The real global warming agenda

The New York Times reports:

European Union leaders on Friday offered to contribute money to a global fund to help developing countries tackle global warming hoping kick-start stalled talks on a new agreement on climate change.

The European Commission had called on E.U. leaders to make an offer of up to 15 billion euros annually by 2020.

Mr. Reinfeldt, the Swedish prime minister, said leaders had instead agreed that developing nations needed about 100 billion euros annually by 2020 and that, of that sum, between 22 billion euros and 50 billion euros would have to come from public funds, as opposed to private sources like investments in carbon-reduction projects.

Global Warmism is all about government redistribution of wealth. If global warming didn't exist, the left would have to invent it. (Hat tip: Sweetness & Light)

In addition to global wealth redistribution, global warming also serves a domestic agenda. Last May, in regards to global warming, Speaker Pelosi said "Every aspect of our lives must be subjected to an inventory." Democrats generally advocate increased government control of individual lives. Global warming provides the excuse to regulate "every aspect." (Hat tip: Robert L.)

Apple and iPolitics

Reviews say Motorola's new Droid phone will not be competition for the iPhone.  Weisshaupt summarizes why:

Essentially the iPhone is safe from the Droid because most iPhone users are liberals. They are people who WANT a Mommy and Daddy watching over them. iPhone developers  must navigate a Byzantine approval process that is so bad, that some even stoop to using Microsoft's .NET to get things done.  Apple tests and approves every application offered on the iPhone to make sure they all play nice together. This of course ensures the phone will deliver the beautiful and slick  user experience Apple has decided its users will have. The iPhone is a good example of the "one-size-fits all" top-down mentality of liberals.  If you want a different experience from what your masters thinks you SHOULD have and SHOULD want, you are just SOL.  The lowercase "i" in iPhone doesn't occur by accident. The individual just isn't as important, and the "Phone" takes precedence. Many iPhone and Mac  users come near to worshipping Apple and their products,  going so far as to genuflect when they turn on a Apple device, ensure they face San Jose 3 times a day to give thanks for their iLife and to pray for the saving of the pagans who do not yet have one.

Weisskopf's analysis is not completely accurate: I know many Apple fans and they do not face San Jose to give thanks. They face Cupertino.

Hat tip: Instapundit.

Rep. Speier rewrites history

Today, Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA), a member of the House Financial Services committee, wrote a quite jarring sentence to her constituents:

One year after the nearly-catastrophic meltdown of our financial system, Congress is finally addressing the root causes: deregulation, uncontrolled speculation and lack of oversight from the agencies who were supposed to be minding the store.

What were the Financial Services Committee and its current Chairman, Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), doing while the crisis brewed? You guessed it: they were advocating lower lending standards, riskier loans, and denying the possibility of financial problems. For example, Rep. Frank and Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) sent a letter to the heads of Fannie and Freddie exhorting them to lower lending standards for condo buyers. He claimed that those two agencies "are not facing any kind of financial crisis,'' Rep. Frank claimed Fannie Mae and Feddie Mac were "fundamentally sound financially" (see this video starting at 1:37). Rep. Frank consistently advocated "affordable mortgages" which is a code phrase for giving mortgage loans to those who cannot afford them which happens to be exactly what caused the current crisis.

Rep. Speier's statement that the crisis was caused by lack of regulation and oversight appears to be the opposite of the truth: it was regulation ("affordable mortgages") and oversight (like Rep. Frank's letter to Frannie Mae and Freddie Mac) that were direct causes of the financial crisis.

RELATED: Videos of Rep. Frank's faulty memories on the financial crisis are here. A video primer on the Democrat's Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) is here. There is more on the history of the crisis is here. More details of the CRA, including how Pres. Bush's reforms made it worse, are here.

MORE: The East Bridgewater Savings Bank, through cautious management, not only survived the mortgage meltdown, but is solvent and even profitable. What did the regulators say about that: the FDIC complained that, under the requirements of the CRA, it is not making enough risky loans.

The vicious cycle of liberalism

Peggy Noonan writes on the liberal tax cycle:

This week the New York Post carried a report that 1.5 million people had left high-tax New York state between 2000 and 2008, more than a million of them from even higher-tax New York City. They took their tax dollars with them—in 2006 alone more than $4 billion.

You know what New York, both state and city, will do to make up for the lost money. They'll raise taxes.

As to why Democrats in Congress seem unconcerned by record-breaking federal deficits, she writes:

They don't feel anxious, because they never had anything to be anxious about. They grew up in an America surrounded by phrases—"strongest nation in the world," "indispensable nation," "unipolar power," "highest standard of living"—and are not bright enough, or serious enough, to imagine that they can damage that, hurt it, even fatally.

We are governed at all levels by America's luckiest children, sons and daughters of the abundance, and they call themselves optimists but they're not optimists—they're unimaginative. They don't have faith, they've just never been foreclosed on.

Commander-in-chief Obama

James Lavery illustrates our current military strategy:Pres. Obama is normally a shoot-from-the-hip want-immediate-action kind of a guy (Examples: stimulus, nationalized health care, cap-and-tax). Why does he appear to be vacillating on Afghanistan? In my opinion, his delay deciding is because of important national considerations: he does not want to announce an unpopular decision until after the special elections.

NJ Dems demand equal rights for fraudulent voters

"Paul P. Josephson, a lawyer representing the New Jersey Democratic State Committee, wrote to Secretary of State Nina Mitchell Wells, asking her to 'instruct County Clerks not to deny (vote by mail) applications on the basis of signature comparison alone.' "

Socialism isn't cheap!

According to the Economist, as reprinted by Wikipedia, the five countries with the highest prices for a Big Mac (as of 4 February 2009) are:

1. Norway - USD 5.79
2. Switzerland - USD 5.60
3. Denmark - USD 5.07
4. Sweden - USD 4.58
5. Eurozone - USD 4.38

Krauthammer on a roll

Spiegel interviews a feisty Charles Krauthammer. First, Speigel talks of admiring Pres. Obama:

SPIEGEL: Maybe Europeans want to just see a different America, one they can admire again.

Krauthammer: Admire? Look at Obama's speech at the UN General Assembly: "No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation." Take the first half of that sentence: No nation can dominate another. There is no eight year old who would say that -- it's so absurd. And the second half? That is adolescent utopianism.

After Krauthammer suggested that international institutuions are "90 percent worthless and 10 percent harmful", Der Speigel asked:

SPIEGEL: And there is not even 1 percent that is constructive?

Krauthammer: No. The UN is worse than disaster. The UN creates conflicts. Look at the disgraceful UN Human Rights Council: It transmits norms which are harmful, anti-liberty, and anti-Semitic among other things. The world would be better off in its absence.

On Obama's foreign policy:

SPIEGEL: You famously coined the term "Reagan Doctrine" to describe Ronald Reagan's foreign policy. What is the "Obama Doctrine?"

Krauthammer: I would say his vision of the world appears to me to be so naïve that I am not even sure he's able to develop a doctrine. He has a view of the world as regulated by self-enforcing international norms, where the peace is kept by some kind of vague international consensus, something called the international community, which to me is a fiction, acting through obviously inadequate and worthless international agencies. I wouldn't elevate that kind of thinking to a doctrine because I have too much respect for the word doctrine.

SPIEGEL: Are you saying that diplomacy always fails?

Krauthammer: No, foolishness does. Perhaps when he gets nowhere on Iran, nowhere with North Korea, when he gets nothing from the Russians in return for what he did to the Poles and the Czechs, gets nowhere in the Middle East peace talks -- maybe at that point he'll begin to rethink whether the world really runs by international norms, consensus, and sweetness and light, or whether it rests on the foundation of American and Western power that, in the final analysis, guarantees peace.

SPIEGEL: That is the cynical approach.

Krauthammer: The realist approach. Henry Kissinger once said that peace can be achieved only one of two ways: hegemony or balance of power. Now that is real realism. What the Obama administration pretends is realism is naïve nonsense.

On healthcare reform:

SPIEGEL: How could Obama still win Republican support for healthcare reform?

Krauthammer: He should finally realize that we need to reform our insane malpractice system. The US is spending between $60 and $200 billion a year on protection against lawsuits. I used to be a doctor, I know how much is wasted on defensive medicine. Everybody I practiced with spends hours and enormous amounts of money on wasted tests, diagnostic and procedures -- all to avoid lawsuits. The Democrats will not touch it. When Howard Dean was asked why, he said honestly and explicitly that Democrats don't want to antagonize the trial lawyers who donate huge amounts of money to the Democrats.

Read the whole thing.

Racism in E. St. Louis?

Explaining his preference for a black candidate, Mayor Alvin Parks allegedly said "the city wasn't ready to hire a white police chief."

Separately, Mayor Parks explains how FBI's searches of his offices were a "good thing."

PREVIOUSLY on racism:

Overt Racism in Tennessee
San Franciscans discriminate against blacks
"He's not black and he can't represent me, that's just the bottom line"
"NAACP defends racism."
Stanford finds Democrats are racist
Obama nominates a racist
Leaders acknowledge Democrat base is racist
"That's just how white folks will do you." ---Barack Obama
Dem says Dem primary voters are racist
Dems accuse Bill and Hillary of racism

Obama's war on Fox, updated

Fox's ratings are up and Pres. Obama's are down. Glenn McCoy cleverly illustrates the results of the White House's war on Fox News:
PREVIOUSLY:
War on Fox shows White House's frustrations and amateurishness.
Obama's Nixonesque attempt to isolate Fox fails
What the war on Fox shows about Obama's priorities

The public option refuses to die

Sen. Reid tried to revivify the public option. Nate Beeler illustrates:The attempt does not appear to have succeeded. Reid's claim to allow states to "opt-out" seems likely to be a fraud, and lacks critical support. After reviewing the latest Rasmussen poll of likely voters, John Hinderaker writes:

[B]y a margin of 3-1, voters think Obamacare will raise the cost of health care, and by more than two to one, voters believe it will make the quality of health care worse. Isn't that the death knell for government medicine? If not, why not?

When HillaryCare proved unpopular, Bill Clinton and the Democratic Congress dropped it. None of our current leaders appear to be as sensible.

Does your workplace smell ethical?

According to a Brigham Young University study, people's ethics improve when they are in a clean-smelling environment.

Barack Milhous Obama

Michael Ramirez illustrates:
PREVIOUSLY on the Obama-Nixon connection:
Obama goes back to the future
Geo. Will on Obama learning from Nixon
"I'm not naive."
Pew says Obama more polarizing than Nixon
Do all Dems maintain an enemies list?

RELATED: Pres. Obama jokes about having the IRS audit his enemies. TheNewNixon has a collection of similar rhetoric from Nixon and Obama.

Obama steals your tax refund

As the Philadelphia Inquirer reports today, Pres. Obama's "stimulus" plan lowered the amounts for IRS withholding for many. This means you may have had an increase in your take-home pay. The catch is that Obama didn't actually lower tax rates, just the withholding: So, in April, many people will find their refund check surprisingly small. The Inquirer writes:

That little extra bit of money in the form of a larger paycheck tied to the Obama stimulus plan could end up taking a bite out of your federal income tax refund or even leave you owing taxes, say observers.

The stimulus plan lowered federal income tax withholding rates, which results in more take-home pay but less money going toward taxes. The downside is some taxpayers may end up with not enough taxes being withheld to cover what they owe in 2009. ....

Single taxpayers who are working at more than one job and married couples filing jointly in a situation where both spouses work are the most likely groups of taxpayers to be caught short.

"They are probably going to find out they are either getting a lot less back or they might owe," said Mark Steber, chief tax officer at Jackson Hewitt Tax Service, a tax preparation firm.

Others that could face this scenario are those who can be claimed as a dependent on someone else's tax return (for example, a working student claimed as a dependent on a parent's tax return) and some Social Security recipients who work.

HHS says Obamacare will cause costs to go up and 12 million will lose their employer-coverage

From BigGovernment:

Richard Foster, Chief Actuary for the Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, released this week to several Congressional offices a financial analysis of HR 3200, the House version of ObamaCare. He reached some inconvenient conclusions for President Obama and Congressional Leadership:

-“Total national health expenditures under this bill would increase by an estimated 2.7 percent in 2019…”

-“The additional demand for health services could be difficult to meet initially with existing health provider resources and could lead to price increases, cost-shifting, and/or changes in providers’ willingness to treat patients with low-reimbursement health coverage.”

-More than half of the expansion in coverage (18 million out of 34 million) would be from increased Medicaid coverage.

-12 million people would lose employer-sponsored coverage.

-The productivity adjustments to Medicare are “unrealistic” and providers “might end their participation” because the cuts would make serving Medicare beneficiaries unprofitable.

-Medicare Advantage enrollment would decrease by 64 percent (from a projected level of 13.2 million to 4.7 million under the proposal).

As of today, HHS still hadn’t published the analysis on their website, even though it was written by its own staff.

One reason for the 2nd Amendment

The sign reads:

My next door neighbor
wants to BAN all guns!

Their house is
NOT ARMED!

Out of respect for their opinions
I promise NOT to use MY GUNS
to PROTECT THEM

Because there is no law that liberals can pass that would prevent criminals from getting guns, gun control laws are all about assuring criminals that they can commit crimes against innocent civilians without fear.

Hat tip: Gunslinger's Journal

Job opening at ABC's Good Morning America

Only liberals need apply?

Republican self-destruction

Matt Latimer, a former speechwriter for Pres. Geo. W. Bush, writes:

People forget these days that Cheney and Rumsfeld, though traditional conservatives, were once widely-admired senior statesmen who received bipartisan acclaim. That was before BushWorld got hold of them.

By BushWorld, he is referring to those in the Republican party who have engaged in a war of leaks against conservatives. This is consistent with Republican attacks on Gov. Palin and the choosing of the wrong side in NY23 race. Latimer's new book is Speech*Less.

Obama's war on Fox

On ABC's This Week (video below), Laura Ingraham explains why the Obama administration likes ABC but not Fox:

[W]hen [ABC anchor] Charlie Gibson didn't know what the ACORN story was all about, that was a collective gasp you heard across the United States. Charlie Gibson is an esteemed journalist. How do you not know about a story about a group where President Obama cut his political teeth that had been exposed to the extent that Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill were ready to pull the rug out from under them and their funding? That's the kind of story that the White House doesn't want to have reported and repeated on other networks. That's why they don't like Fox News.

Cynthia Tucker points out that it is amateur-hour at the White House: "The scandal for the Obama administration is not that they are trying to manipulate the news media but that they seem to be so clumsy at it."

PREVIOUSLY on the subject of Obama and Fox:
Obama goes back to the future!
Obama's priorities, updated

PREVIOUSLY on the subject of amateur-hour in the Obama administration:
Amateur Hour at the State Dept.
Amateur Hour, continued
Amateur hour at the White House
EU finds Obama debt plan too extreme

Rep. Rogers tells it like it is

Rep. Mike Rogers' (R-MI) opening statement from July 16, 2009 on the lost opportunity of the Democrat health care reform plan remains fresh and relevant:

"I can't tell you how much I'm disappointed at what a lost opportunity we have, I think, to solve a huge problem in health care in access and quality"

Hat tip: Peninsula 9-12

Cell phones, cancer, and press release abuse

The Daily Express reports

MOBILE USE IS LINKED TO BRAIN TUMOURS

LONG-term mobile phone users could face a higher risk of developing cancer in later life, according to a decade-long study.

The report, to be published later this year, has reportedly found that heavy mobile use is linked to brain tumours.

The survey of 12,800 people in 13 countries has been overseen by the World Health Organisation.

Preliminary results of the inquiry, which is looking at whether mobile phone exposure is linked to three types of brain tumour and a tumour of the salivary gland, have been sent to a scientific journal.

As I write, a google search could locate no news or science source more detailed than this Daily Express article. Note that:

1. This is not peer-reviewed study. The results are only "preliminary" and have merely been "sent to a [unspecified] scientific journal."
   
2. It is said that the study was done for the World Health Organization but no specific authors/scientists are mentioned.
3. It is not specified what statistical standards were used or which cancers they claim correlations for.
   

In sum, this is not even information to begin to evaluate the results. News reports like this should never be published.

It is normal for statistical-medical studies to produce the occasional false result. So, statistical studies generally should not be believed until they are confirmed by independent studies. For such cell-phones-cause-cancer claims, despite all the scare headlines in newspapers, there has been no confirmation.

The UN uses a similar press-release technique for hyping global warming. First, they release a press summary with no supporting data. The press accepts the frightening conclusions uncritically. The full report is not released until many months later and, by the time it can be evaluated, the press has moved on to the next scare story.

Obama goes back to the future!

James Lavery illustrates:
This refers to Obama's various attempts to marginalize Fox News. One attempt to exclude Fox from the normal five channel rotation failed when ABC/CBS/NBC/CNN refused to participate without Fox:

Some people credit ABC/CBS/NBC/CNN with high-minded freedom-of-the-press motives. I don't. I suspect someone just explained to them what accepting this precedent would mean the next time that a Republican was president.

What is Obama's real problem with Fox? Likely, it is that Fox reports stories the other media ignore, such as the ACORN and Van Jones videos. Rich Lowery comments (hat tip Instapundit):

This New York Times account today confirms that what most bothered the White House about Fox is that it caused inconvenient reporting by other news organizations. Can't have that! .... In other words, their problem is not that Fox isn't a real news organization, their problem is that it is.

Is Mona Lisa smiling?

Is she or isn't she? Scientists say the ambiguity is a carefully crafted optical illusion:

Those fake Rush quotes

The racists have won a round, as James Lavery illustrates:It has been known since last March that the quotes were fake but the fringe media repeated them anyway. Rush Limbaugh credits Smash Mouth Politics with documenting the quotes as lies. Smash Mouth was kind enough to credit me (John) with a role in finding the internet address (IP) of the source.

Since then, others claim to have matched that IP with politically-connected law firm, Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP. I find the match, so far, to be less than definitive: the cited source matches the IP to the law firm but only for the period from 14-March-2006 to 10-April-2006. That, however, does not cover the critical date of 20-July-2005, and it is not unusual for IP addresses to change with time. We need better documentation of PBWT's internet plan (did Electric Fiber give PBWT a static IP?) or other spy data that covers the critical date.

Our Commander-in-chief is missing in action

It have been seven weeks since General McChrystal delivered his urgent recommendations on the fight in Afghanistan and Pres. Obama is still "non-committal." Michael Ramirez illustrates who pay the price for this indecision:

Videos of San Francisco Tea Party

When Pres. Obama came to San Francisco last Thursday night, he was greeted by protesters from the left and right. Here is a scan of the crowd gathered at Union Square showing single-payer enthusiasts mixed with Tea Partiers and even a 9-11 truther. Signs include "don't share my wealth; share my work ethic" and "instead of apologizing for America, apologize to America":Here is another scan as the Tea Party crowd chants "U S A." You can see signs ranging from"which beverage were you drinking? (tea or kool-aid)" and "[House Obamacare bill] HR3200 is to die for!"
My photos from this Tea Party are here.

UPDATE: Linked by Get Out of Our House

The fringe media have no fact checkers

Reuters, CNBC, the NY Times, and Washington Post all fell for a left-wing hoax: the left-wing group, the Yes Men, issued a fake press release that pretended to be from the US Chamber of Commerce announcing an unlikely reversal of the Chamber's policy on cap and tax. No one at any of those "prestigious" news organizations thought to check the facts before running the story. The hoax was exposed when a real Chamber of Commerce official disrupted the fakers at a pretend "press conference."

In related news, drops in circulation are forcing the New York Times to lay off 8% of its newsroom staff. (The Wall Street Journal is now the largest newspaper by circulation, indicating that there are some benefits to being a paper with some measure of editorial balance.)

Obamacare still unpopular

Despite the speeches and talk show appearances, Rasmussen reports that likely voters oppose Obamacare by 54% to 42%, numbers that, given the margins of error, are little changed since August. Pres. Obama's presidential approval index is also stuck at a low level with 40% who strongly disapprove vs. only 30% who strongly approve:
Looking carefully at the plot, you can see that he received a bump up in approval after his prime-time health care speech and another bump after his Olympics trip. Neither bump lasted. He might do better if he learn to stop being so bitterly partisan and divisive.

UPDATE (21-Oct-2009): The strongly-approve number has dropped to 27% and, with the other numbers remaining unchanged, this lowers the Rasmussen's "approval index" to -13. This change is within the 3% margin of error for the poll.

Obama's priorities, updated

Chip Bok illustrates Pres. Obama's sense of priorities:Despite not having time for the Dalai Lama or to decide what to do about Afghanistan, the administration has found time to quasi-legalize pot.

You can read more about the Nobel Laureate's bizarre war-on-Fox-News here, here, here, and here.

PREVIOUSLY on similar subjects:
A further clarification of Obama's priorities
Obama's sense of priorities

A Tea Party greets Obama in San Francisco

UPDATE: My videos of this Tea Party are here.

Even in San Francisco, Pres. Obama cannot escape protesters. He held a fundraiser at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco tonight (Thursday) and a crowd turned out across the street on Union Square to let him know what they thought:That cable car is climbing Powell Street which separates Union Square from the St. Francis Hotel.

The crowd was not just Tea Partiers. There were also single-payer enthusiasts, 9-11 truthers, and US-out-of-Aghanistan'ers as well. Here is a shot of the central section which, as you can tell from the signs, was largely Tea Partiers:
and from another angle:
The below sign is philosophical: capitalism is freedom. As I took this photo, a liberal was disagreeing with the sign holder about the meaning of freedom.
Some may complain that this sign, with its botany lesson, lacked proper respect for our leader: "Mighty Nuts from Acorns grow"
This man had a nicely illustrated two-sided sign about kool-aid:
This sign recommends drinking the tea instead of the kool-aid:
This sign pointed to the practical economic problem of the soon to expire tax cuts:

It is clear that Rep. Joe Wilson's point has resonated:

This sign speaks for many of us: "instead of apologizing for America, apologize to America":
This sign pointed out that there wouldn't be an America for Obama to be president of if the US military hadn't preserved it for him:
Many protesters wanted more attention paid to the constitution:
This woman emigrated from Russia and she had a tale to tell about "single-payer" medicine:
In another moral lesson for liberals, "don't share my wealth, share my work ethic":
What does Obama stand for? This sign has the answer: Our Beautiful America Misused & Abused:
This concerned citizen knows full well that the "unbiased" media will portray her as part of an angry mob conspiracy:

The Tea Party crowd stayed well past dark:
With the close proximity of left and right in this crowd, there were many discussions but everything remained peaceful. Obama, fundraising inside the hotel, likely heard none of it.

UPDATE: My videos of this Tea Party are here. Bay Area Patriot organizer Sally Zelikovsky discusses the tea party movement here. Zombietime's selection of the 20 best signs from this protest are here.

Thanks to FoxNation, Lucianne.com, Gateway Pundit, Michelle Malkin, Atlas Shrugs, Red State, Tammy Bruce, American Power, LiveLeak, Solid Principles, Conservative Nation, Free US Now, Now Public, The Fox Hole, Worse Than Carter, Ketchikan Tea Party, Can I Just Finish My Waffle?, Wake Up America, and the many others for their links and for spreading word about this event. Via Gateway Pundit, Rush Limbaugh saw these photos and mentioned them on his radio show.

Where bin Laden gets his anti-Western views:

The BBC is Osama bin Laden's "favorite station."

Hat tip: Ghost of a Flea

Congress and the hypocritic oath

From Glenn McCoy:

Nobel Prize for best politics, again

(From Jim Lavery)

Unlike the other Nobel prizes which are selected by scholars, Nobel peace prize winners are picked by politicians. This explains their consistently short-sighted selections.

Because Pres. Obama is both anti-Israel, like previous winners Jimmy Carter and Yassir Arafat, and a true-believer in global warming, like previous winner Al Gore, he must have seemed irresistible to the peace prize committee.

UPDATE: Rush says "this is a greater embarrassment [for Obama] than losing the Olympics was". More reactions can be found at Michelle Malkin.

PREVIOUSLY in this series:
Another Grammy for Best Politics
The Emmy for best politics goes to
The Nobel prize for best politics
The Oscar for best politics goes to
And, the Grammy for best politics

Obama sells out free speech

Anne Bayesky reports that the Obama administration is supporting a UN Human Rights Council resolution to limit/end free speech:

Privately, other Western governments were taken aback and watched the weeks of negotiations with dismay as it became clear that American negotiators wanted consensus at all costs. In introducing the resolution on Thursday, October 1--adopted by consensus the following day--the ranking U.S. diplomat, Chargé d'Affaires Douglas Griffiths, crowed:

"The United States is very pleased to present this joint project with Egypt. This initiative is a manifestation of the Obama administration's commitment to multilateral engagement throughout the United Nations and of our genuine desire to seek and build cooperation based upon mutual interest and mutual respect in pursuit of our shared common principles of tolerance and the dignity of all human beings."

His Egyptian counterpart, Ambassador Hisham Badr, was equally pleased--for all the wrong reasons. He praised the development by telling the Council that "freedom of expression . . . has been sometimes misused," insisting on limits consistent with the "true nature of this right" and demanding that the "the media must . . . conduct . . . itself in a professional and ethical manner."

The new resolution, championed by the Obama administration, has a number of disturbing elements. It emphasizes that "the exercise of the right to freedom of expression carries with it special duties and responsibilities . . ." which include taking action against anything meeting the description of "negative racial and religious stereotyping." It also purports to "recognize . . . the moral and social responsibilities of the media" and supports "the media's elaboration of voluntary codes of professional ethical conduct" in relation to "combating racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance."

It is pretty clear what Democrats mean when they talk about "negative racial ... stereotyping":  They are referring to any criticism of Obama or his policies.

Hat tip: Astute Blogger.

Obama considers returning Taliban to power in Afghanistan

The AP reports:

A senior administration official says President Barack Obama is prepared to accept some role for the Taliban in Afghanistan's political future.

Way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory! With leadership like this, it is not wonder that there are reports that the troops are demoralized.

More at Lonely Conservative.

FTC to regulate blogs

It begins:

The Federal Trade Commission will try to regulate blogging for the first time, requiring writers on the Web to clearly disclose any freebies or payments they get from companies for reviewing their products.

Have you ever seen a product review in a typical print magazine which disclosed how much money that product's manufacturer spends on ads in that magazine (or perks for the author)?

Hat tip: Instapundit.

If the IOC hated Bush, how did Chicago get into the finals anyway?

Like many other Democrats, Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL) blames former President Bush:

"I believe that [Friday]'s action is just the latest example of the cultural breach that still exists between the United States and several leaders of the global community of nations. [Friday}'s vote by the IOC members reflects the tattered relationships that remain after eight years of the catastrophic reign of the Bush administration,"

Chicago was named a finalist by the International Olympic Committee on June 4, 2008, that is, when Bush was president, and eliminated in the first round after the Obamas' weird narcissistic arrogant appeal.

Has Jimmy Carter opined on whether the IOC is racist?

UPDATE: Geo. Will writes on the narcissism of the Obama's presentations.

When France chides you for appeasement, you know you're scraping bottom

See Charles Krauthammer

Obamanomics, illustrated

From Chip Bok:As manager of a lemonade stand, she will soon need to hire a lawyer to assure that she is in compliance with the Obamacare mandates. Then, she will of course need to evaluate her carbon footprint for cap and trade.

New evidence on what caused the financial crisis

When did financial concern turn to panic? In the WSJ, john Cochrane and Luigi Zingales looked at interest rate spreads:After the Lehman bankruptcy there was concern but the panic did not start until the TARP bailout program was introduced. In an upcoming textbook, John Taylor and Akila Weerapana look at the SP500 and see the same pattern: panic happened only after TARP was introduced:Cochrane and Zingales explain why:

The nearby chart shows that the main risk indicators only took off after Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke's TARP speeches to Congress on Sept. 23 and 24—not after the Lehman failure. ....

Why? In effect, these speeches amounted to "The financial system is about to collapse. We can't tell you why. We need $700 billion. We can't tell you what we're going to do with it." That's a pretty good way to start a financial crisis.

During the same time period, Obama took a commanding lead over McCain in the polls.