Chebama

Friday, December 11, 2009

Armed Response to 'Climategate' question

Journalist Phelim McAleer ('Mine Your Own Business', 'Not Evil Just Wrong') asks Prof Stephen Schneider from Stanford University an Inconvenient Question about 'Climategate' emails. McAleer is interrupted twice by Prof Schneider's assistant and UN staff and then told to stop filming by an armed UN security guard.

The new socialism

By Charles Krauthammer | Friday, December 11, 2009

In the 1970s and early '80s, having seized control of the U.N. apparatus (by power of numbers), Third World countries decided to cash in. OPEC was pulling off the greatest wealth transfer from rich to poor in history. Why not them? So in grand U.N. declarations and conferences, they began calling for a "New International Economic Order." The NIEO's essential demand was simple: to transfer fantastic chunks of wealth from the industrialized West to the Third World.

read more

Barack Obama wasn’t ready to be president, and he better figure out what he’s doing before it’s too late

Hillary Was Right
by Reihan Salam | December 11, 2009 | 12:36am

As the first year of the Obama era draws to a close, the president is losing the battle for America's hearts and minds. It's hard not to feel some sympathy for him, given the disastrous state of the economy when he took office and the many smoldering international crises that keep flaring up. President Obama's predecessors deserve plenty of blame for his woes—as Obama and his advisers never tire of reminding us. But their not-so-subtle digs at President George W. Bush paper over their own unforced errors.

The most glaring and consequential unforced error came in how the Obama administration framed the health-care reform debate. The mantra of "bending the cost curve" was tailor-made for conservative and moderate intellectuals who preach the gospel of entitlement reform. If passing health-care reform were fundamentally about winning over the think tanks, the green-eyeshade approach might have made sense. But of course the real goal was to overcome the fear of the large majority of Americans who are insured and who deeply, desperately, and sometimes irrationally oppose anything that would change the status quo. A large number of those Americans are elderly Medicare recipients, and they vote in large numbers.

read more

Glenn Beck: Barbara Walters' Ten Most Fascinating People

Obama’s Individual Health Care Mandate is Unconstitutional

by Brian Darling | Posted Dec 10th 2009 at 6:15 pm

The Senate is debating the future of American health care, yet one very important issue has yet to get a full and fair debate. Is the individual mandate that forces citizens to purchase health care insurance a constitutional power of the federal government? When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Ca.) was asked this question, she answered with the non sequitur “are you serious?” Conservatives who respect the idea that the constitution maps out a federal government with limited powers would answer with a loud — “Hell No.”

read more

Vaclav Havel on the fall of the Berlin Wall, Barack Obama, and the hidden costs of moral compromise.

When someone soils his pants prematurely, then they do not respect you more for it.
Interview by SUSAN GLASSER | DECEMBER 9, 2009

Foreign Policy: This year marks the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Do you think the spirit of those times is still reflected in Czech and Eastern European society today?

Vaclav Havel: I think that the basic ideals of that time -- free elections, the democratic program, freedom of the press, and so on -- are being fulfilled. We have not abandoned that road, nor did we betray it. Nevertheless, everything has been much more difficult than we might have thought at that time. Everything is taking much more time, and the road is much more thorny than somebody might have thought in those times of passion.

read more

Thursday, December 10, 2009

Harry Alford: Obama takeover straight from the Communist Manifesto

Why Obama's Nobel speech was flat and uncompelling

By Byron York | 12/10/09 9:40 AM EST | Washington Examiner

. . . it was a speech Obama didn't want to make. It's odd when you start an address accepting a great honor by recognizing the painfully obvious fact that you don't deserve it. Many speeches begin with a note of false humility -- "I'd like to thank the Academy for this award, even though there were so many great performances this year" -- but rarely is the humility as appropriate as Obama's. In any event, the speech lacked a certain life because the president's heart did not seem in it.

But the bigger problem is that Obama doesn't actually know what he was talking about. At the highest levels of human achievement, we honor people who have done great things. When they speak, we know they have a deep knowledge of their subject. When Dwight Eisenhower talks about waging war, we listen. When Steve Jobs talks about the computer revolution, we listen. When Martin Luther King talks about civil rights, we listen. When Lech Walesa talks about standing up to communism, we listen. We listen to hear the deep knowledge that such experience gives a speaker.

Barack Obama hasn't done anything that would warrant our listening to his speech at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony. It doesn't mean he doesn't know anything; if he gave a speech on, say, beating the Clintons at their own game, we would listen because he would have that kind of deep knowledge that brings real insight. But this? No.