UN 'peacekeepers' hurl pepper spray at Haitians and call them 'animals'

• The Times of London reports:

"Machete fights have been reported as families argue over who should have access to the desperately limited supply of tents. Yesterday UN peacekeepers were forced to

• use pepper spray and rubber bullets as a food hand-out at one of the biggest homeless encampments in the centre of Port-au-Prince was over-run by thousands of starving people.

"Whatever we do, it doesn't matter - they are animals," said one of the 18 Uruguayan peacekeepers in front of the collapsed National Palace, struggling to hold back the 4,000-strong crowd with a plastic shield.

• As some of the troops fired pepper spray, others standing on top of a UN tank fired rubber bullets into the air, all but ignored by the people striving to get at the food supplies."...

1/26/10, TimesOnlineUK, "Desperate Haitians over-run UN food hand out," photo getty, UN peacekeepers arrest Haitian man. The UN as usual is completely useless at best.

Obama endorsed UN Climate Report used student and climbing magazine, Obama accepted as basis to punish and tax US

• This is not about the environment. It is obviously about organized crime. When will Obama apologize to the American people and renounce any plan to regulate carbon? And drop the joke that it's about 'national security'? If he wants to publicly scold and threaten the Supreme Court about something, why not their 5-4 decision on CO2?
  

"In its (the UN IPCC's) most recent report, it stated that observed reductions in mountain ice in

• the Andes, Alps and Africa was being caused by global warming, citing two papers as the source of the information.

However, it can be revealed that one of the sources quoted was a feature article published in a popular magazine for climbers which was based on anecdotal evidence from mountaineers about the changes they were witnessing on the mountainsides around them.

• The other was a dissertation written by a geography student, studying for the equivalent of a master's degree, at the University of Berne in Switzerland that quoted interviews with mountain guides in the Alps.

The revelations, uncovered by The Sunday Telegraph, have raised fresh questions about the quality of the information contained in the report, which was published in 2007."...

• "UN Climate Change Panel based claims on student dissertation and magazine article," UK Telegraph, 1/30/10, by Richard Gray. via Tom Nelson
  

Obama terror trials threaten entire city of New York--NYC Police Commissioner

SICK: NY Times says NYC Mayor Bloomberg desire trials be elsewhere "a political blow" to Obama.

• "“We were not consulted,”

(NY City Police Commissioner Ray) Kelly said tersely of the decision. He stated that the trial

• “will raise the threat level of this city,” a threat that “will not fade any time soon.”

• 

And it affects more than lower Manhattan, we learned. “We will have to look at the entire city as a potential target.”"...

• from Loud Citizen, 1/23/10, via Lucianne.com

photos of September 11, 2001 in New York City, ap or falling man

The battle of our time: the public sector is overwhelming the private sector-Henninger

• 1/21: "The central battle in our time is over political primacy.

It is a competition between the public sector and the private sector over who defines the work and the institutions

• that make a nation thrive and grow.

In 1962, President John F. Kennedy planted the seeds that grew the modern Democratic Party. That year, JFK signed executive order 10988 allowing the unionization of the federal work force.

• This changed everything in the American political system. Kennedy's order swung open the door for the inexorable rise of a unionized public work force in many states and cities.

This in turn led to the fantastic growth in membership of the public employee unions—The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the teachers' National Education Association.

• They broke the public's bank. More than that,
  

they entrenched a system of taking money from members' dues and spending it on political campaigns. Over time, this transformed the Democratic Party into a public-sector dependency.

• They became different than the party of FDR, Truman, Meany and Reuther. That party was allied with the fading industrial unions, which in turn
  
• were tethered to a real world of profit and loss.

The states in the North and on the coasts turned blue because blue is the color of the public-sector unions. This tax-and-spend milieu became the training ground for their politicians.

• Until the Obama exception, the only recent Democrats electable into the presidency had to be centrist Southerners little known to the country. Every post-Kennedy liberal who tried, failed, including Teddy.

What an irony it is that in the same week the Kennedy labor legacy hit the wall in Massachusetts, the NEA approved a $1 million donation from the union's contingency fund to the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate.

• It is this Kennedy legacy, the public union tax and spend machine, that drove blue
  
• Massachusetts into revolt Tuesday.
  

Yes, health care was ground zero, but Massachusetts—like New Jersey, like California, like New York—has been building toward this explosion for years....

• But here's the party's self-destroying kicker: Feeding the public unions' wage demands starved other government responsibilities.
  
• It ruined our ability to have a useful debate about any other public functions.

Massachusetts' spending fell for mental health, the environment, housing and higher education.

• The physical infrastructure in blue states is literally falling apart.
  

• But look at those public wage and pension-related outlays. Ever upward.

Enter the Obama administration, the first one born and raised inside this public bubble, with zero private-sector Cabinet members.

• Act one: a $787 billion stimulus bill, which they brag mainly saved state and local jobs. Then came the six-month odyssey for Obama's $1 trillion health-care bill,
  
• dripping with taxes.
  
• Independent voters felt like everything was being sucked into a public-sector vortex.

This is why New Jersey's Chris Christie won running on nothing.

• It's why in California Carly Fiorina is within three points of Sen. Barbara Boxer. It's why the party JFK enabled, "the machine," is hitting the wall.
  

There's no way out for these Democrats. They made a Faustian bargain 40 years ago with the public unions. For the outlays alone, they'll get some version of the Obama health-care bill. They'll also go to the same old "populist anger" well.

• Scott Brown's victory has given the GOP a rare, narrow chance to align itself with an electorate that understands its anger.
  

Now the GOP has to find a way to disconnect from a political legacy that smothered governments at all levels

• and is now smothering the Democratic Party."

FromWall St Journal article by Daniel Henninger, "The Fall of the House of Kennedy," 1/21/10

Now Bernanke...WSJ notes "populist surge on the hill"

• Bernanke, keyholder of private slush fund of stolen taxpayer money, the Federal Reserve, may be subject to what they are calling
  
• 'populism' ...
  
• Well, actually, it's what happened in Massachusetts, they say...
  

"Until this week, Mr. Bernanke was expected to be bloodied, but get the needed votes.

• Then at a closed-door caucus of Democratic senators on Wednesday,

the day after Democrat Martha Coakley lost to Republican Scott Brown

• in Massachusetts,

• a show of hands revealed significant opposition."...

from Wall St. Journal, "Populist Surge on Hill eases the support for Bernanke," 1/22/10

• It's funny that elected republicans think Scott Brown's victory had anything to do with them. It was very much in spite of them that Scott Brown was elected.
  
• If democrats want to make correct decisions for any reason and use Scott Brown as an excuse for doing so, even subconsciously,
  
• that's fine. ed.
  

"Obama Loses Kennedy's Seat" Sydney Morning Herald

"'Tsunami' in US politics: Obama Loses Kennedy's Seat,"
Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) 1/20/10, photo from
Sydney Morning Herald

• P.S. Despite Mitt Romney taking bows last night, giving the appearance he had much to do with Scott Brown's victory, local reporters say he had next to nothing to do with it.

They say credit belongs to Tea Partiers who came from near and far. From listening to WRKO radio the past few days, I learned Scott Brown is also a talk radio fan, has called into Howie Carr's show for a few years. Carr's show is heard on stations around Massachusetts. Many people obviously got to know Brown through his exchanges with Carr and listeners. I heard many callers to Carr's show who have followed Brown, and

• not one mentioned Romney's name.

I listened to another Boston talk show on Sunday, and Romney never came up except in one instance. Which was to say ugh, and change the subject. I mention all this because the national GOP apparently has decided Romney is their next presidential candidate. Whatever Romney once was or was thought to be, that person is gone.

• The people in Massachusetts who know him best consider his case well closed.

Note to the GOP-Brown's win was only possible because the republican party does not exist in Massachusetts. Half the voters there identify as independent.


photo from Globe & Mail

JFK pushed for income tax cuts to spur economy.

via mention of Massachusetts caller to Michael Savage radio show, 1/19/10

'David vs Goliath' Boston Herald

Boston Herald front page, 1/19/10, via Gateway Pundit via Legal Insurrection