1) Morning Bell: Global Warming – Is There Anything It Can’t Do?
Tomorrow, NBC (which is owned by General Electric) will begin broadcasting the 2010 Winter Olympics from Vancouver, Canada. Only two events are scheduled for the opening day (alpine skiing and ski jumping), but even those events will be difficult to pull off. Why? There is no snow in Vancouver. And International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge knows exactly what is to blame: global warming. Rogge tells AFP: “Global warming of course is a worry, it is a worry for the entire world.”
Considering that NBC/GE has already received billions in TARP bailout cash from the Obama administration and is actively lobbying for a global warming energy tax bill so that it can receive billions more in government green-energy subsidies on top of the millions it already receives, we are sure to hear lots from NBC announcers about how the lack of snow in Vancouver is just another reason Washington needs to act now to stop global warming.
But back in Washington, the global warming scare-monger crowd is singing a slightly different tune. Facing record snowfalls, Time is reporting: “Snowstorm: East Coast Blizzard Tied to Climate Change.” But do not confuse this headline with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s column from two years ago claiming that global warming was causing “anemic winters” in the Washington region.
No snow, too much snow. It does not matter to the enviroleft crowd. For them, global warming always is to blame…One British citizen even maintains a comprehensive list of everything the enviroleft has tried to blame on global warming including: Atlantic ocean less salty, Atlantic ocean more salty, Earth slowing down, Earth spinning faster, fish bigger, fish shrinking, and (most importantly) beer better, beer worse.
See: http://blog.heritage.org/2010/02/11/morning-bell-global-warming-is-there-anything-it-cant-do/
2) Democrats rush to curb corporate election spending before Nov.
Democrats are hoping to fast-track a set of sweeping new campaign finance regulations to prevent the Supreme Court’s landmark Citizens United decision from affecting the November midterm elections.
Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) on Thursday unveiled the majority party's legislative response to the Citizens United case, which they and other Democrats — including President Barack Obama — have sharply criticized as one that will "open the floodgates" to corporate financing of federal elections.
Opting against a constitutional amendment to undo the court’s rejection of existing laws that ban certain political spending by corporations, Democrats are proposing to ban donations by foreign-influenced (which are already banned - see http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZDcxNjNjNTlhNmQxZDYwYjNkOGJjZjkxZTZiMjI0NTg - this is nothing but political spin) and taxpayer-assisted corporations, as well as a series of tough new disclosure requirements on corporations that would still be allowed to steer money toward political action groups.
See: http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/80745-dems-look-to-crack-down-on-corporate-political-spending-ahead-of-midterms
3) Obama ‘Agnostic’ on Deficit Cuts, Won’t Prejudge Tax Increases
Feb. 11 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama said he is “agnostic” about raising taxes on households making less than $250,000 as part of a broad effort to rein in the budget deficit. Obama, in a Feb. 9 Oval Office interview, said that a presidential commission on the budget needs to consider all options for reducing the deficit, including tax increases and cuts in spending on entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare. “The whole point of it is to make sure that all ideas are on the table,” the president said in the interview with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which will appear on newsstands Friday. “So what I want to do is to be completely agnostic, in terms of solutions.” See: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-02-11/obama-agnostic-on-deficit-cuts-won-t-prejudge-tax-increases.html 4) PROMISES, PROMISES: Jobs bill short on making jobs WASHINGTON – There's a problem with the bipartisan jobs bill emerging in the Senate: It won't create many jobs. The bill includes tax cuts to please Republicans and its passage would hand President Barack Obama a badly needed political victory. But even the Obama administration acknowledges the legislation's centerpiece — a tax cut for businesses that hire unemployed workers — would work only on the margins. Tax experts and business leaders said companies are unlikely to hire workers just to receive a tax break. Before businesses start hiring, they need increased demand for their products, more work for their employees and more revenue to pay those workers. See: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100211/ap_on_bi_ge/us_what_jobs 5) 2011 Budget Increases Funding for Planned Parenthood President Obama's proposed budget for 2011 includes more than $327 million for Title X, the program that funds Planned Parenthood. That's a $10 million increase. Carrie Gordon Earll, senior director of issue analysis for Focus on the Family Action, said even though the funds cannot go to pay for abortions, any time Planned Parenthood funding is increased, it's cause for concern. "What Title X funding does is it frees up other money that they can then use for abortion," she said, "or other things that people would disagree with." One of the major problems with the funding, according to life advocates, is a change that allows taxpayer dollars to be used to pay for lawsuits involving abortion. "That's something previous administrations have stayed away from, because of the political nature of abortion," Earll said. "It's just not appropriate for tax dollars to be used in the way."
See: http://www.citizenlink.org/content/A000012061.cfm
6) Family feud: Nancy Pelosi at odds with President Obama House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s increasingly public disagreements with President Barack Obama are a reflection of something deeper: the seething resentment some Democrats feel over what they see as cavalier treatment from a wounded White House. For months, the California lawmaker has been pushing Obama hard in private while praising him in public. But now she’s being more open in her criticism, in part because she feels the White House was wrong — in the wake of the Democrats’ loss in Massachusetts — to push the Senate health care bill on the House when she knew there was no way it would pass. …“He wants a jobs bill, we get a jobs bill,” the official said. “He wanted health care, we got health care. Then the answer is, ‘You just need to twist enough arms to pass the Senate bill.’ You can twist arms if you’ve got a handful of them to twist. You can’t twist over 100 arms. There needs to be some reality check there.” “Both ends of the Capitol — the House and the Senate — are starting to wonder if they’re on their own,” the official continued. “You have a lot of frustration there. And the White House’s reaction to all of that seems to be, ‘Run against Congress’ — which, as you can imagine, doesn’t go over very well with House members. The White House reaction seems to be, ‘Position ourselves against Congress.’” See: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0210/32863.html 7) Rockefeller on Obama: Prez isn't 'believable' Message the same as famous 'You lie' by GOP's Joe Wilson Republican Rep. Joe Wilson created waves that left Washington rocking for weeks by shouting "You lie" to Barack Obama during the president's address to Congress last fall, and now a similar message has been delivered by a member of the president's own party. Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., told an audience today the president is "beginning to be not believable to me." The comment was just the latest evidence of the dissension in the Democratic Party that prevented Obama from passing his health care proposal last year despite having a significant party majority in the U.S. House and a supermajority of 60 votes in the Senate. Rockefeller, a Democrat in a family of lifelong Republicans, was referring to Obama's proposed budget that would cut tax incentives to coal mining companies. See: http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=124963 8) Feds push for tracking cell phones Two years ago, when the FBI was stymied by a band of armed robbers known as the "Scarecrow Bandits" that had robbed more than 20 Texas banks, it came up with a novel method of locating the thieves. FBI agents obtained logs from mobile phone companies corresponding to what their cellular towers had recorded at the time of a dozen different bank robberies in the Dallas area. The voluminous records showed that two phones had made calls around the time of all 12 heists, and that those phones belonged to men named Tony Hewitt and Corey Duffey. A jury eventually convicted the duo of multiple bank robbery and weapons charges. Even though police are tapping into the locations of mobile phones thousands of times a year, the legal ground rules remain unclear, and federal privacy laws written a generation ago are ambiguous at best. On Friday, the first federal appeals court to consider the topic will hear oral arguments (PDF) in a case that could establish new standards for locating wireless devices. In that case, the Obama administration has argued that warrantless tracking is permitted because Americans enjoy no "reasonable expectation of privacy" in their--or at least their cell phones'--whereabouts (emphasis mine). U.S. Department of Justice lawyers say that "a customer's Fourth Amendment rights are not violated when the phone company reveals to the government its own records" that show where a mobile device placed and received calls. …"This is a critical question for privacy in the 21st century," says Kevin Bankston, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who will be arguing on Friday. "If the courts do side with the government, that means that everywhere we go, in the real world and online, will be an open book to the government unprotected by the Fourth Amendment." See: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10451518-38.html 9) Germany, Forced to Buoy Greece, Rues Euro Shift BERLIN — As Europe edges toward emergency guarantees to stem market panic over one of the most profligate members of the euro bloc, the country that the region turns to for leadership, Germany, is suffering from growing doubts about the European experiment it long championed. Reluctant German leaders now find themselves forced to help Greece remain solvent, or risk watching markets attack one weak member after the next, from Portugal to Spain to Italy, threatening the stability of the euro, the European currency Germany fought so hard to create. On Thursday, European leaders meeting in Belgium announced they had agreed to a political statement to try to reassure bond markets and head off the crisis, and said that finance ministers would work through the details next week. Earlier, in a conference call with the finance ministers from the 16 countries that use the euro and the president of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet, officials said that some action had to be taken to calm markets and take pressure off Greece. See: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/11/world/europe/11germany.html?ref=todayspaper 10) New 'cold war' gaining steam Intel report reveals China's new tone LONDON – A secret intelligence report warns a number of Western nations soon could be caught up in a new "cold war" brewing between China and the United States, according to a report from Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin. The dispute apparently was sparked by a Washington decision to arm Taiwan with $6.4 billion of state-of-the art weapons systems. The deal includes 60 Black Hawk helicopters, 114 Patriot anti-missile missiles and 12 Harpoon missiles. Now the impact could be felt in Britain as well as Germany, France and other European nations that have substantial trading relationships with China. For the U.K., the slowest nation to recover from global recession, any threat to its business relations with China could be devastating. The threat is contained in a highly confidential report about the U.S. sale to Taiwan and Washington's criticism of China's position on Tibet, climate change, Internet freedom and human rights that has poisoned relationships between the Obama administration and Beijing. …Sources close to Milliband say he is alarmed that the Chinese leadership could use the arms sale to Taiwan as a reason to sell a range of its latest weapons to Syria and Iran to kick-start the trading cold war (emphasis mine).See: http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=124811
11) Declining U.S. Navy facing Chinese challenge
Fleet's status creates door of vulnerability to other powers, terrorists
A growing Chinese fleet could keep the declining U.S. Navy out of the Western Pacific, according to an expert cited in a report from Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin.
The U.S. also could be faced with new military challenges around the globe because of the projection of power a growing Chinese navy would present.
Yet, the U.S. Navy has cut back the number and type of ships to the level it was prior to the Reagan administration. Indeed, the Navy hasn't been as small since the administration of William Howard Taft, according to naval expert Seth Cropsey.
The dire development leaves the U.S. vulnerable to "proliferation, resource scarcity, environmental change, the emergence of new international power centers including non-state actors, significant changes in relative U.S. power, failed states and demographic change … (in) an increasingly unstable future and a challenging international strategic environment," Cropsey said.
Cropsey, who served during the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations as a principal deputy under the secretary of the Navy, said the U.S. Navy is "in distress."
See: http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=124930
12) Iran is now a 'nuclear state' says Ahmadinejad as thousands take to the streets
Iran is now a 'nuclear state', President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced this morning.
As Gordon Brown warned that the world's patience is wearing thin, Ahmadinejad told scores of cheering Iranians that the Islamic Republic is capable of producing weapons-grade uranium.
He said it had produced its first batch of 20 per cent enriched uranium - and had the capability to enrich to far higher levels at its Natanz plant.
Enriching uranium produces fuel for a nuclear power plants but can also be used to create material for atomic weapons.
The international community has warned Iran against further enrichment activities, threatening new UN sanctions.
…Thousands of supporters had been brought in on buses to hear Ahmadinejad speak as security forces threatened to crush any opposition protests.
Witnesses say security forces fired paint balls to disperse anti-government protesters in one of the first clashes of the day's ceremonies.
…Iranian authorities again tried to squeeze off text messaging and Web links in attempts to cripple protest organisers. The opposition has used internet and text messaging as its main communication channels.
Internet service was sharply slowed, mobile phone service widely cut and there were repeated disruptions in popular instant messaging services such as Google chat.
But several Iranians reached by The Associated Press said some messenger services, including Yahoo!, and mobile phone texting were still sporadically accessible. Many Internet users said they could not log into their Gmail account, Google's e-mail service, since last week.
See: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1250127/Iran-Revolution-day-protests-Islamic-Republic-nuclear-state.html
13) How being vegetarian does more harm to the environment than eating meat
It is a claim that could put a dent in the green credentials of vegetarians: Meat-free diets can be bad for the planet.
Environmental activists and vegetarians have long taken pleasure in telling those who enjoy a steak that livestock farming is a major source of harmful greenhouse gases.
But research has shown that giving up meat may not be as green as it seems.
The Cranfield University study found that switching from British-bred beef and lamb to meat substitutes imported from abroad such as tofu and Quorn would increase the amount of land cultivated, raising the risk of forests being destroyed.
Production methods for meat substitutes can be energy intensive and the final products tend to be highly processed, the report, which was commissioned by the environmental group WWF, found.
The researchers concluded: ‘A switch from beef and milk to highly refined livestock product analogues such as tofu could actually increase the quantity of arable land needed to supply the UK.
See: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1250532/Being-vegetarian-does-harm-environment-eating-meat.html#ixzz0fNGOq9GF
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