The First Step is Admitting You Have a Problem (Rep. Nita Lowey)

[Meanwhile, from our congressional 'leaders'...]

In the past month, the House Minority Leader called the idea that carbon dioxide - a greenhouse gas and known carcinogen - is dangerous “almost comical,” and members of his party suggested that the planet is actually cooling and “carbon-starved” and invited a global warming denier as a public witness to a Congressional hearing on the topic.

As anyone with experience with recovery knows, the first step in addressing a crisis is to admit that you have a problem. Unfortunately, these displays and others make it increasingly clear that, despite conclusive scientific evidence on the existence of global warming and the human role, some elected officials refuse to take Step 1.

Today - Earth Day - I introduced a resolution that says three very simple things critical to a constructive dialogue on global warming:

• The Earth is warming;
• Human activity plays large role in that warming;
• Congress can mitigate the risks through legislation...

[Right: a 'constructive dialogue' can only begin after one sides' opinions are established as fact. How very convenient. And some say it's not a religion... if not, why is the first rule 'thou shalt not question'?]

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image toon bdd grn engry - Live before 2008 vs cave afte

Thought Police Muscle Up in Britain

Britain appears to be evolving into the first modern soft totalitarian state. As a sometime teacher of political science and international law, I do not use the term totalitarian loosely.

The Government is pushing ahead with legislation that will criminalize politically incorrect jokes, with a maximum punishment of up to seven years' prison. The House of Lords tried to insert a free-speech amendment, but Justice Secretary Jack Straw knocked it out.

Countryside Restoration Trust chairman and columnist Robin Page said at a rally against the Government's anti-hunting laws in Gloucestershire in 2002: "If you are a black vegetarian Muslim asylum-seeking one-legged lesbian lorry driver, I want the same rights as you."

Page was arrested, and after four months he received a letter saying no charges would be pressed, but that: "If further evidence comes to our attention whereby your involvement is implicated, we will seek to initiate proceedings." It took him five years to clear his name.

Page was at least an adult. In September 2006, a 14-year-old schoolgirl, Codie Stott, asked a teacher if she could sit with another group to do a science project as all the girls with her spoke only Urdu. The teacher's first response was to scream at her: "It's racist, you're going to get done by the police!"

Upset and terrified, the schoolgirl went outside to calm down. The teacher called the police and a few days later, presumably after officialdom had thought the matter over, she was arrested and taken to a police station, where she was fingerprinted and photographed... [snip]

Muslim parents who objected to young children being given books advocating same-sex marriage and adoption at one school last year had their wishes respected and the offending material withdrawn. This year, Muslim and Christian parents at another school objecting to the same material have not only had their objections ignored but have been threatened with prosecution if they withdraw their children... [snip]

[And on and on...]

Any one of these incidents might be dismissed as an aberration, but taken together - and I have only mentioned a tiny sample; more are reported almost every day.

This campaign seems to come from unelected or quasi-governmental bodies controlling various institutions, which are more or less unanswerable to electors,* more than it does directly from the Government, although the Government helps drive it and condones it in a fudged and deniable manner.

[You know, like school systems. It's happening here as well, we're but a few years 'behind' them...]

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Is Your Minister a 'Hate Crime' Peddler?

The George Orwell congress resumed its session yesterday. Not content to attempt to end the secret ballot by the “Employee Free Choice Act,” the House Judiciary Committee is scheduled to mark up and pass the equally-Orwellian “Hate Crimes” bill, HR 1913.

The “Hate Crimes” bill wants to criminalize speech that insults politically-fashionable minorities... [snip]

Rather than offering protection to a class of Americans, the effect of enacting HR 1913 into law will be to create a new persecuted class in order to correct these imaginary crime waves against the richest and most politically active part of the Democratic Party’s and President Obama’s base.

HR 1913 targets mainstream religious people for prosecution because their sincerely-held religious beliefs and centuries of theology inform them that homosexuality is a disordered behavior and a sin. Just expressing that belief will amount to a crime under this bill and pastors across America will be risking their freedom to quote certain passages of the Bible from their pulpits...

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Then >


"OPPOSE HR 1913"


YOUR Congressman: https://forms.house.gov/wyr/welcome.shtml

or: Speed Message them with your personal distribution list...

and as always, pass it on...

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Miss California's Competitors From Gay Marriage States Say She Needed to Be PC

Meowww. The claws are coming out. The Miss USA contestants from the four states that allow same-sex marriage say Miss California should have been more politically correct* when she was asked for her thoughts on the issue during the nationally televised pageant...

[*Memo: "politically correct" is a derogatory phrase, not a literal political ideal.]

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It's Alternative Media That's Cooling Global Warming Hysteria

The latest Rasmussen poll reports that the lowest number of voters ever polled -- one-in-three -- believe that global warming is caused by human activity. That’s an astonishing figure, especially considering the all-out green propaganda assault the mainstream media (MSM) exposes the public to on a daily basis.

After all, it’s become nearly impossible to open a magazine, unfold a newspaper or turn on the television without being scolded about the selfishness of your energy consumption and the damage your unworthy existence does to the planet. And yet, Friday’s Rasmussen found that forty-eight percent of all likely voters attribute climate change to long-term planetary trends, not their so-called carbon-footprint. That’s up 4% in less than three months.

Aided by an all-too-eager MSM, policy makers speak of manmade climate change as “settled science” and perpetrate the lie that only a few “fringe” scientists question its tenets. Nevertheless, the latest Gallup Poll reports that 41% of Americans consider global warming to be an exaggeration. That’s up 11% in just 3 years.

So despite a MSM that spoon feeds its audience the latest alarmist crap about how manmade CO2 kills polar bears, threatens coastal cities and islands, incubates all manner of pestilence and so on and so on, the number of people actually buying into their still-unsubstantiated carbo-chondria continues to shrink... [snip]

“Every opinion poll--even those conducted by the bed-wetters themselves – shows that global public opinion is cooling as fast as the global climate. In one recent survey, ‘global warming’ came at the very bottom of a list of political and environmental concerns, immediately behind the need to clean up dog-poop on the streets. Why? Because dog-poop is a real environmental problem and ‘Global warming’ is not. The correct policy response to the non-problem of climate change is to have the courage to do nothing.”

Indeed, the latest Gallup poll concurs. Global warming ranked last in public concern among eight specific environmental issues. Dead last. And I doubt it would have fared any better had dog crap been a menu item. [snip]

But if you weren’t a consumer of the New Media (ezines, blogs, etc.), you wouldn’t know that, would you? You’d likely continue to believe the lame MSM warnings that we’re running out of time to save the planet. And given the acute rise in public skepticism that one monster of a winter energized, just imagine the panic the specter of decades of cooling stirs in those whose dreams of controlling our energy consumption – and thereby our lives -- depend entirely upon an alarmed populace.

You see, it’s actually climate alarmists that are running out of time -- and they know it.

Policy makers know very well that time grows short to implement their carbon control schemes. And the media face a similar problem. Sure, today NBC launches yet another of their excruciatingly silly “Green is Universal” weeks to celebrate this year’s Earth Day on Wednesday. And once again they’ll sully their often worthwhile conservation tips by spreading carbon phobia and climate alarmism throughout their broadcast and myriad cable networks.

But these recent public opinion shifts suggest that more and more people will be turned off by such counterfeit tactics, and will in turn turn off their TVs and head for the internet...

[One can hope. And BTW; got a friend who could use a 'subscription' {same low price} to NNB? Don't forget you can 'push' them - anonymously - to try it (left side bar).]

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PETA protesting chicken dance at NASCAR

PETA is pecking away at NASCAR fans doing the chicken dance. (snip)KFC was the sponsor of the record attempt and PETA charges the Colonel is cruel to chickens. A KFC spokesman denies the allegations.

[Exactly how many chickens were offended?
You can't make this stuff up.]

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image photo - fnn - Handicapped sign with Cancer-crab logo

image toon - 1st intl sclm reps = Oby's book for dummies = no harm done

Bailout fraud cases emerge

In the first major disclosure of corruption and fraud in the $750 billion federal bailout program, investigators said Monday that they have opened 20 criminal probes into possible securities fraud, tax law violations, insider trading and mortgage modification fraud.

Ultimately, fraud could run into the tens of billions of dollars. The risk of those kinds of criminal activities is growing as the bailout becomes bigger and more complicated...

[Seriously, who didn't see this coming?]

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CNN Touts Obama $100M Spending Cut, but Even White House Acknowledges Insignificance

It must be hard to keep a straight face when you report that the President of United States going to cut $100 million from a $3.5 trillion budget and then say he is serious about cutting government spending.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs couldn't pull it off. In the White House's April 20 press briefing, Gibbs was asked by Associated Press reporter Jennifer Loven why the $100-million target was so small and she even accused him of making a joke about it.

But somehow, CNN correspondent Elaine Quijano pulled it off. Originally on CNN's April 20 "American Morning," and again on CNN throughout April 20, Quijano reported the Obama administration was making an effort to cut spending.

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image toon - mny 1st = Oby slices of thin piece of budget to save

Cheney Calls for Release of Memos Showing Results of Interrogation Efforts

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"One of the things that I find a little bit disturbing about this recent disclosure is they put out the legal memos, the memos that the CIA got from the Office of Legal Counsel, but they didn't put out the memos that showed the success of the effort,"

Cheney said he's asked that the documents be declassified because he has remained silent on the confidential information, but he knows how successful the interrogation process was and wants the rest of the country to understand.

"I haven't talked about it, but I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw, that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country," Cheney said. "I've now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was." [snip]

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., has repeatedly criticized the use of certain techniques that have been described by critics as torture. But McCain said earlier in the day that the decision to release the Justice Department memos "helps no one."

"(The release) doesn't help America's image, does not help us address the issue and I think it was a serious mistake,"

[Q: What other nation publicizes its clandestine operations?]

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CIA Confirms: Waterboarding 9/11 Mastermind Led to Info that Aborted 9/11-Style Attack on Los Angeles

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CNSNews.com today that it stands by the assertion made in a May 30, 2005 Justice Department memo that the use of “enhanced techniques” of interrogation on al Qaeda leader Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM) -- including the use of waterboarding -- caused KSM to reveal information that allowed the U.S. government to thwart a planned attack on Los Angeles.

Before he was waterboarded, when KSM was asked about planned attacks on the United States, he ominously told his CIA interrogators, “Soon, you will know.”

According to the previously classified May 30, 2005 Justice Department memo that was released by President Barack Obama last week, the thwarted attack -- which KSM called the “Second Wave”-- planned “ ‘to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into’ a building in Los Angeles.” [snip]

A CIA spokesman confirmed to CNSNews.com today that the CIA stands by the factual assertions made here.

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image toon - nsec gwot = Oby decides not to prosecute CIA

HEROES

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Soldiers in Afghanistan Get Dirty to Stay Connected

Paratroopers at Forward Operating Base Salerno here are busy running fiber-optic lines to keep critical lines of communication open.

We provide all of the connectivity for the brigade throughout the Task Force Yukon area of operation,” Collins said, referring to a sector of eastern Afghanistan about the size of Maryland. “It is a huge tasking for the smallest company in the entire brigade.”

“We have soldiers that fly out to different forward operating bases on signal maintenance, we have the help desk located in the tactical operations center, network operations, and constant troubleshooting,” ... ”We do a lot in 24 hours.”

“We have to do our job very well, because if we don’t, then everyone else can’t do their jobs,” ... “Yeah, we may get a little wet and muddy, but the bottom line is that the job has to be done.”

[The next time my IS guy complains about his working conditions...]

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Soros worms his way into the Pentagon

Billionaire financier and convicted inside trader George Soros has never lacked for access to the highest levels of government. Now it appears he will have an ally strategically placed in the Pentagon where he might influence our defense policy Rowant Scarborough writes in Human Events.

Democratic Party financier George Soros, who puts much of the blame for Islamic terrorists on America and former president George W. Bush, can celebrate his first foothold inside the Pentagon.

It is in the person of Rosa Brooks, far-left former Los Angeles Times columnist. She was once counsel to billionaire Soros' Open Societies Institute, whose funding arm bankrolls a number of hard-left pressure groups, such as MoveOn.org. MoveOn.org, of course, is the Washington outfit that smeared Gen. David Petraeus as a betrayer of his country, and depicted Bush in a Web ad as Adolph Hitler.

Brooks, who has also likened Bush to Hitler and claims the former president is "psychotic" and "fanatical," will not be a minor player. The Pentagon's No. 3 official and top policymaker, Undersecretary of Defense Michele Flournoy, has selected Brooks as a "principal adviser."

The title means Brooks will have the constant ear of the Defense Department's policy chief as Flournoy weighs in on the budget, troop deployments, secret missions and weapons buying. In the Pentagon bureaucratic elevator, every major decision flows through Flournoy's shop on its way to the defense secretary.

According to the Pentagon, Brooks will be an advisor to Flournoy on how the military shapes its relations with other countries. But there is little doubt she will get her two cents in on other policy matters as well.

To have a radical, anti-military leftist in such a high position - not to mention her close connection to Soros - is almost incomprehensible.

Until you remember who is president and what party he represents.

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Twofer

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Obama envoy tells Israel U.S. wants Palestinian state

Jerusalem - U.S. President Barack Obama's Middle East envoy told Israel's ultranationalist foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, on Thursday that Washington wants to see the creation of a Palestinian state. I reiterated to the foreign minister that U.S. policy favours, with respect to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a two-state solution which will have a Palestinian state living in peace alongside the Jewish state of Israel envoy George Mitchell told reporters, with Lieberman at his side.

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Netanyahu demands Palestinians recognize 'Jewish state'

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told visiting U.S. envoy George Mitchell on Thursday that his government would condition talks over Palestinian statehood on the Palestinians first recognizing Israel as a Jewish state. ''Israel expects the Palestinians to first recognize Israel as a Jewish state before talking about two states for two peoples,'' a senior official in Netanyahu's office quoted the new prime minister as telling Mitchell, U.S. President Barack Obama's special envoy to the Middle East.

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2nd Twofer

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Report: Hamas killed, maimed dozens of opponents

Ramallah, West Bank - Hamas directed gunmen to eliminate political opponents and suspected collaborators under the cover of Israel's military offensive in Gaza, killing 32 people and wounding dozens in such attacks since December, an international human rights group said Monday.

Such practices are aimed, in part, at quashing dissent in Gaza and make a mockery of Hamas' claim it upholds the law, the group said.

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British lawmakers meet Hamas leader in Syria

A British parliamentary delegation on a visit to Syria has met Hamas political leader Khaled Meshal as part of European efforts to communicate with the Palestinian Islamist group, Hamas said on Wednesday.

The meeting with Meshal, who lives in Syria, took place in Damascus on Tuesday. The British Embassy confirmed the meeting but denied a Syrian media report that Ambassador Simon Collis attended.

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image toon bdd gwot islm israel - Hamas assaults Israel then yells brute

Trouble Brewing In Caucasus, But Media Silent

Here’s a quick informal poll: Who has heard news of Russia’s recent troop buildup in the South Ossetia region of Georgia?

Chances are, nobody has heard of it.

According to a Newsweek interview dated April 11, President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia claims:

A week ago Russian tanks arrived in South Ossetia. We have information that there are about 5,000 Russian troops in the territory of South Ossetia, and 5,000 troops in Abkhazia.

A week before April 11, Russian tanks were apparently rolling into South Ossetia. One might immediately think that there was something else occurring in the world about that time; and indeed there was. President Obama was in Strasbourg, France, at a NATO summit.

That’s right, Russia timed its troop buildup to coincide with the NATO summit.

So why is this slowly leaking through the cracks now? This morning, Jackson Diehl wrote an editorial in the Washington Post containing the following paragraph:

Those aren't the only signs that the new medicine isn't taking. Europeans commonly blamed Bush for Russia's aggressiveness -- they said he ignored Moscow's interests and pressed too hard for European missile defense and NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine. So Hillary Clinton made a show of pushing a "reset" button, and Obama offered the Kremlin a new arms control agreement while putting missile defense and NATO expansion on a back burner.

Yet in recent weeks Russia has deployed thousands of additional troops as well as tanks and warplanes to the two breakaway Georgian republics it has recognized, in blatant violation of the cease-fire agreement that ended last year's war. The threat of another Russian attack on Georgia seems to be going up rather than down.

This is the best coverage that NewsBusters could find of the recent Russian troop movements – and that’s no exaggeration.

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I still have US support, says Georgian leader

President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia has insisted that he still enjoys the backing of his Western allies, despite America's concerted drive to achieve reconciliation with Russia

Eight months after Russia invaded Georgia to support rebels in South Ossetia, Mr Saakashvili is facing mass protests urging him to resign. The West has snubbed Georgia's long-cherished hopes of joining Nato amid signs that European politicians - especially those dependent on Russian energy supplies - increasingly portray the president as an impetuous embarrassment. [snip]

President Barack Obama has already held cordial talks with Dmitry Medvedev, his Russian counterpart, and is planning to visit Moscow in July. But its contact with Georgia has been limited to one phone conversation between Mr Saakashvili's national security adviser and "a high-up US official".

"I still hope to meet Mr Obama," said Mr Saakashvili. "I'm confident this will happen this year."

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Russia may cancel military talks with NATO

Moscow - Russia threatened on Monday to call off a meeting of senior military commanders with NATO next month if the alliance went ahead with planned exercises in ex-Soviet Georgia, Interfax news agency reported.

''If we see no reaction (to Russia's protests about the exercises) ... the Russia-NATO meeting of the chiefs of staff planned for May 7 will not take place''

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Hugo Chavez Says Venezuelan Socialism Has Begun to Reach U.S. under Obama

Inspired by his meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama at the Americas Summit, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez declared on Sunday that Venezuelan socialism has begun to reach the United States under the Obama administration.

''It would seem that the changes that started in Venezuela in the last decade of the 20th century have begun to reach North America''

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America is heading down the road to socialism

The stimulus plan has something for every important Democratic special interest group - labor, the teachers unions, big-city bosses, environmentalists, Hispanics, and African-Americans. Key constituencies will benefit from school construction, infrastructure projects, public works, retooling federal buildings with green technologies, expanding Medicaid and unemployment insurance, and more money for strapped states and localities. The plan is primarily designed not to stimulate the economy, but the size and scope of government. More citizens will be dependent upon government largesse.

This empowers the Democratic Party and its liberal elite.

As National Review's Jonah Goldberg has rightly noted, modern American liberalism is a form of fascism - otherwise known as national socialism. Its goal is to establish a centralized corporatist state, in which a ruling class manages to transfer power from the private to the public sector.

Liberalism champions huge entitlements, expensive social programs and the regimentation of nearly every aspect of people's lives - from smoking bans and university admissions policies, to prayer in schools and how much right-wing talk-radio one can listen to. It seeks to dominate not only politics and the economy, but culture and the arts as well... [snip]

Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it...

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MSM's Tea Party Cognitive Dissonance

In all my years of watching news coverage in America, I don't believe I have ever witnessed more condescending, amateurish, purely politicized reporting than what just transpired among the liberal MSM covering America's Tax Day Tea Parties. The Tea Parties represented a very significant news event.

Whenever close to 300,000 middle-class Americans put their productive lives on hold on a midweek workday, make original signs with their own hands, and travel miles and miles to stand with other private citizens just to demonstrate their anger with government, in more than 300 cities from coast to coast and everywhere in between, that's NEWS.

Yet, many local newspapers - even the Boston Globe for crying out loud - pettily refused to even cover their local protests. When every news channel - except the only one thriving on the block, Fox - finally decided to cover the events, it was with derision, mockery and elitist condescension.

Note to MSM: This is why you're going broke

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image toon - CNN's Rosegen = 'down Bo' msm bias - tea -

Tea Parties about Far More than Taxes

Folks who believe that the American Revolution was over nothing but taxation -- a penny more for a cup of tea or sugar or any of the other fees and taxes that the British were constantly adding to colonists' backs -- are as dimwitted as was King George in his day. The tea tax may have been the single match that started the fire, but the British had been soaking their American colonies in tyrannical kerosene for a long, long time.

But the message in grassroots Tea Parties today is of exactly the same character as its historical inspiration.

The Tea Parties represent a growing anger against encroaching tyranny by a federal government that pays far more heed to billionaire financiers, union bosses, special interest lobbyists, and those on the bottom who pay no income taxes, than it does to all the folks in the middle, who work hard to pay their taxes and all their other bills.

The Tea Parties represent real citizens' anger over watching powerlessly for the past two months as a president, who ran as a moderate to get elected, has taken the fastest, boldest leap to the far left of any president to date. Not only has President Obama upped the ante on the failed policies of FDR and Lyndon Johnson, he has gone on an apology tour of Europe, bowed to a Saudi King, and promised billions more of our hard-earned money to global entities over which we have absolutely no control.

All the while we in the modern-day Tea Party movement are being billed by the leftist press as greedy, insane, rightwing zealots who not only hate the poor, the minorities, the women and all the little children, but are now seen as a terrorist threat to homeland security.

Tax Day Tea Parties may merely be the tip of a growing-by-the-day iceberg of anger experienced by millions and millions of Americans who see the overreach of a federal government drunk on its own power. The American people know tyranny when they see it and they see it all around them now, threatening to finally extinguish what little liberty we have remaining.

[More, Recommended > ]

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image toon - 1st reps mny crpt = Tea parties throw both parties overboard

The Planet Cools While Romm Burns

[hysterical/unsubstantiated alarmist claims, then >] ... But Romm's longtime nemesis Lord Monckton recently observed that the exponential forecasts of the UN simply don't match reality [PDF]:

"The IPCC's estimates of growth in atmospheric CO2 concentration are excessive. They assume CO2 concentration will rise exponentially from today's 385 parts per million to reach 730 to 1020 ppm, central estimate 836 ppm, by 2100. However, for seven years, CO2 concentration has been rising in a straight line towards just 575 ppmv by 2100. This alone halves the IPCC's temperature projections."

I must confess, I chose Spencer and Lindzen in part because many alarmists consider them among the "small number of credible skeptics out there," and thereby don't automatically dismiss them outright, as they so arrogantly do others. But keep in mind that although CO2 continues to climb, there's been no warming since 1998. Not only was this little anthropogenic global warming (AGW) glitch obviously not predicted by IPCC models, but it lends great credence to those scientists who believe Earth's greenhouse effect to be either non-existent or inconsequential.

No wonder alarmists continue to ignore that the historic correlation between CO2 levels and temperature trends observed in Greenland ice core samples depict CO2 lagging, not preceding temperature, by hundreds of years.

Its implications shatter the theory on which their entire duplicitous agenda is built. [snip]

... [Romm] also denies the existence of "negative" feedbacks which many scientists believe hold climate sensitivity in check, among them Dr. Roy Spencer. The former NASA senior scientist believes one example -- cloud cover -- which both Romm and the IPCC declare to be a positive feedback, may in fact be a negative feedback and that " the ‘balance of evidence' suggests [clouds] have been acting to reduce the small amount of warming being caused by more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere."

And MIT's Prof. Richard Lindzen recently reiterated his position that:

"The earth's climate (in contrast to the climate in current climate GCM[odels]s) is dominated by a strong net negative feedback. Climate sensitivity is on the order of 0.3°C, and such warming as may arise from increasing greenhouse gases will be indistinguishable from the fluctuations in climate that occur naturally from processes internal to the climate system itself."

Chart of Climate Researcher Alan Siddons and illustrates the difference when allowing for negative feedback is staggering. [I.e., bottom/0.3 line - snip]

Considering the want and suffering their progress-ravaging and unnecessary policies would inflict on people worldwide, particularly the poor and sickly in developing countries, it is they and he who threaten the health and well-being of "countless" billions among the earth's population.

And must be stopped.

[More, a little 'dry' as it's science, but Highly Recommended {it's your money and liberties on the line} > ]


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Report: Ethanol raises cost of nutrition programs

WASHINGTON –Food stamps and child nutrition programs are expected to cost up to $900 million more this year because of increased ethanol use.Higher use of the corn-based fuel additive accounted for about 10 percent to 15 percent of the rise in food prices between April 2007 and April 2008, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

[Rarely has an idea been shown to be so bad so quickly than that of burning a staple food crop. And congress' response?

Increase ethanol mandates this year.]

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FLASHBACK >

Corn Ethanol Will Not Cut Greenhouse Gas Emissions

California regulators, trying to assess the true environmental cost of corn ethanol, are poised to declare that the biofuel cannot help the state reduce global warming.

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On Immigration, Large Gap Remains Between Mainstream America and Political Class

Sixty-six percent (66%) of likely voters nationwide say it is Very Important for the government to improve its enforcement of the borders and reduce illegal immigration. However, the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that just 32% of America’s Political Class agrees.

An even more dramatic gap appears on the question of legalizing the status of those immigrants now in the country illegally. Voters nationwide are evenly divided on the question of whether it is even somewhat important: 48% say it’s important, and 45% say it’s not.

However, among the Political Class, 74% say legalizing the status of these residents is important, and only 17% disagree.

This finding confirms that little has changed since the 2006 debate when immigration reform legislation championed by President George W. Bush and senior senators of both parties was defeated. Although that legislation had tremendous support among the political elite, the Senate was eventually forced to surrender to public opinion.

[But we'll need do so again, as they will try again.]

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Counting On Illegal Aliens

Robert M. Groves, nominated to be the next director of the bureau, recommended that the 1990 census be statistically adjusted to correct an alleged undercount of minorities in urban areas — areas that tend to vote heavily Democratic. Commerce Secretary Robert Mosbacher overruled him, saying the use of "statistical sampling," as it's known, was a form of "political tampering."

Statistical sampling is a technique akin to polling. You select what you consider a representative sample and extrapolate your findings over the general population.

The problem is that Article 1, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution forbids it. It requires an "actual enumeration" of all Americans every 10 years, not a guess based on statistical sampling. That means counting real, live, breathing people.

The Founding Fathers weren't fools. Sampling techniques have changed, but human nature has not... [snip]

The next U.S. census chief also wants to count people who aren't there, or are here when they shouldn't be.

And Acorn will help do the counting...

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image toon - othr fnn - Dept of Commerce taken leave of Census

How to Buy A City Council

Eyebrows shot up last week when teachers-union operatives handed out pre-printed questions for City Council members to ask at a hearing. But the UFT was merely calling in an IOU.

As Chuck Bennett reported in yesterday's Post, the United Federation of Teachers paid good money for those council members. And the union expects value for its cash...

If you've any doubt as to who's interest teacher's unions serve...]

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Yes, California, There Is an Individual Right to Keep and Bear Arms

[WARNING: Those of you who have followed the antics of the 9th Circuit SIT DOWN before reading...]

YESTERDAY the Ninth Circuit (the federal appellate court covering most Western states) ruled that the Second Amendment restricts the power of state and local governments to interfere with individual right to have guns for personal use.

That is, the Fourteenth Amendment “incorporates” the Second Amendment against the states, as the Supreme Court has found it to do for most of the Bill of Rights. I rarely get a chance to say this, but the Ninth Circuit gets it exactly right.

Here’s the key part of Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain’s opinion:

We therefore conclude that the right to keep and bear arms is “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.” Colonial revolutionaries, the Founders, and a host of commentators and lawmakers living during the first one hundred years of the Republic all insisted on the fundamental nature of the right. It has long been regarded as the “true palladium of liberty.”

Colonists relied on it to assert and to win their independence, and the victorious Union sought to prevent a recalcitrant South from abridging it less than a century later. The crucial role this deeply rooted right has played in our birth and history compels us to recognize that it is indeed fundamental, that it is necessary to the Anglo-American conception of ordered liberty that we have inherited.

We are therefore persuaded that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment incorporates the Second Amendment and applies it against the states and local governments.

In short, residents of Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington now join D.C. residents in having their Second Amendment rights protected. And courts covering other parts of the country — most immediately the Seventh Circuit, based in Chicago — will have their chance to make the same interpretation in due course.

Just as interesting — and potentially equally [more] significant — is the footnote Judge O’Scannlain drops at the end of the above text in response to arguments that the right to keep and bear arms, regardless of its provenance as a fundamental natural right, is now controversial:

But we do not measure the protection the Constitution affords a right by the values of our own times. If contemporary desuetude sufficed to read rights out of the Constitution, then there would be little benefit to a written statement of them.

Some may disagree with the decision of the Founders to enshrine a given right in the Constitution. If so, then the people can amend the document. But such amendments are not for the courts to ordain.

Quite right.

[outstanding]

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image toon - intl owg 1st = Chavez clown takes Oby seriously

Americas Summit: Missed Opportunity

If President Barack Obama's goal at the fifth Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago this weekend was to be better liked by the region's dictators and left-wing populists than his predecessor George W. Bush, the White House can chalk up a win. If, on the other hand, the commander in chief sought to advance American ideals, things didn't go well.

Mr. Obama had to know that the meeting is used by the region's politicians to rally the base back home by showing that they can put Uncle Sam in his place. Realizing this, the American president might have arrived at the Port of Spain prepared to return their volley. They have, after all, tolerated and even encouraged for decades one of the most repressive regimes of the 20th century.

In recent years, that repression has spread from Cuba to Venezuela, and today millions of Latin Americans live under tyranny. As the leader of the free world, Mr. Obama had the duty to speak out for these voiceless souls.

In this he failed... [snip]

Another way Mr. Obama could have neutralized the left would have been to announce a White House push for ratification of the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement.

That didn't happen either. He only promised to talk some more, a strategy that will offend no one and accomplish nothing. It is a strategy that sums up, to date, Mr. Obama's foreign policy for the region.

[Recommended > ]

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Remembering Ortega’s Gulag

President Obama sat quietly, enduring a 50-minute rambling diatribe from socialist Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega at the Fifth Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago over the weekend.

Ortega denounced what he called a century of “terroristic U.S. aggression in Central America” and lashed out at the U.S. trade embargo against Castro’s Cuba. He also condemned what he termed the "illegal" war that was waged against the Sandinista regime, that he once led, by U.S.-backed Contra rebels in the 1980s.

But if Ortega is interested in history lessons, then it might be useful, on this occasion, to reflect on the Marxist tyranny he once headed -- and on its barbaric and vicious oppression of the Nicaraguan people. In so doing, it becomes transparently clear that the United States was not just justified, but also noble, in its backing of the Contra freedom fighters, whose sole purpose was to liberate Nicaraguans from Sandinista despotism.

If Ortega wants to engage in history lessons, then its high time for a history lesson that involves the whole story, not just rhetoric about American “imperialism.” It's time for an honest reconciliation with who the Sandinistas really were and the tragic dark chapter they introduced into Nicaragua's history...

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image toon - 1st intl - 3 Amigos = Oby Chavez Ortega down with USA

The Memos Prove We Didn't Torture

The four memos on CIA interrogation released by the White House last week reveal a cautious and conservative Justice Department advising a CIA that cared deeply about staying within the law.

Far from "green lighting" torture -- or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of detainees -- the memos detail the actual techniques used and the many measures taken to ensure that interrogations did not cause severe pain or degradation...

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What Releasing the CIA Memos is Really About

[HT:BM]
It's realistic, not cynical, to assume political entities generally act out of their own self-interests. And political self-interests are what the CIA memos are really about. The oldest declassified CIA memo is from 2002, the youngest from 2005. So one question is about timing. Why now?

Here's another option. It's about controlling the news cycle, putting opponents on the defensive, and diverting attention away from other, more-timely battles underway...

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Tone Deaf On Terror

If nothing else, President Obama's deci sion to overrule his own intelligence officials and release Bush-era legal memos justifying what The New York Times sanctimoniously described as the CIA's "brutal" interrogation techniques proves what a bunch of pushovers we Americans are.

We deprive captives of sleep, push them into walls and put harmless caterpillars that we say are poisonous in their cells.

Al Qaeda kidnaps Americans, tortures them, then decapitates them on TV.

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Descendents of Doolittle Raiders celebrate alongside the war heroes

For Todd Joyce of Louisville, Neb., the annual Doolittle Raiders reunion is more than just a gathering of old warriors. It’s a family reunion.

Joyce is the son of the late Raider Dick Joyce, pilot of Plane No. 10 and crew mate with the late Raider Horace “Sally” Crouch of Columbia.

He was one of about 40 Raider children and grandchildren who traveled to Columbia from across the nation for this week’s 67th anniversary reunion of his father’s famous Tokyo Raid.

“We would find it real hard to sit home on April 18,” Joyce said.

On that date in 1942, the 80 Raiders flew 16 Army bombers off a Navy carrier and bombed Japan just four months after Pearl Harbor. It is the most famous air raid in U.S. history...

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Father charged with hiring hit men to kill mini-skirt-wearing daughter

An Azeri immigrant in Russia's northern city of Saint Petersburg has been charged with hiring hit men to kill his 21-year-old daughter for wearing a mini-skirt, police say.

The man's arrest follows the detention last week of two other citizens of Azerbaijan, a majority Muslim state in the Caucasus, who confessed to murdering the girl, a university medical student.

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Free Speech vs. Islam in Europe

It is really great to be here in California. So a special thanks to the United States border police for letting me enter this country. It feels good to be allowed entering a country once in a while... [snip]

Ladies and gentlemen, free speech is no longer a given in Europe. What we once considered a natural element of our existence, our birth right, is now something we once again have to battle for. To exercise free speech has become a dangerous activity.

Let no one fool you about Islam being just a religion. In its essence Islam is a political ideology and a totalitarian ideology. Islam wants to dictate every aspect of life and society and prohibits individual, political and religious rights and freedoms. Islam is not compatible with our Western civilization or democracy, nor will it ever be, because Islam doesn’t want to coexist, it wants to submit and set the entire agenda. Islam’s end goal, for all time, is to dominate and establish a world ruled by Islam.

That, ladies and gentlemen, that is why Winston Churchill compared the Koran to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf as the famous Italian writer Orianna Fallaci did and why the brave Californian psychiatrist dr. Wafa Sultan rightfully said about the clash between the West and Islam that it is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between rationality and barbarity.

As you know, the current Islamization of Europe is not an invasion like those we have seen in the past. This time it is not a military invasion with swords, this time we have to deal with a stealth invasion. Nowadays, the armies are replaced by cultural relativism and mass-immigration. It is this dangerous cocktail that is the main cause of the Islamization and is responsible for the introduction of Sharia law in Europe...

[Highly Recommended > ]

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Cuba's Bailout

Here's a few things you're not hearing from the MSM regarding travel and remittances to Cuba. Until fairly recently, the Castro regime (classified by the U.S. State Department as a state-sponsor-of terrorism, and classified by the liberal media as a victim of a "cruel U.S. embargo") was in fact enjoying a (conservatively estimated) $1 billion a year lifeline straight from the U.S., which also serves as Cuba's biggest food-supplier and 5th biggest commercial partner. The $1 billion plus bundle came in the form of cash remittances to Cuba from some of Castro's former subjects and from the spending by these former subjects upon their frequent visits to their homeland. This $1 billion in remittances approaches China's monetary infusion into Cuba...

[What's China doing pouring >1Billion $ into Cuba? A: Oil. They're using the slant-drilling technology we could be using to drill from the shore (no evil oil rigs or truely risky tanker ships) to mine oil fields in US teritorial waters. {And no doubt taking all the evironmental safety measures we would were we to do it. Right}

Our Just-Say-No Energy policy is insane and will cost us dearly.]

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image toon - intl reps = Oby opens money gates to cuba

Putin’s Tariffs Stall Russian Growth for Caterpillar

April 20 (Bloomberg) -- Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s trade measures are starting to keep Deere & Co. combines and Caterpillar Inc. trucks out of Russian wheat fields and coal mines, dimming the companies’ prospects for expansion abroad.

Deere and Caterpillar, reeling from the longest U.S. recession in a quarter century, were the companies most affected by loan restrictions and tariffs of as much as 25 percent that Putin imposed this year, according to a U.S. Chamber of Commerce survey of the top 50 American businesses operating in Russia.

Putin’s efforts may hurt U.S. companies’ operations in the rest of the world, said De Maria, of Sterne Agee.

“There is a worry that these measures could spread to China and other emerging-market countries,” De Maria said. That “would be a blow to the Deere brand and others, stifling their growth strategy as local companies build share.”

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US court allows apartheid cases

A US court has ruled that victims of South Africa's apartheid-era government can sue General Motors, IBM and other corporations accused of complicity in human rights abuses.

The lawsuits argue that the car-makers knew their vehicles were being used by South African forces to violently suppress protests.They also claim that IBM and Fujitsu knew their computers were being used by South Africa's white minority government to help strip black citizens of their rights...

[So manufacturers of anything are now to be responsible for how anyone uses them? We need overhaul our broken judicial system.]

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Miami judge rules against Florida gay adoption ban

MIAMI – A judge on Tuesday ruled that a strict Florida law that blocks gay people from adopting children is unconstitutional, declaring there was no legal or scientific reason for sexual orientation alone to prohibit anyone from adopting.

[ah, excuse me: but if they passed a law saying it it illegal, does that not count as a 'legal reason'?]

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image toon - vals bbro legal - Courts = men in dresses passing Iowa gay marriage

States Can't Afford to Track Stimulus Spending - AP Forgets to Ask Why

Apparently, one-tenth of one percent is too much money spend tracking, ah, your money. The states are now starting to complain that they don't have enough money to track and publicize all the spending they're doing: [snip]

Among the questions the Post and the AP decided not ask were:

• Why not take the money out of the state programs being supplemented? Don't these states already have offices devoted to tracking spending?
• Why didn't our representatives think of this before voting for this bill? Aside from, you know, the fact that they apparently didn't read the bill.
• If transparency is important for stimulus spending, why are the state Democrats blocking actual transparency in both school and the general budget review?

You can see why having newspapers around is so critical to a functioning democracy.


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The President's Mirage

Does Obama's recovery plan ignore economic logic?

President Obama has made no secret of his vision for America's 21st-century economy. We will lead the world in "green" technologies to stop global warming. Advancing medical breakthroughs will improve our well-being, control health spending and enable us to expand insurance coverage. These investments in energy and health care, as well as education, will revive the economy and create millions of well-paying new jobs for middle-class Americans.

What Obama proposes is a "post-material economy." He would de-emphasize the production of ever-more private goods and services, harnessing the economy to achieve broad social goals. In the process, he sets aside the standard logic of economic progress.

Since the dawn of the Industrial Age, this has been simple: produce more with less. ("Productivity," in economic jargon.) Mass markets developed for clothes, cars, computers and much more because declining costs expanded production. Living standards rose.

By contrast, the logic of the "post-material economy" is just the opposite: Spend more and get less...

[Highly Recommended > ]

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A worthy plan

When President Obama delivered his record-breaking $3.6 trillion budget to Congress, it was Page One news and led all the TV broadcasts - with little or no critical analysis.

But when the Republicans brought forth their alternative budget, it was relegated to the back pages and received only a cursory mention on the nightly news shows, usually accompanied by a Democratic talking head who dismissed the GOP plan as coldhearted and a penny-pinching approach that turned its back on people in need during these hard economic times.

Actually, the House Republican plan does a number of things to grow the economy that the Democrats do not, like provide tax incentives for business investment, economic growth and job creation; borrow a lot less than the Democrats would and create less debt; and not raise taxes, when to do so would be job-killer in a recession.

In short, House Republicans took up Mr. Obama's challenge to offer their own budget, and it turns out to be pretty good. It deserves a lot more attention than it got from the news media...

[Recommended > ]

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Reagan's Legacy: Our 25-Year Boom

[HT:JH]
Golden Age: After 25 years of record-setting economic performance around the world, set off by President Reagan's free-market policies, the world has fallen into a recession. Is this the inevitable end of an era?

Let's go back to 1982, in many ways the bleakest year since the Depression. The economy had emerged severely damaged by the stagflation of the 1970s. Americans' confidence, both in government and in the economy, had reached a low ebb in 1980. Many felt our best years lay behind us.

On the nations' campuses and even in some of its boardrooms, people were talking about capitalism as a failed system.

Some advocated a "third way" between socialism and capitalism, as in Europe, which would include heavy doses of government intervention in markets to bring them back to life. Still others took up the call in E.F. Schumacher's best-seller, "Small Is Beautiful," to downsize expectations. Live frugally, they said. Inhabit small houses. Drive small cars. Don't use oil. Rein in your ambitions.

One man didn't agree with this: President Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980 amid a wave of voter disgust at his predecessor's failures.

It was Reagan who brought America's capitalist economy roaring back to life, ending energy price controls, slashing income tax rates by 25% and dramatically reducing tax rates on capital gains.

Americans had been told for years — as they're now being told again — to expect diminished standards of living. Then they watched as the Reagan years set in place one of the most durable and remarkable booms in incomes and wealth in history.

Yet the media and academia rarely credited Reagan for his accomplishments — especially on the economy, where "Reaganomics" became a term of opprobrium among the intelligentsia.

But it's a fact.

As the nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research once declared, we lived in the "longest sustained period of prosperity in the 20th century" from 1982 to 1999 — one big boom, the NBER said, set off by Reagan. [snip]

A shocking new Rasmussen Poll shows that just 53% think capitalism is superior to socialism — despite the fact that socialism, wherever it's been tried, has brought misery and poverty.

So is Reagan's dream of free-market capitalism dead? Or is it just sleeping, as in the 1970s, waiting for a new champion to emerge?

[And do we passively wait for a 'leader' or demand a return to the principles that made this country great?]

[Not long, Recommended > ]

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image toon - 1st mny reps fnn - Oby re sand while in debt hourglass

Corn Ethanol Will Not Cut Greenhouse Gas Emissions

CALIFORNIA

California regulators, trying to assess the true environmental cost of corn ethanol, are poised to declare that the biofuel cannot help the state reduce global warming.

As they see it, corn is no better – and might be worse – than petroleum when total greenhouse gas emissions are considered.

Such a declaration, to be considered later this week by the California Air Resources Board, would be a considerable blow to the corn-ethanol industry in the United States.

If passed, the measure could serve as a model as other states and the federal government tackle carbon emissions. But California's regulators say they have no choice...

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Oil chief warns US green policy will kill economy

Washington's energy and environment policy risks plunging the US into an economic tailspin that could turn it into "the world's cleanest third world country", one of the US oil industry's most successful chief executives has warned.

James Hackett, chairman and chief executive of Anadarko, one of the US's largest independent oil and gas companies, said in an interview:

"The histrionic and maniacal focus on carbon dioxide is intellectually repugnant to me."

[Of course we need hear of this from a UK paper...]

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Socialized Medicine on Display

Latest news in the exciting saga of Britain's socialized medicine is that a nurse, Margaret Haywood, aged 58, has been struck off for the crime of exposing neglect and mistreatment of elderly patients at the Royal Sussex Hospital on a television program. It was found that because of this: "It would not be in the public interest for her to be able to practise as a nurse." [snip]

After a decade of New Labour, much of Britain's hospital system is coming to defy description. Not even Cancer Ward, Solzhenitsyn's harrowing description of hospital treatment in Stalinist Russia, had quite such refinements of socialized medicine. And woe betide would-be whistle-blowers...

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Palin 'Media Malpractice' Documentarian Thrown Off USC Campus

"Media Malpractice" documentarian John Ziegler was thrown off the USC campus in southern California Wednesday by security guards.

Ziegler was attempting to interview people attending The Annenberg Norman Lear Center's excellence in journalism awards ceremony at which CBS's Katie Couric was to be honored for her "Evening News" segments with Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

Unfortunately, the good folks at USC didn't want Ziegler to speak with anyone, and physically escorted him off campus -- in handcuffs.

[I saw this on TV and it was disturbing in that the fellow never attempted to enter/'crash' the (invitation only) event, but rather stand passively on a side walk and try to give away DVDs of his chronicle re: the smear campaign he believes Palin to have been subjected to.

Nonetheless the campus police saw fit to handcuff him and remove him, his only 'offense' being that of having an opinion, respectfully/harmlessly conveyed.

Evidently too much for the current definition of 'diversity of thought' at our colleges.]

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Steyn on Obama 'distractions'

The Great One nails it again, taking on both the media and the Obama administration for defining foreign policy challenges as nothing more than "distractions:"

.. Tom Blumer of Newsbusters notes that in the last 30 days there have been some 2,500 stories featuring Obama and "distractions," as opposed to about 800 "distractions" for Bush in his entire second term. The sub-headline of the Reuters story suggests the unprecedented pace at which the mountain of distractions is piling up: "First North Korea, Iran - now Somali pirates."...

When all the world’s a “distraction,” maybe you’re not the main event after all...

Typical Steyn. Making you laugh out loud while making you think. Damned effective combination.

Read the whole thing.

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51% View Tea Parties Favorably, Political Class Strongly Disagrees

Fifty-one percent (51%) of Americans have a favorable view of the “tea parties” held nationwide last week, including 32% who say their view of the events is Very favorable.

Thirty-three percent (33%) hold an unfavorable opinion of the tea parties according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Fifteen percent (15%) are not sure.

While half the nation has a favorable opinion of last Wednesday’s events, the nation’s Political Class has a much dimmer view—just 13% of the political elite offered even a somewhat favorable assessment while 81% said the opposite. Among the Political Class, not a single survey respondent said they had a Very Favorable opinion of the events while 60% shared a Very Unfavorable assessment.

['Representitive' governmnet.]

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image toon = 1st mny reps crpt - Congress dumps revolutionaries and raises tea tax

Why Doesn't Communism Have as Bad a Name as Nazism?

Both Nazism and the Communism brought great human suffering to the world, killing and imprisoning untold millions of individuals while destroying many societies and cultures, before they were finally defeated. And yet, as Dennis Prager asks,

Why is it that when people want to describe particularly evil individuals or regimes, they use the terms "Nazi" or "Fascist" but almost never "Communist?"

After all, he notes,

There are Mao Restaurants in major cities in the Western world. Can one imagine Hitler Restaurants? Che Guevara T-shirts are ubiquitous, yet there are no Heinrich Himmler T-shirts.

Good question and observation, Mr. Prager; this is something I've asked myself many times because, as you note

This question is of vital significance. First, without moral clarity, humanity has little chance of avoiding a dark future. Second, the reasons for this moral imbalance tell us a great deal about ourselves today.

While he thinks both are evil to the core he offers what he thinks are significant differences affecting the perception of both.

Basically, he believes, while most have acknowledged the evils of the Nazi philosophy the left still hasn't come to terms with the evil that is was--and still is--Communism...

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Student Strip Search Heads To High Court

The U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear the case of a young Arizona honor student who was strip-searched in the eighth grade by school officials looking for ibuprofen pills.

Savana Redding and her mother have been fighting the Safford Unified School District in Safford, Ariz., since 2003...

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Woman sees her house being robbed on webcam

US authorities say a woman checking her video surveillance system from the internet while she was at work caught four people robbing her house.

Police say Jeanne Thomas logged on to the $US250 Wilife system and saw a person standing in her house. She quickly called 911. While talking to the operator, she saw several other people.

She pleaded with the dispatcher to send police, and 18 officers arrived and surrounded the house several minutes later...

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DailyKos Kook Attacks Heroic Capt. Phillips

You have to wonder what is running through the minds of some of the kooks at the extreme-left DailyKos website. Amazingly, one America-hating Kossack who goes by the handle "---" actually denounced rescued Maersk Alabama Captain Richard Phillips for

"recklessly put[ting] himself, the crew, and the Navy Seals at unnecessary risk."

[You can't make this stuff up.]

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image toon = gwot owg othr fnn = pirate + 1 bullet = 1 less pirate

image photo - fnn mny - Cash Recycling System