HALF-FULL REPORT 06/21/13

Tweet, tweet!  As of yesterday (6/20), thanks to Miko, TTP is on Twitter: @2thepointnews.  Or click on the Twitter icon in the right side bar.  Now you can tweet your favorite quotes from or link to any TTP article to any of your followers.  Tweet and Retweet away!

For example.  Quite often, TTP gets the jump on stories that go viral afterwards.  Take Elbert Guillory.  TTP had his Why I Am A Republican up early Monday morning (6/17).  Guillory had posted it only a few hours before, and we were tipped off by TTPer Citizen K in Louisiana.  Guillory was unknown and his video had barely 100 hits.

A TTPer then tipped off Rushbo, so by Tuesday (6/18) afternoon, he was telling his audience about Guillory.  By Wednesday (6/19), WND ran it, which Drudge then headlined.  By Thursday (6/20), Neil Cavuto interviewed Guillory on Fox, and today, Guillory’s video has over a half-million hits.

So, from now on, when you learn of something cool on TTP, you can Twitter your friends and followers so they can know about it too, before everyone else does.  Thanks, Miko!

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Do you remember Charlie Crist?  He was the Governor of Florida once (2007 through 2010).  He was really popular, and when he decided to run for Senator in 2010, everyone thought he was a shoe-in – and that upstart kid named Marco Rubio challenging him didn’t stand a chance.

Then Crist exposed himself as the marshmallow he was, flip-flopping on abortion, supporting homosexual "marriage" and the like.  Rubio cleaned his clock in the GOP primary, won the general, and as the Tea Party’s favorite Senator, came very close to being Romney’s running-mate last year.

A year later, Rubio is morphing into another Charlie Crist, with his obdurate support of the Gang of Eight Amnesty Bill.  Why would he be so passionate about a 1,000+ page legislative monstrosity?  The only reasonable conclusion seems to be that his Hispanic blood is thicker than his patriotism.

Maybe that’s not true, but what is true is that any chance he has to run for the presidential roses in 2016 is vanishing fast.  So fast that that his chances of being reelected Senator in 2016 are now in jeopardy – particularly when Allen West disclosed on Wednesday (6/19) that he might run against him.

Senator Allen West – doesn’t that just ring your bell?  Rubio better straighten up and start flying right again, or West is going to ring his.

Rubio will go down in flames unless he ejects from this Amnesty Hindenburg.  A good read on this mess is Rushbo yesterday (6/20) Untangling the Gang of Eight’s Web of Deceit.

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Speaking of messes… wow, did Zero step deep into two of them this week.  First was on Monday (6/17) at the "disastrous" G8 meeting in Northern Ireland, where Zero and Putin were "comically awkward" toward each other, as described by the London Daily Mail.  Look at the photos of them in the story – Putin straight out humiliated Zero, his contempt is palpable.

Second was Barack’s Berlin Buffoonery on Wednesday (6/19).  His ghastly speech, attended by a crowd the size of a junior high school basketball game, was savaged in the European press.  The London Telegraph described it as:

"A combination of staggering naiveté, the appeasement of America’s enemies and strategic adversaries, and the championing of more big government solutions."

The "must read" on the subject is George Will’s devastating Obama Hits a Wall in Berlin.  Since it’s in the WaPo (6/20), every White House operative and Dem Hill staffer will be reading these words:

"Obama’s vanity is a wonder of the world that never loses its power to astonish, but really: Is everyone in his orbit too lost in raptures of admiration to warn him against delivering a speech soggy with banalities and bromides in a city that remembers John Kennedy’s ‘Ich bin ein Berliner‘ and Ronald Reagan’s ‘Tear down this wall‘?"

The magic is gone, folks. 

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The Dems know it’s gone.  They combined with conservative Pubs in the House to defeat the trillion-dollar Farm Bill yesterday (6/20).  This was a very interesting vote – a defeat for both Zero and Boehner.  The vote was 234 No-195 Yes, with the party breakdown: 62R-171D No,  172R-24D Yes.  The Democrats defeated this bill.

The Dems couldn’t stand to cut Food Stamps by a tiny amount, even though the bill is riddled with gargantuan payoffs to a vast array of special interests.  Many of those special interests are Zero’s cronies.  And many others are Boehner’s.  Now all of those cronies get nothing, because 171 Dems want to keep the Food Stamp gravy train rolling and 62 Pubs want to derail it.  Politics is either fascinating or mentally ill, depending on how you look at it.

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And isn’t this a sad, sad story.  It’ll break your heart to read how the lefties at Politico think the Dems don’t have much of a chance to retake the House until 2022.  They blame this on the evil nefarious Pubs gerrymandering districts – the same trick the Dems used for 64 years (1930-1994).

It’s fun to watch Dems cry.  It will be even more fun to watch Pelosi Galore announce her retirement after she fails to become Speaker in November 2014.

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Edd Forke sent me an excited message on Monday (6/17): "Baby, she’s back!!"  Of course, he was referring to Mama Grizzly herself, Sarah Palin, who, on Fox & Friends, shut down Elizabeth Palmer of CBS News for comparing Iranian mullah politicians to Tea Partyers:  "Elizabeth, you just put the BS in CBS."   Ba-da-boom.

On Saturday (6/15), Sarah gave a fabulous speech at Ralph Reed’s Faith & Freedom Conference.  When you have 24 minutes to spare, it’s worth watching entire:

 
 
One key line of Sarah’s was her comment on NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden:

"The problem is not twenty-something security contractors leaking government documents, the problem is government grown so big that it intrudes into every aspect of our lives."

The current June issue of Wired magazine, however, leaves Snowden in the dust with its exposé of the NSA:  The Secret War.

One of the great benefits of exposing Leviathan’s Surveillance State is the revulsion of young voters regarding it.  As the Guardian notes, this could be the issue persuading them to abandon Zero and go for Pubs like Rand Paul.

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Meanwhile, free market technology may be coming to our rescue.  Take a look at this picture from a building above a huge street crowd.  Click on the + sign in the top left corner to zoom in.  You can zoom in to clearly identify every single individual face in the crowd.  It will astound you.

Combine that with this WaPo story (6/16) explaining how the Surveillance State has the personal photo of at least 120 million Americans on file.  So if you’re someplace the Fascisti don’t want you to be, surveillance cams even at a great distance can spot you, and late one night there’s a knock on your door (then again, SWAT thugs don’t need to knock).

You can prevent this, however, by wearing just-developed facial recognition-prevention goggles.  Invented in Japan, they’ll soon be available commercially.  You can expect a wide selection of surveillance-avoidance technologies to be on the market soon.  People wanting to make money are far more creative than bureaucrats.

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So it helps to put things in perspective.  For instance, historian Niall Ferguson in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday (6/18) accurately and depressingly depicted our country today as "The Regulated States of America."  The Federal Register-the official directory of regulation-today runs to 78,961 pages.  And Zero wants thousands more. 

But now look at this AP story today (6/21): Federal Nullification Efforts Mounting in States.  It’s not just a handful of states so the Fascisti can squash them easily.  Forty out of fifty states "now have enacted local laws that directly reject or ignore federal laws on marijuana use, gun control, health insurance requirements and identification standards for driver’s licenses."

The Supremacy Clause be damned.  When the federal government overtly and blatantly refuses to obey the Constitution, then states may refuse to obey its unconstitutional edicts.  The Nullification Movement is growing, and that should give us hope.

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The main event on nullification is coming right up:  to nullify Obamacare.  The most important "must read" of the week is by Betsy McCaughey in the IBD on Tuesday (6/18):  Using Obamacare to Create a Permanent Democrat Majority.  That, in fact, seems to be a principal purpose of Zero’s health care fascism in the first place:

"The Obama health law creates a permanent stream of funding  (of hundreds of millions of dollars) for unions and community activists by outsourcing insurance enrollment to them."

There are few things Tea Partiers could do now to come to the aid of their country than to disrupt the implementation of Obamacare in their community by whatever means necessary.  I leave those means to their imagination.

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All righty, let’s have some good news.  The EPA announced today (6/21) that it has failed, for the third time, to find any evidence that fracking causes groundwater pollution.  "The EPA witch hunt" against fracking may be over, according to Sen. David Vitter (R-LA).

The eco-fascists’ "They’re poisoning our drinking water!!" fear-mongering scam is the one hope they had to stop the oil and natural gas boom in the US creating jobs and cheaper energy that’s also screwing Zero’s "renewable energy" cronies.  The bad guys took a real hit today.

In other good news:  The Pew Research Center issued its latest assessment of Zero’s Job Approval on Wednesday (6/19).  While the Takers still outnumber the Makers so his overall approval is higher than disapproval (49%-43%), Pew reported:

"The survey finds that the one-word impressions people have of Obama have changed a great deal throughout his presidency. Terms like incompetent and liar now are among the most frequently used words to describe Obama. In April 2009, when his job approval was at 63%, these words were rare."

We’re heading in the right direction here.  Let’s work to add fascist and crook to the list in the near future.

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We’ll end with a story appropriate to today:  June 21^st, the Summer Solstice (in the northern hemisphere).  No, it’s not about flower-bewreathed New Agers communing with the Druids at Stonehenge.  It’s about one of the most extraordinary geniuses in history you may have never heard of.

His name was Eratosthenes (era-toss-thin-ease, 276-194 BC).  He was a Greek who lived in Ptolemaic Egypt – that part of the empire conquered by Alexander the Great ruled by the Greek descendants of Ptolemy, one of Alexander’s primary generals.  The Ptolemaic Greek rule of Egypt lasted from 323 (Alexander’s death) to 30 BC (with the suicide of Cleopatra and its seizure by Rome under Octavian, later Caesar Augustus).

In 331, Alexander founded the city of Alexandria on the Mediterranean near the mouth of Nile.  Under the Ptolemies, it became not only the capital of Ptolemaic Egypt but of the entire Greek world, and the largest city in the world at the time.  It was not only the political capital of the Western World, but the intellectual capital as well.  The center of that learning and intellectuality was the great Library of Alexandria.  Originally based on the library of Aristotle, donated by Alexander as Aristotle was his tutor, it contained hundreds of thousands of papyri and vellum scrolls.

By 240, Eratosthenes had acquired such a reputation for scholarship and mathematical genius that Ptolemy III made him Director and Chief Librarian of the Great Library.  He had already invented the Sieve of Eratosthenes, an algorithm for determining prime numbers.

He had such a fascination with geography that he is known to history as the Father of Geography and coined the actual word (it means "writing about the earth" in Greek).  He had determined the sources of the Nile were two lakes and drew a map depicting them.  It’s now lost, but he was right:  the source of the White Nile is Lake Victoria in Uganda, while that of the Blue Nile is Lake Tana in Ethiopia, with both meeting in Khartoum in Sudan.

According to the Greek astronomer Claudius Ptolemy (85-165 AD, no relationship to the Greek rulers of Egypt), Eratosthenes determined, using measurements of lunar eclipses, that the Sun was 804,000,000 stades from the Earth.  The "stade" as used in Ptolemaic Egypt, was about 157.5 meters or 516 feet.

Converted into miles, that’s 78.5 million miles away for the sun — it’s 90 million, so not a bad measurement some 2,300 years ago.  Claudius Ptolemy also relates that Eratosthenes estimated the tilt of the earth’s axis relative to celestial north as 23.5 degrees. At the time it was 23.7 (it is now 23.4).  Almost exactly on.

But the most amazing estimate of Eratosthenes involves the Summer Solstice.  He has learned that there was a well on Elephantine Island in the Nile at Syene (now Aswan) in southern Egypt.  On June 21^st at high noon, the sun shone directly down this well at no discernable angle.  This was because Syene was very close (24.05) to the Tropic of Cancer (23.26) where the sun reaches its apogee and casts no shadow at noon on June 21^st.

Yet in Alexandria at noon on June 21^st, there was an angle cast by the sun, on an obelisk and a sundial.  The angle was measured at 7.2 degrees of arc.  Knowing that the sun was so far away its rays are parallel, and that the earth is round (every Greek knew that), he then divided 360 by 7.2 and got 50.  So the distance between Syene and Alexandria, he concluded, was 1/50^th of the circumference of the earth.

Caravans had been going from Syene to the Med for a long time and the distance was accurately known, a little more than 5,000 stades.  Thus the earth’s circumference, Eratosthenes said, was 252,000 stades – or 24,627 miles.  The best measurement we have today with satellites is a polar circumference (what Eratosthenes was measuring, Syene to Alexandria is north) is 24,858.82 miles.  The equatorial circumference is a bit greater due to the gravitational tug of the sun, 24,901.55 miles.

Sitting in his study in the Library of Alexandria in 240 BC, Eratosthenes figured out the exact size of the earth.  Now that’s genius.

And it is the genius of human spirit that will triumph over evil in the end, especially where there is the spirit of freedom.  It’s flickering in America but it’s still aflame.  Count on it blazing again.