Tuesday, June 15, 2010
US turned down Britain’s offer to help clean up BP oil rig spill
Subject: txt 1st hots grn engry -
Officials said the US claimed that the chemicals held in Britain did not have the correct paperwork but the spokeswoman said: “We are not aware of any problems with licensing. I cannot say why they have not accepted the offer. That is a question for the US State Department.”
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Why Isn’t That Maine Boom Being Deployed to the Gulf?
Subject: txt engry - 2010 -
As the oil spill crisis has worsened, members of the public and media have seized upon various ways the government could be doing more to either plug the hole or alleviate the environmental damage. One such story has described boom manufactured by an Auburn, Maine, packaging company called Packgen that’s been sitting in storage waiting to be delivered to the Gulf. Four weeks ago, in four days, Packgen manufactured 80,000 feet of boom, but the government placed no orders for boom...
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Media Fail to See Obama's Fingerprints on Lack of Press Freedom in Gulf
Subject: txt grn engry msm pltcs - libs -
It's been more than 50 days since a BP oil rig exploded off the coast of Louisiana, beginning a massive leak of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Miles of beaches have been soiled and birds, turtles and other sea creatures have died. But the most disturbing pictures of the disaster weren't available to the public for more than 40 days.
That was when many people finally witnessed Louisiana's state bird, the brown pelican, literally covered in thick brown oil. Why so long? Because federal agencies including the Coast Guard and Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) were preventing the press from reaching many areas affected by the disaster.
CBS, Associated Press, Mother Jones and The Times-Picayune have all complained about local and federal authorities and and British Petroleum contractors inhibiting their reporting.
But while many in the news media blame BP, the real culprit may well be the Obama administration. When asked, Obama and other administration spokespeople say the U.S. government is in charge of the oil spill cleanup...
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Why the Far Left Hates Baseball
.Why the Far Left Hates Baseball
Or something like that. That headline certainly makes as much sense as this deranged PC-rant from National Progressive Radio by way of the ancient leftist publication The Nation: “Why the Far Right Hates Soccer,” by Dave Zirin. Just when you think the lunatic fringe can’t get any nuttier, along comes this:
Every World Cup, it arrives like clockwork. As sure as the ultimate soccer spectacle brings guaranteed adrenaline and agony to fans across the United States, it also drives the right-wing noise machine utterly insane.
“It doesn’t matter how you try to sell it to us,” yipped the Prom King of new right, Glenn Beck. “It doesn’t matter how many celebrities you get, it doesn’t matter how many bars open early, it doesn’t matter how many beer commercials they run, we don’t want the World Cup, we don’t like the World Cup, we don’t like soccer, we want nothing to do with it.”
That darn right-wing noise machine, upset over a little thing like lethal soccer riots! But you know — you just know — it goes deeper than that, and we all have a sense of where this is heading, don’t we:
Dear Lord, where do we begin? First of all, I always find it amusing when folks like Beck say, “We don’t like soccer” when it is by far the most popular youth sport in the United States. It’s like saying, “You know what else American kids hate? Ice cream!” Young people love soccer not because of some kind of commie-nazi plot conjured by Saul Alinsky to sap us of our precious juices, but because it’s – heaven forefend – fun.
Among adults, the sport is also growing because people from Latin America, Africa, and the West Indies have brought their love of the beautiful game to an increasingly multicultural United States. As sports journalist Simon Kuper wrote very adroitly in his book Soccer Against the Enemy, “When we say Americans don’t play soccer we are thinking of the big white people who live in the suburbs. Tens of millions of Hispanic Americans [and other nationalities] do play, and watch and read about soccer.” In other words, Beck rejects soccer because his idealized “real America” – in all its monochromatic glory – rejects it as well. To be clear, I know a lot of folks who can’t stand soccer. It’s simply a matter of taste. But for Beck it’s a lot more than, “Gee. It’s kind of boring.” Instead it’s, “Look out whitey! Felipe Melo’s gonna get your mama!”
And there you have it: you hate soccer because you’re a racist.
Isn’t time to red-card the left for their constant yammering about imaginary racism? We’ve been hearing from the multi-culti left that soccer is the popular youth sport in America for more than three decades — big deal: it’s cheap and basically nobody gets hurt playing it — and yet that alleged popularity has never translated into meaningful audiences as the professional level. Even the vaunted World Cup — talk about a hotbed of nationalism and nativism! — draws mostly yawns on these shores.
Further, Zirin’s argument that American resistance to soccer is racist in origin is just plain stupid: international football is traditionally dominated by the European powerhouses — Germany, Italy, Holland, France, England — and the Brazilians and Argentines. When plucky little Cameroon does better than expected the world cheers. Mostly, though, the charming Third World teams are ground to powder under the mechanized onslaught of the Teutons or the agile ball-handling (so to speak) of the South Americans.
None of this stops Zirin, in full high dudgeon at his peroration:
But maybe this isn’t just sports as avatar for their racism and imperial arrogance. Maybe their hysteria lies in something far more shallow. Maybe the real reason they lose their collective minds is simply because the USA tends to get their asses handed to them each and every World Cup. After all, as G. Gordon [Liddy] asked, “Whatever happened to American exceptionalism?” When it comes to the World Cup, the exceptional is found elsewhere. Could Beck, Liddy, and company just have soccer-envy? Is it possible that if the USA was favored to win the World Cup, Beck himself would be in the streets with his own solid gold vuvuzela? I feel that to ask the question is to answer it. In fact, this is as good a reason as any to hope for a mighty run by the US team. It would be high comedy to see Beck and Friends caught in a vice between their patriotic fervor and their nativist fear.
Amazing.
Hey, Dave — I’ve got your nativism right here:
Play ball!
Source
Police [in riot gear] Take Over Security at World Cup Stadiums
Subject: txt 1st -
Police took over responsibility for security at World Cup stadiums in Cape Town and Durban on Monday.
In Durban, police used force late Sunday to break up a protest.
At least two protesters were hurt after police used tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse about 400 protesters.
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Hillary Adds U.S. to List of Slave Nations
Subject: txt hots othr bdd -
Secretary of State Clinton included the U.S. for the first time on the State Department’s list of nations “trafficking in persons” for forced labor ranging from farm workers to pole dancers and prostitutes.
“There are Americans, unfortunately, who are held in slavery,”
Clinton said in releasing the annual report on nations who promote or permit the international trade in human beings for profit. The report said the main source countries for forced labor in the U.S. were Thailand, Mexico, the Philippines, Haiti and India.
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Apple secrecy is bitter fruit on Hill
Subject: txt lbrty hots - sclm bbro -
Apple is famous for its veil of secrecy around the new iPads and iPhones. But Sen. John Rockefeller and others in Congress wonder whether the company has more than technological innovations to hide. When Apple didn’t participate in an April hearing on children’s online privacy, the West Virginia Democrat who chairs the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, gave voice to his suspicions.
“When people don’t show up when we ask them to ... all it does is increases our interest in what they’re doing and why they didn’t show up,”
Rockefeller said
[Is this America? Who works for who here?]
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'Four years of Schalit in Gaza'
Subject: txt owg israel bdd islm gwot -
The Schalit family held a press conference in Tel Aviv on Monday to mark four years since their son, Gilad, was kidnapped by Hamas terrorists from the Gaza Strip. Noam Schalit spoke at the beginning of the conference, expressing his disappointment with the failure to free his son over the past four years despite the constant efforts of the Israeli government to find a solution.
Noam Schalit has previously declared that Hamas has held his son in violation of international law and ignored calls set out in the UN’s Goldstone Report on Gaza, which stated that Gilad should be free and that pending this release, he should be allowed visits by the International Red Cross...
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Who Gets the Benefit of the Doubt?
Subject: txt gwot israel islm -
Despite the willful denials of the Obama administration and progressives in general, most Americans understand we are at war with Islamic fascists determined to establish a worldwide, totalitarian, religious empire. Yet even most conservatives insist that such people are only a miniscule segment of the Muslim community. What if they're not? And if, as stated above, we are at war, why we are so hell-bent on giving so-called "moderate" Muslims the benefit of the doubt?
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Worm-full Blindness
Subject: txt islm -
When U.S. President Jimmy Carter speaks with passion about Sudan’s opportunity to rid itself and the world of a horrible problem, he is not talking about Sudanese President Omar el-Bashir, an ICC-indicted war criminal. Carter describes a nightmare scenario in which a foreign entity imposes itself into the very life of the people of Sudan, causing pain, misery, disease, and sometimes death. That sounds like Bashir’s National Islamic Front regime (now known as the National Congress Party or NCP). But Carter is not referring to the imposition of Shari’a or of Arab imperialism in an African country. He is speaking of [guinea] worms, a threat which he takes far more seriously than the threat of Islamism.
It’s not surprising that Jimmy Carter fails to see the threat of Islamism in Sudan. After all, he sees Israel as a threat to Palestinians, but disregards the threat of Hamas and Hezbollah. The Carter Center, established in 1982 by Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter in partnership with Emory University in Atlanta, is heavily funded by donors from Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and other Arab states.
And the level of naïveté and the extent of appeasement shown to the world’s worst tyrants during the Carter presidency have never been matched by any other presidency.
Until today...
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Russia says terrorists seeking nuclear materials
Subject: txt gwot nsec intl -
The chief of Russia's state security service said on Wednesday that terrorists were seeking access to nuclear materials across the former Soviet Union, Interfax news agency reported. Alexander Bortnikov, the chief of the FSB, the main successor to the Soviet-era KGB, gave no further details about the attempts or which groups had sought the materials.
"We have information which indicates that terrorists are continuing to attempt to get access to nuclear materials (and) biological and chemical components,"
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Venezuela farm seizure a vendetta
Subject: txt tyr -
Caracas, Venezuela -- As Venezuela's ambassador to the United Nations, Diego Arria dealt with major conflicts on the Security Council, participating in efforts to bring peace to places like Bosnia and Somalia. Now he is consumed in a personal conflict: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's government has seized Arria's 914-acre (370-hectare) farm after accusing him of not holding proper legal title.
Arria has been a vocal critic of Chavez...
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International protest groups take up ‘Tea Party’ flag in Moscow, Tel Aviv and the Hague
.
“I think the message of the American Revolution is global. The message of natural, unalienable rights, the message of opposition to tyrannical government — that’s not just well-known, that’s universal,” Boris Karpa, organizer of the Israeli Tea Party, told The Daily Caller in an e-mail. “As you know well, many countries have based their founding documents on the U.S. Declaration of Independence or other American documents.”
Although several international organizers had never even heard of the Boston Tea Party until U.S. protests brought the events of 1773 back into the spotlight, they now wear the Tea Party badge proudly as an example of American exceptionalism worth emulating.
“This [Tea Party] title is ideal for Russia,” Max Kronos, organizer of the Moscow Tea Party, told The Daily Caller in an e-mail. “This event has forever gone down in history — in Russia, such events have not happened.”
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Old Media Bail Out
Subject: txt bbro msm bdd - sclm -
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is looking for ways to “support the reinvention of journalism.” Possible measures to help the troubled U.S. news business, outlined in a paper published last month and scheduled to be discussed at a meeting Tuesday, include public subsidies, charity and stronger copyright protection...
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POLL: 85 percent of Americans say freedom of the press more important than saving newspapers
Subject: txt lbrty bbro lbrty -
More devastating news today from Rasmussen Reports for the FTC's "Reinventing Journalism" project, as fully 85 percent of the respondents to a national telephone survey say protecting freedom of the press is more important than saving existing newspapers. Perhaps even more worrisome for the FTC is the fact that only 19 percent of the respondents think it's appropriate for the government to be involved in efforts to prop up existing newspapers, according to Rasmussen. The FTC's "Reinventing Journalism" project is only at the staff discussion level for now, but there is clearly an effort supported by President Obama to get tax payers to pay for old media's continuation...
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Europe's $1.6 trillion hangover
Subject: txt intl mny tax -
Banks in France and Germany alone have nearly $1 trillion in exposure to the staggering economies of southern Europe, according to a report issued Monday by banking watchdogs. The Bank of International Settlements report says German banks have 12% of their capital in government bonds issued by the three hard-hit southern European countries. But France isn't far behind, with 8% of capital exposed to the public sectors of the three stressed nations.
But Europe's banks have bigger troubles, the BIS report shows. Together they have $727 billion of exposures to Spain, $402 billion to Ireland, $244 billion to Portugal, and on and on...
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Arianna Huffington Comes Out in Favor of Flat Tax -- for Greece
Subject: txt libs tax intl fnn - msm -
Sometimes even the seemingly most unreasonable characters as far public policy goes can be reasoned with if the circumstances are right. Just sometimes it takes someone like Steve Forbes to pull it off. On the June 14 broadcast of MSNBC's "Morning Joe," Forbes explained that a flat tax might be the medicine that Greece, a country on the fiscal brink needs...
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Obama seeks new spending
Subject: txt econ mny tax - intl sclm -
Obama this weekend asked Congress to pass legislation that amounts to much the same thing: extending some of the first stimulus bill's programs and adding some of the White House's new priorities such as a tax on big banks. Five months from congressional elections and with the job picture still gloomy, Mr. Obama said the country is "at a critical juncture" economically.
He asked lawmakers to pass a bill that would fund state and local governments...
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Obama's 'Jobs'
Subject: txt sclm bbro econ -
The Obama White House, stung by criticism of the recent May employment report, which showed virtually no job growth beyond the 411,000 temporary census workers, is attempting to find ways to put as many of the 411,000 in permanent government jobs....
[I.e., make their drain on the free market economy permanent...]
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Teachers Blackmail for $23b Bailout
Subject: txt crpt edu -
Education Secretary Arne Duncan is asking lawmakers to put aside “politics and ideology” as they consider a request for $23 billion in “emergency” funding for public schools – a measure Republicans reject as a massive federal bailout for the teachers’ unions.
In a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), Duncan warned that if the bill is not enacted, “millions” of school children will be adversely affected..."
[The blackmail continues.]
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ObamaCare: Unions Get Better Exemptions
Subject: txt crpt hcare -
ObamaCare appears to have one grandfathered standard for labor unions and another standard for everyone else. Unions that had a health plan under a collective bargaining agreement by March 23, 2010, can switch insurers as long as the collective bargaining deal is in effect and not forfeit the grandfathered exemptions from many ObamaCare provisions.
But anyone else — large business, small business, individual — who switches carriers loses their grandfathered status...
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Carbon capture plans failing - IEA
Subject: txt grn -
The world is failing to meet goals to develop carbon capture technology, the energy watchdog to industrialised economies said on Monday as it reported back to G8 countries on their past promises.
At a summit in Japan two years ago, eight of the world's leading economies backed an International Energy Agency goal to launch 20 large-scale projects to demonstrate carbon capture and storage technology by 2010.
The IEA argues that CCS is a vital technology to fight climate change because it could allow developing countries to continue to burn supplies of cheap coal...
[?!? - Will we never learn: none of these schemes have anything to do with 'climate', they're transfer of wealth programs in the socialists tradition...]
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The Twinkle Takeover: Gay(and Gay-Seeming) Boys on the TV and at the Mall
Is it finally okay to be a 13-year-old sissy? From the feather-cuffed, drama-filled Olympic figure-skating competitions to the unashamedly oddball high-school TV show Glee, being young and gay suddenly has a place in pop culture that isn’t cruel or tragic. Of course, there has never been a lack of gay subtext on TV (Dukes of Hazzard, Pee-wee Herman, Jonny Quest, SpongeBob). But it seems that, in our world of niche-entertainment marketing, gay boys are becoming a viable demographic, up there with tween girls and security moms...
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Poll: Americans Overwhelmingly Reject Government's Plan to 'Save Journalism'
An overwhelming majority of Americans prefer freedom of the press to outdated models of journalism, according to a new Rasmussen poll. The survey comes in the midst of discussions in the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission to intervene on behalf of Old Media.
Eighty-five percent of respondents in the Rasmussen poll said they believe maintaining press freedom is more important than financially supporting the newspaper industry. Only six percent said the latter is more important. Just 14 percent said they would favor a bailout of the newspaper industry.
Respondents worried that government involvement in the industry would compromise press neutrality. Indeed, this sentiment reflects the findings of a number of studies over the past few years. As with any bailout, a bailout of a newspaper would inevitably mean at least some say in that newspaper's content.
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NYT's Cooper: Obama Becomes Jimmy Carter If He Doesn't Get Control Of Oil Spill
Barack Obama's presidency goes the way of Jimmy Carter's if he doesn't get control of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
So said New York Times White House correspondent Helene Cooper on the most recent installment of "The Chris Matthews Show."
As the opening segment's discussion concerning the spill moved to a close, the host surprisingly asked his panel if Obama can continue to "blame the previous administration, the oil patch guys, Bush and Cheney" for the disaster.
Readers will likely find the answers quite surprising (video follows with transcript and commentary):
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[Becomes?]
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