Ladies Logic

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

2009-07-15T08:55:00.002-05:00

As I hinted at the other day there are some pretty big changes coming to Ladies Logic. The first one (that I will let you in on anyway) is the implementation of a new comment system. I am moving the comments away from the Blogger platform and over to the JS-Kits platform. Yes it will mean yet another log-on, but then again if you have a Haloscan account you will need to change it anyway since JS-Kit just bought Haloscan and is in the process of migrating all of those accounts over TO the new platform.

So for those of you engaged in the conversation in the comments to the "Cheaper Than What Exactly" post, it is possible that those comments will no longer be seen. If necessary, I can copy those into the new system as I will still have access to the old system.

Stop by later this evening - big changes are coming!

Cheaper Than What Exactly?

2009-07-13T22:35:00.002-05:00

Curious that I find this story today of all days.....

For the past decade, Austin's ambition to become the world's clean-energy capital has been best exemplified by one effort: GreenChoice, a program that sells electricity generated entirely from renewable sources such as wind.

Now the nationally renowned program is struggling to find buyers — the latest allotment is 99 percent unsold after seven months on the market — and Austin Energy is looking for ways to bring down the rising costs...Austin Energy officials say that times have changed and that the nation's most successful (by volume of sales) green-energy program, which offers the renewable energy only to those who select it, might no longer be the best way to carry out the city's goals. It now costs almost three times more than the standard electricity rate.

Hmmm and yet I was just told today that wind and solar were the "cheapest"....what is causing these increases? In part the cost of building the wind farms....

Steel, concrete, copper and labor have all gotten more expensive, in turn making wind-farm construction more costly.

and in part the cost of getting the power from the wind farm to the city that needs the energy...

Texas doesn't have enough transmission lines to carry all the electricity generated in West Texas to the state's big cities. This in turn means Austin has to pay more to get its wind energy here.

One of the reason that there are not enough transmission lines is the fact that environmentalists are fighting the construction of the transmission lines that are necessary to getting the power out of the wind farms.

“We want smaller-scale projects closer to where load is and where there would be less harmful impacts,” Citizens Energy Task Force attorney Paula Maccabee told Greenwire on December 1.

The problem with that (as I was told by a Public Utilities specialist in Minnesota) is that the quality of the wind in the urban areas is not good enough to provide the needed power!

All of this helps belie the talking points of the "green" movement. Their concern is not providing energy - it is taking energy options OFF OF THE TABLE in order to drive the economy further down. It is a dirty little secret that the clean energy crew hopes we never figure out.

Ch-ch-Changes

2009-07-13T21:37:00.002-05:00

There are some big changes coming to Ladies Logic in coming days. Not too many hints but the scenery is going to be much better.

More On The Coup That Never Was

2009-07-13T20:29:00.002-05:00

Last week my friend Ed Morrissey asked why the Honduran government did not simply arrest Manuel Zelaya instead of deposing him and kicking him out of the country (thereby leading to the impression that this was a doup de tat). In today's Opinion Journal, Mary Anastasia O'Grady attempts (and I think succeeds) to answer that burning question.

If there is anything debatable about the crisis it is the question of whether the government can defend the expulsion of the president. In fact it had good reasons for that move and they are worth Mrs. Clinton's attention if she is interested in defending democracy.

Besides eagerly trampling the constitution, Mr. Zelaya had demonstrated that he was ready to employ the violent tactics of chavismo to hang onto power. The decision to pack him off immediately was taken in the interest of protecting both constitutional order and human life.

Two incidents earlier this year make the case. The first occurred in January when the country was preparing to name a new 15-seat Supreme Court, as it does every seven years. An independent board made up of members of civil society had nominated 45 candidates. From that list, Congress was to choose the new judges.

Mr. Zelaya had his own nominees in mind, including the wife of a minister, and their names were not on the list. So he set about to pressure the legislature. On the day of the vote he militarized the area around the Congress and press reports say a group of the president's men, including the minister of defense, went to the Congress uninvited to turn up the heat. The head of the legislature had to call security to have the defense minister removed.

In May there was an equally scary threat to peace issued by the Zelaya camp as the president illegally pushed for a plebiscite on rewriting the constitution. Since the executive branch is not permitted to call for such a vote, the attorney general had announced that he intended to enforce the law against Mr. Zelaya

.A week later some 100 agitators, wielding machetes, descended on the attorney general's office. "We have come to defend this country's second founding," the group's leader reportedly said. "If we are denied it, we will resort to national insurrection."...

It was this fondness for intimidation that prompted Mr. Zelaya's exile. Honduras was worried that if he stayed in the country after his arrest his supporters would foment violence to try to bring down the interim government and restore him to power.

South and Central American politics has a history of violent power struggles. The Honduran Supreme Court and Legislature did what they thought would help save lives and prevent yet another violent change of power.

President Obama took a lot of heat for not "meddling" in affairs in Iran and yet here he has no problems meddling in the affairs of Honduras. This is why the US has such poor reputation in Central America. We piously refuse to meddle in some countries while we continue to meddle away in our own backyard. It's not new, but for someone who said that he was going to change things in DC and who was going to "restore America's reputation in the world" he sure has done a bang up job of keeping the status quo in Central America.

Tolerance On Parade

2009-07-13T20:23:00.000-05:00

One of the major problems that I have with the gay rights movement is their insistence that the rest of the world show "tolerance" for their beliefs and yet they (the gay rights movement) shows a complete and total disregard for tolerating anyone elses beliefs. Todays case in point comes from an altercation that a gay couple had with LDS security while the gay couple was ON LDS PROPERTY!

Wearing bright red lipstick, Isabelle Warnas smiled and planted a big kiss on her husband's cheek, something she said she has done often under the spires of the LDS Church's Salt Lake Temple.

"Nobody has said a thing to us," the 50-year-old Salt Lake City resident said.

This time, though, they had an audience of more than a hundred. They were gathered for a "kiss-in" staged Sunday morning near Main Street Plaza to show support for a gay couple, Derek Jones, 25, and Matthew Aune, 28, who say they were detained by Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints security guards after one man had kissed the other on the cheek Thursday. They had argued with the guards and were later cited for trespassing.

That is the key point here - this gay couple was trespassing ON PRIVATE PROPERTY! They were not on "government owned" property, they were on property owned and maintained by the LDS Church.....

"My husband and I cannot understand the discrimination," Warnas said. "This is not right."

You are correct that discrimination is wrong Mrs. Warnas - so when are you going to speak out against the RELIGIOUS DISCRIMINATION that the gay community shows to the religious community (it's not just the LDS Church that the gay activists have targeted in the past).

If their movement were really a "live and let live" type of movement, my more libertarian side would say go ahead - if you want to put yourself at risk from a multitude of sexually transmitted diseases such as AIDS it is (very literally) your funeral. As a Christian I will pray that you come to a relationship with Christ, but I understand that I can not force you to do anything that you do not what to do. When are you - the supporters of the gay rights movement - going to afford me and the millions of others who share my beliefs the same courtesy?

Offering Solutions

2009-07-13T08:45:00.002-05:00

One other thing that I saw yesterday while perusing the Sunday chat fests (besides the ongoing obsession with Sarah Palin) was the democrats talking point mantra that the Republicans are "just saying no" to President Obama. Besides being just a tiny bit disingenuous (remember the Democrats said "NO" to President Bush plenty of times - especially on judicial nominees) it is also horribly untrue. I have mentioned before some of the solutions that are coming out of the House GOP caucus in the past, and there is a new one that came out yesterday that needs to be highlighted. This time it is from my dear friend and former representative John Kline (MN2).

For those of us in Washington concerned about job creation, the first Friday of each month has always been a notable occasion. That’s when the U.S. Department of Labor issues its monthly employment report detailing how many jobs were gained or lost in the previous month, along with the current unemployment rate. When I first came to Congress, these reports generally brought good news. In fact, from 2003 through the end of 2007, we saw a record 52 consecutive months of job growth. Unfortunately, that all changed in early 2008, when we saw the first job losses in more than four years. Since that time, the U.S. economy has steadily shed more jobs as the recession has deepened. Just last week, we learned that an additional 467,000 jobs were lost in June of this year, and the unemployment rate has reached 9.5 percent, its highest level in more than a quarter-century.

From the moment we saw those first 17,000 jobs lost in January of 2008, it was clear to me that we needed to embrace pro-growth policies. Now, about a year and a half later, more than 6.5 million jobs have been lost and evidence is mounting that the tax-and-spend policies advanced by congressional Democrats are not only failing to stem the tide of unemployment, they are actually making our economic problems far worse.

The Democrats love to yammer about the "failed policies of the past" but remember, they controlled Congress for the last two years of the Bush Administration and policies that they enacted (and to be fair President Bush signed) in 2006 lead to those early job losses in 2008 so when they talk about "failed policies" we need to remember THEIR culpability in the failed policy generation.

I serve as the Senior Republican on the House Education and Labor Committee. It’s ground zero for legislation that impacts American workers and employers, and under the control of Democrats, I believe it has failed to project jobs and promote economic growth. From legislation that will increase litigation in the workplace to the notoriously anti-worker card check scheme, Democrats in Washington have put special interests ahead of the people’s interests. Add to that a failed “stimulus” that cost close to $1 trillion yet still hasn’t produced the jobs it promised; a national energy tax in the form of cap-and-trade; and the impending government takeover of our health care system, and a future of permanent economic stagnation seems almost inevitable.

OK you say - where are these solutions you talk about? Here they are....

It doesn’t have to be this way. Republicans are committed to pro-growth policies that will get our economy back on track without saddling future generations with unmanageable debt. We offered a stimulus plan that would have created twice the jobs for half the price. We have developed a health care proposal that will make health care more affordable, reduce the number of uninsured Americans, and increase quality – all at a price our country can afford. And we plan to continue acting as the party of better solutions, rejecting Democrats’ plans to expand government at the expense of individuals and pushing for commonsense, bipartisan solutions to the many challenges we face. With the right policies, I’m confident we can return the first Friday of each month into an occasion worth celebrating once again.

Whether the topic is job creation, restoring savings, cutting government spending, stimulating the economy, health care reform, solving the housing crisis, energy or any other issue that this country is facing, the House Republican Caucus HAS been putting forward solutions - not just saying "NO" to the President. Anyone who propogates this talking point is flat out lying to the American people. Haven't we had enough of that?

Smell Our Dairy Air!

2009-07-12T20:59:00.000-05:00

The State of Wisconsin is known as "Americas Dairyland" - their license plates say so. Well the good folks at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PeTA) want to change that...

June 29, 2009

The Honorable Jim Doyle
Governor of Wisconsin

Dear Governor Doyle:

On behalf of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and our thousands of members and supporters across Wisconsin, I am writing to ask you to endorse an alternative to the ubiquitous "America's Dairyland" license plate out of respect for the many Wisconsinites who do not wish to support animal abuse on factory farms. Instead of the "America's Dairyland" slogan with the quaint barn in the background, we'd like to see a new license plate that reads, "Wisconsin: America's Cow Hell" and has a more realistic image, perhaps depicting sick cows in a cramped, filthy factory-farm shed...

The letter goes on (and on and on). You have to give Ingrid Newkirk credit here for having huevos. Either that or a seriously warped sense of humor. Either way....

Seriously - does Ingrid really think that she stands a snowball's chance of getting this done?

This is why PeTA, as an animal rights or welfare organization, is worthless. They have (to use a TV term) jumped the shark. They long ago quit being about taking care of animals which is why they are irrelevant. Which in turn leads them to pull stunts like this that are designed to do one thing only - get attention.

Great work Ingrid.

Did You Mean Funny HaHa or Funny Ironic

2009-07-12T20:52:00.001-05:00

When the cap and trade bill passed out of the House a couple of weeks ago, many were appalled and outraged (myself included) that none of the legislators that voted on that bill (or the stimulus bill for that matter) were given the opportunity to read the bill before voting on it. Well get ready for more of the same from the Pelosi/Reid/Obama Transparency team.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Tuesday that the health-care reform bill now pending in Congress would garner very few votes if lawmakers actually had to read the entire bill before voting on it.

Did you get that? If our Legislators actually did their job and read the legislation that they passed, this bill would garner "very few votes". But WAIT - there's more.....

In fact, Hoyer found the idea of the pledge humorous, laughing as he responded to the question. “I’m laughing because a) I don’t know how long this bill is going to be, but it’s going to be a very long bill,” he said.

So it is funny that we should expect transparency from the Legislative process and to expect our Legislators to read what they vote on???? But isn't transparency what Nancy Pelosi promised voters when she took over the Speakers gavel?

THIS is Nancy Pelosi's idea of transparency? I don't know about you but it sure is not MY idea of transparency......

Sunday Morning Thought

2009-07-12T09:44:00.003-05:00

Watching the Sunday Morning chat fests, I have to wonder....if resigning from her position as governor was such a bad idea - why are we still A WEEK LATER talking about Sarah Palin and her prospects for 2012? She couldn't BUY the amount of time on the air that she is getting from the media as result of this.

Paging Margaret Sanger

2009-07-10T09:58:00.001-05:00

The NY Times has an interview in it's upcoming Sunday edition with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg that is generating a lot of buzz (HT Powerline). Most of the interview focused on Justice Ginsberg's feelings that the Supreme Court "needs" another woman. However, the quote that has everyone buzzing is this comment on Roe v Wade...

Q: If you were a lawyer again, what would you want to accomplish as a future feminist legal agenda?

JUSTICE GINSBURG: Reproductive choice has to be straightened out. There will never be a woman of means without choice anymore. That just seems to me so obvious. The states that had changed their abortion laws before Roe [to make abortion legal] are not going to change back. So we have a policy that affects only poor women, and it can never be otherwise, and I don’t know why this hasn’t been said more often.

Q: Are you talking about the distances women have to travel because in parts of the country, abortion is essentially unavailable, because there are so few doctors and clinics that do the procedure? And also, the lack of Medicaid for abortions for poor women?
JUSTICE GINSBURG: Yes, the ruling about that surprised me. [Harris v. McRae — in 1980 the court upheld the Hyde Amendment, which forbids the use of Medicaid for abortions.] Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion. Which some people felt would risk coercing women into having abortions when they didn’t really want them. But when the court decided McRae, the case came out the other way. And then I realized that my perception of it had been altogether wrong.

Emphasis mine. Populations that we don't want too many of? A good reporter would have followed up with "and what populations ARE those Justice Ginsberg????" and yet the NYTimes reporter lets that pregnant comment slide right on by.

Justice Ginsberg's comments do give a hint back into the origination of Planned Parenthood. You see, Margaret Sanger the founder of Planned Parenthood, like Adolph Hitler, was a firm believer in eugenics. Unlike Hitler, Sanger was more worried about the "b "black" and "yellow" peril." While Planned Parenthood has tried really hard to step away from that past but they can't step too far from it. A vast majority of their abortion clinics happen to be located in minority communities. The African American Community, which makes up roughly 15% of the US population, has over 30% of the abortions performed in America! It is not a pretty picture. In Planned Parenthood you have an agency who will gladly accept donations designated to go directly to "killing black babies". Are these the populations that you "don't want too many" of Justice Ginsberg?

Before we can have an HONEST debate on abortion in America, we have to wrestle with some very ugly, very real facts about the practice of abortion and the people behind it. Planned Parenthood needs to come clean about it's past, it's present and what it will do to change the illegal practices that it engages in (failure to report statutory rape for example) instead of suing those that expose the illegal and racist activities.

However, given that they have tried to hide these ugly facts for as long as they have, I am not holding my breath that this kind of change will ever happen.

Cap And Trade Postponed

2009-07-09T21:42:00.001-05:00

In light of Brave Sir Harry postponing a vote on cap and trade until after the summer recess (in hopes of people forgetting about it no doubt) I thought I would bring you even more documentation as to why this is a bad bill that must be stopped at all costs.

First comes this from the Washington Post.

The Congressional Budget Office recently estimated that the resulting increases in consumer prices needed to achieve a 15 percent CO2 reduction -- slightly less than the Waxman-Markey target -- would raise the cost of living of a typical household by $1,600 a year. Some expert studies estimate that the cost to households could be substantially higher. The future cost to the typical household would rise significantly as the government reduces the total allowable amount of CO2.

Americans should ask themselves whether this annual tax of $1,600-plus per family is justified by the very small resulting decline in global CO2. Since the U.S. share of global CO2 production is now less than 25 percent (and is projected to decline as China and other developing nations grow), a 15 percent fall in U.S. CO2 output would lower global CO2 output by less than 4 percent. Its impact on global warming would be virtually unnoticeable. The U.S. should wait until there is a global agreement on CO2 that includes China and India before committing to costly reductions in the United States.

This is not $1600 per year for the family making over $250,000 a year - this is for the AVERAGE FAMILY OF 4 and the average family of 4 living in the United States of America makes a whopping $61,000 a year! So much for that campaign promise.

Meanwhile, The Heritage Foundation found this little gem.

At yesterday’s hearing before the Senate Environment Public Works Committee,
EPA Administrator Jackson confirmed an EPA analysis showing that unilateral U.S. action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions would have no effect on climate. Moreover, when presented with an EPA chart depicting that outcome, Energy Secretary Steven Chu said he disagreed with EPA’s analysis.

“I believe the central parts of the [EPA] chart are that U.S. action alone will not impact world CO2 levels,” Administrator Jackson said.

Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) presented the chart to both Jackson and Secretary Chu, which shows that meaningful emissions reductions cannot occur without aggressive action by China, India, and other developing countries. “I am encouraged that Administrator Jackson agrees that unilateral action by the U.S. will be all cost for no climate gain,” Sen. Inhofe said. “With China and India recently issuing statements of defiant opposition to mandatory emissions controls, acting alone through the job-killing Waxman-Markey bill would impose severe economic burdens on American consumers, businesses, and families, all without any impact on climate.”

So let me get this straight - it will cost us $1600 per family AND it won't impact the climate one iota????? If that is the case then why are we even dealing with this? Jason - Richard, any defense of this???????

UPDATE: Another "cure" for global warming gets shot down (HT HA).

It’s a beautiful theory — highways full of electric cars emitting no greenhouse gases or pollutants after being plugged into an outlet in our garages overnight. The problem, according to a new Government Accountability Office report, is that the effort may only shift the problem somewhere else.

“If you are using coal-fired power plants, and half the country’s electricity comes from coal-powered plants, are you just trading one greenhouse gas emitter for another?” asks Mark Gaffigan, co-author of the GAO report. The report itself notes: “Reductions in CO2 emissions depend on generating electricity used to charge the vehicles from lower-emission sources of energy.”

The GAO report says a plug-in compact car, if recharged at an outlet drawing its power from coal, provides a carbon dioxide savings of only 4% to 5%. If the feeling of saving the environment from driving an electric car causes people to drive more, that small amount of savings vanishes entirely.

It's a point that I have tried to make in the past. I'm glad to see that the GAO has the data to back it up!

Four Little Words

2009-07-09T09:26:00.002-05:00

A couple of weeks ago - my friend Gary Gross wrote about the jobs that were created or saved in Minnesota as a result of the ARRA.

It’s a good thing I was sitting down when I read this Strib article. If I hadn’t been sitting down, I might’ve been knocked over by a feather.

Though much of the stimulus plan was sold on the strength of road and highway investments, records released by Congress last week show that only 37 transportation and infrastructure projects were underway in Minnesota as of May 31, creating or sustaining 124 jobs.

Well Gary is not the only one noticing how many jobs were created by ARRA. Utah's very own Jason Chaffetz has noticed it as well.

U.S. Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a Republican from Utah, is no fan of the federal stimulus package. He thought it was a waste when it was passed in February. And he thinks now that it has produced too few jobs - 150,000, by the latest White House estimate - for the $57 billion that has been spent nationally so far.
When Gov. Rendell appeared before him yesterday at a hearing on Capitol Hill, Chaffetz asked, "How many jobs have been created in Pennsylvania by the stimulus?"
Governor Rendell's answer was almost as overwhelming as the Minnesota figures.

Though he had no precise jobs figure to offer, Rendell guessed that "a couple of thousand" jobs had been created by the $1 billion spent to date in Pennsylvania, and that 5,000 to 10,000 jobs had been saved.

It is this lack of jobs created that has caused the President's approval to plummet in recent days. He can no longer claim that this economy is someone else's fault. He went into DC promising that the faster ARRA was passed the faster people will get back to work and that is just not happening! While jobs is not the only reason when you couple it with the out of control deficit spending and the realization that there is no WAY that the President could keep his promises of not raising taxes on people who make under $250,000 a year...

President Barack Obama promised to fix health care and trim the federal budget deficit, all without raising taxes on anyone but the wealthiest Americans. It's a promise he's already broken and will likely have to break again. Obama and the Democratic-controlled Congress have already increased tobacco taxes — which disproportionately hit the poor — to pay for extending health coverage to 4 million children in working low-income families.
Now, lawmakers are looking for more revenues to help pay for providing medical insurance to millions more who lack it at a projected cost of $1 trillion over the next decade.

The floated proposals include increasing taxes on alcohol, which could raise $62 billion over the next decade, and a new tax on sugary drinks such as soda, which could raise $52 billion.

Emphasis mine. As an aside I have to give the AP mad props for pointing out two of the REGRESSIVE taxes that the Democrats are proposing...

The bloom is most assuredly off of the Obama rose. The question is, will the RNC take advantage of the situation and quote the ragin' Cajun James Carvelle and start chanting "IT'S THE ECONOMY STUPID!!!!!"

Casualty Of Peace

2009-07-08T21:29:00.002-05:00

The Los Angeles Times/Chicago Tribune ran a rather disturbing story today (HT the Logical Husband" about a mentally ill young man and a years long deception that he ran.

Retired Marine Capt. Rick Duncan carried a list of phone numbers of those in the business of helping veterans. One was for the VA clinic in Colorado Springs, and in 2008 he pressed it upon Mike Flaherty, a young Army veteran struggling with depression.

He understood, Duncan told Flaherty. He'd been to Iraq three times. Attacked in Fallouja, he'd returned home with a metal plate in his head and a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Except that "Captain" Duncan was no captain - nor did he serve in Iraq or even the Marines. "Capt" Duncan was actually Rick Strandloff - an anti-war protester and convicted felon who is also bipolar. I want to go on the record now and say that his having bipolar disorder should not be used as an excuse for his bad behavior or thought of as "normal" behavior. I have a very, VERY dear friend back in MN who is bipolar and while she does have some things that she struggles with, this kind of deception is not even close to being this egregious. I have also learned from this dear friend that when you are dealing with bipolar disorder, nothing is "normal" - they are all individuals with individual brain chemistry misfires.

All that said, I live in a military family. My husband served in the Army as does my brother in law. My late father in law was in the Air Force and was buried with full military honors. My father tried to enlist, but could not due to health issues. The list goes on and on. Besides being married to the military, I was employed by the Army as support staff. Needless to say, the military and military issues are near and dear to our household.

The reporter does a fantastic, indepth job of reporting this story and creates, in Mr. Strandloff, a compelling and sympathetic figure. However, buried deep in the story is a brief comment by Mr. Strandloff that belies his claims of "I didn't know what I was doing or why I did it"....

"Any good production has to have a compelling character," he said.

And that in a nutshell shows that he knew a little more about what he was doing then he led on. It should also be noted that this is not the first time that the anti war movement was taken in by a fake. Michelle Malkin has run a number of stories by people claiming to be anti-war veterans. While I have no doubt that there are real "anti-war" veterans out there (heaven knows that no soldier really WANTS to go to war) the sheer number of these stories leads one on the outside to suspect that the anti-war movement wouldn't know the real thing if jumped out in front of them. Either that or...

Yet Strandlof also said that he had a greater effect in his antiwar efforts as Duncan the veteran than he ever did as Strandlof the liberal protester.

Does the end justify the means? And if it does, why have the anti-war protesters been so silent since January 20? If you are against wars after all.....

Founders Morning Quote

2009-07-07T08:42:00.001-05:00

"It behooves you, therefore, to think and act for yourself and your people. The great principles of right and wrong are legible to every reader; to pursue them requires not the aid of many counselors. The whole art of government consists in the art of being honest. Only aim to do your duty, and mankind will give you credit where you fail."

--Thomas Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British America, 1775

Wishful Thinking or Fractured Fairy Tale

2009-07-06T22:56:00.003-05:00

Once upon a time in a magical land, there lived a charming young knight who gained prominence for slaying the old dragon named Cannon. This young knight had his legions of fans and many detractors. These detractors, tried their hardest to take the gleam off of the young knights armour by spreading many falsehoods about the young knight - or his twisting words in such a manner that the words had no resemblance pf what the young knight had really said.

Freshman Rep. Jason Chaffetz says several GOP state convention delegates are urging him to challenge fellow Republican Sen. Bob Bennett for his seat next year, and Chaffetz is keeping the door open to that possibility.

"I don't have any intention of doing that (running against Bennett)" now, he told the Deseret News. "But I guess I like to keep my options open. Never say never."

Emphasis mine.

All story telling aside, this has to be one of the lamest attempts at stirring up controversy that I have seen out of the media in these parts. I do know that there are conservative activists who are trying to talk Jason into running against Senator Bennett AND/OR Senator Hatch. Here are just a couple of reasons why the timing is not right in 2010....

1) As a freshman in Congress, Jason has had more media recognition than most freshman Congresspeople could dream of. He has also had a couple of pieces of legislation see the light of committee which for a freshman in the MINORITY PARTY is huge. However, he still does not have the track record that he would need to make the step to the Senate. A couple more years in the House would be a plus.

2) With redistricting on the horizon, Jason stepping aside to run for the Senate would probably open up his seat for Democrat to pick up. Let's not forget that part of his district includes a portion of Salt Lake County. Dividing Salt Lake County between Matheson's district and the new 4th District will open the door for one almost guaranteed pick-up. Depending on how badly the 3rd and the 1st get gerrymandered to create the 4th, the Republican strong-hold of Provo could essentially be wiped out by one of the few liberal enclaves in the state.

3) A protracted primary fight could (if the Democrats actually put up a serious candidate which is always a wild card) leave the Republican Party divided enough to hand that seat over to the Dems as well. While I realize that this was a reason why Jason should not run against Chris Cannon, there is a reason why it is still "conventional wisdom".

4) Firebrands like Jason tend to do better in the House than the do in the Senate. That, my friends, is a fact of legislative life.

However, I suspect that this is yet another made-up media fairy tale. The field (to challenge Sen. Bennett) is already a crowded one with a couple of candidates that stand a chance of "pulling off a Chaffetz" in this race. The need (by the media) to throw out the possibility of a Chaffetz campaign will (the thinking goes) chase a couple of these more talented challengers off out of respect for a Congressman that they know, like and respect. In doing this, the media secures another term for Senator Bennett.

Constitution? What Constitution?????

2009-07-06T21:29:00.004-05:00

That seems to be the thinking of the UN and President Obama when it comes to dealing with the situation in Honduras (HT The Logical Husband)

...when a socialist demagogue was ejected unceremoniously from Honduras on Sunday by his own government for trying to establish a presidency for life, Mr. Obama instantly sprang to his defense.

What happened in Honduras was not a military coup. Honduras has a civilian president, Roberto Micheletti, a member of former President Manuel Zelaya's own Liberal Party, who was elevated to the post after Mr. Zelaya was removed. The army did not seize power, but acted as the elected government's instrument in ousting Mr. Zelaya, who was well on his way to subverting the Honduran constitution and erecting a dictatorship.

Emphasis mine. Let me emphasize again that this was a Constitutional action and not a military coup. The Honduran Supreme Court, in response to unConstitutional actions by Mr. Zelaya, issued an appropriate arrest warrant which the military carried out.

The UN apparently thinks as little of the Honduran Constitution as it does of ours - choosing to side with a potential dictator over the rule of law.

Scrambling to hold on to his presidency, deposed Honduran leader Manuel Zelaya pleaded his case in the United States yesterday, winning a rare unanimous vote of support from the U.N. General Assembly but failing to get an audience with top Obama administration officials.

The President's response to this working of the Honduran Constitution? A move to rescind economic and military development agreements with the country.

However, this is not the only Constitution that our President is willing to ignore in order to advance his agenda (HT Hot Air).

With the clock running out on a new US-Russian arms treaty before the previous Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START, expires on December 5, a senior White House official said Sunday said that the difficulty of the task might mean temporarily bypassing the Senate’s constitutional role in ratifying treaties by enforcing certain aspects of a new deal on an executive levels and a “provisional basis” until the Senate ratifies the treaty.

Emphasis mine. I wonder how President Obama former colleagues in the Senate will take to being bypassed in such a blatent manner.

As my friend Ed Morrissey noted, this is not surprising in the least. There is a reason why Republicans spent so much time "obsessing" on then candidate Obama's relationships. Whether it is Bill Ayers or Jeremiah Wright or any of his other past radical associations, it is a clear window into the political philosophy of man. The political philosophy tells you how a person is going to govern.

The only ones "surprised" by all of this seems to be the journalists that glossed over all of this during the primaries. This is what happens when you buy into a meme without checking out the man behind the meme.

Update: - WELCOME Hot Air readers. Please take a moment to snoop around - open the cabinets and see what else is here.

Dissecting Waxman Markey

2009-07-05T18:37:00.004-05:00

One of the good (or bad depending on your point of view) of the Legislature pushing through Waxman-Markey without the transparency that the Speaker and President Obama promised during the last campaign. It gives us a look at just how corrupt the people writing our legislation today are.

The stimulus bill was the legislative equivalent of the famous cantina scene from Star Wars, an eye-popping collection of the freakish and exotic, gathered for dubious purposes. The Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, known as ACES (the American Clean Energy and Security Act), is more like the third panel in Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights — a hellscape that disturbs the sleep of anybody who contemplates it carefully.

Two main things to understand about Waxman-Markey: First, it will not reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, at least not at any point in the near future. The inclusion of carbon offsets, which can be manufactured out of thin air and political imagination, will eliminate most of the demands that the legislation puts on industry, though in doing so it will manage to drive up the prices consumers pay for every product that requires energy for its manufacture — which is to say, for everything. Second, it represents a worse abuse of the public trust and purse than the stimulus and the bailouts put together. Waxman-Markey creates a permanent new regime in which environmental romanticism and corporate welfare are mixed together to form political poison. From comic bureaucratic power grabs (check out the section of the bill on candelabras) to the creation of new welfare programs for Democratic constituencies to, above all, massive giveaways for every financial, industrial, and political lobby imaginable, this bill would permanently deform American politics and economic life.

The House of Representatives, famously, did not read this bill before passing it, which is testament to either Nancy Pelosi’s managerial incompetency or her political wile, or possibly both. If you take the time to read the legislation, you’ll discover four major themes: special-interest giveaways, regulatory mandates unrelated to climate change, fanciful technological programs worthy of The Jetsons, and assorted left-wing wish fulfillment. We cannot cover every swirl and brushstroke of this masterpiece of misgovernance, but here’s a breakdown of its 50 most outrageous features.

I'm not going to list all 50, but I did want to highlight a couple of the more egregious ones. First I am going to combine #1 & #3 so that we can highlight just WHO really is the party of big business (hint - not the party in the minority this year)...

Eighty-five percent of the carbon permits will not be sold at auction — they will be given away to utility companies, petroleum interests, refineries, and a coterie of politically connected businesses. If you’re wondering why Big Business supports cap-and-trade, that’s why. Free money for business, but higher energy prices for you....
With its rich menu of corporate subsidies and special set-asides for politically connected industries, Waxman-Markey has inspired a new corporate interest group, USCAP, the United States Climate Action Partnership — the group largely responsible for the fact that carbon permits are being given away like candy at Christmas rather than auctioned. And who is lined up to receive a piece of the massive wealth transfer that Waxman-Markey will mandate? Canada Free Press lists:

Alcoa, American International Group (AIG) which withdrew after accepting government bailout money, Boston Scientific Corporation, BP America Inc., Caterpillar Inc., Chrysler LLC (which continues to lobby with taxpayer dollars), ConocoPhillips, Deere & Company, The Dow Chemical Company, Duke Energy, DuPont, Environmental Defense, Exelon Corporation, Ford Motor Company, FPL Group, Inc., General Electric, General Motors Corp. (now owned by the Obama administration), Johnson & Johnson, Marsh, Inc., National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council, The Nature Conservancy, NRG Energy, Inc., Pepsico, Pew Center on Global Climate Change, PG&E Corporation, PNM Resources, Rio Tinto, Shell, Siemens Corporation, World Resources Institute, Xerox Corporation.

One major group of recipients of the free money being given to industry in the form of carbon permits are the electric utilities, represented in Washington by the Edison Electric Institute. Along with the coal and steel businesses, the utilities are positioned to receive a huge portion of the carbon permits — some of which will be disguised as measures for consumers — and have become one of the nation’s highest-spending lobbies, working to ensure that their interests are served by cap-and-trade.

Emphasis mine. For my MN readers Rio Tinto is the global corporate parent company of Kennicott Copper Mining here in Utah. Those who claim to be looking out for the interests of the poor are now writing legislation designed to help out corporate interests! Nice....

Briefly to continue on a theme, 10 & 11 point out that...

Rural electrical cooperatives are demanding that the offsets be awarded in proportion to historic emissions, and they probably will prevail.

The farm lobby will be rewarded for practices that do little or nothing to reduce greenhouse gases.

Number 13 lists out more corporate beneficiaries of Waxman-Markey...

David H. McCormick of the Treasury Department recently gave a speech on the establishment of an $8 billion fund for that purpose; those who showed up to gets the specs on this new gravy train included Sequoia Capital, the United Steelworkers Union, the Clinton Climate Initiative, Ernst & Young, Duke Energy, SunPower, Honeywell, Shell, ConocoPhillips, Credit Suisse, Chrysalix Energy Venture Capital, and Goldman Sachs.

15, 16, & 17 have some interesting tidbits...

The renewable electricity standard is the big one here. This would require utilities to supply 20 percent of their power from renewable energy sources (or “increased efficiency”) by 2020...
The bill would create a system of renewable electricity credits similar to the carbon offsets mentioned above — utilities that cannot meet the standard could purchase credits from other utilities.
The renewable standard excludes sources of power like nuclear and coal gasification, and perhaps that’s to be understood. Even though these sources are cleaner than traditional coal-burning plants, they violate a number of green taboos.

21 through 23 have very interesting implications to everyone out there who lives indoors....

The bill regulates every light fixture under the sun... There are rules governing fluorescent lamps, incandescent lamps, intermediate base lamps, candelabra base lamps, outdoor luminaires, portable light fixtures...The bill extends its reach to cover appliances as well. Clothes washers and dishwashers, portable electric spas, showerheads, faucets, televisions — all these and more are covered specifically in the bill...Appliances will be required to come with “carbon output” labels, and retailers will get bonus payments for marketing those that are certified “best-in-class.” The bill sets up a payment schedule to reward the manufacturers of these “best-in-class” products: $75 for each dishwasher, $250 for each clothes washer, and so on...

Hey - how about a "bonus payment" for the consumers who choose to do the environmentally friendly thing? Why are we giving more and more to big business?

Then there is #24....

The bill requires the EPA to establish environmental standards for residences, meaning a federally dictated one-size-fits-all policy for greening every home in America.

For more on the governments plan to totally kill the housing market and get rid of the notion of "affordable housing" see this Reuters article. The Feds are set to usurp yet another local power...local building codes....

The bill would affect commercial properties, too. In fact, all buildings would be governed by a “national energy efficiency building code”...Businesses and homeowners will pay twice — once to retrofit their roosts and again when the energy bill arrives.

Another hit to federalism comes from #29...

The bill undermines federalism by prohibiting states from creating their own cap-and-trade programs.

So all you pesky state legislators - give up YOUR RIGHT to regulate your state...

We all saw what happened last summer when the price of gasoline went through the roof and the demand for ethanol went up....so did the cost of food. Well Waxman-Markey wants to INCREASE the mandates for ethanol - increasing starvation in 3rd world countries as well.

Then there are the dozens of different new goernment agencies that will be created by this bill.

Waxman-Markey will create yet another raft of government dependents, but of a different sort — bureaucrats. The bill creates: a new United States Global Change Research Program, a National Climate Change Adaptation Program, a National Climate Service, Natural Resources Climate Change Adaptation Strategy office at the White House, and an International Climate Change Adaptation Program at the State Department.

And since everyone else who doesn't pay taxes gets a check...

Bambi gets one, too, in the form of money for “domestic wildlife and natural resource adaptation.”

Waxman-Markey, a bill that was sold on the premise of "jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs" and Speaker Pelosi is right - it will create more jobs...

Waxman-Markey will create a lot of jobs for Wall Street sharps, Big Business rent-seekers, ACORN hucksters, utility-company lobbyists, grant-writers at left-wing organizations, college administrators, light-bulb-policing bureaucrats, and an army of parasitic hangers-on...

But no jobs for the ones that need it the most - the 467,000 hard working taxpayers who (last month alone) lost their jobs even after being promised that if the stimulus package passed would be saved. If the stimulus bill (which was passed without being read) didn't do what it was supposed to do (save jobs) and did nothing more than line the pockets of bureaucrats, why should we believe that Waxman-Markey would do anything different?

Shouldn't we be holding these elected officials accountable FINALLY for their actions?

Across The Universe In A (Health Care) Handbasket

2009-07-05T17:07:00.003-05:00

Mark Steyn and Jonah Goldberg over at National Review's "The Corner" have been playing dueling health care horror story posts (HT Powerline). Mr. Steyn started off with this story from the Daily Mail....

After 12 years cleaning care homes and private houses, Tereza Tosbell has a keen eye for a dirty room.
But the last place she expected to need her skills was in hospital - where she was a patient.
The sick 48-year-old was so disgusted at the conditions after three days on a 'filthy' ward that she grabbed the antibacterial fluid dispenser at the end of her bed and some hand towels from the bathroom.
She set about cleaning her four-bed ward, even going down on hands and knees to sanitise the floor as she dragged her drip trolley behind her.

Jonah followed with this lovely story from the BBC...

A search for the source of a maggot infestation at the Royal Children's Hospital in Aberdeen will continue over the weekend.
The discovery has caused the closure of three operating theatres, and postponements of procedures.

Which lead Mark to quip...

Jonah, you're missing the point. Those maggots are part of the treatment:

The treatment for the cancer appeared to be working, but the bedsore continued to get worse despite attempts to treat it with "maggot therapy" in which maggots are used to clean out the wound.

and then he doubled down....

This is the story of a decades-long cancer survivor who survived the cancer but died of an NHS bedsore:
During four weeks of what her family describe as "torture" in a bed in East Surrey Hospital, the sore resulted in a fatal blood infection and she died on October 27.

Her son Adrian Goddard, who lives in the US, said: "She survived cancer for 40 years, then died from a bedsore.

"It is just beyond belief that they could let a bedsore develop to the point where it actually kills someone from septicaemia."

He said the nurses seemed largely unconcerned by the growing size of the sore and his mother's increasing pain...

"The level of crisis that attracts their attention has to be very high for them to put down their biscuits."

...and relayed a very personal story...

My father is currently ill, and the health "system" is doing its best to ensure it's fatal. When an ambulance has to be called, they take him to a different hospital according to the determinations of the bed-availability bureaucrats and which facility hasn't had to be quarantined for an infection outbreak. At the first hospital, he picked up C Difficile. At the second, MRSA. At the third, like the lady above, he got septicaemia. He's lying there now, enjoying the socialized healthcare jackpot - C Diff, MRSA, septicaemia. None of these ailments are what he went in to be treated for. They were given to him by the medical system.

On a side note, I know what it takes to treat MRSA after dealing with my mother's bout with that particular "super-bug"...it ain't a pretty sight!

Jonah followed with a link to a story that I had heard of before but never gotten around to writing on...

A former soldier pulled his own teeth out with a pair of pliers because he could not find a dentist to take on NHS patients.
Iraq War veteran Ian Boynton could not afford to go private for treatment so instead took the drastic action to remove 13 of his teeth that were giving him severe pain.
He said: 'I've tried to get in at 30 dentists over the last eight years but have never been able to find one to take on NHS patients.'

Emphasis mine.

Meanwhile, individual doctors who are actually trying to HELP the uninsured are being shut down by the government because they dared to do it on their own.

The state is trying to shut down a New York City doctor's ambitious plan to treat uninsured patients for around $1,000 a year.

Dr. John Muney offers his patients everything from mammograms to mole removal at his AMG Medical Group clinics, which operate in all five boroughs.

"I'm trying to help uninsured people here," he said.

His patients agree to pay $79 a month for a year in return for unlimited office visits with a $10 co-pay.
But his plan landed him in the crosshairs of the state Insurance Department, which ordered him to drop his fixed-rate plan - which it claims is equivalent to an insurance policy.

Muney insists it is not insurance because it doesn't cover anything that he can't do in his offices, like complicated surgery. He points out his offices do not operate 24/7 so they can't function like emergency rooms.

Which just goes to prove that those driving health care "reform" are not interested in real reform and real choice. It goes to prove that the ONLY solution that they have for this problem is a government take over of health care.

It is a lesson that Americans need to learn before it is too late.

Google It

2009-07-05T15:19:00.002-05:00

Everyone has been buzzing about Helen Thomas and Chip Reid's grilling of Robert Gibbs over the purported staging of President Obama's last health care town hall. If you have not seen the video, I'm sure it is still on the front page of Hot Air or the Huffington Post - whichever you have bookmarked - you can view it there. However, the funniest reaction to the whole thing (I think) came from Dana Perino (former Bush press secretary) writing over at National Review.

A friend emailed this morning to say he couldn’t believe what he heard Mika Brzezinski say on Morning Joe today regarding yesterday’s press briefing where Helen Thomas and Chip Reid asked Robert Gibbs several questions about President Obama’s so-called “Town Hall” on health care yesterday:

The question I would have for her [Helen] is if she felt she could ask that question during the Bush administration and get that aggressive.

Seriously? I almost injured myself when I fell over laughing when I read that comment.

I am no longer a spokesperson, but I feel I can speak for all of Bush’s press secretaries when I say that the question I would like to ask Mika is: Did she miss every press briefing of the Bush administration?

Yesterday was tame by comparison to the grilling we all got — including questions premised on our troops purposely killing innocent people. Those were really fun to field. Not.

The things all press secretaries have in common are going toe-to-toe with Helen Thomas, living through it, and being better communicators for having had the experience.

I wonder if Helen takes offense at the notion she wasn’t aggressive with us.

I don’t think I’ll ask her!

If Mika is looking to broaden her horizons, I'm sure there are plenty of reports of Helen Thomas lobbing "softballs" at Dana or Tony Snow or Scott McClellan or Ari Fleisher. All you have to do is have your research staff "Google It".

Recycle OR ELSE!!!!!

2009-07-02T08:54:00.000-05:00

The Logical Husband gets the credit for this find....

San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors voted today to require all businesses and residences to recycle and compost their garbage or face fines, which could lead to a lien on their property.
The ordinance, approved in a 9-2 vote, will force building owners to sign up for the city’s existing composting and recycling programs. The Board will deliver a final vote on the ordinance next week.
"Many tenants want to recycle and compost but the building does not offer the service,” Mayor Gavin Newsom said in a statement. “We're going to change that."

If these tenants are so willing to recycle, why not help them by setting up a way for them to drop it off somewhere? Why do you feel the need to force building owners to do this? Or are you in the business of putting renters out on the street - because that is what will happen if you are serious about putting liens on properties.

Or is this just another one of those unenforceable green mandates put in place to make yourself feel good? If you really were serious about your waste reduction goals, how about working WITH property owners instead of telling them what to do? You might just get a better than expected response if you did.....

Illinois Is #1!

2009-07-02T08:34:00.001-05:00

I said this last fall and I still stand uncorrected. The Land of Lincoln has become the Land of "What's in it for me?" politics (HT Ed Morrissey).

As U.S. stock markets plummeted last September, the Senate's No. 2 Democrat, Dick Durbin, sold more than $115,000 worth of stocks and mutual-fund shares and used much of the money to invest in Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc.

The Illinois senator's 2008 financial disclosure statement shows he sold mutual-fund shares worth $42,696 on Sept. 19, the day after then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke urged congressional leaders in a closed meeting to craft legislation to help financially troubled banks. The same day, he bought $43,562 worth of Berkshire Hathaway's Class B stock, the disclosure shows.

Emphasis mine. If you or I had done something like this, we would be in jail for engaging in insider trading. However, since the Democrats have drained the swamp on the culture of corruption, I'm sure we will see the investigation into this any day now.....right?????

Seriously, Ed asks a very valid question when he asks....

Durbin’s spokesman says that the September meeting revealed nothing of an insider nature, and that Durbin traded along with the market as the storm clouds gathered. I wonder if the SEC would consider that a compelling alibi if it had been a Wall Street regulator who met with Paulson and traded like this the next day. The Democrats in Congress would be screaming for his head in the latter example, but will surely remain silent as the graveyard about Durbin’s suspicious trading.

It's nice to know, as long as I have been away from Illinois, that some things are constant - like corrupt politicians.

Have We Learned NOTHING?

2009-07-01T08:50:00.003-05:00

I have to shake my head in sheer disbelief. After 16 months of listening to whisper campaigns against Hillary (during the "Democratic" Primary) and Sarah during the general election, we are now starting to see the whispers against another ambitious woman politician - Minnesota's Laura Brod. The comments first started showing up on conservative leaning blogs within the past week. While the blog owners rightly pulled the comments down, it was not done before lefty blogs picked up on the allegations and ran with them. Shawn Towle at Check's and Balances ran with it as did AAA at Residual Forces (after digging into Towle's allegations to try to disprove them. AAA's post was filled with a lot of "various sources told me" type comments that led a lot of people to complain and in the end AAA pulled the post. However, one lefty blogger saved a copy of the post and posted it at his site. In all of the comments that were made about the situation (at RF anyway) not ONE COMMENTER had the dignity to condemn the rumor mongers. Not here - right here right now I join with the blogger at Change We Must Fight For in saying what needs to be said....

Before I go any further, I am in no way condoning these comments. In fact, I find them to be cowardly, childish, and completely against the values of either political party. Whether the comments are true or not, hiding behind false identities and performing drive by smears should never be tolerated.

Thus, I am calling these individuals out, I am daring them to comment on my blog. They either need to fess up or shut up.

I may not agree with Rep. Laura Brod, but I do respect her enough to put my name behind everything I write about her. She does not deserve the smears she’s receiving by the likes of these people.

They need to stand up and be accountable for their actions.

They need to show us they are people with courage and not cowardice.

Left or right, I don't care....who EVER is spreading these rumors about Representative Brod are the lowest of low - the slimiest of slime and they deserve to be brought forward and suffer the consequences of their actions....and if the slime mongers are indeed supporters or agents of another Republican candidate for Governor, I hope that the candidate will kick those people OUT of the campaign and that he will denounce those scurrilous allegations loudly and publically. It is the correct thing to do!

Health Care Rationing

2009-06-30T21:02:00.002-05:00

Long time readers of this site know that my biggest concerns about a "universal" government run health care plan center around the very real possibility of health care rationing. That concern is, in large part due to the circumstances surrounding the health of my 73 year old mother. The Logical Mother has (among other conditions) a weak immune system, rheumatoid arthritis, no thyroid, a bad heart, bad circulation and myriad of other ailments large and small. Four years ago, due to an undiagnosed electrolyte imbalance, she collapsed in her home. She lived alone and my sister (who lives nearby) was out of town when it happened. She had just moved into this home and I had no phone numbers for neighbors when it happened. When my sister and brother in law found her, she was hours from death. It was only due to the heroic efforts of the EMTs and the phenomenonal staff at Alexian Brothers Hospital in Hoffman Estates IL that she is alive today. Based on what President Obama said last Wednesday night - she would have been allowed to DIE THAT DAY under his vision of health care reform. After her collapse, my mother spent the next year and a half in the hospital trying to figure out the cause of her collapse and the many others that followed. We moved her into an assisted living facility annd it was there that a cut on her foot got infected with a MRSA infection. After weeks of fruitless treatments, her doctors went out on a limb and prescribed a long series of treatments that included heavy doses of antibiotics and treatment in a hyperbaric chamber. After 9 weeks of some pretty grueling (for a clausterphobic) treatments, the infection was cleared up and the blackouts, borderline dementia and heart issues that were unrelated to her heart blockage she is healthy (for a 73 year old with rheumatoid arthritis) and talking about travelling - something that 5 years ago would not have been discussed. Again - none of this would have been possible in a Canada Care/Britian care type system that lacks neo-natal ICU beds and mandates that only women between the ages of 39 and a half and 40 are eligible for in-vitro fertilization treatment (among other odd restrictions).

President Obama, last Wednesday night said that we needed to face the reality that we can not treat everyone for everything that sometimes "heroic" measures need to be stopped. Even my mother, a STAUNCH Obama supporter and former health care worker, realizes that his health care plan would have meant that she would not be around today...and she is not fond of that idea at all.

Dissent Is Patriotic But Only....

2009-06-30T20:33:00.003-05:00

Once upon a time, dissent (from the President's policies) was the HEIGHT of patriotism. Leftists across the country assured those on the right that they didn't hate the country - they just disagreed with President Bush. Well now that the shoe is on the other foot, we start to see that maybe they didn't believe that as much as they claimed to have.

So the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill. In political terms, it was a remarkable achievement.
But 212 representatives voted no. A handful of these no votes came from representatives who considered the bill too weak, but most rejected the bill because they rejected the whole notion that we have to do something about greenhouse gases.
And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.

It is good to know that the people who were so demanding that we conservatives be "tolerant" of others opinions are so tolerant of other opinions themselves. I have no doubt that this will be remembered the next time that there is a majority change in the Government.

Open Primary?

2009-06-29T22:37:00.004-05:00

Last week, the Deseret News ran a very interesting column on the pros and cons of the open primary. As someone who grew up in a primary state and who spent the last 15 years in a caucus state, count me as being squarely in the caucus camp and here is why....

Lavarr Webb brings up the obvious cons of an open primary system - out of control 3rd party special interest ads, cronyism run amok (what you have here and now is no where NEAR what it would be in a primary system) and the perrenial rule of incumbents with name recognition that no amount of money can buy, but oh the money that name recognition draws. What he doesn't tell you is that the same con that Frank Pignelli uses against the caucus system is one of the same cons of the primary system. You still only have about 3000-4000 people deciding who will be the nominee....the ones who bother to show up to vote in the primary! The biggest "pro" caucus argument that I can give is how EASY it is to get involved. All you have to do is SHOW UP on caucus night. Once you show up, decide how far "up" you want to go and odds are, you will get there. You want to go to the state convention to decide who runs for Senate, come to caucus and run for a delegate position! It's that simple!

Mr. Pignelli starts off his argument against the caucus system with a contradiction. He starts off stating that "Powerful incumbents are shifting their focus of attention to those who will determine their fate: 3,000 or so current and potential delegates that will attend the Utah Republican convention in June 2010. History demonstrates millions will be spent to influence this small universe of activists, a fact LaVarr ignores." and then he turns around and uses the Chaffetz/Cannon race in 2008 as his example. The problem is that the Chaffetz/Cannon race shows the exact opposite. Representative Cannon had a 6-1 campaign warchest advantage over the neophyte Chaffetz. All Jason Chaffetz had was drive, determination and a cadre of dedicated volunteers to help him overcome a HUGE disadvantage and they did it. Come to think of it, he reminds me of another outsider who overcame a huge monitary and name recognition deficit who became one of the progressive movements patron saints - Paul David Wellstone!

Mr. Pignelli calls the caucus system "an archaic throwback to the early 20th century." What he misses though is that the caucus system is also the most "progressive" system. It is there that a virtual unknown who has a vision and the will to push him or herself to the limit can succeed. It is the ultimate equalizer when you have an incumbent who is suffering from a severe case of DC-itis.

I can think of no better outlet for the average Joe or Jane Voter who cares about who represents them to truly have their say than in a caucus state. For you never know when or where the next Jason Chaffetz or Paul Wellstone will show up - but boy when he or she does the excitement that this person brings to to electorate is almost always ELECTRIC!

Legislative Malfeasance

2009-06-29T22:23:00.002-05:00

Once again our US House of Representatives voted on a bill that NO ONE EVER HAD THE OPPORTUNITY TO READ, just as they had done on the "stimulus" bill. The chairman of the Energy Committee, Henry Waxman, even threw in a 300 page amendment at 3am on the day that they voted on the bill and when some legislators had the nerve to ask for a copy of the bill to read, they were told "it's here somewhere!"

I just have one question for the defenders of the actions of the House Leadership - if these bills are so good, why can't the House abide by their own rules (and their President's rule) and post the bill for 72 hours on their website before the vote? Are they so afraid of the voters that they can not handle a little criticism?

Bring In The Stunt Groom

2009-06-27T19:41:00.004-05:00

So today was a very busy outside of the house day. Most of our gardening done and the Junior Logician is off visiting his grandmother so the Logical Husband and I spent most of the day at the farmers market and walking the dogs and taking pictures of the capital area and basically just enjoying an absolutely splendid early summer day in Utah. As a result, I didn't get to any of my emails until very late today. One of the daily must reads is my electronic version of the New York Times. They honestly do have some decent stories....unless they are reporting on President Obama and then the love fest starts.

It was a bit like planning the dream wedding only to have a hurricane rip away the chapel roof as you make your way down the aisle. ABC News and the White House probably thought they had scored a coup in arranging “Questions for the President: Prescription for America,” a prime-time opportunity (with a followup session on “Nightline”) for Barack Obama to explain his health care proposal to the voters and for ABC to monopolize an hour-plus with the most famous man in the world. And then came Iran. And Mark Sanford.

Wait - Mark Sanford??? The story broke on Sanford before the President's hour long market re-rollout (because the program has been out for a while now). If he had mentioned the latest trio of celebrity deaths (Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson) I could maybe see making a case for it. But then again how could the "most famous man in the world" be overshadowed by a mere electon or a couple of celebrity deaths.

And, well, there was the fact that it was about health care reform. The result: the 10 p.m. show drew 4.7 million viewers, or nearly 3 million fewer than a competing repeat of CBS’s “CSI: New York” and less than half what the evening’s top draw, NBC’s “America’s Got Talent,” attracted in the previous hour. Well, could the president’s plan have got a second-day bump at America’s water coolers? Not likely.

Oh OK - there are the obligatory references to Farrah and MJ...Oh course there is no mention of the real news like the pending vote on Cap and Trade but then again who cares about climate change...RIGHT????

So who did tune in? Certainly more than a few people who are simply curious or worried about the future of their insurance plans, as well as a few us who are paid to pay attention and, of course, bloggers, who are simply masochists for this kind of thing.

Not this blogger - I was engaged in my weekly Wednesday volunteer activity with 4H. However, the Opiniator was gracious enough to provide us with a wrap up of the blogosphere's reaction to the whole thing. After quoting the ABC chief and the Business and Media Institute's reactions to it, the Opinator gets to the meat/light supper/salad of the reactions.....

Scarecrow at FireDogLake’s Oxdown Gazette, however, thinks the network lured the president into a devilish trap:

For its part, ABC insisted on having Charles Gibson and Diane Sawyer, instead of informed, qualified health care experts, guide the conversation. That was a mistake, but not the worst of ABC’s offensive conduct.

Sawyer’s main contribution was to introduce her own uninformed biases/opinions in framing issues and introducing questioners. Gibson’s primary role was to reveal his own misconceptions and then literally read talking points from a Republican letter — an obvious ransom extracted after days of Republican whining about giving the President air time on a critical public issue.

Gibson’s other role was to interrupt the President every few minutes to announce a commercial break. The all too frequent commercial interruptions served as an apt metaphor for how private commercial interests demand our attention and extract their profits while limiting our ability to discuss critical public policy issues.

Emphasis mine...Damn those pesky commercial breaks! Maybe Scarecrow would have been happier if Donald Trump had just purchased this hour instead of "buying" Monday Night Raw - then he could have run it commercial free (as he did last Monday night). Then we could treated to Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson starting the hour with the intro "Can you SMELL what Barack is cookin'?" Then all Charlie and Diane would need to worry about doing is bowing in proper deference to the President lest they suffer a three count and be "traded" to MSNBC.

The Baltimore Sun’s David Zurawik thinks the problem wasn’t the message, but the medium:

Let’s make one thing clear right from the start: ABC News did not give President Barack Obama a free pass in its prime-time special Wednesday night to sell his plan for a radical overhaul of the health care system.

There were people in the town hall setting who asked pointed questions, and if you listened very closely, it was obvious after a while that Obama did not have any very good answers when it came to specifics. Furthermore, anchorman Charles Gibson, who moderated the discussion, asked solid follow-up questions of the president.

But, ultimately none of that mattered much, because the majority of viewers can’t or don’t listen very closely when such vast amounts of information, opinion and statistics are thrown around as they were Wednesday night on ABC. Television does not work like that. In the manner that TV does work, Obama had his way from early morning to latenight on ABC Wednesday to push his agenda for massive social change on healthcare. In short, he owned ABC’s airwaves.

Zurawick is correct in that the media was part of the problem but I don't think he gets the "why". Most people turn on the television to tune out. With few exceptions (like political junkies) people use television to escape their daily lives - that's one reason why the moniker "the idiot box" has been used to describe the media almost from day 1.

The Opinionator then quotes Jake Tapper's and my dear friend Ed Morrissey's posts on the subject as well as a response to Ed from Pete Able at the Moderate Voice (for the record I do think calling that exchange Obama's "Dukakis moment" was a bit of a stretch Ed). He also quoted a rather common sense proposal from Shannon Love at Chicago Boyz....

We should create a legal requirement that political elites have to use the same system they foist on everyone else. They should have to wait for hours in doctors’ offices. They should have to wait weeks or months for tests. They should be fobbed off on emergency rooms if they get sick over the weekend. They should be denied any Hail Mary test, medication or procedure. They should get the entire politically-managed health-care experience.

This standard should extend to all elected officials, political appointees and their immediate families.

Such a law would create a built-in feedback loop that would prevent politicians from ignoring the health of the people.

However, the common sense quote of the piece comes from my BTRadio partner in punditry Jazz Shaw (again at the Moderate Voice).

The President once again trotted out the same quote I’ve heard repeatedly when he’s been asked about competition in the private industry. He wants to be “absolutely clear” that if you have a health plan you like, you can keep it! Of course you can keep it. But will you? If your current plan through your employer costs you a couple hundred dollars per month, like mine does, and suddenly there’s a government run plan available that promises roughly the same level of coverage for one hundred bucks per month, how many of you will stay with your old plan? I don’t see why I would. I’d like to save more than one thousand dollars per year, wouldn’t you? Sounds great, but then what happens to this huge industry and all of its various employees when most of us bail out? Is American health insurance, as an industry, too big to fail?

That is something that Jazz and I discussed on our show last Wednesday because that IS the million dollar question. IF the "public option" is so much cheaper than the private option to the point where Americans dump their private insurance en masse will we then have to bail out the insurance industry the way we bailed out the automobile industry or the financial industry? I understand that not all of those employees of the current insurance industry will probably not lose their jobs, but easily one half will and those that don't lose their jobs will grossly under-employed. What will THAT do to our economy? What kinds of jobs will President Obama "create" to replace the lost insurance industry jobs? More fast food jobs? More road repair jobs? The people that are losing these insurance jobs are not people who can repair roads or dig trenches.....and that is the dirty little secret of government job creation. It is a secret that NO POLITICIAN will tell you - but anyone who has worked in a government job, knows exactly what I am talking about.....

Climate Change - A Historical Timeline.

2009-06-27T18:58:00.002-05:00

We had quite the spirited debate in my last post on "climate change" and during that debate I brought up a point that is often ignored by the global climate change alarmists.

Richard - some scientific "facts" to lay on ya...

Fact 1) at one time during early history of the Earth, much of the upper Midwest was covered in VAST SHEETS OF ICE. What caused them to melt? Global climate change....

Fact 2) at one time during the early history of the Earth the Salt Lake Valley was covered by the ocean - we have a remnant of that with us today in the form of the Great Salt Lake. What caused THAT ocean to recede and evaporate? Global Climate change!

Global climate change is real but as the previous two examples SCIENTIFICALLY PROVE mankind has nothing to do with it. There were NO coal-fired power plants, no SUV's, mega-opolis' full of people then. Just a living changing planet that circles a living changing sun.

Well my good friend Gary Gross sent me a graphic today that not only illustrates the previous cycles, it also documents what really caused all of the climate change (and it was not SUVs or factories....)

If you look at the far right on the graphic you can see that the last trend of global "warming" actually peaked in 1998 and we are now at the bottom (so far) of this latest cooling trend. We saw SNOW in Minnesota and Canada as late as June this year and as far south as NEW ORLEANS LA as this picture from January of this year indicates.

That does not mean that we should stop all efforts to reduce the amount of pollutants that we are putting into the air. But it does mean that we do not have to take the extremely draconian measures that are outlined in the misguided Cap and Trade bill that was just passed by the House. Our three Utah Representatives were all quite right to vote against this bill.

Grilling Bernanke

2009-06-26T09:14:00.002-05:00

The New York Time takes a lot of heat (quite rightly) for editorializing news stories. However, today they deserve a lot of kudos for for watching the sausage being ground - one of their reporters live blogged the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee testimony of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on the Fed's involvement in Bank Of America's take-over of Merrill Lynch. For those that don't know why this is an issue, the best thing to do is scroll to the bottom and read the preview first...

Mr. Bernanke has come under heavy criticism for his handling of Bank of America’s acquisition of Merrill Lynch. The House committee is investigating how the deal turned into an enormous second bailout of Bank of America and Merrill, and lawmakers are examining how Mr. Bernanke and former Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. pushed the bank to complete the transaction after it discovered billions of dollars in additional losses at the securities firm.
Bank of America’s chief executive, Kenneth D. Lewis, told the committee earlier this month that federal officials had pressured him to go through with the Merrill deal and acknowledged that his job had been at risk if he did not.

Mr. Paulson is expected to give the committee his side of the story next month.

The House investigation is heavily colored by partisanship. President Obama is seeking formidable new powers for the Fed to regulate giant institutions, including Bank of America, that could pose risks to the financial system.
Republicans, along with some Democrats, argue that the Fed already has too much power.

The apparent point of contention (in the hearing) was pressure that BOA CEO Lewis says that the Fed exerted on them when they talked about exercising the merger agreements "material adverse effect" or MAC clause. I'm not going to relay the whole thing - you are going to have to go to the NYTimes website to read it all but I wanted to highlight a couple of specific questions.

10:39 a.m. | More on the MAC: Was the MAC clause in the Merrill deal just a “bargaining chip” that Mr. Lewis used to get federal assistance? That’s what Mr. Issa asks Mr. Bernanke, who replies that, in his view, the MAC could not have been invoked to cancel the deal, and if it were invoked, it would have caused a near-collapse of the financial system.

So in otherwords, yes it probably was. I have no doubt that if the Fed believed that invoking the MAC would cause a "near-collapse" of the economy that they relayed that information to Mr. Lewis.

10:50 a.m. | ‘Was Mr. Paulson Lying?’: There’s a blunt question from Dan Burton of Indiana, who wants to know if Mr. Paulson was lying when he testified that Mr. Bernanke told him to threaten BofA’s board and management if the bank tried to walk away from the Merrill deal. “I didn’t tell him anything like that,” Mr. Bernanke says.

Asked about a conversation with Jeffrey Lacker, another Fed official, Mr. Bernanke says he can’t remember the details. In summarizing the conversation in an e-mail, Mr. Lacker has said Mr. Bernanke was going to make it clear that BofA’s management would be gone if they tried to invoke the MAC.

Ouch - that is going to sting.

Utah's own Jason Chaffetz asked a very interesting question...

11:12 a.m | What Makes a Threat?: As with the previous hearing starring Mr. Lewis, there is plenty of discussion today about whether or not threats were made to keep the Merrill-BofA deal intact. Jason Chaffetz of Utah wants to know how Mr. Bernanke’s questioning of Mr. Lewis’ management and judgment could not be perceived as a threat.

Mr. Bernanke tells him that the Fed did not control Mr. Lewis’ destiny. If he had decided to invoke the MAC “and the company had prospered. we would not have the basis to do anything,” he says.

I would be interested to know how Mr. Bernanke would feel if the shoe were on the other foot. Would he have "assumed" that the Fed's had no "basis" to punish him or not? I would venture to guess the answer is "NOT"....

While there was a couple of dips into the conspiracy theory pool (see Marcy Kaptur's non-question at the 11:28am mark) there were a lot of very indept probing questions including this one by Peter Welch of Vermont...

12:17 p.m. | Too Big to Exist?: Peter Welch of Vermont ask whether institutions that are too big to fail should “be too big to exist.” Mr. Bernanke said that it was legitimate to discuss that possibility, but that big banks had an economic role and businesses around the world.

and this one by Dennis Kucinich of Ohio...

1:02 p.m. | What About Those Losses?: Mr. Kucinich continues to believe that Bank of America knew about the losses in mid-November. He also asks if the Fed knew about the losses before it approved the deal at the end of the November, even though the central bank was getting daily updates of Merrill’s financial condition. Mr. Bernanke replied, “We didn’t know about the $14 billion.”
“It’s difficult to know what these valuations are unless they are done by professional asset managers,” he said.

Overall this exercise (by the NYTimes) was well worth it as they provided the country with an insight into the mechaniations that take place in DC. The more light that is shone on how legislation gets done (in DC or in the state capitals) the better it is for ALL citizens. For the more we know about how political business gets done, the more educated the voters will be when they next go into the voting booth - and that is a very good thing!

Of Ganders And Geese

2009-06-25T09:47:00.003-05:00

So last night was the ObamaCare infomercial. I didn't watch it last night as we had dog training, but ABC News has an interesting story up today about one of the key exchanges in the townhall portion of the event. (HT HA)

President Obama struggled to explain today whether his health care reform proposals would force normal Americans to make sacrifices that wealthier, more powerful people -- like the president himself -- wouldn't face.
The probing questions came from two skeptical neurologists during ABC News' special on health care reform, "Questions for the President: Prescription for America," anchored from the White House by Diane Sawyer and Charles Gibson.
Dr. Orrin Devinsky, a neurologist and researcher at the New York University Langone Medical Center, said that elites often propose health care solutions that limit options for the general public, secure in the knowledge that if they or their loves ones get sick, they will be able to afford the best care available, even if it's not provided by insurance.
Devinsky asked the president pointedly if he would be willing to promise that he wouldn't seek such extraordinary help for his wife or daughters if they became sick and the public plan he's proposing limited the tests or treatment they can get.
The president refused to make such a pledge, though he allowed that if "it's my family member, if it's my wife, if it's my children, if it's my grandmother, I always want them to get the very best care.

Emphasis mine. We all want the best of care for our families Mr. President. That is why so MANY of us have been fighting the nationalization of our health care system. We want our local doctors to be the ones to make the decisions - not a bureaucrat in DC. That local doctor will know what is best for the patient while the bureaucrat in DC will not. It's that simple.

Final Day

2009-06-25T09:15:00.002-05:00

Today is the final day of the Move America Forward "Troopathon". If you have not done so, now would be a perfect time to buy a care package for our soldiers overseas. The link in my sidebar will take you out to the donations page where you can buy a care package and help Team Hot Air (or any of the other teams competing in the Blogger Competition).

Founders Morning Quotes

2009-06-24T08:56:00.001-05:00

"The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. If `Thou shalt not covet' and `Thou shalt not steal' were not commandments of Heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in every society before it can be civilized or made free."

--John Adams, A Defense of the American Constitutions, 1787

A Perfect Fit

2009-06-24T08:27:00.002-05:00

Not just a perfect fit, this is a tailor made to perfection fit.

The National Republican Congressional Committee’s volunteer program, “Call to Arms,” will host its first event of the cycle next month.
An invitation to the July 15 reception asks guests to enroll in the volunteer program or donate $50 to the NRCC. Freshman Rep. Jason Chaffetz (Utah) heads the CTA program, which targets potential volunteers in the Washington, D.C., area.

Given how well motivated Rep. Chaffetz' volunteers were in the last campaign there is no doubt that he is perfect for the job.

From the Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don't Department

2009-06-23T07:35:00.000-05:00

President Obama has been taking a ton of heat from his critics for not coming out stronger in his condemnation of the Iranian regime in it's violent reaction to the protesters. Senators Lindsay Graham and John McCain went on the Sunday shows and talked about the "tepid" response to the crisis in Iran. Even some leftward leaning media outlets thought that the President's reponse was less than underwhelming. Some even criticized the President for going about his "normal" business while Iran burned.

I have to respectfully disagree with all of them. Iran is an odd creature and President Obama HAS learned a little bit from our dismal past history with Iran. He made the calculated decision to hold back on comment on the situation, knowing (rightly) that the Mullah's and Iranian state run television would use anything that he said against the US...and he was right.....

The Iranian government, meanwhile, accused the U.S. for the first time of interfering in the postelection dispute. Iran protested to the Swiss ambassador, who represents U.S. affairs in Iran because the two nations have no diplomatic ties. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said that President Barack Obama stands by his defense of principles such as the right of people to demonstrate...

So even though he took a cautious prudent approach, the President is getting what he feared, which actually should free him up to do the BOLD thing - to come out and condemn the Iraqi government for the escalation of violence. You've done the politically correct thing, now do the morally correct one! It's that time.....

Selective Memory

2009-06-21T16:32:00.002-05:00

I had to laugh when I started reading today's op-ed by Paul Rolly in the Salt Lake Tribune.

Federal agents swooped in on dozens of unsuspecting peaceful folks who were minding their own business and doing their jobs and ripped them from their families.

They handcuffed them and dragged them from their workplace. They threw them in jail and then public officials had a press conference to boast about it. The raid on illegal artifact peddlers in San Juan County?
Nope. The one I'm talking about occurred at the Salt Lake International Airport in December 2001 when federal and state officials wanted to show the world how safe Salt Lake City was for the 2002 Winter Olympics and ended up scattering the families of non-threatening dishwashers, floor sweepers and cargo handlers. None of those arrested had committed a crime other than being in the country illegally.

Yep - Rolly spends the rest of this column taking our esteemed Senators to task for being "inconsistent" on law enforcement while blithly ignoring the inconsistencies in his own rant.

And Utah Sens. Orrin Hatch and Bob Bennett didn't say squat about the heavy-handed tactics of law enforcement in that raid. Nor did they complain about the raid that broke up the families of dozens of workers at the Champion Safe Co. in Provo, which eventually led to that company's move to Mexico.

Nor did they complain about the Gestapo-like tactics that netted dozens of harmless workers at the Swift meat packing plant in northern Utah.

The people arrested, wrenched from their families and eventually deported in those raids, were breaking the law because they had come into the United States illegally.

Except that one of the big problems that many conservatives have with Senator Bennett is his rather wobbly stands on immigration reform and enforcement of the current immigration law! While he voted "Yes" on English as the official language of the US and on building the border fence, he has voted for a guest worker program (without a path to citizenship) and for allowing more migrant farm workers into the country - something that is a bit of an issue for many on both sides of the debate. Senator Hatch has voted consistently for enforcement of our existing immigration law and against many of the forms that would allow those who are already here illegally an easy way to citizenship. So essentially Rolly does have a point with Senator Hatch....

However, he selectivly ignores his own inconsistency. He is for (you can tell by the tenor of the article) harsher treatment of those who stole the Native American artifacts, yet he wants everyone to look the other way to illegal immigration (as you can tell from his previous columns and blog postings where anyone who is anti-ILLEGAL immigration is simply referred to as "anti-immigration").

However, the biggest problem that I have with Rolly's column and arguement is the fact that he is totally ignores the biggest difference between those that broke the law in the artifacts case and those who broke the law in the case he brings up from 2002. In the latter, the people arrested were NOT AMERICAN CITIZENS and in the former case all of the accused were AMERICAN CITIZENS. There is a difference in court of law!

Me??? I think both the illegal immigrants and the artifacts smugglers should be held accountable for their actions. I certainly don't care that they have been smuggling artifacts (in that region of the country) for generations....just because it has been done for generations does not make it right. It is still theft!

The moral of the story is pretty clear - if you don't want to be arrested in a humiliating fashion - don't break the law. It's a pity Mr. Rolly couldn't see that simple fact.....

Fixing Climate Change

2009-06-19T09:43:00.001-05:00

OK so climate change is back on the front page thanks to soon to be Governor Herbert's comments at the Western Governors Association meetings this week. Well before everyone gets back on their high horse about yes it is real or no it isn't I would like to take a look at a few FACTS about climate change, cap and trade and living the "green" lifestyle.

The below the fold headline in yesterday's SLTribune blazed "Climate change is here - deal with it, the White House says" The headline is correct - climate change IS REAL and is indisputable. If the climate didn't change we would never get rain or snow or hot or cold. Climate change can also be called the FOUR SEASONS! Cyclical "climate change" is well documented through out human history! However, it is in the body of the article that the Tribune gets off base.

Utahns have heard it before: Climate change threatens to make water more scarce. It will shrink the ski season, and swell the demand for summertime air conditioning.

I don't know if Ms. Fahys (the author of the piece) has noticed but this has been one of the coolest, wettest Junes in a long times (as the local forecasters have repeatedly pointed out). My friends in Minnesota were told this week to prepare for a year "without summer". In FACT there is a plethora of documentation out there to show that the climate is actually COOLING. The FACT is (as Governor to be Herbert pointed out) the science is far from settled as to whether vain, arrogant mankind can do anything to control climate change. There are plenty of published scientists out there who disagree with the "consensus" that climate change is manmade.

That's not to say that we can't or shouldn't reduce our use of energy. Conserving resources is a VERY conservative principle. You want to use less energy so that you spend less on heating and cooling and lighting so that you have more money to spend on other things (like increasing taxes?). That is a no brainer! But are the "conventional wisdom" ways of cutting back really that effective? Turning off unused appliances and lights most definately does help. Taking public transit....maybe not so much according to some reports!

In some circumstances, for instance, it could be more eco-friendly to drive into a city -- even in an SUV, the bete noire of green groups -- rather than take a suburban train. It depends on seat occupancy and the underlying carbon cost of the mode of transport.

...and of course no one could have know that before, right????? What about solar energy you ask. Well that does not incurr the cost savings that it's proponents thought as quickly as they thought either!

So what do we do? Well, as the details start to come out (remember my recent comments about the devil in the details...) it appears that the Waxman Markey bill is not the answer either! Things are so bad with Waxman Markey that many blue dogs (like Rep Jim Matheson of Utah and Rep. Collin Peterson of MN) initially came out against it (rumor has it a deal is in the making). Why, you may ask? The liberal leaning Brookings Institute confirms what many conservatives have long said - that Waxman Markey will cripple the already fragile economy! Even the non-partisan Congressional Budget office has said the same thing!

So Waxman Markey isn't the answer, you say - are YOU REPUBLICANS proposing anything or are you just the party of "NO"? The answer is Republicans in the House ARE proposing solutions. However, the Speaker of the House has refused to give ANY of these solutions time in committee.

The bottom line is that we should conserve, but if we are going to do it we need to look at the whole picture in order to get a good idea as to whether our actions have any positive impact (turning off lights, combining errands on one trip) or not (taking the bus, cap and trade) and then chose to engage in the activities that really work. It's that simple and that much common sense - something we don't need government action to do.

Why Do We Need Health Care Reform?

2009-06-19T09:11:00.003-05:00

The biggest reason that government run health care proponents use as a reason why we need to do this is the "fact" that 45 million Americans don't have health insurance. Larry Elder took a look at that number and found it to be "wanting:.

About 45 million Americans lack health care insurance. Or do they? ...

Nearly half of the 45 million fall in the category of my 26-year-old nephew. He smokes cigarettes, dates, eats out, goes to movies and, like all young people, lives through his cell phone. With a slight change in priorities, he could afford health insurance, the cost of which at his age and health starts at about $100 a month. Take a look at a Reason Foundation video of interviews with a bunch of non-health-insured 20-somethings.

These Gen Xers copped to dropping money on clothes, booze, nightlife, the latest tech gizmos and other things of interest to them. With a change in priorities, these young folks -- far more representative of those without insurance than the forlorn husband and wife sitting on a porch swing -- could both afford and qualify for health insurance. They simply consider it a low priority.

So let's do the math....of the 45 million with "no" health care, some 22 million are eligible for health insurance but choose not to buy it. That is not a valid reason to take over an industry this large.

Millions more can access health care -- through SCHIP (State Children's Health Insurance Program), Medicaid or other government programs. But for whatever reason, 11 million people simply refuse to take advantage of them.

So of the remaining 23 million without health insurance, 11 are eligible for existing government programs! That brings the total number of people "without" insurance down to 12 million - a large number to be sure but as a percentage of the entire US population.....

What about criminals without insurance? More than 2 million Americans -- with access to health care, by the way -- use jail, prison or penitentiary mailing addresses. And for every one behind bars, how many live among us who survive by theft, drug dealing, prostitution or some similar career path? Taxpayer health insurance for them, too?

Actually they already get taxpayer funded health care in the prison infirmary. That brings us down to roughly 10 million or so without health INSURANCE. I stress the word insurance here because as Mr. Elder states, not having insurance does not equate a lack of health CARE.....

Lacking health care insurance is not the same as lacking health care . By law, most emergency rooms must provide health care -- to both legals and illegals. Yes, they stand in line, but no health insurance does not equal no health care.

That is a point I have made on MANY occasions.

Mr. Elder closes asking the same questions that most thinking people are asking today.....

Do we allow a complete government takeover of the section of health care it doesn't already run, for 10-15 million or so without health insurance on a persistent basis? Again, 255 million Americans already have it. Many millions more could get it if they wanted to. And 89 percent of Americans are satisfied with the care they now receive.

There are plenty of ways to fix the problem without bankrupting the country and rationing care. One solution (from the House GOP Caucus) would give health care tax credits to low income Americans, eliminate wasteful spending (unnecessary tests and the like), allow small business to band together in a buying block in order to get insurance for themselves and their employees and introduces liability reform as ways to bring the high costs of INSURANCE down to an affordable level.

When you look at the FACTS of the situation you see that there is no real need for a complete take over of the health care system by government. The only real "reason" for it, given the facts is is simply that it is a power grab - another way for big government to take yet another piece of your precious freedom away - thanks to President Obama and the House Democrats.

Putting People First!

2009-06-18T09:40:00.000-05:00

Now this is refreshing to see.

I knew when I ran for Congress that fighting would be part of the job description. I came here to fight for what I believe in, to fight to be heard and to fight for the interests of the people I serve. The problem is, so did everyone else.

And with competing priorities, beliefs, constituencies and approaches, there's no way we can all agree. Fighting, or more accurately "debate," is a natural and beneficial part of the legislative process.

The trick is knowing where to draw the line between productive debate and destructive debate. Quite simply, productive debate produces something positive, whether agreement or simply mutual understanding. Destructive debate sets out to destroy the character of the fighters. Fighting for ideas and policies can all too easily morph into personal attacks against those who disagree with us.

At the other extreme, we can sometimes be quick to label as mudslinging any effective argument that makes our position look bad, regardless of whether the attack was actually personal. During my campaign, I was very aggressive in talking about my opponents' records, positions and public statements. I believe these things are fair game.

But I did not and will not tolerate the politics of personal destruction from either side. Once you find yourself calling someone a name, questioning their character or insulting their friends and loved ones, you're over the line.

Now one of the things I do have to add is that disagreeing on a policy matter is NOT a personal attack. I don't think that gay marriage is healthy for society to take as a policy stand. That does not mean I "hate" gay people. I have some people in my life who are very dear who happen to be gay. We disagree on the policy without being enemies. It's not hard! I have very dear friends who voted for President Obama and we are still friends. It is a matter of putting PEOPLE (your friends and neighbors and co-workers) over ideology.

Founders Morning Quote

2009-06-18T08:15:00.001-05:00

"As parents, we can have no joy, knowing that this government is not sufficiently lasting to ensure any thing which we may bequeath to posterity: And by a plain method of argument, as we are running the next generation into debt, we ought to do the work of it, otherwise we use them meanly and pitifully. In order to discover the line of our duty rightly, we should take our children in our hand, and fix our station a few years farther into life; that eminence will present a prospect, which a few present fears and prejudices conceal from our sight."

--Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776

Honoring Their Service

2009-06-17T22:58:00.003-05:00

The Troopathon blogger competition is just barely 48 hours old and already the Hot Air Steamers have jumped to a commanding lead. If you have not done so already, please go out to the Honor Their Service blogger competition page and buy a care package or three. Thanks!

You're Fired

2009-06-17T08:46:00.002-05:00

In 2008, on the heels of the US Attorney's firing "scandal", the Democrats on Capital Hill put together legislation to add further protections to the Inspector Generals corps as these federal employees are supposed to be more insulated from the political winds of change than US Attorneys (who serve at the pleasure of the President) are. That Legislation, the Inspector General Reform Act of 2008, was sponsored by Senator Claire McKaskill and one of the 11 co-sponsors was none other than then Senator Barack Obama! The bill (which has not made it out of committee in the House) was designed to:

Require Congressional notification on the removal of an inspector general;
Expand the reporting requirements for IG budget requests;
Require IGs to have their own legal counsel;
Establish an IG Council;
Provide IGs with some additional investigative, law enforcement, and personnel
authorities and require additional reports by IGs and the Government Accountability
Office (GAO).

Another requirement of the bill was:

(Sec. 3) Requires the President, the heads of designated federal entities, the Librarian of Congress, the Capitol Police Board, and the Public Printer to communicate to Congress in writing the reasons for removing or transferring an IG no later than 30 days before such removal or transfer.

However, since this bill was not passed out of the House, the law that applies to Mr. Walpin's firing is the Inspector General Act of 1978. One of the provisions of that law is that when an IG is removed from office or transferred that the head of the federal entity doing that (in this case that would be the head of the Executive Branch - ie President Obama) must notify both Houses of Congress - something President Obama has not done according to Sen. McKaskill!

“The White House has failed to follow the proper procedure in notifying Congress as to the removal of the Inspector General for the Corporation for National and Community Service,” McCaskill said. “The legislation which was passed last year requires that the president give a reason for the removal.”

McCaskill, a key Obama ally, said that the president’s stated reason for the termination, “Loss of confidence’ is not a sufficient reason.”

Another provision of the existing law is that the President must give the Inspectors General 30 day advance notice of their firing - something else this President did not not considering he gave Mr. Walpin 1 hour to resign or be fired. Only after Walpin refused to resign did this President decide to follow the law and tell Congress of his intent to fire the IG - but by then the die had been cast and it was too late for the President to abide by the intent of the law.

Regardless of whether you are applying the existing law, or the amendments to that law that then Senator Obama co-sponsored, it is clear that PRESIDENT Obama broke the intent of the law in his firing of Gerald Walpin. This is in no way akin to President Bush's wholesale firing of US Attorney's - a faux scandal created by the left-o-sphere to discredit President Bush. This is a real and legit scandal and something that the media and Congress need to bring light to. However, I suspect that will not happen with this President. It will be swept under the rug by a besotted media and a hyper-partisan congress.

So much for the "politics of change" that we were promised.

The Devil In The Details Part 2

2009-06-16T20:56:00.002-05:00

The next most over-used meme to defend ObamaCare is "we are the only civilized nation to NOT have single payer care". Well as my momma used to say "if your friends all jumped off of a bridge would you do it too?" There are a multitude of reasons as to why that argument is specious at best, however my friend Gary Gross has probably the best reason why we should not rush to single payer...in a nutshell it is HEALTHIER to live here - our odds of surviving major disease is much better here than it is in any of these other "civilized" countries that have single payer health care.....

Jack Kingston cited two startling comparisons on cancer survival rates.
The survival rate for breast cancer in the United States is 84%; in Britain, it’s 69%.

The survival rate for prostate cancer in the United States is 92%; it’s only 51% in Great Britain.

That last statistic was a jaw-dropper for me. Think of the difference between 9 men in 10 surviving in the United States vs. 1 in 2 men dying of prostate cancer in the UK.

Think about it - men in the "great civilized" nation of Great Britian with it's single payer plan have a 50/50 shot of surviving Prostate Cancer. Yeah that is something to aspire to all right.

Meanwhile the Campaigner in Chief is busy back-pedaling away from the Kennedy Health care bill as more and more details about the costs and restrictions and pork attached to the bill are coming out.....

"This is not the Administration’s bill," White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said in a statement following the Congressional Budget Office's analysis of Sen. Ted Kennedy's health care reform legislation, "and it's not even the final Senate Committee bill."

And yet that is exactly what the President was campaigning FOR when he went to Green Bay last week and Chicago yesterday.....

Meanwhile the estimated cost of this bill keeps climing....can you say FOUR TRILLION DOLLARS? That is what one independent group says will be the true 10 year cost of this bill when you factor in all of the variables that the CBO left off!

As I said yesterday, I agree that we need reform but this is NOT the reform that the American people were promised or wanted. It's time to drive a stake into the heart of this bill so that the discussion can turn to REAL reform - a compromise that includes voices from ALL sides of the debate - not just the side that the government and the media want you to hear.

Honoring Their Service

2009-06-15T23:08:00.003-05:00

OK guys - it's another call to arms....

Move America Forward is running it's first annual "Troopathon" to raise money to send care packages to our troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and Gitmo and we would like your help. I have joined Ed Morrissey of Hot Air and a whole host of other bloggers to help raise money for this worthy project. It ends on June 25 with an 8 hour streaming video broadcast. It will be a lot of fun.

Please join all of us bloggers in this effort. I will have a link in my sidebar through June 25 that sends you out to the Team Hot Air Steamers order page. Please help - won't you?

The Devil In The Details (Or But We MUST Do Something...)

2009-06-15T22:52:00.002-05:00

We MUST do something...that is the plaintive refrain of the defenders of ObamaCare - we must do "something"... but is this really the "something" that we want? That is the question that must be asked. For example, do we want or need a health care "reform" program that taxes the health insurance benefits as if it were income? How about one that will tax things like soft drinks or that Big Mac you had for lunch? That is what the Democrats in the Legislature are proposing. Do we want a health care reform that actually cuts health care benefits for Medicare and Medicaid recepients while spending money on "Community Make-Over" programs and spending on streetlights, sidewalks, grocery stores and jungle gyms? Do we really want a health care "reform" bill that will spend approximately $1,000,000,000,000 (that is 1 TRILLION dollars) more than we are currently spending on health care? Do we really want a health care "reform" package even the AMA finds to be unworkable?

Oh I fully agree that something needs to be done, but the devil is (as always) in the details and the details of THIS so-called reform bill shows that this Congress and this President are not serious about real reform - they are only serious about enacting single payer health care and in the process putting several hundred million more people (in the insurance industry ALONE) out of work.

Is that really the kind of reform we want?

Update: Oh and according to the CBO this plan still leaves roughly 30 MILLION people uninsured (HT Ed Morrissey)

The Congressional Budget Office has tried crunching the numbers on Barack Obama’s plan to reform health care, which Obama says will save money and protect the uninsured. The CBO director on his official blog says, “Wrong!” — on both counts. The reform plan will cost more than a trillion dollars over the next decade, and while it will put 39 million people on insurance plans, it will drive off more than 23 million more from their existing plans. The cost doesn’t include Obama’s public plan option, either:

According to our preliminary assessment, enacting the proposal would result in a net increase in federal budget deficits of about $1.0 trillion over the 2010-2019 period. When fully implemented, about 39 million individuals would obtain coverage through the new insurance exchanges. At the same time, the number of people who had coverage through an employer would decline by about 15 million (or roughly 10 percent), and coverage from other sources would fall by about 8 million, so the net decrease in the number of people uninsured would be about 16 million or 17 million.

These new figures do not represent a formal or complete cost estimate for the draft legislation, for several reasons. The estimates provided do not address the entire bill—only the major provisions related to health insurance coverage. Some details have not been estimated yet, and the draft legislation has not been fully reviewed. Also, because expanded eligibility for the Medicaid program may be added at a later date, those figures are not likely to represent the impact that more comprehensive proposals—which might include a significant expansion of Medicaid or other options for subsidizing coverage for those with income below 150 percent of the federal poverty level—would have both on the federal budget and on the extent of insurance coverage.

A net decrease of 16-17 million would still leave about 30 million uninsured, according to the figures thrown around by ObamaCare advocates. It would simply exchange individuals in the uninsured category, and those most likely to lose their coverage would be those in lower-income jobs, as well as people working in small businesses and startups.

Is this really the kind of change you want?

Leadership

2009-06-14T22:05:00.002-05:00

Eric Black, reporting for MinnPost, has the latest in the "unallotment" story.

DFL legislative leaders, union officials, attorneys and representatives of some of the groups that expect to be hammered by Gov. Tim Pawlenty's "unallotment" plans have been meeting to strategize ways to fight back.

A legal challenge is under discussion, as well as political counterattacks.

Three meetings have been held over recent days, including one Wednesday. House Speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher seems to be running or at least coordinating the effort. She presided over two of the three meetings and another legislator close to the speaker represented her at the third.

The first thought that sprang to my mind when I read this was "where were these people last summer when the session ended with the ANNOUNCEMENT of a huge budget shortfall?" and "What were they doing all last fall and winter when the reality of this recession was settling on us all?" and most importantly "where were they in February, March, April and the first part of May during the legislative session when they SHOULD have addressed all this?" Then my next thought answered the questions.....

Where were these people last summer when the session ended with the ANNOUNCEMENT of a huge budget shortfall? - They were all gearing up for the fall campaign by holding townhall meetings that only screened out questions that were critical of the Legislature or asked how they were going to FIX the problem.

What were they doing all last fall and winter when the reality of this recession was settling on us all? They were (in the fall) campaigning for office on the claims of fiscal responsibility and fixing the problem - promises that they never kept.

Where were they in February, March, April and the first part of May during the legislative session when they SHOULD have addressed all this? They spent the first 13 weeks of the session passing more spending bills on wants - rather than figuring out how they were going to fund the needs (like GAMC).

The same people that frittered away the last 12 months that they had to fix these problems are now complaining about the fact that someone has decided to FIX THEIR MESS (rather than kicking the can down the road some more)??? If the DFL leadership was so concerned about fixing the budget, why didn't they do it during session? Why didn't they take the compromise that Governor Pawlenty offered them (when he gave in to them on 2/3 of their objections to the his budget proposals)? WHY DIDN'T THEY DO ANYTHING CONSTRUCTIVE THIS PAST SESSION?

My dear friend Gary Gross is absolutely spot on in his analysis of the situation....the only one showing leadership in this situation is Governor Pawlenty. The DFL Leadership, on the other hand, are acting like a bunch of spoiled three year olds that didn't get candy before dinner. It's time for the DFL Leadership in St. Paul to grow up - and if they refuse to do their Constitutional DUTY then the voters need to replace them with adults who are willing to do the job that they have been hired to do!

Parallels

2009-06-13T17:54:00.002-05:00

In the course of researching a rebuttal to this Telegraph story, I was absolutely gobsmacked by the parallels between the Steel Industry of the 1970's and the auto industry of today.

During the 1970s and 1980s, the U.S. steel industry came under increasing pressure from foreign competition. Manufacture in Germany and Japan was booming. Foreign mills and factories, built with the latest technology, benefited from lower labor costs and powerful government-corporate partnerships, allowing them to capture increasing market shares of steel and steel products. Separately, demand for steel softened due to recessions, the 1973 oil crisis, and increasing use of other materials.^[9]^[42] At this critical juncture, free market, anti-union policies, and deregulation, especially under President Ronald Reagan, came into play. Free market pressures exposed the U.S. steel industry's own internal problems, which included a now-outdated manufacturing base that had been over-expanded in the 1950s and 1960s, hostile management and labor relationships, the inflexibility of United Steelworkers regarding wage cuts and work-rule reforms, oligarchic management styles, and poor strategic planning by both union and management. In particular, Pittsburgh faced its own challenges. Local coke and iron ore deposits were depleted, raising material costs. The large mills in the Pittsburgh region also faced competition from newer, more profitable "mini-mills" and non-union mills with lower labor costs.^[42]

Beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the steel industry in Pittsburgh began to implode. Following the 1981–1982 recession, for example, the mills laid off 153,000 workers.^[42] The steel mills began to shut down. These closures caused a ripple effect, as railroads, mines, and other factories across the region lost business and closed. The local economy suffered a depression, marked by high unemployment and underemployment, as laid-off workers took lower-paying, non-union jobs. Pittsburgh suffered as elsewhere in the Rust Belt with a declining population, and like many other U.S. cities, it also saw white flight to the suburbs.^[43]

Emphasis mine. It was a potent cocktail of union, corporate and governmental errors along with free market pressures that the American steel and auto industries were unable to overcome that led, in the end, to the demise of those industries.

Where the parallels diverge comes in how the cities of Flint and Pittsburgh handled the paradigm change. Where the city of Pittsburgh reinvented itself from Steel City to High Tech Haven...

Present-day Pittsburgh, with a diversified economy, a low cost of living, and a rich infrastructure for education and culture, has been ranked as one of the World's Most Livable Cities.^[48]

... the city of Flint is tearing whole neighborhoods down...

The government looking at expanding a pioneering scheme in Flint, one of the poorest US cities, which involves razing entire districts and returning the land to nature.
Local politicians believe the city must contract by as much as 40 per cent, concentrating the dwindling population and local services into a more viable area.

...and the Obama Administration wants to bring this plan to a neighborhood near you! The reason for this is an obvious one - the cities in question are in decline....

"Places like Flint have hit rock bottom. They're at the point where it's better to start knocking a lot of buildings down," she (Karina Pallagst, director of the Shrinking Cities in a Global Perspective programme at the University of California, Berkeley) said.
Flint, sixty miles north of Detroit, was the original home of General Motors. The car giant once employed 79,000 local people but that figure has shrunk to around 8,000.
Unemployment is now approaching 20 per cent and the total population has almost halved to 110,000.
The exodus – particularly of young people – coupled with the consequent collapse in property prices, has left street after street in sections of the city almost entirely abandoned.

The Telegraph tap dances around many of the reasons for the flight - lack of jobs, high unemployment etc - but they never get to WHY these jobs are leaving.... usually a government climate that makes it next to impossible to attract and maintain businesses (hello Minnesota). I mean a publicly traded company is ultimately responsible to it's shareholders. If the shareholders are not making money then the company has two choices - move to a climate where it is cheaper to do business (off-shoring) or go out of business! It's that simple.

But Mr Kildee, who has lived there nearly all his life, said he had first to overcome a deeply ingrained American cultural mindset that "big is good" and that cities should sprawl – Flint covers 34 square miles.

Look I'm not saying that Flint should be forced into doing something that won't work for them. If shrinking the size of the town works for THEM then by all means, they should do it. Where I do depart with the idea is that this is something that should be forced on other cities due to FEDERAL MANDATE! Pittsburgh re-invented itself without federal involvement - that's fantastic - but how do you Pittsburghers will react to the Federal government coming in and telling them that their jobs and neighborhoods are being torn down because the Federal government thinks their city is "too big"? We should not be using Flint's cookie cutter on everyone else. Let the cities of Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Memphis, Detroit and the 46 other "targeted" cities decide what's best for their citizens. If it is reinvention ala Pittsburgh, reduction ala Flint, a combination of the two or some other outside of the box solution - it has to be up to the city and the county...not the Federal Nanny State.

Gettin' While The Gettin' Is Good

2009-06-13T17:18:00.003-05:00

Governor Huntsman is hosting his last WSGA Annual Conference this weekend in Park City, but it sounds like there might be some rumblings of discontent in the ranks.

Jon Huntsman, the Republican governor of Utah, has had one foot out the door since being named Ambassador to China by President Obama. But he will still be chair of the Western Governors Association when it holds its annual meeting in Salt Lake City this weekend.
Moreover, it looks like his final days in office will be marred by a controversy over just whose tax dollars are being spent on a highly controversial "Western Climate Initiative." Paul Chesser, a global warming skeptic who is a researcher with Climate Strategies Watch, submitted Freedom of Information Act requests and discovered that the initiative -- aimed at supporting dramatic reductions in carbon emissions -- has contracted or partnered with a wide range of liberal climate change groups. A full-time WGA staff member has been detailed to manage the climate project. The subsidies to pay for all this will likely be a topic of discussion at the governors' meeting because a majority of state governors didn't sign on to it. Many of them view draconian reductions in carbon emissions as a serious threat to their states' economies.
One governor I spoke with points out that the WGA is supposed to operate on a consensus basis. He says the WGA's involvement in planning climate change proposals is serious overreach. "The dues states give WGA come from tax money and I was surprised to learn just how much the WGA seems to be getting ahead of many of the states on carbon regulation," he told me.

So the Governor, like many of the Global Warming/Cooling/Whatever-it-is-today crowd over-stepped his boundaries in the name of "saving the planet" from something that we are arrogant to think we can influence? Color me shocked...

Maybe this is why he was so eager to jump on that Ambassadorship.....

Deja Vu Yet Again!

2009-06-13T13:54:00.002-05:00

This is really getting ridiculous. First it was inserting politics into the Miss America Pageant and now the whole brouhaha with David Letterman and Sarah Palin. Now I am not going to ask the trope "What if Rush had said something like this about Sasha or Malia?" because we all know that if Rush had said something this absolutely tasteless, the left would not REST until he had been removed from the airwaves once and for all.

I don't care who you are or which side of the aisle you are on...political kids are OFF LIMITS! I don't care if it is Chelsea or Amy Carter or Sasha and Malia OR Bristol and Willow Palin - KIDS ARE OFF LIMITS! They didn't chose their parents or their parents political careers and to make them the butt of your jokes is the lowest of the low.

David Letterman should be ashamed of himself and anyone who defends this behavior is engaging in the most boorish of behavior. I said it before and I will say it again - THERE IS NO EXCUSE! Although I have no doubts that Anonymous from St. Paul will attempt like crazy to do just that.....

Well Now.....

2009-06-12T17:24:00.000-05:00

Well, well, well.....

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama says he has lost confidence in the inspector general who investigates AmeriCorps and other national service programs and has told Congress he is removing him from the position.

Obama's move follows an investigation by IG Gerald Walpin finding misuse of federal grants by a nonprofit education group led by Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, who is an Obama supporter and former NBA basketball star.

Now half of me is curious as to how the people who called for President Bush's impeachment for doing the same thing are going to react to this, the other half of me realizes that I already know what the response will be.....stone, dead, graveyard silence.

And before you all cry "but wait you defended Bush when HE did it" let me just remind you that there is a little bit of difference between the two situations. These cases no where NEAR identical....when President Bush fired the AG's a few years back he fired a large number of them and NONE of the fired AG's were investigating supporters of the then President. While the larger point that the IG and the AG's before him serve at the pleasure of the President remains, when the President fires an IG or AG when he is in the middle of an investigation that just HAPPENS to center around a support of said President, you know a few eyebrows SHOULD be raised in the media - and you expect it in the blogosphere.

That said, I have no doubts that the left will remain deadly silent on an issue that had them HOWLING with indignation a short two years ago. Which again shows exactly where their priciples (and their priorities) really are...

But What KIND of Reform Is it?

2009-06-12T09:10:00.002-05:00

Nicholas Kristof, writing in the NY Times yesterday doubles down on Canadian Style health care with a column under the headline "This Time We Won't Scare Off". In it he talks about one woman who had a positive experience with the system as if that one story will be enough to off sent the hundreds of reports of bad experiences with the system (many of which I have reported here). Meanwhile, President Obama was back on the campaign trail in Green Bay Wisconsin trying to sell his nationalized health care system to the American people. One of the comments that he made (in addressing the critics of his plan) was the comment that "no one in DC" is proposing socialized medicine. Or really Mr. President? Why is it then that your Administration met with the Jack Layton, the ND member of Parliment, who drew up THEIR socialized medical program? Mr. Layton even contradicted the President with this comment prior to his meetings WITH the Obama Administration.

"We know the Americans can't just simply adopt our model, walk it across the border and put it in place," Layton said in an interview Saturday after making a speech to the Ontario NDP provincial council in Toronto.
"But the principles of universality, of access and of insuring that health care's available to everybody, those kinds of principles are very much motivating the Obama administration."

Emphasis mine. Another meme that the President and his sycophants are perpuating is the meme that there are no alternatives being proposed. The only truth to that comment is that there are no alternatives that THE MEDIA IS REPORTING! The real truth is that there are alternatives as this op-ed shows.

To be effective, health care reform must include insurance coverage for everyone, encourage prevention measures, and reform the inefficiencies in our system to ensure the future strength of our economy. CPR—Coverage, Prevention, Reform—is a plan I have proposed that sets up a system where every American will be required to purchase meaningful health insurance to ensure each family will be protected against bankruptcy if a family member becomes seriously ill or injured. No family should lose their home or life-savings because of illness or injury. For those who may not be able to afford this plan, you will have assistance getting coverage. This proposal also aggressively focuses on the need for more robust preventive care and creates incentives for people and businesses to work toward better health sooner, rather than later when such measures may not work and crisis treatment is much more costly. By offering first-dollar coverage for early health screenings and immunizations, this program will create the foundation for healthy lifestyles and reduce the need for later treatments. Further, by rewarding employees for taking part in employer-sponsored programs, which often include programs to help people quit smoking, fitness club membership options, and affordable access to programs like Weight Watchers, CPR creates incentives that will motivate Americans to take control of and improve their personal health. The third component of CPR entails much needed reform of the way we pay for health care in this country. As it stands now, health care constitutes 17% of the U.S. economy, an amount that totals more than $8,000 annually for every person in the U.S. We already have more than $38 trillion in promised Medicare benefits over the next 75 years that we don’t know how to pay for. The President himself has stated, "The biggest threat to our nation’s balance sheet is the skyrocketing cost of health care." We don’t need more health care that spends more taxpayer dollars to grow government; we need better health care that offers Americans peace of mind and quality care at prices they can afford.

This is coming from the President's first pick for the Commerce Secretary. But wait - the sycophants say - the President says that this is going to save everyone (including the Government) money. Well I think we should wait for the CBO to weigh in on this to be certain, but if past performance (of the President's cost savings claims) are any indication, the CBO is going to be singing a different tune - AGAIN!

Senator Gregg closes with this thought.

Reform starts with paying for quality, not quantity. According to a study at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, as much as $750 billion is spent each year on procedures or health-related services that don’t necessarily help patients get better. For example, when discharging patients, hospitals have an obligation to provide patients with a care plan to ensure they don’t end up readmitted. However, Medicare pays more to hospitals when a patient ends up back in the hospital. And physicians are paid more when they order more tests, procedures and office visits, whether you need them or not.

Ask yourself: Would you pay your dinner bill if the waiter spilled your first plate all over the floor, brought you a replacement plate, and then charged you double? We have the information and ability to change how we pay for health care; we just need to begin implementing the policies to do it, such as informing providers and the public of their performance compared to other providers in their locality and around the country. Payment incentives can also be instituted to improve care by encouraging physicians to coordinate care for patients, thereby eliminating unnecessary procedures and tests. Efforts such as these will improve quality and reduce costs.

President Obama has said that health care reform needs to be passed "right away". The last time we heard that it was the stimulus package and we all know how well that has worked - right? Rather than rush this bill throw and get even more flawed legislationi (like the stimulus) let's take the time to thoroughly and completely discuss ALL options for health care reform. After all, if the reform is that necessary - isn't it a good idea to make sure that everyone's concerns are addressed?

Founders Morning Quote

2009-06-12T09:03:00.000-05:00

"The hour is fast approaching, on which the Honor and Success of this army, and the safety of our bleeding Country depend. Remember officers and Soldiers, that you are Freemen, fighting for the blessings of Liberty - that slavery will be your portion, and that of your posterity, if you do not acquit yourselves like men."

--George Washington, General Orders, August 23, 1776

PayWhat?????

2009-06-11T09:24:00.002-05:00

So President Obama announced his PayGo plan. The media reaction has been less than laudatory - almost (dare I say it) critical of a PayGo plan that does NOT Pay as you Go.....

The AP said - “President Barack Obama on Tuesday proposed budget rules that would allow Congress to borrow tens of billions of dollars and put the nation deeper in debt to jump-start the administration’s emerging health care overhaul. The “pay-as-you-go” budget formula plan is significantly weaker than a proposal Obama issued with little fanfare last month. It would carve out about $2.5 trillion worth of exemptions for Obama’s priorities over the next decade. His health care reform plan also would get a green light to run big deficits in its early years. But over a decade, Congress would have to come up with money to cover those early year deficits.”

So he proposes a "pay as you go" plan that OK's billions of dollars in borrowing...how is that paying as you go?

The Washington Post reports that Congressional DEMOCRATS are pointing out the borrowing loopholes -

And while the proposal found favor in the House, it faced serious obstacles in the Senate, where several key senators said they would oppose it.

"I'm not for waiving PAYGO for $3.5 trillion of items, much of which I think ought to be paid for," said Senate Budget Committee chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.). "I don't think at this point we can afford not to pay for those very large expenditures."

Coming one day after Obama vowed to shovel money from the economic stimulus package out the door even more quickly, yesterday's call for fiscal rectitude also drew catcalls from Republicans.

"The president continues to display a frightening ability to say one thing, yet do the exact opposite," said Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.). "It's frankly insulting that a president who is on a path to bankrupting our government would try to play the role of fiscal hawk."

One independent analyst put it more bluntly when she said "This is like quitting drinking, but making an exception for beer and hard liquor," said Maya MacGuineas, president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

Meanwhile that ultra conservative rag the New York Times had this to say about the "PayGo" proposal.

During the first four months of his administration, President Obama has committed roughly $1 trillion in federal spending – a $787 billion economic recovery package, and $350 billion in money to bail out the nation’s banks. But on Tuesday, Mr. Obama was talking about saving money, not spending it.

Speaking from the East Room of the White House, the president announced he is sending legislation to Congress to restore the 1990s era “pay as you go’’ law, known as Paygo. The law, in effect from 1990 to 2002, required that any new entitlement spending or tax cuts be offset with by entitlement increases or tax cuts.

“The ‘pay as you go’ principle is very simple,’’ Mr. Obama said. “Congress can only spend a dollar if it saves a dollar elsewhere. This principle guides responsible families managing a budget. And it is no coincidence that this rule was in place when we moved from record deficits to record surpluses in the 1990s - and that when this rule was abandoned, we returned to record deficits that doubled the national debt.’’

But critics of Paygo say it is not simple at all. Brian Riedl, a budget analyst at the conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation, said the Paygo law required Congress to make across-the-board cuts in entitlement spending at the end of any year in which the Congressional Budget Office found that Paygo requirements had not been met. He said lawmakers responded each time by passing another bill, waiving the Paygo requirements.
“Paygo is a gimmick,’’ Mr. Riedl said.

Emphasis mine. CBS - a long time cheerleader for the President explains why this PayGo proposal is a gimmick...

But briefing reporters, White House Budget Director Peter Orszag conceded some of PAYGO’s limitations. It doesn’t cover discretionary spending.

“PAYGO only applies to the mandatory side of the budget and to revenue,” said Orszag. That means entitlement programs such as Medicare and revenue programs like taxes. It’ll cover the compulsory health care plan the president wants Congress to pass – but over five or 10 years. In a single year, the plan may exceed PAYGO limits.

In addition, about 40 percent of the federal budget, programs for education, energy, the military, etc., would not be covered by PAYGO, said Orszag. A different set of Senate and House rules apply to those programs, he said.

As for existing deficits and the National Debt, which today stands at an all-time high of $11.39 trillion, PAYGO has no effect, other than to slow its growth by restraining some government spending. Orszag says the government is already in a deep economic hole and PAYGO is intended to stop further digging.

Except as CBS pointed out it does NOT stop further digging. If it did, it would cover ALL aspects of the federal budget, not just small portions of it.

If President Obama were really sincere about the need for PayGo he would have never proposed all of the billions of dollars in deficit he has proposed, nor would he have signed the pork laden "stimulus" bill or any of the bail out bills. No - President Obama is not serious about PayGo - he is only throwing this out now as a bone to the Tea Party Movement. He is tacking back to the political middle because he understands that many voters are disappointed with the growth of government spending.

He's just another politician who campaigns on what the voters want to hear - only to ignore (or pay lip service to) those voters once he gets into office. I hate to say I told you so but.....

Deja Vu All Over Again

2009-06-10T21:21:00.004-05:00

Monday night we had a bunch of folks over to the Logical Household for dinner. A lot of interesting conversations, but the one that really interested me was listening to a group of folks who had lived their early working lives during the early 1970's. Now I was still blissfully unaware of how bad things were as a teen-ager (oh sure I heard the news stories and heard my parents worry about how to make ends meet) but these folks were working or just marrieds and starting families during that time and the stories that they told about the hyper inflation and high interest rates were eye-opening. Mostly due to the similarities to today. Then I read this.....

Here we stand more than a year into a grave economic crisis with a projected budget deficit of 13% of GDP. That's more than twice the size of the next largest deficit since World War II. And this projected deficit is the culmination of a year when the federal government, at taxpayers' expense, acquired enormous stakes in the banking, auto, mortgage, health-care and insurance industries.

With the crisis, the ill-conceived government reactions, and the ensuing economic downturn, the unfunded liabilities of federal programs -- such as Social Security, civil-service and military pensions, the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation, Medicare and Medicaid -- are over the $100 trillion mark. With U.S. GDP and federal tax receipts at about $14 trillion and $2.4 trillion respectively, such a debt all but guarantees higher interest rates, massive tax increases, and partial default on government promises.
But as bad as the fiscal picture is, panic-driven monetary policies portend to have even more dire consequences. We can expect rapidly rising prices and much, much higher interest rates over the next four or five years, and a concomitant deleterious impact on output and employment not unlike the late 1970s.

This is not a blame Bush or blame Obama thing....BOTH administrations have had a hand in this mess - and then there is the FED.

What this IS about, is the fact that this country is in need of an economic wake up call! We need to quit spending beyond our means and we need to setting priorities. What is the priority...keeping Medicare and Social Security solvent or Universal Health Care? Because I am telling you now if we try to do everything we will fail at doing them all because there are not enough resources. It's that simple.

The Culture of Corruption

2009-06-10T20:36:00.003-05:00

From the in-box comes this Top 15 list of the latest corrupt Republicans in Congress.

14. Major Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-C.A., caused an uproar on the hill and in the national media when she played politics with accusations of torture by the Bush administration. When confronted with fact that she herself knew but failed to raise issue concerning waterboarding (which she considers torture – on terrorism suspects) back in 2002 when first informed, she insisted that the CIA failed to inform her and was known to mislead the congress. Leon Panetta, who served with Pelosi in Congress as a fellow California Democrat, had issued a memo to CIA staff Friday reiterating that agency records show "CIA officers briefed Pelosi truthfully in 2002 on the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, describing the enhanced techniques that had been employed.

13. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., is being investigated by the House Ethics Committee in at least four areas, including his reported failure to properly report income taxes on a Caribbean villa in the Dominican Republic; use of four, rent-controlled apartments in Harlem; questions about an off-shore firm asking Rangel for special tax exemptions; and whether Rangel improperly used House stationary to solicit donations for a school of public affairs named after him at City College of New York.
http://www.foxnews. com/politics/ elections/ 2009/01/04/ rangel-ethics- probe-incomplete -despite- pelosis-predicti on/

12. Obama's auto industry adviser, Steven Rattner is linked to NY pension fund pay-to-play probe: http://abcnews. go.com/Business/ wireStory? id=7361490

11. In the ongoing federal Blagojevich corruption case, candidate Jesse Jackson Jr. is under investigation for offering to raise $5 million for Obama's vacant senate seat. Excerpt: "At first he denied it, but now it seems his denials were in vain." http://www.puma08. com/2009/ 04/13/jesse- jackson-jr- barack-obamas- campaign- muscle-offered- blago-6-million- for-obamas- seat/

10. Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius (D-KS), Obama's pick for Secretary of Health and Human Services in now under investigation concerning misuse of $713,000 in extra Medicaid funds . . . at a time when no Medicaid funds existed? http://www.noquarte rusa.net/ blog/2009/ 03/19/kathleen- sebeliuss- political- cronyism- problem-obama- appointee- to-hhs-may- have-misused- medicaid- funds/comment- page-1/

9. Impeached/ removed governor Blagojevich appointed candidate Senator Roland Burris who now acknowledges a deeper contacts with Blagojevich allies after initially portraying himself as a surprise pick for the controversial seat the former governor is accused of trying to sell. http://irishspy. typepad.com/ public_secrets/ 2009/02/culture- of-corruption- watch.html

8. The infamous and soon to be convicted former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, who was impeached and ousted, has been indicted on charges he engaged in a "wide-ranging scheme to deprive the people of Illinois of honest government." http://www.foxnews. com/politics/ 2009/04/02/ blagojevich- indicted- federal-corrupti on-charges/

7. Upon the announcement of Obama's Labor secretary nominee; Rep. Hilda Solis, her husband rushed to resolve a 16 year tax liens against his business paying $6,400.
http://www.usatoday .com/news/ washington/ 2009-02-05- solis-husband- taxes_N.htm

6. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson; Obama's initial choice as Commerce Secretary, stepped aside because of a federal grand jury investigating of kickbacks of a financial firm which improperly won more than $1.4 million in work for the state of New Mexico shortly after making contributions to political action committees of Bill Richardson.
http://www.washingt onpost.com/ wp-dyn/content/ article/2008/ 12/15/AR20081215 02940.html

5. Treasury Secretary designee Tim Geithner’s on Nov. 21, 2008, Geithner paid $25,970 in these overdue taxes plus interest after being notified in 2006 by the IRS that he owed self-employment taxes and interest for 2003 and 2004.
http://blogs. abcnews.com/ politicalpunch/ 2009/01/a- rocky-road- fo.html

4. Health Secretary Nominee Tom Daschle’s abruptly withdrew his nomination following an admission that he failed to pay about $140,000 in back taxes. $70,000 unpaid taxes.
http://abcnews. go.com/Politics/ President44/ story?id= 6795650&page=1

3. Obama's nominee to be chief performance officer; Nancy Killefer, withdrew her nomination following the revelation that she had a $946.69 lien on her property in 2005 for failure to pay taxes.
http://blogs. abcnews.com/ politicalpunch/ 2009/02/another- tax-pro.html

2. Senator Christopher Dodd was among several high-profile federal officials who got loans on favorable terms from now-failed mortgage giant Countrywide Financial Corp., he's been sought to set the record straight by releasing his mortgage papers but after 6 months still hasn't.
http://www.courant. com/news/ opinion/editoria ls/hc-doddmortga ge.art.artfeb07, 0,1266337. story

1. Democratic senatorial candidate Al Franken who's Minnesota Senate seat is in dispute has admitted to owing $ 50,000 in back taxes, interest, and penalties.
http://www.topix. com/us/politics/ 2009/02/al- franken-admits- 50-000-tax- debt

Oh and let's not forget Senator Roland Burris (D-Blago) who, come to find out, DID offer to raise money for disgraced Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich after swearing (under oath) to the Illinois legislature that he did no such thing.

What's that you say????? They're not Republicans????? You say they are all Democrats?????? But that can't be - after all Nancy Pelosi swore that she would personally "drain the swamp" of corruption.......

Back to the drawing board eh?

Founders Morning Quote

2009-06-10T09:32:00.001-05:00

"Government, in my humble opinion, should be formed to secure and to enlarge the exercise of the natural rights of its members; and every government, which has not this in view, as its principal object, is not a government of the legitimate kind."

--James Wilson, Lectures on Law, 1790

Founders Morning Quote

2009-06-09T09:17:00.000-05:00

"A free people [claim] their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate."

--Thomas Jefferson, Rights of British America, 1774

The True Wonder Is....

2009-06-09T08:33:00.002-05:00

I got an email yesterday from my old friend Warren "Bones" Bonesteel. Bones is a retired USMC Sgt, a published author and an all around great thinker. Warren has retired from published writing and just about everything else, he does still send out occasional thoughts to friends, former colleagues and anyone else who happens to be fortunate enough to be in his email address book. Bones sent the following email out yesterday and with his gracious permission, I am posting it here. Any emphasis throughout is mine.

The true wonder is...

The rhetorical and political attacks on right-wing 'extremists' by left-wing 'extremist' politicians, activists, media outlets and bloggers are creating the environments for the very things they fear. The same is true with the right's rhetorical and political attacks on the left.

If both sides don't stop and take a deep breath and think about the consequences of their own words and deeds, open violence and civil war are inevitable. The Tiller murder and the demonization of more than a hundred million Americans because of it? The eco-terrorist's destruction of the environment in the name of protecting the environment? The stalking and 'mobbing' of ideological opponents by right-wing and left-wing 'extremists'?
The violent and deadly Muslim attacks on innocent Americans? The miltarization of civilian police departments, with SWAT teams 'accidentally' killing more than three hundred innocent Americans in their own homes, each and every year? All of that and more are only the beginning of the violence that we will see and experience for ourselves.

An extreme pov? No. It is historically inevitable. America is not immune from history. The world is not a nice, quiet, middle-class suburb or a gated community. Violence is always the result when opposing ideologies indulge in such rhetorical and political attacks upon one another as are seen in today's American political and social landscape. Historically, when the government begins to exert control over the private lives of its citizens? When its civilian police force become militarized? Historically, when opposition parties begin to actively and openly dehumanize and demonize their ideological opponents, as is now occuring in America? Such things are always a prelude to violence and to civil war.

Both of the major political ideologies in America will bear full and complete responsibility for the death and destruction that is now almost inevitable. The poor and inept leadership by members of the political, social and intellectual leadership in America has led us all to this point in history.

You complain about the economy and about big government spending... but you vigorously defend your own debt and credit-driven lifestyles. You quite correctly accuse your ideological opponents of corruption, but violently defend your own. You complain when another ideology legislates a law that restricts your own freedom, but you vigorously pursue the legislation of laws which restrict the freedoms of others. Thus, you now live in a society where anything not approved by the government is a crime - and there is very little that the government approves. Then, you wonder why America has the highest incarceration rate of any nation on earth. Are Americans so evil that we must lock them all up? Or have we imprisoned nearly two million people just because you don't approve of them? The majority of American 'criminals' who are imprisoned have performed no violent crime nor have they committed fraud or interfered in the freedoms of others.

You think you are free...you've been told that you are free. ...but you cannot make a move without some form of government approval; paying a tax or a fee or getting a license or a permit. Every move you make is regulated by the government. The very air you breath is now being taxed.

But, in the midst of your Keynesian-consumerist driven and government-controlled lifestyles, you think that you are free...and you think that you are just...and you think that you are patriotic, freedom-loving fools...and you believe that anyone who disagrees with you is an unpatriotic 'extremist.'

As Americans have continued to elect and re-elect such inept and corrupt leaders as we now have in Washington and in state legislatures around the nation, we each bear responsibility for the inevitable result of such leadership. If we wish to place the blame for the current state of affairs on anyone, we need only look in the mirror.

The wonder isn't that America will experience another civil war or possibly break up into individual nation-states. The true wonder, historically, is that America has held together as long as it has.

Disclosure: Although I registered as a Republican for a local election in 2004, I am actually a rare breed these days. I'm a 'Jeffersonian Democrat.' A true Classical Liberal. Of course, from the pov of our government, that makes me an enemy of the state. From the pov of the political right, I'm a left-wing liberal. From the pov of the left, I'm a right-wing extremist. The Cassandra Effect does apply, here. You see, your own hubris and ideologies have blinded you. Most of you believe, in complete denial of all of the facts and against all of the evidence of mankind's recorded history, that 'this sort of thing just can't happen in America.'

I've got news for you.

That paradigm is about to crash and burn around your ears.

I Can See Clearly Now

2009-06-08T09:14:00.001-05:00

More fantastic news on the Adult Stem Cell front. First is the news that contact lenses cultured with stem cells has restored sight to three people in less than one month!

THREE Australians have had their sight restored thanks to their own stem cells and ordinary contact lenses.

Although the novel technique was used to reverse blinding corneal disease, it promises to be a quick, painless and cheap treatment for other visual disorders. It may even be useful for repairing damaged skin, the researchers reported today in the journal Transplantation...

According to team member Stephanie Watson - an opthalmic surgeon with Sydney's Prince of Wales Hospital - two of the three patients were legally blind in the treated eye; they can now read big letters on the eye chart. The third could read the top few rows of the chart but is now able to pass the vision test for a driving license.

While it is way too early to tell if the correction will hold, this is extremely promising research and the most important part is where these stem cells came from...

To obtain the stem cells, Dr Watson took less than a millimeter of tissue from the side of each patients' cornea. Working with colleagues at POWH and UNSW, he cultured stem cells from the tissue in extended wear contact lenses.

Dr Watson then cleaned the surface of the patients' corneas and inserted the lenses. Within 10 to 14 days the stem cells began to attach to the cornea, replenishing damaged cells. Satisfied that the stem cells were doing their job, Dr Watson removed the lenses and the patients have been seeing with new eyes for the last 18 months.

Another win for non-emb ryonic stem cell treatments came out of China as reported by the BBC.

Chinese scientists have given cells from adult pigs the ability to turn into any tissue in the body, just like embryonic stem cells.

They hope the breakthrough could aid research into human disease, and the breeding of animals for organ transplants for humans.

It may also enable the development of pigs that are resistant to diseases such as swine flu.

While I am not fond of the idea of breeding animals for human organ transplants, this is still great news. If we can breed pigs resistant to diseases like swine flu, we can make the world better for both humans and animals. However the downside of human/porcine transplants is still a wee bit troubling.

Dr Sebastien Farnaud, science director of the Dr Hadwen Trust for Humane Research, said: "Persisting with highly speculative research that would see us use sentient animals as little more that living organ grow-bags, is not only ethically unsupportable but also scientifically dubious.

"Creating pig stem cells does not necessarily remove the risk of organ rejection but even more worrying is the risk of infecting patients and the wider public with pig viruses."

While the advocates of human embryonic stem cell research are still talking "promise", these two articles give us more evidence of the realities of NON-embryonic stem cell treatments. It is past time to give up on the pipe dream and latch on to the reality of ethical treatments!

Founders Morning Quote

2009-06-08T09:02:00.000-05:00

"If men through fear, fraud or mistake, should in terms renounce and give up any essential natural right, the eternal law of reason and the great end of society, would absolutely vacate such renunciation; the right to freedom being the gift of God Almighty, it is not in the power of Man to alienate this gift, and voluntarily become a slave."

--John Adams, Rights of the Colonists, 1772

Selling A Pig In A Poke

2009-06-07T19:28:00.004-05:00

Joe Puente is obviously no fan of Jason Chaffetz as his latest screed in City Weeky shows(for my MN readers City Weekly is Utah's City Pages).

Well, Jason’s at it again. He has sent out a letter in which he criticizes the stimulus package for being both too big and ineffective. He also claims that “The President projected that his stimulus package would prevent the unemployment rate from exceeding 8%.” (emphasis added)

Oh, did he? Actually, no, he didn’t. At least I haven’t been able to find a direct quote from the President or anyone on his staff to that effect. Just third party hearsay from the blogosphere (by the way, blogs are not usually credible sources of information as they are largely used to express opinion that may or may not be based on actual facts). If any readers can find me a direct quote from a credible and verifiable source, I’d really appreciate it. Now, what did the President say?

I have a copy of the letter in question. It is a letter that Rep. Chaffetz sent out to all constituents on his mailing list. It also included a link to a graph very similar to the one below.

Mr. Puente is being more than a little disingenuous when he claims that the President "never said that" other than third party hearsay in the blogosphere when this report is out there for the Googling. The report was created for and approved BY the then President-elect of the United States in order to garner support for his very ambitious Stimulus package! He then went on the radio two weeks before his inaguaration to tout THIS VERY REPORT and he echoed it's claims of massive numbers of jobs it would create or save and thus keeping unemployment low!!!!!

If there is a real discussion to be had on the effects of the stimulus, we have to get beyond Mr. Puente's hyperbolic partisanship ("Ya know, one of these days all of his lying and political bullshit is going to come back and bite Chaffetz right in his Republican ass and I plan on being there when it happens.") and look at some economic realities (HT to my favorite economic professor King Banaian)

Everyone wants to know when the U.S. economy will start growing. I will focus on a related question: when will the stimulus law begin to have a significant positive effect on U.S. economic growth? And could it have come sooner if the Administration had done something different?

I believe the Administration made an enormous mistake in its legislative implementation of the stimulus. As a result, the boost to GDP will come six to nine months later than it needed to (maybe more). Given the President’s desire to do a large fiscal stimulus, and given his policy preferences, he could have had a different bill that would have been producing significant GDP growth beginning now, rather than in the middle of next year. That’s a huge mistake with real consequences for the U.S. and global economies.

One thing that I told many friends (during the campaign and during the stimulus debate) was that the economy is not something that can be turned on a dime. It is not like a sports car - if fact it is more like a super-tanker! It is just too big for any single piece of legislation to impact in anything less than 24 months, so to expect (or to give the expectation as the Obama graph did) that it can "cap" unemployment within 6 months of this bill being enacted is naive at best. Conversely to declare the stimulus to be a success or a failure at this stage is equally naive. Oh to be sure we can take a look at individual benchmarks - such as the creation of so-called "shovel ready" jobs and get a foreshadowing of the overall success of the plan (these so-called "shovel ready" jobs were jobs that were supposedly immediately available and yet we have not seen any of these jobs to date). Even the Chairman of the Federal Reserve - an early supporter of the President's Stimulus plan - is starting to see the early indications that the plan was not all it was cracked up to be.

To be honest, I can see where Representative Chaffetz is coming from. If you go strictly based on how the stimulus package was "sold" to us (both by the incoming Obama Administration and the media) then you could say that the stimulus packaged did not live up to it's billing. However, it IS too early to tell how much harm or good will be done to the economy as a result of this economic package. We will most likely start seeing that more clearly next summer - just in time for the 2010 mid-term elections. If it is as bad as many economists think it will be, will Mr. Puente renounce his words? Somehow I doubt it.

Defining A Lobbyist

2009-06-06T14:03:00.004-05:00

My good friend Gary Gross sent me a link to this story on Redstate.

The Connecticut Office of State Ethics (OSE) is poised to investigate and penalize the Diocese of Bridgeport for having the temerity to exercise at least four of the five sections of the First Amendment (religion, speech, assembly, petition).

The story begins earlier this year when Connecticut State Senator Andrew McDonald proposed legislation (S. 1098) that would have forced the Catholic Church, contrary to the church’s doctrine, to relinquish control of parish finances (for those from congregationalist traditions who may not be aware of the organization of Catholic Churches, the Catholic Church, by doctrine, is very hierarchical, with Bishops responsible for all the parishes within the bishopric, and those Bishops reporting on up the line, ultimately to the Vatican. Unlike most protestant demoninations, local parishes exercise little governing control. This is not merely an issue of secular control but one of theological doctrine deeply entwined in the Catholic Church’s views on the role of clergy, the papacy and the church in fulfilling God’s mission). Naturally the church opposed this incursion into its governance and doctrine, with the Bishop urging Catholics to contact their legislators and the Church supporting a mass rally in the state capital.
So the state struck back...

Get that - the STATE introduced a bill that would have forced THE CHURCH to change how it runs it's business. Just another case of how the so-called "separation" of church and state is only there when it is convenient to the state. Now you know why the Danbury Baptist Association was worried...

...From the American Spectator story by Lisa Fabrizio:
It seems that our Diocese of Bridgeport — which in March was forced to marshal the faithful to defend itself from unconstitutional government interference — was notified by the Connecticut Office of State Ethics that it is under investigation for possible violations of the state’s lobbying laws.

Emphasis mine. Remember - the First Amendment reads...

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Congress in this cite also includes the state legislators who must make law that will pass Constitutional muster....

To the Bishop's credit he is not taking this lying down.

Following the surprise introduction of Bill 1098, a proposal that singled out Catholic parishes and would have forced them to reorganize contrary to Church law and the First Amendment, our Diocese responded in the most natural, spontaneous, and frankly, American, of ways: we alerted our membership - in person and through our website; we encouraged them to exercise their free speech by contacting their elected representatives; and, we organized a rally at the State Capitol…

On April 23, 2009, the Diocese received a letter from Thomas K. Jones, Ethics Enforcement Officer for the OSE, stating that it was “the subject of an Office of State Ethics evaluation,” which was “being conducted to ascertain whether the Diocese had violated [Connecticut General Statutes Sections] 1-94, 1-95 and 1-96 by failing to register as a lobbyist in Connecticut, by failing to submit all other appropriate lobbyist filings, and by failing to follow all applicable registration procedures.”

The OSE claims the Diocese acted as a “lobbyist” by: participating in a March 11, 2009, State Capitol rally against Raised Bill 1098 (the unconstitutional attempt to reorganize Catholic parishes contrary to Catholic teaching and tradition); making statements on its website urging its members to contact their elected representatives to oppose Raised Bill 1098; and making statements on its website urging its members to contact their legislators to oppose another bill, Raised Bill 899 (regarding same-sex marriage).

It is interesting to note that the House and Senate sponsors of this bill are both gay.....

How this investigation plays out will be telling not only for the Church but also for ANY grass roots activist group out there. Are you a dog club that wants to lobby against Breed Specific Legislation - you could be charged as being lobbyists! Are you a Scout troop looking to advocate for more state parks - careful kids you could be lobbyists as well!

This is just one more example of big government that has totally gotten out of control. It is far past time for the voters to issue a stern reminder to their elected legislators that they work for US and not the other way around.

Oh and for the Church - it is time to wake up and realize that what government does effects us as well!

Jump, Jive and Wail

2009-06-05T20:52:00.003-05:00

Jazz music lost ANOTHER legend yesterday...tenor saxophonist Sam Butera.

Sam Butera, a hard-swinging tenor saxophonist who formed a rowdy and successful onstage partnership with entertainers Louis Prima and Keely Smith in the 1950s, died Wednesday at a hospital in Las Vegas. He was 81.

He had Alzheimer's disease, according to a report in the Las Vegas Sun.

Prima, nearly 20 years older than Butera, was a composer ("Sing, Sing, Sing"), trumpeter, singer and irrepressible stage performer, a combination of Louis Armstrong and Jerry Lewis. His career was on the wane when he teamed in 1954 with Butera, who a few years earlier had been named the country's outstanding teenage jazz musician by Look magazine. Both men were New Orleans natives of Italian heritage.

"Sing, Sing, Sing" was a high school band staple when I was growing up. It gave you the opportunity to feature your drum section AND the horns and saxophones (which I played). Louis Prima has long been a personal favorite because of the sense of fun that the entire band put into their music as can be seen in the clip below.

Louis Prima - Sam Butera - Night Train
Uploaded by rocknroll50 - See the latest featured music videos.

You can also hear the virtuiosity of Butera in the Prima version of "Jump, Jive and Wail"

I can only begin to imagine the raccous jam session that will be happening in the heavenlies tonight! Koko, Louis (who died in 1978) and now Sam.......

RIP Koko

2009-06-04T22:54:00.003-05:00

Jazz aficionados (of which I am one) are in mourning over the loss of one of the great female voices of the genre - Koko Taylor.

Koko Taylor, a Chicago musical icon who became one of the most revered female blues vocalists of her time with signature hits such as "Wang Dang Doodle," "I'm a Woman" and "Hey Bartender," died Wednesday at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago of complications from gastrointestinal surgery. She was 80.

Growing up in Chicago, Koko was a legend.

RIP Koko - you will be missed.

Founders Morning Quote

2009-06-04T14:01:00.001-05:00

It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes.
A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world.
Thomas Jefferson

Founders Morning Quote

2009-06-03T09:15:00.001-05:00

"One single object ... [will merit] the endless gratitude of the society: that of restraining the judges from usurping legislation."

--Thomas Jefferson, letter to Edward Livingston, March 25, 1825

Doin' Work

2009-06-02T22:01:00.003-05:00

One of the true pleasures of my move to Utah has been the opportunity to meet this wonderful gentleman.

In his poem, “The Road Not Taken,” Robert Frost paints the perfect picture of today’s debate on America’s energy future. Here, Frost describes two paths leading in two different directions, “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.”

Much like the subject of Frost’s poem, America today finds itself at a crossroads. There are two diverging paths we can choose with regard to this nation’s energy policy. The road we ultimately choose will indeed make all the difference.

I have had the extreme pleasure of speaking with the Congressman a couple of times and I can not begin to express how impressed I am by his gentle manner and his keen intellect. He reminds me of a dear friend back in the Minnesota Legislature. Another way where Congressman Bishop reminds me of that dear friend is his grasp of energy policy.

Despite growing job losses, some in Washington, D.C. have decided a recession is the ideal time to impose a massive new cap and trade energy scheme. Cap and trade is Washington-lingo where the federal government imposes a federal ceiling on carbon emissions and then sets up a complicated market for entities to buy and sell the right to emit carbon at levels under the cap.

Going down this road leads to a regressive national energy tax that intentionally increases energy prices on every American consumer, restricts economic growth, and aims to dictate and regulate Americans into a new “green” energy future. To put this in more concrete terms, some studies indicate the Democrats cap and trade proposal will raise electricity prices by 90% and gasoline prices by 74%. Now for some folks, energy price hikes of this nature may be more of an inconvenience than a hardship, but for low-income families already spending one out every five dollars on energy bills, these increases will have a devastating impact on already struggling family finances.

Emphasis mine. Now my friend Representative Beard and I have had more than a few discussions about using the "R" word when discussing the Democrats inclination to raise the so-called "sin" taxes but in this case Congressman Bishop is correct. Cap and Trade will have a devastating impact on the people that the Democrats claim they care the most about - the poor and the elderly. Anyone who is already dealing with a tight budget will have to make the life and death choice between food and heat their home when it is 20 below zero and cooling in it when the temperature is over 100 degrees with 95% humidity!

However (and this is what I love the most about Congressman Bishop) the critique is not the only thing that Congressman Bishop brings to the table - he also highlights some of the solutions that the "party of no" has brought forward that the "Democratic" leadership of the House has said no hearings to.

Representing just one of the thousand-plus bills the so-called “Party of No” has introduced so far this Congress, the Congressional Western Caucus and the Republican Study Committee recently introduced the American Energy Innovation Act (H.R. 2300). This bill provides a competing energy vision for the country; one we believe is shared by the majority of the American people.

Our proposal provides a comprehensive, forward-thinking approach to how we address today’s energy and job creation needs, and one that goes in an entirely different direction than the Democrat’s approach. The path we believe we should travel looks to innovation, conservation, and production as the means to greater economic prosperity, a cleaner environment, real job creation and realistic environmental achievements in the near future.

This alternate energy vision is premised on the idea that tax increases never lead to job creation and that arbitrary government mandates only stifle American ingenuity. It is based on historical evidence that progress in the environmental arena follows economic prosperity, not the other way around.

Congressman Bishop has said before, that solutions are needed - that the Republican Party can not just be about "no" and they can not just be about attacking their opponents (gee now where have I heard THAT before????)...they have to provide solutions. The American Energy Innovation Act is an option for a solution that you will never hear about from the "traditional" media sources which is one reason why the internet has taken off as a source of information. The Republican Party needs to get on the solutions train fast. The American people want answers - they want SHARED sacrifices - not sacrifice for the voters but none for the politicians.

The voters are willing - is DC?

Founders Morning Quote

2009-06-02T08:57:00.000-05:00

"The truth is, that, even with the most secure tenure of office, during good behavior, the danger is not, that the judges will be too firm in resisting public opinion, and in defence of private rights or public liberties; but, that they will be ready to yield themselves to the passions, and politics, and prejudices of the day."

--Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution, 1833

This quote is pertinant to a couple of hot topics today - one being (naturally) the pending Supreme Court confirmation but the other.....

Well that is for you to find out later......

Two Wrongs...

2009-06-01T20:42:00.003-05:00

Yesterday some so-called "pro-life" advocate decided that vengeance was his and he killed late term abortion provider George Tiller as he greeted guests at the door of the church that he attended. I would think it goes without saying that as a right to life advocate myself, I can not condone the shooters actions. I find the taking of this man's life to be as reprehensible as I found Mr. Tiller's "business". Taking an abortionists life is no more acceptable (to a pro-life advocate) than the taking of an child's life!

I have written in these pages before that the taking of a life is contrary to Christian theology (which brings one to wonder about the church that Mr. Tiller attended) but just as his actions were against Christian theology, so to is the killing of this abortionist. Both men have many sins to atone and one can only hope that at some time before his life was ended, Mr. Tiller did repent of his sins - but that is not something that any of us here on earth will know any time soon.

All that said, to use the leftist logic that Bill O'Reilly is somehow responsible for the murder of Mr. Tiller is about as "logical" as blaming Code Pink or Cindy Sheehan for the murder of a military recruiter in Little Rock!

Come on guys - can we please get real here.....

Founders Morning Quote

2009-06-01T09:45:00.000-05:00

"[T]here is not a syllable in the plan under consideration which directly empowers the national courts to construe the laws according to the spirit of the Constitution."

--Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 81, 1788

Personal Cause Time

2009-05-31T18:44:00.003-05:00

A couple of years ago, I wrote a post about an issue that touched me greatly at the time. The post was about a human trafficking as a sex slavery ring was broken up in Minneapolis.

"The women came mostly from Mexico and Central America.
When they arrived in Minnesota, the women had their passports and other identifying documents taken away and they were forced into a world of prostitution. In one night, two women serviced more than 80 men in a south Minneapolis house." (emphasis mine)

Well starting today, you actually can do something to help children who are forced into sex slavery. Stephen Baldwin (of the Baldwin acting family) is taking part in this year's "I'm A Celebrity - GET ME OUT OF HERE". Baldwin is competing for the charity Love146. The charity announced the support here.

So why am I telling you about a reality show? Because Stephen Baldwin is playing for Love146! That's pretty exciting. The other exciting thing is that it seems America actually gets to decide who stays or leaves. Did you ever think that you could further abolition by watching a reality TV show? Me neither but hey I'm willing to try.

In other Baldwin news (I'm a little weirded out that I just wrote that.) Alec Baldwin has been talking about meeting with Rob Morris and his support of Love146.

News like this is exciting but it takes a movement to abolish slavery. So, to Stephen, Alec, Liz T, Sally R, Spike J and everyone else who raises their voice and joins the movement - Keep going.

One of the ways you can help (besides watching the show and voting to keep Stevie B) on the show is to text the word "Give" to 20222. Your text will donate $5.00 to Love146 to help them bring children out of sex slavery and put them on the road to recovery from the abuse.

If you would rather make a traditional donation (online or via snail mail) or if you want to learn more about Love146, you can find that information here. A link to the Donation page at Love146's website will be on my side bar for the month of June.

Please help these children who are being exploited! Give to Love146 and please vote for Stephen Baldwin on "I'm A Celebrity - GET ME OUT OF HERE!!!!!"

Your Home Is Not Your Own UPDATE

2009-05-31T17:45:00.003-05:00

An update on this post that I put up the other day. San Diego County representatives are saying that the visit stemmed from a parking complaint.

The county official said Jones has got it all wrong and tried to explain the curious line of questioning the county had for the pastor.
Jones said he has been hosting weekly Bible studies in his Bonita home for the past five years, but it wasn't until last month that someone complained about the sessions and county code enforcement went out to investigate.
Every Tuesday night about 15 people drive to Jones’ Bonita home to eat dinner and discuss the Bible. They usually park on Jones' property, he said, but sometimes that parking spills out into the cul-de-sac.
Last month, someone filed a complaint about the number of cars.

OK - I can understand the concern about parking and road access - especially as it may impact emergency access to the neighborhood - however, one has to wonder why the complaining neighbor didn't just come over and talk to the pastor and his wife about his/her concerns.....

10News asked the county official about the officer's line of questioning.
"Did the officer actually do that? Is that part of the requirements to ask those questions?" Reporter Joe Little asked.
"Obviously, I wasn't there, so I can't tell you exactly what was said. However, what our officer was trying to do is establish what the use is so that we know what regulations to actually utilize," explained Chandra Wallar of the county's land use and environment group.
Wallar said it's the officer’s job to determine what kind of event is hosted at Jones’ house to decide what part of county code the event falls under.
"The Bible studies are one that's probably in a very gray area," Waller said.

Gray area???? Here is a hot tip for EVERYONE involved....apply a little common sense here. First off if the Bible study draws 15 people one must assume that at least a few of the visitors are (like the pastor and his wife) married couples driving together! That drops the number of cars by (and I'll be generous here) a third - say 5 cars. Now the pastor and his wife don't drive so that is a 6th car. Based on the picture attached to the story, it looks as if you could fit 3 possibly 4 cars in the driveway. That means we are looking at 5, maybe 6 cars parked in the street. Any of us who lives in a neighborhood with people who have folks over know that 5 or 6 cars is really not a whole lot. Yes it can be an inconvenience at times, but it is usually never a public safety hazard. Now from the other side of the coin, if parking at the pastor's neighborhood is at a premium - why not ride share????? There is a common sense issue that does not involve calling the police OR the county zoning office! All one needs to do is talk to your neighbor - tell the pastor of your concerns. Is that not a logical solution to the "problem"?

Either way, this county employee over-reacted calling a home Bible study a zoning violation. That IS a gross over-reach and another example of out of control government.

Targeting Cancer

2009-05-29T10:20:00.001-05:00

Yet more unheralded non-embryonic stem cell treatments to tell you about today!

Genetically engineered stem cells from bone marrow showed promise as a potential new way to deliver a cancer-killing protein to tumors, British researchers said on Tuesday.

Experiments in cell cultures and in mice showed the adult stem cells — a type known as mesenchymal stem cells — could home in on cancer cells and deliver a lethal protein that attacked only the cancer while sparing normal healthy tissue.

“We’ve developed cells which specifically target cancer through the body and deliver an anti-cancer protein to where it is needed in a seek-and-destroy approach,” said Dr. Michael Loebinger of University College London, who presented his findings at the American Thoracic Society conference in San Diego.

Then there is this new treatment for blocked arteries!

Injecting bone marrow cells into the heart's muscular wall restored blood flow to hearts with blocked arteries for which conventional treatments had proven ineffective, Dutch physicians have reported.

"I think this is very good news for patients who are at the end of the line and have no options left," said Dr. Douwe E. Atsma, an interventional cardiologist at Leiden University Medical Center and an author of the study, which appears in the May 20 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The 50 people in the study, 43 of them men, were experiencing angina, or severe chest pain, because of blockages in their heart arteries. All had undergone several artery-opening procedures, such as angioplasty or bypass surgery, to restore blood flow, but such measures would no longer help them, Atsma said.

Half of the participants received injections of cells taken from their own bone marrow, and the others received inactive cell injections. After three months, the responses were varied, with some participants reporting complete relief and others with partial benefits.

"The most important thing is that the amount of ischemia [artery blockage] was halved" in those given the marrow cells, Atsma said. "The amount of tissue with ischemia was reduced, heart function improved significantly in a small way and their grades of quality of life were higher."

Emphasis mine. This is a huge discovery for people that are unable to undergo heart surgery for whatever reason.

I am going to keep beating this drum because someone needs to. Adult stem cells are producing cures while embryonic stem cells are producing cancers! Isn't it time to end this debate once and for all. HESC needs to be defunded - it's not producing the cures. When will the left acknowledge that simple fact?

More Adult Stem Cell Cures

2009-05-29T09:50:00.003-05:00

The Texas Alliance for Life has a series of YouTube interviews up of Texas citizens who utilized existing adult stem cell cures for injuries and diseases that they are suffering from. The interview that struck me the most was this couple whose son's Sickle Cell Disease was cured thanks to adult stem cells.....

This boy had a disease that 30 years ago would have killed him in his teens is now cured! That can not be emphasized enough....this boy was cured using adult stem cells. Meanwhile we are still hearing about the "potential" of embryonic stem cells. Why are we wasting time and money on embryonic stem cells "potential" when cures are here and NOW with adult stem cells? All I can say is follow the money.....

Founders Evening Quotes

2009-05-28T21:42:00.001-05:00

"It has long, however, been my opinion, and I have never shrunk from its expression ... that the germ of dissolution of our federal government is in the constitution of the federal Judiciary; ... working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped."

--Thomas Jefferson, letter to Charles Hammond, August 18, 1821

About That Global "Warming" I Have Heard So Much About

2009-05-27T23:17:00.000-05:00

Remember the much vaunted IPCC report - the one that swore that global warming was man made and that we had to make drastic changes to our lifestyles because "the planet has a fever". So does Mark Hendrickson - he remembered what was reported so much that he decided to read the report for himself and what he found didn't always resemble what the media reported (shocking I know....)

The IPCC’s Feb. 2007 report stated: It is “very likely” that human activity is causing global warming. Why then, just two months later, did the Vice Chair of the IPCC, Yuri Izrael, write, “the panic over global warming is totally unjustified;” “there is no serious threat to the climate;” and humanity is “hypothetically … more threatened by cold than by global warming?”

IPCC press releases have warned about increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere, yet Dr. Vincent Gray, a member of the IPCC’s expert reviewers’ panel asserts, “There is no relationship between warming and [the] level of gases in the atmosphere.”

A 2001 IPCC report presented 245 potential scenarios. The media publicity that followed focused on the most extreme scenario, prompting the report’s lead author, atmospheric scientist Dr. John Christy, to rebuke media sensationalism and affirm, “The world is in much better shape than this doomsday scenario paints … the worst-case scenario [is] not going to happen.”

Hmmmmm.....maybe that is why the "consensus" keeps getting smaller every day....

For years as a broadcast meteorologist, I kept silent about the issue of “global warming.” Declaring skepticism labeled you (and still does) as an anti-environmentalist. After former VP Gore’s movie hit the big screen, I could remain silent no more. “An Inconvenient Truth” was filled with so many gross distortions and outright scientific misrepresentations; I felt it was my obligation to speak out….

CO2 is not a pollutant and it’s not a problem. The problem is rent-seeking corporations looking to cash in on cap and trade and low-output, high-cost alternative energy. As your Michigan House colleague Congressman Dingell says “cap and trade is a tax, and it’s a great big one.” This is not the time to raise energy prices, which is what this bill will surely do. I believe the majority of your constituents will suffer adversely if this legislation is passed.

Even better, the data is starting to show that the climate is not only cooling but it has been doing so for some time now!

There is now irrefutable scientific evidence that far from global warming the earth has now entered a period of global cooling which will last at least for the next two decades.

Evidence for this comes from the NASA Microwave Sounding Unit and the Hadley Climate Research Unit while evidence that CO2 levels are continuing to increase comes from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii.

Professor Don Easterbrook one of the principle speakers at the recent World Conference on climate change held in New York in March this year attended by 800 leading climatologists, has documented a consistent cycle of warm and cool periods each with a 27 year cycle. Indeed the warm period from 1976 to 1998 exactly fits the pattern of climate changes for the past several centuries long before there were any CO2 emissions. Greenland Ice core temperature measurements for the past 500 years show this 27 year cycle of alternating warm and cool periods. Recently the global temperature increased from 1918 to 1940, decreased from 1940 to 1976, increased again from 1976 to 1998 and has been decreasing ever since.

STOP RIGHT THERE and read the section that I emphasized...SCIENCE is showing that climate change is cyclical and has been going on for longer than there has been CO2 outputs! Mankind is not "causing" climate change - it is a regular cyclical thing. Just like all the "deniers" have been saying all along!

Many have been saying for a long time now that the hysteria over "global warming" was simply a scam - that it was not based in sound science. Well now science is proving that out. I wonder what the global warming acolytes will have to say about this....no there is no need to wonder I know already that we will be called deniers of science. But given what we are seeing now we KNOW who the real science deniers are.....

Your House Is Not Your Own...

2009-05-27T22:59:00.003-05:00

I preface this by saying that I have not been able to find any mention of this outside of WND and whole bunch of blogs, but if there is any modicum of truth to this story anyone who holds regular meetings in their homes (be it 4H, the Sierra Club or a church) should be concerned.

A San Diego pastor and his wife claim they were interrogated by a county official and warned they will face escalating fines if they continue to hold Bible studies in their home.
The couple, whose names are being withheld until a demand letter can be filed on their behalf, told their attorney a county government employee knocked on their door on Good Friday, asking a litany of questions about their Tuesday night Bible studies, which are attended by approximately 15 people.

As I was working on this, I got another email on this story. Fox News reported on the story as well so it has been confirmed. According to the interview, the Pastor and his wife, who have weekly Bible studies with friends, were told by a county employee that it was a "zoning" violation to have more than 10-15 people in your house at one time!

Again, this should trouble anyone who has every had a Tupperware party or a Mary Kay Party of a weekly book club meeting in their home. Big government can dictate to you how many people you can have come visit you in your home!

Well isn't that special.....

Founders Morning Quote

2009-05-27T09:45:00.000-05:00

"The eyes of the world being thus on our Country, it is put the more on its good behavior, and under the greater obligation also, to do justice to the Tree of Liberty by an exhibition of the fine fruits we gather from it."

--James Madison, letter to James Monroe, December 16, 1824

The Bullet Minnesota Dodged

2009-05-26T22:25:00.003-05:00

The Wall Street Journal tells the story of what could have been in Minnesota.

Here's a two-minute drill in soak-the-rich economics:

Maryland couldn't balance its budget last year, so the state tried to close the shortfall by fleecing the wealthy. Politicians in Annapolis created a millionaire tax bracket, raising the top marginal income-tax rate to 6.25%. And because cities such as Baltimore and Bethesda also impose income taxes, the state-local tax rate can go as high as 9.45%. Governor Martin O'Malley, a dedicated class warrior, declared that these richest 0.3% of filers were "willing and able to pay their fair share." The Baltimore Sun predicted the rich would "grin and bear it."

Wow does THAT sound familiar?????? Minnesota's Legislature couldn't balance the budget either. I don't care what the Speaker of the House says, when you are spending $34 billion dollars and you are only bringing in $31.6 you are spending MORE than you bring in and that is NOT the definition of a balanced budget! Anyone who says that is needs to go back to 3rd grade math class! Oh and then there was the unaddressed $6+ billion in the current deficit that they never addressed.....

One year later, nobody's grinning. One-third of the millionaires have disappeared from Maryland tax rolls. In 2008 roughly 3,000 million-dollar income tax returns were filed by the end of April. This year there were 2,000, which the state comptroller's office concedes is a "substantial decline." On those missing returns, the government collects 6.25% of nothing. Instead of the state coffers gaining the extra $106 million the politicians predicted, millionaires paid $100 million less in taxes than they did last year -- even at higher rates.
No doubt the majority of that loss in millionaire filings results from the recession. However, this is one reason that depending on the rich to finance government is so ill-advised: Progressive tax rates create mountains of cash during good times that vanish during recessions. For evidence, consult California, New York and New Jersey (see here).

The Maryland state revenue office says it's "way too early" to tell how many millionaires moved out of the state when the tax rates rose. But no one disputes that some rich filers did leave. It's easier than the redistributionists think. Christopher Summers, president of the Maryland Public Policy Institute, notes: "Marylanders with high incomes typically own second homes in tax friendlier states like Florida, Delaware, South Carolina and Virginia. So it's easy for them to change their residency."

....like Tom Golisano did?????

All of this means that the burden of paying for bloated government in Annapolis will fall on the middle class. Thanks to the futility of soaking the rich, these working families will now pay Mr. O'Malley's "fair share."

In Minnesota's case, it's not just the Middle Class that the DFL wanted to soak. With new taxes on cigarettes and liquor (in Minnesota) and junk food, fast food and soft drinks (on the national levvel) this new generation of Democrats are proposing some of the most (dare I say it) regressive taxes we have EVER seen!

As I said the other day - these are not your grandparents Democrats. These Democrats don't care WHO they soak as long as they can get their special interest spending projects passed. Thankfully (for Minnesota) we had a Governor who was willing to do what the DFL led Legislature refused to do - balance the budget.

Thank you Governor Pawlenty for doing your job.

Submitted Without Comment

2009-05-26T21:58:00.000-05:00

Founders Morning Quote

2009-05-26T09:42:00.000-05:00

He that lives upon hope will die fasting.

~Benjamin Franklin

Fueling The Myth

2009-05-25T23:08:00.004-05:00

I want to dedicate this post to three people back in Minnesota - my dear friend Andy Aplicowski (AAA from Residual Forces), my former state Representative Mike Beard and Governor Pawlenty. To two of these people, the information attached, while not new, confirms what they already knew - to the other hopefully a revelation!

More than one major transportation-based industry in America besides Detroit is on the ropes. For the fourth time in our history the ethanol industry has come undone and is quickly failing nationally. Of course it's one thing when Detroit collapsed with the economy; after all, that is a truly free-market enterprise and the economy hasn't been good. But the fact that the ethanol industry is going bankrupt, when the only reason we use this additive is a massive government mandate, is outrageous at best....
the primary job of the Environmental Protection Agency is, dare it be said, to protect our environment. Yet using ethanol actually creates more smog than using regular gas, and the EPA's own attorneys had to admit that fact in front of the justices presiding over the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in 1995 (API v. EPA).

Second, truly independent studies on ethanol, such as those written by Tad Patzek of Berkeley and David Pimentel of Cornell, show that ethanol is a net energy loser. Other studies suggest there is a small net energy gain from it.

Third, all fuels laced with ethanol reduce the vehicle's fuel efficiency, and the E85 blend drops gas mileage between 30% and 40%, depending on whether you use the EPA's fuel mileage standards (fueleconomy.gov) or those of the Dept. of Energy.

OK - those of you who have read these pages or the pages of RF already know who is who in this little contretemps. Andy and I have long been railing against mandates promoting corn ethanol over all other alternative fuels and Rep. Beard, being the ranking Republican on most House Public Utilities committees and all around Public Utilities and energy policy wonk, has been a strong advocate for allowing the market to find alternatives that work. Governor Pawlenty, on the other hand.....

Fourth, forget what biofuels have done to the price of foodstuffs worldwide over the past three years; the science seems to suggest that using ethanol increases global warming emissions over the use of straight gasoline. Just these issues should have kept ethanol from being brought back for its fourth run in American history.

But, but, but....wait.....

The author's last point is one that has been pooh-poohed by corn ethanol proponents but the facts say that they are dead wrong.....

Last July was bad enough for motorists on a budget—gasoline prices had shot up to more than $4 a gallon. But for some the pain in the pocketbook was about to get worse. At City Garage in Euless, Tex., for example, the first of numerous future customers brought in an automobile whose fuel pump was shot. A quick diagnosis determined that that particular car had close to 18% ethanol in the fuel. For that unlucky owner, the repairs came to nearly $900. The ethanol fun was just beginning.

City Garage manager Eric Greathouse has found that adding ethanol to the nation's gasoline supply may be a foolish government mandate, but it has an upside he'd rather not deal with. It's supplying his shop with a slow but steady stream of customers whose plastic fuel intakes have been dissolved by the blending of ethanol into our gasoline, or their fuel pumps destroyed. The average cost of repairs is just shy of $1,000.

But wait - it gets BETTER!!!!!!

On Jan. 16 of this year, Lexus ordered a massive recall of certain 2006 to 2008 models, including the GS Series, IS and LS sedans. According to the recall notice, the problem is that "Ethanol fuels with low moisture content will corrode the internal surface of the fuel rails." In layman's terms, ethanol causes pinpoint leaks in the fuel system; when leaking fuel catches your engine on fire, that's an exciting way to have your insurance company buy your Lexus. Using ethanol will cost Toyota (TM) untold millions.

Finally the last piece of ethanol justification is skewered.....

But until this massive economic slowdown, as Gusher of Lies (PublicAffairs, 2008) author Robert Bryce pointed out, even while the ethanol mandate was being ramped up we were increasing our imports of foreign oil.

Translation: The entire politically stated purpose of using ethanol had already been proven to be a false one before the program even got fully under way.

No surprise there. The premise that ethanol could give America the freedom to one day stop importing oil has always been fraudulent. Another fun fact: If we outlawed gasoline and diesel, thereby removing every last car, truck and SUV from our highways—no vehicles anywhere on any road in the country—America would still have to import oil because we would still use more crude than domestic production can supply.

Why is that? Crude oil is also used to make fertilizers, aviation fuel, home heating oil, and many other products. Not to mention polyester suits for car salesmen.

So in summation, ethanol pollutes more, reduces fuel efficiency, ruins the fuel system in your car to the point of being dangerous, takes tillable acreage away from food production and does not reduce our foreign dependence on oil one iota?????

Can someone please tell me again why government should be mandating that we use this stuff?

Founders Morning Quote

2009-05-25T09:39:00.000-05:00

A special quote for a special day.....

"Our obligations to our country never cease but with our lives."

--John Adams, letter to Benjamin Rush, April 18, 1808

Today is for remembering those who gave it all for our freedoms. May we never take their sacrifices for granted.

Courage!

2009-05-24T21:48:00.003-05:00

This should not surprise anyone given the nature of this Presidency.

Frustrated liberals are asking why a Democratic-controlled Congress and White House can't manage to close the Guantanamo prison or keep new gun-rights laws from passing.
After all, President Barack Obama pledged to shut down the military detention center on Cuba for suspected terrorists. And Democratic control of the government would suggest that any gun legislation leads to tighter controls on weapons, not expanded use.

After all - a President who voted "present" more than he vote either "aye" or "nay" is bound to not be able to take a firm stand on the issue.

Even as they grouse, however, liberal lawmakers acknowledge that no one factor explains last week's disappointing back-to-back votes in Congress.
The Obama administration is focused on other priorities, they say. Party leaders don't want to endanger Democratic lawmakers from conservative districts by stressing divisive issues such as gun control.

We'll come back to that last sentence in just a brief moment....

On Guantanamo, many say, Obama and his allies were caught napping as Republicans stirred public fears about relocating suspected terrorists.

Yep - those darned Republicans like Max Bacchus, Ben Nelson, Mark Warner, Diane Feinstein and Jim Webb all stopped President Obama's plans to close Gitmo....I mean for crying out loud, the vote in the Senate alone was 90-6. There are NOT 90 Republicans in the Senate.

But the excuse that I found to be most enlightening was the excuse offered up by Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY) on why the national parks gun bill (which allows legal permit holders the ability to take their firearms into national parks) sailed through the House and Senate and will be signed by the President.

"We'll probably end up passing more gun bills" that expand owners' rights "than we did during the Republican administration," said Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, D-N.Y., a leading gun control advocate. "That is what surprises me."
She placed less blame on the White House than on ordinary Americans and advocacy groups that are consistently outflanked by gun owners' groups, especially the National Rifle Association.
"Until the American people say enough is enough, and get active in it," Democratic control of Congress and the White House will not be enough to turn the tide, said McCarthy, whose husband was killed by a gunman in 1993.

Emphasis mine. Never mind the fact that they have overwhelming majorities in both Houses, the Democrat know that they do not dare vote in too many gun controls out of fear of losing power. While for many that is some cold comfort, it should show everyone (especially their liberal supporters) that these Democrats ONLY care about getting an maintaining power. Principles don't matter if those principles could end up costing you the election. (Granted a vast majority of the current crop of Republicans in DC are also bitten with that bug - but that is another post for another day....)

Or not....I am reminded of a time, back during the Clinton Administration. I, along with many other Minnesotans, had written to our then Senator Paul Wellstone about a particular vote he was about to take. The Senator's answer is one that I will never forget. He said that while he understood our disagreement with him on this particular issue, he could not IN GOOD CONSCIENCE set his principles aside in order to make the "popular" vote. Obviously this generation of "Democratic" legislators do not share the late Senator's courage.

Are there ANY in this current crop of politicians( from either party) that share the late Senator's courage? I think that there may be a couple of promising lights out there, but they are all so new to DC. DC has changed more than a few who went there on their "principles". Even Senator Wellstone had his principles changed in the end - he campaigned on the principle of term limits - saying he would only serve two terms and then he would term limit himself out and yet when the time came he ran for that third term - a campaign that in the end, proved to be his physical demise. Would he still be alive today if he hadn't run that third campaign? Who knows...even if he had not run, he could have been on that plane in that storm to go up to that debate as an advisor to his successor...we will never know for sure. But one thing that we do know is abandoning your principles - principles that you campaigned on - for political gain will in the end lose any political advantage that you may gained. Is it really worth it?

Founders Morning Quote

2009-05-24T16:39:00.001-05:00

"We have staked the whole of our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self-government, upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God."

James Madison

(HT to Morgan Philpot)

More RNC Stupidity

2009-05-23T22:19:00.002-05:00

The 'net is abuzz over the latest RNC web ad. You can view it here for yourself....

Now some of the reaction has been a bit hyperbolic, but that still does not excuse the abject stupidity of the ad. I mean does anyone under the age of 50 know who "Pussy Galore" is? However, Utah's newest Congressional representative put it about right when he said...

"I thought it was reprehensible, irresponsible and unpersuasive. If we're going to regain the credibility of the American people, we're going to have to stop with silly antics like that. It may get a snide chuckle inside the Beltway, but it offends most people. We have to get away from the politics of personal destruction," he said of the video.

I say he has it about right because I think calling the ad "reprehensible" is a little over the top. However he is spot on about the ad being irresponsible and completely and totally unpersuasive! I argued loud and long with the MNGOP during the last election cycle over their continued attacks on Al Franken - arguing that if the GOP did not talk about substantive issues that they would lose the election AND THEY DID!

Rather than worthless resolutions trying to rebrand the opposition or trying to connect to the popular culture of 30 years ago, the RNC needs to be focusing on issues that are facing the country today! It's really that simple.

I don't know who the idiots responsible for these kinds of ads are, but the RNC could do much better if they would just fire them and concentrate on issues instead of personalities!

Out For The Weekend

2009-05-23T11:38:00.001-05:00

We're taking advantage of a weekend where we don't have work around the house to do to play and explore our "new" home. Posting will be light!

Have a safe and fun Memorial Day weekend!

Question.....

2009-05-23T11:30:00.003-05:00

What ever happened to the so-called "separation" of church and state?

MANCHESTER, New Hampshire (Reuters) - A bill that would have made New Hampshire the sixth state in the United States to authorize gay marriage stalled unexpectedly Wednesday over concessions to religious groups opposed to such unions.

The state's House of Representatives objected to language in the bill that would have allowed religious groups to decline to participate in same-sex marriage ceremonies or to offer gay couples other services.

OK - this is exactly the kind of thing that the 1st Amendment expressly prohibits. A refresher....

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Emphasis mine. Michael Kinsley (that's liberal Michael Kinsley from Crossfire) reminds us that...

...But Miss California's views on gay marriage have nothing to do with her qualifications for the job and shouldn't disqualify her for it.
This is really Liberalism 101, and it's amazing that so many liberals don't get it. Yes, yes, the Bill of Rights protects individuals against oppression by the government, not by other private individuals or organizations. But the values and logic behind our constitutional rights don't disappear when the oppressor is in the private sector. They may not have the force of law in that situation, but they ought to have the force of understanding and of habit. The logic behind freedom of speech is that "bad" speech does not need to be suppressed as long as "good" speech is free to counter it. Or at least that letting the good and bad do battle is more likely to allow the good speech to triumph than giving anyone the power to choose between them.

It really is Liberalism 101, which is one reason why today's Democrats are not your father's classic liberal - they ARE socialists. A classic JFK or Hubert Humphrey liberal would never engage in the kind of thuggish behavior that today's Democrats engage in. They understood that to win the battle of ideas you had to have good ideas and beat the other sides ideas in the court of public opinion - as opposed to just shouting them down. Something that both sides need to remember..... Meanwhile we have a big probelm - we have an out of control government that has no qualms about interfering in religion if it suits them - but religous people are supposed to just sit back and take it....What ever happened to the so-called "separation" of church and state? It's only there if it suits the state apparently.....

Founders Morning Quote

2009-05-22T08:24:00.000-05:00

For all of my more Libertarian friends...

"There is no maxim in my opinion which is more liable to be misapplied, and which therefore needs elucidation than the current one that the interest of the majority is the political standard of right and wrong.... In fact it is only reestablishing under another name and a more specious form, force as the measure of right...."

--James Madison, letter to James Monroe, October 5, 1786

Let Gthe Spin Begin

2009-05-22T08:14:00.001-05:00

I had to do a double take when I saw this headline on my LATimes daily email the other day.

Reporting from Washington -- In the debate over his top environmental goals, President Obama is backing away from "cap and trade."

Not the policy. It's the phrase itself, deemed confusing by Democratic pollsters, that has all but disappeared from the president's vocabulary of late.

Now to be fair to the President both parties are playing buzzword bait and switch of late. But to see one of the President's most vocal campaign cheerleaders actually admitting that the White House is engaging in verbal jujitsu will take most moderates aback - and throw many conservatives into a dead faint!

Control the language, politicians know, and you stand a better chance of controlling the debate. So the Obama administration, in its push to enact sweeping energy and healthcare policies, has begun refining the phrases it uses in an effort to shape public opinion.

Words that have been vetted in focus groups and polls are seeping into the White House lexicon, while others considered too scary or confounding are falling away.

Today, aides in Obama's Council on Environmental Quality will meet with a research and marketing group that is promoting an alternative to the phrase "global warming," which some pollsters say fails to capture the idea of greenhouse gases threatening the environment.

They are doing this in large part because right now the global warming alarmists are losing the debate. Scientist after scientist is proving that there is no consensus - contrary to what the alarmists will tell you. Many real scientists will even tell you that (gasp) the AGW theory has more holes in it than a block of Swiss cheese!

While both sides are engaging in the verbal jujitsu the Democrats have put their money where their "mouth" is on this - investing almost $90,000 on focus groups so far this year!

Which goes back to one of my long standing political beliefs. Don't ever believe what they SAY - do the research and see what they DO. While the flowery rhetoric plays well on the tube, it is how they vote when the cameras are not on them that tell you all you need to know about an elected officials character. Look at the candidates voting record. It will tell you more about the way the person will govern than any speech will ever do.

Batten Down The Hatches!

2009-05-20T21:25:00.000-05:00

There is a storm a brewing......

In an abrupt shift, Senate Democratic leaders said they would not provide the $80 million that President Obama requested to close the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The move escalates pressure on the president, who on Thursday is scheduled to outline his plans for the 240 terrorism suspects still held there.

The House had already voted against the funding...Meanwhile a Federal Judge ruled that indefinite detentions were A-OK. All of this is a continuation of Bush regime policies that the Democrats PROMISED they would overturn once they got their guy in the White House. What's even worse is that now the White House is saying that they may have been "hasty" in signing the Executive Order on Day 1! Of course, no Republicans had ever said that it would be hasty to close Gitmo - Noooooooo

I wonder if we will see Code Pink and World Can't Wait attacking this administrations officials and calling them "war criminals"...or is that a privilege that they only give to Republicans?????

Legislative Heroes of the 2009 Session Rep. Rod Hamilton

2009-05-19T22:55:00.002-05:00

Another speech from the House floor that really impressed me came for Rep. Abeler's "Over-Ride 6" mate, Rep. Rod Hamilton of Mountain Lake (starting at the 55:10 mark here). He starts off acknowledging the GAMC recipients in the gallery, thanking them for their courage in sharing their stories. He then turned to those guests in the gallery and said...

...you should be absolutely outraged. I hope you realize that we are passing bills off of this House floor when we have a $6.4 billion budget deficit to address invasive earthworms over you. We are passing bills to bail out the XCel Energy Center - the debt that they have - over your needs. We are "investing" in indigenous earth keepers over your needs. We are willing to build hockey arenas, bike trails and dog parks over your needs. We are willing to purchase more land for the DNR when they can't even care for the land that they have - over your needs. And we are also able to fund additionally able bodied adults over your needs...

So when the DFL, in their jettings around the state, talk about how much the Governor is hurting people I want you to remember that instead of funding GAMC, the Democrats CHOSE to spend $2.4 MILLION on invasive earthworm research! How many GAMC recepients could have been helped with that kind of money? I wonder.....