Laissez-faire

In an interview recorded by the BBC in Africa, Bill Clinton told people in Africa to practice monogamy and that we need to control unprotected sexual relations with unlimited numbers of partners. In fact, the minute he said that, the Secret Service wrestled him to the ground and said, “Who are you and what have you done with the real Bill Clinton?”

– Jay Leno

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It’s obviously YOUR fault !! If you refuse to open YOUR wallet, Africa is threatening to use OUR courts to sue YOUR ass to collect !!

And it’s not like working stiff taxpaying saps like YOU have ever done anything for Africa anyway !!!!!!

– Smitty, 6-27-09

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Source: http://planetark.org/wen/53523

Africa Needs Compensation For Climate Change

Date: 26-Jun-09
Country: AFRICA
Author: Barry Malone and Tsegaye Tadesse

ADDIS ABABA - Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi has demanded that the rich world compensate Africa for global warming and said pollution in the northern hemisphere may have caused his country’s ruinous 1980s famines.

A U.N. summit scheduled for December in Copenhagen will try to reach global agreement on how to tackle climate change and come up with a post-Kyoto protocol to curb emissions.

“Africa should demand compensation at the upcoming Copenhagen negotiations,” Meles, one of Africa’s most outspoken leaders on global issues, told reporters late on Wednesday.

“(There are) certain theories that the droughts of the 1980s in much of the Sahel, including in Ethiopia, were to some extent due to pollution in the northern countries,” added the former rebel, who represented Africa at this year’s G20 summit.

A study commissioned by the Geneva-based Global Humanitarian Forum last month said poor countries bear more than nine-tenths of the human and economic burden of climate change. Yet the 50 poorest countries contribute less than 1 percent of carbon emissions heating up the planet, it found.

“Africa is going to be very significantly affected,” said Meles. “Some parts of the continent may become uninhabitable. Therefore, those that did the damage have to pay.”

“Any agreement in Copenhagen which does not include substantial compensation for Africa would be illegitimate,” Meles added. “I hope that it won’t come to lawsuits.”

(Editing by Andrew Cawthorne)

I bet the people of Gomorrah felt like they got the short end of the stick. After all, they didn’t get a perversion or a criminal activity named after them

– Mike Miles

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………. read the Miranda Rights to captured al Qaeda and Taliban savages (who are actually unlawful combatants since they routinely violate the laws of war). Tell these vermin that they have the right to remain silent and the right to a lawyer (paid for naturally by working saps like YOU).

Hey, why not ……… they’re no worse than shoplifters, right ??

Did the Justice Dept secretly hire the Marx Brothers to create & implement their program to “fight” terrorism when we weren’t looking ???

Gosh, I sure hope that FDR made certain in 1942 that the Nazi Saboteurs captured during Operation Pastorius (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Pastorius) were similarly told that they enjoyed all the rights of American citizens !!! You know, those rights that were secured through the shedding of blood from countless US Soldiers, Airmen, Marines and Sailors for over 2 centuries.

P.S. The Justice Dept recently came out with a new theme song honoring their commitment to “fight” terrorism. I was able to track it down; you can hear it here: http://tinyurl.com/mhdwb3

– Smitty, 6-13-09

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Source:http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/06/11/combatant-criminal-reading-miranda-rights-detainees-draws-criticism/

Combatant or Criminal? Reading of Miranda Rights to Detainees Draws Criticism

Critics warn that reading Miranda rights to terrorist suspects could impede intelligence operations and suggests the administration is treating the “War on Terror” too much like a criminal matter

FOXNews.com
Thursday, June 11, 2009

By reading Miranda rights to suspected terrorists at military detention facilities in Afghanistan, the United States could be accelerating a shift from a war against terrorists to a courtroom battle against criminal defendants, Republicans and terrorism analysts warn.

The Department of Justice acknowledged Wednesday that FBI agents have read terrorist suspects their rights overseas, at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and other places, to “preserve the quality of evidence obtained.”

But Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd insisted the move does not represent a “policy change” and that no “blanket instruction” was given to the FBI to Mirandize detainees. Officials said it was a practice that began under the Bush administration.

Gen. David Petraeus, head of Central Command, said Thursday that FBI agents, not members of the U.S. military, have read rights to detainees in only a “very limited number of cases” and that the practice had been used in other countries previously.

“This is the FBI doing what the FBI does,” Petraeus said. “So we are comfortable with this.”

However, a senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee who just returned from Afghanistan and Bagram said the practice is causing chaos, confusion and frustration in the field. He was concerned it was being expanded and could impede intelligence operations.

“We don’t want our soldiers thinking, is this a law enforcement event or is this a combat event,” Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., told FOX News Thursday. “It’s shocking to believe that we’re going to give non-United States citizens in combat zones who are training, equipping and planning to kill United States citizens and our military and treat them as if they’re U.S. citizens and afford them those rights.”

Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, told FOXNews.com that’s exactly what’s happening.

“They’re going back to a law enforcement mentality,” he said. “I think it’s a really lousy way to fight a war. … This dramatically changes the way that our frontline forces work.”

The FBI’s role in Mirandizing suspects is an apparent product of reported plans for the agency to expand its role in counter-terrorism operations under what’s called the “global justice” initiative. According to reports, FBI agents would take over some CIA responsibilities under the assumption that most of these suspects would end up in a court of law.

But while the administration suggests this will help legitimize the “quality of evidence obtained” should the suspects come for trial, others worry that investigators and interrogators will miss out on valuable information.

They wonder what would have happened if Khaled Sheikh Mohammad, a self-confessed architect of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, had been read his Miranda rights.

“If you get captured, just say you want a lawyer,” Hoekstra said. “In today’s world if we picked up KSM today, the first thing we’d say to KSM is you have the right to remain silent.”

Terrorism analyst Neil Livingstone called the move a “dramatic shift” in policy.

“(We’re) going back to the bad old days that gave rise to 9/11 when we treated terrorism as though it were a criminal problem, not as a war or not as an attack on the United States,” he said. “We don’t want to have to make a legal determination every time we go after a terrorist whether we’ve got a good case or not, we should go after them as enemy combatants of the United States.”

Some lawmakers are increasingly concerned the administration is moving too far away from what was once called the Global War on Terror.

The shift in tone comes as the Obama administration tries to heal rifts with the Muslim world that deepened during the Bush administration’s prosecution of the war. The Abu Ghraib prison scandal and persistent controversy surrounding the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, as well as the Iraq war as a whole, have hurt America’s image abroad.

President Obama has tried to correct this by outlawing so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” calling for Guantanamo’s closure, drawing down the Iraq war and making a series of optimistic appeals to the Muslim world — like his speech last week in Cairo, Egypt.

Though it has followed the advice of some conservatives by retaining the military commission system to try some detainees and arguing against the release of photos that allegedly show prisoner abuse, the administration has also made a rhetorical shift that signals the war is not viewed the way it once was. It refers to the battlefield as the “overseas contingency operation” and officials often refrain from using the term “terrorism” in public addresses.

Hoekstra called the reading of Miranda rights “politically correct” and part of a “continuing shift.”

FOXNews.com’s Judson Berger and FOX News’ Mosheh Oinounou contributed to this report

The Miss Universe pageant must be fixed, because the winner is always from Earth

– Dale Jenkins

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The Winner !! Obama Tops the List of ALL-TIME (living or dead) Americans’ Heroes in the mid-January Harris Poll !! Barack even beat out “hacks” like Gandhi, God, FDR, Jesus Christ, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Mother Teresa !!!!!

And YOU Thought There was no Hope !!

Remember, these people vote !!

– Smitty, 2-28-09

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Sources:http://news.aol.com/article/american-hero/353807

http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/pubs/Harris_Poll_2009_02_19.pdf

January 2009

Barack Obama 1
Jesus Christ 2
Martin Luther King 3
Ronald Reagan 4
George W. Bush 5
Abraham Lincoln 6
John McCain 7
John F. Kennedy 8
Chesley Sullenberger 9
Mother Teresa 10
God 11
Hillary Clinton 12
Billy Graham 13
Franklin Delano Roosevelt 13
Mahatma Gandhi 15
Colin Powell 16
George Washington 16
Bill Clinton 16
Condoleeza Rice 19
Oprah Winfrey 20
Sarah Palin 21
General George S. Patton 22
Bill Gates 22

If life was fair, Elvis would be alive and all the impersonators would be dead.

– Johnny Carson

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Another liberal talk radio network is going down the tubes. LTR simply can’t compete in the marketplace of ideas …….. there aren’t enough saps, er, ah, um I mean listeners out there who voluntarily choose to listen to people badmouth the US and spew economic nonsense when they can already get plenty of that from PBS, NBC, CNN, ABC, CBS, NPR, MSNBC, the NY Times, the LA Times, the Star Tribune, the Washington Post, etc. etc. etc. (at least those similarly not hemmoraging listeners/readers or going bankrupt!)

So to hell with the 1st Amendment !! We need to shove LTR down American’s throat in the name of “free speech.” Support the (Un)Fairness Doctrine now !!!!!!!!!

– Smitty, 2-28-09

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FEBRUARY 19, 2009

Source:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123500238535517781.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Liberal Nova M Radio to File for Liquidation

By SARAH MCBRIDE

Nova M Radio Inc., a competitor to troubled radio network Air America, is filing for bankruptcy liquidation, according to the company’s co-founder, amid mounting disarray in the small world of liberal talk radio.

Anita and Sheldon Drobny, a married couple from Chicago, founded Nova M in 2006 and have been funding the business partly out of their own pockets. Compounding their troubles: Nova M’s highest-profile host, Randi Rhodes, vanished from the airwaves earlier this month. Mrs. Drobny also said that her husband is currently hospitalized for problems stemming from the stress of dealing with the network, which has 34 affiliates.

Nova M hired Ms. Rhodes last year after she fell out with Air America, which is now run by Pendulum Media LLC. A person familiar with the matter says that Nova M was supposed to have promised to cover certain legal costs for Ms. Rhodes, who some herald as the liberal answer to Rush Limbaugh. But she quit after discovering that her employment contract didn’t offer such indemnification.

A message on Ms. Rhodes’s Web site blames her disappearance on Nova M’s failure to correct an unspecified problem and says she is seeking a new home for her show. Ms. Rhodes’s lawyer, Robert Gaulin, blamed “technical problems.” Anita Drobny says she can’t discuss the terms of Ms. Rhodes’s contract.

Stations that aired Ms. Rhodes are left scrambling. KKGN “Green 960″ in San Francisco has found a replacement. But programming director John Scott fumed in a posting on the station’s Web site that while conservative radio is organized, liberal radio is plagued by “drama, inconsistency, miscommunication, ego and a trail of wreckage.”

Ms. Rhodes has been replaced on station WJNO in West Palm Beach, Fla., by conservative talk host Sean Hannity.

Ms. Rhodes left Air America last year after she made inflammatory comments about Geraldine Ferraro and Hillary Clinton during a stand-up comedy performance. Although Air America has found new financial backers, it doesn’t have the high profile its founders had hoped for. The Drobnys, who helped get Air America off the ground, are no longer involved with that company.

Nova M’s other host, Mike Malloy, is switching to another would-be Air America competitor: Phoenix-based start-up On Second Thought Radio Network LLC. The backer of On Second Thought, Dr. Mike Newcomb, who was involved with Nova M until last year, describes his new network as “talk radio for independent minds.” He plans to use former Nova M station KNUV in Phoenix as his company’s flagship.

Ms. Drobny says she and her husband had poured their own money into Nova M, but the business became unsustainable last fall. As advertising revenue plummeted, so did the Drobnys’ personal portfolio, making it impossible for them to keep supporting the company. Toward the end, Nova M lost $100,000 a month. The financial stresses eventually affected her husband’s health, she says, leading to the breakdown that landed him in the hospital.

“There were so many wealthy progressives out there that could have made [progressive radio] happen,” she said, but they didn’t want to help. “It ended up being on Sheldon’s shoulders.”

Write to Sarah McBride at sarah.mcbride@wsj.com

When the police told me that anything I said could be used against me in a court of law, I eagerly shouted, “Fur handcuffs and an ostrich feather!” Hey, who WOULDN’T want to be on the receiving end of that kind of justice ??

– Unknown

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Great news !! The transition has begun ! Instead of using our evil military, we’ll now be handling Al Qaeda operatives via our wonderful criminal justice system !! You know, that same “crack” system that sentenced OJ Simpson to playing golf for 13 years as a punishment for cutting his wife’s head off !!

Gentlemen such as Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri (below) will now get full constitutional rights and a lawyer, just like YOU would if you forgot to pay your taxes (like Timothy Geithner, our new head of the IRS) !!!

And our criminal justice system already has a great track record given how they “nailed” Zacarias Moussaoui !!! His circus, er, ah, um, I mean his trial only lasted 4 years (well OK, only 4 years because after 4 years of wrangling he chose to plead guilty!) and it only cost YOU ten$ of million$ of tax dollars !!

Open YOUR wallet WIDE ……….. this is gonna be pricey !!!!

Take THAT Osama !!! Hear Obama roar !!!!!

Smitty, 2-28-09

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Source: 2/27/09 N.Y. Times Page A1

U.S. Will Give Qaeda Suspect A Civilian Trial

DAVID JOHNSTON and NEIL A. LEWIS; John Schwartz contributed reporting from New York

WASHINGTON The Justice Department, in an abrupt change in policy from the Bush administration, is preparing to bring terrorism-related charges against a man identified as an operative of Al Qaeda who has been held in a military brig for more than five years, government officials said Thursday.

The charges would move the case of the only enemy combatant to be held on American soil, Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, into a civilian criminal court. The Bush administration had argued that he could be held indefinitely without being charged.

The decision also would allow the Obama administration to avoid taking a position for the time being on whether a president may detain legal residents indefinitely without trial.

The Justice Department faced a March 23 deadline to file a brief with the Supreme Court declaring whether it was continuing to hold to the Bush administration’s position that the government had the authority to detain legal residents like Mr. Marri indefinitely, without charges.

The decision to move Mr. Marri to a civilian court should give the Obama administration time to sidestep that issue for now as it sets about a large-scale review of detention policies that would affect those prisoners being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and those who may later be captured on suspicion of involvement with terrorism.

Mr. Marri was arrested in Peoria, Ill., in December 2001, and moved to the Navy brig in Charleston, S.C., in 2003. The Bush administration described him as a sleeper agent for Al Qaeda.

Mr. Marri is expected to be charged in Illinois as early as Friday with providing material support to terrorist groups. The Justice Department would then probably ask the Supreme Court to drop the case from its docket, saying that the issue was moot.

The decision to bring criminal charges against Mr. Marri was reported separately Thursday on the Web sites of The Washington Post and The New Yorker.

At least in part, the decision is a demonstration that Obama administration officials believe the nation’s civilian courts are capable of handling some terrorism cases.

Bush administration officials had argued that the president needed the authority to detain some terrorism suspects indefinitely because it was impracticable to prosecute many of them in civilian courts.
=0 A

The issue as to whether there are some terrorism cases that cannot be successfully brought in a civilian criminal court is also at the heart of the debate about what to do with many of the 245 detainees still at Guantanamo.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said Thursday that legal teams would reassess each of the inmates at Guantanamo to decide whether they should be prosecuted for criminal offenses or released.

‘’We need to look at these people again,'’ he said in an interview at his office at the Justice Department. ‘’What kind of threats do they represent, if they pose any threats at all? We are determined to do this on an individualized basis.'’

Mr. Holder said that some detainees were likely to be found to represent a low enough security risk to warrant their release, but that others would be likely to be found to have engaged in terrorist acts and would be prosecuted under a legal system that he said ‘’must be seen as fair and must be fair.'’

He said that department officials had not determined in what forum such prosecutions might take place, but that officials had not ruled out calling for legislation to create a new legal entity like a civilian national security court.

Several lawyers both inside and outside the academic world have said there was a need for such a new court that would allow the government to deal with the most troublesome group of terrorist suspects: those who are believed to be too dangerous to release but who could not be prosecuted effectively because it would require highly classified evidence.

Justice Department officials declined to discuss the developments on the Marri case. But after taking office, President Obama ordered a review of the situation and the decision to charge Mr. Marri in federal court reflected the results of that review, officials said.

Jonathan Hafetz of the American Civil Liberties Union, the lead lawyer in the case, said bringing charges would ‘’definitely be a positive step in that the government will no longer be detaining Mr. Marri without charge and returning him to the civilian justice system.'’

But Mr. Hafetz said the criminal charges should have been filed seven years ago, when Mr. Marri was first arrested in Peoria on suspicion of ties to Al Qaeda.

He said the Supreme Court should reject any government argument that the case is moot because the issue of whether the government may indefinitely detain legal residents or those in Guantanamo remains alive.

The case should go forward, Mr. Hafetz said, ‘’to make clear, once and for all, that the indefinite military detention of legal residents or American citizens is illegal, and to prevent this from ever happening again.'’

If the Supreme Court does not consider the case, it would leave in place a decision of the federal appeals court in Richmond, that upheld President George W. Bush’s authority to detain Mr. Marri indefinitely and without charging him.

In preparation for arguments before the Supreme Court, the Bush administration provided a sworn 2004 statement from Jeffrey N. Rapp, a military intelligence official. It said Mr. Marri had met with Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the chief plotter of the Sept. 11 attacks, in the summer of 2001.

‘’Al-Marri offered to be an Al Qaeda martyr or to do anything else that Al Qaeda requested,'’ Mr. Rapp said.

The Qaeda leaders told Mr. Marri, the statement said, to leave for the United States and to make sure he got there before Sept. 11.

Advice for the day: If you have a lot of tension and you get a headache, do what it says on the aspirin bottle: “Take two aspirin” and “Keep away from children”

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Hey, I’m all for our children’s welfare too. But as a threat to MN children, this doesn’t make the top 10 on my list (the last time I checked it). So I’d like to propose an alternate idea: If MN politicians REALLY give a damn about “the children”, then let’s get serious. How about a ban on the monopoly of public schools ??

– Smitty, 1-30-09

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Source:http://www.twincities.com/newsletter-morning/ci_11577227

Minnesota smoking foes want ban in cars with kids
Lawmakers to introduce legislation today; fines would start at $100

By Jason Hoppin
jhoppin@pioneerpress.com

Updated: 01/28/2009 11:18:39 PM CST

Minnesota has banned smoking in workplaces, bars and restaurants. Some suburban communities have banned smoking in parks, and university campuses are taking up the fight, too.

Now, under a bill expected to be introduced today at the state Capitol, lawmakers will consider extending that prohibition to your ride.

Backed by the same groups that helped enact t he statewide ban on smoking in bars and restaurants, the new bill would prohibit smoking in cars when children are present.

“It’s our children who are breathing this air,” said=2 0Rep. Nora Slawik, DFL-Maplewood, chief author of the bill in the House. “That is a concern for all of us.”

Slawik said she expects the bill to be controversial, though versions of the ban have passed in at least four states: California, Arkansas, Louisiana and Maine.

The ban would be part of a new frontier in anti-smoking advocates’ efforts to fight the harmful effects of smoking, as state and municipal governments have pushed legislation into new areas. They include not only bans on smoking in cars with children, but passing bans on foster parents smoking around their children, for example.

Sen. Sandy Pappas, DFL-St. Paul, will serve as chief author of the Senate’s companion bill.

“I’m a mom. I’m a grandma. There’s no safe level of secondhand smoke for kids, especially in the closed environment of a car,” Pappas said.

Studies have shown that even with a window rolled down, it takes mere seconds of a lit cigarette for the air quality inside a vehicle to vastly exceed the levels deemed too hazardous t o breathe by the Environmental Protection Agency.

In 1975, Minnesota became the first state to ban smoking in most workplaces. Anti-smoking advocates scored another big victory in 2007, when the Freedom to Breathe Act extended the ban to bars and restaurants.

The U.S. Surgeon General has determined there is no safe level of exposure to secondhand smoke. In children, it has been linked to everything from ear infections to sudden infant death syndrome.

That’s why people such as Phyllis Sloan, executive director of La Créche, a childhood development center that serves 130 young children in northeast Minneapolis, supports the bill.

Sloan said many of the parents at the school often discuss the dangers of smoking around children, and she’s seen the effects on children at La Créche.

“Ear infections and asthma — we see far too many cases of those,” Sloan said.

Lawmakers expect the bill to catch some criticism, including by those who still feel stung by the Freedom to Breathe Act. Pappas, however, said there are many cases where the state sets rules for parents, including car seat and seat belt laws.

“The state does act like a super-parent in some instances,” Pappas said.

The bill would make smoking while driving with children a moving violation. Fines for moving violations begin at a little more than $100.

However, a violation of the law would be a secondary offense, like a seat belt violation. In other words, a patrol officer would need some other reason to stop a vehicle before issuing a ticket for smoking in the car.

“This is heavily educational,” said Jeanne Weigum of the Association for Nonsmokers-Minnesota, one of the groups advocating the law. “We don’t ever want police officers chasing smokers. That’s not their job.”

Abdicate (v.), to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach

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“Chumps” and “hacks” like General Petraeus, General Ann Dunwoody (1st female Four-Star General), Clarence Thomas, Ron Paul, etc. didn’t even make the top 5. Obviously the American People have a keen grasp on appropriate role models.

Smitty, 12-27-08
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Source:http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/2008-12-25-admire-poll_N.htm

America’s Most Admired

WASHINGTON — A month before his inauguration, Americans choose Barack Obama as the man they admire most in the world, according to a new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll. It’s the first time a president-elect has topped the annual survey in more than a half-century. President Bush falls to a distant second after seven years as the most-admired man. Hillary Rodham Clinton leads the list of most-admired woman, a spot she’s held for 13 of the past 16 years.

My ex found the perfect law firm to handle the divorce: Doberman, Pincher, & Rottweiler

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A Perfect Anthem & Flag for The Obama Administration

The Anthem:
“Strong and Peaceful, wise and brave;
fighting the fight for the whole world to save.
We the people will ceaselessly strive
To keep our great Revolution alive!
Unfurl the banners! Look at the screen!
Never before has such glory been seen!

Oceania, ’tis for thee!”

The Flag:

Smitty, 10-25-08

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“I think at core, he’s an honest person … I think you can be an honest person and lie about any number of things.”

– Dan Rather, CBS News anchor, on former President Clinton, during a Fox News interview

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Oops !! Never mind !!

Unfortunately, the damage has been done and most Americans don’t have a clue …….. so they’re about to elect a President whose party and whose personal fingerprints are all over the housing crisis disgrace.

– Smitty, 10-25-08
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Sources:
http://greensboro.rhinotimes.com/Articles-i-2008-10-09-185828.112113_Would_the_Last_Honest_Reporter_Please_Turn_On_the_Lights.html

http://www.ldsmag.com/ideas/081017light.html

Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?

By Orson Scott Card

Editor’s note: Orson Scott Card is a Democrat and a newspaper columnist, and in this opinion piece he takes on both while lamenting the current state of journalism.

An open letter to the local daily paper - almost every local daily paper in America:

I remember reading All the President’s Men and thinking: That’s journalism. You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public has a right to know.

This housing crisis didn’t come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.

It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.

What is a risky loan? It’s a loan that the recipient is likely not to be able to repay.

The goal of this rule change was to help the poor - which especially would help members of minority groups. But how does it help these people to give them a loan that they can’t repay? They get into a house, yes, but when they can’t make the payments, they lose the house - along with their credit rating.

They end up worse off than before.

This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it. One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules. The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them.

Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible loans. (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to do so baffles me. It’s as if the Pentagon were allowed to contribute to the political campaigns of Congressmen who support increasing their budget.)

Isn’t there a story here? Doesn’t journalism require that you who produce our
daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a position where the only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700 billion bailout? Aren’t you supposed to follow the money and see which politicians were benefiting personally from the deregulation of mortgage lending?

I have no doubt that if these facts had pointed to the Republican Party or to John McCain as the guilty parties, you would be treating it as a vast scandal. “Housing-gate,” no doubt. Or “Fannie-gate.”

Instead, it was Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, both Democrats, who denied that there were any problems, who refused Bush administration requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and who were still pushing for these agencies to go even further in promoting sub-prime mortgage loans almost up to the minute they failed.

As Thomas Sowell points out in a TownHall.com essay entitled “Do Facts Matter?”

( http://snipurl.com/457townhall_com ] ): “Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago. So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President. So did Bush’s Secretary of the Treasury.”

These are facts. This financial crisis was completely preventable. The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was … the Democratic Party. The party that tried to prevent it was … the Republican Party.

Yet when Nancy Pelosi accused the Bush administration and Republican deregulation of causing the crisis, you in the press did not hold her to account for her lie. Instead, you criticized Republicans who took offense at this lie and refused to vote for the bailout!

What? It’s not the liar, but the victims of the lie who are to blame?

Now let’s follow the money … right to the presidential candidate who is the number-two recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae.

And after Freddie Raines, the CEO of Fannie Mae who made $90 million while running it into the ground, was fired for his incompetence, one presidential candidate’s campaign actually consulted him for advice on housing.

If that presidential candidate had been John McCain, you would have called it a major scandal and we would be getting stories in your paper every day about how incompetent and corrupt he was.

But instead, that candidate was Barack Obama, and so you have buried this story, and when the McCain campaign dared to call Raines an “adviser” to the Obama campaign - because that campaign had sought his advice - you actually let Obama’s people get away with accusing McCain of lying, merely because Raines wasn’t listed as an official adviser to the Obama campaign.

You would never tolerate such weasely nit-picking from a Republican.

If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish, and possibly corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama.

If you who produce our local daily paper had any personal honor, you would find it unbearable to let the American people believe that somehow Republicans were to blame for this crisis.

There are precedents. Even though President Bush and his administration never said that Iraq sponsored or was linked to 9/11, you could not stand the fact that Americans had that misapprehension - so you pounded us with the fact that there was no such link. (Along the way, you created the false impression that Bush had lied to them and said that there was a connection.)

If you had any principles, then surely right now, when the American people are set to blame President Bush and John McCain for a crisis they tried to prevent, and are actually shifting to approve of Barack Obama because of a crisis he helped cause, you would be laboring at least as hard to correct that false impression.

Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth. That’s what you claim you do, when you accept people’s money to buy or subscribe to your paper.

But right now, you are consenting to or actively promoting a big fat lie - that the housing crisis should somehow be blamed on Bush, McCain, and the Republicans. You have trained the American people to blame everything bad - even bad weather - on Bush, and they are responding as you have taught them to.

If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth - even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate.

Because that’s what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don’t like the probable consequences. That’s what honesty means . That’s how trust is earned.

Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one. He has revealed his ignorance and naivete time after time - and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing.

Meanwhile, you have participated in the borking of Sarah Palin, reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter - while you ignored the story of John Edwards’s own adultery for many months.

So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all? Do you even know what honesty means?

Is getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for?

You might want to remember the way the National Organization of Women threw away their integrity by supporting Bill Clinton despite his well-known pattern of sexual exploitation of powerless women. Who listens to NOW anymore? We know they stand for nothing; they have no principles.

That’s where you are right now.

It’s not too late. You know that if the situation were reversed, and the truth would damage McCain and help Obama, you would be moving heaven and earth to get the true story out there.

If you want to redeem your honor, you will swallow hard and make a list of all the stories you would print if it were McCain who had been getting money from Fannie Mae, McCain whose campaign had consulted with its discredited former CEO, McCain who had voted against tightening its lending practices.

Then you will print them, even though every one of those true stories will point the finger of blame at the reckless Democratic Party, which put our nation’s prosperity at risk so they could feel good about helping the poor, and lay a fair share of the blame at Obama’s door.

You will also tell the truth about John McCain: that he tried, as a Senator, to do what it took to prevent this crisis. You will tell the truth about President Bush: that his administration tried more than once to get Congress to regulate lending in a responsible way.

This was a Congress-caused crisis, beginning during the Clinton administration, with Democrats leading the way into the crisis and blocking every effort to get out of it in a timely fashion.

If you at our local daily newspaper continue to let Americans believe - and vote as if - President Bush and the Republicans caused the crisis, then you are joining in that lie.

If you do not tell the truth about the Democrats - including Barack Obama - and do so with the same energy you would use if the miscreants were Republicans - then you are not journalists by any standard.

You’re just the public relations machine of the Democratic Party, and it’s time you were all fired and real journalists brought in, so that we can actually have a news paper in our city.

Well it looks like the $50 I spent on that dog translator wasn’t such a great idea. He is barking to anyone who listens, “Help! I’m trapped in a fetching sweatshop with three neurotic cats and a porn addict who fraudulently orders credit cards using my name !!”

– Unknown

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……. and the timing couldn’t be better !!

The feds already got us “saps”, er, ah, um ……. I mean us “taxpayers” to fork over $750+ billion to bail out previous government idiocy without a shred of proof that such an immense cost will improve the situation.

Now at the same time, they want legislation in place to cut “global greenhouse gas” emissions by 15% per year …….. without a shred of proof that such an immense cost will improve the situation.

Do you see any pattern here ?????

Care to guess what that will do to US competitiveness, job creation, YOUR utility bills, YOUR taxes, and your standard of living (and that’s assuming the positive ……… that the current fiscal meltdown doesn’t push us into a depression)

Obviously, the ruling class thinks that working stiffs like YOU are made of $$$$$$ and therefore will happily continue to carry the rest of the country and the stupid policies of the feds on your back.

– Smitty, 10-18-08
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Source: http://www.wastenews.com/email.html?id=1222961415

Members of Congress push for global warming legislation

Oct. 2 — More than 150 members of Congress signed a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., urging passage of global warming legislation and outlining specifics they would like to see in the final legislation.

The letter said that the cap-and-trade legislation must achieve four goals: reducing emissions to avoid global warming, transitioning America to a clean energy economy, recognizing and minimizing any economic impacts from global warming legislation, and aiding communities and ecosystems vulnerable to harm from global warming.

The letter specifically calls for total emissions to decline every year to a 15% to 20% reduction by 2020 and to fall to 80% below 1990 levels by 2050.

In addition, the representatives call for the federal government to invest in clean energy technologies, commit funding to low- and moderate-income households to offset higher energy costs, and provide protection for U.S. businesses facing competition from companies operating in countries that do not adopt a greenhouse gas reduction program. The funding for the programs would come out of proceeds from the auction of greenhouse gas allowances.

The full text of the letter is available online at http://oversight.house.gov/documents/20081002101124.pdf

Contact Waste News senior reporter Bruce Geiselman at (330) 865-6172 or bgeiselman@crain.com Read the rest of this entry »