Some Stuff to Consider

First a disclaimer:  In my entire adult life, I have never engaged in a birthday party ticklefest with other full-grown men.  Just in case anybody was wondering.

Seriously, you almost have to feel sorry for Congressman Massa.  He is obviously a very confused individual who cannot bring himself to publicly admit to his sexual orientation.  His interview with Glenn Beck is one of the most skin-crawlingly uncomfortable episodes I can remember witnessing.  The reality that Mr. Massa actually thinks anyone believes a word he said is a very sad indicator of his utter lack of fitness for serving in congress.  Then again, being abjectly out of touch with reality appears to place him right in the mainstream of Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives.

But enough of that sad and sorry spectacle.  On to more important matters...

Professor Mark J. Perry, at his excellent Carpe Diem blog, contrasts the economic performance of California and Texas.  One state is heavily unionized and dominated in government by mindless leftist cretins.  The other is a right to work state dominated in government by low tax conservatives.

Guess which state has a vastly more healthy economy?  The only drawback to this is that many of the cretins fleeing California for greener pastures are coming to Texas, which is seeing more than 1,000 people move within its borders every day.  Shit, they've already ruined formerly wonderful places like Montana, New Mexico and Colorado - can't they leave the Lone Star State alone?

We have been saying for some time that this Administration and Democrat congressional leaders are attempting to transform America from a constitutional democracy to a strong-arm fascist form of government.  Nowhere has this reality been more starkly borne out than in this morning's report by Mark Tapscott at the Washington Examiner that San Fran Nan is now planning to create a "rule" that will allow her to "deem" the senate healthcare bill to have been "approved" by the House without first requiring the House members to actually take a vote on the bill!

This is an extraordinary perversion of the legislative process, even for a shameless creep like Pelosi, who has made a career out of perverting the process in the House.  These people - Pelosi, Obama, Reid, et al - are literally a threat to the very existence of this country.  Wake up, folks, before it's too late.

On the Great Climate Fraud front, it should come as a surprise to no one that the reliable fellow travelers in the tired, dying, dinosaur leftist news media are beginning to rally to one final push in defense of Pope Al Gore and his minions in the Church of Global Warming.  See this USA Today puff piece as today's prime case in point.

These people will not go down without a fight, and their bones will continue to rattle long after they are buried.

A Nation Recoiling From the Politics of Frivolity

Is America rinally recoiling from the politics of frivolity?


We’ve written a great deal about the Great Climate Fraud in recent months, as the cultish Church of Global Warming (CGW) has entered its inevitable decline in credibility with the scientific community, policymakers and the public at large. The revelation last fall of hundreds of emails detailing an organized commission of outright fraud by some of the leading fake “scientists” who have promoted the Warmist religion has had the same effect on the CGW as the revelation of emails detailing an organized effort to manipulate U.S. natural gas markets had on Enron a decade ago.

Citizens in the United States, Great Britain and across the free world have begun recoiling at the idea that they’ve been had by a bunch of two-bit charlatans. Ok, make that a bunch of trillion dollar charlatans, but charlatans they are. In the most recent Pew survey on public attitudes towards major issues, the percentage of Americans who believe human activity is the cause of climate change fell to an all-time low 34 percent. Climate change ranked 21st out of 21 issues surveyed in terms of public concern, with just 28 percent still laboring under the belief the matter is cause for major congressional action.

Politicians with those kinds of numbers keep themselves busy looking for other lines of work. Public policy issues with that low level of public concern seldom become the subject of successful legislation to address them. Thus we have simultaneously seen over the last few months the collapse of leftist efforts to enact cap and trade legislation targeting carbon dioxide, as well as growing bipartisan congressional opposition to efforts by the Environmental Protection Agency to severely hamstring the economy by implementing command and control regulation over carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases”.

What is happening here is that the public is beginning the process of rejecting the politics of frivolity. And frivolity is exactly what the CGW and really environmentalism in general have become.

Over the past 30 to 40 years in America, many good and positive things have been accomplished in the name of environmentalism, since the implementation of major pieces of legislation like the Clean Air Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Endangered Species Act. Automobiles no longer belch out plumes of black smoke as they run down the road; the emissions from coal-fired power plants have been dramatically reduced, although they are still the dirtiest things around; emissions from oil refineries have been cut by a factor of 9 and more; cities no longer are allowed to flow their sewage into the nation’s waterways; important and significant animal species like the Whooping Crane and the Bald Eagle have been brought back from the brink of extinction. All of these and more were good and worthy goals that were worth taking on, and the nation is a much cleaner and safer place as a result.

But, with the fall of the Soviet Union and the resulting de-legitimizing of world socialism, the worthiness of the environmental movement in general began to change, as leftist activists of all stripes came to the conclusion that the best way to advance their radical agenda was under the guise of “environmentalism”. Suddenly, beginning in the early 1990s, proposals for listing species under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) moved away from species, like the Whooping Crane, whose very existence was truly threatened, to animals like the Sage Grouse native to Wyoming and Colorado, which literally exist in the millions (and even have an open hunting season dedicated to them), but whose listing under the ESA on the grounds of decreasing habitat would result in massive economic and societal disruption.

Environmentalist activities under the Clean Air Act (CAA), the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA), and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) began to take on a similar profile of proposing “solutions” designed to cause maximum cost and economic disruption possible. Under NEPA, the EPA can require the conduct of hugely costly environmental impact studies whenever a citizen raises concerns about almost any potential environmental impact that could allegedly result from some economic activity. Such studies typically cost millions of dollars and can take years to complete. These NEPA provisions have been systematically used by radicals around the country to delay and increase the cost of all manner of infrastructure projects. In Texas these tactics have been used to dramatically increase the time and cost of major highway project on I-35 north of Waco and I-45 north of Houston. One seven mile stretch of road on I-35 has now taken more than 14 years to reconstruct, and is still unfinished.

Examples of this sort of abuse of the provisions of these major federal acts are legion, and the public invariably becomes incensed once the abuses are revealed, despite the best efforts of the leftist news media to cover them up. This has never been more true than the last two years, as a nation mired in a major recession begins to realize that it can no longer afford to tolerate such mindless frivolity in the name of “environmentalism”.

Of course, there has never been a more frivolous environmental policy proposal than the current efforts by congress and the EPA to either legislate or regulate control of carbon dioxide emissions. To understand exactly how frivolous such proposals are, all you really need to know is that carbon dioxide makes up only about 4% of all so-called “greenhouse gas” emissions. Of that 4%, human-based emissions amount to around 3.4%, meaning that, in the now-failed Waxman-Markey legislation, congress proposed to cost the U.S. economy more than $2 trillion over 8 years to attempt to marginally reduce what currently amounts to around 13/100ths of 1% of greenhouse gas emissions. Now that the Waxman-Markey bill has failed, the EPA now proposes to cost the economy even more than that under its heavy-handed, Soviet-style regulatory system.

This is rank frivolity that a nation mired with trillion dollar-plus annual budget deficits as far as the eye can see simply cannot afford or tolerate. The recent polling data indicate that most citizens outside of the hard-core radical left have come to that realization. You can expect that shift in attitudes to show up in a big way in this November’s congressional elections.

The frivolity of the liberal zoo has fallen into a state of unrecoverable ill repute.

Al Gore: The Ken Lay of Global Warming

Predictably, the NY Times has today ceded 1/4th of its op/ed page to a guest opinion piece by Al Gore, Pope of the Church of Global Warming.  It's title?  "We Can't Wish Away Climate Change".

[sigh]

The first paragraph is a thing of climate-hysteric beauty:  "It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it."

You have to love the chutzpah, coming from a guy whose every pronouncement of impending doom to mankind made over the last 20 years has been demonstrated false in just the last few months.  Since last November, we learned that a) hurricanes are not becoming either stronger or more numerous than in the past, b) the Himalyan glaciers are not melting, c) the Amazon rain forests are not endangered by global warming, d) arctic sea ice is not disappearing, e) antarctic sea ice is actually expanding, f) Greenland is not melting, g) polar bears are not in any way an endangered species, h) sea levels are not rising, period, i) crop production in Africa is not decreasing, j) global warming is not a threat to water resources to 3/4ths of the globe, and k) there has been no global warming at all since 1995.

But it gets even better, as Pope Al continues talking himself into a corner:  "...what a burden would be lifted! We would no longer have to worry that our grandchildren would one day look back on us as a criminal generation that had selfishly and blithely ignored clear warnings that their fate was in our hands. We could instead celebrate the naysayers who had doggedly persisted in proving that every major National Academy of Sciences report on climate change had simply made a huge mistake."

The irony of Pope Al pointing fingers at anyone else and accusing them of criminal behavior is stunning in light of what we know today about the utter and complete fraud he has attempted to perpetrate on the world community.  This is a man who was given a Nobel Peace Prize and an Academy Award for the production of a fake documentary - An Inconvenient Truth -  every element of whose narrative was designed to convince the people of the world to spend trillions of dollars in establishing a global carbon trading scheme.  At the same time, Gore was secretly setting himself up in the carbon credit trading business, massively enriching himself in the process.

Now we know that every element of the narrative to An Inconvenient Truth is a lie, the foundation of the most expensive fraud ever perpetrated on mankind.  And we know that Pope Al has been one of the main beneficiaries of that fraud. 

When similar fraud-based houses of cards come tumbling down in the corporate world, as happened with Enron, Arthur Anderson and others, the United States Justice Department conducts formal investigations and people go to jail.  The proper analogy here is to think of Pope Al as the Ken Lay of the Global Warming fraud.

But it doesn't end with Pope Al - you also have to consider the fake "scientists" who have since November been revealed to have intentionally falsified their data in order to produce fake "science" in support of the global warming fraud scheme.  Again, when corporate emails revealing systematic fraudulent behavior are made public, the U.S. Justice Department conducts formal investigations, issues indictments, and throws people in jail.  Given that the emails revealed since last November reveal exactly such fraudulent intent, similar investigations from U.S. and European law enforcement officials are in order.

If future generations want to find criminal behavior in the current generation, they need look no further than Mr. Gore himself, and the fake scientists who dummied up the data to support his criminal endeavor.

Pope Al sums up his op/ed piece with the following breathtaking assertion:  "We have overcome existential threats before. Winston Churchill is widely quoted as having said, “Sometimes doing your best is not good enough. Sometimes, you must do what is required.” Now is that time. Public officials must rise to this challenge by doing what is required; and the public must demand that they do so — or must replace them."

This is the one true thing he writes in the entire piece, and I fully agree.  It is time for public officials at the U.S. Justice Department and law enforcement agencies around the world to rise to the challenge and do what is required here:  Investigate and prosecute Pope Al, the fake scientists who dummied up the data, the officials at the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change, and anyone else who has had a knowing hand in the perpetration of this massive, unprecedented fraud against humanity.

If these public officials fail to perform their obvious duty in this case, then the public must replace them.  It was probably not Pope Al's intent, but in this piece he has made the best possible argument for returning both houses of congress to Republican control this November.  We know the Obama Administration will never act to correct this fraud so long as they are able to avoid it.  Congressional pressure from a new majority will be the only way to force it, and if that fails, then the President himself must be replaced in 2012.

Pope Al had better make all the millions he can as quickly as he can.  Time is growing short, and the editorial board at the NY Times will not be able to provide him cover forever.

Obama Approval Continues to Tank

morning's Rasmussen survey has him at -21 in the "strongly approve/strongly disapprove" measurement:

...and, for the first time, his overall approval rating has fallen to 43% in this poll:

If he continues down his path of radical leftism, he will be in the 30s by summer.

It's morning in America.  Have a great Saturday.
 

Post-Summit Stuff

Ronald Reagan would have been proud of congressional Republicans yesterday.  The healthcare summit was a draw according to MSNBC, which means the Republicans won, and won big.

Some thoughts, in no particular order:

• The President was petulant, condescending and tense.  His idea of "bi-partisanship" appears to be to tell any given Republican who was speaking "those are all good points", and then to immediately dismiss them and move on.  He diminished his office by playing emcee to the room, and made himself look a little silly by singlehandedly talking longer than all the Democrats combined, and all the Republicans combined.
• The comparisons of President Obama to Ronald Reagan as a "Great Communicator" need to end, and end now.  Obama is very literate, and speaks well.  Reagan was a little less smooth as a speaker, but he was convincing whenever he spoke, and able to persuade others to his point of view.  Obama has zero ability to convince others, which is why he fails whenever he tries.  From last year's trips to Copenhagen to try to win the 2016 Olympics for Chicago, to try to get a deal on global warming, to his campaigning for Democrat candidates in races in New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts, Obama is on a losing streak of epic proportions in terms of personal persuasion.  He may be a great talker, but he is far from being a great communicator.
• Harry Reid looked as if he was chewing on a lemon and had a grassburr in the seat of his pants all day.  But then, that's pretty much how he always looks.  Nancy Pelosi is a worthless, lying sack of horse dung, and I literally celebrate every time her party is stupid enough to put her in front of television cameras.
• The Republicans, much to my surprise, showed up well-prepared with factual information and real ideas for real reforms that would actually improve healthcare delivery in the U.S. while lowering costs.  Naturally, each and every one of those ideas were rejected out of hand by the President and the other Democrats in the room, given that their goal here is to create a new, massive dependent class of Americans, not to in any way improve the system.
• Paul Ryan was especially impressive, easily the most serious and best-prepared person in the room.  His critique of the budgetary shenanigans contained in the Democrat plan were utterly understandable to the average person and thus devastating to the Democrat cause.
• It didn't hurt anything at all that the Rs were also able to bring real medical doctors to the table in the form of Senators John Barrasso of Wyoming and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma.  These two guys debating nitwits like Turban Durbin and San Fran Nan just is not a fair fight.
• The sad thing about all of this is that there really is a need for real, good faith reforms in the U.S. system of healthcare delivery.  Unfortunately, such reforms cannot happen at the federal level so long as radical leftist ideologues occupy the White House and the majority in congress.  And so we are left with the current stalemate.  Any real reforms must continue to happen at the state level on a piecemeal basis.  Obamacare is dead - Democrats will not be able to force the monstrosity through on a "reconciliation" strategy.

It is dead.  RIP.

Have a great Friday.

Some Stuff To Consider

The latest Rasmussen survey  on the Texas gubernatorial race shows incumbent Rick Perry running away from Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison by a 48-27 margin.  9/11 truther candidate Debra Medina has slipped since her revelation on the Glenn Beck Radio Program a couple of weeks ago, now coming in at 16%.  This is too bad, since for a while there she was providing some actual suspense in this race, with everyone wondering if Sen. Hutchison could manage to even finish second after the horrid and ridiculously stupid campaign she has run.

Disclaimer:  I have long been a fan of Sen. Hutchison for a variety of reasons I will not go into here.  But I have lost pretty much all respect for her and the morons who are running her campaign after the nit-witted campaign she has presented to Texans this year.  In fact, I really find myself at this point rooting for Medina to make a comeback and edge her out for second place.

Seriously, Sen. Hutchison has for the last few weeks been running radio ads featuring a guy with a folksy Texas drawl (I think it's the guy who does the Whataburger commercials) complaining about Gov. Perry's "fancy roadside parks".  I swear I am not making this up - Sen. Hutchison and her campaign's "brain trust" (Pictured at the beginning of this piece) think they're going to defeat a 10-year incumbent Governor who has never in his life lost a race for elected office by complaining about roadside parks.

In light of all of that, no magnitide of defeat will be too much for Sen. Hutchison to suffer in this election.  She gets what she deserves.

Elsewhere, the news is all about today's Healthcare Summit, at which President Obama will get a 3 hour photo-op while ignoring any suggestions for real, sensible reform offered by the Republicans who are stupid enough to actually show up.

George Will  has a very nice op-ed piece about it all today.  His opening paragraph is right on point:

Today's health policy "summit" comes at a moment when, as happens with metronomic regularity, Washington is reverberating with lamentations about government being "broken." Such talk occurs only when the left's agenda is stalled. Do you remember mournful editorials and somber seminars about "dysfunctional" government when liberals defeated George W. Bush's Social Security reforms?

Meanwhile, our favorite simpering half-wit com-symp op/ed writer, E.J. Dionne apparently woke up yesterday and realized that the liberals are in the process of losing a large swath of young people exactly as they did in the 1980s.  This comes as a surprise only to E.J.  Pity him an his existence.

I love this story , in a tragic sort of way.  So let me get this straight:  a killer whale has already killed two people, and we're somehow supposed to be surprised when it kills a third?  In a sane world, this whale would have long ago either been put out to sea or put down.  Instead, our frivolous, simpleton-minded society somehow believes the beast is just misunderstood, and should be protected.  Even this woman's own sister is quoted as saying the victim “would not want anything done to that whale” because she loved the animals like children.

Well, guess what, sis?  Killer Whales aren't children, and they're called "killer" whales for a reason.

Idiot.

Have a great Thursday.

So Much for the "Pivot to Jobs"

Y’all remember way back in January – yes, a whole month ago – when the word out of the White House was that President Barack Obama was going to finally, at long last, really, truly get serious about dealing with the economy and implementing policies designed to create jobs? He was, according to his army of professional prevaricators – otherwise known as the mainstream news media – going to perform a “pivot to jobs”, a fancy dance move that would promenade away from his single-minded focus on the frivolity of cap and trade and healthcare nationalization, and dosey-doe to a new (for him) pursuit of policies designed to create real jobs.


So what has changed in the President’s behavior since that barrage of White House talking point parroting by the lapdog media?

Nothing.

If you got up early on Sunday morning and logged onto RealClearPolitics.com as I did, the very first headline you saw was a link to a transcript of the President’s Saturday morning YouTube address, demonstrating what he is clearly focused on today. The headline read “It’s Time to Move Forward on Healthcare”. Huh? Beg pardon? Say what?

Did I misread that? Is it a typo? Did it really say “It’s Time to Move Forward on Jobs”, or “It’s Time to Finally, at Long Last, to Focus on the Economy”, or “It’s Time For Me To Get Serious About Doing My Job”, or “It’s Time For Me To Drop My neo-Fascist Dreams”?

No, I had it right – it really does say “It’s Time to Move Forward on Healthcare”. Hooboy.

So I clicked on the piece to see if the headline was misleading. I thought, you know, the address might have been more focused on jobs and the economy, with just a passing mention about healthcare that was latched onto by a headline writer at RealClearPolitics. But no, the entire piece is about healthcare nationalization. I mean that literally – every word of the speech is solely focused on socializing 1/6th of the U.S. economy. It reads like a speech the President would have made last July – chock full of the ad hominem attacks on and demonization of healthcare providers we have so come to know and love from this President. We’re right back to boogeyman politics. Ok, really, we never left.

So much for the “pivot to jobs”.

Seriously, this should not come as a surprise to anyone – we’ve said all along this guy is not going to change. He has no clue what to do about the economy, and doesn’t much care. He has no clue how to go about creating jobs, and why would anyone expect otherwise? This is a man who has never been involved in a job-creating endeavor in his entire life – he has spent his entire adult life as a political agitator and a politician. His mentors in life have all, without exception, been men of the radical left. He is constitutionally incapable of changing his behavior, and has no desire to change it in any event – he is what he is, a man seeking the creation of a neo-fascist American state.

Oh, well, it could’ve been worse – the President’s Saturday address could have been all about cap and trade. Hmmm, why do I suspect that will be his topic in the coming weeks?

So the White House and the Democrats in congress remain focused on healthcare nationalization. They’re holding a summit on February 25th dedicated to healthcare nationalization. They’ve invited Republicans to attend, and will no doubt reject out of hand any Republican idea that would not lead directly to nationalization of 1/6th of the economy. The White House, after leaving it entirely up to congress to write various healthcare nationalization bills over the last 14 months, is going to post its own healthcare plan on its website on Monday. An anonymous source tells Fox News that the White House plan will be based on – guess what? – the current Senate bill, only without the bribes to Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Ben Nelson of Nebraska in exchange for their votes.

Yeah, that’s the ticket! The White House obviously believes that the only reason why the overwhelmingly liberal voters of Massachusetts elected a Republican last month to fill that state’s vacant senate seat was due to the backroom deals surrounding the senate healthcare negotiations, and that all those polls taken since showing upwards of 60% of Americans opposing healthcare nationalization are meaningless.

So, you might ask, why does this President remain myopically focused on what is so obviously a political loser of a policy? Because healthcare nationalization is not about “fixing” the healthcare system, it’s about creating the most massive new dependent class of Americans since FDR’s New Deal.

This President has not abandoned his goal of “transforming America”, which he repeated hundreds of times throughout his presidential campaign. He wasn’t kidding when he said that, nor was he resorting to hyperbole. His true, undying goal is to transform this country into a neo-fascist state, and the only way to make that happen is to render as many Americans as possible dependent on the federal government for their livelihoods and their healthcare. This is why the only “jobs” he has even attempted to create are government jobs, why his regulatory agencies focus on making it harder and costlier for anyone to create a private sector job, and why he refuses to abandon his unpopular plan to nationalize healthcare.

There is no mystery here, folks. This President is extremely transparent, and he has been telling us for a couple of years now what he really plans to do to this country. It’s time everyone started taking him at his word.