Thursday, March 12, 2009
Obama Signs Spending Bill as He Criticizes Earmarks
President Obama on Wednesday signed an ''imperfect''spending bill packed with special projects in order to keep government running*, but he vowed that it will be the last one and proposed ways to curb lawmakers from abusing the process in the future.
[*untrue: the default was a 'continuation resolution' which would have funded all activity at last year's levels]
READ MORE
Obama & Earmarks: One Year Ago This Week
Then-Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., one year ago this week, swooped in from the campaign trail to vote for an amendment to impose a one-year moratorium on earmarks for fiscal year 2009. All three then-presidential candidates voted for the amendment. It failed. Obama said then
"we can no longer accept a process that doles out earmarks based on a member of Congress’ seniority, rather than the merit of the project."
[LDot: "And the MSM media continues to bat their eyes and swoon"]
READ MORE
N Korea to test Obama's resolve
NORTH Korea says it is making "brisk headway" towards launching a satellite into space, the clearest indication that the Pyongyang regime will defy a warning from US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to test a long-range missile.
The launch vehicle, likely to be a Taepodong-2 ballistic missile theoretically capable of reaching the US west coast, could be fired within a week, some analysts say.
READ MORE
The writing is on the synagogue wall
[HT:BN]
The periodic crises that have shaken world capitalism in the century and a half since Marx wrote Das Kapital are marked by a common political phenomenon. It is the rise of political anti-Semitism. Attacks on Jews and Jewishness constitute the canary in the coal mine that tells us something is going seriously wrong.
... London School of Economics - “Kill the Jews” or “Jihad 4 Israel” .... In Milan, streets are daubed with slogans urging Italians not to buy goods at Jewish shops ... In Berlin, placards stating “It was a good idea to use gas” ... [snip]
The economic crises of the 1970s led to a marked increase in the vote for the National Front in Britain and the openly anti-Semitic BNP, its successor extreme party, is doing very well in local elections - below the radar of the national press... [snip]
Terrible massacres of Muslims have taken place in different parts of the world so far this century, from Kashmir to Gujarat. In Iraq and Afghanistan, Nato soldiers are accused of brutality but the men with the most blood on their hands of fellow Muslims have been Islamist ideologues.
Yet there is no outrage against the perpetrators of those attacks compared with the onslaught on Israel and on Jews. Jews are again made to feel they are not full citizens of the countries of their birth because they refuse to support the right of Hamas and Hezbollah to use terror attacks against Israeli civilians.
The canary in the coal mine seems in danger of its life once again.
READ MORE
UN demands explanation from Iran and Syria on arms ship
Iran and Syria have until next week to explain to a United Nations sanctions committee how they were involved with a ship detained off Cyprus found to be loaded with explosives believed to be bound for Gaza.
The ambassadors of France and Britain described the episode at a Security Council meeting held Tuesday in New York as a "gross violation" of existing resolutions banning Iranian arms exports.
Both countries are required to respond within ten working days, according to a statement from Japanese ambassador Yukio Takasu, who chairs the Security Council committee set up in 2006 to oversee Iran sanctions.
The committee determined February 6 that Iran was in violation of existing sanctions but has not taken any punitive action.
READ MORE
Labour's disastrous policy is radicalising a whole new generation of Muslims
[UK {both}]
The repellent spectacle of Muslims demonstrating in Luton against the British soldiers returning from Iraq does more than turn our stomach. It tells us in graphic form that this country has not only utterly failed to combat a threat to itself from within but — astoundingly — turns not against those who threaten it but against those who seek to defend it.
READ MORRE
Stop pandering to enemies of our way of life
Radical Muslims get special treatment, says Ruth Dudley Edwards
The Government's neurotic placating of Islamists has not yet led to the censorship of tabloids for giving vent to occasional outrage. "Hate for Heroes: Muslims in vile demo", declared yesterday's Sun, rightly furious that in Luton 15 or so youths had screamed "terrorists" at a homecoming parade of the Royal Anglia's 2nd Battalion and waved banners calling the soldiers baby-killers and butchers. Other newspapers showed a group of watching women enveloped in abayas and niqabs.
In some ways the silent women were the more potent image of what disturbs readers of broadsheets as well as tabloids, their dress providing an in-your-face statement that they consider themselves proudly separate from the rest.
That the police arrested only counter-demonstrators will increase the average Joe's belief that radical Muslims have reason to think of themselves as not only separate but privileged."I am worried at how Bedfordshire police allowed this type of protest with offensive banners to take place," said Margaret Moran, the Labour MP for Luton South. "It seems to me that this amounted to huge provocation and was potentially racially divisive."
She's right, of course, but she must know that in agreeing in advance to what was bound to be an offensive protest, the police were only following what they believe to be government policy: don't upset radical Muslims in case they blow us up.
READ MORE
The New Battle for Britain
Despite the Thatcher reforms, government spending was only reduced to about 40 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) while the United States was able to keep government spending at about one-third of GDP for the last quarter-century.
The British public sector is almost certain to grow to about 48 percent of GDP, while the U.S. government spending will grow to the old British level of 40 percent of GDP.
The large countries within the EU that had government sectors approaching 50 percent of GDP (i.e., France, Germany and Italy) grew at about half the rate of the United States over the last 25 years, with Britain falling in between.
Thus it is reasonable to expect British growth to fall to the anemic levels of the other big EU countries and the United States. to drop to the old British levels...
READ MORE
NJ comptroller: Stimulus funds 'ripe' for misuse
New Jersey officials must carefully monitor the economic stimulus cash flow to guard against theft or mismanagement, the state comptroller warned Monday. Comptroller Matt Boxer said federal dollars will flow into the Garden State from nearly 100 different sources, making the situation "ripe" for misuse.....
READ MORE
Second stimulus idea
Republican leaders today slammed the idea of a second economic stimulus package, just one day after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she was open to such a bill.“I think the fact that they are already talking about stimulus two indicates they already think stimulus one has failed,”
House GOP Conference Chairman Mike Pence (R-Ind.) told reporters.
“We don’t even know what was in the first stimulus yet.”
READ MORE
Cabinet short on managerial experience
For a president set on changing the way Washington works, Barack Obama has depended upon current or former members of Congress for initial cabinet appointments more than any elected president since at least the 1950s.
During a time of economic crisis, Obama has no former company chief executive officer or cabinet member or nominee with significant private business experience...
READ MORE
Deceitfully Claims of Climate Conference Disharmony
You’d expect a gathering of over 700 reputable scientists, economists, and policy makers tackling an issue as topical and media-hyped as global warming to be big news.
And you know it would be, had the goal of their discussions and presentations been to parrot and propagate the conclusions of the alarmist mainstream. But instead, attendees of the International Conference on Climate Change arrived on Sunday prepared to put anthropogenic warming claims to the test, and for their sins the publicity they received ranged from none to insulting. [snip]
Although this year’s New York Times attack dutifully mentioned the tired but requisite erstwhile Exxon Mobil funding, IPCC heresy and dwindling numbers blather, its very title, Skeptics Dispute Climate Worries and Each Other, implied a new strategy. This time out, Revkin played the old divide et impera card – characterizing scientific points of debate as “internal rifts” within realist’s ranks, sprinkling words like “division” and “dissent” to imply disruptive disunity throughout.
While the piece is fraught with intellectual dishonesty, the manner in which he highlighted Dr. Richard Lindzen’s Sunday keynote address to make his point was a conscious misrepresentation of Lindzen’s position and demands rebuke. Here’s what was actually said on Sunday night:
The global warming issue has done much to set back climate science. In particular, the notion that climate is one-dimensional -- which is to say, that it is totally described by some fictitious global mean temperature and some single gross forcing a la increased CO2 -- is grotesque in its oversimplification. I must reluctantly add that this error is perpetuated by those attempting to ‘explain’ climate with solar variability. Unlike greenhouse forcing, solar forcing is so vague that one can’t reject it.
However, acting as though this is the alternative to greenhouse forcing is asking for trouble.
Okay, for starters, the expression “asking for trouble” hardly implies “erroneous.” Telling your wife she’s gaining weight is certainly asking for trouble, but it doesn’t make you a liar.
Of course, had Revkin included these words Lindzen spoke next, he would have made the climate guru’s actual meaning quite clear:
Remember, we are dealing with a small amount of warming (concentrated in two relatively brief episodes) in an inadequately observed system. The proper null hypothesis is that there was no need whatsoever for external forcing in order to produce such behavior. The unsteady and even turbulent motions of the ocean and atmosphere are forever moving heat from one place to another on time scales from days to centuries and, in doing so, they leave the system out of equilibrium with the sun, leading to fluctuations in temperature.
Just moments prior, Lindzen had explained that nature is “dominated by stabilizing negative feedbacks rather than destabilizing positive feedbacks,” and that once such is made clear, “the silliness of the whole issue becomes evident.”
[Highly Recommended for examples of how messy real science is and the lengths to which the scamsters will go to discredit it.]
READ MORE
Obama: No U.S. troops to Mexico border
Mexico’s drug war and the risks of cross-border violence deserve top-level attention, President Barack Obama said in an interview today, but it isn’t time to send U.S. troops. “I’m not interested in militarizing the border.”
Last month, Texas Gov. Rick Perry visited El Paso – whose neighbor, Ciudad Juarez, has taken the brunt of drug violence that has claimed more than 7,000 lives in Mexico in 14 months – and called on Washington to send a thousand troops or border agents...
[ 'not interested'? 'militarizing'? (vs. defending?, protecting?) - anyone else not reassured by this peculiar response?]
READ MORE
Will Someone Ask Obama About Voucher Kids?
There are many disgraceful aspects to the $410 billion 0mnibus spending bill that is working its way to passage in Congress. But amid the many porky earmarks and boondoggles that are part of this travesty there is one provision worth singling out.
The killing of the experimental school choice program that was giving 1,700 D.C. children a chance to get out of their failed public school system and attend a quality private or religious school. The Senate vote on Tuesday ensured that the program will be effectively killed after the 2009-10 fiscal year.
This was hardly a surprise, given that killing any plan that would give families vouchers to attend the school of their choice was a priority for the Democrats. President Obama has been a consistent opponent of school choice.
The arguments that choice would hurt public schools are a joke. Forcing failed public school systems to compete can only make them better. As for the loss of funds, Washington, D.C., like some other urban areas, already spends far more per student than other districts that give kids a better education.
Other attempts to smear choice, such as claiming it will fund Farrakhan’s schools, are red herrings. State education standards about curricula can deal with that problem. The notion that such plans will undermine the separation of church and state is a canard.
Public education means educating the public not slavishly supporting a government-run monopoly on education.
Wherever voucher plans have been tried, the demand for them has been overwhelming as parents desperately try to give their children a better education than the one provided by the often terrible public schools in the area.
The hypocrisy of liberal Democrats, who claim to be acting on behalf of the poor and the underprivileged, spiking efforts that throw a lifeline to inner-city kids is appalling.
But Obama’s hypocrisy is even more special...
[And to answer the title's question; no one in the MSM will even ask him about it.]
READ MORE
California AG on Media: 'A Little State Control Wouldn't Hurt Anybody'
With Democrats in control of Washington, the possibility of the reinstitution of the Fairness Doctrine is getting stronger and the rhetoric is getting bolder. But this time, it's getting attention on the state level - the biggest state.
Former Democratic California governor and current Attorney General Jerry Brown appeared on conservative talk host Michael Savage's radio show. One of the issues the two debated was the possibility of the renewal of the Fairness Doctrine. During the interview, Savage noted that Brown sounded as if he wanted state control over the media."Well, a little state control wouldn't hurt anybody,"
Brown rationalized his view by citing a quote that state control would be an attempt to balance, not to censor.
READ MORE
Card Check's Bounce
One of the most important goals of the Obama program is to strengthen labor unions. Explained the president: "I do not view the labor movement as part of the problem. To me, it's part of the solution." Of course more powerful unions would make it easier for him to push through the rest of his policy agenda. That's why he is backing the "card check" bill, which makes it a battle to control the entire economy. [snip]
The secret ballot is key. It protects workers from retaliation -- that's why the U.S. elects public officials, rather than allowing citizens to sign election cards. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to tell which worker is more vulnerable to pressure and even violence: one who gets to cast a secret ballot or one who must sign or not sign a card in public view. Four decades ago a federal appeals court declared:"it is beyond dispute that secret election is a more accurate reflection of the employees' true desires than a check of authorization cards collected at the behest of a union organizer."
This may be why even union members favor elections. Polls have found that eight to nine of every ten of them favor a vote. Card check is a tool for union executives and Democratic politicians, not workers. [snip]
In the public sector this practice has increased costs, which"have long been seen as a significant feature of out-of-control local government budgets,"
notes attorney Thomas P. Gies. Moreover, the process would likely lead to an economy-wide standard irrespective of industry, product, service, or finances.
Organized labor is hoping for a double "gimme" -- recognition without winning an election and contract without completing a negotiation.
READ MORE
THE EMPLOYEE FREE CHOICE ACT: ECONOMIC IMPLICATIONS
The Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which is pending before the U.S. Congress, would provide for union representation when an employee majority has signed union authorization cards and would create a system of mandatory arbitration if a collective bargaining agreement is not reached approximately 130 days after a union is newly certified.
Are there any likely unintended consequences, should the legislation be passed?
- While card checks could be expected to increase union membership as hoped by EFCA proponents, EFCA is unlikely to achieve its main goal of improving social welfare, which should take into account possible consequences not only for union members but for all individuals.
- In particular, passing EFCA would likely increase the U.S. unemployment rate and decrease U.S. job creation substantially.
READ MORE
Dancing to Big Labor's Tune
Biden to Unions:
“You All Brought Me to the Dance…It’s Time We Start Dancing"
After spending an astounding $61 million to elect Democrats in the 2008 elections, union bosses are getting their payback this week.
Yesterday, so-called “Card Check” legislation was introduced in both the House and the Senate.
Card Check strips American workers of the right to a secret ballot and gives the federal government the right to impose labor contracts on workers.
The timing of this assault on the freedom of the American workplace could not be worse. A new study shows that for every three workers coerced into joining a union under Card Check, one job will be eliminated by besieged American businesses.
Card Check is a job killer. Even Obama supporter Warren Buffet opposes it, saying
“I think the secret ballot is pretty important in the country. I’m against card check.”
Watch him here.
But as far as Big Labor is concerned, a deal’s a deal. Their goal is to get their allies in Washington to ram Card Check through Congress this week, before anyone notices that American workers and businesses are losing fundamental rights.
READ MORE
Congress Is Holding Hearings This Week
Make Your Voice Heard at
Join the 143,514 people who have signed this petition:
We, therefore, petition the U.S. Congress to ensure that every worker has the right to a secret ballot when deciding whether to organize a union, as well as the right to ratify the contract terms of their employment, rather than be forced to accept a contract through binding arbitration.
AND...
"OPPOSE EFCA 'CARD-CHECK'"
Senate-Reid: http://reid.senate.gov/contact/index.cfm
House-Pelosi: http://speaker.house.gov/contact/
YOUR Senator: http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
YOUR Congressman: https://forms.house.gov/wyr/welcome.shtml
and as always, pass it on...
.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
