Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Sotomayor Failed to Disclose to Senate Memo in Which She Argued Death Penalty Is 'Racist'
The Judicial Confirmation Network (JCN) says Judge Sonia Sotomayor failed to disclose to the Senate Judiciary Committee a controversial document arguing that the death penalty is “racist” and a violation of the present “humanist” thinking of society.
The 1981 memo, they say, should have been disclosed as required under Question 12 (b) of the questionnaire that the Supreme Court nominee turned in Thursday...
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Republicans grumble about Sonia Sotomayor's hearing rush
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy has forged ahead with a July 13 start date for confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, pushing past Republicans who want more time to review her judicial and personal history.
On Tuesday, Leahy indicated that he was tired of Republican questions on Sotomayor, (snip)Leahy told POLITICO he had a "long talk with the president" – who, Leahy said, is supportive of the hearing schedule...
[I.e., another rush job, in this case a lifetime appointment we must {evidently} make now-right-now. You'd think we'd learned from the stimulus fiasco.]
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Sotomayor Support Softens Over Past Week
While her confirmation by the Democratic-controlled Senate is expected, the number who support confirmation slipped a bit, according to the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Forty-one percent (41%) now favor confirmation of Sotomayor while 36% are opposed. A week ago, those figures were 45% and 29% respectively.
Unchanged from last week is the fact that most Democrats favor confirmation while most Republicans are opposed. Those not affiliated with either major party are now evenly divided.* Last week, unaffiliateds leaned modestly in favor of confirmation.
[*Hence their hurry to rush the confirmation process - they more we learn...]
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Reid Hasn't Read One of Sotomayor's Opinions, Media Mum
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) admitted Tuesday that he "[hasn't] read a single one" of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's opinions despite praising her as "the whole package."
Not surprisingly, the Obamedia gleefully reported the latter while almost completely ignoring the former...
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Iran stockpiles enough uranium to make nation's first nuclear bomb
Iran now has enough nuclear material to make its first atomic bomb, it was claimed last night. The Islamic republic, whose president has threatened to ''wipe Israel off the face of the Earth'', has nearly doubled stockpiles of enriched uranium in the last six months, the United Nations said yesterday.
Experts believe it would take no more than six months for Iran to turn its stocks into enough weapons-grade material for a bomb...
[And still the world does nothing - but insult Israel that a non-existent 'peace process' with 'Palestinians' (which? Hamas? Fatah?) is more important than is preventing Iran from getting nukes.]
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The Blind Spot on Iran
It’s nice to see that the scales have fallen from the Obama administration’s eyes when it comes to North Korea. The New York Times, which in this case serves as the semi-official government mouthpiece (just as the Times of London once did for the British government), reports: [snip]
The administration is to be commended for its realism in this case and its realization that there are, after all, limits to what diplomacy can achieve if not backed up by credible threats. The question is why, having seen the light on North Korea, the administration is now about to commit the same mistake that its predecessors made in dealings with Pyongyang in its own relations with Tehran?
What makes the administration think Iran is any more open to giving up its nuclear weapons program than North Korea is?
All the evidence indicates that Iran is dead-set on going nuclear — just as North Korea was. If they undertake negotiations it will be as a smokescreen and delaying mechanism to give them time to weaponize. And by all indications Obama is going to play right into their hands...
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The reason the president won't talk about the Long murder
Yesterday at American Thinker Jan LaRue asked :
Why haven't the President and Attorney General of the United States been as quick to condemn the murder of one U.S. soldier and the wounding of another as they were in condemning the murder of an abortionist?
James Dao and David Johnston of the New York Times present some information which might answer LaRue's question:
The suspect charged with killing one soldier and seriously wounding another in a shooting outside an Army recruiting office in Little Rock, Ark., was once detained in Yemen for possessing a fake Somali passport and other counterfeit documents, law enforcement officials said Tuesday.
The episode in Yemen prompted a preliminary inquiry by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other American law enforcement agencies into whether the man, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, had ties to extremist groups, the officials said. But that investigation was inconclusive, they said, leaving the bureau with insufficient evidence to wiretap his phone or put him under surveillance.
It would be embarrassing to highlight his Muslim background or his possible training as a terrorist overseas would be inconvenient on the eve of Obama's big speech in Cairo to the Muslim world.
And so Obama and others in his administration are all too happy to ignore the outrageous murder of an innocent soldier in America while condemning the outrageous murder of an abortion doctor in a church. The latter won't affect Muslim relations with the U.S.
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China Requires Censoring Software on New PCs
BEIJING — China has issued a sweeping directive requiring all personal computers sold in the country to include sophisticated software that can filter out pornography and other “unhealthy information” from the Internet.
The software, which manufacturers must install on all new PC’s starting July 1, allows the government to update computers regularly with an ever-changing list of banned Web sites...
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Nagin's Phone Calls Screened 'to Keep Him Safe' While Quarantined in China
BEIJING -- They take their quarantines very, very seriously in China. They don't even allow phone calls. The mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, is under lockdown in a suburban Shanghai hotel after a passenger on his flight from the U.S. exhibited symptoms of swine flu -- and now his Chinese hosts are screening his calls "to keep him safe."
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China's Greenhouse Gas Emissions Threaten to Double
"Many Western industrialized nations want China to commit to reducing its CO2 emissions," says Dabo Guan of the Electricity Policy Research Group at the University of Cambridge in England. "But the country will not even be capable of doing so." [snip]
China's CO2 emissions, they claim, will almost double in the next two decades compared with 2002 levels.
[But we'll still saddle ourselves with trillions of 'green' costs...]
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Obama's Enemies List Grows
A de facto Obama enemies list and dirty political machine have been expanding since last year. Obama has established several embarrassing presidential firsts including targeting private individuals by names, assigning a well-known "partisan dirt-digger" and non-lawyer to the White House Counsel's Office to likely gain access to Bush Administration documents protected under attorney-client privilege, and moving the senior political adviser into the West Wing.
These are heretofore unseen partisan practices... [snip]
Two military psychologists who supervised the enhanced interrogation techniques that were used on only three terrorist leaders were publicly outed by Democratic Senator Carl Levin placing both doctors and their families in personal danger. The doctors' identities had previously been kept under wraps. [snip]
The Department of Homeland Security issued a document warning counterterrorism and law enforcement authorities of an alleged threat to the U.S. posed by "domestic rightwing terrorists." Included in the group of potential rightwing terrorists are individuals who are pro-life, support the Second Amendment and oppose the flood of illegal aliens. The DHS pamphlet also singled out military veterans for possible recruitment into domestic terrorist cells. [snip]
One fund manager reported being on the receiving end of a profanity-laced tirade by Auto Industry Task Force head Steve Rattner that included threats to use the Internal Revenue Service and the Securities and Exchange Commission in gangster-like enforcement roles... [snip]
Thomas Lauria, a lawyer for financial firm Perella Weinberg Partners, reported the car czar threatened that "the full force of the White House press corps would destroy its [Perella Weinberg's] reputation" unless the firm agreed to Obama administration demands in Chrysler's bankruptcy...[snip]
The failure by the White House press corps to repudiate Rattner's threat speaks volumes and underscores their role as an ally of the Obama Administration...
[Recommended > ]
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Finally, Someone In The Establishment Press Calls Out Obama's 'Created and Saved' Jobs Baloney
Until now, no one in the press of note has paid any attention to this "clever" abandonment of logic and accountability. After all, by the new "create and/or save" non-logic, Dear Leader has "saved" over 130 million jobs since his inauguration -- even though, on a seasonally adjusted basis, almost 2.2 million Americans lost theirs from February through May:
Finally, someone in the establishment media has done a serious call-out of Team Obama's risible ruse. Here are excerpts from William McGurn's hard-hitting column in today's Wall Street Journal:
The Media Fall for Phony 'Jobs' Claims
The Obama Numbers Are Pure Fiction
..... "We would never have used a formula like 'save or create,'" he former Bush administration communications team member Tony Fratto) tells me. "To begin with, the number is pure fiction -- the administration has no way to measure how many jobs are actually being 'saved.' And if we had tried to use something this flimsy, the press would never have let us get away with it." [snip]
"You would think that any self-respecting White House press corps would show some of the same skepticism toward President Obama's jobs claims that they did toward President Bush's tax cuts," says Mr. Fratto. "But I'm still waiting."
How much higher does the unemployment rate have to go before Team Obama's apparatchiks at the Associated Press, the New York Times, and elsewhere -- who, as noted, rightly would never have let the Bush administration get away with a similar move -- stop repeating the President's patently obvious "created and/or saved" nonsense without challenging it?
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Lies, Damned Lies, And "Saved" Jobs
More than 1.6 million jobs have disappeared since the stimulus package was signed in February. Government can't create jobs, only dependency. Make-work jobs will not turn the economy around.
The Obama administration, totally unfamiliar with the first rule of holes*, has announced it's about to really, really ramp UP stimulus spending to 'create' 600,000 more jobs this summer...
[*When you're in one, stop digging.]
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The White House "Jobs-Saved" Deception
After nearly twenty years in Washington I thought I've seen every trick ever conceived, but the White House claims of "jobs saved" attributed to the stimulus bill is unrivaled.
What causes the jaw to drop is not just the breathtaking deception of the claim, but the gullibility of the Washington press corps to continue reporting it...
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Comparison: Economic Reporting Under Bush, and Under Obama
Ed Frank created an interesting little video that serves as a stark reminder of how harsh the Old Media was on Bush's "faltering" economy in comparison to today's hearts and flowers style of reporting during the age of Obama, even though the stats are far, far worse under Obama than they ever were under Bush.
Frank's video is shocking for its revelation of how Bush was slapped around and how every economic indicator during his tenure in the White House was deemed as obvious proof of the supposed though times we then faced. Yet now, every dismal indicator is celebrated as if recovery just around the corner. Under Bush the Old Media was sure the economy was a wreck, now the wreck proves we will surely be saved by Summer
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