What Is This World Coming To?

From today’s Politico:

Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) received a handwritten note Thursday from Joint Committee on Taxation Chief of Staff Tom Barthold confirming the penalty for failing to pay the up to $1,900 fee for not buying health insurance.

Violators could be charged with a misdemeanor and could face up to a year in jail or a $25,000 penalty, Barthold wrote on JCT letterhead. He signed it “Sincerely, Thomas A. Barthold.”

Your tax dollars are being used to help a start-up automotive manufacturing company called Fisker Automotive.  The car company received $529 million from the US government so that it can build hybrid sports cars — in Finland!

The Fisker will sell for about $89,000.00 US so not only will Americans not get jobs building them for the $529 million investment — Americans probably can’t afford to buy them, either.    So why would the US government kick out a half a billion dollars in taxpayer money to build a foreign car for foreigners?

Fisker Motors says it will use the loan money to produce a $40K family sedan that hasn’t been designed yet for American families but in the meantime, production on the $89K Karma, pictured here,  is due to begin this December.

Fisker Motors managed to get the half-billion dollar loan through connections with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a veteran Silicon Valley venture-capital firm of which Gore is a partner.

Employees of KPCB have donated more than $2.2 million to political campaigns, mostly for Democrats, including President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that tracks campaign contributions.

When the DOE was asked if Gore had any influence on Fisker’s application, DOE representative Matt Rogers was quick to reply, “Absolutely not.”

Of course it didn’t.  Using American tax dollars to build cars in Finland that Americans can’t afford  – why would anybody question  that?

President Obama’s “green jobs czar’ Van Jones tendered his resignation Sunday. According to most news outlet reports on the resignation, it came ‘following a firestorm of controversy’ about past statements and affiliations.

It wasn’t much of a ‘firestorm’ — the liberal media did all that it could to contain it. Byron York at the Washington Examiner said that as of Friday morning at 11:30 am, he found: (or didn’t)

Total words about the Van Jones controversy in the New York Times: 0.
Total words about the Van Jones controversy in the Washington Post: 0.
Total words about the Van Jones controversy on NBC Nightly News: 0.
Total words about the Van Jones controversy on ABC World News: 0.
Total words about the Van Jones controversy on CBS Evening News: 0.

If you were to receive all your news from any one of these outlets, or even all of them together, and you heard about some sort of controversy involving President Obama’s Special Adviser for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, your response would be, “Huh?”

If you heard that that adviser, Van Jones, had apologized for a number of remarks and positions in the recent past, your response would be, “What?” And if you were in the Obama White House monitoring the Jones situation, you would be hoping that the news organizations listed above continue to hold the line. . . .

Well, they held the line until the Labor Day weekend news cycle.  Except for one innocuous piece in the Washington Post and a brief mention on CBS Nightly News,  ABC, NBC and the NYTimes continued to spike the story.

But the White House doesn’t control either Fox News or the blogosphere.  And perhaps realizing that the Obama administration was exposing the level of editorial control it has over the mainstream media,  by Saturday night,  somebody in the White House decided Van Jones wasn’t worth all the hassle.

On Sunday,  Van Jones resigned.  When I Googled “Van Jones” Google’s News site headlined ABC News’ cover story, which ironically enough, was ABC’s first mention of the Jones ‘controversy’.    What Google chose to highlight from the ABC piece was this summary from Jones’ resignation letter:

“On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me,” … “They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide” - Van Jones

The story ran at NBC news under the headline, Obama Aide Van Jones Resigns After GOP Attacks. National Public Radio ran the story under this unbelievably transparent headline; “White House ‘Green’ Advisor Jones, Under Fire From Beck and Others, Resigns.

I can see why the Obama Media might frame it that way for their broadcast and print media, but the logic of carrying the party line over onto the internet where the story’s been headlines for a week is an open insult to their web audience’s intelligence.

On Thursday, Jones tried to save his job by apologizing for some of what his resignation letter called “smears” and the mainstream press called “attacks”

“In recent days some in the news media have reported on past statements I made before I joined the administration - some of which were made years ago. If I have offended anyone with statements I made in the past, I apologize,” Jones said. “As for the petition that was circulated today, I do not agree with this statement and it certainly does not reflect my views now or ever.”

How it made the transition from facts for which he apologized on Thursday into a vicious partisan ’smear’ on Sunday is worth noting carefully.    It is the Principle of the Big Lie in action.

The North Korean government executed a thirty-three year old woman on June 16th. Her crime? She was distributing Bibles. She was executed in the northwestern city of Ryongchon near the border with China.

The next day, her parents, her husband and their three children were arrested and sent to a political prison camp in the northeastern city of Hoeryong.

North Korea claims to guarantee freedom of religion for its 24 million people but the only religion permitted North Koreans is the worship of Kim Jong il.

There is a Catholic church, two Protestant churches and one Russian Orthodox, but they are only for foreigners.

The Investigative Commission On Crime Against Humanity also alleged in its report that in March, North Korean security agents arrested Seo Kum Ok, 30, another Christian, in a city near Ryongchon and tortured her.

The agents alleged she was attempting to spy on a nuclear site and hand over the evidence to South Korea and the U.S.

The report said it remains unclear whether she survived. Her husband was also arrested and their two children disappeared, it said.

In North Korea, a person can face execution for distributing Bibles or even for circulating foreign movies.

Nancy Pelosi claimed in a rambling and confused press conference  that the CIA repeatedly lied to her, “every step of the way” concerning the US use of waterboarding.  If true, somebody at the CIA may soon be headed to jail.  Or Pelosi may be forced to admit the obvious — she’s the one doing the lying.

Democrats on the House intelligence committee said Thursday that CIA officers broke the law in 2002 if they told Nancy Pelosi then that they had not yet engaged in waterboarding.

“If they make a false report, absolutely it’s illegal,” said Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. “If they fail to make a report when they’re obligated to that is also illegal — a violation of the National Security Act.”

Said CIA Spokesman George Little: “It is not the policy of the CIA to mislead the United States Congress.”

The Speaker of the US House of Representatives says otherwise.   Both versions can’t be true.

Nobody Told Me Nuthin!

Intelligence officials released documents this evening saying that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was briefed in September 2002 about the use of harsh interrogation tactics against al-Qaeda prisoners, seemingly contradicting her repeated statements over the past 18 months that she was never told that these techniques were actually being used.

In a 10-page memo outlining an almost seven-year history of classified briefings, intelligence officials said that Pelosi and then-Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.) were the first two members of Congress ever briefed on the interrogation tactics. Then the ranking member and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, respectively, Pelosi and Goss were briefed Sept. 4, 2002, one week before the first anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The memo, issued by the Director of National Intelligence and the Central Intelligence Agency to Capitol Hill, notes the Pelosi-Goss briefing covered “EITs including the use of EITs on Abu Zubaydah.” EIT is an acronym for enhanced interrogation technique. Zubaydah was one of the earliest valuable al-Qaeda members captured and the first to have the controversial tactic known as water boarding used against him.

The issue of what Pelosi knew and when she knew it has become a matter of heated debate on Capitol Hill. Republicans have accused her of knowing for many years precisely the techniques CIA agents were using in interrogations, and only protesting the tactics when they became public and liberal antiwar activists protested.

More from Capitol Briefing

Nancy Pelosi says she was briefed by Bush administration officials on the legal justification for using waterboarding — but that they never followed through on promises to inform her when they actually began using “enhanced”  interrogation techniques.

When she starts wagging her finger. . .

“In that or any other briefing…we were not, and I repeat, were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation techniques were used. What they did tell us is that they had some legislative counsel … opinions that they could be used,” she told reporters today.

Earlier, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) criticized Pelosi and other Democratic leaders for backing probes into the use of waterboarding — after reportedly failing to raise objections during a briefing on its potential use in 2002.

“Well, yesterday I saw a partial list of the number of members of the House and Senate, Democrats and Republicans, who were briefed on these interrogation methods and not a word was raised at the time, not one word,” Boehner told reporters at his weekly news availability.

“And I think you’re going to hear more and more about the bigger picture here, that what — the war on terror after 9/11 was done in a bipartisan basis on lots of fronts. And that bigger story will be coming out,” he added.

Pelosi says members who receive classified intelligence briefings are powerless to act on them — or even discuss them with staff — due to confidentiality requirements.

GOP operatives are pointing to a 2007 Washington Post story which describes an hour-long 2002 briefing in which Pelosi was told about enhanced interrogation techniques in graphic detail.

Two unnamed officials told the paper that Pelosi, then a member of the Democratic minority, didn’t raise substantial objections.

Joby Warrick and Dan Eggen wrote:

In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.

Lower down in the article, however, the authors and their sources acknowledge Pelosi & Co. were severely constrained in what they could do with the information — and had no way of knowing how the techniques would ultimately used or abused in a pre-Abu Gharaib era.

Congressional officials say the groups’ ability to challenge the practices was hampered by strict rules of secrecy that prohibited them from being able to take notes or consult legal experts or members of their own staffs. And while various officials have described the briefings as detailed and graphic, it is unclear precisely what members were told about waterboarding and how it is conducted. Several officials familiar with the briefings also recalled that the meetings were marked by an atmosphere of deep concern about the possibility of an imminent terrorist attack.

“In fairness, the environment was different then because we were closer to Sept. 11 and people were still in a panic,” said one U.S. official present during the early briefings. “But there was no objecting, no hand-wringing. The attitude was, ‘We don’t care what you do to those guys as long as you get the information you need to protect the American people.’”

After promising to “push the reset button” on relations with Moscow, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton  presented Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov with a  gift from the Obama administration.   It was supposed to be a joke, but it backfired.  (What’s with the administration and gifts, anyway?)

The gift was supposed to be a red button labeled “reset” to symbolize the moronic suggestion by President Obama that US-Russian relations can be simply reset — even with a button mislabeled “overcharge.”

The Wall Street Journal noted in an editorial that the public is getting tired of listening to the administration blame the Bush administration and is waiting to see results.

As 2009 opened, three weeks before Barack Obama took office, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 9034 on January 2, its highest level since the autumn panic. Yesterday the Dow fell another 4.24% to 6763, for an overall decline of 25% in two months and to its lowest level since 1997. The dismaying message here is that President Obama’s policies have become part of the economy’s problem.

Americans have welcomed the Obama era in the same spirit of hope the President campaigned on. But after five weeks in office, it’s become clear that Mr. Obama’s policies are slowing, if not stopping, what would otherwise be the normal process of economic recovery. From punishing business to squandering scarce national public resources, Team Obama is creating more uncertainty and less confidence — and thus a longer period of recession or subpar growth.

The Democrats who now run Washington don’t want to hear this, because they benefit from blaming all bad economic news on President Bush. And Mr. Obama has inherited an unusual recession deepened by credit problems, both of which will take time to climb out of. But it’s also true that the economy has fallen far enough, and long enough, that much of the excess that led to recession is being worked off. Already 15 months old, the current recession will soon match the average length — and average job loss — of the last three postwar downturns. What goes down will come up — unless destructive policies interfere with the sources of potential recovery. Read the rest of this entry »

By Frank Spaniak

With just over a month before the nations televisions are scheduled to convert to digital transmission,  the incoming Obama administration is asking congress to consider a delay the switchover here.

In the most significant sign to date of concern about the impending digital TV transition, the Obama transition team co-chairman John Podesta said the government funds to support the change are “woefully inadequate” and said that the digital switch date, Feb. 17, should be “reconsidered and extended.”

Is it that Mr Obama doesn’t want you to miss American Idol or what the media thinks is Americas idol?  There are millions of low-income homes that will not be able to watch it and there could very well be rioting in the streets because of it.

This reminds me of the long lost TV show “Max Headroom” where TV was king.  They were once talking about doing the Christmas show to get sympathy from the masses by showing the family sitting around a non functional TV and how hard times really were.  Fantasy at the time, showing that with out it we are lost, and proof that without a TV it would truly be hard times.

Is it more primal than that?  Without a lot of the people that voted for change that now can’t afford the converter boxes not able to see the next President on TV making change for them.  Without it the only change that they will see is that Obama took away their TV?   Not quite the change I’m sure he was hoping to deliver.  We’d better get used to it.

Maybe it’s a great opportunity to sit down with a good book like The Bible.