temperature data—facts that were laid bare by last week's disclosure of thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, or CRU.

But the deeper question is why the scientists behaved this way to begin with, especially since the science behind man-made global warming is said to be firmly settled. To answer the question, it helps to turn the alarmists' follow-the-money methods right back at them.

Consider the case of Phil Jones, the director of the CRU and the man at the heart of climategate. According to one of the documents hacked from his center, between 2000 and 2006 Mr. Jones was the recipient (or co-recipient) of some $19 million worth of research grants, a sixfold increase over what he'd been awarded in the 1990s.

Why did the money pour in so quickly? Because the climate alarm kept ringing so loudly: The louder the alarm, the greater the sums. And who better to ring it than people like Mr. Jones, one of its likeliest beneficiaries?

Thus, the European Commission's most recent appropriation for climate research comes to nearly $3 billion, and that's not counting funds from the EU's member governments. In the U.S., the House intends to spend $1.3 billion on NASA's climate efforts, $400 million on NOAA's, and another $300 million for the National Science Foundation. The states also have a piece of the action, with California—apparently not feeling bankrupt enough—devoting $600 million to their own climate initiative. In Australia, alarmists have their own Department of Climate Change at their funding disposal.

And all this is only a fraction of the $94 billion that HSBC Bank estimates has been spent globally this year on what it calls "green stimulus"—largely ethanol and other alternative energy schemes—of the kind from which Al Gore and his partners at Kleiner Perkins hope to profit handsomely.

Supply, as we know, creates its own demand. So for every additional billion in government-funded grants (or the tens of millions supplied by foundations like the Pew Charitable Trusts), universities, research institutes, advocacy groups and their various spin-offs and dependents have emerged from the woodwork to receive them. [...]

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[bh] [...] When I completed the journey that is Going Rogue, I wrote down five things:

–She is a positive role model for all Americans
–She is an executive, takes on hard problems and makes tough decisions
–She has tremendous energy, balance and intellect
–America shafted itself in this last election
–Alaska is lucky to have her

Oh, and a sixth, Sarah Palin could be the next president of the United States.

Her book washes away all doubts that any reader might have had about her readiness to be president. She comes across as exceptionally bright, dedicated, and passionate about public service. Her moral compass is strong, pointing true North in this case. And she has a wicked sense of humor.

The most salient take-away from Going Rogue for me was what I admired most in her campaign, which was that she had been in charge as either a mayor or a governor whereas none of the other candidates on either ticket had. Having been a commander several times in the military I know that there is a huge difference between being a hardworking and important staff officer and an ‘alone at the top’ commander. No matter how fancy the title, executive officer or Senator, at the end of the day, you are recommending to someone who actually makes the decision.

As a Governor, mayor or commander, you have the unparalleled responsibility to actually make decisions that have ramifications. There is little training that can prepare you for all those heads turning in your direction when it is decision time. You can’t blithely abstain on a vote or hide behind the guy in front of you, because you own the decision. Case in point is Obama’s inexcusable delay in making a decision on Afghanistan. His indecision, cloaked as ‘sleeves-rolled-up-pensiveness’, is an indicator that he was, at a minimum, unprepared to be commander in chief. What we see in his speech at West Point is a minimally slimmed down version of what General Stan McChrystal submitted to the president on August 30th. So now big Stan has nine months to do what he said it takes 12 months to accomplish.

Palin, on the other hand, demonstrates decisiveness and vulnerability. Is she prepared for the enormous breadth of responsibility of president? I think she’s ready for the hard part, which is making tough decisions. She’s no “Ruminator-in Chief”, that’s for sure, and if the American people think a second year back bench senator was ready to be president, I’m not sure we’ve got the right rubric out there.

Palin is real. She takes counsel of her fears and continuously comes back to her foundation of family, God, state and nation for reassurance and guidance. She has strong moral guideposts that she uses to navigate the shark infested political waters. Reading about the decisions Sarah Palin faced at multiple levels of government reminded me of something my command sergeant major in the 82nd Airborne Division used to say when we faced a tough decision together: “Sir, when you’re right, don’t worry about it.”

Palin is right on many issues such as energy policy, defense, business, and size of government. She gets it and my hope is that she firms up her base and then reaches out to moderates across this country. She has a gritty determination borne in the salmon hauls and caribou hunts that make her pioneer tough. [...]

Oddly, as I read Going Rogue and learned the real story behind the mainstream media assault upon this patriot, I was briefly reminded of the first time I met Hillary Clinton. She was in her first year as New York’s junior senator and my impression of her was largely shaped by what I read in the newspapers or saw on television, meaning mostly negative. When she came into the Pentagon for a 45 minute briefing from my boss, I was one of four people in the room: the Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, Senator Clinton, her assistant Uma Abedin, and me.

Over the next 90 minutes, she not only ignored her schedule, but she demonstrated a keen intellect, undeniable sincerity, and genuine interest in the many complex topics discussed. I came away from that meeting with an entirely different viewpoint on Senator Clinton than had been painted for me in the media. I tucked away the lesson to always remember that there is a phalanx of reporters, journalists and hate mongers who are trying to tell us all what to think.

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Iraqi Journalist Throws Shoe at Shoe-Thrower

[tws] Aswat al-Iraq reports:

An Iraqi journalist said on Tuesday that he threw his shoes at the famous Muntather al-Zaydi, a local TV reporter who threw a pair of shoes at former U.S. President George W. Bush at a press conference in Baghdad last year, during his visit to Paris.

“I threw my pair of shoes at al-Zaydi today (Dec. 1) during a conference while he was talking about his famous incident,” Seif al-Khayat told Aswat al-Iraq news agency.

“His behavior with Bush caused Arab and Iraqi journalists to feel shame,” he explained, asserting that what he had done has noting to do with journalism and its important message.

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ALAPALOOZA : $1,200 To Shake The Algore's Hand

[wt] "Meet Al Gore in Copenhagen." The official announcement from this fair Danish city says it all. The former vice president is getting star treatment when he arrives with an entire swarm of green-minded gadflies for the United Nations' global warming extravaganza, which begins on Dec. 7.

"Have you ever shaken hands with an American vice president? If not, now is your chance. Meet Al Gore in Copenhagen during the UN Climate Change Conference," notes the Danish tourism commission, which is helping Mr. Gore promote "Our Choice," his newest book about global warming in all its alarming modalities.

"Tickets are available in different price ranges for the event. If you want it all, you can purchase a VIP ticket, where you get a chance to shake hands with Al Gore, get a copy of Our Choice and have your picture taken with him. The VIP event costs DKK 5,999 and includes drinks and a light snack."

Wait, what? How much is that in American dollars? The currency conversion says it all, too: 5,999 Danish kroners is equivalent to $1,209.

[nb] [...] So, if Big Al can shake your hand and get his picture taken with you in a minute, he'll make almost $73,000 an hour.

Sweet.

Of course, no one knows what the house is getting per ticket or if Gore is donating his take -- whatever that is! -- to charity.

On the other hand, if his share goes to HIS charity, that's better than it going to him for then he gets to control all the proceeds without paying one cent in taxes.

That REALLY is nice work if you can get it.

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The Arabs Have Stopped Applauding Obama

[wsj] 'He talks too much," a Saudi academic in Jeddah, who had once been smitten with Barack Obama, recently observed to me of America's 44th president. He has wearied of Mr. Obama and now does not bother with the Obama oratory.

He is hardly alone, this academic. In the endless chatter of this region, and in the commentaries offered by the press, the theme is one of disappointment. In the Arab-Islamic world, Barack Obama has come down to earth.

He has not made the world anew, history did not bend to his will, the Indians and Pakistanis have been told that the matter of Kashmir is theirs to resolve, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the same intractable clash of two irreconcilable nationalisms, and the theocrats in Iran have not "unclenched their fist," nor have they abandoned their nuclear quest.

There is little Mr. Obama can do about this disenchantment. He can't journey to Turkey to tell its Islamist leaders and political class that a decade of anti-American scapegoating is all forgiven and was the product of American policies—he has already done that. He can't journey to Cairo to tell the fabled "Arab street" that the Iraq war was a wasted war of choice, and that America earned the malice that came its way from Arab lands—he has already done that as well. He can't tell Muslims that America is not at war with Islam—he, like his predecessor, has said that time and again.

It was the norm for American liberalism during the Bush years to brandish the Pew Global Attitudes survey that told of America's decline in the eyes of foreign nations. Foreigners were saying what the liberals wanted said.

Now those surveys of 2009 bring findings from the world of Islam that confirm that the animus toward America has not been radically changed by the ascendancy of Mr. Obama. In the Palestinian territories, 15% have a favorable view of the U.S. while 82% have an unfavorable view. The Obama speech in Ankara didn't seem to help in Turkey, where the favorables are 14% and those unreconciled, 69%. In Egypt, a country that's reaped nearly 40 years of American aid, things stayed roughly the same: 27% have a favorable view of the U.S. while 70% do not. In Pakistan, a place of great consequence for American power, our standing has deteriorated: The unfavorables rose from 63% in 2008 to 68% this year.

Mr. Obama's election has not drained the swamps of anti-Americanism. That anti-Americanism is endemic to this region, an alibi and a scapegoat for nations, and their rulers, unwilling to break out of the grip of political autocracy and economic failure. It predated the presidency of George W. Bush and rages on during the Obama presidency.

We had once taken to the foreign world that quintessential American difference—the belief in liberty, a needed innocence to play off against the settled and complacent ways of older nations. The Obama approach is different.

Steeped in an overarching idea of American guilt, Mr. Obama and his lieutenants offered nothing less than a doctrine, and a policy, of American penance. No one told Mr. Obama that the Islamic world, where American power is engaged and so dangerously exposed, it is considered bad form, nay a great moral lapse, to speak ill of one's own tribe when in the midst, and in the lands, of others.

The crowd may have applauded the cavalier way the new steward of American power referred to his predecessor, but in the privacy of their own language they doubtless wondered about his character and his fidelity. "My brother and I against my cousin, my cousin and I against the stranger," goes one of the Arab world's most honored maxims. The stranger who came into their midst and spoke badly of his own was destined to become an object of suspicion.

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Redeeming Sarah

[pjm] I admit at the outset — to the shock and amazement of many of my friends and colleagues — that I really dig Sarah Palin. I am drawn to her not because she happens to be the most babelicious of the current crop of female politicos — at best, a pleasant distraction — but for reasons that have nothing to do with her physical presence, which I will enumerate farther along. Like all political candidates, she comes with flaws and defects that are readily detectable, but since she is avowedly conservative, these have been invidiously exaggerated beyond the limits of discretion and common decency. The amount of ad hominem invective indiscriminately heaped upon her constitutes the real disgrace in what we might call the “Palin phenomenon.” Cutting short her recent book signing session in Noblesville, Indiana, distressing some of her many fans who had long waited in line, has metastasized into a public relations tumor. Had the culprit been a Democrat, the lump would scarcely have been noticed.

Lord knows, a battery of media anti-Palinists have been shooting from the hip and the lip since day one of her vice-presidential selection on the Republican ticket, the only agile move that John McCain made during his otherwise pedestrian campaign. We know about Katie Couric, David Brooks, Thomas Friedman, Keith Olbermann, Tina Fey, and many others among the media Ferengi, that famous species of sly and deceitful opportunists, who have feathered their careers by depicting Palin as a meeping leper. Even some of a Republican stamp have not held their fire. Former Bush speechwriter (author of the phrase “axis of evil”) David Frum also has it in for Palin. In article after interview, dating from August 2008 to this month, Frum has thrown the book at poor Sarah, including her own. She’s irresponsible, she’s vindictive, she’s a quitter, she prefers to play Madonna rather than Evita, and so on ad biliosum.

Similarly, a recent article by Rick Moran savages Palin for her “cotton candy” thinking, attacking her for not confronting “the verity of the present” and for not taking proper stock of the future — but Moran never scruples to tell us what that “verity” is and what that future portends; nor does he specify how Palin has demonstrably failed in this regard. Such animadversion comes all too easy. One of the most blatant instances involves the Newsweek cover flap, which has also been blown completely out of proportion. The cover shows a woman in excellent shape dressed in a standard running outfit. There is nothing much there to make a fuss about, except, of course, from the perspective of a prurient and partisan press corps.

In this connection, I think, a little facetiously, of those mellifluous lines from the prologue to Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women — “As she, that is all flowers flower, Fulfilled of all virtue and honor” — which are patently over the top in the cynical times in which we live, but which, I submit, furnish a better portrait of this “good woman” than the nasty distortions of her detractors. [...]

I suspect that Victor Davis Hanson is absolutely correct when he sums up Palin’s imperatives for the future: “The best thing she can do is to go out and talk, take her licks, promote her book, fend off foes, and gain experience in the arena of ideas — while spending her evenings reading and debating wonks and politicians.” Palin is deemed by her defamers as a polarizing figure and a disaster for both the Republican Party and the nation. This is pure nonsense but it will take much cerebral scrubbing to redeem her. Thankfully, she seems up to the job.

Palin : Copies Sold : One Million

[y] "Going Rogue" has sold a million copies.

HarperCollins spokeswoman Tina Andreadis said Tuesday that just two weeks after publication, Sarah Palin's memoir has sold 1 million copies. The print run for "Going Rogue" has been increased again, to 2.8 million copies. The original printing was 1.5 million, then moved up to 2.5 million.

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