Green Czar Van Jones: ‘White Polluters’ steered poison into minority communities
Van Jones, Special Advisor for Green Jobs, the White House Council on Environmental Quality. February 11, 2009, Berkeley, CA. From a lecture Jones gave at the 2nd Annual…
GOP Principles with Thaddeus McCotter: Chapter 1 of 5 – Uncommon Knowledge on National Review Online – VIDEO
GOP Principles with Thaddeus McCotter: Chapter 2 of 5 – Uncommon Knowledge on National Review Online – VIDEO
Thaddeus McCotter talks about stimulus
Krauthammer American’s intuitively know everyone has a breaking point…
THE NUMBERS GUY SEPTEMBER 2, 2009
Bleak Cancer Reports Mask Major Advances
Overall Mortality Rates Miss Longer Survival Periods, Gains Among Younger People; Misleading Comparison With Heart Disease
By CARL BIALIK
Grim reports about the war on cancer have masked significant signs of progress against the disease.
In recent years, it has been hard to avoid hearing that the fight against cancer has been largely futile. News stories have cited government statistics showing that death rates from cancer have barely budged, even as major progress has been made against heart disease. It is a humbling and disheartening return on tens of billions of dollars of investment in research.
But some statisticians and epidemiologists say that aggregated death rates conceal promising numbers. The U.S. government compiles cancer-mortality data from death certificates each year. When researchers assess trends in cancer survival, they typically compare today’s numbers with those from 1950 or 1975, two years that marked important improvements in collecting these data. But relying on those dates cloaks what researchers say are significant gains in the past decade or two.
The benchmark date is critical when evaluating the fight against cancer. The American Cancer Society doesn’t agree with the grim conclusion that arises from comparing today’s death rates with those in the 1950s. ACS prefers to contrast today’s rates with those in the early 1990s, when overall cancer deaths peaked. The nonprofit health organization argues that without public-health and medical progress, cancer mortality rates would have continued to rise. Instead, in the past few years, they have started to fall from peak levels.
MIDDLE EAST NEWS SEPTEMBER 2, 2009
Warlord’s Defection Shows Afghan Risk
By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV
HERAT, Afghanistan — Ghulam Yahya, a former mayor of this ancient city along the Silk Road, battled the Taliban for years and worked hand in hand with Western officials to rebuild the country’s industrial hub.
Now, Mr. Yahya is firing rockets at the Herat airport and nearby coalition military headquarters. He has kidnapped soldiers and foreign contractors, claimed the downing of an Afghan army helicopter and planted bombs in central Herat — including one that killed a district police chief and more than a dozen bystanders last month.
Mr. Yahya’s stranglehold over the outskirts of Herat has destabilized a former oasis of calm and relative prosperity. “The security situation here is critical,” said Herat’s current mayor, Mohammed Salim Taraki.
Al Jazeera English
Ghulam Yahya, former mayor of Herat, once worked with Western officials. Now he sides with the Taliban.
The warlord’s odyssey from friend to foe shows how disillusionment with the Western-backed administration of President Hamid Karzai has pushed even some former enemies of the Taliban into the insurgency. Violence is rapidly spreading beyond the ethnic Pashtun heartland of southern and eastern Afghanistan, where much of the countryside already is in rebel hands, into parts of the country that were considered safe just a few months ago.
Cyber Land Grab: Does Obama administration have designs on your personal computer?
ACORN quick to collect from feds, but slow to pay taxes
By: DAVID FREDDOSO - Commentary Staff Writer
09/01/09 9:34 AM EDT
The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) is perhaps best known for its volunteers’ habit of signing up fake voters. This has resulted in numerous state investigations and convictions of ACORN members for voter fraud activities.
But the group is also a tax scofflaw to the tune of more than $1 million, according to documents unearthed by another Louisiana-based non-profit, the Pelican Institute.
Pelican researcher Steve Beatty has come across dozens of outstanding and released tax liens against ACORN and ACORN affiliates, headquartered at two addresses in New Orleans. Although some of the liens have been paid, Beatty found that several are still outstanding, including a $547,000 lien by the federal government against ACORN itself.
ACORN, a non-profit, must pay federal Social Security and Medicare taxes for its employees, as well as state unemployment taxes.
Even as it keeps Uncle Sam waiting for tax payments, ACORN’s cup runneth over with federal money. The group and its subsidiaries have received at least $53 million from Uncle Sam since 1989 through a variety of programs.
The Examiner has reported previously that ACORN received more than $5.4 million between 2002 and 2006 from just one federal department, Housing and Urban Development. According to reporting by our own Kevin Mooney, President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package contains an additional pool of $2 billion in housing redevelopment funds and $1 billion more in Community Block Grants for which ACORN and its related organizations can compete by applying to the federal and state governments.
via ACORN quick to collect from feds, but slow to pay taxes | Washington Examiner .
Van Jones Communist in the White House
Became a Communist in the aftermath of the 1992 “Rodney King riots” in Los Angeles
Founded the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in 1996
Was active in the anti-Iraq War demonstrations organized by International ANSWER
Served as a board member of the Rainforest Action Network and Free Press
In March 2009, President Barack Obama named Jones to be his so-called “Green Jobs Czar.”
Born in 1968 in rural West Tennessee, Van Jones (whose birth name was Anthony Jones) attended the University of Tennessee at Martin. As an undergraduate aspiring to a career in journalism, he founded an underground campus newspaper as well as a statewide African American newspaper. After earning his BA degree, Jones abandoned his plan to become a journalist and instead enrolled at Yale Law School, where, as an angry black separatist, he first arrived wearing combat boots and carrying a Black Panther bookbag. “If I’d been in another country, I probably would have joined some underground guerrilla sect,” he reflects. “But as it was, I went on to an Ivy League law school…. I wasn’t ready for Yale, and they weren’t ready for me.”
via .
Obama Calls Islam ‘Great Religion’ at Ramadan Dinner – Political News – FOXNews.com
Obama Calls Islam ‘Great Religion’ at Ramadan Dinner
Obama said Islam is “part of America,” and the American Muslim community is diverse, like the broader citizenry of the United States
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama on Tuesday praised American Muslims for enriching the nation’s culture at a dinner to celebrate the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.
“The contribution of Muslims to the United States are too long to catalog because Muslims are so interwoven into the fabric of our communities and our country,” Obama said at the iftar, the dinner that breaks the holiday’s daily fast.
The president joined Cabinet secretaries, members of the diplomatic corps and lawmakers to pay tribute to what he called “a great religion and its commitment to justice and progress.”
Attendees included Congress’ two Muslim members — Reps. Keith Ellison and Andre Carson as well as ambassadors from Islamic nations and Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren.
via Obama Calls Islam ‘Great Religion’ at Ramadan Dinner – Political News – FOXNews.com .
Michael Chertoff talks to Riz Khan – Security eight years after 9/11 – 31 Aug 09 – Pt1
We discuss the US administration’s anti-terror policies and ask: Is the US safer eight years after the attacks of September 11, 2001?
OPINION AUGUST 31, 2009, 11:49 P.M. ET
What Happened to the ‘Depression’?
Despite the rhetoric from Washington, we were never close to 25% unemployment.
By ALLAN H. MELTZER
Day after day, economists, politicians and journalists repeat the trope that the current recession is the worst since the Great Depression. Repetition may reinforce belief, but the comparison is greatly overstated and highly misleading. Anyone who knows even a bit about the Great Depression knows that this is false.
The facts we face today are very different than the grim reality Americans confronted between 1929 and 1932. True, this recession is not over. But it would have to get improbably worse before it came close to the 42-month duration of the Great Depression, or the 25% unemployment rate in 1932. Then, the only safety net was the soup line.
The current recession is also much less severe than the 1937-38 Depression. A more accurate comparison is to the 1973-75 recession. Today’s recession is as deep and most likely won’t be much longer than the one we experienced some three decades ago. By pointing this out, I do not intend to minimize the damage that the economic crisis has had on individuals and businesses. But as policy makers make decisions in order to alleviate the recession, they are not helped when economists overstate its severity.
via Allan H. Meltzer: What Happened to the ‘Depression’? – WSJ.com.
Liz Cheney on her father’s FNC interview…it’s dangerous world.
