Back in the 2006 nomination of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court , Barack Obama criticized the philosphy on confirming Supreme Court Justices stating the Senate should "only examine whether or not the Justice is intellectually capable and is nice to his wife."  He further objected that, "once you get beyond intellect and personal character there shouldn't be further question to whether the justice should be confirmed.  Meaningful advice and consent includes an examination of a judge's philosophy, ideology, and record."

 I agree with his objection, and find it very curious as to why Obama has focused on his nominee's empathy and "personal story" of how she was born in the Bronx,  diagnos ed with diabetes at the age of 8, her father's death, and how she overcame so many obstacles.  It is also interesting to note how the media latched on to the sympathetic success story.  Of course, it isn't surprising how quickly the media played on the heart strings of this narrative.  However, as Obama advises, let's get beyond personal character and examine the judge's philosphies, ideologies, and record."

One statement made by Sotomayor is very disturbing in the realm of judicial philosophy.  This month…a video surfaced of Judge Sotomayor asserting in 2005 [during a panel discussion for law students] that a ‘court of appeals is where policy is made.’  She then adds:

 ‘And I know — I know this is on tape, and I should never say that because we don’t make law. I know. Okay. I know. I’m not promoting it. I’m not advocating it. I’m — you know.’

This statement has been largely ignored by the main stream media yet the need for clarification is extremely important if the Senate is to approve this woman to one of the most powerful positions in America.

If we are to look at judge Sotomayor's  personal ideologies it would be reckless to ignore her feelings on race and sex.  One statement the media has been forced to cover, thanks to people like Rush Limbaugh, is quite alarming. 

I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.

I imagine this is the kind of "empathy" Obama was looking for in a nominee, however the benefit of the doubt could rule she mispoke.  Similar statements, however, seem to make clear exactly how she feels her sex and race influence her judgement:

"Our experience as women and people of color affect our decisions.  Whether born from experience or physiological or cultural differences...our gender and national origins may and WILL make a difference in our judging.  Personal experiences affect the facts judges CHOOSE  to see."

That statement is pretty clear cut, and as far as I know completely unreported by the media.  Just looking at Sotomayor's record, we can already see how she is prone to rule in race cases.  We also shouldn't ignore what we ended up with the last time a nomineemember of the NCLR, otherwise known as "La Raza".

News Busters

Human rights activists are turning their attention to the drone program in part because they say there's no warning to innocent civilians who are in a targeted area.

Human rights activists at odds with President Obama over his recent national security decisions are indicating that they might legally challenge the U.S. military's use of Predator drones, a weapon that intelligence officials say is their single most effective tool in combating Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Predator spy planes are unmanned aerial vehicles that are virtually invisible when flying overhead. The Air Force uses them frequently in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where they are able to track and hit targets from the air when mountainous terrain makes it notoriously hard to send troops. 

"That's the spooky thing about the Predator," national security and terrorism expert Neil Livingstone said. "Even if the Predator is directly overhead and you know it's overheard, you still can't see it or hear it. This is kind of like death out of the blue."

Human rights activists are turning their attention to the drone program in part because they say there's no warning to innocent civilians who are in a targeted area. 

Gabor Rona, international legal director of Human Rights First, a U.S.-based group that advocates universal rights and freedom, said large number of civilians are being unintentionally hit, harmed and killed.

"This is not only a violation of the international laws of war," he said. "It's bad policy."

Opponents of the drones say that the policy could be illegal. The laws of war allow individuals who are engaged in hostilities to be targeted in an armed conflict but strictly prohibit actions against those not engaged. 

"Even when you're attacking a legitimate military objective, you cannot cause civilian casualties that exceed the value of a legitimate military attack," Rona says.

It's undeniable that more civilians have been killed than actual Al Qaeda terrorists in the 16 Predator strikes this year. But there's little chance that could change. 

"So many of these guys surround themselves with collateral casualties," Livingstone said, and large numbers of women and children are strategically placed around hotbeds of activity. Livingstone makes the point that even if high-value targets are killed in one of these drone attacks, Al Qaeda still can claim a "propaganda victory" because of the number of civilian casualties.

"That's the spooky thing about the Predator," national security and terrorism expert Neil Livingstone said. "Even if the Predator is directly overhead and you know it's overheard, you still can't see it or hear it. This is kind of like death out of the blue."

Uh, Neil, that's the whole point.  Why are you leftist shitheads so worried about fighting "fair" with terrorists??  Where was the outrage by you losers on 9/11?

FNN

Black Panthers had wielded weapons, blocked polls

Justice Department political appointees overruled career lawyers and ended a civil complaint accusing three members of the New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense of wielding a nightstick and intimidating voters at a Philadelphia polling place last Election Day, according to documents and interviews.

The incident - which gained national attention when it was captured on videotape and distributed on YouTube - had prompted the government to sue the men, saying they violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act by scaring would-be voters with the weapon, racial slurs and military-style uniforms.

Career lawyers pursued the case for months, including obtaining an affidavit from a prominent 1960s civil rights activist who witnessed the confrontation and described it as "the most blatant form of voter intimidation" that he had seen, even during the voting rights crisis in Mississippi a half-century ago.

The lawyers also had ascertained that one of the three men had gained access to the polling place by securing a credential as a Democratic poll watcher, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The Washington Times.

The career Justice lawyers were on the verge of securing sanctions against the men earlier this month when their superiors ordered them to reverse course, according to interviews and documents. The court had already entered a default judgment against the men on April 20.

Change!!!

Washington Times

National Geographic, February 1982

OJ Simpson, TIME Magazine, June 1994

When a darkened mugshot of troubled football star appeared on the cover of TIME Magazine, it was deemed artistic interpretation. Critics accused the mag of blackening OJ Simpson's skin to make him appear more animalistic and incite racial sentiments. It didn't help that an unaltered photo of Simpson appeared on a Newsweek cover that same week.

More at 10,000 Words

"The consciousness of having discharged that duty which we owe to our country is superior to all other considerations." --George Washington

Every week, the greatest challenge I face as editor of The Patriot Post is determining which subject among all the current news and policy issues concerning liberty and constitutional integrity should be the target of an essay. I mention this because deep into this week's treatise and just a few hours ahead of deadline, I received a message from one of our Patriot readers that offered a far more powerful perspective on where we are as a nation than anything I'd been writing.

That message was from Mike McGinn, and began: "Only under the administration of a former 'community organizer,' a product of the corrupt Chicago political machine, who never served a day of his life in uniform, could a 20-year retired Marine Corps Officer be prohibited from visiting the Arlington National Cemetery resting place of his father, a 30-year retired Marine Corps Officer with distinguished combat service, on the most hallowed of days for our fallen and deceased military servicemen and women -- Memorial Day."

Interred at Arlington, Section 68 Site 113, are the remains of Mike's father, Marine Colonel James Arthur McGinn.

He writes, "Each Memorial Day, we go to visit Dad and pay our respects, driving up from Southern Maryland. This is the first time I've been turned away from the Cemetery grounds."

<snip>

...Mike and his wife left their home early Monday morning, expecting to encounter the usual entry delay into the Cemetery grounds for Memorial Day.

Inching their way through traffic that morning Mike and his wife made it to second in line at the entrance checkpoint, with an Arlington National Cemetery access pass and a DoD military officer vehicle sticker clearly displayed on his windshield, when they were abruptly waved off and directed to leave the area immediately. Apparently, Barack Hussein Obama's motorcade was en route for the ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknowns and the area was being locked down for security.

The McGinns were not turned away on previous Memorial Days when President George Bush arrived to place a wreath at the Tomb, but a lot has changed in the last year.

For the record, while James Arthur McGinn was serving his country and flying Crusaders for the Marine Corps, Ann Dunham was giving birth to her son, BHO, Jr., somewhere between Nyanza Province, Kenya, and Honolulu, Hawaii. As Capt. McGinn was preparing for combat in Vietnam, young Barry O was on his way to Indonesia with his mother and her second husband, Lolo Soetoro. As Maj. McGinn was earning his DFC, BO was converting to Islam, even though his mother was an avowed atheist. As Maj. McGinn was returning from Vietnam, BO was returning from Indonesia for an elite private school education in Honolulu, where he was mentored by Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis. As Col. McGinn was completing his Marine billets, BO was attending Occidental College and then Columbia University; a period of Obama's life that to this day remains shrouded in mystery and devoid of college transcripts.

I'm REALLY getting sick of Obama's arrogance and narcissism.  Jackass.

Patriot Post

It was back slaps and grins all around as Obama celebrated his successful “stimulus” program. That was less than two months ago. Today, those same 25 new policemen whose jobs were “saved” by the great father in Washington have been laid off over lack of funds.

Obama’s great hope and mirrors campaign strikes its false stance as savior again, proving that there was no “stimulus” in the stimulus plan and that it was a false front all along meant only to serve as a part of Obama’s permanent political campaign effort. In reality, there’s just no there, there.

Anyone that believes that government spending can “save” anything is the sucker every con man is waiting for. This is further proof of the un-sustainability of an ever increasing government. And what will we see from this? Will we see government trim its budget, tighten its spending? Certainly not. We will see government require more money from tax payers instead of expecting of itself a renewed effort to live within its means. And those calls have already been issued.

Chains you can believe in!

Publius' Forum

From where I sit, former vice president Dick Cheney had the easier case to make today.

His speech had a lot of phrases I loved; when Cheney said that the New York Times was "publishing secrets in a way that could only help al-Qaeda. It impressed the Pulitzer committee, but it damn sure didn’t serve the interests of our country, or the safety of our people," the audience emited a few "oohs" like they had just watched a blindside blitz level a quarterback.

But in a nutshell, the Cheney argument is, "it worked." And when he notes that after 9/11, the administration and all of the various government agencies managed to prevent another attack on American soil for 2,689 days, it's a rather illuminating figure. Early on, Cheney also quickly repeated the list of al-Qaeda's hits from the 1990s both on U.S. soil and abroad: "In 1993, they bombed the World Trade Center, hoping to bring down the towers with a blast from below. The attacks continued in 1995, with the bombing of U.S. facilities in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; the killing of servicemen at Khobar Towers in 1996; the attack on our embassies in East Africa in 1998; the murder of American sailors on the USS Cole in 2000." That's six major bombings, with many casualties, in six years.

But the unspoken contrast goes beyond U.S. soil . . . In fact, since 9/11, have we seen any indisputably successful al-Qaeda attacks on American targets outside of our borders, besides Iraq and Afghanistan? I recall a grenade being sent through an embassy window in Athens. I know they attacked the British consulate in Istanbul, and a not-terribly-successful attack on our consulate there, as well as an attempted attack on our consulate in Jiddah. Gunmen tried to attack the U.S. Embassy in Syria. I suppose you could consider the attacks on the hotels in Amman stand-ins for American targets. Looking back, we see fatal attacks outside the consulate in Karachi and at a housing compound for westerners in Riyadh.

But nothing on par with what al-Qaeda did in the 1990s.

The standard has been set; Obama is now tinkering with the methods. They're betting a lot — not just their chance at a second term, but the lives of you and me — that they can get the same results with different methods. We will see.

NRO

By Charles Krauthammer

"We were able to hold it off with George Bush. The idea that we might find ourselves fighting with the Obama administration over these powers is really stunning." -- Unnamed and dismayed human rights advocate, on legalizing indefinite detention of alleged terrorists, New York Times, May 21

WASHINGTON -- If hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue, then the flip-flops on previously denounced anti-terror measures are the homage that Barack Obama pays to George Bush. Within 125 days, Obama has adopted with only minor modifications huge swaths of the entire, allegedly lawless Bush program.

The latest flip-flop is the restoration of military tribunals. During the 2008 campaign, Obama denounced them repeatedly, calling them an "enormous failure." Obama suspended them upon his swearing in. Now they're back.

Of course, Obama will never admit in word what he's doing in deed. As in his rhetorically brilliant national-security speech on Thursday claiming to have undone Bush's moral travesties, the military commissions flip-flop is accompanied by the usual Obama three-step: (a) excoriate the Bush policy, (b) ostentatiously unveil cosmetic changes, (c) adopt the Bush policy.

Cosmetic changes such as Obama's declaration that "we will give detainees greater latitude in selecting their own counsel." Laughable. High-toned liberal law firms are climbing over each other for the frisson of representing these miscreants in court.

What about disallowing evidence received under coercive interrogation? Hardly new, notes former prosecutor Andrew McCarthy. Under the existing rules, military judges have that authority, and exercised it under the Bush administration to dismiss charges against al-Qaeda operative Mohammed al-Qahtani on precisely those grounds.

On Guantanamo, it's Obama's fellow Democrats who have suddenly discovered the wisdom of Bush's choice. In open rebellion against Obama's pledge to shut it down, the Senate voted 90 to 6 to reject appropriating a single penny until the president explains where he intends to put the inmates. Sen. James Webb, the de facto Democratic authority on national defense, wants the closing to be put on hold. And on Tuesday, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said, no Gitmo inmates on American soil -- not even in American jails.

That doesn't leave a lot of places. The home countries won't take them. Europe is recalcitrant. Saint Helena needs refurbishing. Elba didn't work out too well the first time. And Devil's Island is now a tourist destination. Gitmo is starting to look good again.

Consume as they say, not as they consume. Today’s eco-hypocrisy of the day comes to you via the Toronto Star with a schadenfreude-licious hat tip to Don Surber:

How much packaging does it take to promote energy conservation?

Lots, evidently, if you’re Toronto’s Better Buildings Partnership.

The partnership, which provides incentives for energy conservation in new and existing large buildings, issued a one-page press release yesterday. But it wasn’t the release that was eye-catching.

It arrived in a large brown paper envelope, padded with plastic bubble wrap.

Inside the envelope was a cardboard box.

Inside the box, stuffed with tissue paper, was a green Lego toy, representing a building, with the Better Buildings Partnership logo on it.

Also in the box was a colour picture of the Lego toy; a piece of paper with the Better Buildings Partnership logo; and a one-page release about the Better Buildings Partnership.

Angela Gurley of Ketchum Public Relations, which handled the release, said the release was made as eco-friendly as possible.

“The paper itself – the actual one-page letter – was on recycled paper,” she said. “And we did make sure it was pushed down to one page, so it wasn’t utilizing multiple pieces of paper.”

Snort.

MM

President Obama wants you to know that nothing is ever his fault.

He gave a speech on national-security matters Thursday the gist of which was: George W. Bush left me a mess, and I’m doing the best I can to clean it up. A more forthright theme would have been: Radical Islam has thrust the United States into a defensive war, and it’s now my duty to protect the nation — despite legal complications created by left-wing lawyers, many of whom are now working in my administration.

President Obama described Bush’s counterterrorism program as an “ad hoc legal approach for fighting terrorism that was neither effective nor sustainable — a framework that failed to trust in our institutions, and that failed to use our values as a compass.” But here Obama must contend with himself as much as with Bush: His own Justice Department has argued, as the Bush Justice Department argued, that the nation is at war, that the laws of war therefore apply, and consequently that enemy combatants may be captured and detained without trial until the conclusion of hostilities.

...The president insisted in his speech that the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and enhanced interrogation techniques (which he characteristically referred to as “torture,” a term both legally inaccurate and morally obtuse) increased terrorist recruitment. In fact the leading driver of terrorist recruitment is successful terrorist attacks. That is what convinces the fence-sitters that radical Islam can win, and that Osama bin Laden is correct when he argues that the United States is a weak horse that will retreat when things get tough enough. The counterterrorism policies of the Bush administration prevented new terrorist attacks and assured the world’s bin Ladens that the United States was committed to their defeat. We hope that assurance still holds; if it does, it is only because President Obama, for all his unseemly disparagement of his predecessor, has picked up the tools George W. Bush left him and made them his own.

Funny how it looks different when you're the one in the spotlight, huh, O?

NRO

By ROBERT GUY MATTHEWS

A large portion of the U.S. steel industry could be severely hurt under a carbon-emissions cap and trade system, with some companies indicating it could push operations overseas.

U.S. Steel Corp., AK Steel, ArcelorMittal SA and OAO Severstal would be the biggest losers among the operators in the U.S., because of the carbon-intensive way that they produce steel.

These companies, called integrated mills, make steel from scratch, using iron ore and coke to produce the steel. Coke is made of carbon. If the companies are forced to reduce carbon-dioxide output or pay more for their emissions, they would be forced to sell pricier steel or simply make less of it.

The steel industry is lobbying to get credit for the fact that it has reduced carbon emissions sharply since the 1990s. Indeed, the steel industry has steadily reduced the amount of carbon emissions, but that is because of the growing production of steel made by minimills, which melt down scrap steel into new steel.

Re-melting steel emits nearly 66% less carbon dioxide in the production process. Nucor Corp., a minimill, is the largest producer of steel made within the borders of the U.S., having supplanted U.S. Steel.

It isn't feasible to switch entirely over to the minimill process, because some types of steel, such as exposed automotive parts and cans for food, have to be made through the integrated steel process, which is more rust resistant.

While minimills wouldn't be as affected by the legislation as integrated mills, they still oppose the current plan.

The worst-case scenario, the industry says, would be that the integrated steel operations would move to developing nations such as Brazil, where there are large stocks of iron ore in the earth. Set up abroad, they would essentially emit the same amount of carbon -- only without restrictions. The steel industry argues that if that scenario were to pass, the carbon emissions wouldn't be reduced, but U.S. jobs would be lost.

Wall Street Journal

Human production of CO2 causing global warming or climate change is the biggest deception in history. Previously this statement met with incredulity. How could the entire world or a majority of scientists be fooled? Now after the almost complete collapse of the global financial system people understand. The Obama government is fooled because it doesn’t want to understand and it suits their political agenda. They ignore facts and abandon logic to produce policies guaranteed to continue US economic decline. 

Vilification of CO2 and Cap and Trade

Vilification of CO2 allows them to push Cap and Trade as essential to save the planet when it is solely a major source of tax revenue. It allows them to push alternate energies that don’t work, are already heavily subsidized and will leave the US energy deficient for decades to come. They promote them under the guise of energy independence when that is attainable with coal, natural gas, nuclear and geothermal. It is all about government control and will add enormously to the US cost of living. The Heartland Institute estimates the impact of the Waxman – Markey bill will;

• Reduce aggregate gross domestic product (GDP) by $7.4 trillion,
• Destroy 844,000 jobs on average, with peak years seeing unemployment rise by over 1,900,000 jobs,
• Raise electricity rates 90 percent after adjusting for inflation,
• Raise inflation-adjusted gasoline prices by 74 percent,
• Raise residential natural gas prices by 55 percent,
• Raise an average family’s annual energy bill by $1,500, and
• Increase inflation-adjusted federal debt by 29 percent, or $33,400 additional federal debt per person, again after adjusting for inflation.
Heritage.org

This is damage to the domestic economy but the added cost to manufacturing will make the US uncompetitive in world markets. It is a self-destructive agenda. The revenue from Cap and Trade is essential to help pay just part of the interest on the massive amount of money borrowed for the stimulus package and the budget. However, it will restrict growth thus reducing internal and external wealth creation. Naively the budget proposal assumes a growth in the economy to generate more money to pay down the debt, but Cap and Trade assures it won’t happen.

Excellent article.  Read the rest at Canada Free Press.

New study finds Waxman-Markey could cost 2.5 million U.S. jobs by 2030 and reduce earnings

WASHINGTON, May 21 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Today, in anticipation of Friday's House Energy and Commerce Committee vote on the Waxman-Markey legislation, the National Black Chamber of Commerce (NBCC) released a new study that determines the potential economic impacts of the federal cap-and-trade system outlined in the bill. Compiled by CRA International, the analysis determines that by 2030 the law would:

• reduce national GDP roughly $350 billion below the baseline level;
• cut net employment by 2.5 million jobs (even after accounting for new "green" jobs); and
• reduce earnings for the average U.S. worker by $390 per year.

NBCC President and CEO Harry Alford notes, "These findings add to a growing body of evidence that demonstrates cap-and-trade would make American consumers poorer and the products they buy more expensive.

"Moreover, the NBCC study finds there will be little, if any, environmental impact to justify the high price U.S. families will have to pay, since the trading system will deliver virtually negligible changes in global CO2 emissions so long as developing nations such as China and India don't buy in.

"The House cap-and-trade bill seems to profit special interests at the expense of small businesses and hard-working families. It's evident from the some 85 percent of emissions permits that politicians have already given away for free to favored industries that the 111th Congress is learning that producing laws (like making sausages) requires a lot of pork.

"The inherent complexity of a government-regulated emissions trading system sets the stage for a perpetual struggle for political handouts. This makes Waxman-Markey a good way to promote corruption, but not energy efficiency."

PR Newswire

The Waxman-Markey bill is making just about every segment of the oil and natural-gas industry unhappy.

Oil refiners would be hit, because they would likely be among the largest buyers of emissions allowances. In addition to covering their own emissions, the refineries that turn crude oil into gasoline, diesel and other fuels will be responsible for the carbon emissions from transportation.

That puts the industry on the hook for some 44% of U.S. carbon emissions, according to the American Petroleum Institute, but it would receive just 2% of the emissions allowances available under the bill. Refiners would have to buy the rest at auction or on the open market.

By comparison, the electricity sector, which accounts for about 40% of U.S. CO2 emissions, would receive 35% of the allowances, with other industries such as cement, glass and paper manufacturers getting 15% of the free permits.

"The distribution of these credits is out of line with the actual distribution of emissions," said Amy Myers Jaffe, associate director of the Rice University Energy Program.

Refiners, already under pressure as the recession cuts U.S. demand for gasoline, say the bill will raise prices for consumers, force some refineries to close and increase foreign imports from countries that don't have to abide similar rules.

The added cost of buying allowances would likely be passed on to consumers in the form of higher gasoline prices, which could rise 28 cents to 54 cents a gallon by 2030, according to analysts at the National Commission on Energy Policy, a Washington-based bipartisan group.

Very bad bill, people.  Burn up the phones to D.C.

WSJ

WASHINGTON -- An Obama administration official says a top Al Qaeda suspect held at Guantanamo Bay will be sent to New York City for trial.

Ahmed Ghailani would be the first Guantanamo detainee brought to the U.S., and the first to face trial in a civilian criminal court.

An official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to disclose the decision, tells The Associated Press that the administration has decided to bring Ghailani to trial in New York. He was indicted there for the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa -- attacks that killed 224 people, including 12 Americans.

Ghailani, a Tanzanian, is a high-value detainee captured in Pakistan in 2004 and transferred to the U.S. detention center in Cuba two years later.

What a completely insane idea.  I guess Dear Leader learned well at his Master's feet.

Of course, it does feed the chaos.

FNN

When examination of the science is too much work for show preparation and taking a position that falls in line with like-minded ideologues is part of your shtick, you can always resort to ad hominem attacks if needed.

In a May 19 segment on his "Hardball" program about global warming, MSNBC's Chris Matthews interviewed Reps. Jim Moran, D-Va., and Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., who had opposing views on the issue. However, Matthews attacked Rohrabacher, a global warming skeptic, as someone ignorant of science.

"Congressman Rohrabacher, are you a Luddite, a troglodyte? Are you a part of ‘The Planet of the Apes' that doesn't want science? Where would you place yourself in this argument?" Matthews asked.

Rohrabacher stated his position and cited a Rasmussen poll that Matthews dismissed as a "Republican poll."

"I would place myself in the - in the position of being someone who's willing to speak the truth while the rest of the - while the rest of the people are being fed a bunch of baloney," Rohrabacher said. "Let me just note this to you, Chris - the poll you quoted was wrong. That's an old poll. The Rasmussen - the latest Rasmussen poll shows that a vast majority of the American people do not believe that the climate is changing due to human activity."

Later in the segment, Matthews used the global warming debate to probe a so-called
"cultural divide" between the two political parties and portrayed Republicans as faith-based and unscientific.

"Is there a cultural divide between the two parties that goes beyond this issue, where one party is more traditional in its values and it relies more on faith than on science?" Matthews asked Rohrabacher. "For example, we've had people on this program - I'm sure they're all over the country - who don't believe in evolution. They don't believe in biology the way it's taught."

Rohrabacher didn't take the bait and called Matthews out for his portrayal of the GOP.

"Chris, that's a good way to shut down the argument. Case closed," Rohrabacher said. 

Despite Matthews' unwillingness to accept any contrary point-of-view on the global warming debate as "science," there are hundreds of scientists that question the premise of man-caused global warming trotted out as "consensus" by the news media. A report released by the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee Dec. 22, 2008 listed more than 650 prominent scientists questioning the hype surrounding global warming alarmism.

Oh. My. GOD!  This explains EVERYTHING!!  The "Leg Tingler" is actually Surrogate!

News Busters

The Obama administration Tuesday pledged $110 million in humanitarian aid for Pakistani refugees fleeing heavy fighting in the country's Swat Valley and asked Americans to donate $5 each via text-messaging for tents, clothing, food and medicine.

New concerns were raised, meanwhile, about Pakistan's nuclear weapons program by recent satellite images showing continuing expansion of two key nuclear sites.

The administration, which announced an initial $5 million this past week to help more than 1 million people who have fled the fighting between the military and Taliban forces in Swat, said that most of the $110 million will come from the State Department budget, with $10 million from the Pentagon.

"Pakistan is facing a major humanitarian crisis," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told reporters, adding that Washington was responding to a request from Islamabad and was ready to do more. "As long as this crisis persists, our assistance will continue."

The largest part of the new money, $26 million, will go "for the immediate purchase of wheat, other food and related items from local sources," the White House said. About $20 million will be used "to provide family relief kits, tents, FM radios and generators that will provide light and water."

Mrs. Clinton, who harshly criticized Islamabad for "abdicating" to the Taliban in some areas of the country last month, on Tuesday praised its decision to take on the extremists in Swat. She added there is a "national mood change" among Pakistanis against the Taliban.

She also called U.S. policy toward Pakistan in the past 30 years "incoherent."

"We have walked away from Pakistan before with consequences that have not been in the best interests of our security, and we are determined that we are going to forge a partnership with the people of Pakistan and their democratically elected government against extremism," she said.

The secretary urged Americans to help directly, in addition to the official aid from their taxpayers' dollars.

"Using your cell phone, Americans can text the word 'Swat' to the number 20222 and make a $5 contribution that would help the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees provide tents, clothing, food and medicine for hundreds of thousands of affected people," Mrs. Clinton said.

U.N. High Commissioner Antonio Guterres on Monday called the current displacement crisis "one of the most dramatic of recent times," his office said. "Humanitarian workers are struggling to keep up with the size and speed of the displacement, and Mr. Guterres warns of potential destabilization if uprooted people and tens of thousands of host families trying to care for them don't get help fast."

Now mind you, we already provide Pakistan with $500 million a year, which Congress is increasing to $1.5 billion next year, so these donations will be on top of that.  Why is it that no matter who does what to whom, the U.S. Taxpayer has to be the one to ride to the rescue, and be called "stingy" by some blowhard in the criminal U.N. for their trouble?

The Washington Times

In case you've ever wondered what it must have been like to read Pravda, reading the American media's treatment of the financial crisis and our wise leaders' expert management of it all has given everyone a wonderful opportunity. For instance, check out this piece from several days ago on Politico.

If you can't bring yourself to click on the link, I'll give you the headline: "Obama Would Regulate New 'Bubbles.'"

Yes, you read that right. "Bubbles" just occur spontaneously. They have no cause or explanation. We need government to identify and destroy them.

Sometimes I wish our overlords would get their stories straight. First, Alan Greenspan — whom the New York Times once described, in its typical toadying, totalitarian fashion, as "the infallible maestro of our financial system" — told us it was impossible to tell if a bubble existed at any given time. Now we have Barack Obama insisting that not only can we detect bubbles, but we can also deflate them with sufficient dispatch to prevent them from causing any serious economic disturbances.

How are we peons to decide between the competing views of our infallible maestro on the one hand and the man who would be FDR on the other?

I shouldn't be so cynical. It is not for us to question how our overlords intend to distinguish between genuine growth in some industry on the one hand and bubble conditions on the other. Just to be safe they may have to quash all rapid growth wherever it occurs. Perhaps they can cut off credit to an entire sector of the economy, or levy industry-specific taxation. (Anyone who thinks this type of discretion and micromanagement might be exercised with political motivations in mind, or for any purpose other than the common good, is almost surely a good candidate for surveillance in our progressive commonwealth.)

In their quest to free us from economic instability, our betters may find it necessary to institute new rules. It is our job to accept these new rules with docility and thanks. These rules might have to be kind of sweeping, perhaps on the order of nobody may do anything. In liberal times that could perhaps be modified to nobody may do anything without asking permission. True, we could then wind up with a lengthy debate about whether asking permission itself counted as doing something, such that we'd need to ask permission in order to ask permission, in an endless regress. We'd then be back to the original nobody may do anything, which is probably the safest place to be anyway.

Or perhaps our rulers could shut down the electrical grid from time to time. I'd like to see those greedy fat cats inflate a bubble without any electricity!

Now the possibility that the government itself could be the primary culprit in the generation of asset bubbles is of course not merely rejected; the very idea cannot even be entertained. The great progressive institutions of government and central banking the causes rather than the solutions to our problems? Impossible!

Everyone knows Bad Things happen in the economy because of wicked speculators and grasping businessmen. If someone were to ask whether the Federal Reserve's creation of $8 billion out of thin air every week on average for four solid years might have had a tiny bit to do with the housing bubble, well, we'd have to remind such a cynic that the Fed was created in order to give us macroeconomic stability. Our present crisis was caused by excessive "leverage," you see — though we won't bother asking where major economic actors managed to get all this credit in the first place. That might lead people to ask hard questions about the Fed yet again, and as we've seen, the Fed is our Wonderful, Stabilizing Friend.

Excellent.  Go read the rest.

The Mises Institute

by Thomas Sowell  (May 11,  ;2009)

One of the many signs of the degeneration of our times is how many serious, even life-and-death, issues are approached as talking points in a game of verbal fencing. Nothing illustrates this more than the fatuous, and even childish, controversy about "torturing" captured terrorists.

People's actions often make far more sense than their words.

Most of the people who are talking lofty talk about how we mustn't descend to the level of our enemies would themselves behave very differently if presented with a comparable situation, instead of being presented with an opportunity to be morally one up with rhetoric.

What if it was your mother or your child who was tied up somewhere beside a ticking time bomb and you had captured a terrorist who knew where that was? Face it: What you would do to that terrorist to make him talk would make water-boarding look like a picnic.

You wouldn't care what the New York Times would say or what "world opinion" in the U.N. would say. You would save your loved one's life and tell those other people what they could do.

But if the United States behaves that way it is called "arrogance"-- even by American citizens. Indeed, even by the American president.

There is a big difference between being ponderous and being serious. It is scary when the President of the United States is not being serious about matters of life and death, saying that there are "other ways" of getting information from terrorists.

Maybe this is a step up from the previous talking point that "torture" had not gotten any important information out of terrorists. Only after this had been shown to be a flat-out lie did Barack Obama shift his rhetoric to the lame assertion that unspecified "other ways" could have been used.

For a man whose whole life has been based on style rather than substance, on rhetoric rather than reality, perhaps nothing better could have been expected. But that the media and the public would have become so mesmerized by the Obama cult that they could not see through this to think of their own survival, or that of this nation, is truly a chilling thought.

When we look back at history, it is amazing what foolish and even childish things people said and did on the eve of a catastrophe about to consume them. In 1938, with Hitler preparing to unleash a war in which tens of millions of men, women and children would be slaughtered, the play that was the biggest hit on the Paris stage was a play about French and German reconciliation, and a French pacifist that year dedicated his book to Adolf Hitler.

When historians of the future look back on our era, what will they think of our time? Our media too squeamish to call murderous and sadistic terrorists anything worse than "militants" or "insurgents"? Our president going abroad to denigrate the country that elected him, pandering to feckless allies and outright enemies, and literally bowing to a foreign tyrant ruling a country from which most of the 9/11 terrorists came?

It is easy to make talking points about how Churchill did not torture German prisoners, even while London was being bombed. There was a very good reason for that: They were ordinary prisoners of war who were covered by the Geneva Convention and who didn't know anything that would keep London from being bombed.

Whatever the verbal fencing over the meaning of the word "torture," there is a fundamental difference between simply inflicting pain on innocent people for the sheer pleasure of it-- which is what our terrorist enemies do-- and getting life-saving information out of the terrorists by whatever means are necessary.

The left has long confused physical parallels with moral parallels. But when a criminal shoots at a policeman and the policeman shoots back, physical equivalence is not moral equivalence. And what American intelligence agents have done to captured terrorists is not even physical equivalence.

If we have reached the point where we cannot be bothered to think beyond rhetoric or to make moral distinctions, then we have reached the point where our own survival in an increasingly dangerous world of nuclear proliferation can no longer be taken for granted.

Capitalism Magazine

By Reverend Keith A. Gordon, About.com Guide to Blues

It's been nearly eight months since I first wrote about the insults heaped upon the memory of blues legend Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown. First, Hurricane Katrina forced Brown to flee from his Louisiana home and relocate in Orange, Texas, his former hometown. Brown died from lung cancer shortly after losing everything in the storm, including his beloved black 1977 Cadillac.

Buried in Hollywood Cemetery in Orange, the temporary marker on Brown's grave was blown away a couple of weeks after his death by Hurricane Rita. Sadly, Brown's grave remained unmarked until Hurricane Ike devastated the Gulf Coast of Texas. The top of Brown's burial vault was forced off by flood waters, and his bronze casket simply floated away, one of over a dozen to do so. Brown's vault has since been properly re-buried.

Here's the good news: thanks to the efforts of local educator Robert Finch and the state of Texas, Brown's grave will be honored with an official Texas Historical Commission marker, placed in tribute for his contributions to the state. Finch also began a drive to raise money for a proper marker last summer, and the money that he raised – some of it from you great About.com Blues readers – will be used to improve the gravesite and place an elaborate, permanent grave marker. The state marker will take about a year to produce and place on or near Brown's grave.

Better than three-and-a-half years after the death of Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, the American music legend can finally rest in peace.

Very cool, and about time.

The Blues Report

What is strange about the furor over the Cheney interviews is that so many of the arguments against them simply have no precedent or logic.

1. If one were to say the vice president emeritus, as a matter of understood decorum, should refrain from criticism of the subsequent administration, then why did former vice president Al Gore — to the delight of much of the media — go on a virtual barnstorming crusade against the Bush administration in language far more partisan and hysterical (e.g., "He [Bush] lied to us! He betrayed this country! He played on our fears!")?
2. If one were to say that the vice president was representing some fringe position on the status of detainees at Guantánamo, then one need only review the transcript of Attorney General Eric Holder’s 2002 CNN interview when Holder explicitly said those at Guantánamo could be held indefinitely for the duration of the war and were without the benefit of the protections offered by the Geneva Convention Accords.
3. If one were to argue Cheney is simply covering his tracks on the subject of waterboarding, then one need only be reminded that Cheney admits he was briefed and approved the techniques and now candidly tells us why he did so — while the Speaker of the House was likewise briefed, and by her silence as a congressional overseer approved de facto the techniques, but now quite disingenuously denied such complicity at the very time she seeks to ruin the careers of lawyers who merely offered opinions rather than set or oversaw policy.
4. If one were to believe that Cheney  was selectively trying to refashion the past, then consider that (a) his points are clearly in reply to the Obama’s administration’s own prior selective release of Bush-administration legal counsel briefs, done for partisan political purposes and over the objections of career CIA officers, and (b) Cheney is asking for full, let-the-chips-fall-where- they-may disclosure in his requests to make the entire record public of both the interrogations and their relevance to preventing further attacks.

In short, while pundits still believe Cheney is a marginalized figure and an easy target of scorn, in fact, his methodical defense of the past is both logical and principled, and is beginning to illustrate, in quite painful fashion, the utter hypocrisy of the entire Democratic position on enhanced interrogations techniques and Guantánamo Bay. The American people more likely agree with Cheney than not; and even if they did not, they still prefer a candid and honest opponent to a disingenuous and self-serving ally.

As a footnote: In these Machiavellian times, it almost seems that the White House and some in the Democratic Congress who are still calling for hearings are at ease embarrassing Nancy Pelosi, whose prior value to the party as anti-Bush bomb thrower has now been eclipsed, since she appears as a looney, undisciplined partisan that can do far more damage to the cause than she ever did to Bush.

VDH Friday goodness...

NRO

There is now irrefutable scientific evidence that far from global warming the earth has now entered a period of global cooling which will last at least for the next two decades.

Evidence for this comes from the NASA Microwave Sounding Unit and the Hadley Climate Research Unit while evidence that CO2 levels are continuing to increase comes from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii.

Professor Don Easterbrook one of the principle speakers at the recent World Conference on climate change held in New York in March this year attended by 800 leading climatologists, has documented a consistent cycle of warm and cool periods each with a 27 year cycle. Indeed the warm period from 1976 to 1998 exactly fits the pattern of climate changes for the past several centuries long before there were any CO2 emissions. Greenland Ice core temperature measurements for the past 500 years show this 27 year cycle of alternating warm and cool periods. Recently the global temperature increased from 1918 to 1940, decreased from 1940 to 1976, increased again from 1976 to 1998 and has been decreasing ever since.

However throughout this time CO2 has been added to the atmosphere in increasing amounts. This point was brought out by at the New York conference by Vaclav Klaus the rotating President of the EU and President of the Czech Republic. If CO2 emissions cause temperature rises than why is it that every 27 years the earth climate switches to a cooling mode with decreasing temperature? Clearly there is another explanation that does not include humans. .

Nearly ten years into the 21 century it is clear that the UN IPCC computer models have gone badly astray. The IPCC models have predicted a one degree increase in global temperature by 2011 with further large temperature rises to 2100. Yet there has been no warming since 1998 with a one degree cooling this year being the largest global temperature change ever recorded. Nasa satellite imagery from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California has confirmed that the Pacific Ocean has switched from the warm mode it has been in since 1977 to its cool mode, similar to that of the 1945-1977 global cooling period.

The evidence that the earth is in a cooling mode rather than a warming mode is there for all to see. the RSS(Remote Sensing System) in Santa Rosa California has recorded a temperature fall of two to three degrees in the Arctic since 2005, while US Army buoys show an increase in Arctic ice thickness to 3.5 metres. North America has had two of its worst winters for sixty years with the temperature in Yellowstone Park falling to a staggering minus 60 degrees.

About 46” of snow fell in New York in two weeks! Last February Toronto had over 70 cms of snow, more than anything since 1950! Snow has fallen in parts of China and Asia for the first time in living memory while Britain had its worst January for twenty years. Alps have best snow conditions in a generation ran a newspaper headline last December. Strange indeed that the BBC , who likes us to believe it is impartial does not mention these freezing temperatures and Arctic conditions.

Some warming in the Antarctic has only been on a small 20 mile strip of the Antarctic Peninsula as a result of the 1977- 1998 warming period. This is insignificant compared to the overall size of the huge Antarctic continent.

Studies by the WeatherAction team(weatheraction.com) led by astrophysicist Piers Corbyn and also the measurements of sun spots by the Institute of Solar-Terrestrial physics in Irkutsk in Russia show that over the last 50 years solar activity has been at its highest for the past several thousand years.

The Russian physicists have analysed sun spot activity from 1882 to 2000 and have noted that the minimum of the cycle of solar activity will occur around 2021 to 2026 and that we will be facing not global warming but global cooling leading to a deep freeze around 2050.

The UN IPCC graphics have left out the medieval warming period (950-1300AD) and the Little Ice Age (1350- 1850). This alters the picture entirely

and does not then portray the alternating warm cool warm cool cycle of recorded world temperatures. Also statements put out by the UN IPCC are unrepresentative of many of its members. I do not recall any votes being taken of the opinion of members.

At the New York climate change conference in March as well as Vaclav Klaus delegates also heard Dr Richard Linzen from MIT probably the leading climatologist in the world today, as well as Professor Syun-Ichi Akasofu, former director of the International Arctic Research Center, Dr Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for astrophysics and Professor Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute who all demolished the global alarmists case piece by piece.

In his speech the EU President Vaclav Klaus had these controversial words for the environmentalist lobby.

“Environmentalists- even mainstream environmentalists are less concerned about any crisis posed by global warming than they are eager to command human behaviour and restrict economic activity” He also said “their true plans and ambitions: to stop economic development and return mankind centuries back.

They are interested in their businesses and their profits made with the help of politicians”

He got a standing ovation from the assembled audience.

His assertion about the involvement of politicians is not surprising. This whole movement is in many parts a political movement with nearly all the recognised climatologists throughout the world dissenting from the man made global warming theory.

This can be seen on the US Senate Environment committee web site with over 700 leading climatologists from 24 different countries including Nobel Prize laureates all dissenting from the man made global warming theory. It has been well reported that at least one of the architects of Koyoto has strong links with the New Age Movement which is not a movement that would promote economic growth.

We have all recently noticed the escalating price of food. The reason for this is because American grain, the breadbasket of the world, is increasingly being turned into ethanol which has led to a three fold increase of maize prices worldwide. This has the potential to cause worldwide starvation!

Terri Jackson is a Queens graduate physicist, climatologist and formerly founder of the Energy Group at the Institute of Physics, London.

The Belfast Telegraph

Federal regulations on greenhouse gas emissions could boost the monthly electricity bill for the average Texas consumer by $27, maybe even twice that amount, according to a study by the state's grid operator.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas – a nonprofit corporation whose members are largely electricity companies – evaluated how much electricity prices in Texas would rise if Congress imposes costly regulations on carbon dioxide emissions. The study considers various prices for carbon and other factors such as the impact on natural gas prices and whether more wind power could reduce costs.

Congress is considering a bill that would cap the amount of carbon dioxide that power plants and other facilities may emit. The government would issue tradable allowances, so that companies could buy allowances rather than cut their emissions.

Texas Republicans have complained that climate change legislation would kill the state's economy. Democrats say carbon dioxide regulations would create opportunities for the Texas energy industry and wouldn't be as costly as naysayers fear.

"I'm more concerned about climate change legislation than I am about climate change," Public Utility Commission Chairman Barry Smitherman has said. The ERCOT study was his idea.

Jim Marston, head of the Texas office of the Environmental Defense Fund, said he's astounded that the study failed to analyze how much energy efficiency could offset the cost of regulations on consumers.

"I think either they are incompetent or they have a political agenda," he said. [Or both...  --ed.]

Dallas Morning News

It appears that initial reports about the EPA memo this morning missed a key passage.  The internal memo, marked “Attorney Client Privilege”, did warn about the negative impact EPA regulation of CO2 would have on the economy.  But The Hill reports that it also challenged the notion that the EPA or anyone else had proven CO2 or other greenhouse gases to be harmful to humans:

An EPA finding last month that greenhouse gases are a danger to public health rests on dubious assumptions and could have negative economic impacts, a memo from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) warned.

The memo has no listed author but is marked “Deliberative&ndash ;Attorney Client Privilege.” A spokesman for OMB told Dow Jones Newswires that the brief is a “conglomeration of counsel we’ve received from various agencies” about the EPA finding, the conclusions of which would trigger regulation of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.

The author(s) of the memo suggest the EPA did not thoroughly examine the relationship between greenhouse gases and human health.

“In the absence of a strong statement of the standards being applied in this decision, there is concern that EPA is making a finding based on…’harm&rsq uo; from substances that have no demonstrated direct health effects,” the memo says, adding that the “scientific data that purports to conclusively establish” that link was from outside EPA.

The memo then borders on secular heresy by suggesting that if warming was indeed the result of man’s activity, it may have beneficial effects rather than being a net negative:

Finally, in language sure to anger climate change activists, the memo questions whether climate change might bring benefits that would mitigate the costs.

“To the extent that climate change alters out environment, it will create incentives for innovation and adaption that mitigate the damages,” the memo reads. “The [EPA finding] should note this possibility[.] … It might be reasonable to conclude that Alaska will benefit from warmer winters for both health and economic reasons,” the authors note.

Senator John Barasso calls the memo a “smoking gun”, and notes the memo insists that the EPA has shown no deleterious effects from the gases Lisa Jackson wants regulated:

Video at Hot Air

Among the many commonly-sited DHMO-related environmental impacts are: 

• DHMO contributes to global warming and the "Greenhouse Effect", and is one of the so-called "greenhouse gasses."
• DHMO is an "enabling component" of acid rain -- in the absence of sufficient quantities of DHMO, acid rain is not a problem.
• DHMO is a causative agent in most instances of soil erosion -- sufficiently high levels of DHMO exacerbate the negative effects of soil erosion.
• DHMO is present in high levels nearly every creek, stream, pond, river, lake and reservoir in the U.S. and around the world.
• Measurable levels of DHMO have been verified in ice samples taken from both the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps.
• Recent massive DHMO exposures have lead to the loss of life and destruction of property in California, the Mid-West, the Philippines, and a number of islands in the Caribbean, to name just a few.
• Research has shown that significant levels of DHMO were found in the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 which killed 230,000 in Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and elsewhere, making it the deadliest tsunami in recorded history.
• It is widely believed that the levee failures, flooding and the widespread destruction resulting from Hurricane Katrina along the U.S. Gulf Coast in 2005 were caused or exacerbated by excessive DHMO levels found in the Gulf of Mexico, along with other contributing factors.

Industrial DHMO Dumping

Meanwhile, federal (EPA) regulations are in place to make illegal the disposal of DHMO in landfills, including those licensed for hazardous waste. Regulations also stipulate that any DHMO appearing in a landfill must be removed. Judging from these laws it appears that the U.S. government recognizes the inherent danger DHMO poses to the environment, at least in certain circumstances.

The U.S. government refuses to ban the production, distribution, and use of DHMO. This inaction may be due to pressures from private interests and corporate-sponsored economists, among many, who predict a DHMO ban could produce disastrous results. Claims include damage to public health and the well-being of the U.S. and world economies.

Fortunately, some industry and governmental leaders are taking the initiative to inform and educate their employees in spite of what the U.S. government's official policy may be. Major employers, such as Sandia National Laboratories, a national security laboratory operated by the Sandia Corporation, a Lockheed Martin Co., for the U.S. Department of Energy, have begun notifying their workers of the DHMO issue. With efforts such as those at Sandia, the proliferation of DHMO may one day be minimized.

Equally encouraging is the support of environmental organizations, such as the Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand, an important force in the southern hemisphere promoting "ecological wisdom, social responsibility, appropriate decision-making and non-violence." Notably, a busy high-ranking Member of Parliament there supports a ban on DHMO. This welcome endorsement serves as a reminder to a pre-occupied world that fostering a widespread knowledge of DHMO is crucial.

DHMO.org

Remember those words. Every few days you will see something on the news to remind you that they are true.

Like Cheerios.

The new Democrat-controlled Food and Drug Administration has decided that Cheerios are a drug and are under its control.

That’s one of the dominant themes of Change You Can Believe In. Control. The government takes control, you lose control. The government gets more powerful, you get less free.

Now it extends to breakfast cereal.

Having taken over General Motors, now the Democrats want to take over General Mills. At least it seems that way.

I guess you can blame it on the oats. Cheerios are made of oats. Whole-grain oats, including the soluble fiber that makes them so healthy.

See, oats contain a substance that seems to suck cholesterol out of the blood. Doctors think that’s good for you because cholesterol is bad for you – at least excess cholesterol is.

And people are worried about cholesterol. Most people over 40 know their cholesterol levels and wish they were lower. There are drugs, expensive drugs, that you can take to lower your cholesterol.

And there are oats.

Eating oats can be better for lowering your cholesterol than taking drugs.

That’s good news.

And Cheerios has put that news on the front of its box. Specifically, Cheerios claims that by eating it for a month, you can lower your cholesterol by as much as 10 percent.

And that’s not a con.

Study after study bears it out.

So Cheerios are a good thing. So are oatmeal and some other oat products.

But this is about Democrats. And while oats will clean you out, Democrats will clog you up.

Bob Lonsberry

When does an unelected union without legal governing powers get a say in what the federal government does with its dealings with a state? When a president that is more beholding to unions than he is to the Constitution and the people of the United States comes to office, that’s when. And now we have that in Barack Obama.

The L.A. Times is reporting that Obama allowed the Service Employee International Union to interfere in the relationship between the state of California and the federal government over the issuance of the “stimulus” funds coming out of Congress. Apparently, Obama gave the SEIU veto power over the “stimulus” funds that was supposed to go to the Golden State because Sacramento had voted for a wage cut for state workers that belong to the union.

But this is where we are in America today. We have people in high places that either have no clue about what the rule of law is, or they simply don’t care. We are either ruled by judges that think they have been anointed by God to rule from the bench with no interest in the actual law or we are being ruled by unelected activists like in this case with SEIU president Andy Stern’s manipulation of the Obama administration.

In this case we have a bankrupt state trying to stay alive by cutting the costs of government. Those cuts are in the exorbitantly overgenerous benefits and wages of government workers. Certainly these sorts of cuts are common in real life, that where business is ruled by the reality of economic forces, but here we are in the fantasy world of government where only an upward projection of wages and benefits is apparently possible despite any such silly thing as “reality.” And these self-interested unions are being given veto power over federal funds by a president that has no desire or interest to observe the Constitution or the rule of law.

Publius' Forum

On Friday the IEEE unveiled a plaque commemorating the 50th anniversary of the first practical IC, which was created at Fairchild’s original building at 844 Charleston Road in Mountain View (it’s just off San Antonio Road near 101). The plaque was unveiled by Margaret Abe-Koga, the mayor of Mountain View who wasn’t even born back then.

The story of the founding of Fairchild is pretty well known. Shockley invented the transistor at Bell Labs in New Jersey (for which he eventually won the Nobel prize in physics) and then moved to California to commercialize it. This was truly the founding of Silicon Valley.

Unable to persuade any of his colleagues to join him, he hired young graduates. But his abrasive management style and his decision to discontinue research into silicon-based transistors led eight key engineers, the “traitorous eight,” to leave and form Fairchild Semiconductor (Fairchild Camera and Instrument put up the money).

Two of the eight, Gordon Moore and Jay Last spoke at the ceremony that commemorated the work of two more of the eight, Robert Noyce and Jean Hoerni. Jean invented the planar process that was (and is) the foundation of integrated circuit manufacture and Robert Noyce took it and ran with it to create the first true integrated circuit in 1959, 50 years ago. Both Robert Noyce and Jean Hoerni unfortunately passed away in 1990 and 1997 respectively.

Of course those are some famous names. Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore went on to co-found Intel and employee #3 was Andy Grove. If you drive down 101 past Montague Expressway, that huge Intel building to the east side of the freeway is the RNB, the Robert Noyce Building.

EDN Blog

What a difference an inauguration makes.

It was only a few months ago that "dissent is the highest form of patriotism" was still the rage among the elite, liberal, "tolerant" class.

But then Barack Obama became president. And now, suddenly, dissenters are paranoid, violent extremists worthy of surveillance by the federal Department of Homeland Security. Returning war veterans, who tend to be conservative and believe that terrorists ought to be called terrorists, need to be watched.

Average working Americans who held polite "Tea Party" protests on April 15 against confiscatory taxes and rampant government spending — protests marked by a lack of broken windows, overturned cars, torched buildings and injuries — are mocked with a not-so-veiled reference to a gay sex act. Conservative television and radio commentators are not only crazed nutcases, they are dangerous purveyors of hate and violence, unlike the civil, issue-oriented discourse of Keith Olbermann and Bill Maher.

Suddenly, there is no tolerance for dissent. It is tantamount to treason.

It was only a few months ago that blocking every element of President Bush's agenda was tops on the elites' list of good things to do. Wanting him to fail was a very good thing, whether it was his effort to stabilize Social Security by giving individuals more responsibility and control of it or winning a war. It didn't matter if the Democrats didn't have a constructive alternative. Blocking Bush was enough — the highest form of political responsibility.

Then Obama became president. And suddenly any opposition to the president's agenda is not worthy of substantive debate or discussion. It is simply a very bad thing, to be dismissed with a label: The Party of No. Wanting his vast expansion of government authority and spending to fail is hateful and divisive.

It was only a few months ago that the only way to have any street cred as an elite was to throw something like "BushHitler" into your conversation. Even better was to call the president an idiot, insane, incompetent and/or a swaggering cowboy.

Then Obama became president. Suddenly, "swagga" is a very cool thing. What is not cool is to suggest that the president's agenda is leading us on a path to socialism. Or to suggest that he may not be as brilliant as the adoring press makes him out to be, since he can't seem to go anywhere or say much of anything without a teleprompter. Those are ugly political smears. Not cool at all.

Funny how that works, no?

The Eagle-Tribune

Get out your notebooks, kids. Textbook case of liberal media bias here, with the NY Times at the forefront, regarding the recent conviction of ACORN in voter registration fraud in Nevada.

I guess the Times at least gets props for reporting the story. But they know where their bread is buttered: The story was not on the front page; it was in the U.S. Section. Can you imagine for a millisecond that if an organization a hypothetical president John McCain was associated with was even hinted of engaging in voter fraud, it would not be on the top fold of the front page? Would we not have seen days of editorials by Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd, etc., screaming, “What did McCain know and when did he know it!?!?!?”

Here’s the piece:

As El Rushbo says: Stop the tape!

OK, so according to initial (and most important) paragraph, here’s what you need to know about ACORN:

First, it is described simply an “antipoverty organization” (which is like saying the mafia is a “pro-family organization”) This should tug at the heartstrings of all the NY Times’ predominantly liberal/Democrat readership. Second, Freiss writes ACORN “drew criticism from Republicans” during the presidential race. The message is clear: Republicans are mean, selfish bastards who criticize things that are decent, good, and compassionate; therefore, the fact that ACORN was a target of Republican criticism, Mr. Freiss wants you to think, is a plus for ACORN.

Notice the wording? Supporters of John McCain “charged …” Mr. Freiss presents this as a simple issue of “He Said, She Said.” It’s one party’s word against the other. It’s completely different from when a conservative/Republican organization or individual is the subject of a scandal. It’s never “Mr. Democrat charges that Mr. Republican is guilty of X.” It’s simply “Mr. Republican is guilty of X.” This is usually followed for days by stories to the effect of “Mr. Republican trying to defend himself against charges of X,” even though by this time such charges have been determined to be bogus.

Go read the rest at Vocal Minority.

THE most effective weapon terrorists have found to wield against us isn't the headline-grabbing suicide bomber or even the deadly roadside bomb, the IED.

Such weapons can harm us, but they can't stop us. Terror's super-weapon is the lie.

Lying about civilian casualties is the one sure way to impede or even halt US (or Israeli) operations, to force such tight restrictions on our troops that they can't win.

The casualty con's so effective as both propaganda and tactic that terrorists everywhere have adopted the technique. It's been so successful that our enemies long ago transitioned to the next phase: creating civilian casualties and blaming us.

It works. The media love the charge. Our troops and pilots are always guilty -- even if proven innocent. Because so many on the left want us to be guilty.

Few journalists bother to investigate. If the Taliban, al Qaeda, Hezbollah or Hamas says it, it must be so. In Media Wonderland, terrorists never lie. Now every successful strike on a Taliban target generates the instant claim that the dead were all civilians.

And it isn't just the media who back the Taliban. The Obama administration -- a case study in instant foreign-policy ineptitude -- signs up, too.

This week, Taliban terrorists publicly beheaded three civilians in Afghanistan's Farah province, then herded women and children into compounds from which they fought government forces and US advisers.

With a vicious ground battle under way, the Talibs knew attack aircraft would appear. According to military sources, they set up the target. And, just in case, they slaughtered those women and children with grenades before any aircraft appeared. The entire massacre was a planned media event.

And who gets blamed? Not the Taliban. Before the smoke cleared, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was apologizing. (Apologizing is one thing this administration does with real enthusiasm.)

Our SecState played right into the Taliban's hands. It was instinctive on her part. Clinton and her new Cabinet peers know that our military's evil. No need to say a single word about the Taliban's atrocity.

Obviously, it's all above their paygrade...

New York Post

In psychology, the study of brainwashing, often referred to as thought reform, falls into the sphere of "social influence." (snip) For instance, the compliance method aims to produce a change in a person's behavior and is not concerned with his attitudes or beliefs. It's the "Just do it" approach.

Persuasion, on the other hand, aims for a change in attitude, or "Do it because it'll make you feel good/happy/healthy/succes sful." The education method (which is called the "propaganda method" when you don't believe in what's being taught) goes for the social-influence gold, trying to affect a change in the person's beliefs, along the lines of "Do it because you know it's the right thing to do." Brainwashing is a severe form of social influence that combine­s all of these approaches to cause changes in someone's way of thinking without that person's consent and often against his will.

Over the last several months, Washington has been abuzz over the demise of one of the main entities that make up our political system. 
 
Commentators shake their heads and shrug their shoulders, saying that it was bound to happen. It lost its way. It failed to keep up with the times. Its popularity rating and its credibility are circling the drain — and so is the money. Many people long associated with it are making the tough decision to leave it and join other groups. It is beleaguered and out-of-sync with America.  
 
Some people delight in its demise but politely cover their mouths to hide their snickers, while others openly sneer. Some wonder if it’ll even survive at all, while others are silently (or, not so silently) hoping it won’t. 
 
And since this is Washington, there’s no shortage of people providing advice for a comeback, like “return to your roots!” 
 
You may think that I’m describing the Republican party. I’m not. I’m describing the mainstream American media. 
 
During the last two years of the Bush administration, I was constantly asked how I felt about the president’s low approval ratings and what we were doing to change him or his policies so that his numbers would improve. I read about those low approval ratings in what seemed like every story about him. In fact, I’m still reading it. It’s good to know that the cut-and-paste tool is functioning so well.   
 
Interestingly, there were two entities that consistently had worse poll numbers than the president’s; those would be Congress — and the media. 
 
In private, I challenged a few reporters on what they would be doing to change their approval ratings. The funny thing was that some of them seemed to wear their unpopularity as a badge of honor. They didn’t think they needed to change. 
 
Well, how do they like it now?  
 
One of the changes in the last few years has been the trend of putting commentary into every news story. My question is: Just what are they suppose to comment on? Who is covering the news? As my dad, the one who taught me to love the news, said recently, “Just give it to me straight — I’ll make up my own mind.” 
 
Those of us who love journalism and want to see it thrive are dismayed at the loss of so many talented journalists as some abandon the profession to seek greener pastures — including explicit politics — and others are laid off for financial reasons as bureaus and even entire papers close down.  
 
President Bush would tell reporters from emerging democracies that to have a successful democracy, a strong national defense is important, but a strong free press is even more important. 
 
I agree with him. The media plays a critical role in our political system, and I hope it finds its way out of its wilderness before too long. But unlike the Republican party, which is working together to emerge as a stronger party, there are days when it’s really hard to see how the media plan to get themselves out of the mess they’ve helped get themselves into.

— Dana Perino served as the White House press secretary for President George W. Bush.

NRO

Let me preamble by pointing out that if George Bush had done this, it would have been sufficient for a blatantly dishonest and biased media to broadcast the footage everywhere in order to create the narrative that Bush was hopelessly stupid, and it would have inspired a four-part CNN miniseries questioning why President Bush was so hostile and so ignorant regarding Hispanic culture.  Mainstream talking heads would have crawled out of myriad holes to opine on this shocking display of stupidity and insensitivity, and “journalists” would have produced dozens of offended Mexicans to document their outrage for mass consumption.  Many would discover some deeply hidden and obscure racist meaning to “cinco de quatro” a la “macaca.”

WASHINGTON (AP) – President Barack Obama’s joke wasn’t lost in translation—even though he referred to a Cinco de Mayo celebration as “Cinco de Cuatro.”Obama jumbled his words as he welcomed guests to the White House to observe the Mexican holiday, sending the crowd into laughter before he referred to the day correctly.

“Welcome to Cinco de Cuatro—Cinco de Mayo at the White House,” said Obama, in what appeared to be an attempt to note they were celebrating on the fourth of May instead of the fifth.

Cinco de cuatro means “five of four” in Spanish.

Start Thinking Right

Youtube.

To hear liberals in Congress tell the story, the American health care system is crumbling before our very eyes, the unwashed masses are desperate for a solution, and only the United States government can save us. But a recent poll of 1,200 registered U.S. voters provides a striking contrast between voter attitudes toward health care reform and some oft-repeated myths being pushed in media and on Capitol Hill.

Here’s a look at seven of the most common myths, versus what American voters actually think:

Myth #1: Americans are clamoring for health care reform.

They aren’t. Only 5% of voters cite health care as either the top issue facing the country, as the biggest problem facing their daily lives or even as the greatest fear they have for themselves or their families. In fact when given a specific list of issues to choose from, health care comes in far behind the top concerns of 95% of American voters.

Myth #2: The U.S. Health Care system needs a complete overhaul.
Says who? Not American voters. Slightly more voters (47%) say that our health care system can be fixed with some minor reforms versus those who say it needs a radical overhaul (44%).

Myth #3: Coverage for the uninsured is the major problem facing the U.S. Health Care system.

By nearly a 3 to 1 margin, these voters see rising health care and health insurance costs as the biggest problem over too many being without insurance coverage. While government takeover advocates are fond of talking about millions of uninsured Americans, they generally fail to mention that many of those are uninsured by choice, or only temporarily uninsured. Yet this single misleading statistic remains a favorite of Congressional liberals as they make the case for a government takeover.

Myth #4: Government, not free market competition, is the best way to reduce health care costs.

Again, false. Clear majorities say that MORE competition among health care providers will do more to lower costs than increased government involvement. Further, pluralities believe that increased government involvement will cause health care costs and insurance premiums to go up. Americans undoubtedly feel this way because there are few (if any) examples where government involvement in any endeavor, let alone health care, actually caused prices to go down.

Read the rest at Human Events

The Conficker Internet virus has infected important computerized medical devices, but governmental red tape interfered with their repair, an organizer of an antivirus working group told Congress on Friday.

Rodney Joffe, one of the founders of an unofficial organization known as the Conficker Working Group, said that government regulations prevented hospital staff from carrying out the repairs.

Joffe, who also is the senior vice president for the telecom clearinghouse Neustar, told a panel of the House Energy and Commerce Committee that over the last three weeks, he and another Conficker researcher identified at least 300 critical medical devices from a single manufacturer that have been infected with the computer virus.

The devices were used in hospitals to allow doctors to view and manipulate high-intensity scans like MRIs and were often found in or near intensive care unit facilities, connected to local area networks with other critical medical devices.

"They should have never, ever been connected to the Internet," Joffe said.

Regulatory requirements mandated that the impacted hospitals would have to wait 90 days before the systems could be modified to remove the infections and vulnerabilities.

Joffe's testimony and earlier reports of infected medical devices show the risks involved in efforts to reap the economic benefits of a networked world. President Obama's stimulus package has allocated billions of dollars for digitizing medical records and networking the nation's electric grids.

"The open Internet, one of its great values is it allows you to connect fairly cheaply and fairly easily to other computers," Joffe said. He added, however, that "the Internet was never designed to do the things it's doing today."

That includes connecting control systems to the Internet to manipulate and coordinate the nation's electric grids.

"The future of widespread (electric) meter-to-meter communication does have me concerned," said Dan Kaminsky, a technology consultant who last year discovered a critical flaw in the Internet's core infrastructure. "I would like to see more security for those meters."

It was recently reported that Chinese and Russian spies had infiltrated the grid networks. Politicians introduced a bill on Thursday to give the Homeland Security Department and other federal agencies more authority over utilities in order to protect the "smart" grid from cyberattacks.

Joffe and other witnesses said that, at an operational level, the DHS is the appropriate government agency to improve cybersecurity. He called the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team, which is operated by the DHS, "woefully understaffed and woefully underfunded." As part of its mission, USCERT acts as a liaison between the public and private sectors.

Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy, doesn't it.  Can't wait 'till all our medical records are on-line...

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