Here’s a cheery thought

Why does everything bad always happen to ME?

Michael Goodwin: Obama’s ship is sinking, and that’s bad news

His worldview, his politics, his prejudices, his habits — they’ve been a mismatch for the country and its needs. He has been a dud even in the one area where he seemed a lock to make things better, racial relations. Only 10 percent believe race relations have improved under him, while 35 percent said they are worse, according to a New York Times survey. The remainder said there wasn’t much change either way.

That’s shocking — but not surprising. Barack Obama was not ready to be president, and still isn’t. It is a fantasy to believe he’ll master the art in his final two years.

The lasting image will be his yukking it up on the golf course minutes after giving a perfunctory speech on the beheading of James Foley. It revealed him as hollow, both to America and the world, and there is no way to un-see the emptiness.

That means, I fear, we are on the cusp of tragedy. It is reasonable to assume the worst-case scenarios about national security are growing increasingly likely to occur.

Obama’s fecklessness is so unique that our adversaries and enemies surely realize they will never face a weaker president. They must assume the next commander in chief will take a more muscular approach to America’s interests and be more determined to forge alliances than the estranged man who occupies the Oval Office now.

So Vladimir Putin, Iran, China, Islamic State, al Qaeda and any other number of despots and terrorists know they have two years to make their moves and advance their interests, and that resistance will be token, if there is any at all.

Throw in the fact that Europe largely has scrapped its military might to pay for its welfare states, and the entire West is a diminished, confused opponent, ripe for the taking. Redrawn maps and expanded spheres of influence could last for generations.

 

Our government at work – on us

Who, me?

Child pornography conviction overturned for violation of the Posse Comitatus  act.

A special agent of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) launched an investigation for online criminal activity by anyone in the state of Washington, whether connected with the military or not. The agent found evidence of a crime committed by a civilian in the state and turned it over to civilian law enforcement officials. The civilian, Michael Dreyer, was prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced to eighteen years in prison. We hold that the NCIS agent’s investigation constituted improper military enforcement of civilian laws and that the evidence collected as a result of that investigation should have been suppressed….

The Posse Comitatus Act (PCA), 18 U.S.C. § 1385, “prohibits Army and Air Force military personnel from participating in civilian law enforcement activities.” [Footnote: The PCA states, “Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any part of the Army or the Air Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.”] We have previously recognized that, “[a]lthough the PCA does not directly reference the Navy,” “PCA-like restrictions” apply to the Navy as a matter of Department of Defense (DoD) and Naval policy….

The extraordinary nature of the surveillance here demonstrates a need to deter future violations. So far as we can tell from the record, it has become a routine practice for the Navy to conduct surveillance of all the civilian computers in an entire state to see whether any child pornography can be found on them, and then to turn over the information to civilian law enforcement when no military connection exists.

My personal choice would be to put both the pervert and the Navy’s agents in the same jail, but I’d settle for the Navy snoop in the brig.

Bird brains

Dead Duck

Audubon convinces Greenwich Time that global warming will kill all our birds

Imagine never again hearing the ethereal four-syllable call of the veery, that small forest thrush that sings in the summertime in Greenwich’s woodlands. Try to picture life in Greenwich without the blue-winged warbler, a favorite of local bird watchers, or the dunlin — a shorebird seen in both spring and fall at Greenwich Point.

According to a recent report by the National Audubon Society, these birds are just a few of the local species that may disappear from Greenwich and its environs by 2080 because of climate change — read that as global warming. Rising temperatures and tides, the report says, could force the birds to seek cooler climates or imperil their very existence.

Stewart Hudson, who heads up Audubon Connecticut from his offices at Greenwich’s Audubon Center was shocked by the report’s findings, which were based on 30 years of citizen-scientist observations from Audubon Christmas Bird Counts and the North American Breeding Bird Survey.

Patrick Comins, Audubon Connecticut’s director of bird conservation, said Audubon Connecticut’s preservation efforts will have a special focus on five locally found species, including the veery. Its habitat, he said, will be threatened by global warming and by the increase of invasive species that comes with warmer temperatures.

“Up to 89 percent of their habitat is expected to shift northward by 2080,” Comins said. [Don’t you love that precision in both quantity: 89% – not 87, not 90, and the exact year? Kind of makes you fell like it’s real science don’t it?]

The saltmarsh sparrow, Comins said, could be seriously affected by climate change.

“It’s a high-tidal marsh nesting species threatened by sea level rise and increasing storm activity associated with global warming,” Comins said. “They nest on the ground, and with the rising sea levels they have to race to lay their eggs before the spring tide comes in.”

Loss of habitat is the case also with the bobolink, a grassland nesting bird. “In the next 40 to 50 years it will likely move north and out of Connecticut,” said Comins, “and by 2080 it will shift to Canada.”

But will the grassland and hayfields they need to survive be there? Comins wonders. “Birds can fly,” he said. “Trees can’t.”

No, trees can’t fly, but the birds that carry their seeds do, and as climate changes, so too does the flora. As for salt marsh meadows, if the sea level rises, the marshes will still be here; they’ll just occupy what was once your back lawn.

Silly, sentimental articles like this do nothing but reinforce global warming skeptics’ opinion that the entire hypothesis of warmists is a hoax: why would they resort to such emotional, false arguments if they had science on their side?

The birds will abide.