Crossposted from Flopping Aces

Whether Hillary or some other yahoo is SecState matters not to me (seeing as how we are gonna get a terrible SecState either way) but the fact that Obama, a former lecturer on Constitutional Law, seems willing to ignore the Constitution is troubling, but not surprising in the least.

The section he will ignore wholesale in the appointment of Hillary is the Constitutional prohibition in the Emoluments Clause (Article I, Section 6, clause 2):

No Senator or Representative shall, during the time for which he was elected, be appointed to any civil office under the authority of the United States, which shall have been created, or the emoluments whereof shall have been increased during such time: and no person holding any office under the United States, shall be a member of either House during his continuance in office.

In a nutshell this means Congress cannot take an appointment for which the pay has gone up during the time that person held office in Congress. The pay for the Secretary of State has gone up in the last year that which would prevent Hillary from getting appointed.

But Taft, Nixon, Carter, and Clinton all ignored the Constitution. They did it by lowering the pay after the fact. One of the Democrats favorite former KKK member, Robert Byrd, didn’t like this tactic in 1973 and said this:

we should not delude the American people into thinking a way can be found around the constitutional obstacle

But now that its the Democrats in power, and wanting Hillary in the SecState spot it’s all good.

Professor Volokh quoted Prof. Michael Stokes Paulsen, author of Is Lloyd Bentsen Unconstitutional?, in his post on the subject:

A “fix” can rescind the salary, but it cannot repeal historical events. The emoluments of the office had been increased. The rule specified in the text still controls.

Unless one views the Constitution’s rules as rules that may be dispensed with when inconvenient; or as not really stating rules at all (but “standards” or “principles” to be viewed at more-convenient levels of generality); or as not applicable where a lawsuit might not be brought; or as not applicable to Democratic administrations, then the plain linguistic meaning of this chunk of constitutional text forbids the appointment of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State.

I wouldn’t bet on this actually preventing the appointment, however. It didn’t stop Lloyd Bentsen from becoming Secretary of State. But it does make an interesting first test of how serious Barack Obama will be about taking the Constitution’s actual words seriously. We know he thinks the Constitution should be viewed as authorizing judicial redistribution of wealth. But we don’t know what he thinks about provisions of the Constitution that do not need to be invented, but are actually there in the document.

You think the Democrats will stand firm against this tactic, as they did in 1973?

I highly doubt it seeing how much hypocrisy we have seen come from the left side of the aisle.

Also:

UN embarks on new attempt to criminalize expressions of “defamation of religion”

Ah the UN… ever the politically correct, Islamic country membership dominated nanny of free speech.

The United Nations saw another shred of its tattered dignity stripped away November 24, when a committee of the General Assembly approved what amounts to a direct assault on Western liberal democracy. In an 85-50 vote, with 42 abstaining, the so-called Third Committee adopted a resolution, submitted by a caucus of Islamic nations, to criminalize expressions deemed to be “defamation of religion,” with special concern for Islam. All U.N. member states would be called on to amend their criminal codes accordingly. The measure’s next stop is the General Assembly, where it is expected to win handily, probably in December.

Evidently this was almost identical measure to on adopted last year by the General Assembly. But this one is set to have more teeth, and far more encompassing ramifications when – after it receives the nod from the General Assembly, it moves to the second World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, scheduled to convene next April in Geneva.

Many legal scholars believe that the decisions of international conferences of this sort can be incorporated into international law, putting them under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. Individual nations could not be forced to amend their laws, but they might find Interpol knocking at their doors, serving them extradition requests to hand over their cartoonists and novelists. Stand-up comics and philosophers might find they’re unable to cross international borders for fear of being arrested and remanded for trial in Jordan or Malaysia.

The Geneva conference is planned as a follow-up to the first world conference against racism, which took place in early September 2001 in Durban, South Africa. That meeting did some serious work, but it was memorably upstaged by a parallel gathering of nongovernmental activists, who staged a noisy show of anti-Israel and antisemitic speech-making, rallies and parades, all under U.N. auspices. And, of course, a week later, on September 11, 2001, all hell broke loose.

The years since then have not been kind to the spirit of reconciliation supposedly invoked at Durban. It has been a decade of intense friction between the West and the Muslim world, of invasions and terrorism, of cartoon wars, eavesdropping, beheadings, Guantanamo and intifada. The religious defamation ban is part of an effort by Muslim nations to retake the initiative. The resolution, which is being pushed by the Organization of the Islamic Conference, is seen as winning back some of Islam’s lost stature in world opinion and offering some protection to Muslim minorities in increasingly suspicious Western societies. The idea, it seems, is to reduce Western suspicion of Islam by outlawing criticism.

Not content to try to control speech, there’s new and bolder anti-Israel language being sent to Geneva for approval… including accusations against Israel of crimes against humanity, of practicing “a new kind of apartheid” and — apparently for the first time in a formal document — “a form of genocide.” Unless that language is softened, a boycott may be in effect for some western nations. Canada has already refused to attend. France is also boycotting, and Sarkozy is reaching out to other Euro nations to band together in resisting the anti-Israel language.

In the US, Jewish and black representatives are working together to line up support in the administration”.

Saudi Arabia has assumed the middle man role.

Surprisingly, Saudi Arabia is leading its own behind-the-scenes effort, with moderate Arab states, to soften the anti-Israel language and prevent a Western boycott, according to several close U.N. watchers. Saudi King Abdullah is said to view the extreme anti-Israel rhetoric as an Iranian ploy to alienate the West and sabotage the conference. Abdullah favors cooperation with the West, and he fears Iran. That’s why he’s offered his own peace plan, convened an inter-religious dialogue and invited Israeli President Shimon Peres to his recent New York tolerance forum. Abdullah can’t boycott Geneva, but he can work quietly within the Islamic bloc to cut out the worst Israel-bashing. But he needs something to show the folks back home that he is defending the faith. Some diplomats speculate that he might accept a ban with fewer teeth.

Without the western free world, Geneva would be no more than a gathering of the 3rd world countries… and the stakes are high for Europe.

That [boycott] would hurt sub-Saharan Africa, where the Durban process is cherished as a long-delayed acknowledgement of African suffering under colonialism. The prospect of a boycott, then, puts pressure on the Africans to find a way of softening their Muslim allies’ stance.

No one, however, has more to lose than Europe. European leaders view the Durban process as a form of penance for their role in Africa, and they’re anxious to see progress at Geneva.

On the other hand, Europe is home to large and restive Muslim minorities, and the clash of cultures puts tolerance to the test daily. Friction between traditionalist and sometimes militant Muslims and the freewheeling societies of Denmark and the Netherlands has already led to crisis and bloodshed. Legislating absolute protection for religious sensibilities without equal protection for secular, democratic beliefs would tilt the playing field against the European democracies as they struggle to defend their values on their own home turf. But holding firm could undermine Abdullah, arguably the best hope for reconciliation.

As the Muslim population expands, their influence in world body agencies, and state leadership, also grows. Assimilation into their chosen countries by these migrating Muslim communities remains essential… a trend they reject in all too many numbers.

And no one is more aware of the dangers of the national culture divides with their new Muslim population than Euro countries such as the Netherlands and France.

Finally:

Oh joy… While Russian warships were docked in Venezueal, awaiting training exercises with the Venezuelan Navy, we get the word that Russia is planning to help Chavez embark on a nuke energy program.

Uh huh… a country a’wash in oil and it’s profits is focusing on nuke energy. Okay… I suppose it’s possible. But somehow, I don’t get the idea the world will be any more comfortable with Chavez using a peaceful energy program to potentially mask an undercover WMD program than they are with Iran’s Ahmadinejad.

Right along with that “peaceful” nuke energy was $4 billion in Russian weaponry, fighter jets and choppers.

Bad time for the DNC and our President-elect to continue snubbing our Latin American ally, Columbia, over protectionist trade issues, don’t you think?

By Barry Rubin

For years, India has been subjected to periodic terrorist attacks throughout the country. But what happened in Mumbai is something new and different: a full-scale terrorist war.
This is the kind of threat and problem Israel has been facing for decades. What are the lessons for India from Israel’s experience, points also reflected by India’s own recent history?

First, India needs and has the right to expect international sympathy and help. It will get sympathy but will it get help? Once it is clear that other countries must actually do something, incur some costs, possibly take some risks, everything changes.

If the terrorists come from bases or training camps in Pakistan, after all, India wants international action to be taken. Pakistan must be pressured to close such camps, stop helping terrorists, and provide information possessed by Pakistani intelligence agencies.

But how might this happen? Will Western countries make a real effort? Are they going to impose sanctions on Pakistan or even denounce it? Will they make public the results of their own investigations about responsibility for the terror campaign against India?

Not likely. After all, such acts would cost them money and involve potential risks, perhaps even of the terrorists targeting them. Moreover, they need Pakistan for various things, notably to cooperate on keeping down other Islamist terrorist threats, not spread around nuclear weapons’ technology too much, and being cooperative on maintaining some stability in Afghanistan.

This parallels Israel’s situation with Syria, Lebanon, and Iran. For decades, the United States and some European countries have talked to the Syrian government about closing down terrorist headquarters in Damascus. The Syrians merely say “no” (though sometimes they have just lied and said the offices were closed). The United States even did put on some sanctions. But by being intransigent, pretending moderation, and hinting help on other issues, Syria has gotten out of its isolation.

So, despite all the pious talk about fighting terrorism, in real terms, India—like Israel—is largely on its own in defending itself from terrorism.

Another problem India faces, like Israel in the case of Lebanon, is that it is dealing with a country that lacks an effective government. Pakistan is in real terms a state of anarchy. Even within the intelligence apparatus, factions simply do as they please in inciting terrorism. Given popular opinion and Pakistan’s Islamic framework, even a well-intentioned government would be hard-put to crackdown.

In Israel’s case, the whole rationale for regimes like those in Iran and Syria is a radical ideology. So pervasive is the daily incitement to hatred and the lies, that popular opinion supports the most murderous terrorism. The murder of Israeli civilians brings celebrations in the Arab world. The usual types of appeals to law and order, holding governments responsible for their actions, shaming them, or going over their heads to appeal to the masses on humanitarian grounds simply don’t work.

So what’s a country to do? It will consider cross-border raids against terrorist camps or retaliation to pressure the terrorist sponsor to desist. Sometimes it will actually take such action. But can India depend on international support for such self-defense measures or will it then be labeled an aggressor?

How much is India willing to risk war with Pakistan even though it has a legitimate casus belli due to covert aggression against itself by that neighbor? And let’s not forget that Pakistan has nuclear weapons, a situation which Israel may soon face in regard to Iran.

Now we can see the logic of terrorism as a strategy by radical groups and countries pursuing aggression by covert means. The terrorists and their supporters have lots of advantages; the victims are not only put on the defensive but have to make tough decisions about self-defense. (more…)

From Brian Griffith

I’m pretty sure that bloggers, Republicans, and those with an ounce of common sense saw this coming:

It wasn’t supposed to be this way after last year’s special session of the General Assembly.

About $1.5 billion worth of hard choices were made and many government leaders were confident the deficit demons had been vanquished.

But between $800 million and $900 million of expected new tax revenue never materialized because of faltering collections in a spiraling economy, according to the state’s nonpartisan Department of Legislative Services, leaving Maryland again in a perilous budget situation.

Most people understood that raising taxes and increasing discretionary spending in a bad economic climate was morally and fiscally irresponsible. Unfortunately as we all know, Governor O’Malley decided to take the irresponsible and immoral course of action. And that is what has brought us to the situation today, and economic problem that O’Malley called a model for the nation.

I think the most troubling aspect so far of the current budget crisis is that Governor O’Malley refuses to concede that he made a mistake, and refuses to take corrective steps to fix what he has done. I don’t know if it’s ego, or just a general lack of understanding of economics, or both, but Governor O’Malley wrecked our fiscal posture here in Maryland and doesn’t seem all that concerned with fixing what he has broken. Sure, we have seen piecemeal budget cuts here and there, but no broad based fiscal plan that will serve as a solution to our current economic problems and one that will lighten the load that O’Malley and General Assembly Democrats dumped on the taxpayers.
(more…)

By Dick Morris

The subprime mortgage crisis is only the Sarajevo which caused the financial collapse. The real reason is the massive explosion of debt at all levels and in all forms that has engulfed the world. Since 1992, the total of debt in the world has gone from a level equal to global GDP to a level that is now 3.7 times as much as global GDP. This debt explosion, explained in Charles Morris’ book (no relation) The Trillion Dollar Meltdown, consists not only of mortgages, but bonds for corporations that can’t repay them, credit cards for consumers who are neck deep in debt, car loans for drivers who can’t meet the payments, student loans that are swamping young couples, and default insurance sold by companies that can’t make good on their commitments. This massive debt has to be sweated out of our global economic system like a heroin addiction.

But we won’t have to go cold turkey. Governments around the world are committed to mitigating the pain. They are not about to ask us to go through the agony of another Great Depression. They have learned the lessons of the 30s. So government will ease our pain with stimulus packages and corporate bailouts to protect us and the companies that sustain our employment base. These bailouts and stimuli will not solve the problem. They are simply pain killers – methadone – designed to mitigate our suffering. It is only the private sector shakeout, “creative destruction” in the words of Joseph Shumpeter, that can eradicate the bad debt and bring the economy back to health. To fail to go through this process would put us in the same situation as Japan, which evaded a reckoning with its bad debt crisis and has suffered with twenty years of stagnation as a result. But to go through withdrawal, even with methadone, will be a long and painful process.

Liberals — demand siders — and conservatives — supply siders — disagree on the remedies for the crisis. The demand siders feel that we need to stimulate demand by passing out checks and cutting middle class taxes. The right points out that this will only be a drop in the ocean of global demand and that much of the money will be used for debt reduction and to buy Chinese products. The supply siders plead for a cut in corporate taxes and capital gains levies. Critics say that the current lack of confidence in the economy inhibits investment no matter how much the tax code incentivizes it. Both solutions and both criticisms are correct. The proper medication – the right methadone – is a balance between the two.

But, conceptually, what is happening is the end of the consensus around free market economics engendered by the fall of communism. The era of free market consensus lasted from 1989 through 2008. It is now over. Bush and Obama will leave us with a legacy of government regulation, at a minimum, and control, at the maximum, over the economy. When the Republican version of the bailout, calling for loans and insurance instead of outright grants of money to corporations, was rejected (thanks to John McCain), the fate of the free market era was sealed. With the bailout cash came the reasonable demand for “equity for the taxpayers” in return. Enter the government. Now the federal government is the major shareholder in most of our important financial and insurance companies and in many of our manufacturing corporations. Now we hear this leverage articulated in reasonable demands for limits on corporate executive bonuses and compensation. But soon it will metastasize into calls for a public voice in lending policies and government management and control. Obama and a top heavy Democratic Congress will accelerate this trend and there is nothing the Republican Party will be able to do about it.
(more…)

Crossposted from Flopping Aces

One that sadly, it seems we are forgetting…

[note: I ran this before the election and it's a message we may need to be reminded of often in the years ahead]

A warning from the first Thanksgiving!

William Bradford was one of the leaders of that group of persons we call “The Pilgrims.” They settled in what is now Massachusetts in 1620 after a long and perilous sea voyage. Bradford became Governor, a post in which he served off and on for over 30 years. He completed “History of Plymouth Plantation” in 1650 (text here).

The first months after their arrival half the Pilgrims died of disease, starvation or exposure to the elements. At first, they banded together to share the fruits of labor equally among themselves. Here’s Bradford’s report of the success of the collective “redistributive” approach:

The experience that was had in this common course and condition, tried sundry years and that amongst godly and sober men, may well evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato’s and other ancients applauded by some of later times; and that the taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God. For this community (so far as it was) was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort. For the young men, that were most able and fit for labor and service, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense. The strong, or man of parts, had no more in division of victuals and clothes than he that was weak and not able to do a quarter the other could; this was thought injustice. The aged and graver men to be ranked and equalized in labors and victuals, clothes etc., with the meaner and younger sort, thought it some indignity and disrespect unto them. And for men’s wives to be commanded to do service for other men, as dressing their meat, washing their clothes, etc., they deemed it a kind of slavery, neither could many husbands well brook it.

Three years later “after much debate of things” they decided to try things differently and let everyone work the land for themselves:

This had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the Governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and gave far better content. The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.

Happy Thanksgiving! I am taking a few days off and will return Monday the 1st!

Crossposted from Flopping Aces

Isn’t it nice to hear just one voice of sanity amongst the insane?

Amid all the political and media hysteria, national output has declined by less than one-half of one percent. In fact, it may not have declined even that much– or at all– when the statistics are revised later, as they very often are.

We are not talking about the Great Depression, when output dropped by one-third and unemployment soared to 25 percent.

What we are talking about is a golden political opportunity for politicians to use the current financial crisis to fundamentally change an economy that has been successful for more than two centuries, so that politicians can henceforth micro-manage all sorts of businesses and play Robin Hood, taking from those who are not likely to vote for them and transferring part of their earnings to those who will vote for them.

For that, the politicians need lots of hype, and that is being generously supplied by the media.

~~~

Much as we may deplore partisanship in Washington, bipartisan disasters are often twice as bad as partisan disasters– and this is a bipartisan disaster in the making.

Too many people who argue that there is a beneficial role for the government to play in the economy glide swiftly from that to the conclusion that the government will in fact confine itself to playing such a role.

In the light of history, this is a faith which passeth all understanding. Even in the case of the Great Depression of the 1930s, increasing numbers of economists and historians who have looked back at that era have concluded that, on net balance, government intervention prolonged the Great Depression.

The politicians are using this “crisis” as not only a means to micro-manage, but to gain more power:

Modern Washington owes its very existence to the 1929 crash, which occasioned a vast expansion of the federal government under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. A legacy of the increase in federal power during that era, largely undiminished during a 28-year electoral backlash against big government, is that Washington became Wall Street’s principal rival when it came to running the world. Which wielded more power—the financial markets or the government? Uncle Sam had the world’s largest military, but Wall Street had all that goddamned money.

~~~

For Wall Street, a way of life may be coming to an end. For Washington, a new era of government activism has already begun. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, after presiding over an unprecedented sequence of receiverships, bailouts, and liquidations, is urging Congress to commit up to $700 billion to unfreeze the credit markets. The CEOs of once-powerful investment banks will be called down to Congress and subjected to humiliating questions. Journalists will sign six-figure contracts to write books about the events of what is already being dubbed “Black September.” Think-tankers will hold conferences to fight over the proper role government should assume in the new financial world. The Washington Post—which, like all big-city dailies, has been experiencing some circulation difficulty—will sell more papers than it would otherwise. Presidential candidates are already demanding, and will probably receive, curbs on CEO pay as a condition of restoring liquidity to Wall Street.

~~~

…On Wall Street, financial crisis destroys jobs. Here in Washington, it creates them. The rest is just details.

And just as Obama said he “will hit the ground running,” so is the next act in this power struggle:

Together, the programs from the Federal Reserve and the New York Fed aim to dump $800 billion in additional funds into the struggling U.S. economy, more than Congress approved in October for a bailout of the nation’s banks and Wall Street firms.

What’s another 800 billion or so right?

Sigh….

Also:

Anti-Prop 8 Mob Gets Another Victim

Looks like we have another victim of the liberal McCarthy machine.

I wrote about the angst, and blackballing going on in the film industry over Prop 8 yesterday and one of the main liberal targets has been hit. Richard Raddon will resign:

Under mounting pressure, LA Film Festival director Richard Raddon has ankled his post.

Raddon and Film Independent (FIND), the festival’s parent org, have faced a barrage of protests over Raddon’s contribution to the successful Yes on Prop 8 campaign that banned same-sex marriage in California.

After bloggers published his name, culled from public records of donors, Raddon tendered his first resignation on Nov. 13 to Film Independent’s board of directors, which was not accepted. Film Independent then released a statement saying, in part, “Our organization does not police the personal, religious, or political choices of any employee, member, or filmmaker.”

Yet Internet message boards and other published reports kept the issue at the center of a growing protest movement that has targeted “Yes on 8″ donors including the Mormon church and Cinemark Theaters, whose CEO was a contributor.

On Monday, Raddon submitted a second resignation. Those close to the org described Monday’s conference call with the board of directors as emotional. While Raddon’s contribution had caused some internal angst, he was well liked within the org.

On Tuesday, Film Independent issued a statement saying “With great reluctance, Film Independent has accepted Richard Raddon’s resignation. Rich’s service to the independent film community and to Film Independent has been nothing less than extraordinary. He has always shown complete commitment to our core principles of equality and diversity during his long tenure.”

Raddon, a devout Mormon who took the reins of the fest in 2000, said, “I have always held the belief that all people, no matter race, religion, or sexual orientation are entitled to equal rights. I prefer to keep the details around my contribution through my church a private matter. But I am profoundly sorry for the negative attention that my actions have drawn to Film Independent and for the hurt and pain that is being experienced in the GLBT community.”

Film Independent has not yet picked a replacement for Raddon.

Love that liberal tolerance and open-mindness of the truths of others.

Finally:

Incoming Attorney General Defended Clemency For Terrorists

What kind of people does the nation get to lead us when Obama brings in virtually every Clinton buddy in the beltway? People who defended the pardon of terrorists who committed this:

It was nearly 10 p.m. on New Year’s Eve, 1982. Two officers on New York Police Department’s elite bomb squad rushed to headquarters at One Police Plaza, where minutes earlier an explosion had destroyed the entrance to the building. Lying amid the carnage was Police Officer Rocco Pascarella, his lower leg blasted off.

“He was ripped up like someone took a box cutter and shredded his face,” remembered Detective Anthony Senft, one of the bomb-squad officers who answered the call 25 years ago. “We really didn’t even know that he was a uniformed man until we found his weapon, that’s how badly he was injured.”

About 20 minutes later, Mr. Senft and his partner, Richard Pastorella, were blown 15 feet in the air as they knelt in protective gear to defuse another bomb. Detective Senft was blinded in one eye, his facial bones shattered, his hip severely fractured. Mr. Pastorella was blinded in both eyes and lost all the fingers of his right hand. A total of four bombs exploded in a single hour on that night, including at FBI headquarters in Manhattan and the federal courthouse in Brooklyn.

The perpetrators were members of Armed Forces of National Liberation, FALN (the Spanish acronym), a clandestine terrorist group devoted to bringing about independence for Puerto Rico through violent means. Its members waged war on America with bombings, arson, kidnappings, prison escapes, threats and intimidation. The most gruesome attack was the 1975 Fraunces Tavern bombing in Lower Manhattan. Timed to go off during the lunch-hour rush, the explosion decapitated one of the four people killed and injured another 60. (more…)

From Red Maryland

– Richard E. Vatz

I just returned from my annual convention of the National Communication Association (NCA), my main academic organization. I went with concern, because not only does my national professional organization have a history of being liberal, it also has a history of a prevailing bias against conservatives, conservative ideas and conservative writing, manifested in its political structure filled with liberal interest groups, its tendency to publish mostly — and in an earlier time exclusively — liberal positions in its journals and its favoring by an astonishing ratio liberal or “progressive” submissions for its conventions.

The backdrop for the convention did not assuage my concern. There was a radical liberal attempt to boycott the hotel at which we stayed because the owner gave funds to support Proposition 8, which is intended to outlaw gay marriage. No matter that both 2008 presidential candidates oppose gay marriage; no matter that the NCA had planned the convention 5-6 years ahead of time with all of the consequences a successful boycott would have had, and no matter that those with disabilities indicated their outrage that these NCA members wanted them to leave the hotel which has multiple accommodations for the disabled.

The power hierarchy of NCA had so feared the success of the hotel boycott, which could have led to a folding of the convention, that the president — a good man, but a weak leader — had publicly written a letter indicating his understanding and condoning of the outrage, if not the boycott, of the protesters.

Fast forward to last week: the protest fizzled; the listserv majority that had railed in uncivil rhetoric against the hotel (which has a history of pro-gay policies) and its owner, was revealed to be an unrepresentative, tiny minority of the NCA; and the convention hosted a record number of NCA members for a California convention.

When the Legislative Assembly (LA) of the NCA met on the first day of the convention, I anticipated similar irresponsible liberal craziness. The LA, of which I am a current and past member, was going to vote on the NCA’s officially taking a position against the United States’ use of torture and solitary confinement.

The proposal was a “Resolution Regarding Extended Solitary Confinement and Torture” which, in my opinion, would have certified the NCA as a primarily political, not academic, organization and which would have opened the door to endless other irresponsible resolutions (e.g. nuclear disarmament, foreign policy initiatives, taxes, etc.), perhaps indelibly identifying NCA as a (radical left) political organization. My motion to table the resolution failed 54-53, but the original resolution was defeated by voice vote (according to my informal estimation) by about 75-25. Very surprising…also surprising was the number of Assembly representatives who told me they changed their mind pursuant to the ensuing debate and didn’t want the NCA to relinquish and sully its reputation as an academic organization.

A surprisingly satisfying, if not definitive, happenstance to be followed by the failure of an untoward, unjustifiable boycott, a boycott threatening the support for freedom of speech by the National Communication Association, formerly the Speech Communication Association. (more…)

By Dick Morris

Lost in the dramatic disaster unfolding on Wall Street and the brazen hypocrisy of the Hillary Clinton nomination is President-elect Obama’s double signal that the war on terror is now over. His appointment of Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano as Secretary of Homeland Security signals that the Department will once again focus on southern border immigration issues rather than on fighting terrorism.

He could have selected a Rudy Giuliani or a Louis Free or a Ray Kelly anyone with real life experience in battling terrorists. Instead he chose a governor with no knowledge of the subject whose obvious credential is her proximity to the border. The Department of Homeland Security is a polyglot agency which includes immigration enforcement (the old INS) among its many missions. It is also charged with fighting drugs (the old DEA), and battling terrorism. By appointing someone who knows nothing about terrorism but everything about immigration, Obama has signaled the lack of priority he will give to domestic efforts to keep us safe.

Imagine if President George W. Bush had named the governor of Arizona as his Homeland Security director when the post was created in the aftermath of 9/11! The nation would have howled in protest. But now that nobody is focused on terrorism (except the terrorists who still want to strike at us), Obama has felt free to bury the task of battling terrorism in the bureaucracy dedicated to policing the Mexican border.

Just as troubling is Obama’s appointment of Eric Holder as his Attorney General. While criticism of the nomination has focused, justifiably, on his sell-out of the public interest by recommending the pardon of fugitive Marc Rich, it is his approval of commutations for the FALN – the Puerto Rican terrorists – that should raise red flags. Before 9/11, when we were not hyper-sensitive to terrorism, Holder did Hillary Clinton’s bidding in approving the pardon of those who bombed Fraunces Tavern in New York City, killing four people and injuring fifty others. Facing a run for Senate in New York State, with its sizable Puerto Rican population, Hillary was anxious to deliver a signal of her empathy with the desires of New York’s Hispanics. Bill, eager to please, sought Justice Department approval for the commutations. Even though the prisoners themselves had not asked for commutation (two refused to accept it), Holder approved the action and cleared the way for a pre-election gift to New York’s Puerto Rican community.

If these two appointments presage Obama’s approach to the war on terror, we are going to be in deep trouble, indeed. There is not a hawk in the bunch. (more…)

Disgusting!
Democrats change the meaning of “Pro-Life” to deceive voters about their Far Left candidate, Barack Obama, who voted four times to approve infanticide of newborn babies!
Pro-Life Obama–

In case you forgot, this is Barack Obama in his own words defending the slaughter of a baby born alive after surviving an abortion:

“Essentially adding an additional doctor who then has to be called in an emergency situation to come in and make these assessments is really designed simply to burden the original decision…”
Obama claimed that having doctors help a baby born alive after a botched abortion would be a burden. At the time he was arguing against the Born Alive Infant Protection Act at the Illinois state legislature April 2002.

But, that didn’t stop faithful (and dishonest) Obama devotees of creating a “Pro-Life Obama” website!
This is stunning in its dishonesty.
CBN News reported:

Barack Obama may be pro-choice, but don’t tell that to the Matthew 25 Network. They are a PAC supporting Barack Obama for president and they believe his policies are definitely pro-life.

The Brody File has been give an exclusive sneak peek to the Web site “Pro-Life, Pro-Obama.” Check it out here.

The Democratic Party has been making this pro-life case for a long time now, not just with Obama, but with Democrats who want to see abortion reduced in this country. They don’t want to get hung up on Roe v. Wade. The Web site lays out their case in a succinct and pretty easy to understand way.

But this Web site is going to tick off the pro-life community because this is pretty in your face. Calling Obama “pro-life” won’t go down well with conservative Evangelicals. Additionally, it will be really interesting to see the fallout and reaction from this, especially from the McCain campaign.

Read the Rest Here.

Crossposted from Flopping Aces

VDH is right on target, as usual:

For years now we have been preached to that Guantanamo is a gulag where Korans are stomped and flushed (not laptops provided to the chief architect of 9/11), that we waged a foolhardy, amoral, and hopelessly ‘lost’ war against the Iraqi people, that the rich plundered the economy on the backs of the poor, and that the Constitution was burned so that covert agencies could play James Bond. I could go on, but you get the picture.

Given all that, are we now suddenly — in 1984-fashion — around late January either to be told all that was not quite so, or will we simply hear no more about how these Bush legacies have ruined America — or what exactly is the party line to be? There is still such a thing, after all, as Google.

The point is that somewhere around early to mid-2007 ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, Newsweek, Time, etc. chose to become — in the manner that they selected, emphasized, and presented their news stories — a quasi-official Obama media, or at least a quasi-official what-they-thought-Obama-was news media. Chris Matthews’ asinine statement about his investment in the success of the Obama administration was merely a crude summation of the creed of the more sober and judicious.

I don’t really think they can now pull off an Animal-Farm-like ‘two-legs were bad’, ‘now two-legs good’ complete turn-about just because they’ve taken over the manor. I do think that the media’s unprofessional lobbying for the cause of Obama — not now, but in a decade or two — will become a classic case study in any graduate class on journalistic ethics.

If there has been anything we have learned from this election, it’s that the only thing that matters to the MSM is the D next to the name. The same policies under Bush that were evil are now thought of as, well, necessary.

While 52% of the nation fell for one of the biggest con jobs in American history by electing the most inexperience politician to come around in a century, we can take solace that we didn’t fall for the MSM and their baloney. I mean look at the headlines now:

Obama Steps Up to the Plate on the Economy
Hope springs eternal for Obama presidency

or the talking heads sputtering:

Obama Cabinet Unparalleled in ‘Brain Power’.

They stopped trying to hide their bias long ago, and as VDH said….10 years from now there will be classes on the idiocy the MSM displayed over the last few years.

Also:

The Liberal McCarthy Era Begins With Prop 8

Geoffrey R. Stone, currently a Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law, and the author of “Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism” once wrote an article on what it means to be a liberal. The number one meaning was this:

Liberals believe individuals should doubt their own truths and consider fairly and open-mindedly the truths of others. This is at the very heart of liberalism. Liberals understand, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once observed, that “time has upset many fighting faiths.” Liberals are skeptical of censorship and celebrate free and open debate.

Sounds fabulous right?

But liberals in action are something entirely different:

Should there be boycotts, blacklists, firings or de facto shunning of those who supported Proposition 8?

That’s the issue consuming many in liberal Hollywood who fought to defeat the initiative banning same-sex marriage and are now reeling with recrimination and dismay. Meanwhile, activists continue to comb donor lists and employ the Internet to expose those who donated money to support the ban.

Yes indeed….should there be firings and blackballing of individuals who supported Prop 8?

The answer is a resounding YES from the liberal left.

Most conservatives have seen the liberal left become unyielding to any viewpoint not their own. They call those who supported the liberation of Iraq “warmongers” and “criminals”. They love debate, so long as you have the same views as their own.

There is no “celebration of free and open debate.” Recall the rushing of the stage while a Minuteman stood up to talk at a college. They shut down his speech, and forced his viewpoint to be smothered. A liberal doesn’t agree with you, they will just shout, scream, and yell to drown it out. How dare a opposing viewpoint get out into the public realm.

And so it is with Prop 8. The people of California voted, for the second time, to define Marriage as between a man and a woman. Because they don’t agree with that, they take to the streets, they blackball filmmakers like Richard Raddon of Film Independent:

Raddon has been a particularly polarizing figure because Film Independent’s board includes many independent film stalwarts, including Don Cheadle, Forest Whitaker, Fox Searchlight President Peter Rice and Oscar-winning writer Bill Condon. One of the group’s explicit missions is to promote diversity.

Last week, Raddon offered to resign. According to one board member, a conference call was hastily arranged, and after much discussion the board voted unanimously to keep him.

Yet the anger continues to stew.

“There is still roiling debate within the organization,” says distributor Howard Cohen, an advisor to the film festival who is gay. “Is it OK to let this go? There are a lot of gay people who work at Film Independent. The issue has not been closed.”

No one is certain how the current protest will affect Film Independent’s Spirit Awards in the spring, a popular event recognizing work that “challenges the status quo.” And there are already indications the Los Angeles Film Festival could be affected.

Gregg Araki, director of the critically acclaimed gay cult hit “Mysterious Skin” and an influential figure in “new queer cinema,” has said he won’t allow his films to be shown there, while others, such as “Milk” producers and gay activists Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen, say they’re going to “study in depth all the facets of our specific situation before making a decision.”

Araki says Raddon should step down. “I don’t think he should be forcibly removed. The bottom line is if he contributed money to a hateful campaign against black people, or against Jewish people, or any other minority group, there would be much less excusing of him. The terrible irony is that he runs a film festival that is intended to promote tolerance and equality.”

Hateful campaign against black people? Huh?

It was a Democratic campaign to have the citizenery of this State decide whether marriage should be between a man and a woman. There was no hateful campaign. Gays already have the same legal rights as those who marry by joining together in a civil union. They may have to do a bit more paperwork by putting their partner on their will and so forth, but all in all….legally, its the same.

Mataharley has done a great job describing the agenda of the gay community in this debate. It’s to re-educate the public on what is and what isn’t traditional rites:

A marriage between a man and a woman follows natural laws of conception and procreation. It is the way our world evolves and grows. Were any animal species of this inclination to any serious degree, it becomes extinct.

I can easily agree with the 50-60% of the population that feels civil unions gives same sex partners legal benefits that are enjoyed by married couples. But marriage and civil unions are not “equal” in the laws of nature… unless you think premature extinction from the lack of ability to conceive is “natural”. They should be equivalent in benefits, but in no way considered equal as a traditional family.

Marriage is, and will always remain, a union between a man and a woman. It is only by the two, combined, that a child is borne of natural (not petrie dish) conception… a natural order to procreation. Just as animals will not continue to exist without the natural order of procreation, neither will man. I do not want my granddaughter taught anything different.

If same sex unions needs to be “blessed” by govt in order to achieve their benefits, that is their choice. There is no reason to muddy the waters by the govt redefining what is not theirs to define. The meddling in the traditional rite of marriage is unconcionable. Civil unions… fine. Marriage? An insult to the rite…. and to it’s traditional history.

~~~

If I choose to be married… whether “in the eyes of God”, or perhaps just a vow spoken between myself and another on a remote beach somewhere… the vow and intent bind me in a way far more powerful than a govt contract. Marriage was not created to be a govt contract, but a very personal vow between a man and a woman before God… or the powers they believe exist.

So my question to you would be… why does the govt have to sanction it as “marriage” for your “right” to be recognized?

I cannot, and will not, put govt on a par with God – enabling them to define a religious (and intensely personal) rite on this issue. The govt does not grant us rights. They pre’exist and usurp govt power.

Again, you still miss the true agenda. This is not about govt benefits for the LGBT community. It is about reeducating the public as to what is “marriage” in order to tear down traditional rites. Otherwise, they’d go for the civil unions.

That reeducation of the public is all that matters. If they have to go back to the McCarthy era and start blackballing people, then so be it.

Professor Stone wrote that to be a liberal means you “consider fairly and open-mindedly the truths of others.”

In a alternative universe maybe, but not in this one.

Finally:

Obama Skips Church and Heads to the Gym Instead….Again…

When your supporters think you are god I suppose you don’t feel the need to worship the real one!

Obama skips church, heads to gym
By JONATHAN MARTIN & CAROL E. LEE
The Politico
11/23/08

President-elect Barack Obama has yet to attend church services since winning the White House earlier this month, a departure from the example of his two immediate predecessors.

On the three Sundays since his election, Obama has instead used his free time to get in workouts at a Chicago gym.

Asked about the president-elect’s decision to not attend church, a transition aide noted that the Obamas valued their faith experience in Chicago but were concerned about the impact their large retinue may have on other parishioners.

“Because they have a great deal of respect for places of worship, they do not want to draw unwelcome or inappropriate attention to a church not used to the attention their attendance would draw,” said the aide.

Both President-elect George W. Bush and President-elect Bill Clinton managed to attend church in the weeks after they were elected.

This is the same guy who never missed a service at Rev. Wright’s church (“God damn America, U.S. of K.K.K.A”) for 20 years but can’t recall one sermon. I guess he no longer needs the political and social connections that church provided.

Now he’s free to go back to doing what he does best: worship himself!

From Red Maryland

Tom Pelton may be gone, but the Baltimore Sun’s blatant environmental advocacy journalism continues. Tim Wheeler writing about Barack Obama’s cap and trade proposal mentions in passing:

Coincidentally, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that combined global land and sea-surface average temperatures last month were the second warmest since record-keeping began in 1880. For details, go here.

In the words of Lee Corso, “not so fast my friend.” Wheeler has one huge problem. NOAA’s data was used to build James Hansen’s NASA GISS report, which falsely claimed that last month was the hottest (second or otherwise) October on record. However, Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre analyzed NOAA’s dataset and found that in fact there was no data at all for October. The numbers for September had been carried over for a second month. McIntryre, some readers may remember, forced Hansen to revise his flawed findings, which claimed the 1990s were the hottest decade in the 20th century—it was actually the 1930s. McIntyre also that debunked the infamous hockey stick graph, which alarmists amazingly still trot out as proof of the theory of anthropogenic global warming.

I wait with baited breath for Wheeler’s clarification…

Some background on Wheeler:
(more…)

By Michelle Malkin

Congratulations, tolerance mau-mauers: Your shakedown of a Christian-targeted dating website worked. Homosexuals will no longer be denied the inalienable “right” to hook up with same-sex partners on eHarmony. What a landmark triumph for social progress, eh?

New Jersey plaintiff Eric McKinley can now crown himself the new Rosa Parks — heroically breaking down inhumane barriers to Internet matchmaking by forcing a law-abiding private company to provide services it was never created to provide. “Men seeking men” has now been enshrined with “I have a dream” as a civil rights rallying cry of the 21st century. Bully for you, Mr. McKinley. You bully.

Neil Warren, eHarmony’s founder, is a gentle, grandfatherly businessman who launched his popular dating site to support heterosexual marriage. A “Focus on the Family” author with a divinity degree, Warren encourages healthy, lasting unions between men and women of all faiths, mixed faiths or no faith at all.

Don’t like what eHarmony sells? Go somewhere else. There are thousands upon thousands of dating sites on the Internet that cater to gays, lesbians, Jews, Muslims, Trekkies, runners, you name it.

No matter. In the name of tolerance, McKinley refused to tolerate eHarmony’s right to operate a lawful business that didn’t give him what he wanted. He filed a discrimination complaint against eHarmony with the New Jersey Division on Civil Rights in 2005.

To be clear: eHarmony never, ever refused to do business with anyone. The company broke no laws. Their great “sin” was not providing a politically correct service that a publicity-seeking gay plaintiff demanded they provide. For three years, the company battled McKinley’s legal shakedown artists — and staved off other opportunists as well. The dating site had been previously sued by a lesbian looking to force the company to match her up with another woman, and by a married man who ridiculously sought to force the company to find him prospects for an adulterous relationship.

This case is akin to a meat-eater suing a vegetarian restaurant for not offering him a rib-eye, or a female patient suing a vasectomy doctor for not providing her hysterectomy services. But rather than defend the persecuted business, the New Jersey attorney general intervened on behalf of the gay plaintiff and wrangled an agreement out of eHarmony to change its entire business model.

The company agreed not only to offer same-sex dating services on a new site, but also to offer six-month subscriptions for free to 10,000 gay users, pay McKinley $5,000 and fork over $50,000 to New Jersey’s Civil Rights division “to cover investigation-related administrative costs.” Oh, and that’s not all. Yield, yield to the grievance-mongers:

Additional terms of the settlement include: (more…)

Crossposted from Flopping Aces

As Ace said, its easier to beg for forgiveness rather then asking for permission. So what did the MSM do? They showed extreme bias. Now its time to beg for forgiveness and promise it will never happen again…

Cough:

Media bias was more intense in the 2008 election than in any other national campaign in recent history, Time magazine’s Mark Halperin said Friday at the Politico/USC conference on the 2008 election.

“It’s the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq war,” [ed. failure to force the United States to run like cowards?] Halperin said at a panel of media analysts. “It was extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage.”

Halperin, who maintains Time’s political site “The Page,” cited two New York Times articles as examples of the divergent coverage of the two candidates.

“The example that I use, at the end of the campaign, was the two profiles that The New York Times ran of the potential first ladies,” Halperin said. “The story about Cindy McCain was vicious. It looked for every negative thing they could find about her and it case her in an extraordinarily negative light. It didn’t talk about her work, for instance, as a mother for her children, and they cherry-picked every negative thing that’s ever been written about her.”

The story about Michelle Obama, by contrast, was “like a front-page endorsement of what a great person Michelle Obama is,” according to Halperin.

These people twisted stories, disregarded stories, and lied about stories in their campaign to get Obama elected and NOW….now they realize the error of their ways?

Puhlease…

Also:

Global Warming Wrapup:

Ain’t that the truth: (h/t Tom Nelson)

In a Nov. 20 story about African negotiations on global warming, The Associated Press erroneously reported that China refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol. China has signed and ratified the pact, but like other developing nations was not asked to reduce its emissions under the 1997 protocol.

Why should they? It’s not like they are a huge polluter or anything right?

New Zealand has some common sense, and they are promptly called “a joke” by Europeans:

A leading New Zealand carbon trader says international markets can no longer take New Zealand seriously, carbon trading has come to a standstill and experts are warning business not to think carbon pricing has gone away.

~~~

Carbon News quotes Brunel as saying major players in the European market – which was last year worth $US55 billion – have been seriously interested in using the emerging New Zealand market to complement the European market.

“We are the antipodes of Europe,” Brunel said. “Their time zone is the exact opposite of ours, and there’s a real opportunity to have a 24-hour carbon market that starts in Europe and when they go into their night we take over.

“There is real interest in that because carbon is such an important market over there. Some very big players were very keen to establish a market down here because of the ability to then create a 24-hour market.

“This was New Zealand’s opportunity to reinvent its financial markets by being the Asian centre of the carbon trade.”

But this week’s announcement that the incoming government will put the ETS on hold pending a review that will go as far as considering a carbon tax instead of an ETS and will re-examine the validity of the science behind climate change, has jeopardised everything, Brunel says.

Global warming was supposed to make “killer” hurricanes right?:

Here we go again – hurricane season has come to an end and yet another year has failed to produce the widespread pain and suffering that can reinforce the claim that the buildup of greenhouse gases is the root cause of all the damage. We have covered this topic dozens of times in the past, but the literature on the subject never seems to stop oozing right through the distortion of the greenhouse crusaders. We get tired of writing about this subject over and over and we suspect you see this as another in a very long line of essays on the topic…we feel each other’s pain. The hurricane story should have been destroyed a decade ago, but for whatever reason, the global warmers continue to insist that hurricanes are increasing in frequency, intensity, and/or duration and the blame should sit squarely on carbon dioxide emissions from the United States.

~~~

The bottom line is that claims that hurricanes are increasing due to global warming are questionable, if not laughable given the enormous amount of evidence that at the very least suggests this is a very complex question.

European press: Bush the reason Kyoto was never ratified in the US. How wrong they are:

Prospects for success in the world’s struggle to combat global warming have been transformed at a stroke after US President-elect Barack Obama made it clear that America would play its full part in renewing the Kyoto Protocol climate-change treaty.

His words, in effect, brought an end to eight years of wilful climate obstructionism by the administration of George Bush, who withdrew the US from Kyoto in March 2001, thus doing incalculable damage to the efforts of the international community to construct a unified response to the threat.

The Bush withdrawal set back the international effort by nearly a decade – years in which it became increasingly clear that the warming of the atmosphere being caused by greenhouse gas emissions was proceeding much faster than UN scientists thought it would.

Uh….hello? Clinton never sent it to be ratified because it was going to be crushed. All Bush did was state the US position on Kyoto. BDS at it’s finest.

NBC misleading its viewers on melting ice:

In a taped segment for NBC “Nightly News” Nov. 19 Curry presented a dire image of the volcanic glacier and connected its ice loss to climate change – presumably she meant global warming, not global cooling.

“Mt. Kilimanjaro has become a kind of poster-child for climate change. Eighty-four percent of the ice has disappeared in less than 100 years and by 2020, scientists expect as early as that it could all be gone,” Curry said.

Curry also cited the “dramatic change” in the amount of ice on the mountain with a photographic comparison: 1980 and 2008.

But what Curry didn’t tell viewers was that “most scientists who study Kilimanjaro’s glaciers have long been uneasy with the volcano’s poster-child status,” according to Seattle Times science reporter Sandi Doughton.

Why were those scientists “uneasy?” Because despite its status as an “icon of global warming,” climate scientists like Philip Mote say Kilimanjaro’s melt hasn’t been caused by greenhouse gases “from cars, power plants and factories.”

~~~

According to Doughton’s article, the ice loss on the Tanzanian glacier “seems to be driven by two factors: a lack of snowfall and sublimation.”

The glacier has also been declining for more than a century – “since long before humans began pumping large amounts of carbon dioxide in to the atmosphere” according to Mote.

Planet has cooled since Bush took office:

On this symbolic date, it seems worthwhile to reflect that the planet has not only cooled since George W. Bush took office – pause and let the significance of that one sink in – but began to chill significantly at almost precisely the moment that we signed the Kyoto Protocol, exactly ten years ago today.

Global warming? Nope, it’s another Ice Age:

The IPCC prediction of global temperatures, 1° F warmer by 2011 and 2° F by 2038 (Fig. 1), stand little chance of being correct. NASA’s imagery showing that the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) has shifted to its cool phase is right on schedule as predicted by past climate and PDO changes (Easterbrook, 2001, 2006, 2007). The PDO typically lasts 25-30 years and assures North America of cool, wetter climates during its cool phases and warmer, drier climates during its warm phases. The establishment of the cool PDO, together with similar cooling of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), virtually assures several decades of global cooling and the end of the past 30-year warm phase. It also means that the IPCC predictions of catastrophic global warming this century were highly inaccurate.

~~~

Global warming (i.e, the warming since 1977) is over. The minute increase of anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere (0.008%) was not the cause of the warming—it was a continuation of natural cycles that occurred over the past 500 years.

The PDO cool mode has replaced the warm mode in the Pacific Ocean, virtually assuring us of about 30 years of global cooling, perhaps much deeper than the global cooling from about 1945 to 1977. Just how much cooler the global climate will be during this cool cycle is uncertain. Recent solar changes suggest that it could be fairly severe, perhaps more like the 1880 to 1915 cool cycle than the more moderate 1945-1977 cool cycle. A more drastic cooling, similar to that during the Dalton and Maunder minimums, could plunge the Earth into another Little Ice Age, but only time will tell if that is likely.

Global warming is dead:

Recently, NBC’s chief environmental affairs analyst Anne Thompson once said there is “no doubt that man is responsible for global warming” and every scientist worth their weight in beaker solvent agrees that the globe has been warming steadily over the past four decades.

One problem, though—the past two-plus years have seen a precipitous decline in global temperatures that negated the increase of the prior eight-year period (1998-2006). We’re talking a whole 0.2 degrees Celsius! Then there’s the nasty problem of the “little Ice Age” which appeared to be sending the world into an icy new era during the 1970s.

With world temperatures already depressed far below normal levels, the subsequent rise over the following three decades becomes much more ominous. It is exactly this kind of clever accounting that is responsible for the hysterical call for enormous curbing of carbon-dioxide emissions and the institution of crippling cap-and-trade schemes all across the world which target emission-heavy industries like coal-fired power plants for extinction.

~~~

No matter which side any particular observer may fall on in this debate, one thing has become ominously clear—the verbiage is changing. It is rare to hear the words “global warming” coming from anyone but rabid environmentalists these days, while “climate change” is the term du jour. Perhaps a modicum of backpedaling in light of hard evidence against their once prominent beliefs? You decide.

Environazi’s doing what they are good at….scaring people:

Both exhibits frankly aim to scare visitors into changing their personal habits to improve life on our shared planet.

~~~

“This is scary,” said Josh Lane, 12, of Randolph, after touring the exhibit. “The world will be much different. Animals will go extinct. If we don’t do somethsing, the world will never be the same.”

As visitors leave, they can write down their thoughts and concerns for the future, which are clipped to a 12-foot wall. Many are children’s drawings that show impressions of pollution decorated with sad faces.

A debate between warming alarmist David Karoly and sceptic Bill Kininmonth:

The climate change debate between David Karoly of Melbourne University and Bill Kininmonth (ex Bureau of Meteorology)last night in Melbourne was well attended with lots of vocal support for the heretics’ position. Karoly came across as patronising, and resorted to hectoring the audience when the degree of opposition to him became clear. A pseudo-academic version of Al Gore. As an example of his approach, one of his first slides showed ice melting in the northern hemisphere but he completely neglected to mention the lack of melting in Antarctica. He did a great job in reinforcing the weakness of the AGW position and I’m more convinced than ever that this stuff is just an interesting hypothesis that has been taken over by vested interests.

More scare mongering from NBC:

MEREDITH VIEIRA: Matt [Lauer] is in Belize, he’s off the coast at a place called the Blue Hole. It is the home to some of the most exotic marine life in the world, and all sorts of beautiful coral reefs and they’re all being threatened because the water temperatures are rising.Al [Roker] on the other hand is in Iceland looking at the glaciers which store most of our fresh water. And if they were to melt, the oceans could rise at least 200 feet.

Forget Al Gore’s measly 20-foot sea level rise from “An Inconvenient Truth.” That’s small potatoes compared to the kind of catastrophe Meredith Vieira was talking about last night. Kicking off NBC’s Global Alarmism Green Week during the halftime of Sunday Night Football, Vieira raised the spectre of the seas rising . . . 200 feet! Al imagined much of Manhattan under water, but if Meredith’s scenario comes true, we’re near to talking Manhattan, Kansas By The Sea!

Just one little problem: Meredith’s talk of 200 feet exaggerates the increase predicted by scientists by . . . literally hundreds of times.
And finally, show your support for a common sense film called Not Evil, Just Wrong:

Finally:

President Of Fox News Tells Network To Tone Down Attacks On Obama

And here I thought it was the obligation of the media in this country to report on news that will affect its citizens. It’s supposed to be unbiased but instead we get get the O’ network (MSNBC) going out of its way to report on any news that will support Obama and make his opponents look bad. Hell, the election is over with and the O’ network still report on some turkeys getting killed behind Sarah Palin as she was interviewed. That’s news? Here I thought the turkey on our tables were grown on trees.

So, about that obligation….Roger Ailes, president of the Fox network, has told his people to tone down any stories on Obama that would “obstruct” the incoming administration: (h/t Newsbusters)

Ailes responded to the report in the New York Daily News that he instructed FNC to tone down attacks on President-elect Barack Obama. He denied giving specific orders, but said he told staffers “all presidents deserve time to get their team on the ground and get organized.” “We have some obligation in a new presidency not to attempt to destabilize it,” he said. As for whether the big stars will heed the advice, he tells Gold: “Who knows? Most of them do whatever the hell they want.”

While the media shouldn’t obstruct a incoming administration, it most definitely has an obligation to report on its shortcomings….which is not “obstructing.”

From Red Maryland

After the third arrest of a Washington DC teen, the local police had enough. Specifically, the suspect in question has allegedly committed 21 robberies, in which he sneaks up behind victims and knocks them to the ground. He then robs his prey of items such as money, cellphones, and IPODS. Still, this punk was allowed to continue to roam the streets of DC. Therefore, the police devised a plan. In a plea send to subscribers of his 3rd District Substation e-mail group, Inspector Edward Delgado asked everyone to “Flood the email system (of Attorney General Peter Nickles) today because time is critical in this matter. Let them not release this criminal yet again into the community.”

Instead of embracing the opportunity to hear from the citizens of his locality, Peter Nickles blasted the effort by police. “I don’t mind getting 20 e-mails about a particular problem that reflects the unique perspective of people in the community”, he said, “but I don’t approve of an organized campaign to send me 50 e-mails”. He added, “I haven’t touched them. I told my secretary to put them in a pile.”

Well, I hate to bring this to Mr. Nickles’ attention, but it’s his duty to carry out the will of the people. While he may not face the voters directly, he serves at the pleasure of the elected mayor. Therefore, if Nickles thinks he’s above answering to the citizens of Washington DC, perhaps the mayor should send him a stern reminder.
(more…)

By Dick Morris

It is still hard to believe but, if Hillary Clinton’s “confidantes” are to be trusted, Barack Obama is about to appoint her secretary of state and she is about to accept. This appointment represents the capstone of betrayal of Obama’s promise to be the “change we can believe in.”

Having upended the Democratic Party, largely over his different views on foreign policy and the war in Iraq, he now turns to the leader of the ancient regime he ousted, derided, mocked and criticized to take over the top international-affairs position in his administration.

No longer, apparently, does he distrust Hillary’s “judgment,” as he did during the debates when he denounced her vote on the Iraq War resolution. Now, all is forgiven. After all, Obama’s election, the only change he apparently truly believed in, is a fait accompli.

Apart from the breathtaking cynicism of the appointment lies the total lack of foreign-policy experience in the new partnership. Neither Clinton nor Obama has spent five minutes conducting any aspect of foreign policy in the past. Neither has ever negotiated anything or dealt with diplomatic issues. It is the blonde leading the blind.

And then there is the question of whether we want a Secretary of State who is compromised, in advance, by her husband’s dealings with repressive regimes in Kuwait, Kazakhstan, Dubai, the UAE, Morocco, and governments about which we know nothing. These foreign leaders have paid the Clinton family millions of dollars E2 directly and through their library and/or foundation – funds they can and have used as personal income. How do we know that she can conduct foreign policy independently even if it means biting those who have fed her and her husband?

But the most galling aspect of the appointment is that it puts Obama in the midst of an Administration which, while he appointed it, is not his own. Rather he has now created a government staffed by Clinton people, headed by Clinton appointees, and dominated by Hillary herself. He has willingly created the same untenable situation as that into which Lyndon Johnson stepped when JFK was assassinated in 1963. Johnson inherited a cabinet wholly staffed by Kennedy intimates with Bobby himself as Attorney General. LBJ had no choice and had to spend two years making the government his own. But Obama had all the options in the world and chose to fence himself in by appointing Hillary as Secretary of States, Clinton cabinet member Bill Richardson for Commerce, Clinton staffer Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff, Clinton buddy (and top lobbyist) Tom Daschle to HHS, and Bill’s Deputy Attorney General, Eric Holder, to Justice.
(more…)

by Chris Cavey

Since the November 4th election, there has been much ballyhoo about the redefinition and much needed re-packaging of the Republican Party, especially as to whom should be the authors and leaders of this remake and even how to get started.

Republicans need self examination. The party of Lincoln has become two-parties. One side is a party of conservatives, who invoke everything, correctly or incorrectly in the name of Ronald Reagan. The other side is a party which has morphed into some brand of Democrat-lite. Both are wrong, the election was the proof on many levels.

Ten short months ago America was full of “doubtful” voters. There was no clear front-runner in either the Republican or Democrat primaries. People in the neighborhoods and local precincts soon sorted it out, however, one vote at a time.

Abraham Lincoln knew that elections were won one vote at a time. On February 21, 1840, he talked about campaign organization for the Whig Party. He was quoted: “Keep a constant watch on the doubtful voters and … have them talked to by those in whom they have the most confidence.”

Push forward to today where precinct leaders and local committee people from both parties worked to influence friends and neighbors. Everyone was clear on only one issue: change was coming. George W. Bush was leaving. Apparently the Democratic Party had a clearer definition of this change and a superior way of selling it.

Now, in the aftermath, it is time for the Republican Party to get with the program and change. Not necessarily a change in principles, but a dramatic change in packaging. This election Republicans were selling 1980 with every candidate invoking the Reagan factor, while the Democrats were 28 years ahead and on the cutting edge of candidate packaging.

Republicans had the oldest candidate ever to run – the first time – for president trying to invoke the 28-year-old ideals of the oldest president ever elected (his second term). Even when they added a hip young conservative woman to the ticket, she was throttled within weeks, like a father grounding his daughter for getting bad grades on an exam.

(more…)

Crossposted from Flopping Aces

Looks like the Supreme Court will conference on the Obama citizenship lawsuit:

A case that challenges President-elect Barack Obama’s name on the 2008 election ballot citing questions over his citizenship has been scheduled for a “conference” at the U.S. Supreme Court.

Conferences are private meetings of the justices at which they review cases and decide which ones to accept for formal review. This case is set for a conference Dec. 5, just 10 days before the Electoral College is scheduled to meet to make formal the election of Obama as the nation’s next president.

The Supreme Court’s website listed the date for the case brought by Leo C. Donofrio against Nina Wells, the secretary of state in New Jersey, over not only Obama’s name on the 2008 election ballot but those of two others, Sen. John McCain and Roger Calero.

The case, unsuccessful at the state level, had been submitted to Justice David Souter, who rejected it. The case then was resubmitted to Justice Clarence Thomas. The next line on the court’s docket says: “DISTRIBUTED for Conference of December 5, 2008.”

If four of the nine justices vote to hear the case in full, oral argument may be scheduled.

The action questions whether any of the three candidates is qualified under the U.S. Constitution’s requirement that a president be a “natural-born citizen.”

The rest of the article goes on to detail the fact that the FEC has waived its right to respond to the Berg complaint:

“There are a number of reasons why the respondents here would choose not to respond. First, because the court only grants between 70 and 120 of the 8,000 or so petitions it receives every year, perhaps they just liked their odds of Berg’s petition getting denied. Second, because they have made arguments as to Berg’s lack of standing several times at the district court level and beyond, perhaps they felt as though any arguments had already been made and were available on the record. Or, perhaps the waiver shows that the FEC and other respondents do not take seriously the allegations put forth by Berg, and did not wish to legitimize the claims with a response,” the blogger speculated.

“Another thing which is not completely clear is whether the FEC is filing for itself or on behalf of all respondents,” he added.

“If it were just the FEC filing the waiver, I must say that I’m surprised,” Berg told America’s Right. “I’m surprised because I think they should take the position that the Supreme Court should grant standing to us. I think they have a responsibility not only to Phil Berg, but to all citizens of this country, to put forth a sense of balance which otherwise doesn’t seem to exist.

“However, if this was filed by the FEC on behalf of the DNC and Barack Obama too, it reeks of collusion,” he said, noting that the attorney from the solicitor general’s office should be representing federal respondents and not the DNC or Obama.

Stop The ACLU is asking those of us who believe there is a valid question to Obama’s place of birth to write to SCOTUS at:

The Honorable Associate Justice
Clarence Thomas
United States Supreme Court
One First St. N. E.
Washington DC 20543

Put docket # on Envelope 08-A407

Ask him UPHOLD our Constitution with Full Disclosure as the only Constitutionally viable answer.

Not too hard is it? Full disclosure. But as commenter CTN has stated on this earlier thread, its not only the question of producing the original live birth certificate:

More specifically, the issue at hand is one fold — “loyalty” — as demonstrated by the founding fathers’ absolute, non-negotiable insistence that only a “natural born citizen” could hold the executive office. They placed this requirement in the Constitution to insure that no one with any conflicts of interest would sit as president, and in this case “conflict of interest” means “possible loyalty to another country.”

Obama’s website has already conceded that he is a “natural born citizen” of Kenya, which was under the dominion of the King when he was born, and that he allegedly allowed his Kenyan citizenship to expire when he turned 21. Expiration does not remove the problem, however, because it does not eradicate his “natural,” i.e. “inherent,” loyalty. In other words, assuming Obama was born in Hawaii, he would hold “natural born citizenship” in two different countries, which is tantamount to saying that he has “dual loyalties” to two different dominions.

This means that, in the end, someone will have to define the founding fathers’ intent vis-à-vis the “natural born citizen” requirement. Did they require a pure pedigree? — or would they accept split loyalties in the executive office? The answer to this question strikes me as a no-brainer. My brain notwithstanding, however, the question must be answered at a constitutional level — the Supremes must define “natural born citizenship” and they must apply their definition to the Constitutional requirement. In short, Obama’s in a world of hurt, which explains why this Harvard-trained Constitutional attorney has consistently ducked the issue. Once he produces a birth certificate, he will be compelled to answer all the other questions, and there is no satisfactory answer that won’t demonstrate his dual loyalties.

Consider, for example, that less than one year ago Obama campaigned for his cousin Odinga in Kenya. Most Americans understand that an American senator campaigning in Kenya for a Communist who pledged to institute Sharia Law was problematic. This matter becomes even more complex when you remember that the same American senator is a “natural born citizen” of Kenya — it just looks funny. And now he wants to be president.

I’m telling ya, the next four years will see a increase in popcorn sales.

Also:

Majority Of Americans Approve Of The Way Obama Does Nothing

Awesome! 61% of the American people approve of how Obama is doing nothing. A higher percentage then he got in the general election:

Overall, 61% of voters somewhat or strongly approve of Obama’s performance so far while 35% disapprove.

But I have to say, come January 21st….that number will be going down down down.

Finally:

Rebuilding the Conservative Majority

You don’t get there by compromise!

While I have been procrastinating on an in depth post about reorganizing the Republican Party, I’ve been reading a lot of great material like this op-ed by South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint(R):

Republicans Must Fight for Freedom to Regain America’s Trust
By Senator Jim DeMint(R-SC)

November 10, 2008 – They say that elephants never forget, but that’s exactly what the Grand Old Party has done.

Between the 1950s and 1970s, Rockefeller and Nixon Republicans kept the party in a seemingly permanent minority with a “me-too” philosophy that allowed Democrats to balloon the size and scope of government.

But, when Ronald Reagan ran unashamed on conservative principles in 1980 and Republicans in Congress embraced bold conservative reforms in 1994, America responded with overwhelming approval.

Since then, many Republicans have run for office as conservatives but governed as scandal-plagued big-spending moderates. They stopped offering common-sense solutions and broke promises with Americans by overspending and wasteful earmarking to special interests.

In the name of bipartisanship, our leaders supported amnesty, big new entitlements, more federal control of education, and compromises on energy. And too often Republicans shied away from defending values of life, family and faith.

The final straw for many was a series of Wall Street bailouts that cost over a trillion dollars and looked more like knee-jerk socialism than confident conservative leadership.

No wonder Republicans have lost a dozen Senate seats and nearly 50 House seats in two years.

Democrats will likely mistake Republican failures as a mandate for their liberal policies. Obama promises to “spread the wealth” and repeal all restrictions on abortion.
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From Red Maryland

The CEO’s of Ford, GM and Chrysler left Washington yesterday empty handed. Hopefully, this ends any talk of a bailout for the automotive industry. Clearly, these companies don’t need additional capital. Instead, they need to hire someone to better manage their current finances. After all, it’s hard for me to empathize with these beggars when I struggle to afford an airline ticket on coach while they continually enjoy the luxuries of a private jet.

Yesterday, Rep. Brad Sherman of California derailed the automotive executives by requesting them to “raise their hand if they flew here commercial.” Sherman continued, “Let the record show, no hands went up. Second, I’m going to ask you to raise your hand if you are planning to sell your jet in place now and fly back commercial. Let the record show, no hands went up.”

After the hearing, the Big 3 released the following statements:

GM- “Making a big to-do about this when issues vital to the jobs of millions of Americans are being discussed in Washington is diverting attention away from a critical debate that will determine the future health of the auto industry and the American economy,” (GM spokesman Tom Wilkinson)

Chrysler-”while always being mindful of company costs, all business travel requires the highest standard of safety for all employees.” (Chrysler spokeswoman Lori McTavish)

Ford declined to comment through spokesperson Kelli Felker. Instead, they hid behind their company policies. Well, it sounds to me like there needs to be some modifications made to Ford’s long standing procedures. In the same way, GM better learn that while they may not think it’s a big deal, it’s a huge bone of contention among us taxpayers. In addition, Chrysler needs to come up with a better excuse than personal safety. Face it, very few people would even recognize an automotive executive. Even if someone did, how and why would they be subjected to any more danger than anyone else?
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By Frederick Meekins

As the nation’s capital, Washington DC is often looked to for various approaches on how to handle a number of growing issues around the country. Usually government eggheads like to formulate their grandiose schemes from their comfortable halls of power and impose them upon areas of the heartland so far from scrutinizing eyes that very few end up seeing what is actually going on. However, there are now a number of policies being implemented within the city that will soon be at the forefront of efforts to undermine life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

In the episode of “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” titled “Past Tense”, areas called Sanctuary Districts were established in mid-21st century America as places in major cities in which to corral the economically challenged irrespective of their criminal status. Though initially established in the name of the well being of those assigned to reside there, according to the entry at Star Trek Wiki Memory Alpha, “This internment, in fact, amounted to nothing less than imprisonment.”

Those thinking their feet are more firmly planted on the ground and heads out of the clouds will no doubt respond that all that is just a story that could never become reality. Think again.

In order to curb the crime in the Trinidad neighborhood of Northeast, Washington, DC, police established “Neighborhood Safety Zones” where checkpoints were set up blocking access. It’s bad enough if law enforcement just about literally points a gun at the head of everyone coming into the neighborhood compelling motorists to permit officers to ransack through vehicles regardless of whether or not anything suspicious is going on.

However, things have gone beyond the limits of conscience when American citizens that have neither been convicted nor accused of a crime are then forbidden from proceeding down a free public street. Supporters of these police state tactics will counter that those entering the neighborhood with a “legitimate purpose” such as “going to a doctor, to church, or visiting a relative” could be granted access.

For starters, who are police to determine if an activity that does not violate pre-established law is of a legitimate purpose or not? Secondly, people that must divulge their law abiding activities to law enforcement who then pass judgment as to whether or not such innocent undertakings are appropriate are dangerously close to losing one of the most basic of fundamental liberties that at one time set this country apart from the lesser nations of the earth. Do we really want to further condition the American people into embracing their status as docile little Pavlovians who eagerly wag their tails every time the government blows its whistle and demands that we reveal additional information about ourselves?

Though it was claimed motorists would be granted access if they had legitimate reasons to enter the neighborhood, individuals with valid reasons in fact claim they were turned away. What part of public in “public street” don’t these Keystone Cops not understand?

For now, these blockades are often temporary. What is to prevent them from being made permanent and expanded in the future?

What is to stop authorities from turning the entire federal city into a Neighborhood Safety Zone with anyone barred entry that cannot prove either residency or occupational status in the district? Already in the name of preventing terrorism, Americans are denied access to structures we are repeatedly told through propaganda belong to all of us such as the Capitol building in Washington, DC and the Statue of Liberty in New York City.

If there is power now to tell us whether or not we are to be granted access to structures belonging to “the people” and once deemed public, makes you wonder if there might come a day that they might tell you what otherwise lawful discretionary activity you can and cannot enjoy in your own home. Wait, they are already trying to do that now.

If these checkpoints are constitutional, what is to stop them from being implemented across the United States either independently by various municipalities or through the promulgation of a presidential executive order such as those already quietly drafted basically saying the government can essentially take from you anything it wants and do to you anything it wants including compulsory civilian involuntary servitude during a time of so-called “national emergency”. Through implementing nationwide “safety zones”, only those granted police or bureaucratic approval would be permitted to move within or without specified jurisdictions. There are likely those such as Al Gore and even Barack Obama (who chastised Americans for eating too much and driving SUV’s even though he has been seen locomoting in this particular kind of vehicular conveyance on numerous occasions who would probably have no qualms about implementing such measures in the name of the environment.
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