Government cannot create a moral people. A moral people can create a moral government.
Lib Radio Host: Record Snows and Cold Caused By Global Warming
The liberal mind never ceases to amaze me.
Our nation is experiencing record snows and cold spells, and Air America host Thom Hartmann actually told his audience Friday:
What we are seeing in this cold, that has me trapped in my house here today, is that, what we are seeing is a symptom of global warming. But you wouldn’t know that from the crazies on the right.
Speaking of lunacy, Hartmann was so proud of this moment in broadcast history that he created an mp3 of his explanation as to why global warming is making us all freeze to death, and not only posted it at Air America’s website, but also included an embed feature if folks wanted to share his astounding stupidity with others.
As you might imagine, I do (audio embedded below the fold, h/t Tom Nelson, readers are cautioned to stow all potables and combustibles before proceeding further):
Now, I don’t know what "science piece" Hartmann was referring to. I’ve done a Google news search, and found a NewScientist article discussing the recently released data from the World Meteorological Organization concerning world ice levels.
However, neither suggested that evaporated ice is adding moisture to the atmosphere that’s causing the recent snows and cold spells. Frankly, I haven’t been able to find any published work stating that.
Maybe Thom will do us a favor and shoot us a link so that we can examine this fabulous theory in greater detail.
Stay tuned.
CBS’s Chen: Leave Caroline Kennedy Alone, Criticism ‘Unfair’
On Thursday’s CBS Early Show, co-host Julie Chen came to the defense of would-be New York Senator Caroline Kennedy, who has faced criticism for her lack of experience: "This is so unfair. I mean, look, the system is set up the way it’s set up and Governor Paterson decides and that’s it. Leave her alone, everyone." That comment followed a report by correspondent Meg Oliver, in which Kennedy avoided tough questions from the press: "She quickly got a taste of the pressure that comes with seeking a high-profile political office…questions mostly went unanswered."
Chen was not so quick to defend Sarah Palin from critics during the campaign. When Tina Fey began impersonating Palin on Saturday Night Live in September, Chen remarked: "Tina Fey has just so much material to work with, this is like, probably a dream come true for her." Earlier in September, Chen wondered about Palin’s foreign policy experience: "The education of Sarah Palin. The Alaska governor has her first meetings with world leaders as they gather at the U.N. How will she do?"
Here is the full transcript of the segment:
7:05AM SEGMENT:
JULIE CHEN: Well, it is official, Caroline Kennedy wants to succeed Hillary Clinton in the Senate. She launched her quest yesterday with a highly anticipated visit to upstate New York. CBS News correspondent Meg Oliver reports.
MEG OLIVER: Kennedy’s non-campaign campaigning included three upstate New York stops in Syracuse.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Welcome to Rochester.
OLIVER: Rochester and Buffalo.
CAROLINE KENNEDY: How are you doing?
OLIVER: And she finally said it in public. She would like to succeed Hillary Clinton as the junior Senator from New York.
CAROLINE KENNEDY: Well, I just wanted to say that, as some of you may have heard, I’ve told Governor Paterson that I’d be honored to be considered for the position of United States Senator.
OLIVER: But she quickly got a taste of the pressure that comes with seeking a high-profile political office.
KENNEDY: The Governor has laid out a process and I am proud to be in that process.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: What can you say to New Yorkers that says that you’re qualified?
UNIDENTIFIED MAN B: Are you ready for this, Mrs. Kennedy? You’re not going to answer questions at all?
OLIVER: So while the goal was to seek support from local elected officials and political leaders-
BYRON BROWN [BUFFALO MAYOR]: I look forward to us continuing our dialogue.
KENNEDY: Thank you.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN C: No, you speak first.
KENNEDY: No, I want to answer questions.
OLIVER: But questions mostly went unanswered.
MAN C: What makes you think you can represent upstate?
KENNEDY: Well, as I — first of all, this was a great visit and I’ve already learned a lot and I would want to come back-
MAN C: What did you learn?
KENNEDY: -were I lucky enough to be chosen, but it is a process.
OLIVER: Ultimately it’s up to New York’s Governor to decide who will be appointed to the Senate seat. Meg Oliver, CBS News, New York.
HARRY SMITH: And it may not be all that simple. It’s very interesting. There’s a kind of a backlash that’s starting to develop for people saying, ‘oh, so these seats just go to the elites?’ So there’s a very interesting to and fro.
CHEN: This is so unfair. I mean, look, the system is set up the way it’s set up and Governor Paterson decides and that’s it. Leave her alone, everyone.
Sun-Times: Obama’s Senate Seat is a ‘Black Senate Seat’
Betcha didn’t know that the elected office of Senator of the United States of America was a color coded position? Apparently, Laura Washington of the Chicago Sun-Times thinks it is, anyway, because she is warning that Obama’s “black Senate seat” will be lost because of this mess with Governor Rod Blagojevich getting arrested for trying to sell that “black seat” to the highest bidder.
In hers headlined “Black leaders see Senate seat being hijacked,” Washington is ostensibly reporting on what black community leaders and politicos in Chicago are saying about who should be appointed to fill Obama’s vacant seat. Still, Washington injected quite a lot of her own feelings into the tale of this gnashing of teeth and rending of cloth over the fate of that same seat to the effect that she endorses the idea that Obama’s position in the Senate is officially a “black seat” and should stay that way.
Washington is worried most that if the seat is left to be filled by an actual vote of the people of Illinois, instead of an appointment by the governor, it will spell the end of the “black seat.” At one point, Washington even claims that “white voters” are uninterested in why they might “deserve” a black senator and so cannot be counted on to vote black. That despite the fact that when Obama ran he was overwhelmingly elected by those same white voters — not to mention that the other party also put up a black senate candidate to face him. Wouldn’t it seem obvious that voting black is not much of a problem for white voters in Illinois?
Naturally, as far as Washington and her black leaders are concerned, it’s all a conspiracy to defraud blacks of their “black seat” in the Senate.
While they aren’t ready to coalesce around Jackson, they are gearing up for a fight. There’s a massive conspiracy afoot, Gadlin says. “We see it for what it is. What we are really looking at is ‘The Luck of the Irish’ — two Madigans, Fitzgerald, Durbin, Cullerton, Claypool, Daley, and all the rest. They’re making a power play to regain the control of the politics, money and jobs in this state.”
There is a conspiracy, of course. But it has nothing to do with the color black. It is/was focused entirely on another color: green… as in the color of money. No one is looking to take away anything from blacks here. This is just a normal case of greed, not racism. But leave it to Washington and her “black leaders” to turn run-of-the-mill Chicago corruption and greed into a giant racist conspiracy.
Regardless, Washington is all worried that the people might be asked to vote for a new Senator.
The obstacles to “keeping the seat” are manifold:
Illinois’ Powers That Be are hurtling headlong into election mode. The Legislature will convene today to hammer out legislation to mandate an election, no doubt in record time. The appointment option is fading fast.
Darn the luck! Imagine. Expecting the voters to actually vote for their Senator! The nerve.
And, worse, we are stuck with all those racist, white Illinoisans — you know, the many thousands that voted for Obama for Senator and then again for president — that will surely succeed in keeping the next black Senator down.
White voters don’t and won’t accept the idea that America and Illinois need — and deserve — a black senator. (When the Senate was all white, they never complained).
What Washington wants is an appointment. She wants a perfect affirmative action appointment. She wants at all costs to keep the people of Illinois from having a vote in who represents them in Congress. Democracy is no good as far as she is concerned. She knows better, after all.
I have to say, though, that color coding Senate seats is an intriguing thought. I mean, we have Bernine Sanders of Vermont holding one of these seats and he is a commie. Is his the “red” seat? Our 31st Vice President, Charles Curtis, was also once a Senator from Kansas. He was half American Indian. Should his seat be considered the “yellow” seat? Is Colorado Senator Ken Salazar’s seat the “brown” seat? What other colors for seats can we imagine?
But, after such an exercise in the Balkanization of our Senate, one wonders when we went from having elected officials by acclamation of the people to selected officials by accident of birth? I guess Laura Washington and the Chicago Sun-Times aren’t much interested in that whole silly “voting” thing?
(Photo credit: pbs.org)
Scarborough Rips MSM: In Wasilla Instead of Investigating Obama-Blago Connection
Rahm Emanuel, a congressman from Chicago and a friend of Obama’s, told me that he, Obama, David Wilhelm, who was Blagojevich’s campaign co-chair, and another Blagojevich aide were the top strategists of Blagojevich’s victory. He and Obama "participated in a small group that met weekly when Rod was running for governor," Emanuel said. "We basically laid out the general election, Barack and I and these two." A spokesman for Blagojevich confirmed Emanuel’s account, although David Wilhelm, who now works for Obama, said that Emanuel had overstated Obama’s role. — from Making It: How Chicago Shaped Obama, by Ryan Lizza, the New Yorker, July 21, 2008.
In one of the more incisive indictments of the MSM I’ve witnessed, certainly by one of its own, Joe Scarborough tore into the media this morning for its failure to have investigated Barack Obama’s political roots. In particular, the Morning Joe host ripped the MSM for not testing the truth of Ryan Lizza’s reporting, above, of Rahm Emanuel’s claim that he and Obama were central figures in Blago’s 2002 gubernatorial campaign. Scarborough pointed out that already this summer, when the Lizza article appeared, it was known that Blago was under a deep ethical cloud. Yet the MSM charged off to Wasilla to investigate Sarah Palin’s librarian, utterly uninterested in the report of Obama’s intimate link with America’s most corrupt governor. John Harwood of NYT/CNBC and Mike Barnicle played the perfect foils for Scarborough’s impassioned tirade, Barnicle going so far as to claim that no investigation was necessary: his "instinct" told him that Emanuel had overstated Obama’s involvement with Blago’s campaign.Excerpts:
JOE SCARBOROUGH: How rich is it that we sit around and say "we don’t know, we have to wait until Obama tells us. We don’t know what these connections, we don’t know whether he really ran the 2002 [Blago] campaign or not"? Again, I will guarantee you, if Sarah Palin had run the most corrupt–if Sarah Palin had run Ted Stevens’s campaign in 2002, and somebody had bragged about it in the New Yorker, the press would have savaged her. But we sit here now, it’s almost Christmas, and we don’t know the truth about it. We don’t know the truth about any of this, because we haven’t done the investigative work.
. . .
SCARBOROUGH: I’m convicting the press because they didn’t investigate this past summer, when they were sending all those people to Wasilla, a town of 9,000, they should have been going to Chicagoland.MIKA BRZEZINSKI: I think that’s really fair.
SCARBOROUGH: The press never covered –
JOHN HARWOOD: To cover Blagojevich?
SCARBOROUGH [temperature rising]: To look at the background of a candidate who had only been in national politics for one year before he decided to run for president of the United States, and was born from the most corrupt political city in America. Do you not think, do we not think, that warranted an investigation? Not to suggest he did anything wrong, but to see what his background was?
HARWOOD: Of course. There was coverage of his background–Ryan Lizza’s piece.
SCARBOROUGH: OK, then tell me this–yeah, Lizza’s the only one that wrote about it and he got kicked off the campaign plane. So here’s my question for you: if we know so much about this, answer this question. Did Barack Obama, was Barack Obama intimately involved in Blagojevich’s 2002 campaign?
HARWOOD: He was involved, I don’t know how intimately.SCARBOROUGH: Why? Why don’t you know that?
HARWOOD: I’m not sure how to factor out the BS quotient in that quote you were talking about.
SCARBOROUGH: Why can’t you factor that out?
HARWOOD: Well, because it’s not a story I personally covered.
SCARBOROUGH: I know, but why didn’t somebody investigate this six months ago when Ryan Lizza wrote it? It’s pretty fascinating, because in 2008 we knew he was the most corrupt governor in America.
MIKE BARNICLE: Let me put my newspaper columnist/newspaper editor hat on for you to answer your question about Wasilla, Alaska as opposed to the Blagojevich administration.
SCARBOROUGH: Not Blagojevich–Barack Obama.
BARNICLE: Whatever. She was the next, new face. No one had ever heard of her. So you’re going to send as many people as you can afford up to Alaska to explain to the reading public who she is. You’re sitting there, you know Obama, you know the governor of Illinois –
SCARBOROUGH: You don’t know Obama. You can’t even tell me whether he ran the 2002 campaign of the most corrupt governor in America.
BARNICLE: I can tell you this much: he was a state senator then, and he ran that campaign about as much as I did.
SCARBOROUGH: Oh really? How do you know that?BARNICLE: Just instinct.
SCARBOROUGH: Instinct?
BARNICLE: Yeah.
SCARBOROUGH [at moment of screencap]: Newspaper editor: shouldn’t we have facts instead of instinct? That’s what everybody’s working on: instinct! You know what? I like him! So I expect that he’s a really good guy. I hope if I ever run for politics again, I am given this much benefit of the doubt.
Will Thomas Tamm Be Prosecuted?
Thomas Tamm, a former Bush Justice Department lawyer, says he’s the one who leaked to the New York Times and other news media, the existence of the Bush terrorist surveillance program. He’s outed himself as some sort of hero to Newsweek. But he’s no hero at all. Saboteur is the nicest appropriate word. The rest, other than traitor, are not printable here without expletive deleteds.
During his childhood, he played under the desk of J. Edgar Hoover.
Hmmm . . . now I know why he leaked the info: Exposure to dresses on men wounds you mentally for life.
The New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for its story. The two reporters who worked on it each published books. Congress, after extensive debate, last summer passed a major new law to govern the way such surveillance is conducted. But Tamm–who was not the Times’s only source, but played the key role in tipping off the paper–has not fared so well. The FBI has pursued him relentlessly for the past two and a half years. Agents have raided his house, hauled away personal possessions and grilled his wife, a teenage daughter and a grown son. More recently, they’ve been questioning Tamm’s friends and associates about nearly every aspect of his life. Tamm has resisted pressure to plead to a felony for divulging classified information. But he is living under a pall, never sure if or when federal agents might arrest him.
Exhausted by the uncertainty clouding his life, Tamm now is telling his story publicly for the first time.”
So, we’re supposed to feel sorry for this guy who sold out America to Islamic terrorists because the people who helped him do so won a prize, but he’s been harassed? Tell it to the 3,000 graves from 9/11, dude. Tell their families how tough life is.
Tamm concedes he was also motivated in part by his anger at other Bush-administration policies at the Justice Department, including its aggressive pursuit of death-penalty cases and the legal justifications for “enhanced” interrogation techniques that many believe are tantamount to torture.
Ah, now we get to the point of this not-heroic-at-all coward. He has an agenda. He didn’t like U.S. policy. Well, maybe, then, he should have joined the ACLU, not the Justice Department, which also bends over for these terrorists.
He had never been “read into,” or briefed, on the details of the program. All he knew was that a domestic surveillance program existed, and it “didn’t smell right.”
You know what doesn’t smell right? The stench of traitors who jeopardize American lives and boost the chances of success for terrorists. That’s what really smells. He emboldened those who are bent on our destruction–whatta guy. The whole Muslim world is laughing at him. They love, but never appreciate, useful idiots like him. He won’t be getting any awards for bravery from them.
Tamm is haunted by the consequences of what he did-and what could yet happen to him. He is no longer employed at Justice and has been struggling to make a living practicing law. He does occasional work for a local public defender’s office, handles a few wills and estates–and is more than $30,000 in debt. (To cover legal costs, he recently set up a defense fund.) He says he has suffered from depression. He also realizes he made what he calls “stupid” mistakes along the way, including sending out a seemingly innocuous but fateful e-mail from his Justice Department computer that may have first put the FBI on his scent. Soft-spoken and self-effacing, Tamm has an impish smile and a wry sense of humor. “I guess I’m not a very good criminal,” he jokes.
So sad, too frickin’ bad. A lot of attorneys–like me–are having a tough time in this economy. And some of us didn’t jeopardize America’s national security like he did.
At the very least, he violated the attorney-client privilege and should be grieved for in whichever state or states he’s licensed to practice law. (The client was us–the U.S. government.) But he should also be prosecuted. It’s a crime to leak information about espionage activities. Isn’t that what all the liberals were whining about over Valerie Plame?
So, when will Thomas Tamm get the Lewis “Scooter” Libby treatment? I guess we’re only in the business of prosecuting non-leakers (ie., Libby) not going after real, actual leakers who broke the law, like Tamm and Richard Armitage (the real leaker of Plame’s CIA status).
