Mr President, it looks like you are about to be one and done

By now you've seen that Michael Moore is questioning the Chosen One and don't think for one second that it is just about his Afghanistan policy in my humble opinion.

With just one speech tomorrow night you will turn a multitude of young people who were the backbone of your campaign into disillusioned cynics. You will teach them what they've always heard is true -- that all politicians are alike. I simply can't believe you're about to do what they say you are going to do. Please say it isn't so.

We the people still love you. We the people still have a sliver of hope. But we the people can't take it anymore. We can't take your caving in, over and over, when we elected you by a big, wide margin of millions to get in there and get the job done. What part of "landslide victory"* don't you understand?

(*just to nitpick with Moore a little here, while Obama crushed McCain in the Electoral vote, a 7.3% margin in the popular vote is not quite a landslide)

but even big government Keynesian Paul Krugman sounds like he has has his doubts

But my sense is that to have any hope of breaking out of this trap, Obama and company have to take risks — they have to propose new initiatives that might not pass, and be prepared to run against the do-nothing Republicans if the initiatives fail. That’s not happening now; as best as I can tell, the administration strategy is to insist that only a few minor course corrections are needed, and to wait for the jobs to start coming in.

Maybe they’ll get lucky. But hope is not a plan.

What can the rest of us do? Progressives have to keep the pressure on. The time for trusting the administration to do what’s necessary is past — all indications are that it won’t, not on its own. But maybe, just maybe, the president can be brought to see the danger he’s running by playing it safe.

but wait there's more, New York Magazine weighs in

Yet the emerging doubts about Obama among even his most ardent and sensible fans are deeper and more nuanced than that. After 300-plus days in office, the president remains, for many of his supporters, a worryingly indistinct figure. One whose pragmatic sensibility is crystal clear but bedrock convictions are still blurry. And whose White House has proved less than fully adept at the marriage of politics and policy, preferring all too often to fall back on their boss’s charm and dazzle to advance the ball upfield.

“I have no idea what they believe,” a leading House Democrat and Obama ally told me recently when I asked if he could define the administration’s governing philosophy. “I know that their governing strategy seems to be, ‘Don’t worry, the big guy will make it all right in the end.’ They have the sublime sense that they don’t have to do all that much to plan events, or to come up with the message for what they’re doing, or to line up support, because whenever they need to, they can just put Mike Tyson in the ring. And I think (a) it’s wrong, and (b) it’s a bad way to run a White House.”

You see, while style over substance can win the Presidency, it can't govern a nation. And the mindless robots that supported for Obama are finally starting to see the light.

And somewhere, Jimmy Carter is smiling.

Climategate : CRU data dump

H/T Left Coast Rebel

Who knew that the CRU had something in common with ACORN (San Diego ACORN Document Dump Scandal)?

The Sunday Times

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.

The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.

DOJ: Pay ACORN for contracts

Are you kidding me?

It's bad enough that these corrupt bastards already received billions from the government, but now the DOJ is saying that prior contracts need to be honored with this criminal organization.

And worse, they held on to the ruling for a week, waiting to release it on what amounts to a holiday.

Instead of giving them federal funds, the DOJ should be using their full force to investigate the criminal activities of ACORN under RICO statutes.

Politico

The Justice Department has ruled that the federal government can honor some existing contracts to fund ACORN, despite a law barring the flow of all federal money to the beleaguered community group.

David Barron, the acting assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel, concluded in a five-page ruling that the funding ban signed by President Barack Obama in October as part of the legislative branch appropriations bill does not direct the Department of Housing and Urban Development to breach pre-existing contracts to pay ACORN. Much of ACORN’s federal funds come in the form of housing subsidies.

The ruling, issued Monday, was made public on Friday.

Republicans are already seizing on the DOJ judgment. Rep. Darrell Issa of California, the top Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform committee, said the administration is circumventing the intent of Congress. He called the ruling “old-fashioned cronyism” intended to benefit an organization he said is allied with Obama.

“Taxpayers should not have to continue subsidizing a criminal enterprise that helped Barack Obama get elected president,” Issa said in a news release.

Issa will hold a forum Tuesday on ACORN with Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), the top Republican on the House judiciary committee.

Via Memeorandum

Are Americans ready to end marijuana prohibition?

Faced with a slumping economy, increasing violence on our southern border along with an apparent shift to less government and more libertarian ideals in the country, Americans seem to be coming around to the idea of ending our government's 70+ year prohibition on marijuana.

Gallup's October Crime poll finds 44% of Americans in favor of making marijuana legal and 54% opposed. U.S. public support for legalizing marijuana was fixed in the 25% range from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, but acceptance jumped to 31% in 2000 and has continued to grow throughout this decade. - Gallup 

Even the once resistant AMA, while not endorsing re-legalization, is coming around to at least studying cannabis' medicinal benefits.

"Our American Medical Association (AMA) urges that marijuana's status as a federal Schedule I controlled substance be reviewed with the goal of facilitating the conduct of clinical research and development of cannabinoid-based medicines," - AMA statement (PDF)

To me the re-legalization of marijuana, yes it was legal in the US until 1937 when Harry Anslinger, the head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, introduced the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 which, while it did not criminalize cannabis, levied a tax on it which made the possession and use without a tax stamp a crime, is a civil liberties issue more than anything. What consenting adults choose to consume responsibly in the privacy of their home is no business if the government.

Let's look at what re-legalization would achieve if the laws prohibiting marijuana use were changed.

Changes to the current laws would bring about an end to the drug cartels that rely heavily on for a majority of their funding, free up much needed resources for law enforcement who must now waste their time persecuting otherwise law abiding citizens and help end the suffering of millions of Americans who would benefit immediately from cannabis' medicinal value.

Don't just take my word for it, look at these statements

More than 60 percent of the [Mexican drug] cartels' revenue -- $8.6 billion out of $13.8 billion in 2006 -- came from U.S. marijuana sales, according to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. - CBS News 10/7/09

We spend about $150 billion on policing and courts, and 47.5% of all drug arrests are marijuana-related.

At the same time, there is an enormous potential windfall in the taxation of marijuana. It is estimated that pot is the largest cash crop in California, with annual revenues approaching $14 billion. A 10% pot tax would yield $1.4 billion in California alone.- Time 4/2/09

Ending prohibition enforcement would save $7.7 billion in combined state and federal spending, the report says, while taxation would yield up to $6.2 billion a year. - Forbes 6/2/05

We have millions of Americans who live every day with pain that's not relieved by current medications, but is relieved by marijuana. It helps reduce nausea and vomiting and improve appetite for a lot of very ill cancer patients and patients with HIV. And it helps with neuropathic pain in people who have diabetes and multiple sclerosis. - Former US Surgeon General Dr Joycelyn Elders - Indyweek.com 6/24/08

So I ask, if there is this much overwhelming evidence that the re-legalization of marijuana will benefit us on the whole, why does the government feel the need to continue it's ridiculous and short sighted prohibition of it especially, when with little public debate on the subject, it is something that almost half of the American public supports already?

The time has come for the re-legalization of marijuana and HR 2943: Personal Use of Marijuana by Responsible Adults Act of 2009 would be a good start.

Via Libertarian Republican

China reaping the benefit from stimulus funds?

Why not? China is nice enough to fund our economy, whats wrong with giving them a little gravy too?

Seriously though, while I have nothing against doing business with China or any other country and in fact the company I work for imports probably 90% of the products we sell from China and Taiwan, we are not receiving taxpayer funds from DC. Consumers have the choice when it comes to spending their own personal income on foreign made goods.

However I do have a problem with my tax dollars being used to benefit foreign companies especially with rising debt and unemployment in the US. When the government uses our tax dollars to subsidize foreign companies, we are not given a choice.

If we continue to allow the government to outsource our tax dollars we have no one to blame but ourselves when our economy goes down the tubes. This is especially true if we allow the government to continue to tax small business into extinction.

And we still haven't seen what the effects of ridiculous programs like Cap & Trade or National Health Care will do, although the CBO doesn't paint a rosy picture.

Soon there will be nothing left to our economy, but at least we will be able to look forward to government funded Mandarin lessons.

China Daily

China State Construction Engineering Corp, the largest contractor in China, has bagged a subway ventilation project worth about $100 million in New York's Manhattan area, marking the construction giant's third order in the United States' infrastructure space this year.

The contract was given to China Construction American Co, a subsidiary, the Wall Street Journal quoted a source as saying.

"The new project, along with the $410-million Hamilton Bridge project and a $1.7-billion entertainment project it won earlier this year, signals China State Construction's ambition to tap the American construction market," said Li Zhirui, an industry analyst at First Capital Securities.

Li, however, said the order came as no surprise as the US government is spending massively on infrastructure projects.

Or how about this one? What happened to T Boone Pickens anyway?

Wall Street Journal

A Chinese wind-turbine company, with financing help from Beijing, has struck a deal to be the exclusive supplier to one of the largest wind-farm developments in the U.S., a sign of how Chinese firms are aggressively capitalizing on America's clean-energy push.

The 36,000-acre development in West Texas would receive $1.5 billion in financing through Export-Import Bank of China. Shenyang Power Group, a five-month-old alliance, would supply the project with 240 of its 2.5-megawatt wind turbines, among the biggest made in the world.

Cappy McGarr, managing partner of U.S. Renewable Energy Group, a private-equity firm that is lead partner on the 600-megawatt development, said the partnership would seek tax credits and support from the federal stimulus package, which should amount to millions of dollars. Mr. McGarr said the project should create 2,800 jobs -- of which 15% would be in the U.S. The rest would flow to China, where Shenyang employs 800 people.

The Obama administration is hoping a shift to renewable energy will inject new life into the U.S. manufacturing base and provide high-paying jobs, making up for losses in other sectors. But while the U.S. has poured money into renewable energy through tax credits and other subsidies, China has positioned itself to reap many of the benefits by ramping up its export machine.

"This is just the beginning," said Lu Jinxiang, chief executive of A-Power Energy Generation Systems Ltd., which controls Shenyang Power. He said the U.S. "is an ideal target" as it seeks to shift to renewable energy from fossil fuels.

Climategate : New Zealand edition

Another 'Inconvenient Truth' from TBR.cc and just in time for the UN Climate Conference in  Copenhagen.

Maybe the lame stream mediots will take notice now. Nah, I doubt it.

BREAKING: NZ’s NIWA accused of CRU-style temperature faking

UPDATE 15:49 NZDT - NIWA's news release in response to this story appears to have been delayed, and according to a radio news report a few minutes ago Rodney Hide, leader of the minority Act Party and a minister in the National Government, is now calling on his Cabinet colleague, Climate Change Minister Nick Smith, to "please explain" [normal transmission now resumes]

The New Zealand Government's chief climate advisory unit NIWA is under fire for allegedly massaging raw climate data to show a global warming trend that wasn't there.

The scandal breaks as fears grow worldwide that corruption of climate science is not confined to just Britain's CRU climate research centre.

In New Zealand's case, the figures published on NIWA's [the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric research] website suggest a strong warming trend in New Zealand over the past century:

The caption to the photo on the NiWA site reads:

From NIWA's web site — Figure 7: Mean annual temperature over New Zealand, from 1853 to 2008 inclusive, based on 

between 2 (from 1853) and 7 (from 1908) long-term station records. The blue and red bars show annual differences from the 

1971 – 2000 average, the solid black line is a smoothed time series, and the dotted [straight] line is the linear trend over 1909 

to 2008 (0.92°C/100 years).

But analysis of the raw climate data from the same temperature stations has just turned up a very different result:
 
Gone is the relentless rising temperature trend, and instead there appears to have been a much smaller growth in warming, consistent with the warming up of the planet after the end of the Little Ice Age in 1850. 

The revelations are published today in a news alert from The Climate Science Coalition of NZ: 

Straight away you can see there's no slope—either up or down. The temperatures are remarkably constant way back to the 1850s. Of course, the temperature still varies from year to year, but the trend stays level—statistically insignificant at 0.06°C per century since 1850.

Putting these two graphs side by side, you can see huge differences. What is going on?

Why does NIWA's graph show strong warming, but graphing their own raw data looks completely different? Their graph shows warming, but the actual temperature readings show none whatsoever!

Have the readings in the official NIWA graph been adjusted?

It is relatively easy to find out. We compared raw data for each station (from NIWA's web site) with the adjusted official data, which we obtained from one of Dr Salinger's colleagues.

Requests for this information from Dr Salinger himself over the years, by different scientists, have long gone unanswered, but now we might discover the truth.

Proof of man-made warming

What did we find? First, the station histories are unremarkable. There are no reasons for any large corrections. But we were astonished to find that strong adjustments have indeed been made.

About half the adjustments actually created a warming trend where none existed; the other half greatly exaggerated existing warming. All the adjustments increased or even created a warming trend, with only one (Dunedin) going the other way and slightly reducing the original trend.

The shocking truth is that the oldest readings have been cranked way down and later readings artificially lifted to give a false impression of warming, as documented below. There is nothing in the station histories to warrant these adjustments and to date Dr Salinger and NIWA have not revealed why they did this.

Read the rest TBR.cc

SEIU thugs charged in Town Hall assault

FINALLY! It only took nearly 4 months.

Of course the paper calls it a disturbance and not once does it mention SEIU by name. Also, ordinance violations in St Louis are lesser charges than a misdemeanor so apparently if union goons beat someone there it's not really a big deal.

St Louis Post-Dispatch

ST. LOUIS COUNTY • Six people arrested in August outside a raucous town hall meeting in south St. Louis County have been charged with misdemeanor ordinance violations.

The six, including a Post-Dispatch reporter, had attended a demonstration outside an Aug. 6 forum called by U.S. Rep. Russ Carnahan, D-St. Louis, at Bernard Middle School in Mehlville to discuss health care reform.

The charges were filed Tuesday by the St. Louis County counselor’s office, which prosecutes misdemeanor ordinance violations in unincorporated areas. All are to appear in court Jan. 21.

The maximum penalty upon conviction would be one year in jail and a $1,000 fine.

Gladney, 39, of St. Louis, who police said had been assaulted, said a call from a reporter Wednesday was the first he had heard of the charges. "I’m shocked it took this long," he said.

He said he believes the crime against him should be prosecuted as a felony. "I’m mad as I-don’t-know-what about this," Gladney said. "It seems like average people can’t get justice."

And what took almost 4 months to file the charges? County Counselor Patricia Redington in an interview with St Louis station KMOX had this to say about the amount of time it took to get charges files

"Nobody called me and I don't know why that was perceived to be long," Redington said.  "We have about 90 thousand charges a year. We try to get charges written up within six to eight weeks of getting a report."

But

"Most of our charges don't involve dozens of police officers, multiple defendants and quite a few videos to review," she said.

I won't even touch the subject of what the outcry would have been if the thugs that committed the assault did not have the POTUS in their hip pocket, given that Kenneth Gladney is black.

Al Sharpton, where are you?

I'm actually surprise that SEIU hasn't claimed to be the victim in all this and then started an investigation into why Mr Gladney did not just allow himself to be beaten and instead fought back.

I predict that all charges are either dropped or the thugs get off with some community service, with pay at grade of course.



Via Memeorandum

San Diego ACORN Document Dump Scandal

Breaking on Big Government

On October 1st, 2009 California Attorney General Jerry Brown announced that an investigation had been opened into ACORN’s activities in California, resulting from undercover videos showing employees seemingly offering to assist the undercover film makers with human smuggling, child prostitution and even tax advice to boot.

Although ACORN has denied any wrongdoing, some of the employees involved were terminated, and ACORN has publicly stated that they would fully cooperate with any investigations that followed.

Shockingly, we now learn that the ACORN office in National City (San Diego County) engaged in a massive document dump on the evening of October 9th, containing thousands upon thousands of sensitive documents, just days prior to the Attorney General’s visit.

Hats off to concerned citizen and licensed private investigator Derrick Roach for breaking another case showing the level of corruption at ACORN.

ACORN of course is the victim or as Amy Schur, state head organizer for California ACORN, claims, it is just a simple mistake. "In early October, when our San Diego staff were doing an office clean-up in preparation for a major 10-station phone bank program being set up in our offices, it appears that included in the piles of garbage being thrown out may have been some documents containing private information." 

This "private information" included  ACORN employee names, addresses, social security numbers and driver's license numbers along with confidential information from Citibank consumers.

Now a few people did apparently lose their jobs over this careless little act, but you can bet your last nut that that no one higher up the food chain will even come within a whiff of any investigation.

Again, are these the type of people and organizations we want having access to the POTUS?

Via Big Government
Via FoxNews

Climategate : Lord Christopher Monckton's take

Exclusive interview with Pajamas Media

The man who challenged Al Gore to a debate is furious about the content of the leaked CRU emails — and says why you should be, too.

The tiny, close-knit clique of climate scientists who invented and now drive the “global warming” fraud — for fraud is what we now know it to be — tampered with temperature data so assiduously that, on the recent admission of one of them, land temperatures since 1980 have risen twice as fast as ocean temperatures. One of the thousands of emails recently circulated by a whistleblower at the University of East Anglia, where one of the world’s four global-temperature datasets is compiled, reveals that data were altered so as to prevent a recent decline in temperature from showing in the record. In fact, there has been no statistically significant “global warming” for 15 years — and there has been rapid and significant cooling for nine years.

Worse, these arrogant fraudsters — for fraudsters are what we now know them to be — have refused, for years and years and years, to reveal their data and their computer program listings. Now we know why: As a revealing 15,000-line document from the computer division at the Climate Research Unit shows, the programs and data are a hopeless, tangled mess. In effect, the global temperature trends have simply been made up. Unfortunately, the British researchers have been acting closely in league with their U.S. counterparts who compile the other terrestrial temperature dataset — the GISS/NCDC dataset. That dataset too contains numerous biases intended artificially to inflate the natural warming of the 20th century.

Finally, these huckstering snake-oil salesmen and “global warming” profiteers — for that is what they are — have written to each other encouraging the destruction of data that had been lawfully requested under the Freedom of Information Act in the UK by scientists who wanted to check whether their global temperature record had been properly compiled. And that procurement of data destruction, as they are about to find out to their cost, is a criminal offense. They are not merely bad scientists — they are crooks. And crooks who have perpetrated their crimes at the expense of British and U.S. taxpayers.

I am angry, and so should you be.

Climategate : The Harry_Read_Me File

I have no idea what the code means but there are some serious shenanigans going on here.

What it comes down to is that the entire AGW myth is based on manipulated, manufactured and flawed data and it appears that the lame stream mediots have zero interest in covering it.

And this is only the tip of the iceberg.

H/T SOYLENT GREEN

Love the ironic title. Got this from reader, Glenn. I’m out of my depth trying to read the code–and apparently so were several folks at CRU. If what he, and the techies at the links, say is true, it’s no wonder they had to spin this for 10 years–it’s all absolute bullshit.

Here’s Glenn’s take with links:

The hacked e-mails were damning, but the problems they had handling their own data at CRU are a dagger to the heart of the global warming “theory.” There is a large file of comments by a programmer at CRU called HARRY_READ_ME documenting that their data processing and modeling functions were completely out of control.

They fudged so much that NOTHING that came out of CRU can have ANY believability. If the word can be gotten out on this and understood it is the end of the global warming myth. This much bigger than the e-mails. For techie takes on this see:

http://www.tickerforum.org/cgi-ticker/akcs-www?post=118625&page=13

http://www.neuralnetwriter.cylo42.com/node/2421

To base a re-making of the global economy (i.e. cap-and-trade)on disastrously and hopelessly messed up data like this would be insanity.

Send it far and wide.

Climategate : The AGW lie - Hadley CRU email hacked, truth exposed

Dubbed Climategate, an unknown hacker broadcast hundreds of emails stolen from the databases of the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia (Hadley CRU) to expose what many of us already believe, that global warming is an unscientific hoax. Or as Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research says in one email

The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a
travesty that we can't.

And this wasn't just a few emails, but rather a zip file containing 1,073 emails in one folder, and 3,485 documents in another. This release will expose the global warming conspirators and their junk science for what it really is, an attempt by enviro-nazis and eco-business to control the economic well being of the rest of us by attempting to scare us into believing that the sky is falling.

This should put a damper on The United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December, but since the email release is barely a blip on the radar of the MSM, it won't.

To read all the emails in full, go to An Elegant Chaos where they have all been posted in searchable form.

SEIU thugs intimidate workers in CA union vote

H/T Libertarian Republican

This is what Andy Stern and his band of thugs stand for. Corruption, intimidation and control.

Are these really the people we want having unfettered access to the POTUS?



From BigGovernment.com:

Earlier this week, we brought you the story of SEIU’s alleged ballot fraud during a union election in Fresno, CA. SEIU’s fraud wasn’t against political opponents or some evil capitalist. No, SEIU’s fraud was against a brother/sister labor union.

SEIU has been engaged in a fire-fight with the National Union of Health Workers. For SEIU, it isn’t enough that workers are unionized, but they must be unionized AND their dues flow into the purple political machine. The video features SEIU official David Regan, who ran the union’s voting campaign. Keep in mind, again, the “opponents” he mentions aren’t Republicans or businesses, but another labor union.

You can see why SEIU thugs were so ambitious to win this election when you read why the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) was created

NUHW was formed after a two-year struggle to expose and reverse SEIU President Andy Stern’s drive to centralize power among a small clique of Washington-based officers and staff at the expense of rank-and-file workers’ voices with their employers and in their own union.

Read the NUHW complaint here.

Peter Schiff in tie with Chris Dodd for CT Senate Seat

H/T Libertarian Advocate

That's the good news from a November 12 Quinnipiac poll

If the 2010 election for United States Senator were being held today, and the candidates were Chris Dodd the Democrat and Peter Schiff the Republican, for whom would you vote?

                 Tot Rep Dem Ind Men Wom

Dodd             42% 11% 74% 34% 41% 43%
Schiff           41  81  10  47  44  38
SMONE ELSE(VOL)   1   -   -   1   -   1
WLDN'T VOTE(VOL)  1   2   1   1   1   1
DK/NA            15   6  16  17  13  17


The bad news is that Schiff is running 4th in the Republican primary race, from the same poll, behind Rob Simmons, Tom Foley and Linda McMahon and that any Republican stands a good change of beating Dodd in the general election.

(If registered Republican) If the 2010 Republican primary for United States Senator were being held today and the candidates were Rob Simmons, Tom Foley, Sam Caligiuri, Linda McMahon and Peter Schiff, for whom would you vote?

Simmons               28%
Foley                  9
Caligiuri              4
McMahon               17
Schiff                 5
SMONE ELSE(VOL)        -
WLDN'T VOTE(VOL)       2
DK/NA                 36

The trend shows that Mrs McMahon is definitely siphoning votes away from Rep Simmons but with 33% of CT voters' main concern the economy and 30% concerned about health care, inroads can be made by Schiff once he gets his message of fiscal responsibility out since nearly 90% of CT voters have not heard enough about him.



Please go to Schiff for Senate to donate to the one candidate in CT that will support the Constitution and bring fiscal sanity back to DC.

KSM should stand trail : Judge Andrew Napolitano

May not be the most popular opinion but he is a lot more versed in the Constitution and law than I am.

If he is right we have to accept the Constitution, warts and all. We can't just pick and choose when we want to accept it or it suits our purpose and ignore it when it doesn't.



O'Reilly concedes the argument when he says "I don't care about the Constitution".

Obama May Attend Climate Change Conference After All

Don't look now but the Chosen One thinks he can be the force to save the world.

Guardian UK

President Barack Obama will travel to the climate summit in Copenhagen next month if the countries involved are on the verge of a deal and he thinks his presence will help to clinch agreement, he said in an interview last night.

It is Obama's strongest assertion yet that he will attend the meeting in Denmark to help secure a binding treaty in the fight against climate change, and comes after weeks of pessimism and a significant downgrading of the summit's goal.

"If I am confident that all the countries involved are bargaining in good faith and we are on the brink of a meaningful agreement and my presence in Copenhagen will make a difference in tipping us over edge, then certainly that's something that I will do," the US president told Reuters.

And in case you have forgotten what Lord Christopher Monckton had to say about this conference.

China's state-owned energy firm buys U.S. off-shore leases

H/T SOYLENT GREEN

What the hell is going on in DC?

From the Washington Examiner

Gas prices here in the U.S. are creeping back up towards the $3-per-gallon mark even as news breaks today that China's state-owned energy firm just closed a deal to buy interests in four development leases on the American Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) in the Gulf of Mexico.

The deal, which requires approval of the U.S. government, is between Norway's Statoil and China National Off-Shore Oil Corporation (CNOOC). This is the same CNOOC that would have bought Unocal four years ago for $18.5 billion but for pressure from Congress, according to The New York Times, quoting an energy industry trade publication.

Because it must be approved by the U.S. government, the Statoil/CNOOC deal puts President Obama and Ken Salazar, his Secretary of the Department of the Interior, which controls OCS leasing, in a difficult position.

If the administration approves the deal, it will be more vulnerable to charges that the White House is being careless with U.S. national security issues in the energy sector, and that it is putting the interests of a foreign power before those of U.S. energy consumers.

If Obama and Salazar reject the deal, it will likely complicate relations with China, the emerging Asian superpower that defense experts predict will be able at will to challenge U.S. legitimate national security interests around the globe in the near future.

The deal also focuses renewed attention on Salazar's slow-walking of a new plan for approving energy exploration and development in the OCS, which includes approximately 1.7 billion acres, and, according to Interior, holds up to 86 billion barrels of recoverable oil and more than 400 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

So let me get this straight, the US is looking for alternative sources of oil to break free from our dependence on foreign countries yet we may let the Chinese drill in our backyard for risk of upsetting them.

The Administration needs to grow a pair and be aggressive in securing oil rights for us and drilling within our borders, foreign opinions and environmetalcases be damned.

It is all well and good that we are trying to develop other sources of energy like solar, hydro and wind to end our dependence on fossil fuels, but until that day comes we need to exploit all the oil, natural gas and coal we can get our hands on. And lets not forget about nuclear power too.

With the way things are going in the White House we all better learn Mandarin quickly.

Via Washington Examiner

Russell Means on Socialized Medicine

By Glenn Jacobs

If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see how much it costs when it's free.
—P.J. O'Rourke

It looks as if the democrats have enough votes to pass the government takeover of the American health care system.  Although I like to call it socialized medicine to tweak my liberal friends, what we are really talking about is fascist medicine. 

While the popular myth is that big government is at odds with big business, the opposite is true.  Big business loves regulations which benefit it, and politicians love the money that flows from big business.  Congress did not write this 1,900 page monstrosity—lobbyist did, and many of those lobbyist work for the insurance industry.  After all, the law will now mandate everyone carry some sort of health insurance.  What a sweet deal to have the government force everyone to buy your product.  Only in America!

I could go on and on about the dangers that this bill poses to individual liberty, but I'll let Judge Napolitano speak for me.

Russell Means is probably the most famous living American Indian activist.  Means saw government run health care close up.  Writing in his 1991 autobiography Where White Men Fear to Tread, at the height of the push for Hillary-care, Means had this to say:

Now the government wants to turn all Americans into welfare recipients by taking control of health care because, as demonstrated with my people, long-term welfare destroys families and creates a pliant, easily manipulated society.  As an Indian and a Libertarian, I saw that unless something was done to awaken the people, as William Shirer wrote in the 1950s, America will be the first country to become fascist democratically—a process that has begun.(p. 488)

Via The Adventures of Citizen X

Ron and Rand Paul on Beck (w/ Judge Napolitano)

Discussing the viability of 3rd Parties.

The Problems With "Printing Your Way out of Debt"

We are so screwed if the POTUS and Congress continue to allow the printing presses at the Treasury to churn 24/7.

This is why it is so important for candidates like Rand Paul and Peter Schiff to win their respective Senate races.

11/07/09 Beunos Aires, Argentina – Governments are running breathtaking deficits…and accumulating alarming debts. Japan has a national debt of nearly 200% of its GDP. Where did that debt come from? It came from 20 years of trying to buy its way out of a slump with borrowed money. Of course, it didn’t work. But now, Britain and America are following the Japanese lead…and the Japanese are still at it! At the present rate, Japan’s government debt will grow to 300% of GDP in 10 years. America’s debt could grow to 100%…and then 200% of GDP…over the next decade (depending on whose projections you believe). And Britain, if we read the report in The Financial Times correctly, will have debt equal to 200% of GDP within 3 years.

Why wouldn’t the US just “print its way out of debt?”

Because it’s not that easy. In effect, the feds are trying to print their way out of debt now. They’ve added huge amounts to the monetary base. But that money is not getting into the real economy. Instead, it’s going into vaults and speculations.

“Jittery Companies Stash Cash,” says The Wall Street Journal.

And banks, too, borrow…but they don’t lend. They can borrow at negligible rates of interest…and buy US Treasury bonds on a leveraged basis…producing a 20% yield. That means, the US dollar has replaced the yen as the go-to currency for speculators.

Net effect? Lots of cash in what appears to the Mother of all Carry Trades. The Financial Times:

“The US dollar has become the major funding currency of carry trades as the Fed has kept interest rates on hold and is expected to do so for a long time. Investors who are shorting the US dollar to buy on a highly leveraged basis higher-yielding assets and other global assets are not just borrowing at zero interest rates in dollar terms; they are borrowing at very negative interest rates – as low as negative 10 or 20 per cent annualized – as the fall in the US dollar leads to massive capital gains on short dollar positions.”

But in the economy itself? As in Japan, very little economic progress comes from this kind of speculation.

Bankruptcies rose 7% last month. Unemployment gets worse.

The financial markets bubble up. The real economy shrivels up. And people with any sense are stocking up.

Via The Daily Reckoning

Working Families Party "Scam" Exposed

H/T Michelle Malkin

Surprise, surprise, another ACORN scandal is popping up. This time it is the ACORN funded "party" the Working Families Party that is accused of skirting campaign finance laws by giving it's candidates cut rate services through a for-profit, private, consulting company called Data & Field Services (DFS) which the NYC Campaign Finance Board has declared to be an arm of the Party.

NY Post

The labor-backed Working Families Party has engaged in "an audacious scheme to violate the law" to help the party's favored political candidates get elected, a sweeping new lawsuit charges.

The first-of-its-kind suit says the WFP created a political outfit, Data and Field Services, that it is using to "circumvent state election and local campaign finance laws."

The way the scheme works, according the suit, is that the WFP gets involved in local races, backing its favored candidates, who in turn hire DFS for vital campaign services, such as phone banking, polling and get-out-the-vote efforts.

But under the plan, the WFP-endorsed candidates pay only "a nominal sum, well below fair market value," for those services -- giving those candidates a major, unfair advantage over their opponents, whose spending is limited by law.

Interestingly enough, City Council candidate Debi Rose who has been accused of receiving the cut rate services of DFS, has decided to invoke her Fifth Amendment rights during a pre-hearing on the matter.

I am just amazed by the either arrogance or stupidity of ACORN, along with its affiliates, and honestly I have to believe that it is the arrogance that they feel they are smarter than the rest of us and know what is best for us. I just hope they know that we are watching them and will expose them for what they are, a group of progressive socialists and marxists intent in co-opting our government, our freedoms and our liberties.