Miscellanous-- TEA Party behavior -- Liberal Generousity-- Global Warming

Democrat Harrassment

Were the Democrats really harassed on their way to the Capital to vote on Obama's healthcare proposal? There have been charges that they were spit upon and that they were called racists names. The MSM has assumed that this happened but in spite of a $10,000 reward offered by Andrew Breitbart (he has since raised it to $100,000) no one has been able to produced any recording where anything more than people yelling such things as "Kill the bill" has been found.

Now I assumed that this was just the luck of the draw. No one was filming their walk to the capital from start to finish. But I just recently found out that the Democrats had their own cameras running! Now if such things were actually going on, don't you think they would have recorded it? Did they instead take advice once again from Saul Alinsky to try an demonize their enemy? You can't say for sure either way, but there is a lot of room for doubt now.

It also was reported that a coffin had been left on the front lawn of a house just down from Missouri Democrat Russ Carnahan. But that turns out not to be true.

As we now know, the coffin was a stage-prop. It was covered with an American flag, at a protest which was covered by local television station KSDK. The coffin was not left on any lawn, but instead was used and then taken back to the garage of a St Louis Tea Party organizer.

Knowing this, Carnahan still sends out a fundraising request painting himself as a victim, citing a story he planted in the national press three days after the incident occurred. "He must have been so frightened he couldn’t call the press for three days."

Carnahan press secretary Sara Howard told KMOV this morning that the Congressman did not take the mock funeral as a threat, but did say that this “kind of rhetoric and behavior has absolutely no place in civil discourse.”


Liberal charity.

It seems the liberals as the old saying are willing to "give you the shirt off ..... my back." Arthur Brooks, the author of a book on donors to charity, “Who Really Cares,” cites data that households headed by conservatives give 30 percent more to charity than households headed by liberals.

“When I started doing research on charity,” Mr. Brooks wrote, “I expected to find that political liberals — who, I believed, genuinely cared more about others than conservatives did — would turn out to be the most privately charitable people. So when my early findings led me to the opposite conclusion, I assumed I had made some sort of technical error. I re-ran analyses. I got new data. Nothing worked. In the end, I had no option but to change my views.”


In the meantime we see when Virginia Delegate Kirkland Cox, R-Colonial Heights, set up the “Tax Me More Fund” in 2002, he did it to make a point: Those complaining the most loudly about spending “cuts” in Richmond could put their own money where their mouth was and make a voluntary contribution to the state.

Last year - to supplement a $74 billion 2008-10 biennial state budget – they did just that. Total collected: $1,500, according to the Virginia Department of Taxation

So here we have another cherished self belief about liberals that they care more than conservatives down the drain at least when they have an opportunity to personally prove it.

Global Warming


James Lovelock, the grandfather of the green has come to some interesting conclusion and has some interesting observations. Liberals like to say there is no disagreement among "knowledgeable" scientists about global warming. But if we are to believe Lovelock that is simply untrue. Here's a quote from an interview he did with Leo Hickman

"The great climate science centres around the world are more than well aware how weak their science is. If you talk to them privately they're scared stiff of the fact that they don't really know what the clouds and the aerosols are doing. They could be absolutely running the show. We haven't got the physics worked out yet. One of the chiefs once said to me that he agreed that they should include the biology in their models, but he said they hadn't got the physics right yet and it would be five years before they do. So why on earth are the politicians spending a fortune of our money when we can least afford it on doing things to prevent events 50 years from now? They've employed scientists to tell them what they want to hear. The Germans and the Danes are making a fortune out of renewable energy. I'm puzzled why politicians are not a bit more pragmatic about all this."

Wiki-liberal

The Wikipedia site is often charged with being dominated by leftist especially on key issues. Most frequently cited is Global Warming. There appears to be an editor on this subject who has no other job than to keep the citation on Global Warming something Al Gore would approve of.

I learn it myself when I went to use it as a source for my article on Democrat scandals. If you look at it you will find under the Obama Administration four scandals. You have the AmeriCorp scandal and the Eric Massa scandal for the Democrats and they include Joe Wilson saying "you lie" during an Obama speach on healthcare and an affair by Republican John Ensign.

Interesting--two for the Democrats and two for the Republicans.

I listed about 30 democrat scandals, but some of them came before the Obama Administration. But calling saying "you lie" a scandal, opens up more scandals by the democrats. Let's see if we can find more than four scandals during the Obama Administration.

Obama was very tough on the Bush Administration for their use of executive privilege. However, Obama has used it once for Desiree Rogers, his social secretary. When congress wanted to investigate how uninvited guest could get into White House receptions, Obama must have felt this was a matter of national security and refused to let her tesitify.

+1

When Obama went into office he tried to get a number of appointments through that had tax problems. These included two who are actually serving in the cabinent (Kathleen Sebelius HHS and Tim Geithner Treasury) and three who withdrew (Tom Dashle HHS, Ron Kirk US Trade Representative and Nancy Killefer Chief Performance Officer).

Former Democrat star Bill Richardson also had to withdraw his name as a nominee for Secretary of Commerce. The heart of the problem is a federal investigation into an alleged pay-to-play scheme involving Richardson’s political action committee, Moving America Forward.

+7

Kevin Jennings was appointed by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in July 2009 as assistant deputy secretary to head the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools. His nomination was spotted by the fact he had failed to report to the police a case about 20 years ago where a student was sexually used by an adult male.

The current Secretary of Education Arne Duncan it was reveal this week, manipulated a system (Chicago) to favor powerful political allies by placing their children in the schools of their choice.

+9

Fortunately for Obama, the John Edwards scandal broke before he was offered a cabinent post. We wont count Edwards.

In my previous posting I left out the czars.

Obama Science Czar John Holdren is directly involved in CRU’s unfolding Climategate scandal. In 1977, Paul R. Ehrlich, Anne H. Ehrlich, and Holdren co-authored the textbook Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment; they discussed the possible role of a wide variety of solutions to overpopulation, from voluntary family planning to enforced population controls, including forced sterilization for women after they gave birth to a designated number of children, and recommended "the use of milder methods of influencing family size preferences" such as access to birth control and abortion.

Van Jones was the green czar who was found out to be a Truther (someone who thinks the US Government was responsible for the 9/11 attacks) and forced to resign.

Steven Rattner Obama's car czar was forced to resign when it was revealed he was subject of a long-running SEC investigation into a massive pay-to-play scheme. Authorities allege that several investment firms, including the one co-founded by Mr. Rattner, paid to get investments from the $122 billion New York state pension fund.

+12

In September 2009, the House ethics committee said it would put off for now an expanded investigation into whether Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. or his representatives tried to buy President Barack Obama's former Senate seat.

Others under investigation include Jane Harman who allegedly tried to trade favors to get a leadership position in the House and Laura Richardson who may have filed improper financial disclosures.

Maxine Waters' came under scrutiny after former Treasury Department officials said she helped arrange a meeting between regulators and executives at OneUnited Bank last year, without mentioning her husband's financial ties to the institution. Her husband, Sidney Williams, served on the bank's board until early last year and owned at least $250,000 in its stock.

John Murtha before his death was among seven lawmakers under review for allegedly trading earmarks for campaign contributions.

Alan Mollohan is under investigation for allegedly using his office for personal profit

Former Democratic Rep. William Jefferson of Louisiana on August 5, 2009, was found guilty of 11 of the 16 corruption counts. Jefferson's lawyers have promised to appeal. Jefferson was sentenced to 13 years on November 13, 2009, the longest sentence ever handed down to a congressman for bribery. This happened just before Obama came into office, but is relevant because of the audacity of it.

Charles Rangel (D-NY) failed to report $75,000 income from the rental of his villa in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic and was forced to pay $11,000 in back taxes.(September 2008) Even with this he held onto his chairmanship for the Democrats and only recently gave it up due to remaining under investigation by a House ethics panel for other problems.

Chris Dodd was implicated in get a “sweetheart deal” from Countrywide Mortgage even while he chaired a committee that oversaw the financial sector. His popularity has dropped so much, that he has announced his retirement.

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D., N.D.) also had a sweetheart deal.

+21

Scandal associated with the Healthcare bill.

Ben Nelson’s might be the most blatant vote for pay democrat – a deal carved out for a single state, a permanent exemption from the state share of Medicaid expansion for Nebraska, meaning federal taxpayers have to kick in an additional $45 million in the first decade.

Democratic holdout, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), took credit for $10 billion in new funding for community health centers, while denying it was a “sweetheart deal.” He was clearly more enthusiastic about a bill he said he couldn’t support just three days before.

Nelson and Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) carved out an exemption for non-profit insurers in their states from a hefty excise tax. Similar insurers in the other 48 states will pay the tax.

Vermont and Massachusetts were given additional Medicaid funding, another plus for Sanders and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) Three states – Pennsylvania, New York and Florida – all won protections for their Medicare Advantage beneficiaries at a time when the program is facing cuts nationwide.

All of this came on top of a $300 million increase for Medicaid in Louisiana, designed to win the vote of Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu.

The Healthcare bill includes tens of millions of extra Medicaid dollars for the state to help assuage nervous Tennessee Dems like Rep. Bart Gordon (D-TN).

While most American banks will be cut off from subsidies for private student loans (as part of the government takeover of the student lending industry attached to the bill), banks in Rep. Earl Pomeroy’s (D-ND) state will still see the cash rolling into its banks.

Democratic staffers were huddled behind closed doors with PhRMA lobbyists as they crafted the final bill. Not so coincidentally, PhRMA has now decided it will run expensive television ads in the districts of 38 wavering Democrats. That type of apparent quid pro quo is about as ugly as political payoffs get.

+32

I expect we will see more scandals come to light as more is known about the healthcare bill.

Here's what I expect to see the Republicans run on in 2010.

1. Repeal and Replace the Healthcare bill
2. The economy
3. The deficit
4. The culture of Democrat corruption

These are all winners for them.

Too Good To Be True?

Late last week the Democrats rejoiced when the CBO priced out their healthcare scheme at $940 billion and project that it would reduce the deficit by $138 billion in the first 10 years.

There is an old saying, "If it sounds to good to be true, it probably is." But wait, you say, isn't the CBO an nonpartisan watchdog that will give us the actual figures. The problem is the CBO is required by law to take the written legislation at face value and not second guess the assumptions. Fantasy in and fantasy out is the rule of thumb on this legislation.

The first problem with this bill is you have in the 10 year CBO estimate 10 years of taxes, but only 6 years of spending. It is the equivalent of saving for 4 years so you can make the payments on that new house. The problem is the 4 years of savings will run out after 6 years of payments and then what?

Now lets take a quick look at the other accounting tricks used to come up with this CBO number.
1. The cost of administration of all the new functions in this legislation is completely left out of the CBO numbers. It will cost $114 billion to do this over 10 years.

2. The government projects they will collect $70 billion in premiums for the new long term care insurance in the bill. This is counted as deficit reduction even though the government is adding future obligations. This type of accounting is illegal in the private sector, but is standard for the government and is why Social Security is in such bad shape. Remember the lock box?

3. There is a cut of $463 billion in Medicare that is included to help finance this bill. However, this includes a 20% decrease in reimbursement to doctors which everyone knows won't stand. Therefore $247 billion of this decrease will be lost when the congress "fixes" this. Everyone knows this will happen, but CBO cannot put this in their figures.

4. There are a number of smaller accounting gimmicks that account for another $80 billion for increased Social Security taxes, a one time early payment of taxes, and having all student loans made by the federal government.

So if you add these up you come up with $411 billion in additional spending and that $138 billion surplus becomes a $273 billion deficit. And all of this happens without "fixing" Medicare or looking ahead to the next 10 years when you have all the spending going on and you don't have a 4 year period to build up reserves.

We need to repeal this bill and actually come up with a cheaper reform.

Healthcare in America

One of the statistics you hear a lot of from supporters of universal healthcare is that it would save 40,000 lives per year. But the study that came up with this figure assumes that by providing universal healthcare everyone would be brought up to the standards of care we have today in America.

But is that realistic? What we know is that in Europe where there is universal healthcare there is also a lot of cost containment measures that make the quality of care in Europe less than America. In 2004 Europeans saw 2.9 million cases of cancers with 1.7 million deaths. That same year in the USA we had 1.37 million cases of cancer and 563 thousand deaths.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14974761 US Stats

http://annonc.oxfordjournals.org/content/16/3/481.full Europe Stats

The rate of cancer mortality in the USA was 41% while in Europe it was 58.6%. The difference between these two numbers means 237,000 Americans survived that would have died with European style universal healthcare.

What we are looking at is not saving 40,000 lives, but condemning an additional 237,000 Americans to death each year.

Democrat Scandals

In 2006 and 2008 the Democrats used corruption as an issue promising to drain the swamp and put into place the most ethical congress in the history of the institution. There were financial scandals, sex scandals, and abuse of power scandals they used to vilify the Republicans. So how are they doing?

Democrat Financial Scandal

When Obama went into office he tried to get a number of appointments through that had tax problems. These included two who are actually serving in the cabinent (Kathleen Sebelius HHS and Tim Geithner Treasury) and three who withdrew (Tom Dashle HHS, Ron Kirk US Trade Representative and Nancy Killefer Chief Performance Officer).

Former Democrat star Bill Richardson also had to withdraw his name as a nominee for Secretary of Commerce. The heart of the problem is a federal investigation into an alleged pay-to-play scheme involving Richardson’s political action committee, Moving America Forward.

Maxine Waters' came under scrutiny after former Treasury Department officials said she helped arrange a meeting between regulators and executives at OneUnited Bank last year, without mentioning her husband's financial ties to the institution. Her husband, Sidney Williams, served on the bank's board until early last year and owned at least $250,000 in its stock.

John Murtha before his death was among seven lawmakers under review for allegedly trading earmarks for campaign contributions.

Alan Mollohan is under investigation for allegedly using his office for personal profit

Former Democratic Rep. William Jefferson of Louisiana on August 5, 2009, was found guilty of 11 of the 16 corruption counts. Jefferson's lawyers have promised to appeal. Jefferson was sentenced to 13 years on November 13, 2009, the longest sentence ever handed down to a congressman for bribery.

Charles Rangel (D-NY) failed to report $75,000 income from the rental of his villa in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic and was forced to pay $11,000 in back taxes.(September 2008)

Chris Dodd was implicated in get a “sweetheart deal” from Countrywide Mortgage even while he chaired a committee that oversaw the financial sector.

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D., N.D.) also had a sweetheart deal.

In the meantime Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac used $174 million, to pay for lobbyists to insulate them from the tightened regulation and oversight that might have avoided the financial crisis. It may surprise you to learn that Obama received over $126,000 in campaign contributions since first running for the Senate in 2004. Obama ranked #2 on the list of people getting contributions which includes mostly Democrats. Other top Democrats on Fannie Mae’s money list include Senator Chris Dodd, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi.

And outside of Washington

Colorado Democrat Governor Bill Ritter's awarded Hogan & Hartson a no-bid contract made available by Obama stimulus money to his former law partners. Ritter has announced he will not run for reelection.

Former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich has been indicted for looking to sell Barack Obama’s senate seat.

Democrat Sex Scandals.

Democratic Rep. Eric Massa, from western New York, acknowledged Friday he acted inappropriately with a male staffer and said he's leaving with "a profound sense of failure."

Roosevelt Dobbins (2005): Congressman from Arkansas, pleaded guilty to fondling a 16-year-old.

Outside of Washington

John Edwards (2008): Had an affair resulting in a child with a campaign employee while running for President.

Earlier, Democratic Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York resigned after revelations that he was involved in a prostitution ring. Mean while, his successor David Patterson has admitted to both he and his wife having numerous affairs.

Democrat Abuse of Power

In September 2009, the House ethics committee said it would put off for now an expanded investigation into whether Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. or his representatives tried to buy President Barack Obama's former Senate seat.

Others under investigation include Jane Harman who allegedly tried to trade favors to get a leadership position in the House and Laura Richardson who may have filed improper financial disclosures.

Rep. Charles Rangel of New York, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, remains under investigation by a House ethics panel.

The panel is looking at Rangel's occupation of several rent-controlled apartments in Manhattan, failure to pay taxes on an offshore rental property and other ethics questions. The panel officials said the investigation was expanding to include accusations that Rangel supported a tax break for an oil-drilling company in exchange for a donation to a school that would bear his name.

President Barack Obama (D) suspended Investigator General Gerald Walpin following his investigation of the misuse of funds by St. Hope Academy formerly run by NBA star and current mayor of Sacramento Kevin Johnson (D). Mr. Walpin's boss Lawrence Brown (a Bush appointee) had filed a complaint against Walpin for numerous reasons. St. Hope has agreed to repay $350K. This scandal is known as the Americorp Fraud Scandal

Former Democrat Senator Robert Torricelli withdrew from the 2002 Senate race with less than 30 days before the election because of controversy over personal gifts he took from a major campaign donor and questions about campaign donations from 1996. An abuse of power was prominently displayed when as this scandal eroded Torricelli’s electability, Shortly thereafter, the Democrat controlled New Jersey Supreme Court tossed out the longstanding State election law and unanimously ruled that the Democratic Party could legally replace Torricelli's name on the ballot with that of former U.S. Senator Frank Lautenberg.

Outside of Washington

Gov. David Paterson personally directed two state employees to contact the woman who told police she was assaulted by her then-boyfriend, a top aide to Paterson, but later failed to press charges, The New York Times reported late Monday.

A Paterson administration official speaking on the condition of anonymity confirmed that the two employees were directed by Paterson to contact the woman, but denied that the state employees sought to persuade the woman to drop her charge or change her story.

National Security Advisor Sandy Berger during the Clinton Administration was fined $50,000 for illegally removing highly classified documents and handwritten notes from the National Archives during preparations for the Sept. 11 commission hearings.

Results of AGW Poll

This past week I ran a poll on global warming. The choices ran from yes it is happening and man is to blame to it's a fraud.

9% of the respondents voted that it was happening and it was man's fault. Another 9% thought it was happening but it wasn't caused by mankind. Just 4% thought it had stopped around the year 2000. The rest or 78% saw global warming as a fraud.

Personally I see some fraud associated with the believers/advocates, but I wouldn't call global warming as a fraud. But the planet tends to heat up and cool down on its own on a regular basis. My belief is that we were in one of those periods when the global warming people started telling us about it.

What A Deal!

Monday in Strongsville, Ohio, President Obama said that ObamaCare will reduce health insurance premiums by "3,000 percent."

Wow! Sign me up now. What this means is if you are paying $6000 for healthinsurance, your health insurance company instead of collecting from you will send you a check fo $174,000!!!

For all the talk about how stupid George W. was, he never made a boneheaded comment like this.

I thought Obama was supposed to be brilliant?

Perhaps it is time rather than a test for people wishing to vote, that we institute a test for people who want to run for office. We could title the test "You need to be smarter than a fifth grader to be a congressman and a tenth grader to be President."

Is Our Healthcare System Broken?

As the healthcare debate rages in congress, one should ask is our system broken or does it just need tweaking in certain areas.

Here are 10 interesting facts about the American Healthcare system. As you can see, the problem we have is the cost of healthcare, not the quality or the outcomes.


Fact No. 1: Americans have better survival rates than Europeans for common cancers.

Fact No. 2: Americans have lower cancer mortality rates than Canadians.

Fact No. 3: Americans have better access to treatment for chronic diseases than patients in other developed countries.

Fact No. 4: Americans have better access to preventive cancer screening than Canadians.

Fact No. 5: Lower income Americans are in better health than comparable Canadians.

Fact No. 6: Americans spend less time waiting for care than patients in Canada and the U.K.

Fact No. 7: People in countries with more government control of health care are highly dissatisfied and believe reform is needed

Fact No. 8: Americans are more satisfied with the care they receive than Canadians.

Fact No. 9: Americans have much better access to important new technologies like medical imaging than patients in Canada or the U.K

Fact No. 10: Americans are responsible for the vast majority of all health care innovations.

You can read more about this at:

http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba649

But survival rates also differ within the United States, between insured and uninsured populations. The American Cancer Society found that the five-year survival rates for colorectal cancer averaged 63 percent for the privately insured but 49 percent for the uninsured. According to the Lancet study, five-year relative survival rates for colorectal cancer were 59.1 percent in the U.S. and 45.3 percent in Europe. Breast cancer survival rates among the uninsured were also similar to Europe – 85 percent survival for those with private insurance, 75 percent for the uninsured, close to the European average. Rates for people on Medicaid were similar to the uninsured.

So when you hear people say we need to provide national health insurance and because we don't we are condemning people to death, understand America's uninsured have about the same survival rate for cancers as do the nationally insured in Europe.

Progressive?

I had an incident that happened to me that illustrates the difference between progressives and conservatives.

Now it is my experience that progressives (or liberals) have a very high estimate of themselves and a very low opinion of conservatives. They are the political movement of intention so they tend to judge things not on the outcome, but the intention of the action itself. Hence, programs started by the left that don't work are successes in their view while programs that do work started by the right tend to be failures.

I was driving one day to DIA. I was driving up to the entrance onto the expressway that would get me there. There were two left turn lanes turning onto the expressway to help what was a heavy traffic entrance.

A pickup truck got into the furtherest left lane to enter the highway. As he did a number of pipes fell unto the roadway. He stopped to pick up what he had dropped. It was at this point that a progressive pulled up beside him and stopped his car jumping out to help. Here was a perfect example of a progressive seeing a problem and wanting to help. However, he stopped blocking up the second left turn lane onto the highway. So although his intention was good, his action caused a huge backup in people entering the highway. As more and more people honked their horns, he was horrified that these people didn't do the wonderful thing he was doing and help this poor unfortunate.

Progressives are like this. The man who lost his pipe could easily have picked up the materials himself and if the progressive hadn't stopped to help, traffic would have flowed unto the highway. In helping with a small problem, the progressive caused a bigger one.

Obama and other US Presidents

For US Presidents that share things with Barack Obama, we have to first look at George Herbert Walker Bush (41). He made a pledge by telling people to read his lips, "No new taxes." Obama told the American public "I can make a firm pledge," he said in Dover, N.H., on Sept. 12. "Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes." He apparantly will break this pledge just as Bush 41 did.

But probably the person he is most compared to is Jimmy Carter. Carter was the one term president who like Obama talked about rejecting the old politics, attacking special interests and lobbyists, wearing his Christian ideals on his sleeve. All of that is very much Carteresque in many ways.

Of course at this point in his presidency, Jimmy Carter was much more popular than BHO. After one year in office, Carter's approval rating was 57% to 27% disapproval while Obama's 49% approval and 46% disapproval. And this disapproval has continued to climb.

Having held on to most of the war on terror tactics that G.W. Bush (43) instituted, I won't compare him to Bush, but he is looking more and more like LBJ. LBJ tried to have both guns and butter, but it eventually drove him out of the race in 1968. Obama is spending so much money both on the war and on domestic spending that the American people are saying stop.

Obama and Caligula

As a student of history, I look to see if there are parallels between what is happening today and things that happened in the past.



Obama's election and then quick drop in popularity does look a lot like what happened in ancient Rome when Tiberius Caesar died and was succeeded by Caligulia. Now I'm not comparing Obama to Caligulia, but I will compare the expectations and drop in popularity of the two.



Tiberius was not well liked. He was considered and old tightwad who persecuted his enemies. When Caligulia was named by the Senate as the new emperor there was rejoicing in the streets. His father, Germanicus (Tiberius brother), was handsome, a hero, and warmly remembered by the people of Rome. So when he was named as the new emperor by the Senate, the people looked forward to a time of hope and change.

Caligulia started his reign well. He piously got the ashes of his mother and brothers who had died and brought them back to Rome putting them into a royal mausoleum. He held games almost continuously.

But he was spending all the treasure of Rome. He in fact bankrupted the country.

The reason I think of Caligula and compare him to Obama is because of the hope everyone held out when he came into office and how his policies depleted the treasury of Rome. He was young and inexperienced. He had never held an executive office and it showed in his rule. The joy at his ascension was only surpassed at the joy of his removal from office.

Tomorrow I'll go a little closer to home and see who among previous presidents are most like Obama.

Miscellaneous

Healthcare

The chant of the Democrats now seems to be "it's time to stop debating. Healthcare deserves an up or down vote."

I agree. So why don't we have that vote today in the House of Representatives? Errr, perhaps because a vote today would result in a defeat for President Obama.

Women Live Longer.

A new study that is out confirms that women live longer than men. I have a theory about that. Women do live longer, but the extra time is spent waiting in lines to go to the bathroom. The net amount of time is the same for both men and women.

Jimmy Carter Redux

In a speech yesterday in St. Louis, President Obama said "People have lost faith in government -- they had lost faith in government before I ran (for president), and it has been getting worse." Strangely reminiscent of Jimmy Carter's malaise speech.

Some Things Liberal Believe that Aren't True.

Green jobs are the answer to today's economic problems. Green jobs tend to decrease the overall number of jobs since they require big subsidies.

Liberals are smarter than conservatives. We keep hearing how liberals are so smart, yet they seem to be the ones who fall for the lies conservatives told them especially about war (they voted to get us in Vietnam, Iraq, etc.).

You can cut the spending on Healthcare by adding over $1 trillion dollars to what you spend on healthcare. A corollary to this is you can cut the spending on Healthcare by insuring an additional 31 million people. This is another example of why the previous point is so obviously wrong.

You can spend your way to prosperity. Yet another example of how liberals aren't smarter than conservatives.

Most Americans agree with liberals. Actually, most liberals agree with liberals and tend to keep among themselves. Remember the story about Bush beating Gore and the lament from NYC that they didn't know anyone who had voted for Bush.

It is patriotic to protest. However, since Obama was inaugurated it's been changed to it is racists to protest.

Watermelons?

The left in Europe is known as watermelons, that is, they are green on the outside and red on the inside. The environmental movement has been hijacked by people who are looking to primarily impose control rather than help the environment. Here are some statements from those people.


“Obama is already setting a new historic course by reorienting the economy from private consumption to public investments…free-market pundits bemoan the evident intention of Obama and team to ‘tell us what kind of car to drive’. Yet that is exactly what they intend to do…and rightly so. Free-market ideology is an anachronism in an era of climate change.”
- Quote by Jeffery Sachs, Columbia University, Director of The Earth Institute

“A climate change response must have at its heart a redistribution of wealth and resources.”
- Quote by Emma Brindal, a climate justice campaigner coordinator for Friends of the Earth

“We’ve got to ride the global-warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”
- Quote by Timothy Wirth, U.S./UN functionary, former elected Democrat Senator

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
– Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme

“The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States. We can’t let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the US. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are.”
- Michael Oppenheimer, Environmental Defense Fund

“We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects. We must reclaim the roads and plowed land, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers and return to wilderness millions of acres of presently settled land.”
- David Foreman, co-founder of Earth First!

“Childbearing should be a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license. All potential parents should be required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.”
- David Brower, first Executive Director of the Sierra Club

As you can see by these quotes, a green future is a frightening one.

Is this the Democrats only hope?

Who said this?

"Time and events will strengthen my position, and the idea of believing in me and understanding my value will seem the most natural state of affairs. You will come to defend me with a fervor based upon the most enduring trait in man: self-interest. Under my absolute authority, problems insoluble to you will be solved: famine, overpopulation, disease. The human millennium will be a fact as I extend myself We can coexist, but only on my terms. You will say you lose your freedom. Freedom is an illusion. All you lose is the emotion of pride. To be dominated by me is not as bad for humankind"

A. Barack Obama when he accepted the Democrat nomination.

B. Colossus in the movie The Forbin Project

With the verbage around "ramming" through Healthcare, it makes you wonder.

Truth or???

Believers in AGW often cite that the science is settled and anyone who disagrees with their belief is against science. But many on the left, both scientific and political, in weaker moments have revealed what they truly believe and it is frightening.

Stephen Schneider, Stanford Professor of Climatology, lead author of many IPCC reports has said, “We need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination… So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts… Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”

Sir John Houghton, first chairman of IPCC, was quoted as saying, ”Unless we announce disasters no one will listen.”

Paul Watson, co-founder of Greenpeace articulated, “It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.”

The former Senator and presidential aspirant Timothy Wirth, who is now President of the UN Foundation, “We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.”

Christine Stewart, Former Canadian Minister of the Environment said, “No matter if the science of global warming is all phony, climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.”

Emeritus Professor Daniel Botkin is quoted as saying, “The only way to get our society to truly change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe.”

What is frightening is not what these people say but how many people believe them. In fact, this may be the most scary statement of all. “Climate change is real. Not only is it real, it’s here, and its effects are giving rise to a frighteningly new global phenomenon – the man-made natural disaster.” Barack Obama, US Presidential Candidate

It appears that the real manmade natural disaster is the mistaken belief in man caused global warming.

Joke of the Day

“I can make a firm pledge, under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.” – Barack Obama

Healthcare--panacea or money pit

The Healthcare debate rages on. Will it provide quality healthcare for all Americans at a lower cost? Will it help the economy as President Obama claims? Or is it a leftwing dream that will lower the quality while increasing the cost add to the deficit as the Republicans claim.

Let's look at the question of quality. This bill will compromise quality.

Quality compromise #1. Adding 30 million new people to our healthcare system without adding at least 10% more doctors will create a shortage of medical treatment. People on Medicare already don't have access to all doctors (some won't take medicare because it price controls what the doctor will get). By adding 30 million new people with private health insurance the number of doctors who will take medicare will drop.

Quality compromise #2. Medicare is in big trouble and the government must reduce the cost. This bill has that feature taking $500,000,000,000 out of Medicare over a 10 years period. The problem that exists is that instead of using this reduced cost to shore up the system, this bill will respend the money on the 30 million new people it will insure. So Medicare will be weakened even while the quality of the care is reduced.

Quality compromise #3. This bill is being touted as deficit neutral. It isn't. Although they get the numbers to come out neutral they only accomplish this by taking the money out of Medicare and imposing taxes for 10 years while not providing benefits for the first four years. If you look at the first 14 years you have a budget buster.

Quality compromise #4. The Obama Administration says the people want the government to control the rate increases by the insurance companies and make it so the insurance companies can't discriminate against people for preexisting conditions. The say this bill will take care of both of these problems. But it doesn't say how they will do it.

Quality compromise #5. Although the Democrats went crazy when Sarah Palin said they would have "death panels" this bill does create a panel to determine good therapuetic practice. What this has lead to in every country where everyone has coverage is to rationing. Need open heart surgery at 65--you can get it. Need it at 75--take two aspirin and call us in the morning. This bill will hurt the aged so the liberals can insure the young. The liberals won't admit this, but that is the bottom line.

Poll Resuts

Last weeks poll asked what Obama's approval rating would be in November. A total of 96% saw it as being under 50% with 85% seeing it being under 40%. Only 3 people thought it would be over 50%.

Now these kinds of polls don't really mean much. They aren't scientific, but it does indicate where the energy is. The anti-Obama, anti-Democrat, and anti-spending forces seem energized and should vote in big numbers at the next election.

What amazes me is how the Democrat leadership seems intent on voting on something that will ensure their defeat in November. Was it only 16 months ago the pundits were telling us this was a reallignment of America and the Republican would be out of control for 40 years?

Pulling It All Together

I frequently see warmists dismiss skeptics as not scientific or even hostile to science. In their universe it seems that if you disagree with them you are unscientific.

The ironic part of this is disagreement is the cornerstone of science. Because after you publish your results, others are supposed to verify your findings or find fault with them. The mantra "the science is settled" is in reality a political statement, not a scientific one. As Einstein said, "The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing."

But let's look at what we know about the AGW theory. We know that AGW theory rests on the belief that warming is due to mankind and specifically mankind's use of fossil fuels which has increased the level of CO2 in the atmosphere.

The IPCC tells us this. But how did they come to that conclusion? I had no idea until I saw a slide presentation by Dr. Richard Lindzen of MIT. Basically what the IPCC did was to use numerous climate models that showed natural variability could not account for the warming that was being experienced from the mid 1970s to the mid 1990s. The problem with this is the models were not good representations of the actual climate but to make this conclusion you have to assume that they do accurately represent the climate.

As Dr. Lindzen stated that this "makes arguments in support of intelligent design sound rigorous by comparison. It constitutes a rejection of scientific logic, while widely put forward as being 'demanded' by science."

The IPCC's proof that mankind is causing global warming is inaccurate models that couldn't account for the warming so it had to be mankind's influence.

But if it isn't greenhouse gases what else could it possibly be? The other suspects include the sun (sunspot activity), cloud formation, cosmic rays, volcanic activity, deep ocean circulation, reductions in air pollution, and localized only heating caused by the Urban Heat Island Effect.

A second reason I find it difficult to worry about global warming also comes back to logic and common sense.

It is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every theory — if you are looking for confirmations.

Confirmations should count only if they are the result of risky predictions; that is to say, if, unenlightened by the theory in question, we should have expected an event which was incompatible with the theory — an event which would have refuted the theory.

Every "good" scientific theory is a prohibition: it forbids certain things to happen. The more a theory forbids, the better it is.

A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice.

In an early post I showed how global warming seems to forbid nothing.

• If you get more snow or less, that is compatible with AGW.
• If you get more hurricanes or fewer that is compatible with AGW.
• If glaciers are growing or shrinking, that is compatible with AGW.
• If you have droughts or floods, both are compatible with AGW.
• If you have warming or cooling (that's why they changed the name to climate change) it is compatible with AGW.

In short, nothing seems to disqualify AGW from being one of the causes of whatever calamity happens and this puts it into the category of being non-scientific.

Next up are the arguments scientific or political?

Back in 1989, future Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) Working Group 2 (WG2) lead author Stephen Schneider disclosed several tricks of the trade to Discover magazine:

"To capture the public imagination, we have to offer up some scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements and little mention of any doubts one might have. Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective, and being honest." Schneider said.

And when Climategate happened we saw much more of this.

In November 1996 Geoff Jenkins was head of climate change prediction at the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, part of the United Kingdom’s Met(eorological) Office (national weather service). He wrote to Phil Jones:

• " Remember all the fun we had last year over 1995 global temperatures, with the early release of information (via Australia), “inventing” the December monthly value, letters to Nature, etc., etc.? I think we should have a cunning plan about what to do this year, simply to avoid a lot of wasted time. "

Later in November 1996 Phil Jones wrote to Ray Bradley, Mike Mann, Malcolm Hughes, Keith Briffa, and Tim Osborn, regarding a diagram for a World Meteorological Organization Statement: and this is where we get the famous statement:

"I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temperatures to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline."

Jones revealed that Mann did not address this problem by making honest note of it in the paper that he and his co-authors pubished in Nature, but rather fraudulently substituted the real temperature data into the graphs, for the past twenty or forty years as required. This information would have greatly diminished the validity of Mann's study.

There are numerous other quotes from Climategate that show a disdain for the scientific method.

When you look at AGW science, feedback is the most important part of the AGW theory. They see the feedback (water vapor) as large and positive. But actual observation and measurement shows just the opposite.

Spencer et al. (2007) found a strong negative cirrus cloud feedback mechanism in the tropical troposphere. Instead of steadily building up as the tropical oceans warm, cirrus cloud cover suddenly contracts, allowing more OLR to escape. Dr. Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, who directed the study, estimates that if this mechanism operates on decadal time scales, it would reduce model estimates of global warming by 75%.

Finally I find it ironic that warmist keep telling us the current lack of warming is only 12 years and therefore is too short a time to call it climate rather than weather. Yet the IPCC was created in 1988 after just 13 years of warming.

I will end with another Einstein quote. "Whoever undertakes to set himself up as judge in the field of truth and knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the Gods."