Say Anything Blog

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After spending half her diary comparing America to Nazi Germany, Daily Kos diarist Granny Doc openly roots for an “economic meltdown” in America,

The parallels are undeniable, and I see only one solution if America, The Grand Experiment, is to survive.
I want to stand by and watch it all blow up.

I want the dollar to plunge to worthless paper.

I want the stock market to implode.

I want the economy to plunge into chaos.

I want the Chinese to call in all the debt they hold.

I want an economic meltdown of such staggering proportion that even that idiot on Bill Moyer’s Journal who does not know the difference between a State Constitution and the United States Constitution, is forced to look around in mild surprise and wonder what the hell happened.

Only total economic destruction will get the attention of the fools.

I want every single idiot who doesn’t think politics is any of their concern to be gob smacked by the terror of losing it all. I want a wake up call of such stunning proportion that a generation will slip from the stage before any American citizen votes on the basis of looks, or, charm, or cant - before any claim of “Free Trade” is accepted as uninteresting. Before any citizen thinks it’s cute, or hep, or stylish, to be distainful of politics.

I want every politician who places getting elected ahead of protecting the Constitution to find their corporate masters have lost interest in their little fiefdom as economic collapse makes their petty posturing even more pathetic.

I want a culture war against greed to emerge from the rubble, and the blyth acceptance of what is, in favor of the hard work of what could be to become so passe that our grandchildren will forever wonder what we were thinking.

I want every bamboozled, bubble headed, super-star chasing, reality show afficianado thrown off the island, and forced to swim in the shark infested waters of what their indifference has wrought.

And I want it now, before this inept, self-serving Congress allows the Facists one more opportunity to fully convert this from the United States of America, into the 4th Reich.

Remind you of anyone who comments on this blog?
Just another reminder that what’s bad for America is good for the lefties.
If they prayed, they would be praying for our destruction.

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Six years after the Taliban’s ouster, medical care in Afghanistan has improved such that nearly 90,000 children who would have died before age 5 in 2001 will survive this year, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Sunday.

Saddled for years with one of the world’s worst records on child health, Afghanistan has seen access to health care rise dramatically since the U.S.-led invasion.

Thousands of health clinics have been built across the country, and the Afghan government and aid agencies have trained tens of thousands of doctors, vaccinators and health volunteers who now reach into some of the country’s most remote areas.

[...]

Noel Sheppard

If a middle school in Northern California had on its events schedule a cross-dressing, gender-shift day encouraging children to attire themselves as a member of the opposite sex, wouldn’t you expect liberal media members across the fruited plain to be all over the story?

Yet, according to Google News and LexisNexis searches, not one press outlet, including those near the situation in California, thought this matter was at all newsworthy.

Fortunately, as announced Tuesday by the Pacific Justice Institute, the event was canceled

  Following parent complaints, a middle school on the outskirts of the Bay Area has reversed course and canceled a cross-dressing or “gender switch” day.
  The mother of a seventh-grade student at Adams Middle School was alarmed when she heard that on the last day of the school’s “Spirit Week,” students were being encouraged to dress like the opposite sex. Perhaps even more disturbingly, parents were given virtually no advance notice from the school and found out about the event after flyers were posted throughout the campus. When this parent met with the principal to express her concerns, she was told the event would continue this Friday as planned, and she could keep her son home from school if he did not want to participate. The parent contacted Pacific Justice Institute on Monday, which advised her on enlisting other parents’ support and communicating with the school. PJI also began laying the groundwork to hold the school accountable to the public if it did not reverse course by Tuesday.

[...] 

Would you like your eleven-year-old to be encouraged to cross-dress?

[...]

After all, depending on your political leaning, it would be easy to make this town a poster-child either for rampant homophobia in the suburbs, or growing tolerance for sexual-preference discussions in our public schools.

Think about it.

More typical leftie lunacy from the Bay Area, but this time it’s real.
The social engineers keep trying to strike at our society through our children.

Christopher J. Alleva

The estimable Michael Barone wrote an excellent book in 2005 titled Hard America, Soft America: Competition vs. Coddling and the Battle for the Nation’s Future. Inspired by a column he wrote in 2003, the book posits that there are two Americas: soft America and hard America. (Perhaps this is where John Edwards got his two Americas idea).

Barone argues that hard and soft America metaphorical proxies of the never ending struggle between New Deal Liberalism and Free Market Conservatism. The settlement last month of an old 1999 lawsuit over emissions from coal-fired power plants in the Ohio River Valley is a good example of Barone’s thesis in action.  It was reached among American Electric Power (“AEP”), nine Northeastern and Midatlantic states, the EPA and a number of environmental groups, including the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club. The settlement requires AEP to meet annual sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxides (NOx) emissions limits for its fleet of 16 coal-fueled power plants in Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Virginia and West Virginia.

[...]

The lawsuit was a spoiled leftover from the Clinton’s litigious approach to everything.  From terrorism to the environment, their first impulse was always call the lawyers.  This lawsuit came out of their politically-motivated interpretation of the New Source Review (NSR) rules concerning maintenance and pollution control upgrades of coal fired power plants. Like all spoiled leftovers from Clinton, this on has that familiar pungent aroma.

Before Clinton and his trial lawyers pals came on the scene, the rule was interpreted to allow plants built prior to NSR’s adoption in 1977 to be “grandfathered,” only required to install pollution controls when they are expanded or substantially upgraded. Plants were permitted to undertake routine repair and maintenance without triggering NSR’s requirements. Under Clinton, changing a light bulb at the plant could trigger an NSR giving Clinton’s trial lawyer cronies a pretext to make a claim.

The effect of the Clinton policy was to increase pollution from these power plants because they were discouraged from doing routine maintenance like replacing worn-out boiler tubes or boiler fans. This made the plants less reliable, less efficient and more polluting. In 2003, President Bush finally got around to ending this failed policy. Writing at the National Review in October 2003 Jonathan Alder covered the President’s announcement of his new policy at Michigan’s largest coal fired plant in Monroe. The plant is very important to Michigan, producing 3000 megawatts of power.  Adler describes the adverse impact of Clinton’s NSR policy on the environment:

  “For years Detroit Edison has sought to replace the turbines at the facility to increase its operating efficiency. Now that some of the President Bush’s NSR reforms are finalized, the replacement will proceed. A more efficient plant will produce more energy without increasing its emissions. As this energy needs to be produced somewhere, the net result of the Detroit Edison upgrade will be less air pollution, not more.”

Clinton’s soft America produced tons of legal briefs and legal fees but not one ton of reduced emissions or any environmental clean up. Bush’s hard America derailed Clinton’s lawyer gravy train and implemented policies that will tangibly reduce air pollution. AEP has been a favorite punching bag for the self-appointed environmentalists.  They are one of the largest electric utilities in the United States, delivering electricity to more than 5 million customers in 11 states. AEP is the target because most of their generating capacity is coal fired because it is the least expensive available fuel in their service territory. But remember, eco-dogma, coal is bad, solar, wind good.

[...]

Bush undertook an Augean task of undoing the damage caused by Clinton’s soft America energy policies. Once again, the voters have a choice. They can vote for soft America and let the lights go out or they can vote for hard American and keep the lights on. This shouldn’t be a difficult choice, just ask former California Governor Gray Davis.

So, adversarial environmental policies produce more pollution and less electricity at a higher cost.  Nothing new here.
The market, driven by the need to produce the most at the lowest cost, actually provides the best outcome, not endless environmental litigation.
What a surprise!  /sarcasm

Gary H. Johnson, Jr.

  A review of
  The Al Qaeda Reader
  Raymond Ibrahim, Editor/translator.
  $15.95, 282 pp.

Recently, Raymond Ibrahim edited and translated into English a decade’s worth of public releases by al Qaeda’s leadership.  Published by Broadway Books, with partial proceeds donated to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Ibrahim’s The Al Qaeda Reader is not only a timely fountainhead for the United States citizenry’s understanding of our Jihadi enemies, it is also a necessary release for all Muslims living under secular governments to grapple with in the coming years.

The text focuses on the prepared statements of both Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leading authority figures of the Al Qaeda forces, which coordinated and carried out the devastating attacks of 9/11/2001.  Since Muhammad’s definition of war is “deceit”, and al Qaeda has declared war against America, we can only assume that these al Qaeda releases hold a two-fold purpose:  to provide sound, doctrinal justification for terrorism; and to gather popular support for their cause.

[...]

Al-Zawahiri confirms that all Muslims are ordered to wage jihad against infidels, apostates, and hypocrites by the consensus of the ulema (jurists of accepted hadith).

[...]

This is the logic that America needs to understand.  America must come to grips with the fact that the jihad is obligatory to the Islamic faithful.  Thus, with a sweep of historic citations, Ayman al-Zawahiri, utilizes the sheik of Islam, Ibn Taymiyyah, whom all Muslims adhere or respect, to define defensive jihad as second only to faith in Islam, and at the same time justifies suicide bombing in the measure of antiquity… via ijma, or parallels, to Muhammad’s battle of Ta’if.

[...]

In full, Raymond Ibrahim’s release The Al Qaeda Reader is a necessary addition to the scholarship of jihad.  The text begs the question: does the doctrine proclaimed by al Qaeda’s leadership, now widely known among the world’s Muslims,  guarantee a state of perpetual war against the whole of humanity?  And if so, what is the process of eradication of these elements from the Ulema consensus in order to defuse this ticking bomb of world-wide genocide?

Read the whole thing; better yet, read the book.

For those who are still in denial of the real threat of world jihadist terrorism, this should serve the same purpose as a dash of cold water to the face.

James Lewis

‘Global Warming’ as Pathological Science
[...]

There is such a thing as pathological science. Science becomes unhealthy when its only real question—-  “what is true?”—- is sabotaged by vested interests, by ideological Commissars, or even by grant-swinging scientists. Today’s Global Warming campaign is endangering real, honest science. Global Warming superstition has become an international power grab, and good science suffers as a result.

Freeman Dyson, one of the great physicists alive today, put it plainly enough in his autobiography:

  “...all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. ... I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. ... They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in.”

When the scientific establishment starts to peddle fraud, we get corrupt science. The Boomer Left came to power in the 1970s harboring a real hatred toward science. They called it “post-modernism,” and “deconstructionism”—- and we saw all kinds of damage as a result. Scientific American magazine went so far as to hire a post-modern “journalist” to write for it. John Horgan became famous for writing a book called The End of Science, but never seemed to learn much about real science. It was a shameful episode. 

The explosive spread of AIDS occurred when the known evidence about HIV transmission among Gay men was suppressed by the media. The medical science establishment did not speak up. HIV is most easily transmitted through anal intercourse, because the anus bleeds far more easily than the vagina. So one Gay man simply passes blood products straight on to the next.  Sexually transmitted plagues have been studied scientifically ever since syphilis arose several centuries ago. We know how to limit their spread, but many Gay men have died as a result of political suppression of scientific medicine. The spread of AIDS was partly a self-inflicted wound.

Pathological science kills people and ruins lives. Such fake science is still peddled by the PC establishment in Europe and America. Global Warming is only the most recent case. Rachel Carson’s screed against DDT caused malaria to re-emerge in Africa, killing hundreds of thousands of human beings.  Those human-caused disasters have never been discussed honestly in the media, and rarely if ever in science journals. The DDT scandal is still suppressed.

[...]

Britain is even more vulnerable to politicized science than we are, because medicine is controlled by the Left. That is a huge chunk of all science in the age of biomedicine.  But the British Medical Journal and even the venerable Lancet are no longer reliable sources. Their political agenda sticks out like a sore thumb. It was The Lancet that published a plainly fraudulent “survey” of Iraqi civilian casualties a few years ago—- the only “survey” ever taken in the middle of a shooting war. As if you can go around shell-shocked neighborhoods with your little clipboard and expect people to tell the truth about their dead and wounded: Saddam taught Iraqis to lie about such things, just to survive, and the internecine fighting of the last several years did not help. The whole farce was just unbelievable, but the prestigious Lancet put the fake survey into the public domain, just as if it were real science.  It was a classic agitprop move, worthy of Stalin and Lysenko. But it was not worthy of one the great scientific journals. Many scientists will never trust it again.

[...]

Modern science fraud seems to come from the Left, which makes it especially weird because the Left claims to be all in favor of science. Marxism itself was a scientific fraud, of course. In 1848 Marx and Engels claimed to have a “scientific” (wissenschaftlich) theory of history. They predicted that communism would first arise in England, because it was the most advanced capitalist nation. (Not) They predicted that centralized planning would work. (Not) They predicted that the peasants and workers would dedicate their lives to the Socialist State, and stop caring about themselves and their families. (Not).  They predicted that sovietization would lead to greater economic performance. (Not). And then, when seventy years of Soviet, Chinese, Eastern European, and North Korean history showed Marx’s predictions to be wrong, wrong and wrong again, they still claimed to be “scientific.” That’s pathological science—- fraud masquerading as science.

[...]

When the truth-tellers in society begin to sell out and tell lies for some ideological goal, people end up dying.

Read the whole thing.

Agenda-driven science isn’t really science, it’s propaganda.

Bob Unruh

Yet more evidence that our schools are being turned into leftie indoctrination centers

Mandatory program ‘treats’ politically incorrect attitudes
WND BRAVE NEW SCHOOLS

A mandatory University of Delaware program requires residence hall students to acknowledge that “all whites are racist” and offers them “treatment” for any incorrect attitudes regarding class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality they might hold upon entering the school, according to a civil rights group.

“Somehow, the University of Delaware seems terrifyingly unaware that a state-sponsored institution of higher education in the United States does not have the legal right to engage in a program of systematic thought reform. The First Amendment protects the right to freedom of conscience – the right to keep our innermost thoughts free from governmental intrusion. It also protects the right to be free from compelled speech,” said a letter from Samantha Harris, director of legal and public advocacy for The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education to university President Patrick Harker.

The organization cited excerpts from the university’s Office of Residence Life Diversity Education Training documents, including the statement:

“A RACIST: A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. ‘The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality. By this definition, people of color cannot be racists, because as peoples within the U.S. system, they do not have the power to back up their prejudices, hostilities, or acts of discrimination….’”

The education program also notes that “reverse racism” is “a term created and used by white people to deny their white privilege.” And “a non-racist” is called “a non-term,” because, the program explains, “The term was created by whites to deny responsibility for systemic racism, to maintain an aura of innocence in the face of racial oppression, and to shift the responsibility for that oppression from whites to people of color (called ‘blaming the victim’).”

The “education” regarding racism is just one of the subjects that students are required to adopt as part of their University of Delaware experience, too, FIRE noted.

The “shocking program of ideological reeducation,” which the school itself defines as a “treatment” for students’ incorrect attitudes and beliefs, is nothing less than “Orwellian,” FIRE said.

[...]

One student reacted to the indoctrination with rebellion. On the FIRE blog, he wrote:

“Take the issue of homosexuality, and the rights that should or should not be associated with it. As a Christian, I believe that the Bible says homosexuality is wrong, and is a sin against God. As such, I cannot accept it as a legitimate lifestyle. While I accept homosexuals as people, I do not accept their choice as right, and subsequently I do not think that homosexual couples should be given marital rights. I accept that others do not hold the same views as me. But it is wrong that under the Residence Life curriculum and school mandated curriculum that I should made to feel guilty for my views. … It is not the school’s right to try to convince me to embrace the values that Residence Life has chosen. Essentially, if I do not change my views, I will be labeled by my RA as not embracing diversity, and not accepting of certain groups, and thus my RA will try all the harder to change me. This is not the school’s job, or right.”

Read the whole totalitarian thing.

It seems the only “choice” the lefties want us to have is the “choice” to kill your unborn child.
The Thought Police are just around the corner, apparently.

Find it here

Forensic computer scientists track down those who stuff the ballot boxes in online polls

For a guy who claims he is a conservative, Gynecologist Ron Paul, the Texas congressman, sure has supporters who are quite liberal in their interpretation of fairness and truth.

Anyone who has tried to run an online poll on this presidential campaign has run into this wall of blockheads who are trying to hijack the Republican Party for the 1988 Libertarian Party presidential candidate.

It is something that Ron “Turn the Clock to 1913″ Paul ought to denounce and take steps to quit happening.

He won’t. He’s an America First clown who thinks the Constitution cannot be amended. Why should he try to police his supporters and get them to play fair?

Now some forensic computer scientists at the University of Alabama-Birmingham are on the trail. They are checking out where all these Ron Paul spams are coming from: Brazil, El Salvador, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, and Nigeria.

Pretty funny that the fellow who wants to have no foreign policy at all has such support overseas.

[...]

If I were running for president, I would make sure my campaign obeyed the federal laws. All of them.

Read the whole thing.

Not really all that surprising.  I think this guy is a certifiable nut, and is being used to serve the same purpose as Ross Perot(another certifiable nut) served in 1992: to divide the Conservative vote, this time to usher another Clinton into the White House.

Be wary of climate policy development

Imagine you are an advocacy group and want to sway a government’s policy development, but really want to keep your activism a secret. You could learn a lot by observing and then avoiding the practices of the Center for Climate Strategies, a group of global warming worrywarts.

CCS in recent years has approached many states, including Washington, with an inexpensive, tantalizing offer: to establish and manage a process for climate change policy development. The results are a study legitimized by government that promotes onerous regulations, property rights infringement through smart growth initiatives, and new taxes and fees on fuels and utilities.

CCS operates in Washington in nearly the same way it’s worked in every other state where it’s been hired. First a governor (such as Gov. Chris Gregoire) issues an executive order declaring global warming a problem that must be confronted through state policy. Then a so-called stakeholder (political appointees and special interests, really) panel considers dozens of CCS-created policy options—most of which impinge upon individual rights, increase energy costs, or add to the cost of government—that ostensibly reduce CO2 emissions in the state. CCS holds the hand of the group through several meetings and its decision-making, until the threats to personal liberty and financial well-being are established as official government philosophy. Ideally (to CCS), legislatures will adopt them and add to everyone’s cost of living. Nanny-staters celebrate.

[...]

Start with its funding. CCS comes to states promising to bring money with them to pay for their greenhouse-gas reduction development. Who foots the bill? Several foundations on the global warming panic train: the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, The (Ted) Turner Foundation, The Heinz Endowments, the Energy Foundation, and many others. For example, the state of Washington is paying only $200,000 for CCS’ services—half of what their cheap process has cost in other states.

Then CCS controls the entire policy development: the agenda, scheduling and oversight of their meetings; the CO2 reduction options that stakeholders consider; analysis (which is not an examination of cost/benefit or climate impact) of those options; the voting process; the changing and/or elimination of options; and the writing of all meeting minutes, presentations and reports.

Virtually every one of CCS’s greenhouse gas-reducing options, which stakeholders find almost impossible to eliminate or alter (as if they wanted to) because the voting procedures are stacked against it, will curtail individual freedom or further burden taxpayers and consumers. Rather than surveying stakeholders in an up-or-down vote, options are instead considered already approved unless enough members (who are political appointees, with almost no scientists or economists) are bold and knowledgeable enough to object to them.

CCS has conducted this cookie-cutter process in more than a dozen states, and more are in its sights. The motives, tactics and plans are not hard to see, but they are a threat.

State government watchdogs and free-market believers need to tag that kid behind the flagpole. He is only getting fatter.

Bookworm

While I don’t agree with 100% of everything here, I submit it as thought-provoking.

[...]

Immigration

Core Conservative Belief: Conservatives believe in immigration as an important part of American vibrancy.  They also believe that America is weakening itself by allowing illegal immigrants to stream into the country unchecked, both because this influx saps America’s sovereignty over her citizens and because the illegal immigrant pathways can also serve terrorists.

Progressive Belief: It’s racist to keep illegal immigrants out of the country.  For that reason, there should not be any hurdles in the illegal immigrant’s path to the full panoply of American rights and welfare services.

The Supreme Court

Core Conservative Belief: Conservatives believe that the role of the Supreme Court is to examine state and federal laws, and lower court decisions to determine whether they comport with the written Constitution.  An even lowest common denominator belief is that the Supreme Court should examine only whether federal matters comport with the written Constitution, and to interfere with states only if the states enact laws that conflict or overlap with federal matters.

Progressive Belief: The Supreme Court is to decide what is right and what is wrong - and it can get help for this by looking to each justice’s own private standards of morality, to dominant cultural trends, and to foreign systems.  Having examined the moral position, the Court should then direct policy consistent with its findings.

Abortion

Core Conservative Belief:  Whether you’re pro-Choice or pro-Life, Conservatives who are being honest with themselves admit that Roe v. Wade was a badly decided opinion that, without any Constitutional authorization, represented a federal power grab of something that ought to be a states’ rights issue.  Roe v. Wade should be overturned, so that the question of abortion can be returned to the states, where it belongs.  An alternative, of course, is to amend the Constitution so that it specifically allows or disallows abortion.

Progressive Belief:  Abortion is an absolute, fundamental right that must remain inviolate.  The main reason Progressives must win the White House is to put a stop to the Originalist Supreme Court justices that Conservatives have placed, and will continue to place, on the Supreme Court.  Only a Democratic President will appoint justices who will maintain Roe v. Wade’s existence.

The Iraq War

Core Conservative Belief: Conservatives believe that, whether or not we made the right decision in 2003 to invade Iraq, it is a done deal.  Our only responsibility now is to fight wholeheartedly and to win.

Progressive Belief: President Bush got us into the War to for nefarious reasons, mostly to satisfy his oil buddies in Texas and Cheney’s friends at Halliburton.  Now, to punish the President and the whole corrupt Bush Administration, we must leave Iraq immediately, regardless of the consequences to America, to Iraq, or to world security.

Islamic Terrorism

Core Conservative Belief: (a) Islamic terrorism is real, (b) it is the product of a totalitarian religious ideology that has as its ultimate goal the destruction of non-Muslim Western culture, (c) there is no middle ground given its goal, and (d) we must fight it.

Progressive Belief: Islamic terrorism is the work of a few people angry at the US (and especially at George Bush), and the best thing we can do to placate these people is to (a) leave Iraq; (b) abandon Israel; (c) dump George Bush; and (d) engage in dialogue with the Islamic leaders.

Taxes

Core Conservative Belief: Government is a bad money manager. People make money grow, and lower taxes allow for a livelier, growing economy.  The inevitable result of trusting people with their own money is that the government, despite lower taxes, sees increased revenue (which is nicely balanced out by lower costs).

Progressive Belief: People cannot be trusted to make the right decisions with their money. It’s better if the government takes and redistributes wealth, notwithstanding the fact that doing so slows the economy.

Religion

Lowest common denominator Conservative beliefs:  (a) Religion is a good thing; (b) It’s okay if people’s religious values shape their political beliefs; (c) It’s okay to acknowledge America’s predominant Christianity by nodding to Christmas and Easter, as long as no one is forced to observe those holidays or discriminated against for not observing those holidays; (d) People should be free to worship without government interference in their beliefs; (e) Neither government nor business should be forced to change their practices to accommodate one belief system over others (see here and here for examples of some of the changes demanded).

Progressive Belief:  Traditional Christianity is dangerous and must be stifled at all costs, everywhere.  Islam has some problems but, to make up for the damage the Bush Administration has done to our standing in the Muslim world, we must accommodate Islamic demands in America.

America

Core Conservative Belief:  While America has flaws, we are proud of her, since we believe that the American system and American values are the best human systems of governance yet created.

Progressive Belief:  America is an imperialist bully that seeks to destroy non-white people, whether within or outside of America.  Her power must be reined in at all costs.

Government

Core Conservative Belief:  Conservatives believe in Thoreau’s dictum that “That government is best which governs least.”  Much as they are proud of America, Conservatives trust American people more than any government.  To them, government is an artifice that can only legitimately govern with the consent of the governed. Conservatives also believe that individuals are smarter with respect to their own interest than the collective wisdom of government.

Progressive Belief:  Progressives believe that government is responsible for fulfilling all citizen needs in all ways.  They also believe that the government’s collective wisdom about individual interests is greater than individuals’ own knowledge about themselves.

Gun Control

Core Conservative Belief:  Conservatives believe that the only way a people can remain free is to have their Second Amendment right to carry arms.  They like to point to Nazi Germany as an example of what can happen when a government with totalitarian tendencies successfully denies its people the right to carry arms.  Conservatives also believe that, when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.  They like to point to London and Washington, D.C., as examples of what happens when ordinary citizens are denied access to arms.

Progressive Belief:  The risks associated with guns are so high that it is government’s moral obligation to try to remove them from the population entirely, even if that effort is imperfect (see, e.g., London and Washington, D.C.)

The Nature of Human Beings

Core Conservative Belief:  Conservatives believe that human nature is a combination of good and bad and that society’s role is to control people’s bad impulses through checks and balances that permit people’s good sides to flourish.

Progressive Belief:  Progressives believe that humans and society are products of their environment and, therefore, perfectible. The role of society is to mold people into better individuals and, ergo, better societies.

Multiculturalism

Core Conservative Belief:  Conservatives’ idea of multiculturalism is still the old Melting Pot idea:  people who want to come here should buy into our basic systems of values and history, learn to speak English, and enrich our culture with their background while merging with the whole.

Progressive Belief:  Progressives believe that every other culture is superior to American culture, so immigrants and ethnic enclaves should be encouraged to remain separate and distinct.  Not only that, they believe that it is the responsibility of ordinary Americans to yield in every instance when there is a conflict between the dominant American culture and an ethnic subculture.

Climate Change

Core Conservative Belief:  Conservatives believe that climate change is happening, but they do not believe that the debate is settled as to the anthropocentric idea that it is entirely the West’s fault.  They recognize that the earth’s climate is in a constant state of flux, and want more, less politically charged, information before panic begins.  They like the idea of alternative energy sources, since they not only enjoy clean air and water, but would also like to see fewer Petrodollars flow to tyrannically governed nations.  Again, though, they do not believe in going off half cocked.

Progressive Belief:  Progressives believe that humans are entirely responsible for climate change, that it is an impending catastrophe that could potentially end our way of life, and that the only thing to be done is to take drastic measures, even if they undermine entirely modern civilization.

Not bad.

Find it here

Budget Policy: An oft-heard criticism leveled at President Bush is that he’s a “record spender.” And because it’s repeated by those at both ends of the political spectrum, it sounds right. But that doesn’t mean it is right.

Bush is “arguably an even bigger spender than LBJ,” says a story from McClatchy Newspapers on the president’s fiscal record. Pretty tough words, given that LBJ conducted both a war in Vietnam and a War on Poverty simultaneously, racking up huge gains in spending over his term and a half in office.

The McClatchy piece says discretionary spending under Bush has risen an inflation-adjusted 5.3% in his first six years, outstripping the 4.6% under Johnson — and way above President Reagan’s meager 1.9%. By “almost any yardstick,” the article continues, Bush “generally exceeds the spending of his predecessors.”

“Any yardstick,” that is, except the most important of all — spending as a share of GDP. On this, Bush is actually lower than most of his predecessors. Spending as a share of GDP is the most important measure of the size of government, since it measures what government actually takes from the national economy.

In the first six years of his term, including the Office of Management and Budget’s most current estimate for 2007, Bush spent, on average, 20% of GDP.

Was that a lot? Not really. As the chart shows, it puts him in the middle of the presidential pack. Since Johnson took office in late 1963, spending as a share of GDP has averaged 20.4%. And, ironically, spending under LBJ was the lowest.
So rather than a “record” spender, as some claim, Bush is actually below average. Indeed, he’s within statistical spitting distance of President Clinton, who on average spent 19.6% of GDP.

[...]

If you really want to worry, look long-term. Bush has tried to do something about runaway entitlements but has gotten no help. As GAO chief David Walker has noted, $50.5 trillion in entitlement spending looms in the next few decades — with no way to pay for it.

Read the whole thing.
As usual, the ongoing propaganda is simply wrong.

SCIENCE magazine just published a critical review of climate models by Professors Gerald Roe and Marcia Baker of the University of Washington, Seattle. It is echoed in the New Scientist magazine (October 25). As New Scientist puts it, “Climate is too complex for accurate predictions.”

The Roe and Baker article is a statistical analysis to see if any model of the climate can make useful predictions. It is called, “Why is Climate Sensitivity so Unpredictable?” It begins:

“Uncertainties in projections of future climate change have not lessened substantially in past decades.” (Italics added).

Specifically,

“… it is evident that the climate system is operating in a regime in which small uncertainties in feedbacks are highly amplified in the resulting climate sensitivity. We are constrained by the inevitable: the more likely a large warming is for a given forcing (i.e., the greater the positive feedbacks), the greater the uncertainty will be in the magnitude of that warming.” (italics added)

Just think about that: After hundreds of millions of dollars spent on climate modeling, and decades of screaming headlines, we have no more certainty today about Global Warming prediction than we did decades ago. What’s more, that is a provable inherent limitation of the data and models.

That is a scientific scandal by any measure.

[...]

Now maybe we can pay attention to some real issues in the world?

Brent Bozell

Poor Planned Parenthood?

As much as liberals decry major corporations that act as if they’re above the law, there’s always quiet when the subject is Planned Parenthood, America’s number one corporate provider of abortions. During its 2005-2006 fiscal year, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America performed a record 264,943 abortions, reported a tidy profit of $55.8 million – and received a record high in taxpayer funding of $305.3 million.

This is one corporation the media hold in the highest regard. They’re not “merchants of death.” That would be the tobacco companies, or gun manufacturers, or hamburger joints. These are the heroic “providers” of “a woman’s right to choose.”

They’re also sleazy in their business practices. In Aurora, Illinois, Planned Parenthood planned to build the biggest abortion clinic in the country, but they lied by omission to the city. Throughout the construction process, the McDonald’s of the abortion industry applied for permits by listing the owner as “Gemini Office Development,” not as Planned Parenthood.

[...]

Planned Parenthood is a formidable force in national (and state) politics. One major reason is networks like ABC, news outlets that don’t really care whether this corporation plays by the rules, as long as the abortion assembly line keeps running.

Read the whole thing.

Unlike the oil companies, which sell us something we want and need, PP is a merchant of death.  The real obscenity is the amount of taxpayer money they are getting. 
Talk about “corporate welfare”.

Richard Baehr

Why I am a Jewish Conservative

[Editor’s note: The following is the text of an address given by AT political director Richard Baehr to Congregation Rodfei Zedek in the Hyde Park district of Chicago, and a group of visiting students from Harding University, a Christian college in Searcy, Arkansas.]

[...]

I am a Jewish conservative and I will try to explain what that means, and why that perspective or orientation makes sense to me, and why I think it should to others. There are many kinds of conservatives.  There are small government conservatives, who believe that an economy works better when more of it is in the hands of private rather than public enterprise. I consider myself a small government conservative. Small government conservatives believe that lower tax rates on employment and capital spur an economy and promote work and entrepreneurship. The alternative is the nanny state-where government seeks to control and provide more services, and tax rates are far higher to support this.  In Europe, the fastest growing economies are all the low tax model countries, many of them in Eastern Europe, countries which have had their fill of collectivism, and state control. The slow growing economies, with high unemployment and little new job creation, are in Western Europe, following the high tax, social welfare model. The new leaders in Germany and France are finding out how difficult it is to combat an entrenched culture and laws developed over 50 years that penalize work and job creation even though this model has produced sustained high unemployment levels and slow growth for decades.

[...]

Finally, I am a conservative because of foreign policy—in particular American national security and support for Israel. For me this issue trumps all the others. In fact, I am not just a conservative, but a neoconservative. Which means that I personally was the one who brought you the Iraq war. Funny, right? Actually, not. For Israel’s enemies in the United States, on the right, and even more so on the left,  make precisely that charge: that supporters of Israel in America led us to war against Iraq in service to Israel’s Likud Party.  And capitalizing on that charge at a time when the Iraq war is unpopular, these critics are now arguing that America risks being led into another war, taking action against Iran’s nuclear program at the behest of these same pro-Israel advocates. Some of those who make these charges claim that they are the real conservatives, and that the neocons are inauthentic conservatives (hence neo), since many were once on the left. One wonders howthis brand of conservatives hope to win a governing majority when they reject those who switch to their side on most other arguments.  These Israel critics on the right are known by some as paleoconservatives. In their ranks are folks like Pat Buchanan and Robert Novak. But the fiercest attacks on the neocons have come from the left. 

The very term neoconservative has become to a certain extent a slander, when uttered by a cable TV talk show host such as Chris Mathews or a writer like Michael Lind. For many left wing critics of the Iraq war,  the term is used as virtually synonymous with Jews, and in particular, with the group of Jews who they believe encouraged or supported the Bush Administration in going to war in Iraq. Among the names often associated with the necoons are: Charles Krauthammer, Joshua Muravchik, Bill Kristol and his father Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz and his son John Podhoretz, Douglas Feith,  Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams, and Richard Perle. These individuals I just named are all Jewish.

There are non-Jewish neocons: Jeanne Kirkpatrick, John Bolton, and William Bennett, among them.  Those who blame the neocons for the Iraq war generally exclude the non-Jewish members since a core part of their argument is that the American neocons were all doing Israel’s bidding, and it is more convenient to blame Jews for this. The charge I think is preposterous. The idea that President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Don Rusmfeld, Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell are shrinking violets who needed a push from a group of neocons, some in government, some political writers outside of government, to decide to go to war, strains credulity. And of course none of the Administration figures have ever suggested that they needed any push from anybody else to take action in Iraq.

What is disturbing I think is that so many American Jews have been completely oblivious to the rank anti-Semitic undercurrent in the charge and the danger to American support for Israel that is tied to the effort to associate the neocons, meaning the Jews and Israel, with the Iraq war. The effort by anti-Iraq war critics on the left to tag Israel and its supposed agents (the neocons) with causing the war, has picked up steam recently with the publication of a new book by Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt called The Israel Lobby. It was also seen in the vicious attacks on Senator Joe Lieberman last year when he ran for re-election and was rejected by his own party in the Democratic primary.

[...]

Read the whole thing.
For those weak-minded individuals who can’t think for themselves and need an authority figure to tell them what’s going on, here it is.
This is a Jew addressing other Jews, discussing the neocon smear by the lefties.

Steven Mufson

The Kansas Department of Health and Environment yesterday became the first government agency in the United States to cite carbon dioxide emissions as the reason for rejecting an air permit for a proposed coal-fired electricity generating plant, saying that the greenhouse gas threatens public health and the environment.

The decision marks a victory for environmental groups that are fighting proposals for new coal-fired plants around the country. It may be the first of a series of similar state actions inspired by a Supreme Court decision in April that asserted that greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide should be considered pollutants under the Clean Air Act.
 

Sunflower Electric Power already operates a coal-fired power plant in Holcomb and had proposed to build two more units.
Sunflower Electric Power already operates a coal-fired power plant in Holcomb and had proposed to build two more units.

In the past, air permits, which are required before construction of combustion facilities, have been denied over emissions such as sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and mercury. But Roderick L. Bremby, secretary of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, said yesterday that “it would be irresponsible to ignore emerging information about the contribution of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to climate change and the potential harm to our environment and health if we do nothing.”

The Kansas agency’s decision caps a controversy over a proposal by Sunflower Electric Power, a rural electrical cooperative, to build a pair of big, 700-megawatt, coal-fired plants in Holcomb, a town in the western part of the state, at a cost of about $3.6 billion. One unit would have supplied power to parts of Kansas; the other, to be owned by another rural co-op, Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, would have provided electricity to fast-growing eastern Colorado.

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Read the whole sickening thing.
The entire global warming hypothesis has now gotten out of hand.
It’s time to put this BS where it belongs, then flush it.