These two photos say something to me. Just look at the paraphernalia our pompous president carries into an elementary school to speak to small children...
Here's what the last guy needed.You remember... the dumb one ...
---Rest assured the weakness Obama has already conveyed may well have laid the foundation for another tragic war in the Middle East. If so, because of the disparity of population numbers involved, it will eventually,of necessity, run the risk of going nuclear. I hate to be so blunt but that is what I fear .
Obama threw Mubarak under the bus, he has warned Syria and Iran more times than a child psychologist would advise a parent should warn a child and even in Libya, he turned the heavy lifting over to NATO which was totally unprepared for the task at hand and could not have succeeded had we not provided the sophisticated technology. So much for the awesome power of NATO against a rag tag Libyan army.
I submit drawing a parallel among Chamberlain, Hitler, WW 2 and today is very much in order and not beyond the realm of rational thinking. (See 1 and 1a below.)
Then in North Carolina Obama gave us additional insight, and the world for that matter, into his narcissistic personality by cajoling the crowd of Obama worshippers with this presidential plea: "If you love me, you got to help me pass this bill."
No Obama, we do not have to love you. We only need respect you and then buy into the soundness of what you propose. You were elected because too many suckers fell in love with you and hopefully, enough have wised up and will not renew your contract because they have learned what an incompetent and divisive leader you truly are.
They no longer trust you, they no longer believe you and with justification and oops there goes the youth vote. (See 1b and 1c below.)
---
Nobel scientist is frosted over claims and resigns. Does not agree with: "... the official position of the American Physical Society (APS) which supports the theory that man's actions have 'inexorably' led to the warming of the planet, through increased emissions of carbon dioxide." (See 2 below.)
---
Let 'em eat cake. Someone has to do this. Maybe a bit tongue in cheek but not good form I would say.(See 3 below.)
---
Will a Middle East War begin over oil drilling? (See 4 below.)
---
A new book about the education of the current White House. (See 5 below.)
---
Dick
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1)Israel and the “Arab Spring”
By Ed Koch
Israel is isolated politically and surrounded by Muslim nations waiting for the moment to destroy it.
Israel is now surrounded by Arab and other Muslim nations who believe
this is the moment when they can finally destroy the Jewish state. They
tried and failed to conquer Israel in five different wars since 1948.
They are still trying.
Since the "Arab Spring" revolts in the Arab heartland of Tunisia , Libya ,
Egypt , Yemen , and Syria , opinion-makers in the Western world have sought
to glamorize those revolutions by comparing them to those by which
eastern European countries freed themselves from Communist regimes
imposed on them by the Soviet Union .
So when the uprisings took place against the existing repressive Arab
governments, the media labeled the various revolutions the "Arab
Spring." That title was intended to convey that finally, the Arabs,
heretofore stuck in medieval times, had come out of those dark ages and
were now to be applauded and welcomed to the western world.
Some observers, including myself, have voiced great concern about the
blind support in the West, particularly in our government, for the Arab
revolutionary movements everywhere.
In my view, it was harmful to our own - the U.S. - national security
needs to throw president of Egypt Hosni Mubarak under the bus by
demanding his removal as President Obama did. Yes, he was a despot,
described as an authoritarian in a world of Muslim dictatorships, but he
believed in keeping good relations with the U.S. and keeping the peace
with Israel established back in 1978 by Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin
at Camp David .
Those who overthrew him have made clear that their intention is to end
that peace. The forces that are dominant in Egypt today are the
military, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other Islamists. The goal of the
military is to preserve their special niche as the principal governing
power. The Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist factions are the
strongest politically and most organized of all the civilian groups
vying for power in the next presidential election.
As a result of the recent occupation and sacking of the Israeli embassy
in Cairo while Egyptian police and army stood by, we know that the
current interim Egyptian government has decided to cast aside peace with
Israel and go with the Islamists.
The New York Times of September 11 reported, "Egyptian military and
security police officers largely stood by without interfering with the
demolition. Instead, they clustered at the entrance to the embassy to
keep protesters out. The security forces had pulled back from Tahrir
Square and other areas before the start of the day to avoid clashes with
the protesters, although the military had issued a stern warning on its
Facebook page against property destruction."
The Israeli ambassador, his family, and other Israeli officials were
forced to flee the embassy in fear of their lives. Because of the
entreaties of President Obama to the Egyptian government, they were
saved from violence and permitted to board Israeli jets to go home to
Israel .
And what of the situation with Turkey ? Once a friend of Israel , it now
has an Islamist government led by its prime minister, Recep Tayyip
Erdogan, who has issued a statement tantamount to a declaration of war.
The Times reported on September 10, "The prime minister, Recep Tayyip
Erdogan, told Al Jazeera, the pan-Arab network, that he would use his
warships to prevent Israeli commandos from again boarding a Gaza-bound
ship as they did last year, killing nine passengers, and from letting
Israel exploit natural gas resources at sea."
While the United Nations, not normally a defender of Israel , recently
issued a report that Israel had a right to blockade Gaza so as to
prevent weapons from being brought into the Gaza Strip, now governed by
Hamas , Turkey has rejected the report, and expelled the Israeli ambassador.
Hamas has declared that it is at war with Israel , and that if it is ever
in a position to do so, it will expel every Jew living in Israel who
came to Palestine after 1917, and will use violence to achieve its
goals. It has intentionally killed innocent civilians, sending thousands
of rockets into southern Israel or allowing other terrorist groups to do
so.
In addition to Hamas on its southern border, Israel is now facing an
increasingly hostile Egypt , with an army of nearly one million and a
population of 81 million. To Israel 's north are not only hostile Lebanon
and Syria , but now Turkey with an army of 1 million and a population of
73 million.
It is also disturbing that there is a rising tide of Jew hatred in Great
Britain and in France .
In Great Britain , that hatred was recently demonstrated by those who
called themselves artists, who disrupted a concert by the Israel
Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Zubin Mehta in London on September
1. The police arrested no one who for a time prevented the audience of
5,000 from enjoying the evening.
No speaker supporting Israel is permitted to speak at British
universities. They are not invited or hooted down if invited.
France is working with the Palestinians to achieve their admission to
the United Nations General Assembly. Israel 's only apparent defender on
the European continent is Germany because of the continuous ongoing
support of Israel by Chancellor Angela Merkel. I met and heard
Chancellor Merkel in 2004 when I attended in Berlin the Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) conference on rising
anti-Semitism, when I served as chairman of the U.S. delegation. I was
impressed by the depths of her sincerity in denouncing anti-Semitism and
recognizing the depravity of the German nation under Hitler in its
efforts to exterminate world Jewry.
The Muslim nations are undoubtedly licking their chops at what they
would do if they were ever to be successful in defeating Israel on the
battlefield or at the U.N. which is prepared to serve as the site of
today's Munich . If Assad of Syria is willing to kill innocent men,
women, and children in the streets and cities in Syria , what do you
think he would do if his soldiers patrolled Tel Aviv?
The Arab countries' threats to destroy Israel , a nation with a total
population of 7.7 million, including 1.2 million Muslims, is not
receiving front-page coverage or denunciations from NATO nation leaders.
The revolutionaries making up the "Arab Spring" are lauded by the
opinion-makers here in the U.S. and even more so in Europe .
This past Sunday, we commemorated in New York City , Washington , D.C.,
and Shanksville , Pa. , the deaths of more than 3,000 innocent civilians
on 9/11, committed by Islamic terrorists whose supporters run into the
millions and are now located in at least 62 countries. Our NATO allies
never supported the U.S. to the extent they promised when we invaded
Afghanistan to punish the Afghan government for providing a refuge for
al-Qaida, which perpetrated the 9/11 atrocities and many others.
In my judgment, as harsh as it sounds, many of those NATO countries,
including Britain and France , would deliver the Jewish nation into the
hands of their putative murderers if it gave them "peace in our time,"
just as Chamberlain gave Czechoslovakia to the Nazis. Are we willing
here in the U.S. to continue to fight for our precious liberties and
support countries like Israel having the same moral and cultural values?
We in America , led by President Obama and Congress, must make it
absolutely clear to the Islamist terrorists that we will never
surrender. We will hunt them down as we did their leader, Osama bin
Laden, and kill them.
The U.S. is Israel 's only friend and ally. It is not foolish or
premature to ask what will the U.S. do when and if the Muslim nations
surrounding Israel , this time led by Egypt and Turkey , supported by
others, assault the Jewish nation? Will the president and the Congress
come to its aid? Shouldn't Israel know now? Shouldn't the Muslim nations
know?
I urge the president and the Congress to do for Israel what President
Kennedy did during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
President Kennedy said "It shall be the policy of this nation to regard
any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western
Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States ,
requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union ."
1a)Optimists Were Wrong About the Arab Spring
There's a reason that hatred of Israel played well on the Arab street.
By JOSEF JOFFE
I wasn't alone, but the mea culpa is all mine. Like many, I thought that dawn was finally breaking over the Arab world when those nice, middle-class crowds thronged Cairo's Tahrir Square chanting "freedom" and "democracy" without burning American and Israeli flags. What a miracle, I mused: The dogs of hate are not barking. And what a wondrous moment of transcendence! Free the people, and they will free themselves from the obsession of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism their overlords had implanted to distract them from misery and oppression.
It was a false dawn—and not only because of the sacking of the Israeli embassy in Cairo last week. On my desk sits a Reuters photo dated May 13; the caption reads: "People burn an Israeli flag during a demonstration on Tahrir Square." There were no such symbols of "Arab rage" when the protests erupted in late January.
The demons of yore are back and presumably they have never left. The Friday demonstration on Tahrir Square was at first standard fare—yet another protest against the military regime. But at the end, several thousands armed with Palestinian flags, crowbars and hammers marched off to the Israeli embassy for a bit of deconstructionist work.
But there is more. For six hours, desperate Israeli leaders tried to contact the junta; its leader Field Marshall Tantawi refused to speak with either the Israeli prime minister or his defense minister. It took another seven hours before Egyptian security forces rescued the last Israeli—perhaps only because Washington had interceded in the meantime.
The moral of this tale is simple. The revolution isn't going anywhere, and life is as miserable as always. So how about a little pogrom? It wasn't the junta that invented this stratagem, but our good friend Hosni Mubarak now fighting for his life in a Cairo courtroom.
How do despots stay in power amid poverty, hopelessness and repression? By feeding the people the heady brew of hatred against the "Other." But why Israel, a neighbor officially recognized by Cairo and granted 30 years of peace? An iron law of Arab politics cracks the paradox: the better state-to-state relations, the worse the anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism within.
Jew hatred? Isn't it just righteous anti-Israelism fed by the plight of the Palestinians? Go to a bookstore in Cairo, Amman or Riyadh—all quasi-allies of Israel—and you will find piles of anti-Semitic tracts. They are in Arabic, but a 100% import from yesterday's Europe—blood libel, world conquest and all. Ditto the TV fare and newspaper cartoons, which depict the Jew as bloodsuckers or cannibals.
Mubarak et al. had struck a devil's bargain with their peoples: I'll treat with the infidels, and you gorge yourselves on the fantasies that keep you in line. The mistake of Arab Spring optimists like me was to ignore the stubborn reality behind the well-worn tactic. We should have asked: Why would the despots call on those particular demons? Because they are an integral part of Arab political culture, hence so easy to rouse. The import of European anti-Semitism began in the '30s, long before Israel's birth, let alone its conquest of the West Bank.
To invoke "essentialism"—deep and enduring traits—when looking at a culture, is a tricky thing. Cultures do change, even profoundly—look at Germany's breathtaking leap from Nazism into liberal democracy. But the sad trajectory of the Egyptian revolution, going toxic only after a few weeks, confirms the depth of the loathing. Acceptance of the "Other" who is the Jew (or even a Copt) is not a pillar of Islamic culture. But the opposite—abhorrence—is such superb cement for societies rent by myriad conflicts: between sects, classes, tribes and nationalities, between modernity and tradition, city and country, devout and secular. To serve as target and unifier has been the fate of Jews in Europe, and it remains their fate in Arabia.
Nor does it help to apologize, as the hapless effort of the Netanyahu government demonstrated when it tried to soothe tempers after five Egyptian soldiers were inadvertently killed when Israeli troops were pursuing militants along the Sinai border last month. The message of the mob in Cairo was: The embassy must go, the peace must go, Israel must go.
Is there no way out? Sure there is. Happy societies don't need the barbarians at the gate. But Arab society is not happy, which is why the clash within drives the conflict without, spilling over into Europe and, on 9/11, into the United States.
When will it ever end? Not soon. Take Sweden, a nice Protestant place. In the 17th century, it was the scourge of Europe, conquering about half of the Holy Roman Empire's states. It stopped fighting in 1814, taking the slow road to development and democracy instead. Only in the mid-20th century did it become such an admirable model of tranquility. Would that history moves a bit faster in this century.
Mr. Joffe is editor of Die Zeit, a senior fellow of the Freeman-Spogli Institute, and a fellow of the Hoover Institution.
1b)The Obama Promise: Then and Now
The president's own economic words are coming back to haunt him.
By STEPHEN MOORE
Barack Obama now faces perhaps his most politically crippling deficit of all: a credibility deficit.
That observation is reflected in the latest Bloomberg poll, which finds that on the heels of his big jobs speech last Thursday night, more than half of Americans (51%) do not believe the president's claim that this latest $447 billion spend-and-tax-or-borrow scheme will create new jobs.
"As the economy has gotten worse, people have stopped listening to Obama and his speeches are no longer an asset, they're a liability," concludes Kellyanne Conway, president of the Polling Company. That is because the gulf between three years of rhetoric and reality is so gigantic.
It is hard to make a persuasive case for a $447 billion economic stimulus plan that looks and sounds so much like the $830 billion plan that Americans were sold two-and-a-half years ago. That first plan didn't "create or save" the 3.5 million jobs the White House promised, and most Americans don't agree with Vice President Biden that it worked beyond his "wildest dreams." Tell that to the 14 million Americans—two million more than when all the spending and borrowing began—who are still out of work, or the tens of millions who do have jobs but have seen their income drop in the last two years.
American voters can't conceive of how $447 billion of more debt and spending will create jobs when the last three years have already given us $4 trillion of new debt with no jobs. What is even harder to believe is the president's assurance that the new American Jobs Act "will not add to the deficit. It will be paid for." How can this plan be paid for when the first, $830 billion, plan has never been paid for?
While running for president Mr. Obama promised "pay as you go budgeting," and in February 2009 during his "fiscal responsibility summit" he sounded like Ronald Reagan when he said that "this is the rule that families across this country follow every single day, and there's no reason why their government shouldn't do the same." But the Obama government isn't doing the same. It is doing the opposite.
Here's another Obama promise that sounds like a whopper today. In 2008 he pledged he would "go through our federal budget—page by page, line by line—eliminating those programs we don't need, and insisting that those we do operate in a sensible cost-effective way." That hasn't happened.
In the wake of the lousy economic news, Mr. Obama, who promised a new era of "accountability," has blamed the ongoing jobs recession on "a run of bad luck." Who knew there would be a tsunami in Japan, disruptions in the oil supply from the Mideast—when has that ever happened before?—and so many other job-killing events beyond the president's control?
The green jobs revolution we were expecting to put America back to work is also browning out. A new Department of Energy study finds that between 2007 and 2010, clean-energy subsidies more than doubled. But after billions of taxpayer handouts have been pumped year after year into solar and wind power, these two industries supply 2.4% of America's electricity.
Mr. Obama says he wants to make America less dependent on foreign oil, but this week he called again for raising taxes on domestic oil and gas production. He said last year that he believes America is "running out of places to drill" even though in the last five years new discoveries of oil and natural gas have occurred in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, North Dakota, Texas, Montana and Colorado—causing a near doubling in U.S. recoverable reserves.
Mr. Obama said in his speech on Thursday that health-care costs are a major contributor to the debt and need to be reined in. He neglected to mention what voters surely remember, which is that last year Mr. Obama signed a health-care law that adds at least 30 million more Americans to Medicaid—the program Mr. Obama now says is the problem. During the debate over ObamaCare the White House insisted that the fees in the plan for not purchasing health insurance were not a tax. But arguing before the courts on the constitutionality of the law, the White House now says these are taxes. Which is it?
Mr. Obama says he has been one of the most constantly attacked presidents in history and he is probably right about that. But his attackers in the conservative movement aren't likely to be his undoing. His most damning persecutors are his own words and promises. The problem for President Obama is that fewer voters are listening to him. There's no blaming George W. Bush for that.
1c)There Goes the Youth Vote
By Ross Kaminsky on 9.16.11 @ 6:09AM
AttackWatch, the new Obama campaign site, confirms just how inept and out of touch this president is.
You have to hand it to the Obama administration when it comes to consistency: Its players are singularly skilled when it comes to refusing to learn from their own failures. No, I'm not talking about their cult-like belief in "green jobs" despite a mountain of evidence that those jobs only exist when taxpayers are forced to incinerate money to subsidize them. (Actually, that's an interesting thought: Could we end up generating more power for the nation if, instead of giving half a billion dollars to a solar panel company, we just burned five hundred million one dollar bills? But I digress…)
And I'm not talking about Obama's latest stimulus plan. Oops, we can't say "stimulus" anymore; it's a "jobs" plan, despite every similar policy of this president having failed spectacularly to produce a job. (Don't forget, however, to be eternally thankful for "jobs saved.")
The newest and simultaneously funny and frightening Obama reprise is the launch of an Obama campaign website called AttackWatch.com, designed to "Get the facts (and) Fight the smears." According to ABC News, "Obama for America national field director Jeremy Bird said the site offers 'new resources to fight back,' including policy issue pages that fact check statements by Obama's Republican opponents with links to 'evidence' to back them up."
Before getting to the early reaction to AttackWatch.com, a little history is in order:
In June, 2008, the Obama campaign launched a website -- which you can still see today, although it hasn't been noticeably updated since the election -- called Fight the Smears. (It should be no surprise that the SEIU has a web page with precisely the same title.) It used paid bloggers to do such things as explain to taxpayers that "a recent email smear falsely claims Michelle ordered room service, but she never even stayed at the hotel." If only Michelle were still so careful with taxpayers' money!
As could be expected, left-leaning bloggers suggested the site was a success while conservatives said it was a failure. Most likely, the site was preaching to the choir, with little impact on the national debate. Nevertheless, this was the Obama campaign's last overt web-based propaganda maneuver that could have been considered even close to a success.
On August 4, 2009, in order to counter "disinformation about health insurance reform," the White House created an e-mail address asking Americans to use it to inform on their friends and neighbors: "If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov."
There was the predictable and justifiable response from civil libertarians and those of us who were around during the Nixon administration wondering whether the administration was collecting names for a new version of an Enemies List. Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) called it the "Obama monitoring program" and wrote in a letter to the president, "I can only imagine the level of justifiable outrage had your predecessor asked Americans to forward e-mails critical of his policies to the White House."
On August 17, 2009, less than two weeks after this e-mail snitching program was announced, and after the White House was further criticized for sending out "spam" e-mails to many Americans, flag@whitehouse.gov was unceremoniously shut down.
Obama's Director of New Media Macon Phillips, the same gentleman who announced the beginning of the snitch-on-your-neighbor program, noted an "ironic development" from the administration's propaganda efforts: those efforts themselves "(have) become the target of fear-mongering and online rumors…"
And that brings us to 2011 and the latest example of Obama's "fatal conceit," that if something failed in the past it just needs to be done bigger to succeed. And so is unleashed on unsuspecting Americans the AttackWatch.com website as well as a Twitter "hash tag" (#AttackWatch) for the nation's many "tweeters" to use to report naughty conservatives to the government.
If there has ever been a more spectacular failure of a propaganda campaign in such a short time, I am unaware of it.
It doesn't help the Administration's efforts that while Fight the Smears had the look and feel of a campaign website, the new AttackWatch site is a foreboding black and red, looking like something Che Guevara or V.I. Lenin would approve. The site is an unwitting parody of itself.
The pictures on the main page are of Rick Perry (from shoulders upward) and three smaller pictures of the mouths (and only the mouths) of Perry, Mitt Romney, and Glenn Beck. Apparently, the too-clever-for-their-own-good staffers of the Obama campaign think that will focus us on the conservatives' "lies" and "twist[ing] the facts." Instead, it's just uncomfortable and weird.
If Richard Nixon had kept fetish-like photos of the mouths of his "enemies," his web page would have looked like AttackWatch, though even Nixon probably wouldn't have used as dark and intimidating a color scheme as Obama has, and that's saying something.
There are plenty of web pages going after Obama's propaganda and "thought police," such as here and this amusing YouTube faux-advertisement here.
But the real beauty of AttackWatch, which is to say the seeds of its own destruction, is the campaign's use of Twitter, allowing and encouraging thousands, or perhaps millions, of people to jump into the conversation.
As I follow #attackwatch in my Twitter application on Thursday morning, I can't keep up with the updates. A new tweet hits about every two seconds, almost all of them obviously by people who are not just opposed to the administration's Goebbels-like activities, but who are effectively turning AttackWatch into the biggest joke in Internet history.
Here are a few of the tweets which have come across the #attackwatch hashtag just during the writing of this article:
From DrFreeLance: "I saw a werewolf drinkin a pina colada at Trader Vic's, and his hair was perfect."
From chuckdevore (Republican state legislator in California): "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean a big majority of us isn't out to get you..."
From EddieRobbins: "My neighbor removed his Obama bumper sticker. I think he's a racist."
From DickMeyers: "Bless me #AttackWatch for I have sinned. I have muttered naughty words about our Dear Leader 9 times & have doubted his divinity a few times"
From joaniekensil: "Ate refried beans & chips for breakfast which is sort of racist foodist - Carbon emissions to follow."
From PoliticalGravity: "Saw a kid with a lemonade stand and she didn't have a permit."
From thorninaz: "Hey #attackwatch, I saw 6 ATM's in an alley, killing a Job. It looked like a hate crime!"
And from the always excellent IowaHawkBlog: "#AttackWatch have you cried "uncle" yet? Because we can keep this up all f***in' day."
Most of these occurred within a 2-minute span. You get the idea.
The beauty of the Twitter situation is that it is completely out of the government's control. They can't turn off the hashtag the same way they can turn off an e-mail address or a web page. At this pace, it's only a matter of time before even Jon Stewart and Jay Leno jump on the train to shame and embarrass the Obama over AttackWatch. It's too funny to avoid, even for a liberal, not least because it is so flamboyantly self-inflicted.
It's hard to say what's worse, the Administration's blatant attempts at propaganda, its failure to learn from past mistakes (in this area and many others), or its truly remarkable incompetence. Don't forget, in 2008, voters aged 18-29, likely the biggest group of Twitter users, cast 66 percent of their ballots for Barack Obama. And at election time, that age group had a 45 percent Democratic Party affiliation versus 26 percent for the Republicans (the parties were about even in this measure just eight years earlier).
Obama needs these naïve and idealistic youngsters (their votes and their free campaign labor) to have any chance at re-election (though their horrible post-college employment prospects are making that extremely difficult). Yet this is exactly the group now most exposed to this president's folly. Remember when John McCain said he didn't know how to use a computer? The Obama Administration even ran an ad making fun of McCain for it, even though the primary reason for McCain's lack of computer use is that his war wounds make typing quite painful.
But now who looks foolish and out of touch on the Web?
Twitter offered some statistics about itself last week, including: over 100 million active users around the world, averaging nearly 1.5 billion (yes, with a "b") "tweets" per week. More from the Guardian article linked above: "Twitter's website alone records 400 million monthly unique browsers, up 70 percent from the start of 2011, while 55 percent of active users are on mobile. In contrast with Facebook, growth is increasing this year compared with last, Twitter claims, with a further 26 million users likely to join by January. That's more than 2006-09 combined."
Is this really the place the Obama administration wanted to demonstrate how out of touch it is with so many Americans, how willing it is to be the domineering, mind-controlling, nagging-parent-like force that young adults regardless of political persuasion have spent their last decade or two rebelling against?
By the near-instant overwhelming of the AttackWatch story by conservatives, and the fact that the overwhelming reaction is mostly being accomplished with humor, the Obama administration has done its opponents a tremendous favor. It has allowed conservatives, for once, to be shown to a huge number of young people to be funny and light-hearted, while the administration yet again encourages Americans to use the Internet to report their friends, neighbors, and colleagues to the government.
Thank goodness Progressives never learn from their mistakes.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2)Nobel Prize-Winning Physicist Resigns Over Global Warming
The global warming theory left him out in the cold.
Dr. Ivar Giaever, a former professor with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the 1973 winner of the Nobel Prize in physics, abruptly announced his resignation Tuesday, Sept. 13, from the premier physics society in disgust over its officially stated policy that "global warming is occurring."
The official position of the American Physical Society (APS) supports the theory that man's actions have inexorably led to the warming of the planet, through increased emissions of carbon dioxide.
Giaever does not agree -- and put it bluntly and succinctly in the subject line of his email, reprinted at Climate Depot, a website devoted to debunking the theory of man-made climate change.
"I resign from APS," Giaever wrote.
Giaever was cooled to the statement on warming theory by a line claiming that "the evidence is incontrovertible."
"In the APS it is ok to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?" he wrote in an email to Kate Kirby, executive officer of the physics society.
"The claim … is that the temperature has changed from ~288.0 to ~288.8 degree Kelvin in about 150 years, which (if true) means to me is that the temperature has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this 'warming' period," his email message said.
A spokesman for the APS confirmed to FoxNews.com that the Nobel Laureate had declined to pay his annual dues in the society and had resigned. He also noted that the society had no plans to revise its statement.
The use of the word "incontrovertible" had already caused debate within the group, so much so that an addendum was added to the statement discussing its use in April, 2010.
"The word 'incontrovertible' ... is rarely used in science because by its very nature, science questions prevailing ideas. The observational data indicate a global surface warming of 0.74 °C (+/- 0.18 °C) since the late 19th century."
Giaever earned his Nobel for his experimental discoveries regarding tunneling phenomena in superconductors. He has since become a vocal dissenter from the alleged “consensus” regarding man-made climate fears, Climate Depot reported, noting that he was one of more than 100 co-signers of a 2009 letter to President Obama critical of his position on climate change.
Public perception of climate change has steadily fallen since late 2009. A Rasmussen Reports public opinion poll from August noted that 57 percent of adults believe there is significant disagreement within the scientific community on global warming, up five points from late 2009.
The same study showed that 69 percent of those polled believe it’s at least somewhat likely that some scientists have falsified research data in order to support their own theories and beliefs. Just 6 percent felt confident enough to report that such falsification was "not at all likely."
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3)Dear American Taxpayer
For only the second time in my adult life, I am not ashamed of my country. I want
to thank the hard working American people for paying $242 thousand dollars for my
vacation in Spain.
My daughter Sasha, several long-time family friends, my personal staff and various guests had a wonderful time.
Honestly, you just haven't lived until you have stayed in a $2,500.00 per night private 3-story villa at a 5-Star luxury hotel.
Thank you also for the use of Air Force Two and the 70 Secret Service personnel who tagged along to be sure we were safe and cared for at all times. By the way, if you
happen to be visiting the Costa del Sol, I highly recommend the Buenaventura Plaza restaurant in Marbella ; great lobster with rice and oysters! I'm ashamed to admit the lobsters we ate in Martha's Vineyard were not quite as tasty, but what can you do if you're not in Europe , you have to just grin and bear it?
Air Force Two (which costs $11,351 per hour to operate according to Government Accounting Office reports) only used 47,500 gallons of jet fuel for this trip and carbon emissions were a mere 1,031 tons of CO2. These are only rough estimates, but they are close. That's quite a carbon footprint as my good friend Al Gore would say, so we must ask the American citizens to drive smaller, more fuel efficient cars and drive less too, so we can lessen our combined carbon footprint.
I know times are hard and millions of you are struggling to put food on the table and trying to make ends meet. So I do appreciate your sacrifices and do hope you find work soon.
I was really exhausted after Barack took our family on a luxury vacation in Maine a few weeks ago. I just had to get away for a few days.
Cordially,
Michelle Obama
P.S. Thank you as well for the $2 MILLION dollar trip to India from which we just returned!
PPS. Thank you, too, for that vacation trip to Martha's Vineyard ; it was fabulous.
And thanks for that second smaller jet that took our dog Bo to Martha's Vineyard so we and the children could have him with us while we were away from the White House for eleven days. After all, we couldn't take him on Air Force One because he might pee on some wires or something.
PPPS. Oh, I almost forgot to say thanks also for our two-week trip to Hawaii at Christmas. That 7,000 square foot house was great!
Love ya!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4)Israeli-Greek-Turkish air sea forces prepare for first Cypriot gas drilling
Military tension is building among Greece, Turkey and Israel as Cyprus prepares to start exploratory drilling for gas offshore Monday, Sept. 19 in the face of threats from Ankara. All three have placed their air and sea forces in a state of preparedness along with the Cypriot army.
Turkish warplanes and fighters kept watch on the Homer Ferrington rig belonging to Houston-based Noble Energy as it moved from Israel's offshore field Noa opposite Ashdod to Cyprus's Aphrodite (Block 12) field ready to start work.
It was the first time since the Mavis Marmara episode of May 2010 that Turkish warships came less than 80 kilometers from Israel's territorial waters. Israeli missile ships and drones kept watch from afar on the Noble rig's movement and tracked Turkish surveillance.
As the rig moved into position opposite Cyprus, so too did two Turkish frigates. A Cypriot spokesman said Turkish warships and fighters had not entered the island's territorial waters.
Ankara questions the rights of Israel and Cyprus to drill for hydrocarbon reserves in the respective Exclusive Economic Zones marked out in an accord they concluded last year.
The UN-approved Law of the Sea authorizes nations to mark out their Exclusive Economic Zones for the exploration of natural resources to a distance of 200 miles outside their territorial waters. Israel has never signed this treaty.
Thursday, Sept. 15, in Tunis, Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan continued to inveigh against Israel declaring: "They will see what our decisions will be on this subject. Our navy attack ships can be there at any moment."
Without specifically mentioning Cyprus, he said: "Israel cannot do as it pleases in the Mediterranean" and "Turkey is committed to preserving the freedom of navigation in international waters."
Erdogan avoided linking Israel to the Turkish dispute with Greece and Greek Cyprus but is obviously galled by the connection and its three manifestations.
1. Cyprus's Block 12 where drilling starts Monday borders on the huge Leviathan field Israel is developing in the eastern Mediterranean, whose proven gas reserves are calculated to be 8.5 trillion cubic feet. This would supply the entire US economy's needs for a year.
2. Noble Energy of Houston has a license to drill in Cyrus's Aphrodite while the Israeli company Delek which is developing the Israeli offshore gas fields also has an option in the Cypriot field.
3. Greece and Israel concluded a mutual defense pact on Sept. 4, 2011. Ten days later, Prime Ministers George Papandreou and Binyamin Netanyahu agreed to activate the pact in the light of Turkish threats against Israel and to exploration activity in the Mediterranean basin.
Israel and Greece have therefore begun to coordinate their fleet movements in the eastern Mediterranean and around Cyprus.
Erdogan's threats were followed up this week by a Turkish Foreign Ministry statement saying: “It has been agreed that Turkey and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus will conclude a continental shelf delimitation agreement should the Greek Cypriot administration proceed with offshore drilling activities in the south of the island.”
Ankara's problem is that the Turkish Republic of Cyprus is not recognized by any country but Turkey.
Washington has not only given Noble Energy a green light to start drilling off Cyprus but backed it up with a State Department statement Thursday: "The US supports the efforts to enhance energy diversity in Europe, noting the fact a US company was involved was also positive."
Since last Tuesday, Sept. 13, Turkish troop reinforcements are reported as having landed in North Cyprus along with drilling equipment.
These preparations indicate that Turkey is planning to start drilling in the Cypriot EEZ without reference to Nicosia. This would mean that Prime Minister Erdogan, while spouting high-sounding pledges to "preserve "freedom of navigation in international waters," is preparing a wildcat breach of international law and treaties. Friday, the Greek government in Athens warned Ankara against pursuing this step.
However, it would be in keeping with his past defiance of international norms. Even though Turkey accepted the UN Palmer commission's mediation in its dispute with Israel over the flotilla escapade, Erdogan declared its findings "null and void" –-after the panel ruled that Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip was legal and justified.
Next Monday, therefore, many eyes will be watching to see what happens when the Noble rig starts drilling in Cyprus' Block 12 of the Mediterranean.
The Turkish prime minister has painted himself into a corner: If he orders his naval and/or air units to strike the American rig, he will have to take the consequences, possibly a confrontation with the US, Israel, Greece and Cyprus.
If he does nothing, or nothing more than a token drilling off the Turkish side of the island, he will lose face as a leader able to back up his threats.
He could take a third course like other Muslim rulers and vent his ire on Israel.
The guessing in Washington, NATO and Israel is that the most likely arena for a potential clash of arms in the Mediterranean is offshore Cyprus and it is most likely to evolve into sea and air confrontatons involving Turkey, Greece, Cyprus and Israel.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5)Book portrays dysfunction in Obama White House
The new book “Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President,” by Ron Suskind, says women have occupied many of the West Wing’s senior positions but felt outgunned and outmaneuvered by male colleagues.
The book, which covers Obama’s presidency through February of this year and is based on more than 700 hours of interviews, suggests that the president was not always the dominant figure in his White House.
Suskind cites a series of memos from top aide Pete Rouse sharply critical of the White House’s operations, including one cautioning that an ongoing “rolling dialogue” by Summers and others on the economic team with Obama “strengthens Larry’s power to shape policy.”
The book portrays discord within the economic team, with Summers, then director of the National Economic Council, attempting to shut out the views of Romer and then-budget director Peter Orszag.
According to the book, Summers sought to derail Obama’s push on several policies, including a financial transactions tax.
At one point, Orszag delivered a private report to the president, at his request, about what might happen if the government did not act to rein in the long-term federal budget deficit. Summers was outraged that Orszag would communicate with the president without going through the National Economic Council.
“What you’ve done is immoral!” Summers shouted.
Orszag told Suskind, according to the book: “Larry just didn’t think the president knew what he was deciding.”
Meeting over dinner at the Bombay Club one night, Summers told Orszag that “we’re really home alone,” according to the book. “I mean it,” Summers said. “We’re home alone. There’s no adult in charge. Clinton would never have made these mistakes.”
Suskind asked Summers about the comment. “What I’m happy to say is, the problems were immense, they came from a number of very different sources, they were all coming at once, and there were not very many of us,” Summers replied.
In an e-mail Friday to The Post, Summers, who left the administration last year, said, “The hearsay attributed to me is a combination of fiction, distortion, and words taken out of context. I can’t speak to what others have told Mr. Suskind, but I have always believed that the president has led this country with determined, steady and practical leadership.”
The book also claims that Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner essentially ignored a key request by Obama to come up with a plan to restructure the mega-bank Citigroup, which had been bailed out by the government.
In early 2009, Obama had decided to authorize a series of
Geithner-designed stress tests for the banks to determine whether they were likely to survive the financial crisis without additional funds. According to the book, Obama saw this moment as one when he could begin to overhaul Wall Street and told the Treasury secretary to develop a plan to restructure Citi.
A month later, at a meeting Geithner didn’t attend, Obama asked about the plan.
“I’m sorry, Mr. President,” Romer said, “but there is no resolution plan for Citi.”
The book says Obama was stunned. “Well, there better be,” he said.
Suskind alleges that Geithner, who disagreed with immediately pressing a plan to overhaul Citi, simply did not produce the plan.
In an interview with Suskind, Geithner denied that he ignored the president’s request. “I don’t slow-walk the president on anything,” he told him.
On Friday, the Treasury Department called the book’s account “untrue.”
The Treasury said Obama asked Geithner to develop backup plans to overhaul banks if the government was forced to maintain a big ownership stake in the companies. “There was fortunately never a need to put them in place,” the department said.
Senior Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod, who was a top White House aide during the administration’s first two years and was interviewed by Suskind, said Friday that the book’s account was not accurate. He said Obama was in command of his White House and ran an inclusive West Wing.
Still, apart from the book, Axelrod said he is not surprised that many Democrats at the moment are finding fault with the White House’s strategies – criticisms that he said would likely be different if Obama’s political standing improved.
“Whenever you hit turbulence, these kinds of questions always arise,” he said. “It’s like sports. If a team has a losing streak, then the heralded manager all of a sudden doesn’t know baseball.”
No comments:
Post a Comment