On target

What’s new Today 

Story #1 tells of lottery winners holding on to their welfare checks.  #2 brings together Gasland with our crucifixion EPA official.  #3 show the inconsistency of the NY Times editorial pages.  Their position depends upon which way the left needs it to go.  #4 gives you more on cosmic rays vs CO2. 

Today’s thoughts

It appears a number of Hugo Chavez underlings are jockeying for position to succeed him even as certain government functions seem to have shut down without him. 

In regard to Osama bin Laden, we are seeing Obama and the Democrats bragging about how they killed a man. 

From the White House Correspondence Dinner and Jimmy Kimmel, “There’s a term for guys like President Obama. Probably not two terms, but there is.’

1.   Michigan’s examples of the Welfare State run Amok

Never has there been a clearer manifestation of the addictiveness of our entitlement culture than what occurred recently in the state of Michigan -- not once, but twice.

For several months after winning a $1 million state lottery jackpot, 25-year-old Michigan resident, Amanda Clayton, collected thousands of dollars in state assistance. Clayton reportedly received approximately $5,500 in food stamps and public medical benefits. She was exposed by a Detroit news station, WDIV-TV4, in March and has since been arrested for welfare fraud.

When confronted by the Detroit station and asked if she felt that she had a right to the money, Clayton replied, "I mean I kinda do." She further added, "I feel that it's okay because I mean, I have no income and I have bills to pay. I have two houses." Clayton then declared that she intended to continue to use her benefits until she was cut off.

Perhaps Ms. Clayton learned her trade from 60-year-old Leroy Hick. In June of 2010 Hick won $2 million in a Michigan state lottery TV show. In May of 2011, the Detroit News noted that, according to Hick's attorney, Michigan's state "Department of Human Services determined he was still eligible for food stamps."

The News also noted that, "Eligibility for food stamps is based on gross income and follows federal guidelines; lottery winnings are considered liquid assets and don't count as income. As long as Fick's gross income stays below the eligibility requirement for food stamps, he can receive them, even if he has a million dollars in the bank."…

… Not only are Mr. Fick and Ms. Clayton guilty of defrauding the taxpayer, they are an example of the worst kind of greed. Other than get "lucky," neither of them did a thing to accumulate their wealth. Yet they continued unapologetically to seek more through other means that would again require them to do almost nothing. They are the poster children for an entitlement society….

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/04/entitlement_addiction.html#ixzz1tQX9vZg3

Here’s an example of the 1% that are truly taking advantage of the system.  Do nothing but take everything.

2.  ‘Gasland’ and the EPA

…EPA Region 6 Administrator Al Armendariz, who became deservedly infamous last week when his public articulation of his "Crucify Them" philosophy towards enforcement of environmental laws and regulations in a speech a year ago was exposed, really loves the film, which industry officials have shown is riddled with deceptions and outright falsehoods. Not only that, he was also involved in making it:

Armendariz said in the same speech his proudest moment in his first year at EPA was to have its enforcers watch “Gasland,” an anti-fracking propaganda documentary financed by the government of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, who also opposes all U.S. drilling. Armendariz collaborated with its makers, and got his name in the credits…

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tom-blumer/2012/04/29/year-ago-ibd-noted-venezuelan-funding-flawed-gasland-documentary-which-e#ixzz1tQjzuXaT

So much for the left being ones who believe in science.  The movie was filled with scientific errors.  It was a propaganda piece pure and simple. 

3.   The NY Times flip flops

A few days after the Supreme Court finished hearing oral argument in the legal challenge to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act last month, The New York Times ran an unsigned editorial denouncing the Court’s conservative justices for their apparent willingness to strike down President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul. “For anyone who still thought legal conservatives are dedicated to judicial restraint,” the Times huffed, “the oral arguments before the Supreme Court on the health care case should put that idea to rest. There has been no court less restrained in signaling its willingness to replace law made by Congress with law made by justices.”

Pretty forceful words.  In fact, they strongly echoed the arguments made by well-known legal conservative Robert Bork, the former federal appeals court judge who was unsuccessfully nominated to the Supreme Court in 1987. In his bestselling 1990 book The Tempting of America, Bork argued that the “first principle” of the American system wasn’t the protection of individual rights, it was majority rule. “In wide areas of life,” Bork wrote, “majorities are entitled to rule, if they wish, simply because they are majorities.” For the courts, this meant adopting a pro-government posture of judicial restraint—precisely what The New York Times wants the Supreme Court to do in the health care case.

Yet just two days ago the Times ran another unsigned editorial that offered a very different take on judicial restraint. In that piece, the paper attacked GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney for asking Bork to head up his campaign’s Justice Advisory Committee. According to the Times, Romney's acceptance of Bork and his “extreme views” reveals the shortcomings of Romney’s own approach to the law. So what’s so bad about Bork? Here’s the Times again:

[T]he confirmation shed considerable light on Mr. Bork’s extreme views. As a critic of what he called the “imperial judiciary,” he contended that, except when the Constitution expressly says otherwise, the court must defer to the will of the majority. Otherwise, he said, it makes “corrupt constitutional law” that is constrained only by the personal values of justices, leaving government subject to the “tyranny of the minority.”

To recap: The New York Times attacks the current Supreme Court for abandoning judicial restraint and “signaling its willingness to replace law made by Congress,” then turns around less than a month later to attack Judge Bork for advocating judicial restraint and saying that “the court must defer to the will of the majority.”

http://reason.com/blog/2012/04/28/the-new-york-times-flip-flops-on-judicia

While both the left and the right seem to be guilty of changing their positions depending upon circumstances, this is just another example of how easily the left does it. 

4.  The Real Cause of Extreme Weather

…Meanwhile, the mainstream media has been largely hiding from the public the actual cause of recent extreme weather events -- big amplitude swings in the jet stream. In an April 2 YouTube video British astrophysicist Piers Corbyn explains why severe weather occurs regularly every 60 years, plus or minus 5 years:

Technically, they say, "Well, the big extremes are caused by changes in the track of low pressure systems as they go around the globe, and when there's big amplitude swings in this track, then you do get more extreme events." However, they don't know where these big amplitude swings come from.

However, we do understand the origin of these big amplitude swings in the jet stream, and these are caused by a mingling of solar-magnetic factors and lunar factors which is why the basic signal is the 60 year signal we've mentioned.

And for the last three years we have been in the middle of one of these peaks of big swings in the jet stream, and we are going to carry on like this for at least another year or so. And right now we are in, perhaps, the most exciting phase of this 60 year cycle.

Corbyn is a brilliant astrophysicist. He looks for repetitions of historic solar-magnetic factors (such as sunspots) and bases his long-range weather forecasts on what those patterns, when combined with moon factors, caused in the past. His long-range predictions have been correct about 85% of the time. He makes his money, mostly from British insurance companies and farmers, by successfully predicting extreme weather events.

We are fortunate that he is starting to make long-term predictions about U.S. weather. In the same YouTube video, he notes that he correctly predicted March's extreme weather in the U.S.:

The thirteenth to fifteenth of March, we specifically predicted this in our forecast in detail, we said there would be tornadoes and giant hail in the lower Midwest. That happened.

We also said, after that there would be a big heat wave in the central and eastern parts of the USA. That happened.

And then we said that would turn into or change into something more focused on Texas with intense heat in Texas. That happened.

And then, finally, there was a cold blast just coming down from Canada in the Northeast part of America at the end of March carrying into April which we predicted.

The theory that climate change, both global warming and cooling, is related to magnetic disturbances on the sun and cloud-creating cosmic rays is supported by a large number of scientists who have published their findings in refereed journals This theory has succeeded in explaining climate changes whether the scale is years or hundreds of millions of years. For example, it explains the colder climate from 2006-2010 as partly the result of reduced solar activity and the recent warmer climate as partly the result of solar activity rising throughout 2011.

Its adherents don't deny that global temperatures may be influenced by greenhouse gas concentrations, but they hold that the influence of greenhouse gases on the weather is probably small. Once the contributions of solar and cosmic rays to climate are precisely determined, it will be possible to determine what is left to be explained by other influences.

In contrast, the AGW theorists can't explain why earth temperatures stopped rising in 1998, despite the continuing rise in carbon dioxide concentrations. They are vicious toward those who oppose them, calling them "deniers" and unscientific. One could argue that it is they who are the deniers. It is scandalous that none of those involved in the East Anglia revelations of attempts to suppress publication of contrary findings has been punished by the universities employing them.

In short, there are two competing theories. The solar/cosmic ray theory successfully predicts weather and climate. The man-made global warming theory correctly predicts opinion polls….

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/04/does_global_warming_cause_extreme_weather.html#ixzz1tQUfGYon

Certainly an 85% rate of correctly predicting the weather both long and short term is a lot better than the AGW crowd.