Ramirez says it all in one cartoon

http://www.investors.com/image/RAMclr-011211-murdereribd-f.jpg.cms

Obama: Not Always a Fan of Upping Debt Ceiling

Obama: Not Always a Fan of Upping Debt Ceiling - By Katrina Trinko - The Corner - National Review Online By Katrina Trinko

While President Obama’s economic advisor Austin Goolsbee argued Sunday that a refusal by the Senate to increase the government’s debt ceiling (currently $14.3 trillion) would be “catastrophic” and a sign of “insanity,” that’s not the position the president has held in the past.

Here are Obama’s thoughts on the debt limit in 2006, when he voted against increasing the ceiling:

The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies. … Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here. Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.

In 2007 and in 2008, when the Senate voted to increase the limit by $850 billion and $800 billion respectively, Obama did not bother to vote. (He did vote for TARP, which increased the debt limit by $700 billion.)

Sen. Jim DeMint (R., S.C.) told Human Events in an interview released today that the decision about the debt ceiling “needs to be a big showdown” in the Senate.

“We are going to cut [spending] necessary to stay within the current levels, which is over $14 trillion,” said DeMint.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/256199/obama-not-always-fan-upping-debt-ceiling-katrina-trinko

Not "crosshairs" from rifle scope--just surveyor mark

Oh, By the Way...  by John Hinderacker/Powerline
The Democratic Party is trying to blame Jared Loughner's crime on Sarah Palin. So, if Governor Palin or any other Republican were to be raped, or shot, or come to any other harm, would it be the liberals' fault? By their logic, the case would be more than air-tight. One can reasonably ask: did any Republican ever suggest that it would be a good thing if Representative Giffords were shot or raped? Of course not. Only liberals sink that low.

I haven't had much time to watch cable news over the weekend, but from what I've seen, I've been disappointed in the performance of Republicans. Conservatives need to hit back aggressively against the Democrats' ridiculous attacks, not try to be high-minded.

PAUL adds: Some Democrats are relying on a map by Sarah Palin's PAC indicating that it was targeting certain congressional districts in the 2010 election. The map identifies the districts as targets by placing crosshairs on them. Palin also stated that Republicans should not retreat, but rather reload.

There is no evidence that this speech had anything to do with the shooting of Rep. Giffords. Nor, obviously, did it advocate or suggest that she be the target of violence. The crosshairs appear on geographic locations, not the faces of individuals. And the word "reload" is often used in non-gun contexts (e.g., the Duke basketball program doesn't rebuild, it reloads).

Nonetheless, it would be nice if, going forward, politicians and the PACs refrained from using crosshairs in ads.

JOHN adds: Well, perhaps. But as many commentators have pointed out, the target motif has been common in both parties' communications. Thus, we have this graphic from the Democratic Leadership Committee, illustrating its "targeting strategy" for attacking those Republican Congressmen who are "behind enemy lines":

As well as this graphic from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, where each of the bulls-eyes represents a "targeted Republican":

My own view is that it is pointless to try to wipe out military metaphors, which abound in our language, political and otherwise. Military metaphors, in my opinion, have nothing to do with mass murder by lunatics, whether those metaphors crop up among Republicans or Democrats.

PAUL adds: I'm not sure anyone is going to have to try wipe out shooting metaphors from our politics. Using them gains nothing and risks the kind of criticism Palin is getting now. Thus, politicians with serious ambitions would be foolish to employ shooting metaphors where other rhetorical devices will do.

I won't miss them. They may be edgy, but it's an edginess we can do without. In this country politics is not warfare.

SCOTT adds: Oh, by the way, those aren't crosshairs on Palin's map.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/01/028104.php
 
http://bigjournalism.com/dloesch/2011/01/09/the-difference-between-purveyor-symbols-and-crosshairs/

The upper 1% earned 19.6% of total income before tax, and paid 41% of the individual federal income tax

"theblogprof" A blog about politics, faith, science and technology, physical fitness, and life

Fleeced: The upper 1% earned 19.6% of total income before tax, and paid 41% of the individual federal income tax. "No other major country is so dependent on so few taxpayers"

The most productive citizens in this country are being fleeced by the unproductive. The so-called rich are being punished for achieving the American Dream via punitive taxation. Earlier this month, and after voters repudiated Democrats' class warfare rhetoric in November, Dick Durbin trots it out again - the class warfare card - and gets taken behind the woodshed by Dave Ramsey for his effort:

 
Note that the bottom 50% pay almost no taxes, while the top 5% pay about 60% of the federal tax bill. I agree with one thing - this isn't fair. But I think it is the rich that are paying too much, only to be sneered at by those that pay nothing at all and get OUR money back from the government. It's now gotten so bad, so unfair, that the top 1% pay more in federal taxes than the bottom 95%:
 

 
(The entire blog post is not that long, has YouTube and more charts, that explain it better than words):
 
http://theblogprof.blogspot.com/2010/12/fleeced-upper-1-earned-196-of-total.html

The Utter Futility of Reducing Carbon Emissions

Pajamas Media » The Utter Futility of Reducing Carbon Emissions

The Utter Futility of Reducing Carbon Emissions

Even with the calculations used by the warmists, virtually nothing would happen if man never produced another CO2 molecule.

 by Art Horn

The Climate Catastrophe Confab in Cancun, Mexico, is now over. Once again we heard the cries from the 20,000 delegates about how the wealthy nations of the world have stolen the future from developing nations by using up all the carbon space in the air by their reckless and selfish use of fossil fuels. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon proclaimed:

We need to fundamentally transform the global economy, based on low carbon, clean energy resources.

It’s quite interesting and revealing — when one looks at the decisions made at the conference, nearly all of them are about money, not climate.

The problem with this transformation of the world economy to low carbon resources? Even if we could eliminate all fossil fuel use around the world, it would have virtually no effect on Earth’s temperature. The attempt to reduce human carbon dioxide emissions to control global warming is completely, utterly pointless and doomed to failure. … well, perhaps I should qualify that statement a bit: Reducing man-made carbon dioxide emissions is completely and utterly pointless if your goal is to change the future climate. On the other hand, if you’re looking to make money from the trading of carbon allowances (carbon credits), then it makes a great deal of sense. If you’re looking to control the way the modern world makes energy, then it makes perfect sense as well. If you’re trying to save the world from capitalists, it’s highly desirable to reduce “dirty” carbon emissions.

If your mission is to extract money from developed nations and give it to those countries that have been robbed of their right to burn fossil fuels to grow their economies, then it is the moral thing to do. If you are in the renewable energy business, it makes perfect sense to support the reduction of carbon dioxide “pollution.” If you’re one of hundreds of environmental corporations whose mission is to save the planet at any cost, then shutting down all sources of man-made carbon dioxide is quite sensible.

Earth has a thick atmosphere that provides the living things on it and in its oceans with a warming greenhouse effect. This keeps the Earth’s temperature at an average of 59 degrees Fahrenheit. If there were no greenhouse effect the average temperature of the Earth would be zero. Life as we know it would not likely exist.

The primary greenhouse gases listed in order of their contribution to the effect are: water vapor, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane. There are others, but their concentrations in the atmosphere are so small they don’t contribute much effect. Water vapor and clouds are about 90% of the greenhouse effect, carbon dioxide about 8%, nitrous oxide about .95% and methane about .36%. It’s the combined greenhouse warming from these gases that gives the Earth its current average temperature.

Studies by Raval & Ramanathan (1989) estimated that the greenhouse effect of a cloudless atmosphere is 146 W/m2 (watts per square meter) for the average Earth. They further pointed out that water vapor is accounting for most of this greenhouse effect, leaving about 8 W/m2 for the total amount of atmospheric CO2 — some 8%. In addition, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 4th Assessment showed that 3% of the atmospheric CO2 comes from man-made sources. Global gross primary production and respiration, land use changes, plus CO2 from the oceans totals 213 gigatonnes of carbon exchanged each year between the Earth/oceans and the atmosphere. The IPCC figure also shows man-made carbon emissions to be about 7 gigatonnes, bringing the total to 220 gigatonnes per year. So from this, we can see that making energy from fossil fuels is producing about 3% of the carbon dioxide added to the air each year. From that, the total human component of the greenhouse effect is therefore about 3% of the total carbon dioxide component of the greenhouse effect, which is 8%.

That gives us a value of .2% from man-made carbon dioxide. If you think that’s a small number you’re right.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says even this small component of warming caused by man’s use of fossil fuels will cause dramatic warming in the future. This dramatic warming is forecast by the use of computer models. The IPCC’s forecasts are flawed for many reasons, but one significant error is the residency time of carbon dioxide in the air far into the future. The IPCC claims carbon dioxide, once emitted into the air, stays there for 50 to 200 years. The vast majority of studies say the residency time for carbon dioxide is more like 5 years.

The very small human component of the greenhouse effect has profound implications when governments are considering reducing carbon dioxide concentrations to fight global warming. The United States produces about 20% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions each year. If we were somehow able to shut down all sources of carbon dioxide emissions from the United States, the effect on the global average temperature would be 20% of .1 degree, or .02 degrees. And that’s with shutting down everything that makes carbon dioxide! This decrease of .02 degrees is so small it is completely irrelevant. If achieved, it would drop the global average temperature from 59.0 to 58.98 degrees, and it would take billions, if not trillions, to achieve. After all — we make 87% of our energy from burning fossil fuels. If there were a way to eliminate all carbon dioxide emissions on a global scale, the decrease in temperature would be .1 degree — dropping the temperature from 59.0 degrees to 58.9 degrees. Once again, completely insignificant at a cost that would quite possibly bankrupt the world.

When so much is at stake you would think this would be common knowledge, but apparently it is not. Part of the reason is that there are so many competing factions looking to squeeze every dollar they can from the lie. Interestingly, the Chicago Climate Exchange closed its doors recently. This can only be seen as good news. Not for Al Gore, Goldman Sachs and others, but for the nation at large: very good news. Apparently, the Republican revolution of 2010 has caused the climate exchange to be taken off life support. The Republicans took over the House of Representatives and made significant gains in the Senate. Because of this, the idea of a national cap and trade law that would allow the buying and selling of carbon allowances on a national scale is over. “It is dead for the foreseeable future,” said Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and the Environment, part of the Competitive Energy Institute. “Economy-wide cap and trade died of what amounts to natural causes in Washington,” said Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund that supported cap and trade legislation.

So on the bright side, not all is lost. The bad economy is dragging on and on, and enough people, except for the 20,000 delegates in Cancun, have come to see that trying to control the climate is potentially out-of-this-world expensive and impossible. They’ve seen that a few individual investors would make billions while nations go broke and the climate goes on doing what it has been doing for millions of years — changing on its own. If only more people knew the total temperature payback for eliminating all carbon dioxide emissions was one-tenth of one degree of cooling.

Art Horn spent 25 years working in television as a meteorologist. He now is an independent meteorologist and speaker who lives in Connecticut. He can be contacted at skychaserman@cox.net.

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/the-utter-futility-of-reducing-carbon-emissions/

K-12 Spending Per Student in the OECD

K-12 Spending Per Student in the OECD Mercatus

K-12 Spending Per Student in the OECD
Veronique de Rugy

This chart by Mercatus Center Senior Research Fellow Veronique de Rugy compares K-12 education expenditures per pupil in each of the world’s major industrial powers. As we can see, with the exception of Switzerland, the United States spends more than any other country on education, an average of $91,700 per student between the ages of six and fifteen.

That’s not only more than other countries spend but it is also more than better achieving countries spend – the United States spends a third more than Finland, a country that consistently ranks near the top in science, reading, and math testing.
 
 http://mercatus.org/publication/k-12-spending-student-oecd

Think the anti-capitalist left is resting? They want O to preside over more chaos like the EU failed states--goal: US must fail

The Second Time is Farce: Frances Fox Piven Calls for a new Cloward-Piven Strategy for Today  By Ron Radosh

Writing in The Nation magazine on May 2, 1966, sociologists Richard Cloward and his wife Frances Fox Piven published what was to become in later years one of the most famous and influential of leftist articles. Titled “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty,” the two socialist intellectuals developed a new so-called “crisis strategy” — that of trying to use the existing welfare system to create chaos that would weaken the corporate capitalist state and eventually foment revolution. “Discover the Networks” has a good summary [1] of their thesis.

The two became the ideologists of a group formed to implement their strategy, called “The National Welfare Rights Organization,” or NWRO. As Stanley Kurtz explains [2] in Radical-in-Chief: “the idea was to flood state and local welfare systems with more applicants than they could possibly afford to carry. Cloward and Piven believed that this ‘break the bank’ strategy would force President [Lyndon B.] Johnson and a liberal Democratic Congress to bail out overburdened state welfare systems with a federally guaranteed annual income.” This experience of activism by the poor would create a new anti-capitalist sentiment, and would stoke the poors’ “sense of entitlement and rage.” Later, the group’s mission would be carried on by ACORN, whose leaders endorsed and built upon Cloward and Piven’s strategy.

The idea was to consciously create a fiscal crisis of the state. ACORN’s chief strategist, Peter Dreier, explained this in an article, “The Case for Transitional Reform,” which appeared in the journal Social Policy in February 1979. Dreier called for injecting “unmanageable strains into the capitalist system, strains that precipitate an economic and/or political crisis,” producing a “revolution of rising entitlements” that “cannot be abandoned without undermining the legitimacy of the capitalist class.” Once a “fiscal crisis in the public sector” occurred, the movement could push for creation of “socialist norms” being advanced as the only possible solution.

A few decades have passed since this strategy was first announced. They had great hopes that when Bill Clinton became president, they could implement their strategy. But the Clinton administration — once seen potentially by the Left as a vehicle for fulfillment of its dreams — worked with Republicans in Clinton’s second term to pass meaningful and successful welfare reform. This was precisely the opposite of what the Left wanted and hoped for.

Now, as President Barack Obama is beginning the mid-point of his first and possibly only term in office, the Left is again trying to advance a new form of the old strategy. And the author of the new program is none other than Frances Fox Piven, the co-author with her late husband of the original 1966 article. Clearly, Piven looks back fondly with memories of what NWRO did in the 1970s. The New York Times reported on their tactics on September 22, 1970:

There have been sit-ins in legislative chambers, including a United States Senate committee hearing, mass demonstrations of several thousand welfare recipients, school boycotts, picket lines, mounted police, tear gas, arrests — and, on occasion, rock-throwing, smashed glass doors, overturned desks, scattered papers and ripped-out phones.

My friend Sol Stern, now with City Journal and the Manhattan Institute, explained how successful they were [3]:

The flooding succeeded beyond Wiley’s wildest dreams. From 1965 to 1974, the number of households on welfare soared from 4.3 million to 10.8 million, despite mostly flush economic times. By the early 1970s, one person was on the welfare rolls in New York City for every two working in the city’s private economy.

Under the liberal administration of Mayor John Lindsay, welfare spending more than doubled, from $400 million to $1 billion a year. Money for the poor was now 28 per cent of the city’s budget, and New York almost collapsed as a result — precisely the hope of Cloward, Piven and George Wiley.

Now, as our national economy and many state and city budgets again are at the breaking point, Frances Fox Piven has issued a new call to repeat and build upon the ruinous strategies that she and her late husband advanced decades ago. And as in 1966, her vehicle is The Nation, the flagship magazine of the Left which today has a huge circulation and much greater influence than it had in the 1960s.

Writing in the current issue, Piven presents [4] a clarion call for a new mass movement, one that the magazine publishes as an editorial statement representing its editors. (It is currently under the magazine’s firewall.) She begins by noting that nothing is taking place to deal with ending what she claims is an unemployment rate of 15 million people. To regain the 5 percent rate of 2007, she estimates there would have to be 300,000 jobs created each month for several years, something that is next to impossible.

Thus Piven asks a question: “So where are the angry crowds, the demonstrations, sit-ins and unruly mobs?” In other words, the kind of action her protégé George Wiley fomented in the 70s with the NWRO. She admonishes the Left not to wait for “the end of the American empire and even the end of neoliberal capitalism,” but to up the ante at present to pressure for “big new [government] initiatives in infrastructure and green energy” that could “ward off the darkness.” Her fear is that the new Congress, instead of moving in the direction she and the Left favors, will concentrate on “deficit reduction by means of tax cuts and spending cuts.” As for President Obama, she sees him as a new version of Herbert Hoover, who foolishly meets with corporate executives and seeks to placate them.

What is needed, she suggests, are “mass protests” that might influence Obama and press “him hard from his base.” To do that, however, she notes that they have to get past the many obstructions to mobilize the unemployed. This is especially the case that the unions today “do little for their unemployed,” who don’t pay dues and “are likely to be malcontents.”

Piven argues that their task is harder than it was in the past, because the unemployed are diverse, are not in one area of the country and have no common institutional setting. It is hard to bring people together, even in welfare and unemployment centers, she complains, since often administrators try to avoid long lines and crowded waiting areas, where organizers could proselytize and inflame the dissatisfied applicants.

But most important, she writes, “they have to develop a proud and angry identity and a set of claims that go with that identity. They have to go from being hurt and ashamed to being angry and indignant (my emphasis) …Losing a job is bruising; even when many other people are out of work, most people are still working. So, a kind of psychological transformation has to take place; the out-of-work have to stop blaming themselves for their hard times and turn their anger on the bosses, the bureaucrats or the politicians who are in fact responsible.”

They also need targets, which she sees as “the most difficult of the strategy problems.” Since she knows well that “local and state governments are strapped for funds,” the poor and the unemployed must demand “federal action.” It is, in other words, another “fiscal crisis of the state” that, as in the past, can be used to advance the radical goal. There first have to be local protests that have to “accumulate and spread,” then “become more disruptive” (my emphasis) in order to pressure our national political leaders. What does Piven mean when she calls for disruption? She is clear and up front about her intent:

An effective movement of the unemployed will have to look something like the strikes and riots that have spread across Greece in response to the austerity measures forced on the Greek government by the European Union, or like the student protests that recently spread with lightning speed across England in response to the prospect of greatly increased school fees. (my emphasis.)

What she is calling for is nothing less than the chaos and violence engulfing Europe. Disgruntled leftist unionists, students who expect an education without cost, and citizens of social-democratic states cannot accept that the old terms of the social contract they thought would last forever have worn out their welcome. The European welfare-state governments can no longer function with the kind of social programs that now far exceed their nation’s budgets and hence are moving their countries to the precipice of total collapse.

So Piven hopes that in our own country, “a loose and spontaneous movement of this sort could emerge,” spurred on, no doubt, by ideologues like Piven and the encouragement of the New York City leftists who run The Nation magazine. Perhaps on their next Carribbean cruise they can talk about it some more. Hence Piven hopes that young workers and students, “who face a future of joblessness, just might become large enough and disruptive enough to have an impact in Washington.”

Will it happen here? There is no exact science of protest movements, she notes. But who, she asks, “expected the angry street mobs in Athens or the protests by British students?” Living in the past, she looks hopefully at the strikes in 1934, and the civil rights movement of the1960s. Clearly no student of history, Piven fails to comprehend the very different circumstances that made these social movements have legs. All she can do is issue her hope that another “American social movement from the bottom” will emerge, and then the organized Nation left can “join it.”

This time, however, ACORN is collapsing, and no George Wiley and NWRO even exists to implement her strategy. Somehow, I doubt whether the current Nation readers will even pause to leave their cruise ship to try and organize the social base she thinks is the movement’s hope. It’s far easier to issue flaming declarations in the magazine’s pages and hope that someone will take her up on it. Doesn’t she remember her Karl Marx?

http://pajamasmedia.com/ronradosh/2010/12/30/cloward-piven-strategy-for-today/

The Liberal Reckoning of 2010--voters said "Hell, no!"

The Liberal Reckoning of 2010

The year voters saw the left's unvarnished agenda and said no..
 
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid sent out a press release last week headlined "111th Congress Accomplishments." It quoted a couple of Democratic Party cheerleaders calling this the greatest Congress since 1965-66 (Norm Ornstein) or even the New Deal (David Leonhardt), and listed in capital letters no fewer than 30 legislative triumphs: Health Care Reform, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a Jobs Package (HIRE Act), the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, Food Safety, the Travel Promotion Act, Student Loan Reform, Hate Crimes Prevention, and so much more.

What the release did not mention is the loss of 63 House and six Senate seats, and a mid-December Gallup poll approval rating of 13%. Never has a Congress done so much and been so despised for it.

While this may appear to be a contradiction, it is no accident or even much of a surprise. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party had been waiting since the 1960s for its next great political opening, as we warned in an October 17, 2008 editorial, "A Liberal Supermajority." Critics and some of our readers scored us at the time for exaggerating, but in retrospect we understated the willful nature of that majority.

Democrats achieved 60 Senate votes by an historical accident of prosecutorial abuse (Ted Stevens), a stolen election (Al Franken) and a betrayal (Arlen Specter). They then attempted to do nearly everything we expected, regardless of public opinion, and they only stopped because the clock ran out.

Editorial Board Member Matt Kaminski on the winners and losers of 2010.

The real story of 2010 is that the voters were finally able to see and judge this liberal agenda in its unvarnished form. For once, there was no Republican President to muddle the message or divide the accountability. The public was able to compare the promise of 8% unemployment if the government spent $812 billion on "stimulus" with the 9.8% jobless result. They stood athwart liberal history in the making and said, "Stop."

Note well, however, that the Democrats still standing on Capitol Hill remain unchastened. In her exit interviews, Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said she would do it all the same way again, and her colleagues have seconded her lack of remorse by keeping her as their leader despite their November thumping. Her consolation to defeated Democrats was not to invite them to the House caucus meeting when she denounced President Obama's tax deal with Republicans.

Note, too, that the organized left and its media allies are also beginning to rewrite the story of the 111th Congress as an historical triumph. The same people who claimed that ObamaCare was a defeat because it lacked a public option are suddenly noting it will put 32 million more Americans on the government health-care dole. It won't be long before liberals and the press are defending the 111th Congress's every achievement as historic.

There is a lesson here both about modern liberalism and for Republicans who will soon have more power in Congress. For today's left, the main goal of politics is not to respond to public opinion. The goal is to impose the dream of an egalitarian entitlement state whether the public likes it or not. Sooner or later, they figure, the anger will subside and Americans will come to like the cozy confines of the cradle-to-grave welfare state.

This is the great Democratic bet with ObamaCare. The assumption is that once the benefits start to flow in 2013 the constituency for "free" health care will grow. As spending and deficits climb, the pressure for higher taxes will become inexorable and the GOP will splinter into its balanced budget and antitax wings. A value-added tax or some other money-machine will pass and guarantee that the government will control 40% to 50% of all economic resources.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said she would do it all the same way again.

If the price of this bet was losing control of the House for a moment in time in 2010, Mrs. Pelosi's view is so be it. You have to break a few Blue Dog careers to build a European welfare state. Liberals figure that as long as President Obama can be re-elected in 2012, their gamble will pay off and the legacy of the 111th Congress will be secure. The cheerleaders will write books about it.

The lesson for Republicans is to understand the nature of their political opponents and this long-term bet. The GOP can achieve all kinds of victories in the next two years, and some of them will be important for economic growth. But the main chance is ObamaCare, which will fundamentally change the balance of power between government and individuals if it is not repealed or replaced.

While repeal will no doubt founder in the Senate in the next two years, Republicans can still use their House platform to frame the debate for 2012. They can hold hearings to educate the public about rising insurance costs and other nasty ObamaCare consequences. And they can use the power of the purse to undermine its implementation.
***
The difference between the work of the 111th Congress and that of either the Great Society or New Deal is that the latter were bipartisan and in the main popular. This Congress's handiwork is profoundly unpopular and should become more so as its effects become manifest. In 2010, Americans saw liberalism in the raw and rejected it. The challenge for Republicans is to repair the damage before it becomes permanent.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703909904576051803529108190.html

Relatively Speaking, It's Still Cold--so much for "warming"

Relatively Speaking, It's Still Cold

Most people, I think, have caught on to the fact that global warming hysteria is a politically-inspired hoax. In that regard, it is helpful to put current temperatures into historical context. At Watts Up With That? Don Easterbrook charts temperatures since the last Ice Age, approximately 10,000 years, based on Greenland ice cores. This is his description of the methodology:

One of the best ways to look at long-term temperatures is with isotope data from the GISP2 Greenland ice core, from which temperatures for thousands of years can be determined. The ice core isotope data were obtained by Minze Stuiver and Peter Grootes from nuclear accelerator measurements of thousands of oxygen isotope ratios (16O/18O), which are a measure of paleo-temperatures at the time snow fell that was later converted to glacial ice. The age of such temperatures can be accurately measured from annual layers of accumulation of rock debris marking each summer's melting of ice and concentration of rock debris on the glacier.

Is the methodology reliable? I don't know, but it is typical of the sort of data that climate scientists use. This is the chart that shows temperatures over the last 10,000 years; as you can see, virtually all of that time has been warmer than the present.

We are still warming up from the Little Ice Age, and, according to these data, we have quite a distance to go before we reach temperatures that are normal in historical terms. This chart also reflects the fact that human civilization has generally prospered the most during warmer periods.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/12/028039.php

Must read and see charts: http://liten.be//LFRhK

Time to Rethink Public Employee Unions

Time to Rethink Public Employee Unions by John Hinderacker/Powerline

In New York, sanitation workers have reported that their union ordered them to sabotage the city's blizzard cleanup efforts. If that claim is true, the union may be responsible for at least one death. Mayor Bloomberg has vowed to investigate.

It remains to be seen what will come of this particular controversy, but the broader point is coming into ever-clearer focus: it is time to ban public employee unions.

For the large majority of our history, public employee unions have been illegal. It is only since the 1960s and 1970s that they have been allowed. Currently, they are legal in roughly half the states. The United States has carried on a four-decade experiment in legalization, and the results are in: public employee unions are a cancer on our country.

Public employee unions flourish because government is, by its nature, a monopoly. Thus, there is no need for unionized government units to compete against non-unionized units. Moreover, public officials who negotiate with public employee unions generally lack the same incentives that private employers have to keep costs down. The result has been a fiscal disaster, with numerous states and municipalities now going over the waterfall of bankruptcy.

Meanwhile, public employee unions have become perhaps the dominant force in our political life. They extract dues from their members which go to fund the candidacies of politicians who will pay public employees even more money. The unions' ill-gotten clout has created a vicious cycle; at the same time that government units are going broke, public employees are now far better paid than their private sector counterparts, while enjoying better benefits and ridiculous job security.

Enough is enough. Legalization of public employee unions has been a disaster. It is time to end the experiment and make them illegal once again, at both the federal and state levels. I expect that this will become one of the great political issues of the next decade.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/12/028031.php

The early returns on Obamacare

The early returns on Obamacare by Paul Mirengoff/Powerline

The Washington Post reports that Obamacare is off to a rocky start. One of its key early features -- the one that allows people who are already sick to obtain insurance -- is attracting few customers and costing more than expected.

As to the first matter, the chief actuary of the Medicare program predicted earlier this year that 375,000 people would sign up for the new pool plans by the end of 2010. As of early December, only 8,000 people had enrolled.

As to the second matter, the Post reports that in some states the "high-risk pools" are proving very costly. Thus, "it is an open question whether the $5 billion allotted by Congress to start up the plans will be sufficient."

It is also an open question whether the high-risk pools are even serving their intended purpose -- making affordable insurance available to people who are already sick. In addition to citing anecdotal evidence of how costly premiums are, the Post quotes one researcher who states, "from my perspective, [the new plans] are not a good match for people who have expensive conditions." This may help explain why so few people are signing up.

The high-risk pools are only one aspect of Obamacare, of course. However, according to the Post, some health-policy researchers believe that "the success or failure of the pools could foreshadow the complexities of making broader charges in health insurance by 2014, when states are to open new marketplaces -- or exchanges -- for Americans to buy coverage individually or in small groups."

At a minimum, I think the early experience with the high-risk pools foreshadows the unreliablility of key predictions made by Obamacare's supporters. Look for the serious overstatement of benefits and the serious understatement of costs to be a constant feature as the rest of Obamacare is rolled out (assuming no repeal).

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/12/028014.php

White House Plans to Push Global Warming Policy, GOP Vows Fight

White House Plans to Push Global Warming Policy, GOP Vows Fight

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/12/28/white-house-plans-push-global-warming-policy-gop-vows-fight/

Obama under pressure to deliver on climate

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/environment/2010-12-29-Obamaclimatefull29_ST_N.htm?csp=34news&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+usatoday-NewsTopStories+%28News+-+Top+Stories%29&utm_content=My+Yahoo

Gangster government, HHS edition--tyranny on installment plan

Gangster government, HHS edition by Scott Johnson/Powerline (use links for more info from sources)

Obamacare figures to be a fount of gangster government if and when it is ever fully implemented. Over time it will render us all subjects of the administrative state.

As Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius is giving us a preview of coming attractions. Jeffrey Anderson explains:

Not satisfied with the colossal amounts of power that she would acquire under Obamacare if it isn't repealed, Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary Kathleen Sebelius has issued a 136-page "rule" that will now give her (and her subordinates) largely unchecked power to pass judgment on the prices of health insurance throughout the United States. Notwithstanding the fact that 43 states already regulate and approve health insurance premiums, Sebelius claims that we need an additional, more centralized, protection against insurers' unseemly "profit motive." But a far greater threat to the future of American republicanism is posed by the impulse that animates Sebelius and the bulk of the Obama administration: the power motive.


It's staggering that one person would think that she should ultimately get to decide what a product, which Obamacare would soon require all Americans to purchase, should cost. Moreover, the Wall Street Journal writes that Sebelius's "rule" marks "an effort to end-run Congress, which by some miracle declined to give HHS the formal legal authority to explicitly block premium increases, despite a direct appeal from President Obama." Not having been granted that formal power, "Ms. Sebelius is creating by regulatory fiat larger de facto powers to achieve the same end."

The linked Wall Street Journal editorial concludes: "Politicized rate-setting is the new reality of the U.S. health insurance market, not that consumers will in any way benefit."

Anderson also links to Charles Kesler's Claremont Review of Books editorial. Kesler writes of Obamacare's administrative regime:

Faster than one might think, a government of equal laws turns into a regime of arbitrary privileges.


A "privilege" is literally a private law. When law ceases to be a common "standard of right and wrong" and a "common measure to decide all controversies," then the rule of law ceases to be republican and becomes despotic. Freedom itself ceases to be a right and becomes a gift, or the fruit of a corrupt bargain, because in such degraded regimes those who are close to and connected with the ruling class have special privileges.

Anderson concludes that Obamacare leads to "the politicizing of health care, the compromising of liberty, and the debilitating consolidation of power in the hands of the unelected few."

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/12/027993.php

Obama's useful idiots

Obama's useful idiots

by Scott Johnson/Powerline
The new START Treaty that passed the Senate today seems to come out of a Cold War time warp. Let's take a look back at Obama's thoughts on the American nuclear arsenal during the Cold War.

When Ronald Reagan set out to bring down the Soviet Union, he built up America's nuclear arsenal while deploying short-range nuclear warheads in Europe and undertaking a widely derided missile defense program. Reagan's build-up took place over the massive worldwide opposition of the left, much of it orchestrated by the Soviet Union under the auspices of one or another of its "peace offensives."

Reagan's efforts induced a kind of mass hysteria. ABC brought us The Day After, the documentary-style film portraying a fictional nuclear war between NATO forces and the Warsaw Pact that rapidly escalated into a full-scale exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union. The film graphically displayed the effects of the war on Lawrence, Kansas. Nuclear war was a bitch, of course, and the film served as a timely warning against the nightmare toward which Reagan's policies would deliver us.

in Useful Idiots Mona Charen also recalls that public television brought us Testament (1983), "a moving film about a family in Washington State slowly dying of radiation poisoning after a nuclear war." Not to be outdone, Charen adds, NBC "broadcast its own scaremongering documentary called Facing Up To the Bomb (1982)." (The title of Charen's book comes from a phrase attributed to Lenin describing Western left-liberals and Social Democrats.)

In 1983 protesters formed a 14-mile anti-nuclear "human chain" in Berkshire, England. When Reagan visited London for an economic summit the following year, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament turned out somewhere between 80,000 (police count) and 200,000 (CND count) protesters marching from Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square to greet him. Reagan modestly allowed that he didn't "take credit for all of the demonstrators being there for me..."

Nowhere was the hysteria greater than on college campuses. It manifested itself in intense hostility to the military, to national defense and security, and to every aspect of the Reagan defense build-up. The college crowd hated Reagan's opposition to Communism, wherever applied.

The New York Times has reported that in 1983, as a Columbia undergraduate, Barack Obama was among the "useful idiots" expressing high-minded disparagement of Reagan's defense policies. That's not exactly how the Times put it, because Times reporters William Broad and David Sanger failed to supply the missing historical context that Charen's book provides, and because the Times itself figures prominently among the "useful idiots" chronicled by Charen.

The Times article reported on Obama's March 1983 article "Breaking the war mentality." The Times noted that in the article Obama railed against discussions of "first-versus second-strike capabilities" that "suit the military-industrial interests" with their "billion-dollar erector sets," and agitated for the elimination of global arsenals holding tens of thousands of deadly warheads.

In his article Obama praised the nuclear freeze movement and celebrated the work of two groups: Arms Race Alternatives and Students Against Militarism. By Obama's description of them, the groups were among the "useful idiots" promoting the Soviet line on Reagan's build-up: "These groups, visualizing the possibilities of destruction and grasping the tendencies of distorted national priorities, are shifting their weight into throwing America off the dead-end track."

Obama expressed and dismissed a possible reservation regarding the "narrow focus" of the groups, citing the deep wisdom of Peter Tosh that "everybody's asking for peace, but nobody's asking for justice." Heavy, man.

But if Peter Tosh was heavy, he had nothing on Obama himself. Obama decried "the most pervasive tendency of the collegiate system specifically, and the American experience generally." Obama described this "tendency" as the disembodiment of "elaborate patterns of knowledge and theory from individual choices and government policy." According to Obama, Arms Race Alternatives and Students Against Militarism had come "to save us from the twisted logic of which we are today a part."

The Times chose to portray Obama's 1983 article as the early expression of his continuing pursuit of "a nuclear free world." That's one way to put it. While others may hope that Obama has outgrown his youthful radicalism, the Times suggested that he is fulfilling it. The Times unfortunately appears to have gotten that right.

The Soviet Union is gone, but Obama's fantasy of a nuclear free world survives. Enter the new START Treaty. It's hard to follow the rationale offered in support of the treaty by supporters such as Robert Wright without laughing out loud. Rich Lowry swallowed hard and got the job done here.

John Podhoretz does not condemn the treaty, but finds that it does no harm: "This is an unnecessary treaty, made with a bad international actor of the second rank whose word cannot be trusted and who does not deserve to be elevated to the level of a bilateral negotiator with the United States." I am afraid that this errs on the side of charity, but we can hope.

I am more certain that the passage of the treaty on the dying day of a lame duck Congress is an illegitimate act. Matthew Spalding and Anna Leutheuser have reviewed the record since the passage in 1933 of the Twentieth Amendment limiting lame duck sessions. Spalding and Leutheuser write: "The State Department maintains a comprehensive listing of all agreements and treaties currently in force. While considerable research would be required to establish definitively that no treaty has ever been ratified by a lame duck session, it is of note that current research efforts have yet to find any such treaty."

Spalding and Leutheuser therefore conclude: "The ratification of New START by a lame duck Senate would not only ignore the message sent by voters in November but also break a significant precedent, consistent with the principle of consent, maintained by Presidents and Congresses since the passage of the Twentieth Amendment in 1933."

According to Politico, the new START Treaty could not have passed without the support of 10 Republican Senators. In the event, 13 Republican Senators voted for it. Here is the roster via Politco: Indiana's Richard Lugar, Ohio's outgoing senator George Voinovich, Utah's outgoing Bob Bennett, Tennessee's Senators Corker and Alexander, Mississippi's Thad Cochran (the ranking Republican on the Senate Appropriations panel), Georgia's Johnny Isakson, Massachusetts's Scott Brown, New Hampshire's Judd Gregg, Maine's Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, Alaska's Lisa Murkowski, and Nebraska's Mike Johanns. Is it unduly harsh to think of these folks as Obama's useful idiots?

See for links:

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/12/027985.php
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/23/world/europe/23treaty.html?_r=1&hp

Abolish the FCC over bogus "net neutrality" takeover by feds

Abolish the FCC by Scott Johnson/Powerline (Be sure to open the linked pieces)

It's hard to keep up with the outrages perpetrated by the Obama administration, the lame duck Congress, and the Obamaite federal agencies. Our freedom is under assault on many fronts, but this one deserves special attention.

Since Congress declined to adopt the Orwellian "net neutrality" legislation, the FCC stepped into the breach. It's another example of the usurpation of constitutional government by the administrative state.

John Fund calls out the FCC in "The net neutrality coup," and David Harsyani proposes that we "Abolish the FCC." Michelle Malkin holds that net neutrality is the Obamacare of the Web. Senator DeMint is not amused.

Richard Epstein applies the law-and-economics perspective to the underlying issue of policy. Professor Epstein concludes that the "operation [of the Internet] is too important to be left to the FCC, whose record of consistent failure in regulation starts with its control over radio in 1912 and continues to this present day. The rise of an alternative technology is the best way to break the current FCC monopoly. Unfortunately, the FCC knows that as well, which is why it won't stay on the sideline."

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/12/027980.php
 

Our Muslim Congressman: Where Does He Stand?

Our Muslim Congressman: Where Does He Stand?  by JohnHinderacker/Powerline

We have written many times about Keith Ellison (formerly known as Keith Hakim and Keith X Ellison), who represents the city of Minneapolis in Congress and is the nation's first Muslim Congressman. As such, one might expect that he could do some good: he could support moderate Muslims, many of whom are threatened with death; denounce jihad; and distance himself from radical groups like the Nation of Islam, the Muslim Brotherhood, and CAIR. But Ellison has not chosen to do any of these things. Instead, he has aligned himself with, and run interference for, radical Muslims, starting with Farrakhan and continuing on with CAIR and others.

Currently, Ellison is embroiled in a controversy with Rep. Peter King of New York, who proposes to conduct Congressional hearings on radical Islam. Ellison went on the wacko-left-wing Ed Schultz show to denounce King's proposal:

Minnesota Democrat Keith Ellison, the first Muslim in Congress, has been crossing swords with New York Republican Peter King, who has suggested that it's time for an investigation of radicalization in the American Muslim community.


King, a Long Islander, told Fox News "We've seen what happened in England, and we know that Al Qaeda is trying to recruit people over here." ...


"It's scary," Ellison said Monday night in an appearance on MSNBC's Ed Schultz show. "I got so concerned that when I heard about it I actually approached Congressman King on the House floor and told him that, you know, look, we all need to be concerned about violent radicalization, but not just against Muslims, against anybody. What about the guy who flew the plane into the IRS, or what about the guy who killed a guard at the Holocaust Museum?" ...


Ellison said King's plans have "McCarthyistic implications."

Apparently Ellison hasn't noticed that radical Islam poses the principal threat to civilization in the 21st century. Lone left-wing nuts with ideologies like Ellison's, like the guy who flew an airplane into a building, are certainly a concern, but they aren't the reason why we have a cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security. Anyone who doesn't understand that shouldn't be a small-town sheriff, let alone a member of Congress.

"McCarthyistic" [sic] is one of those words that liberals think have magical powers. But let's parse it. What, exactly, was wrong with the Congressional hearings with which McCarthy is associated? Not that there was no legitimate target--on the contrary, Communism was an even more existential threat than radical Islam. McCarthy's problem was that he was a dishonest drunk; he claimed to hold in his hand a fictitious list of Communists, and so on. But there is no reason to assume that next year's hearings on radical Islam will misrepresent anything. It is not "McCarthyistic" to try to defend the United States against an obvious peril.

On the other hand, accusing those who try to defend the United States of "McCarthyism" is a longstanding, and long-discredited, left-wing trick. It is hard to imagine, knowing what we now know about Communism as well as radical Islam--a weirdly similar ideology--how shouts of "McCarthyism" could dissuade anyone from wanting to learn about the threat that radical Islam poses. Keith Ellison has gotten himself on the wrong side of this issue; but then, that is precisely why he got involved in politics in the first place.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/12/027976.php

The road to Obamacare and to possible repeal

The road to Obamacare and to possible repeal  by Paul Mirengoff/Powerline

Tevi Troy at Contentions cites studies by Stanford University and the University of Minnesota finding that at least one-third of the 63-seat Democratic loss in the House of Representatives can be attributed to the electorate's negative reaction to the health-care bill. In other words, that legislation was responsible for turning a bad election and into a historically awful one for the Dems.

I don't know what methodology these two studies used, but their conclusion seems plausible enough. Indeed, if one combines displeasure over the merits of the health-care bill with dismay over what it symbolized --- Obama's broken promise to be post-partisan --- it's not difficult to believe that the Obamacare cost the Dems more than one-third of their losses in the House.

Troy's reference to the two studies appears in the opening paragraph of his very worthwhile article in the January 2011 issue of Commentary called "The Democrats and Health Care." After noting the central role Obamacare played in the 2012 election, Troy goes back in time to recount how Obama rejected warnings from Joe Biden, Rahm Emanuel, and others of just such a scenario. In other words, the electoral disaster was not only foreseeable, it was foreseen by the president's men.

Any liberal president would have wanted to adopt far-reaching health care reform --- it's been a staple of the Democrats' agenda for decades. But an ordinary liberal president would have heeded the advice of ordinary liberals like Biden and Emanuel to back off given the mood of the electorate. Obama's insistence on forging ahead in the face of these warnings is evidence that he is a socialist.

There are other possible explanations for Obama's persistence, to be sure. The best is Obama's arrogance, which comes through in Troy's account. But then, socialism and arrogance are not mutually exclusive.

Troy also looks ahead to discuss the possibility of repeal, citing two possible avenues:

There is actual legislative repeal, passed by both Houses and signed by the president, which cannot happen until 2013 at the earliest. And there is effective repeal, in which the body politic rejects the substance of the bill, seeks waivers and exemptions, supports defunding important provisions, and challenges it in court, all of which would have the effect of making the whole scheme unworkable.

The battles associated with "effective repeal" may shape the 2012 election through which legislative repeal might be accomplished.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/12/027975.php

Barack Obama's Department of Selective Justice--favors muslims

Barack Obama's Department of Selective Justice

We are a few days late, but it is worth noting this editorial by Investors Business Daily on the Obama Justice Department's selective enforcement of the laws:

On Monday, Justice sued an Illinois school district for rejecting a Muslim teacher's request to take a three-week leave of absence to travel to Mecca. The suit claims that the Berkeley School District discriminated against middle-school instructor Safoorah Khan, whose religion "required" her to perform the hajj, and is seeking damages for this so-called victim.


But it's not stopping there. It seeks an order mandating school officials adopt policies accommodating all Muslim customs, no matter how unreasonable.

The vast majority of Muslims never make it to Mecca on their own time, let alone their employers'. The lawsuit in which DOJ joined strikes me as another instance of "lawfare," in which radical Muslims, probably associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, are trying to carve out ever-growing spaces in which Sharia becomes the law of the land.

Attorney General Eric Holder is fulfilling a promise to pander to the special interests of Muslims. In June 2009, he pledged "a new beginning between the United States and the Muslim community" that includes "robust enforcement" of "religious freedoms."


"We are committed to using criminal and civil rights laws to protect Muslim Americans" in the workplace, housing market and schools, he said, adding that he was making it "a top priority."


Earlier this month, Holder spoke in San Francisco at the annual dinner of an anti-FBI group called the Muslim Advocates, whom he described as "partners in our work to promote tolerance."


He told Muslims gathered there that all 94 U.S. attorney's offices were partnering with the department's Civil Rights Division to act as "force multipliers" in helping to protect the Muslim community. He informed them that he'd brought a third of the nation's U.S. attorneys to Washington for an unprecedented meeting to work on being more "sensitive" toward Muslims.


"Last year," moreover, "I established an Arab-American and Muslim Engagement Advisory Group to help identify more effective ways for the Justice Department to foster greater communication and collaboration -- as well as a new level of respect and understanding -- between law enforcement and Muslim and Arab-American communities," Holder said.

"Equal justice under law" is an ideal to which the Obama administration does not aspire. Rather, as the most divisive administration in memory, it has friends, and it has enemies. Its thumb is always on the scale, one way or another.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/12/027955.php

The Second Swoon: President Obama's Kept Press

The Second Swoon: President Obama's Kept Press

Wednesday's press conference may have starred President Obama fresh off his alleged big win on START and DADT, his losses on the Dream Act and the Omnibus spending bill, and the tie on the tax deal, but the big story was the eagerness of the White House Press Corp to revert to fawning treatment of their once-and-future leader.

"I think while they may be saying Merry Christmas," Mark Steyn told me on yesterday's broadcast, "but actually as far as they’re concerned, it’s Easter, that their messiah has risen from the dead, and now bestrides lame duck Washington like a colossus."

Even the leader of the rump group of real reporters at 1600, ABC's Jake Tapper, succumbed to the mood in the press room and congratulated the president on the passage of the repeal of the ban on gays and lesbians serving openly in the military. I don't think it is fair to attribute support for the repeal to Tapper on the basis of the remark, but reporters don't typically cheer the president's agenda anymore than they hiss at it.

Tapper's lapse may have been reflecting the loneliness of the holdout serious journalist when it comes to Obama. Yesterday's presser was a perfect example. The night before the press conference the president's Director of National Intelligence --James Clapper-- was stumped by Diane Sawyer's reference to Monday evening's arrests of a dozen terror suspects in Great Britain. Clapper blinked incomprehension when Sawyer asked him if the threat over there had any connections to the threat over here. An astonished Sawyer later returned to the subject and pressed Clapper, who admitted that he simply hadn't heard of the arrests, which had played nonstop on cable all day Tuesday and which I had discussed at length with New York Times London Bureau Chief on my Monday night show, --proving only that it wasn't exactly hard to get up to speed on the arrests even though they occurred across the Atlantic.

Imagine the press conference George W. Bush would have faced if either of his DNIs --John D. Negroponte or Michael Hayden-- had blanked on a major story with a network anchor the night before the questions rolled out. If either Bush appointee had been shown to be clueless about the smashing of a major terror ring in England on the week of Christmas, the tape would have rolled endlessly and the press would fairly have screamed questions about resignation demands at W.

Not this press corps and not this president. What conservatives saw yesterday was the first act in MSM's campaign to re-elect Barack Obama. The script isn't difficult to anticipate.

First, every Obama defeat --like the massive repudiation of the president's first two years in office and especially of Obamcare-- must be air brushed off the front page as quickly as possible.

Second, legislative defeats, like the ban on moving Gitmo detainees to the U.S. for trial which passed Wednesday, must not be mentioned unless, like the Dream Act, the MSM perceives political advantage in spinning the defeat in the president's direction.

Third, pratfalls by key members of Team Obama like James Clapper must vanish quickly and not be allowed to feed the public's obvious dismay with the competence of this Administration.

Next, prepare to present the GOP House as a band of rogue inquisitors eager to cobble together some sort of Whitewater II. Ignore the demands of Congress that out-of-control agencies like the FCC abandon unnecessary and ideological extreme initiatives like "net neutrality," and bury the baseline deficit from fiscal year 2007 --the last GOP budget-- of $160 billion versus the trillions spent in red ink since then.

Finally, keep all eyes off of the president's incredible record of weakness aboard, his hostility to Israel, and his inability to do anything about the rogue regimes of North Korea and Iran despite his many promises of engagement and a new start. The president's child-like approach to foreign affairs has left our friends with their heads shaking and our enemies with their hands clasping. The White House press corps, even with the Korean peninsula on the brink of all out war, must not press the president on the subject or on his manifest inability to bring any pressure to bear on the North Koreans or to do anything to stop the runaway nuclear proliferation of the gangster regime.

Wednesday's press conference featured the return of the media we saw throughout campaign 2008 --a blocking front for a hard-left president they approve of over drinks and to whose re-election they are resoundingly, and obviously, committed.

http://townhall.com/columnists/HughHewitt/2010/12/23/the_second_swoon__president_obamas_kept_press

MSM Inertia: What We Can Learn from 120 Years of Climate Catastrophe Reporting.

MSM Inertia: What We Can Learn from 120 Years of Climate Catastrophe Reporting.

The media falls in love with catastrophic predictions, and is consistently 10-15 years behind(!) in reporting on what the global temperature is actually doing.

by Art Horn

The annual Climate Catastrophe Party is marching along in Cancun, Mexico, making for a lovely all-expenses-paid vacation.

At this latest doom fest, some 20,000 delegates from around the world are doing their best to keep the scary story of man-made global warming/climate change alive. I’ve been around long enough to remember a time when global warming was a non-issue — in fact, it was the very real threat of another ice age making headlines in the 1970s. With that in mind, I did an investigation into the comings and goings of predicted environmental cataclysm in modern history. What I found is that this has all happened before — the reporting of climate catastrophe has been going on for over 120 years.

What’s fascinating about the reporting is that it has encompassed the full range of temperature: searing heat and bitter cold, both reported as real and potentially deadly.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says the world is warming at an unprecedented rate. The irrefutable results of this global temperature heat wave will be starvation, drowning of coastal cities, mass extinctions, war, and the death of billions. These warnings come to us from many reliable sources, including all forms of news media. We have been alerted to this climate catastrophe for two decades now.

But when one looks back at the history of climate reporting, you find a remarkably consistent and recurring theme. The global temperature has cycled from cold to warm to cold to warm again over the last 120 years. The media cycles of impending climatic doom mirror the climate cycles themselves, but with a roughly ten- to fifteen-year lag. It seems whenever the world warms, the volume of global warming stories increases to match the trend. Conversely, when the climate cools the major media outlets pull on their long johns and warn us of the next ice age. However, it takes many years for the media to catch up to what the climate is actually doing.

On February 24, 1895, the New York Times reported: “Geologists think the world may be frozen up again.” The story wondered “whether recent and long continued observations do not point to the advent of a second glacial period.”

In 1912, shortly after the sinking of the Titanic by an iceberg, the New York Times reported on a professor from a Cornell University: “Professor Schmidt warns us of an encroaching ice age.” On the very same day, the Los Angles Times reported: “Fifth ice age is on the way. … Human race will have to fight for its existence against the cold.”

Was what they were reporting true? The temperature records from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia say yes. The Earth was cooling from about 1875 to 1910, about 35 years of downward temperature. During this time there would have been more ice in the Arctic, and glaciers would have advanced. The stories were based upon what scientists of the day were observing. From there, the media drew their own conclusions as to what this meant for the future climate and its effects on humanity. Many times, they chose disaster.

The oceans contain more than one thousand times more heat than the atmosphere, and the vast majority of that heat is in tropical waters. When the oceans warm, so does the atmosphere. When they cool, global temperature follows. The Pacific Ocean covers a third of the Earth’s surface and exhibits a dominant impact on the global temperature. Around 1920, the tropical Pacific Ocean began to warm. The impacts of such a warming are not always readily apparent — it takes years for glaciers and sea ice to react to the gradual ocean warming.

The huge social inertia generated by the ice age scare prior to 1910 continued to drive media fear stories of coming cold into the 1920s. On July 3, 1923, the Christian Science Monitor reported: “Captain MacMillan left Wiscasset, Maine, announcing that one of the purposes of his cruise was to determine whether there was the beginning of another ice age as the advance of glaciers in the last 70 years would seem to indicate.” On September 18, 1924, the New York Times declared the threat was real, saying: “MacMillan reports signs of new ice age.” Earlier that year, on April 6, the LA Times reported that Swedish scientist Rutger Sernander claimed there were “scientific grounds for believing” that “when all winds will bring snow, the Sun cannot prevail against the clouds and three winters will come in one, with no summer between.”

Unknown to anyone during this time was the fact that the Pacific was beginning to warm, and would continue to do so until the mid-1940s.

Reacting to this ocean warmth, the temperature of the Earth began to rise as well.The ice age stories began to fade from the headlines. On March 11, 1929, the LA Times reported: “Most geologists think the world is growing warmer and that it will continue to get warmer.” On March 27, 1933, the New York Times headline read: “The next ice age, if it is coming … is still a long way off.” Also that year, meteorologist J.B. Kincer of the United States Weather Bureau published in the September Monthly Weather Review: “Wide-spread and persistent tendency towards warmer weather.” He noted that of the 21 winters prior to 1933 in Washington, D.C.: “Eighteen were warmer than normal and all of the past 13 were mild.”

During the early 1920s, the Atlantic Ocean began its cyclic 30-year warming trend. This warmer water combined with the warmer Pacific pumped up world temperature to the point where everyone began to take notice. By November 6, 1939, the Chicago Daily Tribune published the story: “Experts puzzle over 20-year mercury rise.” The story noted: “Chicago is in the front rank of thousands of cites throughout the world which have been affected by a mysterious trend towards warmer climate in the last two decades.”

They knew it was warming, but not why. On August 2, 1952, the New York Times reported that Eskimos were eating cod, a fish not previously in their diet. The following year the Times reported that studies confirmed summers and winters were getting warmer. Again, unknown to the Times and other media outlets, was the fact that the oceans were changing again.

The stories of a warming continued into the late 1950s as the media inertia plowed forward with the popular warming stories of the 1930s and 1940s. The Atlantic Ocean had been warming since the early 1920s. This warming was keeping the Arctic milder by pumping warmer water northward trough the Gulf stream. On February 15, 1959, the New York Times reported: “Arctic findings in particular support theory of rising global temperatures.” However, the temperature of the Earth was not warming at this point, it was falling.

The massive and dominant Pacific had been cooler since the mid-1940s and would continue to be so into the middle of the 1970s. The climate data show that starting in the middle 1940s the Earth began a multi-decadal cooling trend. Around 1960 the Atlantic began to cool again. Both oceans were in their cooler phase, working together to chill the planet.

It was not until later in the 1960s that the media noticed.

On November 15, 1969, Science News quoted meteorologist Dr. J. Murray Mitchell Jr.: “How long the current cooling trend continues is one of the most important problems of our civilizations. … If the cooling continues for another 200 to 300 years the Earth could be plunged into an ice age.” On January 11, 1970, the Washington Post reported: “Colder Winters Held Dawn of New Ice Age. … Better get a good grip on your long johns, cold weather haters, the worst may be yet to come.” Fortune reported in February 1974: “It is the root cause of a lot of that unpleasant weather around the world and they warn that it carries the potential for human disasters of unprecedented magnitude.” (Sound familiar?) On June 24, Time wrote: “Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age.” Newsweek said on April 28, 1975: “The Earth’s climate seems to be cooling down. … [Meteorologists were] Almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century.”

So it looked like we were on the precipice of a new ice age with cataclysmic consequences for the world. Then, unannounced to all, the Pacific Ocean began to warm again, and so did the Earth’s temperature.

The warming Pacific Ocean began to nudge global temperature up in the late 1970s. This warming continued through the 1980s — soon, the ice age stories were gone. By 1993, from U.S. News and World Report: “Global Climate Change may alter temperature and rainfall patterns, many scientists fear, with uncertain consequences for agriculture.” Time wrote on November 13, 2000, that 27 European climatologists have become worried that the warming trend “may be irreversible, at least over most of the coming century.” Newsweek, in its August 8, 2005, edition: “Extremely dry weather of recent months has spawned swarms of locusts.” Was global warming the cause? The story concluded: “Evidence is mounting to support just such fears.”

On April 3, 2006, Time magazine’s cover story — accompanied by a picture of a lonely polar bear on a small piece of ice — read: “Be Worried, be very worried. Climate change isn’t some vague future problem — it’s already damaging the planet at an alarming pace.” It also stated on the cover in bold: “Earth at the tipping point. How it threatens your health. How China and India can help save the world, or destroy it.”

What can we learn from 120 years of media reporting on climate change?

1: The mainstream media outlets are going to publish whatever sells. If someone publishes a story about the world getting colder and people buy it, you can be sure there will be many more stories touting the same headline.

2: There is a long lag between what nature is doing and what the media will report. The lag seems to be anywhere from 10 to 15 years after the climate changes. There is an inertia problem with the mainstream media even when the evidence is clear.

3: When all the stories are about warming or cooling, you can be sure they are all wrong.

When government agencies or United Nations Climate Change conferences warn you that the climate is changing you can be sure that is true — the climate is always changing. Determining the direction is the hard part. Based on the past reporting of these changes, be it from global cooling or warming, the trend will have reversed many years earlier than reported.

Incidentally there has been no global warming for a decade. Get a good grip on your long johns. Maybe a trip to Cancun is not such a bad idea after all, but I’ll wait until the delegates have gone home.

Art Horn spent 25 years working in television as a meteorologist. He now is an independent meteorologist and speaker who lives in Connecticut. He can be contacted at skychaserman@cox.net.

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/msm-inertia-what-we-can-learn-from-120-years-of-climate-catastrophe-reporting/?singlepage=true