GUANTANAMO VS. NUREMBERG. "In short, the procedural protections afforded the Guantanamo detainees under the statute before the Supreme Court in Boumediene . . . substantially exceed those accorded the Nuremberg defendants. Obama's unfavorable comparison of the legal treatment of the Guantanamo detainees with that of the Nuremberg defendants suggests either that he does not know what he's talking about, or that he feels free to take great liberties with the truth."DKK
DKK
In June I commuted for an hour and a half each way and learned what the radical increase in gas prices means. One day while stopped at a busy intersection, two demonstrators came out with signboards strapped to them. One said something like: Al Gore fell on his head at birth. Drill for oil now! The appearance of such demonstrators is a sign of the times.
John McCain for President and Steve Sauerberg for U.S. Senator from Illinois are calling for nuclear power as well as more domestic oil drilling. Meanwhile, Democrats Obama and Dick Durbin do nothing on drilling. Recently Obama appeared with Al Gore in a show of Democratic unity. It unites him with the excess environmentalism of the past, which has been a stumbling block of Democratic candidates.
Durbin has been in Washington for decades and had ample time to fix the oil crisis. Obama is backed by a lot of western state environmentalists, as opposed to the blue collar people who backed Hillary and who need gas for their jobs. The Democrats continue to have a disdain for the average voters who need gas for their jobs.
We need to get new leadership now. For a change, see www.johnmccain.com, and www.sauerberg2008.com.
James Thompson
Crystal Lake
The bill, which the House was to vote on later on Thursday, has a "use it or lose it" provision that requires oil companies to diligently develop their existing federal leases or turn them back to the government before they could obtain new acres to drill.DKK
"By blocking some firms from competing for new leases, this legislation would further increase gasoline prices that already exceed $4 per gallon and result in unintended consequences due to litigation," the White House said in a statement.
As a disreputable sort, I freely confess to having a fondness for oil. Actually, I have a mild crush on all carbon-emitting fuels that feed our prosperity. But I'm especially fond of cheap oil. For many years, those who spread apocalyptic global-warming scenarios have warned me that a collective national sacrifice was needed to save the world.DKK
One option, we were told, was to make gas artificially expensive, forcing our ignorant, energy-gobbling neighbors to alter their destructive habits.
Well, here we are. At $4 a gallon for gas, we already have a flailing economy. Isn't it glorious? And isn't it exactly what many environmentalists desired?
The problem is that there is no feasible "alternative" fuel that can haul food from farms to cities, produce affordable electricity for your plasma TV and drive your kids to school. Not yet. It can happen, of course, but only (to pinch a word from enlightened grocery shoppers) organically.
The problem is that when "green" fantasies crash onto the shores of economic reality (as they did with corn-based ethanol), we all suffer.
Don't worry, though, congressional Democrats have a bold plan. Hold on for 10 or 15 years and they'll have a bounty of energy options. They promise. But no oil shale. No clean coal. No nuclear power. And definitely no more oil.
He says drill. Oil prices drop immediately. The press doesn’t see the connection.Read the summary of the reportage, but needless to say they mentioned just about everything but the above.
And on top of that, dropping oil prices now are a bad thing.
To recap: President Bush officially announced at a press conference a lift on the presidential ban on offshore drilling — at 10:20 a.m. on Tuesday.
At 11 a.m. on Tuesday, oil prices began a slide from about $145 a barrel to just under $130.
That’s a 10% drop.
How has the press reported this?
US Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama has arrived in Afghanistan, at the start of a high-profile international tour. BBC News
Obama is a three-year senator without a single important legislative achievement to his name, a former Illinois state senator who voted "present" nearly 130 times. As president of the Harvard Law Review, as law professor and as legislator, has he ever produced a single notable piece of scholarship? Written a single memorable article? His most memorable work is a biography of his favorite subject: himself.DKK
...
For the first few months of the campaign, the question about Obama was: Who is he? The question now is: Who does he think he is?
We are getting to know. Redeemer of our uninvolved, uninformed lives. Lord of the seas. And more. As he said on victory night, his rise marks the moment when "our planet began to heal." As I recall -- I'm no expert on this -- Jesus practiced his healing just on the sick. Obama operates on a larger canvas.
First, David Evans, formerly of the Australian Greenhouse Office has become a skeptic.DKK
...
Second, the American Physical Society has acknowledged that there is "considerable presence within the scientific community" of anthropogenic global warming skeptics.
Mathematical proof that there is no “climate crisis” appears today in a major, peer-reviewed paper in Physics and Society, a learned journal of the 10,000-strong American Physical Society, SPPI reports.I have said it repeatedly, we really don't know what we are doing and this only shows that all of our assumptions are suspect. The debate cannot be over when the input is not real.
Christopher Monckton, who once advised Margaret Thatcher, demonstrates via 30 equations that computer models used by the UN’s climate panel (IPCC) were pre-programmed with overstated values for the three variables whose product is “climate sensitivity” (temperature increase in response to greenhouse-gas increase), resulting in a 500-2000% overstatement of CO2’s effect on temperature in the IPCC’s latest climate assessment report, published in 2007.
Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered [http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/200807/index.cfm] demonstrates that later this century a doubling of the concentration of CO2 compared with pre-industrial levels will increase global mean surface temperature not by the 6 °F predicted by the IPCC but, harmlessly, by little more than 1 °F. Lord Monckton concludes – (...)
- “… Perhaps real-world climate sensitivity is very much below the IPCC’s estimates. Perhaps, therefore, there is no ‘climate crisis’ at all. … The correct policy approach to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing.”
- The IPCC’s 2007 climate summary overstated CO2’s impact on temperature by 500-2000%;
- CO2 enrichment will add little more than 1 °F (0.6 °C) to global mean surface temperature by 2100;
- Not one of the three key variables whose product is climate sensitivity can be measured directly;
- The IPCC’s values for these key variables are taken from only four published papers, not 2,500;
- The IPCC’s values for each of the three variables, and hence for climate sensitivity, are overstated;
- “Global warming” halted ten years ago, and surface temperature has been falling for seven years;
- Not one of the computer models relied upon by the IPCC predicted so long and rapid a cooling;
- The IPCC inserted a table into the scientists’ draft, overstating the effect of ice-melt by 1000%;
- It was proved 50 years ago that predicting climate more than two weeks ahead is impossible;
- Mars, Jupiter, Neptune’s largest moon, and Pluto warmed at the same time as Earth warmed;
- In the past 70 years the Sun was more active than at almost any other time in the past 11,400 year
Spending on health care was a major factor, the study of 31 countries said.
There is a huge variation in cancer survival rates across the world, a global study shows.BBC News
The US, Australia, Canada, France and Japan had the highest five-year survival rates, while Algeria had the worst, Lancet Oncology reported.
The UK fared pretty poorly, trailing most of its western European neighbours - although the data is from the 1990s since when survival rates have risen.
Spending on health care was a major factor, the study of 31 countries said.
(...)
While the US led the way with more than 13% of gross domestic product spent on health, Canada, Australia and the best-performing European nations were all spending about 9% to 10%.
The UK was spending just over 7% but that figure has now been increased following record rises in the NHS budget to bring it much closer to the likes of France and Germany.
Algeria was spending around 4%.
The importance of money was further illustrated by an ethnic breakdown of outcomes in the US.
White Americans, who are on the whole wealthier and therefore more able to afford the insurance which underpins the US system, were up to 14% more likely than others to survive cancer.
“We are one vote away from easing our dependence on costly oil and reducing gas prices in America,” Manzullo said. “I urge Speaker Pelosi to allow us to vote to end the Congressional ban on offshore drilling so we can increase our supplies of homegrown energy. Americans have had enough of these record gas prices and higher natural gas prices are just around the corner. It’s time for Congress to act.”
