More IPCC Errors Exposed

The United Nations’ expert panel on climate change based claims about ice disappearing from the world’s mountain tops on a student’s dissertation and an article in a mountaineering magazine.

Say What??!!!! 😦

The revelation will cause fresh embarrassment for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which had to issue a humiliating apology earlier this month over inaccurate statements about global warming.

The IPCC’s remit is to provide an authoritative assessment of scientific evidence on climate change.

In its most recent report, it stated that observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa was being caused by global warming, citing two papers as the source of the information.

However, it can be revealed that one of the sources quoted was a feature article published in a popular magazine for climbers which was based on anecdotal evidence from mountaineers about the changes they were witnessing on the mountainsides around them.

The other was a dissertation written by a geography student, studying for the equivalent of a master’s degree, at the University of Berne in Switzerland that quoted interviews with mountain guides in the Alps.

The revelations, uncovered by The Sunday Telegraph, have raised fresh questions about the quality of the information contained in the report, which was published in 2007.

It comes after officials for the panel were forced earlier this month to retract inaccurate claims in the IPCC’s report about the melting of Himalayan glaciers.

Sceptics have seized upon the mistakes to cast doubt over the validity of the IPCC and have called for the panel to be disbanded.

This week scientists from around the world leapt to the defence of the IPCC, insisting that despite the errors, which they describe as minor, the majority of the science presented in the IPCC report is sound and its conclusions are unaffected.

But some researchers have expressed exasperation at the IPCC’s use of unsubstantiated claims and sources outside of the scientific literature.

Professor Richard Tol, one of the report’s authors who is based at the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin, Ireland, said: “These are essentially a collection of anecdotes.

“Why did they do this? It is quite astounding. Although there have probably been no policy decisions made on the basis of this, it is illustrative of how sloppy Working Group Two (the panel of experts within the IPCC responsible for drawing up this section of the report) has been.

Why did they do it? Because it fit their politics. The “Evidence” fit what they want to accomplish.

It’s Not Science, it’s just politics.

Making them Political Scientists, not actual Scientists.

“There is no way current climbers and mountain guides can give anecdotal evidence back to the 1900s, so what they claim is complete nonsense.”

The IPCC report, which is published every six years, is used by government’s worldwide to inform policy decisions that affect billions of people.

The claims about disappearing mountain ice were contained within a table entitled “Selected observed effects due to changes in the cryosphere produced by warming”.

It states that reductions in mountain ice have been observed from the loss of ice climbs in the Andes, Alps and in Africa between 1900 and 2000.

The report also states that the section is intended to “assess studies that have been published since the TAR (Third Assessment Report) of observed changes and their effects”.

But neither the dissertation or the magazine article cited as sources for this information were ever subject to the rigorous scientific review process that research published in scientific journals must undergo.

The magazine article, which was written by Mark Bowen, a climber and author of two books on climate change, appeared in Climbing magazine in 2002. It quoted anecdotal evidence from climbers of retreating glaciers and the loss of ice from climbs since the 1970s.

Mr Bowen said: “I am surprised that they have cited an article from a climbing magazine, but there is no reason why anecdotal evidence from climbers should be disregarded as they are spending a great deal of time in places that other people rarely go and so notice the changes.”

Because it’s not scientific?? Next thing you know the world will be flat because that’s what it looks to us down her on the surface!! 🙂

The dissertation paper, written by professional mountain guide and climate change campaigner Dario-Andri Schworer while he was studying for a geography degree, quotes observations from interviews with around 80 mountain guides in the Bernina region of the Swiss Alps.

Experts claim that loss of ice climbs are a poor indicator of a reduction in mountain ice as climbers can knock ice down and damage ice falls with their axes and crampons.

The IPCC has faced growing criticism over the sources it used in its last report after it emerged the panel had used unsubstantiated figures on glacial melting in the Himalayas that were contained within a World Wildlife Fund (WWF) report.

It can be revealed that the IPCC report made use of 16 non-peer reviewed WWF reports.

One claim, which stated that coral reefs near mangrove forests contained up to 25 times more fish numbers than those without mangroves nearby, quoted a feature article on the WWF website.

In fact the data contained within the WWF article originated from a paper published in 2004 in the respected journal Nature.

In another example a WWF paper on forest fires was used to illustrate the impact of reduced rainfall in the Amazon rainforest, but the data was from another Nature paper published in 1999.

When The Sunday Telegraph contacted the lead scientists behind the two papers in Nature, they expressed surprise that their research was not cited directly but said the IPCC had accurately represented their work.

The chair of the IPCC Rajendra Pachauri has faced mounting pressure and calls for his resignation amid the growing controversy over the error on glacier melting and use of unreliable sources of information.

A survey of 400 authors and contributors to the IPCC report showed, however, that the majority still support Mr Pachauri and the panel’s vice chairs. They also insisted the overall findings of the report are robust despite the minor errors.

The Religion of Global Warming, overwhelms Science.

But many expressed concern at the use of non-peer reviewed information in the reports and called for a tightening of the guidelines on how information can be used.

The Met Office, which has seven researchers who contributed to the report including Professor Martin Parry who was co-chair of the working group responsible for the part of the report that contained the glacier errors, said: “The IPCC should continue to ensure that its review process is as robust and transparent as possible, that it draws only from the peer-reviewed literature, and that uncertainties in the science and projections are clearly expressed.”

Roger Sedjo, a senior research fellow at the US research organisation Resources for the Future who also contributed to the IPCC’s latest report, added: “The IPCC is, unfortunately, a highly political organisation with most of the secretariat bordering on climate advocacy.

“It needs to develop a more balanced and indeed scientifically sceptical behaviour pattern. The organisation tend to select the most negative studies ignoring more positive alternatives.”

The IPCC failed to respond to questions about the inclusion of unreliable sources in its report but it has insisted over the past week that despite minor errors, the findings of the report are still robust and consistent with the underlying science.(UK Telegraph)

NYTimes: Now, there’s a danger that the uproar over the IPCC’s erroneous paragraph could overshadow the scientific group’s broader conclusions about the effects of climate change, said Ben Santer, a climate scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

“Focusing on a mouse and ignoring the elephant would be a mistake,” he told reporters yesterday, especially since independent assessments by the National Academy of Sciences, the federal government and other sources echo the IPCC’s overall findings.

The Elephant in the room, dear reader, is that THEY ARE LYING!!! and they keep getting caught at it. And they all take the Liberal political dismissive route of “there’ nothing to see, it’s meaningless, it only a small error. Not big deal. get over it.”

Now, in science, if your wrong. Or if you make errors that means your theory is not correct.

Not not in Politics.

And this is Politics. Not Science.

Roger Pielke, Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, said scientists make mistakes all the time “and it isn’t a big deal.”

Well, that makes me feel better 😦

And the kicker:

Dr. Murari Lal, the scientist behind the bogus claim about melting Himalayan glaciers, suggested over the weekend that the panel intentionally ignored the facts.

The statement “related to several countries in this region and their water sources,”Lal told the London paper The Mail. “We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action. It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in.”

The Mail concluded that the comments were included “purely to put political pressure on world leaders.”(Times)

According to the IPCC’s statement of principles, its role is ‘to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis, scientific, technical and socio-economic information – IPCC reports should be neutral with respect to policy’.

Now, you can’t write comedy like that.

A comedy of errors, that is.

And with comedy comes tragedy.

The tragedy of the degradation and politicization of the Scientific Method by the left for their own needs for power and control.

It’s as corrupted now as everything they touch.

For example, Hayley Fowler of Newcastle University, suggested that their draft did not mention that Himalayan glaciers in the Karakoram range are growing rapidly, citing a paper published in the influential journal Nature.

In their response, the IPCC authors said, bizarrely, that they were ‘unable to get hold of the suggested references’, but would ‘consider’ this in their final version. They failed to do so.

The Japanese government commented that the draft did not clarify what it meant by stating that the likelihood of the glaciers disappearing by 2035 was ‘very high’. ‘What is the confidence level?’ it asked.

The authors’ response said ‘appropriate revisions and editing made’. But the final version was identical to their draft.

Last night, Dr Pachauri defended the IPCC, saying it was wrong to generalise based on a single mistake. ‘Our procedure is robust,’ he added. (Daily Mail)

I hate “robust”. It’s a Liberal code-word for shut up.

No amount of errors or misrepresentations of facts will stop the Global warming Religionists though.

Their Agenda is the Agenda!

Much Like Dear ole’ Speaker Pelosi:

“We will move on many fronts — any front we can,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat herself, said Thursday. “We must take whatever time it takes to do it. But we are going to get health care reform passed for the American people.”

Interesting, that usage of the word “for.” “Against” would be a more accurate description. Americans simply don’t want what Washington’s Democrats are selling — and it’s not because they don’t know what’s in the 2,000-page bills. It’s because they do know what’s in them. (IBD)

The Bulls of Liberal Group DoubleThink are wrecking our China shop….

Can’t We All Just Get Along?

Just listen to the tone of some of the liberal media on Obama’s trip to the Republican Retreat to meet with them and be on camera being feisty.

It was a great photo-op.

But I’m more interested in the coverage.

NY Post – President Obama slams obstructionist Republicans at GOP issues retreat

WASHINGTON – President Obama dove headfirst into the belly of the GOP beast Friday – and left the not-so-loyal opposition bleeding on a Baltimore ballroom floor.

He skewered Republicans for obstructionist tactics, dubious facts and a lack of civility in opposing his domestic agenda, especially health care reform.

“If you were to listen to the debate and, frankly, how some of you went after this bill, you’d think that this thing was some Bolshevik plot,” Obama told the GOP issues retreat after unveiling a proposal for $33 billion in small-business tax incentives.

No Bias here…. 🙂

MSNBC: Some Republicans prefaced their questions with lengthy recitations of conservative talking points.

“I know there’s a question in there somewhere, because you’re making a whole bunch of assertions, half of which I disagree with,” Obama said to Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas, whom he mistakenly called “Jim.”

Or Here… (see a different way of seeing this one later in the piece)

GOP lawmakers pressured him to support a presidential line-item veto for spending bills and to endorse across-the-board tax cuts. Obama said he was ready to talk about the budget proposal, though he disputed accusations that his administration was to blame for big increases in deficit spending. And he demurred on the idea of cutting everyone’s taxes, saying with a smile that billionaires don’t need tax cuts.

This last bit would be the JFK tax cut remark. But you’d never know for this “report”.

Chicago Tribune-BALTIMORE – In an unprecedented town-hall meeting, President Barack Obama went toe to toe Friday with some of his fiercest critics – a ballroom-full of House Republicans – accusing them of trying to derail his health-care overhaul while they complained about being shut out of the political process.

Obama repeatedly defended his policies and accused Republicans of distorting his positions for political gain. He was especially critical of the GOP’s efforts to derail the massive health-care overhaul bill in Congress.

House Republicans, who have little political power because of the large Democratic majority in the chamber, were determined to use the occasion to rebut skeptics who argue that the party offers few ideas and opposes legislation out of political convenience, not principle. They handed Obama a thick document containing Republican policy proposals when he was introduced.

Then you have the New York Times, a Little less in-your-face partisanship for once:

BALTIMORE — President Obama denied he was a Bolshevik, the Republicans denied they were obstructionists and both sides denied they were to blame for the toxic atmosphere clouding the nation’s political leadership.

But if it was at times a wonky clash of ideas, it also seemed to be a virtual marriage-therapy session — with the most pointed exchanges shown again on the evening news — as each side vented grievances pent up after a year of partisan gridlock.

Mr. Obama complained that the Republicans were painting him as a radical, making it harder to compromise. His health care plan, he said, was not “a Bolshevik plot.” The Republicans, for their part, complained that he did not listen to them and instead sat back while the Democratic “attack machine,” as one called it, demonized them.

“I am not an ideologue,” Mr. Obama said at one point, drawing skeptical murmurs from the crowd that seemed to surprise him. “I’m not,” he insisted.

But if he rejected the Republican labels for him, the Republicans rejected his for them.

“I can look you in the eye and tell you we have not been obstructionists,” Representative Jason Chaffetz, a freshman from Utah, told him.

Just to make the point that they have been more than the party of no, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House Republican leader, as he introduced the president handed him a booklet called “Better Solutions” compiling a variety of Republican ideas that they said the president had ignored or resisted over the last year.

“We don’t expect you to agree with us on every one of our solutions,” Mr. Boehner said, “but we do hope that you and your administration will consider them.”

See the tonal differences.

BALTIMORE SUN:

The tone was civil, but Obama stood his ground as he parried some of the harshest critics of his performance as president. His Republican hosts, aware that the event was being beamed live from a Baltimore hotel, went out of their way to show deference and largely pulled their punches.

If the session was rare by the standards of American politics – and it was – it didn’t rise to the level of question time in the British House of Commons, where opposition politicians hurl barely disguised insults at the prime minister. In the ballroom of an Inner Harbor hotel, Joe Wilson, the South Carolina congressman who loudly called the president a liar at a joint session of Congress last year, was never heard from.

Obama said that Republicans have attacked his agenda as “some wild-eyed plot to impose huge government in every aspect of our lives.” As a result, he added, “you guys then don’t have a lot of room to negotiate with me.”

Truth hurts, Mr. President. 🙂

In line with his remarks about partisanship in Wednesday night’s State of the Union address, Obama said Democrats and Republicans were both to blame for demonizing the opposition party – typically to satisfy more extreme elements of the left or right. That is one of the reasons, he added, that it has gotten tougher to actually get things done in Washington.

“I think both sides can take some blame for a sour climate on Capitol Hill,” he said, after hearing repeated criticism of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s style of leadership.

At another point, he sought to ally himself with Republicans against a common enemy: the news media. “The problems we have sometimes is a media that responds only to slash-and-burn style politics,” the president said.

You didn’t hear this bit in the more liberal attack pieces. They were too busy slashing-and-burning… 🙂

Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas, accused by Obama of posing a dishonest campaign talking point in the form of a question, called the event “an honest conversation. I find myself agreeing with 80 percent of what the president says. I just disagree with 80 percent of what he does.”

Amen to that.

President Obama argued that his health care plan was “pretty centrist” actually.

Yikes!

If this is “centrist” to him we are all doomed.

The president grew more exasperated when Representative Jeb Hensarling of Texas challenged him on the spending plan he will unveil next week. “Will that new budget, like your old budget, triple the national debt and continue to take us down the path of increasing the cost of government to almost 25 percent of our economy?” he asked.

Mr. Obama called the question “an example of how it’s very hard to have the kind of bipartisan work that we’re going to do because the whole question was structured as a talking point for running a campaign.”(NYT)

So was the non-answer, Mr. President. 🙂

When Georgia congressman Tom Price charged that Obama had repeatedly accused Republicans of offering “no ideas and no solutions,” Obama shot back, “I don’t think I said that.”

Should we roll the tape? 🙂

PolitiFact:

Price then said, “Mr. President, multiple times from your administration there have come statements that Republicans have no ideas and no solutions, in spite of the fact that we’ve offered, as demonstrated today, positive solutions to all of the challenges we face, including energy and the economy and health care.”

Because Price appeared to correct himself after Obama’s reply, we decided to focus on the second claim, that people in Obama’s administration have made “statements that Republicans have no ideas and no solutions.” Price spokesman Brendan Buck provided a couple of examples and we found a couple of our own:

• At a picnic with labor officials in Cincinnati, Ohio, on Sept. 7, 2009, Obama complained that the critics of health care reform — he didn’t identify them as Republicans, but it was clear he was referring to them — were not offering their own solutions. He said, “I’ve got a question for all those folks: What are you going to do? What’s your answer? What’s your solution? And you know what? They don’t have one. Their answer is to do nothing. Their answer is to do nothing.”

• A White House blog post attacking the Republican health care plan said it offered “no ideas.” (The posting appears to have a typo. It reads: “The Republican bill offers new no ideas.”)

• White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel on April 19, 2009, described the Republicans as “the party of never . . . the party of no new ideas.” (He was referring not just to health care, but also to fiscal discipline.)

• At a White House briefing April 28, 2009, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs made a very similar comment, saying that, “I think you heard me and others say that you can’t just be the party of no or the party of no new ideas.”

The White House doesn’t dispute that aides have portrayed Republicans that way, but a spokeswoman said the Democratic health care plan includes many amendments that were proposed by Republicans.

Still, Price is right. Obama and his aides have said the Republicans have no ideas on health care and other issues. We rate Price’s statement True.

He says one thing and does the opposite.

So the real question after all this is, will there be bi-partisanship where Democrats honestly work with Republicans and vice versa, or will it be the oft-mentioned liberal definition of “bi-partisan” where you agree to everything they say and shut and sit down as it as been modeled for the last year.

Time will tell.

But you need to watch out for The Ministry of Truth and their spin.

Orwell is alive and well.

And we must be ever vigiliant.

But the best bit I found from the forum was during Rep. Jeb Hensarling’s questions (remember that from earlier):

Obama:  “That’s why I say if we’re going to frame these debates in ways that allow us to solve them, then we can’t start off by figuring out, A, who’s to blame; B, how can we make the American people afraid of the other side.”

You Mean Like it’s GEORGE W. BUSH’s FAULT!! 🙂 🙂 🙂

It’s all Wall Street’s Fault!

It’s Rich People’s Fault!

It’s the Insurance Companies Fault!

D’oh!!  🙂

“And unfortunately, that’s how our politics works right now, and that’s how a lot of our discussion works. That’s how we start off.”

Can you hear the rock crashing through his own Glass House?

I bet he can’t.

And Nancy Pelosi was sound asleep…

Adams vs Freud

Before we get to today’s blog. I thought I would share this nugget of wisdom from the Far Left.

And they don’t get too much farther left than MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann.

Last Night he said  that when white men call Obama “flippant” or “arrogant,” that is a racist code word.

Isn’t that fascinating…. 😦

Now on with the Show…

“If anyone from either party has a better approach that will bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen Medicare for seniors and stop insurance company abuses, let me know. Let me know. Let me know. I’m eager to see it.” — President Obama in the State of the Union Speech.

Gee, didn’t we hear this last year and then Democrats shut down and shut out the Republicans completely?

Even Obama said at a picnic for the AFL-CIO that they had “no ideas”.

Yet every time they were presented them they were shot down with extreme prejudice.

So is this the sequel?

I think the Republican should charge forward and say, “here they are” so the Democrats can nuke them again.

Just to show The People just how uninterested the Democrats really are in anything anyone says to them.

Ideas Like Portability (buying insurance across state lines) and Tort Reform.

But since Tort Reform means the Democrats would have to piss off their lobbyist buddies in the Trial Lawyers that’s not happening.

So Republicans should push it.

That should make the Democrats squirm.

George Will:

Barack Obama tiptoed Wednesday night along the seam that bifurcates the Democratic Party’s brain. The seam separates that brain’s John Quincy Adams lobe from its Sigmund Freud lobe.

The dominant liberal lobe favors Adams’ dictum that politicians should not be “palsied by the will of our constituents.” It exhorts Democrats to smack Americans with what is good for them — health care reform, carbon rationing, etc. — even if the dimwits do not desire it.

The other lobe whispers Freud’s reality principle: Restrain your id — the pleasure principle and the impulse toward immediate gratification. Settle for deferred and diminished but achievable results.

Obama was mostly in Adams’ mode Wednesday. His nods to reality were, however, notable.

Such speeches must be listened to with a third ear that hears what is not said.

Unmentioned was organized labor’s “card check” legislation to abolish workers’ rights to secret ballots in unionization elections. Obama’s perfunctory request for a “climate bill” — the term “cap-and-trade” was as absent as the noun “Guantanamo” — was not commensurate with his certitude that life on Earth may drown in rising seas.

Last Feb. 24, when unemployment was 8.2%, Obama said in the second sentence of his speech to Congress that the economy “is a concern that rises above all others” and later that his agenda “begins with jobs.” After 11 months of health care monomania, he said Wednesday that “jobs must be our No. 1 focus.” Unemployment is 10%.

He called Wednesday for a third stimulus (the first was his predecessor’s, in February 2008) although the S-word has been banished in favor of “jobs bill.” It will inject into the economy money that government siphons from the economy, thereby somehow creating jobs. And you thought alchemy was strange.

Not until the 33rd minute of Wednesday’s 70-minute address did Obama mention health care. The weirdness of what he said made it worth the wait.

Dim Americans

Acknowledging that the longer the public has looked at the legislation the less the public has liked it, he blamed himself for not “explaining it more clearly.” But his faux contrition actually blames the public: The problem is not the legislation’s substance but the presentation of it to slow learners.

He urged them to take “another look at the plan we’ve proposed.” The plan? The differences between the House and Senate plans are not trivial; they concern how to pay for the enormous new entitlement.

Last Feb. 24, with a grandiosity with which the nation has become wearily familiar, he said, “Already, we have done more to advance the cause of health care reform in the last 30 days than we have in the last decade.”

He was referring to the expansion of eligibility to an existing entitlement — the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. But that expansion was minor compared with the enormous new Medicare entitlement for prescription drugs created under Obama’s predecessor. Before the Massachusetts nuisance, this year’s speech was to be a self-coronation of the “last” president to deal with health care.

Last Feb. 24, he said he had an activist agenda because of the recession, “not because I believe in bigger government — I don’t.” Ninety-seven days later, he bought General Motors.

Truth Deficit

Wednesday night’s debut of Obama as avenging angel of populism featured one of those opaque phrases — the “weight of our politics” — that third-rate speechwriters slip past drowsy editors. Obama seems to regret the existence in Washington of … everyone else.

He seems to feel entitled to have his way without tiresome interventions in the political process by the many interests affected by his agenda for radical expansion of the regulatory state. Speaking of slow learners, liberals do not notice the connection between expansion of government and expansion of (often defensive) activities referred to under the rubric of “lobbying.”

Lamenting Washington’s “deficit of trust,” Obama gave an example of the reason for it when he brassily declared: “We are prepared to freeze government spending for three years.” This flagrant falsehood enlarges Washington’s deficit of truth: He proposes freezing some discretionary spending — about one-eighth of government spending.

Obama’s leitmotif is: Washington is disappointing, Washington is annoying, Washington is dysfunctional, Washington is corrupt, verily it is toxic — yet Washington should conscript a substantially larger share of GDP, and Washington should exercise vast new controls over health care, energy, K-12 education, etc. Talk about a divided brain.

****

Obama: “I know there are many Americans who aren’t sure if they still believe we can change — or that I can deliver it.”

It’s the Change you want to bring that scares the crap out me, Mr. President!!

It’s the economy, stupid!

Not your pet liberal fantasies.

But I don’t think they want to hear that. 🙂

Deficit of Understanding

“We have more than a deficit of dollars right now,” Obama said. “We face a deficit of trust.”

That’s True.

I don’t Washington D.C in general, and Democrats in specific.

And the last year doesn’t inspire any trust.

Oh Health Care:

“The longer it was debated, the more skeptical people became,” Obama said. “I take my share of the blame for not explaining it more clearly to the American people. And I know that with all the lobbying and horse-trading, this process left most Americans wondering what’s in it for me?”

I know what was in it for me, Higher Taxes, Government control, and less quality and quantity of care.

That’s why I still object to it.

But we do have Democrat in-fighting:

“We have to wait for the House of Lords to do their contemplating,” said Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y. “We’re also not getting much guidance from the mother ship about what the White House really wants and what they’re prepared to push for.”

Rep. Marion Berry, D-Ark., who is retiring at the end of the year, said of Obama what some Americans have said all year, “‘You’re trying to do too much too quickly.'”

“Maybe we should listen to them,” Berry said. “If we don’t listen to them, then they will make you listen to them in November.” (UK Guardian)

Ya Think? 🙂

Newly Elected VA Governor Bob McDonnell: “It was Thomas Jefferson who called for “A wise and frugal Government which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry ….and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned…”

But our president is a creature of Ideology.

It was filled with old ideas, campaign cliches, and frequent use of personal pronoun, “I.”  That’s the Obama pattern.

The chief takeaway from 70 minutes of presidential oratory was that Obama doesn’t intend to move to the center.  Should we have been surprised?  Not at all.  Obama is no Bill Clinton.  He’s an ideologically committed liberal.

Obama voiced concern about the lack of trust by Americans in their government.  But he didn’t help matters by repeating discredited (or at least less than believable) claims about his policies.  He said that 2 million more people would be jobless today were it not for his economic stimulus bill.  Not much empirical evidence for that claim.  And he said his health care legislation would actually reduce the deficit.  Please!  Everyone knows this is the result of transparent accounting tricks and, in truth, ObamaCare would increase the deficit by hundreds of billions.

It was nice to hear the president praise innovation.  He said his administration had spent a record amount on basic research, which is good.  Then he outlined a series of steps to promote innovation. Guess what?  They were all things that government would do, which is bad.  Unleash the private sector?  He didn’t mention that. (Fred Barnes)

After all, Government is vastly superior to the evil capitalist private sector!!

And he was still talking about Climate change legislation! Is he nuts!??

No. Just a very committed Idealogue that wants to sound like something he isn’t.

Like listening to the American People.

I’m not surprised at all.

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 cool,” hot-tempered opponents will, of course, realize they were wrong about the bill.

Obama began his presidency insisting that government is the answer to our problems. A year later, he still believes that the era of big government is upon us. (NY Post)

So backlash against him in Massachusetts is the same backlash that got him elected because of George W. Bush, so he was right all along and should continue doing what he has been doing because the backlash against him is not hi, it’s George W. Bush??

Really?? 😦  My head hurts from that Doublethink.

He decried the politicians who are in “permanent campaign” mode — the same week he brought into the White House his campaign manager.

Other politicians are vain, cowardly and insubstantial. They need the courage to change. Meanwhile, Obama is great the way he is.

That is the attitude that has gotten the president in so much trouble. And last night’s State of the Union speech showed us that change really isn’t easy, particularly for the president. (NY Post)

The Greatness that is Me.

Ugh…where’s that barf bag….

This from Mr. “Tinkle up my leg”.

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews: “He is post-racial by all appearances. You know, I forgot he was black tonight for an hour. You know, he’s gone a long way to become a leader of this country and passed so much history in just a year or two.”

<<excuse for a moment. I have to use the barf bag….>>

HEALTH CARE REFORM NEEDS A DOCTOR

Pelosi told Politico this week that she might attempt some piecemeal changes in the health system and try comprehensive reform again later. The thinking is that if Americans just cool down, they will accept a massive transformation of the finest health care system in the world.

But the studies indicating thousands of dollars more in premiums, new regulations forcing employers to drop coverage and hard-hitting polls such as IBD/TIPP’s finding that 45% of doctors would consider retiring or quitting their practice if something resembling government care is passed, are factors unlikely to go away.

As I said previously, it suffered a near-fatal heart attack, but Washington Politicians do have the best Medical Care in the World, so it will be back. 😦

And as the President said last night, “I don’t quit”

He also doesn’t really moderate his radicalism, he just wants to sound like he is.

Nothing new there.

“We’re going to give them (The Republicans) another chance to become part of this government,” one of the president’s top advisers said at a briefing before the speech. (liberal blog of EJ Dionne Jr)

So the time-out in the corner is over and they come back and play with the rest of the kids as long as they are nice and agree with us on everything.

Where’s that barf bag…

Gov. McDonnell: “The amount of this debt is on pace to double in five years, and triple in ten. The federal debt is already over $100,000 per household.
This is simply unsustainable. The President’s partial freeze on discretionary spending is a laudable step, but a small one.
The circumstances of our time demand that we reconsider and restore the proper, limited role of government at every level.
Without reform, the excessive growth of government threatens our very liberty and prosperity.”

Amen, Governor.

But Washington D.C. is still not listening. And our President most certainly did not hear us clearly.

But he wants to sound like it.

In particular, Obama said he would use an executive order to create a bipartisan commission to devise a plan for reducing the growing federal debt. The Senate recently defeated a bill by Democratic Sen. Kent Conrad of North Dakota and Republican Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire to set up such a panel. (CNN)

It was defeated by Democrats and Republicans, by the way.

Nothing new here…move along…

President Obama gets the last word today, “We were sent here to serve our citizens, not our ambitions. So let’s show the American people that we can do it together.”

<<<RALPH>>>

Let the Show Begin

Tonight, President Obama will give his State of The Union Speech.

It’s not really a speech about the real State of the Union so much as a Campaign Speech to try and shore up the State of his Union with the voters who are mad at him.

But it will be all platitudes and pagentry.

It’s a Show.

I will be working to pay my bills at the time he’s pontificating about he “I hear your pain”.

So I won’t need the barf bag on stand-by.

“The middle class feels beleaguered, and I think the message of Massachusetts, which I believe the president is now heeding, was pay attention to our plight. We’re not as worried about changing the health care system as we are about getting by week to week,” Sen. Charles Schumer said to CBS 2 in NY.

D’oh!

It took him a year to figure that one out. Give that man the Nobel Prize!

Whoops, Obama already has one. 🙂

But does he really believe it?

NO.

Does he really care?

NO.

It’s all Show.

But I hope they put a seat belt on Nancy Pelosi’s and Vice-President Biden’s  chairs tonight and strap them down! 🙂

The Americans For Tax relief have a way for you play at home : atr.org

Back by popular demand: Obama BINGO! To help you get through the State of the Union address on Wednesday night, Americans for Tax Reform once again presents Obama BINGO!  Use the cards to check off terms and phrases likely to be used during President Obama’s State of the Union address.

We’ve prepared four different cards this year so that you may compete with your friends and family:

Obama BINGO Card 1

Obama BINGO Card 2

Obama BINGO Card 3

Obama BINGO Card 4

I guess a square with “I…” would be too easy… 🙂

Or “I inherited…” or “The Last 8 years…” (like the last year didn’t exist).

But never let it be said that I don’t provide entertainment. 🙂

A few thoughts from atr.org:

1. Welcome to the fiscal responsibility party, Mr. President.  After a year of trillion-dollar bailouts, trillion-dollar stimulus bills, and trillion-dollar healthcare plans, it’s nice to see at least a rhetorical nod toward sanity coming out of the White House.
2. One little problem: CBO was actually projecting a decline in non-defense discretionary spending over the next few years (from $682 billion in FY 2010 gradually down to $640 billion in 2014).   The reason is all the “temporary” spending programs that were enacted the first year of the Obama Administration.  This is like the weatherman taking credit for a sunny day–it was happening anyway.  In fact, freezing this spending is actually a hike in projected spending over the next several years.
3. The spending “restraint” is a drop in the bucket.  Let’s take the White House claim on its face–that this measure will reduce total spending over the next decade by $250 billion.  CBO says that under current services, the federal government will be spending $42.9 trillion.  So even if this “freeze” is followed through on by the Congressional appropriators, the Obama-Pelosi-Reid regime will still be spending 99.42% as much as they were planning to, anyway.  Big deal.  It’s like if you were planning on spending $100 on groceries this week, and instead spent only $99.42.
4. It’s awfully heroic to say that you’re not going to increase spending after it just went up by 17.4 percent.  That’s right: non-defense discretionary spending grew by 17.4 percent in Obama’s first year. Even if it stays at that level for the next three years, that would still be an average annual increase of 5.5 percent.  That’s faster than the economy is expected to grow, and faster than wages are expected to grow.

And here’s a disturbing statistic you won’t hear spoken of at all, let alone tonight as we get another “Feel your pain” speech.

ATR: According to data released last week, for the first time in history, more than 50 percent of union members work for the federal, state or local government.

This unprecedented event raises the question: How can a public that wants smaller government achieve that goal when every dollar that goes into that government is paying to build an interest group intent on growing the government?

And we have a Union President and a Union Congress, given the private White House session the Unions got during December on the Health Care bill that led to them being exempted for 5 years.

So the bloat now has a Union.

God help us all!

And then there’s the Bank Tax.

Obama will assault the The evils of Wall Street and The Banks (he bailed out) tonight. It’s his version of get tough.

It’s so phony.

And those “middle class” voters he’s trying to “reconnect” with will get a dial tone.

ATR: One natural question is, “who will pay the bank tax?”  It’s true that it’s assessed on the 50 biggest banks, but surely that will be passed along to all of us.  The “bank tax” is actually one of the most regressive taxes likely to be proposed by the Obama regime.

How will we pay the bank tax?

• Imagine opening up your bank statement every month and seeing a $1 “bank tax” surcharge in there.  Assuming about 100 million active bank accounts in America and $12 in annual fees, that alone would be enough to pay about 10 percent of the tax every year
• Another mechanism might be to increase fees to manage 401(k) and IRA accounts.  This could take the form of fees assessed to your employer (which you never see), or 12b-1 fees on your mutual funds (which you didn’t even know existed before I typed that)
• Befuddled by all the fees and costs on your house’s HUD-1 closing form?  Here’s another one that might be in there.  Check for it just above “county recorder fee” and just below “water reclamation fee”

The list could go on, but I take it you see my point.  You can’t force the banks to reduce their profits in order to pay this new tax.  Ultimately, the only way any business has to pay any tax is by increasing prices for what they sell.  That’s exactly what’s going to happen here.  It’s not the banks’ fault–it’s the Obama Administration’s fault for hiking taxes on a crippled industry in the middle of a deep recession.

But it will make the liberals feel better, they have a new greedy capitalist pig to squeal about.

So get some popcorn, sit back, and enjoy the show.

But have the anti-acid tablets near by and the barf bag on stand by as the “new”  Touchy-feely Obama “feels your pain”….

Freezing Taxpayers

(CBS) Thanks to a recently filed Congressional expense reports there’s new light shed on the Copenhagen Climate Summit in Denmark and how much it cost taxpayers.

CBS News Investigative correspondent Sharyl Attkisson reports official filings and our own investigation show at least 106 people from the House and Senate attended – spouses, a doctor, a protocol expert and even a photographer.

For 15 Democratic and 6 Republican Congressmen, food and rooms for two nights cost $4,406 tax dollars each. That’s $2,200 a day – more than most Americans spend on their monthly mortgage payment.

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., is a key climate change player. He went to Copenhagen last year. Last week, we asked him about the $2,200-a-day bill for room and food.

“I can’t believe that,” Rep. Waxman said. “I can’t believe it, but I don’t know.”

But his name is in black and white in the expense reports. The group expense report was filed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. She wouldn’t talk about it when our producer tried to ask.

Pelosi’s office did offer an explanation for the high room charges. Those who stayed just two nights were charged a six-night minimum at the five-star Marriott. One staffer said, they strongly objected to no avail. You may ask how they’ll negotiate a climate treaty, if they can’t get a better deal on hotel rooms.

I had a job as a reservationist in the hotel business for 7 years. I can tell you that a minimum length of stay is usually programmed in to system so you can’t override it. So complain all you want, it matters not.

But since they weren’t paying for it anyhow…

Total hotel, meeting rooms and “a couple” of $1,000-a-night hospitality suites topped $400,000.

Flights weren’t cheap, either. Fifty-nine House and Senate staff flew commercial during the Copenhagen rush. They paid government rates — $5-10,000 each — totaling $408,064. Add three military jets — $168,351 just for flight time — and the bill tops $1.1 million dollars — not including all the Obama administration officials who attended: well over 60.

Imagine the “carbon footprint”.

Imagine the trash and the environmental damage. 🙂

And they accomplished ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!!!

Attendees
Speaker Nancy Pelosi
Pelosi’s husband
Majority Leader Steny Hoyer
Rep. George Miller
Rep. Henry Waxman
Rep. Ed Markey
Markey’s wife
Rep. Charles Rangel
Rep. Bart Gordon
Rep. James Sensenbrenner
Sensenbrenner’s wife
Rep. Sander Levin
Rep. Joe Barton
Barton daughter
Rep. Fred Upton
Rep. Earl Blumenauer
Rep. Diana DeGette
Rep. Jay Inslee
Inslee’s wife
Rep. Shelley Moore Capito
Rep. Moore Capito husband
Rep. John Sullivan
Rep. Tim Ryan
Rep. GK Butterfield
Rep. Emanuel Cleaver
Rep. Gabrielle Giffords
Gifford’s husband
Rep. Marsha Blackburn
President Obama
Sen. James Inhofe
Sen. John Kerry
Stacee Bako
Don Kellaher
Wilson Livingood
Brian Monahan
John Lawrence
Karen Wayland
Drew Hammill
Kate Knudson
Bridget Fallon
Bina Surgeon
Mary Frences Repko
Nona Darrell
Tony Jackson
Josh Mathis
Phil Barnett
David Cavicke
Lisa Miller
Peter Spencer
Andrea Spring
Lorie Schmitt
Greg Dotson
Alex Barron
Christopher King
Shimere Williams
Tara Rothschild
Margaret Caravelli
Gerry Waldron
Ana Unruh-Cohen
Jeff Duncan
Eben Burnham-Snyder
Joel Beauvais
Michael Goo
Tom Schreibel
Harlan Watson
Bart Forsyth
Ed Rice
Steve Rusnak
Carey Lane
Matt Dempsey
Dempsey wife
George Sugyama
Tom Hassenbohler
31 additional unnamed Senate staff

State Dept:
Special Envoy Todd Stern
Secretary Hillary Clinton
Pershing Deputy U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change
Maria Otero, Under Secretary for Democracy and Global Affairs
Ambassador Alejandro Wolff, Deputy Permanent Rep. United States Mission to the U.N.
Daniel Reifsnyder, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Environment
Lilburn Trigg Talley, Director of the office of Global Change
Sue Biniaz, Deputy Legal Adviser
William Breed, Director of Climate Change Programs USAID.
Energy Dept:
Steven Chu, Energy Secretary
Jean Chu, Spouse of the Energy Secretary
Rod O’Connor, Chief of Staff
Amy Bodette, Special Assistant to the Secretary
David Sandalow, Assistant Secretary for Policy and International Affairs
Rick Duke, Dep. Assistant Sec. for Policy and International Affairs
Holmes Hummel, Senior Advisor to the Assistant Secretary for Policy and
International Affairs
Elmer Holt, Economist in the Office of Policy and International Affairs
Matt Kallman, Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary for Policy
and International Affairs
Dan Leistikow, Director of Public Affairs
Devin Hampton, Lead Advance Representative
Interior Dept:
Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar
Deputy Secretary David Hayes
Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks Tom Strickland
Science Advisor Kit Batten
Senior Advisor of Global Change at USGS Tom Armstrong
USGS Director Marcia McNutt
Deputy Communications Director Matt Lee-Ashley
Jack Lynch (Security)
Dave Graham (Security)
Mike Downs (Security)
Director of Advance Tim Hartz

EPA:
Security Officer # 1 Security, Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance
Marcus McClendon Director of Advance, Office of the Administrator
Security Officer # 2 Security, Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance
Jennifer Jenkins Physical Scientist, Climate Change Division, Office of Air and Radiation COP 15 Negotiator
Shalini Vajjhala Deputy Assistant Administrator, Office of International Affairs COP-15 Negotiator
Maurice LeFranc Senior Advisor, International Climate Change, Office of Air and Radiation COP-15 Negotiator
Kimberly Todd Klunich Technical Expert, Climate Change Division, Office of Air and Radiation COP-15 Negotiator
Leif Hockstad Environmental Engineer, Climate Change Division, Office of Air and Radiation COP-15 Negotiator
Seth Oster Associate Administrator, Office of Public Affairs
David McIntosh Associate Administrator, Office of Rep.ressional and Intergovernmental Relations
Michelle DePass Assistant Administrator, Office of International Affairs
Security Officer # 3 Security, Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance
Lisa Jackson Administrator, EPA
Gina McCarthy Assistant Administrator, Office of Air and Radiation

White House Executive Office staff:
From the Office of Energy and Climate Change:
Heather Zichal
Tony Russell
Jake Levine
Joe Aldy

From the Office of Science and Technology Policy:
John Holdren
Steve Fetter
Shere Abbott

From the Council on Environmental Quality:
Nancy Sutley
Amy Salzman
Jess Maher

National Security Council:
Mike Froman
Ed Fendley

Communications:
Ben LaBolt

And you, the taxpayer,  got stuck with the check.

So Now Obama is going to selectively “freeze” spending in certain area of the government to make it appear like he actually is doing something.

But it’s like sticking your finger in the dike wall after the wall collapsed around you.

But he’ll look “presidential” and it will be a good Campaign Speech.

It just won’t be Leadership.

And from what I understand it would be from 2011-2013. He’s re-election wouldn’t be a factor, now would it?? 🙂

WSJ: The spending freeze, which is expected to be included in Wednesday’s State of the Union address and the president’s Feb. 1 budget proposal, is one of a series of small-scale initiatives the White House is unrolling as the president adjusts to a more hostile political terrain in his second year. On Monday, the president unveiled a set of proposals aimed at making child care, college and elder care more affordable.

Yeah, that get some of the 7 million unemployed a job. 😦

“Given Washington Democrats’ unprecedented spending binge, this is like announcing you’re going on a diet after winning a pie-eating contest,” said Michael Steel, spokesman for House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R., Ohio). “Will the budget still double the debt over five years and triple it over 10? That’s the bottom line.”

Among the areas that may be potentially subject to cuts: the departments of Housing and Urban Development, Justice, Energy, Transportation, Agriculture, and Health and Human Services.

But it would exempt security-related budgets for the Pentagon, foreign aid, the Veterans Administration and homeland security, as well as the entitlement programs that make up the biggest and fastest-growing part of the federal budget: Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

Remember, in the Health Care Reform Bill where they were going to cut $500 Billion dollars form Medicare and Medicaid to pay for it??

And I said that’ll never happen.

Well, why not still do it?

That’s real reform. 🙂

But that’s not what this is about. This is all show.

Yet again.

And mind you, it’s just a Proposal.

The Congress would have to enact it.

Then they would have to do.

How likely is that with this porked out bunch of lunatics running that asylum??

They’ll just give away even more trying to buy the angry voters off.

John Makin, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, called the effort “certainly a step in the right direction.” He said the amount saved isn’t large, but noted that he preferred this approach over raising taxes. “I’m not going to belittle it because it’s not a big cut in spending.”

A year after the White House rolled out ambitious initiatives on health care and energy, in addition to a giant economic stimulus plan, the president is in some respects taking smaller steps. That’s partly because much of the 2009 agenda remains undone. Also, in an election year, members of Congress are typically reluctant to take on controversial proposals.

But the president said Monday that he remains committed to tackling health care and other big problems. “I’d rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president,” he told ABC News.

Or as Charles Krauthammer said, “There’s a third option. He could be a mediocre one-term president”.

Remember, this is the guy who gave his first year a B+. 🙂

Wouldn’t you love to have seen the Pre-Jan 19th State of The Union Speech that had to be scrapped. 🙂

And on energy, following last year’s proposal to fight global warming by requiring companies pay for the right to emit greenhouse gases, Democrats concede it is more likely that Congress will approve a scaled-back bill with subsidies and more modest rules.

So the far-left, super oppressive, Cap & Tax will likely be neutered. Just like the Copenhagen Summit went up in a puff of hot air.

Thank you, Massachusetts!!

“A government afraid of its citizens is a Democracy. Citizens afraid of government is tyranny!”
— Thomas Jefferson

Pew Research Institute

Notice where Global Warming fell?  Dead Last!

Immigration (Reform) 4th to last!

Health Care, 8th!

Yep, They got it! 🙂

The administration officials said the part of the budget they have singled out — $447 billion in domestic programs — amounts to a relatively small share, about one-eighth, of the overall federal budget.(NYT)

Gee whiz, that’s just over 1/2 as much as the Stimulus that was supposed to create millions of jobs and save the world! 🙂

“A lot of our caucus won’t like it but I don’t think we have any choice,” said an adviser to Congressional Democratic leaders, who would only speak on condition of anonymity about internal party deliberations. “After Massachusetts and all the polls about independents’ abandoning us for being fiscally irresponsible, we can’t afford to be spending more than Obama.” (NYT)

“A government afraid of its citizens is a Democracy. Citizens afraid of government is tyranny!”
— Thomas Jefferson

On the eve of President Obama’s first State of the Union address, two Democratic congressmen are advising him to extend the Bush tax cuts instead of letting them expire. (IBD)

The EVIL Satan-inspired, Spawn of the Devil Himself ,Greedy- Corporate-America-Give-to-the-Rich-Tax-Cuts?? 🙂

Reps. Bobby Bright, D-Ala., and Mike McMahon, D-N.Y., sent a “Dear Colleague” letter on Thursday asking their fellow congressmen to support extending the Bush tax cuts, passed in 2001 and 2003, at least for two years.

“Allowing these tax rates to expire during this recession runs the risk of curtailing economic expansion just when it begins to pick up and could lead to a ‘double-dip’ recession,” says the letter.

Even Harry “The Tool” Mitchell (D-AZ) agrees (and no one had to tell him how to change his vote this time): “Given the unique economic difficulties we face as a nation, this is the wrong time to raise these taxes. We need to retain these tax cuts that encourage investment that stimulates growth and job creation,” Mitchell wrote.

But after spending literally years bitching about them as the evil incarnate, can they reverse course just to make it look like “they care”.

Of Course they can.

But the mere fact that they propose it is fascinating.

How the world has changed in a week.

The Campaign Marches On

White House officials said Obama campaign manager David Plouffe would be brought on as a political consultant as the White House gears up for the midterm elections.

Plouffe was the campaign manager for Obama’s successful 2008 presidential campaign.

So the Democrats are hunkering down.

The President wants his CAMPAIGN Manager back.

That’s what they learned from Massachusetts.

It’s time for Super Campaign Mode!

Not Governing Mode, Not Leadership Mode, but the ever-present, never-stopped-for-a-minute Campaign Mode!

Any hope for REAL change instead of hardened Ideology are gone.

Not that I believed it could be any other way.

The crew in their now are hardened Ideologues.

And they backed up by the likes, in the Media, of Keith Olbermann (MSNBC), who is so far right he must do everything with his left hand.

Monday, Olbermann described (Scott) Brown as “an irresponsible, homophobic, racist, reactionary, ex-nude model, tea-bagging supporter of violence against women and against politicians with whom he disagrees.”
Tuesday night, Olbermann apologized for the comment — because he didn’t go far enough.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I left out the word sexist.”
“And if he or you don’t like that characterization, my answer to you is simple: disprove it, because he hasn’t,” Olbermann said.
Keith Olbermann apologized for his comments about Massachusetts Senator-Elect Scott Brown Friday night just one day after being called out by Jon Stewart over the remarks (but not Joe Scarborough on the same network, who described the comment as “reckless.”)
But on Thursday’s “Daily Show,” Stewart described Olbermann’s comments as “the harshest description of anyone I’ve ever heard uttered on MSNBC” and performed an impression of Olbermann’s trademark special comments.

Friday, Olbermann played Stewart’s critique in full, offered himself as a guest for “The Daily Show,” and responded with an apology.

After playing The Daily Show segment in full, Olbermann initially struck back at Stewart: “This from a guy who reached his professional apex when he was the host of Short Attention Span Theater, 1991?” But he then relented: “Nah, you know what, you’re right. I have been a little over the top lately. Point taken. Sorry.”

Yeah, right Keith. Then he went to rant about how sorry he was in a very partisan manner and kept going.

And some of the liberal comments to this story that was in the Huffington Post were ragging very personally on Jon Stewart!

And MSNBC head Phil Griffin then fired off the memo, denouncing not Olbermann’s remarks, but Scarborough’s (who criticized the comments as “”How reckless and how sad,” Scarborough wrote. “It is no longer enough to simply disagree with someone. These days some feel the need to call opponents evil. It happens on both extremes.”), as “unprofessional.”

So not much has actually changed.

It’s just going to be a new face, and new diversions of attention, on the same old ideology.

THE AGENDA lives.

It just had a non-fatal Heart Attack on Jan 19th.

WSJ:“People are working harder,” White House senior adviser David Axelrod said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” referring to the economy. “They look at a wave of irresponsibility from Wall Street to Washington that led to that. And those were the frustrations that got the president elected in the first place, and they were reflected again on Tuesday” in Massachusetts.

Not quite the message there, David. But a cute spin.

The re-emergence of Mr. Plouffe on the political stage took some Democratic officials by surprise, though White House officials said he wouldn’t have a title and wouldn’t work from the White House. Mr. Axelrod, in emails to The Wall Street Journal, dismissed as “overblown” the speculation that an enhanced role for Mr. Plouffe was a prelude to a shake-up of the political staff or a change of course by the White House. Although Mr. Plouffe will be consulted on political strategy and communications, “he is not coming into the White House,” Mr. Axelrod said. “He will bring added value and an outside perspective we need.”

The message Mr. Plouffe is bringing was a collaborative effort by him, White House officials and the leadership of the Democratic National Committee. That message is one of no retreat in the face of polling that shows opposition to the president’s push on health and discontent with economic efforts.

Writing in Sunday’s Washington Post, Mr. Plouffe said Democrats needed to quickly pass a broad health overhaul, get serious about job creation even as they tout the impact of last year’s stimulus package, turn up the heat on Republicans over the deficits incurred in the Bush years, and stop grousing about the political climate.

“Instead of fearing what may happen, let’s prove that we have more than just the brains to govern—that we have the guts to govern. Let’s fight like hell,” Mr. Plouffe wrote, striking the same chord Mr. Obama did at a town-hall meeting in Ohio Friday and likely will Wednesday in his first State of the Union address.

On “Meet the Press,” White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett said, “What we learned from the Massachusetts victory is that people are sick and tired of Washington not delivering for them.”

Oh, God! More Spending!!!

More Social Programs!

Stimulus II?

Go after  “Greedy” Corporate America and The Banks.

More George W. Bush Bashing!

Saturday, he endorsed legislation in the Senate to create a bipartisan commission to tackle the budget deficit. A vote on creating that commission is scheduled in the Senate for Tuesday; it isn’t expected to pass.

White House officials hope the president’s endorsement of the bill will soften GOP opposition to his plan to create a similar panel by executive order. That commission will need GOP cooperation to fill eight of the 18 seats on the panel with Republicans.

So in hyper-partisan Washington you’re going to create a panel of 10 Democrats and 8 Republicans and expect something meaningful and “bi-Partisan” to come out of it??

Has anyone talked to the Democrats on that one??

After all, many Democrats blame the whole mess on Republicans. And the Republicans blame it on being shut out of the process, which they were.

The dysfunction continues.

While presidents typically experience rough patches, this one is particularly challenging for Mr. Obama. Liberals have grown disenchanted with what they see as his unwillingness to fight harder for their causes; independents have been turned off by his failure, in their view, to change the way Washington works; and Republicans have become implacably hostile.(NYT)

Gallup: The 65 percentage-point gap between Democrats’ (88%) and Republicans’ (23%) average job approval ratings for Barack Obama is easily the largest for any president in his first year in office, greatly exceeding the prior high of 52 points for Bill Clinton.

But they still miss the Independents, don’t they. Politics is so polarized that it’s black and white. But Massachusetts was done largely by the Independents.

But I don’t expect any change.

As David Plouffe said in a Washington Post Editorial : We need to lay it out plainly: If you put the GOP back in charge, lobbyists and huge corporate special interests will be back in the driver’s seat. Workers and families will get run over, just like they did in the past decade.

Grandma will be eating dog food. The sky is falling! The Sky is falling!

The Republicans are Evil, We are Good.

The same old fear campaign.

Tedious, but predictable.

Meanwhile, Independents go <<yawn>>

“Change” is not just about policies. In 2006, Democrats promised to drain the swamp and won back Congress largely because the American people soured on corrupt Republican leadership. Many ethics reforms were put in place by the Democrats. But a recent Gallup poll showed that a record 55 percent of Americans think members of Congress have low ethics, up from only 21 percent in 2000. In particular, we have to make sure the freshman and sophomore members of the House who won in part on transparency and reform issues can show they are delivering. The Republicans will suggest they have changed their spots, but the GOP cannot hold a candle to us on reform issues. Let’s make sure we own this space.

So hold on tight, it’s going to be even worse than 2008.

And the lies and distortions and Mainstream media manipulations will be even worse!

Oh Joy!

But the ole’ Gang that brought you the 2008 hyper-partisan super-controlled message is back in town for the sequel.

So, The Times They aren’t a Changin’ 🙂

Even More Global Warming Fraud

Bet you won’t see this on The Ministry of Truth (The Mainstream Media).

(Times of London)The chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has used bogus claims that Himalayan glaciers were melting to win grants worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Rajendra Pachauri’s Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), based in New Delhi, was awarded up to £310,000 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the lion’s share of a £2.5m EU grant funded by European taxpayers.

It means that EU taxpayers are funding research into a scientific claim about glaciers that any ice researcher should immediately recognise as bogus. The revelation comes just a week after The Sunday Times highlighted serious scientific flaws in the IPCC’s 2007 benchmark report on the likely impacts of global warming.

The IPCC had warned that climate change was likely to melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 – an idea considered ludicrous by most glaciologists. Last week a humbled IPCC retracted that claim and corrected its report.

The Indian head of the UN climate change panel defended his position yesterday even as further errors were identified in the panel’s assessment of Himalayan glaciers.

Dr Rajendra Pachauri dismissed calls for him to resign over the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change’s retraction of a prediction that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035.

But he admitted that there may have been other errors in the same section of the report, and said that he was considering whether to take action against those responsible.

“I know a lot of climate sceptics are after my blood, but I’m in no mood to oblige them,” he told The Times in an interview. “It was a collective failure by a number of people,” he said. “I need to consider what action to take, but that will take several weeks. It’s best to think with a cool head, rather than shoot from the hip.”

The IPCC’s 2007 report, which won it the Nobel Peace Prize, said that the probability of Himalayan glaciers “disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high”.

But it emerged last week that the forecast was based not on a consensus among climate change experts, but on a media interview with a single Indian glaciologist in 1999, Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.
When finally published, the IPCC report did give its source as the WWF study but went further, suggesting the likelihood of the glaciers melting was “very high”. The IPCC defines this as having a probability of greater than 90%.

The report read: “Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate.”

However, glaciologists find such figures inherently ludicrous, pointing out that most Himalayan glaciers are hundreds of feet thick and could not melt fast enough to vanish by 2035 unless there was a huge global temperature rise. The maximum rate of decline in thickness seen in glaciers at the moment is 2-3 feet a year and most are far lower.

The “Glaciergate” affair has seen Pachauri come under increasing pressure in India, prompting him to call a press conference yesterday (Saturday) where he dismissed calls for his resignation and said no action would be taken against the authors of the erroneous section of the IPCC report.

He said: “I have no intention of resigning from my position,” adding the errors were unintentional and not significant in comparison to the entire report.

Sound Familiar? 🙂

In India questions are also being asked about Pachauri’s links with GloriOil, a Houston, Texas-based oil technology company that specialises in recovering extra oil from declining oil fields . Pachauri is listed as a founder and scientific advisor.

Critics say it is odd for a man committed to decarbonising energy supplies to be linked to an oil company. 🙂

Fascinating… 🙂

“This number is not just a little bit wrong, but far out of any order of magnitude,” said Georg Kaser, an expert in tropical glaciology at the University of Innsbruck in Austria.

“It is so wrong that it is not even worth discussing,” he told AFP in an interview.

But then he went on to say, “But its overall conclusion that global warming is ‘unequivocal’ remains beyond reproach, he said.

A Doublethink. Believing two contradictory ideas at the same time and believing both are true.

Massive error….Unequivocal Conclusion based on that Massive error… 🙂

So you Want More: 🙂

THE United Nations climate science panel faces new controversy for wrongly linking global warming to an increase in the number and severity of natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods.

It based the claims on an unpublished report that had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny — and ignored warnings from scientific advisers that the evidence supporting the link too weak. The report’s own authors later withdrew the claim because they felt the evidence was not strong enough.

The claim by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that global warming is already affecting the severity and frequency of global disasters, has since become embedded in political and public debate. It was central to discussions at last month’s Copenhagen climate summit, including a demand by developing countries for compensation of $100 billion (£62 billion) from the rich nations blamed for creating the most emissions.

Ed Miliband, the energy and climate change minister, has suggested British and overseas floods — such as those in Bangladesh in 2007 — could be linked to global warming. Barack Obama, the US president, said last autumn: “More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent.”

The new controversy also goes back to the IPCC’s 2007 report in which a separate section warned that the world had “suffered rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather-related events since the 1970s”.

The Sunday Times has since found that the scientific paper on which the IPCC based its claim had not been peer reviewed, nor published, at the time the climate body issued its report.

When the paper was eventually published, in 2008, it had a new caveat. It said: “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses.”

Despite this change the IPCC did not issue a clarification ahead of the Copenhagen climate summit last month. It has also emerged that at least two scientific reviewers who checked drafts of the IPCC report urged greater caution in proposing a link between climate change and disaster impacts — but were ignored.

Well, you couldn’t very well promote Heresy now could you. 🙂

“We should also remember the overwhelming evidence still shows global warming is real and manmade,” adds Bob Ward, policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change. (UK Guardian)

How the claim ended up in a report whose authors are supposed to scrutinise “every statement in every sentence” is a mystery. Worse was the IPCC’s reaction to the geologists who first questioned the panel’s glacier claim last year. IPCC chairman Pachauri dismissed this work as “voodoo science” and argued it was not peer-reviewed. In fact, it was his own panel’s report that had not been properly peer-reviewed. “At that point, the glacier claim ceased to be an appalling cock-up and looked more like a systematic failure on the IPCC’s part,” says Fred Pearce, the New Scientist journalist who first reported the glacier story. A seasoned climate change writer, he adds: “Deniers will now be on a hunt to find more errors like these and if they get them, Pachauri will be in real trouble.” (UK Guardian, a pro-global warming newspaper)

And that ain’t all folks: (IBD)

In a report on global warming on KUSI television by Weather Channel founder and iconic TV weatherman John Coleman, that reticence has been traced to the deliberate manipulation and distortion of climate data by NASA.

As Coleman noted in a KUSI press release, NASA’s two primary climate centers, the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, N.C., and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia University in New York City, are accused of “creating a strong bias toward warmer temperatures through a system that dramatically trimmed the number and cherry-picked the locations of weather observation stations they use to produce the data set on which temperature record reports are based.”

Joseph D’Aleo, of Icecap.us, said the analysis found NASA “systematically eliminated 75% of the world’s stations with a clear bias toward removing higher-latitude, high-altitude and rural locations.” The number of actual weather stations used to calculate average global temperatures was reduced from about 6,000 in the 1970s to about 1,500 today. The number of reporting stations in Canada dropped from 600 to 35.

To us, it looks like just another example of ideologically driven climate deceit following the Climate Research Unit scandal and the fraudulent claim by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that Himalayan glaciers would soon vanish.

But don’t worry, the Faithful will soldier on. And they Major media will ignore this one too.

After all, The Truth is Heresy. 🙂

Love Labors Lost

The Honeymoon is over.

Now it’s time for the in-fighting.

A Separation?

A Divorce?

The Congressional Democrats, and even the Europeans are so over “Mr. Hope & Change” Obama.

Hope has become Nope.

He ran as something he’s not and never has been: A post-partisan centrist transformative healer. That’d be a difficult trick to pull off even for somebody with any prior executive experience, someone who’d run something, like a state, or even a town, or even a commercial fishing operation, like that poor chillbilly boob Sarah Palin.

“In his world,” wrote the Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes, “everything is political and everything is about appearances.” (IBD)

And those appearances have been deceiving. But when ripped off, the expose an ugly underbelly.

California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who supported Obama’s $787 billion stimulus a year ago, says the president needs to be much more forceful about how, where and why the money was spent if Democrats are going to get credit for attacking the recession in an era of double-digit unemployment.

“I think the administration needs to be much more aggressive, and hopefully the president will outline some of this in his State of the Union address,” she said. “We very much need leadership from the executive on this. You can’t just put money out there — even if we had it to put it out there — unless it’s going to produce an actual new job.”

The Super ultra-leftist Sen Feinstein complaining about the stimulus and jobs?

Now that’s amazing.

Here, I thought the Stimulus  was a marvelous success and the recession was over, according to Democrats. They “saved or created” over a million jobs, so they said pompously.

That is, prior to the Massachusetts Massacre.

Administration officials say they get it — with Axelrod recently admitting that Obama’s team is recalibrating and refocusing on the economy. Emanuel, for his part, is now pushing for a stripped-down health care bill that could be passed within a few weeks and force Republicans, for a change, to take a few tough votes.

That may mollify some Democratic moderates, but it will further infuriate the liberals, who insist that the lesson of Massachusetts is that Obama has come on too weak, not too strong. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman captured the left’s winter of discontent Thursday with a blog post in which he wrote that he’s “pretty close to giving up on Mr. Obama, who seems determined to confirm every doubt I and others ever had about whether he was ready to fight for what his supporters believed in.”(Politico)

At the moment, the whole cacophonous crew seems to be united by the fear that no one is safe if a tea party-backed Republican can win the Senate seat the late Ted Kennedy held for nearly 50 years.

I even read that except for 1 term that seat had been Democratic since 1926.

We all pretty much knew for sure we were going to lose Massachusetts,” one person in attendance told POLITICO on Wednesday. “And yet, last night and this morning, we had absolutely no message guidance from the White House, [the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee] or [the Democratic National Committee]. There was no leadership. … So all of the members today are just opining about what they think it means and whether we should move forward on health care.”

The unsinkable Titanic has hit the Massachusetts Iceberg.

But House Democrats, already terrified by the wholesale defection of independents to the GOP in Massachusetts, were infuriated when a New York Times article, apparently citing an administration source, suggested Speaker Nancy Pelosi could pass an unamended version of the Senate’s health reform bill.

“The sense was that the Obama folks were trying to say it was inevitable when it wasn’t,” said New York Rep. Anthony Weiner, a supporter of the public option who has clashed with the White House repeatedly about the issue.

“It wasn’t that they were bullying us, but it reinforced the idea that they were a little tone-deaf to what the reality inside the House and Senate really were,” Weiner added.

And they and The Congress have been tone deaf for over 6 months about the warning of the Iceberg coming.

And some still are:

Howard Fineman, the increasingly loopy editor of the increasingly doomed Newsweek, took it a step further. The truck wasn’t just any old prop, but a very particular kind. “In some places, there are codes, there are images,” he told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann. “You know, there are pickup trucks; you could say there was a racial aspect to it one way or another.”(IBD)

So Senator-Elect Brown’s old pickup is a code word for Racism??

Someone want to get Mr. Fineman a white coat with the sleeves on backwards please…

But many Democrats aren’t the only ones who have fallen out of love with The Messiah.

As Paul Krugman, the New York Times’ “Conscience of a Liberal,” put it: “He Wasn’t The One We’ve Been Waiting For.” Not the once-delirious Europeans, either. As the headline in Der Spiegel put it: “The World Bids Farewell To Obama.”

When it comes to great headlines, no publication beats the (UK) Daily Mail. Wednesday morning’s edition featured a classic which dovetailed the first anniversary of Obama’s inauguration with the election of Scott Brown.  It read:  “Happy Birthday, Mr. President — here’s a bloody nose!” 🙂

Financial Times Deutschland: “For everyone else in the world, this means that they will have to bid farewell to a candidate for whom the hopes were so high. They will have to say goodbye to the charisma they fell in love with. Obama will be staying home after all.”

Center-left daily Süddeutsche Zeitung writes on Thursday:

“Obama made a serious misjudgement. Right at the beginning of his first year in office, he saved the banks, rescued the automobile industry from collapse and passed a huge economic stimulus package. He had hoped that these enormous deeds would give him the space to address those issues which are dearest to him: health care reform, climate change and investment in education.”

“Those issues, however, are clearly not priorities for people in the US at the moment. Scott Brown campaigned on two promises, both of which apparently struck a nerve with the electorate. He wants to block health care reform and he wants to find ways to reduce the enormous budget deficit. It is here where the roots of dissatisfaction with Obama are to be found. His reform agenda, in its current form, is highly suspect to Americans. And they have the impression that, if he continues piling up debt, he will be gambling away the country’s future.”

Gerald Scarfe, a major political cartoonist for the Times of London, began — at Obama’s inauguration — depicting the new President as a promising Superman.  By the middle of last year, these images had devolved into a Superman whose biceps and pecks had disintegrated and whose cape hung limply from shriveled shoulders.  In the August addition to his series, Scarfe shows Super Obama having a face first collision into a brick wall labeled “Health Care.”

Darn that Massachusetts Kryptonite!!

Or perhaps Super Obama, rather than being faster than a locomotive, could be drawn being mowed down by a runaway train called The Tea Party Express. 🙂

Sarkozy was the first European leader to turn on President Obama in 2009, describing him in an interview as “naïve.”  He had good reason to feel that way. Early in his Presidency, Obama had sent a letter to the French President going on about how well he envisioned them working together.  Alas, the letter was sent to the former French President, Jacques Chirac — not Sarkozy. The news of Obama’s diplomatic faux pax was widely reported in Europe, but not by the hypnotized American media.  This incident was followed by a bungled dinner invitation in which both Sarkozy and Obama perceived themselves as snubbed by the other.  Needless to say, the French media are no longer dazzled by the American President and they think even less of Michelle Obama’s fashion sense. (Human events)

But here’s the Best One:

But Nile Gardiner of the Telegraph will surely have to gate crash his way into the White House from now on after penning his opus: “10 Reasons why George W. Bush was a smarter world leader than Barack Obama.”  Since David Letterman is unlikely to read this top ten list, we’ve printed them here for your convenience:

(1) Bush never apologized for his country;

(2) Bush identified and confronted evil;

(3) Bush made the advance of freedom a key component of his agenda;

(4)  Bush defended national sovereignty;

(5) Bush believed in the Special Relationship (with Britain);

(6) Bush cultivated key allies;

(7) Bush understood the importance of missile defense;

(8) Bush believed in fighting a global war;

(9)  Bush did not compromise U.S. security: and

(10)  Bush did not send mixed messages in the face of the enemy.

Ouch! And he was so “European”. 🙂

Just shows to go you, a house of cards, built on shifting sand cannot last. A small, northeast, gust of wind has blown it all to smithereens. 🙂

This Election Brought to you by…

So are we headed for the same Corporatization of Elections that we have, say in, Stadiums. Like the ones here Locally, University of Phoenix where the Cardinal play. Where the University of Phoenix won the “naming rights” by paying the Cardinals lots of Money.

The same with US Air Arena (built as America West- and I still call it that).

Or Chase Field (built as Bank One Ballpark- or “BOB” as I still call it).

So as we going to have McElections??

These election results brought to you by…

Or are we already there to begin with.

WSJ:  Corporations, labor unions and other political entities are gearing up to play a larger role in influencing elections in 2010 and beyond after a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down elements of campaign-finance law.

The Supreme Court on Thursday made it easier for entities to influence elections for Congress and the White House by stripping away rules that limited their ability to fund campaign advertisements. The court also struck down a part of the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law that prevented independent political groups from running advertisements within 30 days of a primary election or 60 days of a general election.

The question now is whether corporations and labor unions will take advantage of their new freedom. For the past decade, labor unions have been more aggressive than corporations in finding legal ways to fund independent political campaigns. But the relaxation of campaign-spending restrictions could clear the way for groups from all points along the political spectrum to spend more, and target more of that spending in the critical final days of a campaign.

Or will be get EVEN MORE Negative Attack ads in this hyper-partisan atmosphere?

Corporations, unions and wealthy individuals have sought to influence elections for decades by funding their own independent campaigns for or against candidates.

In the 2004 election, outside groups spent more than $550 million on their own campaigns, more than double what they spent in the 2000 campaign. Most of these independent efforts were bankrolled by labor unions and wealthy Democrats and were designed to help Democrats at the polls.

WSJ’s Ashby Jones speaks to Kelsey Hubbard on the News Hub about the Supreme Court’s decision today striking down limits on corporate political spending.

The two largest independent groups in 2004—America Coming Together and the Media Fund—spent a total of $136 million in an effort to elect Democrats. The Service Employees International Union spent $48 million, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

During the 2008 election cycle, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which represents businesses, led all other independent groups by spending $36.4 million, mainly to help elect Republicans to the Senate, according to the nonpartisan Campaign Finance Institute, which tracks spending by outside groups. The second-largest organization was the labor union American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which spent $30.7 million. The Service Employees International Union spent $27 million.

William McGinley, a campaign finance lawyer with Patton Boggs who works with Republicans, said Democratic-leaning organizations “have outspent their conservative counterparts during the last few years, and now is the time for conservatives to re-engage.”

I would argue we are already there.

And have been for a long time.

Special Interest groups rule Washington D.C.

You only have to look as far as the Labor Unions who objected to the “Cadillac Plan” tax in the now largely defunct Health Care Reform.

They screamed and yelled and got special treatment.

AARP got bought off.

The U.S Chamber of Commerce got shut out because it wouldn’t be bought off.

The AMA got bought off.

Whole States (Nebraska, Louisiana and Florida) got bought off.

So the Politicians get bought off by the Special Interests, and they by them off too.

There is no place for the American people in this equation.

Only at the Ballot box.

And Massachusetts proved that.

The Political earthquake that that set off is still being assessed.

Obama Jan 14,2009: “If Republicans want to campaign against what we’ve done by standing up for the status quo and for insurance companies over American families and businesses, that is a fight I want to have.”

But on Jan 19th, the people spoke.

And the entire country changed.

That’s all, We the People have.

That’s our only weapon.

Charles Krauthammer:  After Coakley’s defeat, Obama pretended that the real cause was a generalized anger and frustration “not just because of what’s happened in the last year or two years, but what’s happened over the last eight years.”

Let’s get this straight: The antipathy to George W. Bush is so enduring and powerful that … it just elected a Republican senator in Massachusetts? Why, the man is omnipotent.

The evidence was unmistakable: Independents, who in 2008 elected Obama, swung massively against the Democrats: dropping 16 points in Virginia, 21 in New Jersey.

On Tuesday, it was even worse: Independents, who went 2-to-1 Republican in Virginia and New Jersey, now went 3-to-1 Republican in hyper-blue Massachusetts.

But you have to wonder, how many Anti-Bush attack ads will be airing soon because that’s still the main demon and main excuse of the Left in this country.

Will they run against a past President this fall?

And will you buy it?

An astonishing 56% of Massachusetts voters, according to Rasmussen, called health care their top issue. In a Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates poll, 78% of Brown voters said their vote was intended to stop ObamaCare. Only a quarter of all voters in the Rasmussen poll cited the economy as their top issue, nicely refuting the Democratic view that Massachusetts was just the usual anti-incumbent resentment you expect in bad economic times.

So, my advice, is to get a DVR between now an November and record your shows and fast forward through all the attack ads or else you may just go mad.

The SEIU has been one of the largest donors to outside political groups in the past decade. On Thursday, the organization denounced the court decision, saying it opened the door for corporations to outspend unions.

“I don’t think working people would ever have as much to spend as corporations. For us, being able to spend a few extra dollars isn’t worth allowing decisions to be made from boardrooms instead of the polling booth,” said union spokeswoman Lori Lodes.(Bloomberg)

But you don’t want them decided at the polling booth, you want them decided in D.C. That’s why you had a special meeting with The White House to pitch a fit over the “Cadillac plans” and got exempted from them for five years, while the normal average American (92% non-union) was not.

But at least we had some good news:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said her chamber lacks the votes to pass the Senate’s health-care legislation, dashing hopes of a quick resolution for President Barack Obama’s top domestic priority.

“In its present form, without change, I don’t think it’s possible to pass the Senate bill in the House,” Pelosi told reporters today in Washington. “We are not in a big rush,” Pelosi said. Congress will “take the time it needs to consider the options,” she said.

That doesn’t mean they will stop trying. Oh no, that will never happen.

But at least for this moment, the Wicked Witch is dead. Massachusetts, of all places, dropped a House on Nancy Pelosi. 🙂

“The sense is we shouldn’t drop the subject, but maybe we need to look at some pieces of it,” said Representative Jose Serrano, a New York Democrat.

That would fit with a suggestion Obama made yesterday.

“I would advise that we try to move quickly to coalesce around those elements in the package that people agree on,” Obama said in an interview with ABC News broadcast last night.

So, the people still have the ultimate power.

The Congress is already bought and paid for by Special Interests.

I don’t see much of a change.

But WE THE PEOPLE still elect these people. So ultimately, regardless, we have the last say.

But that doesn’t preclude the Corporations and other Interests  from picking the Candidates as many Special Interest Groups do now.

So we may still get Twiddle-Dee and Twiddle-Dumber.

That’s when we have to raise our standards. No rubber stamps. No “I voted for the Democrat/Republican just because I am a Democrat/Republican”.

Be a savvier shopper than that.

Yes, that will require time and dedication while your working and relaxing and playing with the kids.

But, no one said Democracy was easy.

Because we can’t hope to out spend the Special Interests in Washington now.

But we get the Vote.

We have to use what tools we do have.

Now, more than ever.

With characteristic condescension, they contemptuously dismissed the (tea party) protests as the mere excrescences of a redneck, retrograde, probably racist rabble.

You would think lefties could discern a proletarian vanguard when they see one. Yet they kept denying the reality of the rising opposition to Obama’s social democratic agenda when summer turned to fall and Virginia and New Jersey turned Republican in the year’s two gubernatorial elections.

That something is substance — political ideas and legislative agendas.

Democrats, if they wish, can write off their Massachusetts humiliation to high unemployment, to Coakley or, the current favorite among sophisticates, to generalized anger. That implies an inchoate, unthinking lashing-out at whoever happens to be in power — even at your liberal betters who are forcing on you an agenda that you can’t even see is in your own interest.

Democrats must so rationalize, otherwise they must take democracy seriously and ask themselves: If the people really don’t want it, could they possibly have a point?

“If you lose Massachusetts and that’s not a wake-up call,” said moderate — and sentient — Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana, “there’s no hope of waking up.”

I say: Let them sleep.

Good Night. Sleep Tight. Don’t let the Special Interest Bugs Bite. 🙂

To Get it or Not to Get it

That is the question.

Whether it ’tis nobler to suffer the slings and arrows of outrage voters
Or to take arms against a sea of  Debt,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream (of Ultimate control): ay, there’s the rub;

(apologies to Shakespeare) 🙂

Obama One Year ago: “There are some who question the scale of our ambitions, who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans,” Obama declared. “What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them.”

Now will the Democrats feel the ground shifting beneath their feet?

NO.

Why would they.

They would have to acknowledge they were wrong. And when has that ever really happened?

Is the president a Leader or an Ideologue??

“The people of Massachusetts spoke,” Obama said, and Senator-elect Scott Brown has “got to be part of that process.”

So we can ram it through and declare victory after he gets here.

Speaker Pelosi is defiant and says she will pass Health Care in some form regardless. “I heard the candidate in Massachusetts, the Republican candidate, say ‘Let’s go back to the drawing board,'” Pelosi told reporters in California on Monday. “There is no back to the drawing board. . .. We will have health care one way or another.”

The Democrat thinking is that they must have a victory in this year-long obsession of theirs or else they are failures and have nothing to show for their last year. Completely missing the fact that is the obsession with Health Care that GOT them here in the first place.

So let’s pass the deeply unpopular legislation in some form just so we can infect the system with our cancer and let it grow on it’s own.

And that’s Victory to the Democrats.

Yikes!

“Does she stay loyal to the faction who made her speaker? Or will she go the bipartisan path?” (Former Speaker Newt) Gingrich asked. “I suspect she can’t risk the left being mad at her. … [Former House Speaker] Tom Foley would basically tell me, ‘Newt, I can’t bring up that bill — They’d kick me out if I did.’”

And, of course, there’s no guarantee that Republicans, who’ve voted in lock step against reform, would play along now — especially if they’re thinking that they’ll have more seats and more power after November’s midterm elections. (Politico)

I mean there are plenty of left-wing ideologues that firmly believe they lost in Massachusetts because they weren’t FAR-LEFT ENOUGH!

Just watch MSNBC.

Seriously.

And then there’s the faction that even blamed George W. Bush for the defeat!!

Mr. Obama said on ABC, “People are angry and they are frustrated. Not just because of what’s happened in the last year or two years, but what’s happened over the last eight years.”

Democratic Rep. Steny Hoyer trotted out the old blame-the-GOP card — incoherently arguing that GOP candidate Scott Brown’s surge among conservatives, independents and once-reliable rank-and-file Democratic voters in the deep-blue state of Massachusetts was a backlash against Republican obstructionism.(IBD)

IBD: Perhaps it’s because it’s never been about health care. It’s been about nationalizing one-sixth of the economy and making as many people as possible dependent on government. After all, the idea of a health care overhaul began with a lament about the uninsured, whose numbers changed with the political wind, and ended with a 2,000-page, $2.5 trillion hash that would leave millions uninsured.

🙂

And to top it off:

WASHINGTON – Senate Democrats on Wednesday proposed allowing the federal government to borrow an additional $1.9 trillion to pay its bills, a record increase that would permit the national debt to reach $14.3 trillion.

But it’s all the Republicans and George W Bush’s fault, remember that. 🙂

Less than a decade ago, $1.9 trillion would have been enough to finance the operations and programs of the federal government for an entire year. Now, it’s only enough to make sure Democrats can avoid another vote before Election Day.

Aaron Zelinsky, Huffington Post:

To put this in familiar terminology of our common cultural touchstone, Star Wars: In 2008, the Democrats made the election all about The New Hope. In 2010, The Republicans turned the Massachusetts election into Return of the Jedi (with Mr. Brown’s pickup truck as a stand-in for the Millennium Falcon). The last thing the Democrats want is for voters to think November 2010 is The Empire Strikes Back.

I would just add The Phantom Menace to come as the Democrats scramble to save their precious Holy Grail and appear to be something their not, Like Emperor Palpatine did.

And that’s the Change you can Believe in. 🙂

The Scott Heard Around the World!

Kryten From “Red Dwarf”: <<Engage Gloat Mode>>

The people of Massachusetts sent a message to an oppressive government yet again.

Democrats from all over Massachusetts sent a message to Washington D.C last night, they voted for a Republican.

DEMOCRATS IN MASSACHUSETTS VOTED FOR A REPUBLICAN!!  🙂

Scott Brown, the pick-up driving (since Obama made fun of that last Sunday)  Republican is now the Senator-Elect.

And it wasn’t even close.

It was a Smackdown.

But were the Democrats in Washington D.C. and the Liberal Intelligentsia listening?

I doubt it.

Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, head of the House Democrats’ campaign effort, said Coakley’s loss won’t deter his colleagues from continuing to blame the previous administration.

“President George W. Bush and House Republicans drove our economy into a ditch and tried to run away from the accident,” he said. “President Obama and congressional Democrats have been focused repairing the damage to our economy.” (MSNBC)

So it’s George W. Bush’s Fault! 🙂

Ezra Klein on the “Rachael Maddow Show” on MSNBC- He wasn’t sympathetic to the “exhaustion” he was hearing from some on Capital Hill because they were “tired of Town halls. Tired of angry constituents. Tired of fighting with Republicans…and compromising…”

He and the Host (a Former Hate Air America leftist) both were commiserating that The Democrats needed to pass Health Care Reform even more now than ever!

That the they’d spent the last year on this and to come up with nothing means they failed and to go to the voters in November as a failure would hurt them greatly.

Which to me says, they didn’t get the message.

If you pass Health Care Reform now, as it is, You’ll have a “Political Jonestown” (Patt Cadell, Democratic Pollster On “Sean Hannity” earlier in the day) on your hand in November.

Drink this Kool-Aid, it’s toxic.

Just ask the Democrats in Massachusetts I saw on FOX  (yes they were on FOX) and there was a room of about 25 of them. Every single one of them voted for Obama. Only 2 Voted for the Democrat, Martha Coakley.

They said things like “sending a message to Washington”  about their “arrogance”  “spending” and “tired of the one party rule”.

One day shy of the first anniversary of Obama’s swearing-in, the election played out amid a backdrop of animosity and resentment from voters over persistently high unemployment, Wall Street bailouts, exploding federal budget deficits and partisan wrangling over health care.

“I voted for Obama because I wanted change. … I thought he’d bring it to us, but I just don’t like the direction that he’s heading,” said John Triolo, 38, a registered independent who voted in Fitchburg.
He said his frustrations, including what he considered the too-quick pace of health care legislation, led him to vote for Brown. (MSNBC)

And these are DEMOCRATS in MASSACHUSETTS!

Where they have had Universal Health Care since 2007 (which is also causing premiums to go up!)

Yikes!!!

But the real story is the Independents. Like me.

We have spoken!

Thank you very much. I’ll bet they can hear all this cheering down in Washington, D.C.

And I hope they’re paying close attention, because tonight the independent voice of Massachusetts has spoken.

From the Berkshires to Boston, from Springfield to Cape Cod, the voters of this Commonwealth defied the odds and the experts. And tonight, the independent majority has delivered a great victory.

I thank the people of Massachusetts for electing me as your next United States senator.

Most of all, I will remember that while the honor is mine, this Senate seat belongs to no one person and no political party – and as I have said before, and you said loud and clear today, it is the people’s seat.–Senator-Elect Scott Brown

And the Republicans better beware of us too!

But first be vigilant on the Far-Left. There are still many who want to cram the THE AGENDA down regardless.

They want to ignore last night. Say it doesn’t matter. That they must press on.

Soldier on to the end.

Would you like some Kool-Aid to quench your thirst for power?

They aren’t going to give up this easily.

So They need be reminded constantly through November that “We are Not Amused” as Queen Victoria famously said.

Newsweek Column “The Gaggle”:  To their credit, Washington Democrats haven’t given up. The White House is weighing a plan to pass the Senate bill immediately through the House, which would, with Obama’s signature, make it law automatically without Scott Brown or anyone else in the Senate getting another crack at it. Then the Democrats would use “reconciliation” budget rules to fix problems in the Senate version with 51 votes, per the agreement Obama has been working on for the last couple of weeks. This is a messy approach but doable.

The impediment is the herd-like habits of professional politicians. So-called “Blue Dog” Democrats from moderate-to-conservative districts are desperate to get right with their mad-as-hell constituents. But killing health care now won’t help these vacillating members. Those who have already voted for it will get attacked this fall as tax-and-spend liberals. That’s inevitable. But if they now vote against it, they’ll get attacked as tax-and-spend liberal flip-floppers whose party can’t deliver for the American people — a more searing indictment. With a bill, at least Obama and the Democrats could play some offense, charging that Republicans side with the insurance companies against working people facing soaring premiums, a costly “donut hole” on drugs and the threat of medical bankruptcy.

So it’s not much of a choice, is it? Any moderate House Democrat with half a brain should vote for the Senate bill, which is much more to their liking than the House bill that many of them supported in November. Of course it’s the half a brain part that’s a cause of worry. Some of these guys are as politically clueless as Martha Coakley.

Muddling through this period (and that’s the very best that can be hoped for) requires that the President and congressional leaders accept the message of Massachusetts–that voters are mighty PO’d–without succumbing to the GOP’s interpretation of it as a mandate for No Change.

Obama plans to spend most of the year in Campaign Mode (ed: Campaign Mode is not Leadership!), not Congressional Sausage Maker Mode. That will help. So will proving that Washington can still deliver something big for the American people.

So what’s missing in this analysis is staring her right in the face: INDEPENDENTS.

But, before the Senate crammed down the Health Care Bill on Christmas Eve, had anyone ever even heard of Scott Brown??

He went from zero to hero in less than 3 weeks!

But partisanship has become so vitriolic and so black-and-white that they miss the real point.

And I think the Democrats will continue to miss it; and I hope the Republicans don’t miss it either.

This wasn’t really their victory.

It was the People’s Victory.

It’s the Independents, Stupid! 🙂

CBS: Registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans three-to-one in Massachusetts, yet Brown was able to win because independents broke heavily in his favor. President Obama’s approval rating among independents has fallen to 40 percent in the latest CBS News poll, and 64 percent of them say the country is on the wrong track. Two in three, meanwhile, disapprove of the way the Democrat-dominated Congress is handling its job.

If they want to limit their losses in the midterms, Democrats must find some way to win at least some of these independents back. That could be a challenge, because their party is now widely associated with the unpopular government bailouts, as well as federal spending levels that have helped create an anti-incumbent mood. Expect to see Democratic lawmakers ratchet up their rhetoric on issues like Wall Street bonuses in the coming months in an effort to co-opt the populist mantle that has been driving many independents into the waiting arms of the GOP.

And Expect me to call them on it. Republican or Democrat.

I’m an Independent, Hear Me Roar! 🙂

The Fight For 41

Today decides the nation.

Socialism or Not.

The election in Massachusetts will decide who gets the seat of the late Sen. Edward Kennedy.

The Republican wins, they have 41 seats. Enough to stop the Democrats by filibuster.

Which means the Democrats will Lie, Cheat, Steal, and say anything to preserve it.

Morality today, at least from the Democrats has the day off.

And if the Republican, Scott Brown, wins as previous noted the Democrats will try to cram Health Care down before he is sworn in by hook or by Crook.

As this Headline on the Liberal blog site  Salon.com illustrates:

Pelosi: “We will have healthcare — one way or another”

“Let’s remove all doubt, we will have healthcare one way or another,” Pelosi said during an event in San Francisco on Monday. “Certainly the dynamic would change depending on what happens in Massachusetts. Just the question about how we would proceed. But it doesn’t mean we won’t have a health care bill.”

There is one way to pass the bill, even without 60 votes in the Senate, that’s getting a lot of attention now. But Pelosi probably won’t like it, and neither will a fair amount of her members.

The procedure in question would involve simply having the House vote on the bill that the Senate has already passed. That would mean avoiding yet another cloture vote in the Senate, one Democrats would be likely to lose if their caucus is down to 59 members after the special election in Massachusetts on Tuesday.

House liberals will be upset about this idea, and progressive activists would likely be angry as well, but it may well be the only option left, and Democrats are reportedly leaning towards it. On Monday night, the New York Times reported: “The White House and Democratic Congressional leaders, scrambling for a backup plan to rescue their health care legislation if Republicans win the special election in Massachusetts on Tuesday, are preparing to ask House Democrats to approve the Senate version of the bill, which would send the measure directly to President Obama for his signature.”

Remember when this was alledgedly for the good of the American people?

I never thought so. But remember when that was what was said?

Apparently, neither did they.

Democrats are mobilized by the prospect of conceding a Senate seat in a state where they control all 10 House seats. President Barack Obama stumped for Coakley in a trip to Boston Sunday. He also cut a new television ad, while his grassroots organizing group says it placed 93,000 (robo)calls across the state on Jan. 16 alone.

“In some ways, Republicans have already won,” said Jennifer Duffy, the Senate analyst for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report in Washington. “Nobody ever imagined a special election in Massachusetts for Ted Kennedy’s seat would ever get remotely competitive.”

Research “strongly suggests” that Brown, 50, will defeat Coakley, 56, the Washington-based nonpartisan Rothenberg Political Report said. That outcome or even a narrow Coakley win could discourage House or Senate Democrats in competitive districts and states from running in this November’s elections amid a sagging economy and declining poll numbers for Obama.(salon.com)

Democrats could try a strong-arm tactic, such as rushing to hold a final Senate vote before Brown is sworn in, knowing it would ignite a ferocious public outcry.

If Brown wins, health care’s fate will turn on the Democrats’ answer to a wrenching question: Which is worse, enduring such a firestorm of criticism at the start of an election year, or admitting defeat on their top agenda item despite controlling the House, Senate and White House?

“I think Democrats fully understand they have to pass this legislation,” said Ron Pollack, head of the Families USA advocacy group. “The alternative is an absolute disaster.”

“Put the corn where the hogs can get it,” (Former President Bill Clinton on “educating the public to the benefits of the Congress’ plan) Clinton said, using a colorful phrase for making something clear and accessible, according to an aide who took notes at the speech. (Washington Post)

Anyone for Revenge of The Hogs? 🙂

If he wins, and I pray he does, the Democrats might actually discover who the American People are again.

And won’t that be a shock to their little minds.

Obama warned that much of his agenda in Congress, specifically his health-care overhaul and proposed fee on big banks, hinges on retaining Kennedy’s former seat.

“We’ve begun to deliver on the change you voted for,” Obama told a crowd of about 1,500 people Jan. 17 at Northeastern University in Boston.

This would be massive spending, pork & bribes, special deals for apparatchiks, no emphasis on job creation, and a year-long super-duper hyper-partisan fight over control of who lives and who dies that has been nastier than any fight since The Civil War.

The Government Mandating by law you must have insurance or potentially go to Jail.

And the massive taxes to come with it.

Yeah, that’s what people voted for. 😦

So let’s all pray for the Brown Miracle.

We Need “Hope & Change!”

“Yes We Can!” 🙂

Honey, It’s Not You, It’s Me…

It’s for the people.

It’s for their benefit.

“I’m telling you, Massachusetts, if it goes wrong, is going to be a big catalyst to push a vote,” said Bronx Rep. Eliot Engel, who is among many in the House frustrated with how long the Senate took.

“They will tell us that it’s now or never, we’ve gotta have a bill, we’ve gotta do this, we’ve gotta do that,” Engel predicted, should Coakley lose as many Democrats now fear. “If we don’t vote on whatever bill we compromise on, then health care reform is killed, the majority is gonna get killed..”

That’s because not only would the Democrats have failed at their top promise, but the whole process would leave a nasty taste in the nation’s mouth.

Given that, he’s confident his party will get it together, and do what it has to.

“The tell us that it takes 10 days to count the vote in Massachusetts, so I’m sure they’ll be doing a very slow count,” Engel said, only half joking.

Yes, they have their interests above the people’s.

They have to cram it down our throats. FAST!

Or else they might lose like in the 1994 Elections?

“I think the worst thing would be to do no bill at all, because what would happen is we would have the negativity of the contentiousness, of the fighting and the distortions, and then not come up with anything,” Engel said. “It would be 1994 all over again, it would look like we just can’t produce.” (NY Daily News)

Have they not been following the polls?

They are likely to lose in 2010 BECAUSE they want to cram it down our throats not because they couldn’t produce it!

But it’s all about “the people” after all. 🙂

AP: A panicky White House and Democratic allies scrambled Sunday for a plan to salvage their hard-fought health care package in case a Republican wins Tuesday’s Senate race in Massachusetts, which would enable the GOP to block further Senate action.
The likeliest scenario would require persuading House Democrats to accept a bill the Senate passed last month, despite their objections to several parts.

Just cram it down Pelosi’s throat so we can cram it down yours.

That’s “reform” for you.

The newly discussed fallback would require House Democrats to swallow hard and approve the Senate-passed bill without changes. President Barack Obama could sign it into law without another Senate vote needed.

House leaders would insist that the Senate make some changes later under a complex plan called “budget reconciliation.” It requires only a simple majority, but it’s unclear whether that could happen.

But some Democrats said failure to pass a health bill will cripple their ability to tell voters this November that they accomplished anything with their control of the House, Senate and White House.

What they don’t get is that, if they do cram it down and congratulate themselves on their success they will likely lose in November BECAUSE of that.

But remember, it’s not about them…. 🙂

President Obama, who last week wasn’t going anywhere near Massachusetts is now in full Campaign Mode.

That should tell you something.

And it’s not about you.

“Understand what’s at stake here, Massachusetts. It’s whether we’re going forward or going backwards,” Obama told Coakley supporters on the campus of Northeastern University in Boston. “If you were fired up in the last election, I need you more fired up in this election.”

If forwards is socialism. Put this baby is Reverse and floor it!

The roughly 30-minute speech was heavy on partisan rhetoric, without much appeal to the independent voters who account for nearly half the state’s electorate.

So much for the “post-partisan” president, Mr Unity. Mr. Bi-Partisan. 🙂

MSNBC Host Ed Schultz (23:02): I tell you what, if I lived in Massachusetts I’d try to vote 10 times. I don’t know if they’d let me or not, but I’d try to. Yeah, that’s right. I’d cheat to keep these bastards out. I would. ‘Cause that’s exactly what they are. (Washington Times)

Now that’s Journalism for you.

Do it the Chicago Way.

Someone better keep one eye on ACORN.

And you know what has them so mad?

Jobs.

The very thing Obama and the Democrats have been ignoring because of their obsession with Socialist control of our lives.

But remember, it’s not about them. 🙂

Democratic Party leaders who assumed their candidate, state Attorney General Martha Coakley, would have a cakewalk to the U.S. Capitol after winning a four-way primary in November.

They hadn’t counted on voters like Luis Rodriguez.

The 46-year-old plastics factory supervisor, who emigrated to the U.S. in 1988 from Uruguay and became a citizen last year, said he’s fed up with what he calls the lies told by Washington. It’s enough for him that Coakley supports Obama, who Rodriguez says has failed to make good on his pledge for openness.

“We don’t buy what we can’t afford. We don’t spend what we don’t have,” said Rodriguez, echoing the anger expressed by other voters who say Democrats are too eager to bail out bankers and people who bought homes they couldn’t afford. “These people, what they’re doing now, they’re spending money they don’t have so they can get elected again.” (Washington Post)

Bravo, Mr Rodriguez.

Despite the Bay State’s liberal reputation, some Massachusetts voters are also chafing at the idea that just because the Senate seat had been held by Kennedy for 47 years, it should automatically go to a Democratic successor.

“One of the things that have blown our minds is people saying, ‘Well, what would Ted Kennedy want?'” said Kathleen Halloran, 47, a teacher in Worcester, who attended a Brown rally with her husband Brian, 38, a police officer, and their two children. “It’s mind-numbing that someone would think … that there was some kind of entitlement or legacy that needs to be passed on.”

Democrats thinking they are entitled to something just because they believe they are? Nah, that never happens. 🙂

Among them (at a Scott Brown Rally) was James Johnson, a hotel facilities manager who said electing another Democrat will drag the country even more to the left and away from its constitutional base.

“It’s socialism. It starts with health care. It starts with the government bailouts,” said Johnson, 43, who’s retired from the military. “I work for a living and I see more and more of my money going to people who sit home and don’t do it. I’m all for helping people out, but I like keeping what I earn.”

But the scariest part of all of this is, if the Democrat wins, do you think the Democrats in Washington will take this as a sign of the unrest and unpopularity of their cram downs?

Do you think humility will creep into Washington D.C.??

NO.

They are far too conceited for that.

After all, It’s Not you, dear, it’s Me. 🙂

Control and Cost

Thomas Sowell: The verbal packaging of consumer choice as business “control” has become so widespread that few people seem to feel a need to do anything so basic as thinking about the meaning of the words they are using, which transform an ex post statistic into an ex ante condition.

By saying that businesses have “power” because they have “control” of their markets, this verbal virtuosity opens the way to saying that government needs to exercise its “countervailing power” (John Kenneth Galbraith’s phrase) in order to protect the public.

(Galbraith being a Keynesian economist and prominent Liberal ‘thinker’ and a model for liberals like President Obama)

Despite the verbal parallels, government power is in fact power, since individuals do not have a free choice as to whether to obey government laws and regulations, while consumers are free to ignore the products marketed by even the biggest and supposedly most “powerful” corporations in the world. There are people who have never set foot in a Wal-Mart store and there is nothing that Wal-Mart can do about it, despite being the world’s largest retailer.

And I know such people.

Henry Ford pioneered in mass production methods and had some of the highest paid workers of his day — decades before the industry was unionized — and the lowest priced cars, notably the legendary Model T, which made the car no longer a luxury confined to the wealthy.

But none of these plain facts prevailed against the vision of the Progressive era intelligentsia, who in this case included President Theodore Roosevelt. His administration launched antitrust prosecutions against some of the biggest price cutters, including Standard Oil and the Great Northern Railroad.

Roosevelt sought the power, in his words, to “control and regulate all big combinations.” He declared that “of all forms of tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of a plutocracy.”

No doubt it was true, as TR said, that Standard Oil created “enormous fortunes” for its owners “at the expense of business rivals,” but it is questionable whether consumers who paid lower prices for oil felt that they were victims of a tyranny.

One of the popular muckraking books of the Progressive era was “The History of the Standard Oil Company” by Ida Tarbell. The book said among other things that Rockefeller “should have been satisfied” with what he had achieved financially by 1870, implying greed in his continued efforts to increase the size and profitability of Standard Oil.

A study done a century later, however, pointed out: “One might never know from reading ‘The History of Standard Oil’ that oil prices were actually falling.”

That fact had been filtered out of the story. The question whether Rockefeller’s pursuit of a larger fortune made the consuming public worse off was seldom even addressed.

How consumers would have been better off if a man who introduced extraordinary efficiencies into the production and distribution of oil had ended his career earlier, leaving both the cost of producing oil and the resulting prices higher, is a question not raised, much less answered.

Businesses that charge lower prices often lead to losses by competing businesses that charge higher prices. But, obvious as this might seem, it has not stopped outcries over the years from the intelligentsia, legislation from politicians and adverse court decisions from judges, aimed not only at Standard Oil in the early 20th century, but also later at other businesses that reduced prices in other industries, ranging from the A&P grocery chain in the past to Microsoft today.

In short, the verbal transformation of lower prices and larger sales into an exercise of “power” by business that has to be counteracted by more government power has more than purely intellectual implications. It has led to many laws, policies and court decisions that punish lower prices in the name of protecting consumers.

As a result of the spread of globalization, even if a particular company is the only producer of a given product in a given country, that monopoly means little if foreign producers of the same product compete in supplying that product to the consumers.

Eastman Kodak has long been the only major American producer of film, but camera stores across America also sell film produced in Japan (Fuji) and sometimes in England (Ilford) and in other countries, quite aside from the competition from digital cameras, produced primarily overseas.

In short, Kodak’s ability to jack up film prices without suffering lost sales is hemmed in by substitutes. The fact that Eastman Kodak is a huge enterprise does not change any of that, except in the visions and rhetoric of the intelligentsia.

The straining of words to depict businesses as exercising “power” in situations where consumers simply buy more of their products has been used to justify depriving people who run businesses of the rights exercised by other people. This attitude can even extend to putting the burden of proof on businesses to rebut accusations in certain antitrust cases and civil rights cases.

A somewhat similar mind-set was expressed in a question asked in the Economist magazine: “Why should companies be allowed to dodge taxes and sack workers by shifting operations overseas?”

In free countries, no one else’s right to relocate for their own benefit is treated as something requiring some special justification. Indeed, workers who relocate to other countries in violation of immigration laws are often defended by those who consider it wrong for businesses to relocate legally.

So are “Big Oil” and “Big Tobacco” and “Big Pharma” business successes that have to be punished for being successful.

That the people, the consumers, must be protected from their “power” by the government’s “power”?

So the Liberal Intelligensia want to destroy them, and replace them with their own.

And use the cudgel of Government “control” and “power” to save the people from something they actually don’t need saving from.

That gets THEM more “power”.

Because then the people will look to them to save them.

When in fact, they are being enslaved all over again.

Doesn’t that kind of sound like the “War on Poverty” started over 40 years ago?

And explain why the Liberals hate Bank CEOs because they dare to give bonuses to their employees. But if Congress porks certain groups or gives them special deals (Cornhusker Kickback, Union “Cadillac” Deal” etc) that’s ok.

CEO’s salaries must be “controlled” except for the government ones, Like GM, Chrysler, Fannie and Freddie. (Fannie Mae Chief Executive Officer Michael Williams and Freddie Mac CEO Charles Haldeman Jr. are each eligible for compensation of as much as $6 million this year, the companies said Thursday in regulatory filings.

In addition to the CEO pay, 10 additional executives at the two companies are eligible collectively for $30.1 million in compensation for 2009.–NY Post 12/24/09)

Have you seen them vilified in the Ministry of Truth Mainstream Media??

No.

Will you?

No.

Overall, pay for top executives of the mortgage-finance companies is down 40% from before they were seized, the regulator said in a statement. 🙂

So this “control” is considered “good” in fact.

Because they are defending the “middle class” person and “small business” against the “power” of “big business”.

After all, the whole of the last year of Health Care “reform” was about lower costs. But in the end it’s come down to “control” not costs.

Hence, the Democrats meet in secret to work out how to pass the “control”, and not actually address the “costs” because the “Control” is the “cost” to them.

Now that’s verbal dexterity at it’s finest.

Technology Gap

The Hill: A big reason why the government is inefficient and ineffective is because Washington has outdated technology, with federal workers having better computers at home than in the office.

This startling admission came Thursday from Peter Orszag, who manages the federal bureaucracy for President Barack Obama.

The public is getting a bad return on its tax dollars because government workers are operating with outdated technologies, Orszag said in a statement that kicked off a summit between Obama and dozens of corporate CEOs.

The White House release that included Orszag’s comments said one “specific source” of ineffective and inefficient government is the huge technology gap between the public and private sectors that results in billions of dollars in waste, slow and inadequate customer service and a lack of transparency about how dollars are spent.

So that’s why they are holding all the negotiation for Nationalized health Care in Secret. They are writing it on a Commodore 64!! 🙂

It’s not the people.

It’s not the bloat of bureaucracy.

It’s not the ideology.

It’s not the Liberal need to control anything and everything.

It’s the Technology.

So if we just invest a few more Billions everything will be all great. Right? 🙂

“Improving the technology our government uses isn’t about having the fanciest bells and whistles on our websites — it’s about how we use the American people’s hard-earned tax dollars to make government work better for them,” Obama said in a statement.

<<Insert cynical laughter here>>

“It’s time to bring government into the 21^st century,” Orszag said. “Information technology has the power to transform how government works and revolutionize the ease, convenience and effectiveness by which it serves the American people.”

On That note: The FCC wants to take over the Internet.

The FCC and the rest of the federal apparatus should keep their hands off the Internet. The Web is doing fine without the “help” of Washington. There are no compelling reasons for the government to be involved. It has neither the moral nor constitutional authority to interfere with peaceful, noncriminal private affairs that are voluntarily entered into.

Yet our governments at all levels are filled with officials, both elected and appointed, who feel that nothing in the private sphere should go unsupervised by them.

In the case of the Web and the FCC, the government wants to regulate consumer access to the Internet. Its goal is to reclassify broadband so it can be regulated the same way telephone service is regulated. It would use this power to stop Internet service providers from blocking customers’ access to legal content, a concept known as net neutrality, and perhaps to assert itself in pricing.

Government officials won’t admit that their urge to issue orders to ISPs is a power grab. Rather, they frame the issue as a matter of consumer protection.

“I am absolutely certain that consumers expect protection against gatekeeper control,” said Commissioner Michael Copps, a Democrat. “That’s why we need to move forward with whatever tools we have at our disposal to ensure an open Internet.”

Does Copps not understand that the Web would no longer be open once government steps in? A third party of lawmakers and bureaucrats will be an occupying force. Policies will be made in the halls of government and they will be based on politics, hardly an advancement for such a key resource as the Internet. To say the FCC will “open” the Web by violating ISPs’ right to determine how their property is used is to pervert the language.

While the FCC waits for a federal appeals court ruling in a Web traffic case that could decide what authority it has for regulating the Internet, it’s sifting through public comments on its attempt to regulate Internet service providers. So it’s possible that with everything going on, it has missed the dust-up in which Google is threatening to quit China if Beijing continues to insist on Web censorship.

That still doesn’t excuse government’s insatiable appetite for forcing its way even deeper into private matters. That’s an institutionalized flaw that needs to be removed. (IBD)

Well, since a large section of the American People go around the State Controlled Ministry of Truth Media, the Orwellian Liberals have to find a way to destroy dissent.

Trust us, we’re from the Government and we are always telling you what you need to know. 🙂

And, of course, the super-partisaned Democrats can be trusted to respect people who disagree with them, right?

“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.'”–Ronald Reagan

This could never happen here:

Google said Tuesday the company and at least 20 others were victims of a “highly sophisticated and targeted attack” originating in China in mid-December, evidently to gain access to the e-mail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

“Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective,” according to a statement by David Drummond, senior vice president of corporate development and chief legal officer for Google, operator of the most popular Internet search engine.

“These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered — combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the Web — have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China,” Drummond wrote.

//

“We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all.

“We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China,” Drummond’s statement reads. (CNN)

Next thing you’ll tell me is that they will have an Anti-Obama “Tea-Bagger” as a host on MSDNC!!

“Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.”–Ronald Reagan

The Monty Hall Reform

You knew it would happen. I knew it would happen.

Unions, big Important Democrat supporters, were mad about the “Cadillac” plan taxes because many unions have them.

So it’s “Let’s Make a Deal”.

With your Host, President “Monty Hall” Obama.

Behind Door #1 is…The Cornhusker Kickback

Behind Door #2 is…The Louisiana Purchase

And the American people get  Door #3, the Zonk (Unless you’re in Louisiana, Nebraska or The UAW or SEIU or other Obama favored Unions)

WSJ: Democratic negotiators acceded to union demands for a scaled-back tax on high-end health-insurance plans, exempting union contracts from the tax until 2018, five years beyond the start date for other workers.

Can you say, “tough” Union Negotiations the next time it come up.What you wanna bet they’ll want to renegotiate those helth care deals they’ve been making for the last few decades? Hmmmmm…

Government Motors (GM) is likely exempt anyways.

And so we can add this to the list of known deals to buy off votes to pass this monster.

It just gets more and more like like pig sty doesn’t it folks? 🙂

All this pork. And we’ll end up getting stuck like a pig.

“This is a policy designed to benefit elites,” said AFL-CIO boss Richard Trumka in a speech Monday, demanding his union exemption. And yes, it started as a plan to stick it to the rich, targeting benefits “like the ones that the executives at Goldman Sachs have, the $40,000 policies,” as White House adviser David Axelrod says when he plays the class warfare card.

The whole concept blew up in unions’ faces, however, when they realized as many as a quarter of their own members — about four million and their families — had such plans. But instead of working toward a fair system for all, they sought and got a set-aside.

They knew the 40% tax on the “evil” insurers was not really a tax on companies, but a cost that would be passed on to them. But instead of coming up with an economically viable plan for cutting health care costs and extending it to more people as they claimed to want, they opted to stick it to the public, carving out a special exemption for themselves.

This is nothing more than another a political payoff for the $400 million in campaign contributions unions have forked over to elect Democrats since 2006.

With a health care overhaul that will scarcely pay for itself, ordinary Americans will end up footing the bill for the union elites with “Cadillac” plans. Which calls into question what this “reform,” coming in the middle of an economic crisis, is really about. In other words, has it been a plan to bail out unions all along?(IBD)

Well, the bailout of GM and Chrysler sure was.

The deal helped Democrats clear a key hurdle, but the break for organized labor added to the pressure to find new revenue to pay for their health bill, which is designed to give coverage to tens of millions of uninsured Americans. Negotiators were considering increasing the financial hit on drug makers, nursing homes and medical-device makers, according to people familiar with the discussions.

In addition to softening the tax on high-end plans, Democrats plan to increase subsidies for lower earners to buy health insurance. To pay for such changes, Democrats are considering levying an additional $10 billion in fees on medical-device makers, for a total of $30 billion over 10 years. But it wasn’t a done deal as the House was showing resistance.

Congressional negotiators have also told drug makers they were considering decreasing reimbursements under government health programs or increasing fees by an additional $10 billion over a decade, beyond the $80 billion in concessions the industry agreed last year, according to people familiar with the negotiations.

Yeah, that won’t increase insurance costs or ration/cut-back services and products available.

No, not at all… 😦

And if you’re not a Union member and have a “Cadillac” plan, well, you’re just evil. 🙂

The tax on high-value insurance plans was included in the Senate’s version of the bill but not the House’s, and has been one of the main unresolved issues as Democrats work to combine measures passed by the two chambers late last year.

Unions, as well as many House Democrats, are fiercely opposed to the tax on “Cadillac” insurance plans, which they say will hit many middle-class workers and undermine benefits won by unions.

President Barack Obama has supported the measure as a way to pay for the legislation and control overall health-care spending. The changes mean that the tax will raise about $90 billion over 10 years, down from $149 billion in the Senate bill, labor officials said.

Mr. Obama traveled to Capitol Hill to reassure House Democrats who feared a vote for the bill would be politically damaging. “I know how big a lift this has been. I see the polls,” Mr. Obama said. He promised to wage a “great campaign from one end of the country to the other” to sell the legislation to the public should it become law.

Read: CAMPAIGN MODE!

But once it’s law, it’s not like we can do anything about it, so why the Campaign Mode?

Oh, that’s right 2010 Elections!

D’Oh! 🙂

Please don’t throw us out even if the latest polls that the President referred to show EVEN LESS support now than before the Christmas Eve Cram-down.

And this President is so popular right now, He won’t even campaign in the Massachusetts Special Election for the Democrat like he did in New Jersey, Virginia and New York.

I guess he’s afraid he’d get the Republican elected. 🙂

He was 1 for 3 the last time. 🙂

But THE AGENDA IS THE AGENDA.

“The White House and congressional Democrats are picking one group of workers over another,” said Antonia Ferrier, spokeswoman for House Minority Leader John Boehner. “If this sounds discriminatory, well it is.”

Issues that have yet to be resolved, aides said, included how to structure the new exchanges where Americans would buy coverage, how much to increase the Medicare payroll tax, and how to handle restrictions on abortion coverage.

So Let’s Make a Deal! 🙂

Under the Senate bill, health insurers would have paid a 40% tax on premiums that exceed $8,500 annually for individuals, or $23,000 for family plans. The agreement reached Thursday raises those thresholds slightly, to $8,900 for individuals and $24,000 for families, with annual increases tied to one point above the Consumer Price Index, labor and White House officials said.

The threshold increases further if health-care costs rise faster than predicted between now and 2013, when the tax takes effect, officials said.

Wasn’t the stated point of this to LOWER the costs?? 🙂

And, of course, this is all Transparent in Secret and only Democrats in “post Partisan” Obama-Land may apply.

What’s one more bone to a favored political group on a bill Democrats are determined to pass no matter what?

It’s a Great Bill after all.

And Monty Hall Obama will be out selling his P.T. Barnum Tonic Water all Spring, Summer, and Fall.

Maybe QVC can get a Special Deal on it.

Buy one Congressman, get one Re-elected. 🙂

Aren’t you excited about “Hope and Change”

Yes, We Can….Get Screwed!

Tax & Blame Season Cometh

The Democrats have pigged out on pork and spending.

It’s now time for the Democrats to start laying on the taxes.

Those taxes that Candidate Obama said he wouldn’t.

But since Liberals can’t do anything but spend and then tax because it’s the only thing they understand what else is there to do.

We have had trillions in spending that did nothing.

Now it’s time for Tax Season.

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama is expected Thursday to propose taxing large banks and other companies based on their exposure to risk, White House officials said.

The plan marks the latest in a slew of proposed fees, penalties and constraints the White House envisions slapping on Wall Street during the cleanup of the U.S. financial crisis, and marks a new stage in the White House’s populist assault on the finance industry.

Administration officials went out of their way Wednesday to show no sympathy for big banks they acknowledged would lobby hard against the proposal.

“The banks that are in question were significantly responsible for the enormous degree of the reckless risk-taking that was borne throughout the economy,” one official said.

If approved by Congress, the new tax — which the White House calls a “financial crisis responsibility fee” — would force about 50 banks, insurance companies and large broker-dealers to collectively pay the federal government roughly $90 billion over 10 years. Of the 50, about 35 would be U.S. companies and 10 to 15 would be U.S. subsidiaries of foreign financial firms.

A senior administration official said the largest 10 institutions would pay about 60% of the tax’s total cost.(WSJ)

And Just because you repaid your TARP Bribe doesn’t mean your exempt from the anti-capitalist wrath of the Obama Administration.

No, Big Brother government is taking you out to the wood shed and is going to beat into submission.

You are the devil incarnate and they will smite you!

The proposal will also help the administration tackle the U.S.’s budget deficit, projected to reach $1.4 trillion this fiscal year.

The debt they ran up sending money to fake zip codes and fake Congressional Districts, Unions, and their pet projects.

Not Jobs.

Unemployment is still over 10%.

“Using tax policy to punish people is a bad idea,” J.P. Morgan Chase Chief Executive James Dimon told reporters after a hearing in Washington. Mr. Dimon said it would be unfair for banks to be left shouldering the cost of the auto bailout.

You see, GM (Government Motors) and Chrysler are immune because “they did cause the problem” is effective what President Obama said.

Why?

The UAW.

The Union is already mad at him over the “Cadillac Plans” surtax in the Health Care Bill. Saddle them with more taxes and GM will just lay them off and that will make them even madder at him.

So, like a good Liberal, find a different scapegoat and make them pay for it.

Rep. Scott Garrett (R., N.J.) has said any tax or fee could hinder the economic recovery and further limit the industry’s ability to extend more loans. Mr. Dimon, when asked how any tax could be felt by consumers, said “all businesses tend to pass their costs on to their customers.”

“How you are going to tax banks and expect them to lend more is frankly lunacy,” said Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R., Texas).

You;re assuming they actually care. Beating up Capitalists is there favourite sport.

These are the same Capitalists, by the way, that are supposed to create the jobs that the President has been ignoring for the last year while he’s been working on his Socialist Takeover.

Good Luck with that. 🙂

And the Smoke and Mirrors continue (IBD):

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission has kicked off its long-awaited hearings by promising a “thorough examination of the root causes” of the subprime scandal. But don’t hold your breath.

If the witness list for Wednesday’s curtain-raiser is any indication of the direction the panel’s Democratic chairman plans to take the yearlong inquiry, we are deeply skeptical any roots will be exposed.

Wall Street honchos from Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan landed in the pillories first, instead of Washington executives from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, who have far more to answer for. Under pressure from Washington, the congressionally chartered and subsidized agencies gobbled up more than $1 trillion of the subprime and other toxic home loans that nearly KO’d the financial system.

Yet they’re missing from the witness list for today’s hearing.

Another giveaway is Wednesday’s star policy witness, Mark Zandi — Democrat Barney Frank’s favorite economist.

As head of the House banking panel, Frank protected Fannie and Freddie from oversight as it took on more and more bad loans in the name of Frank’s hobbyhorse, “affordable lending.”

In his 2008 book “Financial Shock,” Zandi gave Frank a pass while laying blame at the feet of Wall Street CEOs. Frank, in turn, wrote a blurb for the dust jacket of Zandi’s book and praised it during last year’s hearings to craft tough new banking regulations.

Asked by a reporter whether he and Zandi, a registered Democrat, disagree about anything, Frank replied: “Not really.”

Also appearing was an activist for the Center for Responsible Lending, which helped pressure Fannie and Freddie to ease credit rules by accusing the mortgage giants of racial discrimination.

It pushed for risky loans to uncreditworthy borrowers. Now that they’ve gone bust, the group accuses banks of “predatory lending.”

So it’s show trial??

Time will tell, but it sure looks like a dog-and-pony show. And Liberals never do that… 🙂

While commission chair Phil Angelides, a Democrat, pledges “a full and fair inquiry,” the “bipartisan” 10-member panel is stacked with six Democrats who clearly have it in for Wall Street.

Hmmm. 6 Democrats and 4 Republicans….Yep, that’s “Bi-Partisan”!! 🙂

Angelides brings his own strong bias to the table. A former state treasurer of California, he’s a big fan of the Community Reinvestment Act and other regulations that socialized mortgages and helped create the subprime market. His investigative team is stacked with California Democrat cronies, including a San Francisco trial lawyer who specializes in securities class-action suits.

While Wall Street contributed to the feeding frenzy, Washington chummed the waters by giving Fannie and Freddie affordable-lending credits for subprime securitizations. Wall Street, in turn, marketed Fannie’s and Freddie’s mortgage-backed securities.

Meaning the government and their baby cousins Fannie and Freddie were in on the scam. But let’s not talk about that….

If the heads of Fannie and Freddie aren’t subjected to equal grilling, the hearings will prove a farce. The American public will never get to the bottom of what wiped out trillions in household wealth. Worse, we may repeat the very mistakes that led to the crisis.

And think you can count it. Liberal Elites are never responsible for their own actions.

And we will pay the price.

Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) will introduce legislation that would impose a 50% tax on excessive bonuses at firms that received bailout funds.

The “Wall Street Bonus Tax Act” would apply only to bonuses over $50,000.

So I guess we’ll see lots of $49,999.99 bonuses. They’ll just be more than 1 a year. 🙂

The envy and class warfare anti-capitalism just never ends does it.

And the Taxes from Health Care and Cap & Trade yet haven’t even started.

Politically, it is awkward. Obama’s support for the tax (on “Cadillac” and “Millionaire” plans) puts his allies in a tough spot.

“The organizations who are the biggest advocates for reform are spending a lot of time trying to get this excise tax eliminated when they’d rather be spending time effecting reform,” said Richard Kirsch, the coalition’s national campaign director.

That is especially true for unions, which are credited with helping Obama win.

Yet even the usual adversaries are united in their dislike for the “Cadillac plan” tax. Both the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and America’s Health Insurance Plans, the trade group for insurers, have come out against it.

The insurers, which would actually have to pay the tax, wonder whether they would be able to pass the cost on to subscribers.

The U.S. Chamber has no doubt that the costs would be passed on to employers.

“A large number of employers will be affected by this new tax, not because their plans are overly generous, but rather because health-care costs are increasing by an average of 7 [percent] to 8 percent a year while the [proposed] tax thresholds will only be increased by a much smaller rate,” said Katie Hays, the chamber’s executive director of congressional affairs.

“Further, small businesses, who, on average, pay 30 percent more for their health plans will also adversely be affected by this new tax,” she said.

By some estimates, nearly half of all health plans will be subject to the tax by 2019.(philly.com)

Yeah, that is certainly addressing the rising cost of Health Insurance, Mr President.

Other ideas on the table: (MSNBC)

• Further increase Medicare payroll taxes (even beyond what is in the health care bill) for high-income individuals and families.
• A “transaction” tax on stock trades.

This last prospect has faded, I am told, but Obama insiders haven’t stopped touting it around town. Since it would be applied to brokers — and to hedge fund transactions — it is attractive politically. It would not be a direct tax on individuals or families, but would allow Obama to go after unpopular Wall Street traders. The bank-transaction tax has the same populist appeal.

“Politically, it’s a good narrative,” said MacGuineas.

It’s a narrative you can expect to hear when the president steps to the podium in the House of Representatives for the State of the Union. But the real narrative is this: his struggle to make the numbers add up, not only for this year, but for the generation to come.

So it’s time to dust off Campaign Mode, even though we never actually stopped.

It’s time to put some WD-40 on the Teleprompters and Lie Up your Ass.

But by 2019 you’ll be so drugged out by Big Brother you likely won’t even care.

Welcome one and all to the Estados Unidos Venezuela Del Norte.

I hope it’s just a bad dream.

But I fear it’s a Nightmare.

The Fix is In?

There are reports out there now that the Democrats may stall the installation of Sen. Ted Kennedy’s replacement in the Senate if it turns out to be a Republican.

The guy in their now is just a rush-job fill in so the Democrats have at 60 votes to cram Health care down your throat.

But a Special Election is looming next week in Massachusetts.

The home of the most Liberal tradition is America has a chance of having a Republican Senator.

Normally, such an impossibility should be a sign of the End of Time.

Instead, it’s just a sign of how much people really hate the Health Care Reform Agenda being rammed down their throat.

But the Senate heedless of this, yet again, is talking about not swearing in the Republican if he wins in any particularly fast manner, some reports say even as much as a month later.

Just so he can’t vote on Health Care.

Isn’t Representative Democracy grand in Obama’s 2010.

Boston Herald: It looks like the fix is in on national health-care reform – and it all may unfold on Beacon Hill.

At a business forum in Boston Friday, interim Sen. Paul Kirk predicted that Congress would pass a health-care reform bill this month.

“We want to get this resolved before President Obama’s State of the Union address in early to mid-February,” Kirk told reporters at a Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce breakfast.

The longtime aide and confidant of the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, who was handpicked by Gov. Deval Patrick after a controversial legal change to hold Kennedy’s seat, vowed to vote for the bill even if Republican state Sen. Scott Brown, who opposes the health-care reform legislation, prevails in a Jan. 19 special election.

“Absolutely,” Kirk said, when asked if he’d vote for the bill, even if Brown captures the seat. “It would be my responsibility as United States senator, representing the people and understanding Senator Kennedy’s agenda. . . . I think you’re asking me a hypothetical question but I’d be pleased to vote for the bill.”

“The outcome of this race couldn’t be more important,” Obama himself wrote in a fundraising e-mail Monday night.

“This is a stunning admission by Paul Kirk and the Beacon Hill political machine,” said Brown in a statement. “Paul Kirk appears to be suggesting that he, Deval Patrick, and (Senate Majority Leader) Harry Reid intend to stall the election certification until the health care bill is rammed through Congress, even if that means defying the will of the people of Massachusetts. As we’ve already seen from the backroom deals and kickbacks cut by the Democrats in Washington, they intend to do anything and everything to pass their controversial health care plan. But threatening to ignore the results of a free election and steal this Senate vote from the people of Massachusetts takes their schemes to a whole new level. Martha Coakley should immediately disavow this threat from one of her campaign’s leading supporters.” A spokeswoman for Coakley’s campaign declined to comment Friday.

THE AGENDA IS THE AGENDA!!

The Brown race in Taxachusetts is an ominous rumbling beneath America’s political landscape, with the earthquake arriving in November. Democrats and their stimulus bills that don’t stimulate have spent us into double-digit unemployment.

They’ve refused to work with the GOP on the tried-and-true low-tax solutions to recession. And now they want to spend another trillion-plus wrecking a health system that’s the envy of the world.

Win or lose, Scott Brown has already done a heckuva job showing the Washington establishment that a nationwide grass-roots revolt is getting bigger and bigger. (IBD)

As was said famously in Mel Brooks’ “History of the World Part I”:

“The Peasants are revolting!”

The Emperor: “Yeah, they stink on Ice”

An American Liberal perspective on the use of the filibuster (aka the 60 votes):

(The filibuster) it makes the Senate a closed and rigid place, where a minority can block everything and where the president and the majority not only need 60 votes; they need exactly the same 60 votes every time. One or two senators at the farthest right edge of the Democratic coalition — or the most malevolent edge — become effectively co-presidents, with full veto power over any initiative. Other individual senators become irrelevant.(American Prospect)

Could the Universe handle a Republican Senator from The People’s Socialist Commonwealth of Taxachusetts??

Maybe not.

But the storm clouds are building.

The question is, will the storm arrive in November or will rise in fury and then fizzle?

Stay Tuned.

Called on Account of Weather

The bitter winter afflicting much of the Northern Hemisphere is only the start of a global trend towards cooler weather that is likely to last for 20 or 30 years, say some of the world’s most eminent climate scientists.

Their predictions – based on an analysis of natural cycles in water temperatures in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans – challenge some of the global warming orthodoxy’s most deeply cherished beliefs, such as the claim that the North Pole will be free of ice in summer by 2013.

According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado, Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 per cent, since 2007 – and even the most committed global warming activists do not dispute this.
The scientists’ predictions also undermine the standard climate computer models, which assert that the warming of the Earth since 1900 has been driven solely by man-made greenhouse gas emissions and will continue as long as carbon dioxide levels rise.

They say that their research shows that much of the warming was caused by oceanic cycles when they were in a ‘warm mode’ as opposed to the present ‘cold mode’.

This challenge to the widespread view that the planet is on the brink of an irreversible catastrophe is all the greater because the scientists could never be described as global warming ‘deniers’ or sceptics.

Among the most prominent of the scientists is Professor Mojib Latif, a leading member of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has been pushing the issue of man-made global warming on to the international political agenda since it was formed 22 years ago.

Prof Latif, who leads a research team at the renowned Leibniz  Institute at Germany’s Kiel University, has developed new methods for measuring ocean temperatures 3,000ft beneath the surface, where the cooling and warming cycles start.

He and his colleagues predicted the new cooling trend in a paper published in 2008 and warned of it again at an IPCC conference in Geneva last September.

Prof Tsonis said that the period from 1915 to 1940 saw a strong warm mode, reflected in rising temperatures.

Last night he told The Mail on Sunday: ‘A significant share of the warming we saw from 1980 to 2000 and at earlier periods in the 20th Century was due to these cycles – perhaps as much as 50 per cent.

‘They have now gone into reverse, so winters like this one will become much more likely. Summers will also probably be cooler, and all this may well last two decades or longer.

‘The extreme retreats that we have seen in glaciers and sea ice will come to a halt. For the time being, global warming has paused, and there may well be some cooling.’

As Europe, Asia and North America froze last week, conventional wisdom insisted that this was merely a ‘blip’ of no long-term significance.

Though record lows were experienced as far south as Cuba, where the daily maximum on beaches normally used for winter bathing was just 4.5C, the BBC assured viewers that the big chill was merely short-term ‘weather’ that had nothing to do with ‘climate’, which was still warming.

The work of Prof Latif and the other scientists refutes that view.

On the one hand, it is true that the current freeze is the product of the ‘Arctic oscillation’ – a weather pattern that sees the development of huge ‘blocking’ areas of high pressure in northern latitudes, driving polar winds far to the south.

Meteorologists say that this is at its strongest for at least 60 years.

However, according to Prof Latif and his colleagues, this in turn relates to much longer-term shifts – what are known as the Pacific and Atlantic ‘multi-decadal oscillations’ (MDOs).

For Europe, the crucial factor here is the temperature of the water in the middle of the North Atlantic, now several degrees below its average when the world was still warming.

But the effects are not confined to the Northern Hemisphere. Prof Anastasios Tsonis, head of the University of Wisconsin Atmospheric Sciences Group, has recently shown that these MDOs move together in a synchronised way across the globe, abruptly flipping the world’s climate from a ‘warm mode’ to a ‘cold mode’ and back again in 20 to 30-year cycles.

‘They amount to massive rearrangements in the dominant patterns of the weather,’ he said yesterday, ‘and their shifts explain all the major changes in world temperatures during the 20th and 21st Centuries.

‘We have such a change now and can therefore expect 20 or 30 years of cooler temperatures.’

But from 1940 until the late Seventies, the last MDO cold-mode era, the world cooled, despite the fact that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere continued to rise.

Many of the consequences of the recent warm mode were also observed 90 years ago.

For example, in 1922, the Washington Post reported that Greenland’s glaciers were fast disappearing, while Arctic seals were ‘finding the water too hot’.

It interviewed a Captain Martin Ingebrigsten, who had been sailing the eastern Arctic for 54 years: ‘He says that he first noted warmer conditions in 1918, and since that time it has gotten steadily warmer.

‘Where formerly great masses of ice were found, there are now moraines, accumulations of earth and stones. At many points where glaciers formerly extended into the sea they have entirely disappeared.’

As a result, the shoals of fish that used to live in these waters had vanished, while the sea ice beyond the north coast of Spitsbergen in the Arctic Ocean had melted.

Warm Gulf Stream water was still detectable within a few hundred miles of the Pole.
In contrast, Prof Tsonis said, last week 56 per cent of the surface of the United States was covered by snow.

‘That hasn’t happened for several decades,’ he pointed out. ‘It just isn’t true to say this is a blip. We can expect colder winters for quite a while.’

He recalled that towards the end of the last cold mode, the world’s media were preoccupied by fears of freezing.

For example, in 1974, a Time magazine cover story predicted ‘Another Ice Age’, saying: ‘Man may be somewhat responsible – as a result of farming and fuel burning [which is] blocking more and more sunlight from reaching and heating the Earth.’

Prof Tsonis said: ‘Perhaps we will see talk of an ice age again by the early 2030s, just as the MDOs shift once more and temperatures begin to rise.’

Like Prof Latif, Prof Tsonis is not a climate change ‘denier’. There is, he said, a measure of additional ‘background’ warming due to human activity and greenhouse gases that runs across the MDO cycles.

‘This isn’t just a blip. We can expect colder winters for quite a while’

But he added: ‘I do not believe in catastrophe theories. Man-made warming is balanced by the natural cycles, and I do not trust the computer models which state that if CO2 reaches a particular level then temperatures and sea levels will rise by a given amount.

‘These models cannot be trusted to predict the weather for a week, yet they are running them to give readings for 100 years.’

Prof Tsonis said that when he published his work in the highly respected journal Geophysical Research Letters, he was deluged with ‘hate emails’.

He added: ‘People were accusing me of wanting to destroy the climate, yet all I’m interested in is the truth.’

He said he also received hate mail from climate change sceptics, accusing him of not going far enough to attack the theory of man-made warming.

The work of Profs Latif, Tsonis and their teams raises a crucial question: If some of the late 20th Century warming was caused not by carbon dioxide but by MDOs, then how much?

Tsonis did not give a figure; Latif suggested it could be anything between ten and 50 per cent.

Other critics of the warming orthodoxy say the role played by MDOs is even greater.

William Gray, emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Colorado State University, said that while he believed there had been some background rise caused by greenhouse gases, the computer models used by advocates of man-made warming had hugely exaggerated their effect.
Dr David Viner stands by his claim that snow will become an ‘increasingly rare event’

Dr David Viner stands by his claim that snow will become an ‘increasingly rare event’

According to Prof Gray, these distort the way the atmosphere works. ‘Most of the rise in temperature from the Seventies to the Nineties was natural,’ he said. ‘Very little was down to CO2 – in my view, as little as five to ten per cent.’

But last week, die-hard warming advocates were refusing to admit that MDOs were having any impact.

In March 2000, Dr David Viner, then a member of the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, the body now being investigated over the notorious ‘Warmergate’ leaked emails, said that within a few years snowfall would become ‘a very rare and exciting event’ in Britain, and that ‘children just aren’t going to know what snow is’.

Now the head of a British Council programme with an annual £10 million budget that raises awareness of global warming among young people abroad, Dr Viner last week said he still stood by that prediction: ‘We’ve had three weeks of relatively cold weather, and that doesn’t change anything.

‘This winter is just a little cooler than average, and I still think that snow will become an increasingly rare event.’

The longer the cold spell lasts, the harder it may be to persuade the public of that assertion. (Dailymail.co.uk)

And now the punchline for Global Warming Religionist out there:
Of course so-called global warming experts claim that the frigid conditions do not disprove global warming. According to Gerald Meehl, an analyst with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo, “We’ll still have record cold temperatures. We’ll just have fewer of them.”
Badump Bump!

(Oslo) — Global warming may not be responsible for the break-up of ten Antarctic ice shelves.Scientists have dropped sensors through several holes drilled in an eastern Antarctic Ice Shelf and discovered sea water in the area is still around the freezing point.It has not reached higher temperatures that are frequently blamed for crumbling ice shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula.

The discovery is welcome news but adds to the puzzlement of scientists worried about the way the continent may be responding to climate change.

NYTIMES Blog: Dr. Betts (Britain’s Met Office) writes that it’s not enough to blame the media for uncritically reporting such claims: I have quite literally had journalists phone me up during an unusually warm spell of weather and ask “is this a result of global warming?” When I say “No, not really, it is just weather,” they’ve thanked me very much and then phoned somebody else, and kept trying until they got someone to say yes it was.

It won’t be, but this should be good news to the climate hysterics: They won’t die of global warming.  More to the point, if there is a problem of man-caused climate change, it gives us much more time to accommodate our energy and other industries to a cleaner approach without a wrenching economic dislocation.  Best of all, we don’t need global oligarchy governing us to stop a purported global warming apocalypse.  And that, my friends, is why this news–if it pans out–could be very unwelcome among certain quarters of the Copenhagen Crowd.(First Things).
I guess Lord Doom himself, Al Gore, who invented the Internet you know, and then helped Invent Global Warming, will have to skulk off and try to come up with a new scheme.
Nah, the Global Warming Religionists won’t go that quietly.
Climate change is real and has occurred on this planet for 4 billion years and will continue again for another 5 billion years until our sun burns out and turns into a red dwarf and swallows the inner  planets.
But at least right now we can hit them with a snowball when they talk about how man is destroying the earth.

Also see: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/01/what_is_it_that_global_warming.html