Obamanati.info

Editors note: Even in the face of all of this evidence, Obama wants to cripple the US economy with carbon tax. It is merely a globalist ruse to further deindustrialize the United States and force savage austerity type economic conditions on us. -Gibb

Telegraph.co.uk - 2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved, according to the Telegraph’s Christopher Booker. Sceptics have long argued that there are other explanations for climate change other than man-made CO2 and here we look at some of the arguments put forward by those who believe that global warming is all a hoax.

Temperatures are falling, not rising

As Christopher Booker says in his review of 2008, temperatures have been dropping in a wholly unpredicted way over the past year. Last winter, the northern hemisphere saw its greatest snow cover since 1966, which in the northern US states and Canada was dubbed the “winter from hell”. This winter looks set to be even worse.

The earth was hotter 1,000 years ago

Evidence from all over the world indicates that the earth was hotter 1,000 years ago than it is today. Research shows that temperatures were higher in what is known as the Mediaeval Warming period than they were in the 1990s.

The earth’s surface temperature is not at record levels

According to Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies analysis of surface air temperature measurements, the meteorological December 2007 to November 2008 was the coolest year since 2000. Their data has also shown that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s but the 1930s.

Ice is not disappearing

Arctic website Crysophere Today reported that Arctic ice volume was 500,000 sq km greater than this time last year. Additionally, Antarctic sea-ice this year reached its highest level since satellite records began in 1979. Polar bear numbers are also at record levels.

Himalayan glaciers

A report by the UN Environment Program this year claimed that the cause of melting glaciers in the Himalayas was not global warming but the local warming effect of a vast “atmospheric brown cloud” over that region, made up of soot particles from Asia’s dramatically increased burning of fossil fuels and deforestation.

Temperatures are still dropping

Nasa satellite readings on global temperatures from the University of Alabama show that August was the fourth month this year when temperatures fell below their 30-year average, ie since satellite records began. November 2008 in the USA was only the 39th warmest since records began 113 years ago.

by Brian Darling

Human Events - One of my New Year’s Resolutions for 2009 is to never ever again believe a politician who makes a bold promise on the campaign trail — even a speaker as gifted as President-elect Barack Obama.  Candidate Obama rattled off promise after promise during his speech at the Democrat National Convention. He pledged that he would get away from the “broken politics in Washington,” to name just one vow. Yet many of Sen. Obama’s campaign promises are already on life support and in danger of being broken by President Obama.

Don’t Pardon Eric Holder

“You understand that in this election, the greatest risk we can take is to try the same old politics with the same old players and expect a different result. You have shown what history teaches us — that at defining moments like this one, the change we need doesn’t come from Washington. Change comes to Washington.”

– Senator Barack Obama at the Democratic National Convention on August 28, 2008

President-elect Obama’s cabinet reads like an all-star team of the “same old players” from the Bill Clinton years. That begins with Vice President-elect Joe Biden, who represented the state of Delaware for 36 years. Former First Lady and Senator from New York Hillary Clinton, and former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle also made the roll.  Obama’s nominee for Attorney General, Eric Holder, was Deputy Attorney General for Clinton. Holder’s the definition of a person who has “come from Washington.” There’s no reason not to expect these nominees to perform as consummate insiders who practice “the same old politics.”

The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to have a confirmation hearing on Holder’s nomination on January 15. It’s widely expected that Holder will be grilled by Senate Judiciary Ranking Member Arlen Specter, R-Pa.  Holder’s official action in recommending a “neutral, leaning toward favorable” Justice Department position on a pardon for fugitive financier Marc Rich is expected to be the most important area explored by Committee members.  The facts of the Rich case would seem to lead a non-partisan lawyer at the Justice Department toward an official no.

Rich, after all, landed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List because of his reported trading with Iran while Americans were being held in the hostage crisis.  That should have been enough to cancel a pardon. Rich also was accused of trading with South Africa during apartheid, Cuba and Libya.  He fled the United States to Switzerland in 1983 to avoid prosecution.  Rich renounced his American citizenship to avoid extradition.  Does Eric Holder retain information that would lead one to recommend the extraordinary remedy of the President of the United States to grant a pardon?  Hopefully the Committee and the American people will find out.

Conservatives also want to learn more about Holder’s dismissive view on the constitutional right to bear arms, his role in the Elian Gonzalez case and his participation in a special investigation at the behest of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

Don’t Bail out Geithner

President-elect Obama’s nominee to be the new Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner, should receive some tough questioning by members of the Senate Banking Committee, notably Senators Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) and Jim Bunning (R-Kent.).  As President of the New York Fed, Geithner played a significant role in the critical government decisions to let Lehman Brothers go belly up, then to take $85 billion of your tax dollars to bail out American International Group.  Conservatives want to make sure that an individual who is partly responsible for the meltdown on Wall Street is not rewarded for failure.

The New York Times opined that the Lehman and A.I.G. “decisions proved cataclysmic.”  If Geithner does not fully explain his decision making process, then he shouldn’t be promoted to head Treasury. Conservatives want to make sure the era of bailouts ends.

Read the rest here: http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=30100

Editors note: The irony of this is hilarious. Its interesting to see their reasons for Burris not being eligible. Is Burris at least 30 years old, a law abiding US citizen, and without a criminal record? Yes, and thats more than Obama can say. -Gibb

Roland Burris

Obama backs Senate Democrats’ decision to deny Blagojevich appointee his seat in the Senate

Associated Press

December 30, 2008

‘There is nothing more important than our U.S. Constitution’

WorldNetDaily

A lawyer who already has two conferences pending before the U.S. Supreme Court on the issue of Barack Obama’s eligibility to be president has filed a new lawsuit, this one on behalf of a retired military colonel who would need to know whether to follow any orders issued by Obama as commander-in-chief.

Philip Berg’s earlier case and a request for an injunction in the case are scheduled for conferences with the justices on Jan. 9 and Jan. 16.

The new case, filed with co-counsel Lawrence J. Joyce, was submitted to U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., and names as defendant “Barry Soetoro a/k/a Obama.”

It demands to know Obama’s real name and his constitutional qualifications to occupy the Oval Office. The plaintiff is Gregory S. Hollister, a resident of Colorado Springs, who has “standing” and “needs a decision so he knows whether or not to follow any order of Soetoro a/k/a Obama.”

Berg reported the case is in the nature of an interpleader, shifting the burden of proof to Obama and Joe Biden.

“I am determined, on behalf of the 320 million citizens in the United States, to see that ‘our U.S. Constitution’ is followed. Specifically, in the case of Soetoro a/k/a Obama, does he meet the constitutional qualifications for president?” Berg said.

He said he doubts that is the case based on his information that Obama was born in Kenya, his mother was not yet 19, Obama later was a citizen of Indonesia and several other factors.

“I am appalled that the main stream media continues to ignore this issue as we are headed to a ‘Constitutional Crisis.’ There is nothing more important than our U.S. Constitution and it must be enforced,” he said.

Berg said he was pleased the U.S. Supreme Court has scheduled two conferences to look into the merits of the claims in his earlier case.

“I know that Mr. Obama is not a constitutionally qualified ‘natural-born’ citizen and therefore, is ineligible to assume the office of the president of the United States,” he continued. “Obama knows he is not ‘natural born’ as he knows where he was born and he knows he was legally adopted/acknowledged in Indonesia; is an attorney, Harvard Law head of the Law Review and graduate who taught constitutional law; knows the Obama candidacy is the biggest ‘hoax’ attempted on the citizens of the United States in over 200 years; places our constitution in a ‘crisis’ situation; and Obama is in a situation where he can be blackmailed by leaders around the world.”

WND reported earlier on a campaign to seek members of Congress to object to the Electoral College vote when it is presented for affirmation.

More than a dozen cases have been brought into various courts challenging Obama’s eligibility. Several have reached the Supreme Court.

They all in various ways allege Obama does not meet the “natural born citizen” clause of the U.S. Constitution, Article 2, Section 1, which reads, “No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President.”

Some of the legal challenges have alleged Obama was not born in Hawaii, as he insists, but in Kenya. Obama’s American mother, the suits contend, was too young at the time of his birth to confer American citizenship to her son under the law at the time.

Where’s the proof Barack Obama was born in the U.S. or that he fulfills the “natural-born American” clause in the Constitution? If you still want to see it, join more than 200,000 others and sign up now!

Other challenges also have focused on Obama’s citizenship through his father, a Kenyan subject to the jurisdiction of the United Kingdom at the time of his birth, thus making him a dual citizen. Such cases contend the framers of the Constitution excluded dual citizens from qualifying as natural born.

Several details of Obama’s past have added twists to the question of his eligibility and citizenship, including his family’s move to Indonesia when he was a child, his travel to Pakistan in the ’80s when such travel was forbidden to American citizens and conflicting reports from Obama’s family about his place of birth.

His campaign posted the image of a “Certification of Live Birth” online when the questions first arose, but critics have dismissed that as irrelevant, since at the time Hawaii granted such documents to parents whose children were born outside the state.

WND has reported on two of the cases that the Supreme Court justices apparently reviewed, but refused to continue to a full hearing.

Those cases were brought by Cort Wrotnowski and Leo Donofrio. Both challenged Obama on essentially the same issue: allegations that dual citizenship based on a father who was a British subject and a mother who was an American minor disqualified him for office.

A partial listing and status update for several of the cases surrounding Obama’s eligibility to serve as president is below:

• Philip J. Berg, a Pennsylvania Democrat, demanded that the courts verify Obama’s original birth certificate and other documents proving his American citizenship. Supreme Court conferences on the case and its motions are scheduled Jan. 9 and 16.
  
• Leo Donofrio of New Jersey filed a lawsuit claiming Obama’s dual citizenship disqualified him from serving as president. His case was considered in conference by the U.S. Supreme Court but denied a full hearing.
• Cort Wrotnowski filed suit against Connecticut’s secretary of state, making a similar argument to Donofrio. His case was considered in conference by the U.S. Supreme Court, but was denied a full hearing.
• Former presidential candidate Alan Keyes headlines a list of people filing a suit in California, in a case on which the United States Justice Foundation is working, that asks the secretary of state to refuse to allow the state’s 55 Electoral College votes to be cast in the 2008 presidential election until Obama verifies his eligibility to hold the office. The case is pending, and lawyers are seeking the public’s support.
• Chicago’s Andy Martin sought legal action requiring Hawaii Gov. Linda Lingle to release Obama’s vital statistics record. The case was dismissed by Hawaii Circuit Court Judge Bert Ayabe.
• Lt. Col. Donald Sullivan sought a temporary restraining order to stop the Electoral College vote in North Carolina until Barack Obama’s eligibility could be confirmed, alleging doubt about Obama’s citizenship. His case was denied.
• In Ohio, David M. Neal sued to force the secretary of state to request documents from the Federal Elections Commission, the Democratic National Committee, the Ohio Democratic Party and Obama to show the presidential candidate was born in Hawaii. The case was denied.
• In Washington state, Steven Marquis sued the secretary of state seeking a determination on Obama’s citizenship. The case was denied.
• In Georgia, Rev. Tom Terry asked the state Supreme Court to authenticate Obama’s birth certificate. His request for an injuction against Georgia’s secretary of state was denied by Georgia Superior Court Judge Jerry W. Baxter.
• California attorney Orly Taitz also has brought a complaint alleging Obama is not a “natural born” citizen and has written an open letter to the Supreme Court asking for the issue to be resolved.
• Pennsylvania attorney James D. Schneller is suing Pennsylvania’s secretary of state, Pedro A. Cortes., to prevent transmittal of the certified electoral vote, claiming severe moral consequences and infringement upon even freedom of religion if Obama’s eligibility is not established. His case is active before the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania.
• In Washington state, attorney Stephen Pidgeon is representing 12 plaintiffs in a case that claims to have standing under a unique Washington statute that allows any registered voter to challenge the election of someone who, at the time of the election, was ineligible to hold the office. The suit intends to include a subpoena of Obama’s Hawaii birth certificate. The case is scheduled for argument before the Washington Supreme Court on Jan. 8.

Last month, WND reported on the potential complications an ineligible president could create.

“Should Senator Obama be discovered, after he takes office, to be ineligible for the Office of President of the United States of America and, thereby, his election declared void,” argues the Alan Keyes case pending in California, “Americans will suffer irreparable harm in that (a) usurper will be sitting as the President of the United States, and none of the treaties, laws, or executive orders signed by him will be valid or legal.”

With such high stakes potentially at risk, WND earlier launched a letter campaign to contact Electoral College members and urge them to review the controversy.

That followed a campaign that sent more than 60,000 letters by overnight delivery to the U.S. Supreme Court when one case contesting Obama’s eligibility for the Oval Office was pending.

A separate petition, already signed by more than 200,000 also is ongoing asking authorities in the election to seek proof Obama was born in the U.S. or that he fulfills the “natural-born American” clause in the Constitution.

WND senior reporter Jerome Corsi had gone to both Kenya and Hawaii prior to the election to investigate issues surrounding Obama’s birth. But his research and discoveries only raised more questions.

The biggest question was why, if a Hawaii birth certificate exists as his campaign has stated, Obama hasn’t simply ordered it made available to settle the rumors

The governor’s office in Hawaii said there is a valid certificate but rejected requests for access and left ambiguous its origin: Does the certificate on file with the Department of Health indicate a Hawaii birth or was it generated after the Obama family registered a Kenyan birth in Hawaii?

Imperialism, by Leon Kuhn

Source: Leon Kuhn

A soldier wounded in Afghanistan

The Coming Surge Into Afghanistan

By GARY LEUPP

CounterPunch.org

Joint Chief of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen is reportedly recommending to President-Elect Obama that the U.S. increase by 30,000 its current force of 32,000 in Afghanistan. That, as Robert Dreyfuss points out in a recent column, is about 20,000 more troops than Obama was proposing while on the campaign trail.

Obama, who has enthused about refocusing the “War on Terror” back on Afghanistan, is likely to accede to the admiral’s request. There are at present under NATO command approximately 31,000 non-U.S. troops within the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) fighting the Taliban and other “insurgents” in Afghanistan. (80% of these are from from the UK, Germany, France, Canada, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Australia, and Turkey.) Popular opinion in most of those countries runs high against continued deployment, but except in Australia it is of course sold as an obligation of NATO membership.

Add to these the redoubled U.S. force and we’ll have a have a robust occupation army of 93,000 foreigners. With the exception of Albania and Azerbaijan, which have sent only small contingents, all participating nations are historically Christian, encouraging the Afghan perception that their Muslim nation is under infidel attack. In the 1980s, the Mujahadeen encouraged by the Reagan administration viewed the Soviet-backed secular regime as an assault on their religion and way of life; Soviet troops peaking at over 100,000 in 1987, with the advantage of supply lines from the immediately neighboring USSR, and including numerous ethnic Uzbeks and Tajiks who could speak local languages and had some understanding of local culture, could not repress the rag-tag CIA-supplied guerrillas and secure control of the country.

Nor, as Michael Beardon warned in his prescient article in Foreign Affairs in November 2001, entitled “Afghanistan: Graveyard of Empires,” could an honor roll of would-be conquerers from Alexander the Great in the third century BCE to the British in the nineteenth century defeat the hardy, fiercely independent Afghan tribesmen.

Beardon citing Louis Dupree, the premier historian of Afghanistan, attributed the “British disaster” of 1878-81 to four “mistakes”: the occupation of Afghan territory by foreign troops, the placing of an unpopular ruler in power, harsh acts committed against  local enemies, and paltry subsidies paid to local allies. “The United States would be wise to consider them today,” he concluded. Again, Beardon was writing just as the U.S. was beginning its adventure in Afghanistan, and when the war in Iraq based on lies was still a twinkle in Dick Cheney’s eye.

Does Obama, often described as lacking knowledge of foreign affairs, and praised (by all the wrong people) for reaching out to (all the wrong) “experienced” foreign policy wonks, really believe that he can succeed in Afghanistan where so many others have failed?

Here perhaps we find the audacity of sheer historical ignorance. The audacity of hope that “Yes, we can”—with a center-right Democratic administration, better than a far-right Republican administration—sufficiently stabilize Afghanistan to achieve the primary U.S. (imperialist) objectives in the region.

Obama seems to believe that the U.S. can defeat those resisting the foreign presence and its local allies, stabilize the thoroughly corrupt Northern Alliance warlord regime with Hamid Karzai as its symbolic head, and stem the flow of Taliban back and forth across the Pakistan border. Most importantly, it can finally get that oil pipeline done—the one that’s to run from the Caspian Sea through Turkmenistan and Afghanistan, Pakistan and India to the Indian Ocean bypassing Russia and unfriendly Iran. The deal was signed in December 2002 but construction has been stymied by the situation on the ground in Afghanistan. That pipeline is, I believe, the big prize.

The war on Iraq has been in my opinion less “a war for oil” actually promoted by Big Oil than a war engineered by neoconservative ideologues to reconfigure Southwest Asia for longterm U.S. and Israeli geopolitical advantage. But it’s in fact been disastrous for the interests of U.S. imperialism, and bitterly divided the ruling class. It’s produced the highly unusual situation where one faction of that class has bet its money on an African-American named Barack Hussein Osama (accused of “socialism” by his right wing critics) to rectify the situation. While I don’t expect a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq under what will in fact be a center-right administration, the focus will be on the competition for control over Central Asian oil and gas. That means a degree of control over Afghanistan that has eluded Washington since the invasion of 2001.

In the view of the faction of hawks Obama represents, the Iraq War has been a colossal distraction from the Afghan War. The problem isn’t just that Bush diverted troops to Iraq “before we got bin Laden” or wiped out all the remnants of al-Qaeda, a group notoriously difficult to quantify or even define. The problem is that  he used 9-11 for one purpose rather than another. He used the toppling of the Taliban to seque into Iraq rather than to rigorously pursue the agenda for U.S. hegemony over Central Asia centering around control of Caspian Sea oil and gas.

Obama presumably wants to go back in in force and do Afghanistan properly. That doesn’t necessarily mean wiping out the Taliban mentality that (say) requires women to wear burqas (that mentality is, after all, pre-Taliban and not so different from the mentality prevalent in societies such as Saudi Arabia whose governments are pro-U.S.). The U.S. and ISAF don’t need to produce a social revolution to maintain permanent bases (encircling China) or to construct and protect a pipeline providing privileged access to oil and natural gas. All they need to do is maintaining a puppet regime with minimal authority and establish a sufficient level of stability to attain such objectives.

But even that is proving a highly difficult undertaking. Thus Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, British ambassador to Afghanistan, reportedly told the duputy French ambassador to Kabul François Fitou in September 2008, “The foreign forces are ensuring the survival of a regime which would collapse without them . . . They are slowing down and complicating an eventual exit from the crisis, which will probably be dramatic… In the short term we should dissuade the American presidential candidates from getting more bogged down in Afghanistan . . . The American strategy is doomed to fail.” These are observations by a top diplomat of the nation most deeply invested alongside the U.S. in the Afghan War. He proposed replacing president Karzai with “an acceptable dictator.” The top British military commander in Afghanistan agrees; Brig. Mark Carleton-Smith stated in October, “We’re not going to win this war.”

Karzai himself has repeatedly protested the high civilian casualty rate as a result of U.S. bombing; has called for negotations with the Taliban for an end to the insurgency, even (over U.S. objections) agreeing to insure Mullah Omar a safe-conduct should he agree to participate in talks in the country; and (although this has attracted little press attention) called for a firm deadline for foreign troops’ withdrawal. “This war has gone on for seven years;” he observed in a statement last month, “the Afghans don’t understand any more how come a little force like the Taliban can continue to exist, can continue to flourish, can continue to launch attacks.”

While the supposedly sovereign leader of Afghanistan—this puppet who seems to chafe at his puppet role—is talking like this, Obama and what will soon be his generals are planning a drastic increase in foreign forces with no deadline for their withdrawal. (By the way: Afghanistan is scheduled to hold a presidential election in October 2009, and Afghan-American neocon politician Zalmay Khalilzad, one-time UNOCAL executive, Afghan kingmaker in 2002, former ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq and the UN, may well be a candidate.)

Obama wants to “finish the job” in Afghanistan, a real war for oil in the guise of “the war on terror.” The unfinished job’s been easy so far, requiring only 629 U.S. troops’ lives (up 154 so far this year from 117 in 2007, 98 in 2006), and an additional 410 lives of allied troops. But the blood and treasure spilt in Afghanistan was a key factor in the collapse of the once-mighty Soviet Union. As Obama orders his troops into that graveyard, how will the empire, reeling from crises unprecedented in many decades, respond? As the candidate of change and hope becomes the commander in chief of an escalating expanding war, how will his antiwar supporters rethink their politics?