Say Anything Blog

Senate confirms controversial judge

WASHINGTON — The Senate on Thursday confirmed U.S. District Judge David Hamilton for the Chicago-based federal appeals court, approving a nominee targeted by conservatives as a liberal activist.

Hamilton was approved on a 59-39 vote and became the eighth of President Barack Obama’s judicial nominees to win confirmation. He is the third confirmed for a U.S. appeals court, which is usually the last stop for federal court cases.

Republican senators — backed by their conservative allies outside Congress — had blocked a vote for five months until Democrats overcame a filibuster last Tuesday with a 70-29 vote.

Dem lawmakers introduce Afghan war surtax

A trio of Democratic lawmakers on Thursday introduced legislation that would impose a surtax to pay for the war in Afghanistan.

Appropriations Committee chairman Rep. Dave Obey (Wis.), Defense Appropriations Subcommittee John Murtha (Pa.), and Democratic Caucus chairman John Larsen (Conn.) say that the bill woild end the practice of paying for the war with deficit spending.

“Regardless of whether one favors the war or not, if it is to be fought, it ought to be paid for,” the lawmakers said in a statement. “Now the president is being asked to consider an enlarged counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan, which proponents tell us will take at least a decade and would also cost about a trillion dollars.  But unlike the healthcare bill, that would not be paid for.”

Should the bill pass, the surtax would come into effect in 2011 and would pay off war costs from the previous year. Democratic lawmakers previously introduced a similar measure to fund the Iraq War that failed to pass through Congress.

“We believe that if this war is to be fought, it’s only fair that everyone share the burden. That’s why we are offering legislation to impose a graduated surtax so that the cost of the war is not borrowed,” the three sponsors said.

Will Tea Partiers turn on each other?

The grass-roots activists powering the movement have become increasingly divided on core questions such as whether to focus their efforts on shaping policy debates or elections, work on a local, regional, state or national level or closely align itself with the Republican Party, POLITICO found in interviews with tea party organizers in Washington and across the country.

The philosophical and strategic disagreements have been present within the tea party movement almost from the beginning. But they were hidden — or at least overshadowed — by the initial explosion of activist enthusiasm, which has dissipated somewhat, exposing and widening the rifts.

In Granbury, Texas, local tea party organizer Josh Sullivan says he believes the movement’s effectiveness is being compromised by extremism.“You have some interesting folks in the Tea Party movement — some of them I can support, but some of them are kind of out there and radical, and I don’t want to associate myself with them,” he said.

Ain’t that a bitch.

WASHINGTON (CNN) – The Republican Party’s favorable rating among Americans is at lowest level in at least a decade, according to a new national poll.

Thirty-six percent of people questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Friday say they have a favorable opinion of the Republican Party, with 54 percent viewing the GOP negatively.

He joins other notable self-whoring losers such as Cyndi Lauper, Sharon Osbourne, Bret Michaels, and Darryl Strawberry for the upcoming ‘Celebrity Apprentice’.

Reuters made some erroneous characterizations in this story about Dobb’s, showing their partisanship. Nonetheless, I sincerely doubt Dobb’s has a political future, outside something local perhaps.

A week after abruptly quitting his longtime job as a CNN television news host and commentator, Lou Dobbs said on Thursday he is considering career options including possible runs for the White House or U.S. Senate.

“Right now I feel exhilaration at the wide range of choices before me as to what I do next,” Dobbs, whose outspoken views on immigration and other topics often angered liberals, told Reuters in a telephone interview from New York on Thursday.

Dobbs, 64, a veteran CNN anchor who had become one of the most divisive figures in U.S. broadcast journalism, announced last Wednesday he was leaving CNN after spending the better part of 30 years at the 24-hour cable news network.

He still hosts a daily radio show.

A Texas native, Dobbs has drawn fire from Latino leaders and civil rights groups for frequent on-air remarks about U.S. border control and immigration that critics saw as demonizing illegal immigrants.

He was also seen as lending credence to the “birther” conspiracy theory, whose adherents believe President Barack Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate was faked to hide a Kenyan birthplace that would make the first black U.S. president ineligible for his office.

http://www.comcast.net/articles/news-general/20091119/NEWS-US-USA-POLITICS-DOBBS/

While I agree with Dobb’s mostly about illegal aliens and while I am no ‘birther” which is a liberal pejorative and not an accurate label, I also am not pleased that a man running for POTUS and holding that office is not more forthcoming about all the necessary documents to silence such genuine Constitutional concerns.

Nevertheless, it seems to me that his position on aliens alone would kill national political office ambitions. Surely, to be outspoken in favor of the Truth will win him few friends. Lastly, his age is getting close to being prohibitive.

Obama’s Home Teleprompter Malfunctions During Family Dinner

Tuesday on the Air Vent (a global warming skeptic website), this comment was left:

We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps.

We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents.
Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.

This is a limited time offer, download now: http://ftp.tomcity.ru/incoming/free/FOI2009.zip

Sample:

0926010576.txt * Mann: working towards a common goal
1189722851.txt * Jones: “try and change the Received date!”
0924532891.txt * Mann vs. CRU
0847838200.txt * Briffa & Yamal 1996: “too much growth in recent years makes it difficult to derive a valid age/growth curve”
0926026654.txt * Jones: MBH dodgy ground
1225026120.txt * CRU’s truncated temperature curve
1059664704.txt * Mann: dirty laundry
1062189235.txt * Osborn: concerns with MBH uncertainty
0926947295.txt * IPCC scenarios not supposed to be realistic
0938018124.txt * Mann: “something else” causing discrepancies
0939154709.txt * Osborn: we usually stop the series in 1960
0933255789.txt * WWF report: beef up if possible
0998926751.txt * “Carefully constructed” model scenarios to get “distinguishable results”
0968705882.txt * CLA: “IPCC is not any more an assessment of published science but production of results”
1075403821.txt * Jones: Daly death “cheering news”
1029966978.txt * Briffa – last decades exceptional, or not?
1092167224.txt * Mann: “not necessarily wrong, but it makes a small difference” (factor 1.29)
1188557698.txt * Wigley: “Keenan has a valid point”
1118949061.txt * we’d like to do some experiments with different proxy combinations
1120593115.txt * I am reviewing a couple of papers on extremes, so that I can refer to them in the chapter for AR4

The data size of this download is 61 MB, it expands to 168 MB when uncompressed.  There are 1071 formerly confidential emails in this archive.

The authenticity of many of the (formerly confidential) emails has already been confirmed.  It is too soon to tell if the data are legitimate, but if so, most of that data has not been publicly available before.

However, it is too soon to tell (as some of us suspect) whether or not “spiked” emails were inserted among otherwise legitimate emails.

I’m not going to reproduce any of the emails here (some degree of caution is probably good in this case), but there are threads you can follow if you’re interested.  Let’s just say this stuff would make the Pentagon Papers look tame, if it’s true and accurate.

Climate Audit thread.

Jeff ID’s Air Vent article.

Lucia’s Blog: Real or Fake?

Watt’s Up With That.

Update: Thomas Fuller's Comments at the SF Examiner

Pelosi Not Sure if Osama Bin Laden Should be Told He Has Miranda Rights

UN-FREAKING-BELIEVABLE…..only radical DEM libs want to give radical Islamo-terrorists Miranda. How about a pillow for their chair as we ask why they just killed thousands of innocent people?

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/57443

Looks like a tough choice for Blanche!
http://www.newsmax.com/morris/obamacare_vote/2009/11/19/288601.html

A Zogby Poll this week illustrates the stark choice facing Senate Democrats as they have to decide whether or not to vote for ObamaCare. The poll shows that Arkansas Sen. Blanche Lincoln, high up on the list of vulnerable Senate Democrats seeking reelection in 2010, literally faces a choice between being reelected and voting for the bill.

The Zogby Poll shows Arkansans opposed to the Obama/Reid bill by 28-64, with 50 percent “strongly opposed” to the legislation. To swim in the face of such a current of public opinion is risky business for a U.S. senator.

Lincoln’s most likely Republican opponent, state Sen. Gilbert Bennett, is hot on her heels in the poll, trailing by only 41-39. But asked who they would support if Lincoln votes for ObamaCare, Arkansas voters switch to Bennett, giving him a 49-36 victory. That Lincoln goes from two points ahead to 13 points behind over one Senate vote illustrates the potency of the opposition to healthcare changes.

61% of America are against this reform bill.
Obama’s numbers are dropping,
Congress’s numbers are plummeting,
Time to clean house again!

The Democrat War on the Christian God: Part II

Waging a successful war today usually requires establishing alliances and letting allies assume some of the burdens of the battles.  That requisite holds true for the Democrat War on the Christian God as well.

The Democrat allies in their war are legion, ranging from ACORN, to pro-abortionist feminist groups to the leftist blogosphere, even to a few Republicans in Name Only, RINOS, quisling traitors to their party’s and to the nation’s deep-felt values.

All one has to do is read the papers, watch the news, or peruse a few blogs to see the extent of how the United States, a former democratic republic founded on timeless Christian principles, has been inexorably deteriorating into a secularist, godless cesspool of Saul Alinsky-inspired chaos.

(Better yet, for a quick overview of the corruption in progress, see “The Democrat War on the Christian God, (Part I):” http://bit.ly/1XhuiL)

No significant political/social movements occur in vacuums and none fail to have ramifications that go beyond mere politics.  In military terms, the Democrat war on the Christian God is in progress on many strategic fronts. 

Those ramifications are varied and may be likened to pustules on the body politic, rotting the social structure from within even as those pustules gain favor in the general populace.

Two seditionist Democrat allies stand out from the others, one for the depth of its godless depravity, the other for its widespread capacity to control public thought.

The first is the homosexual, LGBT, movement, the second the mainstream media, the MSM. . . .

(Read the rest at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=1332)

VIRUS in the VOTING MACHINES: Tainted Results in NY-23

GOUVERNEUR, NY - The computerized voting machines used by many voters in the 23rd district had a computer virus - tainting the results, not just from those machines known to have been infected, but casting doubt on the accuracy of counts retrieved from any of the machines.

Cathleen Rogers, the Democratic Elections Commissioner in Hamilton County stated that they discovered a problem with their voting machines the week prior to the election and that the “virus” was fixed by a Technical Support representative from Dominion, the manufacturer.  The Dominion/Sequoia Voting Systems representative “reprogrammed” their machines in time for them to use in the Nov. 3rd Special Election. None of the machines (from the same manufacturer) used in the other counties within the 23rd district were looked at nor were they recertified after the “reprogramming” that occurred in Hamilton County.

Republican Commissioner Judith Peck refused to speculate on whether the code that governs the counts could have been tampered with.  She indicated that “as far as I know, the machine in question was not functioning properly and was repaired” by the technician.

Perhaps we should start here!

                       
                     



Gov’t Said To Waste Over $98 Billion
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/11/18/national/main5690979.shtml

Medicare Fraud: A $60 Billion Crime
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/10/23/60minutes/main5414390.shtml

Will GM Spend Taxpayer Bailout Money on Overseas Operations?
U.S. Operations Received $50 Billion in Taxpayer Funds—And Now May Send Millions of
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/general-motor-spend-taxpayer-bailout-money-overseas-operations/story?id=9091248

Illegal Immigrants Account for $10.7 Billion of Nation’s Health Care Costs, Data Show
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/51751


How many hundreds of other “Government Programs” are out there that drain tax money faster than it can be confiscated? I looked for five minutes for a few of my favorite Government pet peeves and found enough waste to buy a hell of a lot of insurance policies.

Congress says a trillion for health care reform?
History and fact say quadruple that at a minimum.

Government is not the answer to a cost problem with health care.

Stop the waste.
Lower our taxes.
Let "private insurance companies" compete for our business, as in let them compete across state lines.

http://www.foxnews.com/static/managed/img/Politics/Obama_FoxNews_111809_monster_397x224.jpg

http://www.foxnews.com/static/managed/img/Politics/Obama_WarCouncil_doomsday_604x341.jpg

http://www.foxnews.com/static/managed/img/Politics/obama_japan_monster_397x224.jpg

US leading indicators up for seventh month in row

The forward-looking US index of leading economic indicators rose nearly as expected in October, the Conference Board said Thursday, in a sign that economic recovery from recession is on track.

The index edged up 0.3 percent, following a 1.0 percent gain in September and 0.4 percent rise in August, the business research firm said.

Most economists had expected a 0.4 percent rise in the index, which is based on data such as manufacturing hours worked, stock prices and consumer expectations,

“The data indicate that economic recovery is finally setting in,” said Ken Goldstein, a Conference Board economist.

“We can expect slow growth through the first half of 2010. The pace of growth, however, will depend critically on how much demand picks up, and how soon,” he said.

Factors such as interest rates, initial unemployment insurance claims and stock prices contributed positively to the index, more than offsetting declines in such areas as consumer expectations and home construction, the firm said.