The contents of these articles are based on Fact and Truth. Challenges are invited.
The day’s top political news:
Alexi Giannoulias, Mark Kirk set for November Senate showdown in Illinois
Illinois state Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias (D) and Rep. Mark Kirk (R) claimed their respective party nominations for the state's Senate seat – one previously held by Obama -- victories that ensure the Prairie State will host one of the marquee contests this fall.
Giannoulias won a five-point victory over former Chicago Inspector General David Hoffman with Chicago Urban League President Cheryle Jackson finishing a distant third. A bank owned by Giannoulias’s family is alleged to have made loans to Obama friend Toney Rezko, a convicted felon.
Kirk dispatched conservative businessman Patrick Hughes -- among others -- with ease. The National Republican Senatorial Committee moved quickly to define Giannoulias as part of a corrupt, broken political machine with the release of a web video detailing his alleged ties to the mafia.
Rep. John Murtha hospitalized in intensive care
Pennsylvania Democrat Congressman John Murtha has been placed in a Virginia hospital's intensive care unit with unexpected complications from gallbladder surgery.
Murtha, 77, had been suffering from gallbladder pain and problems in December and arranged to have the organ removed last week. A spokesman declined to discuss the seriousness of Murtha’s condition.
Murtha has been increasingly controversial since his accusations – proven false -- that Marines had murdered Iraqis, and because of connections with federal contracts awarded his friends and supporters.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2010/02/john-murtha-hospitalized.html?wpisrc=nl_politics
Nancy Pelosi's new health care plan
The Democrat health care bill seems close to failure and collapse, but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will take on the health insurance industry by scheduling a vote on a smaller bill to revoke an exemption from antitrust laws.
Pelosi is promoting a new two-track strategy to address matters that won’t survive a more sweeping bill – even if Congress passes one – while giving her members something politically popular The move also pressures Republicans, the industry and wavering Democrats, who wish their leaders would abandon the issue altogether.
The bill amounts to a concession to her caucus. Pelosi’s bill resembles a section of the House health care bill that ends an exemption for health and medical malpractice insurers and grants the federal government more authority to regulate antitrust laws.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0210/32427.html#ixzz0eU603c4U
Opinion:
Obama rushes damage control efforts in an attempt to reenergize his Democrat Senate colleagues.
Obama is desperate in his rush to staunch the political bleeding his Democrats are suffering. Democrat Senate seats provide inviting targets for Republicans in areas thought invulnerable just a few months back. Republican capture of the Senate seat held for decades by Ted Kennedy, has cast a pall over Senate Democrat politicians.
Yesterday. GOP Congressman Mark Kirk grabbed the Republican nomination for Obama’s own former Senate seat, as Democrats selected Alexi Giannoulias, a candidate already scarred by details of his family’s bank operation. Among other problems for Giannoulias, are banking connections with convicted felon, Tony Rezko, a personal friend of Obama himself.
Obama’s frantic actions this morning, trying to reassure Senate Democrats, comes on the heels of news of the most recent increase in the nation’s debt limit will be exceeded this month or shortly thereafter.
Last week, Obama faced stiff, if polite, questioning by Republicans when he address their retreat in Baltimore. Obama, having experienced a season of increasing political pressures, was forced to plead “I’m not an ideologue” – a claim easily refuted by his own record.
Obama must now deal with his party as his administration attempts to steer a liberal agenda through to passage. Democrat plans for government take over of the nation’s health care system have already hit a stone wall. While Speaker Nancy Pelosi struggles to find new strategies, opposition and faint hearted Democrats who once supported the idea, limit her options and downgrade her potential for success.
No wonder. Polls offer little encouragement for Democrats.
Until recently, Obama and Democrats in general, could count on the firm support of the mainstream media – a culture that has been openly corrupted for decades by the far left. Now, even that grip is failing.
Coverage of the tallying of votes in the Massachusetts’ special Senatorial election saw Fox News exceed ABC over-the-air audiences. That’s big – and got far less notice than it deserved. By the millions, Americans are voting with their TV remotes, and its more bad news for Democrat politicians.
As reports tell us,
“Fox News had its best January in the history of the network, and was the only cable news network to grow year-to-year.
FNC also had the top 13 programs on cable news in total viewers for the fifth month in a row, and the top 13 programs in the A25-54 demographic for the first time in more than five years.
• FNC grew in double digits in both total viewers and the A25-54 demographic from January 2009. In prime time, it was up 22% in total viewers and 51% in the demo. CNN was down 34% and 37% and MSNBC down 26% and 38%. In total day, FNC was up 16% and 28%. CNN was down 34% and 41% and MSNBC down 28% and 39%. Last January all networks performed while with the Inauguration coverage. This month, the big political event was Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts, which FNC dominated in the ratings.”
Yet Democrats remain tone deaf to normal America. Nothing illustrates the complete disconnect more dramatically than a befuddled Obama retreating from his incredible proposal to have our war wounded pay for their own treatment, recuperation, and insurance.
Obama said:
"Look, it's an all volunteer force," Obama complained. "Nobody made these guys go to war. They had to have known and accepted the risks. Now they whine about bearing the costs of their choice? It doesn't compute.."
"I thought these were people who were proud to sacrifice for their country, "Obama continued. "I wasn't asking for blood, just money. With the country facing the worst financial crisis in its history, I'd have thought that the patriotic thing to do would be to try to help reduce the nation's deficit.
I guess I underestimated the selfishness of some of my fellow Americans."
Just tone deaf? It’s more appropriate to note “the guy hasn’t got a clue”. If a more absurd and stupid comment has been offered by a politician in my life time, I haven’t heard it.
It gives new meaning to terms such as “outrageous”. Of course Obama – as most liberals – has no respect for our military or those who serve.
Buddy
The day’s top blogs:
1.
New Emails Show Contradictions with Sworn Testimony by Controversial Labor Nominee as Cloture Vote Looms
Reid Breaks Pledge Not to Hold Important Votes Prior to Scott Brown Certification
Robert Romano
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, breaking a pledge not to hold important votes prior to Senator-elect Scott Brown's seating, is now set to push through another highly controversial Obama nominee.
M. Patricia Smith, Barack Obama's nominee for Solicitor of Labor, is scheduled for a cloture vote Monday, February 1st, at 5:30PM, according to the Senate Executive Calendar.
However, new emails have emerged from a freedom of information request by Americans for Limited Government (ALG), showing more contradictions between Smith's testimony and her communications within the New York State Department of Labor, casting doubt on whether she would be confirmed.
According to an ALG analysis of the emails and Smith's testimony, "The email traffic found in the attachment shows clearly that Department officials were in touch with outside groups from the beginning of the program. Not only did Department officials contact outside groups at the outset but these groups provided input, they even provided suggested edits to the Department. Further, Patricia Smith was in the loop on the discussions and development of the program."
In testifying to Congress, when asked by Senator Richard Burr if she "reached out to individuals and groups to craft the specifics," Smith said, "Actually, no, Senator, we did not. This was an internally crafted group. It was only after we sat down and crafted it ourselves that we reached out to groups to see if they would be interested."
The Wage Watch Initiative was not launched until January, 2009. Said Don Todd, Director of Research for ALG, "The emails go back as far as April, 2008. She misled the Senate, no question."
Yesterday, Reid scheduled a cloture vote on Smith, as reported by the American Spectator. But according to top Capitol Hill sources familiar with the situation, it highly unlikely that Senator Brown will be sworn in before the vote.
"Simply put, Reid's promise to hold off on important votes until Brown is sworn in is a lie," said Todd, also noting key votes yesterday confirming Ben Bernanke to a second term at the Federal Reserve and raising the national debt ceiling to $14.294 trillion.
"Reid ramming Smith through without seating Brown is particularly troublesome in view of the fact that Ms. Smith misled Congress in sworn testimony," Todd added.
Todd's charge that Smith "misled Congress" stems from a hearing concerning the nominee's participation at the New York State Department of Labor enforcement initiative called, "wage watch," which deputizes private entities, such as ACORN, to do enforcement work through "formal partnerships" with the state.
Groups participating in this initiative are given a specific geographic zone to patrol, are provided with training and literature, and are assigned a designated contact person to which they provide "referrals" when they find what they decide are violations of wage and hour laws.
The majority of groups participating in the initiative are either labor unions or labor union-affiliates. When the initiative was launched in January 2009, a coalition of trade associations representing thousands of New York businesses protested, writing to Smith that "To give quasi-enforcement capabilities to certain, seemingly hand-selected constituencies sets a troubling precedent that could spread among the spectrum of state agencies."
The letter continues, "We wonder how such an effort can create an atmosphere of anything other than vigilantism where every honest employer will have a legitimate concern for the preservation of his or her rights as a taxpaying business owner in the state of New York. The image painted by the Department in its January 26 release is of a posse of activists, duly deputized by the weighty imprimatur of the Department, demanding access to any employer in the state whom they have chosen either at random, by will, or by prejudice."
However, that is not how Smith described the program to Congress. According to the Washington Times, "Smith told senators vetting her appointment to be the Labor Department's solicitor that her 'wage watch' pilot program in New York was created over the last year to 'engage groups to help us with education' and not to let the private groups conduct labor investigations.
"But internal memos obtained by Republican aides on the Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee show Ms. Smith's state labor agency in New York actually referred to the union and group participants as 'enforcers,' The Washington Times has learned."
Senator Michael B. Enzi (R-WY) said Smith may have misled Congress about the true nature of the program. As reported by the Times, Enzi wrote in a letter, "If it was her intention to mislead the Senate, then I must oppose her nomination. If she unintentionally gave inaccurate statements to the Senate, then I question her ability to manage a large operation, since she does not have a clear understanding of what is taking place in her own department in New York."
"There have been definite misstatements of fact by Ms. Smith about 'wage watch.' There is no question," said Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson, citing the new emails. "She claimed that the unions were not reached out to craft specifics for 'wage watch,' but they were."
With the senatorial hold put on Smith by Enzi, it would require a 60 vote cloture motion to have it lifted. According to ALG's Todd, if Brown were seated, Smith would face "a near-certain filibuster. She lied to Congress, and the only way she could get confirmed now is on a party-line vote."
Smith was nominated to be Solicitor of Labor in March, 2009, the third highest official and the person with the final word on all legal advice in the Department.
http://washingtonalert.org/?p=1425
2.
Ivy League Critical Mass
John Kelly
"One man's meat is another man's poison," as the saying goes. Let me explain a most striking case in point. Last year at about this time, David Brooks of the New York Times anticipated an enormous intellectual dividend for our country. After cataloguing the Obama administration's numerous Ivy League J.D.s and Ph.D.s, and with no mention of their real-world experience, he went on to write:
Already the culture of the Obama administration is coming into focus. Its members are twice as smart as the poor reporters who have to cover them, three times if you include the columnists.
While Mr. Brooks was pleased to finally see intellectual meat on the Washington bone, many others were dismayed to see this Ivory Tower culture reaching critical mass in our government. Brooks's comment was an instance of arrogance acknowledging itself. More realistic people were concerned at seeing an inexperienced, extremely nonrepresentational elite about to pilot the powerful federal government.
If Mr. Brooks felt it suitable to render such a smug assessment with so little apparent evidence, then I feel it necessary to offer a contrary assessment.
The suggestion that a seasoned and well-balanced administrator having a Ph.D. or a J.D. may be well-suited to govern would seem inarguably correct. Yet these administrators probably constitute the most culturally remote and least experienced presidential administration in history.
The country needs more than a narrowly focused intellectual dividend. Take away this administration's heap o' sheepskin and you have a group of people lacking the qualifications to do anything other than mouth obscure intentions and display self-esteem. Note that those are traits shared, according to a Scientific American article, by many inhabiting our country's finer penal institutions. Source material for this wisecrack provides food for serious thought.
The very fact, as that article stated, that degreed sociologists and psychologists had erroneously assumed that criminals have general low self-esteem is an indicator that the former depended heavily on pure speculation. The moat surrounding their intellectual castle was deep and wide. Criminals and their counselors may have long known answers to questions Ph.D.s have only recently bothered to ask.
If Obama's administration had felt their deficiency of practical experience, they would have gone about slowly and cautiously gaining it during their first year's apprenticeship. To the contrary, they have attempted to move mountains of legislation at lighting speed. They obviously value practical experience less than their education and ideology.
Ask yourself this: Would you be a passenger on a plane piloted by someone with an aerospace Ph.D. but no practical flying experience? Or would you rather be a passenger on a plane piloted by someone having extensive flying experience but no Ph.D.?
Government depends heavily on academic testimony and research for informed decision-making. The contemporary American university, academics' home turf, is the fountainhead of politically correct thought. P.C. has become like a physical constant, as is gravity. It is balanced into every academic discussion.
Climategate revealed "researchers discussing how to manipulate historical temperature data." This is a glaring example of the willingness of academics to falsify data and propagate unproven assumptions. Progressive agendas figure heavily in the funding pursuits of academic science. While presenting opposing arguments is essential to scientific inquiry, "scheming to muzzle their critics" isn't.
Larry Summers, leading economist, Harvard president, and himself a victim of academic ridicule, advised academics going into government, "If you cannot offer a better critique of your proposal than your opponent, you have not examined it carefully enough." Has the traditional need for self-scrutiny been replaced by misrepresentation of fact and opponent ridicule? Present-day academics have culled their intellectual opposition to the point of extinction.
Perhaps the ultimate example of academics' tyranny was the expulsion by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory of their director, Dr. James Watson. The Nobel Prize-winning co-discoverer of DNA stated politically incorrect yet verifiable test results concerning the human I.Q. His talk to the London Science Museum was soon canceled.
The business world has been invaded by academia via the MBA. Those marketing the degree have attempted to replace the school of hard knocks with a certificate. Looking at MBA success rates, McGill University professor Henry Mintzberg took "a list of Harvard Business School superstars ... tracked the performance of the 19 corporate chief executives on that list ... Ten were outright failures ... another four had questionable records at best. Five out of the 19 seemed to do fine."
As Werner Patels of Agoravox.com puts it, "Being able to run a business requires, first and foremost, good common sense and life experience. No school or executive MBA program can ever teach or replace that."
University professors, consciously or unconsciously, tend to mold students into their own image. Gospel for the academic progressive is this: "If it is good to use men as they are," Rousseau writes, "it is much better to transform them into what one intends them to be." Duke professor Michael Gillespie said of students that after attending "four years of college, they are 40 percent more liberal than their parents." Without natural, real-world incentives, universities expose conservative students to grade reduction and the possible denial of credit and credentials.
Contrived or appropriate, the politically leftward-leaning university is commonplace. Disproportions exist at Berkeley, where "Democrats outnumber[ed] Republicans on the faculty by a ratio of nine to one," and at the "University of Colorado, where the number of registered Democrats on the faculty exceeded the registered Republicans by thirty-one to one."
The butcher, the baker, and the computer chip-maker -- each project their characteristic worldviews. Academics do likewise. The natural tendency of academics in government may be to transfer the modus operandi of their native institution to governance, leading them to insist rather than request, demand rather than serve, and scold rather than listen. Citizens may be seen as undergraduates, who when becoming too noisy and contrary can be threatened with demotions and fines.
Back in 1975, U.C. Berkeley physicist Charles Schwartz wrote Academics in Government and Industry. In it, he states, "It is told that 800 years ago, at the University of Bologna in Italy, professors had to obtain permission from their students and had to post bond in order to leave town on private business." Schwartz was then worried that a big corporation might pay a Ph.D. chemist to tell Congress that their new product is safe when it really isn't. In 2010, something worse may have come to pass.
Last year, an Obama brand package of academic goods was delivered to the voting public. Now voters seem to have found that those goods came with instructions they are reluctant to follow. Voters, like customers, expect service. What Obama delivered was something different. The voters are expected, even to the point of fines and jail time, to serve government rather than be served by it. Says Charles Schwartz, "I do not imagine the university as an ivory tower; it should be interactive, it should serve society."
Our government is based on Natural Law. We as Americans insist to be allowed to live as we are. Employ academics as teachers of theory and tools of research, not as authorities.
3.
Gitmo-bashing judge rebuked; lax sentence for millennium bomber rejected
Michelle Malkin
Hell has frozen over. Pigs are sprouting wings. The left-leaning 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has removed a moonbat judge from the botched LAX millenium bomber case and ruled that his sentence was too short, unreasonable, and in blatant violation of federal sentencing guidelines.
The story is breaking. Seattle P-I reports:
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ordered that Ahmed Ressam, a convicted terrorist arrested in December 1999 in Port Angeles with a car full of explosives, be sentenced again. And this time, the court has ordered that U.S. District Judge John Coughenour, who presided over Ressam’s trial and his sentencing and re-sentencing, not be involved.
Ressam also will likely face a much longer sentence, given that the appeals court noted several times how much lighter his 22-year sentence was than what sentencing guildelines call for. In a 2-1 decision, the court’s majority said Coughenour’s sentence — 43 years below the low range of the federal sentencing guidelines — was “both procedurally and substantively unreasonable.”
It concluded: “The district judge’s previously expressed views appear too entrenched to allow for the appearance of fairness on remand. For these reasons, we direct that the case be reassigned to a different judge for resentencing.” A new judge could be assigned in three weeks, prosecutors said. Ressam’s attorneys could appeal, and they have not responded to requests for comment. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Seattle, which has sought a longer sentence, greeted the appeals court ruling with approval,
“Our primary mission is to protect the public. We are gratified that the Court of Appeals recognized the importance of public safety at sentencing and that Mr. Ressam remains a threat to the public.” said U.S. Attorney Jenny A. Durkan in a statement. “We have the greatest respect for Judge John Coughenour and his hard work on a difficult case. However, we maintain that to protect the public, and deter others, a longer prison sentence is necessary.” In December 2008, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Seattle appealed the 22-year sentence imposed Ressam. Ressam, an Algerian, had intended to set off the explosives at Los Angeles International Airport around New Year’s Eve 1999.
And from the LA Times:
Ressam was detained in Washington state in December 1999 when he attempted to smuggle explosives into the United States on a ferry from Canada with plans to detonate them at LAX. He initially cooperated with interrogators and provided what Coughenour termed vital insight into the workings of terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda.
But Ressam ceased helping federal agents and retracted his statements implicating other terror suspects after being subjected to solitary confinement and what he considered interrogation excesses.
Coughenour twice rejected the federal sentencing recommendation of 65 years in prison for the terrorism conspiracy offense, a position the 9th Circuit panel said constituted procedural error. The judge also failed to consider the potential national security consequences for the U.S. public if Ressam were to be released after only a 22-year term, as he would be only 53 years old, the appeals panel said. Ressam, now 42, has remained incarcerated the federal Supermax prison in Florence, Colo., throughout the legal appeals of his sentence.
I’ve reported on Coughenour’s antics over the years. He’s a notorious terrorist’s little helper who engaged in brazen grandstanding during Ressam’s sentencing in 2005 — using the occasion to pat himself on the back, express his opposition to military tribunals and detention of enemy combatants, and argue in support of applying the full panoply of constitutional rights to foreign al Qaeda conspirators.
More recently, as Morgen Richmond at Verum Serum reported, Coughenhour spoke at George Soros’s Open Society Institute and shrugged off the prospect of Gitmo detainee releases as the “price we pay” for granting them the full panoply of constitutional rights in civilian trials.
His retort: “So be it.”
There are more like him in the judiciary, and you can bet the Gitmo detainees’ lawyers at Eric Holder’s old law firm, Covington and Burling, are court-shopping for them.
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