Friday, June 12, 2009
Science Magazine and the WHO Promote Pandemic Panic
Although the “worried well” are still swamping emergency rooms, our pig flu is appearing to be a piglet. But a study in Science magazine claims the outbreak portends a pandemic and the media have gone hog wild over it. “Swine Flu Is as Severe as 1957 Pandemic,” blared a typical headline about the outbreak that killed 1-3 million people worldwide and 70,000 Americans.
Actually reading the study and its accompanying citations – rather than just the summary and press release, as most reporters do – the data shows both that swine flu is less contagious and far less severe than ordinary seasonal flu...
[That's 'Science' magazine and the World Health Organization {WHO} - if you don't already associate their names with junk science, remember this for future reference when they next grand stand {and they will; it's their bread & butter}.]
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Congressional Democrats try to push an ambitious agenda before recess
President Barack Obama and Democratic leaders in Congress are pushing hard to reform the nation’s health care system, pass sweeping climate change legislation and confirm a Supreme Court justice —
all in the seven [3-day: Tue-Thur] workweeks ...
[Same rush-stunt as was pulled for the unread porkulus bill. When do we start learning from our mistakes?]
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Qualms and Questions About Obama's Health Plan
Michael Barone
Barack Obama has said he wants to pass a national health care bill this year, with a government insurance policy option. Democratic congressional leaders have called for passage of such a bill before the beginning of the August congressional recess.
What they want more than anything else is a government insurance program that will tend over the next few years to crowd out private insurance. We are told that a government insurance plan reduces the amounts spent on health care by using "comparative effectiveness research" -- in other words, by rationing care and limiting options through the use of statistics. Unfortunately, statistics are constantly in flux and do not capture the differing needs of actual patients as well as skillful practitioners can.
Obama and his party are pursuing an ambitious goal. It could drastically change health care in the United States.
And there's not much time. Congress is scheduled to be in session for only six weeks from next week to the August recess. Six weeks of Tuesday-to-Thursday sessions means 18 days for actual legislating - ant that will other work on the table like annual appropriations and cap-and-trade. Still, Obama and the Democratic congressional leaders see this as a rare chance to make "transformational" changes in America.
Unfortunately, they may be right...
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Carbon costs add to health regions' woes
The Lower Mainland's health authorities will have to dig more than $4 million a year out of their already stretched budgets to pay B.C.'s carbon tax and offset their carbon footprints.
Critics say the payments mean the government's strategy to fight climate change will further exacerbate a crisis in health funding...
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Dem mutiny on climate bill grows
More and more Democrats are ready to vote against Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s climate change bill, according to a congressional committee chairman who opposes his leader.
The House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) said Wednesday that he’s at an impasse with the lead sponsor of a climate change bill strongly backed by Pelosi (D-Calif.), and that his list of Democratic members who would join him in voting against the measure is growing rather than shrinking....
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[ACT now >
"OPPOSE PELOSI CLIMATE BILL"
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...
.
MSNBC Guests Provide 'Clarity' on Iraq, Pre-War Intelligence and WMD
Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell, appearing on Maddow's show and criticizing Dick Cheney's assertion that harsh interrogation of captured al Qaeda prevented terrorist attacks after 9/11 --
WILKERSON: You'll notice that Cheney always says, seven and a half years or almost eight years, no terrorist attack and so forth. That's because he has the honor of being, or the dishonor of being the man on whose watch 3,000 Americans died. More Americans died from a terrorist attack under Dick Cheney's leadership, if you will, than any other president in our history. [classy]
The reason we have not had another attack in this country, more than any other thing, is over 200,000 Americans who have been fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq against al Qaeda and other associated enemies. So we have had 200,000 Americans overseas presenting al Qaeda with very, very lucrative targets and therefore, why would they want to come here?* This is idiocy of the first order that Dick Cheney is putting out. [?!?...]
*> Also known as fighting them there instead of here. Chief proponents? George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
A better example of "idiocy of the first order"?
Keeping those 200,000 Americans at home after 9/11 instead of deploying them abroad, the better to provide al Qaeda with "very, very lucrative targets" on the homefront. In addition to the skyscrapers, nuclear plants, bridges, dams and malls that al Qaeda would have targeted in the process...
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CBS’s Schieffer Admits Cheney ‘Winning’ Security Debate
While discussing Thursday’s opposing national security speeches by President Obama and former Vice President Cheney, on Friday’s CBS Early Show, Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer acknowledged:
"...the fact that the President of the United States had to make this speech, the fact that Congress had turned him down in giving him the money to close Guantanamo, on points, I give it to -- to the Vice President on this...Right now I think the Vice President has made his case. And at this point I'd have to say he's winning." [snip]
While both Smith and Schieffer recognized Cheney’s success at countering Obama on issues like closing Guantanamo Bay, near the end of the segment Schieffer still declared:"I think most people think that Guantanamo is an open sore. That it in many ways it's a recruiting tool for these terrorists."
[Like it recruited the 9/11 terrorists. Just like CO2 & global warming: effect preceding cause. We're not smart enough to notice.]
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CBS News Chief Legal Analyst: Is Cheney Just A D**k?
It appears CBS News's Chief Legal Analyst doesn't agree with his colleague Bob Schieffer that former Vice President Dick Cheney is winning the national security debate with Barack Obama.
Quite the contrary, Andrew Cohen thinks Cheney is still living in "the world of September 11, 2001, a world where hijacked planes are screaming toward their targets, chaos reigns, and anything goes."
As a result, Cohen wondered in a Friday posting at his CBSNews.com blog "Court Watch" if Cheney is, "as many people say, just a d**k":
[And they're losing viewership - imagine.]
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Dude, Where's My Torture Prosecutions?
There has been very little attention paid in the MSM to a meeting on Wednesday between President Obama and various leftwing "human rights" groups,except for a brief mention at the CBS News Political Hotsheet.
However, according to a detailed report provided by Newsweek's Michael Isikoff, Obama has revealed that there won't be any prosecutions of Bush administration for so-called torture.
Perhaps this was the reason for so little MSM coverage on this meeting.
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'Booby-trapped horses used in attack'
Under the cover of morning fog, a group of around 10 Palestinian gunmen armed with "huge amounts of explosives" launched a failed Gaza border assault at the Karni Crossing on Monday, in which booby-trapped horses were used, a security source told The Jerusalem Post.
{Israel's continuing 'thanks' for having unilaterally and completely left Gaza.]
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Obama: “No You Can’t!”
North Korea is launching missiles, Iran is building nukes, Saudi Arabia is sponsoring hate that translates into worldwide terrorism, Sudan is still massacring and raping, China is busy ethnic cleansing Tibet into a Chinese province… but the Obama Administration is furious, yes “furious” at only one country, Israel.
What did Israel do? Well it’s building a hotel in Jerusalem...
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Obama's 2 pictures of Middle East
Two high-stakes speeches exactly a year apart, both delivered by Barack Obama, both focused on the Middle East. Same message, same tone? Not really.
The president reached out Thursday to the world's billion-plus Muslims in a conciliatory Cairo speech that included a bow to that religion and its contributions to the United States. He spoke of the U.S. desire to remove its troops from Muslim Iraq and Afghanistan, lamented that Palestinians have spent decades suffering "intolerable" treatment, and decried their "daily humiliations" under Israeli "occupation."
On June 4, 2008, presidential candidate Obama's emphasis was different when he addressed his country's most influential Jewish lobbying group. He promised the American Israel Public Affairs Committee an "unshakable commitment" to Israel's security, bemoaned the "rockets raining down" on Israeli towns from Palestinian territory, and said he would never force the Jewish nation to make concessions to its Palestinian and Arab antagonists... [snip]
When he was seeking Jewish-American votes a year ago, he said the holy city "will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided."
After Palestinians complained, he later said the city's fate should be decided by 'negotiation'...
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Most Reject Government Control of Executive Compensation If Bailout Is Repaid
If a company repays its bailout funds, 61% of Americans say the government should not regulate the company’s executive pay and bonuses. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey also found that 31% disagree.
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Americans Disapprove of GM Takeover
Most Americans are unhappy with the actions the federal government has taken with General Motors, and people are uncertain about GM's future -- even with the government's help, according to a FOX News poll released Thursday.
By 58 percent to 38 percent voters across the country say they disapprove of the government takeover and majority ownership stake in General Motors. Majorities of Republicans (79 percent) and independents (59 percent) think it was a bad move, as well as a sizable minority of Democrats (39 percent).
And by an 8 percentage point margin slightly more Americans think the government should have let the market decide GM's fate (52 percent) than believe it was in the country's best interest to save the car maker (44 percent).
A majority of Democrats (62 percent) support the government intervening in GM, while majorities of Republicans (72 percent) and independents (54 percent) back letting market forces decide.
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Almost half of top unions have underfunded pension plans
Almost half of the nation’s 20 largest unions have pension funds that federal law classifies as “endangered” or in “critical” condition due to being underfunded, an Examiner review of federal actuarial reports shows...
[And the vast majority of the public (government) unions, meaning they're underwritten by guess-who?]
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State's budget crisis opens rift between unions and Democrats
Reporting from Sacramento -- The Capitol's usual political alliances are being tested by the state's severe financial problems as interest groups scramble to hold onto as much as possible of the state's shrinking coffers.
The union leaders say they are appalled that Democratic leaders are talking openly now about decimating government programs without first making a stand for bigger, broader tax hikes that could substantially offset budget cuts...
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The Man Who Cried Doom
If you ever wondered why the idea of Global Warming never sounded quite right....
It's been more than 20 years since James Hansen first warned America of impending doom. On a hot summer day in June 1988, Hansen, the head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, came to Washington to announce before a Senate committee that "the greenhouse effect has been detected and it is changing our climate now."
The greenhouse effect would have looked obvious enough to anyone watching on television. The senators conducting the hearing, including Al Gore, had turned the committee room into an oven. That day it was a balmy 98 degrees, and as former Colorado senator Timothy Wirth later revealed, the committee members "went in the night before and opened all the windows. And so when the hearing occurred, there was not only bliss, which is television cameras and [high ratings], but it was really hot."
Hansen has been a media star ever since.... [snip]
But Hansen's "testimony is not working out". The earth has been cooling since 2001. . . .
They're scrambling," he says.
And indeed Hansen got caught with his hand in the cookie jar in 2007, when Stephen McIntyre, the man who debunked the infamous "hockey stick" graph showing stable Northern Hemisphere surface temperatures for most of the last millennia before a sharp upturn, found a flaw in Hansen's numbers. McIntyre analyzed NASA's temperature records for the last century and found that, contrary to Hansen's charts, 1998 was not the hottest year on record. That honor belongs to 1934, and five of the ten hottest years on record are now found prior to World War II.,, [snip]
"They don't understand what the hell is going on." Theon says, but evidently they don't need to because "Gore was in his corner and now the president is in his corner"...
[The state of 'science' in America.]
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‘Climate Change’ Is the Terrorist the U.S. Should Be Fighting, Muslim Leader Says
The Environmental Protection Agency announced last week that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, and on Monday, the agency held the first of two hearings to hear what the public thinks of its finding. Among the dozens of people offering comments on Monday, one Muslim leader claimed that the war on terror is ''really a euphemism'' for the battle to control the world’s oil supply...
[To a degree true - but only because we still refuse to develop our own vast reserves (literally greater than the Middle-East's).]
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Essay: Beltway and Media Induce Conservative Stockholm Syndrome
It’s small wonder the fawning media continue to note how “confident” and “cool” the new president is in office. The Sun King has assumed the throne and found it to his liking. Barack “L’État c’est Moi” Obama is a company man in a company town – a statist in a place where he needs only to stretch a hand to stretch the state. The federal apparatus in Washington, D.C. is vast, and designed to do one thing: grow and assume power. Obama is large. He contains multitudes.
Small wonder too that the GOP lost its identity after 12 years controlling Congress. No matter how strong your small-government credentials, or how “in-touch” you are with the folks back home, living and working at the heart of a sprawling, powerful government apparatus “dulls the edge of husbandry,” as Shakespeare might have put it. Conservatives can end up captive to Beltway norms and mores, and end up conservative no more.
It’s Stockholm Syndrome for conservatives.
This is particularly so because the inherently liberal news media doesn’t question whether government should expand. So when the party of small government strays, who’s going to call them on it? Not the party of big government, and not the press.
So government grows...
[Recommended for its specific examples of the systems put in place to guarantee government growth... > ]
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Schwarzenegger suggests state consider flat tax
California
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said today that he would like to see such “radical” proposals come out of a commission now studying an overhaul of the state’s tax system. The governor told the editorial board of the Sacramento Bee that he hoped the commission would not be afraid to propose something like “a 15% straight tax.”
“That’s the kind of radical, daring kind of a proposal that I want to see on the table so we can look at it and say, ‘Oh, let’s study this, maybe that is the way to go,’ ” Schwarzenegger said during the discussion, which was webcast.
The current system, based on highly unstable income tax revenue that fluctuates with the economy, “doesn’t work,” Schwarzenegger said.
Advocates of a flat tax, which applies a single tax rate to all income, say it increases compliance with the tax codes because it is so simple and easy to understand. But opponents dislike that it taxes the wealthy at the same rate as the poor.
[Note that a15% state income tax represents a near doubling of the current 8% average - probably just an innocent slip.
And as long as the states controlled by liberals, a perfectly progressive flat tax will never be acceptable: it undermines the divide and conquor class warfare relied upon by the left to retain power. We want it done, we'll have to do it with a grass roots initiative - our politicians never will. ]
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Fox Newsers Are 'Extremists' Who View the World Through 'S**t-Colored Glasses'
Alex Leo at The Huffington Post was delighted that Jon Stewart mocked Fox News "crazypants coverage" of President Obama's opus in Cairo. Stewart said of the speech: "How will it play with the extremists?" and then showed a Fox News Alert logo and a set of Fox clips.
Then Stewart just let the hate flow, mocking Fox's Gretchen Carlson with these words:
"What a torture it must be for such pretty people to have to see such ugly things. That's what happens when you view the world and apparently hear the world through "s--t-colored glasses."
[Class]
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Poll: Americans Want Sarah Palin for Neighbor
LOS ANGELES – If they had to live next door to a celebrity, American adults would most like to be neighbors with Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and chat show host Oprah Winfrey.
Republican vice presidential candidate Palin topped the poll of most desirable celebrity neighbors with 14 percent, closely followed by Winfrey, who was particularly popular with women.
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National Review Skewers Newsweek's Obama Fixation
The good folks at National Review are absolutely skewering Newsweek's disgraceful Obama fixation with a delicious parody of the magazine including "New, improved, and longer articles extolling the First Family!" (h/t Hot Air, larger picture below the fold):
Articles in the satirical issue include "The 'Toned' Debate: Barack's Pecs or Michelle's Arms?" by Jonathan Alter, and "Bo's Amazing Adventures" by Jon Meacham.
Last but not least, Evan "Obama Is 'Sort of God'" Thomas's "Better Than FDR (And Cooler Than JFK."
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