Obama to Reverse Bush Abortion Regulation

This is the soft of thing I would have expected from the OLD Washington... I guess things haven't changed much at all.

To think that a medical professional could be forced to participate in an abortion is... well UNthinkable to me. Why do pro-choice people want to give everyone a choice but the doctor?

Official: Obama to Reverse Bush Abortion Regulation - First 100 Days of Presidency - Politics FOXNews.com [This Post Continues after the jump...]

Politics in the Guise of Pure Science

so much for "change"

Findings - Politics in the Guise of Pure Science - NYTimes.com



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Floridians Unite - Orlando Tea Party

I just might have to attend this things... you know.. reporting on it for my blog... maybe wear my PJs....

Floridians Unite - Home



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Holder: US is nation of cowards on racial matters

Holder: US is nation of cowards on racial matters

WASHINGTON (AP) - Attorney General Eric Holder described the United States Wednesday as a nation of cowards on matters of race, saying most Americans avoid discussing unresolved racial issues.

In a speech to Justice Department employees marking Black History Month, Holder said the workplace is largely integrated but Americans still self-segregate on the weekends and in their private lives.

"Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards," said Holder, nation's first black attorney general.

Race issues continue to be a topic of political discussion, Holder said, but "we, as average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each other about race."

He urged people of all races to use Black History Month as a chance for frank talk about racial matters.

"It is an issue we have never been at ease with and, given our nation's history, this is in some ways understandable," Holder said. "If we are to make progress in this area, we must feel comfortable enough with one another and tolerant enough of each other to have frank conversations about the racial matters that continue to divide us."

He told Justice Department employees they have a special responsibility to advance racial understanding.

Oh, and this is SUCH a GREAT way to start the conversation.. calling us all COWARDS!

It's an indication to me that they, black leaders, are NOT serious about having a real conversation. They are laying the ground work for labeling ME the coward for walking out on the hypothetical "conversation". Why? Because they know I'm going to walk out because they are not being serious. I have no desire to talk with some that is only going to whine about their victimization and then call me a coward to not wanting to listen to it.

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Questioning Obama

Before anyone goes nuts, place note that it doesn't say "Opposing Obama" but just Questioning him and his policies. Something every voter should always do.


The Obama-cide Shop [This Post Continues after the jump...]

The Illustrated Road to Serfdom

WOW..

I hope everyone reads this.
I'm not saying it IS happening, just that it honestly COULD happen.
The emotion, rather than logic, that got Obama elected is troubling to me, and could be the beginning of something like this. The power of the government over the economy is certainly increasing now, and rather illogically and quickly. And don't forget the speed in which is "must" be done.

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
-- Thomas Jefferson (Attributed)

The Illustrated Road to Serfdom [This Post Continues after the jump...]

Former astronaut, Harrison Schmitt, speaks out on global warming

I think the scientific pendulum is starting to return to reason, but the political pendulum is still moving left!

Former astronaut speaks out on global warming - BostonHerald.com [This Post Continues after the jump...]

Federal obligations exceed world GDP

We're doomed....

Federal obligations exceed world GDP


...the American public is largely unaware that the true deficit [ed: should be true DEBT] of the federal government already is measured in trillions of dollars, and in fact its $65.5 trillion in total obligations exceeds the gross domestic product of the world.

The real 2008 federal budget deficit was $5.1 trillion. [This Post Continues after the jump...]

Obama's So-Called Stimulus: Good For Government, Bad For the Economy

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White House may move to buy mortgages

White House may move to buy mortgages - Personal finance- msnbc.com

It seems to me that this is the root of the problem. Bad mortgage mixed in with good ones and no one wants to trade them around. Maybe there's more to it than that, but buying a $300K mortgage on a house worth $200K for $200 would be a small "punishment" to the bank with the mortgage (similar but easier than what they would get from a foreclosure). The Government could then refinance with the home owner at $200K and then sell that "good" mortgage back into the system.

In this case the government loose NOTHING (but some time value of the $200K).

The down side is two fold

A- The bank holding the "bad" mortgage almost assuredly isn't the bank that MADE the bad mortgage, so we're punishing the wrong bank.

B - The homeowner might not be able to really afford the "new" mortgage either so the government may end up kicking them out of the house anyways. Which is bad PR is they do, and another "bad" mortgage in the system if they don't. [This Post Continues after the jump...]

Essay - Darwinism Must Die So That Evolution May Live - NYTimes.com

Essay - Darwinism Must Die So That Evolution May Live - NYTimes.com

Darwinism Must Die So That Evolution May Live
By CARL SAFINA

“You care for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat-catching,” Robert Darwin told his son, “and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.” Yet the feckless boy is everywhere. Charles Darwin gets so much credit, we can’t distinguish evolution from him.

Equating evolution with Charles Darwin ignores 150 years of discoveries, including most of what scientists understand about evolution. Such as: Gregor Mendel’s patterns of heredity (which gave Darwin’s idea of natural selection a mechanism — genetics — by which it could work); the discovery of DNA (which gave genetics a mechanism and lets us see evolutionary lineages); developmental biology (which gives DNA a mechanism); studies documenting evolution in nature (which converted the hypothetical to observable fact); evolution’s role in medicine and disease (bringing immediate relevance to the topic); and more.

By propounding “Darwinism,” even scientists and science writers perpetuate an impression that evolution is about one man, one book, one “theory.” The ninth-century Buddhist master Lin Chi said, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” The point is that making a master teacher into a sacred fetish misses the essence of his teaching. So let us now kill Darwin.

That all life is related by common ancestry, and that populations change form over time, are the broad strokes and fine brushwork of evolution. But Darwin was late to the party. His grandfather, and others, believed new species evolved. Farmers and fanciers continually created new plant and animal varieties by selecting who survived to breed, thus handing Charles Darwin an idea. All Darwin perceived was that selection must work in nature, too.

In 1859, Darwin’s perception and evidence became “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.” Few realize he published 8 books before and 10 books after “Origin.” He wrote seminal books on orchids, insects, barnacles and corals. He figured out how atolls form, and why they’re tropical.

Credit Darwin’s towering genius. No mind ran so freely, so widely or so freshly over the hills and vales of existence. But there’s a limit to how much credit is reasonable. Parking evolution with Charles Darwin overlooks the limits of his time and all subsequent progress.

Science was primitive in Darwin’s day. Ships had no engines. Not until 1842, six years after Darwin’s Beagle voyage, did Richard Owen coin the term “dinosaur.” Darwin was an adult before scientists began debating whether germs caused disease and whether physicians should clean their instruments. In 1850s London, John Snow fought cholera unaware that bacteria caused it. Not until 1857 did Johann Carl Fuhlrott and Hermann Schaaffhausen announce that unusual bones from the Neander Valley in Germany were perhaps remains of a very old human race. In 1860 Louis Pasteur performed experiments that eventually disproved “spontaneous generation,” the idea that life continually arose from nonliving things.

Science has marched on. But evolution can seem uniquely stuck on its founder. We don’t call astronomy Copernicism, nor gravity Newtonism. “Darwinism” implies an ideology adhering to one man’s dictates, like Marxism. And “isms” (capitalism, Catholicism, racism) are not science. “Darwinism” implies that biological scientists “believe in” Darwin’s “theory.” It’s as if, since 1860, scientists have just ditto-headed Darwin rather than challenging and testing his ideas, or adding vast new knowledge.

Using phrases like “Darwinian selection” or “Darwinian evolution” implies there must be another kind of evolution at work, a process that can be described with another adjective. For instance, “Newtonian physics” distinguishes the mechanical physics Newton explored from subatomic quantum physics. So “Darwinian evolution” raises a question: What’s the other evolution?

Into the breach: intelligent design. I am not quite saying Darwinism gave rise to creationism, though the “isms” imply equivalence. But the term “Darwinian” built a stage upon which “intelligent” could share the spotlight.

Charles Darwin didn’t invent a belief system. He had an idea, not an ideology. The idea spawned a discipline, not disciples. He spent 20-plus years amassing and assessing the evidence and implications of similar, yet differing, creatures separated in time (fossils) or in space (islands). That’s science.

That’s why Darwin must go.

Almost everything we understand about evolution came after Darwin, not from him. He knew nothing of heredity or genetics, both crucial to evolution. Evolution wasn’t even Darwin’s idea.

Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus believed life evolved from a single ancestor. “Shall we conjecture that one and the same kind of living filaments is and has been the cause of all organic life?” he wrote in “Zoonomia” in 1794. He just couldn’t figure out how.

Charles Darwin was after the how. Thinking about farmers’ selective breeding, considering the high mortality of seeds and wild animals, he surmised that natural conditions acted as a filter determining which individuals survived to breed more individuals like themselves. He called this filter “natural selection.” What Darwin had to say about evolution basically begins and ends right there. Darwin took the tiniest step beyond common knowledge. Yet because he perceived — correctly — a mechanism by which life diversifies, his insight packed sweeping power.

But he wasn’t alone. Darwin had been incubating his thesis for two decades when Alfred Russel Wallace wrote to him from Southeast Asia, independently outlining the same idea. Fearing a scoop, Darwin’s colleagues arranged a public presentation crediting both men. It was an idea whose time had come, with or without Darwin.

Darwin penned the magnum opus. Yet there were weaknesses. Individual variation underpinned the idea, but what created variants? Worse, people thought traits of both parents blended in the offspring, so wouldn’t a successful trait be diluted out of existence in a few generations? Because Darwin and colleagues were ignorant of genes and the mechanics of inheritance, they couldn’t fully understand evolution.

Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk, discovered that in pea plants inheritance of individual traits followed patterns. Superiors burned his papers posthumously in 1884. Not until Mendel’s rediscovered “genetics” met Darwin’s natural selection in the “modern synthesis” of the 1920s did science take a giant step toward understanding evolutionary mechanics. Rosalind Franklin, James Watson and Francis Crick bestowed the next leap: DNA, the structure and mechanism of variation and inheritance.

Darwin’s intellect, humility (“It is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance”) and prescience astonish more as scientists clarify, in detail he never imagined, how much he got right.

But our understanding of how life works since Darwin won’t swim in the public pool of ideas until we kill the cult of Darwinism. Only when we fully acknowledge the subsequent century and a half of value added can we really appreciate both Darwin’s genius and the fact that evolution is life’s driving force, with or without Darwin.

Carl Safina is a MacArthur fellow, an adjunct professor at Stony Brook University and the president of the Blue Ocean Institute. His books include “Song for the Blue Ocean,” “Eye of the Albatross” and “Voyage of the Turtle.”
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Ruin Your Health With the Obama Stimulus Plan

I'm not posting this because I think these health care proposals are necessarily BAD.
I honestly don't know and I doubt many in Congress do either.
They should be openly debated as a SEPARATE bill and not part of the emergency "must past" Stimulus bill

Obama is losing any chance he ever had to really lead and unite the country. He should insist on a clean stimulus only bill and veto anything else. But he's not. He's using the cover of the economic crisis to enact far reaching changes that few know about and many would oppose.

So much for Changing Washington...


Bloomberg.com: Opinion



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50 De-Stimulating Facts

Obama was supposed to bring CHANGE... But here are 50 ways that Washington has already CHANGED Obama... oh wait, Obama hasn't really changed at all, he's always been a socialist.

50 De-Stimulating Facts by Stephen Spruiell & Kevin Williamson on National Review Online

Summary:

• $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts
• $380 million in the Senate bill for the Women, Infants and Children program
• $300 million for grants to combat violence against women
• $2 billion for federal child-care block grants
• $6 billion for university building projects
• $15 billion for boosting Pell Grant college scholarships
• $4 billion for job-training programs, including $1.2 billion for “youths” up to the age of 24
• $1 billion for community-development block grants
• $4.2 billion for “neighborhood stabilization activities”
• $650 million for digital-TV coupons; $90 million to educate “vulnerable populations”

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