Here’s a five-minute clip from C-Span of a speech by Representative Ted Poe (R-Texas) on the “energy bill”. You wouldn’t think that a man could heap this much scorn and derision on Congress in that short of time, but he does. It becomes evident in just in the first few seconds of his speech:
Congress passed an energy bill which should have been called the anti-American non-energy bill because it punishes Americans for using energy rather than finding new sources of affordable energy. But the bill does one thing, Madam Speaker, it controls the type of light bulbs that all Americans must use throughout our fruited plains.
He goes on to question the constitutional authority of Congress telling Americans what type of light bulb to use, he pulls out actual EPA regulations on the procedures to follow if a CFL bulb is broken (3 pages, single spaced) because they contain mercury, and even points out that all CFL bulbs are made in China.
Give Rep. Poe a listen, and then thank God for good old southern boys that will go to Washington and tell it like it is. If only there were more of them.
Japan hung (hanged?) three convicted murderers, bringing the number of executions performed this year to ten. In contrast, Texas has only executed one prisoner in 2008.
Japan is making their move this year, as it only executed 9 in 2007, while Texas dispatched 26.
And here I am living in a whimpy state that hasn’t killed anyone this year, and only 2 last year.
Disclaimer:Before y’all go and get mad at me, I must admit that I am actually against the death penalty. Just havin’ a bit of fun, here.
Billionaire and presidential race spoiler Ross Perot is back. During the 1992 race Perot was famous for making economic charts and graphs part of his political process as he attempted to explain in clear terms the economic trends of taxation, government spending, GDP and national debt, and why he thought we were headed towards disaster.
Now Perot has launched a web site, Perot Charts, which is just stock full of charts and graphs highlighting America’s “economic crises” due to deficit spending.
In a statement Monday, Perot said the nation's debt reached $9.4 trillion in April and is rising more than $1 billion a day.
"We are leaving our children and grandchildren with debt they cannot possibly pay," he said. "The economic crisis facing America today is far greater than anything since the Great Depression."
There’s also a blog with some additional materials. I rather like this chart:
It clearly shows that the top 10 percent of earners pay an astounding 69.7 percent of the taxes in this country. Add in “earned income tax credit” and what we have here is wealth redistribution (can you say “socialism” children?).
The presidential candidate told senior citizens in Ohio that it is unfair for middle-class earners to pay the Social Security tax "on every dime they make," while millionaires and billionaires pay it on only "a very small percentage of their income."
This would be the largest expansion of FDR’s “New Deal” since LBJ’s “Great Society”. Obama would be turning something that was originally intended to be a pensioning program for retirees into yet another liberal wealth redistribution scheme. It’s bad enough that the government takes my money and returns it years later with a fraction of the interest that I could earn in the private sector. Now he wants to take money and flat out give it to people who didn’t earn it.
To further complicate matters, Obama is proposing a “Doughnut Plan” in which income between $102K and $250K would still be immune to Social Security tax. Any doubt that once in place, the hole of this “doughnut” would gradually shrink until it completely disappears?
McCain, on the other hand, would not consider an increase “under any imaginable circumstance” (something Obama would never promise). Then again, he is mangling the presentation of his Social Security plan to the point of appearing to be flip-flopping on the word that frightens liberals so much: “privatization”.
Hey McCain, when you allow younger workers to choose the accounts they want to put their retirement savings into it is in fact partial privatization, so don’t be afraid of calling it that. Old people will understand as long as you guarantee their retirement income too. We have to get out of this hole. Lead us there, and maybe even libertarians like me will follow.
The man who would be National Security Advisor thinks Winnie the Pooh is a “fundamental text on national security”:
Richard Danzig, who served as Navy Secretary under President Clinton and is tipped to become National Security Adviser in an Obama White House, told a major foreign policy conference in Washington that the future of US strategy in the war on terrorism should follow a lesson from the pages of Winnie the Pooh, which can be shortened to: if it is causing you too much pain, try something else.
Mr Danzig told the Centre for New American Security: “Winnie the Pooh seems to me to be a fundamental text on national security.”
He spelt out how American troops, spies and anti-terrorist officials could learn key lessons by understanding the desire of terrorists to emulate superheroes like Luke Skywalker, and the lust for violence of violent football fans.
Seems that someone took this book a little too seriously.
It's good that Obama is going to Iraq and Afghanistan. And he would be wise to articulate a national security policy that relied more on personal meetings with Gen. David Petraeus and less on reading Winnie the Pooh.
From being able to tag bookmarks to resumable downloads to faster speed and better memory management, Firefox 3 is a definite improvement over previous versions. It will be available Tuesday.
I’ve been running the candidate 2 release for a while, and like it. Except for that whole not being able to see YouTube because of problems with the Flash plugin thing, of course. Hopefully they will have that fixed by tomorrow.
In 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee unanimously approved a report acknowledging that it "did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments." The following year, the bipartisan Robb-Silberman report similarly found "no indication that the intelligence community distorted the evidence regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction."
Contrast those conclusions with the Senate Intelligence Committee report issued June 5, …
Yet Rockefeller's highly partisan report does not substantiate its most explosive claims. Rockefeller, for instance, charges that "top administration officials made repeated statements that falsely linked Iraq and Al Qaeda as a single threat and insinuated that Iraq played a role in 9/11." Yet what did his report actually find? That Iraq-Al Qaeda links were "substantiated by intelligence information." The same goes for claims about Hussein's possession of biological and chemical weapons, as well as his alleged operation of a nuclear weapons program.
Four years on from the first Senate Intelligence Committee report, war critics, old and newfangled, still don't get that a lie is an act of deliberate, not unwitting, deception. If Democrats wish to contend they were "misled" into war, they should vent their spleen at the CIA.
Professor Reno persuasively argues that removing all religion from the political arena actually reduces liberty:
In other words, in the old system, the state presumed the existence of a substantive, natural reality that required legal adumbration: the union of a man and a woman, and the children resulting from their sexual relations. Now the Canadian government sees that it must intervene and redefine marriage and parenthood in order to give fixed legal standing to otherwise fluid and uncertain social relations. When the gay friend donates his sperm to the surrogate mother hired by a lesbian couple, the resulting “family” is a purely legal construct, one that requires the power of state to enforce contracts and attach children to adoptive parents.
The result is the opposite of the libertarian dream of freedom. As Farrow observes, with gay marriage we are giving over the family to the state to define according to the needs of the moment. The upshot, he worries, will be a dangerous increase in the power of the state to define our lives in other realms once thought sacrosanct. “Remove religiously motivated restrictions on marriage,” he writes, “and it is much easier to remove religiously motivated restrictions on human behavior in general, and on the state’s power to order human society as it sees fit.” The libertarian dream turns into the totalitarian nightmare. Who can or cannot be a spouse? That’s for the state to decide. To whom do children belong? It’s up to the state to assign parents as its social workers and judges think best.
2006 was a record year in terms of known lawbreakers. Two million offenders were either in jail or prison, 4.2 million were on probation, and nearly 800,000 were on parole. for a total of 7.2 million people in the American criminal justice system.
The cost to taxpayers, about $45 billion, is causing states such as California to reconsider harsh criminal penalties. In an attempt to relieve overcrowding, California is now exporting some of its 170,000 inmates to privately run corrections facilities as far away as Tennessee.
"There are a number of states that have talked about an early release of prisoners deemed non-threatening," said Rebecca Blank, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, a centrist think tank. "The problem just keeps getting bigger and bigger. You're paying a lot of money here. You have to ask if some of these high mandatory minimum sentences make sense."
Meanwhile in Ohio, Joseph Groth has been sentenced to eight years in prison for attempted murder and felonious assault after he stabbed his wife multiple times, hospitalizing her for over a month. Groth was paroled in 1983 after serving one year for the killing of his first wife, Eva, in 1981.
For the first time since the resort on top of Aspen Mountain first put a tourist in skis, Aspen Skiing Company will open the ski slopes in June:
An average depth of more than 3 feet on the upper slopes will allow the ski area to open seven runs from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. this Friday, Saturday and Sunday. About 45 acres of mainly intermediate terrain served by the Ajax Express chairlift will be available.
That paragon of morality in a corrupt world has been exposed in a report that is the result of a two-plus year probe into the operations of the United Nations Development Program for North Korea. The report shows how the agency routinely and systematically disregarded U.N. regulations and considered itself above the law:
The report depicts an organization that for years apparently considered itselfimmune from its own rules of procedure as well as the laws and regulations of countries that were trying to keep weapons of mass destruction out of Kim’s hands.
It also shows that UNDP apparently considered itself above the decisions of the United Nations Security Council, itself, when that organization tried — as it is still trying — to bar Kim from gaining the means to create more weapons of mass destruction.
The UNDP operation not only transferred millions of dollars to the corrupt Kim Jong-Il regime, it also gave Kim “dual use” technology that can be used for civilian purposes or for terrorist activites or perhaps even creating weapons of mass destruction. Specifically:
The UNDP hired North Korean government employees, hand-picked by the Kim regime, to fill sensitive core staff posts, including finance officer, technology officer, and assistant to the head of the UNDP office.
The UNDP office in North Korea paid the salaries of these staff directly to the government in hard currency — another forbidden practice.
Furthermore, the UNDP gave them hard-currency supplements in cash — yet another violation of its own rules.
The regime-appointed finance officer — the person who wrote UNDP’s checks for 10 years — also was responsible for reconciling UNDP’s bank statements with the checkbook. As a result, the study’s authors were denied being able to see roughly $16.6 million worth of canceled checks that were signed by UNDP, nor were they allowed to even interview the finance officer.
In 78 percent of a transaction sample of UNDP payment records that they reviewed, the signature on payment receipts could not be verified. For all the rest there was no sign of a receipt at all.
Other UN agencies operating in the country also made hard currency transfers to Kim, so the problem is not limited to the UNDP. Perhaps as much as $20 million dollars went to Kim.
A staggering $381 million flowed into North Korea from non-UN donors through an arrangement called the Agriculture Recovery and Environmental Protection, or AREP, Cooperation Framework, an initiative supported by the UNDP.
Sensitive “dual use” items — which can be used to create weapons of mass destruction — that UNDP handed over to North Korea included computers, software, satellite-receiving equipment, spectrometers and other sensitive measuring devices: 95 items in all.
Moreover, some of these items were secured in a “misleading” fashion, with UNDP employees going as far as supplying false information to a Dutch manufacturer that questioned how its product would be used in North Korea.
Although annual reports of the UNDP’s safe’s contents list counterfeit US $100 bills (Kim’s famous “Super-Note”) for years, yet no one informed US authorities and UNDP officials claimed no knowledge of the bogus money.
The report reaches two disturbing conclusions, which do little more than support the view of the UN as a corrupt, perhaps even evil, entity:
The whistleblower that kicked off the investigation, Artjon Shkurtaj, was not being retaliated against when a promotion that had already been granted was withdrawn after he made his allegations. The report goes as far as to attack Shkurtaj’s personal integrity.
The report dismisses any notion of holding anyone at UNDP accountable for these spectacular lapses by invoking a concept of blanket immunity. Further, it finds, “There is no evidence that anyone acted in bad faith or in a fraudulent or deceptive manner.” The lapses are blamed on “inadequate communications.”
Fox News’ George Russell wraps up his article nicely:
Rather than bringing “closure on the allegations against UNDP,” as the organization’s boss, Dervis, hopes, the North Korean investigative report ought to raise bigger and more urgent questions about UNDP operations around the world.
If Kim Jong Il’s despotic government was able to twist UNDP’s rules and its adherence to international law with such ease, what is going on in UNDP offices in dictatorships such as Zimbabwe and Syria?
Most urgently of all, as the U.N. wobbles toward further sanctions on the nuclear-ambitious Islamic regime in Iran, what is going on in UNDP offices in Tehran?
What, indeed? Do we need further proof that the UN aids terrorist regimes and is a destabilizing force in the world politic?
And does anyone really think that either a President McCain or (shudder) a President Barack will hold the UN accountable, much less withdraw our ambassador and kick the whole oily mess across the ocean to Europe where it belongs?
(Kevin on
Jun 15, 2008 12:10 AM)
Well, let's not the dismiss the UN out of hand. Without UN resolutions to enforce, the invasion of Iraq would have been a much tougher sell.
The UN, flawed as it may be, is an excellent tool for selling US foreign policy, because if we're not enforcing UN resolutions, then we have to explain why we're violating some third-world shithole's "sovereignty" (as if those countries mattered anyway).
I mean the whole WMD thing was a good trick, but it's probably not going to work again. Even most liberals aren't quite dumb enough to be fooled twice. So if we need to get into Iran (and we do), the UN's going to be the way to do it.
(daddysteve on
Jun 12, 2008 11:13 PM)
If I can't write in my guy RP then Barr is likely to get my vote. But such an ugly past.
(J B Books on
Jun 15, 2008 2:58 PM)
Hi,
I find it interesting that since you're a political "professional" you don't know that Ron Paul is a Republican U.S. Congressman... a member of the Grand Old Party... NOT a member of the Libertarian Party (a.k.a. a Libertarian)...
According to the Commercial Appeal you don't know that as a Republican (not Libertarian) candidate he supported a SECURE border with NO amnesty for illegal aliens (unlike RINOs like McCain)...
Then again he was the only candidate that demonstrated during the debates that he'd actually READ the Constitution and noted that ONLY congress has the power to take the country to war.
My guess that most Ron Paul Constitutional Conservatives will vote for former Republican Representative and current Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr.
(J B Books on
Jun 15, 2008 3:01 PM)
Hi,
I find it interesting that since you're a political "professional" you don't know that Ron Paul is a Republican U.S. Congressman... a member of the Grand Old Party... NOT a member of the Libertarian Party (a.k.a. a Libertarian)...
According to the Commercial Appeal you don't know that as a Republican (not Libertarian) candidate he supported a SECURE border with NO amnesty for illegal aliens (unlike RINOs like McCain)...
Then again he was the only candidate that demonstrated during the debates that he'd actually READ the Constitution and noted that ONLY congress has the power to take the country to war.
My guess that most Ron Paul Constitutional Conservatives will vote for former Republican Representative and current Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr.
You would think that swimming with sharks would rate as highly dangerous, and it probably does. But in terms of sheer number of injuries caused each year, what are the summertime activities that cause Americans to head for the emergency room?
The International Monetary Fund has forecast the top five inflationary economies for 2008:
Zimbabwe (a mind-boggling 300,000 percent-plus)
Venezuela (25.7 percent)
Bolivia (15.1 percent)
Nicaragua (13.8 percent)
Argentina (9.2 percent)
According to Dr. Hendrickson:
What do these countries have in common? You could reply in two ways: 1) they are poorly governed; 2) they are leftist governments, which is simply another way of saying that they are poorly governed.
Read the article to see how the Democrat-controlled Congress is making some of the same mistakes.
The Politico has a poll up that asks 
