Praise with Caution

As anyone who reads this blog is full aware, I'm not a fan of Pres. Obama as I think he will take this country in a very wrong direction during a very vital time for our nation. However, I've been challenged by a friend that when he does do something I agree with that I give props when they are due as I've complained for 8 years that Pres. Bush never got praise for anything good he did (for example quadrupling the money giving to foreign countries and international organizations to combat HIV which liberals claim to support very strongly), especially in the MSM.

On that note I'm glad to see that yesterday he kept his campaign promise to continue to allow faith groups to compete with other non-profits for federal funding. However, I do say that with some caution though b/c of how it was announced. During the announcement it was said concerning faith groups that prohibit members that espouse different beliefs than the organization (for example Catholic organizations not supporting giving information on abortions during teenage counseling sessions), the rules would be reviewed on a case by case basis.

So, I do give him credit for maintaining a very vital program, however I will keep an eye on the initiative to see how that plays out and whether or not groups will be forced to submit to standards they don't agree with in order to continue receiving the funds.

Only 16 Days to Break Biggest Campaign Promise

As we heard many times on the campaign trail: "I can make a firm pledge. Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes." - Barack Obama, 9/12/08

Well, he has already broken that promise: "Today, on the sixteenth day of his presidency, Barack Obama broke one of the central promises of his candidacy: No American earning under $250,000 per year would face any form of tax increase under his administration. By signing the S-CHIP legislation today, Obama has now broken his oft-repeated promise. Obama's signature puts into effect a 156 percent increase in the federal excise tax on tobacco, a hike of 61 cents per pack." - Americans for Tax Reform, 2/4/09

So unless no one making under $250,000 a year smokes (and we all not that isn't the case, quite the opposite), he just raised taxes on millions of people as stated above by 156%! And who will this hurt the most? Oh yeah...the poor! However, I'm sure you didn't hear any of that in the MSM...just like you didn't hear about the very successful election in Iraq this past weekend...yep...that's right...they had another election...and this time all parties, Sunnis, Shia, and Kurds participated to the praises of the international community for a fair run campaign.

HapTip: Muth's Truths

The Al Gore Effect Again

It has happened again. Al Gore shows up for a speech on manmade global warming (oh...excuse me...it's no longer global warming it is just climate change being the earth has had record COOLING for the last 2 years so they have to change their rhetoric as opposed to admitting they were wrong) and the weather is the exact opposite. Here in the DC area today we had a major ice storm while AlGore was testifying in Congress that the earth is in "grave danger" if we don't stop destroying the planet now! This is really getting ridiculous.

No Word for Snow

Imagine something so rare in your village that there is not even a name for it in your language. That's what some citizens in the United Arab Emirates are facing today with this white fluffy stuff falling from the sky for only the second time in recorded history. You and I of course know it as snow.

So last winter as you remember I posted pics of snow in Iraq for the first time in 100 years and now this winter a country well to the south and much closer to the equator is seeing it (not just a flurry either...over 3 inches on the ground in some places), yet I'm sure the manmade global warming fanatics are going to find an excuse for it. No way they will admit that they were wrong and we were just in a NATURAL warming CYCLE that nearly all recent studies are concluding ended in 1998.

All The News That's Fit to Smear

Once again the MSM is doing everything in its power to smear our troops. The latest culprit is an old hand at the game, the NYT. Coulter points out in her latest article how they Times is highlighting the fact that 121 troops who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan have committed homicides in order to show the harm the wars are doing to our society when the soldiers return.

However, they once again fail to give any context by comparing the percentage of military male homicides to homicides in the general male population of the same age. Surprise, surprise. General male population aged 18-35 commits over 30 homicides per 100,000 while members of the military it is only 7.6 per 100,000.

To me the conclusion should be that if you serve in the military you are LESS likely to commit a homicide than a male who doesn't, but of course that is not the conclusion of the grey old lady. Sad indeed!

Kinda Late Now!

Now that the election is over, the Washington Post admits it was biased for Obama. Not that comes at any surprise! The question now is will they learn from their mistakes or continue to do the same and look the other way. I'm not holding my breath that the Post or any of the rest of the MSM all of a sudden finds a conscience.

The Forgotten Global Crisis

Yesterday I blogged about the forgotten war due to all the good news coming out of Iraq lately. Have you noticed another topic that has been very absent from the media? What ever happened to the end of the earth predictions for the global warming alarmists?

Maybe it has to do with FL breaking a 150 year record or maybe Switzerland having the most snow in Oct since records began or maybe it has to do with the first Oct snow in London since 1922 (on the day a Global Warming bill was being debated...lol) or maybe 15 degrees below normal temps in the Carolinas or how about near 125 year record cold in Cambridge (the day Al Gore spoke on Global Warming at Harvard...maybe Al Gore can stop Global Warming after all...he just needs to speak around the world and keep having record cold wherever he speaks!).

Don't worry, if this keeps up in about 5 years the lefty enviros will be warning of all the doom and gloom global cooling will bring and hope we forgot how wrong they were with global warming and the MSM will play right along.

The Forgotten War

In case you have been wondering if we are still fighting a war in Iraq being the MSM is no longer covering it, here may be the reason why you are no longer hearing about it. We just turned over the 13th province, Babil, to the Iraqis last week. That leaves only 5 provinces left. So being this is a very positive development, of course you won't hear about it.

Would the Last Honest Reporter Turn On the Lights?

This article is so powerful, I had to post the whole thing. It lays out in absolute terms who is responsible for the financial crisis we are in and how the MSM is totally covering it up by not reporting the facts. As you will see in the editor's note, the author is a Democrat, so Clinton can't say it's a right wing conspiracy on this one!


Editor's note: Orson Scott Card is a Democrat and a newspaper columnist, and in this opinion piece he takes on both while lamenting the current state of journalism.

An open letter to the local daily paper — almost every local daily paper in America:

I remember reading All the President's Men and thinking: That's journalism. You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public has a right to know.
This housing crisis didn't come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.

It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.

What is a risky loan? It's a loan that the recipient is likely not to be able to repay.
The goal of this rule change was to help the poor — which especially would help members of minority groups. But how does it help these people to give them a loan that they can't repay? They get into a house, yes, but when they can't make the payments, they lose the house — along with their credit rating.

They end up worse off than before.

This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it. One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules. The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them.

Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible loans. (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to do so baffles me. It's as if the Pentagon were allowed to contribute to the political campaigns of Congressmen who support increasing their budget.)

Isn't there a story here? Doesn't journalism require that you who produce our daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a position where the only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700 billion bailout? Aren't you supposed to follow the money and see which politicians were benefiting personally from the deregulation of mortgage lending?

I have no doubt that if these facts had pointed to the Republican Party or to John McCain as the guilty parties, you would be treating it as a vast scandal. "Housing-gate," no doubt. Or "Fannie-gate."

Instead, it was Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, both Democrats, who denied that there were any problems, who refused Bush administration requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and who were still pushing for these agencies to go even further in promoting sub-prime mortgage loans almost up to the minute they failed.

As Thomas Sowell points out in a TownHall.com essay entitled "Do Facts Matter?" ( http://snipurl.com/457townhall_com] ): "Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago. So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President. So did Bush's Secretary of the Treasury."

These are facts. This financial crisis was completely preventable. The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was ... the Democratic Party. The party that tried to prevent it was ... the Republican Party.

Yet when Nancy Pelosi accused the Bush administration and Republican deregulation of causing the crisis, you in the press did not hold her to account for her lie. Instead, you criticized Republicans who took offense at this lie and refused to vote for the bailout!
What? It's not the liar, but the victims of the lie who are to blame?

Now let's follow the money ... right to the presidential candidate who is the number-two recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae.

And after Freddie Raines, the CEO of Fannie Mae who made $90 million while running it into the ground, was fired for his incompetence, one presidential candidate's campaign actually consulted him for advice on housing.

If that presidential candidate had been John McCain, you would have called it a major scandal and we would be getting stories in your paper every day about how incompetent and corrupt he was.

But instead, that candidate was Barack Obama, and so you have buried this story, and when the McCain campaign dared to call Raines an "adviser" to the Obama campaign — because that campaign had sought his advice — you actually let Obama's people get away with accusing McCain of lying, merely because Raines wasn't listed as an official adviser to the Obama campaign.

You would never tolerate such weasely nit-picking from a Republican.

If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish, and possibly corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama.

If you who produce our local daily paper had any personal honor, you would find it unbearable to let the American people believe that somehow Republicans were to blame for this crisis.

There are precedents. Even though President Bush and his administration never said that Iraq sponsored or was linked to 9/11, you could not stand the fact that Americans had that misapprehension — so you pounded us with the fact that there was no such link. (Along the way, you created the false impression that Bush had lied to them and said that there was a connection.)

If you had any principles, then surely right now, when the American people are set to blame President Bush and John McCain for a crisis they tried to prevent, and are actually shifting to approve of Barack Obama because of a crisis he helped cause, you would be laboring at least as hard to correct that false impression.

Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth. That's what you claim you do, when you accept people's money to buy or subscribe to your paper.

But right now, you are consenting to or actively promoting a big fat lie — that the housing crisis should somehow be blamed on Bush, McCain, and the Republicans. You have trained the American people to blame everything bad — even bad weather — on Bush, and they are responding as you have taught them to.

If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth — even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate.

Because that's what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don't like the probable consequences. That's what honesty means . That's how trust is earned.

Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one. He has revealed his ignorance and naivete time after time — and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing.

Meanwhile, you have participated in the borking of Sarah Palin, reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter — while you ignored the story of John Edwards's own adultery for many months.

So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all? Do you even know what honesty means?
Is getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for?

You might want to remember the way the National Organization of Women threw away their integrity by supporting Bill Clinton despite his well-known pattern of sexual exploitation of powerless women. Who listens to NOW anymore? We know they stand for nothing; they have no principles.

That's where you are right now.

It's not too late. You know that if the situation were reversed, and the truth would damage McCain and help Obama, you would be moving heaven and earth to get the true story out there.

If you want to redeem your honor, you will swallow hard and make a list of all the stories you would print if it were McCain who had been getting money from Fannie Mae, McCain whose campaign had consulted with its discredited former CEO, McCain who had voted against tightening its lending practices.

Then you will print them, even though every one of those true stories will point the finger of blame at the reckless Democratic Party, which put our nation's prosperity at risk so they could feel good about helping the poor, and lay a fair share of the blame at Obama's door.

You will also tell the truth about John McCain: that he tried, as a Senator, to do what it took to prevent this crisis. You will tell the truth about President Bush: that his administration tried more than once to get Congress to regulate lending in a responsible way.

This was a Congress-caused crisis, beginning during the Clinton administration, with Democrats leading the way into the crisis and blocking every effort to get out of it in a timely fashion.

If you at our local daily newspaper continue to let Americans believe — and vote as if — President Bush and the Republicans caused the crisis, then you are joining in that lie.

If you do not tell the truth about the Democrats — including Barack Obama — and do so with the same energy you would use if the miscreants were Republicans — then you are not journalists by any standard.

You're just the public relations machine of the Democratic Party, and it's time you were all fired and real journalists brought in, so that we can actually have a news paper in our city.

This article first appeared in The Rhinoceros Times of Greensboro, North Carolina, and is used here by permission.

Meet the BIASED Press

As I said when Tim Russert passed away in June, the presidential race won't be the same without him. That was proven yesterday on Meet the Press or should I say Meet the Obama Press. Russert was so revered by those on the right and left b/c of his fairness. Yesterday was anything but.

While I obviously disagree with Colin Powell's endorsement of Obama, NBC has apparently decided fairness is no longer their goal, not that that is any big surprise as Russert was the only host on NBC that did, by being completely biased and one-sided in their broadcast yesterday by not having one guest on to counter Powell's statements for McCain. Russert would have, and he must be rolling in his grave as his beloved show goes the way of the rest of the MSM.

Alaska Breaking Summer Temp Record

Most people reading that headline that have been duped by the manmade global warming fanatics (MGWF) will automatically think that Alaska is about to break a summer HEAT record. Not so fast! Alaska is actually on the verge of having the COLDEST summer ever. So far this summer there have only been seven 65-degree days. The record for least days over 65 degrees is 16, and most weather forecasters don't see this year hitting that mark.

Don't worry though. The MGWF's and their MSM allies aren't giving up that easy. Even though one hot year or one bad year of hurricanes is enough to ring the alarms worldwide, one year in the opposite is just an anomaly. It's all La Nina's fault...here is the phrase that the MGWFs need to learn...WEATHER CYCLES!!!

Keep Moving...No Bias Here

Obama goes on a tour of the Middle East and all the networks send their top anchors. McCain goes, and he gets embeds. Then you add the NYTimes accepting an oped from Obama on Iraq but rejecting McCain's oped on the same topic! Nah...no bias there whatsoever...no need to look behind the curtain...keep on moving.

31,000 Scientists Refute Manmade Global Warming

So much for the science being settled and there being a scientific consensus (which I still ask when has that ever been part of the scientific method?). Now a new report (not surprisingly I'm finding it almost two weeks after b/c it of course never appeared in the MSM) is out that has over 31,000 scientists, 9000 of which are PhDs (the UN's "consensus" report only had 2500 supposed scientists) stating that CO2 produced by humans is not causing global warming, which they accurately also point out peaked 10 years ago and has been cooling since.

Also the founder of the Weather Channel is once again bashing the claims of Gore and his enablers and showing how these erroneous claims are causing food shortages worldwide and one of the major reasons for the high gas prices. A very informative article everyone needs to read.

Obama, The Illegitimate Nominee

For 8 years all we have heard from liberals and the MSM over and over is that Bush is an illegitimate President because he didn't win the majority of the popular vote in 2000. Now by that same logic then Obama is an illegitimate Democratic nominee right being Clinton has won the majority of the popular vote? Don't hold your breath waiting for the MSM and the libs to be consistent with their logic though as it no longer serves their purpose.

Jupiter's Next on Our Destruction List

First it was Earth, then Mars, now us SUV-loving, planet destroying humans are destroying Jupiter! How else would you explain the current warming of Jupiter's climate if it isn't being caused by our selfish overproduction of CO2? I'm sure that can be the only cause right? I'm sure the big HEAT producing fire ball in the center of our solar system has nothing to do with, so our CO2 must be so powerful and overbearing that it is starting to even effect other planets!

What A Cool Year This Has Been

While it has been a neat year so far, the cool I'm referring to here is the temperature.

In March, it was reported that the past winter (Dec - Feb) was the coolest in the last 7 years and the 54th coolest since 1895.

Then in April, March was reported to be the 52nd coolest since 1895.

And now the report for April just came out...wait for it....waaaait for it...ok...I'll stop the pain...it was the 29th coolest since 1895! And let's not forget the many articles I could link of the record snowfall in many places that allowed some ski resorts to extend their season the longest in memory.

Seems to me that the CYCLE of warming is possibly coming to an end and now the CYCLE has started cooling again. Better rev up them engines to start releasing more CO2 or we might be headed to another ice age at this pace!

Lowering Expectations

Global warming is haulting? I thought we were on the brink of the point of no return? Don't worry though, the manmade global warming hypers aren't completely throwing in the towel. Research is showing that the oceans are cooling again...hmmm...why does CYCLE keep going through my head...and because of this it will, according to the alarmist, hide the effects of manmade global warming for about 10 years.

Don't mind the fact that there is a lot of research that shows it is the warming oceans that release the most CO2 into the atmosphere and not humans, so CO2 goes up after warming not causing the warming.

And why you wonder are the alarmist so scared of this new turn of events. Well the last statement in the article above says it all...they are worried that ExxonMobile (ie...evil big oil companies) will take this new cooling trend to stop all the work to end manmade global warming. Granted they ignore the billions of dollars they themselves get from governments. I'm sure that is no motivation whatsoever for them to keep sounding the alarm no matter the evidence...nah...they would never do something like that.

Economy Still Growing???

What??? You mean the economy is still growing??? We still aren't even at the beginning of a recession which is 2 straight quarters of economic decline??? No way...this can't be true...we've seen all the headlines and heard all the stories of recession by the trusted MSM!

Well, no surprise, they are wrong again. The figures just released shows the economy grew (also incomes rose and inflation was not as high as expected) again last quarter. Don't worry though, the MSM media will keep banging the recession drum until they force it to be a reality. As they say even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Truth Behind Gas Prices

One of the good things about being here in Iraq is that I don't have a vehicle, so I'm not having to buy any gas. As I'm sure ya'll are aware, the MSM is crying every day about the rise in gas prices. Of course they love to blame President Bush and the Iraq war for causing this "crisis", but the truth is quite different.

First, it wasn't until last week that gas prices, when adjusted for inflation, even went higher than the prices in the early 80's. This chart shows the historical prices going back to the 1920's adjusted for inflation and in 1981 the price per gallon was $3.31. It was also over $3 per gallon in the early 20's. It was only in the last couple of weeks that we crossed that record to be at $3.38 this past week. So when you look at the real numbers we are just now approaching the numbers of the 80s, hardly the worst in history.

Second, why the big increase? Certainly the Iraq war and unrest in the Middle East has played a part in it, but there are much bigger culprits. The biggest being we haven't built a new refinery in the US since 1976! So, what happens when you have the same supply (actually the supply has dropped due to reduced capacity due to refineries also not being able to make many of the needed improvements) yet demand continues to increase due to growing populations? That's basic economics, prices will increase.

And who is at fault for no new refineries? You guessed it...liberals and their environmentalist allies. There is no reason with the technology available today that new refineries can't be built and have reasonable regulations to control pollution. Yet, any time a company even proposes a new refinery they are held up in court for decades from lawsuits from the enviro crowds, so they end up abandoning the project.

And let's not forget about taxes which are nearly 12% of the price you pay at the pump. If the Dem controlled Congress truly wanted to help with gas prices they would take McCain's proposal immediately and suspend all federal gas taxes for the summer.

Despicable, Disgraceful, Dishonoring

Those words and more describe the absolutely shameful use of the Iwo Jima picture and tie it to "manmade" global warming. To in any way liken an unproven theory to the sacrifice of those who fought and died on Iwo Jima just shows how little respect the liberal media has for our military and to what lengths they will go to spread their propaganda. Thanks Time for giving me yet another reason to never read your rag.