Jack's Newswatch

Well before Barack Obama brought hope to the White House, Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi was adamant that something new and different and wonderful had arrived. In 2006, the incoming Speaker pledged that hers would be the “most honest, most open, and most ethical Congress in history.”

At the time, we were skeptical — to say the least. Our refusal to accept her rhetoric was roundly vindicated last week. That was when Madam-Speaker used every dirty trick at her disposal to coldly ram a 1,500 page global warming bill through the House of Representatives.

The Speaker chose to stifle the usual observances of deliberative democracy because open, honest debate would have attracted unwelcome scrutiny to her massive new energy tax.

Pelosi’s legislation, the American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) Act, would raise the price of hydrocarbon energy sources like coal and oil thought to cause global warming, but which power 85 percent — 85 percent! — of the economic production in America.

A large energy tax during a deep recession is a political cyanide pill that 44 of Pelosi’s Democratic colleagues refused to swallow. That almost doomed the bill and in fact would have killed it outright Friday night if eight Republicans hadn’t voted with the majority of Democrats. (The final vote was 219 to 212.)

Likely there would have been many more Democratic “no” votes if Madame-Speaker and Energy & Commerce chairman Henry Waxman didn’t find creative ways to shorten or skip every step of that “How a Bill Becomes a Law” song.

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Notes:

Doesn’t this “little piece of heaven”  hail from the bankrupt state?

Popularity: 35% [?]

The Ontario Court of Appeal has dismissed a constitutional challenge to Parliament’s anti-gang law, upholding the convictions of two former Hells Angels found guilty of committing extortion “in association with” a criminal organization.

Steven “Tiger” Lindsay and Raymond Bonner argued the legislation, introduced in the aftermath of Quebec’s biker wars and in anticipation of the Hells Angels’ arrival in Ontario in 2002, was unconstituitonally vague and that minor criminals or even innocent people could be subject to its harsh penalties.

The court disagreed.

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Popularity: 35% [?]

BERLIN — German Chancellor Angela Merkel defended her plan to cut taxes despite the country’s soaring budget deficit as she introduced her conservative alliance’s manifesto ahead of national elections in September.

Lower incomes taxes would “provide motivation” and encourage economic growth, Ms. Merkel told a conference of her party, the Christian Democratic Union, and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union.

“It would be wrong not to do what is right and necessary for growth, and so prevent ourselves emerging quickly from this crisis,” Ms. Merkel said in her conference speech.

The conservative parties’ election platform promises tax cuts worth €15 billion ($21 billion), but gives no time frame. The parties plan to cut the lowest income tax rate to 12% from 14% at present, raise the threshold for paying the top income tax rate of 42%, and reduce the degree to which a rising income leads to a progressively higher tax rate.

However, Germany’s widening budget deficit has led to expectations the next government might have to plug the budget gap with higher taxes. Some state governors and lawmakers from the Christian Democrats have in recent days suggested raising some sales taxes to increase revenue, a debate Ms. Merkel is struggling to stamp out.

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Popularity: 33% [?]

During his campaign, President Obama made a big deal of criticizing leaders who are elected democratically but don’t govern democratically. He’s had a chance to show that it mattered in Honduras. He didn’t.

That’s the sorry story as Honduras’ now ex-president, Mel Zelaya, last Thursday defied a Supreme Court ruling and tried to hold a “survey” to rewrite the constitution for his permanent re-election. It’s the same blueprint for a rigged political system that’s made former democracies like Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Ecuador into shells of free countries.

Zelaya’s operatives did their dirt all the way through. First they got signatures to launch the “citizen’s power” survey through threats — warning those who didn’t sign that they’d be denied medical care and worse. Zelaya then had the ballots flown to Tegucigalpa on Venezuelan planes. After his move was declared illegal by the Supreme Court, he tried to do it anyway.

As a result of his brazen disregard for the law, Zelaya found himself escorted from office by the military Sunday morning, and into exile. Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Cuba’s Fidel Castro rushed to blame the U.S., calling it a “yanqui coup.”

President Obama on Monday called the action “not legal,” and claimed that Zelaya is still the legitimate president.

There was a coup all right, but it wasn’t committed by the U.S. or the Honduran court. It was committed by Zelaya himself. He brazenly defied the law, and Hondurans overwhelmingly supported his removal (a pro-Zelaya rally Monday drew a mere 200 acolytes).

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Updates:

2:29 pm EDT, June 30th, 2009 — U.N. General Assembly Demands Restoration of Honduras’ Ousted President

2:55 pm EDT, June 30th, 2009 — BEWARE THE OBAMA ‘EVIL EYE’

2:58 pm EDT, June 30th, 2009 — New Honduran President Warns Former Leader of Arrest

Video:

Notes:

Lot’s of noise about Honduras — not so much about Iran. 

Why is that?

Popularity: 35% [?]

Todd Purdum pulls down the black ski mask and whips out the sawed off shotgun for this utterly predictable hit piece on Sarah Palin in the August issue of Vanity Fair.

To be clear, there are three certainties in life: death, taxes, and the elitist MSM’s contract-killer journalism against political figures with whom they disagree – which, more often than not means conservatives.

Purdum’s piece is an absolute classic of the genre, complete with a slew of juicy, negative quotes from insiders and a smoothly crafted narrative that demeans and diminishes Palin’s accomplishments and portrays her as an ignorant white trash whack job who stumbled her way into the governorship of Alaska through a combination of raw ambition and blind luck.

Sarah Palin is one of those rare figures who evokes acute emotions in a lot of people. I’m not one of them, so it’s always been hard for me to understand why those who didn’t even know her name before August 28 of last year could either fall so madly in love with her or be driven into such an absolute blind rage over her.

Even more perplexing is the MSM’s continuing fascination with, and seemingly instiatible desire to destroy Sarah Palin. Why are Todd Purdum and Vanity Fair pulling out all the stops for a piece on Palin 10 months after the election? Is it because they fear she’s still viable as a national political figure, or simply that a 9,800 word hit job on Palin is the kind of delicious red meat VF’s readers can’t resist?

Either way, there’s the very real possibility that this kind of piling on Palin by the elitist MSM will actually improve her image outside the New York/DC corridor and make people in flyover country like her more, not less.

[Source]

Related:

Sarah Palin: Stayin Alive

Popularity: 35% [?]

Alberta’s oil sands producers and their U.S. refiners face sharply higher costs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions under legislation approved by the U.S. House of Representatives and championed by U.S. President Barack Obama.

The American Clean Energy and Security Act, if passed by the U.S. Senate, could also result in new tariffs on Canadian exporters of energy-intensive goods from cement to chemicals if Washington deems Ottawa’s climate-change regulations to be lacking.

Under the cap-and-trade plan, U.S. refiners will have to buy permits for each tonne of carbon dioxide that they send into the air. While utilities will be provided free allocation of those permits to reduce the impact on power users, the oil industry will have to purchase virtually all of its permits.

Such a system would heavily penalize oil companies that ship oil sands bitumen to the United States because refining the raw bitumen into petroleum products such as gasoline and heating oil is more energy-intensive and higher in emissions than is the processing of conventional oil. U.S. refiners processing the heavier oil sands crude will face higher permit costs, cutting into profit margins for producers and refiners.

Both producers and refiners would likely share that cost. A resulting drop in demand would in turn drive down the price of bitumen.

Many U.S. refiners have been moving to retool their refineries in recent years to accommodate the heavy crude from Alberta’s oil sands.

But the proposed legislation could put all of that at risk.

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Popularity: 36% [?]

The exiled Honduran President Manuel Zelaya has said he will return to his country later this week after addressing the United Nations in New York to protest the coup that ousted him from power.

“I go to Tegucigalpa on Thursday,” Mr Zelaya said in a speech before regional leaders in Mangua.

“I’m the elected president, I will fulfil my four-year term,” he vowed.

Mr Zelaya was ousted in a dawn coup on Sunday morning after being roused by his own soldiers while in his pyjamas at the presidential compound, and put on an airplane for Costa Rica.

It was Central America’s first military coup since the Cold War and ended a bitter power struggle with the military. The National Congress swiftly voted in a new leader, Roberto Micheletti, the parliamentary speaker.

Mr Micheletti was appointed the country’s new leader a few hours after Mr Zelaya had been flown across the border and he immediately ordered a 48-hour curfew after denying that there had been a coup d’etat on the deposed president.

“A curfew begins today and ends on Tuesday,” he said at his first press conference on Monday as worldwide condemnation of the overthrow, led by the United States, continued.

However Mr Zelaya has remained defiant.

“I will return voluntarily with the protection of the blood of Christ, for God and for my people,” he said on Monday.

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Updates:

5:20 pm EDT, June 30th, 2009 — Honduras gov’t struggles against Zelaya support

5:39 pm EDT, June 30th, 2009 — Officials to return to Honduras with leader

6:06 pm EDT, June 30th, 2009 — The Honduran Counter-Coup

Popularity: 34% [?]

In the last week of May, Prime Minister Stephen Harper met with his top political advisers and the Conservative party campaign team. He “put all the troops on high election alert,” an adviser said last week, “and told them to get ready for the campaign.”

Nothing particular in the outside world had triggered this decision, no action by Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff or the other opposition leaders, no big news story. And it was hardly the first time Harper had ordered his party put on campaign footing without being sure a campaign was actually coming. The Conservative leader would always rather be safe than sorry. What had spurred this latest escalation in the threat level, the Harper adviser says, was the Conservatives’ own calculation of the Liberals’ best interests.

Every now and then, Harper’s advisers—a loose-knit group that includes campaign chairman Doug Finley, chief of staff Guy Giorno, communications director Kory Ten­eycke and a few others—try to figure out what they would advise the Liberal leader if that were their job. This time they came up with four strong arguments that, they thought, should persuade Michael Ignatieff to force an election before Parliament’s summer break if he could.

“First, he’s only going to get a second chance”—that is, he would only be permitted by Liberals to stay on and lead them into a second election after losing the first—“if he takes the first chance pretty early. And we think he expects to need a second chance,” the adviser said.

“Second, the ads were starting to bite.” These were the “Just Visiting” ads the Conservatives were running on television and the Internet, which argue that Ignatieff has no interest in Canada unless he can run it. Here the Harper adviser’s argument sounds self-serving, because most polling organizations can find no evidence the ads have been a drag on voter support for the Liberals. “But the target isn’t the horse-race numbers,” the adviser countered. “The target is Ignatieff’s personal numbers. And they’re starting to erode.”

Third, “there was starting to be evidence that the economy hit bottom in March. And they would rather go against us in a bad economy than a good one.

“Fourth, he’s 61 f—ing years old. He doesn’t have a lot of time.”

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Popularity: 34% [?]

US troops are withdrawing from towns and cities in Iraq, six years after the invasion, having formally handed over security duties to new Iraqi forces.

A public holiday – National Sovereignty Day – has been declared, and the capital, Baghdad, threw a giant party to mark the eve of the changeover.

US-led combat operations are due to end by September 2010, with all troops gone from Iraq by the end of 2011.

Iraqi troops are on the alert for insurgent attacks during the handover.

Despite the pullback from cities and towns, due to be completed on Tuesday, US troops will still be embedded with Iraqi forces.

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Popularity: 31% [?]

Chrysler workers in Ontario were back on the job Monday after the auto manufacturer halted production for two months while it was undergoing bankruptcy proceedings in the U.S.

About 3,500 workers who work the morning and afternoon shift returned to Chrysler’s minivan plant in Windsor, Ont and about 3,800 workers returned to work at a second plant in Brampton, Ont.

Employees working the third shift are expected to return to their jobs on July 27 after the summer break.

For Brampton workers, it will be a four-day work week. A problem with a supplier means the plant will shut down again next week. Then, the facility shuts down for its annual two-week summer break in mid-July.

Workers say they are just happy to be employed again after being off the job since May 4.

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Popularity: 32% [?]