PrairiePundit

Reuters: Osama bin Laden urged an end to reliance on the U.S. dollar as one solution to the global financial crisis and blamed developed countries for climate change, in an audiotape said to be of the al Qaeda leader. The authenticity of the tape, aired on Friday and the second by bin Laden to air on Arab satellite channel Al Jazeera this week, could not be immediately confirmed. "It is necessary for us to avoid doing business in the dollar, and to finish with it in the fastest possible time," bin Laden said on the brief tape. Saudi-born bin Laden has never been found and is believed to still be hiding in the mountainous border areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan. He is known to suffer from ill-health. ... This is just another PR stunt for this loser. He has no experience in either subject and is just spouting anti US propaganda. I wonder how those with the same views like being on the side of one of the worst terrorist in the world. I think the activity from bin Laden...

Boston.com: Throughout his political career, Scott Brown has been dogged by one image from his modeling days, a nude spread in Cosmopolitan magazine 28 years ago. Last night, appearing as a guest on “The Jay Leno Show,’’ the 50-year-old US senator-elect from Massachusetts joked that he would do it again. “I’d probably have to do it for Mature Senior AARP Magazine,’’ Brown said. ... Brown also told Leno about his weekly workout routine, which includes biking, swimming, and running, prompting the comedian to quip: “God, that’s another thing we have in common. This is unbelievable.’’ The senator-elect didn’t crack a lot of jokes. But he played along with Leno’s humor. When asked how his daughters reacted to the “available’’ comment, Brown pointed his finger like a gun to his head and pulled a pretend trigger. Asked to recite a line from his favorite movie, Brown did his best Rocky Balboa imitation. “Adrian, Adrian,’’ he cried. “We did it.’’ And when Leno asked about Brown’s signature truc...

Houston Chronicle: A pair of climate papers published this week in the world's top science journals may offer some hope that rising levels of carbon dioxide won't imminently bring the planet to boil. One paper concerns the effect of a warming climate on oceans and other sources of carbon dioxide on Earth, and found they will be slower to release more CO2, and thus do less to amplify warming than previously expected. The second study analyzed a decline in water vapor — a potent greenhouse gas — in the upper levels of the atmosphere and found that it may have contributed to a decade-long halt in the rise of global temperatures since 1998. Both studies are a bit technical, but they are important because they get to the cutting edge of climate science. Amid the over-reaching catastrophic claims of environmentalists on one side, and cries of global warming being a great hoax from the other, there is actually a good deal of common ground among scientists. All agree concentr...

Washington Times: Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey has warned Republican National Committee Chairman Michael S. Steele that his plans to align the Republican Party with the "tea party" movement will fail unless Mr. Steele proves his bona fides on taxing-and-spending issues. Mr. Armey told The Washington Times that he had told the chairman that if the Republican Party wants to earn the trust of skeptical tea partiers, it must show it is serious about "not lying to its voters" on those issues as it did in the George W. Bush administration. Mr. Steele, regarded with suspicion by some RNC members, including some conservatives, has sought to address tea-party events and has called himself a "tea partier." But Mr. Armey says he told Mr. Steele that he has not gained the trust of the movement, though he said one way to change that would be for Mr. Steele to drop his objections to two resolutions being proposed by the tea-party-friendly, 24-member National ...

NY Times: Laws banning cellphone use while driving apparently haven’t reduced crashes, according to a study released on Friday that compared the number of total crashes before the ban with the number after. The study found virtually no difference in the numbers, a finding that had the researchers scratching their heads. “We were very surprised,” said Adrian Lund, the president of the Highway Loss Data Institute that conducted the study and an affiliate of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety . ... This is another failure for control freak Nanny state regulations. I do think text messaging while driving is too much of a distraction and people should not do it. Hopefully, they will come to that conclusion without coercive laws.

NY Times: Facing mounting pressure from New York politicians concerned about costs and security, the Obama administration on Thursday began considering moving the trial of the chief organizer of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks out of Manhattan, administration officials said. President Obama said through a spokesman that he still believed a civilian criminal trial for Khalid Shaikh Mohammed , who has admitted planning the attacks, and four accomplices could be conducted “successfully and securely in the United States.” He did not mention New York specifically. Mr. Obama left the decision on possible alternate sites to the Justice Department, which was scrambling to assess the options, administration officials said. A decision to move the Sept. 11 trial from Manhattan would be a retreat by the administration from its calculated choice in November to bring the defendants to a courthouse just blocks from where the World Trade Center stood. The dispute over a trial location, touched off ...

From the Daily Mail: Water vapour a 'major cause of global warming and cooling' It is certainly a more significant green house gas than CO2.

Times: Twelve men arrested in Malaysia this month for alleged terrorist offences had connections to the Nigerian student accused of attempting to blow up a US passenger aircraft on Christmas Day, according to a report from Kuala Lumpur. The Malaysian Home Minister, Hishamuddin Hussein, refused to confirm the report in the New Straits Times , a newspaper which follows the lead of the Government. He insisted however that the detained men, who were arrested eight days ago at a gathering of Muslims in Kuala Lumpur, were “a serious security threat to the country”. They included at least one Malaysian, four Syrians, one Yemeni, one Jordanian and two Nigerians, and are being held under Malaysia’s Internal Security Act (ISA). Under the Act suspects can be detained indefinitely without charge or trial. Mr Hishamuddin said that the arrests were part of a broader international terrorist investigation, although he stopped short of confirming the report in the New Straits Times that they were m...

Nile Gardiner: ... But the scant attention paid in the State of the Union speech to US leadership was pitiful and frankly rather pathetic. The war in Afghanistan, which will soon involve a hundred thousand American troops, merited barely a paragraph. There was no mention of victory over the enemy, just a reiteration of the president’s pledge to begin a withdrawal in July 2011. Needless to say there was nothing in the speech about the importance of international alliances, and no recognition whatsoever of the sacrifices made by Great Britain and other NATO allies alongside the United States on the battlefields of Afghanistan. For Barack Obama the Special Relationship means nothing, and tonight’s address further confirmed this. Significantly, the global war against al-Qaeda was hardly mentioned, and there were no measures outlined to enhance US security at a time of mounting threats from Islamist terrorists. Terrorism is a top issue for American voters, but President Obama displayed wha...

Guardian: There are a handful of subjects - among them cricket, the weather and the art of downing pints through a funnel - on which the French deign to allow the English a degree of authority. Sex, however, is not one of them. Today, just three weeks after scientists at King's College London declared that the elusive G-spot may be a myth, a group of gynaecologists gathered in Paris to launch a counter-attack on what they called a "totalitarian" approach to female sexuality. Denouncing the study carried out last year by British researchers as fundamentally flawed, the French scientists insisted the fabled erogenous zone did exist in many women – around 60% according to Sylvain Mimoun, the organiser of the conference. But, they said, it had fallen victim to an Anglo-Saxon tendency to reduce the mysteries of sexuality to absolutes. This attempt to set clear parameters on something variable and ambiguous, they said, was characteristic of British scientific attitudes to sex. ...

NewOrleans.com: As the Saints march toward the Super Bowl, there's a chill in the midst of the Who Dat Nation. The National Football League has issued cease and desist orders to various local merchants, including infractions as small as a fleur de lis in the middle of the "o" in #whodat. When you're covering something this important to the city, you go to the source. As far as trademarks for “WhoDat?” is concerned, that’s Sal & Steve Monistere. Steve recorded the Who Dat chant in 1983, and using that chant, he recorded the original "Who Dat" single with members of the Saints offensive line and singer Aaron Neville. Then, together, the Monistere brothers immediately embarked on one of the most ingenious marketing campaigns in sports history. And the Who Dat Nation was born. Steve Monistere, a founding member of New Orleans' own party band The Topcats, read about the recent NFL actions regarding the use of Who Dat on NewOrleans.com. "I had heard ...

Bill Shink crunches the numbers and finds Texas as the leader. California is second with 18. No other state was in double figures. Texas also leads the US as headquarters for Fortune 500 companies.

After watching the Apple video on the new device, I don't think I will be rushing out to own one. One of the first things I noticed is that it is for one handed computing for the most part. A user holds it in one hand while running a finger over the display to manipulate data. As a data entry device, you have to either put it down and look at it at an awkward angle while trying to mainipualate virtual keys, or buy the accessary that holds it like a screen while working on a regular keyboard. It would not surprise me to see a lot of these machines dropped. I may change my mind if I ever get may hands on one, but I can wait for that.

Rasmussen Reports: ... A new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of likely voters in Wisconsin finds Republican Tommy Thompson edging incumbent Russ Feingold 47% to 43% in a hypothetical U.S. Senate match-up. Five percent (5%) like some other candidate, and four percent (4%) are undecided. Any incumbent who attracts less than 50% support at this point in a campaign is considered potentially vulnerable. Thompson, who served as governor of the state from 1987 to 2001 and as secretary of Health and Human Services in President George W. Bush’s first term, is being urged by Republicans to enter the race. However, it remains unclear if he will enter the race. Feingold is seeking a fourth six-year term in the Senate this November. ... I think Thompson is a smart guy. I hope he runs. It is surprising that Feingold is in this much trouble in liberal Wisconsin. It maybe another Massachusetts, but Thompson is a much more known commodity than Scott Brown.

San Antonio Express-News: Hundreds of gang members and their associates in 83 U.S. cities have been arrested in a weeklong sweep dubbed “Project Big Freeze,” U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said Wednesday. ICE said last week's operation was its largest to date targeting transnational gangs, with almost half of the 476 arrested being members of gangs with ties to Mexican, South American and Asian drug cartels. Twenty-six of the arrests were in South Texas, including nine in San Antonio, 14 in the Rio Grande Valley and three in Laredo. “Through gang enforcement operations like Project Big Freeze, ICE continues to work to target and dismantle transnational gangs to rid our streets not only of drug dealers but the violence associated with the drug trade,” ICE Assistant Secretary John Morton said. ... The surprise to me is that so few of the arrest were in Texas. It is good to see ICE going after these guys and it will be hard for the open borders crowd to criticize this round...

ABC News: Former John Edwards' aide Andrew Young , who covered up the Democratic presidential candidate's affair , said when he cleaned up his house after his role in the cover-up ended he found one more shocker. "There was one tape that was marked 'special,'" Young told ABC News' Bob Woodruff in an exclusive interview. "It's a sex tape of Rielle and John Edwards made just a couple of months before the Iowa caucuses." Though Young never saw the woman's face in the tape, he said she was "visibly pregnant" and was "wearing a bracelet" and a "thumb ring" typically worn by Rielle Hunter . "It's her jewelry," Andrew Young's wife, Cheri, told ABC News. "It could be on another woman with the same jewelry." Young gives his account of the sex scandal and the elaborate cover-up for the Democratic presidential candidate in a new tell-all book titled, "The Politician," which ...

Karl Rove: ... Mr. Obama's slide over the past year has been led by independents (whose support is down 17 points since last January), seniors (down 19 points), those making $60,000 to $90,000 a year (down 19 points), Republicans (down 23 points) and conservatives (down 24 points). On the generic ballot, a measure of party strength, Republicans lead Democrats by five points in National Public Radio's latest poll and by eight points in Rasmussen's latest survey. These numbers are worse than Democrats faced at this point in 1994. If Democrats fare better this year than they did 16 years ago, it will likely only be because they have fewer open seats to defend and because they are taking their challengers more seriously than they did in 1994. One of Mr. Obama's first reactions to last week's Massachusetts debacle was to install his 2008 campaign manager as an über-election czar for Democrats. But the White House tried to boost Democrats running for governor in New Je...

Jonah Goldberg: ... There was no "pivot to the center," no serious accounting for the Massachusetts miracle or his misfortunes. Instead, there was an innumerate, inaccurate and distinctly unpresidential whine -- blaming George W. Bush for nearly all of his problems (leaving out, among other things, that the Democrats have been controlling Congress and crafting budgets since 2006). The White House insists that the new wave of populism created by Democratic governance is, in fact, the same populist wave that carried Obama to victory in 2008. In other words, Obama was elected president by the backlash against his own presidency. This novel theory allows Obama to stick to his view that there's nothing wrong with his health-care plan, and anyone who feels differently hasn't heard or understood the president's explanations. So, he not only implored Democrats not to "run for the hills" on the health-reform bill, but insisted that as "temperatures co...

John Harris, Politico: President Barack Obama on Wednesday night tacked to the right with appeals for tax cuts for small business and new investments in off-shore oil drilling and nuclear power. He tacked to the left with renewed vows to let gays serve in the military and to get U.S. troops out of Iraq. He sounded at times like a Bill Clinton-style centrist, at others like a bank-bashing populist. He taunted Republicans, and also presented himself as a lonely tribune of cooperation and bipartisan civility in Washington. In a favorable light, his State of the Union speech may have revealed the mind of a leader who has never cared much about traditional ideological categories and is determined to create his own results-oriented composite of ideas from across the spectrum. Less charitably, the address could be interpreted as the work of a president who is desperately improvising by touching every political erogenous zone he and his advisers can think of. Under either judgment, how...

Daniel Henninger: ... After seven nonstop months ObamaCare is failing, just as ClintonCare failed after a year's effort in 1994. It's clear there is something inherently wrong in what the Democrats have been trying to do here. What is it? The answer lies in the often-repeated phrase that they are trying to reform "16% of the American economy." Why would anyone think it possible in 2010—as politics, economics or mere practical feasibility—to reorder 16% of a $14 trillion economy of 300 million people living in 50 separate states whose geography is 16 times larger than France? The Obama reformers are driven by the idea that their bill would fulfill a dream running back 70 years to 1939, when FDR failed to win passage of a universal health-care bill. But this isn't 1939. It's not even 1994. American health care, whatever its defects, is today unimaginably complex. What the Democrats are trying to do isn't just difficult. It's impossible. According to da...