HOW LONG DO WE HAVE? July 31, 2008

HOW LONG DO WE HAVE?

This is the most interesting thing I’ve read in a long time. The sad thing about it, you can see it coming.

I have always heard about this democracy countdown. It is interesting to see it in print. God help us, not that we deserve it.

How Long Do We Have?

About the time our original thirteen states adopted their new constitution in 1787, Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the  University  of  Edinburgh , had this to say about the fall of the  Athenian    Republic  some 2,000 years earlier:

‘A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government.’

‘A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.’

From that moment on, the majority always vote for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.’

‘The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years’

‘During those 200 years, those nations always progressed through the following sequence:

1. from bondage to spiritual faith;

2. from spiritual faith to great courage;

3. from courage to liberty;

4. from liberty to abundance;

5. from abundance to complacency;

6. from complacency to apathy;

7. from apathy to dependence;

8. from dependence back into bondage’

Professor Joseph Olson of Hemline University School of Law,  St. Paul ,   Minnesota , points out some interesting facts concerning the 2000 Presidential election:

Number of States won by: Democrats: 19 Republicans: 29

Square miles of land won by: Democrats: 580,000 Republicans: 2,427,000

Population of counties won by: Democrats: 127 million Republicans: 143 million

Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by: Democrats: 13.2 Republicans: 2.1

Professor Olson adds: ‘In aggregate, the map of the territory Republican won was mostly the land owned by the taxpaying citizens of this great country. Democrat territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in government-owned tenements and living off various forms of government welfare…’ Olson believes the  United States is now somewhere between the ’complacency and apathy’ phase of Professor Tyler’s definition of democracy, with some forty percent of the nation’s population already having reached the ‘governmental dependency’ phase.

If Congress grants amnesty and citizenship to twenty million criminal invaders called illegal’s and they vote, then we can say goodbye to the  USA in fewer than five years!

Apathy is the greatest danger to our freedom.

WE LIVE IN THE LAND OF THE FREE,
ONLY BECAUSE OF THE BRAVE

World’s Largest Wind Farm Planned In Oregon July 30, 2008

The Portland Business Journal reports that Oregon has just been given the go-ahead by The Oregon Energy Facility Siting Council to build a 909 MW wind farm in the north-central part of the state. That’s enough energy to power 200,000 homes.

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Big Government Claims Two Victims July 30, 2008

THE
MORNING BELL
WEDNESDAY,
JULY 30, 2008

Big
Government

Claims Two Victims

Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), who once
threatened to resign if Congress stripped funding for the infamous Bridge to
Nowhere, was indicted
yesterday on seven felony counts for failing to disclose gifts from an Alaskan
firm. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic in Geneva, international talks aimed at
ushering in a new era of free trade collapsed over
World Trade Organization member nations’ unwillingness to end farm
subsidies. These events are not unrelated. They are examples of how big
government inherently breeds powerful special interests that leverage government
power to create policies for a narrow benefit over the nation as a whole.

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Free trade has been a strong
engine for economic growth in the United States. Over the past
decade, open trade has boosted job growth by more than 13% and has helped to
raise U.S. GDP by nearly 40%. The benefits go not only to workers and
entrepreneurs in export industries, but also to consumers of imports. Free trade
has delivered a greater choice of goods for Americans — everything from food
and furniture to computers and cars — at lower prices.

While some jobs have been
lost due to trade, many more are created each year. America is now
the top exporter of services, consistently recording trade surpluses since
1970. As 15 million jobs do go away each year (most due to
technological advancement, not trade), another 17 million are created. And
the new jobs pay better. During the
1990s, average earnings in manufacturing industries that showed net declines
in employment were $10.63 per hour. During the same period, wages in expanding
service-providing industries were $11.26 per hour, or about 6% higher.

Lowering world trade
barriers, as the WTO talks aimed to do, would have benefited Americans even
further. The Institute for International Economics has calculated that moving from
today’s trade envi­ronment to one characterized by perfectly free trade and
investment would generate an addi­tional $500 billion in annual income for the
United States, or about $5,000 per household each year. A University of
Michigan study
concludes that reducing agriculture, manufacturing and ser­vice trade barriers
by just one-third would add $164 billion, or about $1,477 per American
household, annually to U.S. economic activity. Completely eliminating trade
barriers would boost U.S. annual income by $497 billion.

Contrast these gains with the
parochial interests that U.S. agriculture subsidies serve. Nearly 90% of
all subsidies go to growers of just five crops (wheat, cotton, corn, soybeans
and rice), while the vast majority of farmers specializing in livestock, fruits,
vegetables and all other crops flourish in a free market without subsidies.
Furthermore, two-thirds of subsidies are distributed to the wealthiest 10% of
farmers . According to a 2004 Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development study,
U.S. farm programs resulted in higher food prices and had the effect of
transferring more than $16 billion from American households to domestic farmers
over and above what the farmers received from direct government assistance.

Congressional hypocrisy on
free trade and parochial protectionism is rampant. Instead of supporting
comprehensive trade agreements with other nations , many members of Congress
limit their support of free trade to narrow special interests. In 2005, various
members of Congress introduced more than 250 specific bills to waive tariffs
that harm their constituents. In 2006, Sens. Ted Kennedy and John Kerry
(D-Mass.) introduced no
fewer than 17 “suspension of duty” bills that directly lower tariffs paid by
some state businesses, including rubber and synthetic basketball and volleyball
makers.

Fighting for Massachusetts
volleyball manufactures while ignoring the wider benefits of free trade is
exactly the attitude that led Stevens to fight for his Bridge to Nowhere while
ignoring the nation’s wider infrastructure needs. These big government attitudes
need to go. Farm subsidies should be eliminated, tariffs need to be lowered, and
transportation funding decisions must be returned to the states.

Solar Power From Outer Space Could Reduce Fossil Fuel Depend July 29, 2008

Rising fuel costs have spurred some pretty wacky ideas. One that maybe isn
’t so crazy is harvesting solar power from space. While the idea isn’t new—NASA and The US Department of Energy studied it throughout the 1970s—the time has come when it might not be too expensive to start pursuing it.

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Americans drove 9.6 billion miles less this month July 29, 2008

Commuters are driving less, the federal government says. Workers are leaving their cars at home and finding other ways to get to work. Highway funds at risk.

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Wind Power Superhighway for West Texas July 29, 2008

Texas likes to do everything big, including wind farms and investing in clean energy. The states has been given the thumbs up for a $4.9 billion plan to set up transmission lines to carry the wind power generated in West Texas to surrounding urban areas.

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Digital artwork by Jay Keating using TwistedBrush Pro Studio July 28, 2008

“The Flower Ballerinas” by Jay Keating 2008

A ‘Dr. No’ We Can Believe In July 28, 2008

THE
MORNING BELL
MONDAY,
JULY 28, 2008

A
‘Dr. No’ We Can

Believe In

Today both the The Washington
Post and The New York
Times have front-page stories on Sen. Tom Coburn’s (R-Okla.) use of
legislative “holds” to bring debate on spending priorities back to the U.S.
Senate. A “hold” prevents the majority party in the Senate from moving forward
on a bill until it has been debated. But in this Congress, the liberal majority
does not want to debate issues or allow amendments.

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Of the 890 bills that have
been passed in the 110th Congress, only 50 of them have been debated. For simply
insisting that the Senate debate a bill before it is passed, Coburn has been
labeled “Dr. No” by both the Post and Times. If Coburn is Dr. No, then he is a
Dr. No our country desperately needs.

Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) tells the Post, “For those of you who may
not know this, you cannot negotiate with Coburn. It’s just something that you
learn over the years … its a waste of time.” But the Times disagrees,
reporting:

Even some Democrats have a grudging admiration for Mr. Coburn’s
determination. They point out that Mr. Coburn has shown an occasional
willingness to make concessions, as he did after long months of effort with
Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, on a genetic
nondiscrimination law. And he has worked with Senator Barack Obama of Illinois,
a fact that the Democratic presidential candidate has proudly referred to when
talking about his ability to reach across the aisle.

Frustrated with Coburn’s insistence on debate, Reid has bundled 35 separate
bills, each with at least one Republican co-sponsor, into one omnibus bill. Reid
hopes Coburn’s GOP colleagues will force him to relent. So far Coburn is holding
firm: “I am OK taking the consternation of my colleagues. I take my oath
seriously.” Coburn is quick to point out he doesn’t even oppose much of the
spending in the bills. He just wants to see other federal spending reduced so
that our already record
deficit does not get worse.

Coburn, for example, supports a bill that spends money creating a new Justice
Department cold-case unit that would investigate unsolved civil rights cases.
But Coburn believes we should pay for that new unit by cutting back on Justice
Department spending on conferences. The department has spent $312 million on
conferences this decade. Reid will not allow Coburn to offer this amendment.

When Reid isn’t claiming that Coburn refuses to negotiate, he falls back on
the claim that the bills in question only authorize money, and that no money is
actually spent until an appropriations bill is passed. Coburn ably exposes the
blatantly dishonest game senators play when they deploy this argument:

Now, you will hear the argument over the next 10 days to 2 weeks, as we
debate this bill, that these are just authorizations, that it is not money that
is actually spent until it is appropriated. But if you go to the Web site of all
of the Senators who are supporting these bills, they have already sent out press
releases bragging about what they have done. They intend to spend the money. So
one of three things comes about from that. One is they plan on authorizing it
and spending the money; two is they are just gaming their constituency, they are
planning on passing the bill but never spending the money, which is highly
unlikely, or three is they just want on the bill so they can get a positive
parochial benefit and do not really care whether the money gets
spent.

In 2006, Coburn introduced the Federal Funding Accountability and
Transparency Act, which requires the full disclosure of all entities or
organizations receiving federal funds. Obama and Sen. John McCain both
co-sponsored the bill so that Americans could better hold government accountable
for wasteful spending. But that database will be useless unless our elected
leaders also have the opportunity to debate and vote to end that wasteful
spending. Let’s hope Dr. No wins the fight to have those debates.

QUICK HITS

• According
  to the Associated Press, in Iraq the United
  States is now winning the war that two years ago seemed lost.
• Barack
  Obama told Newsweek that his 16-month timetable for troop withdrawal is “entirely
  conditions-based.”
• Virginia
  has implemented a law that requires jail officials to notify federal
  authorities of all foreign-born inmates regardless of their immigration
  status.
• According
  to the Los Angeles Times, the stimulus checks Congress authorized have “done little to
  boost [consumer] confidence in the economy.”
• According
  to Rasmussen
  Reports, 71% of American believe suspected terrorists should be tried by
  military tribunals rather than in U.S. courts.

Seattle Magazine: The Case For Pot July 27, 2008

What do a Seattle cop, an Edmonds travel writer and the ACLU have in common? They all want to legalize marijuana, and not just for medical purposes. As Seattle
’s annual Hempfest returns to Myrtle Edward Parks August 16-17, these odd bedfellows are putting Seattle at the center of a national conversation about marijuana reform.

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The Friends of Barack Obama: The Video July 26, 2008

A reader created this video highlighting Barack Obama’s relationship with terrorists Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives2/2008/07/020903.php

If you have a web site, feel free to embed it. Or you can email it to your friends. While the media have done a good job of covering the Jeremiah Wright story, Obama’s relationship with Ayers and Dohrn has not gotten the attention it deserves.

URGENT BREAKING:2 More Banks Failed tonight!!! DIGG IT!! July 26, 2008

On July 25, 2008, First National Bank of Nevada, Reno, NV, was closed by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). Subsequently, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) was named Receiver. No advance notice is given to the public when a financial institution is closed.

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A Highly Anticipated Trial About Conflicting Marijuana Laws July 26, 2008

A highly anticipated trial involving conflicting laws over the use and sale of marijuana got underway Friday in federal court in Los Angeles .

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New Technology Can Turn Heat Waste Into Electricity July 25, 2008

Scientists have invented a new material that can efficiently convert heat waste in cars, power generators & heat pumps into electricity. The new material is thermoelectric, and can turn heat into energy without any pollution.

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A Unique Solar Powered Community in Canada July 25, 2008

The Drake Landing Solar Community is the first solar powered community of North America. Located in the town of Okotoks, Alberta, Canada, the project sets a wonderful example of how every household can lead a sustainable lifestyle.

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TEXAS DAD “HONOR” KILLINGS, 17 & 18 Year-old Girls July 25, 2008

UPDATED: Great comet sent along the link to my space page here,“the one small picture says it all. Two more lynching victims by the Islamic community.”

What kills their own kinderlach?

Where, in G-d’s name, is the global condemnations? What has become of us?

Of course the jihad loving media won’t dare speak its name …….but we know. Savvy Atlas reader Bob picked this up over WBAP radio and added, ” ‘no
motive’ they say. But, it looks like an Arab [Muslim] murdered his
own daughters probably because he thought they were too “worldly”. I
hate the term “honor killing” because there is NO honor in it”. Indeed.

Irving Police Seek Suspected Double Killer
Father suspected of murdering his two teenage daughters. WBAP

Irving, Texas (WBAP) — Irving police are searching for a father suspected of killing his two daughters Tuesday night. At about 7:30 police got a cell call from
a woman saying she had been shot, but didn’t know her location. Police
searching the area where the call originated were unable to locate the
vehicle. An hour later, responding to a call of a suspicious vehicle in
a parking lot, police found two female victims dead of gunshot woulds. Investigators have identified the two as 17 year-old Sarah Yaser Said, and 18 year-old Amina Yaser Said. They are now looking for the father, Yaser Abdel Said.
He is said to be fifty years old, 6′2″, weighing about 180 pounds. Said
was last seen wearing a black turtleneck, tan slacks, and a brown coat.
He is believed to be armed and dangerous.

Dangerous? Nah only to Western women, infidels and non believers. No worries.

UPDATE: Robert over at The Washington Times has done an extensive post on Lone
Jihadi aka Sudden Jihad Syndrome here;

Sudden Jihad Syndrome

Sara’s story is also linked at the Counterterrorism
Blog, Reality
Check and Rhymes
With Right, where Greg summarizes:

In other words, the writings of Islamists may be sufficient to push
some susceptible individuals to act upon the ideology of Islamic radicalism
expressed by terrorist groups. Having pulled an ideological justification from
extremist sources, their actions should not be seen as isolated, but are instead
a part of the global jihad being waged by the likes of bin Laden. In other
words, look for more cases of homegrown terrorism linked by ideology, not direct
command-an-control, to radical groups abroad.

– Robert Stacy
McCain, assistant national editor, The Washington Times

He mentions Atlas too …….. Fishwrap, always one step ahead

UPDATE: The Dallas Keystone cops are getting closer. McCain sent me this;

Dallas Morning News is VERY close to nailing it, I’d say:

Police say they are looking into the possibility that the father was upset with his daughters dating activities.

“It’s something well worth looking into,” said OFC David Tull of Irving Police. More here.

UPDATE: From Jihadwatch;

More evidence that the Dallas murders were honor killings

Amina and Sarah

“Friends of the girls say their father was Egyptian and critical of popular American lifestyles.” And that he was abusive.

“Friends: Murdered Teens Were Afraid Of Their Dad,” by Bud Gillett for CBS 11 News (thanks to Ian):

LEWISVILLE (CBS 11 News) ― Friends and classmates are in
shock after two teenage sisters are murdered, police say, by their own
father.

Washington Times reports this as well.

UPDATE
10:15 p.m.:

The Dallas
Morning Newsconfirms the girls’
family is Muslim:

Friends
describe Amina and Sarah as quiet but well-liked students at Lewisville High
School. They played tennis and soccer and were enrolled in many Advanced
Placement classes.

“They were extremely smart –
like geniuses,” said Allison Villarreal, a senior at Lewisville High, where
Amina was a senior and Sarah was a junior.

Liz
Marines, secretary of the Lewisville High School Student Council, had classes
with both of the sisters and also remembers their scholastic
abilities.

“Amina
was very nice with everybody. She helped me in [Advanced Placement English]
class,” she said. Sarah was a sophomore when she took an Algebra II class with
Liz, who was a junior at the time.

She said
the sisters, who wore typical American clothes, didn’t talk much about their
family. “I didn’t know they were Muslims until she told me they were Egyptian
and Muslim,” Liz said

Posted by Pamela Geller on Wednesday, January 02, 2008 at 11:41 AM in Honor Killings: Islam Misogyny, Islam 2007: Religion of Peace through Barbarism, Islam: The War on Jihad, Jihad in America: Enemy in our Midst, Killing America, Women | Permalink

TV rabbit tells young Muslims to ‘kill and eat Jews’ July 24, 2008

Assud the rabbit, who vows to ‘kill and eat Jews’ and glorifies the maiming of ‘infidels’ appears on Palestinian children’s show, Tomorrow’s Pioneers. Religious leaders across the UK have today spoken out against the controversial show which can be viewed via satellite. The show originally featured a Mickey Mouse-style character called Farfur

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Russian plans to station nuclear bombers in Cuba July 24, 2008

The story broke earlier this week, when Russian newspaper Izvestia quoted an un-named source from within the Russian military: “While they are [Bush administration] deploying the missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic, our strategic bombers will already be landing in Cuba.” The question is if another Cuban crisis is imminent?

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Raiding California: Medical Marijuana Provider Faces 100 Yrs July 24, 2008

Should medical marijuana be kept from minors at all costs? Why is it that pharmacists can dispense amphetamines without getting busted, but legal operators who dispense medical marijuana face prison time? Why do armed federal agents persist in raiding California? Charlie Lynch is facing 100 years in federal prison — but he followed state law.

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Islamists Buying Ads in NYC Subways July 24, 2008

by David J. Rusin
Thu, 24 Jul 2008 at 11:27 AM
http://www.islamist-watch.org/blog/2008/07/islamists-buying-ads-in-nyc-subways.html

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New York City straphangers will have something controversial to read once September rolls around. That is when ads promoting Islam
are slated to appear in one thousand of the system’s subway cars. While
there is nothing wrong with groups purchasing advertisements to tell
others about their faith, the collection of radicals involved in this
campaign is cause for concern:

The main sponsor is a grassroots organization, Islamic Circle of North America.
The ads, simple black-and-white panels, will feature key words or
phrases about Islam on one side of the panel such as “Head Scarf?” or
“Prophet Muhammad?” and the words “You deserve to know” along with the
website address WhyIslam.org on the other side.
“The idea is to evoke certain thoughts in the mindset of the person
who is looking at the ads and get them to a point where they can
reflect upon certain words that one could define as hot words or
keywords that get thrown around a lot but are not necessarily defined
in the most proper context,” said New York University’s Imam Khalid
Latif, a cleric who is promoting the project in a YouTube video created
by the Islamic Circle.
Another of the backers of the advertising campaign — which will
launch in September to coincide with the monthlong Islamic holiday of
Ramadan — is Siraj Wahhaj, imam of a Brooklyn mosque.

Wahhaj, who stars in the low-quality YouTube video,
was designated a potential co-conspirator during the trial of blind
sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and his followers, who were convicted of
plotting the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and planning subsequent
attacks on New York City landmarks. He later served as a character
witness for Rahman. Wahhaj
is also known for promoting polygamy, questioning Osama bin Laden’s
role in 9/11, touting the virtues of martyrdom, and warning that the
United States will fall unless it “accepts the Islamic agenda.”

The Islamic Circle of North America is equally troubling. ICNA has close ties to Jamaat-e-Islami, a Pakistani arm of the radical Muslim Brotherhood, and is identified in a MB memo
as a friendly organization that could help Muslims “understand that
their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and
destroying the Western civilization from within.” In addition, ICNA has
been investigated as part of a U.S. Senate terror fundraising probe and may have recently funneled money to Hamas. WhyIslam.org,
the ICNA-run website to which travelers will be sent, has been
described by Americans Against Hate chairman Joe Kaufman as laced with “anti-Semitism, homophobia, terrorism, and misogyny.”

Contemplate this: unless the Metropolitan Transportation Authority
drops the campaign, as Congressman Peter King has demanded, subway
riders headed to Ground Zero on the anniversary of 9/11 will find
themselves surrounded by ads from terror-linked Islamists.

Al Gore’s Doomsday Clock July 24, 2008

As America’s leading peddler of both doom and salvation, Mr. Gore has moved beyond the constraints and obligations of reality. His job is to serve as a Prophet of Truth.

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T. Boone Pickens says U.S. must rely less on foreign oil July 23, 2008

T. Boone Pickens has a new role model: Al Gore.

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Info-nology’s NEW Poster Store – Check it out Today! July 23, 2008

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Groups Urge FCC to Keep the Internet Open July 23, 2008

The FCC needs to take steps to keep the Internet free of interference from broadband providers, such as the slowing of peer-to-peer traffic and the tracking of subscribers’ Web habits, several witnesses told the FCC at a hearing in Pittsburgh.

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Saharan sun’s solar power could provide Europe’s electricity July 23, 2008

Speaking at the Euroscience Open Forum in Barcelona, Arnulf Jaeger-Walden of the European commission’s Institute for Energy, said it would require the capture of just 0.3% of the light falling on the Sahara and Middle East deserts to meet all of Europe’s energy needs.

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Obama: I’ll Be President For ‘The Next 8 to 10 Years’? July 23, 2008

Obama: I’ll Be President For ‘The Next 8 to 10 Years’?

By Warner Todd Huston (Bio | Archive)
July 20, 2008 – 20:20 ET

• 
• Democratic
  presidential candidate Barack Obama, the reputed “Constitutional
  scholar,” just today said on CBS’s Face the Nation that he went to Iraq
  to talk to important leader that he expects to be “dealing with over
  the next eight to 10 years.” So, does this “Constitutional scholar” not
  realize that there is this little thing called the 22nd Amendment that
  holds a president to only two, four year terms? Um, that would be a
  grand total of only 8 years, Barack, not 8 to 10. Of course,
  the big question is, will we see this idiot gaffe race through the MSM
  as it would if a Republican had said it?

At the very least ABC’s Jake Tapper, one of the best political
reporters in the biz, sure noticed. Tapper has a blog entry on his “Political Punch” blog all about it with an amusing side note about time travel added in just for fun.

Tapper zings the presumptuous nominee a good one.

The notion that Obama will be dealing with world leaders for
eighjt-to-ten years, possibly up through July 2018, suggests that
either (a) he believes that not only will he be elected and re-elected,
but the 22nd amendment will be repealed and he will be elected for a
third term, OR (b) he was speaking casually and just meant two terms.

Tapper goes on to zing Obama several more times before this entry is done.

But, why is it that Tapper is seemingly the only denizen of the MSM
ever willing to bring out these stories? Why does the MSM so constantly
give the Obamessiah a pass? I’ll bet you can say why.

But here is a real point to ponder. What if John McCain had said
he’d be president for the next 10 years? Wouldn’t the press and every
late night comedian gin up the “he’s old and senile” jokes until those
jokes would go through the country like wildfire?

Lastly, we have yet one more example of this man’s arrogance. He is
beginning to carry on foreign policy before he even gets elected!

“And it’s important for me to have a relationship with them early,
that I start listening to them now, getting a sense of what their
interests and concerns are.”

You see, Barack, that is a president’s job! Have you been elected yet?

What do you think?

(Photo credit: campaigncircus.com)

Vast Farms of Desert Solar Panels Could Power All of Europe July 23, 2008

Vast farms of solar panels in the Sahara desert could provide clean electricity for the whole of Europe, according to EU scientists working on a plan to pool the region’s renewable energy. Harnessing the power of the desert sun is at the centre of ambitious scheme to build a €45bn European supergrid to share electricity across the continent.

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The Cost Of Wind Power July 23, 2008

One of the big challenges with using wind to replace natural gas is that, unlike the steady flame from natural gas, the wind doesn’t blow all the time.To make sure enough power is available when the wind isn’t blowing, back up generators would be needed. That could mean maintaining those natural gas plants in case of emergency.

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World’s Largest Offshore Wind Farm Back on Track July 22, 2008

The world
’s biggest offshore wind farm was revived yesterday when German-based energy group E.ON and the Danish utility Dong Energy agreed to acquire Shell’s 33% stake in the 1,000-megawatt London Array.

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Immigration Letter to the Editor… July 22, 2008

A great letter;

This is a very good letter to the editor. This woman made some good
points. For some reason, people have difficulty structuring their arguments
when arguing against supporting the currently proposed immigration revisions.
This lady made the argument pretty simple. NOT printed in the Orange County
Paper …

Newspapers simply won’t publish letters to the editor which they
either deem politically incorrect (read below) or which does not agree with the
philosophy they’re pushing on the public. This woman wrote a great letter to the
editor that should have been published; but, with your help it will get
published via cyberspace!

SNOPES <
http://www.snopes.com/politics/immigration/newimmigrants.asp > claims Rosemay LaBonte’s letter is
FALSE. They are not saying she didn’t write the letter or that her husband
didn’t circulate it by email; they don’t agree with her opinions, therefore it
is FALSE!

From: ‘David LaBonte’

My wife, Rosemary, wrote a wonderful letter to the editor of the OC Register
which was not printed. So, I decided to ‘print’ it myself by sending it out on
the Internet. Pass it along if you feel so inclined. Written in response to a
series of letters to the editor in the Orange County Register:

Dear
Editor:

So many letter writers have based their arguments on how this
land is made up of immigrants. Ernie Lujan for one, suggests we should tear down
the Statue of Liberty because the people now in question aren’t being treated
the same as those who passed through Ellis Island and other ports of entry.

Maybe we should turn to our history books and point out to people like
Mr. Lujan why today’s American is not willing to accept this new kind of
immigrant any longer. Back in 1900 when there was a rush from all areas of
Europe to come to the United States, people had to get off a ship and stand in a
long line in New York and be documented. Some would even get down on their hands
and knees and kiss the ground. They made a pledge to uphold the laws and support
their new country in good and bad times. They made learning English a primary
rule in their new American households and some even changed their names to blend
in with their new home.

They had waved goodbye to their birth place to
give their children a new life and did everything in their power to help their
children assimilate into one culture. Nothing was handed to them. No free
lunches, no welfare, no labor laws to protect them. All they had were the skills
and craftsmanship they had brought with them to trade for a future of
prosperity.

Most of their children came of age when World War II broke
out. My father fought along side men whose parents had come straight over from
Germany, Italy, France and Japan. None of these first generation Americans ever
gave any thought about what country their parents had come from. They were
Americans fighting Hitler, Mussolini and the Emperor of Japan. They were
defending the United States of America as one people.

When we liberated
France, no one in those villages were looking for the French-American or the
German-American or the Irish-American. The people of France saw only Americans.
And we carried one flag; that represented one country. Not one of those
immigrant sons would have thought about picking up another country’s flag and
waving it to represent who they were. It would have been a disgrace to their
parents who had sacrificed so much to be here. These immigrants truly knew what
it meant to be an American. They stirred the melting pot into one red, white and
blue bowl.

And here we are in 2008 with a new kind of immigrant who
wants the same rights and privileges, only they want to achieve it by playing
with a different set of rules, one that includes the entitlement card and a
guarantee of being faithful to their mother country. I’m sorry, that’s not what
being an American is all about. I believe that the immigrants who landed on
Ellis Island in the early 1900’s deserve better than that for all the toil ,
hard work and sacrifice in raising future generations to create a land that has
become a beacon for those legally searching for a better life. I think they
would be appalled that they are being used as an example by those waving foreign
country flags.

And for that suggestion about taking down the Statue of
Liberty, it happens to mean a lot to the citizens who are voting on the
immigration bill. I wouldn’t start talking about dismantling the UNITED STATES
just yet.

FOR THE WRONG THINGS TO PREVAIL THE RIGHTFUL MAJORITY NEEDS TO
REMAIN COMPLACENT AND QUIET!!

LET THIS NEVER HAPPEN!!
I sincerely
hope this letter gets read by millions of people all across the nation!!

This was sent as an email…

O’Reilly Attacks Gore… July 22, 2008

O’Reilly Attacks Gore For Attending Netroots Nation: ‘The

Same As If He Stepped Into The Klan Gathering’»

On Saturday, former Vice President Al Gore made a surprise appearance at the Netroots Nation
convention in Austin, TX. In his speech, Gore praised the gathering of
progressives, saying that they are part of an effort to “reclaim the integrity of American democracy.”

While the attendees of Netroots Nation received Gore with enthusiasm, his appearance has caused Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly to declare that Gore has “gone off the deep end.”

On his radio show today, O’Reilly claimed that Gore was now
associating himself with the most “hateful group in the country.” “And
I’m including the Nazis and the Klan in here,” said O’Reilly.” He then
claimed that attending Netroots Nation was “the same as if he stepped
into the Klan gathering”:

O’REILLY: Al Gore now is done. He’s done. Ok. He is not a man of respect, he doesn’t have any judgment. The fact that he went to this thing is the same as if he stepped into the Klan gathering. It’s the same. No difference. None. K, he loses all credibility with me. All credibility.

Listen here:

It’s no surprise that O’Reilly is attacking Netroots Nation given his previous verbal assaults on its predecessor YearlyKos. Before the YearlyKos conference last year, O’Reilly compared it to “a David Duke convention.”

But O’Reilly exposes the hyperbolic shallowness of his name calling
when he claims that “these Daily Kos people” are worse than “the Nazis
and the Klan,” but then assures his audience that they won’t “come to
your house and hurt you.”

Note to O’Reilly: The Nazis and the Klan actually hurt people.

Transcript:

O’REILLY: Ok, now he shows up on Saturday at the most
hateful, there is not — and I’m including the Nazis and the Klan in
here — there is not a more hateful group in the country than these
Daily Kos people. Now, will they come to your house and hurt you? I
don’t know, probably not. But, do they want to hurt you? Do they say
terrible things about Tony Snow when he dies? All day long. Ok. Hateful
hateful hateful. The rhetoric that they use and the rhetoric that the
Klan and the Nazis use are the same rhetoric. It’s hate. Everyone knows
that.

Now why would you go to a convention sponsored by these people
when you know that currently on the Kos is stuff about Tony Snow, it’s
good that he’s dead, he’s in hell, all of that. But Gore did, Gore went
there. So did Nancy Pelosi. That disqualifies Gore from any serious
consideration by me in the future. Al Gore now is done. He’s done. Ok.
He is not a man of respect, he doesn’t have any judgment. The fact that
he went to this thing is the same as if he stepped into the Klan
gathering. It’s the same. No difference. None. K, he loses all
credibility with me. All credibility.

Published on the Think Progress Blog

Opinion: How to make the Kindle a mainstream success July 21, 2008

Although the Kindle is the fastest-selling e-book reader to date, Amazon needs to get to work on its glaring issues and ensure that the mistakes it made the first time around aren’t made again in October.

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8,500 U.S. banks; many will die soon(updated 3x) July 21, 2008

8,500 U.S. banks; many will die soon(updated 3x)

by Stranded Wind

Sun Jul 20, 2008 at 03:49:28 AM PDT

I called the death of Indymac Bancorp on Monday, July 7th. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation seized Indymac on Friday, July 11th.

I called the implosion of the two Government Sponsored Entities in the mortgage business, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on Wednesday, July 9th. Sunday, July 13th the White House announced a bailout for them.

Want to know what happens next? It’s ape ass ugly and it’s going to happen to you, so don’t say I didn’t warn you.

• Stranded Wind’s diary :: ::

First and foremost, let’s discuss my qualifications in this area; I know jack shit. I have, however, been through a couple of publicly held company bankruptcies, I’ve funded a couple of startups and worked for a few others, and I have an operations accounting background acquired in the context of the bankruptcy and dissolution of a firm with over seven hundred retail locations and a couple of thousand franchisees. I can read a P&L, a balance, sheet, and I can detect bullshit in an SEC 10K/10Q filing (How? Damned simple – they’re a pack of lies as a rule, labeled as “forward looking statements”).

I was blessed with the good sense to follow Stoneleigh and Ilargi when they stopped doing the finance roundup on The Oil Drum and moved on to their own thing over at The Automatic Earth. Everything I know comes from studying their daily roundup of financial news with associated commentary and I check in occasionally with the Bank Implode-O-Meter and the Hedge Fund Implode-O-Meter to see the scoreboards and flow of troubles. The most complete overall timeline on this mess seems to be over at Credit Writedowns.

Now that we’ve got the bona fides for my amateur status, let’s tackle the topic at hand: The Ginormous Banking Enema of 2008

What is happening?

If you look down from a very high level what you see is this: There is $75 trillion in global real estate, $50 trillion in annual global GDP, and $675 trillion in derivatives – synthetic financial instruments loosely associated with the real world that, when inspected, prove to be worth a small fraction of their face value. Nine years ago Weathervane McCain’s chief economic adviser, Phil Gramm, got the Glass Steagall Act largely repealed. Investment houses engaged in an orgy of what can only be described as private money printing, taking real assets, puffing them up, marking them up, passing them around, and they kept at it until there were five or six dollars of funny money for every real dollar of stuff. Ssshhh, don’t anyone tell the pension funds …

What is the connection to commercial banks?

We have 8,500 commercial banks in the United States. They take deposits from folks, they make loans, and the bigger ones are publicly held, so their fortunes influence the stock market’s so called “financial sector”. It’s in quotes because it was 5% of the economy for a long, long time, then it mysteriously poofed up to 25% … before beginning a slow motion deflation starting last August. Again, we should keep the pension funds in the dark …

So these 8,500 commercial banks wrote and sold mortgages and they made commercial real estate loans. Now the housing market is tanking because the asset inflation associated with houses is over because five dollars in funny money isn’t going to get you a nickel of real stuff soon. The commercial real estate market, that being the strip malls and such desired by all those newly minted suburbanites, well … as Marvin the Martian would say There’s supposed to be a huge ka-b00m! There will be and make no mistake about it … Ilargi summed it up nicely in the July 19th Debt Rattle.

Ilargi: The rate of failure among the approximately 8500 US banks is about to start accelerating, probably in large and fast steps. The main reason for most of the smaller ones is their positions in commercial real estate and construction, where “The loss rates are just astronomical.”

There is just one article supporting this statement,  but Ilargi has been dead on with every other prediction and pretty close on the timing of them. I take the failure of Indymac Bancorp to be another event in this chain, with it being the third largest bank failure ever.

How bad is this going to get?

Bear Stearns got bailed out ‘cause they were highly visible (read: failure would have exposed aforementioned funny money to the average Joe), Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are Government Sponsored Entities who now have their sickly balance sheets backstopped by the U.S. Treasury (read you & me), but all the commercial banks have is the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

Great! All accounts are insured to $100,000! We’re saved!

Way wrong. The FDIC is an insurance operation. They make an educated guess as to how many banks will fail and what the total exposure is, then they collect insurance premiums from them. They’ve got $51 billion … and Indymac alone sucked up 10% of that. If a big one lets go, like Washington Mutual or Wachovia, then the FDIC will look just like FEMA did facing down hurricane Katrina. Don’t go and look at the scoreboard on the Bank Implode-O-Meter unless you’ve got a very strong stomach. Oh, and do note that a good bit of those write downs are investment banks – the FDIC does not cover their activities.

OK, very scared now, so what do I do?

Run, don’t walk, to your bank and get the funds you have clear of this mess before it gets any worse. The safe deposit box … isn’t. There were rules during the Great Depression such that a treasury agent got to paw through any that were opened before the owner got to touch their stuff; gold, silver, and cash could easily be confiscated in an emergency.

So, what to do? Cash at home in the First Bank of Serta? A fire proof safe? Maybe cashier’s checks in your name and leave the receipts in the safe deposit box, thusly meeting the portability requirement with safety? Nope on that last one, cashier’s checks drawn on a dead bank are dead. Treasury Bills? Wow, look at the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bailout … they’ll not go *poof* instantly, but they’re going down in value bigtime. Swiss bank account? Hey, look at that first salvo in making sure dollars in the U.S. stay in the U.S.

OK, terrified, what do I do?

The GSEs, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are indeed “too big to fail” – they’d whack the whole U.S. economy if they went down hard. Ditto for Bear Stearns – had they not moved to conceal the troubles there the failure would have sucked all of the monoline bond insurers under. Monoline bond insurers? If you don’t know I’ve laid enough pain down in this diary – we’ll cover that mess another day. 8,500 commercial banks, putatively protected by the FDIC? Only a few are large enough to receive the “too big to fail” label. The government doesn’t dare touch the FDIC (yet) for fear of clearly communicating they expect the worst. A lot of folks got trimmed in the Indymac crash, with $BIGBUCKS reset to the $100,000 maximum and no recourse. Once this truly gets rolling there will be a reduction in the amounts covered and probably withdrawal limits even with solvent banks.

This can not be stopped. The losses have already occurred. It isn’t an “if”, it’s a “when” and I was expecting it around 4/1/2008, but they held it off for another quarter. It looks for all the world like July is the lucky month with the Indymac stuff coming down right next to Fannie and Freddie’s corpses hitting the mighty U.S. Treasury Reanimator. Someone, somewhere is going to pull a joker out of this house of cards – some innocuous bond sale somewhere will fail, a monoline insurer will get pushed over the edge, and then the rout will begin.

The Ginormous Banking Enema has begun with the first little squirt from Indymac Bancorp’s failure. It won’t end until we’re all up to our nostrils in an alphabet soup of make believe financial instruments and newly created federal agencies conceived to clean up the mess.

Some of these entities are indeed “too big to fail” … but there is no reason we can’t impoverish and imprison those that got us here. This isn’t about Angelo Mozilo and a couple of unlucky bastards who worked for Bear Stearns – I’m talking a genuine housecleaning – there are thousands of cases where people facilitated fraud and got paid big bucks to do it. They should, every last one of them, be made paupers … because it’s what they’ve done to us, our children, our grandchildren, and perhaps even further out than that.

(UPDATE:

I’ve seen a few comments indicating that what I’ve said here is not happening. If that be the case why did the FDIC seek and receive rule changes allowing retirees to come back to work without impacting their benefits? As I recall a staffer with experience handling the S&L mess from the 1980s is worth $180k/year. Google with a mix of FDIC, hiring, and retiree if you want to confirm for yourself, but these two links seem a good starting point.

http://calculatedrisk.blogspot.com/…

http://www.fedsmith.com/…

Oh, and Stoneleigh, one of the keepers of The Automatic Earth stopped by to comment this morning, leaving a link to something she wrote a year ago that would be of interest.

The Resurgence of Risk – a Primer on the developing Credit Crunch.

OK, you guys are all talking about this now and as expected there are a spectrum of opinions. Being mindful of this impending change is the first big step in doing what you need to do to protect you and yours. I can offer no more specific advice than that you use what I’ve written as a measure of the worthiness of any financial advice you might seek; if the source is not aware of this stuff or doesn’t think it’s important it is time for you to move on to the next option.

Many is a word that only leaves you guessing
Guessing ’bout a thing you really ought to know – Led Zepplin

The FDIC admits to prepping for a hundred, the highest estimate I’ve seen is 1,500 gone of the 8,500. Size matters; if it’s only a hundred but it’s the hundred largest, well, that would be grim.

This being said, we’re going out to play in the sunshine – have a great Sunday!

FROM THE: Daily Kos

)

Tags: economy, banking, Republicans, Recommended, recession (all tags) :: Previous Tag Versions

Saudi man ‘wins’ 10-yr-old in deal with her dad July 21, 2008

A 60-year old Saudi man who was set to marry a 10-year old girl
—he ‘won’ in a bet with her father—has postponed his marriage after protests from human rights groups, press reports revealed. The fate of the little girl was decided after her father dared the elderly man to marry a second wife and teased him about being afraid of his current wife…

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CAIR Has Its Way with the Fairfax County Police July 19, 2008

by David J. Rusin

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 at 2:33 PM
http://www.islamist-watch.org/blog/2008/07/cair-has-its-way-with-the-fairfax-county.html

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The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has a long history of ingratiating itself with government officials, alleging anti-Muslim bias, and demanding — and sometimes obtaining — special treatment for Muslims. All these elements are found in CAIR’s interaction with the Fairfax County (Virginia) Police Department.

In 2006, the FCPD ended its use of counter-terror and counter-infiltration training programs after CAIR and a group of Muslim officers complained that the courses present Islam in a negative light. One of the officers taking offense was Sgt. Weiss Rasool, who sports close ties to CAIR. He also was brazenly engaging in the type of infiltration that the scuttled courses aim to prevent:

Rasool put his religion ahead of his adopted country when he alerted a fellow member of his mosque that he was under federal surveillance. At his Muslim brother’s request, he searched a police database and confirmed that FBI agents were tailing him.

[…]

That’s when agents discovered the police sergeant had breached their database at least 15 times to look up names of other contacts, including relatives, to see if they showed up on the terrorist watch list.

Rasool pled guilty but was sentenced to just two years probation on April 22, 2008. The FCPD has even allowed him to remain on the force during its internal investigation. As Paul Sperry writes, “The leniency afforded Rasool is unprecedented, given how he copped to the crime — and not just any crime, but one that betrayed his fellow officers and country.”

In addition, CAIR recently intervened in the Fairfax County case of Dr. Mustafa Abbasi, who consented to a search at a traffic stop and was found to have loose pills and prescriptions made out to others. CAIR’s national legal counsel quickly slammed “the Fairfax County Police Department’s repeated and relentless attacks on American Muslims” — an odd claim, considering the FCPD’s cozy relations with CAIR. For example, the police chief praised the lobby group at its 2006 national fundraising dinner.

Among other things, CAIR demanded that it be invited to provide workplace sensitivity and diversity training to the FCPD. This is a classic CAIR shakedown: concoct examples of discrimination and then offer its “training” as a remedy. No doubt this program would be designed to dissuade officers from addressing issues of radical Islam.

Abbasi’s no-contest plea to a single count of drug possession clearly legitimates the charges against him. Will the Fairfax County Police Department now reject biased anti-bias training from a terror-linked organization? Or will it continue its impersonation of the Keystone Cops?

Who Does He Think He Is? July 19, 2008

Who Does He Think He Is?
Charles Krauthammer
Friday, July 18, 2008

WASHINGTON — Barack Obama wants to speak at the Brandenburg Gate. He figures it would be a nice backdrop. The supporting cast — a cheering audience and a few fainting frauleins — would be a picturesque way to bolster his foreign policy credentials.

What Obama does not seem to understand is that the Brandenburg Gate is something you earn. President Reagan earned the right to speak there because his relentless pressure had brought the Soviet empire to its knees and he was demanding its final “tear down this wall” liquidation. When President Kennedy visited the Brandenburg Gate on the day of his “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech, he was representing a country that was prepared to go to the brink of nuclear war to defend West Berlin.

Who is Obama representing? And what exactly has he done in his lifetime to merit appropriating the Brandenburg Gate as a campaign prop? What was his role in the fight against communism, the liberation of Eastern Europe, the creation of what George Bush 41 — who presided over the fall of the Berlin Wall but modestly declined to go there for a victory lap — called “a Europe whole and free”?

Does Obama not see the incongruity? It’s as if a German pol took a campaign trip to America and demanded the Statue of Liberty as a venue for a campaign speech. (The Germans have now gently nudged Obama into looking at other venues.)

Americans are beginning to notice Obama’s elevated opinion of himself. There’s nothing new about narcissism in politics. Every senator looks in the mirror and sees a president. Nonetheless, has there ever been a presidential nominee with a wider gap between his estimation of himself and the sum total of his lifetime achievements?

Obama is a three-year senator without a single important legislative achievement to his name, a former Illinois state senator who voted “present” nearly 130 times. As president of the Harvard Law Review, as law professor and as legislator, has he ever produced a single notable piece of scholarship? Written a single memorable article? His most memorable work is a biography of his favorite subject: himself.

It is a subject upon which he can dilate effortlessly. In his victory speech upon winning the nomination, Obama declared it a great turning point in history — “generations from now we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment” — when, among other wonders, “the rise of the oceans began to slow.” As economist Irwin Stelzer noted in his London Daily Telegraph column, “Moses made the waters recede, but he had help.” Obama apparently works alone.

Obama may think he’s King Canute, but the good king ordered the tides to halt precisely to refute sycophantic aides who suggested that he had such power. Obama has no such modesty.

After all, in the words of his own slogan, “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” which, translating the royal “we,” means: “I am the one we’ve been waiting for.” Amazingly, he had a quasi-presidential seal with its own Latin inscription affixed to his podium, until general ridicule — it was pointed out that he was not yet president — induced him to take it down

He lectures us that instead of worrying about immigrants learning English, “you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish” — a language Obama does not speak. He further admonishes us on how “embarrassing” it is that Europeans are multilingual but “we go over to Europe, and all we can say is, ‘merci beaucoup.’” Obama speaks no French.

His fluent English does, however, feature many such admonitions, instructions and improvements. His wife assures us that President Obama will be a stern taskmaster: “Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism … that you come out of your isolation. … Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.”

For the first few months of the campaign, the question about Obama was: Who is he? The question now is: Who does he think he is?

We are getting to know. Redeemer of our uninvolved, uninformed lives. Lord of the seas. And more. As he said on victory night, his rise marks the moment when “our planet began to heal.” As I recall — I’m no expert on this — Jesus practiced his healing just on the sick. Obama operates on a larger canvas.

750 MW wind farm development announces public offering July 18, 2008

Dakota Wind Energy, based in South Dakota, has announced a major development underway for which it is offering up securities to the public (though only in SD) who will open up their land and grant wind-related rights to them.

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First Commercial-Scale Tidal Power System Delivers July 18, 2008

The world
’s first commercial-scale tidal turbine developed by British tidal energy company, Marine Current Turbines, has delivered electricity onto the grid for the first time. In principle, SeaGen works much like an “underwater windmill”, driven by the power of the tidal currents.

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Less Accessible Obama July 18, 2008

Less Accessible Obama

by L. Brent Bozell III July 16, 2008

The press has been endlessly dazzled with the prowess and the promise of the Barack Obama campaign. Observers of these quivering scribes have to wonder if they don’t collapse from exhaustion at the end of the day from all the involuntary spine tingling and shortness of breath over Obama’s inspirational aura.

One obvious sign the media have been too dazzled is by their utter lack of concern about Obama’s accessibility to journalists. Obama may be the least accessible primary winner in decades, but this press avoidance has in no way damaged his standing with reporters, who instead of growing frustrated with said lack of access, hounded Hillary Clinton to step aside and let the general election campaign begin.

This must be incredibly frustrating for John McCain. After all, when McCain ran against George W. Bush for president in 2000, the liberal media heaped their collective adoration upon him. When challenged about their gooey copy, reporters claimed it was the tremendous hours of access McCain granted to reporters. Eight years later, this argument has fallen away.

Their cooing over McCain then wasn’t about access. Their flattery of McCain came because he pleased their liberal impulses, decrying Bush’s tax cuts as favoring the wealthy and denouncing conservative Christian leaders as “agents of intolerance.” Running in this liberal-pleasing way made it easy for reporters to enjoy their bus rides and be flattered by McCain’s willingness to consider their liberal ideas for the country.

But the McCain campaign of 2008 isn’t running a doomed insurgency. McCain is now steering what he ridiculously called the “Death Star” in 2000, the Republican party establishment. He has bowed to the right to gain support in the base, shedding his opposition to permanent Bush tax cuts, and clumsily trying to gain the support of conservative Christian leaders instead of spitting at them. These and other actions separate him dramatically from what his campaign strategists once joked was “his base”: the national media.

This result is both frustrating and strangely refreshing. The press’s relentless liberalism is always frustrating. But it’s refreshing that John McCain is being forced to learn that you can’t be best friends with the media and stand for anything Republican or conservative. If you’re calling your party mates the “Death Star,” the media myth-builders might love you, but not when you’ve become Darth Vader in your own analogy.

It’s also refreshing that the media don’t always abide by the rule of rewarding the candidate who grants them the most access. If their excuse-making about McCain in 2000 were more genuine, it would appear that the press would be putting its own professional needs and desires ahead of the people. Collectively they resemble a spoiled child preferring whichever uncle brings the most toys.

The press easily slips into arrogance, equating itself with the people. Refusing to talk to them isn’t a refusal to talk to a few people who then report to other people. Shutting them out is utterly shutting the entire public out. They act clueless to the idea that conservatives don’t grant as much access to reporters because it feels to them like putting sharks into your swimming pool – and feels like you’re wearing a swimming suit of steak.

Granting access can’t give McCain an advantage this time. The media elite talks a lot now about the enormous “head winds” McCain faces as a candidate. The greatest of those is the undisguised passion that liberals have to make “history” and have a black man standing before Chief Justice Roberts, taking the oath. Anyone standing in the way of that cinematic dream seems to be preparing to spray Barack Obama with a hose like Bull Connor’s segregationist minions.

You could say it doesn’t seem to matter to them what kind of “history” follows with a President Obama. But in truth, they expect a lot of liberalism to follow. Obama’s race is not merely a historical marker. It is a way to pick the lock, running an ultraliberal candidate with a voting record to the left of socialist Bernie Sanders, but who can be presented to the country as their chance to prove their willingness to “desegregate” the presidency.

Barack Obama should be credited with some political prowess for taking apart the Clinton machine in the primaries, which almost no one expected a year ago. But in every national race, the Democrat’s prowess is greatly enhanced by a cheerleading press corps. Behind the scenes, journalists still believe, as Newsweek’s Evan Thomas blurted out four years ago, that the glow they put on Democratic candidates offers Democrats a fifteen-point advantage. Buying more donuts for the press bus isn’t going to help McCain.

Voice Your Opinion!
Write to Brent Bozell

True or False…you decide? In response to the previous blog. July 17, 2008

Origins: On 7 April 2008, ABC News aired a report about how closely U.S. military personnel stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan are following the current U.S. presidential campaigns. The segment featured reporter Martha Raddatz questioning service members in Iraq about what issues were important to them and which candidates they were supporting. In June 2008 the above-quoted e-mail account began circulating, claiming that Raddatz had interviewed some 60 soldiers in Iraq, 54 of whom expressed a preference for the Republican presidential candidate, Senator John McCain — but none of those 54 interviews was used in the aired

segment, which instead featured 5 different interviewees expressing a preference for one of the two Democratic candidates, Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

As for what material actually made it into the finished segment, the e-mail is largely true, although it’s a tiny bit off in claiming that there was “not one mention of the 54 [soldiers] for McCain”: The beginning of the aired segment included six brief interviews with soldiers, three of whom expressed a preference for Barack Obama, two for Hillary Clinton, and one for John McCain.

As to the question of whether Martha Raddatz really interviewed 60 service members in Iraq and found 54 of them to be John McCain supporters, that’s difficult to independently verify without access to outtakes (or to someone who has viewed them). It’s probably fair to say, though, that any random, representative sampling of U.S. military personnel in Iraq would find a much higher proportion of support for John McCain (over either of the two leading Democratic candidates) than one in six.

Whether this segment reveals some deliberate agenda on the part of ABC to mispresent the political preferences of U.S. military personnel is an argumentative and subjective issue. On the one hand, one side claims that the ABC report wasn’t supposed to be a representative sampling of party preferences; it was supposed to illustrate that American troops are following the presidential campaign closely and evaluating candidates based on their positions on all the issues (not just the war in Iraq), and some are even favoring Democratic candidates who advocate U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. Hence, the preponderance of interviews showing soldiers who were not (as many might expect) reflexively endorsing the Republican candidate, John McCain.

On the other hand, critics maintain that by showing only one soldier’s expressing a preference for the Republican candidate (prefaced by a laconic Martha Raddatz voice-over intoning, “there were some McCain backers …”), by separating the portion of the report in which soldiers discussed their candidate preferences from the portion in which they discussed what issues (other than the war) were important to them, and by identifying the report with titles such as “Whom Are Our Troops Endorsing?” and “Surprising Political Endorsements by U.S. Troops,” ABC News presented the piece as being a survey of American troops’ presidential preferences while offering viewers a distinctly skewed perspective of those preferences.

Whatever intepretation one applies to the ABC News segment in question, the e-mail decrying it appears to be erroneous in its facts. The Major General [Louis C.] Buckman to whom it is attributed stated that he did not write it, and in an e-mailed response about this subject, Martha Raddatz maintained that she hadn’t interviewed nearly as many service members about their presidential preferences as claimed:

The story that was supposedly told by “Katelyn” is simply not true. First … she must have a hundred aunts and uncles because whoever is forwarding it usually claims to be a close friend of one of them. I never went on a trip with John McCain … and I certainly didn’t interview 60 soldiers about who they are voting for. These attacks on me started because of a story that aired after a visit I took in March to Balad air base with Vice President Cheney. I followed him down a rope line and was surprised to see how many of the military personnel (largely Air Force) said they supported Barack Obama. I did not talk to many more than a dozen service members. I was with the VP and had no time! There were, of course McCain supporters and Clinton supporters, as well … which I mentioned in the story. But this was not a poll. It was simply surprising that so many came forward to voice support for a candidate who is advocating withdrawal, just moments after cheering for the vice president. So if there is in fact a “Katelyn” she is making this up. Not only that, she could not possibly have heard me in the noisy crowd. If you would like to check my integrity with some high ranking active duty officers please feel free to do so. And, please, if any of you actually knows retired MG Buckman, please pass on his email address and this email so I can let him know what he has started. I assume he would not want this to continue or have any role in it.

Please feel free to share this email. Thanks so much for understanding how important my bond with the troops is and how important I feel it is to cover the amazing job they do on a daily basis.

Based on the wide circulation of the original e-mail and the flood of (mostly negative) comments about this report that have been posted to ABC’s web site, we expect that ABC News and/or Martha Raddatz will be offering some additional insight into this now-controversial segment in the near future.

Last updated: 21 June 2008

And the rest of the story you missed… July 17, 2008

Just in case you happened to see the ABC News piece
(if you watch ABC News) with interviews of 5 military
folks in Iraq – 3 planned to vote for Obama and 2 for
Hillary; no mention of any McCain supporters.  Well,
here’s the ‘Rest of the Story.’

**********************************************************************************************
This from Major General (ret) Buckman, *********************************************************************************************

My niece, Katelyn, stationed at Baluud , Iraq was
assigned, with others of her detachment, to be
escort/guard/ watcher for Martha Raddatz of ABC News
as she covered John McCain’s recent trip to Iraq .
Katelyn and her Captain stood directly behind Raddatz
as she queried GI’s walking past. They kept count of
the GI’s and you should remember these numbers. She
asked 60 GI’s who they planned to vote for in
November. 54 said John McCain, 4 for Obama and 2 for
Hillary.  Katelyn called home and told her Mom and Dad
to watch ABC news the next night because she was
standing directly behind Raddatz and maybe they’d see
her on TV. Mom and Dad of course, called and emailed
all the kinfolk to watch the newscast and maybe see
Katelyn. Well, of course, we all watched and what we
saw wasn’t a glimpse of Katelyn, but got a hell’uva
view of skewed news.  After a dissertation on McCain’s
trip and speech, ABC showed 5 GI’s being asked by
Raddatz how they were going to vote in November; 3 for
Obama and 2 for Clinton . No mention of the 54 for
McCain.


***************************************************************
It is Time for America to Speak up!
***************************************************************

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