Not Cronies

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com The picture is not pretty. Government's pets or, in the president's words, "savvy businessmen," use government to get policies that will give them competitive advantages and stifle smaller competitors. Pleasing their masters in government is now absorbing the psychic energy of CEOs who used to concentrate on meeting consumers' needs in order to make profits. What we're seeing is the beginning of a renaissance of National Socialism, thought dead after World War II. Big business, threatened by government, does the logical thing: if you can't beat them, join them. Big business enjoys government protection against innovation, and in exchange transforms itself into a tool of government control over the economy. Top executives and lobbyists will do very well under a National Socialist regime. The rest of us? In Barack Obama's world, we don't count. We aren't cronies.

Why They Voted For Obama

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Expensive Lies

clipped from pajamasmedia.com For several months, the “Monthly CO2 Reports,” compiled by me at www.scienceandpublicpolicy.org, have been pointing out that there has been no statistically significant “global warming” for 15 years. Regular attacks on my calculations and graphs have appeared on blogs by the usual suspects — Gavin Schmidt of NASA being, as usual, the most venomously ad hominem and the least scientifically plausible. Now, Professor Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia has admitted publicly, and — as far as I know — for the first time, that there has been no statistically significant “global warming” for 15 years. Jones has admitted that he is not very good at keeping data tidily. In effect, the temperature record of the CRU is little better than a fabrication — much like the four assessment reports of the IPCC. Taxpayers should clamor for the abolition of the CRU and of the IPCC. Their findings are not just lies — they are expensive lies.

Q and A

clipped from wattsupwiththat.com Specifically, the Q-and-As confirm what many skeptics have long suspected: Neither the rate nor magnitude of recent warming is exceptional. There was no significant warming from 1998-2009. According to the IPCC we should have seen a global temperature increase of at least 0.2°C per decade. The IPCC models may have overestimated the climate sensitivity for greenhouse gases, underestimated natural variability, or both. This also suggests that there is a systematic upward bias in the impacts estimates based on these models just from this factor alone. The logic behind attribution of current warming to well-mixed man-made greenhouse gases is faulty. The science is not settled, however unsettling that might be. There is a tendency in the IPCC reports to leave out inconvenient findings, especially in the part(s) most likely to be read by policy makers.

Obamunism Today

clipped from www.moonbattery.com The President of Russia, Dmetri Ledvedev, has ordered Government bureaucrats to privatize profitable companies. Medvedev's order for a greater sale of key assets comes after he conferred with officials last week about ways to encourage investment -- and as the government is facing a budget deficit for a second straight year. Medvedev also instructed the Cabinet to come up with a proposal to punish more severely those bureaucrats that hamper investment Meanwhile, the Obama Regime, which has already taken over two car companies and several banks, wants to hire 300,000 bureaucrats to hamper investment. Our Obamunist Government pushes forward on its "jobs bill" which, like the last one, will borrow billions in order to keep Government bureaucrats at work, pushes forward on massive new regulations of finance and insurance, pushes forward on industry-destroying climate change regulations, and declares that companies that make profits are enemies of the regime.

Lincoln's Extended Hand

clipped from biggovernment.com As he prepared “Notes on Government” for publication in 1791, Congressman James Madison wrote a note to himself. “In proportion as slavery prevails in a State, the Government, however democratic in name, must be aristocratic in fact. The power lies in a part [of the people] instead of the whole, in the hands of property, not of numbers.” He drew a telling conclusion: “The Southern States of America,” very much including his native Virginia, “are on the same principle aristocracies.” As an architect of the new Constitution, Madison knew that Article IV, Section 4 says, “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.” He knew, therefore, that the American regime contained a self-contradiction. It took civil war and Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation to continue the liberation that the founders had begun. Lincoln extended his hand to Madison, redeeming the promise of the old fathers who had not lived to see the fulfillment

Socialists Kill

clipped from www.moonbattery.com Gateway Pundit has a fascinating rundown on socialist professor Amy Bishop, who yesterday or the day before shot and killed three of her colleagues after a faculty meeting at the University of Alabama. It seems, this was not her first murder. Back in 1986, she shot and killed her own brother during an argument. She was not prosecuted, however, because of the intervention of District Attorney Bill Delahunt, who is now a Democrat Congressman from, of course, Massachusetts (where election to Congress is pretty much a work-release program for perverts, murderers, drunks, and their enablers). Congressman Delahunt is notorious for his admiration of chubby Venezuelan Socialist Strongman Hugo Chavez. I guess this means, statistically speaking, you're in much more danger of being shot to death on by a socialist professor on a college campus than by a redneck at a Gun Show.

Wind Damage

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com The Obama administration is setting a standard of incompetence not likely to be rivaled any time soon. In the "stimulus" bill, nearly $2 billion was allocated to support wind power, thereby creating "green jobs" and contributing to energy independence. Investors Business Daily describes what happened instead: According to the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, nearly $2 billion in money from the American Recovery and Investment Act has been spent on wind power. The goal was to further energy independence while creating American jobs. It has done neither. Of the money spent, according to the report, nearly 80% has gone to foreign manufacturers of wind turbines. If the Obama administration were actually trying to damage our economy, it is not clear that it could do a better job.

Infragravity

clipped from wattsupwiththat.com The researchers used seismic data collected on the Ross Ice Shelf to identify signals generated by infragravity waves that originated along the Northern California and British Columbia coasts, and modeled how much stress an ice shelf suffers in response to infragravity wave impacts. Bromirski said only recently has technology advanced to allow scientists to deploy seismometers for the extended periods on the ice shelf needed to capture such signals. The study found that each of the Wilkins Ice Shelf breakup events in 2008 coincided with the estimated arrival of infragravity waves. The authors note that such waves could affect ice shelf stability by opening crevasses, reducing ice integrity through fracturing and initiating a collapse. “(Infragravity waves) may produce ice-shelf fractures that enable abrupt disintegration of ice shelves that are also affected by strong surface melting,” the authors note in the paper.

What Will Go Next? II

clipped from blogs.telegraph.co.uk The technique is familiar. The powers-that-be allow a scandalous situation to develop whereby no serious attempt is made to police paedophile, pornographic and criminal activity on the web. Then the authorities use the excuse of public concern to overreact and impose Draconian controls that police ordinary citizens but are usually circumvented by criminals. It is a familiar scenario, offline as well as in cyberspace. Without the internet, the completely fictitious global warming “consensus” would still be unchallenged, state power massively enlarged, $54 trillion of Western taxpayers’ money flooding into the coffers of carbon companies and people’s lives made miserable by totalitarian restrictions imposed to counter a non-existent threat. I forecast that the right to anonymity on the internet will become one of the most fiercely contested issues over the coming decade. Be very afraid…

What Will Go Next?

clipped from blogs.telegraph.co.uk The American blogosphere is going increasingly “viral” about a proposal advanced at the recent meeting of the Davos Economic Forum by Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer for Microsoft, that an equivalent of a “driver’s licence” should be introduced for access to the web. This totalitarian call has been backed by articles and blogs in Time magazine and the New York Times. As bloggers have not been slow to point out, the system being proposed is very similar to one that the government of Red China reluctantly abandoned as too repressive. It was inevitable that, sooner or later, the usual unholy alliance of government totalitarians and big business would attempt to end the democratic free-for-all that is the blogosphere. The recent uprising in the blogosphere that resulted in the overturning of the Global Warming consensus can only have focused our rulers’ attention more acutely on this infuriating challenge to their totalitarian control. “What will go next?”

Dead Mann Walking

clipped from sonicfrog.net Dr. Phil Jones, the man at the center of the Climategate scandal, has for the first time admitted that the Medieval Warm Period could have been warmer than the present day, flying directly in the face of the stupid HockeyStick Graph that caused so much of the Climate panic in the first place. From the BBC report, titled “Climate data ‘not well organised“: Phil Jones, the professor behind the “Climategate” affair, has admitted some of his decades-old weather data was not well enough organised. But he agreed that two periods in recent times had experienced similar warming. And he agreed that the debate had not been settled over whether the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than the current period. Here is why that is important. If there was a warmer Medieval Warm Period, then the current warming could be more likely due to natural variation, instead of CO2 and man-made.

Where Is It?

clipped from wattsupwiththat.com The claim is made over and over that humans are having an effect on the climate. But where is the evidence that there is anything that even needs explanation? Where is the abnormal phenomenon? What is it that we are trying to make sense of, what is the unusual occurrence that requires a novel scientific explanation? There are not a lot of long-term temperature records that can help us in this regard. The longest one is the Central England Temperature record (CET). Now, where in that record is there anything which is even slightly abnormal? Where is the anomaly that the entire huge edifice of the AGW hypothesis is designed to elucidate? The longest sustained rise is from about 1680 to 1740. That time period also has the steepest rise. The modern period, on the other hand, is barely above the long-term trend despite urban warming. There is nothing unusual about the modern period in any way. We find the same thing in this record as in the CET. The fastest rise was a long, long time ago.

RTWT.

Rent-A-Mob Update

clipped from www.nypost.com Thursdays's events in Iran dealt a serious political blow to a beleaguered re gime unable to either accommodate its opponents or crush them by force. It was billed as the biggest show in the history of the Islamic Republic, and the celebrations marking the 31st anniversary of the seizure of power by the mullahs were planned like a military operation with the code name Simorgh (a mythical Persian bird) under the direct control of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard. What Iranians saw on live TV, however, was a chaotic gathering of tens of thousands of rent-a-mob elements -- along with guardsmen, all with standard and easily recognizable beards, and members of the Baseej professional street fighters. "What is the point of an exercise that shows how divided our nation is today?" asks a member of the Islamic Majlis, Iran's ersatz parliament. "Unless a political solution is found to bring the two camps together again, we should forget about anniversaries and demonstrations."

Missing

clipped from www.cashill.com Until last week, I had avoided the swamplands of Barack Obama’s origins, a place from which reputations rarely return. What prompted my interest was a reader inquiry into a poem by then 19-year old Obama called “Pop,” a cynical bit of work almost assuredly written about his maternal grandfather Stanley Dunham, “Gramps.” In researching the meaning of the poem—Obama’s oeuvre being my own personal swamp--I came to a conclusion I had not anticipated, namely that there is a full year missing from Obama’s biography, his first year. Obama is right. They do look alike. Obama does not, however, look like Barack Sr. and, Abercrombie concedes, the grown-up Obama does not sound at all like him either. As Obama admits in Dreams, Gramps hangs out in otherwise all-black bars and pals around with his communist soul mate and sex merchant, Frank Marshall Davis. Do not wait for the mainstream media to answer these questions. They still have not thought to ask where Obama spent the first year of his life.

50!

clipped from www.americanthinker.com The storm that just dumped enough snow on the Florida Panhandle to force the closing of the University of West Florida has brought the official count of states with the white-stuff on the ground to a full 50.

Fanciful Failure

clipped from cfecon.blogspot.com Rick Santelli says yes. So does MarketTicker Bad. Actually, let's go worse than bad and call it what it is - by any definition this is just one step off from "Failed." The more-worrying factor here is that we've got this "mystery" direct buyers out here again taking nearly 25% of the offered amount (who is bidding for that undisclosed?) and another 11% taken down by The Fed for the SOMA account. Given the Primary Dealer system we have in this country, any BTC under 2.0 is an effective fail. To get an auction that behaves in this sort of fashion, complete with mystery direct bidders and heavy SOMA (Fed) participation, yet Treasury has to pay up in the form of a significantly higher coupon is not a good sign at all. It will continue through the year, as we are on track to run record budget deficits, so the premise that "it will all be ok and this won't start a ratchet up of rates on the long end" is perhaps more than a bit fanciful.

Deficits

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It's A Frozen Wasteland

clipped from www.moonbattery.com In case the Super Bowl halftime show left you in the mood for The Who, here's the Minnesotans for Global Warming version of Baba O'Riley:

And the Goracle has been found!

Stepping In

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com hese weren't the tea-party platforms I heard discussed in Nashville last weekend. They were the campaign promises of Barack Obama in 2008. Ouch. That seems like a long time ago. Mr. Obama made those promises because the ideas they represented were popular with average Americans. So popular, it turns out, that average Americans are organizing themselves in pursuit of the kind of good government Mr. Obama promised, but has not delivered. And that, in a nutshell, was the feel of the National Tea Party Convention. The political elites have failed, and citizens are stepping in to pick up the slack. Tea party-inspired candidates are springing up across the country. One whom Glenn highlights is Les Phillip: He is running against Republican Parker Griffith in Alabama's fifth congressional district. Mr. Phillip, a black businessman and Navy veteran who immigrated with his parents from Trinidad in his youth, got his start in politics speaking at a tea-party protest in Decatur, Ala., last year.

The Only Kind Of Lasers We'll Be Doing

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Cancelled By O Duce Of Course -- Just Like The Space Program Has Been Cancelled In Favor Of...

clipped from closingvelocity.typepad.com Last night off the coast of California, history was made as the Airborne Laser (ABL) successfully detected, tracked, and destroyed a boosting ballistic missile for the first time: WASHINGTON, Feb 12 (Reuters) - A U.S. high-powered airborne laser weapon shot down a ballistic missile in the first successful test of a futuristic directed energy weapon, the U.S. Missile Defense Agency said on Friday. UPDATE: Video of the intercept released by MDA --- note the target missile breaking up around 0:12:

...funding James Hansen to do "Climate Research" of course.

53 And 2.4 Are Both < 100

clipped from www.slate.com And if an Iranian bomb incites other powers in the region to build their own bombs for deterrence, that may "stabilize" tensions—by giving everyone a "deterrent"—though, more likely, it will make things worse. The other regimes probably won't have control devices, either, at least not at first. There's also the geographic factor: These countries are very close to one another; a nuclear-armed missile's flight time, from launcher to target, is a few minutes. In the event of a crisis, one nation's leader might launch a first strike to pre-empt an anticipated first strike by some other nation's leader. (If U.S. and Russian borders were only 100 miles apart, it's doubtful we could have survived the Cold War without a "nuclear exchange." This is one reason, by the way, that Soviet missiles in Cuba, and U.S. missiles in Turkey, were viewed with such alarm.)

Good grief. And Sarah Palin is mocked for claiming you can see Russia from Alaska.

The Bering Straight is 53 miles wide and there are islands within it on the respective sides that are 2.4 miles apart. Yes, you can see 2.4 miles across water.

Unless you're morally and intellectually blind.

And we're all dead already.

Don't worry, it's coming soon enough with O Duce getting trounced by the evil Ahmadinnamidget.

Stopped Clock Watch

clipped from news.cnet.com The ACLU, EFF, the Center for Democracy and Technology, and University of San Francisco law professor Susan Freiwald argue that the wording of the federal privacy law in question allows judges to require the level of proof required for a search warrant "before authorizing the disclosure of particularly novel or invasive types of information." In addition, they say, Americans do not "knowingly expose their location information and thereby surrender Fourth Amendment protection whenever they turn on or use their cell phones." "The biggest issue at stake is whether or not courts are going to accept the government's minimal view of what is protected by the Fourth Amendment," says EFF's Bankston. "The government is arguing that based on precedents from the 1970s, any record held by a third party about us, no matter how invasively collected, is not protected by the Fourth Amendment."

In which I am on the ACLU's side until they cave to Ogabe because he's still just so much better than the evil Bush so it doesn't really matter what he does at all as long as we don't allow Bush back...

Did I forget to mention that Bush is Hitler?

Brother.

Oh, Yeah...

clipped from pajamasmedia.com HEY, REMEMBER PORKBUSTERS? So I was talking to a reporter about the Tea Party movement yesterday, and he asked why nobody was complaining about spending under Republicans. Well, I remarked, there was the whole PorkBusters movement, whose biggest target was probably Trent Lott. “Oh yeah,” he said. “I had forgotten about that.” So here’s a reminder. And a few other items here and here. And I noted to him that CNN was a lot more interested in having me on back when I was criticizing Republicans for spending . . . .

O So Odd

clipped from pajamasmedia.com THE MUDVILLE GAZETTE on Biden’s Iraq Victory Claim: “There’s an odd thing about this administration claiming credit for victory in Iraq – half the country knows Biden and Obama had nothing to do with it, and the other half will never admit there is a victory to claim. However, since they think we’re all stupid, I guess the White House wants to give it a shot.”

Banking On Re-election

clipped from pajamasmedia.com DAN RIEHL: Why would Obama not mind Dimon and Blankfein getting huge bonuses? “Well, Dimon has given over $100k just to the DSCC. Plus individual candidate donations, most of which go to Democrats. And Blankfein gives almost all of his donations to Democrats – $136k to $4k.”

The (Non)Working Man

clipped from www.moonbattery.com Listen: Nearly 20% of men in this age group [25-54 yrs] are out of the workforce, and none of the overall second-derivative labor market improvements seem to be helping much. How this trend impacts society more broadly should be interesting, to say the least.

Sleep Deprivation

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com So that's it. Binyam Mohammed was subjected to sleep deprivation. He was shackled during interrogations and was threatened with being removed from the safety of American custody. He was not beaten, waterboarded, or subjected to bodily pain of any sort. As one who suffers from insomnia I can sympathize with the sleep-deprived, but this is not torture by any reasonable definition. If anything less pleasant than a weekend at a spa is considered torture, and therefore illegal, we may as well give up on interrogating terrorists. There was, of course, a context for the interrogation of Binyam Mohammed. That context was the September 11 attacks. Which brings us to the second story, the release, apparently via a Freedom of Information Act request, of aerial photographs of the collapse of the World Trade Center You can see the NYPD pictures here. On September 11, thousands of Americans experienced something far worse than sleep deprivation.

6%

clipped from hotair.com You don’t say. Even the Obama administration acknowledges the legislation’s centerpiece — a tax cut for businesses that hire unemployed workers — would work only on the margins. $5,000 may sound like quite a substantial tax credit, but it can cost that or more simply to hire and orient a new employee. In fact, according to some studies, “turnover costs for a manager average 150% of salary, including tangible costs of hiring new workers and relocation, and intangible costs such as the new worker’s inefficiency and lost productivity while the job is vacant.” The median household income in the United States is $50,740. Using that figure, it can cost $76,110 to hire and train a new worker. The $5,000 tax credit would cover about 6% of that cost.

Yes Way!

clipped from hotair.com Yesterday, Barack Obama made an unexpected appearance at the daily press briefing to stress the need for bipartisanship, while at the same event, Robert Gibbs demonstrated the way the White House apparently intends to put it into practice.  Chris Muir brilliantly ties this to the entire nanny-state impulses of the Democrats and the Obama administration in a must-see entry of his Day by Day series:

6"

clipped from www.slate.com The regime cannot rule by terror alone, and now all it has left is its race-based military ideology. Small wonder that each "negotiation" with it is more humiliating than the previous one. As Myers points out, we cannot expect it to bargain away its very raison d'etre. All of us who scrutinize North Korean affairs are preoccupied with one question. Do these slaves really love their chains? Here are the two most shattering facts about North Korea. First, when viewed by satellite photography at night, it is an area of unrelieved darkness. Barely a scintilla of light is visible even in the capital city. (See this famous photograph.) Second, a North Korean is on average six inches shorter than a South Korean. You may care to imagine how much surplus value has been wrung out of such a slave, and for how long, in order to feed and sustain the militarized crime family that completely owns both the country and its people.

QOTD: Archives Are A B*tch

clipped from www.qando.net he QOTD for today actually comes to us from a NY Times editorial in 2005 which clearly states their understanding of the job of an opposition party: Mr. Bush has reacted by railing against Democrats for obstruction — as if Democrats are duty-bound to breathe life into his agenda and, even sillier, as if opposing a plan that the people do not want is an illegitimate tactic for an opposition party. Why I believe that is exactly the point the right is now arguing.  As witnessed by the editorial, the Democrats, lefty blogs and much of the media thought it was fair play in 2005.  Take heed, Republicans and don’t end up breathing life into a corpse.  The Democrats didn’t apologize for killing Social Security reform.  And it obviously didn’t hurt them electorally. Question: did killing SS reform in 2005 make America “ungovernable?” More importantly, did that mean the NY Times wanted the Bush agenda to “fail”? Heh … Archives are a bitch, aren’t they?

His D.L.

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com If you seek a handy compilation of the shibboleths that now guide our approach to the phenomenon formerly known as Islamist terrorism, Brennan's speech is must reading. To take one example cited by Pipes, Brennan rejects any connection between "violent extremism" and Islam: "Using the legitimate term jihad, which means to purify oneself or to wage a holy struggle for a moral goal, risks giving these murderers the religious legitimacy they desperately seek but in no way deserve." Any connection between Islam and Islamist terrorism is purely coincidental. While Brennan's take on jihad may be a big hit in Obama's White House, it is not exactly authoritative. Pipes also captured the tone of Obama worship in which the speech is pitched: "Disturbingly, Brennan ascribes virtually every thought or policy in his speech to the wisdom of the One. This cringe-inducing lecture reminds one of a North Korean functionary paying homage to the Dear Leader."

Never Mind

clipped from www2.timesdispatch.com No more illegal wiretapping of American citizens . . . .This administration acts like violating civil liberties is the way to enhance our security. It is not. -- Barack Obama, Aug. 1, 2007 . . . On second thought, never mind. With the world's attention riveted by the earthquake in Haiti, few noticed when, late last month, a federal judge took a pair of sharp scissors to the Bill of Rights. But on Jan. 22, federal district judge Vaughan Walker agreed to dismiss a lawsuit over warrantless wiretapping, as the administration -- the current one -- had requested. The second suit was filed against the National Security Agency. Walker threw it out on the grounds that the plaintiffs could not show they had been individually harmed, because they could not "differentiate themselves from the mass of telephone and Internet users in the United States." They needed a "direct, personal stake" to claim standing for the right to sue, not merely "a right to have the government follow the law."

At Least 12.5%

clipped from www.qando.net The most recent release of unemployment data has raised some questions, namely, how can we lose 20,000 jobs in the same month that the unemployment rate declined to 9.7%.  The answer is simple: The unemployment rate is essentially a made-up figure.  And I can give you a much more accurate way to measure the unemployment rate. Fortunately, there is a better way to calculate the rate of real unemployment, and the BLS web site conveniently provides you with all the data you need to do it.  From here, we only need three items: The Civilian Noninstitutional Population, the Participation Rate, and the number of Employed. OCT 08: Civilian Noninstitutinal Population: 234,612,000 Participation Rate: 66% Labor Force: 154,843,920 Employed: 145,543,000 Unemployment Rate: 6.0% Jan 10: Civilian Noninstitutinal Population: 236,832,000 Participation Rate: 66% Labor Force: 156,309,120 Employed: 136,809,000 Unemployment Rate: 12.5%