Nightly Ramble: FISA Fizzle;NORK;Obama Can’t Run; More

• Look, left-o-shere… if you’re that pissed at the Democrats in Congress over FISA and whatever else,  that you’re going to waste all our time and bandiwth with your screaming, does that mean you will be doing America a favor and not be voting fot them? And Obama, too? Yeah, didn’t think so. So, shut UP already. In wartime, like it or not you do what’s needed.
• If you’ll recall, I said of Sullivan yesterday that the reason his comments on gasoline were so screwy is that he’s ot out here in the reasl world with the rest of us. Seems to me that this USSC ruling yesterday shows us pretty much the same thing.
• I’m not so sure I’m too worried about NORK getting off the terror list for the moment. Arguably, there are still uncomfortable connections between them and Syria where high-powered weaponry are concnerned. Still, when an errant dog returns to heel, you need to reinforce the behavior with a reward. Not only does it keep the one dog at heel, but sets an example for the rest.
• Point of order: The phrase “Olberman goes nuts” makes the assumption he didn’t START there.  You really have to wonder what the guy is on, that is fueling this constant paranoia with him.  See, there’s the real problem with being ‘edgy’. It means the edge is near.
• I mentioned the “Obama isn’t elegible to run for POTUS meme yesterday, and in last nights’ Ramble, and allowed last night, particularly how the thingw as going to light up shortly. I was right. Israeli Insider:
  

  It is now a certainty that the “birth certificate” claimed by the Barack Obama campaign as authentic is a photoshopped fake.

  The image, purporting to come from the Hawaii Department of Health, has been the subject of intense skepticism in the blogosphere in the past two weeks. But now the senior spokesman of that Department has confirmed to Israel Insider what are the required features of a certified birth document — features that Obama’s purported “birth certificate” clearly lack.

  The image became increasingly suspect with Israel Insider’s revelation that variations of the certificate image were posted on the Photobucket image aggregation website — including one listing the location of Obama’s birth as Antarctica, one with the certificate supposedly issued by the government of North Korea, and another including a purported photo of baby Barack — one of which has a “photo taken” time-stamp just two minutes before the article and accompanying image was posted on the left-wing Daily Kos blog.

  That strongly suggests that Daily Kos obtained the image from Photobucket, not the State of Hawaii, the Obama family, or the Obama campaign. Photobucket is not generally known as a credible supplier of official vital records for any of the fifty states, and the liberties that other Photoshoppers took with the certificates confirms this.

  Oh, it gets better… Go and read. And look; there are questions from both sides of this thing. Lest anyone get the wrong idea, here,  I’m skeptical of both of them, just now. And perhaps that’s the point.  Both sides are equally incredible.  But my overwhelming mistrust of Obama and his minions cause me to look seriously at it all.

• Verne Troyer (Yeah, that mini-me guy)  in a sex tape? Okaaaaayyyyy… A short film, I suppose.
• Rich Lowry passes along a note about how the Democrats are still trying to push the ‘gobal warming’ myth, and using up valuable intel community time doing it.It’s clear they value pushing their political fables over actual national security priorities.

Word just coming off the wires now that the USSC has ruled on In District of Columbia v. Heller, in a 5-4 ruling which strikes down Wahington DC’s 32 year old handgun ban, as being incompatible with the Second Amendment and the rights therein. As you might expect, Memeorandum has lots on this.

“$4 a gallon is the best news this country has had in a very long time. Here’s to $5. It’s the only way Americans will ever learn.”

Sullivan: “The Joy Of $4 A Gallon”. It’s just wonderful that we are all blessed with such care and concern, from a man who doesn’t drive a car. I can’t wait to start going around the countryside telling all & sundry what a good deal this is for them.

To begin with, let’s stipulate that Sullivan has labled himself an idiot for all time. That’s number one, here. Past that, Billy, it’s like I said a month or so back, now;

… stop at any gas station, and tell the people paying twice what they should for fuel, that they’re saving the Snail Darter. After you remove the gasoline hose from your mouth, (and barf up a few gallons of the stuff they’ve poured into you) and get several attackers off of you, you’ll begin to understand that there is a groundswell of anger against the left and the enviro-whackjobs on these issues.

You’re quite right that Sullivan, past being an idiot, has no sense of the anger out here because he’s not out here in it.  But I for one would love to see the look on his face if he ever had the courage to come out here with the rest of us mere mortals and experience the real world. Alas, he never has yet, and I doubt he ever will.

• My older boy is graduating from High school tonight. I will doubtless blog about this further, on Sunday,  but I thought I should make note of the milestone. I’ve noted lately that they’ve been going by a bit faster.
• Another Honorable mention at OTB’s caption contest.
• From just down the road in Buffalo, comes word  of some of the better work the state has done of late. Make no mistake, with me at the helm this blog has enough typos in it to fill a floppy. But this thing goes well beyond typos… and the excuses are even worse. Want to know why the exodus has long since begin from Buffalo? there’s one major reason, right there.
• Michelle Malkin notes that Rep Chris Cannon has lost his primary by about 20 points.  Seems every time Amnasty comes up as an issue, this kinda thing happens. You’d think the Republicans would get the message.
• Speaking of citizenship, this citizenship thing with Obama is coming to a boil shortly, if I read the signs aright. Lots of background chatter, but no movement on the major news sources, yet.
• That matter of the $22mUSD debt I mentioned of Hillary Clinton the other day won’t get solved until she can stop being pissed at him long enough. Sister Toldjah’s been folloing that aspect, and it doesn’t look from here where things are any less frosty than they were.  A nifty little diversion is what this amounts to… and they may hold it all in a pocket until it’s needed to make Obama look like a generous soul for the sake of party unity.  Never mind tha party unity among the Democrats is a joke lately.

Consistancy, as I like to say here, is only a virtue if you’re not a total screwup. Bruce Bawer has a note today over at Pajamas Media that reminds us that the New York Times has been fairly consistant in it’s anti-American slant. In this case, the main topic is The Times and it’s slant on the resugence of radical Islam and the threat it represents to the west.  But, says Bawer, they’ve been making small of threats against the west for years, now. Decades, in fact.

First case in point: Walter Duranty, the Times’s Moscow correspondent during much of the Stalin era. The celebrated British author Malcolm Muggeridge once commented that “no one…followed the Party Line as assiduously” as Duranty did; Tim Rutten, in a 2003 Los Angeles Times article, called Duranty “an active agent of Soviet propaganda and disinformation – probably paid, certainly blackmailed, altogether willing.” Author of a novel, One Life, One Kopeck (1937), that was pure Communist cant and a non-fiction book, The Kremlin and the People (1941), that another old Moscow hand, Louis Fischer, described as a “Song of Praise” for Stalin, Duranty was an unswerving Kremlin apologist: he praised a 1932 law that forbade peasants to leave their collective farms, insisted (to Trotsky’s consternation) that the false confessions extracted at Stalin’s show trials were true, and condemned the Berlin Airlift. It was Duranty who coined the term “Stalinism” and who, rationalizing Stalin’s brutality, first said “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” Duranty claimed to want to bring about “Russian-American…understanding” — which is to say that he used the word “understanding” in exactly the same way that it’s often used now vis-à-vis Islam. (What’s being encouraged, of course, isn’t understanding at all but its opposite — a determination not to understand, see, or acknowledge certain facts. In the 1930s, Britons who were desperate to avoid war with the Nazis also spoke about “understanding” in this way – refusing to recognize that there are some things that, once properly understood, must be actively resisted and destroyed.)

Duranty’s position afforded him immense power to shape the American public’s image of the Soviet Union. As Muggeridge biographer Ian Hunter put it in 2003, Duranty was “the most influential foreign correspondent in Russia,” a man whose articles were “regarded as authoritative” and “helped to shape U.S. foreign policy.” While Stalin was shipping people to the Gulag, Duranty’s rosy dispatches were taken by many American leftists as confirmation that the USSR was indeed a veritable workers’ paradise.

Billy Beck, call your office. I can just picture Billy sittting down in the Hollow, smiling and nodding. But of course Duranty isn’t the only thing going on in this short glimpse of the History of The Times. he points their Polyanna-ish coverage of Castro, and to the Khmer Rouge, and to Hitler, as well:

 Not only did the Times give America a fraudulent picture of the Soviet Union in the 1930s; its coverage of the Holocaust in the next decade suggests a determination both to maintain an appearance of impartiality and to preserve an illusion that Hitler’s regime was not as monstrous as it really was. Hitler’s destruction of the Jews was so blatantly evil that to write about it in a civilized and responsible manner meant taking sides; but that was apparently too much for the Times to ask of itself.

I would add that Anthony Lewis was an apolist for Mugabe as well… and the Times has yet to really tell the truth of what’s going on down there, just now. Too ugly, one supposes.

The Times as of yet is unrepentant; they still hold Duranty’s Pulitzer, for example, which is as well, given the quality of the work that has been assocaited with that award in recent years, hasn’t gotten much better than that of Duranty himself.

 I suggest the same kind of slant, however, occurs at CNN/NBC/CBS/ABC, etc, and to a lesser degree, Fox… and that mostly because of relationships with such dictators as there are have not been around for very long; eventually, I suspect, that situation will change to the worse for them as well.

The central issue of course, is the idea that telling both sides of the story as if they were equal, in the cases mentioned and so many more, is in itself, bias. And that’s what my commentary, here is building to. The truth, you see, never is neutral. It ALWAYS takes sides. What I’ve listed here are but a few of the examples where neutrality is itself bias. Or, where, “not to decide is to decide.” Irony abounds; the very reason that they consider themselves unbiased is the reason that they’re bias, and in many cases, the cause of it. More, there is a lack of counterbalance against this bias, because of the longstanding claim of a lack of bias.

Bruce explains the reaction of Congress to our gas prices very well, indeedL

Why do you suppose Congressional leaders are spending all their time blaming current oil prices on speculators, price gougers and OPEC?

Because if they addressed the real problem – supply and demand – it is they who are at fault for not foreseeing the obvious building problem or acting on it with a coherent and rational energy policy. And, of course, politicians aren’t about to take the blame for their short-sightedness. Instead they’re casting about for anything or anyone on whom to hang the blame.

There it is, gang. There’s only one way to deal with what is essentiall a supply and demand problem: More supply.

Drill, Refine, Repeat.

there’s lots more at the link, of course.

Me at OTB just now:

Every major scientific body in the entire world is on the same ‘side’ on this one. And any payola to Hansen or any influence of Gore is far outweighed by Exxon-Mobil paying for the science they want, and the Bush administration’s documented efforts to politicize science.

The desperation is palpable. You’ve apparently forgotten NASA.

There’s several other groups of the like.

And let’s call this what it is; Hype. The fact is that the oft referred to National Academy of Sciences report doesn’t provide any valid scientific basis for global warming, and it also does not show any scientific consensus on the issue.

As for scientists with views oppoing the myth spreading, let’s take for example, Lindzen, whose report is of such size and weight and which include all of their oft spoken doubts about warming and the facts backing those doubts, are spelled out in such detail as assure that folks like M1EK will never have a hope in hell of understanding it. And it certainly doesn’t end up in the group summary, which is written by the political hotheads of the group. And of course since nobody’s ever read the full report, nobody ever questions the sumamry.

In the end, what we have here is an agenda being driven by the UN, with statistical falacies that are remanufactured by that body every few years. If you’re a scientists and you need those lucarative grants from the UN and other leftist agencies, you need to toe the liberal line.

Which is to say that you need to be “progressive” and have what a “social conscience” which means of course, means being anti-business, anti-industry, anti-technology.

Note M1EK’s tactics which are fairly typical of the global warming scam artists… In M1EK’s world, you’re offered only two chocies; to be a “concerned” environmental advocate, or to be dismissed as a shill for Big Oil.

Every scientist… those getting government money, or money from the UN, who invariably support the global-warming scam is portrayed as independent, unbiased, trustworthy–and meanwhile M1EK goes out of his way to label any dissenter not as a scientist, but as “people with direct financial interests at stake (like the oil companies).”

You’ll forgive me if I don’t stand up and salute.

From several sources, this morning:

Barack Obama is not legally a U.S. natural-born citizen according to the law on the books at the time of his birth, which falls between “December 24, 1952 to November 13, 1986? Presidential office requires a natural-born citizen if the child was not born to two U.S. citizen parents, which of course is what exempts John McCain though he was born in the Panama Canal .. US Law very clearly stipulates: “.If only one parent was a U.S. citizen at the time of your birth, that parent must have resided in the United States for at least ten years, at least five of which had to be after the age of 16.” Barack Obama’s father was not a U.S. citizen and Obama’s mother was only 18 when Obama was born, which means though she had been a U.S. citizen for 10 years, (or citizen perhaps because of Hawaii being a territory) the mother fails the test for being so for at least 5 years **prior to** Barack Obama’s birth, but *after* age 16. It doesn’t matter *after* . In essence, she was not old enough to qualify her son for automatic U.S. citizenship. At most, there were only 2 years elapsed since his mother turned 16 at the time of Barack Obama’s birth when she was 18 in Hawaii. His mother would have needed to have been 16+5= 21 years old, at the time of Barack Obama’s birth for him to have been a natural-born citizen. As aforementioned, she was a young college student at the time and was not. Barack Obama was already 3 years old at that time his mother would have needed to have waited to have him as the only U.S. Citizen parent. Obama instead should have been naturalized, but even then, that would still disqualify him from holding the office.
*** Naturalized citizens are ineligible to hold the office of President. *** Though Barack Obama was sent back to Hawaii at age 10, all the other info does not matter because his mother is the one who needed to have been a U.S. citizen for 10 years prior to his birth on August 4, 1961, with 5 of those years being after age 16. Further, Obama may have had to have remained in the country for some time to protect any citizenship he would have had, rather than living in Indonesia. Now you can see why Obama’s aides stopped his speech about how we technically have more than 50 states, because it would have led to this discovery. This is very clear cut and a blaring violation of U.S. election law. I think the Gov. of California would be very interested in knowing this if Obama were elected President without being a natural-born U.S. citizen, and it would set precedence. Stay tuned to your TV sets because I suspect some of this information will be leaking through over the next several days.

Thomas Sowell
Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow
The Hoover Institution
Stanford University
Stanford, California 94305

Hmmm. If true, this would seem to be a constitutional crisis in the making, and something that will need to be legally addressed before Denver.

Hume last night:

Barack Obama’s first general election ad says about 46 seconds in that the Illinois senator passed laws that “extended health care for wounded troops who’d been neglected.”

The ad “Country I Love”, which was released Friday, provides a citation at the bottom of the screen which reads “Public Law 110 – 181.”

The problem is Senator Obama never voted for that legislation. Public Law 110 – 181 is part of the defense authorization bill which passed the Senate in January by a vote of 91 to three with six senators not voting. Barack Obama was among those six absent senators.

Is anyone shocked that Obama’s revealed as a liar, here?  And isn’t it funny how Hume at Fox is the only one to notice?

• I see Don Imus is in trouble again. Gee, what a shock, huh? Look, let’s be honest here; PacMan Jones is about as worthless a human being as one might ever be able to contrive.  As Imus points out, he’s been arrested more often than the average street hooker, and that doesn’t account for the mjisdeeds he did, but managed to avoid arrest by some means or another.   That said, however, we have two other situations driving this are political correctness, and the historical willingness on the part of Imus to kiss race huckster backsides, like that of Al Sharpton for example…. (Who it must be said is somewhere bloew whale poop himself on the evelutionary scale of post-racialism)  What this comes down to is some folks have an aversion to the truth. And Imus is now suffering because he didn’t have the testicular mass to stand up to these racial thugs when he had the chance.I doubt he’ll get the reaction this time, that he did the last time. Jerry Wright’s racism got too much of a pass for Imus to be skewered too badly for this comment. Dont’ want to make Obama look bad this close to the election, after all. But to the degree he is for this and future events, he’s only got his reaction last time, to blame. (Photo is an old MSNBC file photo)
• From the Ethenol newsfront, a study which shouldn’t shock anyone. Ethenol production has raised food prices, but hasn’t done a bloody thng for fuel prices. Pretty much as we predicted here.
• I still say the Iraqi WMD went to Syria.
• James Dobson is correct, as far as he goes, here. But of cousre, he’s not going to change many minds. we’ve discussed this guy before. He’s well beyond the point where anyone outisde the church, and many within, can take him seriously. Which in this case is not a good thing.
• The real disgrace here is that the idiot at the Star likley still has a job.
• Ah, yes, the global warming monster. When the left gets pressed on stuff like this, the reaction is one of kneejerk authoritariansim that would amke crazy Uncle Hugo beam with pride… and this report is a prime examlpe of this.  So much for the compassion they’d like to project themselves as having.  Have you ever wondered why the left finds themselves so enamoured with Che, and with crazy uncle Hugo, with Castro, and the like? It’s because tha’s who the left really is. When they’re under threat, as they are about ‘global warming’ they fall back on their roots.  And why are they in trouble?The models… the numbers they’re plugging into the computers to come up with their “proof” of global warming; if you plug historical numbers into them, they don’t predict what we have today. That seems a major issue they’ve not addressed; if they cannot explain with their model how we got where we are, how are we to take them at their word about where we’re going, using the same figures?Also; The concentration on the matter of CO2 to the exclusion of all else seems a major concern. 95% of all global warming is water vapor caused. The models they’re using to ‘prove’ their theory don’t even take this into account. Why’s that, you may reasonably ask… and I suggest the reason is that water vapor cannot be controled, and that thereby man cannot be made out the bad guy and thus broughht under control of those pushng ‘global warming’.And in the end, that’s what all this global warming BS is… it’s about control. Political Power. The ability to check the growth of the successful. As we go on, more and more people are figuring out that he whole global warming thing is a hoax.
• Doing our run to Fostoria Ohio on Saturday. I’ll have pictures Sunday afternoon.
• You who have diabetics in the family (I have two) will be interested in this.
• Elian Gonzalez. There’s a name to remember. Eight year ago, already, it was, that Janet Reno’s storm troops kidnapped the boy from his stateside relatives, after his mother had died trying to get both herself and the boy to freedom… and away from Casto’s Cuba. Remember? Thank God they managed to do it, at least without burning the place and everyone in it to the ground. It seems likely to me that Gore lost Florida based on that situation,  and would have lost Florida if Mickey Mouse had been running against him. So, along comes Greg Craig, who represented his absentee father in Cuba, and Eric Holder, who was Janet Reno’s number 2 back in the day.  Both of them turn up on Barack Obama’s staff, and are odds on favorites for the Attorney General’s office.  No shock that Obama tries to minimze the damage these two did in that case.Recall, please that this was consdiered a straightforward custody case, and the boy being with his father… who hardly knew him until this came up, was suppsedly of highest import. Well, as was predicted, as soon as he went back to Cuba, Gonzolez, now 14 became a full ward of the state… someone for the Castro regime to trott out on holdays. We see he’s now a member of the Communits Youth movement there.  So it is that the reality of this situation is far different from what he Demorats in general, and Holder and Criag…and now Obama, particualrly, portrayed it as.

  And I’ll tell you this; Obama will lose Florida… the resentment over that kid being forced to live in that hellhole, has if anything, grown.

I’ve beend saying for some time now that even Obama doesn’t believe half of what he spews. I’ve also been saying that his pandering would catch up to him eventually. And, here we are, in the New York Times, this morning, we see evidence of how far this stuff has gone

As Senator Barack Obama courted voters in Iowa last December, Representative Keith Ellison, the country’s first Muslim congressman, stepped forward eagerly to help.

Mr. Ellison believed that Mr. Obama’s message of unity resonated deeply with American Muslims. He volunteered to speak on Mr. Obama’s behalf at a mosque in Cedar Rapids, one of the nation’s oldest Muslim enclaves. But before the rally could take place, aides to Mr. Obama asked Mr. Ellison to cancel the trip because it might stir controversy. Another aide appeared at Mr. Ellison’s Washington office to explain.

“I will never forget the quote,” Mr. Ellison said, leaning forward in his chair as he recalled the aide’s words. “He said, ‘We have a very tightly wrapped message.’ ”

When Mr. Obama began his presidential campaign, Muslim Americans from California to Virginia responded with enthusiasm, seeing him as a long-awaited champion of civil liberties, religious tolerance and diplomacy in foreign affairs. But more than a year later, many say, he has not returned their embrace.

While the senator has visited churches and synagogues, he has yet to appear at a single mosque. Muslim and Arab-American organizations have tried repeatedly to arrange meetings with Mr. Obama, but officials with those groups say their invitations — unlike those of their Jewish and Christian counterparts — have been ignored. Last week, two Muslim women wearing head scarves were barred by campaign volunteers from appearing behind Mr. Obama at a rally in Detroit.

In interviews, Muslim political and civic leaders said they understood that their support for Mr. Obama could be a problem for him at a time when some Americans are deeply suspicious of Muslims. Yet those leaders nonetheless expressed disappointment and even anger at the distance that Mr. Obama has kept from them.

 For all that Obama’s been saying he is a ‘uniter’, what’s really gone down is that Obama has been exposed as someone whose entire schtick is centered around group politics… pitting one group against the other.  Funny, how it usually works out that way with the left, isn’t it?  And of course it should be mentioned that Ellison himself is a problem with most Americans.

Obama now finds himself in a balance act, trying, as a novice high-wire artist might, to keep from falling off either side. Such is the taskhe’s set himself.

Saturday, I blogged about BO’s faux presidential seal, and as did Bit earlier today.   Now Ken Wheaton, Advertising Age, reports:  “Obama Campaign Drops Faux Presidential Seal:”

Last week, Barack Obama unveiled a new campaign seal — and not the kind that swims, barks and balances balls on the end of its nose. Rather, it was the kind that has a big old eagle on it and some Latin (Vero possumus, which translates very loosely to “Yes we can”). It’s also a seal that combined elements of Richard Nixon’s White House police uniforms and George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished.” And it went over about as well. Andrew Malcolm at the L.A. Times had some fun with it. And Mickey Kaus predicted it would be disappeared over the weekend. His exact words were: “But unless David Axelrod is insane, the thing will never be seen again.” Kaus was right

Mission accompished!

• The middle class is moving out of SanFrancsico, bigtime.  The reason: Housing costs, (Read that, taxes)
• Meanwhile, in another socialist paradise, Mugabe wins by default. In spite of the vote.
• One of our favorite places to vacation is downeast Maine. I’ve written about it in the past. Reports are, however, that it’s not so good, this year. Just as well we didn’t plan up there, I guess. We tend to avoid the Adirondacks this time of year for the same reason.  But why is it happening so big up there?  Turns out that the environmentalists are killing the tourism industry. Not only for gas prices, by the way.
• Boortz mentions some nutcase in the Gainsville Florida area who has started a homeless soccer team.  Only two problems. One, as Boortz notes, he has no players. Secondly, and this seems more important to me….what do you call the home team? Nothing, they aren’t home.
• Kaus wonders if that Presidential-looking seal of Obama’s is his ‘Mission accomplished” banner. Interesting question.
• Dick Morris apparently agrees with us here at BitsBlog that Gas prices are the first real issue of the campaign. As I said yesterday, In the end, Americans are going to vote their wallets. Even the poor, who are particularly hard hit by the current high prices of oil caused by the mismanagement of our energy resources in the name of ‘the environment’. Come election time, people will remember who was responsible with their micro-mis-mangement for ruining a summer vacation, and they will remember come November who it was who doubled the price of heating oil, far more easily than they will remember who it was who saved the snail darter.
• Wanna make your own Obama poster like this one? Try here.
  
• Speaking of things Obama, I see by way of the Jawas, that he’s picked up the Kim Junbg Il endorsement.  Now, THERE’S a reason to vote for him, huh? I wonder if the Korean people agree with him on what constitutes’Change’. How many dictators have endorsed him, now? Castro, Crazy uncle Hugo,  The Iranian nutbag, AhMydinnerjacket, and who else?
• Turns out Obama’;s not nearly as popular as they’d like us to think, else the people who are his supporters are dangerously illiterate. Unfocused has some vid of Team Obama passing out fake ‘home-made’ signs. Apparently, they learned the lessons via Jerry Wright and so on, what happens when you turn Obama supporters loose to express their true racist and anti-American feelings.
• Victor Davis Hanson asks the question we’ve been asking at BitsBlog for months; What change are we talking about, here, Barry? Obama has benefitted form being most vauge in his calls for change, and I’ve long since begin to doubt that even his mindless minions agree on what change he’s talking about.  Hanson does his usual good job of breaking this out point by point. It’s worth a read.
• The Ugly Austrailians? Turns out, they out “fat” those of  us here in the states.
• And up in the great white north, Glenn suggests  they’ve started to notice that there’s a bit a problem with terrorism, up there. The utter uselessness of hate speech laws is shown for all to see. And remember, gang we’ve been saying this was the way of it, for years, now… and one is surely a manifestation of the otrher.
• More on Chris Dodd, from a paper with a long record of supporting him. Ya knowif these were Republicans, we’d be hearing about all this 24* 7.
• Interested in a job as a lighthouse Keeper?

From the paper that still can’t get over the idea that Hillary Clinton won’t be the next President, the NY Times:

When VeraSun Energy inaugurated a new ethanol processing plant last summer in Charles City, Iowa, some of that industry’s most prominent boosters showed up. Leaders of the National Corn Growers Association and the Renewable Fuels Association, for instance, came to help cut the ribbon — and so did Senator Barack Obama.

Then running far behind Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in name recognition and in the polls, Mr. Obama was in the midst of a campaign swing through the state where he would eventually register his first caucus victory. And as befits a senator from Illinois, the country’s second largest corn-producing state, he delivered a ringing endorsement of ethanol as an alternative fuel.

Mr. Obama is running as a reformer who is seeking to reduce the influence of special interests. But like any other politician, he has powerful constituencies that help shape his views. And when it comes to domestic ethanol, almost all of which is made from corn, he also has advisers and prominent supporters with close ties to the industry at a time when energy policy is a point of sharp contrast between the parties and their presidential candidates.

In the heart of the Corn Belt that August day, Mr. Obama argued that embracing ethanol “ultimately helps our national security, because right now we’re sending billions of dollars to some of the most hostile nations on earth.” America’s oil dependence, he added, “makes it more difficult for us to shape a foreign policy that is intelligent and is creating security for the long term.”

Nowadays, when Mr. Obama travels in farm country, he is sometimes accompanied by his friend Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader from South Dakota. Mr. Daschle now serves on the boards of three ethanol companies and works at a Washington law firm where, according to his online job description, “he spends a substantial amount of time providing strategic and policy advice to clients in renewable energy.”

Mr. Obama’s lead advisor on energy and environmental issues, Jason Grumet, came to the campaign from the National Commission on Energy Policy, a bipartisan initiative associated with Mr. Daschle and Bob Dole, the Kansas Republican who is also a former Senate majority leader and a big ethanol backer who had close ties to the agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland.

Well, look; As I say the Times is still in the tank for Clinton. More, they have to live in the state where she holds court. So, this is not too far out of the realm of the expected, and is the only way you’ll ever see the Times passing along info that makes any Democrat look less than electable.

That point aside, we now have a fair reason for Obama’s stance on things of late. Why, for example, he’s less than thrilled of more oil becoming available. Why he’s against domestic drilling.

Fellow Swamp Stomper, Sister Toldjah notes the same story, and says:

Karl at Protein Wisdom points out that Daschle’s ties with ethanol special interests are even more extensive than the NYT reports, and so, for that matter, are Barack Obama’s.

Of course, this isn’t a surprise to those of us who have payed close attention to Barack Obama’s double-speak throughout the primaries and caucuses, as well as his general election flip flops, but it is refereshing nevertheless to see the NYT writing about it, even if they don’t go as in depth as they should have.

That’s certainly correct, but I maintain it’s remarkable that they dare mention it at all. Make no mistake; She may have no chance at winning, but she still looms large over Obama’s chances.

And isn’t it interesting that these should be in the tank for ethenol?  It took 5 years to get processes online to make ethenol, and ship it, and will likely take another 5 to get enough distillaries online to make an appreciable dent in the energy needs of America. Yet the stated reason for not not drilling for oil domestically is that it’d take ten years.

I’ll leave you to work on that for a moment.

Good news, the East Ponders, the British, are not buying into Al Gore’s crock of anthropogenic global warming, Juliette Jowit, Observer (UK):

The majority of the British public is still not convinced that climate change is caused by humans – and many others believe scientists are exaggerating the problem, according to an exclusive poll for The Observer.

Now if we could only get some reverse lend-lease of some of the British sanity.

?