Return of the Creepy Obama Kids

I just happened to stumble upon this video by the always hilarious Iowahawk.

Solar Blemishes VII

In their zeal to latch onto anything that portrayed former President Bush in a bad light, in December 2007 the Sun editorial board fully endorsed the faulty National Intelligence Estimate that claimed Iran had halted its nuclear program in 2003.

President Bush, as recently as October, was warning of the specter of "World War III" because of the threat he said a nuclear-armed Iran could pose. Now, however, we know differently - much differently: A National Intelligence Estimate found that as far back as 2003 Iran had stopped work on its nuclear weapons program, contradicting previous White House claims.

The White House had been beating the war drums for some time with respect to Iran, saying the Islamic regime was developing a nuclear weapons program, but such talk generated considerable skepticism.

We now know that the NIE assessment was wrong. Not only that but the authors of the report may have known it was wrong at the time but released it anyway.

This report may have done some serious damage to American efforts to confront Iran. Critics of the Bush administration, including then-Senator Obama, used the report to dismiss attempts at taking a hard line against the Iranians as unnecessary saber-rattling. Those, such as the Democrats and the Sun editorial board, who used this report in this way weakened our position with Iran and set back our efforts in halting their very real and very active nuclear program.

There may be those who will dismiss this as a bit of Monday morning quarterbacking since none of us civilians had access to the data behind this report and we could not have known it was not true. But there were those who warned at the time to be skeptical of that NIE, including this bright, informed, articulate writer whose letter the Sun so graciously chose to print.

After having failed to foresee the collapse of the Soviet Union, underestimating Saddam's weapons programs in the early '90s, overestimating them in the late '90s, completely missing Iran's nuclear program for 18 years and issuing a contradictory report just two years ago, we are to believe that this time the intelligence agencies have it completely correct.

Already the Russians and the Chinese have used the NIE report to claim they will not support further U.N. sanctions against Iran. So we are now forced to approach Iran carrying only carrots and no sticks. For some, their hatred of Bush allows them to put their trust in the brutal Iranian theocracy that has pledged the destruction of the United States. Personally, I do not think that wise.

We now know that it was not wise. And, seriously, when the French mock you for being too wimpy...

The Traveling Circus Comes to Town

I stopped by the car wash today and look who came in to gas up.



It's the Code Pink van. The left (driver's) side says, among other things, "War under Bush, war under Obama, is still war."

Gitmo May Remain Open

There may actually be a modicum of sanity* inside the Obama administration after all. When the President announced in January that he would be closing Gitmo within a year I predicted that it would not happen. It was more than simply a means of consoling my more distraught friends and family.

The White House acknowledged for the first time Friday that it might not be able to close the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay by January as President Barack Obama has promised.

Senior administration officials told The Associated Press that difficulties in completing the lengthy review of detainee files and resolving thorny legal and logistical questions mean the president's self-imposed January deadline may slip. Obama remains as committed to closing the facility as he was when, as one of his first acts in office, he pledged to shut it down, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to more freely discuss the sensitive issue.

Despite the hysterical cries of their opponents, the Bush administration had been searching for a way to close Gitmo for years. They found exactly what Obama is now discovering - it's a whole lot easier said than done.

But eight months after Obama's pledge and with only four months to go before the January deadline, a number of difficult issues remain unresolved. They include establishment of a new set of rules for military trials, finding a location for a new prison to house detainees and finding host countries for those who can be released.

This has prompted top Republicans in Congress to demand that the prison stay open for now, saying it is too dangerous to rush the closure. Even Democrats defied the president, saying they needed more information about Obama's plan before supporting it. Congress is for now denying Obama funds to shut down Guantanamo.

The detainees do not consist entirely of unfortunate shepherds and tourists who happened to stumble into the wrong place at the wrong time. There are actually some real legitimate bad guys there! People who are so dangerous they should not be let out under any circumstances.

After Obama's promise, administration officials and lawyers began to reviewing the files on each detainee. At issue: which can be tried, and whether to do so in military or civilian courts; which can be released to other nations; and -- the hardest question -- which are too dangerous or their cases too compromised by lack of evidence that they must be held indefinitely.

Obama doesn't want to be the President who is responsible for freeing the terrorist inside the US who goes on to kill Americans. Gitmo will remain open.

* - via Don Surber

Unions Push From Another Angle

Trade unions pursue another leg in their strategy.

A group of 18 homebuyers and the Laborers International Union of North America charged Thursday in Las Vegas that Pulte Homes Corp. and other builders harmed buyers during the housing boom by inducing them into purchasing homes at inflated values and with unaffordable mortgages.

During a news conference organized by the union they asked the Nevada Attorney General's office to take action on complaints alleging deceptive sales and lending practices.

Traditionally in Las Vegas construction work on the Strip hotel-casinos has been union and virtually all of the residential and remaining commercial projects have been non-union. As what little remains of the Strip construction winds down, the unions have pressed harder to try to force themselves on the rest of the industry.

The unions have enlisted the help of sympathetic commissioners to push Project Labor Agreements on public works projects. They have also begun running ads criticizing certain non-union contractors. About a decade ago they also made a concerted effort to organize residential construction workers that largely failed.

With such high unemployment and companies running on small to non-existent margins, the unions' chances this time around wouldn't appear to be very good. But they certainly have more allies in higher positions (especially in Washington) than ever before or that than they can expect for a while. So they're probably thinking the time is right for the big push.

What to Really Fear

An Australian who wrote a DIY book on jihad has been given a 12-year prison sentence. As I was reading the article, one part caught my eye.

Khazaal, a former Lebanon-born Qantas Airways baggage-handler

With all of the extra security at airports, the idea that people with access to the secured areas may be jihadists is chilling. It is true that these workers are subject to security screening as well but they could also assist those without such clearances. Preventing this sort of plot is much more important than worrying about cologne bottles.

There's No Indoctrination Here

The right side of the blogosphere is all abuzz about this video.


Duane at AAB also points us to this.

A few days after President Obama’s speech, one of the members of Smart Girl Politics contacted me and was upset about something that had transpired in her daughter’s school. Her daughter, a senior in high school, had come home upset because, although the speech was not shown in her school, her anatomy teacher had made the class watch the President’s health care speech. After the video was shown, the students were given a short quiz about the speech. The questions asked gave the assumption that the answers provided in the President’s speech were fact and not opinion. The students were given no opportunity to discuss opposing views or have a debate on the topic. In fact, when one student stated that the President had lied, the student was told that kind of talk was unnecessary. Students in the class with opposing views were forced to remain silent or whisper amongst themselves.

I remember a couple weeks ago when many conservatives were skeptical (and more) about the President's speech to schoolchildren. Democrats condemned them for overreacting and, when the text of the speech was released, they had a point. It was very innocuous - at least the final version. (Personally, I was ambivalent about it. I don't have a child in public school and I neither advised others for or against letting their children listen.)

The video and the report above are exactly the types of things that the skeptics were concerned about. Parents do not send their children to school to have politics forced upon them. These children are young, impressionable and easily influenced by authority figures such as teachers, especially with parents not present.

It is appropriate for schools to discuss current events and issues but teachers must be careful not to cross the line into advocacy. The unions that represent teachers have become largely political organizations. They venture into advocacy that extends far beyond issues related to education. Combine this fact with the evidence presented above and elsewhere and I don't believe that our public schools can be trusted to objectively present political controversies in the classroom.

The Sun Also Rises

Victor Joecks at Write on Nevada discovers something I never thought I'd see. Wow: Sun article shows the downside of government subsidies.

Let's give credit where credit is due. The Sun has an excellent article today on why the first-time homeowner tax credit is good politics and terrible policy.

Another Foreign Policy Success

Poland shuns call for more NATO troops to Afghanistan. Obama's policy of coddling our enemies and slighting our friends is going to leave the US more alone than ever.

Solar Blemishes VI

A recent Sun editorial repeats and supports Jimmy Carter’s baseless and ill-informed smear that racism underpins the popular movement opposing President Obama. This charge was unbecoming a man of Carter’s supposed stature and irresponsible for a respectable news organization.

Is it any wonder that Americans would oppose a President who has traveled around the world not to extol the virtues of America but to apologize for her alleged transgressions? Is it any wonder Americans would oppose a President who has coddled tyrants like Hugo Chavez, Vladimir Putin and the mullahs in Iran while shunning, or worse, our friends such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Great Britain, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Honduras and Colombia? Is it any wonder that Americans would object to a President who has already nationalized large segments of our economy and promises an increasingly more intrusive, expansive and expensive government? No, it must be racism.

What is it about people on the left that they must portray all opposition as being rooted in some moral or intellectual failing in those whose oppose them? Why can they not accept that intelligent, informed, well-meaning people are capable of disagreeing with them?

While there are extremists in every movement, examples exist in both the pro- and anti-Obama factions, the idea that they constitute a significant portion of those who oppose President Obama’s policies is true only in the imaginations of those who are unable to countenance legitimate disagreement.

Keep Your Hands On Your Wallets

Now necessary even when the legislature is not in session.

Radicals Wrote Failed Stimulus

IBD reports that a radical leftist group wrote a draft stimulus last year that is largely similar to the one that was adopted.

If the stimulus isn't working, perhaps it's because it was largely written by a collection of leftist interest groups called the Apollo Alliance that counts among its directors a co-founder of the Weather Underground.

[...]

Clearly, the stimulus bill that no congressman read is not working. As it turns out, no congressman may have written it either. It's largely the creation of a coalition of leftist organizations called the Apollo Alliance, whose primary interests are saving the Earth, environmental justice and redistributing wealth. They are not friends of job-creating capitalism.

And just look who's praising them.

On Apollo's Web site, [Nevada] Sen. [Harry] Reid, whose state also leads in foreclosures, is quoted praising the group of which former green czar Van Jones was a board member.

"We've talked about moving forward on these ideas for decades," Reid is quoted as saying. "The Apollo Alliance has been an important factor in helping us develop and execute a strategy that makes great progress on these goals and in motivating the public to support them."

Independent like Nevada, huh, Senator? Another piece of evidence that the economic crisis simply provided a pretext for enacting the left's decades-old wish list. Never let a crisis go to waste, indeed.

In addition to "former...community organizer and self-avowed communist" Jones, there are lots of interesting characters involved with the Apollo Alliance.

Wade Rathke, founder of Acorn, was also on the Apollo board, as is Gerald Hudson, vice president of the Service Employees International Union, which provides the shock troops in the movement to pass government-run health care.

John Podesta, former chief of staff to President Clinton and now president of the leftist Center for American Progress, also sits on the Apollo board. Each day his group sends out talking points to the left side of the blogosphere. Mark Lloyd, diversity czar at the Federal Communications Commission, was a senior fellow at CAP.

According to Kerpen, the Apollo Alliance put together a draft stimulus bill in 2008 that included almost everything in the final $787 billion package. Little did the voters know that the congressmen and senators they would elect would pass a bill written by activist outsiders.

Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of all this is that an even more radical Jones (no relation) has a relationship with the Apollo Alliance. Jeff Jones was a domestic terrorist in the '60s and a fugitive from justice throughout the '70s who, with Bill Ayers, helped found the Weather Underground in 1969.

[...]

Welcome to government of the activist, by the activist and for the activist.

The ironic part is that the failure of the stimulus to create jobs is going to be used to as an excuse to push even harder on this agenda.

The Worst Threat to the Environment: YOU!

Two recent studies claim that the greatest thing we could do to help the environment is to have fewer people.

Every new life, the report says, is a guarantee of new greenhouse gases, spewed out over decades of driving and electricity use. Seen in that light, we might be our own worst emissions.

The activist group that sponsored the report says birth control could be one of the world's best tools for fighting climate change. By preventing the creation of new polluters, the group says, contraceptives are a far cheaper solution than windmills and solar plants.

[...]

It is nothing unusual, of course, to think that the Earth could really use fewer of us.

In the 1700s, Thomas Malthus worried that population growth would outstrip the food supply. And a decade ago, writer Bill McKibben connected environmental concerns to his decision to have one child in a book called "Maybe One."

What is new, in the British study and in a separate report from Oregon State University, are statistics that show exactly how much each life -- and especially each American life -- adds to the world's emissions.

In the United States, each baby results in 1,644 tons of carbon dioxide, five times more than a baby in China and 91 times more than an infant in Bangladesh, according to the Oregon State study. That is because Americans live relatively long, and live in a country whose long car commutes, coal-burning power plants and cathedral ceilings give it some of the highest per-capita emissions in the world.

What these stats actually reveal is that what we really need is not fewer people but more poverty. Thus, the cap and trade bill.

Is there any wonder why I have referred to radical environmentalists in the past as anti-humans. This is the ultimate portrayal of humans as liabilities and not assets, something lefties are quick to (wrongly) condemn corporations for doing.

Not to be too alarmist but let me draw a scenario. A government believes that carbon dioxide emissions pose a severe threat to the planet. That government is convinced that the most efficient means of controlling those emissions is by controlling the human population. That government is also in charge of health care...

Solar Blemishes V

Or, Does Brian Greenspun Read His Own Paper?

In his latest column, the publisher of the Sun laments the decline of civility in politics.

[W]e have respect for the other person’s opinion, and that means we don’t shout him down, we don’t talk over him to the point of distraction (a common tactic on cable “news”), we don’t call people with whom we disagree Nazis (unless they really are), and we don’t attack folks with epithets just because our own words and reason fail us.

[...]

When I don’t see good manners and civility, I wonder. And today I wonder if those people on whom the lessons of manners and civility didn’t take are the same ones who think it is OK to shout down a guest in their own home — that is, the president in Congress — or think it is OK to call elected officials and others who are trying to serve the public (whether we agree with them or not) the kind of names we are supposed to reserve for our worst enemies.

This piece is disturbing on several levels. First, I wonder if Mr. Greenspun has been reading his own paper. Virtually every day for the last several years, the Sun has printed letters to the editor condemning Bush adminstration officials and conservatives/Republicans in general in the most vicious terms imaginable for a family publication. I have often wondered what level of vitriol was required to render an attack on conservatives as too extreme for inclusion in the Sun's letters section.

The incivility extends far beyond the letters, which in every paper tend to over-represent outliers since emotion intensifies as one ventures from the middle. In just the last few days, Sun editorials have claimed that Harry "Reid appropriately called [former President George W.] Bush a liar" and that "no one should want [to become the darling of the anti-Obama movement] because of the racism that has infused the movement." Greenspun himself dismissed the Tea Parties as "petty, unpatriotic and un-American." The paper's news coverage of the health care reform opponents has been hostile and condescending.

Second, I find Democrats' (and liberals' and leftists') sudden fondness for civility utterly self-serving. There was no shortage of Nazi references directed at Bush. We were also treated to Democrats booing Bush during the 2005 State of the Union, Dick Durban (on the Senate floor) and John Murtha slandering our soldiers, Reid's "liar" remark, Pete Stark (on the House floor) viciously attacking then-President Bush, and many, many more. (Durban, weakly, and Stark later apologized for their remarks. Reid and Murtha have not.)

Greenspun himself seemed to value dissent a lot more a couple years ago. To be fair, he did write a column in 2007 regretting the lack of civility in the political process but he appeared more concerned with the "system" than the "people".

Finally, I find it hard to interpret Greenspun's complaints in any other way than an attempt to protect the powerful from the masses. He condemns a representative of the minority party for yelling out during the President's speech and regular citizens for calling their elected officials names. Not addressed are the fact that the President dismissed his critics during the same speech with a version of the same term ("lies") and that powerful politicians have criticized common citizens using the same expressions Greenspun considers out of bounds when used against the elected. Holding the powerless to a higher standard than the powerful violates everything the Founders stood for and everything the media claims to represent.

Whatever happened to speaking truth to power? When their people gained power the MSM shed that like dirty underwear.