World-Famous Bear Trainer Encounters Setback

Am I the only one who thinks that President Obama’s insistence that Russia seized Crimea out of weakness was one of the most embarrassing moments in recent diplomatic history? Michael Ramirez evaluates the great bear trainer’s performance. Click for larger file size:

The War on Hobby Lobby

The War on Hobby Lobby
The Obama administration wants to win this to prove a point.

ByRich Lowry

David and Barbara Green, co-founders of Hobby Lobby

 

Not too long ago, the Greens of Oklahoma City were law-abiding people running an arts-and-crafts chain called Hobby Lobby.

They weren’t disturbing the peace, or denying anyone his or her rights. They were minding their own business — quite successfully and in keeping with their Christian faith. The roughly 600 Hobby Lobby stores stock Christian products, close on Sundays, and play Christian music.

Then one day Uncle Sam showed up to make an offer that the Greens couldn’t refuse — literally. As part of Obamacare, federal law demands that the chain cover contraceptives that the Greens consider abortifacients. The family decided it couldn’t comply with the law in good conscience, and its case is now before the Supreme Court.
Hobby Lobby went from an inoffensive business to a scofflaw and an alleged combatant in the “war on women” in no time at all — and without changing any significant employment or business practice. Thus is the transformation wrought by the coercive sweep of Obamacare, which risks doing as much damage to conscience rights as it has done to the insurance market.
Hobby Lobby is trying to fend off the federal government via the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a law that Democrats used to support before they realized how inconvenient it would prove to the Obama-era project of running roughshod over moral traditionalists. The act says that government can’t substantially burden someone’s exercise of religion unless there’s a compelling governmental interest at stake and it’s pursued by the least restrictive means.
The contraception mandate fails on all counts, as Ed Whelan of the Ethics and Public Policy Center has demonstrated in his incisive writings on the case. The Obama administration has admitted that the mandate is a burden on religious exercise through its own regulatory actions. It exempted a small category of “religious employers” (e.g., churches) for just this reason. The Department of Health and Human Services explained that “it is appropriate” to take into account the “effect on the religious beliefs of certain religious employers if coverage of contraceptive services were required.”
It is hard to see how the government has a “compelling interest” in the mandate, when the vast majority of employers already cover contraceptives and the administration has exempted many employers with no religious objections by grandfathering their pre-mandate insurance plans.
There are certainly less restrictive means of widening access to contraception. Whelan points out that government could find another, more direct way to distribute or subsidize contraceptives, without forcing any employer to pay for contraceptives that it considers immoral.
The administration argues that the owners of a for-profit corporation have no free-exercise rights, although this runs counter to common sense and the law. Everyone recognizes that nonprofit corporations have such rights, so what makes for-profit corporations different? Besides, Congress went out of its way to define the ambit of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to include “any exercise of religion,” in order to create “a broad protection of religious exercise.”
Hobby Lobby is now bizarrely portrayed as wanting to barge into examination rooms. “Selectively denying insurance coverage for contraceptive methods an employer considers sinful,” the liberal legal lion Walter Dellinger wrote in the Washington Post, “makes the employer a party to a woman’s medical consultations.” And here the Greens thought they were just selling glue, scrapbook paper, beads, and the like.
The truth is that the Obama administration wants to bring Hobby Lobby to heel as a matter of principle. In its pinched view of religion, faith should be limited as much as possible to the pews. In its attenuated regard for civil society, it believes government should overawe any person, business, or institution whose beliefs run counter to officially sanctioned attitudes.
Make no mistake, the culture war is alive and well, and the aggressor isn’t Hobby Lobby. The Greens will be happy to go back to minding their own business — if the federal government sees fit to permit them.
— Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review. He can be reached via e-mail: comments.lowry@nationalreview.com . © 2014 King Features Syndicate

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/374108/war-hobby-lobby-rich-lowry#!

One Liberal Woman’s Experience With Obamacare

by John Hinderaker in Obamacare
Nancy Wurtzel writes for the Huffington Post, on her own site www.datingdementia.com, and occasionally for the Minneapolis Star Tribune. It is safe to assume that she is a liberal; worse, she makes no bones about the fact that what attracted her to Obamacare was the prospect of a subsidy–making someone else pay her bills. So the heartbreak that she experienced trying to get that subsidy via MNSure, Minnesota’s Obamacare plan, as she described it in the Star Tribune, could reasonably be a source of schadenfreude: “MNsure Made Me Cry. My Five-Month Quest for Health Insurance.”

As a self-employed, small business owner, I had high hopes for the Affordable Care Act. I was giddy at the thought of lowering my premium costs, which now total $6,000 a year for an individual policy with a very high deductible.
Obamacare, as it is usually called, was passed in spring 2010, but didn’t go into effect until this year. I couldn’t wait to sign up.
If only it were that easy. …
When MNsure launched in late October 2013, I was probably one of the very first to go on the website. Certainly I was one of the first kicked off the website. We’ve all read the news accounts of people attempting over-and-over to create a MNsure account, shop for insurance and then filter through the qualifying process. I had the classic bad experience. Countless times, I went on the website, only to have it freeze up or boot me off. Then, at one point, the system would no longer let me login at all and I got a “password fail” message. …
[After the MNSure site started working better], I logged on easily and sailed through the application process. Next, I started shopping for healthcare policies. To my surprise, the policy costs were about the same as the open market and there didn’t seem to be any way to find out if I qualified for a reduction due to my income level.
That’s when I discovered, I had clicked on the wrong tract [sic] — the tract that was for those who wanted to purchase insurance with no financial assistance. This proved to be a mistake that would cost me, both financially and emotionally.

God forbid that she should pay for her own health care! What a blunder!

One of MNSure’s dumber ads for Obamacare.

Back to the phone, which meant more hours calling and calling and holding and holding. Many times, I would simply have to hang up since I had a life with responsibilities and obligations. Other times, I would be holding for a long period and suddenly the call would disconnect.
That’s when I cried again.

You can read it all if you have a strong stomach, but the short version is, after five months of frustration and countless phone calls with Obamacare “navigators” who had no idea what was going on–one of them told Wurtzel, “No one can do anything more for you”–Wurtzel finally found the key to success: political influence. The update to her Star Tribune article says:

Thanks to some helpful staff of the Minnesota State Legislature, I am happy to report I now have my MNsure health care policy in place and retroactive to the beginning of 2014. I do not like to use my blog and social media platform for this purpose, but I felt I was out of options. This saga took close to five months to resolve.

Right. So, if you have Democratic Party connections and you squawk in a major metropolitan newspaper, so that the Democratic Party is embarrassed, functionaries will cut through the red tape and get you a health insurance policy. Not only that, a policy that is subsidized by your neighbors! Yeeaah! Nothing like stealing from your fellow citizens to make you feel good about being a Democrat. If you are not a politically connected Democrat, of course, you are stuck with what the Affordable Care Act actually says, in which case…sorry, you poor loser! No one ever cared about you in the first place.
Never before has our nation seen corruption on this scale.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/03/one-liberal-womans-experience-with-obamacare.php

This Is Really Going to Harsh Some Mellows

This Is Really Going to Harsh Some Mellows

by Steven Hayward


Well guess what? Growing pot is very carbon-intensive.  Says Mother Jones:

You thought your pot came from environmentally conscious hippies? Think again. The way marijuana is grown in America, it turns out, is anything but sustainable and organic. . .

Bummer, man.  The rest of the MJ piece is photo memes.  Here are the best ones:

Noah: One of the Most Moral Stories Ever Told

Noah: One of the Most Moral Stories Ever Told

by Dennis Prager

Having taught the Torah (the Five Books of Moses) from the Hebrew for more than 40 years (hundreds of hours are available by download through my website), I consider the biblical flood story one of the world’s most profound moral teachings. As I will show, it means that God cares about goodness more than anything else.
Let me explain by answering the most frequent challenges to the story.
Q: Why did God destroy the world?
A: Because “The Lord saw how great was man’s wickedness on earth. … And the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth and His heart was saddened” (Genesis 6:5-6).
When God created the world, He announced after each day’s creations, “It was good.” But only after His final creation — the human being — on the sixth day, did God say, “It was very good.” God was particularly pleased with, and had the highest hopes for, this creation, the only one created “in His image.” This is not about man having God’s physical attributes (God is not physical). It is about humans being infinitely more precious than all other creations; and only man, like God, has moral knowledge and therefore moral free will.
When God saw how cruelly human beings treated one another, He decided that He would start over. Once people reach a certain level of widespread evil, life is pointless.
Q: Why did God destroy animals as well?
A: In the biblical worldview, the purpose of all creation is to benefit man. This anthropocentric view of nature, and indeed of the whole universe, is completely at odds with the current secular idealization of nature. This secular view posits that nature has its own intrinsic meaning and purpose, independent of man.
All of creation, in the biblical view, was to ultimately prepare the way for the creation of man. But one does not need the Bible alone to hold this view. A purely scientific reading of the universe is in keeping with this view. Everything — every natural and physical law — is exquisitely tuned to produce life, and ultimately man, on earth.
Q: Isn’t the biblical flood story just a fairy tale?
A: Two responses:
First, this is so only if you believe that the biblical flood story states that the entire earth from the North Pole to the South Pole was flooded and that every living creature from penguins to polar bears, except for the animals and the people on Noah’s ark, was killed. But that is not what the story says. The narrative speaks of the world where Noah lived: It is expressly stated in Genesis 9:10 that there were other animals in the world that were not killed by the flood.
Second, the primary purpose of the flood story — like other stories in the Bible, such as the creation story — is to convey enduring wisdom and moral insight, not geology or science. And the lessons of the flood story influenced civilization for millennia.
Q: What are these lessons?
A: One has already been mentioned: If evil becomes widespread enough, there is no longer a purpose to human existence.
Second, God values goodness more than any other human trait. Thus, the only reason Noah was saved was that “Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations” (Genesis 6:9). This alone renders the biblical story unique among the flood stories of the ancient world. In those stories, a very common reason the gods saved a man was that the gods found him physically, not morally, exceptional.
Third, God hates evil. And so should we.
A fourth lesson is the moral necessity of divine revelation. God created man without giving him a Ten Commandments or any other revealed moral instruction. The only moral code was the one God built in to the human being: the conscience. Clearly this was not enough to make a good world. The world sank into evil. This is another biblical lesson that runs entirely counter to a dominant belief of the modern age. The secular world holds that religion and God are morally unnecessary; the individual’s conscience is sufficient to guide moral behavior. The Bible, as usual, knew better.
After the evil that led to the flood, God decided to reveal basic moral rules — such as that murder is wrong. So wrong that one of the moral rules revealed after the flood is that murderers must be put to death — yet another way in which this story runs counter to the prevailing doctrines of our time. No wonder the secular world ignores the Bible and the left largely loathes it.
Given the unprecedented ignorance of the Bible in contemporary America, it is likely that more young Americans will only know the Noah of “Noah.” We can only hope that the film offers even a fraction of the wisdom of the original.

http://www.dennisprager.com/noah-one-moral-stories-ever-told/

What is to be done?

What is to be done?
by Scott Johnson

Once upon a time, not so long ago, administrative agencies were vested only with the authority to interpret the laws they enforced. Unless the authority was delegated to them, agencies lacked the power to write the laws. They certainly lacked the power simply to rewrite them.

Yet this was precisely what Barack Obama has done in his increasingly lawless administration. In the blizzard of Obamacare pronouncements and regulations issued to date, we are tending toward rule by decree.
At the heart of Obama’s rule by decree stands the IRS. It enforces Obamacare or not at the whim of the president. Even more notably, it is the blunt instrument restraining political opposition and resistance to the Obama administration. Angelo Codevilla puts it this way:

After the IRS harassed Barack Obama’s and the Democratic Party’s opponents during the 2012 election cycle, the Democratic members of the congressional oversight committee before which the officials who had done the harassing appeared supported them. When Lois Lerner, the most obviously responsible of these officials, “took the Fifth” and the committee chairman sought to hold her in contempt, the Democratic contingent moved to censure him. No less than the President of the United States stated categorically that there had been “ not one smidgen of corruption” in the IRS. Then, the same officials drafted rules that would regularize precisely their authority to target for invidious treatment whichever political organizations they wish. Tony “The Bender” could never have managed hits like that.

What is to be done? Jeff Bergner has given the question some thought and formulated a set of proposals set forth in the recent Weekly Standard article “Upholding the law.” Bergner argues, as I suggest, that “the IRS lies at the heart of the problem” and that “[a]n action forcing event like the defunding of the IRS is needed.”
Bergner urges Republicans to condition funding of the IRS in two ways: they should require the president to sign legislation enacting into law the steps he has taken by executive order regarding Obamacare, and they should require the president to appoint an independent investigator to look in the IRS across the board, including its role in Obama and its targeting of conservative public interest groups and individuals. Bergner explains:

Defunding is the right idea, but there is a better target than Obamacare if the object is to address presidential overreach. What House Republicans should seek to defund, in whole or in part, is the Internal Revenue Service. The IRS is the enforcement arm of Obamacare. Without the IRS there is no enforcement of the individual mandate, no basis for determining individual subsidies, and no enforcement of employer mandates. The central role of the IRS in Obamacare should be clear enough from one perverse fact alone: In order to improve health care delivery in America, Obamacare creates not thousands of new doctors and nurses, but thousands of new IRS employees.
The president’s overreach could fairly be described this way: In delaying and deferring provisions of Obamacare, he has given an unlawful order to the IRS. One could imagine a parallel universe in which an IRS commissioner would resign rather than obey such an order. In the real world of Democratic politics, however, this can be neither hoped for nor expected.
What the president has done with the IRS on Obamacare is of a piece with other actions of his administration. There have been many scandals, including Fast and Furious and Benghazi. Significant as these are, they pale beside the administration’s effort to politicize the IRS, which strikes at the heart of decent, limited government, as the president seems willing to admit hypothetically if not in fact. The targeting of conservative public interest groups is not the only misuse of the IRS by this administration. Numerous other instances of what seems to be the coordinated targeting of individuals by the IRS, the Justice Department, and the Labor Department exist. Be that as it may, if instructing the IRS not to enforce the law with regard to employer mandates is not an abuse of the IRS, it is hard to imagine what would be.
House Republicans should condition funding for the IRS in two ways. First, they should require the president to sign legislation enacting into law the steps he has taken by executive order regarding Obamacare. The president’s position here is incoherent: He claims to act via executive order because Congress won’t—but he vows to veto legislation passed by Congress to enact the very provisions in question. Is the president really asserting that he has unlimited power to alter and suspend laws and that Congress is superfluous?
Second, Congress should require the president to appoint an independent investigator to look into the IRS across the board, including its role in Obamacare and its targeting of both conservative public interest groups and individuals. The current internal investigation, headed by Obama campaign donor Barbara Bosserman, does not inspire confidence. Indeed, the president has already foreordained the outcome of this investigation by announcing there is not “a smidgen of corruption” at the IRS. Nor should it be too much to expect the president publicly to instruct not only the IRS but also the Justice Department and the Treasury Department to make available any and all emails bearing on these topics. This, after all, is the president who promised the most transparent administration ever.
The House should defund the IRS, in whole or in part, until these conditions are met and a degree of public confidence in the workings of the IRS is restored. In any event, all funding for new IRS employees to enforce Obamacare, many provisions of which have been delayed by the president, should be eliminated.
These steps would be opposed by the Democratic Senate and the president, but they would be widely supported by the American people. The IRS is not much loved by the public at any time; but a current Fox poll shows that 64 percent of Americans believe there is corruption at the IRS that should be fully and fairly investigated. What Harry Reid and the president would be defending in this instance is not the president’s signature health care legislation, but the Internal Revenue Service, a far more daunting task.

Bergner addresses the threat of a government shutdown and other practical issues related to the proposal, but concludes that “a degree of courage is going to be required to at some point to rein in the president’s excesses.” He contemplates putting off such action until 2015, but implies that the time is now and that fortune favors the bold. The question of timing can be debated, but there can’t be any question that Bergner is on to something.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/03/what-is-to-be-done-3.php

Drudge Exposes Another ObamaCare Lie, Pays 'Liberty Tax'

Health Reform: Despite White House claims no one has to pay ObamaCare's individual mandate tax until next year, a Web heavyweight points out that self-employed individuals file their estimated taxes this year for 2014.

In what could be the tweet heard around the world, Internet icon Matt Drudge tweeted at 11:09 a.m. Friday:
"Just paid the ObamaCare penalty for not 'getting covered' ... I'M CALLING IT A LIBERTY TAX!"
A mere 22 minutes later, White House spokesman Jesse Lee tweeted: "Flat lie, no fee for previous year."
Lee's tweet shows just how little the White House knows about business, particularly small business, and the self-employed individuals such as Matt Drudge who file as small businesses and who each year must not only settle up for the prior year by mid-April but must also pay their first-quarter estimated taxes for the current year.
The Obama administration's media sycophants were no better informed, with the Washington Post's Greg Sargent blogging by midafternoon:
"Matt Drudge proudly tells the world he paid the penalty for not having health coverage, which he has termed the 'liberty tax.' Which is odd, because no one has to pay the penalty until they file their 2014 tax returns in April 2015."
While some, such as Timothy Geithner, can be Treasury secretary in the Obama administration while playing fast and loose with skirting their tax obligation, self-employed individuals who operate as small businesses do not. This is particularly true of right-wing notables, something Drudge explained to the hyperventilating left in a subsequent tweet.
Drudge indicated in follow-up tweets that since he is self-employed as proprietor of the Drudge Report, he files as a small business. Drudge followed up with "Dazed team Obama media reporters think Opt-Out tax 'year away'? Not for small businesses that file Qtr estimates. We're there NOW, baby."
"As a self-employed individual, generally you are required to file an annual return and pay estimated tax quarterly," the IRS website states.
IRS form (1040-ES) for estimating quarterly taxes specifically recommends adding the mandate penalty to line 12 for "other taxes" — to pay before the first quarterly deadline of April 15.
"It is true that thousands of small businesses will be forced to pay ObamaCare taxes quarterly in 2014," a Senate Budget Committee aide told Breitbart News on Friday afternoon.
An administration elected by low-information voters is populated with low-information officials who are ignorant of the laws they are charged to enforce even though they often misuse them — as in the case of IRS targeting of Tea Party groups — for their own political purposes.
Self-employed entrepreneurs ranging from Drudge to small-shop proprietors and independent contractors have long been aware of the requirement to estimate their tax liability and send a quarter of it in every three months, and that this amount includes "other taxes" such as the ObamaCare opt-out penalty.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 14.4 million Americans were self-employed in January. Of those, 9.2 million were unincorporated self-employed workers and another 5.2 million were incorporated. All who file quarterly estimated tax payments this year are subject to the ObamaCare individual mandate tax.
When you tax something you get less of it, and certainly ObamaCare leaves us with less freedom. We lose the freedom to buy the insurance plans of our own choosing and the freedom to pick our doctors. Our nation was born in revolt against such oppressive taxation. The penalty imposed under ObamaCare for refusing to be compelled to buy a product you don't want is indeed a tax on our liberty.

Read More At Investor's Business Daily: http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-obama-care/032414-694425-matt-drudge-pays-obamacare-liberty-tax.htm#ixzz2x1JITCKm
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Obama’s bogus political science lesson

by Paul Mirengoff in 2014 Election, Barack Obama, Democrats
Barack Obama famously declared, “I’ll tell you right now that I’m. . .a better political director than my political director.” He may be right, but you couldn’t tell from his recent analysis of the upcoming midterm election.
Obama claimed that Americans agree with Democrats on every issue, but that Washington politics have “become so toxic” that they aren’t voting. “That’s especially true during the midterms,” Obama added:

During presidential elections, young people vote, women are more likely to vote, blacks, Hispanics more likely to vote. And suddenly a more representative cross-section of America gets out there and we do pretty well in presidential elections. But in midterms we get clobbered — either because we don’t think it’s important or we’ve become so discouraged about what’s happening in Washington that we think it’s not worth our while.

I love Obama’s use of the words “we” and “our” in the last sentence. Obama is much of what’s happening in Washington and he clearly believe that what happens there is important. Yet, he associates himself with those who are too disillusioned to participate in politics on a consistent basis. Who, one wonders, is that Obama impersonator engaging day and night in Washington politics?
The president is either delusional or the most shameless phony ever to occupy the White House. And he isn’t delusional.
I also love the way Obama attributes the Democrats’ midterm woes to near-immutable laws of political science. Obama knows that the real problem is not voter apathy but voter anger — anger directed at his policies and reflected in his low approval rating.
That’s why Obama delivered this discourse to 75 fat-cats during a fundraiser at the Florida home of former basketball star Alonzo Mourning, not on the hustings in any of the states where the Democrats are in danger of losing a Senate seat. The Dems running for those seats don’t want the president in their states. They understand, as Obama does, that disillusionment with the president, not with politics in general, is the key driver this year. They understand, as Obama does, that Washington politics per se aren’t toxic right now; Obama’s policies are.
In this regard, Obama also knows that, far from agreeing with Democrats on every issue, Americans disagree with them on virtually all of the key ones. He is aware, for example, that poll after poll for month after month and year after year shows that Americans don’t agree with Democrats that Obamacare is good legislation.
But voter disenchantment with Democrats doesn’t end at Obamacare. Americans also disagree with Dems on the key economic and fiscal issues. They trust Republicans more than Democrats to handle the economy and to deal with the federal budget. The Republican’s lead on the economy is its biggest advantage in Washington Post-ABC News polling since 2002.
The polls that show the disillusionment with President Obama and his policies don’t exclude folks who voted in 2012, but might not vote this year, and polling suggests that this disillusionment extends to some of the groups that Obama frets won’t vote. In other words, there has been a shift in public sentiment on the merits of Obama and his policies, not just a drift towards apathy. If this were a presidential election year, Obama would be in serious trouble.
It’s also true, of course, that the political map favors Republicans in this year’s battle for the Senate. If Republicans win the Senate race in every state Romney carried, they will win control of that body. So Obama’s distinction between what happens in presidential elections and what’s likely to happen this year misses the mark.
But Obama’s take on the 2014 election isn’t intended as serious political analysis. It’s an attempt to convince rich people to write checks with which to rally the masses and an attempt to duck responsibility for what Obama fears will be another shellacking.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/03/obamas-bogus-political-science-lesson.php

Why the Alarmists’ Climate Models Are Worthless

by John Hinderaker in Climate
Climate alarmism is not based on empirical observation; rather, it is entirely predicated on computer models that are manipulated to generate predictions of significant global warming as a result of increased concentrations of CO2. But a model in itself is evidence of nothing. The model obeys the dictates of its creator. In the case of climate models, we know they are wrong: they don’t accurately reproduce the past, which should be the easy part; they fail to account for many features of the Earth’s present climate; and to the extent that they have generated predictions, those predictions have proven to be wrong. There is therefore no reason why anyone should rely on predictions of future climate that are generated by the models.
For a relatively simple and understandable explanation of why the climate models are worthless, check out this article by Dr. Tim Ball at Watts Up With That:

Realities about climate models are much more prosaic. They don’t and can’t work because data, knowledge of atmospheric, oceanographic, and extraterrestrial mechanisms, and computer capacity are all totally inadequate. Computer climate models are a waste of time and money.
Inadequacies are confirmed by the complete failure of all forecasts, predictions, projections, prognostications, or whatever they call them. It is one thing to waste time and money playing with climate models in a laboratory, where they don’t meet minimum scientific standards, it is another to use their results as the basis for public policies where the economic and social ramifications are devastating. Equally disturbing and unconscionable is the silence of scientists involved in the IPCC who know the vast difference between the scientific limitations and uncertainties and the certainties produced in the Summary for Policymakers (SPM).
IPCC scientists knew of the inadequacies from the start. Kevin Trenberth’s response to a report on inadequacies of weather data by the US National Research Council said

It’s very clear we do not have a climate observing system….This may come as a shock to many people who assume that we do know adequately what’s going on with the climate, but we don’t.

This was in response to the February 3, 1999 Report that said,

Deficiencies in the accuracy, quality and continuity of the records place serious limitations on the confidence that can be placed in the research results.

***
Before leaked emails exposed its climate science manipulations, the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) issued a statement that said,

[General circulation models] are complex, three dimensional computer-based models of the atmospheric circulation. Uncertainties in our understanding of climate processes, the natural variability of the climate, and limitations of the GCMs mean that their results are not definite predictions of climate.

Phil Jones, Director of the CRU at the time of the leaked emails and former director Tom Wigley, both IPCC members, said,

Many of the uncertainties surrounding the causes of climate change will never be resolved because the necessary data are lacking.

Stephen Schneider, prominent part of the IPCC from the start said,

Uncertainty about feedback mechanisms is one reason why the ultimate goal of climate modeling – forecasting reliably the future of key variables such as temperature and rainfall patterns – is not realizable.

[Ed.: Steve Schneider is notorious for having been a hysterical advocate of human-caused global cooling before he became a hysterical advocate of human-caused global warming.] Schneider also set the tone and raised eyebrows when he said in Discover magazine:

Scientists need to get some broader based support, to capture the public’s imagination…that, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have…each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.

The IPCC achieved his objective with devastating effect, because they chose effective over honest.

Dr. Ball goes on to explain how general circulation models are constructed, and why they are so unreliable:

The surface [of the Earth] is covered with a grid and the atmosphere divided into layers. Computer models vary in the size of the grids and the number of layers. They claim a smaller grid provides better results. It doesn’t! If there is no data a finer grid adds nothing. The model needs more real data for each cube and it simply isn’t available. There are no weather stations for at least 70% of the surface and virtually no data above the surface. There are few records of any length anywhere; the models are built on virtually nothing. The grid is so large and crude they can’t include major weather features like thunderstorms, tornados, or even small cyclonic storm systems.

One thing I had not realized is that climate models are so complex that they require an unrealistic amount of computer time to perform a single run. As a result, the climateers simply leave out lots of variables:

Caspar Ammann said that GCMs (General Circulation Models) took about 1 day of machine time to cover 25 years. On this basis, it is obviously impossible to model the Pliocene-Pleistocene transition (say the last 2 million years) using a GCM as this would take about 219 years of computer time.

So you can only run the models if you reduce the number of variables. O’Keefe and Kueter explain.

As a result, very few full-scale GCM projections are made. Modelers have developed a variety of short cut techniques to allow them to generate more results. Since the accuracy of full GCM runs is unknown, it is not possible to estimate what impact the use of these short cuts has on the quality of model outputs.

Omission of variables allows short runs, but allows manipulation and moves the model further from reality. Which variables do you include? For the IPCC only those that create the results they want.

The alarmists’ models cannot withstand scrutiny by qualified scientists who are not in on the scam:

Most don’t understand models or the mathematics on which they are built, a fact exploited by promoters of human caused climate change. They are also a major part of the IPCC work not yet investigated by people who work outside climate science. Whenever outsiders investigate, as with statistics and the hockey stick, the gross and inappropriate misuses are exposed.

There is much more, but let’s close with this:

The IPCC chapter on climate models appears to justify use of the models by saying they show an increase in temperature when CO2 is increased. Of course they do, that is how they’re programmed. Almost every individual component of the model has, by their admission, problems ranging from lack of data, lack of understanding of the mechanisms, and important ones are omitted because of inadequate computer capacity or priorities. The only possible conclusion is that the models were designed to prove the political position that human CO2 was a problem.
Scientists involved with producing this result knew the limitations were so severe they precluded the possibility of proving the result. This is clearly set out in the their earlier comments and the IPCC Science Report they produced. They remained silent when the [Summary for Policy Makers] claimed, with high certainty, they knew what was going on with the climate. They had to know this was wrong. They may not have known about the political agenda when they were inveigled into participating, but they had to know when the 1995 [Summary for Policy Makers] was published because Benjamin Santer exploited the SPM bias by rewriting Chapter 8 of the 1995 Report in contradiction to what the members of his chapter team had agreed. The gap widened in subsequent [Summaries for Policy Makers] but they remained silent and therefore complicit.

We are witnessing the greatest scandal in the history of science. Someday before long, the discreditable role played by Benjamin Santer, Michael Mann and others will be universally recognized. Until then, governments will continue to funnel billions of dollars to alarmist scientists to reward them for leading the charge for expanded government power.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/03/why-the-alarmists-climate-models-are-worthless.php

The Profound Arrogant Ignorance and Stupidity of Liberals in Charge

By C. Edmund Wright

The recent Twitter kerfuffle between Matt Drudge and the Obama/media/academic complex over the ObamaCare tax demonstrates in plain view and without question something many of us have known for years: while the organized left insist that they are the only ones smart enough to run the world, they remain astonishingly ignorant of how it works. They’re even ignorant of how the most fundamental parts of laws that they champion operate.

In case you missed it, Drudge tweeted, “Just paid the Obamacare penalty for not 'getting covered'... I'M CALLING IT A LIBERTY TAX” shortly after filing his first quarterly installment for 2014 as a self-employed person. Apparently unaware of how self-employed people pay taxes – which is neither new nor a secret – liberals at the White House, Talking Points Memo, the Huffington Post, and the National Journal all responded immediately by calling Drudge either a liar or ignorant, or both. After all, the liberal reasoning went, Drudge could not possibly have paid a cent toward his 2014 ObamaCare "penalty" because it's not 2015 yet.
Yes, these wizards who would organize everything and everyone lack even a cursory familiarity with the most basic of tax realities.

What is it Bill Engvall says? Oh yeah: “Here’s your sign.” These liberals really didn’t need Engvall’s sign at all. They tweeted their own "I’m stupid" signs. Some wrote full-fledged low-information articles, including TPM’s Dylan Scott and the HuffPo’s Jeffrey Young.
In none of these attacks on Drudge did it occur to these media maestros how self-employed people are impacted by the tax ramifications of ObamaCare. If Drudge figures he’ll owe, say, ten million in federal income taxes for 2014 (it’s probably a lot more), he is required to send in a quarter of that now. He would also be compelled to include charming little IRS add-ons in his payment, like the ObamaCare penalty. Or is it a fee? A tax, maybe? Whatever John Roberts decided to call it, Drudge and other self-employed quarterly filers have indeed started paying it.
This is not some esoteric detail, nor is it overly technical – it is a fact of life that all self-employed people have had to deal with for many decades. And not just the wealthy like Drudge or Rush Limbaugh – quarterly installments impact little shop proprietors and tiny contractors as well. Welcome to the Main Street problems caused by applied liberal policies varnished by isolated but powerful interests on K Street and Wall Street. And yet, liberals who are highly paid to comment on such things know nothing about it. Neither do Obama administration hacks who helped ram this absurdity through Congress.
There’s no word if Timothy “TurboTax” Geithner has weighed in yet on the issue. Geither, of course, was the first low-information appointment made by the low-information president-elect in late 2008. Back then, low-information voter euphoria had Obama riding waves of approvals in the 70s.
But forget low-information voters for just a minute; the malignancy that is really destroying this country is low-information people with high-profile power and/or influence. You know, people who would lobby for, comment on, advocate for, or vote on laws like ObamaCare without any understanding of its real-world impact. Such felonies are then carried out by low-information bureaucratic microbes with the power to destroy lives and businesses with impunity, and a political and talking-head class with the access and sway to codify these common malfeasances. Destruction of private property and liberty – and these two concepts are not divisible – takes place in government cubicles every minute of every day across the country. And why not?
We have a low-information president, who has appointed a low-information cabinet, including the low-information secretary of health and human services who is applying a low-information health care law (one of many such laws) behind the big power of a low-morality Internal Revenue Service. The result of all of this low information in power is a low-liberty nation.
So when Matt Drudge – fully complying with the inane and unworkable law as it applies to his 2014 taxes – calls them out on it, they publicly and bumptiously step in their own pile of ordure. These liberals, who claim that they alone can run the auto industry, the banking industry, and all of health care – haven’t the foggiest notion how one of the most basic tenets of tax law works. This particular part of a disastrous health care law is exhibit A for what happens when those who have never signed the front of a business check in their lives have power over those who have. And power over everybody else, too.
Pardon the worn out cliché, but the inmates really are running the asylum. Yet when you expose their ignorance and incompetence, they just ramp up the outrage. Frankly, Drudge wasn’t even trying to expose their ignorance. He was simply making a point, and the policy mavens came out of the woodwork and volunteered headlong into their own excreta.
And yet, there will be no apologies, nor will any of these pseudo-experts be fired or even censured. This is not what happens on the left. When they make obvious and grotesque mistakes, they simply double down, or change the subject, or attack someone on the right personally. And as we see daily with the headlines around Obama Care, liberals make obvious and grotesque mistakes all the time. This ignorance and arrogance can be demonstrated with Obama Care, and filtered down through almost every other leftist dream program, from Dodd-Frank to the EPA to Common Core.
The profound arrogant ignorance of liberals, on display daily. This is the kind of thing that could make for a dynamic, funny, sarcastic, and effective political message, should an opposition party to the Obama machine ever re-emerge.

The recent Twitter kerfuffle between Matt Drudge and the Obama/media/academic complex over the ObamaCare tax demonstrates in plain view and without question something many of us have known for years: while the organized left insist that they are the only ones smart enough to run the world, they remain astonishingly ignorant of how it works. They’re even ignorant of how the most fundamental parts of laws that they champion operate.

In case you missed it, Drudge tweeted, “Just paid the Obamacare penalty for not 'getting covered'... I'M CALLING IT A LIBERTY TAX” shortly after filing his first quarterly installment for 2014 as a self-employed person. Apparently unaware of how self-employed people pay taxes – which is neither new nor a secret – liberals at the White House, Talking Points Memo, the Huffington Post, and the National Journal all responded immediately by calling Drudge either a liar or ignorant, or both. After all, the liberal reasoning went, Drudge could not possibly have paid a cent toward his 2014 ObamaCare "penalty" because it's not 2015 yet.
Yes, these wizards who would organize everything and everyone lack even a cursory familiarity with the most basic of tax realities.
What is it Bill Engvall says? Oh yeah: “Here’s your sign.” These liberals really didn’t need Engvall’s sign at all. They tweeted their own "I’m stupid" signs. Some wrote full-fledged low-information articles, including TPM’s Dylan Scott and the HuffPo’s Jeffrey Young.
In none of these attacks on Drudge did it occur to these media maestros how self-employed people are impacted by the tax ramifications of ObamaCare. If Drudge figures he’ll owe, say, ten million in federal income taxes for 2014 (it’s probably a lot more), he is required to send in a quarter of that now. He would also be compelled to include charming little IRS add-ons in his payment, like the ObamaCare penalty. Or is it a fee? A tax, maybe? Whatever John Roberts decided to call it, Drudge and other self-employed quarterly filers have indeed started paying it.
This is not some esoteric detail, nor is it overly technical – it is a fact of life that all self-employed people have had to deal with for many decades. And not just the wealthy like Drudge or Rush Limbaugh – quarterly installments impact little shop proprietors and tiny contractors as well. Welcome to the Main Street problems caused by applied liberal policies varnished by isolated but powerful interests on K Street and Wall Street. And yet, liberals who are highly paid to comment on such things know nothing about it. Neither do Obama administration hacks who helped ram this absurdity through Congress.
There’s no word if Timothy “TurboTax” Geithner has weighed in yet on the issue. Geither, of course, was the first low-information appointment made by the low-information president-elect in late 2008. Back then, low-information voter euphoria had Obama riding waves of approvals in the 70s.
But forget low-information voters for just a minute; the malignancy that is really destroying this country is low-information people with high-profile power and/or influence. You know, people who would lobby for, comment on, advocate for, or vote on laws like ObamaCare without any understanding of its real-world impact. Such felonies are then carried out by low-information bureaucratic microbes with the power to destroy lives and businesses with impunity, and a political and talking-head class with the access and sway to codify these common malfeasances. Destruction of private property and liberty – and these two concepts are not divisible – takes place in government cubicles every minute of every day across the country. And why not?
We have a low-information president, who has appointed a low-information cabinet, including the low-information secretary of health and human services who is applying a low-information health care law (one of many such laws) behind the big power of a low-morality Internal Revenue Service. The result of all of this low information in power is a low-liberty nation.
So when Matt Drudge – fully complying with the inane and unworkable law as it applies to his 2014 taxes – calls them out on it, they publicly and bumptiously step in their own pile of ordure. These liberals, who claim that they alone can run the auto industry, the banking industry, and all of health care – haven’t the foggiest notion how one of the most basic tenets of tax law works. This particular part of a disastrous health care law is exhibit A for what happens when those who have never signed the front of a business check in their lives have power over those who have. And power over everybody else, too.
Pardon the worn out cliché, but the inmates really are running the asylum. Yet when you expose their ignorance and incompetence, they just ramp up the outrage. Frankly, Drudge wasn’t even trying to expose their ignorance. He was simply making a point, and the policy mavens came out of the woodwork and volunteered headlong into their own excreta.
And yet, there will be no apologies, nor will any of these pseudo-experts be fired or even censured. This is not what happens on the left. When they make obvious and grotesque mistakes, they simply double down, or change the subject, or attack someone on the right personally. And as we see daily with the headlines around Obama Care, liberals make obvious and grotesque mistakes all the time. This ignorance and arrogance can be demonstrated with Obama Care, and filtered down through almost every other leftist dream program, from Dodd-Frank to the EPA to Common Core.
The profound arrogant ignorance of liberals, on display daily. This is the kind of thing that could make for a dynamic, funny, sarcastic, and effective political message, should an opposition party to the Obama machine ever re-emerge.

Obamacare Premiums Will Skyrocket Next Year

by John Hinderaker in Obamacare
Of course they will. We wrote last week:

Insurance companies set premiums based on experience. When they lack experience, as with Obamacare, they make assumptions. One assumption that carriers used in setting 2014 premiums was that a bailout would be available if premiums turn out to be too low. The law establishes “risk corridors” for individual and small group insurance, under which the government will reimburse insurance companies’ losses, up to a point. The risk corridors encourage insurers to quote lower premiums, since they are protected (again, up to a point) by the federal government. But the risk corridor provisions of the act expire in 2016.
Even more fundamental is the composition of the risk pool in the Obamacare exchanges. The economics of Obamacare, and therefore the premiums charged by insurers, depend entirely on how healthy or sick the people who enroll in Obamacare turn out to be. The Obama administration made projections on this subject, as did the insurers. I don’t think there is any doubt about the fact that actual enrollments in the exchanges have been disappointing from this standpoint. There are nowhere near as many young, healthy people signing up as will be required to make the system work. This is why the Obama administration has embarrassed itself in trying to recruit young people into the program, with Pajama Boy, Obama’s pathetic “Between Two Ferns” interview, Angry Mom, and so on. What this means is that once the insurance companies are able to set premiums based on actual experience, as opposed to rosy projections, those premiums inevitably will rise due to the risk pool being lower-quality than predicted.

Today the Hill headlined, based on information from insurance industry sources: “O-Care premiums to skyrocket.”

Health industry officials say ObamaCare-related premiums will double in some parts of the country, countering claims recently made by the administration.

Why will Obamacare premiums rise so much next year? The main reason is the poor composition of the risk pool on the exchanges:

“I think everybody knows that the way the exchange has rolled out … is going to lead to higher costs,” said one senior insurance executive who requested anonymity.
The insurance official, who hails from a populous swing state, said his company expects to triple its rates next year on the ObamaCare exchange.

It is important to note that, while the increases will be most dramatic in the individual market, employer-sponsored group policies will also become more expensive due to Obamacare’s mandates:

In Iowa, which hosts the first presidential caucus in the nation and has a competitive Senate race this year, rates are expected to rise 100 percent on the exchange and by double digits on the larger, employer-based market, according to a recent article in the Business Record.

Insurance carriers will announce their 2015 rates over the summer, although, as the Hill notes, some “could also leak their rates earlier as a political statement.” So the rolling disaster of Obamacare has just begun to plague Democrats running for election in November. Which is why RNC chairman Reince Priebus is predicting that the election will be a “tsunami” for Republicans.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/03/obamacare-premiums-will-skyrocket-next-year.php

Don's Tuesday Column

     THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   3/25/2014

Republican Dinner Honors President Reagan

Before letting readers know about this Saturday’s Republican Dinner, I want to give all of you a heads-up on a planned State of Jefferson town hall informational meeting on April 5^th, 6 PM, at the Elks Lodge. Speakers will provide you with what you need to know before the June 3^rd vote on Proposition A, advising the Board of Supervisors on the issue.

There are some great reasons to attend this year’s premier Republican Party event, the Red, White and Blue Reagan Dinner, Saturday the 29^th. As of Sunday, tickets were available but will not be sold at the door. Make a call as soon as you can to 567-2323 to reserve your seat or table. There is a “no host” cocktail mixer at 5:30 and dinner at 6:30.

We will be celebrating the legacy of our 40^th President, Ronald Reagan, with quotes, jokes and quips from his life, as well as an address from a special guest, Dennis Revell, President, Revell Communications, Chair of the Placer County Republican Party, and son-in-law to Ronald Reagan. He was a privileged and passionate observer to some of the dramatic episodes, as well as the quiet moments of the last 25 years of Ronald Reagan’s life, blessed as he was to be Maureen Reagan’s husband for over 20 years. They met in 1973 when both were active leaders in the California Young Republicans.

This dinner is always a chance for a warmer and more intimate interaction than you would normally have at public events with our local elected officials, up to and including U.S. Representative Doug LaMalfa and State Senator Jim Nielsen. The food is always top quality, memorable, provided this year by Cattle Country Catering, and includes Pork Tenderloin Medallions and Prime Rib Stroganoff. Your $40 ticket, together with any silent auction items you purchase, is a great way to show your support for local Republican outreach events; remember, we are not receiving government or taxpayer funds and rely on your generosity. Also note that active, uniformed military can attend free but a reservation ahead of time is appreciated for the benefit of the caterer.

Let’s take this opportunity to review some timeless things that Ronald Reagan said in the course of his long role in public service and conservative advocacy. I received a timely email with a link to “7 Amazing Reagan Quotes that Capture America’s Current Condition,” posted at www.breibart.com/Big-Government on 2/24. I think you will find much that speaks to the need for sober and finite expectations for government at every level; each concept contained herein should help you discern between the liberal/left advocates for governmental failure, and conservative proponents of freedom’s inherent success.

Appropriately, the first one is: “Man is not free unless government is limited.” Everything—whether food, health care, housing, or income support—that comes from the seeming governmental generosity of other people’s taxes, comes with a price tag of servitude.

“Can the black teenager who faces a staggering unemployment rate feel that government policies are a success?” Indeed, you could not have a more depressingly stark, revealing indictment of economic failure under liberal, Democratic policies than the long, sorry uninterrupted state of minority unemployment under Barack Obama’s presidency and Democrat-run cities.

“When you put a big tax on something, the people will produce less of it.” We are seeing that, under Obamacare, the IRS tax penalty is producing, on balance, fewer insured Americans; those signing up for insurance are not keeping pace with those kicked off their health plans (Obama’s lie), and many uninsured young plan not to participate.

“Welfare’s purpose should be to eliminate, as much as possible, the need for its own existence.” Instead, under Obama’s epic failure of an economic recovery, every benefit program is, through eager governmental advocacy, growing the dependency class.

“If we ever forget that we are one nation under God, then we will be a nation gone under.” Bear that truth in mind as you watch anti-religious zealots, whether in governmental, regulatory or judicial positions of power, or even cynical writers or cartoonists on this page, arrogantly advocating against the faithful. The first step of an atheistic tyranny is to force religious believers to bow and accede to secular authorities and their godless mandates—as when Obamacare forces Christian business owners to provide abortion-inducing drugs to their employees.

“One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine.” The leftward trend of state mandates against the economic free will of Americans has marched lockstep with government-provided health care services.

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” When every aspect of one’s personal and economic life can be analyzed, evaluated and regulated for its impact on public health or the environment, generations become accustomed to the constant purview of governmental overlords; they inevitably, inexorably lose even the memory of free will choices. Thus is the transition from living where all is allowed unless ruled illegal—to living as if nothing is allowed except what is declared legal. Think about it.

Nixon vs. Obama: Who Deserves Impeachment More?

by John Hinderaker in Obama Administration Scandals

Impeachment is a political remedy, not a legal one, and Republicans in Washington should never even hint at impeaching Barack Obama. Still, you would have to be an unusually obtuse observer not to notice that the grounds for removing Obama from office are stronger than the grounds that were deemed sufficient to impeach Richard Nixon. The president’s most fundamental constitutional duty is to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” but Obama has not even pretended to execute the laws faithfully. Rather, he enforces the ones of which he approves, and declines to execute the law whenever it is politically convenient for him to do so. Further, Obama’s coverups of various scandals–Fast and Furious, Benghazi and the IRS are probably the best known, but by no means the only ones–are at least as brazen as Nixon’s coverup of Watergate, and much more successful.
Michael Ramirez draws the comparison; click to enlarge file size:

Nixon had his faults, but one thing we can say in his favor: he was nowhere near as dishonest as Barack Obama.


http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/03/nixon-vs-obama-who-deserves-impeachment-more.php