Auditors: FEMA Paid $1 Billion In False Hurricane Claims

"Included in that is $10 million in housing assistance that went to 1,000 convicted criminals who already had housing -- in prison.

'FEMA's fraud detection and prevention controls were so weak or nonexistent that these fraudulent applications were never detected, let alone prevented,' said Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas.

The hearings left some members of Congress exasperated because FEMA's top officials never showed up to answer questions. That left a 20-year civil service FEMA employee to field the brunt of representatives' wrath.

'Why weren't these steps taken?' one congressman asked.

'Sir, I think that's a very difficult question to ask a career person,' the FEMA employee answered."

The irony being that it is the career people, and not temporary appointees who should have the best handle on the workings of FEMA and every other Federal agency

Scientists respond to Gore's warnings of climate catastrophe

"But it becomes smaller still. Among experts who actually examine the causes of change on a global scale, many concentrate their research on designing and enhancing computer models of hypothetical futures. 'These models have been consistently wrong in all their scenarios,' asserts Ball. 'Since modelers concede computer outputs are not 'predictions' but are in fact merely scenarios, they are negligent in letting policy-makers and the public think they are actually making forecasts.'

We should listen most to scientists who use real data to try to understand what nature is actually telling us about the causes and extent of global climate change. In this relatively small community, there is no consensus, despite what Gore and others would suggest."

What if it turns out that, as one study suggested, reduced amounts of soot and other light blocking pollutants has actually caused more heat generating light to hit the ground and is thus responsible for what we call "global warming"? Would Gore and his followers suggest then that we all go back to burning coal in our fireplaces rather than using natural gas or electric heat?

Like many politicians, he can only operate in an environment where there is a "boogyman" to be overcome. Let's turn our collective boogyman field glasses on the destructive power of simplistic Powerpoint presentations as a substitute for true substantive debate. The left made a surprisingly stupid mistake when they tried to make the Bush academic record a campaign issue, inviting comparisons with Gore's record. Gore was the type of guy you loved to have in your class to bring the curve down. View the movie as a comedy, if you must see it. We really are dealing with a conspiracy of dunces here. Real scientists hopefully won't be distracted from real work on the issues by all the needless media attention created by the Duncmaster General.

Hurricanes and Global Warming

"Now there’s a few modelers around who know something about storms, but they would like to have the possibility open that global warming will make for more and intense storms because there’s a lot of money to be made on this. You know, when governments step in and are saying this – particularly when the Clinton administration was in – and our Vice President Gore was involved with things there, they were pushing this a lot. You know, most of meteorological research is funded by the federal government. And boy, if you want to get federal funding, you better not come out and say human-induced global warming is a hoax because you stand the chance of not getting funded."

Not news, but news to me.

Impact of Inevitable Sanctions on Iran

According to the WSJ, maybe not so bad...

"For oil-importing countries, even though Iran exports roughly 2.7 million bbl/d in petroleum, a complete cutoff of these shipments could be offset in large measure by increased OPEC and non-OPEC output, greatly diminishing the dreaded prospect of $100-a-barrel oil. Saudi Arabia has the most untapped capacity, in the order of 1.3 million to 1.4 million bbl/d. Other OPEC members, according to the International Energy Agency, have spare capacity of 1.1 million bbl/d, not including Iraq's estimated 700,000 bbl/d. With a total of 2.4 million to 3.1 million bbl/d in idle capacity, OPEC alone could offset a loss of Iranian exports. Furthermore, global oil consumption is anticipated to grow in the range of 1.4 million to 1.6 million bbl/d this year, while new supply is expected to increase by 1.2 million to 1.3 million bbl/d. Much of the imbalance is expected to be covered by OPEC exports of LNG."

WSJ.com - A Beautiful Sunset

"Ronald Reagan used to quip that the closest thing to immortality in this life is a government program. We'd add one modern caveat, which is that under Beltway budget rules tax cuts automatically expire after five or 10 years, but spending programs and tax increases live forever.

The latter would change, however, if a group of House Republicans led by Texan Jeb Henserling and Mike Pence of Indiana succeed in pushing new rules to sunset out-of-date federal programs. Under their proposal that has been promised a vote this summer, Congress would have to reauthorize agency budgets every five years, or they would die. The legislation would also create a sunset commission to recommend program terminations, and Congress would vote up or down on the package. This procedure is modeled after the successful military base closing commissions."

Sounds like something worth writing your congress person (and everyone else you know) about, doesn't it?

Mr. Murtha's Rush to Judgment

"A year ago I was charged with two counts of premeditated murder and with other war crimes related to my service in Iraq. My wife and mother sat in a Camp Lejeune courtroom for five days while prosecutors painted me as a monster; then autopsy evidence blew their case out of the water, and the Marine Corps dropped all charges against me ['Marine Officer Cleared in Killing of Two Iraqis,' news story, May 27, 2005]."

Unstoppable Drones

Crazy talk? Maybe not.

Cops: Kennedy Was Under Influence - May 5, 2006

Or as one pundit put it: It's 3AM, do you know where your Kennedys are?

USNews.com: Despite a troubled history, police across the nation are keeping tabs on ordinary Americans

"The outfit stumbled in 2002, when two of its agents were assigned to follow around the county executive. Their job: to determine whether he was being tailed--not by al Qaeda but by a district attorney investigator looking into alleged misspending. A year later, one of its plainclothes agents was seen photographing a handful of vegan activists handing out antimeat leaflets in front of a HoneyBaked Ham store. Police arrested two of the vegans and demanded that they turn over notes, on which they'd written the license-plate number of an undercover car, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which is now suing the county. An Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial neatly summed up the incident: 'So now we know: Glazed hams are safe in DeKalb County.'"

VOTE.COM - ROUSING THE ISOLATION GENIE

"This withdrawal from globalism is a predictable consequence of the quagmire of Iraq. Bush has spent the constructive energies unleashed by Sept. 11 on his bid to make Iraq a stable democracy. Whether he has squandered our national vigor or simply invested it wisely will only become apparent in the next few years, but what is glaringly obvious is that our patience is over.

Republicans criticize Democrats for not proposing new solutions to the Iraq war, but the GOP misses the point that their opponents don’t have to do so. The wind of isolationism is at the Democrats’ back, propelling them onward to the likelihood of massive victories in 2006 and 2008."

“‘Just War Theory’ vs. American Self-Defense” by Yaron Brook and Alex Epstein

The reason is that, despite their claims that they will do whatever is necessary to defend America, our leaders believe that it would be wrong—morally wrong—to do so. They believe this because they consistently accept a certain moral theory of war—one that has come to be universally taught in our universities and war colleges. This theory is accepted, at least implicitly, not only by intellectuals, but by our politicians, the leadership of our military, and the media. And while the American people are not explicitly familiar with this theory, they regard the precepts on which it is based and the policies to which it leads as morally uncontroversial. The theory is called Just War Theory. To understand today’s disastrous policies, and to reverse them, it is essential to understand what this theory holds.

Putting the cuckoo in our clocks�

"In other words, it isn't 1975 any more; we've made one or two technological advances since then; and did anybody stop to think that people might actually take advantage of the daylight by driving their gas-burning cars to more places? "

Director Rob Reiner resigns from Calif. commission

"Legislators from both political parties said Reiner, an outspoken Democrat, improperly spent $23 million of commission funds to highlight preschool when he was promoting a referendum for the June 2006 ballot that would guarantee preschool for 4-year-olds."

Meathead!

Man Overboard

"Mansfield writes that he wants to 'convince skeptical readers -- above all, educated women' -- that 'irrational manliness deserves to be endorsed by reason.' Sorry, professor: You lose. What this country could use is a little less manliness -- and a little more of what you would describe as womanly qualities: restraint, introspection, a desire for consensus, maybe even a touch of self-doubt."

Correction: You lost. And you will continue to make us laugh at your inability to recognize that fact. Better save all your propaganda/analysis for 2008. You're gonna need it.

The right to abandon your child�

"The feminists may well be stumped by this argument. After all, they've based their abortion advocacy as a matter of women's reproductive rights. Is it logical to claim women have reproductive rights that men lack? Yes, a woman has to carry an unplanned pregnancy for nine months and give birth. But Mr. Dubay, and many other men, are saddled with 18 years of child support. That's a pretty substantial inhibition of one's 'reproductive freedom.' "

Former Soviet Dissident Warns For EU Dictatorship | The Brussels Journal

"No, they did not. Look at Denmark which voted against the Maastricht treaty twice. Look at Ireland [which voted against the Nice treaty]. Look at many other countries, they are under enormous pressure. It is almost blackmail. Switzerland was forced to vote five times in a referendum. All five times they have rejected it, but who knows what will happen the sixth time, the seventh time. It is always the same thing. It is a trick for idiots. The people have to vote in referendums until the people vote the way that is wanted. Then they have to stop voting. Why stop? Let us continue voting. The European Union is what Americans would call a shotgun marriage."

Funny. Tax referendums work that way too don't they? Congress votes over and over for new spending programs until they pass. then we spend the next 50 years debating how to pay for it.

At what point to ordinary citizens say "ENOUGH!"

We have to look to the former Soviet Union for examples. We're not quite there yet.

WCPE - Great Classical Music 24 Hours a Day

With local radio stations under largely deserved pressure to do something useful, an unfortunate outcome is that many marginal specialty stations are going under, or worse, changing format in the unlikely hope that having just one more top-40 broadcaster per square mile might make them slightly profitable again.

I can see myself soon totally weaned of the need for radio stations at all. Living now beyond the outskirts of much of anything the "scan" button on my radio has trouble finding a signal strong enough to stop at. Just the opposite of the problem I used to have where the stations were so close together it stopped at every single frequency (making it mostly indistinguishable from the up-down tuning buttons).

By some miracle though, I have a fast Internet connection, and various means of listening to "Internet Streaming Radio" (I'm not sure if there is an official term for this, so I made that up). I can listen directly, using one of several computers, but after I got used to this notion I wanted that music piped out of my moderately fancy stereo system as well, so I got an Apple Airtunes gadget and have been using it for coming up on two years I think. More recently I caught These Things on sale for $99 (well more, if you wanted the nicer display) and decided to try one (and then another). Being able to tune into an Internet radio station without the need to be sitting at a computer (as was the case with Airtunes) or even have a computer turned on, is really liberating. Having two going at once in different rooms is also nice, even if the sounds are a bit out of sync. More expensive devices can cure this problem too, but this one is good enough for my needs, namely being able to go from the living room to bedroom without losing continuity.

Now if I want to listen to my own music collection rather than someone else's, this devices connects (in a more user friendly way than Apple hardware) directly to my iTunes setup, and it will also connect to several other music server programs (including one that runs on Linux, a big bonus for me), but I haven't yet gotten over the convenience of having such a large selection of music (and with database search capability rather than that mere up-down tuning mode of an actual radio) so other than to prove it works, my local music collection is sitting idle for the time being.

Finally though, this is about revenge. Revenge for one thing against all those top-40 stations which seem to be coming and going monthly around here so that you can no longer keep the presets on your radio programmed properly for any length of time. Do you hear me top forties?! I'M NOT LISTENING! But this is also revenge against some of those marginal stations, that, rather than do more to leverage whatever specialty market they are in, and rather than do the graceful thing of just going out of business, instead embarrass themselves and their listeners by making sweeping death spiral changes to their programming switching from classical to religious, from religious to country, from country to talk, from talk to top-40 and then finally closing their doors after wearing out whatever audience they had.

Locally, here in the middle of nowhere, there was only one station that played classical music, a college station, and they did a fairly good job of it too, using two different frequencies, one of which I could receive in my concrete silo, the other I could only receive in the car. For some reason they decided that the farmers in this area do not include enough old-time Communist sympathizers, so they have switched one of the two stations to 24-hours of NPR programming. Guess which one? So at home, there is now no reception of classical music, and on the station that such reception used to exist there is a constant demand that I send them money. They are barking up the wrong tree. I spent my donation money on a new Internet radio and now I'll be listening to this:

theclassicalstation.org

among others. Maybe the connected world only needs a few of these, and I'll be sending them a check to let them know I appreciate their efforts. In the mean time, I wish the local stations were more imaginative. But they aren't. So there.

Sen. Clinton Says Rove Obesses About Her

"'He spends more time thinking about my political future than I do,' Clinton said, noting that Rove and other White House aides have met regularly with her possible opponents in November's 2006 Senate race."

No es possible.

WSJ.com - Daughter of Islam

"After 9/11, many Americans assume that the radical Islamic agenda is to destroy the U.S. The reality is that attacks on Western targets are designed to function as brutal propaganda coups that will attract recruits to the cause of violent revolution. The main goal of ideologues like Osama bin Laden is to topple the governments of Muslim countries, including, most famously, the Wahabi royal regime of Saudi Arabia. But the real strategic plum, Ms. Wahid says, would be her native Indonesia and its 220 million citizens -- with the largest Muslim population on earth."

Andrew C. McCarthy on Port Security on National Review Online

"You may recall, however, that, upon election, President Clinton proceeded to get tough with Beijing for, oh, about ten minutes. After that, there was no transfer of precious technology and no national security secret that couldn’t be had for the right price. Oh, and guess who now controls several port operations on the West Coast? And has for years? Well, whaddya know? It’s China.

Indeed, Chinese infiltration of U.S. ports would have been even more pervasive if Senator Clinton’s husband had had his way. In 1998, the Republican Congress (led by Senator James Inhofe (OK) and Congressman Duncan Hunter (CA)) had to stop him from turning over management of a 144-acre terminal at the former U.S. Naval Station in Long Beach to the Chinese Ocean Shipping Company — a subsidiary of the People’s Liberation Army linked to arms trading to Iran, Iraq, Syria, North Korea, Pakistan, Cuba, and even the street gangs of Los Angeles."