Fun And Frivolity: Epic Scale

To finish out the week, here are a few videos that display things of epic scale. Enjoy!

The opening of Burj Dubai, tallest building in the world






Powers of 10






The Known Universe

Have a great weekend!

End Of Week Terrorism Man-Made Disasterism Update

While we're on the subject of terrorism man-made disasterism, what's the latest with Gitmo? Still not closed, though not for a lack of tough talk. Of course, the latest plan of bringing them up to a prison in Indiana until they go for their show trial in NYC is encountering resistance. Oh, sure, from the people of Indiana, too, but also from...seriously, you'll never guess...the terrorists man-made disasters being held at Gitmo! No joke:

But the final irony is that many of the detainees may not even want to be transferred to Thomson and could conceivably even raise their own legal roadblocks to allow them to stay at Gitmo.

Falkoff notes that many of his clients, while they clearly want to go home, are at least being held under Geneva Convention conditions in Guantánamo. At Thomson, he notes, the plans call for them to be thrown into the equivalent of a "supermax" security prison under near-lockdown conditions.

"As far as our clients are concerned, it's probably preferable for them to remain at Guantánamo," he says.

Seems Gitmo isn't quite the house of torture and terror the Left would have you believe, is it?

And speaking of the Gitmo bunch and their trial, you'll never guess what a judge just did:

A federal judge has tossed out most of the government's evidence against a tarrorism detainee on grounds his confessions were coerced, allegedly by U.S. forces, before he became a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay.

In a ruling this week, U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan also said the government failed to establish that 23 statements the detainee made to interrogators at Guantanamo Bay were untainted by the earlier coerced statements made while he was held under harsh conditions in Afghanistan.

Or, as Hot Air puts it, the canary in the coal mine keeled over. This ruling basically confirms the worst fears of everyone who thinks that putting terrorists man-made disasters on trial is a very bad idea. On the field of battle (which is, in fact, where these guys were 'detained'), it isn't possible to gather evidence in little plastic baggies and broadcast Miranda rights over a bullhorn. Our soldiers are more worried about dodging bullets and roadside bombs, as well they should be. So, when you start requiring from soldiers in a war the kind of evidence that a law enforcement clean-up crew gathers at the scene of a crime, you're not going to get much. Thus, the terrorist man-made disaster is going to be kicked from the judicial system.

And what happens next? Are they released onto U.S. soil? I've still not heard a satisfactory answer to that. Here's what Hot Air says about the end result:

Obama has basically rigged these trials from the get-go with his two-tiered approach to detainees. Remember? When he’s got a bunch of evidence on someone such that the confession is basically unnecessary, they go to federal court so that The One can boast about due process. When he doesn’t have much evidence besides the confession, they go to a military tribunal so that the confession can be admitted into evidence and he can boast about the eventual conviction. It’s a sham, and it’s crowned by the fact that he’s all but promised to keep dangerous detainees imprisoned even if they’re acquitted, but that’s the game he’s decided he wants to play.

Then there's this bit of lemonade from these lemons:

Frankly, we could use more of these test cases before the KSM trial gets going: If he and Holder miscalculate and end up sending some low-level jihadi to federal court on the assumption that they can get a conviction even if the confession’s thrown out, and then the defendant is freed, the uproar will be such that he’ll have to rethink his whole stupid KSM strategy.

That's an unfortunately good point.

Here's something else that disturbs me. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said she was 'most surprised' by Al Qaeda's 'determination'. Uh, Madam Secretary? In case you missed it (and apparently you did), these people strap bombs to themselves and commit suicide in order to kill their enemies. What part of that doesn't strike you as 'determination'? You're surprised by this??

Again, this is the mindset of the people who have a Constitutional duty to protect Americans from foreign enemies. God help us!

Anyway, in the continued wake of the outright mockery made of him by the Christmas Day Undie Bomber, Barack Obama has made yet another statement on terrorism man-made disasterism:

“I am less interested in passing out blame than I am in learning from and correcting these mistakes to make us safer. For ultimately, the buck stops with me. … When the system fails, it is my responsibility.”

Sounds wonderful, doesn't it? Color me skeptical, and Ace of Spades communicates that skepticism well:

He dodged responsibility for a week. He minimized it and claimed it was just an independent actor, unconnected to anything bigger, even when it was pretty firmly established it was Al Qaeda.

I don't think he made this statement because he believes it, or because he wanted to. I think he made this statement because polling and focus-groups told him that if he didn't make it, he was risking an even bigger loss in his poll numbers than anything he'd seen before.

So it's a case -- I am 99% confident -- of "doing the right thing when there are no other options left."

Bingo. For me, it's a classic case of actions and words not meshing. These words would actually mean something if he had ever -- EVER -- acted in a way that matched. Since he has not, the logical conclusion is that these are only just words.

But he didn't stop there. In the latest decisive non-change of policy, Obama has now declared that U.S. intelligence agencies will be...wait for it...following up on tips about terrorist activities:

In a revealing admission, President Barack Obama said today he was directing U.S. intelligence agencies to begin to do something many had assumed they were already doing: "[A]ssigning specific responsibility for investigating all leads on high priority threats so that these leads are pursued and acted upon aggressively."

"That is a shock because we had such a follow-up system when I was there," said Richard Clarke, the White House counter-terrorism director in the Clinton and Bush administrations. Clarke, who worked on the Obama transition team, is now an ABC News consultant.

What?! Uh, yeah, I think pretty much everyone assumed that was going on anyway. It would be ludicrous to think otherwise. Oh, that's right - remember, this is the Obama administration, where terrorism man-made disasterism isn't taken seriously. Oh, and it's all Bush's fault. Can't forget that.

It is this mindset that is going to eventually condemn Americans to death, and it will be on his shoulders for failing to act out his tough-sounding words.

All of this simply adds up to this brilliant cartoon:


There's my two cents.

End Of Week Wrap-Up

There are a bunch of things that deserve updates this week! To avoid getting obnoxiously wordy, I'm just going to do a whole bunch of summarizing - you can hit the links for the details. Dig in!

Unemployment rate still at 10%. But that's only due to the huge number of people who have stopped looking for work:

Once people stop looking for jobs, they are no longer counted among the unemployed.

When discouraged workers and part-time workers who would prefer full-time jobs are included, the so-called "underemployment" rate in December rose to 17.3 percent, from 17.2 percent in October. That's just below a revised figure of 17.4 percent in October, the highest on records dating from 1994.

In reality, millions of jobs have been lost since Obama's stimulus plan was signed into law. This is what we can expect on a long-term basis from Obamanomics. How's it feel? Ironically, Obama says unemployment is heading in the right direction...and Gateway Pundit helpfully illustrates:

The 'right direction'? Really? This is why conservatives freely admitted that we hoped Obama failed.

Cadillac heart attack. Apparently, the Dem leadership is having some trouble reconciling the House and Senate DemCare bills, even in secret. The major tax increase on so-called 'Cadillac' health care plans is proving to be quite a snag. Also, Ted Kennedy's former Senate seat in Massachusetts is very much in play...says a Democrat polling firm! If Scott Brown can pull of the unlikely victory there, he has already stated that he'll vote against DemCare. I've also heard several people say that if Brown wins (or even comes close to winning), it could trigger another round of panicked Democrat 'retirements'. Pay attention to this race.

Polyamory is the new gay rights. Proof that the entire concept of non-traditional marriage is a slippery slope:

There's monogamy where two people are exclusive. There's cheating in which people are lying about being exclusive. And poly is everything else.

This is what happens when you give up the foundational nature of marriage being between one man and one woman - you cannot logically limit any other possible combination of people, animals, things, or whatever. Shall we take a stand now, or wait until people are marrying their pets to get a tax exemption?

The government's case against Navy SEALs appears to be weakening. It disgusts me to even write that sentence - since when should our own government prosecute heroic soldiers who capture a man guilty of planning and carrying out the execution of American soldiers?! Anyway, it looks like the case is falling apart, but feel free to add your fuel to the fire of defending these brave SEALs by signing the petition at the link.

Where was this last year?!

Sorry, but if you couldn't call Barack Obama a radical Leftist who wanted to bankrupt America back when it counted, it doesn't mean much now. I suppose it's good that someone is saying it, though...

The real story behind TARP. Whoa! Get a load of this video:

Hot Air rightly points out that this was essentially an old-time coercion scam:

How far off is this from, “Hey, nice bank ya got here. Hate to have anything … happen to it. Capisce?” As Allison explains, the Fed didn’t exactly sweeten the deal, either. BB&T had to pay back some hefty interest when they gave the money back — a tax on wisdom and good investment while providing political cover to institutions whose lack of same caused the fragility Bernanke wanted to mask.

It's not like this idea is any new revelation (here, here, here, here, here, here), but it is interesting to see the banks themselves start talking about how the government took over their industry by force. Oh, and while we're at it, we now know that Geithner instructed AIG to lie to the public about their bailout.

Whew! Did you get all that? It's a bunch of mish-mash, but important mish-mash to know.

I'm putting together one more post on terrorism before calling it a week, and that should be along later.

There's my two cents.

Political Humor

I've been forwarded a number of funny political cartoons from various sources. Enjoy!

First, the economy...


In my dreams, they would have said something like this...


Emancipating your tax dollars, a trillion at a time (whether you want him to or not)...


No explanation needed for these...




And how about DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano and terrorism?


This really sums up the bottom line, I think...


'Nuff said.

There's my two cents.

Thousands Protest Global Warming

Hm...they might actually have cause for concern! If it was real, that is.

There's my two cents.

Japan Leads The Way...

...into a long, dark tunnel with no light at the end of it:

Japan’s newly minted finance minister, Naoto Kan, seems an excellent choice to lead Japan on an expedited road to fiscal perdition. For those who argue the best way to deal with the coming financial crisis is to precipitate it quickly, Mr. Kan’s choice should be particularly welcome.

The governments of the industrialized world are almost uniformly embarking on a crash course in sovereign debt calamity. In raw dollar terms, the United States is leading with a budget deficit in 2009 of $1.4 trillion and even more expected for 2010 and thereafter. But for fiscal chutzpah, the Japanese are the clear leader, with a debt-to-GDP ratio over 200 percent and climbing fast.

Finance Minister Kan appears likely to extend Japan’s lead. A political operative with “little, if any experience in fiscal affairs or macroeconomic issues” according to the Financial Times, he is more prone to worry about fiscal stimulus than fiscal restraint.

Many governments of the industrialized world are playing a game of deficit spending chicken, hoping credit markets will continue to underwrite their folly. Japan has been cut some slack because of its prodigious domestic saving, but that slack will soon be taken up and then some by all the government debt.

But Greece has already been put on notice by its creditors. The U.K. appears completely at sea under its lamest of ducks, Prime Minister Gordon Brown. And the United States government operates as though stern words about fiscal discipline can substitute indefinitely for spending restraint. Memo to Washington: the markets are not fooled for long.

For proof, look at Tokyo. The Nikkei closed 2009 near 10,500. It closed 1989 near 39,000. And Japanese investors have it exactly right. Japan’s world-beating debt-to-GDP ratio has yielded an economy which was about the same size in 2009 as it was in 1993. Japan took a two-year sharp and painful recession and, through the miracle of deficit spending, turned a short, sharp recession into a two-decade absolute calamity. Now the rest of the world seems to want to follow suit.

It is especially astounding that the world should be coming out of a near cataclysmic financial disaster predicated on the deadly mixture of bad public policies and private debt, only to charge full speed toward yet another disastrous mix of bad public policies and bad public debt. There is still time to shift course. But the appointment of Mr. Kan is not an omen for hope.

And how does this affect us in the U.S.?


The liberal mantra appears to be 'follow the worst possible example, and hope for a new outcome'.

Brilliant.

There's my two cents.

Busting Some Terrorism Euphemisms

While terrorism is on the front burner again, here are some excerpts of a couple stories that completely bust some common euphemisms about terrorism (emphasis mine).

Poverty causes terrorism

On Monday the Times of London, citing analysts, reported: "'Orchard of fighters' grows out of poverty and mistrust in Yemen."

Last week, President Obama said of the Christmas bomber, "We know that he traveled to Yemen, a country grappling with crushing poverty and deadly insurgencies."

Yemen's crushing poverty? Abdul Mutallab isn't even Yemeni; he is Nigerian, and an affluent one, at that. Apparently, the president is suggesting that poor, unsuspecting Abdul Mutallab wound up in Yemen and was radicalized by Muslims there who were themselves radicalized by Yemen's "crushing poverty." Why mention it if that is not the general theory he is putting forth?

Yet there is a little problem with that theory. According to the World Bank, Zimbabwe is 11 times poorer than Yemen. Yet no Zimbabwean national has been caught trying to blow up U.S. airliners. There's a simple reason for that. Less than 1 percent of the population of Zimbabwe is Muslim.

Consider this list of known al-Qaeda terrorists, and find what links all of them:

• Kahlid Sheikh Mohammed was a mechanical engineer

• Mohammed Atta grew up in a middle class household; his father was an attorney.

• Ramzi Binalshibh was a bank clerk.

• Mohammed Atef was an Egyptian police officer.

• Ziad Jarrah came from a wealthy Lebanese family and attended private, Christian schools.

• Zacarias Moussaoui, the "20th hijacker," had an MA in international business studies.

• Major Malik Nadal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, was a psychiatrist.

• Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab, the underwear bomber, was the son of a bank chairman.

• Hammam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi, who killed eight CIA agents in Afghanistan last month, was a physician.

When looking for one factor that unites all al Qaeda operatives, it is clearly not poverty. Al Qaeda's terrorists cannot be connected based on their family or personal income. The one commonality they all share is an adherence to radical Islam.

They all share an adherence to radical Islam.  Osama bin Laden himself is a phenomenally wealthy Saudi.  If poverty is the driving force behind terrorism, what drives him?

Better a hundred terrorists go free...

There's a phrase repeated over and over by civil libertarian and ACLU types and often attributed to either Justice William O. Douglas or Justice Louis Brandeis:

"Better 100 guilty parties go free than one innocent person be convicted."

I once wrote a book on crime and after hearing this phrase for about the 20th time, I came to one conclusion: Whoever said it wasn't planning on living in the same neighborhood with those ... 100 guilty criminals.

There's too much detail to excerpt here.  Suffice it to say that William Tucker lays out the case that our justice system has been making it more and more difficult for law enforcement to do their jobs for decades.  The end result of such policies is the asinine notion of granting full rights to terrorists guilty of massacring thousands of citizens:

Constitutional Rights for a man who has never lived in this country and whose only connection is that he orchestrated an attack that killed 3,000 people? It may sound strange, but that's exactly what we're letting ourselves in for. As a criminal defendant, KSM will have every much a right as the Blackwater guards and O.J. Simpson and Claus Von Bulow to challenge the system. And he won't need ACLU lawyers to do it for him. It is more than likely that Muslim defense funds -- fed by Arab oil money -- will hire the best attorneys (or train them themselves) to work the system to the nth degree. Same goes for Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who just won his Constitutional Rights by climbing on an airplane with a bomb in his underpants. Could we make attacking this country any more attractive?

And here we have the danger of liberal thinking:

It is staggering to try to grasp the naïveté of the Obama Administration in leading us down this path. The only thing that makes it comprehensible is their staggering naïveté in going to Copenhagen for the Climate Conference. Obama and the gang -- let's face it -- live on the myth that they are poor little college graduates armed only with their law degrees, taking on the big bad businesses that are worth millions and billions and zillions of dollars. All they have to do is make a convincing case to the general public and they can start redistributing all that wealth.

What never occurs to them is that, in the eyes of most of the world, they're the undeserving rich. Obama went to Copenhagen and found himself facing representatives of millions and billions of people saying, "Give us money, too." And of course Obama & Co. all too ready to cough up some loose change out of America's pockets -- although the taxpayers are not likely to agree with them.

Now Obama and his administration are going to get a lesson in what it means to try to extend the niceties of the American criminal justice system to a world full of potential terrorists.

It's not going to be pretty.

No, it's not.  It's going to be fatal, but only to anonymous American citizens like you and I.  Thus, outside the political ramifications of such attacks...they don't care.

There's my two cents.

Quick DemCare Update

There's not a whole lot to report on the DemCare front because the buy-offs negotiations are going on in secret, and no one knows that they involve except for Pelosi, Reid, and Obama. In fact, they're so secret that even Democrats are getting huffy about it:

Yep, that's a Democrat who is quite plainly saying that his own leadership is holding out on both the American people and their own members. If only we could count on guys like this to actually stand up to their leadership when the time came for an actual vote.

Nevertheless, we push forward. There are a couple of DemCare details worth mentioning here.

Barack Obama has now endorsed the Senate plan of raising taxes on the 'Cadillac' health care plans of union members. The thing I don't understand is how Obama can throw every single one of his political allies under the bus whenever he feels like it, and they still bow down to him. Doesn't say much for their intelligence, if you ask me. Anyway, there are supposedly a whole bunch of Dems who will fight the Cadillac plan tax, but I don't buy it - it just means more buy-offs that you and I will be forced to pay for are on the way. Yay.

Another dirty secret follows the age-old first rule of politics: follow the money. If you see some doc groups suddenly endorsing DemCare now, take a look at how their own bottom line would be affected by it, courtesy of the AMA's special sweetheart deal:

Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Dahl, a Maryland doctor and a former assistant chief at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, posits in a letter to the editor:

[While] Democrats are touting the AMA’s endorsement, little has been reported in the media that a large portion of the AMA’s income (the exact amount will not be released by the AMA) stems from the exclusive rights to the medical billing codes that doctors are required to use when they submit bills to insurance plans.

These are essentially the same as a bar code, and are used for nearly every medical procedure, from appendectomies to heart transplants. This arrangement results from a once-secret deal established in the 1980s whereby the AMA maintains and updates the codes at no cost to the government, but generates millions each year selling the code books and software licenses to doctors and insurers. This enabled the government to streamline billing procedures for its insurance programs by setting a single code as the standard.

Pointing to a growing number of state medical societies that have come out against Obamacare, Dahl continues: “The AMA touts its proof of supporting doctors in that it is working to abolish the 21% Medicare payment cut to physicians scheduled for the coming year. However, we all know this would never take place, as millions would be dropped from the Medicare rolls. This is the reason only 17% to 19% of physicians belong to the AMA, and this number is dropping.”

In addition to the AMA’s ties with the government, a small group of influential hospitals appear to have received a little-known provision in House and Senate legislation that would allow them to gain millions in Medicare funding. The Washington Post reports that language in both bills “would reward hospitals in their Medicare spending, a dramatic change in the formula for parceling out the public dollars, which can account for as much as half of a hospital’s budget.”

“That could prove to be a windfall for some hospitals but a significant loss of funding for others, mostly those in big cities and the South,” the article says.

Yep, this is what happens when you have secret 'negotiations' and thousands of pages in a bill that no one knows about.

It looks like one of the ways DemCare is going to be paid for will be on the backs of states:

Momentarily putting aside the question of whether expanding the nation’s worst program counts as reform, expanding Medicaid poses yet problems, using Medicaid to cover the uninsured is appealing to federal lawmakers because they can share the burden of paying for it with the states. Most state officials, unlike Congress, actually have to balance a budget.

In their budgets for 2010, states made across the board spending cuts. 30 states made cuts to their K-12 education budgets, 30 states cut higher education, and 28 states even made cuts to Medicaid. And yet Congress expects these same states to increase spending on Medicaid by adding more people to the program.

Adding to these dim prospects is the fact that states have become more and more dependent on federal funding to meet their budgets. Federal funding for the states has increased 21.2 percent, mostly due to the stimulus bill. When these funds expire, which they will, it will be up to the states to either make further cuts to state programs or somehow come up with the funds themselves.

The states are currently facing a fiscal crisis. Adding to their financial obligations will only result in more drastic cuts to other state programs.

So, even if the federal government somehow manages to not raise taxes to pay for DemCare (which they won't), don't forget that your state government will be forced to raise taxes in their place. Does it really matter who is gouging you? Whether fed or state, it's still more taxation that takes money out of your pocket.

And that's what really infuriates people who know what they're actually doing. Brian Lamb sums it up in one very short, tidy sentence:

“If we pay for something and it’s the public’s business, we ought to be able to see how it’s done. It's just that simple.”

Too bad the Democrats have decided they're above that sort of thing.

There's my two cents.

Why Stimulus Can't Work, How Tax Cuts Can Go Wrong

This is probably the best explanation I've seen of the basic premise that stimulus packages simply cannot work (emphasis mine):

Just last month in a speech to The Brookings Institution, President Obama outlined his proposal for a third round of stimulus funding on top of the $787 billion stimulus he signed into law last February. Third stimulus you say? Yes, third stimulus. Any fair accounting of government deficit spending in response to this recession must also include President George Bush's failed 2008 $168 billion economic stimulus bill. Why did these first two economic stimuli fail? For the same reason any third stimulus will also fail: government spending does not inject any new money into the economy. Heritage Foundation Senior Policy Analyst Brian Riedl explains:

Congress does not have a vault of money waiting to be distributed. Every dollar Congress injects into the economy must first be taxed or borrowed out of the economy. No new spending power is created. It is merely redistributed from one group of people to another.
…
Yes, government spending can put under-utilized factories and individuals to work–but only by idling other resources in whatever part of the economy supplied the funds. If adding $1 billion would create 40,000 jobs in one depressed part of the economy, then losing $1 billion will cost roughly the same number of jobs in whatever part of the economy supplied Washington with the funds. It is a zero-sum transfer regardless of whether the unemployment rate is 5 percent or 50 percent.

That's the bottom line with 'stimulus': in order for the government to inject money into the economy, they first have to tax it out of the economy.  Remember, the government doesn't have any money on its own; it has to take it from taxpayers first.  So, if you look at the whole system, all of these stimulus things are a net wash at best.  And even a net wash is only if you trust the government to do the redistribution efficiently and effectively.  Ha ha ha.

The rest of the post has some great information that is worth checking out, too.  For example, even tax cuts can be done wrong, too:

...the wrong kind of tax cuts can also be worthless in spurring economic growth. Riedl explains:

Many tax cutters commit the same fallacy as do government spenders when asserting that tax cuts spur economic growth by "putting spending money in people's pockets." Similar to government spending, the tax-cut cash does not fall from the sky. It comes from reduced investment and a higher trade deficit (if financed by budget deficits) or from government spending (if offset by spending cuts).

Permanent cuts to marginal to high marginal tax rates can encourage more business investment and economic growth. But Bush's 2008 tax cuts and Obama's 2009 tax cuts were both just tax rebates which, especially when they are given to people with no tax liability to begin with, are economically indistinguishable from government spending.

That's how Obama got away with campaigning on 'tax cuts' (though some of us were pointing out even then that this wasn't an actual tax 'cut', but it's kind of a moot point now) for 95% of Americans - he offered a one-time minuscule tax rebate (mostly to people who paid no taxes anyway) which did nothing to stimulate economic growth in the future.  People simply pocketed the money and changed nothing about their behavior or activities.  On the other hand, Reagan's tax cuts in the 1980s and Bush's tax cuts in 2003 were great examples of those permanent cuts because they implemented long-term changes in the actual tax rates.  Businesses and individuals saw that the tax rate they would be paying for years into the future were lower, thus freeing up more of their resources for growth and expansion for years into the future, and they changed their plans accordingly.  That's why these tax cuts actually worked.

Excellent stuff, and critical to understand.

There's my two cents.

Underwhelming Response To Terrorism

To borrow a phrase, "Let me be clear"...

Barack Obama sucks at fighting terrorism. If his lackadaisical response to the Undie Bomber attack on Christmas Day is any indication (and I believe it is), it simply provides further evidence that fighting terrorism and protecting America from terrorist attacks is nothing more than an unwanted irritation or distraction from his real mission of looking out for number one re-making America into his vision of a statist paradise. But he's not alone. It took Obama three days to make a statement after the attack, but his counter-terrorism chief, Michael Leiter, couldn't be bothered to come down off the ski slopes for several days after that:

The top official in charge of analyzing terror threats did not cut short his ski vacation after the underwear bomber nearly blew up an airliner on Christmas Day, the Daily News has learned.

Michael Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center since 2007, decided not to return to his agency's "bat cave" nerve center in McLean, Va., until several days after Christmas, two U.S. officials said.

"People have been grumbling that he didn't let a little terrorism interrupt his vacation," said one of the sources.

The NCTC, the post-9/11 clearinghouse for intelligence to detect terror plots against the U.S., is under intense scrutiny for failing to "connect the dots" on Nigerian bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

Hot Air points out a rather significant difference between the two:

Presidents remain on the job regardless of their location. One can certainly criticize the optics of staying in Hawaii rather than returning home to the White House to handle the situation, but Obama had plenty of resources at his command in Hawaii to actually do his job. The same cannot be said for Leiter. His job is in the NCTC, and it can't be done from the ski slopes, not even with a hands-free Bluetooth headset connected to his cell phone. The need for Leiter's leadership was obvious from almost the first few hours, when people wondered how American intel allowed the EunuchBomber to keep his visa after the State Department got a tip from his Nigerian banker father that his son was a danger to the US. If heads should roll after this incident, perhaps Leiter's should be first.

From other reports, it looks like Obama is indeed going to throw Leiter under the bus. You can count on the fact that it'll be Bush's fault (Leiter was appointed by Bush) despite the fact that Obama left him in that same position after taking office.

Regardless, I'm not sure why this is a surprise. If it's not a priority to the top dog, why would it be a top priority to the people around the top dog? Apparently, the only people who care about terrorism (outside the military) are Americans in the trenches at the border, on the planes, working the phones, and doing their jobs every day who continually prove to be the ones stopping terrorist attacks. It's a shame that the administration can't be bothered to share the concern of those they're sworn to protect, even to the point of implementing policies that would make their jobs easier. But, Obama's suckage on terrorism goes beyond this most recent attack. For example, he plunged boldly ahead with a plan to return Gitmo terrorists to...wait for it...Yemen:

Barack Obama explained on Tuesday that the mere fact that Yemen can't control its own state and that a good percentage of Gitmo detainees released wind up back in al-Qaeda won't deflect him from releasing more terrorists and closing Gitmo. In fact, Obama says that al-Qaeda expanded to Yemen because we opened Gitmo in the first place

Sounds nice, but that's incorrect. And even if it was correct...

So what? AQ also uses the US-Israel alliance, the American military presence in the Gulf region, the war in Af-Pak and Iraq, and our status as infidels for recruiting tools. Using this logic, we should abandon Israel, sail out of southwest Asia and Africa, and convert to Islam in order to take away their other recruiting tools.

In fact, why don't we just surrender altogether? I bet that would really cut into AQ's recruiting, right?

This is a great example of the non-logic pretzel-magic employed by liberals to avoid facing the reality that terrorists are on a deep-seated ideological quest to kill Americans. Reality is pretty cold and hard sometimes, and for someone to see only ponies and rainbows while being in charge of fighting terrorism...well, people are going to die because of this irrational mindset. People almost died on Christmas Day because of it. So Barack Obama then announced that he'd temporarily hold off on the return of Gitmo terrorists to Yemen. Emphasis on the temporary part. Despite the fact that the number of former Gitmo inmates returning to active terrorist duty has now risen to 20%, the Obama administration is playing the blame-Bush card:

A White House official told ABC News, "We have been presented with no information that suggests that any of the detainees transferred by this administration have returned to the fight…

How does that help (or excuse) anything? Analysis:

Is the insinuation that Bush officials were too comparatively stupid to know a recidivist when they saw one? Or is this more of an MSNBC-esque conspiracy accusation that the Bushies knew some of these guys were likely to take up arms again and yet they freed them anyway? A word to the wise in the White House: If you're going to greenlight the release of people like Qais Khazali, whose pockets are lined with Iranian money and whose hands are stained with American blood, be very, very careful about pointing fingers. Especially when you've released half a dozen Yemeni Gitmo detainees within the past three weeks. The odds say at least one of them will be back on the field trying to kill Americans again soon. What's the excuse then?

Ponies and rainbows...ponies and rainbows...ponies and rainbows... Finally, we have a devastating critique of Obama's handling of the Undie Bomber from former Attorney General Michael Mukasey. There's a load of great content in here, but I've pulled out the main theme:

There was much to celebrate in the providential combination of an incompetent terrorist and surpassingly brave passengers and crew who saved 288 people aboard Northwest Airlines flight 253 on Christmas Day. There is a lot less to applaud in the official reaction.

Well-deserved mockery has already been heaped on the move-along-folks-nothing-to-see-here tone of the administration's initial pronouncements—from Janet Napolitano's "the system worked," to President Obama's statement that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was an "isolated extremist." This week brought little improvement.

The president acknowledged that the plot had been hatched in Yemen, but not without adding the misleading statement that Yemen faces "crushing poverty and deadly insurgencies." That Yemenis have to cope with "crushing poverty" is irrelevant here. Abdulmutallab is the son of a wealthy Nigerian banker.

Then, too, there was the unfortunate metaphor chosen by a senior intelligence adviser to account for why a conspiracy helped along by at least two Guantanamo alumni had not been discovered before Abdulmutallab boarded the plane. There was, he said, "no smoking gun"—a clue one would expect to find after disaster strikes, not before. There were, as it happens, many smokeless but redolent clues lying about before the plane took off. These included Abdulmutallab's father's warning to the State Department that his son was being radicalized and had gone to Yemen; the one-way ticket purchased for cash; no luggage; and intercepted communication referring to a plot involving "the Nigerian" in Yemen.

But it is not so much these gaffes as what they appear to reflect that gives serious cause for concern. Even as the initial spin was in progress, Abdulmutallab was chattering like a magpie to his FBI captors about having been trained by al Qaeda and about there being more where he came from.

Braggadocio aside, he was certainly aware of who had prepared the potentially deadly mix that was sewn in his underwear, who had trained him, where the training had taken place, whether there was in fact a South Asian man described by two other passengers who helped him talk his way on to the plane, and a good deal more. Such facts are valuable but evanescent intelligence. The location of people—and with it our ability to find and neutralize them—is subject to rapid change.

Had Abdulmutallab been turned over immediately to interrogators intent on gathering intelligence, valuable facts could have been gathered and perhaps acted upon.

What the gaffes, the almost comically strained avoidance of such direct terms as "war" and "Islamist terrorism," and the failure to think of Abdulmutallab as a potential source of intelligence rather than simply as a criminal defendant seem to reflect is that some in the executive branch are focused more on not sounding like their predecessors than they are on finding and neutralizing people who believe it is their religious duty to kill us. That's too bad, because the Constitution vests "the executive power"—not some of it, all of it—in the president. He, and those acting at his direction, are responsible for protecting us.

There is much to worry about if they think that the principal challenge of the day is detecting bombs at the airport rather than actively searching out, finding and neutralizing terrorists before they get there.

Barack Obama and his entire administration are becoming more and more dangerous to the American people with each day they remain in charge of this country. There's my two cents.

Sobering Thought Of The Day

Hot Air:

No specific imminent threat, they claim. Really? Sure does sound like a five-alarm fire:

President Barack Obama has ordered a "surge" of federal air marshals to be in place by Feb.1 in what officials said was a "race against time," with other suicide bombers believed to be in the terrorist pipeline, although there is no specific imminent threat, federal officials told ABC News.

Under a preliminary plan, the officials said the already existing federal air marshal force of more than 3,200 personnel would be deployed almost exclusively to overseas flights flown by U.S. carriers.

Domestic high-risk flights will be covered by agents from other federal law enforcement agencies who were trained as air marshals in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

"The personnel we trained back then comprised a kind of reserve air marshal force and they are now going to be borrowed on orders from the President to work domestic flights," said a senior law enforcement agent briefed on the plan.

Let me get this straight. According to ABC, both Abdulmutallab himself and independently collected intel point to more than a dozen other bombers ready to strike. (British intelligence claims the number could be as high as 25.) We've already seen one eerily similar plot broken up before it could come off. The feds are worried enough that they're actually yanking people out of other agencies to ride the sky and they want them in place before the month is out. Meanwhile, Yemeni forces are now staging near-daily raids on the sort of Al Qaeda scum they've tolerated for years. Oh, and of course The One just instituted special screening protocols for citizens of 14 nations, 13 of which are Muslim, despite the inevitable shrieking he'll have to endure as a result. Anyone seriously want to argue that they're not worried about a very specific, very imminent threat?

Remember all these warnings about how the weak policies enacted by Barack Obama will cause harm to Americans?  Just sayin'...

There's my two cents.

Suicidal Motivations

I'm not much of a Gingrich fan these days, but he hits the ball out of the park with this one:

When you're right, you're right.

This is why the Dems are plunging full speed ahead into their suicidal re-making project on things like DemCare, cap-n-tax, and bigger and more intrusive government everywhere possible despite the clear objections of the American people.

This is why they're dangerous, and must be STOPPED.

There's my two cents.

DemCare Update

So, what's the latest?

Things happen pretty fast when you don't have to worry about things like parliamentary procedure, minority party concerns, or the American public:

Nine months ago, the quarterly party identification gap was 13 points. Now it’s five. Fully 67 percent of likely voters say that their congressman doesn’t represent their best interests. Democratic consultants are whispering to lefty blogs that they genuinely fear losing the House.

None of it matters. You’ll eat this crap sandwich and like it.

“We’ve had a very intense couple of days,” Pelosi said. “After our leadership meeting this morning, our staff engaged with the Senate and the administration staff to review the legislation, suggest legislative language. I think we’re very close to reconciliation.”…

House Democrats are reluctant to abandon elements of their legislation favored by liberals but rejected by Senate moderates, but face doing just that. That means no new government insurance plan, which the House wanted but the Senate omitted, and changes to the House’s preferred payment scheme. The House wants to raise income taxes on individuals making more than $500,000 and couples over $1 million. The Senate would slap a new tax on high-cost insurance plans. Although the Obama administration supports the Senate’s insurance tax as a cost-saver, labor unions, which contribute heavily to Democratic candidates, oppose it.

According to the AP, The One’s ready to tell the House to suck it up on that latter point too. There’s only one thing that stands between us and ObamaCare now, my friends: Blanche Lincoln’s terrible, terrible poll numbers. Er, I mean Blanche Lincoln’s inspiring devotion to governmental ethics.

Dude, I think it’s over.

Interestingly, GOP Rep. Eric Cantor seems to think he can pick off enough Dems in the House to cause problems. I'm not buying it. In the end, the one thing we can count on with elected Democrats is that they'll be bought off by their leadership rather than stand on their 'principles'.

And that brings us to the fact that DemCare's multiple trillion dollar price tag is going to be far, far higher:

President Obama has given House and Senate leaders the green light to eschew the transparency that comes with a formal conference to merge the chambers' health care bills, and instead have informal closed door talks that will be inaccessible to the media. The clear message is that speed is more important than anything else, including President Obama's campaign pledge to have health care negotiations broadcast on C-SPAN to "enlist the American people in the process." This need for speed isn't being driven by a desire to give Americans health care coverage as soon as possible -- those benefits don't kick in until 2014 -- but entirely a result of Obama's own vanity and political calculations, because he wants to be able to sign a bill before his State of the Union Address.

As I've noted on a number of occasions, the CBO cost estimates that get quoted in the media understate the true cost of the health care bills because Democrats have employed a number of accounting gimmicks to get the number they want. While the frequently-quoted number may not be representative of the true cost of the legislation, the White House decided at some point that the number that does get quoted shouldn't be higher than $900 billion. Majority Leader Harry Reid found a formula that enabled the CBO to churn out the number $871 billion as the cost of the final Senate bill. However, the comparable number in the CBO analysis of the House bill was $1.055 trillion (the subsidies alone cost $166 billion more).

So, the question is, what will be the cost of getting liberals to fall in line with a bill that does not include a public option?

You've been warned. Here's a quick summary of all the taxes and fees that you're about to pay in order to enact the worse possible health care option:

House-passed Affordable Health Care for America Act (H.R. 3962):
- $460.5 billion over 10 years from a 5.4 percent Surtax on individuals making more than $500,000 and families earning more than $1 million (begins 2011)
- $135 billion as part of an 8 percent tax of a firm’s payroll ($750,000 or more) and a lower rate if firm payroll is between $500,000 $749,999 (begins 2013)
- $33 billion as part of a 2.5 tax on modified adjusted gross income (AGI) for those individuals that do fail to secure “acceptable” health coverage (begins 2014)
- $20 billion from a 2.5 percent excise tax on medical devices (begins 2013)
- $17.1 billion in corporate information reporting requirements (applies to payments made after December 31, 2011)
- $13.3 billion from a cap on Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs) at $2,500 and indexed forward to the CPI-U (begins 2011; currently there is no cap)
- $7.5 billion for the limitation of tax treaty benefits related to U.S. withholding tax imposed on deductible related-party payments
- $6 billion from a “worldwide interest allocation” repeal (begins 2011)
- $5.7 billion as a result of codifying the economic substance doctrine and imposing penalties on underpayments
- $5 billion for reforming the definition of medical expenses under FSAs, health savings accounts, Archer Medical Savings Accounts, and health reimbursement arrangements, including the exemption of over-the-counter medications prescribed by a doctor (begins 2011)
- $2.2 billion as part of an end to the Medicare Part D subsidy (begins 2013)

Senate-passed Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act (H.R. 3590):
- $148.9 billion as part of a 40 percent nondeductible excise tax on insurance plans of more than $8,500 for individuals and $23,000 for families and indexed to the CPI-U plus 1 percentage point (begins 2013)
- $101 billion in yearly nondeductible fees on manufacturers and importers of pharmaceuticals (begins 2010), on manufacturers and importers of medical devices (begins 2011), and health insurance providers (begins 2011)
- $86.8 billion as part of Medicare Payroll tax increase from 1.45 to 2.35 percent for individuals with wages of more than $200,000 and $250,000 for joint filers (begins 2013)
- $28 billion from employer penalties on full-time workers that receive subsidies to purchase coverage through new insurance exchanges
- $17.1 billion in corporate information reporting requirements (applies to payments made after December 31, 2011)
- $15.2 billion from an increase in the floor for deductible medical expenses from 7.5 percent of AGI to 10 percent of AGI and a “carve-out” for those older than 65
- $15 billion in tax penalties on individuals who fail to secure “qualified” health coverage (begins 2014)
- $13.3 billion from a cap on Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs) at $2,500 and indexed forward to the CPI-U (begins 2011; currently there is no cap)
- $5.4 billion as part of an end to the Medicare Part D subsidy (begins 2011)
- $5 billion for reforming the definition of medical expenses under FSAs, health savings accounts, Archer Medical Savings Accounts, and health reimbursement arrangements, including the exemption of over-the-counter medications prescribed by a doctor (begins 2011)

And that's just the stuff they've already passed. Who knows what will be added in the current closed-door meetings to reconcile the two bills? Remember, a lot of Dems need to be bought off...isn't it great that you get to pay for it?

There's my two cents.

What Was That About C-SPAN Again?

How many times did Barack Obama promise to publicize the negotiations over DemCare on C-SPAN? Count 'em yourself:

Reality begs to differ:

Democrat leaders have been promising the most ethical, transparent, open, and engaged administration for years. Instead, they have delivered a bleak and creepy legislative environment that could double as a Twilight movie set. House Democrat leaders forbade debate on all but one amendment not authored by themselves. Skulking Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid rammed the government health care takeover package through under cover of darkness before Thanksgiving and Christmas. The Senate Finance Committee killed a GOP amendment that would have required Demcare to be available online for 72 hours before the committee voted. Reid and his Volterra–style henchmen cut last minute Cash-for-Cloture deals behind closed doors.

And now House and Senate Democrat leaders are reportedly preparing to cut dissenters out of the reconciliation process by bypassing the formal conference committee.

In Hill parlance, this legislative short-cut is called “ping-ponging.” A better game analogy: Dodgeball. With mounting opposition from both conservative Republicans and progressive Democrats, President Obama’s water-carriers must use every trick in the book to speed the final merging and passage of the bill before the end of the month.

The hypocrisy reeks stronger than rotting garlic.

This devil needs to be slain, as do the lies being used to perpetrate it. Things like this broken C-SPAN promise are so obvious and un-complex that they can alienate all but the most devoted Kool-Aid drinkers.

Spread the word.

There's my two cents.

Proof Of Obama's Big Government Desires

As if we needed any more proof, but here it is anyway, courtesy of Stephen Spruiell:

Government Jobs Have Overtaken Goods-Producing Jobs [Stephen Spruiell]

Goods-producing jobs — the blue line — include construction, manufacturing, mining and agriculture:

Of course, the goods-producing sectors have achieved large leaps in productivity (increasing output with fewer workers) over the same time frame. We don't have good statistics on public-sector productivity, but the federal government certainly doesn't seem to be doing more with less.

For whatever handful of jobs Obama can legitimately claim he 'created', the vast majority of those few will be government jobs. The problem with that, of course, is that government jobs generally produce only paperwork, regulation, or headaches for citizens. Nothing that provides a good or service, and certainly nothing that creates wealth for anyone.

Yippee.

There's my two cents.

Global Warming...Really?

Earlier today, this was a big chunk of the headlines posted on the Drudge Report:

Winter Could Be Worst in 25 Years for USA...
CHILL MAP...
Britain's big snow shuts cities...
GAS SUPPLIES RUNNING OUT IN UK...
Elderly burn books for warmth?
Army drafted to rescue 1,000 snow stranded motorists...
Vermont sets 'all-time record for one snowstorm'...
Iowa temps 'a solid 30 degrees below normal'...
Seoul buried in heaviest snowfall in 70 years...
3 die in fire at Detroit home; power was cut...
Midwest Sees Near-Record Lows, Snow By The Foot...
Miami shivers from coldest weather in decade; Florida Gov Signs Emergency Order ...
Cold snap spurs power rationing in China...

Global warming?  Really?

There's my two cents.

About That Carbon Thing...DOH!

Hot Air sets up, quotes, and comments:

Science Daily reported on a new study from the University of Bristol released over the holidays that deserves to get wider attention.  In contrast to claims from anthropogenic global-warming activists, this new analysis refutes one of the key principles of carbon-driven warming:

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. …

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 thumbnail argument for AGW is this: the CO2 emitted by industrialization over the last 150 years has accumulated in the atmosphere, along with other gases such as methane, warming the globe more rapidly than otherwise would have happened.  The continuing emissions of CO2 from industrialized and developing nations will result in an exponential explosion of warming the longer it continues as the CO2 accumulates at faster and faster rates in the atmosphere, both because the previous emissions have not been absorbed and more people are emitting than ever.  Therefore, we have to control emissions just to contain the damage, and it might already be too late!

Of course, that's why everyone flew private jets to Copenhagen last month — in order to warn about carbon emissions.

If this University of Bristol analysis is correct, CO2 hasn't been accumulating in the atmosphere at all.  That means whatever warming we have experienced (and we have experienced warming) did not come from increased CO2 in the atmosphere.  That would explain why we have experienced a cooling cycle for the last ten to twelve years despite an increase of CO2 emissions, albeit an increase at a slower rate than before.  The new analysis completely destroys the AGW argument, because if CO2 is not accumulating in the atmosphere, it can't be causing global warming.

Hit the link for some interesting follow-ups to the conversation.

The point is, of course, that environmentalist wackos are, well, wackos, and that the notion of man-made climate change is a complete hoax.  The science is far from 'settled', and in fact points the other direction.

Also, look out the window.  Most of the country is in the middle of a massive cold snap that is breaking record after record in a tsunami of...non-warming.  The fact that liberals will claim that all this cold is just the result of global warming simply proves the point about being wackos.

There's my two cents.

Decisive Action: Intelligence Agencies To Spy On...(Wait For It)...Icebergs

Unreal.  Even for someone as jaded as I am about the complete inability or unwillingness of Barack Obama to protect the American people from terrorism, this report from Gateway Pundit is shockingly distressing (emphasis mine):

After returning from his 11 day Hawaiian vacation President Barack Obama announced changes today in the fight against man-made disasters. Obama said, ""We have to do better and we will do better. And we will do it quickly."

Obama also admitted that, "We had information that this group was working with an individual … who we now know was in fact the individual involved in the Christmas attack." Terrific.
Obama outlined changes to the security protocol.

The latest changes implemented by the Obama Administration also mean that the CIA will be spying on icebergs instead of terrorists.
The National Center for Public Policy Research reported:

As terrorists continue to infiltrate America, the Obama Administration is tasking some of our nation's most elite intelligence-gathering agencies to divert their resources to environmental scientists researching global warming.

Experts with The National Center for Public Policy Research are decrying this practice as a distraction from important counterterrorism duties. They further question if it a possible avenue to renew climate change subterfuge already plaguing some of these scientists.

"This is another example of President Obama not taking terrorism seriously," said Deneen Borelli, a fellow with the National Center's Project 21 black leadership network. "Our enemies must be laughing at the Obama Administration's incompetence."

Well that ought to keep us safe.

Egad.  Seriously?!

There's my two cents.

Why The Retirements?

More and more Democrats are seeing the inevitable handwriting on the wall - they cannot possibly win re-election because they've followed Barack Obama off the cliff.  The latest casualties?

Senator Chris Dodd --- one of the people most directly involved with covering up the Fannie/Freddie scandal that began the initial economic meltdown, Dodd is also a member of the Friends of Angelo Countrywide scandal.  His retirement should be in a 6x6 prison cell.

Senator Byron Dorgan --- North Dakotans oppose DemCare (which Dorgan voted for) by a whopping 64%, and one poll shows Dorgan trailing a potential Republican challenger by more than 20 points.  The headline at Ace of Spades sums it up: "Byron Dorgan (D-ND) Retiring This Year To Spend Time With His Family And Avoid Getting His A** Kicked But Mostly To Avoid Getting His A** Kicked".  This is a shocker because he's an incumbent...but he's also a 'moderate' Democrat (hahahahaha...!) in a red state, and that's going to be a vicious combination for the near future.

On the House side, RedState gives us a summary which includes 11 Democrat retirements or resignations in numerous states.  If you follow the link, you'll see 12 Republican seats being vacated as well, but there's a key difference - every single Rep is moving on to run for higher office, while over half of the Dems are simply bailing out of public office.  Coincidence?  I think not.

And it's not just Congress.  Democrats are taking serious heat simply for being Democrats.  Colorado Governor Bill Ritter is the first Governor to declare he won't run for re-election, but he likely won't be the last.  It's a general toxicity, and Dems in general seem to be inflicted with it right now, as indicated by the GOP leading a generic Congressional ballot by 9 points, their highest point in years.

All this begs the question: if these Democrats are so certain that what they're doing is truly in the best interests of the American people, why are they finding such a sudden interest in retirement?  We don't need to think too hard to come up with the answer.

There's my two cents.