Jason Hayes – Musing

I’m not particularly fond of Jack Layton’s politics, but I am happy to lay aside political differences to wish him well and pray for a speedy recovery as he undergoes treatment for prostate cancer.

Via rabble.ca

This year, more than 25,000 Canadian men will be diagnosed with treatable prostate cancer and I have recently learned that I’m one of them.

For what it’s worth – Good luck Mr. Layton, my prayers for health and a long life are with you.

Thank heaven for young men like Tim Tebow

• Young men whose mother’s had a “choice” to make when they were pregnant and they chose life.
• Young men with a life-changing faith in God.
• Young men with the courage to boldly share that faith, rather than hiding behind politically-correct façades.
• Young men who openly admit that they are “saving themselves” for marriage (despite the childish snickers of holier-than-thou liberal reporters who view virginity as a disease). Anyone with a daughter they love will understand this – How nice is it to know that your daughter might be able to meet a young man who is seriously considering marrying and staying married to one woman for the rest of his life.
• Young men who see that there are things in the world bigger than they are and who dedicate themselves to serving those in need, rather than believing that life is there for them to waste and to take. Rather than thinking they are ’sick’ or ‘all that’ for bedding every second female they encounter.

Thank heaven that there still are young men who “celebrate family and celebrate life.” And the fact that his Super Bowl ad is receiving so much resistance from the women at NOW speaks far more of their desires and their intolerance than it ever could about Tebow.

More thoughts on the SOTU address that Obama gave Wednesday night now that I’ve had a chance to finish listening to the speech. (yeah, I’m late but I was busy yesterday)

Short version of the review – this was one of the more irresponsible and childish displays that I have ever had the misfortune of enduring. This man is frightening. He is quite simply an arrogant and spoiled, thin-skinned egomaniac. He used the State of the Union address the same way he would use a campaign speech. This speech was all about him and his plan for fixing everything for everybody. He’s not giving us the state of the union. He’s starting his campaign for 2012.

Additionally, his commitment to keep on spending, despite the deficit, is downright scary. We couldn’t afford his spending from the past year and now he has told us that he is going to keep spending at this rate for another year. Furthermore, he intends to make us endure a further $150 billion stimulus plan, before he agrees to halt spending. But even at that point, his spending halt amounts to something like 1% of the budget and will do nothing to touch the $2 trillion deficit he has created.

He’s boldly ignoring the last three big losses in the polls — even the Obama Girl has apparently lost faith in the ONE. But he’s trying to spin those loses as support for him and his policies. He’s ignoring the needs and wants of the American people and telling us that regardless of what we say, he’s committed to carrying on. “Damn the torpedos! Full speed ahead!”

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Continuing on from my previous post. The President starts right into the “Lost Decade” portion of his speech – Amazing! This guy is still blaming Bush!?!?! Get over it man!!! Bush hasn’t even been on the scene for a full year. You’re in charge now. Man up and take responsibility for YOUR policies!

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Interesting that he’s talking about people having to do more with less, that small towns are closing because of the recession. His policies are threatening to shut down our energy industry, as he refuses to drill for more oil and his cap and trade bill will shut down half of our energy generation. If he was serious about helping these people out, he would recognize that affordable energy is at the very base of our economic well-being.

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Now, he’s moving on to blaming the banks for the economic downturn. He loves this class envy, pseudo-populism thing. Get the people revved up and waving their pitchforks, demanding the heads of the bankers in New York.

Don’t get me wrong, much of what happened pre-2008 was an offense to any thinking, free market-supporting individual. What we currently have on Wall Street isn’t even close to a “free market.” We have a cozy little partnership between big banks and both of the big parties in DC. Phrases like “too big to fail” ensure that the big Wall Street players have little to fear from a down economy. They know that no matter what happens, they’ll be protected by their friends in DC. As a result we have these companies paying multi-million dollar bonuses to CEOs when their shareholders were taking a bath. Our 401Ks were dwindling away to nothing while our elected officials and Wall Street bigwigs keep on driving limos and eating caviar. Then they have the nerve to tell small business and individuals around the country that its our responsibility to shoulder the real financial burden of “too big to fail” and their profligate waste.

It’s pathetic to hear him targeting the big banks and pretending to be the friend of the smaller institutions and the individual investor. He knows the primary factor behind the careless lending practices and shoddy oversight that caused the recent downturn was the Clinton administration’s community reinvestment act. That legislation, pushed on by Congressmen and Senators that defended men like Franklin Raines, essentially forced the larger banks to give loans to people who had no means to afford the payments. Of course the bigwigs in those banks quickly figured out that they could ride those regulations hard and make billions for themselves, knowing all along that they’d be protected when the bubble burst.

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Funny that he is now talking about the “great decency” of America and the American spirit when he spent the past year roaming around the world, apologizing to anyone who would listen for what he sees as a broken, imperialistic bullying country. Now, when he’s losing support across the country, he’s suddenly proud of the country? Now he’s standing up for the country?

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Amusing applause line – “I wouldn’t just do what was popular, I would do what was necessary.” Translation: you people out there need to just shut up and let your betters tell you what you need. You’re not bright enough to figure out what this country needs. I … Barack Milhouse Obama … will lead you in the path everlasting. Now “get out of my way,” quit with your “petty” complaints and let me do what I want.

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Trying to give reasons for pushing his second $787 billion bailout bill (over and above the Bush bailout) by telling us that unemployment would be double what it is today. He promised up and down that unemployment would not pass 8%. It’s still over 10%.

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He’s claiming that he “cut taxes for 95%” of the country – True that he allowed reduced federal withholding from working Americans to the tune of ~$400 a year (a few dollars a month not withheld from your paycheck – Yippeee!!!). However, the Bush tax cuts are still set to expire (they were worth more to the average working American, but at best that will be a wash and some will just break even), the death tax is rumored to be making a comeback (die in 2011+ and the government gets half). Additionally, he’s promised to effectively raise taxes on fuel, he is attacking property owners with new taxes, he counted the C4C handout as taxable income, and he’s strongly pushed the 13+ new taxes included in the Obamacare reform bill.

We “haven’t raised income taxes” amounts to word games because he’s allowing other tax breaks to die out and raising other fees and costs. Plus, he completely overlooks the fact that the top 1% of taxpayers pay 39% of the total tax bill and the top 50% of taxpayers foot 97% of the total tax bill. Half — HALF — of the people in the country pay ZERO or almost nothing in taxes. But he sits there and states that he’s cut their tax bill to the tune of $400 per year.

Even the left-leaning Brookings Institute agrees on their TaxVox blog that to meet his spending plans, Obama is going to have both raise taxes (a lot) and make serious cuts in spending to meet his goals. You know he’s not going to cut spending in any serious fashion — unless he can follow Clinton’s lead and gut the military — so, as is always the case with any politician, ignore what he says and watch what he does. Your taxes are going up in the very near future.

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Have to like how he picks out a few individual “stories” about how his $787 billion stimulus fiasco has helped business. Not hard to find how close to a trillion in spending might help a handful of special businesses. Meanwhile we can’t find many of those billions and several billion more went to imaginary districts in Arizona.

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What is a “jobs bill”? Just wondering. What will it accomplish? Is he going to legislate that everyone gets a job? That was perhaps the most meaningless, throw-away, applause seeking line any president has ever given in a SOTU. It means nothing.

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He got one right!!! Business (especially small business) is the engine of the American economy. …. And he just dropped the ball. Business doesn’t need $30 billion in handouts. They need Obama and his cronies in the government to get out of the way. Stop regulating them to death. Stop taxing them to death. …

Eliminating capital gains on small businessesis an EXCELLENT idea, but I do wonder what constitutes a “small” business. Why not do this across the board, why leave out “big” business? They provide many of the jobs that he is seeking to encourage. Doing that would take us out of the ranking as having one of the highest corporate tax rates on the planet.

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Talking about removing tax breaks from businesses that move jobs overseas. Don’t forget about the heavy regulatory load that you place on all businesses across the country. There’s more to keeping businesses and jobs in the country than just tax policy.

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Already discussed his attempts to attack the banks above. It’s a sham because Washington has always been intimately involved in the corruption and mismanagement of our financial system.

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OK, wait for it … here’s my one moment of faltering toward the left. Enjoy it while it lasts. If we absolutely HAVE to spend government dollars on something, it may as well be on very carefully watched infrastructure projects. I still wholeheartedly believe that private industry would do a much much much much better job of it. But if the American people are dead set on allowing people who have demonstrated time and time again that they can’t manage their way out of a wet paper bag to spend our dollars, we should be putting that money into roads, railways, transmission lines, etc. Again, private industry could do it a LOT better, but if government absolutely HAS to do something, let it be something that will actually help the country move forward. Leave ACORN’s greed out of the equation.

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I still have a great deal of difficulty with this idea that government absolutely has to be involved in the development of new technologies.

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Yeah! New nuclear!!! Yes – more offshore drilling!!! Yes – new clean coal technologies!!!!

And … you just lost it with pushing the cap and trade bill – which will kill, or seriously set back, all the things you just said you support.

Quit beating the climate change thing. The Climategate (“hide the decline”) and Glaciergate foolishness have effectively sewered that discussion, and Rajendra Pachauri’s profiteering off of climate change has only made it worse. Focus on clean energy because it makes environmental sense (without playing the clichéd climate change tune) and economic sense.

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Double our exports? Interesting. When you are taxing and regulating companies out of the country, who is going to be left to export their products? We’ve set ourselves up to be a service economy. Becoming an exporting nation means that we have to actually produce products – when it is impossible to get a permit to log/mine/grow things, there’s very little to export.

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If they were actually interested in improving our schools, they would support those people who are home schooling their children, or they would support the freedom to choose where your children are education. Pitching unending billions into the public school system has proven over the past several decades to be largely unfruitful.. I understand that education is a state issue, but the feds are heavily involved in education – anyone who tries to pretend otherwise is either a fool or a liar.

Funny that he is again attacking the banks for student loans – no doubt he would much rather have the federal government running the entire student loans program. That would be that much more power and control for the government. And his notion that we should forgive student loan debt after 10 years if you go into “public service” is just another example of that same plan. He’s already grown the federal bureaucracy and bureaucrat’s pay at astronomical levels. Now telling people that after 10 years, they get a full reprieve on their education loans if they work for government will ensure a rush to those jobs.

“No one should go broke because they chose to go to college.” Everyone has an inherent right to health care. Everyone has an inherent right to an education. Everyone has an inherent right to … pretty much whatever they want, don’t they Mr. Obama. And it is the job of the “rich” to provide it for them. Just “spreading the wealth around.”

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Need health care insurance reform as a means to help middle class families? Do we really? Then why is it that married couples will pay a $2,000 per year marriage penalty in health care premiums under the Obamacare plan?

Don’t tell me you’re trying to help the middle class and that you’re trying to “give” health care to everyone in the country and then tell me that because I chose to marry my wife, rather than just shack up with her, I have to pay a $2,000 a year premium.

And now we’re getting the same tired ‘populist’ politicking against the insurance companies. We’re getting the same tired rhetoric and And he’s misquoting the numbers on bringing down the deficit – he just makes it up as he goes along.

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“I take my share of the blame for not explaining it more clearly to the American people” – Translation: you people are too stupid to recognize just how badly you need me to fix your problems.

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“I will not walk away from these Americans and neither should the people in this chamber” – Translation: I don’t care if the American people don’t want socialized health care or the latest version of Obamacare. I don’t care what you think. I don’t care what you want. I don’t care what the past three or four elections have demonstrated. YOU WILL GET OBAMACARE!!! Now “get out of my way” and let me do what I want.

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His claim that Bush left an over $1 trillion deficit is an outright lie. Bush left office with a ~$430 billion deficit. Obama’s policies have taken it to about $1.8 trillion, with forecasts out to the next decade saying it will be on average comfortably over $1 trillion every year.

How much longer will he keep trying to blame Bush for the failures of his policies? Bush has enough failures of his own to live up to, he doesn’t need Obama piling more on top of his head. Mr. Obama, man up and accept your failures as your own.

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Freezing government spending for 3 years is a great idea. Why wait for a full year before you do it? Why was it a bad idea when McCain suggested it in the presidential campaign. I remember something from Mr. Obama’s mouth about using a “hatchet” instead of a “scalpel” when McCain brought it up.

Another executive order to create his economic committee. The Senate just voted it down, but this guy is going to do it anyway.

“That’s how budgeting works” actually had people in the audience laughing at him None of us are that stupid Mr. President.

“The problem is that’s what we did for 8 years.” – Bush isn’t in power anymore. Get over it Obama. You’re the president now. To steal a line from Arlen Specter – “we’re treating you like the President … act like one.”

Anyone else find it a bit ironic that the man with one of the largest populations of lobbyists in his administration is still talking about “ending the influence of lobbyists”?

Anyone else find it a bit ironic that the man who refused to allow C-SPAN in to record the health care negotiations (despite promising on the campaign trail that he would have those cameras there to avoid back room dealing) is talking about “doing our work openly”?

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His attack on the Supreme Court was completely inappropriate – to say nothing about being completely inaccurate. Others have listed the multiple areas in which Obama’s fact checking failed in that comment, so I won’t go into it. However, last year, House Republican Joe Wilson was excoriated throughout government and the media for breaking protocol and shouting “you lie” during Obama’s speech on health care. Wilson was forced to apologize and was then given a formal reprimand by the House for his breach of protocol. Obama’s brazen attack on the Supreme Court was at least as bad and likely worse. Obama styles himself as a Constitutional scholar and should know that using this venue to openly defame another branch of government is completely inappropriate. Even worse, openly challenging them with factually deficient claims is beneath the office he holds.

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Earmark reform?!?!?!?! You signed a budget bill last year with 9000 9000 earmarks in it! You signed that bill after telling us over and over again that you would veto and deny any earmarks. And now you have the temerity to lecture the country about earmark reform?

As an aside, the idea of openly publishing earmark requests for the public to see is an excellent idea. I hope they actually do that.

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“A perpetual campaign” to find dirt on the other people. He’s telling the truth. Now if he would just drop his chronic campaign about “the past 8 years,” and “that’s what I inherited.” If he would quit campaigning against the Bush administration, his lecturing here would be a whole lot more effective.

Classic! He’s actually attacking the Republicans as “just saying no”. This from the same group of people who invented the term “Borking”.

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His discussion on national security would be easier to believe if he hadn’t allowed three terrorist attacks on American soil in the last year. As it is his unwillingness to even use the term “war on terror” or “terrorist attacks,” choosing “overseas contingency operation” and “man caused disasters” instead, makes him and his administration’s efforts on the terror front almost wholly unbelievable.

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As much as I dislike the fact that giving a date certain for the end of the war in Iraq will embolden the terrorists, I do hope and pray that he is able to bring our troops home soon!

He’s absolutely right that we need to support the troops now, and when they return.

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I’ve posted extensively on the hate crimes legislation, not worth expanding on here.

Not even sure how the “don’t ask don’t tell policy” fits into this speech. Seems like he had to pay off a special interest here so he needed to shoe horn a note on it in somewhere.

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He’s closing his address out with cynicism and retelling all the problems. He’s making it about himself again — I never said I could do it all by myself — the narcissism this man possesses is beyond comprehension.

Now he’s talking the country and its spirit up again – again, this is the same man who spent the last year apologizing for the country to anyone who would listen.

Closing with the “I don’t quit” theme is another reminder that we will be dealing with Obamacare and Cap & Trade for many months to come. It’s a shot across the bow more than a call to action.

Wow!!!

Chris Matthews admits openly that for an hour he “forgot that (Obama) was black tonight.” Once again, we see that Matthews views everything — first and foremost — through the prism of race. He states clearly that he sees an African-American standing before a “bunch of other white people.” He doesn’t see the President — a human being — standing in front of a group of other people. He sees skin color before he sees or thinks about anything else.

Now, who’s the racist?

Update — John Stewart’s take on Matthew’s comment is absolutely priceless. (Watch right after the 4 minute mark.)

Was out at church last night and am just listening to the SOTU address this morning. Amazing that Obama starts off by characterizing the differences he’s experienced in DC as “pettiness.” More of the same from our president; if you don’t agree with me and my plans to socialize the country, you’re “petty.”

Now, I don’t doubt that much of what passes for work in DC is actually petty partisan posturing. However, when you have a president and the president’s party heading up a Congressional push to nationalize health care, to take over our banks and major industry, to quadruple our annual deficit and send our national debt into the stratosphere, to send the cost of energy “skyrocketing” out of the reach of any but their most affluent supporters, to refuse to develop known sources of energy (when other countries are drilling just a few miles off of our shores), and so much more, disagreements by the people of the country and other parties can hardly be classified as “petty.”

Mr. President, these are serious issues and your willingness to call people “petty” for resisting your neo-Marxist policies and to demand (in previous speeches) that those who disagree with you should just “get out of the way” is offensive in the extreme.

More thoughts as I make it through the video of the SOTU address.

I thought that they boarded up the Air America studios a few years back, but apparently the hardcore left-wing, blame America first group at Air America had been eking out an existence up until the last few days. A Jan. 21 Yahoo News article notes,

Air America Radio, a radio network that was launched in 2004 as a liberal alternative to Rush Limbaugh and other conservative commentators, on Thursday shut down abruptly due to financial woes. …
Air America ceased airing new programs Thursday afternoon and said it will soon file to be liquidated under Chapter 7 bankruptcy. It began broadcasting reruns of programs and would end those as well Monday night.

Nod to Steve @ ESR

Amazing the leaps in logic that so-called academics will go to “prove” their politically-correct biases. A recent study, published in the peer-reviewed medical journal, “The Lancet”, attempts to forge a statistical link from the high rate of spousal and familial abuse in Palestine to the “Israeli occupation.”

Study authors play the victim card with a vengeance, claiming that Palestinian men have been so completely emasculated by the Israeli presence that they are forced to abuse their wives and children as a means of bolstering their frail male egos. No mention by the study authors of the numerous other well-known examples of abuse, violence, honor killings, etc. in Muslim countries and communities that are not “occupied” by Israel though. I wonder why?

This is what passes as dispassionate, scientific inquiry at the Lancet today. Amazing and sad.

David Limbaugh’s new column nails Obama’s sham humility and his claims that “it’s not about me.” Obama’s narcissism is boundless; he can’t resist taking credit for anything good and passing the buck for anything bad. His arrogance is so completely overwhelming that despite the fact that his agenda is threatening to bankrupt the country and is making him both a domestic and international laughingstock, he continues to push his neo-Marxism onto a country he views as ignorant sheep, desperately in need of his all-knowing guiding hand.

Given what we’ve learned about Obama’s self-absorption, it’s not a stretch to infer that when he says “it’s not about me,” he wants to project an air of humility while receiving personal credit for that which he denies seeking credit. What he really means is, “The causes I am working on are greater than self, but — wink, wink — I darn well expect you to applaud me anyway, not just for my transcendent accomplishments but also for my being humble and selfless about it. …

His entire domestic and foreign policy agenda is so much about him that he insists on cramming it down our throats even though the polls overwhelmingly indicate that we Americans do not want it and, more importantly, that it is bankrupting this nation and making us less safe. That’s not selflessness. It’s self-indulgence and conceit to an obscene degree.”

Limbaugh continues with a long list of Obama’s “its not about me” speeches. Each of which demonstrates that he has carefully cultivated this phony humility game for decades. No one with any sense is even remotely fooled. Everyone sees clearly that it is always all about him – the one “we’ve all been waiting for.” The sad thing is that Obama is so completely engrossed with his own celebrity that he won’t recognize or care about what the people want.

In his all-seeing eyes, you and I are just too ignorant to admit that all we actually need is him.

Amazing to see how the mighty have fallen.

Obama was swept into office with a near orgasmic frenzy. He could do no wrong. He was the second coming. Some of his more brainwashed followers appeared to think he had surpassed Christ. But now, one short year into his tenure, Obama’s approval ratings have already fallen to almost the same level as Bush enjoyed during the Hurricanes Katrina and Rita mess.

One wonders just how low can he go?

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting comparison of presidential approval ratings since WWII.

RealClearPolitics.com is tracking the Obama plunge in the polls.

Classic head-in-the-sand reporting and (dare I say “deliberate”) omissions on the part of the mainstream media. They just can’t bring themselves to report on the fact that Obama has presided over one of the most dismal economic failures in the history of the country.

Last year, Obama and his stimulus plan brought on the loss of some 4.1 million jobs — more than has been lost in a single year since 1940 — and a 10%+ unemployment rate. But the network newsies chose instead to focus on Obama’s fantasy-world claim to have created 2 million jobs. Even worse, they actually reported that we were looking at a “rebound: a slew of good news about jobs and the economy,” “glimmers of hope,” and that we had seen “some job creation.”

When the Bush administration was overseeing the creation of some 2 million jobs in 2005, those same talking heads couldn’t stop talking about layoffs. When Reagan was busy rebuilding after the same sort of economic mismanagement by the Carter administration caused double-digit inflation and skyrocketing unemployment, the networks talked endlessly about how Reagan was making people live on the streets and pushing them toward suicide.

But in the MSM’s cloistered world, the ONE can do no wrong. They’re determined to be happy with his job performance no matter how badly he botches things.

Looks like it will be the coldest winter since 1985.

Nearly the entire eastern half of the United States is enduring bitterly cold temperatures not experienced since 1985. Even Florida, which has been hovering around freezing levels overnight recently, is also feeling the almost-nationwide chill.

Add that to the facts that we have not seen warming in most of the last decade, the open and flagrant fraud perpetrated by those associated with the East Anglia CRU, lessening intensities of hurricanes, and dropping sea levels in key spots around the world and I’m thinking it sure was a good thing they got everything all settled in Copenhagen last month.

The Heritage Foundation has a good review of one of the reasons that Obamacare is unconstitutional.

A mandate requiring all individuals to purchase health insurance would be an unprecedented form of federal action. The government has never required people to buy any good or service as a condition of lawful residence in the United States. An individual mandate would have two features that, in combination, would make it unique. First, it would impose a duty on individuals as members of society. Second, it would require people to purchase a specific service that would be heavily regulated by the federal government.

Shades of what’s to come …

The Mayo Clinic, praised by President Barack Obama as a national model for efficient health care, will stop accepting Medicare patients as of tomorrow at one of its primary-care clinics in Arizona, saying the U.S. government pays too little. …

Mayo’s move to drop Medicare patients may be copied by family doctors, some of whom have stopped accepting new patients from the program, said Lori Heim, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians, in a telephone interview yesterday.

“Many physicians have said, ‘I simply cannot afford to keep taking care of Medicare patients,’” said Heim, a family doctor who practices in Laurinburg, North Carolina. “If you truly know your business costs and you are losing money, it doesn’t make sense to do more of it.”

Mayo lost $840 million on providing care to Medicare patients last year. So now doctors and major health care providers are telling Medicare patients that they will have to pay cash, but Obamacare supporters keep blindly pushing for their version of Medicare-on-steroids. They know that once they’ve killed the private markets, they’ll be able to strong arm what’s left of the the doctors into accepting the only health insurance that does exist.

An informed voice in Congress?? Who would have thought it possible?

Why am I not surprised to read that the U.N.s top climate change guru is,

1) Not trained in climate science (normally I wouldn’t bring this up as sufficient reason to discredit someone, but isn’t the “he’s not a climatologist” epithet the first thing true believers spit out a reason for skeptics being denied the opportunity to comment? Interesting that their top guy is guilty of the same sin.)
2) Making bucketloads of money from his involvement in setting world wide climate policy

From the Telegraph,

No one in the world exercised more influence on the events leading up to the Copenhagen conference on global warming than Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and mastermind of its latest report in 2007.

Although Dr Pachauri is often presented as a scientist (he was even once described by the BBC as “the world’s top climate scientist”), as a former railway engineer with a PhD in economics he has no qualifications in climate science at all.

What has also almost entirely escaped attention, however, is how Dr Pachauri has established an astonishing worldwide portfolio of business interests with bodies which have been investing billions of dollars in organisations dependent on the IPCC’s policy recommendations.

These outfits include banks, oil and energy companies and investment funds heavily involved in ‘carbon trading’ and ‘sustainable technologies’, which together make up the fastest-growing commodity market in the world, estimated soon to be worth trillions of dollars a year.

Today, in addition to his role as chairman of the IPCC, Dr Pachauri occupies more than a score of such posts, acting as director or adviser to many of the bodies which play a leading role in what has become known as the international ‘climate industry’.

With this sort of thing going on in more than one place (can you say Al Gore) and the East Anglia CRU fraud, it’s no wonder that reasonable people are starting to get angry at the growing level of control these people have over our lives.

It would be interesting to see some attempt to estimate the total direct cost to the world’s taxpayers of all the scare-mongering since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring first started appearing in The New Yorker magazine in June 1962.

Each scare, in turn, is packaged and marketed with more skill than the previous; each enjoys its run in the world’s headlines, and the frenetic political attention we have been watching in Copenhagen in its most advanced form. Each in turn is gradually forgotten as more facts come to light, as the apocalyptic predictions fail, as the storyline bores through repetition. And then a new scare needs to be invented.

This is perhaps one of the best descriptions of the costs of this type of over-the-top environmental hysteria and fraud I have read in a few years. Would that more people would pay close attention to the suggestions this author makes on dealing with these so-called leading lights.

For this reason, I think we need, after thorough public inquiries, to bring criminal prosecutions against some of the major scientific players exposed by the recent release of e-mails and papers at the centre of the “global warming” scam. The more any percipient reader pours through those “hacked” documents, the clearer he will see the criminal intent behind the massaging of the numbers; for the masseurs in question stood to benefit directly and personally from getting “the right results.” This is, by its nature, an issue for the criminal courts.

My reasoning here is that “environmentalism” at large has — like all other “progressive” movements — exploited public gullibility about motivations.

The leading lights have accumulated wealth and power, while presenting themselves as men of goodwill. They have projected themselves through sympathetic media as unselfish and pure and have demonized their opponents as selfish and impure while themselves being on the take.

Even before examining, objectively, details of the claims environmentalists are making, the public needs to be put on its guard. A successful representative democracy requires an electorate armed against politicians of any stripe or kind (elected or otherwise) who make claims to personal sanctity, for this is an infallible mark of grave hypocrisy. Genuinely good people do not advertise their goodness; genuinely humble people do not advertise their humility; genuinely truthful people do not claim to be messengers of “settled science” when there is no such thing.

Bush certainly had his share of faults and mistakes. However, one has to admit that his administration was admirably effective in stopping domestic terror attacks. In the seven and a half years after 9-11, we had zero domestic terror attacks. Several tried, but they were all stopped.

In comparison, in Obama’s first year, there have been over a dozen attempted attacks and his administration has missed three domestic terror attacks. As Jennifer Rubin rightly noted in this Commentary Magazine article,

You might not recall the three attacks, in large part because the administration refuses to recognize jihadist terror attacks as jihadist terror attacks. But Sen. Joe Lieberman rightly reminded us on Fox New Sunday that “we really did go to war with the Islamist extremists who attacked us on 9/11” and that we have had more than a dozen attacks on our homeland — three of which penetrated security (the army-recruiter killed in Little Rock in May, Major Nadal Hassan’s Fort Hood massacre on November 5, and the Abdul Farouk Umar Abdulmutallab’s Christmas Day bombing mission). To be blunt: after seven and a half years without a single attack on American soil following 9/11, we have had three in a year during the Obama administration.

Lieberman discussed this issue on Fox News yesterday,

Not surprisingly, people are starting to recognize that the Obama administration is too busy surfing, and vacationing. When he is actually on the job, he’s too busy apologizing for the U.S., calling terrorism “man-caused disasters,” changing the war on terror into an “overseas contingency operation,” and playing nice with those who are dead set on killing us.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 79% of U.S. voters now think it is likely there will be another terrorist attack in the United States in the next year. That’s a 30-point jump from the end of August when just 49% of Americans felt that way. The current level of concern is even higher than it was in the summer of 2007 when 70% considered an attack likely. In December 2008, 58% said an attack was likely.

The new number includes 42% who say another terrorist attack in America is very likely within the next year.

So marketing firms run by associates and friends of Obama and Hillary are getting millions in stimulus dollars to create advertisements for up and coming government projects?

Shades of AdScam and the Canadian Liberal Party. I’m just waiting to see the announcement that Jean Chrétien and Alfonso Gagliano have been hired on as Obama’s advertising Czars.

But seriously, is anyone even remotely surprised that $6 million in stimulus funds went to prop up the marketing firm of one of Hillary’s cronies and that a further $70,000 went to an Obama advisor?

Obama and his administration see the treasury and our economy as their personal play toy. They appear to think that government spending and out tax dollars are there to cover the costs of their last campaign and to pay off their political allies. In their world view, there doesn’t appear to be any end to government largess. We don’t need to make hard decisions or cutbacks. We can just spend our way to prosperity, helping our friends make payments on their Hummers and Arlington real estate along the way.

Obama talks a good line about deficits but his latest deficit-fighting idea to use a portion of the returned TARP funds to “make payments” on the burgeoning deficit is nothing more than using a line of credit to “pay off” a loan. He’s switching the debt from one account to another. At the same time, he’s continuing to take advances from that second loan faster than any president in the history of this country.

But I guess that when you’re dealing with tens of trillions in debt and deficit, a $6 million payoff or something as piddling as a $70,000 contract to a political ally is pocket change. These people light their cigars and scoop their caviar with larger bills than that.

When (many) Dems find that they can’t win an argument on the merit of their premises, they resort to their standard litany of ‘ists’ and ‘isms.’ In this case, Harry Reid actually tries to make the case that if you don’t agree with their power grab at 1/6th of the economy and the dismantling of the best medical system on the planet, you’re no better than those (Democrat) House and Senate members who voted against the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Or, you’re just like the people who tried to keep women from having equal rights and the vote. Racist, sexist, ageist, heterosexist, thisist, thatist, theotherist … whatever ‘ist’ or ‘ism’ they can try and stick to you, they’re completely happy to do it.

Reid’s comments, of course, betray his fundamental and woeful misunderstanding of the concept of rights. He actually tries to conflate the alleged “right” to medical care to the same status as the right to equal treatment of individuals, regardless of their gender or skin color. Reid needs to go back and do a bit of research and reading into the difference between negative and positive rights. As I have written in this blog previously,

Simply put, no such right exists because, for it to exist, there must be a corresponding responsibility on the part of another/others to provide the rights holder with that medical care. Additionally, the rights holders have the moral base from which they can demand that treatment and – if need be – forcibly extract the means of providing that treatment from others. …

Don’t fall for the flawed logic that underlies positive rights theories. That ‘logic’ always dead ends in the state or the alleged rights holder deciding – for you – how much, when, and why. Occasionally they will revert to talk of “autonomy” and claim that infringing on your rights is quite alright, so long as you are allowed to maintain some airy concept of autonomy. However, their defense of positive rights does not remove the requirement of some other person or power defining the level of acceptable level of rights infringement. That other person or power makes the choice of how much or how little autonomy you are allowed to posses and then tells you to be happy that they deigned to give you that much.

When the premises for autonomy fail, arguments will typically revert to ad hominems and claims that you are cold-hearted and uncaring for actually daring to claim rights to your private property, your life and your work.

Imagine that!

Kids who grow up in a home with a loving and involved mother and father that are in a committed, traditional marriage tend to,

1. Have better emotional health (and less emotional distress)
2. Have higher self-esteem
3. Have better educational success (more likely to complete high school and higher levels of education)
4. Have better behavior (and exhibit fewer antisocial and/or aggressive tendencies)
5. Have lower incidence of delinquent behavior
6. Have higher rate of pre-marital abstinence
7. Have lower teen pregnancy rates
8. Have lower incidence of tobacco use
9. Have lower incidence of substance abuse (alcohol, marijuana, and tobacco)
10. Have better academic achievement

Why do we continue wasting our time on this train wreck?

We now have 62% of American voters opposing a single-payer plan (& only 27% actually supporting it).

At the same time, leading medical experts from Johns Hopkins are making the clear case that Obamacare will effectively destroy the ability of medical organizations to provide care for any patient and will overwhelm already strained state budgets.

But without an understanding by policy makers of what a large Medicaid expansion actually means, and without delivery-system reform and adequate risk-adjusted reimbursement the current health-care legislation will have catastrophic effects on those of us who provide society’s health-care safety-net. In time, those effects will be felt by all of us.

The sad thing is that Obama doesn’t seem to care. He is once again treating our legal system and our constitution as a hindrance and, as he said on the campaign trail, his plan is to spread the wealth around (read: make us all equally miserable). Democratic means are only useful to him insofar as they can be bent to achieve his will. When they stop helping him, he demands that those who disagree “get out of his way.”