Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Giant Omnibus Bill Includes $7.7 Billion in Earmarks for Bugs, Pigs, Parking – and La Raza
Termite research, walrus rehabilitation and pig manure are among the more than 8,570 of earmarks in the omnibus spending package currently before the Senate. Critics charge the bill is stuffed full of so many pork barrel projects -- $7.7 billion worth -- that President Barack Obama should veto it.
Perhaps the most controversial is a direct earmark for a Hispanic civil-rights group -- the National Council of La Raza -- worth $950,000. The group has been a lighting rod of controversy since it helped organize large protests in 2006 aimed at derailing efforts by conservative congressional Republicans to enforce U.S. immigration laws.
The late Rep. Charles Norwood (R-Ga.) first criticized earmarks for La Raza in 2005 in the magazine Human Events saying federal money shouldn’t be used for groups who don’t support U.S. laws.“We ought not to send taxpayer's money to people who absolutely advocate . . . using that money for the country not to follow the law of the land and not to secure our country's borders"
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China confrontation is test for Obama: Kirk
- US President Barack Obama faces a critical "early test" from China over a tense naval standoff in the South China Sea, and the whole world is watching his response, a US lawmaker cautioned Monday."This story will reverberate around the world and will be carefully watched in North Korea, Iran and Syria,"
said Mark Kirk, a US Navy Reservist who was at the Pentagon when the incident occurred Sunday."It’s an early test" of the new US president, but "it’s right on schedule,"
Kirk said, noting that China similarly challenged then-president George W. Bush two months after he took office in January 2001.
The Obama administration needs to respond forcefully, perhaps by sending the unarmed surveillance ship "right back into the same area" — this time with a destroyer escort, to make clear Washington cannot be bullied in international waters, said Kirk.
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Kirk Requests Another Investigation Into Freeman
I just spoke to Rep. Mark Kirk, who along with Rep. Steve Israel has requested another investigation into Charles Freeman's finances -- this time focusing on his role as a member of the advisory board of the Chinese state-owned oil company CNOOC. Asked if Freeman's appointment will stand, Kirk replied "I hope not." He suggested that the White House should "suspend him pending a real review."
Most troubling is the "lack of disclosure by Ambassador Freeman and the lack of review by the administration." Given that this is "one of the most important positions in the intelligence community," Kirk said he "would have expected a comprehensive review" by administration officials prior to making the appointment. Per Eli Lake's piece today in the Washington Times, we now know that the administration did no vetting at all of this pick, and worse was not even aware that it had been made until after Dennis Blair had offered Freeman the job. "They skipped all of those steps," Kirk says.
Perhaps most troubling, the tax forms for Freeman's tax-exempt Middle East Policy Council were submitted to the IRS with a post-it note covering the names of his donors. This may be legal from a tax perspective, but it is deeply problematic given the slightly higher bar set for public officials -- and the fact that Freeman has still yet to file his financial disclosure forms, meaning no one has any idea who precisely was bankrolling his think-tank...
[Transparency]
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Scientist group: Drop missile shield
President Barack Obama should drop plans for a U.S. missile defense system in Eastern Europe, the Union of Concerned Scientists said Wednesday.
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[Scientist group?
TimesWatch.org, a project of Media Research Center (MRC), has called the UCS an "unlabeled left-wing activist group".
L. Brent Bozell, founder of the MRC, has claimed that the UCS is "a left-wing activist organization...trying to position itself as being some kind of objective, centrist, moderate, apolitical entity when it is nothing of the sort."
Capital Research Center, a non-profit that studies left-political organizations, criticized the UCS as having "policy positions that are predictably those of a far-left pressure group".
S. Fred Singer, physicist, Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia, and founder of the Science & Environmental Policy Project, has said that the UCS has "zero credibility as a scientific organization."
Reporter, author, and co-anchor for the television newsmagazine 20/20 John Stossel commented, "The key word in 'Union of Concerned Scientists' isn't 'Scientists' — you don't need any particular degree or experience to join — but 'Concerned,' and the concerns in question are decidedly left wing."
Huh, that's funny - the article doesn't mention any of that.
I.e., every time you hear 'Concerned' in the name of the group being quoted {and you will; they're among the MSM's favorites}, be very concerned you're being played.]
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Iran buying time, says Israel
[HT:WP]
Israel's chief of military intelligence has warned that Iran was just ''buying time'' to enable it to develop nuclear weapons as reports emerged that the country successfully test-fired a precision air-to-surface missile on Sunday. (Snip) ''Moderate Arab states believe that this will be used by Iran and Syria, who will waste time under the guise of talk, while continuing their support for terrorism,'' he said.
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U.S.: Evidence mounts of Syrian nuclear cover-up
The United States said on Wednesday that United Nations inspectors had found growing evidence of covert nuclear activity in Syria, and European allies said a lack of Syrian transparency demanded utmost scrutiny. ''This report contributes to the growing evidence of clandestine nuclear activities in Syria,''
Gregory Schulte, U.S. ambassador to the IAEA, said during a debate by its 35-nation Board of Governors in Vienna.
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Syria heartened by Obama's plan for Iraq
UNITED NATIONS - Syria said on Friday it was heartened by U.S. President Barack Obama's plan to pull U.S. combat troops from Iraq within 16 months of taking office... [snip]"We feel ... encouraged by what we hear as promises from the president, Mr. Obama, that he would like to withdraw the American forces from Iraq within a fixed timetable,"
Syrian Ambassador Bashar Ja'afari told reporters after a meeting of the U.N. Security Council on Iraq.
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Brookings study gives thumbs down to European test
When it comes to measuring U.S. students against kids around the world, the National Governors Association and other groups have encouraged states to look at a European test used in 57 other countries.
But after scrutinizing the exam, the Brookings Institution has concluded it's seriously flawed.
The governors have urged states to compare the performance of American schoolchildren against tests including the Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA. The idea is to borrow their best ideas to move American students forward in the global arena.
The Brookings study, however, says the PISA test goes beyond learning to measure values and beliefs. For example, asks students whether they favor laws that protect the habitats of endangered species. And it asks if children favor electricity from renewable sources and regulation of factory emissions... [snip]
"These are political judgments," said Tom Loveless, the study's author.
Along with test results, the Paris-based group that runs PISA issues dozens of policy recommendations, ranging from testing and accountability to school choice and universal pre-kindergarten.
But Loveless pointed out several instances in which the group ignored data that contradict its recommendations...
[Make no mistake, the social engineers of the world know where our soft belly lies, and they target our children. Eternal vigilance]
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NEXT STOP, FRANCE
According to last month's Newsweek cover story, "We Are All Socialists Now," the "America of 2009 is moving towards a modern European state" -- whether we like it or not:
- A decade ago our national, state and local government spending was 34.3 percent of gross domestic product, while next year it will reach 39.9 percent, and America "will become even more French."
- So there will be "more government taxing and spending," and "more government intrusion in the economy will almost surely limit growth (as it has in Europe, where a big welfare state has caused chronic high [double digit, as the norm] unemployment)."
Obama promised to increase federal spending by $303 billion a year, or 10 percent, but the recessionary emergency spending bill he signed last week will cost a minimum of $790 billion over the next several years. It is the largest annual spending increase since World War II, an enormous deficit-spending bill that, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out,
expands "the role of the federal government across the breadth of American business, health care, energy and welfare policy."
If the spending increases and tax reductions of the bill are extended over 10 years, the Congressional Budget Office estimates they will add $1.7 trillion to the federal deficit. And since there are no sunset provisions to end the spending increases, we can be sure that any "cuts" in federal spending will be vigorously opposed...
[And with fewer and fewer Americans paying any Fed. income taxes...]
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image toon - sclm bbro - OB at Constitution signing re rights to health care-green energy - bailouts
'Bold', 'breathtaking' & biased
As Gov. Bobby Jindal began to offer a Republican response, it became apparent that he would be no match with Barack Obama in the soaring-oratory department. The Republicans really should have tried a gimmick instead.
Perhaps Jindal could have simply walked on and said,"Today, the president held what he called a fiscal responsibility summit."
He could afford a wide smile at that point, knowing his audience had erupted in laughter.
Last year, Republicans warned that Barack Obama was ultraliberal but the media handlers typically presented this as a conservative smear. Instead, they painted Obama as an aspiring moderate-Republican deficit reducer.
Honestly, now: Are we quite ready finally to declare the Era of Obama As Fiscally Conservative is over?
Now that Obama's emphatic ultraliberalism is the elephant in the room, and liberals are cheering the reversal of everything Ronald Reagan tried to accomplish economically, the media still don't want to call it liberal.
Instead, it's a pollster's list of positive adjectives: bold, ambitious, audacious and even breathtaking...
It should be laughable for the White House to promote a "fiscal responsibility summit" days after it shoved through a $787-billion "stimulus" bill through Congress. But the gooey flood of positive adjectives from the press demonstrates that its members are not government watchdogs. They're "breathtakingly bold" Obama enablers. The honesty deficit in our press just grows and grows.
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mage toon - 1st fnn mny - Ex-government worker in charge of fiscal responsibility
Czech leader joins meeting of climate change challengers
It is billed as the largest ever gathering of climate change challengers, a convention that kicked off last night with a title suggesting global warming is a thing of the past, and a guest list that includes a sitting European president.
Entitled Global Warming: Was It Ever Really a Crisis? and featuring some of the most prominent skeptics in the climate change debate, this week's conference in New York sets out to escalate its confrontation with the political establishment, the majority of which is aggressively promoting the view that humans are the principal cause of climate change.
Conference organisers were celebrating something of a coup in securing as a keynote speaker the Czech president, Václav Klaus, at a time when his country holds the rotating presidency of the EU. Klaus, a Eurosceptic, believes that efforts to protect the world from the impact of climate change are an assault on freedom."The largest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy, and prosperity, at the end of the 20th and at the beginning of the 21st century, is no longer socialism. It is, instead, the ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism,"
Klaus will say, according to prepared remarks provided by the organisers. He adds:"Environmentalism and the global alarmism are challenging our freedom."
This week's gathering brings together some of the more vocal critics of the scientific consensus, which maintains that climate change has been caused by human activity and that rising temperatures are now so dangerous to people's existence as to warrant urgent action... [snip]
A poll by the Pew Research Centre this year showed that climate change ranked last among topics of public concern to Americans; only 30% put global warming as their top priority, far down the scale from the economy, jobs, terrorism, moral decline, and even trade policy...
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Mexican cartels plague Atlanta
[HT:JK]
Atlanta — In a city where Coca Cola, United Parcel Service and Home Depot are the titans of industry, there are new powerful forces on the block: Mexican drug cartels. Their presence and ruthless tactics are largely unknown to most here.
Yet, of the 195 U.S. cities where Mexican drug-trafficking organizations are operating, federal law enforcement officials say Atlanta has emerged as the new gateway to the troubled Southwest border...
[We need a Manhattan-project-like effort to develop the technology to build a fence.]
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Let parents pick: Harlem proves moms and dads are clamoring for school choice
Long trapped in dead-zone local schools, Harlem's mothers and fathers are figuring out that they now have a remarkable range of options. That's because charter schools have blossomed in the community, making the neighborhood a national epicenter for reform.
Among competitors were traditional public schools - getting more than a run for their money now that Harlem has 24 charter schools, with a student body of 6,000 and growing. [snip]
Harlem's District 5 has been a victim of educational neglect by a system with a monopoly on public education. More than 70% of the district's eighth-graders and half the third-graders don't read at grade level. Last year, more than 84% of city charter school students scored at or above grade level on math exams...
This explains why tens of thousands of parents have kids on waiting lists for charter admissions. They want rigorous academics. They want a challenging curriculum. They want accountability. They want success.
Choice is the way to get it. Opening more charters would force all schools to raise performance. The obstacle is the Legislature, notably Assembly Democrats, who have capped charters in the city and state.
They are wrong. They are defending an atrocious status quo to the detriment of children...
[If run privately, they succeed every time - Highly Recommended > ]
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The unfairness of a Fairness Doctrine
Proposals by some Democrats are really just aimed at cracking down on conservative talk radio.
The Obama administration may say that it doesn't back a new Fairness Doctrine, but it has suggested it might support another reform, called "localism," which should also worry defenders of media freedom.
Localism would impose greater "local accountability" on broadcasters -- that is, it would force stations to carry more local programming. Localism, as sketched out in a recent FCC report, also could require stations to set up permanent community advisory boards (including "underserved community segments") that would have to be regularly consulted on "community needs and issues."
This measure -- a kind of community organizing applied to the airwaves -- could complicate life for national syndicators like Salem Radio, which make conservative and Christian shows available from coast to coast.
As a candidate, Obama supported both localism and the idea of relicensing stations every two years, rather than eight, as is currently the case -- which would make the new monitors a constant worry for stations...
[Different name, same game: silence your critics. Recommended > ]
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please join me in working against it by joining MRC's
Free Speech Alliance -
and as always, pass it on...]
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Free Speech Alliance -
and as always, pass it on...].
McGovern vs. unions
The Employee Freedom Action Committee (EFAC) is running ads in “targeted markets and on national cable” featuring 1972 Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern decrying the card-check legislation that is currently being deliberated in the legislative branch.
The organization’s website calls the card-check “fundamentally wrong” and McGovern himself says in the ad,“I’ve always been a champion of labor unions, but I fear that today’s union leaders are turning their backs on democratic work place elections. I’ve listened to all their arguments, and I’ve reviewed the facts on both sides. Quite simply, this proposed law cannot be justified.”
McGovern’s denouncement is all the more striking because his presidential nomination is viewed as one of the most liberal and once electorally disastrous choices for the Democratic Party. EFAC reached out to him after he wrote a op-ed in the Wall Street Journal a year ago.
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The Need for the Ancient Wisdom and Values
[Victor Davis Hanson]
... They sense that if one collapses — can't pay taxes, can't pay credit cards, can't pay mortgage, can't pay the monthly health care premium, can't pay college tuition — the Obama administration will have some sort of new program for the can'ts. But they suspect there won't be a bailout for them, the cans, and they will inevitably end up paying in increased taxes, fees, or inflated dollars for these spread-the-wealth efforts.
Obama's challenge will be to assure the millions of Americans who pay all their bills, and who scrimped, and passed on gratuitous expenditures, that their capital is safe from the greed of Wall Street, the tentacles of government, and the redistributive demands of their fellow citizens.
In such a climate, one must tread carefully and speak about uplifting the American people. Yet, so far we've heard the opposite. Serial citations of the Great Depression, fiscal meltdown, and catastrophe coupled with finger-wagging lectures about cowards, the new California dust bowl, and the wrongs the U.S. committed abroad now seem to come daily from the new cabinet.
It is a reflection of an entrenched anti-establishment culture suddenly given the reins of power that has not adjusted to the idea that trashing incumbent conservatives is not the same as the responsibility of governance.
Or it could be that we are in perpetual us/they and "we are on the brink of disaster" campaign mode, deemed necessary to alter radically American government, the economy, and culture — or all three combined.
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Inner cities a snapshot of America's future
by Star Parker
Blacks are not given enough credit for being trendsetters in America.
Black women got into having babies without marriage. Then white women started getting into it and the incidence of white out-of-wedlock births today -- almost 30 percent -- is higher than the black rate in the 1960's.
Blacks for years elected politicians championing public policy that destroyed their own communities. Now the rest of America has installed a new political leadership with the perfect formula -- run roughshod over private ownership, disdain traditional values, substitute political power for personal responsibility.
Why, then, when poor immigrant families readily move in one generation into the middle class, does one fourth of black America remain poor, generation after generation?
It's what happens when lives get politicized and people are instructed to be helpless... [snip]
Blacks bought into dependency and the welfare state. Now the rest of America has bought in. We can expect the rest of America to reap the same benefits that blacks have enjoyed from this lunacy...
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UNFUNDED HEALTH COSTS FOR CALIF. WORKERS TOPS $48B
CALIFORNIA
As if the state's budget problems weren't big enough, California's unfunded obligation for future government retiree health benefits has now topped $48 billion. According to state Controller John Chiang:
- The amount California is obligated to pay but has not funded is $340 million more than previously projected.
- Future obligations now stand at $48.2 billion.
- The tab would have been higher had the California Public Employees' Retirement System not used surplus money to offset rising health care rates.
A bipartisan panel appointed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger handed over a voluminous report in January 2008 recommending pension reforms.
[ 'recommending reforms'? WE'RE BANKRUPT, they're civil servants, why do we allow them to unionize in the first place?]
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Online News Sources Seen As Reliable As Local Papers
Fifty-two percent (52%) of Americans say they go online and use the Internet every day or nearly every day, and most of those adults now find online reporting comparable to that in their local newspaper.
Seventy-four percent (74%) of these daily Internet users say that reporting from web sources is as reliable while 69% say the same about local newspaper reporting.
[As reliable? That's a five point spread - presidents call that a mandate...]
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