konane's Blog

"Obama's thuggery is useless in fighting spill
By: Michael Barone
Senior Political Analyst
June 20, 2010
Source Washington Examiner
 
"Thuggery is unattractive. Ineffective thuggery even more so. Which may be one reason so many Americans have been reacting negatively to the response of Barack Obama and his administration to BP's Gulf oil spill.

Take Interior Secretary Ken Salazar's remark that he would keep his "boot on the neck" of BP, which brings to mind George Orwell's definition of totalitarianism as "a boot stamping on a human face -- forever." Except that Salazar's boot hasn't gotten much in the way of results yet.

Or consider Obama's undoubtedly carefully considered statement to Matt Lauer that he was consulting with experts "so I know whose ass to kick." Attacking others is a standard campaign tactic when you're in political trouble, and certainly BP, which appears to have taken unwise shortcuts in the Gulf, is an attractive target.

But you don't always win arguments that way. The Obama White House gleefully took on Dick Cheney on the issue of terrorist interrogations. It turned out that more Americans agreed with Cheney's stand, despite his low poll numbers, than Obama's.

Then there is Obama's decision to impose a six-month moratorium on deepwater oil drilling in the Gulf. This penalizes companies with better safety records than BP's and will result in many advanced drilling rigs being sent to offshore oil fields abroad.

The justification offered was an Interior Department report supposedly "peer reviewed" by "experts identified by the National Academy of Engineering." But it turned out the drafts the experts saw didn't include any recommendation for a moratorium. Eight of the cited experts have said they oppose the moratorium as more economically devastating than the oil spill and "counterproductive" to safety.

This was blatant dishonesty by the administration, on an Orwellian scale. In defense of a policy that has all the earmarks of mindless panic, that penalizes firms and individuals guilty of no wrongdoing and that will worsen rather than improve our energy situation. Ineffective thuggery.

And what about the decision not to waive the Jones Act, which bars foreign-flag vessels from coming to the aid of the Gulf cleanup? The Bush administration promptly waived it after Katrina in 2005. The Obama administration hasn't and claims unconvincingly that, gee, there aren't really any foreign vessels that could help.

The more plausible explanation is that this is a sop to the maritime unions, part of the union movement that gave Obama and other Democrats $400 million in the 2008 campaign cycle. It's the Chicago way: Dance with the girl that brung ya.

Or the decision to deny Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal's proposal to deploy barges to skim oil from the Gulf's surface. Can't do that until we see if they've got enough life preservers and fire equipment. That inspired blogger Rand Simberg to write a blog post he dated June 1, 1940: "The evacuation of British and French troops from the besieged French city of Dunkirk was halted today, over concerns that many of the private vessels that had been deployed for the task were unsafe for troop transport."

Finally, the $20 billion escrow fund that Obama pried out of the BP treasury at the White House when he talked for the first time, 57 days after the rig exploded, with BP Chairman Tony Hayward. It's pleasing to think that those injured by BP will be paid off speedily, but House Republican Joe Barton had a point, though an impolitic one, when he called this a "shakedown."

For there already are laws in place that insure that BP will be held responsible for damages and the company has said it will comply. So what we have is government transferring property from one party, an admittedly unattractive one, to others, not based on pre-existing laws but on decisions by one man, pay czar Kenneth Feinberg.

Feinberg gets good reviews from everyone. But the Constitution does not command "no person . . . shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law except by the decision of a person as wise and capable as Kenneth Feinberg." The Framers stopped at "due process of law."

Obama doesn't. "If he sees any impropriety in politicians ordering executives about, upstaging the courts and threatening confiscation, he has not said so," write the editors of the Economist, who then suggest that markets see Obama as "an American version of Vladimir Putin." Except that Putin is an effective thug."

Michael Barone, The Examiner's senior political analyst.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/Obama_s-thuggery-is-useless-in-fighting-spill-96684389.html

June 19, 2010 5:00 A.M.

"Gulf War Three
Mark Steyn
Source National Review Online

"Thank goodness, the president has directed BP to order up some new tackle and connect it to the thingummy next to the whachamacallit.

"I believe it was Jean Giraudoux who first said, “Only the mediocre are always at their best.”

Barack Obama was supposed to be the best, the very best, and yet he is always, reliably, consistently mediocre. His speech on oil was no better or worse than his speech on race. Yet the Obammyboppers who once squealed with delight are weary of last year’s boy band. At the end of the big Oval Office address, Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews, and the rest of the MSNBC gang jeered the president. For a bewildered Obama, it must have felt like his Ceausescu balcony moment. Had they caught up with him in the White House parking lot, they’d have put him up against the wall and clubbed him to a pulp with Matthews’s no longer tingling leg.

For the first time I felt a wee bit sorry for the poor fellow. What had he done to so enrage his full supporting chorus? In the Washington Post, the reaction of longtime Obammysoxer Eugene Robinson was headlined “Obama Disappoints From The Beginning Of His Speech.”

So what? He always “disappoints.” What would have been startling would have been if he hadn’t “disappointed.” His eve-of-election rally for Martha Coakley “disappointed” the Massachusetts electorate so much they gave Ted Kennedy’s seat to a Republican. His speech for Chicago’s Olympic bid “disappointed” the Oslo committee so much they gave the games to Pyongyang, or Ouagadougou, or any city offering to build a stadium with electrical outlets incompatible with Obama’s prompter. Be honest, guys, his inaugural address “disappointed,” too, didn’t it? Oh, in those days you still did your best to make the case for it. “He carries us from meditative bead to meditative bead, and invites us to contemplate,” wrote Stanley Fish in the New York Times. “There is a technical term for this kind of writing — parataxis, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘the placing of propositions or clauses one after the other without indicating . . . the relation of co-ordination or subordination between them.’”

Gotcha. To a fool, His Majesty’s new clothes appear absolutely invisible. But, to a wise man, the placing of buttons and pockets without indicating the relation of co-ordination is a fascinating exercise in parataxical couture.

And so Obama bounded out to knock ’em dead with another chorus of “I’ll be down to get you in a parataxis, honey,” only to find himself pelted with dead fish rather than Stanley Fish. The Times’s Maureen Dowd deplored his “bloodless quality” and “emotional detachment.” This is the same Maureen Dowd who in 2009 hailed the new presidency with a column titled “Spock At The Bridge” — and she meant it as a compliment. Back then, this administration was supposed to be the new technocracy — cool, calm, and credentialed chaps who would sit down, use their mighty intellects to provide a rigorous, post-partisan, forensic analysis of the problem, and then break for their Vanity Fair photo shoot.

What was it all the smart set said about Bush? Lazy and uncurious? Had Obama or his speechwriters chanced upon last week’s fishwrap, they might have noticed that I described the president as “the very model of a modern major generalist,” and they might have considered whether it might not be time to try something new. For example, he could have demonstrated, as he and his energy secretary (whoops, Nobel Prize–winning energy secretary) have so signally failed to do, an understanding of what is actually happening 5,000 feet underwater and why it’s hard to stop. Instead, lazy and uncurious, this is what the Technocratic Mastermind offered: “Just after the rig sank, I assembled a team of our nation’s best scientists and engineers to tackle this challenge — a team led by Dr. Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist and our nation’s secretary of energy. Scientists at our national labs and experts from academia and other oil companies have also provided ideas and advice.

“As a result of these efforts, we’ve directed BP to mobilize additional equipment and technology.”

Excellent. The president directed his Nobel Prize–winning Head of Meetings to assemble a meeting to tackle the challenge of mobilizing the assembling of the tackling of the challenge of mobilization, at the end of which they directed BP to order up some new tackle and connect it to the thingummy next to the whachamacallit. Thank you, Mr. President. That and $4.95 will get you a venti oleaginato at Starbucks.

The boring technocrat stuff out of the way, he then did his usual shtick. In the race speech, invited to address specific points about his pastor’s two-decade pattern of ugly anti-American rhetoric and his opportunist peddling of paranoid conspiracies to his gullible congregants about AIDS being invented by the U.S. government to wipe them out, Obama preferred to talk about race in general — you know, blacks, whites, that sort of thing; lot of it about. The media loved it. This time round, invited to address specific points about an unstoppable spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Obama retreated to more generalities — the environment, land, air, that sort of thing; lot of it about. “President Obama said he is going to use the Gulf disaster to push a new energy bill through Congress,” observed Jay Leno. “How about using the Gulf disaster to fix the Gulf disaster?”

When he did get specific, he sounded faintly surreal. “As we speak, old factories are reopening to produce wind turbines, people are going back to work installing energy-efficient windows.” Energy-efficient windows? That’s a great line — if Obama’s auditioning to play himself on Saturday Night Live parodies.

And hang on, isn’t this the same guy who was promising to start “kicking ass” just a few days ago? You may find yourself recalling the moment in the film In and Out when Kevin Kline is trying to master the How to Be Manly audiotape and accidentally says, “What an interesting window treatment.”

But, as Rahm Emmanuel shrewdly noted, never let a crisis go to waste, not when you can get a new window treatment out of it.

My colleague Rich Lowry suggested the other day that most people not on the Gulf coast aren’t really that bothered about the spill, and that Obama has allowed himself to be blown off course entirely unnecessarily. There may be some truth to this: For most of America, this is a Potemkin crisis. But what better kind to trip up a Potemkin leader? So the president has now declared war on the great BP spill — Gulf War 3! — and in this epic conflict the speechgiver-in-chief will surely be his own unmanned drone:

“I fired off a speech
But the British kept a-spillin’
Twice as many barrels as there was a month ago,
I fired off a speech
But the British kept a-spillin’
Up the Mississippi from the Gulf of Mexico . . .”

Chris Matthews and the other leg-tinglers invented an Obama that doesn’t exist. Unfortunately, they’re stuck with the one that does, and it will be interesting to see whether he’s capable of plugging the leak in his own support. If not, who knows what the tide might wash up?

Memo to Secretary Rodham Clinton: Do you find yourself of a quiet evening with a strange craving for chicken dinners and county fairs in Iowa and New Hampshire, maybe next summer? Need one of those relaunch books to explain why you’re getting back in the game in your country’s hour of need?

“It Takes a Spillage.”

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist "

http://article.nationalreview.com/436712/gulf-war-three/mark-steyn

I pulled the brasschektv link concerning a possible bubble under the gulf.  I had reason to believe it was overblown and speculative at this point.

That does not negate the slow response from Obama to this crisis. 

He remains holding it when it broke.

Awesome article has some really good maps, especially underwater topo of where Deepwater Horizon is located.

_________

"It's the largest environmental disaster in U.S. - and possibly world - history.

But do you know exactly where it is? Could you point to a map and show where the oil rig sank?

Do you know what the topography of the surrounding area is? Hint: If you think it's flat seafloor - as implied by BPs drawings - you'd be wrong (the spill site is actually located within a giant canyon system, rather than on flat ground).

This essay will provide some basic orientation as to ground zero for the oil spill.........."

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2010/06/visualizing-gulf-oil-spill-site.html

Wooohooo Governor Christie!!!  WTG!!!   

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"Democrats Surrender to Christie in N.J. Budget Battle

by  Mark Impomeni
Source Human Events
06/17/2010

"What looked to be an impending showdown between the Democratic-controlled New Jersey legislature and Republican Gov. Chris Christie over the state budget for fiscal 2011 may be over before it ever began. Democrats in the state assembly publicly conceded this week that Christie’s $29 billion budget would pass largely intact with Democratic support.  

The move comes on the heels of last week’s collision between Christie and State Senate President Steve Sweeney (D-Camden). Sweeney delivered two bills reinstating New Jersey’s expired “millionaire’s tax” to the governor’s office in the State House, only to see Christie veto the bills almost as quickly as he received them. Sweeney promised that the Democrats would return with a similar tax increase soon, but reports indicate that there was no stomach among Democrats either to attempt a veto override or pass another version of the tax.  

Rather than confront Christie and his veto pen again, Democrats have decided to allow the budget to go through. However, they are going to try and force Republicans to “own” the proposed cuts to programs for the elderly and the poor by insisting that those bills be initiated and sponsored by the minority. Most Democrats will then vote against the bills, supplying only the eight votes in the Assembly and four in the Senate needed for the measures to pass each house.

The chairman of the Assembly Budget Committee, Assemblyman Lou Greenwald (D), explained that the Democrats’ strategy is designed to pin responsibility on Republicans in the legislature for Christie’s proposed cuts. “The Republican Party is going to own this budget,” he said. “We will get them the necessary votes to pass it, but they will own it.”

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Paul Sarlo (D) similarly challenged Republicans to stand up for Christie’s budget. Referring to the Democrats’ claim that Christie’s reductions in state aid to municipalities and a one-year elimination of property tax rebates contained in the budget will cause property taxes to go up. “Show us some sponsors,” he said. “Show us some people willing to stand up for these tax increases.”

If Democrats are trying to put them on defensive, however, New Jersey Republicans are not taking the bait. Senate Minority Leader Tom Kean (R) told HUMAN EVENTS last week that his caucus would be glad to sponsor any bills necessary to implement Gov. Christie’s budget. “If the Democratic majority is either incapable or unwilling to sponsor the bills, we certainly will do so,” Kean said.  

Kean scoffed at Assemblyman Greenwald’s suggestion that Republicans would “own” the budget cuts, turning the charge back on the majority, and aligning his caucus squarely on the governor’s side.  

“Democrats in the Legislature have continued to practice the politics of the status quo by insisting on tax increases rather than spending reductions,” Kean said. “Democrats continue to focus on gimmicks and unsustainable one-shots (like the millionaire's tax) even as Chris Christie is focusing on real solutions for the affordability crisis facing the citizens of our state. The Democrats' record of 115 tax increases on every thing from income to sales to phones to tires to home energy over the past eight years is a clear contrast to Governor Christie's efforts thus far.”  

Christie’s budget cutting ways got an unexpected boost from the courts this week, as a New Jersey appeals panel decided that the governor acted within his authority in rescinding planned school aid in February. The court ruled that the governor’s order left school districts with options from relying on other revenue to cutting programs.

“A school district may have sufficient resources without transferring excess surplus to support its current operating budget,” the court ruled. “If not…the district may review its budget for potential efficiencies.”

New Jersey Democrats have been frustrated at nearly every turn by Christie’s forthright and frank talk about New Jersey’s budget problems. With the state facing an $11 billion shortfall in fiscal 2011 and unemployment in the state at 9.8%, traditional Democratic arguments like increasing taxes on the wealthy are not having the same impact as in prior budget battles.

Republicans have tied their fate squarely to Christie’s, who often states that he was not elected to worry about getting reelected, but to fix the problems in state government. Kean said that Senate Republicans have adopted a similar attitude. Asked if Republicans were comfortable facing the voters next year after sponsoring the necessary implementing legislation, Kean said, “I’m not worried one bit.”

Mark Impomeni is a New Jersey based freelance writer and contributing editor at RedState. He will be reporting regularly on New York/New Jersey metropolitan area politics.

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=37530

       
"Era of Obama rhetoric is over
Examiner Editorial
June 17, 2010
Source Washington Examiner
 
(PHOTO) The President made a speech regarding the Gulf oil spill from the Oval Office Tuesday — ending an era in which many people believed in his supposed rhetorical genius. (Alex Brandon/AP)  
 
"President Obama's Oval Office speech Tuesday marked the end of an era -- an era in which at least half the population believed any crisis could be defused by one man's supposed rhetorical genius and personal charisma. The derisive reception of President Obama's Tuesday night speech from the Oval Office on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill makes it clear that Obama's sweet voice no longer suffices, not even for his biggest boosters.

The thrill that Obamian rhetoric once sent up the leg of MSNBC commentator Chris Matthews is apparently gone. Obama's repeated references to Energy Secretary Steven Chu's Nobel Prize, Matthews said, now make him want to "barf." He compared Obama with former President Carter. Host Keith Olbermann, who normally wouldn't hesitate to lavish praise on Obama for coughing, was almost as blunt. "It was a great speech if you were on another planet for the last 57 days," he said. Even Howard Fineman, a font of Washington conventional wisdom and a huge fan of the president, suggested that Obama wasn't acting like a commander in chief.

All three liberal commentators agreed: The speech contained little substance and far too few specifics. Even Obama's fans are catching on to a key feature of his political success. Biographer David Mendell described it before Obama's election as his "his ingenious lack of specificity. ... While talking or writing about a deeply controversial subject, he considers all points of view before cautiously giving his own often risk-averse assessment, an opinion that often appears so universal that people of various viewpoints would consider it their own." Now that a crisis is afoot, such hedging no longer helps Obama become all things to all men. Instead, it makes him appear unprepared. He is once again the state senator who voted "present" 130 times, and who on at least one occasion was present and near the Senate chamber but absented himself from a controversial vote.

The same day Obama spoke, a new poll from the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling found that 50 percent of Louisianans think Obama's response to the spill is poorer than his predecessor's response to Hurricane Katrina. The tainted, oily tide has turned on the inexperienced man whom Americans placed in the Oval Office based on hopes and dreams and little else."

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/Era-of-Obama-rhetoric-is-over-96490264.html

-

Conspiracy theory or fact?  Published by European Union Times. VIDEO showing Kenyan birth certificate with embossed seal, also enlarged birth certificate.

You decide for yourself.

Page loads slowly.

__________

http://www.eutimes.net/2010/06/barack-h-obama-was-born-in-kenya-the-real-birth-certificate-at-last/

http://boortz.com/nealz_nuze/2010/06/fairtax-rally-this-weekend.html

June 17, 2010
"Are Liberals Breaking Up with Obama?

By Kyle-Anne Shiver
Source American Thinker

"President Obama gave his big oil-spill speech Tuesday night, and I sat rather dumbfounded just after it as MSNBC's Keith Olberman and Chris Matthews virtually trashed a guy they've tingled and swooned over since early 2008. Hearing so much reality from the formerly dazzled was quite akin, I thought, to witnessing a teenage breakup, where a girl suddenly has the epiphany and sees the character defects in Mr. Cool. Teen-romance epiphanies, where the once-infatuated person now sees clearly the cause-for-grave-concern flaws that her friends saw all along, usually occur just after some especially revealing event.

For our liberal friends, the oil spill seems to represent the impetus for epiphany.

So, are liberals breaking up with Obama?  

Now, liberals may wince mightily at having their sudden disdain for their own president compared to a teenage breakup, but it would take a rare ninny indeed not to admit that the entire Obama affair was always more fairytale -- as Bill Clinton surmised early on and was pitilessly pilloried for -- than it was based on reality.  

The fairytale aspect of liberals' affair with Obama is, I think, that they -- like the infatuated teenage girl -- saw in him only what they wanted to see. The gaping holes in Obama's résumé got short shrift, while his teleprompted eloquence had them all a-swooning. Like the teenage girl who wants to hear or see nothing amiss about her new beau, liberals turned a deaf ear and blind eye to every troublesome bit of Obama's idealistic folderol and defended his lack of executive experience on the ridiculous notion that he was above those sorts of things because he was, after all, rather like a god.     

There's a huge moral lesson in here, and I, for one, just hope that every good liberal is still open-minded enough to engage the lesson and still has enough integrity to own up to it. The purely golden moral lesson at hand has less to do with ideology than it has to do with keeping one's head about him. It has far less to do with who is president than with why he is president. If we, as a nation, are able to absorb the true lesson of Obama in time, we just might save our country for the next generation. We very well might be able to show our young people something so important that it will become next to impossible to elect another pure knave on the strength of emotional attachment and fantastical wishful thinking to the presidency.

By now, every single reasonable, sentient, in-charge-of-his-own-thoughts adult ought to know exactly where this is going.

When a republic elects an executive leader and commander in chief based on little more than an ethereal charisma, that nation gets what it deserves -- a celebrity president who takes his office about as seriously as the fawning crowds took their votes. Upon such idiotic decisions great civilizations do indeed fall.

However, all is not lost. One of the most wondrous, yet inherently sound, facets of the American form of government is that mistakes -- even of this magnitude -- last only four years. And even though the damage of Obama's incompetence has been exacerbated greatly by a lapdog congressional majority willing to sell themselves and the country out to make the president's day, the country is still redeemable. When all is said and done, the Obama presidency fades into the sunset, and another presidential election comes around, Americans once again will have the chance to take their votes seriously and elect a proven, competent executive to fill the office of the presidency.

There is the chance that Obama's election will have a spectacular silver lining for our republic.

Many candidates, mostly of the hollow political sort that Obama has proven to be, may think long and hard now before putting their names in contention. Without the requisite experience to handle huge national crises, or even the kind that occur in every city hall and governor's office in the country, legislators may see the debacle of Obama and stop themselves from making a similar mistake.  

The presidency does not lend itself to vainglorious appraisals of one's own abilities; all is laid bare when push comes inevitably to shove. In light of Obama's historic failure to steer our ship of state, there is a lesson for every single would-be candidate of the future, a chance to see Obama's ignominious defeat at the cruel hand of reality, and a clear opportunity to take the hard, long look before leaping into the fires of a presidential campaign. Men and women of sound reason who might be candidates in 2012 should heed the lesson of Obama and not assume that just because they've been elected to office, they would make a good president.

A CEO job is a CEO job is a CEO job, and if one has never had one before -- either private or public -- then one ought to approach the candidate's ring with far more apprehension and humility than did either Barack Obama or any of his swooning party backers.  

As for liberal ideologues in particular, the golden lesson of Obama ought to be that indulging in identity politics to the exclusion of demonstrated competence is a recipe for disaster at almost any level. When Chris Matthews gushed some months ago that he had "forgotten the president was black for an hour," he pretty much gave away his own penchant for identity politics. Liberal media elites, celebrities, and white guilt-ridden pols never let the public think much beyond this president's skin color for the entire campaign, when going beyond the book's cover is always -- every single time -- the duty of every voter, but most especially the duty of the fourth estate and all those who would use their positions to make endorsements.  

At the end of the day, every one of these folks who rallied the votes for Obama -- based on nothing but his skin color and teleprompted eloquence -- have done far more damage to the cause of African-American parity than if they had refused to indulge their identity politics and had looked at the candidate's bona fides with a skeptical, purely investigative eye. As Walter Williams wrote recently, due only to the liberal bent to encourage character and ability judgments based upon one's skin color, gender, or any other artificial label, future black candidates will indeed be judged -- whether rightly or wrongly -- by the incompetency of Barack Obama.

This is inherently unfair. Obama is not a flailing president because he is half-black. His skin color has nothing whatsoever to do with his failure to lead coherently and competently. It has to do with him as an individual. Obama's failure is the result of biting off a bigger job than he was ready to chew. What is happening to Obama is precisely what would happen to anyone in so far over his head in any job. It's no more a black thing than it is a white thing; it's no more a man thing that it is a woman thing. It's an individual thing.

President Obama still has a couple of years to go in his term. Liberals may not be breaking up with him yet. They may require more epiphanies still. But once the spell cast by identity and charisma begins to fade, it's a sure bet that the gut-wrenching, self-examining morning after is well on its way.

And in that, I think I see hope for America's restoration.

It won't be easy or fast, but at least it seems possible now that liberals are showing that they might be willing to go all the way and break up with Mr. Cool."

Kyle-Anne Shiver is a frequent contributor to American Thinker.
 
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/06/are_liberals_breaking_up_with.html

June 16, 2010 Posted by John at 2:37 PM

"Who is the most inspiring conservative leader in America today? Happily, there are a number of pretty good answers to that question. But I'm not sure anyone tops New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. Here he is again, speaking at a town hall meeting in Perth Amboy yesterday:

UPDATE: So, how is Christie doing with New Jersey voters? Pretty well. Scott Rasmussen finds his approval/disapproval ratio at 51/45. Considering how deeply entrenched the Democratic Party/teachers' union/organized crime complex has been in New Jersey, those are hopeful numbers."

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/06/026541.php

Read about this... video came in email.  Conspiracy theory or fact??  Not a clue but the question won't go away. 

You decide.
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"The former Honolulu elections clerk who maintains President Obama was not born in Hawaii and has no birth certificate from any hospital in the Aloha State is promoting a simple way to resolve the uproar over eligibility, at least for the future.

Tim Adams, 45, senior elections clerk for the city and county of Honolulu in the 2008 campaign, says all candidates for all offices should be required to prove their identity and eligibility before they can even run.

"The easiest way would be to pass legislation saying everyone has to verify their identity when they're running for office," Adams told WND in an exclusive interview last week. "I do think requiring everyone to certify their identity would probably solve the entire controversy."

Adams stresses the requirement should be for all political contests, from the presidency down to local races, to make sure officeholder-wannabes are who they say they are, and live in the proper district, for instance.

Regarding Obama's case specifically, he said, "I'd like to see it resolved finally."

"It's quite strange because when the next cycle comes, will they require that he show the birth certificate, or will he not get on the ballot in those states?" he wondered.

Adams, a Hillary Clinton supporter who now teaches English at Western Kentucky University while he works on his master's degree, burst onto the scene last week in a WND story in which he asserted that Obama was definitely not born in Hawaii as the White House claims and that a long-form, hospital-generated birth certificate for Obama does not even exist there.

"There is no birth certificate," he said. "It's like an open secret. There isn't one. Everyone in the government there knows this."

"I had direct access to the Social Security database, the national crime computer, state driver's license information, international passport information, basically just about anything you can imagine to get someone's identity," Adams explained. "I could look up what bank your home mortgage was in. I was informed by my boss that we did not have a birth record [for Obama]."

He stressed, "In my professional opinion, [Obama] definitely was not born in Hawaii. I can say without a shadow of a doubt that he was not born in Hawaii because there is no legal record of him being born there. If someone called and asked about it, I could not tell them that person was born in the state."

At the request of his university, Adams is now declining any further comment on the matter.

WND confirmed with Hawaiian officials that Adams was indeed working in their election offices during the last presidential election.

"His title was senior elections clerk in 2008," said Glen Takahashi, elections administrator for the city and county of Honolulu.

Adams oversaw a group of 50 to 60 employees and was responsible for verifying the identity of voters, especially absentee voters."

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=165633

Posted by Karl Denninger in Oil The World at 18:18

SourceThe Market Ticker

"Ehhhh... BP A Zero?

"Probably not, but that's not the problem.

Let's run the numbers.  The Government just said that the amount beingejected from the well is somewhere between 35,000 and 60,000 bbls per day.

Now let's look at the numbers, and analyze this strictly on that basis.

The minimum fine is $1,000/bbl spilled.  But if negligence can be shown,the fine can be as high as $4,300/bbl. 

This is strictly for the fine for spilling the oil,and excludes other considerations (damages, cleanup costs, potential criminalliability and of course whatever civil liability juries come at them with forall sorts of litigation.)

At $4,300/bbl we're looking at a fine of $150 - $258 million per day, andafter today's hearings it is probably reasonable to assume that BP will gettagged for "negligence" (at best.)

We're 50-some days into this; that works out to somewhere between $7.5 and$13 billion in fines alone thus far.  If we presumethey can shut the well down in the middle of August, we're looking at another 50days (roughly) before that happens, leaving the totalfines in the neighborhood of $15-25 billion.

The company, like most multi-nationals, is partitioned.  That is, BP is aconglomerate with legal and financial firewalls (physical ones) betweensubsidiaries. 

The total value of their US-based assets is estimated somewhere around $90billion.  On a 12-month trailing basis they have produced $265 billion inrevenue with an EBIDTA of $38.8 billion and a net income attributed to commonshares of $20 billion - globally. 

Taken that way, and expecting complex litigation around any fine and otherlitigation, the payout time would be expressed in years, not months.  As suchat first blush the fines and other exposure doesn'tlook like it will be enough - even under an adverse scenario - to zero thecompany.

BUT - will BP let things go that far and contaminatetheir global earnings with this claim? 

More to the point, why should they?

Leave the morals/ethics out of this - this is, and will remain, a businessdecision. 

Were I sitting in the White House contemplating my speech this evening Iwouldn't be so <snip>sure that I can bludgeon the company into submission.

There is real danger here for the Obama administration.  If it appears thatthe fines and litigation losses will come within reasonable reach of their USassets they may well be better off to draw down the curtain and place the USsubsidiary into Chapter 11 - then let the creditors - including litigants -fight it out for the scraps in a restructuring.  They come out with a good partof the liability (perhaps all or most of the fines!) discharged, and voila!

Want to bet they aren't thinking about it? 

Oh yes they are.  They've hired Goldman and Blackrock, and I don't care whatthey claim - you don't go hiring folks like that for a cakewalk.  They've donethis analysis too and they're well-aware of the option - one that there isabsolutely nothing that the Obama Administration cando to prevent.

Congress and President Obama have a political Kobyashi Maru here. 

MMS is 100% responsible for approvingthe well casing changes made on the rig - changes that, were they notapproved, would have likely prevented the blowout in the first place.

But MMS is the Obama Administration and thosechanges were approved just days before the blast.  And while BP selected thedesign and implementation they used, they didn't do it in a vacuum - they did sowith the full permission of the government's so-called "regulators."

Oops.

President Obama doesn't want to discuss this, of course.  Did you notice thelack of an MMS representative at the hearings today?  Guess why?  Yep.  Startasking about those permits and the rubber stamp at the MMS office, and you'regoing to get a lot of stuttering in response.

BP's chief executive said in the hearing today that he has no intention ofestablishing an escrow account, and frankly, I don't blame him.  I also wouldn'tlet a third party adjudicate claims - other than a court, should someone want tosue.  That's how it works in this country; being brow-beaten byCongress and Obama sounds good, and I believe BP is culpable for and will beforced to pay huge damage claims and fines - but nonetheless theyare entitled to due process of law, as is everyone.

I wouldn't touch this stock - except as a daytrade orhighly speculative play.  With a dividend yield today ofclose to 10% and with all the litigation and fine risk there is certainly apossibility of a dividend cut - or elimination - in the future.   With about 40%of its assets in the United States, the firm would be severely-damaged if it cutloose the US subsidiary and walked off.

But calls for debarment of the firm from leases it holds simply expropriatethe assets that the US wants BP to use to pay these claims.  The higher the riskof that outcome, the more intriguing erecting the middle finger in the directionof President Obama becomes.  And with the firm's stock trading with a current10% dividend, shedding 40% of the assets and literally walking off on theliabilities as those assets dwindle in value starts looking better andbetter.

Careful Barack. 

You may get what you ask for, but it may not be what you actuallywant."

http://market-ticker.org/archives/2409-Ehhhh...-BP-A-Zero.html

Found these videos on another site.  Conspiracy theory connecting dots .... or facts?  Or maybe a few facts knit together by conspiracy theories?

You decide.

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Friend sent this in email. 

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Toyota Dealership

I have been driving nothing but Toyota trucks since 1980.  I currently drive a 1995 Tacoma.  It only has 250,000 miles.  Had it tuned up and the drive shafts reworked last week for about $1200.  Will probably be good for another 100k but my wife has been after me to get a new truck.
 
I stopped by the Toyota Dealership yesterday for a look at the new Tacoma. Just for fun, I took it out for a test drive. I wanted to sense that new "feel" before they become extinct.

The salesman (wearing an Obama "change" lapel pin) sat in the passenger seat describing the truck and all its "wonderful" options.
 
The seats were of particular interest. He explained that the seats directed warm air to your butt in the winter and directed cool air to your butt in the summer heat.
 
Feeling like messing with his mind, I mentioned that this must be a Republican truck. Looking a bit angry, he asked why I thought it was a Republican truck.
 
I explained that if it were a Democrat truck, the seats would blow smoke up your @$$ year-round.
 
I had to walk back to the dealership; darn guy had no sense of humor.