Friday, February 19, 2010

Global Warming Initiatives, 401(K) Confiscation, Bolshevik Plots, WTC Takedown, & Jobs Lost


From the Wall St. Journal comes the following news:  "Three big companies quit an influential lobbying group that had focused on shaping climate-change legislation, in the latest sign that support for an ambitious bill is melting away. 
Oil giants BP PLC and ConocoPhillips and heavy-equipment maker Caterpillar Inc. said Tuesday they won't renew their membership in the three-year-old U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a broad business-environmental coalition that had been instrumental in building support in Washington for capping emissions of greenhouse gases.
The move comes as debate over climate change intensifies and concerns mount about the cost of capping greenhouse-gas emissions."  For entire article, go to http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704804204575069440096420212.html
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Investors Business Daily reports on the possible government confiscation of your  401(k) and IRAs:  "You did the responsible thing. You saved in your IRA or 401(k) to support your retirement, when you could have spent that money on another vacation, or an upscale car, or fancier clothes and jewelry. But now Washington is developing plans for your retirement savings.
BusinessWeek reports that the Treasury and Labor departments are asking for public comment on "the conversion of 401(k) savings and Individual Retirement Accounts into annuities or other steady payment streams."
In plain English, the idea is for the government to take your retirement savings in return for a promise to pay you some monthly benefit in your retirement years.
They will tell you that you are "investing" your money in U.S. Treasury bonds. But they will use your money immediately to pay for their unprecedented trillion-dollar budget deficits, leaving nothing to back up their political promises, just as they have raided the Social Security trust funds."  [What has been left out of this article is that these monies become the property of the US Government upon our deaths, and will not be inherited by our heirs.]
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Robert Huff of American Thinker opines: "I have recently come to the conclusion that leftists reveal their innermost thoughts when attacking those with whom they disagree.  For example, in President Obama's recently televised meeting with Republicans, he chastised critics who believed his policies were part of some "Bolshevik plot."


My first thought was, "Huh?"  I frequently listen to and read conservative media, and I had never heard this analysis.  So, it seemed he was responding to an argument no one had made.  Why would he do this?  The answer may lie in my second thought, which was that Mr. Obama had just provided the most brilliant and succinct analysis I have heard for the motivation behind his administration's agenda.  Why all these czars?  Bolshevik plot.  Why take over General Motors?  Bolshevik plot.  Why attack the banks?  Bolshevik plot.  Why force nationalized health care down our throats?  Bolshevik plot.  Why attempt to turn the National Endowment for the Arts into a propaganda ministry?  Bolshevik plot.  And so on and so on.  Thank you, Mr. President.  The previously non-existent argument you responded to now exists, and it is a powerful one."
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From Hunterdon County's weekly paper comes this item:  "Raritan Township resident Joseph Urcinas, a 2009 mechanical engineering graduate from Rowan University, is holding a press conference at the office of Rep. Leonard Lance on Friday at 2 p.m. to discuss a decision by more than 1,000 architects and engineers in dozens of countries to call for a new independent, investigation into the destruction of the Twin Towers and Building 7 at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.
It’s their belief that that all three skyscrapers were destroyed by explosive-controlled demolition, not by jet plane impacts and fires.
They say this includes the free-fall collapse of the 47-story WTC building 7 into its own footprint and the discovery of advanced explosive nano-thermitic material found in the WTC dust samples. The implications of these findings have the potential of profound impact on the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed trial, the group says."
[We certainly do need to know what really happened.  I wonder if they recognize that Muslim terrorists might have been the ones who, if evidence is found, planted the explosives in the building priors to the plane crashes.]  http://www.nj.com/hunterdon-county-democrat/index.ssf/2010/02/raritan_twp_man_involvled_in_g.html
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While listening to Obama tout his jobs saved or created, we need to revisit the following, written byHoover Institution's Mr. Zywicki, a professor of law at George Mason University and the author of a book on consumer bankruptcy and consumer lending, forthcoming from Yale University Press.
Concerning the Obama administration's handling of the Chrysler bankruptcy he wrote:  "It is a profound challenge to the rule of law. Secured creditors -- entitled to first priority payment under the "absolute priority rule" -- have been browbeaten by an American president into accepting only 30 cents on the dollar of their claims. Meanwhile, the United Auto Workers union, holding junior creditor claims, will get about 50 cents on the dollar.
The absolute priority rule is a linchpin of bankruptcy law.
Violating absolute priority undermines this commitment by introducing questions of redistribution into the process. It enables the rights of senior creditors to be plundered in order to benefit the rights of junior creditors.
In a Chapter 11 reorganization, creditors have the right to vote to approve or reject the plan. The Obama administration's asset-sale plan implements a de facto reorganization but denies to creditors the opportunity to vote on it.
By stepping over the bright line between the rule of law and the arbitrary behavior of men, President Obama may have created a thousand new failing businesses. That is, businesses that might have received financing before but that now will not, since lenders face the potential of future government confiscation. In other words, Mr. Obama may have helped save the jobs of thousands of union workers whose dues, in part, engineered his election. But what about the untold number of job losses in the future caused by trampling the sanctity of contracts today?
The value of the rule of law is not merely a matter of economic efficiency. It also provides a bulwark against arbitrary governmental action taken at the behest of politically influential interests at the expense of the politically unpopular. The government's threats and bare-knuckle tactics set an ominous precedent for the treatment of those considered insufficiently responsive to its desires. Certainly, holdout Chrysler creditors report that they felt little confidence that the White House would stop at informal strong-arming.
Chrysler -- or more accurately, its unionized workers -- may be helped in the short run. But we need to ask how eager lenders will be to offer new credit to General Motors knowing that the value of their investment could be diminished or destroyed by government to enrich a politically favored union. We also need to ask how eager hedge funds will be to participate in the government's Public-Private Investment Program to purchase banks' troubled assets.
And what if the next time it is a politically unpopular business -- such as a pharmaceutical company -- that's on the brink? Might the government force it to surrender a patent to get the White House's agreement to get financing for the bankruptcy plan?
For full article see: http://www.hoover.org/pubaffairs/dailyreport/44874772.html

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Fomenting Violence on Critics, Changing History, Obama "Agnostic" on Raising Taxes, and the EPA


 
Free Republic.com: "Two of the most popular liberal news sites are calling for violence against Republicans for obstructing the radical agenda of President Barack Obama. CNN and Huffington Post have each published op-eds this past week by regular contributors with headlines that explicitly call for Obama to use violent gangland tactics against his political opponents.

CNN published a column by Roland Martin on February 11 with the headline, Time for Obama to go ‘gangsta’ on GOP. Martin concluded the article with a plea for Obama to emulate the violent tactics of the Prohibition-era Chicago mob boss Al Capone.

"Obama’s critics keep blasting him for Chicago-style politics. So, fine. Channel your inner Al Capone and go gangsta against your foes. Let ‘em know that if they aren’t with you, they are against you, and will pay the price."

The Huffington Post followed-up with their own call for gangland violence against Republicans with the publication on February 14 of a column by David Bourgeois with the title, Obama Better Start Breaking Kneecaps. (www.huffingtonpost.com/david-bourgeois/obama-better-start-breaki_b_461873.html)

Bourgeois concludes his article with this call for gangland violence. "You’ve given it your best shot, you’ve tried numerous times to talk with the Republicans, to negotiate, to meet them halfway on every single matter before the American people. But they hate you for many reasons. It’s time you break kneecaps (bold in original). It’s time to destroy the Republican Party. They don’t deserve a seat at the table when all they want to do is score political points by being the Party of No."

In case the message wasn’t clear, Huffington Post illustrated the call to violence with a wooden baseball bat with Obama’s first name on it in large letters."  [Where is Nancy Pelosi when we need her?  She should be getting teary-eyed once again when witnessing this divisive language.]
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The Conservative Outpost reports the following: "As hard (or easy) as it may be to believe, the education establishment in North Carolina is proposing new standards that would eliminate the teaching of any American history prior to 1877 to high school seniors. Yes, really. Of course, the people pushing these changes have a perfectly logical explanation...

"We are certainly not trying to go away from American history," Rebecca Garland, the chief academic officer for North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, told Fox News. "What we are trying to do is figure out a way to teach it where students are connected to it, where they see the big idea, where they are able to make connections and draw relationships between parts of our history and the present day."
Under the proposed change, the ninth-graders would take a course called global studies, focusing in part on issues such as the environment. The 10th grade still would study civics and economics, but 11th-graders would take U.S. history only from 1877 onward.”
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President Barack Obama said he is “agnostic” about raising taxes on households making less than $250,000 as part of a broad effort to rein in the budget deficit. Obama, in a Feb. 9 Oval Office interview, said that a presidential commission on the budget needs to consider all options for reducing the deficit, including tax increases and cuts in spending on entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare.
“The whole point of it is to make sure that all ideas are on the table,” the president said in the interview with Bloomberg Business Week, which will appear on newsstands Friday. “So what I want to do is to be completely agnostic, in terms of solutions.”
Obama repeatedly vowed during the 2008 presidential election campaign that he would not raise taxes on individuals making less than $200,000 and households earning less than $250,000 a year. When senior White House economic adviser Lawrence H. Summers and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner suggested in August that the administration might be open to going back on that pledge, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs quickly reiterated the president’s promise.
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President Barack Obama said in Turkey :
"We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation
Or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation.
We consider ourselves a nation of citizens
Who are bound by ideals and a set of values."  
Do you know the preamble for your state?
[Most of the 50 states do acknowledge God - not Allah - in their Constitutions.   
Some states do use the terms Supreme Ruler (Colorado, Missouri and Washington), Author of Existence (Vermont), Great Legislator (Massachusetts), Supreme Being (Iowa), Sovereign Ruler of the Universe (Maine), and Divine Providence (Virginia).  
If our President respected the formation and history of our country, he would have said that we are a Christian nation which protects the rights of its citizens to worship whomever they please, and that our government cannot force us to choose any certain religion.  That's what religious freedom is meant to mean!]
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-A new poll conducted by CNN shows that 52 percent of Americans said President Barack Obama doesn't deserve reelection in 2012
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Fox News reports what others have chosen not to cover:  "President Obama’s new envoy to the Organization of Islamic Conference, Rashad Hussain, is at the center of a controversy over remarks attributed to him defending a man who later pleaded guilty to conspiring to aid a terrorist group.
The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs quoted Hussain in 2004 as calling Sami al-Arian the victim of “politically motivated persecutions” after al-Arian, a university professor, was charged in 2003 with heading U.S. operations of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
The United States has designated the Palestinian Islamic Jihad as a foreign terrorist group as far back as 1997. At the time of al-Arian’s arrest, then Attorney General John Ashcroft called it “one of the most violent terrorist organizations in the world.”
Al-Arian pleaded guilty in 2006 to conspiracy to aid Palestinian Islamic Jihad and was sentenced to more than four years in prison."    http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/rubin/238741
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From the El Paso Times:  "Texas Republican leaders Tuesday ramped up their fight against federal environmental efforts by filing suit to avoid facing limits on carbon dioxide emissions. Gov. Rick Perry, Attorney General Greg Abbott and Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples started a legal battle against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. They said an "endangerment" finding that was released in December by the agency was based on faulty science and would hurt Texas' economy. "





Monday, February 15, 2010

Joe Biden, Dick Cheney, Iraq - and more Global Warming Fraud

"America will never be destroyed from outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves." Abraham Lincoln


I ask you all to beware the kibuki dance the President has now proposed: a bipartisan meeting at Blair House to keep the current health care bill alive. Word is that the fix is in: the bill will be accepted as is, then "fixed by the House of Representatives. It will then be passed by the Senate using "reconciliation" - or passage by only 51 Senators. The Republicans will either go along without any of their proposed measures being adopted or be accused of being obstructionists. I believe the American people will see thru this latest attempt to ram down our throats a bill that Congress is fully aware that the people don't want. Republicans are considering a refusal to attend. The Democrats are desperate...

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Fred Barnes has written the following: "So much for ObamaCare. It’s hanging by a thread. So is the remainder of the liberal agenda. To deal with this dire situation, Obama is preparing to issue executive orders “to advance energy, environmental, fiscal and other domestic policy priorities,” according to Peter Baker of the New York Times.

There’s nothing wrong with executive orders, except they are less immutable than legislation passed by Congress. They can be revoked by subsequent presidents. What’s unusual is that a president with large majorities of his own party in both houses of Congress must turn to such orders to salvage a semblance of his agenda."

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Dick Cheney has responded to the comments of Joe Biden stating that Iraq may end up as one of Obama's great achievements by saying: "If [the administration is] going to take credit for [Iraq's success], fair enough ... but it ought to come with a healthy dose of 'Thank you, George Bush' up front and a recognition that some of their early recommendations with respect to prosecuting that war were just dead wrong," Cheney told ABC News' Jonathan Karl.

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Nile Gardiner is a Washington-based foreign affairs analyst and political commentator. He appears frequently on American and British television and radio, including Fox News Channel, CNN, BBC, Sky News, and NPR. Part of Nile Gardiner's recent column follows:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney stormed the beachheads of the liberal US media again today with a fiery performance on ABC’s This Week. He offered a stinging rebuke to current VP Joe Biden’s ludicrous claim that Iraq may end up as one of Barack Obama’s “great achievements”, as well as blistering criticism of the Obama administration’s handling of terrorist suspects. He also launched a strike on Biden’s recent comment that another 9/11 scale attack was “unlikely.”

I just think that’s just dead wrong. I think the biggest threat the United States faces today is the possibility of another 9/11 with a nuclear weapon or a biological agent of some kind. And I think al Qaeda is out there — even as we meet — trying to do that. You have to consider it as a war. You have to consider it as something we may have to deal with tomorrow. You don’t want the vice president of the United States running around saying, ‘Oh, it’s not likely going to happen.’”

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From the LA Times comes the following: "Many Americans recall the ex-Sen. Biden's Democratic primary plans to give in to Iraq's fractious factions and carve the country into three territories. And even more probably recall Biden's boss' plan to halt the Iraq war years ago. As long as it got started anyway without the permission of the then state senator.

Plus, of course, Obama's vehement opposition to the 2007 American troop surge of you-know-who from Texas that Obama knew for certain was only going to worsen sectarian strife there.

Well, of course, it didn't turn out that way, thanks in large measure to the brave service of hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops who served in that war-torn land and helped peace to break out despite the loud political acrimony back home over their role.

Now, the Obama-Biden pair that opposed the Iraq war and its tactics and predicted their failure is prepared to accept credit for its success.

It seems that Biden, who's from Delaware when he's in Delaware and Pennsylvania when in Pennsylvania, is certain now that Iraq will turn out to be one of the Obama-Biden administration's greatest achievements. Plus, of course, the vehement opposition of the Nobel Prize winner to the 2007 American troop surge of you-know-who from Texas that Obama knew for certain was only going to worsen sectarian strife there. [Video available at website - I am adding Obama's own words: " I am not persuaded that the 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, it will do the opposite. It takes pressure off the Iraqis to arrive at the sort of political accommodation that every observer believes is the ultimate solution to the problems that we face there. I am going to actively oppose the President's proposal [for a surge]. And I think the American people believe that he [Bush] is wrong."]

As Biden continues: I am very optimistic about -- about Iraq. I mean, this could be one of the great achievements of this administration. You're going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the summer. You're going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government.

I spent -- I've been there 17 times now. I go about every two months -- three months. I know every one of the major players in all the segments of that society. It's impressed me. I've been impressed how they have been deciding to use the political process rather than guns to settle their differences.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2010/02/joe-biden-update-larry-king-iraq-obama-sarah-palin.html

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Below is the link to the entire article, which is abbreviated here: The academic at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble ‘keeping track’ of the information.

Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers.

Professor Jones told the BBC yesterday there was truth in the observations of colleagues that he lacked organisational skills, that his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’.

The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory.

Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.

And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

Data for vital 'hockey stick graph' has gone missing

There has been no global warming since 1995

Warming periods have happened before - but NOT due to man-made changes


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1250872/Climategate-U-turn-Astonishment-scientist-centre-global-warming-email-row-admits-data-organised.html#ixzz0fYAzqlrI