Signaleer

Hot Air » Blog Archive » Coburn fires warning shot across Senate Democrats’ bow; Update: DeMint joins Coburn, video statement added; Update: DeMint threatens to do the same to entire bill

2009-12-16T13:10:00.000-06:00

"It took eighteen minutes just to get through the table of contents … for an amendment. Philip says the pace picked up a bit afterward, and the entire amendment could be read within about 12 hours. That’s twelve hours of floor time, assuming Coburn keeps withholding unanimous consent."

Pakistan's Zardari resists U.S. timeline for fighting insurgents - washingtonpost.com

2009-12-16T13:07:00.000-06:00

"Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari has resisted a direct appeal from President Obama for a rapid expansion of Pakistani military operations in tribal areas and has called on the United States to speed up military assistance to Pakistani forces and to intervene more forcefully with India, its traditional adversary."

Daily Express | UK News :: Climate change is natural: 100 reasons why

2009-12-16T12:08:00.000-06:00

"HERE are the 100 reasons, released in a dossier issued by the European Foundation, why climate change is natural and not man-made:"

Peace Time: Dangerous When Moved

2009-12-15T14:27:00.000-06:00

"As U.S. bases are shut down, many memorial items, dating from World War II, are being moved, sometimes to be scrapped. Those involved in the removals are warned to remember a 1958 incident. Back then, a British air base, at Scampton, was rebuilding the road through the main gate. There were two 'gate guards' on either side of the main gate. One was a demilitarized Lancaster heavy (four engine) bomber, and the other was a 22,000 pound (10 ton) 'Grand Slam' bomb that was believed to be demilitarized. But it wasn't."

Leadership: Where "Good Enough" Can Get You Killed

2009-12-15T14:24:00.000-06:00

"NATO and American trainers have to recruit and educate a lot of their own technical people, after first improving the literacy skills of promising candidates. But then, when you've trained, say vehicle mechanics, you often find that they will leave the army (often just deserting) for a better paying civilian job.
Thus you have the familiar pattern where, new equipment, say trucks, are delivered to the army or police. After a while, most of the vehicles become inoperable. This is because of the chronic shortage of qualified mechanics and operators to maintain these vehicles. As a result, after a year or so of use, these vehicles start to break down, and there are not enough qualified mechanics to keep the vehicles operational."

Forces: Iraq Comes Back

2009-12-15T14:21:00.000-06:00

"The 1st Intervention Corps consists of the two motorized, one infantry and one armored divisions. One of the motorized corps is the also known as the Reaction Force Division. This is considered the most effective division in the army, and one to be used for the most difficult situations. Think of this corps as the new 'Republican Guard.'
The other three corps are named after the part of the country they are based in."

Afghanistan: Fighting For The Dry, Mountainous Nothing In The Middle Of Nowhere

2009-12-15T14:16:00.000-06:00

"American commanders believe the 30,000 additional U.S. troops, plus increases in Afghan and NATO forces, will enable the Taliban to be crushed within a year. But after that, Afghanistan will require economic and military assistance for at least twenty years, to bring sustained peace to the country. The plan is to turn over security to the central government within five years."

Naval Air: Sea King Leaves The Navy

2009-12-14T23:36:00.000-06:00

"The U.S. Navy has retired its last UH-3H Sea King transport helicopter, and transferred most of the remaining ones to the U.S. Marine Corps. The navy used to be the largest operator of the H-3, using hundreds of them for anti-submarine warfare, as well as transporting personnel and supplies, plus search and rescue."

Logistics: Light The Little Suckers Up And Watch Them Die

2009-12-14T23:28:00.000-06:00

"It takes 48 seconds to clean half a liter (16 ounces) of water (and 90 seconds for a liter). Just stick the probe in the water, press the button and watch the countdown timer. One set of batteries will purify 58 liters (14.3 gallons). Unlike purification tablets, the SteriPen method does not leave a chemical taste. For this reason, many troops buy a SteriPen, which cost a hundred dollars."

The Long View [Darleen Click]

2009-12-14T10:02:00.000-06:00

"Cash For Cubes! In an effort to stop global warming & create jobs!!!11!, the Obama administration pays selected Democrats in the Teamster Union to haul ice cubes from bicycle powered freezers in about-to-be-foreclosed homes to the Maldives, where it is packed around panting polar bears, sweating penguins, and an occasional spotted owl."

U.S. agency sees more health spending with reform | Reuters

2009-12-12T20:07:00.000-06:00

"U.S. healthcare spending would rise by about $234 billion over the next decade under the Senate Democrats' overhaul bill and some of the proposed savings might never be achieved, a U.S. agency said in a report released on Friday."

Health care loophole would allow coverage limits - Yahoo! News

2009-12-12T20:00:00.000-06:00

"A loophole in the Senate health care bill would let insurers place annual dollar limits on medical care for people struggling with costly illnesses such as cancer, prompting a rebuke from patient advocates."

My Way News - Regulators shut banks in Florida, Arizona, Kansas

2009-12-12T19:57:00.000-06:00

"Regulators have shut down banks in Florida, Arizona and Kansas, bringing to 133 the number of U.S. banks that have failed to hold up this year against the struggling economy and a cascade of loan defaults."

Big Government » Blog Archive » UN Security Stops Journalist’s Questions About ClimateGate#more-44722#more-44722

2009-12-12T19:55:00.000-06:00

"A Stanford Professor has used United Nation security officers to silence a journalist asking him “inconvenient questions” during a press briefing at the climate change conference in Copenhagen.
Professor Stephen Schneider’s assistant requested armed UN security officers who held film maker Phelim McAleer, ordered him to stop filming and prevented further questioning after the press conference where the Stanford academic was launching a book."

Intelligence: Up The Creek Without A Linguist

2009-12-12T19:41:00.000-06:00

"The Department of Defense can't train enough new military interpreters, so it has to hire local people. That is difficult in Afghanistan. The problem is that the local terrorists realize that the interpreters are important, and they, well, terrorize the interpreters into quitting or, even better, becoming a terrorist spy. This, obviously complicates things for the combat troops who need the interpreters to get their work done. The solution has been to have the intelligence troops work closely with hiring and monitoring interpreters. In some parts of Afghanistan, the interpreters are hired in secret, and much effort goes into keeping their job status secret from the local community."

Air Transportation: Black Hawk Upgrade

2009-12-12T19:40:00.000-06:00

"This M model is the new standard for the UH-60. The UH-60M features several improvements, including new rotor blades (more reliable, and provide 500 pounds of additional lift), an all electronic cockpit (putting all needed information on four full-color displays), an improved autopilot (which will fly the chopper if the pilot is injured and unable to), improved flight controls (making flying easier, especially in stressful situations), a stronger fuselage, more efficient navigation system, better infrared suppression (making it harder for heat seeking missiles to hit), and more powerful engines. The oldest model, the UH-60As, will continue to serve until the last of them is retired in 2025. By then, all UH-60s will be L or M models."

Electronic Weapons: Turning PlayStation Into A Supercomputer

2009-12-11T11:46:00.000-06:00

"Three years ago, the Tesla supercomputer add-on for PCs appeared on the market. This was basically an Nvidia graphics board tweaked to act like a supercomputer, rather than a device that put 3-D, photo-realistic game graphics on your computer screen. The latest version of this system will give you a teraflop of computing power for $10,000.
The Cell Processor on the PlayStation 3 (PS 3) is also a GPU, and that GPU alone was used to built several of the fastest supercomputers on the planet."

Is ObamaCare Constitutional?

2009-12-10T17:52:00.000-06:00

Commerce and taxing power don't support mandate

In a recent legal memorandum, Heritage legal scholar Todd Gaziano, joined by Georgetown law professor Randy Barnett and Nathaniel Stewart, LLP, argues that the individual mandate is both unconstitutional and unprecedented.

Neither the power to regulate commerce nor the power to impose taxes grants Congress the power, they write, to "mandate that an individual enter into a contract with a private party or purchase a good or service and…no decision or present doctrine of the Supreme Court justifies such a claim of power."

Though many on the Left overlooked it, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service even recognized the constitutional obstacles to the individual mandate:

Whether such [an individual mandate] requirement would be constitutional under the Commerce Clause is perhaps the most challenging question posed by such a proposal, as it is a novel issue whether Congress may use this clause to require an individual to purchase a good or a service.

The Supreme Court has long held that there are limits to Congress' power under the Commerce Clause. An individual mandate would require stretching these limits. Although this has been done in the past, "the current Supreme Court is unlikely to stretch the commerce power further than it already has," explain Gaziano, Barnett and Stewart.

Congress' power to "lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States...." also does not validate an individual mandate. The Constitution requires that a tax be apportioned on the basis of the census population, and not vary based upon factors such as the financial condition of the state's residents. "[But] this [constitutional] requirement will be impossible to meet based upon the variety of exceptions provided in the mandate," write Gaziano, Barnett and Stewart.

Interpreting the Constitution to support an individual mandate would open the door for future abuses, as Heritage's Conn Carroll explains:

If the individual mandate is Constitutional, then Congress could do anything. They could: require us to buy a new Chevy Impala each year to support the government-supported auto industry; require us to buy war bonds to pay for the Iraq and Afghan wars; require us to grow wheat (10 bushels each), or pay someone else to grow your share; require us to buy whatever they want.

"Politics may tell us what we want to do, but the Constitution tells us what we may do and we must keep those separate," Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) said yesterday at a Heritage event on the Constitution's role in the health care debate. An individual mandate that forces all Americans to purchase health coverage or incur a penalty would blur this separation horribly. And that's a serious problem.

Petraeus Says Afghan War Is Tougher Fight Than Iraq (Update1) - Bloomberg.com

2009-12-10T15:07:00.000-06:00

"“Achieving progress in Afghanistan will be hard and progress there likely will be slower in developing than was the progress in Iraq,” Petraeus told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee today. “Nonetheless, as with Iraq, in Afghanistan hard is not hopeless.”"

The real inconvenient truth

2009-12-10T14:48:00.000-06:00

Canadian OP/ED proposes China style one child rule for the whole planet. Health care reform lays the ground work to allow it in the US. "None will work unless a China one-child policy is imposed. Unfortunately, there are powerful opponents. Leaders of the world's big fundamentalist religions preach in favor of procreation and fiercely oppose birth control. And most political leaders in emerging economies perpetuate a disastrous Catch-22: Many children (i. e. sons) stave off hardship in the absence of a social safety net or economic development, which, in turn, prevents protections or development."

Dems to lift debt ceiling by $1.8 trillion, fear 2010 backlash - - POLITICO.com

2009-12-10T14:45:00.000-06:00

"In a bold but risky year-end strategy, Democrats are preparing to raise the federal debt ceiling by as much as $1.8 trillion before New Year’s rather than have to face the issue again prior to the 2010 elections."

Leadership: Leading With A Laptop

2009-12-10T14:32:00.000-06:00

"Starting in 2002, the marines took four years to design, build, test and roll out a new battalion headquarters system. It was only a generation ago that a battalion headquarters was a bunch of radios, typewriters, maps and troops, hauled around in a truck and set up in tents. That's all changed. There are still radios, but now the tent is full of laptop computers, a local area network, large flat screen displays, a satellite link, and much else that is new. The tent is also air conditioned. To keep the equipment from overheating, but it does make life easier for the troops. The battalion headquarters is now standardized, to make managing and quickly setting up all this new equipment possible."

Counter-Terrorism: Women, Literacy And Angry Young Men

2009-12-10T14:29:00.000-06:00

"Thus in most Islamic countries, the women are having fewer children, and making more noise about economic and educational opportunities. This resonates with some of the better informed Islamic men. One reason the West, and other parts of the world, have enjoyed much better economic growth than the Moslem countries, is that they have added large number of educated women to their work force."

Iran: Government Promises Students More Death Sentences

2009-12-10T14:22:00.000-06:00

"Currently, Iran has enriched its nuclear material to about five percent. For weapons, you need to increase the content of Uranium 235 in uranium ore to at least 54 percent (producing uranium that contains that percentage of the more volatile U-235 form of the nuclear material). This is far above the 5-10 percent minimum needed for nuclear power plants. Normally, Uranium ore is only about .7 percent U-235. Anything over 20 percent enriched can be used for a nuclear bomb. But the most effective and reliable nuclear weapons use 80 percent enriched nuclear material. Iran appears to believe that the UN will not be able to implement more severe sanctions (because China is an Iranian ally)."

Infantry: The Phantom Menace

2009-12-10T14:19:00.000-06:00

"The basic 'Level 3' SAPI plates are 10x12 inches, weigh 4.6 pounds each and cost about $400. The older Level 4 plates, weighing about 6.4 pounds each, could stop some types of armor piercing bullets, and the new XSAPI weighs about six pounds and have somewhat greater stopping power. ESAPI is more expensive, at $600 a plate."