NYC Mayor Bloomberg intervened for Ground Zero mosque group

Tweet 12/24/10, "Records: Mayor intervened for mosque group," AP by Chris Hawley

"Mayor Michael Bloomberg's office worked behind the scenes to help the organizers of a mosque and community center near Ground Zero, intervening with city administrators to get a temporary prayer service permit and having an official ghostwrite a letter to community leaders.

E-mails released by the city document the cooperation between Bloomberg's Community Affairs Unit and the Cordoba Initiative, even as a furor erupted this year over the center's proposed existence two blocks north of Ground Zero. The city released the documents

• in response to a public-records lawsuit by Judicial Watch, a conservative group.

Bloomberg's spokesman said the city has extended similar help to other religious groups. But Judicial Watch says the e-mails show the city government went too far with its assistance.

Bloomberg has been one of the strongest supporters of the project, which drew huge protests on both sides in the months before the ninth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. Opponents argued that locating a mosque so close to the attack site is insensitive to the victims' memories. Bloomberg and other supporters have said allowing the center to be built reflects American values of tolerance and religious freedom.

• The city's help was no different than the assistance it gives other organizations, Bloomberg spokesman Stu Loeser said.

"It is nothing out of the ordinary. This is what the Community Affairs Unit does," he said, citing assistance the mayor's office gave Roman Catholic officials in composing a letter to community boards asking for their help with a papal visit and in rushing through a permit for a temporary hut erected for a Jewish holiday.

In May, Nazli Parvizi, the head of the city's community affairs unit, composed a 500-word letter to send to Community Board 1, an advisory council in lower Manhattan, about the mosque project.

The draft of Parvizi's letter describes the center as

• a "wonderful expression of our religion" and laments "media distortion" of the project.
  

The letter in e-mails was signed by Daisy Khan, the wife of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the man behind the project.

• In August, Bloomberg cited the community board's support in a speech endorsing the project.

In January the Cordoba Initiative asked Bloomberg's commissioner of immigrant affairs, Fatima Shama, for help getting a temporary permit to hold Friday worship services at the proposed site. The city had approved permits for previous weeks, and the group believed the omission was due to a clerical error.

• Shama responded a few hours later, saying the problem had been fixed.

As public anger over the mosque began to spread in May, supporters turned to the city for advice.

• "Is there a good time to chat tomorrow. We need some guidance on how to tackle the opposition," Khan wrote to Shama.

The e-mails also document donations of $300 from the Cordoba Initiative and $150 from the American Society for Muslim Advancement, a sister group, to help pay for an Aug. 24, 2009, dinner celebrating the holy Islamic month of Ramadan at the mayor's residence.

• Loeser said the donations did not influence the mayor's support of the project.

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said the documents show the city was an active proponent of the project. "He obviously feels strongly about it, but he

shouldn't turn the taxpayers of New York into advocates for this group," Fitton said."...

The most important thing to know about the Tea Party "is that there are more of them than ever before in American history." Spengler

Tweet And we are just beginning to come of age. Speaking as a supporter, the Tea Party isn't only about finances and Obama, though those issues alone could end the country.

• Being routinely scorned by George Bush and his cronies got many of us going.

Those career politicians and lobbyists still populate the GOP and still scorn us. Every one of them must go. Someone once said, "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned." It can apply to men as well.

12/7/10, "Longevity gives life to Tea Party," Spengler

"How could the Tea Party elect five senators and 40 members of the United States Congress last November, none with political experience and many with evident eccentricities? The answer is that a single issue united a slapdash agglomeration of amateurs, with sufficient power to override all the sources of weakness.

The Tea Party represents creditors of the government who do not want to be cheated out of their savings; that is, people close to retirement age who fear slow confiscation by inflation. Governments that run huge deficits normally reduce them by debasing the currency, in order to repay their debts in inflated money.

In fact, the Tea Party is a triumph of economic rationality over lack of talent: its reason for being is so compelling and so clear that it has succeeded despite the silliness of some of its candidates. One top Republican pollster thinks that the "I am not a witch" message aired by losing Tea Party candidate Christine O'Donnell in Delware was the

• single worst piece of advertising in political history.

Elite commentators tend to dismiss the Tea Party as a mob of engaged boos. On the contrary, pollster Scott Rasmussen, reports, the Tea Partiers tend to be older than 45, married, wealthier and better educated than the general population, and concerned first of all with federal spending and deficits.

• The most important thing to know about such people is that there are more of them than ever before in American history.

Young families with small children borrow money from older people who have finished raising families. Most Americans begin adulthood heavily in debt and become lenders as they approach retirement. The changing proportions of young and old Americans has enormous bearing on political outcomes.

Elderly dependents have remained fairly static as a percentage of total population during the past 40 years. But the proportion will jump from 19% today to 32% in 2030. This seismic change in American demographics explains a great deal.

In 1975, when Jimmy Carter ran for president, 39 out 100 Americans were dependent children, but only 16 out of 100 Americans were dependent elderly. The baby boomers were in their twenties and starting families. Once elected president, Carter allowed the inflation rate to reach double-digits by 1981. A family that bought a house for $60,000 in January 1975 could have sold it for $110,000 in January 1981. In fact, home prices offered positive returns after inflation (stocks, bonds, and cash all showed negative real returns during the 1980s).

Elderly people on fixed pensions took part-time jobs or ate pet food as the value of money shrank; young people caught a free ride on the inflation wave. No one liked inflation, to be sure, but it was an ill wind that blew good to a great many people. The Carter administration, though, made an elementary blunder: as inflation drove up nominal income, it also pushed middle class taxpayers into higher tax brackets intended to soak the rich. With a top tax rate of 70%, the tax squeeze due to inflation became a crushing burden on the middle class, and the high rate of taxation on nominal capital gains was often confiscatory. If the Carter administration had indexed tax rates to inflation, it might have lasted a second term.

Now the tables are turned. By 2030, elderly dependents will comprise 32% of the American population, twice the level in 1975.

• For the first time in history, the number of elderly dependents will equal the number of child dependents. Americans now aged 45 will retire in 2030, and it is their concerns that give buoyancy to the Tea Party.

The Tea Party is an exercise in economic rationality. Measured inflation in the United States is less than 1% (according to the woefully inadequate Consumer Price Index), but the Tea Partiers anticipate higher inflation in the future should the federal government remain at 11% of gross domestic product.

This is not the first time that monetary issues have motivated the formation of an important third party. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a prolonged deflation under the gold standard drew Western farmers to the inflationist Free Silver movement. Permitting silver coinage would have increased the money supply, raised the price level and helped debtors. The movement was powerful enough to take over the Democratic Party in 1896, when its candidate William Jennings Bryan (an unknown 36-year-old congressman) excoriated Eastern creditor interests and their ''cross of gold'' imposed by Eastern creditor interests.

• The proportion of prospective pensioners in the rest of the industrial world exceeds that in the United States...

America's open political model makes it relatively easy for challengers to force their way onto the stage (although not to remain their for long), so the Tea Party as such is likely to remain a distinctly American phenomenon. But the shift towards an older population also will act as a brake on inflationist impulses elsewhere,

• for example, on the extent to which France and Germany will bail out Ireland, Portugal, Greece, or Spain.

In its first electoral outing, America's Tea Party helped shift the political balance. It would be incautious to view it as a passing expression of voter frustration. On the contrary: spontaneity and inexperience held the Tea Party back from harvesting the political support that should come to it. If the Tea Party does a better job of screening and prepping candidates - or the Republican party has the good sense to adopt its program -

• demographics and rational interest will make it an

even stronger force as time passes, and an obstacle to a new inflation cycle."

####

• (As for the left, they believe the country is theirs because we will be dead soon. Many Tea Partiers are in their 40's or younger, so they'll have a long wait. They hope to hurry us off by giving us a UK style medical system where seniors are routinely left to starve. They figure in a few years we'll be gone, and a snakepit of crime, poverty and despair will be theirs. A land mass with no borders. But our numbers are just beginning.
  

We didn't work our whole lives to watch some slobs throw the country down the toilet to George Soros and his relatives. ed)

Individuals in Kenyan government stealing a third of national funds. Africa is poor because of corrupt leaders NOT 'climate'

Tweet 12/3/10, "Kenyan corruption costs government dearly," BBC

"The Kenyan government has said it could be losing nearly one-third of the national budget to corruption.

• Finance ministry officials told a parliamentary committee the losses could be nearly $4bn (£2.5bn) a year.

They said individuals were taking huge sums meant for development projects.

• Analysts say many Kenyans will be surprised not by the news of the losses, but by the fact the
  

admission has come from such senior officials.

• Kitu kidogo - the Swahili for "something small" - is how the kickbacks are commonly described in Kenya.

Taking 10% of an awarded tender or inflating project costs are said to be the commonest means of dipping into government coffers.

• Corruption has been the Achilles heel of successive Kenyan regimes.

But the efforts of the country's newly-appointed anti-corruption commissioner - who now has the power to prosecute individuals -

• are causing ripples in government quarters."

Reference: 11/9/10, BBC, "French appeals reopens African assets case"

• 3 African leaders accused of stealing $223 million from their goverments

"France's highest appeals court has authorised judges to proceed with an investigation into assets held in the country by three African leaders.

• The anti-corruption group Transparency International has accused the three of using African public funds to buy luxury homes and cars in France....

The three leaders, one of whom is now dead, had denied wrongdoing.

• They are Denis Sassou-Nguesso of the Republic of the Congo and
  

• Teodoro Obiang Nguema of Equatorial Guinea, as well as
  

• the late Gabonese leader, Omar Bongo (whose living relatives are also named).
  

Transparency estimates the total value of the three leaders' estates in France at 160m euros (£140m, $223m)."...

.

ClimateGate leader Phil Jones is 'in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC' and governments

Tweet Nov. 28, 2009, Telegraph UK: "The reason why even the Guardian's George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents (emails) is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics.

• Their importance cannot be overestimated.

What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Professor Philip Jones, the CRU's director, is in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC's key scientific contributors, his global temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC

• and governments rely –
  

not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless

• trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.
  

Dr Jones is also a key part of the closely knit group of American and British scientists responsible for promoting that picture of world temperatures conveyed by Michael Mann's "hockey stick" graph which 10 years ago turned climate history on its head by showing that, after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures have recently shot up to their highest level in recorded history.

• Given star billing by the IPCC, not least for the way it appeared to eliminate the long-accepted Mediaeval Warm Period when temperatures were higher they are today, the graph became the central icon of the entire man-made global warming movement.

Since 2003, however, when the Steve McIntyre , an increasingly heated battle has been raging between Mann's supporters, calling themselves "the Hockey Team", and McIntyre and his own allies, as they have ever more devastatingly called into question the entire statistical basis on which the IPCC and CRU construct their case.

The senders and recipients of the leaked CRU emails constitute a cast list of the IPCC's scientific elite, including not just the "Hockey Team", such as Dr Mann himself, Dr Jones and his CRU colleague Keith Briffa, but Ben Santer, responsible for a highly controversial rewriting of key passages in the IPCC's 1995 report; Kevin Trenberth, who similarly controversially pushed the IPCC into scaremongering over hurricane activity; and Gavin Schmidt, right-hand man to Al Gore's ally Dr James Hansen, whose own GISS record of surface temperature data is second in importance only to that of the CRU itself....

• But the question which inevitably arises from this systematic refusal to release their data is – what is it that these scientists seem so anxious to hide?...

What is tragically evident from the Harry Read Me file is the picture it gives of the CRU scientists hopelessly at sea with the complex computer programmes they had devised to contort their data in the approved direction, more than once expressing their own desperation at how difficult it was to get the desired results.

The third shocking revelation of these documents is the ruthless way in which these academics have been determined to silence any expert questioning of the findings they have arrived at by such dubious methods – not just by refusing to disclose their basic data but by discrediting and freezing out any scientific journal which dares to publish their critics' work. It seems they are prepared to stop at nothing to stifle scientific debate in this way, not least by ensuring that no dissenting research should find its way into the pages of IPCC reports.

Back in 2006, when the eminent US statistician Professor Edward Wegman produced an expert report for the US Congress vindicating Steve McIntyre's demolition of the "hockey stick", he excoriated the way in which this same "tightly knit group" of academics seemed only too keen to collaborate with each other and to "peer review" each other's papers in order to dominate the findings of those IPCC reports on which

• much of the future of the US and world economy may hang.
  

In light of the latest revelations, it now seems even more evident that these men have been failing to uphold those principles which lie at the heart of genuine scientific enquiry and debate. Already one respected US climate scientist, Dr Eduardo Zorita, has called for Dr Mann and Dr Jones to be barred from any further participation in the IPCC. Even our own George Monbiot, horrified at finding how he has been betrayed by the supposed experts he has been revering and citing for so long, has called for Dr Jones to step down as head of the CRU.

The former Chancellor Lord (Nigel) Lawson, last week launching his new think tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation , rightly called for a proper independent inquiry into the maze of skulduggery revealed by the CRU leaks. But the inquiry mooted on Friday, possibly to be chaired by Lord Rees, President of the Royal Society –

• itself long a shameless propagandist for the warmist cause –
  

is far from being what Lord Lawson had in mind. Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with a whitewash of what has become the greatest scientific scandal of our age."

by Christopher Booker, "Climate Change: This is the worst scientific scandal of our generation" Telegraph, 11/28/09

'Racial profiling: be sure to get my good side'

Tweet 11/21/10 "It seems as if every day and night on cable TV and every Sunday morning on traditional TV, the political, legal, social, historical, financial and moral debate flares over “racial profiling.”

• But lost in these debates among wise men and wise women is the practicality of the matter as it relates to the baddest of the bad guys — those we’d most like to keep the hell out, those most worth stopping once they’re here.

What do you think the reaction is to these satellite-delivered American TV racial profiling debates as heard by Islamic terrorists, operating anywhere from Tehran to Toronto? They must laugh their heads off, wonder if we’re all nuts.

• Surely, they ask: “How, at this point in history, can there be any such debate among our sworn enemies? How much more mayhem can we inflict on them before they realize that we’ve declared war?”

Same with murderous, drug-running and people-running operations in Mexico and Central America. Their primary wholesale delivery depots are in the US. Every time these baddest of bad guys tune in to one of these racial profiling debates they have to be left in stitches:

• “They’re debating whether, just over the U.S. border, the police should be allowed to ask for identification based on a Hispanic’s — or anyone else’s — suspicious behavior. How funny is that! Why not just send the Welcome Wagon to pick us up at the border!”

The practicality of the debate is lost in a stew of Constitutional applications that reflect “feelings” — whether it’s “fair” to racially profile, whether it’s “nice.”

• No, it’s not nice, but it’s fair. Consider: No one’s rooting harder for the anti-profilers than the baddest of the alien bad guys!

Funny, those who oppose racial profiling as a violation of inalienable rights, ignore the most open and virulent form of racial profiling as legally practiced within our judicial system.

If a minority crime suspect is arrested and charged, his/her defense team often accuse the cops and the DA’s office with a race-based arrest and prosecution — racial profiling — which may or may not be true.

Yet, in choosing juries, defense teams carefully, conspicuously and without apology select jurors based on race and gender profiling.

• So it’s considered intolerable that a person be questioned, suspected or arrested if there’s even fractional evidence that he or she was stopped due to a racial profile.

But there’s no problem when the determination of a defendant’s alleged crime becomes, to some small or large degree, a matter of racially profiling the jury that will sit in judgment of the accused.

So race should play no role in the deterrence or the investigation of crime, yet it should play a role in the adjudication of those accused of crimes.

• Why is that tolerated?

Meanwhile, it’s Sunday. That’s Comedy Day/Night for the baddest of bad guys operating from Yemen to the Yucatan, targeting the wide-open US to do their worst.

• Sunday’s the day when satellite TV carries those serious debates among American wise people as to whether it’s right for police to stop a person based on fitting the profile of law breakers, because it might hurt their feelings.

“Oh man, that’s rich! Stop, you’re killing me!” Yeah, maybe we can get them to laugh themselves to death."

from NY Post by Phil Mushnick, 11/21/10, "Racial profiling-be sure to get my good side"

10 year old boy caned for possible non-Islamic food in "moderate" Islamic country of Malaysia

Tweet 11/10/10, Ten year old boy caned in Malaysia for bringing non-Islamic food to school for his lunch. This is one of the supposedly 'good' 'moderate' Islamic countries.

• "Jakim to probe man's creed after son caned over sausages," theMalaysianInsider.com

via Weasel Zippers

Growth slows across Europe in 3rd quarter, Spain abandons dozens of jobs projects. Soros has to be thrilled

Tweet 11/12/10, BBC, "Growth slows in Europe's leading economies"

"The pace of economic recovery has slowed in Europe's major economies, according to official estimates.

Germany, Europe's largest economy, has seen a sharp slowdown in the third quarter,

• with growth of 0.7% compared with the record expansion of 2.3% it reported in the previous three months.

In France, GDP grew by 0.4% between July and September, compared with growth of 0.7% in the previous quarter.

• The 16 eurozone members grew 0.4% on average, down from 1% growth before.

Italy also saw its rate of recovery decline, to 0.2% from 0.5% in the second quarter."...

• Hey, how about those GREEN JOBS Obama said were so great in
  
• SPAIN!

March 27, 2009, Bloomberg: "Subsidizing renewable energy in the U.S. may destroy two jobs for every one created if Spain’s experience with windmills and solar farms is any guide.

For every new position that depends on energy price supports, at least 2.2 jobs in other industries will disappear, according to a study from King Juan Carlos University in Madrid."...

• (There is no such thing as a 'green job,' as most know. ed.)
  

11/11/10, "The government has

• suspended dozens of road and rail projects and cut civil servants' wages as

• part of deep spending cuts aimed at reining in the massive public deficit."...

Communists in India burn Obama in effigy

Tweet

"Activists from the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) (CPI-ML) shout slogans as they burn an effigy depicting U.S. President Barack Obama during a protest in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad November 8, 2010" Reuters photo

via Weasel Zippers