Obama to Let States Restrict Emissions Standards

Washington - President Obama on Monday will direct federal regulators to move swiftly to grant California and 13 other states the right to set strict automobile emissions and fuel efficiency standards, two administration officials said Sunday evening.

The directive makes good on an Obama campaign pledge and marks a sharp reversal from Bush administration policy. Granting California and the other states the right to regulate tailpipe emissions [and thereby segment the market into unmanageable pieces to further accelerate an industry's demise we're already spending billions to rescue. Brilliant.]

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image toon grn Polar bears thermometer frozen

WaPo Touts Waxman, Pelosi, and Boxer as Pragmatists Who'll Reawaken 'Sleeping Beauty' of Regulation

California
Monday’s Washington Post touted on page A3 how "Californians Shape Up as Force on Environmental Policy," over three large pictures of liberals Henry Waxman, Nancy Pelosi, and Barbara Boxer. Something amazing followed: the word "liberal" is never used in the piece to describe them. (Pelosi merely is pressed to "find common ground between conservative and liberal Democrats.") Reporter Lyndsey Layton’s feat began in paragraph one:

California Democrats will assume pivotal roles in the new Congress and White House, giving the state an outsize influence over federal policy and increasing the likelihood that its culture of activist regulation will be imported to Washington.

Layton also found a liberal political scientist to suggest moderation will follow:

Barbara Sinclair, a political scientist at the University of California at Los Angeles, said the Californians are pragmatic and mindful of overreaching. "All these folks really want to make policy change," she said. "On the other hand, they very, very much want to stay in power."

To complete this act of journalistic servility to the California liberals, Layton quoted from a telephone interview with Senator Boxer, but the sophisticated reader would wonder why the Post would need a phone interview to solicit the press-release quotes that were offered:

"Californians coming, they don't have to rewrite the laws. They just have to enforce them. It's like the EPA has been asleep for eight years. The Californians are coming to wake the sleeping beauty."

Only liberals would see an entrenched regulatory agency as a "sleeping beauty."

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waxman image toon engry mny

SUNDOWN FOR CALIFORNIA

Since 2000, California's job growth rate has lagged behind the national average by almost 20 percent. Rapid population growth, once synonymous with the state, has slowed dramatically. Most troubling of all, domestic out-migration, about even in 2001, swelled to over 260,000 in 2007 and now surpasses international immigration, says Joel Kotkin, presidential fellow at Chapman University.

All of this suggests a historical slide of California's role as a bastion of upward mobility:

• In 1946, Californians enjoyed the nation's highest living standards and the third highest per-capita income, and as recently as the 1980s, Californians generally got richer faster than other Americans did.
• However, in 2008, median household income growth trailed the national average while the already large divide between the social classes grew faster than in the rest of the country.
• Today, California has the 15th highest poverty rate in the nation; only New York and the District of Columbia fare worse if the cost of living is factored in.

Is there hope for the Golden State? Perhaps, although California likely will never regain its past preeminence, says Kotkin.

[policies matter - we're being mismanaged, yet we keep sending the same folks back]

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"I Hope Obama Fails"

[for clarity]
Rush Limbaugh, The Rush Limbaugh Show, January 16

I got a request here from a major American print publication. "Dear Rush: For the Obama [Immaculate] Inauguration we are asking a handful of very prominent politicians, statesmen, scholars, businessmen, commentators, and economists to write 400 words on their hope for the Obama presidency. We would love to include you. If you could send us 400 words on your hope for the Obama presidency, we need it by Monday night, that would be ideal." Now, we're caught in this trap again. The premise is, what is your "hope." My hope, and please understand me when I say this. I disagree fervently with the people on our side of the aisle who have caved and who say, "Well, I hope he succeeds. We've got to give him a chance." Why?... I've been listening to Barack Obama for a year and a half. I know what his politics are. I know what his plans are, as he has stated them. I don't want them to succeed.

If I wanted Obama to succeed, I'd be happy the Republicans have laid down. And I would be encouraging Republicans to lay down and support him. Look, what he's talking about is the absorption of as much of the private sector by the US government as possible, from the banking business, to the mortgage industry, the automobile business, to health care. I do not want the government in charge of all of these things. I don't want this to work. So I'm thinking of replying to the guy, "Okay, I'll send you a response, but I don't need 400 words, I need four: I hope he fails."… Why not? Why is it any different, what's new, what is unfair about my saying I hope liberalism fails? Liberalism is our problem. Liberalism is what's gotten us dangerously close to the precipice here. Why do I want more of it?

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A Comedy of Tax Errors

Make no mistake about it: Tim Geithner made mistakes. (Snip) Grassley asked what software he used to prepare his taxes. "These are my responsibility, not the tax software's responsibility," Geithner replied, "but I used TurboTax." A future Treasury secretary using TurboTax? The mistakes were multiplying.
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[not funny: how do we tell our children what's right and wrong when this guy is likely to be confirmed as head tax guy - despite intentionally cheating on his taxes. Character is critical - when did we forget that?

There's still time {they vote Monday}, tell 'em:

"Character is critical - Do Not Confirm Geithner"


Whitehouse: mailto:president@whitehouse.gov
Senate-Reid: http://reid.senate.gov/contact/index.cfm
YOUR Senator: http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

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

and as always, pass it on...

Face of Defense: Mother, Daughter Enlist in Army Reserve

Altoon, like many parents, was concerned about the possibility of Megan deploying to a combat zone.

After learning about the Army Reserve, Altoon, a postal carrier in Fremont, decided that she, too, would become a soldier.

Mother and daughter enlisted in the same military occupational specialty -- computer information specialist -- and were assigned to the same unit, the 351st Civil Affairs Command in Mountain View, Calif.

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Iraqi Scouts Are Back

[HT:GP]
Originally formed in 1954 and silenced during the reign of former President Saddam Hussein, the voices of the Iraqi Boy Scouts are rising once again. The new Iraqi Scouts have been meeting for seven months now. Technology has allowed these young men to talk with their American counterparts back in Texas and Georgia through a video conference.

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Obama Outlaws Legal Interrogation Methods, With An Out

This particular Executive Order proclaims that the only interrogation methods to be used on detainees in the War on Terror are those found in the Army Field Manual . As media reports are already starting to show, that's a bit problematic:

The executive order says everyone in custody should be questioned under the Army Field Manual, which is intended for honorable combatants, meaning POWs in a military conflict. The rule would prevent trained interrogators at the CIA from using lawful interrogation techniques against terrorists who have been trained to withstand Army Field Manual techniques.

So by this order, Obama is not outlawing so-called torture of detainees, but preventing the use by our national security apparatus of certain legal interrogation techniques that have kept us safe for the past 7+ years...

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Islamic Terrorists Forming Cells In America

Hezbollah could be one of the first security challenges faced by the new Obama administration. An official government report concludes the Iranian-backed Islamic terror group has been forming sleeper cells throughout the United States that could become operational. The report estimates Hezbollah could become a much more potent national security threat by 2014.

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U.S. Intercepts Iranian Arms-Smuggling Ship

U.S. defense officials say a Navy vessel that is part of the new piracy task force intercepted and searched an Iranian-owned ship that officials feared was carrying arms to Hamas.

Two defense officials say the Cypriot-flagged commercial vessel was tracked by a U.S. Navy ship in the Red Sea over the weekend. One official says it was boarded with the consent of the vessel's crew on Monday and Tuesday.

The search turned up ammunition that included artillery shells. But one official said that since Hamas is not known to use artillery, officials are now uncertain who the intended recipient was. They're asking Egypt to do another search when the ship arrives in port.

Israeli officials said they believe the ship was headed for Hezbollah, not Hamas.

[oh well, false alarm then]

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The dangerous illusion of independent terrorists

Since the 9/11 attacks in New York, the world has completely misconceived the age of terror.

The radical increase in the lethality, range, political consequence and strategic influence of terrorists comes not from their being non-state actors at all. Instead it comes from their being sponsored by states.

Sometimes they are the instruments of states and at other times they make strategic alliances with states.

A terrorist group operating without any state sponsorship is an infinitely less dangerous outfit than a terrorist group operating with the co-operation of even the most ramshackle state.

However, states not only co-operate with terrorists, in many cases they direct and even found the terrorists...

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No room for Jews in the West Bank

There will be no room for Jews or settlements in the West Bank because their presence there will always be an obstacle to peace with Israel, Ahmed Qurei, head of the Palestinian Authority 'negotiating' team, said at the weekend...

[the West Bank; you know, part of the 1/3 of land ceded to Jews by the UN (2/3 to Arabs) which Jordan 'annexed', and the world did nothing]

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Likely National Security Advisor Suggested NATO Forces For West Bank

Jerusalem - The man widely reported to be the leading candidate to become President-elect Obama’s national security advisor has reportedly proposed putting NATO forces in the West Bank in place of Israeli security forces – an idea that makes some Israelis uncomfortable. (Snip) Israel argues that it must maintain security control over the West Bank because its major population centers are vulnerable to rocket attacks...

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'Companies could be sued over climate change'

The scare

In early December 2008, The Guardian, a newspaper of the British Left and an unquestioning true-believer in the catastrophist version of climate alarm, quoted Professor Myles Allen, a physicist at Oxford University, as saying computer models such as one that he has developed can now ascribe individual extreme-weather events to anthropogenic "global warming", allowing environmental pressure groups to sue the corporations they believe are to blame for the catastrophic heating of the planet. Professor Allen joked, "We are starting to get to the point that when an adverse weather event occurs we can quantify how much more likely it was made by human activity."

The truth

Even the UN's climate panel, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, admits in its 2001 report that the climate is a "complex, non-linear, chaotic object" whose long-run evolution cannot be predicted by any method. In this the panel echoes the celebrated paper Deterministic Non-Periodic Flow, with which the mathematician Edward Lorenz founded the new mathematical discipline of chaos theory in 1963. Precisely because the climate is, in mathematical terms, a chaotic object, it is altogether impossible to predict the likelihood, timing, magnitude, duration, or even the sign of any "phase transition" that disrupts the steady state of the object. For this reason, it is not possible to ascribe individual extreme-weather events to "global warming", as the IPCC makes explicitly clear in both its 2001 and 2007 reports.

In practice, the international, alarmist Left has taken very great care not to get into court battles over the science behind "global warming", because the courts, unlike the majority of the news media, are obliged to give a full and fair hearing to both sides of the story. Therefore, all of the "global warming" court cases instigated by the alarmist faction have been sweetheart cases, where both sides secretly want the same outcome. The recent case by lavishly-funded environmental groups against the US Secretary of the Interior to order him to make a decision on listing polar bears as an "endangered species" was a prime example: Mr. Kempthorne was as much a true-believer as those who were apparently suing him, and the court was in effect used as a mere rubber-stamp, in which no real argument was heard.

The alarmist faction knows that, if it were to bring a case against a corporation whose executives were not minded merely to believe in the extremist presentation of "global warming" just because it is temporarily in fashion, they would lose. The case of Dimmock v. Secretaries of State for Education and for the Environment in the UK in 2007 was a very clear warning. The UK Government threw all of the resources of the taxpayer and of the Meteorological Office at the case, attempting to defend Al Gore's sci-fi comedy horror movie against the plaintiff's allegation that it was serially and seriously inaccurate. The judge, having heard both sides, said bluntly of Al Gore that "the Armageddon scenario that he depicts is not based on any scientific view". A few more judgments like that and the "global warming" fantasy would rapidly collapse. End of scare.

Slowly but surely, the number of news media willing to give credence to fantasies such as those which Professor Allen puts forward is declining as the truth dawns: carbon dioxide's impact on "global warming" is small, harmless, and largely beneficial.

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Loblaws bags a nickel starting tomorrow

It's like there's a scarlet letter burned across Jennifer Sutcliffe's forehead as she hastily piles eight bags of groceries into the cart – ''P.'' For plastic. For polluter.

''I have cats. I use them for the litter,''

she clarifies apologetically. Not good enough. Gazing down the line of nine open cashiers, Sutcliffe is the only one who didn't BYOB. The 40-year-old retreats from the Loblaws store, which as of tomorrow will begin a plastic fee of 5 cents per bag...

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NYT: Make The Mormons Walk To Wal-Mart

In the social circles of the New York Times editorialists, it's OK to have one kid. Two is pushing the envelope. Three or more is déclassé, and a threat to the survival of the planet.

That being so, there's really no reason to let any car bigger than a Prius be built. Doing so just encourages the unenlightened to overbreed.

And so it is that in its editorial of today, the Grey-but-barren Lady suggests that as a condition of the Detroit bailout,

"Congress could consider demanding that Detroit simply phase out S.U.V.’s and vans by a certain date."

[and that's the defining aspect of the Green Religion; adherence is compulsory {come to think of it, I can think of a 2nd religion with the same mindset... maybe we should refer to this as the march to the Green Global Caliphate ]

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[meanwhile, in reality]