Surprise, surprise - cabinet nominee drops out over principles not scandals

In Gregg Stories, Short Shrift to White House's Census Grab

ABC, CBS and NBC centered their Thursday night stories, on Senator Judd Gregg's decision to withdraw as Commerce Secretary-nominee, around his disagreement with the Obama administration's “stimulus” plan -- with only passing mention, if any, of the administration's wish to move the 2010 census count from Commerce to the White House.

CNN's Jessica Yellin reported at the top of the 6 PM EST Situation Room that “sources close to Senator Gregg say the bigger issue for him was the White House's effort to take control of the census,” yet that politicalization of the census wasn't mentioned at all in a full CBS Evening News story from Chip Reid, who found time to relay how “a top Democratic source on Capitol Hill was more blunt, saying Gregg actively campaigned for the job, then 'erratically dropped out without warning,'” nor in a Katie Couric-Bob Schieffer discussion.

On ABC's World News, George Stephanopoulos offered a clause about the census, but couched as merely a 'GOP allegation'.

Only after a full story on Gregg and Obama campaigning in Illinois for the “stimulus” bill did NBC's Chuck Todd get to the census issue:

There actually might have been a raw political reason and that was the fact that the White House was going to take control of the census away from the Commerce Department and into their own hands. And that had become sort of a mini [?] firestorm.

A February 10 NewsBusters item by Rich Noyes, “Networks Silent on White House Grab of 2010 Census,” recounted:

The Obama administration's decision to have the White House supervise the 2010 Census -- a response to left-wing complaints that the Census was too important to leave under the authority of Republican Judd Gregg, the nominee for Commerce Secretary -- has thus (as of Tuesday morning) far drawn absolutely no attention from the three broadcast networks, with not a single mention on the ABC, CBS or NBC morning or evening newscasts.

This would undoubtedly be a huge story if the White House were still in Republican hands and it was the GOP that was attempting to take over the Census. As the Wall Street Journal's John Fund reported on Tuesday:

"'There's only one reason to have that high level of White House involvement,' a career professional at the Census Bureau tells me. 'And it's called politics, not science.'"

—Brent Baker is Vice President for Research and Publications at the Media Research Center

Who is Pulling Geithner’s Strings?

Appearing behind a podium that proclaimed, “Financial Stability and Recovery,” Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on Tuesday carefully read from a teleprompter and provided what his flack said was a “comprehensive” plan.(Snip)It seemed so amateurish and shallow that the market dropped and commentators and senators were almost incredulous at the lack of detail. But what were they expecting? Geithner doesn’t know the details because he hasn’t been given them yet.

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Subject: image toon 1st mny sclm bbro - Geithner = here to help

Will the stimulus actually stimulate?

WASHINGTON — The compromise economic stimulus plan agreed to by negotiators from the House of Representatives and the Senate is short on incentives to get consumers spending again and long on social goals that won't stimulate economic activity, according to a range of respected economists.

"I think doing nothing would have been better,"

said Ed Yardeni, an investment analyst who's usually an optimist, in an interview with McClatchy.

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67% Say They Could Do A Better Job On The Economy Than Congress

Nineteen percent (19%) trust members of Congress more, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Fourteen percent (14%) aren’t sure.

Republicans and unaffiliated voters by double digits have more confidence in themselves than Democrats do, but even a majority of the party that controls Congress trust themselves more than the average legislator.

Forty-four percent (44%) voters also think a group of people selected at random from the phone book would do a better job addressing the nation’s problems than the current Congress, but 37% disagree. Twenty percent (20%) are undecided.

The new Congress fares worse on this question that the previous Congress. Last October, just 33% said a randomly selected group of Americans would do a better job than the Congress then in session.

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Parties Now Neck-and-Neck on Generic Congressional Ballot

Is increased awareness of what is in the economic stimulus package eroding support for Democrats? Democrats and Republicans are nearly even in this week's edition of the Generic Congressional Ballot.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone surveys found that the Democrats’ lead is down to just one percentage point. Forty percent (40%) of voters said they would vote for their district’s Democratic candidate while 39% said they would choose the Republican.

This marks the lowest level of support for the Democrats in tracking history and is the closest the two parties have been on the generic ballot.

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Subject: image toon - Trojan Pig spending bill

REAGANOMICS VS. OBAMANOMICS

President Obama's economic policy is following not what has been proven to work but liberal ideology. The best way to understand this is to compare what's being proposed now with what Ronald Reagan accomplished.

In 1980, amid a seriously dysfunctional economy, Reagan campaigned for president on an economic recovery program with four specific components, says Peter Ferrara, director of entitlement and budget policy for the Institute for Policy Innovation.

The first was across-the-board reductions in tax rates to provide incentives for saving, investment, entrepreneurship and work. The second component was deregulation to remove unnecessary costs on the economy.

In today's world, that would especially mean removing the onerous restrictions on energy production -- allowing drilling offshore and onshore for oil and natural gas, revival of the nuclear power industry, and construction of more electric power plants.

Third was the control of government spending:

• In 1981, Reagan forced through Congress not only his famed, historic tax cuts, but also a package of budget cuts close to 5 percent of the federal budget -- equivalent to roughly $150 billion today.
• In constant dollars, nondefense discretionary spending declined by 14.4 percent from 1981 to 1982, and by 16.8 percent from 1981 to 1983.

Even with the Reagan defense buildup [which has a very stimulatory effect on the economy], total federal spending declined to 21.2 percent of gross domestic policy in 1989 from 23.5 percent of GDP in 1983. That's a real reduction of 10 percent in the size of government relative to the economy.

The fourth component of the Reagan recovery plan was tight, anti-inflation monetary policy, which was spectacularly successful. Inflation was cut in half to 6.2 percent in 1982 from 13.2 percent in 1980, and cut in half again to 3.2 percent in 1983.

We know such policies work because they turned around in just two years an economy far worse than today's. We were suffering from multiyear, double-digit inflation, double-digit unemployment, double-digit interest rates, declining incomes, and rising poverty.

President Obama's economic policy is following not what has been proven to work but liberal ideology.

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"We don't have a trillion-dollar debt because we haven't taxed enough; we have a trillion-dollar debt because we spend too much."

-- Ronald Reagan
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THE MISSING OBAMA TAX CUT

Obama's original promise to cancel the capital gains tax for small enterprises was highlighted on his campaign Web site under "Small Business Emergency Rescue Plan." A few weeks before the election, advisers Austan Goolsbee and Jason Furman touted their boss's pro-growth credentials by noting in this newspaper that "he is proposing additional tax cuts" that included

"the elimination of capital gains taxes for small businesses and start-ups."

The revenue loss would be minimal, especially as compared to the rest of the $800 billion spend-a-thon, because any untaxed gains would only be realized well into the future.

But the proposal would at least signal some Democratic interest in encouraging businesses to take risks again -- the only way the economy is going to recover.

So what happened?

• According to the Journal, the obstacle is House Democrats, who oppose any cut in capital gains tax rates.
• The objection seems to be wholly ideological, a concern that such a cut -- even for start-ups, rather than for current capital holdings -- would validate Republican tax-cutters.
• The White House decided not to fight Democrats to add the President's own pro-growth idea to a bill whose supposed purpose is to promote growth.

This looks like an early example of Obama repeating a mistake that President Bush made too often -- refusing to challenge a Congress run by his own party.

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Subject: image toon - 1st crpt mny - Dems keep digging on economy

Cheney attacks

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The headline on CNN was "Cheney Attacks!" Correspondent Tom Foreman commented that,

"even in the bare- knuckle world of Washington these days, this was a remarkably sharp attack by the former vice president just weeks into President Obama's term."

And how had the former vice president expressed his fabled bellicosity this time? In an interview with Politico.com, he warned that there is a "high probability" that, in the years ahead, terrorists will attempt to use a nuclear or biological weapon to mass-murder Americans.

Cheney said he was concerned that the Obama administration may discard some of the policies that have defeated such attempts since 9/11/01. As he put it:

"When we get people who are more concerned about reading the rights to an al-Qaeda terrorist than they are with protecting the United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything they can to kill Americans, then I worry."

The guests on one CNN program thought that an outrageous comment (with a single exception: me).

Who would really insist on reading terrorists their rights? But a recent front-page headline in the Washington Post announced:

"Bush's 'War' On Terror Comes to a Sudden End."

If there's no war, terrorist suspects cannot be "unlawful enemy combatants"; they must be treated instead as suspects in criminal justice proceedings. Such suspects are legally entitled to "Miranda warnings" -- they must be informed, for example, that they have a "right to remain silent." [snip]

The former vice president did not talk about all this in his interview with Politico.com. Perhaps he decided that to do so would be seen by his critics as crossing the line from mere attack to barbarian rampage.

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Subject: image toon - bdd gwot - Terrorist has right to any attorney

Russia may allow shipment of Afghan-bound US arms

Moscow - Russia is open to the possibility of letting the United States and NATO ship weaponry across its territory to Afghanistan if the broader relationship between Moscow and the West improves, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Wednesday. Lavrov spoke after U.S. and Russian diplomats discussed the logistics of possible American shipments of non-lethal supplies.

[these folks are our enemies - we need drill, now, and bankrupt them or we will soon regret it]

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Germany Shifts to the Right

Berlin - German Chancellor Angela Merkel's chances of a decisive win in elections later this year are rising, as the downturn in Europe's biggest economy boosts support for her pro-business allies. Recent opinion polls suggest Ms. Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats could win the September vote in alliance with the Free Democrats, a small party that stands for lower taxes and smaller government.

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French fighter planes grounded by computer virus

French fighter planes were unable to take off after military computers were infected by a computer virus, an intelligence magazine claims. The aircraft were unable to download their flight plans after databases were infected by a Microsoft virus they had already been warned about several months beforehand. At one point French naval staff were also instructed not to even open their computers.

[Who in their right mind puts anything Microsoft into weapons systems?]

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UN ordered to pay legal fees of oil-for-food chief

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The U.N.'s highest internal judicial body has ordered the United Nations to pay legal fees to the former chief of its oil-for-food program, who has been accused of accepting money to illegally influence the humanitarian program in Iraq.

The program was the biggest humanitarian program in U.N. history, but a U.N.-sanctioned investigation found widespread corruption, involving thousands of parties, that bilked the humanitarian program of $1.8 billion...

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The New Book Banning

Children’s books burn, courtesy of the federal government.

It’s hard to believe, but true: under a law Congress passed last year aimed at regulating hazards in children’s products, the federal government has now advised that children’s books published before 1985 should not be considered safe and may in many cases be unlawful to sell or distribute. Merchants, thrift stores, and booksellers may be at risk if they sell older volumes, or even give them away, without first subjecting them to testing—at prohibitive expense. Many used-book sellers, consignment stores, Goodwill outlets, and the like have accordingly begun to refuse new donations of pre-1985 volumes, yank existing ones off their shelves, and in some cases discard them en masse.

The problem is the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 (CPSIA), passed by Congress last summer after the panic over lead paint on toys from China. Among its other provisions, CPSIA imposed tough new limits on lead in any products intended for use by children aged 12 or under, and made those limits retroactive: that is, goods manufactured before the law passed cannot be sold on the used market (even in garage sales or on eBay) if they don’t conform.

Whatever the future of new media may hold, ours will be a poorer world if we begin to lose (or “sequester” from children) the millions of books published before our own era. Could we really be on the verge of losing all of this? And if this is what government protection of our kids means, shouldn’t we be thinking instead about protecting our kids from the government?

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THIS LAND IS MY LAND, YOUR LAND IS MY LAND

Recently, property owners sued the governor, the mayor, the state, city agencies and private developers who had agreed that the plaintiffs must be forced to sell their land. Guess who won. To piece the land together, the developer and government created a coalition to overcome the squawking of those being booted out. Promises include:

• Creating an estimated 15,000 union construction jobs; 45 percent will be held by women and minorities. [I.e., State sponsored discrimination against one and only one demographic - no much for the 14th Amendment]
• In an agreement with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), over half of the housing units will be rent controlled or sold at below-market rates to low-income buyers.

The largess is borne, to the tune of $1 billion, by the taxpayers and, in part, by the property owners forced out at a price less than they were willing to accept. However, the court noted that judges may not intervene on behalf of the property owners "simply on the basis of our sympathies," and that this case follows precedent, including the much discussed Kelo case.

[we need a legal revolution in this country]

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Global warming debunkers to have conference in March

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Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe reports on a conference this coming March, sponsored by the Heartland Institute, which will gather together global warming realists:

THE MAIL brings an invitation to register for the 2009 International Conference on Climate Change, which convenes on March 8 in New York City. Sponsored by the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based think tank, the conference will host an international lineup of climate scientists and researchers who will focus on four broad areas: climatology, paleoclimatology, the impact of climate change, and climate-change politics and economics.

Most AT readers already know that global temperatures have been falling since 1998, causing the warmists to redouble their fury in claiming we must act now, and rely on an imagined scientific "consensus" that the nascent field of climatology has perfected mathematical models explaining all relevant variables in the global climate.


It would appear to me that the global warming craze has peaked, especially now that the world economy is contracting and people are focused on immediate tangible concerns like putting food on the table. So many wild predictions of disaster have rung hollow that warmist credibility is on the ebb.

Yet Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress appear ready to impose extremely costly regulations on the American economy in the name of green concerns over carbon dioxide, a gas essential to life. The readiness of Americans to impoverish themselves based on theoretical models will be tested; there's too much money and power on the line for the alarmists to simply admit defeat and walk away...

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Subject: image toon bdd grn engry - Live before 2008 vs cave after

Lithium-rich Bolivia now a global player

In the rush to build the next generation of hybrid or electric cars, a sobering fact confronts both automakers and governments seeking to lower their reliance on foreign oil: Almost half of the world's lithium, the mineral needed to power the vehicles, is found in Bolivia - a country that may not be willing to surrender it easily.

Japanese and European companies are busily trying to strike deals to tap the resource, but a nationalist sentiment about the lithium is building quickly in the government of President Evo Morales, an ardent critic of the United States who has already nationalized Bolivia's oil and natural gas industries.

"We know that Bolivia can become the Saudi Arabia of lithium,

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[So we're going to trade our dependance on foreign oil to foreign lithium - also from a hostile nation. OR - we could develop our own vast resources...

[click, sign, pass it on...]
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A HEALTH-TECH MONOPOLY

Democrats are using the economic "stimulus" bill to create a health information monopoly that will help centralize government control of the health-care market.

Democrats have decided that the government will simply pick the next Blu-Ray. Instead of building on a voluntary public-private standard-setting body created by the Bush Administration, the stimulus bill codifies it as a federal office and gives it broad new powers if private companies are not "substantially and adequately" meeting the needs of doctors and hospitals.

This will certainly muffle innovation. Anyway, what's the rush? Democrats give the game away by mandating that most medical providers who aren't linked into the government-approved health information network after 2016 will start to be penalized.

Their ultimate political goal, however, is cost control, explains the Journal. For the Pete Stark Democrats whose ambition is Medicare for all -- no exceptions -- giving government exclusive control over electronic health information and reporting is a step toward "comparative effectiveness" research.

That in turn will be used to impose price controls and deny some types of medical treatment and drugs. And because government is able to skew the whole health system through Medicare and Medicaid, comparative effectiveness could end up micromanaging the practice of medicine.

Source: "A Health-Tech Monopoly; Another surprise in the stimulus fine print," Wall Street Journal, February 11, 2009.

[I.e., when the issue of socialized health care was debated in '94, it lost. So this time around they're skipping the debate and covertly slipping it into spending bills that must be passed now to avert "catastrophe".

The most transparent/ethical administration/congress in history?

We're being rolled.]

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D.A. Selling T-Shirts to Fight ACLU

Weld County District attorney says he was lying in bed one night and then about 4 o’clock in the morning it came to him.

" I wanted to send a very clear message that we're not going to be intimidated.That there are a lot of people here that are going to support us,"

The DA has designed and produced 160 t-shirts to help raise money to defend the lawsuit filed by the ACLU in Operation Number Games. The ACLU is claiming that Sheriff Cooke and Buck violated privacy laws by using tax records to arrest people they believed were stealing and making up Social Security numbers for tax benefits.

"I think the message is pretty clear this case is about victims of identity theft and not about illegal immigration,"

The front of the shirt says “The ACLU Sued My District Attorney & Sheriff” and on the back “Weld County Standing Up For Americans” Buck says he chose those words carefully.

" We feel very strongly about limited government in northern Colorado and so we chose our words carefully on there and tried to convey the message that its all about the victims of crime,"

Dustin Mundell of Kersey says he supports what the DA is doing and came down to get his shirts.

" I just think it's ridiculous that an organization like the ACLU would go after something like that when there was illegal immigrants involved,"

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Subject: image photo - fnn - Always open = closed