Don Singleton: 2008-11-16

Saturday, November 22, 2008

Stupid idea #39827 - Time for Him to Go

Gail Collins, Op-Ed Columnist wrote in NYTimes Thanksgiving is next week, and President Bush could make it a really special holiday by resigning. Seriously. We have an economy that’s crashing and a vacuum at the top. Bush — who is currently on a trip to Peru to meet with Asian leaders who no longer care what he thinks — hasn’t got the clout, or possibly even the energy, to do anything useful. His most recent contribution to resolving the fiscal crisis was lecturing representatives of the world’s most important economies on the glories of free-market capitalism.

And do you think that is not a good idea.

Putting Barack Obama in charge immediately isn’t impossible.

Have you ever read The United States Constitution
Do you know anything about Order of Presidential Succession? If the president resigns, the next inline are:
* The Vice President Dick Cheney
* Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi
* President pro tempore of the Senate Robert Byrd
* Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
* Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson
* Secretary of Defense Robert Gates
* Attorney General Michael Mukasey
* Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne
* Secretary of Agriculture Edward T. Schafer
* Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez (born in Cuba and is ineligible)
* Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao (born in Taiwan and is ineligible)
* Secretary of Health and Human Services Mike Leavitt
* Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Steven C. Preston
* Secretary of Transportation Mary E. Peters
* Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman
* Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings
* Secretary of Veterans Affairs James Peake
* Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff
I don't see Obama's name there anywhere

Dick Cheney, obviously, would have to quit as well as Bush.

And do you think he is as tired as Bush, or wouldn't he love a couple of months in the top chair.

In fact, just to be on the safe side, the vice president ought to turn in his resignation first. (We’re desperate, but not crazy.)

Then to be safe, maybe Bush should stay.

Then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would become president until Jan. 20. Obviously, she’d defer to her party’s incoming chief executive,

Really????? She and Obama have been having battles as to who is top dog. Don't you think she would adjourn the house and hope she could take over the White House for a two month emergency, and stil figure out a way of staying Speaker of the House in January. I know there was a movie about that, but I don't know whether the examined all of the loopholes involved.

and Barack Obama could begin governing.

No then you have Robert Byrd, who is so old they want to take him out of the order of succession, and you then have 15 cabinet officers, all Republicans, and only two ineligible, and even if you could talk all of them into not wanting some time at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Obama still is not in the Order of Presidential Succession. Maybe you need to talk to your doctor and see if he will just sedate you until January 20. And if Obama loses in 2012, are you going to be as eager to see him go and his replacement take over? What if he is a Republican? Or if Obama is reelected in 2012 he will be term limited. Are you going to be as eager to see him go before January 20, 2017 and his replacement take over? What if he is a Republican?

Gen. Kevin Chilton: Sounding the Nuclear Alarm

WSJ reported Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. nuclear weapons program has suffered from neglect. Warheads are old. There's been no new warhead design since the 1980s, and the last time one was tested was 1992, when the U.S. unilaterally stopped testing. Gen. Chilton, who heads U.S. Strategic Command, has been sounding the alarm, as has Defense Secretary Robert Gates. So far few seem to be listening. The U.S. is alone among the five declared nuclear nations in not modernizing its arsenal. The U.K. and France are both doing so. Ditto China and Russia. "We're the only ones who aren't," Gen. Chilton says. Congress has refused to fund the Department of Energy's Reliable Replacement Warhead program beyond the concept stage and this year it cut funding even for that. Gen. Chilton stresses that StratCom is "very prepared right now to conduct our nuclear deterrent mission" -- a point he takes pains to repeat more than once. But the words "right now" are carefully chosen too, and the general also conveys a sense of urgency. "We're at a point where we need to make some very hard choices and decisions," he says. These need to be "based on good studies that would tell us how we would modernize this force for the future to incorporate 21st century requirements, which I believe are different than in the Cold War."

It looks like we should be modernizing our force just to stay even, but can we trust Obama to do that. Didn't he oppose it during the election. And The Wall Street Journal talks about liberal Democratic obstruction of military ties with Indonesia. Since the 1960s, the U.S. has worked with Indonesian officers in exchanges ranging from short courses at military colleges to joint training exercises. These programs help Indonesians gain technical expertise as well as learn key values, such as observing human rights and respecting civilian control. In return, the U.S. develops relationships with the officers who lead the military of the world's largest Muslim-majority democracy. But these programs have fallen victim to liberal interests in Washington, which object to offering military assistance to countries with bad human rights records.

If we refuse to upgrade our nuclear response capability to just keep it operational (not increase it), if we let Iran get atomic weapons if we won't cooperate with the officers who lead the military of the world's largest Muslim-majority democracy, and if depend on reports like this one in the NY Times Al Qaeda could soon be on the decline, having alienated Muslim supporters with indiscriminate killing and inattention to the practical problems of poverty, unemployment and education.
So their poll numbers are down. They are not trying to win elections, they are trying to use fear of death to put them in power, and they have plenty of young men with raging hormones listening to promises of 80 virgins if they get killed, they have plenty of recruits ready to die. They don't know it is Hell they are headed for, and there in no way for the first one down to notify his brothers the Mullahs and Imams were lying.

Liberal messiah sending his daughters to ritzy private school

Allahpundit blogged at Hot Air Michelle believes very strongly in the value of public education, mind you. Just not for her kids.

Lelyveld said that while public schools were considered, the Obamas felt that a private school was in the best interest of their children.
Children of elite parents used to an elite private school should not be exposed to the riff raff in the public school system, especially in the poor Washington DC system. School Choice is a good thing there. Why can't the other blacks in Washington DC get the same right? Would this be because they might go to the private Sidwell Friends School, alma mater of former first daughter Chelsea Clinton, and now Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7, will be attending the Quaker school. I know the Obamas left their church of 20 years, but did they become Quakers?
The two girls currently attend the private University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, where Michelle Obama is on the board. Michelle Obama went to public schools on Chicago’s South Side, and undestands the importance of strong public schools, Lelyveld said, and the administration plans to work hard on that issue…
For everyone else's kids.
The quality of the school and its extra security make Sidwell Friends a good choice, said Letitia Baldrige, who was Jackie Kennedy’s social secretary and chief of staff during the Kennedy administration. Caroline Kennedy attended first grade in a makeshift third-floor classroom inside the White House.

I’d say something snarky but I’ve been informed by my betters

President-elect Barack Obama and his wife Michelle “have every right” to send their children to public or private school, and no one should “criticize” their decision, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), said in an interview with CNSNews.com on Monday at the National Press Club.
Does that apply to everyone, i.e. do you now support School Choice, or does that only apply to rich Black parents?

Wall Street Journal reports Michelle Rhee, chancellor of the Washington, D.C. schools, who is speaking truth to teacher-union power to shake up one of the nation's worst education systems said "Tenure is the holy grail of teacher unions, but it has no educational value for kids; it only benefits adults." Do you agree with Rhee?

The Christian Science Monitor said Barack Obama needs to .... be as a "science president," supporting basic research and science education that will benefit the public good long after he leaves office. What good will that do if we keep graduating kids not qualified in Science and Mathematics?
Democratic Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack echoed Weingarten’s comments at the conference, telling CNSNews.com that “it’s a very personal decision” that the president-elect and his wife need to make and the issue “should not be subject to criticism or comment.”
We have just been through 8 years of criticism about Bush for everything he did, did not do, said, or did not say, and a very long election season when pot shots were fired at many other Republicans. Why is it no longer our place to criticize. If Obama had truly opposed School Choice all the time, rather than supporting it when talking to people that wanted it, and opposing when talking to teachers, it would be one thing. But he was a true politician when running for office.
The AFT endorsed Obama for president in July. On the campaign trail, Obama spoke out against school choice and vouchers for children in households of any income level.
Sometimes, and other times spoke out of the other side of his mouth.

that it’s wrong to criticize The One for hypocrisy on this point because, and I quote, “none of us knows what it’s like to be a president of the United States of America or a president-elect.” There’s video at the link; do bear it in mind the next time you get the urge to object to anything he says or does.

Chelsea Clinton went to this same school, incidentally, which is perfectly in keeping with the blueprint Obama’s followed thus far. Here’s an actual e-card I sent to our favorite liberal a few days ago. Share it with a Democrat you love.

Fox News

Los Angeles Times reported Roger Ailes, the savvy and hard-charging television executive who transformed the Fox News Channel from an upstart enterprise to the top-rated cable news network said "Democrats tend to go over there and watch," Ailes said, then paid his rival a rare compliment, noting its high-tech set: "I think CNN did a good job, also. They bought enough equipment to outfit all the movie theaters in America."

Maybe they are going in the Left Wing movie business. They slant their news to much for me. I like mine "Fair and Balanced".

Still, he said he was confident that Fox News, known for its outspoken conservative commentators, would fare well in an Obama administration. While all the cable networks saw large audience drop-offs in the week after the election, Fox News retained 70% of its prime-time viewers, while CNN held on to 42% and MSNBC kept 60%.

Good for Fox News.

"If we keep doing what we're doing, which is tell the truth and let the chips fall where they may, I think we're going to be fine," he said.

The TRUTH is always the best policy, unless your wife asks how a dress fits.

Ailes said he had not given any orders about how the network should treat Barack Obama, despite a recent report that he had instructed Fox News hosts to show deference to the president-elect.

Deference is proper.The election is over, and Fox News treated both candidtes in a "Fair and Balanced" fashion. We should now give Obama a chance to do things, but keep a close eye on what he is doing, and as the Loyal Opposition we should speak up if we think he is going down thw roung road. And maybe we can hold him as close to the center as the position he took before the election, rather than off the ragged left edge as many on the left will be pulling him. And we should see soon whether he is his own man, and if so which of the two Obamas he will be, or whether he will just be Reid and Pelosi's lap dog.

Rather, he said he told staffers at a meeting that "all presidents deserve time to get their team on the ground and get organized."

They are supposed to be doing that before Jan 20, and if he is making mistakes there, we have both a right and an obligation to let our thoughts be heard, but we should not bundle in theings said during the campaign unless his actions go against what he said then.

"As American citizens, we all believe we are innocent until proven guilty," he said. "I think we should extend that same rule to our leaders in our country.

I don't think we have to expect a jury trial on every thing they do, but a trial in the court of public opinion is fine, and if a jury trial seems justified the constitution does provide for Impeachment, which is like a jury trial, although it should be used only in extreme conditions, and only if you know you have enough opposition votes to get the required 2/3 vote in the Senate if the charges are true. The Republicans should not have impeached Clinton, because while he was technically guilty of a crime they knew they could not get the Democratic votes to convict, and if they had not done it to Clinton, the Angry Left might not have screamed Impeachment every time Bush did something they do not like. We should be able to complain about things the president does, and have the mdeia report fairly both sides of the argument, without having to draw up Articles of Impeachment in the House.

And therefore we have some obligation in a new presidency not to attempt to destabilize it.

But we don't have the obligation to withhold information or lie about it to prop up an unstable President. The stability we should be worried about is the stability of the Country, and to the Constitution which defines how the country should be run.

It does not mean we wouldn't cover something that came and it was new information."

I hope not.

Whether the network's hosts will heed his advice remains to be seen, he said, adding wryly: "Who knows? Most of them do whatever the hell they want."

And that is why we watch them.

A little humor

As Allah Pundit blogged I can’t make up my mind on this one. Either it’s Obama trying to enact his economic policies with free-market capitalism in the way or it’s Hillary trying to run America’s foreign policy with Obama himself in the way.

I guess either is possible. Certainly someone's nose must hurt.

Your call.

17 seconds in, right after the lad pulls up his socks:

e=mc²

Yahoo! News reported It's taken more than a century, but Einstein's celebrated formula e=mc² has finally been corroborated, thanks to a heroic computational effort by French, German and Hungarian physicists.

This is the way science should work. Other scientists try to prove someone else's theory They don't just form a consensus and find a number of scientists willing to say they can't disprove a theory, and call that consensus PROOF of something like Anthropogenic Global Warming, and then by denial of tenure or persuading governments that have political reasons for wanting to pretend the science is true to withhold scientific grant money to doubters seeking to disprove the theory.

A brainpower consortium led by Laurent Lellouch of France's Centre for Theoretical Physics, using some of the world's mightiest supercomputers, have set down the calculations for estimating the mass of protons and neutrons, the particles at the nucleus of atoms.

According to the conventional model of particle physics, protons and neutrons comprise smaller particles known as quarks, which in turn are bound by gluons.

The odd thing is this: the mass of gluons is zero and the mass of quarks is only five percent. Where, therefore, is the missing 95 percent?

The answer, according to the study published in the US journal Science on Thursday, comes from the energy from the movements and interactions of quarks and gluons.

In other words, energy and mass are equivalent, as Einstein proposed in his Special Theory of Relativity in 1905.

Youngest Viagra User

Viagra was originally developed as a remedy for high blood pressure – and its use as a sex drug was only discovered by accident. I am happy to see it is able to save the life of Britain's Youngest Viagra User. The Sun reported Calvin Muteesa was first prescribed the impotence remedy aged just three months. Now he is believed to be Britain’s youngest regular Viagra user, having taken the drug — for up to six times a day — for the past 30 months. Calvin has pulmonary arterial hypertension, a rare condition which means his blood pressure is dangerously high. This starves his lungs of oxygen-rich blood.

I hope the doctors can find a better way to treat his conditions, but with Britain's Nationalized Health Service that is not likely, but I am glad they found this will work, and may God watch over Calvin.

The youngster struggles for breath and his heart has to work twice as hard to force blood to his lungs. Viagra relaxes his pulmonary artery, which carries blood to the lungs, and allows more blood and oxygen through.

Tulsa Residents

KOTV reported The city courts now have a website that can tell you which tickets require a court appearance and which ones don't along with other valuable information, like how to get a friend out of jail.

I don't support breaking the law, but sometimes we do it unintentionally, and this can eliminate some of the hassels of paying what you owe.

You can also pay up to seven tickets at one time with a credit card on the secure site.

"Most tickets you get in the City of Tulsa have a dollar amount on the front. They're not crimes of violence or drugs or alcohol and there's no reason to come to court and miss four hours of work when you can pay online in 90 seconds and avoid that," said Judge Crawford.

75% of the 90,000 tickets issued could be handled this way. You can also mail the fine or pay at the cashier's window outside the courtrooms. It's all about saving you time.

"Every day we have people in court who didn't have to come, had they known the answer to a simple question they could've found online," said Judge Crawford.

Sunday, November 16, 2008

Obama throws Israel under the bus

Caroline Glick blogged it appears that as his critics warned, Obama's moves toward the center on issues relating to the Middle East were little more than campaign tactics to obscure his true policy preferences.

I am afraid many of his moves to the center were the same thing.

Two days after his election, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius gave a sense of the direction in which Obama will likely take US foreign policy.... Obama, he claimed, will want to push hard to force Israel to come to an agreement with the Palestinians as soon as he comes into office.

Like forcing them back to the indefensible pre-67 borders.

... WHAT IS most alarming about Obama's emerging foreign policy toward Iran and its proxies on the one hand and Israel on the other is that it will cause actual harm to the Jewish state.

I wonder what the 77% of Jews that supported bama will have to say about that.

... As for direct talks with Iran itself, the question immediately arises, what could Obama offer Teheran in exchange for an end to its nuclear program that Bush hasn't already offered? What it can offer is Israel.

And it appears he is perfectly willing to throw Israel under the bus. Despite what Genesis 12:3 says.

... The Obama team's pre-inaugural signals indicate strongly that Israel's next government will need to strike Iran's nuclear installations before two rapidly approaching deadlines.

Thankfully they took out Saddam's reactor, and now it looks like they will have to deal with Iran's, since they can't count on us to help them.

The strike will have to occur before the mullahs enrich sufficient quantities of highly enriched uranium to produce nuclear bombs. And Israel will need to neutralize Iran's nuclear program before the Obama administration begins implementing America's new foreign policy.

The answer is Chapter 11

TCS Daily reported Total compensation per hour for the big-three carmakers is $73.20. That's a 52 percent differential from Toyota's (Detroit South) $48 compensation (wages + health and retirement benefits). In fact, the oversized UAW-driven pay package for Detroit is 132 percent higher than that of the entire manufacturing sector of the U.S., which comes in at $31.59. I don't care how much money Congress throws at GM. With that kind of oversized comp-package they are not gonna be competitive. It's throwin' bad money after a bad cause. What a way to start the new Obama era.

Professor Bainbridge blogged Is the UAW the Problem? "The” problem? No. The automakers have lots of problems. But the UAW is “A” problem.... I have no beef with unions per se. To the contrary, I believe that collective bargaining is both economically rational and morally desirable. I do have a problem with using tax payer dollars to bailout the auto industry so long as their UAW contracts leave them unable to compete either financially or in product quality with the US factories of German and Japanese automakers.

The answer to the Auto problem is the clensing effect of Chapter 11. I agree with JorgXMcKie who commented I’ll only be happy with a bailout that cuts both union and management pay and benefits to the average level in the industry (US), trims work force at both levels to the industry average, and brings rationality to the dealership mess.

As Gateway Pundit pointed out Titan Trader at Power Line Forum asked today:

Why should a taxpayer making $50 grand per year be expected to bail out NON-Skilled Union laborers making $152,256.00 per year. SKILLED Union Electricians who went through two years of day school and four years of night school - paid for by themsleves- make only half as much as the United Auto Workers.

UAW Contracts Put Detroit On Road to Ruin, and A $50B Bailout Would Only Be The Down Payment