From the Washington Post: As Democrats reel from the loss of a U.S. Senate seat in deep blue Massachusetts, Virginia Sen. Jim Webb becomes the first senator we've seen tonight to call for suspending all votes on health care until newly elected Republican Scott Brown can take office. Some Democrats had been mulling trying to complete health care legislation before Brown can be seated, to maintain their 60 seat super majority in the senate.
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Part of Barney Frank's statement: "But our respect for democratic procedures must rule out any effort to pass a health care bill as if the Massachusetts election had not happened. Going forward, I hope there will be a serious effort to change the Senate rule which means that 59 votes are not enough to pass major legislation, but those are the rules by which the health care bill was considered, and it would be wrong to change them in the middle of the process.” [He is going to seriously try to change the rule for the future, to make fewer than 60 votes the number required to enact a new law of this magnitude. In the past, the number was 69.... As Saul Alinsky teaches: the ends justify the means....]
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Kakistrocracy: Government by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens.
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From Commentary Magazine: Last November Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. portrayed the trial [of Muhammed] as a way to showcase the American justice system to the world - and to accelerate President Obama's stalled plans to shut down the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay. But because of shifting political winds in Congress, the trial is now "potentially in jeopardy,"� a senior official, who did not want to be named talking about a sensitive situation, tells Newsweek. The chief concern: that Republicans will renew attempts to strip funding for the trial and, in the aftermath of the bombing attempt aboard Northwest Flight 253, pick up enough support from moderate Democrats to prevail." It seems that Sen. Lindsay Graham and Rep. Frank Wolf will try to force votes in Congress to cut off funding for the trial. And one additional issue: the more than $200 million price tag for each year of the trial. The kicker: "If Holder's plans are thwarted, though, one top administration official, who also didn't want to be named talking about delicate issues, notes there is a Plan B - reviving the case against the alleged 9/11 conspirators before a military tribunal, just as the Bush administration tried to do."� This would be a stunning turnaround, an admission of Holder's irresponsibility and of the Justice Department's loony leftism.
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TALLAHASSEE -- The Miami Herald is reporting: In a move cheered by environmental groups, the federal government on Friday proposed stringent limits on ``nutrient'' pollution allowed to foul Florida's waterways. The ruling -- which will cost industries and governments more than a billion dollars to comply -- marks the first time the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has intervened to set a state's water-quality standards. The agency issued the proposed regulations after reaching a settlement in August with five environmental groups that sued the federal government in 2008 for not enforcing the Clean Water Act in Florida.
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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6991177.ece Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world's glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.
In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC's 2007 report.
It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.
Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was "speculation" and was not supported by any formal research. If confirmed it would be one of the most serious failures yet seen in climate research. The IPCC was set up precisely to ensure that world leaders had the best possible scientific advice on climate change.
Professor Murari Lal, who oversaw the chapter on glaciers in the IPCC report, said he would recommend that the claim about glaciers be dropped: "If Hasnain says officially that he never asserted this, or that it is a wrong presumption, than I will recommend that the assertion about Himalayan glaciers be removed from future IPCC assessments."-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://therealbarackobama.wordpress.com/2010/01/14/klein-sunstein-ban-conspiracies-wants-to-send-government-agents-to-infiltrate-extremists-who-believe-global-warming-is-fraud/ President Obama’s regulatory czar, Cass Sunstein, argued in a paper he wrote that the U.S. government should ban “conspiracy theorizing.”
Among the beliefs Sunstein banned is advocating that the theory of global warming is a deliberate fraud.
Sunstein also recommended the government send agents to infiltrate “extremists who supply conspiracy theories” in order to disrupt the efforts of those “extremists” to propagate their theories.
In a 2008 Harvard law paper entitled “Conspiracy Theories,” Sunstein and co-author Adrian Vermeule, a Harvard law professor, ask “What can government do about conspiracy theories?”
“We can readily imagine a series of possible responses. (1) Government might ban conspiracy theorizing. [I would assume that this would not include Hillary Clinton's theory of a "vast right wing conspiracy"] (2) Government might impose some kind of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories.” [Let me presume that the government will then be able to determine which ideas that conflict with theirs are conspiracies and which are true differences of opinions or based on facts. Are we living in China now, or does it just seem as if we are?]
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The Wall St. Journal writes: Mr. Obama's new "Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee"-please don't call it a tax-is being sold as a way to cover expected losses in the Troubled Asset Relief Program. That sounds reasonable, except that the banks designated to pay the fee aren't those responsible for the losses. With the exception of Citigroup, those banks have repaid their TARP money with interest. The real TARP losers-General Motors, Chrysler and delinquent mortgage borrowers-are exempt from the new tax. Why the auto companies? An Administration official told the Journal that the banks caused the crisis that doomed the auto companies, which apparently were innocent bystanders to their own bankruptcy. The fact that the auto companies remain wards of Washington no doubt has nothing to do with their free tax pass.
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The New York Times is reporting that following Obama's proposal to tax our nation's banks, President Obama urged the financial lobby to stand down when he introduced the tax proposal last week: “Instead of sending a phalanx of lobbyists to fight this proposal or employing an army of lawyers and accountants to help evade the fee, I suggest you might want to consider simply meeting your responsibilities.”
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The AP reveals: The Obama administration is considering a criminal trial in Washington for the Guantanamo Bay detainee suspected of masterminding the bombing of a Bali nightclub that killed 202 people, a plan that would bring one of the world's most notorious terrorism suspects just steps from the U.S. Capitol, The Associated Press has learned.
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Fox News reports: One year after taking office Obama has done a total reversal on his isolationist, non-interventionist foreign policy, and is now pushing President Bush’s neo-conservative philosophy as a justification for starting a new war in Afghanistan. What the Democratic Party once criticized as an over-simplified good vs. evil argument has become the cornerstone of Obama’s reasoning.
[In a move which demonstrates that even ideologues can be made to accept the truth comes the following]: “Evil does exist in the world,” Obama recently admitted. “A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism – it is recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of man.” [Do you suppose he has called President George W. Bush yet?]
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