Clipmarks | merrie's POLITICS collection

United Nations Theater of the Absurd

Wed, 21 May 2008 04:42:52 GMT

clipped by: merrie
clipper's remarks: It is hard not to conclude that the U.N. is up to mischief in commissioning a major investigation during a presidential-election year.

Doudou* Diene has a track record of focusing his attention on freedom-loving democratic societies, with damning reports on alleged institutionalized racism in countries such as Japan, Canada, Denmark, and Switzerland. His reports are highly controversial and are usually rejected out of hand by the Western governments he is targeting. Like most other U.N. “Special Rapporteurs” Diene is unaccountable as well as unqualified for the position he holds. The United Nations doesn’t even bother to post his biography online, though his career details can be found on the website of the Organization of American States. His entire career has been spent as a U.N. bureaucrat, with absolutely no real world experience. Even by the dismally low standards of the United Nations, Diene is a spectacular non-entity. *pronounced 'doo-doo'

Clip Source: www.sphere.com

Posted May 20th, 2008 at 10.46am in American Leadership.

Robert Mugabe’s government is still killing opposition leaders in Zimbabwe. South African shantytown residents are killing migrant workers. A terrorist organization still controls half of Lebanon a full six days after violence began. So how does the United Nations spend its resources? It sends a French-educated lawyer from Senegal, Doudou Diene, on a three week tour of Washington, New York, Miami, Los Angeles, and Chicago to investigate “racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance” in America. Heritage Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom Director Dr. Nile Gardiner exposes this game in NRO:

The United Nations has a habit of interfering in U.S. elections, as it showed in 2004, when the New York Times published an “October surprise” a week ahead of the election revealing that 380 tons of powerful explosives had gone missing from the al-Qaqaa former military complex in Baghdad.

Tags: united nations, doudou diene, special rapporteurs, human rights

Who Will Pay For The Politicians Promises?

Wed, 14 May 2008 09:48:30 GMT

clipped by: merrie
clipper's remarks: Because of onerous regulations, it has been 30-plus years since a new refinery has been built.

Similar regulations also explain why the U.S. nuclear energy production is a fraction of what it might be.

Congress' solution to our energy supply problems is not to relax supply restrictions, but to enact the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 that mandates that oil companies increase the amount of ethanol mixed with gasoline.

Anyone with an ounce of brains would have realized that diverting crops from food to fuel use would raise the prices of a host of corn-related foods, such as corn-fed meat and dairy products. Wheat and soybeans prices have also risen as a result of fewer acres being planted in favor of corn.

Congress' proposed "solutions" to the energy and food mess it has created include a windfall profits tax on oil companies, food stamps, etc. These measures will not solve the problem, but will create new problems.

Clip Source: www.ibdeditorials.com

Most of the great problems we face are caused by politicians creating solutions to problems they created in the first place.

The Community Reinvestment Act encouraged banks and thrifts to make so-called "no doc" and "liar" loans to customers who had no realistic ability to pay them back. A decade of monetary expansion by the Federal Reserve Bank, contributing to the housing bubble, encouraged lending institutions to take risks they otherwise would not have taken.

Government actions created the subprime crisis, and now government-proposed "solutions," such as foreclosure holidays, bailouts and further regulation of financial institutions, to the problems they created will create more problems.

Congress, doing the bidding of environmental extremists, created our energy supply problem.

The Pacific and Atlantic Oceans and eastern Gulf of Mexico offshore areas have enormous reserves of oil and natural gas. These energy sources of oil have also been placed off-limits by Congress.

Tags: congress, sub-prime crisis, bailouts, regulation, financial institutions, energy, food costs

Too "Complex"?: Part II: Thomas Sowell

Wed, 14 May 2008 07:48:36 GMT

clipped by: merrie
clipper's remarks: --all the while lamenting the lack of affordable housing.

So long as politicians can get some people's votes by publicly feeling their pain when it comes to housing costs, and other people's votes by restricting the building of housing, they can have a winning coalition at election time, which is their bottom line.

Moral melodrama is where it's at, politically.

Too "Complex"? [Part I]
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/ThomasSowell/2008/05/13/too_complex

Clip Source: www.townhall.com

Supply and demand will never replace "need" and "greed" in political discussions of economic issues.

Voters don't want to hear about impersonal things like supply and demand. They want to hear about how their political heroes will stop the villains from "gouging" them or "exploiting" them with high prices.

A politician with good rhetorical skills can create a new Garden of Eden in people's minds, though only in their minds. However, that is sufficient, if that vision or illusion can be kept alive until election day, and its failure to materialize afterwards can be explained away by the obstruction of villains.

One of the many ironies of politics is that those politicians who do the most to reduce supply often express the greatest outrage about high prices.

Clip Source: www.townhall.com

t is not at all uncommon for land to cost more than the housing that is built on it, in those places where politicians have made housing unaffordable with land use restrictions under pretty names--

Tags: economics, supply, demand, politicians, voters, "greed"

McCain’s Assault On Reason: Dr. Roy W. Spencer

Wed, 14 May 2008 05:36:52 GMT

clipped by: merrie
clipper's remarks: So, here we are with bad science ready to support bad policy decisions that will lead to bad economic times ahead, and no presidential candidate who is willing to ask the hard questions. While we hate to be pandered to by politicians, in this case I can only hope that they really are pandering — that this is hot air and not prospective policy.

Clip Source: article.nationalreview.com

McCain has made it clear that the science really does not matter anyway because, even if humans are not to blame for global warming, stopping carbon-dioxide emissions is the right thing to do

But carbon dioxide is necessary for life on Earth, and I have a difficult time calling something so fundamentally important a “pollutant.” Maybe the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is higher now than it has been in hundreds of thousands of years. So what? I am increasingly convinced that its influence on climate pales in comparison to the influence that natural climate events like El Niño and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation have on regional climate. Indeed, most of the warming we’ve seen in the last century might well be due to these natural modes of climate variability alone.

The trouble is that no one has been funded by the government to investigate such a possibility, and the mandate for the U.N.

(IPCC) is to address manmade climate change — not natural climate change.

Tags: mccain, co2, "pollutant", el nino, pacific decadal oscillation, natural cllimate change

Oppose Climate Alarmist Gore: Sign Free Petition

Mon, 12 May 2008 00:36:09 GMT

clipped by: merrie
clipper's remarks: Worried about high food prices, Congress tries to push the biofuel industry to use nonfood crops.
Chicago - America's love affair with corn-based ethanol is cooling – at least in Washington.

Some legislators blame the rising use of corn as a biofuel as a key factor behind high food prices. Others want to freeze the federal mandate on biofuels production at current levels, reversing legislation passed just a few months ago that increases it through 2022. Still others are pushing to shift tax incentives away from corn-based to cellulose-based ethanol in the nearly completed farm bill.

These moves represent a dramatic backlash against corn ethanol, which until a few months ago was widely viewed as a boon for both farmers and consumers. Many experts worry that Washington's new skepticism will undo important progress the US has made in replacing foreign oil with domestic energy alternatives.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0501/p03s03-usec.html

Clip Source: www.grassfire.org

Grassfire's Aggressive Petition Opposing Climate Alarmist Agenda Surpasses 100,000 Signers (outperforming Gore's petition over the same time frame)

More than 130,000 petitions and counting, as citizens wake up to the Al Gore's perpetrated Climate Alarmist ruse that could cost Americans $1.2 trillion! Grassfire opposes any such tax increase, and what would be the largest expansion of government power in our nation's history through the Lieberman-Warner bill. Grassfire is urging citizens to take immediate action to stop this mad dash that will cost us all dearly. Help us reach 200,000 before May 31. See below for more information and to sign our petition
Sign our national petition opposing the Al Gore Carbon Tax Scheme
Read more about the Climate Alarmist Agenda and how you can make a difference
Read our latest release on Climate Alarmism and the coming Carbon Tax

Tags: global warming, al gore, petition

Hillary's Bitter Victory

Sat, 10 May 2008 07:19:30 GMT

clipped by: merrie
clipper's remarks: Is there any relief in sight? When will this thing end? The short answer to this question is no, there isn't.

Watching this scene, I was struck suddenly by the genius of the Clinton campaign — and also felt myself beginning to understand why this Obama-Clinton contest may yet prove to be one of those defining cultural clashes that come along once a generation or so, like Bryan-Darrow or Ali-Frazier.

what we have in Hillary Clinton: a once-in-a-generation political pugilist who, like her much smoother adversary, is amazingly capable of turning weakness into strength. Pitted against physical beauty and inspirational rhetoric, Hillary made herself the champion of everything stylistically ordinary, superficially unimpressive and ignored. And while her opponent won all the attention and admiration, all the teen-idol gushings of the beautiful people, she went for something deeper — resentment at the lack of those same things.

Clip Source: www.rollingstone.com

This contest no longer has anything to do with the electoral math. After the Pennsylvania contest, Obama holds some 1,724 delegates, which include 1,488 pledged delegates and 236 superdelegates. Hillary, by contrast, has 1,593 total delegates, broken down into 1,334 pledged and 259 superdelegates.

By the time the primary season officially ends on June 3rd with Montana and South Dakota, Obama will almost certainly be leading in delegates and the popular vote — but there almost certainly will be no nominee, either.

In the meantime, one thing about this contest can be said with absolute surety: Everyone involved has lost their minds. For Clinton supporters, the race has taken on a meaning that transcends politics.

Somewhere in there is where you can find the emotional imperative underneath this campaign, and the reason why all the electoral math in the world doesn't mean shit to these people. Hillary calls them the "invisible Americans." There are a hell of a lot of them

Tags: clinton, obama, delegates, superdelegates, popular vote, florida, michigan