Sen. Hatch to Vote Against Sotomayor

Well, at least there’s one person in the Senate who has had a moment of clarity:

Hatch to vote against Sotomayor’s Supreme Court bid
By Matt Canham

The Salt Lake Tribune
07/24/2009

Washington – For the first time in his 33-year Senate career, Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch will vote against a Supreme Court nominee.

Hatch decided Friday to oppose Sonia Sotomayor when her nomination comes before the Senate Judiciary Committee next Tuesday. Sotomayor, who would become the high court’s first Hispanic justice, is widely expected to easily win confirmation in the next few weeks.

“I reluctantly, and with a heavy heart, have found that I cannot support her nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court,” Hatch said in a statement. “Although Judge Sotomayor has a compelling life story and dedication to public service, her statements and record were too much at odds with the principles about the judiciary in which I deeply believe.”

Hatch declined a request for an interview, but his statement indicates that he largely based his decision on her judicial philosophy.

[…]

Largely based on her judicial philosophy?  Hey, all you Senators out there, Sotomayor is a criminal:

Sotomayor earned $3,773,824 since 1988 + received $381,775 in loans = $4,155,599 + her 1976-1987 earnings, yet only disclosed assets worth only $543,903, thus leaving unaccounted for in her answers to the Senate Judiciary Committee  $3,611,696 – taxes and the cost of her reportedly modest living…

And likewise withheld from it [the Senate Judiciary Committee] the DeLano Case, which reveals her participation in a cover-up of concealment of assets as part of a judicially run and tolerated bankruptcy fraud scheme…

You can browse the associated documents by CLICKING HERE

Obama has been Officially Warned: Terrorist Group Hamas will Get that $900 Million in U.S. Aid

So, now that Obama has been officially warned, let’s see what he does.  My money is on Obama ignoring the report and shelling out that $900 million (of YOUR tax dollars) to the terrorists.  Yup, you don’t have to be Sun Tzu to realize that it is a real bad idea to pay the enemy to destroy your allies so that they (your enemies) can more fully focus their attention on you:

‘Hamas may get claws into Gaza aid’
By YAAKOV KATZ AND HERB KEINON – jpost.com

Increasingly concerned that Hamas will steal money donated for Gaza’s rehabilitation, the Defense Ministry distributed a document this week revealing that unions affiliated with the terrorist group have set up joint committees with UN agencies that dispense humanitarian aid.

The document was distributed to the Foreign Ministry, Finance Ministry and the Israeli intelligence community, and was also sent to the United States to warn it that the $900 million it has pledged to help rebuild the Gaza Strip could fall into Hamas hands.

“All humanitarian aid sent into the Gaza Strip today needs to receive Hamas clearance,” a senior defense official told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday. “Hamas uses violence against international organizations, including UNRWA, if they do not cooperate.”

Hamas recently published an ad in a Palestinian newspaper warning that “whoever does not follow its orders will be forced to leave Gaza.”

The internal Defense Ministry document revealed that on July 12, a meeting was held between UNRWA, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and Hamas officials who are in charge of the contractors and engineer unions in the Gaza Strip.

The objective was to establish a mechanism which will be responsible for distributing the billions of dollars pledged for the rehabilitation of the Strip by the US and European and Arab countries.

So far, Hamas has taken control of millions of dollars transferred monthly by Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salaam Fayad to the UNDP and designated for Gazans whose homes were destroyed during Operation Cast Lead last winter.

At the meeting, Hamas officials told the UN representatives they wanted to be able to draw up the list of people who would receive the money, according to the Defense Ministry document. The sides decided to set up joint committees and to continue to meet in the future.

“This is an indication to us that there is no effective mechanism that can be established that will bypass Hamas and ensure the money goes straight to the Palestinian people,” the senior defense official said.

Peer-Reviewd Study Discounts Anthropogenic Global Warming

But, I doubt it will matter much to the asses in Congress who, like all their counterparts in the UN, are using the AGW bogeyman as a vehicle to raise taxes and tighten their grip on the throat of  We the People.

Another New Study Challenges Climate Change ‘Orthodoxy’
Friday, July 24, 2009
By Patrick Goodenough, International Editor

(CNSNews.com) – Virtually all changes in global atmospheric temperatures in the late 20th century were the result of nature rather than human activity, according to a new peer-reviewed study, one of whose authors predicted Friday was “sure to cause a stir.”

“It goes against the orthodoxy,” said climate scientist Chris de Freitas of New Zealand’s Auckland University. The new findings called into question the politically-correct, politically-motivated assumptions driving the climate change debate, he said.

De Freitas and Australian scientists John McLean and Bob Carter reported that at least 80 percent of climate variability tracked over the past half a century could be attributed to internal climate-system factors including the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) Pacific warming phenomenon and its cooling twin, La Nina.

This left little room for human-caused factors like emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other so-called greenhouse gases. Intermittent volcanic activity, producing significant cooling, was found to have been a factor.

The paper was published Thursday, following a six-month peer review process, in the American Geophysical Union’s Journal of Geophysical Research.

The Australasian trio compared the ENSO and the rise and fall of lower-atmospheric temperatures between 1958 – when continuous records of those temperatures began – and 2008, and found that the one closely correlated with the other, with a lag of around seven months between the ENSO and the temperature variation.

“The sequence of the lagged relationship indicates that ENSO is driving temperature rather than the reverse,” the paper states.

The results showed that the oscillations accounted for some 80 percent of the rise and fall in temperatures, leaving “little room for CO2” as an attributable factor, De Freitas said Friday.

He described the data as established, reproducible, and “out in the open.”

This IS About Obama. This IS About Politics!

Charles Krauthammer gives us his take on why Obama has lost support for his plan to destroy America with commie-style healthcare:

Why Obamacare Is Sinking
You can’t fake health-care nirvana in legislation.

By Charles Krauthammer – NRO

What happened to Obamacare? Rhetoric met reality. As both candidate and president, the master rhetorician could conjure a world in which he bestows upon you health-care nirvana: more coverage, less cost.

But you can’t fake it in legislation. Once you commit your fantasies to words and numbers, the Congressional Budget Office comes along and declares that the emperor has no clothes.

President Obama premised the need for reform on the claim that medical costs are destroying the economy. True. But now we learn — surprise! — that universal coverage increases costs. The congressional Democrats’ health-care plans, says the CBO, increase costs in the range of $1 trillion plus.

In response, the president retreated to a demand that any bill he sign be revenue-neutral. But that’s classic misdirection: If the fierce urgency of health-care reform is to radically reduce costs that are producing budget-destroying deficits, revenue neutrality (by definition) leaves us on precisely the same path to insolvency that Obama himself declares unsustainable.

The Democratic proposals in Congress are worse still. Because they do increase costs, revenue neutrality means countervailing tax increases. It’s not just that it is crazily anti-stimulatory to saddle a deeply depressed economy with an income-tax surcharge that falls squarely on small business and the investor class. It’s that health-care reform ends up diverting for its own purposes a source of revenue that might otherwise be used to close the yawning structural budget deficit that is such a threat to the economy and to the dollar.

These blindingly obvious contradictions are why the Democratic health plans are collapsing under their own weight — at the hands of Democrats. It’s Max Baucus, Democratic chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, who called Obama unhelpful for ruling out taxing employer-provided health insurance as a way to pay for expanded coverage. It’s the Blue Dog Democrats in the House who wince at skyrocketing health-reform costs just weeks after having swallowed hemlock for Obama on a ruinous cap-and-trade carbon tax.

The president is therefore understandably eager to make this a contest between progressive Democrats and reactionary Republicans. He seized on Republican senator Jim DeMint’s comment that stopping Obama on health care would break his presidency to protest, with perfect disingenuousness, that “this isn’t about me. This isn’t about politics.”

51% of Americans Disapprove of the Dark Overlord!!!

So, how’s Obama going to spin this one?

CLICK HERE  for Rasmussen Reports