Will The Democrats Slaughter The Constitution For Socialized Medicine?

Nancy Pelosi is expressing confidence that the Democrat's Health-care bill will pass. Her confidence may be well founded. The Democrats are contemplating a maneuver that has been dubbed The Slaughter rule. Named after Louise Slaughter (D., N.Y.), Chair of the House Rules Committee.

See: The House Health-Care Vote and the Constitution

Under her proposal, Democrats would pass a rule that deems the Senate's health-care bill to have passed the House, without the House actually voting on the bill. This would enable Congress to vote on legislation that fixes flaws in the Senate health-care bill without facing a Senate filibuster, and without requiring House members to vote in favor of a Senate bill that is now politically toxic.

Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution may pose a problem for the Democrats, but since the Health-care bill is an “all the marbles” play for them, I think that they would be willing to risk a constitutional chalenge, thinking that if in the off chance the court rules in their favor, they will own the whole of the Republic outright.

Article 1 - The Legislative Branch
Section 7 - Revenue Bills, Legislative Process, Presidential Veto

All bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills.

Every Bill which shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate, shall, before it become a Law, be presented to the President of the United States; If he approve he shall sign it, but if not he shall return it, with his Objections to that House in which it shall have originated, who shall enter the Objections at large on their Journal, and proceed to reconsider it. If after such Reconsideration two thirds of that House shall agree to pass the Bill, it shall be sent, together with the Objections, to the other House, by which it shall likewise be reconsidered, and if approved by two thirds of that House, it shall become a Law. But in all such Cases the Votes of both Houses shall be determined by Yeas and Nays, and the Names of the Persons voting for and against the Bill shall be entered on the Journal of each House respectively. If any Bill shall not be returned by the President within ten Days (Sundays excepted) after it shall have been presented to him, the Same shall be a Law, in like Manner as if he had signed it, unless the Congress by their Adjournment prevent its Return, in which Case it shall not be a Law.

Every Order, Resolution, or Vote to which the Concurrence of the Senate and House of Representatives may be necessary (except on a question of Adjournment) shall be presented to the President of the United States; and before the Same shall take Effect, shall be approved by him, or being disapproved by him, shall be repassed by two thirds of the Senate and House of Representatives, according to the Rules and Limitations prescribed in the Case of a Bill.

M. Connell explains in the Wall Street Journal Article cited above:

As the Supreme Court wrote in Clinton v. City of New York (1998), a bill containing the "exact text" must be approved by one house; the other house must approve "precisely the same text."

Again, I think that the Democrats may be willing to gamble that the present makeup of the Supreme Court could possibly rule in their favor.

If they lose, its back to the status quo with a loss of a few seats in congress. The voting publics notoriously short memory will help them regain the lost seats in a few election cycles. No real penalty will be paid.

However, if they were to win at the Supreme Court, they will have made everyone in the Republic dependent on them for their health-care.

Lose a little versus win the whole damn enchilada.

(See also: Slaughter Solution Unconstitutional)

Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine

See: Vladimir Lenin: “Socialized Medicine is the Keystone to the Arch of the Socialist State.”

See: The story of Medicare

HT : Design Czar at CC

Democrats Screwed If They Do And Screwed If They Don't

There is an important article in the Friday edition of the Washington Post.

Its available on-line now. Most every Democrat in congress will read it. You should too.

The article is written by two long time pollsters for the Democrats. It is an oracle of doom.

See: If Democrats ignore health-care polls, midterms will be costly

First, the battle for public opinion has been lost. Comprehensive health care has been lost. If it fails, as appears possible, Democrats will face the brunt of the electorate's reaction. If it passes, however, Democrats will face a far greater calamitous reaction at the polls. Wishing, praying or pretending will not change these outcomes.

Yep. The Democrats are screwed blue and true.

I did not think it possible for the Democrats to make such a disaster of things. They have made such asses of themselves that they now risk repeating the same congressional blowout that Clinton suffered after his over-reaching attempt to socialize health-care. It was a lesson that the Democrats did not heed. It may well be one that they can not fully grasp. They will blame others. Again.

Patrick H. Caddell and Douglas E. Schoen are very worried that the Democrats will suffer an “unmitigated disaster” in the midterms. They argue their case ably and well.

The links in the article are worth looking at too.

A Climate Alarmist's /dev/null Debate Strategy

After the alarmists have politicized the science in a way that would make even Trofim Denisovich Lysenko blush, some are arguing that the best way for them to deal with those that have doubts about the credibility of AGW science is to just refuse to discuss it with them in public forums.

See: How Best to Debate Climate Deniers on TV? Simple: Don't.

The solution to the climate debate crisis is simple.

Since the Peer Review process is no longer credible, open source the data. If the data can stand on its own, it will stand. If it can't, it won't.

The email leak from the CRU proved that the much of the data and the whole of the Peer Review process must be reexamined and reformed.

No more secret data.

No more secret software.

Pelosi: "We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it"

Pelosi on why the health care bill should be passed.



Would you give a Democrat a blank check?

Elections have consequences.

The Political Lesson Of The Massa Scandal

Pick your staff carefully, with loyalty being paramount.

Massa's sin was in choosing his staff poorly. One of them betrayed him.

See: Massa Details 'Salty' Comment That Led to Resignation, Slams Dem Leaders

But Massa said the staff member "never said to me that he felt uncomfortable" and "never went to anybody." 

Rather, he said "somebody went to another staff member who was uncomfortable for him. It was a third-party political correctness statement."

 

The cruel truth is that everyone has a price. For some, the price is so impossibly high that you can trust your life to them. Others will drool for a mere thirty pieces of silver.

You need to know your people's price. What are their limits? What are their concerns? What are their weaknesses? What can make them fold on you?

In politics, when you select your core and your support staff, you must know these things.

Especially if you are a Democrat going up against Rahm Emanuel and the Obama Administration.

Republicans are not safe. While it is very unlikely that any Republican would "Massa" another, the Democrats would do it to you in a heartbeat.

Know your staffers.

Know them better than Rahm knows them.

American Troops Begin Withdrawel From Haiti

We have been very fortunate that American troop presence in Haiti has thus far been remarkably trouble free. With UN troops taking over, American troops can pull out and leave Haiti to the UN and the people of Haiti to rebuild after that terrible earthquake destroyed what little that there was to wreck in that poverty stricken nation.

See:American troops withdrawing en masse from Haiti

Soldiers are not best suited to aid work. Putting American troops in a position where they might have to shoot and kill civilians in riot situations was very risky. The downside risks in this operation were tremendous. It is good that we have dodged this bullet.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak To Undergo Gallbladder surgery.

It may not seem like much of a thing to take note of but think about what it could mean for Egypt and the world if something were to go wrong.

See: Egypt president to undergo gallbladder surgery

He is 81 years old.

He has been the President of Egypt since 1981. Now he is in his eighties. When he passes, Egypt may return to the strife and turmoil that preceded Mubarak's rule. The Muslim Brotherhood is a potent force in Egypt. They and a other factions will seek advantage and power in a post Mubarak Egypt.

Mubarak maintained stability in Egypt for almost 30 years.

His race is almost run.

What next then for Egypt?

UPDATE[19:53 March 7th, 2010] Operation Declared A Success.

He is still alive. But at 81 years of age, how long can we count on him to remain?

Pentagon Shooter A Truther Loon

It won't be up for very long so click quickly to J Patrick Beddell's Page on Wikipedia.

User:JPatrickBedell

This guy's mind was broken.

He was a nut along the lines of Theodore (Ted) Kaczynski and Joseph Stack.

UPDATE[00:25 March 5th, 2010]:The Wikipedia link is down.

It didn't take long. At midnight tonight, it was taken down.

Democrat Union Stooge, Sander M. Levin, To Chair Ways & Means

The Ways and Means Committee is the power center of the House of Representitives. It has the power to destroy. Taxation and the byzantine regulatory nightmare that details its applications are made here. If you run afoul of the Barrons and Lords that rule this thing, they can make your life a nightmare, and your business a wreck.

If you have ever wondered why businesses give money to anti-business Democrats, consider the tax-gun that these guys on the Ways and Means Committee are holding to their heads.

See:Levin to Replace Rangel as Ways and Means Chairman

Mr. Levin, a champion of organized labor who represents suburban Detroit, was elected in 1982 and is serving his 14th term. Emerging from a caucus meeting Thursday morning, he said that he would serve as “acting chairman” and appeared to have mixed feelings about the circumstances that led to his appointment.

With a Union puppet set to rule at Ways and Means, expect the Union agenda to become all but unstoppable.

Detroit, Levin's congressional district, is the model for the America of Organized Labor's dreams.

Mort Zuckerman Bails

Mort Zuckerman has decided not to run for Senate.

See: Mortimer Zuckerman announces he will not run for the Senate

In my opinion, Mort Zuckerman would have been good for the country running as a Democrat. There was some speculation and indication that had he decided to actually run, he would have run on the Republican ticket.

As a Democrat, Zuckerman could have stood as an example of what a sane and rational Democrat would look like as opposed to the far left extremist that now dominate the Democrat Party. The Democrats and the country need more sane and respectable Democrats.

I don't think that Zuckrman, an otherwise life long Democrat, would have been a good team player as a Republican. I have doubts that Zuckerman is sufficiently committed to the Republican vision of citizen primacy over the government. The Republican's need to elect more people to office that believe enough in their mission to actually fight for it while they are in office. We don't need anymore weak Republicans who are more interested in making friends with the Democrats then in fighting for the rights of citizens against a rapacious and ravenous government.

Party politics is a team sport. Mavericks that are looking to govern from the middle destroy team cohesion.

Record Levels Of Welfare, Unemployment And Other Government Benefits

See: American reliance on government at all-time high

Without record levels of welfare, unemployment and other government benefits as well as tax cuts last year, the income of U.S. households would have plunged by an astonishing $723 billion — more than four times the record $167 billion drop reported last month by the Commerce Department.

Moreover, for the first time since the Great Depression, Americans took more aid from the government than they paid in taxes.

[emphaisis is mine]

All of that is paid for somewhere. Watch your wallet.

Fun times ahead.

Investing The Souls Of Children In A Deep Evil

One of the worst things about evil is that all too often, those that are the principle actors of evil, believe that they are doing a good thing with the best of intentions.

Take for example the teachers that had their students send letters to the Israeli Ambassador to Spain in Madid that asked "Mr. Ambassador, how many Palestinians did you murder today?"

See: Israel Demands Explanation from Spain on Letters

This is a deep evil that has been done to these children. It invests them personally in the hatred by making them participants.

Everyone wants to believe that they are good. They also want to believe that the people that they love and respect are good. Now that these children have participated in this, they will have to confront their participation in something that is not good. A thing that they have been persuaded to participate in by people that they love, trust and respect.

The personal struggle that they will have to confront will be too much for many if not most of them. "How" they will reason "can people that I trust and respect goad me into evil? If they are good and deserving of my respect and my love, then what they have made me do must not be evil."

The teachers and others involved in this project surely believed that what they were doing was right and good.

What these teachers have done was a deep evil.

Who can repair the damage done to these children?

Hat Tips Weasel Zippers,
RealWest & Kosh of C2

The Looming Commercial Mortgage Debt Crisis

With California, New York, and some of the other large states on the verge of default, a problem with commercial property debt may push them that much closer to the brink.

See: Commercial Mortgage Default Rate in U.S. More Than Doubles

The default rate for commercial property mortgages held by U.S. banks more than doubled in the fourth quarter and may reach a peak of 5.4 percent at the end of next year, according to Real Capital Analytics Inc.

We may have rough seas ahead of us.

The timing of the midterm elections will make all of this that much more interesting.

Democrats Will Destroy California

The Democrats are inherently incapable of stopping themselves from destroying California.

See: California is a greater risk than Greece, warns JP Morgan chief

Mr Dimon told investors at the Wall Street bank's annual meeting that "there could be contagion" if a state the size of California, the biggest of the United States, had problems making debt repayments. "Greece itself would not be an issue for this company, nor would any other country," said Mr Dimon. "We don't really foresee the European Union coming apart." The senior banker said that JP Morgan Chase and other US rivals are largely immune from the European debt crisis, as the risks have largely been hedged.

California however poses more of a risk, given the state's $20bn (£13.1bn) budget deficit, which Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is desperately trying to reduce.

I have serious doubts about California coming to grips with it's debt problem. The Democrats own that state's legislature lock, stock and barrel. Even if Arnold Schwarzenegger were inclined to be a fiscal conservative, there is damn little that he could do to stop the Democrats from running the state smack into the ground.

The Democrats will not become fiscal conservatives. It just won't happen. Their very reason for existence is to create an ever expanding welfare state. It's what they promise to get elected and it is what they believe is right and good.

Given the Democrat's visceral hatred and fear of the concept that lowering taxes increases tax revenue, and their willingness if not eagerness to raise tax rates for both revenue collection and for social engineering purposes, what can we foresee them proposing to get themselves out of the mess that they have spent themselves into?

Can we really imagine for a moment that Democrats will seriously even entertain the notion of tax cuts and social spending reductions?

Tax cuts and social spending reductions, real tax cuts and real reductions in social spending, just won't happen.

Unfortunately, California is such a large part of our nations economy that when they hit the wall, the rest of us will feel it.

Obama Backer George Soros And The Collapse Of The Euro

See: Man who broke the Bank of England, George Soros, 'at centre of hedge funds plot to cash in on fall of the euro'

A secretive group of Wall Street hedge fund bosses are said to be behind a plot to cash in on the decline of the euro.

This may be an interesting summer.

Hillery Clinton's Risky Rhetoric On Pakistani Taxation Policies

See: Hillary urges rich Pakistanis to pay more tax

“The very well-off” in Pakistan “do not pay their fair share for the services that are needed, in health and education primarily,” she observed.

It's one thing to talk to Pakistanis about the Taliban but why does she think that she has license to lecture them on internal tax policy in regards to building up a welfare state?

Does she really believe that this kind of officious rhetoric helps us?

She has done this before.

Democrat Gov. David A. Paterson To Withdraw Campaign.

It's not a done deal yet, but likely will be in a few hours.

See: Paterson to Drop Out of Governor Race

Gov. David A. Paterson, his administration caught up in a whirlwind of allegations about its intervention in a domestic violence episode involving a top aide, is set to announce that he is suspending his election campaign and will not run in November, according to a person told about the plans.

Mr. Paterson is expected to make the announcement this afternoon. It would end his campaign less than a week after it officially began, with an angry speech at Hofstra University on Long Island. There, on the campus where he had gone to law school, the man who had been the state’s top official for 23 months — and a state senator for more than 20 years before that — presented himself as something of an outsider tiliting against special interests in Albany.

The New York Times is even acknowledging that Paterson is a Democrat in this article.

The New York Times Hides The Most Damning Truth About The New York Gov. David A. Paterson Scandel!

In a huge article detailing the corruption and abuse of political power at the heart of the scandal that threatens to bring down the Governor of New York, something is missing. It is not a mistake. It is a damning truth that can only be missing in an article of this length if this fact was omitted deliberately with knowing intent.

Take a look at the article for yourself.

See: Questions of Influence in Abuse Case of Paterson Aide

Have you spotted it yet?

The body of the article, that is everything from the first word after the byline to the last word at the bottom consists of about 2,031 words.

What is missing?

Hint: What is the Governor's Political Party?

Out of 2,031 words about a horrific scandal that threatens to knock a sitting Governor out office, Democrat is not used in the article even once.

Clearly, the truth of Gov. David A. Paterson's Democrat Party affiliation is a fact so damning, that it needed to be left out.

In fact, the only Political Party mentioned in the whole of the 2,031 words used in the NYT article about a present day political scandal involving corruption and violence is . . . Republican.

Go Figure.

Is Wall Street Switching Sides?

The times, they are a chang'en.

See: Democrats: Say Goodbye to Wall Street?

The securities and investment industry gave 2 to 1 to Democrats in early 2009 but sent nearly half its donations to Republicans by year's end, according to data complied by the Center for Responsive Politics for the Post.

The commercial banking industry and its employees gave nearly twice has much to Republicans during the last three months of 2009, the newspaper reported.

It may be that some of the Wall Street Execs and employees have figured out giving money to Democrats was like giving guns to gangsters.

The report cited JP Morgan Chase, headed by Obama supporter Jamie Dimon, as having scaled back its giving to Democrats.

"The bank and its employees, who doled out nearly $500,000 in federal contributions last year, went from giving 76 percent of the money to Democrats in the first quarter to giving 73 percent to Republicans in the fourth," the newspaper said.

Look for Democrats to start complaining about the need for more campaign contribution reform in the near future. I would not be too shocked if they start pushing hard for public financing of campaigns again.

Gasoline Prices Going Up In A Down Economy?

Gas prices are set to rise soon.

See: Experts: Gas prices in Chicago to top $3

What's pushing prices higher is the crude oil that's used to make motor fuel, said Fred Rozell of the Oil Price Information Service. Crude is an international commodity that has become ever more expensive as demand grows in China. As crude prices increase, so do gas gas prices.

Don't be shocked if the price per gallon goes up well over the $3 dollar mark,

In the not too distant future, some dumb and/or dishonest Democrats will be raising a stink about the rising price of gasoline (petrol) at the pump. Being economically challenged from their starting point, the complexities of supply and demand are not something that the Democrats care much about nor do they know how to cope with them save to use them to engage in class-warfare rhetoric.

The markets are rational. There is an increasing demand for certain types of crude. Other buyers are now on the market. The commodities markets, particularly the oil markets, are less and less directly tied to the American economy.

There is also the additional influence of the changing value of the dollar to account for. As the value of the dollar falls due to the actions of the Democrats and the Obama Administration, the dollar price of the commodity will also rise.

Shit will happen. Democrats will promote class-warfare. And the sun will also rise.

Greedy Democrats Lusting For A Tax On Gold

Democrat greed knows no bounds. Hungry for revenue from any source that She and her fellow Democrats can think of, the Governor Of Washington State is lusting for a sales tax on gold and other precious metals.

See: Is Washington's tax exemption on bullion a gold mine?

Gov. Chris Gregoire repeatedly has singled out the bullion tax break since she ran for her first term in 2004 as an example of the sort of preferential treatment that ought to end.

The governor followed through this year, proposing to start taxing bullion sales as part of her budget proposal to the Legislature. State-employee unions, interested in staving off job cuts, have come out in support.

The State-employees unions are the most powerful lobbies in the state of Washington. They have the Democrats by the short hairs. What they want, they get.

Unfortunately, the real world will not cooperate as slavishly as the Democrats and their State-employee union puppet-masters would like.

The association estimates there are now at least 100 coin and bullion dealers in the state — small coin shops and larger dealers who also sell gold as an investment for retirement accounts. Their businesses would be in jeopardy if the state reinstitutes the sales tax, Robinson said.

As an added blow, national coin-dealer trade shows no longer would consider meeting in Washington.

Because the price of gold is set like a stock on a national market, dealers operate on only a 1 to 3 percent markup, said Karen Feldman, who owns Tacoma Mall Blvd Coin Stamp & Jewelry.

Gold is selling at more than $1,000 an ounce, so if Washington dealers had to tack on a sales tax of nearly 10 percent, it would add about $100 to the price of a 1-ounce gold Krugerrand, Feldman said. Customers simply would buy gold on the Internet or in Oregon and Idaho, which don't tax bullion sales.

A tax on precious metal trades in Washington State would just move the transactions somewhere else. It is a predictable result. The Democrats are just too possessed by greed to give a tinker's damn.

HT: Fenway Nation

See Comment in Do You Deserve To Have Your 401k And Your IRA Confiscated?

Do You Deserve To Have Your 401k And Your IRA Confiscated?

If you plan on voting for Democrats, the answer is Hell Yes! Its your party pushing this abomination from hell so by all rights, you should suffer the worst from it.

See: Retiree Annuities May Be Promoted by Obama Aides

The U.S. Treasury and Labor Departments will ask for public comment as soon as next week on ways to promote the conversion of 401(k) savings and Individual Retirement Accounts into annuities or other steady payment streams, according to Assistant Labor Secretary Phyllis C. Borzi and Deputy Assistant Treasury Secretary Mark Iwry, who are spearheading the effort.

I have some comments that I will be sending their way. I will politely suggest that they forget about this crazy idea. I would encourage you to do the same and to suggest that everyone that you know do the same as well. I will also forward a like missive to my local Congress-Critter and my state Senators. This is the kind of horrifically bad idea that will get passed through a Democrat controlled Congress and White-House in the dead of night if we aren't aggressively vigilant.

If this thing can't be stopped, I will liquidate my 401k's and my IRA's rather then give those scum sucking, bottom dwelling, excrements any more control over my retirement then they already have. Its my money. I earned it. I am going to spend it however I see fit. I would rather take the tax hit for liquidating everything then give the Democrats anything else to hang over my head.

Voting to put Democrats in office is no different then voting to put thugs and thieves in charge of safeguarding your rights and your money. Only bad things will come of it.

See also:Class Warfare's Next Target: 401(k) Savings

See also:Are the Democrats Coming After Your Savings?

HT: JCM at CC

Disproving The Nightmare Lie Of AGW

The Lysenkoism of Anthropogenic Global Warming will continue until like a Vampire, a wooden stake is driven through its heart.

See: The AGW Smoking Gun By Gary Thompson

The science behind the AGW hypothesis is that increased amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere (that humans produce by burning fossil fuels) will block more outgoing long-wave IR radiation (OLR) from exiting the atmosphere and thereby warm the surface. It is well-known that IR radiation causes CO2 molecules to vibrate, but only at very specific wavelengths (wavelengths are the distances between peaks of each wave), and that wavelength is 15µm. (Fifteen µm means that each wavelength crests at a distance of 15 millionths of a meter.) As was discussed above, this vibration of the molecule causes it to heat and then radiate IR radiation back toward the atmosphere and the surface of the Earth. If the solar activity is taken to remain constant, more CO2 in the atmosphere will trap more of the OLR, and thus cause a net heating of the planet.

So what type of experiment could be performed to test this AGW hypothesis? If there were satellites in orbit monitoring the emission of OLR over time at the same location, then OLR could be measured in a very controlled manner. If, over time, the emission of OLR in the wavelengths that CO2 absorbs decreases over time, then that would prove the AGW hypothesis (i.e., that OLR is being absorbed by CO2 and heating the planet instead of being emitted from the atmosphere). But what if, over time (say, over thirty years), the emissions of OLR wavelengths that CO2 absorb remained constant? That would disprove the hypothesis and put the AGW argument to bed.

As luck would have it, that experiment has actually been performed! Three journal papers report the data from three monitoring satellites that have measured the OLR of 1997 and 2006 and compared those measurements to 1970, and they are located here, here, and here.

HT to PaladinPhil and JCM of CC


~~~

(Carthago delenda est!)

The peer review process needs to be reformed.

No more secret data.

No more secret software.

Everything must be be out in the open and available for all to see.

Bad CPAC Kookiness

The straw poll results out of the CPAC meeting are a bit of bad news.

See: Rep. Ron Paul surprise winner of CPAC presidential straw poll

Ron Paul, the isolationist nutburger, won the Presidential straw poll. Romney placed second with Palin showing at third.

Ron Paul is not acceptable.

No fucking way.

What an embarrassment.

Environmentalists And The Change In The Climate

The environment for the Climate Change Alarmist is changing. More and more their critics are likening them to Chicken Little, or the Boy Who Cried Wolf.

Unfortunately for them, those criticism are very apt.

See: Climate turning against kooky alarmists

The latest revelation is that there's been no significant warming for 15 years. One prominent climate scientist has acknowledged the current warming period may be no hotter than the medieval warming era (800 to 1300 A.D.) when the world lived green with nary a SUV or industrial smokestack around.

The devastating Hurricane Katrina of 2005 was cited as the harbinger of killer storms to come, spawned by a warming planet. Then came this winter's record snowstorms. Now the climate alarmists lecture us that one season's weather tells us nothing about climate change.

Actually, they've gone further to claim that the cold weather mess is in fact a product of a hotter globe. Their cause has come to resemble religion more than science -- it explains everything! One British Internet site, www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm, offers a list of articles linking global warming to a whole catalog of woes -- from the conflict in Darfur to the deadly 2007 Minneapolis I-35 bridge collapse to more potent dope from poppies to higher waves off the Pacific Northwest coast to a boom in kitten litters in Toronto to the prevalence of acne.

It is not hard to predict that we will see more commentary like this in the future.

Testing Blogger Comments

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If you would like to comment on this blog, use just about any other browser besides FireFox. Try using IE, Safari, Chrome, Epiphany, Konqueror, etc.

I have tested the Blogger Comment feature using alternative browsers. With other browsers, everything works just fine. WIth FireFox, not so much.

If you are on a MS Windows system, try using Safari or Chrome.

Former IPCC Chairman: ‘Every error exaggerated the impact of change’

Professor Watson, a former IPCC Chairman, is calling for an investigation of what happened with the IPCC report. Professor Watson points out that that the errors are just too one sided to be easily excused as simple mistakes.

See UN must investigate warming ‘bias’, says former climate chief
‘Every error exaggerated the impact of change’

Professor Watson, currently chief scientific adviser to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, said that if the errors had just been innocent mistakes, as has been claimed by the current chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, some would probably have understated the impact of climate change.

The errors have emerged in the past month after simple checking of the sources cited by the 2,500 scientists who produced the report.

The report falsely claimed that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035 when evidence suggests that they will survive for another 300 years. It also claimed that global warming could cut rain-fed North African crop production by up to 50 per cent by 2020. A senior IPCC contributor has since admitted that there is no evidence to support this claim.

The Dutch Government has asked the IPCC to correct its claim that more than half the Netherlands is below sea level. The environment ministry said that only 26 per cent of the country was below sea level.

Professor Watson, who served as chairman of the IPCC from 1997-2002, said: “The mistakes all appear to have gone in the direction of making it seem like climate change is more serious by overstating the impact. That is worrying. The IPCC needs to look at this trend in the errors and ask why it happened.”

[Emphasis is mine - Syrah]

The "why" of it all is multifaceted. From the highly political nature of how Academia receives funding for research projects to the narcissistic desire of many in the environmental movement to save the world. The temptation of the dark side became too great for many of the well intentioned people in the environmental and climate sciences to resist.

They meant well. It is very important to understand that. They really did and really do want what is best. The did not wake one day and decide to be villains or monsters. Many fell into it unwittingly and with the best of intentions and the noblest of goals. They became caught up in something bigger than themselves, with their social and their financial lives caught up in a maelstrom of compounding errors and narcissistic conceits that became ever more impossible and dangerous to escape.

Much of their data was good and they could and did take refuge in that. Unfortunately, much of their data was just dead wrong, plain missing or even totally faked. Unsurprisingly, their conclusions suffered miserably from their impossible reality.

I recall being lectured as a young student of science about the sins of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko. He was a man who began with the best of intentions, the noblest of goals, and he was also terribly wrong. His error led to the deaths and imprisonments of those that challenged his ideas. His ideas had become the "settled science" of the party and were enforced by the guns and the bludgeons of the state.

Trofim Denisovich Lysenko's ideas became the scientific "consensus" of his nation. That consensus did not make his ideas any less wrong. That consensus did not prevent people from starving or from being shot or from being imprisoned because they were wrong.

The horror of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko's sins are truly monumental.

Every scientist and probably every politician should bow their heads in prayer every day, earnestly beseeching whatever God they pray to, that they do not become so full of themselves that they end up committing the same sins as Trofim Denisovich Lysenko.

~~~

(Carthago delenda est!)

The peer review process needs to be reformed.

No more secret data.

No more secret software.

Everything must be be out in the open and available for all to see.

Professor Jones: for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

The foundations of the AGW movement has taken another serious blow, this time, one delivered by one of their principles.

See Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995

Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.

And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

It has all been nothing but bafflegab and flumadiddle designed to help the power mad fleece the public treasuries. Tons and tons of money have been burned to foment this fraud. Countless laws and regulations have been passed and enforced to prevent something that mankind can neither start nor stop.

And it had all the scientific credibility of the Piltdown Man.

The peer review process needs to be reformed. (Carthago delenda est!)

No more secret data.

No more secret software.

Everything must be be out in the open and available for all to see.

The IPCC, Sea Levels and Flooding - An Underlying Credibility Issue

The IPCC is acknowledging that they erred when they stated that 55% of the Netherlands is below sea level.

See U.N. climate panel admits Dutch sea level flaw

The 2007 report included the sentence: "The Netherlands is an example of a country highly susceptible to both sea level rise and river flooding because 55 percent of its territory is below sea level."

"A preliminary analysis suggests that the sentence discussed should end with: 'because 55 percent of the Netherlands is at risk of flooding'," the IPCC note said.

So what drove the need to have the original erroneous sentence in the initial IPCC report?

Was it included because like the Himalayan Glacier Melt farce, it was meant to advance a political agenda?

Given all of the other problems that the IPCC report has been shown to have, given the revelations from the CRU email dump that brought to light the attempts to manipulate data and rig the peer review process, how can we believe that it was anything other than politics?

The whole peer review process needs to be reformed. No more secret data. No more secret software. If they can't tell us how they arrived at their conclusions including showing us the raw data and the underlying programing that they used to derive them, then they should not be taken anymore seriously then we should take the Discovery Institute "Intelligent Design" creationist.

Its time to scrap the IPCC in its entirety and start from scratch with data and programing that they can show us.

Zuckerman Versus Obama

Zuckerman is rumored to be considering a run for the Senate.

If he does, it looks like it will be a candidacy that is a reaction to Obama's extremism.

Read Zuckerman's own words: He's Done Everything Wrong

Obama’s ability to connect with voters is what launched him. But what has surprised me is how he has failed to connect with the voters since he’s been in office. He’s had so much overexposure. You have to be selective. He was doing five Sunday shows. How many press conferences? And now people stop listening to him. The fact is he had 49.5 million listeners to first speech on the economy. On Medicare, he had 24 million. He’s lost his audience. He has not rallied public opinion. He has plunged in the polls more than any other political figure since we’ve been using polls. He’s done everything wrong. Well, not everything, but the major things.

I don’t consider it a triumph. I consider it a disaster.

One business leader said to me, “In the Clinton administration, the policy people were at the center, and the political people were on the sideline. In the Obama administration, the political people are at the center, and the policy people are on the sidelines.”

I’m very disappointed. We endorsed him. I voted for him. I supported him publicly and privately.

There is talk that if Zuckerman decides to run for the Senate, he will do so as a Republican or as an Independent.

I could respect Zuckerman as an Independent. I would have a hard time trusting him as a Republican. He really should run as a Democrat. The Democrats need a few sane people in their Party. Mort could help them reduce the influence of the kooks in the Democrat Party and still stay true to his political ideals.

Is Zuckerman A Republican Or A Democrat?

He will have to decide if he is going to run for the Senate.

See Zuckerman Said to Mull Run for U.S. Senate

Mr. Zuckerman, 72, is known as a Democrat, , but if he runs, it would likely be as a Republican or independent, to avoid participating in a costly primary.

In doing so, Mr. Zuckerman would be following the path of his close friend and fellow media executive, Michael R. Bloomberg, who switched his party affiliation from Democratic to Republican to run for mayor of New York City.

What is he?

I do not like candidates that choose their political party affiliation by sticking a wet finger to the wind. They are suspect from the start. They cannot be trusted. One day they may be with you, the next they are against you.

Enableing Savagery.

The following is a security-cam video of a savage beating that took place in Seattle a few weeks ago.

Warning. This is brutal.



This is what an emasculated culture devolves into.

The thugs become the De Facto rulers of the city.

The guards will not protect you. The bystanders will do nothing, especially if there are guards their doing nothing. Guards in uniform. Guards looking all the world as if they are there to prevent this kind of savagery from taking place. Guards guarding nothing.

The victim of the attack in the video thought that the guards could protect her.

See: Girl, 3 men charged in tunnel attack

The 15-year-old girl who was beaten and robbed in the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel as security personnel watched said she had headed straight for the guards because she thought they would help her.

"I went to the security and told them that these kids were trying to jump me," the girl wrote in a statement to King County sheriff's investigators. "I know that I am about to get jumped and I am hanging around the guards to try and get protection. ... I thought the security guards would defend me."

But the girl was wrong.

The guards were following "policy."

According to the Sheriff's Office and King County Metro, the guards followed policy by not intervening in the Jan. 28 attack. Instead, they alerted transit officials, who summoned police.

The attack has prompted Metro to discuss contract changes with Olympic Security Services, whose guards were in the tunnel during the attack. It also has sparked widespread anger at the guard policy and with the suspects accused of the attack and robbery.

It was policy? Policy to not intervene?

What kind of madness puts such a policy in place?

What kind of madness requires adverse publicity from a video like this being released to make a change to that policy?

Do you believe that if this video had not been released that any change would have been made to their "policy."

Madness.

IPCC's African Rainfall Reduction Claims Prove Unsupportable.

The IPCC report continues to fail under scrutiny.

See Africagate: top British scientist says UN panel is losing credibility

The most important is a claim that global warming could cut rain-fed north African crop production by up to 50% by 2020, a remarkably short time for such a dramatic change. The claim has been quoted in speeches by Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, and by Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general.

This weekend Professor Chris Field, the new lead author of the IPCC’s climate impacts team, told The Sunday Times that he could find nothing in the report to support the claim. The revelation follows the IPCC’s retraction of a claim that the Himalayan glaciers might all melt by 2035, dubbed 'Glaciergate' by commentators.

Someone should remind all of the responsible persons involved in putting together the now much-discredited IPCC report of the old tale about the little boy who cried wolf. The story ends badly for all involved, except for he wolf. The wolf does alright. But the boy, the sheep, and the villagers, not so well.

Audi, Eco-Nazis and the Green Police

Audi fucked-up.

You have to wonder what would posses a German corporation to sponsor an ad like this.



The Green Police?

Fucking Eco-Nazis!

Towards A More Productive And Useful Understanding Of North Korea

Christopher Hitchens reviews B.R. Myers' The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters.

Visiting North Korea some years ago, I was lucky to have a fairly genial "minder" whom I'll call Mr. Chae. He guided me patiently around the ruined and starving country, explaining things away by means of a sort of denial mechanism and never seeming to lose interest in the gargantuan monuments to the world's most hysterical and operatic leader-cult. One evening, as we tried to dine on some gristly bits of duck, he mentioned yet another reason why the day should not long be postponed when the whole peninsula was united under the beaming rule of the Dear Leader. The people of South Korea, he pointed out, were becoming mongrelized. They wedded foreigners—even black American soldiers, or so he'd heard to his evident disgust—and were losing their purity and distinction. Not for Mr. Chae the charm of the ethnic mosaic, but rather a rigid and unpolluted uniformity.

I was struck at the time by how matter-of-factly he said this, as if he took it for granted that I would find it uncontroversial. And I did briefly wonder whether this form of totalitarianism, too (because nothing is more "total" than racist nationalism), was part of the pitch made to its subjects by the North Korean state.

When Christopher Hitchens is good, he is very good. His review of B.R. Myers' book, flavored with his own personal in person observations of North Korea, make it clear that the oft ignored and shunned little crazy kingdom of North Korea may be far too dangerous to just ignore and shun.

I think I will head on over to the bookstore this weekend.

Hat Tip To FinallyFree at Correspondence Committee

An Example Of How Climate Change Hysteria Hurts Everyone

Soil erosion is a very serious problem. As the world's population increases, the importance of good soil conservation practices increases in pace.

The US had an early attention getting experience with why good soil management is essential. The Great Dust Bowl was impossible to ignore. We learned a lot from it. There is still more that we can learn to help us protect and better manage our soils.

However, confusing soil science with the discredited AGW hysteria will do more to hurt the advancement of good soil management practices than it will do to help it.

See: Britain facing food crisis as world's soil 'vanishes in 60 years

Fertile soil is being lost faster than it can be replenished and will eventually lead to the “topsoil bank” becoming empty, an Australian conference heard.

Chronic soil mismanagement and over farming causing erosion, climate change and increasing populations were to blame for the dramatic global decline in suitable farming soil, scientists said.

[Emphasis is Mine]

Due to climate change?

Bullshit.

Bad farming practices yes. Climate change? Give me a fucking break.

This is the kind of bullshit that discredits science. Every kind of environmental calamity that is discussed, some idiot comes along and claims that "climate change" is the cause or part of the cause.

In this case, climate change is not a factor. Deep tilling and the failure to let a field lay fallow after a season can destroy the soil. Rotating crops and protecting the soil from the wind can do a lot to remedy this very serious problem. Fretting over a non-existent climate crises won't help at all and will actually make the problem worse by distracting people and resources away from things that could actually help.

Blaming soil erosion on climate change? When the "scientist" include that drivel in these kinds of reports, they make a mockery of science, or at the very least, make it appear as if they can't really be taken seriously. If they are including climate change in this kind of report without any real or credible evidence, then how can we trust the other claims that they make in their report?

Soil erosion is a very serious issue. It should be discussed and treated by the scientific and political community as a serious issue. Attempting to tie soil erosion to anthropogenic climate change is dangerous and stupid.

Dutch Call "BullShit" On IPCC Report

The hits just keep coming. Holland issued another blow to the IPCC report, challenging the grossly exaggerated claim it made that more than half of the country was below sea level.

See:Netherlands adds to UN climate report controversy

IPCC experts calculated that 55 percent of the Netherlands was below sea level by adding the area below sea level -- 26 percent -- to the area threatened by river flooding -- 29 percent -- Vallaart said.

"They should have been clearer," Vallaart said, adding that the Dutch office for environmental planning, an IPCC partner, had exact figures.

Correcting the error had been "on the agenda several times" but had never actually happened, Vallaart said.

The spokesman said he regretted the fact that proper procedure was not followed and said it should not be left to politicians to check the IPCC's numbers.

The Dutch environment ministry will order a review of the report to see if it contains any more errors, Vallaart said.

The CRU Email dump has unraveled the IPCC report. The more that the report is critically examined, the more crap that is found in it.

The CRU Email dump and the consequent unraveling of the IPCC is proof that the whole of the "Peer Review" process needs to be reexamined. At present, "Peer Reviewed," means squat.

The Secular Religion Of Global Warming

Michael Barone has an amusing article in the Boston Herald.

Some decades hence, I suspect, people will look back and wonder why so many elites were taken in to the point that they advocated devoting trillions of dollars to a cause that was based on flagrant dishonesty.

The secular religion of global warming has all the elements of a religious faith: original sin (we pollute), ritual (must recycle), redemption (renounce economic growth) and the sale of indulgences (carbon offsets).

People in the grip of such a religious frenzy evidently feel justified in lying, concealing good evidence and plucking bad evidence from any flimsy source.

The Global Warmist are on a quest to save the world. Anything that stands in the way of their quest to save the world threatens the world, even it is just data that does not conform to their preconceived notions. For the Global Warmist, the stakes are so high, there is so much at risk, they cannot permit the inconvenient truth to stand in their way.

They believe with a powerful belief. Their Crusade is not yet over. For them, these recent setbacks are minor. They also have many willing allies in the government and in the media that have profited in both power and money from the global warming hysteria of the last three decades. They will give each other succor and rejoin the fray with even more bitterness and hatred for "the evil" that has set them back.

It is incumbent upon us, the enemies of the anti-human luddites of the environmental movements, to heed the ancient old ways of battle. When you have shattered your enemies ranks and knocked your enemy to the ground, when you have winded him, shriven his shield, broken his sword, and splintered his lance, you keep hitting him. Do not stop till he is dead. You can show your enemies mercy only after they have fully and completely surrendered, not before, and even then, you must not be too eager to let the hurts they have caused you to be forgotten.

Fun times.

Hat tip: Kosh'sShadow at Correspondence Committee

NASA Probe To Study The Importance And Role Of Sun Storms

NASA is embarking on what will be an interesting mission. The Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) probe is set to launch in less then two weeks time. The probe will observe disturbances in the sun's atmosphere.

Barbara Thompson, project scientist, said: “It is Nasa’s first weather mission and it aims to characterise everything on the sun that can impact on the Earth and near Earth.

“We know things happen on the sun which affect spacecraft, communications and radio signals. If we can understand the underlying causes of what is happening then we can turn this information into forecasts.

The Sun is our planet's primary source of heat. This mission has the potential to reveal more information about our planets unstable climate then any study involving tree rings ever has.

4 billion years of an unstable climate before SUV's were even invented is nothing to sneeze at. It is good that NASA will begin to look at our climate's primary driver, the sun, with an eye to how it can affect things here on earth.

Space Exploration For India: All Systems Are Go!

Here in the US, at the direction of Democrat President Obama, our nation is scaling back our efforts to reach for the stars.

India, on the other hand, is stepping it up.

From CNN World: India plans manned space mission in 2016

New Delhi, India (CNN) -- Indian researchers have announced plans to send their astronauts to space in 2016.

The cost of the proposed mission is estimated at $4.8 billion, said S. Satish, spokesman for the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO).

Studies have begun on the design of the crew capsules that will be used to put a pair of astronauts 300 kilometers aloft for seven days, he said. The project budget has been sent for federal approval, he added.

While the US is saddled with politicians launching ever larger and ever more intrusive government programs, India is taking steps to become a space faring nation.

The race to the stars will not go those driven to shakedown the banks. It will go to those that see man's place among the stars.

Barrack Obama, Reckless Lending, The State Of The Union and Punishing Banks.

There are lots of people out there taking the President's State Of The Union Speech to pieces. It lends itself easily to that task. It really is a stinking pile.

The part that I would like to highlight is a few of President Obama's comments about Banks.

Our most urgent task upon taking office was to shore up the same banks that helped cause this crisis.

The Banks are to blame?

Look, I am not interested in punishing banks. I'm interested in protecting our economy. A strong, healthy financial market makes it possible for businesses to access credit and create new jobs. It channels the savings of families into investments that raise incomes. But that can only happen if we guard against the same recklessness that nearly brought down our entire economy.

Barrak Obama's interests in banks goes way back. Punishing banks is not a new thing to him. I suspect that from a certain point of view, he really isn't particularly interested in “punishing” banks per say, but punishing them is not a new thing for him.

From Forbes.com: A Poisonous Cocktail by Peter Schweizer

Obama's battle against banks has a long history. In 1994, freshly out of Harvard Law School, he joined two other attorneys in filing a lawsuit against Citibank, the giant mortgage lender. In Selma S. Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank, the plaintiffs claimed that although they had ostensibly been denied home loans "because of delinquent credit obligations and adverse credit," the real culprit was institutional racism. The suit alleged that Citibank had violated the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, the Fair Housing Act and, for good measure, the 13th Constitutional Amendment, which abolished slavery. The bank denied the charge, but after four years of legal wrangling and mounting legal bills, elected to settle. According to court documents, the three plaintiffs received a total of $60,000. Their lawyers received $950,000.

Barrack Obama has been a major player in our current banking problem for a long time.

He is offering the people of the United States solutions to a problem that can substantively be laid at his feet. It would be unfair to lay the blame exclusively on Barrack Obama. Lots of people were helping “punish” the banks. He was just one of many.

And now he offers to help fix the problem.

A problem that he helped create.

What a guy.

Fox News Wins In Trustworthyness.

Reported at Politico: Poll: Fox is most trusted name in news

Fox is the most trusted television news network in the country, according to a new poll out Tuesday.

A Public Policy Polling nationwide survey of 1,151 registered voters Jan. 18-19 found that 49 percent of Americans trusted Fox News, 10 percentage points more than any other network.

Ouch.

That has to sting.

Worse yet, Public Policy Polling (PPP) is a Democrat affiliated polling company.

I have some concerns about the survey because it was a robot-poll, which typically excludes cell phone only households. Cell phone only households are a large and growing minority of eligible respondents. Excluding cell phone only households from a poll of this type can result in some misleading numbers.

PPP is a Democrat affiliated polling company known for its extreme partisanship. These are the same yucks that thought it would be fun to ask "Do you think that George Bush is the Antichrist?" and "Do you think that Barak Obama is the Antichrist?" and then report results that were almost identical as a slam against Republicans. In a survey that acknowledges a +/-3.9% margin of error, a 2 point difference is no difference at all. These are the kind of snotty hacks that give polling a bad name.

Beau Biden Decides Against Running For Senate

Vice President Joe Biden's son, Beau Biden, has decided to just run for re-election as Delaware's Attorney General instead.

From Fox News:GOP Encouraged to Pick Up Senate Seat as Beau Biden Decides Not to Follow Dad

"Clearly, Beau Biden's decision not to run for the United States Senate represents a major recruiting setback for national Democrats, who have been counting on his candidacy to keep the vice president's former seat in Democrat control," Reed said. "As we saw in Massachusetts last week, voters clearly stated that these seats belong to the people - not to either political party or dynasty."

Democrats on Tuesday saw the seat formerly held by the late Sen. Ted Kennedy in Massachusetts fall to Republican Scott Brown. The win raised questions about Democrats' ability to hold onto seats once thought to be reliable for their party.

This is not good for the Democrats. It makes it look as if they see defeat in their future when their more promising candidates give up on what would have been easy wins.

I was looking forward to a Beau Biden race. What little I had heard about him made it sound like he was one of the very few Democrats that wasn't a stark raving loon.

Hat tip/ design czar @ Correspondence Committee

Bogus Claims Were Included In The IPCC Report To Advance Political Agendas

More proof that politics trumped science in the UN's IPCC report.

From MailOnline: Glacier scientist: I knew data hadn't been verified

The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.

Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. 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.’

This is just the tip of the iceberg glacier.

The IPCC report and every other outrageous environmental claim will begin to be rightly challenged. Good science will stand. Politicized science will fail.

UN IPCC Report Included Unsupportable Linkage Between Natural Disasters And AGW

Another indication that the UN IPCC report was a sloppy con from the word go.

TimesOnLine: UN wrongly linked global warming to natural disasters

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.

The AGW con-artists needed the linkage so it was included in the report. They effectively said "fuckall" to the demands and rigors of science because for them, the authority and prestige of the UN IPCC report is just a cover and a stage-prop for their grifting.

(PS - Its the Sun that you guys need to be looking at. You know, that great big energy pump in the sky. Its kind of important.)

The New York Times Exposes A Blogger Suffering From A Self-Inflicted Flame-War

Many of us knew that the New York Times would be publishing a feature article about a certain blogger this month. That his melodramatic flouncing away from “the right” would attract the attention of the New York Times was no surprise. What was surprising was how thorough the New York Times article was. It wasn't the "puff piece" that we had expected that blogger to get.

Johnathon Dee of the New York Times gets much right about how the fracas spun out of control.

It was a kind of orgy of delinking, an intentionally set brush fire meant to clear the psychic area around Johnson and ensure that no one would connect him to anyone else, period, unless he first said it was O.K. No one would define Johnson’s allegiances but Johnson. Of course, much of this was accomplished by the very methods he felt so threatened by: a kind of six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon approach to political rectitude, in which the existence of even a search-engine-generated connection between two people anywhere in the world implied a mutual back-scratching, an ideological partnership. It was unfair and simplistic and petulant, but it also seems to have achieved its goal. Very few people on the right want to be linked with Charles Johnson anymore.

I sure don't. I won't link to him. I don't even like having his or his blog's name mentioned here in these quotes.

The following paragraph is essential to understanding how that place devolved into what it has become. I am very surprised that Johnathon Dee included it. I am grateful that he did.

No one ever said L.G.F., or any blog, had to be about the free exchange of ideas. “It’s his sandbox,” Pamela Geller says simply. “He can do whatever he wants.” Still, if you read L.G.F. today, you will find it hard to miss the paradox that a site whose origins, and whose greatest crisis, were rooted in opposition to totalitarianism now reads at times like a blog version of “Animal Farm.” Johnson seems obsessed with what others think of him, posting much more often than he used to about references to himself elsewhere on the Internet and breaking into comment threads (a recent one was about the relative merits of top- versus front-loaded washing machines) to call commenters’ attention to yet another attack on him that was posted at some other site. On the home page, you can click to see the Top 10 comments of the day, as voted on by registered users; typically, half of those comments will be from Johnson himself. Even longtime commenters have been disappeared for one wrong remark, or one too many, and when it comes to wondering where they went or why, a kind of fearful self-censorship obtains. He has banned readers because he has seen them commenting on other sites of which he does not approve. He is, as he reminds them, always watching. L.G.F. still has more than 34,000 registered users, but the comment threads are dominated by the same two dozen or so names. And a handful of those have been empowered by Johnson sub rosa to watch as well — to delete critical comments and, if necessary, to recommend the offenders for banishment. It is a cult of personality — not that there’s any compelling reason, really, that it or any blog should be presumed to be anything else.

That place got freaky weird.

Cults and abusive spouses threaten their victims with being cast-out. They will tell their victims, and it will be echoed by their enablers, that they would be nothing without their leader/spouse. They are also slowly but then thoroughly isolated from friends and relatives outside the group/family. Even speaking to or associating with casual acquaintances or strangers on the outside is discouraged and sometimes even forbidden.

These are powerful tools of control. As you can see from what Johnathon Dee describes, those tools were evident in their use, even if their named intent was for something else. When these methods start out small and grow in their utilization over time, the victim may not even recognize that they are being manipulated in this way. They become like the frogs sitting in a pan of cool water with the heat set on low.

But . . .

This is the internet . . .

I would never have thought such relationships could be made on the web.

Now I am certain that they can.

I used to think that internet cults were an impossibility.

Now I believe that they are possible and even real.

Pres. Obama Is Nationalizing The Democrat 2010 Midterm Campaigns

Pres. Obama is assigning his 2008 Campaign manager, David Plouffe, to coordinate his parties campaigns accross the whole country.

Mr. Obama has asked his former campaign manager, David Plouffe, to oversee House, Senate and governor’s races to stave off a hemorrhage of seats in the fall. The president ordered a review of the Democratic political operation — from the White House to party committees — after last week’s Republican victory in the Massachusetts Senate race, aides said.

This is a risky stratagy in that by running the Democrat's various 2010 campigns from the White-House, with Obama 2008 Campaign staffers, they will make the Midterm Elections de facto a referendum on Obama.

This does not mean that the Midterm Elections will be a cake walk for Republicans. Karl Rove explained a few weeks back how the Democrats think that they can retain and even potentialy gain power.

Mr. Obama can placate congressional Democrats by arguing that all that extra spending he has already crammed through can cover their spending desires at least through the 2010 congressional elections.

The Democrats believe that campaigns can be bought. They are banking on it this next go-round.

The Democrat Rank and File Rebellion Begins tonight.

It may sputter and die quickly or it could result in Reid and Pelosi being tossed out of their leadership posts on their asses.

A political office is a pretty cushy job. Elected Democrats now understand that their once "safe" seats, even the safest of them as were the Massachusetts Senate seats, are now all at risk because of Obama's, Pelosi's and Reid's extremist leadership over the last 365 days.

From Politico: The fallout: Democrats rethinking health care bill

Republican Scott Brown’s upset win in Massachusetts on Tuesday threatened to derail hopes of passing a health reform bill this year, as the White House and Democratic leaders faced growing resistance from rank-and-file members to pressing ahead with a bill following the Bay State backlash.

Democratic leaders and the White House insisted ahead of the vote that they aren’t preparing to desert health care. They admit they’ll have to come up with a new strategy to win passage but said they didn’t want to allow one Senate race to take them off course on the president’s top legislative item for the year.

This was not just "one Senate race" and the Democrats know it. It is a Republican trouncing a Democrat out of the one of the safest Democrat seats in the country largely due to the Democrats arrogant and base lust for power.

Tonight, the Democrats got their clock cleaned. They know it. They will try to play it down, but they all know the truth of it.

The Democrats will now show their true colors in how the deal with seating Senator Elect Brown.

If they play games and delay seating him, they will just make their naked malice and greed so plain that only the willfully blind will not see it.

Tuesday, Massachusetts will elect a new Senator.

So far, Scott Brown, the Republican, looks likely to win in a landslide. A big landslide.

Elected Democrats are predictably freaking out. Well that they should. This race may be a bellwether for the next ten years.

If the establishment Democrat, Martha Coakley, loses big to a Republican in Massachusetts, then no Democrat will feel that their seat is “safe” anywhere. If a Democrat can lose “Ted Kennedy's seat,” then all bets are off on every Democrat “safe” seat.

If Coakley loses, and loses big, watch for a rebellion among elected Democrats who will realize that they could lose their cushy sinecures by being associated too closely with Nancy Pelosi's and Harry Reid's flavor of politics.

The polls are all over the place. There are many reasons for this. The whole polling industry is struggling with some huge changes that they must come to grips with.

The primary problem is cellphones and cellphone only households.

If you would like a first hand anecdotal feel for how big of a problem cellphones present to the polling industry, ask the following question in the next large group that you are in. “How many of you no longer have a land-line phone and only have cellphones in your household?” If your group is made up largely of people under forty years of age, odds are that half to over half of them will be cellphone only households. This is very significant. It is a game changer in the polling business. It is also a number that is very likely to increase over the next ten years. In twenty years, land-line phones may be as anachronistic as Telegraph machines.

There are rules for calling cellphone sample that make it very expensive to work with. Mainly, you cannot use any kind of automated dialing method. If you are knowingly dialing on cellphone sample, you must hand dial the phone numbers.

Robo polls will miss cellphone only respondents. The results of a robo poll are ever more doubtful due to the fact that the robot dialed poll cannot account for the opinions of respondents that live in cellphone only households. (Texting may be a way around this problem. So far as I know, there are no rules against using automated systems to send out text messages to cellphones.[Where there is a will, there is a way - especially if there is money involved.])

When it comes down to the wire in regards to elections, I find that I am much more trustful of the punters then I am of the pollsters.

The punters ask a different question. They do not ask “Who will you vote for?” they ask “Who are you willing to bet good money, your money, on to win?” Its a question of knowledge, not of opinion. Which makes its a very different question. The results can be significantly different and potentially far more accurate.

Predicting elections was once something that the odds-makers dominated. Scientific telephone polling changed the game and allowed telephone pollsters to take that role away from the bookies. Now the game may be changing again, giving the advantage in predicting election outcomes back to the gamblers.

Take a look at Intrade and watch the election numbers as they come in Tuesday. Election Markets may be the way of things to come. Time will tell.

And these are very exciting and interesting times indeed.

Can the New York Times Be Marketed Like Porn?

The New York Times will soon try a strategy that will reduce its readership and relevance, further accelerating its decline.

How?

They will try to charge you to read their articles.

This model does work for online porn. (It is pretty amazing that it does since so much Internet porn is available completely free of charge.)

The New York Times must think that their content will sell as well as porn. I think that they should keep their pants on.

News, for the most part, is not porn.

Most people will just begin to skip links to the NYT and to any other news organization that attempts this online subscription (Porn) model.

Display ads can still be seen in the off the rack "paper" newspapers. When people used to regularly read news printed on paper, display ads were profitable.

Then the Internet happened and print readership plummeted. Click-through ads were then touted and became the de facto norm for online advertising.

Click-through ads are stupid. Think about the long ago days of yore when you actually read a "paper" newspaper. There were ads all over the execrable thing were there not? Did you drop everything when you came across an advertisement about a product or service that interested you, pick up the phone and call or hop in your car to run out and buy it? No? No shit.

What on earth would make anyone think that such a model would then work for news-sites on the Internet?

Display ads in the paper and even the ads on television and radio worked on the concept of impressions. The idea was to use the ads to put the product brand or service brand in your mind for when you were actually ready to buy that type of product or service. The impression concept focused on shaping your opinion of which brand you would buy when you were ready to buy. There was no expectancy of an immediate customer response while you were reading through the newspaper.

While the Internet changed the way the news was delivered to the reader, it did not change the way the reader responded to display advertisements.

Display ads can be profitable online. Keep them simple. Sell them by the old impression model. Human psychology has not changed even if the news delivery medium has.

Leave the click-through ads for the adult content websites.

Another AGW Hysteria Fraud Exposed.

More indications that you have to view Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) claims with a certain amount of skepticism.

From an article titled World misled over Himalayan glacier meltdown at Times Online

Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world's glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.

In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC's 2007 report.

It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was "speculation" and was not supported by any formal research. If confirmed it would be one of the most serious failures yet seen in climate research. The IPCC was set up precisely to ensure that world leaders had the best possible scientific advice on climate change.

It turns out that it was all just gum-flapping bullshit.

The old peer review process must be revised. No more secret data. No more secret programing. If they “can't” share their data and their sources, they should not be given the time of day.

HT: squatch at Correspondence Committee (See Post #20)

A Compassionate Invasion?

From a Time Magazine article titled: The U.S. Military in Haiti: A Compassionate Invasion

The Obama Administration is doing things differently: Haiti, for all intents and purposes, became the 51st state at 4:53 p.m. Tuesday in the wake of its deadly earthquake. If not a state, then at least a ward of the state — the United States — as Washington mobilized national resources to rush urgent aid to Haiti's stricken people.

I wonder if these idiots understand what they are saying here. They are putting us in the position of being responsible for Haiti. Do they sling around their words like the meaningless guttural utterances of drunkards or do they really think that the US should become Haiti's owner?

Will Haiti Devolve Into A Mogadishu?

The Earthquake in Haiti is truly a catastrophe.

The number of dead may be innumerable. We will likely never really know the true number of causalities. In that kind of climate, the bodies must be disposed of quickly. There will not be time for careful counts.

The desperation of the survivors will soon be at a pitch. They are on the verge of losing what little ties they have to civilization. There are no police. There is no government. There are reports of armed gangs setting up road blocks to demand money and goods from relief trucks attempting to bring in emergency relief supplies. Armed shop keepers are attempting to protect their property from roving gangs of looters.

While there are some UN “Peace keepers” there in Haiti, individuals are left to fend for themselves against looters and thieves that would rob them of what they have left. Relief workers and even those driving truckloads of the dead off for disposal are being threatened and even killed while they attempt to do what little they can.

Sending US troops into this mix is problematic.

What will be their mission?

What will be their Rules Of Engagement(ROE)?

How can they bring law and order to that country without operating as an Army of Occupation? And most importantly to that question, do we have the will and courage as a nation to allow our troops to use the deadly force that will be necessary for them to use in order to bring Haiti back from the brink of anarchy.

Are we prepared for that first day that an American soldier has to kill a Haitian? What if he kills several, or if several troops get trapped and have to kill and wound a whole lot of them? Can we allow US troops to put down the Riots and Unrest that are likely to result in the days and weeks to come?

This is a very dangerous situation for us to be in.

It will get worse before it gets better.

Obama will have to be very careful if he is to avoid having Haiti become his Mogadishu.

Taxation Used As A Weapon

It didn't take long for the “Tax everything that moves and doesn’t move”* party to set its sights on taxing bonuses at 50%.

The initial proposal here is to tax bonuses paid out to bank executives for expressly punitive purposes. This is copy-cat to something that the socialist kleptomaniacs in the UK imposed on their bankers in December of 2009. (See Make Them Work for Free Dammit!)

Reported in The Hill.

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, and would use the tax revenue to support loans to small businesses.

Democrat Congresscritter Peter Welch's claim that the tax would be used “to support loans to small businesses” is pure bullshit. This is taxation being used as a weapon. It is just that simple.

~~~
*“The percentage of taxes on GDP (in Pakistan) is among the lowest in the world... We (the United States) tax everything that moves and doesn’t move, and that’s not what we see in Pakistan,” - Sec. Of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton(D) October 2009.

Its The Sun Stupid!

It may take some of the Anthropogenic Global Warming clowns a little while to accept that the sun dominates the climate cycles, but give them a little ice-age in the middle of their histrionics and they may have no other option.

From a report at Fox News:

Latif thinks the cold snap Americans have been suffering through is only the beginning. He says we're in for 30 years of cooler temperatures -- a mini ice age, he calls it, basing his theory on an analysis of natural cycles in water temperatures in the world's oceans.

We should be cautious however since Professor Mojib Latif is a major proponent of AGW. His track record is a little suspect.

A Jobless Recovery And A Devious Midterm Election Strategy

The new Unemployment Numbers are telling a grim tale.

From Bob Willis and Courtney Schlisserman at Bloomberg.com:

The so-called underemployment rate -- which includes part- time workers who’d prefer a full-time position and people who want work but have given up looking -- rose to 17.3 percent in December from 17.2 percent.

The number of discouraged workers, those not looking for work because they believe none is available, climbed to 929,000 last month, the most since records began in 1994.

Normally, this kind of news would doom the Party in power to a Midterm Election rout. This next Midterm Election may well be an exception.

Watch for the Democrats to begin spending money like its going out of style as the Midterm Elections approach. The Stimulus moneys are still largely unspent. That will change as the election approaches. The Stimulus moneys were never meant to be spent to improve the economy, rather their purpose was to stimulate Democrat election chances in the midterms.

Karl Rove discusses this at the Wall Street Journal.

But Americans shouldn't be misled by the election year ploy: Mr. Obama rigged the game by giving himself plenty of room to look tough on spending. He did that by increasing discretionary domestic spending for the last half of fiscal year 2009 by 8% and then increasing it another 12% for fiscal year 2010.

So discretionary domestic spending now stands at $536 billion, up nearly 24% from President George W. Bush's last full year budget in fiscal 2008 of $433.6 billion. That's a huge spending surge, even for a profligate liberal like Mr. Obama. The $102 billion spending increase doesn't even count the $787 billion stimulus package, of which $534 billion remains unspent.

Mr. Obama can placate congressional Democrats by arguing that all that extra spending he has already crammed through can cover their spending desires at least through the 2010 congressional elections.

This will be an interesting election cycle.

Gelb on Islam

There is an important article posted up at The Daily Beast by Leslie H. Gelb . The Daily Beast is notably left of center so the publication of Gelb's article there is all the more notable.

Of the terrorist killings and maimings that have taken place over the last three years, over 90 percent have been Muslim on Muslim, Shiite on Sunni, Sunni on Sunni, or Shiite on Shiite, with rare exceptions. Most of these slaughters have religious, cultural, and historical causes. But wherever the fanatics lodge themselves firmly in power, as the Taliban did in Afghanistan, they will try to practice the totalitarianism of Hitler and Stalin. Their rule is the end of hope for women, the end of freedom for all, except themselves—and the institutionalization of corruption and cruelty, which they rationalize with their interpretation of the Koran. They’ve tried to impose totalitarianism in Iran, but haven’t succeeded so far—because the Iranian people have fought back. And if you listen to the fanatics’ rhetoric, they plan to move on to the rest of the world and apply the same principles. They are Muslim fanatics. The culprits are not Hasidic Jews running amok around the world or Tea-baggers bent on replanting Christianity among the heathen.

I think that Gelb still has a few misconceptions about Islam to work through, but he is looking at the problem of Islam with more thought than is usually found on the political left. For that he deserves our respect.

Gelb correctly takes American Political leaders on both the left and the right to task for their counterproductive avoidance of specifically identifying Muslims or Islam as the source of most terror attacks in the present world. He correctly blames "Political Correctness" for their failure to speak honestly about the problem.

Go to the link.

Read the whole article.

Car-B-Ques In France.

Here in the Puget Sound Region of Washington State, my neighbors set off Fireworks, banged on pans and shouted "Happy New Year" at the top of their lungs to any and all that would here them at midnight. For the most part, it was good and fairly uneventful celebration.

Not so good elsewhere.

From Crispian Balmer at Reuters.

It said police detained 549 people overnight, compared with 288 in 2009 New Year celebrations. However, unlike in previous years, there were no direct clashes between police and youths. "The few disturbances that did take place were brought swiftly under control," the ministry said in a statement.

"Youths." A curious euphemism. Something important is being left unsaid in that little article.

"move along, move along, nothing to see here, move along. . . ."