If Tea Partiers think the NAACP condemning the Tea Party as racist is, essentially, an irrelevant action, then what do you suppose members of al Qaeda will think of President Obama condemning al Qaeda as being racist?
Good morning.
Good morning.
Turns out that the prisoners in Gitmo would rather stay in Gitmo than go home.
The Obama administration would quickly send home six Algerians held at the military detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but for one problem: The men don’t want to go. Given the choice between repatriation and incarceration, the men choose Gitmo, according to their lawyers.
He’s got what seems to be a good reason why.
The detainee had asserted that if he is returned, the Algerian government will torture him or he will be targeted by terrorist groups who will kill him if he refuses to join.
But i spite of the recent history of torture of prisoners in Algeria, the administration disagrees.
Administration officials point out that despite this history, the United States, under the Bush and Obama administrations, has already sent 10 Algerian detainees home from Guantanamo Bay, and that none has been persecuted.
"We take some care in evaluating countries for repatriation. In the case of Algeria, there is an established track record and we have given that a lot of weight," said an administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the active litigation. "The Algerians have handled this pretty well: You don’t have recidivism and you don’t have torture."
You know, if we really were torturing prisoners in Gitmo, this sort of request wouldn’t be such an issue. Algeria doesn’t torture released Gitmo detainees, and they want to stay? Understand, we’re not talking about some guys who just showed up.
The administration has been preparing to repatriate one of the six Algerians. But lawyers for Aziz Abdul Naji, 35, who has been held at Guantanamo for more than eight years, said he is "adamantly opposed to going back."
Adamant about staying at Gitmo. Just let that sink in.
(Hat tip: Power Line)
From a Facebook friend,
Q: What do Twilight and the World Cup have in common?
A: They’re 90 minutes, nothing happens, no one scores, and if you don’t like it, it’s because you “just don’t get it”.
Not that we really needed a commission to tell us this, but Obama apparently did.
The co-chairmen of President Obama’s debt and deficit commission offered an ominous assessment of the nation’s fiscal future here Sunday, calling current budgetary trends a cancer "that will destroy the country from within" unless checked by tough action in Washington.
The two leaders — former Republican senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming and Erskine Bowles, White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton — sought to build support for the work of the commission, whose recommendations due later this year are likely to spark a fierce debate in Congress.
They’re talking mostly about a future economic crisis, not even the current one.
Bowles said that unlike the current economic crisis, which was largely unforeseen before it hit in fall 2008, the coming fiscal calamity is staring the country in the face. "This one is as clear as a bell," he said. "This debt is like a cancer."
So where’s all the money going?
The commission leaders said that, at present, federal revenue is fully consumed by three programs: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. "The rest of the federal government, including fighting two wars, homeland security, education, art, culture, you name it, veterans — the whole rest of the discretionary budget is being financed by China and other countries," Simpson said.
Entitlement spending has become the federal government’s primary purpose these days, despite there not being anything in the Constitution specifying this role. And because people feel, indeed, entitled to it, cutting always has been and always will be, extremely difficult if not politically impossible.
And remember, this is before ObamaCare.
What’s their recommendation?
"We can’t grow our way out of this," Bowles said. "We could have decades of double-digit growth and not grow our way out of this enormous debt problem. We can’t tax our way out. . . . The reality is we’ve got to do exactly what you all do every day as governors. We’ve got to cut spending or increase revenues or do some combination of that."
Bowles pointed to steps taken recently by the new coalition government in Britain, which also faces an acute budgetary problem, as a guide to what the commission might use in its recommendations. That would mean about three-quarters of the deficit reduction would be accomplished through spending cuts, and the remainder with additional revenue.
I remember what got George Bush (the first one) essentially fired from the Presidency. He promised, "Read my lips; no new taxes." He then proceeded to go along with Congressional Democrats who bargained with him to raise taxes with promises of spending cuts to come later. The taxes went up, but the spending cuts never happened. The public blamed Bush, but they were only half right.
Democrats now control Congress (for now). Do you really think they’ll go for such spending cuts? Their history over the decades suggests they’ll have nothing to do with them, and they’ll run us into the ground with debt.
If Republicans win big enough in November to change the balance of power, they had better start living up to their talk of fiscal conservatism. But if they do, will the entitled public go along with it?
Good morning.
They check immigration status at traffic stops. This can only be referring to those racists in … Rhode Island. Do you think we’re likely to see a lawsuit from the Justice Department there? Yea, me neither. In fact, it’s already been upheld by the First Circuit Court of Appeals when a private citizen sued. Yet the government is going after Arizona for this. Can’t have anything to do with who each state voted for in the last election, right?
“A federal district court judge in Boston today struck down the 1996 federal law that defines marriage as a union exclusively between a man and a woman.” I’ve read portions of the ruling, and I can actually see the judge’s point. However, I think the 10th Amendment’s “equal protection” clause is being misused a bit to now refer to things like health benefits, which doesn’t really strike me as “protection” from a government’s viewpoint. And Jack Balkin, a supporter of same-sex marriage incidentally, wonders (among other things) if liberals really want to go down this path with the 10th Amendment. “As much as liberals might applaud the result, they should be aware that the logic of his arguments, taken seriously, would undermine the constitutionality of wide swaths of federal regulatory programs and seriously constrict federal regulatory power.”
The “biggest revolution in the NHS [Britain’s National Health System] for 60 years” is … giving doctors responsibility for overseeing patient care! Yes folks, it took 60 years of socialized medicine for them to realize that. Do you want to lose those 60 years of common sense here?
Much of the media is saying that the report that was commissioned by the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia to investigate the ClimateGate document dump exonerated the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia. Except there’s the issue of the biggest thing critics have been harping on; the “hide the decline” suggestion that inconvenient data has been reworked to be consistent with the conclusion already drawn. Buried in the report is this gem:
On the allegation that the references in a specific e-mail to a “trick” and to “hide the decline” in respect of a 1999 WMO report figure show evidence of intent to paint a misleading picture, we find that, given its subsequent iconic significance (not least the use of a similar figure in the IPCC Third Assessment Report), the figure supplied for the WMO Report was Misleading.
Terry Miller explains:
The researchers were not trying to hide evidence of a decline in global temperatures over the last decade—we have plenty of actual thermometer readings to show temperatures in recent years. What they were trying to hide was the discrepancy between actual temperature readings and the temperatures suggested by tree ring data. They have relied on tree ring data to show that the earth was cooler in the past. If the tree ring data is not reliable (as the discrepancy in recent years would suggest), then maybe the earth was actually hotter in the past than these researchers would have us believe—and perhaps the hot temperatures of recent years do not represent unprecedented global warming but just natural variation in climate.
So the big issue that critics latched on to is, indeed, still a big issue.
Good morning.
Four years after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the schools there have made an impressive turnaround. How this was done was with rebuilding the system with school choice and competition. It’s working.
Is there a turn in the tide regarding gun rights? As a result of the recent Supreme Court ruling on 2nd Amendment rights, a DA in Wisconsin will not prosecute certain state laws restricting the use or carrying of firearms. Some of the laws he will not prosecute include:
prohibiting uncased or loaded firearms in vehicles; prohibiting the carrying of concealed weapons, including firearms; prohibiting the possession of firearms in public buildings; and prohibiting the possession of firearms in establishments where alcohol may be sold or served.
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Besides not letting them learn to read, black slaves couldn’t own guns either. Justice Clarence Thomas likens restrictions to the 2nd Amendment to tactics used by racists. From his opinion on the McDonald v. Chicago suit,
Militias such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camellia, the White Brotherhood, the Pale Faces and the ’76 Association spread terror among blacks. . . . The use of firearms for self-defense was often the only way black citizens could protect themselves from mob violence.
By the way, Otis McDonald, of McDonald v. Chicago, is black.
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And lastly, regarding the 2nd Amendment, a cogent and well thought out argument. Excerpt,
In no other country, at no other time, has such a right existed. It is not the right to hunt. It is not the right to shoot at soda cans in an empty field. It is not even the right to shoot at a home invader in the middle of the night.
It is the right of revolution.
Written not by a Tea Partier or Right-wing Gun Nut, but by a very liberal author at Daily Kos.
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Well, if we can’t ban gunsmoke, then how about… smoke?
Under the new law, smoking is prohibited in indoor and outdoor areas frequented by the public, including sidewalks, parking garages, bars, restaurants, stores, stadiums, playgrounds and transit centers. Lighting up outside is also banned in places that are within 20 feet of indoor areas.
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There won’t be any smoke around our family meal, though. In Family Meal as Therapy, we read,
…there is something about a shared meal–not some holiday blowout, not once in a while but regularly, reliably–that anchors a family even on nights when the food is fast and the talk cheap and everyone has someplace else they’d rather be. And on those evenings when the mood is right and the family lingers, caught up in an idea or an argument explored in a shared safe place where no one is stupid or shy or ashamed, you get a glimpse of the power of this habit and why social scientists say such communion acts as a kind of vaccine, protecting kids from all manner of harm.
At risk to my standing at my place of employment, I make it a point to have dinner with my family. It matters.
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What about Jeremiah 29:10? Never read a Bible verse; especially Jeremiah 29:11.
Good morning.
Which country is not allowed to defend itself?
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