Monday, April 27, 2009
Media Jumping 100-Days Gun, Praising His Popularity
The major media aren’t waiting for the actual 100 days of the Obama administration to end before crowning him a success. The front page of Friday’s USA Today touted their poll with Gallup, using the headline
"Poll: Public thinks highly of Obama."
He’s only getting stronger, they claimed...
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[? But...]
Obama Approval Relatively Low Compared to Predecessors
On Saturday’s Fox News Watch, panelist Jim Pinkerton pointed out that, contrary to the impression given by the mainstream media, President Barack Obama’s approval rating, as measured by Gallup, is relatively low compared to his recent predecessors for the 100-day mark, and is even below where President George W. Bush was after his first 100 days. Pinkerton observed:"Judith Klnghoffer, writing for the History News Network, made the point that Obama actually ranks seventh of the last nine presidents in Gallup poll opinion ratings. So seventh out of nine isn't so good."
Judith Klinghoffer’s article, "Obama’s Polls Trail Those of W.; Gallup Covers it Up," notes that Bush’s approval rating taken by Gallup stood at 62 percent after his first 100 days, while Obama’s currently stands at 56 percent...
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Sanger on ABC: Obama 'More Moderate than Expected'; Brown on CBS: 'Spring Time in America!'
Asked by George Stephanopoulos to name the “most important thing we've learned” about President Barack Obama during his first one hundred days in office (which is still three days away), David Sanger, a Washington correspondent for the New York Times, asserted:
“I think we've learned that he's more moderate than we had expected.” [????? - !]
That says a lot about the mindset of New York Times reporters and prompted George Will to retort, during the roundtable segment on ABC's This Week:
“He's less moderate than I thought. He's going to design our cars. He's going to design our light bulbs. He's going to tell us where our house shall be built. This is supervisory liberalism in the most nagging, annoying sort.”
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Obama Worship Goes Into Overdrive as 100-Day Mark Approaches
[HT:GK]
"The Truth" is stranger than fiction.
This is not a spoof picture from The Onion or any other satirical website.
The image you see to the right (larger version below the fold) is a painting by artist Michael D'Antuono called "The Truth" that will be officially unveiled at Union Square in New York City on April 29 to mark President Barack Obama's hundreth day in office. Here are the details from the official press release...
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'Star Trek' Cast Visits Soldiers in Kuwait, Media Couldn't Care Less
When Hollywood movies and their stars trash America's brave soldiers, the anti-war press can't give them enough attention.
Yet, when cast and crew members of the soon to be released prequel of the sci-fi classic "Star Trek" visited service men and women in Kuwait on Saturday, newsrooms across the fruited plain couldn't care less.
Spc. Howard Ketter filed this report shortly after the event concluded (h/t Big Hollywood, video embedded below the fold h/t Blackfive):
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The West Coast Plot: An "Inconvenient Truth"
.Critics of the CIA program are desperate to convince Americans that no valuable information came from the interrogations of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) and other senior terrorists.
They know that if our citizens learn the details of how enhanced interrogations stopped terrorist plots, most would support the CIA program.
A recent Pew poll showed that 71% of Americans believe that there are circumstances under which strong interrogation (not just enhanced interrogations, but actual torture) is justifiable to get information from captured terrorists.
This is why Timothy Noah of Slate (with Andrew Sullivan cheerleading him on his blog) is at such pains to debunk the story of the West Coast plot.
In his post, Noah calls the West Coast plot “Thiessen’s claim” and Anderw Sullivan calls it “Thiessen’s LA Tower Canard.”
What these two fail to appreciate is that the story of how enhanced interrogation broke up the West Coast plot is not my story — it is the official position of the intelligence community...
[Highly Recommended > ]
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McCain: Don't Investigate EIT Memos
Arizona Sen. John McCain suggested today that the push to investigate and possibly prosecute Bush administration officials who crafted the legal basis for the use of ''enhanced interrogation techniques,'' such as waterboarding, may have grown from a desire to ''settle old political scores'...'
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58% Oppose Further Investigation of U.S. EIT Allegations
58% of U.S. voters are opposed to more investigations of how the Bush administration treated terrorism suspects. Just 28% think the Obama administration should do further investigating of how suspected terrorists were questioned during the Bush years.
But congressional Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, are pushing for a wider probe...
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Dutch TV Jury Acquits Osama bin Laden of 9/11
A Dutch TV jury has found Osama bin Laden not guilty of the September 11 attacks.
In the conclusion Wednesday night to the show "Devil's Advocate" on Dutch public broadcaster Nederland 2, the jury of two men and three women, along with the studio audience, ruled that there was no proof bin Laden was the mastermind behind the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001.
In the latest show, Spong was able to convince the jury that bin Laden's connection to September 11 was a product of "Western propaganda." The jury also ruled there was insufficient evidence to prove bin Laden was the real head of terrorist network al-Qaida.
The jury did rule, however, that bin Laden is a "terrorist who has misused Islam."
The show is certain to provide further ammunition* in the already heated Dutch debate over immigration and the country's large Muslim minority.
[*And there it is: while we consider this a sad joke, many middle easterners {urged on by the Arab press} will take it seriously - continuing the societal struggle the the benefit of our enemies.]
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Tony Blair calls on world to wage war on militant Islam
Tony Blair has said he does not regret leading Britain to war in Iraq when he was Prime Minister and has called on the world to take on and defeat Islamic extremists. He believes that, without intervention, the problem will continue to grow in countries such as Afghanistan.
He called for a battle to be waged against militant Islam similar to that fought against revolutionary communism...
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Obama declares US not at war with Islam
ANKARA, Turkey - Barack Obama, making his first visit to a Muslim nation as president, declared Monday the United States "is not and will never be at war with Islam." (snip)...We will convey our deep appreciation for the Islamic faith, which has done so much over so many centuries to shape the world for the better, including my own country," Obama said.
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The Price Tag of Modern Liberalism
As we struggle to come to terms with the “Islamic fact,” it should by now be obvious that we are dealing with what Robert Spencer has called “stealth jihad,” a serpentine Islamic movement which envisions the demolition of a way of life and the weakening of the State which braces it. We do not seem to realize the extent to which we have boogied into the arms of those who would jeopardize our stability and well-being, as if in agreement with the Islamic notion of the West as jahiliyya (“pre-Islamic,” i.e., pagan, ignorant) and therefore deserving of immolation.
For militant Islam, the West is ripe for the plucking. Whether we are dealing with the sly, insinuating eloquence of Tariq Ramadan, whose project is the gradual permeation of Islamic culture into the center of the Western public space, or the agonistic declamations of Dyab Abu Jahjah, who defines assimilation as “cultural rape,” the difference is the same: the message is that of Islamic supremacy.
Countries like Holland, England, Belgium, France and eventually Canada will find themselves paying in tax dollars and social turbulence, if not in blood, for their political inertia, ethnic patronage, civic permissiveness, electoral calculations and the usual multicultural chestnuts. This is the price tag of modern liberalism, which the precient American political thinker James Burnham, in his 1964 Suicide of the West, defined as “a philosophy of consolation [that] permits Western civilization to be reconciled to dissolution.” [snip]
All of which leads to an inescapable conclusion. In the drama of civilization being enacted before our very eyes, it is not only the bombers who are suicidal...
[Highly Recommended > ]
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POPULATION ALARMISTS
[HT:JN]
The great British broadcaster Sir David Attenborough has become the latest in a long line of illustrious people to say we need to cut population growth sharply or face a grim future. Is he right?
Attenborough, in supporting Britain's Optimum Population Trust -- a group that advocates reducing human numbers -- has put himself on the wrong side of one of the great questions of our time.
- Today's world population is about 6.8 billion, give or take a hundred million or so.
- By 2050, most estimates show the population will be about 9 billion -- roughly a 35 percent or so increase.
- That's the equivalent, population-wise, of adding seven new countries the size of the United States to the world population.
- If fertility rates decline just a little more than predicted (and the decline in fertility rates over the past four decades has been faster than almost any estimate out there), the population actually begins to shrink in 2040.
- By 2050, at the low end of fertility expectations, U.N. forecasts show just 7.96 billion people in 2050.
- And by the end of the century, the population will actually drop below its current levels.
To do this, we'll need to have more babies, not fewer. Attenborough is wrong, but then so has been everyone to fret over human expansion throughout history...
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We’re fleeing high-tax Britain, say City tycoons
Two of Britain’s best known entrepreneurs are considering leaving Britain in protest against Alistair Darling’s new 50 per cent tax rate, as leading figures from business and the City warn of a talent exodus.
Hugh Osmond, the pubs-to-insurance entrepreneur, is thinking about a move to Switzerland. Peter Hargreaves, the £10 million-a-year co-founder of Hargreaves Lansdown, the financial adviser, is looking at the Isle of Man or Monaco.
More are likely to follow...
[Are we paying attention?]
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Why the Law is Foreign to Ginsberg
.
"I frankly don't understand all the brouhaha lately from Congress and even from some of my colleagues about referring to foreign law [when handing down court rulings] . . . ."
Well, you know what? I believe her. She and her fellow travelers really don't understand. That is, they don't grasp the correct legal philosophy well enough to understand what they're rejecting.
Note that I called the legal philosophy "correct" and not "strict constructionism," and for good reason. When you call it correct, it follows that other positions are incorrect. But what is the other side of the coin of constructionism? It would be living-document legal philosophies. To accept these categorizations implies that we just have a bunch of different credible perspectives on constitutional law, and who is to say what is correct? Call it legal relativism... [snip]
She added that the failure to engage foreign decisions had resulted in diminished influence for the Supreme Court.
The Canadian Supreme Court, she said, is ‘probably cited more widely abroad than the U.S. Supreme Court.' There is one reason for that, she said: ‘You will not be listened to if you don't listen to others.'"
This is a striking statement, and it vindicates something I've long believed. I once wrote that part of the problem with our judges is that they're not content to just be judges. A judge is much like a referee at a baseball game. It's not his place to make or alter the rulebook (Constitution); his is simply to determine whether or not it has been violated. His like or dislike of a rule shouldn't come into play.
Yet today we have judges who would be kings. They're not satisfied to just referee; that's too small a role for them. They want to be agents of activism, molders of men, shapers of society -- and they want the ego satisfaction attending such status... [snip]
The point is that activist judges undermine the rule of law by setting an example of contempt for it.
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Polish Academy of Sciences Questions Gore's Man-Made Global Warming Theory
Just as Al Gore prepares to testify on the dangers of Global Warming and urgency of new legislation the Polish Academy of Sciences has published a document that expresses skepticism over the concept of man-made global warming.
This report from a major scientific institution in the European Union shows the “consensus” position is becoming increasingly untenable.
The report found: [snip]
Experiments in natural science show that one-sided observations, those that take no account of the multiplicity of factors determining certain processes in the geo-system, lead to unwarranted simplifications and wrong conclusions when trying to explain natural phenomena. Thus, politicians who rely on incomplete data may take wrong decisions. It makes room for politically correct lobbying, especially on the side of business marketing of exceptionally expensive, so called eco-friendly, energy technologies or those offering CO2 storage (sequestration) in exploited deposits. It has little to do with what is objective in nature. Taking radical and expensive economic measures aiming at implementing the emission only of few greenhouse gases, with no multi-sided research into climate change, may turn out counterproductive.
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Gore's Global Warming Riff Keeps Melting
What a strange week. First, we saw what just might be an official transformation of the institution of science into a bordello, as its constituent members cheered on proven nonsense about “global warming.” Then the American Association for the Advancement of Science applauded alarmist-in-chief Al “there is no debate” Gore for admitting to them that this non-existent debate needs their help.
As the news reports came in last weekend, I was embarrassed for the lab-coat set, manifesting how they have completely sold out in the name of a taxpayer-funded gravy train. Reporters told us of their feverish approval at being told that, when it comes to their own personal bailout -- catastrophic man-made global warming theory -- things are even worse than we thought. [snip]
Turns out that, given such inconvenient observations, it meant “global warming” no longer really has anything to do with temperature. You can prove global warming instead by pointing to emissions from energy use (a proxy for population and economic activity). In slightly confused fashion, the alarmists have cut out the middleman [that would be the temperature], and energy use is now formally the demon..
[Bait & switch - but there's too much money to just let it go...]
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Dobbs Mocks Gore for Likening Global Warming Alarmism to Civil Rights Legislation of the 1960s
"Well, as you just heard Lisa [Sylvester] report, the former vice president claimed that this climate change legislation has the moral significance or equivalence of the civil rights legislation of the '60s and the Marshall Plans," Dobbs said. "Well, an interesting note - Gore's father, Senator Al Gore, Sr., like many southern Democrats at the time voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964."
Dobbs also noted during the segment prior Earth Day prognostications in his report, all of which didn't quite come true.
"Well, Earth Day, this week, and here are some words of doom and gloom from leading scientists, academics and authors on our climate and environment associated with Earth Day," Dobbs said. "Journalists Peter Collier wrote, ‘One to two million people per year will be starving to death during the next 10 years.' Biologist Paul Ehrlich claimed that most people are going to die in ‘the greatest cataclysm of mankind.' Harvard biologist George Wall said, ‘If we don't take act now, civilization will end between 15 or 30 years.' And ecologist Kenneth Watt claiming that in 15 years, ‘Air pollution will reduce the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one- half.' I want to point out if I may that each and every one of those quotes were from the first Earth Day in 1970, nearly 40 years ago."
The CNN segment highlighted a ClimateDepot.com report that global warming skeptic Lord Christopher Monckton was denied the opportunity to testify before the House Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment.
"The House Democrats don't want Gore humiliated, so they slammed the door of the Capitol in my face,"
Monckton told the online magazine Climate Depot," CNN correspondent Lisa Sylvester said.
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'Cap and Tax' to Hurt Americans
“The provisions they are proposing would change our economy and would have detrimental effects to American industry,”
“What we have learned from our research and findings — not our own but those of other outside agencies and groups such as the MIT study — is that this would cost American families $3,128 per year in basically what is a national energy tax.
“The National Association of Manufacturers estimates that it would cost three to four million American jobs. And then they estimate what they think the jobs growth would be. They only think that this legislation would create two million green jobs. So we are looking at a large jobs loss in this country if they pass that bill.”
“We are very concerned about that private right of action [next piece] being included in that bill,” ... it would be “bankrupting to the federal government.”
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FOR LAWYERS, "GREEN" MEANS MONEY
The carbon cap-and-trade idea is bad enough on its own. But Congress will make the climate bill even worse if it tacks on language that encourages lawyers to tie up the courts with frivolous suits:
- If it becomes law, it will place limits on carbon dioxide emissions.
- Businesses that discharge the harmless gas will be forced to buy tradable emissions permits from the government.
- Utilities, energy companies and other large industries that need to release CO2 beyond their allowed limit can buy unused cap space from others.
Already the country is strewn with frivolous and abusive lawsuits. Sometimes the plaintiffs in these cases actually end up with generous awards from juries that often have no problem giving away a lot of someone else's money. Imagine how plaintiffs and their lawyers will use the climate bill to shake down taxpayers and private companies...
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RECKLESS ENDANGERMENT
The Environmental Protection Agency has decided to play cap-and-trade roulette with the U.S. economy by ruling that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant that threatens the public and therefore must be regulated under the 1970 Clean Air Act. This so-called "endangerment finding" sets the clock ticking on a vast array of taxes and regulation that EPA will have the power to impose across the economy, and all with no political debate. This is a momentous decision that has the potential to affect the daily life of every American.
Peter Glaser, an environmental lawyer at Troutman Sanders, told Congress in 2008,"The country will experience years, if not decades, of regulatory agony, as EPA will be required to undertake numerous, controversial, time-consuming, expensive and difficult regulatory proceedings, all of which ultimately will be litigated."
The EPA has now opened this Pandora's box:
- The centerpiece of the Clean Air Act is something called the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) under which the EPA decides the appropriate atmospheric concentration of a given air pollutant.
- Under this law the states must adopt measures to meet a NAAQS goal, and the costs cannot be considered...
Under the Clean Air Act, the EPA also must regulate all "major" sources of emissions that emit more than 250 tons of an air pollutant in a year. That includes "any building, structure, facility or installation." This might be a reasonable threshold for conventional pollutants such as sulfur oxide (SOX) or nitrogen oxide (NOX), but it's extremely low for carbon.
Hundreds of thousands of currently unregulated sources will suddenly be subject to the EPA's preconstruction permitting and review, including schools, hospitals, malls, restaurants, farms and colleges. According to EPA, the average permit today takes 866 hours for a source to prepare, and 301 hours for EPA to process. So this regulatory burden will increase by several orders of magnitude...
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[The time is now... > ]
"STOP THE GREEN LUNACY: NO CARBON CAP-AND-TAX"
House-Pelosi: http://speaker.house.gov/contact/
YOUR Congressman: https://forms.house.gov/wyr/welcome.shtml
or: Speed Message them with your personal distribution list...
and as always, pass it on...
.
Kids live in fear
Modern children crippled by environmental anxiety
Habitat Heroes is a social networking site for environmentally conscious kids. To find out what American kids were thinking about the environment, the folks behind the website commissioned a 'survey'.
Nearly 60% believe Earth will be a blasted, apocalyptic wasteland by the time they're adults. One out of three children surveyed aged 6-11 fears that the Earth itself will cease to exist by the time they grow up.
Anxiety is highest among minority kids -- 75% of black kids and 65% of Hispanics think the planet will be damaged beyond repair by the time they're old enough to legally buy beer... [snip]
That's what the message of the modern eco-terrorist such as Gore and Suzuki is all about. To scare us all into dismantling the global economy.
The fact that it's all an overblown lie and that even if the world does warm up a bit, it won't be the first time and it won't cause environmental horror but might even save a bunch of human lives, is all beside the point.
All the poor little kid hears is the adults in his life telling him the world is going to end.
There was a time when parents, teachers and society's leaders -- even during real crises, such as time of war, as opposed to manufactured nonsense such as this -- did their very best to protect their children from the big bad world around them...
[That was before children became a political weapon. We should be outraged.]
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Unfair and unbalanced, Times spins toward oblivion
The nation’s largest left-wing newspaper and the bible for network news producers and bookers may be going under.
This past week, The New York Times [NYT] announced more staggering losses: nearly $75 million in the first quarter alone...
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Swiss heartland voters ban nude hiking
APPENZELL, Switzerland – Voters in the heart of the Swiss Alps on Sunday passed legislation banning naked hiking after dozens of mostly German nudists started rambling through their picturesque region.
The cantonal government recommended the ban after citizens objected to encountering walkers wearing nothing but hiking boots and socks...
[Now had they been Italians...]
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