Sibby Online

Biggest scam since selling tap water in a bottle

Brad O'Leary shows how Obama's far-left agenda regarding global warming will line the pockets of Wall Street:

President Obama would like you to believe he is a crusader for the middle class. He wants you to look at his proposed tax increases on big banks, investment houses and Wall Street and see a president trying to take down Goliath in the name of the little guy. Don't be fooled. Obama's get-tough-on-big-business act is little more than a magician's diversion for his real sleight of hand: showering Wall Street with trillions.

The Obama administration is gunning to pass the Waxman-Markey bill – otherwise known as "cap-and-trade" – more accurately known as "cap-and-tax." The bill would set artificial limits on how much carbon dioxide businesses are allowed to emit – supposedly all in the quest to fight global warming. But that's not the half of it.

Waxman-Markey would give birth to an enormous, Wall Street insider carbon-trading market, where CO2 (yes, the same CO2 we exhale when we breathe) would be traded like any other stock or commodity on Wall Street. This is because companies that reach their limit for CO2 emissions under Waxman-Markey would be permitted to purchase carbon credits on a market exchange, which would then allow them to emit more CO2. If you think this sounds like the biggest scam since selling tap water in a bottle, you're right.

In fact, there is already a $100 billion carbon market today. The market is largely the handiwork of green congressmen, who have convinced some companies to begin voluntarily capping their emissions and buying and selling carbon credits so that they'll be ahead of the game when something like Waxman-Markey becomes law.

But many financial experts agree that should cap-and-trade become reality, this $100 billion market could grow to $3 trillion over the next 10 years. And who do you think would cash in on this boom? That's right. Wall Street and big banks, which gave Obama $18 million over the course of his 2008 presidential campaign.

Behemoths like the New York Stock Exchange, Goldman Sachs (which gave Obama nearly $1 million), and J.P. Morgan Chase (which gave Obama nearly $700,000) have long been in the process of developing the infrastructure necessary for trading CO2 on a massive scale. They just need their green friends in Congress to pass legislation that turns the stuff that makes our soda fizzy into solid gold. And they need help from the Obama administration to get it passed, which shouldn't be too hard to come by considering Obama has stocked his Cabinet full of Wall Street insiders and big-bank lobbyists – many of whom made millions of dollars just prior to joining team Obama.

How confused must Amy Bishop be

Jack Cashill explains:

She walks into a faculty meeting at the University of Alabama-Huntsville and shoots six of her colleagues, killing three of them, all three people of color, two of them black, and even Nancy Grace won't give her the time of day.

Where, she must wonder, are the feminists? Why are they not heralding her as the Danica Patrick of school shooters, the most lethal femme fatale since the Manson girls, and a worthy distaff descendant of Eric and Dylan?

Where are Al and Jesse, and why no thunderous evocations of the ghosts of Emmett Till and James Byrd? Hell, Harry Reid evoked the specter of slavery just to denounce Republican opposition to health-care reform, and Amy can't even get a passing comparison to David Duke for killing two African-Americans.

Where are the gun-control people? They got more air time denouncing Plaxico Burress, and he only shot himself, and in the leg at that, or Gilbert Arenas, who didn't shoot anyone at all.

Where are Abe Foxman of the ADL or the lamentable Morris Dees and the SPLC? Don't they care that Amy once sent a pipe bomb to the home of a Jewish doctor?

If Amy had put a Hitler mustache on an Obama poster and showed up at a tea party, she would have gotten more heat from these clowns. Yes, literally.

How colorful, Amy has to wonder, must a killer be before the networks pay her any heed? Should it not add to her street cred that she once murdered her brother and attempted an armed carjack to get away?

Ought it not help that she walked away from this bloody fratricide thanks to a DA who is now a sitting Massachusetts congressman?

Are there no media points scored for sucker punching a young mom at an I-Hop in a battle over a booster seat?

This is not ordinary behavior from your average female Harvard Ph.D. and college professor.

After all this mayhem, much of it outside the proverbial box, Amy Bishop must question why she is not even the most famous felonious "Amy."

That honor, of course, belongs to Amy Fisher, the Long Island Lolita, who plugged Joey Buttafuoco's wife, Mary Jo, but did not even kill her.

Amy Fisher had an advantage though. Unlike Amy Bishop, she did not dwell within the ivy tower. She knew the way the world turned and the media worked.

Obama's education agenda, training Alinsky-style community organizers

Phyllis Schlafly has the goods on where Obama's education funding is going toward:

President Barack Obama's budget has added more than $100 billion of federal taxpayers' money to what is called "education," so that means it will be spent by alumni of the Saul Alinsky school of radical community organizing and/or the Chicago Democratic machine. We're indebted to Pamela Geller of AtlasShrugs.com for exposing the shocking use of some of these funds.

Obama is using the public schools to recruit a private army of high-schoolers to "build on the movement that elected President Obama by empowering students across the country to help us bring about our agenda." We now know that Obama's "agenda" is to move the United States into European-style socialism.

Obama's Internet outreach during his campaign, Obama for America, has been renamed Organizing for America to recruit students to join a cult of Obama and become activists for his goals. Geller discovered that the teacher of an 11th-grade government class in Massillon, Ohio, passed out the sign-up sheet, headed with Obama's "O" logo, asking students to become interns for Organizing for America.

These interns will be given an intensive nine-week training course using comprehensive lesson plans. Assigned readings include Saul Alinsky's notorious "Rules for Radicals," "Stir It Up: Lessons From Community Organizing and Advocacy" by the left-wing activist Rinku Sen, and particular sections of "Dreams From My Father" dealing with Obama's days as a community organizer in Chicago.

Republican students will be filtered out of the intern program by requiring applicants to answer questions that reveal their politics. One example is, "What one issue facing our country is important to you and why?"

Geller said the purpose of this training to become Alinsky-style community organizers is, "of course, to elect more Democrats." The internship program is specifically geared to get the kids working in the 2010 elections.

The sign-up sheet for Organizing for America starts with this instruction: "Organizing for America, the successor organization to Obama for America, is building on the movement that elected President Obama by empowering students across the country to help us bring about our agenda of change." The application explains that this national internship program is "working to make the change we fought so hard for in 2008 a reality in 2010 and beyond."

This is not the first time Obama has tried to enlist schoolchildren into an Obama cult. Last fall, the instructions mailed to every school by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan added a very political dimension to Obama's speech that was broadcast to public school children on Sept. 8.

Geller explained the extensive political dimension of the new intern program. The OFA student interns will be trained in the goals and language of the left: "anti-war agitation, anti-capitalism, Marx, Lenin, (Bill) Ayers, LGBT agenda promotion, global warming, soft-on-jihad and illegal immigration."

Another item on OFA's reading list is "The New Organizers" by Zack Exley. It brags about "an insurgent generation of organizers" inside the Obama campaign that has "almost without anyone noticing ... built the Progressive movement a brand new and potentially durable people's organization, in a dozen states, rooted at the neighborhood level."

Obamacare is anti-woman & anti-marriage

So says David R. Usher:

The greatest test of conservative brilliance rests on our ability to weaken Democratic support for President Obama's budget reconciliation version of national health-care legislation Democrats threaten to ram through the roof of Congress' teapot dome via simple majority vote.

We can say with certainty that Republicans cannot change so many Democrats' votes lacking a powerful fresh argument. How can Republicans puncture the partisan support Obama commands for national health care?

The proposed healthfare state is anti-woman and anti-marriage. Forty-five years of social data demonstrate that every advance of the welfare state has resulted in more women and children living in poverty in cities unsafe because the fabric of marriage is destroyed. National healthfare, the largest proposed expansion of the Great Society since 1963, would accelerate evisceration of marriage and the futures of the neighborhoods so many women are already afraid to live in.

The majority of the health-care problem is a direct consequence of "marriage-absence" – which describes adults living singly or who cohabit, and illegitimate children raised in sub-marital arrangements.

The National Center for Health Statistics reports that unmarried women age 25–64 are about 60 percent more likely than married women to lack health-insurance coverage. The NCHS message is unmistakable: "Marriage affects health-insurance coverage. As marriage rates in the United States decline, fewer women will have the opportunity to obtain health-insurance coverage through their spouse. Marriage can also increase family income and may make health insurance more affordable."

Scott Brown joins the RINOs

Erick Rush puts forward Obama's plan, that only RINOs could support:

As conservatives rode high on the afterglow of last week's wildly successful CPAC convention, which galvanized and fired the hopes of millions of their number across America, some commentators and Republican lawmakers continued to admonish President Obama to cut spending and taxes in a real effort to turn the economy around, as opposed to what he is currently doing.

Something fundamental is eluding these folks here, and the prominence of some of them should not engender incredulity regarding their ignorance of what is transpiring; it is likely that the "unthinkable" and outrageous nature of Obama's objectives account for their escaping these otherwise astute men and women. Indeed, the president's design has always been to drive the U.S. economy over a cliff. It is only in this way that he will be able to implement the drastic measures that, no doubt, he will claim to hate as much as he "hated" the bank bailout, but which will secure the presidency (read: Obama) unprecedented latitude, to put it very mildly.

So, apropos Rep. Bachmann's remarks: Of course Obama is intending to fail; in failing to preserve the economy, he is succeeding in his own designs. Therefore, discussions around Obama putting a halt to spending, implementing tax cuts, or "what he ought to do" are beyond specious.

Meanwhile, afraid of being associated with the "party of 'no,'" and desirous of being able to say that they were for job creation as economic conditions further deteriorate, Sens. Scott Brown, R-Mass., Susan Collins, R-Maine, Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, George Voinovich, R-Ohio, and Christopher Bond, R-Mo., voted against the GOP's efforts to filibuster President Obama's so-called "jobs bill" (also referred to as "Stimulus II") this week. While many Americans will be aware that at least a couple of these are Republicans in Name Only (RINOs), some will no doubt be perplexed as to why the others would support something this imprudent and economically unsound – not to mention oxymoronic.

Pat Powers' flock of misinformed chickens, Part 2

Yesterday I explained how Pat Powers has been misinforming his anonymous readers. While HB 1278 was about protecting anonymous whistle blowers from corporations using cyber-SLAPPs, Powers and also Cory Heidelberger have been saying that the legislation was about taking away anonymous speech. As I have said, these Progressives have things exactly backwards. So here is a comment I posted on Powers' incorrect post:

Pat,

If you want “to share information”, when are you going to deal with the SLAPP point that I have presented? Should we not be against SLAPP?

(You’re in favor of more government. The rest of us are not. Besides, Why am I writing this? No one sees this or any of your other comments. So long as you moderate my comments, so too shall your comments be hidden. -PP)

Note teh second paragraph is Pat Powers informing me he has banned my comments.It is your web site Pat, you can go ahead and prevent me from correcting your falsehoods. BUt don't go around saying you are for free speech. Here is another comment that I posted that Pat hid from his readers:

“Fit the facts to support your conclusion.”

Here are the facts:

1). Pat Powers uses IP tracking.
2). thc and Mike C. left anonymous comments.
3). IP tracking does not ban anonymous comments.
4). Pat Powers says IP tracking violates the First Amendment regarding anonymous speech.
5). Pat Powers is illogical.
6). The followers of the illogical Pat Powers are fools.

Conclusion: I fully understand why you two want to remain anonymous.

And then I could not stop, so I posted this too:

“Fit the facts to support your conclusion.”

Here are the facts:

1). Political contributions are political speech.
2). Campaign finance laws require campaign contibutions to be tracked, reported to the governemnt, and to be made public.
3). Campaign finance laws ban anonymous speech.
4). Pat Powers supportes campaign finance laws.

Conclusion: Pat Powers supports banning anonymous speech.

And I even tried to bring Cory Heidebeger some truth:

And Cory, How would legislation that prevented courts from allowing Corporate monopolies form using SLAPP suits against anaonymous commenters be a nanny state?

And since you claim to ban anonymous comments, isn’t the Madville Times a police state?

Pat Powers and Cory Heidelberger, two Progressives in a pod. The South Dakota blogosphere is in really bad state of affairs nowadays.

Federal regulatory agencies caused housing bubble

Progressvies like Cory Heidelberger and Pat Powers often get things exactly backwards. For example. to prevent future housing bubbles, the Progressvies think the answer is more government regulations. But Thomas Sowell correctly explains that regulators caused the problem:

Mortgages made in California were sold to nationwide financial institutions, including Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and to firms in Wall Street that bundled thousands of these mortgages into financial securities that were sold nationally and internationally. The problem was that, not only were these mortgages based on housing prices inflated by the Federal Reserve's low-interest rate policies, many of the homebuyers had been granted mortgages under federal government pressures on lenders to lend to people who would not ordinarily qualify, whether because of low income, bad credit history or other factors likely to make them bigger credit risks.

This was not something federal regulatory agencies permitted. It was something federal regulatory agencies – under pressure from politicians – pressured and threatened lenders into doing in the name of "affordable housing."

The housing market collapse was set off when the Federal Reserve returned interest rates to more normal levels, but it was a financial house of cards that was due to collapse, sending shock waves through the economy. It was just a matter of when, not if.

A fuller account of all this appeared last year in my book "The Housing Boom and Bust." The revised and expanded edition, which has just been published, shows how more of the same kinds of policies today are making it harder for the economy to recover. It's not that politicians never learn. They learn how much they can get away with, when they can blame others.

Who rules God or government?

Dennis Prager has the question answered:

One of the major differences between the right and the left concerns the question of authority: To whom do we owe obedience and who is the ultimate moral authority?

For the right, the primary moral authority is God (or, for secular conservatives, Judeo-Christian values), followed by parents. Of course, government must also play a role, but it is ultimately accountable to God and it should do nothing to undermine parental authority.

For the left, the state and its government are the supreme authorities, while parental and divine authority are seen as impediments to state authority.

Let's begin with God.

From Karl Marx – "man is God," "religion is the opiate of the people" – to today's left in America and elsewhere, God and God-based religion, specifically Judaism and Christianity (Islam, too, but in the West, Islam has played little role) have been the primary obstacles to leftist victory.

That is why the further left a government or an ideology, the more it has opposed religion. The first targets of Lenin and Stalin were churches, synagogues and clergy. At the modern Western university, the epicenter of leftist ideology, the same has held true. A clear, if unstated, goal of modern liberal arts education is that as few college graduates as possible hold values rooted in traditional Judaism or Christianity.

This also explains the left's passion about maintaining and furthering secularism – under the banner of "separation of church and state." Anything – any value, any idea, any person – rooted in Judeo-Christian values must be confined to as narrow a place in society as possible.

Pat Powers' flock of misinformed chickens

Pat Powers continues to mislead his readers, many who are too chicken to identify themselves, regarding HB 1278. He was honest enough to admit this regarding his committee testimony:

Aargh. I stunk. I can tell I haven’t done this much. The adrenaline kicked in hard right about the time I had to testify.

Thankfully there are many, many people against it more experienced than I.

And here are thsoe people who testified against HB 1278:

David Bordewyk, SD Newspaper Association
Mike Shaw, Motion Pictures Assn. Of America
Bob Miller, Funeral Director's Association
Bill Van Camp, AT&T
Greg Dean, SD Telecommunications Association
Dick Gregerson, SD Newspaper Association

All organization who can afford to pay lobbyists that protect their self-interests. You would think that those corporate giants would have enough resources to afford IP tracking software, as I pay less than $10 a month for this web site that includes as part of the package IP tracking logs. So what is up with these corporate giants? Again I bring foreword a point I made during my testimony:

But what happens when the alleged libeler is anonymous? The offended individuals, corporations or other entities may try to smoke out their critics — and, they hope, suppress their criticism — by filing what have been called cyber-SLAPPs. “SLAPP,” coined by the University of Denver’s Political Litigation Project, stands for “strategic lawsuit against public participation.” (See SLAPP topic in Petition section.)

The target of an anonymous online attack typically files a lawsuit against a “John Doe” defendant and then attempts to discover John Doe’s identity. This is done through subpoenaing the Internet Service Provider (or ISP, such as America Online or Earthlink) to reveal the identity of the person who posted the offending material.

And HB 1278 contained the four-part test that would prevent cyber-SLAPPs. In other words, HB 1278 protected anonymous commenters and corporate whistle blowers from corporate giants with deep pockets who can afford lawyers to use the courts to intimate and silence their anonymous critics. When you have the collective powers of industry associations and AT&T lining up against something, they must be concerned about something that is very important to them. And it was not the First Amendment. It was their own selfish self-interest.

When will Pat Powers and Cory Heidelberger wake up and stop misinforming their readers on this issue? Perhaps their own selfish self-interests prevent them from even looking at the truth. Why are they not supporting the First Amendment rights of their anonymous commenters against cyber-SLAPPs, that are used by deep-pocketed corporations to silence their critics and whistle blowers?

Leftist professors and progressives versus the Founding Fathers

Chuck Norris starts another fight:

It's still difficult to believe that last week President Obama actually celebrated Feb. 17 as the first anniversary of his stimulus plan (a.k.a. American Recovery and Reinvestment Act), in which Washington borrowed $862 billion on American taxpayers' credit. Celebrate the piling of $1 trillion on the backs of our posterity? Call me clueless, but I've never considered easing present circumstances by going into massive amounts of debt as an answer to anyone's economic recovery and longevity.

But I bet there's one date the president definitely won't be celebrating: this Saturday, Feb. 27, which marks the first anniversary (or first birthday) of the tea-party movement.

To think, last year at this time, the mainstream media and Washington politicians were either completely overlooking them or labeling those patriot gatherings as extreme and wacky fringe resistances. WorldNetDaily was virtually alone in reporting the tea parties as a legitimate patriotic movement, like the original 1773 protest in Boston Harbor.

Today, just one year later, tea-party patriots have proven themselves as a collective and formidable force and foe against big government power and corruption. Even according to the latest CBS News/New York Times poll, roughly one in five adult Americans identifies with the tea-party movement.

Tea-party patriots cross all partisan lines. What unifies us is our fundamental belief that what America's founders established was good and right, that we've largely abandoned their vision, and the only recourse to reawaken America is to return to their principles and values. But that is easier said than done, as progressives have worked double-time to discredit and undermine them and the very pillars of their republic.

A few years back, an editor at the New York Times wrote, "The Founding Fathers were paranoid hypocrites and ungrateful malcontents." He's not alone. Many liberals in media and higher education share his sentiments, labeling our Founding Fathers as racists, bigots, chauvinists and charlatans, among other things. This is not only ungrateful – it's wrong. It's their contributions, not their character flaws, that we should be highlighting. As Samuel Adams said in 1771, "Let us first see it prov'd that they were mistakes. 'Till then we must hold ourselves obliged to them for sentiments transmitted to us so worthy of their character, and so important to our security."

Thomas G. West, professor of politics at the University of Dallas, rightly acknowledged our founders' worth in his excellent book "Vindicating the Founders" by pointing out that they "set up a government that did what no democracy had ever done before: It combined majority rule with effective protection for minority rights. It enabled a larger number of men and women to live in prosperity and liberty than any other nation has ever done."

Of course, the founders weren't perfect, but they were far better than what leftist professors and progressives make them out to be. We know that most of the founders regarded slavery as a wrong that would have to be addressed. They knew that equal rights applied to all: men, women and children – slave and free. They did not achieve all they wanted, but what they did achieve was miraculous. That miracle is our heritage. As Joseph Ellis stated in his narrative masterpiece, "Founding Brothers," the Constitutional Convention should be called "the miracle of Philadelphia …"

America's Founding Fathers gave us the framework and foundations to experience freedom and liberty for all. But we can't do that unless we know who they were, what they stood for and what they achieved. To restore America, we need to reclaim our past and learn from it. It is only by turning back and examining the past that we can reawaken or (if you will) reboot our country.

Unfortunately, those who want to reconstruct our constitutional government, redefine our founding documents and revise our history according to their ideological whims are being allowed to do just that because of the apathy of too many well-meaning Americans. If we don't care about our past, if we don't learn our history, if we don't cherish the Constitution and the principles of the Declaration of Independence, then just as we have allowed ourselves to be robbed of our past, so too will America be robbed of its rightful future. The first thing we need to do to restore America is to insist that our government officials abide by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and that they rightly interpret their tenets.