It's a Wonderful Life Working for the Government

A Commentary By Michael Barone

Thursday, December 31, 2009

 

It looks like a happy new year for you -- if you're a public employee.

That's the takeaway from a recent Rasmussen poll that shows that 46 percent of government employees say the economy is getting better, while just 31 percent say it's getting worse. In contrast, 32 percent of those with private-sector jobs say the economy is getting better, while 49 percent say it is getting worse.
Nearly half, 44 percent, of government employees rate their personal finances as good or excellent. Only 33 percent of private-sector employees do.
It sounds like public- and private-sector employees are looking at different Americas. And they are.
Private-sector employment peaked at 115.8 million in December 2007, when the recession officially began. It was down to 108.5 million last November. That's a 6 percent decline.
Public-sector employment peaked at 22.6 million in August 2008. It fell a bit in 2009, then rebounded back to 22.5 million in November. That's less than a 1 percent decline.
This is not an accident -- it is the result of deliberate public policy. About one-third of the $787 million stimulus package passed in February 2009 was directed at state and local governments, which have been facing declining revenues and are, mostly, required to balance their budgets.
The policy aim, say Democrats, was to maintain public services and aid. The political aim, although Democrats don't say so, was to maintain public-sector jobs -- and the flow of union dues to the public-employee unions that represent almost 40 percent of public-sector workers.
Those unions in turn have contributed generously to Democrats. Service Employees International Union head Andy Stern, the most frequent non-government visitor to the Obama White House, has boasted that his union steered $60 million to Democrats in the 2008 cycle. The total union contribution to Democrats has been estimated at $400 million.
In effect, some significant portion of the stimulus package can be regarded as taxpayer funding of the Democratic Party. Needless to say, no Republicans need apply.
One must concede that there is something to the argument that maintaining government spending levels helps people in need and provides essential public services. Something, but not everything.
For it's more difficult to cut waste and unnecessary spending from government agencies than from private-sector businesses.
As Charles Peters, founder of the neoliberal Washington Monthly, noted years ago, when government is ordered to cut spending, it does things like closing the Washington Monument to visitors. Tourists from the 50 states and 435 congressional districts quickly squawk to their members of Congress, and the spending cuts are rescinded.
When businesses must cut, they do so with an eye to profits -- which is to say with an eye to providing consumers with goods and services they need enough to be willing to pay for. They tend to lay off unproductive employees while striving to retain productive ones.
Governments, restrained by civil service rules and often by union contracts, do not have similar incentives.
As for the argument that maintaining government payrolls pumps money into the private-sector economy -- well, where does that government money come from? From private-sector employees and employers or from those who buy government bonds and who must be repaid by government in the future.
At some point -- and this already has occurred in much of Western Europe -- public-sector spending tends to choke off private-sector growth. America's current high unemployment levels have been commonplace in much of Western Europe for the last 25 years.
The question now is whether they will become commonplace in the United States in the decade ahead. The decision by the Barack Obama administration and the Democratic Congress to hold public-sector employees in place while the private sector is gravely weakened has the potential to put us on that trajectory.
The unemployment data show that this recession has had a much greater impact on private-sector workers than on public employees, on men than on women, on blue-collar workers than on white-collar employees.
This seems not to have gone unnoticed. Democrats have been surprised that so many downscale voters oppose their big-spending programs. Maybe many of those voters have noticed how much of that spending has gone to public-sector union members, leaving the rest of America with a less-than-happy new year.
Michael Barone is senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner.
COPYRIGHT 2009 THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
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See Other Commentaries by Michael Barone

Posted by Rasmussen 

The Predictable Muslim Response There Is v. The One There Should Be (But Never Happens)

By Debbie Schlussel

In response to the Islamic terrorist attack on Northwest Flight 253 by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the usual suspects are holding press conferences fertilized with the usual, predictable, empty condemnations of Al-Qaeda, while they refuse to condemn Hezbollah, HAMAS, Islamic Jihad, the Muslim Brotherhood, and pretty much every group and person who has murdered and continues to attempt to murder U.S. citizens as part of the Al-Qaeda Network.

In Detroit, Dawud Walid a/k/a Delano Anthony Willis, Jr. (a man with a significant criminal rap sheet), Executive Director of CAIR-Michigan, told the media that Muslims are “worried about backlash” and, “People in the community are just frustrated.”  Whatchoo Talkin’ ‘Bout Willis?!  That’s chutzpah, but we let him get away with this outrageous response.  So he continues with it.
When will the day come when Muslims are “worried about Americans being murdered by their fellow co-religionist” and when “People in the community are just frustrated”–not to mention, embarrassed–by that?  NEVER. 

Instead, the Islamic community is uppity, indignant, and self-righteous about this BS “backlash” that never has happened, and unfortunately, never will.  If only there was “backlash,” we’d have less of these attacks and less whining-with-no-basis Muslims.  But we simply don’t have the guts.  We don’t even have the guts to yank a guy’s visa, when his own Muslim father says he’s a terrorist.
Nope, they’re not embarrassed in the least that one of their co-religionists–that MANY, MANY, MANY of their co-religionists–seek to mass murder Americans and that several have succeeded.  Instead, it’s yet another boon to putting them in front of the cameras and complaining.  300 Americans might have died?  Who cares–it’s all about the “real victims,” Muslims.
Yesterday, Walid/Willis held one of these phony baloney news conferences, which was so predictably eaten up like cotton candy by all of the Detroit mainstream media.  But Walid has, in the past, when I’ve questioned him in public forums, defended the Hezbollah mass murder of over 300 U.S. Marines and Embassy officials in Beirut.  His condemnations here–with regard to Flight 253–are meaningless and empty.  And that’s especially the case, when  you consider that  this cretin and his cohorts spend every waking minute moaning and bitching in order to make it nearly impossible to catch and prosecute the Abdulmutallabs of the world before they murder or nearly do so, failing only because their undies failed to ignite correctly.

His organization, CAIR, is the force behind the Flying Imams’ behavior and resulting lawsuit.  So, if Abdulmutallab’s bomb had gone off, he’d share the blood of nearly 300 passengers on his hands.

No Rise of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Fraction in Past 160 Years, New Research Finds

ScienceDaily (Dec. 31, 2009) — Most of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activity does not remain in the atmosphere, but is instead absorbed by the oceans and terrestrial ecosystems. In fact, only about 45 percent of emitted carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere.

---

New research finds that the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide has not increased either during the past 150 years or during the most recent five decades, contrary to some recent studies. (Credit: iStockphoto)

Earth & Climate

• Climate
• Air Quality
• Global Warming
• Atmosphere
• Forest
• Geochemistry

Reference

• Atmospheric chemistry
• Ocean acidification
• Consensus of scientists regarding global warming
• Carbon cycle

However, some studies have suggested that the ability of oceans and plants to absorb carbon dioxide recently may have begun to decline and that the airborne fraction of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions is therefore beginning to increase.
Many climate models also assume that the airborne fraction will increase. Because understanding of the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide is important for predicting future climate change, it is essential to have accurate knowledge of whether that fraction is changing or will change as emissions increase.
To assess whether the airborne fraction is indeed increasing, Wolfgang Knorr of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol reanalyzed available atmospheric carbon dioxide and emissions data since 1850 and considers the uncertainties in the data.
In contradiction to some recent studies, he finds that the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide has not increased either during the past 150 years or during the most recent five decades.
The research is published in Geophysical Research Letters.

Posted at Science Daily

MUSLIM ‘PANTY’ BOMBER invited radical Muslim cleric who advocated dying while ‘fighting jihad’ to address British Muslim students

The cleric, who converted to Islam from Roman Catholicism, has written that conflict between Islam and the West is ‘ordered in the Qur’an’, and that Muslims and Westerners ‘ cannot live peaceably together.’

Well, he’s got that part right.

Radical Cleric Green

He has also claimed: ‘Dying while fighting jihad is one of the surest ways to paradise and Allah’s good pleasure’.

While president of the Islamic Society at University College London, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab helped arrange for Abdur Raheem Green to speak. In 2005, shortly before Abdulmutallab arranged for him to address UCL, Green was barred from entering Australia after opposition leader Kim Beazley accused him of ’spreading hate’.

The revelation adds weight to the belief that Abdulmutallab was radicalised during his time studying in London, where he read mechanical engineering and business at UCL between 2005 and 2008. The 23-year-old spent most of his spare time with the university’s Islamic Society, for which he served as president between 2006 and 2007.

Panty Bomber Abdulmutallab

He organised a week-long conference under the banner War on Terror Week in January 2007 with advertised speakers including former Guantanamo Bay detainees.

Security sources are concerned that the picture emerging of his undergraduate years suggests that he was recruited by Al Qaeda in London. They added that Islamic radicalisation was rife on university campuses, especially in London.

Green, 44, was born Anthony Green, the son of a colonial administrator in Tanzania. He was brought up a Roman Catholic but converted to Islam in 1987. He works at the London Central Mosque and Islamic Cultural Centre as the Visits and English Dawa Co-ordinator.

In 2005, Green was prevented from boarding a flight with a stopover in Brisbane because he appeared on an Australian government ‘ movement alert list’ due to his inflammatory comments. UK DAILY MAIL

By Bare Naked Islam

Houston: Rocket launcher, jihadist writings found in apartment -- no charges filed

Talk about bringing in the new year with a bang ............

uh Houston, we have a problem.

Houston: Rocket launcher, jihadist writings found in apartment -- no charges filed Jihadwatch

Rocket launcher? Check. Jihadist writings? Check. But no worries -- the Feds found no ties to terrorism!
Keystone Kops Alert from Houston: "Rocket Launcher Found In Apartment: No Charges Filed," from Click2Houston.com, December 31 (thanks to Rich):

HOUSTON -- Police went to a southwest Houston apartment to break up a disturbance but ended up finding something else, KPRC Local 2 reported Wednesday. A woman called police on Monday and said a man was forcing his way into her apartment in the 5300 block of Elm Street.
When officers went inside, they found something that made them concerned enough to call the bomb squad.
They found an AT-4 shoulder-mounted rocket launcher. It can shoot a missile nearly 1,000 feet through buildings and tanks.
"It gives infantrymen the advantage with an ultra-light weapon that can stop vehicles, armored vehicles as well as main battle tanks and fortifications," said Oscar Saldivar of Top Brass Military and Tactical on the North Freeway.
That type of rocket launcher has been used in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The renter of the apartment didn't want to talk to KPRC Local 2.
"This is my house," the woman said. " Get away from here. I don't want to talk to nobody."
The woman did tell police that the rocket launcher belonged to Nabilaye I. Yansane, someone whom she allowed to store items at her apartment.
Police records show that she didn't want Yansane at her apartment, so she called them.
According to court documents, officers also found Jihadist writings that allegedly belonged to Yansane. The woman didn't want to talk to KPRC Local 2 about that, either.
"I don't know," she said. "You'll have to ask the police."
Yansane was charged with criminal trespassing and pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to three days in jail, which he has already served. No charges related to the rocket launcher or writings were filed.
"Other people could have had access to the apartment, so maybe if a rocket launcher was located there, as is stated in the offense report, maybe it belonged to somebody else," attorney Garl Polland said.
Prosecutors said there are no state charges for having the unarmed launcher or possessing Jihadist writings, unless they contain some type of threat.
The former director of Houston's FBI office said rocket launchers can be dangerous if they're in the wrong hands.

No kidding, really?

"I don't know any other use for those weapons except in combat," Don Clark said. "I've had them in combat, used them in combat. That's what they are used for." Houston police said they did a thorough investigation and did not find any ties to terrorists or a terrorist network.

Sounds really thorough. I am so relieved.

Posted by Pamela Geller on Thursday, December 31, 2009 at 01:21 PM

Dem Rep: Cheney Has ‘Political Tourette’s’

 Listen to Bush criers decry Cheney. What a bunch of obfuscate-rs.

Gingrich Blames Political Correctness For Security Failure

TSA subpoenas bloggers, demands names of sources

Dec 30 06:59 PM US/Eastern
By EILEEN SULLIVAN
Associated Press Writer

(AP) - As the government reviews how an alleged terrorist was able to bring a bomb onto a U.S.-bound plane and try to blow it up on Christmas Day, the Transportation Security Administration is going after bloggers who wrote about a directive to increase security after the incident. TSA special agents served subpoenas to travel bloggers Steve Frischling and Chris Elliott, demanding that they reveal who leaked the security directive to them. The government says the directive was not supposed to be disclosed to the public.

Frischling said he met with two TSA special agents Tuesday night at his Connecticut home for about three hours and again on Wednesday morning when he was forced to hand over his lap top computer. Frischling said the agents threatened to interfere with his contract to write a blog for KLM Royal Dutch Airlines if he didn't cooperate and provide the name of the person who leaked the memo.
"It literally showed up in my box," Frischling told The Associated Press. "I do not know who it came from." He said he provided the agents a signed statement to that effect.
In a Dec. 29 posting on his blog, Elliott said he had told the TSA agents at his house that he would call his lawyer and get back to them. Elliott did not immediately respond to an e-mail seeking comment.
The TSA declined to say how many people were subpoenaed.
The directive was dated Dec. 25 and was issued after a 23-year-old Nigerian man was charged with attempting to bomb a Northwest Airlines flight as it approached Detroit from Amsterdam. The bomb, which allegedly was hidden in Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's underwear, malfunctioned and no one was killed. Authorities said the device included a syringe and a condom-like bag filled with powder that the FBI determined to be PETN, a common explosive.
The near-miss attack has prompted President Barack Obama to order a review of what intelligence information the government had about Abdulmutallab and why it wasn't shared with the appropriate agencies. He also ordered a review of U.S. aviation security. The government has spent billions of dollars and undergone massive reorganizations since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to prevent such a tragedy from happening again.
The TSA directive outlined new screening measures that went into effect the same day as the airliner incident. It included many procedures that would be apparent to the traveling public, such as screening at boarding gates, patting down the upper legs and torso, physically inspecting all travelers' belongings, looking carefully at syringes with powders and liquids, requiring that passengers remain in their seats one hour before landing, and disabling all onboard communications systems, including what is provided by the airline.
It also listed people who would be exempted from these screening procedures such as heads of state and their families.
___
On the Net:
http://www.elliott.org/blog/full-text-of-my-subpoena-from-the-department-of-homeland-security/(pound sign)more-10228 

http://boardingarea.com/blogs/flyingwithfish/2009/12/30/the-fallout-from-sd-1544-09-06-the-feds-at-my-door/

By Breitbart

Armed TSA Agents Threaten Travel Journalist

TSA shows up at the door of a Connecticut blogger, demands he relinquish his laptop, and says "we could make this difficult for you."

December 31, 2009 - by Annie Jacobsen

At 7:00 p.m. on December 29, armed TSA agents banged on the door of photojournalist and KLM Airlines blogger Steven Frischling’s Connecticut home. “They threatened me with a criminal search warrant and suggested they’d call up my clients and say I was a security risk if I didn’t turn over my computer to them. They said ‘we could make this difficult for you,’” Frischling told me in a telephone interview the following afternoon. By then, TSA had removed Frischling’s computer from his home, made a copy of his hard drive, and returned the computer to him.
The federal agents, dispatched form the Transportation Security Administration’s Office of Inspection, had wanted Frischling, a respected travel journalist, to name names. They wanted Frischling to tell them who had given him “TSA Security Directive SD-1544-09-06,” which Frischling and another blogger had posted online three days earlier.
“It was a double-edged sword for me because I did not know who sent me the document. And it was absurd because that document had been seen by approximately 10,000 airline personnel around the world, including personnel in Islamabad, Riyadh, and Nigeria, so the idea that it was somehow in their control” was false, Frischling said.
Frischling explained that he posted the document because he wanted people to be able to read it and form their own opinions and ideas about it. The document was not marked “classified,” and it had already apparently been posted on some airline websites. The email had been sent to him anonymously from someone with a gmail address. TSA believed it was one of their own and wanted to know who, exactly.
For Frischling, thinking beyond the immediate safety of his three children — alone with him in the house — was difficult. His wife works at night and was already gone.
“I stood talking to the agents with my three-year-old in my arms,” Frischling told me.
While the agents were intimidating him, he feared if he were to be arrested then his children would be left without a parent present. He telephoned an attorney, who suggested he cooperate with TSA since there was no federal shield law to protect him in matters deemed national security threats. Besides, the agents “made it clear that if I said ‘no’ to letting them have my hard drive, they were going to come back with a search warrant,” Frischling explained.
But why come at Frischling with such heavy-handed tactics? In a statement, TSA later said that security directives “are not for public disclosure” — which hardly sounds like it’s against federal law per se. (If it were, it’s almost certain the TSA would have said so in its statement.) But that didn’t help Frischling in the heat of the moment.
So, why then?
In covering the attempted bombing of Northwest Flight 253 for Pajamas Media, and also for a column I write at LATimes.com, I have spoken with five different FBI and TSA agents — none of whom are presently authorized to make statements about Northwest Flight 253 on the record. That job has been relegated to the Department of Justice, whose spokesman, Dean Boyd, had only this to say to me:

Because this is an ongoing criminal investigation, we are not at liberty to provide you with any comment beyond the public allegations that are contained in the criminal complaint.

But I did find my answer — in a pre-recorded message at the FBI’s Detroit Metro Bureau to which press are referred. The message there states that anyone seeking information about “the Christmas Day event at Detroit metro airport” should call the Department of Justice in Washington.
Wait. A Christmas Day “event”?
The FBI makes the attack against Northwest Flight 253 sound more like a shopping sale or a rock concert than the terror strike that it was. Trying to kill 298 airline passengers, destroy an airplane, and crash it into the suburbs of Detroit is now called an “event”? Could the jackbooted TSA visit to blogger Steven Frischling’s Connecticut home be just another trickle-down result of DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano’s insistence that terrorist attacks be referred to as “man-caused disasters”?
You see, in the TSA directive which Frischling’s posted online, the TSA was caught calling a spade a spade:

INFORMATION: On December 25, 2009, a terrorist attack was attempted against a flight traveling to the United States.

Yup, “terrorist attack.” In plain old English, spelled out. When out of public earshot, apparently the TSA is allowed to call a terrorist attack a terrorist attack by name. But when the public is listening, it’s to be referred to as a Christmas Day event.
“We are a free society, knowledge is power, and informing the masses allows for public conversation and collective understanding,” Frischling wrote on his blog. “You can agree or disagree, but you need information to know if you want to agree or disagree. My goal is to inform and help people better understand what is happening, as well as allow them to form their own opinions.”
Prescient words. Another goal for journalists is to inform the people that a terrorist attack is not a “Christmas Day event.”

By Pajamas Media

Flight 253 passenger Kurt Haskell: 'I was visited by the FBI'

By Aaron Foley | MLive.com

December 31, 2009, 9:41AM

Courtesy photoLori and Kurt Haskell
Following up on a visit from FBI officials about an eyewitness account first described to MLive.com, Michigan attorney Kurt Haskell described the visit in comment sections across MLive on Wednesday.

Haskell and his wife, Lori, were aboard Flight 253 when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab allegedly tried to destroy the plane. They say another man tried to help Abdulmutallab board the plane in Amsterdam.

Haskell had two detailed posts in two different stories. Here is Part One, originally posted here:

"Today is the second worst day of my life after 12-25-09. Today is the day that I realized that my own country is lying to me and all of my fellow Americans. Let me explain.
Ever since I got off of Flight 253 I have been repeating what I saw in US Customs. Specifically, 1 hour after we left the plane, bomb sniffing dogs arrived. Up to this point, all of the passengers on Flight 253 stood in a small area in an evacuated luggage claim area of an airport terminal. During this time period, all of the passengers had their carry on bags with them. When the bomb sniffing dogs arrived, 1 dog found something in a carry on bag of a 30 ish Indian man. This is not the so called "Sharp Dressed" man. I will refer to this man as "The man in orange". The man in orange, who stood some 20ft away from me the entire time until he was taken away, was immediately taken away to be searched and interrogated in a nearby room. At this time he was not handcuffed. When he emerged from the room, he was then handcuffed and taken away. At this time an FBI agent came up to the rest of the passengers and said the following (approximate quote) "You all are being moved to another area because this area is not safe. I am sure many of you saw what just happened (Referring to the man in orange) and are smart enough to read between the lines and figure it out." We were then marched out of the baggage claim area and into a long hallway. This entire time period and until we left customs, no person that wasn't a law enforcement personnel or a passenger on our flight was allowed anywhere on our floor of the terminal (or possibly the entire terminal) The FBI was so concerned during this time, that we were not allowed to use the bathroom unless we went alone with an FBI agent, we were not allowed to eat or drink, or text or call anyone. I have been repeating this same story over the last 5 days. The FBI has, since we landed, insisted that only one man was arrested for the airliner attack (contradicting my account). However, several of my fellow passengers have come over the past few days, backed up my claim, and put pressure on FBI/Customs to tell the truth. Early today, I heard from two different reporters that a federal agency (FBI or Customs) was now admitting that another man has been held (and will be held indefinitely) since our flight landed for "immigration reasons." Notice that this man was "being held" and not "arrested", which was a cute semantic ploy by the FBI to stretch the truth and not lie.
Just a question, could that mean that the man in orange had no passport?
However, a few hours later, Customs changed its story again. This time, Mr. Ron Smith of Customs, says the man that was detained "had been taken into custody, but today tells the news the person was a passenger on a different flight." Mr. Ron Smith, you are playing the American public for a fool. Lets take a look at how plausible this story is (After you've already changed it twice). For the story to be true, you have to believe, that:
1. FBI/Customs let passengers from another flight co-mingle with the passengers of flight 253 while the most important investigation in 8 years was pending. I have already stated that not one person who wasn't a passenger or law enforcement personnal was in our area the entire time we were detained by Customs.
2. FBI/Customs while detaining the flight 253 passengers in perhaps the most important investigation since the last terrorist attack, and despite not letting any flight 253 passenger drink, eat, make a call, or use the bathroom, let those of other flights trample through the area and possibly contaminate evidence.
3. You have to believe the above (1 and 2) despite the fact that no flights during this time allowed passengers to exit off of the planes at all and were detained on the runway during at least the first hour of our detention period.
4. You have to believe that the man that stood 20 feet from me since we entered customs came from a mysterious plane that never landed, let its passengers off the plane and let this man sneak into our passenger group despite having extremely tight security at this time (i.e. no drinking even).
5. FBI/Customs was hauling mysterious passengers from other flights through the area we were being held to possibly comtaminate evidence and allow discussions with suspects on Flight 253 or to possibly allow the exchange of bombs, weapons or other devices between the mysterious passengers from other flights and those on flight 253.
Seriously Mr. Ron Smith, how stupid do you think the American public is?
Mr. Ron Smith's third version of the story is an absolute inplausible joke. I encourage you, Mr. Ron Smith, to debate me anytime, anywhere, and anyplace in public to let the American people see who is credible and who is not.
I ask, isn't this the more plausible story:
1. Customs/FBI realized that they screwed up and don't want to admit that they left flight 253 passengers on a flight with a live bomb on the runway for 20 minutes.
2. Customs/FBI realized that they screwed up and don't want to admit that they left flight 253 passengers in customs for 1 hour with a live bomb in a carry on bag.
3. Customs/FBI realize that the man in orange points to a greater involvement then the lone wolf theory that they have been promoting.
Mr. Ron Smith I encourage you to come out of your cubicle and come up with a more plausible version number 4 of your story."
Haskell continued his comment in a different post on MLive.
"For the last five days I have been reporting my story of the so called "sharp dressed man." For those of you who haven't read my account, it involves a sharp dressed "Indian man" attempting to talk a ticket agent into letting a supposed "Sudanese refugee" (The terrorist) onto flight 253 without a passport. I have never had any idea how it played out except to note that the so called "Sudanese reefugee" later boarded my flight and attempted to blow it up and kill me. At no time did my story involve, or even find important whether the terrorist actually had a passport. The importance of my story was and always will be, the attempt with an accomplice (apparently succesful) of a terrorist with all sorts of prior terrorist warning signs to skirt the normal passport boarding procedures in Amsterdam. By the way, Amsterdam security did come out the other day and admit that the terrorist did not have to "Go through normal passport checking procedures". Amsterdam security, please define to the American public "Normal passport boarding procedures".
You see the FBI would have the American public believe that what was important was whether the terrorist in fact had a passport.
Seriously think about this people. You have a suicide bomber who had recently been to Yemen to but a bomb, whose father had reported him as a terrorist, who supposedly was on some kind of U.S. terror watchlist, and most likely knew the U.S. was aware of these red flags. Yet, he didn't go through "Normal passport checking procedures." What does that mean? Maybe that he flashed a passport to some sort of sympathetic security manager in a backroom to avoid a closer look at the terrorist's "red flags"? What is important is that the terrorist avoided using normal passport checking procedures (apparently successfully) in order to avoid a closer look into his red flags. Who cares if he had a passport. The important thing is that he didn't want to show it and somehow avoided a closer inspection and "normal passport checking procedures." Each passport comes with a bar code on it that can be scanned to provide a wealth of information about the individual. I would bet that the passport checking procedures for the terrorist did not include a bar code scan of his passport (which could have revealed damning information about the terrorist).
Please note that there is a very easy way to verify the veracity of my prior "sharp dressed man" account. Dutch police have admitted that they have reviewed the video of the "sharp dressed man" that I referenced. Note that it has not been released anywhere, You see, if my eye witness account is false, it could easily be proven by releasing the video. However, the proof of my eyewitness account would also be verified if I am telling the truth and I am. There is a reason we have only heard of the video and not seen it. dutch authorities, "RELEASE THE VIDEO!" This is the most important video in 8 years and may be all of two minutes long. Show the entire video and "DO NOT EDIT IT"! The American public deserves its own chance to attempt to identify the "sharp dressed man". I have no doubt that if the video indicated that my account was wrong, that the video would have already swept over the entire world wide web.
Instead of the video, we get a statment that the video has been viewed and that the terrorist had a passport. Each of these statements made by the FBI is a self serving play on semantics and each misses the importance of my prior "sharp dressed man" account. The importance being that the man "Tried to board the plane with an accomplice and without a passort". The other significance is that only the airport security video can verify my eyewitness account and that it is not being released.
Who has the agenda here and who doesn't? Think about that for a minute."

By MLive.Com

Now I'm Really Getting Pissed Off

By David Michael Green (about the author) Page 1 of 3 page(s)

opednews.com Permalink

For OpEdNews: David Michael Green - Writer
Hey did you hear about the iconic African-American guy who plays golf, and whose relationship with the public is in a free-fall lately?

No, as a matter of fact I'm not talking about Tiger Woods.

You know, I've really been trying not to write an article every other week about all the things I don't like about Barack Obama.


But the little prick is making it very hard.

Like any good progressive, I've gone from admiration to hope to disappointment to anger when it comes to this president. Now I'm fast getting to rage.

How much rage? I find myself thinking that the thing I want most from the 2010 elections is for his party to get absolutely clobbered, even if that means a repeat of 1994. And that what I most want from 2012 is for him to be utterly humiliated, even if that means President Palin at the helm. That much rage.

Did this clown really say on national television that "I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of you know, fat cat bankers on Wall Street"?!?!

Really, Barack? So, like, my question is: Then why the hell did you help out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street?!?! Why the hell did you surround yourself with nothing but Robert Rubin proteges in all the key economic positions in your government? Why did you allow them to open a Washington branch of Goldman Sachs in the West Wing? Why have your policies been tailored to helping Wall Street bankers, rather than the other 300 million of us, who just happen to be suffering badly right now?

You can read the rest at OpEdNews.

Public Sector Unions Are Killing California

William Voegeli writes in City Journal:

Before 1990, [California and Texas] grew much faster than the rest of the country. Since then, only Texas has continued to do so. While its share of the nation’s population has steadily increased, from 6.8 percent in 1990 to 7.9 percent in 2007, California’s has barely budged, from 12 percent to 12.1 percent.
Unpacking the numbers is even more revealing—and, for California, disturbing. The biggest contrast between the two states shows up in “net internal migration,” the demographer’s term for the difference between the number of Americans who move into a state from another and the number who move out of it to another. Between April 1, 2000, and June 30, 2007, an average of 3,247 more Americans moved out of California than into it every week, according to the Census Bureau. Over the same period, Texas saw a net gain, in an average week, of 1,544 people.

So why are Americans, predominantly middle class Americans, fleeing California?

The biggest factor accounting for California’s loss of population to the other 49 states, bond ratings that would embarrass Chrysler or GM, and state politics contentious and feckless enough to shame a banana republic, has to be its public sector’s diminishing willingness and capacity to fulfill its promises to taxpayers.
…
According to a report issued earlier this year by McKinsey & Company, Texas students “are, on average, one to two years of learning ahead of California students of the same age,” though expenditures per public school student are 12 percent higher in California.

And why is the public sector so inefficient in California? Voegeli again, this time in the Claremont Review of Books:

Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee says California’s “public employee unions wield immense—even hegemonic—influence” over the Democratic majorities in the state legislature. … No other political entity comes close to the unions’ ability to produce effective, sophisticated get-out-the-vote campaigns with hundreds of experienced workers. According to the Los Angeles Times, the California Teachers Association, the state affiliate of the National Education Association, “has deep pockets, a militia of more than 300,000 members to call on and a track record of making or breaking political careers.”

And once compliant politicians are in office, what do public sector unions lobby for?

It’s neither a coincidence nor a surprise, then, that California’s government employees receive higher compensation than those in any other state. The Census Bureau’s latest figures cover the year 2006, and show that California’s local government employees were paid at an average annual rate of $60,780, 33% above the national average. … California’s public workers receive more, often significantly more, than government employees in other states with high living costs. Californians who work for local governments were paid 7.7%, 9.1%, 11.5%, and 21.4% more than their counterparts in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts respectively.

Overall government spending also skyrockets when public sector unions are in control:

Adjusted for inflation, California’s per-capita outlays increased by 21.7% between 1992 and 2006; the increase for the other 49 states and the District of Columbia was 18.2%. What’s striking is that California is an exception to the pattern we were told to expect in Statistics 101, the regression to the mean. The states where inflation-adjusted, per-capita government outlays grew the fastest between 1992 and 2006 were, generally speaking, ones where those outlays were among the lowest to begin with. Conversely, of the ten states that had the highest per-capita public expenditures in 1991-92, California and Wyoming are the only two that saw those expenditures, adjusted for inflation, grow faster than the national average over the next 14 years.

Back to Voegeli’s City Journal piece:

James Madison would have to revise—or possibly burn—Federalist No. 10 if he were forced to account for the new phenomenon of the government itself becoming the faction decisively shaping its own policy and conduct. This faction dominates because it’s playing a much longer game than the politicians who come and go, not to mention the citizens who rarely read the enormous owner’s manual for the Rube Goldberg machine they feed with their dollars. They rarely stay outraged long enough to make a difference.

The public sector union takeover of government is not confined to California. As Heritage fellow James Sherk reported earlier this year, for the first time in history most union members work for the government, not the private sector. The days when “union member” meant an American working in a steel plant, or coal mine, or auto factory are gone. Today, unions are dependent on government, not the private sector, for their livelihood. Therefore, unions have little interest in private sector job growth. Private sector jobs don’t help fund political campaigns. But government jobs do. The change in incentives has been devastating to American taxpayers. Manhattan Institute senior fellow Steven Malanga explains why:

In the private sector … employers who are too generous with pay and benefits will be punished. In the public sector, however, more union members means more voters. And more voters means more dollars for political campaigns to elect sympathetic politicians who will enact higher taxes to foot the bill for the upward arc of government spending on workers.

This is why you see big labor supporting Obamacare and cap and trade taxes. Private sector job growth does nothing to increase union dues … only the further expansion of government does. The result in California has been high taxes, poor services, and a disappearing middle class. But at least Californians can still move to Texas. After the Obama administration is done with our country, we’ll have no place left to move to.

By Heritage

SOMALI MUSLIM ARRESTED at airport with chemicals and syringe

A Somali MUSLIM tried to board a commercial airliner in Mogadishu last month with powdered chemicals, liquid and a syringe that could have caused an explosion on board, officials said today.

The hallmarks bear chilling similarities to the terrorist plot to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner. Police spokesman Abdulahi Hassan Barise said the suspect was arrested before the November 13 Daallo Airlines flight departed. It was scheduled to travel from Mogadishu to the northern Somali city of Hargeisa, then to Djibouti and Dubai.

Two international officials in Nairobi said the incident is similar to the Detroit attack in that the Somali man had a syringe, a bag of powdered chemicals and liquid. US officials are aware of the incident and hastening to investigate any possible links with the Detroit attack.

The Somali man – whose name has not yet been released – was arrested by African Union peacekeeping troops. “We don’t know whether he’s linked with al-Qaida or other foreign organisations, but his actions were the acts of a terrorist. We caught him red-handed,” he said.

A Nairobi-based diplomat said the incident in Somalia is similar to the attempted attack on the Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day in that the Somali man had a syringe, a bag of powdered chemicals and liquid – tools similar to those used in the Detroit attack.

Western officials say many of the hundreds of foreign jihadi fighters in Somalia come in small boats across the Gulf of Aden from Yemen. The officials also say examination of equipment used in some Somali suicide attacks leads them to believe it was originally assembled in Yemen. A Somali security official involved in the capture of the suspect in Mogadishu said he had a 1kg (2.2lb) package of chemical powder and a container of liquid chemicals. The security official said the suspect was the last passenger to try to board.

Once security officials detected the powder chemicals and syringe, the suspect tried to bribe the security team that detained him, the Somali security official said. The security official said the suspect had a white shampoo bottle with a black acid-like substance in it. He also had a clear plastic bag with a light green chalky substance and a syringe containing a green liquid.

The Somali security officials said the Daallo Airlines flight was scheduled to go from Mogadishu to Hargeisa, to Djibouti and then to Dubai. LINK

By Bare Naked Islam

Jihadi Homicide Bomber Kills 8 Americans in Afghanistan

This was Obama's war, remember? This was the important war, the good war. He was going to go to Afghanistan and rip 'em a new one. Instead, he dithered for nine months and made insane concessions to his partners, the Taliban, while the US military suffered the biggest losses month over month since our incursions began into this hotbed of jihad activity. Such stupidity is lethal.
Somebody warn Obama, his anti-Americanism is showing.
Chaos with the muhammadan in the White House.

Afghan suicide blast kills eight U.S. civilians National Post, hat tip Jane

KABUL, Dec 30 -- Eight American civilians were killed in a suicide attack on a military base in Afghanistan's southeastern Khost province on Wednesday, U.S. officials said.
"We can confirm that there was an explosion in Khost province and eight Americans have been killed," a U.S. official in Kabul said on condition of anonymity.
No U.S. or NATO troops were injured in the blast at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost province, said a U.S. defense official who declined to be named.
Attacks in Afghanistan this year have spiralled to their highest levels since the Taliban were overthrown by U.S.-backed Afghan forces in late 2001.
Washington is sending 30,000 extra troops to Afghanistan in an attempt to stem the mounting violence, with NATO allies also contributing thousands more.
Civilian and military casualty tolls have reached record levels this year, with suicide attackers even targeting United Nations employees at a guesthouse in the heart of Kabul.
Khost, on the Pakistani border, is one of the areas of Afghanistan where the Taliban insurgency is strongest, and most foreigners there are troops or working under military protection.
In late September a suicide bomber rammed a car into a military convoy of foreign forces there, killing one American

Posted by Pamela Geller

Wednesday, December 30, 2009 at 04:42 PM

On Planet Janet

President Obama yesterday pulled his head out of the sand long enough to promise a thorough review of US se curity practices after the near-suicide bombing of a commercial airliner over Detroit on Christmas Day.
Then he stuck it right back in.
Obama, in a brief address from Hawaii, did manage to utter the "T" word: "A full investigation has been launched into this attempted act of terrorism." But he refused to define the nature of the threat.
Nor did he fire Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano -- a pity, because if any government official ever earned the boot, it's her.

AP

Sunday, she claimed "the system" she allegedly oversees "worked" on Christmas Day -- even though Nigerian jihadist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab brought a bomb aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253 and almost detonated it.
The claim was nonsensical, as she finally noted yesterday -- "the system didn't work" -- but not before destroying the credibility she needs to hold the job.
Yet Obama is short on credibility, too. Why can't he bring himself to describe the threat for what it is: an Islamist holy war against America?
Yesterday, Obama termed Abdulmutallab "an isolated extremist."
Really? Is that all?
The bomber's own father warned US officials in October that his son had fallen in with Islamic radicals.
Abdulmutallab himself reportedly told federal officials he trained with al Qaeda in Yemen -- and, for what it's worth, al Qaeda in Yemen confirms that.
And ABC News reported yesterday that two of Abdulmutallab's Yemeni trainers had been released from Guantanamo Bay to the Saudis in 2007 -- and then set free after (no joke) "art therapy rehabilitation."
Meanwhile, Brian Jenkins of the Rand Corporation reports 12 incidents of Islamist terror either in the United States or involving Americans abroad in 2009, the most in any year since 9/11. (These include the Fort Hood massacre.)
See the trend line?
Obama refuses to.
"Those who would attack our country" is how he described the jihadis -- a formulation he used four times in his brief address.
But if the president refuses to define the enemy, how can he expect America to defend against that enemy?
No wonder Napolitano is so confused.
No reasonable person believes that terror screening can ever be foolproof. But Americans need full confidence that their government is addressing the problem as vigorously as possible.
This would require Obama to order two basic changes in anti-terror policy:
* Captured terrorists need to be treated as such -- and not as common criminals. Abdulmutallab needs to disappear down a black hole somewhere, and stay there until the war on terror is over. No criminal trials for terrorists.
* Homeland Security needs to quit pretending little old ladies from the heartland pose a security threat and institute an intelligent traveler-profiling policy that targets Middle Eastern males.
Certainly, Abdulmutallab's attack was instructive: Who knew it was so easy to waltz through security with high explosives stuffed down one's pants?
But while odds are that some equally imaginative jihadist will someday succeed, a comprehensive, focused anti-terror policy will make that much less likely.

By New York Post

Meet Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, Global Climate Hustler

Posted by Vladimir (Profile)

Tuesday, December 29th at 11:48PM EST

 

Do you ever wonder who stands to benefit from global trading in carbon credits?
We’ve looked at some of the investments of former VP Al Gore with “green” investment bank Kleiner-Perkins. We’ve also considered the Top 10 Green Energy Whores and the Climate-Industrial Complex, led by General Electric. These are companies who stand to win big in the New Green Economy, and are not above gaming our democratic system in the pursuit of green profits.
Now, the Telegraph graces us with an interesting look at the commercial pursuits of Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, Chairman of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The good Dr. Pachauri makes Algore look like a piker.
Questions over business deals of UN climate change guru Dr Rajendra Pachauri

Although Dr Pachauri is often presented as a scientist (he was even once described by the BBC as “the world’s top climate scientist”), as a former railway engineer with a PhD in economics he has no qualifications in climate science at all.
What has also almost entirely escaped attention, however, is how Dr Pachauri has established an astonishing worldwide portfolio of business interests with bodies which have been investing billions of dollars in organisations dependent on the IPCC’s policy recommendations.
These outfits include banks, oil and energy companies and investment funds heavily involved in ‘carbon trading’ and ‘sustainable technologies’, which together make up the fastest-growing commodity market in the world, estimated soon to be worth trillions of dollars a year.

The original power base from which Dr Pachauri has built up his worldwide network of influence over the past decade is the Delhi-based Tata Energy Research Institute, of which he became director in 1981 and director-general in 2001. Now renamed The Energy Research Institute, TERI was set up in 1974 by India’s largest privately-owned business empire, the Tata Group, with interests ranging from steel, cars and energy to chemicals, telecommunications and insurance (and now best-known in the UK as the owner of Jaguar, Land Rover, Tetley Tea and Corus, Britain’s largest steel company).

It is one of these [carbon trading] deals, reported in last week’s Sunday Telegraph, which is enabling Tata to transfer three million tonnes of steel production from its Corus plant in Redcar to a new plant in Orissa, thus gaining a potential £1.2 billion in ‘carbon credits’ (and putting 1,700 people on Teesside out of work). [Sound familiar? This was previously blogged as "How Cap and Trade Plans to Cripple Our Economy" - ed.]

More than three-quarters of the world ‘carbon’ market benefits India and China in this way. India alone has 1,455 CDM projects in operation, worth $33 billion (£20 billion), many of them facilitated by Tata – and it is perhaps unsurprising that Dr Pachauri also serves on the advisory board of the Chicago Climate Exchange, the largest and most lucrative carbon-trading exchange in the world, which was also assisted by TERI in setting up India’s own carbon exchange.
[emphasis added]

As per usual, “Follow the money” is excellent advice.

At Redstate

Senator Jim DeMint Steps Up Again to Lead. McClatchy Newspapers Cries.

Posted by Erick Erickson (Profile)

Tuesday, December 29th at 7:00AM EST

 

McClatchy Newspapers is the alleged “news” organization that runs terrorist propaganda out of Iraq as legitimate news. It’s Washington editor tried very hard to push local McClatchy reporters in North Carolina to write damaging stories on Blackwater. It hired anonymous Iraqis during the Iraq War to write lots of unverifiable stories about the horrors of American soldiers.
Today, in another example of its bias, its national news feed runs the headline Who’s running the TSA? No one, thanks to Sen. Jim DeMint.
Compare that to the Washington Post, which ran the identical story with the headline “Republican senator DeMint holds up nomination for TSA chief“.
The McClatchy headline is not even true. In fact, it is objectively a lie.
From the story itself, “Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) had not scheduled a floor vote on Southers before the Senate left town on Christmas Eve, and the Senate will not be back in session for another three weeks.”
So Reid hasn’t even tried to schedule a vote.
But what is most important is the reason for Jim DeMint’s hold on the TSA nominee. The nominee, Erroll Southers, has refused to go on record opposing the TSA from hooking up with a labor union. That’s right — the Obama administration is flirting with unionizing the TSA and Southers is refusing to say whether he supports or opposes the efforts.
Remember the Department of Homeland Security votes in 2002? The effort by Max Cleland (D-GA) to let that department unionize sank his re-election bid. The public does not want federal agents charged with protecting them unionizing.
We must prevent the TSA from operating like a trip to the DMV. Imposing union work rules would cripple an already burdensome airport experience. Jim DeMint is on the right side of this, despite McClatchy Newspapers and the White House trying to make him look like the bad guy.

By Redstate

Sen. Chris Dodd (D): airport screenings for explosives doubleplusungood.

Posted by Moe Lane (Profile)

Tuesday, December 29th at 8:36AM EST

 

In fairness, that money was just sitting there, all fat, dumb and happy, and practically begging to be misappropriated to some domestic pork program. Besides, how was Dodd supposed to know that international terrorists would come up with the novel idea of using explosives to try to blow up airplanes?

Now that our attention is focused on airline security measures thanks to the failed airline attack on Christmas Day, it’s worth mentioning that one Senator took money away from aviation security to line the pockets of constituency that supported his presidential campaign in a big way.
Back in July, Senator Chris Dodd, D-Conn., proposed an amendment reducing aviation security appropriations by $4.5 million in favor of firefighter grants — a notoriously inneffective program. In fact, the money was specifically “for screening operations and the amount for explosives detection systems.”

…oh, wait.
Via Jim Geraghty, who notes that the Senate in general signed off on the amendment (S.AMDT.1458 to H.R.2892; it was part of the Homeland Security appropriations bill). This is fostering an atmosphere where you have the ability to read and assess bills before you sign them is so critically important…
…oh, wait.
Moe Lane
PS: This pet program of Dodd’s wasn’t funding firefighters, by the way. It was funding firefighting-flavored processed pork substitute; you can tell the difference via the fact that the program doesn’t actually work.
PPS: Would the extra money stopped the Christmas attack? Good question. Better one: why did Sen. Dodd cut national defense in favor of domestic pork?
Crossposted to Moe Lane.

At Redstate

The Obama Administration Gives INTERPOL More Favorable Immunities Than American Law Enforcement Agencies

Posted by Erick Erickson (Profile)

Tuesday, December 29th at 1:42PM EST

 

“This is extremely important because it comports with Barack Obama’s world view in ways harmful to American sovereignty. ”

Okay, okay. I know a lot of you know about this already.
For about a week I have been getting emails about Barack Obama surrendering American sovereignty to Interpol, the international criminal police force under the UN’s jurisdiction, but I honestly couldn’t believe even Obama would do that.
The people emailing me were, frankly, mostly of the black helicopter crowd variety so I dismissed it is as overhyped.
Then RedState regulars like Kenny Soloman and Veronica Estrada started taking it seriously. I had to pay attention.
Finally, I got an email with several links from a friend saying I needed to say something about this. He wanted to make sure it was on my radar screen.
This is an extremely serious issue.
The best and most reasonable take comes from Andy McCarthy. Let me put this in perspective for you.
American law enforcement agencies at the local, state, and federal level are bound by open records act laws. At the federal level, the Freedom of Information Act applies.
Knowing that an intrepid reporter can, after establishing credible sources, file a judicially enforcible FOIA request to obtain information from a law enforcement agency is one of the chief deterrents to law enforcement agencies from abusing discretionary power.
Additionally, Interpol is a foreign power, but operates out of the U.S. Department of Justice inside the United States. While Interpol has some limited immunities given by Ronald Reagan in the early 1980’s, it does not — or at least did not until last week — have immunity from the 4th Amendment. Consequently, this international agency could, should it abuse its powers, have the federal government seize its assets, etc.
In other words, the international police organization Interpol was treated like every other law enforcement agency in America — it was subject to FOIA requests and could, like any arm of a municipal, county, state, or federal government agency, have its property taken by the federal government if it crossed the boundaries of criminal law protection for the accused.
For no discernible reason whatsoever, last Wednesday when no one was looking, Barack Obama signed an executive order giving all immunities of foreign powers to Interpol.
In other words, Interpol is now in a better position than any American law enforcement institution that operates on American soil. It cannot have its records searched or seized and it is not subject to the restraints of sunshine and transparency that FOIA requests can bring.
At a time when Obama is worried about ensuring the rights of terrorists against the abuses of the American government, he has no problem surrendering American rights to an arm of the United Nations.
This is extremely important because it comports with Barack Obama’s world view in ways harmful to American sovereignty. Obama has said repeatedly that he views no nation as greater than any other nation. He has said repeatedly that one nation should not be able to impose its will on another. He applies this even to the United States.
In Barack Obama’s world, the United States is no better and no worse than Iran, China, North Korea, or Kenya. In his world view, we are all players on an international stage with the United Nations as the leader. Therefore, while Obama will not give up American sovereignty to Peru, he is perfectly happy to give up sovereignty to the United Nations.
The man is not just an amateur. He is also a damnably naive fool.
This is also a backdoor to the International Criminal Court (”ICC”). The United States chose, before Obama took office, to avoid the ICC. Interpol has become the law enforcement arm of the ICC. By taking away the limits to Interpol’s immunity in the United States, Barack Obama has freed the organization up to conduct criminal investigations of individuals inside the United States on behalf of the ICC without any of us knowing about it.
And who does the ICC want to investigate? The lawyers, CIA operatives, and soldiers who have defended the United States in the War on Terror by setting up GTMO and prosecuting the war. These men and women now have yet another deterrent to keep them from being fully effective — the fear of an international criminal investigation that they don’t even know about.
How many Americans will get killed because of the policies Barack Obama is employing to undermine our safety and security in a dangerous world?

By Redstate

Why The Latest Terror Threats Prove Beyond A Shadow Of A Doubt That Sarah Palin Is Right About Energy Independence For America

Tuesday, December 29, 2009

The terror attack on Christmas Day has brought out all sorts revelations about just how pathetic our terror fighting abilities truly are. I mean this deal was a comedy of errors and it was only by the grace of God almighty himself that this Islamic mad man’s Underbooms © failed to explode and take the plane down.

Not only was Abdul Farouk Umar Abdulmutallab on several watch lists, and from a real hotbed of al Qaeda terrorist activity, the guy’s own father warned the embassy that his son had become radicalized by militant Islamic fanatics. Never mind Abdul showed up with no luggage, tried to board with no passport, and paid for the one-way ticket to Detroit in cash. Who goes to Detroit without a ticket out of there anyway?

As bad as all of this is though, and this is a serious indictment on our entire terror fighting process, it also highlights another issue, energy independence.

Long before Sarah Palin made "death panels" a household word, long before she was even picked as the John McCain’s running mate, Sarah made energy independence a centerpiece of her message, her career. Sarah didn’t just talk the talk either, within hours of stepping into her new office as the Governor of Alaska, she began working on making the decades long dream of a natural gas pipeline to the lower 48 a reality.

It was Sarah’s dream to get Alaska’s 100's of trillions of cubic feet of clean burning natural gas out of the ground and into use. She was able to work out all of the issues and now the pipeline is on track to become a reality.

Of course, Sarah’s message on energy independence isn’t just an economic one. Now it’s true, we send between $700 billion and $1 trillion dollars annually overseas. The problem is many times it’s to nations that not only hate us, but use our own dollars to fund efforts to undermine us as a nation. In other words, they use our dollars to fund terror, world wide, against the United States, and our allies.

Even worse, we are forced to act gingerly, even timidly, on many issues, lest we cause major problems with big oil producing nations like Saudi Arabia. We make those guys mad, and they can shut us off, or raise prices to the moon, destroying our already devastated economy. (That is if Obama and the rest of the democrat/communists don’t beat them to it!)

Brian Ross, from ABC News, has this little gem on two of the planners of the Christmas Day attack:

Two al Qaeda Leaders Behind Northwest Flight 253 Terror Plot Were Released by U.S.

Former Guantanamo Prisoners Believed Behind Northwest Airlines Bomb Plot; Sent to Saudi Arabia in 2007:

Two of the four leaders allegedly behind the al Qaeda plot to blow up a Northwest Airlines passenger jet over Detroit were released by the U.S. from the Guantanamo prison in November, 2007, according to American officials and Department of Defense documents. Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for the Northwest bombing in a Monday statement that vowed more attacks on Americans.

American officials agreed to send the two terrorists from Guantanamo to Saudi Arabia where they entered into an "art therapy rehabilitation program" and were set free, according to U.S. and Saudi officials.

Guantanamo prisoner #333, Muhamad Attik al-Harbi, and prisoner #372, Said Ali Shari, were sent to Saudi Arabia on Nov. 9, 2007, according to the Defense Department log of detainees who were released from American custody. Al-Harbi has since changed his name to Muhamad al-Awfi.

Art therapy rehabilitation program. Really? Who’s running our war on terror efforts, Pee Wee Herman? This of course, just points out the absurdity of our entire approach to this issue. It should also be the final nail in Obama’s grand scheme to move Gitmo to Chicagoland, and make his corrupt buddies richer off of tax payer dollars that it will take to basically convert an unused prison into a "supermax" job.

There are issues with much of the Middle East, for sure, but by far, Saudi Arabia is the biggest problem, and a hot bed for radicals. Well funded radicals. But we are powerless, because we need them for the oil they have, so we must "play nice" with them.

There are other nations, such as Venezuela, who are teaming up with bad actors like Iran, and Russia, forming alliances that will further weaken the United States, and her allies. These relationships will also allow Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez to exert power over weaker South American states, thus spreading communism and further destroying what freedoms people in that region have. It will be a disaster.

I know Obama and his group of thugs, along with Al Gore, the Bernie Madoff of the climate change hoaxers, are doing their level best to keep Americans from using their own God given natural resources, all in an effort to enrich themselves, and their friends, by lying to the American people.

First they create a "crisis" in the name of the totally laughable claim of "global warming," then, they just so happen to have ready made solutions, and the promises of completely non-existent "green jobs" that will "grow the economy," if only we will allow them to destroy the one we have now.

These are really just schemes to enrich themselves, and their closest friends. We’ve already written about the Chicago Climate Exchange an already in place carbon credit trading scheme, where billions of dollars worth of carbon credits will be traded on the open market. Owing to the fact this thing is in Chicago, does one even need to ask if there is any corruption, or "friends of Obama" involved in this deal?

Al Gore has already made millions off of his hoax, and stands to make billion through the cap and trade schemes. Past that, big Obama supporters like General Electric, which owns NBC/Universal, will also clean up, so to speak, as they make many of the implements of the global warming scam.

There is more mass corruption, that we can get to in a minute, but this editorial from Investor’s Business Daily is critical reading, and reminds us that fossil fuels are here to stay for the foreseeable future:

No Substitute For Fossil Fuels

Energy: Earlier this year, Congress approved a scheme to pour $80 billion — on top of the tens of billions already spent — into renewables. A government report released last week indicates the money will be wasted.

Renewable energy is the shiny gem that everyone wants but no one can have. Not even a president. Campaigning last year in Lansing, Mich., President Barack Obama said that it was his goal for the U.S. to generate 10% of its electric power from renewable sources by 2012 and 25% by 2025. But he cannot, by the force of will or executive order, change the laws of physics and economics.

America has long relied on fossil fuels to power its economy. Oil, natural gas and coal provide about 84% of the nation's energy.

And for good reason. They are plentiful and typically easy to retrieve, and, consequently, cheap.

At the other end of the spectrum are renewable sources such as solar, wind, biomass and geothermal. They supply only about 4% of our energy, the remainder coming from hydro and nuclear power.

An axis of environmentalists and Democrats want to change this ratio, because, according to the usual complaint, we depend too heavily on the fossil fuels that emit carbon dioxide.

Trouble is, the market for renewables is poor. Few want to use the inefficient, unreliable and expensive sources. But that hasn't slowed the renewable energy campaign, which has succeeded in persuading the public that renewables are a sensible energy source and convincing Congress to fund supporters' daydreams.

The government can continue to "invest" in renewables, and the dreamers will keep using public money to find the magic formula. But little will change over the next 25 years.

The federal Energy Information Administration's Annual Energy Outlook says in 2035, demand for liquid fuels will increase by almost 10% over 2008 levels, natural gas by nearly 7% and coal by 12%.

While use of renewables will increase as well — by 81%, including hydropower — they will still be unable to unseat our dominant energy source. Fossil fuels' share of consumption will fall by only six percentage points, from 84% to 78% by 2035. Renewables will provide about 8%.

It's clear that renewables, which have benefited from government subsidies far in excess of what fossil fuels have received, can't compete in today's market and won't be faring much better a quarter century from now, according to the government's own reckoning.

It's just as clear that throwing taxpayers' dollars at renewables has produced little progress.

Spain provides perhaps the best lesson. The government there has spent $43 billion on solar energy projects, yet solar provides less than 1% of the country's electric power. It was a bad investment.

Chasing the wind is just as ineffective. When Congress temporarily eliminated wind power credits in 1999, 2001 and 2003, the number of new turbine projects fell sharply. The Texas Public Policy Foundation says that providing a modest level of wind power in that state would cost taxpayers at least $60 billion through 2025.

Biomass is also a poor substitute. It's both primitive — its sources are wood and trash — and an environmental nightmare, devouring in some cases as much as 10 times the land mass than needed to create a wind farm. And wind farms themselves are big land eaters.

Geothermal energy, considered "free" energy from the earth, is also a space eater that requires heavy capital investment, which is often hard to recoup. In California earlier this month, a geothermal project was abandoned, despite a $6 million grant from the Energy Department and roughly $30 million in venture capital.

Geothermal has, as well, some environmental drawbacks. The day before the California project was closed, Swiss government officials permanently shut down a geothermal project in Basel because, the New York Times reports, "of the damaging earthquakes it produced in 2006 and 2007."

Maybe some of these renewables will one day be cheap and reliable. Technological advances will help. But today they are neither cheap nor reliable, and, based on the government's report, won't be for another generation.

Until they can compete, the country has to rely on proven sources: fossil fuels and nuclear power. To force cutbacks on these so that renewables can get a bigger market share, and to continue to fund projects with public money, is foolish and irresponsible.

This is a huge waste of tax payer dollars, something that Congress is very good at. Spain, by the way, promised millions of "green jobs" but instead saw only increases in the unemployed, once again proving that if one listens very closely to what the liberals recommend, and then does the exact opposite, things will usually work out much better. Spain’s quest to be "green" has destroyed their economy. Cap and trade schemes have crippled the entire European Union, as well.

It would be one thing if the United States wasn’t sitting on massive oil reserves, reserves that rival the biggest oil producing nations, as well as a century’s worth of natural gas, and several hundred years worth of coal. But we are, and it’s criminal that we aren’t using these resources.

As a practical matter, anyone care to guess what the effect of keeping an extra $700 billion to $1 trillion in the American economy would do for the American people? How about how it would effect state sponsors of terror, who rely on American dollars to fund these efforts?

But of course, there is major corruption going on in these industries, and, as usual, you can trace this back to Barack Obama and his puppet master, former Nazi collaborator, and multi-billionaire, George Soros. Soros, the self proclaimed "owner of the democrat party," funds many of the left wing organizations that drive the democrat/communist party machine. They are truly too many to mention, but groups like MoveOn.org, and even ACORN benefit from his billions. Suffice it to say, if there is a prominent democrat/communist cause, or group, you will find Soros involved.

With that kind of money comes power and influence. And Soros wields incredible influence over his hand picked puppet, Barack Obama. Back in August the big talk was Petrobas, and the huge deal Obama made with the Brazilian Oil Giant. Obama "loaned" Petrobas $10 billion American tax payer dollars so they could drill offshore, something Obama and his thugs fight tooth and nail against in our own country.

America is rich in oil, right off our own coast line, but we are told we will literally destroy the world, and all of mankind, plus all of the fishes in the sea, and the polar bears, of course, if we dare to drill for that oil.

This made me wonder why, if drilling for our oil would be such a disaster, could one drill off the coast of Brazil without such harmful effects. Are the waters magical down there? Is there some sort of fairy dust that floats in the air that keeps the evil oil companies from destroying everything? Nope, turns out the answer is a lot simpler, and well, a lot more predictable.

You see literally just days before our most corrupt president in the nation’s history was so generous with our money, his boss, George Soros, became the major stockholder in Petrobas! In fact, it became Soros’ largest holding. Funny how having Soros involved made all of the environmental concerns go away, huh? You can read more, including a statement from Sarah, here.

But wait, there’s more! Remember the Copenhagen sham of a conference? Well, our buddy George was over there as well, causing all sorts of problems for those who wish to bring clean, and dare I say "green" natural gas to market. Under the guise of "saving the planet" Soros, and his enablers, sought to block all efforts.

Investor’s Business Daily has this:

Get The Frackin' Gas

Energy: An oil company wants to invest its profits in clean-burning American natural gas. A Hungarian billionaire and a "green" politician want to stop it. This is the real Climate-gate scandal.

While the greenies of the world united in Copenhagen to talk about the weather, emitting a Third World-country-size chunk of greenhouse gases to gather there, the world's largest oil company, Exxon Mobil, was doing something about it.

On Dec. 14, Exxon agreed to buy XTO Energy, a natural gas firm, in a deal valued at $41 billion. XTO is one of the leaders in something called "fracking" technology, in which water, sand and additives are pumped into the ground to unlock trillions of feet of natural gas previously thought to be unobtainable.

This is what energy companies really do with their profits. They find more energy, then sell it to you.

While the technique is not new, the technology exploiting it is.

XTO has helped develop new technologies that let it drill a single well 9,000 feet and then bore horizontally through shale formations to unlock the natural gas trapped in the porous rock. The rock is fractured and the gas is pushed into accessible pockets whence it can be extracted with a minimal surface footprint.

Because of these new technologies, it is estimated that the U.S. sits on 83% more recoverable natural gas than was thought in 1990.

The Barnett Shale rock formations of Texas and Louisiana, the Bakken Shale formation in Montana and North Dakota, and the Marcellus Shale formation running through New York and Pennsylvania and other states may hold as much as 2,000 trillion cubic feet of this clean-burning, domestically produced fuel.

We are the Saudi Arabia of shale.

At current use, we have an estimated 90-year supply, if we are allowed to get at it.

Slam dunk? Hardly. Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., one of the sponsors of the job- and economy-killing Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill and no fan of domestic energy, wants to hold hearings on the alleged environmental dangers of the new technology.

There's been an organized campaign to discredit fracking as an environmental danger to the nation's water supply. Ed Lasky at American Thinker has traced a tangled web of deception that rivals the "hide the decline" campaign by the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit.

A media group called Pro Publica has done what it calls "investigative journalism" and exposed the alleged dangers of fracking in a series of stories it has provided free to cash-starved media outlets and newspapers. The first expose was an attack on energy companies developing the Marcellus Shale.

Pro Publica was started by billionaires Herbert and Marion Sandler, who, along with billionaire George Soros, funded the left-wing Center for American Progress, run by John Podesta and touted as the Obama administration's "idea factory."

Soros owns a major stake in a company called InterOil, a company that has discovered a large natural gas field in Papua, New Guinea, with which American shale resources would compete.

Soros would rather have us import his liquefied natural gas than develop our own. His allies in the media, the environmental movement and the Democratic caucus are all too eager to exploit public fears to do it.

Roger Willis owns a hydraulic fracturing company in the Pennsylvania town of Meadville. He says thousands of frack jobs have been done in rock formations above and below the Marcellus Shale in New York state with no aquifer damage.

"This 60-year-old technique has been responsible for 7 billion barrels of oil and 600 trillion cubic feet of natural gas," according to Sen. James Inhofe, ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee. "In hydraulic fracturing's 60-year history, there has not been a single documented case of contamination."

Whether some are trying to hide the decline in global temperatures or the abundance of clean-burning domestic natural gas, it's a scandal. If we're serious about both carbon emissions and energy independence, let's stop this nonsense and get the fracking gas.

Another story, another corrupt democrat/communist, and another case for severely limiting the amount of time one can "serve their country" in Washington. Let’s face it, crooks and usurpers like Gore, Obama, and Soros would have a harder time influencing policy if Congress worked as the founders intended, and actual citizens served a term or two, and then went home, forced to live under the laws, and conditions, they help to create. But that’s another story for another day.

I know this started out as a discussion of energy and national security, but as one sees, all of this is intertwined. As they say, "it’s complicated!"

Doesn’t have to be though, that’s for damned sure! First, we must get rid of the corruption in Washington, no matter how hard it is, how much time and effort it takes. We all know this entire global warming scam is nothing more than a way for a select few to enrich themselves on the backs of normal hard working people world wide. Greed and corruption has been with us since the beginning of time, but the current president and Congress have certainly set the bar at a whole new level for future politicians to shoot for.

Heads need to roll and jail cells need to be filled. Say,.... maybe we CAN buy that prison in Chicagoland after all. That way Obama will feel at home while he serves out his sentence after he is convicted of his High Crimes and Misdemeanors. He will have a lot of company there if we do this right! Gore could be his cell mate!

Next we need to look at the suggestions that Sarah Palin has been making for years now. Sarah has an incredible commonsensical approach to the whole problem that will work. Obviously, we need an "all of the above" approach to the energy issues at hand. And well, we also would like to have clean energy, please.

We are now spending not millions, not billions, but trillions of dollars, amounts of money that are so large that no one can really comprehend fully them. Obama and his corrupt Congress have spent more money in one year than all of our previous presidents and congresses have in the nation’s 233 year history, COMBINED! For what? For failed programs that do little but put us further in debt, and cost more jobs. Nothing is created, we might as well just pile the money up and burn it. At least it would keep us warm this winter!

For what we are throwing away on all of these idiotic programs we could start a crash program that would guarantee energy independence, and our national security for the foreseeable future. We need a program similar to the one that saw us go from small rockets that blew up more often than not, to walking on the surface of the moon, in less than a decade. We need a serious "all of the above" approach.

We have the oil, and we know how to get it. Stop the bureaucratic nonsense and "drill baby drill" make it a matter of national security, and tell all of the crazed groups who would try and stop it through law suits, and what have you, to go take a powder.

Next, get that natural gas to market, and instead of wasting efforts on silly things like electric cars, work on converting the fleet to natural gas. I could write a book on why natural gas is the right solution for much of our automotive needs, but will save that for later. Suffice it to say, for now, that this is well proven technology. The Big 3 automakers, Ford, GM, and Chrysler, have made cars, trucks, and buses that run on compressed natural gas (CNG) for decades. With today’s engine management technology, coupled with exciting new things like direct injection for gasoline engines, the time is right to move from using gasoline exclusively for motorfuel. As a bonus, diesel engines can be converted to run, and run well, on CNG too. Natural gas burns very cleanly and would reduce (actual) harmful emissions greatly as well as extending engine life.



What people forget about electric cars is the fact that the have been around since the invention of the automobile. They were actually relatively popular in the early years, especially among women, as the first Model T Fords were a serious pain to drive, and maintain. By the 1920's though, the manufacturers,, and the public, came to realize they just weren’t the practical solution to transportation needs. Ever since, a dedicated few have sought to prove the consensus wrong. The results:

After billions spent, and Lord knows how many attempts, the mechanics of it all, and the results are really no different than the were 100 years ago. An all electric vehicle is still no more practical. It still has a very limited range of travel, top speed, and driveability. Oh, and they cost a lot of money, and since they must be plugged in to the existing electrical grid, they use the same "dirty" electricity that all of the greens are losing their minds over today!

Oh sure, you can buy a hybrid, but they are underpowered, overpriced, and only work because they also have a gasoline engine for when you actually want to drive them somewhere. Other than making yourself feel better, and lightened your bank account unnecessarily, you’ve accomplished absolutely nothing. Oh, and those batteries? Major environmental hazzards. Wait till the landfills start filling up with those deals. Talk about pollution!

Natural gas fixes this problem. It’s proven technology that’s been with us for decades. It works, and would take minimal effort to get the infrastructure in place to make it happen. Many larger municipalities already run most of their city owned fleet on CNG, and other countries have retail outlets that dispense the product, such as this one in the Czech Republic:




Of course, any discussion that talks energy, must talk nuclear. We must do it. France gets nearly 80 percent of it’s electricity from nuclear energy. France! If France can do it, the United States, the most powerful nation on earth, most certainly can.

It always amuses me: We actually aid rouge nations, nations who want to develop nuclear weapons to destroy the world, by helping them set up civilian nuclear plants "to generate electricity," and yet, we are absolutely verboten from building our own cheap, safe, and really clean sources of nuclear power. It is the very definition of insanity.

Again, move the enviro-nuts out of the way and start expediting the process. Instead of wasting billions on "cash for clunkers" or trillions trying to destroy the best health care system on the planet, lets make it our goal to get 80 percent of our electricity from nuclear power, in say, a decade!

In the mean time, it is said that we have several hundreds of years worth of coal. It is actually our most plentiful source of energy in this country. It goes without saying that we need to develop clean coal technology to it’s fullest.

Now, while all of this is going on, we absolutely should look at other ways to generate energy, and power our cars and trucks. That quest should never stop. But we need better ideas than what we have now, because so far, we don’t have true workable solutions, solutions that can work in a free market. In other words, solutions that will work without billions, or trillions in tax payer funded subsidies.

Now the other benefit from all of this is Joe Biden’s favorite three letter word "J-O-B-S." And I’m not talking the Barack Obama style temporary jobs, or jobs in government. I’m talking quality, durable jobs. Jobs that will pay Americans a good wage for a good days work, the kind of jobs that built America in the first place.

Energy is the single most important issue to society in general, and the United States in particular. The entire world runs on energy. We simply can’t function without it. Even more important, something that most folks overlook, even if we stopped using oil today, as a source of fuel, almost every product you use, every medicine you take, has some form of petroleum in it’s base. Oil isn’t going away!

We need to get serious for many reasons. A realistic energy policy, one like Sarah Palin has been touting for years, will not only give us economic security, but security from terrorism, as well. It will make America independent and able to look out for her own interests rather than having to bow before ruthless dictators world wide, just to keep the flow of our economy’s lifeblood coming. We will no longer fund terror, and we will no longer have to be gentle with nation states who continue to sponsor terror.

A coherent and comprehensive energy policy will create millions upon millions of well paying, durable jobs, for generations to come. The push to attain this goal will stimulate our economy right now, and create real jobs, right now.

It’s time to "Drill Baby, Drill" and do "all of the above" as well.

Posted by Gary at 7:42 PM