Democratic Leadership on Stimulus Not Creating Jobs – “So What”

Hat Tip Hotair

The quotes come from an NPR interview Obey gave which shows a rather cavalier attitude towards responsibility, especially when considering the $787 billion context of the question.

That’s right. The government said that the stimulus created jobs in congressional districts that do not exist. Yup it’s this bad.

Obama organizing group: Palin book tour “dangerous”

Dangerous to whom?

Ed Morrissey at Hotair.com:

 

This is actually kind of cute, and completely hypocritical.  Organizing for America warns its mailing list of a new danger to America.  Is it terrorists getting a global platform in federal court?  Political correctness keeping soldiers in danger?  Massive deficits being run up by the Democrats to satisfy their statist agenda?  Er … not quite:

President Obama’s political operation took a shot at Sarah Palin today, accusing her of lying on her media blitz.

“It’s dangerous,” Organizing for America Director Mitch Stewart said of Palin’s book tour. …

Russ Carnahan and St. Louis Democrats Tried to Censor Political Speech

By the way, the bakery takes in over a million dollar a year, but their profit margin is 2% and when the commodities market changed they lost money and almost went out of business. Since McArthur’s Bakery takes in over $250,000 a year they are a part of the evil rich that Obama says aren’t paying their fair share.

If Obama’s tax plan was in place the bakery would be gone and the employees would be on unemployment.

Thanks to public schools our kids know everything about sex and nothing about history.

Demand school choice now.

Government has a 23% success rate at delivering vaccines since it took that industry over.

Government legislated and regulated the American vaccine industry out of business and out of the country thanks in large part to Senator Hillary Clinton.

The results…

 

 

 

Sarah Palin on the Dennis Miller Show

This is a good interview. Palin goes more into her record and policy in this interview as opposed to the conflict stuff that the elite media always wants to talk about.

Palin also explains in part her decision to leave the governor’s chair early. MY problem with Palin is that previously she is only told two thirds of the story. She tells how all was left was a lame duck session of the legislature. She had already gotten her legislative agenda through and the Democrats were exploiting a loophole in the Alaska ethics law to cost her family and the State of Alaska millions of dollars.

In this interview she finally put forth the other third of the story, which should have been front and center from minute one. Palin makes it very clear that she could not fight the awful, cruel and hurtful policies of the Democratic leadership while cooped up in Alaska. She had to bring that fight to the lower 48.

University of California Regents Approve 32 Percent Student Fee Increase

UPDATE – Students riot

Socialists spend until they run out of other peoples money and few places are a better demonstration of this than the California budget crisis that regulated, taxed, corrupted and tinkered with its economy to the point where the jobs and wealth are fleeing the state.

So the first group to feel the pain are the ones with the least political power. Young people by and large don’t vote, don’t donate to campaigns and are easily manipulated by emotional appeals in political campaigns and are most likely to vote for the same leftist incumbents, or replace one progressive with another.

Fastweb:

By MICHAEL R. BLOOD, Associated Press via Yellowbrix

November 19, 2009

University of California students will get a much larger tuition bill next year.

The Board of Regents on Thursday approved a 32 percent increase in undergraduate student fees, despite protests by hundreds of demonstrators outside the regents’ meeting at UCLA.

By next fall, undergraduate fees will be boosted by $2,500, sending the average annual education cost at a UC campus to more than $10,000.

Regents say they had to raise fees because the cash-strapped state government can’t meet the university’s funding needs.

The decision came as hundreds of students chanted and marched outside the meeting hall to protest the measure. Some students also took over another UCLA building and chained the doors shut.

Police in riot gear kept an eye on the protesters.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.

LOS ANGELES (AP) – Officers armed with beanbag guns stood by as hundreds of protesters chanted, marched and even took over a building Thursday on the UCLA campus, where University of California regents were scheduled to vote on a 32 percent student fee increase.

The UC Board of Regents is considering boosting undergraduate fees – the equivalent of tuition – by $2,500 next year. The average annual fee for a full-time undergraduate would jump to about $10,300 – three times the cost only a decade ago.

For a second day, the proposal drew demonstrators to the University of California, Los Angeles. Some came from other UC campuses and stayed overnight in a tent city.

The demonstrators outside UCLA’s Covel Commons building chanted, beat drums and waved signs urging “No fee hikes” and “Wanted: Leadership.”

One student was arrested for obstructing an officer. She was cited and released, said UCLA spokesman Phil Hampton.

Campus police in helmets with face shields stood guard outside the conference building. The campus was also being monitored by police from several UC campuses and more than a dozen California Highway Patrol officers armed with beanbag-tossing shotguns.

MSNBC’s Norah O’Donnell Grills Little Girl Over Palin Support

I have seen low, but wow this takes the cake. O’Donnell is engaging in a half truth.

And now for the truth..

Sarah Palin opposed the bailouts and has stated so. Sarah Palin was the VICE-presidential candidate which means that if the Presidential candidate takes a position so do you. Anyone who accepts the VP nomination knows this. Palin went back to her own views after the campaign was over.

Joe Biden had some different policy positions than Obama, Biden conformed.

Dick Cheney had disagreements with President Bush, especially on Scooter Libby and standing up to the administrations critics.  Cheney conformed until he was out of office and is now on the offensive (and his approval numbers are going up).

John Edwards was more hawkish than John Kerry, Edwards conformed to the ticket.

Joe Lieberman had a great many policy differences with Al Gore, especially on Social Security policy, national defense and environmental policy. Lieberman argued for Al Gore’s positions in the debates. Lieberman assumed his old policy positions after the campaign was over. Did MSNBC find a little girl Lieberman supporter to grill over it?

Al Gore was further to the left than Bill Clinton, it is well known that they didn’t get along. Gore played the VP role as the VP role is expected to.

Dan Quayle had domestic policy differences with President Bush 41. I know this because I have talked with VP Quayle about this very subject. Quayle is a Reaganite and Bush 41 never was.

Bush 41 had differences with President Reagan.

LBJ hated JFK and reversed many of his policy positions after JFK was murdered.

Question of the day; why the double standard when it comes to former VP candidate Palin?

Senator Graham Grills Attorney General Eric Holder Over NYC Terrorism Trials

Watch Senator Graham run legal rings around the Attorney General, who by the way has a conflict of interest because his law firm is playing an active role in the defense of these terrorists.

The Obama Administration refuses to give intelligence on the jihadist who killed 14 people at Ft. Hood but is perfectly willing to give national security secrets to 9/11 terrorists as a part of the discovery process with this bone headed move to take enemy combatants and treat them like bank robbers.

There is only one reason for this trial is to have a show trial where ACLU lawyers and lawyers from the Attorney General’s law firm can put the United States on trial as their defense. They will try to get all evidence thrown out by claiming torture and that they werent read their “Miranda” warnings.  This will serve the purpose of putting such claims in the court aqs evidence which canb them be used by so called international courts to invent war crimes charges against members of the previous administration.

Will this happen for sure? We will have to see but opening it up to even the possibility of it is foolish. These are illegal military combatants who should be tried in a military court as this is a martial matter not a criminal one.

Pay close attention to the part where the Attorney General is asked about previous precedent about trying enemy combatants caught on the battlefield in civilian criminal court. Holder doesn’t know the answer to the question. This is very disturbing because precedent is the bread and butter of the law. The first thing any lawyer does is scour the record to see what courts may have ruled on this issue. This is a matter of basic competence.

Long Lines for Sarah Palin in Indiana

 

Klavan: Limbaugh, Beck and Coulter Are Nazis and I know that because the elite media tells me so!

Charles Krauthammer: Obama’s Narcissism is Unbounded.

WOW!

Where is the elite media fact checking Obama statements like Krauthammer just did.

Professors Paid to Plagiarise – UPDATE: Global warming scientists hacked emails show manipulation of data, hiding of other data and conspiring to attack/smear global warming skeptics!

Before we dive into the meat of this important story let me state that we are woefully behind in our academics coverage. The editor has about 30 articles and posts in his head that he is ready to write if he can just find enough hours in the day. Constant news from the banking sector, government etc has been sucking the oxygen out of the air when it comes to news as well. We do hope to catch up soon. There is much news from our friends at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (www.thefire.org) so all readers are encouraged to read that site every day.

This news is so big that it cannot wait.

We hear it all the time, don’t plagiarise, never present an idea or thought that isn’t yours without crediting it.

But guess what….

If you are a professor and you are paid to put your name on an article written by another person, or a company or a research group to put your name on it to give it “added prestige” they no longer call it plagiarism, they call it “ghost writing” and that of course is peeeeeeerfectly ok …..

New York Times:

Senator Charles E. Grassley wrote to 10 top medical schools Tuesday to ask what they are doing about professors who put their names on ghostwritten articles in medical journals — and why that practice was any different from plagiarism by students.

Mr. Grassley, of Iowa, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, sent the letters as part of his continuing investigation of so-called medical ghostwriting. The term refers to publication of medical journal articles in which an outside writer — sometimes paid by a drug or medical devices company whose product is being studied — has done extensive work on the article without being named on the publication. Instead, one or more academic researchers may receive author credit.

Mr. Grassley said ghostwriting had hurt patients and raised costs for taxpayers because it used prestigious academic names to promote medical products and treatments that might be expensive or less effective than viable alternatives.

“Any attempt to manipulate the scientific literature, which can in turn mislead doctors to prescribe treatments that may be ineffective and/or cause harm to their patients, is very troubling,” the senator wrote.

Some journals, medical associations, writers’ and editors’ groups and pharmaceutical companies themselves have called for crackdowns on ghostwriting. But some universities that employ the professors who put their names on the articles have been slow to respond. Merck, Wyeth (now part of Pfizer), GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca are among the companies accused by lawyers and investigators of providing ghostwriters for research papers.

Mr. Grassley asked the universities to describe their policies on both ghostwriting and plagiarism and to enumerate complaints and describe investigations into both practices since 2004.

Dr. Ross McKinney Jr., director of the Trent Center for Bioethics at Duke University, said faculty who took credit for a ghostwritten paper should suffer the same penalties as students who plagiarized.

“But it is a very, very difficult thing to prove, just as it turns out that plagiarism is hard to prove,” he said in an interview.

Some say “wow” after reading that, but this writer who has been researching for a new book on academia and its shortcomings, is not surprised one bit and you deserve to know why.

In academics it is no secret that money, prestige and ideological conformity (in that order) are the bread and butter for most academics and most universities. Most academic writings are designed to serve two purposes, to generate grant money and to win the praises of academic and journalistic peers. Generating true scientific discovery and debate is a distant third.

The current state of “global warming” academic writing is a real world example. Most of the grant money put up for such “research” are handed out by those who expect who to see papers that promote the idea that central control of our economy and lifestyles is the best way to combat “global warming”, which is now called “climate change” because of a minor 10 year cooling trend in global temperatures (even the EPA admits this in a report that they tried to suppress but was forced out by FOIA).

In short, if you publish studies and research that says that man-made global warming is such a tiny drop in the bucket that it is next to irrelevant you are likely to find much of your grant money drying up.

This results in a great deal of bought and paid for junk science. Most of the “science” that “proved” man-made global warming were computer models that are so flawed that if you put in yesterdays data it could not show today’s climate. After a long enough perioud of time, others will publish studies without funding to get their name out there and to be considered “in”.

Dr. Richard Lindzen from MIT says the same thing although he is careful to be much nicer about it than we have to be, but his meaning is just the same. The prestige of his position protects him to be as honest as he likes and freely admits this and says that other less prestigious professors have no such protection.

I will put it in a way that is less nice but likely as accurate. If I had a couple of billion dollars to spend and I started handing out fat grants to research the possible evolutionary existence and eventual extinction of unicorns and after a time I lowered and stopped grants to those who dismissed the idea and increased the grants to those who wrote of its possibility, soon I would see papers that  “presented evidence” of their previous existence. After a number of years I would have peer-reviewed published evidence of the previous existence of unicorns.

UPDATE – How right I was proven above in such a short amount of time.

UK Telegrapgh:

Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming’?

By James Delingpole

If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka Hadley CRU) and released 61 megabites of confidential files onto the internet. (Hat tip: Watts Up With That)

When you read some of those files – including 1079 emails and 72 documents – you realise just why the boffins at Hadley CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be “the greatest in modern science”. These alleged emails – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory – suggest:

Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.

One of the alleged emails has a gentle gloat over the death in 2004 of John L Daly (one of the first climate change sceptics, founder of the Still Waiting For Greenhouse site), commenting:

“In an odd way this is cheering news.”

But perhaps the most damaging revelations  – the scientific equivalent of the Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses scandal – are those concerning the way Warmist scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause.

Here are a few tasters. (So far, we can only refer to them as alleged emails because – though Hadley CRU’s director Phil Jones has confirmed the break-in to Ian Wishart at the Briefing Room – he has yet to fess up to any specific contents.) But if genuine, they suggest dubious practices such as:

Manipulation of evidence:

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up:

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

Suppression of evidence:

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?

Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.

Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.

We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.

Fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Sceptic scientists:

Next
time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat
the crap out of him. Very tempted.

Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP):

……Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back–I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “MWP”, even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back….

And, perhaps most reprehensibly, a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority.

“This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?”

“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”“It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !”

Hadley CRU has form in this regard. In September – I wrote the story up here as “How the global warming industry is based on a massive lie” – Hadley CRU’s researchers were exposed as having “cherry-picked” data in order to support their untrue claim that global temperatures had risen higher at the end of the 20th century than at any time in the last millenium. Hadley CRU was also the organisation which – in contravention of all acceptable behaviour in the international scientific community – spent years withholding data from researchers it deemed unhelpful to its cause. This matters because Hadley CRU, established in 1990 by the Met Office, is a government-funded body which is supposed to be a model of rectitude. Its HadCrut record is one of the four official sources of global temperature data used by the IPCC.

I asked in my title whether this will be the final nail in the coffin of Anthropenic Global Warming. This was wishful thinking, of course. In the run up to Copenhagen, we will see more and more hysterical (and grotesquely exaggerated) stories such as this in the Mainstream Media. And we will see ever-more-virulent campaigns conducted by eco-fascist activists, such as this risible new advertising campaign by Plane Stupid showing CGI polar bears falling from the sky and exploding because kind of, like, man, that’s sort of what happens whenever you take another trip on an aeroplane.

The world is currently cooling; electorates are increasingly reluctant to support eco-policies leading to more oppressive regulation, higher taxes and higher utility bills; the tide is turning against Al Gore’s Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. The so-called “sceptical” view is now also the majority view.

Unfortunately, we’ve a long, long way to go before the public mood (and scientific truth) is reflected by our policy makers. There are too many vested interests in AGW, with far too much to lose either in terms of reputation or money, for this to end without a bitter fight.

Senator Inhoffe Responds:

Poetic Injustice: Pfizer Abandons New London Connecticut

It is the government’s mandate to protect private property and the fruits of ones labor. Excessive taxation and abuse of property rights were some of the main reasons that Americans participated in the revolution.

It is well known among historians that the Declaration of Independence written by Thomas Jefferson and edited largely by Ben Franklin was a near plagiarism of the writings of philosopher John Lock who expressed that “no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.” Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries, which was a popular reading at the time, has a similar message.

The first article of the Virginia Declaration of Rights written by George Mason and adopted unanimously by the Virginia Convention in 1776:

That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.

This is why Kelo v. New London,  the worst Supreme Court decision since Korematsu, has been condemned by states, scholars and citizens alike. In Kelo the Supreme Court redefined the “public use” clause in the Constitution to “government benefit”.

When we were all in grade school we were taught that the government could take your property only with just compensation and only for projects like military bases and roads that must be built. In Kelo the court ruled that the government can take your home and give it to another private citizen or private company that is willing to pay more property taxes to use the property. In short the court said that you are one bribe away from having the government confiscate yours or anyone else’s property.  Almost immediately most states passed laws banning just such a practice.

The City of New London spent $60 million taking their homes so that pharmaceutical giant Pfizer was interested in building on the site. Now Pfizer has abandoned the whole idea of building anything in the state leaving the city with the bill. It served them right. So much for the brilliance of central control over freedom and people’s basic rights.

Here is the site.

Kelo v. New London site. Click to enlarge.

Dollar Tanking Against Gold & Foreign Currency

And government policy as well as Federal Reserve Policy is encouraging it.

The world is screaming at us to stop the furious pace of printing and burrowing, foreign banks want out of the dollar, the oil producing nations are soon to abandon the dollar for oil swaps. They are behaving as if they believe that we are trying to exercise political control over our banks and blow up our own currency to either pay off the debt by monetizing it and/or blow up the US Dollar for the purpose of establishing a new currency in its place. Either way this will have the effect of great damage to our economy, wiping out the value of peoples savings and creating yet another ecop0nopmic crisis that the government can use as an excuse to take more control.

Bloomberg News:

Gold Futures Rise to Record on Speculation Dollar Will Decline

By Pham-Duy Nguyen and Nicholas Larkin

Nov. 11 (Bloomberg) — Gold surged to a record $1,119.10 an ounce in New York on speculation a decline in the dollar will spark demand for the precious metal as an alternative asset.

The metal climbed for the eighth straight session, the longest rally since January 2006. Before rebounding today, the dollar extended a slump to a 15-month low against a basket of currencies. India’s central bank bought gold last month to diversify reserves.

“The interest that central banks have shown for gold has really lit a fire under the market,” said Matt Zeman, a metals trader at LaSalle Futures Group Inc. in Chicago. “People are questioning the value of not only the U.S. currency, but all paper currencies. Investors are more comfortable holding gold.”

Gold futures for December delivery climbed $12.10, or 1.1 percent, to $1,114.60 on the New York Mercantile Exchange’s Comex division. The price has jumped 7.1 percent this month, while the dollar dropped 1.5 percent against the currency basket. The metal is headed for a ninth straight annual gain.

Gold for immediate delivery jumped to a record $1,118.88.

The dollar has declined more than 7 percent since December, when the Federal Reserve cut its benchmark lending rate close to zero percent to pull the U.S. economy out of recession.

Dollar Outlook

“The dollar is not going to get any firm footing with rates at zero,” Zeman said. “The dollar is going to continue to be the victim of the carry trade. People are selling dollars and putting it in higher-yielding assets. All commodities are going higher.”

 

With the benchmark lending rate at zero (The rate at which the fed and some other top banks lend money to its most credit worthy customers) those customers are burrowing dollars now to buy gold, silver, Chinese investments, or Euro’s witch are going up. Since the value of the dollar is falling the dollars they are peying back are worth less than the dollars they borrowed. The affect is that they are creating a bubble of such assets and inflating their value while pushing the value of the dollar down and making servicing our foreign debt less attractive.

Question – what if that asset bubble bursts like the mortgage bubble did?

Bloomburg News:

U.S. stocks extended a global advance, sending the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index to a 13-month high, as China’s industrial production surged and Federal Reserve policy makers signaled interest rates will remain at a record low. Gold climbed to an all-time high.

AP:

A weaker dollar may boost the nation’s economy by increasing exports and narrowing the trade gap — but that won’t happen anytime soon.

Instead, the nation’s trade deficit rose in September by the largest percentage in a decade as U.S. exports grew for the fifth straight month, but imports rose faster, a government report showed Friday. That trend is likely to continue until the middle of next year, economists said.

UK Telegraph:

Barrick shuts hedge book as world gold supply runs out.

Global gold production is in terminal decline despite record prices and Herculean efforts by mining companies to discover fresh sources of ore in remote spots, according to the world’s top producer Barrick Gold.

Aaron Regent, president of the Canadian gold giant, said that global output has been falling by roughly 1m ounces a year since the start of the decade. Total mine supply has dropped by 10pc as ore quality erodes, implying that the roaring bull market of the last eight years may have further to run.

“There is a strong case to be made that we are already at ‘peak gold’,” he told The Daily Telegraph at the RBC’s annual gold conference in London.

AFP/Yahoo:

Dollar falls, sending gold to record high.

LONDON (AFP) – The dollar fell on Monday as China accused the United States of increasing protectionism and following unexpectedly strong Japanese economic growth figures, pushing gold prices to a record high point.

US President Barack Obama is in China for a three-day mission aimed at convincing Beijing that Washington is its partner, not its rival.

As the dollar dropped against the euro and yen, gold struck an all-time peak of 1,133.20 dollars an ounce.

In late morning trading here, the euro climbed to 1.4969 dollars from 1.4918 dollars late in New York on Friday.

Against the Japanese currency, the dollar fell to 89.42 yen from 89.66 yen late on Friday.

“Far better than expected Japanese third-quarter GDP data…spurred risk appetite,” said Jane Foley, an analyst for online trading firm Forex.com.

“This pushed the euro close to 1.50 dollars in early European hours.”

.

 

 

 

 

How Did the Government Go From “Your Life is in danger at 40 if you don’t get your regular mammograms” to “Don’t do self exams and don’t get a mammogram till age 50″ in six months?

The health recommendations board that was passed as part of the stimulus, that will likely become mandatory if Pelosi/ObamaCare passes. Guess how many oncologists are on that board; if you guessed a big fat goose egg congratulations.

Government insurance only pays for a test if it is rated an A or a B test. Well mammograms for women under 50 and over age 75 got moved by this board to a C.

The rationing has already begun and you women who voted for Obama in such overwhelming numbers are the first target. He knows that single women under 30 will likely vote for him anyways.

Penn’s Leftist Friends Show Him Their Hateful Side After He Expressed His Libertarian Views to Glenn Beck

More hate from the far left.

UK TV Shows How Police Laser Speed Guns Give False Readings

Safety my foot, it is about taking your money.

Leftist Elite Media Smearing Glenn Beck, But Each Major Story He Has Reported Was at First Ridiculed Only to be Proved True.

Beck lists every major story he has broken and how each one has proved true. Yet leftist reporters lie about what he says and his message.

Beck current has FOUR books on the New York Times best seller list.

 

 

 

AWESOME: Lou Dobbs Interview with Larry King

This is a video that anyone who cares about the status and future of the United States must see. Lou Dobbs explains a point of view that has a great deal of merit and truth. About how both parties are owned by special interests, how there are only a few honest and straight shooters in either party (by the way, Sarah Palin is attacked because she has successfully brought down a massive corporate/political corruption ring in Alaska. If Palin becomes President billions in corruption will come to an end and that has parts of both parties frightened to death).

I am very aware that some people see me and this blog as some ideological instrument, what we really try to do here is shine a light on what the elite media culture under reports, ignores, or tries to render powerless so people can be better informed.

When Tiller Was Killed, Leftists didn’t say, “Hey don’t be mean to those abortion protestors”…

All of two abortionists in the country have ever been shot and we see Christians being smeared by CBS’s Bob Seiffert and compared to the Taliban by NBC etc. However, when 1 in 3 Muslims in western countries such as England admit in polls that they are sympathetic or strongly in favor of jihadists the elite media snd the far left jump through hoops to deny any connection from violence to radical islam.

Ann Coulter says that the far left doesn’t like capitalism (which they freely admit) and doesn’t like America in its traditional form. The left also hates Christianity, so when a large section of a religion declares war on both the fer left has now found a religion that they like, so they are taking active steps to protect it and bring us back to a pre-911 mentality.

Ann Coulter gives the quote above in her analysis. No matter what you think of Coulter she makes totally valid points here worth listening to.

It is now clear from the evidence that NPR and the UK Telegraph (LINK) uncovered that Hasan outed himself as a dangerous jihadist to his colleagues more than once (LINK).

Those colleagues were afraid of reporting him in fear of being accused of discrimination.

Those colleagues were right. Getting reported to social actions in the military is serious trouble that is not easy to escape. When I was in the military if you were reported to social actions you were guilty unless you could prove beyond doubt that you were innocent. Lately I have made it a point to ask every veteran I know (and I am in a position to ask many) if their experience when it comes to social actions was different and not a single person saw the situation differently.

The Secretary of the Army came out with a “diversity uber alles” message as Michelle Malkin so ably described it. When George Tiller died President Obama said that he was outraged by the shooting. After the Ft. Hood massacre President Obama came out, spoke about American Indian policy, did some shout outs to some of his friends and started the Ft. Hood discussion on “Now lets not jump to conclusions”.

We watched as the elite media invented excuses for Hasan, calling it “secondary post traumatic stress disorder” which never existed till this shooting and did everything to say that the reason was not what the overwhelming evidence was, that Hasan is a jihadist who was protected by leftist political correctness until 14 people are dead and a great many others injured.

The end result is that political correctness will have an even greater stranglehold on the armed services and the other Hasan’s in the military are now enjoying more protection than ever.

Lt. Colonel Ralph Peters:

Peters asks, where are the Baptist and Methodist marketplace bombers? He also explains how the strategy of political correctness doesn’t work. He explains how his co-workers knew how dangerous he was, but would have had their careers put in danger by trying to take Hasan on.

Michelle Malkin comments:

Question of the day – What would the elite media’s reaction be if the shooter had attended a Tea Party?

Dr. Charles Krauthammer comments:

What a surprise — that someone who shouts “Allahu Akbar” (the “God is great” jihadist battle cry) as he is shooting up a room of American soldiers might have Islamist motives. It certainly was a surprise to the mainstream media, which spent the weekend after the Fort Hood massacre downplaying Nidal Hasan’s religious beliefs.

“I cringe that he’s a Muslim. … I think he’s probably just a nut case,” said Newsweek’s Evan Thomas. Some were more adamant. Time’s Joe Klein decried “odious attempts by Jewish extremists … to argue that the massacre perpetrated by Nidal Hasan was somehow a direct consequence of his Islamic beliefs.” While none could match Klein’s peculiar cherchez-le-juif motif, the popular story line was of an Army psychiatrist driven over the edge by terrible stories he had heard from soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

They suffered. He listened. He snapped.

Really? What about the doctors and nurses, the counselors and physical therapists at Walter Reed Army Medical Center who every day hear and live with the pain and the suffering of returning soldiers? How many of them then picked up a gun and shot 51 innocents?

And what about civilian psychiatrists — not the Upper West Side therapist treating Woody Allen neurotics, but the thousands of doctors working with hospitalized psychotics — who every day hear not just tales but cries of the most excruciating anguish, of the most unimaginable torment? How many of those doctors commit mass murder?

It’s been decades since I practiced psychiatry. Perhaps I missed the epidemic.

But, of course, if the shooter is named Nidal Hasan, whom National Public Radio reported had been trying to proselytize doctors and patients, then something must be found. Presto! Secondary post-traumatic stress disorder, a handy invention to allow one to ignore the obvious.

And the perfect moral finesse. Medicalizing mass murder not only exonerates. It turns the murderer into a victim, indeed a sympathetic one. After all, secondary PTSD, for those who believe in it (you won’t find it in DSM-IV-TR, psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual), is known as “compassion fatigue.” The poor man — pushed over the edge by an excess of sensitivity.

Have we totally lost our moral bearings? Nidal Hasan (allegedly) cold-bloodedly killed 13 innocent people. In such cases, political correctness is not just an abomination. It’s a danger, clear and present.

Army New About Hasan, Administratrion Keeping Info Secret

ABC News:

U.S. intelligence agencies were aware months ago that Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan was attempting to make contact with an individual associated with al Qaeda, two American officials briefed on classified material in the case told ABC News.

According to the officials, the Army was informed of Hasan’s contact, but it is unclear what, if anything, the Army did in response.

Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-MI), the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said that he requested the CIA and other intelligence agencies brief the committee on what was known, if anything, about Hasan by the U.S. intelligence community, only to be refused.

Great, so the Administration is now hiding information from the intelligence committee. All in the name of political correctness.

 

 

New Battlestar Galactica Movie in Production Based on 1978 Story. Glen Larson to Produce, Bryan Singer to Direct.

I have been waiting for this for a long time and the timing of such a film, for release in 2011, could not be better timed as Battlestar Galactica came out in 1978 and Star Wars came out in 1977.

Glen Larson to produce

The legendary Glen Larson who brought us the original Battlestar Galactica, Knight Rider, the Six Million Dollar Man and who was also a consulting producer in the popular 2004-2009 “re-imagined” BSG television series on the sci-fi network is in charge and is producing the new film.

Battlestar Galactica 1978 won many awards and enjoys a large cult following to this day. It was the first television series to break the cost of $1 million per episode. The problem is that the stories being told were too ambitious for the technology at the time and the cost overruns and shortcuts they took to save money plagued the series. Larson began working on the story in 1968.

The thing that made the original Battlestar series work were compelling characters and truly great stories that showed some philosophical depth much like Star Trek The Original Series.  Some episodes of the 1978 series were a tad campy, but so was everything else made at the time. Larson has shown in his affiliation with the “re-imagined” BSG series that he can be as edgy and intense as anyone so worries about a campy new movie in my view are unfounded.

With that said, the “re-imagined” had some flaws and was targeted to a very specific demographic. It is likely that Larson is very much aware of it seeing that he refused (according to some press reports) to let the people in charge of the “re-imagined BSG” have his movie rights.

The problem with the re-imagined BSG series

The re-imagined series lost its nobility and the people (especially the male characters) were so over the top flawed, emasculated, and indecisive that I often lost suspension of disbelief while watching.

To be blunt, the characters in “re-imagined” are so west coast university pop culture overly feminized and flawed that, in spite of good acting performances by the actors, after a while I just stopped liking them and certainly did not admire them. The “culture” of “re-imagined” was all wrong.

Perhaps “re-imagined” was meant to be a reflection of today’s flawed “emo” pop culture rather than an example of the best of our own. While the eye candy “re-imagined” was inspiring the story sub plots were less and less so and at times smacked of a bad soap opera.  I was pushing myself to watch it and as the second season went onto the third I just couldn’t watch it any more.

I hope that Glen Larson does his legacy justice with this new film and creates something that is more philosophically deep rather than psychologically in need of a good therapist.

Bryan Singer to Direct

Bryan Singer has had some real hits including the super popular House series, X-Men and X-Men II. Singer also had some royal flops like the abysmal Superman Returns. Singer’s big mistake in Superman Returns is that he didn’t understand the culture of the franchise.  This is where Singer has to make certain that he does  not get a BSG movie wrong.

Singer is quoted as saying that he “likes working on science fiction films because they teach the audience about mankind” which is certainly a step in the right direction. Perhaps Singer can find some excellent writers that can accomplish what Ira Behr did in the Star Trek franchise with Deep Space Nine which provided more depth to the Star Trek Universe.

Obama Purging Bush Appointees From Bureaucracy

Did you just see the post below how 40% of top Obama donors were given positions within the administration? Well in the name of “hiring for merit” if you worked for the Bush administration you are locked out of civil service.

There is establishing proper civil service rules for merit and then there is Chicago style use and selective enforcement of such policies.

Most of these policies go back one or two years, but five …wow. It just kills me how bureaucrats can make the most outrageous of policies sound so reasonable.

Bush fired six “serve at the pleasure of the president” US Attorneys and the elite media and the Democrats had a cow and pretended like it was a criminal act. Of course when Bill Clinton fired ALL of them in a single stroke they said it was perfectly justified.

Here it is:

I believe we must hold ourselves and the government to a higher standard, one that honors and supports the President’s strong commitment to a Government that is transparent and open.   OPM’s responsibility to uphold the merit system is not limited to Presidential election years nor to competitive service appointments.  That is why I am instituting a change in OPM policy with respect to hiring political appointees for civil service jobs.

Beginning January 1, 2010, agencies must seek prior approval from OPM before they can appoint a current or recent political appointee to a competitive or non-political excepted service position at any level under the provisions of title 5, United States Code.  OPM will review these proposed appointments to ensure they comply with merit system principles and applicable civil service laws.  I have delegated decisionmaking authority over these matters to career Senior Executives at OPM to avoid any hint of political influence.

In no case may an agency make an appointment of the type described below without written authorization from OPM:

1. The appointment of a current political Schedule A or Schedule C Executive Branch employee or a former political Schedule A or Schedule C Executive Branch employee who held the position within the last five years to a competitive or non-political excepted service position under title 5 of the U.S. Code.

1. The appointment of a current Non-career SES Executive Branch employee or a former Non-career SES Executive Branch employee who held the position within the last five years to a competitive or non-political excepted service position under title 5 of the  U.S. Code.

UK Daily Telegraph: Obama’s Top Ten Broken Promises

We have composed lists of these and our friend Michael van der Galien at Poligazette wrote one as well.

European press is reporting this where is the NYT?

 

UK Telegraph:

Less than nine months into his four-year term of office, President Barack Obama’s record is already one of abandoned promises, sidelined issues and lack of action.

1.PROMISE BROKEN. Mr Obama said he would “not sign any non-emergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House website for five days”. But the “sunlight before signing” promise has already fallen by the wayside with Mr Obama signing three major bills without public scrutiny.

2.PROMISE BROKEN. Mr Obama repeatedly said he would negotiate health care reform in televised sessions broadcast on C-SPAN, the public service network. Instead, he his approach has been no different from his predecessors, holding talks behind closed doors at the White House and Congress.

3.PROMISE BROKEN. Mr Obama solemnly pledged that “no political appointees in an Obama-Biden administration will be permitted to work on regulations or contracts directly and substantially related to their prior employer for two years”. In practice, Mr Obama has granted several waivers to this rule, allowing lobbyists to serve in the top reaches of his administration.

4.PROMISE BROKEN. Mr Obama said he would end income tax for the elderly making less than $50,000 per year, thereby eliminating taxes for seven million of them. This has not been part of his economic stimulus bill, his first budget outline or any legislation proposed by the White House.

5.PROMISE STALLED. On taking office, Mr Obama announced with great fanfare that the Guantanamo Bay prison camp would be closed within a year of his inauguration on January 20th. Defence officials now concede that this self-imposed deadline will not be met.

6.PROMISE SIDELINED. Mr Obama promised to end the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy that prohibits openly gay personnel from serving in the United States armed forces. Despite reiterating the pledge this weekend, Mr Obama shows no signs of taking concrete action on the issue.

7.PROMISE BROKEN. Mr Obama said that in 2009 and 2010 “existing businesses will receive a $3,000 refundable tax credit for each additional full-time employee hired”. Democrats on Capitol Hill opposed this and Mr Obama has quietly abandoned the proposal, omitting it from his list of requirements for draft legislation.

8.PROMISE BROKEN. During the campaign, Mr Obama promised that “as President I will recognise the Armenian genocide” carried out by the Ottoman Empire after 1915. Once in office, he travelled to Turkey and made no mention of genocide. In a statement in April on the memorial day for the genocide he spoke of the “heavy weight” of history and the “terrible events ” of the period but failed the use the g-word.

9.PROMISE SIDELINED. As a candidate, Mr Obama highlighted his support for abortion rights, stating he would back this up “by passing the Freedom of Choice Act as president”. At a press conference marking his first 100 days, Mr Obama said this was “not my highest legislative priority” and that it was important to “focus on those areas that we can agree on”.

10. PROMISE SIDELINED. Mr Obama promised to end warrantless wiretaps on the domestic communications of Americans and to “update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to provide greater oversight and accountability”. So far, he has taken no action.

CORRUPTION: 40% of top Obama fundraisers get posts

“Your doing a good job Brownie.” Those are the words spoken by President Bush to the soon after to be doomed FEMA Director Michael Brown. Democrats including Barack Obama chastised the Administration for appointing cronies to government positions. Obama promised to appoint professionals based on merit. As we can see this was just another lie.

USA Today:

WASHINGTON — More than 40% of President Obama’s top-level fundraisers have secured posts in his administration, from key executive branch jobs to diplomatic postings in countries such as France, Spain and the Bahamas, a USA TODAY analysis finds.

Twenty of the 47 fundraisers that Obama’s campaign identified as collecting more than $500,000 have been named to government positions, the analysis found.

Overall, about 600 individuals and couples raised money from their friends, family members and business associates to help fund Obama’s presidential campaign. USA TODAY’s analysis found that 54 have been named to government positions, ranging from Cabinet and White House posts to advisory roles, such as serving on the economic recovery board charged with helping guide the country out of recession.

Nearly a year after he was elected on a pledge to change business-as-usual in Washington, Obama also has taken a cue from his predecessors and appointed fundraisers to coveted ambassadorships, drawing protests from groups representing career diplomats. A separate analysis by the American Foreign Service Association, the diplomats’ union, found that more than half of the ambassadors named by Obama so far are political appointees, said Susan Johnson, president of the association. An appointment is considered political if it does not go to a career diplomat in the State Department.

That’s a rate higher than any president in more than four decades, the group’s data show, although that could change as the White House fills more openings. Traditionally about 30% of top diplomatic jobs go to political appointees, and roughly 70% to veteran State Department employees. Ambassadors earn $153,200 to $162,900 annually.

 

The list of donors who got jobs:

RAISED MORE THAN $500,0000

Nicole Avant     Ambassador to the Bahamas

Matthew Barzun     Ambassador to Sweden

Don Beyer     Ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein

Jeff Bleich     Ambassador to Australia**

Richard Danzig     Member, Defense Policy Board

William Eacho     Ambassador to Austria

Julius Genachowski     Chairman of Federal Communications Commission

Donald Gips     Ambassador to South Africa

Howard Gutman     Ambassador to Belgium

Scott Harris     General Counsel, Department of Energy

William Kennard     Ambassador to the European Union**

Bruce Oreck     Ambassador to Finland

Spencer Overton     Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General

Thomas Perrelli     Associate Attorney General

Abigail Pollack     Member, Commission to Study the Potential Creation of a National Museum of the American Latino

Charles Rivkin     Ambassador to France and Monaco

John Roos     Ambassador of Japan

Francisco Sanchez     Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade

Alan Solomont     Ambassador to Spain and Andorra**

Cynthia Stroum    Ambassador to Luxembourg**

RAISED BETWEEN $200,000 and $500,000

A. Marisa Chun     Deputy associate attorney general

Gregory Craig     White House counsel

Norman Eisen     Special counsel to the president for ethics and government reform

Michael Froman     Deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs

Mark Gallogly     Member, Economic Recovery Advisory Board

Max Holtzman     Senior adviser to the Agriculture secretary

James Hudson     Director, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development

Jeh Johnson     General counsel, Department of Defense

Samuel Kaplan     Ambassador to Morocco

Nicole Lamb-Hale     Deputy general counsel, Commerce Department

Andres Lopez     Member, Commission to Study the Potential Creation of a National Museum of the American Latino

Cindy Moelis     Director, Commission on White House Fellows

William Orrick     Counselor to the assistant attorney general

John Phillips    Chairman, Commission on White House Fellows

Penny Pritzker***    Member, Economic Recovery Advisory Board

Bob Rivkin     General counsel, Transportation Department

Desiree Rogers     White House social secretary

Louis Susman     Ambassador to the United Kingdom

Robert Sussman     Senior policy counsel, Environmental Protection Agency

Christina Tchen     Director, White House Office of Public Engagement

Barry White     Ambassador to Norway

RAISED BETWEEN $100,000 and $200,000

Preeta Bansal     General counsel, Office of Management and Budget

Laurie Fulton     Ambassador to Denmark

Fred Hochberg     President, Export-Import Bank of the United States

Valerie Jarrett     Senior adviser to the president

Kevin Jennings     Assistant deputy secretary of Education

Steven Rattner     Treasury Department adviser

Miriam Sapiro     Deputy U.S. trade representative**

Vinai Thummalapally     Ambassador to Belize

RAISED BETWEEN $50,000 and $100,000

Eric Holder     Attorney general

David Jacobson     Ambassador to Canada

Ronald Kirk     U.S. trade representative

Rocco Landesman     Chairman, National Endowment for the Arts

Susan Rice     Ambassador to the United Nations

** Nominated, not yet confirmed by Senate

*** National finance chairwoman

Sources: Obama campaign, Public Citizen; White House; USA TODAY research

Tucson Tea Party Party – November 10, 2009

Blue Dog Democrats who turned yellow.

The Human Cost of Canadian Government Health Care

These are heartbreaking, but you need to see them.

Who is Joe Biden?: “Just how ignorant are people who watch the elite media”

In the previous installment of just how ignorant are people, Steven Crowder went to the number one public university in the country, Berkeley California, to ask a few simple questions and was able to find almost no one who could answer them.

Crowder got complaints saying that going to Berkeley wasn’t fair because California people are spacey. So Crowder went to New York to do the same experiment. The following are the results…

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Doesn’t Know The Constitution: Claims It Has No Preamble.

It is no surprise that the left doesn’t know the Constitution. After all they spend so much time trying to ignore it, subvert it and get around it. Maddow has whopping flubs pretty regularly (1, 2, 3) and when we we started to look at her statements we realized that correcting and making fun of her ignorance would become a full time job. Nonetheless this flub is pretty entertaining.

Via Newsbusters.org:

RACHEL MADDOW, HOST: Congressman Akin was not alone in stumbling over a little basic U.S. history. He had some good company in the top Republican in the House, Minority Leader John Boehner.

(VIDEOTAPE)

JOHN BOEHNER (R-OHIO.): This is my copy of the Constitution. And I’m gonna stand here with our Founding Fathers who wrote in the Preamble, “We hold these truths to be self-evident…”

(END VIDEOTAPE):

MADDOW (waving hands): Nnn, Constitution doesn’t have a Preamble. Not. Nope. Stop it. That would be the Declaration of Independence. Ooh.

Actually, Rach, the Constitution DOES have a Preamble, and I doth quote:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

As you liberals so love Wikipedia, in its section titled “Preamble to the United States Constitution”

The Limbaugh Smear Machine NFL Round-Up

I was very sick while this went on, but it is worth noting that the same people that fact checked a Saturday Night Live skit teasing President Obama, put vile and totally invented quotes on the air to smear Limbaugh to prevent his consortium from buying the St. Louis Rams.

MSNBC says that Limbaugh would love to say that he owns a plantation full of black men – LINK.

MSNBC Admits: ‘Unable to Verify’ False Limbaugh Quote; No Retraction or Apology- LINK.

Since the fictional Limbaugh quotes were exposed, the networks spent only 47 seconds discussing it – LINK.

Huffington Post Pulls Bogus Limbaugh Quotes after not being able to substantiate them – LINK.

CNN Features False Limbaugh Quote – LINK.

CNN Reads Limbaugh’s Denial of Alleged Slavery Quote, Doesn’t Retract Use. Says there are “Other Quotes” and couldn’t substantiate those either – LINK.

So Called ‘Journalists’ Claiming Limbaugh Praised MLK’s Assassin Offer No Proof – LINK.

ANC Claims “Limbaugh has a history of making racially offensive comments” but offers no quotes and no proof – LINK.

Video: MSNBC’s Matthews muses on killing Rush Limbaugh – LINK.

Roger Goodell from the NFL, a known Obama supporter, made disparaging comments about Limbaugh and got chewed out for it during a Congressioanl hearing by Represetative Steve King. You can watch Goodell squirm. He very much deserved this public humiliation.

Wall Street Journal:

The Race Card, Football and Me

By Rush Limbaugh

My critics would have you believe no conservative meets NFL ’standards.’

David Checketts, an investor and owner of sports teams, approached me in late May about investing in the St. Louis Rams football franchise. As a football fan, I was intrigued. I invited him to my home where we discussed it further. Even after informing him that some people might try to make an issue of my participation, Mr. Checketts said he didn’t much care. I accepted his offer.

It didn’t take long before my name was selectively leaked to the media as part of the Checketts investment group. Shortly thereafter, the media elicited comments from the likes of Al Sharpton. In 1998 Mr. Sharpton was found guilty of defamation and ordered to pay $65,000 for falsely accusing a New York prosecutor of rape in the 1987 Tawana Brawley case. He also played a leading role in the 1991 Crown Heights riot (he called neighborhood Jews “diamond merchants”) and 1995 Freddie’s Fashion Mart riot.

Not to be outdone, Jesse Jackson, whose history includes anti-Semitic speech (in 1984 he referred to Jews as “Hymies” and to New York City as “Hymietown” in a Washington Post interview) chimed in. He found me unfit to be associated with the NFL. I was too divisive and worse. I was accused of once supporting slavery and having praised Martin Luther King Jr.’s murderer, James Earl Ray.

Next came writers in the sports world, like the Washington Post’s Michael Wilbon. He wrote this gem earlier this week: “I’m not going to try and give specific examples of things Limbaugh has said over the years because I screwed up already doing that, repeating a quote attributed to Limbaugh (about slavery) which he has told me he simply did not say and does not reflect his feelings. I take him at his word. . . . “

Mr. Wilbon wasn’t alone. Numerous sportswriters, CNN, MSNBC, among others, falsely attributed to me statements I had never made. Their sources, as best I can tell, were Wikipedia and each other. But the Wikipedia post was based on a fabrication printed in a book that also lacked any citation to an actual source.

I never said I supported slavery and I never praised James Earl Ray. How sick would that be? Just as sick as those who would use such outrageous slanders against me or anyone else who never even thought such things. Mr. Wilbon refuses to take responsibility for his poison pen, writing instead that he will take my word that I did not make these statements; others, like Rick Sanchez of CNN, essentially used the same sleight-of-hand.

The sports media elicited comments from a handful of players, none of whom I can recall ever meeting. Among other things, at least one said he would never play for a team I was involved in given my racial views. My racial views? You mean, my belief in a colorblind society where every individual is treated as a precious human being without regard to his race? Where football players should earn as much as they can and keep as much as they can, regardless of race? Those controversial racial views?

The NFL players union boss, DeMaurice Smith, jumped in. A Washington criminal defense lawyer, Democratic Party supporter and Barack Obama donor, he sent a much publicized email to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell saying that it was important for the league to reject discrimination and hatred.

When Mr. Goodell was asked about me, he suggested that my 2003 comment criticizing the media’s coverage of Donovan McNabb—in which I said the media was cheerleading Mr. McNabb because they wanted a successful black quarterback—fell short of the NFL’s “high standard.” High standard? Half a decade later, the media would behave the same way about the presidential candidacy of Mr. Obama.

Having brought me into his group, Mr. Checketts now wanted a way out. He asked me to resign. I told him no way. I had done nothing wrong. I had not uttered the words these people were putting in my mouth. And I would not bow to their libels and pressure. He would have to drop me from the group. A few days later, he did.

As I explained on my radio show, this spectacle is bigger than I am on several levels. There is a contempt in the news business, including the sportswriter community, for conservatives that reflects the blind hatred espoused by Messrs. Sharpton and Jackson. “Racism” is too often their sledgehammer. And it is being used to try to keep citizens who don’t share the left’s agenda from participating in the full array of opportunities this nation otherwise affords each of us. It was on display many years ago in an effort to smear Clarence Thomas with racist stereotypes and keep him off the Supreme Court. More recently, it was employed against patriotic citizens who attended town-hall meetings and tea-party protests.

These intimidation tactics are working and spreading, and they are a cancer on our society.

Sarah Palin: DRILL!

Sarah Palin in NRO:

Given that we’re spending billions of stimulus dollars to rebuild our highways, it makes sense to think about what we’ll be driving on them. For years to come, most of what we drive will be powered, at least in part, by diesel fuel or gasoline. To fuel that driving, we need access to oil. The less use we make of our own reserves, the more we will have to import, which leads to a number of harmful consequences. That means we need to drill here and drill now.

We rely on petroleum for much more than just powering our vehicles: It is essential in everything from jet fuel to petrochemicals, plastics to fertilizers, pesticides to pharmaceuticals. According to the Energy Information Administration, our total domestic petroleum consumption last year was 19.5 million barrels per day (bpd). Motor gasoline and diesel fuel accounted for less than 13 million bpd of that. Meanwhile, we produced only 4.95 million bpd of domestic crude. In other words, even if we ran all our vehicles on something else (which won’t happen anytime soon), we would still have to depend on imported oil. And we’ll continue that dependence until we develop our own oil resources to their fullest extent.

Those who oppose domestic drilling are motivated primarily by environmental considerations, but many of the countries we’re forced to import from have few if any environmental-protection laws, and those that do exist often go unenforced. In effect, American environmentalists are preventing responsible development here at home while supporting irresponsible development overseas.

My home state of Alaska shows how it’s possible to be both pro-environment and pro-resource-development. Alaskans would never support anything that endangered our pristine air, clean water, and abundant wildlife (which, among other things, provides many of us with our livelihood). The state’s government has made safeguarding resources a priority; when I was governor, for instance, we created a petroleum-systems-integrity office to monitor our oil and gas infrastructure for any potential environmental risks.

Alaska also shows how oil drilling is thoroughly compatible with energy conservation and renewable-energy development. Over 20 percent of Alaska’s electricity currently comes from renewable sources, and as governor I put forward a long-term plan to increase that figure to 50 percent by 2025. Alaska’s comprehensive plan identifies renewable options across the state that can help rural villages transition away from expensive diesel-generated electricity — allowing each community to choose the solution that best fits its needs. That’s important in any energy plan: Tempting as they may be to central planners, top-down, one-size-fits-all solutions are recipes for failure.

For the same reason, the federal government shouldn’t push a single, universal approach to alternative-powered vehicles. Electric cars might work in Los Angeles, but they don’t work in Alaska, where you can drive hundreds of miles without seeing many people, let alone many electrical sockets. And while electric and hybrid cars have their advantages, producing the electricity to power them still requires an energy source. For the sake of the environment, that energy should be generated from the cleanest source available.

Natural gas is one promising clean alternative. It contains fewer pollutants than other fossil fuels, it’s easier to collect and process, and it is found throughout our country. In Alaska, we’re developing the largest private-sector energy project in history — a 3,000-mile, $40 billion pipeline to transport hundreds of trillions of cubic feet of natural gas to markets across the United States. Onshore and offshore natural gas from Alaska and the Lower 48 can satisfy a large part of our energy needs for decades, bringing us closer to energy independence. Whether we use it to power natural-gas cars or to run natural-gas power plants that charge electric cars — or ideally for both — natural gas can act as a clean “bridge fuel” to a future when more renewable sources are available.

In addition to drilling, we need to build new refineries. America currently has roughly 150 refineries, down from over 300 in the 1970s. Due mainly to environmental regulations, we haven’t built a major new refinery since 1976, though our oil consumption has increased significantly since then. That’s no way to secure our energy supply. The post-Katrina jump in gas prices proved that we can’t leave ourselves at the mercy of a hurricane that knocks a few refineries out of commission.

Building an energy-independent America will mean a real economic stimulus. It will mean American jobs that can never be shipped overseas. Think about how much of our trade deficit is fueled by the oil we import — sometimes as much as half of the total. Through this massive transfer of wealth, we lose hundreds of billions of dollars a year that could be invested in our economy. Instead it goes to foreign countries, including some repressive regimes that use it to fund activities that threaten our security.

Reliance on foreign sources of energy weakens America. When a riot breaks out in an OPEC nation, or a developing country talks about nationalizing its oil industry, or a petro-dictator threatens to cut off exports, the probability is great that the price of oil will shoot up. Even in friendly nations, business and financial decisions made for local reasons can destabilize America’s energy market, since the price we pay for foreign oil is subject to rising and falling exchange rates. Decreasing our dependence on foreign sources of energy will reduce the impact of world events on our economy.

In the end, energy independence is not just about the environment or the economy. It’s about freedom and confidence. It’s about building a more secure and peaceful America, an America in which our energy needs will not be subject to the whims of nature, currency speculators, or madmen in possession of vast oil reserves.

Alternative sources of energy are part of the answer, but only part. There’s no getting around the fact that we still need to “drill, baby, drill!” And if those in D.C. say otherwise, we need to tell them: “Yes, we can!”

Mika Brzezinski: With One Exception, Every CBS Reporter is a “Liberal”

BRZEZINSKI: — but we’re all liberals and Democrats.

SCARBOROUGH: You know that everyone you worked for, they were all liberals, they were all pro-choice, they were all pro-gun control, they were all, I mean, let me ask you this question: when did you work at CBS?

BRZEZINSKI: Collectively, over a course of 10 years.

SCARBOROUGH: Give me years.

BRZEZINSKI: ‘90, 2001 to 2007.

SCARBOROUGH: OK, how many people that you worked for at CBS do you think voted for George W. Bush? Of all the thousands you worked for, how many people at CBS do you think voted for George W. Bush?

BRZEZINSKI: A very small percentage.

SCARBOROUGH: Maybe 1%?

BRZEZINSKI: I don’t know.

SCARBOROUGH: Can you think–seriously–you don’t have, just use your insight, your inside head voice here, can you think seriously of one correspondent, of one producer, of one anchor, that was a George W. Bush fan?

BRZEZINSKI: I can. I can think of one, yes.

Democrats prevent hearing on corrupt “VIP Sweetheart Mortgages” given out by Countrywide to top Democrats. Lock Republicans out of committee room.

The Hill:

Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.) locked Republicans out of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee room to keep them from meeting when Democrats aren’t present.

Towns’ action came after repeated public ridicule from the leading Republican on the committee, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), over Towns’s failure to launch an investigation into Countrywide Mortgage’s reported sweetheart deals to VIPs.

For months Towns has refused Republican requests to subpoena records in the case. Last Thursday Committee Republicans, led by Issa, were poised to force an open vote on the subpoenas at a Committee mark-up meeting. The mark-up was abruptly canceled. Only Republicans showed up while Democrats chairs remained empty.

Republicans charged that Towns canceled the meeting to avoid the subpoena vote. Democrats first claimed the mark-up was canceled due to a conflict with the Financial Services Committee. Later they said it was abandoned after a disagreement among Democratic members on whether to subpoena records on the mortgage industry’s political contributions to Republicans.

A GOP committee staffer captured video of Democrats leaving their separate meeting in private chambers after the mark-up was supposed to have begun. He spliced the video to other footage of the Democrats’ empty chairs at the hearing room, set it to the tune of “Hit the Road, Jack” and posted it on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s minority webpage, where it remained as of press time.

UPDATE: Key Evidence Destroyed – Wall Street Journal:

The discovery that Countrywide Financial Corp. recorded phone conversations with borrowers in a controversial mortgage program that included public officials — and that those recordings have been destroyed — has prompted new congressional calls for more information about the program.

Rep. Darrell Issa of California, the ranking Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, is trying to subpoena the remaining records of Countrywide’s VIP loan program. So far, the committee’s chairman, New York Democratic Rep. Edolphus Towns, has turned down that request.

Democrats’ 2010 midterm strategy: Attack relentlessly and win ugly

Via the ALLAHPUNDIT @ Hotair.com reports:

That’s what the “experts” are telling them, anyway. I don’t know, though. It’s so …unlike them.

Do Nancy “Un-American” Pelosi and Harry “Evil-mongers” Reid really have it in them to go bareknuckle?

“Very often the instinct for an incumbent party is to defend and justify,” said Geoff Garin, a pollster for Democratic candidates. “But in this kind of environment, the best defense is a good offense. This needs to be a cycle where Republican vulnerabilities are a central part of the debate.”

Charlie Cook, the nonpartisan political handicapper, framed the Democrats’ challenge for 2010 more bluntly. It does not track the genial, new-politics identity that President Obama has cultivated.

“They’re going to have to play really rough,” said Mr. Cook, who pegs Democrats’ chances for holding the House next year at only slightly better than even…

Democrats will “have to make the opponent the issue,” said Neil Newhouse, a Republican pollster. “No. 1, try to tie them to George W. Bush — and then make it personal after that.”