Thursday, June 18, 2009
600 protest Pelosi in Houston
Hundreds laid down their money to watch an onstage interview with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in Houston, the epicenter of Bush Country, on Friday night. And hundreds turned up outside the venue to Tea-Party Pelosi. And the protesters themselves seemed pretty hardcorewith signs like,"I'm the ProLife gun toting Consitutionalist the D.H.S. warned you about."
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83% Say U.S. Legal System Should Treat All Americans Equally
Eighty-three percent (83%) of U.S. voters say America’s legal system should apply the law equally to all Americans rather than using the law to help those who have less power and influence. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that just 8% disagree.
This belief is shared overwhelmingly by Republicans, Democrats and voters not affiliated with either party.
However, voters are more divided when asked how the legal system is actually performing today. Thirty-seven percent (37%) say the U.S. legal system generally provides unfair advantages to minorities, while 34% say it generally treats all Americans equally.
Eighteen percent (18%) of voters say the American legal system generally discriminates against minorities.
[Coincidence that 17% don't think the legal system should apply equally and 18% think minorities are discriminated against??]
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Hiroshima, 2.0
I am referring to Siobhan Gorman's front-page story in last Wednesday's Journal, in which she reported widespread cyberspying of the U.S. electricity grid, much of it apparently originating in China and Russia.
"Authorities investigating the intrusions have found software tools left behind that could be used to destroy infrastructure components." ... "If we go to war with them, they will try to turn them on." [snip]
If you shut down power for about three days it causes very little damage. We can handle a long weekend. But if you shut down power for longer, all kinds of other things begin to happen. After about 10 days the curve levels off with about 72% of all economic activity shut down...
Plainly, we have a problem. And as we consider ever-more elaborate defenses for our vulnerable networks, here's a modest suggestion: Gently alert our non-NATO "partners" that we might be in their electricity grids, too.
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FLASHBACK > China deploys secure computer operating system
"China is playing chess while we're playing checkers"
.image toon - china sclm lbrty - Chinese flab wallpapered over American
Willful Deafness about the Real Meaning of Two States
[HT:DT {-1 demerit for not 'briefing'}]
The Palestinians, Saudis and Egyptians propose two states. The U.N., E.U., U.S. demand two states. Most Israeli governments have agreed to the concept of two states. Other than Israel, none of the proponents of a "two-state" solution ever planned for one of the states to be the Jewish State of Israel.
Just the thought of such a state is an insult to those who live in all-Muslim countries. On Sunday, when Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu offered a Palestinian State if there is recognition of a Israel as the national homeland for Jewish people, a senior Palestinian negotiator responded,
"Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu can wait a thousand years without finding a single Palestinian prepared to accept his offer."
The offer of living side-by-side in peace and tolerance is too offensive to discuss even for the "moderate" Arab Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said the demand that Palestinians recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people
"schuttles [sic] the chances for peace."
So what are these two states supposed to look like?
The Arab spokesmen are crystal clear on their intentions. One Judea/Samaria, a.k.a. the West Bank, will be 100% Palestinian immediately. Not a single Jew will be allowed to live there. It will be armed and ready to fire at close range into Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa.
If history is a guide [and it's the only guide we have], within a short time, Hamas will challenge and beat the P.A., gain control and begin firing... [snip]
The other state, now Israel, will not only have to defend itself from terrorist and rocket attacks on all borders, it will need to open its doors to millions of Arabs, who have fabricated a “right” to return to Israel rather than a “right” of return to a Palestinian State.
Israel will then face destruction from within... [snip]
The President certainly doesn’t publicly chastise the Palestinian and other Arabs who reject a Jewish state as he did Israel’s Prime Minister for rejecting another terrorist state on Israel’s border.
The President praises the proposal for two states as an `important step` forward even though Palestinians and their Arab brothers have for over 60 years flatly rejected countless proposals for two-states if one of those states happens to be Jewish...
[Another sham. Again and again, our 'leaders' speak of a "two state solution" and our 'professional' media never ask any of them to name those two states...]
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Obama`s Real Agenda: Israel`s Dimona Nuclear Facility
[HT:DT {2nd demerit for again not 'briefing'}]
And any nation - including Iran - should have the right to access peaceful nuclear power if it complies with its responsibilities under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. That commitment is at the core of the Treaty, and it must be kept for all who fully abide by it. And I am hopeful that all countries in the region can share in this goal."Pres. Barack Obama, June 4, 2009
As a policy statement, this means that America (or any other country) cannot deny the right of any country to WMD. It undercuts the reasons for America`s attack in Iraq, assents to nuclear proliferation and precludes any action against Iran.
It also turns the focus on Israel.
Amidst all of the distortions and inaccuracies of Pres Obama`s speech in Cairo, this paragraph sends chills through Israel`s intelligence community. Obama`s emphasis on a commitment to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, something which Israel has refused to agree, since that means opening all of its facilities to inspection - including its top secret plant in Dimona - is a direct threat to Israel`s security.
Aware of Israel`s long-standing policy in this matter, Obama shifts the attack. By linking support for Israel against Iran with the existence of Dimona and Israel's refusal to sign the pact, Obama can blame Israel for American inaction against Iran, and lack of support for its war in Afghanistan.
It`s a perfect excuse: `Israel didn`t do enough; it`s Israel`s fault.`
[Shameful. 'With friends like us... ]
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Carter Wants Obama to Remove Hamas from Terror List
[HT:DT {-3rd demerit for not 'briefing' - you're pushing it}]
Carter’s comments came during a joint press conference with Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh following their meeting today in Gaza. The former president said he tried to convince Hamas leaders to denounce violence, accept the existing interim agreements and recognize the right of the Jewish state to exist.
Haniyeh told Carter that he supported any plan that aims at preserving Arab rights and leads to the establishment of a sovereign Arab state on all the territories that were occupied by Israel in 1967 "with Jerusalem as its capital." He urged Carter to pressure Israel to lift the security blockade which was imposed on Gaza’s border crossings to prevent weapons smuggling. [presumably so they could flow once more]
During his visit Carter handed over a letter from kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit’s [kidnapped on 25 June 2006 by Palestinian militants] parents and asked the group to deliver it on humanitarian grounds.
Haniyeh said Hamas desired to end the Shalit case [prove it: free him] and welcomed Carter's mediation [media] efforts [exposure].
[Some things are recession proof: useful idiocy is alive and well...]
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Gilad Shalit (image courtesy of the Shalit family)
"If Arabs laid down their arms there'd be no war. If Israel laid down its arms, there'd be no Israel."
.
Earnest goodwill doesn't substitute for foreign policy
President Obama likes to see himself as a pragmatist, but in foreign policy he is proving to be a supreme idealist of the Woodrow Wilson variety.
Like Wilson's, Obama's foreign policy increasingly seems to rest on the assumption that nations will act on the basis of what they perceive to be the goodwill, good intentions or moral purity of other nations, in particular the United States. If other nations have refused to cooperate with us, it is because they perceive the United States as aggressive or evil. [snip]
In the speech, the Washington Post reports, "Obama made his own biography the starting point for a new U.S. relationship with Islam." Or as the New York Times put it, while "the president offered few details on how to solve problems around the globe," his basic argument "boiled down to this: Barack Hussein Obama was standing on the podium in this Muslim capital as the American president." [I.e., all about him. snip]
The last president who sincerely pursued this approach was Woodrow Wilson. He, too, believed that the display of evident goodwill and desire for peace, uncorrupted by the base motives of national interest or ambition, gave him the special moral authority to sway other nations. And Wilson was as beloved around the globe as Obama is today, possibly more beloved, at least for a moment.
His gifts to persuade, however, proved ephemeral, and the results of his efforts were, from his own perspective, an utter failure...
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GM needs fresh start from UAW, too
In March of this year, GM President Rick Wagoner was forced to resign at the insistence of the Obama administration. That Ron Gettelfinger, Wagoner's counterpart at the UAW, has clung to his own position is an injustice, but one that could easily be remedied with some pressure from Deese. Continuing to invite Gettelfinger to the table for restructuring talks makes as much sense as tapping Bernie Madoff to reform the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Gettelfinger oversaw the implementation of a UAW contract that runs to more than 1,110 pages, nearly five times larger than the nimble non-union contract Toyota works with. While GM bled $70 billion during the past two years, Gettelfinger resisted all significant cost-savings measures while loudly trumpeting trivial concessions like eliminating Viagra from the UAW health plan and giving up the Easter Monday holiday.
GM's workforce has seen countless layoffs and plant closures caused by deep-rooted union legacy costs and head-in-the-sand denial. When GM made a last-ditch attempt at viability by trying to restructure in 2007, the union instigated a futile 41-hour "shot across the bow" strike that in many ways sealed the automaker's fate.
The UAW has failed its members, and GM will never be competitive with the UAW's noose around its neck. The American public is set to become 60 percent shareholders, so we've all got a stake in Brian Deese's performance. We the shareholders can only hope that President Obama's fledgling car czar will exceed expectations, make the tough call, and sever the union cord for good.
The UAW had a good run, but it's time to go...
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80% want government to sell its stake in Car Companies Now
A Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that only 11% disagree and want the government to retain ownership for a long time.
Support for ending the government ownership is so strong that 64% favor a proposal that would force the government to sell the auto companies within a year. Only 26% are opposed.
Voters feel nearly as strongly about the ownership interest the government has taken in several bailed-out U.S. banks. Seventy-one percent (71%) say the government should sell that ownership to private investors as soon as possible.
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Americans Have Voted ‘No' on GM Bailout From Day One
When GM came begging to the federal government last fall, driven to the brink of bankruptcy by poor management, high labor costs and a faltering economy, America signaled that the love affair was over. In survey after survey since, Rasmussen Reports has found that Americans are not in a bailout mood, for GM or anybody.
In November just after the election, 45% of Americans were opposed to the loans, 35% favored them, and 20% were undecided. Four-out-of-five (80%) were concerned the government would get too involved in the private economy.
That same month, nearly half of U.S. voters (48%) said it was better for the economy to let companies like General Motors fail rather than providing government subsidies to keep them in business.
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Once, We Would Have Called It a Scandal
In 1921, oil tycoon Harry Sinclair gave several prize head of cattle and around $269,000 to President Harding's Secretary of the Interior, Albert Fall.
In return, Sinclair got the exclusive rights to drill in an oil field in Wyoming. Sinclair's no-bid contract became the Teapot Dome scandal, the most notorious example of political corruption in America prior to Watergate.
Between 2000 and 2008, the United Auto Workers (UAW) union gave $23,675,562 to the Democratic Party and its candidates.
In 2008 alone, the UAW gave $4,161,567 to the Democratic Party and Barack Obama."At a Time When Some American Workers are Facing Stiff Pay Cuts, UAW Workers Gave Up Their Customary Paid Holiday on Easter Monday"
In return, the UAW received 55 percent of Chrysler and 17.5 percent of GM, plus billions of dollars."Never Has an American Union Done So Well At the Expense of Shareholders and Creditors"
But nobody's calling this a scandal."The issue of secured creditors' rights is bigger than Chrysler. It's an essential foundation of our capital markets. And fundamentally, this is about the law."
It's time we start.
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GOVERNMENT'S PROFLIGATE FISCAL POLICIES LIKELY TO LEAD TO 1970S-STYLE STAGFLATION
Rather than cure Great Britain's economic recession, Gordon Brown's current fiscal policies are more likely to lead to 1970s-style stagflation, says David B. Smith, a professor at the University of Derby:
- Using the 2009 Budget forecasts, Smith calculates that next year the ratio of government expenditure to national income will rise to 53.4 percent, the highest ratio since World War II and 6.9 percent above the peak recorded in World War I.
- The ratio of public expenditure to private spending, which was 92.4 percent in 2008, will rise to 107 percent in 2009 and 114.5 percent in 2010 -- the highest burden since 1945; the private sector will therefore have to carry more than its own weight in government activity.
- To fund this, public sector net borrowing will increase from 8 percent of national income in 2008-09, to 14.1 percent in 2009-10, and 13.5 percent in 2011-12.
[Sound familiar? And by a trivial 2/10th of a percent (49.7 v 49.9%), America is the second highest taxed industrial nation in the world...
and of course; FLASHBACK >
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Will Widespread Global Cooling Reports Freeze Al Gore Media Credibility?
It is "an inconvenient truth" for Al Gore that the world is currently experiencing some of the coldest weather in decades. Just how cold? How about snow in Saudi Arabia in May according to this report?
If this were the only such report, it could be written off as just an isolated incident of freak weather. Unfortunately for Al Gore's credibility there have been widespread reports of unseasonably cold weather from many sources including a story yesterday in the Minneapolis Star Tribune about a "year without summer"...According to a story in the Saudi Gazette and sourced to the American News Agency, the Associated Press, snow fell in Al-Baha city, to the south-west of Riyadh, on Tuesday.
[A: nope; there's too much money at stake to give up.]
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Al Gore invests millions to make billions in cap-and-trade software
Al Gore’s venture capital firm has invested $6 million in a software company that stands to make billions of dollars from cap-and-trade regulation — further fueling controversy that Gore lied about his profiteering from cap-and-trade to Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and the House Energy and Environment Subcommittee during testimony in April.
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State Department Says China to Get U.S. Aid under New Climate Deal
(CNSNews.com) - U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change Todd Stern said that there was “no question” that China would receive both financial and technological assistance from the United States as part of upcoming climate change talks to be conducted in Copenhagen, Denmark.
China, called a developing country by the U.N., is being given a special definition by U.S. negotiators who want any final agreement to reflect that despite its vast swaths of undeveloped rural countryside, China is rapidly urbanizing, boasting fully modern cities.
Regardless, the United States will be spreading the wealth China’s way, helping them to meet whatever final carbon emissions reduction goals come out of Copenhagen.
The Copenhagen talks are part of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), the U.N. body responsible for negotiating the Kyoto Protocol and its successor treaty, negotiation of which will be finalized in Copenhagen this December
]What's our trade deficit with that nation again?]
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Raising taxes by the mile
During the 2008 presidential campaign, President Obama endeared himself to many voters with a promise that 95 percent of Americans would get a tax cut and those making under $250,000"would not see a single dime of tax increase - not on anything."
Since Obama won and he's already spent so much, it was only a matter of time before this promise too went by the wayside...
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The Russians, Arabs, Drug Cartels and our Southern Border
immig
On June 3rd Sara Carter and the Washington Times reported, “Al-Qaeda Eyes Anthrax Attack On U.S from Mexico.” The story is based on an Al-Qaeda recruitment video first broadcast back in February on Al Jazeera.
In it, Kuwaiti dissident Abdullah al-Nafisi tells a roomful of people that Al-Qaeda is currently casing the U.S. border with Mexico to see how they could smuggle weapons through border tunnels and into the U.S....
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Meanwhile, in the SRM {State Run Media}...
CBS: Immigration Raid Left Iowa Town’s Economy ‘In Tatters’
On Saturday, CBS’s Anthony Mason blamed tough economic times in a small Iowa town on immigration enforcement:
"...the small town of Postville, Iowa, is still struggling to recover from an immigration raid last year that left its economy in tatters."
In November, Doane issued an almost identical report on the impact of the raid on the Early Show: "With empty streets and shuttered shops, this small town is facing economic calamity. Mayor Bob Penrod is taking steps this weekend to declare a state of emergency here. But it's not a natural disaster. Rather, one that's manmade...It all started May 12th, when hundreds of federal immigration authorities raided Agriprocessors and arrested 389 workers."
What Doane failed to report in both stories was the numerous labor law violations that Agriprocessors has been accused of by many of the illegal immigrants who once worked at the Postville plant. A July 27, 2008 article in the New York Times detailed those allegations: ...
[Again and again: portraying the law breakers as the victims.]
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The Civil Rights Challenge of Our Time
edu
An incensed Andrew Sullivan -- homosexual journalist and activist -- told CNN anchor Anderson Cooper the other night that Barack Obama is ducking the "core civil rights challenge of his time."
Most recently, and flagrantly, was the announcement that Obama would sit by and allow Congress to pull the plug on the five-year old voucher program enabling 1700 kids in Washington, DC to attend private schools. This despite a new study from Obama's own Department of Education saying that these kids outperformed their peers in DC public schools in reading. And that the vouchers, valued up to $7500 per scholarship, cost less than half the $17,000 per student that DC spends to maintain one of the worst public school systems in the country.
Today's real minority group is low to middle income parents who want their children educated with traditional values. Of the 1700 kids in DC's soon to be defunct voucher program, 879 had been attending Catholic elementary or high schools.
Liberating our kids from the cesspools in our urban areas that we call public schools is the great "civil rights challenge" of our time.
[Recommended > ]
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WaPo Highlights D.C. Graduation Speaker Denouncing 'Snarl of Hatred' of Pro-Lifers at Notre Dame
edu msm vals
[once again; if you disagree with the left, it's because you 'hate']
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On Gov. Palin All the Lies Fit to Print
It seems that Froma Harrop of Creator's Syndicate news service was on vacation from just about five days before the general election until today and she's just catching up on all the Palin hatin' she must have missed. Unfortunately for Harrop, she still hasn't caught up with the truth yet because her latest is filled with every lie about Governor Palin she could jam into one column.
In hers headlined, "Palin should move to TV talk show," Harrop proves that she should move from Creator’s Syndiacte to the National Enquirer...
[why the continuing attacks? A: genuine fear - of genuine conservatives]
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Trip Outside shows Palin's national star still blazes
Gov. Sarah Palin returned to the national stage in a big way this past week, rocketing back into the national consciousness with her David Letterman feud, slams on the Obama administration and drama with national Republican leaders."Katie Couric doesn't have a lot of fans in Des Moines, Iowa, and Manchester, New Hampshire,"
Mueller said."Sarah Palin does."
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Sarah Palin, the 21st Century 'It' Girl
The best and the brightest on the left go into politics. The best on the right run their own businesses. So it is no surprise that the left is far more adept, even expert at the art of hardball politics. And they are telling us something profound.
The left is telling us something many feel, many know intuitively; that Sarah Palin is the most dangerous threat to the Obama administration...
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