Sunday, September 30, 2012

Surrender in New York

Surrender in New York

Thursday, September 27, 2012

Shadow on the corn

Shadow on the corn @ 60 MPH.

 

Some people work for a living, some people vote for a living


Bill Bennett-Why you shouldn't vote for Obama

Why you shouldn't vote for Obama

By William J. Bennett, CNN Contributor
updated 10:51 AM EDT, Thu September 27, 2012
President Barack Obama waves to visitors before leaving for a campaign trip to Ohio on Wednesday, September 26.
President Barack Obama waves to visitors before leaving for a campaign trip to Ohio on Wednesday, September 26.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
  • William Bennett outlines five reasons Obama should not serve a second term
  • First, he says, Obama has not gotten the U.S. out of its dire economic straits
  • Bennett: Obamacare is a costly federal mandate that amounts to huge tax increase
  • Bennett: He has broken promises, bypassed Congress, mishandled foreign policy
(CNN) -- It has been said that a democratic republic such as ours is a do-it-yourself enterprise. People change the course of this country through conversation, debate and, eventually, consensus. As the 2012 elections near, these debates, particularly the upcoming presidential and vice presidential debates, take center stage.
In light of what has been a long and tumultuous political season, here are my strongest arguments for Mitt Romney, Rep. Paul Ryan, and fellow conservatives to explain to their fellow Americans why President Barack Obama does not deserve a second term.
Obama's handling of the economy: The U.S. is mired in the midst of the worst recovery since the Great Depression: 43 straight months of unemployment over 8%. The unemployment rate when Barack Obama took office was 7.8% and today it is 8.1%. Worse, the labor force is shrinking to record lows. People are giving up looking for work.
William Bennett
William Bennett
In August the labor force participation rate fell to 63.5%, its lowest level since September 1981. For men, the August participation rate in the labor force was 69.8%. That's the lowest ever on record. Furthermore, half of all recent college graduates are underemployed or unemployed.
Since Obama took office, median household income has declined more than $4,000. More people are on food stamps than ever before -- 46.7 million. The poverty rate is around 15%, unchanged since 1993. The average retail price of gasoline has more than doubled under Obama, rising from $1.84 per gallon to more than $3.80 per gallon. In spite of this, he stopped the approval of the Keystone pipeline for further review.
Obama inherited a bad economy, but his policies have made it even worse. The $800 billion stimulus package failed, according to the standards promised by an Obama administration economist. With Democrats in control of Congress, Obama then spent the next two years of his political capital on health care reform. Subsequently, the nation, mired in a debt crisis, underwent its first-ever credit downgrade. With our national debt exceeding $16 trillion, he has offered no credible plan for the nation's long term fiscal health. Our country is hurtling toward a fiscal cliff in January 2013.
Foreign policy: Obama ascended to the presidency promising a new era of American foreign policy. Apart from the killing of Osama bin Laden, the death of Moammar Gaddafi and and the successful expansion of drone strikes, the foreign policy record of this administration has largely been one of capitulation, indecision and weakness.
In the first true foreign policy test of his presidency, Obama failed to back the pro-democracy Green Revolution in Iran, saying he didn't want to "be seen as meddling." The uprising was crushed.
When the Arab Spring erupted, the president then decided to meddle in Egypt, calling for Hosni Mubarak to step down. Today, a country that was once a valuable Middle East ally is under the majority control of the Muslim Brotherhood. But when the Arab Spring spread to Syria, a longtime proxy of Iran, he didn't intervene, even when Bashar al-Assad began massacring his own people.
The president has given some of our enemies a pass and some of our allies the back of the hand. He was caught on open mic badmouthing Benjamin Netanyahu and hasn't visited Israel once in his presidency. He left our ally Poland out to dry by canceling the missile defense system in Europe, but was heard on an open mic assuring Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that he will have "more flexibility" after the election to deal with missile defense.
America's two most important investments in the Middle East -- Iraq and Afghanistan -- are hanging by a thread. Ignoring the recommendations of his generals, Obama pulled troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan prematurely.
Most recently, an American ambassador and three other Americans were killed in Libya. Yet, for nearly two weeks the administration blamed their deaths on a movie before finally admitting it was a terrorist attack, and took too long to make a forceful defense of the First Amendment.
Obamacare: President Obama's crowning legislative achievement, whether he likes to admit it or not, is Obamacare. Mitt Romney has promised to repeal the Affordable Care Act and he should make his argument with these reasons: First, Obamacare is not Romneycare. Romneycare was a state mandate; Obamacare was a federal mandate.
Second, Obamacare is terrible federal policy. It is a massive tax increase over the next 10 years that will fall largely on middle-class families; it steals more than $700 billion from Medicare to pay for the expanded coverage under ObamaCare; the unelected Independent Payment Advisory Board will ration and control Medicare costs and services without the say of doctors and patients; the Department of Health and Human Services is granted virtually unfettered powers, like the contraception mandate. Obamacare is bad policy. It was over 2,700 pages of complex rules and regulations passed behind closed doors with backroom deals -- exactly the opposite of what Obama promised when he campaigned in 2008.
The imperial presidency: Throughout his first term in office, the president has repeatedly ignored or gone around Congress and arrogated his own agenda through executive fiat.
He instituted his own version of the Dream Act; his administration granted waivers to welfare reform without the approval of Congress; he refused to help Arizona enforce its immigration laws; he ordered his Justice Department to stop defending the Defense of Marriage Act in court; he gave states waivers to avoid No Child Left Behind requirements; he claimed executive privilege on Operation Fast and Furious to protect the faults of his Justice Department and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobbaco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF); and when the Senate refused to confirm his nominations to the National Labor Relations Board, he proclaimed the Senate was in recess and appointed them on his own. His own runaway EPA has waged regulatory war on coal plants resulting in the closure of six plants and possible closures of many more.
Broken promises: If you think I'm being too hard on the president, let's hold him to his own words and promises.
He promised to cut the deficit in half in his first term. He sought in Cairo in 2009 a "new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world." He promised to change the "tone" of Washington. His economic team promised that his $800 billion stimulus package would keep the unemployment rate under 8 percent. In 2008, he promised to tackle entitlement reform in his first term. Before Obamacare was passed Obama promised to "cut the cost of a typical family's premium by up to $2,500 a year" and that "If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan."
Americans realize the president has over-promised and under-delivered. The objective record, the multiple failures, and the unkept promises make a profound and fair case against the reelection of Barack Obama.

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Obama: “The Future Does Not Belong to Those Who Slander the Prophet of Islam” (Video)

Obama: “The Future Does Not Belong to Those Who Slander the Prophet of Islam” (Video)

Unreal… Notre Dame Invites Radical Abortion President Obama to Come Speak Again

Unreal… Notre Dame Invites Radical Abortion President Obama to Come Speak Again

Abortion pills for teens

How can you not hand out aspirin to teens, but give abortion pills to the same teens without parental approval/knowledge?

New York City quietly launched a pilot program last year that allows a school nurse or doctor to dispense free emergency contraceptive pills and birth control pills to girls at 13 public high schools. High schools nationwide have distributed condoms for years, but the New York City program may be one of the first to provide contraceptive pills.
The program, called CATCH, or Connecting Adolescents To Comprehensive Healthcare, is aimed at reducing unplanned teen pregnancy. It began in January 2011, but wasn't publicized until the New York Post reported it over the weekend.
“In any given every year there are about 7,000 pregnancies to girls ages 15 to 17 in New York City, about 90 percent of those are unintended,” said Deborah Kaplan, assistant commissioner at the city health department’s Bureau of Maternal, Infant and Reproductive Health. "We wanted to make sure young people who are sexually active have easy access to contraceptive services and general reproductive health services."
Oral contraceptives, including the morning-after Plan B pill, have been available to students at most of the 40 schools that have school-based health centers for the last one to four years, depending on the school, Kaplan said. The centers, which serve about one-quarter of New York City’s public high school students, provide primary care health services and are run privately by separate institutions like hospitals.
For the first time, with the CATCH program, the Health Department is making the contraceptives available in schools without the private health centers. The program began in January 2011 in five schools, and is now in 13 schools. The schools were chosen because they are in neighborhoods with high teen pregnancy rates or with limited resources for young people to get contraception. City high schools have long provided condoms.
Parents learned of the program through a letter that gave them a chance to opt out, which 1 percent to 2 percent of parents did, she said.
“We’ve had no negative reaction to the CATCH program,” Kaplan said. “We haven’t had one objection. We’ve just had the opt-outs.”
The pilot program offers pregnancy testing, along with the Plan B morning-after emergency contraceptive pill, which helps prevent pregnancy when taken within 72 hours, and traditional birth control pills. To get Plan B, girls must see a nurse, who would obtain a doctor’s order for the drug, Kaplan said. For oral contraceptives, they would need to see a Health Department doctor, Kaplan said.
The Health Department is studying to the program before deciding whether to expand. In the last school year, fewer than 1,200 of the 12,000 girls enrolled in the 13 schools obtained the oral contraceptives. For the 2011-2012 school year, 567 students received Plan B and 580 received birth control pills, Kaplan said. Of the unplanned teen pregnancies in the city, about 64 percent are terminated, the city says.
Dr. Cora Breuner, a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Adolescence, called the program, “totally new. Totally awesome.”
Teens nationwide aren’t doing a good job using birth control to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, she said, and most do not have access to contraception at school.
“This is the first time that a school nurse can give both Plan B and oral contraceptives to their students,” Breuner said. “This is great because it improves access to contraception and promotes education on reproductive health.”
Dr. John Santelli, an adolescent medicine specialist and professor at Columbia University who studies contraception use, said the program sends a strong message to sexually active teens about the need for contraception.
“Kids that see that level of support for condoms and contraception are more likely to use it,” he said. “It’s a big deal in the sense that it’s going to help the young woman that comes in, or the young man in the case of condoms, and it’s a strong statement to young people that contraception is important.”
Santelli predicted that the program will be effective, and said it could be replicated elsewhere. “I could see other big cities doing this,” he said. “I hope they do.”
The program is not without critics, though.
Valerie Huber, president of the National Abstinence Education Association, saw the program as an expansion of sex education and said the school system is not providing “meaningful skill building for abstinence education.”
"This new service is kind of, no pun intended, a plan D for what to do if sex education doesn’t work," Huber said. “We think it normalizes teen sex and does nothing to prevent sexually transmitted diseases.”
Kaplan, from the Health Department, noted that 38 percent of teenagers are sexually active, and said the city is committed to keeping them safe.
“We’re proud to play that role in promoting and protecting the health of our young people,” she said.

Monday, September 24, 2012

From Powerline, Obama, Axelrod and Gun Control-2nd term

Posted on by Steven Hayward in Second Amendment

Obama, Axelrod, and Gun Control in a Second Term?

The overachieving Charles C. Johnson of the Breitbart domain and several other enterprises (and a recent product of the Claremont brain factory), writes in exclusively to Power Line with a topic that Obama ought to be asked about in one of the debates—will a second-term Obama press for gun control? Apparently his chief strategist likes the idea:
David Axelrod called on citizens to “put pressure” on lawmakers and demagogued the recent shooting of a Chicagoan over the Christmas holiday. In an article titled simply, “Gun Control,” Axelrod prophesized there might come a time when guns could be restricted, writing on January 2, 1974:
“Thus far, that pressure [to pass gun control laws] has not been forthcoming. But maybe someday there will be one too many blood murders, one too many homicides entered into the police files, and that “pressure from the people” will come.”
Axelrod wanted to extend Chicago’s controversial gun ban and restriction law to the entirety of Illinois, and like Mayor Daley, pushed to make gun laws still stricter in his daily column for the Hyde Park Herald. He applauded the efforts of former New York Mayor John Lindsay to demand stricter federal gun laws and condemned efforts by the National Rifle Association to “thwart” those laws.
To his credit, Axelrod realized that the Chicago anti-gun approach wasn’t working. “Clearly, the gun problem is a perplexing one,” Axelrod wrote. “The registration laws have been ineffective, and any effort to construct stricter gun control laws will be crushed by the monstrous gun lobby.” What was needed was more gun control laws, beyond the usual registration and safety courses advocated by gun restrictionists.
Over and over again, Axelrod called for more anti gun laws in his column. There was, for instance, the glowing profile he did of the Civic Disarmament committee, which sought to pass handgun bans (January 16, 1974).
State Senator Barack Obama shared Axelrod’s views, pushing for gun control at every opportunity, including in the aftermath of tragic shootings in Chicago’s notoriously violent—and anti-gun—South Side. (See The Vetting: Obama Has Demagogued Guns, from 2000 to Today). Indeed, Obama campaigned on making gun control laws restricted in his 2000 bid for Congress.
The views Axelrod expressed in The Hyde Park Herald then provide an unusual glimpse into the politics and agenda of the man whom the president says shares nearly all of his political views. The anti-gun views also provide an insight into what the Obama Administration might do in a second term.
Might a horrific shooting be a crisis to good to waste?

Sunday, September 23, 2012

America's Undecided Voters


Democrat False Narrative-Auto Industry

The Democrats’ False Narrative on the Auto Industry

No, Obama did not "save" the auto industry.
by
Rand Simberg
Bio
September 21, 2012 - 12:15 am
Joe Biden has a bumper-sticker phrase to justify reelecting the president: “Bin Laden is dead, and GM is alive.” Some, such as former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm, doubled down on the demagoguery during the Democratic National Convention, declaring that Barack Obama saved not just General Motors, but the auto industry itself. But is it really true that were it not for the president, there would be no American auto industry?
Let’s start with Governor Granholm’s claim that Romney said that the “industry should go bankrupt.” Here’s what he actually wrote at the time:
The American auto industry is vital to our national interest as an employer and as a hub for manufacturing. A managed bankruptcy may be the only path to the fundamental restructuring the industry needs. It would permit the companies to shed excess labor, pension and real estate costs. The federal government should provide guarantees for post-bankruptcy financing and assure car buyers that their warranties are not at risk.
In other words, he actually endorsed a government bailout. While it would no doubt have been better if the title of his piece hadn’t been “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt” (that likely came from the editorial page copy editor, not Romney himself), what he proposed was completely reasonable, in the context of a bailout (whether there should have been a bailout at all is a separate issue).
Part of the problem is that the governor is either ignorant herself or hopes that her listeners are ignorant of the meaning of the word “bankruptcy.” It doesn’t necessarily mean that the bankrupt company ceases to exist, let alone that the industry itself would disappear. It simply means that the business is restructured to allow it to continue to operate if it is producing viable products. This might include voiding existing contracts and agreements (including labor agreements), and renegotiating with creditors. But to listen to the Democrats, if Obama hadn’t stepped in, there would be no autos built in America today, and millions more people would be out of work. This is nonsense, on multiple levels.
Let’s review the history. In the fall of 2008, amid the general financial crisis and global recession, Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler were hemorrhaging money and came to the government with their hands out. There was a hearing in Washington (at which the well-compensated auto executives were stupidly criticized for attending via private jet, as if their time had no value). Rick Wagoner, then-head of GM, brazenly declared that failure to bail his company out would be the cause of a “catastrophic economic collapse” of the U.S. economy.
Ford was actually in reasonable shape to weather the economic storm compared to its two American competitors, having undergone restructuring on its own in the past half decade, but it came to the table because it didn’t want to be at a competitive disadvantage in terms of access to taxpayer funds. In addition, Alan Alan Mulally, its CEO, claimed that the loss of one or more of its competitors would affect its supplier base, which it shared with them. But all of these claims had to be taken with a grain of salt, considering how self-serving they were.
In early December, unhappy with the automakers’ restructuring plans, the Senate voted down a taxpayer bailout, but lame-duck president George W. Bush, by executive order, overrode Section 102 of the TARP funding, meant to provide bridge loans to prop up failing financial institutions while they came up with restructuring plans, and issued them to GM and Chrysler. This turned out to be not only (probably) illegal, but a terrible policy, because it gave the Obama administration an excuse, as a “watchdog on the taxpayers’ money,” to interfere with what should have been a properly structured bankruptcy for both companies when it came into power in January, to aid its political allies.
What Jennifer Granholm and others need to understand is that in fact both GM and Chrysler did file for bankruptcy, and did restructure. But rather than doing it before an impartial bankruptcy judge with a negotiation between the companies and their creditors, as a major (new) creditor, the federal government (Obama’s federal government) became the arbiter instead, screwing the existing bondholders. Rather than the UAW being forced to renegotiate the terms of its contracts with those companies that had been a partial cause of their financial failure, the administration simply handed part of them over to the union, with an arbitrary amount of stock in return for their pension obligations, and converting its own debt to stock.
What would have happened had the government not stepped in? Well, we know what wouldn’t have happened. It wouldn’t have been the end of the auto industry in America. Honda, Nissan, Toyota, Mercedes and the other companies would have continued to manufacture cars in the U.S. without missing a beat. It wouldn’t even have been the end of the American auto industry, because Ford never received any government funds, and they have actually been pulling thousands of jobs back from Mexico and Asia to the U.S. Chrysler and GM would have probably continued in some form, and undergone a proper restructuring, including renegotiation of the union contracts to make them competitive once more. In the worst case, liquidation, Ford (or someone else, perhaps even a startup) could have acquired their assets and expanded its own production to satisfy the demand created by the disappearance of the two companies.
That is, contra the latest false narrative of the campaign, Obama didn’t “save the car companies from bankruptcy,” let alone “save the auto industry” — he simply saved the UAW, the administration’s political ally, from a bankruptcy judge. Judge Gerber’s ruling in July of 2009 was simply a rubber stamp of a corrupt government restructuring by fiat.


Rand Simberg is a recovering aerospace engineer and a consultant in space commercialization, space tourism and Internet security. He offers occasionally biting commentary about infinity and beyond at his

Friday, September 21, 2012

Mia Love, Great Lady


Jill/Joe Biden, penis joke?


Romney taxes

Romneys to Release Taxes

1:48 PM, Sep 21, 2012 • By DANIEL HALPER
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The Romney campaign is releasing Mitt and Ann Romney's 2011 tax return today. The campaign previews a few of the highlights here:
  • In 2011, the Romneys paid $1,935,708 in taxes on $13,696,951 in mostly investment income.
  • The Romneys’ effective tax rate for 2011 was 14.1%.
  • The Romneys donated $4,020,772 to charity in 2011, amounting to nearly 30% of their income.
  • The Romneys claimed a deduction for $2.25 million of those charitable contributions.
  • The Romneys’ generous charitable donations in 2011 would have significantly reduced their tax obligation for the year. The Romneys thus limited their deduction of charitable contributions to conform to the Governor's statement in August, based upon the January estimate of income, that he paid at least 13% in income taxes in each of the last 10 years.
Additionally, the Romney campaign is releasing a summary of 20 years of taxes, between 1990-2009, detailing their tax expenditures during those years:
  • In each year during the entire 20-year period, the Romneys owed both state and federal income taxes.
  • Over the entire 20-year period, the average annual effective federal tax rate was 20.20%.
  • Over the entire 20-year period, the lowest annual effective federal personal tax rate was 13.66%.
  • Over the entire 20-year period, the Romneys gave to charity an average of 13.45% of their adjusted gross income.
  • Over the entire 20-year period, the total federal and state taxes owed plus the total charitable donations deducted represented 38.49% of total AGI.

Top House Republican on Benghazi Terror Attack: The President Is “Purposely Misleading the American People” (Video)

Top House Republican on Benghazi Terror Attack: The President Is “Purposely Misleading the American People” (Video)

Food Stamp President

More Americans Added to Food Stamps Than Find Jobs

10:30 AM, Sep 21, 2012 • By DANIEL HALPER
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An alarming data point from the minority side of the Senate Budget Committee: More Americans are being added to food stamps than are finding jobs. The data is detailed in this chart, provided by the committee:

As the chart shows, between April-June 2012 (the most recent three month block for which government data is available), only 200,000 jobs have been created while 265,000 individuals have been added to the food stamp rolls. Additionally, in that time period, 246,000 workers were awarded disability.
Another chart shows that the last three month block is part of a larger trend. The chart, also from the minority side of the Senate Budget Committee, shows that "Workforce Shrinks Since January 2009 While Millions Sign Up For Disability And Food Stamps."

As the chart shows, since January 2009, when President Barack Obama took office, the net change jobs has been negative (-1.3 million), while 5.7 million workers and dependents have been awarded disability and a whopping 15.1 million have been added to the food stamp rolls.
"A total of 46,670,373 Americans are now on food stamps," according to the minority side of the Senate Budget Committee. "The food stamp program has doubled in size since 2008 and quadrupled since 2001."
And the government program isn't cheap: "Spending on food stamps alone is projected to reach $770 billion over the next decade."

Thursday, September 20, 2012

Dr Helen Smith-Modern Feminist

Portrait of a Modern Feminist: Helen Smith


Charlotte Hays





One of the oft-cited “facts” at the Democratic Conventions was that being a woman was “a pre-existing condition” before Obamacare. Hooey, according to Dr. Helen Smith, a forensic psychologist known as “Dr. Helen” on Pajamas Media.

Far from being discriminated against, women already consume about 75 percent of health care in the United States, Smith says. Men, on the other hand, are frequently encouraged not to go to the doctor for routine tests, including the life-saving PSA test to detect cancer.

“I absolutely think there’s a war on men. I laugh and cringe every time I see something on the ‘war on women,’” says Smith. Smith, who is also an authority on violent children, is half of a blogging couple—she is married to Glenn Harlan Reynolds, the University of Tennessee law professor known as Instapundit. They live in Knoxville, Tennessee, where she continues to see patients once a week, though she has shifted her focus to writing.

Smith has a book coming out from Encounter Books entitled Male Strike: Society’s War on Men. The thesis of the book is that the deck is so stacked against men that they are “going Galt,” as Smith puts it. The term comes from Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged in which society’s productive members went on strike—led by John Galt—because they were being exploited.

“In the case of men, the government and the politicians work in cahoots with women to extract money from men,” Smith says.” And then men aren’t entitled to a lot of the benefits, such as WIC (Women, Infants and Children Program) or a lot of welfare.”

The male strike can take the form of not marrying, not going to college or working at low-paying jobs and taking up hobbies to avoid paying into a system that uses state and federal programs to transfer men’s taxes to women. And taxpayer money doesn’t just go to what we regard as traditional welfare programs. Smith cites the Violence Against Women Act, which funnels taxpayer dollars to organizations staffed by activist women.

“One reason women promote the war on women is that many of these women have degrees in such things as women’s studies and hold academic jobs, and they are the ones yelling because they know that if their benefits were cut out, who the hell needs them? They are not necessary but there is a lot of funding for these things. It’s all about money.”

“I’m a feminist in that I believe in equality,” says Smith. “But that doesn’t mean the superiority of women. What has happened is that [a legitimate movement for equality] has morphed into a whole political system based on women having special privileges, and the more privileges they have the more entitled they feel.”

Women activists have sought and obtained laws that make it easier to convict men of sexual abuse on what formerly would have been deemed insufficient evidence. The Violence Against Women Act seriously eroded traditional legal standards regarding evidence. A letter from the Department of Education’s Civil Rights Office—known as the “Dear Colleagues” letter—further diluted the evidence standards when accusations are lodged against young men on campus.

“A man’s rights go only as far as a woman’s honesty,” Smith says. “If a woman says a man is domestically abusive, hardly any evidence is needed. Women can just point the finger at you, and men don’t have rights in terms of getting kids.” In the past, men had more say in marriages. This was not right, Smith says. But today men have far fewer rights than women in a marriage, and that isn’t fair either.

“Men are discriminated against in ways that women can’t understand and yet we say there is a war on women,” scoffs Smith. Title IX, for example, a law passed forty years ago, to expand opportunities for female athletes, ended up curtailing the opportunities for men to participate in sports. This has made men feel “less welcome” on college campuses, Smith says.

While Smith is a fan of Kay Hymowitz, the Manhattan Institute scholar who wrote the classic Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys, she does have a quibble. “What Kay Hymowitz calls the perpetual adolescence of men is just men understanding that the cards are dealt against them,” she says—or, in other words, men going Galt.

“One thing I talk about [in the book] is that I used to think as a woman it’s hard to be a men’s rights activist,” she says. “I want men and women who care about them to have the courage to stand up in a world that says that there is only male privilege. I would like people to put themselves in somebody else’s shoes and see the world from the male point of view and see that maybe things aren’t so great.”

Smith’s advocacy for men is a second career of sorts. She originally became well-known as anexpert on violent children. Her book The Scarred Heart is about suchkids. She has done a documentary film entitled Six on the six young people who in 1997 murdered a family. It shows how failures in the mental health and legal systems failed to stop the killings.

Whenever there is a rampage shooting—such as the ones in Tucson or Aurora—an immediate response is to look for “a simplistic answer” such as blaming guns or violent music and movies. But the real problem is more complicated: “Most of them are mentally ill, and one of the big problems is mental health in our society is not thebest. We don’t focus on getting the people the treatment they need. There are roughly about a thousand murders a year by the mentally ill,” she says.

Smith, who specializes in treating violent children, says that intervention can prevent murders, if the child’s problems are diagnosed in time. She says that the goal is not to turn these damaged children into saints or even admirable citizens but simply to help them not commit bigger crimes such as murder. Interestingly, a lack of self-esteem isn’t their problem.

“What [experts] have found is that high self-esteem isn’t necessarily linked to highly adaptive behavior,” Smith says. “In fact it can be just the opposite. One of the things found with killers is that many of them have very high self esteem—a high self-esteem that is fragile. One thing I’ve found with rampage killers is that they can’t stand having people judge them. The fact that somebody is judging them and finding them inadequate sends them into a rage. And they’ll take the rage out on anybody.”

“Often what you see with rampage shooters is that [the shooting] is a climactic conclusion…. They have a feeling like I should be special. It gives them this discrepancy: I am down here and yet I am supposed to be up here, and somebody is going to pay for that.”

Another problem leading up to a dramatic event is that children haven’t faced consequences for smaller actions. This leaves them confused. “We are a society that doesn’t have consequences anymore.” Smith says. “Even in the political system there are no consequences. If you don’t pay your mortgage, hey, you can probably get off the hook in some way. Our political system is based on that. We’re a society in which anything goes in a certain sense, and at the same time nothing does.”

Obama Refuses Meetings With ALL Israeli Leaders Next Week – Will Meet Egypt’s Morsi

Obama Refuses Meetings With ALL Israeli Leaders Next Week – Will Meet Egypt’s Morsi

New Obama Flag Looks Eerily Like Blood-Stained Walls at Benghazi Consulate

New Obama Flag Looks Eerily Like Blood-Stained Walls at Benghazi Consulate

Despite What Obama Said – The Two Ex-Navy SEALs Were Not Part of Libyan Ambassador’s Security Detail

Despite What Obama Said – The Two Ex-Navy SEALs Were Not Part of Libyan Ambassador’s Security Detail

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Global Warming, My A$$.

Antarctic Sea Ice Sets Another Record

2478
7660
4
19
129
Antarctic Iceberg
Antarctic Iceberg (Photo credit: NOAA's National Ocean Service)
Antarctic sea ice set another record this past week, with the most amount of ice ever recorded on day 256 of the calendar year (September 12 of this leap year). Please, nobody tell the mainstream media or they might have to retract some stories and admit they are misrepresenting scientific data.
National Public Radio (NPR) published an article on its website last month claiming, “Ten years ago, a piece of ice the size of Rhode Island disintegrated and melted in the waters off Antarctica. Two other massive ice shelves along the Antarctic Peninsula had suffered similar fates a few years before. The events became poster children for the effects of global warming. … There’s no question that unusually warm air triggered the final demise of these huge chunks of ice.”
NPR failed to mention anywhere in its article that Antarctic sea ice has been growing since satellites first began measuring the ice 33 years ago and the sea ice has been above the 33-year average throughout 2012.
Indeed, none of the mainstream media are covering this important story. A Google News search of the terms Antarctic, sea ice and record turns up not a single article on the Antarctic sea ice record. Amusingly, page after page of Google News results for Antarctic sea ice record show links to news articles breathlessly spreading fear and warning of calamity because Arctic sea ice recently set a 33-year low.
Sea ice around one pole is shrinking while sea ice around another pole is growing. This sure sounds like a global warming crisis to me.