Lefty loon Nancy Pelosi wants those who oppose the Radical Islam Victory Mosque to be investigated. She wants to know who is funding their efforts to keep it from being built. Are you kidding me? Hey lady, how about investigating who the hell is funding the thing being built. That would be far more instructive. Hey media, why don’t you people do your damn job. For once. Find out who is building a freaking monument to the 9/11 attacks. This is a provocative statement by radical Islam.
I pray that November will find these great Unites States with a new Speaker. Exactly what side is Pelosi on anyway? Yea, I get that Islam has the right to build a mosque on that site. But it is not the right thing to do. I hope Americans continue to fight against this insensitive provocation to this country. It’s an outrage that a leader of this country would want to investigate the people opposed to this. Unbelievable.
Radical Islam slammed two planes into our towers. We lost thousands of Americans in that attack. People have mourned their losses for ten years. Countless billions of dollars it cost this country. And the religion that perpetrated this attack is going to build a monument to their victory using our freedom of religion? That is a real tolerant and sensitive religion.
Even more important is the reaction from our leaders. Pelosi does not have our back. Obama does not have our back. They are basically attacking the people they supposedly serve. Huge majorities of people are against the mosque. People are simply asking that it be built somewhere else. Why is that so difficult? It’s not. Radical Islam wants their mosque built there as a symbol of the Islamic victory. But some of our leaders support radical Islam over America. At least Harry Reid came out against it, as difficult as that probably was for him, but he is in the fight of his political life.
Can we make a stand against radical Islam in our country right here and now?
The border with Mexico has 1,969 miles. The Obama administration is acting tough on illegal immigration by signing a bill that would increase the number of border patrol agents and add two unmanned drones.
“But the one thing they are not willing to do is what has been proven to work: a strong physical presence at the border and diligent enforcement of existing law,” Sessions said. “We know how to solve the problem; what we don’t know is why President Obama remains unwilling to do so.” . . .
The bill includes money for 1,500 new border personnel, a pair of unmanned drones and military-style bases along the border. It would be paid for mostly by hiking fees on foreign companies that use U.S. visa programs to import lower-cost labor from countries like India. Firms with more than 50 employees and more than 50 percent of their employees on H-1B work visas would be affected. . . .
Border Patrol Director of Media Relations Lloyd Easterling confirmed this week . . . that his agency is planning for a net decrease of 384 agents on the U.S.-Mexico border in fiscal 2010, which begins on October 1. . . .
The Obama administration is proposing to scale back some border security programs set up after the 9/11 attacks . . .
• The Border Patrol, which doubled to 20,000 agents during the Bush administration, would lose 180 agents through attrition. Border staffing would stay the same.
• A “virtual” fence of pole cameras and sensors aimed at stopping illegal immigrants, drug smugglers and terrorists on the U.S.-Mexican border, faces a $225 million cut from $800 million last year. That would delay implementation while a review of the fence, plagued by technical problems, is done.
• Five of the Coast Guard’s 13 elite Maritime Security and Safety Teams (MSST), created since 2001 to protect waterfront cities, would be eliminated. Obama is proposing cuts in New York City, San Francisco, Anchorage and King’s Bay, Ga.
• The existing 643 miles of concrete-and-steel border fence would be maintained but no new barriers would be built. . . .
Spending under the budget heading “border security, fencing, infrastructure and technology” has gone down — from $1.2 billion in 2007 to $800 million this fiscal year. Obama’s proposed 2011 budget calls for trimming the fence budget again, to $574 million. . . .
The other major piece of the fencing budget is the so-called “virtual border fence” championed by Bush. Earlier this year, the Department of Homeland Security announced it was freezing funding for the “virtual border fence” along the U.S. Mexican border. The virtual fence — which includes cameras, radar and ground sensors to detect illegal border crossings — has been plagued by cost overruns, missed deadlines and technical bugs, such as the radar motion detector being unable to distinguish between humans and animals crossing the border. The program had gotten several dreadful reviews from the Government Accountability Office. . . .
Here’s a pleasant Friday afternoon surprise. Don’t expect to see it on the front page of tomorrow’s NYT, though. Via AP:
A federal appeals court on Friday threw out a decision that had barred Congress from withholding funds from ACORN, the activist group driven to ruin by scandal and financial woes.
The ruling by the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan reversed a decision by a district court judge in Brooklyn that found Congress had violated the group’s rights by punishing it without a trial.
Congress cut off ACORN’s federal funding last year in response to allegations the group engaged in voter registration fraud and embezzlement and violated the tax-exempt status of some of its affiliates by engaging in partisan political activities.
Fueling the outrage was a video that caught three employees allegedly advising a couple posing as a prostitute and her boyfriend to lie about her profession and launder her earnings.
ACORN responded with a lawsuit accusing Congress of abusing its power with what amounted to a “corporate death sentence.”
The appeals court disagreed, citing a study finding that ACORN received only 10 percent of its funding from federal sources.
Pennsylvania State University recently released a report summarizing its final “investigation” into whether one of its employees had committed scientific misconduct. The report exonerated Dr. Michael Mann of all charges, although he did receive a tap on the wrist – for sharing unpublished manuscripts with third parties without first getting the authors’ permission!
The result was hardly unexpected. Most experts who question climate disaster claims had assumed Penn State would produce a whitewash. PSU stood to lose significantly in reputation and dollars if it found that Dr. Mann had cheated on research and engaged in other conduct unbecoming of a university professor. What was surprising is the reason it gave for its “not guilty” finding.
Dr. Mann could not possibly be guilty, the report averred, because his “level of success in proposing research and obtaining funding” was possible only because he had “met or exceeded the highest standards of his profession.” Indeed, his research was consistently “judged to be outstanding by his peers.”
Mann’s innocence was further proven, said Penn State, by the awards and recognition he has received. For example, his “hockey stick” temperature graph for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change played a significant role in the IPCC receiving the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. Had his “conduct been outside the range of accepted practices, it would have been impossible for him to receive so many awards and recognitions,” the report argued.
Such a circular tautology would earn an “F” in introductory college reasoning courses. It is eerily similar to views taken by starry-eyed investors and SEC officials before they realized Bernie had Madoff with billions in client money. The Penn State report is akin to what Mrs. Madoff might issue following her “investigation” of his conduct, “investment” strategies, “standards,” accolades and awards.
Dr. Mann and many of his “peers” were implicated in the Climategate scandals, obstruction of legitimate FOIA requests via deletion of emails, manipulation of global warming temperature data and research, and the politicized funding system that kept them and their institutions awash in government/taxpayer dollars. They conferred awards and recognition on each other, excluded skeptical scientists from “peer reviews” of one another’s papers, and conspired to blackball editors who permitted the publication of professional papers by Sallie Baliunas, Willie Soon, Patrick Michaels, Richard Lindzen, Roy Spencer and other climate experts whose work challenged the Mann-made global warming disaster thesis.
In so doing, Mann and his colleagues promoted laws, treaties and regulatory schemes that imposed higher prices and greater government/activist control over energy use, economic growth, and virtually everything modern societies eat, drive, make, ship and do. They, their institutions, and a host of politicians, bureaucrats, bankers and corporate executives thus had a direct stake in the science, politics and “renewable energy future” supported by billions of dollars in annual research grants – and in ensuring that no investigation upset this convenient golden apple cart.
For the first time since 2001, there is real and building momentum to include caps or even reductions in defense spending as part of the bipartisan drive to address the United States’ runaway deficits.
Defense spending, which has more than doubled since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, has always been the third rail of congressional funding debates. After Defense Secretary Robert Gatessaid last year that “the spigot of defense funding opened by 9/11 is closing,” there was widespread skepticism in Washington that either party would take up the cause.
Gates is directing all the military services to tighten their belts, and Pentagon sources say that every shop is looking for things it can do without. But as part of Gates’s plan to incentivize the military to get rid of waste, he’s instituted a policy that services can “keep what they catch,” so that initiative won’t lower budgets all by itself.
But now, a growing chorus of congressional Democrats, along with a smattering of Republicans, is feeling more confident that 2011 could be the year when actual limits on defense funding, or even cuts to the defense budget, might be imposed.
A watershed moment in this debate came last week, when the head of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Daniel K. Inouye, D-HI, unveiled spending guidelines for all the Senate subcommittees. His initial guidelines for the defense subcommittee, which he also chairs, limited core defense spending to $522.8 billion, $2.1 billion less than the president’s request.
But when Republicans clamored at the hearing for lower overall spending, Inouye later reduced the total allocations by another $6 billion, taking all of that spending authority from defense.
The final guidelines also recommend $157.8 billion in war funding for next year, about $1 billion less than what the administration had asked for.
There is no single duty that a President has as Commander-in-Chief that is more important than ensuring the nation’s engines of defense remain at a level that will deter and defend against any attack upon America or its allies.
How is that going under the Obama Administration? As this is being written, the U.S. Air Force and Navy are seeking alternative ways of powering their aircraft after having been ordered to cut fuel costs by $20 billion. The Obama solution includes an August test flight of the C-17 transport aircraft attempt to fly missions on tallow, which is a nice way of describing animal fat.
The push for biofuels notwithstanding, the notion approaches absurdity considering the fact that, beneath the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, there are millions of untapped barrels of oil to power military aircraft. The absurdity is compounded by the White House attempt to shut down deep water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico which has been struck down by the courts not once, but twice.
My interest in the status of our air defense was piqued while watching a recent C-SPAN broadcast of some Senate committee discussing funding of the C-17. I paid scant attention until one senator said, “We don’t have the money.” Suffice to say, that caught my attention.
Of course we have the money! There are billions unspent in the failed “stimulus” act and millions more wasted weekly across the spectrum of a government that funds all manner of idiotic “research” programs of dubious value. Some $20 million was just spent on signs touting construction projects funded by the stimulus bill.
As Frank Gaffney, the founder and president of the Center for Security Policy, recently noted, “Barack Obama came to office promising to ‘fundamentally transform’ America.” Gaffney and others are increasingly concerned that Obama is “changing the United States from ‘the world’s sole superpower’ to a nation that may require the permission, or at least the help, of others to project power and defend its interests around the globe.”
Nothing invites mischief and outright attack more than weakness. Theodore Roosevelt said, “The pacifist is as surely a traitor to his country and to humanity as is the most brutal wrongdoer.” The latter is a good description these days of Iran.
I’ve been flagging the MSM newspaper bailout campaign for the last two years (chronology recap here). The clamor for big government to rescue old media has not died now.
The latest? Columbia University president Lee Bollinger doing the Chicken Little routine in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Really:
We have entered a momentous period in the history of the American press. The invention of new communications technologies—especially the Internet—is transforming the human capacity to speak, perhaps as monumentally as the invention of the printing press in the 15th century. This is facilitating the largest and fastest expansion of global economic growth in human history. Free speech and a free press are essential to a dynamic economy.
At the same time, however, the financial viability of the U.S. press has been shaken to its core. The proliferation of communications outlets has fractured the base of advertising and readers. Newsrooms have shrunk dramatically and foreign bureaus have been decimated. My best estimate is that there are presently only a few dozen full-time foreign correspondents from the U.S. covering all of China, despite the critical importance of that nation to our future.
Both the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission are undertaking studies of ways to ensure the steep economic decline faced by newspapers and broadcast news does not deprive Americans of the essential information they need as citizens. One idea under consideration is enhanced public funding for journalism.
Bollinger goes on to assert that “trusting the market alone to provide all the news coverage we need would mean venturing into the unknown—a risky proposition with a vital public institution hanging in the balance.” As if life without NPR and PBS would be catastrophic.
Newsalert responds: ” Lee Bollinger makes over a million dollars a year and is a director of the New York Federal Reserve Bank. If Lee Bollinger and his wealthy friends wants to fund investigative research : there’s nothing stopping them.”
As I wrote back in December 2008 in opposition to newspaper moochers:
How “free” can a “free press” be if it is leveraged with government funding? How free would they be to criticize other corporate enterprises seeking local, state, or federal help to keep them afloat in hard times? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? A press beholden to the ruling class – a press that cannot stand on its own two feet and the strength of its products — is a press better off dead.
I noted the pathetic fiscal prognosis for bloated, bankrupt Illinois the other day.
Reader Scott from North Dakota e-mails: “Reading about all of the states that are going belly-up, I can’t help but tout my home-state; North Dakota. Good old-fashioned sense and discipline (lot’s of farmers up there).”
State budget director Pam Sharp says North Dakota should finish its two-year budget cycle with an $800 million surplus.
Some states aren’t as fortunate and had been hoping for extended federal stimulus aid. Congress was poised to extend some stimulus funding to states, but the measure died in the Senate last month. States that counted on the money must now make up the difference in their budgets…Sharp says the state has never relied on federal stimulus funds and has never counted on them.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nev. pauses during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, April, 13, 2010. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
With the nation focused on the spill in the Gulf and hearings with oil executives this week, Democrats in Congress have a tiny amount of breathing room to try to move two enormous spending bills through.
However, Republicans say the votes are still not there for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a sign of the growing public discomfort with exploding budget deficits and national debt. A Reid spokesman blamed Republican obstruction, though it is not at all clear that all 57 Democrats and the two Independents who caucus with the Democrats are currently on board.
Reid, a Nevada Democrat, moved Monday to end debate on a $115 billion grab bag of extensions on unemployment insurance, Medicaid assistance to states, payouts to physicians who take Medicare patients, tax exemptions for certain industries, as well as a series of new taxes on corporations and investors.
This legislation, which would increase the budget deficit by about $79 billion, has been batted around Congress since March, with lawmakers passing short-term extensions in the interim. The House passed a scaled down version late last month that has since been beefed back up by the Senate. Republicans have pushed Democrats to pay for the spending with money from the $862 billion stimulus bill, an idea that has gained traction but continues to be resisted by Reid, a Nevada Democrat.
Democrats aim to pass the “extenders package” this week. But another huge spending battle awaits over $50 billion split between money for state education systems and money to spur community banks to increase lending to small businesses. President Obama pressed congressional leaders in a letter Saturday to pass this spending without paying for it, promising to address the $1.3 trillion deficit and $13 trillion national debt.
Despite the fact that the national spotlight has moved for the moment off of the Senate’s deliberations and on to the oil fiasco — which has taken center stage this week largely due to hearings with executives Tuesday and Wednesday as well as Obama’s two-day trip to the region and Oval Office address to the nation Tuesday night – Reid is still searching for ways to pass the extenders package.
Nancy Pelosi recently told the Catholic Community Conference that she has a duty to pursue public policies in keeping with the values of Jesus.
Pelosi repeatedly referenced “The Word.” She didn’t, however, tell anyone that the word is “crazy,” but this video makes that quite evident:
Kind of like watching Jack Kevorkian trying to gain the trust of attendees at an AARP convention, isn’t it?
“The word was made flesh” — unless that flesh wasn’t wanted for any reason whatsoever.
Here’s a bit of Pelosi’s abortion voting record from On the Issues:
Voted YES on expanding research to more embryonic stem cell lines. (Jan 2007)
Voted YES on allowing human embryonic stem cell research. (May 2005)
Voted NO on restricting interstate transport of minors to get abortions. (Apr 2005)
Voted NO on making it a crime to harm a fetus during another crime. (Feb 2004)
Voted NO on banning partial-birth abortion except to save mother’s life. (Oct 2003)
Voted NO on forbidding human cloning for reproduction & medical research. (Feb 2003)
Voted NO on funding for health providers who don’t provide abortion info. (Sep 2002)
Voted NO on banning Family Planning funding in US aid abroad. (May 2001)
Voted NO on federal crime to harm fetus while committing other crimes. (Apr 2001)
Voted NO on banning partial-birth abortions. (Apr 2000)
Voted NO on barring transporting minors to get an abortion. (Jun 1999)
Rated 100% by NARAL, indicating a pro-choice voting record. (Dec 2003)
Rated 0% by the NRLC, indicating a pro-choice stance. (Dec 2006)
The border with Mexico has 
There is no single duty that a President has as Commander-in-Chief that is more important than ensuring the nation’s engines of defense remain at a level that will deter and defend against any attack upon America or its allies.
