Say Anything Blog

Hannitized’s pal Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is showing his moderation, demonstrating why we should talk with him and look for him to keep his word.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who says “scholars” have every right to question the existence of the Holocaust, now has described Israel as a “filthy black germ” that was set loose on the Middle East by those who wanted to “use it as a pretext” to have their way.

And he warned those who oppose Iran’s pursuit of nuclear power he no longer will “joke” about the issue. “We consider the [nuclear] issue a done deal,” he said.

He’s also steadfastly opposed Israel’s right to exist, and has urged Iranians to prepare for the coming of an Islamic messiah, the Mahdi, by turning the country into an advanced Islamic society and by avoiding the corruption and excesses of the West.

He said his nation’s pursuit of a nuclear program is “a done deal.

This is not a rational leader of a nation within a community of nations, he is mad with power, he has a bloodlust, he is a religious zealot of the worst order. Try and negotiate with him and appease him and he will take your freaking head off and say it is to the glory of Allah

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=57417

Sadly, the answer is yes.

The Republican Party is in big trouble. While we have some young prospects on the horizon, they are far from having the experience and skill sets necessary for a run at the white house.

Look at the democrats. Forget the issues for now and think about their depth of field.

They have two individuals running for the white house in Obama and Clinton. But in the wings they have Kerry, Bayh, Fiengold, Schumer, and of course, Gore. All of whom have some experience, are respected within their ranks and have had enough national exposure that they should be recognized and cherished by the left.

Other than McCain, the republicans have… who?

One obvious choice would be the often vilified former White House Chief of Staff, former Secretary of Defense and current Vice President Richard B. Cheney. But the general consensus (among republicans) is he has served his country well and is finished with his nearly forty years of public service.

Senators Inhoff and Kyle both considered to being divisive. There is a cadre of people like Snowe and Collins who are at best conservative democrats. We have the old, emphasize old, guard in Warner and Lugar. We have some recent draft picks, in Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Missouri Governor and Naval Academy licentiate Matt Blunt, neither yet tested nor refined.

Then there are the prominent and former plenipotentiaries of the past decade: Newton Leroy Gingrich, who now has boarded the Climate Change express and will soon jet-off with Richard Branson and John Travolta to underscore the need for a reduction in carbon emissions.  The un-absolved and bitter Chester Trent Lott who was castigated by even his own party for inoffensive remarks made to pay homage to an all but deceased colleague and his successor William Harrison Frist whose blandness was only slightly improved upon by his outward pomposity.

Then there is litany of Governors, who remain obscure until they run for a national office: Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi, native born Nebraskan and West Point graduate Governor Dave Heineman and the fiscally responsible South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford.

So the question remains. Who in the near future will the republicans have that can rally their base as effectively as the democrats have?

The drunken sailors on leave increased spending during Bush’s economic boom and now the states want the feds to send more money:

At a time when states like Arizona are grappling with billion-dollar budget shortfalls, the federal government is making matters worse by reducing assistance to the states for Medicaid and other social services, Gov. Janet Napolitano told a U.S. Senate panel Tuesday.

Even the economic-stimulus package recently approved by the Democrat-led Congress figures to cost about two dozen states, excluding Arizona, nearly $2 billion this year and next because of corresponding reductions in state corporate and individual income-tax revenues.

So letting citizens of the states keep more of their own money is preventing the states themselves of taking more of it. The states have a right to that money damn it, so the Feds better offset it.

...This fiscal year alone, 18 states face budget shortfalls totaling $14 billion. It gets worse for fiscal 2009, with 21 states projecting shortfalls in excess of $32 billion. For Arizona, Napolitano expects a $1.15 billion shortfall this year, $1.7 billion next.

“States are left with the very real problems of service delivery - educating children, maintaining roads and providing health care - at the same time that we must cut our budgets to compensate for dramatic declines in revenue,” the Arizona Democrat told the panel.

Complicating matters, as commonly happens when the economy slows, states are seeing increased demand for food stamps and unemployment assistance.

But Steve Voeller, president of the conservative Arizona Free Enterprise Club, said any similar federal bailout would serve only to “cover up the fact that the state simply spent too much money on all sorts of things when times were good.”

“Asking for $12 billion in new state spending to provide ‘economic stimulus’ is like telling a drunk to sober up by heading down to the local tavern,” Voeller continued.

While the federal government ponders funding cuts for Medicaid and other state needs, it has already heaped additional costs onto local governments. Napolitano provided a laundry list of complaints:

• Federal funding for homeland-security grants is down by more than half from fiscal 2005.

On the upside, we have not been attacked in 6.5 years and most of the spending increase was in response to 9-11 and much of misguided.  Blame Bush for this for keeping America safe using wiretaps, intelligence, and purging Afghanistan and Iraq of their terror supporting regimes.

• Arizona is owed more than $400 million through a federal program to reimburse states for their costs in jailing illegal immigrants.

Yet Arizona is seeing real progress in the number of illegals in the state simply by enacting employer sanctions laws.  Plus Arizona has stopped spending on entitlements for illegals.  Prop 300 did that.  Surely that money helps offset the cost of jailing illegals.

• The states have received less than $100 million to assist with implementation of a national identification card known as REAL ID. Costs to develop and operate the system range between $3.9 billion and $11 billion over five years.

Dems will fix that when Hillary is elected.  The ACLU was against REAL ID in the first place.  Wait, I guess if we stop he REAL ID, we might have to increase funding for Homeland Security after the terrorists attack us again.

One of Congress’ biggest spending hawks, Rep. Jeff Flake, told The Arizona Republic, “States have a legitimate gripe with the federal government with regard to unfunded mandates, particularly the costs related to illegal immigration.”

But the Arizona Republican added that “Congress may be reluctant to bail the states out when many of them, including Arizona, have been on a spending binge over the last few years.”

So let us build a border fence and states should enact laws like Arizona’s Prop 300.  Illegals are fleeing our state.  Bet that helps huh.

never been a fan of Bob Barker…

Bob Barker Donates Money for Animal Rights Class
February 26, 2008

On February 11, former game show host Bob Barker donated $1 million towards the creation of an undergraduate animal ethics class at Drury University in Springfield, Missouri.

Barker, a 1947 graduate of the University has been a long-time advocate of animal rights and spent several months coordinating the class structure with Patricia McEachern, an associate professor of French at the university.

This is not the first time Barker has pushed the animal rights agenda.  Barker hosted the Miss USA pageant in 1987, and asked producers to stop using fur coats.  He resigned from hosting the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants a year later when producers would not stop using fur coats as prizes.

The course will study animal ethics through religion, environment, criminology, philosophy, biology and law.  It will be offered as a semester-long class beginning in either fall of 2009 or spring of 2010.  Various pro-animal rights faculty are enthusiastic about teaching the new course. 

After reading several threads on Say anything about how Barack Obama is the “inevitable candidate”, I felt I needed to point something out. If the trends continue as they have been, Hillary Clinton will become candidate.

Clinton and Obama will probably split the Texas delegates, 93-90 (Obama) and the Ohio delegates 70-56 (Clinton, some undecided-most likely to go to Clinton).

Given that the superdelegates have been going to Hillary at a rate of between 4-5 to Obama’s 3, Hillary is still the nominee given any way you look at the polls.

If the super delegates continue to vote the same way they have been, Obama doesn’t have a chance unless he starts beeing Hillary in 70-30 margins.

On a bit more serious note on the “global warming” front, we have this:



Notice the near total absence of sun spots.

Then we have this:

Sunspot Cycle Predictions Solar physicists believe the speed of a massive circulating current of hot plasma within the Sun predicts the amplitudes of sunspot cycles approximately twenty years into the future. In recent years that speed has become lower than ever before observed. Based on the plasma-speed/future-cycle-amplitude theory, a team led by physicist Mausumi Dikpata of the National Center for Atmospheric Research predicts Cycle 24 will be intense. NASA solar physicist David Hathaway agrees, but predicts Cycle 25 will be extraordinarily weak. Dikpati’s team prediction for Cycle 24 is shown above in pink. Hathaway’s Cycle 24 and 25 predictions are shown in red.

Finally, there is this, the real punchline: “Solar Activity Diminishes; Researchers Predict Another Ice Age”

Global Cooling comes back in a big way

Dr. Kenneth Tapping is worried about the sun. Solar activity comes in regular cycles, but the latest one is refusing to start. Sunspots have all but vanished, and activity is suspiciously quiet. The last time this happened was 400 years ago—and it signaled a solar event known as a “Maunder Minimum,” along with the start of what we now call the “Little Ice Age.”

It may be a bit premature to be purchasing an extra pair of wool pants, or perhaps a fur coat, but still this is rather disconcerting news.

Wonder how Al Gore will respond to this one?

A 2005 technical analysis found that up to 1,000 days of e-mails were missing from White House servers during a 2-1/2 year period, amounting to more than 1 million separate e-mail messages, according to statements from a former White House technology manager released today.

Steven McDevitt also said in written answers to questions from a House committee that the White House’s e-mail system was so “primitive” that there was a high risk that data would be lost.

McDevitt, who formerly oversaw many of the White House’s computer systems, said he oversaw a wide-ranging study that found e-mail missing for hundreds of days from January 2003 through August 2005. He also told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that security was so lax that e-mail could be modified by anyone on the computer network until the middle of 2005.

The accounting scandal now haunting the National Republican Congressional Committee was preceded by a series of decisions over the past decade to relax internal financial controls at the committee, according to numerous Republican sources familiar with the NRCC’s operations during those years.

…These changes gave committee staffers more freedom to spend money quickly and react to a shifting political landscape during heated campaign battles, and House Republicans were able to claim larger majorities after the 2000, 2002 and 2004 elections.

… the actions also may have contributed to a perceived lack of oversight within the NRCC, especially over financial records, a failure that outside observers blame for an accounting scandal that could go much deeper than the allegedly forged audit a former treasurer sent to the committee’s principal lender in January. NRCC officials contacted the FBI soon after discovering that the former employee, Christopher J. Ward, had submitted what they believe to be a fake internal audit to Wachovia as part of a loan application by the committee.

WASHINGTON, Feb 25 (Reuters) - The United States expects to have 140,000 troops in Iraq in July after withdrawing five combat brigades, leaving a force larger than before it began pouring in troops last year, the Pentagon said on Monday.

“These force posture levels are truly conditions based and driven by the mission requirements and the assessments of commanders on the ground,” Ham said at a Pentagon briefing.

...There were some 132,000 U.S. troops in Iraq before President George W. Bush ordered a surge of about 30,000 more to curb rampant violence that threatened to plunge the country into all-out civil war.

After 6 ½ years of occupation we need more troops than before the surge because we are winning. Just look at the force posture levels that are truly conditions based and driven by the mission requirements and the assessments of commanders on the ground.

Move_Zig posted on Net Neutrality earlier today and linked to this article from The Nation:

And so, unless there’s some effective opposition, the several-headed vendor that now sells us nearly all our movies, TV, radio, magazines, books, music and web services will soon be selling us our daily papers, too—for the major dailies have, collectively, been lobbying energetically for that big waiver, which stands to make their owners even richer (an expectation that has no doubt had a sweetening effect on coverage of the Bush Administration). Thus the largest US newspaper conglomerates—the New York Times, the Washington Post, Gannett, Knight-Ridder and the Tribune Co.—will soon be formal partners with, say, GE, Murdoch, Disney and/or AT&T; and then the lesser nationwide chains (and the last few independents) will be ingested, too, going the way of most US radio stations. America’s cities could turn into informational “company towns,” with one behemoth owning all the local print organs—daily paper(s), alternative weekly, city magazine—as well as the TV and radio stations, the multiplexes and the cable system. (Recently a federal appeals court told the FCC to drop its rule preventing any one company from serving more than 30 percent of US cable subscribers; and in December, the Supreme Court refused to hear the case.) While such a setup may make economic sense, as anticompetitive arrangements tend to do, it has no place in a democracy, where the people have to know more than their masters want to tell them.

So let’s look at the single biggest beef that prompted the Net Neutrality movement in more detail. 

This article lays out the problems that cable customers are having with their data downloads:

Markey filed a bill along with U.S. Rep. Charles Pickering (R- Miss.) in support of Net neutrality, the idea that network providers shouldn’t discriminate against Web sites or various types of traffic. The FCC is investigating complaints that Comcast Corp. has interfered with peer-to-peer traffic associated with file-sharing sites…

“Respect for the free flow of information was bred into our country from its founding,” said Commissioner Jonathan S. Adelstein. “We must preserve the open and neutral character of the Internet, which has been its hallmark from the very beginning. It is clear consumers don’t want the Internet to be a another version of old media dominated by a number of giants.”

Gilles BianRosa, CEO of Vuze Inc., a video service that uses peer-to-peer technology, said that while his company competes with Comcast in the delivery of content, the latter company holds an unfair advantage. “What we have here is a horse race, and Comcast owns the racetrack,” he said. “I agree the market should decide which services win ... but there is no market without basic ground rules and transparency. ... We believe corporate assurances of good faith are not enough.”...

“This hearing is not about technical details of managing networks; it’s about the future of online TV and the Internet,” Ammori said. “By targeting P2P, Comcast is disrupting investment and innovation in its online competition.”...

“Comcast does not block any Web site, application or protocol, including P2P. Period,” he said. He said that the company “manages” protocols, such as P2P, during limited periods of heavy traffic; does so in limited geographic areas; only manages uploads, not downloads; and delays, but does not block requests for uploads.

Comcast isn’t some standalone company.  It is part of a mega-corporate holding company with AT&T:

Comcast was first incorporated in the state of Pennsylvania in 1969. On November 18, 2002, Comcast and AT&T Broadband combined to form the new Comcast Corporation.

Now, let’s put this in perspective.  What if DirecTV was owned by Viacom and Viacom decided that it wanted to promote its networks on its own system.  In order to do that, they refused to carry HD Feeds of other networks.  Therefore, those other networks were of inferior quality.  And they went one step further, they purposely degraded the signal of their competitors.  Suddenly viewership for CBS and CBS News increased while NBC, ABC and so on suffered because CBS was higher quality.

That is what Comcast is doing.  They are effectively degrading peer to peer communications and other communications on their network so that they free up the bandwidth for their own multimedia services.  They are pushing their content onto consumers by ensuring that their content is of higher quality than the competition.

The idea of net neutrality is that of packet neutrality.  Packets from one source get treated the same as other packets.  Peer to peer packets get treated the same as packets intended for Amazon or Comcast or E-Bay or Sayanythingblog.com.  Net neutrality prevents ISPs from degrading services for sites or protocol in favor of their preferred protocols.

Considering that AOL-Time Warner is one of the largest cable internet providers, how would you like it if AOL-TW degraded users’ connections when they tried to access content from Viacom and vice versa?  Do you want AOL-Time Warner or Comcast or any other ISP discriminating against packets that they don’t like?

Move_Zig was really off the mark to compare this to the Fairness Doctrine or Hillary’s previous remarks.

Arizona’s Senate is debating a new law to combat college shootings:

Legislation that would allow people to carry guns on Arizona community-college or public-university campuses advanced Monday, 11 days after a gunman killed five people and himself in an Illinois university lecture hall.

Members of the Republican-led Senate Judiciary Committee passed the legislation along a party-line 4-3 vote. Democratic senators Ken Cheuvront, Albert Hale and Richard Miranda voted no.

Senate Bill 1214, which would allow concealed-weapons permit holders to carry a gun at community colleges and Arizona’s three public universities, next heads to the Senate Rules Committee.

Gun owners must be 21 or older to obtain a permit.

Sen. Karen Johnson, the bill’s lead sponsor, originally introduced legislation that would allow guns at all schools, including elementary, middle and high schools. But facing pressure from some Republican colleagues, the senator was forced to narrow the bill’s scope to apply only to higher-education institutions.

“It’s not the bill that I wanted because I still feel our little kindergartners are sitting there as sitting ducks,” said Johnson, a Mesa Republican and Judiciary Committee member. But she added that the revised bill has a better chance of moving forward...

Police chiefs from Arizona's three public universities - Arizona State University, University of Arizona and Northern Arizona University - said allowing guns on campuses could create greater confusion and lead to the loss of additional innocent lives when police respond to a school shooting. Officers could shoot the wrong person, they said.

In short--HELL YEAH.  I want my kids safe.  This law does more to ensure their safety than all the “Zero Tolerance” bans could ever accomplish.

And I like the idea of allowing guns in all schools, not just colleges.

Welcome to Texas.  You wanna start shooting people, you might get a few rounds off before your ass is done.  Over.  Toast.  Makes you think twice about a shooting rampage at a school.

But the last part about police chiefs' concerns that they might shoot the wrong person--ok, shoot the one person that is going to be pointing a gun at police when they arrive 15 minutes after the rampage started. In actuality, that person will already have committed suicide or if the other students are armed, he/she will be dead. Then all the police need to do is say "put your weapon on the ground". The chiefs are basically saying that their officers are incapable of distinguishing between a murderer with a weapon and your average law abiding citizen with a weapon who responds to commands and doesn't point it at police.

That really says something about the competence of police. I am glad that they are there to keep us all safe. It sure worked at VA Tech and at Northern Illinois.

MC-CAIN/NEW YORK TIMES NEO-CON COLLUSION

New York Times Neo-Con/Neo-Lib propagandists achieved publicity for themselves; and Neo-Con McCain gained greater notoriety for himself. Was this not just another clever political collusion among these notorious Neo-Cons, hatched in the devious mind of political trickster Charlie Black? Clearly, by hook or by crook these Neo-Cons/Neo-Libs insanely intend to win the American Cultural War against the Reagan Conservatives and Kennedy Liberals, even at the risk of self-destruction.

The Marxist Bolsheviks partially succeeded for several decades in the Russian Cultural War; but Marxists completely failed in Germany, France, Italy, Greece, and Spain. Will the Neo-Marxist Neo-Cons/Neo-Libs succeed in America, or ultimately suffer the same catastrophic fate as in Europe.

The Cultural War is a experimental test of the United States Constitution, as intentionally designed by the Founding Fathers to preserve a government “by the People and for the People” by violent revolutionary means, whenever necessary to secure their Liberty against tyranny. 

Google: Mearsheimer Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy; Stricherz Why the Democrats are Blue; Wall Street Journal McCain-Feingold; Human Events Ron Paul Interview; Who Would the World Elect.

MC-CAIN RISES FROM THE DEAD, TRANSFORMED FROM PODHORETZ NEO-CON TO REAGAN CONSERVATIVE

  McCain has miraculously acquired expertise in macro-economics from Neo-Con strategist Charlie Black. Watch closely for other miraculous signs of Neo-Con McCain’s blooming intellect and born again morality in the months ahead; on the subjects of Christianity, Founding Fathers, and Constitution;  as Black magically transforms him overnight from a Podhoretz Neo-Con into a Reagan Conservative.
  Black supposes that the vast majority of trusting Americans are so easily tricked, by Judas ministers bought for 10 pieces of silver, that they will then flock like fools to McCain, as their messiah president; but this clever trickster supposes erroneously, for while he is scheming and plotting, the Reagan Conservatives are moving to condemn McCain to the Republican firing squad, for his notorious record of insane treason against Christian morality and Constitutional Law.

WHO CONTROLS THE PAST CONTROLS THE FUTURE

WHO CONTROLS THE PRESENT CONTROLS THE PAST

Statists very rarely come right out and admit that they are Statists, or any kid of ‘ist’ for that matter.  They will identify themselves and/or their agendas under some pink fuzzy bunny camouflage term, often diametrically opposed to what the true intended effect of what their program really entails.

Net Neutrality is to the internet what Hush Rush legislation is to Talk Radio.

It is helpful to recall how incensed the then First Lady Hillary was when the Lewinsky scandal broke.  It broke on the internet on the DrudgeReport’s website, and not in Newsweek, which is alleged to have spiked (refused to publish) the story.

We are all going to have to rethink how we deal with (the Internet), because there are all these competing values ... Without any kind of editing function or gatekeeping function, what does it mean to have the right to defend your reputation?

No doubt Gore and Kerry will sit on neighboring barstools, drinking umbrellaed girly drinks commiserating over how FreeRepublic or Swiftboat Veterans did them in. 

Obviously, the internet needs to be controlled.

Luckily for them, aside from Talk Radio, it is about the last bastion of Free Speech.  Consider that the vast unwashed masses get their programming (and I do mean programming) from television, and a vast proportion of television is owned by a handful of multinational corporations, it cannot be said that television news is free or neutral.

Links

What’s Wrong With This Picture? (2001)

Who Controls the Media? (NOW)

The Big Ten (Flash)

By Brian M. Carty, MD, MSPH

February 6, 2008

Defendants acquitted by Canadian court in tainted blood case.

Fearful of offending the gay community, the Canadian Red Cross refused to exclude male homosexuals, many infected with HIV, from blood donation in the 1980s.

Famous for their blended whiskeys, Canadians mixed politics, public health, and political correctness in the 1980s with deadly results, namely infections transmitted by contaminated blood and blood products. So far, the accused have escaped jail terms. On October 1, 2007, a Toronto court acquitted four doctors and an American drug company of charges of knowingly distributing HIV and hepatitis C contaminated blood products in the 1980s.

One of the defendants acquitted on Oct. 1, Dr. Roger Perrault, former medical director of the Canadian Red Cross, then faced additional criminal charges in a trial set to begin in Hamilton, Ontario. However, the prosecutor dropped these charges on Friday, January 18, 2008, stating that there was not a reasonable chance of a conviction. Victims of the tainted blood disaster were furious.

Blood system screw-ups infect thousands.

The recent trial involved contaminated blood clotting products given to a group of patients with hemophilia in 1986 and 1987, but there were many other errors in the Canadian blood system in the 1980s. Together, these errors caused thousands of hepatitis C and HIV infections. Many victims who are still alive are terminally ill.

[...]

Curiously, the affair has received no coverage in the American medical literature and virtually none in the lay press, aside from brief accounts of the recent verdicts given with few details and no explanation of the causes of the disaster. In fact, in the US, little media attention is given to the defects of the Canadian health care system, often praised as a desirable alternative to our own.

[...]

Political correctness produces fatal results.

For example, fearful of offending the gay community, the Canadian Red Cross refused to exclude male homosexuals, many infected with HIV, from donating blood in the mid 1980s. The US began to exclude male homosexuals, Haitians, and other donors likely to be infected with HIV in March 1983. This was standard practice in virtually all developed countries at the time. Canadian blood banks, however, did not consistently exclude high risk donors until more than 2 years later. Many Canadian transfusion recipients were thus infected with HIV.

Senior Canadian Red Cross officials not only failed to take measures to exclude high risk donors; they actually ordered local Red Cross medical directors not to exclude such donors.

Even so, some blood system employees were unwilling to sacrifice the lives and health of transfusion recipients in order to avoid offending political interest groups. In 1983 the employees of the Calgary blood center began to mark blood donations with a black dot if the donor appeared unwell or belonged to a group at high risk of having HIV. The marked blood was not transfused or processed further. This practice was concealed from the national Red Cross.

Canadian Red Cross rejects test which would have prevented thousands of hepatitis C infections.

[...]

Read the whole thing. Do we really want govt-run healthcare in this country? It’s good to know the real risks inherent in such a system.