I just don’t see how Nancy Pelosi could possibly continue lying about this when the funding of abortion is pretty much the entire reason this awful bill can’t pass. How stupid do they think we are? Wait. Don’t anwer that.
Doug Johnson of National Right to Life wrote:
Speaker Pelosi has her own idiosyncratic dictionary, one in which federal agencies can pay for abortion on demand without spending “public funds” or “taxpayer funds” for abortion. In ordinary English, however, this is deceptive claptrap.
Kathleen McKinley at Right Wing News said:
Every version of the health-care bill has contained multiple pro-abortion mandates and federal subsidies for abortion, except for the version that was fixed by adoption of the Stupak-Pitts amendment. But Obama and Reid kept that provision out of the Senate bill. It had been used to get Stupak and other pro life Democrats (I love typing that..pro-life Democrats- music to my ears ) votes in the House, but then quickly dropped to satisfy abortion lobby. The final bill is the most pro-abortion piece of legislation since Roe v. Wade. It would result in direct federal funding of abortion through Community Health Centers, tax subsidies for private plans that cover abortion, and pro-abortion federal administrative mandates. When Obama said that no federal funds would be used to fund abortion, he was either flat out lying or he changed his mind. He should admit that now.
I think that the Democrats have had the media in their pocket for so long that they’ve believed that they can lie with impugnity and never get called on it. But it’s our job as bloggers and new media types to continue getting the word out that the people are being lied to.
Yet another news agency spreads misinformation about Obama’s birth certificate. Today Sky News did a story about “birthers” and falsely claimed Obama’s paper birth certificate was burned in a fire that destroyed many state records. There are four problems with this.
1. The Obama people claimed this happen
2. The media reports it as fact.
3. In Obama’s book Dreams of my father he writes he has the birth certificate in his possession.
4. The media Doesn’t seem to put two and two together and see that Obama lied, or they are ignoring this huge lie about the birth certificate being destroyed in a fire.
Glenn Beck compares birthers to terrorists. You see, Obama has been very very good to Beck. If not for Obama, Beck wouldn’t be where he is today. Getting to the bottom of Obama’s birth certificate would get Obama thrown out sooner. Beck, along with Fox News wants to milk this presidency for all its worth. Beck and O’Reilly just repeat things that have been proven false for 2 yrs now and wouldn’t dare look into any of it himself.
Feb 26 it was posted in Post Mail Blog they have received pdf files from Hawaii showing the Hawaiian birth index has no record of Obama listed. This does not surprise me at all. After all, there is no record of Obama or Obama’s mother ever being admitted into any hospital in Hawaii…ever.
The media wonders why they are becoming irrelevant. Well its because every day people are doing the media’s job while they sit there spinning the news, protecting terrorists, covering up stories, and calling every day Americans names.
Kadıköy Cumhuriyet Savcılığı, Üsküdar Cumhuriyet Savcılığı,Sultanahmet,Büyükçekmece Cumhuriyet Savcılığı,Eyüp Cumhuriyet Savcılığı,Edirne Cumhuriyet Savcılığı,Ankara Cumhuriyet Savcılığı’nda Moris (Maurice) Mitrani hakkında açılmış ve hazırlık aşamasında olan , bir çok suç duyurusu(dava)’na rağmen Mitrani dolandırıcılığa doymuyor. Bazı finans ve iş çevrelerine göre yatırımcıların kayıpları dahil edildiğinde mağdurların zararlarının milyon doların üzerine çıktığı ileri sürülüyor.
Nitelikli dolandırıcılıktan sabıkalı olan Moris (Maurice) Mitrani ; yanında yerli ve yabancı düzmece avukatlar barındırıp ,finans sağlama işini profosyonel bir şekilde tüm dünya genelinde yaptığını iddia ederek,paraya ihtiyacı olan iş adamlarının ,sahte avukatlarının yardımı ile önce güvenini kazanıp ,daha sonra ‘’expertiz bedeli’’ adı altında dolandırıyormuş.Mitrani’nin kurduğu düzmece şirketin isminin ise ‘’BENA INTERNATIONAL’’ oldugu ancak şirketin hiçbir ticari faaliyetinin olmadığı belirtildi.
Adli kaynaklara göre, İddianamelerde ; Mitrani,kendisinin Alaton ailesinin akrabası ,Nesim Malki’nin yiğeni ,adı Galataport ihalesi ile gündeme gelen İsrailli işadamı Eyal Ofer’in temsilcisi olduğunu ve Sabancı ailesine ait olan SASA’nın mali danışmanlığını yaptığını ileri sürerek işadamlarını ve bazı kurumları kandırıp dolandırmak sureti ile kanunlara aykırı biçimde ciddi gelirler elde ederek suç işlediği iddialarına sıkça yer verilmiş. Nitelikli dolandırıcılıktan sabıkalı olan Mitrani , basit yalanı aşmış ve mağdurların karar verme yetisini engelleyecek derecede hile ve göz boyamalarla,kişi ve şirketlere finans sağlayacağını vaat edip expertiz bedeli adı altında haksız kazanç elde etmiş.
Bilindiği üzere Türk Ceza Kanunu’nda,Bir kişiyi veya kurumu kandırabilecek nitelikte hile ve desiseler yaparak hataya düşürerek veya mağdurda esasen varolan hatadan hile ve desise kullanmak sureti ile yararlanarak onun veya başkasının zararına ,kendisine veya başkasına haksız bir menfaat sağlamak dolandırıcılık suçunu oluşturur.Moris (Maurice) Mitrani ve suç ortaklarından Nedim Beneroya’nın, ‘’kişiyi içinde bulunduğu zor şartlardan kurtarmak bahanesi suretiyle dolandırıcılık’’(finans sağlamak bahanesi) yaptığı tespit edilmekte olup,cezalarının da bu nedenlerden dolayı ağırlaşacaği(nitelikli dolandırıcılık) finans çevrelerinde büyük yankı uyandırdı.
Çok yakında,Moris Mitrani ve suç ortaklarından Nedim Beneroya’nın ,Savcılıklarda yer alan suç bilgilerini ve iddianame detaylarını ,okurlarımızla paylaşacağız.
You’re sound asleep when you hear a thump outside your bedroom door. Half-awake, and nearly paralyzed with fear, you hear muffled whispers. At least two people have broken into your house and are moving your way. With your heart pumping, you reach down beside your bed and pick up your shotgun. You rack a shell into the chamber, then inch toward the door and open it. In the darkness, you make out two shadows.
One holds something that looks like a crowbar. When the intruder brandishes it as if to strike, you raise the shotgun and fire. The blast knocks both thugs to the floor. One writhes and screams while the second man crawls to the front door and lurches outside. As you pick up the telephone to call police, you know you’re in trouble. In your country, most guns were outlawed years before, and the few that are privately owned are so stringently regulated as to make them useless. Yours was never registered…
Police arrive and inform you that the second burglar has died. They arrest you for First Degree Murder and Illegal Possession of a Firearm.
When you talk to your attorney, he tells you not to worry: authorities will probably plea the case down to manslaughter.
“What kind of sentence will I get?” you ask.
“Only ten-to-twelve years,” he replies, as if that’s nothing. “Behave yourself, and you’ll be out in seven.”
The next day, the shooting is the lead story in the local newspaper. Somehow, you’re portrayed as an eccentric vigilante while the two men you shot are represented as choirboys. Their friends and relatives can’t find an unkind word to say about them. Buried deep down in the article, authorities acknowledge that both “victims” have been arrested numerous times. But the next day’s headline says it all: “Lovable Rogue Son Didn’t Deserve to Die.”
The thieves have been transformed from career criminals into Robin Hood-type pranksters. As the days wear on, the story takes wings. The national media picks it up, then the international media. The surviving burglar has become a folk hero.
Your attorney says the thief is preparing to sue you, and he’ll probably win. The media publishes reports that your home has been burglarized several times in the past and that you’ve been critical of local police for their lack of effort in apprehending the suspects. After the last break-in, you told your neighbor that you would be prepared next time. The District Attorney uses this to allege that you were lying in wait for the burglars.
A few months later, you go to trial. The charges haven’t been reduced, as your lawyer had so confidently predicted. When you take the stand, your anger at the injustice of it all works against you. Prosecutors paint a picture of you as a mean, vengeful man. It doesn’t take long for the jury to convict you of all charges. The judge sentences you to life in prison.
This case really happened.
On August 22, 1999, Tony Martin of Emneth, Norfolk, England, killed one burglar and wounded a second. In April, 2000, he was convicted and is now serving a life term.
How did it become a crime to defend one’s own life in the once great British Empire?
It started with the Pistols Act of 1903.
This seemingly reasonable law forbade selling pistols to minors or felons and established that handgun sales were to be made only to those who had a license.
The Firearms Act of 1920 expanded licensing to include not only handguns but all firearms except shotguns. Later laws passed in 1953 and 1967 outlawed the carrying of any weapon by private citizens and mandated the registration of all shotguns.
Momentum for total handgun confiscation began in earnest after the Hungerford mass shooting in 1987. Michael Ryan, a mentally disturbed man with a Kalashnikov rifle, walked down the streets shooting everyone he saw. When the smoke cleared, 17 people were dead.
The British public, already de-sensitized by eighty years of “gun control”, demanded even tougher restrictions. (The seizure of all privately owned handguns was the objective even though Ryan used a rifle.)
Nine years later, at Dunblane, Scotland, Thomas Hamilton used a semi-automatic weapon to murder 16 children and a teacher at a public school.
For many years, the media had portrayed all gun owners as mentally unstable or worse, criminals. Now the press had a real kook with which to beat up law-abiding gun owners. Day after day, week after week, the media gave up all pretense of objectivity and demanded a total ban on all handguns. The Dunblane Inquiry, a few months later, sealed the fate of the few sidearms still owned by private citizens.
During the years in which the British government incrementally took away most gun rights, the notion that a citizen had the right to armed self-defense came to be seen as vigilantism. Authorities refused to grant gun licenses to people who were threatened, claiming that self-defense was no longer considered a reason to own a gun. Citizens who shot burglars or robbers or rapists were charged while the real criminals were released.
Indeed, after the Martin shooting, a police spokesman was quoted as saying, “We cannot have people take the law into their own hands.”
All of Martin’s neighbors had been robbed numerous times, and several elderly people were severely injured in beatings by young thugs who had no fear of the consequences. Martin himself, a collector of antiques, had seen most of his collection trashed or stolen by burglars.
When the Dunblane Inquiry ended, citizens who owned handguns were given three months to turn them over to local authorities. Being good British subjects, most people obeyed the law. The few who didn’t were visited by police and threatened with ten-year prison sentences if they didn’t comply. Police later bragged that they’d taken nearly 200,000 handguns from private citizens.
How did the authorities know who had handguns? The guns had been registered and licensed. Kind of like cars. Sound familiar?
WAKE UP AMERICA; THIS IS WHY OUR FOUNDING FATHERS PUT THE SECOND AMENDMENT IN OUR CONSTITUTION.
“…It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people’s minds…” – Samuel Adams
If you think this is important, please forward to everyone you know.
You had better wake up, because your new president is going to do this very same thing over here if he can get it done. And there are stupid people in congress and on the street that will go right along with him.
I am very pleased to announce the newest feature for NZNRL – Celebrity NZNRL Report.
Each week (depending on celebrity availability, I will be bringing you an mini interview with worldwide celebrities and present their take on the current events in both the NRL and the NZNRL!
The first few have been completed and will be unleashed in the very near future.
"Coming Soon - Celebrity NZNRL Report
So if there are any celebrities you would like me to conatct for this feature, please let me know and I’ll do my best to have it done…
The Progressives who believe that the government can spend its way out of the current recession typically justify the huge expenditures with one of the follow arguments.
1. If the goventment didn’t do the Stimulus Package, more serious economic calamities would occur. And/or,
2. When the private sector is not spending at a certain level, the government has to jump in to make up the difference, a classic Keynesian view.
Neither argument stands up to reasonable scrutiny. The first one, heading off more serious calamities, is no different than the one George W. Bush used in fighting terrorism. His argument was that we needed to give the government additional powers to avoid unseen calamities caused by terrorists. It is remarkable that the Progressives were able to see Bush’s power grab, but not Obama’s. It all boils down to the glasses one sees through.
The second argument, that government spending can make up for private sector shortfalls, requires a belief in alchemy. First, some rhetorical questions. When is the last time any major governmental spending program achieved the stated goal? For example, has the trillions spent on anti-poverty over the past 40 years eliminated poverty or even put a dent in it? How many broken government promise does it take for us to finally get it?
More to the point, to assume governmental spending can make up for private sector spending shortfalls requires that the spending benefits be greater than the negative impact of the tax increases required to pay for the spending. This is where alchemy comes in; we aren’t paying for the spending, ….. yet. We just keep barrowing, ignoring the fact that some day it has to be paid back. Sort of reminds me of the sub-prime mortgage mess, but on a governmental scale.
The above logic should be enough to conclude that the Stimulus Package could not work and future ones will not work. But, for those that require more empirical data, I suggest an Op-ed from the Wall Street Journal on February 23 by Dr. Robert Barro, professor of economics at Harvard University and a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute. I have posted some of Barro’s comments below, as well as a link to the entire article. His reasoning is sound and may help explain why clear-thinking senators like Evan Bayh have decided to call it a day.
We need to ask whether the government’s spending reduced or enhanced private spending and whether public-sector hiring lowered or raised private hiring.
I estimate a spending multiplier of around 0.4 within the same year and about 0.6 over two years. Thus, if the government spends an extra $300 billion in each of 2009 and 2010, GDP would be higher than otherwise by $120 billion in 2009 and $180 billion in 2010. These results apply for given taxes and, therefore, when spending is deficit-financed, as in 2009 and 2010. Since the multipliers are less than one, the heightened government outlays reduce other parts of GDP such as personal consumer expenditure, private domestic investment and net exports.
Christina Romer, the chair of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, and her husband, David, have been major contributors to research on tax multipliers. Their results, which rely on the history of U.S. tax legislation since 1945, show tax multipliers of larger magnitude than the one I found. (So my conclusions here—based on the coming increases in taxes—would be strengthened if I switched to their estimates.)
How attractive this short-run deal looks depends on how much one values the added governmental activity. If it’s considered useful public investment—such as building a needed highway or, more modestly, fixing potholes—it might look good. If it’s wasteful spending in a hastily constructed and highly political stimulus package, it looks bad.
But these calculations are not nearly the end of the story, because the added $600 billion of government spending leads to a correspondingly larger public debt. These added obligations must be paid for sometime by raising taxes (unless future government spending declines below its 2008 level, an unlikely scenario).
Thus, viewed over five years, the fiscal stimulus package is a way to get an extra $600 billion of public spending at the cost of $900 billion in private expenditure. This is a bad deal.
The Stimulus Evidence One Year On – By Robert J. Barro
The New York Times reports that a top Justice Department official has concluded that “poor judgment” is not professional misconduct, reversing an earlier O.P.R. finding:
WASHINGTON (AP) — Justice Department lawyers showed ”poor judgment” but did not commit professional misconduct when they authorized CIA interrogators to usewaterboarding and other harsh tactics at the height of the U.S. war on terrorism, an internal review released Friday found.
The decision closes the book on one of the major lingering investigations into the counterterrorism policies of George W. Bush’s administration. President Barack Obamacampaigned on abolishing the simulated drowning technique of waterboarding and other tactics that he called torture, but he left open the question of whether anyone would be punished for authorizing such methods.
An initial review by the Justice Department’s internal affairs unit found that former government lawyers Jay Bybee and John Yoo had committed professional misconduct, a conclusion that could have cost them their law licenses. But, underscoring just how controversial and legally thorny the memos have become, the Justice Department’s top career lawyer reviewed the matter and disagreed.
”This decision should not be viewed as an endorsement of the legal work that underlies those memoranda,” Assistant Deputy Attorney General David Margolis wrote in a memo released Friday.
Margolis, the top nonpolitical Justice Department lawyer and a veteran of several administrations, called the legal memos ”flawed” and said that, at every opportunity, they gave interrogators as much leeway as possible under U.S. torture laws. But he said Yoo and Bybee were not reckless and did not knowingly give incorrect advice, the standard for misconduct.
…
The Office of Professional Responsibility, led by another veteran career prosecutor, Mary Patrice Brown, disagreed.
”Situations of great stress, danger and fear do not relieve department attorneys of their duty to provide thorough, objective and candid legal advice, even if that advice is not what the client wants to hear,” her team wrote in a report that criticized the memos for a ”lack of thoroughness, objectivity and candor.”
In God and Whose Army?, I note the flawed logic of the torture memos and conclude that their advice was reckless if not outright gleefully malicious:
This is demonstrated pointedly in the leaked torture memos, which were labyrinthine in their attempts to provide a legal shadow of doubt for torturers. For example, page 16 of the Bybee-Rizzo memo holds that an action only constitutes torture if there is a “specific intent to inflict severe pain or suffering.” Further, the intent must be express (stated openly), and cannot be predicated on a “good faith belief that his actions will not cause such suffering.” What constitutes a good faith belief? One that is honest, but not necessarily reasonable. What constitutes an honest belief? One that is based on the “advice of experts” (advice which was routinely twisted by the Justice Department–see for example the citation of a sleep study by James Horne as proof that extreme sleep deprivation was not torture. Horne later expressed his outrage that the results of his experiments, which restricted themselves to controlled environments with subjects who experienced no additional stress factors, were misrepresented to justify 11 day non-controlled sleep deprivation periods). Read narrowly, the memos argue that it is possible to simulate drowning on an individual in one’s custody while believing (neither reasonably nor expressly, but at the same time based upon so-called “expert advice”) that the panicked, drowning detainee at one’s thrall is not suffering severely.
It must finally be asked if any such torturer could be said to have acted in good faith, provided they have read the memos, which concede that a court may object to their actions? Is it possible to read and understand a legal argument which sidesteps the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment by pointing out that such a prohibition was directed against convicted individuals and not detainees who have not even been charged with a crime, accept this as adequate justification for committing torture, and remain a morally exempt agent of the state? An individual who fully digests the memos’ slipshod legal reasoning and maintains a good-faith belief in spite of it is highly devout or dangerously uneducated–perhaps too devout or uneducated to be placed in a position which allows him or her to hold such extensive power over another human being. Neither can one cannot remain a “good faith” actor if he or she is aware that the “enhanced interrogation” program was being used to ferret out a confession to substantiate a manufactured link between al-Qaeda and Iraq, in order to justify an act of aggression (one of the victims of torture who provided such a link, Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, later recanted his confession and committed suicide–allegedly–in a Libyan prison). In reality, the only good faith actors were the few who refused to take part in torture, legally sanctioned or otherwise.
For further evidence of this, see the following exchange between Yoo and an O.P.R. official (source):
Yoo was asked how to explain how the torture statute would interfere with the President’s war making abilities, and gave the following answers:
Q: I guess the question I’m raising is, does this particular law really affect the President’s war making abilities…
A: Yes, certainly.
Q: What is your authority for that?
A: Because this is an option that the President might use in war.
Q: What about ordering a village of resistants to be massacred? … Is that a power the President could legally –
A: Yeah. Although, let me say this. So, certainly that would fall within the Commander-in-Chief’s power over tactical relations.
Q: To order a village of civilians to be [exterminated]?
A: Sure.
Sure! Elsewhere in the O.P.R. documents is the following reasoning:
On one of the interrogation videotapes, CIA OIG investigators noted that a [REDACTED] interrogator verbally threatened Abu Zubaydah by stating, “If one child dies in America, and I find out you knew something about it, I will personally cut your mother’s thoat.” [REDACTED] commented, in its review of CIA OIG Report, that the threat was permissible because of its conditional nature.
The Margolis decision underscores a major inconsistency in American law: the myth of the good faith actor. This ties in to the plea of superior orders defense (“just following orders”), but is used here in a far more twisted manner to exonerate a high-level official, one who could be thought of more accurately as a order-giver (or order-facilitator) rather than order-follower.
It is time to admit that the memos were written with the winking assumption that the executive was essentially untouchable. Margolis’ reversal (and Obama’s unwillingness to support the prosecution of any involved individuals) is the culmination of this illicit hubris. How is this “good faith”? In order to conclude that Yoo and Bybee were not acting with malicious intent, one must be uncritical to the point of slavering fanaticism, and a constant danger to those nearby–or, at the very least, to a distant village which has found itself within the President’s cross-hairs. Margolis claims to not endorse the particular legal reasoning of the memos, but there is a surfeit of evidence that the insidious reasoning which exonerated them (that the attacks of September 11th were unprecedented and created a hectic atmosphere in which sloppy legal reasoning–adopted under explicit pressure from Washington, especially from Cheney and Addington, by the former’s own admission–could be forgiven–or that there is a “war exception” to the Constitution) is still being honored in Washington.
Margolis’ memorandum repeatedly references the September 11th attacks. Indeed, the panic of September 11th, incredibly, is used as an excuse in both Yoo and Bybee’s memos and in Margolis’ exoneration of Yoo and Bybee. September 11th is as well-traveled an excuse as anyone is likely to find–a boon for the hateful bureaucrats who no longer even attempt to hide their contempt for the law. Are they too good faith actors?
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