Amy Ridenour is the president of the National Center for Public Policy Research. She and her husband David, the vice president of the National Center, are the parents of three third graders. David's comments, like those of other National Center staff members, directors, associates and fellows, often appear in this blog.
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Friday, November 20, 2009
Criticizing This Administration Is Getting Way Too Easy
Peter Orszag, the director of the Office of Management and Budget at the White House has an op-ed in The Washington Post today entitled, "A Leap Forward to Better Care."
The last great leap forward left more than 30 million Chinese dead.
You'd think this wouldn't be the word association the White House would be wanting to promote.
Written by David A. Ridenour, vice president of the National Center for Public Policy Research. Write the author at info@nationalcenter.org. Please note if you prefer that your correspondence be kept private.
The United Nations Climate Summit in Copenhagen is fast approaching, and with cap and trade legislation languishing in Congress, developing nations averse to binding regulations, and the public preoccupied with a faltering economy, hopes by climate treaty advocates that a climate agreement will be reached this December are diminishing. Nevertheless, advocates for a sovereignty-usurping, economically-devastating, wealth-redistributing and environmentally-fraudulent treaty are tirelessly churning out materials meant to sway the public and assert pressure on leaders to reach an enforceable agreement.
The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) provides an example. Agitating for a "green industrial revolution," the WWF is a vociferous advocate for global warming legislation and environmental activism - regardless of the practical consequences. Last month, for example, the outfit came out with the breathless pronouncement that the world has less than five years to drastically cut carbon emissions or, it claims, climate catastrophe will be inevitable. (To be fair, this was less absurd than British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's October 19 prediction that the global community had only 50 days to avert disaster.)
Several days ago the WWF crossed a line, releasing a propagandistic video of children of WWF staffers parroting the illogical doomsday scenarios the group works to propagate. The WWF explained the video's objective:
"To urge the President to lead us in Copenhagen and outline what we'd like to see in the agreement, we invited children of WWF staffers to tape a personal message to the President asking for his support... We hope you'll be inspired to send an email or write a letter to the White House that tells President Obama that you want him to go to Copenhagen to protect our planet."
Child welfare officials have investigated the now infamous parents of "Balloon Boy" for allegedly coaching him to lie in a publicity scheme. These WWF parents coerced their children for political influence, and, should their efforts succeed, a thoroughly destructive climate treaty.
Which is worse?
Written by Caroline May, policy analyst at the National Center for Public Policy Research. Write the author at info@nationalcenter.org. Please note if you prefer that your correspondence be kept private.
Now That This Important Business Has Been Dispensed With, Perhaps Our Commander-in-Chief Could Notice Afghanistan
Thanks to a bill signed into law by President Obama today, it's illegal to murder a gay person now.
What, you say? It was illegal yesterday?
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Project 21 Fellow Deneen Borelli will be a guest on the Fox New Channel show "Fox and Friends" Monday, October 19. She is expecting to discuss the White House war on Fox News as well as left-wing pressure on the White House to adopt a second "stimulus" package.
If you want to tune in, you can catch her at approximately 6:15 AM Eastern.
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I am glad people are talking about boycotting the NFL. I have already emailed them to let them know of my intent. I almost ditched the Steelers last Super Bowl when Mr. Rooney thanked President Obama. As a huge Steelers fan myself, this was the last straw for me and the entire NFL.
Thanks.
Joseph McCoy Oil City, PA
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Unlike the opposition, Rush Limbaugh handled this situation with class. But let this be a warning! This is a good snapshot of what is happening to OUR country. How dare the left stand on their soap box and play the race card. So far their objectives and goals about Rush Limbaugh are the only transparent objectives and goals of this administration.
Best regards,
Jeanne
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On Rush Limbaugh and the NFL, more from the mailbag:
When our youngest (of 3) child became a serious soccer player, he introduced us to the world of international "football" or soccer. Now twenty years old, he has announced that he will never buy an NFL ticket or another NFL jersey, and he doesn't even listen to talk radio. If you were to check out his Facebook page, you would see an appeal to free Plaxico. He is well informed about the NFL and its players and the rather uneven penalties meted out to the players depending on where they may be found "guilty", and he may still watch a Panthers game or two, but he will save his money for English Premier League, European Soccer or World Cup.
And this is where the NFL is (pardon the expression) idiotic. The world of sports viewership is now global. And as William has pointed out this week to us, you don't hear the EPL players making political statements or any of the European or African players we follow. The governing bodies of international soccer may be territorial, but they are most definitely not commenting on the politics of team owners. A Russian thug can buy an English team, but that won't affect whether we root for Chelsea FC or not (we are, in fact, Arsenal FC, another London club, fans; and they are affectionately know as the "gooners", nothing politically correct about that, despite the rampant political correctness in the UK).
So, good luck NFL, I have been introduced to the excitement of the EPL and I will now allow that to monopolize my weekend viewing. An American actually owns a piece of Arsenal, but that doesn't affect my affections one iota. I will delight in the skills of players from Spain, the Netherlands, Denmark, Russia, France, England, Bosnia, the Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Mexico, and any other country that produces Arsenal talent. And, guess what, these players even understand economics (unlike some loud mouths from the NFL who have no problem alienating me and my pocketbook) and have commented on how the increase of UK income taxes from 40% to 50% this year will affect where they choose to play and the contracts they negotiate. Witness the top player in the world leaving Manchester for a Spanish team this year.
We now live in a GLOBAL economy. The NFL has just revealed how provincial it really is. So weekdays if I'm in my car, I'll listen to Rush; and weekends I'll be tuned in to the soccer channels. I grew up on Johnny Unitas and the Baltimore Colts. I'll relish my football memories as I savor political debate. Life is too short to waste time on Keith O's pregame show or whining football players. RIP, NFL. Your competition is global and your days are numbered. That's what they put the nets up for, regardless of the sport.
Mary Bejan Durham, NC 27707
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"...most of the same people who want Limbaugh ostracized are the same ones who think it is OK for Roman Polanski to drug and rape a 13 year old. These are also the same people, the white ones, who do not want Michael Vice to ever play again, or at least to make his life a living hell as long as he does play.
In the end, and to their shame, the group of potential owners caved in and removed Rush Limbaugh from the investor group saying that it was not worth it to keep Rush involved if it risked their not getting the franchise.
In the past 2 days ESPN and other media outlets have been announcing that Rush Limbaugh has been punted, and there is I am sure great rejoicing in this in many quarters, particularly in the black community and on the left. They see this as some great victory. This is very sad. Why? Because I ask the simple question, who really won and who really lost? Did Rush really lose? Did black players or even more so black Americans win?
Rush is still the most popular radio personality in America. He will still earn over $25 million a year, and he will still want Barack Obama to fail. Nothing has changed.
At the same time, will one black child do better in school? Will one less gang killing take place in Chicago, Philly LA. Will the Rams play any better? The answer is of course no. No new jobs have been created and Iran, North Korea are still feverishly building nuclear weapons.
This is a sad state for our nation. Black America in the grip of the Liberal establishment is more addicted to mediocrity than they are to 'Crack Cocaine.' They are the willing pawns in the Liberal game. This is a sad state. In the end everyone that needs to win loses."
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My favorite letter of the day, and not just because it is from a Pittsburgher:
Amy,
I completely agree with your suggestion to boycott the NFL. I too am originally from Pittsburgh and know exactly what you mean when you say that you care strongly about the sport. In fact, I almost feel like someone has died now that I canceled the NFL Sunday Ticket. I can't however continue to financially support an organization that would single out a private citizen for punishment simply because they don't agree with their political views. Is NBC aware of the hateful vomit that is spewed daily from Keith Olbermann?
In addition, I wonder what sacred "standards" the Commissioner was referring to in his press conference the other day. Are they the same standards that turn a blind eye to sadistic dog killers, wife beaters, suspected murders, and other unsavory thugs? Apparently the Commissioner is fine with filling the NFL ranks with the likes of Michael Vick, Dante Stallworth, Pacman Jones, and Ray Lewis - but conservative talk radio hosts need not apply. I am a proud conservative that is appalled at what is happening to this country. Too bad the NFL doesn't like my political views. I guess they don't like spending my money either. They will never get another penny of it.
It is a sad day for America,
Leah Pembroke Pines, FL
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Sharpton and Jackson Attack on Rush Limbaugh a "Racist Act," Says Black Conservative
It's not up on the Project 21 webpages yet, but Project 21 Fellow Deneen Borelli has issued a statement about the Rush Limbaugh situation that may interest readers:
Jackson & Sharpton Effort Against Rush Limbaugh is an Effort to "Get Whitie" and a "Racist Act," Says Leading Black Conservative
Statement of Project 21 Fellow Deneen Borelli
The left-wing jihad against Rush Limbaugh is un-fair and un-American. Rush is being targeted simply because he is a conservative and a leading critic of President Obama's wealth redistribution policies.
With conservative blood in the water, it's predictable to see the 'race card duo' -- Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton -- circling the victim. Since the election of the first black president, they have been searching for some white meat to feed on and Rush just happens to be a juicy target. Whipping up unjustified black anger is their specialty.
Frankly, I see their effort as 'get whitie' -- an inherent racist act.
It's outrageous that the 'race card duo' are worried about Rush buying a football team following a graphic example of black on black gang violence in Chicago -- Jackson's home town. As so-called black leaders they should be putting their time and effort in dealing with the human tragedies in the urban community: crime and failing schools and not a conservative exercising his right to play in the free market.
Written by Amy Ridenour. E-mail comments to info@nationalcenter.org. | Subscribe to this blog's feed. | Follow the National Center for Public Policy Research on Twitter. | Download our book Shattered Lives: 100 Victims of Government Health Care.
NFL, Rush Limbaugh & the Rams: What Conservatives Should Do
In regards to potential NFL approval of Rush Limbaugh being part of a bid to purchase the NFL's St. Louis Rams, SI.com is reporting "...League sources told SI.com that Limbaugh's candidacy in any Rams bid had 'zero chance' of being approved by the league's owners."
I think conservatives have to stand up and take notice that outspoken mainstream conservatives are not welcome in the NFL. I see two possible practical responses:
1) Boycott; 2) Monitor every liberal NFL owner, coach, player, office worker or dogsbody employed directly or indirectly by the NFL and raise a huge and public stink every time they say anything remotely liberal on a public policy issue.
One way to begin #2 is for those of us so inclined to create Google Alerts covering as many of these people we have time for, and be prepared to make a fuss.
For myself, I am perfectly willing to boycott if others are. I already did it for one season after Limbaugh was treated badly the first time, and I'm from Pittsburgh, which is all that need be said about whether I care strongly about NFL football.
If mainstream conservatives aren't allowed in the NFL club, I see no particular reason why mainstream liberals ought to be, either. Leave the NFL to the unopinionated drones.
Written by Amy Ridenour. E-mail comments to info@nationalcenter.org. | Subscribe to this blog's feed. | Follow the National Center for Public Policy Research on Twitter. | Download our book Shattered Lives: 100 Victims of Government Health Care.
Stop the presses! Stop the presses! The London School of Economics has discovered the solution to global warming: Condoms!
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, birth control will save us all from the hypothesized temperature increase, sea level rise, polar bear demise, and the need for extra interns at the World Meteorological Organization (which is tasked with finding unique names for hurricanes) resulting from greenhouse gas emissions.
Last month the School released a study sponsored by the Optimum Population Trust (OPT) titled, "Fewer Emitters, Lower Emissions, Less Cost." Its report concluded that "family planning methods should be a primary tool in the optimum strategy for reducing carbon emissions." The authors' reasoning is sound - if not ominously Malthusian - namely, they argue that the more children mankind produces, the more people there are to engage in carbon emitting activities. Further, using condoms is an easier and cheaper method of carbon abstention than, say, using solar-powered vehicles.
The chairman of OPT, Roger Martin, was thrilled the study validated his think tank's mission: to save the planet via a decrease in the human population "It's always been obvious that total emissions depend on the number of emitters as well as their individual emissions – the carbon tonnage can't shoot down, as we want, while the population keeps shooting up." He and his group have since called on international leaders to include population control mechanisms as part of the negotiations at the Copenhagen climate change summit in December.
While it is amusing to poke fun at the premise's simplicity and overt sexual overtones, the London School's conclusions are profoundly disturbing. They highlight the truly ant-ihuman approach to environmental policies some anthropogenic global warming crusaders advocate. Indeed, if a catastrophe caused by manmade global warming is truly imminent, using their logic, the most effective remedy would be the mass extinction of that evil, omnivorous, environment altering, CO2 breathing species: humanity.
Ironically, quite chilling.
Written by Caroline May, policy analyst at the National Center for Public Policy Research. Write the author at info@nationalcenter.org. As we occasionally reprint letters on the blog, please note if you prefer that your correspondence be kept private, or only published anonymously.
Outrage of the Day: More Racist Rants from the Anti-Black-Conservative Left
Sometimes I wonder how stupid you have to be to be a liberal. I mean, really. Take this, for example. Some liberals are so, I guess the word would be "threatened," that not all black Americans chose to live on the liberal plantation that they actually have an Internet thread going about how Project 21 Fellow Deneen Borelli (who is black) looks lighter-skinned in one of the four photos of her they found online than in the other three.
The guy who started the thread, an "administrator" of the website U.S. Politics Online who goes by the pseudonym (presumably it is a pseudonym) "O'Sullivan Bere," questions whether it is "unethical" for there to be a photo in circulation in which Deneen's skin looks lighter.
What is it, buddy? Afraid she'll "pass"?
Another dope on the thread opines, "She obviously realizes that most conservatives won't listen to her if she looks really black."
People, get real. The photo in which Deneen looks "lighter" is a professional studio shot. Studios have special lighting. Everybody looks different in professional portraits -- that's why people pay good money for them. (As to whether the portrait studio photoshopped it a bit, who knows. That's standard nowadays, even for white subjects. If the "administrator" used his own photo instead of one I bet he stole off a movie-related website for his own picture, he'd probably know that.)
So the guy, the dishonorable "O'Sullivan Bere," questions Deneen's ethics in his headline while using stolen photos on his website to raise the ethics issue. I took the Fox News photo O'Sullivan Bere posted on my home computer -- a screen shot of Fox programming off my computer monitor using a $29 piece of software (gee, I wonder why a screen shot looked different than a professionally done studio pic?) and I don't remember the fellow who is pretending to be a character in a movie asking me for permission to re-post the photo. Deneen's husband, Tom, took the shot of her at the Tea Party rally in which she looks darker, and sent it to us for this blog -- so if the Borellis have a plot to make Deneen look lighter in public photos, they sure have a weird way of going about it.
I suppose in all fairness I should note that it appears the apparently-fake O'Sullivan Bere did not steal Tom's Tea Party photo of Deneen directly from my blog. He took it (with permission? I bet not) from this blogger, another idiot. Presumably, that blogger, who also wrote disparagingly about Deneen's skin tone, stole it from our blog, although I won't rule out the possibility that there was another racist little photo-stealing twerp in the mix somewhere, and they all stole from one another after they stole from us.
Now that I have said all that, I'm going to go all moderate for a minute and admit not all liberals are stupid. I bet most of them would find this sort of thing at to be an embarrassment -- for their side. They'd be right.
P.S. Ironically, the thread about Deneen supposedly being unethical for supposedly having her her studio shot photoshopped to make her look lighter had the following ad running when I visited:
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E-mail comments to info@nationalcenter.org. | Subscribe to this blog's feed. | Follow the National Center for Public Policy Research on Twitter. | Download our book Shattered Lives: 100 Victims of Government Health Care.
Cut Off Health Care to ObamaCare Opponents, Says Bitter Old NPR Guy
Garrison Keiller fantasizes about cutting off ObamaCare opponents' access to the health care system.
Thanks, Keiller, for another reminder of why government-run health care really s---ks, because in those systems, bitter old fogeys like yourself really can cut off the health care access of people who disagree with them, shocking as it may seem.
Recall what Britain's National Health Service did to senior citizen Edward Atkinson, who had the temerity to mail pro-life literature to a government hospital that aborts young Britons.
If you want hospital administrators deciding they don't want to treat you based on your public policy or political views, then by all means, support government-run health care. Just be sure you really mean it, because once you get it, government-run health care is notoriously difficult to get rid of (you see, the employees unionize, and give campaign contributions, and before you can say 'why can't I have cancer drugs?,' you find the politicians are willing to let them let you die).
P.S. To Mr. Keiller: I don't recall you ever supplying any of my health care, so you have scant business talking about cutting it off. I, on the other hand, have been forced against my will to help pay for NPR...
P.P.S. If readers of this blog haven't yet read our new book, Shattered Lives; 100 Victims of Government Health Care, what on earth are you waiting for? If you are willing to read it on your computer you can downloaded a free PDF of the full book here. That's free, as in no money, no catch. But if you hate reading a computer screen, or want to give a copy of the book to someone who doesn't use computers, you are welcome to purchase a paper copy of Shattered Lives on Amazon.com for $14.95.
Written by Amy Ridenour. E-mail comments to info@nationalcenter.org. | Subscribe to this blog's feed. | Follow the National Center for Public Policy Research on Twitter. | Download our book Shattered Lives: 100 Victims of Government Health Care.
On Rt. 50 this morning, I saw a black VW plastered with left-of-center bumper stickers. These made clear the driver's support for an expansion of the nanny state and for laws designed to protect us from ourselves.
Imagine my surprise to see the driver reading a document and pulling a cigarette out of a package all while attempting to drive down this heavily-trafficked major highway.
Guess she isn't familiar with the slogan, "Think globally, act locally."
Written by David A. Ridenour, vice president of the National Center for Public Policy Research. Write the author at info@nationalcenter.org. As we occasionally reprint letters on the blog, please note if you prefer that your correspondence be kept private, or only published anonymously.
Daily Kos Wants Tea Party Participants to Forgo All Government Services, But Still Pay All Taxes
At times, activists of the superficial left write such stupid things, it is embarrassing to read them.
Such is the case with a Laura Clawson Daily Kos post Friday in which lefties are encouraged to send a faux "Socialist Free Purity Pledge" around the Internet. The gist of Clawson's message is that anyone who attended a Tea Party rally is a hypocrite if they from this point forward ever use a single thing funded by the federal government.
The post had at the time I read it 265 comments, most of which were favorable to the idea, which many of them actually thought was clever.
I ask myself, can the activist left be so uniformed as to believe that when it comes to government spending, there are only two positions possible, that of wanting the feds to spend more and grow larger, and that of wanting the feds to spend not one penny? That anyone who does not support President Obama's government-expansion plans is, ipso facto, the strictest of libertarians?
Seeing how badly the left governs when in office, I conclude "yes." Yes, they really can be this ignorant.
Which explains why the leftists in Congress and the White House think socialized medicine works and that the best way to deal with the Kremlin is from a position of slobbering, supplicating subservience.
The leftists think anyone who attended a Tea Party rally should sign a document pledging they will never use a government service again...
...but what the lefties don't put in their "Socialist Free Purity Pledge" is a pledge of their own to pass legislation offering to refund the tax dollars coercively paid by every person who might choose to sign their Purity Pledge and who sticks to it.
So selfish, these lefties. In their bitter little world, even the people who don't use any government will be forced to pay for it.
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Media Matters Attacks Me as "Nativist" for Criticism of Andrew Sullivan
Got attacked by Media Matters today for what I wrote here (I also cross-posted it at Newsbusters, where you can leave a comment if you like).
Media Matters regards me as "nativist" because I expressed discomfort with Andrew Sullivan involving himself extensively in U.S. domestic affairs while retaining his British citizenship and not making it clear that he has done so.
Would a little disclaimer once in a while of the I'm-telling-you-how-to-vote-but-be-aware-if-I-ever-get-drafted-it-won't-be-the-U.S.-Army's-unform-I-wear variety really have gone amiss?
Because the team a writer is playing for actually is important information for a reader to know.
Media Matters didn't mention me saying that Sullivan should include a disclaimer occasionally. It's not as if I called for Sullivan to be deported.
Media Matters also complained that in June I quoted Mark Steyn saying that the only way to reduce health care costs is to have less of it. You see, Mark Steyn is Canadian. Unlike Sullivan, though, Steyn frequently mentions this. I've been reading Sullivan since the mid-1980s and I had the impression he became an American a long time ago. When Sullivan writes phrases such as "our nation's history," referring to the USA, is it strange that I thought so?
Anyway, my original comments are here. You can read them and decide for yourself if I'm "harken[ing] back to the good old days of Know-Nothingism and immigration quotas" and believe "Sullivan shouldn't be trusted because he's a 'foreigner,'" as Media Matters says.
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The thematic mantra emanating from the Obama administration this week has been a general lamentation of the "coarsening of our political dialogue."
So you can imagine my shock and indignation, while commuting to work on the Washington Metro this morning, when my attention wandered from the dulcet tones of Mark Levin's podcast commentary and my eyes focused on an inflammatory back page advertisement in the Washington Post Company's daily tabloid Express. Sponsored by a website called Avaaz.org, the ad featured a large picture of former Vice President Dick Cheney with the caption "Could this be Al Qaeda's best recruiter?" followed by "Close Guantanamo. End Torture. Investigate All Abuses."
Sufficiently angered by the disrespect shown to not only one of the country's most effective Vice Presidents but also the men and women of our armed services and intelligence agencies (all of whom have kept the nation safe and protect the very rights permitting such contemptible displays), upon finally arriving to work, I quickly signed on to my Internet browser for a bit of Nancy Drew investigation. Here are my findings:
Avaaz.org advertises itself as "a community of global citizens who take action on the major issues facing the world today. The aim of Avaaz.org is to ensure that the views and values of the world's people shape global decisions." That is, to ensure a voice for the views and values of the world's people who promote provocative activism on such issues as human rights (especially as they pertain to that bastion of evil - the USA), ending the war in Iraq, and global warming... Your basic liberal nightmare group.
In addition to the tasteless display of drivel to which I was treated this morning, there will be other editions of the ads. One has Osama bin Laden in an "I love Gitmo" t-shirt (in the wake of bin Laden's recent endorsement of Carter's book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," it might be more fitting to feature the terrorist in an "I love Jimmy Carter" t-shirt) and another quotes from President Obama and Senator John McCain.
Though these ads appear to have a limited scope, due to the group's D.C. focus, they are nonetheless disturbing and deserve a response. The MoveOn.org General Petraeus "General Betray Us" advertisement in the New York Times two years ago garnered mass condemnation by a wide variety of powerful political leaders. We ought to demand a similar response to these Avaaz.org ads. Any less is an insult to those who fight each and every day to maintain our freedom to even have a commute.
This post was written by Caroline May, policy analyst at the National Center for Public Policy Research. Write the author at info@nationalcenter.org. As we occasionally reprint letters on the blog, please note if you prefer that your correspondence be kept private, or only published anonymously.
The Atlantic is telling the world its own Andrew Sullivan is the 9th most influential commentator in the United States, which is hogwash (or did I miss the nation following Andrew Sullivan's obsession with Sarah Palin's last pregnancy?).
The Atlantic's often-silly list (Paul Krugman is #1!) is not completely without value, however, as it provides a cautionary tale of how foolish we can look when we pretend there is no such thing as a conflict of interest.
But back to Andrew Sullivan.
Why has a man who is not a citizen of the United States been commenting on U.S. domestic policy for the last couple of decades as if he had a citizen's stake in the nation? As Robert Stacy McCain, Ace, Patterico, Ann Althouse, Glenn Reynolds and others have reported (somewhat incidentally, given the more interesting scandal with intriguing implications to which their attention was primarily directed), after a couple of decades of telling us how to arrange our domestic affairs (in more ways than one), Sullivan's retained his foreign citizenship, at least until whenever his upcoming citizenship hearing is.
Way back in the days when Andrew Sullivan was still a 20-something toiling for the New Republic, I took a phone call from a pollster during a major British election while at a friend's house in London. As I was keenly interested in the outcome of the election, I was sorely tempted to assist my favored candidate with a miniscule poll bump. But I kept my opinions to myself and told the pollster, that, as I am an American, I have no business influencing Britain's internal political processes as if I were a British subject.
Sullivan took a different course. He has been happy to tell Americans how to vote while owing his allegiance to a foreign power. (I don't see a disclaimer on the linked page anywhere, do you?)
A bio of Sullivan I found in a source he presumably approved (an employer, not the often-fictional Wikipedia) doesn't mention his citizenship either way (beyond the fact that he was born and raised in England, a fact he does mention reasonably often), but it does say he testified before the U.S. Congress on domestic legislation as early as 1996. He may have testified as a neutral expert and taken no position on the legislation, but seeing as how the bill was the Defense of Marriage Act, I'm not going to bet on it. And an article Sullivan penned for the October Atlantic entitled "Dear President Bush" is topped by a paragraph including the phrase "our nation's history" (referring to the United States of America), starts with Sullivan saying to the most recent President Bush, "I supported your presidential campaign in 2000, as I did your father's in 1988," and includes the words "the America I love and have made my home."
I ask you, are these activities and phrases that could lead a reasonable reader to believe Andrew Sullivan, domestic commentator, had become an American? And was advising us as one?
Would a little disclaimer once in a while of the I'm-telling-you-how-to-vote-but-be-aware-if-I-ever-get-drafted-it-won't-be-the-U.S.-Army's-unform-I-wear variety really have gone amiss?
Because the team a writer is playing for actually is important information for a reader to know.
Next time I'm in London I suppose I'll answer the pollster (though given that the two biggest parties these days are both run by climate-deluded NHS vote whores, I can't imagine endorsing either one of them). So what if I have no allegiance to the Queen?
Cross-posted at Newsbusters, where comments are enabled
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Rebutting False Racism Claims - Upcoming Deneen Borelli TV Appearances
Project 21 Fellow Deneen Borelli will be a guest on Fox's "Your World with Neil Cavuto" today at approximately 4:10 PM Eastern to discuss claims by former President Jimmy Carter and others that critics of the Obama Administration are motivated by racism. Speaker Nancy Pelosi's comments today comparing current political rhetoric to that preceding the murders of two San Francisco elected officials in 1978 are also likely to be discussed.
The Fox News Channel has also booked Deneen for an appearance Sunday, September 20 at 11:05 AM Eastern.
Deneen also has been scheduled to appear as a part of the Great American panel on the September 24 Hannity Show on the Fox News Channel, and, as noted yesterday in this blog, will be a guest on Fox and Friends on Friday, September 18 at approximately 6:20 AM Eastern.
Deneen also continues to be interviewed by a variety of print and radio news organizations, so if you are a fan, keep an eye & ear out for her as she continues to rebut the offensive nonsense being spewed by the intolerant left (for example, this).
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Project 21's Deneen Borelli on BBCAmerica Wednesday Night to Discuss Race and Obama Opposition
Project 21 Fellow Deneen Borelli is scheduled to appear on the "BBC World News America on the BBCAmerica channel on Wednesday September 16 at 7:00 PM and 10:00 PM eastern.
Deneen has been asked to discuss the issue of race and opposition to the Obama Administration agenda. Deneen was a speaker at the 9/12 rally on the Capitol grounds this past Saturday. Coverage of her speech can be found here.
Deneen's comments on the issue of race and Obama in light of former President Jimmy Carter's comments on the issue can be found here.
Check your local listings for BBCAmerica on cable. BBCAmerica is available on channel 189 on Fios, channel 135 on Dish Network and channel 264 on DirectTV.
This post was written by David Almasi, executive director of the National Center for Public Policy Research. Write the author at info@nationalcenter.org. As we occasionally reprint letters on the blog, please note if you prefer that your correspondence be kept private, or only published anonymously.
On the way in to work this morning, I saw a vehicle with a bumper sticker "Buy Fresh, Buy Local" and various other green bumper stickers. Presumably, the point was that by buying local, you avoid extra greenhouse emissions from transportation.
The vehicle was a Subaru Forester... one of the few Subarus with 0% domestic content.
This post was written by David Ridenour, vice president of the National Center for Public Policy Research. Write the author at info@nationalcenter.org. As we occasionally reprint letters, please note if you prefer that correspondence be kept private, or only published anonymously.
The perpetually non-serious (despite his grim look) New York Times columnist Paul Krugman claimed on ABC's This Week that "the argument against the public option is sheer nonsense, we know that, it's nothing except the insurance lobby." (See the last few seconds of video, above.)
So the tens of millions of Americans who ardently oppose a public option (takeover) are insurance companies?
Gee, with millions of insurance companies out there, infesting Congressional town hall meetings, tea parties and whatnot, you'd think we wouldn't need the so-called "enhanced competition" of Krugman and Obama's public "option."
Earlier this month, ObamaCare opponents were racists. Now we're insurance companies. What will we be in September -- potted plants?
Download a pre-production PDF of The National Center for Public Policy Research's upcoming new book, Shattered Lives: 100 Stories of Government Health Care, for more on the way waiting lists affect the lives of people living in countries with government-run medicine. Feel free to email a free copy to Krugman.
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6,000 surgical operations may be cut to make up for budgetary shortfall in Vancouver. Would 6,000 Canadians trade health insurance for health care? (Let's ask when some of them visit.)
How much would you spend to apply a solution that doesn't work to a problem that doesn't exist? Me: Not so much. Congress: $8 billion. (H/T Celebrity Paycut)
The Cash for Clunkers program's rules say dealers will be reimbursed within ten days, but dealers have found themselves on waiting lists. Reminds me of this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this. You can't make government efficient by passing a law saying it has to be.
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This post by National Center for Public Policy Research Vice President David Ridenour. E-mail comments to info@nationalcenter.org. | Subscribe to this blog's feed. | Follow on Twitter.
Is Obama Really Dropping the So-Called Public Option? Not a Chance
The media is making much of the Obama Administration's hints that the President will no longer insist on a so-called "public option" in a health care bill he signs, but the idea of a government-started "co-op" alternative to private health insurance has not been abandoned.
What we have here is the left, finding a block on a road heading left, choosing another read, also heading left.
A closer look suggests that the only thing intriguing about the co-op alternative is whether it is a completely meaningless construct or simply camouflage for the "Public Plan" option...
...The new co-ops would presumably have to advertise like other insurance companies, build physician networks, pay competitive reimbursement rates, and in general act like, well, every other insurance company. It is suggested that the new federal co-ops would be nonprofits, and therefore would offer better service and lower costs. But many insurance companies, including "mutual" insurers and many "Blues," are already nonprofit companies. If the new co-ops operate under the same rules as other nonprofit insurers, why bother?
And there's the rub. Supporters of government-run health care have no intention of letting the co-ops be independent enterprises that operate by the same rules as other insurers. This is not really about creating more choices and competition. In fact, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) makes it clear, for example, that the co-op's officers and directors would be appointed by the president and Congress. He insists that there be a single national co-op. And Congress would set the rules under which it operates. As Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) says, "It's got to be written in a way that accomplishes the objectives of a public option."
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks likes a duck, it's probably a duck.
Moreover, several previous attempts by governments to set up co-ops have, in fact, failed. Perhaps the largest such failure was the Florida Community Health Purchasing Alliance, which was set up by the State of Florida in 1993, and at one time covered 98,000 people. It was unable to attract small business customers and ultimately went out of business in 2000. Does anyone really believe that a Congress that is busy bailing out banks and automobile companies because they are 'too big to fail" is going to sit idly by while one of these new co-ops suffers a similar fate?
If a "co-op" is run by the federal government under rules imposed by the federal government with funding provided by the federal government, it's simply government-run health insurance by another name. Opponents of a government takeover of the health care system should not be fooled.
A single national co-op with officers and director appointed by the President and Congress and set up to accomplish the objectives of a public option.
Sounds exactly like government-run health care to me.
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If PhRMA doesn't want America to think it was bribed by the White House not to oppose government-run health care, it could oppose government-run health care.
Warning: You won't want to read this apology if you want to keep offensive words out of your life.
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Egg on Face of Left, But It's Probably the Right's Fault Anyway
The left-wing Think Progress website reports that the situation of Kenneth Gladney, the "Don't Tread on Me" t-shirt salesman who reportedly was assaulted at a town meeting last week, "underscores the vital need for health care reform" because Gladney "has no affordable health care option available."
Another website the group quotes, the Moderate Voice, says, "If anything was more calculated to make the Right look foolish than this St. Louis incident then I'd love to see it."
But of course the Right is always defending the accuracy of the mainstream media, so the whole muck-up is probably still our fault.
To Think Progress' credit, it updated its blog post with the information that Mr. Gladney does have health insurance.
Nevertheless, something more needs to be said: this debate is not only, or even primarily, about access to health insurance. It is about access to health care. No one argues that Mr. Gladney got that, and promptly, too.
As a new book the National Center for Public Policy Research will soon release, "Shattered Lives: 100 Stories of Government Health Care" aptly demonstrates, prompt (or even any) access to health care is not something people in Britain, Canada, Australia or other nations with government-run health care systems can take for granted.
Insurance they got.
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Pelosi and Hoyer: "'Un-American' Attacks Can't Derail Health Care Debate"
Here's a link to the op-ed by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD).
It's not very good, and not at all factual (haven't they read the bill?), but as its headline, helped along by Drudge, has made it notorious, I thought folks might like a link.
By the way, who agrees with me that "the promise of affordable health care for all" -- as the Representatives put it -- has not been the most debate domestic issue since the Lyndon Johnson Administration, as Pelosi and Hoyer claim? Just a guess, but I think the honor for that title would go to the abortion debate.
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Congressman Barney Frank: Public Option is Route to Single Payer
One thing I have always appreciated about Rep. Barney Frank is that he is a very effective communicator.
In this video, he can't be more plain: The Obama/Democrat leadership health care "public option" is intended to lead the U.S. to single-payer health care.
The left will keep denying it, but there's no doubt its Barney Frank in this video, and he's in a position to know.
If you have a blog, I hope you will consider re-posting this video. It's YouTube page is here.
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The memos purport to show the benefits that will head toward constituents of the individual Members if only they would sell their souls to obtain the benefits.
Talking Points Memo helpfully displayed the one created for the district of Rep. Mike Ross (D-AR). Like others I reviewed, this document is just one page -- a curiously short summary for an over 1,000 page bill with literally life-and-death implications.
Such things as the following also were missing from the summaries:
revealing that people who pursue healthy lifestyles and are rewarded by lower premiums will lose this benefit ("hardly a formula for lower costs," says CNN Money) if the House bill becomes law;
the Lewin Group estimate that 88.1 million Americans could lose their present health care coverage, even if they don't want to;
the fact that an estimated 1.2 million small businesses would be hit by a 5.4 percent surtax, and many Americans would face a higher income tax rate than do taxpayers in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Japan;
It appears that Talking Points Memo and the Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee want the public to be educated on what is in the House bill -- but not too educated.
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House Left Moves to End Community Service Requirement in Public Housing
The Congressional conservatives' Republican Study Committee reports that Congressmen Rangel (D-NY), Frank (D-MA), Waters (D-CA) and Watt (D-NC) will introduce an amendment to the Transportation-HUD appropriations bill later today to prohibit requiring people in public housing to contribute eight hours per month to community service or spend a comparable time in an economic self-sufficiency program.
Eight hours per month must have been too much to ask.
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It seems the White House plans to re-write the health care bill after some version of it passes the House and Senate, then jam the re-written version through Congress before anyone in Congress -- or the public -- has a chance to see what's in it.
Is this the transparency candidate Obama promised?
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Paul Mirengoff says Walter Cronkite "didn't represent the victory of substance over style, but rather the victory of a style that implied substance over substance itself." I agree.
Struggling for purpose in light of the election of the first black president, the NAACP moves in the wrong direction, says a group of black conservatives, when it endorses a climate policy in tandem with the World Wildlife Federation that is opposed by a majority of black Americans.
"I'm all in favor of the nation's oldest civil rights group redefining its mission and agenda; however this indicates that the NAACP continues to struggle with current realities that face the nation's black communities by promoting policies they are opposed to," said Project 21’s Joe Hicks, who is also a PajamasTV commentator. "If this group simply wants to be defined as another left-wing organization touting the weak science on climate change, then it is destined to face ever-growing irrelevancy."
Project 21 Fellow Deneen Borelli added: "It's outrageous for the NAACP to place liberal ideology over the welfare of the nation. By aligning with the environmental activist lobby, the NAACP is now an official member of 'Club Green' - the exclusive club of elites waging war against fossil fuels. Tragically, the cover charge for their membership - job losses, reduced standard of living and high energy costs - will be borne disproportionately by the very people the NAACP claims to represent."
The NAACP's zeal for regulation is opposed by most black Americans. A recent poll of 800 black Americans found 76 percent believe Congress should make economic recovery, not climate change, its top priority. 56 percent believe policymakers do not adequately consider the quality of life of black Americans when addressing climate policy. When asked how much they would pay for gas and electricity to reduce greenhouse emissions, 76 percent said they would be unwilling to pay more than $50 a year while 52 percent were unwilling to pay anything at all.
Hicks added: "The NAACP shows how out of touch it has become by advocating Obama Administration policies on so-called climate change that impact the very population that claim to represent - poor, black Americans. Adding an increased burden of higher coast for essential things like gasoline and electricity at a time of economic hardship demonstrates that they have no independent course of leadership, but instead is blindly following this administration's disastrous lead."
Rep. Tom Price (R-GA), a doctor in the real world, gives a good description of the majority's health care destruction bill in these comments delivered to his fellow members of the House Education and Labor Committee. Following Price's sharp exchange with Committee Chairman George Miller (D-CA) over something Price says Speaker Pelosi said and Miller says she didn't, my favorite part is Price saying this: "You know what [the American people] will have access to? They have access to an opportunity to get in line. They'll be able to get in line."
Price also said, flatly, that the House Democrats' bill "will destroy health care in this nation."
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The Congressional Budget Office said today taxpayers should expect no net savings if one of the health care plans being developed by House and Senate Democrats is adopted.
In a nutshell, CBO Director Doug Elmendorf says any savings the plans might deliver are offset by additional costs they impose.
President Obama, has, of course, been insistent that health care reform is necessary so cost savings can be achieved.
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Video of Tom Borelli on Obama's Corporatism Strategy on Glenn Beck
Here's the video of Monday's broadcast of the Glenn Beck Show on the Fox News channel in which Tom Borelli, director of the National Center for Public Policy Research's Free Enterprise Project and Wall Street analyst/Fox Business News commentator Charles Payne talk about GE's quasi-merger with the Obama Administration, GE's hiring of Linda Daschle as a lobbyist, the recent appointment of a GE executive to a top Obama Administration post at the EPA and how, as Glenn Beck put it in the segment, "the little guy gets screwed."
If The Average of 25 and 75 Is 50, Does That Make Us All Middle-Aged?'
Would you buy a used climate model from a man who could say this?
The average age of scientists in the space center control room was 26, which means they were 18 when they heard President Kennedy say he wanted to put a man on the Moon in ten years.
P.S. The high temperature yesterday in the Oxford, England area, where Al Gore spoke, was 64 degrees F. According to weather.com, the average high for that date is 8 degrees F higher.
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National Center's Tom Borelli Discusses Cap-and-Trade on Glenn Beck
In case you missed it, here's the segment of Glenn Beck's Fox TV show from Wednesday night featuring Tom Borelli of the National Center for Public Policy Research and David Kreutzer of the Heritage Foundation.
The topic is cap and trade, USCAP, corporations doing the bidding of the left, the Waxman-Markey global warming bill and the use of last minute amendments filled with goodies (amendments Congress wasn't given time to read, of course) by the House leadership to get the legislation approved by the House.
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Naughty Conservatives Shouldn't Mind Votes for Waxman-Markey (Or So We're Told)
In an error-riddled column posted Wednesday on TownHall.com, the supposedly conservative Michael Gerson has a novel take on the Republican Congressmen who voted for the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill: He blames conservatives for minding.
One of his reasons: "It is typical that we praise independent judgment and political nerve in our elected officials -- until they actually show those qualities."
If any conservatives and/or others dedicated to limiting government called on our elected representatives to show "independent judgement and political nerve" in service of anything other than principle, they were wrong to do so.
Gerson doesn't quote anybody, though, and I can see why: There are a lot more quotes available of conservatives calling upon their elected representatives to govern conservatively.
Gerson's try to tar the conservative movement with a hypocrisy tag doesn't work.
Gerson is honest, though, in saying he likes the bill (I find it difficult to believe this man is a conservative).
He likes it because, he says, the global warming theory is the dominant view of the "scientific community" (a brush broad enough to include gynecologists), because "some scientists" warn of "possible 'tipping points'," and because, supposedly, mankind's carbon dioxide emissions have reduced crop yields and driven some species to extinction. How he could possibly know this is not mentioned, possibly because what he claims is beyond the current ability of modern science to prove or disprove.
Gerson says "global warming since the 19th century is undeniable," which is another way of saying the planet warmed as the Little Ice Age ended, though Gerson does not mention that there even was a Little Ice Age (and before it, warmer temperatures, though no SUVs).
Gerson doesn't mention, either, that if concern for crop yields is paramount, a little more CO2 in the atmosphere might be just the thing.
And then there's his comment that warming since the end of the Little Ice Age is "closely correlated with increases in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide," which by itself would prove nothing if it were true, but it isn't.
There's more, such as Gerson's ludicrious comment that in failing to appreciate cap-and-trade, "conservatives seem strangely intent on ignoring the power of markets to encourage... innovation," as if Waxman-Markey had anything whatsoever to do with free markets (oops, Gerson left the word "free" out, so there goes the innovation).
I could go on, but there's really no need. I linked to the version of this column on TownHall with comments. The column is impossible to appreciate, but some of the comments are superlative.
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Many readers will be aware that New York Times opinion writer Paul Krugman wrote in his Monday column that individuals who did not support the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill when it came up in the House for a vote last Friday are guilty of "a form of treason" against the planet.
A thought experiment: If two doctors were to disagree on a patient's diagnosis, and Krugman agreed with one of them, would the one Krugman disagrees with be guilty of a form of treason?
Even that analogy is too generous to Krugman, as doctors take an oath to (essentially) be loyal to their patients' welfare, but it is not at all common for people with opinions (of any kind) on cap-and-trade or even global warming to first take an oath of loyalty to the planet.
What many of us have done is take oaths of loyalty to the United States. The Waxman-Markey bill would ship American jobs overseas, raise energy prices, shovel money to special interests corruptly, drag down economic growth and impose regressive regulatory taxes on consumers. It would not have a measurable effect on temperature. As it does bad without doing good, the Waxman-Markey bill is bad for the United States of America.
Thus, by Paul Krugman's definition, anyone who supports Waxman-Markey is guilty of "a form of treason" against the United States.
Fortunately for Krugman, his definition of treason is even more silly than it is offensive, which is saying a great deal.
P.S. Climate Skeptic has very good commentary about Krugman's treason charge, going into different areas than I did. (I read it after seeing a link on Coyote Blog.) Interesting that neither Krugman nor his editors knew that you can't write "degrees" with meaning without specifying the temperature scale being used.
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Project 21 just issued a press release criticizing the Congressional Black Caucus's apparent plans to retaliate against the House Office of Congressional Ethics, which concluded that several CBC members should be investigated by the full Ethics Committee for alleged violations of gift rules.
The release says:
Project 21 Critical of Members of Congress Under Ethics Investigation for Retaliating Against House Ethics Office and for Playing 'Race Card'
An apparent effort by the Congressional Black Caucus to deter ethics investigations of its membership is drawing sharp criticism from members of the black leadership group Project 21.
CBC members reportedly are considering changes to the law authorizing the House Office of Congressional Ethics, or OCE, in retaliation for the OCE referring allegations against several CBC members to the House Ethics Committee.
CBC members reportedly also have complained that the OCE does not have enough minority staffers, adding a racial element to the apparent retaliation.
"What does the racial or ethnic makeup of the Office of Congressional Ethics have to do with the fact that these members of the Congressional Black Caucus may have violated ethics laws? It has absolutely no bearing on the charge, and to claim that is a lack of diversity at the OCE is playing the race card plain and simple," said Project 21 member Joe Hicks, also a commentator for Pajamas Television. "It is laughable that CBC members are charging the OCE with some sort of racial targeting. The OCE was created by Speaker Pelosi, someone who shamelessly bends over backwards to be politically correct."
Of the three investigative counsels hired by the OCE, one is black. The chairman of the formal Ethics Committee investigation sparked by the OCE referral is a black Member of Congress, Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D-NC), a CBC member.
"A legitimate complaint has been filed and an investigation has begun, but political pressure is now being applied to cover up the allegations and brush everything under the rug," said Project 21 member Bishop Council Nedd II. "So much for those promises to 'drain the swamp' and root out the 'culture of corruption.' It seems that swamp has turned into a hot tub for them rather quickly."
"President Obama has long proclaimed that it is special interest lobbyists who are the root of what is wrong with our federal government. This latest lapse in congressional sensibilities exposes the fact that it is wayward members of Congress themselves, whether Republican or Democrat, who pose the greatest threat to good government for the citizens of this country," said Project 21 member John Meredith. "The idea of disbanding the one avenue the citizens of this great nation have to track congressional malfeasance is an affront to the pledge of transparency in government and the use of the race card to facilitate the closing of the Office of Congressional Ethics is insulting not only to black people but to people of every color."
In November 2008, Flaherty attended the "Caribbean Multi-Cultural Business Conference" on the Caribbean island of St. Maarten. Although the conference officially was sponsored by the Carib News Foundation, according to Flaherty, signs and materials present indicate the event was funded by Citigroup, Pfizer, American Airlines, Verizon, IBM and other large corporations with business before Congress. CBC members Charles Rangel (D-NY), Carolyn Kilpatrick (D-MI), Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX), Donald Payne (D-NJ), Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and Delegate Donna Christensen (D-Virgin Islands) attended the event.
Members of Congress have been prohibited since 2007 from taking funded trips of over two days if those trips are paid for or coordinated by companies that "employ or retain a registered lobbyist."
Flaherty alerted the OCE. In his letter to the OCE, Flaherty noted: "My characterization of the trip as a 'junket' is based on my observation that the sessions were lightly attended. Most attendees spent significant time at the beach or the pool. Members of Congress attended the sessions when they had a speaking role." Flaherty also said any suggestion that attendees could not see evidence of corporate involvement was "implausible."
Climate Depot unveils two shocking examples of hypocrisy by Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) when it reports that global warming zealot Schumer is seeking federal aid for New York farmers because below-average temperatures are affecting crop yields.
That's my opinion, anyway.
Hypocrisy #1: Schumer has been co-sponsoring climate legislation that would have immense negative economic effects on the American public, supposedly in the interest of preventing global warming. So now he wants to hit up the taxpayers because it's too cold?
Hypocrisy #2: To hear him tell it, Schumer is extremely worried about farmers in New York who lost crops due to below-average temperatures. Federal funds are needed, he says, to mitigate the damage of nature: "We must provide immediate assistance after the unusually low temperatures that destroyed... crops and profits for the season."
But does Schumer do anything when federal laws -- federal laws he supports, such as the Endangered Species Act -- restrict vital water to farmers in the San Joaquin Valley, causing what one California Congressman, Rep. Dennis Cardoza (D), called a "Dust Bowl migration," as thousands of families are moving away from his district, thanks to unemployment nearing 50 percent in some communities.
Schumer calls upon the federal government to act immediately when nature hurts the farmers of his state, but when policies he ardently supportS hurt the farmers of California, he just doesn't care.
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Roll Call reports that negotiations over climate legislation among Democrats on Capitol Hill blew up last night.
This mimics the disorder among members of the Congressional majority on health care. CNN reported today that that the Democrats' plans to advance government's role in health care may be "on the rocks"; that's our sense of things as well.
Believers in a free market should not become overconfident, however; the left still holds most of the cards, and it has shown in the past that it is willing to pass nearly anything, as long as it is left-wing and/or shovels tax money to groups and individuals allied with the left. The Congressional majority will gladly pass bad, even horrendous, bills on climate and health care (indeed, from what I can see, they are only considering horrendous bills), so the odds against our team remain high.
That said, I'm amazed at the incompetence and lack of discipline going on in leftist ranks on the Hill. Congressional liberals were mostly out of power from 1995-2007 (House liberals were the entire time). They wanted to curb our use of energy and increase government's role in health care decisionmaking during that entire period, so why did they not get together and make plans? Work out drafts and get those drafts scored?
The Republican majority in Congress had its problems, but it sure hit the ground running in 1995.
This makes no sense to me.
P.S. One possibility just occurred to me. Possibly the environmental groups, with their hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, did not expend enough effort to get folks together on their version of climate heaven because they figure, if a climate bill passes, they wouldn't be able to do fundraising on global warming anymore. That's just a guess on my part, though. Could be they've just been incompetent.
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Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle's decision to give up for now on a federal public health care plan has to be a blow to the Administration and the left.
Daschle, while retired from the Senate, remains an influential and respected voice in the Democratic party. This can't be happy news for the left.
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"The Biggest Bureaucratic Power Grab in a Generation"
If you haven't visited the National Center for Public Policy Research's new Clean Water Restoration Act Information page (or even if you have), you can get a good 2 1/2 minute summary of CWRA from Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) from the video above.
Senator Inhofe starts the video with "Rural America, watch out!" and goes on to call CWRA "the biggest bureaucratic power grab in a generation."
If you have a blog or web page yourself, please consider posting this video. Although few people have heard of this bill, Senator Inhofe is not exaggerating about its scope.
It's important that people become educated about CWRA -- the issue is that big.
The White House is running away from Senator Ted Kennedy's health care reform bill, now that the bill is receiving adverse publicity.
I don't believe any of the liberal bills calling for an increase in the government's role in our health care system are a good idea for America, but I can't call myself impressed by the way the White House is dissing Kennedy here. Kennedy at least is man enough to put a bill out there.
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A Somewhat Happy Ending to the Latest Death Threat Story...
...first covered in Climate Depot about the global warming believer and blog writer at the prominent liberal blog Talking Points Memo who asked: "at what point do we jail or execute global warming deniers?"
"The Insolent Braggart," as the anonymous blogger is known, isn't the first to wish death upon those of us who aren't convinced that human beings are causing soon-to-be-catastrophic global warming. (My own e-mail in-box is proof of that.) Over the years, I've reached the conclusion that most of these folks have stopped thinking of their political opposition as human beings, so when they express death wishes or grotesque threats, it doesn't seem real to them.
Until somebody who hasn't drunk the Kool-aid notices, that is.
Ironically, given how he got his 15 minutes of fame, "The Insolent Braggart" is probably a perfectly nice, if occasionally misguided, fellow.
Here's predicting that one day he'll feel about the global warming theory the same way he now feels about writing blog posts about executions.
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General Electric boss Jeffrey Immelt faced a tough crowd at GE's annual stockholder's meeting in April, and it's just now becoming clear how much he minded.
At the meeting, Project 21 Fellow Deneen Borelli asked if media reports that Immelt had tried to silence anti-Obama reporting on GE-owned networks are true. During her dialogue with Immelt, her microphone was cut off (it was restored after she continued talking anyway).
Then Fox News Channel O'Reilly Factor Producer Jesse Watters, a GE shareholder, asked Immelt about Keith Olbermann's handling of the Janeane Garofalo interview. Watters' microphone was soon cut off as well, but this did Immelt no good, as next up was the National Center for Public Policy Research Free Enterprise Project Director Tom Borelli, who, as I reported here in April, asked Immelt about GE's business with Iran, GE's lobbying for cap-and-trade, and GE's double-hit on senior citizen stockholders [by cutting dividends after saying it wouldn't while lobbying for cap-and-trade regulations that will dramatically raise consumer energy prices].
Following the meeting, in an apparent counterattack against Borelli, false allegations were made that Tom was there as a front for Fox News, which competes with GE-owned MSNBC and CNBC. Tom has no relationship with Fox News except that he appears on the network periodically as a guest and he lent an audiotape he made of the GE shareholder's meeting to Fox, which broadcast it (leading fact-challenged Keith Olbermann to falsely accuse Fox's Jesse Watters of making the perfectly legal tape and lying about it to GE security guards).
So why bring all this up now? Because it seems that GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt, whom one would think has better things to do, was so upset that three shareholders -- Deneen Borelli, Jesse Watters and Tom Borelli -- would ask him questions about the GE-owned networks' liberal bias, trade with Iran and lobbying for cap-and-trade that he ordered retaliation against a news media outlet that reported they had done so.
Specifically, the LA Weekly's Nicki Finke's Deadline Hollywood column reported Friday night that after Paul Bond of The Hollywood Reporter wrote a story about the three questions and the shareholder's meeting (a story immediately picked up by the Drudge Report), Immelt immediately ordered a GE-wide ban on Nielsen Business Media, which owns The Hollywood Reporter.
That's when, sources inside and outside Nielsen Business Media tell me, GE Chairman Jeff Immelt ordered a GE company-wide ban on all of THR's parent company: advertising, editorial, the works. After a few days, the ban was reduced to GE's NBC Universal against Nielsen Business Media's The Hollywood Reporter and lasted six weeks. (My NBC Universal sources believe the ban was lifted yesterday.)
My reporting is the first about the ban or what led to it. "People need to know that GE is using its media arm to stifle coverage about its company, and this is coming from Immelt and Zucker," a Nielsen Business Media insider said.
Finke adds:
...sources inside and outside Nielsen Business Media tell me, GE Chairman Jeff Immelt personally issued a GE ban on all of the Nielsen company. "Jeff Immelt severed relations between all of GE with all of Nielsen over that story. Immelt called Zucker, and Zucker took it from there. Then, after a few days, GE backtracked, and then it became NBC Universal severing relations with The Hollywood Reporter."
According to my sources, Zucker ordered NBC Universal employees "not to talk" to THR. "They took away passes and tickets," says one insider. Another told me advertising was affected: it appears all or almost all advertising was stopped by NBC Universal at what was and continues to be a very important revenue time for the trade -- just before the Emmy nominations. Still another told me that NBC Universal employees stopped returning THR reporters' calls. One NBC Universal employee actually said to a THR reporter: "I'm not allowed to talk to The Hollywood Reporter."
Only a handful of people within the publication knew about the GE/NBC Universal ban. "It was all very mysterious," one reporter whose calls stopped being returned by NBC Universal told me. "No one told me specifically why. But I think some story really pissed them off."
I don't want to quote all of the Finke column here, so I'll just say GE's retaliation evidently did not stop there. GE reportedly also tried to use its advertising clout to get The Hollywood Reporter journalist, Paul Bond, fired (go to the Finke piece for details).
My conclusion: Never assume the corporate and news executives whose work product is being criticized aren't paying attention. GE's Jeffrey Immelt is one of the most powerful corporate executive in the world. His corporation owns not just MSNBC and CNBC, but the storied NBC itself. Yet despite his lofty position, he not only is paying attention, he's paying close attention, and he apparently doesn't like the criticism one bit.
Maybe someday he'll figure out that if he cleans up his networks and starts running GE like a capitalist firm instead of as a welfare queen-wannabe, he can get the criticism he hates so much to stop.
Note: For video on the story as it originally unfolded, go here for the audio of a Glenn Beck radio interview with Tom Borelli (prepared by Olbermann Watch) and here for video of the story on the Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly Fox News shows, including an interview with talk radio host Laura Ingraham about it.
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On the Murder of Private William Long, Obama Finally Speaks
I guess the White House noticed rising numbers of complaints about the President's failure to give the apparently-political murder of Private William Long the same level of concern he gave to the apparently-political murder of Dr. George Tiller.
Michelle Malkin has the complete White House statement, along with commentary.
I agree with Michelle's commentary, but at least the President finally said something.
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On Sotomayor, Rumors of Conservative Hypocrisy are Overblown
ScienceBlogs, which, despite the neutral and academic-sounding name, apparently is a left-wing political blog, has a curious attack on "the Right" today on the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor. Since husband David and I are in it, mildly, and post author Ed Brayton appears to have a glaring blind spot that causes him to unfairly malign several of my fellow conservatives, I thought I'd take a minute to set the record straight.
Brayton claims there is "glaring hypocrisy" of which some conservatives are guilty. Specifically, Brayton charges, in 2005 (Brayton actually wrote "1995") quite a few conservatives signed a letter to Republican Senators opposing the use of the filibuster to obstruct up-or-down 50-percent-plus-one votes on judicial nominees. The hypocrisy comes in, Brayton charges, because some of those same conservatives also signed a letter dated June 2, 2009 calling on Republican Senators to consider using a filibuster to, if needed, make sure the Senate debate on Sotomayor is "appropriately long."
Brayton misses, either intentionally or because he did not understand one or both of the letters, the important common position in each letter: Opposition to the use of the filibuster to obstruct a straightforward up-or-down 50-percent-plus-one vote.
The 2009 letter spells out very clearly that the letter's signers are not trying to obstruct a majority vote on Sotomayor, but merely make certain a meaningful debate on the nomination occurs. Paragraphs are devoted to the explanation, as well as very clear phrases, such as "the traditional filibuster, not intended to obstruct [a vote]."
It seems so clear to me, I don't see how Brayton could have misunderstood it.
P.S. The Other McCain rebuts another ridiculous criticism of the June 2 letter. Really, why do certain people feel so threatened by a call for a mere debate?
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Outrage of the Day: Obama's Silence on the Murder of William Long
Thanks to Michelle Malkin for the link to the Newsbusters version of my post on the lopsided news media coverage of the George Tiller and William Long murders.
Kudos to Michelle for calling President Obama to account for the shameful way Obama has ignored William Long's murder.
Obama was Private Long's commander-in-chief. Long was murdered specifically because of this service. On Sunday, President Obama lamented the murder of George Tiller, whose killer allegedly had political and religious motivations. On Monday, Private Long was murdered by someone else who likewise allegedly had political and religious motives. Long, unlike Tiller, had a direct tie to President Obama -- Long had sworn an oath to follow Obama's orders, even at the risk of his own life. Then, in the performance of these duties, apparently directly because he had sworn that specific oath, Long is murdered. And Obama, so quick to condemn ideological murder just a day before, says nothing.
Even after people complain, giving the clueless White House a clue that words were sought, Obama still says nothing.
You should read the whole thing, but here's part of Michelle Malkin's column on this:
President Obama issued a statement condemning "heinous acts of violence" within hours of Tiller's death. The Justice Department issued its own statement and sent federal marshals to protect abortion clinics. News anchors and headline writers abandoned all qualms about labeling the gunman a terrorist. An almost gleeful excess of mainstream commentary poured forth on the climates of hate and fear created by conservative talk radio, blogs, and Fox News for reporting Tiller's activities.
By contrast, President Obama was silent about the military recruiter attacks that left 24-year-old Private William Long dead and 18-year-old Private Quinton Ezeagwula gravely wounded. On Tuesday afternoon -- more than 24 hours after the attack on the military recruiting center in Little Rock -- President Obama held a press conference to announce his pick for Army Secretary. It would have been exactly the right moment to express condolences for the families of the targeted Army recruiters and to condemn heinous acts of violence against our troops.
But President Obama said nothing. The Justice Department was mum. And so were the legions of finger-pointing pundits happily convicting the pro-life movement and every right-leaning writer on the planet of contributing to the murder of George Tiller. Obama's omission, it should be noted, comes just a few weeks after he failed to mention the Bronx jihadi plot to bomb synagogues and a National Guard airbase during his speech on homeland security.
Why the silence? Politically and religiously-motivated violence, it seems, is only worth lamenting when it demonizes opponents...
Michelle scolds the media, too: "Is it too much to ask the media cartographers in charge of mapping the 'climate of hate' to do their jobs with both eyes open?"
Yes, apparently it is.
William Long was willing to give his life to his country. Because of this, he was (apparently) targeted by a domestic terrorist and killed. His sacrifice deserves at least token recognition by his commander-in-chief.
Michelle's June 3 blog post on this contains the full text of her column. After you read it, click the "send to a friend" tag at the end, and send the column to at least five friends.
Obama does things when he thinks they'll help make him popular. If we keep this story alive, Private Long eventually may get the presidential recognition he deserves.
Addendum: Vocal Minority has good thoughts on this as well, including a roundup of comments from other sources. (That's where I learned of Michelle Malkin's hat tip in the first place, as well.)
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Kirchick is an assistant editor of the liberal New Republic magazine and a contributing writer to The Advocate, which is a national gay newsmagazine.
An excerpt:
...Within hours after the murder [of abortion doctor George Tiller], every antiabortion group in the country denounced the attack...
...These unqualified reproaches are nothing new. The organized antiabortion movement has always opposed violence against abortion providers. That has never stopped opportunistic prochoice activists, however, from conflating their passionate rhetoric with the behavior of individual criminals. True to form, on Sunday, Mike Hendricks of the Kansas City Star accused anyone who had criticized Tiller as a murderer (Tiller aborted healthy, nine-month old fetuses) of being an "accomplice" to his death.
Over the past decade this argumentative tactic has taken on an even more insidious twist. In addition to fighting violent, Muslim jihadists abroad, some liberals argue that America must deal with its own, homegrown terrorists. These are not just people who commit violence but millions of socially conservative evangelicals and Catholics -- "Christianists" -- who comprise the base of the Republican Party and threaten the stability of the country.
In 2007, former New York Times Middle East Bureau Chief Chris Hedges published a book called "American Fascists" that compared conservative evangelicals to European brownshirts of the 1920s and 1930s. That same year, CNN's Christiane Amanpour hosted a three-part series, "God's Warriors," that equated Christian (and Jewish) fundamentalists with Muslim extremists...
...But if the reactions to the death of Tiller mean anything, the "Christian Taliban," as conservative religious figures are often called, isn't living up to its namesake. If "Christianists" were anything like actual religious fascists they would applaud Tiller's murder as a "heroic martyrdom operation" and suborn further mayhem...
...There is no appreciable number of people in this country, religious Christians or otherwise, who support the murder of abortion doctors. The same cannot be said of Muslims who support suicide bombings in the name of their religion.
Yet speak of the disproportionately violent strain in Islam to a "progressive" person and you'll be met with sneering recitations of millennia-old Christian crusades or Jewish settlements in the West Bank. As for conservative Christians' contemporary political endeavors, lobbying to ban the teaching of evolution in schools or forbidding same-sex marriage simply does not threaten society in quite the same way as the genital mutilation of young girls or the bombing of the London transit system.
I happen to support a legal regime that would, in Bill Clinton's famous words, keep abortion safe, legal and rare. I hold no brief for the religious right, and its views on homosexuality in particular offend (and affect) me personally. But it's precisely because of my identity that I consider comparisons between so-called Christianists (who seek to limit my rights via the ballot box) and Islamic fundamentalists (who seek to limit my rights via decapitation) to be fatuous.
In the coming days, we will hear more about how mainstream conservative organizations and media personalities created an "environment" in which the murder of an abortion doctor became an inevitability. Just as talk radio was blamed for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, an attempt will be made to extend the guilt for this crime from the individual who pulled the trigger to the conservative movement writ large. But the Christian right's responsible reaction to the death of George Tiller should put to rest the lie that Judeo-Christian extremists are anywhere near as numerous or dangerous as those of the Muslim variety.
P.S. If you are interested at all in former New York Times Middle East Bureau Chief Chris Hedges' book, "American Fascists," you can read a review I wrote of it in the Washington Examiner here.
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Michael Kinsey has quite a takedown of the "new" Newsweek in the old New Republic, but he's very clear on one point: he dislikes Time more.
In my view, the only thing that would save either Time or Newsweek in the long run is really top-flight, undercovering-new-facts reporting on fast-breaking issues. People don't need news recaps any more. They have little reason to pay for access to opinion columns, or cutsey, gossipy short pieces.
The problem is the magazines face is that this kind of reporting is hard to do. Hard to research, hard to write, hard to edit. And even if the owners of either Time or Newsweek agreed with me and were willing to try the business model I suggest, it is unclear that the modern mainstream media has enough true journalists available to staff and maintain the truly high-quality newsroom that would be required.
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The ...investigation of the Speaker of the House has been an opportunity to direct public attention to several issues that conservatives have considered key. Among these: the unprecedentedly heavy-handed tactics of the majority in Congress...; the frequently-disastrous self-serving involvement of Members of Congress into foreign affairs...; the leaking of classified information for partisan gain...; the unfair targeting of conservatives only in politically-motivated "ethics" probes.
If you guessed May 22, 1989, you are correct.
It could almost be written today, couldn't it?
The paragraph comes from an in-house report I wrote on May 22, 1989 regarding National Center for Public Policy Research activities to bring public attention to the ethics problems of Speaker of the House Jim Wright of Texas. I found the report while searching some old files for something else entirely and couldn't resist posting part of it after I realized the date was twenty years ago exactly today.
I was amused by the following paragraph:
Our second activity was a "Clean the House" rally "in demand of a full and fair investigation of Speaker Wright" held at the Democratic National Committee on April 20... The Democrats were not pleased. An internal DNC memo circulated to all staff inside the headquarters in advance of the rally instructed DNC staffers to ignore the rally and forbade them from looking out the windows overlooking the rally site. Some staffers disobeyed, however, and threw a large stack of copies of photographs of Republican Members of Congress and leading conservatives (Oliver North, Jerry Falwell) from the DNC roof onto the rally.
I no longer recall, but as we all had carried brooms at the rally, I guess we swept them up.
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No way it's torture, says Project 21 Chairman Mychal Massie in his latest independent column for WorldNetDaily.
Some excerpts (I particularly like the line about Senator John Kerry):
It is a misnomer to call the techniques employed in the extraction of information from terrorists "enhanced" anything. They should simply be called "basic interrogation techniques."
The word enhanced, by definition, means to augment with improved, advanced or sophisticated features. Therein lies my complaint in part. Forced nakedness, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, prolonged isolation, sensory bombardment (e.g., prolonged loud music and/or bright lights), scriptural desecration, simulated drowning, i.e., waterboarding, and stressful positions are not enhanced or extreme, nor are they torture.
Torture would be a battery with cables connected to one's more personal or sensitive areas. Torture would be being placed in a stressful position that caused bones to break or legs and arms to pop out of their sockets. Torture is pliers to fingers, hammers to toes, and the removal of teeth by blunt force trauma. Rough interrogation is being beaten until the person is bloodied and permanently disfigured beyond recognition.
Keeping someone awake is not torture, nor is it sophisticated. Keeping bright lights on in a room with the temperature turned up is not torture. It is being made uncomfortable...
...Neither time nor space allows me to explain fully the difference, but the plaintive cries and pleadings that the Geneva Conventions were somehow violated are scurrilous. Captured terrorists are being treated with more respect than they deserve – certainly more than Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and John Murtha, D-Pa., have shown our military personnel. In my mind, John Kerry, D-Mass., has treated our military more inhumanely with his specious accusations than the pouring of water on someone to help them remember information could ever be.
This isn't about whether Nancy Pelosi lied about being briefed. It's a reasonable belief that she did. It isn't about mistreatment of captured terrorists. It is about saving the lives of American military personnel and American citizens. It is about the disruption of terrorist activity and the incapacitation of terrorists...
...Political correctness and politically correct verbiage has sullied and redefined everything it has been applied to – and EIT is a further example. With that said, when does America's treatment of the captured get the recognition it deserves as the most humane in the history of warfare?...
The "central activity" of the Obama Administration "is corruption," says George Will today.
The column begins:
Anyone, said T.S. Eliot, could carve a goose, were it not for the bones. And anyone could govern as boldly as his whims decreed, were it not for the skeletal structure that keeps civil society civil -- the rule of law. The Obama administration is bold. It also is careless regarding constitutional values and is acquiring a tincture of lawlessness...
Misbehaving for Money: Something Wanda Sykes, Perez Hilton and Donald Trump Have in Common
When comedian Wanda Sykes, heretofore largely anonymous, got the gig to be the professional funny person at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, she could have been funny (she knows how). Everyone would have laughed (it was an easy crowd), she would have received compliments afterward (and presumably some more bookings), and that would have been that.
Alternatively, she could do something outrageous, be all over the news for a few days, and get even more bookings and interviews and make a lot more money.
When professional gossip Perez Hilton had the chance to be a judge at the Miss USA pageant, he could have asked the sort of question pageant judges ask, or limited himself to questions appropriate to a show with untold numbers of children in the audience, or even restrained himself from behaving intolerantly and abominably (and to the detriment of the political cause he claims to champion) after receiving the answer he solicited and presumably expected. Because he did not, he received extensive national publicity, which, I expect, has benefited him financially and professionally.
When Donald Trump saw that personnel employed by the beauty pageant he owns were behaving grotesquely, he could have issued a few orders and knocked 90 percent of this story off the front pages. Because he made a different choice, the news media is abuzz with the fact that he will hold a press conference in the morning, and he'll no doubt be all over the news tomorrow. Ratings for his pageant will be up next year, not because greater numbers will tune in to admire the young ladies for their grace and beauty, but for the same reason people slow down on the highway to look at a car wreck. But Donald Trump will receive more publicity, and he will earn more money.
The behavior of Wanda Sykes, Perez Hilton, Donald Trump and others who intentionally behave less than graciously for money and profit is not admirable. If we wish to see less of it, we should turn our eyes away.
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Writing in the Wall Street Journal, former Senator George McGovern comes out against the mandatory arbitration provisions in the card check bill.
He says, "George Meany, president of the AFL-CIO for nearly 30 years before retiring in 1979, had it right in condemning mandatory arbitration as 'an abrogation of freedom.'"
You know the liberals in power are way, way out there when George McGovern quotes George Meany to criticize them.
Outrage of the Day: Keith Olbermann Got a Big Raise While His Employer Got a Bailout
Writing on U.S. News and World Report's website, Peter Roff notes that MSNBC's Keith Olbermann negotiated a $3.5 million raise at the very time his employer was receiving a taxpayer bailout.
While General Electric, the parent-company of your MSNBC network, was negotiating a $126 billion taxpayer-funded bailout, you signed a new contract raising your salary from $4 million to $7.5 million annually. You have used your show as a platform to call for the resignation of corporate executives accepting excessive bonuses on the backs of taxpayers who are picking up the tab for these atrocious bailouts, yet you yourself have no problem engaging in the same “class economic rape” that you accuse them of.
Please heed your own advice and stop accepting taxpayer money to subsidize your nightly diatribes. Resign or return the balance of your excessive raise to the U.S. Treasury.
Sincerely,
Go here if you'd like to sign it (and/or go if you'd like to watch a video the hilarious SNL send-up of Olbermann).
P.S. Here's a video of Keith Olbermann complaining about spending by bailed-out firms ("corporate pirates" ... who "need to be fired"). It's jaw-dropping to watch it knowing that he just got an extra $3.5 million in pay from a bailed-out firm.
The Obama Administration has just reversed rules requiring labor unions to make public certain financial and compensation arrangements.
The rules requiring disclosure had been adopted to help root out and prevent corruption and conflicts of interest.
In effect, the Administration said filing the forms was just too much of a bother for the unions, which, coincidentally, were a major backer of Obama's election.
No word on whether the Administration plans to reverse rules requiring taxpayers to file the onerous 1040 Form, the filing of which is regarded as a great bother.
"'Well, as you just heard Lisa [Sylvester] report, the former vice president claimed that this climate change legislation has the moral significance or equivalence of the civil rights legislation of the '60s and the Marshall Plans,' Dobbs said. 'Well, an interesting note -- Gore's father, Senator Al Gore, Sr., like many southern Democrats at the time voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964.'" -CNN's Lou Dobbs, as quoted by Ed Poor on NewsBusters.org.
Today's Outrage of the Day is news out of Spokane of environmentalist efforts to ban the sale of dishwasher detergent that actually gets dishes clean.
From Nicholas K. Geranios of the Associated Press:
The quest for squeaky-clean dishes has turned some law-abiding people in Spokane into dishwater-detergent smugglers. They are bringing Cascade or Electrasol in from out of state because the eco-friendly varieties required under Washington state law don't work as well. Spokane County became the launch pad last July for the nation's strictest ban on dishwasher detergent made with phosphates, a measure aimed at reducing water pollution. The ban will be expanded statewide in July 2010, the same time similar laws take effect in several other states.
But it's not easy to get sparkling dishes when you go green.
Many people were shocked to find that products like Seventh Generation, Ecover and Trader Joe's left their dishes encrusted with food, smeared with grease and too gross to use without rewashing them by hand...
The article goes on to say that Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Michigan, Vermont, Minnesota, Illinois, Massachusetts and New York are joining Washington state in mandating dirty dishwasher dishes, and that there is a bill on Capitol Hill to make the phosphate ban national.
The article also says the affected industry group, the Soap and Detergent Association, at first opposed the ban, but now it has completely surrendered to the point of exhibiting signs of Stockholm syndrome (not the AP's wording).
The piece ends by quoting a Spokane resident who runs his dishwasher longer to make up for what the green groups have gotten mandated by law. That, he says, uses five gallons more water (and more electricity).
So we're basically going to hurt the environment by using more water (longer cycles or hand-washing after the dishwasher finishes) and more electricity in order to help the environment.
Is there any part of our lives that is not now or will not soon be regulated by environmentalists working through patsy legislatures?
Members of the Congressional Black Caucus met with brutal dictator Fidel Castro and fell in love.
Read these quotes American Thinker collected from Representatives Laura Richardson (D-CA), Barbara Lee (D-CA), Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO) and Bobby Rush (D-IL), if you think I exaggerate.
Some people see ugly old murderers and brainlessly swoon. Other people see the Castros and are so repelled, they immediately force their minds to think of something more pleasant -- such as flies in poop. I still believe most Americans fall into the latter category. I'm not sure about a majority of the Congress.
The Washington Post (of all places, so perhaps we have some hope) had a mostly decent staff editorial on this. It notes that, when it comes to Cuba, Senators Christopher Dodd (D-CT) and Richard Lugar (R-IN) could also use some scrutiny.
Although I can usually read the left-wing journal Mother Jones without feeling the need to leave comments or otherwise editorialize, I thought this "Is Homophobia Just Narcissism?" article was so idiotic, I tried to leave a mild comment calling the post a "noodlehead analysis."
It was not to be.
Mother Jones' software system brooks no disrespect. Its website immediately sent me this message:
Washington, D.C.: President Barack Obama has now laid the groundwork for sweeping government intervention in the free market with his announcement of new government requirements for its continued support for struggling American automakers.
Mychal Massie, the chairman of the Project 21 black leadership network, had this to say about Obama's announcement:
I am not aware of any part of the U.S. Constitution in which the government is given the right to dispense taxpayer money to private institutions and then use that ability to hire, fire and make other major decisions for that business. But I am aware of Saul Alinsky's infamous rules for radicals. So is the President, having been a disciple of Alinsky's teachings since his days as a community organizer.
These rules are now being employed at the peril of our economy.
Alinsky's eight rule advocated keeping up pressure so critics are kept off balance. We have seen this is the relentless march toward the heavy regulation of our financial and manufacturing sectors to the brink of nationalization.
Alinsky's ninth rule advised making the threat more terrifying than the reality. It is the exactly the opposite of FDR's first inaugural assertion during the Great Depression that the "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Today's dire assertions about the futures of GM and Chrysler without government involvement plays into this strategy
Then there is Alinsky's twelfth rule of personalizing and polarizing targets, with a preference of demonizing individuals rather than institutions. That's what we saw with the AIG executives before and are seeing now with General Motors's Rick Wagoner.
What must not be forgotten is Alinsky's first rule: "Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have." In whipping up the anger and the fear of the American people, Obama is attempting to blind people to the power of the free market.
We must not forget that ours is a society based on and reliant on a vibrant free market. To upset it with overregulation and domineering government intervention could be crippling now and for generations to come.
I am the owner of both GM and Chrysler vehicles. I don't want these prominent American companies to go out of business, and I don't want their workers or the workers of their subsidiaries to lose their jobs. That being said, however, I do not want the government - especially this government - to be in the power to call the shots.
This nation was founded on a rebellion against a tyrannical government. We should not now create a new one in our haste to return to the comfort of years past.
Project 21, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization, has been a leading voice of the African-American community since 1992. For more information, contact David Almasi at (202) 543-4110 x11 or Project21@nationalcenter.org, or visit Project 21's website at http://www.project21.org/P21Index.html.
The California Drought's Congressional "Kangaroo Court"
The kangaroo waits for the hearing to begin.
The kangaroo listens attentively to hearing proceedings. The National Center for Public Policy Research's Jeff Temple and Devon Carlin are seated to the kangaroo's left.
Devon Carlin provides a report on the U.S. House Resources Committee hearing Monday -- the one to which the National Center for Public Policy Research sent a "kangaroo" (actually, an undercover operative in a kangaroo suit).
By Devon Carlin:
Rural Californians are in their third year of a severe drought, but Congressional leaders seem more fixated on finding a "comprehensive" solution that accommodates endangered species and adheres to the belief in catastrophic man-made global warming than in dealing with very real human suffering.
This was our observation during a March 31 U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Natural Resources hearing, titled "The California Drought: Actions by Federal and State Agencies to Address Impacts on Lands, Fisheries, and Water Users."
According to the hearing's initial announcement, the hearing was to feature only one panel of witnesses - one overwhelmingly comprised of federal bureaucrats.
To some, this was seen as a "kangaroo court" that would promote the global warming and endangered species gospel with little or no opposition. It seemed to lack everything but an actual kangaroo. But the National Center for Public Policy Research was more than happy to provide one!
As the overflow crowd lined up for entry into the hearing room, the National Center's kangaroo stepped out of a nearby elevator. As participating members of Congress arrived, they certainly noticed the large, brown kangaroo. When acting Committee Chairwoman Grace Napolitano (D-CA) gaveled the hearing to order, our kangaroo was prominently seated in the audience.
As National Center Senior Fellow R.J. Smith pointed out in a press release that was handed out at the hearing:
At the height of a California drought and during a serious recession with massive unemployment in California's Central Valley, one would hope that the Committee cared enough about agricultural workers and minorities to invite as witnesses actual unemployed farm workers from the scores of communities closing down. Let's have an open Committee hearing and hear real people discussing the impacts on their lives from government regulations and massive job losses - instead of more government bureaucrats who are only causing the problem.
The furry, National Center-provided visual reminder - and some last-minute intervention from a bipartisan delegation of Congressmen from districts affected by the drought - helped to provide balance.
While it seemed the Committee's leaders had already made up their minds, they and the witnesses they selected nevertheless ended up receiving an earful about the human suffering brought about by poorly-applied government regulations and what could be done to alleviate the distress.
It was originally announced that testimony would be given exclusively by the panel of representatives of government agencies. Invited agency representatives were Mary M. Glackin of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; J. William McDonald of the Bureau of Reclamation; Candy Thompson of the Farm Service Agency and California Secretary of Natural Resources Mike Chrisman. The lone critic was to be Allen Ishida, a Tulare County Supervisor and farmer.
Things changed due to the last-minute inclusion of a bipartisan panel of Congressmen representing the region worst hit by the drought. This panel was comprised of Representatives Mike Thompson (D-CA), Dennis A. Cardoza (D-CA), George Radanovich (R-CA), Devin Nunes (R-CA), Wally Herger (R-CA) and Ken Calvert (R- CA).
This new panel, unanticipated at the time the hearing was announced (and the kangaroo was called) brought much-needed balance.
All participants appeared to agree that California is in bad shape. The lack of an adequate supply of water in affected areas is putting farmers and ranchers out of work. Their crops aren't growing and livestock are going thirsty. Employment rates in affected areas range from 20 to over 40 percent, and job losses could rise to nearly 80,000. Families are flocking to food lines. Depleted food bank pantries reflect the state's shortage of produce. Incredible numbers of acres are left even more vulnerable to the type of brush fires that consumed more than one million acres last year. Agricultural economic losses are projected to exceed $3 billion by year-end.
What people want to know is what the government is going to do to help. The representatives of the government, and their liberal supporters among the Committee majority, seem committed to a "comprehensive" solution that protect the environment first and merely seeks to aid the afflicted human population. Conservatives, however, offered concrete plans to alleviate human suffering and increase agricultural productivity while minimizing environmental impact.
Congressmen from the affected areas - both on the Committee and on the testifying panel - noted that, despite California's historic familiarity with natural drought conditions, the problem this time is man-made. With rainfall and snow-pack totals nearing the average when compared to recent years, neither nature nor global warming can be blamed for the water shortage.
One of the many regulatory culprits is the Endangered Species Act (ESA).
The Delta Smelt, for example, is a three-inch long fish that has been declared "threatened" under the ESA. Federal water officials reallocated a substantial amount of the water supply to flow out to sea in order to help protect the Delta Smelt. In the process, it recklessly slashed water deliveries to agricultural areas of California.
The local Congressman pointed out factors in the Smelt's population decline that are not man-made, such as larger predatory fish. Representative Tom McClintock (R-CA), who represents the region and is a member of the Committee, noted from the dais that more water diverted for the good of the Delta Smelt has not helped its recovery.
When queried, the government officials, who gave very dry presentations about "comprehensive" relief strategies, offered no precise ways to bring about an end to the human suffering in the region.
Conversely, the lawmakers whose constituents were affected and have a sense of the needs of the region proposed multiple relief plans and suggested reform of the ESA that would bring water back to residents in need and pose a minimal threat to the Delta Smelt population.
In the short history of the Obama Administration, conservatives have been cast as obstructionist and lacking ideas by their liberal counterparts. At this hearing, exactly the opposite was the case.
One proposed idea, known as the "Two-Gates" project, involves the installation of two temporary gates in the central Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. These gates would reduce the number of smelt removed from the Delta, thus permitting water export restrictions to be minimized.
Another proposal was to reform the ESA to overcome an ESA-based lawsuit that forced the Red Bluff Diversion Dam ("RBDD") to cease operating. Prior to the lawsuit, the RBDD performed as an efficient, gravity-fed water diversion. Shutting the existing diversion down has created the need for a comparable alternative. A popular pitch for its replacement is a power-driven, screened pumping plant that would supply 150,000 acres of agricultural land with irrigation water.
These and other relief proposals were called "shovel-ready" and within the scope of projects that could be funded by the recently-passed "stimulus" bill. The committee liberals' response? Representative George Miller (D-CA) mocked members of the Congressional panel who voted against the "stimulus." As for human suffering at the hands of government regulation, he considered that "cherry-picking history." He passed off any blame to a judge, whose decision set the policy.
This liberal disdain is surprising when the drought was called the "Katrina of California" by both panelists and members of the committee alike.
Near the end of the hearing, freshman Representative Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) came right out and asked the direct and nearly rhetorical question that was surely on the minds of many in attendance: "What's more important - people or fish?"
This post was written by Research Associate Devon Carlin. To send comments to the author, write her at info@nationalcenter.org. Please state if a letter is not for publication or if you prefer that it be published anonymously.
"We cannot afford to put off change any longer. We have to get on a new path within this new administration. We have only four years left for Obama to set an example to the rest of the world. America must take the lead."
- Celebrity Dr. James Hansen, Goddard Institute of Space Studies, January 2009
NY Times Magazine's Sympathetic Portrait of a Global Warming "Skeptic"
Despite an occasional line likely to raise a conservative's eyebrow ("Dyson may be an Obama-loving, Bush-loathing liberal who has spent his life opposing American wars and fighting for the protection of natural resources, but he brooks no ideology," for example) writer Nicholas Dawidoff's 8,200-word March 29 New York Times magazine feature, "The Civil Heretic," on world-renowned physicist, Iraq-protesting liberal and "global warming skeptic" Freeman Dyson will be appreciated by many readers of this blog.
Using a comfortable, storytelling style, Dawidoff immediately sets the scene:
For more than half a century the eminent physicist Freeman Dyson has quietly resided in Princeton, N.J., on the wooded former farmland that is home to his employer, the Institute for Advanced Study, this country's most rarefied community of scholars. Lately, however, since coming "out of the closet as far as global warming is concerned," as Dyson sometimes puts it, there has been noise all around him. Chat rooms, Web threads, editors' letter boxes and Dyson's own e-mail queue resonate with a thermal current of invective in which Dyson has discovered himself variously described as "a pompous twit," "a blowhard," "a cesspool of misinformation," "an old coot riding into the sunset" and, perhaps inevitably, "a mad scientist." ...Dyson's son, George, a technology historian, says his father's views have cooled friendships, while many others have concluded that time has cost Dyson something else. There is the suspicion that, at age 85, a great scientist of the 20th century is no longer just far out, he is far gone - out of his beautiful mind...
From there Dawidoff tells the story of Dyson's life, intermittently returning to, and ultimately concluding on, the subject of global warming.
Some brief excerpts, not complete, of the global warming sections, as they are likely to be of interest to this blog's readers:
...Dyson has been particularly dismissive of Al Gore, whom Dyson calls climate change's "chief propagandist," and James Hansen, the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and an adviser to Gore's film, "An Inconvenient Truth." Dyson accuses them of relying too heavily on computer-generated climate models...
...Climate models, he says, take into account atmospheric motion and water levels but have no feeling for the chemistry and biology of sky, soil and trees. "The biologists have essentially been pushed aside," he continues. "Al Gore's just an opportunist. The person who is really responsible for this overestimate of global warming is Jim Hansen. He consistently exaggerates all the dangers."
Dyson agrees with the prevailing view that there are rapidly rising carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere caused by human activity. To the planet, he suggests, the rising carbon may well be a MacGuffin, a striking yet ultimately benign occurrence in what Dyson says is still "a relatively cool period in the earth's history." The warming, he says, is not global but local, "making cold places warmer rather than making hot places hotter." Far from expecting any drastic harmful consequences from these increased temperatures, he says the carbon may well be salubrious - a sign that "the climate is actually improving rather than getting worse," because carbon acts as an ideal fertilizer promoting forest growth and crop yields. "Most of the evolution of life occurred on a planet substantially warmer than it is now," he contends, "and substantially richer in carbon dioxide." Dyson calls ocean acidification, which many scientists say is destroying the saltwater food chain, a genuine but probably exaggerated problem. Sea levels, he says, are rising steadily, but why this is and what dangers it might portend "cannot be predicted until we know much more about its causes."...
... Beyond the specific points of factual dispute, Dyson has said that it all boils down to "a deeper disagreement about values" between those who think "nature knows best" and that "any gross human disruption of the natural environment is evil," and "humanists," like himself, who contend that protecting the existing biosphere is not as important as fighting more repugnant evils like war, poverty and unemployment...
... Climate-change specialists often speak of global warming as a matter of moral conscience. Dyson says he thinks they sound presumptuous. As he warned that day four years ago at Boston University, the history of science is filled with those "who make confident predictions about the future and end up believing their predictions," and he cites examples of things people anticipated to the point of terrified certainty that never actually occurred, ranging from hellfire, to Hitler's atomic bomb, to the Y2K millennium bug. "It's always possible Hansen could turn out to be right," he says of the climate scientist. "If what he says were obviously wrong, he wouldn't have achieved what he has. But Hansen has turned his science into ideology. He's a very persuasive fellow and has the air of knowing everything. He has all the credentials. I have none. I don't have a Ph.D. He's published hundreds of papers on climate. I haven't. By the public standard he's qualified to talk and I'm not. But I do because I think I'm right. I think I have a broad view of the subject, which Hansen does not. I think it's true my career doesn't depend on it, whereas his does. I never claim to be an expert on climate. I think it's more a matter of judgement than knowledge."
Reached by telephone, Hansen sounds annoyed as he says, "There are bigger fish to fry than Freeman Dyson," who "doesn't know what he's talking about." In an e-mail message, he adds that his own concern about global warming is not based only on models, and that while he respects the "open-mindedness" of Dyson, "if he is going to wander into something with major consequences for humanity and other life on the planet, then he should first do his homework - which he obviously has not done on global warming."...
... But one evening last month they sat down in a living room filled with [Dyson's wife] Imme's running trophies and photographs of their children to watch "An Inconvenient Truth" again. There was a print of Einstein above the television. And then there was Al Gore below him, telling of the late Roger Revelle, a Harvard scientist who first alerted the undergraduate Gore to how severe the climate's problems would become. Gore warned of the melting snows of Kilimanjaro, the vanishing glaciers of Peru and "off the charts" carbon levels in the air. "The so-called skeptics" say this "seems perfectly O.K.," Gore said, and Imme looked at her husband. She is even slighter than he is, a pretty wood sprite in running shoes. "How far do you allow the oceans to rise before you say, This is no good?" she asked Dyson.
"When I see clear evidence of harm," he said.
"Then it's too late," she replied. "Shouldn't we not add to what nature's doing?"
"The costs of what Gore tells us to do would be extremely large," Dyson said. "By restricting CO2 you make life more expensive and hurt the poor. I'm concerned about the Chinese."
"They're the biggest polluters," Imme replied.
"They're also changing their standard of living the most, going from poor to middle class. To me that's very precious."
The film continued with Gore predicting violent hurricanes, typhoons and tornados. "How in God's name could that happen here?" Gore said, talking about Hurricane Katrina. "Nature's been going crazy."
"That is of course just nonsense," Dyson said calmly. "With Katrina, all the damage was due to the fact that nobody had taken the trouble to build adequate dikes. To point to Katrina and make any clear connection to global warming is very misleading."
Now came Arctic scenes, with Gore telling of disappearing ice, drunken trees and drowning polar bears. "Most of the time in history the Arctic has been free of ice," Dyson said. "A year ago when we went to Greenland where warming is the strongest, the people loved it."
"They were so proud," Imme agreed. "They could grow their own cabbage."
The film ended. "I think Gore does a brilliant job," Dyson said. "For most people I'd think this would be quite effective. But I knew Roger Revelle. He was definitely a skeptic. He's not alive to defend himself..."
These excerpts don't do justice to Nicholas Dawidoff's entire piece; I recommend that readers here take the time to read the whole thing.
Kudos to the New York Times Magazine for publishing it.
Addendum: The Center for American Progress Action Fund's Climate progress blog has lost its mind over Nicholas Dawidoff's Freeman Dyson profile, calling Dyson's relatively tame comments about James Hansen (certainly, by the standards of Hansen, who has called for the jailing of certain global warming skeptics) "slander."
Climate Progress also blasts the New York Times' Andrew Revkin for mentioning the Dyson profile on Revkin's Dot Earth Blog, demanding that Revkin "retract his absurdly indefensible assertion that 'On climate, Mr. Dyson may be right…,'" which actually was written by Revkin as "On climate, Mr. Dyson may be right or wrong...," which is rather different, though either version is perfectly defensible.
Everybody who hasn't lost his mind knows perfectly well that climate science isn't settled; even the global warming theory proponents don't agree with one another, which is enough right there to prove that whatever the truth turns out to be (and I doubt very much anyone alive on this Earth today will live long enough to know it), the science isn't settled. If the Center for American Progress thinks the New York Times is too skeptical on global warming and that it's wrong for the Times to write of one of our nation's most prominent physicists that he "may be either right or wrong," then the Center for American Progress has pretty much gone out to lunch, having exited through the door at the far, far left.
Diverse Coalition Appeals to Congress Regarding Unjust Provisions of Omnibus Land Management Act
Readers with an interest in property rights, civil rights or simply staying out of jail for doing something one has no idea is illegal will want to review the coalition letter sent to the Congressional leadership, the Attorney General and to President Barack Obama by the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Association of Applied Paleontological Sciences and the National Center for Public Policy Research during the last 24 hours.
Our respective organizations have diverse viewpoints, but we share a deep and abiding belief in due process under the law. We believe that that Congress should perform careful diligence before adding violations to the criminal codes, that federal crimes should be narrowly defined and show clear criminal intent, and that the use of asset forfeiture must be narrowly tailored so that it does not unduly punish the accused before a trial has proven their guilt. As such we have grave concerns about sections of the pending Omnibus Land Management Act of 2009, which passed the Senate last week as H.R. 146, regarding "paleontological resources preservation."
These sections, now contained in the bill under Subtitle Dof Title VI, seek to empower the Departments of Agriculture and the Interior to"protect paleontological resources on Federal land using scientific principles and expertise." We understand that preventing theft of and harm to important fossils on federal land is a serious objective. However, we are concerned that the bill creates many new federal crimes using language that is so broad that the provisions could cover innocent human error. There is also, in defining the crimes, a troubling lack of words such as "knowingly" that clearly establish criminal intent as a prerequisite for prosecution. As Georgetown University legal ethicist John Hasnas has written, to serve the greater goal of justice, all criminal laws must require the government to establish that "one had to knowingly or at least recklessly act in a morally blameworthy way to be subject of criminal punishment."
H.R. 146 would make it illegal to excavate, remove, damage, or otherwise alter or deface or attempt to excavate, remove, damage, or otherwise alter or deface any paleontological resources located on Federal land" without special permission from the government. Penalties for violations include up to five years imprisonment. "Paleontological resources" are loosely defined as all "fossilized remains ... that are of paleontological interest and that provide information about the history of life on earth." We are troubled by this definition that paleontological organizations say could cover many common rocks that adults and children collect. The Association of Applied Paleontological Sciences has warned that with this wording, it is easy to visualize "a group of students unknowingly crossing over an invisible line."
We are also concerned about the bill's prohibition against "false labeling" of fossil specimens, an offense that also carries criminal penalties. The bill makes it a crime to "make or submit any false record, account or label for, or any false identification of, any paleontological resource excavated or removed from federal land." This broad language could criminalize innocent misidentifications, limit scientific inquiry, and infringe on the First Amendment's protection of freedom of speech. Fossil labeling is a complex process, and even the top museums of the world have been known to revise labeling in their exhibits upon scholarly review or new facts being discovered ..Thus, the fear of making an honest mistake in fossil labeling or even having fossil identifications proven "false" in light of new scientific discoveries could have a chilling effect on new research in paleontology.
We are pleased that the Senate recently improved provisions regarding forfeiture. Language in earlier versions of the legislation would have allowed government officials to engage in the pretrial seizure of "all vehicles and equipment of any person" accused of theft or harm to a "paleontological resource." Forfeiting a person's property without a conviction undermines the bedrock principle of our legal system: that a person is innocent until proven guilty. Past abuses of forfeiture led to bipartisan passage of the Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act of 2000, and we had feared that these provisions would go against the spirit of these reforms. The Senate heeded our concerns with an amendment, and as passed on March 20, "vehicles and equipment" were removed from the forfeiture language, so that the forfeiture provisions apply only to the "paleontological resources" taken from federal land. This is a marked improvement, and we would oppose any attempts to reinsert forfeiture of personal property in a revised bill.
Above all, we are concerned that a bill containing new federal crimes, fines and imprisonment, and forfeiture provisions may come to the House floor without first being marked up in the House Judiciary Committee. That committee is tasked with providing centralized oversight of criminal legislation, thereby enhancing the fairness and consistency of those enactments. As such we strongly urge that the criminal provisions of the Omnibus Public Land Management Act be stripped from any final legislation until they are subject to Judiciary Committee review and amendment."
Representatives of the signatory organizations of this letter would be happy to meet with you or members of your staff to address these concerns.
Sincerely,
Caroline Fredrickson Director American Civil Liberties Union Washington Legislative Office
Tracie Bennitt President Association of Applied Paleontological Sciences
John Berlau Director, Center for Investors and Entrepreneurs Competitive Enterprise Institute
Kyle O'Dowd Assoc. Executive Director for Policy National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers
David A. Ridenour Vice President The National Center for Public Policy Research
Cc: House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer House Majority Whip James Clyburn House Minority Whip Eric Cantor House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Lamar Smith President Barack Obama Attorney General Eric Holder
For more information on this issue, see this blog's previous coverage of this here and here. ________________________________
George Will's 'Partial List of Recent Lawlessness, Situational Constitutionalism and Institutional Derangement'
I recommend George F. Will's column in the Washington Post and other papers Tuesday.
If it doesn't make you want to fight what's going on in Washington, nothing will.
The column begins:
With the braying of 328 yahoos -- members of the House of Representatives who voted for retroactive and punitive use of the tax code to confiscate the legal earnings of a small, unpopular group -- still reverberating, the Obama administration yesterday invited private-sector investors to become business partners with the capricious and increasingly anti-constitutional government. This latest plan to unfreeze the financial system came almost half a year after Congress shoveled $700 billion into the Troubled Assets Relief Program, $325 billion of which has been spent without purchasing any toxic assets.
TARP funds have, however, semi-purchased, among many other things, two automobile companies (and, last week, some of their parts suppliers), which must amaze Sweden. That unlikely tutor of America regarding capitalist common sense has said, through a Cabinet minister, that the ailing Saab automobile company is on its own: "The Swedish state is not prepared to own car factories."
Another embarrassing auditor of American misgovernment is...
Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said in an interview Friday on 365gay.com that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is a "homophobe."
"At some point, [the Defense of Marriage Act] is going to have to go to the United States Supreme Court," Frank said. "I wouldn't want it to go to the United States Supreme Court now because that homophobe Antonin Scalia has too many votes on this current court."
I predict Justice Scalia won't call Rep. Frank any nasty name in response, which should tell us all we need to know about which of them has more class.
Some people call others names because their brain boxes are too small to permit them to think through and then articulate an idea. Barney Frank, however, is very intelligent, so we can put this one down to nastiness. ___________________
Today's Outrage of the Day goes to MoveOn.org, which has responded to widespread reports of death threats against AIG employees and their families by creating an online game in which visitors who surrender their names and email addresses to MoveOn.org throw virtual tomatoes at an AIG building.
Sure, we know the tomatoes aren't real and no one got hurt in the making of this ploy to expand the MoveOn.org mailing list, but with real people being subjected to threats of violence, is this really the best time to employ virtual violence?
MoveOn.org should save its game for another day, and another issue. No doubt there will be plenty of (safe) opportunities for the throwing of virtual tomatoes over the coming four years. ___________________
Outrage of the Day - Congress Treats Death Threats Lightly
Today awarded to Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) for his callous response to death threats received by private citizens, including children, employed by or related to someone employed by AIG.
Sound public policy relating to AIG - whatever that might be and not that we can expect this Congress to enact it - does not require that Congress possess the actual names of AIG employees who received contractual bonuses. Even the farcical policy of handing out money only to tax it right back (really, how ridiculous can Congress get?) does not require that Congress have these names. (The IRS would take care of collections.)
Congress leaks. And leaks. And leaks. (Usually for very selfish reasons; once in a while due to stupidity or carelessness.) Anyone who cares a fig for the safety and peace of mind of these people should just err on the side if caution and leave people's names out of the debate.
Or maybe we've just reached a place in this country in which Congress doesn't care if children are the focus of death threats. ______________________________
Outrage of the Day: Obama Administration Says Some Americans Are Deadbeats
Courtesy of the Wall Street Journal, we see this line in the President's budget:
"While middle-class families have been playing by the rules, living up to their responsibilities as neighbors and citizens, those at the commanding heights of our economy have not."
Reminds me of a certain U.N. Secretary General, who considers the country he gets the most money from to be a "deadbeat" nation.
The more money an American makes, the higher his taxes are; not just in the amount of dollars, but in the percentage of his income taxed. If you pay more taxes than your neighbor, and a higher percentage of your income goes to taxes, how is it that, on the matter of taxation, your neighbor is living up to his "responsibilit[y] as a neighbor and a citizen," and you are not?
Hat tip: Tim Graham on Newsbusters. ___________________
Looks like the lefties get mighty edgy when they get questioned.
Earlier this week we had Disney Chairman Robert Iger swearing at conservative activist Tom Borelli. Now we have the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Charlie Rangel, asking a young man who asks him about his subsidized cars and apartments, "why don't you mind your G-- d----- business"?
I'm thinking it became the young man's business when he had to help pick up the tab. _____________________________
World Net Daily has run two stories on Tom Borelli's presentation to the Walt Disney Company's annual stockholder meeting.
In Foul Mouse! Disney 'Drops F-Bomb' Over '9/11', WND columnist Joe Kovacs asks, "Did the head of the Walt Disney Company drop the F-bomb on one of its own investors at its annual shareholder meeting?" Kovacs goes on to cover Disney's denial, and our response, and includes some additional information about Disney's attitude toward the "Path to 9/11" miniseries it owns, but declines to distribute.
In the news story Disney Censors F-Bomb From CEO Iger to Conservative Activist, NewsMax recounts how the Walt Disney Company edited out of the webcast version of its March 10 annual shareholder meeting the incident in which conservative activist and Disney investor Tom Borelli received the "f-bomb" from Disney CEO Robert Iger.
The piece begins:
The Walt Disney Company has edited out of the webcast version of its March 10 annual shareholder meeting an incident in which Disney CEO Robert Iger dropped the "f-bomb" on conservative activist and Disney investor Tom Borelli.
Iger scowled at and said "f--- you" to Tom Borelli, director of the National Center for Public Policy Research's Free Enterprise Project, at Tuesday's annual Disney shareholder meeting after Borelli told shareholders about Iger's refusal to sell the DVD or the distribution rights of the miniseries "The Path to 9/11."
Borelli, who was attending the meeting on behalf of the Free Enterprise Action Fund, a mutual fund with which he is affiliated, had just ended his presentation and was attempting to shake Iger's hand when Iger used the phrase. Iger also refused to uncross his arms and shake Borelli's hand. Borelli, who had received applause from fellow shareholders after his presentation, went back to the podium and precisely reported to his fellow shareholders what Iger had just said, to gasps from the assembled crowd....
John McCaslin's popular Inside the Beltway column in the Washington Times today began with the Disney story:
The late Walt Disney, who in testimony before Congress accused the Screen Actors Guild of being a Communist front, must have rolled over in his grave when Walt Disney Co. CEO Robert Iger reportedly spouted "[expletive] you" to Tom Borelli, director of the National Center for Public Policy Research's Free Enterprise Project, at Tuesday's annual Disney shareholder meeting.
Mr. Borelli says he just finished informing shareholders from the podium about Mr. Iger's refusal to sell the DVD or distribution rights of the miniseries "The Path to 9/11," and upon returning to his seat attempted to shake hands with Disney's CEO.
That's when the not-so-kind words were uttered. At which time Mr. Borelli says he stepped back before the microphone and quoted Mr. Iger word-for-word, which caused "gasps" from the crowd of shareholders.
"So much for the family-friendly Disney reputation," he now says in a statement released by the District-based conservative think tank and research foundation supportive of a strong national defense.
A two-part miniseries based on the federal 9/11 commission report, "The Path to 9/11" received seven Emmy nominations after airing in 2006 to large audiences over the Disney-owned ABC television network.
The think tank suggests Mr. Iger, who is labeled a longtime donor to "liberal politicians," considers the miniseries too embarrassing to officials who served in the Clinton administration.
Breitbart.tv Posts Borelli Portion of Disney Shareholder Meeting
Breitbart.tv has posted the portion of the audio recording of the Walt Disney Company Shareholder's meeting in which Tom Borelli makes his presentation. Quite apart from the controversy regarding the expletive, Tom's full (and quite frank) presentation to the Disney shareholders will be of interest to many conservative activists, who also are likely to appreciate the fact that the assembled shareholders gave Tom strong applause.
As we noted yesterday, the audio recording the Disney Company released does not include the recording of Tom reporting Iger's remark to him after Tom concluded his presentation.
Walt Disney Company Chairman John Pepper's response to Tom is included at the end of the recording.
The entire recording runs just under nine minutes.
P.S. For those interested, the spot at which Tom returned to the podium to report to the other shareholders the comment Iger had just made to him -- the comment erased from this version of the tape by Disney -- ran from 5:52 to 5:53 on Breitbart.tv's time clock.
More specifically, the tape begins with Disney Chairman John Pepper introducing Tom. Then:
-Tom's presentation -the applause following the end of Tom's presentation starts at 5:46 -Mr. Pepper says "thank you Mr. Borelli" at 5:50 -silence where Tom's comment about what Mr. Iger said is cut out from 5:52 to 5:53 -Mr. Pepper says "let me respond to your comments, Mr. Borelli" at 5:54 -Mr. Pepper responds until the end of the tape
Outrage of the Day: Disney CEO Swears at Conservative Activist at Shareholder Meeting
Walt Disney Company CEO Robert Iger dropped the "f-bomb" on conservative activist and company investor Tom Borelli at the Walt Disney Company's annual shareholder meeting Tuesday.
Details can be found in this National Center for Public Policy Research press release:
Disney CEO Drops F-Bomb at Shareholder Meeting
Iger's Nasty Comment to Investor Rooted in 9/11 Miniseries Controversy
Washington, D.C.: Walt Disney Company CEO Robert Iger scowled at and said "f--- you" to Tom Borelli, director of the National Center for Public Policy Research's Free Enterprise Project, at Tuesday's annual Disney shareholder meeting.
Iger's remark came after Borelli told shareholders about Iger's refusal to sell the DVD or the distribution rights of the miniseries "The Path to 9/11."
Borelli had just ended his presentation and was attempting to shake Iger's hand on his way back to his seat. Iger, who was sitting in the audience at the time, also refused to uncross his arms and shake Borelli's hand. Borelli, who had received applause from fellow shareholders after his presentation, went back to the podium and precisely reported to his fellow shareholders what Iger had just said, to gasps from the assembled crowd. Borelli then sat back down.
"The Path to 9/11" is a miniseries based on the federal "9/11 Commission Report." The miniseries aired in 2006 on the Disney-owned ABC television network. The shareholder meeting was held at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland, California.
"So much for the family-friendly Disney reputation," said Borelli. "Shareholders have a legitimate concern about the political and financial implications of Iger's actions. It wasn't until today that the depths of his contempt were revealed."
Borelli, who was attending the meeting on behalf of the Free Enterprise Action Fund, a mutual fund with which he is affiliated, registered a shareholder proposal asking the company to be more transparent about the company's political donations due to concerns about Iger possibly using the company’s assets to advance Iger’s personal political agenda. Borelli cited Disney's refusal to sell the DVD or its rights to "The Path to 9/11" miniseries as evidence of iger's bias. Iger is a long-time donor to liberal politicians and the miniseris was thought to be embarrassing to officials who served in the Clinton Administration. Withholding distribution of the DVD for personal political reasons would be a conflict with shareholder interests.
In his statement he made at the shareholder meeting, Borelli said:
Unfortunately, because CEO Bob Iger is putting politics before profits - shareholders are being denied an opportunity to benefit from DVD sales of the ABC-TV miniseries "The Path to 9/11."
Since its broadcast in September 2006 - Iger has refused to profit from this project - despite its significant market potential.
"The Path to 9/11" received seven Emmy nominations, had 25 million views over two nights and it was highly ranked in Nielsen ratings - the first night it was number-two and on the second night it was the number-one - the most-watched TV program in the country.
Clearly, "The Path to 9/11" is a valuable asset!
Not only has Iger decided that Disney will not to sell the DVD - he will not allow the sale of its distribution rights. Lions Gate was told the distribution rights were not available, and Disney has ignored repeated attempts by our company to negotiate the purchase of the miniseries distribution rights.
This is the second year in a row that Borelli has pressed Iger and Disney to release "The Path to 9/11" on DVD. Borelli has offered to negotiate to purchase the rights to the miniseries in three letters to Iger and the Disney board of directors. Disney has never replied.
Additionally, the Fund's shareholder proposal for more transparency with regard to the company's political contributions received 24 percent support.
Borelli added: "Disney truly can say it's putting people before profits - in this case, it's Bill and Hillary Clinton. Lions Gate inquired about buying the rights to 'The Path to 9/11' and was rebuffed... It's a shame that Disney is allowing these profits to slip away at a time when Disney is laying off employees."
Disney has said webcast of the meeting will be made available at http://corporate.disney.go.com.
Senior Fellow Tom Borelli has an op-ed in the D.C. Examiner: "Congress, corporate lobbyists creating Green Bubble."
It begins:
With President Barack Obama and his allies in Congress pushing for a cap-and-trade regulatory program to reduce greenhouse gases, the future of American energy is at a crossroads — and the creation of an economic “Green Bubble” is in the works.
It’s not surprising that liberal politicians embrace the cap-and-trade cause, but to many it is shocking and surprising to see corporate CEOs joining the crusade. The 21st century business model of these CEOs seems to be: “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”
But their capitulation is likely to lead to history repeating itself, and not in a good way.
If there’s one lesson we all can take from the housing bubble, it’s this: The pursuit of liberal policy goals is not a sustainable business strategy.
The housing crisis developed after businesses yielded to social activism and the seduction of politically-driven and unsustainable economic incentives. It started with the Community Reinvestment Act in 1977, which encouraged banks to lend in poor neighborhoods. The Clinton administration later lowered credit standards, and set subprime lending quotas for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), the leftist advocacy group, also pressured banks to make loans, and Congress skewed laws to encourage lenders to give mortgages to buyers with poor prospects for ever repaying them.
With the game rigged to make unsound lending practices profitable over the short-term, Wall Street was happy to play in this government-constructed casino. For a time, it was a win-win situation.
Profits were made, ACORN was pacified and lawmakers deemed lenders “responsible” for providing loans to low-income households with nary an eye cast to the soundness of it all. But when the over-inflated housing market collapsed, all the fun came to a crashing halt.
Yet, like hard-core gambling addicts, some CEOs haven’t learned their lesson. Instead of returning to selling good products at market prices, they want to go back to the craps table. They’re lobbying Congress to create yet another “bubble” in which government regulatory policy creates artificial value, this time in a ubiquitous gas, carbon dioxide.
Call this forthcoming disaster the “Green Bubble,” for it’s based on the notion that fortunes can be made buying and selling something for which there is no real-world market, greenhouse gas emissions credits...
Outrage of the Day: Rep. George Miller's "Dirty Money"
Rep. George Miller (D-CA) has long been known for carrying water for labor unions. Now Kevin Mooney of the D.C. Examiner asks if he's carrying dirty union money around, too:
"WHO: Rep. George Miller, D-CA, chief House sponsor, Employee Free Choice Act (aka Card Check).
WHAT: Miller received the following dirty money: Communication Workers of America (PAC) $10,000 in 2008 cycle; $10,000 in 2006 cycle; Boilermakers Union (PAC) $10,000 in 2008; $6,500 in 2006. American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) $2,500 in 2008; $1,500 in 2006. International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) $10,000 in 2008; $10,000 in 2006.
WHY IT'S DIRTY: At least eight members of these four unions have been convicted since 2001 of felonies ranging from embezzlement, falsifying official reports to government, mail fraud and conspiracy."
Outrage of the Day: Al Gore Claims Global Warming Theory is Not a Theory
Al Gore on the global warming theory not being a theory:
"The scientific community has gone through this chapter and verse. We have long since passed the time when we should pretend this is a 'on the one hand, on the other hand' issue. It’s not a matter of theory or conjecture, for goodness sake."
Comment: We all know Al Gore is too attracted to the politics of control and his own celebrity status to accurately report facts about global warming, but it he could at least get the definition of "theory" right.
And sorry, Al. Just because you appear to believe in it with all your heart doesn't mean it's been proven. Even Albert Einstein was satisfied to have developed the Theory of General Relativity. If Einstein could live with the word "theory," you should be able to manage it as well, Al.
Carol Browner: Dictating Climate Policy Like Caesar of Old
An op-ed by David Ridenour on President Obama's choice of Carol Browner to serve as a so-called "climate czar" has appeared in newspapers nationwide, including this version from Investor's Business Daily:
Climate Czar Will Reign Like Caesar Of Old
By David A. Ridenour
President Obama vowed to set a new direction of ethics and transparency in government and with his selection of Carol Browner as climate control czar. Unfortunately, her steadfast belief in the far-left policies of extreme environmentalism make that vow impossible to achieve.
An environmental zealot, Browner has so much baggage she could be an airline. But then, maybe not. For despite Browner's best efforts, some of her baggage simply won't stay lost.
Carol Browner is the right person to drive expansion of the state under Barack Obama.
The Washington Examiner recently discovered that she was one of 15 original members of the Commission for a Sustainable World Society, a branch of the Socialist International, an organization linking socialist and labor parties throughout the world.
Among other things, its Declaration of Principles 'demands compensation for . . . social inequities.' That's another way of saying that if you've prospered because of ingenuity or hard work, be prepared to give a lot of it away to those who haven't.
The issue isn't that Browner is a socialist. We crossed the socialism bridge — a real bridge to nowhere — when we sent a man to the White House who promised to spread our wealth around.
The real issue is the attempt to hide this fact from the public. Browner's photograph, which once appeared alongside that of close Vladimir Putin ally Sergei Mironov, was quietly removed from the Socialist International's Web site after the Examiner's story broke. Much like the trillions of dollars in bailouts and economic stimulus, it's as though Browner never existed.
This isn't transparent government, but all-too-transparent politics. Browner has a lot more baggage, too.
Throughout her years as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency in the Clinton administration, EPA officials routinely violated the Anti-Lobbying Act — a law prohibiting federal employees from using agency money for 'telephone, letter, printed or written matter, or other device intended or designed to influence in any manner a Member of Congress.' In 1995, the EPA flagrantly violated that law when it lobbied against the Job Creation and Wage Enhancement Act, a bill that would have curbed some of the EPA's worst abuses.
As James Hinchman, comptroller general of the United States, noted, EPA officials 'distributed EPA fact sheets to various organizations' and 'directly lobbied the Congress.' Not only that, but an EPA regional administrator wrote a strong op-ed designed to stop the bill's passage.
Four years later, Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., accused the EPA of violating the Anti-Lobbying Act again. Byrd — who has made a career of steering pork to his state — complained that the EPA's Transportation Partners Program was coordinating and funding anti-road lobbyists against the law and his state's interests. Browner was forced to terminate the program. The following year, Browner was at it yet again. This time, her agency was accused of allowing special interests to improperly influence last-minute — so-called midnight — environmental regulations.
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth ordered the EPA to preserve communications with such groups. Instead, Browner had her computer hard drive re-initialized, wiping it clean. Lamberth then held the EPA in contempt for 'contumacious conduct.' As little respect as she's shown for the law, Browner has shown even less for science. During her years at the EPA, agency scientists who didn't toe the party line were subjected to relentless harassment.
David Lewis, an EPA Science Achievement Award recipient, publicly criticized the quality of science used in crafting regulations. In response, the EPA charged Lewis with ethics violations and repeatedly denied him promotion. Although he won whistle-blower judgments against the EPA, he was eventually forced into retirement.
The term 'czar' comes from the Latin word caesar — as in Julius Caesar, the Roman leader who proclaimed himself dictator perpetuo (dictator in perpetuity) and oversaw massive expansion of government bureaucracy.
If a czar is actually what President Obama was looking for, Carol Browner may have been the perfect choice, after all.
Ridenour is vice president of the National Center for Public Policy Research, a conservative, nonpartisan think tank.
Anti-global warming protester uses a "Stop Global Warming" sign as an ice scraper at rally at the U.S. Capitol coal-fired power plant Monday
"We don't want the world to boil, no coal, no oil!"
There was no chance, despite the warning of this protest chant, of anything boiling outside in Washington, D.C. today. Global warming activists who threatened "mass civil disobedience" in the nation's capitol Monday probably never expected to be competing with the biggest snowfall of the season.
Not going to get much power from this snowy solar panel...
Yet this seems to happen every time the global warming activists plan a major event to talk about how hot our planet is going to get. (For more information about this practice, see the children's story "Chicken Little.")
...as the non-functioning light bulbs supposedly powered by that solar panel demonstrate.
Hundreds of activists - mostly students, from the looks of it - were protesting Nancy Pelosi's private coal-fired power plant. It's the plant that powers the Capitol complex. Until recently, Pelosi and company pretended to have a carbon-neutral Congress by using taxpayer dollars to buy "carbon offsets" that essentially gave them little more than peace of mind. This practice has since been discontinued. An analysis found it might not be doing any good, and they no longer have faith in throwing money at their embarrassment (now, if we can get them to expand this line of thinking to their spend-and-tax agenda).
David Almasi and Devon Carlin of the National Center for Public Policy Research
Anyway, the Competitive Enterprise Institute enlisted the help of The National Center for Public Policy Research, FreedomWorks and other groups to point out that coal and oil provide plentiful and affordable energy to average Americans. Energy bills are up this year, and there is no way wind and solar - the darling energy-generation methods of today's protestors - are going to provide people with the amount of energy they need at the prices they can afford.
No one is against new and alternative sources of energy, but it's their way or the highway in the minds of these protestors. If they are successful, expect bigger bills and energy shortages in the future.
This blog post was compiled largely from notes compiled by David Almasi. _________________________
Project 21 Fellow 
