Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Sotomayor Failed to Disclose to Senate Memo in Which She Argued Death Penalty Is 'Racist'
The Judicial Confirmation Network (JCN) says Judge Sonia Sotomayor failed to disclose to the Senate Judiciary Committee a controversial document arguing that the death penalty is “racist” and a violation of the present “humanist” thinking of society.
The 1981 memo, they say, should have been disclosed as required under Question 12 (b) of the questionnaire that the Supreme Court nominee turned in Thursday...
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Republicans grumble about Sonia Sotomayor's hearing rush
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy has forged ahead with a July 13 start date for confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, pushing past Republicans who want more time to review her judicial and personal history.
On Tuesday, Leahy indicated that he was tired of Republican questions on Sotomayor, (snip)Leahy told POLITICO he had a "long talk with the president" – who, Leahy said, is supportive of the hearing schedule...
[I.e., another rush job, in this case a lifetime appointment we must {evidently} make now-right-now. You'd think we'd learned from the stimulus fiasco.]
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Sotomayor Support Softens Over Past Week
While her confirmation by the Democratic-controlled Senate is expected, the number who support confirmation slipped a bit, according to the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Forty-one percent (41%) now favor confirmation of Sotomayor while 36% are opposed. A week ago, those figures were 45% and 29% respectively.
Unchanged from last week is the fact that most Democrats favor confirmation while most Republicans are opposed. Those not affiliated with either major party are now evenly divided.* Last week, unaffiliateds leaned modestly in favor of confirmation.
[*Hence their hurry to rush the confirmation process - they more we learn...]
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Reid Hasn't Read One of Sotomayor's Opinions, Media Mum
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) admitted Tuesday that he "[hasn't] read a single one" of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's opinions despite praising her as "the whole package."
Not surprisingly, the Obamedia gleefully reported the latter while almost completely ignoring the former...
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Iran stockpiles enough uranium to make nation's first nuclear bomb
Iran now has enough nuclear material to make its first atomic bomb, it was claimed last night. The Islamic republic, whose president has threatened to ''wipe Israel off the face of the Earth'', has nearly doubled stockpiles of enriched uranium in the last six months, the United Nations said yesterday.
Experts believe it would take no more than six months for Iran to turn its stocks into enough weapons-grade material for a bomb...
[And still the world does nothing - but insult Israel that a non-existent 'peace process' with 'Palestinians' (which? Hamas? Fatah?) is more important than is preventing Iran from getting nukes.]
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The Blind Spot on Iran
It’s nice to see that the scales have fallen from the Obama administration’s eyes when it comes to North Korea. The New York Times, which in this case serves as the semi-official government mouthpiece (just as the Times of London once did for the British government), reports: [snip]
The administration is to be commended for its realism in this case and its realization that there are, after all, limits to what diplomacy can achieve if not backed up by credible threats. The question is why, having seen the light on North Korea, the administration is now about to commit the same mistake that its predecessors made in dealings with Pyongyang in its own relations with Tehran?
What makes the administration think Iran is any more open to giving up its nuclear weapons program than North Korea is?
All the evidence indicates that Iran is dead-set on going nuclear — just as North Korea was. If they undertake negotiations it will be as a smokescreen and delaying mechanism to give them time to weaponize. And by all indications Obama is going to play right into their hands...
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The reason the president won't talk about the Long murder
Yesterday at American Thinker Jan LaRue asked :
Why haven't the President and Attorney General of the United States been as quick to condemn the murder of one U.S. soldier and the wounding of another as they were in condemning the murder of an abortionist?
James Dao and David Johnston of the New York Times present some information which might answer LaRue's question:
The suspect charged with killing one soldier and seriously wounding another in a shooting outside an Army recruiting office in Little Rock, Ark., was once detained in Yemen for possessing a fake Somali passport and other counterfeit documents, law enforcement officials said Tuesday.
The episode in Yemen prompted a preliminary inquiry by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other American law enforcement agencies into whether the man, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, had ties to extremist groups, the officials said. But that investigation was inconclusive, they said, leaving the bureau with insufficient evidence to wiretap his phone or put him under surveillance.
It would be embarrassing to highlight his Muslim background or his possible training as a terrorist overseas would be inconvenient on the eve of Obama's big speech in Cairo to the Muslim world.
And so Obama and others in his administration are all too happy to ignore the outrageous murder of an innocent soldier in America while condemning the outrageous murder of an abortion doctor in a church. The latter won't affect Muslim relations with the U.S.
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China Requires Censoring Software on New PCs
BEIJING — China has issued a sweeping directive requiring all personal computers sold in the country to include sophisticated software that can filter out pornography and other “unhealthy information” from the Internet.
The software, which manufacturers must install on all new PC’s starting July 1, allows the government to update computers regularly with an ever-changing list of banned Web sites...
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Nagin's Phone Calls Screened 'to Keep Him Safe' While Quarantined in China
BEIJING -- They take their quarantines very, very seriously in China. They don't even allow phone calls. The mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, is under lockdown in a suburban Shanghai hotel after a passenger on his flight from the U.S. exhibited symptoms of swine flu -- and now his Chinese hosts are screening his calls "to keep him safe."
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China's Greenhouse Gas Emissions Threaten to Double
"Many Western industrialized nations want China to commit to reducing its CO2 emissions," says Dabo Guan of the Electricity Policy Research Group at the University of Cambridge in England. "But the country will not even be capable of doing so." [snip]
China's CO2 emissions, they claim, will almost double in the next two decades compared with 2002 levels.
[But we'll still saddle ourselves with trillions of 'green' costs...]
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Obama's Enemies List Grows
A de facto Obama enemies list and dirty political machine have been expanding since last year. Obama has established several embarrassing presidential firsts including targeting private individuals by names, assigning a well-known "partisan dirt-digger" and non-lawyer to the White House Counsel's Office to likely gain access to Bush Administration documents protected under attorney-client privilege, and moving the senior political adviser into the West Wing.
These are heretofore unseen partisan practices... [snip]
Two military psychologists who supervised the enhanced interrogation techniques that were used on only three terrorist leaders were publicly outed by Democratic Senator Carl Levin placing both doctors and their families in personal danger. The doctors' identities had previously been kept under wraps. [snip]
The Department of Homeland Security issued a document warning counterterrorism and law enforcement authorities of an alleged threat to the U.S. posed by "domestic rightwing terrorists." Included in the group of potential rightwing terrorists are individuals who are pro-life, support the Second Amendment and oppose the flood of illegal aliens. The DHS pamphlet also singled out military veterans for possible recruitment into domestic terrorist cells. [snip]
One fund manager reported being on the receiving end of a profanity-laced tirade by Auto Industry Task Force head Steve Rattner that included threats to use the Internal Revenue Service and the Securities and Exchange Commission in gangster-like enforcement roles... [snip]
Thomas Lauria, a lawyer for financial firm Perella Weinberg Partners, reported the car czar threatened that "the full force of the White House press corps would destroy its [Perella Weinberg's] reputation" unless the firm agreed to Obama administration demands in Chrysler's bankruptcy...[snip]
The failure by the White House press corps to repudiate Rattner's threat speaks volumes and underscores their role as an ally of the Obama Administration...
[Recommended > ]
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Finally, Someone In The Establishment Press Calls Out Obama's 'Created and Saved' Jobs Baloney
Until now, no one in the press of note has paid any attention to this "clever" abandonment of logic and accountability. After all, by the new "create and/or save" non-logic, Dear Leader has "saved" over 130 million jobs since his inauguration -- even though, on a seasonally adjusted basis, almost 2.2 million Americans lost theirs from February through May:
Finally, someone in the establishment media has done a serious call-out of Team Obama's risible ruse. Here are excerpts from William McGurn's hard-hitting column in today's Wall Street Journal:
The Media Fall for Phony 'Jobs' Claims
The Obama Numbers Are Pure Fiction
..... "We would never have used a formula like 'save or create,'" he former Bush administration communications team member Tony Fratto) tells me. "To begin with, the number is pure fiction -- the administration has no way to measure how many jobs are actually being 'saved.' And if we had tried to use something this flimsy, the press would never have let us get away with it." [snip]
"You would think that any self-respecting White House press corps would show some of the same skepticism toward President Obama's jobs claims that they did toward President Bush's tax cuts," says Mr. Fratto. "But I'm still waiting."
How much higher does the unemployment rate have to go before Team Obama's apparatchiks at the Associated Press, the New York Times, and elsewhere -- who, as noted, rightly would never have let the Bush administration get away with a similar move -- stop repeating the President's patently obvious "created and/or saved" nonsense without challenging it?
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Lies, Damned Lies, And "Saved" Jobs
More than 1.6 million jobs have disappeared since the stimulus package was signed in February. Government can't create jobs, only dependency. Make-work jobs will not turn the economy around.
The Obama administration, totally unfamiliar with the first rule of holes*, has announced it's about to really, really ramp UP stimulus spending to 'create' 600,000 more jobs this summer...
[*When you're in one, stop digging.]
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The White House "Jobs-Saved" Deception
After nearly twenty years in Washington I thought I've seen every trick ever conceived, but the White House claims of "jobs saved" attributed to the stimulus bill is unrivaled.
What causes the jaw to drop is not just the breathtaking deception of the claim, but the gullibility of the Washington press corps to continue reporting it...
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Comparison: Economic Reporting Under Bush, and Under Obama
Ed Frank created an interesting little video that serves as a stark reminder of how harsh the Old Media was on Bush's "faltering" economy in comparison to today's hearts and flowers style of reporting during the age of Obama, even though the stats are far, far worse under Obama than they ever were under Bush.
Frank's video is shocking for its revelation of how Bush was slapped around and how every economic indicator during his tenure in the White House was deemed as obvious proof of the supposed though times we then faced. Yet now, every dismal indicator is celebrated as if recovery just around the corner. Under Bush the Old Media was sure the economy was a wreck, now the wreck proves we will surely be saved by Summer
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Thirty years after Three Mile Island
Thirty years ago, the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station had a partial meltdown. The Left in American had a total breakdown. We know today that nuclear power is very safe, very clean, and can provide a true "alternative energy" to fossil fuels, but the whipped up hysteria surrounding Three Mile Island has prevented America from using ending much of our dependence on foreign oil.
No one was killed because of Three Mile Island. No one was even harmed. France has been building nuclear power plants for almost fifty years. France now generates almost all its electrical power from these plants and it exports more electricity than any other nation on Earth. There was no reason why America could not have done much of what France did -- nothing, except, for the sick pseudo-science of the Left.
Consider the surreal absurdity of our present policies. Barack Obama is spending unimaginable sums of future tax dollars to end our present economic crisis. At the same time, he proposes nothing to end the economic calamity of politically correct environmentalism. Nuclear energy is the safest and surest means to reduce our dependence on foreign energy and on domestic fossil fuels.
But instead of embracing the proven and the sensible, the politically correct science of the Left demands we do what is wasteful and inefficient...
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Out of Thin Air
I am really astounded by the public's apparent ignorance about "wind energy".
We all experience sunshine and wind but few of us bother to examine the "quality" of that sunshine and wind. Obviously wind turbines only spin and generate electricity when the wind is blowing. Accordingly, solar panels only generate electricity when the sun is shining on them. In order for these technologies to be economically viable you have to have a lot of wind and/or a lot of sunshine.
Once these wind farms clutter up a skyline, more and more people will lose interest. Solar power is even more inefficient except in a very few locations. Even in the best locations solar arrays require a lot of real estate and unless built on top of an existing structure, they destroy or certainly change the ecosystem beneath them.
Only a fool would believe that government subsidy will create thousands of sustainable long-term jobs and significantly supplement our future energy needs out of thin air.
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HEALTH COST ILLUSION
The main White House argument for health-care reform goes something like this: If we spend now on a hugely expensive new insurance program for the middle class, we can save later by reducing overall U.S. health spending. This "tastes great, less filling" theory could stand some scrutiny, not least because it is being used to rush through the greatest social spending program in American history, says the Wall Street Journal.
What if this particular theory turns out to be a political illusion? What if the speculative cost savings never report for duty, while the federal balance sheet is still swamped with new social obligations that will be impossible to repeal? The only possible outcome will be the nationalization of U.S. health markets, which will mean that almost all care will be rationed by politics, says the Journal.
- Since Medicare was created in 1965, U.S. health spending has risen about 2.7 percent faster than the economy and on current trend would hit 20 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) within a decade.
- Every public or private attempt to arrest this climb has failed: wage and price controls in the 1970s, the insurance industry's "voluntary effort" in the '80s, managed care in the '90s.
- In 1965, the average American paid more than half of his health care out of pocket; spending has since increased sevenfold, but the amount that consumers pay directly hasn't even doubled.
- When people aren't exposed to the true cost of their care -- though it is paid in foregone wages and higher taxes for public programs -- they consume more care.
- According to Amy Finkelstein, an economist with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, roughly half of the real increase in U.S. health spending between 1950 and 1990 is due to Medicare and the spread of third-party, first-dollar insurance.
The U.S. health cost "crisis" is that we spend so much without incentives to weigh the costs against the benefits.
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The Denver Post on HSAs and Single-Payer
Guess which one gets a better review?
As the Colorado House of Representative took us further down the road to socialized health care earlier this week, Douglas County School are considering moving to a Health Savings Account plan for their employees. Needless to say, the Denver Post finds this objectionable:
Douglas County School District soon may join a growing number of employers pushing workers to manage their own medical spending with health savings accounts, eliminating copays for drugs and doctor visits.
The transition is frightening for many who see it as a reinvention of health insurance as they've always known it.
...
The plan would work nicely for about 85 percent of employees, who are predicted not to spend more than the $1,000 put into their accounts by the district.
By the twenty-second paragraph, we find out that the system would actually include all that preventative care that single-payer advocates talk about:
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Dependency
Imagine this: a campaigning lawmaker speaks to a rally and here is what he says: "Vote for me, folks, and I'll take of you.
That's right, my fellow countrymen, you won't have to do anything more than cast that ballot, sit back and relax. My government will step right in to usurp, regulate, and control lots of things you could better do for yourselves, but will no longer have to.
And we'll do it with your money.
.
Imagine this: a campaigning lawmaker speaks to a rally and here is what he says: "Vote for me, folks, and I'll take of you.
That's right, my fellow countrymen, you won't have to do anything more than cast that ballot, sit back and relax. My government will step right in to usurp, regulate, and control lots of things you could better do for yourselves, but will no longer have to.
And we'll do it with your money.
Palin: Defense cuts are 'a sign of weakness'
In her strongest public remarks to date on the matter, Sarah Palin admonished the Obama adminstration on Saturday for proposing cuts to Alaska's missile defense network, a move she said would leave her state and the rest of the country vulnerable in the case of a future attack.
"Reducing Alaska's defense readiness in these perilous times is a show of weakness, it is not a sign of strength," ...
The administration cuts, which were announced by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in April and would be enacted in the next fiscal year, would trim $1.2 billion from the Pentagon's missile defense programs. The expansion of a missile field in Fort Greely, Alaska would be halted under the proposed budget.
"It is clear to many that some of our priorities as a nation are kind of reversed, and it is my imperative, and it should be all of our imperative, that we get our government priorities right, because if they are misdirected, obviously America is going turn into something that we don't recognize."
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Sarah Palin's 'Slutty Flight Attendant Look'
Seven months after Election Day, and the attacks on Sarah Palin keep coming.
On Monday, CBS's David Letterman on the "Late Show" shamelessly went after the Alaska governor and her family during his opening monologue, as well as in his "Top Ten" list.
Readers are advised to proceed with caution as some of the content might be perceived as highly-offensive .
[The fear continues. Why?]
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'Today' Show Trashes Sarah Palin: She's 'Very Much Like Herpes'
VH1 comedian Chuck Nice appeared on Tuesday's "Today" show and compared Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to the sexually transmitted disease herpes. He mocked,
"But, Sarah Palin to the GOP, this is what I've got to say, she is very much like herpes, she's not going away."
[Audio available here]
[More class {more fear}]
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Megan Fox: 'Take Out the White Trash'
Bad news for those living in “Middle America.” Actress Megan Fox would like Megatron, the evil character from her new movie “Transformers,” to blow you up. Kat Giantis, of Wonderwall, reported the actress was recently interviewed by “Total Film UK.” Although nobody asked her who she would like Megatron to obliterate, she volunteered it anyway.
When asked how she would stop the ruthless Megatron from demolishing the world, Fox first said that she would “barter with him.” She then, however, went on to say,“... and instead of the entire planet, can you just take out all of the white trash, hillbilly, anti-gay, super bible-beating people in Middle America?"
[Liberal tolerance.]
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Drivers use GPS to avoid speed traps, high fines
For Washington-area motorists who live in fear of the flash from a speed camera and the costly ticket that will surely follow, there is hope. Joe Scott has an answer to their nervous prayers.
The 39-year-old D.C. resident has invented a GPS application that alerts motorists to speed traps and red-light cameras...
[Free market to the rescue again...]
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[cool]
Love or lust, Obama and the fawning press need to get a room
This article is by Phil Bronstein of the San Francisco Chronicle.
Is this a trend?
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