CBS News: Senator Bernie Sanders Compares Climate Change Skeptics to Those who Downplayed Nazism

Independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders said Tuesday that people who do not take the threat of climate change seriously remind him of those who downplayed the growing threat of fascism and Nazism in the 1930s.

The climate change debate “reminds me in some ways of the debate taking place in this country and around the world in the late 1930s,” Sanders said during a Senate hearing on the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2011 budget…

He continued: “And during that period with Nazism and fascism growing — a real danger to the United States and Democratic countries all over the world — there were people in this Congress, in the British parliament saying, ‘don’t worry! Hitler is not real! It’ll disappear! We don’t have to be prepared to take it on.’”

Meanwhile, in London…

A Christian teacher told today how he lost his job after complaining that Muslim pupils as young as eight hailed the September 11 hijackers as ‘heroes’.

Nicholas Kafouris said he was forced from his £30,000-a-year post because he would not tolerate the ‘racist’ and ‘anti-Semitic’ behaviour of children.

He said the predominantly Muslim youngsters openly praised Islamic extremists in class, and hailed the terrorists of the 2001 atrocities as ‘martyrs’.

Mr Kafouris, 40, told how one pupil said to him, ‘Don’t touch me, you’re a Christian’, when the teacher accidentally brushed against him with his arm.

Others said, ‘We want to be Islamic bombers when we grow up’, and ‘the Christians and Jews are our enemies, you too because you’re a Christian’, he added.

Mr Kafouris, who had taught at Bigland Green Primary School, in Tower Hamlets, East London, for 12 years, said there was a change in attitude of pupils at the school - where the majority of pupils are Muslim - after the World Trade Center attacks.

Reuters: White House to Paint Grim Fiscal Picture

WASHINGTON - The White House will predict a record budget deficit in the current fiscal year and more big shortfalls for the next decade in its upcoming budget proposal, a congressional source told Reuters on Sunday…

In its budget proposal to be released on Monday, the White House predicts a record $1.6 trillion budget deficit for the fiscal year that ends September 30, the Capitol Hill source said.

According to the estimate, deficits will narrow to $700 billion by fiscal 2013 before gradually rising back to $1.0 trillion by the end of the decade, the source said.

President Barack Obama will seek to strike a balance between reducing the deficit over the long term and stimulating the economy in the short term to ease the pain of double-digit unemployment.

Criticized by Republicans as a big spender, Obama used his State of the Union address last week to tell Americans he would dig the country out of a “massive fiscal hole.”

That hole is even deeper than previously believed, according to the estimate by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget.

The estimate for the current fiscal year is significantly higher than the $1.35 trillion figure forecast by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office last week.

Despite the difference, both estimates indicate that the deficit will continue to hover at a level not seen since World War Two, when measured as a percentage of the economy.

Chart via Instapundit.

R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr: A Modest Healthcare Proposal

End the tax-deductibility of employer-provided healthcare. Allow every citizen, except those enrolled in Medicare or in a military health plan, to receive a refundable tax credit to purchase Health Savings Accounts (HSAs). The key thing is that people should have a choice of plans. The tax credit should be available not only to those who purchase HSAs. Some people, for instance, have higher medical costs, so they may prefer a more comprehensive policy. But we could encourage more widespread use of HSAs by raising the cap on the amount of money that people could put in them. Also, owners of HSAs should be allowed to purchase health insurance in any state in the country. The money should be applicable to those employer-sponsored plans still available or to any healthcare plan an individual or family chooses, thus allowing product competition. Unused money in each account should be rolled over in succeeding years, and whatever money remains in each account should be part of an account holder’s estate upon death….

Also let us have tort reform. Reckless malpractice lawsuits account for at least half a trillion dollars in wasted healthcare expenses annually, through jackpot lawsuits and the unnecessary tests prescribed by doctors fearful of the reach of trial lawyers.

Finally for those who are impoverished and unable to pay for healthcare, let the government give them vouchers to pay for their medical expenses up to a certain amount annually.

Whatever the consequences of the Democrats’ 2009 healthcare monstrosity, conservatives should redouble their efforts to repeal its archaic collectivist requirements, if they ever become policy.

American Spectator: The People’s Seat

Nobody expected the special election to fill the remainder of Kennedy’s term to even be close. Certainly, Attorney General Martha Coakley didn’t. She cruised to victory in the Democratic primary based on name recognition and then hoped the “D” after her name on the ballot would take care of the rest. Her only goal in the campaign was to make sure that Massachusetts voters knew libertarian-leaning independent candidate Joseph Kennedy wasn’t man from Citizens Energy and descendant of Camelot.

Barack Obama didn’t expect to have to fly to Boston for a last-minute get-out-the-vote rally on Coakley’s behalf. He won Massachusetts by 26 points in 2008. His bill expanding the federal government’s role over the American health care system was supposed to be the culmination of Ted Kennedy’s life work. This was, as he put it, a simple choice “whether we’re going forwards or backwards” — between Obama’s change we can believe in or the bad old days that came before.

Well, it took George W. Bush five years to bring his party to the brink of electoral disaster. It has taken Obama one year. That’s change, all right.

Read the rest…

Neal Boortz: Obama Panders to the Wealth Envy Crowd

Obama continues to refer to this as a “fee.” This is just a fancy was of saying “tax.” We are taxing the very institutions that we want increase loans and stimulate our economy. But Obama insists that “We want our money and we’re going to get it back.” But wait? Haven’t these banks and financial institutions already paid that money back? Well .. what does that matter.

He is just playing into wealth envy, folks. Pure and simple. I would sure like to see Obama answer a few questions ….. like why he doesn’t plan to limit executive compensation at institutions like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which took $100 million in taxpayer money, never intend to pay it back and are in fact still losing money for the taxpayers.

Republican Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas gets to the point: “To think that banks will loan more money if you tax them is beyond economic ignorance.” That’s because this tax has nothing to do with economics and everything to do with wealth envy and politics. Easy as that.

The Wall Street Journal: Bank Tax Is Centerpiece of Party’s New Populism

Investor’s Business Daily: Bailing Out The Banks Was Wrong, But New Tax Won’t Make It Right

Seeking Alpha: The Bank Tax - Just Another Bit of Demagoguery

The Long War Journal: US Releases ‘Dangerous’ Iranian Proxy Behind the Murder of US Troops

The US has released the leader of an Iranian-backed Shia terror group behind the kidnapping and murder of five US soldiers in Karbala in January 2007.

Qais Qazali, the leader of the Asaib al Haq or the League of the Righteous, was set free by the US military and transferred to Iraqi custody in exchange for the release of British hostage Peter Moore, US military officers and intelligence officials told The Long War Journal. The US military directly implicated Qais in the kidnapping and murder of five US soldiers in Karbala in January 2007.

“We let a very dangerous man go, a man whose hands are stained with US and Iraqi blood,” a military officer said. “We are going to pay for this in the future.”

The US military has maintained that the release of members and leaders of the League of the Righteous is related to a reconciliation agreement between the terror group and the Iraqi government, but some US military officers disagree.

“The official line is the release of Qazali is about reconciliation, but in reality this was a prisoner swap,” a military intelligence official said…

“This was a deal signed and sealed in British and American blood,” a US military officer told The Long War Journal. “We freed all of their leaders and operatives; they [the League of the Righteous] executed their hostages and sent them back in body bags. And we’re supposed to be happy about it.”

ABC News: As Part of Iraqi Reconciliation, US Forces Release Head of Shiite Extremist Group

Threat Matrix: Did the Release of Qais Qazali Violate an Executive Order?

The Wall Street Journal: U.S. Move to Cover Fannie, Freddie Losses Stirs Controversy

The Obama administration’s decision to cover an unlimited amount of losses at the mortgage-finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac over the next three years stirred controversy over the holiday.

The Treasury announced Thursday it was removing the caps that limited the amount of available capital to the companies to $200 billion each.

Unlimited access to bailout funds through 2012 was “necessary for preserving the continued strength and stability of the mortgage market,” the Treasury said. Fannie and Freddie purchase or guarantee most U.S. home mortgages and have run up huge losses stemming from the worst wave of defaults since the 1930s.

“The timing of this executive order giving Fannie and Freddie a blank check is no coincidence,” said Rep. Spencer Bachus of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the House Financial Services Committee. He said the Christmas Eve announcement was designed “to prevent the general public from taking note.”

The American Spectator: Harry Reid’s surprise tanning tax.

The “Hockey Stick” explained:

Video borrowed from Kini.