Al Gore and Hot Air

Dear Al Gore:

After hurricane Katrina you told us that we could expect more such hurricanes and more devastation due to global warming. The media publicized your words and many were terrified by your warnings.

Five years later we don't talk of global warming anymore, but rather about climate change. Now any change can be blamed on industrilzed nation, except China and India.

Western states were buried in snow in October and November. Argentina had major snow storms the same month. Clarification for lefties: Argentina in in the Southern hemisphere, and it snowed in the middle of spring.

Where is the media playing and replaying your prophecies of doom? Why aren't they posting the graph below, and question what happened to your prognosticated hurricanes? The North Atlantic hurricane season is the slowest since 1997. Temperatures have not risen in 10 years, yet you are still the darling of the left wing environmental movement.

The time has come to tell the world that you wear no clothes. The Goremperor is naked.

Your agenda and that of your cohort is clear. Destroy western civilization as we know it and replace it with a new world order ruled by cheap intellectualoids with degrees in divinity, or political science, or psychology or women studies who have become pseudo scientists.

You have eliminated debate on the the topic of climate, and have become an inquisitor. Your followers are mini Torquemadas ready burn us alive.

If there is any global warming, it's due to the the hot air you produce.

More on the study Global and Northern Hemisphere Tropical Cyclone Activity


Click on the graph to enlarge.

My Favorite Articles This Weekend

From Valerie Jarrett to Julius Caesar to Larry David. Mark Steyn offers his spin on personalities and events in the news. Perceptive and funny. Vintage Steyn.

Read Article

For those who see in government the solution to our health problems, look at the way the distribution of the H1N1 vaccine was handled by the Obama administration. By the way, Google to find out how the press reported on flu vaccine shortages during the Bush administration.

Read Article

Will Obama be a Truman or a Carter in foreign affairs. Victor Davis Hanson offers a historical perspective on these three presidents.

Read Article

Why are Egyptian liberals antisemitic? For those who rush to say that it is a an anti Israeli reaction, read this article. There is little differentiation between Israel and Jews in the eyes of anti Semites.

Read Article

Read This

The most ethical Congress ever. Well...perhaps not.

Read Article from Associated Press

The Canadian magazine Maclean has just published Mark Steyn's latest column. This one deals with the Copenhagen Agreement and the rise of statism under the guise of protecting the planet. Regardless of your position on the subject, read it and ponder.

Click for Mark Steyn's article in Maclean

Who knows more, Republicans or Democrats? A new study by the Pew Research Center attempts to find an answer to this question. Take the test and find the results. Interesting.

Read Pew's Study

For history buffs only. A book review of Thucydides: The Reinvention of History by Donal Kagan.

Read Book Review

Victor Davis Hanson

Here is an article by Victor Davis Hanson. For those of you, not familiar with him, he is one of our great historians. His lack of mass popularity has to do with the fact that he is far too serious for Don Imus, and too intellectual for the Sunday political shows where they look to historians for vignettes and anecdotes rather than factual analysis based on Santayana's adage "Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it."

Read Article by Victor Davis Hanson

Good for you...Campbell Brown!

Campbell Brown of CNN, has managed to show Fox News-basher Valerie Jarrett for what she really is: an Obama attack dog.

Thank you Noel Sheppard at Newsbusters

VALERIE JARRETT, SENIOR WHITE HOUSE ADVISOR: What we’re saying is is that we want the public to understand what’s going on. When we saw the kind of distortions this summer, particularly directed at seniors, over health care reform, it was really outrageous. And I think what the president said in his message before Congress is we’re going to speak directly to the American people and make sure that they understand the truth. And so, certainly, if we see somebody distorting the truth, we’re going to call them on the carpet for that. But we don’t want to take our focus away from the core issues that are so important to the American people. Now, when there’s all that chatter and distortion and false information, we have to disseminate — we have to distinguish between truth and fiction.

BROWN: So do you think Fox News is biased?

JARRETT: Well, of course they’re biased. Of course they are.

BROWN: Well, then do you also think that MSNBC is biased?

JARRETT: Well, you know what, this is, this is the thing. I don’t want to — actually, I don’t want to just generalize all Fox is biased or that another station is biased. I think what we want to do is to look at it on a case-by-case basis. And when we see a pattern of distortion, we’re going to be honest about that pattern of distortion.

BROWN: But you only see that at Fox News. That’s all, that you’ve only spoken out about Fox News.

JARRETT: That’s actually not true. I think that what the administration has said very clearly is that we’re going to speak truth to power. When we saw all the distortions in the course of the summer, when people were coming down to town hall meetings and putting up signs that were scaring seniors to death. When we’ve seen commercials go up on television that are distorting the truth, we’re, we’re actually calling everybody out. So, this isn’t anything that’s simply directed at Fox. We really just want the American people to have a clear understanding. There’s so much at stake right now. We really don’t have a lot of time for nonsense and distortions. The American people are also smarter than that. Let them reach their own judgments based on the facts. Let’s just take health care, for example. Reasonable people could differ about the right approach. So let’s have a conversation about that. Let’s not scare people by telling them that things are going to happen that are actually not even on the table. Let’s just talk about the facts.

Sarkozy to the Rescue

Hillary Clinton is virtually invisible, and to a large extent insignificant. Her role is now limited to presenting awards such as the one she presented to the Gays & Lesbians in Foreign Affairs Agencies on winning the Employee Resource Group of the Year Award by Out & Equal Workplace Advocates. The one region where we heard her name mentioned is Honduras, where she has managed to ally the United States with the wrong side in the conflict. Chavez-Castro-Lula-Kircher-Avo must be thrilled.

The important day to day operations of the Department of State is in hands on undersecretaries, while the Middle East and the Afghanistan-Pakistan axis are in the care of Ambassadors Mitchell and Holbrooke. Turkey is little by little going Green, as in Islamist Green, distancing herself from Israel, and getting closer to Ahmadinejad. Meanwhile Obama remains in campaign mode, travelling, playing golf and basketball, supporting bills thousands of pages long that he has not written or read and allowing American soldiers to die, because sending reinforcements to Afghanistan would antagonize the left prior to next week's elections.

Well, natura abhorret a vacuo. The vacuum created by this lack of leadership is being filled by French president Sarkozi. His speech at the United Nations, the nomination of a special envoy to North Korea, his posture against the naivete of Obama's "a world without nuclear weapons," are little by little positioning France in the position of a major player in international affairs.

When the French realize that America is disengaged and too soft, it is time to worry.

Click here to read a NY Post article on the subject.

Hating Haters

The insanity of political correctness is manifested everyday in what otherwise would be considered insignificant events. For example, The Daily Mail reports from London that pensioner Pauline Howe was visited by the police after she complained about a gay rally. This action was deemed as a hate crime, and as such investigated by the police.

'I've never been in any kind of trouble before so I was stunned to have two
police officers knocking at my door,' she said.

'Their presence in my home made me feel threatened. It was a very
unpleasant experience.
'The officers told me that my letter was thought to be
an intention of hate but I was expressing views as a Christian...'

The two police officers later turned up at her home in Poringland, near
Norwich, and informed her the contents of her letter had caused offence.

The insanity of this action in a democracy is frightening. Having the police become a branch of the thought police, is taking another step into the world of 1984, Kafkaesque nightmares, or the descriptions in the novels of Solzhenitzyn.

Writing about the topic of hate crimes in Canada, Mark Steyn writes in the Corner in National Review Online:

Ian Fine, the senior counsel of the CHRC, has declared that the commission is
committed to the abolition of hatred—not hate crimes, not hate speech, but hate.
Hate is a human emotion; it beats, to one degree or another, in every breast. It
is part of what it means to be human... and when the alternative is a coercive
government bureaucracy regulating what you can say... you are no longer
free.

Obamistas Emulate Peronistas: The outcome will be the same

In this article, Mary Anastasia O'Grady, from the Wall Street Journal explains how Argentina went on the road of econimic disaster, and faced with opposition enacted laws to silence the press. A must read for Americans. The similarities are striking.

Read Article

Alan Dershowitz on the Goldstone Report.

Read Article

Sunday Readings

Israel had to storm the Temple Mount to stop young hoodlums from throwing stones. The typical condemnations and threats have been uttered by the usual suspects. Somehow, I don't think that Biby Netanyahu is afraid.

Read Article

George Will on Michele Bachmann. Must read for conservatives who are looking for alternatives to the RINO's.

Read George Will

For those of us who have long suspected that The Guardian is an anti-Semitic newspaper, we can be suspicious no more. When publishing a list of Nobel peace prize winners, Israelis magically disappeared. No Begin, Rabin or Peres. Arafat was still there. A pity they didn't publish the winners in medicine, physics, chemistry and economics. They would have had to eliminate many of the greatest minds in history. The original list published can be seen here. Because of an international outcry, The Guardian's list has been updated.

Read Article

Would you like to know how much your relatives, friends and neighbors earn? Live in Norway.

Read Article

Sunday Readings

Is Barack Obama aware of Muslims awash in petrodollars?

Read Article

I am sorry to have to notify you that I have just been diagnosed as mentally ill. My only consolation is that I am one of about half the population. To test yourself please answer check the correct statement:

a: I support the policies of President Obama

b: I disagree with president Obama

If your answer is B, you too are mentally ill.

In the old Soviet Union dissent was also called a mental illness. Welcome to America 2009.

Read Article

Sick and getting sicker. Democrats on the House Financial Services Committee have voted to grant ACORN a role in setting regulations for financial institutions.

Read Article

Why I am a Conservative and not a Republican. Go Hoffman, Go!

Read Article

Read all about it...

Once again Charles Krauthammer has synthesized an event in the news and given us his take. And as usual, he is right.

Read Column

The Boston Globe reports that the wackos at Amherst, Massachusetts, have voted to allow the relocation of Guantanamo released terrorists. Notice this quote by one of the selectmen supporting the resolution: "The United States has a long history of being a place of refuge and asylum for persecuted people. There's nothing new about this."

Words do matter. Illegal aliens have become "immigrants," and now terrorists are becoming "persecuted people." Years ago, a joke circulated in poor countries. "Declare war on the United States, and surrender the next day. That would ensure that America would pump billions to the defeated nation." Now all you have to do to get a green card is threaten to kill us. Only in America, or should I say only in a university town in Massachusetts.

Read Article in The Boston Globe

A conference in Cairo, organized by the Susan G. Komen for the Cure, to raise awareness of breast cancer, has rescinded the invitations to Israeli doctors that were supposed to attend. The interesting point is that this conference was touted by international news organizations as an unprecedented example of cooperation in the region. If you had to bet on where will a cure for cancer be found, would you bet on Cairo or Tel Aviv? Yes…that’s what I thought. Perhaps next year the conference should be held in Amherst. People there are very tolerant.

Read Article

Pro-Israel Article in Britain's Guardian

As incredible as it sounds, the left leaning Guardian has published a terrific article by Harold Evans critical of the Goldstone Report. It's a must read not only for supporters of Israel, but also for those who believe in the United Nations and want it to have more power in international affairs.

Here is the article in its entirety. The above link will take you to the Guardian site, in case you want to verify the publication.





A moral atrocity

Judge Goldstone has been suckered into letting war criminals use his name to pillory Israel
By Harold Evans
The Guardian, Tuesday 20 October 2009

Aren't the British sickened by the moral confusions of their government?First, we have the weasel words to justify the unjustifiable release of the Lockerbie bomber. Now we have the sickening spectacle of Britain failing to stand by Israel, the only democracy with an independent judiciary in the entire region.

It was to be expected that the usual suspects of the risible UN human rights council would be eager to condemn Israel for war crimes in defending itself against Hamas. If you treat people as the Chinese do the Tibetans or Uighurs("Off with their heads!"); or as the Russians eliminate Chechen dissidents;or as the Nigerians tolerate extrajudicial killings, the evictions of 800,000, rape and cruel treatment of prisoners; or as the Egyptians get prisoners to talk (torture) and the Saudis suppress half their population …well, go through the practices of all 25 states voting to refer Israel to the security council for the Gaza war, and you have to acknowledge they know a lot about the abuse of humans. Anything to divert attention from their own atrocities.

Only six refused to join the farce – Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Slovakia,Ukraine and the US. Britain didn't just abstain. It shirked voting at all(along with those beacons of civilisation Angola, Kyrgyzstan, Madagascar,and surprisingly, France).

Of course, here the fig leaf for being scared of dictators, especially oil-rich abusers, is the report by the South African judge Richard Goldstone. Poor Judge Goldstone now regrets how his good name has been used to single out Israel. The Swiss paper Le Temps reports him complaining that"This draft [UN human rights council] resolution saddens me … there is not a single phrase condemning Hamas as we have done in the report. I hope the council can modify the text." Fat hope.

The truth is he was suckered into lending his good name to a half-baked report – read its 575 pages and see. He said that, as a Jew himself, he was surprised to be invited. He shouldn't have been, and should never have accepted leadership of a commission whose terms of reference were designed to excuse the aggressor, Hamas, and punish the defender, Israel. The council's decision was to "dispatch an urgent, independent, international fact-finding mission … to investigate all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law by the occupying power, Israel, against the Palestinian people throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territory, particularly in the occupied Gaza Strip, due to the current aggression, and [it] calls upon Israel not to obstruct the process of investigation and to fully co-operate with the mission".

Israel is not an "occupying power" in Gaza in either fact or international law. Four years ago it voluntarily pulled out all its soldiers and uprooted all its settlers. Here was a wonderful chance for Gaza to be the building block of a Palestinian state, and for Hamas to do what the Israelis did –take a piece of land and build a model state. They didn't. Instead of helping the desperate Palestinians, they conducted a religious war.In signing on for the UN mission – with others who had already condemned Israel – it seems to have escaped the judge that Hamas is committed not just to fight Israeli soldiers; it is a terrorist organisation hell bent on the destruction of the state of Israel. The terms of reference he accepted validate the torment of Israeli civilians. Hamas launched 7,000 rockets –every one intended to kill as many people as possible – then contemptuously dismissed repeated warnings from Israel to stop or face the consequences.

The rockets were war crimes and ought to have been universally condemned as such. While new rockets hit Israel over many months there was no rush by theworld's moralisers – including Britain – to censure Hamas, no urgency as there was in "world opinion" when Israel finally responded. Then Israel was immediately accused of a "disproportionate" response without anyone thinking: "What is a 'proportionate' attack against an enemy dedicated exterminating your people?" A dedication to exterminating all of his?

Israel risked its own forces by imposing unprecedented restraint. In testimony volunteered to the human rights council (and ignored), Colonel Richard Kemp, a British commander in Bosnia and Afghanistan, stated: "The Israeli Defence Forces did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare." The "collateral damage" was less than the Nato allies inflicted on the Bosnians in theconflict with Yugoslavia.

No doubt there were blunders. A defensive war is still a war with all its suffering and destruction. But Hamas compounded its original war crime with another. It held its own people hostage. It used them as human shields. It regarded every (accidental) death as another bullet in the propaganda war.The Goldstone report won the gold standard of moral equivalence between thekiller and the victim. Now Britain wins the silver. Who's cheering?

Must Read!

Once again Mark Stey manages to convey in few words and with a sense of humour an analysis of current events.

Read Article by Mak Steyn

Steve Huntley, of the Chicago Sun-Times has a scathing column basically telling Obama that blaming the Bush administration as an excuse for his problems is wearing thin.

Read Article

Transformation by Kidnapping

How does a reporter become more aware of the realities of the Islamic world, Islamism and Islamists organizations? Let him be kidnapped.

This seems to be transformative moment New York Times reporter David Rohde who reported from the region for 7 years. The following segment appeared in an article in yesterday's New York Times. You can read the complete article by clicking here: Held by the Taliban.

"During our time as hostages, I tried to reason with our captors. I told them we were journalists who had come to hear the Taliban's side of the story. I told them that I had recently married and that Tahir and Asad had nine young children between them. I wept, hoping it would create sympathy,and begged them to release us. All of my efforts proved pointless. Over those months, I came to a simple realization. After seven years of reporting in the region, I did not fully understand how extreme many of the Taliban had become. Before the kidnapping, I viewed the organization as a form of "Al Qaeda lite," a religiously motivated movement primarily focused on controlling Afghanistan. Living side by side with the Haqqanis' followers, I learned that the goal of the hard-line Taliban was far more ambitious. Contact with foreign militants in the tribal areas appeared to have deeply affected many young Taliban fighters. They wanted to create a fundamentalist Islamic emirate with Al Qaeda that spanned the Muslim world."

If only we could get some of the State Department officials to be transformed by this method.


On a similar note:

Reporters around the world have rediscovered the word "terrorists", normally missing from reports in Israel. The word emerged in reports about the explosion in Iran.

Obama, Iranian Thugs, and the NY Times: By Tom Gross, National Review Online

"It is amazing. It took many, many days for the administration of Nobel peace-prize laureate Barack Obama to condemn the brutalization of pro-democracy demonstrators in Iran last June (and even then it did so only in the most tepid way), but by contrast it took just a couple of hours for the Obama administration to condemn the attacks on the brutalizers yesterday."

The New Fascism

Let’s see if I remember my social studies lessons. There was a special definition for a government that denounced democracy as inefficient, scoffed at civil liberties, praised dictatorships, was extremely nationalistic and controlled every aspect of life, including the economies and workers organizations. Mmmmmm...what was it called? Oh, I remember…it was the definition for fascism!

Today’s New York Times is carrying an article under the banner Russia’s Leaders See China as Template for Ruling. What a surprise and how ironic that the tables have turned and it is Russia that does the emulating sixty-two years after being the role model for the Communist takeover of China. Putin has discovered the formula for success. Be fascist but call yourself a socialist. The West will love you.

Sixty-four years after the defeat of fascism, nations are using the templates of Hitler and Mussolini without hearing one word of condemnation from Western democracies. The reason is simple and exemplifies the power of words. Instead of calling themselves fascists, they use the terms People Democracies, Communists, Socialists or just plain Revolutionaries. But; a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

Whether it is China, Russia, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, Bolivia or any of the many nations that are in the grip of despotic governments, the West accepts it because they use the mantle of the left.

And so it is that in the United States we can have Bill Maher, intellectual comic of the Left, announce that he envies China because it’s a dictatorship. Van Jones states that he is a communist, Anita Dunn quotes chairman Mao as her favorite political philosopher, the Hollywood elite, with high numbers in their bank accounts, and low numbers in their IQ’s, travel to Venezuela or Cuba praising the achievements of Castro and Chavez. Michael Moore continues making millions blaming millionaires. The UN blames Israel for everything, MSNBC gives a platform to the Left, the Dalai Lama is denied access to the White House, and we kowtow to Russia getting nothing in return.

All this because despots have discovered the magic of the Red banner. A few others are even shrewder. They know that they can destroy democracy, freedom and free markets under a different banner. The green one.

Is America Moving Toward Third Worldism?

Despite having a Nobel laureate as president, it is hard not to feel that that the United States is in a state of decline.

Every news item seems to be another nail in the coffin of American exceptionalism. Can it be that the the experiment that started with The Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution is coming to an end, and that democracy and free markets lost? Is our position as a superpower coming to an end? Is the American dollar to be discarded as the reserve currency of the world? Many feel that the answer to these questions is yes. Yet, others believe that this is just another bump on the road, just like the many we hit over the last decades.

For the best arguments on the subject, we have two excellent articles. The first, Decline Is a Choice, by Charles Krauthammer, who has emerged as the intellectual voice of the Conservative movement, and the other, The Default Power, by Josef Joffe, Co-Editor of Die Zeit, a Senior Fellow at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Marc and Anita Abramowitz Fellow in International Relations at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

The articles are free at the Weekly Standard and Foreign Affairs websites. If you have problems with the links, you may need to register. Registration is free.