Author: papundits

By William Warren

See more Cartoons by William Warren, and Great Articles at NetRight Nation Blog

Filed under: 111th Congress, America (USA), Barry Soetoro (aka Barack Hussein Obama), Cartoons, Conniving Politicians, Democrats, economy, Humor, Liberals, Lily-Livered Liberals, Limp-Wrist Liberals, Political Prostitutes, Power Hungry, Propaganda, Public Opinion, Satire, Spine Donor Politicians Tagged: Budget Deficit, NetRight Nation Blog, Obama Deficit, Political Cartoons, Political Humor, Political Satire, President Obama, Tony, William Warren

By Alan Caruba

Alan Caruba writes a daily post at Warning Signs. A business and science writer, he is the founder of The National Anxiety Center.

Read more thought provoking articles at Warning Signs

Filed under: 111th Congress, America (USA), Barry Soetoro (aka Barack Hussein Obama), Cartoons, Conniving Politicians, Democrats, economy, Humor, Liberals, Lily-Livered Liberals, Limp-Wrist Liberals, Political Prostitutes, Politics, Power Hungry, Propaganda, Satire, Spine Donor Politicians Tagged: Alan Caruba, Budget Considerations, Obama Budget, Political Cartoons, Political Humor, Political Satire, Tony, Warning Signs

By Andrew Bolt

That deceitfully named “carbon pollution” – actually just carbon dioxide – turns out to be wonderful for greening the planet:

However, a new study to be published the week of Feb. 1 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has found evidence that forests in the Eastern United States are growing faster than they have in the past 225 years. The study offers a rare look at how an ecosystem is responding to climate change…

“We made a list of reasons these forests could be growing faster and then ruled half of them out,” said Parker. The ones that remained included increased temperature, a longer growing season and increased levels of atmospheric CO2.

Shouldn’t greens love anything that gives us more and healthier forests?

(Via Watts Up With That.)

Andrew Bolt is a journalist and columnist writing for The Herald Sun in Melbourne Victoria Australia.

Read more excellent articles from Andrew Bolt’s Blog

Filed under: America (USA), Climate Alarmists, Climate Change, Environment, Environmental activists, Fanatics, Fear-mongering, Global Warming, Liberals, Lily-Livered Liberals, Limp-Wrist Liberals, Politics, Power Hungry, Propaganda Tagged: Andrew Bolt, Carbon Dioxide (CO2) Emissions, Carbon Dioxide Greenhouse Gas, Climate Change Religion, Global Warming Hype, Global Warming Hypocrisy, Tony

By Alan Caruba

The utterly baseless case for “global warming” is melting a lot faster than the glaciers in India’s Himalayas which, by the way, are not melting.

It is time for the Nobel Committee to rescind the Peace Prize given to Al Gore and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

It is time for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences committee to take back Al Gore’s Oscar for “An Inconvenient Truth”, an alleged documentary that became mandatory viewing for students in the U.S. and around the world. Purporting to “prove” that the Earth was rapidly warming due to the rise in “greenhouse gases”, it is a fraud.

In the event the news hasn’t reached you, in mid-August 2009, after repeated requests for the Climate Research Unit’s raw data from which it calculated global temperatures, the CRU at the University of East Anglia (UK), a key element of the UN’s IPCC, announced that it had discarded the data, thereby making it impossible to determine if their assertions of rising global temperatures were accurate and true. Or not.

In October 2009, in the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America, it was demonstrated that the IPCC’s tree ring data from Russia that showed a cooling after 1961 had been disguised in its report (AR4) that, of course, asserted the Earth was warming.

A month later, just prior to a huge, international Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen, emails from the CRU were leaked, revealing the lengths to which the CRU staff had gone to discredit and suppress any independent studies that disputed the global warming thesis.

In brief, the entire “scientific” basis on which the IPCC “scientists” and global warming advocates like Al Gore made their claims was a fraud. It rendered AR4 “scientifically questionable” in the polite parlance of the worldwide scientific community.

In January, Joe D’Aleo and E. Michael Smith released a detailed report that indicted the U.S. National Climatic Data Center and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies for having eliminated many meteorological stations from their data bases in recent years and, to no one’s surprise, the stations were mostly in colder climate areas. Without their data, the “warmists” could continue to claim the Earth was in a warming cycle.

None of this came as a surprise to the “deniers” and “skeptics”, many of them internationally renowned climatologists and meteorologists, who had attended the Heartland Institute’s two international conferences on climate change, participating in seminars and addressing attendees to provide the truth; the Earth has been in a cooling cycle since 1998, any prior warming was a normal and natural cycle following the Little Ice Age that ended around 1850, and the claims of the IPCC and other alleged science-based government agencies were utterly false.

The sheer magnitude of the deception, directed and orchestrated from within a United Nations entity, given support by United States and British agencies, and further supported by multi-national groups such as the European Union, made it difficult for the average person to believe anything other than the elements of the hoax that were constantly proclaimed and then reinforced by the media and Hollywood.

When the global warming dam burst, millions around the world would conclude what they had always suspected; there was no global warming and all the billions spent in the name of “reducing greenhouse gases” or “clean energy” was part of a massive fraud, a set-up to permit new forms of taxation and to enrich the participants.

That is the case against multinational organizations such as the United Nations and the European Union, to name just two. They are, too often, giant propaganda machines whose agenda is to eliminate fundamental concepts of individual liberty and freedom, replacing them with faceless bureaucrats with no obligation to be responsive to citizens anywhere.

A U.S. President, Barack Obama, who attended the UN Copenhagen Conference and would, in the course of his State of the Union speech, claim that there was “overwhelming evidence” of climate change a.k.a. global warming, is part of the cabal that would waste taxpayer’s billions on “green jobs”, “clean energy”, and “biofuels” as opposed to actually encouraging the building of nuclear and coal-fired plants, exploring and extracting offshore oil and natural gas reserves, and maintaining the nation’s vital infrastructure.

A rogue government agency, the Environmental Protection Agency, is brazenly warning Congress that it will regulate carbon dioxide if it does not pass the patently false “Cap-and-Trade” legislation intended to limit so-called “greenhouse gases.” The EPA must be reined in and a complete housecleaning is necessary to repeal the many regulations and laws based on the global warming fraud.

The U.S. needs a new Congress filled with men and women who want to protect the nation against the frauds perpetrated by its own science-related agencies, to kill legislation that would impose a massive tax on energy use, and bring the global warming advocates within the government to the bar of justice.

The world needs to dissolve the United Nations in the same way it shunted aside the useless League of Nations. The present institution should be broken into units that perform legitimate services, but governance is not a legitimate purpose. No global taxes. No global army. No global propaganda machine.

Nations, worldwide, need to reclaim their sovereignty and then work together for the mutual goal of peace and other worthwhile causes.

Alan Caruba writes a daily post at Warning Signs. A business and science writer, he is the founder of The National Anxiety Center.

Read more thought provoking articles at Warning Signs

Filed under: 111th Congress, America (USA), Blundering Bureaucrats, Climate Alarmists, Climate Change, Conniving Politicians, Democrats, Environment, Environmental activists, Europe, Fanatics, Fear-mongering, Fraud/Waste, Global Warming, Great Britain, Liberals, Lily-Livered Liberals, Limp-Wrist Liberals, Political Prostitutes, Politics, Power Hungry, Propaganda, Public Opinion, Spine Donor Politicians, U.K., U.N. – United Nations (United Nitwits) Tagged: Alan Caruba, Carbon Cap And Trade Tax, Carbon Dioxide (CO2) Emissions, Clean Energy Fraud, Climate Change Fraud, Climate Change Religion, Climategate, Environmental protection Agency (EPA), Global Warming Alarmism, Global Warming Hype, Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Tony, UK Climatic Research Institute (CRU), UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), University of East Anglia, Warning Signs

By Nick Loris

President Obama released his fiscal year 2011 budget this morning; his budget provides $28.4 billion for the Department of Energy (DOE) and $10 billion for Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Both sections in the budget reflect the president’s message in the State of the Union address delivered last week: a government attempt to facilitate America’s transition to a clean energy economy.

Highlights of the DOE budget include:

$36 billion for Nuclear Loan Guarantees: Many are writing that nuclear is one of the big winners this year because of the $36 billion in new loan guarantees, but $18.5 billion in authorized loan guarantees already exists to provide predictability after years of erratic regulatory hurdles. Extending the loan guarantee program is not only unnecessary but will also crowd out technological development within and across the nuclear industry by artificially reducing the capital cost for large, lightwater reactors. In reality, a loan guarantee extention could prevent a dynamic, robust nuclear industry by reducing the need to innovate and creat private sector solutions to financing.

$4.7 billion for Clean Energy: Obama’s budget calls for a five percent increase for the energy efficiency and renewable energy section which includes funding for solar, biofuels, advanced vehicle technologies and energy efficiency improvements in buildings. Research and development may be a plausible role for the government, but much of this money is being spent on private sector responsibilities.

The reason the private sector isn’t investing in these technologies (without help from the government) is a telling sign that these energy sources aren’t economical. One project that is still many years away from commercialization is carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). The clean energy section also includes $545 million for clean coal technologies, most notably carbon CCS. Even after the extraordinary technological and economic hurdles have been cleared, the political and environmental obstacles to storing tens or hundreds of millions of gallons of liquid CO2 each day must be overcome.

Elimination of Tax Credits for Coal, Oil and Natural Gas: The budget also plans to reduce the deficit by eliminating $36.5 billion in tax breaks to the oil and natural gas industry. Without removing tax breaks and subsidies to other sources of energy, this is essentially a tax increase on our proven sources of energy. Removing government support isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it should be done across the board.

Highlights of the EPA budget include:

Revenue Neutral Cap and Trade: Last year, President Obama’s Budget said a cap and trade system would generate $646 billion in revenue from 2012 to 2019 from higher energy taxes. This year, a footnote in the President’s budget says that cap and trade will be deficit neutral since “proceeds from emissions allowances will be used to compensate vulnerable families, communities, and businesses during the transition to a clean-energy economy.” The reason a cap and trade bill is revenue neutral is because most of the energy tax revenue was handed out to big businesses lobbying for a slice of the pie. The Heritage Foundation’s analysis of the Boxer-Kerry Senate cap and trade bill found that the government will collect $4.6 trillion in higher energy taxes from 2012-2035. While all this would likely be given away, a cap and trade bill would actually increase a family’s share of the debt because an energy tax will lower Americans’ incomes. Lower incomes generate lower tax revenues and have a real impact on government expenditures and debt levels. Heritage analysis found a family of four’s share of the national debt would actually rise by an additional $27,000.

Mitigating Climate Change: The EPA’s section of the budget also includes $21 million to implement a Mandatory Greenhouse Gas Reporting Rule and “$56 million – including $43 million in new funding – for the EPA and states to address climate change effectively through regulatory initiatives to control greenhouse gas emissions.” With the EPA set to move forward with its backdoor global warming policy, beginning with new regulations for vehicle tailpipe emissions, it appears the administration is willing to provide the funding. Congress should amend the Clean Air Act in order to prevent unelected government bureaucrats from bankrupting the nation.

In his opening message in the budget President Obama said, “Because we know the nation that leads in clean energy will be the nation that leads the world.” There are a few countries that have gone down this road and would beg to differ.

Contributing Author Nick Loris writes at The Heritage Foundation and he is a Research Assistant at The Heritage Foundation’s Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies.

Read more informative articles at Heritage – The Foundry

Filed under: 111th Congress, America (USA), Blundering Bureaucrats, Climate Alarmists, Climate Change, Conniving Politicians, Democrats, economy, Environment, Environmental activists, Fraud/Waste, Global Warming, Infrastructure Problems, Liberals, Lily-Livered Liberals, Limp-Wrist Liberals, Political Prostitutes, Politics, Power Hungry, Propaganda, Spine Donor Politicians Tagged: Carbon Cap And Trade Tax, Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), Climate Change Religion, Department Of Energy (DOE), Energy Tax, Environmental protection Agency (EPA), Global Warming Hype, Heritage – The Foundry, Tony

By Glenn Foden

Does anyone seriously believe he will really push for nuclear, offshore drilling, natural gas or that Pelosi/Reid will let it go through?

Glenn Foden contributes cartoons at NewsBusters and does editorial cartoon work for CNSNews as well as the Business and Media Institute and the Culture and Media Institute.

See and Read more Quality Material at NewsBusters

Filed under: 111th Congress, America (USA), Barry Soetoro (aka Barack Hussein Obama), Conniving Politicians, Democrats, Environment, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Infrastructure Problems, Liberals, Lily-Livered Liberals, Limp-Wrist Liberals, Political Prostitutes, Politics, Power Hungry, Propaganda, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Spine Donor Politicians Tagged: Glenn Foden, NewsBusters, Nuclear Power Plants, Obama State Of The Union Address, offshore drilling, Political Cartoons, Political Humor, Political Satire, President Obama, Tony

By Andrew Bolt

The only real things that’s changed now is the media’s willingness to see the fraud and fiddling that was always part of the great global warming scam. To finally see the fraud and fiddling that bloggers have written about for years.

Example? Well, take the Guardian.

For nearly three years, mathematician Douglas Keenan has campaigned to get the University of East Anglia, the University of Albany, the IPCC and the media to accept that a key piece of evidence behind the IPCC’s claims that the world was warming was based on a study that was wrong, if not outright fraudulent. Keenan described not just the tricking up of results to hide the urban heat island effect, but the disgraceful efforts by climate scientists and University of Albany administrators to hush up the scandal.

When Climategate broke last year (again, through the blogs), I discovered and noted that one Climategate scientist, Australian Tom Wigley, was so shocked by this particular scandal that he had written scathing (private) emails to the head of the now discredited Climatic Research Unit, Phil Jones, damning what had been done.

I also summarised the scandal, which had also been well-covered by other blogs:

One of the biggest problems with calculating temperature trends over the past century is how much to allow for the fact that measurements in our fast-growing concrete jungles will suffer from the “urban heat island” effect of all those extra machines and concrete. How much of the warming until 2001 must be discounted as a result?..

The IPCC’s 2007 report made an allowance that drew heavily on a 1990 paper by Phil Jones that dismissed the UHI effect as largely trivial. That in turn drew heavily on a paper by Professor Wang Wei-Chyung of Albany, State University of New York, which presented data from China which both Wang and Jones claimed came from stations that had “few, if any, changes in instrumentation, location or observation times”, and so could be relied upon.

Mathematician Doug Keenan and others obtained the original Wang data and used it to track down the Chinese weather stations. They found that 49 of the 84 stations used actually had no records of station location, eight had inconsistent histories, 18 had been moved a considerable distance, and only seven were known not to have been relocated. One station had five different locations in 30 years as far as 41 km apart.

Wang seemed to have lied. His data was essentially worthless, and Jones’ (and the IPCC’s) claim that the Urban Heat Island effect was trivial now seemed unsupported by solid evidence.

For all this time, the Guardian kept up its alarmist campaign on global warming, and ignored this particular scandal.

But today I read that the Guardian has a “scoop” thanks to its “investigation” and “today reveals” what it last year wouldn’t:

Phil Jones, the beleaguered British climate scientist at the centre of the leaked emails controversy, is facing fresh claims that he sought to hide problems in key temperature data on which some of his work was based.

A Guardian investigation of thousands of emails and documents apparently hacked from the University of East Anglia’s climatic research unit has found evidence that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed and that documents relating to them could not be produced.

And Wigley and his emails are “revealed”, too:

Today the Guardian reveals how Jones withheld the information requested under freedom of information laws. Subsequently a senior colleague told him he feared that Jones’s collaborator, Wei-­Chyung Wang of the University at Albany, had “screwed up”.

The leaked emails from the CRU reveal that the former director of the unit, Tom Wigley, harboured grave doubts about the cover-up of the shortcomings in Jones and Wang’s work. Wigley was in charge of CRU when the original paper was published. “Were you taking W-CW [Wang] on trust?” he asked Jones. He continued: “Why, why, why did you and W-CW not simply say this right at the start?”

This example actually suggests how complicit the media has been in keeping the global warming scare alive by failing to report what was actually under its nose.

But now there’s a great change. There is now a race on to uncover the next big IPCC scandal, and I doubt the great climate change scare can survive. The papers will, of course, take the credit.

Andrew Bolt is a journalist and columnist writing for The Herald Sun in Melbourne Victoria Australia.

Read more excellent articles from Andrew Bolt’s Blog

Filed under: Blundering Bureaucrats, Climate Alarmists, Climate Change, Environment, Environmental activists, Europe, Fear-mongering, Fraud/Waste, Global Warming, Great Britain, Liberals, Lily-Livered Liberals, Limp-Wrist Liberals, Politics, Power Hungry, Propaganda, Public Opinion, U.K., U.N. – United Nations (United Nitwits) Tagged: Andrew Bolt, Climate Change Fraud, Climate Change Religion, Climategate, Global Warming Alarmism, Tony, UK Climatic Research Institute (CRU), UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), University of East Anglia

Monday Brief from The Patriot Post

The Foundation

“Here comes the orator! With his flood of words, and his drop of reason.” –Benjamin Franklin

Opinion in Brief

“The Constitution requires that the president ‘from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union.’ But it doesn’t mandate the modern pageant of pomp, circumstance, and phony promises we suffer through every year. In fact, for most of the Republic’s first century, the SOTU was a modest, informational affair. Presidents sent the written address to Congress, to be read aloud by a clerk. That was thanks to President Jefferson, who thought delivering the speech before Congress assembled smacked too much of a king’s ‘Speech from the Throne.’ When the power-hungry Woodrow Wilson overturned the Jeffersonian tradition in 1913, one senator cursed the revival of ‘the old Federalistic custom of speeches from the throne,’ calling it a ‘cheap and tawdry imitation of English royalty.’ The speech only got worse from there, especially after the advent of television and LBJ’s decision to move the address to prime time. That sealed the SOTU’s transformation into the modern ritual, in which the president stands at the front of the House chamber making exorbitant promises that would shame a carny barker, while congresscritters stand and clap like members of the Supreme Soviet cheering a Brezhnev speech.” –columnist Gene Healy, vice president at the Cato Institute

Government

“The central fact of the [State of the Union] speech was the contradiction at its heart.

It repeatedly asserted that Washington is the answer to everything. At the same time it painted a picture of Washington as a sick and broken place. It was a speech that argued against itself: You need us to heal you. Don’t trust us, we think of no one but ourselves. The people are good but need guidance — from Washington. The middle class is anxious, and its fears can be soothed — by Washington. Washington can ‘make sure consumers … have the information they need to make financial decisions.’ Washington must ‘make investments,’ ‘create’ jobs, increase ‘production’ and ‘efficiency.’ At the same time Washington is a place ‘where every day is Election Day,’ where all is a ‘perpetual campaign’ and the great sport is to ‘embarrass your opponents’ and lob ’schoolyard taunts.’ Why would anyone have faith in that thing to help anyone do anything?” –columnist Peggy Noonan

Political Futures

“If President Obama took any lesson from his party’s recent drubbing in Massachusetts, and its decline in the polls, it seems to be that he should keep doing what he’s been doing, only with a little more humility, and a touch more bipartisanship. That’s our reading of [Wednesday] night’s lengthy State of the Union address, which mostly repackaged the President’s first-year agenda in more modest political wrapping. … On health care, Mr. Obama offered a Willy Loman-esque soliloquy on his year-long effort, as if his bill’s underlying virtues and his own hard work haven’t been truly appreciated by the American public. He showed no particular willingness to compromise, save for a claim that he was open to other ideas. … Mr. Obama’s economic pitch also differed little from last year, when the jobless rate was 7.2%. He offered a spirited defense of the stimulus, though the jobless rate is now 10%, and he promised more of the same this year, especially on ‘green jobs.’ … [H]e couldn’t resist more banker baiting, and he promised that he’s determined to see tax rates rise for millions of Americans next year when the Bush rates are set to expire. He also pushed more exports while saying he’ll raise taxes on some of our biggest exporters, otherwise known as multinationals that ’ship our jobs overseas.’ Mr. Obama believes he can conjure jobs and a durable expansion from the private sector while waging political war on its animal spirits. It can’t be done. This reflects a larger problem, which is his belief that economic growth springs mainly from the genius of government.” –The Wall Street Journal

For the Record

“There are more loopholes in President Obama’s proposed ’spending freeze’ than in an Olympic volleyball net. Gargantuan government entitlements (Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid) are exempt. A half-trillion in unspent stimulus money is exempt. Foreign aid is exempt. The Democrats’ proposed $154 billion jobs bill (Stimulus II) is exempt. Pet federal education programs will be exempt (including $4 billion for the White House ‘Race to the Top’ standards initiative and an additional $1.35 billion he just requested in the 2011 budget). Green jobs spending will be exempt. (Obama proposed $10 billion in new clean energy spending earlier this month.) Electorally driven tax-credit expansions will be exempt. The health care takeover plan is not included. As even The New York Times reported, the ‘estimated $250 billion in savings over 10 years would be less than 3 percent of the roughly $9 trillion in additional deficits the government is expected to accumulate over that time.’ Which amounts to a molecule in a drop of the ocean of red ink in which American taxpayers have been drowning.” –columnist Michelle Malkin

Re: The Left

“Critics of [the Supreme Court’s recent] decision [on campaign-finance reform], like censors throughout history, worried that freedom of speech would have bad consequences. ‘It gives the special interest lobbyists new leverage to spend millions on advertising to persuade elected officials to vote their way — or to punish those who don’t,’ Obama warned. ‘Any public servant who has the courage to stand up to the special interests and stand up for the American people can find himself or herself under assault come election time.’ It was a bit rich for Obama to bemoan the influence of ’special interests’ the same week Massachusetts voters expressed their anger over bailouts he enthusiastically supported, the week after he cut a deal that exempted union members from a tax everyone else would have to pay, around the same time he was bragging about a spending binge that has stimulated lobbying more than the economy and in the midst of his attempt to salvage health care legislation backed by big corporations. In any case, democracy is a clash of interests, which we call ’special’ when we don’t like the policies they support, and the election-time ‘assault’ of Obama’s nightmares is nothing more than public criticism of politicians. Obama and other supporters of restrictions on political speech believe voters can’t handle clashing versions of the truth, that they need to be shielded, in the name of democracy, from messages that would otherwise mesmerize them into doing the bidding of ‘powerful interests.’ The Framers thought otherwise, and that’s why we have the First Amendment.” –columnist Jacob Sullum

Liberty

“[Those on] the left complain about the bind in which they find themselves. They can spare 4o votes on any House vote, and they have a Senate majority, but they can’t get anything done. It’s as if a genius schemed against them to thwart their efforts and require impossibly large majorities to accomplish something. … But our founders didn’t set out to frustrate any specific people. They were concerned with one big question: how does one prevent a republic from degenerating into tyranny, as all historical republics had? … In Federalist 51 [James Madison] writes: ‘It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. … If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure.’ … Our constitutional system of government works — but it works to protect liberty, not allow those who want to get their agenda passed and get it passed yesterday to run roughshod over the minority. Madison warned of such a system, writing, ‘In a society under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker, anarchy may as truly be said to reign as in a state of nature.’ … More often than not, divided government has been the rule. Thus left and right are both stymied by the Constitution, which was designed to frustrate change in favor of freedom. America is ungovernable because the founders never intended the lives of Americans to be governed from the federal capitol.” –columnist Adam Graham

The Gipper

“Conservatism is the antithesis of the kind of ideological fanaticism that has brought so much horror and destruction to the world. The common sense and common decency of ordinary men and women, working out their own lives in their own way — this is the heart of American conservatism today. Conservative wisdom and principles are derived from willingness to learn, not just from what is going on now, but from what has happened before.” –Ronald Reagan

Faith & Family

“Pop quiz: What billion-dollar multinational receives hundreds of millions in tax dollars even though it is enormously profitable? If your thoughts turned to defense contractors, you would be right about the purpose — killing — but wrong about the recipient. The answer, in fact, is Planned Parenthood. According to its most recent annual report, in fiscal 2008, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the nation’s largest abortion provider, had annual revenue of more than $1 billion. Of this, about 34 percent was made up of government grants. In other words, almost $350 million of American taxpayer dollars supported the work of Planned Parenthood from October 2007 to September 2008. And, according to tax records from the same time period, this 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization had a net income $85 million greater than its expenses. That looks suspiciously like a profit…. The enterprise of abortion in America is big business. It turns a profit, and for the American taxpayer, the bailout of a financial behemoth — one engaged in an activity most Americans find troubling — is obviously unnecessary. Even without pondering such moral questions as ‘When does life begin?’ and ‘What is happening in a woman’s body that abortion stops?’ the fact that this billion-dollar industry needs no tax support should be enough to stop taxpayer handouts.” –Jeanne Monahan of the Family Research Council

Reader Comments

“Thank you Patriot Post — you hit the nail on the head concerning the upholding of the Constitution! As Mark Alexander stated, ‘Nowhere in our Constitution is there any authority or provision for these key proposals from Obama’s SOTU…’ Perhaps someone should author a book entitled ‘America’s Constitutional Republic 101 For Dummies.’” –Rick

“This is an excellent article, Mark! You are spot on with your assessment of our president’s State of the Union address: a socialist response to government created problems. I couldn’t agree more. Ditto on the Republican response; I found it a tepid reaction to an elitist agenda wrought with fundamental violations of basic liberties and enumerated powers. This approach assures only that Republicans will forever be only the lesser of two evils.” –Ed

“Scott Brown for president? I’m not saying he should run. In fact, I have a hard time believing any U.S. senator should be in the mix. State governors, who you would think have a better understanding of what the Constitution says about States’ rights, would make better candidates. While this is not a certainty, I think we should look for a constitutional conservative to wisely lead this country back to Ronald Reagan’s vision — or more appropriately, the Founder’s vision!” –Rob

“Re: Chris Matthews’ comment: I don’t care what color Obama is. I just wish I could forget that he is president.” –Jim

The Last Word

“Obama is addicted to utilizing language that he has carefully tailored or perverted to obfuscate the truth. In other words, he uses double talk on a routine basis. In order to understand what Obama truly tells us when he speaks to us, it is necessary to grab our Little Orphan Annie Decoder Ring and decipher precisely what he means when he uses his pet phrases. This, then, is a list of his favorite linguistic flourishes — and just what he means when he uses them: ‘Hope and change’: Socialism at home, surrender abroad. … ‘False choice’: A very real choice Obama wants to pretend doesn’t exist. … ‘Deficit reduction’: Deficit increases. Obama suggests that he will cut the rate at which the deficit is growing — something he has never actually achieved — and acts as though this is actual deficit reduction. … ‘Let me be clear’: Let me lie to you. ‘Make no mistake’: See ‘let me be clear.’ … ‘This isn’t about me’: This is completely about me. … ‘Reaching out to the other side of the aisle’: Totally rejecting all ideas from anyone outside the Obama-approved bubble. Then suggesting that subsequent political impasses are their fault, and that they ought to bend down and grab their ankles to establish a new tone in Washington. ‘Failed policies of the past’: Don’t blame me! Blame Bush! … ‘Tax cut’: Redistribution of money from those who pay a disproportionate amount of taxes to those who pay none. … Watch for these phrases while marveling at Obama’s supposed rhetorical brilliance. They shouldn’t be taken at face value, because Obama isn’t a master of pure artistry of the English language — he’s a master at manipulation above all.” –columnist Ben Shapiro

Read more great articles at The Patriot Post.US

Filed under: 111th Congress, America (USA), Barry Soetoro (aka Barack Hussein Obama), Blundering Bureaucrats, Conniving Politicians, Democrats, economy, Liberals, Lily-Livered Liberals, Limp-Wrist Liberals, Political Prostitutes, Politics, Power Hungry, Propaganda, Public Opinion, Spine Donor Politicians Tagged: Clean Energy, Obama Budget, Obama State Of The Union Address, Political Comment, President Obama, The Patriot Post, Tony

By Noel Sheppard

Less than two months after receiving a Nobel Peace Prize, the President is proposing a huge increase in war spending.

Despite his campaign pledges to the contrary, Obama’s new budget calls for expenditures associated with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to increase to levels only ten percent below the average of former President George W. Bush’s last two years in office.

Given the media’s anti-war predilections, it’s going to be fascinating to see how the following numbers revealed by Politico a few hours ago will be reported in the coming days:

President Barack Obama’s new budget, to be released Monday, forecasts two consecutive years of near $160 billion in war funding, far more than he hoped when elected and only modestly less than the last years of the Bush Administration.In 2011 alone, the revised numbers are triple what the president included in his spending plan a year ago. […]

The president’s 2010 defense budget a year ago requested $130 billion for operations in Afghanistan and Iraq and just $50 billion in 2011. The new budget ramps up 2010 spending to $163 billion and for 2011 requests $159 billion in overseas contingency funds for the military.

This reverses the drop in war-related spending seen in fiscal 2009, which ended last Sept 30th and was a transition year of sorts between the two administrations. When compared to the peak war spending of the Bush years, Obama is only about 10% below Bush’s annual average of $176 billion in fiscal years 2007 and 2008-the time of the Iraq war surge.

This budget proposal comes just five days after Obama blamed current and future budget deficits on his predecessor “not paying for two wars.”

With this in mind, and given how the media loved to ridicule Bush for what they felt was unnecessary military spending, it’s going to be fascinating to see how they react to Monday’s announcement.

Stay tuned.

Noel Sheppard is the Associate Editor of NewsBusters

Read more Great Articles at NewsBusters

Filed under: America (USA), Barry Soetoro (aka Barack Hussein Obama), Conniving Politicians, Democrats, economy, Liberals, Lily-Livered Liberals, Limp-Wrist Liberals, Military, Political Prostitutes, Politics, Power Hungry, Propaganda, Spine Donor Politicians Tagged: Bush Derangement Syndrome, Military Funding, NewsBusters, Obama Budget, President Obama, Tony, War Funding

By Sammy Benoit

Its amazing what a little research will do. Once the climategate scandal broke, more people in the media have felt empowered to investigate claims made by the climate change moonbat community.

A particularly fertile place to find bogus climate change claims has been the United Nations climate change panel, the IPCC. Two weeks ago, The IPCC was forced to retract a warning that climate change was likely to melt the Himalayan glaciers by 2035. That warning was also based on claims in a WWF report, which wasn’t peer reviewed. The data in the report came from a student’s dissertation and a mountain climbing magazine. There was also the bogus claim that climate change may be increasing the severity and frequency of natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods. The latest UN climate change hoax is a report that global warming is causing the rainforests to disappear.

A STARTLING report by the United Nations climate watchdog that global warming might wipe out 40% of the Amazon rainforest was based on an unsubstantiated claim by green campaigners who had little scientific expertise.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in its 2007 benchmark report that even a slight change in rainfall could see swathes of the rainforest rapidly replaced by savanna grassland.

Just like the glacier report the IPCC is relying on unsubstantiated data,that hasn’t been peer-reviewed. In this case it is even worse, they took data meant for a different purpose and applied it to climate change.

The source for its claim was a report from WWF, an environmental pressure group, which was authored by two green activists. They had based their “research” on a study published in Nature, the science journal, which did not assess rainfall but in fact looked at the impact on the forest of human activity such as logging and burning. This weekend WWF said it was launching an internal inquiry into the study.

….Scientists fear the controversies will be used by climate change sceptics to sway public opinion to ignore global warming — even though the fundamental science, that greenhouse gases can heat the world, remains strong.

Not quite, because many elements of the fundamental science including the famous hockey stick have been proven to be false, despite the fact that Osama Bin Laden is now a big fan.

The latest controversy originates in a report called A Global Review of Forest Fires, which WWF published in 2000. It was commissioned from Andrew Rowell, a freelance journalist and green campaigner who has worked for Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and anti-smoking organisations. The second author was Peter Moore, a campaigner and policy analyst with WWF.

In their report they suggested that “up to 40% of Brazilian rainforest was extremely sensitive to small reductions in the amount of rainfall” but made clear that this was because drier forests were more likely to catch fire.

The IPCC report picked up this reference but expanded it to cover the whole Amazon. It also suggested that a slight reduction in rainfall would kill many trees directly, not just by contributing to more fires.

It said: “Up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation; this means that the tropical vegetation, hydrology and climate system in South America could change very rapidly to another steady state. It is more probable that forests will be replaced by ecosystems that have more resistance to multiple stresses caused by temperature increase, droughts and fires, such as tropical savannas.”

Simon Lewis, a Royal Society research fellow at Leeds University who specialises in tropical forest ecology, described the section of Rowell and Moore’s report predicting the potential destruction of large swathes of rainforest as “a mess”.

“The Nature paper is about the interactions of logging damage, fire and periodic droughts, all extremely important in understanding the vulnerability of Amazon forest to drought, but is not related to the vulnerability of these forests to reductions in rainfall,” he said.

“In my opinion the Rowell and Moore report should not have been cited; it contains no primary research data.”

WWF said it prided itself on the accuracy of its reports and was investigating the latest concerns. “We have a team of people looking at this internationally,” said Keith Allott, its climate change campaigner.

Scientists such as Lewis are demanding that the IPCC ban the use of reports from pressure groups. They fear that environmental campaign groups are bound to cherry-pick the scientific literature that confirms their beliefs and ignore the rest.

It was exactly this process that lay behind the bogus claim that the Himalayan glaciers were likely to melt by 2035 — a suggestion that got into another WWF report and was then used by the IPCC.

As we have learned in the climategate mess and now this IPCC hoax, anxious to keep their bogus science going, the climate change scientists will use any dubious research that supports their claims and will toss out peer reviewed research that disputes their claims.  This is not real science it is political advocacy with the ultimate objective to redistribute income from the major economies to the third world nations.

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Filed under: Climate Alarmists, Climate Change, Environment, Environmental activists, Fanatics, Fear-mongering, Fraud/Waste, Global Warming, Liberals, Lily-Livered Liberals, Limp-Wrist Liberals, Power Hungry, Propaganda Tagged: Amazon Jungle, Brazilian Rainforests, Climate Change Fraud, Climate Change Religion, Climategate, Global Warming Alarmism, Global Warming Hype, The Lid, Tony, UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), World Wildlife Fund (WWF)

By Alan Caruba

Alan Caruba writes a daily post at Warning Signs. A business and science writer, he is the founder of The National Anxiety Center.

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Filed under: 111th Congress, America (USA), Barry Soetoro (aka Barack Hussein Obama), Cartoons, Democrats, Humor, Liberals, Lily-Livered Liberals, Limp-Wrist Liberals, Politics, Power Hungry, Public Opinion, Satire Tagged: “Hope” and “Change”, Alan Caruba, Political Cartoons, Political Humor, Political Satire, President Obama, Tony, Warning Signs

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Filed under: 111th Congress, America (USA), Barry Soetoro (aka Barack Hussein Obama), Blundering Bureaucrats, Conniving Politicians, Democrats, Humor, Liberals, Lily-Livered Liberals, Limp-Wrist Liberals, Political Prostitutes, Politics, Power Hungry, Propaganda, Satire, Spine Donor Politicians, Video Tagged: NewsBusted, NewsBusters, Political Humor, Political Satire, Tony

By Andrew Bolt

Now the Stern report is found to have grabbed any alarmist report – especially out of Australia – that suited its agenda:

The Stern Review on the economics of climate change, which was commissioned by the (Australian Government) Treasury, was greeted with headlines worldwide when it was published in October 2006

It contained dire predictions about the impact of climate change in different parts of the world.

But it can be revealed that when the report was printed by Cambridge University Press in January 2007, some of these predictions had been watered down because the scientific evidence on which they were based could not be verified.

Among the claims that were removed in the later version of the report, which is now also available in its altered form online, were claims that North West Australia has been hit by stronger tropical typhoons in the past 30 years.

Another claim that southern regions in Australia have lost rainfall due to rising ocean temperatures and air currents pushing rain further south was also removed.

Claims that eucalyptus and savannah habitats in Australia would also become more common were also deleted.

The claims were highlighted in several Australian newspapers when the report was initially published, but the changes were never publicly announced.

Amazing. For an insight into Stern’s cherry-picking frame of mind at the time he wrote his report, check what his spokesman concedes now:

Statements were identified in the section on Australia for which the relevant scientific references could not be located.

Next for us to check is this: who first made these wild claims for “which the relevant scientific references could not be located”? How many of these unsubstantiated claims from the initial Stern report were then accepted by (Australian Prime Minister) Kevin Rudd’s guru, Professor Ross Garnaut, who relied so heavily on Stern for his own report?

I’ll keep you posted.

Andrew Bolt is a journalist and columnist writing for The Herald Sun in Melbourne Victoria Australia.

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Filed under: Australia, Blundering Bureaucrats, Climate Alarmists, Climate Change, Conniving Politicians, Environment, Environmental activists, Fanatics, Fear-mongering, Fraud/Waste, Global Warming, Liberals, Lily-Livered Liberals, Limp-Wrist Liberals, Political Prostitutes, Politics, Power Hungry, Propaganda, Public Opinion, Spine Donor Politicians Tagged: Andrew Bolt, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, Climate Change Fraud, Climate Change Religion, Climategate, Global Warming Alarmism, Global Warming Hype, Professor Ross Garnaut, Tony

Satire by  Shawn Goodwin

This week, media outlets, bloggers, and bitter, gun-clinging religious fanatics have been preoccupied with the story of “Ellie Light,” a woman who spends all of her free time writing and distributing letters of support for President Barack Obama. Light has been sending the same letter to every newspaper, gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse and doghouse in America. While obviously a big fan of the current administration, Ms. Light is probably a victim of its economic policies, since only the unemployed and the “American Idol” contestant who sang “Pants on the Ground” have the time to spam a newspaper’s Letters to the Editor section.

From the inception of this spontaneous, “grassroots” campaign, Light has been an army of one. However, the fact that Light posted the same name on every letter reveals that this army is based out of Fort AstroTurf. Make no mistake, when it comes to hiding her secret identity, this woman is not exactly Clark Kent, even though some pundits thought they had her real name, then they didn’t, then they did again. The real irony here is that a seven-year-old investigative reporter from New York City’s PS 63 could have solved this mystery in the amount of time it takes Keith Olbermann to say something stupid. Sadly, it took the Cleveland Plain Dealer about a week:

“On Thursday evening, The Plain Dealer’s Sabrina Eaton reported on ‘Ellie Light,’ who had virtually identical letters to the editor published in newspapers around the country, with most of them claiming a different hometown in each paper’s circulation area.

Since then, others have followed the trail of the Ellie Light letter. The blog Patterico’s Pontifications seems to have the most comprehensive list so far. To the dozen or so original listed, the blog adds several dozen more, including the Stamford (Conn.) Advocate and the Gainesville (Ga.) Times.  The letter has even appeared overseas, including in the Bangkok Post. And now there’s a Facebook fan page for her. In most letters, Light claims a nearby hometown.”

Judging by the letter, Light’s real hometown is most likely Los Angeles, California.

Specifically, she may reside at 4211 Avalon Boulevard, at the Kedren Community Mental Health Hospital, Bed #302. Only a mental patient of R.P. McMurphy proportions would attempt what this person has been doing. Strangely enough, this is not Light’s first incident with a chain letter explosion. For instance, in 1979, Light used the name P. Nutt-Farmer in a series of chain letters defending President Jimmy Carter’s economic policies. Among other claims, Light argued that “malaise” was a good thing, stating that “it was the largest cash crop for our Native Americans and is now enjoyed in movie theaters across the country.” Not one editor had the heart to school her on the difference between “maize” and “malaise.”

In 1998, Light utilized the chain letter bomb to praise the leadership of President Bill Clinton. This time, Light’s nom de plume was “Willie Wonky,” and she carried the water for Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Light wrote that Clinton “inherited” intern problems from evil Republican George H. W. Bush, and that the president could not wave a magic wand to make all of his problems disappear. Magic wand, of course, was a poor choice of words. This AstroTurf effort was stopped as quickly as it began because while he was a rather competent president, no one in America ever confused the first President Bush with being a ladies man.

Now Light is posting letters extolling the virtues of President Barack Obama. She makes the argument that “Candidate Obama didn’t feed us happy talk, which is why we elected him.” If there was a section in the crimes code for writing under the influence, Light would make Paris Hilton look like a teetotaler. The only thing Candidate Obama gave us was happy talk! After a while many Americans expected the skies to open up on Inauguration Day before it rained unicorns and sugar plums! As it stands, it is much too early to judge Obama’s presidency – good or bad – and it is irresponsible to give him a free pass for the current state of the union.

If Light had merely sent a deluge of votes into an “American Idol” runoff, no one would bat an eye. Heck, if she voted multiple times in the same election no Democrat would care, either. The problem with these letters is that Light is trying to give the appearance of a groundswell of support for an unpopular president while at the same time making excuses for his recent failures. Had this been a solo incident through Light’s local paper, there’s no harm, no foul. Publishing the same letter in dozens of newspapers across the country and the world? Bizarre.

FamilySecurityMatters.org’s official satirist, Shawn Goodwin, is a blogger and police detective from Philly.

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Filed under: America (USA), Barry Soetoro (aka Barack Hussein Obama), Humor, Liberals, Lily-Livered Liberals, Limp-Wrist Liberals, Media Mind Manipulators, MSM (Main Stream Media) Liberal, Muddled Media, Power Hungry, Propaganda, Pseudo-Journalism, Satire Tagged: Ellie Light, FSM (Shawn Goodwin), Obama Propaganda, Political Satire, President Obama, Tony

By Alan Caruba

All across America, various environmental organizations have been engaged in schemes to deter development such as housing, new energy plants, or the horror of a manufacturing facility that might actually employ people. In some states, the attack has been on farms and ranches, finding ways to punish their owners for improving their land in any fashion such as digging a drainage ditch.

Property rights were deemed so essential, so important to the economic future of America that the Founding Fathers wrote an Amendment to the Constitution to protect those rights, ensuring that private property could not be taken for public use “without just compensation.”

As far as environmentalists are concerned, private property rights are an impediment to the “protection” of what they always describe as “pristine” forests, deserts, or some horrid wilderness such as the Alaskan National Wildlife Reserve. ANWR is unfit for human habitation, but it does have countless thousands of caribou and several billion barrels of untapped oil beneath a “pristine” surface.

In a small State like New Jersey, land and its proper use has been a major concern from its earliest years. The State got its moniker, “the Garden State”, from the many farms in its southern half, although there are some in the north. One can drive up Route 78 through the northern portion and see horse farms and even cattle being raised.

Beyond its urban centers, there are large, verdant areas in which one can find small, picturesque suburbs and one of those areas is known as the Highlands. It is a 1,400- square-mile region, some 860,000 acres, extending from the northern border with New York and including land in Sussex, Warren, Passaic, Morris, and Hunterdon Counties.

The Highlands Water Protection and Planning Act was enacted in 2004 and signed into law by former Governor James McGreevey whose lamentable and mercifully abbreviated term in office was cut short when, in the wake of a scandal concerning a young man whom he had put on the state payroll, he announced he was a homosexual and resigned.

Put into motion in 2006, the State’s largest daily newspaper, The Star-Ledger, editorialized that “Development controls are so sweeping that perhaps less than 20 percent of land in the region is left available for construction, even in the half of the region lawmakers had targeted for future growth. That small amount of buildable acreage could be cut further when additional rules, such as new regulations for septic systems, are completed.”

The area in question is a watershed and the environmental claim was that any further construction or use of it posed a threat to water quality and that the area, home to abundant wildlife, needed to be subject to all manner of regulation and restrictions to protect it against the humans who had been living there since before the Revolution.

There never was a need for the Highlands Act. Existing environmental laws were and are sufficient, but the objective was to render the huge tract of land beyond any development, to reduce the value of its homes and other structures, and generally put it off limits. This kind of green gangsterism is part of the reason why, along with high taxation, and senseless spending, more people leave New Jersey than move here.

In 2007, northern New Jersey farmers and landowners affected by the Highlands Act made plans to contest it in court to protect their loss of equity and private property rights. Consider if you owned a home in this vast region and wanted to sell it. Who would buy it knowing that you could not add a porch, a swimming pool, or even some swings for kids to play on? If you were a farmer almost any normal act of tillage or harvest could be ruled a danger to the environment.

As a Star-Ledger columnist, Paul Mulshine, pointed out in July 2007, “The purpose of the plan was not to redistribute development, but to stop it entirely. And the way the law was written is positively Machiavellian. The Highlands law amounts to an ingenious effort by the state to grab as much land as possible without leaving the state open to a court challenge under the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment.”

I was reminded of this appalling piece of environmental chicanery when a story appeared in The Star-Ledger in late January. “A report by Gov. Chris Christie’s transition team calls the Highlands Council ‘a disaster on multiple levels’ and recommends cutting the water-protection agency’s powers over local zoning or eliminating it.”

It has taken six years of suffering by the many landowners of the affected area and frustration among the many local officials in towns affected by this hideous land grab to finally reach a point where something might begin to be done to repeal the act and return the legislatively stolen property rights.

All around America, similar actions have been occurring, spurred on by various environmental groups, and all intended to drive out farmers and ranchers, to kill any development of any kind, and to abrogate the Constitutional protection of private property in every way possible.

It is part of a vast matrix of efforts to destroy the nation’s economic growth and it is too often successful. Given their antipathy to all human activity, if the Greens had their way, they would put up signs everywhere that would say, “Keep Out!”

Alan Caruba writes a daily post at Warning Signs. A business and science writer, he is the founder of The National Anxiety Center.

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Filed under: America (USA), Blundering Bureaucrats, Climate Alarmists, Climate Change, Conniving Politicians, Democrats, Environment, Environmental activists, Fanatics, Fraud/Waste, Global Warming, Infrastructure Problems, Liberals, Lily-Livered Liberals, Limp-Wrist Liberals, Political Prostitutes, Politics, Power Hungry, Propaganda, Public Opinion, Spine Donor Politicians Tagged: Alan Caruba, Environmental Political Agenda, environmentalists, Green Lobby, Green Protectionism, Green Tactics, New Jersey Politics, Tony, Warning Signs

By Nancy Morgan

Mort Zukerman, editor-in-chief of US News and World Report, in his article,  How To Get Americans Working Again opines that there is no snap answer as to how accelerate job growth. He is wrong.

I’m not an intellectual, nor a PhD., nor have I ever labeled myself an expert, but do have a snap answer to his seemingly perplexing question. An answer that is guaranteed to lower the unemployment rate, kick start the jobs market and get the economy on track again. In four simple steps:

1. Cut capital tax gains and voila, people start investing, selling, freeing up income in the private sector which businesses can use to hire.

2. Kill and bury current health care reform. No one will hire until they know the costs.

3. Cut corporate tax rates across the board. The economy will rebound in about 10 seconds. And state and government coffers will receive massive infusions of new tax dollars.

4. Get rid of minimum wage laws and let the market function and prosper as is has done for centuries.

Wrap your mind around that, Mort, and tell me where I’m wrong. Please try to couch your answer in terms I’ll understand and I’m not as smart as you.

I am smart enough, however, to still have the common sense God gave me. A common sense that is sorely lacking in any of these phony job summits and speeches that Obama is currently engaged in.

I hear lots of pretty words from Obama, but his actions speak louder than his PR spin. And his actions have me scared because every single step he has taken in the past year has plunged the economy deeper into recession. From letting the Bush tax cuts to expire, to his war on banks, to his quadrupling of the deficit. I could go on…

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Yet every single proposal and/or supposed ’solution’ issuing out of the Obama White House are policies that have failed in the past and are failing now. Obama’s solution: More of the same.

I don’t need to be a PhD. to know that Obama’s ’solutions’ are a recipe for disaster. Yet I seem to be the only one asking the question: Is Obama intentionally trying to destroy the economy? Or is he just acting on blind ideology and a supreme case of hubris? Either way, the results are the same. Failure. That you and I end up paying for. Again.

Obama, man of action that he is, has authorized yet another commission to study the job market, or something. The only jobs created will be the bureaucrats toiling to reconcile the growing disconnect between leftist theory and virtual reality. And we will keep losing jobs. And Obama will continue to make it worse by attacking the banks, undermining the dollar and putting America on the path to bankruptcy.

I have a suggestion. For a mere $100,000, I will issue the four easy steps to beat the recession I listed above to the big mucky-mucks surrounding Obama. No-one can claim that those 4 steps won’t immediately cure what the Obama administration seems to regards as a perplexing and unsolvable issue.

Which begs the question: Are Obama and his advisors so ignorant of the lessons of history that they are merely idealistic intellectuals educated beyond their intelligence? Or could they have another objective in all this? Stupid or devious? Enquiring minds want to know.

With the old media still framing the debate, the media elite will continue to inform we the people that snap answers and clear solutions are somehow unavailable. The ‘experts’ know best. Well folks, based on the events of the past year, we know the ‘experts’ don’t know their backsides from their spin – so why are we still listening to them?

Why are we allowing them to sow the seeds of class envy? Why have we allowed them to define the problem as ‘greedy rich people?’ When, by the way, is the last time a poor man gave you a job?

Lest we forget, government doesn’t create jobs. People create jobs. And I am curious as to why Obama is throwing every road-block he can in the way of economic recovery? Do you have a snap answer for that, Mort?

Nancy Morgan is a columnist and news editor for RightBias.com and she lives in South Carolina.

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Filed under: 111th Congress, America (USA), Barry Soetoro (aka Barack Hussein Obama), Blundering Bureaucrats, Conniving Politicians, Democrats, economy, Fraud/Waste, Liberals, Lily-Livered Liberals, Limp-Wrist Liberals, Political Prostitutes, Politics, Power Hungry, Propaganda, Public Opinion, Spine Donor Politicians Tagged: Economic Downturn, Obama Administration Policies, President Obama, Right Bias (Nancy Morgan), Tony, Unemployment Concerns, Unemployment Data

By Andrew Bolt

Biogeographer Professor Philip Stott on the collapse of the global warming scare:

It is like watching the Berlin Wall being torn down, concrete slab by concrete slab, brick by brick, with cracks appearing and widening daily on every face – political, economic, and scientific. Likewise, the bloggers have been swift to cover the crumbling edifice with colourful graffiti, sometimes bitter, at others caustic and witty…

And, as ever, capitalism has read the runes, with carbon-trading posts quietly being shed, ‘Green’ jobs sidelined, and even big insurance companies starting to hedge their own bets against the future of the Global Warming Grand Narrative. These rats are leaving the sinking ship far faster than any politician, many of whom are going to be abandoned, left, still clinging to the masts, as the Good Ship ‘Global Warming’ founders on titanic icebergs in the raging oceans of doubt and delusion.

And what can one say about ‘the science’? ‘The ‘science’ is already paying dearly for its abuse of freedom of information, for unacceptable cronyism, for unwonted arrogance, and for the disgraceful misuse of data at every level, from temperature measurements to glaciers to the Amazon rain forest. What is worse, the usurping of the scientific method, and of justified scientific scepticism, by political policies and political propaganda could well damage science sensu lato – never mind just climate science – in the public eye for decades.

Stott says it’s no surprise that the IPCC’s faked scares about India feature strongly in the growing scandal. He quotes Dr. Robert Bradnock, a world authority on the sub-continent and founder-editor of the Ashgate Studies in Development Geography:

I know that many of the claims about the impact of ‘global warming’ in Bangladesh, for example, are completely unfounded. There is no evidence that flooding has increased at all in recent years. Drought and excessive rainfall are the nature of the monsoon system. Agricultural production, far from being decimated by worsening floods over the last twenty years, has nearly doubled. In the early 1990s, Houghton published a map of the purported effects of sea-level rise on Bangladesh. Coming from a Fellow of the Royal Society, former Head of the Met Office and Chair of the IPCC, this was widely accepted, and frequently reproduced. Yet, it shows no understanding of the complex processes that form the Bengal delta, and it is seriously misleading. Moreover, despite the repeated claims of the World Wide Fund, Greenpeace, and, sadly, Christian Aid, the melting of the Himalayan glaciers is of completely marginal significance to the farmers of the plains in China, India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. One could go on!

And, on cue, in India, Open magazine publishes this front-page feature:

UPDATE

And, indeed, it turns out the IPCC was wrong not only about the speed of melting of the Himalayan glaciers, but about the cause, too:

Glaciers are here to stay in the Himalayas. Studies conducted by glaciologists across the Himalayan region in Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand have shown that global warming has little to do with their melting.

The conclusion was drawn by glaciologists after studying the behaviour of 35 Himalayan glaciers. The Mentossa glacier in Miyar valley of Lahaul-Spiti in Himachal Pradesh has, in fact, expanded in the last few years while there is no change in the Kangriz glacier in Zanskar valley of J&K since 1913.

Glaciologists, claiming that global warming and melting of glaciers have no relation with each other, say each glacier is behaving in a different manner. Had global warming been responsible, then all of them would have behaved in a similar manner, they claimed.

The prediction that glaciers would melt by 2035 by Professor Syed Iqbal Hasnain may have landed the Inter Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) chairman R K Pachauri in a tight spot, but data collected by glaciologits across the Himalayan region shows that such claims do not hold water, and the major rivers orginating from the Himalayas would continue to flow for the years to come as the glaciers are going to stay…

A comparison of photographs of glaciers available from 1907 shows that after 1998, glaciers have not changed much…

Andrew Bolt is a journalist and columnist writing for The Herald Sun in Melbourne Victoria Australia.

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Filed under: Blundering Bureaucrats, Climate Alarmists, Climate Change, Environment, Environmental activists, Europe, Fanatics, Fear-mongering, Fraud/Waste, Global Warming, Great Britain, India, Liberals, Lily-Livered Liberals, Limp-Wrist Liberals, Politics, Power Hungry, Propaganda, Public Opinion, U.K. Tagged: Andrew Bolt, Climate Change Fraud, Climate Change Religion, Climategate, Global Warming Alarmism, Global Warming Hype, Tony, UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)

By Michelle Malkin

Imagine this nightmare courtroom scenario: Unhinged Jew-bashing, open mockery of American soldiers, juror intimidation and coldly calculated exploitation of U.S. constitutional protections by a suspected al-Qaida defendant. Well, there’s no need to wait for the Gitmo terror trial circuses. New York City is already getting a glimpse of the future.

Jihadi scientist Aafia Siddiqui is on trial right now in a federal Manhattan court for the attempted murder and assault of U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan’s Ghazni province two years ago. She’s an accomplished Karachi-born scientist who studied microbiology at MIT and did graduate work in neurology at Brandeis University before disappearing in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

Counterterrorism investigators connected Siddiqui and her estranged husband, anesthesiologist Dr. Mohammed Amjad Khan, to Saudi terror funders. The couple’s bank account showed repeated purchases of high-tech military equipment and apparel, including body armor, night-vision goggles and military manuals. Her second husband, fellow al-Qaida suspect and 9/11 plot helper Ammar al-Baluchi, is one of five Gitmo detainees the Obama administration is planning to transfer to New York for trial.

Siddiqui was identified as an al-Qaida operative, financier and fixer by no less than 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed during U.S. interrogations. Al-Baluchi is KSM’s nephew. Mohammed reportedly enlisted Siddiqui in a Baltimore-based plot to bomb gas stations, fuel tanks and bridges, and to poison water reservoirs in the greater Washington, D.C., area. Siddiqui was taken into custody in Ghazni in July 2008 after attempting to shoot U.S. military interrogators and FBI agents.

Now, the savvy “Terror Mom” of three is pulling out all the stops to win a mistrial. Among her Cirque du Jihad antics:

– Demanding that jurors be genetically tested for a “Zionist or Israeli background” to ensure a fair and impartial jury of her Jew-hating peers.

– Ranting about 9/11 Israel conspiracies during voir dire.

– Screaming out loud during the testimony of U.S. Army Capt. Robert Snyder, who was in the room in Ghazni when Siddiqui allegedly grabbed an M-4 rifle and proclaimed, “Allahu Akbar!” and “I hate Americans! Death to America!” Before being ejected from the courtroom, Siddiqui shouted to Snyder, “You’re lying!” She also babbled about torture at a secret prison.

– Blurting out “I feel sorry for you” to the witness in front of the jury before being led out of the courtroom again.

Siddiqui’s defense team, funded in part by the Pakistani government, asserts that Lady al-Qaida is so mentally ga-ga that she should not be allowed to take the witness stand. Bleeding-heart human-rights groups have dutifully rallied around Siddiqui. She’s Mumia Abu-Jamal in a burqa. Indeed, her supporters have launched their own “Free Aafia” campaign. But two government-retained psychiatrists, working independently, determined last year that Siddiqui’s so-called symptoms of mental illness were attributed to “malingering” and “manipulation.” The judge in the case concluded that she is competent and understands full well the charges against her.

The Crazy Jihadi tactic is in perfect sync with the al-Qaida training manual advising its operatives to claim victimhood status if arrested and put on trial. This act is also in keeping with a long tradition of terror defendants invoking the insanity card — from “20th hijacker” Zacarias Moussaoui (whose lawyers chalked up his mass-murdering ambitions to a traumatic childhood) to Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan (whose defense will undoubtedly play up his lonely bachelorhood).

To make matters worse, the New York Post reported this week that an “unidentified man in a white headdress” mouthed an obscenity at the Siddiqui trial and cocked his finger like a gun at two jurors. The jurors were let go; it remains unclear whether the thug in white headdress will be charged and what relation, if any, he has to Siddiqui.

Would you answer a jury summons knowing you could end up sitting in front of a Jihadi sympathizer on the loose who is mentally painting a target on your forehead? And would you trust the White House ringmasters and Justice Department terror-coddlers to protect you from harm?

These suspects belong in controlled military tribunals, not federal courtrooms that are being turned into al-Qaida P.R. platforms. The O.J. Simpson spectacle of a smirking murder suspect, preening defense attorneys, a showboating judge and the judicial process run amok on cable TV 24/7 was bad enough. The 1993 World Trade Center bombing trial, which gave the bin Laden network a multimillion-dollar tax-subsidized legal team, free translation services, personal dry-cleaning services, race-baiting defense witnesses and access to information that was allegedly used by jihadists to evade surveillance, was even worse.

The specter of 10, 15, 20 Siddiqui-style courtroom carnivals — at a cost of at least $1 billion to taxpayers — threatens to throw our civilian court system into complete chaos. America can’t afford to clown around with national security.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies (Regnery 2009).

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Filed under: al Qaeda, America (USA), anti-American, Anti-Semitism, Fanatics, Islamic Terrorists, IslamoFascists, Muslim Terrorists, Propaganda, Terrorist Organizations Tagged: Aafia Siddiqui, al Qaeda, FSM (Michelle Malkin), Terrorist Trials, Tony

By Alan Caruba

We are back to the Obama administration’s original theory of governance, “All Obama, all the time.” Having basked on the spotlight during his rather long State of the Union Speech, Obama addressed the Baltimore conference of Republican members of Congress with yet another familiar excuse, it’s all George W. Bush’s fault.

In one year in office he has learned nothing or, if he has, the lessons have been dismissed as irrelevant to his mission of “transforming” a nation that is far more focused on just surviving the worst Recession/Depression since the 1930s.

Obama seems mystified that, with the greatest majority in Congress in decades, he is unable to get Democrats to coalesce behind his major initiatives such as healthcare “reform.” Republicans wisely decided to avoid being a part of this debacle and have since been labeled “the Party of no.” Sometimes, the right answer is no.

In other parts of the world, our system of government is baffling, particularly for the way it deliberately slows the passage of various legislative proposals. Writing recently in El Mundo, a leading newspaper in Spain, Prof. Rafael Navarro-Valls, said, “The problem, it seems to me, is that we should first consider the very system of power in America. When speaking of the U.S. President as the most powerful man in the world, one forgets the rules of the political circus in which he functions.”

“America produced a political system that is burdened and slowed down by a game of opposing powers,” said Navorro-Valls, who noted that this was intentional on the part of the Founding Fathers who had “fears of kings and tyrants.”

If Obama is unable to lead his own party when it had a lock on political power in Congress, his ability to do so for the rest of the nation is indeed in question and Navorro-Valls noted that “reality is relentless when we come down from the blue sky of promises to the vulgar world of facts, so the gap between what was offered and the reality concerns the electorate.”

The power of the American electorate was seen most recently in Massachusetts, in Virginia, and in New Jersey. It will be seen again in November.

Around the world, America is watched closely and what happens here is news everywhere else. This is particularly true in the Middle East when America, following 9/11, invaded Afghanistan to drive out the Taliban and al Qaeda, and then invaded Iraq to remove a regional destabilizing figure, Saddam Hussein. And, of course, America has long been an ally of Israel through several wars perpetrated against it by Arab nations and, lately, the Iranian proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas.

Writing in The Jordan Times, Hasan Abu Nimah took a look at “The Arabs and Obama after a year.” The Arab fixation on the “Arab-Israeli conflict” remains the obstacle to any rational resolution; it is now past sixty years since Israel became a reconstituted sovereign nation and, with the exception of Jordan and Egypt, none of the 22 Arab states with their 360 million people, have been willing to accept that fact.

Nimah bluntly said that “Until the Arabs take control of their own destiny, they will continue to wait and hope in vain that rescue will come, if not from Obama’s promises, then from someone else’s.” None of them want that someone else to be Osama bin Laden.

The answer, of course, is to recognize Israel’s right to exist and to seek peace with it. That is not likely to happen. Nimah wrote, “The Arabs expected that with Obama in office they would see the beginning of the end of the occupation of their land.” Israel is not an occupier. Its claim to the Holy Land predates both Christianity and Islam by thousands of years.

Georgiy Bovt, writing in Izvestia, the Russian newspaper, also took a look at Obama’s first year. Suffice it to say he tore into the young President, along with the “reset” message he tried to send Russia and the rest of the world. Bovt said, “While Obama practiced conciliatory gestures, the camps of al Qaeda prepared and continues to prepare for future attacks.” He ripped the political correctness that leaves America vulnerable.

“How many more of these ‘resets’ will this pillar of modern political correctness be able to withstand, with the assertion that terrorism has no nationality, nor religious affiliation?” asked Bovt. Good question!

The Russian analyst concluded saying, “We hope that he doesn’t fall quickly and disgracefully.”

Reading from the newspapers around the world, the message is the same, a distinct sense of disappointment and apprehension regarding Obama’s first year. They are not alone. If the polls are any indication—and they are—approval of Obama’s performance in office is dropping rapidly.

All Obama, all the time is not the answer. It is the problem.

Alan Caruba writes a daily post at Warning Signs. A business and science writer, he is the founder of The National Anxiety Center.

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Filed under: 111th Congress, America (USA), Barry Soetoro (aka Barack Hussein Obama), Conniving Politicians, Democrats, Liberals, Lily-Livered Liberals, Limp-Wrist Liberals, Political Prostitutes, Politics, Power Hungry, Propaganda, Public Opinion, Spine Donor Politicians Tagged: Alan Caruba, Democrat Congress Control, Obama’s First Year, President Obama, Tony, Warning Signs, world opinion