.[ no post yesterday - blogspot was down in the morning ]

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The Carbon Curtain Begins to Fall

This week, the Senate is going to take up the America's Climate Security Act, a cleverly titled assault on both our freedoms and our economy offered up by Sens. Joe Lieberman and John Warner. The bill essentially limits how much gasoline and other fossil fuels Americans can use, "in the name of the planet."

The Heritage Foundation says the bill would raise gasoline prices by $1.10 per gallon and "represents an extraordinary level of economic interference by the federal government" that "promises extraordinary perils for the American economy."

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Senate Bill 2191: "America's Climate Security Act"

President Bush: president@whitehouse.gov

Barbara Boxer: http://boxer.senate.gov/contact/email/policy.cfm?CFID=9716973&CFTOKEN=89336911

Dianne Feinstein:
http://feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=ContactUs.EmailMe

YOUR Senator: http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

Carbon's Power Brokers

An unprecedentedly radical government grab for control of the American economy will be debated this week when the Senate considers saving the planet by means of a cap-and-trade system to ration carbon emissions. [snip]

"Cap-and-trade" comes cloaked in reassuring rhetoric about the government merely creating a market, but government actually would create a scarcity so that government could sell what it had made scarce. [snip]

Businesses with unused emission allowances could sell their surpluses to businesses that exceed their allowances. The more expensive and constraining the allowances, the more money government would gain...

[to the tune of 7 trillion dollars - no conflict of interests here...]

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Beating Al-Qaida

Before the surge, the CIA said the Iraq War was boosting al-Qaida globally. Now it finds the group is beaten in Iraq and Saudi Arabia, and is losing elsewhere. Imagine if we'd surrendered in Iraq. In a Washington Post interview last week to mark his two years as head of the Central Intelligence Agency, Gen. Michael Hayden rattled off a [longish, global] list of accomplishments...

[and our 'professional' media? McClellan, McClellan, McClellan, ... ]

[Recommended > ]

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Pelosi Says Iranians, Not Troops, Make Surge Success

... Deep in an interview the House Speaker granted to the editorial board of the hometown San Francisco Chronicle, Abe Greenwald found this eyebrow-raising passage:

"Whatever the military success, and progress that may have been made, the surge didn’t accomplish its goal. And some of the success of the surge is that the goodwill of the Iranians -- they decided in Basra when the fighting would end, they negotiated that cessation of hostilities -- the Iranians."

These remarks were not apparently included in the Chronicle itself, but were found on a Chronicle podcast of the interview. We didn't find any mainstream-media notice of this on Thursday or Friday.

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Iran says its right to enrichment is non-negotiable

TEHRAN - Iran will not give up its right to enrich uranium, a senior Iranian official said on Saturday, days before major powers submit an upgraded package of incentives to try to coax Tehran into halting the work. "Suspending enrichment is not negotiable ... Depriving Iran of its right cannot be on offer," Gholamhossein Elham, the government spokesman, told a weekly news conference.


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You Can't Appease Everybody

After decades of comparing Nixon to Hitler, Reagan to Hitler and Bush to Hitler, liberals have finally decided it is wrong to make comparisons to Hitler. But the only leader to whom they have applied their newfound rule of thumb is: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. While Ahmadinejad has not done anything as starkly evil as cut the capital gains tax, he does deny the Holocaust, call for the destruction of Israel, deny the existence of gays in Iran and refuses to abandon his nuclear program despite protests from the United Nations. [snip]

There are reasons to meet with a tyrant, but none apply to Ahmadinejad. We're not looking for an imperfect ally against some other dictatorship, as Nixon was with China. And we aren't in a Mexican stand-off with a nuclear power, as Reagan was with the USSR. Mutually Assured Destruction was bad enough with the Evil Empire, but something you definitely want to avoid with lunatics who are willing to commit suicide in order to destroy the enemies of Islam.

What possible reason is there to meet with Ahmadinejad? To win a $20 bar bet as to whether or not the man actually owns a necktie?

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[HT:NN]

International

Russia Warns U.S. On Missile Defense
Moscow - A top Russian general warned on Tuesday that the military will respond to U.S. missile defense plans with countermeasures, and said Washington's trust-building proposals have bogged down in diplomatic arguments. Lt. Gen. Yevgeny Buzhinsky told reporters that Russia was thinking about ''asymmetrical'' steps if the United States deploys missile defense elements in Europe. He said Moscow has no intention of building a similar missile shield, but refused to elaborate on what specific measures the military might take...
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US probes whether laptop copied on China trip
WASHINGTON - U.S. authorities are investigating whether Chinese officials secretly copied the contents of a government laptop computer during a visit to China by Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez and used the information to try to hack into Commerce computers, officials and industry experts told The Associated Press.
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Scientists sign petition denying man-made global warming

More than 31,000 scientists have signed a petition denying that man is responsible for global warming. The academics, including 9,000 with PhDs, claim that greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane are actually beneficial for the environment.The petition was created in 1998 by an American physicist, the late Frederick Seitz, in response to the Kyoto Protocol a year earlier.

[it's making the rounds - slowly - but why has it taken 10 years to get noticed?]

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WHO IS REALLY RESPONSIBLE FOR THE HIGH PRICE OF GAS?

datums:

• Over the last 28 years, Congress has again and again opposed our drilling for oil in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Reserve (ANWR) when we knew it contained at least 10 billion barrels of oil we could be using now.

• During the past 31 years, Congress repeatedly prevented us from building any new oil refineries that we now badly need.

• More recently, congressional Democrats defeated and discouraged any bill that would let us drill in the deep sea 100 miles out.

• Since the 1980s Congress has continually stopped all building of nuclear power plants while France, Germany and, yes, Japan, plus 12 other major nations, did build plants and get 20 percent to 80 percent of their energy.

Does Congress really think Middle America's voters are so gullible that they will believe that its latest answer to increasing our supply of oil and gas is to slap a 25 percent windfall penalty tax on oil companies and remove all other incentives for oil companies to drill and explore for oil?

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Twofer

Boy Scouts sue Phila. to stay in headquarters
The Boy Scouts of America's Philadelphia chapter has sued the City of Philadelphia in federal court to block the city's May 31 deadline for the scouts to open membership to gays and atheists, or vacate their historic 1928 headquarters off Logan Square. The civil rights lawsuit, filed Friday in federal court in Center City, contends that the city's ultimatum violates the scouts' rights under the U.S. and Pennsylvania Constitutions.

[evidently 'tolerance' of others' beliefs only applies to the state's view of things]

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The Scouts show some moxie
SO MICHAEL Nutter is "astounded" that the Boy Scouts had the "audacity" to file a lawsuit against the city. Join the club, Mayor. I'm also astounded. And elated. And I'm definitely not alone. It finally looks as if the local Cradle of Liberty chapter has stopped playing by the Marquis of Queensbury rules, and is taking on the municipal bullies who've been persecuting them...

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WHEN TAXPAYERS IGNORE LESS VISIBLE TAXES

Shoppers are inattentive to taxes, say the authors of a National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper. To prove this, the authors partnered with a supermarket chain to conduct an experiment in one of its stores:

For taxable items, like cosmetics and other non-food products, stores customarily do not include the sales tax in the price tags on the shelves, but rather have them rung up at the register, making them less salient to the consumer.
In the targeted store, the researchers adjusted the price tags to display prices including the 7.375 percent sales tax.

The result was a decline in sales of those items by 6 to 8 percent; reminding shoppers of the tax at the time of purchase made for more cautious consumers, suggesting that most of them do not normally take into account the sales tax on such products.

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Media Coverage Was More Upbeat at Start of the Great Depression

The news media have covered recent economic trials with four times as much negativity as they covered the worst economic period in the nation's history - the Great Depression - a new study from the Business & Media Institute shows.

"They were four times more negative during the Bear Stearns buyout than the worst economic couple days in our country's history," BMI Vice President Dan Gainor said, announcing the release of the new study, "The Great Media Depression." [snip]

"The economic impact both Neil Cavuto here and Maria Bartiromo on CNBC have warned [is] that we're kind of talking ourselves into a recession," Gainor said. "The political impact of that is this is the No. 1 issue for Americans and we're in danger of going back to 1992, when the media didn't tell us the economy had rebounded and that had a huge impact on the election."

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Court: Sect children should be returned to parents

AUSTIN, Texas - The Texas Supreme Court has ruled that children taken from a polygamist sect's ranch should be returned to their parents, saying child welfare officials overstepped their authority. The high court on Thursday affirmed a decision last week by an appeals court that said Child Protective Services failed to show an immediate danger to the more than 400 children swept up from the Yearning For Zion Ranch nearly two months ago...

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Illinois says less roadkill to be picked up from state highways this summer Carbondale, Ill. - The view along Illinois highways this summer should be beautiful - for the turkey vultures. The state's transportation department says it won't be picking up as much roadkill left along roads because it spent too much of its budget during the winter...
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