Sunday, December 27, 2009

Trouble ahead?

An attempt by a terrorist to blow up an airliner in Detroit on Christmas Day is shaping up as a tragedy/comedy of errors.
It appears many signals were disregarded and that the only reason he failed is that the passengers on the plane took action.
Was this a case of Political Correctness run wild? Are we back to profiling everyone EXCEPT people who obviously should be watched?
The president, at this point, hasn't seen fit to comment. Since when has he been at a loss for words?

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Harry Christmas

Ah, the arrogance.
Harry Reid and the Democrats are poised to ram a health insurance takeover bill through the Senate tomorrow night, Christmas Eve.
Democrats have abandoned principle, promises, fairness and everything else they claimed to stand for to get this legislation through, because it is the left wing's highest priority.
There are no Republican fingerprints on this bill. To get their own party to vote for it, Democrats engaged in the most shameless vote buying ever seen in Washington, which is to say a lot.
Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska was the last holdout and he got a fabulous payoff in the form of a guarantee that his state won't have to pay the increased cost of Medicaid that goes along with this bill.
Even the newspaper in Lincoln, to its credit, could not stomach this pork dinner. It said, "Since when has Nebraska become synonymous for cynical 'what's in it for me'-type politics?"
In an editorial the paper called the deal "an embodiment of everything that is wrong with Washington."
Sen. Mary Landrieu got the "Louisiana purchase," for $300 million, Sen. Chris Dodd, got $100 million for a hospital, Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida got a Medicare exemption. All the senators who got a lump of coal in their stockings now are grumbling.
In addition to all this, the Obama administration and its congressional cohorts brazenly cooked the books to disguise the horrendous cost. Ironically, part of the scam is to pretend that they will raid Medicare for a half-trillion dollars -- after decades of accusing Republicans of wanting to slash Medicare.
Like lemmings going over the cliff, the Democrats in Congress have followed blindly, disregarding the polls, history, common sense and anything else that might deter them.
The cynical bet is that if they can get it passed it won't matter if they lose power because it can never be undone.
The worst is yet to come. When it goes to conference, it probably will get even more costly and more controlling.
This is a juggernaut, led by ruthless people who have no regard for American values.
One ray of hope. If the Senate bill is the final product, the Supreme Court may save America. It is clearly unconstitutional to require Americans to buy insurance, or anything else.

Saturday, December 19, 2009

Thanks a lot

Nine out of 10 black Americans vote for a Democrat at the polls.
What do they get in return?
Unemployment overall is 10 percent. Black unemployment is 16 percent.
Higher taxes, minimum wage laws, prevailing wage laws and other Democrat policies always result in job losses for black Americans, especially the young.
Now, Democrats in Congress have voted to stop poor black kids from getting out of the worst schools in Washington, D.C., and getting a good education in some of the best schools.
Many black parents who care about their children are outraged. But the Democrats merely were following orders from the teacher union bosses who bankroll them.
For decades, liberal Democrats have pumped money into the public schools -- not to improve education but to inflate the salaries of adults. They have, at the bidding of teacher unions, fought ferociously against any attempt to require competition and accountability, which improve educational achievement.
Probably the worst carnage inflicted on black Americans was welfare, which Democrats put into place in the 1960s. It created a poverty industry that ate up more than $5 trillion and also tore apart millions of black families, causing them to become mired in poverty and go without educations and jobs.
The more educated and prosperous a voter is, the more likely he is to vote Republican.
One could almost conclude there is a conspiracy against black Americans. Especially after reading this.

Friday, December 18, 2009

Hold the hysteria

With the hype in Copenhagen peaking, and the president of the United States pledging to take billions of dollars from American families and send it to thugs and dictators in Third World nations, it is time for a dose of reality.
All this is about an increase in the average of temperature readings taken at various points on the Earth over a period of 150 years.
The increase amounts to 0.6 degrees Celsius.
The increase occurred since the end of a period of global cooling, so severe that it is referred to as "the little Ice Age."
I don't believe any alarmist would take issue with the above statements.
Now, ask yourself:
Is there only one optimum temperature that the Earth is supposed to have over millions of years?
If so, is that temperature what it is now, what it was 150 years ago or what it will be in 150 years?
Alarmists forecast the future by creating computer models. In other words, they feed literally thousands of assumptions into computers and use those to mathematically project what the Earth's temperature will be in a century.
Obviously, the accuracy of that forecast depends on each of those thousands of assumptions being accurate.
The way you test computer models is to input actual data from the past to see if they can "predict" -- retroactively -- what we know is happening today.
These models have failed those tests. They failed to predict the cooling of the past decade, for example.
You don't have to be a scientist to discern the problem. Still, 31,000 scientists have signed a petition saying that there is insufficient evidence of global warming being caused by human activity.
It is easy to understand why Americans place global warming very low on their list of priorities.
Alarmists say we must spend trillions of dollars even if the chance that they are right is 1 percent.
Really?

Signs of the times

The Associated Press has closed its office in Jacksonville. Some in the Old Media are sad, seeing it as another example of the decline in the newspaper industry.
Actually, it might be a good sign.
AP long ago abandoned objective reporting. See this example from James Taranto.
Stories from AP probably will continue to be published in the local daily but since fewer and fewer people are reading that publication, the AP propaganda will have a diminishing effect.
Meanwhile, people can find all the news and opinion they could possibly want on the Web. What they need to do is learn how to tell the difference.

Thursday, December 17, 2009

News you can use

How do you know if something is important? Easy, read the Old Media. If it is not there, it probably is important.
So it is with the Tea Party movement.
Fortunately, the Wall Street Journal, while old, is not part of the leftwing Old Media. It reports the news and it notes a new poll that finds the Tea Party movement currently has higher favorability ratings than either the Democratic or Republican parties.
This follows a Rasmussen Poll that found the Tea Party ahead of the Republican Party in a generic three-way ballot matchup.
Yet despite millions of people attending and supporting mass protests this year all across the country, the Old Media have either ignored the movement or denigrated it with lame sex jokes.
What we could be witnessing is the kind of historic transition not seen in 150 years.
Back then, the Whig Party gave way to the Republican Party because the Whigs had lost their way. Today, it is Republicans who have shunned conservative principles in a vain attempt to be more like Democrats. In other words, an echo not a choice.
Will they learn in time or be replaced? We'll see.

On the beaches

America was in the thick of World War II just 65 years ago, and today it is fighting Word War II -- the battle between capitalism and the totalitarian forces variously known as communism, socialism, fascism, Marxism, etc.
Word War I (1932-1941) ended in a stalemate. Franklin D. Roosevelt railed against capitalism throughout the war and his administration, riddled with admirers of socialism, communism and fascism, did everything it could to reduce the mighty engine of growth, peace and prosperity that is the result of individual liberty and free markets.
But when World War II broke out, the government found out it needed capitalism badly. Armies and navies are no good without bullets, planes and ships. America became the arsenal of democracy because of capitalism, and saved the world.
Today, far too many Americans, brought up in government schools that indoctrinate rather than educate, and hampered by a powerful media focused on tearing down the very system that has allowed it to flourish, are ignorant of the fact that they live in the most prosperous, most tolerant, most just, most generous and most peaceful nation in the world.
Partly because of that ignorance, Word War II (2008-?) now is raging and the government once again is verbally and politically battling capitalism.
“Fat cat bankers” are the enemy to those in Washington, rather than the Islamofascists who are killing Americans.
An attempted takeover of the health care system is the equivalent of the Battle of the Bulge 65 years ago, when the forces against freedom staged their last big push.
Public opinion polls, tea parties, talk radio and the Internet all show a sizable majority of people in this country want to preserve capitalism and freedom. Like the brave British, they are ready to fight with the tenacity and determination exemplified by the magnificent Winston Churchill, who said in the House of Commons on June 9, 1940:
“We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”
The "new world" was the United States, which abandoned Word War I and stepped into World War II, turning the tide. Americans supported that effort then, by enduring rationing, buying war bonds and working tirelessly in defense plants.
Like World War II, Word War II could result in a significant loss of freedom and a total transformation of America. Even those hoping for such change would pay the price of that loss.

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Baring the truth

Pity the poor polar bears.
Al Gore, the Prophet of Doom, says they are disappearing. Apparently, he believes that would be a bad thing. I'm sure he mourns the loss of the dinosaurs as well.
But if you Google "polar bear population" you can find a lot of other opinion.
Yes, opinion.
Gore presents it as fact.
But, on one site produced by greens, I found a question posed to "the experts." It cited a report by Fox News that the polar bear population is 4-5 times what it was 50 years ago and asked if it was true.
The greens gave a lengthy response, never denying the figures but saying, in essence, no one knows how many polar bears exist.
If that's true, why present their decline as fact?
Here is another site with a lot of polar bear information. Among other things it debunks the famous photo of polar bears clinging to a piece of ice. Turns out they were in no danger. Actually, they were playing and having a great time, and the ice was melting because it melts every summer in that location.
Add it all up, toss in Climategate and you can understand why things aren't going so well at the love-in greens are having in Copenhagen.

Monday, December 14, 2009

A class act

Lying for profit

The Old Media does not report the news. It misrepresents the news.
There are countless examples. Many of the best come from the Media Research Center.
Here, MRC lists the top 10 economic myths perpetrated by the Old Media this year.
My favorite example features Charles Gibson, a highly paid misrepresenter who, in 1982, found the economic news "all bad" when unemployment hit 9.4 percent, but found "good news" when it hit 9.4 percent in 2009.
The difference between 9.4 and 9.4? A conservative president in 1982 and a liberal president in 2009.
When Rush Limbaugh refers to them as "the state-controlled media" he makes a strong point.

Where THEY want to go

Anyone who harbors any illusions about socialized medicine, which is what the liberals are trying to bring to America, should read this piece by a doctor, posted on American Thinker.
The story is much the same anywhere it has been tried: rationing, higher costs, lower quality.
Even worse are the two examples she gives from France.
"For economic expediency and with government approval, units of blood contaminated with HIV were transfused into over 4,400 patients, who were later confirmed to develop AIDS."
In 2003, more than 11,000 people died during two weeks of 104-degree heat.
"The overburdened, ill-equipped health care system -- particularly for elderly victims -- was blamed in part for this tragedy. Overwhelmed hospitals stopped admitting patients. Ambulance services told patients to cope wherever they were. French citizens died in hotels, in apartments, and in nursing homes. Some died on the street."
There are reasons why a majority of Americans oppose this plan. It's just that the Old Media don't want you to know what they are.

Saturday, December 12, 2009

Getting the gold finger

Another Golf Rush is on, folks. Not in Sacramento but in Washington, D.C.
Last year the government defunded a $2 billion project it said was inefficient. But this year, the latest "stimulus" bill revives a near-zero emissions coal power plant in Illinois.
It is only one of hundreds of pork projects to be built with the federal government's platinum credit card.
My favorite is $88 million for the Coast Guard to design a new polar icebreaker (arctic ship). Didn't Al Gore say the polar ice caps are melting?
Another is a $246 million tax break for Hollywood movie producers to buy motion picture film. Film? The whole world is using digital cameras. Are they going to put the film in hand-cranked cameras without sound?
Of course, government buildings that house such highly paid people (see previous post) can't be shabby: $448 million for constructing the Department of Homeland Security headquarters is vital to save and create jobs, as is $248 million for furniture at the new Homeland Security headquarters and $88 million for renovating the headquarters of the Public Health Service.
So is $412 million for CDC buildings and property and $500 million for building and repairing National Institutes of Health facilities in Bethesda, Maryland.
We can't do without $160 million for "paid volunteers" at the Corporation for National and Community Service. Can you spell "oxymoron"?
Anytime there is a handout, Amtrak will be at the front of the line and, sure enough, there is $850 million going down that huge black hole.
Don't blame me, I voted for Sarah Palin and what's-his-name who was on the ticket with her.

Giving til it hurts

Our president says we all must sacrifice, for the common good.
But, with his usual admirable nuance, he is willing to make exceptions.
For example, the number of civil servants earning six figure salaries has increased by -- wait for it -- 46 percent since the recession began.
There are now 383,000 federal employees making more than $100,000. That puts them in the category liberals call "rich" -- when they are gainfully employed in the private sector.
If that sounds high, it is only because it does not include the $41,000 in benefits the average federal employee receives.
Special rules help boost such figures. If Congress, for example, increases the pay for one bureaucrat, it can require automatic pay raises for 2,000 others who are higher in the pecking order.
Most of the jobs being "created or saved" by the Obama stimulus are in the public sector.
For them, sacrifice must wait. For the common good, of course.

Friday, December 11, 2009

A visual aid

Remember the "hockey stick graph" used by the charlatan Al Gore (winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and inventor of the Internet)?
Using falsified data, it purported to show a sharp rise in global temperatures in the past few years, which alarmists attributed to human activity.
Here's another graph with a blip at the end. This one is real.
The large uptick in the 1940s is, of course, the cost of winning World War II. This was followed by a decline and then another rise, followed by the dip after Republicans gained control of Congress in the mid 1990s. At the end is the sharp increase in debt that is the result of Republicans losing their way and then being replaced by tax-and-spend liberals who are even worse.
You can see the graph at www.usgovernmentspending.com
Next fall's congressional elections may help determine which way the trend will go -- even without concocted computer simulations.


Thursday, December 10, 2009

Bulletin

Only half the people in the country prefer having Barack Obama as president instead of George Bush.
This is the most startling result in a new poll, done by Public Policy Polling, a liberal group!
Allow me the pleasure of quoting: "Perhaps the greatest measure of Obama's declining support is that just 50 percent of voters now say they prefer having him as President to George W. Bush, with 44 percent saying they'd rather have his predecessor."
They try to spin the results with this: "Given the horrendous approval ratings Bush showed during his final term that's somewhat of a surprise and an indication that voters are increasingly placing the blame on Obama for the country's difficulties instead of giving him space because of the tough situation he inherited."
This last is getting a bit tiresome. Do you ever remember the media bemoaning the horrid mess Ronald Reagan inherited from the little pipsqueak from Georgia?
The bottom line is that it appears the highly praised and hugely overrated Obama will soon be the second choice of voters, behind the scathingly libeled Bush. How's that for hope and change?

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Hold that Tiger

As I golfer I admire Tiger Woods. As a person, not so much.
While he arguably is the greatest golfer in history, he doesn't make the cut as a husband and father.
At last count, he was up to 11 bimbos. And still blaming the media for invading his "privacy."
In his 30s, he is almost a billionaire. He has a beautiful wife and two beautiful kids. As an international role model I think he forfeits a little privacy when he acts like a college sophomore.
I suppose that some may insist no one has proved he is guilty of anything.
But, years ago, an insider on the PGA Tour with personal knowledge told me that when he came to town, Tiger and his father, Earl, had a standing request -- demand, really -- for women to amuse and entertain them.
Tiger credits his late father for teaching him a lot. Maybe Earl taught him too much.

More on persecuting the SEALS

The Washington Times has weighed in on the SEALS controversy, coming to the same conclusion I did in an earlier post: We can't fight terrorism and win by punishing our troops for victories.
The Times editorial says the SEALS are accused of hitting the terrorist in the midsection. The original stories said he displayed a bloody lip, indicating he had been struck in the face.
This is a bit puzzling. Here is a guy eager and willing to blow himself to bits to kill Americans but he complains about being punched out? Maybe he just feels shortchanged because they didn't make him a martyr.
Meanwhile the point remains. Any of our troops captured by the enemy wouldn't complain about a punch. Instead, they are brutally slaughtered.
Terrorist troops that Americans capture see an improvement in their living standards, even if they are bruised while being subdued. In addition, under the Obama standard, they are given protections under a Constitution they despise and seek to destroy.

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Rather confusing

Climate alarmists seem to have adopted the Dan Rather defense: Just because we lied doesn't mean it's not true.
Like Ed Begley's rant on YouTube, they shout down every question about the global warming theory with "peer review."
They claim that it ain't science if it ain't had peer review.
But let's peer at peer review a bit.
If you have a cabal that includes climate scientists who lust for billions of dollars in government funding to study "climate change," then they have an excellent incentive for them to find evidence of climate change, as long as they attach the caveat that "more research is needed." Almost as much incentive as a politician who promotes their work and stands to make millions in profits from efforts to "combat" global warming.
If this cabal controls whose research gets published -- peer review -- then it controls the debate.
Oddly enough, this is exactly what we find in the emails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.
One scientist said darkly, "we may have to redefine peer review" to keep another scientist from publishing his research questioning the idea that humans are causing the planet to heat up.
Several of the alarmists claim there is no peer reviewed evidence against global warming.
Yet, in 2005 after a Wall Street Journal story pointing out flaws in the theory, especially the "hockey stick" graph so beloved of the alarmists, a congressional investigation began.
The committee wrote to the author of the hockey-stick theory and in the letter said that in, "peer-reviewed articles in Science, Geophysical Research Letters, and Energy & Environment, researchers question the results" of his work.
Galileo Galilei, the father of modern science, wrote a paper in 1632 challenging the consensus by suggesting that the Earth revolves around the sun. As a result, he was tried by the Inquisition, found "vehemently suspect of heresy," and forced to recant. He spent the rest of his life under house arrest.
I wonder if Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems was peer-reviewed?
I wonder who is more religiously dogmatic -- the Inquisition or the Climate Change Community?

Unions are NOT pro-choice

Teacher union bosses have served notice on their politicians that they had better not allow poor children to get a good education in Washington, D.C.
I covered this issue in a piece I wrote for the American Thinker a while back.
Sheryl Blunt, writing in the Weekly Standard, has an update. The board of the non-profit that oversees the successful school choice program has written members of Congess, saying failure to act to reauthorize this program "will send well over 1,000 children to failing and, too often, unsafe schools. That result would, in our view, constitute a moral failing of the highest order on all of our parts."
As Blunt's piece notes, teacher union bosses spent $70 million of their members' money to buy votes and they expect to get their money's worth. Never mind all that nonsense about educating poor kids.

Hide the decline

Public opinion polls are so numerous that it is often hard to fashion any real sense of direction, but let's take a crack at it anyway.
Gallup Poll: Obama approval rating hits a new low at 47 percent. For those of you who read the New York Times, that's less than a majority.
Rasmussen Poll: 41 percent favor Obamacare, 51 percent oppose.
A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey finds that two-thirds of all Americans believe global warming is a fact.
But hold on, alarmists. That’s down eight points since June 2008.
Furthermore, about one-third of the people who believe the Earth is warming think it is due to natural causes, rather than manmade causes such as industrial emissions. As a result, the number who say that global warming is caused by humans has dropped from 54 percent last summer to 45 percent currently.
Twelve national polls have been released on ObamaCare in the past three weeks (Rasmussen, USA Today/Gallup, Ipsos/McClatchy, Fox, Democracy Corps, Quinnipiac, CBS, CNN, PPP, ABC/Washington Post, Pew, and Public Opinion Strategies), and in toto they show it losing by 8 percent.
Another poll shows a majority of the people in the nation think the United States is on the wrong track.
The most important fact is that all of this is taking place as Obama's media cheerleaders praise him to the skies for pursuing policies unpopular with Americans and bombard Americans with assurance that Obama's policies are good for them.
Summary: His key initiatives are opposed by Americans and Obama's support is less than a majority and dropping. Are those two facts related?
I report. You decide.

Monday, December 7, 2009

Recipe for defeat

Will President Obama win his war in Afghanistan?
It is his war now, and while he might blame Bush all day long he will have to preside over defeat or victory.
President Bush at least succeeded in winning the war in Iraq and in capturing Saddam Hussein. The left insisted loudly that he would fail at both. Indeed, they hoped he would fail.
So, when will Obama capture Osama?
Osama bin Laden, head of Al-Qaida, has been at large since his devastating attack on the United States Sept. 11, 2001. Bill Clinton had been afforded the chance to capture bin Laden before that and he took a pass.
When Obama's secretary of defense was asked when bin Laden would be captured he said he didn't know. He also said it had been "years" since the United States had good intelligence about bin Laden.
One reason is that the left wing of the Democrat Party has been trying to disable and dismantle the U.S. intelligence apparatus since the mid-1970s. That also is a reason Sept. 11 happened.
No wonder Obama didn't use the word "victory" in his West Point speech. If this nation is going to cripple intelligence gathering efforts, punish military heroes for capturing terrorists, provide terrorists with show trials, and fight a war with a deadline set in advance, victory is out of the question.

Punishing heroes

There is plenty to be outraged about these days, but nothing more outrageous than the court-martial of three Navy SEALS who captured a top-ranking terrorist.
They asked for the court-martial, which is a trial, because the Navy was going to give them a captain's mast, which is a proceeding that results in punishment and, usually, the end of a military career.
They captured the terrorist who ran the operation in which four Americans were murdered brutally, burned and dragged through the streets before being strung up so that they could be photographed for the media.
Instead of bringing him back feet first, which many Americans would have applauded, they brought him back alive. After a night in captivity, during which one witness reportedly checked on him and found him in good shape, he displayed a bloody lip and said the SEALS had done it.
Even if they did, and even if liberals scream "torture," this is political correctness run amok. We cannot win a war if our soldiers are punished for giving a fat lip to people who cut off heads.

Hanfstaengel, the prophet?

Victor Davis Hanson, an excellent historian who specializes in warfare, has a piece on National Review Online about the problem of dealing with Afghanistan.
He sums it up this way, "To put this in contemporary terms, what we are asking today is for a young man with a $250,000 education from West Point to climb into an Apache helicopter—after emailing back and forth with his wife and kids about what went on at a PTA meeting back in Bethesda, Maryland—and fly over Anbar province or up to the Hindu Kush and risk being shot down by a young man from a family of 15, none of whom will ever live nearly as well as the poorest citizens of the United States, using a weapon whose design he doesn't even understand. In a moral sense, the lives of these two young men are of equal value. But in reality, our society values the lives of our young men much more than Afghan societies value the lives of theirs. And it is very difficult to sustain a protracted war with asymmetrical losses under those conditions.
"My point here is that all of the usual checks on the tradition of Western warfare are magnified in our time. And I will end with this disturbing thought: We who created the Western way of war are very reluctant to resort to it due to post-modern cynicism, while those who didn't create it are very eager to apply it due to pre-modern zealotry. And that's a very lethal combination."
He likens it to the complacency of ancient Rome before its downfall.
Someone else once said, “Democracy has no convictions for which people would be willing to stake their lives.”
It was said by Ernst Hanfstaengel, college roommate of Franklin D. Roosevelt and an early supporter and close confidante of Hitler, who fled Germany when Hitler decided to murder him and went to work for Roosevelt.
Let's hope that Hanfstaengel, who was wrong then, is not proven right some 70 years later by the left wing in America.

Saturday, December 5, 2009

Crux of the issue

Liberals are hell-bent on bringing socialized medicine to the United States and the Senate is where it will be decided.
Whatever the Senate passes may not be the worst of it. The House and Senate bills will go to conference to be reconciled but what will really happen is that the bill will be written by the conference committee.
In every legislative body rules say that the product of conference will contain only what was in the two original bills. Nothing is to be added. It is a virtual certainty that the liberals, drunk with power, will ignore that rule and tradition.
The so-called government option is what the debate is about. Liberals say it is needed to ensure competition.
This is ludicrous.
There are 1,300 health insurance companies in the nation now. How does one more "option" increase competition?
What's more, it will not be an option. Government will force private insurance out of health care, leaving everyone to foot the bill. As it is in every other socialized medicine scheme, health care will be rationed.
Private companies would be competing with a "company" -- the government -- that would determine what they can sell and how much they can charge for their products. Give Apple that power and see how long Microsoft stays in business.
Unemployment is at 10 percent and the nation is $12 trillion in debt. Socialized medicine will increase both numbers and lower the quality of health care in America.
Here's what we know from history: No liberal entitlement program has lived up to its billing. The costs always are higher and the benefits less.
George Santayana often is quoted as saying, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." That is applicable in this case, certainly. But, given that liberals have stated they want to improve health care and lower costs, something else Santayana said is even more apropos: "Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim."

Warmup for Copenhagen

Of all the revelations in Climategate, the most shocking is that the alarmists who support the notion that mankind is causing the Earth to warm up destroyed the raw data allegedly supporting that notion.
Revealed emails from scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit contain a number of alarms. They call on others in their network to destroy emails in order to thwart freedom-of-information requests; suggest boycotting scientific journals that give opposing views a forum; and otherwise display an attitude that is the antithesis of true science.
But, all that aside, the fact is they have destroyed the original records used to construct the faulty computer models that allege catastrophe will result in a century unless humans spend trillions of dollars and essentially surrender individual freedoms to a world dictatorship. The raw data thus supports the entire house of cards that constitutes “anthropogenic global warming.”
“Trust us,” these demonstrably untrustworthy worthies say. "We know what the data said." Yet their emails talk of using tricks to "hide the decline" in temperatures over the past decade.

The laughable excuse they offer for dumping the data is that they didn’t have room in their computers back then to save all the information. On its Web site, CRU says, "Data storage availability in the 1980s meant that we were not able to keep the multiple sources for some sites, only the station series after adjustment for homogeneity issues. We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (i.e. quality controlled and homogenized) data."
First, who believes that? Admittedly, computer storage generally was smaller, but these were not large graphic files that hog storage space. This was numbers and text, which can be stored in huge amounts in a matter of gigabytes. Secondly, if there was no storage space for the digital info, why not print it out and store the hard copy in file cabinets? Certainly, there was no lack of file cabinets 20 years ago. It just won’t wash.
They could not turn over the raw data because honest scientists would see that it did not support the far-out projections of the alarmist community. That’s the only logical conclusion.

Thursday, December 3, 2009

We need health care reform

America's health care system is ailing. And the main reason is government interference in the free market. We need real reform, not more government interference, which is what the Washington wonks and their media lapdogs are trying to ram down the public throat.
Consumers and small businesses, whose interests usually are linked, are the main victims of the Obamacare scheme.
By any rational assessment it would increase health care costs, yet not improve health care or cover all of those not now insured.
Why do we need reform?
During World War II, the New Dealers had control of a large share of the economy. They instituted wage and price controls. Having forced wages and prices up in the 1930s, prolonging the Depression, in the 1940s they held wages down, forcing employers to offer fringe benefits as a way to get workers. One of those benefits was subsidized health insurance. Because higher income taxes and the new payroll tax were for the first time being withheld from paychecks, this was an enticement.
But the system that grew in response to these incentives eventually resulted in people relying on employers for insurance. If they left the job, they left their insurance. Furthermore, co-pay hid the true costs and thus the incentives to control them.
After all, if someone else paid 80 percent of your grocery bill each week, wouldn't you eat steak more often?
Since the late 1940s, liberals have yearned to go to socialized medicine, giving politicians even more control over people and business. When the most liberal president since FDR was elected, they saw their chance and it is upon us.
Polls show that people are beginning to realize what would happen. Support is eroding rapidly among the under-25 set, which had voted 2-1 for Obama. Conservatives are proposing viable alternatives -- true reform -- such as nationwide health insurance, tort reform and other measures that would not penalize consumers and businesses in the midst of an economic downturn and mounting public debt.
This is reform, and this is what is needed. Not socialism.