Vocal Minority

Liberal Media Bias: AP Fact-Checks Sarah Palin's Book. What About Al Gore's?

In a few days Sarah Palin’s much-anticipated Going Rogue hits the stores. But this morning Ms. Palin is already meeting some criticism for allegedly false statements. Before the book is even released, a gaggle of Associated Press—yes, Associated Press!—writers took it upon themselves to embark on a fact-checking mission:

FACT CHECK: Palin's book goes rogue on some facts
By CALVIN WOODWARD, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON – Sarah Palin's new book reprises familiar claims from the 2008 presidential campaign that haven't become any truer over time.

Ignoring substantial parts of her record if not the facts, she depicts herself as a frugal traveler on the taxpayer's dime, a reformer without ties to powerful interests and a politician roguishly indifferent to high ambition.

Palin goes adrift, at times, on more contemporary issues, too. She criticizes President Barack Obama for pushing through a bailout package that actually was achieved by his Republican predecessor George W. Bush — a package she seemed to support at the time.

In Palin’s 400+ page memoir Calvin Woodward and his team of assistants found only a handful of questionable statements. This would hardly be a news story were the author of the book not the leftocracy’s the most hated and feared woman.

Now, in theory I have no problem with a news outlet parsing a popular new book and addressing misstatements, exaggerations, and falsehoods. If an author is gilting the lily, they should be called on it.

What I do have a problem with is the apparent enthusiasm with which a news source went after this book. You’d be hard pressed to find the mainstream media so ambitiously fact-check the publication of a liberal/Democrat public figure.

In 2003, Hillary Clinton’s Living History memoir came out. Taxpayer-funded NPR granted her no less than four interviews. In one of them, NPR did not fail to note that Hillary “criticizes the Bush administration for a ‘power grab on so many fronts’ which she calls an attempt to implement a ‘very radical, right-wing agenda.’” (This would be the same NPR which seems not to have a problem with the Obama administration grabbing power on so many friends in order to implement a very radical, left-wing agenda.)

Interestingly, one of the most critical reviews of Hillary’s book came from Maureen Dowd at the NY Times. But Dowd’s complaints were not with any questionable statements, but merely with her writing style and content. No matter. Hillary was vindicated in 2004 when Clyde Haberman skewered Dick Morris in the Times’ review of Rewriting History. The Washington Post was also not very kind with Morris’ 300+ page retort to Hillary’s fantasy memoir.

You have to go across the pond to London’s Independent to find an article questioning the veracity of Living History.

It was actually Bill Clinton’s My Life memoir from June, 2004, that got more criticism by the press, e.g., USA Today. But that didn’t stop the media from ooh-ing and aah-ing over the sales records Clinton was breaking, and it certainly didn’t stop Clinton from being applauded on all the news shows, from Oprah to 60 Minutes. 

The headline on CBS News’ Politics page on June 14, 2004 blared “The Return Of The Comeback Kid” and declared: “Bill Clinton is back.” Instead of critiquing the nearly 1000-page tome, the Chief Political Writer David Paul Kuhn wondered how much Clinton’s book was going to hurt George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential election.

Again, when Dick Morris and Eileen McGann hit back in December, 2004, with Because He Could, the mainstream media circled the wagons. Chris Suellentrop in the Washington Post mocked the 270-page attempt to set the record straight as an “extended blog entry with a dust jacket.”

And what of the pièce de resistance, the opus d’opus, the king of all books which are loads of B.S. from front cover to back cover: An Inconvenient Truth by Albert Gore, Jr. Five years after the release of this deceptive piece of propaganda and its accompanying movie, the mainstream media is still enamored with Al Gore and his cause.

But the inconvenient truth is there are more lies in one chapter of An Inconvenient Truth than in Sarah Palin’s whole book. This is handily demonstrated, for instance, by Marlo Lewis, Jr. at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, whose monograph A Skeptic’s Guide to AIT meticulously deconstruct’s Gore’s book page by fallacious page.

If the Associated Press or any mainstream news outlet were anywhere near as ambitious at fact-checking An Inconvenient Truth as they are Going Rogue, Al Gore would be a humiliated has-been and the campaign to fight man-made global warming climate change would be at the top of every list of humanity’s greatest scams.

Get ready for some more Gore-lovin' from the mainstream media; the thinking man's thinking man has a new man-made global warming climate change book out this month. You think Calvin Woodward and the gang at the Associated Press are going to be fact-checking this or any of Gore's books? Sure, and pigs will be flying out of my skinny white butt.

Like I said, in theory I have no problem with—and even welcome—the media conducting a principled analysis on a public figure’s memoir.

But the selective fact-checking crusades are just a little too transparent.

Around the Web in 80 Minutes (11/11/09)

On President Hope&Change:

November 11, 2009 | American Spectator
The Man Who Despises America
By Mark Hyman

When people who voted for Obama in 2008—including registered Democrats—start speaking in normal conversational voices at dinner parties, neighborhood gatherings and PTA meetings that the over-inflated ego from Chicago has it “in for America,” then it’s clear most reasonable people have reached the same conclusion.

The central conviction of Obama’s ideology is that America is guilty of limitless moral failures and is the chief architect of the world’s ills. Obama has boundless enmity for America, its key institutions, and its longtime allies. …

November 11, 2009 | American Thinker
Obama’s Post-American World
By Monte Kuligowski

… Mr. Obama needs a weak America to facilitate his view of global multiculturalism. No country is better than any other. So-called evil regimes are really dispossessed nations that need to be understood and brought to the table. Once at the table, we will see that our mutual interests make self interests innocuous. Old views of American exceptionalism are simply worn out.

The President is a creature of postmodern, post-Christian thinking. He is a new kind of leftist. Barack Hussein Obama is essentially a global Marxist. On a global scale, the proletariat consists of the poor nations of the world that have been oppressed by powerful, greedy, self-interested countries. The United States is the prime example of the global bourgeoisie. The evil, capitalistic country, still high on religious opium represents all that is wrong with the world. …

Mr. Obama was photographed during the 2008 campaign carrying the book, "The Post-American World" by Fareed Zakaria. A guy running to be president of the country that saved Europe and the world from Nazism and communism and provided stability to the world ever since was reading about a post-American world. …

On the Ft. Hood massacre:

November 11, 2009 | American Thinker
Victims, Villains and Heroes
By Ben Voth

… For NPR and related ‘journalistic’ outlets, Nidal is a “victim” of the trauma associated with war. Though he had never been deployed, as a psychologist he witnessed the trauma of combat soldiers and the burdens of war and found that ‘too much to bear.’ Consequently, because of America’s ‘warmongering character’, psychologist soldier Nidal Hisan ‘snapped’ and fired more than 100 rounds at Fort Hood killing a dozen American soldiers and wounding dozens more.

The careful consideration of Nidal’s victimage stands in sharp contrast to the treatment of American soldiers at Haditha denounced as cold blooded killers by a member of the United States Congress. A U.S. Senator was willing to refer to American soldier interrogators at Guantanomo as comparable to Pol Pot and Hitler.

What American soldiers are not allowed to be is heroes. The moral consequence of this propaganda war fought by “journalists” is the increased deaths of our soldiers at home and abroad. With attacks on our bases here at home and hundreds of attacks overseas, the world has been conditioned to believe that American soldiers do not enter the world to protect the innocent but to kill them. …

11/11/2009 | Human Events
The Phantom Backlash
by Robert Spencer

… Did armed bands of furious Islamophobes throw molotov cocktails at mosques? Did ferocious white supremacists maul fragile little girls in hijabs on their way to school? Did angry bigots spit at pious imams quietly going about their business?

No. [Do they ever?]

Had there been any report—any report at all—of any innocent, random Muslim being attacked in a “backlash” after the Fort Hood jihad?

Nope. Not one. [Do they ever?] Americans are decent people. Americans believe people are innocent until proven guilty. But Ibrahim Hooper and his fellow thugs at the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) need to be able to claim that hate crimes are being committed so that they can claim victim status for Muslims and deflect attention away from such small matters as the jihad at Fort Hood. And, naturally, the clueless and/or complicit mainstream media in their hip pocket.

And so we witness the strange phenomenon of stories of Muslims fearing a backlash soaring and the numbering of actual incidents of backlash remaining at zero. In the AP story, all that followed the announcement of an “immediate” anti-Muslim backlash were various stories about mosques and Muslims asking for special police protection, and the like. So in reality, the story should have been headlined, “Muslims claim victim status in wake of Fort Hood jihad attack.” …

On man-made global warming climate change:

Nov 7, 2009 | Newsweek [to its credit]
Everyone Out of the Water! Damn the pesky models! Full speed ahead.
George F. Will

In last week’s NEWSWEEK, the cover story was a hymn to “The Thinking Man’s Thinking Man.” Beneath the story’s headline (“The Evolution of an Eco-Prophet”) was this subhead: “Al Gore’s views on climate change are advancing as rapidly as the phenomenon itself.” Which was rather rude because, if true, his views have not advanced for 11 years.

There is much debate about the reasons for, and the importance of, the fact that global warming has not increased for that long. What we know is that computer models did not predict this. Which matters, a lot, because we are incessantly exhorted to wager trillions of dollars and diminished freedom on the proposition that computer models are correctly projecting catastrophic global warming. On Nov. 2, The Wall Street Journal’s Jeffrey Ball reported some inconvenient data. Soon after the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—it shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the Thinking Man’s Thinking Man—reported that global warming is “unequivocal,” there came evidence that the planet’s temperature is beginning to cool. “That,” Ball writes, “has led to one point of agreement: The models are imperfect.” …

On government-run health (s)care:

Nov. 11, 2009 | Town Hall
The U.S. House of Presumptuous Meddlers
By John Stossel

I’m embarrassed that my representatives think that government can subsidize the consumption of medical care without increasing the budget deficit or interfering with free choice.

It’s a triumph of mindless wishful thinking over logic and experience.

The 1,990-page bill is breathtaking in its bone-headed audacity. The notion that a small group of politicians can know enough to design something so complex and so personal is astounding. That they were advised by “experts” means nothing since no one is expert enough to do that. There are too many tradeoffs faced by unique individuals with infinitely varying needs.

Nov. 11, 2009 | Jewish World Review
Constitutional Contempt
By Walter Williams

At Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Oct. 29th press conference, a CNS News reporter asked, “Madam Speaker, where specifically does the Constitution grant Congress the authority to enact an individual health insurance mandate?” Speaker Pelosi responded, “Are you serious? Are you serious?” The reporter said, “Yes, yes, I am.” Not responding further, Pelosi shook her head and took a question from another reporter. Later on, Pelosi’s press spokesman Nadeam Elshami told CNSNews.com about its question regarding constitutional authority mandating that individual Americans buy health insurance. “You can put this on the record. That is not a serious question. That is not a serious question.” …

Speaker Pelosi’s constitutional contempt, perhaps ignorance, is representative of the majority of members of both the House and the Senate. Their comfort in that ignorance and constitutional contempt, and how readily they articulate it, should be worrisome for every single American. It’s not a matter of whether you are for or against Congress’ health care proposals. It’s not a matter of whether you’re liberal or conservative, black or white, male or female, Democrat or Republican or member of any other group. It’s a matter of whether we are going to remain a relatively free people or permit the insidious encroachment on our liberties to continue. …

Have a blessed day!

Liberal Media Bias: Newsweek Is Just So ... Newsweek

Remember this pathetic Newsweek cover story from a few weeks ago?

 

Just when you thought this left-wing rag couldn’t become any more of a sad caricature of itself, they surprise you:

 

The Thinking Man's Thinking Man? How about the Con Man's Con Man?

Robocop at Angry White Dude has some more select words:

The Thinking Man’s Thinking Man??? Just what the hell is that supposed to mean when you are referring to an absolute dunce???

The story is titled, “The Evolution of an Eco-Prophet”. An Eco-Prophet? So, they make up titles for him just like he makes up his “Junk Science”. Perhaps they should try just a moment of truth and use a more accurate title, “The Evolution of a Lying Eco-Profiteer”.

Get your spew bag ready … this is just more of the “Main Stream Media” being a bitch for the extreme leftist, socialist agenda of the demonrats and this Gorey buffoon. The tripe cover story is another love fest of the media whores being pimped by the sleazy “Inventor of the Internet” for his boundless ego and his shameless profiteering. Read it and you will feel slimy … guaranteed.

Stop the madness. Think for yourself. Get the real facts from real scientists who are experts in the field of climatology. Then you decide why anyone should listen to this fraud and wonder why people continue to line his pockets with gold.

Here here!

On a similar note, here's the latest from Zack R. at the infamous Diversity Lane:

Around the Web in 80 Minutes (11/3/09)

My favorite articles of the day …

On today’s closely-followed elections:

November 3, 2009 | USA Today
Don’t bury GOP yet: Prophecies of party’s demise this election are way overdone.
By Jonah Goldberg

After Obama’s presidential election, a cottage industry of punditry sprang up to forge a new conventional wisdom. It goes something like this: The Republican Party has been discredited by the Bush presidency, congressional scandals and overspending. Worse, it is “out of touch” due to the stranglehold of knuckle-dragging, troglodytic, Bible-thumping, gun-nuts and greedy capitalists. Confronted with the divine light of Obama, these hissing conservatives must scurry to the shadows like vampires fearful of the burning rays of the sun. The only chance for Republican survival is to embrace moderation, compromise and, in some cases, what Barry Goldwater called “me-too Republicanism.” Whatever the merits of this advice, two things are now quite clear.

First, most conservatives and Republicans have next to no desire to follow it. And, second, it looks like they’re right not to.

The Virginia contest alone shows that much of this talk about “moderates” vs. “extremists” or “pragmatists” vs. “ideologues” within the GOP was nonsense.

McDonnell is socially and economically very conservative, but he has dominated the race by focusing on mainstream issues such as transportation, taxes and the economy. Meanwhile, Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have been working overtime to recast the Democrats as big spenders more committed to an ideological agenda than setting the country right. As a result, independents — the same voters who delivered the election for Obama — are now flocking to the Republicans. McDonnell beats Democrat Creigh Deedsamong independents by 2-1.

The best illustration of the conservative comeback is the special election for the 23rd congressional district in New York (a district Obama carried in 2008). Before last Saturday, the race was being cast a “civil war” on the right because many conservatives were supporting not the Republican nominee, Dierdre Scozzafava, but Doug Hoffman, a Republican who switched to theConservative Party ticket when he failed to get the nomination. Scozzafava is a very liberal, pro-choice Republican, the sort of candidate the conventional wisdom says the right must embrace to stay relevant. Hoffman is a mainstream conservative. On Saturday, Scozzafava dropped out of the race because Hoffman was crushing her in the polls. Most tellingly, it was Hoffman’s support among independents that gave him the advantage.

There’s more than one way to read all of this. Independents might just want to be a counterweight to the Democratic Party’s lurch to the left. Corzine and Deeds might just be lousy candidates in a bad economy.

All of that’s true. But it’s also true that the GOP is not much interested in becoming a Democrat-lite party, and it seems voters don’t want it to, either.

On government-run health (s)care:

November 3, 2009 | Real Clear Politics
The “Costs” of Medical Care
By Thomas Sowell

… There is a fundamental difference between reducing costs and simply shifting costs around, like a pea in a shell game at a carnival. Costs are not reduced simply because you pay less at a doctor’s office and more in taxes—or more in insurance premiums, or more in higher prices for other goods and services that you buy, because the government has put the costs on businesses that pass those costs on to you.

Costs are not reduced simply because you don’t pay them. It would undoubtedly be cheaper for me to do without the medications that keep me alive and more vigorous in my old age than people of a similar age were in generations past.

Letting old people die would undoubtedly be cheaper than keeping them alive—but that does not mean that the costs have gone down. It just means that we refuse to pay the costs. Instead, we pay the consequences. There is no free lunch.

Providing free lunches to people who go to hospital emergency rooms is one of the reasons for the current high costs of medical care for others. Politicians mandating what insurance companies must cover is another free lunch that leads to higher premiums for medical insurance—and fewer people who can afford it.

Despite all the demonizing of insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies or doctors for what they charge, the fundamental costs of goods and services are the costs of producing them.

If highly paid chief executives of insurance companies or pharmaceutical companies agreed to work free of charge, it would make very little difference in the cost of insurance or medications. If doctors’ incomes were cut in half, that would not lower the cost of producing doctors through years of expensive training in medical schools and hospitals, nor the overhead costs of running doctors’ offices.

What it would do is reduce the number of very able people who are willing to take on the high costs of a medical education when the return on that investment is greatly reduced and the aggravations of dealing with government bureaucrats are added to the burdens of the work. …

Jewish World Review | Nov. 3, 2009
A Society that Venerates Lawyers More than Doctors
By Dennis Prager

… Nothing better illustrates the reorientation — indeed, the transformation — of values that will take place if the Democrats’ health care legislation is passed. Thanks to trial lawyer/Democratic influence, for decades, we have been moving in the direction of litigation-based society. But with a Democratic health care bill, the movement will accelerate exponentially.

Much of our money, our innovation, our creativity and our ingenuity will gravitate from medicine to law. …

No rational person argues that society doesn’t need law or lawyers, or that all lawyers, even trial lawyers, do no good. That is certainly not what is being argued here.

But it does say something about a society when those who sue physicians and hospitals make as much or more money than those who heal disease. It says something about a society when it glorifies and rewards those who litigate while it demonizes and punishes those who produce the drugs and devices that keep its citizens alive and well.

This is part of the upside-down world the left is bequeathing to us and our children in the name of health care “reform.”

On the Leftocracy’s continued pile-up on Rush Limbaugh:

American Thinker | November 02, 2009
The Vilification of Rush
By Kenneth L. Hutcherson

[NB: Ken “Hutch” Hutcherson is a former NFL player, a pastor, and an African-American. - ETR]

... The Minority Thought Pattern is aimed at destroying America, at rending the very fabric that makes America great. The Minority Thought Pattern denies the greatness, honor, bravery, courage, humility, and sacrifice that has brought us the power to be the greatest nation that has ever existed. The Minority Thought Pattern has a mission to undermine and redefine every characteristic of America, maintaining that it is a nation based on greed, cowardice, selfishness, and a lack of genuine humility. The Minority Thought Pattern is the reason for all the apologies to the rest of the world for how bad American is, coming even from our top leader. …

This is extremely personal to me. It’s about a friend. When I look at Rush, I don’t see a white man; I see a friend. I don’t see a talk show host (a very famous talk show host); I see a friend, and friendship overrides color and political stances. I don’t see a controversial figure, but a man whose heart and thoughts I know, and a man who is not a racist.

I believe with all my heart that minorities, especially African-Americans, will never be free until they stop allowing people like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton to insist they adopt the mentality of victims. Likewise, they will not be free until they take the next bold step: start thanking God for America, and stop condemning the white male.

It is time for America to reject the Minority Thought Pattern and the hateful campaign against Rush Limbaugh.

On Obama’s dithering in Afghanistan and photo-op at Dover AFB:

American Thinker | November 01, 2009
O isn’t dithering on Afghanistan! It’s a Harvard Law Seminar!
By James Lewis

… Why would Obama be any better informed than the rest of the Left? He’s swallowed the Party Line for decades. He never has an original thought when it comes to liberalism; he memorized it when he was a kid, and by gum, it’s still exactly the same as it was decades ago. So he must have gulped down the whole peacenik delusion wholesale. And now a Divine Providence with a highly developed sense of irony has made him Commander in Chief.

After all, what does a Chicago pol have to really know about national security? Nothing. Chicago pols don’t even know about school security on the South Side. If they did, the schools would be much more peaceful. In New York City, it took Rudy Giuliani to clean up crime because generations of liberal mayors couldn’t figure it out. If they can’t run safe schools, what can they know about keeping peace on a global scale? When Obama and Bill Ayers got together on that Chicago inner-city program for fixing schools and buying votes, the best he came up with was a “jazz curriculum.” That’s the Dixiecrat solution for African-American education. It is disrespectful to parents and children of any race. …

George W. Bush accepted six years of foaming rage from the yapping Left with good grace. I think he could shrug it off because he understood what was important and what was merely self-serving. The Bush family has a record of solid values. Dad still jumps out of airplanes at 85. George W. Bush used to visit privately with wounded soldiers and their families, and go to see the dead coming home. Real tears are private. Bill Clinton had Hollywood photo ops in Normandy. …

On the latest from the “Religion of Peace”:

November 02, 2009 | World Net Daily
‘Everyone hates Jews,’ declares Islamic cleric
By Aaron Klein

JERUSALEM – Trees, animals and non-Jewish athletes despise Jews, declared an Egyptian cleric on his country’s television network.

“People hate (Jews). They don’t like them. We are not talking only about people. [The same goes] even for trees and animals,” stated Egyptian cleric Amin Al-Ansari on a program two weeks ago that aired on Egypt’s Al-Rahma satellite network. …

“The proof is that the Prophet Muhammad said that when Judgment Day draws near, the final war between the Muslims and the Jews will take place. The Prophet said that the Muslims would kill the Jews. ‘Judgment Day will not come before the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them,’“ declared Al-Ansari.

He added, citing from a hadith, a collection of the sayings of Muhammad: “The Muslims will kill the Jews. Be patient. All the trees and all the stones will say: ‘Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him – except for the Gharqad tree.’ Only one kind of tree will not call [the Muslims]. It is the Gharqad tree.”

On man-made global warming climate change:

November 3, 2009 | U.K. Telegraph
Al Gore could become world's first carbon billionaire

Al Gore, the former US vice president, could become the world's first carbon billionaire after investing heavily in green energy companies.

On liberal media bias:

November 3, 2009 | NewsBusters
USA Today Defines Sycophantic Media in Front Page Homage to Obamas
By Brent Baker

… USA Today’s Mimi Hall and Maria Puente gushed in a front page story on Tuesday marking a year since President Obama’s election, “With cultural ‘flair,’ Obamas updating first family’s image.” The two reporters began by describing Barack and Michelle Obama as just like any other hip couple:

He carries a smartphone on his hip, goes out for burgers and plays pickup hoops. She goes to their daughters’ soccer games, works in the garden and loves listening to her iPod. Together, they host poets, artists and musicians at their house and invite neighborhood kids to drop by.

The journalistic duo soon featured this glowing assessment: “‘The Obamas’ White House is the most open for cultural and intellectual activities since the Kennedy administration,’ says Douglas Brinkley, author and presidential historian at Rice University in Houston. ‘It’s not simply a matter of doing events of statecraft and cultural gravitas. They have a great flair for American pop culture.’”

November 02, 2009 | TimesWatch
‘The G.O.P. Stalinists Invade Upstate New York.’
By Clay Waters

Though he’s predicting Democrats will prevail in the end, former theatre critic turned over-dramatic liberal columnist Frank Rich sounded even more skittish than usual in his pre-election column in the Sunday Week in Review, “The G.O.P. Stalinists Invade Upstate New York.”

Barack Obama’s most devilish political move since the 2008 campaign was to appoint a Republican congressman from upstate New York as secretary of the Army. This week’s election to fill that vacant seat has set off nothing less than a riotous and bloody national G.O.P. civil war. No matter what the results in that race on Tuesday, the Republicans are the sure losers. This could be a gift that keeps on giving to the Democrats through 2010, and perhaps beyond.

Have a blessed day!

Profiles in Liberal Ignorance, Hate, and Intolerance: Ted Danson

As often she does when she opens her mouth, Joy-less Behar shattered the myth that it’s liberal hosts and their liberal guests who corner the market on civility and intelligence. Yesterday she had help: actor/activist Ted Danson. They both traded jibes about how conservative Americans are easily brainwashed by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and the religious right because they’re not smart enough to form their own opinions.

This, of course, is in contrast to liberals like Joy Behar and Ted Danson who are sooo enlightened and sooo impervious to indoctrination that the fact they think exactly the same is just sheer coincidence! It’s also mere coincidence that virtually every liberal/Democrat—from the mainstream newsrooms to the pressrooms and even to the White House—is responding to Rush’s Fox News Sunday interview with Chris Wallace using the exact same talking points. These libs really know how to formulate their own opinion, let me tell you!

Danson admitted that people like El Rushbo and the religious right “really piss me off, to be honest,” followed immediately by the claim that the right is all about playing on people’s fear and anger. This is, by the way, the same Ted Danson who in 1988 declared “We only have ten years to save the oceans” (for those of you in Rio Linda, that would have made the point of no return 1998) and who co-founded and sits on the board of an ocean-focused envirowacko group.

Behar—remember: a liberal and therefore intelligent enough to formulate her own opinions—nodded approvingly to Danson’s statements and then punctuated them by calling conservatives like Rush “extremists.”

But remember, it’s conservative talk that’s coarsening the culture.

Both Danson and Behar then demonstrated their complete ignorance of the government-run health (s)care issue by blaming vocal opposition either on uneducated bumpkins who don’t know what’s good for them or on greedy parties seeking to thwart the “competition” that government-run program would allegedly foster.

Jeff Poor at NewsBusters has the story, with quotes and other painful details.

Ways the Left Has Screwed Up My Country Today: Climate Bill Ever-Closer to Ratification [UPDATED]

As President Hope&Change, cheered on by the radical leftist environmental alarmists who have coopted this government, comes closer to signing on to the Copenhagen global climate bill, Britain's Lord Monckton has some words of farewell to the United States. Monckton, a one-time science advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, knows that this climate bill is the end of American prosperity and exceptionalism. Funny we need a foreigner to point this out to us. [h/t David Horowitz at Front Page Mag]:

Welcome to the future, suckers.

Related reading: Roger Kimball at Pajamas Media

UPDATE 10/22: FYI, here's Monckton on with Glenn Beck this past week:

Movie Challenging Man-Made Global Warming Alarmism Is Here

This evening marks the debut of the documentary "Not Evil, Just Wrong" debuted on the web. (How's that for grassroots, San Fran Nan?)

Here is the description of the film from their website:

Not Evil Just Wrong is a feature length documentary directed by Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer. It examines how extreme environmentalism is damaging lives of vulnerable populations. This show will feature a panelist discussion after the premiere of the movie.

Watch it streaming here. Enjoy!

Around the Web in 80 Minutes (10/13/09)

I have to say I am so glad this issue is being tackled: With the news of El Rushbo’s contemplating buying the St. Louis Rams, liberal “reporters” in the sports world and in general are bursting with the latest attacks by reviving a number of made-up bigoted comments that no one can actually prove was uttered by Rush at any time. But because these unattributable quotes have been repeated by the leftocracy over and over again—I’ve seen them online; they’re even on Rush’s Wikipedia page!—they’ve been accepted as truth.

Even if Rush ends up not buying the Rams, I hope some light is shed on the shameless smears the left has been conducting for years, including those leftists who are supposed to be professional journalists in search of truth, rather than in search of pushing their liberal agenda.

Here’s Jeffrey Lord at American Spectator discussing the issue:

Who Is Libeling Rush Limbaugh?
10.13.09

Rush Limbaugh hit back today on this racist business, put out there by leftists so blinded by racial issues that they will fight the colorblind America vision of conservatives with everything they have. They are claiming Rush said the following. Anyone who listens to Rush on a regular basis knows this is simply nuts, decidedly not Rush but the left-wing Rush stereotype. Here's the quote:

"Slavery built the South. I'm not saying we should bring it back. I'm just saying it had its merits. For one, the streets were safer after dark."

Liberals masquerading as "sports reporters" and "journalists" have been out there repeating this kind of garbage in the last few days. The goal: to keep Rush from buying an ownership stake in the St. Louis Rams.

Next, Debra Saunders at JWR (and elsewhere) asks the unaskable question:

Oct. 13, 2009
What Happened to Global Warming?

"What happened to global warming?" read the headline — on BBC News on Oct. 9, no less. Consider it a cataclysmic event: Mainstream news organizations have begun reporting on scientific research that suggests that global warming may not be caused by man and may not be as dire and eminent as alarmists suggest.

Indeed, as the BBC's climate correspondent Paul Hudson reported, the warmest year recorded globally "was not in 2008 or 2007, but 1998." It's true, he continued, "For the last 11 years, we have not observed any increase in global temperatures." […]

Over the years, global warming alarmists have sought to stifle debate by arguing that there was no debate. They bullied dissenters and ex-communicated non-believers from their panels. In the name of science, disciples made it a virtue to not recognize the existence of scientists such as MIT's Richard Lindzen and Colorado State University's William Gray.

For a long time, that approach worked. But after 11 years without record temperatures that had the seas spilling over the Statue of Liberty's toes, they are going to have to change tactics.

They're going to have to rely on real data, not failed models, scare stories and the Big Lie that everyone who counts agrees with them.

Next, Dennis Prager adds his two shekels to the Obama Nobel “Peace” Prize:

Oct. 13, 2009
Why President Obama Was Awarded the Nobel Prize

[The Oslo Committee] may be moral idiots, but they are not stupid: I believe that they had two clear aims.

One is to undercut American exceptionalism — the notion that America has a superior moral value system to that of the "world" (specifically the United Nations and the European Union) and America's willing to use its unique power, alone when necessary, in accordance with that value system. The other is to promote an essentially pacifist agenda.

[…] 4. "Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts."

Meaning: As the pacifist bumper sticker puts it: "War is not the answer."

Oslo's approach echoes what the British government under Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain believed vis a vis Adolf Hitler. But had Hitler been confronted instead of "dialogued" with, perhaps tens of millions of innocent men and women's lives would have been spared and the Holocaust averted. Europeans tend to believe that evil regimes will act responsibly because of dialogue, not threats of force.

5. "The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations."

Meaning: We believe that a world in which no country possesses nuclear weapons will be a safer world. We believe that even though the technology to make nuclear weapons will still exist, no terrorist organization, nor any other bad people, will make such weapons.

The existence and deterrent power of nuclear weapons have probably saved as many lives as have antibiotics. As David Von Drehle writes in this week's Time Magazine, "If the Nobel committee wants someday to honor the force that has done the most over the past 60 years to end industrial-scale war, they will award a peace prize to the bomb."

6. "Thanks to Obama's initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting."

Meaning: To our delight, unlike the previous president, this one believes in global warming and in changing the American economy to combat it.

The "climate change" scare has become the most effective vehicle for compelling a transformation of Western economies along the lines that left-wing environmentalists have urged for decades.

7. "Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened."

This, unfortunately, has no meaning; it is nonsense. Under Barack Obama, the United States has not been the friend of democrats around the world. America has responded weakly to the democratic movement in Iran, ended the funding of the largest pro-Iranian human rights groups in America, pressured democratic Israel, made overtures to Hugo Chavez while denying American ally and pro-democratic Colombia a free trade agreement, abandoned Honduran anti-Chavez democrats, and has obsequiously deferred to Vladimir Putin.

8. "Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future."

Meaning: Only very rarely does the European left have such a kindred spirit in the American presidency.

9. "His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population."

Meaning: With Barack Obama, we in Europe finally have an opportunity to end American exceptionalism.

The Oslo committee's view is, tragically, true. Thanks to Barack Obama, America is for the first time is aligning its values with those of "the majority of the world's population." If you think the world's population has had better values than America, that it has made societies that are more open, free, and tolerant than American society, and that it has fought for others' liberty more than America has, you should be delighted.

Finally, here’s some entertainment-gossip news. Ree Hines at MSNBC.com (yes, that MSNBC) interviews actor Jamie Foxx about the Roman Polanski story [h/t Hot Air]. According to the piece, Foxx was quoted by Parade Magazine saying:

“If it had been my daughter who was barely a teenager—my daughter is 15—Roman Polanski would be missing … period.”

Yeah, if it were my daughter, Polanski would’ve needed to park himself on a different planet, not continent.

Have a blessed day!

Liberal Lie #15 - The Right Is Against Science; The Left Promotes It: The U.N.'s Latest GW Deceptions

This post is for those of you who think it’s the right who rejects, politicizes, or is “waging a war on” science.

For the past week Marc Sheppard at American Thinker has been doing yeoman’s work tracking the deceptions being inserted into the most recent U.N. climate reports. The long-time debunked “Hockey Stick” is back in a shiny new form and climate alarmists are hoping real scientists won’t notice. [some highlights mine; some in original]

October 05, 2009
UN Climate Reports: They Lie

For years, claims that UN climate reports represent the consensus of the majority of international scientists have been mindlessly accepted and regurgitated by left-leaning policy makers and the media at large. But in the past week or so, it’s become more apparent than ever that those who’ve accused the international organization of politicizing science and manipulating data have been right all along.

This latest disclosure again concerns what has become the favorite propaganda propagation tool of climate activists—the infamous “Hockey Stick Graph.” The familiar reconstruction, which deceitfully depicts last millennium’s global temperatures as flat prior to a dramatic upturn last century, has been displayed and touted ad nauseum as irrefutable proof of unprecedented and, therefore, anthropogenic, global warming (AGW).

Despite its previous debunking, the embattled AGW poster-child continues to languish in UN climate reports, which are unduly revered and quoted as gospel by all manner of proselytizers. In fact, just last week it had the bad timing to show up in a desperate UN compendium, released just days before Climate Audit published facts that promise to be the Hockey Stick’s (HS) long overdue epitaph. And those facts not only assuage any doubt of the chart’s fraudulence, but also of the deliberate and devious complicity of its creators, defenders and leading UN sponsors. […]

The End of a Warming Era

During testimony before the Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works Hearing on Climate Change and the Media in 2006, University of Oklahoma geophysicist Dr. David Deming recalled “an astonishing email from a major researcher in the area of climate change” who told him that “we have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.” In June of this year, Deming identified the year of that email as 1995 and the source only as a lead author of that month’s Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States report.

Many believe that man to be Jonathan Overpeck—which Prof. Deming didn’t deny in an email response—who would later also serve as an IPCC lead author. So it comes as no surprise that this reconstruction, which did indeed “get rid of the Medieval Warm Period,” was featured prominently in the subsequent 2001 TAR, particularly in the Summary for Policymakers (SPM), the highly-politicized synopsis which commands the bulk of media and political attention.

This, the original and by far most ubiquitous version of the HS graph, was derived from a 1998 paper by Michael E. Mann, Raymond S. Bradley and Malcolm K. Hughes (MBH98). It was promptly met with challenges to both its proxy data and statistical analysis methodology. Of these, various papers by two Canadians—statistician Stephen McIntyre and economist Ross McKitrick—stood out in dispelling the AGW-supporting hockey-stick shape arrived at by MBH, claiming it the result of severe data defects and flawed calculations, particularly an invalid principal component analysis.

In a coordinated effort to defend the refuted thesis, alarmed alarmists tendered a handful of supporting studies. Mann himself cheered those either attacking McIntyre and McKitrick or supporting his own reconstruction and dubbed them the “Hockey Team.” And the position of team forward and co-captain was bestowed upon Keith Briffa of Britain’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), whose temperature graphs, derived from Yamal, Russia tree ring data were heavily cited by the IPCC as supporting evidence of MBH’s assertion of unprecedented 20^th century warming.

While studies reaffirming both the MWP and LIA continued to be published, congressional hearings and expert panels found MBH to be largely unsupported by studies relying on legitimate proxy data other than Briffa’s. Still, most alarmists continued (and continue) to defend the HS on principle.

Which in no way dilutes this plain truth: By the time most Americans received their first lesson in climate hysteria in the Albert Gore lecture hall that was the 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth, the MBH chart the nutty professor stood before and offered as proof of impending doom was already held in disrepute by most serious persons of science.

Lest there be any doubt, why else would the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report (AR4)—notwithstanding the appointments of both Briffa and Overpeck as lead authors—give the graph short mention and exclude it entirely from the SPM?

It appeared the Hockey Team was being sent back to the minors.

That is—for the moment.

Desperate Times Call For Disparate Actions

Given the current economic and political climate, it’s not surprising that the globe’s climate ranks dead last when Americans are asked to name the “most important issue facing the country right now.” Needless to say, that’s an uncomfortable position for the Greenhouse Gas Team, what with a Senate Climate Bill promising even more government control than its House counterpart at the plate and the December Copenhagen Climate Summit on deck.

Accordingly, on September 24^th, in a transparently desperate effort to stoke the coals, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) released its Climate Change Science Compendium 2009. The eco-plea opens with these words from UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon:

“The science has become more irrevocable than ever: Climate change is happening. The evidence is all around us. And unless we act, we will see catastrophic consequences including rising sea-levels, droughts and famine, and the loss of up to a third of the world’s plant and animal species.”

Amazing. But the frantic hype of this call-to-pointless-action quickly segues to blatant lies just three sentences later when Ban states “that climate change is accelerating at a much faster pace than was previously thought by scientists.” It would appear the Sec-Gen believes that the cooling temperatures the new millennium issued in have somehow escaped everyone’s notice.

Imagine the uphill battle he’ll face should predictions of the U.S. Northeast suffering its coldest winter in a decade due to a weak El Nino come true.

So it wasn’t all that shocking to spot this undeniably dramatic graph on only the fifth of this end-is-near report’s 75 pages. The striking chart is marked as Figure 1.3: Correlation between temperature and CO2. As its title suggests, it attempts to plot atmospheric CO2 concentrations and mean global temperature during the past millennium. Notice anything vaguely familiar about the temperature plot in red?

Why, it’s our old friend, Mr. Hockey Stick—apparently having sat for a bit of a makeover.

Interestingly enough, this reconstruction wasn’t lifted from prior IPCC assessments, or, for that matter, any UN entity at all. No, the source was actually a graphic posted to Wikimedia in 2005 by Hanno Sandvik, a Norwegian research biologist. Sandvik cited two data sources for his temperature plot—a 2004 paper by Jones and Mann (abracadabra—no more MWP) for 1000–1880, and, for the remainder, “instrumental records published on the web” by Jones, Parker, Osborn and—wait for it … Briffa.

[…]

Not Man Made—Mann Made

One of McIntyre's chief complaints when auditing MHB98 was Mann’s refusal to provide his data, methods and source code. The Hockey Team’s most dreaded opposing goaltender has been reporting the same deceptiveness from Briffa, who for years refused to release his Yamal measurement data. This, despite the fact that HS-defending papers relying solely on Yamal continued to be published in major science journals.

But last year, Briffa used the data in a paper he published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society Journal. As the journal adheres to its strict data archiving rules, McIntyre convinced one of its editors to help get Briffa’s data released. And late last month, the data was indeed published at CRU.

Last week, McIntyre analyzed the CRU archive Yamal data and proved that Briffa et al. had cherry-picked and manipulated data, intentionally omitting records not friendly to their position. In fact, when Briffa’s hand-selected figures were replaced by a broader dataset for the same Polar Ural region (much of which he had deliberately dropped), the Hockey-Stick suddenly disappeared, revealing no significant trend in the 20^th century whatsoever!

In Steve’s new graph, below, the Red represents the original 12 cherry picked Yamal trees, while the Black incorporates the broader Polar Ural dataset.

Any questions whether or not global warming is Mann made?

Inhofe was right

The public’s belief in manmade climate change doesn’t hang on its grasp of geophysics or thermodynamics. Technical explanations of positive feedbacks and radiative forcings, read by few and understand by fewer still, aren’t likely to foster acceptance of a new energy tax that will dramatically raise the price of literally every facet of human life. Let’s get real—even experts on the subject can’t seem to agree on what caused modern warming.

But alarmists know all too well that as long as citizens are convinced that warming is both enduring and unprecedented, such inconveniences as the missing hot spot, laughably mistaken climate models, 800 year CO2/Temperature latency and perhaps even current cooling can be cleverly obfuscated with Goebbels-like double-talk and outright lies.

And without the Hockey Stick’s counterfeit portrait of runaway 20^th century warming, climate crisis peddlers’ credibility levels are reduced to those of used car salesmen. Not where you want to be when hoping to sell the instinctively absurd premise that the actions of mankind can influence temperatures in either direction.

So they cheat. And they lie. And they have from the very beginning.

In 1989, climate scientist Stephen Schneider told Discover magazine:

“To capture the public imagination, we have to offer up some scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements and little mention of any doubts one might have. Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective, and being honest.”

Twelve years later, Schneider was a lead author of the IPCC’s TAR, the same UN report that formally introduced the delusory Hockey Stick Graph. […]

And here’s Sheppard’s follow-up yesterday:

October 06, 2009
UN Quietly Scrubs Embattled Graph from Climate Report

… [A]s now reported by Anthony Watts at Watt’s Up With That, UNEP has replaced the embattled graphic, which was taken not from peer-reviewed journals but rather a 2005 Wikimedia posting by an unknown Norwegian research biologist, with a more traditional (and carbon free) chart from GISS. Curiously, no explanation was given for the switch. UNEP simply treated Hanno 2009 in the same deceitful manner they treat the MWP—as though it were never really there.

Here’s the original page 5, as I first saw it on September 24^th:

And here’s what you’ll find if you pull the PDF today. Notice the new graph in the upper right hand corner.

Not surprisingly, even in choosing the replacement graph—the UN was less than honest. After all, while the original depicted the entire millennium, its replacement conveniently begins at 1880, immediately AFTER the post-Little Ice Age warming began. This slice, in conjunction with the previous graph of post-1960 atmospheric CO2 levels on the same page, is no-doubt intended to give readers the false impression that modern warming is exceptional and indisputably linked to rising CO2.

Furthermore—as Anthony correctly points out—the reconstruction of Global Annual Mean Surface Air Temperature Change used was Hansen et al. (2006). But that chart has been superseded on the GISS data site by the one below, dated January 2009.

It appears the latest downtrend was just too much truth for these UN “scientists” to handle.Unbelievable.

Still—Any idea what may have prompted UNEP’s sudden chart switch decision?

Hmm, I wonder.

Folks, GW alarmists have an agenda. They will do anything to the science they have to in order to push that agenda through. They hate capitalism and especially advanced capitalist nations like the U.S. and they consider humanity a cancer on the planet. Make no mistake, among the billions of victims of any climate legislation passed from on high will be you.

Listen & Learn: Mark Levin on the Evil That Is Environmentalism (10/1/09)

The radical environmentalist movement has wrapped its tentacles around almost every facet of our lives. It's so prohibitive of freedom and progress that not even Native Americans want them near them. Whether Congress is imposing prosperity-crushing c(r)ap-and-trade regulations or the EPA is labeling the very gas that we exhale and which makes plants and trees grow as a pollutant, they are simply dangerous. Unfortunately, our own president is one of them. God help us.

Here's Mark on Thursday's (October 1) first hour discussing the latest abominations brought to us by the environmentalist movement. Prepare to be infuriated:

[Edited for commercials, long pauses, and other extraneous content]

 

Levin2009-10-01

Some of my liberal friends who read this will ask, Don't you care about the planet!?!? Of course I do. But the environmentalist movement as it currently exists has nothing to do about caring about the planet. It hates capitalism and everything in its agenda revolves around crushing capitalism, and especially knocking the United States of America down a few notches.

Diversity Lane (9/30/09): Global Warning; No Stone Left Unturned

The latest from Zack R. at the inimitable Diversity Lane:

Liberal Lie #15 - The Right Is Against Science; The Left Promotes It: John Holdren, Obama's Frightening "Science" Czar

I have liberal friends and relatives who were frightened, frightened, by George W. Bush. Something about a “Republican war on science.” Then Sarah Palin came on the scene. Then my liberal friends got really scared. All I heard them talk about was how scary she was. The same people who were losing sleep because George W. Bush was president were losing more sleep for fear that Sarah Palin would soon be one elderly president’s heartbeat from the Oval Office.

What’s to be frightened of? Oh yeah, she’s a quick-witted conservative woman who refused to abort her Down Syndrome baby and who reached her position in life without hanging on the coattails of a man. In other words, Sarah Palin’s a liberal’s (and feminist’s) worst nightmare.

Bottom line is that there is nothing frightening about Sarah Palin. She represents the best of America, and that’s why the left needed to destroy her and her family any way they could.

But this post isn’t about Sarah Palin. It’s about people who are truly frightening. Someone, for instance, who believes humans should be eliminated because you’re a threat to the planet.

Someone who believes he should be able regulate how many children you have “for the sake of the planet”—even to the point of forcing you against your will to have an abortion.

Someone who believes inanimate objects like trees should have the right to sue you in court if some ambulance-chasing enviro-wacko lawyer thinks you’ve violated their civil rights.

Someone who is so disdainful of American progress and technology that in the 1970’s he helped promote the hoax that humans were causing another Ice Age. Of course, now that same person is promoting the hoax that humans are causing global warming.

Who is this truly frightening individual? That would be John Holdren, personally hand-picked by President Hope&Change as science czar.

The Zomblog posts some background on Holdren, including a 1971 book which he edited in which he co-wrote an essay pushing the man-made Ice Age hoax and making the case for population control.

John Holdren in 1971: “New ice age” likely
Wed, Sep 16, 2009

In 1971, John Holdren edited and contributed an essay to a book entitled Global Ecology: Readings Toward a Rational Strategy for Man. He wrote (along with colleague Paul Ehrlich) the book’s sixth chapter, called “Overpopulation and the Potential for Ecocide.” (Click here to view a photograph of the table of contents, showing Holdren’s essay on pages 64-78; click on the image to the left to view the cover.) In their chapter, Holdren and Ehrlich speculate about various environmental catastrophes, and on pages 76 and 77 Holdren the climate scientist speaks about the probable likelihood of a “new ice age” caused by human activity (air pollution, dust from farming, jet exhaust, desertification, etc.).

Below is a direct scan from pages 76-77 in the book Global Ecology, with an exact transcription on the right.

(Following this section, scroll down to see the extended passage from which this quote was taken, with more context and more discussion.)

John Holdren is now not only the “Science Czar” for the United States, but he’s also one of the original leaders of the “alarmist” wing of the Global Warming debate — and he now promotes the notion that the current climate data points to a looming planetary overheating catastrophe of unimaginable dimensions. (He helped make the charts and graphs for Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth, for example.)

Just the title of that book—Global Ecology: Readings Toward a Rational Strategy for Man—should make people shiver. It screams, “We, the enlightened ones, shall decide who lives and who dies.” Liberals are frightened of Sarah Palin because she’s staunchly and unapologetically pro-life? Fine. I’m frightened of John Holdren because he’s staunchly and unapologetically pro-death. And he’s been outwardly so for decades.

The American people, whether I am happy about it or not, got to reject Sarah Palin at the ballot box. But there is no such a power check John Holdren. He works at the pleasure of the president, who clearly has no problem with Holdren’s radical anti-human pro-“environment” ideology.

Funny, several months into the predictably disastrous Obama presidency, I have yet to hear a single liberal friend or relative express fright at any of this and other truly scary characters occupying the Obama czardom. Are any of you out there?

But remember: There’s a Republican war on science.

Related reading: Global Warming: Since People Are the Problem, Just Get Rid of Them

The Democrat War on Science: Earth Approaching Sunspot Records

Aw, darn. And right when this global warming alarmist movie is about to come out. Don't you just hate it when reality kicks the pants out of your left-wing agenda?

Around the Web in 80 Minutes (9/8/09)

First, this piece by Brian T. Schwartz at Pajamas Media is sure to rustle some liberal feathers:

Health Care Is Not a Privilege … Nor Is It a Right
September 8, 2009

… Health care is not a right. Rights are freedoms of action, not entitlements to what others produce. A “right” to health care violates the rights of those who produce it.

“Health care” consists of diagnoses and treatments by highly-trained medical professionals. It involves sophisticated products, instruments, and tests designed and developed at great investment, effort, and cost by scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs. That is, people produce health care.

Nor is medical care a privilege. A privilege is something authority figures permit us to do at their discretion. No one considers auto repair to be a right, but it’s absurd to consider it “a privilege.” No one grants you the “privilege” of having money to repair your car. Rather, if you want to own a functioning car, you must take responsibility to finance its repair by earning wealth. The same goes for medical treatment. As Mark Twain said, “the world owes you nothing” — adults must take responsibility to finance medical treatment they want. People who choose to become parents are also responsible for paying for their children’s medical treatment.

There’s no right to health care, just as there’s no right to happiness. But the pursuit of happiness is a right. Similarly, everyone has the right to pursue medical treatment through voluntary exchange with those who produce it. We also have the right to protect ourselves against medical expenses as we see fit. Low-premium catastrophic insurance is just one option. Others include more costly comprehensive health plans, paying a retainer at a cash-only clinic, or obtaining membership in a health care co-op or health care sharing ministry. Yet when politicians seek to guarantee health care as a right, they decide what qualifies as appropriate medical treatment. Whether you get the treatment you want depends on the discretion of authorities. That is, health care becomes a privilege. […]

Second, on the theme of the president addressing the nation’s schoolchildren, Byron York at the Washington Examiner reminds us [h/t Malkin]:

When Bush spoke to students, Democrats investigated, held hearings
09/08/09

The controversy over President Obama’s speech to the nation’s schoolchildren will likely be over shortly after Obama speaks today at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia. But when President George H.W. Bush delivered a similar speech on October 1, 1991, from Alice Deal Junior High School in Washington DC, the controversy was just beginning. Democrats, then the majority party in Congress, not only denounced Bush’s speech—they also ordered the General Accounting Office to investigate its production and later summoned top Bush administration officials to Capitol Hill for an extensive hearing on the issue.

Unlike the Obama speech, in 1991 most of the controversy came after, not before, the president’s school appearance. The day after Bush spoke, the Washington Post published a front-page story suggesting the speech was carefully staged for the president’s political benefit. “The White House turned a Northwest Washington junior high classroom into a television studio and its students into props,” the Post reported.

With the Post article in hand, Democrats pounced. “The Department of Education should not be producing paid political advertising for the president, it should be helping us to produce smarter students,” said Richard Gephardt, then the House Majority Leader. “And the president should be doing more about education than saying, ‘Lights, camera, action.’”

Democrats did not stop with words. Rep. William Ford, then chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, ordered the General Accounting Office to investigate the cost and legality of Bush’s appearance. […]

Next, the brilliant Thomas Sowell at Real Clear Politics expresses his thoughts on Obama umpteenth speech on government-run health (s)care, which takes place tomorrow:

What Obama Says vs. What He Does
September 8, 2009

… No doubt millions of people will be listening to the words of President Barack Obama Wednesday night when he makes a televised address to a joint session of Congress on his medical care plans. But, if they think that the words he says are what matters, they can be led into something much worse than being swindled out of their money.

One plain fact should outweigh all the words of Barack Obama and all the impressive trappings of the setting in which he says them: He tried to rush Congress into passing a massive government takeover of the nation’s medical care before the August recess—for a program that would not take effect until 2013!

Whatever President Obama is, he is not stupid. If the urgency to pass the medical care legislation was to deal with a problem immediately, then why postpone the date when the legislation goes into effect for years—more specifically, until the year after the next Presidential election? […]

Gregory Gethard at Front Page discusses the resignation of Van Jones, the “Red” Czar:

The Fall of the Red Czar
Tuesday, September 08, 2009

No thanks to the establishment media and Congressional Democrats, the Obama administration’s “green jobs czar” Van Jones is out of a job.

Jones resigned this weekend in the wake of revelations, initially ignored by the press, that he has a long record as a political radical, a background that includes his association with the so-called “Truther” conspiracy theorists who claim that the September 11 attacks were an inside job by the U.S. government.

Now that Jones has stepped down, the media has rallied to his defense, depicting Jones as the victim of a “vicious smear campaign” by foes of his environmental politics – a charge echoed by the administration’s Democratic allies. The less palatable truth is that Jones is a racial provocateur and opportunist who tried to capitalize on the administration’s sympathy for the “green” agenda to bring his own brand of socialist and black radical politics to national prominence.

Although apparently missed by the Obama administration’s screeners, Jones’ intention to use environmentalism as a way to push his socialist agenda can clearly be seen in his remarks at the “PowerShift ‘09” youth conference in Washington. Described as an attempt to bring together young people united in support of climate change and other green policies, PowerShift ’09 quickly became a forum for Jones to push his radical views on a captive audience. […]

And finally, Jay Nordlinger at NRO is on liberal hypocrisy watch with more on imagined right-wing hate vs. actual left-wing hate:

When protest is uncool, &c.
September 8, 2009

They say that “hate” is rearing its head, and that President Obama and the Democrats are the victims of it. Let me make a couple of predictions: I predict that the chairman of the Republican National Committee will never say, “I hate the Democrats and everything they stand for. This [politics, basically] is a struggle of good and evil. And we’re the good.” Howard Dean said that about the GOP: “I hate the Republicans and everything they stand for. . . .” I predict that an editor of a conservative magazine will never write a piece called “The Case for Obama Hatred,” beginning, “I hate President Barack Obama.” A New Republic editor did this, about Bush. And there is increasing worry about assassination: that someone will take a shot, not just at the president, but at the first black president, which would be extra-catastrophic for the country. A few protesters have carried signs urging violence against Obama, or smacking of violence. Let me make some more predictions: I predict that a network talk-show host will not show a video of President Obama giving a speech and put the following words on the screen: “SNIPERS WANTED.” Craig Kilborn of CBS did that to George W. Bush. […]

For many more examples, see my post from last week here.

"Green" Czar Van Jones Steps Down

I must say I'm very shocked by this. I really thought Obama would stick by his guns. 

In the linked Breitbart article Jones says:

"On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me," Jones said in his resignation statement. "They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide."

It's not lies and distortions, you creep. You are on tape and on video denouncing capitalism, openly calling for "green" (read: red) revolution in the U.S., accusing white environmentalists of blowing pollution into minority neighborhoods, accusing the Bush administration of plotting 9/11, and defending Al Qaeda.

Oh yeah, Jones produced an anti-American CD too, co-starring the left's favorite cop-killer Mumia abu-Jamal. See more at Gateway Pundit and Verum Serum.

Lies and distortions my tuchas. You had no business being anywhere near the White House, and I guess Obama learned that the hard way so he buckled.

The man doesn't even admit that any of his statements or positions are wrong. But remember, the Obama administration swore they vetted this guy, that they followed him for a long time, and were thrilled he was coming on board.

DLTDHYOTAOTWO

One America-hating capitalism-denouncing human-life-disrespecting czar down. Several to go.

Other blogs posting: Fire Andrea Mitchell, The Other McCain,