What Is This World Coming To?

Sixty plus rockets flew from the Gaza Strip into civilian areas of Israel as Israeli warplanes continue to pound at Hamas targets inside Gaza.   Five Israelis were wounded today - one critically, one seriously and three lightly - when a rocket fired by Gaza terrorists hit an Ashdod bus stop. 

Hamas took responsibility for firing the missile and reported that a “Zionist” was killed in the attack. 

“If Hamas doesn’t immediately stop the criminal and intentional firing of rockets, Israel will use all the legal resources and courses of action at its disposal to force the enemy to stop its aggressive and illegal action against its citizens,” Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Monday following a security assessment at the Defense Ministry.

UN Secretary General Condemns Israel’s Disproportionate Use of Force

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Monday condemned Israel’s “excessive use of force” in the Gaza Strip and said that international powers were not doing enough to force a ceasefire on the two sides.

Ban made the statements at a press conference held at the UN’s headquarters in New York.

 “I am deeply alarmed by the current escalation of violence in and around Gaza. This is unacceptable. I have been repeatedly condemning the rocket attacks by Hamas militants against Israel. While recognizing Israel’s right to defend itself, I have also condemned the excessive use of force by Israel in Gaza.

No similar concern was expressed for the practice by Hamas of hiding among civilians, or using them as human shields in direct violation of UN conventions and international law.  

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CNN Meteorologist Chad Myers had never bought into the notion that man can alter the climate and the Vegas snowstorm didn’t impact his opinion. Myers, an American Meteorological Society certified meteorologist, explained on CNN’s Dec. 18 “Lou Dobbs Tonight” that the whole idea is arrogant and mankind was in danger of dying from other natural events more so than global warming.

Myers is the second CNN meteorologist to challenge the global warming conventions common in the media. He also said trying to determine patterns occurring in the climate would be difficult based on such a short span.

“But this is like, you know you said – in your career – my career has been 22 years long,” Myers said. “That’s a good career in TV, but talking about climate – it’s like having a car for three days and saying, ‘This is a great car.’ Well, yeah – it was for three days, but maybe in days five, six and seven it won’t be so good. And that’s what we’re doing here.”

“We have 100 years worth of data, not millions of years that the world’s been around,” Myers continued.

TIME selected Barack Hussein Obama to be its ‘Person of the Year’ some three days after Vice President-elect Joe Biden (that still doesn’t sound right) picked senior TIME editor Jay Carney to be his communications aide.

TIME says that Obama has risen to “dominate the public sphere” in his short time on the national scene. It says the incoming president overcame “centuries of the social pecking order” to become the first African-American elected to the White House.

Time is also praising Mr. Obama for the swift and business-like manner in which he has assembled his administration, beginning the very day after his historic election.

The president-elect tells the magazine there are a number of issues he hopes to resolve over the next two years, including putting the U.S. economy back on track, closing the Guantanamo Bay terrorist detention camp,  withdrawing troops from Iraq, healing the sick, restoring sight to the blind and raising the dead (provided they’re Democrats.)

Barack Hussein Obama joins Irish rock singer Bono, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, former New York Mayor Rudy Guiliani, and three of the most recent U.S. presidents: outgoing President George Bush, his father George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton as TIME’s “Persons of the Year.”

Consumer prices in November plunged by the largest amount on records going back 61 years as energy costs posted nearly double the decline of the previous month.

The Labor Department reported Tuesday that consumer prices fell 1.7 percent in November, surpassing the previous record decline of 1 percent set in October. The drop was the largest one-month decline dating to February 1947.

The huge decreases reflect the severe recession gripping the country and raise the pressure for the Federal Reserve to act decisively to guard against a debilitating bout of deflation.

In other economic news, the Commerce Department reported that construction of new homes fell in November by 18.9 percent, the biggest drop in a quarter-century. The steep decline pushed construction down to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 625,000 homes, the slowest pace on records that go back to 1959.

The fawning media coverage given the Obama-Biden ticket during the campaign is beginning to pay dividends as the Obama-Biden campaign began paying off some of its campaign debts.

TIME Magazine’s Jay Carney was tapped as assistant to the vice president and director of communications. Noted Politico.com;

Carney, the magazine’s Washington bureau chief, is one of Washington’s best-known talking heads, with regular appearances on ABC’s “This Week,” “The McLaughlin Group” and MSNBC’s “Hardball.”

Biden has assembled a team of heavyweights: Ron Klain, who was chief of staff to former Vice President Al Gore, as chief of staff; Mike Donilon, one of Washington’s best connected Democratic consultants, as counselor; and Tony Blinken, a longtime Biden adviser, who is expected to fill a senior role on the National Security Council or on Biden’s staff.

Later in the piece Politico quoted an anonymous ‘Democratic official’ stating the obvious; “There are those on the right who will see this as the embodiment of their assertions about the media and Obama, and this is just making it official.”

Ya think?

Nobody has said it out loud, but the silence could not make it any more clear.   It doesn’t matter if Barack Hussein Obama is Constitutionally eligible to be the President of the United States.   He’s The One, and that’s all there is to it.

If we have to change the Constititution, we’d better get to it, because Barack Hussein Obama is The One.

Enough with silly lawsuits, it’s time to change Constitution on presidential eligibility.

Citizenship — natural-born or naturalized — has a bit role in a presidential drama, with an important constitutional lesson. The United States Constitution says that “No person except a natural-born citizen … shall be eligible to the office of President …”  This provision is “an anachronism that discriminates against far too many Americans.”

That is the “Our View” page from the Merced Sun-Star expressing its contention that Obama ought to be allowed to serve, even if he is only “naturalized.”    (The citizens of Merced are poorly served  — if Obama isn’t natural-born, he isn’t naturalized, either, since naturalization is NOT automatic under any circumstances, but must be officially applied for and granted)

One Otis L. Sanford of the Memphis Commercial-Appeal writes in that paper’s op-ed section:

“Hear ye, hear ye. The U.S. Supreme Court has spoken.Or more precisely, it has refused to listen. And every rational-thinking American should be grateful.”

This establishes what passes for ‘thinking’ among Obama’s supporters — that a refusal to listen is the same thing has rendering a favorable opinion.  Call me crazy, but if the Supreme Court expected Obama could and would prove his eligibility, they would have heard the case just to eliminate future challenges.

It is far more likely they refused to hear it because they didn’t want to be forced into a position where they had to rule on what to do when the president elect is not eligible to serve.

Salon published a column by Alex Koppleman making fun of the idiots who insist that Barack Obama’s refusal to provide a birth certificate means something.

You might think these rumors would have died off after Obama produced proof in June that he was, in fact, born in Hawaii to an American citizen, his mother, Ann, or after Hawaii state officials confirmed in October that he was born there. You might think the rumors would have died off after he was elected by a comfortable margin. Instead, they’ve intensified. There have been paid advertisements in the Chicago Tribune questioning the president-elect’s birth certificate and eligibility, and one group is raising money to run a similar ad on television. The right-wing Web site WorldNetDaily has been reporting on the issue almost nonstop. Numerous plaintiffs have filed lawsuits in various states.

You might think Koppleman would read the ‘evidence’ he is citing.  All Hawaii state officials did was confirm that there is a certificate on file for Barack Obama — not that he was born there.

Perhaps the most common argument of those questioning Obama’s eligibility is that he should just release his full, original birth certificate, rather than the shorter certification, which is a copy. His failure to do so only proves there is reason to be suspicious, they say, and if the document was released, the issue would go away.

Koppleman concludes that even that evidence wouldn’t satisfy Obama’s critics”

If the long-form birth certificate were released, with its unequivocal identification of Hawaii as Obama’s place of birth, the cycle would almost certainly continue.

THIS is Obama-journalism:  It would ‘almost certainly’ continue anyway, so why release the proof?  Koppleman concludes:

We could be dealing with the repercussions of the tangled web these people have woven for years after Obama is inaugurated.

But the only way Koppleman will be correct is if Obama is successful for years in keeping his birth records shielded from ‘these people’.  But if Koppleman is right and Obama is inaugurated without putting the controversy to rest, what then?

In the worse case scenario we will have taken just another baby step towards losing our Republic and the rule of law when that dusty and irritating Constitution becomes something to just be ignored or set aside whenever it might be inconvenient, or upset some people, or just be impractical for this particular “situation”.

Maybe we have reached the point where we just set aside parts of the Constitution if they are inconvenient and that might potentially be a problem for He Who Will Slow the Rising of the Seas and the fainting, ecstatic, potentially angry mob who propelled him to power. We have already journeyed a ways down the road once traveled by ancient Rome where the elites began to worry about the mood and reactions of the masses who openly threatened disorder and mayhem if they were unhappy, while those who held the reigns of power increasingly ignored the once revered rules that had held their political system together.

Kaveh L Afrasiabi , in an Asia Times Online ARTICLE, argues that, contrary to a recent Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) REPORT that stated Iran would soon achieve Nuclear Weapons Breakout Capability – in fact, the opposite is true. Whatever the truth, Afraisabi infers that President elect Obama will need to sift through the conflicting information:

The incoming Barack Obama administration has already been inundated with reports, policy recommendations and position papers vying for the president-elect’s attention on the Iran nuclear issue.

A little further into his essay, Afrasiabi claims:

By ignoring these issues completely, the respected nuclear experts seem unconvincing in their quasi-alarmist projections of Iran’s near-term nuclear weapon capability - the same projections which are indirectly fueling the argument of the more hawkish experts for the military option.

Their report serves as a half-cooked meal for new US policy-makers gearing up for action come next January. But it will surely give them indigestion, as it replicates the coercive approach that is centered on the theology of Iran’s “nuclear intentions” and “capability”.

Read the rest of this entry »

By Frank Spaniak

In keeping with the Illinois tradition of citizens here electing corrupt politicians, we have a host of them here - the list keeps getting longer and I suspect that there are more on the way. Illinois now has another candidate in Governor Rod Blagojevich for the dubious honor of being the latest arrested governor in our state.

I’m told that there is the beginnings of a grassroots effort to build a politician’s prison  including telephones, faxes and computers. Day to day operations will be assisted by lesser corrupt secretaries and other incarcerated staffers. The perfect place to “put the arm” to the deal makers that pass thru on state business.

There are already complaints that they (those in the former governors’ wing) will have to share a conference room for important meetings, and indictment-answering press conferences. The bidding for the property and building for this new prison has already begun - the under the table bidding is in full deal-making mode, the state has already agreed to supply the brown paper bags and shoeboxes as courier packages. Currently supply is meeting demand for these tools of the Illinois bidding process.

This is not really a shock to anyone from Illinois —  these kinds of things happen.  In fact I think more eyebrows are raised when people say they are not going on. To get attention though, it has been suggested that inward pointing razor wire fencing and guard towers be built around the governor’s mansion to appease the public and get the current and future governors used to the look and feel.

If I could get my tongue any further into my cheek it would be sticking out the side of my face. The reason Chicago is called the windy city was not originally for the four-season weather we get here - but the constant and sadly amusing politics in this state.

Sheesh.

They say that it takes faith to believe in God. I submit that it also takes faith to be an atheistic scientist. While there is no foundation for a belief in “goo to you” evolution, evolution is required to be “true” and “indisputable” because the alternative (a divine cause) is strictly disallowed.

Recently, I read a book REVIEW by Royal Truman over at Creation Ministries International. The book, “A review of Genetic Entropy & The Mystery of the Genome”, written by John C Sanford, will most likely end up putting the scientist in hot water with his academic colleagues. Ben Stein, who produced the movie “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” blew the whistle on the common practise of ostracizing dissenters. Read the rest of this entry »

According to an article in Israel Today, when President Bush met with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert last week, he had some surprisingly sage advice for the outgoing leader. He advised Olmert not to concede the Golan Heights for nothing and not to trust Syrian President Bashar Assad. While Olmert had no reply, Israeli commentators speculate that the Prime Minister desires to “score a major diplomatic victory before leaving office”. Interestingly enough, Olmert’s predecessor, Ariel Sharon, suffered a massive stroke after conceding the Gaza strip. Read the rest of this entry »