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Friday, August 29, 2008

Obama: "I (the government) am my brothers keeper"

Apparently, Obama sees the people of America as helpless sheep who need a strong shepherd (ie. the government) to guide them through the storms and hardships of life. This is frightening to a people who inherently cherish the liberty handed down to them by their forefathers. When the government tells you that you are ineligible for surgery until you lose weight, quit drinking alcohol or do any other such thing, you'll know that your dependence upon the government has morphed into slavery. Last night Obama proudly declared: "I am my brother's keeper," but is Obama going to look after us the same way he looks after his step-brother who lives on one dollar per day in a dirt floored hut in Africa? According to Barry:
"Ours is a promise that says government cannot solve all our problems, but what it should do is that which we cannot do for ourselves - protect us from harm and provide every child a decent education; keep our water clean and our toys safe; invest in new schools and new roads and new science and technology. Our government should work for us, not against us. It should help us, not hurt us."
Everything after the "but" reveals Obama's governing philosophy--one of big government paternalism. My question to Senator Obama is: which of the following things can American citizens NOT do for themselves?
  1. Protect ourselves from harm: The Democrat's governing philosophy explains why they clamor for the government (George W. Bush) to personally rescue people from hurricanes, and why they expect homeowners to wait patiently (and without a firearm) for the police to arrive while a robber is breaking down their door.
  2. Keep our water clean: Mr. Obama, out here in "fly-over country" we live off of well water, irrigate our yards from canals and go swimming in ponds filled with alligators and we do it all without some government bureaucrat certifying that the water is safe.
  3. Keep our toys safe: Mr. Obama, isn't this what consumers use "name brands" for?--to differentiate between high quality goods and low quality goods? Is Barry going to suck on ever painted toy before our kids play with it?
  4. "Invest" in everything: Mr. Obama, I've commented on this before here, but I'll repeat it again. Every time you hear some politician talking about how they want to "invest" in this or that amount of money for some government boondoggle, just know that every dollar the government "invests" of your tax money, is a dollar which be cannot spent by you or your family on new clothes, tires, computers or other goods and services. The government does not produce capital, it merely sucks up capital from the private market that could have contributed to the expansion of the economy. Additionally, when the government "invests" money, no real wealth has been created, because, undoubtedly, the government will not earn any return on its "investment." You can be assured that a large portion of the "invested" funds will be lost, diverted, squandered and/or end up lining the pockets of crooked politicians across the land.

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Thursday, August 28, 2008

Will the MSM Discuss Obama (Sr.'s) Legacy of Polygamy?

This from Newsweek:

Born in 1961, [Barack] Obama is the son of a white mother from Kansas; his father was a black man from Kenya. The parents met at the university of Hawaii and married; Obama was born; the father, who, it turned out, already had one family in Africa, left for Harvard and never came back. "I consider myself a serial polygamist," Obama Sr. once told a friend. "That is, one wife at a time." By most accounts Senior had eight children with four women."
I seem to remember a few months ago when the main stream media attempted to railroad another presidential candidate because of his alleged connection or descent from a polygamist ancestor? Examples of this can be seen here, here and here. While Mitt Romney's great-great-grandfather had more than one wife, Barack Hussein Obama's father (note: that's just one generational step above the current Democrat presidential nominee) was, by his own admission a "serial polygammist." In the eyes of the MSM will that disqualify his son for the presidency? I doubt it.

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In Denver, the End of Capitalism

David Harsanyi describes perfectly the philosophical underpinnings of the Democrat National Convention:
"buried beneath the idealistic policy talk in Denver is an ugly detail: It's about coercion.

[Gov. Brian] Schweitzer claims "we must invest" in projects he likes, he means government will take it and invest it for you. You see, you must. Then Schweitzer claimed (in a half-truth) that Republican nominee John McCain voted "against" solar energy, biofuels and wind energy.

Which is weird because I could swear my neighbor has solar panels, so they must be legal. I've seen windmills. So I suppose that Schweitzer meant that McCain voted against some federal boondoggle for wind and/or solar energy.

Sen. Hillary Clinton later chimed in that she would force energy companies to invest in the projects deemed worthy of the common good. (Imagine if your business were told how it "must" invest its money.) She claimed Americans "give" windfall profits to oil companies. No, we don't "give" them anything; we pay them for a product.
Here's the point. Every time you hear some politician talking about how they want to "invest" in this or that amount of money for some government boondoggle, just know that every dollar the government "invests" of your tax money, is a dollar which be cannot spent by you or your family on new clothes, tires, computers or other goods and services. The government does not produce capital, it merely sucks up capital from the private market that could have contributed to the expansion of the economy.

Additionally, when the government "invests" money, no real wealth has been created, because, undoubtedly, the government will not earn any return on its "investment." You can be assured that a large portion of the "invested" funds will be lost, diverted, squandered and/or end up lining the pockets of crooked politicians across the land. The reason is simple. As Henry Hazlitt put it:
"there is a difference between the loans supplied by private lenders and the loans supplied by a government agency. Each private lender risks his own funds...If money is lost he must either make good out of his own funds or be forced out of business. When people risk their own funds they are usually careful in their investigations to determine the adequacy of the assets pledged and the business acumen and honesty of the borrower."
"If the government operated by the same strict standards, there would be no good argument for its entering the field at all. Why do precisely what privately agencies already do? But the government almost invariably operates by different standards. The whole argument for its entering the lending business, in fact, is that it will make loans to people who could not get them from private lenders. This is only another way of saying that the government lenders will take risks with the people's money (the taxpayers') that private lenders will not take with their own money."
Is it possible to get Hazlitt's book distributed in Denver before it's too late?

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Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Recruiting Men for College

Colleges across the land have begun to wonder: where have all the men gone? According to insidehighered.com:

Male students made up 52 percent of the U.S. undergraduate population in 1976, but that figure dropped to 43 percent by 2004, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. The difference between male and female participation was found to be particularly stark among black students, where women outnumbered men in college enrollments by 29 percentage points in 2004.
Having recently completed my indoctrination education at one of the nation's center's of higher learning, I have a few thoughts on the subject. Whether anyone really wants to admit it, one of the primary objects of going to college is to select a suitable (attractive) spouse from among the overflowing masses of humanity on this earth. Getting your foot in the door of a lucrative profession is nice byproduct as well, but while going to college allows a man to find a woman who might be more intelligent, attractive or successful than one he might find in his own small home town, going to college may not be what it once was.

Is it possible that young men are now able to have their cake and eat it too? At least since the housing bubble beginning in the early 2000's, it seems that young men have been able to leave high school slap up a few homes and pocket a couple of hundred thousand dollars. That sure looks a lot more attractive to a woman than a piece of parchment on the wall and a huge debt on the books. Additionally, is it possible that young men without college educations are capable of weighing the financial risks/rewards of going to college? Who wants to end up like this:
"For more than two decades, colleges and universities across the country have been jacking up tuition at a faster rate than costs have risen on any other major product or service - four times faster than the overall inflation rate and faster even than increases in the price of gasoline or health care (see the chart to the right). The result: After adjusting for financial aid, the amount families pay for college has skyrocketed 439% since 1982....Mind you, some borrowing can actually be a good thing, giving students a built-in investment in their education. But today many kids leave school with unprecedented amounts of debt - $20,000 on average, up from $9,000 a decade ago - and one in 10 private college students borrows over $40,000...One chilling sign: Among students who graduate from four-year schools with more than $15,000 in debt, the default rate is nearly 20%.
Update: Maybe there's a correlation between the rising number of women on college campus and the rise in prices. While I think it has much more to do with government subsidizing of student loans (ie. subsidies naturally create an artificial demand for a product) John Lott makes a similar argument that the growth of "big government" correlates with the age of women's suffrage:
"If women's right to vote increased government, our analysis should show a few definite indicators. First, suffrage would have a bigger impact on government spending and taxes in states with a greater percentage of women. And secondly, the size of government in western states should steadily expand as women comprise an increasing share of their population. Even after accounting for a range of other factors — such as industrialization, urbanization, education and income — the impact of granting of women's suffrage on per capita state government expenditures and revenue was startling. Per capita state government spending after accounting for inflation had been flat or falling during the 10 years before women began voting. But state governments started expanding the first year after women voted and continued growing until within 11 years real per capita spending had more than doubled. The increase in government spending and revenue started immediately after women started voting."

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Obama on the cover Newsweek again!

This is getting embarrassing for Newsweek, but at least there aren't any halos this time:

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Obama appeals to FEC to silence political advertisement

The scary thing is that if Obama gets elected, you can bet he and Pelosi will do, by means of the 'fairness doctrine,' the same thing to conservative talk radio.
Sen. Barack Obama has launched an all-out effort to block a Republican billionaire’s efforts to tie him to domestic and foreign terrorists in a wave of negative television ads. Obama’s campaign has written the Department of Justice demanding a criminal investigation of the “American Issues Project,” the vehicle through which Dallas investor Harold Simmons is financing the advertisements. The Obama campaign — and tens of thousands of supporters — also is pressuring television networks and affiliates to reject the ads. The effort has met with some success: CNN and Fox News are not airing the attacks. Obama has also launched his own response ad, directly addressing Simmons' attempt to link him to domestic terror. The project is “a knowing and willful attempt to violate the strictures of federal election law,” Obama general counsel Bob Bauer wrote to Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Keeney last week in a letter provided to Politico. Bauer argued that by advocating Obama’s defeat, the ad should be subject to the contribution limits of federal campaign law, not the anything-goes regime of issue advocacy.
Here's the ad:

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Democrat Convention Spending Spree

This week's Democrat National Convention has become a microcosm of the governing philosophy that pervades both parties from top to bottom. Free spending is easy at the DNC (as well as in DC) when those spending the money are not the same as those actually earning the money. Compare this account about the Democrat National Convention to the description about the Wal-Mart Shareholder's Convention:
  1. DNC: "Lobbyists are once again spending millions of dollars here on gourmet food, top-shelf liquor and private lavish parties for Democratic elected officials who seem more than happy to play the role of world-class freeloaders. According to Denver's top chefs and caterers, no expense is being spared. Kevin Taylor, of the Denver restaurant Palette, who says he is the only four-star chef in Denver, says he is booked to prepare delicacies for more than 100 "high end, hush-hush events." "The demand is over the top, you've never seen anything like this," said chef Taylor, especially for his signature King Crab terrine appetizer with white champagne caviar. At the Ritz Carlton Hotel, where rooms for Democratic VIP's are now going for $2,000 a night, the executive chef, Andre Jimenez, says even the room welcome gifts need to be elaborate for the 35 top donors and celebrities, including "the rarest peaches in America." "It's only for the best of the best that we host here," the chef told ABC News. "We're seeing lobbyists gone wild," said Craig Holman of Public Citizen, a non-profit group that lobbied for the new ethics law enacted last year, aimed at curbing lobbying abuses.
  2. Wal-Mart Convention: "Scott and Chief Financial Officer Tom Schoewe earned a combined $14 million in stock and cash in 2003. But on business trips, the two will share a $49 hotel room. "Sharing rooms is a very symbolic part of what we do," Scott says. "It's also an equalizer. If I'm asking the district managers to share a room, but I won't share a room with Schoewe, then what am I saying? There are two different standards here? The customer is the most important thing for all of you, but for me I think I'll run a different standard."

The differences between the practices of the private sector versus the public sector are astounding. When will one of these parties stop to think about the virtues of thrift, savings, service and sacrifice? Don't hold your breath. Obama recently claimed:
"We will not take another dime from Washington lobbyists," Obama said in a speech June 5, repeating a theme he has main a key to his campaign. "They will not fund my party."
So what is the reality? This from Steve Weisman of the Campaign Finance Institute, affiliated with George Washington University.
"Barack Obama, who says that he doesn't want to have any lobbyist money in his campaign, is having a lobbyist bundle money from large corporations, many of which are clients, for the convention that's going to nominate Obama," said Steve Weisman
It's kind of odd to see Democrats shaking down corporations for cash when they have been demonizing them for years.

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Monday, August 25, 2008

Hidden Victories In (The Republic of) Georgia:

A little good news:
A small number of Georgians received special operations training, but not enough of these troops were available to defeat the Russian advance. The Georgians did better in the air and at sea, even though they were greatly outnumbered there as well. Georgian warplanes shot up the Russians pretty badly (killing the commander of Russian ground forces, for example) before the Russians were able to shut down the Georgian air force. But in the process Russia lost at least four aircraft destroyed, and a number of others badly damaged. At sea, Georgian missile boats hit several Russian warships, which had not been equipped with equipment, or crews, that were capable of dealing with this kind of threat. Two Russian warships were damaged sufficiently that they had to withdraw from the area. Within a few days, however, Georgia's miniscule navy and air force were destroyed, largely by the much larger Russian air force.

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From Street Agitator to Senator: How Obama Got His Start

As a street agitator, Obama worked the machine politicians until he was 'made' Senator. This From the Chicago Sun Times:
"He came to me and he said, 'You're the Senate president. You have a lot of power,' " Jones recalled. "I said, 'I do? What kind of power do I have?' He said, 'You have the power to make a United States senator.' 'Oh? I didn't realize that. If I have that kind of power, do you know of anyone I could make a United States senator?' He said, 'Me.' He caught me by surprise. I said, 'Let me think about it.' And we continued to talk, and I told him, 'That sounds good. Let's go for it.' That started the campaign."

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Pelosi Lies about Catholic Abortion Doctrine

This Sunday, Nancy Pelosi attempted to redifine 2,000 year old Catholic doctrine on abortion:



Do you really have to make this so easy Nancy? This from "Catholic.com":

The Catholic Church has always condemned abortion as a grave evil. As the early Christian writer Tertullian pointed out, the law of Moses ordered strict penalties for causing an abortion. We read, "If men who are fighting hit a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely [Hebrew: "so that her child comes out"], but there is no serious injury, the offender must be fined whatever the woman’s husband demands and the court allows. But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot" (Ex. 21:22–24).

In 1995 Pope John Paul II declared that the Church’s teaching on abortion "is unchanged and unchangeable. Therefore, by the authority which Christ conferred upon Peter and his successors . . . I declare that direct abortion, that is, abortion willed as an end or as a means, always constitutes a grave moral disorder, since it is the deliberate killing of an innocent human being. This doctrine is based upon the natural law and upon the written word of God, is transmitted by the Church’s tradition and taught by the ordinary and universal magisterium. No circumstance, no purpose, no law whatsoever can ever make licit an act which is intrinsically illicit, since it is contrary to the law of God which is written in every human heart, knowable by reason itself, and proclaimed by the Church" (Evangelium Vitae 62).

The Didache:
"The second commandment of the teaching: You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not seduce boys. You shall not commit fornication. You shall not steal. You shall not practice magic. You shall not use potions. You shall not procure [an] abortion, nor destroy a newborn child" (Didache 2:1–2 [A.D. 70]).

The Letter of Barnabas
"The way of light, then, is as follows. If anyone desires to travel to the appointed place, he must be zealous in his works. The knowledge, therefore, which is given to us for the purpose of walking in this way, is the following. . . . Thou shalt not slay the child by procuring abortion; nor, again, shalt thou destroy it after it is born" (Letter of Barnabas 19 [A.D. 74]).

The Apocalypse of Peter
"And near that place I saw another strait place . . . and there sat women. . . . And over against them many children who were born to them out of due time sat crying. And there came forth from them rays of fire and smote the women in the eyes. And these were the accursed who conceived and caused abortion" (The Apocalypse of Peter 25 [A.D. 137]).

Athenagoras
"What man of sound mind, therefore, will affirm, while such is our character, that we are murderers?. . . [W]hen we say that those women who use drugs to bring on abortion commit murder, and will have to give an account to God for the abortion, on what principle should we commit murder? For it does not belong to the same person to regard the very fetus in the womb as a created being, and therefore an object of God’s care, and when it has passed into life, to kill it; and not to expose an infant, because those who expose them are chargeable with child-murder, and on the other hand, when it has been reared to destroy it" (A Plea for the Christians 35 [A.D. 177]).

Tertullian
"In our case, a murder being once for all forbidden, we may not destroy even the fetus in the womb, while as yet the human being derives blood from the other parts of the body for its sustenance. To hinder a birth is merely a speedier man-killing; nor does it matter whether you take away a life that is born, or destroy one that is coming to birth. That is a man which is going to be one; you have the fruit already in its seed" (Apology 9:8 [A.D. 197]).

"Among surgeons’ tools there is a certain instrument, which is formed with a nicely-adjusted flexible frame for opening the uterus first of all and keeping it open; it is further furnished with an annular blade, by means of which the limbs [of the child] within the womb are dissected with anxious but unfaltering care; its last appendage being a blunted or covered hook, wherewith the entire fetus is extracted by a violent delivery.

"There is also [another instrument in the shape of] a copper needle or spike, by which the actual death is managed in this furtive robbery of life: They give it, from its infanticide function, the name of embruosphaktes, [meaning] "the slayer of the infant," which of course was alive. . . .

"[The doctors who performed abortions] all knew well enough that a living being had been conceived, and [they] pitied this most luckless infant state, which had first to be put to death, to escape being tortured alive" (The Soul 25 [A.D. 210]).

"Now we allow that life begins with conception because we contend that the soul also begins from conception; life taking its commencement at the same moment and place that the soul does" (ibid., 27).

"The law of Moses, indeed, punishes with due penalties the man who shall cause abortion [Ex. 21:22–24]" (ibid., 37).

Minucius Felix
"There are some [pagan] women who, by drinking medical preparations, extinguish the source of the future man in their very bowels and thus commit a parricide before they bring forth. And these things assuredly come down from the teaching of your [false] gods. . . . To us [Christians] it is not lawful either to see or hear of homicide" (Octavius 30 [A.D. 226]).

Hippolytus
"Women who were reputed to be believers began to take drugs to render themselves sterile, and to bind themselves tightly so as to expel what was being conceived, since they would not, on account of relatives and excess wealth, want to have a child by a slave or by any insignificant person. See, then, into what great impiety that lawless one has proceeded, by teaching adultery and murder at the same time!" (Refutation of All Heresies [A.D. 228]).

Council of Ancyra
"Concerning women who commit fornication, and destroy that which they have conceived, or who are employed in making drugs for abortion, a former decree excluded them until the hour of death, and to this some have assented. Nevertheless, being desirous to use somewhat greater lenity, we have ordained that they fulfill ten years [of penance], according to the prescribed degrees" (canon 21 [A.D. 314]).

Basil the Great
"Let her that procures abortion undergo ten years’ penance, whether the embryo were perfectly formed, or not" (First Canonical Letter, canon 2 [A.D. 374]).

"He that kills another with a sword, or hurls an axe at his own wife and kills her, is guilty of willful murder; not he who throws a stone at a dog, and unintentionally kills a man, or who corrects one with a rod, or scourge, in order to reform him, or who kills a man in his own defense, when he only designed to hurt him. But the man, or woman, is a murderer that gives a philtrum, if the man that takes it dies upon it; so are they who take medicines to procure abortion; and so are they who kill on the highway, and rapparees" (ibid., canon 8).

John Chrysostom
"Wherefore I beseech you, flee fornication. . . . Why sow where the ground makes it its care to destroy the fruit?—where there are many efforts at abortion?—where there is murder before the birth? For even the harlot you do not let continue a mere harlot, but make her a murderess also. You see how drunkenness leads to prostitution, prostitution to adultery, adultery to murder; or rather to a something even worse than murder. For I have no name to give it, since it does not take off the thing born, but prevents its being born. Why then do thou abuse the gift of God, and fight with his laws, and follow after what is a curse as if a blessing, and make the chamber of procreation a chamber for murder, and arm the woman that was given for childbearing unto slaughter? For with a view to drawing more money by being agreeable and an object of longing to her lovers, even this she is not backward to do, so heaping upon thy head a great pile of fire. For even if the daring deed be hers, yet the causing of it is thine" (Homilies on Romans 24 [A.D. 391]).

Jerome
"I cannot bring myself to speak of the many virgins who daily fall and are lost to the bosom of the Church, their mother. . . . Some go so far as to take potions, that they may insure barrenness, and thus murder human beings almost before their conception. Some, when they find themselves with child through their sin, use drugs to procure abortion, and when, as often happens, they die with their offspring, they enter the lower world laden with the guilt not only of adultery against Christ but also of suicide and child murder" (Letters 22:13 [A.D. 396]).

The Apostolic Constitutions
"Thou shalt not use magic. Thou shalt not use witchcraft; for he says, ‘You shall not suffer a witch to live’ [Ex. 22:18]. Thou shall not slay thy child by causing abortion, nor kill that which is begotten. . . . [I]f it be slain, [it] shall be avenged, as being unjustly destroyed" (Apostolic Constitutions 7:3 [A.D. 400]).

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Helmet Hair: are we seeing a pattern among VP Nominees?

The Politico has this to say about Biden's Hair:

It is a fraying, combed-back helmet that barely covers a longtime fact of Washington life: The senator from Delaware has taken steps to pre-empt baldness. The most common hypothesis is that he received a hair transplant, where follicles from the bushier back of the head are grafted onto fading spots closer to the front of the dome. In 1987, a Washington Post reporter asked him to confirm the theory. "Guess," he responded. "I've got to keep some mystery in my life."
I have to admit, I have much more confidence in Biden's hair than the hair of the "metrosexual" they nominated last time:

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Democrats open faith-filled convention with prayer

From the outset, the Obama campaign incorporated religious imagery to build a cult of personality around its candidate. In New Hampshire in January, for example, the Obama told an audience that:
"a beam of light will come down upon you, you will experience an epiphany . . . and you will suddenly realize that you must go to the polls and vote for Obama."
In that vein, the Democrat Convention recently opened with an (religious) invocation of all things. The Associated Press hit the nail right on the head with this comment:
"Four years ago, such a scene would have been unthinkable at a Democratic National Convention."
At the convention, "young Muslim women in headscarves sat near older African-American women in their finest Sunday hats."

This is the most obvious feint to Bible thumpers I've ever seen. Isn't it the Democrat Party who unleashed the rabid anti-Christian campaign on America through their surrogates at the ACLU, CAIR and La Raza? Shouldn't the ACLU be standing up for the rights of these Muslim women not to be offended by the prayers of Christians and Jews?

Why would Obama invoke religion at his convention? His mentor Saul Alinsky, taught his followers not to be "Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman with their long hair and hippie attitudes. … He said they should cut their hair, they should shave their beards, they should get business suits." All this in order to mask one's true ideology. This tidbit from Investors Business Daily gives us some insight:
"Obama calls his years as an Alinskyesque community organizer in Chicago "the best education I ever had, and where I learned the true meaning of my Christian faith." But as radicalism expert Richard Lawrence Poe has noted, "Camouflage is key to Alinsky-style organizing. In organizing coalitions of black churches in Chicago, Obama caught flak for not attending church himself. He became an instant churchgoer." Indeed, Alinsky believed in sacrificing ethics and morals for the great cause. "Ethical standards must be elastic to stretch with the times," Alinsky wrote in his last book, "Rules for Radicals," adding that "all values are relative in a world of political relativity." Published a year before Alinsky's death in 1972, "Rules for Radicals" includes a dedication in which he gives "an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical . . . who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom — Lucifer."

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Interesting First Campaign Appearance

When Barack Obama talks about "Hope and Change" I'm not sure this is what he had in mind:

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More News on Chinese Infrastructure

This from the Epoch Times over the Weekend:

Southern China was slammed by severe snowstorms resulting in blackouts which seriously affected railway transportation for millions of people planning to travel for Chinese New Year. The Jing-Guang (Beijing-Guangzhou) Railway, one of the major railways connecting North and South China, was nearly paralyzed by the storm. Some experts and reporters have noted that this situation exposes insufficiencies and inefficiency in China's infrastructure, particularly for transport and the electric power system. It has also shown that its capacity to handle a crisis is very fragile; Chinese authorities need to consider this situation seriously. According to a recent article written by Deng Liwen, a researcher at the Central Party School in Beijing, currently the biggest problem facing China's rail transit system is not only its inability to meet the demands of social and economic development, but also that it is falling behind the air and road transit systems. As of 2006, China had less than 80,000 kilometers of railway, only six percent of the world's total railway length. This is an average railway length of about six centimeters per person in terms of China's 1.3 billion people, while its railway network carries 24 percent of the world's rail freight traffic.
Doing business in China is sounding better and better every day. You don't have to worry about environmental or labor regulations. Eminent Domain is not a problem. What's not to love?
China has always suffered from aridity, as about 20 percent of its landmass...but the situation is getting worse. Persistent drought, overgrazing, indiscriminate use of ground water and rampant logging are eroding the edges of China’s deserts, allowing them to merge and spread. Recent satellite imagery shows that the Badain Jaran desert in north-central China is pushing southward toward the nearby Tengger desert to form a single, larger desert, overlapping both northwestern Gansu province and neighboring Inner Mongolia. Expanding deserts swallow almost a million acres of land every year, China’s State Environmental Protection Administration says. Soon 40 percent of China could turn into scrubland, creating massive social, economic and ecological challenges, including the problem of millions of “ecological refugees.”

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Friday, August 22, 2008

Obama on American and Chinese Infrastructure

This February, Barack Obama called for:

"the establishment of a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank that would invest $60 billion over a ten year period for highways, technology, and other projects. Obama proposed this concept as a component of his $210 billion economic stimulus package, when he made an economic policy address at a GE Assembly Plant on Wednesday. “For our economy, our safety, and our workers, we have to rebuild America,” said Obama. “This investment will multiply into almost half a trillion dollars of infrastructure spending and generate nearly two million new jobs—many of them in the construction industry that’s been hit hard by the housing crisis.”
Yesterday, Obama had this to say:
"Everybody's watching what's going on in Beijing right now with the Olympics , Think about the amount of money that China has spent on infrastructure. Their ports, their train systems, their airports are vastly the superior to us now, which means if you are a corporation deciding where to do business, you're starting to think, 'Beijing looks like a pretty good option.'"

Hugh Hewitt calls the Communists' Olympic infrastructure in Beijing "eye candy."

For instance, the Communists' iconic "Bird's Nest" stadium is nothing more than those that have become a dime a dozen here in the states. According to Wikipedia, the stadium currently has a seating capacity of 80,000 and ten people were killed in its construction. We have lots of those (without the deaths). Just about every city in America boasts some massive stadium that rivals the Bird's Nest. Here's a list of just the NCAA's largest stadiums.

To steal a line from Owen Wilson, they've got a 2,000 year old civilization (with a Billion of starving and oppressed people), and this is all they could come up with? The fact is that even in rural areas, American infrastructure is vastly superior to Chinese infrastructure. I guarantee you won't be driving 95 miles per hour in western China's highways, but in "nowhere" Nevada and Montana people regularly drive faster than that. America's infrastructure is just one item in a long list of things Obama has thrown under the bus.

Let's face it folks, with all the rain this week at the Olympics, it is obvious that the Bird's Nest is just another glorified Texas Stadium which you can neither heat when it's cold nor cool when it's hot. Here in the States our stadiums have trains, water slides, retractable roofs and football fields that roll in and out on giant rails. I didn't see any drunk Chinese Olympic fans by the center field fence sitting in "lazy boys" or hot tubs like we've got here.

Update: I hope Barry Obama doesn't forget about Texas' shrines to High School Football when he's commenting on which country's infrastructure is better.


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More Ominous Economic Clouds on the Horizon?

This week's Fortune Magazine continues to sound the alarm bell:

There were $85 billion in mortgage securities downgraded in third quarter of 2007, $237 billion in the fourth quarter, $739 billion in the first quarter of this year, and $841 billion in the second quarter of 2008."
Meredith Whitney, (who by Fortune's own admission is a lousy analyst) graces the cover is quoted as warning a standing-room only crowd of money managers that:
"What's ahead is much more severe than what we've seen so far...While my loss estimates are much more severe than those of my peers, my biggest concerns is that they're way too low."
That was back in May. Today we get this from Ben Bernanke:
"Although we have seen improved functioning in some markets, the financial storm that reached gale force" around this time last year "has not yet subsided, and its effects on the broader economy are becoming apparent in the form of softening economic activity and rising unemployment," Bernanke said in a speech to a high-profile economics conference here..."A jump in inflation, in part the product of a global commodity boom, and the result has been one of the most challenging economic and policy environments in memory," he said.
Maybe it's because I live on Florida's Emerald Coast and work in the real estate development/construction industry, but many of the contractors, subcontractors and laborers that I have spoken to give me an indication that the problems are just starting to mount. Their teaser rates are just now beginning to end, their interest reserves are just now expiring and their home and car loans are just now coming due. Just a few years ago these guys were raking in $10,000 a week and went on a spending spree purchasing $46,000 trucks and furnishing their bachelor pads. Just based on my conversations with these guys, the Banks can expect additional losses as the real estate industry continues to implode.

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The Personification of Ice

The Associated Press Reports that a large chunk of ice is breaking off of some really cold ice cube in Greenland. Notice how the writer wants us to think that this giant snow cone is a living being with feelings:

In northern Greenland, a part of the Arctic that had seemed immune from global warming, new satellite images show a growing giant crack and an 11-square-mile chunk of ice hemorrhaging off a major glacier, scientists said Thursday. And that's led the university professor who spotted the wounds in the massive Petermann glacier to predict disintegration of a major portion of the Northern Hemisphere's largest floating glacier within the year. The crack is 7 miles long and about half a mile wide. It is about half the width of the 500 square mile floating part of the glacier. Other smaller fractures can be seen in images of the ice tongue, a long narrow sliver of the glacier... The question that now faces scientists is: Are the fractures part of normal glacier stress or are they the beginning of the effects of global warming?
The AP continues:
"Satellite images show that the Jakobshavn glacier, the fastest retreating glacier in the world, set new records for how far it has moved inland. That concerns Colorado's Abdalati: "It could go back for miles and miles and there's no real mechanism to stop it."
There's no mechanism to stop it? I have a suggestion. Maybe we could round up a few of those human shields that were lucky enough to survive the Iraq War and ship them up to Greenland. Their patriotic service is needed once again! Just like the Chinese Tank Man, the glacier would stop dead in its tracks at the very thought of grinding the human shields into fine powdery dust under the weight of 5 million tons of ice.

Or maybe Barry Obama can lead an expedition of shaamen and miracle workers to the iceberg. Does the ability to turn back the "rise of the oceans" and "heal the planet" also empower one to cure an iceberg? For the planet's sake, I hope so!

Update: Hopefully the glaciers in Greenland won't treat the human shields the same way the ones in Washington State did.

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Thursday, August 21, 2008

The Religion of Pelosi

Technically, Nancy Pelosi is a Roman Catholic (she recently crossed herself while at a Syrian Mosque), but during the recent Congressional infighting over the moratorium on offshore oil and gas exploration Pelosi was quoted as saying:
“I’m trying to save the planet; I’m trying to save the planet,” she says impatiently when questioned. “I will not have this debate trivialized by their excuse for their failed policy.”
I think Pelosi needs to go back to Catechism. Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., reminded Americans that the world has already been saved. She says:
“[Pelosi] is committed to her global warming fanaticism to the point where she has said that she’s just trying to save the planet,” Bachmann said. “We all know that someone did that over 2,000 years ago, they saved the planet — we didn’t need Nancy Pelosi to do that.”
Then a week later Pelosi greeted Obama at a California fundraiser calling him:
"a leader that God has blessed us with at this time."
I'm not denying that the hand of God hasn't been behind Obama's meteoric rise from community agitator to Democrat Presidential nominee; however, I think it has more to do with the fact that he has gets three times the media coverage that John McCain receives.

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Wind Turbine Syndrome...??

New research from Dr. Nina Pierpont entitled Wind Turbine Syndrome: A Report on the Natural Experiment suggests that living close to wind turbines can cause:

"sleep disorders, difficulty with equilibrium, headaches, childhood "night terrors" and other health problems."
The real question is whether the mental problems related to living in and around wind turbines is the result of:
  1. "low-frequency noise and vibration generated by wind machines," or
  2. having to live with the piles of shredded birds so close to your house.

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Obama on the Cover of Time Magazine for 7th Time This Year

Flashback: Weeks ago I said Newsweek was suffering from the same disease regarding the "Messiah." See the story here.

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California's Proposition 8 and Judicial Tyranny

This November California's proposed Proposition 8 would amend the California Constitution to read:

Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.
What Prop 8 has to do with Judicial Tyranny? Let me explain. In 2000, by means of a ballot initiative, the People of California voted 61.4% in favor of Proposition 22 which altered Section 300 of the California Civil Code to define marriage as
a personal relation arising out of a civil contract between a man and a woman, to which the consent of the parties capable of making that contract is necessary.
Predictably since that time, the radical left has thrown the whole issue into the courts and succeeded in overruling the will of the people on the matter.

Today, traditional marriage and family advocates are once again trying to maintain that sacred institution by means of a Constitutional amendment. Advocates hope that the amendment would take the issue out of the hands of the courts by adding a new section to the California Constitution (Section 7.5) to Article I, but I would not hold my breath.

The people of California need to understand that the Judicial tyrants in their state don't care if the people vote in favor of this measure. They do not care if it is placed within the State's Constitution for a time. There is absolutely no way that Proposition 8 will stand for long. State Supreme Court Judges throughout the country have made a habit of invalidating and striking down ballot initiatives. The "Men (and Women) in Black" are just biding their time until they can strike Proposition 8 down as well.

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Wednesday, August 20, 2008

He's Always Been a Superb Swimmer



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Clarence Thomas' Resume Not Strong Enough for Supreme Court?

“I would not have nominated, uhhh, Clarence Thomas. Uh, I don’t think that he’s—uhhh... uhhh... I—I—I—I—I—I don’t think that he was an exper... uh, a strong enough jurist or legal thinker, uh, at the time, uh, for that elevation. Setting aside the fact that I profoundly disagree with his interpretations of a lot of the Constitution.”
—Barack Obama when asked by Saddleback Church pastor Rick Warren which Supreme Court Justice he would NOT have nominated

From the WSJ: So let's see. By the time he was nominated, Clarence Thomas had worked in the Missouri Attorney General's office, served as an Assistant Secretary of Education, run the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and sat for a year on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the nation's second most prominent court. Since his "elevation" to the High Court in 1991, he has also shown himself to be a principled and scholarly jurist.

Meanwhile, as he bids to be America's Commander in Chief, Mr. Obama isn't yet four years out of the Illinois state Senate, has never held a hearing of note of his U.S. Senate subcommittee, and had an unremarkable record as both a "community organizer" and law school lecturer. Justice Thomas's judicial credentials compare favorably to Mr. Obama's Presidential résumé by any measure. And when it comes to rising from difficult circumstances, Justice Thomas's rural Georgian upbringing makes Mr. Obama's story look like easy street.

Even more troubling is what the Illinois Democrat's answer betrays about his political habits of mind. Asked a question he didn't expect at a rare unscripted event, the rookie candidate didn't merely say he disagreed with Justice Thomas. Instead, he instinctively reverted to the leftwing cliché that the Court's black conservative isn't up to the job while his white conservative colleagues are.

So much for civility in politics and bringing people together. And no wonder Mr. Obama's advisers have refused invitations for more such open forums, preferring to keep him in front of a teleprompter, where he won't let slip what he really believes.

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While Obama's Brother lives on $1 per day Obama calls Americans Stingy

While Obama has earned millions of dollars from the sale of two books about his heretofore paper thin life experience, his brother subsists on just one dollar per day.

Recently, at Saddleback Church Obama stated:

“Americans’ greatest moral failure in my lifetime,” he said, “has been that we still don’t abide by that basic precept in Matthew that whatever you do for the least of my brothers, you do for me.”
I say that Obama should first set his own house in order, then begin thinking about how to confiscate our money. Aside from the obvious hypocritical nature of Obama's statement, what Obama is really attempting to assert is that Jesus Christ himself espoused Obama's radical redistributionist philosophies. Attempting to pandering to the "Religious Right" by telling them that their Bible really justifies the theft of their honest incomes by distant bureaucrats is not likely to fly here in the South.

Also, this from the DC Examiner:
"the evidence of an internationally superior American generosity is impressive, beginning with the numbers on our charitable giving. We give twice as much as the British per capita, and according to The American magazine, seven times as much as the Germans and 14 times as much as the Italians.

Even in inflation-adjusted dollars, the amount given each year just keeps getting larger, and meanwhile, we do far more volunteer work than in other industrialized countries."

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Monday, August 18, 2008

Chinese Athlete In Her Own Words

Were your parents here to see you compete, among the cheering crowds?

“I don’t know.”

When was the last time you went home?”

“Ummm … before I joined the national team,” Yang said, her small voice hard to hear.

When was that?

“More than a year ago.”

Will you go on holiday after the games?

“I don’t know.”

How many holidays do you get a year?

“I have not had a holiday since I joined the national team.”

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Treatment of Chinese Peformers Indicative of Communism

The Kung Fu pupils in the opening ceremony of the Olympics have spent the last year cooped up in a military camp outside Beijing. Conditions have been bad. "They weren't even given enough food," says their trainer. This news adds to the criticism of the Beijing Organizing Committee.

Viewers from around the globe marvelled at the Opening Ceremony last Friday. One of the most spectacular features was the martial arts display by 2008 pupils from the famous Shaolin Centre in Henan province. With coordinated movements, they showed the Tai Chi variant of Kung Fu; a popular way to relax for many Chinese people.

The skilful and well-executed show took a severe toll on many of the participants; both those who took part and the performers who were held in reserve.

Many of the martial arts performers feel abused and ignored by the Olympic organizers. For the last year, they have been housed 50 to a room, more than 70 kilometres from the ‘Bird’s Nest’ National arena. This is where they have slept, eaten and spent all their time.

Leaving the compound around the barracks was strictly forbidden. The dormitories are crammed with bunk beds. Between 30 and 50 of the teenagers spent the night in each room. Only a few of the showers work and the toilet facilities have been bad. The winter was icy and in summer, the pupils had to battle against mosquitoes and the heat.

"After repeated complaints they finally installed air-conditioning in the sleeping quarters. However, most of the equipment was so old that it didn't work," says one of the pupils.

Most of the 2500 performers have been sent home after the opening ceremony. The few that remain in order to take part in the closing ceremony are extremely angry about the treatment they have received from the Olympic organizers.

"The food is the worst thing. We’ve had the same two courses for dinner for a year. Sometimes there hasn't been enough for everyone. Those who have arrived last haven't got anything to eat," says a pupil.

He adds that he "wants to throw up," when the food is served.

"We never get noodles or dumplings. All we get is rice," he says.

Another pupil describes his disappointment as he arrived in Beijing last year. "We were proud at being chosen to take part. We all had great dreams about what we were going to do, what we were going to see and what big stars we would become, but all we've seen is the inside of this military camp. The only thing we dream of now is going home," he says.

Conditions have been so bad that their trainer, Kung Fu master Liu Haike, has sent a series of complaints to the Olympic organizers. The complaints did have some effect.

"In the end, the pupils got enough to eat, even if the diet was extremely monotonous," he says to daily newspaper Aftenposten.

Liu describes pressure from the organizers as extreme. Everything had to be perfect. As result the performers had to practice up to 16 hours a day. "The test performance of the opening ceremony was worst of all. The pupils had to remain in the stadium for 51 hours. They were hardly fed. There was nowhere to sleep. Some managed to sleep on the seats, but they didn't get more than a couple of hours at most," says Liu.

He adds that several of the pupils got heatstroke, but their physical training meant that they got better again relatively quickly. Liu says that he felt very sorry for his pupils and the way that they were treated.

"But the organizers have promised them an Olympic certificate thanking them for their effort. They will not receive pay. Nevertheless I think that the majority will think that it was good to do what they did for the Olympics and their country," says Liu.

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Friday, August 15, 2008

Germans try to slow glacier melt with giant screen

Folks, this is getting ridiculous. How far afield has western civilization drifted from any rational notions of morality when you have a bunch of German scientists running around trying to 'save the ice?' Just read this story for starters:

German researchers trying to slow melting glaciers have set up a large screen in the Swiss Alps that they hope will trap cold air over the icy mass, Johannes Gutenberg University said Thursday. 'We hope our installations will bring about a net cooling of the area. And if the melt is not stopped, that it is at least slowed,' the project's leader, geography professor Hans-Joachim Fuchs, said in a statement.
For years the environmental movement has advocated a new type of morality (one which places and animal life above human life and the 'earth' above all) but now the Germans have taken this absurdity to a whole new level. They have decided to expend huge amounts of time, research, money and energy to "clothe" the glaciers from the sun's rays. I think that someone needs to inform these guys that the ultimate injunction is to feed the hungered and clothe the naked, not to run around "clothing" the ice. The ice has been there for hundreds of years and will be there long after any of us are gone. The ice doesn't need your charity, HUMANS DO!

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Francis Fukuyama Wrong Again

In his 1989 book The End of History and the Last Man (which we were forced to read as political science students) Francis Fukuyama wrote:

"What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such... That is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."
He was wrong then, and today (in his WSJ editorial) he's wrong again.

Today, Fukuyama writes:
The Bush administration this week rebuked Russia for its disproportionate military intervention in Georgia; many rightly suspect Moscow's real goal is regime change of the pro-Western, democratic government in Tbilisi. But who set the most recent precedent for a big power intervening to change a regime it didn't like, without the sanction of the U.N. Security Council or any other legitimating international body?

Mr. Fukuyama, while I reject your naked assertion that the US went to war "without the sanction of the UN Security Council or other legitimate international body," let's assume arguendo that your statement is true. The precedent of going to war in such manner is as old as war itself. I don't remember Jefferson, McKinley, Polk, Reagan or any other President knocking on the UN's door before entering into armed conflicts.

There's only one function of the United Nations as it is comprised today, and that is to weaken and dilute America's influence in the world. The U.N. is without equal in its ineptitude and corruption. Its sole purpose is to justify the existence of its budgets and bureaucracies. As it squanders the worlds donations, it attempts to stand in judgment of the very nation that props it up.

But there's another thing that you do not understand, and that is that international organizations neither have authority nor legitimacy to restrain America's constitutional authority to wage war. America must not grant a veto over its power to the socialist countries of Europe or to every third world dictatorship which happens to belong to the U.N. A majority of Congress voted in favor of military action against Saddam Hussein's Iraq, and that war was waged with remarkable efficiency and success.

In light of the lessons from the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, which were not lost on President Bush, the Iraq War had to be fought. First, we would no longer would we allow failed nations to become havens for Islamic extremists, and Second, would we not allow rogue nations (ie. Iraq) develop weapons of mass destruction which they could then deliver to their Islamo-Fascist surrogates. Saddam Hussein both claimed the ability and had shown in the past the willingness to use WMD's. He had violated the terms of the Persian Gulf War for years, financially supported Palestinian suicide bombers, harbored and trained international terrorists and needed to be dealt with.

The real reason Fukuyama cringed when he saw the "mission accomplished" banner was not because he "knew" we would be fighting for five more year (he was wrong again by the way), but because professors like Fukuyama and the left (aren't those synonymous?) cannot stand a victorious American military. Rather, they want America hamstrung by international organizations and desperately yearn for China, the EU, Brazil or Russia to act as a counterweight to our influence in the world. Pray that day never comes.

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Thursday, August 14, 2008

Peak Oil Theory Debunked

You gotta love this line: "peak oil is a moving target,” Mr. Hatlen said. “Oil is always a function of price and technology.”

In fact, the world oil shortage is political, not geological.

The case for drilling—and more energy production

Jon Basil Utley | August 14, 2008

The media constantly repeat the claim that it would take a decade to get the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) into oil production and about as long for offshore continental oil to start flowing. Most accounts promote the views of extreme environmentalists to make the issue appear so hopeless that we must instead "change our way of life" rather than tap into proven oil reserves. In July, CNN repeatedly reported that offshore drilling would take "seven to 10 years" to get into production. Yet Brazil's Petrobras expects its new finds in extraordinarily deep waters to already be producing 100,000 barrels per day in just two years. What is wrong with American oil companies that they would take so long?

In fact, the world oil shortage is political, not geological. In the U.S., the government prohibits drilling offshore. In Nigeria, civil strife has shut down major production. In Libya and Iran, Washington effectively blockaded and isolated the nations for years to inhibit new production. In Iraq, of course, the U.S. destroyed much of the infrastructure since the first Gulf war in 1991 and then blockaded reconstruction. In nations such as Russia and Mexico nationalism and corruption curtail increased production.

Outside of developed Western countries, the single largest reason for oil "shortages" is government incompetence and ownership of the subsoil rights so that landowners don't benefit from oil discoveries. In Patagonia, Argentina (a nation with abundant oil), I was told how it was common for landowners to try to hide any evidence of oil seepages from underground, lest the government oil company come in and ruin their lands with no benefit to themselves. Private mineral rights ownership is the reason some 90 percent of all oil wells drilled have been in the U.S. Scientific advances and innovative engineers keep coming up with ways to both discover new fields and keep old ones in production almost indefinitely.

ANWR could become the fastest way to generate hundreds of billions of dollars of new oil. But laws need to be changed to fast track the leasing (there are 11 litigation choke points) and to create special courts to expedite environmental issues, as recently proposed by Rep. Michele Bachman (R-Minn.). Under current laws, it could indeed take 10 years to produce oil, compared to two or three years for the actual drilling and pumping. Additionally, leasing is done slowly, thanks to laws written when oil was plentiful. Such laws were designed to gain maximum upfront money for the government, not for speed. For example, BP recently paid $1.2 billion for a new offshore lease, some 400 miles East of Canada's Alaska's Prudhoe Bay. The cost and distance gives some idea of industry expectations as to the extent of oil reserves.

In Anchorage last month, Marilyn Crockett, executive director of the Alaska Oil & Gas Association, explained to me the following time frame for ANWR drilling: Expect 12 months or more for an Environmental Impact Statement after Congress approves drilling. And this is working fast. It would likely take much longer. Expect 12 months to 18 months for the Department of Interior to draw up and bid out the lease-sale process. Plan on two years for oil companies to do test drilling and analysis. Drilling and transport of heavy equipment can only be done in the winter months when the permafrost ground is solidly frozen, from December through April. Concurrently with oil drilling, a 75-mile pipeline spur needs be built to connect to the main Alyeska Pipeline from Prudhoe Bay to the Southern shipping port.

However, this time frame does not allow for environmental lawsuits "every step of the way," as Crockett warned. The rest of the 10-year time frame is to allow for lawsuits trying to prevent or harass production in one way or another. For example, a single judge in California's 9th circuit has failed to issue a decision on a Shell Oil project that already had $200 million of investment before it was ordered to stop. It will produce 30,000 barrels per day, about $1 billion per year of oil.

There has already been a test well drilled in ANWR and the oil drilling could be done from a concentrated small area, about the size of Dulles Airport. Compare this to the total size of ANWR, which is roughly equivalent to the size of South Carolina. Its reserves are estimated at 10 billion barrels by the U.S. Geological Survey, compared to 32 billion nationwide, almost a 33 percent increase. At full production, ANWR would add a million barrels per day to U.S. production. At $100 per barrel, this would equal over $36 billion per year that would not need to be spent on foreign oil. It would also create some 700,000 well-paying jobs, according to a Wharton Econometrics study [pdf].

Some accurate pictures are finally beginning to circulate. Previously, ANWR was typically portrayed as if it was like the Rockies, with happy goats jumping around. But the land is actually flat and desolate for most of the year, feeding birds and caribou in the summertime. I have personally seen such land with its untold numbers of shallow, frigid little lakes on the Arctic Circle in Northern Russia. It reminded me of what the first French explorer called such lands in Canada's northern extremes: "The Land God Gave to Cain." I was in Alaska hiking last July; the quantity and variety of animal life is astounding. Grizzly bears roam within the city limits of Anchorage and moose die of starvation every winter all over the state. Nearly a million caribou (reindeer) roam. The whole western half of the state is without roads. Hundreds of streams are filled with salmon. I saw a bowhead whale breaching and little sea otters (once nearly extinct) in Seward Harbour during one afternoon boat trip out into the bay. Drilling, in other words, will not spoil the richness and abundance of Alaska's wildlife.

Here are some other interesting facts about Alaskan oil:

• Drilling is permitted in the Beaufort Sea on Alaska's north coast. On the west coast, it is not allowed under the general prohibition against offshore drilling.

• Wells at Prudhoe Bay and nearby ANWR, if allowed, are very shallow, mostly 1,000 feet to 2,000 feet deep, which allows for fast drilling.

• New technology now also allows long distance slant and horizontal drilling from a single drill site. BP is now planning such an eight-mile drill.

• The Beaufort Sea off shore is very shallow and production is done from man-made islands. A single platform allows for many slant wells.

• The Bering Sea between Alaska and Siberia is only some 2,000 feet to 3,000 feet deep.

• Estimates of recoverable oil are based on a $40 barrel price—they should be much higher with oil at $100-plus per barrel. The higher price justifies more costly drilling and secondary recovery engineering.

• Alyeska Pipeline once pumped 2.1 million barrels of oil per day, It's now at 700,000 and declining 7 percent annually. Roughly 400,000 of these barrels come from many new, smaller fields discovered after Prudhoe Bay started production.

• The Alaska National Petroleum Reserve, a very large area west of Prudhoe Bay, may also have large new oil reserves. However, most of the area has not yet been leased by the Federal government's very slow plan, nor explored, nor litigated.

The amounts of natural gas are just as astounding as the quantities of oil. The U.S. Geological Survey estimated years ago that there were 150 trillion cubic feet of conventional gas, 590 trillion cubic feet of gas hydrates (an as-yet-unexploited form of methane trapped in water molecules underground). The U.S. Geological Survey estimated that to be "twice the amount of carbon to be found in all known fossil fuels on Earth." Also, there is an uncalculated amount of drillable coal-bed methane in an estimated 13.7 billion tons of indicated coal resources.

The state government of Alaska is now proposing a new pipeline to transport already discovered gas through Canada to connect with pipelines reaching the American Midwest and the east. It will cost around $30 billion, be underground, and transport quantities equal to some 6 percent to 8 percent of all current U.S. consumption.

Meanwhile, Washington has become paralyzed by dysfunctional government. France and China can build nuclear electric plants in just years; in the U.S. it takes a decade. Brazil will bring offshore oil online in 24 months, while for U.S. companies it takes 10 years. New refineries are virtually illegal to build. New electricity-generating plants using coal are now unable to obtain financing because of environment constraints.

This is destroying the value of the dollar and wrecking our balance of trade, making oil prohibitively expensive, and sending hundreds of billions of dollars to foreign lands—many of whom are no friends of America. No wonder 80 percent of Americans think their nation is on the wrong track. Washington needs to declare a national emergency program to produce energy. The reasons we don't are political, not technical. Indeed, new natural gas discoveries have knocked U.S. prices down by about 30 percent.

Jon Basil Utley is associate publisher of The American Conservative and a former foreign correspondent for Knight Ridder newspapers. He has decades of experience in the oil business, including as the owner and operator of a small oil drilling partnership.

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Chi-Comms Beating and Detaining Press and Others

  1. John Ray of Brittain's ITV news was detained
  2. Another man Ji Sizun came to Beijing from the southern province of Fujian and wanted to demonstrate in one of three protest zones Chinese officials have designated for the games, Human Rights Watch said in a statement. Ji, 58, applied at the Deshengmenwai police station on Aug. 8, the day the Olympics began, and disappeared three days later, when he went back to check on his application, it said. Witnesses saw Ji enter the police station on August 11 only to be escorted out of the building later and put into a car by several men "who appeared to be plainclothes policemen," the group said. Ji's cell phone was turned off on Wednesday. A man who answered the telephone at the Deshengmenwai police station said no one had been arrested or taken away.
  3. Now China is trying to stomp out the media reports of the fake face/voice
  4. A Chinese Christian on his way to a worship service attended by Pres. Bush while in China is now missing after being taken away by security forces
  5. Chinese detain and beat 2 Japanese reporters.

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Olympic Deceptions

If the facts do not fit, simply change the facts. Read this story:
Just nine months before the Beijing Olympics, the Chinese government's news agency, Xinhua, reported that gymnast He Kexin was 13, which would have made her ineligible to be on the team that won a gold medal this week.

In its report Nov. 3, Xinhua identified He as one of "10 big new stars" who made a splash at China's Cities Games. It gave her age as 13 and reported that she beat Yang Yilin on the uneven bars at those games. In the final, "this little girl" pulled off a difficult release move on the bars known as the Li Na, named for another Chinese gymnast, Xinhua said in the report, which appeared on one of its Web sites, www.hb.xinhuanet.com

Female Olympic gymnasts by Olympic rules, are not allowed compete under the age of 16. Other Olympic deceptions include:
  1. Fake fireworks
  2. Then the Milli Vanilli-esq lip synk
  3. Then the faked gymnasts' ages (Photos)
  4. Now we get fake spectators at events:

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Obama Refuses to Give Credit to Troops for Surge's Success

Fast forward to minute 7:20 and watch until the end.

Brokaw: "And the 'Anbar Awakining,' most people believe, was successful in large part because the American troops did come in and make it possible to have the kind of political reconciliation. Do you disagree with that?"

Obama: "As I said before, to try to single out one factor in a very messy situation is just not accurate."



Question to ponder: Why does Obama continue this farce of saying "As I said before..."

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Friday, August 8, 2008

Republicans: "The Party of the Stupid"

Paul Krugman writing for the left leaning Old Gray Lady today writes:

"Republicans, once hailed as the 'party of ideas,' have become the party of stupid."
Before I respond to his editorial, let me just note that Mr. Krugman reminds me of just about every one of my former college professors. Why is it that the Left breeds these left-over sixties radical wimps...who all wear beards as a sign of their intellectualism? Is it a requirement that you have to wear a beard once your thesis is approved? American special forces wear beards when hunting down Al Queada, but I don't think these limp wristed leftests all wear beards because they are manly, I think it's because they, if nothing else, want to look manly.

Now to address Krugman's editorial. It's hard to reason with man who asserts absolutely no facts in his writing and then relies upon "experts from the energy department," but I'll try. Krugman attacks Republicans as the party of "instant-gratification," but that's hardly a befitting description for a party that, at least traditionally, was opposed to governmental bailouts for every spoiled, lazy or self indulgent modern American. It's certainly not the Republican platform to espouse abortion to avoid the consequences of one's action, to bail out people with bad credit histories, many of whom lied about their income and nature of employment, got mortgage loans they weren't qualified for to buy houses they couldn't afford.

Krugman again puts forth the Leftists favorite naked assertion that "it would take years before offshore drilling would yield any oil at all, and that even then the effect on prices at the pump would be 'insignificant.'" The Spectator does a good job analyzing that one:
On Friday, July 14, the price of a barrel of oil hit $147. On Monday, July 17, President Bush withdrew the Executive Order banning offshore drilling. That doesn't even start any new drilling because there is still a Congressional ban in place. Nevertheless, by Friday, July 21, after 4 straight days of decline, the price of oil had plummeted to $128, a decline of 13% on a symbolic action alone. The Center for American "Progress" was only off by 21 years, 51 weeks.

There are oil wells off the Pacific coast that were capped years ago when the offshore drilling ban was first adopted. They could be brought back into production in less than a year. Expert oil engineers recently interviewed have said other sites could be producing in 18 months. The standard estimate for production from new drilling in Alaska is 10 years. But if the government gets the lawsuits and regulatory delays out of the way, here's betting the new wells would be producing in less than 5 years.
The truth of the matter can be summed up as Representative Michele Bachmann assures us: Democrats “want Americans to move to the urban core, live in tenements, [and] take light rail to their government jobs.”

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Thursday, August 7, 2008

Obama: America is Not the Model of the World

Aside from the Bible, the American system, including the United States Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, is the greatest means of freeing man from the oppressed and impoverished station in which they have existed for endless centuries. When you look around the world, the default human condition is POVERTY and TYRANNY. America is the exception to that rule. No system has ever allowed its people to produced such wealth. No system has ever reserved such expansive judicial guarantees to its people. No system has ever allowed so many people to escape poverty and oppression. If one nation follows Americas founding political and economic principles, they will invariably experience greater liberty, greater freedom, greater property rights and greater wealth.

So, how is America not the model for the world?


Type rest of the post here

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Sunday, August 3, 2008

Al Qaeda Weapons Chief Killed in U.S. Missile Attack

The U.S. military has become extremely proficient at finding their enemies and eliminating them. I'm proud to be an American.

By ALAN CULLISON
August 3, 2008 3:05 p.m.

KABUL -- In a blow to al Qaeda in Pakistan, the terror group confirmed Sunday that one of its top weapons researchers, Abu Khabab al-Masri, was killed, apparently in a U.S. missile strike last week.

For more than a decade, Mr. Masri moved in the top echelons of al Qaeda as a bomb-maker and innovator of the group's mostly feckless attempts to build viable chemical and biological weapons. While his expertise is replaceable, Mr. Masri's death further decimates the old guard of al Qaeda who were trusted by leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahri.

Al Qaeda confirmed Mr. Masri's death in a posting on Islamist Web sites Sunday, calling him an "expert" who had left behind a generation of students. He was rumored to have been killed in a missile strike on a village in Pakistan's northern tribal areas last week.

The timing of Mr. Masri's death in the attack coincided with a visit to the U.S. by Pakistan's new prime minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani, who is under pressure to do more to combat Islamists in Pakistan's border areas.

Mr. Masri, who carried a $5 million bounty on his head, was part of a well-educated Egyptian cadre in al Qaeda that has developed and directed some of the group's most spectacular terror attacks. Experts say he likely helped train the suicide bombers who attacked the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen in 2000, and assisted in the failed mission of Richard Reid, a British citizen, who tried to blow up a trans-Atlantic airline flight with a bomb concealed in his shoe in 2001.

A chemist by training, Mr. Masri started in al Qaeda as a bomb-maker, but branched out into biological and chemical weapons development after the group settled in Afghanistan in the 1990s. There he was entrusted with part of al Qaeda's so-called "yogurt project" to develop weapons of mass destruction and operated a training camp in the village of Derunta. He tried unsuccessfully to develop an anthrax weapon, and with Dr. Zawahri tried to develop poisons that could kill more quickly by mixing them with chemicals that caused them to be absorbed into the skin quickly.

It's not clear how much of the research bore results, though U.S. authorities said Mr. Masri did gas some dogs at the Derunta training camp. U.S. authorities said he provided hundreds of Mujahidin with hands-on training in the use of poisons and explosives and distributed training manuals showing how to make chemical and biological weapons.

Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism specialist and professor at Georgetown University, noted that one of Mr. Masri's students was Kamal Bourgass, who was convicted in 2005 of trying to spread ricin and other poisons on streets in the U.K. "He had his hands in a lot of different things," Mr. Hoffman said. "He was involved with projects that were approved at the highest levels."

In April, U.S. officials confirmed that another senior al Qaeda planner, Abu Obaidah al-Masri, alleged mastermind behind the 2005 London transportation bombings, died in Afghanistan last year of hepatitis.

"The old guard is being slowly diminished," Mr. Hoffman said. "You can replace some of them but what you can't replace is the trust and access to the leadership, which is important."

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