Mother Nature, of course, is oblivious to the federal government's machinations. Ironically, 2008 is on pace to be a slightly cooler year in a steadily rising temperature trend line. Experts say it's thanks to a La Nina weather variation. While skeptics are already using it as evidence of some kind of cooling trend, it actually illustrates how fast the world is warming.
At Reason's 40th anniversary event, held in Hollywood on November 14 and 15, "Skeptical Environmentalist" Bjorn Lomborg kicked things off with an engrossing 30-minute presentation about man-made climate change and the best ways to prioritize and solve global problems ranging from water shortages to poverty to malaria.
The dealing seemed very close to a climax — and an explosive political scandal. And then, on the morning of December 5, the Chicago Tribune ran a story on its front page reporting that law enforcement had secretly recorded Blagojevich's conversations as part of a criminal investigation. Blagojevich immediately instructed Fundraiser A to "undo" the plan to meet personally with the associate of Candidate Five. Blagojevich instead turned his energy to preparing his legal defense.
The deal was off, blown, apparently, by the Tribune's report. For anyone who has watched the case, the astonishing thing is that Blagojevich, prior to December 5, could possibly have assumed that he wasn't under surveillance. But he apparently did, making for some of the juiciest political wiretaps in years. And he appeared to be moving toward actually making a corrupt deal to sell Obama's Senate seat when he finally, belatedly, figured things out. And that seems to be the best explanation for why prosecutor Fitzgerald went public on December 9, instead of letting the case continue for a while longer.
As for Obama's appointment of Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, what sense does that make except within parochial Democratic politics? Awarding such a prize plum to Hillary may be a sop to her aggrieved fan base, but what exactly are her credentials for that position? Aside from being a mediocre senator (who, contrary to press reports, did very little for upstate New York), Hillary has a poor track record as both a negotiator and a manager. And of course both Clintons constantly view the world through the milky lens of their own self-interest. Well, it's time for Hillary to put up or shut up. If she gets as little traction in world affairs as Condoleezza Rice has, Hillary will be flushed down the rabbit hole with her feckless husband and effectively neutralized as a future presidential contender. If that's Obama's clever plan, is it worth the gamble? The secretary of state should be a more reserved, unflappable character -- not a drama queen who, even in her acceptance speech, morphed into three different personalities in the space of five minutes.
Given Obama's elaborate deference to the Clintons, beginning with his over-accommodation of them at the Democratic convention in August, a nagging question has floated around the Web: What do the Clintons have on him? No one doubts that the Clinton opposition research team was turning over every rock in its mission to propel Hillary into the White House. There's an information vacuum here that conspiracy theorists have been rushing to fill.
The Obama transition team may be the first one in history ever to need a pardon planning team.Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and his chief of staff John Harris were arrested Tuesday morning in Chicago on two counts each of federal corruption charges stemming from allegations Blagojevich was trying to sell President-elect Barack Obama's vacated Senate seat to the highest bidder.
The arrest is part of a three-year probe of "pay-to-play politics" in the governor's administration. The criminal complaint by the FBI says each man was arrested on two charges of conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud and solicitation of bribery.
The charges also relate to allegations that Blagojevich and Harris schemed with previously convicted defendants and Obama associates Antonin Rezko, Stuart Levine, Ali Ata and others to arrange financial benefits in exchange for appointments to state boards and commissions, state employment, state contracts and access to state funds.
In addition, the case alleges that Blagojevich tried to influence the composition of The Chicago Tribune editorial board in exchange for state aid to the Tribune Company, which owns the newspaper.
As Secretary of State-pick Hillary Rodham Clinton and U.N. envoy-choice Susan Rice separately visited the diplomatic agency's headquarters in Washington's Foggy Bottom neighborhood, persons familiar with the transition said that Rice wants to install her own transition team inside the department.
It seems like only yesterday that Al Gore invented the Internet. But technology is rapidly changing how political campaigns are conducted and it is time for Republicans to be in front of these revolutionary changes – not lagging behind.
The United Auto Workers (UAW) wants Congress to bail out General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler to prevent their undergoing restructuring in bankruptcy proceedings. In bankruptcy, a judge could order union contracts to be renegotiated to reflect competitive realities. Many analysts have objected that hourly autoworkers at the Big Three are some of the most highly paid workers in America, costing the Big Three over $70 an hour in wages and current and future benefits. All taxpayers should not be taxed to preserve the affluence of a few.
Some observers argue that UAW members do not actually earn this much.[1] They argue this figure includes the cost of benefits paid to current retirees as well as wages and benefits paid to current workers and that the actual hourly earnings of current UAW members are much lower. This is a mistaken interpretation of the financial data released by the Detroit automakers.
Has this stuff really been thought through? Is thinking-through a thing the new administration intends to do? Or are we just to be serenaded with familiar old tunes from the "progressive" songbook for the next four years?
The leading indicator here will be Head Start, the grandaddy of all no-demonstrated-benefit feelgood "progressive" boondoggles. If we start hearing about Head Start, we'll know that this new team doesn't have an idea among them that's less than thirty years old.
At the exact moment Jon Favreau is receiving high praise in pre-inaugural media puff pieces, the 27-year-old chief speechwriter for President-elect Barack Obama (not Jon Favreau, the Hollywood actor/ director) finds himself in a minor mess over a photo from a recent private party showing him groping the breast of a cardboard cutout of Hillary Rodham Clinton as an unnamed pal wearing an "Obama staff" T-shirt kisses and feeds her beer.[...]
The aggressive iconography of two young drunk men taking advantage of a life-size cutout of a woman - especially a powerful one - would bring an elite college campus to a standstill, force a housecleaning of a Fortune 500 company, ground the Air Force Academy and would, in most cases, ruin the career of a Republican staffer or elected official.
At a Pentagon meeting in 2002, a Muslim official from an Asian country observed that there were nearly as many Muslim citizens of India as of Pakistan, yet it was virtually unheard of that an Indian Muslim would join al Qaeda, while many Pakistanis had done so. Why? Because India is free and democratic, he asserted.
His point was not that democracy is a cure-all, but that the problem of terrorism cannot be solved by military or law-enforcement means alone. In other words, it is also crucial to confront the challenge at the level of ideas: to counter extremist teachings, and to promote democratic reforms with the aim of undermining the appeal of extremist Islamism.
So someone from the audience asked Reston, who worked on the interviews, about whether it was right to pay Nixon for the interviews. Reston gave a very self-serving answer. "More important than that is the abuse of power. The relationship of Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal to the abuses of power today ... The younger generation feels that Richard Nixon was railroaded out of office and what he did was really trivial compared to what George W. Bush did. So it's important to go back to the source, to go back to the cauldron both for checkbook journalism and abuse of power." In other words, Reston basically admitted what they were doing was unethical journalism but then said the end justifies the means because they were out to get Nixon who was the real criminal.
At which point, Chris Wallace seized the microphone in the audience, apparently fed up with the Nixon and Bush comparisons: "I respectfully would like to disagree with that and I think it trivializes Nixon's crimes and completely misrepresents what George W. Bush did. Whatever George W. Bush did was after the savage attacks of 9/11 in which 3,000 Americans were killed and was done in service of trying to protect this country. I'm not saying you have to agree with everything he did, but it was all done in service of trying to protect this country and keep us safe and, the fact is, that we sit here tonight so comfortably and the country has not been attacked again since 9/11. Richard Nixon's crimes were committed purely in the interest of his own political gain, and I think to compare what Nixon did for pure political self-preservation to George W. Bush, even if you disagree with rendition or waterboarding, is a gross misunderstanding of history then and now." Somewhat surprisingly, given the political make up of the crowd, Wallace got a smattering of applause.
the soft left (Liberals), hard left (NDP) and secessionist left (the Bloc Quebecois) have entered into a backroom agreement signed in blood (and with many billions of dollars and Senate seats changing hands) and are leaning on the Governor-General to fire the Conservative Prime Minister and replace the present government with a "coalition" - a misbegotten pantomime horse comprised of three rear ends. The Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, is contemplating ways to avoid defenestration and will be addressing the nation (I use the term loosely) this evening.
"But doesn't the government have to act?" people ask. "We can't just let financial companies fail!"
I say, Why not?
Jim Rogers, the successful investor and author, puts it well: "Why are we bailing out Citibank? Why are 300 million Americans having to pay for Citibank's mistakes? The way the system is supposed to work [is this]: People fail. And then the competent people take over the assets from the failed people, and then you start again with a new stronger base. What we're doing this time is ... taking the assets from the competent people, giving them to the incompetent people, and saying, "OK, now you can compete with the competent people." So everybody's weakened: The whole nation is weakened, the whole economy is weakened. That's not the way it's supposed to work."
Fresh off his runoff victory Tuesday night, Georgia Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss credited Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin with firing up his base.
"I can't overstate the impact she had down here," Chambliss said during an interview Wednesday morning on Fox News.
"When she walks in a room, folks just explode," he added. "And they really did pack the house everywhere we went. She's a dynamic lady, a great administrator, and I think she's got a great future in the Republican Party."
Well, who will Obama rely on when hit with the next surprise? The people he has around him, that's who. And, so far, those people ain't left-wingers.
Don't get me wrong. Given the alternatives, I'm delighted with most of Obama's picks. But there's a reason why the old Reaganite phrase "personnel is policy" has become a Washington cliché: Because it's true.
Obama will surely learn that if he tries to implement a left-wing agenda with a centrist team at his disposal.
the sudden arrest in London last week of of Damian Green, a conservative MP and Shadow Minister for Immigration, who was seized by anti-terrorist personnel from the Metropolitan police, held for questioning for 9 hours, and whose private papers and computer files in his home and office in the House of Commons were confiscated. The Honorable Member's offense? Embarrassing Gordon Brown's government. How did he do this? By revealing in debate on the floor of the House of Commons and in various lapses, failures, and dirty-little-secrets about the government's immigration policy
The allegations about CAIR's conduct in the Days' affair and the guilty verdict rendered against its co-conspirators in the Holy Land case point up a central reality: In the words of a wise lawyer, shady organizations, even stealth ones, invariably engage in culpable conduct no matter how sophisticated they are because there are too many loose ends and you cannot control all of them. It appears that that is what happened with respect to the Muslim Brotherhood's stealth jihad operatives at CAIR.
Armed with the verdict of the Holy Land Foundation trial, it is high time for federal prosecutors to turn their sights on CAIR beyond simply naming them as an unindicted co-conspirator. By opening up their own investigation based on the evidence already proven in the HLF trial and the troubling allegations in the civil lawsuit, the government may soon turn a bad CAIR day into curtains for this Muslim Brotherhood engine for stealth jihad.
Augusta — Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin roared back onto the campaign trail Monday, calling on Georgians to re-elect incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss in his hotly contested runoff with Democrat Jim Martin. "The eyes of the nation are on you," Palin told several thousand people at the James Brown Arena for her 8:55 a.m. speech, the first of four appearances in the state. "We all have Georgia on our mind."
Martin started the last day of campaigning greeting commuters at a downtown Atlanta MARTA station, then planned to travel to Augusta and Macon before returning to Atlanta for an appearance at the Capitol with civil rights veterans and hip-hop star Ludacris. Martin spokesman Matt Canter also said the Democrat will have "Georgia's own Miss Alaska" on hand to sing the national anthem at a 5:30 p.m. rally at the Capitol. Atlanta-based recording artist Maryline Blackburn won the 1984 Miss Alaska pageant — the one where Palin finished as a runner-up.
Augusta — Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin roared back onto the campaign trail Monday, calling on Georgians to re-elect incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss in his hotly contested runoff with Democrat Jim Martin. "The eyes of the nation are on you," Palin told several thousand people at the James Brown Arena for her 8:55 a.m. speech, the first of four appearances in the state. "We all have Georgia on our mind."
Martin started the last day of campaigning greeting commuters at a downtown Atlanta MARTA station, then planned to travel to Augusta and Macon before returning to Atlanta for an appearance at the Capitol with civil rights veterans and hip-hop star Ludacris. Martin spokesman Matt Canter also said the Democrat will have "Georgia's own Miss Alaska" on hand to sing the national anthem at a 5:30 p.m. rally at the Capitol. Atlanta-based recording artist Maryline Blackburn won the 1984 Miss Alaska pageant — the one where Palin finished as a runner-up.
