konane's Blog

October 07, 2009

"The Obama Justice Department’s Secret Blogging Team… Is it Illegal?

Warner Todd Huston | 8:35 am Obama’s

Source Right Wing News 

"Attorney General, Eric Holder, has apparently hired a cadre of left-wing, Democrat campaign bloggers to troll through the Internet looking for news stories and blog posts that denigrate the Obama agenda. After such websites are found it is the job of these secret lefty bloggers to leave comments that come to the support of Obamaism in the comments sections. It seems that Eric Holder has created his own little propaganda unit in a valiant effort to become the Bloggi Riefenstahl of the Obama era.

As reported at The Muffled Oar, a blog that first broke the story of Holder’s secretive blogging unit — dubbed the “Blog Squad” by blogger Isaac Muzzey — Holder has housed this unit in the Office of Public Affairs at the Department of Justice. It also appears that former John Edwards staffer Tracy Russo is part of this special unit.

A site called whorunsgov.com reported back in May that DOJ hired Russo to do “media outreach for the whole department.” It is, according to whorunsgov.com, the first time such an effort has been made at DOJ.

Of Russo’s duties, The Muffled Oar says:

Not only is the Department of Justice Blog Squad going to reach out to nontraditional media like TPM Muckraker or the Muffled Oar, but they are also tasked with fostering anonymous comments at conservative leaning blogs such as the Free Republic. They are also tasked with fostering anonymous comments, or comments under pseudonyms, at newspaper websites with stories critical of the Department of Justice, Holder and President Obama.

If indeed this is what DOJ media outreach does it would most certainly qualify as “astroturfing.” Astroturfing is the action of using fake commenters and multiple screen names on all sorts of sites to push a similar opinion to create the appearance of a grass roots movement and make it seem as if there are all sorts of individuals naturally supporting a product or political movement.

It most certainly is a creepy, propagandistic sort of effort that Holder’s office is involved in and it is one that certainly seems an immoral one. After all, it most certainly is lying to the public if there are a handful of DOJ employees casting about on hundreds of different websites pretending that they are just your average citizen coming to the support of the Obama administration. But is it illegal? Hans von Spakovsky of National Review’s the corner blog certainly thinks so.

I doubt that the Office of Public Affairs (OPA) has received an ethics opinion from Justice’s Professional Responsibility Advisory Office (PRAO) saying that it is acceptable for OPA employees to be harassing critics of the department through postings that deliberately hide their DOJ affiliation (a practice that is not very “open” or “transparent”). DOJ lawyers also ought to be aware of ABA Model Rule of Professional Conduct 8.4, which states that it is professional misconduct for a lawyer to engage in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation. If the report in The Muffled Oar is correct, tax dollars are being used directly for such dishonest, deceitful behavior.

I must say, it’s hard to disagree with von Spakovsky (if that’s his real name! — a little joke there).

Mr. von Spakovsky also makes a perfectly pertinent point to wrap up his blog post on this matter. He wonders if the Obama administration will ever learn the difference between political campaign and the “entirely different responsibility it now has to enforce this nation’s laws in an objective, nonpartisan, nonpolitical manner”?

I think that the question is a good one. After all, after nearly a year in office, we have yet to see the end Obama’s constant blaming of Bush for every little problem he runs up against not to mention the constant campaign speeches and appearances on TV at every hour, day and night. One gets the uneasy feeling that President Barack Obama has yet to put in an actual day’s work as he constantly campaigns for office instead."

(Image credit: Associated Press/Lefteris Pitarakis – April 27, 2009)"

http://rightwingnews.com/2009/10/the-obama-justice-departments-secret-blogging-team-is-it-illegal/

Plant trees which give off oxygen as a by-product of their growth aside from being aesthetically pleasing.  Then by the time the cycle changes back to global warming there will be more shade, preventing heat from absorbing into the surface.

Wonder how global warming scientists would do on "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader"?

_________

"What happened to global warming?

By Paul Hudson
Climate correspondent, BBC News

"This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that factthat the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in1998.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbondioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, hascontinued to rise.

So what on Earth is going on?

Climate change sceptics, who passionately and consistently argue thatman's influence on our climate is overstated, say they saw it coming.

They argue that there are natural cycles, over which wehave no control, that dictate how warm the planet is. But what is theevidence for this?

During the last few decades of the 20th Century, our planet did warm quickly.

Sceptics argue that the warming we observed was down to the energy fromthe Sun increasing. After all 98% of the Earth's warmth comes from theSun.

But research conducted two years ago, and published by the Royal Society, seemed to rule out solar influences.

The scientists' main approach was simple: to look at solar output andcosmic ray intensity over the last 30-40 years, and compare thosetrends with the graph for global average surface temperature.

And the results were clear. "Warming in the last 20 to40 years can't have been caused by solar activity," said Dr PiersForster from Leeds University, a leading contributor to this year'sIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

But one solar scientist Piers Corbyn fromWeatheraction, a company specialising in long range weatherforecasting, disagrees.

He claims that solar charged particles impact us farmore than is currently accepted, so much so he says that they arealmost entirely responsible for what happens to global temperatures.

He is so excited by what he has discovered that heplans to tell the international scientific community at a conference inLondon at the end of the month.

If proved correct, this could revolutionise the whole subject.

Ocean cycles

What is really interesting at the moment is what is happening to our oceans. They are the Earth's great heat stores.

“ In the last few years [the Pacific Ocean] has been losing its warmth and has recently started to cool down ”

According to research conducted by Professor Don Easterbrook fromWestern Washington University last November, the oceans and globaltemperatures are correlated.

The oceans, he says, have a cycle in which they warmand cool cyclically. The most important one is the Pacific decadaloscillation (PDO).

For much of the 1980s and 1990s, it was in a positivecycle, that means warmer than average. And observations have revealedthat global temperatures were warm too.

But in the last few years it has been losing its warmth and has recently started to cool down.

These cycles in the past have lasted for nearly 30 years.

So could global temperatures follow? The global cooling from 1945 to1977 coincided with one of these cold Pacific cycles.

Professor Easterbrook says: "The PDO cool mode hasreplaced the warm mode in the Pacific Ocean, virtually assuring us ofabout 30 years of global cooling."

So what does it all mean? Climate change sceptics argue that this is evidence that they have been right all along.

They say there are so many other natural causes for warming andcooling, that even if man is warming the planet, it is a small partcompared with nature.

But those scientists who are equally passionate aboutman's influence on global warming argue that their science is solid.

The UK Met Office's Hadley Centre, responsible forfuture climate predictions, says it incorporates solar variation andocean cycles into its climate models, and that they are nothing new.

In fact, the centre says they are just two of the wholehost of known factors that influence global temperatures - all of whichare accounted for by its models.

In addition, say Met Office scientists, temperatureshave never increased in a straight line, and there will always beperiods of slower warming, or even temporary cooling.

What is crucial, they say, is the long-term trend inglobal temperatures. And that, according to the Met office data, isclearly up.

To confuse the issue even further, last month MojibLatif, a member of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)says that we may indeed be in a period of cooling worldwidetemperatures that could last another 10-20 years.

Professor Latif is based at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences atKiel University in Germany and is one of the world's top climatemodellers.

But he makes it clear that he has not become a sceptic;he believes that this cooling will be temporary, before theoverwhelming force of man-made global warming reasserts itself.

So what can we expect in the next few years?

Both sides have very different forecasts. The Met Office says that warming is set to resume quickly and strongly.

It predicts that from 2010 to 2015 at least half the years will be hotter than the current hottest year on record (1998).

Sceptics disagree. They insist it is unlikely that temperatures willreach the dizzy heights of 1998 until 2030 at the earliest. It ispossible, they say, that because of ocean and solar cycles a period ofglobal cooling is more likely.

One thing is for sure. It seems the debate about whatis causing global warming is far from over. Indeed some would say it ishotting up."

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/8299079.stm

Published: 2009/10/09 15:22:46 GMT

© BBC MMIX

"The Nobel Peace Prize Is Over

Weston KosovaSource The Gaggle blog.newsweek.com 

"Posted By: Victor Erimita (October 10, 2009 at 2:37 PM)

Should the Nobel Prize in medicine be awarded to someone who hopes and aspires to create a cure for cancer? Should the physics prize be awarded to someone who makes soaring speeches about proving the Unified Field Theory?

And, Tomcat, the reason some of us might have a problem with just any American getting the prize is that the last three who got it, got it precisely for their anti-American rhetoric. In the view of Euro elites, America is the cause of most of the world's problems. We are to be diminished, weakened, humbled and vilified. Any prominent figure who will do that in a popular way is eligible for the prize. Obama qualifies, because he has "changed the tone" of American foreign policy, which means he apologizes endlessly for our national iniquity, ignores or praises tyrants from Iran to Saudi Arabia, from "Palestine," to Venezuela, Cuba and Honduras, while disrespecting our allies and joining the international chorus of condemnation for that other cause of all the world's problems, Israel. This is music to the ears of the luminaries of the Nobel committee. Yo see, Tom ,many of us lesser-enlightened Americans still feel we have done far more good than harm in the world, and that the self-styled voices of enlightenment in Europe and the American Left ignore, appease and praise the most vicious tyrants in the world so long as they mouth leftist slogans and and say hostile things to the hated U.S. Obama was awarded for that, which we think merely feeds the destructive narrative. But of course, those of us who have a different opinion than you are not worthy to speak, are we? Diversity of opinion is not a diversity you honor."

http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/thegaggle/archive/2009/10/09/the-nobel-peace-prize-is-over.aspx

HR1207 - Audit The Fed - The Hearing  Karl Denninger

Just in time for lunch .......

These guys are always good for relevant commentary.  From Powerlineblog.com.

_____________

October 9, 2009 Posted by Scott at 6:48 AM

"President Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize after only nine months on the job. It seems a tad premature, but is undoubtedly a token of the committee's high expectations for what is to come. Obama's five disciples on the prize committee are helping to spread the word that he has come to bring peace, not a sword. His recognition comes for giving the world "hope for a better future" and striving for nuclear disarmament. Ah, but of course!

Congratulations are in order. The prize will provide a fitting occasion for another trip to Europe, and another speech! In truth, however, the Nobel Peace Prize has gone haywire on numerous occasions over many years. Although it has honored some worthy recipients, it has also become a megaphone amplifying the voice of tyrants, rogues and reprobates. Consider, in any event, a few recipients of years past.

2007
AL GORE The award to Al Gore and the IPCC "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change" fits in with a subset of cosmopolitan frauds, fakers, murderers, thieves, and no-accounts going back about twenty years.

2005
MOHAMED ELBARADEI (joint winner). He's done such a nice job with Iran.

2004
WANGARI MAATHAI The Kenyan ecologist peacefully teaches that the AIDS virus is a biological agent deliberately created by the Man.

2002
JIMMY CARTER JR., former President of the United States of America. A true cosmopolitan, he has undermined the foreign policy of his own country and vouched for the bona fides of tyrants and murderers all over the world. Commenting on the award, Nobel Committee Chairman Gunnar Berge emphasized that the award was meant as a denunciation of American policy toward Iraq. "It should be interpreted as a criticism of the line that the [Bush] administration has taken," Berge said. "It's a kick in the leg to all that follow the same line as the United States."

2001
UNITED NATIONS, New York, NY, USA.
KOFI ANNAN, United Nations Secretary General. Among other things, they respectively served as the vehicle for, and presided over, one of the biggest scams in history.

1994
YASSER ARAFAT (joint winner), Chairman of the Executive Committee of the PLO, President of the Palestinian National Authority. He was a cold-blooded murderer both before and after receiving the award.

1992
RIGOBERTA MENCHU TUM, Guatemala. She is the notorious Guatemalan faker and author, sort of, of I, Rigoberta Menchu. Like President Obama, she is a memoirist of distinction.

1988
THE UNITED NATIONS PEACE-KEEPING FORCES New York, NY, U.S.A. Notwithstanding rapes and sex abuse committed by the team in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea and the Congo, still doing fine work all over the world.

1976
BETTY WILLIAMS, United Kingdom, founder of the Northern Ireland Peace Movement (later renamed Community of Peace People), who in later years repeatedly called for the assassination of President George Bush. How peaceful can you get?

1973
LE DUC THO (with Henry Kissinger) for the 1973 peace with honor bequeathed to the fortunate people of Vietnam.

A few years back Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby commented on the Nobel Peace Prize: that "the Norwegian committee entrusted with awarding the peace prize comprises politicians, not scholars. Like politicians everywhere, the peace prize committee tends to be more interested in what the headlines will say today than in what historians will believe 20 -- or 100 -- years from now. And unlike their Swedish counterparts, the Norwegians often intend their choice to have a political impact." That certainly explains this year's award, but one further point remains. Our occasional contributor Bill Katz observed:

[T]o fully appreciate the farcical nature of the peace prize, you need only go back to the painful years before World War II:

In 1931 the prize was shared by Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University, whose later enthusiasm for keeping good relations with Nazi universities has been a source of embarrassment to Columbia.

In 1933, 1934 and 1936, the peace prize went to executives of the League of Nations, already a colossal failure.

From 1939 through 1943 there was no peace prize. You know, World War II was such an inconvenience, and Oslo, where the peace prize is given, was under occupation. Ah, the success of those past prize winners!

Is it wrong to fear that the Columbia connection -- from Nicholas Murray Butler to Barack Obama -- may be the most relevant of the lot?

PAUL adds: There must be some sort of run-up to winning this award -- e.g. analysis, nominations, more analysis. When did the process that led to Obama getting this award begin and what was his record at that point? Surely, if there was any record at all, it was even more meagre than it is now.

The fix must have been in, sort of like TV wrestling.

UPDATE: I'm told that the cut-off date for nominations was only ten days after President Obama was inaugurated."

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2009/10/024667.php

(continued reading below videos)


http://market-ticker.org/archives/1500-Bernanke-Gives-Finger-To-The-Law-Again.html

.......Norwegian Nobel committee as a way of expressing European gratitude for an end to the Bush Administration .......

Obama administration .... same song second verse on steroids strapped to a retro rocket .... except GW didn't view US with utter contempt as Obama clearly does.

____________

From Times Online
October 9, 2009
"Comment: absurd decision on Obama makes a mockery of the Nobel peace prize

"The award of this year’s Nobel peace prize to President Obama will be met with widespread incredulity, consternation in many capitals and probably deep embarrassment by the President himself.

Rarely has an award had such an obvious political and partisan intent. It was clearly seen by the Norwegian Nobel committee as a way of expressing European gratitude for an end to the Bush Administration, approval for the election of America’s first black president and hope that Washington will honour its promise to re-engage with the world.

Instead, the prize risks looking preposterous in its claims, patronising in its intentions and demeaning in its attempt to build up a man who has barely begun his period in office, let alone achieved any tangible outcome for peace.

The pretext for the prize was Mr Obama’s decision to “strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples”. Many people will point out that, while the President has indeed promised to “reset” relations with Russia and offer a fresh start to relations with the Muslim world, there is little so far to show for his fine words.
Times Archive, 1973: Worldwide criticism of Nobel peace awards

The choice of Dr Henry Kissinger and Mr Le Duc Tho as joint winners of the Nobel peace prize continued to provoke criticism today

East-West relations are little better than they were six months ago, and any change is probably due largely to the global economic downturn; and America’s vaunted determination to re-engage with the Muslim world has failed to make any concrete progress towards ending the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

There is a further irony in offering a peace prize to a president whose principal preoccupation at the moment is when and how to expand the war in Afghanistan.

The spectacle of Mr Obama mounting the podium in Oslo to accept a prize that once went to Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi and Mother Theresa would be all the more absurd if it follows a White House decision to send up to 40,000 more US troops to Afghanistan. However just such a war may be deemed in Western eyes, Muslims would not be the only group to complain that peace is hardly compatible with an escalation in hostilities.

The Nobel committee has made controversial awards before. Some have appeared to reward hope rather than achievement: the 1976 prize for the two peace campaigners in Northern Ireland, Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan, was clearly intended to send a signal to the two battling communities in Ulster. But the political influence of the two winners turned out, sadly, to be negligible.

In the Middle East, the award to Menachem Begin of Israel and Anwar Sadat of Egypt in 1978 also looks, in retrospect, as naive as the later award to Yassir Arafat, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin — although it could be argued that both the Camp David and Oslo accords, while not bringing peace, were at least attempts to break the deadlock.

Mr Obama’s prize is more likely, however, to be compared with the most contentious prize of all: the 1973 prize to Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho for their negotiations to end the Vietnam war. Dr Kissinger was branded a warmonger for his support for the bombing campaign in Cambodia; and the Vietnamese negotiator was subsequently seen as a liar whose government never intended to honour a peace deal but was waiting for the moment to attack South Vietnam.

Mr Obama becomes the third sitting US President to receive the prize. The committee said today that he had “captured the world’s attention”. It is certainly true that his energy and aspirations have dazzled many of his supporters. Sadly, it seems they have so bedazzled the Norwegians that they can no longer separate hopes from achievement. The achievements of all previous winners have been diminished."

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6867711.ece

Furthering globalist agenda at the speed of light, that's all. 

For American citizens, the fastest failed president in US history.

___________

"Analysis: He won, but for what?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091009/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_obama_nobel_analysis_1

Top link is interactive site, bottom is story link.

___________

http://www.h1n1responsecenter.com

http://www.wsbtv.com/h1n1/21225695/detail.html

"What the Doctors Think

By Larry Kudlow  17 Sep 2009

"Will Americans soon be too sick to work, produce, invest, and generate new prosperity? That's one conclusion you can draw from a new series by Investor's Business Daily, which reveals that doctors are overwhelmingly opposed to a government takeover of health care (including the Baucus plan). Just as important, IBD reports that any government-based health-care overhaul will exacerbate the growing shortage of doctors in this country.

IBD/TIPP found that 71 percent of physicians believe that government cannot cover 47 million more people without significant rationing of health care. And nearly half of the doctors polled say they would retire early if Congress passes the proposed overhaul.

IBD/TIPP surveyed nearly 1,400 physicians for its series. In written responses, doctors have pointed to lower pay, increased government mandates, and less freedom to practice as reasons for the physician shortage. In particular, Medicare and Medicaid, which essentially are running half of our health-care system, continue to pay below-market reimbursement rates that are putting doctors out of business.

Primary-care physicians are the worst off. The American Academy of Family physicians reports that primary-care doctors need a 30 percent pay raise in order to survive. They're not going to get it under Obamacare, or Obamacare Lite. In fact, physician payments will move lower should any of the various House and Senate plans pass.

The Massachusetts Medical Society, operating in a state that has implemented a Washington-like universal-overage plan, reports that primary-care doctors are in short supply for a fourth straight year, that the percentage of primary-care practices closed to new patients is the highest ever recorded, and that seven of 18 specialties — dermatology, neurology, urology, vascular surgery, and obstetrics-gynecology, in addition to family and internal medicine — are all in short supply.

On top of all that, enrollment in medical schools is already declining. By some estimates, the nation will have 159,000 fewer doctors than it needs by 2025.

So what exactly are we supposed to do about this doctor shortage? The easy answer is to create incentives for new doctors. And for that matter nurses. And for that matter hospital space. We should expand and grow the entire free-market health-care system, which up until recently was America's greatest growth industry.

But these government plans will do just the opposite. They will shrink private care and private insurance. They will reduce jobs. And they may well undermine American health and wellness.

Everyone should read the IBD series and consider the health-care debate from the standpoint of the doctors. That's something that hasn't been done yet. But it's darn important."

http://tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=091709A

From SteveQuayle.com Q news Photo of the Day .... too good to pass up posting.

_______

"are you ready to fight?