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someBody had a meeting tOday

Mr1ncred1ble — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 02:30:54 GMT

CapeCodTimes.com - Associated Press Wire

Sorry Grandma

AnnieOakley — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 01:09:31 GMT

They can't say it ain't true now because the mouthpiece of the administration has just told us it's on its way:

msnbc.com Video Player

Lou Dobbs leaving CNN

dray — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:50:40 GMT

Wonder why he's leaving now? maybe the death threats?

Anchor Lou Dobbs says he's leaving CNN immediately - Yahoo! News

Quote:

NEW YORK � CNN host Lou Dobbs shocked his viewers Wednesday when he announced that he would be leaving the network effective immediately. The longtime host of "Lou Dobbs Tonight" said on his show that it would be his last and that he was ready "to pursue new opportunities."
He said CNN had allowed him to be released from his contract, which was set for the end of 2011 and that he was considering a number of options.
"I will let you know when I set my course," he said.
The longest-running anchor on CNN's air, Dobbs was one of the nation's leading financial journalists before turning his program in a more opinionated direction. His persistent advocacy against illegal immigration angered many.
"I'm the last of the original anchors here on CNN and I'm proud to have had the privilege of helping to built the world's first news network."
CNN's average prime-time audience was third behind Fox and MSNBC during October, and it was even eclipsed by sister network HLN among younger viewers, according to the Nielsen Co.

When Is It Legitimate For The Oppressed To Take Up Arms?

AZXD — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 21:14:05 GMT

...

Thank you for your service

fmfdocglock — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 19:10:27 GMT

Just wanted to thank you all for your service on Veterans Day.

Semper fi and Semper fortis

Fort Hood shooter: terrorism or criminal charges

eric_t12 — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 15:58:29 GMT

As there is no charge for terrorism within the UCMJ, and apparently the MSM forgot about:

Article 118 which covers murder

Article 134 which covers pretty much every other crime not listed in the UCMJ

Fox news just polled this morning, and something like 60% of the polled believe it should be tried by the military as a terrorism case, with 37% saying its hould be a criminal case.

Knowing there is no UCMJ charge for a terrorism charge, and that terrorism itself is a criminal act, covered under Title XVIII, Ch 113B, S2331, one (me) wonders how in the world it could NOT be tried as a criminal case.

If the military is going to try him the best they could get is 5 counts of murder or whatever it was.

More than enough for a firing squad i'm sure, at the very least life in leavenworth. Why is this subject even an issue?

oh yes, the MSM are idiots.

Controversial new climate change results

Fredo — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 07:31:21 GMT

Controversial new climate change results

Quote:

Controversial new climate change results

November 10, 2009

(PhysOrg.com) -- New data show that the balance between the airborne and the absorbed fraction of CO2 has stayed approximately constant since 1850, despite emissions of CO2 having risen from about 2 billion tons a year in 1850 to 35 billion tons a year now.

This suggests that terrestrial ecosystems and the oceans have a much greater capacity to absorb CO2 than had been previously expected.
The results run contrary to a significant body of recent research which expects that the capacity of terrestrial ecosystems and the oceans to absorb CO2 should start to diminish as CO2 emissions increase, letting greenhouse gas levels skyrocket. Dr Wolfgang Knorr at the University of Bristol found that in fact the trend in the airborne fraction since 1850 has only been 0.7 � 1.4% per decade, which is essentially zero.

The strength of the new study, published online in Geophysical Research Letters, is that it rests solely on measurements and statistical data, including historical records extracted from Antarctic ice, and does not rely on computations with complex climate models.

This work is extremely important for climate change policy, because emission targets to be negotiated at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen early next month have been based on projections that have a carbon free sink of already factored in. Some researchers have cautioned against this approach, pointing at evidence that suggests the sink has already started to decrease.

So is this good news for climate negotiations in Copenhagen? “Not necessarily”, says Knorr. “Like all studies of this kind, there are uncertainties in the data, so rather than relying on Nature to provide a free service, soaking up our waste carbon, we need to ascertain why the proportion being absorbed has not changed”.

Another result of the study is that emissions from deforestation might have been overestimated by between 18 and 75 per cent. This would agree with results published last week in Nature Geoscience by a team led by Guido van der Werf from VU University Amsterdam. They re-visited deforestation data and concluded that emissions have been overestimated by at least a factor of two.

More information: Is the airborne fraction of anthropogenic CO2 emissions increasing? by Wolfgang Knorr. Geophysical Research Letters, VOL. 36, L21710, doi:10.1029/2009GL040613, 2009.
Provided by University of Bristol (news : web)

It will be interesting to see how this shake out.

Journalists raise funds for troubled Fort Hood shooter

Fredo — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 04:09:11 GMT

Scott Ott's Examiner Scrappleface: Journalists raise funds for troubled Fort Hood shooter | Washington Examiner

Quote:

by Scott Ott

News fairly unbalanced. We report. You decipher.

Journalists across the nation, moved by the plight of a troubled Muslim psychiatrist whose "understandable emotional turmoil" broke out in gunfire last week at Fort Hood, Texas, will hold a major fundraising event in the coming weeks in honor of the accused shooter, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan.

News coverage of the tragedy sparked reporters and anchors in the mainstream media to "reach out to Hasan in love and brotherhood because his righteous indignation at the illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan led him to express his outrage in the only avenue open to a non-journalist," according to an unnamed organizer of the upcoming charity event.

"We in the free press naturally see Hasan's actions as a First Amendment issue," the source said. "As a disadvantaged Muslim American, and captive of the U.S. military, Hasan's options for speaking truth to power were quite limited. He did what he could within his means, and now he's being punished for this expression of free speech."

The event will include a bevy of "A-List" news media figures manning the phones to receive contributions toward establishment of a graduate school that will train disenchanted members of the military to solve their problems with a computer keyboard, rather than with a semi-automatic handgun.

In a news release announcing plans for the fundraiser, the Society of Professional Journalist-Celebrities said, "As Major Hasan lies grievously wounded, cut down in the prime of his life by a police officer whose sworn duty is to protect and serve him, we journalists will do what we can to guard future Hasans from the brutality of an oppressive regime."

"We can't help but think how things would have been different if, instead of a handgun, Hasan would have had a press pass and a laptop computer," the group said. "He still could have accomplished his purposes, and he wouldn't be strapped to a gurney, fighting for his life right now. Rather, he could walk right into the White House or Pentagon press rooms and take the fight to the enemy like the rest of us do every day."

Examiner Columnist Scott Ott is editor in chief of ScrappleFace.com, the world's leading family-friendly news satire source.

John Allen Muhammad has one minute to live....

Cannibul — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 01:59:52 GMT

As I type this JAM has one minute to live.

The State of Virginia is going to put him down like the dog he is.

May he burn in hell.

The Teflon Blob

OKMatt — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 01:23:17 GMT

First prostitution out of his home now this.

"I'm not a great outdoors man" :rolleyes:

The double standard on display yet again.

I truly don't get it. This guy will die a member of the HoR and be spoken highly of by the Dems AND Repubs. Disgusting.

Senate Dems move to curb Federal Reserve's powers

punk rocka — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 22:19:31 GMT

Senate Dems move to curb Fed's powers - Yahoo! News

Quote:

WASHINGTON � Senate Democrats on Tuesday proposed stripping the Federal Reserve of its supervisory powers and creating instead three new federal agencies to police banks, protect consumers and dismantle failing institutions.
The 1,136-page bill, released by Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, would represent a significant shift in power in federal oversight of the U.S. market. The Fed has been a dominate figure in managing the economy, although many lawmakers blame the central bank for not doing enough to prevent last year's crisis.
"We saw over the last number of years when (the Fed) took on consumer protection responsibilities and the regulation of bank holding companies, it was an abysmal failure," said Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat.
Dodd's proposal prompted cheers from consumer advocates and other Democrats, including Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., an influential moderate who said swift action was necessary to prevent future government bailouts of big banks.
"Never again should the American taxpayers have to hear about 'too big to fail,' where the American taxpayer has to pick up the slack," Warner said.
But the financial industry quickly pushed back, and Republicans were expected to oppose much of the bill.
The bill "would produce conflicts among regulators, undermine the state-chartered banking system, and impose extensive new regulatory burdens on those banks that had nothing to do with creating the financial crisis," said Edward Yingling, president of the American Bankers Association.
Among the top points of contention is Dodd's desire to create a Consumer Financial Protection Agency to protect consumers taking out home loans or using credit cards against predatory lending and surprise interest rate hikes.
Republicans and industry officials say that creating another bureaucracy will make it harder for banks to do business and would limit the availability of credit.
Other provisions in Dodd's bill would:
� Consolidate federal supervision of banks under a "Financial Institutions Regulatory Administration."
� Abolish the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Office of Thrift Supervision, and strip the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Fed of their bank supervision duties.
� Create an "Agency for Financial Stability" that would enforce new rules and dismantle complex financial firms if they threaten the broader economy.
� Regulate privately traded derivatives, hedge funds and other private pools of capital so that regulators have a sense of how much risk is being assumed by financial firms.
� Impose new rules on investment rating agencies.
� Limit the Fed's ability to provide emergency loans to mostly healthy institutions, instead of failing firms.
The Senate Banking Committee was expected to take up the legislation next week and vote by early December. Dodd said he expects to need Republican support to get the bill through Congress and that he remains optimistic consensus could be reached.
The bill will also have to be reconciled with the House version. Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said he expects a floor vote in December on his proposal.
Like Dodd, Frank wants to strip the Fed of its consumer protection powers and create a separate agency dedicated to the mission. Both House and Senate bills also would limit the Fed's ability to provide emergency loans and create a council of regulators to monitor the risks posed by large financial firms.
But the House bill wouldn't consolidate federal banking supervision and would ultimately put the Fed in charge of enforcing new requirements for large and influential firms.
Frank said Dodd's announcement on Tuesday confirmed that "we are moving in the same direction" and will enact legislation soon.

Wow, what a great idea! Let's create more government bureaucracies to help combat a problem that the already existing government bureaucracies pretty much created! I guess having the government just butt out must not be an option...

Most trusted news anchor in US

CrAz3D — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 20:54:14 GMT

Poll Results - Now that Walter Cronkite has passed on, who is America's most trusted newscaster? | TIME

Bet you'll be surprised......

TV footage shows Afghan insurgents with US ammo

Frenchy — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:08:55 GMT

The locals say yes, the Army says no....?

Quote:

KABUL � Television footage broadcast Tuesday showed insurgents handling what appears to be U.S. ammunition in a remote area of eastern Afghanistan that American forces left last month following a deadly firefight that killed eight troops.
The U.S. military said the forces that left the area said they removed and accounted for their equipment.
The Al-Jazeera video showed insurgents handling weapons, including anti-personnel mines with U.S. markings on them, but it was unclear when the video had been filmed. The television station reported that insurgents said they seized the weapons from two U.S. remote outposts in Nuristan province.
The ammunition could be used against U.S. and Afghan forces, although the amount shown was not extensive. However, the footage will no doubt be used by insurgent propagandists to promote their "victory" over the Americans and encourage their supporters.
Separately, NATO officials said international forces and the Afghan National Police seized 5,000 components used in roadside bombs and 250 tons ammonium nitrate fertilizer, which is often used in making explosives. Fifteen people were detained in Sunday's raid on a warehouse in Kandahar.
Another 4,000 100-pound bags of fertilizer were found in a nearby compound.
NATO also said a U.S. troop was killed Tuesday by a roadside bomb in Helmand province, but provided no other details.
Nuristan was the site of an Oct. 3 battle in which some 200 fighters bombarded a joint U.S.-Afghan army outpost with small arms, rocket-propelled grenades and mortar shells. Eight U.S. troops died � as well as three Afghan soldiers � in one of the heaviest losses of U.S. life in a single battle since the war began.
Lt. Col. Todd Vician, a spokesman for NATO forces, said the material in the footage "appears to be U.S. equipment." He said it was unclear how the insurgents got the weapons.
"It's debatable whether they got them from that location," Vician said, referring to the mountainous Kamdesh district of Nuristan where the nearly six-hour battle took place.
Tech Sgt. Angela Eggman, another spokeswoman for NATO, said no formal investigation was being conducted regarding the claims in the video.
"Before departing the base, the units removed all sensitive items and accounted for them," Eggman said.
Nuristan's provincial police chief Gen. Mohammad Qassim Jangulbagh disagreed, saying, "The Americans left ammunition at the base."
Three American platoons were deployed at the two posts, mostly troops from Task Force Mountain Warrior of the 4th Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, based at Fort Carson, Colorado.
The U.S. destroyed most of the ammunition, but some of it fell into the hands of insurgents, Jangulbagh said.
After the attack, the Pentagon said the isolated post in Nuristan was on a list of far-flung bases that U.S. war commanders had decided were not worth keeping. The Pentagon said that decision was on the books before the assault � part of plans by top U.S. commander in Afghanistan Gen. Stanley McChrystal to shut down such isolated strongholds and focus on more heavily populated areas as part of a new strategy to protect Afghan civilians.
Jangulbagh lamented the pullback of U.S. forces from the outposts. "Unfortunately, only the police are in Nuristan. There are no foreign troops," he said.

Farooq Khan, a spokesman for the Afghan National Police in Nuristan province, also said U.S. forces left behind arms and ammunition when they left the area, which he said is now in insurgent hands.
However, Gen. Shir Mohammad Karimi, chief of operations for the Afghan Defense Ministry, was skeptical. "As far as I know, nothing was left behind," Karimi said.

TV footage shows Afghan insurgents with US ammo - Yahoo! News

Where Obama Got His Start.....Back When

Ed Ely — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:54:51 GMT

I have attached a link to an interesting
article I thought you might be enjoy
reading. It�s lengthy, but very informative
and really gives us all something very
serious to think about.

American Thinker: Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis

Ed

Obama is the DIC....

Cannibul — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:51:33 GMT

Ditherer in Chief.

When called upon to make a very important decision he can't.

He claims that we must win the war in Afghanistan. But when told more troops are needed he can't decide to sh1t or get off the pot.

Perhaps a look at his background will provide the clues needed to know why this is.

While in the Illinois Senate Obama would vote "Present" rather than taking sides on an issue. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/20/us...s/20obama.html

While in the US Senate he somehow managed to NOT vote on the majority of votes. Votes by Barack Obama | Congressional votes database | washingtonpost.com

The Hillary ad during the campaign about who you would rather have taking that 3:00 AM phone call is now cast in an entirely different light. Not only can't Obama make a quick decision at 3:00 AM he has a hard time making a decision at any time.

Being President means having to make decisions. Was he totally unaware of this while running for President?

Twenty years ago today....

Cannibul — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 14:48:02 GMT

The Berlin Wall came down.

But Obama will not be at the celebration.

Wonder if that's because he and his advisors think the Wall coming down was a bad thing?

A Fatal Flaw In The War On Terror

Fredo — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 12:35:45 GMT

Investors.com - Search Results

Quote:

A Fatal Flaw In The War On Terror
By MARK STEYN

Thirteen dead and 31 wounded would be a bad day for the U.S. military in Afghanistan, and a great victory for the Taliban. When it happens in Texas, in the heart of the biggest military base in the nation, at a processing center for soldiers either returning from or deploying to combat overseas, it is not merely a "tragedy" (as too many people called it), but a glimpse of a potentially fatal flaw at the heart of what we have called, since 9/11, the "war on terror."

Brave soldiers trained to hunt down and kill America's enemy abroad were killed in the safety and security of home by, in essence, the same enemy — a man who believes in and supports everything the enemy does. And he's a U.S. Army major.

And his superior officers and other authorities knew about his beliefs but seemed to think it was just a bit of harmless multicultural diversity — as if believing that "the Muslims should stand up and fight against the aggressor" (i.e., his fellow American soldiers) and writing Internet paeans to the "noble" "heroism" of suicide bombers and, indeed, objectively supporting the other side in an active war is to be regarded as just some kind of alternative lifestyle that adds to the general vibrancy of the base.

When it emerged early on Thursday afternoon that the shooter was Nidal Malik Hasan, there appeared shortly thereafter on Twitter a flurry of posts with the striking formulation: "Please judge Major Malik Nadal (sic) by his actions and not by his name."

Concerned tweeters can relax: There was never really any danger of that — and not just in the sense that the New York Times' first report on Major Hasan never mentioned the words "Muslim" or "Islam," or that ABC's Martha Raddatz's only observation on his name was that "as for the suspect, Nadal Hasan, as one officer's wife told me, 'I wish his name was Smith.'"

What a strange reaction. I suppose what she means is that, if his name were Smith, we could all retreat back into the same comforting illusions that allowed the bureaucracy to advance Nidal Malik Hasan to major and into the heart of Fort Hood while ignoring everything that mattered about the essence of this man.

Since 9/11, we have, as the Twitterers recommend, judged people by their actions — flying planes into skyscrapers, blowing themselves up in Bali nightclubs or London Tube trains, planting IEDs by the roadside in Baghdad or Tikrit. And on the whole we're effective at responding with action of our own — taking out training camps in Afghanistan, rolling up insurgency networks in Fallujah and Ramadi, intercepting terror plots in London and Toronto and Dearborn.

But we're scrupulously non-judgmental about the ideology that drives a man to fly into a building or self-detonate on the subway, and thus we have a hole at the heart of our strategy. We use rhetorical conveniences like "radical Islam" or, if that seems a wee bit Islamophobic, just plain old "radical extremism."

But we never make any effort to delineate the line which separates "radical Islam" from non-radical Islam. Indeed, we go to great lengths to make it even fuzzier. And somewhere in that woozy blur the pathologies of a Nidal Malik Hasan incubate.

An army psychiatrist, Major Hasan was an American, born and raised, who graduated from Virginia Tech and then received his doctorate from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, which works out to the best part of half-a-million dollars' worth of elite education.

But he opposed America's actions in the Middle East and Afghanistan, and made approving remarks about jihadists on American soil. "You need to lock it up, Major," cautioned his superior officer, Colonel Terry Lee.

But he didn't really need to "lock it up" at all. He could pretty much say anything he liked, and if any "red flags" were raised they were quickly mothballed. Lots of people are "anti-war." Some of them are objectively on the other side — that's to say, they encourage and support attacks on American troops and civilians.

But not many of those in that latter category are U.S. Army majors. Or so one would hope. Yet why be surprised? Azad Ali, a man who approvingly quotes such observations as, "If I saw an American or British man wearing a soldier's uniform inside Iraq, I would kill him because that is my obligation" is an advisor to Britain's Crown Prosecution Service (the equivalent of the U.S. attorneys).

In Toronto last week, the brave ex-Muslim Nonie Darwish mentioned en passant that, on flying from the U.S. to Canada, she was questioned at length about the purpose of her visit by an apparently Muslim border official. When she revealed that she was giving a speech about Islamic law, he rebuked her: "We are not to question Sharia."

That's the guy manning the airport security desk.

In the New York Times, Maria Newman touched on Hasan's faith only obliquely: "He was single, according to the records, and he listed no religious preference." Thank goodness for that, eh? A neighbor in Texas says the major had "Allah" and "another word" pinned up in Arabic on his door. "Akbar" maybe?

On Thursday morning he is said to have passed out copies of the Koran to his neighbors. He shouted in Arabic as he fired. But don't worry: As the FBI spokesman assured us in nothing flat, there's no terrorism angle.

That's true, in a very narrow sense: Major Hasan is not a card-carrying member of the Texas branch of al-Qaida reporting to a control officer in Yemen or Waziristan. If he were, things would be a lot easier.

But the same pathologies that drive al-Qaida beat within Major Hasan too, and in the end his Islamic impulses trumped his expensive western education, his psychiatric training, his military discipline — his entire American identity.

One might say the same about Faleh Hassan Almaleki of Glendale, Ariz., arrested last week after fatally running over his "too westernized" daughter Noor in the latest American honor killing.

Or the two U.S. residents — one American, one Canadian — arrested a few days earlier for plotting to fly to Denmark for the purposes of murdering the editor who commissioned the famous Mohammed cartoons.

But Noor Almaleki's brother shrugs that's just the way it is. "One thing to one culture doesn't make sense to another culture," he says.

Indeed. To infidels, Islam is in a certain sense unknowable, and most of us are content to leave it at that. The vast majority of Muslims don't conspire to kill cartoonists or murder their daughters or shoot dozens of their fellow soldiers. But Islam inspires enough of this behavior to make it a legitimate topic of analysis. Don't hold your breath. We'd rather talk about anything else — even in the army.

What happened to those men and women at Fort Hood had a horrible symbolism: Members of the best trained, best equipped fighting force on the planet gunned down by a guy who said a few goofy things no one took seriously.

And that's the problem: America has the best troops and fiercest firepower, but no strategy for throttling the ideology that drives the enemy — in Afghanistan and in Texas.

In one of those weird things you can file under "its a small world after all", I went to medical school with this guy. I don't remember him saying any Islamic rhetoric, but I also didn't hang out with him. I wonder what my classmates who were friends with him think about this.

Bloodless President Barack Obama makes Americans wistful for George W Bush

Fredo — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 11:38:29 GMT

Bloodless President Barack Obama makes Americans wistful for George W Bush - Telegraph

Quote:

Bloodless President Barack Obama makes Americans wistful for George W Bush

Barack Obama's reaction to bad news is to play it so cool that Americans yearn for a bit more drama - and some even for his predecessor

Toby Harnden

During the election campaign, Barack Obama's cool detachment was a winning quality, the "No Drama Obama" a welcome contrast with the "Mr Angry" John McCain, never mind the hot-headed "I'm the decider" President George W Bush.

A year into his presidency, however, Mr Obama seems a curiously bloodless president. If he experiences passion, he seldom shows it. It is often anyone's guess as to whether an event or issue truly moves him.

He has spent more than two months considering a troop increase but do we know how he really feels about the Afghan war?

In a sign that the Obama honeymoon truly is over, I began to hear this week the first stirrings of a wistfulness about Mr Bush. "I never thought I'd hear myself say it," one Democrat told me. "But Obama makes you feel that at least with Bush you knew where he was on something."

When Mr Bush's Republicans were defeated in the 2006 mid-term elections, it was the President himself who stepped up and declared that his party had received "a thumpin'". The Democratic defeats on Tuesday were not on anything like the same scale but Mr Obama acted as if nothing at all had happened.

Mr Obama had campaigned for Jon Corzine, New Jersey's Democratic governor, five times, twice just last Sunday. But when Mr Corzine lost by four points in a state Mr Obama won by 15 last year - a 19-point swing to Republicans - White House aides just shrugged.

In Virginia, which Mr Obama won by six points last year, prompting Democrats to declare an historic political realignment in the state, the Democratic candidate went down by 17 points in the biggest landslide since 1961 - a 23-point swing to the Grand Old Party.

It took Senator Mark Warner of Virginia to admit that his party "got walloped". For three days, Mr Obama maintained a studied silence about the results while his aides blamed them on local factors that had nothing to do with the President. And to think that it was Mr Bush who was always accused of being "in denial".

More serious perhaps was Mr Obama's strange disconnectedness over the Fort Hood massacre of 13 soldiers by an Army major and devout Muslim who opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, had praised suicide bombing and shouted "Allahu Akbar" as he opened fire.

Maybe Mr Obama had been reading the American press, much of which somehow contrived to present the atrocity as a result of combat stress due to soldiers going on repeated war deployments (though Major Nadal Hasan had not been on any) and therefore, no doubt, Mr Bush's fault.

When the television networks cut to the President, viewers listened to him spend more than two surreal minutes talking to a gathering of Native Americans about their "extraordinary" and "extremely productive" conference, pausing to give a cheery "shout out" to a man named Dr Joe Medicine Crow. Only then did he briefly and mechanically address what had happened in Texas.

On Friday, when most of the basic facts were available, Mr Obama tried again. It was scarcely any better. He began by offering "an update on the tragedy that took place" - as if it was an earthquake and not a terrorist attack from an enemy within - and ended with a promise for more "updates in the coming days and weeks".

Completely missing was the eloquence that Mr Obama employs when talking about himself. Absent too was any sense that the President empathised with the families and comrades of those murdered.

It was a reminder that for the past 16 years Americans have had two Presidents who would often extemporise and express emotion. President Bill Clinton could certainly "feel your pain" while Mr Bush sometimes struggled to hold back tears. Mr Obama is more like President George Bush Snr, who famously communicated his concern for people by blurting out: "Message - I care."

The White House argues that Mr Obama was not on the ballot last week and there is therefore no need to fret. The problem with this complacency is that voters were angry about the state of the economy, which Mr Obama can't keep blaming on his predecessor. With unemployment now above 10 per cent, Mr Obama needs to show Americans that he can relate to what they're going through, and take responsibility.

It could do him good to show he has a bit of fire in his belly. Perhaps he might make a decision or two based on gut instinct and deep conviction. In other words, maybe he should try being a bit more like Mr Bush.

The Return of the Inflation Tax

Fredo — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 11:22:48 GMT

Health-Care Bill Doesn't Index for Inflation; Hits Young and Rising Middle Class Hard - WSJ.com

The Return of the Inflation Tax
The Pelosi tax surcharge applies to capital gains and dividends.

All of those twentysomethings who voted for Barack Obama last year are about to experience the change they haven't been waiting for: the return of income tax bracket creep. Buried in Nancy Pelosi's health-care bill is a provision that will partially repeal tax indexing for inflation, meaning that as their earnings rise over a lifetime these youngsters can look forward to paying higher rates even if their income gains aren't real.

In order to raise enough money to make their plan look like it won't add to the deficit, House Democrats have deliberately not indexed two main tax features of their plan: the $500,000 threshold for the 5.4-percentage-point income tax surcharge; and the payroll level at which small businesses must pay a new 8% tax penalty for not offering health insurance.

This is a sneaky way for politicians to pry more money out of workers every year without having to legislate tax increases. The negative effects of failing to index compound over time, yielding a revenue windfall for government as the years go on. The House tax surcharge is estimated to raise $460.5 billion over 10 years, but only $30.9 billion in 2011, rising to $68.4 billion in 2019, according to the Joint Tax Committee.

Americans of a certain age have seen this movie before. In 1960, only 3% of tax filers paid a 30% or higher marginal tax rate. By 1980, after the inflation of the 1970s, the share was closer to 33%, according to a Heritage Foundation analysis of tax returns.

These stealth tax increases—forcing ever more Americans to pay higher tax rates on phantom gains in income—were widely seen to be unjust. And in 1981 as part of the Reagan tax cuts, a bipartisan coalition voted to index the tax brackets for inflation.

We also know what has happened with the Alternative Minimum Tax. Passed to hit only 1% of all Americans in 1969, the AMT wasn't indexed for inflation at the time and neither was Bill Clinton's AMT rate increase in 1993. The number of families hit by this shadow tax more than tripled over the next decade. Today, families with incomes as low as $75,000 a year can be hit by the AMT unless Congress passes an annual "patch."

The Pelosi-Obama health tax surcharge will have a similar effect. The tax would begin in 2011 on income above $500,000 for singles and $1 million for joint filers. Assuming a 4% annual inflation rate over the next decade, that $500,000 for an individual tax filer would hit families with the inflation-adjusted equivalent of an income of about $335,000 by 2020. After 20 years without indexing, the surcharge threshold would be roughly $250,000.

And by the way, this surcharge has also been sneakily written to apply to modified adjusted gross income, which means it applies to both capital gains and dividends that are taxed at lower rates. So the capital gains tax rate that is now 15% would increase in 2011 to 25.4% with the surcharge and repeal of the Bush tax rates. The tax rate on dividends would rise to 45% from 15% (5.4% plus the pre-Bush rate of 39.6%).

As for the business payroll penalty, it is imposed on a sliding scale beginning at a 2% rate for firms with payrolls of $500,000 and rising to 8% on firms with payrolls above $750,000. But those amounts are also not indexed for inflation, so again assuming a 4% average inflation rate in 10 years this range would hit payrolls between $335,000 and $510,000 in today's dollars. Note that in pitching this "pay or play" tax today, Democrats claim that most small businesses would be exempt. But because it isn't indexed, this tax will whack more and more businesses every year. The sales pitch is pure deception.

As for the Senate, instead of the 5.4% surcharge, the Finance Committee bill raises taxes on "high-cost" health care plans. But this too uses the inflation ruse. The Senate bill indexes its tax proposal for the inflation rate plus one percentage point. But that is only about half as high as the rate of overall health-care inflation, i.e., the rate of increase in health-care premiums. So the Joint Tax Committee has found that a Senate tax that starts in 2013 by hitting 13.8 million Americans will hit 39.1 million by 2019.

The return of the inflation tax demonstrates once again the stealth radicalism that animates ObamaCare. In the case of inflation indexing, Democrats would repeal a 30-year bipartisan consensus that it is unfair to tax unreal gains in income, thus hitting millions of middle-class Americans over time with tax rates advertised as only hitting "the rich." Oh, and the House vote on this exercise in dishonest government will come as early as Saturday.

Drawing parallels: Afghanistan and Vietnam

KEVWYO — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 04:15:59 GMT

Ran across this pretty good article in Newsweek. It's not an article trying to draw parallels regarding the wars so much as it looks at the similarities in the types of decisions that Johnson and Obama are faced with. The snip below is the concluding paragraph. I highly recommend the read.

Rereading Vietnam May Help Prevent Same Mistakes | Newsweek Politics | Newsweek.com

Obama's pronounced tendency is to try to find a middle ground, a compromise. He may try to find a way to send, say, 20,000 troops and ask McChrystal to make do. If so, he runs the real risk of repeating Johnson's mistake of incrementalism�of doing just enough (or so he hoped) to get the enemy to the bargaining table and to keep the hawks at home off his back. Hoping to muddle through only got LBJ stuck deeper in the mud. Afghanistan may not be Vietnam, but Obama risks repeating Johnson's mistake.

Why is our military still there?

fmfdocglock — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 15:07:20 GMT

Thousands of Japanese protest U.S. base plan | General News | Comcast.net

Thousands of Japanese protest U.S. base plan

GINOWAN, Japan � Thousands of Japanese gathered in sweltering heat on the southern island of Okinawa on Sunday to demand that a U.S. Marine base be moved out of the region, days ahead of a visit by President Barack Obama...........

What I want to know is why we still have troops in any part of Japan?

Don't they have their own money for defense?

Last time I checked we aren't the worlds police.

Let them defend themselves against China.

We don't need to be spending money on THEIR defense.

Pak's see taiban/ al Qaeda as threat but deny they could be culprit of terror bombing

KEVWYO — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 07:47:40 GMT

I don't understand how, on the one hand Pakistanis can see the Taliban and al Qaeda as threats to their society but be in denial that the domestic terror events are at the hands of fellow Muslims. Seems to me more Muslims die at the hands of Muslims than to the bullets and bombs of the coalition.

In Peshawar, denial over Taliban tactics - Washington Post- msnbc.com

some snips from the article:

PESHAWAR, PAKISTAN - When terrorists last week blew up the Mina Bazaar, a market for women and children, they detonated a car bomb so powerful it left more than 100 people dead and 15 missing in a nightmarish scene of scattered limbs, charred corpses and victims trapped alive under mounds of debris.

The bombing crossed a new line of callousness, uniting Peshawar in grief and fear and unleashing a tide of anger. But most of the outrage expressed by survivors, witnesses, religious leaders and other residents this week was not directed at Islamist extremist groups, whom the government has blamed for the attack, but at the countries many Pakistanis see as their true enemies: India, Israel and the United States.

In part, this reaction stems from a deep popular conviction that no Muslim could perpetrate such atrocities against other Muslims. The more egregious the attack, the stronger seems the tendency to deny a domestic cause and blame other, more remote culprits. Some religious and political groups are encouraging such responses, eager to whip up xenophobic sentiment for their own ends.

Shah Zamin, 35, who sells bales of raw cotton, said the stall ignited when the bomb exploded, engulfing his brother in flames. "I tried to save him, but his body was too hot to touch. He fell and died in front of me," Zamin said, grimacing at the memory. "I am certain that the Taliban would never do this terrible thing. It must be the foreigners, who want to give a bad name to Islam."

There was ample evidence, however, that the attackers had an Islamic fundamentalist agenda of keeping women in seclusion. Merchants sweeping out broken glass from women's clothing and sundry shops said unsigned posters had appeared in the bazaar shortly before the bombing, warning them not to sell cosmetics or display female mannequins.

"They brought us bags with arms and legs, bodies burned so badly no one could identify them," said Fauji, 45, a graveyard tender. The message asked mourners not to weep but to recite from the Koran. "This is the worst thing I have ever seen," Fauji said. "It must have been the work of foreign hands."

Welcome to Socialism

AZXD — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 04:10:10 GMT

The :twisted::evil: DemoCraps :evil::twisted: passed their bill

Islamofascism vs. Military Imperialism

TRIGRHAPPY — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 01:23:09 GMT

Quote:

The term "Islamofascism" is included in the New Oxford American Dictionary, defining it as "a controversial term equating some modern Islamic movements with the European fascist movements of the early twentieth century".

Quote:

Imperialism, defined by the dictionary of human geography, is “the creation and maintenance of an unequal economic, cultural and territorial relationship, usually between states and often in the form of an empire, based on domination and subordination.”

I believe this simplification is a very accurate depiction of the current conflicts between the middle east and the United States. Unfortunately, history is on the side of the Islamofascists.

Islamofascism is basically the desire to create a muslim empire that encompasses not only the current muslim countries, but most of the rest of the world as well. The main problem that it poses, however, is more similar to that posed by nationalism. It is the nationalistic similarities that make Islamofascism the strong foe that it is. If you attack one muslim nation, it is perceived by most other muslims as an attack on Islam. This is the primary problem we are facing......so lets seek to understand our enemy.

Ignoring the existence of a singular Federal government, this can be related to how other Americans would feel if the state of Virginia was being occupied by a muslim aggressor nation. Americans would overwhelmingly feel as if they too had been attacked, and it would be made even worse by an occupation and installation of an occupier friendly government. Add to that the headlines made occasionally of innocent Virginians being bombed, public perceptions of the torture of Virginians by the occupiers......and our unpopularity becomes easier to understand. This also makes it much easier for Virginians to recruit like-minded Americans to fight against the occupier. Every civilian bombing, torture image, and other perceived injustice at the hands of the occupier causes a wave of recruits that were once, more than likely, peaceful people.

Assuming that you do not live in Virginia (since you'd be biased), what are the top 2 things that you would want to see happen? Mine would be:

1) The occupiers get slaughtered
2) The occupiers leave

The deaths of occupiers would fill the "justice void" left in many peoples' minds, but the occupiers would either A) Leave or B) Stay and keep losing since people hate more, which causes more recruits to join the insurgent defense.

If the occupiers left, the waves of new recruits would cease. While I am sure that there will still be plenty of people left who want to harm the occupier, the waves of new recruits stop. Children will not be affected. They will not be raised in an environment where their brothers, fathers, and uncles were killed by the occupiers. They will have to be taught to hate, instead of hating the occupier because of the harm that they have done to them directly.

Quite simply, the only way to win the overall war is to leave. If your mere presence increases their strength, and drains yours, then is simply stupid to stay. If every airstrike kills 5 and creates 20 sympathizers, the moral aspect of the war becomes irrelevant.......the math is against you. (took this from another post). Leaving the war zones do not mean surrender.....it is a psychological war more than a military war. It must be fought psychologically.

So, lets come up with some ideas. Try to stay in the mindframe that I stated earlier. There is no United States government, only American state governments. Virginia has been invaded and occupied by a muslim nation. You have perceived the muslim invaders to have committed many atrocities while they occupied Virginia. However, they have just pulled all their forces out of Virginia.

How can that muslim nation now make you either not hate them, or reduce your dislike of them to the point where you would not seek to harm them.

Answer that question thoughtfully and sincerely, and we'll know how to win the war.

Stupid Politician Barbie Says "Math is Hard!"

afmo — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 17:44:55 GMT

Political Math

Quote:

This is pretty funny. Or horrifying. Depends on how you want to look at it.

Several days ago, I noted on Twitter that there were a lot of “saved” jobs that weren’t saved at all but actually cost of living increases. About 24 hours after I noted this, there was an Associated Press article about that very phenomena.

Coincidence? Almost certainly. But I’ll flatter myself anyway.

But the laugh riot comes several paragraphs into the article as they look into why Southwest Georgia Community Action Council was able to save 935 jobs with a cost of living increase for only 508 people. The director of the action council said:

“she followed the guidelines the Obama administration provided. She said she multiplied the 508 employees by 1.84 — the percentage pay raise they received — and came up with 935 jobs saved.

“I would say it’s confusing at best,” she said. “But we followed the instructions we were given.”

“Confusing at best”? The multiplication of percentages is “confusing at best”? It seems obvious to me she should have multiplied 508 people by the amount the increase (.0184) and gotten 9.3. But she forgot that you have to divide the percentage by 100 before you multiply.

The fact that she had “saved” more jobs than there were people in the organization should have been a tip-off. But this is a pretty common problem with people who don’t have a very good grasp on mathematics… they don’t recognize obvious mathematical errors, they just plug in the numbers and go with whatever comes out.

And this, children, is why you pay attention at school. So you don’t get in the national news for doing something really stupid and then blame it on the instruction manual.

Any guesses on how many of the "jobs saved" fell victim to this exact process?

No wonder our education system is a laughing stock.

This is almost as bad as Verizon Math.

OPPOSE the "health care" vote - TODAY

DarkStar — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 17:08:04 GMT

Then OPPOSE the thing. This is the FAX I sent this morning to ALL N.C. Representatives (not just my own) - Find YOUR Representatives contact info here: Member Web Site Listing (by State) - United States House of Representatives, 111th Congress, 1st Session and either PHONE or FAX them TODAY.

=========================================

Vote NO on the Rule to bring H.R. 3692 to the House floor.

Speaker Pelosi and the Rules Committee have broken the promises that Pres. Obama made that illegal aliens would be excluded from any part of a new federal health care plan.

"The loopholes that are being allowed in H.R. 3692 would be yet another major incentive for illegal foreign workers to break immigration laws to take jobs from American workers.

Representatives voting YES can expect their decision to be viewed as an anti-American-worker and pro-illegal-immigration action during the campaigns of 2010.

It is time that ALL of you stop catering to illegal immigrants and start serving the legitimate American citizens who elected you to begin with !

As one of those constituents, I DEMAND that you vote �NO� on the rule to bring H.R. 3692 to the House floor for a vote � and that, indeed, you vote �NO� on ANY government �health-care� plan.

I am sick and tired to death of being FORCED to pay for this Administration�s power-and-control-mad fantasies and outraged to-the-bone that you�re trying to destroy the economic future of both myself and my children by TAXING/�FEEING�/�FINING� us to death if we don�t all march in lock-step to your tune.

I promise you vocal, visible, personal, online and on-air OPPOSITION to your re-election should you not heed this warning and truly represent the wishes of the people who elected you.

I both expect and demand your further �NO� vote on any version of ANY �immigration reform� bill that comes before you � the legitimate American citizen doesn�t WANT �immigration reform�.

This country is a smoldering powder-keg � DO NOT SET IT OFF.

(Signed)

=============================================

I wouldn't wait to send it, either - they're liable to try to pull some kind shenanigans to get it passed sometime this weekend. Pete

What the Pelosi Health-Care Bill Really Says

AZXD — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 05:17:04 GMT

I sure hope someone can dispell all these rumors and show that Nancy and Co. really do have our best interests in mind as they decide our future :rolleyes:

Quote:

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.

Associated Press Protestors wave signs in front of the Capitol on Thursday.

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.

WH to Dem strategists: Stop making Fox so … balanced?

Fredo — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 03:47:00 GMT

Hot Air Blog Archive WH to Dem strategists: Stop making Fox so … balanced?

Quote:

WH to Dem strategists: Stop making Fox so … balanced?
posted at 2:00 pm on November 6, 2009 by Ed Morrissey

The White House has taken the war on Fox News to a strange new level. Bitterly complaining that the news channel does not provide a balanced presentation of the issues, the Obama administration has now warned strategists from the Democratic Party that they won’t work with them any longer if the strategists appear on Fox’s programming as guests:

Quote:

At least one Democratic political strategist has gotten a blunt warning from the White House to never appear on Fox News Channel, an outlet that presidential aides have depicted as not so much a news-gathering operation as a political opponent bent on damaging the Obama administration.

Political consultants are a staple of cable television talk shows, analyzing current events based on their own experiences working on campaigns or in government.

One Democratic strategist said that shortly after an appearance on Fox he got a phone call from a White House official telling him not to be a guest on the show again. The call had an intimidating tone, he said.

The message was, “We better not see you on again,” said the strategist, who spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to run afoul of the White House. An implicit suggestion, he said, was that “clients might stop using you if you continue.”

In urging Democratic consultants to spurn Fox, White House officials might be trying to isolate the network and make it appear more partisan.

For an administration that can’t make up its mind about strategy and resourcing in Afghanistan, they seem to have plenty of time to plot their offensives against Fox.

This shows that the Fox war isn’t about getting balanced coverage. The fact that they have to threaten fellow Democrats to bully them out of their media appearances on Fox just highlights the fact that Fox airs their views — which undermines their public argument about Fox. What they want to do is to suck up to the Fox-haters on the Left in order to give them a weird sense of power, apparently the only way they can do it, since the hard-Left agenda isn’t moving through Congress.

It’s counterproductive in another way as well. Their very public campaign undermines the credibility of those networks on which the strategists do appear. It’s no accident that Fox News blew away all of the other cable news outlets on Election Day this week, drawing more viewers than all of them combined. The White House has practically anointed them as the only net truly independent of the Obama administration, making the rest of the nets look like toadies. Chasing Democrats off of Fox News will only make that trend accelerate.

It’s good to see the White House interested in fighting someone. Maybe eventually they’ll get around to America’s enemies.

This picture explains so much

mirage2521 — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:18:20 GMT

House Minority Leader Lawrence F. Cafero Jr., R-Norwalk, pictured standing, far right, speaks while colleagues Rep. Barbara Lambert, D-Milford and Rep. Jack F. Hennessy, D-Bridgeport, play solitaire Monday night as the House convened to vote on a new budget. (AP)

The guy sitting in the row in front of these two... he's on Facebook, and the guy behind Hennessy is checking out the baseball scores.

Congress hard at work!

The myth of '08, demolished

Fredo — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 19:06:36 GMT

washingtonpost.com

Quote:

The myth of '08, demolished

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, November 6, 2009

Sure, Election Day 2009 will scare moderate Democrats and make passage of Obamacare more difficult. Sure, it makes it easier for resurgent Republicans to raise money and recruit candidates for 2010. But the most important effect of Tuesday's elections is historical. It demolishes the great realignment myth of 2008.

In the aftermath of last year's Obama sweep, we heard endlessly about its fundamental, revolutionary, transformational nature. How it was ushering in an FDR-like realignment for the 21st century in which new demographics -- most prominently, rising minorities and the young -- would bury the GOP far into the future. One book proclaimed "The Death of Conservatism," while the more modest merely predicted the terminal decline of the Republican Party into a regional party of the Deep South or a rump party of marginalized angry white men.

This was all ridiculous from the beginning. The '08 election was a historical anomaly. A uniquely charismatic candidate was running at a time of deep war weariness, with an intensely unpopular Republican president, against a politically incompetent opponent, amid the greatest financial collapse since the Great Depression. And still he won by only seven points.

Exactly a year later comes the empirical validation of that skepticism. Virginia -- presumed harbinger of the new realignment, having gone Democratic in '08 for the first time in 44 years -- went red again. With a vengeance. Barack Obama had carried it by six points. The Republican gubernatorial candidate won by 17 -- a 23-point swing. New Jersey went from plus-15 Democratic in 2008 to minus-four in 2009. A 19-point swing.

What happened? The vaunted Obama realignment vanished. In 2009 in Virginia, the black vote was down by 20 percent; the under-30 vote by 50 percent. And as for independents, the ultimate prize of any realignment, they bolted. In both Virginia and New Jersey they'd gone narrowly for Obama in '08. This year they went Republican by a staggering 33 points in Virginia and by an equally shocking 30 points in New Jersey.

White House apologists will say the Virginia Democrat was weak. If the difference between Bob McDonnell and Creigh Deeds was so great, how come when the same two men ran against each other statewide for attorney general four years ago the race was a virtual dead heat? Which made the '09 McDonnell-Deeds rematch the closest you get in politics to a laboratory experiment for measuring the change in external conditions. Run them against each other again when it's Obamaism in action and see what happens. What happened was a Republican landslide.

The Obama coattails of 2008 are gone. The expansion of the electorate, the excitement of the young, came in uniquely propitious Democratic circumstances and amid unparalleled enthusiasm for electing the first African American president.

November '08 was one shot, one time, never to be replicated. Nor was November '09 a realignment. It was a return to the norm -- and definitive confirmation that 2008 was one of the great flukes in American political history.

The irony of 2009 is that the anti-Democratic tide overshot the norm -- deeply blue New Jersey, for example, elected a Republican governor for the first time in 12 years -- because Democrats so thoroughly misread 2008 and the mandate they assumed it bestowed. Obama saw himself as anointed by a watershed victory to remake American life. Not letting the cup pass from his lips, he declared to Congress only five weeks after his swearing-in his "New Foundation" for America -- from remaking the one-sixth of the American economy that is health care to massive government regulation of the economic lifeblood that is energy.

Moreover, the same conventional wisdom that proclaimed the dawning of a new age last November dismissed the inevitable popular reaction to Obama's hubristic expansion of government, taxation, spending and debt -- the tea party demonstrators, the town hall protesters -- as a raging rabble of resentful reactionaries, AstroTurf-phony and Fox News-deranged.

Some rump. Just last month Gallup found that conservatives outnumber liberals by 2 to 1 (40 percent to 20 percent) and even outnumber moderates (at 36 percent). So on Tuesday, the "rump" rebelled. It's the natural reaction of a center-right country to a governing party seeking to rush through a left-wing agenda using temporary majorities created by the one-shot election of 2008. The misreading of that election -- and of the mandate it allegedly bestowed -- is the fundamental cause of the Democratic debacle of 2009.

letters@charleskrauthammer.com

Obama's reaction (or lack therof) to the Ft. Hood tragedy

Brickboy240 — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:52:32 GMT

Obama's Frightening Insensitivity Following Shooting | NBC Chicago

I watched his first televised reaction as well as one he made later that evening and thought the same thing as this article. Could he have given a sh*t less and acted more poker-faced and detatched? I don't think so.

You can rip Bush for his response during Katrina and I agree, the man let us all down after that event, but there was no denying the emotion and feelings Bush showed in the rubble after 9-11 and the following televised speech before Congress.

I swear, it seemed as if Obama was running late or could not be bothered and was reading his "response" from a prompter. These people are all about acting and deception...couldn't they at least faked some emotion and concearn?

...I guess not.

- brickboy240

Hope and Change - with the swine flu vaccine

Fredo — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:50:47 GMT

Crazy - I find a daily kos article I agree 100% with.

Daily Kos: State of the Nation

Quote:

Wall Street At Front Of The Line For H1N1 Vaccine
by BarbinMD

Thu Nov 05, 2009 at 06:36:12 PM PST

Words fail:

Quote:

Today, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) asked Health and Human Service (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to investigate why the Center for Disease Control (CDC) approved the distribution of the H1NI vaccine to Wall Street firms at a time when the vaccine is unavailable to most Americans.

Recent news reports indicate 13 companies, including Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase and Time Warner, have been cleared to receive the vaccine.

The CDC is distributing the much sought-after vaccine to Wall Street firms despite reports of vast shortages. In fact, just yesterday CDC Director Thomas Frieden informed Congress that only 32.3 million doses are available, far less than the 159 million needed to cover those at the highest risk. Given the scarce supply, the CDC has recommended the vaccine be directed only to those at highest risk: pregnant women, infants and children and those up to 24 years, those who care for infants, health and emergency services personnel, and adults with compromised immune systems or other chronic health problems.

Melanie Sloan, executive director of CREW said today, “Although CREW has been unable to uncover the demographic makeup of Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and JP Morgan Chase, it seems safe to assume the vast majority of their employees are not pregnant women, infants and children, young adults up to 24 years old, and healthcare workers.”

And file this under prove it:

Quote:

"Goldman Sachs has received 200 doses, and Citigroup has received 1,200, health officials said.

In statements, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs said the vaccine would only go to those in high-risk groups."

Anyone else find it hard to believe that Citigroup and Goldman Sachs are employing 1,400 "pregnant women, infants and children, young adults up to 24 years old, and healthcare workers"?

Wall Street wins out over Main Street once again. Whoever made this decision should be fired. Now.

Get ready for all the excuses....

photogbill — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:00:55 GMT

Well....the new unemployment figure in America has been announced ...and as expected ...it's now higher than the last report!

Somebody pass the popcorn ...now that the new figure has been reported to be 10.2% ...look for Obama, Gibbs, Nancey, and dirty Harry ...as well as the total cadre of Obama apologists to first blame GW!

The list of excuses will surely go on:

The stimulus wasn't big enough so we need another one!
We (the Obamination administration ...as well as 'the One' his holiness) warned us that things were gonna get worse before they get better!:rolleyes:
It's because of the insurance industry and their obscene profits!
It's because Obamacare hasn't been passed yet
It's because of evil provate business not being constrained by 'cap and tax'!
etc. etc. etc.

Feel free to add your own excuse to the above list! ;-)

Dr. Joe is in the house, I'd like to give him a shoutout

LittleDave — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:34:14 GMT

This is Bush in the child's chair.

Billy Jack in Washington

NVXD — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 07:00:00 GMT

YouTube - Billy Jack Goes To Washington Trailer

Yes Billy Jack in Washington, kickin heads and trying to do the right thing.

This movie from 1977, was produced by Tom Laughlin and its release was blocked by hollywood and Washington.

Where is our Billy Jack today?

NVXDRanger

MSNBC ripping on today's protest on the hill

psc — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 05:16:24 GMT

Olberman and Maddow teamed up this evening and were just beside themselves on tv tonite...good lawd...

1. They hit Baynor for saying the constituion has a preamble
2. They hit upon the signs in the crowd
3. They hit upon a gaffe when the Congressman goofed on the Pledge of Allegience
4. They were all over Rep Bachman for calling for a revolution
5. They called the crowd racist and a party of hate
6. They called it terrifying...inciting a climate of fear
....it went on and on...

Seemed like they are were almost scared--grasping at anything negative to diminish the overall intent of the event.

Idiots.

The 'Religion of Peace' Strikes Again

KingArthur — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:32:20 GMT

Quote:

Sources Identify Major as Gunman in Deadly Shooting Rampage at Fort Hood

Thursday, November 05, 2009

FNC

A map showing the location of a mass shooting at Ft. Hood Army post in Killeen, Texas.
A map showing the location of a mass shooting at Ft. Hood Army post in Killeen, Texas.

A shooting rampage Thursday afternoon at the Army's Fort Hood in Texas killed 11 and wounded 31 before the gunman was killed and two suspects taken into custody.
All three of the people believed to have carried out the shooting were soldiers, Lt. General Bob Cone told reporters Thursday evening, though the motive remains unclear.
AP cites an unnamed source saying the gunman was Major Malik Nadal Hasan, though authorities have not publicly identified him.
Cone said witnesses reported seeing more than one shooter, but that couldn't be confirmed. The primary shooter used two handguns, he said.
The shooting took place 1:30 p.m. Thursday at the post's Soldier Readiness Center, where soldiers undergo medical screening before being deployed or after returning from overseas.
"We have a terrible, tragic situation here," said Cone. "Soldiers, family members and the civilians that work here are absolutely devastated."
Cone said the injuries "vary significantly" among the victims wounded in the shooting. The victims include one civilian police officer.

George Stratton's son George Stratton III was five feet away from the shooter at the Soldier Readiness Center and suffered a gunshot wound to his left shoulder.
"He said he was there doing medical stuff and all of a sudden someone came through the door, walked behind the desk and just started shooting," Stratton told FoxNews.com.
He said about 15 rounds went off and people started dropping to the floor.
"He peaked up over the desk and that's when he was shot in the shoulder, and he just went down again. He said he saw one of his NCOs get badly shot," Stratton told FoxNews.com after talking to his son in the hospital. "After he got shot he told me, 'Dad, I got up, held my arm and took off running.'"
Stratton said his son was expected to be deployed to Afghanistan in January after going to basic training exactly a year ago.
"It's pretty hard to believe something like this happened," Stratton told FoxNews.com. "I think he's probably had his fill of war already."
Related Stories

President Obama called the shooting a "horrific outburst of violence" on members of the nation's armed forces. "It is horrifying that they should come under fire at an army base on American soil."
He said he doesn't yet know all the details but promised the government would get "answers to every single question."
Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison said the shooting was a terrible tragedy for all of the military families affected.
The base and area schools were on lockdown after the mass shooting, and all those on the Army post were asked to gather for a head count.
Covering 339 square miles, Fort Hood is the largest active duty armored post in the United States. Home to about 52,000 troops as of earlier this year, the sprawling base is located halfway between Austin and Waco.
FoxNews.com's Michelle Maskaly and The Associated Press contributed to this report

He was described by his cousin as a life-long Muslim who objected to the war and didn't want to be deployed.

PV moderation idea for Mark

mirage2521 — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:09:25 GMT

Mark, why not post a poll in the PV with a list of names that you put together 10-20 names and allow the forum members who post regularly in the PV to vote for 4-5 level headed fair-minded moderators. Leave the poll up for a week and go with the results. That would take the load off of you moderating this forum and it would allow the PV to continue to be the home of lively but moderated discourse. If the PV posters elected the mods then they would be hard pressed to find a reason to complain about the mods they themselves elected

What do the rest of you guys think of this?

Speaker Pelosi�s Government-Run Health Plan Will Require a Monthly Abortion Premium

AZXD — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 23:35:51 GMT

Found on another forum.

How many will want to pay taxes if this is passed ???

Quote:

http://republicanleader.house.gov/blog/?p=666

Quote:

Posted by GOP Leader Press Office on November 5th, 2009

Health care reform should not be used as an opportunity to use federal funds to pay for elective abortions. Health reform should be an opportunity to protect human life - not end it.

Unfortunately, Speaker Pelosi�s 2,032-page government takeover of health care does just that. On line 17, p. 110, section 222 under �Abortions for which Public Funding is Allowed� the Health and Human Services Secretary is given the authority to determine when abortion is allowed under the government-run plan. The Speaker�s plan also requires that at least one insurance plan offered in the Exchange covers abortions.

What is even more alarming is that a monthly abortion premium will be charged of all enrollees in the government-run plan. It�s right there on line 16, page 96, section 213, under �Insurance Rating Rules.� The premium will be paid into a U.S. Treasury account - and these federal funds will be used to pay for the abortion services.

Section 213 describes the process in which the Health Benefits Commissioner is to assess the monthly premiums that will be used to pay for elective abortions under the government-run plan. The Commissioner must charge at a minimum $1 per enrollee per month.

A majority of Americans believe that health care plans should not be mandated to provide elective abortion coverage, and a majority of Americans do not believe government health care plans should include abortion coverage. Currently, federal appropriations bills include language known as the Hyde Amendment that prohibits the use of federal funds to pay for elective abortions under the Medicare and Medicaid programs, while another provision, known as the Smith Amendment, prohibits federal funding of abortion under the federal employees� health benefits plan.

Speaker Pelosi�s 2,032-page health care monstrosity is an affront to the American people and drastically moves away from current policy. The American people deserve more from their government than being forced to pay for abortion.

House Republicans are offering a common-sense, responsible solution that would reduce health care costs and expand access while protecting the dignity of all human life. The Republican plan, available at HealthCare.GOP.gov, would codify the Hyde Amendment and prohibit all authorized and appropriated federal funds from being used to pay for abortion. And under the Republican plan, any health plan that includes abortion coverage may not receive federal funds.

notably, this is blog post # 666

Military today vs. yesterday

theg33k — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 18:08:24 GMT

This thread is sort of in response to one in the general discussion forum, but I didn't want to thread crap or divert that discussion so I thought I'd start my own.

http://www.xdtalk.com/forums/xdtalk-...e-teacher.html

I read that story and I completely get the message. I have the utmost respect for our men and women in military. I can't help feeling though that the military today is not fighting for my freedom and right to an education. Granted, their mere existence is a deterrent against those who would try to attack our soil and for that I'm supremely greatful. The *fighting* they do though, I don't see it as protecting really anything of mine. I do not believe, for example, that the men and women who are dying in Iraq are dying so that I can be free and educated. To the extent that some of the military force in Afghanistan is theoretically trying to find Bin Laden, those guys I can see that they're actively defending me... the rest? Not so much. I feel similarly about Vietnam and any number of other conflicts we've been involved in over the last few decades.

This is in dramatic contrast to the way I feel about the men and women who died in WW1 and WW2. It is clearly obvious to me that our nation, and indeed the entire world, was in danger of heading down a terrible path and they bravely fought to put an end to it.

Please don't misinterpret this as any sort of indictment of anyone in the military. There is nothing but honor involved when someone chooses to come to the call of our Nation. It is definitely intended as an indictment of our politicians. I feel they've cheapened military honor in the eyes of many and taken for granted peoples' sense of patriotic duty.

Anyways, please don't flame me. I'm just curious if anyone else feels this way about the way our military is used, or could perhaps provide some insight as to why I should feel differently about it.

Thanks,
G33k

Remember Remember

AZXD — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:52:44 GMT

Remember, remember the Fifth of November,

The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,

I know of no reason

Why the Gunpowder Treason

Should ever be forgot.

Happy Guy Fawkes day :mrgreen:

More of that infernal global cooling

KEVWYO — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 07:15:02 GMT

I'll let the article speak for itself.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/wo...ca/03melt.html

Mt. Kilimanjaro Ice Cap Continues Rapid Retreat
Stephen Morrison/European Pressphoto Agency
Mount Kilimanjaro's top, shown in June, has lost 26 percent of its ice since 2000, a study says.

The ice atop Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania has continued to retreat rapidly, declining 26 percent since 2000, scientists say in a new report.

Yet the authors of the study, to be published Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reached no consensus on whether the melting could be attributed mainly to humanity�s role in warming the global climate.

Eighty-five percent of the ice cover that was present in 1912 has vanished, the scientists said.

To measure the recent pace of the retreat, researchers relied on data from aerial photographs taken of Kilimanjaro over time and from stakes and instruments installed on the mountaintop in 2000, said Douglas R. Hardy, a geologist at the University of Massachusetts and one of the study�s authors.

The photographs measure horizontal shrinkage of the ice, and the stakes indicate the reduction in depth. Both are decreasing at the same rate, Dr. Hardy said.

Researchers studying the mountaintop, including those involved in this study, differ in their conclusions on how much of the melting could result from human activity or other climatological influences.
The lead author of the study, Lonnie G. Thompson, a glaciologist at Ohio State University, has concluded that the melting of recent years is unique.

In 2000 he extracted deep cylinders of ice from Kilimanjaro�s glaciers and found that the higher layers were full of elongated bubbles � signs that melting and refreezing had occurred in recent years.
There was no presence of the bubbles in the deeper layers of the cores, Dr. Thompson said.

If his dating of the ice core layers is accurate, surface melting like that seen in recent years has not occurred over the last 11,700 years.
But Georg Kaser, a glaciologist at the Institute for Geography of the University of Innsbruck in Austria, said that the ice measured was only a few hundred years old and that it had come and gone over centuries.
What is more, he suggested that the recent melting had more to do with a decline in moisture levels than with a warming atmosphere.

�Our understanding is that it is due to the slow drying out of ice,� Dr. Kaser said. �It�s about moisture fluctuation.�

But Dr. Thompson emphasized that the melting of ice atop Mount Kilimanjaro was paralleled by retreats in ice fields elsewhere in Africa as well as in South America, Indonesia and the Himalayas.
�It�s when you put those together that the evidence becomes very compelling,� he said.

Obama admits he is a muslim

Jazzman1 — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 06:15:37 GMT

YouTube - Obama Admits He Is A Muslim
Jazzman1

Terrorists die a death of terror

KEVWYO — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 06:10:21 GMT

The only thing that would make this better is if they would've died from a wild boar attack!

Wild bear mauls militants - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Wild bear mauls militants

Posted Tue Nov 3, 2009 7:23pm AEDT

Indian police have credited a wild bear for killing two senior militants in the disputed region of Kashmir, where insurgents have fought against New Delhi's rule since 1989.

The bodies of the rebels were recovered on Monday from forests in the southern district of Kulgam, a police spokesman said.
"The two had been mauled to death by a wild bear," he said, adding two rifles were found near their bodies.

The men - known by the names Saifullah and Qaiser - were members of the region's most powerful group Hizbul Mujahedin and had been active in Indian Kashmir for more than six years, police said.
Armed rebels in the Muslim-majority region often use the densely forested mountains as their hide-outs.

Gates may be the swing vote on Afghanistan

KEVWYO — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 06:07:16 GMT

Not a terribly controversial article. Just a good read on SecDef Gates. In keeping him on as SecDef I think we can all agree that is one thing Obama has done right.

November 04, 2009
Christian Science Monitor|by Gordon Lubold

On one of Bob Gates's first trips to the Iraq war theater after accepting the job as Defense secretary in 2006, he walked a dusty "boneyard" in Kuwait filled with row upon row of the remains of military trucks damaged by roadside bombs and seemed to hear the ghosts of the soldiers the trucks had failed to protect.

The vehicles, recalls a senior adviser who accompanied Mr. Gates, "looked like they'd been mangled by the hand of a giant child." The shredded metal seemed to be a reminder of the billions the Pentagon was spending on the war while failing to adequately protect its own troops � and Gates was intensely moved. Mary Beth Long, the official accompanying him that day, jotted down just two words about her boss: "silent" and "determined."
The episode reinforced for the secretary what had to be done. He went home resolved to put life-saving, bomb-resistant trucks in the hands of troops within months. And he did, in record time, by overhauling the Pentagon's byzantine acquisition process. Within five months, the Pentagon had sent nearly 1,200 of the new trucks to Iraq, thanks to an expedited acquisition program that shaved years off the process.
That moment of silent determination reflects the essential Gates � a reserved former Eagle Scout who has established impressive management muscle working his way through the ranks of the United States security establishment. He has changed a Defense Department steeped in its own inefficiency one $400 Pentagon hammer at a time � even one general at a time, firing them when necessary. And that low-key but powerful style is now on display in the Washington debate over what strategy President Obama should take to win the war in Afghanistan.

Indeed, Gates � a former intelligence analyst-turned-CIA director, a Sovietologist with an instinct for reading signs, a consummate Washington insider unstained by party ideology � is the man of the hour, considered the bridge between the Pentagon brass and the Democratic White House.
The Defense secretary's role in shaping Mr. Obama's policy in Afghanistan is seen as a swing vote among the president's counselors on the question at hand: Whether to send a surge of tens of thousands more troops to support the current counterinsurgency against the Taliban or to overhaul the mission entirely. Gates has almost certainly made up his mind. But unlike his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, who telegraphed his decisionmaking process through bluster and ideology, Gates is true to his spycraft roots, discreetly looking for signals to find the right way to play his hand with a divided White House.

FRIENDS AND FORMER EMPLOYEES make much of that contrast with Mr. Rumsfeld � whom Gates replaced during President Bush's first term. While Rumsfeld relied on a cadre of aides, Gates keeps more of his own counsel and has an enduring hunger for information. And that has helped stoke the suspense surrounding Obama's protracted decisionmaking.

Gates is a good example of the oft-cited Washington truism: The ones who talk, don't know; the ones who don't talk, do know. But Gates, who declined a request for a Monitor interview, has talked some about Afghanistan. In the past, he has expressed concern about the size of the American "footprint" � worried that too many forces could look a lot like an occupation. Yet he has also said that the long-term needs of Afghanistan � good governance, economic opportunity, and a strong indigenous force � won't magically appear without the help of the US military stabilizing the country. In recent days, he's dodged questions about just what the noises in his head are saying. Asked by a reporter on a plane with him to Asia late last month "where he was" on the troop surge idea, Gates talked about the legitimacy of the Afghan government. Two days later, asked the same question after a meeting of NATO defense ministers, Gates wriggled: "I was in a listening mode."

It's not that he's slippery, just self-disciplined, say those who know him.
"He's been inside the Beltway his entire life and he knows how to play the cards and when to play them, and he will only telegraph to the decider," says one retired senior officer who served under Gates. "Rummy had his circle of good buddies who were easy to identify. Don't know that about Gates."

The Defense chief is not given to snap decisions, recalls Rob McKee, who served with Gates on the corporate board of Parker Drilling Company before he was named Defense secretary. But he says Gates does act decisively after a genuine effort to get as many facts as possible. And, adds Mr. McKee, who served as an adviser to the Iraqi oil ministry between 2003 and 2004, Gates � a registered Republican � takes pains never to show his politics.

"Who he is, his track record, his style, his intelligence, his bipartisanship, his experience and his proven low-key leadership style all would argue that he would be a much more credible broker than just about anyone," McKee wrote in an e-mail. "I bet he's doing his best to help come up with as right an answer as is possible." And when he shares that conclusion with the president, he'll have great sway, says Sen. Carl Levin (D) of Michigan, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and an admirer of Gates: "[He] is going to have a major say in this because ... he has the confidence of the president, he has the confidence of Congress, and he has an extraordinarily important position in this decision."

LITTLE ABOUT GATES ON THE OUTSIDE betrays the astute student and dealmaker on the inside. By all appearances, he's as vanilla as they come: Stout and round-faced with precision-parted hair and a preference for white shirts, he has a nasal twang from his native Kansas. He goes in for jigsaw puzzles over sports, and has a strong taste for meat and potatoes sometimes even in the most exotic locales.

His other ravenous appetite, say aides, is for information � and he sets aside time every day to read (right now, says Gates, he's into Douglas Brinkley's "The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America"). He has a weakness for low-end escapist movies � such as "Iron Man" and "Wolverine" � but also recently saw and liked the more realistic "The Hurt Locker," about a US Army bomb squad in Iraq.
Gates himself jokes about the unassuming figure he cuts � once saying he was more like Austin Powers than James Bond when he flopped as a young spy and was funneled instead to the less glamorous toils of an intelligence analyst.

So inoffensive is his personality that even his political enemies seem to find no purchase for personal attack. But it wasn't always that way. Earlier in his Washington career, Gates was thought to have played an active role in the Iran-contra affair, derailing his first confirmation as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. But an independent investigation cleared him, and President George H.W. Bush renominated him in 1991.

Cracks in Gates's bland facade often reveal the emotional complexity that makes him tick. He's so intensely compassionate that he can easily become choked up or cry. He's not without ego, say those who work with him, and they notice that when he's loosened up � notably after his iron-clad rituals of predinner cocktail and postdinner "cigar walk" � he enjoys holding forth among groups of people, telling jokes or stories from his illustrious career, less interested in a conversational give-and-take than in his own thoughts. And his temper, while usually contained verbally, can come out in fierce glares.

It's not that Gates never makes mistakes. As a member of the national security team in the late 1980s, he was in part responsible for the US withdrawal from Afghanistan that, it could be argued, led to it becoming a haven for Al Qaeda. But he'll admit to his mistakes, as in a speech last year when he acknowledged the US failing � and his role in it.
"The voice of Bob Gates is not the voice of God � and Bob Gates is the first to acknowledge that," says one Hill staffer. His career arc also is full of that complexity. The Defense secretary now overseeing two war theaters not only served in the Air Force during the Vietnam War but also protested that war in a 1970 march against the Cambodia offensive.

Gates has served under eight presidents and turned down President George W. Bush's offers to run the Department of Homeland Security and later to be director of National Intelligence. He cited a reluctance to return to public life, but probably was awaiting a more important call.
He soon got it. After a bruising midterm election in 2006, Mr. Bush concluded that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld had to go, and Gates was wooed away from his post as president of Texas A&M University to replace Rumsfeld.

He portrayed himself as a reluctant hero � wrenched from what he called the best job he'd ever had. He often referred to the stopwatch a deputy gave him that counted backward to the day when the Bush term would end and he'd be free to retire once again, to drive his SUV in the mountains and wooded groves of the Pacific Northwest, where he and his wife, Becky, own two homes and have two grown children living nearby.
But herein lies a contradiction about Gates. As much as he says he loathes Beltway politics and society, it's what defines him. He often jokes that the first six months in Washington you wonder how you got there, the second six months you wonder how everyone else got there, and the next six months you spend trying to get out of there. Funny when he tells it in the right crowd, it sometimes falls flat with military audiences. Either way, it's pure Gates shtick: making a show of despising Washington, while quietly working the city as few can. At the same time, he shows genuine feeling for the troops. He personally handwrites letters to each family of those killed overseas. Like the episode in the Kuwait "boneyard," the secretary is frequently moved when speaking about the sacrifices of troops � whom he sometimes refers to as the "kids."

Ms. Long, a former assistant secretary of Defense, says Gates's leadership is unique in her experience: "He was not only a master of anticipating what the bureaucracy will do in a given situation, but on several occasions when, on a personal level, others were suffering, he expressed real sympathy and empathy."

There's much similar gushing across the capital about his abilities. Rumsfeld had so poisoned the well that Congress fell all over itself praising the new Defense secretary for his candor, integrity, and lack of combativeness. Though Gates may loathe Congress's lack of civility.
The Obama campaign liked what it saw and, after the election last year, the president-elect summoned Gates to a secret meeting at a fire station near Ronald Reagan National Airport to "re-up" the secretary. Accepting, Gates became the first Defense secretary in US history to be asked to stay on by a new administration.

Obama had promised during the campaign to draw down forces in Iraq and to fix Afghanistan. But if Bush turned to Gates as Iraq's "Mr. Fix-it," then Obama was turning to him to change the equation in Afghanistan.
Put simply, there are two poles in Washington: the counterinsurgency experts, or COIN-istas, who believe Afghanistan's deteriorating security can only be reversed by adding tens of thousands of troops � perhaps as many as 80,000; and those who believe US interests in Afghanistan are few, and the best way to keep it on a low simmer is to employ a counterterrorism-like model � using drones, bombs, and special forces teams to keep Al Qaeda at bay. The debate has become protracted, with military commanders like Gen. Stanley McChrystal politely urging the commander in chief to make a decision soon.

GATES'S SIGNAL TO THE DECIDER � Obama � will be decisive, say observers. His position will be informed by his own political instinct for timing, but also by his impeccably thorough listening process.
Richard Haass, a former senior director on the National Security Council, remembers Gates's knack for running a meeting. In his book "War of Necessity, War of Choice: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars," Mr. Haass, now president of the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote about Gates's leadership skills and noted that he would allow people to be heard � but not to filibuster.

"Bob Gates ran a meeting as well as anyone I've ever worked with," says Haass, reading directly from a page in his book. But Gates is fussy about preparation, demanding that his staff cancel a briefing if he hasn't been provided the right reading materials beforehand, says one senior officer who worked closely with Gates. "It would make him crazy." It's not the highest compliment ever paid to an individual, but in the world of Washington bureaucracy, it's high praise. And for Bob Gates, it fits. One of his chief roles is to demand accountability in a building peopled by career bureaucrats who know instinctively that they will outlast any civilian overseer � unless he beats them to the punch.

Gates has famously removed more than a half-dozen senior officers and civilian secretaries for underwhelming performance or just plain arrogance. Just ask Fran Harvey, the former Army secretary whom Gates fired over a Washington Post expos� of the squalid conditions of soldiers recovering from war wounds at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Harder for even some of Gates's most die-hard fans was the summary firing of Gen. David McKiernan. Gates handpicked him to be the top commander in Afghanistan. By all accounts a fabulous officer with skill, intellect, and integrity, McKiernan was an armor officer by trade, and Gates concluded that he lacked the knack for counterinsurgency and had to go. Few dispute that the mission needed a new kind of blood � but Pentagon brass watched in horror in their E-ring offices as Gates announced McKiernan's firing on live TV.

More often, Gates's style of accountability is far more mundane. Last year, for example, he sent a memo to the Army secretary's office and when he hadn't heard anything back by the deadline he'd directed, Gates sent the memo again. This time it had a message handwritten across the top that couldn't have been plainer: "Pete," Gates scrawled in black ink, "Why hasn't this been answered yet?" A staffer who worked in the office recalled the startled reaction: "It was like a grenade went off inside the office."

Gates wanted answers and he didn't expect to have to wait for them.
That instinct has won him friends and enemies on Capitol Hill after he pushed through a $534 billion reform budget this year that cut many sacred cows (the presidential helicopter with a kitchen) and forced the services to add other programs that weren't seen as critical (dramatic expansion of the drone program).

Gates has marketed his brand of reform with a message that resonates: Buy stuff to support the two wars in which the US is engaged � particularly for troops fighting in the field � and ease up on the massive spending the Pentagon has allowed for rainy-day wars, like one with China. His ending the production of the $140-million-a-copy F-22 Raptor stealth fighter was an oft-cited case in point. Arguing that the US didn't need more than 187 planes to fight a notional war when, with limited resources, the Pentagon should be spending money to fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Gates's version of common sense prevailed and he has � so far � successfully ended the program. Instead he has focused the Pentagon's budget on things that many believe it more apparently needs � like those bomb-resistant trucks he wanted that day in Kuwait.

At a recent Washington conference, former Republican Congressman John McHugh, Obama's pick as secretary of the Army, cracked a joke to introduce Gates: "When Bob Gates changes a light bulb at the Pentagon, it's the building that rotates."

Inside, Gates may have felt the joke rather apt. At the podium, he accepted the characterization without apology.

Glad I don't live in Cali

Dal1as — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 04:52:15 GMT

Is this even legal. How about they take the money for college grants for illegals kids, their education, and all the money going to social services for those illegal kids and put it back in to the system. This is ridiculous. More states will follow eventually. :rolleyes:

Political Deathmatch -> Torches & Pitchforks

When this starts happening in Texas maybe we'll see a civil war.

Deja vu all over again with our current war

Ed Ely — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 04:40:43 GMT

Together, Dan and I drink a cup
of java now and then. He sure
has a powerful story to tell here!

Guest column: Deja vu all over again with our current war: AMNews.com

Guest column: Deja vu all over again with our current war
By DAN NORVELL
Contributing writer
November 4, 2009

Forty-five years ago, I was stationed in Vietnam as a foreign aid representative with a non-governmental organization, and we were absolutely dependent on the United States Operations Mission, the umbrella organization for all U.S. government activities, for basic support like transportation and security. At that time, there were in South Vietnam more than 20,000 American military "advisers," many of whom were engaged in combat patrols alongside their South Vietnamese counterparts of the Army of Vietnam.

The administration of Lyndon B. Johnson, succeeding to the presidency upon the assassination of John F. Kennedy, gave USOM and the South Vietnamese government what amounted to a blank check to pursue the conflict with the insurgents, known as Viet Cong. The latter were supported by the North Vietnamese regulars.

The Tonkin Gulf incident, where supposedly a North Vietnamese patrol boat fired at a U.S. naval vessel in waters off the North Vietnamese coast, provided LBJ with the excuse to increase our involvement in the Vietnam war to more than a quarter of a million men. The rest, as they say, is history � a very dismal history which ended with thousands of American casualties and an ignominious defeat for the allied forces of America and South Vietnam.
The conventional wisdom � at least since World War II � has been that it would not be wise strategically for U.S. military forces to get bogged down in a land war in Asia.

Why then, did we allow ourselves to get embroiled in a land conflict on the Korean peninsula in the late 1940s and early 1950s, to suffer a bloody defeat in Vietnam in the �70s, and now to be involved in what seems to be an interminable conflict in Iraq, Afghanistan and areas of Pakistan in the early 21st century? U.S. General Dwight D. "Ike" Eisenhower was handily elected president in 1952 after promising during his election campaign to end the Korean conflict and cut back on military spending.

Unfortunately, that conflict ended in a stalemate without a peace treaty and periodic confrontations continue to this day.

No less an expert than recently deceased Robert S. McNamara, defense secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, wrote in his book, "In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam," that it was "terribly wrong" to get involved in the Indochinese conflict, and that by 1967 he had "lost faith" in America�s capacity to prevail over the Viet Cong guerillas. As for Afghanistan (where the Soviet Union suffered a humiliating defeat), U.S. General Stanley McChrystal, who favors a policy of more boots on the ground, indicated that it takes at least 14 years to conduct a successful anti-insurgency operation. Since the 1991 Desert Storm operation in Iraq, our military forces have been engaged in that area for nearly two decades, and one cannot say that the Middle East has been pacified.

How far are we willing to go with our democratic goal?

Further escalation with Iran and with al-Qaida, the Taliban and other hostile elements within Pakistan are looming on the horizon.

How far and how long are we willing to go in this effort, and what indeed is the goal? Making the world safe for democracy seems to be an unrealistic pipe dream. Can Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan be called democratic? How about our so-called allies: the kingdoms of Saudi Arabia and Jordan and the military dictatorship in Egypt?

Initially, we attacked the Taliban in Afghanistan to remove a sanctuary for al-Qaida, which took credit for the attack of 9/11. Somehow, we got side-tracked in order to chase down "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq and to remove Saddam Hussein. Pakistan has nuclear weapons, and Iran appears to be rapidly pursuing their development. Are we in for another round of chasing down those weapons of mass destruction?

Some say the whole thing is about keeping the oil flowing. At the same time, the "going green" politics at home and Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez�s policies have not helped the "flow." The extraordinary expenditures in lives and treasure in the Middle East may have done more damage to our economy and our stature in the world than it has been worth.
There are plenty of problems at home and within the Western Hemisphere requiring urgent attention, and keeping America safe for democracy is not at all a sure thing. The United States and the world might be better off if we all spent more time tending to our own knitting.

Dan Norvell, who retired to Danville after many years teaching in schools overseas, has a graduate degree in international affairs.

FYI

Ed

ELEMENTARY EPIDEMIC: 11 Uncovered Videos Show School Children Performing Praises to O

AZXD — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 20:47:25 GMT

ELEMENTARY EPIDEMIC: 11 Uncovered Videos Show School Children Performing Praises to Obama

The lyrics and background to the indoctrination are listed in the link.

Enjoy the brainwashing of our children by the progressive movement that is Barack Hussein Obama.

Killing the American Dream, One Child At A Time :twisted:

Quote:

Big Hollywood has already posted a couple disturbing videos of young school children singing/speaking praises to President Obama, but when eleven more dropped in our email box it came as quite a shock. What seemed like an aberration now appears to be a troubling pattern.

Maybe “epidemic” is a better word.

Each one of the videos below is creepier than the last because the further down you go, the younger the children — brace yourself for kindergartners – except for the last and most disturbing video, which you have to see to believe.

Young captive minds, easily influenced, eager for direction, enlisted into a cult of personality focused on an individual who, other than being the first black president, has yet to accomplish anything of significance.

But Obama’s skin color has nothing to do with this. Does anyone interested in retaining their merit badge for intellectual honesty really want to argue that Condi Rice or J.C. Watts would’ve spawned a dozen-and-counting tribute videos?

This is about brainwashing our children into Leftist identity politics. Sure, the schools can argue that they had some kind of parental permission — which, if true, is somehow even more disturbing — but who even considers doing something like this with young minds? That’s a rhetorical question.
There was some guesswork, but to the best of our ability the videos run from oldest to youngest, starting with high schoolers. We list the name of the school and the date the video was posted. From there, if it could be found (or a confident guess made), you’ll find the schools’ website, followed by the original title given to the video and any notes added by whoever uploaded to YouTube.

Each video has also been transcribed so you can follow the bouncing ball…

Click the link above, for details of each video

I guess this is what he was talking about earlier today.

Race to the Top and Higher Goals

FOXNews - ‎20 minutes ago‎
Obama and his Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, traveled to Wright Middle School in Madison, WI. Wright is a charter school with the highest population of ...
Obama Says Schools Must Tie Performances of Students, Teachers Bloomberg

Obama spends election anniversary talking education USA Today

Obama Touts Education Reform on Anniversary of Election ABC News

Someone should explain the difference between education and indoctrination, and then fire a few people.

Is this the government we've sworn to defend?

Frenchy — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 20:36:10 GMT

Somebody want to explain to me again what our mission there is?

Afghan policeman kills 5 British soldiers

By ELENA BECATOROS, Associated Press Writer Elena Becatoros, Associated Press Writer Wed Nov 4, 11:32 am ET

KABUL � An Afghan policeman opened fire on British soldiers in the volatile southern province of Helmand, killing five before fleeing, authorities said Wednesday, raising concerns about discipline within the Afghan forces and possible infiltration by insurgents.
The attack Tuesday afternoon came a month after an Afghan policeman on patrol with U.S. soldiers fired on the Americans, killing two. Training and operating jointly with Afghan police and soldiers is key to NATO's strategy of dealing with the spreading Taliban-led insurgency and, ultimately, allowing international forces to leave Afghanistan.
Attacks such as these will heighten concern about the effectiveness of the Afghan forces.
Lt. Col. David Wakefield, spokesman for the British forces, told Sky News that the soldiers had been mentoring Afghan national police and had been working and living in the police checkpoint in Helmand's Nad-e-Ali district.
"It is our initial understanding that an individual Afghan policeman possibly acting in conjunction with one other started firing inside the checkpoint before fleeing from the scene," he said.
A Helmand police official said authorities searched through the night and on Wednesday for the attacker. He said the man had been working as a police officer in the area for three years, and had passed through a police academy in Kandahar. The official, who spoke on condition his name not be used because of the sensitivity of the situation, said it was unclear what his motives were.
The attacker was on the roof of a police checkpoint and opened fire on the British soldiers, who returned fire. Six other soldiers were wounded, as were two Afghan policemen, NATO forces headquarters in Kabul said in a statement.
NATO said the attack was being investigated by NATO forces and Afghan authorities.
The British fatalities were among the largest in a single incident in Afghanistan. They brought the total number of British forces who have died in Afghanistan to 229. Britain has 9,000 troops in the country, the second largest force after the United States. Last month, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced plans to increase troop numbers by 500.
Former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah, who was the main challenger to President Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan's recent fraud-marred election, said the continuing violence showed the Karzai administration had failed to bring peace to the country despite assistance from international forces.
"As far as the presence of international forces in Afghanistan is concerned, eight years of golden opportunity we have missed. You were here. Your soldiers were here, and they have made sacrifices for bringing peace and stability to Afghanistan," Abdullah said during a news conference in Kabul.
"But eight years down the road we still need more troops. In the absence of a credible and reliable and legitimate partner, more soldiers, more resources" are needed, he said.
Presidential spokesman Humayun Hamidzada said it was an isolated attack.
"These are incidents that can happen anywhere. The crazy man who has done this has also attacked the Afghan police," he told the AP. "You can't use this isolated incident to say that there is a problem with the police force of Afghanistan. In the U.S., people shoot up people in a shopping mall. There are crazy people everywhere."
Karzai issued a statement condemning the killings and offering condolences to the people of Britain and the relatives of the soldiers.
The commander of international forces in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, said he discussed the shooting with Interior Minister Mohammad Hanif Atmar, who "gave me his assurance that this incident will be fully and transparently investigated."
"We will not let this event deter our resolve to building a partnership with the Afghan National Security Forces to provide for Afghanistan's future," he said in a joint statement issued by NATO forces and the ministry.

Atmar said the attack "appears to be an isolated incident."
Last year, Afghan policemen twice attacked American soldiers in the space of about month. In October 2008, a policeman threw a grenade and opened fire on a U.S. foot patrol, killing one soldier, while in September, an officer opened fire at a Paktia police station, killing a soldier and wounding three before he was fatally shot.
Peter Galbraith, the former top American official at the U.N. mission in Afghanistan who had called attention to fraud charges in the country's presidential election, told British radio that police training and recruiting had been "rushed" in Afghanistan.
"It is a terrible tragedy but it is, I won't quite say inevitable, but it is not surprising," he told BBC Radio 4.
"The process of police training and recruiting has been very rushed. Normally the police get an eight-week training course. That is actually very short and there isn't a lot of vetting of police before they are hired."
Such attacks have also occurred in Iraq, where U.S. and coalition forces are engaged in a similar process of mentoring and training the Iraqi army and police.
In February, two Iraqi policeman opened fire at a police outpost in northern Iraq, killing an American soldier and an interpreter and wounding three U.S. soldiers � the fourth attack since late 2007 with suspected links to Iraqi security units.
In London, Brown extended his condolences to the soldiers' families. "They fought to make Afghanistan more secure, but above all to make Britain safer from the terrorism and extremism which continues to threaten us from the border areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan," he said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091104/ap_on_re_as/as_afghan_british_troops

Dr. Stephen E. Frazer, MD view on Obamacare

ArmyGuy45 — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 18:25:17 GMT

An Indianapolis doctor's letter to Sen. Bayh about the Bill (Note: Dr. Stephen E. Frazer, MD practices as an anesthesiologist in Indianapolis , IN )

Here is a letter I sent to Senator Bayh. Feel free to copy it and send it around to all other representatives. -- Stephen Fraser

July 23, 2009

Senator Bayh,

As a practicing physician I have major concerns with the health care bill before Congress. I actually have read the bill and am shocked by the brazenness of the government's proposed involvement in the patient-physician relationship. The very idea that the government will dictate and ration patient care is dangerous and certainly not helpful in designing a health care system that works for all. Every physician I work with agrees that we need to fix our health care system, but the proposed bills currently making their way through congress will be a disaster if passed.

I ask you respectfully and as a patriotic American to look at the following troubling lines that I have read in the bill. You cannot possibly believe that these proposals are in the best interests of the country and our fellow citizens.

Page 22 of the HC Bill: Mandates that the Govt will audit books of all employers that self-insure!!

Page 30 Sec 123 of HC bill: THERE WILL BE A GOVT COMMITTEE that decides what treatments/benefits you get.

Page 29 lines 4-16 in the HC bill: YOUR HEALTH CARE IS RATIONED!!!

Page 42 of HC Bill: The Health Choices Commissioner will choose your HC benefits for you. You have no choice!

Page 50 Section 152 in HC bill: HC will be provided to ALL non-US citizens, illegal or otherwise.

Page 58 HC Bill: Govt will have real-time access to individuals' finances & a 'National ID Health card' will be issued!

Page 59 HC Bill lines 21-24: Govt will have direct access to your bank accounts for elective funds transfer.

Page 65 Sec 164: Is a payoff subsidized plan for retirees and their families in unions & community organizations: (ACORN).

Page 84 Sec 203 HC bill: Govt mandates ALL benefit packages for private HC plans in the 'Exchange.'

Page 85 Line 7 HC Bill: Specifications of Benefit Levels for Plans -- The Govt will ration your health care!

Page 91 Lines 4-7 HC Bill: Govt mandates linguistic appropriate services. (Translation: illegal aliens.)

Page 95 HC Bill Lines 8-18: The Govt will use groups (i.e. ACORN & Americorps to sign up individuals for Govt HC plan.

Page 85 Line 7 HC Bill: Specifications of Benefit Levels for Plans. (AARP members - your health care WILL be rationed!)

Page 102 Lines 12-18 HC Bill: Medicaid eligible individuals will be automatically enrolled in Medicaid. (No choice)

Page 12 4 lines 24-25 HC: No company can sue GOVT on price fixing. No "judicial review" against Govt monopoly.

Page 127 Lines 1-16 HC Bill: Doctors/ American Medical Association - The Govt will tell YOU what salary you can make.

Page 145 Line 15-17: An Employer MUST auto-enroll employees into public option plan (NO choice!)
Page 126 Lines 22-25: Employers MUST pay for HC for part-time employees AND their families. (Employees shouldn't get excited about this as employers will be forced to reduce its work force, benefits, and wages/salaries to cover such a huge expense.)

Page 149 Lines 16-24: ANY Employer with payroll 401k & above who does not provide public option will pay 8% tax on all payroll! (See the last comment in parenthesis.)Page 150 Lines 9-13: A business with payroll between $251K & $401K who doesn't provide public option will pay 2-6% tax on all payroll.

Page 167 Lines 18-23: ANY individual who doesn't have acceptable HC according to Govt will be taxed 2.5% of income.

Page 170 Lines 1-3 HC Bill: Any NONRESIDENT Alien is exempt from individual taxes. (Americans will pay.)
Page 195 HC Bill: Officers & employees of the GOVT HC Admin. will have access to ALLAmericans' finances and personal records.

Page 203 Line 14-15 HC: "The tax imposed under this section shall not be treated as tax." (Yes, it really says that!)

Page 239 Line 14-24 HC Bill: Govt will reduce physician services for Medicaid Seniors. (Low-income and the poor are affected.)
Page 241 Line 6-8 HC Bill: Doctors: It doesn't matter what specialty you have trained yourself in -- you will all be paid the same! (Just TRY to tell me that's not Socialism!)

Page 253 Line 10-18: The Govt sets the value of a doctor's time, profession, judgment, etc. (Literally-- the value of humans.)

Page 265 Sec 1131: The Govt mandates and controls productivity for "private" HC industries.

Page 268 Sec 1141: The federal Govt regulates the rental and purchase of power driven wheelchairs.

Page 272 SEC. 1145: TREATMENT OF CERTAIN CANCER HOSPITALS - Cancer patients - welcome to rationing!

Page 280 Sec 1151: The Govt will penalize hospitals for whatever the Govt deems preventable (i.e...re-admissions).

Page 298 Lines 9-11: Doctors: If you treat a patient during initial admission that results in a re-admission -- the Govt will penalize you.

Page 317 L 13-20: PROHIBITION on ownership/investment. (The Govt tells doctors what and how much they can own!)

Page 317-318 lines 21-25, 1-3: PROHIBITION on expansion. (The Govt is mandating that hospitals cannot expand.)Page 321 2-13: Hospitals have the opportunity to apply for exception BUT community input is required. (Can you say ACORN?)
Page 335 L 16-25 Pg 336-339: The Govt mandates establishment of=2 outcome-based measures. (HC the way they want -- rationing.)Page 341 Lines 3-9: The Govt has authority to disqualify Medicare Advance Plans, HMOs, etc. (Forcing people into the Govt plan.)
Page 354 Sec 1177: The Govt will RESTRICT enrollment of 'special needs people!' Unbelievable!

Page 379 Sec 1191: The Govt creates more bureaucracy via a "Tele-Health Advisory Committee." (Can you say HC by phone?)

Page 425 Lines 4-12: The Govt mandates "Advance-Care Planning Consult." (Think senior citizens end-of-life patients...)

Page 425 Lines 17-19: The Govt will instruct and consult regarding living wills, durable powers of attorney, etc. (And it's mandatory!)Page 425 Lines 22-25, 426 Lines 1-3: The Govt provides an "approved" list of end-of-life resources; & nbsp;guiding you in death. (Also called 'assisted suicide.')
Page 427 Lines 15-24: The Govt mandates a program for orders on "end-of-life." (The Govt has a say in how your life ends!)

Page 429 Lines 1-9: An "advanced-care planning consultant" will be used frequently as a patient's health deteriorates.

Page 429 Lines 10-12: An "advanced care consultation" may include an ORDER for end-of-life plans. (AN ORDER TO DIE FROM THE GOVERNMENT?!?)
Page 429 Lines 13-25: The GOVT will specify which doctors can write an end-of-life order. (I wouldn't want to stand before God after getting paid for THAT job!)
Page 430 Lines 11-15: The Govt will decide what level of treatment you will have at end-of-life! (Again -- no choice!)
Page 469: Community-Based Home Medical Services = Non-Profit Organizations. (Hello? ACORN Medical Services here!?!)

Page 489 Sec 1308: The Govt will cover marriage and family therapy. (Which means Govt will insert itself into your marriage even.)
Page 494-498: Govt will cover Mental Health Services including defining, creating, and rationing those services.Senator, I guarantee that I personally will do everything possible to inform patients and my fellow physicians about the dangers of the proposed bills you and your colleagues are debating. Furthermore, if you vote for a bill that enforces socialized medicine on the country and destroys the doctor-patient relationship, I will do everything in my power to make sure you lose your job in the next election.
Respectfully,

Stephen E. Fraser, MD

I know its all opinion, but this is coming from a doctor on what he thinks about the Bill.
I have read parts of the bill about illegals getting heath care and its sickening. I didnt realize that your employer is required to enroll you. Thats a new one.

Birther Update Part II!

Carnivorous — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 17:17:49 GMT

Not sure how I missed this one, but here it is: the long-awaited denoument of the Keyes v. Obama case (otherwise known as Barnett v. Obama).

And the result is....

Case dismissed. As expected.

'V' aims at Obamamania

LittleDave — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 13:44:40 GMT

'V' aims at Obamamania -- chicagotribune.com

Quote:

Imagine this. At a time of political turmoil, a charismatic, telegenic new leader arrives virtually out of nowhere. He offers a message of hope and reconciliation based on compromise and promises to marshal technology for a better future that will include universal health care.

The news media swoons in admiration -- one simpering anchorman even shouts at a reporter who asks a tough question: "Why don't you show some respect?!" The public is likewise smitten, except for a few nut cases who circulate batty rumors on the Internet about the leader's origins and intentions. The leader, undismayed, offers assurances that are soothing, if also just a tiny bit condescending: "Embracing change is never easy."

So, does that sound like anyone you know? Oh, wait -- did I mention the leader is secretly a totalitarian space lizard who's come here to eat us?

I was drawing the parallels while watching the first episode. I'll probable watch this series for a while, I was entertained.

The November 3rd Elections

TRIGRHAPPY — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 02:40:59 GMT

Virginia and New Jersey both went to Republicans.

Virginia:
McDonnell (R) wins Virginia .source.

New Jersey:
Christi (R) wins New Jersey .source.

New York 23rd District:
Owens (D) 15,724 vs Hoffman (C) 13,195 .source.

I'll edit as results come in. Mods, please feel free to edit this post if you have updates.

Virginia Gubernatorial Race

twitch1706 — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 01:53:20 GMT

At 8:41pm I received a text message on my phone from the Bob McDonnell for Governor campaign. It follows.

"With your support, we are proud to announce Bob McDonnell as the next Governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia! Thank you, we couldn't have done it without you."

Now for some numbers, taken directly from the Virginia State Board of Elections website.

(As of 8:44pm, 72% of precincts in)
Governor
Bob McDonnell (R) -799,655 votes, 60.52%
Creigh Deeds (D) - 520,259 votes, 39.37%

Lieutenant Governor
William T. "Bill" Bolling (R) - 737,906 votes, 58.53%
Jody Wagner (D) - 522,013 votes, 41.40%

Attorney General
Ken T. Cuccinelli II (R) - 759,189 votes, 59.46%
Stephen C. Shannon (D) - 516,606 votes, 40.46%

NJ race tight in early reporting

psc — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 01:37:52 GMT

Obviously way to early to read...but it's tight! Could be a long night for politico's on the East Coast.

Fox calls for GOP in Virginia!

psc — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 01:00:10 GMT

Excellent news! Congrats to VA.

Masterfleece Theater

hornshwangler — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:38:12 GMT

I seldom post here much anymore but thought given the continued abuse of our liberties by our corrupt to the core government, I'd like to call attention to a local hack writer of the Denver post, David Harsanyi, which I seldom agree with. However, Mr. Harsanyi has finally knocked one out of the park for me and inspired another batch of letters to my 'representatives' in congress. The article is linked here and included below a small portion of of my letter:

...
I object to the 1,900-page House healthcare bill precisely because it's 1,900 pages long. That's too much complexity.

I object because the word "regulation" appears in this bill 181 times, "tax" is there 214 times, and "fees" is used 103 times. I hate these words and I won't feel too good about you either if you inflict them on me.

I object because you're not going to read this bill before you vote on it, or sit with the federal code to look up and read all the parts of existing law that the bill will change.

I object because the bill will require federal bureaucrats to write hundreds, or even thousands of pages of regulations to fill in the details, and because I'll have to pay for lawyers and accountants, either directly or indirectly, to interpret and comply with this mess.

I object because many of my healthcare choices will be dictated by a "Health Choices Commissioner" and an "Inspector General for the Health Choices Administration." I won't be able to elect or fire either of these people, and I do not want them in my life.

I object because this bill costs too much, and because you're hiding the true cost in a variety of fraudulent ways.

I object because this bill contains numerous Trojan Horses that will eventually kill free market healthcare in favor of complete government control.

I object because it is increasingly clear to me that my supposed representatives really represent their own party leadership first, special interest lobbyists second, and me not at all.

Please stop to consider that this bill will be imposed on me at the point of a policeman's gun. If I do not want to pay for it, or comply with it, armed men will eventually knock on my door to force me to submit. Do not do this too me!

If you pass this bill, or anything like it, I will never forgive you.

Quote:

Masterfleece Theater - Reason Magazine
Reason Magazine

Masterfleece Theater

The Democrats say their health care bill will provide real competition. It won't.

David Harsanyi | October 30, 2009

The King James version of the Bible runs more than 600 pages and is crammed with celestial regulations. Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica distills many of the rules of physics in a mere 974 pages.

Neither of them has anything on Nancy Pelosi's new fiendishly entertaining health care opus, which tops 1,900 pages.

So curl up by a fire with a fifth of whiskey, and just dive in.

But drink quickly. In the new world, your insurance choices will be tethered to decisions made by people with Orwellian titles (1984 is only 268 pages!), such as the "Health Choices Commissioner" and "Inspector General for the Health Choices Administration."

You will, of course, need to be plastered to buy Pelosi's fantastical proposition that 450,000 words of new regulations, rules, mandates, penalties, price controls, taxes, and bureaucracy would have the transformative power to "provide affordable, quality health care for all Americans and reduce the growth in health care spending."

It's going to take some time to deconstruct this lengthy masterpiece, but as you flip through the pages of the House bill, you will notice the word "regulation" appears 181 times. "Tax" is there 214 times. "Fees," 103 times. As we all know, nothing says "affordability" like higher taxes and fees.

The word "shall"�as in "must" or "required to"�appears more than 3,000 times. The word, alas, never is preceded by the patriotic phrase "mind our own freaking business." Not once.

To vote for the bill, a legislator must believe a $1 trillion price tag is "revenue-neutral" or that it alleviates any of the pain higher costs bring to the average American. This would require alcohol.

Real competition, as far as anyone can tell, is antithetical to the authors of this bill. Remember, you can purchase oranges from Florida and whiskey from Kentucky, yet you're prohibited from buying health insurance from anywhere outside your state; so sayeth Nancy Pelosi.

Instead of the creation of a new market with interstate trade, what we would get is the institution of the pleasant-sounding "Health Insurance Exchange," which would exist, it seems, only to accommodate a noncompetitive, government-run insurance option.

Now, finding a name for a state-run program without offending the lingering capitalistic sensibilities of bourgeoisie has been problematic. So Pelosi went with the innocuous "consumer option"�known for a fleeting moment as the "competitive option" and popularly as the "public option." Whatever your preference is, it's the option that would lead to a single-payer insurance program.

Democrats say we could save billions by funding a plan that used billions of wasted tax dollars from another public plan that we already supplement with billions. Make sense?

In actuality, we would pay for all this by "cost sharing," or "sharing the cost" of insuring everyone through higher prices and taxes. But no fear. The legislation also would tax "the rich." The bill wouldn't index tax to inflation, so more of you would be on the hook as inflation rose because of the tragically irresponsible behavior of Congress and the White House. The rich�many of them small-business owners�are already set to see their federal rates go up in 2010.

Hey, who needs those jerks to create real jobs when we have Washington pretending to do it?

All of this, as Madame Speaker says, constitutes a "historic moment for our nation and families." True. No legislation in modern American history compares when in comes to injecting itself into the everyday decisions of the citizen.

And few can compete with its deception. The bill's intentions are cloaked in euphemisms, and it is teeming with ulterior motives, all cobbled together in closed-door meetings at which industry payoffs are offered using taxpayer dollars to facilitate a power grab of unprecedented cost.

All of it rolled right into a neat 1,900 pages.

David Harsanyi is a columnist at The Denver Post and the author of Nanny State. Visit his Web site at columnist and author of the 'nanny state' � david harsanyi..

COPYRIGHT 2009 THE DENVER POST

Interview of foreign service officer who quit over Afghan policy

KEVWYO — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 06:31:15 GMT

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Deja vu all over again

KEVWYO — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 06:29:40 GMT

The banking industry is going to take the economy down ... again. Of course regulating the banking industry so they won't engage in the same shell games that screwed the economy the first time seems to be a no-no to some. While some say the administration is dithering on making a decision on Afghanistan it's unbelievable that nothing has been done to clean up the banking industry/Wall Street.

New Market Bubble Is Brewing | Newsweek The Next Economy | Newsweek.com

"The reality is that no one can be sure when the private sector will return to health. A good chunk of the profit recently posted by major multinationals has been wrung from cost cutting rather than from new ideas and sales. Banks like Goldman Sachs have pocketed record gains in recent quarters in part because lucrative trading positions no longer attract as many big players, now that so many big players are dead. The risky plays that killed them are still legal because there's been no real cleanup of the world financial sector. Bankers are likely to rack up huge bonuses this year as a result of the echo bubbles, a ringing incentive to indulge the short-term thinking that everyone says is part of the problem. Trading in derivatives and other explosive assets is still largely unregulated, even as governments take on mind-boggling debts in order to shore up the financial systems those assets brought down. It's no secret who'll foot the bill for it all: private citizens and private business. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Vernon Smith puts it, "The Fed has reserved us all!"

More Ron Paul

psijac — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 04:59:50 GMT