Remember back in 1988, Ted Danson predicted that we only had ten years to live because the oceans were going to be dead and, if the oceans died, then we would soon follow?

He made a big deal out of this, one of the early environmental alarmists, the brilliant oceanologist, Ted Danson.

How can they justify their positions? I wish the media would act like reporters, instead of fanatic Hollywood groupies with those celebrities who claim to be oceanographers and so forth.

“Mr. Danson, Mr. Danson, what do you mean we’ve only got ten years left on earth unless we do — what’s — what’s — what’s your source?”

They never do.

They just — whatever Ted Danson or Whoopi Goldberg, any of these other Hollywood celebs say, they just accept it as gospel.

Ted Danson makes these claims, “Oh, oh, he cares so much.”

Well, on CNBC’s High Net Worth, the Jane Wells interviewed Ted Danson, and she said, “There was a time when you said the oceans are going to be dead in ten years. They’re not dead?“

DANSON: No. They’re not. But, I’m sure there was some hyperbole in what I said to draw attention to the issue, but you go to science journals now, 70% of the world’s fisheries are at a point of collapse.

Really? Oh, you lied, it was just hyperbole.

So now after being proven to have lied, but, but, but 70% of the ocean’s fisheries or the world’s fisheries or whatever are at a point of collapse, 70%. So he’s been proven wrong, throws another figure out there, wow, we’re in trouble, oh, no, 70% of the world’s fisheries are closed.

So Jane Wells, the answer she reported after —
“Danson says some people have wondered, why listen to an actor? They make fun of celebrities taking up causes. He gets that.”
DANSON: Celebrities can be silly, we can take swipes at them, and what the heck, why not, we are silly. But we do raise money. You know something, this community raises more money for charity than any other community in the world. This community is so generous.

WELLS: He says over the years he’s probably given $3 million of his own money to the Oceans Campaign, and just last week he flew to Geneva to urge the World Trade Organization to lift subsidies which may result in overfishing.

DANSON: I do want to be engaged in the process. I do not want to be victimized, or embarrassed, or guilty that I haven’t done something during this really critical time.

After being proved wrong about the death of the oceans, he remains an expert, he remains a go-to guy.

Why?

Because he donates so much to charity to the oceans. He threw $3 million down the drain if he donated it to an ocean charity.

The idea we can control the oceans is about as absurd as being able to control the climate!

I just think that just illustrates the point.

Celebs are silly, he admits all this, and yet we know that you people are going to take us seriously because we’re like the big clique in high school, and you all wish you were in our group.

… THE REAL STARS ARE THE U.S. MILITARY MEN AND WOMEN RISKING THEIR LIVES EVERY DAY TO WIN THE WAR ON TERROR.

GOD BLESS THE U.S.A.

Take all the pork-barrel spending from the beginning of the war and compare it with war costs, and I think it would be very interesting.

Pork barrel, earmarks and so forth. Here we have a war that is being fought in the interests of US national security.

This is one of the legitimate responsibilities of government.

If you start placing a cost on freedom, you’re going to lose it.

If you put a limit on how much you will spend on freedom, you are going to lose it.

All you have to do is go find not just the pork, find the waste, the fraud, the multiple redundancies of programs in the federal government and point out to people like Harry Reid, “Senator, how is it that you never complain about cost overruns on any other government program other than the war in Iraq?”

But I think even fighting this comparing dollars to dollars, accepts their premise, and I think that’s where so many of us get wrong in arguing with these people is accepting their premise.

When we accept the premise and argue on their terms, it’s a waste of time.

What we need to point out is why they’re making the argument and what the purpose of it is.

They are attempting to engage this country in defeat. They are trying to secure it.

They’re doing everything they can to turn public opinion against it because we’re winning. The word “victory” is coming out of more and more mouths now about what’s happening in Iraq, and that’s the worst political outcome for the Democrats possible.

So comparing dollar amounts would be interesting and so forth, but just accepts their premise.

I hate accepting the premises of all these liberal arguments.

Senator Harry Reid yesterday had a press conference on Capitol Hill, and a reporter said to him, “Senator Reid, do you have expectations that you’ll be able to get 60 votes for this latest anti-war resolution of yours?” and Sen. Reid says, “I always have expectations to get 60 votes,” and then added this.

REID: I would hope that the Republicans have gotten the message the American people have had enough of this war and we’ve gotta bring our troops home. Bringing our troops home will be good for our military, but it will also be good for the American taxpayer. We cannot afford this war $12 billion dollars a month? We just can’t — we can’t continue.

This man has literally taken leave of his senses. We’re not spending $12 billion a month on the war. We’re not spending $1.5 trillion dollars on the war, like the Democrats are saying. And the reason he wants out is because we are winning!

The surge is working, and they can’t withstand that politically. There has never been — well, this is hard to say — I think there’s been very clear illustrations of the Democrat position on prior occasions, but this shows how invested in defeat that they are.

We have stability in Baghdad.

Al-Qaeda has been run out of there except for 13% of it. We have Petraeus representatives that are going to sit down with Al-Sadr, other provinces, it’s all going great. The word “victory” is starting to show up on certain people’s lips, and this scares Harry Reid all to hell. This is sabotaging victory, pure and simple.

Get this story.

This is from the blog at TIME Magazine, by Joe Klein. “Are We Winning in Iraq?”

Wait, no, he’s worried.

Winning in Iraq, in the Defeatist Media.

It’s a blog, it’s not the magazine, it’s Joe Klein. “And yet: the reduction of violence is real,” he says. “Also obvious: There are fewer votes now in Congress — and less cause — to cut off funding for the war than there were last Spring. A renewed campaign on the part of the hapless Democratic leadership to cut off the supplemental funds will only increase the public sense of Democratic futility. It will also play into the very real, and growing, public perception that Democrats are too busy wasting time on symbolic measures (like trying to cut off funds for the war) and shoveling pork (the water projects bill) to pass anything substantive for the public good. Too much time, and political capital, has been wasted fighting Bush legislatively on the war. I’m sure the President and the Republican Party are salivating over the prospect that Democrats will waste more time and capital over it this month…especially at a moment, however fleeting, when the situation on the ground seems to have improved in Iraq. Democrats need to think this over very, very carefully before they proceed.”

Joe Klein, TIME Magazine, sounding a warning.

Richard Benedetto, at The Politico.com yesterday issued the first warning to the Democrats, don’t do this again, you’re 1-and-40 on this, you’re not going to win this one.

They have no way they can claim partial credit for the victory, folks, because they had us losing this two years ago.

Republicans are seeking a retraction from the Democrats of a report on the hidden costs of the war.

“Senior Republicans on Congress’s Joint Economic Committee called Tuesday for the withdrawal of a report by the committee’s Democratic staff that argues that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost more than $1.5 trillion. Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kansas, and Rep. James Saxton, R-N.J., attacked the report on ‘hidden costs’ of the wars, calling its methodology flawed and asserting factual errors. The report, issued Tuesday, said the war has cost nearly double the $804 billion in appropriations and requests for war funding thus far. It estimated that the wars have cost the average American family of four more than $20,000.”

If this war had cost $1.5 trillion, that’s half of the federal budget.

FACT:

But more importantly, every social program that the United States Congress has introduced has never met, never been constrained by its actual proposed cost. Social Security, Medicare, you name it, Medicaid, they all balloon beyond what we are told they are going to cost.

I’ll tell you what this is.

It’s just more of the same, of the Democrats trying to sabotage victory here, because they can’t afford it. They are so invested in defeat.

The surge is working. Baghdad’s calm. People are moving back to Iraq. Entrepreneurial capitalism is starting to break out in the place

This is the worst thing that could happen to these people, particularly going into a presidential election year.

You know, you guys in the Democrat Party, we’re going to win this! We are the United States of America.

We’re going to win it despite your attempts to secure defeat, and you haven’t done anything that will allow you to lay claim to helping win this. They haven’t done anything.

The only way they could do that would be to come up and lie and obfuscate and say that their protests and their resolutions and their clamoring for change forced Bush into a policy that worked.

But they can’t even do that, and they’ve opted out of that. They are still trying to sabotage this.

The American people are nowhere near on the war in Iraq where they are on illegal immigration.

President Bush hosted a big state dinner in Washington last night for Sarkozy.

How many times in the last six years have you heard the liberals and the left say that the Bush administration, or Bush personally, has destroyed our image in the world? Our allies hate us, and we got so much to do to rebuild our goodwill. We have destroyed every bit of goodwill we ever built by going to Iraq and all this.

Have you noticed that, since we got rid of, Chirac in France, and Gerhard Schroeder in Germany, have you noticed how wonderful our new allied relationships are?

This is why I say, that way, way, way down the road that historians who are not even born yet, are going to write about this administration in a totally different way than it’s being written about today.

Sarkozy comes over. He wins in France on a full-fledged conservative platform and agenda, stunning everybody.

The Washington Post,by Michael Abramowitz: “White House Hails Renewed Ties with Europe.” French and German leaders are visiting. He talks about Angela Merkel Sarkozy, and they have to go out and they have to get some quotes from some Clinton administration types. Daniel Benjamin, former Clinton administration official, said, ” and Yeah, the Europeans are making nice. The animosities of the first Bush term are not ones they want to revisit, and there are issues like Iran and Kosovo that need to be dealt with but they see the Bush administration as out of time, out of gas, obsessed by Iraq, so their focus is on 2009 and after.”

So here you’ve got this Clinton guy saying (paraphrased),“ Don’t buy this stuff, folks. Sarkozy and Merkel are only coming here to make nice with this country because they know a Democrat’s going to be elected and inaugurated in 2009. You can’t credit Bush with this.”

We most certainly can.

Of course, no comment on this would be complete without the haughty and arrogant Richard Holbrooke, former US ambassador to Germany and a top foreign-policy advisor to Senator Clinton. He said “that Bush appears to be grasping the new opportunity presented by the changing politics of France and Germany but that the results on issues such as Iran are not in yet. ‘It’s good for him to put on these shows, but this administration does not seem to know how to do diplomacy at the highest levels to produce sustained positions.'”

Really?

Mr. Holbrooke, Mr. Sarkozy and Angela Merkel were elected to positions in France and Germany while the Iraq debacle was going on. They were elected because their populations wanted a change from the liberalism that had taken over their countries, and still has a pretty hard grip in some places. The liberalism that you love. So France and Germany do a 180, and in Holbrooke‘s view, “Well, this is a new opportunity presented by the changing politics of France.”

Who changed the politics? Who was it that caused this to happen?

It’s like Bush isn’t even here. It’s like the Bush administration is not even working on this kind of stuff — and they are.

Then this question they don’t know how to do diplomacy. Mr. Holbrooke, last time I looked, the State Department had a bunch of wusses who were refusing postings to Baghdad and our embassy there because it’s too close to the front lines. Yet you sit there and say nobody knows how to do diplomacy.

If diplomacy is the way to stop these kinds of conflicts you don’t like, why don’t you send the State Department experts (so-called) to go over there and show us how this is done? If guns and explosions and mortar fire, jet planes are not the way to defeat people who have much of the same kind of ammo and artillery, then take your guys over there and show us how talking nice to the Al-Qaeda clowns and Al-Sadr can solve this!

But your diplomatic experts don’t want anywhere near Baghdad.

So it seems to me that these claims of diplomacy and Bush doesn’t want to do it, and diplomacy is the only thing that will solve problems, if you are not willing to send “the best diplomats you’ve got,” quote, unquote, into this firestorm area, what good is it?

The hypocrisy of these people, the arrogance, the smugness, the condescension — those characteristics rub me wrong as much as anything else. We got Sarkozy here, he understands American exceptionalism.

He spoke to a joint meeting of the House and Senate today.

If only American liberals and Democrats understood what Sarkozy understands. Here is a portion of what he said.

SARKOZY (via translator): T o the millions of men and women who came from every country of the world and who — with their own hands, their intelligence, and their hearts — built the greatest nation in the world, America did not say, “Come, and everything will be given to you.” Rather, she said, “Come, and the only limits to what you will be able to achieve will be those of your own courage, your boldness, and your talent.”

Unbelievable! Do you think the liberals sitting in the House chamber hearing this started squirming around? This guy understands more of why this is a great nation and what’s going to keep it a great nation than American Democrats do, than American liberals do.

He won an election talking this way. This is a “former ally,” quote, unquote, from the Democrats, “who hates us. The French hate us. We’ve lost our image in the world. We’ve lost our reputation. We’ve lost our standard.”

Well, not with Nick Sarkozy, who just gave a lesson on American exceptionalism that escapes most of the minds that you find on the left, how it’s not about handouts; America didn’t say come and everything will be given to you.

SARKOZY (via translator): The America that we love throughout the world impedes this extraordinary ability to grant each and every person a second chance, another chance, because, in America, failure is never the last word. There is always another chance. Here — in your country, on this soil — both the humblest and the most illustrious citizens alike know that nothing is owed to them and that everything has to be earned. That is what constitutes the moral value of America.

By the way, the Media, are calling Sarkozy “Bush’s new poodle,” since Tony Blair has left office. They just can’t stand this! “Bush was supposed to be a lame duck. This stuff wasn’t supposed to be happening! We can’t have some foreigner coming over here and polluting the people of our country’s minds with some myth about what this country is all about.”

This is rare, from a European leader.

SARKOZY (via translator): America liberated us, and this is an eternal debt we owe America. Every time, whenever an American soldier falls somewhere in the world, I think of what the American army did for France. I think of them –and I am sad as one is saddened to lose a member of one’s family.

He’s defending this country in a way that people in this country are not willing to do so anymore. We have so many people in this country guilty over the oppressive nature of our occupation of the world and our stealing the resources of all the other poor countries and then polluting the planet and destroying it with global warming. We have so many people all wringing their hands over the evils and what’s wrong with this country.

Here comes this guy from across the pond from Europe thanking America, understands what it’s all about.

He acknowledges in this next that France needs to be stronger.

SARKOZY (via translator): We need France to be stronger. I am determined to carry through with the reforms that my country has put off for all too long. I will not turn back. I will implement all of them, because France has turned back for all too long. I have come to present to you today a France that comes out to meet America, to renew the covenant of friendship and alliance that Washington and Lafayette sealed in Yorktown. Together, let us be true to their memories. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I say this to you on behalf of the French people: Long live the United States of America. Long live France. Long live French-American friendship!

He got a standing. That’s just inspiring as it can be, and especially flying in the face of all this rotgut that we’ve been subjected to for the last five years about how we are hated around the world and we’ve lost our image. All of that is just a pack of lies.

Sarkozy on 60 Minutes, when Lesley Stahl wanted to ask him about his divorce, this is 60 Minutes we’re talking about. We’re not talking about Entertainment Tonight or some gossip show. For a woman, a serious newswoman journalist — look at what all they had to talk to Sarkozy about, look at what’s in his mind and on his tongue ready to say — to ask him about his divorce, and he did the right thing.

He got up and left. He said, “I’ve got more important things to do here.”

This guy can teach a lot of Americans a lot of lessons that they’re not being taught in this country by their fellow citizens.

This is from the Financial Times by Michael Franc, who is the vice president of government relations at the Heritage Foundation.

The headline says it all here:

“‘Democrats Wake Up to Being the Party of the Rich.‘ — A legislative proposal that was once on the fast track is suddenly dead. The Senate will not consider a plan to extract billions in extra taxes from mega-millionaire hedge fund managers. The decision by Senate majority leader Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat, surprised many Washington insiders, who saw the plan as appealing to the spirit of class warfare that infuses the Democratic Party. Liberal disappointment in Mr. Reid was palpable at media outlets such as USA Today, where an editorial chastised: ‘The Democrats, who control Congress and claim to represent the middle and lower classes, ought to be embarrassed.’ Far from embarrassing, this episode may reflect a dawning Democratic awareness of whom they really represent. For the demographic reality is that, in America, the Democratic Party is the new ‘party of the rich’.

“More and more Democrats represent areas with a high concentration of wealthy households. Using Internal Revenue Service data, the Heritage Foundation identified two categories of taxpayers — single filers with incomes of more than $100,000 and married filers with incomes of more than $200,000 — and combined them to discern where the wealthiest Americans live and who represents them.

Democrats now control the majority of the nation’s wealthiest congressional jurisdictions. More than half of the wealthiest households are concentrated in the 18 states where Democrats control both Senate seats. This new political demography holds true in the House of Representatives, where the leadership of each party hails from different worlds. Nancy Pelosi, Democratic leader of the House of Representatives, represents one of America’s wealthiest regions. Her San Francisco district has more than 43,700 high-end households. Fewer than 7,000 households in the western Ohio district of House Republican leader John Boehner enjoy this level of affluence.

“Income disparity — to use the class warrior’s favourite term — is greatest among the districts of lawmakers that lead each party’s campaign arm. Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen chairs the Democratic congressional campaign committee. With more than 36,000 prosperous households and a median income of nearly $70,000, his suburban Washington district even out-sparkles Ms Pelosi’s. In contrast, fewer than 5,000 such wealthy households are found in the largely rural district of his Republican counterpart, Tom Cole from Oklahoma. The median income there is only $35,500.”

So the Democrats are the new party of the rich based on their constituents, based on what they represent.

Who could doubt this? Hollywood. San Francisco. New York. They are the new party of the rich.

This is why Sen. Reid put off the vote or actually tabled this whole thing on raising taxes on hedge fund managers and portfolio asset managers because they’re largely Democrat contributors.

Dirty little secret, isn’t it?

They’re largely Democrat contributors, plus, they were lobbied quite a bit. Sen. Reid, lobbied heavily by a number of people, but the truth is out now.

The difference is that the Democrat wealthy feel guilty about it, or want us to think they feel guilty about it.

Resource:

Financial Times: Democrats Wake Up to Being the Party of the Rich