Right Minded Online

From WETMTV.com in a story headlined “How Farm Odors Contribute to Global Warming: New Research Happening in NYS“:

You can definitely smell it, but you can’t see it.

The United States Department of Agriculture has released reports stating that when you smell cow manure, you’re also smelling greenhouse gas emissions.

That will be the focus of new research that might happen right here in the Southern Tier.

Agriculture Under Secretary for Natural Resources and Environment, Mark Rey, was in Corning Wednesday morning at the Big Flats Plant Materials Center to announce the award of nearly $20 million in Conservation Innovation Grants to fund 51 research projects across the country designed to refine new technologies helping dairy and other agricultural producers cut back on their greenhouse emissions and cash in on governmental incentives for the research.

One million dollars of those grants will come to New York State.

The U.S.D.A. is now taking applications from large dairy farms across the state who want to participate.

The agency reports that cow and hog manure produce methane, which is a greenhouse gas.

The problem here is that methane is an odorless gas. Therefore, farm odors cannot possibly contribute to global warming.

The U.S. Senate, at the behest of the American people, defeated the amnesty bill for the second time yesterday. Only 46 senators voted to end debate on the legislation — fourteen short of the 60 votes that are required.

Already, the mainstream press is characterizing the amnesty bill’s failure exclusively as a defeat for President Bush. Granted, what happened in the Senate yesterday was a defeat for President Bush, but it is also a defeat for the Democrats, who are the majority party in the Senate now. Indeed, it was Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid who twice tried to run this legislation through, and twice failed. It is also a defeat for Senator Ted Kennedy, who was more or less the Democrat Party’s leading spokesman in favor of amnesty.

Harry Reid blames talk radio. As a member of the talk radio audience, I’ll gladly take my share of the credit.

By the way, the roll call vote is here.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa has been saved from collapse — a feat for which I hold a special interest since I visited Pisa several times while stationed in Italy, and even climbed to the top of the structure twice before it was closed to the public in 1990.

I heard about the Ann Coulter/Elizabeth Edwards confrontation while listening to the Maha Rushie on Wednesday, then saw it covered while watching the midday news on Nashville’s Channel 4 yesterday. The two versions could not have been starker.

I didn’t see it, but the great Ann Coulter was on Hardball with Chris Matthews Tuesday night when Elizabeth Edwards, wife of presidential candidate John Edwards, just happened to call in to chastise Coulter for her abrasiveness. Coulter hade made a statement about John Edwards while a guest on Good Morning America from the day before that had gotten his wife’s dander up. The quote which I saw while watching the Channel 4 news segment went thus:

If I’m going to say anything about John Edwards in the future I’ll just wish he had been killed in a terrorist assassination plot.

Wow! That’s pretty callous, and it certainly makes Coulter look like the bad girl here, right? Well, that wasn’t the entire quote. The mainstream press cut out just a portion of what Coulter had said during her GMA appearance. Here’s the entire statement:

But about the same time, you know, Bill Maher was not joking and saying he wished Dick Cheney had been killed in a terrorist attack. So I’ve learned my lesson. If I’m going to say anything about John Edwards in the future I’ll just wish he had been killed in a terrorist assassination plot.

And so, I rest my case. I just wonder whether Elizabeth Edwards confronted Bill Maher when he made that statement.

At any rate, here’s what the thin-skinned Elizabeth Edwards said while scolding Coulter:

In the South, when someone does something that displeases us, we ask them politely to stop doing it. I’d like to ask Ann Coulter, too, if she wants to debate on issues, on positions, we certainly disagree with nearly everything she said on your show today, but it’s quite another matter to — for these personal attacks, the things that she has said over the years not just about John, but about other candidates, it lowers our — our — our political dialogue precisely at the time that we need to raise it. So I want to use the opportunity, which I don’t get much because Ann and I don’t hang out with the same people, to ask her politely to stop the personal attacks.

Yeah, like John Edwards has never made a personal attack on anyone before. If Edwards can’t take the heat, he ought to leave the kitchen. You don’t have to put up with this stuff if you don’t want to. All you have to do is drop out of politics and go back to being a private citizen, and you’ll pretty much be left alone. But for the wife of a man who is running for President of the United States to call up a political pundit and ask her to stop the personal attacks illustrates how insecure and thin-skinned these people really are. Welcome to the wonderful world of partisan politics, Mrs. Edwards.

Ann Coulter dedicated her weekly column to the confrontation: “That Was No Lady — That Was My Husband.”

There are also a couple of related news stories I found on Drudge. Both the Des Moines Register and The Hill cite Coulter’s comment, but neither contains the entire quote that I cited above.

Fortunately, the ever-reliable World Net Daily mentioned that the Edwards campaign had taken the quote out of context. And Newsmax got it right, too. Thank goodness for alternative media.

At any rate, the fallout following the Coulter/Edwards confrontation illustrates why you cannot trust the mainstream press to get this stuff right. Perhaps we do need a fairness doctrine, after all.

Dear Senator Harkin,

As a native Iowan and excellent customer of the Internal Revenue Service, I am writing to ask for your assistance. I have contacted the Department of Homeland Security in and effort to determine the process for becoming an illegal alien and they referred me to you.

My primary reason for wishing to change my status from U.S. Citizen to illegal alien stems from the bill which was recently passed by the Senate and for which you voted. If my understanding of this bill’s provisions is accurate, as an illegal alien who has been in the United States for five years, all I need to do to become a citizen is to pay a $2,000 fine and income taxes for three of the last five years. I know a good deal when I see one and I am anxious to get the process started before everyone figures it out.

Simply put, those of us who have been here legally have had to pay taxes every year so I’m excited about the prospect of avoiding two years of taxes in return for paying a $2,000 fine. Is there any way that I can apply to be illegal retroactively? This would yield and excellent result for me and my family because we paid heavy taxes in 2004 and 2005.

Additionally, as an illegal alien I could begin using the local emergency room as my primary health care provider. Once I have stopped paying premiums for medical insurance, my accountant figures I could save almost $10,000 a year.

Another benefit in gaining illegal status would be that my daughter would receive preferential treatment relative to her law school applications, as well as “in state” tuition rates for many colleges throughout the United States for my son.

Lastly, I understand that illegal status would relieve me of the burden of renewing my driver’s license and making those burdensome car insurance premiums. This is very important to me given that I still have college age children driving my car.

If you would provide me with an outline of the process to become illegal [retroactively if possible] and copies of the necessary forms, I would be most appreciative. Thank you for your assistance.

Your Loyal Constituent,
Donald Ruppert
Burlington, IA

Senators Boxer and Clinton are now denying that they want to “do something” about talk radio. Maybe so, but Senator Diane Feinstein seems to want to “do something.” Indeed, the senator reminisces about the good ol’ days when the liberal media still had its monopoly: “I remember when there was a fairness doctrine, and I think there was much more serious correct reporting to people.”

You won’t find a more meddlesome bunch in the free world than liberals. These are people who tell us what to eat, what to drive, what we can and cannot say, where to smoke, how much of our money we can keep, how much toilet paper to use, that we can’t buy “Choose Life” license plates, where we Christians can and cannot share our faith, and now there is an effort underway to tell us what we can listen to on the radio. Liberals in Congress are going to try to impose the grossly misnamed Fairness Doctrine to reign in talk radio. Why talk radio and not any other media outlets? Because talk radio is dominated by conservatives. Why is talk radio dominated by conservatives? Because it’s rooted in the free market, which is driven by the choices made by consumers, and the consumers, left to their own devices, choose conservatism in the arena of ideas. So since the left cannot win in the arena of ideas, their next move is to shut down the arena of ideas.

Don’t ever fall for the lie that liberals are pro-choice — a self-descriptor they apply only to the issue of abortion. They are only pro-choice when you’re making the choice they would have you make. Ironically, the left typically maligns social conservatives for our supposed desire to tell others how to live. Indeed, a more accurate description of liberals is that they are anti-choice busybodies who advocate abortion, and not the concept of choice.

A friend passed along the link to a long open letter by William L. Anderson to the Duke lacrosse families. Anderson nails Duke University, and really nails Mike Nifong.

Additional reading: “DUKE AND MARMADUKE” by the great Ann Coulter

You might wonder what the two have in common. Indeed, it would take a liberal to make the connection, and that’s exactly what U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has done.

“The Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change,” Ban said in a Washington Post opinion column.

As WND reported in 2004, the U.S. declared the rape, pillaging and slaughter of blacks in western Sudan by the Islamist Khartoum regime and its Arab militia allies genocide. The U.N. has described it as the world’s worst current humanitarian crisis, with estimates of over 200,000 dead and more than 2.1 million displaced in four years.

In his column, Ban said U.N. statistics showed rainfall declined some 40 percent over the past two decades, as a rise in Indian Ocean temperatures disrupted monsoons.

“This suggests that the drying of sub-Saharan Africa derives, to some degree, from man-made global warming,” the South Korean diplomat wrote.

“It is no accident that the violence in Darfur erupted during the drought,” Ban wrote.

I have a novel idea that will probably be rejected in liberaldom. I know this is a stretch, but perhaps, just perhaps, the violence in Darfur isn’t the fault of global warming, but the fault of those who have provoked the violence. I know it sounds wacky to blame militant Islam for the crimes of militant Islam, but I’m just a right-wing extremist with strange ideas.

A couple of weeks ago, I made phone calls to Senators Alexander and Corker and Congressman Jim Cooper regarding my opposition to the amnesty bill currently before Congress. On Monday, I received a form letter from Mr. Cooper stating his position on this legislation. He didn’t come right out and state his position on the bill, but there was one curious item in his letter that pretty much tells us everything we need to know about Congressman Cooper and illegal immigration:

My approach to comprehensive immigration reform legislation is rooted in two firm beliefs. The first of these is that it is absolutely crucial that we tighten security at our borders. In the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks and the recent plots against JFK Airport and Fort Dix, the U.S. government must do a better job of controlling the flow of people and goods into the country. The creation of the Department of Homeland Security was an important attempt to coordinate the disparate agencies that control our border security, including the Customs service, Border Patrol, and the Coast Guard. However, even with this increased coordination, our immigration laws have too often gone unenforced at the border and in the heartland. Our first priority in Congress should be improving the strength, training, and equipment of our front line of domestic security control.

However, with more than 12 million people here illegally, enforcement alone will not solve the problem. We must induce people to come out of the shadows by giving them a path to legal residency provided they pay a penalty, are members of their community in good standing, and are willing to work to gain good standing with the American government. While it’s not an ideal situation by any means, the scope of the problem demands that we find practical solutions. Amnesty is not a solution, but the combination of strong border security, reasonable financial penalties and a path to legal residency will allow us to regain our territorial sovereignty.

While I agree with Mr. Cooper on the need for stricter border control, he and I differ on the definition of amnesty. So much of liberalism relies on the redefinition of words, and with respect to illegal immigration, the left is trying to change the meaning of “amnesty.” Congressman Cooper states he is against amnesty, but favors providing illegals with a path to legal residency. Well, that’s amnesty.

The Tennessean ran one of it’s trademark “Tennessee sucks” op/eds today, this one having to do with our shoddy lifestyle choices and — gasp! — turns to big government to provide solutions.

We’ll skip to the last three paragraphs of the editorial, where the editorial board paints its ghastly picture.

The reasons for this are evident to most of us: Too many Tennesseans smoke, eat unhealthy foods and overdo alcohol, leading to cancer, diabetes, hypertension and other fatal diseases. Unhealthy lifestyle choices and income disparity both contribute to Tennessee’s dismal infant mortality rate of 9.3 deaths per 1,000 live births — 47th nationally.

Not to mention abortion, which the Tennessean editorial board advocates, and where the infant mortality rate is much higher — 100%, in fact.

Our state government, to its credit, has taken a number of positive steps. Smoking will soon be banned in most public buildings and gathering places; GetFit Tennessee, with spokesman Eddie George, was launched last year to promote active lifestyles; and junk food is being phased out of our public schools.

Indeed, the Tennessee General Assembly raised taxes on a product they banned so they could raise taxes for schools. Hey, I live a healthy lifestyle, and not because of Eddie George. My cholesterol is good, I’m in pretty good shape, but I also listen to REALLY LOUD MUSIC when I run, which I know isn’t good for my hearing. Plus, I love those sugar-laden cappuccinos you get at Mapco, and I have an insatiable sweet tooth. But, hey, everyone has his vices. It could be worse. I could be a lottery player.

But it is clear that more aggressive measures may be needed. Just as Gov. Phil Bredesen has made education a focus, Tennessee must awaken citizens to the notion that taking care of themselves is not just about feeling better, but lower insurance costs for everyone, higher worker productivity, and fewer health problems handed down to future generations.

And what aggressive measures would those be? More laws? Bigger government? Liberal politicians telling the rest of us how to live? Professional athletes telling us how to live? Newspaper columnists telling us stupid people how to live?

John R. Lott, Jr. over at Opinion Journal points out some seemingly contradictory facts:

One often misunderstood fact: Legal abortions just didn’t start with Roe, or even with the five states that liberalized abortion laws in 1969 and 1970. Prior to Roe, women could have abortions when their lives or health were endangered. Doctors in some states, such as Kansas, had very liberal interpretations of what constituted danger to health. Nevertheless, Roe did substantially increase abortions, more than doubling the rate per live birth in the five years from 1972 to 1977. But many other changes occurred at the same time:

A sharp increase in pre-marital sex.

A sharp rise in out-of-wedlock births.

A drop in the number of children placed for adoption.

A decline in marriages that occur after the woman is pregnant.

Some of this might seem contradictory. Why would both the number of abortions and of out-of-wedlock births go up? If there were more illegitimate births, why were fewer children available for adoption?

He then explains what this all means. You can chalk it up to the one factor that renders liberalism such a failure whenever it’s tried: unintended consequences.

Gary Parrish over at CBS Sports Line has named the Memphis Tigers the preseason #1 team in college basketball. Great. While it’s nice to be recognized, the baggage that comes with being named the #1 team before you’ve even played a game outweighs the prestige of being #1. I would much prefer to be ranked, say, 17^th, and then spend the rest of the season being ignored by the media.

I guess you could say we’re now living in the post-global warming era.

The salient facts are these. First, the accepted global average temperature statistics used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that no ground-based warming has occurred since 1998. Oddly, this eight-year-long temperature stasis has occurred despite an increase over the same period of 15 parts per million (or 4 per cent) in atmospheric CO₂.

Second, lower atmosphere satellite-based temperature measurements, if corrected for non-greenhouse influences such as El Nino events and large volcanic eruptions, show little if any global warming since 1979, a period over which atmospheric CO₂ has increased by 55 ppm (17 per cent).

Third, there are strong indications from solar studies that Earth’s current temperature stasis will be followed by climatic cooling over the next few decades.

Go ahead and start using as much toilet paper as you like now.

Related story: Helping along global warming

This month we’re studying parts of Deuteronomy in Sunday School, where the nation of Israel finds itself wandering in the desert for a period of 40 years. God has promised the Israelites the land of Canaan. In fact, God has been making this promise for several centuries, back to the father of the Israelites, Abraham.

The Lord has led the nation of Israel out of its Egyptian captivity after raising up Moses as its leader and inflicting a series of plagues upon Pharaoh and the Egyptians in order to precipitate their release. God’s miraculous works culminated in the parting of the Red Sea.

But the Israelites soon forgot the Lord’s faithfulness, and fell into a state of disobedience. After having been brought to the edge of Promised Land, the Israelites sent twelve spies into the new land. Ten of the twelve returned shell-shocked, reporting that the land was inhabited by giants and that no way can the Israelites take that land. Only two, Caleb and Joshua, insisted otherwise.

Indeed, the Israelites had less faith in the centuries-old promise of the Lord than in the pessimism of their own spies, and so God punished their faithlessness by banishing them to aimless wandering for forty years, withholding that promise a little while longer. The waiting period allows for the naysayers to more or less die off, thereby passing the baton of inheritance to the next generation of Israelites.

But even during their wandering, the Lord provides the Israelites manna for nourishment, and provides for their other needs by not allowing their clothes and shoes to wear out. Furthermore, the Lord reminds them of His presence, traveling always by cloud during the day, and fire by night.

Now, in the eighth chapter of Deuteronomy, God reminds the Israelites of those promises, ensures them they will multiply further, instructs them not to forget Him nor his promises, and that they must keep His commands.

The class got into sort of a tangential discussion on the nation of Israel as God’s chosen people.

Why did God choose the Israelites above all others? It was Abraham, the father of Isaac, who was the father of Jacob, who was the father of the twelve tribes of Israel, who had found favor with God. It was also from the line of Abraham that Jesus Christ would eventually be born some 42 generations later.

Why did God wait so long to fulfill the promise? It required an army of Israelites to be able to conquer the land of Canaan and its inhabitants, and to occupy the land thereafter. Even though the Israelites spent 400 years in captivity in Egypt, they multiplied so greatly that Pharaoh had begun to fear their numbers. Indeed, the nation had descended from Joseph and his eleven brothers when the former brought them into his home in Egypt during a famine.

It is important to note that Jewish people are still God’s chosen even today. That the nation of Israel even exists today is miraculous. The Jews are the most persecuted people in human history, going all the way back to their captivity in Egypt, then the Babylonian conquest, then the Roman conquest in 70 A.D. that Christ predicted while on earth.

The Israelites went 1,878 years without a nation to call their own until the formation of the modern nation of Israel in 1948, itself a miracle considering that the Jews were just three years removed from perhaps their worst persecution of all — the Holocaust — and that they were greatly outnumbered by the Arabs they defeated in order to reclaim their Promised Land.

Today, the tiny nation of Israel is surrounded by enemies who would love nothing more than to eliminate the Jews and take their land. The Muslim world stretches from northern Africa through the Middle East, and is far larger and more populous than Israel. Yet Israel remains an oasis of freedom, prosperity, and military might amidst this volatile region of the world — a unique position that is duplicated nowhere else on the globe.

When you get into the end times prophecies that were predicted by various Old Testament prophets, Jesus Christ, and John, the writer of Revelation, nowhere is the United States of America, the richest, most powerful nation on the planet, ever mentioned. We are irrelevant to these future events. Instead, the focal point for the end times events is the tiny nation of Israel, home of the Jews, the chosen ones of God.

Perhaps, just perhaps, part of the reason for our own continued peace and prosperity here in the United States emanates from the fact that we are probably the best friend Israel has in the world.

So while Tennesseans are shelling out $1,454,350 million of our tax money to help fund Planned Parenthood, and while we’re shelling out another $305 million nationwide, the nation’s largest abortion provider is reporting record profits.

After Hurricane Katrina, I was under the impression that Democrats were all about protecting people from hurricanes. I was wrong. Democrats care more about politicizing hurricanes.

Commissioners in a Florida county who objected to having hurricane warnings run on Clear Channel radio station WIOD because the station also carries talk radio host Rush Limbaugh have backed down.

The action in Broward County came after the South Florida Sun-Sentinel said in an editorial that “you’d think that emergency and storm information would be something to keep above politics and demagoguery,” but “You obviously thought wrong.”

That’s correct. The Broward County Commission – all Democrats — originally did not want hurricane warnings to play on their county’s most powerful, most listened to radio station because it carries Rush Limbaugh. You have to love those Democrats. They really do care about the people.

And it really bothers him. Senator Lott, who supports the amnesty legislation the U.S. Senate plans to revive, lashed out at conservatives who have made their feelings known to elected representatives en masse, and took his frustration out on talk radio.

Comments by Republican senators on Thursday suggested that they were feeling the heat from conservative critics of the bill, who object to provisions offering legal status. The Republican whip, Trent Lott of Mississippi, who supports the bill, said: “Talk radio is running America. We have to deal with that problem.”

At some point, Mr. Lott said, Senate Republican leaders may try to rein in “younger guys who are huffing and puffing against the bill.”

By “talk radio,” one assumes Senator Lott refers to conservative talk radio, which pretty much dominates talk radio on the national level. I only listen to one talk radio program, Rush Limbaugh, so I cannot speak for all of talk radio, but the Maha Rushie has been passionate and consistent in pointing out what the amnesty bill REALLY says compared to what the pro-amnesty politicians say it says. I would assume that Rush Limbaugh has been responsible for a few hundred thousand phone calls being made to the Capitol switchboard, which has made it really hard for pro-amnesty types to run this legislation through without being exposed.

Let’s look at the phrase “Talk radio is running America.” First, what is talk radio? Is talk radio simply Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, etc., pulling the strings of the American electorate in a form of dictatorship? Not at all, although that’s what a lot of non-listeners would like to believe. At least in the case of Limbaugh, it’s a host plus 22,000,000 listeners who tune in voluntarily because we like to be informed, and Rush Limbaugh is a valuable source of news and analysis that one cannot find from the mainstream press. That’s why he has become so popular.

So, when Senator Lott refers to “talk radio,” he might think of Rush Limbaugh being a thorn in the side of arrogant politicians who want to jam through a horrible piece of legislation without being called on the carpet. However, when I hear “talk radio,” I think of 22,000,000 people who are engaged in American politics, and who care deeply about the United States of America. In that sense, talk radio (i.e., the people) SHOULD be running America. After all, ours is a government (at least in theory) of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Unfortunately, politicians such as Trent Lott have been in Washington for so long, far removed from the people who keep electing them, that the concept of a government of, by, and for the people is completely lost on them. They are infuriated that the truth about the amnesty bill has been so widely disseminated, and that the dastardly taxpayers who vote and pay the bills via taxes would dare to challenge the authority of those who, in their own insulated minds, know better than us what’s best for us.