Fred Thompson sums it up very nicely

In this new video from the RNC Sen. Fred Thompson gives his thoughts on liberalism, conservatism, responsible change and just exactly what an Obama Presidency would mean for America. It's over 12 minutes but worth every second.



h/t

So you think you can dance?

What if election competitions were like this?



Another fun election video at Just Right!

Voter Fraud and ACORN

via Investors Business Daily:

That the greatest attempt at voter fraud in the nation's history is being funded in large part at taxpayer's expense is more than a bit ironic. House Minority Leader John Boehner wants it stopped and Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, wants the group allegedly behind the fraud, ACORN, criminally investigated and prosecuted.

ACORN calls itself a "nonpartisan" group seeking to register minorities and the poor. But its political arm has endorsed Barack Obama, who both trained the group's staff and sued the state of Illinois on their behalf. And Obama's campaign has given ACORN affiliates $800,000 for a get-out-the-vote drive.

In fact, it's a get-out-the-vote for Obama drive as evidenced by a video recently aired by Fox News that showed just how "nonpartisan" the group is.

Kyoto suit dismissed

A judge has dismissed a lawsuit brought by greenies against the Canadian Government to force it to prepare a plan for meeting the emissions targets of the Kyoto Protocol.

Such an order would be so devoid of meaningful content and the nature of any response to it so legally intangible that the exercise would be meaningless,'' Judge Robert Barnes said in a 40-page ruling issued today.

For his part, back in April Environment Minister Baird said,

...that Canada couldn't meet its commitments under the Kyoto Protocol without causing a recession. An economic impact report presented by Baird said implementing the Kyoto plan would result in 275,000 job losses in 2009 while the cost of electricity would rise 50 percent after 2010 and gas prices would increase 60 percent.

Wither Stéphane

Like everyone else, I was eagerly awaiting news of Stéphane Dion's press conference earlier today. Not because I wanted to gloat over his expected resignation as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. But rather because I contemplating doing something different - like saying something nice about him.

I had words rolling in my head about how he was a decent sort of fellow, a poor politician and party leader, but still a decent chap. I thought I would say that he pushed his failed agenda because he truly believed in his Green Shift as a step towards solving all that global warming nonsense. He wouldn't be alone. Millions of Canadians have drunk that kool aid and Dion would be following his beliefs. Not such a bad thing. Misguided, but still a noble thing.

With his anticipated departure, I was even contemplating making a few changes to this blog, which after all takes it's very name from the fact that Stéphane named his own dog after the disastrous Kyoto accord. I was going to remove that little graphic that says Stéphane Dion is not a leader. I felt that this blog could continue on without Stéphane Dion. After all, Kyoto is a "dog" in its own right, without any help from M. Dion.

That was before I heard the news.

Instead of doing the graceful thing and stepping down as leader immediately, Stéphane Dion chose to stay on until a leadership convention can be held in the spring. And that's not so bad either. He is the leader and this was his decision. Still OK.

But then he went on to explain his decision. Dion refused to accept the blame for losing the election, the poorest showing for the Liberal Party since 1867. He blamed the Conservative "propaganda machine" for "misrepresenting his leadership and goals".

Come on, Stéphane don't you know this is politics? Its a blood sport, you know. The Conservative campaign was effective in portraying you as an ineffective leader only because you let them. Besides, you Liberals have done your best to misrepresent Stephen Harper over the years, remember "scary" and "secret agenda".

Next he blamed his own Party for poor fundraising! He said they couldn't compete with the spending of the Conservatives. This is true but who is going to carry the blame for that if not the leader himself? A strong leader can motivate the grass roots and fill the party coffers. You need look no further than to Stephen Harper for proof.

As for his Green Shift, which proved unpopular with voters, Dion said "at the end of the day, people thought it was a carbon tax and were afraid of it". He is implying that Canadians didn't understand his Green Shift. If it hadn't been for those nasty Conservatives, people would have understood!

I beg to differ with M. Dion on this one. I think Canadians understood all too well what it meant to allow the Liberals into power with a mandate to implement a massive new tax on everything. And they wanted no part of it.

Stéphane Dion's leadership has left the Liberal party broke and disunified. More so than when he took the helm. But most importantly, Dion, wrapped in his own arrogant self importance has just shown us that he still doesn't get it.

It would have been better for him to have just slipped quietly into the night.

But hey, I won't have to change the curtains around here for a while yet.

The Iron Curtain revolt

The financial crisis trumps the so called "climate crisis":

Europe’s commitment to ambitious green goals became the latest victim of the global financial crisis yesterday when a growing number of EU countries rebelled, claiming that the plans were now too expensive.

Plans for binding European legislation by December were dropped as the EU watered down the carbon dioxide blueprint that it had announced with a fanfare 18 months ago.

The revolt by eight countries, led by Italy and Poland, left the EU’s self-proclaimed mission to shape a global, post Kyoto agreement on greenhouse gases in disarray.

Actually, financial crisis or not, it would have eventually come to this anyway. The only way to meet the EU's crazy carbon targets would be to severely curtail industrial production and throw their economies into a tailspin.

President Sarkozy of France, which holds the rotating EU presidency, led the way in appealing to all 27 countries to stick to their targets.

But tempers flared at the quarterly European Council in Brussels, with Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister, clearly furious at the pressure being applied. During a stand-up row behind the scenes, he told Mr Sarkozy that the targets would crucify Italian industry.

“Our businesses are in absolutely no position at the moment to absorb the costs of the regulations that have been proposed,” Mr Berlusconi said later.

Donald Tusk, the Polish Prime Minister, said: “We don’t say to the French that they have to close down their nuclear power industry and build windmills, and nobody can tell us the equivalent.”

In an extraordinary break with EU protocol, both leaders said that they did not have to stick to the deal because neither had been in office when it was signed by their predecessors in March 2007.

Bravo to Italy, Poland and the other renegades for putting their economies and their people's welfare first and not giving in to the EU on this.

Let Mr. Sarkozy commit Kyotocide if he wishes. Vive le revolution!

Update: Looks like the Euros have got the UN worried.

The collapse of environmentalism

The next commodity to collapse will be mass-marketed environmentalism, says Lawrence Solomon in Friday's Financial Post:

Stock market indexes have plummeted from their inflated peaks. Oil and other commodities have likewise plummeted. The next commodity to tumble from unsustainable peak levels: environmentalism.

In part, I am making this prediction because, in my 30 years as an environmentalist, I have never seen so many governments and so many corporations so profusely espousing so many environmental causes. Where promoting environmentalism was once seen as daring and counter-cultural, today it has become banal, no longer the exclusive preserve of a Body Shop chain, but of every retailer down to Wal-Mart. For the same reason that clothes go out of fashion after the masses embrace them, mass-marketed environmentalism will come to be disdained. That won’t sell for long.

I am predicting a collapse of today’s Wal-Mart environmentalism for another reason, too: Much of it is misguided, based on misunderstanding and vacuity.

The economy will always trump environmentalism. When it comes down to it, people will be all for environmentalism - until it affects their pocket books.

Not a pretty story

Obama's influences include radicals, a terrorist and felon writes Salim Mansur:

Among those with whom Obama worked in Chicago's corrupt politics were the radical preachers Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Father Michael Pfleger, the unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers, and the convicted felon Antoin Rezko.

Alinsky was a radical socialist. He invented community organizing as a political camouflage for subverting America's democracy and capitalist economy.

In Rules For Radicals, Alinsky described the means and ends of his politics as did Karl Marx in the Communist Manifesto. Alinsky wrote, "Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity."

This is the Trojan horse principle of destroying the enemy -- capitalism and democracy -- from the inside.

Update: John McCain finally gets it.

Updater: The Obama-Odinga connection.



The longer version of this video is here.

h/t: CFP.

The godfather of Kyoto

A fascinating interview with Maurice Strong in the Wall Street Journal's Weekend Review by Claudia Rosett, who asks "Is the godfather of the Kyoto treaty a public servant or a profiteer?":

Often described as an "international man of mystery," Mr. Strong during his long, globe-trotting career has been one of the most influential architects of the opaque cross-border bureaucracy that is today's United Nations. He is probably best known as godfather of the U.N.'s 1997 Kyoto treaty, and as a former U.N. top adviser who in that same year received a check for almost $1 million, bankrolled by the U.N.-sanctioned regime of Saddam Hussein.


(...)

The apple-faced Mr. Strong was born in 1929 in rural Canada. He grew up with a hankering to see the world. His travels took him to New York, where he spent a few months working in 1947 as a junior security officer at the U.N. He went on to tour Africa, and returned home to climb the corporate and public-sector ladders in Canada. In 1970 he returned to the U.N. for the first in a series of high-level incarnations that included organizing the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the environment, founding and becoming the first head of the U.N. Environment Program, and chairing the 1992 Rio summit on the environment.

Now, Mr. Strong is no fan of Ms. Rosett who has written much about him in the past, especially concerning his connections to other characters implicated in the UN's Oil for Food scandal like Tongsun Park and Benon Sevan. So just the fact that Rosett was granted this interview is something in itself.

Here's a couple of select comments from the interview...

He says that when he left New York in 2005, "I didn't just run away to China, I already had an apartment here." He adds that his departure from the U.N. was motivated not by the Oil-for-Food investigations, but by his sense at the time, as Mr. Annan's special adviser on North Korea, that the U.N. had reached an impasse. "It just happened to coincide with the publicity surrounding my so-called nefarious activities." He insists: "I had no involvement at all in Oil-for-Food . . . I just stayed out of it."

On his current activities in China, Strong tells Rosett:

"My advice gets to the highest levels." he says. He has also been involved in setting up the Tianjin Climate Exchange for trading carbon credits: "the first climate exchange in China." It's a joint venture with several entities, including the Chicago Climate Exchange, where he holds a seat on the board.

There's much more, so be sure to read the whole thing.

h/t: Newsbeat1

Update: Strong publishes his views on the Future of China. Curiously the essay is marked "NOT FOR PUBLICATION IN AUSTRALIA, CANADA, NEW ZEALAND, CZECH REPUBLIC, IRELAND, POLAND, THE UNITED STATES, AND THE UNITED KINGDOM". But you can read it at the link.

Harper victorious

My election prediction was way off. Thankfully.

A strengthened minority for Stephen Harper's Conservatives with 37.6% of the popular vote and significant gains in Ontario. And a possible career change for Stephane Dion?

Record cold all over the place

California:

Temperatures dropped to 31 degrees in the Ukiah Valley on Saturday night and early Sunday morning, the coldest Oct. 12 morning since record keeping began in Ukiah in 1893, said Troy Nicolini, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Eureka. The previous record was 34 degrees in 1916.

Oregon:

Cold temperatures set several new record lows this weekend, including a low of 22 Saturday in downtown Pendleton that broke a 118 year-old record of 24.

Alaska:

Never before in the history of a research project dating back to 1946 had the Juneau Icefield witnessed the kind of snow buildup that came this year. It was similar on a lot of other glaciers too.

Election predictions

Just for fun tonight, Kate has a "seat projection thread" going at small dead animals. For what it's worth, I posted my prediction there.

BQ = 55
Conservatives = 132
Green = 0
Liberal = 85
NDP = 34
Other/Independent = 2

I also predicted the percentage of the popular vote for the winning party at 38.5%

I would like to see the Tories win bigger, but I think my projection is fairly realistic. Unless of course, there is real 3 way split on the left between the Grits, the NDP and Greenies. In that case the Tories could win a lot more seats.

We should know in a few hours!