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DON'T BELIEVE LYING LIBERALS!
LET ALL CONSERVATIVES PUT ASIDE THEIR DIFFERENCES AND BAND TOGETHER TO
STOP THIS TYRANNY IN D.C.!
Remember what Ben Franklin said:
"We must
hang together, gentlemen...else, we shall most assuredly hang
separately."
Columnist Connie Schultz at the Cleveland Plain Dealer has added her voice to those calling for new laws that would prevent Web sites from summarizing news stories that originate elsewhere.
Schultz joins figures such as influential judge Richard Posner and newspaper industry lawyers Bruce Sanford and Bruce Brown in claiming that this massive rewrite of copyright law is necessary to “save” journalism.
All are proposing some form of new copyright laws to make it harder for publications to rewrite news scoops that first appear elsewhere. Schultz endorses a specific proposal to ban any publishers from summarizing others’ reports for at least 24 hours.
Recommendations of this sort should frighten anyone who cares about a free press. But one would think that journalists would be especially suspicious of any proposals to give someone ownership — even if temporary — over information.
Certainly, it wouldn’t serve readers’ interests to prevent one publication from rewriting and/or linking to another’s articles. If the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports on something of national importance, isn’t it a good thing that readers in, say, New York, who might not think to visit the Plain Dealer Web site, are able to learn of that story via Google News? And if the Cleveland Plain Dealer honestly believes the answer to that question is no, the paper has the ability to keep its pages out of Google’s results. Or it could refrain from putting them online altogether.
Schultz has special contempt for “aggregators” that, she claims, make newspapers redundant. “Parasitic aggregators reprint or rewrite newspaper stories, making the originator redundant and drawing ad revenue away from newspapers at rates the publishers can’t match.” she complains. “The inevitable consequence: diminished revenue and staff cuts.”
That aggregators also send traffic — and potential ad eyeballs — back to news sites seems to have escaped her.
Besides, some former advertisers have stopped spending as much on newspapers for reasons having nothing to do with aggregators. Newspapers’ classifieds revenue dropped from around $20 billion in 2000 to $10 billion last year as listings migrated to the free Craigslist — a site that no one would accuse of aggregating news.
A few days ago, in response to a request from Erica, one of our loyal readers and supporters, we put together an article outlining some of the Broken Promises Of Barack Obama.
We were all sitting around the office when Dan asked “Didn’t we do something that ties in with that awhile back?”
So we dug through the archives and sure enough, there it was.
Another campaign promise Barack Obama had made was that his White House would be “The most ethical administration in history!”
Well, take a look at we had come up with in response to that claim, and let us know if you feel, as we do, that this is just another example of one of Obama’s broken promises to the American people:
His original choice for Secretary of Commerce, Governor Bill Richardson, was removed from consideration after it was revealed that he was the subject of a grand jury investigation into government corruption.
His appointment for White House Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, has had many things said about himself.
Possible the politest was that the man was like a pit bull.
This is an individual who once mailed a dead fish to a political opponent.
Tim Geithner, appointed as Treasury Secretary, had a bit of a bump in the road when…Read the rest of this entry
The first settlement in North America was Fort Caroline at St. John’s River in Florida, founded by French Christians known as Huguenots.
On JUNE 30, 1564, they set a day of Thanksgiving and offered the first Protestant prayer in North America: “We sang a psalm of Thanksgiving unto God, beseeching Him that it would please Him to continue His accustomed goodness towards us.”
Rep. Charles E. Bennett sponsored a bill, September 21, 1950, establishing the Fort Caroline National Memorial. In 1989, Rep. Bennett recited the history: “The 425th anniversary of the beginning settlements by Europeans…renamed from Fort Caroline to San Mateo, to San Nicolas, to Cowford and finally to Jacksonville in 1822…Three small ships carrying 300 Frenchmen led by Rene de Laudonniere anchored in the river known today as the St. Johns.”
Charles Bennett continued: “On June 30, 1564, construction of a triangular-shaped fort…was begun with the help of a local tribe of Timucuan Indians…Home for this hardy group of Huguenots…their strong religious…motivations inspired them.” Rep.
Bennett related the colony’s end: “Fort Caroline existed but for a short time…Spain…captured…the fort and…slaughtered most of its inhabitants in September of 1565.”
After a contentious session in the House last Friday, the largest tax increase in history – the Waxman-Markey bill – passed 219-11. Touted as a “jobs” bill by its supporters, how many Americans realize that the jobs created will not benefit Americans, but the nations of China and Iran?
On its face, the bill is part of a noble cause – noble, of course, if you believe that man is responsible for global warming (even though the trend toward global cooling is more evident than ever). In a nutshell, manufacturers will only be allowed a certain amount of carbon emissions. Those who have emissions to “spare” can trade them to other companies that need more. Those that go over the limit will be fined, or taxed.
Sounds great, doesn’t it? Let’s Save The Earth™! Until, of course, you realize that all living beings are carbon-based and we all “emit” carbon when we exhale, in the form of carbon dioxide. Will individual people end up being taxed just for breathing? But we digress.
Naturally, those companies that are taxed for their emissions will pass the cost on to consumers, driving up the cost of goods and services everywhere. How this helps our tanking economy is still unclear. But there’s an even more worrisome aspect to all of this: Energy prices for all will go up. Perhaps the wealthiest among us can weather such increases, but as the Wall Street Journalpoints out, Read the rest of this entry »
Ever hear of Alan Carlin? Probably not, and that is the way the Obama Administration wants to keep it. Dr. Carlin is an Environmental Protection Agency veteran who recently wrote a damaging report, warning that the science behind climate change was questionable at best, and that we shouldn’t pass laws that will hurt American families and hobble the nation’s economy based on incomplete information.
Despite its promise to put science above politics, the Administration has suppressed Carlin’s report, banned him from writing or speaking about climate change, told him to forget about attending any meetings that addressed his main job function—climate change—and gave him a new assignment: updating a grants database. One supposes that, by dedicating its distinguished scientists to data-entry tasks, Obama’s EPA is able to free up true-believing interns to do its research.
Until recently, Dr. Carlin’s assignment was to research climate change issues for the agency. As part of this responsibility, he prepared a 98-page report earlier this year questioning the need for the agency to regulate CO2. His main argument—buttressed by citation after citation of peer-reviewed science—was that the agency’s earlier argument for regulating was based on incomplete science that ignored much more recent (and contrary) studies.
EPA responded by burying the report. As for Dr. Carlin himself, he was put under a strict gag order by superiors. They forbade him from writing, speaking or e-mailing about global warming to anyone outside his group at EPA. Now that his comment has been leaked (available here), the truth can come out.
We spoke to an embattled Dr. Carlin on the phone today, and, though he does fear losing his job because of his opinion, he has the strength of his beliefs. He told us that in 40 years of working for the government, he can’t remember any other time such pressure has been put on him. But you can hear in his voice that Dr. Carlin, who got his undergraduate degree in physics from CalTech and his PhD in economics from MIT, is not easily silenced.
“I’ve been involved in public policy since 1966 or 1967,” he said. “There’s never been anything exactly like this. I am now under a gag order.”
As for travel, “it’s been made abundantly clear that I was not to attend anything to do with climate change.” When he did attend a conference in Washington that was open to the public, he was reprimanded by a superior who told Dr. Carlin that he had “shown poor judgment” in daring to ask a question.
So many people declare that they want to “save the world!” A candidate for Miss Universe declared that to be the main purpose of her life, a candidate for the presidency announced that to be his top priority goal after the election, et cetera. Recently, 219 congressmen who voted in favor of the Waxman-Markey energy bill H.R. 2454 on Friday seemed to be driven by the best intentions of making this planet a better place to be as well.
Ambitions to save the world are always dominant for big political figures. However, politicians generally represent their constituents—or at least make an attempt—and their interests locally may be at odds with what is best for the world as a whole.
The Obama administration announced that Waxman-Markey will make the world cleaner and better by reducing pollution and the risk of global warming. But if their intention is to protect the world, then why is the American federal government the only beneficiary of “border adjustments?” If the main purpose of Waxman-Markey is to get the largest CO2-emitting countries to “contribute equitably to the reduction of greenhouse gas,” then why is the U.S. going to collect the fees and payments from the rest of the world?
It is pretty surprising that the international community has yet to begin demanding answers. Perhaps they are still reading the 1,500-page bill? Well, the consequences will influence everyone, so maybe it is time to start reading before it reaches the Senate floor.
For background on this post, we posted this earlier article about this decision from Sonia Sotomayor to deny qualified firefighters promotion following a series of examinations that those who were promoted all passed. Some who failed this series of intense examinations on all aspects about firefighting, took legal action saying that the promotions were based solely on race issues, (not that those promoted passed all the examinations, and those who were not promoted did not pass). Sonia Sotomayor was one of the judges who agreed with them and set aside the promotions. This new decision sets aside her decision and reinstates those promotions.
“Wise Latina” Sonia Sotomayor, President Barack Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, is judged by her peers to be a racist – in the nicest possible way, of course:
The Supreme Court ruled Monday that white firefighters in New Haven, Conn., were unfairly denied promotions because of their race, reversing a decision that high court nominee Sonia Sotomayor endorsed as an appeals court judge.
New Haven was wrong to scrap a promotion exam because no African-Americans and only two Hispanic firefighters were likely to be made lieutenants or captains based on the results, the court said Monday in a 5-4 decision. The city said that it had acted to avoid a lawsuit from minorities.
Andrew Bolt is a journalist and columnist writing for The Herald Sun in Melbourne Victoria Australia.
Which Republicans in the House voted for Cap and Tax – H.R. 2454 Tax Increase? (American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009)
In Reality it’s the single largest tax increase in American history! Call these Republican Turncoats and give them HELL!!! Tell them to pull a ‘Spector’ and switch parties!
If you want to call your Democrap Rep and read them the riot act that’s a good idea also. Let them know you are watching them. Also CALL your Senators NOW! Links tophone numbers, fax + emails of both Senators and Reps., at the end.
We’ve added some posts recently about how the current Obama Administration is questioning the Defense Budget because it contains money for the ‘unwanted’ F 22 Raptor, a fighter aircraft without equal anywhere on Earth, and one that Obama does not wish to continue with. This post concerns a much older aircraft, the F 15, and I have included it to add some context to this current debate, even though this story is about this aircraft in the Israeli Air Force. Read the post here and then the post script I have added at the end of this post.
F-15 Eagle "Commando" with 6 Syrian kill markings
Breakfast in Tehran? The Israeli Air Force is upgrading its F-15s and F-15Is to better equip them to make bombing runs at long distances.
Why? Because Israel deals from strength:
“The reelection of Iran’s president, his grave utterances regarding his will to harm the state of Israel and Iran’s continual effort to achieve unconventional weapons require us to maintain an army that is coiled and ready to spring into action, and an Air Force that is skilled and sharp as a razor, that will stand up to any enemy and remove any threat from our citizens and residents,“ IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi said Thursday in an IAF ceremony for new pilots at the Hatzerim Air Force Base.
“Every new regulation concerning commerce or revenue; or in any manner affecting the value of the different species of property, presents a new harvest to those who watch the change and can trace its consequences; a harvest reared not by themselves but by the toils and cares of the great body of their fellow citizens.” –James Madison (likely), Federalist No. 62
POLITICAL FUTURES
The only emissions problem is on Capitol Hill
The Heritage Foundation’s senior policy analyst for energy and environment, Ben Lieberman, has produced a stellar paper on [the cap and trade bill]… Based on available evidence and analysis, Lieberman concludes ‘that both the seriousness and imminence of anthropogenic global warming has been overstated.’ But even if we assume the problem is as bad as the hysterics claim, the proposed bill ‘would have a trivial impact on future concentrations of greenhouse gases. …[It] would reduce the earth’s future temperature by 0.1 to 0.2 degree C by 2100, an amount too small to even notice.’ The bill would bind only the U.S., not other nations, many of which, like China, are ‘polluting’ at a record pace. Also note that many European nations that have already imposed similar emissions restrictions have seen their emissions rise. But what would the costs be for this quixotic legislative paean to earth goddess Gaia? Contrary to the flawed analyses being advanced by the bill’s proponents, Heritage estimates that the direct costs would be an average of $829 per year for a household of four, totaling $20,000 between 2012 and 2035. But when considering the total cost as reflected in the cost of allocations and offsets, the average cost to that family unit would be $2,979 annually from 2012 to 2035. Adding insult and hypocrisy to injury, the bill would hurt the poor the worst because they would bear a disproportionate burden of the higher energy costs the bill would trigger. Now here’s the kicker. The bill is also projected to harm the manufacturing sector and cause estimated ‘net’ job losses, averaging about 1.15 million between 2012 and 2030. The overall gross domestic product losses would average $393 billion per year from 2012 to 2035, and the cumulative loss in gross domestic product would be $9.4 trillion by 2035. The national debt for a family of four would increase by $115,000 by 2035. Enough already. Throw the bums out.” –columnist David LimbaughRead the rest of this entry »
Most of you reading this are probably not old enough to have heard of an organization once known as the Civil Defense, or what it once stood for.
We’ll get back to that in a minute.
Some of you may recall that during the Presidential campaign, Barack Obama made the claim that “America needs a domestic security force just as strong and just as well funded as our military.”
At the time, I figured that candidate Obama was choosing to ignore the fact that we already have something along those lines, those of us who are sensible know it as the National Guard.
But it turns out that what Mr. Obama had in mind was, in our opinion, his own private army, formed under the pretense of having a domestic group ready to respond in case of a national emergency or terrorist attack.
Again, Mr. Obama, ever hear of the National…Read the rest of this entry
As the U.S. Senate now prepares to consider the cap-and-trade climate bill recently passed by the House, they will want to consider all the facts related to this landmark spending program. So far we have learned that the Environmental Protection Agency has suppressed an internal report skeptical about the wild global warming claims and now, from across the pond, we find out that a polar bear expert has been forbidden by global warming alarmists from reporting that most of those animals have actually been increasing in population during the past few years or are at optimum levels.
Although you won’t find this story anywhere in the American media, Christopher Booker of the UK Telegraph has delivered an excellent report on this inconvenient truth suppression:
Over the coming days a curiously revealing event will be taking place in Copenhagen. Top of the agenda at a meeting of the Polar Bear Specialist Group (set up under the International Union for the Conservation of Nature/Species Survival Commission) will be the need to produce a suitably scary report on how polar bears are being threatened with extinction by man-made global warming.
This is one of a steady drizzle of events planned to stoke up alarm in the run-up to the UN’s major conference on climate change in Copenhagen next December. But one of the world’s leading experts on polar bears has been told to stay away from this week’s meeting, specifically because his views on global warming do not accord with those of the rest of the group
This is a great idea, and you might think at first that it actually is an altruistic thing with the high ideal of saving the environment, and the green lobby of environmentalists will be hailing this as a great thing.
However, is it really?
Let’s look at it in some detail, because this gives us an insight into how Cap and Trade works.
This Australian Company will be giving those light bulbs away, in, of all places, Mexico.
Not in Australia, where consumers here are exhorted to replace all their older style incandescent light globes with these new compact fluorescent light bulbs to save on CO2 emissions.
These bulbs cost 6 to 8 times more than the ones they are replacing, and when extrapolated out over your whole electrical utilities bill, the amount actually saved is quite tiny really, as I have explained in numerous posts, and here are links to two of them, the first, and this, the second of some of those posts where I have detailed the actual savings to be minimal, at best.
No! Australian consumers will still be expected to go out and purchase these bulbs, so Australian retail companies, distributors etc will not lose money if the bulbs are just given away here.
It’s still an altruistic thing you say, to be giving away these bulbs in what is considered to be still one of those ‘Developing’ Countries of the World, where the vast bulk of the population lives in poverty, and the money that they do earn would not even be considered for replacing light globes, no matter how much good it would do for the environment in Mexico.
So then, how does this case show us how Cap and Trade works?
“I would rather be right than President,” stated Henry Clay, who died JUNE 29, 1852.
The son of a Baptist minister, Henry Clay was elected Speaker of the U.S. House 6 times, serving in Congress over 40 years with Daniel Webster and John Calhoun.
The State of Kentucky placed Henry Clay’s statue in the U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall.
Struggling to hold the Union together prior to the Civil War, Henry Clay stated in 1829 to the Kentucky Colonization Society in Frankfort: “Eighteen hundred years have rolled away since the Son of God…offered Himself…for the salvation of our species…When we shall…be translated from this into another form of existence…we shall behold the common Father of the whites and blacks, the great Ruler of the Universe.”
In an obituary address upon his death, Representative John C. Breckinridge recalled Henry Clay as saying: “The vanity of the world, and its insufficiency to satisfy the soul of man, has been long a settled conviction of my mind. Man’s inability to secure by his own merits the approbation of God, I feel to be true.” Henry Clay concluded: “I trust in the atonement of the Saviour of mercy, as the ground of my acceptance and of my hope of salvation.”
“My God! How little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy!” said Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence and our third President. As usual, he was right.
Present-day Americans take for granted the story of the American Revolution, but few consider what a fearful undertaking that was when the Declaration was published on July 4, 1776.
Thirteen colonies of the greatest power on Earth at that time, Great Britain, determined to establish a free and independent nation.
With some notable exceptions, we are mostly ignorant of the signers of that document and I would be willing to guess that few Americans realize how long the war for our independence lasted.
It began with a local militia engagement with the British in Lexington, Massachusetts in 1775. It would end eight years later in 1783 at Yorktown, Virginia. Estimates are that 25,000 Americans gave their lives over the course of the war; some 8,000 in battle and the rest by disease or as prisoners of war.
Eight years is a long time and it is generally conceded that the tenaciousness and will of one man led to victory. His name was George Washington.
“Those who won our independence believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty,” said Louis D. Brandeis, a Supreme Court Justice.
What followed the Revolution were the Articles of Confederation that proved a dismal failure. On May 25, 1787, in great secrecy, a group of delegates from seven States, gathered to revise them. Eventually, 12 of the 13 States were represented.
Remember the Left screaming that global warming believers were being wickedly censored? Well, where’s that Left now that the censorship of warming facts is real?
Less than two weeks before the agency formally submitted its pro-regulation recommendation to the White House, an EPA center director quashed a 98-page report that warned against making hasty “decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data.”
The EPA official, Al McGartland, said in an e-mail message to a staff researcher on March 17: “The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward… and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision.”
Add to that:
TOP of the agenda at a meeting of the Polar Bear Specialist Group will be the need to produce a suitably scary report on how polar bears are being threatened with extinction by man-made global warming. But one of the world’s leading experts on polar bears has been told to stay away from this week’s meeting. Mitchell Taylor has been researching polar bears in Canada and around the Arctic Circle for 30 years, as an academic and a government employee. The (PBSG) chairman, Andy Derocher explained in an email that (Mitchell’s) rejection had nothing to do with his expertise on polar bears: “It was the position you’ve taken on global warming that brought opposition.” Taylor was told that his views running “counter to human-induced climate change are extremely unhelpful”.
Recently, one of our reader’s asked if we would do an article outlining how many of his campaign promises President Obama has already broken.
Being responsive to our reader’s wishes is one of our top priorities, but we did ask her to give us some time to compile the information, as chances are it would prove to be quite a task.
We had no idea what an understatement that was.
To list them all would cause you to lose your eyesight before you finished reading them, so we will list, in no particular order, what we consider to be the major ones.
1. Reforming Of “Earmarks.”
Obama said “When I am President, I will go through a spending bill line-by-line to make sure we are not spending money unwisely.”
I guess the hundreds of millions of dollars in the “Porkulus” economic stimulus package failed to catch his eye.
He also missed the almost 7 billion dollars in earmarks in the 2009 Omnibus spending bill for 2009 that he signed.
2. No Jobs For Lobbyists.
“Lobbyists have not funded my campaign, and they will not run my White House.”
Today’s music video is ‘Surfside’ from the Australian group The Denvermen.
Surf music has a rich heritage here in Australia, as has surfing itself. The music was popular in the sixties, and then when the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean made it popular as well.
This piece of music, ‘Surfside’ was done by this band, basically just a group of young guys who got together to play at some of the Surf clubs that are so prevalent in and around Sydney.
They were picked up as the backing band for a popular Australian vocalist of the time Digger Revell, and they also produced their own music as well.
This song was inspired by the legendary ‘Sleepwalk’ by Santo and Johnny Farina, and has that same tremelo sound it did. It was released in 1962.
It was a number one hit in Sydney, where the band mostly performed, and also did well in Melbourne, when those two cities were quite parochial, music from one city rarely played on the radio stations in the other city.
The band reformed recently in 2006 to play backing tracks for the surf movie, Delightful Rain.
The Waxman Markey Cap and Trade bill passed by a narrow margin tonight, 219 to 212 with 8 Republicans supporting and 44 Democrats voting against, hardly overwhelming support. So, one of the largest tax revenue generating bills in history passed the House of Representatives on a 7 point margin in a 435-seat chamber. A 1,200 page bill that policymakers rushed through the House (how many Members do you think read the entire bill?) that will drive up energy prices for years to come passed by just seven votes. And it took a lot of meetings and promises behind closed doors to get that seven-vote cushion.
The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis found that by 2035 gasoline prices would increase 58 percent, natural gas prices would increase 55 percent, home heating oil would increase 56 percent, and worst of all, electricity prices would jump 90 percent.
But the direct tax on household energy use is just the beginning. The energy tax also hits producers. As the higher production costs ripple through the economy, the household pocketbooks get hit again and again. When all the tax impacts have been added up, the average per-family-of-four costs rise by $2,979 per year. In the year 2035 alone, the cost is $4,609. And the costs per family for the whole energy tax aggregated from 2012 to 2035 are $71,493.
Keep in mind, this is all for a change in the global temperature we most likely won’t even notice.
So, it’s off to the Senate we go. The good news is this extremely close margin will add extra pressure on the Senate should they decided to take up the bill.
Contributing Author Nick Loris writes at The Heritage Foundation and he is a Research Assistant at The Heritage Foundation’s Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies.
The Constitutional Convention was in a deadlock over how large and small states could be represented equally. Some delegates gave up and left.
Then, on JUNE 28, 1787, 81-year-old Benjamin Franklin spoke and shortly after, the U.S. Constitution became a reality.
As recorded by James Madison, Franklin stated: “Groping as it were in the dark to find political truth, and scarce able to distinguish it when presented to us, how has it happened, Sir, that we have not hitherto once thought of humbly applying to the Father of lights.”
Franklin continued: “In the beginning of the Contest with Great Britain, when we were sensible of danger, we had daily prayer in this room for Divine protection. Our prayers, Sir, were heard and they were graciously answered. All of us who were engaged in the struggle must have observed frequent instances of a Superintending Providence in our favor…And have we now forgotten that powerful Friend? or do we imagine we no longer need His assistance?”
Franklin concluded: “We have been assured, Sir, in the Sacred Writings, that ‘except the Lord build the House, they labor in vain that build it.’…I also believe that without his concurring aid we shall succeed…no better than the Builders of Babel.”
