Monday, May 18, 2009
Speaker Pelosi Lied? N.Y. Times Puts It On Page A-18
The top of the front page of Friday’s Washington Post was all about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s press conference in which she accused the CIA of deliberately misleading her in 2002 about waterboarding. There were two stories up top and a box promising two more stories inside. So what about the New York Times? There was no Pelosi story anywhere on Page One, just a plug to a story inside – on page A-18.
Here’s what went on the front page instead: Chrysler telling dealers to close, Mexican immigration plummeting, Afghans fault U.S. for airstrikes, the end of a pension case at the Carlyle Group, an advertising story headlined "Does Ranting Sell? Worth a Try," and the light story of the day:
"For Frozen Entrees, ‘Heat and Eat’ Isn’t Enough."
It came complete with a photo of a Banquet chicken pot pie box.
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CBS and NBC Spike Panetta's Rejection of Pelosi's Smear of the CIA
After ignoring for three weeks House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's denial she was briefed by the CIA about how water-boarding was being used, only to decide it was news on Thursday when Pelosi at a press conference accused the CIA of “lying” and of “misleading” the Congress, on Friday the CBS and NBC evening newscasts fell silent again despite the backlash from CIA Director Leon Panetta, a former Democratic Congressman.
He issued an emphatic statement about how “it is not our policy or practice to mislead Congress” and declaring: “CIA officers briefed truthfully on the interrogation of Abu Zubaida, describing the 'enhanced techniques that had been employed.'”
That was enough of a news hook for ABC's World News to make it the Friday night lead,
“It is important to point out that those who briefed Speaker Pelosi at that September [2002] briefing were career intelligence officers, these were not political operatives from the Bush administration.”
Yet not even that mendacious blame-shifting prompted a single syllable from CBS or NBC.
It's a pretty sad state of affairs when the newscast anchored by a former Democratic political operative is the one willing to highlight news deleterious to a top liberal Democrat.
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SF Chronicle Reporter: Pelosi 'Torture Woes' Politically Motivated
So how does the Washington correspondent for Nancy Pelosi's hometown newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, explain away Nancy Pelosi's disastrous news conference on Thursday in which she accused the CIA of lying?
Simple. Blame it all on the evil Republicans and portray the House Speaker as the victim of political gamesmanship.
Such was the laughable premise of Carolyn Lochhead in her Chronicle article:
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China deploys secure computer operating system
China has installed a secure operating system known as "Kylin" on government and military computers designed to be impenetrable to US military and intelligence agencies, The Washington Times reported on Tuesday.
The newspaper said the existence of the secure operating system was disclosed to Congress during recent hearings which included new details on how China's government is preparing to wage cyberwarfare with the United States.
Kevin Coleman, a private security specialist who discussed Kylin during the April 30 hearing of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, said its deployment is significant because it has "hardened" key Chinese servers.
"This action also made our offensive cybercapabilities ineffective against them, given the cyberweapons were designed to be used against Linux, UNIX and Windows" [snip]
Coleman said Chinese state or state-affiliated entities are on a wartime footing in seeking electronic information from the US government, contractors and industrial computer networks.
The Chinese have also developed a secure microprocessor that, unlike US-made chips, is known to be hardened against external access by a hacker or automated malicious software, Coleman said.
"If you add a hardened microchip and a hardened operating system, that makes a really good solid platform for defending infrastructure ... In the cyberarena, China is playing chess while we're playing checkers"
[I.e., our assumed supercity and/or naivety re: our enemies' intentions will be our ruin, as we again chose to ignore all evidence of a coming war and prepare. Recommended > ]
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U.S. Has Plan to Secure Pakistan Nukes if Country Falls to Taliban
The United States has a detailed plan for infiltrating Pakistan and securing its mobile arsenal of nuclear warheads if it appears the country is about to fall under the control of the Taliban, Al Qaeda or other Islamic extremists.
American intelligence sources say the operation would be conducted by Joint Special Operations Command, the super-secret commando unit headquartered at Fort Bragg, N.C.
JSOC is the military's chief terrorists hunting squad and has units now operating in Afghanistan on Pakistan's western border. But a secondary mission is to secure foreign nuclear arsenals -- a role for which JSOC operatives have trained in Nevada.
The mission has taken on added importance in recent months, as Islamic extremists have taken territory close to the capital of Islamabad and could destabilize Pakistan's shaky democracy.
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Joe Biden on U.S. aircraft carrier: Mission Accomplished (secretly)
The voluble Vice President Joe Biden was in San Diego today and visited the USS Ronald Reagan, its crew and their families.
We have the full text of the vice president's remarks below. But you should know that they require a certain security clearance to read them. And if you don't have that clearance, then you shouldn't read them.
That's because Biden shared a secret story with the crowd about a recent mission accomplished by the bravery of Navy personnel in general and Navy Seals in particular. But he and we can't tell you about it because it's still classified.
And no one in this country remembers any recent military activity involving Navy Seal snipers blowing holes in the heads of three Somali pirates ship hijackers. So that can't be it.
Anyway, on with the Vice President's secret public speech...
[Worthless, but I wanted to post the photo of
'Obama endangering Israel'
[HT:DT]
Former US House speaker Newt Gingrich on Sunday blasted the Obama administration for setting itself on a collision course with Israel and endangering the Jewish state, ahead of his address that day to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) Policy Conference."They are systematically setting up the most decisive confrontation that we've ever seen," the leading Republican politician told The Jerusalem Post, referring to news reports about the administration's approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
"There's almost an eagerness to take on the Israeli government to make a point with the Arab world," he said.
He called US President Barack Obama's program of engagement on Iran a "fantasy," and his Middle East policies "very dangerous for Israel." He summed up Obama's approach as "the clearest adoption of weakness since Jimmy Carter."
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'40.5% of Israeli Arabs deny Holocaust'
As many as 40.5 percent of Israeli Arabs believe that the Holocaust never happened, up from 28% in 2006, a new study released by Haifa University on Sunday stated. According to the research, Holocaust-denial was present in all class sectors, with about 37 percent of respondents having studied beyond high school.
Only 41 percent of Arab Israelis recognize the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish and democratic state...
[The consequences of the West's refusal to aggressively counter the war of ideas the the aggressive extremist Islam: increasing belief in an alternative history. These are Arabs within Israel - so by all means let's follow a 'peace' plan that calls for a 'right of return' of hundreds of thousands of non-Israeli Arabs...]
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Questionnaire for Palestinian Advocates
If you are so sure that "Palestine, the country, goes back through most of recorded history," I expect you to be able to answer a few basic questions about that country of Palestine :
1. When was it founded and by whom?
2. What were its borders?
3. What was its capital?
4. What were its major cities?
5. What constituted the basis of its economy?
6. What was its form of government?
HINT: Can you name one Palestinian leader before Arafat?...
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Biased UN Report on Gaza Operation
[HT:DT]
The Foreign Ministry expressed outrage Tuesday in response to a United Nations report that accused the IDF of deliberately targeting United Nations buildings during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza.
The report was "unbalanced, biased and ignores the facts," Israel said in its rejection. It called on the U.N. to take a second look at the "complex reality in which a terror organization operates in proximity to its facilities. [snip]
Two weeks ago, Israel completed its own independent investigation into allegations that the IDF fired at a UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) compound during the war.
"The findings of these inquiries… proved beyond doubt that the IDF did not intentionally fire at the U.N. installations," said the Foreign Ministry in a statement."One must wonder why the report assigns no blame to the Hamas organization, which placed its installations and dispatched its men to confront the IDF in proximity to the U.N. installations. It is very regrettable that this pattern, as well as the responsibility of Hamas for harming Israeli and Palestinian civilians, was disregarded by the [U.N.] investigators." [snip]
The [UN] report did not mention - even once - the circumstances that led to the counterterrorist operation – eight years of increasing rocket and missile attacks on civilians in southern Israel. Nor did it include any evidence provided by Israel that would have supported the IDF's claim that it had not deliberately targeted U.N. facilities.
It did, however, rely on evidence provided by Hamas...
[The organization is worse than worthless. Recommended > ]
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and into
Social Pathology
Social pathology: crack and heroin epidemics, family violence, out-of-wedlock births, abortion as "just another option," alcoholic mothers having brain-damaged babies, violent and uncontrollable schools, constantly irresponsible and self-destructive behavior, endemic crime.
Obama has seen that for twenty years in South Side Chicago, and it is well-established that social pathology is directly responsible for the failure of the "structurally poor" to rise out of their misery. Obama seems to be in denial of the obvious. His own life is entirely middle class. Married, career-oriented, successful, steadily rising income, two daughters born in his marriage.
Obama could be teaching all these obvious rules of behavior, which have worked so well over two centuries since the Industrial Revolution, to bring people out of poverty. They know, just like white liberals, what works in their own lives.
But they will not draw the obvious conclusions: That would be "conservative." Almost a kind of treason to the sacred doctrine of state control... [snip]
The biggest question to ask liberals is: Why don't you support those solutions that have worked so well in your own life?
It is hard to avoid the feeling that the Left is endemically racist and classist: That they have simply decided that what works in their own lives will never work to raise poor blacks, Hispanics and whites out of poverty.
If that's not true, I would like to hear from liberals: Why don't you just encourage all the people you feel sorry for to adopt those work and life habits that made your own friends and families successful?
I'm ready to hear the answer.
Do I hear anything?
[Recommended > ]
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The Nation Mag: Time for Socialist Intervention for an 'Independent' Media
This was inevitable with the economic crisis. In The Nation magazine, leftist media critics John Nichols and Robert McChesney announce their utopian intentions to have the government intervene heavily in the media sphere and spread their tentacles all over the project of insuring an "independent" media in every American city and town. It’s time for an "immediate journalism economic stimulus," and then a much bigger government "investment" in public broadcasting. If that sounds like jamming the accelerator on funding a feistier left-wing PBS/NPR/Pacifica axis, you would be exactly right: [inane arguments - snip]
If these names are not familiar, they are certainly well known on the radical left. Together, they wrote a book called Tragedy and Farce lamenting coverage of Iraq and the re-election of George Bush: they argued
"that during the 2004 election and throughout the Iraq war and occupation, Americans have been starved of democracy’s oxygen: accurate information.
More than anything John Kerry, George Bush, or even Karl Rove did, the media’s miscoverage of the campaign and war decided the election."
[No, you read it right: these media luminaries seriously contend that the media's coverage of the Iraq war, by 2004, was an aid to getting Bush re-elected. Cue alternate-universe music {I've no idea what that is, but these folks are obviously hearing it}]
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WaPo Declares 'Historic Low' in Tax Burden, But Leaves Out More Than Half the Burden
The Washington Post carried this headline in a text box at the top of Page One: "Tax Burden Near Historic Low: The average family sent about 9 percent of its income to the IRS, with the middle-class faring especially well, according to federal data. A12." (The D.C. tea party was noted at the bottom of the page, and readers were sent to B-1, the front of Metro.) But how do the Post’s "tax burden" claims stand up?
Inside the paper, there’s a chart, and the source is the "nonpartisan" Congressional Budget Office, now controlled by the Democratic majority. It measured only the "Effective individual income tax rate."
The Post is measuring less than half the federal "tax burden".
Here’s what the CBO director’s blog on the study reported: ...
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New data suggest the Maldives may not sink beneath the sea
Maldives - Since climate change fears first gripped the globe, tourists have flocked to the Maldives to enjoy the islands' spectacular vistas before they vanish.
Do they really need to rush?
Scientists have long warned that the Maldives, an archipelago nation of nearly 1,200 islands in the Indian Ocean, will be wiped out by rising sea levels in the coming decades.
But recent data challenge the widespread belief that the islands are destined to disappear - and a few mainstream scientists are even cautiously optimistic about their chances for surviving intact beyond the next century.
[Another claim bites the dust.]
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Bogeymen of the C02 hoax losing ground
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
James Hansen, head of NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS), and Andrew Weaver, lead author of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Reports, made statements clearly designed to frighten people.
Both men are politically active in climate change and at the forefront of the attempt to convince the world that CO2 is a problem. Their remarks are intended to scare people by threatening impending doom – nothing new - except there is increasing urgency and fear because their message is failing. As Andrew Weaver summarized,”All those fossil fuel emissions need to be eliminated. And we must do so quickly if we are to have any chance of stabilizing the climate and maintaining human civilization as we know it.”
Hansen increases urgency for action claiming we are on the verge of a tipping point, defined as follows.“Tipping points can occur during climate change when the climate reaches a state such that strong amplifying feedbacks are activated by only moderate additional warming.”
We’re reaching a tipping point, but it’s not the one Hansen anticipates. We’re close to the point where the public and politicians realize they have been totally deceived about the nature and cause of climate change. Even before a shift to concern about the economy polls showed a growing shift in public opinion...
[It would be a good trend if we lived in a democracy. Still, Recommended > ]
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81% Oppose Gas Tax Hike To Encourage Sales of More Efficient Cars
Just 10% of adults think the federal government should increase the tax on gasoline by a large amount as a way of encouraging people to buy more fuel-efficient cars, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.
Eighty-one percent (81%) oppose a large tax hike for that purpose, and eight percent (8%) are undecided.
These sentiments remain largely unchanged from nearly two years when 86% said they opposed the idea of raising gas taxes by 50 cents a gallon as a result of congressional legislation that would encourage the development of more fuel-efficient cars.
In April of last year, 60% of Americans favored suspending the federal gas tax completely for the summer to offset soaring gas prices.
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Al Sharpton vs. Sheriff Joe: The Hypocrite vs. The Patriot
The Reverend Al Sharpton must be running out of things to protest. Last month he went after Sheriff Joe Arpaio. According to a report by Reuters, the opportunist Sharpton, called on Sheriff Joe to resign accusing him of racially profiling Hispanics because of his attempts to enforce US immigration laws:
Under a deal allowing them to enforce federal immigration laws, the deputies have arrested more than 1,500 people who they determined were in Arizona illegally, triggering street protests and condemnation from Latino activists who accuse him of racial profiling." I am first calling for the resignation and or removal of Sheriff Arpaio ... harassment based on color is nothing short of racial profiling, which many of us ... helped to fight to make against the law," Sharpton told reporters.
"Arpaio needs to be confronted, he needs to be removed. ... We also need to suspend the law that he is using. We must stand with our brown brothers and sisters," Sharpton said.
It's ironic that Sharpton is fighting Arpaio's efforts to rid his county of people who are there illegally especially when you consider that Sharpton once incited a deadly riot to rid Harlem of a Jewish store owner who had the nerve to operate at the same location for over 40 years.
The store was called Freddie's Fashion Mart. Sharpton decided that Harlem should be segregated and decided that the Jewish owned store should close even though it had been there for decades. Jeff Jacoby wrote this account:
When the United House of Prayer, a large black landlord in Harlem, raises the rent on Freddy's Fashion Mart, Freddy's white Jewish owner is forced to raise the rent on his subtenant, a black-owned music store. A landlord-tenant dispute ensues; Sharpton uses it to incite racial hatred. "We will not stand by," he warns malignantly, "and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business." Sharpton's National Action Network sets up picket lines; customers going into Freddy's are spat on and cursed as "traitors" and "Uncle Toms." Some protesters shout, "Burn down the Jew store!" and simulate striking a match. "We're going to see that this cracker suffers," says Sharpton's colleague Morris Powell. On Dec. 8, one of the protesters bursts into Freddy's, shoots four employees point-blank, and then sets the store on fire. Seven employees die in the inferno.
Those seven lives are just a few of the deaths caused by the Reverend Al and his hypocrisy; he also helped incite a pogrom in Crown Heights, Brooklyn that resulted in the death of Yankel Rosenbaum. You won't read anything about it in the MSM when they talk about Sharpton's latest hypocrisy; they are too intimidated by this press hungry hypocrite.
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68% of Arizona Voters Favor Sheriff Who Gets Tough on Immigration
Sixty-eight percent (68%) of Arizona voters have a favorable view of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, whose aggressive enforcement of laws against illegal immigration have triggered an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice. Forty-six percent (46%) view the sheriff very favorably.
Just 26% have an unfavorable opinion of Arpaio, including 16% who are very unfavorable, according to a new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Arizona voters. Seven percent (7%) are not sure.
Arizona voters also strongly approve of some of the tactics the sheriff employs to fight illegal immigration and crime related to it.
Seventy-four percent (74%), for example, believe that when a police officer pulls someone over for a traffic violation, they should automatically check to see if that person is in the country legally. Twenty-one percent (21%) disagree. These numbers are virtually identical to national findings on the same question.
Sixty-three percent (63%) say that if law enforcement officers know of places where immigrants gather to find work, they should sometimes conduct surprise raids to identify and deport illegal immigrants. Thirty-one percent (31%) oppose those raids. Voters nationally are a bit more supportive of this tactic to fight illegal immigration.
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The Mandate Trap
The New York Times reports on a series of regular health care policy meetings that have been taking place in the Senate between insurers, doctors, hospitals and business groups and staffers for Ted Kennedy. According to the article, there is an emerging consensus forming around the need for an individual mandate requiring that all Americans obtain health insurance.
An individual mandate is the most controversial and unpopular element of any universal health care proposal, and it makes it harder to argue that you aren't supporting government-run health care when you are having the federal government require that everybody purchase health insurance.
It can also be attacked as a giant handout to big insurers, since government is requiring that Americans purchase their product...
[Read the list of attendees again, and ask who's interests are being served.]
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SOME IMPORTANT FACTS TO KEEP IN MIND
Americans are subjected to a stream of opinion deriding as utterly miserable the U.S. health-care system compared to the rest of the developed world. But it may be a good time to consider a few unheralded facts about America's health-care system:
- Americans have better survival rates from both common and rare cancers than Europeans and Canadians.
- Americans have better access to preventing screening and treatment for chronic diseases than Canadians.
- In the United Kingdom and Canada, patients wait far longer than Americans (about twice as long, sometimes even more than a year) to see a specialist, have elective surgery like hip replacements or cataracts, or get radiation treatment for cancer.
- Sixty percent of Western Europeans say their health systems need "urgent" reform.
- Although much maligned by economists and targeted by policymakers, an overwhelming majority of America's leading physicians themselves recently listed the computerized tomography (CT) scan and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) as the most important medical innovations in improving patient care in the previous decade.
- By any measure, the vast majority of all the innovation in health care in the world comes out of the U.S. health-care system.*
[Like nearly 75% of all new drug development.]
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FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY SUMMIT AND HEALTH CARE
According to the Social Security and Medicare Trustees:
- The unfunded liability in Social Security and Medicare is more than $100 trillion dollars (that's trillion, not billion), or about 6 ½ times the size of the entire U.S. economy.
- That's the size of our commitments over and above expected premiums and dedicated taxes, measured in current dollars.
- Of this amount, Medicare accounts for about $85 trillion; additionally, Medicaid is almost as large as Medicare and two thirds of that is a federal obligation.
If we stay on the current course, these programs will crowd out every other federal program over time...
[And to this Obama wants to add a massive new entitlement.]
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TEACH FOR (SOME OF) AMERICA
Teach for America (TFA) -- the privately funded program that sends college grads into America's poorest school districts for two years -- received 35,000 applications this year, up 42 percent from 2008. More than 11 percent of Ivy League seniors applied, including 35 percent of African-American seniors at Harvard. [bravo]
So poor urban and rural school districts must be rejoicing, right? Hardly: Union and bureaucratic opposition is so strong that TFA is allotted a mere 3,800 teaching slots nationwide, or a little more than one in 10 of this year's applicants. Districts place a cap on the number of TFA teachers they will accept. This is a tragic lost opportunity:
- TFA picks up the $20,000 tab for the recruitment and training of each teacher, which saves public money.
- More important, the program feeds high-energy, high-IQ talent into a teaching profession that desperately needs it.
- Unions claim the recent grads lack the proper experience and commitment [?] to a teaching career; despite two-thirds staying in the field after their two years.
But why have any caps? TFA young people should be able to compete on equal terms with any other new teaching applicant.
The fact that they can't is another example of how unions and the education establishment put tenure and power above student achievement.
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Detroit Free Press: Era of Oppression of Free Speech?
Looks like it is just starting to dawn on some lefties that Obama is ushering in an era of oppression of free speech. So it seems for Laura Varon Brown of the Detroit Free Press, at least.
Oh, she isn't saying that Obama himself is trampling on free speech, but she is starting to understand that the left's penchant for political correctness is serving the function as a sort of self-imposed oppression no matter what Obama says. It's getting so bad, according to Brown, that any criticism of Obama is treated as akin to treason... at least it is in the "circles" she runs in, anyway.
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Big Labor's Investment in Obama Pays Off
.''We spent a fortune to elect Barack Obama -- $60.7 million to be exact -- and we're proud of it,''
boasted Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, to the Las Vegas Sun this week. The behemoth labor organization's leadership is getting its money's worth.
The ubiquitous Stern now enjoys a prominent seat at the table of every major policy discussion at the White House, including economic recovery and health care radicalization...
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McGovern says the secret ballot is 'a matter of principle'
George McGovern’s name has long been synonymous with the kind of principled, doctrinaire and politically suicidal liberalism that Democrats from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama work to avoid.
But McGovern, 87, has reemerged in recent months on the other side of the political spectrum, as a prominent foe of a key piece of the progressive agenda: the labor-backed Employee Free Choice Act - card check...
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Resigned Miss California Director Claims National Organization for Marriage is Hate Group; CBS Doesn’t Bat an Eye
After her resignation from her Miss California position, Moakler went on the show in an exclusive interview to discuss her departure. Donald Trump's announcement in a press conference on May 13 that Carrie Prejean would keep her title as Miss California led to her departure, and Moakler criticized Prejean in the interview.
"I think it's wrong to start screaming that you're being persecuted, then you go and align yourself with organizations like NOM, to me that are particularly, I consider them hate groups," said Moakler.
After briefly clarifying what "NOM" refers to (Moakler said, "The National Organization for Marriage."), Chen immediately moved on to a completely different question about Trump's response to her resignation.
[Hmmm. Wonder what that would make of the majority of Californians who voted for prop. 8?]
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Axelrod Joke: Obamas Considered Naming Dog Miss California
On Monday, NewsBusters asked, Is Miss California the Left's new Sarah Palin?
Given what White House senior advisor David Axelrod said in jest about the Obamas considering naming their new dog "Miss California," and
judging by the reaction from the audience at George Washington University, one has to think the answer is a resounding "Yes."
Appearing on NPR's "Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me," Axelrod was asked about Bo by host Peter Sagal.
Axelrod's response, and the audience laughter, is rather telling (YouTube audio embedded below the fold with partial transcript):
[Classy. From the White House yet.]
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