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Deal Behind Closed Doors Holding Up Bipartisan Amendment

Posted by Defend America on Friday, December 11, 2009 8:27:59 AM

Pharmaceutical deal holding up bipartisan health amendment

By Jeffrey Young - 12/10/09 08:25 PM ET
A deal between the White House and the pharmaceutical industry is holding up a bipartisan amendment to allow the importation of cheaper prescription drugs from abroad, according to a member of the Senate Democratic leadership.

The Senate has been debating the amendment, sponsored by Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), since Tuesday but has not held a vote, which is contributing to a stall in the floor action on healthcare reform.

http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/71767-pharmaceutical-deal-holding-up-bipartisan-health-amendment
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'The New Socialism'

Posted by Defend America on Friday, December 11, 2009 8:21:28 AM
The New Socialism
by Charles Krauthammer

WASHINGTON -- In the 1970s and early '80s, having seized control of the U.N. apparatus (by power of numbers), Third World countries decided to cash in. OPEC was pulling off the greatest wealth transfer from rich to poor in history. Why not them? So in grand U.N. declarations and conferences, they began calling for a "New International Economic Order." The NIEO's essential demand was simple: to transfer fantastic chunks of wealth from the industrialized West to the Third World.

On what grounds? In the name of equality -- wealth redistribution via global socialism -- with a dose of post-colonial reparations thrown in.

The idea of essentially taxing hard-working citizens of the democracies in order to fill the treasuries of Third World kleptocracies went nowhere, thanks mainly to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher (and the debt crisis of the early '80s). They put a stake through the enterprise.

But such dreams never die. The raid on the Western treasuries is on again, but today with a new rationale to fit current ideological fashion. With socialism dead, the gigantic heist is now proposed as a sacred service of the newest religion: environmentalism.

http://townhall.com/columnists/CharlesKrauthammer/2009/12/11/the_new_socialism

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Indoctrinating Our Kids

Posted by Defend America on Friday, December 11, 2009 8:20:21 AM
Hollywood and Howard Zinn's Marxist Education Project
by Michelle Malkin

The two most important questions for society, according to the Greek philosopher Plato, are these: What will we teach our children? And who will teach them? Left-wing celebrities have teamed up with one of America's most radical historians to take control of the classroom in the name of "social justice." Parents, beware: This Hollywood-backed Marxist education project may be coming to a school near you.

On Sunday, Dec. 13, the History Channel will air "The People Speak" -- a documentary based on Marxist academic Howard Zinn's capitalism-bashing, America-dissing, grievance-mongering history textbook, "A People's History of the United States." The film was co-produced and bankrolled by Zinn's Boston neighbor and mentee Matt Damon. An all-star cast of Bush-bashing liberals, including Danny Glover, Josh Brolin, Bruce Springsteen, Marisa Tomei and Eddie Vedder, will appear. Zinn's work is a self-proclaimed "biased account" of American history that rails against white oppressors, the free market and the military.

Zinn's objective is not to impart knowledge, but to instigate "change" and nurture a political "counterforce" (an echo of fellow radical academic and Hugo Chavez admirer Bill Ayers' proclamation of education as the "motor-force of revolution"). Teachers are not supposed to teach facts in the school of Zinn. "There is no such thing as pure fact," Zinn asserts. Educators are not supposed to emphasize individual academic achievement. They are supposed to "empower" student collectivism by emphasizing "the role of working people, women, people of color and organized social movements." School officials are not facilitators of intellectual inquiry, but leaders of "social struggle."

http://townhall.com/columnists/MichelleMalkin/2009/12/11/hollywood_and_howard_zinns_marxist_education_project

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'Global Warming as a Political Tool'

Posted by Defend America on Friday, December 11, 2009 8:19:09 AM
Global Warming as a Political Tool
by Jonah Goldberg

On Monday, Lisa Jackson, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, formally announced that her agency now considers carbon dioxide to be a dangerous pollutant, subject to government regulation. The "finding" comes two years after the Supreme Court ruled that CO2 falls under the EPA's jurisdiction.

A day later, an unnamed White House official told Fox's Major Garrett that the message for Congress is clear: "If you don't pass this (cap-and-trade) legislation ... the EPA is going to have to regulate in this area. ... And it is not going to be able to regulate on a market-based way, so it's going to have to regulate in a command-and-control way, which will probably generate even more uncertainty."

And such "uncertainty" is a huge "deterrent to investment," which will hurt the economy even more.

Translation: We don't want the EPA to kick the economy in the groin, but if Congress doesn't act, well, a-groin-kickin' we shall go.

This is grotesquely dishonest.

http://townhall.com/columnists/JonahGoldberg/2009/12/11/global_warming_as_a_political_tool

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Look at Both Polar Ice Caps

Posted by Defend America on Friday, December 11, 2009 8:17:33 AM

Emails, schmeemails, look at the polar ice caps

By Randall Hoven

Apparently, you don't really need a whole bunch of temperature data to know what's happening with temperatures.  Don't bother looking for trends of 0.007 degrees per year averaged over the planet (the rate over the last century, per the IPCC) by wading through all that adjusted, quality-controlled and homogenized data, fudge factors or not.  Just look at the polar ice caps and ... QED.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/12/emails_schmeemails_look_at_the.html
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In Alinskyite Fashion, One Must find Somebody to Blame

Posted by Defend America on Friday, December 11, 2009 8:16:19 AM

In trouble, White House searches for a billionaire to blame

By: Byron York
Chief Political Correspondent
December 10, 2009

In 1998, when the Clinton White House found itself in the middle of the Lewinsky scandal, one of its key defense strategies was to attack the conservative philanthropist Richard Mellon Scaife as the dark power behind the allegations against the president.  The Clinton camp believed Scaife to be "the Goldfinger of the right-wing conspiracy," as Newsweek put it in a February 1998 report.

Now it's the Obama White House that is in trouble. The president isn't engulfed in scandal, but his political fortunes are waning, with historically low job approval ratings for this point in his term and an administration struggling to pass its initiatives, even with big Democratic majorities in Congress.  And now, as in the Clinton years, White House surrogates are looking for a billionaire to blame.  This time, they've found two.

"The Billionaires Behind the Hate" is the title of a new report published by the Center for American Progress, which is the liberal think tank run by John Podesta, the former Clinton chief of staff who also ran the Obama transition and serves as an outside adviser to the Obama White House.  The supposedly hateful billionaires in the article's title are brothers Charles and David Koch of Koch Industries, one of the nation's largest conglomerates.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/In-trouble-White-House-searches-for-a-billionaire-to-blame-78953842.html

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Green Future that Doesn't Work

Posted by Defend America on Friday, December 11, 2009 8:14:45 AM

A green, sustainable future that doesn't work

By: Byron York
Chief Political Correspondent
December 11, 2009

Cordes Junction, Ariz.

In the high desert of central Arizona, more than five thousand miles from the global-warming summit in Copenhagen, sits an aging and unfinished vision of the enviro-friendly, sustainable life that some climate change activists foresee for us all. It's called Arcosanti, created in 1970 by the Italian architect Paolo Soleri, and it is the prototype of a green community of the future.

The only problem is, it doesn't work. And it never did.

Arcosanti is an "arcology," a word Soleri coined by combining "architecture" and "ecology." In Soleri's vision, an arcology is a self-contained city in which hundreds of thousands of people live in a small space, their needs met by green energy sources, recycled and sustainable products, and carefully planned social and cultural events. There are -- God forbid -- no cars.

In a Soleri design, masses of people are packed into the small-footprint arcology so that the land surrounding the community can remain pristine, unpolluted by human touch. It was an idea much in fashion a few decades back. "As urban architecture, Arcosanti is probably the most important experiment undertaken in our lifetime," wrote Newsweek in 1976.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/A-green_-sustainable-future-that-doesn_t-work-8648843-79008007.html

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