‘Lines that Divide’
By Chuck Colson:
Scientists at Children’s Hospital in Oakland, California, are discovering a potential cure for leukemia and sickle-cell disease. How? By using blood stem cells from the placentas of women who have had Caesarian deliveries.
But researchers at the hospital are frustrated. State agencies have made multi-million-dollar grants available for embryo-destructive research, but money is scarce for its ethically sound counterpart, adult stem cell research.
In the Contra Costa Times, lead Children’s Hospital researcher Frans Kuypers says, “No one has been cured by an embryonic stem cell. We are able to cure folks with [adult] stem cells.”
So why isn’t adult stem cell research receiving more funding? Josephine Quintavalle, director of Comment on Reproductive Ethics, says “What you get from [the adult stem cell] approach is a patient-specific cure. There’s no middleman . . . and there’s no drug company that’s going to get rich as a result of it.”
But, she explains, a lot of the pressure for stem-cell research is to find products that they can sell, as opposed to a treatment they can do to cure you.
[...]
OBAMA MORE THAN ‘CONCERNED’
By Neal Boortz:
North Korea launches a missile and it takes Barack Obama and the UN five days to respond. Iran holds fraudulent elections, kills protesters and it takes weeks before Barack Obama can stand up and say that he is “concerned” about the situation.
Then the people of Honduras try to uphold their constitution and laws of the land from being trampled by a Chavez-wanna be … and it takes Barack Obama one day to proclaim that this was not a legal coup.
Audio: Democrat “close to nauseated” over MJ moment of silence
by Ed Morrissey, HOT AIR:
My friend John Ziegler always manages to get great moments out of his interviews, even when he’s interviewing someone across the ideological divide. Yesterday on his new show for KGIL 1260 AM in Los Angeles, John got an honest reaction from Rep. John Yarmuth (D-KY) about the “moment of silence” demanded on the House floor for the death of Michael Jackson. Yarmuth said he headed for the door, and he wasn’t alone:
[...]
It says so much about so much …
Bernard Madoff, De-Funder of the Left
by matthewvadum, Newsreal:
Embezzler Bernard Madoff, who swindled clients out of at least $50 billion, was sentenced to 150 years imprisonment Monday.
Very few media reports have focused on the damage that Madoff did to left-leaning foundations and political causes. I wrote about this topic in the American Spectator in January.
The record-breaking fraud is forcing the closing of the JEHT and Picower foundations, longtime supporters of leftist groups.
Left-wing groups funded by those charities include ACORN (known for its massive voter-fraud campaigns), the Center for Constitutional Rights (a pro-Castro member of the open borders lobby), and Alliance for Justice (which supports habeas corpus protections for terror suspects
[...]
h/t: FrontPage
Out of sight, Iran remains on the brink
Melanie Phillips:
The way in which Iran has disappeared from media view is, although predictable, still dismaying. With the exception of small flurries of interest over the seizure and release of British embassy staff and the tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats, the people’s revolution has pretty well dropped out of sight. This is for two main reasons, one shocking and the other just, well, dispiriting. The shocking one is that the ‘progressive’ western intelligentsia, who don’t stop hollering and stamping their feet and marching and petitioning and boycotting over the perceived crimes by America or Israel (‘torture’, settlements’, ‘rendition’, ‘checkpoints’, ‘warmongering’ ‘repression’) are mute over the brutal crackdown that has been going on in Iran these past three weeks, and totally indifferent to the desperate struggle for freedom that is being waged. Dispiriting because the western media think the story is over, the revolution has fizzled out, and there wasn’t even a leader or a cause to support anyway because Mousavi just represents more of the same old regime.
Well as far as I can see it has not stopped.
Settlement freeze demand ‘extortion’
ERB KEINON, REBECCA ANNA STOIL and HILARY LEILA KRIEGER, THE JERUSALEM POST:
MK Otniel Schneller (Kadima) lashed out Monday against the US demand for a settlement freeze, labeling it “extortion” and warning it could set back Israeli readiness for peace.
In an interview with The Jerusalem Post, Schneller assailed Obama administration officials as holding beliefs shaped by “far-Left opinions outside of the Israeli consensus.”
[...]
Ideologue-in-chief
Caroline Glick, THE JERUSALEM POST:
No, whether an America-hating regime is legitimate or not is completely insignificant to the White House. All the Obama administration wants to do is go back to its plan to appease the mullahs into reaching an agreement about their nuclear aspirations. And for some yet-to-be-explained reason, Obama and his associates believe they can make this regime — which as recently as Friday called for the mass murder of its own citizens, and as recently as Saturday blamed the US for the Iranian people’s decision to rise up against the mullahs — reach such an agreement.[...]
Criminal Suppression of Evidence
The View From 1776:
President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and other leaders of the Democrat/Socialist Party are guilty of criminal suppression of evidence that makes the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill unnecessary, as well as ferociously expensive for all of us.
[...]
Purdum’s Hit on Palin
by Tom Bevan, RCP:
Todd Purdum pulls down the black ski mask and whips out the sawed off shotgun for this utterly predictable hit piece on Sarah Palin in the August issue of Vanity Fair.
To be clear, there are three certainties in life: death, taxes, and the elitist MSM’s contract-killer journalism against political figures with whom they disagree – which, more often than not means conservatives.
[...]
Either way, there’s the very real possibility that this kind of piling on Palin by the elitist MSM will actually improve her image outside the New York/DC corridor and make people in flyover country like her more, not less.
I have never seen such a visceral reaction to a politician in my life. The Left must be absolutely terrified of this woman. It is beyond juvenile at this point.
MORE
Obama’s Attraction to Human Rights Violators
By Lauri B. Regan, AT:
Unfortunately, President Obama has traveled the globe handing out carrots to each and every one of America’s enemies, leaders who also happen to be repressive dictators. Yet, no matter which tyrant Obama approaches with his open hand, he has, as my kids like to say, been “dissed.”
With each fist bump from Hugo Chavez, Team Medvedev/Putin, Kim Jong-Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, one would expect that Obama would learn to close his open palm and offer up the tough policy that he promised would appear. Yet the only world leader who has seen Obama’s stick wielding, clenched fist is Israeli Prime Minister, Benyamin Netanyahu.
[...]
More on the Honduran ‘Military Impeachment’
Rick Moran, AT:
Not even our own State Department is calling what occurred in Honduras over the weekend a “coup.” What’s more, Hillary Clinton’s refusal to brand the military’s legal ouster of President Zeyala a coup puts her seemingly at odds with the Obama White House.
Once again, our Keystone Kops foreign policy makes us look ridiculous when the president brands the action “illegal” while the State Department rejects that term “coup.”
Mary Beth Sheridan of the Washington Post:
[...]
RELATED:
Universal embryo test ‘very near’
BBC:
A gene mapping test that can test embryos for almost any inherited disease could be available in the UK within a year, say researchers.
Unlike current tests doctors do not need to know the specific gene mutation involved.
At the same time embryos can be tested to check they are generally in good genetic shape.
Experts say there will have to be strict limits on what the test can be used for.
[...]
Well, as they say, what could go wrong?
Hiring freeze on nurses wrong Rx
Calgary Herald:
Nurses are among the most key components of Alberta’s healthcare system, so it is difficult to fathom why the provincial government has so badly managed such a crucial human resource. On the other hand, it’s very easy to understand why so many nurses are leaving Alberta, never to return.
[...]
More of the ‘Stelmach Advantage’ to keep us humble, poor, censored and now sick. Way to go, Ed.
Hal Lindsey – Reid is Right
Incredible. Never thought I’d agree with Reid on anything either and frankly I was unaware he understood the truth about Israel and the PLO [i.e. PA, Hamas etc, etc.].
Announcing the Release of Demographic Winter Part II — ‘The Demographic Bomb
Christian Newswire:
SRB Documentaries is pleased to announce the release of “Demographic Bomb: demography is destiny,” the long-awaited sequel to 2008′s “Demographic Winter: the decline of the human family.”
Barry McLerran, producer of both documentaries, observed, “Like ‘Demographic Winter,’ ‘The Demographic Bomb’ deals with rapidly falling birth rates and their consequences for humanity in the 21st century.”
Viewers of “Demographic Winter” heard from demographers, sociologists, economists and historians on the demographic crisis confronting us.
McLerran commented: “‘Demographic Bomb: demography is destiny’ explores the history of the modern population-control movement — how it persuaded the public that there are too many people in the world, and how these fallacies became institutionalized.”
[...]
The U.N.’s New Factfinding Mission
By Anav Silverman, FrontPageMagazine.com:
In May, the UN came out with a report accusing Israel of “negligence or recklessness” in the Gaza war. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he would seek compensation from Israel for damages numbering at $11 million to UN facilities. Led by Ian Martin, former head of human rights group Amnesty International, the UN inquiry cited that Israel was at fault for nine incidents of damage to UN property.
The 184-page report blamed Hamas for one case of damage, stating that a Palestinian rocket fired at a UN warehouse had caused $29,000 in damages, while according all other damages to Israel.
Indeed, the report apparently did not point out the millions of dollars in damages that Hamas rockets caused in the southern region of Israel or call for an investigation into the nine Israeli schools that Gaza missiles struck during the war.
[...]
The U.N. is an embarrassment. I suggest it be renamed the United Nazis.
Obama and the ‘Noble Lie’
By Victor Davis Hanson:
For much of the Bush administration, the media splashed stories of neoconservative conspiracies and cabals. Exposés about mostly Jewish liberals-turned-conservatives charged that they were adherents of the philosopher Leo Strauss and embraced the Platonic notion of the “noble lie.”
In his Republic, Plato outlined an elaborate, ranked utopia, a good city (“Kallipolis”) run by a sort of benign natural selection. The philosopher-kings sat atop hierarchies in which occupations were assigned for the citizenry. To justify arbitrary selections, the rulers would make up “noble lies” about divine edicts, making clear that the occupations chosen for lesser folk were god-given.
Once the inferiors understood that there were divine sanctions behind their lot in life, they would feel happier. And society at large would benefit by each worker’s having the proper aptitude for his occupation. The larger point Plato was making was simply that sometimes an all-knowing elite must hedge on the truth to convince the ignorant public what is good for it.
[...]
With passage of time, greater doubts emerge over values guiding president
Mor Altshuler, YNet:
In recent days, the world has seen simple folk in Iran risking their lives in order to gain freedom. They are standing there unarmed, only equipped with their righteousness, in the face of snipers firing into the masses. The world saw Neda, a gentle-looking woman shot by a sniper during a protest; blood gushed out of her mouth and she bled to death on the street. Is Neda akin to a bothersome fly that can be crushed with one hand gesture? Is her death a domestic Iranian affair?
The whole world saw and understood, with the exception of the American president. At first, his spokespeople said that the US will not be interfering so it is not accused of organizing the uprising. Yet with the passage of time, it turned out that events in Iran are not an outside conspiracy, but rather, a cry of despair from the hearts of Iranians who are fed up with the poverty, suppression, and isolation forced upon them by the fanatic clerics.
What is going through Obama’s mind when he condemns, belatedly and meekly, the violence against civilians whose only sin was their desire to see their democratic vote respected? Why isn’t he coming to the aid of those rebelling in the name of universal values – democracy, liberty, and fairness? After all, thanks to these values he was elected president. Why is he turning his back on the young men and women on Tehran’s streets who would have likely voted for him had they been American citizens?
[...]
Obama sees only one thing: his own glory. So of course the little people better not upset His Worshipfulness’s big picture … himself.
Rights commission threatens our liberty
The Gazette:
The Canadian Human Rights Commission appears to have learned little from its adventures of the last few years. In its latest report to Parliament it stubbornly defends its authority to police the Internet – or any other electronic medium – for opinions that are “likely to” expose people to hatred or contempt.This is, as we have said previously in this space, an unacceptable assault on free speech.
With frightening eagerness to rein in Canadians’ free expression, the commission finds the authority to restrict honest opinion in Section 13 of the Human Rights Act, a notoriously vague bit of legal writing that forbids transmissions “likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt.” The subjective power of that “likely to” makes everyone vulnerable to bureaucratic whim, malice, or distemper.
[...]
THEY ARE EVIL.
MORE
Another stupid, knee-jerk, enviro Chicken Little lesson to remember
Health Canada issues CFL warning
Compact fluorescent lightbulbs may be energy efficient but their potential hazards have prompted Health Canada to warn of effects ranging from too much UV exposure to possible mercury poisoning.[...]
China’s banks are an accident waiting to happen to every one of us
Telegraph [UK]:
China’s banks are veering out of control. The half-reformed economy of the People’s Republic cannot absorb the $1,000bn (£600bn) blitz of new lending issued since December.
Money is leaking instead into Shanghai’s stock casino, or being used to keep bankrupt builders on life support. It is doing very little to help lift the world economy out of slump.
[...]Mr Xie thinks the spring recovery is an inventory spike, to be followed a double-dip downturn into next year as stimulus wears off.
Reformers know what must be done to boost consumption. China needs a welfare revolution. But creating a social security net takes time, and right now Beijing is facing a social crisis as 20m jobless workers retreat to the rural hinterland.
So the regime is resorting to hazardous methods to keep excess factories humming: issuing a “Buy China” decree: using a plethora of export subsidies; holding down the price of coke, bauxite, zinc and other resources to lower production costs (prompting a complaint from America and Europe); and suppressing the yuan, again.
Protectionism is a risky game for a country that lives off global trade and runs a surplus near 10pc of GDP. Mr Pettis said he fears China is nearing its “Smoot-Hawley moment”, repeating the US tariff blunder of 1930 that brought the world crashing down on Washington’s head.
[...]
To Meddle, Or Not To Meddle
[...]
But there is a common denominator: President Obama does whatever it takes to keep anti-American dictators in power. In Iran: don’t meddle. In Honduras: meddle. In Venezuela: soul shake. In Saudi Arabia: bow.
The Origin of President Obama’s Fascist State Corporatism
The View From 1776:
The origin of President Barack Obama’s programs is to be found in the pages of Stuart Chase’s A New Deal.
//
President Obama’s economic programs bear close resemblance to the 1920s Fascist State Corporatism of Benito Mussolini.The Federal government has nationalized banks and automobile companies, firing executives, deciding what products will be manufactured and where, and commanding banks to lend money to poor credit risks. Cap-and-trade “green” legislation will force a massive increase in energy prices for the industrialized nation between the heavily liberal-progressive-socialist East and West Coasts, along with the loss of many thousands of manufacturing jobs. Ever more detailed regulation of our daily lives is being imposed across many sectors of the economy.
After imposition of the President’s procrustean global warming policies, government will become the major generator of new jobs. This is what Friedrich von Hayek called The Road to Serfdom.
[...]
Obama stands with Castro, Chavez and Ortega
Powerline:
In condemning the removal of Honduran President Mel Zelayaya by the Honduran military, Pesident Obama stands shoulder to shoulder with the Fidel Castro and his thug epigones Hugo Chavez and Daniel Ortega. Zelaya sought to conduct an illegal referendum to extend his rule. The Honduran military has sought to enforce the rule of law by providing for Zelaya’s departure from the scene. Mary Anastasia Grady explains:
[...]
Stelmach losing favour in Alberta, poll says
Calgary Herald:
Despite the Tories’ overwhelming grip on power, holding 72 of the province’s 83 seats in the legislature, several political analysts see a threat simmering in the Wildrose Alliance, as the fledgling right-wing party continues to draw donations from the oilpatch and is in the midst of a leadership race.
The party, which elected no MLAs in the March 2008 election, has been the staunchest political opponent of the Conservatives’ royalty hikes, which have been steadily downgraded through government revisions.
Mount Royal College political scientist Duane Bratt suggests repercussions of that royalty review, coupled with the ensuing recession and projected multibillion-dollar deficits, are splintering Stelmach’s support not only in Calgary, but also in the traditional Conservative bedrock of rural Alberta.
Bratt said the Wildrose Alliance could turn this discontent into political opportunity.
[...]
I can hardly wait for the next opportunity to throw out these faux conservative liberals
Multiculturalism: a dangerous oxymoron
Posted at vladtepesblogdotcom’s Channel:
Culture isn’t about what time signatures you play your music in or whether you prefer cilantro over pepper on a tube steak. It’s about whether or not you kill albinos and use their skin and blood for your witchcraft rituals to get rich instead of you know, getting a job.
Tyrannies
by David Warren:
One of the truest things said about Iran under the mullahs is “nothing in that country is quite as it appears.” This is something journalists should know about Iran, or about any country where ideological misrepresentations of reality have been introduced, on a huge scale, for the very purpose of altering reality.For the Shah was not the only thing overthrown during the Khomeinist takeover of 1979. In their attempt to reconstruct abiding Persia as a utopian, “revolutionary,” quasi-Muslim quasi-state, the mullahs launched an attack on reality itself. Predictably, it has failed and, as we see today, a generation raised entirely on their doctrines and under their watchful thugs shows no gratitude.
[...]
Big Brother is actually a Canadian bureaucrat.
by Michael Taube:
Shakedown
How Our Government is Undermining Democracy in the Name of Human Rights
by Ezra Levant
McClelland & Stewart,
232 pp., $25.95Ezra Levant is not a household name to most Americans. He’s spent most of his career in Calgary, working in the fields of Canadian conservative politics, journalism, think-tanks and law. But if you read this book and hear his story, it’s unlikely you will soon forget his invaluable contribution to the contemporary literature of freedom of thought and individual liberty. (Full disclosure: Ezra Levant is a friend of long standing.)
In February 2006, Levant was the publisher of a conservative magazine, the Western Standard. After some consideration, he decided to reprint the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed “to show our readers what all the fuss was about.” It was a gutsy move. Whereas most Canadian publications decided against publishing them, Levant thought people should be free to look at these cartoons in print and judge for themselves.
This decision changed the course of his life, especially after a heated radio interview about the cartoons with Syed Soharwardy, a Calgary imam. Described in Shakedown as a “Pakistani-born, madrassah-trained preacher popular on the Saudi lecture circuit who is the president of the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada,” Soharwardy launched a complaint with a human rights commission (HRC) in Alberta following a failed attempt to get Levant arrested by the Calgary police.
[...]
MORE
Beware ‘cosy relationships’
By LORRIE GOLDSTEIN, TORONTO SUN:
Often, when climate hysterics and global warming alarmists don’t like what I write — but don’t know what they’re talking about and thus have nothing intelligent to say in response — they come back with what they think is their knock-out punch.
It’s always words to the effect of: “I hope you’re happy getting your blood money from the oil companies, Mr. Goldstein. How can you look at yourself in the mirror every morning? Don’t you care about your grandchildren? What happened to journalistic integrity?”
Sometimes, they include in their missives their membership in some obscure organization, usually built around the idea that if we would all just give all our money to the government, or to some other collection of wise elites, and let them spend it for us on our behalf, the world would be a cleaner, safer and “cooler” (pardon the pun) place.
That’s pretty much the theory behind carbon taxes and cap-and-trade, by the way.
However, I’m afraid these rants don’t have the desired effect, because while their obvious aim is to make me angry via cheap smears, they just give me the giggles.
That’s because the idea that I’ve been sitting here for over two years reading book after book, doing hours upon hours of independent research and pounding out column after column, trying to get people to calm down about anthropogenic climate change before we do something really stupid, all because I’m secretly in the pay of the fossil fuel industry, is simply, utterly, laughably absurd. Plus, it’s a lie.
Besides, if you really want to skim the fiscal cream on the issue of man-made global warming these days, the last place you want to be is in the camp of the so-called skeptics, or, as I prefer to call us — sane.
[...]
Breakthrough on the Authorship of Obama’s ‘Dreams’
By Jack Cashill, AT:
Within days of my going public last September with the speculation that terrorist emeritus Bill Ayers helped Barack Obama write his acclaimed memoir, Dreams From My Father, I learned that I was not alone in that intuition.
Since then, I have received helpful contributions from serious people in at least five countries and any number of states and have integrated many of their observations into my ongoing narrative, summarized here. If you are unfamiliar with this research, please read this before going forward.
About a week ago, however, I heard from a new contributor. I will refer to him as “Mr. West.” Like most contributors, he prefers to remain anonymous. The media punishment that Joe the Plumber received has much to do with this nearly universal reticence.
A week before that, I heard from another excellent contributor, Mr. Midwest. Their collective contribution should dispel the doubts of all but the willfully blind that Ayers played a substantial role, likely the primary role, in the writing of Dreams.
[...]
Feds should ban the burka
The Calgary Herald:
[...]
That people would visibly identify with an ideology that spurns the very liberty in which they flourish is perverse.
The issue, then, is not the burka, but what it signifies.
When it ceases to be an occasional eccentricity and instead becomes a widespread observance, the phenomenon can only be seen as a marker for a growing and widespread rejection of a society’s core liberal values–and a preference for a culture that in its own way denies true freedom to men, as surely as it renders their women invisible.
Such beliefs are dangerous to a liberal democracy, and must by all means be resisted.
To me the whole idea of living in a free society is that the government does not tell its citizens what, among many other things, they can or cannot wear.
Big government more or less guarantees rule by creeps and misfits.
Mark Steyn:
There is a rather large point to all this. As my National Review colleague Kathryn Jean Lopez observed, a sex scandal a week from the Republicans will guarantee us government health care by the fall – in the same way that the British Tories’ boundlessly versatile sexual predilections helped deliver the Blair landslide of 1997. And once government health care’s in place the game’s over: Socialized medicine redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in all the wrong ways, and, if you cross that bridge, it’s all but impossible to go back.
[...]
About That “Fire Shower of Nuclear Retaliation”
Claudia Rosett, PJ Media:
What neither North Korea nor Iran has felt from the U.S. is any demonstration of will to get rid of either regime. At this point, we know plenty about the trangressions, aggressive ambitions, and growing dangers of North Korea and its pals. What’s missing — apart from the brave strike by Israel on the Syrian reactor two years ago — is the will to do anything about it. All courses are fraught with risk. But the worst possible course is to bluster, and talk, and wheedle, and confirm to Pyongyang, Tehran and the rest of world’s web of rogue and nuclear-aspiring states that America, faced with a game of chicken, will stand down.
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