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the Republican creed is "We got ours; let the devil take the hind most"
its the only thing they have in common. the Faith groups are patsys they have played for fools. The born to priviledge bastards can all kiss my arse
what a friggin gap since the last post
ba ba ba boom.........get some VVUS....thats right im pounding the table about it........after you study it you will too
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=45589880
http://www.vivus.com/
We've already written the White house on 'Obama's' Website and congratulated him for convincing us that the vote of the American people doesn't mean shit. Corporatism rules this country, what's left of it.
Yeah I'm pissed off.
Speak up too loudly and you disappear or have an accident.
They're doing their best to finish bankrupting this country. And giving 2 Billion dollars of so called stimulus money to F!cking China to do things Americans ought to be hired to do.
We're so done. Almost too done to accept the fork they're testing us with.
I'm so sorry I'm lashing out at you because you seem to be liking pushing what political buttons I had left.
None of it matters any more. They even killed Bhutto (sp) after she divulged that Osama Bin Laden was already dead. Two weeks after that she was dead. The 'powers that be' want this country stupid and fighting with each other.
And we're certainly doing that aren't we?
Isn't this the great play book? I thought I was responding by the rules? Being led around by the nose by the descriptive in one of your last posts, Intolerant Liberal.
Just trying to give you what you want. You know, a raving whackjob responding to a phrase meant to go straight to the monkey brain.
The problem is there are too many issues and one phrase can create a raving lunatic, because there are too many years of maybe being called (I like this one, another from the playbook,) un American, but it is a new one since W's day, not on the list as written.
Maybe we both want the same thing, safety, health, nice quiet retirement, some extra money to spend, and the knowledge that there is a third party on the phone listening without permission, or reading boards like these looking for 'terrist' code words.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4443.htm
Language: A Key Mechanism of Control
Newt Gingrich's 1996 GOPAC memo
As you know, one of the key points in the GOPAC tapes is that "language matters." In the video "We are a Majority," Language is listed as a key mechanism of control used by a majority party, along with Agenda, Rules, Attitude and Learning. As the tapes have been used in training sessions across the country and mailed to candidates we have heard a plaintive plea: "I wish I could speak like Newt."
That takes years of practice. But, we believe that you could have a significant impact on your campaign and the way you communicate if we help a little. That is why we have created this list of words and phrases.
This list is prepared so that you might have a directory of words to use in writing literature and mail, in preparing speeches, and in producing electronic media. The words and phrases are powerful. Read them. Memorize as many as possible. And remember that like any tool, these words will not help if they are not used.
While the list could be the size of the latest "College Edition" dictionary, we have attempted to keep it small enough to be readily useful yet large enough to be broadly functional. The list is divided into two sections: Optimistic Positive Governing words and phrases to help describe your vision for the future of your community (your message) and Contrasting words to help you clearly define the policies and record of your opponent and the Democratic party.
Please let us know if you have any other suggestions or additions. We would also like to know how you use the list. Call us at GOPAC or write with your suggestions and comments. We may include them in the next tape mailing so that others can benefit from your knowledge and experience.
Optimistic Positive Governing Words
Use the list below to help define your campaign and your vision of public service. These words can help give extra power to your message. In addition, these words help develop the positive side of the contrast you should create with your opponent, giving your community something to vote for!
active(ly)
activist
building
candid(ly)
care(ing)
challenge
change
children
choice/choose
citizen
commitment
common sense
compete
confident
conflict
control
courage
crusade
debate
dream
duty
eliminate good-time in prison
empower(ment)
fair
family
freedom
hard work
help
humane
incentive
initiative
lead
learn
legacy
liberty
light
listen
mobilize
moral
movement
opportunity
passionate
peace
pioneer
precious
premise
preserve
principle(d)
pristine
pro- (issue): flag, children, environment, reform
prosperity
protect
proud/pride
provide
reform
rights
share
strength
success
tough
truth
unique
vision
we/us/our
Contrasting Words
Often we search hard for words to define our opponents. Sometimes we are hesitant to use contrast. Remember that creating a difference helps you. These are powerful words that can create a clear and easily understood contrast. Apply these to the opponent, their record, proposals and their party.
abuse of power
anti- (issue): flag, family, child, jobs
betray
bizarre
bosses
bureaucracy
cheat
coercion
"compassion" is not enough
collapse(ing)
consequences
corrupt
corruption
criminal rights
crisis
cynicism
decay
deeper
destroy
destructive
devour
disgrace
endanger
excuses
failure (fail)
greed
hypocrisy
ideological
impose
incompetent
insecure
insensitive
intolerant
liberal
lie
limit(s)
machine
mandate(s)
obsolete
pathetic
patronage
permissive attitude
pessimistic
punish (poor ...)
radical
red tape
self-serving
selfish
sensationalists
shallow
shame
sick
spend(ing)
stagnation
status quo
steal
taxes
they/them
threaten
traitors
unionized
urgent (cy)
waste
welfare
Will Charlie Gibson leave another scandal to the 'Cables'?
Monte Kuligowski
Approximately a week after the ACORN video scandal broke Charlie Gibson was a guest on WLS-AM out of Chicago. He was asked why the networks were not covering the story. After nervous laughter and admitting he wasn’t even aware of the story, he stated, “Maybe this is just one you leave to the cables.”
The appointment of Kevin Jennings as Obama’s “Safe School Czar,” was an irony and a huge story from the day Jennings was installed. First, it was reported that Jennings had once counseled a male high school student who was having sex with a man. No, Jennings didn’t report the crime to the authorities; but he made sure the kid knew to use a condom.
Certainly, that wasn’t news. After all, Jennings now says he should have reported the matter.
Then it came out that Jennings was the founder of the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), a radical homosexual-promoting organization.
Next, we learned that Jennings wrote a forward to a book in 1999 that advocated the “queering of elementary education.” Nothing newsworthy there.
Now we have the Fistgate story. The following is from BigGovernment.com:
In March 2000 the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) organization of Massachusetts held its 10 Year Anniversary GLSEN/Boston conference at Tufts University. This conference was fully supported by the Massachusetts Department of Education, the Safe Schools Program, the Governor’s Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth, and some of the presenters even received federal money. During the 2000 conference, workshop leaders led a “youth only, ages 14-21? session that offered lessons in “fisting” a dangerous sexual practice. During another workshop an activist asked 14 year-old students, “Spit or swallow?… Is it rude?” The unbelievable audio clip is posted here. Barack Obama’s “Safe Schools Czar” Kevin Jennings is the founder of GLSEN. He was paid $273,573.96 as its executive director in 2007. Jennings was the keynote speaker at the 2000 GLSEN conference.
If the “mainstream” news media had investigated and reported on ACORN, the king of corruption and voter registration fraud, Obama’s name certainly would have come up. Therefore, it looks as though the media whispered, “story about ACORN, what story?”
Ditto on Kevin Jennings. Obama is tied and bound to Jennings; after all Obama chose the man to be his “Safe School Czar,” knowing that Jennings was the founder of GLSEN. Sure Obama will deny knowing the details of GLSEN; but a simple visit to their website would have revealed what they’re all about. Or he could have just asked Jennings.
The Kevin Jennings appointment will hurt Obama immeasurably once the story breaks through the double-bolted door of the “mainstream” newsroom. Every day that Jennings remains on staff Obama will have some explaining to do.
Charlie may want to leave this one to the “cables;” but, like the ACORN story, this one is too big -- and sick.
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/12/will_charlie_gibson_leave_fist.html
"You guys did that."
Sorry, I don't belong to any political party.
You seem to have your facts wrong.
I believe Slick Willy Clinton started funding faith based initiatives. You don't seem to be worried about what Obama is doing in this area. Congratulations, you voted for this too:
Controversy surrounds Obama's faith office
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/02/05/obama.faith.based/
Where's your outrage?
You seem to be stuck here:
Wow, You're all over the place....
Nobody mentioned the bible, which by the way I could care less about, at least from a religious point of view...
You seem to have a lot of pent up unresolved issues and it appears your version of tolerance may be somewhat strange...
Meanwhile, Tolerate this, you voted for it:
Do safe schools require an iron fisting?
http://hotair.com/archives/2009/12/11/do-safe-schools-require-an-iron-fisting/
You seem to be the one sitting on the high perch, with all the best view.
Tell me what is wrong with wanting to become aware of things which effect our health.
Tell me what is wrong with wanting to become more aware of what it is which drives us as human beings to do good.
Tell me what it is that you think is so much a better good than I think is good.
What are the principles to living a good life?
Don't even start with that fucking Bible.
What do you think its about?
What do you think when you see a homeless person in the same place he or she has been for the last 10-15 years on the same corner?
Would you ever stop and give them a meal? or money?
Yep I have pre existing conditions. My wife has pre existing conditions.
Shoot us now if that is such a fucking crime.
Why should an insurance company decide you're well enough to go home with an existing infection just because they don't want to cover your hospital bill any more? My sister was an active employee and the insurance company that her company used for their employees, (big famous aerospace company just like the one I work for) told the hospital, fuck her send her home. We don't care if she has to go home in an ambulance.
And she falls and hurts herself again because she can't walk up the stairs, and perhaps her piece of shit husband who is giving her daughter kids lets her fall down the stairs, and thay have to call the 911 for help to take her back to the hospital.
Suppose that hospital says they don't want her anymore?
And they take her to the butcher shop hospital and let her get worse and worse?
And they decide they can't afford her any more and they have her sent to some nursing home which cares even less?
Never happened in your family I'm sure.
She didn't make 50, because she died this spring.
I'm guessing you're saying so what? She deserved what she got because she actually had a job with an insurance and she could be sent off to die because it hurt the profits of the god damned insurance company?
Wait till it happens to someone in your direct family.
You won't be singing like the canary like you have been here.
It could happen to your wife.
or maybe your daughter.
or your mom if you still have any feelings for her.
It won't be long till my mom has to be scooped up to my house or my sister's because no one can afford the price of whatever it costs for hospice or anything else. We went through it with my wife's mom, we'll go through it with my mom.
The problem isn't affording 'health insurance', its health care.
The fucking mooks that got elected started receiving the checks from the insurance industry to squelch anything which could involve ordinary citizens being able to get through an illness without having to give up every last dime.
And you laugh at me for being pissed off?
Who the fuck are you?
Do you even have a conscience?
Republicans have controlled everything in Congress since they took over in Clinton's era. W poured Church and state together by allowing federal funding of faith based initiatives. I'm sorry, aren't we known as godless liberals?
You guys did that.
So some how you think tolerance hinges on legalizing gay marriage... What a laugh...
Maybe you should take your own quotes to heart:
"Dialogue does not mean everyone at the “table” will agree with one another."
"This country has been shredded in so many different ways"
It sure has been and the intolerant left did the majority of it the last 9 years.
stick it in your intolerant darkside..
This country has been shredded in so many different ways, and those who ripped it apart love to laugh and brag about their achievements. Like ET
Not that I'm advocating communication anymore. That direction leads to being victimized by those who take. I can't turn the other cheek, so that equates to me not being qualified to be a modern day 'christian', and I don't care. Being a Christian used to mean being a good person, now it means intolerance. They're the largest example of intolerance I can think of.
When I see you out there raising consciousness for Gay marriage ET, you can point your shitty finger at me, but it won't mean anything.
I already support it. Again a non christian concept.
http://pluralism.org/about/eck_cv.php
What is Pluralism?
The plurality of religious traditions and cultures has come to characterize every part of the world today. But what is pluralism? Here are four points to begin our thinking:
1) First, pluralism is not diversity alone, but the energetic engagement with diversity. Diversity can and has meant the creation of religious ghettoes with little traffic between or among them. Today, religious diversity is a given, but pluralism is not a given; it is an achievement. Mere diversity without real encounter and relationship will yield increasing tensions in our societies.
2) Second, pluralism is not just tolerance, but the active seeking of understanding across lines of difference. Tolerance is a necessary public virtue, but it does not require Christians and Muslims, Hindus, Jews, and ardent secularists to know anything about one another. Tolerance is too thin a foundation for a world of religious difference and proximity. It does nothing to remove our ignorance of one another, and leaves in place the stereotype, the half-truth, the fears that underlie old patterns of division and violence. In the world in which we live today, our ignorance of one another will be increasingly costly.
3) Third, pluralism is not relativism, but the encounter of commitments. The new paradigm of pluralism does not require us to leave our identities and our commitments behind, for pluralism is the encounter of commitments. It means holding our deepest differences, even our religious differences, not in isolation, but in relationship to one another.
4) Fourth, pluralism is based on dialogue. The language of pluralism is that of dialogue and encounter, give and take, criticism and self-criticism. Dialogue means both speaking and listening, and that process reveals both common understandings and real differences. Dialogue does not mean everyone at the “table” will agree with one another. Pluralism involves the commitment to being at the table -- with one’s commitments.
—Diana L. Eck
For the time being,
I'm done with the table she's talking about.
extremism killed dialog.
You fuckers led the way.
There never was any tolerance on your side....
Thanks for proving the point.
Tolerance is gone, and you're a waste of space.
Global Warming Really Does Create Prostitution
Posted by Van Helsing at 8:24 AM | Comments (6)
Many laughed when a UN moonbat barked that global warming causes prostitution. But a dry run earlier in the year for the big upcoming global warming hoaxathon in Copenhagen did create a boom for the Danish skin trade.
We have been busy like mad. The politicians do also need to relax after a long day, is the verdict from 'Miss Dina', who works as a prostitute.
At last we know what "green jobs" are.
Whatever prostitutes get paid out of taxpayer-financed expense accounts to lay down for slimy left-wing bureauweenies, it isn't enough.
My experience wasn't too much different. I don't think kids get even that now...
My dad reached a point when I was a senior in high school, that it was 'time for the talk'. He had me come upstairs to his room and close the door. I can't think of this without chortling. He reached into his dresser drawer and tossed a package of rubbers on the bed and asked me if I knew what they were for. I said yes of course, whereupon he replied, 'I guess we're done here'.
They certainly don't print an instruction book which accompanies kids when you pick them up in the hospital.
I told my mom that story last year, and the big question was why he had a package of those things in his drawer in the first place. The most 'obvious' answer was he bought them for me.
yeah, sure.
Nope, I don't agree with the abstinence only education. The problem is many parents think the sex education is a private family thing which it may be. I certainly don't agree with what went on in the article I posted either. I have posted my views on parenting before so it should be no surprise...
A half year of sex education in the 10th grade in Maryland back in the 60s didn't send the lot of us out to get laid, though there were many who were going to answer the call regardless of any education.
Nope I don't have any kids. Maybe the classes didn't teach it well enough?
That abstinence 'education' sure is working well in Texas isn't it?
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/110507dnmetteenbirths.35daddb.html
Texas teens lead nation in birth rate
Experts questioning abstinence-only education approach
12:17 PM CST on Monday, November 5, 2007
By ROBERT T. GARRETT / The Dallas Morning News
rtgarrett@dallasnews.com
While the national teen birth rate has slowed, Texas has made far less headway, alarming public health officials and child advocates.
Texas teens lead the nation in having babies. Last month, the nonprofit group Child Trends conferred another No. 1 ranking on Texas. In the latest statistics available, 24 percent of the state's teen births in 2004 were not the girl's first delivery.
"That astounded me," said Kathryn Allen, senior vice president for community relations at Planned Parenthood of North Texas. "I mean, what are we doing wrong?"
Also Online
Tell Us: Is abstinence-only education the correct approach in Texas?
Texas' policy is to deny contraceptives without parental consent wherever possible and to push an abstinence-only sex education program in public schools.
Experts, though, are questioning that approach. They note that from 1991 to 2004, the state's teen birth rate dropped by 19 percent, while the U.S. rate dipped by one-third.
By contrast, California, which has seen its teen birth rate drop by 47 percent in the same period, teaches abstinence but also explains contraception at school and has gone to dispensing birth control to teenage boys and girls – for free, no parental consent required – in community clinics and doctors' offices.
While the political cultures and religious traditions of Texas and California differ, the two huge states share fast-growing immigrant populations who are especially at risk of teen childbearing.
Erandy Gonzalez, 17, of Oak Cliff, could almost be the poster girl for Texas' challenges. She is Hispanic, and Hispanics by far have the highest teen birth rates of any ethnic group. She is the mother of a 15-month-old girl and is pregnant again.
In 2004, Hispanic girls ages 15 to 19 accounted for 61 percent of teen births even though only 39 percent of Texas adolescents were Hispanic, according to the federal National Center for Health Statistics.
Though low-income teens have a federally protected right to get birth control without parents' consent under Medicaid and family planning grants, many teenage girls in Texas don't learn that until it's too late.
"I had heard parents had to go" with their daughters, Erandy said, referring to the deHaro-Saldivar Health Center on Westmoreland Avenue, run by the Parkland Health and Hospital System.
That's not true. YWCA young parent educator Tracie Brewer, who is trying to rescue Oak Cliff girls one by one with mentoring and assistance, said she tells them that they can get birth control on their own at the clinic and hands out flyers explaining how to get there by bus.
Ms. Brewer has worked with Erandy, a straight-A student, since March.
"She's sharp," Ms. Brewer said. "I don't know when that fails them. They're intelligent, but they don't make some good decisions."
Making possibly fateful decisions in the mid-1990s were two Republican governors with their eyes on the White House – California's Pete Wilson and Texas' George W. Bush.
Mr. Bush endorsed a law that requires schools to teach abstinence as the "preferred choice" for unmarried young people and affirms parents' rights to take their youngsters out of sex-education instruction. Mr. Wilson won passage of a far-ranging program of "abstinence-plus" education, media campaigns and state-provided birth control.
"It's unsurpassed in the country," said Kathy Kneer, president of the Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California.
Bill Albert, deputy director of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, said the California effort hasn't wavered.
"Through Republican and Democratic administrations, they have put an awful lot into preventing teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease," Mr. Albert said.
California pours resources into cities or regions where teen pregnancy spikes and also funds youth development programs that stress skills development or the value of going to college, said Claire Brindis and Douglas Kirby, California research scientists who have evaluated sex-education programs for the government and other groups.
A Wilson-backed program called Family PACT "made contraception substantially more available to teens," Dr. Kirby said. "The number of providers increased. And by making income eligibility apply to the teen herself, not the family, most teens qualify. In most other states, if a teenager comes to a clinic they ask about family income."
Dr. Brindis of the University of California at San Francisco, though, isn't satisfied.
"There are still a lot of teenagers who do not come in for services," she said. "I do not want to paint a panacea."
In Texas, social conservatives such as Cathie Adams of Eagle Forum suggest that liberal abortion policies and not the Wilson program may account for California's teen birth rate dip – from 74 births per 1,000 girls aged 15 to 19 in 1991 to 39 in 2004. In Texas, the 1991 mark was 78 births per 1,000; and the latest, 63.
"I certainly wouldn't believe anything coming out of California," Ms. Adams said. "I don't know where abortion comes in under their laws. ... Most anything that plays in California is out of step with the rest of America."
However, citing recent national studies, Dr. Janet Realini, a onetime medical school professor now with the Bexar County health department, said teen birth rates are declining because fewer young people are having sex and more are using birth control, "not because of more abortions."
Dr. Realini, who has spent the past decade trying to reduce San Antonio's teen pregnancy rate, said Texas' policy assumes that teaching teens about contraception encourages them to have sex. But she said research shows no link between more information and more sex, and that promoting abstinence, while valuable, has its limits.
"In real life, abstinence fails sometimes," Dr. Realini said. "I know lots of young people who said they were not going to have sex and yet they did."
Still, Texas public health leaders and advocates of women's reproductive rights aren't pushing huge course corrections, such as dispensing birth control at school sites – a practice approved last month by a school board in Portland, Maine.
Some advocates, though, are pushing for a bill in the 2009 legislative session that would clarify how school districts opting to teach about contraceptives should discuss different methods' failure rates. Teachers would use failure rates published by the federal Food and Drug Administration.
The bill also would require school districts to give parents a more detailed explanation of their choices of sex education for their children.
Last spring, despite opposition from some social conservatives, an identical measure cleared a House panel with some Republicans' support. It died, however, in the end-of-session crush – amid signals that some key Senate GOP leaders weren't enthusiastic about it.
Meanwhile, state leaders stoutly defend teaching abstinence – and without parents' permission, only abstinence – in the schools and wherever possible requiring parents to sign off on youngsters' obtaining contraceptives.
A spokeswoman said Gov. Rick Perry sees no need for new legislation.
"The governor is satisfied with current law, in that abstinence is the only 100 percent [effective] way to prevent pregnancy," said spokeswoman Allison Castle.
Ms. Castle added, "It's important to make a distinction between pregnancy rate and birth rate. Texas does not have the highest teen pregnancy rate."
The last time teen pregnancy rates were reported, for 2000, Texas was fifth highest, with 101 pregnancies per 1,000 girls aged 15 to 19. The U.S. average was 84.
Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, while "deeply concerned" about teen pregnancy in the state, said parents have the most responsibility. Still, he said, "our public health facilities and public schools can help reduce teenage pregnancies by educating young people about the consequences of premarital sex and promoting abstinence."
House Public Education Committee Chairman Rob Eissler, R-The Woodlands, opposes more instruction on contraceptives.
"The problem with moving away from the abstinence curriculum ... is the notion that premarital sex is state condoned," he said.
Back in Dallas, Erandy Gonzalez had the abstinence instruction at Sunset High but in January, before she's 18, is due to give birth for a second time.
The fact she's still in school is little short of miraculous. Last winter, she missed more than 60 days of instruction after her toddler, Emily, then 7 months old, had to be hospitalized for two weeks with a serious respiratory ailment. Then Carolina Gonzalez, her Spanish-speaking mother, needed her to translate for her during a job search. The mother now works nights as a temporary worker, mostly in factories.
Ms. Brewer helped Erandy appear before a judge for truancy last spring and get her child care and education back on track. Days later, Ms. Brewer got distressing news.
"Erandy called and said, 'Tracie, let's go to lunch,' " Ms. Brewer recalled. "I said, 'Are you pregnant?' ... When my girls call and ask me to lunch, I know they're either pregnant or homeless."
Once again, Erandy told her, the father was Vicente Rivera, 20, her housepainter boyfriend. He lives with the Gonzalez family in a small apartment in the Wynnewood area and helps pay the bills and care for Emily.
After the unmarried couple's daughter was born in July 2006, Erandy had a DepoProvera injection, a long-lasting contraceptive.
"I didn't want to have any more" babies, she said. "I was OK until I had a well-paying job and Emily was at least 5."
But the shot caused irregular bleeding, she said. Then clinic nurses gave her low-dose estrogen pills. They were for anemia, but Erandy thought they were birth control pills – and soon was pregnant again.
Last summer, at Ms. Brewer's urging, Erandy switched from Sunset to the CAN Academy, an alternative public school. She has doubled up on course work, in hopes of getting her diploma in June, a year early. Someday, she said, she'd like to go to college and become a kindergarten teacher.
Ms. Brewer, herself a product of Mexican-American teen parents in Odessa, said Erandy "has come a long way" and is resilient, but her desire to achieve might not survive another misstep.
"No one wants to talk about teens having sex," Ms. Brewer said. "That's why we're No. 1 in the nation. We're not No. 1 for nothing."
TWO STATES, TWO APPROACHES
Texas has the nation's highest teen birth rate – 63 births per 1,000 girls ages 15 to 19 in 2004, the most recent year for which state comparisons are available. In 1991, when teen births peaked nationally, it had the fifth highest rate.
Over the same period, California's rate went in the opposite direction – from 11th highest to 24th highest.
Though a tangle of social, cultural and economic factors are at work and are still not well understood, experts say government policies have some effect on teen birth trends. A look at key policies in Texas and California:
SEX EDUCATION
In Texas, public schools don't have to offer sex education. If local school boards choose to offer it, state law says teachers must:
• Present abstinence as the "preferred choice ... for unmarried persons of school age."
• Devote more attention to abstinence than to "any other behavior."
• Emphasize that abstinence is the only 100 percent effective method of preventing pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease, HIV/AIDS and "the emotional trauma associated with adolescent sexual activity."
If a school district decides to teach about contraception, it must:
• Allow parents to pull their children from such classes.
• Teach "human use reality rates" of failure for various birth control methods, not "theoretical laboratory rates."
The state distributes about $5 million a year of abstinence education grants to contractors who work with schools. Ninety percent is federal money.
In California, if local school districts offer sex education, instruction must comply with a state law requiring that both abstinence and other birth control methods be taught.
• Information must be "evidence-based, scientifically driven and demonstrated to have a positive impact." Abstinence-only instruction fails to meet that standard, according to many social scientists.
The state, which rejects federal abstinence money, spends about $100 million a year on sex education.
AVAILABILITY OF BIRTH CONTROL
In Texas, state law doesn't specifically give minors the ability to give consent for themselves to get birth control. For 10 years, the Legislature has passed budget provisions that try to prevent that from happening if a teen on Medicaid sees a doctor or a low-income teen goes to a clinic that receives federal family planning grants.
While federal rules override the state's effort, and low-income teens can and do receive birth control without parental consent under those programs, teens are not taught about that at public schools.
The state spends about $9 million a year on family planning services for teens and has a $1.1 million pregnancy prevention effort under way in six high-need counties.
In California, state law gives teens the right to obtain birth control without parents' permission. Teens of all economic backgrounds can receive free contraceptives at community clinics or private doctors' offices.
The state spends nearly $100 million a year providing family planning services to teens, about 60 percent of it federal funds from a Medicaid experiment approved during the Clinton administration.
NOTE: California's population last year was estimated by the Census Bureau to be 36.5 million, while Texas' was 23.5 million. So California has to spend just over 1.5 times as much as Texas to have the same per capita spending on a program.
SOURCES: Office of Gov. Rick Perry; Texas Department of State Health Services; Texas Education Agency; California Department of Health Services; Bixby Center for Reproductive Health Research & Policy, University of California at San Francisco; Dallas Morning News research
Progressive Leftists and the Wisdom of Twilight Fans
Posted by Gregory of Yardale at 7:06 AM | Comments (0)
A progressive leftist group called "Answer" is based at Rutgers University and is devoted to the cause of promoting teen promiscuity. "Answer" produces a magazine called "Sex, Etc" aimed at teenagers. It is distributed in public libraries over the objections of parents. Answer's websites includes a comic strip called "I Am Horny" about a frustrated bisexual girls as well as quizzes on orgasms and oral sex aimed at kids 12 and up.
Answer justifies their cause by saying, “teens are responsible decision makers.”
Consider that sentence for a moment. "Teens are responsible decision makers?" Really? Then, why is the drinking age 21? There's something severely detached from reality in people who believe that “teens are responsible decision makers,” but adults cannot be allowed to make their own health care decisions.
Also, how is it liberals argue on the one hand, "Teens are going to have sex anyway, so we should accommodate them by giving them all the information they want," but on the other hand, "Smoking is harmful, and so we have to do everything possible to discourage teens from smoking." This includes making cigarettes difficult to obtain and severely restricting tobacco advertising. But birth control and pronography are freely available. (The American Library Association fought tooth-and-nail against pronography filters.) Are the health consequences of smoking worse than the consequences of STD's or unplanned pregnancies?
Liberals use television and film to encourage politically correct attitudes on environmentalism, racial attitudes, animal rights, and whatever other cause is trendy. Many loftily claim that the got into the media business in order "to make people think," or even, "to change the world," because they think their words and images can create messages that affect behavior; they sell billions in advertising based on this theory. Yet, at the same time, they insist that saturating media with adolescent sexual imagery has no effect on teenage behavior. You're not allowed to depict a Muslim as a terrorist, or a black man as a criminal because they claim that imagery would affect people's attitudes. But they can show teenagers and twenty-somethings having promiscuous, consequence-free sex and claim it won't influence people's behavior.
Because “teens are responsible decision makers.”
Right.
http://moonbattery.com/
Have Hackers Unearthed Climate Change's Real Inconvenient Truth?
By
Geoff Fox
on 11/20/09 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
When people hear my opinions on human induced global warming they're usually surprised... maybe shocked is a better word. I am a meteorologist with some training in climatology. I watched Al Gore present his global warming lecture as an invited guest in the White House. I'm a liberal. And yet I don't believe we humans are changing our climate in a noticeable or troubling way.
Don't get me wrong. I'm all for freeing ourselves from the grip of foreign oil, even if that's painful in the short term. I'd like the air cleaner with less crap emitted by cars, trucks and industry. My goals are mostly the same as the goals of the global warming doomsayers.
Unfortunately, if you dissent on the issue of global warming you're branded an idiot or heretic or maybe I'm in the pocket of big oil. The global warming theory proponents often have a religious-like fervor in their support. "How can you dismiss all the evidence," they ask?
This is my blog. This isn't the news. My level of fact checking is very low, but published reports say web servers at the England's East Anglia Climate Research Unit have been hacked and some of the personal emails and data removed are damning!
It looks like some well publicized global warming evidence is the product of the books being cooked! It's possible the loudest voices in this fight have been playing fast-and-loose with the truth when it doesn't serve their purpose.
Even though I disagree with these people I am seriously shocked to hear this might be true. I expected the debate was educated and legitimate.
Here are two email snippets.
"I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline." - Phil Jones
"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. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate." - Kevin Trenberth
The problem is recent history has shown a halt to global warming over the last decade. Whatever the reason it doesn't make sense to see this if the most well known theories are correct!
This is a story that's just beginning to be written.
I don't condone breaking into a computer, as these hackers allegedly did. I certainly don't condone passing off lies as fact.
Read more: http://www.geofffox.com/MT/archives/2009/11
Bill Sparkman, Kentucky Census Worker, May Have Committed Suicide
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/05/bill-sparkman-kentucky-ce_n_347851.html
NEWLY REVEALED DOCUMENTS Contradict NEA Chairman Landesman
by Patrick Courrielche
“The former NEA Director of Communications acted unilaterally and without the approval or authorization of then-Acting Chairman Patrice Walker Powell.” – Rocco Landesman, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, on September 22, 2009
Chairman Landesman’s claim that Yosi Sergant, the former NEA Communications Director, acted “unilaterally” on the controversial August 10th conference call is not only beginning to erode, but new documents obtained by Judicial Watch under the Freedom of Information Act show that another federal employee thought the arts effort was entering murky legal waters.
http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/pcourrielche/2009/11/12/newly-released-emails-appear-to-contradict-nea-chair-landesmans-statement/
In an email dated July 30, 2009, Nellie Abernathy, a representative of the federal program United We Serve, sent an email to Sergant to inquire of his interest in attending a meeting regarding 9/11 events – the culmination day of the United We Serve campaign. In the email Abernathy states (emphasis added):
“Just got off the phone with [redacted]. They’re interested in helping produce some 9/11 events and will be in DC next week. Any chance you could join us for a meeting Tuesday morning? Or does this fall into that sketchy grey we might get arrested area?”
Sergant responded, “I’d love to.”
The subject of the email correspondence was entitled “rock the vote,” which presumably should have been redacted (blacked out) in the subject line given that the organization is a non-government group and the other subject lines in the email chain were redacted.
Readers following this story may recall that Rock the Vote was a presenter on the controversial August 10th conference call that encouraged an arts group that worked on Obama’s election campaign to create art on issues that were being vehemently debated nationally; including health care, energy, and the environment. As a presenter Bates stated the following, “We just wanted to give you one quick tangible example of things that can be done.” Bates then went on to explain how Rock the Vote was considering having an artist create an art installation from urban waste to engage young people “on the issue of a new environmental movement.”
Rock the Vote is a non-profit voter registration organization that is frequently involved in partisan political activity – a conflict that Abernathy appears to address in her email correspondence with Sergant. Eleven days after the August 10th conference call, Rock the Vote announced a health care design competition. The contest announcement read:
“We can’t stand by and listen to lies and deceit coming from those who are against reforming a broken system…We need designs that tell the country YES WE CARE! Young people demand health care now.”
The new FOIA documents also show that additional federal employees were aware of this arts effort, including another NEA employee by the name of Elizabeth Stark. Email correspondence between Abernathy, Sergant, and Stark show that a United We Serve meeting was arranged by Stark for Sergant.
Philip Martin, an outreach coordinator for United We Serve, also appears in the FOIA documents, showing that he was aware of Sergant’s efforts and was working with him on another arts outreach program in Philadelphia. The federal employees that were aware of this arts effort continue to grow and now include Yosi Sergant (NEA), Elizabeth Stark (NEA), Nellie Abernathy (United We Serve), Philip Martin (United We Serve), Buffy Wicks (White House Office of Public Engagement), and Kalpen Modi (White House Office of Public Engagement).
Chairman Landesman’s claim that Sergant acted “unilaterally” is becoming harder to swallow.
http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/pcourrielche/2009/11/12/newly-released-emails-appear-to-contradict-nea-chair-landesmans-statement/
Chairman Zero Calls Tea-Party Patriots "Extremists"
Posted by Gregory of Yardale at 6:38 AM | Comments (5)
From the Washington Examiner:
President Obama called the tea partiers "extremists" in front of Democrat House members. Rep. Earl Blumenauer of Oregon said the President asked them, "Does anybody think that the teabag, anti-government people are going to support them if they bring down health care? All it will do is confuse and dispirit” Democratic voters “and it will encourage the extremists.”
Our President believes middle-aged, middle-class, Americans who exercise their First Amendment rights are "extremists", but warns against "jumping to conclusions" when an Islamic radical commits mass murder on a U.S. base. Harvey Dent has nothing on this two-faced hypocrite.
So, in the POV of Chairman Zero and his administration, these people are radical extremists:
And this is a guy from the neighborhood we shouldn't jump to conclusions about:
http://moonbattery.com/
They Don’t Get It on Iran
by Oliver North (more by this author)
Posted 11/10/2009 ET
Creech Air Force Base, NV -- Thirty years ago this week a group of Iranian “students” shouting “death to America” stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, Iran, taking nearly 100 hostages -- among them 65 Americans. Though foreign national employees and some Americans were released within a few weeks, the remaining 52 were held for 444 days. For the American people, it was an introduction to militant Islam. For President Jimmy Carter, intent on “engaging” the radical regime that replaced Shah Reza Pahlavi, it was a disaster. The Obama administration appears to have missed the lessons of this debacle.
Though Mr. Carter described the embassy takeover as “a disappointing development” and “surprising,” it shouldn’t have been. Strikes, mass demonstrations and student protests throughout Iran began early in 1978. In September, the Shah responded by declaring martial law. It didn’t help.
On January 16, 1979, the Shah, seriously ill with cancer, fled and sought refuge in Morocco, Mexico and the United States. Two weeks later, February 1, 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile in France to be greeted by more than five million devotees lining the streets of Tehran. Ten days later he proclaimed himself Iran’s Supreme Leader.
When hundreds of students chanting anti-American slogans flooded into, and briefly occupied, the U.S. embassy on February 15, the Carter administration delivered a “strongly worded diplomatic note” protesting the “lack of protection by Iranian authorities.” For the next eight months, despite increasingly strident pronouncements by Khomeini and officials of his new “Islamic Republic,” Mr. Carter and his aides made repeated overtures to “engage” the regime in Tehran.
On November 1, 1979, Zbigniew Brzezinski met in Algiers with the Ayatollah’s Prime Minister, Mehdi Bazargan. Three days later the “students” charged into the U.S. embassy again. This time they stayed.
Though some of those who participated in the takeover subsequently claimed they planned nothing more than a “sit in” like those on U.S. college campuses during anti-Vietnam War protests, the Ayatollah’s most radical followers were actually in control of events. Despite Carter administration protests, Khomeini’s “Revolutionary Guards” and police, posted outside the embassy walls, did nothing to end the take-over or the hostage situation. Mr. Carter responded by freezing Iranian assets in the U.S. and “severing diplomatic ties” with Tehran.
On Christmas day, less than two months after the hostages were seized in Tehran, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Once again, President Carter, wracked by intelligence failures and indecision, said he was “shocked and surprised” and boycotted the Olympics.
Over the course of the next year, while the Carter administration dithered, Khomeini and his council of militant clerics created all of the instruments of state control common to revolutionary regimes, but with an Islamic twist. He purged the military and the Iranian civil service, created a massive internal secret police network, a “block warden” system to spy on neighbors, took control of print and broadcast media, rounded up opponents and tried them in “special courts” under Sharia law.
By the spring of 1980, when President Carter ordered our deeply under-funded U.S. military to rescue the hostages held in Tehran, Khomeini was convinced that he was on a divine mission to “purify Islam” and re-establish a “Caliphate” in the “Lands of the Prophet.” When Operation Eagle Claw failed catastrophically on the night of April 24-25 with the loss of 8 American lives -- and without the Iranians firing a shot -- the Ayatollah claimed it was because Allah “protected the Islamic State from infidels.” He also began predicting an apocalyptic battle against the U.S. and Israel which would destroy “The Great Satan,” and “the Zionist entity.”
Though the hostages were released on January 20, 1981 -- just hours before Ronald Reagan’s inaugural -- Tehran’s wave of terror didn’t stop. By 1982, despite a bloody war with Iraq, the Ayatollah’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had created a proxy force in Lebanon -- Hezbollah. Over the course of the next five years Hezbollah terrorists armed, trained and paid for by Tehran, hijacked, kidnapped, bombed, and killed more Americans than any terror organization on the planet until the attacks of 9-11-01.
In the three decades since the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, the rhetoric of Revolutionary Islam is little changed. The words and pronouncements of Iran’s current Supreme Leader, Seyyed Ali Khamenei, and the declarations of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad echo those of Khomeini thirty years ago.
Their actions are also unchanged. This week, while our FOX News Team was at this Air Force Base in the Nevada desert, Israeli commandos seized 60 tons of Iranian weapons enroute to Hezbollah.
The regime in Tehran still proclaims “Death to America.” They still promise to destroy Israel. Only now the Iranians are building nuclear weapons and the means of delivering them.
Like the Carter administration, Mr. Obama and his advisers are apparently convinced that “engaging” the Iranian regime will somehow make things different. After 30 years they still don’t get it.
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?print=yes&id=34292
Many California jobs 'saved' by stimulus funds weren't in jeopardy
preese@sacbee.com
Published Friday, Nov. 06, 2009
Up to one-fourth of the 110,000 jobs reported as saved by federal stimulus money in California probably never were in danger, a Bee review has found.
California State University officials reported late last week that they saved more jobs with stimulus money than the number of jobs saved in Texas – and in 44 other states.
In a required state report to the federal government, the university system said the $268.5 million it received in stimulus funding through October allowed it to retain 26,156 employees.
That total represents more than half of CSU's statewide work force. However, university officials confirmed Thursday that half their workers were not going to be laid off without the stimulus dollars.
"This is not really a real number of people," CSU spokeswoman Clara Potes-Fellow said. "It's like a budget number."
That certainly was not the way Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger described it at a news event with Vice President Joe Biden late last week, where he focused on people, not budgets.
"Anyone that criticizes the stimulus money should talk to those 100,000 people that have retained their jobs or gotten jobs because of the stimulus money, especially the 62,000 teachers that have kept their jobs or gotten jobs," Schwarzenegger said.
When asked about CSU's numbers on Wednesday, Camille Anderson, a spokeswoman for the California Recovery Task Force, said it was up to the university to report its numbers accurately.
"CSU assured the California Recovery Task Force that they self-reported in strict adherence with federal reporting requirements," Anderson said.
Multiple cases of inflated and underreported job tallies have surfaced since the federal government released detailed stimulus reports last week, said Craig Jennings, a senior policy analyst at OMB Watch, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit group that tracks federal spending.
"I don't think recipients know what they are supposed to put down," Jennings said, referring to guidelines for estimating the number of jobs retained.
Nonetheless, Jennings said his review so far indicates most employers have reported job creation numbers that appear realistic.
Statewide, numbers reported by the Governor's Office show roughly one job in California created for every $75,000 in stimulus funding received through Oct. 30 – a sum that certainly sounds realistic, especially when benefits are considered.
But broken down by projects and programs, that averaging gets complicated.
Many giant projects, most of them dealing with transportation, have received tens of millions of dollars but reported creating or retaining few jobs because work has not yet begun.
On the flip side, about 500 California employers receiving stimulus funds reported creating work for less than $15,000 per job. California State University is the largest example of this – it spent about $10,000 per job. In another example, the state Employment Development Department reported creating the equivalent of about 12,000 jobs for around $7,000 apiece.
Most of those EDD jobs were temporary and went to youths who would otherwise have had trouble finding employment, said Liz Clingman, deputy division chief in the EDD's work force services division.
By comparison, the University of California system received $717 million in stimulus funding – nearly three times the amount given to the CSU system – but reported only about 8,400 jobs saved, a cost of $85,000 per job.
In the case of the CSU system, spokeswoman Potes-Fellow said university officials followed federal reporting guidelines in calculating the numbers.
They determined that CSU's stimulus funds equaled the pay of roughly 26,000 full-time employees for the two months following the allocation, May and June, and reported that as the number of jobs saved, Potes-Fellow said.
Given CSU's large payroll, the system would need to receive another $1 billion or more to keep funding those jobs for an entire year. But about half of the money California expects to receive under the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund – the stimulus dollars funding the university jobs – already has been spent.
CSU's accounting method, however, seems to violate at least the spirit of written guidance from the federal government.
In a June letter to all funding recipients, White House Budget Director Peter Orszag said, "A job retained is an existing position that would not have been continued to be filled were it not for Recovery Act funding."
When asked about CSU's contention that half its work force was not at risk without stimulus funding, a U.S. Department of Education official suggested that CSU might be downplaying the magnitude of its problems.
"If the recipient claims that they wouldn't have lost the jobs if they didn't have stimulus money to pay for them, it begs the question of where they would have found the funds to keep the jobs," said Sandra Abrevaya, the Education Department spokeswoman.
Asked how many jobs actually would have been lost at CSU campuses without the stimulus infusion, Potes-Fellow said she did not know, though she said it would have been significant.
http://www.sacbee.com/topstories/v-print/story/2309303.html
What the Pelosi Health-Care Bill Really Says
Here are some important passages in the 2,000 page legislation.
By BETSY MCCAUGHEY
The health bill that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is bringing to a vote (H.R. 3962) is 1,990 pages. Here are some of the details you need to know.
What the government will require you to do:
• Sec. 202 (p. 91-92) of the bill requires you to enroll in a "qualified plan." If you get your insurance at work, your employer will have a "grace period" to switch you to a "qualified plan," meaning a plan designed by the Secretary of Health and Human Services. If you buy your own insurance, there's no grace period. You'll have to enroll in a qualified plan as soon as any term in your contract changes, such as the co-pay, deductible or benefit.
• Sec. 224 (p. 118) provides that 18 months after the bill becomes law, the Secretary of Health and Human Services will decide what a "qualified plan" covers and how much you'll be legally required to pay for it. That's like a banker telling you to sign the loan agreement now, then filling in the interest rate and repayment terms 18 months later.
On Nov. 2, the Congressional Budget Office estimated what the plans will likely cost. An individual earning $44,000 before taxes who purchases his own insurance will have to pay a $5,300 premium and an estimated $2,000 in out-of-pocket expenses, for a total of $7,300 a year, which is 17% of his pre-tax income. A family earning $102,100 a year before taxes will have to pay a $15,000 premium plus an estimated $5,300 out-of-pocket, for a $20,300 total, or 20% of its pre-tax income. Individuals and families earning less than these amounts will be eligible for subsidies paid directly to their insurer.
• Sec. 303 (pp. 167-168) makes it clear that, although the "qualified plan" is not yet designed, it will be of the "one size fits all" variety. The bill claims to offer choice—basic, enhanced and premium levels—but the benefits are the same. Only the co-pays and deductibles differ. You will have to enroll in the same plan, whether the government is paying for it or you and your employer are footing the bill.
• Sec. 59b (pp. 297-299) says that when you file your taxes, you must include proof that you are in a qualified plan. If not, you will be fined thousands of dollars. Illegal immigrants are exempt from this requirement.
• Sec. 412 (p. 272) says that employers must provide a "qualified plan" for their employees and pay 72.5% of the cost, and a smaller share of family coverage, or incur an 8% payroll tax. Small businesses, with payrolls from $500,000 to $750,000, are fined less.
Eviscerating Medicare:
In addition to reducing future Medicare funding by an estimated $500 billion, the bill fundamentally changes how Medicare pays doctors and hospitals, permitting the government to dictate treatment decisions.
• Sec. 1302 (pp. 672-692) moves Medicare from a fee-for-service payment system, in which patients choose which doctors to see and doctors are paid for each service they provide, toward what's called a "medical home."
The medical home is this decade's version of HMO-restrictions on care. A primary-care provider manages access to costly specialists and diagnostic tests for a flat monthly fee. The bill specifies that patients may have to settle for a nurse practitioner rather than a physician as the primary-care provider. Medical homes begin with demonstration projects, but the HHS secretary is authorized to "disseminate this approach rapidly on a national basis."
A December 2008 Congressional Budget Office report noted that "medical homes" were likely to resemble the unpopular gatekeepers of 20 years ago if cost control was a priority.
• Sec. 1114 (pp. 391-393) replaces physicians with physician assistants in overseeing care for hospice patients.
• Secs. 1158-1160 (pp. 499-520) initiates programs to reduce payments for patient care to what it costs in the lowest cost regions of the country. This will reduce payments for care (and by implication the standard of care) for hospital patients in higher cost areas such as New York and Florida.
• Sec. 1161 (pp. 520-545) cuts payments to Medicare Advantage plans (used by 20% of seniors). Advantage plans have warned this will result in reductions in optional benefits such as vision and dental care.
• Sec. 1402 (p. 756) says that the results of comparative effectiveness research conducted by the government will be delivered to doctors electronically to guide their use of "medical items and services."
Questionable Priorities:
While the bill will slash Medicare funding, it will also direct billions of dollars to numerous inner-city social work and diversity programs with vague standards of accountability.
• Sec. 399V (p. 1422) provides for grants to community "entities" with no required qualifications except having "documented community activity and experience with community healthcare workers" to "educate, guide, and provide experiential learning opportunities" aimed at drug abuse, poor nutrition, smoking and obesity. "Each community health worker program receiving funds under the grant will provide services in the cultural context most appropriate for the individual served by the program."
These programs will "enhance the capacity of individuals to utilize health services and health related social services under Federal, State and local programs by assisting individuals in establishing eligibility . . . and in receiving services and other benefits" including transportation and translation services.
• Sec. 222 (p. 617) provides reimbursement for culturally and linguistically appropriate services. This program will train health-care workers to inform Medicare beneficiaries of their "right" to have an interpreter at all times and with no co-pays for language services.
• Secs. 2521 and 2533 (pp. 1379 and 1437) establishes racial and ethnic preferences in awarding grants for training nurses and creating secondary-school health science programs. For example, grants for nursing schools should "give preference to programs that provide for improving the diversity of new nurse graduates to reflect changes in the demographics of the patient population." And secondary-school grants should go to schools "graduating students from disadvantaged backgrounds including racial and ethnic minorities."
• Sec. 305 (p. 189) Provides for automatic Medicaid enrollment of newborns who do not otherwise have insurance.
For the text of the bill with page numbers, see www.defendyourhealthcare.us.
Ms. McCaughey is chairman of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths and a former Lt. Governor of New York state.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704795604574519671055918380.html
Regulation Going Backwards
By Barry Ritholtz
November 6th, 2009, 10:00AM
Here’s another one of those stories that will make your blood pressure boil: Instead of moving forward with broad regulatory protections of economics system, we are undoing effective regulations that protect investors.
Floyd Norris has the details. Under the guise of helping small businesses, the accounting requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley are being watered down to near nothing.
So long economic collapse, hello accounting fraud:
“Sarbanes-Oxley was passed, almost unanimously, by a Republican-controlled House and a Democratic-controlled Senate. Now a Democratic Congress is gutting it with the apparent approval of the Obama administration.
The House Financial Services Committee this week approved an amendment to the Investor Protection Act of 2009 — a name George Orwell would appreciate — to allow most companies to never comply with the law, and mandating a study to see whether it would be a good idea to exempt additional ones as well.
Some veterans of past reform efforts were left sputtering with rage. “That the Democratic Party is the vehicle for overturning the most pro-investor legislation in the past 25 years is deeply disturbing,” said Arthur Levitt, a Democrat who was chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission under President Bill Clinton. “Anyone who votes for this will bear the investors’ mark of Cain.”
Note that many of the problems that led to near systemic collapse involved special exemptions from existing legislation. The 5 banks that were exempted from leverage rules, the giant banks that pushed for exemptions from Glass Steagall. Even the CMFA was essentially a special exemption for an entire class of financial instruments — derivatives — that were to be treated differently than typical financial instruments.
The aggressive lobbyists are pushing for less transparency, less accurate reporting, less accounting oversights. Consider:
“This year, a subcommittee of the House Financial Services Committee held a hearing at which legislators sought no facts but instead threatened dire action if the chairman of the financial accounting board did not promptly make it easier for banks to ignore market values of the toxic securities they owned. The board caved in, which may be one reason why banks are reporting fewer losses these days.
But the board’s retreat was not enough to satisfy the banks. The American Bankers Association is now pushing Congress to give a new systemic risk regulator — either the Federal Reserve or some panel of regulators — the power to override accounting standards. The view of the bankers is that the financial crisis did not stem from the fact that the banks made lots of bad loans and invested in dubious securities; it was caused by accounting rules that required disclosure when the losses began to mount.”
This is a shameless attempt for a freer hand to avoid responsibility and correct marking of assets.
If we really wanted to just help small companies reduce their reporting burdens and maintain acceptable financial controls, how hard is it to exempt an appropriate number of firms with modest revenue.
Instead, this is yet another grab for control by the same groups that helped caused the previos accounting crisis in the 1990s and 2000s.
The gall is simply unimaginable.
Source:
Goodbye to Reforms of 2002
FLOYD NORRIS
NYT: November 5, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/06/business/06norris.html
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/11/regulation-going-backwards/
Resolving the Cognitive Dissonance of Islam
By D.L. Adams
The negative spiritual and intellectual consequence of believing two mutually exclusive concepts is "cognitive dissonance." Our interaction as a society with Islam is a direct cause of "cognitive dissonance" for us as individuals and as a culture.
Resolution of the contradiction requires the rejection of one of the concepts as false. If we continue to ignore our cognitive dissonance about Islam the consequences are dire: we will lose our civilization.
Islam is much more than a religion; it is a complete civilization that includes politics (caliphate), jurisprudence (Sharia law), war (jihad), and a deliberately misleading "religion of peace." The doctrine of Islam is found in three books: Koran (the literal word of Allah as "revealed" to Mohammed), Sira (Mohammad's biography), and Hadith (stories about and sayings of Mohammed by contemporaries). The definitive text of Sharia law is "Reliance of the Traveller." Allah and Mohammed are to be obeyed, not questioned. "Islam" means "submission;" a Muslim is "one who submits." "Islam" does not mean "peace."
Say: Obey Allah and the Apostle; but if they turn back, then surely Allah does not love the unbelievers. (Koran,3:32)
O you who believe! Obey Allah and His Apostle and do not turn back from Him while you hear. (Koran, 8:20)
O you who believe! fight those of the unbelievers who are near to you and let them find in you hardness; and know that Allah is with those who guard (against evil). (Koran, 9:123)
The purpose of the Islamic doctrine is the destruction of all cultures that are not Islamic and expansion of Islam until the entire world is under Islamic rule and Sharia law.
O Prophet! strive hard against the unbelievers and the hypocrites, and be hard against them; and their abode is hell; and evil is the resort. (Koran, 66:9)
Saed had been right about taking prisoners after the battle: take no prisoners until Islam has made all submit. They were to forget the ransom and the money, Mohammed said, because submission of the non-believers was all that mattered. (Sira:Ishaq:484 - Mohammed and the Unbelievers: A Political Life, Center for the Study of Political Islam, 2006, p.71)
And fight with them until there is no persecution, and religion should be only for Allah, but if they desist, then there should be no hostility except against the oppressors. (Koran, 2:193)
It is difficult for many to accept that such an ideology can be real and that people kill and die for it; we see the truth of Islam in word and deed but pretend that it is not so. According to Sharia law (Islamic law) Islam abrogates, that is "cancels," all other religions.
Previously revealed religions were valid in their own eras, as is attested to by many verses of the Holy Koran, but were abrogated by the universal message of Islam as is equally attested to by many verses of the Koran.
...It is unbelief (kufr) to hold that the remnant cults now bearing the names of formerly valid religions, such as "Christianity" or "Judaism," are acceptable to Allah Most High after He has sent the final Messenger (Allah bless him and give him peace) to the entire world. (Reliance of the Traveller, w4.0(2))
Our national cognitive dissonance began immediately after 9/11 when President George Bush visited the Islamic Center of Washington on September 17, 2001, and said, "Islam is peace." President Obama has reiterated this misperception of Islam specifically in his recent speech of apology in Cairo to the "Muslim World."
The contradiction of Islam upon which our cognitive dissonance is based is this: Islam is benevolent and peaceful, and Islam is violent and hostile. Both positions cannot be true.
Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued. (Koran:9:29)
You will find others who desire that they should be safe from you and secure from their own people; as often as they are sent back to the mischief they get thrown into it headlong; therefore if they do not withdraw from you, and (do not) offer you peace and restrain their hands, then seize them and kill them wherever you find them; and against these We have given you a clear authority. (Koran, 4:91)
Narrated Abu Huraira: Allah 's Apostle said, "I have been ordered to fight with the people till they say, 'None has the right to be worshipped but Allah,' and whoever says, 'None has the right to be worshipped but Allah,' his life and property will be saved by me except for Islamic law, and his accounts will be with Allah, (either to punish him or to forgive him.)" (Bukhari, Hadith, Volume 4, Book 52, Number 196)
The majority of the doctrine of Islam is about how Muslims are to interact with non-Muslims; it is essentially about - us. Statistical analysis of the doctrine of Islam by Dr. Bill Warner of the Center for the Study of Political Islam is enlightening:
* 62% of Koran is devoted to how Islam interacts with the kafir (the unbeliever).
* 98% of the Sira is devoted to the struggle against kafirs. (70% is jihad; 28% is argument and insults.)
* 20% of Bukhari Hadith is devoted to jihad.
The evidence to resolve our societal cognitive dissonance about Islam is readily available and painfully obvious.
Lo! those who disbelieve, among the People of the Scripture and the idolaters, will abide in fire of hell. They are the worst of created beings. (Koran, 98:6)
Islamist mass murderers and terrorists/jihadists are not "hijackers of Islam," they are not "misunderstanders" of Islam; they are the devout followers of a political ideology that is hostile to our existence because we are not Muslims.
We will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve, because they set up with Allah that for which He has sent down no authority, and their abode is the fire, and evil is the abode of the unjust. (Koran, 3:151)
Then, when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them (captive), and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush. But if they repent and establish worship and pay the poor-due (jizya tax), then leave their way free. Lo! Allah is Forgiving, Merciful. (Koran, 9:5)
The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) which is under a cloud of suspicion (see "Muslim Mafia" by P. David Gaubatz and Paul Sperry) has been the leading espouser of Islamic "understanding" in America. CAIR's mission statement that it is "to be a leading advocate for justice and mutual understanding" is not, according to their founder, their true purpose.
Narrated Abu Huraira: The Prophet said, "Khosrau will be ruined, and there will be no Khosrau after him, and Caesar will surely be ruined and there will be no Caesar after him, and you will spend their treasures in Allah's Cause." He called, ‘War is deceit'. (Bukhari, Hadith, Volume 4, Book 52, Number 267)
CAIR's founder, Omar Ahmad, said in 1998 that "Islam isn't in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran . . . should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth." (San Ramon, CA., Valley Herald, 7/04/1998.)
So obey not the disbelievers, but strive against them herewith with a great endeavour. (Koran, 25:52)
If our culture and society are to survive we must accept the truth of the world and of Islam though it is not what we would prefer.
Warfare is ordained for you, though it is hateful unto you; but it may happen that ye hate a thing which is good for you, and it may happen that ye love a thing which is bad for you. Allah knoweth, ye know not. (Koran, 2:216)
Our cognitive dissonance will be resolved only with honesty and knowledge. Islam is not a "religion of peace." If we are unsuccessful in resolving the cognitive dissonance which results from our confused view of Islam we will lose our civilization.
DL Adams is a co-founder of Stop Islamization of America. SIOANETWORK.COM
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/resolving_the_cognitive_disson.html
Obama: I do not deserve Nobel prize
Barack Obama, the US president, has said he is "surprised and deeply humbled" after being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009, less than a year after taking office.
Speaking in Washington, Obama said he did "not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who have been honoured by this prize".
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/europe/2009/10/2009109152410715115.html
Of course he must be lying since he will accept it....
Sad
For just 4-5 million dollars, this could be your new home! Exotic Yachts.
http://www.sub-find.com/trilobis65.htm
Tell Me Which Side Is the Fringe Again?
A Whopping 12% of Americans agree with Jimmy Carter and the MSM that protests against ObamaCare are motivated by racist animosity toward the president.
(http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/healthcare/september_2009/12_say_most_opponents_of_obama_health_care_plan_are_racist)
Eighty-eight percent (88%) of Republicans reject the notion that most of the opponents are racist. So do 78% of voters not affiliated with either major party. However, just 39% of Democrats share that view. Twenty-two percent (22%) of those in the president’s party say that most of the opposition to his plan comes from racists, and another 39% are not sure.
Whoa, it sounds like one of the political parties is hugely out of step with the public on this one. Maybe this could be a "teachable moment" for the Democrats on race.
http://moonbattery.com/
Fact-Checking the President on Health Insurance
His tales of abuse don't stand scrutiny.
By SCOTT HARRINGTON
In his speech to Congress last week, President Barack Obama attempted to sell a reform agenda by demonizing the private health-insurance industry, which many people love to hate. He opened the attack by asserting: "More and more Americans pay their premiums, only to discover that their insurance company has dropped their coverage when they get sick, or won't pay the full cost of care. It happens every day."
Clearly, this should never happen to anyone who is in good standing with his insurance company and has abided by the terms of the policy. But the president's examples of people "dropped" by their insurance companies involve the rescission of policies based on misrepresentation or concealment of information in applications for coverage. Private health insurance cannot function if people buy insurance only after they become seriously ill, or if they knowingly conceal health conditions that might affect their policy.
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Harrington
Associated Press
Harrington
Harrington
Traditional practice, governed by decades of common law, statute and regulation is for insurers to rely in underwriting and pricing on the truthfulness of the information provided by applicants about their health, without conducting a costly investigation of each applicant's health history. Instead, companies engage in a certain degree of ex post auditing—conducting more detailed and costly reviews of a subset of applications following policy issue—including when expensive treatment is sought soon after a policy is issued.
This practice offers substantial cost savings and lower premiums compared to trying to verify every application before issuing a policy, or simply paying all claims, regardless of the accuracy and completeness of the applicant's disclosure. Some states restrict insurer rescission rights to instances where the misrepresented or concealed information is directly related to the illness that produced the claim. Most states do not.
To highlight abusive practices, Mr. Obama referred to an Illinois man who "lost his coverage in the middle of chemotherapy because his insurer found he hadn't reported gallstones that he didn't even know about." The president continued: "They delayed his treatment, and he died because of it."
Although the president has used this example previously, his conclusion is contradicted by the transcript of a June 16 hearing on industry practices before the Subcommittee of Oversight and Investigation of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. The deceased's sister testified that the insurer reinstated her brother's coverage following intervention by the Illinois Attorney General's Office. She testified that her brother received a prescribed stem-cell transplant within the desired three- to four-week "window of opportunity" from "one of the most renowned doctors in the whole world on the specific routine," that the procedure "was extremely successful," and that "it extended his life nearly three and a half years."
The president's second example was a Texas woman "about to get a double mastectomy when her insurance company canceled her policy because she forgot to declare a case of acne." He said that "By the time she had her insurance reinstated, her breast cancer more than doubled in size."
The woman's testimony at the June 16 hearing confirms that her surgery was delayed several months. It also suggests that the dermatologist's chart may have described her skin condition as precancerous, that the insurer also took issue with an apparent failure to disclose an earlier problem with an irregular heartbeat, and that she knowingly underreported her weight on the application.
These two cases are presumably among the most egregious identified by Congressional staffers' analysis of 116,000 pages of documents from three large health insurers, which identified a total of about 20,000 rescissions from millions of policies issued by the insurers over a five-year period. Company representatives testified that less than one half of one percent of policies were rescinded (less than 0.1% for one of the companies).
If existing laws and litigation governing rescission are inadequate, there clearly are a variety of ways that the states or federal government could target abuses without adopting the president's agenda for federal control of health insurance, or the creation of a government health insurer.
Later in his speech, the president used Alabama to buttress his call for a government insurer to enhance competition in health insurance. He asserted that 90% of the Alabama health-insurance market is controlled by one insurer, and that high market concentration "makes it easier for insurance companies to treat their customers badly—by cherry-picking the healthiest individuals and trying to drop the sickest; by overcharging small businesses who have no leverage; and by jacking up rates."
In fact, the Birmingham News reported immediately following the speech that the state's largest health insurer, the nonprofit Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Alabama, has about a 75% market share. A representative of the company indicated that its "profit" averaged only 0.6% of premiums the past decade, and that its administrative expense ratio is 7% of premiums, the fourth lowest among 39 Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans nationwide.
Similarly, a Dec. 31, 2007, report by the Alabama Department of Insurance indicates that the insurer's ratio of medical-claim costs to premiums for the year was 92%, with an administrative expense ratio (including claims settlement expenses) of 7.5%. Its net income, including investment income, was equivalent to 2% of premiums in that year.
In addition to these consumer friendly numbers, a survey in Consumer Reports this month reported that Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Alabama ranked second nationally in customer satisfaction among 41 preferred provider organization health plans. The insurer's apparent efficiency may explain its dominance, as opposed to a lack of competition—especially since there are no obvious barriers to entry or expansion in Alabama faced by large national health insurers such as United Healthcare and Aetna.
Responsible reform requires careful analysis of the underlying causes of problems in health insurance and informed debate over the benefits and costs of targeted remedies. The president's continued demonization of private health insurance in pursuit of his broad agenda of government expansion is inconsistent with that objective.
Mr. Harrington is professor of health-care management and insurance and risk management at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203440104574409501904118682.html?mod=googlenews_wsj#printMode
The Van Jones (non) feeding frenzy
By: Byron York
Beltway Confidential
Chief Political Correspondent
09/04/09 11:30 AM EDT
From a Nexis search a few moments ago:
Total words about the Van Jones controversy in the New York Times: 0.
Total words about the Van Jones controversy in the Washington Post: 0.
Total words about the Van Jones controversy on NBC Nightly News: 0.
Total words about the Van Jones controversy on ABC World News: 0.
Total words about the Van Jones controversy on CBS Evening News: 0.
If you were to receive all your news from any one of these outlets, or even all of them together, and you heard about some sort of controversy involving President Obama's Special Adviser for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, your response would be, "Huh?" If you heard that that adviser, Van Jones, had apologized for a number of remarks and positions in the recent past, your response would be, "What?" And if you were in the Obama White House monitoring the Jones situation, you would be hoping that the news organizations listed above continue to hold the line -- otherwise, Jones, who is quite well thought of in Obama circles, would be history.
9/5/09 UPDATE: The New York Times, ABC and NBC hold the line
After the Jones controversy reached a boiling point on Friday, the Washington Post published a story, "White House Says Little on Embattled Jones," on page A-3 of its Saturday edition. But the New York Times remained silent on the story.
Likewise, on Friday night the "CBS Evening News" reported the Jones matter, but ABC's "World News" and "NBC Nightly News" again failed to report the story.
My Thoughts:
Why does the left hate Fox News? Why does the left say Fox News is slanted, corrupt, and unfair? Because they hate the fact that Fox News IS FAIR and DOES NOT give the president Obama and his crew any free passes, right or left if it's news it gets aired and printed. We The People must know the facts, he is our president and not our dictator!
Fox News Search Results for Van Jones controversy:
Showing Results 1 - 10 of 24934
Congressman Pete Stark Explains Leverage, Tells Reporter To "Get The Fuck Out" (Video)
Submitted by Tyler Durden
09/03/2009
In a clip that has to be seen to be believed, California Congressman Pete Stark displays the most unbelievable combination of economic incomprehension, stupidity, hubris, and to top it off tells interviewer Jan Helfeld to "get to fuck out" or he will be thrown out of the window for daring to expose just what a sack of... hot air Stark is.
A line that will now live forever, thanks to Congressman Stark: "The more debt we owe, the wealthier we are".
That pretty much sums up political "thought"
The disadvantage to trying to do organic gardening of vegetables in the back yard... not using insecticides..
ANTS are running us out of the house. All over the place. I've sprayed the foundation, unstoppable. We're sleeping with them, and throwing a bomb under the house gives the bedroom a two week hiatus. As soon as we get a break in the heat, I'm closing up the vents, and throwing about 5 bombs under the house. I've tried to tell the Queen to stay the hell out of the house with her scouts, but she's giving me shit.
I know they're in the attic too. Gotta place some bombs there too. They do this in the hot weather. They won't touch ant baits. Smart.
A Doctor's Plan for Legal Industry Reform
My modest proposal to rearrange how lawyers do business.
By RICHARD B. RAFAL
Since we are moving toward socialism with ObamaCare, the time has come to do the same with other professions—especially lawyers. Physician committees can decide whether lawyers are necessary in any given situation.
At a town-hall meeting in Portsmouth, N.H., last month, our uninformed lawyer in chief suggested that we physicians would rather chop off a foot than manage diabetes since we would make more money doing surgery. Then President Obama compounded his attack by claiming a doctor's reimbursement is between "$30,000" and "$50,000" for such amputations! (Actually, such surgery costs only about $1,500.)
Physicians have never been so insulted. Because of these affronts, I will gladly volunteer for the important duty of controlling and regulating lawyers. Since most of what lawyers do is repetitive boilerplate or pushing paper, physicians would have no problem dictating what is appropriate for attorneys. We physicians know much more about legal practice than lawyers do about medicine.
Following are highlights of a proposed bill authorizing the dismantling of the current framework of law practice and instituting socialized legal care:
• Contingency fees will be discouraged, and eventually outlawed, over a five-year period. This will put legal rewards back into the pockets of the deserving—the public and the aggrieved parties. Slick lawyers taking their "cut" smacks of a bookie operation. Attorneys will be permitted to keep up to 3% in contingency cases, the remainder going into a pool for poor people.
• Legal "DRGs." Each potential legal situation will be assigned a relative value, and charges limited to this amount. Program participation and acceptance of this amount is mandatory, regardless of the number of hours spent on the matter. Government schedules of flat fees for each service, analogous to medicine's Diagnosis Related Groups (DRGs), will be issued. For example, any divorce will have a set fee of, say, $1,000, regardless of its simplicity or complexity. This will eliminate shady hourly billing. Niggling fees such as $2 per page photocopied or faxed would disappear. Who else nickels-and-dimes you while at the same time charging hundreds of dollars per hour? I'm surprised lawyers don't tack shipping and handling onto their bills.
• Legal "death panels." Over 75? You will not be entitled to legal care for any matter. Why waste money on those who are only going to die soon? We can decrease utilization, save money and unclog the courts simultaneously. Grandma, you're on your own.
• Ration legal care. One may need to wait months to consult an attorney. Despite a perceived legal need, physician review panels or government bureaucrats may deem advice unnecessary. Possibly one may not get representation before court dates or deadlines. But that' s tough: What do you want for "free"?
• Physician controlled legal review. This is potentially the most exciting reform, with doctors leading committees for determining the necessity of all legal procedures and the fairness of attorney fees. What a wonderful way for doctors to get even with the sharks attempting to eviscerate the practice of medicine.
• Discourage/eliminate specialization. Legal specialists with extra training and experience charge more money, contributing to increased costs of legal care, making it unaffordable for many. This reform will guarantee a selection of mediocre, unmotivated attorneys but should help slow rising legal costs. Big shot under indictment? Classified National Archives documents down your pants? Sitting president defending against impeachment? Have FBI agents found $90,000 in your freezer? Too bad. Under reform you too may have to go to the government legal shop for advice.
• Electronic legal records. We should enter the digital age and computerize and centralize legal records nationwide. All files must be in a standard, preferably inconvenient, format and must be available to government agencies. A single database of judgments, court records, client files, etc. will decrease legal expenses. Anyone with Internet access will be able to search the database, eliminating unjustifiable fees charged by law firms for supposedly proprietary information, while fostering transparency. It will enable consumers to dump their clunker attorneys and transfer records easily.
• Ban legal advertisements. Catchy phone numbers such as 1-800-LAWYERS would be seized by the government and repurposed for reporting unscrupulous attorneys.
• New government oversight. Government overhead to manage the legal system will include a cabinet secretary, commissioners, ombudsmen, auditors, assistants, czars and departments.
• Collect data about the supply of and demand for attorneys.Create a commission to study the diversity and geographic distribution of attorneys, with power to stipulate and enforce corrective actions to right imbalances. The more bureaucracy the better. One can never have too many eyes watching these sleazy sneaks.
• Lawyer Reduction Act (H.R. -3200). A self-explanatory bill that not only decreases the number of law students, but also arbitrarily removes 3,200 attorneys from practice each year. Textbook addition by subtraction.
Enthusiastically embracing the above legal changes can serve as a "teachable moment" and will go a long way toward giving the lawyers who run Congress a taste of their own medicine.
The Dems' Healthcare Plan Can't Be Done--Not Because of Politics, But Economics
September 03, 2009 03:03 PM ET | Peter Roff | Permanent Link | Print
By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Just days before President Obama is scheduled to address the nation in a televised attempt to restart his healthcare reform initiative, congressional Democratic leaders seem to have painted themselves into a corner on the very same issue.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., continues to push for the so-called "public option," arguing as late as last week that it had to be included in any legislative vehicle the House would produce. "There's no way I can pass a bill in the House of Representatives without a public option," she said at one recent press conference back in her San Francisco, Calif., district.
Backing her up on this is House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., who agrees that any healthcare reform that is going to pass the Congress has to include the public option.
Hoyer said last week that House leaders are considering changes to their plan that, according to Bloomberg, include "raising the threshold for a proposed surtax on the wealthy to those earning at least $500,000 a year from $350,000. And, he added at the time, his support for public option was balanced against his plans "for passing a bill."
"We believe the public option is a necessary, useful and very important aspect of this, but you know we'll have to see because there are many important aspects of the bill," he said. But he also said, speaking earlier this week at a town hall meeting that was broadcast on C-SPAN radio, that any healthcare bill the Democrats would pass would "pay for itself" and would not include any tax increase.
So Pelosi says the bill has to have public option. Hoyer now says it can't raise taxes
and has to be revenue neutral. Public option, revenue neutral and no tax increase? It can't be done. Not as a matter of politics but as a matter of economics. The money just isn't there, especially in light of the fact that Obama, Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., have, in just over six months, run up almost as much public debt as George W. Bush managed to do in his entire eight years in office.
http://www.usnews.com/blogs/peter-roff/2009/09/03/the-dems-healthcare-plan-cant-be-done--not-because-of-politics-but-economics.html
If Death Panels Were Real, This Measure Might Need One
By Dana Milbank
Friday, September 4, 2009
This is what a leadership vacuum looks like:
House Democratic chiefs, after a calamitous August recess, dispatched Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.) to the Capitol on Thursday to try to pick up the pieces of the shattered health-care bill.
"We've heard the stories -- death panels, euthanasia," the vice chairman of the House Democratic caucus told a roomful of reporters and cameras summoned by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office.
"We've heard any number of things," Becerra went on. "Seniors will pay for the health care of younger Americans. The myths abound."
To remedy this, he distributed a pamphlet from Pelosi's office devoted to "Clearing Up Misinformation" that Americans heard at town hall meetings last month: "A government panel or bureaucrat will tell me when to die. . . . Health care reform will lead to rationed care. . . . Health care reform is a government takeover." After each one was printed: "FALSE!"
"This is not socialized medicine," Becerra pleaded, before asking consent to deliver a quick message in Spanish: "Hay muchas mentiras!" -- there are many lies.
It was a painfully defensive performance, and if news conferences were subject to death panels, Becerra may well have been euthanized. By the end, the Democratic leader had tossed out his script and was pleading with President Obama to show some leadership when he comes before a joint session of Congress on Wednesday. "That's what a president is for: A president is supposed to be the leader and give us that direction," the vice chairman said. "I think the president now, seeing everything that's gone on . . . is going to give us a far better road map about where America should go."
It's a plea Obama is hearing in more and more places on more and more topics. Proponents of climate-change legislation fear that its prospects are fading in the Senate. As the public turns against the war Afghanistan, even Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele on Tuesday found himself urging Obama to "stand strong and speak out."
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told Helene Cooper of the New York Times that, on Afghanistan, "the president needs to be more aggressive about taking ownership of this strategy." And Time's Joe Klein, generally sympathetic to Obama, accused him of a "deferral of responsibility" on such matters as health care and investigating torture at the CIA. "He has to lead, clearly and decisively, starting right now," Klein advised.
So eager was Obama to avoid the mistakes of 1993, when the Clinton administration tried to present Congress with a fully formed health-care proposal, that he left Congress to its own devices on the issue. That led to a disastrous summer: Democrats on the defensive, the left wing snarling, and splits within the White House. It's almost enough to make one nostalgic for George W. Bush's theory of congressional relations: my way or the highway.
Now Obama, after months of avoiding Bill Clinton's playbook, finds himself preparing to give a health-care speech to Congress, just as Clinton did in September 1993. When Fox News's Chad Pergram helpfully pointed out this irony to Becerra on Thursday, the congressman said it would turn out better this time because "we had a chance over these last eight months to try to shape a good bill."
It was strange to argue that lawmakers would be more receptive to Obama's proposal because they already failed to pass one of their own. But the entire session required some suspension of disbelief.
Becerra, entering the room through a back door that led from a kitchen storage area, found reporters in their recess attire of open collars and jeans. The congressman, promising to provide "the truth as opposed to the myths about health-care reform," was joined by a quartet of like-minded activists who took turns at myth-dispelling.
"When you explain things that are in the bill," said Richard Fiesta of the AFL-CIO-backed Alliance for Retired Americans, "we find that people are much more willing to not believe what may be on television."
"The bill does not cut benefits," promised Patricia Nemore of the Center for Medicare Advocacy, a group that often sues the government to expand Medicare access.
But the questioners had other topics for discussion, such as how Democrats "lost control of the debate" during August. "I wouldn't say there was any loss of control," Becerra answered gamely. "What I'd say happened was Americans started speaking. . . . Some spoke to drown out, some spoke to distort, some spoke to delay."
CNN's Ted Barrett asked how Democrats could get enough votes to pass a bill. Becerra likened the situation to skydiving: "As I keep saying to my colleagues, you're packing my parachute, I'm packing yours. America needs to know that when we're packing their parachute, we're doing it the right way. We had all of August to tell people how we're going to try to pack the parachute. Now its time to start to get ready and take the jump."
It was an unfortunate metaphor for a piece of legislation that is losing altitude. But the Democratic leader held out hope for a safe landing -- assuming Obama finally decides to take the controls next week. "Every one of us has our goals, every one of us has our bottom lines, but at the end of the day, what the president would like us to do becomes the most influential comment," Becerra said. "We have to try to get something done, and the president is the most powerful voice in trying to get us somewhere."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/03/AR2009090303211_pf.html
Obama ditches union financial disclosure rules
Rick Moran
I'll bet a lot of union bosses are breathing a sigh of relief these days. It's not just that they have a best friend in the highest possible place - the White House. But it's what that friend can do for them that allows them to retain their lavish, dues-supported lifestyles while feathering their own beds at the expense of their members.
Word is that the new Labor Secretary Hilda Solis will not enforce regulations promulgated during the Bush Administration that force labor bosses running unions with more than $250,000 in receipts to abide by strict financial disclosure requirements.
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/09/obama_ditches_union_financial.html
The Not Ready for Prime Time President
By Bruce Walker
Pundits, including perceptive conservative opponents like Charles Krauthammer, have noted the consummate political skill of Barack Obama. There is not much doubt that Obama was able to wage a very effective campaign for the Democrat nomination and then for the presidency in the general election.
Bill Clinton was a masterful campaigner too (I had the opportunity to watch some of that first hand.) Ronald Reagan, because in part of his long career in Hollywood, could give "The Speech" a thousand times and each time it was electrifying. The word "charisma" entered our popular political language to describe John Kennedy, whose beautiful wife and boyish good looks created the myth of Camelot. Franklin Roosevelt had the same gift for making people feeling comfortable and winning elections.
But there is a huge difference between Obama, on the one hand, those other presidents on the other hand - and the difference transcends ideology. FDR, Clinton, and Obama had the same Leftist agenda. JFK was what today would be called a moderate, and the Gipper, of course, was overtly conservative. But JFK, FDR, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton had the ability to govern once they had won their elections.
FDR, by the time he became president, he had served as Secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson, Governor of New York, and Vice Presidential Candidate of his party in 1928. Forget the rightness or the wrongness of his policies: Franklin Roosevelt understood governance.
John Kennedy had been a war hero, a member of Congress, and the real author of some important books (like Why England Slept, in which JFK describes the dangers of appeasing evil.) The Roosevelt and Kennedy clans also grew up with a sense of aristocratic responsibility and a backdoors familiarity with power which may not have been moral, but certainly was valuable.
Ronald Reagan, in addition to being a movie star, a union president, and an ambassador for General Electric, served eight years as Governor of California and was twice an unsuccessful candidate for the Republican nomination before finally winning the nomination in 1980.
Even Bill Clinton had been a congressional candidate, then attorney general of Arkansas, then for many years governor of Arkansas before he ran for president. Clinton served a term as Chair of the National Governors Association. He was a leading member of the Democratic Leadership Council, a group considered, wrongly, to be moderate but which was influential.
Obama, while possessing many of the campaigning gifts of these presidents, has shown no ability to govern at all. This is a very dangerous situation for our nation. Our leader is a man whose ignorance, in many areas of history and policy, is simply appalling. He is rather like the "President in the Plastic Bubble." Obama's entire life has been insulated from any sense of reality of the nation he governs.
When a black Marxist professor obviously blinded by intense racial rage has to be taken to a police station by a police officer nursed in all the nuances of political correctness, Obama cannot see his friend as the wailing bigot and the white policemen as the reasonable figure. At best, Obama calls it a moral draw.
When millions of Americans spontaneously protest at Tea Parties and Town Meetings proposals for massive federal changes, Obama instructs his satrapies in government, the Democratic Party, and the media that the voters are simply uninformed. When citizens cite specific sections of federal bills, how serious does Obama expect to be taken?
When polls show his support dropping steadily as well as support for his specific policies and his party, Obama seems to think that his cronies and he have simply not repeated the same unbelievable statements often, clearly, or loudly enough. It is as if John Edwards had taken the position, when his infidelity was exposed, that he simply needed to get in front of the television camera as often as possible repeating his lies as persuasively as he could.
His pals from Chicago seem unable to help him. His partisan handlers fancy that they can simply ram whatever they want. Men like Axelrod and Emmanuel seem to think that it should be simple to push radical Leftist programs through a nation in which conservatives outnumber liberals in virtually all of the fifty states. Obama and his clique appear certain that in a modern culture in which celebrity means everything to many, that just remaining on the cover of glamour magazines will assure political support -- when actually the immature voter is the most feckless and unreliable source of muscle around.
President Obama seemingly has no clue about what he is doing, and, increasingly, it shows. What will happen when things start to go sour in Afghanistan? Our Commander-in-Chief simply will not be able to blame President Bush. After Obama has effectively destroyed the CIA, what will he do when terrorists strike? War is a nasty business in which lawyers should have little role. Has Obama noticed that Islamic terrorists are now threatening him? Does he understand that these vicious men are still threatening America?
Looking smooth on television and wowing those fawning socialites and film directors who want to be wowed brings a sort of ephemeral "popularity," but great nations are not governed on such spun sugar. Winning elections and running superpowers are very different tasks. Now, we have a president who is every second still just a candidate. As the world grows more dangerous by the day, we are "led" by the Not-Ready-For-Prime-Time-President.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/09/the_not_ready_for_prime_time_p.html
Solar activity and climate change
By Bob Confer
Niagara Gazette
If you participated in the CB radio craze of the 1970s and 1980s you’ll remember that quite often communication become difficult if not impossible. There were numerous times when the skip (signals from afar) would roll in and CB operators from all over the US (and world, for that matter) would drown out your conversation with someone in the next town over. Nowadays, it’s a very rare day when you’ll be able to hear anyone beyond the line of sight.
If you’re a stargazer or someone who just likes to step outside at night for a breath of fresh air or a smoke, you’ll remember seeing plenty of aurora in years past, with some pretty impressive displays of the northern lights in the late-80’s and early-90’s. You may have noticed that those displays have been almost nonexistent in recent years. Those gaudy shows still occur in the polar region, but we here in the mid-latitudes have not been so fortunate.
These two declines in activity — one on the airwaves, the other in the air — are directly related to one another and tell us something about the state of the sun. Solar activity, which can typically be tracked in an 11-year pattern of highs and lows, determines a number of things which include the amount of solar radiation and space weather of all types (flares, ejections, etc.) that reach the Earth. The cycle’s peak and therefore the sun’s overall activity is made evident by sunspots, dark spots of magnetic activity on the sun’s surface.
We are currently amidst a deep low in the solar cycle, accounting for the decrease in skip and aurora, and a total lack of sunspots. According to spaceweather.com, the sun is setting modern-day records for inactivity, with the current stretch of days without a sunspot at 47 and 700 days of no spots whatsoever since 2004. This period, known as the solar minimum, is far longer than most. The average length of a minimum is 485 days.
This minimum looks like it will go on for a very long time based on a July study issued by William Livingston and Matt Penn of the National Solar Observatory. They showed that the magnetic field strength of sunspots has been weakening at a fast-paced linear rate (one that they have verified since a similar study 5 years earlier), which may mean that sunspots will be nonexistent by 2015, putting the sun into a historic low similar to the Maunder Minimum of 1645 to 1715 when the sun’s face was basically free of blemishes.
So what does this mean to the average person who’s not a radio enthusiast or amateur astronomer? It could mean a great deal and it just might disprove the global warming alarmists. If this is a repeat of the Maunder event the world will plunge into a prolonged period of cold. The Maunder Minimum happened during the coldest part of the Little Ice Age and many scientists don’t see this as a coincidental occurrence. They believe that the lack of solar activity caused the decline in global temperatures which, based on careful study, showed the Earth cooled by more than 3 degrees Fahrenheit during the minimum. This effect was considerably-more pronounced in North America and Europe where the winters became longer and more frigid, native Americans formed collectives to beat the associated food shortages, glaciers advanced, and Iceland became sealed off by ice in 1695.
To put this cooling into perspective, the Earth has warmed by just under 1 degree Fahrenheit since 1901. Some cite the warming trend as the direct result of Mankind’s assault on the atmosphere with greenhouse gas emissions. Yet, studies show that across the twentieth century’s multiple solar cycles the magnetic energy leaving the sun more than doubled while ultraviolet radiation grew by 15 percent. This is the exact opposite of what happened during the Maunder Minimum: In the 1900s we had an overactive sun which in turn led to warmer Earth.
It was not an overactive population, as some would say, that caused global warming. It’s foolish — even vain — to believe that Man is powerful enough to change the temperature of our planet. But, the sun, on the other hand, the very glue that keeps our solar system together and gives us the light and heat so crucial to life, is more than powerful enough to change temperatures when it’s in one of its moods. And it’s just getting into one of those moods, a very tranquil one at that. That cool demeanor will create a cool Earth and, once that happens, you can bet we’ll all be begging for global warming.
http://www.niagara-gazette.com/opinion/local_story_243204156.html
The Science of Global Warming: Saving the World or Hunting for Ghosts?
By Larrey Anderson
If we wanted to know how to cure a sick cow we could ask the scientist known as a veterinarian. The veterinarian has studied the biology, physiology, anatomy, etc., of animals and could probably help us with our sick cow.
Veterinarians know about cows and cow diseases. Vets can back up their knowledge with thousands of experiments and the accumulation of mountains of incontrovertible data.
On the other hand, there are people who pretend to be scientists and pretend to have explanations for how certain things work -- things that either don't exist or aren't anything like the phenomena that the pretend scientist claims that the things are.
Take "ghost hunters" as an example. What is their science? Does it have a name?[ii] How does one become a ghost-hunting scientist? What evidence qualifies for proving that ghosts exists? How do ghost hunters cure us of the ghosts? (By mumbling some words and then telling their gullible clients that the ghost is gone?)
Doesn't the "science" of ghost hunting presume, without any credible evidence, the existence of ghosts? How do these ghost scientists even look for something that probably doesn't exist? Notice that veterinarians don't assume that cows are sick and that there is only one cow sickness. They study the cow for symptoms and then render a diagnosis. (A diagnosis, I should add, that the vet might change if the symptoms of the cow change.)
Now to our topic: What about the science of global warming? Is it more like the science of healing cows or the "science" of ghost hunting?
For starters, let me make it clear that the leaders of the AGW movement claim that there is a global warming science. Al Gore's official web site is called: "An Inconvenient Truth Official Site: Global Warming Science, Climate Change Science, Facts and Evidence." [Emphasis added.][iii]
Got that? "Global Warming Science." Let's ask ourselves: What could global warming science possibly be?[iv] Remember, when we needed a scientist to tell us whether or not a cow was sick -- we asked a vet. But what scientist do we ask to tell us that the world is "sick" because it is getting warmer? And aren't there two huge assumptions in the questions to begin with? Namely, (1) that the world is actually getting warmer? And (2) that warmer means sick. ("Can you prove to me the world is getting warmer and is sick?" is much more like asking, "Can you prove to me the noise I hear is a ghost and is scary?" than it is "Can you show me why this cow is sick and what is the specific disease?"[v])
When we talk to a global warming "scientist" are we talking to the equivalent of a veterinarian or a ghost hunter? And with whom, exactly, are we talking?
I, for one, have never heard anyone actually make this claim: "I am a global warming scientist." So I did a little research.
With a special thanks to Robert Carter, Professor at the Marine Geophysical Laboratory, James Cook University, Australia, here are some candidates for the title of "Global Warming Scientist":
(1) ENABLING DISCIPLINES:
(a) Mathematics
(b) Statistics
(c) Computer modeling
(2) ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCES:
(d) Atmospheric physics
(e) Atmospheric chemistry
(f) Cosmochemistry
(g) Meteorology
(h) Climatology (partim)
(3) GEOLOGICAL SCIENCES:
(i) Climatology (partim)
(j) Geochemistry
(k) Geophysics
(l) Geology
(m) Palaeolimnology
(n) Palaeoclimatology
(o) Palaeoecology
(p) Palaeontology (up to and including - i.e. subsuming - biological studies)
(q) Stratigraphy
(r) Quaternary geology
(s) Palaeooceanography
(t) Ice core studies
(u) Ocean Drilling Program
(v) Cosmogenic and radiometric dating
Professor Carter in a personal email to me also estimates:
[T]hat there are more than 100 expert sub disciplines involved in climate change studies; my personal filing system recognizes more than 80 alone, and I am sure there are many topics not included.
In other words, I have given AT readers a short list of possible global warming scientist candidates.
So what is a global warming "scientist?" The answer could be one of two things:
One: there is no such thing as a global warming scientist. There is, instead, a consensus among a number of scientists in differing fields that the planet is warming at an alarming rate. This is the usual explanation that we hear.
There are a couple rational criticisms of this position that need to be understood. Science is not in the business of consensus. It is (usually) in the business of collecting specific facts and then creating abstract principles and general conclusions from those specific facts.[vi] Now this does not mean that these facts cannot be collected and shared by different scientists from different disciplines -- in fact, science is becoming so complex that such cross-disciplinary accumulation and exchange of data is now the norm, rather than the exception.
Here is the problem with this approach as summarized by Professor Carter:
Nobody, including Jim Hansen, is truly expert across more than one or two of these topics. It follows that no scientist "understands" climate change; rather, tens of thousands of scientists each understand, to a greater or lesser degree, those small parts of the climate change miasma that they have personally studied.
Sharing on this level of minutia would be okay but for (as Carter so masterfully puts it) the "climate change miasma." The fact is that the specific facts are not leading in a highly probable way to any general conclusions about global warming, CO2, and our (human) part in it. Induction just isn't working to prove the catastrophic theory of man made global warming ... and most scientists know it.[vii]
This is why those of us who have carefully studied the IPCC reports detect the numerous discrepancies between the logic of the scientists' articles in the body of the reports (and in any outside peer reviewed materials that disagree with the IPCC findings and are therefore spurned) and the rhetoric of doom and gloom in the political summaries of the reports. Scientists that complain about the polarization and the politicizing of the scientific process at the IPCC are routinely ignored, demoted, fired, or quit. Here are 50 (that's right FIFTY) articles that prove this internal dissension within the IPCC and between the leaders of the IPCC and the rest of the scientific community.
All of the talk about "healing the planet" shouldn't be fooling anyone. Global warming science is mostly about grant money, about keeping the myth alive, about buying fancy new equipment to prove that there really are ghosts ... er ... global warming. All of this talk of global warming isn't about healing anything. It is about stretching out the process of proving the unprovable and getting paid for it -- as long as the public can be suckered into coughing up the money for the ongoing studies.
If the history of our human fascination with ghosts is any indication, the "science" of global warming is just getting started.
Two (and more hopefully): maybe all of this confusion is finally teaching us that there is no science, none at all, of global warming. Maybe the earth warms and then it cools. Maybe there are sick cows and healthy cows. Maybe some ghosts are just a loose window, or rats in the attic, or someone's vivid imagination and the need to believe in something greater (and spookier) than the self.
It is not that we have learned nothing by focusing on the "problem" of global warming -- we have learned many things. I would hope that the most important thing that we have learned is that we should not take a half baked theory by Al Gore and jump to the conclusion that we must drastically reduce our output of CO2 or human beings will lay waste to the planet as the world exponentially heats beyond our ability to stop the carnage. And the only way to seriously reduce the human contribution of CO2[viii] is to completely (on a worldwide basis) revamp our system of energy production, delivery, and consumption -- by utilizing the full coercive power of the each nation state and the United Nations to enforce Draconian laws and regulations on the lifestyles of every human being on this planet.
Such a plan shows massive ignorance of that thing that rises in the east, sets in the west, and goes (insolationally speaking) bump (not "moo") all the time with our planet. It is not a ghost -- or a cow. And no scientist, or anyone else, can exorcise, heal, or save us from ... the sun.
Larrey Anderson is a writer, a philosopher, and submissions editor for American Thinker. He is the author of The Order of the Beloved, and the new memoir, Underground: Life and Survival in the Russian Black Market.
Hat tips: Professor Robert M. Carter and John McMahon
Not all, or even much, of the experimental data will have been collected by any particular veterinarian. I have shown here why it does not have to be.
[ii] I hear "paranormalist" once in a while. It's got to be embarrassing to hand out that business card: John Smith, Professional Paranormalist. Got a ghost? We can handle it!
[iii] The proponents of global warming have been trying to shift the terms from the conclusory "global warming" to the more open and objective sounding "climate change." I have written about that elsewhere and will not go into their terminology scam here.
[iv] I recently published an article on AT showing that the probability of human beings as the major cause of any type of the heating of our planet is very low. But in this article let's focus on another question: is there is such a thing as a "science" of global warming.
[v] Here is the logic: Some things are cows, some cows are healthy and some are sick. It is hard for an untrained person to always tell the difference. The scientist who specializes in animals can, perhaps, tell us whether the animal is ill and what that sickness is. The ghost "scientist," like the global warming scientist, assumes the existence of the subject matter. (The ghost hunter assumes the existence of the ghost; the global warming scientist assumes a world that is getting warmer and sicker.) The faulty logic of these people is sometimes argumentum ex silentio and sometimes argumentum ad verecundiam -- although the dead polar bears and drowning cities arguments we hear from Al Gore fall under argumentum ad baculum.
[vi] This is called inductive reasoning. And it is the form of reasoning most often used in science. I have written about inductive reasoning and global warming here. Those who have been convinced by Thomas Kuhn that science is driven by consensus need to read David Stove's "The Jazz Age in the Philosophy of Science." This devastating essay (devastating for the followers of Kuhn anyway) has been reproduced in a number of works, most recently it appeared in Against the Idols of the Age, Transaction Publishers, 2001, edited by Roger Kimball.
[vii] This is why those of us who have carefully studied the IPCC reports notice the almost indescribable discrepancies between the rhetoric of the scientists in the body of the reports when contrasted with the fatalistic prophecies in the summaries of the reports.
[viii] Which happens to be only 3% of the total output of CO2.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/09/the_science_of_global_warming.html
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