Obama hints at amnesty
for illegal immigrants

"Politically, the goal of today’s dominant trend is statism. Philosophically, the goal is the obliteration of reason; psychologically, it is the erosion of ambition.

The political goal presupposes the two others. The human characteristic required by statism is docility, which is the product of hopelessness and intellectual stagnation. Thinking men cannot be ruled; ambitious men do not stagnate." — Ayn Rand

Thuggery 101; Mr. President, do not talk to a thug unless you absolutely have to.
by Victor Davis Hanson, National Review

Pres. Barack Obama came into office apparently believing that his non-traditional background, charisma, and good intentions could placate dictators hostile to America and ease global tensions. In these first six months, the new administration has made clear to Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and other strongmen like them that Barack Obama is not a mean-talking George Bush. A kinder, gentler United States has promised to push the “reset” button. In the interest of peace, an American president will finally be listening rather than lecturing, and willing to talk to authoritarian bullies without preconditions. But so far the world’s thugs do not seem to appreciate that new goodwill. Intelligence reports indicate that North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il is planning to launch a ballistic test missile in the direction of Hawaii between July 4 and July 8. Russia’s Vladimir Putin would like his country’s money to replace the dollar as the global currency. MORE>

HEAVEN AND EARTH:
Global Warming: The Missing Science
by Ian Plimer

The Earth is an evolving dynamic system. Current changes in climate, sea level and ice are within variability. Atmospheric CO² is the lowest for 500 million years. Climate has always been driven by the Sun, the Earth's orbit and plate tectonics and the oceans, atmosphere and life respond. Humans have made their mark on the planet, thrived in warm times and struggled in cool times. The hypothesis that humans can actually change climate is unsupported by evidence from geology, archaeology, history and astronomy. The hypothesis is rejected. A new ignorance fills the yawning spiritual gap in Western society. Climate change politics is religious fundamentalism masquerading as science. Its triumph is computer models unrelated to observations in nature. There has been no critical due diligence of the science of climate change, dogma dominates, sceptics are pilloried and 17th Century thinking promotes prophets of doom, guilt and penance. MORE>

The Cap and Tax Fiction; Democrats off-loading economics to pass climate change bill.
Review & Outlook, Wall Street Journal

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has put cap-and-trade legislation on a forced march through the House, and the bill may get a full vote as early as Friday. It looks as if the Democrats will have to destroy the discipline of economics to get it done. Despite House Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman's many payoffs to Members, rural and Blue Dog Democrats remain wary of voting for a bill that will impose crushing costs on their home-district businesses and consumers. The leadership's solution to this problem is to simply claim the bill defies the laws of economics. Their gambit got a boost this week, when the Congressional Budget Office did an analysis of what has come to be known as the Waxman-Markey bill. MORE>

Cap & trade costs and Wisconsin
by Jeremy Shown, blogger

Whether you knew it or not, the US Congress is currently considering legislation intended to reduce green house gas emissions and slow global climate change. It is known as the Waxman-Markey bill and its major feature is a cap and trade program. Cap and trade means the government sets limits on how much pollution industry is allowed to produce (this is the cap part). Credits equal to these limits are then issued to polluters (possibly for free, possibly at a cost, but that does not matter for our purposes). If some business decides it needs to emit more green house gasses than are allowed under the limits, it can do so by buying some of the credits of a business that is going to be under the emission limit (this is the trade part). MORE>

Open up Wisconsin
state budget debate to public
A Wisconsin State Journal editorial

Who pays the state’s bills? The public does.
Who has to live under the laws passed by the Legislature? The public. That’s why the public deserves a front-row seat whenever our state leaders are debating how to spend tens of billions of dollars of our money. But state lawmakers in recent weeks have conducted a slew of state budget meetings behind closed doors. Lawmakers huddle in secret with their partisan pals to plot strategy, count votes and cut deals. Then, after hashing out the messy details in the dark, they emerge with agreements the public is supposed to swallow.
Assembly Bill 143 seeks to end this offensive practice. It would rescind the Legislature’s special exemption from Wisconsin’s open meetings law. MORE>

On Health Care, Obama’s Dirty Secret
ObamaCare could unravel the entire private system very quickly.
by Rich Lowry, National Review

Pres. Barack Obama knows health-care policy. Give him an hour and a half to hold forth, as ABC News obligingly did at a town-hall meeting, and he will invariably impress with his fluidity. This makes it all the more remarkable that he often appears unable to understand how his health-care program threatens private insurance. At a recent press conference, Obama argued that the very notion of it doesn’t compute: “If private insurers say that the marketplace provides the best-quality health care, if they tell us that they’re offering a good deal, then why is it that the government — which they say can’t run anything — suddenly is going to drive them out of business? That’s not logical.” MORE>

Another "Good Thing"
by Thomas Sowell , columnist

Even if the "stimulus" package doesn't seem to be doing much to stimulate the economy, it is certainly stimulating many potential recipients of government money to start lining up at the trough. All you need is something that sounds like a "good thing" and the ability to sell the idea. A perennial "good thing" is education. So it is not surprising that leaders of the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities have come out with an assertion that "the U.S. should set a goal of college degrees for at least 55 percent of its young adults by 2025." Nothing is easier in politics than setting some arbitrary goal-- preferably based on numbers-- and go after it, in utter disregard of the costs or the repercussions. MORE>

Obama to Iran: Let Them Eat Ice Cream
by Ann Coulter, columnist

On Iran, President Obama is worse than Hamlet. He's Colin Powell, waiting to see who wins before picking a side. Last week, massive protests roiled Iran in response to an apparently fraudulent presidential election, in which nutcase Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner within two hours of the polls closing. (ACORN must be involved.) Obama responded by boldly declaring that the difference between the loon Ahmadinejad and his reformist challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi, "may not be as great as advertised." Maybe the thousands of dissenters risking their lives protesting on the streets of Tehran are doing so because they liked Mousavi's answer to the "boxers or briefs" question better than Ahmadinejad's. MORE>

The Climate Change Climate Change; The number of skeptics is swelling everywhere.
by Kimberley Strassel, Wall Street Journal

Steve Fielding recently asked the Obama administration to reassure him on the science of man-made global warming. When the administration proved unhelpful, Mr. Fielding decided to vote against climate-change legislation. If you haven't heard of this politician, it's because he's a member of the Australian Senate. As the U.S. House of Representatives prepares to pass a climate-change bill, the Australian Parliament is preparing to kill its own country's carbon-emissions scheme. Why? A growing number of Australian politicians, scientists and citizens once again doubt the science of human-caused global warming. MORE>

Dollars and sense stall water war
by Patrick Mcilheran, Milw Journal Sentinel

You and Wally Morics might have imagined that whether a private company runs the Milwaukee Water Works was a question of prudence and money. Wrong-o. Per the protesters who rallied at City Hall to make sure the city comptroller's idea was stomped dead, dead, dead, the issue is our very civic soul. You can tell because they brought along giant protest puppets. The protesters, a small but doughty band, are sincere in ardently feeling that leasing out the Water Works to scrounge money would be unwise. The union people dislike any dent in the size of the public sector, for instance. Other protesters dislike corporations. MORE>

What Will Mousavi Do Next?
by Charles Krauthammer, Wash Post Op-Ed

Iran today is a revolution in search of its Yeltsin. Without leadership, demonstrators will take to the street only so many times to face tear gas, batons and bullets. They need a leader like Boris Yeltsin: a former establishment figure with newly revolutionary credentials and legitimacy, who stands on a tank and gives the opposition direction by calling for the unthinkable -- the abolition of the old political order. Right now the Iranian revolution has no leader. As this is written, opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi has not appeared in public since June 18. And the Khamenei-Ahmadinejad regime has shown the requisite efficiency and ruthlessness at suppressing widespread unrest. Their brutality has been deployed intelligently. MORE>

It's No Secret:; Both the Process and the Product Just Plain Awful
by Brett Healy, MacIver Institute

Wow. In a budget process that has seen it's share of shocking developments and outrageous statements, perhaps nothing stands out more than this recent pronouncement from Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle. From WisPolitics' Monday PM Subscriber Update: Doyle also shrugged off criticisms that the budget process was not open. "Everything is totally transparent. Everybody knows what the bills were that were passed by the two houses and they know what the issues of debate are, the differences between the two houses. So there aren't any secrets here," Doyle said. MORE>

EPA's Game of Global Warming
Hide-and-Seek
by Michelle Malkin, columnist

The Obama administration doesn't want to hear inconvenient truths about global warming. And they don't want you to hear them, either. As Democrats rush on Friday to pass a $4 trillion, thousand-page "cap and trade" bill that no one has read, environmental bureaucrats are stifling voices that threaten their political agenda. The free market-based Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington (where I served as a journalism fellow in 1995) obtained a set of internal e-mails exposing Team Obama's willful and reckless disregard for data that undermine the illusion of "consensus." MORE>