Iranians suspicious of recount offer as Tehran goes on unofficial strike – Times Online

Iranians suspicious of recount offer as Tehran goes on unofficial strike – Times Online.

DRUDGE REPORT: ABC TURNS PROGRAMMING OVER TO OBAMA 2009®

DRUDGE REPORT: ABC TURNS PROGRAMMING OVER TO OBAMA 2009®.

ABC TURNS PROGRAMMING OVER TO OBAMA; NEWS TO BE ANCHORED FROM INSIDE WHITE HOUSE
Tue Jun 16 2009 08:45:10 ET

On the night of June 24, the media and government become one, when ABC turns its programming over to President Obama and White House officials to push government run health care — a move that has ignited an ethical firestorm!

Highlights on the agenda:

ABCNEWS anchor Charlie Gibson will deliver WORLD NEWS from the Blue Room of the White House.

The network plans a primetime special — ‘Prescription for America’ — originating from the East Room, exclude opposing voices on the debate.

MORE

Late Monday night, Republican National Committee Chief of Staff Ken McKay fired off a complaint to the head of ABCNEWS:

Dear Mr. Westin:

As the national debate on health care reform intensifies, I am deeply concerned and disappointed with ABC’s astonishing decision to exclude opposing voices on this critical issue on June 24, 2009. Next Wednesday, ABC News will air a primetime health care reform “town hall” at the White House with President Barack Obama. In addition, according to an ABC News report, GOOD MORNING AMERICA, WORLD NEWS, NIGHTLINE and ABC’s web news “will all feature special programming on the president’s health care agenda.” This does not include the promotion, over the next 9 days, the president’s health care agenda will receive on ABC News programming.

Today, the Republican National Committee requested an opportunity to add our Party’s views to those of the President’s to ensure that all sides of the health care reform debate are presented. Our request was rejected. I believe that the President should have the ability to speak directly to the America people. However, I find it outrageous that ABC would prohibit our Party’s opposing thoughts and ideas from this national debate, which affects millions of ABC viewers.

In the absence of opposition, I am concerned this event will become a glorified infomercial to promote the Democrat agenda. If that is the case, this primetime infomercial should be paid for out of the DNC coffers. President Obama does not hold a monopoly on health care reform ideas or on free airtime. The President has stated time and time again that he wants a bipartisan debate. Therefore, the Republican Party should be included in this primetime event, or the DNC should pay for your airtime.

Respectfully,
Ken McKay
Republican National Committee
Chief of Staff

ABCNEWS Senior Vice President Kerry Smith on Tuesday responded to the RNC complaint, saying it contained ‘false premises’:

“ABCNEWS prides itself on covering all sides of important issues and asking direct questions of all newsmakers — of all political persuasions — even when others have taken a more partisan approach and even in the face of criticism from extremes on both ends of the political spectrum. ABCNEWS is looking for the most thoughtful and diverse voices on this issue.

“ABCNEWS alone will select those who will be in the audience asking questions of the president. Like any programs we broadcast, ABC News will have complete editorial control. To suggest otherwise is quite unfair to both our journalists and our audience.”

Developing…

EDITORIAL: Iran’s Twitter revolution – Washington Times

Witnessing a new chapter in the quest for freedom

By | Tuesday, June 16, 2009

The spirit of liberty finally arrived at Tehran’s Freedom Square. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians demonstrated Monday against Friday’s election, which handed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad an improbably lopsided victory.

The mass protests followed a weekend of street demonstrations, rioting and other expressions of discontent. These events were brought to the world in real time through social-media networks and online video.

Tehran’s authoritarian leaders clearly were caught off-guard. They had managed to take down the telephone system opposition supporters used for texting but for some reason were slow to eliminate other social media. As open defiance of the election results broke out, citizen journalists used new media to spread the word. And the whole Web was watching.

Iran is a highly computer-literate society with a large number of bloggers and hackers. The hackers in particular were active in helping keep channels open as the regime blocked them, and they spread the word about functioning proxy portals. Hackers also reportedly took down Mr. Ahmadinejad’s Web site in an act of cyberdisobedience.

The immediacy of the reports was gripping. Well-developed Twitter lists showed a constant stream of situation updates and links to photos and videos, all of which painted a portrait of the developing turmoil. Digital photos and videos proliferated and were picked up and reported in countless external sources safe from the regime’s Net crackdown. Eventually the regime started taking down these sources, and the e-dissidents shifted to e-mail. The only way to completely block the flow of Internet information would have been to take the entire country offline, a move the regime apparently has resisted thus far.

There seems to be no shortage of video cameras in Iran. The footage that has emerged is raw, unedited and dramatic. It is a revolution in cinema verite courtesy of YouTube, showing young people throwing rocks, scenes of burning tires and vehicles and riot police delivering savage beatings. By contrast, the videos from early Monday of the Freedom Square demonstration show police standing by as the crowd peacefully flows into the square, chanting and singing, festooned in green scarves and shirts, with banners flying. The message is distinctive: “Marg bar dictator!” they chant. “Death to the dictator!”

The scene turned violent as paramilitary Basij and police rooftop snipers opened fire. Reports of deaths tweeted out, and within minutes, a gruesome picture circulated of a man lying face-up in the street, blood covering his face and pooled around his head. Other photos followed of other people bloodied or dead. Soon there were reports of nonstop shooting and opposition leaders arrested. A crackdown was under way.

What we are seeing is the flickering flame of freedom. People are willing to risk their lives to protest a system that….

Click on the link below to read more….

via EDITORIAL: Iran’s Twitter revolution – Washington Times.

U.S. to Confront, Not Board, North Korean Ships – NYTimes.com

By DAVID E. SANGER

Published: June 16, 2009

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration will order the Navy to hail and request permission to inspect North Korean ships at sea suspected of carrying arms or nuclear technology, but will not board them by force, senior administration officials said Monday.

Times Topics: North KoreaThe new effort to intercept North Korean ships, and track them to their next port, where Washington will press for the inspections they refused at sea, is part of what the officials described as “vigorous enforcement” of the United Nations Security Council resolution approved Friday.

The planned American action stops just short of the forced inspections that North Korea has said that it would regard as an act of war. Still, the administration’s plans, if fully executed, would amount to the most confrontational approach taken by the United States in dealing with North Korea in years, and carries a risk of escalating tensions at a time when North Korea has been carrying out missile and nuclear tests.

In discussing President Obama’s strategy on Monday, administration officials said that the United States would report any ship that refused inspection to the Security Council. While the Navy and American intelligence agencies continued to track the ship, the administration would mount a vigorous diplomatic effort to insist that the inspections be carried out by any country that allowed the vessel into port.

The officials said that they believed that China, once a close cold war ally, would also enforce the new sanctions, which also require countries to refuse to refuel or resupply ships suspected of carrying out arms and nuclear technology.

“China will implement the resolution earnestly,” said Qin Gang, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said.

One official in Washington said the administration was told by their Chinese counterparts that China “would not have signed on to this resolution unless they intended to enforce it.”

The strategy of ordering ships to stop but not provoking military action by boarding them was negotiated among Washington, Beijing and Moscow. It is unclear to what degree South Korea or Japan, at various times bitter adversaries of North Korea, would order their naval forces to join in the effort to intercept suspected shipments at sea, largely because of fears about what would happen if North Korean ships opened fire.

A senior administration official said Monday evening that the United States believed that it already had sufficient intelligence and naval assets in the Sea of Japan to track North Korean ships and flights. The country’s cargo fleet is relatively small, and the North is wary…

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via U.S. to Confront, Not Board, North Korean Ships – NYTimes.com.

U.S. likely to lose AAA rating: Prechter | Industry Summits | Reuters

Mon Jun 15, 2009 5:17pm EDT

By John Parry

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Technical analyst Robert Prechter on Monday said he sees the United States losing its top AAA credit rating by the end of 2010, as he stuck by a deeply bearish outlook on the U.S. economy and stock market.

Prechter, known for predicting the 1987 stock market crash, joins a growing coterie of market heavyweights in forecasting the United States will lose its top credit rating as the government issues trillions of dollars in debt to fund efforts to bail out the economy.

Fears about the long-term vulnerability of the prized U.S. credit rating came to the fore after Standard & Poor’s in May lowered its outlook on Britain, threatening the UK’s top AAA rating. That move raised fears that the United States could face a similar risk, with the hefty amounts of government debt issued in both countries to pay for financial rescues causing budget deficits to swell.

Prechter, speaking at the Reuters Investment Outlook Summit in New York, said he sees investors’ confidence in an economic rebound fading, a trend that will drag the S&P 500 stock index .SPX well below the March 6 intraday low of 666.79 by the end of this year or early next.

“There will be a leg down in stock prices, and it will affect all other areas,” including corporate bonds and commodities, said Prechter, who is executive officer at research company Elliott Wave International, based in Gainesville, Georgia.

Prechter, who is known for his bearish views, has repeatedly forecast a steep decline in stocks this year, even as the stock market has rebounded from 12-year lows set in March as optimism about an economic recovery has risen.

Despite the government and Federal Reserve’s massive rescues for financial companies and securities markets, Prechter expects credit markets to clam up again as they did in the first phase of the global financial crisis and for the U.S. economy to sink into a depression.

Although U.S. banks’ recently passed government “stress tests” that assessed the adequacy of their capital levels to absorb losses and have been able to raise some capital in debt and equity markets, “the banking sector is in severe trouble,” as more loans turn bad, he said.

The economy “is obviously heading toward a depression,” despite the government’s efforts to dodge one, said Prechter.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has not averted a re-run of the 1930s Great Depression, even though investors are becoming firmly convinced that the Fed has avoided disaster and that the economy has hit bottom.

“It’s the next leg down (in stocks) that will make it clear that these things are not true,” Prechter said.

(Editing by Leslie Adler)

via U.S. likely to lose AAA rating: Prechter | Industry Summits | Reuters.

“Conservatives” Are Single-Largest Ideological Group

“Conservatives” Are Single-Largest Ideological Group.

June 15, 2009

Percentage of “liberals” higher this decade than in early ’90s

by Lydia Saad

PRINCETON, NJ — Thus far in 2009, 40% of Americans interviewed in national Gallup Poll surveys describe their political views as conservative, 35% as moderate, and 21% as liberal. This represents a slight increase for conservatism in the U.S. since 2008, returning it to a level last seen in 2004. The 21% calling themselves liberal is in line with findings throughout this decade, but is up from the 1990s.

These annual figures are based on multiple national Gallup surveys conducted each year, in some cases encompassing more than 40,000 interviews. The 2009 data are based on 10 separate surveys conducted from January through May. Thus, the margins of error around each year’s figures are quite small, and changes of only two percentage points are statistically significant.

To measure political ideology, Gallup asks Americans to say whether their political views are very conservative, conservative, moderate, liberal, or very liberal. As has been the case each year since 1992, very few Americans define themselves at the extremes of the political spectrum. Just 9% call themselves “very conservative” and 5% “very liberal.” The vast majority of self-described liberals and conservatives identify with the unmodified form of their chosen label.

Party-Based Ideology

There is an important distinction in the respective ideological compositions of the Republican and Democratic Parties. While a solid majority of Republicans are on the same page — 73% call themselves conservative — Democrats are more of a mixture. The major division among Democrats is between self-defined moderates (40%) and liberals (38%). However, an additional 22% of Democrats consider themselves conservative, much higher than the 3% of Republicans identifying as liberal.

True to their nonpartisan tendencies, close to half of political independents — 45% — describe their political views as “moderate.” Among the rest, the balance of views is tilted more heavily to the right than to the left: 34% are conservative, while 20% are liberal.

Gallup trends show a slight increase since 2008 in the percentages of all three party groups calling themselves “conservative,” which accounts for the three percentage-point increase among the public at large.

Thus far in 2009, Gallup has found an average of 36% of Americans considering themselves Democratic, 28% Republican, and 37% independent. When independents are pressed to say which party they lean toward, 51% of Americans identify as Democrats, 39% as Republicans, and only 9% as pure independents.

Ideological tendencies by leaned party affiliation are very similar to those of straight partisan groups. However, it is worth noting the views of pure independents — a group usually too small to analyze in individual surveys but potentially important in deciding elections. Exactly half of pure independents describe their views as moderate, 30% say they are conservative, and 17% liberal.

As reported last week on Gallup.com, women are more likely than men to be Democratic in their political orientation. Along the same lines, women are more likely than men to be ideologically “moderate” and “liberal,” and less likely to be “conservative.”

Still, conservatism outweighs liberalism among both genders.

The pattern is strikingly different on the basis of age, and this could have important political implications in the years ahead. Whereas middle-aged and older Americans lean conservative (vs. liberal) in their politics by at least 2 to 1, adults aged 18 to 29 are just as likely to say their political views are liberal (31%) as to say they are conservative (30%).

Future Gallup analysis will look at the changes in the political ideology of different age cohorts over time, to see whether young adults in the past have started out more liberal than they wound up in their later years.

Bottom Line

Although the terms may mean different things to different people, Americans readily peg themselves, politically, into one of five categories along the conservative-to-liberal spectrum. At present, large minorities describe their views as either moderate or conservative — with conservatives the larger group — whereas only about one in five consider themselves liberal.

While these figures have shown little change over the past decade, the nation appears to be slightly more polarized than it was in the early 1990s. Compared with the 1992-1994 period, the percentage of moderates has declined from 42% to 35%, while the percentages of conservatives and liberals are up slightly — from 38% to 40% for conservatives and a larger 17% to 21% movement for liberals.

Survey Methods

Results are based on aggregated Gallup Poll surveys of approximately 1,000 national adults, aged 18 and older, interviewed by telephone. Sample sizes for the annual compilations range from approximately 10,000 to approximately 40,000. For these results, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is ±1 percentage point.

In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.

Breaking Down Government Motors – HUMAN EVENTS

Breaking Down Government Motors – HUMAN EVENTS.

Breaking Down Government Motors

by  Brian Darling

06/15/2009

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During a recent speech denouncing capitalism, Venezuelan strong man Hugo Chavez said, “Obama has just nationalized nothing more and nothing less than General Motors. Comrade Obama! Fidel, careful or we are going to end up to his right.” The conversion of General Motors to Government Motors should be of grave concern to all Americans. It appears that President Bush’s bailout of Wall Street merely set the table for an all-out assault by the Obama administration on capitalism.

Thankfully, freedom still has a voice in Congress. Sen. Mike Johanns (R-Neb.) introduced legislation that would require Congressional approval before the government takes ownership of a private enterprise. This bill would allow Congress to stop the current shift away from free-market principles.

Johanns is not the only free-marketer. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) has introduced legislation to require the federal government to distribute its ownership shares in General Motors and Chrysler to taxpayers when those companies emerge from bankruptcy proceedings. Alexander argues, “instead of the Treasury owning 60 percent of shares in the new GM and 8 percent of Chrysler, you would own them, if you were one of about 120 million individuals who paid taxes on April 15. This is the fastest way to get the stock out of the hands of Washington and back into the hands of the American people in the marketplace where it belongs.”

Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) also joined the fray last weekend, introducing legislation that would restore private ownership to companies that have been effectively nationalized. The Thune proposal would make July 1, 2010 a new day of independence. By that date, the government would have to sell any ownership stake acquired over the past year-and-a-half. There’s no better way to fight the ever-expanding power of the federal government’s ownership in private enterprises than to legislate it out of existence.
 
Speaking of debt, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told the House Budget Committee earlier this month “we cannot allow ourselves to be in a situation where the debt continues to rise.” Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) responded, “Bernanke helped open up the floodgates of government spending for the last year. Did he finally have an epiphany this morning before the House Budget Committee or is he just trying to cover-up his mistakes? America is looking at mounting debt because of Chairman Bernanke’s support of policies that will put the American taxpayer an estimated $2.8 trillion more in the red.” The recent explosion of government spending and expansion of the money supply by the Fed are poor decisions by the Obama administration that will further lead America down the pothole-filled road to socialism.
 
The Supreme Court of Health Care

The recently released health reform legislation drafted by Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) contains numerous provisions that propose fundamental changes to our health care system. Many are deeply troubling. One is the call for a Medical Advisory Council that would be comprised of Washington bureaucrats with the power to make significant decisions on health policy for all Americans. This Council would become the Supreme Court of health care, and these unelected bureaucrats would make final decisions about your treatment options.

The Kennedy bill includes an individual mandate requiring all Americans to purchase a health insurance plan approved by the federal government. The Medical Advisory Council would decide what constitutes a “qualified health insurance plan.” It would also determine the “essential health care benefits” that would be included in the much-discussed and debated public-run government plan that would compete against private health insurance plans if it’s created.

To recap: a faceless group of Washington bureaucrats could be making life-and-death decisions about private health care for individuals.

Rather than propose reforms that truly offer Americans better and more affordable health care, Senate Democrats and the Obama administration seem eager to expand the role of government in the lives of individual Americans and their families. By pushing legislation that contains things like the Medical Advisory Board these politicians are endangering our freedoms and seek to come between individuals and their health care choices.

“Save” the Climate — Hurt Farmers

The national energy tax snaking its way through the House of Representatives has a new potential victim — farmers. The cap-and-trade scheme would increase energy prices, building costs and a slow the economy. My colleagues at The Heritage Foundation calculate that farm income, which is the pre-tax amount that farmers live on after all their expenses, would drop 28% in the bill’s first year. In 2035, the last year analyzed, farm income drops a whopping 98%. These numbers should raise a red flag for Midwesteners, and cause concern among all Americans who eat.

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Brian Darling is director of U.S. Senate Relations at The Heritage Foundation.

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