Here’s some speed links to get you by this weekend:

• Jihad Watch reports on a father in “modern, moderate Jordan” who beat his daughter to death for the offense of wearing makeup.
• And while they are at it, a Muslim preacher asks, “Why not just stone all the homosexuals to death?“ 
• There is a tour group heading to some AIG executives houses on a tour.  The sponsor of the tour?  ACORN.
• You have got to see the graph at Gateway Pundit showing the deficit the Democrats have created in just 100 days.
• Gateway Pundit also has the Top 10 Obama-Biden gaffes.
• Wizbang wants to know “Will Obama Regulate Executive Pay?”
• Kids are being taught that Mr. Carbon is killing fuzzy, lovable polar bears.
• Iran on Obama:  “there has been no change even in Obama’s language compared to that of his predecessor.”
• Flaps got the video of Obama dissing the Special Olympics and Sarah Palin’s response.
• Speaking of Sarah Palin, we sure dodged a bullet with that lady, huh.  Great article detailing the Carnival of Gaffes coming from the Obama Administration.
• John Hinderaker wants to know, “Are we living in a banana republic?”
• The Berkeley Marine Corps recruiting station was vandalized by those military loving liberals.  

Finally,

Illegal Aliens! (Featuring the Jimenez Brothers)

By: Dr. Ellis Washington

When I heard about the horrific statistics regarding the stunning rise in AIDS cases in Washington, D.C., I thought to myself, how curious. The AIDS rate should be the lowest in the country. Why? Because residing in that city is Obama, the messiah, as well as 535 members of Congress, who are our representatives in charge of every functioning aspect of America.

Dr. Shannon Hader, D.C.’s HIV/AIDS Administration director, told the grim tale in a report picked up by Reuters:

An official report this week showed that 3 percent of the city’s residents are infected with HIV. Officials believe the true figure is even higher. … I think the true prevalence rate could be 30 to 50 percent higher. Many people are likely infected without knowing it.

Congress has a constitutional mandate to govern America’s capital, Washington, D.C. How did this AIDS catastrophe in our capital come to pass? Aren’t these 535 members of Congress the “best and the brightest”? Aren’t they always trying to inject more and more government over our lives? Why didn’t they prevent this epidemic?

Herein is the dirty little secret about Congress: Virtually every one of them doesn’t have a clue about solving real problems.

Congress is like the AIDS virus itself: only good at mutating, replicating itself, finding a new host to leech off and consolidating its power by destroying every thing good in America.

Tell Congress how you really feel about the job they’re doing with the “THROW THE BUMS OUT!” magnetic bumper sticker from WND!

My mind harkened back to ancient Israel and how they dealt with the AIDS disease of their day, leprosy. Here is an excerpt from Leviticus on how ancient Israel dealt with a healthcare crisis through the direction of the greatest physician of all time, God:

Then the priest shall look upon it: and, behold, if the rising of the sore be white reddish in his bald head, or in his bald forehead, as the leprosy appeareth in the skin of the flesh; He is a leprous man, he is unclean: the priest shall pronounce him utterly unclean; his plague is in his head.

I love the Bible. Unlike the egalitarianism and perversity correctness of today, the Jewish leaders, Moses and Aaron, obeyed the common sense rationalism of God when treating diseases. The good of the nation took priority over the malady of a single minority group, here lepers.

During the Black Plague (1347-50) historians estimate at least one third of Europe (50 million people) was wiped out due to a tiny flea carried by infected rats. What did the “best and brightest” of Europe do to combat this menace?

They killed all the cats and dogs.

That’s where we got the term, “It’s raining cats and dogs.” When a torrential rain came to town, all of these hapless animals would be washed down the streets, looking like it was raining cats and dogs. The lowly kitty was foolishly obliterated, the rat population and their parasitic flea carrying the bubonic plague mutated exponentially … along with the corpses.

The experts of that day analyzed the wrong problem; therefore they picked the wrong solution. In just three short years the body count in Europe reached biblical proportions: entire villages, towns and cities were wiped out.

This was how the gentiles dealt with disease during the rampant ignorance and superstition of the Dark Ages. There was another group of people, however, living in medieval Europe who did not ascribe to the conventional hygiene practices of the day.

Enter the Jewish people. Yes, those despised scapegoats, those curious “People of the Book” with all of their bizarre religious ceremonies. Records show that the Jews escaped the Black Death virtually unscathed. How?

These largely Orthodox Jews strictly followed the ceremonial cleansing laws of the Levitical priesthood. They washed their food and themselves repeatedly just to be allowed to worship at Synagogue. Cats, dogs and especially rats – with that inconspicuous flea carrying the plague – had a difficult time entering into a Jewish community in medieval Europe. So the Jews prospered and lived, while all around them was death, disease and ignorance of the Black Death’s true origins, the tiny flea.

Since the times of the Constitution’s framers, Washington, D.C., has been a city under congressional mandate according to Article 1, Sec. 8 of the U.S. Constitution. I return to my original question: Why is the AIDS rate in Washington, D.C., a place where the “best and the brightest” are supposed to reside, the highest in America?

I got my answer last Thursday while listening to “The Laura Ingraham Show.” She was interviewing fellow radio host, Don Imus, who said:

We heard all that nonsense about the ‘best and the brightest’ from the Kennedy Administration. Then we found out it was [Secretary of Defense] Robert McNamara and all those eggheads from the Ivy League schools that got us into Vietnam in the first place. It turns out that the ‘best and the brightest’ are the dumbest bastards in the room.

Nobody can tell the brutal truth like Don Imus.

Let’s further examine the incompetence of the beltway crowd in Washington, D.C. Remember that 76 percent of all AIDS cases here are black people. Blacks in D.C. comprise only 53 percent of the total population. The mayor of D.C. is black, as are virtually all of the elected officials on the city council, from the school board to the dog catcher. The liberal Democrats in Congress who sit as overseers in D.C. will do nothing to upset this key voting bloc.

Unlike ancient Israel, there are no real men or intelligent leaders in D.C., no Moses and Aaron to create a viable public health policy with the help of God.

We don’t need God today, for we have Whitman-Walker Clinic CEO Donald Blanchon, who said of the genocide in D.C. being worse than the AIDS rate in West Africa: “It’s an epidemic across all aspects of District life. It’s not an epidemic of one group. It’s not just gay or black.”

Congress, not to be outdone in combating a serious healthcare crisis with perversity correctness in 2007, lifted a ban on a needle-exchange program, now underway.

Dr. Hader added, “We want to make condoms widely available for free at a lot of easy-access points around the city, including beauty parlors, barber shops, liquor stores and bars.”

America, let’s be real. Giving a crackhead a clean needle or a moron a fresh supply of condoms is tantamount to Moses mandating all Israelites attend weekly leprosy boil-scratching duty; or Jewish Priests during the Black Death asking his fellow Jews to participate in the Rat Exchange Program – one “clean” rat would be exchanged for every plague rat, to prove to the gentiles that the Jews did not put a curse upon them.

Liberals are slaves to their own anti-intellectual, irrational ideology and appear devoid of reason, accountability and common sense – it’s intellectual nihilism writ large.

If you like how Congress is dealing with the exploding AIDS epidemic in D.C. by enabling promiscuous people to infect the innocent or uninformed in the name of perversity correctness, then you will love how Obama and Congress plan to take over corporate America like rapacious Mafia dons by printing trillions of dollars in new money, driving down the value of the dollar and driving up inflation. I predict that Obama and the Democrats will not stop until they make us all mindless slaves of a socialist welfare state.

Welcome to the USSA – the United States of Socialist America.

(Also published at WesternFront America)

I thought when Barack Obama picked Joe Biden for vice-president we were in luck.  The guy is a gaffe machine.  He just keeps pumping them out.

I had no idea that the main man (with respect to Lobo) would be providing such rich content as well.

Unfortunately, neither to most Americans.  You see, when Bush goofed up, it made headlines.  Remember the door he mistakenly tried to open in China? 

Did you see the same response from the media when Obama tried to walk through a window at the White House?

Oh, some of you saw that one?  Well, you didn’t see the video of Obama reading the wrong speech from his teleprompter.  He even thanked himself.  You didn’t see it because the press won’t release the video. At least Sky News covered it:

Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen was just a few paragraphs into an address in Washington when he realised it all sounded a bit too familiar.

It was. He was repeating the speech President Barack Obama had just read from the same teleprompter.

Mr Cowen stopped, turned to the president and said: “That’s your speech.”

A laughing Mr Obama returned to the podium to take over but it seems the script had finally been switched and the US president ended up thanking himself for inviting everyone to the party.

Mr Obama is an accomplished orator but is becoming known in America as the “teleprompt president” over his reliance on the machine when he gives a speech.

According to Big Hollywood, the video is still MIA:

Update: 10:30 am PST: Still no video released. This is the third Obama gaffe with no video. First the wrong door incident at the White House, then the helicopter head bump and now this. A dangerous precedent is being set here. If any other politician made this kind of blunder it would be everywhere.

Update 4:00pm PST: Still no video. Stories are starting to appear blaming the whole thing on Irish PM Brian Cowen and insinuating that Obama thanked himself as a joke. That is not the tone of the original Sky News article and if that is the case why is the video still absent from the internet or cable news? It surely exists.

It exists, just like that tape “of a 2003 banquet where then-state Sen. Barack Obama spoke of his friendship with Rashid Khalidi” exists. They are just covering for their man.

By the way, Obama’s teleprompter has started its own blog.

The whole uproar is about $165 million dollars in bonuses paid to 73 executives at American International Group (AIG).  If you look at it per American, that comes down to (opens calculator on MacBook…) about fifty-five cents.  So, for those most outrageous bonuses that were owed to them by contract, I am out a can of Mountain Dew (yes, I can buy a can of Dew here for fifty-five cents.)

This is an outrage.

Consider this:  this is money given to AIG as part of a $170 billion bailout.  For that bailout, I am out (back to the calculator…) about $567, or around 1030 cans of Mountain Dew.  That’s a considerably larger amount of emerald goodness.

Finally, consider the fact that these self-described outraged legislators are the same ones who passed the stimulus package, which contained the text that allowed the bonuses.  This 1000+ page monstrosity was read by exactly no one, and it came in at $819 billion. 

For that, you and I are out $2730.  For the record, that’s almost 5000 cans of Mountain Dew the government stole from me.  That’s 1.5 trillion cans of Mountain Dew stolen from America’s refrigerators!

GREAT SCOTT!

So, I am supposed to be outraged over being out a single can of Mountain Dew, but the 6030 cans these looters already took from me is no big deal?

For some reason, that leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.

Newt spells it out very well in this video, but I’ll give kind of the condensed version. Jim Tedisco is a strong conservative Republican who could use your help getting elected. He’s got a good chance of winning, but could use a few extra bucks.

Please give $20 for 20.

Gov. Sarah Palin is choosing to opt out of the stimulus money Alaska is slated to get. Like the banks that are refusing the taxpayers property, she says there are too many strings attached:

“We will request federal stimulus funds for capital projects that will create new jobs and expand the economy,” Governor Palin said. “We won’t be bound by federal strings in exchange for dollars, nor will we dig ourselves a deeper hole in two years when these federal funds are gone. For instance, in order to accept what look like attractive energy funds, our local communities would be required to adopt uniform building codes. Government would then be required to police those codes. These types of funds are not sensible for Alaska.”

When I was in college, I spoke with one of my professors about getting a SBA loan to start a landscaping business. He told me to be careful, because with government money comes government strings. This is a prime example of what he was talking about with the uniform building codes.

Honestly, this is like getting in bed with the mob.

Here’s video of her announcement:

Hat Tip: Hot Air

They are the captain’s of the airplane, and after September 11th, they were allowed to carry a firearm on with them when they flew. That personally made me feel a little more comfortable about flying, but now, Barack Obama has squashed funding for the program that trained pilots to carry:

The Obama administration this past week diverted some $2 million from the pilot training program to hire more supervisory staff, who will engage in field inspections of pilots.

This looks like completely unnecessary harassment of the pilots. The 12,000 Federal Flight Deck Officers, the pilots who have been approved to carry guns, are reported to have the best behavior of any federal law enforcement agency. There are no cases where any of them has improperly brandished or used a gun. There are just a few cases where officers have improperly used their IDs.

Fewer than one percent of the officers have any administrative actions brought against them and, we are told, virtually all of those cases “are trumped up.”

There’s really no reason to halt this program. As the Washington Times noted, the few cases of officers improperly using their IDs have been blown way out of proportion.

Another way the Obama Administration has made America less safe.

In the 1998 movie “Enemy of the State,” Robert Clayton Dean (Will Smith) and “Brill” (Gene Hackman) have their lives turned upside down by excessive surveillance activity from a sinister top NSA official, Thomas Reynolds (Jon Voight). Reynolds and a rogue group of NSA agents killed a congressman in a political-related murder, which was caught on tape, and for the rest of the movie they try to cover up the murder through deceit, misdirection and chaos theory – destroying evidence and intimidating witnesses, including Dean and Brill.

In a climactic scene between Dean and Brill, the tables are turned when Brill, a former career NSA agent himself who became “rogue” when his best friend was killed 18 years ago (the result of a covert mission overseas gone bad), decides to team up with Dean, a labor lawyer who stumbled upon the congressman’s murder by accident. He teaches his young protégé the rudiments of war strategy reminiscent of the military and political classics – Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War,” Machiavelli’s “The Prince,” Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” and chaos theory.

Here is an excerpt from the movie:

Brill: In guerrilla warfare, you try to use your weaknesses as strengths. (Here Brill shows Dean several listening devises NSA agents had planted on him, which up to that point allowed them to make his life a living hell.)Dean: Such as?

Brill: Well, if they’re big and you’re small, then you’re mobile and they’re slow. You’re hidden and they’re exposed. Only fight battles you know you can win. That’s the way the Vietcong did it. You capture their weapons and you use them against them the next time.

That scene from a popular movie 11 years ago reminds me of the Machiavellian tactics President Obama and his advisers are using today. These people, most of them Ivy-League graduates and diehard socialists, are very intelligent people. They realize that their policy remedies to fix the economy have no historical or rational basis and are only causing more economic uncertainty and chaos on Wall Street and on economic indicators throughout the world.

Therefore, the salient question becomes: Why is the Obama administration causing such chaos against his own nation, his own people who just elected him as the first black man to serve as president of United States?

It’s chaos theory.

In 1890, Henri Poincare, a French mathematician, physicist and philosopher of science, was the first discoverer of chaos theory. He applied it to mathematics and described this new phenomenon in this manner:

Chaos theory – the behavior of certain dynamical systems – that is, systems whose states evolve with time – that may exhibit dynamics that are highly sensitive to initial conditions (popularly referred to as the butterfly effect). As a result of this sensitivity, which manifests itself as an exponential growth of perturbations in the initial conditions, the behavior of chaotic systems appears to be random. This happens even though these systems are deterministic, meaning that their future dynamics are fully defined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved. This behavior is known as deterministic chaos, or simply chaos.

Applied to politics, chaos theory is reminiscent of several derivative military, political and philosophy treatises of the past, including “The Art of War” (circa 500 B.C.) – All war is deception; victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win; “The Prince” (1513) – Politics have no relation to morals; the end justifies the means; and “Rules for Radicals” (1971) – Rule No. 13, Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it.

Obama is a master at using his enemies’ strengths (Christianity, free-market capitalism, Reagan conservatism) as a weakness (moral and economic collapse, multi-billion dollar bailouts, George W. Bush). Obama, along with his socialists and fascist minions, believes the best way to dominate a society is by always having a certain degree of controlled (”determined”) chaos to supply the means to achieve their long-term ends of womb-to-tomb socialist controls over the people.

The president has masterfully manipulated chaos theory to exacerbate existing societal problems by acting like he is somehow above it all or disassociated from the plethora of existing problems. (”I inherited this economy” and “not on my watch” are favorite Obama mantras.) Furthermore, Obama has purposely refrained from seriously focusing on fixing these pressing problems facing America, whether it’s the economy, Wall Street, the home mortgage industry, the auto industry, the multi-trillion dollar debt we have with China, or the numerous geopolitical catastrophes across the world.

In “Enemy of the State,” Brill’s dialogue with Dean concluded, “You grow stronger as they grow weaker. Learn to use your enemy’s own weapons against him.” Obama and his minions have been taught by radical professors at the Ivy-League schools they attended to utterly hate America and all of her wonderful attributes like Natural Law, Christianity, liberty, integration of law and morality, free markets, the Bible, the Constitution, separation of powers, federalism – qualities that made America the greatest nation in this history of the world in less than 200 years. Instead, we are literally watching the Obama administration wage a coup d’état against his own country and wage a full frontal assault against her most sacred and vested interests.

I truly believe that Obama and the radicals in his administration will stop at nothing to achieve their nefarious ends, because they have the one characteristic conservatives and Republicans with all their God talk and reliance on the Constitution’s framers could never champion … self-righteousness.

Using pride, arrogance and self-righteousness combined with the political and legal application of chaos theory, the Obama administration should collapse upon the vanity of its own failed ideas, but for the media and our own self-delusion as products of the Stalinist public schools. The result? In the manner that Obama’s mentor, FDR, used the Great Depression as a pretext for the New Deal, Obama will likewise exploit societal instability, the collapse of Wall Street and the brink of a worldwide great depression, which under chaos theory is determinism and chaos, as a means to achieve his diabolical ends of transforming America from the USA to the USSA (the United Socialist States of America).

Obama’s tactics are not new. As I delineated above, they have precedence in Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, Alinsky and chaos theory. President Obama, the prep school/Ivy-League/ community organizer, is banking on the fact that as a public school educated citizen you have never read any of those authors and theories. If that is so, please rent the movie, “Enemy of the State” to understand that your precious natural rights are virtually extinct, and let’s turn chaos theory against the Obama administration instead of being unwitting victims of his vast, Machiavellian conspiracy where in the name of affirmative action, bipartisanship and civility We the People have become willing accomplices to our own demise.

May God forbid.

Author: Dr. Ellis Washington

(Also published at WesternFront America)

The Obama Administration is anti-gun.  You can try to deny it, but The Shooting Wire details how they are working against the interests of gun owners in an incremental manner.

First step:

…the State Department notified Canadian authorities of plans to issue an export ban on “military caliber ammunition” to Canada. That proposed action would prevent the sales of .223, .308 and other military calibers.

When Canadian authorities protested – and notified several members of the American media, the U.S. State Department suddenly went silent. But they quietly reinstated other rules and charges firearms exports-retroactively.

Second step:

Last Friday, the anglers and hunters were notified that the National Park Service planned to make all lands under their control totally lead-free by 2010. No lead in ammo or fishing tackle.

Finally, there is what The Shooting Wire calls “A very disturbing report that points to a very real assault on ammunition supplies.”

The Department of Defense has issued a directive that bans the sale of military brass to ammunition re-manufacturers.

Without that brass, a very large dent is put into civilian ammunition supplies.

New Defense Reutilization and Marketing Service (DRMS) requirements call for the “mutilation of shell casings”. Mutilation, incidentally, is the destruction of the property “to the extent that prevents its reuse or reconstruction”.

Government officials will determine what constitutes “sufficient mutilation” but it’s safe to say that it will no longer be suitable for remanufacturing.

“They’ll go after the ammunition.” I’ve heard it so many times, it’s almost cliche’. But it seems to be an all too dangerous truth.

This is something we should all be discussing with our representatives in Washington. Here’s what The Shooting Wire says to do:

All of us need to start contacting our elected representatives -and telling them, quite directly, that we’re not going to put up with a move that not only curtails access to ammunition (nearly all .223 and .308 manufacturing capacity is tied up to satisfy the needs of the military) for civilians – but wastes taxpayers’ money turning usable surplus into scrap metal.

Reducing the ammo brass to scrap reduces the value of the metal/surplus by nearly eighty percent. It also means that recast brass – in shippable form – may be shipped to China, one of the largest markets for U.S. metals on the world market.

If this is allowed to go unchallenged, anyone who owns a modern or traditional rifle in .223 or .308 calibers will see the impact- probably sooner than later.

…

Today, it’s important that every reader take time to notify Congress that we – taxpayers – oppose this latest DOD move- and all the other not-so-subtle moves against gun owners.

You can contact your elected officials in Washington by going to this webpage http://www.usa.gov/Contact/Elected.shtml and following the links to your respective Senator or Congressman.

One key member of the United States Senate is Montana’s Senator Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. Baucus could make a call to the Pentagon and let them know their budgets might be reexamined if they don’t reconsider this latest directive. At that point, the directive might labeled a “misunderstanding” and rescinded.

But it is important that we keep pressure on Congress.

If that means phone calls, e-mails, and letters, let’s get that done. If that doesn’t produce results, we need to look beyond symbolic gestures like sending tea bags or bringing hundreds of thousands of gun owners to Washington and state capitols to protest.

These are, indeed, uncertain times. But the time for uncertain actions may be passing.

There is only so much America will take. We are not a nation of sheep. Read what was written above, and consider these words from Chuck Norris:

How much more will Americans take? When will enough be enough? And, when that time comes, will our leaders finally listen or will history need to record a second American Revolution?

The liberties that have been taken withthe Constitution didn’t happen overnight. The state America is in today is the result of years of encroachment by the federal government. It’s a bit like boiling a frog. You don’t throw the frog into a pot already boiling. You put it in cool water and slowly bring it to a boil.

The only difference is that Americans will jump out of the pot, and they will be heavily armed. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, but if it does, then remember the words of Thomas Jefferson:

What country before ever existed a century & a half without a rebellion? & what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.

Pray it doesn’t come to that. It will be a civil war to make the last one seem tame.

UPDATE:

Stand down folks, stand down. It’s all over:

- Prior to 11/2008, Demil B items required no mutilation for sale to the public. That policy changed in November, but several exceptions were granted. Expended munitions brass was one of those given a waiver.

- Enter the new administration. Since Demil B category items had been given a broad, general label as “national security sensitive” someone above the DRMS (likely in the DLA) reviewed the policy and immediately went with a CYA policy and yanked all exemptions. No thoughts or considerations were given to the implications of this policy change, but this directive was issued to DOD Surplus effective immediately last week.

- S*** storm blows up as a result. In particular, the letters, phone calls, and emails to our legislators, the media, and anyone else who would listen caused this policy to be review post haste.

- As of this morning our company was informed that expended munitions brass will now be reclassified as Demil Q –– which requires no mutilation unless sold to a foreign country.

There you have it, as the Exurban League writes, “No malice, just some mid-level bureaucrat making a really dumb decision.”

Since I started writing online, I have been writing about global warming and my belief that it is a natural cycle.  Over the last two years, I have been called a lot of nasty things by the disciples of Al Gore.

To those people, I give you a new term to try to wrap your minds around – synchronized chaos:

Scientists at the (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) used a math application known as synchronized chaos and applied it to climate data taken over the past 100 years.

"Imagine that you have four synchronized swimmers and they are not holding hands and they do their program and everything is fine; now, if they begin to hold hands and hold hands tightly, most likely a slight error will destroy the synchronization. Well, we applied the same analogy to climate," researcher Dr. Anastasios Tsonis said.

Scientists said that the air and ocean systems of the earth are now showing signs of synchronizing with each other.

Eventually, the systems begin to couple and the synchronous state is destroyed, leading to a climate shift.

"In climate, when this happens, the climate state changes. You go from a cooling regime to a warming regime or a warming regime to a cooling regime. This way we were able to explain all the fluctuations in the global temperature trend in the past century," Tsonis said. "The research team has found the warming trend of the past 30 years has stopped and in fact global temperatures have leveled off since 2001."

That is a powerful bit of data, but still I don’t think that’s enough for a hard core disciple of the Goracle to disbelieve in the theory of anthropogenic global warming.   However, there are more results that might put a hairline crack in their faith:

"…we were very excited when we realized a lot of changes in the past century from warmer to cooler and then back to warmer were all natural," Tsonis said.

Tsonis said he thinks the current trend of steady or even cooling earth temps may last a couple of decades or until the next climate shift occurs.

Liberals might use the location of the study to be a reason to doubt.  After all, to them, this is fly-over country.  I mean, how much science can they do in between Packers games anyway, right.  A little elitism makes the facts go down.  That’s why I offer this story to back up the above.  This story comes from a professor in liberal Berkeley:

A liberal, Prius-driving Berkeley professor says Al Gore is exaggerating global warming facts, coal is a good source for energy, Thomas Friedman is wrong about global warming and storms, and hybrid cars won’t help save the environment.

Seriously.

Professor Richard A. Muller explains his hybrid ownership this way: "It doesn’t help slow global warming. I just love the technology."

Named a MacArthur "genius" in 1982, Muller who teaches a highly popular course called Physics for Future Presidents, insists that the bulk of misinformation on climate change has been spread by scientifically uninformed folk: "deniers" on the one hand and "exaggerators" like Gore and Friedman on the other.

A Berkeley man, dissing the Goracle?  And a liberal even.

Sooner or later, the idea that man is causing the climate to react one way or the other will be bankrupt.  Everyday there are more and more who do not fear to voice their doubt.  Everyday, more and more evidence piles up to lend credence to those doubts. 

Photo Credit:

• foto3116

I doubt that most Americans have a clue what the leading Green organizations like Friends of the Earth and the Sierra Club have as their agenda for 2009. They have already made it known their members, so I will share it with you.

There are literally dozens of these groups in the United States and each has their own particular focus of attention, but the largest among them play well together in the giant sandbox of Green utopian fantasies. That’s why both FOE and Sierra Club announced they are looking forward to “a clean slate” from the Obama administration.

“There’s nothing like a fresh start. On his first day in office, President Obama could make four decisions that would start 2009 with a ‘clean slate’ of energy policies,” said Friends of the Earth at the same time, the Sierra Club announced its own “Clean Slate Energy Agenda” that—surprise—was the same.

The focus of both is on energy use and accessibility. Both want a lot LESS energy use. Along with all other environmental organizations both use the bogy man of “global warming” to demand huge reductions in “emissions.”

The Sierra Club informed its members that it wants to “reduce global warming emissions quickly by making it possible for over a dozen states to implement their clean car requirements.” This is the objective of one of President Obama’s earliest executive orders. Driving up the cost of owning and operating a car directly strikes at the ability of Americans to be mobile and independent. Justifying it as necessary to reduce global warming is just a big fat lie. There is NO global warming.

Friends of the Earth are totally opposed to any economy stimulus that might include improving the nation’s infrastructure of highways. They warned the plan “is in danger of being hijacked by the road-building lobby, which wants billions of dollars for unnecessary new roads that would increase global warming pollution.”

Over the years I have come to marvel at the ability of environmental organizations to conjure up statistics faster than a magician can pull a rabbit out of a hat. “”Transportation is responsible for 30 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and 70 percent of our oil consumption” warned Friends of the Earth. What does it matter that carbon dioxide emissions (CO2) have no impact whatever on the Earth’s climate? And just what is wrong with oil consumption if it contributes to the success and growth of the nation’s economy?

“Just 10 miles of a new four-lane highway lead to emissions that are equivalent to the lifetime emissions of 46,700 new Hummers,” said Friends of the Earth. To which I reply, who cares? With oil prices plunging, those Hummers, particularly in parts of the nation hit by bad weather, look like a good idea. Bottom line: if you can afford a Hummer, where is it written you should not be allowed to own one?

Friends of the Earth, however, want to “shift the debate” in the environmental community to get the nation to avoid “car-centric highways and toward sustainable alternatives such as transit, biking, walking, and smart growth development, that will help fight global warming.”

What are these Green groups going to do when the vast population of the United States and elsewhere around the world concludes that there is no global warming? That day is not far off insofar as the Earth is now fully a decade into a cooling cycle that promises longer, harsher winters and a shift to generally cooler temperatures that will affect all northern hemisphere nations in particular and to an extent those in the southern hemisphere as well.

This explains why the United Nations environmental program has shifted into high gear to get the bogus Kyoto Protocols ratified. Not surprisingly, the U.S. has never signed on to it and even European nations that did are balking at emission reduction mandates. Meanwhile, neither China, nor India, nor many under-developed nations are subject to any of the restrictions. It’s a plan to undermine the economies of developed nations because greens hate humanity in general and successful economies in particular.

We’re not even halfway through the “clean slate” proposals. They include Sierra Club’s call to “require new and existing coal power plants to limit their global warming emissions” and to “end destructive mountaintop removal mining…” Finally, they want to “restore America’s international leadership in the fight to end global warming by publicly committing the U.S. to cut its CO2 emissions at least 35 percent by 2020.”

The Greens are so demented that the American Bird Conservancy released a statement in mid-December hailing the appointments of the new Obama administration. Its idea of stimulating the economy was to “invest $29 million dollars over the next four years in the Neotropical Migratory Bird Conservation Act” because “bird watching is now big business.” The Conservancy wants the U.S. to “invest “$540 million in America’s 543 national wildlife refuges” to create more “green jobs.” What a big help that will be to Americans who live primarily in America’s cities and suburbs.

The bird-lovers are a bit conflicted over another recommendation to “invest $30.5 million in the five year extension of the renewable energy production tax credit and making renewable energy tax incentives fully refundable. Wind energy is one of the alternative sources of energy” they recommend, but “if left unregulated, has the potential to kill large numbers of birds and bats and harm fragile habitats.” Well, which is it? Dead birds or more “alternative” energy? Both are extremely bad ideas.

The Greens for all their enthusiasm to spend tax dollars on their favorite notions remain opposed to any real energy generation by coal-fired or nuclear plants to meet current and future needs for electricity. They are utterly opposed to people driving around in cars for any reason and, one must assume, trucks that deliver the goods we require to live.

The longer one listens to what the Greens want, the more one becomes convinced that the members of these organizations must be utterly brain dead and that their objective is to render America a third-world nation by opposing the building of new power plants, along with the exploration and extraction of our natural resources of coal, natural gas, and oil.

Does this sound like a good plan to you?

Author: Alan Caruba

(Also published at WesternFront America)

There was a time, not to long ago, when Europe was home base to the world’s pharmaceutical industry.  Today, the United States is the center.

According to a 2003 report by John E. Calfee, "In 1990, European pharmaceutical firms outspent American firms on R&D by approximately $7 billion to $4.3 billion."  Ten years later, the United States was outspending European firms "$20.9 billion to $14.8 billion."

Of the important global drugs approved in the U.S., Europe and Japan from 1975 to 1995, almost half were developed in the United States.  The next closest was Great Britain at 14%. 

GlaxoSmithKlind and Novartis, firms Clafee describes as "traditional European firms" have "moved their most essential operations to the United States."  Between 1990 and 2002, investment in research and development in Great Britain increased by 250%.  America increased R&D fivefold. 

Here are some other staggering statistics surrounding the decline in healthcare R&D in Europe (h/t Andrew Sullivan):

• The latest data on new molecular entities (period 2001-2005) show the predominance of the US which has now become the leading inventor of new molecules in the world (61 against 51 for Europe.)
• The top 20 companies worldwide shows the leadership of US companies.  In 2005, nine of the top twenty pharmaceutical companies in the world are of American origin (against 8 for Europe.)
• US companies significantly increased their share in the world’s top selling medicines.  On the top 30 worldwide products for 2005, 21 originate from the US (against 8 from Europe.)
• US companies are more successful in disseminating their new medicines at international level:  70% of the sales of new medicines launched on the world markets during the period 1998-2002 were made in the US, compared to only 18% in Europe.
• Whereas the European pharmaceutical market was still the world’s largest market in 1990 (representing 37.8% of the world market), it now only represents 30% of the world market (compared to 47% for the North American market.)

This dramatic shift is due to the European economy shifting from a more free market to one dominated by government controls.  And it has been a benefit to America. 

According to Phyllis Gardner, now a Professor of Medicine at Stanford Medical School, "Thanks to America’s free market for prescription medicines, its citizens have access to more new treatments than do any other people in the world.  Almost every pharmaceutical and biotech company from around the world seeks to launch its products here first, making the country the epicenter of global innovation."

All of this could easily change, and will, if the moral busybodies on Capitol Hill are successful in allowing the "reimportation" of drugs from countries where price controls dictate the cost.  While it sounds moral, allowing cheaper drugs from foreign countries to be imported to America, it would have a lasting impact on pharmaceutical innovation.  To understand why, you have to understand why drugs are cheaper in foreign countries.

Why Do Foreign Countries Have Cheaper Drugs?

From Bloomberg.com:

Pfizer’s cholesterol drug Lipitor, the world’s best-selling medicine with $12.4 billion in sales last year, costs twice as much in the U.S. as in Canada, according to Internet pharmacies drugstore.com and canadadrugs.com. A 30-pill prescription of 20- milligram doses costs $124.99 at the U.S. site, compared with $60.78 from Canada.

Many people see this as the pharmaceutical company ripping off the American public.  The fact is that Canada, and other foreign countries are freeloaders.

Lipitor is cheaper in Canada because the government controls the price of Lipitor in Canada, limiting the amount of profit Pfizer can make on their product.  If Pfizer doesn’t agree to the price Canada sets, they risk having their patent revoked or nullified.  Therefore, to save their intellectual property, drug companies agree to sell their product at an extremely low price.  That puts the burden of profit on the United States. 

The United States does not control the price of drugs, so pharmaceutical companies can charge a price that will allow them to turn a profit.  It’s higher here to compensate for it being lower there.  It’s akin to going dutch on a dinner with someone who never pays their fair share.

If the United States allows the "reimportation" of drugs, we are also importing that country’s price controls.  It will flood the American market with artificially low prices and limit the profit pharmaceutical companies make on their products.  And we want pharmaceutical companies to make a profit. 

If they don’t it will hurt on a global level in the future.

Destroying Profits Destroys Innovation

Research and development of a new drug is an extremely costly endeavor, both in time and money.  Annually, close to $58 billion is spent on research and development by U.S. research based pharmaceutical companies.  It takes an average of 12 to 15 years and $802 million to $1.3 billion to bring a drug from idea to reality.  Of the new drugs created, "only 1 of every 5,000 products screened is ultimately approved as a new medicine" and "only 1 in 5 drugs approved and marketed ultimately produce revenues (aka profits) that recoup their R&D costs."

Those profits are then used to perform more research and development.  In fact, the pharmaceutical industry reinvests more of its profits in R&D (17.7%) than electronics, telecommunications and aerospace. The "average ratio of R&D to sales for all US industries is less than 4%." 

Without the profit on drugs, there is no research and development.  There is no innovation.  There are no new drugs.

It’s happened before, exactly as described above, in America:

After anthrax-laced letters killed five Americans in the wake of the 2001 World Trade Center attacks, Secretary of Health Tommy Thompson threatened to suspend Bayer’s patent on its antibiotic Cipro unless the company agreed to his "preferred" price. Bayer, faced with the prospect of generic companies getting the right to break its U.S. patent, caved and slashed its price from $1.83 to less than $1 per pill.

In 2004, Congress passed legislation, called Project BioShield, designed to spur private sector development of treatments for potential bioterrorist attacks. But nearly three years after the bill was signed, pharma companies have expressed little interest in the program. Not a single new product has been approved by the FDA.

Why? One major reason is the suspicion that, in the event of an attack, the government will offer pennies on the dollar for bio- terror drugs and will break patents to ramp up generic production. Instead of joining the biodefense effort, big companies are thus focusing their efforts on diseases like cancer or heart disease — where financial rewards are left to market forces. (Emphasis mine.)

Because of profits, we have a California biotech company that created a new AIDS drug.  Because of profits, Pfizer has created the drug Sutent, which slowed the progression of pancreatic cancer.   And because of profits we have new drugs being created and tested every day, including "36 for high blood pressure, 33 for heart failure, 16 for heart attacks, and 22 for stroke."

The "reimportation" of cheap drugs will destroy the profit making capabilities of pharmaceutical companies, therefore destroying their capability to create new medicines.  While the do-gooders on Capitol Hill may think they are doing what is best for America, they are not, as economist Thomas Sowell would say,  thinking past stage one.

Their efforts to solve the high cost of medicine will provide lower prices now at the cost of future innovations.  The solution doesn’t lie in the demonization of pharmaceutical companies or in socialist price control schemes,  but in the free market and solid profits. 

Photo Credit:

I’ve been slacking on these since I came back from CPAC, but I know that a lot of people like the rapid nature of speed links, so here are your weekend links:

• Sen. Maxine Waters seems to have directed TARP money to a bank that didn’t really qualify for it.  Did I mention “her husband, Sidney Williams, served on the bank board until early last year and held at least $500,000 in investments in the bank in 2007, the most recent year for which public financial disclosure statements are available.”  And if you think she did anything wrong, you are a racist.  Big surprise.
• Michelle Malkin has more coverage on Waters here.
• Speaking of TARP money, it seems more and more banks are turning it down.  Why?  It comes with too many strings attached.  While, how can you be a puppet without the strings?
• Gun sales are still high.  In Oregon, one gun shop owner “reports that he’s sold more guns, rifles and handguns during a three-month interval since the elections than in the past nine hunting seasons combined.”
• According to Investor’s Business Daily, Minnesota “is offering a program to Muslims who want to buy a home but don’t want to break their religion’s laws about interest.”  Whatever happened to separation of church and state, or mosque and state in this instance?
• Vice President Joe Biden directed $1.3 billion to “an absolute national treasure and necessity.”  What was it?  Amtrak, a government run train system that hasn’t made a profit in 40 years.  $1.3 billion to something that bleeds money and only 78,000 people a day use.  That’s your government at work.
• Bill Clinton is a Rhodes Scholar.  He’s repeatedly been called one of the most intelligent presidents in history.  Why then doesn’t he know that an embryo is already fertilized?  He’s too smart for basic biology, I guess.  Like Doug Powers said, “You’d think that if anybody would know the rules of the fertilization process, it would be Bill Clinton. Sperm on egg = embryo. Sperm on dress = impeachment, no embryo.”
• The Holy Grail of comics, Action Comics #1, recently sold for $300,000.  Action Comics #1, for those not cool enough to know this already, is the first appearance of Superman.
• Kansas City just held its fourth weekly tea party.  They marched on Claire McCaskill’s office, and surprisingly, she voted against the omnibus bill.  Grassroots activism at work.
• Remember when Joe said the world was going to test Barack Obama?  Russia may put strategic bombers in Cuba.  And Venezuela.  Go ahead and open your tests…..now!
• Robert Stacy McCain has compiled a nice set of links detailing how the true believers are starting to doubt Barack Obama.  Guess that makes me ahead of the game.  I doubted him from the get-go.
• And for our idiot portion of the links, here’s a story about a guy who tried to rob a Tae Kwon Do studio.

Finally, here’s a video compilation of every Turbo Boost ever used in Knight Rider:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has seized on a fantastic statistic to help Americans understand the enormity of the money being spent by Congress since President Obama started signing bills:

“In just 50 days, Congress has voted to spend about $1.2 trillion between the Stimulus and the Omnibus,” McConnell says. “To put that in perspective, that’s about $24 billion a day, or about $1 billion an hour—most of it borrowed. There’s simply no question: government spending has spun out of control.”

The math: 50 days times 24 hours equals 1,200 hours. 1,200 times 1 billion equals 1.2 trillion (a thousand billions is a trillion).

His math is sound, and powerful. There is a rub, however.

It’s tough to stand for fiscal responsibility when you ask for over $51 billion in earmarks, putting you in the top ten most earmarkers in the Senate. If it were just Mitch, it would just be hypocritical, but 6 of the top ten earmarkers were Republicans.

It’s like a bunch of drunk preachers decrying the sins of the bottle. There might be some sober men of the colth, but no one notices them because of the drunks.

I appreciate the increased focus on spending. I just wish we had a credible party to talk about it. As I said on my RFC Radio show, there is a trust bank account. You can make deposits and you can make withdrawals. Right now, the Republicans are way overdrawn. You want trust again, you have to make some deposits. When the Congressional Republicans all voted against the stimulus, that was a big deposit. But it didn’t bring the party out of the hole they created.

You can’t just talk the talk, Mitch. Get your house in order, then start complaining about the neighbors.

I noted before that back when the Surge was starting, 51% of Democrats wanted Bush to fail. That meat the deaths of thousands of American service members in Iraq. Certainly pales in comparison to Rush Limbaugh’s hope that Obama’s socialist takeover of America fails.

Now, it’s been revealed that in 2001, Democratic Skeletor impersonator James Carville hoped President Bush would fail:

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, just minutes before learning of the terrorist attacks on America, Democratic strategist James Carville was hoping for President Bush to fail, telling a group of Washington reporters: “I certainly hope he doesn’t succeed.”

Carville was joined by Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg, who seemed encouraged by a survey he had just completed that revealed public misgivings about the newly minted president.

“We rush into these focus groups with these doubts that people have about him, and I’m wanting them to turn against him,” Greenberg admitted.”

So not only was Carville against him, but he was interested in turning more and more people against the president. And a few years later, over half of Democrats polled wanted the president to fail. But let one Missourian with a microphone hope for liberty to prevail and you get a political firestorm.