Looks Like It's NO DEAL in Copenhagen!

According to the London Times, the Copenhagen climate change negotiations have stalled, and they’re poised to put off a decision for at least six years!

SEE: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/copenhagen/article6955237.ece

Amazingly enough, it wasn’t the pseudo-science and outright fakery proved by the released CTU emails, it was the ridiculous demands of some 50 sub-Saharan African nations that killed any hope of a global climate deal.

According to the London Times, “The key decision on preventing catastrophic climate change will be delayed for up to six years if the Copenhagen summit delivers a compromise deal which ignores advice from the UN’s science body.

“World leaders will not agree on the emissions cuts recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and are likely instead to commit to reviewing them in 2015 or 2016.”

Cop 15, an environmental group from Copenhagen, has reported that leaders of fifty African nations came to Copenhagen asking $400 billion for the next three years to "offset" carbon credit "damages" which they claim to have suffered. Inexplicably, two days ago, that demand was increased to an astounding 5% of America’s GDP (gross domestic product), estimated at $722 billion....from the United States alone.

SEE: “Africa considering tough demands” at

http://en.cop15.dk/news/view+news?newsid=2955

Thankyou Africa!

Climategate PROVES That There’s NO Science Behind Anthropomorphic Climate Change....

Perhaps the greatest public service ever done was delivered via WikiLeak by those who released over 61 megabytes of CRU e-mails from the UK’s Climate Research Unit (CRU).

Not only did they show that the people (I say “people” and NOT “scientists” because REAL scientists NEVER manipulate data to fit their preconceived views) working at those places “cooked the data” to fit the outcome they and those paying their billions in grant monies both wanted, but they proved conclusively that there’s absolutely NO real science behind the implausible theory of anthropomorphic climate change.

This exchange between two of the so-called “scientists” at the CRU show the collusion and outright fakery behind the current “climate models” substantiating anthropomorphic global warming (AGW);

"I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"

"Can you delete any e-mails you may have had with Keith re AR4?"

"I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."

"The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty we can't."

"I'm getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU temperature station data. Don't any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act!"

The fact is that NONE of the proponents of anthropomorphic global warming can explain the cooling trend over the past decade or more. Remember, “One year’s merely WEATHER, a decade or more is CLIMATE.”

Australian geologist Ian Plimer has claimed, that the e-mails "show that data was massaged, numbers were fudged, diagrams were biased, there was destruction of data after freedom of information requests, and there was refusal to submit taxpayer-funded data for independent examination."

Remember the charge that proponents used to discredit opponents of AGW - claiming they were “bought off” by “Big Oil?” Well, it turns out that the money trail actually indicts the PROPONENTS of man-made global warming and NOT its debunkers. Phil Jones, the director of the CRU and the man at the heart of climategate was, according to one of the documents hacked from his center, between 2000 and 2006, the recipient of some $19 million worth of research grants, a six-fold increase over what he'd been awarded in the 1990s.

The European Commission's most recent appropriation for climate research comes to nearly $3 billion, and that's not counting funds from the EU's member governments. In the U.S., the House intends to spend $1.3 billion on NASA's climate efforts, $400 million on NOAA's, and another $300 million for the National Science Foundation. The states also have a piece of the action, with California—apparently not feeling bankrupt enough — devoting $600 million to their own climate initiative. In Australia, alarmists have their own Department of Climate Change at their funding disposal.

And all this is only a fraction of the nearly $100 billion that HSBC Bank estimates has been spent globally this year on what’s been called "green stimulus" — largely ethanol and other alternative energy schemes, the kind that Al Gore and his partners at Kleiner Perkins are hoping to profit from.

Many have noted that these “scientists” have long depended on an inherently corrupting premise, one that stipulates that the theories upon which their livelihoods depended had already been proved. Absent that proof, everything they represent, including the thousands of jobs they provide ceases to exist. That’s what is commonly referred to as a “vested interest,” and such “vested interests” are the enemy of empiricism, as they bias the eye of the examiner.

Britain's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research recently released figures that seemed to show that the world grew warmer by 0.07 degrees Celsius from 1999 to 2008 and not the 0.2 degrees Celsius assumed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IGPCC), but since then the British experts, have noted that when their figures are adjusted for two naturally occurring climate phenomena, El Niño and La Niña, the resulting temperature trend is reduced to 0.0 degrees Celsius, or no warming at all.

None of the proponents of anthropomorphic global warming can explain that.

Nor can anyone seem to explain away the fact that higher carbon dioxide levels are actually GOOD for life on earth!

John K. Carlisle, director of The National Center for Public Policy Research's Environmental Policy Task Force has said, “Carbon dioxide is good for the environment.

“That simple fact must be restated to counter environmentalists' baseless allegations that the accumulation of man-made carbon dioxide, produced by cars, power plants and other human activities, is causing dangerous global warming.

“Indeed, far from being a poisonous gas that will wreak havoc on the planet's ecosystem, carbon dioxide is arguably the Earth's best friend in that trees, wheat, peanuts, flowers, cotton and numerous other plants significantly benefit from increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide.”

Dr. Craig Idso of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, one of the nation's leading carbon dioxide research centers, has said, “Clearly, there is no way that these real-world observations can be construed to even hint at the possibility that a significant increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide will necessarily lead to any global warming.”

John Carlisle notes, “scientists have lots of evidence demonstrating that increased carbon dioxide levels leads to healthier plants.” He noted, “Increased atmospheric carbon dioxide doesn't just make a plant bigger. Carbon dioxide also makes plants more resistant to extreme weather conditions. In a study discussed in the journal Plant Ecology, a team of scientists subjected the Mojave Desert evergreen shrub to three different concentrations of carbon dioxide - the current level of 360 ppm and at 550 ppm and 700 ppm. The plants, which were being grown in simulated drought conditions, responded more favorably in the carbon dioxide-rich environments. Photosynthetic activity doubled in the 550 ppm environment and tripled at 700 ppm. Increased photosynthetic activity enables plants to withstand drought better.”

So, in the end, the global warming hysteria seems about as grounded in fact as America’s current healthcare debate has been, which is to say that neither has had much of an affinity for the facts.

Proponents of a “Single Payer” plan for America can’t explain why America’s existing PUBLIC OPTION (Medicare and Medicaid) are currently failing badly – both are running huge deficits any more than proponents of man-made global warming can explain why there has been no warming over the last decade or more.

What both are, it seems, are poorly constructed arguments for more government control over the economy and our lives, despite the fact that less government intervention and control has historically and empirically been shown to lead to far more prosperity.

The Fed LOVES Inflation...And We’re Gonna Get IT!...

In the 1970s Fed Chairman Arthur F. Burns had lauded inflation as “priming the pump,” wrongly believing that inflation was a sign of a healthy economy.

As a result, there was significant inflation during Burns’ tenure at the Fed (1970 -1978), which Nixon tried to manage through wage and price controls while the Fed under Burns maintained an expansive monetary policy.

After the 1972 election, due in part to oil shocks from the 1973 oil crisis, price controls began to fail and by 1974, the inflation rate was 12.3 percent.

Burns believed that the American people weren’t willing to accept rates of unemployment in the range of six percent as a means of quelling inflation. From the Board of Governors meeting minutes of November 1970, Burns believed that:

“...prospects were dim for any easing of the cost-push inflation generated by union demands. However, the Federal Reserve could not do anything about those influences except to impose monetary restraint, and he did not believe the country was willing to accept for any long period an unemployment rate in the area of 6 percent. Therefore, he believed that the Federal Reserve should not take on the responsibility for attempting to accomplish by itself, under its existing powers, a reduction in the rate of inflation to, say, 2 percent... he did not believe that the Federal Reserve should be expected to cope with inflation single-handedly. The only effective answer, in his opinion, lay in some form of incomes policy (wage and price controls).”

What many then and today fail to realize is that for the government, inflation has some VERY positive effects, for one thing, it allows one to pay a fixed debt made years before in today’s cheaper dollars. In other words, one MILLION U.S. dollars borrowed at point A, at 5% APR (about $50,000/year in interest payments) is “cheap” when being paid back at point B (after a bout of inflation) when point B’s USD’s are worth, say, 50% of the value of the point A U.S. dollar.

In reality, inflation is VERY BAD, even lethal for people who are on “fixed incomes,” and it’s very damaging to the rest of us who earn incomes, as rises in incomes never keep pace with inflation.

In 2003, three years before he became Fed Chairman, Ben Bernanke visited Japan, which was going through a deflationary period and said, "One might argue that the legal objective of price stability should require not only a commitment to stabilize prices in the future but also a policy of actively reflating the economy, in order to restore the price level that prevailed prior to the prolonged period of deflation."

It’s apparent from that statement that Ben Bernanke doesn’t distinguish between prices that fall on account of a banking or credit crisis and those that fall due to advances in productive technology or improvements in economic organization. It’s all the same to him, and all bad.

That is, quite simply, an inflationary mindset, exactly what America DOES NOT need right now.

Why?

Because we’re drowning in debt and about to get socked with a very damaging and inflationary hit that we won’t be able to moneterize (tweak interest rates) out of.

America’s foreign debt-holders are seriously considering dropping America’s AAA rating, which will significantly INCREASE the cost of servicing our debt.

With the national debt now topping $12 trillion, the White House estimates that the government’s tab for servicing the debt will exceed $700 billion a year in 2019, up from $202 billion this year, even if annual budget deficits shrink drastically. Other forecasters say the figure could be much higher.

In concrete terms, an additional $500 billion a year in interest expense would total more than the combined federal budgets this year for education, energy, homeland security and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The potential for rapidly escalating interest payouts is just one of the wrenching challenges facing the United States after decades of living beyond its means.

The surge in borrowing over the last year or two is widely judged to have been a necessary response to the financial crisis and the deep recession, and there is still a raging debate over how aggressively to bring down deficits over the next few years. But there is little doubt that the United States’ long-term budget crisis is becoming too big to postpone.

Americans now have to climb out of two deep holes: as debt-loaded consumers, whose personal wealth sank along with housing and stock prices; and as taxpayers, whose government debt has almost doubled in the last two years alone, just as costs tied to benefits for retiring baby boomers are set to explode.

“The government is on teaser rates,” said Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan group that advocates lower deficits. “We’re taking out a huge mortgage right now, but we won’t feel the pain until later.”

The competing demands could deepen political battles over the size and role of the government, the trade-offs between taxes and spending, the choices between helping older generations versus younger ones, and the bottom-line questions about who should ultimately shoulder the burden.

The problem, many analysts say, is that these record government deficits have arrived at the very same time as the long-feared explosion begins in spending on benefits under Medicare and Social Security. The nation’s oldest baby boomers are approaching 65, setting off what experts have warned for years will be a fiscal nightmare for the government.

William H. Gross, managing director of the Pimco Group, the giant bond-management firm has said, “What a good country or a good squirrel should be doing is stashing away nuts for the winter, the United States is not only not saving nuts, it’s eating the ones left over from the last winter.”

Making maters even worse, is that the United States will not be the only government competing to refinance huge debt.

Japan, Germany, Britain and other industrialized countries have even higher government debt loads, measured as a share of their gross domestic product, and they too borrowed heavily to combat the financial crisis and economic downturn. As the global economy recovers and businesses raise capital to finance their growth, all that new government debt is likely to put more upward pressure on interest rates.

Even a small increase in interest rates has a big impact. An increase of one percentage point in the Treasury’s average cost of borrowing would cost American taxpayers an extra $80 billion this year — about equal to the combined budgets of the Department of Energy and the Department of Education.

But that would seem like an overly optimistic outlook, as the cost of our debt servicing is expected to rise much higher. Alan Levenson, chief economist at T. Rowe Price, estimated that the Treasury’s tab for debt service this year would have been $221 billion higher if it had faced the same interest rates as it did last year.

And the White House estimates that the government will have to borrow about $3.5 trillion more over the next three years. On top of that, the Treasury has to refinance, or roll over, a huge amount of short-term debt that was issued during the financial crisis. Treasury officials estimate that about 36 percent of the government’s marketable debt — about $1.6 trillion — is coming due in the months ahead.

“Inflation, higher interest rate and rollover risk should be the primary concerns,” declared the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee, a group of market experts that provide guidance to the government, on Nov. 4.

But with a Fed Chairman focused on deflation and with a strong sense in government’s role in “reflating” the economy, those do not seem to be this group’s primary concerns at all.

I’ve said since late 2008 that “the worst is yet to come,” and “this time groups that aren’t traditionally hit by such economic downturns (ie. government workers) are going to be hit and hit hard,” and all that seems to be on our horizon.

We COULD easily see a return to STAGFLATION by mid to late 2010, depending on how quickly and how high the cost of our debt servicing rises. A higher debt servicing will push interest rates higher, as government borrows so much, there’s little left over for private sector borrowing, and that credit crunch, coupled with rising tax rates (especially if healthcare reform and Cap and Trade pass) will pressure inflation rates much higher very quickly.

Worse still, is with government’s interest payments higher, the Fed will not be able to tamp down inflation with lower interest rates.

That portends a tsunami of high interest, inflation and yes, even higher unemployment rates not far down the road.

The Third World Rejects "Western" Gayness....

In America we’re constantly assailed from the loony left with the idiotic drumbeat of how “racist, sexist and homophobic” we are.

I guess that’s true, UNLESS you compare us to...well, just about EVERYBODY else.

For instance, in Uganda, recently proposed legislation would impose the death penalty for some gay Ugandans, and their family and friends could face up to seven years in jail if they fail to report them to authorities. Even landlords could be imprisoned for renting to homosexuals.

While the Bill is still being debated, the Ugandan legislation, in its current form, would mandate a death sentence for active homosexuals living with HIV or in cases of same-sex rape. "Serial offenders" also could face capital punishment, but the legislation does not define the term. Anyone convicted of a homosexual act faces life imprisonment.

It also stipulates that anyone who "aids, abets, counsels or procures another to engage of acts of homosexuality" faces seven years in prison if convicted. Landlords who rent rooms or homes to homosexuals also could get seven years and anyone with "religious, political, economic or social authority" who fails to report anyone violating the act faces three years.

Gay rights activists here in the U.S. believe the bill is part of a continent-wide backlash because Africa's gay community is becoming more vocal.

It seems that many in Uganda, however, blame Western influences. "The youths in secondary schools copy everything from the Western world and America," said high school teacher David Kisambira. "A good number of students have been converted into gays. We hear there are groups of people given money by some gay organizations in developed countries to recruit youth into gay activities."

Uganda's ethics minister, James Nsaba Buturo, said the death sentence clause would probably be reviewed but maintained that the law itself was necessary to counter foreign influence. He said homosexuality "is not natural in Uganda," a view echoed by many Ugandans.

Bottom-line, homosexuality IS an aberration, a sexual deviancy in that it deviates from the accepted sexual norm.

Is it a “hanging offense?”

No, but it’s certainly not something worthy of celebration, any more than bestiality, necrophilia or group sex are things that should be celebrated and encouraged.

Far from being “racist, sexist and homophobic,” America has been the most tolerant nation on earth in regards to all three of those derivations and that’s despite its very vocal and intolerant political Left.

How Disparate Impact...AND “Affirmative Action in Lending” Caused the Housing Crash and the Global Credit Crisis

Throughout the 1970s Housing activists like Dale Rathke (co-founder of ACORN and the SEIU) and Gale Cincotta were able to shake down banks with bank lobby sit-ins, forcing them to offer millions of dollars in loans to “low income Americans,” another term for high-risk borrowers. Those early successes only emboldened these advocates for “marginal America.”

They found eager friends in the likes of naïve and die-hard liberals such as Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and William Proxmire (D-WI). Gale Cincotta was a devout opponent of the very necessary practice of redlining, where banks charged higher rates and higher fees for mortgages in areas where the default rate was higher.

Activists like Cincotta and Rathke and others claimed that such practices not only made it difficult for people to own homes in such areas, they kept businesses from opening in such areas due to the higher costs and lower profitability.

Business is the ONLY real force for GOOD in a free society. That’s right BUSINESS is the ONLY force for good in a FREE SOCIETY.

By solely focusing on making money for their shareholders (owners), businesses seek to help those who CAN and WILL pay to have their problems solved.

Those who CANNOT and WILL NOT pay need not darken their doorsteps. Such chronically poor people DON’T need access to wealth and capital, they NEED to get their lives in order by developing the skills they need to compete and earn a living!

Banks, like any other business are in business SOLELY to make money. They exist for NO other purpose. They do the most social good by delivering the highest profits to their shareholders/owners.

That’s why banks assiduously held to conventional or “traditional” mortgage lending guidelines or parameters, UNTIL forced to abandon them by a series of government law suits.

What were those traditional parameters? Why the same ones being applied to most loan applicants today; 20% down, no more than 2½X your income in mortgage debt and your monthly mortgage payment could NOT be more than 28% of the monthly net of the person/persons (limited to TWO for a residential mortgage) on the mortgage documents is the traditional lending criteria.

And yes, while it’s true that under those criteria, there were wide disparities in the rates at which various ethnic groups were able to meet the lending criteria, there was NOTHING at all “UNFAIR” about those traditional lending criteria, DESPITE whatever disparate or disproportionate impact they may have had. The SAME standards were indeed applied to all.

Anti-Capitalists/anti-Americans like Cincotta and Rathke, with the aid of allies like William Proxmire, they were able to turn what should've been harmless studies, that showed, for instance that banks in Brooklyn, NY invested only 11% of their capital in Brooklyn and that “blacks with similar incomes were far more often turned down for mortgages than whites.”

William Proxmire had no background and less understanding about how the financial services sector worked, which means he didn’t know that banks investing nearly 90% of their assets away from their local areas, was done SOLELY to generate higher profits for their shareholders/owners, which made those banks not only more profitable, but more viable.

And as Steven Malanga of the Manhattan Institute adroitly noted, “the banks protested that such studies did not take into account the creditworthiness of these applicants (ie, credit histories, existing debt to income ratio, the loan to value (of the property) ratio of the desired loan, etc.) which was far more important than income.”

By 1979 this anti-capitalist Axis was able to pass the Community Reinvestment Act, which even the NY Times assailed noting, “Our institutions are not social service organizations...” and added, “measures that would weaken (lending) standards are dangerous...New York’s savings banks already hold large numbers of defaulted mortgages, including many inner city properties...we raise a strong word of caution against the expectation that bank credit is a substitute for wages, salaries, and other income that is necessary to keep a community alive economically,” concluding, “It is hard to believe that anyone would argue that bad loans are good social investments.”

None-the-less, the CRA, which was only debated in one chamber of Congress (the Senate), and with very few legislators present, was passed. Senator Proxmire limited the visibility of the Bill by attaching it to the Housing and Community Development Act, which included the always popular block grants, which meant money to the Senator’s home states.

The CRA not only “gave the housing activists a seat at the table,” it enabled them to monitor every bank’s lending practices and block any mergers and acquisitions by reporting any complaints to specially set up departments within HUD and the DOJ.

By the mid-1980s Housing activists had developed their assaults on banks to an art form. Seattle’s rainier Bank was hit by a campaign organized by a bus driver named Keith Dublanica, who claimed that Rainier Banks lending policies “discriminated against minorities,” and the protesters demanded more “flexible terms” for specific groups of borrowers.

The Seattle Times reported that what Dublanica wanted was “a kind of affirmative action proposal in the making of loans.” And indeed that’s exactly what Keith Dublanica wanted, demanding that the banks offer a 2% discount on rates and waive fees for certain (predominantly minority) neighborhoods. As Dublanica put it, “If the racial mix is different from the rest of the city, perhaps the (lending) criteria should be somewhat relaxed.”

In fact, it’s the REVERSE. Poor credit risks SHOULD ALWAYS pay HIGHER RATES and HIGHER FEES to get loans, that’s the only way to limit default rates among that largely reckless and irresponsible group. In fact, EVERY high risk loan made to the poor directly HARMS working people who CAN afford conventional mortgages under traditional lending parameters. It harms them because the costs of those failures are placed on their backs when they apply for loans and they pay for the subsequent and necessary bailouts with higher taxes.

Ironically enough, the 1990s saw the Clinton administration borrow from the Conservative’s “Ownership Society” endorsed by the likes of Jack Kemp, G W Bush and Bob Dole, to replace public housing as the liberal Democrats’ top priority with an ownership agenda of their own.

As economist John H. Makin noted, "No longer would public housing be at the top of the liberal Democratic agenda...instead, borrowing from conservative ideas about the inestimable benefit of home ownership to the striving poor, the Clinton administration and members of his Party in the House and Senate decided to use government power to achieve that aim.”

Janet Reno (the AG) and Henry Cisneros (HUD Secretary) began suing banks which didn’t make enough loans to low-income Americans and the legal concept behind that screwball policy was yet another screwball concept called “disparate impact.”

Disparate Impact is a deliberate LIE and a SHAM. It seeks to label ANY standard that has a different/disproportionate impact on one group than another to be deliberately discriminatory against the negatively impacted group.

According to this fatally flawed concept, a bank might have policies that were fair and equally applied to all, but if the outcomes were different, the policy was deemed deliberately or objectively discriminatory. For instance, if a bank had a longstanding policy of not issuing mortgages on homes valued at less than $80,000, it could be considered guilty of discrimination because that policy would be determined to adversely and disproportionately impact the poor.

When Henry Cisneros left the Clinton administration in 1997 to accept a very lucrative appointment to the board of Countrywide Mortgage, his successor, Andrew Cuomo actually used the term “affirmative action” when defending the use of disparate impact to force banks to loosen their lending criteria.

At an April 6th, 1998 press conference, Andrew Cuomo said, “but for the affirmative action on the part of the banks, most of these recipients would not have qualified for conventional mortgages." Cuomo went on to acknowledge that the loans were at a “higher risk of default,” and the banks HAD TO “lower their standards on loan applications” to make those loans.

With that admission, Andrew Cuomo had chronicled the perverse and disastrous consequences of what was then two decades and would become three decades of government-coerced lending, via the concept of "disparate impact," to millions of non-creditworthy borrowers.

By 2008 over $4 TRILLION in high-risk, subprime loans were made, almost all of them bought by Fannie Mae and packaged by Freddie Mac into “mortgage backed securities” which were then sold to Wall Street and the rest of the world as highly safe and secure “AAA-rated bonds!”

In short, the entire housing collapse, the mortgage meltdown and the subsequent global credit crisis was caused by government’s adherence to the flawed and pernicious concept of “disparate impact” and its subsequent meddling in the mortgage market (almost solely by politicians with little or no understanding or experience in the financial services sector) in order to effect what Andrew Cuomo accurately called “affirmative action in lending,” or what numerous economists have called “credit socialism.”

Worse yet, subprime loans have not been outlawed, the CRA that’s been used to coerce banks to make TRILLIONS in high-risk, subprime debt has not been abolished, Credit Default Swaps and other murky forms of derivative trading have not been stopped. In short, the SAME policies that caused the current crisis, including many in Washington’s adherence TO and affection FOR the very flawed and pernicious concept of “disparate impact” have yet to be eliminated!

SEE Andrew Cuomo's April, 1996 Pres Conference lauding "affirmative action in lending"; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lr1M1T2Y314&feature=PlayList&p=529CA6593D352484&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=97

Misplaced Priorities...

 

Holder’s Incompetence Seeks Leniency For KSM but Seeks to “Throw the Book” at Three Heroic Navy Seals

In keeping with the Left-leaning, media, best exampled by the likes of Chris (“He went to maybe an enemy camp” - in referring to President Obama’s visit to West Point) Matthews and similar scum that have infected both American politics and its media, Eric Holder, a man completely in simpatico with the pathology (often erroneously euphemized as “political correctness”) that focused the bulk of the Military’s concern and sympathy for jihadist Major Malik Hasan and worried itself sick over unfounded fears of an “anti-Islamic backlash,” rather than the 13 AMERICAN soldiers killed and the 33 others wounded soldiers at Fort Hood, has now made more than clear his desire to push those same intentions legally.

He’s made those intentions clear as he prepares to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM) in a New York City criminal Court, despite the fact that KSM was never mirandized or accorded ANY of the rights that ANY criminal defendant warrants in an American court of law, while he seeks to “throw the book” at three Navy Seals who brought in Ahmed Hashim Abed, the jihadist behind the murder and mutilation of four Blackwater civilian contractors, working to improve the infrastructure of Iraq, back in 2004.

The prosecution of the three Seals (Matthew McCabe, a Special Operations Petty Officer Second Class (SO-2), Petty Officer Jonathan Keefe, SO-2 and Petty Officer Julio Huertas, SO-1) amounts to, no less than siding with Ahmed Hashim Abed and his jihadist in arms AGAINST the U.S. Military.

And trying jihadists detained on battlefields as the “enemy combatants” they are, amounts to virtually assuring their acquittal since none of the required legal requirements for arrest, for search warrants and evidence collection were followed...but NONE of that matters to Eric Holder, who really wants to put the Bush administration and the FBI and CIA on trial.

DUMB!

A HUGE majority of the American people support the way the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were waged.

Add this to the Obama administration’s non-stimulating “stimulus program,” the ill=conceived (pay more for less care) healthcare overhaul and the now UNSCIENTIFIC, punitively anti-business and anti-job creation “Cap and Trade” fiasco and the coming tax increase tsunami and you have a mosaic of misfortune.

The end result here is almost certainly going be even worse than the debacle that the star-crossed Jimmy Carter presided over.

N.B. The video showing Chris (Hoof and Mouth) Matthews referring to West Point as an "enemy camp": http://sayanythingblog.com/entry/chris_matthews_refers_to_obamas_west_point_audience_as_enemy_camp/

Huckabee and the Clemmons Issue...

First, the horror – a homicidal thug ambushed four Washington State Police officers, after being paroled on charges of raping a thirteen year-old!

Yes, another example of the Criminal Justice system letting down the people who pay for it.

And stranger still yet ANOTHER example of Mike Huckabee’s alleged “Christian values” coming back to haunt all of us.

Apparently the former Presidential candidate and former Governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee, still believes that pablum about “inside every bad person is a good one trying to get out,” when Bill Bratton’s “Inside every turnstile jumper is a child-rapist trying to get out,” is far more likely and backed by the bulk of the existing empirical evidence.

Maurice Clemmons’s saga begins back in May of 1989, when Clemmons, then only 17, was caught with a gun at a Little Rock school. That appears to have been his first run in with the law.

Almost immediately after his expulsion from school over the aforementioned gun incident, Clemmons took part in a series of burglaries that landed him in prison. In one late-night incident, a middle-aged woman was hit in the face and Clemmons and another teen snatched her purse. He made the news again when he hid a 10-inch metal bar in his sock before a pretrial hearing, and once again when a padlock he threw at a bailiff hit Clemmons' own mother.

In 1989, for these and other crimes, the young Clemmons received a combined sentence adding up to 108 years, by the Arkansas Times' count. Some argued that that was excessive given his age and apparently the fact that no one was actually killed in those incidents.

By the time then-governor Huckabee was mulling a plea for clemency in 2000, Clemmons had spent roughly a decade (11 years) behind bars, and Maurice Clemmons pledged that he’d turned his life around. As governor, Huckabee granted pardons and commutations much more than most. According to ABC, many believed it was a religious issue for Huckabee, a Baptist minister.

Thus it made strategic sense that Clemmons stressed his faith in a letter to Governor Huckabee, obtained by the Seattle Times:

Clemmons said he came from "a very good Christian family" and "was raised much better than my actions speak (I'm still ashamed to this day for the shame my stupid involvement in these crimes brought to my family name.)," he wrote.  (OR more aptly, some slick lawyer wrote FOR HIM:)

"Where once stood a young (16) year old misguided fool, who's (sic) own life he was unable to rule. Now stands a 27 year old man, who has learned through 'the school of hard knocks' to appreciate and respect the rights of others. And who has in the midst of the harsh reality of prison life developed the necessary skills to stand along (sic) and not follow a multitude of do evil, as I did as a 16 year old child."

In May 2000, citing Clemmons' youth at the time of his crimes, Huckabee commuted the sentence to 47 years, making Clemmons eligible for parole. The board granted parole in July and Clemmons was released in August, but a year later he was back in prison for another Arkansas robbery. He got a 10-year sentence but in 2004 Clemmons was paroled again. He soon moved to Washington State.

For several years after the move, he apparently avoided run-ins with the police. He next landed in jail earlier this year on a second-degree child rape charge - sex with a minor – a 13 year-old.

Just a week before the alleged shooting Sunday, Clemmons got out on $150,000 bail, by posting just 10% or $15,000 secured through a bail bondsman.

It costs the average American charged with  DUI some $20,000 to defend against the charges and get back on the road again...this guy walks out from a kiddie-raper beef on a measly FIFTEEN Grand?!

And as many others have pointed out, this isn't the first time we've seen Huckabee blame the parole board when a parolee reoffends.

When the case of Wayne DuMond became an issue during Huckabee's run for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, the former Governor offered a different set of facts, but almost the same response.

Wayne Dumond was convicted of rape in the 1980s and was paroled in 1997 after Huckabee, who’d declined to commute the sentence, lobbied the parole board to free DuMond. Huckabee has persistently denied a role in the board's decision, despite a ton of evidence to the contrary.

After he was paroled, DuMond went on to kill at least one woman in Missouri.

I didn’t support Mike Huckabee in the GOP Primaries and this was NOT the reason...among other things, I just didn’t like his “we are our brother’s keeper” outlook on things...but then, I never cared much for that kind of sappy stuff.

The other day, Mike Huckabee released a statement that said in part;

“He was recommended for and received a commutation of his original sentence from 1990, this commutation made him parole eligible and he was then paroled by the parole board once they determined he met the conditions at that time.

“He was arrested later for parole violation and taken back to prison to serve his full term, but prosecutors dropped the charges that would have held him.

“It appears that he has continued to have a string of criminal and psychotic behavior but was not kept incarcerated by either state.”  (Mike Huckabee)
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He also apologized personally to the families of the slain police officers. I commend him on that, BUT I have a HUGE problem with a lot of the above statement.

First, it seems to seek to whitewash his own role in the commutation of Clemmons' sentence, when at the time, he’d said that Clemmons sentence (108 years) for a five state violent crime spree, was too severe for a teenager.

Nonsense, they stone violent teens to death in some of the countries America’s Left openly admire. In my view, that’s ONE of the very few things such hell-holes do fairly well.

Huckabee’s last sentence, consciously or not, seems to vindicate this savage by alleging some psychiatric illness on his part...again, NONSENSE; (1) mental illness does NOT result in a ruling of “mentally incompetent” in over 90% of the cases (nor SHOULD IT) in U.S. courts and (2) there’s no evidence whatsoever that this goon was at all mentally ill.

That last sentence seems to indicate that Huckabee hasn't learned ANYTHING even from this failure of our overly lenient criminal justice system.

Maurice Clemmons deserved to have gone down in a hail of gun fire a few decades earlier. It's only too bad that he didn't.

I think more and more Americans are getting the right idea – “Let’s just vote the bastards OUT, no matter what Party, no matter what they claim, professional politicians are about as trustworthy as used cars salesman...on their best days.

58% of Swiss Vote to Ban Minarets (the towers above Mosques) in Switzerland...

This is very welcome news!

The Swiss people voted to ban minarets (those towers, or spires above Mosques) in Switzerland, by a whopping 58% of Swiss voters!

The Wall Street Journal reported it this way, “Swiss voters Sunday approved a ban on the construction of new minarets on mosques, defying appeals from the government to reject the proposal and raising the specter of a new round of tensions in Europe concerning the role of Islam on the Continent.

“The vote highlights the persistent conflict over the integration of Europe's growing Muslim population into civil society...”

“...The Swiss voted strongly for the ban, with 58% of votes in favor of the initiative and 42% against. Until about a month ago, polls had predicted voters would solidly reject the ban...”

SEE: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125947451116668259.html#

I’m liking the Swiss more and MORE!

An Awesome Speech by Congressional Candidate Lieutenant Colonel Allen West

This is an absolutely AWESOME video of a GREAT speech by Congressional Candidate Lieutenant Colonel Allen West - who is running for Congress for Florida's 22nd Congressional District. SEE: http://allenwestforcongress.com/


H/T to FDNY Deputy Chief Paul Mannix, President of Merit Matters

Revisiting an Ironic, Earlier Comment on Another Blog;...

On a piece over at Cynical Nation titled, Obama and the pirates

(Posted by BNJ)

http://www.cynicalnation.com/2009/04/obama_and_the_pirates.html#comments

Barry said, “I don't have time to say much about this other than that I'm disappointed (though not surprised) that so many on the right can't bring themselves to celebrate this because their guy didn't get elected in November. And yes, much of the Left did the same thing for the past eight years, but that doesn't make it okay. So even if I never have occasion to do it again, I'm drinking a toast to Obama and dead pirates.”

In response, and remember, this was back in mid-April of 2009, I replied, “I feared we were getting another Jimmy Carter, but it seems we have another G W Bush - a dedicated, albeit cautious Keynesian, determined to keep us engaged in a military WoT.” (JMK)

Turns out that this certainly appears to have been merely “wishful thinking,” on my part.

Yes, getting the UAW to agree to major concessions was a PLUS, but putting them ahead of GM’s investors and first-line creditors, as was done with the government-overhaul was a HUGE NEGATIVE.

Moreover, the current administration is not only “Carteresque,” but “the Carter administration on steroids.”

Jimmy Carter’s foreign policies were an unmitigated disaster, especially in regards to Iran, where the ousting of the Shah led to the return of the Ayatollah Khomeini and the legitimizing of the scourge of today’s world “radicalized Islam,” by giving it the legitimacy of a home state.

His economic policies were a continuation of the Johnson-Nixon-Ford Keynesianism, only with an emphasis on even MORE reckless and irresponsible social spending.

Housing activists like Gail Cincotta and Wade Rathke (ACORN’s founder) found political allies in the Liberal Congress of that era, especially William Proxmire (D-WI) and Ted Kennedy (D-MA), who helped guide the horrific Community Reinvestment Act through Congress.

Among the worst abuses of the intentionally abusive CRA was that it had housing activists like Ms. Cincotta and Mr. Rathke overseeing how the banks doled out their loans!

The CRA was the first of many steps, and perhaps the BIGGEST, in transforming America’s banking system from one centered on making profits for their shareholders (a bank’s ONLY rightful purpose) to one of assisting in delivering a perceived “public good.”

Ironically enough, Barack Obama was a huge part of that movement. His first job out of law school was working as a lawyer for ACORN and taking on Citibank in 1996 for “not making enough loans to low-income people” (that is “people unable to pay them back).

Today, the banking industry is heavily government-controlled and risk-averse bureaucrats have foisted policies on banks that are crimping the number of loans such institutions make to Venture Capital investments (entities that might turn into the nest Intel or Microsoft) and into Federal Treasury Securities...right now U.S. banks are net BUYERS of such Treasury securities to the tune of some $185 BILLION annually! That’s BAD because is means A LOT LESS credit available for business loans and home mortgages.

Ultimately it means a much LOWER living standard for ALL Americans.

And THAT is the goal of the Liberals in this country...especially those in government.

What we’re looking at now is an economic tsunami whose winds haven’t even hit us YET.

Early next year the rest of the world’s buyers of U.S. debt are set to increase the costs of borrowing for Uncle Sam and that means the cost of servicing that debt will ultimately more than double over the next few years! What that’ll mean is higher interest rates and high inflation rates, along with prolonged high unemployment for as far as the eye can see.

We could, if we’re very unfortunate, see a return of STAGFLATION by 2010...which would almost certainly signal the end of Democratic dominance in Congress.

“But what if they’ve already locked us into Cap and Trade based treaties and a huge healthcare entitlement, by then,” many ask.

Well, it’ll be up to the next crew in D.C. to clean up that mess. Eradicating such treaties, or otherwise signaling our unilateral unwillingness to live up to them AND pulling, not only any new entitlements out by the roots, but perhaps dismantling most, if not ALL of the Great Society, by transforming them the way workfare transformed welfare.

The healthcare overhaul COULD be fine-tuned and tweaked in exactly that way.

Any newly expanded “public option” made restricted (say no more than 4 visits to a physician a year) and rationed (perhaps no more than $10,000 in care, or less, per year)...while encouraging private insurers to allow those able and willing to circumvent that rationing and restrictions via various forms of “gap insurance.”

That way, businesses and Municipalities would be freed from the burdens of providing all the free healthcare they do now AND, more importantly, the rationing and restrictions of the public option would be targeted to the poor and non-productive.

We’re heading for some very dark days economically because the media has assisted in exonerating government in a government-caused economic calamity.

Since the 1970s Liberals like Senators Proxmire and Kennedy helped housing activists force banks to make more loans to low income Americans. That’s BAD BUSINESS and it’s bad for America.

Traditional lending criteria (20% down, along with a reliance on one’s credit history, debt to income ration, etc) resulted in the SAME default rate among both black and white borrowers, proving that “credit-worthy blacks were NOT turned down by banks.”

But Moderate Republicans played a big part in this as well. Jack Kemp fought for “the ownership society” and G W Bush and most of those in his administration also bought into this, baling out banks after they were legislated into making more and more high-risk loans.

Keynesianism, specifically government meddling in the mortgage market is what caused the subprime mortgage mess and triggered the global credit crisis, and STILL the U.S. government has done NOTHING to correct the problems that created that mess. Subprime loans are still legal to make, Glass-Spiegel has not be re-instituted, the CRA hasn’t been reformed, credit default swaps and both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are still very much involved in the mortgage market.

Worse yet, Cap and Trade promises to create a bubble similar to the housing and the tech bubble with energy!

Keynesian economic policy amounts to economic malfeasance.

And yet Keynesianism hasn’t been blamed for the mess it created, instead, it’s been anointed the cure!

As a result, we’ve followed up a Keynesian (big government) created problem with, not only MORE, but indeed hyper-Keynesianism.

That does not bode well for our future.