Here come the Democrats with cap and trade, right on cue, hell bent on destroying the U.S. economy, just not until they’re finished destroying the U.S. health care system first. Nevermind that the U.S. can reduce its emissions to zero and it won’t make a bit of difference toward affecting the global climate, so long as China and India don’t play along with the cap and trade scheme, something that both countries have rejected, in no uncertain terms. The only thing unilaterally imposing a cap and trade scheme on the U.S. will accomplish is to raise energy prices for consumers and devastate our economy.
Are Democrats deaf? Don’t they hear the American people emphatically saying no to their budget busting, tax and spend health care and climate change agendas?
Sens. Barbara Boxer and John Kerry said Monday the climate bill they are writing would not be finished until later in September.
The bill was expected to be ready when lawmakers returned next week.
“Because of Senator Kennedy’s recent passing, Senator Kerry’s August hip surgery, and the intensive work on healthcare legislation particularly on the Finance Committee where Sen. Kerry serves, Majority Leader Reid has agreed to provide some additional time to work on the final details of our bill, and to reach out to colleagues and important stakeholders,” Sens. Boxer (D-Calif.) and Kerry (D-Mass.) said in a joint statement.
No, c’mon, bring it on! The timing is perfect for spewing forth another massive government boondoggle that’ll cost the American taxpayers trillions of dollars, put the country deeper in debt, and castrate the economy.
Seriously, go ahead and stick your Democrat fingers in the light socket, again. Big bonus points if you can get “card check” on the agenda too.
Last week the market barely managed to eke out another gain, with all the major indexes up fractionally. The NYSE composite crawled ahead 0.5%, the S&P 500 added 0.3%, while the Dow and Nasdaq inched up 0.4% each. The IBD outlook is still “market in confirmed uptrend”, but there’s quite a bit of stock churning going on and the market topping vibe is pervasive. Caution is the watchword. Volume should be light again this week and return to more normal levels after Labor Day.
Once again, this week there are no stocks on the watch list that are potential buy candidates, although one might want to consider going long the VIX.
/as usual, your mileage may vary, always do your own homework
Quoting a U.S. source, the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza says the Obama administration has decided against building a missile shield to protect Poland and the Czech Republic. The reason? Russian opposition.
Now, if we want to build a defense system for friends in Europe, we’ll have to place it in the Balkans, Israel or somewhere else. That is, if Russia approves.
This is a stark reversal of past policy and reneges on promises made by the current administration. Worse, it shows weakness. We got into a staredown with the Russian bear and we blinked.
President Obama has vowed to support missile defense, provided it was “pragmatic and cost-effective.” Well, the Congressional Budget Office rated the system going into Poland and the Czech Republic as the most effective of the alternatives.
As for promises to our allies, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton just this month said the U.S. would offer our allies a “defense umbrella” against threats from a possible Iranian nuclear weapon.
Now, all that high-sounding defense rhetoric is out the window.
Coupled with the $1.2 billion slashed from the missile defense budget this year, the administration is making clear it hopes to kill off missile defense — a mistake we may all come to regret.
We’ve just weakened America’s standing in a critical region of the world — Eastern Europe — and let our allies down. We’ve made them vulnerable, in ways that only we could, to Russia’s growing military menace. Polish and Czech friends who had relied on us to stand firm and keep our word no doubt feel betrayed.
This diminishes our global influence. What smallish country will now take our word at face value when we promise to protect them?
The U.S. abandonment of the so-called “third site” development of 10 missile interceptors in Poland and a radar array in the Czech Republic signals our weakness to both Russia and Iran.
Iran, as some have recently estimated, is less than a year away from having a workable nuclear weapon. Germany’s intelligence agency, the BND, said in July that Iran will have the means to produce a nuclear weapon within six months. So the threat is growing.
On Feb. 2, Iran successfully launched a satellite using rocket technology that would be directly applicable to creating a long-range ballistic missile. It’ll soon be able to deliver a nuke.
Worst of all, according to the New York Times, President Obama in February sent a secret letter to Russian President Dmitri Medvedev offering to scrap our Eastern European missile defense in exchange for help with Iran’s burgeoning nuclear threat.
So far, it hasn’t been much of a deal. And as we scale down our defense efforts, Russia is boosting military spending at double-digit rates. Here we have all but abandoned the testing and rebuilding of our nuclear deterrent, and Russia only last month test-launched two new Sineva class sub-based ICBMs.
/if you step back and take a look at all the new hopey/changey U.S. domestic and foreign policies, it’s as if Vladimir Putin himself was elected U.S. President
A general close to the investigation into the mysterious voyage of the Arctic Sea has told a Russian newspaper that he suspected the ship was carrying a secret cargo of illegal weapons, as many conspiracy theorists have suggested.
The newspaper, Komsomolskaya Pravda, interviewed what it described as a senior general in the Russian Navy who had been close to the investigation. The general said that he knew far more than he could say openly at this stage, but his testimony, if genuine, represents the first concrete information to come out of the investigation, which has been shrouded in mystery.
He said the theory that the ship might have been carrying drugs was excluded from the beginning, but that the investigation had focussed on a possible weapons shipment, in particular S-300 or X-55 missiles bound for Iran, and sold by a “weapons mafia” involving top Russian officials but operating outside of the law.
The efforts which Russia put into recovering a ship that had a stated cargo worth less than £1m, has led many to suspect that there may have been a secret, embarrassing cargo.
“I think that if this journey had been successful, Russia could have ended up in a huge international scandal,” he said. “I think that for this reason the order was given from the top to start this huge naval operation. We caught the boat to make sure we didn’t end up in a nasty situation.”
Well, the illegal smuggling of sophisticated Russian missiles destined for Iran would certainly explain why the Mossad might be interested in the cargo and why the Russians would mount such a large naval operation to recover the ship. It certainly makes infinitely more sense than believing all this fuss unfolded over a wayward shipment of lumber. But is it the whole or even partial truth, who the hell knows?
/with the Russians and, allegedly, the Mossad involved, we may never get a straight answer that resembles the actual truth
U.S. State Department staff have recommended that the ouster of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya be declared a “military coup,” a U.S. official said on Thursday, a step that could cut off tens of millions of dollars in U.S. funding to the impoverished Central American nation.
The official, who spoke on condition he not be named, said State Department staff had made such a recommendation to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was expected to make a decision on the matter soon.
Washington already suspended about $18 million in aid to Honduras after the June 28 coup and this would be formally cut if the determination is made because of a U.S. law barring aid “to the government of any country whose duly elected head of government is deposed by military coup or decree.”
The president of the Dominican Republic, Leonel Fernandez, called for Honduras to be suspended from the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) with the United States as a means of putting pressure on the de facto government.
CAFTA offers its members preferential commercial terms.
Despite worldwide opposition over the past two months to the ouster of Zelaya, who was whisked to exile in an army plane, the interim government of former Congress head Roberto Micheletti says it will not be pressured into stepping down.
Military coup? It was the Honduran high court that removed Zelaya and appointed Micheletti, the civilian head of Congress, as the interim President, until the next scheduled elections. Besides escorting Zelaya to the airport, by order of the Honduran high court, the Honduran military had nothing to do with the transfer of civilian power and the military was never in control of the government, not even for one minute.
/is there some reason the United States is carrying water for the Castro brothers, Hugo Chavez, and Daniel Ortega here?
Much has been written about Sen. Kennedy’s reach across the political aisle. One of his closest friends on the Republican side of that aisle, Sen. Orrin Hatch, posted a song he wrote as a tribute to Sen. Kennedy on his YouTube page today.
MSNBC host Chris Matthews appeared three times on Wednesday’s Today show to lionize Sen. Ted Kennedy, and twice he promoted Barack Obama as the “last brother” of the Kennedy political tradition. He tried to clarify a little in his appearance in the 10 am hour: “I don’t mean that in an ethnic sense or a black sense. I mean a brother of the Kennedy tradition. And I think he’s the new brother, not that last brother.”
Democrats are hoping that the memory of Sen. Ted Kennedy will revive the Democratic Party’s flagging push for health care reform.
You’ve heard of ‘win one for the Gipper’? There is going to be an atmosphere of ‘win one for Teddy,'” Ralph G. Neas, the CEO of the liberal National Coalition on Health Care, told ABC News.
Democrats are hoping that Kennedy’s influence in death may be even stronger than it was when he was alive as they push for President Obama’s top domestic priority. Democratic officials hope that invoking Kennedy’s passion for the issue will counter slippage in support for heatlh care reform.
Geez, from all slobbering on the TV today, you’d think that the Sea Lion of the Senate was the most wonderful, sainted human being ever to walk the earth. Nevermind that Teddy left Mary Jo Kopechne to suffocate in the back of his Oldsmobile at Chappaquiddick. And a couple other blasts from Kennedy’s past that you won’t hear a peep about in all the wall to wall, 24/7 sugar coated TV tributes are Teddy’s associations with the IRA and the KGB.
Some hero.
/RIP Ted, now get on with the funeral and bury him
A June report from the United Nations Economic, Social and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) suggests children of all countries and cultures are entitled to sexual and reproductive education beginning at age five.
The report, called International Guidelines on Sexual Education, was released in June in conjunction with the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA), an organization which works for universal access to “reproductive health care.”
In its rationale for creating the guidelines, the UNESCO report said it is “essential to recognize the need and entitlement of all young people to sexuality education.” An appendix backed that claim by pointing to a 2008 report from the International Planned Parenthood Federation that argued governments “are obligated to guarantee sexual rights,” and that “sexuality education is an integral component to human rights.”
The guidelines are designed, according to the report, to be “age-appropriate” and break down the suggested curriculum into four age groups: 5- to 8-year-olds, 9- to 12-year-olds, 12- to 15-year-olds and 15- to 18-year-olds.
For those aged 5 to 8, some key concepts to be discussed are:
— “Touching and rubbing one’s genitals is called masturbation” and that “girls and boys have private body parts that can feel pleasurable when touched by oneself.”
— That “people receive messages about sex, gender, and sexuality from their cultures and religions.”
— That “all people regardless of their health status, religion, origin, race or sexual status can raise a child and give it the love it deserves.”
— “Gender inequality,” “examples of gender stereotypes,” and “gender-based violence.”
— Description of fertilization, conception, pregnancy, and delivery.
. . .
SIECUS and Sex Ed
The authors of the report consulted the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) in building their curriculum framework. One of the two authors, Nanette Ecker, is a former SIECUS employee.
Like the UNFPA, SIECUS advocates for ensuring that “every person has the right and access to sexual and reproductive health, so that humanity and the natural environment can exist in balance and fewer people live in poverty,” according to the organization Web site. Their stated concern is the “depletion of natural resources” – which is reduced through access to abortions.
The founding director of the organization, Mary S. Calderone, was a director of Planned Parenthood. SIECUS currently belongs to the National Coalition to Support Sexuality Education, alongside groups like NARAL — The National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, The Human Rights Campaign, and the National Council of La Raza.
In its justification for the new U.N. guidelines, the report says that programs supporting traditional values on marriage and sex are faulty.
And what does this who’s who of international and national “progressive” organizations have in common, besides teaming up to indoctrinate your kindergarten age children in the ways of mastrubation? Which political party do they support and receive support from? Why, the Democrat party, of course. And who leads this parade for “age-appropriate” sex education for kindergartners?
Sex education for kindergarteners first entered the presidential campaign on July 17, 2007 when Obama discussed his views on the topic while appearing before a Planned Parenthood conference in Washington, D.C.
Obama was asked his position on sex education and he mimicked an attack that was launched on him in his 2004 Senate campaign by Republican Alan Keyes.
“Barack Obama supports teaching sex education to kindergarteners,” said Obama mimicking Keyes’ distinctive style of speech. “Which — I didn’t know what to tell him (laughter).”
“But it’s the right thing to do,” Obama continued, “to provide age-appropriate sex education, science-based sex education in schools.”
