ASPEN COLORADO: Hollywood director James Cameron challenged three high profile global warming skeptics to a public debate at a global warming and energy conference. But Cameron backed out of the debate at the last minute after environmentalists "came out of the woodwork" to warn him not to engage in a debate with skeptics because it was not in his best interest.

Cameron challenged Andrew Breitbart, Climate Depot's Marc Morano and filmmaker Ann McElhinney of 'Not Evil Just Wrong.' The debate was already in the program for the Aspen American Renewable Energy Day (AREDAY) summit. The website program described the agreed to debate as “AREDAY Climate Change Debate: Reality or Fiction?"

After setting up the public global warming debate, Cameron and his negotiator then changed formats multiple times and initially said it would be open to the media and then said he would only participate if it was private with no recording devices. The skeptics agreed to all the changes. According to AREDAY organizers, activist Joseph Romm of Climate Progress urged Cameron not to go ahead with the debate as well.

Cameron's cancellation of the agreed to debate did not happen until one debate participant (Morano) was already in mid-air, flying from DC to Aspen on Saturday August 21 to attend the debate. (AREDAY did grant Morano a 90 minute slot to speak at the summit. See: Climate Depot's Presentation at Warmists' Summit Met By Hostile Interrupting Moderator and Crowd; Call for Morano to Kill Himself!)

(Morano Note: After ducking debate, James Cameron boldy slammed global warming skeptics as "swine" on the day he was supposed to be debating them. "I think they're swine" Cameron told a friendly audience at the AREDAY summit.
How does Cameron square ducking a climate debate he set up when just a few months ago he seemed so confident? See: Director James Cameron Unleashed: Calls for gun fight with global warming skeptics: 'I want to call those deniers out into the street at high noon and shoot it out with those boneheads')

Climate Depot

Imam Obama Imam Obama Imam Obama Imam Obama Imam Obama Imam Obama Imam Obama Imam Obama Imam Obama Imam Obama Imam Obama Imam Obama Imam Obama Imam Obama Imam Obama Imam Obama Imam Obama Imam Obama Imam Obama Imam Obama Imam Obama Imam Obama Imam Obama Imam Obama Imam Obama Imam Obama Imam Obama Imam Obama Imam Obama Imam Obama Imam Obama Imam Obama Imam Obama Imam Obama Imam Obama Imam Obama

 Take that, Google...

14 Weeks from Republican Governors Association on Vimeo.

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Hero Cigars

ABU DHABI — The United States government, which has difficulty controlling its own borders, has agreed to help Saudi Arabia secure its dangerous border areas near Yemen.

"It is a very rough border, very difficult to protect from illegal crossings," U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said.

In late May, Ms. Napolitano met Saudi leaders to discuss a range of security programs, including training, joint exercises, intelligence and arms sales. Officials said both the Americans and Saudis agreed that the Iranian-backed Shi'ite insurgency from Yemen was the leading threat to Riyad.

Un.  Freaking. Believable.

World Tribune

WASHINGTON - What one finds when reading congressional legislation is invariably surprising. Take the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill, for instance, which was created by merging Senate and House bills. When the Senate returns from recess one of its first actions will be to vote on the bill, which passed the House on June 30.

I was searching the bill for a provision about derivatives. What did I find but Section 342, which declares that race and gender employment ratios, if not quotas, must be observed by private financial institutions that do business with the government. In a major power grab, the new law inserts race and gender quotas into America's financial industry.

In addition to this bill's well-publicized plans to establish over a dozen new financial regulatory offices, Section 342 sets up at least 20 Offices of Minority and Women Inclusion. This has had no coverage by the news media and has large implications.

The Treasury, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the 12 Federal Reserve regional banks, the Board of Governors of the Fed, the National Credit Union Administration, the Comptroller of the Currency, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau...all would get their own Office of Minority and Women Inclusion.

Each office would have its own director and staff to develop policies promoting equal employment opportunities and racial, ethnic, and gender diversity of not just the agency's workforce, but also the workforces of its contractors and sub-contractors.

What would be the mission of this new corps of Federal monitors? The Dodd-Frank bill sets it forth succinctly and simply - all too simply. The mission, it says, is to assure "to the maximum extent possible the fair inclusion" of women and minorities, individually and through businesses they own, in the activities of the agencies, including contracting.

Real Clear Markets

The new captain jumped from the cockpit, fully dressed, and sprinted through the water. A former lifeguard, he kept his eyes on his victim as he headed straight for the owners who were swimming between their anchored sportfisher and the beach. “I think he thinks you’re drowning,” the husband said to his wife. They had been splashing each other and she had screamed but now they were just standing, neck-deep on the sand bar. “We’re fine, what is he doing?” she asked, a little annoyed. “We’re fine!” the husband yelled, waving him off, but his captain kept swimming hard. ”Move!” he barked as he sprinted between the stunned owners. Directly behind them, not ten feet away, their nine-year-old daughter was drowning. Safely above the surface in the arms of the captain, she burst into tears, “Daddy!”

How did this captain know, from fifty feet away, what the father couldn’t recognize from just ten? Drowning is not the violent, splashing, call for help that most people expect. The captain was trained to recognize drowning by experts and years of experience. The father, on the other hand, had learned what drowning looks like by watching television. If you spend time on or near the water (hint: that’s all of us) then you should make sure that you and your crew knows what to look for whenever people enter the water. Until she cried a tearful, “Daddy,” she hadn’t made a sound. As a former Coast Guard rescue swimmer, I wasn’t surprised at all by this story. Drowning is almost always a deceptively quiet event. The waving, splashing, and yelling that dramatic conditioning (television) prepares us to look for, is rarely seen in real life.

An excellent article.  I recommend everyone go read the rest of the article, as well as the comments, at Mario Vittone's Blog.

Stay safe, folks, and keep an eye on those little ones ALWAYS!

The bad news is…it’s from the defense budget and will essentially hollow out our military.

The recommendations are from the Sustainable Defense Task Force (I do not think those first words mean what they think they mean) which is an ad hoc group of think tanks and legislators led by Barney Frank and… Ron Paul. Frank and Paul together? What could go wrong?

Just the gutting of the military.

The Air Force must retire six fighter air wings equivalents, and at the same time build 301 fewer F-35 fighters. The nuclear bomber force will be completely eliminated in the name of unilateral disarmament—the B-1 and B-2 and B-52 and other bombers will still be able to drop bombs, but their nuclear weapon wiring and controls will simply be removed. Procurement of the new refueling tanker and the C-17 cargo aircraft will be canceled. Directed energy beam research and other advanced missile and space warfare defense projects will also be eliminated or curtailed.

Active duty Army personnel will be slashed from 562,400 to 360,000. That includes elimination of about five active-component brigade combat teams (the report is not exactly). The Army will also suffer a myriad of other cuts, including closure of overseas bases.

The Marine Corps would be cut by 30%, from 202,000 to 145,000, and the other funding cuts planned for the Corps mean the United States will not be able to mount a major amphibious landing on any hostile shore. Marine Corps programs to be killed include the V-22 Osprey tilt rotor aircraft and the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle.

Granted, a lot of this is pie-in-the-sky thinking from liberals, it’s their wish list but it’s not like they don’t have a friend in a very high place. Remember this Obama video from the campaign? In his heart, he thinks they’re right. So while this may well be the left’s outer marker, it gives you an idea of what we’re up against in the coming years.

And if you don’t think it could happen, well it happened in the 70’s and it’s already happening now as the Air Force considers retiring its entire B-1 Bomber fleet. It’s kind of ironic that the poster child for the Reagan defense build up may well wind up being emblematic of the Obama draw down (though I guess the F-22 will be remember as the beginning of the end).

The Navy is already seeing the disastrous effects of not spending enough and improperly managing the training and maintenance resources they do have.

Sigh.

Via AoSHQ

Last night, as part of a procedural vote on the emergency war supplemental bill, House Democrats attached a document that "deemed as passed" a non-existent $1.12 trillion budget. The execution of the "deeming" document allows Democrats to start spending money for Fiscal Year 2011 without the pesky constraints of a budget.

The procedural vote passed 215-210 with no Republicans voting in favor and 38 Democrats crossing the aisle to vote against deeming the faux budget resolution passed.

Never before -- since the creation of the Congressional budget process -- has the House failed to pass a budget, failed to propose a budget then deemed the non-existent budget as passed as a means to avoid a direct, recorded vote on a budget, but still allow Congress to spend taxpayer money.

House Budget Committee Ranking Member Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) warned this was the green light for Democrats to continue their out-of-control spending virtually unchecked.

"Facing a record deficit and a tidal wave of debt, House Democrats decided it was politically inconvenient to put forward a budget and account for their fiscal recklessness.  With no priorities and no restraints, the spending, taxing, and borrowing will continue unchecked for the coming fiscal year," Ryan said.  "The so-called ‘budget enforcement resolution’ enforces no budget, but instead provides a green light for the Appropriators to continue spending, exacerbating our looming fiscal crisis."

As we reported on HUMAN EVENTS, CBO issued a dire warning about the long term outlook for the budget.  

"Yesterday, the Congressional Budget Office rang the latest fiscal alarm with the release of The Long-Term Budget Outlook," Ryan said.  "Today, Congress again hit snooze.  To avert a fiscal and economic calamity, Washington needs to wake up."

I really loathe these bastards.

Human Events

HERMOSILLO, Mexico — A massive gun battle between rival drug and migrant trafficking gangs near the U.S. border Thursday left 21 people dead and at least six others wounded, prosecutors said.

The fire fight occurred in a sparsely populated area about 12 miles (20 kilometers) from the Arizona border, near the city of Nogales, that is considered a prime corridor for immigrant and drug smuggling.

The Sonora state Attorney General’s Office said in a statement that nine people were captured by police at the scene of the shootings, six of whom had been wounded in the confrontation. Eight vehicles and seven weapons were also seized.

All of the victims were believed to be members of the gangs.

The shootings occurred near a dirt road between the hamlets of Tubutama and Saric, in an area often used by traffickers.

Gangs often fight for control of trafficking routes and sometimes steal “shipments” of undocumented migrants from each other, but seldom have they staged such mass gun battles.

 "The border is safer now than it's ever been," said U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman Lloyd Easterling.

The Herald

Unemployment benefits are creating jobs faster than practically any other program, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday. 

Talking to reporters, the House speaker was defending a jobless benefits extension against those who say it gives recipients little incentive to work. By her reasoning, those checks are helping give somebody a job. 

"It injects demand into the economy," Pelosi said, arguing that when families have money to spend it keeps the economy churning. "It creates jobs faster than almost any other initiative you can name." 

Pelosi said the aid has the "double benefit" of helping those who lost their jobs and acting as a "job creator" on the side. 

"It's impossible to think of a situation where we would have a country that would say we're not going to have unemployment benefits," Pelosi said.

What an absolute loon...

FNN

Cyberspace Security bill, dubbed Internet Kill Switch has passed the Senate.

Internet kill switch gets Senate approval by President Obama. The cyberspace security bill that will give President Barack Obama the power to shut down the Internet has passed. However, the bill does give the government limited power in the communications sector.

"Our responsibility for cyber defense goes well beyond the public sector because so much of cyberspace is owned and operated by the private sector," Senator Joe Lieberman said in a statement. "The Department of Homeland Security has actually shown that vulnerabilities in key private sector networks like utilities and communications could bring our economy down for a period of time if attacked or commandeered by a foreign power or cyber terrorists."

Kill Switch is a term that critics have coined because they believe the White House is using the cyberspace bill as a way to control the Internet. However, the Senate has disputed this fiercely and point out that this new law actually limits the president's power over communication. In fact, the Communications Act of 1934, which was still in place, offered far more control without any of the necessary updates for modern technology.

The Protecting Cyberspace bill as a National Asset Act will create the White House Office for Cyberspace Policy and a National Center for Cyber-security and Communications. These agencies will be dedicated purely to the protection of cyber networks in the United States. It will also allow for the deployment of emergency tactics from cyber entities that are especially critical to the safety and well being of the country. This includes protections for major banks, government agencies, the Department of Defense, and others.

Wonderful.  What could possibly go wrong?

Newsoxy

The legendary pioneer of stop-motion animation Ray Harryhausen, who turns 90 today, is considered by many to be the greatest special-effects creator of all time. A prodigy of the pre-computer animation era, Harryhausen's devotion to his craft often meant spending months designing minutes-long battle scenes.

In honor of his 90th birthday today, we're taking a look at some of Harryhausen's most amazing cinematic monsters.

Happy Birthday, Ray!

Videos at SciFi Wire.

On nearly a dozen occasions President Obama has cited Spain as his model for creating a green economy. Yet a report by the Spanish University of Rey Juan Carlos points out what a dismal disaster Spain’s green policy has been.

Spain’s economy is on the verge of collapse, unemployment is rampant, dept is through the roof, and the housing market makes the United States appear robust. But that isn’t stopping the administration from pushing forward legislation that will cripple our economy just as it has Spain’s.

Senator John Kerry who coauthored the bill with Senator Joe Lieberman was interviewed by the Washington Times last week was asked about the Spanish economy and he called it “an anomaly” and “that it was never implemented correctly.” That sounds oddly like what pro communists say when asked why Marxism has never succeeded.

Spain’s unemployment rate is nearly 20 percent and shows no signs of improving. In fact for every green job that was created it caused the loss of 2.2 jobs. The study concluded that the United States would lose between 6.6 million and 10 million jobs if we continue with these policies. Each green job created also cost Spanish taxpayers about $750,000.00 in case you were wondering.

 Yeah.  Let's do that here.

The Examiner

I really am in a loss for words. We have a war going on in Afghanistan where our soldiers are being killed, the Taliban is gaining force, Afghan President Karzai is thinking about having the Taliban join his government, and some of our foreign allies are leaving the effort. Yet, Congresswoman Giffords (D-AZ) took her time and General Petraeus’ time to declare that the US Air Force uses the most energy in the planet, and that DoD uses the most energy in the United States.

In light of the BP oil spill, Giffords asked the General if our soldiers are going to start using renewable energy in our bases to reduce our need of oil!

Video at Cubachi.

Pres. Barack Obama doesn’t do the mundane. He was sent to us to do larger things. You could see that plainly in his Oval Office address on the Gulf oil spill. He could barely get himself through the pedestrian first half: a bit of BP-bashing, a bit of faux-Clintonian “I feel your pain,” a bit of recovery and economic-mitigation accounting. It wasn’t until the end of the speech — the let-no-crisis-go-to-waste part that tried to leverage the Gulf Coast devastation to advance his cap-and-trade climate-change agenda — that Obama warmed to his task.

Pedestrian is beneath Obama. Mr. Fix-It he is not. He is world-historical, the visionary, come to make the oceans recede and the planet heal.

How? By creating a glorious, new clean-green economy. And how exactly to do that? From Washington, by presidential command, and with tens of billions of dollars thrown around. With the liberal (and professorial) conceit that scientific breakthroughs can be legislated into existence, Obama proposes to give us a new industrial economy.

But is this not what we’ve been trying to do for decades with ethanol — which remains a monumental boondoggle, economically unviable and environmentally damaging to boot — as with yesterday’s panacea, synfuels, into which Jimmy Carter poured billions?

Notice that Obama no longer talks about Spain, which until recently he repeatedly cited for its visionary subsidies of a blossoming new clean-energy industry. That’s because Spain, now on the verge of bankruptcy, is pledged to reverse its disastrously bloated public spending, including radical cuts in subsidies to its uneconomical photovoltaic industry.

There’s a reason petroleum is such a durable fuel. It’s not, as Obama fatuously suggested, because of oil-company lobbying, but because it is very portable, energy-dense, and easy to use.

But this doesn’t stop Obama from thinking that he can mandate a superior substitute into being. His argument: Well, if we can put a man on the moon, why not this?

Aside from the irony that this most tiresome of clichés comes from a president who is canceling our program to return to the moon, it is utterly meaningless. The wars on cancer and on poverty have been similarly sold. They remain unwon. Why? Because we knew how to land on the moon. We had the physics to do it. Cancer cells, on the other hand, are far more complex than the Newtonian equations that govern a moon landing. Equally daunting are the laws of social interaction — even assuming there are any — that sustain a culture of poverty.

Similarly, we don’t know how to make renewables that match the efficiency of fossil fuels. In the interim, it is Obama and his Democratic allies who, as they dream of such scientific leaps, are unwilling to use existing technologies to reduce our dependence on foreign (i.e., imported) and risky (i.e., deepwater) sources of oil — twin dependencies that Obama decried in Tuesday’s speech.

“Part of the reason oil companies are drilling a mile beneath the surface of the ocean,” said Obama, is “because we’re running out of places to drill on land and in shallow water.”

Running out of places on land? What about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or the less-known National Petroleum Reserve — 23 million acres of Alaska’s North Slope, near the existing pipeline and designated nearly a century ago for petroleum development — that have been shut down by the federal government?

Running out of shallow-water sources? How about the Pacific Ocean, a not-inconsiderable body of water, and its vast U.S. coastline? That’s been off-limits to new drilling for three decades.

We haven’t run out of safer and more easily accessible sources of oil. We’ve been run off them by environmentalists. They prefer to dream green instead.

Obama is dreamer in chief: He wants to take us to this green future “even if we’re unsure exactly what that looks like. Even if we don’t yet precisely know how we’re going to get there.” Here’s the offer: Tax carbon, spend trillions, and put government in control of the energy economy — and he will take you he knows not where, by way of a road he knows not which.

That’s why Tuesday’s speech was received with such consternation. It was so untethered from reality. The Gulf is gushing, and the president is talking mystery roads to unknown destinations. That passes for vision, and vision is Obama’s thing. It sure beats cleaning up beaches.

And you leftards rail about the incompetence of Bush?  If Obumbles was a Republican, you'd all be bleeding from the eyes over this crap...

NRO

Bureaucracy fever — catch it!

Eight days ago, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal ordered barges to begin vacuuming crude oil out of his state’s oil-soaked waters. Today, against the governor’s wishes, those barges sat idle, even as more oil flowed toward the Louisiana shore.

“It’s the most frustrating thing,” the Republican governor said today in Buras, La. “Literally, yesterday morning we found out that they were halting all of these barges.”…

[T]he Coast Guard ordered the stoppage because of reasons that Jindal found frustrating. The Coast Guard needed to confirm that there were fire extinguishers and life vests on board, and then it had trouble contacting the people who built the barges…

“They promised us they were going to get it done as quickly as possible,” [Jindal] said. But “every time you talk to someone different at the Coast Guard, you get a different answer.”

Way to go guys.  Read the rest and watch the video at Hot Air.

For the second week in a row, 58% of Likely U.S. Voters favor repeal of the national health care plan adopted into law by Congress in late March. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds 36% oppose repeal.

These findings include 47% who Strongly Favor repeal and 28% who are Strongly Opposed.

Rasmussen Reports has been tracking sentiments about repeal since the plan’s passage, and opposition to the legislation remains as strong since its adoption as it was beforehand. Support for repeal since March has ranged from a low of 54% to a high of 63% in mid-May. Opposition has ranged from 32% to 42%.

The Obama White House last week began a public relations initiative to sell the plan to voters as the mid-term elections near. Right now, a number of Democratic candidates  – and incumbents, in general – are hurting in part because of the voter backlash against the health care plan.  

Most voters (50%) continue to believe that the health care plan is bad for America and that it will hurt the quality of care while driving up costs and the budget deficit. Thirty-nine percent (39%) say the plan is good for the country. Just three percent (3%) think it will have no impact.

While virtually the entire Political Class sees the health care plan as good for America, 64% of Mainstream voters disagree and see it as bad.

Rasmussen

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change misled the press and public into believing that thousands of scientists backed its claims on manmade global warming, according to Mike Hulme, a prominent climate scientist and IPCC insider.  The actual number of scientists who backed that claim was “only a few dozen experts,” he states in a paper for Progress in Physical Geography, co-authored with student Martin Mahony.

“Claims such as ‘2,500 of the world’s leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate’ are disingenuous,” the paper states unambiguously, adding that they rendered “the IPCC vulnerable to outside criticism.”

Hulme, Professor of Climate Change in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia –  the university of Climategate fame — is the founding Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and one of the UK’s most prominent climate scientists. Among his many roles in the climate change establishment, Hilme was the IPCC’s co-ordinating Lead Author for its chapter on ‘Climate scenario development’ for its Third Assessment Report and a contributing author of several other chapters.

Hulme’s depiction of IPCC’s exaggeration of the number of scientists who backed its claim about man-made climate change can be found on pages 10 and 11 of his paper, found here.

The National Post

Remember the big stories in the national media when George W. Bush waited four days to tour New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina hit? Here’s a pop quiz: How long did it take President Obama to visit the Gulf coast after the Deepwater Horizon oil leak began?

The answer is 13 days. Here is how The Washington Post described that visit:

“He flew in and out of New Orleans on May 2, drove two hours to a Coast Guard station and got a briefing before taking a quick helicopter tour. He did not even see the oil slick.”

Mark Knoller of CBS News reported last week that in the first 39 days after each respective catastrophe, Obama visited the Gulf coast twice; Bush visited New Orleans seven times. But remember, this is not Obama’s Katrina!

Now imagine if President Bush, five weeks into one of the largest oil leaks in U.S. history, and without ever having seen the slick, jetted across the country to headline a $17,600 per-person fund-raiser at the home of an oil-fortune heir. How do you think the national press would have treated that? Bush didn’t do that, which is why you didn’t hear about it. President Obama did — which is why you didn’t hear about it.

The media covered Obama’s trip to San Francisco to raise money for Barbara Boxer. Some news outlets even reported that Obama spoke at a private reception at the home of Democratic Party donor Gordon Getty. But few reported that Getty is the heir to the Getty Oil fortune. For instance, the New York Times reports on Obama’s trip never identified Getty as an oil heir. Do you think that would have been omitted had Bush been Getty’s guest?

What if, hours after the head of the U.S. Minerals Management Service left her job over Washington’s mishandling of that giant oil spill, President Bush held a press conference (his first in months) and, when asked about that agency head, could not say whether she had resigned or been fired? What if, hours later, the White House stated that the President knew all along that she had been dismissed, but that story was contradicted by the Cabinet secretary — the one who supposedly did the dismissing — having said that morning during a congressional hearing that she’d resigned voluntarily?

That happened in the Obama administration last week. Where are the outraged cries of incompetence and dishonesty?

Front Page Magazine