Right U.S.

Dem compares Repubs to Nazis,TEA Party to KKK

2011-01-20T09:36:00.000-08:00

In a January 11th Roll Call op-ed Tennessee Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen wrote

"I have been troubled by the hateful and often patently untrue words that enter the American mind via the Internet, talk radio and even mainstream media."

On Tuesday January 18th on the floor of the House, Rep. Cohen compared Republican dissent of Obamacare to Nazi propaganda.

Ahh the new civility.

On Wednesday nights “Keeping them Honest” segment, with CNN's Anderson Cooper, Rep. Cohen defended his earlier statements and even blamed Jesse Venturas Tru TV show "Conspiracy Theories" for creating anti Government sentiment. Cooper calls the show "ridiculous" and "such a joke" Rep. Cohen goes on to claim that shows like Conspiracy Theory are responsible for the murder of Federal employees.

Later in the interview Cooper asks Rep. Cohen to explain the following comments made by Cohen in an April 2010 interview;

"The Tea Party people are kind of, without robes and hoods, they have really shown a very hardcore angry side of America that is against any type of diversity."

Rep. Cohen claimed that the TEA Party did arise much like the KKK did after the civil war but in the same sentence admits that the Tea Party is not doing the kind of things the klan did. Cooper responds by stating that the TEA Party could be compared to any populist movement and the KKK comparison seems incendiary and deeply offensive to those in the party.

Realizing he could no longer defend his position or deny the glaring double standard Rep. Cohen had this to say;

“I won’t say it again, but I was right,”

The aftermath of the Tucson tragedy

2011-01-12T08:51:00.000-08:00

By Charles Krauthammer
Wednesday, January 12, 2011

The shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 19 others Saturday in Tucson brought out an outpouring of emotion for the victims. Six people were killed, including a 9-year-old girl who went to the casual meet-and-greet because of her interest in politics. In addition to Giffords, 13 others were wounded. The suspect, Jared Lee Loughner, 22, was taken into custody at the scene.

The charge: The Tucson massacre is a consequence of the "climate of hate" created by Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, Glenn Beck, Obamacare opponents and sundry other liberal betes noires.
This Story

the verdict: Rarely in American political discourse has there been a charge so reckless, so scurrilous and so unsupported by evidence.

As killers go, Jared Loughner is not reticent. Yet among all his writings, postings, videos and other ravings - and in all the testimony from all the people who knew him - there is not a single reference to any of these supposed accessories to murder.

Not only is there no evidence that Loughner was impelled to violence by any of those upon whom Paul Krugman, Keith Olbermann, the New York Times, the Tucson sheriff and other rabid partisans are fixated. There is no evidence that he was responding to anything, political or otherwise, outside of his own head.

A climate of hate? This man lived within his very own private climate. "His thoughts were unrelated to anything in our world," said the teacher of Loughner's philosophy class at Pima Community College. "He was very disconnected from reality," said classmate Lydian Ali. "You know how it is when you talk to someone who's mentally ill and they're just not there?" said neighbor Jason Johnson. "It was like he was in his own world."

His ravings, said one high school classmate, were interspersed with "unnerving, long stupors of silence" during which he would "stare fixedly at his buddies," reported the Wall Street Journal. His own writings are confused, incoherent, punctuated with private numerology and inscrutable taxonomy. He warns of government brainwashing and thought control through "grammar." He was obsessed with "conscious dreaming," a fairly good synonym for hallucinations.

This is not political behavior. These are the signs of a clinical thought disorder - ideas disconnected from each other, incoherent, delusional, detached from reality.

These are all the hallmarks of a paranoid schizophrenic. And a dangerous one. A classmate found him so terrifyingly mentally disturbed that, she e-mailed friends and family, she expected to find his picture on TV after his perpetrating a mass murder. This was no idle speculation: In class "I sit by the door with my purse handy" so that she could get out fast when the shooting began.
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Furthermore, the available evidence dates Loughner's fixation on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords to at least 2007, when he attended a town hall of hers and felt slighted by her response. In 2007, no one had heard of Sarah Palin. Glenn Beck was still toiling on Headline News. There was no Tea Party or health-care reform. The only climate of hate was the pervasive post-Iraq campaign of vilification of George W. Bush, nicely captured by a New Republic editor who had begun an article thus: "I hate President George W. Bush. There, I said it."

Finally, the charge that the metaphors used by Palin and others were inciting violence is ridiculous. Everyone uses warlike metaphors in describing politics. When Barack Obama said at a 2008 fundraiser in Philadelphia, "If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun," he was hardly inciting violence.

Why? Because fighting and warfare are the most routine of political metaphors. And for obvious reasons. Historically speaking, all democratic politics is a sublimation of the ancient route to power - military conquest. That's why the language persists. That's why we say without any self-consciousness such things as "battleground states" or "targeting" opponents. Indeed, the very word for an electoral contest - "campaign" - is an appropriation from warfare.

When profiles of Obama's first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, noted that he once sent a dead fish to a pollster who displeased him, a characteristically subtle statement carrying more than a whiff of malice and murder, it was considered a charming example of excessive - and creative - political enthusiasm. When Senate candidate Joe Manchin dispensed with metaphor and simply fired a bullet through the cap-and-trade bill - while intoning, "I'll take dead aim at [it]" - he was hardly assailed with complaints about violations of civil discourse or invitations to murder.

Did Manchin push Loughner over the top? Did Emanuel's little Mafia imitation create a climate for political violence? The very questions are absurd - unless you're the New York Times and you substitute the name Sarah Palin.

The origins of Loughner's delusions are clear: mental illness. What are the origins of Krugman's?

Fiscal crises threaten Europe's generous benefits

2010-05-24T05:59:00.000-07:00

Associated Press

LONDON (AP) -- Six weeks of vacation a year. Retirement at 60. Thousands of euros for having a baby. A good university education for less than the cost of a laptop.

The system known as the European welfare state was built after World War II as the keystone of a shared prosperity meant to prevent future conflict. Generous lifelong benefits have since become a defining feature of modern Europe.

Now the welfare state -- cherished by many Europeans as an alternative to what they see as dog-eat-dog American capitalism -- is coming under its most serious threat in decades: Europe's sovereign debt crisis.

Deep budget cuts are under way across Europe. Although the first round is focused mostly on government payrolls -- the least politically explosive target -- welfare benefits are looking increasingly vulnerable.

"The current welfare state is unaffordable," said Uri Dadush, director of the Carnegie Endowment's International Economics Program. "The crisis has made the day of reckoning closer by several years in virtually all the industrial countries."

Germany will decide next month just how to cut at least 3 billion euros ($3.75 billion) from the budget. The government is suggesting for the first time that it could make fresh cuts to unemployment benefits that include giving Germans under 50 about 60 percent of their last salary before taxes for up to a year. That benefit itself emerged after cuts to an even more generous package about five years ago.

"We have to adjust our social security systems in a way that they motivate people to accept regular work and do not give counterproductive incentives," German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble told news weekly Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung on Saturday.

The uncertainty over the future of the welfare state is undermining the continent's self-image at a time when other key elements of post-war European identity are fraying.

Large-scale immigration from outside Europe is challenging the continent's assumptions about its dedication to tolerance and liberty as countries move to control individual clothing -- the Islamic veil -- in the name of freedom and equality.

Deeply wary of military conflict, many nations now find themselves nonetheless mired in Afghanistan on behalf of what was supposed to be a North Atlantic alliance, shying away from wholesale pullout while doing their utmost to keep troops from actual combat.

Demographers and economists began warning decades ago that social welfare was doomed by the aging of Europe's baby boomers. Some governments had been trimming and reforming, but now almost all are scrambling to close deficits in order to prevent a wider collapse of confidence in the euro.

"We need to change, to adapt ... for the sake of the protection of our social model," European Union Commissioner Joaquin Almunia of Spain told reporters in Stockholm Thursday.

The move is risky: experts warn the cuts could undermine the growth needed to pull budgets back on a sustainable path.

On Monday, Britain unveils 6 billion pounds ($8.6 billion) in cuts -- mostly to government payrolls and expenses. The government has promised to raise the age at which citizens receive a state pension -- up from 60 to 65 for women, and from 65 to 66 for men. It also plans to toughen the welfare regime, requiring the unemployed to try to find jobs in order to collect benefits.

Britain says it will limit child tax credits and scrap a 250-pound ($360) payment to the families of every newborn. Ministers are reviewing the long-term affordability of the country's generous public sector pensions.

Funding for Britain's nationalized health care service will be protected under the new government, however, and should rise each year to 2015.

France's conservative government is focusing on raising the retirement age. Many workers can now retire at 60 with 50 percent of their average salary. Extra funds are available for retired civil servants, those with three or more children, military veterans and others.

A parliamentary debate is planned for September. Unions in France are organizing a national day of protest marches and strikes on Thursday to demand protection of wages and the retirement age.

In Spain, billions in cuts to state salaries go into effect next month, and the Socialist government has frozen increases in pensions meant to compensate for inflation for at least two years.

"They've hit us really hard," said Federico Carbonero, 92, a retired soldier. He said he was unlikely to live long enough to see the worst of the pension freeze, but had no doubts he would have to start relying on savings to maintain his lifestyle.

Spain is cutting assistance payments for disabled people by 300 million euros ($375 million) and did away with a three-year-old bonus of 2,500 euros ($3,124.25) per new baby. It also has proposed hiking the retirement age for men from 65 to 67.

Countries in northern Europe have done a far better of reforming social welfare and have unemployment systems that focus on re-employing people instead of making their unemployment comfortable, said Gayle Allard, a professor of economic environment and country analysis at the Instituto de Empresa in Madrid.

Denmark and other Nordic countries are known for the world's highest taxes and most generous cradle-to-grave benefits. Denmark has implemented a system known broadly as "flexicurity," which combines flexibility for employers to hire and fire workers with financial security and training to prepare for new jobs.

Denmark had a 7.5 percent unemployment rate in the first quarter of this year, well below the EU average of 9.6 percent. Swedish and Finnish unemployment stood at 8.9 percent. Norway, with some of the world's most generous unemployment benefits fully funded by oil for the forseeable future, has Europe's lowest jobless rate, just 3 percent in April.

Southern European countries that have not moved toward reforming welfare in the same ways are paying a steep price.

After sharp cutbacks imposed as the condition of an international bailout this month, Greeks must now contribute to pension funds for 40 instead of 37 years before retiring, and the age of early retirement is set to 60 at the earliest.

Civil servants with monthly salaries of above 3,000 euros ($3,750) will lose two extra months of salary -- one paid at Christmas, the other split between Easter and summer vacation.

In Portugal, seen as another potential candidate for bailout, the government is focusing on hikes in income, corporate and sales taxes and has avoided drastic changes to welfare entitlements. Unemployment benefits will be cut somewhat and the out-of-work will have to accept any job paying more than 10 percent more than what they would receive in unemployment benefits.

The government is also stepping up checks on welfare claims, freezing public sector pay and slicing public investment.

"There's been a lack of willingness to shift away from welfare as purely social protection towards an approach which has been in much of northern Europe in recent years, which is welfare as social investment," said Iain Begg, a professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science's European Institute.

Otto Fricke, a budget expert for the Free Democrats, the coalition partner of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union, told The Associated Press that no decisions on cuts have been made, but everything is on the table except education, pension funds and financial aid to developing countries. At least one high-ranking CDU member has called for the idea of protecting education to be re-examined, however.

German public education, which was virtually free until 2005, when some of Germany's 16 states started charging tuition fees of 1000 euros ($1,250) a year.

Virtually all Germany's students pay that much or less to attend state-funded universities, including elite institutions. Education isn't as cheap elsewhere in Europe but the 3,290 pounds ($4,720) per year paid by British students at Cambridge is still far less than Americans pay at comparable schools like Harvard, where annual tuition comes in just shy of $35,000.

The idea of cutting education is proving hard to swallow in the face of Germany's promise to contribute up to 147.6 billion euros ($184.5 billion) in loan guarantees to protect Greece and other countries that use the euro from bankruptcy.

"I am worried that this crisis will also affect me on a personal level, for example, that universities in Germany will raise the tuition in order to pay the loan they give to Greece," said Karoline Daederich, a 22-year-old university student from Berlin.

Associated Press

Tattered Liberty

2010-03-30T06:45:00.000-07:00

Author Mark Steyn
From the January 25, 2010, issue of NR.

While attempting to write a post describing what I see as a rather dismal future for America and much of the rest of the western world, I came across this article in which Mark Steyn describes the present state of affairs much better than I could have. Read on...

Sometimes you do live to see it. In my book America Alone, I point out that, to a five-year-old boy waving his flag as Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee procession marched down the Mall in 1897, it would have been inconceivable that by the time of his 80th birthday the greatest empire the world had ever known would have shriveled to an economically moribund strike-bound socialist slough of despond, one in which (stop me if this sounds familiar) the government ran the hospitals, the automobile industry, and much of the housing stock, and, partly as a consequence thereof, had permanent high unemployment and confiscatory tax rates that drove its best talents to seek refuge abroad.

A number of readers, disputing the relevance of this comparison, sent me mocking letters pointing out, for example, Britain’s balance of payments and other deteriorating economic indicators from the early 20th century on. True. Great powers do not decline for identical reasons and one would not expect Britain’s imperial overstretch to lead to the same consequences as America’s imperial understretch. Nonetheless, my correspondents are perhaps too sophisticated and nuanced to grasp the somewhat more basic point I was making. Perched on his uncle’s shoulders that day was a young lad who grew up to become the historian Arnold Toynbee. He recalled the mood of Her Majesty’s jubilee as follows: “There is, of course, a thing called history, but history is something unpleasant that happens to other people. We are comfortably outside all of that I am sure.” The end of history, 1897 version.

Permanence is an illusion — and you would be surprised at how fast mighty nations can be entirely transformed. But, more important, national decline is psychological — and therefore what matters is accepting the psychology of decline. Within two generations, for example, the German people became just as obnoxiously pacifist as they once were obnoxiously militarist, and as avowedly “European” as they once were menacingly nationalist. Well, who can blame ’em? You’d hardly be receptive to pitches for national greatness after half a century of Kaiser Bill, Weimar, the Third Reich, and the Holocaust.

But what are we to make of the British? They were on the right side of all the great conflicts of the last century; and they have been, in the scales of history, a force for good in the world. Even as their colonies advanced to independence, they retained the English language and English legal system, not to mention cricket and all kinds of other cultural ties. And even in imperial retreat, there is no rational basis for late-20th-century Britain’s conclusion that it had no future other than as an outlying province of a centralized Euro nanny state dominated by nations whose political, legal, and cultural traditions are entirely alien to its own. The embrace of such a fate is a psychological condition, not an economic one.

Is America set for decline? It’s been a grand run. The country’s been the leading economic power since it overtook Britain in the 1880s. That’s impressive. Nevertheless, over the course of that century and a quarter, Detroit went from the world’s industrial powerhouse to an urban wasteland, and the once-golden state of California atrophied into a land of government run by the government for the government. What happens when the policies that brought ruin to Detroit and sclerosis to California become the basis for the nation at large? Strictly on the numbers, the United States is in the express lane to Declinistan: unsustainable entitlements, the remorseless governmentalization of the economy and individual liberty, and a centralization of power that will cripple a nation of this size. Decline is the way to bet. But what will ensure it is if the American people accept decline as a price worth paying for European social democracy.

Is that so hard to imagine? Every time I retail the latest indignity imposed upon the “citizen” by some or other Continental apparatchik, I receive e-mails from the heartland pointing out, with much reference to the Second Amendment, that it couldn’t happen here because Americans aren’t Euro-weenies. But nor were Euro-weenies once upon a time. Hayek’s greatest insight in The Road to Serfdom is psychological: “There is one aspect of the change in moral values brought about by the advance of collectivism which at the present time provides special food for thought,” he wrote with an immigrant’s eye on the Britain of 1944. “It is that the virtues which are held less and less in esteem and which consequently become rarer are precisely those on which the British people justly prided themselves and in which they were generally agreed to excel. The virtues possessed by Anglo-Saxons in a higher degree than most other people, excepting only a few of the smaller nations, like the Swiss and the Dutch, were independence and self-reliance, individual initiative and local responsibility, the successful reliance on voluntary activity, noninterference with one’s neighbor and tolerance of the different and queer, respect for custom and tradition, and a healthy suspicion of power and authority.” Two-thirds of a century on, almost every item on the list has been abandoned, from “independence and self-reliance” (40 percent of people receive state handouts) to “a healthy suspicion of power and authority” — the reflex response now to almost any passing inconvenience is to demand the government “do something,” the cost to individual liberty be damned. American exceptionalism would have to be awfully exceptional to suffer a similar expansion of government and not witness, in enough of the populace, the same descent into dependency and fatalism. As Europe demonstrates, a determined state can change the character of a people in the space of a generation or two. Look at what the Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population: That’s what happened in Britain.

But that’s to cast decline in its least favorable light, after it’s had a couple of generations to work its dark magic. As it’s happening, incremental decline is extremely seductive. Great powers aren’t Chad or Rwanda, where you’re sliding from the Dump category to the Even Crummier Dump category. Take a city like Vienna. Once upon a time it was an imperial capital. The empire busted up, but the capital still had magnificent architecture, handsome palaces, treasure houses of great art, a world-class orchestra, fabulous restaurants . . . who wouldn’t enjoy such “decline”? You benefit from all the accumulated capital of the past without being troubled by any of the tedious responsibilities. Have another coffee and a piece of strudel and watch the world go by. To be sure, everything new — or, at any rate, everything new that works — is invented and made elsewhere. But genteel decline from the heights can be eminently civilized, especially to those of a leftish bent. Francophile Americans passing through bucolic villages with their charmingly state-regulated charcuteries and farmland wholly subsidized by the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy can be forgiven for wondering whether global hegemony is all it’s cracked up to be.

Whether decline will seem quite so bucolic viewed from a Jersey strip mall rather than the Dordogne remains to be seen. Yet in the geopolitical sense it can be marvelously liberating. You still go to all the best parties and have a seat at the top table — Britain and France are members of the U.N. Security Council and the G7 and every other group that counts — and even better, when the check comes, you’re not the one stuck with the tab. You can preen and pose on the world stage secure in the knowledge that nobody expects you to do anything about it: It’s no surprise to find that the post-great powers of Europe are the noisiest promoters of every fashionable nostrum, from the iniquities of the Zionist Entity to the perils of “climate change.” The European Union has attitudes rather than policies. A couple of years back, Bret Stephens, then editor of the Jerusalem Post, opened his mail to find a copy of something called “Conclusions of the European Council,” a summary of the work done during the six months of Ireland’s “Euro-presidency.” A braver man than I, he read it, at least as far as Item 80: “The European Council expresses its deep concern at the recent events in the Eastern Congo, which could jeopardise the transition process.”

And that and a couple euros will get you a café au lait. The EU is free to flaunt its “concern” — whoops, “deep concern” — over events in the Eastern Congo precisely because nobody in the Eastern Congo or anywhere else expects Europe to do a thing about it. The Continent increasingly resembles those insulated celebrities being shuttled around town from one humanitarian gala to another — like Barbra Streisand and Leonardo DiCaprio jetting in to join Barack Obama and Al Gore in bemoaning Joe Sixpack’s carbon footprint.

And when you put it like that, what’s the downside?

Okay, since you ask, here’s my prediction: American decline will not be like France’s or Austria’s. For one thing, we don’t appreciate how unusual the last transfer of power was. If you’re not quite sure when that took place, the British historian Andrew Roberts likes to pinpoint it to the middle of 1943: One month, the British had more men under arms than the Americans. The next month, the Americans had more men under arms than the British. The baton of global leadership had been passed. And, if it didn’t seem that way at the time, that’s because it was as near a seamless transition as could be devised — although it was hardly “devised” at all. Yet we live with the benefits of that transition to this day: To take a minor but not inconsequential example, one of the critical links in the Afghan campaign was the British Indian Ocean Territory. As its name would suggest, that’s a British dependency, but it has a U.S. military base — just one of many pinpricks on the map where the Royal Navy’s Pax Britannica evolved into Washington’s Pax Americana with nary a thought: From U.S. naval bases in Bermuda to the ANZUS alliance Down Under to NORAD close to home, London’s military ties with its empire were assumed by the United States. Britain’s eclipse by its transatlantic progeny is one of the smoothest transfers of power in history — and unlikely to be repeated.

Now look beyond the Anglosphere. Why did decline prove so pleasant in Europe? Because it was cushioned by American power. The United States is such a perversely non-imperial power that it garrisons not ramshackle colonies but its wealthiest “allies,” from Germany to Japan. For most of its members, “the Free World” has been a free ride. And that, too, is unprecedented. Even the few NATO members that can still project meaningful force around the world have been able to arrange their affairs on the assumption of the American security umbrella: In the United Kingdom, between 1951 and 1997 the proportion of government expenditure on defense fell from 24 percent to 7, while the proportion on health and welfare rose from 22 percent to 53. And that’s before New Labour came along to widen the gap further.

Those British numbers are a bald statement of reality: You can have Euro-sized entitlements or a global military, but not both. What’s easier to do if you’re a democratic government that’s made promises it can’t afford — cut back on nanny-state lollipops, or shrug off thankless military commitments for which the electorate has minimal appetite? A Continental might take the view that this is democracy’s safeguard against an old temptation. After all, declining powers frequently turned to war to arrest their own decline or another’s rise — see the Franco–Prussian, the Austro–Prussian, the Napoleonic Wars, and many others. But those were the days when traditional great-power rivalry was resolved on the battlefield. Today we have postmodern post-great-power rivalry, in which America envies the way the beneficiaries of its post-war largesse have been able to opt out of the great game entirely. In reality-TV terms, the Great Satan would like to vote itself off the battlefield. On its present course, as Dennis Prager put it, America “will be a large Sweden, and just as influential as the smaller one.”

And that’s the optimistic scenario — because the only reason Sweden can be Sweden and Germany Germany and France France is that America is America. Who will cushion America’s decline as America cushioned Europe’s?

Furthermore, is “a large Sweden” even possible? Insofar as it works at all, Big Government works best in small countries, with a sufficiently homogeneous population to have common interests. There’s a fascinating book by Alberto Alesina and Enrico Spolaore called The Size of Nations, in which the authors note that, of the ten richest countries in the world, only four have populations above 1 million: America (300 million people), Switzerland (7 million), Norway (4 million), and Singapore (3 million). Small nations, they argue, are more cohesive and have less need for buying off ethnic and regional factions. America has been the exception that proves the rule because it’s a highly decentralized federation. But, as Messrs. Alesina and Spolaore put it, if America were as centrally governed as France, it would break up. That theory is now being tested by the Obamacare Democrats, and, as we see with the wretched Ben Nelson’s cornhusker kickback or the blank check given to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, when American-style Big Government starts “buying off ethnic and regional factions,” the sky’s the limit. To attempt to impose European-style centralized government on a third of a billion people from Maine to Hawaii is to invite failure on a scale unknown to history. Which is to say that, domestically, Washington’s retreat from la gloire will be of an entirely different order of business from Paris’s.

And overseas? If America becomes Europe in its domestic disposition and geopolitical decline, then who will be America? Of the many competing schools of declinism, perhaps the most gleeful are those that salivate over the rise of China. For years, Sinophiles have been penning orgasmic fantasies of a mid-century when China will bestride the world and America will be consigned to the trash heap of history. It will never happen: As I’ve been saying for years, China has profound structural problems. It will get old before it gets rich.

Russia? The demographic deformation of Czar Putin’s new empire is even more severe than Beijing’s. Russia is a global power only to the extent of the mischief it can make on its acceleration into a death spiral.

The new Caliphate? Even if every dime-store jihadist’s dreams came true, almost by definition an Islamic imperium would be in decline from Day One.

So there’s no plausible new kid on the block? Isn’t that good news? Not exactly. Much of the timing of American decline depends on Beijing, which will make the final determination on such matters as when the dollar ceases to be the world’s reserve currency. Given that they hold at least the schedule of our fate in their hands, it would be rather reassuring if they had the capability to assume America’s role as the global order-maker. But they don’t and they never will. The most likely future is not a world under a new order but a world with no order — in which pipsqueak states go nuclear while the planet’s wealthiest nations, from New Zealand to Norway, are unable to defend their borders and are forced to adjust to the post-American era as they can. Yet, in such a geopolitical scene, the United States will still be the most inviting target — first because it’s big, and second because, as Britain knows, the durbar moves on but imperial resentments linger long after imperial grandeur.

One sympathizes with Americans weary of global responsibilities that they, unlike the European empires, never sought. The United States now spends more on its military than the next 40 or so nations combined. Yet in two rinky-dink no-account semi-colonial policing campaigns, it doesn’t feel like that, does it? A lot of bucks, but not much of a bang. You can understand why the entire Left and an increasing chunk of the Right would rather vote for a quiet life. But that’s not an option. The first victims of American retreat will be the many corners of the world that have benefited from an unusually benign hegemon. But the consequences of retreat will come home, too. In a more dangerous world, American decline will be steeper, faster, and more devastating than Britain’s — and something far closer to Rome’s.

In the modern era, the two halves of “the West” form a mirror image. “The Old World” has thousand-year-old churches and medieval street plans and ancient hedgerows but has been distressingly susceptible to every insane political fad, from Communism to Fascism to European Union. “The New World” has a superficial novelty — you can have your macchiato tweeted directly to your iPod — but underneath the surface noise it has remained truer to old political ideas than “the Old World” ever has. Economic dynamism and political continuity seem far more central to America’s sense of itself than they are to most nations’. Which is why it’s easier to contemplate Spain or Germany as a backwater than America. In a fundamental sense, an America in eclipse would no longer be America.

But, as Charles Krauthammer said recently, “decline is a choice.” The Democrats are offering it to the American people, and a certain proportion of them seem minded to accept. Enough to make decline inevitable? To return to the young schoolboy on his uncle’s shoulders watching the Queen-Empress’s jubilee, in the words of Arnold Toynbee: “Civilizations die from suicide, not from murder.”

— This article first appeared in the January 25, 2010, issue of National Review as “Welcome to Rome.”

As Gas Prices Rise

2010-03-17T07:06:00.000-07:00

Interior Department Blocks 61 More Oil and Gas Leases
By Steve Everleyleases
In yet another example of the U.S. government blocking the development of affordable and reliable American energy, the Bureau of Land Management agreed last Friday to suspend sixty-one oil and gas leases in Montana.

The BLM's decision came after a lengthy litigation process: The Western Environmental Law Center filed a federal lawsuit in 2008 claiming that the BLM did not consider the potential climate change impacts of oil and gas development in the area when it sold the leases.

After two years of fighting the lawsuit in court, the BLM agreed last week to settle with WELC by just suspending all of the leases.

The suspension comes just over a year after Interior Secretary Ken Salazar voided 77 oil and gas leases in Utah.

This latest anti-energy decision, however, is apparently part of a broader trend in Montana: Yesterday Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer personally asked Salazar to cancel several other oil and gas leases covering some 200,000 acres in the state.

According to the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, Montana oil and gas production generated more than $25 million in royalties in 2008 alone, a hefty sum for a state expected to face a more than $60 million budgetary shortfall by June 2011.

Shocker: Authoritarian Chinese government complains that IPCC censors are too authoritarian

2010-01-30T12:45:00.000-08:00

Call this one another nail in the coffin of global warming. The Chinese government, never known for endorsing open communication, has called on the UN’s IPCC to show more tolerance for dissent.

Business Standard reports the duplicitious details:

“Amid controversy surrounding the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on melting glaciers, Xie Zhenhua, Vice-Chairman of China’s National Development and Reform Commission, today urged the UN panel to make the fifth assessment report comprehensive by also citing contrarian views.”

Alright, class, what does it tell us when an authoritarian dictatorship known for denying its citizens the right to open communications is appalled by the censorship of the IPCC?

Is it hypocrisy? Or honesty? Or both?

Source: BusinessStandard.com via Tim Blair

Why Obama's State of the Union has America's enemies smiling.

2010-01-29T06:10:00.000-08:00

In Beijing General Secretary Hu Jintao is sporting a big grin. Kim Jong Il is breaking out another case of his favorite Hennessy in North Korea. And in Tehran, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is celebrating in, well, the way that dour theocrats kick up their heels, however they manage to do that.
The cause for all this cheer? On Wednesday Barack Obama delivered his first State of the Union message, and although he surely did not intend to do so, he essentially let these villains--and others--know they can do whatever they want. The president unfortunately will not be doing much to stop them from destabilizing the international system--or even from threatening the United States.

America, whether it should be or not, is a nation at war. There are two obvious ones, Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as a general struggle against Islamic fanaticism taking place across the globe. Then there are especially consequential confrontations. Two nuclear rogues--North Korea and Iran--threaten to upend everything, while others--Syria comes to mind--wait in the wings.
Finally, to take another example from current headlines, there is a silent conflict waged every day against the United States, an unprecedented program of state-sponsored cyberattacks against defense, civilian and corporate networks. This hostile and never-ending campaign gives rise--or at least should give rise--to a state of emergency. Yes, I'm referring to the People's Republic of China.
Yet in a long oration the president devoted just nine minutes--out of 69--to discussing foreign policy and external threats. In that short time, he didn't provide much assurance when it came to Afghanistan and Iraq. He wasn't even particularly candid about how long American soldiers would be in the latter country. "As a candidate, I promised that I would end this war, and that is what I am doing as president," Obama said. "We will have all of our combat troops out of Iraq by the end of this August." Yet as Larry Johnson of the No Quarter blog pointed out on WABC's John Batchelor Show just after the address ended, American soldiers are slated to remain in the country for at least another year.
With regard to nuclear rogues, President Obama is trying to both keep fissile materials out of the hands of terrorists and rid the world of its most destructive arms. "These diplomatic efforts have also strengthened our hand in dealing with those nations that insist on violating international agreements in pursuit of nuclear weapons," he declared. "That's why North Korea now faces increased isolation and stronger sanctions--sanctions that are being vigorously enforced." Unfortunately that's not true: Beijing has, especially since last October, become a sanctions buster by ramping up material assistance to Pyongyang and facilitating its arms sales, now prohibited by U.N. Security Council Resolution 1874.

Gordon G. Chang,

Democrats cry injustice

2010-01-29T05:45:00.000-08:00

Senate Democrats are furious with Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito — and Alito’s Democrats say Alito crossed the line when he mouthed the words “not true” during President Barack Obama’s speech Wednesday night. But worse, they say, both Roberts and Alito misled them during their confirmation hearings when they represented themselves as jurists who would respect precedent. ..

“You bet they misled,” said Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the assistant majority leaderSenate Judiciary Committee. and a member of the

At issue is the ruling in Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) that dealt with regulations on labor union and corporate financing.

Supporters say that Alito, Roberts and the three other justices in the majority simply returned to the original meaning of the First Amendment — that the ruling was intended to uphold the right of free speech.

“I really believe that an injustice was done to the First Amendment and political speech in the earlier decision,” said Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), a Judiciary Committee member who has argued before the high court. “I don’t think that’s activism.”

But Democrats see it otherwise — insisting that the decision represents exactly the sort of precedent-bucking judicial activism that Roberts and Alito rejected in sworn testimony during their confirmation hearings.

Referring to the memorable analogy in which Roberts compared himself to a baseball umpire, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) told POLITICO this week, “He’s not somebody who just measures balls and strikes. It’s been the most activist court that I’ve seen in my 17 years in the committee.”

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) said Roberts in particular “totally misrepresented himself” in testifying about upholding precedent.

In a speech on the Senate floor Thursday, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairmanhttp://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/politico/pl_politico/storytext/32200/34918466/SIG=11memh0s7.r{}

The Significance of Chris Matthews's Admission

2010-01-28T14:58:00.000-08:00

By [Jonah Goldberg]

Personally, I think Chris Matthews' momentary colorblindness offers a telling insight. As many of us have argued around here for a while, conservatives aren't obsessed with Obama's race, liberals are. That's why we've had so many asinine, nasty and ignorant charges of racism hurled at Obama's critics. There's a certain species of liberal that can't get over Obama's race. They assume that conservatives can't get over it either and so criticism of Obama from the right must — according to Olbermannesque thinking — stem from some evil desire to see a "black man fail" or some other idiocy. I think it's nice that we have a black president as do most conservatives I know. I just don't think it's the most important thing in the world. Nor do I think that his blackness makes bad liberal ideas suddenly good. Black men are wrong when they say 2+2 is 5 too.

Unlike Chris Matthews, I go weeks, even months, without "remembering" that Obama is black. It's just not a big part of how I see the world or his day-to-day presidency. It is a big part of how Matthews sees things. I leave it to others to decide whose outlook is healthier.

FDR: Tax Increases Don't Apply to Me

2010-01-28T14:49:00.000-08:00

Katherine Mangu-Ward

FDR's presidency was marked by more than a little chutzpah—22nd Amendment, anyone?—but there was perhaps no move more purely, willfully brass-balled than his personal tax scheme, described by Sarah Lawsky at TaxProfBlog:

Throughout his first term, President Franklin Roosevelt paid taxes at the rates in effect when he took office, even as statutory tax rates increased. His position was that paying tax at a rate higher than that in effect at his inauguration reduced his salary, which violated the Constitutional provision that states that the president's compensation "shall be neither increased nor diminished during the period for which he shall have been elected."

From Roosevelt's 1937 return [PDF], this note:

"I am wholly unable to figure out the amount of tax for the following reason," he writes. "The first twenty days of January, 1937, were part of my first term of office and to these twenty days the income tax rates as of March 4, 1933 apply. To the other 345 days of the year 1937, the income tax rates as they existed on January 30, 1937. As this is a problem in higher mathematics, may I ask that the Bureau let me know the amount of the balance due?"

Among execs, Roosevelt seems to have been alone in trying out this line of reasoning. Judges, who enjoy the protection of similar constitutional language about their compensation, have tried the Roosevelt gambit too. In the 1920s, the Supreme Court ruled that judges' salaries, including their own, should be tax exempt. But by 1939 and again in 2001, the Court decided their paychecks were taxable after all, suggesting that they wouldn't go for this reasoning if Obama tried it on them these days.
See a page of FDR's return here.

Al Queda’s New Strategy in Yemen Threatens U.S.-Saudi Arabia Axis

2010-01-25T08:17:00.000-08:00

ANALYSIS
by Webster Brooks
Al Queda’s shift in global strategy to transform Yemen into a platform to destabilize Saudi Arabia represents the most serious national security crisis the Obama administration has confronted. Saudi Arabia is the strategic lynchpin of energy security powering the U.S. dominated global order. Any chaos, instability or leadership change in Riyadh that disrupts Saudi oil production could trigger price shocks, a global economic downturn and enhance Iran’s status as the dominant regional hegemon in the Middle East. Osama bin Ladin’s escalation of attacks against the House of Saud comes at a time when U.S. military forces are overstretched in Afghanistan and Iraq and American public opinion is staunchly opposed to another military intervention. Given the constraints on his administration’s capacity to commit ground forces to the region, Obama must now rely on President Ali Saleh’s faltering regime to eliminate Al Queda’s growing presence in Yemen’s vast ungoverned spaces. AQAP’s sudden emergence as a serious threat to U.S. interests in the Gulf and Saudi Arabia is not accidental; it is product of Osama bin Ladin’s long-term strategic planning.
Over the past year Osama Bin Ladin has merged his Saudi Arabia and Yemen operations into Al Queda of the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Led by Nasser Wahayshi and his Saudi deputy, Saeed al-Shihri, AQAP includes veterans from its defeated insurgency in Saudi Arabia two years ago, along with recruits from Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. The new franchise has established command structures, communications lines, base areas and bomb making factories that fabricated new stealth PETN explosives recently tested in Saudi Arabia and the United States. By claiming responsibility for Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s Christmas Day attempt to blow up the flight from Amsterdam to Detroit and the August 2009 suicide bomber attack on Saudi Deputy Interior Minister Prince Mohemmend bin Nayef, AQAP has signaled that its presence in Yemen will be permanent, lethal and have global reach.
Al Queda’s strategy in Yemen seeks to leverage the current crisis of President Saleh’s weak regime into a “state of controlled chaos” that will facilitate AQAP’s a long-term presence to conduct operations that undermine the Saudi government. To that end Bin Ladin’s forces are not necessarily seeking the overthrow of President Saleh’s regime. Quite the opposite, as long as President Saleh’s government remains weak and isolated AQAP’s capacity to expand its base in Yemen will grow. This explains why Al Queda is content with operating “in the seam” of the two insurgencies buffeting President Saleh’s regime; one led by the broad-based Southern Movement to secede from the central government, and the other a tenacious Shiaa-based Al Houthi insurgency backed by Iran along Yemen’s northern border with Saudi Arabia. Both movements serve AQAP’s tactical and strategic goals in Yemen, but in different ways.
That the Sunni dominated AQAP is the beneficiary of the Shia-based Al Houthi’s two-front war against Yemen’s central government and Saudi Arabia is a peculiar irony of the crisis. The Al Houthi’s border war with Saudi Arabia is destabilizing the Saudi royal family, the Saudi army and inflaming the passions of the Kingdom’s oppressed Shia minority concentrated around its eastern oilfields. For months Riyadh denied that its troops were engaging Al Houthi’s forces on the ground and that Saudi jets were carpet bombing Al Houthi camps. On December 24, the Saudi government reluctantly announced that 70 Saudi soldiers were killed in fierce border clashes. Desperate to liquidate the Al Houthi Shia rebellion on its border, Saudi Arabia has stepped up its bombing campaign and artillery shelling of Al Houthi positions. Riyadh has also tried to deflect the growing political backlash across the Middle East to the atrocities it is committing against the Al Houthi by claiming Iran is supplying funds and weapons to the insurgents–claims that have yet to be substantiated. Thus, the Al Houthi insurgency serves AQAP’s interests on two fronts; destabilizing the Saudi government with its border war on the one hand and draining President Saleh’s government, army and national resources on the other.
AQAP’s relationship to the secessionist Southern Movement (SM) pivots on maintaining friendly neutrality in order to operate and sustain its base camps in eastern and southern Yemen. As a democratic alliance of Nasserites, socialists, labor and business leaders the Southern Movement and Al Queda do not share a common political program or ideology. Nevertheless, the Southern Movement’s anti-American sentiments and its struggle to secede from President Saleh’s U.S.-backed government has positioned the coalition and AQAP on the same side of the political divide. The complication facing the Obama administration in attacking AQAP’s southern bases were evident when U.S. cruise missiles raked the villages of Arhab and Abyan and Shabwah in December. The attacks were not only condemned by local tribal elders but Southern Movement leader Abbass al Asal characterized the strikes as a “genocidal attack on the people of the south, not Al Queda.” The gruesome scenes of 30 dead Yemeni villagers and five AQAP operatives were broadcast across the Middle East on Al Jazeera. The following day, 10,000 people attended a rally held by the SM’s Joint Meeting Parties which condemned “American targeting of civilians.” President Saleh also came under fire as a “U.S. puppet regime” for his army’s role in supporting the cruise missile attacks on Al Queda. The net political effect of the air strikes sparked anti-American rage and further undermined President Saleh’s government while fostering more support for Al Queda. Thus Al Queda is able to use the Southern Movement as a buffer that provides it with political cover and limits America’s freedom to conduct air strikes and Predator drone attacks that invariably kill civilians. In the future, Al Queda will undoubtedly attempt to co-opt elements of the Southern Movement’s diverse coalition in order to broaden its influence and enhance the security of its base operations. Should the Southern Movement formally break away from the Saleh government to re-establish an independent Republic of South Yemen (1967-1990) AQAP’s relationship to the new government will emerge as a crucial issue. A new government in South Yemen could conceivably sanction Al Queda’s presence and further complicate U.S. counter-terrorist operations.
In response to the AQAP’s offensive, President Obama pledged $70 million to Yemen’s government, increased Special Forces deployments to “train” Yemeni counter-terrorist units and launched cruise missile strikes against Al Queda bases in mid-December. Notwithstanding President Obama’s countermeasures, it’s clear his administration does not have a thoughtful strategy to neutralize Al Queda in Yemen. Indeed, the U.S. intelligence community’s failure to recognize the seriousness of AQAP’s buildup and new capabilities until Abdulmutallab’s failed Christmas bombing attempt has left the Obama administration desperately playing catch-up.
The Obama administration needs a practical strategy to neutralize Al Queda in Yemen. Such a strategy must begin with preventing the collapse of President Saleh’s regime which cannot survive fighting three insurgencies simultaneously. The Southern Movement and the Al Houthi insurgents are not calling for the overthrow of President Saleh’s government; both seek to break away from the Yemen’s corrupt and criminal regime. Therefore, the Obama administration must convince President Saleh that significant concessions must be made to the Al Houthi and the Southern Movement to stabilize his regime, preserve Yemen’s sovereignty and isolate AQAP. In short, both groups will have to be offered some form of regional autonomy and Yemen must be transformed into a federated state with the central government possessing limited powers.
The most critical first step for the Obama administration to undertake is convincing President Saleh and Saudi Arabia’s leaders to agree to an immediate and unconditional cease fire with the Al Houthi insurgents. Further, the cease fire should include a pledge to enter into negotiations on regional autonomy for the Al Houthi’s, a settlement of Saudi border security issues and Al Houthi representation in a restructured national government. President Saleh’s current Six Point plan to implement a cease fire is nothing more than a call for the Al Houthi’s total surrender. It is a non-starter that should be scrapped immediately. A negotiated cease fire will dramatically reduce pressure on Yemen and Saudi Arabia’s government and limit Iran’s maneuvering room to become more deeply entangled in an insurgency on Saudi Arabia’s border.
Similarly, the Obama administration should enlist the services of a skilled mediator (preferably Qatar’s government) to convene talks between Sana’a and the Southern Movement. Qatar negotiated a cease fire between President Saleh and the Southern Movement in 2007 and is considered by both sides as an impartial mediator. Unless the Southern Movement is offered regional autonomy that grants sweeping autonomous powers similar to those enjoyed by Kurdistan today, it is doubtful that reconciliation can be achieved. In addition to a regional autonomy agreement, Southern Movement representatives must be brought into significant leadership roles in Yemen’s central government to ensure that equity, transparency and reforms are implemented. Anything short of giving Southern Movement representatives a significant role in governing a reformed Yemen, including demands that President Saleh step down as President will justifiably be rejected. President Saleh will not be disposed to concede autonomy to the Southern Movement or the Al Houthi, but a partitioned Yemen and the creation of a new breakaway republic in South Yemen will open the door to more instability in the region, particularly from Iran which has the economic largesse and proximate skills to stand-up a proxy state.
The concessions and compromises that President Saleh must make to the Al Houthi’s and the Southern Movement will dramatically alter the nature of Yemen’s embattled government. However, the alternative is more chaos, civil war, the likely breakup of the state and an enlarged presence of Iran and Al Queda on the peninsula. Arguably, it may already be too late for the United States and their allies to prevent the breakup of Yemen and the collapse of the Saleh regime. AQAP has the momentum. Osama Bin Ladin is dictating the time and place of battle, and the choice of weapons. Yemen is now the “new frontline” in the global war between Al Queda and the United States with Saudi Arabia’s security hanging in the balance.

Reviving Federalism

2010-01-13T14:07:00.000-08:00

Reihan Salam
National and state government should be kept apart.
America's federal system is badly broken. The economic downturn has exacerbated its many failings. State governments, meanwhile, have struggled over the past year. Tax receipts have collapsed and new spending commitments have proven unsustainable. Federal stimulus dollars have only delayed the reckoning to come. A number of observers, including James Surowiecki of The New Yorker, have suggested that the essential problem is that our federal system is ill-suited to a fast-moving global economy, and that we'd be better served by a more unified national government. The argument has some merit. The recession-fighting efforts of the federal government are indeed undermined by balanced budget requirements in the states. As Washington borrows and spends, the states are forced to retrench, leaving us at an economic standstill.
Yet it is also true that there are downsides to excessive centralization. Indeed, one could just as easily argue that the real problem with American federalism is that our states are stuck in their ways. Rather than acting as "laboratories of democracy," our states march in lockstep, reluctant to pursue the kind of political and institutional reform that might yield solid returns. The pathologies of the status quo have led a growing number of Californians to demand a constitutional convention, an effort that could easily spread to other dysfunctional states. Unfortunately, new state constitutions can only do so much. The deeper problem is that the United States has forgotten the virtues of what the legal scholars Richard Epstein and Michael Greve call "one problem, one sovereign."
In Greve's telling, which you can find in his brilliant Bradley Lecture on "Commerce, Competition, and the Court," the Supreme Court has abandoned what had once been its central mission, namely the integration of the American national marketplace, the source of the country's prosperity and power. Rather than strictly separating the functions of the federal government and the states, the Supreme Court increasingly allows states to interfere with the free flow of commerce and to create interstate compacts that would have once been deemed unconstitutional. This shift has led to all manner of pernicious economic and political distortions.
The Supreme Court isn't the only guilty party, however. Congress has devised social programs that "share" responsibility between the federal government and the states in a manner that has sent us on the road to fiscal ruin. A number of policy analysts on the left have proposed federalizing Medicaid, including Greg Anrig of the Century Foundation. In "Federalism and Its Discontents," Anrig offers a compelling indictment of the program, and he calls for federalizing it.
But as Anrig acknowledges, the idea of federalizing Medicaid actually has a solid conservative pedigree. The appeal for conservatives is straightforward. Simply put, it will lead to greater accountability: Now the federal government spends the bulk of the money, but the states determine eligibility rules and other factors. Washington depends on the states to control costs, yet the states don't bear the full burden of their spending decisions. The consequence is a ballooning program. By the same logic, all programs that are jointly funded and jointly operated deserve close scrutiny. Timothy Conlan's From New Federalism to Devolution contains an extensive discussion of Reagan's views on federalism, including his belief that Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC)--now known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families--should be the responsibility of the states. In 1982, the Reagan White House launched its federalism initiative.

In his State of the Union address, Reagan proposed to nationalize health care financing for the poor, terminate the federal role in welfare and return to the states 43 major federal grant programs along with 28 billion federal dollars in excise taxes to pay for them. Most proposals for rebalancing federal responsibilities actually handed the federal government responsibility for income maintenance programs, yet Reagan believed, rightly in my view, that an AFDC block grant would be preferable, to give states the flexibility to pursue more effective anti-poverty approaches tailored to local economies. This, of course, is what later enabled welfare reform.

Pregnant Woman Raped at Gun Point in Great Britain, Where Guns Are Banned

2010-01-12T06:44:00.000-08:00

by Duane Lester

A man and woman were sitting in their living room when they heard something outside. The man got up to investigate while the woman, who was seven months pregnant, stayed where she was.
That’s when their personal Hell began.

He saw the three men, all wearing balaclavas and scarves, at the end of the path and tried to shut the front door but the men forced their way inside and shoved him to the ground.

Once inside, the men demanded the keys to the couple’s car. The man was threatened and hit in the head with a sawed off shotgun. Then, it made a horrible turn for the worse:

The woman was then grabbed and forced upstairs by one of the attackers and forced to perform a sex act on him which police have described as ‘oral rape’.
He threatened to shoot the couple unless she did what he said.
Speaking for the first time about the rape, the victim said: ‘I just wanted to protect my baby. I was absolutely terrified and being so late in the pregnancy I didn’t want to get into a fight where they might hurt me or my baby.
‘He (the rapist) said it was my lucky day.’

If you are living in or around North London, please read the article and see if you can help identify these subhumans.
But I have to put some of this blame where it belongs. See, the gun control lobby has a stranglehold on the once Great Britain. The gun control laws are so strict their Olympic shooting team currently has to practice in Switzerland. They’ll have to amend the laws just to let them practice in the country they’ll be playing for.
So who doesn’t have guns? Any law abiding citizen.
Who has guns? The criminals.

In response, allow me to quote at length from “Gun Control in England: The Tarnished Gold Standard,” written by historian Joyce Lee Malcolm and published in the fall 2004 issue of Journal on Firearms & Public Policy:

[Between 1997 and 2003] crimes with [banned firearms] have more than doubled…. In 2002, for the fourth consecutive year, gun crime in England and Wales rose — by 35 percent for all firearms, and by a whopping 46 percent for the banned handguns. Nearly 10,000 firearms offenses were committed….

Clearly since the ban criminals have not found it difficult to get guns and the balance has not shifted in the interest of public safety….

In the four years from 1997 to 2001 the rate of violent crime more than doubled. The UK murder rate for 2002 was the highest for a century….

A recent study of all the countries of western Europe has found that in 2001 Britain had the worst record for killings, violence and burglary, and its citizens had one of the highest risks in the industrialized world of becoming victims of crime….

And here’s the icing on the cake: “[A] United Nations study of eighteen industrialized countries, including the United States, published in 2002 … found England and Wales at the top of the Western world’s crime league, with the worst record for ‘very serious’ offenses.” [Emphasis added]

And all this while crime in the United States, including violent crime, has been steadily falling.

In America, you have the right to defend yourself. In Great Britain, will probably be prosecuted for it.

Hyperbole?

Not at all:

In 1973 a young man running on a road at night was stopped by the police and found to be carrying a length of steel, a cycle chain, and a metal clock weight. He explained that a gang of youths had been after him. At his hearing it was found he had been threatened and had previously notified the police. The justices agreed he had a valid reason to carry the weapons. Indeed, 16 days later he was attacked and beaten so badly he was hospitalized. But the prosecutor appealed the ruling, and the appellate judges insisted that carrying a weapon must be related to an imminent and immediate threat. They sent the case back to the lower court with directions to convict.
In 1987 two men assaulted Eric Butler, a 56-year-old British Petroleum executive, in a London subway car, trying to strangle him and smashing his head against the door. No one came to his aid. He later testified, "My air supply was being cut off, my eyes became blurred, and I feared for my life." In desperation he unsheathed an ornamental sword blade in his walking stick and slashed at one of his attackers, stabbing the man in the stomach. The assailants were charged with wounding. Butler was tried and convicted of carrying an offensive weapon.
In 1994 an English homeowner, armed with a toy gun, managed to detain two burglars who had broken into his house while he called the police. When the officers arrived, they arrested the homeowner for using an imitation gun to threaten or intimidate. In a similar incident the following year, when an elderly woman fired a toy cap pistol to drive off a group of youths who were threatening her, she was arrested for putting someone in fear. Now the police are pressing Parliament to make imitation guns illegal.
In 1999 Tony Martin, a 55-year-old Norfolk farmer living alone in a shabby farmhouse, awakened to the sound of breaking glass as two burglars, both with long criminal records, burst into his home. He had been robbed six times before, and his village, like 70 percent of rural English communities, had no police presence. He sneaked downstairs with a shotgun and shot at the intruders. Martin received life in prison for killing one burglar, 10 years for wounding the second, and a year for having an unregistered shotgun. The wounded burglar, having served 18 months of a three-year sentence, is now free and has been granted �5,000 of legal assistance to sue Martin.

In America, the pregnant woman maybe gets a gun while her boyfriend fights with the robbers at their front door. Then maybe she shoots them as they enter the house. Maybe she doesn’t get raped.
It happens every 13 seconds. Clayton Cramer’s Gun Defense Blog is proof this happens more often than people think.
In America, this could end differently.

The Late Great Britain: Model Warned By Police for Defending Herself…In Her Own Home

2010-01-12T06:25:00.000-08:00

by Duane Lester
The lunacy continues in the island nation that once controlled so much of the world. Now, it’s content to try to control it’s subjects. I’d like to call them citizens, but really, I’m not going to try to fool you.

I recently told you about the man who went to prison for defending his home against intruders who had his family tied up. Now comes the story of a model who scared peeping Toms off by waving a knife at them.
Guess who the police talked to:

Klass was in the kitchen with her daughter upstairs when she spotted the youths in her garden just after midnight on Friday. She grabbed a knife and banged the windows before they ran away.
Hertfordshire police warned her she should not have used a knife to scare off the youths because carrying an “offensive weapon”, even in her own home, was illegal.
Klass’s spokesman, Jonathan Shalit, said the former Hear’Say singer was “utterly terrified” by the intruders and “aghast” at the police warning. “All she did was scream loudly and wave the knife to try and frighten them off,” he told the Sunday Telegraph. “She is not looking to be a vigilante, and has the utmost respect for the law, but when the police explained to her that even if you’re at home alone and you have an intruder, you are not allowed to protect yourself, she was bemused.”

Try to wrap your head around that for a minute. Even if those creeps were to come into the house, she would be in violation of the law if she tried to defend herself or her daughter.
Meanwhile, in crazy Bizarro world:

HOUSTON (KTRK) – A suspected burglar is dead after being shot by a homeowner in northeast Houston.
…
It’s unclear right now if the homeowner will face any charges.

It seems better that way, doesn’t it?

California Looks to Suspend State Cap and Trade Scheme

2010-01-12T05:55:00.000-08:00

By Nan Swift
If it's true that states are the "laboratories of democracy" California's cap and trade experiment should be considered a failed one and the federal government ought to think twice about implementing the same economy-killing measures across the nation. The Wall Street Journal has the story of a possible ballot measure to at least temporarily repeal California's cap and trade carbon tax.

So Republican Assemblyman Dan Logue has begun collecting signatures for "The Global Warming Solutions Act," a ballot initiative that would suspend California's cap-and-trade scheme until the unemployment rate falls below 5.5%. He's aiming to get it on the November ballot.
No matter what one thinks of climate science, it makes little sense for an individual state to unilaterally impose major new tax and regulatory costs on its own industries. The impact of California's gesture on global temperatures will be infinitesimal, but the economic impact will make the state even less attractive to start or expand a business.
...
The law all but encourages outsourcing to Nevada, Texas, China and India. Even the liberal Sacramento Bee, which supports the law, says that policy makers should be "candid about the real costs of the transition it is contemplating. . . . Industries that are energy-intensive will move elsewhere."
Meanwhile, a new study commissioned by the Governor's Office of Small Business Advocacy estimates that the direct cost of current California regulation is $175 billion, or nearly twice the size of the state general fund budget and about $134,000 per small business each year. The Golden State already has the second most business-unfriendly regulatory climate in the nation, after New Jersey and before the cap-and-trade law.
The stakes here are huge, and not merely for California. This is the first serious effort to roll back the environmental extremism that has dominated state capitals in recent years and is now ascendant on Capitol Hill. The green lobbies and businesses that have a monetary stake in cap and trade—including big utilities that want subsidies and Silicon Valley political capitalists investing in solar and ethanol—are sure to spend heavily to stop it. They know that an electoral defeat in the greenest of states could end their national and global hopes for cap and trade.
For Californians the issue is simpler: Whether they want to continue to impose burdens that encourage employers to locate anywhere except their once prosperous state.

Be sure to note the big utilities that want subsidies. Ay, there's the rub. It's not just your typical greenies who would like industry to have stopped progressing sometime in the last century, the real danger is the corporations that are looking for taxpayer funded subsidies and who will game the system to their advantage and the taxpayer's disadvantage. Sign the petition to oppose this next big government bailout here.

Nurse takes on IRS and wins

2010-01-11T13:57:00.000-08:00

by Laura Saunders
Monday, January 11, 2010
provided by

How One Woman Went to Tax Court and Won Deduction
A Maryland nurse accomplished two rare feats in her battle with the Internal Revenue Service: She defended herself against the agency's lawyers and won, and she got a ruling that could help tens of thousands of students deduct the cost of an M.B.A. degree on their taxes.
The U.S. Tax Court handed Lori Singleton-Clarke her victory last month, saying the 47-year-old Bryantown, Md., woman had properly deducted nearly $15,000 in business school tuition. The Tax Court ruling should make it easier for many other professionals to deduct the expense of a Master in Business Administration degree.

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After getting word of the court decision, "I nearly yelled the roof off the house," Ms. Singleton-Clarke says. "I still can hardly believe it."
The IRS's rules on deducting work-related tuition are complicated and onerous, ultimately preventing most students from deducting their tuition. But this case clarifies the rules and will likely lead to more taxpayers taking the deduction, tax experts say.
Few taxpayers decide to go toe to toe with the IRS as Ms. Singleton-Clarke did, arguing her case without a lawyer. For good reason: In 2009, individuals won only about 10% of about 300 such cases, according to data from Tax Analysts. Ms. Singleton-Clarke fought her case in Tax Court, a venue where taxpayers don't have to pay the contested tax before going to trial. The court has a special procedure for small cases.
Some of the losers, such as several dozen tax protesters who defended the filing of frivolous returns, were tilting at tax windmills. Others were simply on the wrong side of the law, including a horse enthusiast who wanted to deduct his hobby losses, an unsuccessful comedian who tried to classify his expenses as business losses, and an attorney who claimed over $100,000 in medical deductions for his visits to prostitutes.
Of the few who did prevail against the IRS, nearly half came to court on a single issue: requests for "innocent spouse" treatment that decouples a spouse from a partner who is a tax cheat. This provision has been used mostly to protect unknowing wives against their husbands' tax misdeeds. One of the spouses granted relief last year was formerly married to an investment banker who didn't pay his taxes after his bonus didn't come though.
Ms. Singleton-Clarke's encounter with the tax system shows what it can take for one individual to prevail over the IRS against the long odds: favorable facts, obsessive organization, and fearlessness. She says she didn't have a lawyer because she couldn't afford one.
Her odyssey began in 2006, when she filed her 2005 return. It showed just over $50,000 of income, several smaller deductions, and one large one—for $14,787 of expenses for an M.B.A. from the University of Phoenix, an online school. Ms. Singleton-Clarke deducted the tuition because her tax preparer told her she met the law's narrow definitions.
When the IRS audited the return in late 2006, she conceded all the IRS's challenges to her deductions but one. She dug in her heels on the tuition deduction because, after looking at a complex diagram in IRS Publication 970, she believed she qualified for it.
The audit process first involved several rounds of confusing IRS correspondence. "At one point I had three requests for the same records, each with a different contact name. I had to spend hours calling to figure out who needed what," says Ms. Singleton-Clarke, a steely but soft-spoken woman.
After that she was summoned to an IRS office in downtown Washington where she had to provide more copies of her résumé, a job description, and other records. She felt overwhelmed and intimidated.
Both the IRS's actions and her reactions are typical, says Christopher Bergin, president of Tax Analysts, a group that fights for tax-system transparency and since l972 has won a series of freedom-of-information cases against the IRS. "Without doing anything illegal, they muscled her. That's what they do. The pressure can be terrifying," he says.
A spokesman for the IRS says that it never comments on issues with specific taxpayers.
As Ms. Singleton-Clarke held fast to her conviction that she deserved the deduction, she drew on skills she developed as a nurse responsible for dealing with doctors who may have infringed hospital rules. That was why she studied for her M.B.A., she says: "I didn't want to feel outmatched by surgeons who didn't want to talk to me."
When the IRS again denied her deduction by mail after her meeting with the agent, Ms. Singleton-Clarke wound up going to Tax Court to set a trial date. But when she came to court in November 2008, it seemed that everyone else had settled their cases: "There was just me by myself at one table and the [IRS] tax team of at another in a big courtroom."
The tax team consisted of a two attorneys and several assistants or paralegals. Ms. Singleton-Clarke had been told to bring copies of her documents in triplicate, including a time line of her career. Judge Stanley Goldberg questioned her closely and complimented her on her record-keeping during the hour-long trial. "The whole time," she says: "I was thinking, here is this god-like man who is going to make an important decision for me. But he wasn't a bully. I had met with the bullies before."
Reached Friday by phone, Judge Goldberg said: "I remember the case well because Ms. Singleton-Clarke was so articulate and well-prepared. Too many taxpayers are not."
Ms. Singleton-Clarke's victory came when the ruling was issued a year later. It is unusual in that it helps not only her but others as well. Decisions in small cases aren't allowed to be cited as precedent. "But everyone uses them," says Melissa Labant, a tax expert with the American Institute of CPAs. "This case definitely provides a road map others can use, especially M.B.A. students."

27 States Say No Thanks To ObamaCare

2010-01-10T10:42:00.000-08:00

By Matthew Clemente on Jan 08, 2010

With 27 states taking legislative steps to combat the Democrats’ healthcare takeover bills and 13 state Attorney Generals joining together to question the constitutionality of some of the sweetheart deals included to secure votes, ObamaCare's next big challenge may be overcoming legal action at the state level. Even state politicians who once supported President Obama's reform plan are now turning against the legislation. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who at one point praised Mr. Obama's efforts toward reforming the healthcare system, used his State of the State address to criticize the current bills:

Health care reform, which started as noble and needed legislation, has become a trough of bribes, deals and loopholes. You've heard of the bridge to nowhere. This is health care to nowhere.

A recent Time.com piece explains why Governor Schwarzenegger and other state legislators are so upset with the legislation being pushed by Congressional Democrats:

As the battle enters its final stage in Washington, a rebellion is taking shape in the states, which are alarmed about the new financial burdens they will face in a revamped system. Governors of both parties are complaining that reform will drive their budgets into even deeper holes, with some feeling the effects far more than others.

Such fears are not unwarranted. The article goes on to give four examples of how ObamaCare will cripple state budgets:

1. A Bigger Medicaid Tab:
Of the 31 million uninsured people who would gain coverage under a revamped health system, about half would do so through a vast expansion of Medicaid — the state-and-federal health care program for the poor. The Senate bill would make eligible anyone earning up to 133% of the federal poverty level (for a family of four, an income of about $29,300 a year); the House bill would lift that threshold to 150% of poverty (or about $33,000 for a family of four).
Congress is looking to expand Medicaid because in terms of raw costs, it is the cheapest and most efficient way to cover people of modest means. That's in part because Medicaid pays doctors and hospitals far lower reimbursements than private insurance does and in part because the states pick up some of the cost.
Both House and Senate bills would pay the states' share of the cost of the new patients over the first two years and up to 95% after that. But states would still face an enormous new financial obligation. There is also the question of finding enough providers to care for 15 million new patients. "It is a huge load on the states at a time when we are still climbing out of the recession," Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen said this week in Nashville. His state — already facing $1.5 billion in budget cuts this year and next — has estimated that the Senate version would cost it an additional $735 million from 2014 to 2019 and that the price tag of the House bill would be nearly double that. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was one of the few prominent Republicans to favor the Obama health care reform effort. Now he is calling on Congress to "rethink it." In a Dec. 22 letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, he wrote, "When asked for my support, I was assured that federal legislation would not increase costs to California." Instead, a state with a $21 billion budget deficit is looking at what Schwarzenegger calls a "crushing new burden" of at least $3 billion a year.

2. New Regulatory Burdens:
Can states enforce the dramatic new health insurance regulations called for in reform legislation? States already oversee commercial health insurers, but few have rules as restrictive as those expected under federal reform, which would bar insurers from setting premiums based on health status and require them to sell coverage to anyone who applies for it.
State legislatures may have to act to give state commissioners power to enforce the new rules, a process that could be complicated by political squabbling — not to mention the many Republican state legislators who have already said they plan to challenge the constitutionality of federal health reform. But even if states adopted the new federal rules, most state insurance departments would need to bulk up staff at a time when many are experiencing layoffs because of already strapped state budgets. "We would certainly argue that we're cut to the bone right now," says Kevin McCarty, head of Florida's Office of Insurance Regulation, which cut 14 positions in the 2009 fiscal year. New staff members could be charged with rooting out insurers who continue to cherry-pick healthy customers and making sure plans stay solvent despite the crush of new, previously uninsured customers.
What's the alternative? The Federal Government could enforce the new national rules, but this would require creating a sizable new regulatory bureaucracy, even though one already exists at the state level. The states don't want that to happen. If the federal bureaucrats assumed regulatory control, says Sandy Praeger, Kansas' insurance commissioner and chair of the health insurance and managed care committee of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, "we'd just be left to mop up the mess. We wouldn't have any authority, but we'd just deal with all the consumer complaints. That, to me, is the worst-case scenario."
3. Insurance Exchanges:
Perhaps the least understood aspect of federal health reform is how private insurance would be sold on the open market if and when the legislation becomes law. Under the Senate bill, states would be responsible for creating and running new insurance marketplaces, also known as exchanges. There, individuals and small businesses would purchase private health insurance, receiving federal subsidies if they qualified. The House bill would establish a national exchange, which states could opt out of if they had the capacity to run their own.
Exactly what states will have to do remains unsettled. But it's likely to be a lot. States may be required to vet some insurance plans to make sure they meet new federal standards. They may have to determine who is eligible for federal subsidies; they may have to build websites to market and rate plans. All that would require expertise and manpower. Massachusetts, which set up an exchange after enacting health reform in 2006, did so quickly and effectively, but Jon Kingsdale, who runs the program, says, "We had a 10% or less uninsurance rate. It's a well-to-do state. It's a progressive employer community. And ... the fact that a Republican governor championed this was a huge advantage." In states where some 25% of the population is currently uninsured, like Texas, setting up exchanges could take longer and cost more. And, Kingsdale warns, in states where there is "sustained and organized hostility" to reform (as in red states in the South and Midwest), "that in and of itself could turn a good program bad."
4. A Fight for Federal Aid:
Around the capital, the special deal that Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson got to secure his vital, filibuster-breaking 60th vote for the health care bill is now known as the Cornhusker Kickback. Even as political favors go, it's a whopper: if reform passes, the Federal Government will pay all of Nebraska's new Medicaid costs forever. And it's fueling envy and outrage in the other 49 states. Led by South Carolina's Henry McMaster, the attorneys general of 13 states — 12 Republicans and one Democrat — have signed on to a letter contending the Nelson deal is unconstitutional.
But that's not the only issue causing friction among states. Another is the fact that some good deeds will be punished under the health reform measures: states that expanded Medicaid coverage on their own — say, to include low-income childless adults under 65 — will get less federal aid than those that have been stingier with their Medicaid programs.
Because liberal and heavily Democratic states have traditionally been more generous in their Medicaid programs, they are likely to be the ones shortchanged. The biggest beneficiaries, arguably, could be states like Texas, whose lawmakers have waged the strongest rearguard campaign against reform. That may be reform's biggest political irony of all.

Feeling ignored by their "representatives" in the federal government, many citizens are now turning to state and local officials to continue their fight against the Democrats' hostile takeover of the American healthcare system. Even if the President's reform does pass through Congress, the battle is far from over.

Obama's Next Three Years

2010-01-08T20:43:00.000-08:00

By John R. Bolton

Where is Barack Obama's foreign policy headed? In answering, one must accept a measure of humility. Predicting American policy makes more fools than sages. That goes double for foreign policy, as analysts must anticipate not only the actions of the United States but of foreign provocateurs as well.
In the case of Barack Obama, there is an additional caveat: the high-profile concerns that have monopolized his efforts abroad are seen by the president himself as little more than Bush-era loose ends, not the defining transactions of his own foreign policy. All new presidents encounter irritating constraints on their aspirations, but Obama is more irritated than most at having to endure any sense of continuity with his predecessor. His criticism of Bush continues unabated even as he fares no better in the same stubborn terrain.
Obama is not looking to build his foreign-policy legacy on top of disputes that predate his arrival. He is working to move past these, toward the day when he can implement his own foreign policy and national-security agendas. Accordingly, the best way to predict Obama's foreign policy in the next three years lies not in examining how he deals with the accumulated baggage of Iraq, Afghanistan, Middle East peace, and the Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs. Important as those are, they constitute what Obama has had to confront. We should ask instead what he will attempt to establish once he has become less encumbered by the inherited issues. Here, the record shows three critical characteristics.

Obama's America need only be restrained, patient, and deferential.

First, Obama has no particular interest in foreign and national-security policy. That is not what he has spent his professional and political career, such as it is, doing, and it is not where his passions lie. There can be no question that the challenges of remaking America's health-care, financial, and energy-production systems claim the bulk of Obama's attention.
Second, Obama does not see the rest of the world as dangerous or threatening to America. He has made it clear by his actions as president that he does not want to engage in a "global war against terrorism." The rising power of other nations, creeds, and ideologies, however unsavory, pose no grievous challenge to which the United States must rise. We are not at a Dean Acheson–style, post–World War II "present at the creation" moment. Therefore, Obama reasons, why behave in reactive, outmoded ways when there are many more interesting and pressing domestic projects to nurture?
Obama's America need only be restrained, patient, and deferential. Take, for example, Obama's November 2009 trip to China, during which the media highlighted how unyielding Beijing was, thus confirming their "rising China/declining America" conventional wisdom. In fact, it was more Obama's submissiveness and less China's assertiveness that made the difference on issue after issue: trade policy and Chinese currency manipulation; Taiwan; Beijing's unwillingness to limit growth for the sake of global-warming theory; and Iranian and North Korean nuclear-weapons programs. Obama repeatedly came away empty-handed, even on blatantly cosmetic aspects of the visit: where he would speak, to whom, and how it would be broadcast.
Third, Obama's vision is embedded in a carapace of naive internationalism, a very comfortable fit when national security is neither that interesting nor that important. Obama is the first president since December 7, 1941, to espouse a determinedly unassertive global role for the United States, one ironically verging on an essentially neo-isolationist view of America. Obama's December 1 announcement of troop increases in Afghanistan is not to the contrary, since he proclaimed the beginning of withdrawal in virtually the same breath. Afghanistan, like Iraq, is the very paradigm of legacy issues Obama does not want to confront. Failures such as his Middle East peace process and dealing with Iran and North Korea have simply led to resignation and inattention.
However, Obama's is not your grandfather's isolationism. He focuses not on America's virtues but on why it is ordinary (thus explaining why, as I have written elsewhere, he is firmly "post-American"). It is America's ordinariness that should enjoin it from imposing its will upon other nations. Obama is our first sitting president to express this sentiment. In April, he articulated this point with absolute clarity. Asked if he believed in American exceptionalism, the president responded, "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism." In other words, "No."
In this vein, the boundless naïveté in the president's UN speeches abundantly demonstrate Woodrow Wilson's patrimony. In September, he said to the UN General Assembly:
It is my deeply held belief that in the year 2009--more than at any point in human history--the interests of nations and peoples are shared. . . . In an era when our destiny is shared, power is no longer a zero-sum game. No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation. No world order that elevates one nation or group or people over another will succeed. No balance of power among nations will hold.
In 1916, Wilson said that "the interests of all nations are also our own," and later advocated "peace without victory." He said, "There must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace" founded on "the moral force of the public opinion of the world." If you removed the dates from these two sets of comments, most people would have to guess which was Obama's and which was Wilson's.

Both enabling and following from the first two foreign-policy imperatives--"global governance" and "international law" will become growth industries under Obama.

Through these prisms--Obama's focus on domestic issues, his belief in the absence of major international threats, and his fascination with multilateralism for its own sake--we can project forward the president's foreign policy. Conveniently for Obama, pushing his priorities will involve international negotiations where presidential authority is virtually exclusive. That does not mean, of course, that he can determine the final outcome where congressional action such as Senate treaty ratification is required, but Obama and his negotiators will be able to dominate in crafting the agreements themselves. Three policy areas loom large and will allow Obama to showcase, in various combinations, the three core characteristics of his worldview.
The first policy on the table will almost certainly be American arms reduction, achieved through budget decisions and arms-control agreements, both bilateral agreements with Russia and multilateral pacts with other nations. At a time of profligate federal spending, only the Department of Defense's budget is constrained. With economic stimulus all the rage, Obama has rejected enlarging the standing military; decided against increasing defense procurement to replenish the weapons and other equipment consumed by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; and stalled progress on critical high-tech military systems. These expenditures (and others) are central to future power-projection capabilities, and all would result in tangible assets and greater policy options, in contrast with the pathetic "shovel-ready" programs of the actual stimulus. This disparity is not accidental.
Even worse, both Obama's Prague speech on a nuclear-weapons-free world and the first U.S. Nuclear Posture Review since 2001, heavily determined by the White House, point toward unilateral nuclear disarmament by the United States, whatever the success of international negotiations. The president believes strongly, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, that lowering U.S. nuclear capabilities toward zero will induce would-be proliferators around the world--Iran and North Korea take note--to give up their own nuclear-weapons programs. This is what Obama means by "strengthening" the regime established by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and what Gordon Brown has already proposed in giving up one of Great Britain's four nuclear-missile submarines.
On several occasions in 2009, Obama and Russian President Medvedev announced agreements on future dramatic cuts in both nations' nuclear arsenals and strategic delivery systems. Obama has already unilaterally reduced U.S. efforts in the missile-defense field, and there is every prospect of returning to some version of an antiballistic missile treaty. The Russians, of course, are delighted to agree to these reductions. For even if the international price of oil were again to rise dramatically, Russia would remain incapable of sustaining its nuclear forces anywhere near U.S. levels. "Mutual and balanced" reductions thus commit Russia merely to their most optimistic projections of their own capabilities and serve essentially to restrain the United States. In fact, "equal" levels severely and disproportionately disadvantage the United States because of our obligations to provide nuclear umbrellas for NATO, Japan, and others. Russia has no comparable need.
Multilaterally, Obama has been even more activist, enshrining his objectives in Security Council Resolution 1887 (indeed, even chairing the council session that adopted it) and convening a global summit on "nuclear security" in 2010. Obama has promised U.S. ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (which was actually defeated by majority vote in the Senate in 1999). He has pledged to renew negotiations for a Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty as well as a treaty for the prevention of an arms race in space. He favors creating and strengthening so-called nuclear-free zones around the world and has urged all states not already party to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to join as non-nuclear-weapons states, meaning that Israel, Pakistan, and India would have to give up their nuclear weapons (which won't happen in any of their cases). Finally, Secretary of State Clinton promised active U.S. involvement in drafting an Arms Trade Treaty for conventional weapons, which is a thinly disguised route to achieve domestic gun-control objectives long blocked in the normal legislative process.
All these objectives will meet fierce domestic opposition in the Senate and elsewhere. But make no mistake; Obama knows where he wants to go and is working hard to get there.
Obama's second leading policy concern is international agreement on global warming. This is not the place to re-debate global warming, but the climate-change True Believers clearly see little appeal in anything less than statist, command-and-control direction of global behavior. Obama's efforts will draw the U.S. more fully into this fold.
Political reality may have doomed the possibility of a full-up treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol in 2009, but that setback has not dimmed Obama's multilateral enthusiasm. Environmentalists have focused blame for the absence of a legally binding treaty on the United States, as Congress is unable to enact cap-and-trade in Obamamania's first year. In response, Obama will likely move more aggressively in multilateral negotiations to create a successor to Kyoto despite congressional inaction. In so doing, he will be following a now familiar strategy for American leftists, which is to internationalize problems on which they cannot make progress domestically. They have attempted in recent decades, with varying degrees of success, to do so on a host of issues: gun control, the death penalty, abortion, and the "rights of the child" among them.
The strategy is to reach agreement with like-minded leaders of other countries, whose governments are likely to be far to the Left of America's political center of gravity. Then, treaty or other international agreement in hand, activists return to the Senate to announce that the rest of the world is determined to do "X" and that America cannot allow itself to be "isolated" along with Somalia, Burma, China, or other assorted holdouts. Thus, on global warming, Obama will likely focus on international approaches to reach his goals, perhaps using executive agreements rather than treaties to bypass the Senate and domestic political roadblocks. Similarly, he will increase efforts to ratify the Law of the Sea Treaty, which global-warming activists are touting as a backdoor to increasing environmental regulation.
Third--both enabling and following from the first two foreign-policy imperatives--"global governance" and "international law" will become growth industries under Obama. To the UN Security Council, Obama said, "The world must stand together. And we must demonstrate that international law is not an empty promise, and that treaties will be enforced." This dovetails nicely with the sentiments of the incoming president of the European Union, former Belgian Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy, who made clear in his November 19 acceptance speech that "2009 is also the first year of global governance with the establishment of the G-20 in the middle of the financial crisis. The climate conference in Copenhagen is another step toward the global management of our planet." As our post-American President Obama well knows, the European Union is a continuing font of ideas on global governance, always eager to share its own form of bureaucratic control and accompanying "democratic deficit" worldwide. Now the new European president has a rapt pupil in the Oval Office and acolytes scattered throughout Washington's foreign-policy establishment.
In many respects, the renunciation of "torture" in interrogating captured terrorists, the commitment to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, and the criminal trials of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other defendants in U.S. courts are about making sure that "international law is not an empty promise." These steps are, perilously, also decisions about retreating from a war paradigm to a law-enforcement paradigm in dealing with terrorism. But it was not coincidental that Obama's first applause line in the General Assembly came when he referred to renouncing "torture" and shutting down Gitmo.
There is much more global governance in the works. The Obama administration sought and won re-election to the new UN Human Rights Council, a body that the Bush administration voted against creating in 2006 and that it subsequently refused to join. The new council has proved itself just as antithetical to American interests as was its predecessor, the UN Human Rights Commission, but mentioning yet another reversal of Bush policy won Obama a further round of applause in the General Assembly.
There will undoubtedly be more such applause to come. Secretary Clinton has committed to ratifying the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Whatever the pros and cons of these agreements, the larger question is how much "law" the Obama administration is prepared to make outside the ever growing U.S. Code we already possess. To Obama's internationalist sensibility, the offense, of course, is that laws "made in the U.S.A." by freely elected representatives of our own citizenry are too "exceptional" and too "parochial" to hold weight in this interconnected world. Mere "municipal" laws, as international-law scholars refer to them, don't pass John Kerry's "global test" of legitimacy for American foreign policy. President Obama clearly wants to fix that problem.
Secretary Clinton opined, in Nairobi last summer, that it was "a great regret but it is a fact we are not yet a signatory" to the Rome Statute, which created the International Criminal Court. So it was no surprise when the State Department confirmed on November 16 that the United States will now participate as an observer in meetings of the court's members. Observer status is manifestly a step toward the administration's ill-disguised ultimate objective of re-signing the Rome Statute, ratifying it, and becoming a full member of the court. Obviously, all these and other steps have implications not only for the United States but also for close allies like Israel, which were protected by earlier U.S. opposition.
Barack Obama's blueprint for the United States spells trouble for American autonomy, self-governance, and defense, all key elements of national sovereignty. His undisguised indifference to repeated diminutions of that sovereignty is entirely consistent with the views of his European admirers, who, at their level, would like to see their nation-states dissolve into the European Union. In the end, however, the United States is exceptional and will not melt into any larger or global union; it will simply become less able to protect itself and its constitutional decision-making system. That is clearly where our first post-American president's policies will take us.
John R. Bolton is a senior fellow at AEI.

Underwear Bomber Pleads Not Guilty

2010-01-08T16:38:00.000-08:00

By ALEX P. KELLOGG

Associated Press

An unmarked Chevrolet Tahoe on Friday entered the Theodore Levin United States Courthouse as a United States Marshal looked on.

DETROIT -- Terror suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab pleaded not guilty Friday in a federal court in Detroit on a six-count indictment for allegedly attempting to blow up a Detroit-bound plane and murder its 279 passengers and 11 crew members.
Mr. Abdulmutallab entered the courtroom just before 2 p.m. Friday shackled by his feet and wearing a white T-shirt, khaki pants and blued shoes.

WSJ's John Bussey joins Kelsey Hubbard on the News Hub to discuss President Obama's speech on national security. Although some might have expected an announcement on overhauling the system, John says, that's not the case.

He is accused of strapping explosives in his pants that failed to detonate and instead set him on fire on a Christmas day Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. His trip originated in Nigeria, where his father had earlier alerted authorities to his radical turn.
U.S. officials had information that could have led them to block Mr. Abdulmutallab from boarding the plane, Obama administration officials said yesterday, but intelligence analysts failed to assemble the picture of the plot. Representatives of the militant group al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, based in Yemen, have claimed credit for organizing the attack.

Judge Mark A. Randon presided Friday, asking the suspect a series of questions during the brief hearing about his mental state and fitness to stand trial Friday. When asked, he told a judge he had taken pain medication in the last day.
Mr. Abdulmutallab made his first appearance in court amid crowds of journalists. Scores of Muslim Americans held up anti-terrorism mantras on posters and waved large American flags outside the coutroom. A handful of Nigerian-born Americans joined in, with signs such as "Nigerians Are Against Terrorism."
Mr. Abdulmutallab will remain detained but has the right to a hearing on the matter. His next appearance in court was not immediately set Friday.
No new details were provided in an indictment earlier this week as to how the suspect was able to board a plane in Amsterdam with two types of explosives hidden in his pants, or how he gained a U.S. visa.

Why Switzerland Has The Lowest Crime Rate In The World

2010-01-06T16:45:00.000-08:00

Screw Gun Control

Olbermann Sinks To New Low To Protect Obamas "Image"

2010-01-06T16:26:00.000-08:00

Some of the media's talking heads are so desperate to absolve the Obama administration of any responsibility for what could have been the a brutal terrorist attack on Christmas day, they have devised some quasi-conspiracy theories to explain how Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was able to board a plane bound for Detroit.

One such libtalker, Keith Olbermann, suggested that the nation's various intelligence agencies may have intentionally withheld information from law enforcement officials in order to make the other branches of the intelligence community look bad. Olbermann's guest, MSNBC political analyst Richard Wolff also suggested such a conspiracy might have been afoot (video and transcript below the fold - h/t Hot Air's Allahpundit).

Sometimes being such fans of President Obama makes liberal media types tie themselves into knots. As I documented earlier today, the New York Times went to great lengths to insist America's rising debt is not the administration's fault.

MSNBC ranter Keith Olbermann decided to try his hand at the absurd apologetics Tuesday by concocting a wild vision of intelligence officials who care nothing about the country's safety, and only about their bureaucratic "turf."

OLBERMANN: ...are people thought to have been deliberately withholding information so that the dots could not be connected?

WOLFF: The question is, was this information that was shared -- remember, there was some sharing of information but it involves the father of this in the end terrorist who walks in to see the CIA officials in a foreign embassy. This is an american embassy in a foreign country. You know, that information, was it shared fully? Why wasn't it shared fully? The question there is, again, cork up or conspiracy? Was there a reason these agencies were at war with each other that prevented that intelligence from being shared?

OLBERMANN: Is the implication there that there is at least a possibility somebody understood how serious this could be and yet withheld information to make some other part of the counterterrorism system look bad?

WOLFF: That has got to be an area that the white house is looking into and, you know, motives can be hard to assess because it's not clear that this person was easily identified as a terrorist, even with the father coming forward saying they had concerns. Was that more of a family concern or were there enough fingerprints here about the radicalization of this individual to suggest that it should have been taken to a different level? At the very least, a security level beyond more than a nominal sharing of information. That's where this inquiry is, this internal inquiry for the moment, has to go.

OLBERMANN: Well, certainly, not to get too far ahead of what the information the white house doesn't have and presumably thus you don't have and certainly I don't have, but that seems to be what you're describing at least in theory is a far greater threat than a guy with explosives on an airplane whether or not he succeeds in blowing them up.

WOLFF: Well, it's the most important line of defense. I don't know that it's a threat in itself but you can defend every airport as much as you like. In the end the most efficient, safest borderline for security has got to be human intelligence. There seems to have been plenty of human intelligence in this case.

It seems that in an effort to shield the Obama administration from criticism--most notably his Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who has been under pressure to resign after she initially (and puzzlingly) insisted that security measures worked as designed. Olbermann and Wolff attempt to divert the blame from security officials to intelligence officials.

This is hardly the first hint at conspiracy theory Olbermann has uttered on air. He came very close to suggesting that the Bush administration was complicit in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. He seems quite willing to use attacks (successful and unsuccessful) on the United States for political purposes--to shield those who share his views and attack those who do not.

Dems Drop The Other Shoe: Universal Voter Registration

2010-01-06T15:11:00.000-08:00

By James Simpson

Many are puzzled that Democrats persist in ramming unpopular and destructive legislation down our collective throats with no apparent concern for their plummeting poll numbers. A widespread belief is that the Democrats are committing political suicide and will be swept from one or both houses of Congress with unprecedented electoral losses next November. But since Democrat politicians rarely do things that will not ultimately benefit themselves, this column asked two weeks ago, "What do they know that we don't?"

We may have found out. It's called universal voter registration. The Wall Street Journal's John Fund described the Democrat plan recently at a David Horowitz Freedom Center forum. Watch the video:

Fund describes the proposal as follows:

In January, Chuck Schumer and Barney Frank will propose universal voter registration. What is universal voter registration? It means all of the state laws on elections will be overridden by a federal mandate. The feds will tell the states: 'take everyone on every list of welfare that you have, take everyone on every list of unemployed you have, take everyone on every list of property owners, take everyone on every list of driver's license holders and register them to vote regardless of whether they want to be ...'

Fund anticipates that Congress will attempt to ram this legislation through, as with the health care bill. What a surprise! Fund covers the vote issue at greater length in his book, How the Obama Administration Threatens to Undermine Our Elections.

Leftist groups are already arguing that universal voter registration will solve all the problems with our voting system. But the left created most of these problems. The radical leftist Nation Magazine, for example, absolutely loves the idea of universal voter registration. This is the same magazine, however, that advanced Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven's Manufactured Crisis strategy. The Cloward/Piven strategy was designed to undermine government institutions by overwhelming them with impossible demands for services. Cloward and Piven focused on welfare, housing, and voting as the main targets of this strategy, and the radical group ACORN was specifically created for the purpose of executing it.

The Nation article enthusiastically lists Cloward/Piven-inspired organizations like Project Vote, the ACORN group where President Obama cut his teeth. It also discusses the left's efforts to push enforcement of the Motor Voter law and explains how universal voter registration could assist in these efforts. Cloward and Piven were the ones who crafted Motor Voter legislation in the early 1980s and pushed for its enactment until 1993, when President Clinton signed it into law.

Cloward and Piven considered Motor Voter to be their crowning, lifetime achievement. The picture at right, from White House photo archives, shows Cloward (light gray suit) and Piven (green coat and navy dress) standing directly behind Clinton at the Motor Voter signing ceremony.

The left has predictably launched vicious smear attacks against John Fund for bringing universal voter registration to our attention. A Google search of the issue brings up any number of nasty ad hominem attacks. Most notable is Media Matters, the leftist group whose sole purpose seems to be to smear Republicans and defend the left's indefensible policies. They put up this gem: "Right-Wing Ass Weasel John Fund Doesn't Like Universal Voter Registration because of ACORN."

The problems with universal voter registration are numerous and obvious. Many states' lists include vast numbers of illegals, including some states which allow illegals to obtain drivers licenses; because many homeowners have more than one home, there will be duplicates; because so many people are on so many separate federal and state government agency lists, there will be duplicates; and because so many lists exist with little or no cross-checking capability, all of these duplicates are likely to go uncorrected. Add to this the fact that Dems hope to extend voting rights to felons, and the whole thing begins to look like a nationwide Democrat voter registration drive facilitated by taxpayers.

Universal voter registration will create massive vulnerabilities to systemic voter fraud nationwide, and if Democrats have proven anything in recent years, it is that they can win elections that way. The George-Soros-funded Secretary of State project (SOS) was designed to take advantage of such vulnerabilities and may have been developed in anticipation of the universal voter registration plan. Al Franken's stolen election in Minnesota was a trial run for the SOS project. Longtime ACORN friend Mark Ritchie was elected Minnesota Secretary of State in 2006 with Soros's SOS and ACORN money, and what followed in Norm Coleman's Senate runoff election was a frightening demonstration of just how far Democrats will go to win. Franken won the runoff, and the Democrats got their filibuster-proof sixty-vote Senate majority.

The Motor Voter law was correctly identified as a facilitator of vote fraud. One of the few legal issues Barack Obama actually participated in as a lawyer was a 1995 suit against the State of Illinois, which he brought on behalf of ACORN. Then-Republican Governor Jim Edgars saw the newly passed Motor Voter act as creating the potential for massive vote fraud and refused to implement it. With the assistance of the Clinton Justice Department, Obama's legal team won that suit. Obama himself actually participated very little, a strategy that seems to have served him well in life. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, after identifying himself in court proceedings, Obama sat back and let "the heavy-hitters at the Justice Department make the arguments."

It is not surprising that the Democrats are now choosing to push this new initiative, for universal voter registration will be Motor Voter on turbochargers. And who better to sign it into law than the president from ACORN?

Puttin’ the fear of Putin into terrorists

2010-01-06T13:15:00.000-08:00

Despots normally don’t do much for us. So we’re not big fans of Russian Prime Minister and shadow Premier Vlad Putin.
But while our president kowtows to terrorists and pays for their defense attorneys, Putin lets them know exactly what kind of reception awaits them in Russia. And you have to admire that about him.

A French journalist challenged Putin’s approach to terrorism and the Russian’s told him what’s what.
Journalist: …Don’t you think that by trying to eradicate terrorism in Chechnya you are going to eradicate the civilian population of Chechnya?
Putin: If you want to become an Islamic fundamentalist and be circumcised, come to Moscow. We are multiconfessional. We have very good specialists. I can recommend one for the operation. He’ll make sure nothing grows back.
Is it just us or does the look in Putin’s eyes reminds you of Dirty Harry staring down at the bleeding bank robber on the street and saying, “You have to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?” Watch them both and see if you don’t agree.
Unfortunately, we know he’s giving our President and our Secretary of State the same steely-eyed glare and scaring the hell out of them.

OBAMACARE: How is it Unconstitutional? Let Me Count The Ways

2010-01-06T10:49:00.000-08:00

When CNSNews.com asked Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D.-Vt.) where the Constitution authorizes Congress to force Americans to buy health insurance, Leahy would not directly answer the question he claimed that "nobody" questioned Congress's authority to do this. Obviously he hasn't been listening.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was equally dismissive of the question of where the Constitution authorized Congress to force Americans to buy health insurance. When reporter Matt Cover asked her the question, she said: “Are you serious? Are you serious?”

White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs similarly dismissed the issue without directly saying where the Constitution authorized the federal government to force people to buy health insurance. When CNSNews.com White House Correspondent Fred Lucas asked Gibbs to comment on the fact that some Republicans were questioning the constitutionality of forcing Americans to buy health insurance, Gibbs said: “I won't be confused as a constitutional scholar, but I don't believe there's a lot of--I don't believe there's a lot of case law that would demonstrate the veracity of what they're commentating on.” Or in other words, Huh?

Actually there are five provisions included in the Obamacare bills that may very well be unconstitutional. They were outlined by Betsy McCaughey in today's NY Post.

Section 3403 of the Senate health bill, establishing a commission to cut Medicare spending, says the law can't be changed or repealed in the future. This whopper shows that Congress thinks its work should be set in stone. Wrong. The people always have the right to elect a new Congress to change or repeal what a previous Congress has done.

A Senate health-bill amendment mysteriously allocates $100 million to an unnamed facility that "shall be affiliated with an academic health center at a public research university in the United States that contains a state's sole public academic medical and dental school" (Sec. 10502, p. 328-329). Why not name the facility?

This pork deal was arranged by Sen. Chris Dodd for the University of Connecticut Health Center, although 11 hospitals in the nation technically meet these specifications. If Congress wrote the provision in Polish or Russian to keep the public in the dark, it would be unconstitutional. The language is a deception. The fact that legislators commonly do this makes it more damaging, not less so.

The bills require you to enroll in a "qualified health plan," whether you want it or not. Forcing people to buy insurance obviously reduces the number of uninsured. But Congress doesn't have the authority to force people to buy a product.

Sen. Orin Hatch (R-Nev.) said on the Senate floor, "If Congress may require individuals to purchase a particular good or service . . . We could simply require that Americans buy certain cars . . . for that matter, we could attack the problem of obesity by requiring Americans to buy fruits and vegetables."

Some Congress members claim the "general welfare clause" of the Constitution empowers them to impose a mandate. But they're taking the phrase out of context. The Constitution gives Congress power to tax and spend for the general welfare, but not to make other kinds of laws for the general welfare.

The Senate bill (pages 320-324) claims the "interstate commerce" clause of the Constitution gives Congress this authority. But for half a century, states have regulated health insurance. In fact, individuals are barred from buying insurance in any state except where they live, the antithesis of interstate commerce.

Congressional majorities have frequently resorted to the commerce clause to justify their lawmaking. In FDR's first term, Congress cited it to pass the National Industrial Recovery Act, which gave the federal government power to micromanage local businesses, setting wages and hours and even barring customers from selecting their live chickens at the butcher. Two Brooklyn brothers, owners of Schechter Poultry Corp., a kosher chicken business, challenged that interference. In 1935, the US Supreme Court ruled the NIRA unconstitutional.

In 1995, the high court again admonished Congress against using the commerce clause as a basis for expanded lawmaking, even when the purpose is as worthy as keeping handguns out of a school zone (US v. Lopez). The court ruled that Congress must stick to its enumerated powers and leave states to police school zones (and, perhaps, mandate health insurance).

Never before has the federal government intruded into decisions made by doctors for privately insured patients, except on narrow issues such as drug safety. Nothing in the Constitution permits it. But the Senate bill makes you enroll in a plan and then says that only doctors who do what the government dictates can be paid by your plan.

"Qualified plans" can contract only with a doctor who "implements such mechanisms to improve health-care quality as the [current or future] secretary [of Health and Human Services] may by regulation require" (Sec. 1311, p. 148-49). That covers all of medicine, from heart care to child birth, stents to mammograms.

Finally, the "takings clause" of the Fifth Amendment bars government from taking your property without compensation. It should protect everyone, no matter how unpopular -- even insurance companies, but Congress ignored it in writing the health bill. The Senate version goes beyond reining in insurance-company abuses, a just cause, and actually caps insurance-company profit margins at well below current levels, robbing shareholders. Next year, Congress could impose similar caps on profit margins of bodegas, pizzerias and grocers, by arguing that food -- also a necessity -- is too expensive. Your business could be next.

Right now there could be up to five parts of the Obamacare thrown out by the courts, these are by no means the only one. So stay tuned.

California Voters Face Show Trial In Kangaroo Court

2010-01-06T09:22:00.000-08:00

by Maggie Gallagher
On Monday, Jan. 11, U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker will put the people of California on trial for voting against gay marriage.
The case will be a show trial in a kangaroo court. I don't say that lightly of any federal judge, but Judge Walker's extraordinary bias has already been flagrantly on display.
Take the trial itself. The constitutionality of Proposition 8 is not really a matter for a trial of fact. It's a question of law. But Judge Walker ordered one anyway. Why? Ordinarily a trial judge's rulings of fact cannot be questioned by higher courts. So the more of his opinions that Judge Walker can stuff into the box of "trial of fact" instead of "review of law," the more power he will have over this historic case.
Next Judge Walker issued an extraordinary ruling that the private intentions of Prop. 8 proponents -- ideas by definition never communicated to voters -- were properly the subject of this trial. So people who worked on the campaign have been put on trial, subpoenaed for all their e-mails and personal correspondence. This is an enormous personal headache, one which will (as intended) discourage participation in the political process in the future.
The people who enacted Prop. 8 were not the campaign manager or executive committee of Protect Marriage, but the 7 million voters who passed it after a free and fair election. The constitutionality of a law passed by voters has never been held to depend on private communications of the campaign committee.
But Judge Walker actually thought he could order the Prop. 8 campaign to turn over private campaign strategy memos. (Even the liberal 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals could not swallow that ruling and overturned it.)
"These are kangaroo-court procedures," distinguished lawyer Ed Whelan noted in National Review Online's Bench Memos this week.
But the third outrageous ruling by Judge Walker is the worst of all: On Dec. 22, he ordered the trial televised -- in defiance of federal rules -- without proper notice and public comment. Informed of his error, Judge Walker responded by hastily posting a notice New Year's Eve, thus allowing comments for only five business days, more or less signaling his determination to put this trial on TV. Why?
Whelan points out that the Judicial Conference of the United States opposes televising federal trials in part because doing so "could jeopardize ... the safety of trial participants" and "produce intimidating effects on litigants, witnesses and jurors."
But this is no ordinary trial. This is a trial in a case where thousands of ordinary citizens have already faced a wave of hatred for participating in democracy. On Oct. 22, the Heritage Foundation released a report titled "The Price of Prop. 8," which concluded that "supporters of Proposition 8 in California have been subjected to harassment, intimidation, vandalism, racial scapegoating, blacklisting, loss of employment, economic hardships, angry protests, violence, at least one death threat, and gross expressions of anti-religious bigotry." (Read it at www.heritage.org.)
To deliberately and needlessly expose these people to a new wave of publicity and attacks by televising the trial is outrageous.
Full disclosure: As the president of the National Organization for Marriage, which created a ballot initiative committee -- NOM California -- that worked with Protect Marriage, I was intimately involved in putting Prop. 8 on the ballot. So I know dozens of people who have been personally threatened, some of whom still live in fear today when they walk outside their door as a result of an organized effort to distribute personal addresses of donors to Prop. 8. NOM is involved in a separate federal lawsuit to protect donors' constitutional rights in future marriage amendment battles.
At stake in this case is not only the future of marriage in all 50 states, but the future of democracy, the future of fair play, ordinary decency and common sense. Not to mention a little thing like constitutional limits on the power of judges.
After Prop. 8, gay couples continue to enjoy unmolested all the legal civil rights of marriage under California law through civil unions. Who will stand up for the core civil rights of the people of California and the rest of the USA to participate in democracy without fear?
Certainly not Judge Vaughn Walker.

Olbermann: Opponents of ObamaCare Are the Real Terrorists

2010-01-06T08:43:00.000-08:00

Posted by Gregory of Yardale

Once again, MSDNC host Keith "Vinegar and Water" Olbermann has inserted himself into the cervix uteri of public discourse and unleashed a torrent of rage and derangement. This time, he claims that the real terrorists in the world are those who oppose the Government takeover of health care:

"Because they die individually of disease and not disaster, Neil Boortz and those who ape him in office and out, approve of their deaths, all 45,000 of them - a year - in America. Remind me again, who are the terrorists?"

So, there you have it. People who believe that the free market can provide better health care than the Government are terrorists, but the people who tried to blow up Flight 253 were just CIA operative trying to embarrass Chris Matthews's boyfriend. (Whackjob radio host Mike Malloy shares that belief.)

Olby really believes that Government bureaucrats are willing to kill people for domestic political objectives, but he still wants the m in charge of health care. That is approximately 55,000 times nuttier than anything Glenn Beck has ever said.

Relief May Be In Sight As Dems Decide To Retire

2010-01-06T07:45:00.000-08:00

WASHINGTON – With the 2010 election year barely under way, two senators and one governor — all Democrats — ditched plans to run for re-election in the latest signs of trouble for President Barack Obama's party.
Taken together, the decisions by Sens. Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota as well as Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter caused another bout of heartburn for Democrats as they struggle to defend themselves in a sour political environment for incumbents, particularly the party in charge.
As 2009 ended, Democrats watched a string of their House members announce retirements and one congressman defect to the GOP.
Now, with Dodd, Dorgan and Ritter out, Republicans have even more to crow about, if not better opportunities to pick up Democratic-held seats.
Democrats, who have a 60-40 Senate majority that includes two independents who vote with them, now will have to defend four open seats in the Senate. The others are Delaware and Illinois, where Sens. Ted Kaufman and Roland Burris were appointed to the seats vacated by Vice President Joe Biden and Obama. Kaufman and Burris are not running for election to the seats.
Among governors, Democrats are seeking to maintain their 26-24 majority in a year when those elected will oversee the redrawing of congressional and legislative districts for the next decade.
Republicans and Democrats alike say they now expect competitive races for the Senate seat in North Dakota, a GOP-tilting state, and the governor's seat in Colorado, a pivotal swing state that has trended toward Democrats in recent years but may be shifting back toward Republicans.
But in Democratic-leaning Connecticut, Dodd's retirement may actually heighten the likelihood that the seat he's held for five terms will remain in Democratic hands. The party can now recruit a more popular candidate to run, bolstering the prospects of thwarting a Republican victory.
Longtime Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal told The Associated Press on Wednesday morning that he will run for Dodd's seat. Blumenthal, a Democrat, is seen as one of the state's most popular politicians. He planned to publicly announce his candidacy later Wednesday.
Considered by many insiders to be the most endangered Senate Democrat, Dodd planned to announce his retirement Wednesday, according to Democratic officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to publicly pre-empt the senator's remarks. Dodd told Democrats of his plans late Tuesday and scheduled an announcement on Wednesday.
Dodd, 66, is chairman of Senate Banking Committee, which was at the center of efforts to deal with the economic meltdown. And he has played a prominent role in the debate over overhauling health care, taking over for his friend Sen. Edward Kennedy during his illness and then after his death. Dodd underwent surgery for prostate cancer in August; he said it was in an early, treatable stage.
His poll standing has fallen precipitously since 2008.
Dodd ran for the Democratic presidential nomination that year, moving his family to Iowa for weeks before the caucuses and angering Connecticut constituents. He dropped out after a poor showing in Iowa.
The senator also has drawn criticism for his role in writing a bill that protected bonuses for executives at bailed-out insurer American International Group Inc. and for allegations he got favorable treatment on mortgages with Countrywide Financial Corp.
Early polling in the race showed him consistently trailing potential GOP challenger Rob Simmons, a former House member who is competing for the Republican nomination against World Wrestling Entertainment co-founder Linda McMahon.
Dorgan, the chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee and a member of the Senate Democratic leadership, said Tuesday he reached his decision after discussing his future with family over the holidays.
"Although I still have a passion for public service and enjoy my work in the Senate, I have other interests and I have other things I would like to pursue outside of public life," said Dorgan, 67.
The move stunned Democrats.
They were confident heading into the new year that Dorgan, a moderate Democrat in a GOP-leaning state, would run for re-election even as rumors intensified that Republican Gov. John Hoeven would challenge him in November. Early polling showed Dorgan trailing Hoeven in a hypothetical contest, and Democrats expected a competitive race if the matchup materialized.
Hoeven has not announced a candidacy but he told The Associated Press on Tuesday that he was "very seriously" considering one.
Democrats quickly started recruiting a candidate to run in Dorgan's place. Democratic Rep. Earl Pomeroy may be interested as well as Heidi Heitkamp, a former state attorney general and tax commissioner who was defeated by Hoeven in the 2000 gubernatorial race.
In Colorado, Democratic officials informed Tuesday of Ritter's decision said the governor planned to announce Wednesday that he won't run for a second term in November.
Elected in 2006, Ritter was among those Democrats who helped the party make inroads into what was once a solidly Republican state. He helped pave the way for Obama to win Colorado in 2008 and had been widely considered a rising star in the Democratic Party.
Top contenders to replace Ritter on the Democratic ticket include Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and former House Speaker Andrew Romanoff.
Two Republicans are seeking the GOP nomination: former Rep. Scott McInnis and businessman Dan Maes.
___
Associated Press writers David Espo, Ken Thomas and Andrew Miga in Washington, Steven K. Paulson in Denver, Dale Wetzel in Bismarck, N.D., and Susan Haigh and David Collins in Hartford, Conn., contributed to this report.

Matthews: Every 'Teabagger' is White, 'What's That About?'

2010-01-05T20:59:00.000-08:00

Chris Matthews just can't stop implying some sort of racist motives behind tea-partiers as on Tuesday's Hardball, the MSNBC host – in a segment about which candidate they would gravitate towards – asked his guests why the protestors were all "monochromatic," and to add insult to injury repeatedly called them "teabaggers." [audio available here]
The following exchanges were aired on the January 5 edition of Hardball:

CHRIS MATTHEWS: So who will lead the tea-baggers? Will it be Rick Perry down in Texas? Will it be Michele Bachman out in Minnesota? Will it be Sarah Palin? You first Mark [McKinnon] it's your idea. The tea-baggers are an interesting group to watch. They're not far right. They're probably center-right, in fact some centrists. But they're generally, I think, Republican voters. Right? Is that fair to say? They vote Republican?
...
MATTHEWS: And they're monochromatic right?
MARK MCKINNON, THE DAILY BEAST: Well I don't know that they're monochromatic?
MATTHEWS: They're not? Every picture I see shows them to be.
MCKINNON: Well there's a lot of people out there that cuts across a lot of demographics who feel disenfranchised.
MATTHEWS: But not that other demographic.
MCKINNON: The other demographic?
MATTHEWS: Meaning they're all white. All of them, every single one of them is white.
MCKINNON: I think that's, I think that's a fair characterization, predominately.
MATTHEWS: Yeah well what's that about?

Dignity: You are Undignified and Shameless, Mr. President

2010-01-05T15:08:00.000-08:00

by Susan Dale

One would think that dignity is an easily understood concept, an equally easily understood word, and to retain one’s dignity an easy thing to do, as it is a self-determined activity.

Will someone please explain this to our fearless, Ivy League over-educated, leader?

Photo-ops at the Delaware Air Force base at the return home of an American warrior who did not survive his last battle; Michelle in scruffy shorts descending the steps of Air Force One; brazen million dollar shopping trips by ‘the family’ in Paris and London; flying Chicago pizza chefs to Washington for the weekly gigs at the White House; Robert Gibbs; the White House social secretary saying “sure, anybody can come by” resulting in crashergate, one among many; giving shoutouts (whatever they are) to Indian chiefs on the heels of the worst terrorist act in this country since September 11; refusing to meet with your Afghanistan theater general until this refusal becomes public knowledge; taking a very public and humiliating trip to the Olympics meeting with your begging bowl to benefit your Chicago cronies; apologizing for America on every stage internationally upon which you land; constant vicious and untrue trashing of your predecessor; ridiculing Nancy Reagan; making fun of the Special Olympics; blowing off the international celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall; giving the Queen of England (a former ally of the United States) a disrespectful pat on the back (no bowing to her); dissing the Cambridge police in favor of your arrogant black friend; appearing shirtless on magazine covers; observed carrying reading material for a flight which consisted solely of a magazine on which you were the cover story; vast overuse of the word ‘I’ in all public speaking; actually bowing, as President of the United States of America, to a Middle Eastern potentate, the Japanese Emperor and the Communist leader of China; to speaking out on everything authoritatively with an astounding ignorance of history, especially this nation’s; insultingly ignoring a dinner invitation from the French President, (a former ally of the United States) -- I could go on and actually list just about everything this embarrassment has done for the last 11 months, but all of these, and more, demonstrate Obama’s lack of comprehension of the term “dignity.”

It also demonstrates that this person has no clue what it means to be the President of the United States of America.

George Washington embodied dignity, not just on the part of the man, but also of the nation he represented. He was also responsible for establishing the precedent of the dignity of the office of President of the United States, to which every President since that greatest of men has attempted to adhere. That is, not until this most recent character, who has neither respect for the office of President nor for the nation he was tragically elected to lead. George Washington would find both of these aspects of our current President to be stunning and inexplicable developments, but what would make him most furious (and George Washington did have a temper, though he worked hard to control it), would be the utter disregard -- no, the actual contempt -- this 11-month holder of the office obviously feels and clearly demonstrates towards the American people.

The will of the people, sovereign in this republic, was almost sacred to George Washington and the other Founders -- it was the whole point of the exercise, one that had never before taken place in the annals of history. We actually weren’t supposed to end up in 2009 in an increasingly tyrannical rule run by socialists just over 220 years later. The sacrosanct documents that the Founders risked their lives to create were meant to be the guarantee ensuring the perpetuity of the freedoms they fought so hard to achieve. This achievement was to have been made, for the first time in history, for the people of this republic.

Obama and his appointed under-the-radar-elite ruling group pay no attention to these documents, nor do they pay attention to the will of the people. This group consists, of: let’s see, we have the charming Chavez admiring FCC czar, Mark Lloyd; the lovely self-proclaimed activist pederast, Kevin Jennings, as our ‘safe schools’ czar; John Holdren, our brilliant science czar, who is an able advocate of forced abortions and sterilization of women (as the great Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up), and so many more of the like that it stuns the 21st Century mind, much less that of George Washington.

I doubt even Bill Clinton could envision this crowd in any White House in any future of this country, much less the 18th century visionary George Washington. Notwithstanding all the other decisions this President has made -- bankrupting our nation, perhaps forever; taking over our automobile industries; trying Islamic terrorists in a civilian court on our precious soil; attempting to destroy our national economy by signing on to completely bogus ‘climate change’ agreements and to annihilating our magnificent health care system in order to pay off his union and corporate supporters and to control every aspect of our lives -- these appointments alone, none of which had or has American popular support, nor Congressional approval, would provide adequate proof that Obama has nothing but contempt for the people of this nation. Obama’s appointees are not in their positions to help the citizens of the United States of America; they are here to implement their agenda, to do it as brutally and as rapidly as possible while doing it as far under the radar of public attention as they can.

Since there are more of us than there are of them, every once in a while they have to pay lip service to the fact of America’s greatness. It is disturbing and humorous at the same time how excruciatingly uncomfortable this makes them and their leader; witness the most recent speech of our great orator-in-chief at West Point. It was positively painful for him to have to say good things about the country he is meant to be leading, but is, more accurately, destroying

At this point in our national decline, it is largely thanks to the new media in this nation, who exemplify the modern equivalent of the courageous soldiers of the Revolutionary War in their refusal to go down without a fight, that these America haters and their activities have been and are continuing to be revealed. The 18th century fighters for freedom, (as exemplified in their beloved general), put all personal concerns aside to fight for the possibility of living as free men. They left behind their families, abandoned their farms, gave up their livelihoods, with no guarantees, all too often for no pay, not enough food, little ammunition, and all for the intangible hope of freedom.

To embark on our current fight for freedom should be an easier task for us. Our 18th century predecessors did not know what it was like to be free men and wouldn’t until they had delivered themselves from the yoke of British tyranny. We, as Americans, have known what it is like to be free for over 220 years, and we are, under this president, beginning to wake up to the nightmare of tyrannical statist control, which is succeeding in taking over increasingly numerous aspects of our lives. This at first surreptitious and now brazen theft of our freedoms is unacceptable to the American spirit, and we know full well that the restoration of our freedoms is worth fighting for.

I guess the radical left thinks that because of their mistaken and temporary ascendancy to governmental leadership in America, we are just going to hand over our nation and our freedom to them. “We won,” they keep telling us. If they think that this easy relinquishing of our freedoms is going to happen, they haven’t studied the history of this nation and its people.

To partially quote the inestimable Reverend Jeremiah Wright, “No, No No, No, No, No, (here’s where America’s patriots diverge from Obama’s spiritual guide), God Bless America, God Bless America, God
Bless America,” That is what lives on in Americans from our 18th Century forebearers, that spirit that won’t allow us to let our uniquely American freedoms be taken from us.

George Washington was an exacting commander in chief, as he was a president. He would demand no less from us that we recapture our dignity as a nation, and as a people.

Susan Dale is a writer and former George Washington historic interpreter. She currently is a financial adviser and can be reached at SusanDaleInvests@yahoo.com

A Blight Grows in Brooklyn

2010-01-05T13:04:00.000-08:00

By George Will
BROOKLYN -- On Aug. 27, 1776, British forces routed George Washington's novice army in the Battle of Brooklyn, which was fought in fields and woods where today the battle of Prospect Heights is being fought. Americans' liberty is again under assault, but this time by overbearing American governments.
The fight involves an especially egregious example of today's eminent domain racket. The issue is a form of government theft that the Supreme Court encouraged with its worst decision of the last decade -- one that probably will be radically revised in this one.
The Atlantic Yards site, where 10 subway lines and one railway line converge, is the center of the bustling Prospect Heights neighborhood of mostly small businesses and middle-class residences. Its energy and gentrification are reasons why 22 acres of this area -- the World Trade Center site is only 16 acres -- are coveted by Bruce Ratner, a politically connected developer collaborating with the avaricious city and state governments.
To seize the acres for Ratner's use, government must claim that the area -- which is desirable because it is vibrant -- is "blighted." The cognitive dissonance would embarrass Ratner and his collaborating politicians, had their cupidity not extinguished their sense of the absurd.
The condo of Daniel Goldstein, his wife and year-old daughter, which cost Goldstein $590,000 in 2003, is on part of the land where Ratner's $4.9 billion project would be built -- with the assistance of more than $1 billion in corporate welfare from the state and city governments, which are drowning in red ink. The Goldsteins' building would not seem blighted to anyone not paid to see blight for the convenience of the payers. Which is of constitutional significance.
The Constitution says government may not take private property other than for a "public use." By "public," the Framers, who did not scatter adjectives carelessly, meant uses -- roads, bridges, parks, public buildings -- directly owned or primarily used by the general public. In 1954, however, in a case concerning a crime- and infectious disease-ridden section of Washington, D.C., the court expanded the notion of "public use" to include removing "blight."
Since then, that term, untethered from serious social dangers, has become elastic in the service of avarice. In 2005, the court held, 5-4, that New London, Conn., could take the property of a middle-class neighborhood and transfer it to a corporate developer who would pay more taxes to the city government than the evicted homeowners had paid. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, dissenting, warned that the consequences of the decision would "not be random." The beneficiaries would be people "with disproportionate influence and power in the political process."
Enter Ratner, with plans to build a huge complex of high-rise residences, commercial properties and a basketball arena for the NBA's New Jersey Nets, which he bought. The city and state governments salivated at the thought of new revenues -- perhaps chimerical -- to waste. The problem was, and is, that people live and work where Ratner wants to build.
So blight had to be discovered. It duly was, by a firm that specializes in such discoveries. New York's highest court ratified that finding, 6-1.
But a week later, Columbia University, which has plans for a $6.3 billion expansion in Manhattan, was stymied in its attempt to wield the life-shattering power of eminent domain against several local businesses that do not want to be shattered. A state court held, 3-2, that condemnation proceedings had been unconstitutional. The court said the blight designation was "mere sophistry": "Even a cursory examination of the study reveals the idiocy of considering things like unpainted block walls or loose awning supports as evidence of a blighted neighborhood."
The idiocy was written on Columbia's behalf by the same firm the Empire State Development Corporation hired to find blight at the Brooklyn site. Both Columbia and Ratner are operating in partnership with the ESDC, an arm of the state government. Both Columbia's and Ratner's attempts at seizing property are "pretextual takings," using trumped-up accusations of blight to concoct a spurious "public use" for a preconceived project.
The Atlantic Yards nonsense was compounded when Ratner, to bolster his balance sheet after the real estate collapse, sold the Nets to a Russian billionaire, who stands to benefit from Ratner's government-subsidized seizure of other people's property. Those people can only hope that New York's highest court will grant their appeal for reconsideration on the grounds that Ratner's argument is about as good as the Nets are. Through Friday, their record was 3-29.

No Way to Help the Poor

2010-01-05T07:05:00.000-08:00

The tax treatment of low-income individuals and families is extremely flawed. We can do better.

When the battle over overhauling the U.S. healthcare system comes to an end, tax reform will reemerge at the top of Congress’s agenda. December 31, 2010 marks the expiration date for most of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, and numerous levies will be under renewed scrutiny. As exhausted congressional aides turn from healthcare to taxes, they need to be mindful of a simple fact: the tax treatment of low-income individuals and families is extremely flawed.
The confusing and labyrinthine structure of low-income credits makes them less effective than they should be. The neediest recipients often fail to apply for credits, and the transaction costs associated with claiming benefits are high. For example, more than 70 percent of tax filers receiving the Earned Income Tax Credit (the EITC provides a refundable credit for low-income workers and their families) use a tax professional to navigate complex eligibility rules and extensive computation requirements. Further, the Internal Revenue Service has estimated that 25 percent of EITC payments go to taxpayers who are not eligible for the credit, while roughly 15 to 20 percent of those who are eligible fail to claim the credit.

A number of easy steps could be taken to simplify existing credits, beginning with streamlining eligibility requirements.

Despite the enormous complexity of low-income tax credits, public policy has increasingly relied on these programs to assist the poor. Consequently, the size and availability of low-income tax credits has expanded dramatically.
In addition, more and more middle-income families have begun to claim a share as well. In 2006, the government paid out more than $22 billion in credits to those with incomes between $50,000 and $100,000, while more than $5 billion was paid to taxpayers with incomes above $100,000.
Five primary credits provide income relief to working individuals and families: in addition to the EITC, the Child and Dependent Care Credit, Child Tax Credit, and American Opportunity Tax Credit are intended to encourage work and savings while also offsetting the cost of raising and educating children. The Making Work Pay credit, introduced in the stimulus package, also attempts to offset part of the payroll tax burden. Keeping track of which credit a family is eligible for is hard enough for tax professionals, much less for a qualifying worker.

The Internal Revenue Service has estimated that 25 percent of Earned Income Tax Credit payments go to taxpayers who are not eligible for the credit.

A number of easy steps could be taken to simplify existing credits, beginning with streamlining eligibility requirements. Under current rules, adjustments for family size and work incentives are needlessly complex. For example, age requirements differ among credits and some provisions employ different methods for measuring gross income.
A more complicated issue is determining the marginal tax rates that should apply at different income levels. A marginal tax rate measures the change in tax liability that occurs when an additional dollar of income is earned. Because higher marginal tax rates reduce incentives to work, it is desirable to keep them low for all taxpayers. Although tax credits enhance the progressivity of the tax system, they also increase marginal tax rates at some income levels, thus discouraging work. Therefore, policy makers face a trade-off between progressivity and work incentives.

If lawmakers seek to enact practical, bipartisan reforms of the tax code this year, an excellent place to start would be to follow the President’s Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform’s 2005 recommendations for simplifying and consolidating low-income credits.

Many tax credits phase in and out according to income. As income rises, the credit value falls and tax liability increases. The effective marginal rate reflects the official tax rate plus the rate at which the credit is being phased out. For example, if a $100 income increase causes a taxpayer to lose $5 of a credit, the effective marginal tax rate rises by 5 percent. The EITC, the largest anti-poverty tax program in the United States, is designed to encourage work among low-income earners by phasing in and out at high rates as earnings from work increase. Steep phaseouts over narrower income ranges can save the government significant revenue that would otherwise go to individuals with relatively high incomes, but they also impose higher marginal rates over the income range where the credit phases out.
In 2005, the President’s Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform created a sensible proposal for reforming low-income tax credits. The panel extensively examined low-income tax credits, seeking ways to improve their fairness and simplicity and to enhance work incentives. Many issues relating to eligibility requirements and phaseouts were resolved by consolidating existing family, child, and work-related tax benefits into two credits—the Family Credit and Work Credit. If lawmakers seek to enact practical, bipartisan reforms of the tax code this year, an excellent place to start would be to follow the tax panel’s recommendations for simplifying and consolidating low-income credits.

Amy Roden is the program manager in economic policy studies and a Jacobs Associate at the American Enterprise Institute.

Olbermann Lip Flapping

2010-01-05T06:28:00.000-08:00

By Brad Wilmouth

On Monday’s Countdown show, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann picked up on an item posted by the far-left Media Matters for America, and slammed Media Research Center founder and President Brent Bozell as "Worst Person in the World" because the MRC founder recently criticized MSNBC host Ed Schultz for accusing Republicans of wanting people to die. Schultz, from the Ed Show last September: "The Republicans lie! They want to see you dead. They'd rather make money off your dead corpse. They kind of like it when that woman has cancer and they don't have anything for her."

Because Bozell argued in a recent NewsMax article that if "Rush Limbaugh went on the air and said that about a liberal, it would be the end of his career," Media Matters sought to prove him wrong as the group compiled quotes from Limbaugh in which the conservative host had responded to incendiary comments from liberal Democrats like Congressman Alan Grayson, with Limbaugh picking up on the promotion by liberals of abortion and euthanasia, and of liberal support for the kind of socialized medicine plans that in other countries have led to government bureaucracies sometimes denying medical procedures to elderly patients in favor of spending limited tax money treating younger people.

As Olbermann began his attack on Bozell, he incorrectly – or perhaps intentionally – referred to the Media Research Center as the "Media Research Council," and called Bozell "Boze." Olbermann: "But our winner, Brent Bozell, the founder of the Media Research Council. He has given out one of his annual prized-by-the-left, foot-in-his-own-mouth awards to our own Ed Schultz because Ed said, ‘The Republicans lie, they want to see you dead, they’d rather make money off your dead corpse.’"

After reading several quotes from Limbaugh collected by Media Matters, Olbermann mocked the MRC and its founder as he concluded:

So two conclusions about Brent Bozell: A, the word "research" in his group, Media Research Council, that’s a brand name. No actual research is actually done. And, B, apparently he thinks what Rush Limbaugh has said about liberals wanting to kill people, that that should be the end of Limbaugh’s career. Brent Bozell, today’s ‘Worst Person in the World.’"

Below is a transcript of the relevant portion of the Monday, January 4, Countdown show on MSNBC:

KEITH OLBERMANN: But our winner, Brent Bozell, the founder of the Media Research Council. He has given out one of his annual prized-by-the-left, foot-in-his-own-mouth awards to our own Ed Schultz because Ed said, "The Republicans lie, they want to see you dead, they’d rather make money off your dead corpse."
Said Boze: "Ed Schultz, Mister MSNBC, making the most hideous of character assassination attacks, saying we want to kill people, and literally saying it. We want to see them dead. ... Just think what would happen if Rush Limbaugh went on the air and said that about a liberal. It would be the end of his career."
Except Limbaugh says things like that constantly. Last August 13, the President, quote, "wants the White House, he wants the executive branch to be making determinations of who lives and who dies."
Last September 30, "It’s the American left that wants you to die, the party of abortion and euthanasia."
Last October 13, "The Obama administration wants to also get to decide when to dig the grave."
Last October 15, "Democrats would make the elderly face the guillotine."
Last December 8, "This administration, the Democrat party, is totally on board with the elderly passing away."
So two conclusions about Brent Bozell: A, the word "research" in his group, Media Research Council, that’s a brand name. No actual research is actually done. And, B, apparently he thinks what Rush Limbaugh has said about liberals wanting to kill people, that that should be the end of Limbaugh’s career. Brent Bozell, today’s "Worst Person in the World."

—Brad Wilmouth is a news analyst at the Media Research Center.

Iran’s December Rising: A Dress Rehersal for Revolution

2010-01-05T05:17:00.001-08:00

Iran’s “December Rising” by opposition forces against the government bore all the markings of a dress rehearsal for the revolution to come. The protests that started in the holy city of Qom where Grand Ayatollah Hossien Ali Montazeri (87) died of natural causes on January 19 quickly took on the character of a national revolt. Demonstrations and protests spread to Mashad, Isfahan, Shiraz, Arak, Tabriz, Najafabad, Babol, Ardebil, Arumieh and Tehran. Calls to overthrow President Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Khamenei’s regime were met by deadly force that claimed eight lives, including the assassination of opposition leader Mir Hussien Moussavi’s 43-year old nephew Ali Moussavi outside his home on January 27. The December Rising clearly demonstrated the transformation of Iran’s opposition movement from an agency of reform to a movement struggling to win state power. The brutal counterattack sanctioned by Supreme Leader Khamenei and President Ahmadinejad foreshadowed another critical development; the Revolutionary Guard’s growing control over the levers of government and Iran’s transition to a classic police state. Grand Ayatollah Montazeri’s death and the December Rising heightened divisions among Iran’s clerical establishment that has wavered between supporting the opposition movement and remaining loyal to the ruling elite. A tilt of the nation’s clerics toward the opposition movement could swing momentum to Iran’s democratic insurgency as Iran lurches down the path of revolutionary confrontations in the weeks and months ahead.
Grand Ayatollah Montazeri was an architect of Iran’s 1979 “Islamic” revolution and Ayatollah Khomenei’s designated successor until exposing the “Imam’s” role in the Iran-Contra scandal in 1987. As one of the most powerful and respected figures in the clerical establishment Montazeri was highly critical of Iran’s leadership, calling them dictators and issuing a fatwa condemning the government. He frequently clashed with Supreme Leader Khamenei, a lesser ranked scholar in the clerical hierarchy whose powers and qualifications as “Supreme Leader” he openly challenged. In June, Montazeri sided with the opposition calling President Ahmadinejad’s re-election “a fraud,” directly contradicting Khamenei’s ruling that Ahmadinejad was the unquestioned victor. Fearing the Grand Ayatollah’s death would serve as a clarion call for opposition forces to resume their offensive against Khamenei’s faltering regime, the government took the unprecedented action of banning reformist ayatollahs in Qom and Isfahan from participating in mourning ceremonies for Montazeri. In July the influential clerics of Qom’s “Association of Researchers and Teachers” issued a statement blasting the elections as illegitimate. Since July, the erosion of support for Khamenei among clerics in Qom, Isfahan and Mashad has significantly undermined the Supreme Leader’s legitimacy and tarnished the integrity of the “Islamic” state. The ruthless measures carried out by the government in the name of protecting “Islam” have been profoundly disturbing to a broad cross section of Iran’s clerical establishment. Indeed, the violence unleashed to quell the December Rising during the Ashoura observances commemorating the death of Imam Hussein outraged many in Iran’s clerical establishment. Historically, violence even in wartime has been strictly forbidden during Ashoura. The government attacks prompted opposition leader and former Majlis Speaker Mehdi Karroubi to say “What happened to this religious system that it orders the killing of innocent people during the holy day of Ashura?” Further, the ascendency of the Revolutionary Guard dictating foreign, national security, nuclear and economic policy is leading to the marginalization of the clerics as the standard bearers of Iran’s Islamic republic.
Increasingly, Supreme Leader Khamenei is surrounded by hardline clerics, right of center politicians, the Revolutionary Guard and Basij militia, all calling for direct confrontation with the opposition. On December 29 and 30, pro-government demonstrators marched in Tehran, demanding that Mousavi and Korroubi be put to death for sedition against the state. Iran’s IRNA news service released a story claiming that Karroubi and Mousavi fled Iran after the government crackdown on the opposition; a claim both men denied on their websites on December 30. With momentum swinging to the opposition, the crackdowns, bloodshed, show trials and executions will not only continue but grow worse in the days ahead as Khamenei’s regime grows more isolated.
Should a significant section of Iran’s clerics “crossover” to support the opposition coalition of youth, students, middle class entrepreneurs, workers, artists and journalists, Khamenei’s regime will rest solely on the naked terror of the Revolutionary Guard and the Basij. At that juncture, mass defections within the military and militia could spell the doom of the current regime. Whether the opposition can move beyond the boundaries of reform to organize a movement capable of seizing power remains to be seen. The emerging leadership of the opposition is young, secular and confronts a formidable adversary. Uniting a broad based front of divergent interests requires patience, the willingness to compromise and a clear vision of the new order to be established. Today, Iran’s opposition lacks a leadership core, a united front and a revolutionary program. But the chaos engulfing Iran is maturing into a revolutionary crisis in which every sector, class and ethnic group is being drawn into the political maelstrom-a crisis that may present a rare opportunity for the opposition to break through and seize power. Irrespective of the outcome, Iran is advancing to higher stage in its long journey to develop its own unique democratic experiment. Even if the Khamenei regime survives, Iran cannot return to the status quo. The decisive hour of confrontation for Iran’s new democratic movement may come sooner rather than later. 2010 could well be Iran’s year of living dangerously.*****

Democrats in final push to screw-up healthcare

2010-01-05T05:04:00.000-08:00

Donna Smith WASHINGTON

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A final push to deliver a sweeping U.S. healthcare overhaul to President Barack Obama begins this week as House of Representatives Democratic leaders prepare for difficult negotiations with the Senate.

Healthcare Reform

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is set to meet on Tuesday with House committee chairmen to map out strategy and set their priorities for landmark healthcare reform legislation that the congressional Democrats hope to deliver to Obama within weeks.

The House passed its healthcare bill on November 7. The Senate passed its bill on December 24. There are some significant differences between the bills that must be ironed out as Democrats merge them into a single bill that the House and Senate would have to pass before sending it to Obama to sign.

Healthcare reform is Obama's top legislative priority. Republicans solidly oppose it and have threatened new procedural roadblocks in the Senate to slow things down.

Negotiations between the House and Senate Democrats must resolve differences between the two bills over abortion funding restrictions, new taxes to pay for the overhaul, and whether to include a new government-run health insurance program.

Democrats hope to secure final congressional passage perhaps before Obama delivers the annual State of the Union address to Congress later this month or in early February.

That would allow Obama and his fellow Democrats to turn to other issues ahead of November's congressional elections in which they will try to protect their majorities in the House and Senate. These include trying to lower the U.S. unemployment rate and to address national security concerns following the botched December 25 bombing attempt aboard a U.S. airliner.

The stakes are high for businesses, the $2.5 trillion U.S. healthcare industry, Democrats and Obama. Businesses that provide coverage to employees have been struggling to cope with steadily rising insurance costs. Polls show that the public is wary of the proposed overhaul and what it could mean for their household budgets and medical coverage.

Democrats are anxious to settle their differences, deliver a major legislative victory to Obama and begin highlighting the benefits of healthcare reform, which aims to rein in rapidly increasing costs and would prohibit insurance companies from excluding people from coverage due to pre-existing conditions.

'AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE'

Democratic leaders could bypass a formal conference between the House and the Senate, shutting out Republicans and avoiding potential partisan procedural roadblocks, to work behind closed doors in concert with the White House to strike a compromise.

"Millions of Americans are looking forward to new tax credits to help them afford the healthcare coverage and new rules putting patients ahead of insurance companies," said Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, who played a major role in writing the Senate version of the bill.

"That's exactly what health reform will do and we are eager to get our reform bill to the president's desk as quickly as possible," Baucus added.

Democrats have little room to maneuver as they strive to maintain the 60 votes in the 100-seat Senate and at least 218 in the 435-seat House that are needed to pass the legislation.

"I think they will get this done," said Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, a healthcare reform advocacy group. "There are some difficult issues, for sure, that need to be worked through."

One key difference is over a proposed new government-run insurance program to compete with private insurers. The House bill includes it. The Senate bill does not.

With conservative Democratic Senator Ben Nelson and independent Senator Joe Lieberman threatening to withdraw their support if the final bill includes this so-called public option, the proposal is unlikely to be included.

Democrats also must resolve differences over abortion language. The Senate bill includes a compromise between Nelson, an abortion opponent, and abortion rights supporters that prohibits public money from being used for abortions.

The House bill includes even more restrictive language backed by a bloc of Democrats who have vowed to withhold support from the final bill if it is changed.

There also are large differences over financing of the bill. The House version includes a 5.4 percent surtax on millionaires. The Senate bill includes a tax on high-cost health plans, a provision opposed by labor unions. The Senate bill also increases the Medicare payroll tax on high earners.

There also are a lot of similarities between the House and Senate bills. Both would create exchanges in which people without employer-sponsored coverage as well as small businesses could shop for insurance. The Senate bill calls for state-based exchanges while the House calls for a national exchange.

Factbox

Major differences in U.S. Senate, House health bills

1:05am EST

WTF U.K.?

2010-01-05T04:37:00.000-08:00

Gordon Brown's official spokesman has admitted that British intelligence officials did not pass any information on the alleged Detroit plane bomber to US authorities.

It follows reports that the White House accused the spokesman making a "mistake" when he appeared to confirm the UK told the US that Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab had links to extremists over a year ago.

During a briefing to journalists, the Prime Minister's spokesman said: "There is no suggestion the UK passed intelligence to the US that they did not act on."
Sky's political correspondent Joey Jones said: "It's not normal practice for government officials to discuss the way their share intelligence with other countries.
"It is plain that the Gordon Brown's official spokesman should not have allowed himself to be drawn into such sensitive territory."
The alleged bomber, 23, is in US custody after apparently trying to trigger a blast on an aeroplane approaching Detroit from Amsterdam.
He has been charged with trying to blow up the plane by setting off explosives stitched into his underwear.
The alleged attempt failed when he was stopped by passengers.
Home Secretary Alan Johnson will make a statement to MPs about the attempted bombing at 3:30 this afternoon.

Global Threats

2010-01-04T15:37:00.000-08:00

Although President Obama spent much of his first year in office trying to revolutionize the U.S. health care system, the external world often inconveniently intruded. As the attempted Christmas mass murder of passengers flying from Amsterdam to Detroit demonstrates, our adversaries have not been idle. Nor will they be idle in 2010.
A critical question, therefore, is whether the president has learned anything during his first year, or whether he will continue pursuing national security policies that leave us at greater risk. The outlook is not promising. Too often, Mr. Obama seems either uninterested in the global threats we face, unpersuaded that they constitute dangers to the country, or content simply to blame his predecessors.
When he does see international threats, his instinct is to negotiate with them rather than defeat them. Facing totalitarian menaces in 1939, British politician Harold Nicolson said of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and his closest aide that they "stepped into diplomacy with the bright faithfulness of two curates entering a pub for the first time; they did not observe the differences between a social gathering and a rough-house; nor did they realize that the tough guys assembled did not speak or understand their language."

Withdrawing from Iraq, mixed signals in Afghanistan (surge troops in 2010, but begin withdrawing in 2011), and public defenders for airplane bombers is a prescription for failure.

Nicolson could be writing today about Mr. Obama. Consider some of the issues lying ahead:
1. The global war on terror: Despite the administration's verbal about-face on the effectiveness of our antiterrorism efforts within days of the unsuccessful Christmas attack, its fundamental approach remains flawed. Mr. Obama himself has led the charge in shifting from a "Global War on Terror" toward a law-enforcement paradigm, continuing, for example, to press for closing the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. Even today, the administration is treating would-be bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as a criminal rather than an enemy combatant, thus losing the chance to gain enormously valuable information on al Qaeda activities and plans.
Al Qaeda-style terrorism has never been susceptible to law-enforcement methods. It is not simply a crime like bank robbery, which is why military and intelligence agencies have undertaken much of our antiterrorist activity since Sept. 11, 2001. And it is why sidelining them now can have potentially catastrophic consequences for the United States and our allies.
Mr. Obama should articulate some grand strategy for countering terrorism. Withdrawing from Iraq, mixed signals in Afghanistan (surge troops in 2010, but begin withdrawing in 2011), and public defenders for airplane bombers is a prescription for failure. Indeed, the Christmas near miss demonstrates that more, not less, attention must be devoted to al Qaeda in Yemen and elsewhere, such as Somalia.
2. Nuclear proliferation: Iran and North Korea, the two gravest nuclear proliferation threats, have so far spurned Mr. Obama's "open hand." This is truly remarkable, since both rogue states have skillfully used prior negotiations to their advantage, buying time to advance their nuclear and ballistic missile efforts, and extracting tangible economic and political benefits from America and others. Accordingly, their current unwillingness to talk shows they think they can extract an even higher price from Mr. Obama before even sitting down, a truly discouraging sign.
In fact, neither Iran nor North Korea will be negotiated out of the nuclear weapons programs (or their chemical or biological weapons, which are not even on the horizon for discussion). Moreover, we cannot be content merely trying to "contain" nuclear rogue states, since so doing simply leaves the initiative entirely with them, given their asymmetric advantage of threatening or actually using their weapons. These countries, each for its own peculiar reasons, are not subject to the Cold War deterrence principals. Still worse, the risks of further proliferation are both palpable and threatening if Pyongyang and Tehran keep their nuclear capabilities. There is simply no sign Mr. Obama understands these ever-growing risks.
Instead, Mr. Obama is negotiating drastic nuclear weapons reductions with Russia, even as he eviscerates our missile defense capabilities, apparently believing unilateral strategic arms cutbacks will entrance Moscow and persuade rogue proliferators to dismantle their programs. This is naive and dangerous.
3. Global governance. Although the Copenhagen Conference on climate change failed to achieve anything like its sponsors' objectives, their under lying push for greater international control over the economies of the world's nations, and their tax and regulatory systems, continues unabated. In fact, as the president's speeches--especially those given at the United Nations in September--demonstrate, he entirely buys into the notion of "global governance," with the United States in time subordinating elements of its sovereignty to international authority.
This worrisome predilection has only been whetted by the failure at Copenhagen, and we can anticipate far more activity in 2010 and beyond, not only on climate change but in a host of areas traditionally considered "domestic" policy (such as abortion, firearms control and the death penalty).
Frustrated by their failures in the United States, the American left has increasingly resorted to international treaties and conferences to advance its agenda. Mr. Obama's administration is filled with people who share that worldview, including the president himself.
In short, if you were concerned in 2009 about America's increasing international vulnerability and its decreasing global influence, you will find little to celebrate in the coming year. Our adversaries sense weakness across the board in Washington, and they will not hesitate to take advantage of it.
Importantly, whatever national security decisions Mr. Obama makes in 2010 will undeniably be his, as the passage of time diminishes his ability to blame President Bush and the situation he inherited. Happy New Year, Mr. President.

December 1st month without US combat death in Iraq

2010-01-01T08:48:00.000-08:00

BAGHDAD – December was the first month since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq nearly seven years ago in which no U.S. forces died in combat in the country.

Gen. Ray Odierno called it a significant milestone and said it speaks to how the violence in Iraq has diminished. Odierno is the commanding general in Iraq.
There were three U.S. troops who died in December as a result of non-combat related incidents.
According to an Associated Press count, 149 U.S. troops died in Iraq in 2009. That includes combat-related deaths and those not related to fighting.
That's the lowest number of U.S. deaths for a year since the Iraq war began in 2003.

North Korea's Kim Jong Il Resolves To Be Less Dirtbaggy In 2010

2010-01-01T08:35:00.000-08:00

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea reaffirmed its commitment to a nuclear-free Korean peninsula in a New Year's message Friday, brightening the prospect that Pyongyang may rejoin the stalled international talks aimed at ending its nuclear weapons programs.

"It is the consistent stand of the DPRK to establish a lasting peace system on the Korean Peninsula and make it nuclear-free through dialogue and negotiations," the message said, referring to the country by its official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

Pyongyang's Jan. 1 statement, examined annually for clues to the regime's policies for the coming year, also said it will strive to develop good relations and friendship with other countries, while calling for an end to hostile relations with the United States.

The North has long called for Washington to end hostility toward the regime and said it developed nuclear weapons to deter a U.S. attack. Washington has repeatedly said it has no intention of invading the communist country.

North Korea traditionally marks New Year's Day with a joint editorial by the country's three major newspapers representing its communist party, military and youth militia force. The editorial was carried by the North's official Korean Central News Agency.

The North's latest commitment came as Washington is trying to coax Pyongyang to return to the international disarmament talks.

The two countries agreed on the need to resume the negotiations during a trip to Pyongyang by President Barack Obama's special envoy in early December, but North Korea did not make a firm commitment on when it would rejoin the talks.

North Korea quit the disarmament talks last year in anger over international criticism of its long-range rocket launch, which was denounced as a test of its missile technology. The regime then conducted a nuclear test and test-fired a series of ballistic missiles.

In 2007, North Korea agreed to dismantle its nuclear program in exchange for aid and other concessions from South Korea, China, Japan, Russia and the U.S., but the process has stalled over how to verify its accounting of its past atomic activities.

The editorial also appealed to North Korean soldiers to unite around leader Kim Jong Il and remain vigilant to thwart any surprise attacks by the enemy.

It urged the country's 1.1 million-strong military, the backbone of Kim's totalitarian rule, to "defend with our very lives the leadership of revolution headed" by Kim.

The lengthy message also said Pyongyang remains committed to improving its relations with South Korea, urging the South to refrain from taking actions that may aggravate the confrontation and tension.

"Unshakable is our stand that we will improve the north-south relations and open the way for national reunification, said the message.

The two Koreas are still technically at war because their 1950-53 Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty. Their relations soured badly after conservative South Korean President Lee Myung-bak took office in early 2008 with a tough policy on the North, with their navies engaging in a brief but bloody skirmish in November.

The latest charm offensive came weeks after the North threatened South Korean ships with possible attack by designating a firing zone along their disputed sea border, where the deadly November clash erupted.

The western maritime boundary has long been considered a flash point between the two Koreas because the North does not recognize a line the United Nations unilaterally drew at the end of the Korean War. Pyongyang claims the actual border is further south.

The dispute led to deadly skirmishes in 1999, 2002 and on Nov. 10. In the latest clash, ships from the two sides exchanged fire in the disputed waters, leaving one North Korean sailor dead and three others wounded, according to the South.

Dumbass Media Quotes of 2009

2010-01-01T08:17:00.000-08:00

by Human Events

The Media Research Center has released its annual list of outrageous media quotes. Here are the winners and runner-ups in each category.

The Coronation of the Messiah Award for Fawning Inaugural Coverage Winner: “We know that wind can make a cold day feel colder, but can national pride make a freezing day feel warmer? It seems to be the case because regardless of the final crowd number estimates, never have so many people shivered so long with such joy. From above, even the seagulls must have been awed by the blanket of humanity.”— ABC’s Bill Weir on “World News,” January 20.

Runners-Up:

“What a day it was. It may take days or years to really absorb the significance of what happened to America today.... When he [Barack Obama] finally emerged, he seemed, even in this throng, so solitary, somber, perhaps already feeling the weight of the world, even before he was transformed into the leader of the free world.... The mass flickering of cell phone cameras on the Mall seemed like stars shining back at him.”— NBC’s Andrea Mitchell on the January 20 “Nightly News.”

“You know what it [Obama’s inauguration] reminds me of? It reminds me of the Velvet Revolution. I was in Prague when that happened. And Vaclav Havel was a generational leader and was in the square in Prague and the streets were filled with joy. And we’re not overthrowing a Communist regime here, obviously, but an unpopular President is leaving and people have been waiting for this moment.”— NBC’s Tom Brokaw during live coverage prior to Obama’s inauguration, January 20.

Master of His Domain Award for Obama Puffery Winner: “The legislative achievements have been stupendous—the $789 billion stimulus bill, the budget plan that is still being hammered out (and may, ultimately, include the next landmark safety-net program, universal health insurance). There has also been a cascade of new policies to address the financial crisis—massive interventions in the housing and credit markets, a market-based plan to buy the toxic assets that many banks have on their books, a plan to bail out the auto industry and a strict new regulatory regime proposed for Wall Street. Obama has also completely overhauled foreign policy, from Cuba to Afghanistan. ‘In a way, Obama’s 100 days is even more dramatic than Roosevelt’s,’ says Elaine Kamarck of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. ‘Roosevelt only had to deal with a domestic crisis. Obama has had to overhaul foreign policy as well, including two wars. And that’s really the secret of why this has seemed so spectacular.’”—Time’s Joe Klein in the magazine’s May 4 cover story on Barack Obama’s first 100 days as President.

Runners-Up:

“It didn’t take long for Barack Obama—for all his youth and inexperience—to get acclimated to his new role as the calming leader of a country in crisis.... Rookie jitters? Far from it.... For the past three months, Obama has spoken in firm, yet soothing tones. Sometimes he has used a just-folks approach to identify with economically struggling citizens. He has displayed wonkish tendencies, too, appearing much like the college instructor he once was while discussing the intricacies of the economic collapse. He has engaged in witty banter, teasing lawmakers, staffers, journalists and citizens alike. He has struck a statesmanlike stance, calling for a renewed partnership between the United States and its allies....”—AP Washington correspondent Liz Sidoti in an April 25 dispatch.

“There were ghosts in that chamber tonight, the other Presidents who tried to reform the healthcare system and failed. From Teddy Roosevelt, to Harry Truman, to Bill Clinton who came to Congress 16 years ago this month with his plan.... There was another ghost in the chamber tonight, the spirit of Senator Ted Kennedy, who fought for decades for universal care.... At the end, President Obama sought to draw on the grand rhetorical tradition of President Kennedy and others, trying to summon the country to a great and necessary endeavor.”—ABC’s Terry Moran reporting on Obama’s speech to Congress on “Nightline,” September 9.

The Crush Rush Award for Loathing Limbaugh Winner: “The type of female that does like Rush is the same type of woman that falls in love with prisoners. You know what I mean? They like Richard Ramirez or—Squeaky Fromme is a good example. I think Charles Manson’s—Eva Braun, Hitler’s girlfriend. That is exactly the type of woman that responds really well to Rush. And there will be some Eva Brauns, Squeaky Frommes out there that will respond really well to this cattle call right now.”—Actress/activist Janeane Garofalo on MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann,” February 26.

Runners-Up:

“Limbaugh’s perceived racist diatribes are too many to name but here’s a sampling: He once declared that [words on screen] ‘Slavery built the South. I’m not saying we should bring it back, I’m just saying it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark,’ said Limbaugh.”—CNN’s Rick Sanchez promoting a made-up quote on the 3 p.m. hour of “Newsroom,” October 12.

“Rush Limbaugh is beginning to look more and more like Mr. Big, and at some point somebody’s going to jam a CO2 pellet into his head and he’s going to explode like a giant blimp. That day may come. Not yet, but we’ll be there to watch.”—Chris Matthews on MSNBC’s “Morning Meeting,” October 13.

Damn Those Conservatives Award Winner: “The Republicans lie! They want to see you dead! They’d rather make money off your dead corpse! They kind of like it when that woman has cancer and they don’t have anything for her.”—Ed Schultz, host of MSNBC’s “The Ed Show,” September 23.

Runners-Up:

“…the total mindless, morally bankrupt, knee-jerk, fascistic hatred—without which Michelle Malkin would just be a big mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick on it.”—“Countdown” host Keith Olbermann talking about the conservative columnist and author, October 13.

“The tenets of the Republican Party are amazing and they seem warm and welcome. But when I watch it be applied—like you didn’t have to go much further than the Republican National Convention.... It literally look[s] like Nazi Germany.”—CNN host/comedian D.L. Hughley to RNC Chairman Michael Steele on “D.L. Hughley Breaks the News,” February 28.

The Poison Tea Pot Award for Smearing the Anti-Obama Rabble Winner:

CNN analyst David Gergen: “Republicans are pretty much in disarray.... They have not yet come up with a compelling alternative, one that has gained popular recognition. So-"

Anchor Anderson Cooper: “Teabagging. They’ve got teabagging.”

Gergen: “Well, they’ve got the teabagging.... [But] Republicans have got a way—they still haven’t found their voice, Anderson. They’re still—this happens to a minority party after it’s lost a couple of bad elections, but they’re searching for their voice.”

Cooper: “It’s hard to talk when you’re teabagging.”

-- CNN’s Anderson Cooper on “Anderson Cooper 360,” April 14. (“Teabagging” is a vulgar slang term for a certain variety of oral sex. Cooper later apologized.)

Runners-Up:

“Let’s be very honest about what this is about. It’s not about bashing Democrats, it’s not about taxes, they have no idea what the Boston tea party was about, they don’t know their history at all. This is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up. That is nothing but a bunch of teabagging rednecks.”—Actress/activist Janeane Garofalo on MSNBC’s “Countdown,” April 16.

“You know, Kyra, this is a party for Obama bashers. I have to say that this is not entirely representative of everybody in America.... It’s anti-government, anti-CNN, since this is highly promoted by the right wing conservative network, Fox. And since I can’t really hear much more and I think this is not really family viewing, I’ll toss it back to you.”—CNN Correspondent Susan Roesgen during live coverage of the Tea Party protests, “CNN Newsroom,” April 15.

Spread the Wealth Award for Socialist Sermonizing Winner: “Why not just nationalize the banks?... People are angry. There’s so much taxpayer money going into the banks. Why shouldn’t the government—why shouldn’t you just fire the executives who wrecked these banks in the first place and tanked the world’s financial system in the process?”—ABC’s Terry Moran interviewing President Obama for “Nightline,” February 10.

Runners-Up"
“I don’t think that left to its own devices, capitalism moves along smoothly and everyone gets treated fairly in the process. Capitalism is like a child: if you want the child to grow up free and productive, somebody’s got to look over the shoulder of that child.”—PBS host Tavis Smiley in a Time magazine symposium on “The Future of Capitalism,” May 25 issue.

“In Britain, a government takeover of a bank last year helped to temporarily calm fears in the financial markets there. Nationalization may have a psychological impact as well, and Uncle Sam wrapping his arms around failing banks in this country might provide a big dose of confidence for the American consumer.”—Katie Couric on the February 19 “CBS Evening News,” talking about the Obama administration possibly taking over American banks.

“We’re the only industrialized democracy that doesn’t cover every citizen. That is immoral.... To be a country this wealthy and be the only industrialized democracy that hasn’t figured out how to cover everyone.”—Time senior political analyst Mark Halperin, ex-ABC News political director, talking about health insurance coverage on CNN’s “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” August 6.

Long Live Camelot Award for Lionizing Ted Kennedy Winner: “Mary Jo wasn’t a right-wing talking point or a negative campaign slogan.... We don’t know how much Kennedy was affected by her death, or what she’d have thought about arguably being a catalyst for the most successful Senate career in history.... [One wonders what] Mary Jo Kopechne would have had to say about Ted’s death, and what she’d have thought of the life and career that are being (rightfully) heralded. Who knows—maybe she’d feel it was worth it.”— Discover magazine deputy web editor Melissa Lafsky, who formerly worked on the New York Times’s Freakonomics blog, writing at the Huffington Post, August 27.

Runners-Up:

“The heavens were weeping for Teddy Kennedy today.”—Andrea Mitchell noting the rainy weather for Kennedy’s funeral, August 29 “NBC Nightly News.”

“America mourns the lion of the Senate.... There is, of course, no royal family in this country. The Kennedys, perhaps, the closest we’ve ever had.... For nearly half a century in the Senate, Ted Kennedy spoke for people who had no voice — the poor and the disabled, children and the elderly.”—Katie Couric kicking off the August 26 “CBS Evening News.”

Brian Williams: “We thought one way to look at his life might be the way some people looked at him today, the way filmmaker Frank Capra might have looked at life: What would it have been like without a Ted Kennedy?”... Reporter Kevin Tibbles: “Many say Ted Kennedy’s passion was people, and tonight they have lost a champion.”—“NBC Nightly News”, August 26.

Oops: No Rise In Killer Carbon Dioxide In 160 Years

2010-01-01T07:09:00.000-08:00

Written by: Evrviglnt

My first reaction is to ask whether this kind of information would have seen daylight a year ago when the AGW carbonshirts were blackballing scientists who deviated from the political line:

ScienceDaily (Dec. 31, 2009) — Most of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activity does not remain in the atmosphere, but is instead absorbed by the oceans and terrestrial ecosystems. In fact, only about 45 percent of emitted carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere.

Oops.

In contradiction to some recent studies, [Wolfgang Knorr of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol] finds that the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide has not increased either during the past 150 years or during the most recent five decades.

Out falls another brick in the wall.

But let’s ponder this – can things get so bad on the Anthropogenic Global Warming front that Algore must come out and defend it against a living, breathing skeptic? Is there any given situation or condition where Algore mounts the stage and takes on critics? Whenever that is, it’s got to blossom soon because the dark forces behind AGW skepticism are scoring body blow after body blow. The polls are already trending hard against the concocted crisis and now politicians are starting to run – witness the pullback now on the Boxer/Kerry cap & trade legislation due to come to the House in 2010. What is probably more interesting to look for now is the long term damage wrought by the absurd claims of AGW cheerleaders. The credibility of both science and the average environmentalist is damaged, and we can only hope the wound is deep enough to reach the shame nerve.

Consequently, if we are embarked on a cooling trend, a global cooling event is far more devastating than global warming. Freezing temperatures becoming more common around the globe means less arable land, water locked up in ice and conditions far more inhospitable to man. If anyone still thinks we can control the earth’s temperatures like pulling levers on a wall, then let’s get to it. Government ought to be financing SUVs, farm animals and maybe breaching a few volcanoes for good measure. It’s about life and death – why wait to see if we’re right?

Hong Kong: Pass The Democracy Please

2010-01-01T06:15:00.000-08:00

HONG KONG — Thousands of Hong Kong residents marched to the Chinese government's liaison office on Friday demanding that Beijing grant full democracy to the semiautonomous financial hub.
Chanting "One man, one vote to choose our leader" and clutching signs reading "Democracy now," the demonstrators set off from a crowded street in the heart of the Central financial district.
However, the relatively low turnout for the New Year's Day protest — police said some 4,600 people took part — showed that Hong Kong's political opposition faces an uphill battle as it tries to re-ignite the local democracy movement, which has been overshadowed by economic issues. Five pro-democracy legislators plan to resign later this month, hoping to turn the special elections they will trigger into a referendum on democracy.
At their peak, pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong drew hundreds of thousands of people. In July 2003, half a million marched to protest a national security bill that many considered draconian, forcing the Hong Kong government to shelve the measure.
The former British colony returned to Chinese rule in 1997 under a separate political system that promises Western-style civil liberties. Democracy is promised in Hong Kong's constitution, but the Chinese government ruled in 2007 that the territory can't directly elect its leader until 2017 and its legislature until 2020.
Hong Kong's current leader was chosen by an exclusive committee stacked with Beijing's allies, and only half of the territory's 60 legislators are elected, with the rest picked by special interest groups.
The protesters Friday said Beijing's timetable for democracy is too slow. Hong Kong activists have argued for years that the wealthy city of 7 million people is mature enough to choose its own leaders.
"Hong Kong should get democracy sooner. The sophistication, the worldliness of Hong Kong people has already reached the level where universal suffrage can be allowed," participant Joseph Fung said.
The Hong Kong government had no immediate comment on the protest. A woman who answered the phone at the Chinese government liaison office said no one was available for comment.

Iran's Mousavi Says He Is 'Ready for Martyrdom'

2010-01-01T05:54:00.000-08:00

TEHRAN, Iran — Iran's opposition leader on Friday pledged to remain defiant in the face of new threats — including calls by hard-liners for his execution — and said he was ready to sacrifice his life in defense of the people's right to hold peaceful protests against the government.
Mir Hossein Mousavi's remarks come after the worst unrest since the immediate aftermath of disputed June presidential election. At least eight people died during anti-government protests Sunday, including Mousavi's nephew.
Iran's state prosecutor on Thursday warned opposition leaders could be put on trial if they don't denounce this week's anti-government protests.
Iranian hard-liners have called for the execution of Mousavi and other opposition figures, while a previously unknown group claimed in an online posting that suicide squads were ready to assassinate opposition leaders should the judiciary fail to punish them within a week.
In one of his strongest statements to date, Mousavi on Friday said he was "ready for martyrdom" — the sacrifice of one's life for a higher cause — and lashed out at the bloody crackdown the authorities are waging against the opposition.
He said the government was making more mistakes by resorting to violence and killings, and that it must accept the people's rights to hold peaceful demonstrations.
"I explicitly and clearly state that an order to execute, murder and imprison (opposition leaders) ... won't resolve the problem," Mousavi said in a statement on his Web site, Kaleme. "I'm not afraid to be one of the martyrs people have offered in the struggle for their just demands."
Iran's internal turmoil has grown increasingly bitter. The confrontation between clerical rulers and their opponents returned to the streets in recent weeks, after a harsh crackdown immediately following the June 12 balloting all but crushed the opposition movement.
One of those killed in clashes between security forces and opposition protesters on Sunday, when Shiite Muslims marked the sacred day of Ashoura, was Mousavi's nephew, Ali Mousavi.
He was buried Wednesday in a hastily organized ceremony that was attended by the opposition leader and other family members. Authorities had taken the body from the hospital earlier in the week in what was seen as an attempt to prevent the funeral from turning into another pro-opposition protest.
Sunday's unrest was followed by two days of pro-government protests Wednesday and Thursday in which crowds chanted calls for the execution of Mousavi, and another opposition figure, Mahdi Karroubi.
Both Mousavi and Karroubi were losing candidates in the June election, in which Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner. The opposition argues the election was rigged and that Ahmadinejad won by fraud.
Some government supporters at the two days of rallies wore white funeral shrouds to symbolize a willingness to die in defense of Iran's clerical rulers. Several hundred turned out for demonstration Thursday in southern Tehran outside the offices of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, state radio reported.
In his statement Friday, Mousavi also denounced hard-liners who he said preached violence from state-funded podiums in the name of Islam.
"Encouraging the killing of people ... is a tragedy carried out by specific individuals and the state TV," he said, adding that efforts to silence the opposition "through arrests, violence and threats," would not succeed.

Obama Grants Interpol Diplomatic Immunity – Ruh Roh!

2009-12-30T10:47:00.000-08:00

By Duane Lester
One of the stories that hit while I was on Christmas/Blizzard ‘09 Part II break concerned a December 17th executive order issued by President Barack Obama.

It reads:

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including section 1 of the International Organizations Immunities Act (22 U.S.C. 288), and in order to extend the appropriate privileges, exemptions, and immunities to the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL), it is hereby ordered that Executive Order 12425 of June 16, 1983, as amended, is further amended by deleting from the first sentence the words “except those provided by Section 2(c), Section 3, Section 4, Section 5, and Section 6 of that Act” and the semicolon that immediately precedes them.

(Emphasis mine, as it is throughout this post.)

Steve Schippert at ThreatsWatch explains what this order does:

It grants INTERPOL (International Criminal Police Organization) a new level of full diplomatic immunity afforded to foreign embassies and select other “International Organizations” as set forth in the United States International Organizations Immunities Act of 1945.

By removing language from President Reagan’s 1983 Executive Order 12425, this international law enforcement body now operates - now operates - on American soil beyond the reach of our own top law enforcement arm, the FBI, and is immune from Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

It gets worse:

Property and assets being immune from search and confiscation means precisely that. Wherever they may be in the United States. This could conceivably include human assets – Americans arrested on our soil by INTERPOL officers.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air suggests Schippert overreaches with his last argument and asks an important question:

American law does not consider people as “assets.” It does mean, though, that Interpol officers would have diplomatic immunity for any lawbreaking conducted in the US at a time when Interpol nations (like Italy) have attempted to try American intelligence agents for their work in the war on terror, a rather interesting double standard.

It also appears to mean that Americans who get arrested on the basis of Interpol work cannot get the type of documentation one normally would get in the discovery process, which is a remarkable reversal from Obama’s declared efforts to gain “due process” for terrorists detained at Gitmo. Does the White House intend to treat Americans worse than the terrorists we’ve captured during wartime?

Here’s a better question: Why would he do such a thing? Why would he write an order elevating a law enforcement agency above the Constitution?

Andy McCarthy at The Corner may be onto something here:

Interpol works closely with international tribunals (such as the International Criminal Court — which the United States has refused to join because of its sovereignty surrendering provisions, though top Obama officials want us in it). It also works closely with foreign courts and law-enforcement authorities (such as those in Europe that are investigating former Bush administration officials for purported war crimes — i.e., for actions taken in America’s defense).

Bob Owens of Confederate Yankee also writes at Pajamas Media. He offers a look at what might be motivating this move:

If President Obama and his radical allies in the Democratic leadership have their way, American soldiers could presumably be brought up on charges as war criminals by enemy nations and marked for arrest and deportation by an international police force on American soil. They would face charges in a foreign land without the constitutional protections they fought and bled to protect. The White House seems to be on the bewildering path of giving al-Qaeda terrorists who murder innocent women and children more legal protection than the very soldiers that risk their lives trying to bring terrorists to justice. The asinine court-martial charges being brought against three Navy SEALs based upon the word of a terrorist they captured suddenly make a sickening kind of sense.

It also stands to reason that Obama’s seeming willingness to put American soldiers’ lives in the hands of a corrupt international community could also be brought to bear against his political enemies. Foreign investigators of dubious intent, and our own left-wing extremists, have long branded officials of the previous administration “war criminals” for actions they’d taken in the war on terror. It is entirely conceivable — perhaps even likely — that these same organizations and enemy governments that went after 25 Israeli government officials through INTERPOL and the ICC would quickly move to indict a wish list of current and former U.S. government officials for alleged “war crimes.” Former President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney would obviously be at the top of such a list of politically motivated suspects, but such a list could just as easily include General David Petraeus, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, congressmen, and senators.

Rick Moran writes:

I would speculate that McCarthy has hit upon the reason; the president may solve the problem of “torture trials” by turning the whole thing over to the International Criminal Court. There are several hands in the Obama foreign policy shop who would support this move, while he would definitely get back in the good graces of his far left base.

But that’s just speculation. Perhaps it’s terrorism related. Maybe he’s just trying to please his European friends.

I’d like to see some others – like Eugene Volohk or Richard Posner – weigh in on this before hitting the panic button.

It’s the hesitance to hit the panic button that makes me mention this post by Jonn Lilyea at This Ain’t Hell:

Basically, the only thing Obama is changing is removing part of a sentence. That sentence refers to text that has to do with import duties on INTERPOL’s stuff they bring into this country and the withdrawal of the text gives them tax exemptions for income they earn here.

Yeah, it’s real riveting stuff. Let’s get outraged about things that are real – Lord knows, Obama does enough real stuff to get angry about.

By Pierre LeGrand
Apparently what is going on is the Thug In Chief and his bastard allies are attempting to remove our ability to question our accusers. After all how can one go about discovery when it is likely that both evidence and witnesses will be scooted behind a impenetrable wall? And who is likely to be the victims of these new International Law Enforcement Thugs in America? Well for sure our military but even worse all the Patriots here in the states. That is specifically against the 6th Amendment to the Constitution but hey what is a bit of paper to a bunch of thugs whose friends once had wet dreams about locking up large swaths of the public for having the wrong thoughts…don’t believe me? Check out this interview with Larry Grathwohl.

Boy is that a fun video or what? Yea Ayers did not get prosecuted, but it was because the left had gotten to the courts prior to these cases and weakened our laws so much that he was released on technicalities.

Obama and his allies are right this very moment attacking swiftly on all fronts…not with half measures designed to win your approval but with full on outright lawlessness that depends on your not believing it is happening. Based on the reaction of Republicans in Congress the left has their opponents pegged. I would like to say that the left has their enemies pegged but the mainstream Republicans are no one’s enemies. They want to be loved. Obama is at war and the Republicans want to be loved. Be scared.

The Health Care Battle, Monkeys, and wrenches

2009-12-30T06:09:00.000-08:00

By Nan Swift
Even though Congress isn't in town this week, and many people using these normally carefree days between Christmas and New Year's to spend time with family and recharge batteries for 2010, we're hearing from many folks who want to continue the fight against the government takeover of healthcare right through the holidays! Everyone is wondering, what can I do this week? Here are three things you can do to keep up the pressure:

Visit: visit the local district offices of your Senators and Representatives. Did they vote the right way? Excellent. Thank them. They need your support. Did their voting on healthcare reform trend socialist? Make sure they know you oppose the plan, you oppose rushing a decision of this magnitude, and that you will work for, fund, and urge your friends to vote for their opponent come election time. This is a good group activity and you can bring hand written letters for the district office staff elaborating your opposition. This could be the biggest thing that happens in that office all month and they won't forget any time soon.
Vigil: especially during such a slow news week, holding a candlelight vigil outside a district office or in a symbolic spot in your town could be big news and really help send home your message to your legislators.
Letters to the Editor: Letters to the editor are a great way to communicate both to your legislators and to other people in your community. Letters to the editor are among the top most frequently read parts of the paper and Congressmen read them to get a feel for what their constituents are thinking.

And don't forget, when trying to organize something in your area, a visit, a vigil, a letter writing party - use the FreedomWorks Ning site to communicate with others nearby who would love to get involved.
Thanks for all your hard work, but do take a moment for some hot chocolate. The fight will still be there when you get back.

Why Iran Sucks: Iranian police vow to crush protesters with no mercy

2009-12-30T05:54:00.000-08:00

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iran's police chief threatened Wednesday to show "no mercy" in crushing any new opposition protests and said more than 500 demonstrators have been arrested in the wake of this week's deadly clashes.

At least eight people were killed in street violence Sunday, the country's worst unrest since the aftermath of the disputed presidential election on June 12. One of those killed was the nephew of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi, who was buried Wednesday in a hastily organized ceremony.

Authorities had taken his body from the hospital earlier in the week in what was seen as an attempt to prevent the funeral from turning into another pro-opposition protest. Mousavi and other family members attended the funeral for Ali Mousavi, the official IRNA news agency reported.

Tens of thousands of hard-liner government supporters turned out for state-sponsored rallies Wednesday to try to show strength against the pro-reform opposition movement. At rallies in the cities of Shiraz, Arak, Qom, Tehran and several others, they chanted "Death to Opponents" of the Islamic establishment. The government gave all civil servants and employees a day off to attend the rallies and organized buses to transport groups of schoolchildren and supporters from outlying rural areas to the protests.

Police chief Gen. Ismail Ahmadi Moghaddam made a harsh threat to protesters to stay off the streets.

"In dealing with previous protests, police showed leniency. But given that these opponents are seeking to topple (the ruling system), there will be no mercy," Moghaddam said, according to IRNA. "We will take severe action. The era of tolerance is over. Anyone attending such rallies will be crushed."

He said more than 500 protesters who took part in Sunday's demonstrations have been arrested but the number may be higher since hardline Basij militiamen and intelligence agents may have apprehended more people on their own.

There are increasing fears Mousavi could also be arrested, following detentions a number of prominent activists and the sister of Nobel peace laureate Shirin Ebadi.

The government has also limited the movement of a leading opposition figure, Mahdi Karroubi, by refusing to protect him when he leaves his home.

Karroubi and Mousavi were the two defeated reformist candidates in the disputed June election, which set off the worst unrest in Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Authorities are also tightly restricting media coverage of street rallies, Internet access in the country is sporadic, as are cellphone and text messaging services.

Sunday's deadly protests coincided with Ashoura, the most solemn day of the year for Shiite Muslims. The observance commemorates the 7th-century death in battle of one of Shiite Islam's most beloved saints, and it conveys a message of sacrifice in the face of repression.

Hard-liners are especially furious that some of the protesters insulted Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, casting aside a taboo on personal criticism of the leader. The government has said the protesters are a tiny minority, and accused the U.S. and Britain of organizing the opposition.

The hard-line criticism has become increasingly vocal, with some activists threatening to take the law into their own hands.

The arrests, along with the tough criticism of the U.S. and Britain, added to rising tensions with the West, which is threatening to impose tough new sanctions over Iran's suspect nuclear program and has criticized the violent crackdown on anti-government protesters.

On Wednesday the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay urged the government to keep security forces from using excessive force. She said she was "shocked by the upsurge in deaths, injuries and arrests" and stressed the people have the right to peacefully protest without being beaten and thrown into jail.

China shows no tolerance for dissidence

2009-12-29T08:21:00.000-08:00

BEIJING, Dec. 29 (UPI) -- China may have deservedly earned all the international accolades for its dazzling economic achievements, but two recent developments show its Communist regime is nowhere near winning similar praise for tolerating political dissidence or challenge to its authority in any form.

In the first instance, China, going against pleas and urgings from around the world, handed an 11-year prison sentence to Liu Xiaobo, the country's widely respected ardent supporter of democracy and freedom of speech.

In an equally disturbing move, China convinced Cambodia to deport 20 Uighurs who had fled to that country for political asylum to escape the crackdown on their fellow Turkic-speaking minority members by Chinese authorities for the ethnic riots last July in the far northwest Xinjiang-Uighur region.

The 53-year-old Liu's trial in a Beijing people's court last week on subversion charges lasted only about three hours. His wife and foreign diplomats were not allowed to attend the proceedings, which preceded his Friday sentencing on charges of "inciting subversion of state power."

The charges against Liu, who has been politically active since the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy protest in Beijing, resulted from articles posted on the Internet and jointly authoring the "Charter 08" petition against one-party rule and urging human rights and free speech.

The Washington Post, quoting a relative, reported that at the trial, Liu's lawyers were allowed only 14 minutes of speaking time.

"Liu has been engaged in agitation activities, such as spreading of rumors and defaming of the government, aimed at subversion of the state and overthrowing the socialism system in recent years," according to a police statement reported by China's state-run Xinhua news agency.

Human Rights Watch in New York said Liu, a prolific writer, has been detained, arrested and sentenced repeatedly for peaceful political activities since the late 1980s.

HRW's Sophie Richardson, calling the trial a "travesty of justice," said its only purpose was "to dress up naked political repression in the trappings of legal proceedings" against non-existent crimes.

China's response was that the international calls for Liu's release were "gross interference" in its internal affairs. A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said those expressing such concerns should respect the country's judicial sovereignty.

Commenting on the former university lecturer's prison sentence, Rebecca MacKinnon, a fellow at the Open Society Institute and co-founder of GlobalVoicesOnline.org, told the Post: "It certainly seems to reflect a high level of sensitivity and very low level of tolerance."

There had been expectations among other Chinese dissidents that some of the reforms in recent years would lead to political modernization in step with the country's economic modernization, the Post report said.

U.S. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley was quoted as saying: "As far as we can tell, this man's crime was simply signing a piece of paper that aspires to a more open and participatory form of government. That is not a crime."

In the incident relating to the Uighurs' deportation from Cambodia, China also said it was an internal matter as the 20 Uighurs were suspected of committing criminal offences, and urged the outside world not to make irresponsible remarks, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said the "Chinese citizens" had broken the laws of both China and Cambodia by illegally crossing the border and that Cambodia had acted according to its immigration law.

"China is a country under the rule of law. Judicial authorities will deal with these people's illegal criminal activities in accordance with the law and safeguard their legitimate rights," Jiang said.

It is not clear what fate awaits the deported Uighurs, but last Friday a Chinese court sentenced five more people to death, bringing to 22 the total condemned to die for the July ethnic riots. The five were part of a new group of 22 suspects tried by a court in Urumqi, capital of the region where the July riots killed about 200 people. The others were sentenced from 10 years to life in prison.

The July riots involved the minority Muslims Uighurs and the majority Han Chinese. Chinese officials have said most of the victims were Han Chinese. Tensions between the two groups have been simmering for a long time as the Uighurs resent being ruled by the Hans.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang, commenting on whether the deportation of Uighurs was linked to China's assistance to Cambodia, said both countries have maintained a comprehensive and cooperative partnership. "We provide assistance to Cambodia in line with our own capacity and without any strings attached," Xinhua quoted her as saying.

However, two days after the 20 Uighurs were deported, China signed 14 business deals with the Cambodian government worth about $1 billion, The New York Times reported.

15 Dead in Iran, Ol Bammy Plays Golf in Hawaii

2009-12-29T07:13:00.000-08:00

Posted by Gregory of Yardale
Doesn't it just suck how those inconsiderate Iranian pro-Democracy demonstrators keep getting murdered? Don't they know that Obama is trying to have a nice family vacation? Don't they know that smart diplomacy is working?
Stop dying, you cowards! You're making Dear Reader look bad!
Update: Obama read a brief statement off a Teleprompter criticizing the Iranian regime. Now, off to the gym Golf Course.
Update: Dear Reader springs into action:
6a00d8341d896453ef0120a7873bc0970b-800wi.jpg

A half-hour after President Obama vowed to catch the terrorists behind a plot to blow up a plane on Christmas, he arrived at 10:40 a.m. at the Luana Hills Country Club, where a golf course winds through a rain forest, the pool reports.

But that's all right. I mean, it's not like anyone ever criticized the president for playing golf as America was at war with terrorists.
Yeah, they're a bunch of effin' hypocrites.

Flight 253 Plotters Were Released from Club Gitmo in 2007

2009-12-29T06:55:00.000-08:00

Posted by Gregory of Yardale

Ruh-Roh.

Two of the four leaders allegedly behind the al Qaeda plot to blow up a Northwest Airlines passenger jet over Detroit were released by the U.S. from the Guantanamo prison in November, 2007, according to American officials and Department of Defense documents. Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for the Northwest bombing in a Monday statement that vowed more attacks on Americans.

Yeah, let's move those poor innocent victims of American oppression to Illinois and give them civilian trials with full Constitutional Rights. That'll teach Al Qaeda to mess with us!

Obama's Image: What a Difference a Year Makes

2009-12-28T07:56:00.000-08:00

By Ed Lasky
Almost a year has passed since January 20, 2009 -- when the waters of the ocean no longer rose and America began to heal from the depredations of Republicans. Barack Obama has been our president for that long, and the people have started to wise up.

The light that shines on Barack Obama as president has reflected back an image that bears very little similarity to the iconic visage that floated above us all in 2008. Why has Barack Obama betrayed so many allies, broken so many promises, thrown so many pledges and people under the bus?

One simple aphorism (paraphrasing Winston Churchill) can explain it all. Barack Obama is no longer a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Much about his past remains murky, but faced with the need to govern, he has given the American people plenty of evidence of his nature...if only they will look.

Obama is a cynic wrapped in a hypocrite inside a bully.

This comes as a shock to many, who are dismayed to find that he is "just a politician," as Reverend Wright, Jr. (who knows him so well) called him back in 2008. But Wright was being all too kind and generous to his future former parishioner (Wright followed a long and ever-growing line of people trampled by Barack Obama's rise.)

But Barack Obama is far more than just a politician. We all swallow a lot from politicians; we know that many pander and narrowcast, changing their message to suit their audience. But Obama expressly campaigned as a man who would not do this. He was the candidate of hope and change -- he would bring a big broom to sweep clean the Augean Stables known as Washington, D.C. He called forth the better angels of our nature (hat tip: Honest Abe Lincoln, one of the truly honest politicians from Illinois) and tapped into a deep yearning for the rarest of the real things: an honest leader.

A cynic

Obama defined his campaign with high-sounding rhetoric that "[his] rival in this race is not other candidates, but cynicism." The line resonated and soon became his mantra.

He later asked us to fight cynicism and revealingly told us that cynics believe they are smarter than everyone else. To this it could be said that Obama knows what that is like.

Could there be anything more cynical than to look upon Americans as being too forgetful to remember all the broken promises Obama made?

These include -- but are not limited to -- a promise that there would be no health care mandates (there are); that he would take a scalpel to the budget and bring down the deficit (headed towards the stratosphere as he rewards his own special interest groups); and that he would end earmarks (his spending bills are polluted by them; he is, after all, a Chicago politician).

He promised to close Gitmo -- not a done deal, and like many deadlines he promised, no one is sure when or if this will happen.

He promised the end of partisanship, but he has stoked it to a roaring blaze with his refusal to work with Republicans. He promised to end our wars, but now he is sending more forces into Afghanistan.

He stated that he would fight the gay marriage ban, but instead he ended up supporting it, in effect, by defending the Defense of Marriage Act.

He promised the most transparent administration in history, but instead he imposes layers of secrecy and invokes executive powers to cloak his administration from scrutiny (e.g., his use of executive privilege to protect Desiree Rogers, his social secretary, from questioning regarding the WhiteHouseGate-crashers).

We were promised that if we passed the stimulus bill under Barack Obama's presidency, then the unemployment rate would drop below 8% by now -- and here we are, during Christmas season, cruising along at a solid 10% (17% if we include the underemployed and those who left the workforce because they saw no prospects of landing a job).

We were promised that the anti-Bush would restore respect for America around the world and bring international comity. Instead, he has alienated our allies and empowered our adversaries -- a dynamic that has brought all but zero benefits to America (very little cooperation in Afghanistan, on "climate change," or on Iran's nuclear program). While he may have snagged himself a Nobel Peace Prize, the leaders of the world are increasingly treating him, and America, with disrespect and contempt.

The betrayals are so breathtaking and widespread (all of his promises have an expiration date) that all one can surmise is that the ultimate cynic is the One who campaigned against cynicism.

We can sense that Obama is a cynic by referring back to his own definition: someone who thinks he is smarter than everyone else.

We have abundant evidence of this derisive attitude.

I think that I'm a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I'll tell you right now that I'm gonna think I'm a better political director than my political director.

Obama had the ego to think he was better than the key experts playing roles in his victory: He is apparently smarter than his policy directors and political directors, and he's a better speechwriter to boot.

We know how Obama feels about small-town Americans: They are bitter yokels who cling to guns or religion or antipathy towards people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment. But he has additionally demeaned a wide range of other Americans (doctors, cops, Special Olympics contestants, and many more, as you can see via the Insulter-in-Chief). And how many of us are the "typical white person" he derided in the not-so-distant past? Patriots who wear flags on their lapels? They are among the great unwashed.

We also know how Obama feels about people living in suburbia. He has no use for those people in the gray flannel suits. He said, in an un-teleprompted remark: "I'm not interested in suburbs. The suburbs bore me."

As Barack Obama has intoned, words matter.

Yes, they do Mr. President, especially in the days of YouTube, Google, and the internet. These are the tools the common folk can tap to remember your promises -- and your breaking of them.

These are the videos we can watch instead of the redacted versions put out by your pals and accomplices in the media --those versions scrubbed clean of your malapropisms, mistakes, stammering, evasions, and most importantly, your broken promises. Only a cynic would think of us as being too forgetful or ignorant to recognize the Big Lie.

Only a certifiable cynic would consider the American people so unperceptive as to not recognize the wide gap between the image and the reality, the promises made and broken, the differences between the smiling visage on the Shepard Fairey posters (themselves a fraud -- how symbolic!) and the hectoring, finger-pointing, vengeful curmudgeon we now have in the Oval Office.

A hypocrite

The hypocrisy knows no bounds, either.

A hypocrite decries the role of money in politics and then breaks his promise to accept public financing for his presidential campaign (because he could see the money rolling in) while his challenger kept his promise to abide by the campaign law he himself created. Was there a certain degree of cynicism displayed there by Obama, knowing McCain was hoisted on his own petard?

A hypocrite preaches that he will bring us together as a people and heal our wounds when he wants our votes -- but after he wins, he practices the politics of polarization and declares that he wants not "to quell people's anger," but to channel it.

Only a hypocrite would campaign on a platform of bringing us together ("we are one people," "this was the moment -- this was the time -- when we came together to remake this great nation," "there is no red America, there is no blue America," etc.) and then stoke the very polarization that he promised would end in the Age of Obama. His guru, Saul Alinksy, would be happy that his Rules for Radicals has become the blueprint for how the president can run, and ruin, a great nation.

Only a hypocrite would engage in as many baldfaced lies as our president has over the past few years. The end of lobbyists? Balderdash. In fact, as a Politico headline noted, "Lobbyists are on pace for a record year."

And what is a lobbyist? What is the meaning of the term when Andy Stern, head of the Service Employees International Union, is such a frequent visitor to the White House that he might as well sublet some space in the Lincoln Bedroom? Does anyone think Andy Stern is there to talk about the weather? A lobbyist by any other name is still, in the end, a lobbyist.

Barack Obama has also countenanced the buying of votes (payoffs to states to get senators to sign on Harry Reid's health care reform bill) in the Senate to get ObamaCare passed.

Obama decried the politics of fear during the campaign and then employed the same as president -- as he did when he had the audacity to predict the "bankruptcy" of America should ObamaCare not pass. Or, before that, he augured the collapse of the economy should the stimulus bill not pass. When every bill becomes a do-or-die proposition, is that not playing the politics of fear?

Is it hypocritical to tout that tax dollars are not "monopoly money" and that we "can't continue to spend as if deficits don't have consequences" while engaging in irresponsible profligacy that would make Nero blanch? (Obama has a history of problems with his own credit standing, but now he is playing with our money.)

Does he think others are too stupid -- the belief that most defines a cynic -- to realize that his deficit-plagued budgets are a sure way to penury for us and our children and grandchildren?

Decrying fat cats while calling up a jet for a trip to Manhattan and a stroll down the Great White Way of Broadway? Taking jaunts to Copenhagen to try to snag the Olympics for his hometown pals in Chicago, who, no doubt, were hoping to snag some lucre? That's the Chicago Way. One could go on.

A bully

All this cynicism and hypocrisy is wrapped up and empowered by the other notable feature of Barack Obama: Our president is a bully.

Among the many examples: demeaning "fat cats" and telling Wall Street bankers that he is the only one standing between them and the pitchforks; telling a recalcitrant Democratic Congressman that they'd better toe the line because "we are keeping score, brother"; belittling allies, such as the Israelis, by telling them they need to be more self-reflective; trying to impose a left-wing lunatic dictator wanna-be on the innocent people of Honduras; dissing Eastern Europeans by not giving them a respectful warning that he was going to break a promise to them regarding missile bases in their nations; and forcing British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to grovel in a kitchen in order to have a few words with the President of the United States. (This treatment is attributable, speculates the Wall Street Journal, to some personal bad will between Great Britain and some Kenyan ancestors of Barack Obama. The man knows how to hold an ancestral grudge -- even if it means the rest of America suffers from slighting one of our formerly most treasured allies).

A bully is someone who can justify his actions by bragging that "I won." Whatever happened to the slogan "Yes we can"? Whatever happened to the "new kind of politics"? Well, they're so 2008.

A bully is someone who taunts, "If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun."

A bully is someone who runs roughshod over not only his opponents (politics can be a blood sport, after all), but also the Constitution -- as Obama has from almost day one of the One. Here are just a few examples of his inclination to ignore our most sacred document: czars exercising power without being approved by the Senate; violating the property clause by ignoring bankruptcy law -- as he did with the auto bailouts and attempted to do with mortgage "cram-down" plans; the chilling of free speech by threats against Fox News and by bringing back the threat of regulation affecting talk radio. Even health care reform has come under scrutiny for violating the Constitution.

There is a cliché in Washington: that all one needs to know about politics can be learned on the playground. But perhaps Obama's street-smart education was learned on the basketball court -- where height reigns (and there is no higher office in America), and where trash-talk is used to demoralize and defeat.

A cynic wrapped in a hypocrite inside a bully.

Iran: A Dying Tyranny

2009-12-28T07:13:00.000-08:00

The Iranian revolution is older than most Iranians and the sclerosis is starting to set in. The Ayatollahs are increasingly out of touch with the Iranian people. Their current president is clearly not playing with a full deck. Even his international supporters can’t keep on ignoring his dumb moves and provocations. The Iranian economy has been bad for years and is getting worse. This whole ramshackle structure might just collapse, maybe with a little nudge.

Iranian protesters are murdered but protests continue
Public protests related to the death of dissident cleric Hossein Ali Montazeri show that the opposition is alive and even stronger than it was after the stolen elections and they are getting bolder. When the regime tries to stir them us with the tired old “death to America” chants, the protesters shout back “death to the dictator.” The government is feeling pressure. In an unprecedented move, they have even admitted that they tortured to death three student protesters. This kind of admission is a big deal for a regime like this.
You can see on the poster nearby some of the young Iranians murdered by the regime in recent months. Protesters are dying but in some places they are taking over the streets.

The American nation is Greater than the American government; the Iranian nation is much greater than the Iranian regime.
The hard part is what to do next. President Obama’s neglect or maybe what we can call the Peter Sellers "Being There" strategy, saying things that sound profound and are interpreted in different ways by others, works only so long. The Iranian leadership is trying hard to provoke us and we face a persistent danger that they could develop nuclear weapons. The Iranian people are the best antidote to the tyrants that rule them. We need to walk the narrow path between smacking the Iranian regime while helping the Iranian people. The American nation needs to engage the Iranian nation and to a large extent we are. The great thing about the communications revolutions of recent times is that the U.S. government doesn’t have to do all the heavy lifting.
This is lucky. President Obama is no Ronald Reagan. He probably doesn’t have the gravitas or the charisma to do what Reagan did in the 1980s to disrupt the teetering communist tyrannies. But maybe his softer approach is more appropriate here anyway. Millions of Americans reaching out to millions of Iranians is much harder for the tyrants to stop or exploit. Beyond that, the Soviet Union was a peer competitor, in many ways an equal adversary. Ahmadinejad is by no means an equal of an American president. It is better not to elevate him by making the contest us against him.

Sanctions are tricky
The Obama Administration must push for smart sanctions. Sanctions are tricky. Rotten regimes insulate themselves from the punishment and pass it along to the people. Beyond that, it is very hard to get the international community to agree to sanctions. Most non-western countries don’t care much about human rights, but they do like Iranian oil. Nevertheless, they also don’t want to get too close to a weak regime that may not be able to keep promises or pay its bills. We should exploit these doubts & uncertainties.

President Obama has a lot of advantages in doing this. He still enjoys widespread good will around the globe. But the President also needs to be careful not to too accommodating to the Iranian regime, or too forgiving. We should not make pointless threats, but there is also no point in making concessions that will never be reciprocated. It is just as bad to cozy up to this regime as it is to threaten and we do owe it to the Iranian people to let them know that we support them in their struggle for freedom. Think of the Iranian President for what he is - the unbalanced leader of a weak and nearly bankrupt tyranny, a local menace and a supporter of terrorism, but not an existential threat in the way the Soviet Union was. Don't let's make him more than he is. The Iranian regime has spurned our President’s tentative advances. They ignore the world’s deadline. They think President Obama is weak. But they are the ones who are oppressive and weak.

Some things don't change ...
This Iranian regime will never live up to agreements or promises it makes to limit its nuclear program. They have been playing their deceptive game for a long time and they are good at it. The only thing that keeps them from developing their programs faster is their lack of abilities and the only thing that will keep them from achieving their goal in the future if the current regime leaves power. But the tyrannical Iranian regime is teetering. The regime is cruel and ruthless and it appears firmly in command, but so did the Shah, so did the communists in Eastern Europe. Tyrannies are naturally hard but also brittle. When the people see that they can stand up to the tyrants, the crumble. The Iranian people are protesting more and more openly. The regime is murdering scores of them and arresting, torturing and raping many more, but fear is giving way to anger. Anything can happen. But it is clear that we will not face the same Iran much longer.

... other things do

We recall that none of the experts accurately predicted the rapid collapse of communist tyrannies. These things rarely happen gradually. The U.S. should be ready to take advantage of whatever comes. The Iranian theocracy has been the source of much suffering and oppression over the past generation. A regime change there would make the world a better place. Maybe we are are seeing the death agony of a thirty-year tyranny. Things might develop better for us than we anticipate. Some might say better than our policy deserves.

Structural Flaws Will Limit China's Rise

2009-12-28T06:50:00.000-08:00

John Lee World Politics Review

On Oct. 1, the People's Republic of China celebrated the 60th anniversary of its founding, most notably with an air show and military parade along Beijing's Orwellian-sounding Avenue of Eternal Peace. The event showcased China's arsenal of indigenously made fighter aircraft, tanks and newer-generation Dongfeng missiles, capable of delivering nuclear warheads to targets over 11,000 kilometers away. This was hardly the first time an authoritarian government has used a military review to impress its citizens and outside observers. And China has used non-martial events to display its national pride, confidence and strength. In many ways, last year's Beijing Olympics served the same function.

But the parade left little doubt that China, the 2009 version, is surely very different from the one Mao Zedong left behind when he died in 1976. Since 1979, its economy has been doubling in size every 10 years, and growth in 2009 will likely surpass 8 percent -- remarkable in the context of the current global environment. Obviously, economic strength underpins political and military power, and if current linear trends continue, the Chinese economy will surpass that of the U.S. in absolute size before the middle of this century.

But does that mean that China will inevitably become a genuine economic and military superpower -- the next East Asian success story, like Japan or South Korea, but on an unprecedented historical scale? Major economic and social problems stand in the way of such a scenario of China's continued rise. But while many analysts recognize that these problems exist, most tend to represent them as Beijing's "to do" list, reflecting the assumption that the PRC's leadership simply needs to identify the appropriate policy solutions and then implement them. But such an approach ignores the ways in which China's problems are structural and becoming worse, and why solving them without the prospect of enormous turmoil will be difficult and even unlikely.

China's Two Distinct Reform Periods

China's modern reform period began under Deng Xiaoping in December 1978. Because the Chinese economy has been growing constantly for the three decades since then, it is commonly believed that China has been gradually but steadily reforming into a free market economy over the past 30 years. In fact, though, there have really been two distinct reform periods driven by two distinct reform philosophies since 1978: the pre-Tiananmen period from 1978-1989 and the post-Tiananmen period from 1991-present.

Prior to 1989, the unplanned, spontaneous explosion of private initiative in rural China -- fueled by limited land reforms -- was encouraged by officials and even supported by government policy. Yasheng Huang called this period the "entrepreneurial decade." Farmers were encouraged to make their own decisions for how they wanted to use their plot, even if the land itself was still owned by the state, and were allowed to sell their produce at market prices after having met their production quotas. A happy accident of the limited land reforms were the spontaneous rise in rural China of small-scale businesses, known as "Township and Village Enterprises," which provided meaningful employment for over 100 million Chinese peasants. Significantly, during this decade, mean wages and incomes were rising at the same rate or faster than GDP growth, leading to the emergence of an independent "middle class" in China. Indeed, 80 percent of the poverty alleviation that occurred since 1979 was achieved during this 10-year period.

After the Tiananmen protests in the spring of 1989, China deliberately and decisively changed tack. The Tiananmen protests -- which actually saw thousands of protests involving millions of people spring up in hundreds of cities across the country -- brought the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to its knees. During the "Tiananmen Interlude" that followed the bloody crackdown in Tiananmen Square, the CCP nervously watched the fall of the Berlin Wall, followed by the implosion of the Soviet Union. It realized that authoritarian regimes become irrelevant at their great peril.

To preserve its relevance, the CCP expended extensive efforts to retake control of the major levers of economic power. This control today is at the heart of an economic structure that entrenches the role and status of Party officials and members in Chinese economy and society. The story of China's economic rise since the 1990s is mainly the story of the rise of the Chinese "corporate state" and the emergence of the "state-led" model of development -- not the flowering of China's private sector. Unfortunately, it is now the CCP's determination to hold on to political, economic and social power that is behind many of China's most serious problems. That is also why these problems are becoming worse.

Behind China's Current "Economic Miracle"

Even before the current global financial crisis, at the National People's Congress in March 2007 (the annual meeting of the state's highest political body), current Premier Wen Jiabao offered his country a warning, declaring that "the biggest problem with China's economy is that growth is unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated and unsustainable." This was all but reiterated by President Hu Jintao at the five-yearly Congress in Beijing in October 2007, and was repeated again this year. In fact, similar warnings have been issued since the late 1990s.

Although economic growth remains robust, growth tells only a small part of the story of how China is faring. Serious flaws have been emerging in the Chinese economic growth strategy, particularly since the 1990s. Indeed, in recent times, China's high level of growth is somewhat symptomatic of the problem.

How has China achieved growth since the 1990s? Most Western commentators focus on the spectacular success of China's export sector and the emergence of China as the "world's factory." But a greater contributor to Chinese growth is actually domestically funded fixed investment, which constituted over 50 percent of GDP in 2008 and over 40 percent of growth in that year. In 2009, due to the massive stimulus order by the government, between 80-90 percent of growth will be a result of capital investment. To put China's growing addiction to loans from state-owned banks in perspective, its banks lent out $150 billion in 2001, $380 billion in 2003, $750 billion in 2008, and $1.13 trillion in the first 7 months of 2009 alone. In other words, growth is largely the result of state-controlled entities pouring money into fixed investment projects.

But it is not just the high reliance on fixed investment that is striking. It is where the capital goes that is all-important. China is unusual in that bank loans -- drawn from the deposits of its citizens funneled into state-controlled banks -- constitute around 80 percent of all investment activity in the country. Even though state-controlled enterprises produce between just one-quarter and one-third of all output in the country, they receive over 75 percent of the country's capital -- and that figure is rising. State-controlled companies received well over 95 percent of the recent stimulus monies lent out in 2008-2009. The Chinese state sector owns over two-thirds of all fixed assets in the country. This is the reverse of what occurred in China during the first 10 years of reform, when private sector businesses received over 70 percent of all the country's capital.

The massive bias toward the state sector would not be so problematic if the 120,000 state-controlled enterprises and their countless subsidiaries could learn to innovate and adapt. Unfortunately, except for a handful of centrally managed state-controlled enterprises, this is not the case. According to one expert, 19 percent of state-controlled enterprises were unprofitable in 1978. That number had grown(.pdf) to 40 percent in 1997, and by 2006 had reached 51 percent. By a conservative estimate, 40 percent of bank loans to these entities are extended on a "policy" rather than a "commercial" basis, with most of those loans made at artificially low interest rates.

Banks are effectively fulfilling the political priorities of the government through their "policy lending" function: to maintain jobs for state-controlled enterprise workers who are the party's most loyal supporters, to maintain support for state-controlled enterprise managers who are core party members and supporters, and to maintain growth in "middle class" and urban areas at any cost, since the party needs the continual support of the new and emerging middle classes to survive. As Zhang Hanya, a senior researcher at Beijing's National Development and Reform Commission's Investment Research Institute, put it in 2007, a full year before the global financial crisis, China needs to keep fixed investment growth levels at around 25 percent per annum just to maintain present levels of employment.

This is all leading to a worsening "bad loans" problem, which has been manifest since the early 1990s and threatens to bring down the Chinese financial system. Worryingly, China's main banks have been technically insolvent for over a decade, weighed down by non-performing-loans (NPLs). Even back in 2006, accounting firm Ernst & Young estimated the total value of NPLs in the Chinese financial system at $911 billion -- about 40 percent of GDP. The balance sheets of these banks are superficially healthy, but they are only able to operate due to periodic bail-outs by the government, in which bad loans are transferred to "asset management companies." Meanwhile, bad loans are removed from balance sheets only due to stipulations that maturing loans be "rolled over" since they cannot be paid back. Banks remain liquid mainly due to the high savings of the population, deposited into their accounts because few other options besides state-controlled banks exist in China.

Recent instances of economic reform have been largely tactical, designed to plug obvious holes, rather than comprehensive. Despite overwhelming evidence that heavily protected state-controlled enterprises use capital poorly, they continue to receive a constantly rising share of the country's wealth. As a result, most of China's 40 million to 50 million private businesses remain small and heavily hamstrung by lack of access to capital. Importantly, these private enterprises use capital between 2-3 times more efficiently, and are twice as efficient in generating employment. Nevertheless, because the CCP refuses to dilute its economic power, support for the ongoing rise of the corporate state will continue despite the enormous cost to the country.

Even the piecemeal reform that has occurred runs into the enormous problem of poor or non-existent implementation. Western experts visiting China generally leave impressed by the competency of its senior officials. But functional authority in China is largely decentralized. Around 45 million provincial and local officials -- compared to less than 1 million central officials -- operate in a largely unaccountable environment, due to the lack of effective institutions for public accountability within the one-party system. These local officials oversee, regulate, and administer almost all economic and enforcement activity in the country. As a result, China's central leaders have consistently run into problems in terms of enforcing the central government's mandates and regulations.

This also leads to the enormous problem of corruption, which is systemic (particularly at the local levels), profound and embedded throughout every level of the Chinese economy and society. Estimates put the value of direct theft of state resources at around 2 percent of GDP each year, while the indirect economic cost of corruption is estimated by various Chinese researchers to represent up to 17 percent of GDP. Moreover, while it is true that China's well-known environmental problems are the result of rapid growth, these problems are also significantly caused and exacerbated by poor adherence to even minimal environmental standards and edicts on the part of local officials -- who are rewarded for achieving growth, no matter the cost. Given the lack of institutions and other mechanisms of accountability, standards imposed by Beijing are regularly ignored.

Yet, China's central leaders have little choice but to continue to support local officials in order to prolong the survival of the CCP as the country's ruling party. In a vast country of 1.3 billion people, Beijing relies on the 45 million local party officials to represent its authority and preserve the CCP's interests. At the same time, local CCP leaders have a huge informational advantage over the central leadership: The latter have few alternate sources of information other than what local authorities reveal. Importantly, national law, economic policies, social order policies, and even centrally instituted fiscal policy are all necessarily executed by local officials.

These are all problems that go to the heart of whether the Chinese model of economy growth is sustainable. Beijing itself is aware of the problems, having warned that its economic model is becoming dangerously dependent on ever-increasing levels of inefficient capital investment to achieve growth. To solve that problem, greater support must be given to China's 40 million to 50 million private businesses. That would result in the much more efficient use of capital, the creation of more jobs, and a rise in private -- rather than just state -- wealth. That, in turn, would increase domestic consumption -- currently at around 30-35 percent of GDP, the lowest of any major economy in the world -- in order to re balance the economy and reorient its growth model toward a more sustainable approach.

However, such a policy would jeopardize the party's ability to concentrate its hold on power. Instead, leaders from Deng Xiaoping onwards have used "tactical reform" as a mechanism to retain power, insisting that the Chinese "corporate state" grow stronger rather than weaker. In this context, the pursuit of growth at all costs, far from alleviating the shortcomings in the Chinese economic model, is actually worsening these shortcomings. The problems are not just cyclical, nor are they only temporary hitches as China confronts the enormous task of development. They are serious, chronic, and systemic.

Rich and Strong State, Poor People and Weak Civil Society

One major problem for China is that too heavy an emphasis on state-led development tends to exacerbate inequality as the economy expands. Since the state dispenses the most valued business, career and professional opportunities, a relatively small group of well-placed and well-connected insiders benefit, while opportunities to prosper are denied to the vast majority. Unlike the pre-Tiananmen period, mean wages and income throughout the country have been rising three to four times slower than economic growth.

This is a serious problem for Chinese society. Its Gini coefficient -- a measurement of income distribution, where 0 means perfect equality and 1 means absolute inequality -- rose from around 0.25 in the 1980s to around .38 in the 1990s. It is now around 0.5, which is the highest in Asia. Worryingly for China, despite enormous GDP growth, about 400 million people have seen their incomes stagnate or decline (.pdf) during the past decade. Another study by the World Bank suggests that the income of the poorest 10 percent of China's population had declined by 2.4 percent each year at the beginning of this century. Since 2000, absolute poverty has actually increased, as has illiteracy. Combined with the absence of social safety nets, such as healthcare, it is no wonder that at 30 percent of GDP, Chinese consumption levels are the lowest of any major economy in the world.

An obvious counterargument here is that inequality is inevitable once development takes off in a backward, agrarian society. However, this is refuted by the cases of South Korea and Taiwan from the 1960s to the 1990s, as well as that of China from 1978-1988, all of whose Gini coefficients (.pdf) hovered around 0.29-0.34, even as their economies were growing rapidly.

Significantly, the CCP has deliberately used vast resources to sponsor, co-opt, and, in many respects, create the privileged middle classes. The great lesson of the 1989 Tiananmen protests for the CCP was that the party was better off tying the future of the middle classes to the future of the CCP, than it was isolating them. It is from the urban middle classes, after all, that any impetus for political reform is likely to come. So it is no surprise that the party's heavy capital investment bias is slanted toward urban China. Enormous national resources are directed toward nurturing the middle class in China's cities, making them the great beneficiaries of China's state-led development model.

This is reflected in the composition of the roughly 70 million CCP members -- of whom a third are businesspeople and entrepreneurs, a third are college students, and a quarter are professionals. Meanwhile, a massive underclass of up to 1 billion people represents the downside of this strategy. It is not surprising that while middle class support for the CCP remains robust -- so long as economic growth is strong, that is -- numerous internal party studies show that support for the CCP in the poorer rural areas is extremely poor.

A second problem facing China's continued rise is the lack of robust institutions needed by all strong economies and societies. The CCP's political imperative of retaining power severely impedes the building of the soft institutions needed for successful economies: enforceable property rights, independent courts and the rule of law, and independent financial and administrative organs. For example, while judges are appointed by the CCP, party officials are explicitly given the right to veto court decisions at all levels of the Chinese judicial system. The Property Rights Index released by the Heritage Foundation gives China a dismal score of 20 (the same rank as countries such as Bangladesh, Cambodia and Uzbekistan), while South Korea and Taiwan rate reasonably well at 70. All land in China is still owned by the state, although individuals may own and transfer long-term leases. But as the report observes, China's judicial system is weak, and even when courts try to enforce decisions regarding land rights, local officials ignore them with impunity. Over the past decade alone, an estimated 40 million households have had their land illegally seized or been offered inadequate compensation for it by local officials, usually in collusion with land developers.

The massive misallocation of China's wealth combined with the entrenched corruption of officials is having very real economic and social effects. For example, independent studies suggest that unemployment and severe underemployment is around 10-20 percent in urban areas and 20-40 percent in rural areas.

But if finding jobs is a problem now, finding enough young people to work will be a problem in the future. In 2015, more people will be leaving the workforce than entering it. An enormously critical juncture will be reached in 2030, when a quarter of the population -- around 350 million people -- will be older than 60, compared to just 10 percent today. Unlike in Western societies and countries like Japan, China will undoubtedly get old before it gets rich. To make matters worse, China's "pay as you go" pension pools -- which cover less than a quarter of its population -- are most likely bankrupt, as the funds have been misused by state-controlled banks and other financial bodies.

Furthermore, reported instances of "mass" social unrest directed against the government -- defined as involving 15 or more people -- have grown from a few thousand in the early 1990s to 90,000 instances in 2006, according to official figures. (A Hong Kong-based study believed that the figure in 2003 was closer to 300,000) Ominously, Beijing has since stopped revealing these figures annually. The vast majority of these protests are directed toward local officials for grievances over such things as illegal land seizures and taxes, mismanagement of the local environment -- either because of incompetence or collusion with well-connected industries -- and the misappropriation of public funds for personal use.

Conclusion

It is true that China has come a long way since Mao died in 1976. But the reform period that began when Deng Xiaoping took power is nearing the completion of its 30th year -- exactly half the age of modern China. In fact, the reform period has already exceeded Mao Zedong's 27 years of terrible rule. After ordering the crackdown on protesters in 1989, Deng presciently warned that the CCP had around 20 years to "get China right." Unfortunately, the party has not found the authoritarian version of the "silver bullet": a successful reform program that can enhance, rather than dilute, the CCP's relevance and grip on economic, social and ultimately political power. Worse still, there is a direct and deepening connection between the CCP's efforts to entrench its place in Chinese economic and civil society, and China's growing economic and social deficits.

Both U.S. President Barack Obama and U.S. Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman have called the U.S.-China relationship the most important one in the world. But the bilateral relationship is almost always spoken about discussed in the context of the challenges America will face as China grows stronger and more confident.

As China's military buildup confirms, Beijing is undoubtedly an ambitious regional and global power. But domestic political and social order in China depends on spectacular rates of economic growth to keep the urban classes satisfied, and tactical initiatives to keep the unsatisfied rural classes at bay. Worryingly, continued growth is dependent on an unsustainable economic model that is highly resistant to reform. It is time to seriously consider the contingency of what it might mean for the United States if, instead of continuing its rise, China becomes increasingly overwhelmed and distracted by its core weaknesses.

Yemen arrests 29 al Qaeda suspects after raids

2009-12-28T05:57:00.000-08:00

DUBAI (Reuters) – Yemen has arrested 29 suspected al Qaeda members since raiding the group to foil attacks on oil installations and foreign interests including the British embassy, national sec urity chief Ali Mohammad Al-Ansi said.

Al Qaeda's presence in Yemen has grown over the past year, and Washington has said a Nigerian who tried to bomb a U.S. passenger jet on Christmas Day claimed he got help from al Qaeda militants in the impoverished Arab country.

Ansi said on the defense ministry website that al Qaeda had been planning to attack Yemeni government institutions as well as the UK embassy in Sanaa.

"Until now 29 persons have been arrested and authorities are still following up and pursuing the remaining terrorists," he said in the remarks published on Monday.

Ansi made no comment on the attempted Christmas Day bombing of the U.S. jet, which has put a spotlight on Yemen.

Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulm utallab, who is charged with trying to blow up a Northwest Airlines plane as it approached Detroit, has been linked to the country.

In U.S. questioning Abdulmutallab claimed al Qaeda operatives in Yemen gave him with an explosive device and trained him on how to detonate it, a U.S. official said.

Yemen has staged two major raids on al Qaeda this month.

Last week, Sanaa said it had killed more than 30 al Qaeda members in an air raid. The dead possibly included the top two leaders of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and an American Muslim preacher linked to a man who shot dead 13 people at a U.S. army base.

The earlier raid on December 17 raid killed about 30 militants in the eastern province of Abyan and in Arhab, northeast of the capital Sanaa, the government said.

The United States and Saudi Arabia, which borders Yemen, fear al Qeada will use instability in the country to stage attacks in the world's top oil exporting region and beyond.

Apart from al Qaeda, Yemen is also grappling with a Shi'ite revolt in the north and a separatist movement in the south with both complaining of social and economic discrimination, a charge the government denies.

On Monday, the ministry also said 13 senior Houthi rebel commanders, part of the Shi'ite rebellion, had been killed, according to the website.

The conflict in northern Yemen drew in Saudi Arabia last month when the rebels briefly occupied some Saudi territory, prompting Riyadh to launch an offensive against them.

(Additional reporting by Mohamed Sudam in Sanaa)

(Reporting by Ulf Laessing; Editing by David Stamp)

Dems Pessimistic About Public Option

2009-12-28T05:33:00.000-08:00

By CALVIN WOODWARD, AP
WASHINGTON – House Democrats aren't optimistic that a government insurance plan, a central element of health care legislation passed in their chamber, will survive negotiations with the Senate.

While insisting "it's not dead," Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland said Sunday he recognizes realities in the Senate, where Democrats had to scrape up every vote from their side to pass a bill — even one without a government plan to compete in the private insurance marketplace.

"Before the House was to give up the public option, we would want to be persuaded that there are other mechanisms in whatever bill comes out that will keep down premiums," said Van Hollen. "We've got to make sure that the final product is affordable."

Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina, the No. 3 Democrat in the House and one who had appealed to President Barack Obama not to yield on the public plan, set out conditions for yielding himself.

"We want a public option to do basically three things: Create more choice for insurers, create more competition for insurance companies, and to contain costs," Clyburn said. "So if we can come up with a process by which these three things can be done, then I'm all for it. Whether or not we label it a public option or not is of no consequence."

Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., underscored the divisions Democrats will need to bridge when negotiators from the House and Senate meet next month to reconcile the two bills. He said there will need to be more give on the House side than the Senate, which took weeks to find the 60 votes needed for passage.

"If we are going to have a final law, it will look a lot more like the Senate version than the House version," Menendez asserted.

The Senate's Christmas Eve achievement brought the nation closer than it's been for generations to a new order in health insurance. It would eventually require nearly all Americans to get coverage, help many pay for it and restrict onerous insurance company practices such as denying coverage to people with pre-existing sickness.

But nothing will change for anyone until the House and Senate can settle on common legislation, pass it and send it to Obama to sign.

The high stakes have both parties hoping they can find a few converts from the other side. Nearly every Republican in Congress has opposed the measures.

"If some of the Republicans would come forward with suggestions — offer a vote or two, or three or four — to take away the need to have every last one of the 60 Democrats, you'd have a much better bill in accordance with the tradition of the Congress, especially the Senate, on bipartisanship," said Democratic Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, himself a party switcher.

Republican Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina voiced similar hope, to opposite ends: "a few Democrats to stand up in the House that maybe didn't before and help us stop this thing."

DeMint, Van Hollen, Menendez and Specter spoke on "Fox News Sunday." Clyburn was on CBS' "Face the Nation" and CNN's "State of the Union."

North korea Weapons Smugglers Left Trail Around World

2009-12-26T07:02:00.000-08:00

Thai authorities' high-profile inspection of 35 tons of North Korean weapons was nearing completion Friday, as clues emerging around the world shed light on the business of arms trafficking — and the lengths smugglers take to hide their identities.
Two weeks after Thai authorities impounded the aircraft and arrested its five-man crew, the key questions of who organized the shipment and where it was headed remain unanswered.
But a trail of companies and fake addresses from New Zealand to Barcelona has illustrated how the traffickers bounced around the globe to lightly regulated countries to disguise their movements. Over the past few months, they created a complex web of holding companies that facilitated the flight in an apparent effort to evade U.N. sanctions on North Korea.
The Ilyushin Il-76 cargo plane was intercepted during a Dec. 12 refueling stop in Bangkok, thanks to a tip from the United States. Its crew — four from Kazakhstan and one from Belarus — has denied any knowledge of arms aboard the plane, which Thai authorities say included explosives, rocket-propelled grenades and components for surface-to-air missiles.
Pending more investigations, a Thai court Friday ordered the crew members to remain in prison 12 more days.
Police Col. Supisarn Bhaddinarinath, acting chief of the Crime Suppression Division, said in a telephone interview that investigators expect to finish their report on the types of weapons seized "within a week." The crew has been charged with illegal arms possession, but the charges are expected to be stiffened once the investigation wraps up, he said.
The plane's chief pilot insisted in an interview published Friday that the aircraft's final destination was Kiev, Ukraine, though arms trafficking experts published a report last week saying it was bound for Iran. Thai authorities have said there is no evidence to support that assertion.
"We were to fly to Ukraine," the pilot, Ilyas Isakov of Kazakhstan, told Russian news agencies ITAR-Tass and RIA Novosti in response to written questions. "I don't know what the cargo owners intended to do next, but we were hired to fly it to Kiev's Borispil airport."
He said the crew was hired by a Ukrainian air freighter called Aviatek to pick up 35.8 tons of cargo in Pyongyang, North Korea — which included 25 tons of oil-drilling equipment and other cargo in sealed wooden boxes. He said the flight path included refueling stops in Bangkok and Sri Lanka.
It was not immediately clear how Aviatek fit into the network of companies linked to the plane's journey.
A spokesman for the Ukrainian Transport Ministry contacted Friday would not say if a company called Aviatek is in the ministry's registry. The search engine of the global aviation registry — http://www.aerotransport.org — had no listing for a company by that name.
The aircraft was registered in the former Soviet republic of Georgia but owned by a company in the United Arab Emirates.
It was leased to a company in New Zealand, which then chartered the plane to a company in Hong Kong, according to a report published last week by the nonprofit groups TransArms in the United States and IPIS of Belgium, who obtained flight plans and documents, some of which could not be independently verified. The report was funded by the Belgian government and Amnesty International.
Associated Press reporters around the world found that some of the companies exist only on paper. Some list fake addresses or post office boxes, while at least one firm didn't exist until a month ago.
The plane was registered to Air West, a cargo transport company set up in September, according to the Georgian transport administration.
Air West's owner Levan Kakabadze told AP he was unaware of the plane's final destination. He said he had leased the plane last month to the SP Trading company and could bear no responsibility for what happened next.
SP Trading Limited was founded July 22, 2009, in Auckland, New Zealand, according to a national registry site. In New Zealand, known as an easy place to set up and register new companies, anyone without a criminal record or history of bankruptcy can create a company quickly online for minimal fees.
New Zealand officials are conducting inquiries into the flight "in a number of countries," James Funnell, a spokesman for New Zealand's Foreign Ministry, told AP. He said the investigation included New Zealand links to the flight, notably the SP Trading, "one of a number of different companies linked to the plane."
On Dec. 4, SP Trading leased the plane to Hong Kong-based Union Top Management Ltd., according to the arms trafficking researchers report. The company's certificate of corporation shows it was created on Nov. 2.
But there is no Union Top office at its Hong Kong address. Instead, there is a company called R & G Management Consultancy, according to a woman who answered the door. She said Union Top is a client but she doesn't know how to reach anyone at the company, nor did she know a man called Dario Cabreros Garmendia — who signed Union Top's incorporation in Hong Kong last month.
Garmendia listed Barcelona, Spain, as his address on another document related to the set up of the company. But AP reporters asked four people living next to the location and none had heard of him or the company.
The plane, according to the researchers, was owned by Overseas Cargo FZE, based in Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates where the plane also made a landing. Officials at the company did not respond to repeated requests for comment and the extent of its physical operations in Sharjah was also unclear. It has a post office box in the Sharjah free zone — one of several similar sites around the UAE that permit firms to operate with limited fiscal oversight from local authorities.
In recent years, Sharjah's international airport has become a hub of many small charter and cargo carriers serving Asia, Africa and the former Soviet republics.

Watch The Decline: The Media Lowlights Of 2009

2009-12-26T06:52:00.000-08:00

By K. Daniel Glover
The tea party movement exposed the bias of liberal journalists to start the year, and ClimateGate did the same to end it.
Climate "scientists" are about as trusted as used-car salesmen or congressmen these days thanks to the beating their profession has taken in the "ClimateGate" scandal. But give the alarmists their due: They know how to hide the decline.
Their friends in the media, on the other hand, are not quite so skilled at chicanery. The press practices plenty of sniper journalism, the kind that kills unaware readers and viewers from afar. But journalists attack in the open often enough that Americans can watch the decline of the Fourth Estate in all of its embarrassing glory.
They had a lot to watch in 2009 -- a year marked by the media's anointed leader moving into the White House, liberals ascending to one-party control of Washington and, to hear journalists report it, an angry mob of dangerous extremists daring to reject the hope-and-change narrative.
There were so many media lowlights that it's a challenge to pick the best of the worst for a year-end recap, but here goes:
"Teabaggers" everywhere! The mainstream media's abysmal coverage of the "tea party" movement wins the award for media bias of the year hands down.
The movement started with a small protest against the pork-laden stimulus in Seattle on Presidents Day in February but quickly snowballed into a nationwide phenomenon that is still going strong. Journalists diligently suppressed the story for weeks, but when the movement grew despite the attempt to kill it with lack of publicity, the media coverage turned ugly. The most unprofessional, unethical and utterly embarrassing moments included:
-- Susan Roesgen of CNN berating tea partiers rather than interviewing them during a live report on the Tax Day Tea Party event in Chicago. "Why do you say he's a fascist? He's the president of the United States," she scolded one protester. Her rants were so biased that a former CNN star said Roesgen "crossed a journalistic line." Three months later, she lost her job.
-- Anchors and media celebrities embracing the term "teabaggers," a vulgar reference to oral sex, as a descriptor for Americans protesting runaway government spending, regulation and inevitable taxation. The Media Research Center documented that episode of decline, including one MSNBC segment where the term was used 51 times, in R-rated detail. Anderson Cooper of CNN issued a phony apology for using the term, but journalists regularly repeated it all year.
-- MSNBC manipulating video footage of a gun-toting protester to insinuate that the town halls of summer were inciting violence by racists who hate America's first black president. Why edit the video? Because the man toting the gun was black, a fact that would have undermined the story. Journalists largely ignored reports of actual violence by liberal protesters, including the beating of Kenneth Gladney and the finger-chomping of William Rice, for the same reason.
Global warming games. The tea party movement exposed the bias of liberal journalists to start the year, and ClimateGate did the same to end it. E-mails and other documents showed that for years, leading climate scientists had been manipulating scientific data, suppressing research, and playing politics in the peer-review system.
Major news outlets largely ignored the story, and green-friendly environmental reporters like Andrew Revkin of The New York Times, who later took a buyout from the newspaper, worked hard to spin the news as insignificant. The coverage continued a pattern of quashing inconvenient news that also was apparent when the Society of Environmental Journalists cut the microphone of a global warming critic questioning Al Gore.
Only one U.S. newspaper, the McClatchy-owned Miami Herald, had the weakness of editorial character to sign a multinational, multilingual editorial urging a global agreement for "overcoming climate change." But American journalists proved time and again that they largely agree with the idea behind the editorial even if they didn't sign it.
Obamania. The occasionally critical press coverage that President Obama has garnered may mislead news consumers into thinking that the media have reported on him objectively, but they have not. The media's Obama worship of Campaign 2008newsroom swoon when Obama visited The Washington Post a few days before inauguration serves as an apt symbol for the first year of his presidency. continued into 2009. The
The adulation that began on Inauguration Day -- Michelle Malkin tracked the clichéd coverage -- continued unabated for months. Newsweek editor Evan Thomas, for example, literally compared Obama to God soon after publishing a fluff piece about him. The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism confirmed the obvious in a study -- that Obama garnered far more positive press in his first 100 days than his predecessors. Even liberal journalists noticed the bias.
The fascination with Obama was on display at most of his nationally televised press conferences, as reporters repeatedly lobbed softball questions to him.
"Palinoia." The media's contempt for former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is as strong as its love for Obama. Their animosity for Palin spawned a new term in political discourse -- "Palinoia" -- and journalists had bouts of the disease on and off all year.
One episode occurred in the summer, when Palin made a figurative reference to "death panels" being part of the Democratic health-care plan. Journalists interpreted her comment literally so they could call Palin a liar. Just last week, the supposedly objective fact-checking organization PolitiFact and its sheep-like audience declared "death panels" the "Lie of the Year."
In the fall, attention turned to Palin's best-selling book, "Going Rogue." Associated Press was so determined to embarrass her that it assigned 11 fact-checkers to review the book, and Newsweek ran hit pieces illustrated by sexist photos. MSNBC, meanwhile, had to apologize for using fake photos of Palin in one of its stories.
The media's penchant for attacking Palin also led to two unprofessional encounters at one book signing in Grand Rapids, Mich. NBC's Andrea Mitchell had to be restrained"gotcha" moment with a teenage Palin fan. (starting at the 1:40 mark of the video) while trying to question Palin, and MSNBC's Norah O'Donnell staged a
Van Who? What ACORN videos? Ignorance may be bliss, but in the news business, it's also bias. Fortunately, the low barriers to journalism in the information age give conservatives the ability to break news on "the fringe" and force the "professionals" to stop neglecting their duty.
That's how Van Jones lost his cushy job as Obama's "green jobs" czar. No matter how radical Jones' political beliefs or how insulting his behavior, establishment journalists scoffed at the suggestion that they should care. As a result of their willful ignorance about Jones being unfit to serve the country, their reputations took a hit.
Rather than learn from the mistake, however, the media quickly repeated it by tuning out another scandal involving the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Undercover activists caught ACORN officials on tape professing a willingness to enable child prostitution and tax fraud, among other offenses.
ACORN's sins were outrageous by any standard, but Charlie Gibson of ABC News laughed and said he "didn't even know" the Senate had voted to cut funding to the group. When The New York Times reluctantly covered the story, it chastised conservatives for their investigative tactics and refused to admit that liberal bias explained the paper's lapse in news judgment.

Canadian Physicist Blames Fluorocarbons for Global Warming Predicts 50 Years of COOLING

2009-12-26T06:34:00.000-08:00

A peer-reviewed study by a respected Canadian physicist doesn't blame global warming on man and CO2, he blames it on a combination of cosmic rays and chlorofluorocarbons. You remember those fluorocarbons, every aerosol can used to be loaded with the stuff until we found out they were putting a hole in the ozone layer. The fluorocarbons were removed and since 2002 the ozone layer has been closing and the earth stopped warming. Qing Bin-Lu, a professor of physics and astronomy at Canada's University of Waterloo took a look at the interaction between cosmic rays and chlorofluorocarbons and predicts that global warming has disappeared, maybe for the next 50 years

This peer-reviewed paper was published in the prestigious online journal Physics Reports, Lu, who holds a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Newcastle, reports that CFCs, the compounds once widely used as refrigerants, and cosmic rays, which are energy particles originating in outer space, are mostly to blame for climate change, rather than carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

Lu says the world has been cooling since 2002

"the observed data show that CFCs conspiring with cosmic rays most likely caused both the Antarctic ozone hole and global warming. These findings are totally unexpected and striking, as I was focused on studying the mechanism for the formation of the ozone hole, rather than global warming."

..Most remarkably, the total amount of CFCs, ozone-depleting molecules that are well-known greenhouse gases ... decreased around 2000.Correspondingly, the global surface temperature has also dropped. In striking contrast, the CO2 level has kept rising since 1850 and now is at its largest growth rate."

But wait, does that mean those fine people at the CRU were wrong? Those emails show that they were really believed in that man-made CO2 theory. That's why they repressed any evidence that would prove it wrong. Please don't tell Phil Jones or Michael Mann about the study below, it may upset them:

Study shows CFCs, cosmic rays major culprits for global warming

Cosmic rays and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), both already implicated in depleting the Earth's ozone layer, are also responsible for changes in the global climate, a University of Waterloo scientist reports in a new peer-reviewed paper.

In his paper, Qing-Bin Lu, a professor of physics and astronomy, shows how CFCs - compounds once widely used as refrigerants - and cosmic rays - energy particles originating in outer space - are mostly to blame for climate change, rather than carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. His paper, derived from observations of satellite, ground-based and balloon measurements as well as an innovative use of an established mechanism, was published online in the prestigious journal Physics Reports.

"My findings do not agree with the climate models that conventionally thought that greenhouse gases, mainly CO2, are the major culprits for the global warming seen in the late 20th century," Lu said. "Instead, the observed data show that CFCs conspiring with cosmic rays most likely caused both the Antarctic ozone hole and global warming. These findings are totally unexpected and striking, as I was focused on studying the mechanism for the formation of the ozone hole, rather than global warming."

His conclusions are based on observations that from 1950 up to now, the climate in the Arctic and Antarctic atmospheres has been completely controlled by CFCs and cosmic rays, with no CO2 impact.

"Most remarkably, the total amount of CFCs, ozone-depleting molecules that are well-known greenhouse gases, has decreased around 2000," Lu said. "Correspondingly, the global surface temperature has also dropped. In striking contrast, the CO2 level has kept rising since 1850 and now is at its largest growth rate."

In his research, Lu discovers that while there was global warming from 1950 to 2000, there has been global cooling since 2002. The cooling trend will continue for the next 50 years, according to his new research observations.

As well, there is no solid evidence that the global warming from 1950 to 2000 was due to CO2. Instead, Lu notes, it was probably due to CFCs conspiring with cosmic rays. And from 1850 to 1950, the recorded CO2 level increased significantly because of the industrial revolution, while the global temperature kept nearly constant or only rose by about 0.1 C.

In previously published work, Lu demonstrated that an observed cyclic hole in the ozone layer provided proof of a new ozone depletion theory involving cosmic rays, which was developed by Lu and his former co-workers at Rutgers University and the Université de Sherbrooke. In the past, it was generally accepted for more than two decades that the Earth's ozone layer is depleted due to the sun's ultraviolet light-induced destruction of CFCs in the atmosphere.

The depletion theory says cosmic rays, rather than the sun's UV light, play the dominant role in breaking down ozone-depleting molecules and then ozone. In his study, published in Physical Review Letters, Lu analyzed reliable cosmic ray and ozone data in the period of 1980-2007, which cover two full 11-year solar cycles.

In his latest paper, Lu further proves the cosmic-ray-driven ozone depletion theory by showing a large number of data from laboratory and satellite observations. One reviewer wrote: "These are very strong facts and it appears that they have largely been ignored in the past when modelling the Antarctic ozone loss."

New observations of the effects of CFCs and cosmic rays on ozone loss and global warming/cooling could be important to the Earth and humans in the 21st century. "It certainly deserves close attention," Lu wrote in his paper, entitled Cosmic-Ray-Driven Electron-Induced Reactions of Halogenated Molecules Adsorbed on Ice Surfaces: Implications for Atmospheric Ozone Depletion and Global Climate Change.