Tuesday, May 12, 2009
White House: Budget deficit to top $1.8 trillion
With the economy performing worse than hoped, revised White House figures point to deepening budget deficits, with the government borrowing almost 50 cents for every dollar it spends this year.
The deficit for the current budget year will rise by $89 billion to above $1.8 trillion -- about four times the record set just last year...
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'Smart power' stumped
The world's terrorists and rogue nations have clearly become more dangerous since President Obama took office, and analysts say they're testing him to see how much they can get away with.
North Korea, Iran, al Qaeda in Iraq and the Afghan Taliban have gotten much more threatening in recent months, while the administration pursues a new foreign policy based on the belief that they can achieve much more through soft diplomacy - sitting down with our adversaries and having a "dialogue" with them.
In an ever-more-dangerous world, the Obama administration says it is practicing "smart power" instead of "hard power."
"With smart power, diplomacy will be the vanguard of foreign policy," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told senators at her confirmation hearings.
That's the message Mr. Obama has sent since his swearing-in, but so far, it doesn't seem to be working. On the contrary, it seems to be encouraging further bad behavior...
[Recommended > ]
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Face of Defense: Sisters Serve Together in Baghdad
Army Staff Sgt. Melodie A. Hunt and Army Pfc. Mallorie A. Hunt, Lumberton N.C. natives, are sisters who are currently deployed to Baghdad. Although they serve in different units, they said, they still find time to get together.
“We were still in the states when we found out that Mallorie would be at the same place as me,” Melodie Hunt said. “It was pleasing to know that I would have someone there for me, and it made our parents more comfortable [with] us being together for my sister’s first deployment.”
Melodie Hunt, who is on her second deployment in her eight-year military career, works as a police officer for the Lumberton Police Department when at home. The Hunt sisters are 12 years apart, and they said they have this deployment to thank for strengthening their relationship.
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Jews as Viruses: The Arab View
The election of reputedly “hard-line” Israeli leaders like Binyamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman is considered a blow to peace, and these leaders feel called upon, again and again, to affirm that Israel does want peace and explain how it intends to achieve it—the clear implication being that the Palestinians and the Arabs in general are just waiting for Israel to make the right move.
But is that assumption justified? Rationally speaking, a new report by the Anti-Defamation League should be enough, by itself, to cast a lot of doubt on it.
“The swine flu epidemic has provided fodder for newspapers in the Muslim and Arab world to continue their broadsides against Israel,” the ADL notes. “Editorial cartoonists for large circulation Arab and Muslim newspapers in several countries have picked up the swine flu theme as a means to depict Israeli leaders as racist pigs.” [snip]
The fact that American and European leaders, with their obsessive talk of peace and pressures on Israel, maintain a conspiracy of silence on this phenomenon—not to mention Israeli leaders, intimidated into compliance—is ultimately a sign of submission, one might say dhimmitude, before the Arab world’s economic power and perceived strategic importance.
Not surprisingly, recent attempts by Israel to “make peace” have resulted in suicide bombings, rocket barrages, and other forms of deadly terror...
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A Table for Tyrants
IMAGINE an election where the results are largely preordained and a number of candidates are widely recognized as unqualified. Any supposedly democratic ballot conducted in this way would be considered a farce. Yet tomorrow the United Nations General Assembly will engage in just such an “election” when it votes to fill the vacancies on the 47-member Human Rights Council.
Only 20 countries are running for 18 open seats. The seats are divided among the world’s five geographic regions and three of the five regions have presented the same number of candidates as there are seats, thus ensuring there is no opportunity to choose the best proponents of human rights each region has to offer.
Governments seem to have forgotten the commitment made only three short years ago to create an organization able to protect victims and confront human rights abuses wherever they occur...
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Italy does not want to become 'multi-ethnic' says Silvio Berlusconi
Previous Left-wing governments had "opened the doors to clandestine migrants coming from other countries, with an idea of a multi-ethnic Italy," Mr Berlusconi said. But that kind of society was "not our idea", he added, as he sought to reassure Italians who were alarmed at the number of immigrants pouring into the country, particularly from eastern Europe and Africa.
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Chávez seizures fuel Venezuela oil fears
A fresh round of expropriations in Venezuela has raised fears that the Opec producer’s already declining oil output could sink to its lowest level in the past 20 years. Troops were mobilised over the weekend to assist Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, PDVSA, in seizing the assets of some 60 oil service companies, after a law was approved last week that paves the way for the state to take increasing control over its all-important oil industry.
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STIMULUS WATCH: Early road aid leaves out neediest
Counties suffering the most from job losses stand to receive the least help from President Barack Obama's plan to spend billions of stimulus dollars on roads and bridges, an Associated Press analysis has found.
Although the intent of the money is to put people back to work, AP's review of more than 5,500 planned transportation projects nationwide reveals that states are planning to spend the stimulus in communities where jobless rates are already lower.
One result among many: Elk County, Pa., isn't receiving any road money despite its 13.8 percent unemployment rate. Yet the military and college community of Riley County, Kan., with its 3.4 percent unemployment, will benefit from about $56 million to build a highway, improve an intersection and restore a historic farmhouse...
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Obama-UAW theft, payoff
President Obama and his advisers are determined to turn control of Chrysler Corp. over to the United Auto Workers in spite of the fact that concessions to the union are largely responsible for the automaker’s inability to make a profit. Still, the UAW and other unions were among Obama’s biggest supporters and are ready to collect...
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57% Expect Government Will Give GM, Chrysler Unfair Advantages
If the federal government becomes the majority owner of General Motors and Chrysler, most Americans (57%) believe it’s likely the government will pass laws and regulations giving those firms an unfair advantage over other car companies. That figure includes 37% who consider such preferential treatment Very Likely.
Under proposals currently in play, the federal government and the United Auto Workers union could end up as majority owners of the two auto giants. Just 18% of Americans believe that ownership team would do a good job running the companies. Seventy percent (70%) continue to oppose any additional bailout funding for GM and Chrysler.
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Goldman Sachs Hires Barney Frank Staffer To Be Its Lobbyist
The revolving door between Wall Street and Washington continues to, well, revolve. In a move that will no doubt delight the Goldman Sachs (GS) conspiracy crowd, the firm has hired a staffer from Barney Frank's office to be their top lobbyist in DC...
[I guess the more things 'change'...]
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Green and mean: The environmental downside of clean energy
YOU can understand the frustration on both sides. Environmentalists worldwide are clamouring for bold action to end the burning of fossil fuels and plug the world into renewables. Politicians throw their weight behind a $14 billion scheme that would replace the equivalent of eight coal-fired power stations with tidal power. What do they get for their pains? Green outrage.
"This massively damaging proposal cannot be justified," said Graham Wynne, chief of the UK's normally staid Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB). Friends of the Earth said it was "not the answer". What is going on here? Have greens lost the plot? Has environmentalism been hijacked by big construction companies?
Or do we simply have to learn that even 'environmental' energy comes at an environmental cost?
The problem is one of scale. Bigness is often an issue for greens, many of whom grew up reading one of the movement's key texts: E. F. Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful. They liked biofuel while it was about recycling cooking fat, but not when it became growing millions of hectares of palm oil in former Borneo rainforest. Solar panels on roofs are good, but covering entire deserts with them is another matter. They like small wind turbines and even small wind farms, but get very jumpy as wind power reaches industrial scale.
Small may be beautiful, but it won't change the world. You can't generate vast amounts of green energy without large-scale engineering projects, which inevitably do some damage to the natural environment...
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All life on planet depends on CO2
A belief is not merely an idea the mind possesses: it is an idea that possesses the mind. Robert Bolton The Possessive Belief CO2 (CARBON) IS NOT CAUSING GLOBAL WARMING OR CLIMATE CHANGE.
I can’t say it more boldly but it doesn’t seem to matter; the belief persists that CO2 is the cause and therefore a problem. The belief is enhanced by government policies and plans, which spawn businesses to exploit the opportunities they create...
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Obama's cap and trade plan "monstrously stupid"
President Obama’s proposal for a cap and trade system to head off global warming would be "monstrously stupid," according to Berkshire Hathaway Inc. CEO Charlie Munger, in an interview with CNBC.“It would be a huge shock to the economy and it wouldn’t accomplish very much given the fact that the vast majority of the pollution, or rather the CO2, is coming from a place like China"
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Congress Pushes Cap and Trade, But Just 24% Know What It Is
The gap between Capitol Hill and Main Street is huge when it comes to the so-called "cap-and-trade" legislation being considered in Congress. So wide, in fact, that few voters even know what the proposed legislation is all about.
Given a choice of three options, just 24% of voters can correctly identify the cap-and-trade proposal as something that deals with environmental issues. A slightly higher number (29%) believe the proposal has something to do with regulating Wall Street while 17% think the term applies to health care reform.
A plurality (30%) have no idea.
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Drought-Stricken Farmers Lose Fight for Water to Endangered Fish
CALIFORNIA
FNC correspondent Ainsley Earhardt filed an in depth report on the plight of farmers in California who are starving for water, exacerbated by a federal court which ordered that one of their sources of water be shut down due to fears that irrigation would harm an endangered species of fish..."California's Central Valley is considered by many to be the richest and most productive farmland in the nation. But this land is being threatened by the small, harmless-looking minnow called the delta smelt. Recently, it has landed on the endangered species list, causing a federal court to shut down vital pumps to farmers to help preserve it."
A shot was soon shown of Earhardt walking on dry ground that used to be a canal full of water until environmentalists convinced a federal court to shut off the water supply:"This was a canal full of gushing water irrigating the farmland here in the San Joaquin Valley. But as you can see, it is all dried up. The pumps were turned off after environmentalists won a federal court case."
The FNC correspondent soon relayed Republican Congressman Devin Nunes’ complaint that thousands of jobs have been threatened by the ruling:"Representative Nunes estimates that 37,000 jobs have been lost due to the smelt issue, and that number is rising higher by the day. And in one town in California, unemployment is up to an astonishing 40 percent..."
[It won't stop until stopped]
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Naturalized citizens are poised to reshape California's political landscape
More than 1 million immigrants became U.S. citizens last year, hastening the ethnic transformation of California's political landscape with more Latinos and Asians now eligible to vote. Leading the wave, California's 300,000 new citizens accounted for nearly one-third of the nation's total and represented a near-doubling over 2006,
Several polls show that Latinos and Asians are more supportive than whites of public investments and broad services, even if they require higher taxes...
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Amnesty Again
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Barack Obama and his immigration-policy team are ready to give amnesty another chance.
This month, President Obama begins his push for "comprehensive immigration reform," an effort at which both his predecessor and his 2008 general election opponent failed repeatedly...
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