“DUMP the IPCC process…
The IPCC was created to use the scientific community to build a case for regulating CO2 emissions. Period.”
“As President Obama prepares to tie a bow on U.S. combat operations in Iraq, Congressional Budget Office numbers show that the total cost of the eight-year war was less than the stimulus bill passed by the Democratic-led Congress in 2009.
According to CBO numbers in its Budget and Economic Outlook published this month, the cost of Operation Iraqi Freedom was $709 billion for military and related activities, including training of Iraqi forces and diplomatic operations.
The projected cost of the stimulus, which passed in February 2009, and is expected to have a shelf life of two years, was $862 billion.”My notes on the Fox report:
1) To verify spending on the Iraq war, see Box 1-3 on page 15 of this CBO link and tally each expense related to Iraq. As reported, it totals $709 billion.
2) The $862 billion figure was reported in January of 2010. The August, 2010 CBO report now projects the cost of the “stimulus” at $814 billion.
3) Bonds issued to fund the ‘stimulus’ cause two years of profligate spending to take 11 years in order to fully accrue all the directly related deficits.
“Real gross domestic product (GDP) increased 1.6 percent in the second quarter of 2010 after increasing 3.7 percent
in the first quarter.”
“Former Sen. Alan Simpson will keep his job on President Obama’s deficit panel despite pressure from advocacy groups worried about his comments comparing Social Security to ‘a milk cow with 310 million tits.’ ”
“The enormous sums committed to mandatory federal programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid dwarf all other aspects of the budget. Left unchecked for a decade or two, they will consume a larger share of the nation's GDP than all our federal programs today combined. Coupled with increasing interest payments on the government's rising debt, they will either force up taxes [on the middle class] or produce dangerous deficits.”Look! We all know Dims treat their enormously destructive entitlement programs as if they were downright sacrosanct. Just ask Sharron Angle how badly Dim propagandists in the media will burn any politician who dares to touch that third rail of American politics. But, even the Leftist Washington Post KNOWS that the ONLY hope of even BEGINNING to reduce deficit spending is to target the big three entitlements (and repeal ObamaCare).
“Picture your neighbor’s pool. Unless you live in Malibu, it’ll contain about 6,000 gallons. That’s the ‘Gulf’ for purposes of discussion. Now go to your garage, get a quart of oil and pour it in when he’s not looking. Pretty good sense of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, right?
Nope, not even close. Put a drop of that oil onto a sheet of paper and carefully cut it in half. Now do it again and toss that quarter of a drop into the deep end. Even this quarter droplet (about the size of the comma in this sentence) is about 10% too large, but NOW you have a sense of what 4.9 million barrels of oil in the Gulf looks like…
It would be safe to assume that 99% of the spill’s effects (economic loss, fishery damage, species diversity/habitat loss) will have disappeared along with the oil in one year or less.”
“The IPCC is a disgrace to science. In its desire to fit the square peg of science into the round hole of politics it has abandoned the ‘scientific method’ and replaced it with a desperate search for data and other material that might support a specific hypothesis.”
“The NHS [National Health Service] in England spent more than £300million on management consultants in the last year, new figures showed today.
The cost is almost the same as the amount spent on skin and lung cancer services combined and is the equivalent of the salary of 10,000 nurses”
“Here are 10 key reasons why the Obama presidency is in serious trouble, and why its prospects are unlikely to improve between now and the November mid-terms.
1. The Obama presidency is out of touch with the American people…
2. Most Americans don’t have confidence in the president’s leadership…
3. Obama fails to inspire…
4. The United States is drowning in debt…
5. Obama’s Big Government message is falling flat…
6. Obama’s support for socialised health care is a huge political mistake…
7. Obama’s handling of the Gulf oil spill has been weak-kneed and indecisive…
[And, the moronic drilling moratorium has made a bad jobs situation even WORSE.]
8. US foreign policy is an embarrassing mess under the Obama administration…
9. President Obama is muddled and confused on national security…
10. Obama doesn’t believe in American greatness”
“ ‘If you ask me as a person, do I think the Russian heat wave has to do with climate change, the answer is yes,’ said Gavin Schmidt, a climate researcher with NASA in New York. ‘If you ask me as a scientist whether I have proved it, the answer is no — at least not yet.’ ”For the uninitiated, Gavin Schmidt (of RealClimate.org) is arguably the single most overt propagandist in the religious cult of Man Made Catastrophic Global Warming Hysteria.
“This [Gavin’s absurd NYT comment] neatly sums up the first of two reasons why I think that the current debate over whether greenhouse gas emissions caused/exacerbated/influenced recent disasters around the world is a fruitless debate. It is not a debate that can be resolved empirically, but rather depends upon hunches, speculation and beliefs…For the record…
there should be no ambiguity in the fact that researchers who have looked for a signal of increasing GHGs [Green House Gases] in increasing disaster losses (whether measured in dollars or in lives) have yet to see such a signal. It would be scientifically incorrect to claim that GHGs have been shown to account for any portion of the damage or suffering resulting from recent events.”
“Drill, baby, drill.
Even after the recent — and highly publicized — oil spill in the Gulf Coast, that’s the overwhelming sentiment from the public, with six in 10 Americans supporting more offshore drilling”
“In the end, the first idea may have been the best.
The capping stack that initially stopped the flow of oil from BP's Gulf of Mexico well more than three weeks ago [as of August 8th] was proposed sometime in late April, less than two weeks after the blowout”
“In the greatest party-affiliation cover-up since the media tried to portray Gary Condit as a Republican, the media are refusing to mention the party affiliation of the thieving government officials in Bell, Calif.
There have been hundreds of news stories about Bell city officials' jaw-dropping salaries. In this poor city on the outskirts of Los Angeles, where the per capita annual income is $24,800 a year, the city manager, Robert Rizzo, had a salary of $787,637.
That's about twice what the president of the United States makes. (To be fair, Rizzo was doing a better job.)
Rizzo was the highest-paid government employee in the entire country, not counting Maxine Waters' husband -- pending further revelations. With benefits, his total annual compensation, according to the Los Angeles Times, came to $1.5 million a year…
According to Nexis, there have been more than 300 news stories reporting on the Bell scandal. Guess how many mentioned the party affiliation of the corrupt government bureaucrats?
One. Yes, just one. Now guess if the government officials were Democrats or Republicans? Yes, that is correct. Congratulations -- you've qualified for our bonus round!
The one newspaper to cough up party affiliations, The Orange County Register, admitted that the corrupt officials were all Democrats only in response to reader complaints about the peculiar omission….
Unlike political corruption involving sex or bribery, the outrage in Bell isn't a scandal that hits both parties from time to time -- it's how the Democrats govern.
Elected Democratic officials bestow ludicrous salaries and benefits packages on government employees, and, in return, public employee unions make sure the Democrats keep getting re-elected.
The scandal in Bell isn't a scandal at all for the Democrats. Au contraire! This is the governing strategy of the Democratic Party.”
“Global tropical cyclone activity (comprised of hurricanes and tropical storms) continues to remain at its lowest level in at least 30 years, according to data from Florida State University. For nearly two years now, global tropical cyclone activity has remained at its lowest level since at least 1979.
According to Florida State hurricane researcher Ryan Maue, it is possible that current accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) is even lower than the extremely low tropical cyclone activity of 1979-1980.”
“When we romanticize the past, we overlook its faults. The past takes on a kind of Disney World cast….
The wealthiest place in the world in the 18th century was London. Yet if you think you'd be content living then and there, you might want to read Liza Picard's book ‘Dr. Johnson's London’ -- which is a lively account of everyday life in mid-18th-century London. I'll bet this book will change your mind.
Consider these reports from Ms. Picard's wonderfully evocative book:”
“Marine scientist Ivor van Heerden… says, ‘There's just no data to suggest this is an environmental disaster…. we're not seeing catastrophic impacts.’…
So far, the teams have collected nearly 3,000 dead birds, but fewer than half of them were visibly oiled… the Valdez may have killed as many as 435,000 birds. The teams have found 492 dead sea turtles… only 17 were visibly oiled; otherwise, they have found only one other dead reptile in the entire Gulf…
The shoreline teams have documented more than 600 miles of oiled beaches and marshes, but the beaches are fairly easy to clean, and the beleaguered marshes don't seem to be suffering much additional damage…
Anti-oil politicians, anti-Obama politicians and underfunded green groups [Underfunded green groups? Are you freaking kidding me?] all have obvious incentives to accentuate the negative in the Gulf. So do the media, because disasters drive ratings and sell magazines; those oil-soaked pelicans you saw on TV (and the cover of TIME) were a lot more compelling than the healthy ones I saw roosting on a protective boom in Bay Jimmy… But honest scientists don't do that, even when they work for Audubon.”
“In recent days, though, we have witnessed an extraordinary U-turn in America’s attitude towards the great spill.
It began when a respected Time magazine environmental writer voiced the near-heretical proposition: that the effects of the Deepwater Horizon disaster on April 20 had been massively hyped.
His article was largely based on the opinions of Professor Ivan van Heerden, a brilliant but controversial marine scientist fired by Louisiana State University after publishing a book about Hurricane Katrina that said cataclysmic flooding was inevitable because the protection given to the coast [by massively corrupt and incompetent government bureaucrats] was wholly inadequate.
He said: ‘There is just no data to suggest this is an environmental disaster - although BP lied about the size of the oil spill, we’re not seeing catastrophic impacts.’ ”
“WikiLeaks, the whistleblower website that posted thousands of secret Afghanistan war documents, says it intends to keep publishing secret government files from all over the world even though the United States has demanded that it stop, as least insofar as the war is concerned.”
“In a blistering letter published earlier in the week, the head of Texas’s environmental agency and the State’s attorney general told the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA): ‘Texas has neither the authority nor the intention of interpreting, ignoring, or amending its laws in order to compel the permitting of greenhouse gas regulations.’
The letter, by Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) Chairman Bryan Shaw and Attorney General Gregg Abbott, comes hard on heels of EPA’s denial of 10 petitions (including one from the State of Texas) to reconsider EPA’s endangerment rule. That rule — the agency’s response to the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in Massachusetts v. EPA – is both trigger and precedent for potentially dramatic and far-reaching Clean Air Act restrictions on fossil energy production and use.”
“In the 1500s, a pestering theologian instituted something called the Marriage Ordinance in Geneva, which made ‘state registration and church consecration’ a dual requirement of matrimony.
We have yet to get over this mistake. But isn't it about time we freed marriage from the state?
Imagine if government had no interest in the definition of marriage. Individuals could commit to each other, head to the local priest or rabbi or shaman -- or no one at all -- and enter into contractual agreements, call their blissful union whatever they felt it should be called and go about the business of their lives…
As the debate stands now, we have two activist groups trying to force their own ethical construction of marriage on the rest of us. And to enforce it, they have been using the power of the state -- one via majority rule and the other using the judiciary (subject to change with the vagaries of public opinion)…
In our Utopian vision, no group is empowered to dictate what marriage should mean to another. And one of the great perks would be the end of this debate.”
“[W]hile I don’t think that this is an easy path to adopt, it’s going to be the eventual solution. Not only does it take government out of people’s private lives, it also means an end to a divisive and essentially meaningless debate — and it protects houses of faith and ends a potential government interference in matters of religion.”
“Christina Romer, Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors Chair, has leaped from the breached and listing USS (r) Obumbles.”Click here to hear the neo-Socialist Berkeley bimbo in her own absurd words.
“48% of Americans like the idea of tax credits for alternative energy cars…
But support drops dramatically when adults are told that the tax credits could cost taxpayers up to $2 billion over the next 10 years. Then just 27% support the credits”
“Environmentalists went with an all-or-nothing strategy for the 111th Congress. Nothing won…
After Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) last month scrapped plans for a vote [on Cap and Trade], the White House made clear it wasn’t impressed with the environmentalists’ effort.
‘They didn’t deliver a single Republican,’ an administration official told POLITICO just hours after Reid pulled the plug on the climate bill. ‘They spent like $100 million, and they weren’t able to get a single Republican convert on the bill.’ [GOOD!]...
‘We really got our ass kicked in August during the town halls,’ EDF spokesman Tony Kreindler said.”… [GOOD!]
“With all precincts reporting, 71% of voters supported Proposition C, establishing a state law that says Missouri cannot compel people to pay a penalty or fine if they fail to carry health coverage…
The state law runs counter to the federal health law President Barack Obama signed in March, which calls on most Americans to carry coverage or pay a fine.
Some state attorneys general have challenged the insurance mandate as unconstitutional.”
“According to a recent Pew / National Journal poll, nearly two-thirds of the American people think that ‘Barack Obama's economic policies’ have failed. That includes 29% who think the president's policies have led to worse results and another 35% who think they have had little or no effect.
The poll numbers on Obamacare are worse still. A Rasmussen poll shows that a 2-to-1 majority of voters are in favor of repealing the president's landmark health care bill. That includes a stunning 46% who ‘strongly’ favor repeal, against just 25% who ‘strongly’ oppose repeal…
There is a giant con game going on here. The Republican Party needs a leader who is onto it and who is capable of attacking it in no uncertain terms. And more than someone who can criticize the wrong policies, it needs someone who can lead the country in an entirely different direction…
In her column in last weekend's Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan pointed to the outspoken New Jersey Governor Chris Christie as the one Republican leader who is not afraid to talk hard sense about real issues and who does so in an exceptionally forceful and compelling manner… I, for one, am more than happy to second the motion that Christie could be the Republicans' man of the hour. He is nothing less than outstanding when it comes to punching holes in the bad arguments and policies advanced by the other party, and he also has the capacity for inspiring people with clarity of his own vision.”
“For the first time since President Obama took office, voters see his policies as equally to blame with those of President George W. Bush for the country’s current economic problems.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 48% of Likely U.S. Voters now think Obama’s policies are to blame for the continuing bad economy, up three points from last month. Forty-seven percent (47%) say the recession that began under Bush is at fault.”
