Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Obama's 'Redistribution' Extends Beyond Wealth to Health Care, Foreign Policy
Subject: txt 1st hcare crpt mny sclm bbro - Huckabee:
"[W]hile we really wish [the president's priorities] were recovery, getting jobs back - that's the number one thing we ought to be focused on - but it appears to be redistribution," ... "That's what's going on in the health care world, where we're trying to make sure that we've redistributed health care, taking it from people who have it, taking from them, giving it to people who may not even desire to have it, and forcing people into an unconstitutional system where they're going to have to virtually pay into a private marketplace in order to get full rights of citizenship. It's the equivalent of a poll tax."
READ MORE
The People Say No
[HT:LDot:
Congress can't hear. Bribery makes them deaf.]
Health Care: The closer the Democratic Congress' radical health package gets to enactment, the less popular it becomes.
The American people smell a rat.
The Democrats' health care revolution, which right now looks like it will include a government-run option that could cripple the health insurance industry, is sinking in approval. The newest Rasmussen poll finds public support down to 38% — falling for the first time below 41%...
READ MORE
Why Americans dislike Obama's health care reform
Subject: txt hcare -
Earlier this week, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., unveiled his chamber's plan for health reform. The nearly 2,100-page bill boasts a price tag of about $850 billion and hues closely to the trillion-dollar reform bill that recently passed the House. Democratic leaders have hit the airwaves to sell the country on the merits of their vision for reform.
But the American people aren't buying their pitch.
Why the negative response? Because they believe they'll be worse off under the terms of the Democrats' legislative package.
And they're right...
[So? Reid will bribe the necessary Senators and they'll pass it anyway. Who's going to expose them - the media?]
READ MORE
Newsweek Editor Admits: Health Care Bill a ‘Fiscal Fraud’ But ‘I’d Still Vote for It’
Subject: txt hcare msm bias -
READ MORE
$100 Million Buyoff to Support Senate's Health Bill - Nets Mum...
Subject: txt hcare crpt reps msm -
What's $100 million of taxpayer money between a few U.S. Senators?
After reports surfaced of $100 million for Louisiana was added to the Senate's health care reform legislation, originally from ABC News, and subsequently commented upon by prominent lefties, like U.S. News and World Report's Bonnie Erbe as my colleague Noel Sheppard pointed out, Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., took the Senate floor on Nov. 21 to announce she would vote in favor to proceed forward with the Senate Democratic leadership's bill...
READ MORE
USNWR Bashes Mary Landrieu's $100 Million Bribe
Subject: txt hcare msm -
U.S. News and World Report's Bonnie Erbe came down strongly Friday on the $100 million "bribe" given to Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) in the Senate's healthcare reform bill.
What makes this shocking is Erbe's consistently far-left leaning views regularly reported.
Readers are advised to strap themselves in tightly, for the following blog posting by Erbe is quite a departure from her normal liberal views:
READ MORE
Reality Check...
Subject: txt 1st hcare bbro sclm mny msm -
"The federal budget is on an unsustainable path, primarily because of the rising cost of health care... Medicare's Part A trust fund... will have insufficient funds to pay for covered services starting in 2017"
Source: CBO.
Estimate of the 10-year cost of the House Democrats' "Affordable Health Choices Act", which includes a "public option": $1 trillion.
(Source: CBO.)
Estimate of the 10-year cost of the Senate Democrats' health care plan: $856 billion.
(Source: AP.)
Estimate of the10-year net decrease in the federal deficit by allowing individuals to buy health insurance in any state: $7.4 billion.
Net decrease of uninsured individuals by 2014, if individuals are allowed to buy health insurance in any state: 400,000.
(Source: CBO.)
.
The Worst Decision by a US President in History
[HT:DG]Subject: txt 1st gwot nsec bbro legal reps libs crpt - 
The Obama administration has taken a giant step in its march to throw in the towel in the war against radical Islam. On FoxNews this morning, Peter King said of the decision to try the soldiers of al-Qaeda — who by their own account have no country but their cause — as civilians
“may be the worst decision by a U.S. president in history.”
It certainly is. It sends a signal to terrorists everywhere to attack civilians.
The administration is justifying its decisions on the grounds that because the 9/11 attackers targeted civilians they should be tried as civilians. This makes no sense unless you are a Democrat who believes that the “holy war” that Islamic jihadists have formally declared on us is no different from the acts of isolated individuals who have decided to break the law.The decision to try the jihadists in a civilian court is also a decision which will divulge America’s security secrets to the enemy since civilian courts afford defendants the right of discovery. It is also a propaganda gift to Islamic murderers who will turn the courtroom into a media circus to promote their hatred against the Great Satan — a hatred shared by their apologists at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the pro-Castro Center for Constitutional Rights who have pioneered the campaign against Guantanamo and whose influence in the Obama Administration is pervasive.
Finally, this move continues and enlarges the refusal of the President and the American Left to recognize that we are in a war that has been declared on us. That the war is conducted by religious armies whose participants and supporters number in the tens of millions, and that they're aided and abetted by many Islamic governments and by the international Left.
By any measure it is the worst decision by a U.S. president in history.
READ MORE
Terrorism under the radar
A "big picture" look at terrorism in America.
A great piece by Praveen Swamiin in India's the Hindu that lists the dozen or so terrorist busts in the US in the last few months that included plans to attack not only the United States but other countries as well.
What struck me as I read this article was that we have not seen this kind of "big picture" coverage of terrorism anywhere in the American media that I have noticed. 
When examined from the standpoint that these arrests can be seen as diligent attempts by al-Qaeda and their offshoots to inflict large scale attacks on America, you realize what a huge mistake the Obama administration is making in downplaying the very idea of a "War on Terror"... [snip]
Looking at this "big picture" highlights the danger to America. And the old saw about terrorism - "Terrorists only need to get lucky once" - rings especially true when you realize that the odds are shortening in the terrorists favor...
READ MORE
Meanwhile, in our Professional media...
.
Labeling Hasan 'Terrorist' Would 'Paint the Democrats as Soft on Terror'
It's one thing to avoid the "terrorist" label when reporting on Ft. Hood suspect Major Nidal Hasan. It's quite another to say that those who do use it are making a political calculation to "paint the Democrats as soft terror." Yet that's what MSNBC's Rachel Maddow insisted on her Nov. 11 broadcast.
Maddow launched into a minute-and-a-half soliloquy on why it is bad for the Democratic Party when commentators label Hasan a "terrorist." She even attempted to make the case on Hasan's behalf against a terrorism label.
READ MORE
Obama’s Weakness: He’s ‘Too Darned Intellectual’
At the top of Friday’s Hardball on MSNBC, host Chris Matthews discovered the reason for President Obama’s political difficulties in recent months:
“President Obama has his chin out on just about every hot issue out there....He’s exposed and vulnerable. His poll numbers are dropping. Is he just too darned intellectual?”
Later in the show, Matthews talked to Atlantic Media’s Ron Brownstein and USA Today’s Susan Page about Obama’s great flaw - and saving grace;
“...there are many strengths to the Obama administration, but they’ve got an awful lot of people who went to Ivy League schools, which is great, but you also need some people who went to big state colleges.” ... “Vice President Biden’s been the target of some fun, he is maybe the only voice in that inner circle that reflects that kind of big state school mentality.”
[As long as they're BIG state colleges - we wouldn't want any of that goodness inadvertently applying to Palin.
Pathetic narcissists. I'll take a successful drop-out entrepreneur any day.]
READ MORE
.
The Value of an International Guarantee
Subject: txt israel owg -
Yesterday, I noted that a UN Security Council endorsement of “a two-state solution based on the June 4, 1967 borders,” such as Mahmoud Abbas is seeking, would radically alter the existing international position, prejudice the outcome of negotiations, and probably spark an escalating war of unilateral moves and countermoves.
But it would also have another deleterious effect: it would provide further proof that international guarantees to Israel are worthless...
READ MORE
Reality Check...
Just who is the "occupier"?
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs was ordered by the Obama administration to express displeasure at the decision by Israel to build houses in the East Jerusalem suburb of Gilo. But Gibbs failed to disclose that the land on which Gilo was built, as with other suburbs in "disputed" parts of East Jerusalem, was home to many Jews who were driven out in 1948 by theArab Legion of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
It was not liberated by Israel, and the land restored, until the June, 1967 Six Day War, nineteen years later. King Hussein of Jordan had thrown in his lot with the Egyptian leader, Gamal Abdul Nasser, who was boasting how he was on the verge of destroying the Jewish state. The King believed Nasser's claims and attacked along the entire Jordanian / Israeli front (including Jerusalem) despite pleas by Israel for him to not follow Nasser's aggression.
In the nineteen years that the Jordanians occupied the territory, they never remotely considered it as anything but Jordanian. Certainly they never thought it belonged to another Arab people who later called themselves 'Palestinians'. As it was, Jordan's illegal occupation of East Jerusalem, as well as of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), was recognized by only two countries, Britain and Pakistan.
But the Obama White House, and the relentlessly anti-Israel State Department, nevertheless have decided that they will echo the demands of the Palestinian Authority and call for Israel to stop building homes, not only in Judea and Samaria, but even within Jewish suburbs of Israel's capital city, Jerusalem; this while Arab settlement building continues unchecked throughout the area at a feverish pace... [snip]
As Frank Gaffney wrote in an article some years ago about the delusional peace process:
... The entire Annapolis house of cards is built on the fraudulent foundation that the Palestinian faction established by Abbas' mentor, Yasser Arafat, is a reliable partner for peace. Only a zealot who has altogether lost any sense of reality could make such an assertion.
Will Prime Minister Netanyahu withstand the brutal pressure from Obama and not sell out Israel's ability to remain a viable state with an undivided capital city in eternal Jerusalem? It remains to be seen, but if he falters Israel may not be able to defend itself after being forced back within the nine mile wide pre-1967 borders, which an Israeli statesman, Abba Eban, once described as the "Auschwitz borders"...
[More actual history, Recommended > ]
READ MORE
Obama Foreign Posture 'Exactly Backward'
Subject: txt intl
On Fox's Nov. 22 "Fox News Sunday," former "Special Report" anchor and Fox News senior political correspondent was dead spot on target in many regards when it came to criticizing the tack President Barack Obama has taken with his foreign policy gestures. First, Hume reflected on how Obama reacted on his trip to Asia last week. He noted that Obama was in a tough position, having to rely on borrowed Chinese money. However,
"But this president seems quite willing to embrace weakness as a position for the United States..."
READ MORE
NBC: All of Obama Struggles Merely 'Perception Problems'
Subject: txt intl mny msm - bias - libs -
At first glance it appeared that NBC's Meredith Vieira and David Gregory, on Friday's Today show, did a decent job of recounting all of the struggles the Obama administration is dealing with from unemployment to foreign policy, but ultimately the pair concluded, in every instance, they weren't actual problems, but merely problems of "perception."
READ MORE
Brussels says churches must lift ban on employing homosexuals
Subject: txt lbrty intl owg bdd vals -
The government is being forced by the European commission to rip up controversial exemptions that allow church bodies to refuse to employ homosexual staff.
It has emerged that the commission wrote to the government last week raising concerns that the UK had incorrectly implemented an EU directive prohibiting discrimination on the grounds of a person's sexual orientation.
The commission's lawyers inform the government that its
"exceptions to the principle of non-discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation for religious employers are broader than that permitted by the directive".
The authoritarian move means that the government now has no choice but to redraft anti-discrimination laws, which is likely to prompt a furore among church groups...
READ MORE
Reality Check...
Subject: txt owg hstry othr msm bias vals =
"The General Assembly today adopted... a moratorium on executions to be established in all States that still maintain the death penalty..."
Number of academic studies between 2001 and 2007 showing that the death penalty is a deterrent: 12.
Number of murders deterred per execution: 3, 5, 14, or 18, depending on the study.
Number of estimated homicides resulting from four years worth of Illinois' death penalty moratorium: 150.
Source: CBS News, reporting in 2007 on academic studies regarding the death penalty.
.
Conspiracy To Falsify Temperature Data Uncovered
Subject: txt grn -E-mail messages between high-ranking scientists appear to indicate a conspiracy by some of the world's leading global warming alarmists to falsify temperature data in order to exaggerate global averages.
Those involved allegedly include: James Hansen, Director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies; Michael Mann, famous for Mann's discredited "Hockey Stick"; Gavin Schmidt, equally discredited NASA climate modeler, and; Stephen Schneider, Stanford professor and Al Gore paid 'consultant'.
A statement released Friday by the website RealClimate has confirmed that e-mail servers at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) in Norwich, England, were hacked recently with contents illegally made available over the Internet.
Although the authenticity of all these e-mail messages has yet to be proven, what's currently available points to a coordinated attempt to manipulate climate data by those directly involved in advancing the theory of anthropogenic global warming.
New Zealand's Investigate magazine reported Friday that it has verified these e-mail messages are indeed real:
The BBC.com filed this report :
A university spokesman confirmed the email system had been hacked and that information was taken and published without permission.
An investigation was underway and the police had been informed, he added.
"We are aware that information from a server used for research information in one area of the university has been made available on public websites," the spokesman stated.
The journal Nature got a comment from one of the scientists whose name appears on some of these e-mail messages:
Some climate-sceptic bloggers are already poring over the posted material, which includes e-mails allegedly sent by the CRU's director Phil Jones to fellow climate researchers, including Michael Mann at Pennsylvania State University in University Park. Mann is the author of a widely cited assessment of past climate records, known as the hockey-stick graph, which shows a pronounced global-warming trend during the latter part of the twentieth century.
"I'm not going to comment on the content of illegally obtained e-mails," says Mann. "However, their theft constitutes serious criminal activity. I'm hoping that the perpetrators will be tracked down and prosecuted to the fullest extent the law allows." Jones declined to comment on the matter.
Andrew Bolt of Australia's Herald Sun has more:
So the 1079 emails and 72 documents seem indeed evidence of a scandal involving most of the most prominent scientists pushing the man-made warming theory - a scandal that is one of the greatest in modern science. I’ve been adding some of the most astonishing in updates below - emails suggesting conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more. If it is as it now seems, never again will “peer review” be used to shout down sceptics.
Bolt included a number of these e-mail messages (emphasis his): [examples, snip]
The Examiner.com found another interesting e-mail message allegedly from a Dr. Tom Wigley to Jones (author's emphasis):
Phil, Here are some speculations on correcting SSTs to partly explain the 1940s warming blip. If you look at the attached plot you will see that the land also shows the 1940s blip (as I’m sure you know). So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC, then this would be significant for the global mean — but we’d still have to explain the land blip. I’ve chosen 0.15 here deliberately. When you look at other blips, the land blips are 1.5 to 2 times (roughly) the ocean blips — higher sensitivity plus thermal inertia effects. My 0.15 adjustment leaves things consistent with this, so you can see where I am coming from. Removing ENSO does not affect this. It would be good to remove at least part of the 1940s blip, but we are still left with “why the blip”. Let me go further...
Wow. Scary stuff.
However, maybe more importantly, with cap and trade legislation currently before Congress, and an international climate meeting happening in Copenhagen next month, the question is what will America's leading media outlets do with this news.
Should we expect investigative television programs like "60 Minutes" and "20/20" to be all over this story interrogating the scientists allegedly involved in these e-mail exchanges?
Will America's press be as eager to find out the truth of this matter as they were in fact-checking former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin's new book?
Consider that at the time of this article's publishing, only FoxNews.com, NPR.com, and WSJ.com have logged printed stories on this subject from this side of the Atlantic.
Will others follow, and if so, how will they report what on the surface appears to be a huge, developing story?
*****Update: Readers are STRONGLY encouraged to watch the scrambling going on at RealClimate.READ MORE
CRU Files Betray Climate Alarmists' Funding Hypocrisy
Subject: txt grn -
It seems that while scientists who accept funding from oil companies are branded as bought-and-paid-for shills, those financed by renewable energy interests remain unchallenged authorities in their fields. Words can’t adequately express my astonishment.
Amid the thousands of files apparently misappropriated from Britain’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) last week sit two documents on the subject of the unit’s funding. One is a spreadsheet (pdj_grant_since1990.xls) logging the various grants CRU chief PD Jones has received since 1990. It lists 55 such endowments from agencies ranging from the U.S Department of Energy to NATO and worth a total of approximately 22.6 million dollars.
I guess cooking climate data can be an expensive habit, particularly for an oft-quoted and highly exalted U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) chief climatologist... [snip]
But it’s actually the second document (potential-funding.doc) that tells the more compelling tale.
In addition to four government sources of potential CRU funding, it lists an equal number of “energy agencies” they might put the bite on. Three -- the Carbon Trust, the Northern Energy Initiative and the Energy Saving Trust -- are UK-based consultancy and funding specialists promoting “new energy” technologies with the goal of reducing carbon dioxide emissions. The fourth -- Renewables North West -- is an American company promoting the expansion of solar, wind and geothermal energy in the Pacific Northwest.
Needless to say, all four of these CRU “potential funding sources” have an undeniably intrinsic financial interest in the promotion of the carbochondriacal reports CRU is ready, willing, and able to dish out ostensibly on-demand. And equally obvious is that Jones is all too aware that a renewable energy-funded CRU will remain the world’s premiere authority on the subject of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) despite all obvious conflicts of interests .
And yet, no such latitude has ever been extended to scientists in the skeptical camp... [snip]
As with all things AGW, the alarmist quick-draw-canard that the science is settled but for a few outlying scientists in the pockets of the fossil-fuel industry is quickly losing whatever civic support it may have had. And the scientific subterfuge surfaced last week by the CRU emails and documents represents but the latest of many recent outrages sure to accelerate the ongoing public awakening to the hoax which has been perpetrated upon them.
For as Lord Christopher Monckton emphasized in his rousing speech to close the second International Conference on Climate Change in New York City last March:
“There is no climate crisis. There was no climate crisis. There will be no climate crisis.”
And it has become abundantly clear that it is not, nor was it ever, the AGW skeptics who have been the liers. Or the cheaters.[There will be no climate crisis unless we create one by retarding development, with its dire consequences, in the name of this false god.]
[HIGHLY RECOMMENDED > ]
READ MORE
White House hits back on climate critics
[Meanwhile, in Disneyland...]
It's been a bad few weeks for the Obama administration when it comes to climate change, as the White House has found itself trapped between a stalled Senate and constant hammering from world leaders on a lack of leadership on global warming. On Monday, the administration hit back.
The United States, said officials, plans to propose a near-term emissions reduction target as part of a ''meaningful submission'' the country will present at the talks....
READ MORE
Media still 'going rogue' on Sarah Palin 
Instead of being cowed into lifelong isolation by the mainstream media's unaccountable treatment of her during her run for vice president last year, Sarah Palin is back. She has a book, a political action committee, a message that is igniting conservatives and fueling her mass popularity.
And the media, stunned at its own inability to take her down the first time around, is circling her like a flock of vultures, ready to finish her off.
They're back for a redux...
READ MORE
Again, Thousands...
After signing books for almost three hours, Sarah Palin rolled out of Fort Bragg this afternoon on her book tour bus. The signing event ended at about 2:15 p.m., slightly later than scheduled. Fort Bragg officials said about 4,000 people showed up...
READ MORE
Subject: txt fnn - Alcohol 'protects men's hearts'
Drinking alcohol every day cuts the risk of heart disease in men by more than a third, a major study suggests. The Spanish research involving more than 15,500 men and 26,000 women found large quantities of alcohol could be even more beneficial for men. The type of alcohol drunk did not seem to make a difference, but protection was greater for those drinking moderate to high amounts of varied drinks...
[FINALLY, some real science...]
READ MORE
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
