YouTube Warned to Remove Koran Film [FITNA]

The government of the world's most populous Islamic state says YouTube has two days to take down a Dutch lawmaker's provocative film on the Koran or it will block access to the popular video-sharing Web site. The warning by Indonesia came as the U.N.'s primary human rights watchdog ended a month-long session amid allegations by Western member-states and non-governmental organizations that Islamic nations are working to curtail free speech.

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>> VIEW VIDEO HERE

Spanish court prohibits ski station because of global warming

Madrid - A Spanish court has prohibited the construction of a ski station partially because global warming would make it economically unviable, media reported Wednesday. The court accepted the arguments of ecologists who opposed the construction of a ski station in the San Glorio mountain pass in northern Leon province for environmental reasons. (Snip) The court also justified its decision with the unprecedented argument that global warming would make the ski station economically unviable.

[all human activity will be regulated by this new religion]

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Analysis of Historic Climate Studies PinpointData Errors

[snip]
The researchers compared the composite output of 22 leading global climate models with actual data. Many of these models are also incorporated in research by the UN Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC), the recent Nobel laureate. Turns out that the historic predictions of these models do not match current climate change - by far.
[snip]
So how bad is it? The answer is "rather bad'. But the irony of the story is that this refers to the studies' reliability, not to the climate. The good news from the climate front is; there's possibly reason for less pessimism...
[snip]
The research published in the Royal Meteorological Society’s International Journal of Climatology, arrives amid already adverse circumstances and raised new concerns about the reliability of models used to forecast global warming.

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Al Gore Spends Millions Promoting Pat Robertson and Al Sharpton?

In Monday's Washington Post environmental reporter Juliet Eilperin wrote up a large article on Al Gore's latest climate heroics, headlined "Gore Launches Ambitious Advocacy Campaign on Climate." Gore has pledged to spend $300 million over 3 years "aimed at mobilizing Americans to push for aggressive reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, a move that ranks as one of the most ambitious and costly public advocacy campaigns in U.S. history."

[again: if skeptics are such a 'minuscule minority', what does he need a 300 million dollar PR campaign for?]

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The Media Ignore Al Gore's Planned Global Warming Profiteering

How is Gore trying to be a climate change profiteer? Essentially, he wants to make a fortune by creating a new market for a product that he is attempting to create by legislative fiat. If he succeeds and carbon emissions trading comes to the United States, Al Gore will be uniquely positioned to cash in. He's made sure of that.

Gore himself is chairman and founder of a private equity firm called Generation Investment Management (GIM). He says the London-based firm invests money from institutions and wealthy investors in companies that are becoming environmentally-friendly, to use green parlance. GIM appears to have considerable influence over major carbon credit trading firms: the U.S.-based Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) and the U.K.-based Carbon Neutral Company (CNC). CCX appears to be the only firm in the U.S. that claims to trade carbon credits.

As reported in the August 2007 issue of Foundation Watch ("Al Gore’s Carbon Crusade: The Money and Connections Behind It," by Deborah Corey Barnes), with help from friends at Goldman Sachs, including Hank Paulson, the investment bank’s former CEO who is now the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Gore has created a web of organizations to promote the so-called climate crisis.

Meanwhile, Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection is pushing for tougher environmental regulations on the private sector. It wants “cap-and-trade” legislation enacted so that companies will be forced to lower their greenhouse gas emissions and buy carbon credits. Untold billions of dollars could be generated in a brand new U.S. carbon market.

When Gore's potential for immense profits is factored in, the $300 million outlay for ads (some of which is likely to come from donations to the Alliance's "We Campaign") seems like a drop in the bucket...

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Obama says Gore would be considered for cabinet-level post

WALLINGFORD, Pa. — Senator Barack Obama said Wednesday he would give Al Gore, a Nobel prize winner, a major role in an Obama administration to address the problem of global warming. At a town-hall meeting, Mr. Obama was asked if he would tap the former vice-president for his cabinet to handle global warming.

[Gore as environment czar. how wonderful]

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DEBUNKING SOCIALIZED MEDICINE

A National Bureau of Economic Research study re: U.S./Canadian patient survey to show that:

• The percent of middle-aged Canadian women who have never had a mammogram is double the U.S. rate.
• The percent of Canadian women who have never had a pap smear is triple the U.S. rate.
• More than 8 in 10 Canadian men have never had a PSA test, compared with less than half of U.S. men.

These differences in screening likely explain why U.S. cancer patients do better than their Canadian counterparts:

• The mortality rate for breast cancer is 25 percent higher in Canada.
• The mortality rate for prostate cancer is 18 percent higher in Canada.
• The mortality rate for colorectal cancer among Canadian men and women is about 13 percent higher than in the United States.

Amazingly, there are quite a few Canadians who are not being treated for conditions that clearly require a doctor's attention:

• Among senior citizens, the fraction of Canadians with asthma, hypertension, and diabetes who are not getting care is twice the rate in the United States.
• The fraction of Canadian seniors with coronary heart disease who are not being treated is nearly three times the U.S. rate.

[i.e., the panacea often painted of 'universal' systems doesn't exist, and is statistically worse than our current system - now consider that any such government run system must destroy its private sector competition to function, and our choice is clear: continue to pressure the private system to improve above the 85% it already serves well, or hand the reigns to government and begin the slide to overpriced incompetence for all that we'll have no power to change]

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Don't go overboard

The lesson offered by the reaction to the last bubble, the Nasdaq-tech stock craze of the late 1990s, and the consequences to our politicians overreaction. Outraged over evidence that many companies lied in their financial statements to prop up stock prices and dupe investors, Congress passed the sweeping Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002.

With every passing year, it is more obvious the legislation went much too far, with terrible results for the economy. Extensive internal audits required by the act have proven far costlier than forecast, wiping out profits for many small firms. The added requirements also drove many established foreign companies to stop listing their stocks on U.S. exchanges and prompted a stunning 90 percent drop in startup foreign firms making their initial public offerings here. This led Sen. Charles Schumer – a liberal New York Democrat who is no friend of corporations – to warn the United States' traditional leading role in global financial services in now at risk.

That role could be lost forever if Congress adopts another far-reaching regulatory scheme that imposes unique-to-America costs – this time on banks, traders, exchanges, hedge funds and insurers...

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Threat to Homeschooling

By John Stossel

The cat is finally out of the bag. A California appellate court, ruling that parents have no constitutional right to homeschool their children, pinned its decision on this ominous quotation from a 47-year-old case,

"A primary purpose of the educational system is to train schoolchildren in good citizenship, patriotism and loyalty to the state and the nation as a means of protecting the public welfare."

There you have it; a primary purpose of government schools is to train schoolchildren "in loyalty to the state." Somehow that protects "the public welfare" more than allowing parents to homeschool their children, even though homeschooled kids routinely outperform government-schooled kids academically. [In 2006, homeschooled students had an average ACT composite score of 22.4. The national average was 21.1.]

Justice H. Walter Croskey said, "California courts have held that under provisions in the Education Code, parents do not have a constitutional right to homeschool their children," Justice Croskey said. If that is the law in California, then Charles Dickens's Mr. Bumble is right: "the law is a ass, a idiot."

The California Constitution says, "A general diffusion of knowledge and intelligence being essential to the preservation of the rights and liberties of the people, the Legislature shall encourage by all suitable means the promotion of intellectual, scientific, moral, and agricultural improvement."

That doesn't appear to rule out homeschooling, unless you read it as a grant of absolute power to politicians...

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The 'Recession' Is a Media Myth

['myth' is a bit strong, but certainly premature and 'curiously' contrary to past reporting...]

During the 2000 election, with Bill Clinton as president, the economy was viewed through rose-colored glasses. According to polls, voters didn’t realize that the country was in a recession. Although the economy started shrinking in July 2000, most Americans through the entire year thought that the economy was fine.

But over the last half-year, the media and politicians have said we were in a recession even while the economy was still growing. Talk of recession is seemingly everywhere. While the majority of people rate their personal finances positively, consumer confidence in the economy has plunged to a 16-year low, well below what it was during the last year of the Clinton administration when we were actually in a recession.

A Nexis search on news stories during the three-month period from July 2000 through September 2000 using the keywords “economy recession US” produces 1,388. By contrast, the same search over just the last month finds 3,166. Over 78 percent more negative news stories discussed a recession when the economy under a Republican was expanding than occurred under a Democrat when the economy was shrinking. [more research data within >]

The hysteria created by this coverage can have a great cost. It creates pressure for government to “do something,” even if that rush to do something actually ends up hurting the economy. For example, Obama's promises last week “to amend our bankruptcy laws so families aren't forced to stick to the terms of a home loan” will only further drive down the value of mortgage-backed securities, making any unstable financial institutions that hold them even more likely to fail. Who is going to want to loan money when the contract can be rewritten at a later date?

The news media have generated a lot of fear. Ben Stein has a point when he says “The actual economic conditions are not that bad. I think if we have a recession, if we have a serious recession, a great deal will lie at the media’s feet.” Hopefully a little perspective will enter the picture before even more harm is done.

[recession is two consecutive quarters of economic (GDP) contraction. We've yet to have a single month of it - and while the metrics for this are trailing and we could be contracting now, we'd need six months of it before anyone honest could claim we're in a recession - yet the hysteria continues, increasing the likelihood of it happening all the while...]

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Twofer:

.
Devastating demolition of the case for mass immigration

Today's report on immigration from the House of Lords Economic Committee strikes a devastating blow against years of blatant government propaganda. It rejects outright the Government's argument that a high level of immigration is of economic benefit to the UK.

The committee's findings are devastating. The report takes each of the arguments that the Government has been putting forward for years, and tears them to shreds one by one. It is a watershed in the debate on immigration...

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Illegal Alien Sues, Saying NYPD Called in Feds

An unlicensed cab driver will seek to show a federal jury this week that the police department is failing to abide by Mayor Bloomberg's pledge that the city won't alert immigration authorities to illegal aliens who otherwise obey the law. The case of the cab driver, Waheed Saleh of Jenin in the West Bank, indicates that a New York City police lieutenant casually tipped off a federal immigration officer about Mr. Saleh's immigration status, court documents in the case show.

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Fox Has Done Fairest Job Covering Campaign

Here's something you never hear from a Democrat: of all the cable networks, Fox News is doing the fairest job covering an issue.

Yet, that's exactly what Gov. Ed Rendell (D-Penn.), an outspoken Hillary Clinton supporter, said on "Fox & Friends" Monday.

I kid you not.

[I'm not the Fox booster some would describe me as - I actually dislike virtually all of their evening programming (the weekend business stuff is ok). But I forward pieces like this because visiting the media monitoring sites as I do I know that time and again, Fox newscasts (vs. their 'opinion' shows) either break stories other networks seem to ignore and/or do a better job of providing some degree of context beyond the one-sided versions of their competitors.
thems just the facts]

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Chavez says U.S. relations could worsen with McCain

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a socialist and fierce U.S. critic, warned on Tuesday that relations with Washington could worsen if Republican candidate John McCain wins this year's presidential election.



[hmm. point for McCain]

http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSN2540966820080325?feedType=RSS&feedName=worldNews&rpc=22&sp=true