AMERICA used to be one nation under God. As of last weekend, it is one nation under Spock. With the new Star Trek movie at No 1 in the box office rankings, the US media has been falling over itself to compare the mixed-race President Obama with the half-human, half-Vulcan science officer of the USS Enterprise ("Obama is Spock: It's Quite Logical," declared one headline).
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The Obama White House revised up 2009's budget deficit projections to $1.8 trillion Monday, and the press blamed it on George W. Bush.
Without considering how the current budget passed last year with virtually no Republican support, and that all spending associated with this record-breaking deficit was either approved by Senator Obama or signed into law by President Obama, news outlets echoed what Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszag ascribed as the culprit in his blog:
The deficits in these years, now projected to be 12.9 percent and 8.5 percent of GDP, respectively, are driven in large part by the economic crisis inherited by this Administration.
Dick Cheney said Tuesday that he's not going to "roll over" while Democrats accuse the Bush administration of breaking the law with its anti-terror policies.
The former vice president defended his decision to stay in the public eye during an interview Tuesday on FOX News, his latest appearance in a media blitz since leaving office.
Cheney, who has taken heat for remaining so vocal, told FOX News that the Obama administration is "dismantling" the national security policies that kept the country safe since the Sept. 11 attacks. He said he continues to speak out to combat the mounting criticism of Bush-era interrogation policies and weigh in on what he called the "outrageous" debate over whether to punish the officials involved with designing those policies.
"I don't think we should just roll over when the new administration ... accuses us of committing torture, which we did not, or somehow violating the law, which we did not," Cheney said. "I think you need to stand up and respond to that, and that's what I've done."
In his “Media Mash” segment, FNC's Sean Hannity picked up on a Tuesday night NewsBusters post, “Third CNN Staffer Joins Obama's Team, As Does ABC Vet; Revolving Door Up to Ten,” about the latest journalists to spin through the revolving door to work in the Obama administration.
Hannity informed his viewers of how the press corps are “losing three more of their own to the Obama administration. Now, at the outset of the President's term, several of the so-called objective journalists left their jobs to join the administration..."
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[HT:BD]
American soldiers, American civilians, and other innocent people are going to die because Pres. Barack Obama wants to release photographs of prisoner abuse. Note: I said, ''wants to release'' — not ''has to release,'' or ''is being forced to release,'' or ''will comply with court orders by releasing.''
The photos, quite likely thousands of them, will be released because the president wants them released...
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Eight years after war was declared on the US and the most heinous attack on the USA was launched on American soil, the war has been won (according to President Obama). Done. Over. Does not exist.
No need to call it the war on terror, so says Obama. Now it is merely an "overseas contingency operation". How wonderful.
Staunch allies in the war against the jihad are no longer relevant or necessary. They have become our adversaries -- Obama believes our security lies with Islamic allies.
Homeland security is refocusing its efforts on domestic threats. Proud Jews like me ("Jewish extremists"), veterans (the malleable variety), tea party activists and assorted Americans are to be feared, monitored, silenced. Normal is the new enemy. Reason and rational, the reviled.
Frankly, it appears to me that the Department of Homeland Security ought to be dismantled. It was established to fight Islam's war on the USA. According to the Obama administration, this is no longer a threat, so why not shut it down and save taxpayers an enormous amount of money?
If we are closing Gitmo, and these killers no longer pose a threat to our national security, why stop there? Just yesterday, Obama halted the program in New York to detect biological attacks. Further deep cost cutting measures could be taken in the same spirit. Dismantle the bloated TSA. Little old ladies need not be harassed at airports anymore. Americans will not have to spend untold hours on line having their moisturizers and lotions and cosmetics confiscated by lucky TSA employees (ah, how many bottles of Eau de Italia have I surrendered).
But most importantly, let's give President George W. Bush his due. He won the war, apparently... [snip]
In truth, I for one do not believe this war is over. I believe it has just begun and Islamic jihad is fresh off the bloody spoils of Obama's capitulation and appeasement accompanied by the surrender of Europe. That, I am sure, makes me a domestic terror threat. But, it's just an opinion, fellas, you can't bust me for that.
Not yet.
[Recommended > ]
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NEW YORK€” A jury convicted a Lebanese-born Swede on Tuesday of plotting to help al-Qaida recruit by trying to set up a weapons-training post in Oregon and distributing terrorist training manuals over the Internet.
The verdict against Oussama Kassir capped a three-week trial that featured the testimony of a U.S.-born Muslim convert who said he tried to create the training camp in Bly, Ore., in 1999...
[Yes Virginia, it's still with us: GWOT.]
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Former ABC News anchor Ted Koppel took to BBC's “torture is always illegal, and those who use it will always be prosecuted.”
Koppel shared how his “greatest disagreement” with Cheney is over describing water-boarding as an “enhanced interrogation technique,” which Koppel contended is a “euphemism” for torture that is “almost the moral equivalent of saying that rape is an enhanced seduction technique.”
Furthermore, Koppel contended in mocking the carefully construed legal reasoning that allowed water-boarding, if you do that “you might as well go all the way to the red-hot pokers.”
[Well, no bias there.
Again: EIT isn't torture, it's a truly ingenious technique to use the body's survival mechanisms to scare the wits out of folks - while doing no harm (physically or mentally, as detailed DOD studies of the >400K American service members subjected to the technique have proven).
But if everyone one in the media just says torture-torture over and over again, viola: torture.
First: control the language.]
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Housed within those whitewashed walls is a lone Army and Air Force Exchange Service store. Air Force Staff Sgt. Eric Began, a member of the Paktia Provincial Reconstruction Team, is responsible for stocking the shelves and seeing to the needs of those on FOB Gardez. He also has taken on the responsibility of bringing a little culture to this desolate base at the foot of an Afghan mountainside.
"There is little to come by here, but people donate supplies on their way out or the extra goodies from packages from home that get mailed in," said Began, a Lancaster, Pa., native who is finishing up his 6-year enlistment. "Someone needs to be here to make sure what little we have is available. It's the small comforts of home that are stocked."
A self-described jack-of-all-trades, Began is on his third deployment in support of the war on terrorism. On all three deployments, he has been tasked as an Army asset. During his first deployment to Iraq, he provided convoy security as a driver and later as a .50-caliber gunner for anyone who needed a gun truck when leaving the confines of the base. On the second deployment, Began was stationed in Kuwait as a line-haul truck driver.
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THE most effective weapon terrorists have found to wield against us isn't the headline-grabbing suicide bomber or even the deadly roadside bomb, the IED. Such weapons can harm us, but they can't stop us.
Terror's super-weapon is the lie.
Lying about civilian casualties is the one sure way to impede or even halt US (or Israeli) operations, to force such tight restrictions on our troops that they can't win.
The casualty con's so effective as both propaganda and tactic that terrorists everywhere have adopted the technique. It's been so successful that our enemies long ago transitioned to the next phase: creating civilian casualties and blaming us.
It works.
The media love the charge. Our troops and pilots are always guilty -- even if proven innocent. Because so many on the left want us to be guilty the seldom even consider what they're being fed by the likes of the Taliban, al Aqeda, Hezbollah or Hamas...
[Highly Recommended > ]
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Paris - France's workers, never known to shrink from the barricades, are meeting the global economic crisis with strikes and protests. Dockworkers at the English channel port of Le Havre, which processes nearly two-thirds of French cargo, recently cut the number of vessels loading and unloading there by half. A one-day strike earlier last month at Electricite de France SA, Europe's biggest electricity generator, plunged parts of the City of Light into darkness...
[This is 'social democracy'...]
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It is now widely understood that presidents must value youth in their Supreme Court nominees. The reason lies in the combination of two factors: life tenure and the two party system.
Because justices serve for life, presidents can increase their influence on the law by choosing young nominees. Given two-party competition, this incentive can provoke an unhealthy game of how-low-can-you-go: If one party nominates young justices, the other party risks ceding long-term control...
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New video has surfaced of possible Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor remarking that the courts are the place "where policy is made."
Sotomayor, who is a federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, was giving a speech at Duke University in 2005 when the footage was shot. She quickly added, "And I know this is on tape and I should never say that, because we don't make law. I know."
This is the same person that ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos touted on last Friday's "Good Morning America." The "This Week" host spun,
"She would be not only a woman, but the first Hispanic on the court. She's built up a strong centrist record on the court."
At the recent media celebration of Barack Obama's first 100 days as President, Barack Obama made the bold claim that he created or saved over 150,000 jobs.
This budget builds on the steps we’ve taken over the last 100 days to move this economy from recession to recovery and ultimately to prosperity.
We began by passing a Recovery Act that has already saved or created over 150,000 jobs and provided a tax cut to 95 percent of all working families. Source
The May 11 broadcast of ABC's "World News with Charles Gibson" cited a report from the President's Council of Economic Advisors claiming the stimulus would "save or create"1.5 million jobs by the end of 2009.
But there's a problem with the Obama administration's math according to a May 11 post on the Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) blog titled "1.9 Million Jobs Lost Under Obama - No Matter How You Slice it.""According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the total number of jobs nationwide fell from 134.3 million at the end of January to 132.4 million at the end of April" ... "Meanwhile, Obama and his economic advisors have resorted to the invention of highly questionable new metrics such as the number of "saved" jobs and - making its debut today -- the number of ‘job-years' created."
Kartch's post also pointed out the Sen. Max Baucus, a Democrat from Montana, debunked the concept of a "saved" job in a March 4 hearing that featured testimony from Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner."You created a situation where you cannot be wrong," Baucus said. "If the economy loses 2 million jobs over the next few years, you can say yes, but it would've lost 5.5 million jobs. If we create a million jobs, you can say, well, it would have lost 2.5 million jobs. You've given yourself complete leverage where you cannot be wrong, because you can take any scenario and make yourself look correct."
[I.e., the play continues...]
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Many years ago, political scientists came up with a theory that elites lead public opinion. And on some issues, they clearly do. But on some issues, they don't. Two examples of the latter phenomenon are conspicuous at a time when Barack Obama enjoys the approval of more than 60 percent of Americans and Democrats have won thumping majorities in two elections in a row.
One is global warming. The other is gun control.
On both issues, the elites of academe, the media and big business have been solidly on one side for years. But on both, the American public has been moving in the other direction...
[Recommended > ]
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President Barack Obama’s ''cap and trade'' plan is designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that allegedly contribute to global warming. Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.), chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, told CNSNews.com that''in order to put in place an effective reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, you’re going to see higher costs for energy going forward,''
[And when energy costs effect the cost of? A: Everything.]
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t's turning out that the biggest problem with carbon taxes is political reality. Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has just announced he will delay implementing his trademark cap-and-trade emissions trading proposal until at least 2011.
This is yet another example of politicians elsewhere cashing in politically on the current anti-carbon enthusiasm, only to discover that support diminishes as the real-world costs become clear...
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In practice, mandates have proven spectacularly unsuccessful at controlling costs. France has compulsory insurance, yet it has the world's third most expensive healthcare system and regularly runs a deficit. This despite the fact that French citizens effectively pay 18.8 percent of their incomes toward keeping this system afloat.
For that sort of money, one would expect French citizens to have a lot of autonomy when choosing their health care provider. They have in the past, but as costs are soaring, the government in January told patients exactly which physicians they're allowed to see -- or not. Noncompliance carries a steep financial penalty.
Switzerland installed an individual mandate 15 years ago. Since then, insurance premiums and overall health care spending have continued to balloon, resulting in a health care system even more expensive than France's.
Faced with mounting public expenses, Swiss officials have closed hospital facilities, reduced medical reimbursement rates, and restricted access to surgeries.
In 2002, the Swiss government even halted the creation of private medical practices. The country now suffers from a severe shortage of working physicians.
In government-run systems, cutting costs often simply means cutting care... [snip]
If reform means following Europe down the road to higher costs and cuts in treatment, we have a moral and fiscal imperative to say "No."
We must instead build on the innovation and quality of American health care, putting doctors and patients in charge of medical decisions and offering people more choices of more affordable health care and insurance.
[Recommended > ]
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This weekend, I was on a panel where the other economics journalist and I spent a great deal of time belaboring the obvious: Obama's health care plans are very, very expensive, and they mean higher taxes for everyone, not just that elusive klatch of greedy fools who are not in the 95% of working families now allegedly slated for stable or lower taxes. Otherwise, how could Obama hope to pay for it?
I think we found out today: magic.
Obama got the SEIU and various corporate entities involved with health care provision in a room and got them to promise to slash 150 basis points from the annual rate of increase in health care spending... [snip]
You may recognize these proposals; they are recycled from the Obama budget. Estimated cost savings listed: $215 billion over ten years. That leaves just $1.785 trillion for the "stakeholders" to find. And with a model of stakeholder cooperation like Chrysler before us, that shouldn't be hard.
This is all very well as political theater; politicians convene never-never working groups all the time. But, being perhaps too cynical, I suspect that the announced plan to save $2 trillion is going to be used to sell Obama's healthcare plan as if we'd already found it.
Then when oh, darn, the SEIU doesn't agree to hold down wages or eliminate jobs, and pharma ratchets up the average price it charges the private sector to make sure it doesn't lose too much on its mandatory Medicaid discounts, etc, well, we'll all just have to dig into our pockets to pay for it, won't we?
[We've been warned.]
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When all of America’s top health insurers and providers met at the White House this week and pledged to save $2 trillion over the next decade in health costs, they were pledging to sabotage our medical care.
The blunt truth, which everybody agreed to keep quiet, is that the only way to reduce these costs is to ration healthcare, thereby destroying our system...
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Then ACT > 
"Oppose government run healthcare"
Obama transition http://www.change.gov/page/s/contact
Your Congressman https://forms.house.gov/wyr/welcome.shtml
Your Senator http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
Now Carrie Prejean, beauty queen and determined supporter of marriage between a man and a woman, finds herself smeared on the Internet, castigated in public, on TV, (Chelsea Handler on E! channel has taken aim with a vicious gleam in her vodka-stoked eyes) and her parents have been dragged through the mud as well.
So where are the free-speech warriors? How about Sean Penn and the rest of the Hollywood elitists who think the First Amendment was written solely for their benefit?
Sean Penn and his ilk should stand up to those who are piling on with their high-tech lynching campaign of Ms. Prejean. Perhaps Penn has forgotten about the blacklisting of his own father because of his beliefs.
I do wonder what Daddy Penn would say… I suspect he would not be pleased.
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A new propaganda video created by an extreme environmental activist is making its way into America's classrooms and The New York Times loves the whole idea. Enviro obsessive Annie Leonard, Greenpeace member and activist, has created a 20 minute video filled with anti-capitalist, anti-American propaganda to encourage kids to eschew "stuff," calling the presentation "The Story of Stuff."
Leonard's propaganda piece is so anti-American she even begins her video by saying that her "friends" say she should describe the United States by using the symbol of a military tank because "it's true in many countries and increasingly in our own." And why is a tank "increasingly" the symbol of the USA? Because "more than 50% of our federal tax money is going for our military."
Naturally, this misleading propaganda doesn't mention that a large portion of that federal military spending ends up going to the weekly pay and health care of our soldiers, something apparently Ms. Leonard is against. She goes on to say that a government's job is to "take care of us, that's their job." Here she is trying to promote dependency and proves that she has no clue what a government is really for -- especially in the U.S. system.
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A tentative, eleventh-hour agreement struck between The New York Times and the Boston Globe’s labour unions has meant that Senator John Kerry’s hometown newspaper has been rescued.
The New York Times has been locked in dispute since early April with labour unions at its lossmaking Boston Globe over $20m in cuts that included the elimination of lifetime job guarantees, but reached a truce last week.
It has been enough to permit consideration of what was previously unthinkable – US government intervention to preserve high-quality local reporting, Senator John Kerry, the former presidential candidate, told the Financial Times...
[Yet another case of liberalism not surviving in the competitive marketplace of ideas, so big-progressive-government will step in to subsidize it with our tax dollars. I.e., state run newspapers - sound familiar? ]
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Palin hater with cocaine conviction goes after Piper Palin, media ignores his past
Tourism has recently been up a little in Juneau, Alaska. More folks than ever have been interested in taking bus tours through Alaska's capitol city with a major attraction being the Alaska State House where Governor Sarah Palin goes about her daily work. In fact, the tours have been gaining in popularity since before John McCain asked the governor along for his run for the White House -- Palin being a draw the whole time. The bus tours are so popular that adorable little Piper has even set up a lemonade stand to sell tourists a glass of lemony goodness to quench their thirst for something wet as well as something cute.
And Palin haters in Alaska are livid. They want the bus tours stopped and little Piper's stand razed to the ground. Palin Derangement Syndrome strikes again. It's an ugly, ugly thing, this PDS and one man in particular is leading the charge but curiously enough his long past of agitation and his criminal record don't quite seem to be making any of the stories in the Old Media...
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