Friday Afternoon Roundup - The Rise of the Oceans Began to Slow

"This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal," the Chosen Zero said in his speech of speeches.

Now as we prepare for Hurricane Irene (known to Congresswoman Shirley Jackson Lee as Hurricane Waneesha) the oceans proved to be as immune to Obama's reality distortion field as the economy. Maybe it was us. If only we had believed in him, then like Tinkerbell, the magic of the Zero would have transformed the planet. But we lost faith in him, and once the rose colored glasses came off, there were mountains of unemployment. And even earthquakes in Washington D.C.

Who's to blame? Global warming, duh.

"Hurricane another sign of global warming's impact‎," says the New Jersey Star-Ledger, which scrambled out ahead of the evacuation to outsource its headline writing to Al Gore's ghostwriter.

"Bill McKibben: Global warming to blame for Hurricane Irene". Who's Bill McKibben? Glad you asked. He's the author of "Eaarth" ( yes it's spelled that way, that's the environmentally correct way to spell it) also he's running a a global-warming awareness campaign that is planning a Global Work Party on climate change for 10-10-10.

Should you trust the credentials of a man who can't even spell "Earth" to tell us that hurricanes come from too many people using old fashioned lightbulbs? Well he is wearing a ski jacket in warm weather while leaning casually on a fencepost and smiling awkwardly at the camera. I find that very convincing.

It's not clear if he has an actual degree in anything related to environmental science, but he is a fellow at the Post-Carbon Institute, which is certain to alienate the inhabitants of the new all-carbon planet that has just been discovered by actual scientists.

Last week a NASA report warned that a failure to crack down on carbon might alienate the aliens, (who of course are bound to be militant environmentalists), but perhaps by embracing carbon, we might actually find things in common with them. Like our mutual hatred of ski jacket wearing carbon hating busybodies.

Bryan Walsh at Time dampens McKibben's enthusiasm a little, while of course paying home to the Flying Climate Change Monster whom we must all worship by buying carbon credits and shopping at Whole Foods.




EVERYBODY NEEDS A FRIEND

Everybody needs a friend, that's what Mr. Rogers said, or maybe it was Colonel Gaddafi, but it's true. Especially terrorists, they really need their friends. And the American Friends Service Committee are the faithful friends of the terrorists.

When the former officers of the Holy Land Foundation who had served as Hamas’ fundraising arm went before the US Court of Appeals– there weren’t many organizations willing to file an Amicus brief. But the American Friends Service Committee​ was first among them.

The American Friends Service Committee had good reason to be worried. It had worked with Life for Relief and Development, an Islamic charity also accused of being a Hamas front. Its concern over the criminal prosecution of charities that passed money along to terrorists was even more pressing because it has a substantial presence in Hamas-run Gaza.

But the AFSC are Quakers, non-violent pacifists, right? Not so much.

By the 1970′s, the American Friends Service Committee had legitimized terrorism and discarded the veneer of non-violence. In a pamphlet titled, “Non-Violence: Not First For Export”,  leading AFSC figure, James E. Bristol wrote, “before we deplore terrorism, it is essential for us to recognize whose ‘terrorism’ came first.”

Read the whole thin in my article, With Friends Like These, Who Needs Enemies

Friendship in the Muslim world is a passing thing too. One day they're selling you cut rate souvenirs and threatening to marry your sister, and the next day they're cutting your throat and marrying your sister. But at least the Arab Spring is making the Middle East a better place. Really? Not so much.

Last year, Israel had three stable borders and one unstable border. Now that the Arab Spring has turned into Terror Summer, those numbers have flipped around. Israel’s border with Egypt has become as troubled as the Lebanese border. And the Syrian border is following close behind.

Such is the passing nature of friendship. But Obama did succeed in finally passing Carter.

The Camp David Accords were one of the few good things that Carter ever did.  And in a dubious achievement, Obama has managed to bring down the only good thing that the worst administration until his had done.

That's quite a legacy. "Worse Than Carter." See the whole piece on Egypt and Israel in my Front Page article, Arab Spring for Dummies





HOW ABOUT A LITTLE INFLATION

Forget the crazy Inlataphobes. They're as nuts as those guys worried about Muslim terrorism. And overreach of executive powers.

It's time to welcome in inflation, also Muslims and hurricanes. And possible cholera. But definitely inflation.

The Fed has room to use additional asset purchases to stimulate the economy and create moderate inflation to aid indebted consumers, as Chairman Ben S. Bernanke signals he’s ready to spurn “inflation-obsessed fanatics,

Those fanatics always obsessed with the return of the Carter Administration. Don't they know that inflation isn't a problem. It's just a really fun way to drive up food prices. And wipe out the middle class.

Policy makers seeking to rescue the U.S. economy are wrong to worry about the threat of inflation and should heed Warren Buffett’s call for higher taxes on the wealthy, according to Don Brownstein, manager of last year’s top-performing hedge fund.

Some Federal Reserve members and lawmakers, acting the part of “modern day ‘Know-Nothings,’” have been “raving about imaginary uncontrolled inflation and wringing their hands over government deficits,”

I'm sure Don in no way stands to profit from inflation. Just like he didn't profit from the subprime meltdown. But as it turns out Don did. Just as Warren Buffett just made a killing on Bank of America with a sweet little sweetheart deal.

For starters, Buffett's investment company, Berkshire Hathaway Inc.    , will collect $300 million annually for letting BofA, Washington state's largest bank by market share, hold its money. Where else do you get that kind of return these days? And it's a pretty safe investment; only at risk if BofA goes belly-up.

When BofA is ready to exit Buffett's equity stake, it'll have to buy the shares back at a 6 percent premium, meaning Buffett gets his $5 billion back, plus $300 million. That's on top of the dividends he received in the meantime.

He would rake in a total of $1.2 billion in dividends and premium payments, a 24 percent return. Then there are the warrants. BofA's two-year high share price was $19.48 in April 2010. If the shares were to reach that point again, Buffett could exercise his warrants, then sell the shares at a profit of $8.7 billion.

And where's all that profit coming from? Well... the American people.

“This is the taxpayer giving Warren Buffett a great return,” said Amar Bhide, a professor of international business at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. “He knows that Bank of America is too big to fail. If it is too big to fail, then why not?”

Bank of America is in business because of a massive bailout, and it is guaranteed by the government. Which makes this Buffett's no risk looting bit of crony capitalism.

 Now, observation No. 2. BofA continues to say it didn't need the capital. So why do the deal? Credibility.

And if you believe that, I've got some real estate overlooking the river to sell you. It's got a lot of ropes and things attached to it, and people drive cars over it between Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Anyone who seriously thinks Buffett's tax tirade and the B of A deal are randomly timed is rather optimistic about human nature. And about the kind of crony capitalism practiced routinely among dedicated socialists.

I wrote about this back in the day, Wednesday,

"New York Times columnists may kvell over Warren Buffett's eagerness to be taxed at a higher rate, but most people suspect that it isn't saintliness at work, but personal economic interest. The same interest that led Buffett, Bill Gates and other top billionaires to support Obama. There is nothing strange about the phenomenon of anti-capitalist capitalists. Capitalism is one way to make money. Socialism is another. The modern monopoly is as likely to rest on government regulation as on the naked marketplace. And the modern trust operates out of the White House and Capitol Hill."

And Small Dead Animals calls it the New Fealty. This isn't new. These fights were happening when Hamilton and Jefferson were glaring at each over over the bargaining table. But they've gotten way bigger since. And the loot has gotten so much sweeter.

The investment had many drawing comparisons to September 2008, when Buffett invested $5 billion in Goldman Sachs during the height of the financial crisis and secured a lucrative deal for his company. That was right before the government passed a bailout package known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program, rescuing a range of financial firms and confirming the wisdom of Buffett’s bet.

The old oracles were someone whispering through a tube into a statue. The Oracle of Omaha, well let's just say he's as oracular as Soros and the rest of the gang.

Forget Wall Street, they're just the middle men for a gang of vampires who make Dracula look like a stockboy. And they're robbing America blind and strongly backing a system that will turn America into a penny stock that they can pick up at fire sale prices.

Let's flash back to Warren Buffett's tender love note to the Obama admin in 2010, in the pages of the New York Times.

DEAR Uncle Sam,

My mother told me to send thank-you notes promptly. I’ve been remiss...

Many of our largest industrial companies, dependent on commercial paper financing that had disappeared, were weeks away from exhausting their cash resources. Indeed, all of corporate America’s dominoes were lined up, ready to topple at lightning speed. My own company, Berkshire Hathaway, might have been the last to fall, but that distinction provided little solace...

I don’t know precisely how you orchestrated these. But I did have a pretty good seat as events unfolded, and I would like to commend a few of your troops. In the darkest of days, Ben Bernanke, Hank Paulson, Tim Geithner and Sheila Bair grasped the gravity of the situation and acted with courage and dispatch...

Your grateful nephew,

Warren


Warren E. Buffett is the chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, a diversified holding company.

If we ever intend to save this country, we might start doing something about all those 'Nephews' who loot by night and then call for higher taxes by day-- while laughing all the way to the Bank of America.

Ah finally the other company that was a beneficiary of Buffett's largess...

Shortly after the Goldman deal, Berkshire also invested $3 billion in General Electric Co. in exchange for preferred stock and warrants.

The CEO of GE just happens to be our good friend, Jeffrey Immelt, also chairperson of Obama's Chairperson of the Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.. and GE is now moving its X-Ray business to China.

Times like these, I have to wonder whether we really are any better than Putin's Russia. Federal law enforcement doesn't shoot critics and then call it a suicide-- but especially in Obama's term, we don't have a government, we have a self-righteous greed machine that steals everything it can, and then lectures us on our obligations.





 LOWEST OF THE LOW


How do you get any lower than that? Well you could be Larry Derfner who suggested that terrorists are justified in attacking Israelis. But to be fair, Derfner is a columnist for the Tehran Times. Except he's actually a columnist for the Jerusalem Post.

"Whoever the Palestinians were who killed the eight Israelis near Eilat last week, however vile their ideology was, they were justified to attack."

If you don't think that someone who writes that sort of thing should be a Jerusalem Post columnist, drop the editor a line.

Derfner has already taken down the post and "explained" that he meant the terrorist attacks are justified, but he didn't want them to actually happen. But foolishly some people assumed otherwise.

Writing that the killing of Israelis was justified and a matter of right took a vile image and attached words of seeming approval to it.

Yes, some people think that saying that murder is a right and justified makes it sound like approval. Derfner's new position is that... (drum roll)

What I mean is this: The occupation does not justify Palestinian terror. It does, however, provoke it. Palestinians do not have the right to attack or kill Israelis. They, do, however, have the incentive to, and part, though not all, of that incentive is provided them by the occupation.

Which puts him safely in the moderate left. The problem was that it isn't what he said.

"I think the Palestinians have the right to use terrorism against us" and "Whoever the Palestinians were who killed the eight Israelis near Eilat last week, however vile their ideology was, they were justified to attack."

So there are two possibilities here. Larry Derfner is so functionally illiterate that he doesn't understand the meaning of the word "right" and "justified." I can only pity him for that and hope that he receives the basic literacy training that he needs.

But if that's the case, the Jerusalem Post can no longer afford to damage its credibility by publishing the writing of a functionally illiterate man. It's a disservice to their readers.

The second possibility is that like the terrorists whose acts he approved of, Derfner is a coward. He was willing to suicide bomb an article on a blog where he thought that only his fellow travelers would see it. But when it was exposed, he scrambled to explain that he confused "incentive" with "right".

In that case he deserves a new job at Haaretz.





HURRICANE ROGER



Give climate change its due-- it was responsible for one of the more disastrous Roger Cohen article in recent memory. And considering that Roger Cohen's pen writes like clowns fight fires, that's a true catastrophe. Here are some fragments of the horror...

The Republican Texas governor clings to an ice floe of diminishing credibility

Perry said there are some gaps in the theory. If so, he is one.

Maybe more important, Perry waxed wrongly on global warming.

And that's just from the first two paragraphs. By the end of the second paragraph, Rog throws in McCarthy's skeleton rattling. Because no string of bad metaphors is complete without the old Senator's skeleton showing up to frighten liberals.


But no dead political skeleton could be scarier than Roger Cohen left alone in a room with a typewriter.

Perry’s quaint belief in the utter innocence of mankind when it comes to polluting our precious atmosphere might seem like an innocuous tick

It's possible that Roger Cohen meant 'tic', but I believe that he was actually back from a weekend of hunting bigfoot, and was discussing the innocuous ticks all over his body.

the entirely wacky conservative belief of yore that the fluoridation of drinking water was a communist tactic to addle the minds of youth

I don't know whether to blame fluoridation of drinking water for that addled sentence, or blame the man who told Roger Cohen that writing articles would keep him from having to serve in Tunisia.


But Roger Cohen can pull back on whatever mental breakdown made him write sentences like these. Perry isn't about to burn environmentalists at the stake.

Six years ago, Texas took an important step towards a cleaner environment and greater energy independence by requiring 3 percent of the state’s energy to come from renewable sources by 2009. 

Senate Bill 20 calls for 5,880 megawatts… …or about 5 percent of the state’s electricity… …to come from renewable sources by 2015.

By 2025, the goal is to have clean sources supply a full 10 percent of the state’s power needs.

This bill will also help ensure that Texas has a diverse supply of clean energy by requiring 500 megawatts to be produced by renewable sources besides wind… such as biomass and solar power.

I am proud to put my name on this bill because it is good for our economy, our environment and our future. 

See Roger, it's not so bad. 




THE ROUNDUP

In the days and weeks leading to September 11, Zilla rounds up some thoughts and precedents for the conflict.

Norman Berdichevsky gets interviewed on the Andrea King show

Katy Perry stands up for Israel.. but not really.

Caroline Glick sums up Beck's visit

“Beck said that his movement will be one of individuals who work together to defend Israel and the Jews from those who seek our destruction. He argued that regular people are far more capable of understanding what needs to be done than the well-heeled experts who lead us down the garden path of weakness and demoralization.

And he is right.

And in bringing this message to Israel, he demonstrated his friendship. We should return the favor by taking his advice. We should trust ourselves and our instincts and stop listening to the ‘experts’ who preach weakness and surrender.”

And life is bad if you're a Pakistani orphan living near an area where dancing boys are on every warlord's list.

According to charities which work to protect street children in Pakistan, up to 90 percent are sexually abused on the first night that they sleep rough and 60 percent accuse police of sexually abusing them.

Another reminder that Islamic law works.