Moonbattery – Page 7 – OfficiallyScrewed.com

Al Gore Wins Booby Prize (Right After Winning Oscar)

February 27, 2007Mulder

Not 24 hours after Al Gore’s movie won an Oscar, he gets awarded the big booby prize. The hypocrisy that this man shows is on the grandest scale.

Last night (Feb. 25, 2007), Al Gore’s global-warming documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, collected an Oscar for best documentary feature, but the Tennessee Center for Policy Research has found that Gore deserves a gold statue for hypocrisy.

Gore’s mansion, [20-room, eight-bathroom] located in the posh Belle Meade area of Nashville, consumes more electricity every month than the average American household uses in an entire year, according to the Nashville Electric Service (NES).

In his documentary, the former Vice President calls on Americans to conserve energy by reducing electricity consumption at home.

The average household in America consumes 10,656 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year, according to the Department of Energy. In 2006, Gore devoured nearly 221,000 kWh—more than 20 times the national average.

Last August alone, Gore burned through 22,619 kWh—guzzling more than twice the electricity in one month than an average American family uses in an entire year. As a result of his energy consumption, Gore’s average monthly electric bill topped $1,359.

Since the release of An Inconvenient Truth, Gore’s energy consumption has increased from an average of 16,200 kWh per month in 2005, to 18,400 kWh per month in 2006.

Gore’s extravagant energy use does not stop at his electric bill. Natural gas bills for Gore’s mansion and guest house averaged $1,080 per month last year.

“As the spokesman of choice for the global warming movement, Al Gore has to be willing to walk to walk, not just talk the talk, when it comes to home energy use,” said Tennessee Center for Policy Research President Drew Johnson.

In total, Gore paid nearly $30,000 in combined electricity and natural gas bills for his Nashville estate in 2006.

(bolded emphasis mine)

I have reprinted the entire article above, a rarity for me, because the URL to Drudge seems to be one that may change.

H/T to Chris in Middle Earth.

I Had A Waking Nightmare…

February 26, 2007Mulder

…that I went to the hospital but the nurses were on strike … and the NDP anti-scab legislation wouldn’t let the hospital hire people to fill in.

…that I walked my kids to school through a foot high pile of trash, fighting off the seagulls, and hoisting my daughter on my shoulders so the rats wouldn’t bite her ankles … because the NDP anti-scab legislation means when the city garbage men went on strike we couldn’t hire replacements.

… that a blogburst to stop the NDP anti-scab legislation didn’t work.

When a man or woman belong to a union, they have a right to strike. They have a right to step up and say to the man “I don’t want what you’re giving.”

But on that token, I would never, ever, ever want to tell someone who runs a company or organization that they can not ensure they operate by hiring whomever they want.

And I would never, ever, ever want to tell someone who has been out of work that if an opportunity came along for them to find a half decent job to help pay the bills or put food on the table for their family that they can’t take that job because of Jack Layton’s anti-scab proposed legislation.

Just Say No To Bill C-257. Call your MP to let them know what you think about this bill that takes the freedom to work away from people who want a job.

Visit Clear Conservative Thought or the National Citizen’s Coalition for more information.

Liberals Have No Plan Except To Repeat No Plan

February 14, 2007Mulder

The following video was (for the most part) created from clips from Oral Questions on February 14th, 2007.

It’s kind of like watching David Letterman’s Stupid Pet Tricks.

Click the video once for it to play.

If you cannot view the video above, try clicking the link below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNjcCzr3sGs

Liberals Take Meaning Of Opposition To A New Level And Oppose Their Own Bill

February 10, 2007Mulder

In what amounts to the Liberals coming out and stating “I spit in your general direction!“, they have come out and opposed the Tory plan to extend the Anti Terrorist bill that the Liberals themselves created and passed while in power.

The former Liberal government of Jean Chretien rushed the sweeping federal law through Parliament in the weeks after 9/11, arguing law-enforcement agencies needed extensive new tools to deal with the threat of terror.

But in response to concerns the law would trample civil liberties, the government placed a “sunset” clause on the provisions of the law enabling “preventive arrests” and “investigative hearings.” Both provisions expire at the end of next week, unless both Houses of Parliament pass a resolution to extend them.

The Conservative government tabled a motion yesterday that would extend the provisions for three years.

But now that the Liberals have withdrawn support, the motion looks doomed. Both the NDP and the Bloc Quebecois oppose any extension. A vote on the motion is expected next week.

The Liberal shift surprised national security experts, who were expecting an extension to sail through Parliament.

Has Dion lead the Liberals further left than they have been in a long time? Or is he opposing just to be opposing? I think it is a bit of both.

What’s your take?

H/T to Werner Patels

Law Professor Allegations Meant To Remove Canadian Forces From Afghanistan

February 6, 2007Mulder

Ottawa University Professor Amir Attaran appeared on Canada AM this morning to discuss the possible abuse by Canadian troops of Afghani prisoners.

I have been doing some light reading this evening and I am wondering why Mr. Attaran would be so interested in the possible abuse of these men.

The information which will be presented in an investigation look pretty clear cut to me.

The three Afghans were captured near Dukah by a small group of Canadian soldiers.

One of the detainees was seen observing the soldiers but escaped, only to be captured the next day. In a field report, the soldiers described him as “non-compliant.”

Another is described as being “extremely belligerent” and “it took four personnel to subdue him.”

In the most serious instance, it was said that only “appropriate force” was used and that the suspect was an alleged bomb maker.

And what did these men suffer? Remember, one that they were “non-compliant”, “extremely belligerent” and one was an alleged bomb maker.

All three of them had a similar set of injuries to their face, to their head and the most seriously injured man had his eyes swollen, cuts on his eyebrows, a slash across his forehead and a cut on his cheek.

So in other words, these men looked like this.

Rocky

Big Deal. It took 4 men to subdue one of them. How do you expect these guys to look?

Right now it seems to me that most of this is still speculation, hearsay, and allegations by Mr. Attaran. Apparently, the men were returned to Afghan authorities and “never seen again.” (cue Twilight Zone music).

So what is this really all about?

Well we can tell you that Dr. Attaran has conveniently brought up these cases (with one file missing) when only a year ago he was criticizing Canada’s Prisoner Transfer Agreement with Afghanistan.

Professor Amir Attaran of the Faculty of Law fears that the agreement between Ottawa and Kabul on prisoner transfers makes Canadian soldiers complicit to torture.
He made this assertion during the conference on the “Canadian Legal Response to Torture” that took place on March 24, 2006 at the University of Ottawa.

This event, organized by the Law Society of Upper Canada, the Human Rights Research and Education Centre and the Faculty of Law, attracted more than two hundred people from different government departments, human rights organizations and lawyers interested in the subject.

So after criticizing the agreement almost a year ago, Mr. Attaran has been reviewing report after report after report on the Afghani prisoner transfers and has finally found 3 that can make his criticism valid. How many prisoner files did he need to review before he found these? How many hundreds of prisoners were processed properly without issue before three “Belligerents” took a couple of shots to put them back in line?

Mr. Attaran should produce a bit more evidence before making allegations as he has.

Judge him for yourself. Mr. Attaran has written for the Globe and Mail (left leaning), The Washington Post (left leaning), The New York Times (VERY left leaning) and his previous employer was the “Sierra Legal Defence Fund” (Granola crunching, left leaning, tree hugging, legal action group).

I think Mr. Attaran should come clean. His actions indicate he wants Canada out of Afghanistan. Just like his buddy Jack Layton.

ADDENDUM: Actually, Mr. Attaran is quoted on page 3 of one of Alexa McDonough’s “Global Perspectives” flyers from 2003. e

GroupThink – We Are Borg, Resistance Is Futile. You Will Be Assimilated

February 4, 2007Mulder

What happens when someone who is considered a leader switches sides? Should his followers shun him or follow him?

This question is being asked again by many on the left after Nick Cohen, infamous leftist protester and activist has come out with his new book What’s Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way.

I was pointed to an interview Nick Cohen gave and he has clearly not left his roots, but he is questioning the current state of affairs among what he calls “Guardianistas”.

“Serious people on the left I have no trouble with. They may not agree with me but they know something is going wrong. An Oxford don has told me, ‘I’m against the war but I hate going on a demo with anti-semites and Trotskyites’. It’s the soft left liberal intelligentsia, those bloody comedians we get these days — they want to feel righteous, they dislike all ambiguity. They want to think they are good. They swear at me.”

Auntie gets it on the chin too. “I support the BBC but I think our problem is the concentration of media in London. When there is an absolute liberal consensus, everyone they meet, eat or sleep with thinks the same damn thing.” So in Iraq’s case this groupthink didn’t come in the hard questions they asked the other side, but the soft questions they asked their own side. “For years,” he writes, “the BBC’s attack dog presenters couldn’t manage to give one opponent of the war a tough interview. Not even George Galloway.”

Auntie got her “impartial, balanced” revenge; on Radio 4’s Start the Week last Monday Cohen was politely monstered by every other left-liberal guest. The Guardian also came up with a novel way of pigeonholing Cohen’s politics as unworthy of serious discussion. “The Guardian online talkboards carried a discussion with me and another supporter of the war from the left with a Jewish name, which was entitled: ‘David Aaronovitch and Nick Cohen Are Enough to Make a Good Man Anti-Semitic’.” Not funny, not clever. He has also been pilloried on the paper’s op-ed pages by an apologist for the communist dictatorship in Cuba.

In that quote we see the term “groupthink”. I recently came across this word in Paul Wells’ new book which I am reading now, but Paul elabourates on not only the meaning but some scientific study into “groupthink”. I will refrain from quoting Mr. Wells directly, but I will say that group think polarizes people according to the studies Mr. Wells quotes. It takes a bell curve where their are few at the extreme and shifts the mass of the bell towards that edge. This is clearly something our society is dealing with now on many issues. Americans and Brits in Iraq … polarized. Canadians in Afghanistan … polarized. Climate Change being unnatural … polarized, etc. etc. etc.

Cohen appears to be standing off from the polarized left on a few issues and as the quote says, he is being “pilloried … by an apologist for the communist dictatorship in Cuba.”?

Wow, with friends like these, who needs enemies?

The left and, in particular, Guardianistas, have made their bed by defending the rights of the minorities in their own nations. Yet only those hard core leftists, leave their own country to protest. The majority of that shifted Bell Curve crowd run and hide when push comes to shove and getting up off their ass is required. You never see the throngs protesting women’s rights in Kabul or Riyadh. You never see the throngs protesting the opening of a Chinese coal fired power plant in Shenzhen. Those not willing to go to the extreme are the ones that are polarized by GroupThink and not the idealogy itself. They just keep jumping on the bandwagon of the issue of the day and pick the left leaning side and champion it, keeping this GroupThink polarization mentality. After all, who wants to be pilloried by your “friends” over a Latte or a Chi at Starbucks?

According to Paul Wells, the Paul Martin government fell in large part due to GroupThink polarizing Liberals towards the idea of change and the extreme was too much change for Canadians. If we are lucky the leftist movement supporting Kyoto will fall because they are all pulling the rope in the same direction and it happens to be one heading towards a cliff that Liberal Environment critic David McGuinty said will cost us as much as $40 Billion a year. That’s a pretty steep cliff that even extreme left leaning Canadians may not want to get close to for fear of falling over.

If we can take anything positive from Nick Cohen’s defection, it is that resistance is NOT futile. We will NOT be assimilated. (If there is anything leftists can take from this, it is that polarization and groupthink will destroy them…but I wouldn’t want to be the one to tell them that before they make like lemmings.)

H/T to my friend Sandy for the Nick Cohen link.

Fearmongering 101 – What Kind Of Person Fearmongers?

February 3, 2007Mulder

Well there is the childhood fearmonger…always good for a laugh.

Then we have the humourous “the end is near, my alien friends will take us to safety” fearmonger…always good for a laugh

Exidor

Then we have the goofball fearmonger…always good for a laugh.

HomerEndIsNear

Then we have the wacky looking (to attract attention) fearmonger…always good for a laugh.

End Is Near

And finally we have the get on a bus, travel across the country, to share the experience fearmonger….

Further

Oops, wrong bus. I meant the following person who plans to ride across the country in a bus and share his experience with the people. And he too is good for a laugh.

Suzuki

Who Will Be The Next Liberal Critic For The Environment Portfolio?

February 2, 2007Mulder

First we had Scott Brison who said:

Instead, the previous plans in terms of Kyoto agreement was written on the back of an airplane napkin on the way to Kyoto. There was no altered planning. There was no real negotiations with the provinces or with industry sectors. In fact, it was a last minute, hastily drafted, agreement.

Scott was removed:

Well on Wednesday, the new Environment Critic, David McGuinty, brother of the infamous Dalton McShifty, showed me what kind of politician he really is.

First, he get’s bitchslapped by Environment Minister, John Baird when Baird quoted past statements by McGuinty:

While we are talking about quotes, what about this quote, “when people see the cost of Kyoto, they are going to scream”. Who said that? It was the environment critic for the Liberal Party, the member for Ottawa South.

Note the member from Ottawa South is David McGuinty.

Here is another quote that I wonder if the hon. member opposite will agree with: “If Canada does ratify Kyoto…the cost…would be as much as $40-billion a year.”

Do we know who said that? It was the official spokesman, the Liberal critic for environment, the member for Ottawa South, who said that.

Note the member from Ottawa South is David McGuinty.

So how does the grown up David McGuinty react? Let’s take a look. During points of order the following conversation took place.

Mr. David McGuinty (Ottawa South, Lib.): Mr. Speaker, during question period the Prime Minister was asked 18 times whether he was misleading Canadians then or misleading them now on climate change. In answering those questions the Minister of the Environment continued misleading the House of Commons and Canadians by taking out of context comments I have made in the past as a professional. This is precisely the kind of conduct that Canadians have come to count on from the new government.

I would ask the Minister of the Environment to table the documents. I would ask all Canadians to understand these comments were taken out of context.

I would ask the Prime Minister again to answer the question as to whether he was misleading Canadians then or whether he is misleading them now.

Hon. John Baird (Minister of the Environment, CPC): Mr. Speaker, I am very happy to give the references for my comments in question period.

When I said, “if Canada does ratify Kyoto, the cost would be as much as $40 billion a year”, that was from the Globe and Mail of January 29.

When I said that the Liberal member for Ottawa South said that the Liberal Party was involved in a “medium sized car crash during the recent federal election”, that came from the National Post of March 23, 2006.

When I said “but when people see the costs of Kyoto, they are going to scream”, that came from Canadian Speeches, January 1, 2003, volume 16, issue 6.

The Speaker: I do not know that we are going far with this. It sounds to me like debate.

Is the hon. member for Ottawa South rising on another point?

Mr. David McGuinty: Mr. Speaker, I would like to congratulate the Minister of the Environment for his extensive detailed research into my background. I thank him very much.

I would remind him on this point of order that the kind of conduct he is pursuing is conduct unbecoming of a Minister of the Environment. He should understand that Canadians are watching; his constituents and my constituents are watching. This does not advance the cause of climate change one iota. In fact, what the Minister of the Environment should do is prevail upon his boss, the Prime Minister, to answer the question.

The Speaker: I do not think we are on a point of order here, so we will move on.

Even the Speaker says it is not a point of order. I call it a point of whining on behalf of Liberals everywhere and with comments like these, I can’t imagine Dion will keep McGuinty on the Environment portfolio for long.

Liberals Would Have Us Believe Lightweight Lift Aircraft Are Heavyweight Lift Aircraft

February 1, 2007Mulder

On Tuesday January 30th, 2007 the Minister of Defence, Gordon O’Connor, cleared up any question of the heavy lift aircraft tender with one statement.

In answering Liberal Denis Coderre’s question regarding the contract being changed so that only one aircraft could meet the requirements, the Minister said:

Requirements are set by the military and they go through a process from a desk officer all the way to the Chief of the Defence Staff, and then they come to me. At that point I get the requirements from the military.

The military requirement was not changed after the Chief of the Defence Staff gave it to me. By the way, the weight I think was 39 tonnes and the aircraft we eventually selected lifts 85 tonnes.

(emphasis mine).

So let’s figure this out. Let’s say that the contract weight lift requirement was dropped to 35 tonnes to allow a second or third bid to be eligible, these options would be lifting LESS THAN HALF what the Boeing airplanes can lift.

Since the armed forces were not looking for a lightweight or middleweight lift aircraft, I think the arguments being made by opposition are simply baseless and the Boeing C18’s are clearly the king of heavy lift … twice over.

To accept other bids from aircraft that can lift 30 odd tonnes would be like a soccer mom buying a Volkswagon Golf instead of a Suburban. Oh sure, it can get our team to the game, but it would take two or even three trips to do it and when it comes to the troops putting their lives on the line, I would rather they get what they need as quickly as possible.

But the ulterior motive is that the Liberals would rather have a non Boeing company provide us with the aircraft because Boeing spreads the wealth around the country, whereas other contractors would focus much of the reinvestment in Quebec.

Handout This ties in nicely to how Gilles Duceppe is looking for 60% of the Boeing reinvestment to be in Quebec as Quebec has 60% of the military contractors in Canada. Does Mr. Duceppe not see the hypocrisy of his request? He is trying to slam the government for not addressing the fiscal imbalance but he wants a completely disproportionate amount of the Boeing money in his province. He is starting to look like a ragged beggar with his hand out all the time.