A Nobel Laureate economist explains why Obamacare will lead to disaster

Back in 1978, Milton Friedman presciently explained the problems that government-funded medicine causes:

Hat tip: Ingo.

PREVIOUSLY on Obamacare:
•Rep. Ryan explains the dishonesty of Obamacare economics
•Obamacare 2.1 and its discontents (illustrated)
•Pushing a losing agenda
•The Obama enigma
•An encounter with the Ideologue-in-Chief
•Democrats' stealth plan to resuscitate Obamacare
•Those who want to go done with the ship: Obamacare Dead-enders
•Obamacare may raise insurance costs by 54%
•Harvard's Dean of Medicine opposes Obamacare
•How good is Canadan health care?
•Rahm Emanuel explains that they are not even trying have Obamacare make sense
•Harvard economist explains why Obamacare will raise premiums
•HHS says Obamacare will cause costs to go up and cause employers to drop coverage
•To protest Obamacare, San Francisco holds a sick-in
•Polls say majority of voters oppose Obamacare
•Obama wants to kill your mother!
•VP Biden offers medical advice
•"The Post Office, with scalpels"
•Dems oppose affordable medicine
•Socialized medicine in Japan: Baby dies after 8 hospitals refuse to admit mother
•The Canadian health care collapse
•Canadian official: "the system is imploding"
•Canadian MP flies to US for treatment

Rep. Ryan on a roll

The Republicans had their act together today. Here is Rep Paul Ryan (R-WI) explaining the budget fraud of the Senate bill to Pres. Obama at today's health care summit (hat tip: Bookwormroom):

The power of Ryan's presentation was noted even on CNN (hat tip: Instapundit):


PREVIOUSLY on Obamacare:
•Obamacare 2.1 and its discontents (illustrated)
•Pushing a losing agenda
•The Obama enigma
•An encounter with the Ideologue-in-Chief
•Democrats' stealth plan to resuscitate Obamacare
•Those who want to go done with the ship: Obamacare Dead-enders
•Obamacare may raise insurance costs by 54%
•Harvard's Dean of Medicine opposes Obamacare
•How good is Canadan health care?
•Rahm Emanuel explains that they are not even trying have Obamacare make sense
•Harvard economist explains why Obamacare will raise premiums
•HHS says Obamacare will cause costs to go up and cause employers to drop coverage
•To protest Obamacare, San Francisco holds a sick-in
•Polls say majority of voters oppose Obamacare
•Obama wants to kill your mother!
•VP Biden offers medical advice
•"The Post Office, with scalpels"
•Dems oppose affordable medicine
•Socialized medicine in Japan: Baby dies after 8 hospitals refuse to admit mother
•The Canadian health care collapse
•Canadian official: "the system is imploding"
•Canadian MP flies to US for treatment

Former AP reporter fears for the children if they are exposed to tea partiers

The Bay Area Patriots, led by Sally Zelikovsky, has organized several San Francisco tea parties, including the tax day, Obama, and sick-in parties. Currently, the group is organizing a meeting of SF Bay area conservative groups for a networking event. They choose a central location for this event, the Mill Valley Community Center, which "ironically" is in trendy liberal Marin County. This has upset some Marin County residents, as the Mill Valley Herald reports:

It’s an irony that doesn’t sit well with local resident Deborah Phelan, a former AP reporter who now works in public relations. Infuriated by the images and rhetoric employed by Tea Party groups across the nation, Phelan said city property should not play host to a right-wing get-together.

The former AP reporter is particularly upset about the harm that would be done to children if they were to be exposed to conservatives or libertarians:

“We have young kids going there to swim, to go to classes,” Phelan said. “Do you want your kid to walk by a picture of the president of the U.S. with the horrible things they say about him?”

Phelan has appealed to city officials to cancel the event, but that appears unlikely. Parks and Recreation Director Christine Sansom said the Community Center can’t discriminate against groups who want to rent the center based on politics.

Ms. Phelan does not plan to let the issue drop:

Phelan nonetheless says she’ll keep seeking ways to stop the gathering from taking place in Mill Valley. “I feel our local government has to make a stand against this movement, which I view as seditious,” she said.

Ms. Zelikovsky describes the Bay Area Patriots core principles as “limited government, individual rights, free markets and lower taxes,” which, of course, any self-respecting AP reporter would consider "seditious."

PREVIOUSLY on the tea party movement:
•Andrew Sullivan says the tea party movement is fraudulent
•Massive storm threatens Washington DC
•3 in 10 Californians identify with tea party protests
•MSNBC's Garafola gets her hate on
•MSNBC responds to tea party protests with obscene jokes
•To protest Obamacare, San Francisco holds a sick-in (Nov. 15)
•A Tea Party greets Obama in San Francisco (Oct. 15)
• Videos of the October 15 San Francisco Tea Party
•San Franciscans speak to Nancy Pelosi (Aug. 14)
•The San Francisco Tax Day Tea Party Protest in Pictures (Apr. 15)
•Farmers protest in San Jose (Nov. 21).
•Tea Party breaks out in Palo Alto (Nov. 21)
•Rep. Eshoo's health care town hall (Sep. 2)
•Rep. Speier's town hall meeting (Aug. 23)
•Million man Tea party

The nuclear option in review

Traditionally, the Senate has required 60 votes to end debate and, traditionally, the majority party dislikes that requirement while the minority cherishes it. Here we flash back to 2005 when Sen. Obama and his Democratic colleagues were defending the 60-vote supermajority requirement:


"What I worry would be be ... simply majoritarian absolute power ... and that is just not what the founders intended." —Sen. Obama

"That's a bridge too far" —Sen Clinton

"We are on the precipice of a crisis, a con crisis, the checks and balances which have been at the core of this republic are about to be evaporated by the nuclear option." —Sen. Schumer

"The right to extend the debate is never more important than one party controls Congress and the White House." —Sen Reid

"The nuclear option is ultimately an example of the arrogance of power." --Sen. Biden


PREVIOUSLY on liberal hypocrisy:
•The UN's global warming advocates vs. their own carbon footprint
•Eco-hypocrite of the day: supermodel Giselle
•The hypocrisy of ACORN and others on minimum wage
•It is outrageous to make Hitler analogies, or not
•Dems, taxes, and hypocrisy
•Poll: Dems think it OK to cheat on taxes
•The rules apply only to other people
•Broadcast networks discover a new responsibility to air presidential speeches.
•Saddam's connections to terror change depending on who is president.
•Dems advocate 10-year effort in Iraq until they don't
•The ever-increasing energy use of Al Gore's mansion
•With five private jets, Travolta still lectures on global warming.
•Dems supported enhanced interrogation.
•UN humanitarian hypocrisy
•Poster child hypocrisy
•Edwards' hypocrisy toward the poor
•Liberals bash gays

Senator Barbara Boxer and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson back away from IPCC

Even if the legacy media in the US are ignoring it, the climate scandals are having an effect.  Details here. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

RECENTLY on global warming:
•Obama appoints scandal-ridden warmist to head NOAA's new Climate Service
•Climategate "scientist" makes U-turn

Racism/sexism quick roundup

1. MSNBC and CNBC personality Donny Deutsch called Republican Senate candidate Marco Rubio a "coconut." Mr. Deutsch claims:

I said "coconut" meaning simple, goofy, bananas...wasn't even aware it could be a racially charged word

"Coconut" is an anti-Latino/Pacific Islander/Filipino slur and Mr. Deutsch just happened to use the word when referring to a Latino?

2. On the sexism front, Sen. Reid has determined that:

Men, when they're out of work, tend to become abusive'

3. On Tuesday’s Countdown show, host Keith Olbermann accused both tea partiers and Fox News of racism. He said this despite the lack of racial diversity among primetime hosts at his network.

4. Last month, you may remember Chris Matthews commenting on Pres. Obama's State of the Union address: "I forgot he was black." John Hinderaker observes:

One of the differences between liberals and conservatives is that many liberals are obsessed by race, while conservatives, in general, rarely think about it.

5. Mass murderers, black conservatives: what's the difference? Not much, according to one of the Washington Post's blogs. Jim Hoft explains:

The Washington Post’s “The Root” blog posted a piece on “Black Folks We’d Like to Remove From Black History.” The list lumps noted mass murderers Idi Amin, Robert Mugabe and John Allen Muhammad along with Clarence Thomas, Alan Keyes and Michael Steele. They forgot about Condi.

PREVIOUSLY on the subject of Democrats practicing sexism:
•It was all about the racism and sexism
•MSNBC's sexist attacks on Sec. Rice and Obama's sexist attacks on Hillary
•DailyKos opposed to treating Hillary "fairly"
•Two examples of sexist stereotyping
•Sexists in the Senate
•A Democrat opposes sexism
•Media sexism backfires
•Salon has a sexual fantasy about Palin as a dominatrix
•Sexist attack on Palin or merely an example of Obama's "silver tongue"?
•Dem Gov says Dem primary voters are sexist and racist
•What is the victim status of your identity group?
•Dems urged to vote their gender

PREVIOUSLY on the subject of racism:
•Black students, harassed for "acting white," get $150,000
•“You can’t vote against healthcare and call yourself a black man.”
•"The city wasn't ready to hire a white police chief."
•A prominent black politician says the white incumbent cannot properly represent black voters.
•San Franciscans discriminate against blacks.
•"He's not black and he can't represent me, that's just the bottom line."
•NAACP defends racism.
• Stanford finds Democrats are racist.
• Obama nominates a racist.
• Leaders acknowledge Democrat base is racist.
•"That's just how white folks will do you." ---Barack Obama.
•Dem says Dem primary voters are racist.
•Dems accuse Bill and Hillary of racism.

Obamacare 2.1 and its discontents

Even though it could not be clearer that the public does not want Obamacare, Pres. Obama pushes forward. Chip Bok illustrates:

Pres. Obama's hyper-partisan plan to ram Obamacare through the Senate on a reconciliation vote (which bypasses the usual 60-vote requirement) was dealt a setback today by Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV). The Huffington Post reports:

"I don't think the timing of it is very good," the West Virginia Democrat said on Monday. "I'm probably not going to vote for that, although I'm strongly for the public option, because I think it creates, at a time when we really need as much bipartisan[ship] ... as possible. "

However, his use of the word "probably" could be a sign that he will vote it after Sen. Reid offers him a deal.

Reportedly, there are already six Democrats who may vote against Obamacare-via-Reconciliation either because of opposition to the public option or opposition to the partisianship of it. The reconciliation route, however, requires only 51 votes.

RELATED: White House caught lying again about the Republican's health care plan. Also, Sen. Rockefeller is leading eight Democrats in a Senate revolt against the EPA's global warming power grab. The other seven Senators are Mark Begich (D-AK), Robert Byrd (D-WV), Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Bob Casey (D-PA), Claire McCaskill (D-MI), Carl Levin (D-MI), and Max Baucus (D-Montana).

PREVIOUSLY on Obamacare:
•Pushing a losing agenda
•The Obama enigma
•An encounter with the Ideologue-in-Chief
•Democrats' stealth plan to resuscitate Obamacare
•Those who want to go done with the ship: Obamacare Dead-enders
•Obamacare may raise insurance costs by 54%
•Harvard's Dean of Medicine opposes Obamacare
•How good is Canadan health care?
•Rahm Emanuel explains that they are not even trying have Obamacare make sense
•Harvard economist explains why Obamacare will raise premiums
•HHS says Obamacare will cause costs to go up and cause employers to drop coverage
•To protest Obamacare, San Francisco holds a sick-in
•Polls say majority of voters oppose Obamacare
•Obama wants to kill your mother!
•VP Biden offers medical advice
•"The Post Office, with scalpels"
•Dems oppose affordable medicine
•Socialized medicine in Japan: Baby dies after 8 hospitals refuse to admit mother
•The Canadian health care collapse
•Canadian official: "the system is imploding"
•Canadian MP flies to US for treatment

RNC self-destructs?

According to Politico, big donors are abandoning the Republican National Committee because of Chairman Steele's free spending ways:

Republican National Chairman Michael Steele is spending twice as much as his recent predecessors on private planes and paying more for limousines, catering and flowers – expenses that are infuriating the party's major donors who say Republicans need every penny they can get for the fight to win back Congress.

Apparently, Michael Steele likes good food and exotic locales:

Most recently, donors grumbled when Steele hired renowned chef Wolfgang Puck's local crew to cater the RNC's Christmas party inside the trendy Newseum on Pennsylvania Avenue, and then moved its annual winter meeting from Washington to Hawaii.

As a result, Politico claims, the GOP is entering this critical election year short on cash:

When Steele took over the chairmanship last winter, he inherited a $23 million surplus. Since then, the former Maryland lieutenant governor has raised $10 million less than the party collected in 2005 and has spent $10 million more. By the end of 2009, the committee’s surplus had shrunk to $8.4 million, according to campaign finance reports.

Just last week, RNC officials touted a January fundraising haul of more than $10 million. But after hosting the sun-filled winter meeting in Hawaii, paying for the holiday party and taking care of other bills, the committee spent almost all of it. Consequently, the RNC added only $1 million to the committee’s $8.4 million in cash, the reports show.

Once they arrive in Washington, Republicans seem to forget why they are there.

PREVIOUSLY on problems with the Republican Party:
•Senate Republicans are despicable
•3 in 10 Californians identify with Tea Party protests
•GOP: a dead brand
•Republican self-destruction
•The Republican Problem: the party is like a lost dog
•Specter: Another Bush mistake
•The GOP establishment is lost
•In the Senate: Big-spending Republicans
•How the Republicans lost control of the Intelligence Committee

Obama appoints scandal-ridden warmist to head NOAA's new Climate Service

Mr. Thomas R. Karl has been appointed "transitional director" of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's new Climate Service. Carol Browner, the assistant to the president for energy and climate change, hopes that the Climate Service will help us "confront climate change." If climate change were to be confronted honestly and scientifically, that would be good. Mr. Karl's history indicates that it will be otherwise. Fox News reports (Hat tip: Instapundit) that Karl "has been criticized for trying to suppress contradictory scientific data on climate change." Prof. Roger Pielke Sr. provides details:

I documented the process by which Tom Karl excluded other viewpoints in my Public Comment

Pielke Sr., Roger A., 2005: Public Comment on CCSP Report “Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere: Steps for Understanding and Reconciling Differences“. 88 pp including appendices.

which I wrote after I resigned from the CCSP Committee (not the IPCC Committee as given in the article).

Excerpts from the Executive Summary of my report read

“The process for completing the CCSP Report excluded valid scientific perspectives under the charge of the Committee. The Editor of the Report [Tom Karl] systematically excluded a range of views on the issue of understanding and reconciling lower atmospheric temperature trends. The Executive Summary of the CCSP Report ignores critical scientific issues and makes unbalanced conclusions concerning our current understanding of temperature trends”

and

“The process that produced the report was highly political, with the Editor taking the lead in suppressing my perspectives, most egregiously demonstrated by the last-minute substitution of a new Chapter 6 for the one I had carefully led preparation of and on which I was close to reaching a final consensus. Anyone interested in the production of comprehensive assessments of climate science should be troubled by the process which I document below in great detail that led to the replacement of the Chapter that I was serving as Convening Lead Author.

Dr. Pielke is not the only person to reports problems with Mr. Karl. Meteorologist Anthony Watts remembers Karl's attempts at faking climate change in his "disastrous NCDC Climate Change Synthesis report with photoshopped images of floods that didn’t happen."

SEPARATELY: As a result of the numerous climategate scandals, Lord Rees, head of the [UK] Royal Society and Ralph Cicerone, president of the US National Academy of Sciences call for "fundamental changes" in the UN IPCC.

PREVIOUSLY on the global warming scandal:
•Climategate: U-turn
•Weather is not climate
•India rejects UN IPCC
•Climategate: laws were broken
•The collapse of the UN IPCC's credibility
•As the state of California goes bankrupt, it continues to spend on global warming
•Yet another UN IPCC Glacier-gate scandal
•UN IPCC claims of melting Himalayan glaciers exposed as fraud
•UN IPCC responds to Climategate with wild accusations
•Surprise: EU's carbon trading riddled with fraud
•Ma'am Sen. Boxer for and against climate whistleblowers.
•Climate alarmist Phil Jones to step down pending review
•Why Penn State's investigation of its global warmist will go nowhere
•Former boss calls James Hansen call an embarrassment to NASA
•NASA's global warming scientists caught hyping false data

Pushing a losing agenda

After he sounded moderate during his State of the Union address, polls showed a sharp rise in Pres. Obama's popularity. Now that he is once again pushing Obamacare, the post-SotU address bounce has disappeared:Rasmussen says that Pres. Obama's current, as of Sunday, net approval (strongly approve minus strongly disapprove) is -19%, the second lowest on record. The only lower number, -21%, was from last December 22 just as the Senate was about to force through, on a pure party-line vote, its health care takeover bill.

UPDATE: As of Monday, 22-Feb-2010, the net approval remains unchanged at Sunday's -19.

SEPARATELY, John Hinderaker reports that the Obama administration is considering, as a way of financing their deficits, a government takeover of your 401(k).

PREVIOUSLY on Obama's unpopular agenda:
•The Obama enigma
•An encounter with the Ideologue-in-Chief
•Democrats' stealth plan to resuscitate Obamacare
•Those who want to go done with the ship: Obamacare Dead-enders
•Obamacare may raise insurance costs by 54%
•Harvard's Dean of Medicine opposes Obamacare
•How good is Canadan health care?
•Rahm Emanuel explains that they are not even trying have Obamacare make sense
•Harvard economist explains why Obamacare will raise premiums
•HHS says Obamacare will cause costs to go up and cause employers to drop coverage
•To protest Obamacare, San Francisco holds a sick-in
•Polls say majority of voters oppose Obamacare
•Obama wants to kill your mother!
•VP Biden offers medical advice
•"The Post Office, with scalpels"
•Dems oppose affordable medicine
•Socialized medicine in Japan: Baby dies after 8 hospitals refuse to admit mother
•The Canadian health care collapse
•Canadian official: "the system is imploding"
•Canadian MP flies to US for treatment

Tea Party movement was named one year ago today

Here is Rick Santelli's now famous rant from one year ago today in which he suggests having a modern day "tea party" (at 2:13):
Hat tip: Instapundit and BigGovernment.

PREVIOUSLY on the tea party movement:
•Andrew Sullivan says the tea party movement is fraudulent
•Massive storm threatens Washington DC
•3 in 10 Californians identify with tea party protests
•MSNBC's Garafola gets her hate on
•MSNBC responds to tea party protests with obscene jokes
•To protest Obamacare, San Francisco holds a sick-in (Nov. 15)
•A Tea Party greets Obama in San Francisco (Oct. 15)
• Videos of the October 15 San Francisco Tea Party
•San Franciscans speak to Nancy Pelosi (Aug. 14)
•The San Francisco Tax Day Tea Party Protest in Pictures (Apr. 15)
•Farmers protest in San Jose (Nov. 21).
•Tea Party breaks out in Palo Alto (Nov. 21)
•Rep. Eshoo's health care town hall (Sep. 2)
•Rep. Speier's town hall meeting (Aug. 23)
•Million man Tea party

Public school caught spying on kids at home

In his welcome speech, the Superintendent of the Lower Merion School District (Ardmore, PA) doesn't mention reading, writing, or arithmetic but he does say he is proud of his school's Federally-subsidized program to hand out laptops to students:

The District is also in the final stages of implementing a one-to-one laptop computer initiative at the high schools. Thanks in part to state and federal grants secured by our technology staff during the past few years, every high school student will have their own personal laptop -enabling an authentic, mobile, 21st century learning environment.

What came as a surprise to Michael and Holly Robbins, the parents of one student, was that the laptops were to be used to enforce discipline even while the student was at home. As alleged in the family's complaint (PDF), the school was secretly using the laptop's webcams to monitor families in their homes:

On November 11, 2009, Plaintiffs [the Robbins family] were for the first time informed of the above-mentioned capability and practice by the School District when Lindy Matsko ("Matkso"), an Assistant Principal at Harriton High School, informed minor Plaintiff [young Blake Robbins] that the School District was of the belief that minor Plaintiff was engaged in improper behavior in his home, and cited as evidence a photograph from the webcam embedded in minor Plaintiff's personal laptop issued by the School District. [Emph. added]

An unsettling feature of this is that the laptop webcams can transmit any image in front of them of any member of the family or guest in the home. The potential for mis-use is nearly unlimited.

Beware of government's bearing gifts.

For more on this story, see Boing Boing and NBC/Philadelphia.

UPDATE: The school claims it never turned on the cameras except to locate a lost computer.

PREVIOUSLY on the subject of education:
•Study: sexist women teachers stunt learning of girl students
•Black students, harassed for "acting white," get $150,000
•Teaching self-esteem backfires
•Education in Korea vs. the US: does "self-esteem" backfire?
•LA pays teachers not to teach
•What teachers learn in teacher's ed.
•Obama promises to throw money at schools
•How to get a job teaching in California even if you are illiterate

Politics of personal destruction, again

Before the Massachusetts special election, Democrats had apparently convinced themselves that the tea party movement was meaningless astroturf.  With the arrival in Washington of Sen. Brown (R-KennedyLand), the Democrats are changing their approach.  BigGovernment reports that some Democrats are planning a counter-attack against the tea party movement using smear campaigns and extortion:

Big Government has learned that Clintonistas are plotting a “push/pull” strategy. They plan to identify 7-8 national figures active in the tea party movement and engage in deep opposition research on them. If possible, they will identify one or two they can perhaps ‘turn’, either with money or threats, to create a mole in the movement. The others will be subjected to a full-on smear campaign. (Has MSNBC already been notified?)

Big Government has also learned that James Carville will head up the effort.

Obviously, there is no love lost between Obama and the Clinton machine. It may at first seem odd that Clinton would rush to Obama’s defense, but the tea party movement poses a threat far beyond the immediate goals of the Obama Administration.

Saul Alinsky would be proud of his students.

Glenn Reynolds is optimistic:

I don’t think the politics of personal destruction will work on a movement that doesn’t have major leaders.... [I]f they go through with this I’m pretty sure it’ll backfire big-time.

On the other hand, smear campaigns are one thing that Democrats are good at.  Just look at the rise in the negatives in Gov. Palin's poll numbers.  Remember the baseless smears against Joe the Plumber?  But then again, the smear campaigns against John McCain (birth issue, supposed affair with lobbyist) seemed ineffective while CBS's attempted smear against Geo. Bush (the supposed Texas Air National Guard memos) did backfire.

PREVIOUSLY on the subject of lefty smear campaigns:
Media fall for the Africa/country hoax about Gov. Palin
The NYT campaign against John McCain
T. Boone Pickens fights back against smear campaign against Swift Boat Veterans
Univision smears Guiliani
AP smears climate scientist for disagreeing with Al Gore / Left falls for photoshop smear
The left blames the Jews
Reporter explains that it is OK to smear if it fits the narrative
Sentence first, trial later
The cost of defending against false charges
Convicted for being in the wrong identity group
Yet another hate crime hoax
Reporter honor roll: those who didn't fall for the charges against the Duke Lacrosse players
How to know what smears to expect

A government and its subjects

If you are an American citizen, you probably have had to waste a lot of time shuffling around courthouses waiting for the lawyers to decide if you are suitable for jury duty.  In LA, that is changing slightly, as the Los Angeles Times reports:

With shrinking budgets, courts are under pressure to do more with less. Los Angeles County courthouses were summoning 55,000 people a week, at $15 a day each, until the economic crisis imposed more belt-tightening. The county is now making do with 45,000 summonses a week

Imagine how much more considerate of citizens the government would become if it had to obey the rules that apply to businesses and pay the prospective jurors the legal minimum wage.

PREVIOUSLY on the courts and jury trials:
•Black students, harassed for "acting white," get $150,000
•The KSM trial, illustrated
•Even a majority of Democrats oppose a civilian trial for KSM
•Holder defends civilian trials for war criminals
•Top Dem fundraiser pleads guilty
•USS Cole attack: Alleged traitor on now on trial
•Sentence first, trial later
•Turkey wants to try Pope for insulting Islam
•Superior Court: your right to privacy does not include your hard disk
•How Al Sharpton escaped trial
•Prosecutorial Misconduct

Obama the enigma

Barack Obama has been president for over a year and people still seem to have no idea who he is or what motivates him. According to Politico, for example, some House Democrats suspect that Obama wants them to lose in 2010 so as to improve his chances for re-election in 2012:

One Democratic official … (said) some Democratic House members actually believe that the White House “wouldn’t mind having a foil, and that foil is a Republican (House) majority — that would serve their political purposes going into 2012.”

These House Democrats say privately that veterans of Bill Clinton’s administration working in Obama’s White House may think having a Republican majority in Congress will help Obama win re-election, as it did Clinton in 1996. House Democrats know that Obama will do whatever it takes to win re-election, whether or not it helps members keep their seats this year.

This makes some sense in that it, at least, provides an explanation for why Pres. Obama continues this year to push an extreme and unpopular agenda. If Republicans retake Congress or, at least, part of it this year, Obama could blame all of his problems on them when he runs in 2012. Contrast that theory, though, with Peggy Noonan's observations:

There is, I think, an amazing political fact right now that is hiding in plain sight and is rich with implications. It was there in President Obama's Jan. 25, pre-State of the Union interview with ABC's Diane Sawyer, who was pressing him about his political predicaments. "I'd rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president," he said. "And I—and I believe that."

Now this is the sort of thing presidents say, and often believe they believe, but at the end of the day they all want two terms. Except that Mr. Obama shows every sign of meaning it, and if he does, it explains a lot about his recent decisions and actions.

So, is he pursuing his unpopular agenda because he wants a second term, as some House Democrats suspect, or because he does not want one, as Peggy Noonan suggests?

Hat tip: Hot Air

PREVIOUSLY on Obama's unpopular agenda:
•An encounter with the Ideologue-in-Chief
•Democrats' stealth plan to resuscitate Obamacare
•Those who want to go done with the ship: Obamacare Dead-enders
•Obamacare may raise insurance costs by 54%
•Harvard's Dean of Medicine opposes Obamacare
•How good is Canadan health care?
•Rahm Emanuel explains that they are not even trying have Obamacare make sense
•Harvard economist explains why Obamacare will raise premiums
•HHS says Obamacare will cause costs to go up and cause employers to drop coverage
•To protest Obamacare, San Francisco holds a sick-in
•Polls say majority of voters oppose Obamacare
•Obama wants to kill your mother!
•VP Biden offers medical advice
•"The Post Office, with scalpels"
•Dems oppose affordable medicine
•Socialized medicine in Japan: Baby dies after 8 hospitals refuse to admit mother
•The Canadian health care collapse
•Canadian official: "the system is imploding"
•Canadian MP flies to US for treatment

Is Glenn Reynolds a phony?

Over at The Atlantic magazine, Andrew Sullivan says Glenn Reynolds, Sarah Palin, and the Tea Party movement are frauds and phonies:

My view is that Ryan is far preferable to the total fraudulence of phony fiscal conservatives like Glenn Reynolds or Sarah Palin or the Tea Party "Government Out Of Medicare!" Movement. At least it opens up a more honest debate in a way the propagandists and opportunists on the right fail to do.

The Ryan he refers to is Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) who has proposed a long-term plan to balance the federal budget by cutting social security and medicare. The tea party movement is, Sullivan claims, phony apparently because it has been focused instead on more immediate budget excesses such as TARP and Porkulus. Of course, if Republicans were seen to adopt any plan to cut either social security or medicare in any way, Democratic demagogues would attack it and Republicans mercilessly. It is Sullivan's claim that such a plan would open up "a more honest debate" that is itself dishonest.

RELATED: Michelle Malkin celebrates the one-year anniversary of an anti-porkulus protest. (The movement didn't get the tea party name until later.)

PREVIOUSLY on the tea party movement:
•Massive storm threatens Washington DC
•3 in 10 Californians identify with tea party protests
•MSNBC's Garafola gets her hate on
•MSNBC responds to tea party protests with obscene jokes
•To protest Obamacare, San Francisco holds a sick-in (Nov. 15)
•A Tea Party greets Obama in San Francisco (Oct. 15)
• Videos of the October 15 San Francisco Tea Party
•San Franciscans speak to Nancy Pelosi (Aug. 14)
•The San Francisco Tax Day Tea Party Protest in Pictures (Apr. 15)
•Farmers protest in San Jose (Nov. 21).
•Tea Party breaks out in Palo Alto (Nov. 21)
•Rep. Eshoo's health care town hall (Sep. 2)
•Rep. Speier's town hall meeting (Aug. 23)
•Million man Tea party

Obama says kill?

After years of decrying Bush's policy of interrogating terrorists, Pres. Obama has promised to end "torture" and close gitmo. That means that there is little value in capturing top Al Qaeda operatives. So, according to the Washington Post, the decision appears to have been made to kill them instead. We won't get any useful intelligence from them that way but the advantage is that no one will be able to accuse Obama of torturing them.

Hat tip: PowerLine and Instapundit.

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey has more.

PREVIOUSLY on terrorism and torture:
•The root cause of terrorism
•Gitmo torture: Metallica is proud of its music's message to terrorists
•Speaker Pelosi's deep thoughts on giving Miranda rights to terrorists.
•AG Eric Holder was for enhanced interrogation before he was against it.
•The NY Times finally admits we were fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq
•Gitmo torture tactic revealed: "she touched my thigh!"
•-NY Times skeptical of Bush but trusts terrorists
•Global warming predicted to cause more terrorism
•Before Al Qaeda: the socialist-terrorist alliance of the 1980s

Global Warming U-Turn

Dr. Phil Jones, a central figure in the UN IPCC global warming cabal and deposed head of the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, has made some startling admissions:
It is interesting that the media, in Europe anyway, now seems free to ask global warmists difficult questions.

The Mail story is based on a BBC interview in which Dr. Jones was asked surprising informed and pointed questions. Although Dr. Jones still maintains that he is "100% confident" in global warming that is caused by man, his admissions are interesting:

A - Do you agree that according to the global temperature record used by the IPCC, the rates of global warming from 1860-1880, 1910-1940 and 1975-1998 were identical?

[discussion of data quality omitted] .... So, in answer to the question, the warming rates for all 4 periods are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other.

Here are the trends and significances for each period:

Period	Length	Trend (Degrees C per decade)	Significance
1860-1880	21	0.163	Yes
1910-1940	31	0.15	Yes
1975-1998	24	0.166	Yes
1975-2009	35	0.161	Yes

B - Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming

Yes, but only just. ....

Since the rise in atmospheric CO2 has only been significant for the recent few decades, these earlier warming periods, with warming rates just as high as today, occurred in the absence of man-made greenhouse gases and were thus likely natural. Climate scientists have long known about these earlier warming periods but, since most of the work at Jones' CRU was devoted to proving otherwise, this is a significant admission from him. The interview continues:

G - There is a debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was global or not. If it were to be conclusively shown that it was a global phenomenon, would you accept that this would undermine the premise that mean surface atmospheric temperatures during the latter part of the 20th Century were unprecedented?

There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. ....

Wow! After decades of efforts to deny the existence of the MWP, he now allows that there is "much debate."

H - If you agree that there were similar periods of warming since 1850 to the current period, and that the MWP is under debate, what factors convince you that recent warming has been largely man-made?

The fact that we can't explain the warming from the 1950s by solar and volcanic forcing - see again my answer to D.

He admitted (above) that the current heating rate is the same as prior heating rates. So the case for man-made global warming now reduces to "we can't explain the warming" even though it is not much different from prior warmings that were unrelated to greenhouse gases.

N - When scientists say "the debate on climate change is over", what exactly do they mean - and what don't they mean?

It would be supposition on my behalf to know whether all scientists who say the debate is over are saying that for the same reason. I don't believe the vast majority of climate scientists think this. This is not my view. There is still much that needs to be undertaken to reduce uncertainties, not just for the future, but for the instrumental (and especially the palaeoclimatic) past as well.

So even one of global warming's most prominent and extreme advocates admits "I don't believe the vast majority of climate scientists think [the debate is over]." If there was any justice, the politicians and news reporters who had claimed that the "science was settled" and who called anyone who disagreed with Al Gore a "denier" would be held to account.

Hat tip: WattsUpWithThat

PREVIOUSLY on the global warming scandal:
•Weather is not climate
•India rejects UN IPCC
•Climategate: laws were broken
•The collapse of the UN IPCC's credibility
•As the state of California goes bankrupt, it continues to spend on global warming
•Yet another UN IPCC Glacier-gate scandal
•UN IPCC claims of melting Himalayan glaciers exposed as fraud
•UN IPCC responds to Climategate with wild accusations
•Surprise: EU's carbon trading riddled with fraud
•Ma'am Sen. Boxer for and against climate whistleblowers.
•Climate alarmist Phil Jones to step down pending review
•Why Penn State's investigation of its global warmist will go nowhere
•Former boss calls James Hansen call an embarrassment to NASA
•NASA's global warming scientists caught hyping false data

Selective editing at MSNBC

Noel Sheppard at News Busters catches MSNBC's Rachel Maddow in a fib:

In a brief segment on the MSNBC program bearing her name, Maddow said the Fox News star claimed the snowstorm that hit the East Coast this week disproves Al Gore's favorite myth.
Unfortunately, Maddow conveniently left out the part when Beck said "one storm does not prove anything."
But that didn't stop the MSNBC host from making the accusation

News Busters has transcripts and video on this as well as on Ms. Maddow's inability to get jokes.

PREVIOUSLY the weather vs. climate debate was discussed here.

PREVIOUSLY on MSNBC:
•On Obamacare, are Democrats just faking it?
•The Brown election: MSNBC says it's all about racism and sexism
•Full-fake mode on MSNBC: Bush let bin Laden get away "intentionally"
•MSNBC host advocates vote fraud
•University study says Fox more fair than NBC (and MSNBC doesn't count)
•MSNBC reports fake news
•MSNBC crops photo to support their lie
•Chief Meteorologist at the NBC's Grand Rapids affiliate, objects to MSNBC's global warming propaganda.
•MSNBC: Garafola gets her hate on
•MSNBC responds to tea party protests with obscene jokes
•Shareholders boo Immelt's defense of MSNBC
•MSNBC's sexist attacks on Sec. Rice
•Sexism at MSNBC
•MSNBC falls for hoax
•MSNBC's Olberman and his defective fact checking

Weather is not climate

The major snow storms on the East coast and around the US this past week have left global warmists scrambling to update their spin. This should not be necessary because climate is about long term trends while weather, such as a snow storm, is merely about temporary fluctuations. For years, however, global warmists have been telling us that every weather event is proof of their version of climate science. Consequently, after every inconvenient weather event, their "climate" theories have to be rewritten. The best summary of this that I have seen this week was written by James Taranto:

It's been a slow week for news because it's been a big week for weather. The East Coast is covered in snow, and Time magazine blames global warming. No, seriously: "There is some evidence that climate change could in fact make such massive snowstorms more common, even as the world continues to warm." The New York Times says the same thing, though two-sidedly: "The two sides in the climate-change debate are seizing on the mounting drifts to bolster their arguments."

The Time story notes that climate is not the same thing as weather:

Ultimately, however, it's a mistake to use any one storm--or even a season's worth of storms--to disprove climate change (or to prove it; some environmentalists have wrongly tied the lack of snow in Vancouver, the site of the Winter Olympic Games, which begin this week, to global warming). Weather is what will happen next weekend; climate is what will happen over the next decades and centuries. And while our ability to predict the former has become reasonably reliable, scientists are still a long way from being able to make accurate projections about the future of the global climate.

Wait a minute, "scientists are still a long way from being able to make accurate projections about the future of the global climate"? We thought global warming was settled science, and anyone who doubted it was a knuckle-dragging lackey or handmaid of Big Oil! (Sorry for the mixed metaphors, but at least we're gender inclusive.)

To be sure, the global warmists are right to distinguish between weather and climate. A short-term condition sometimes can run counter to a long-term trend, as when a growing economy goes through a recession, or a generally healthy man suffers an acute illness (though in the long run, we're all dead).

The problem is that for years, global warmists have claimed that the weather proved their claims about the climate. This is a New York Times story from June 24, 1988:

The earth has been warmer in the first five months of this year than in any comparable period since measurements began 130 years ago, and the higher temperatures can now be attributed to a long-expected global warming trend linked to pollution, a space agency scientist reported today.

Until now, scientists have been cautious about attributing rising global temperatures of recent years to the predicted global warming caused by pollutants in the atmosphere, known as the "greenhouse effect." But today Dr. James E. Hansen of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration told a Congressional committee that it was 99 percent certain that the warming trend was not a natural variation but was caused by a buildup of carbon dioxide and other artificial gases in the atmosphere.

Dr. Hansen, a leading expert on climate change, said in an interview that there was no "magic number" that showed when the greenhouse effect was actually starting to cause changes in climate and weather. But he added, "It is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here."

Breitbart.tv has a collection of clips from the past decade depicting Democratic congressmen blaming global warming for shortfalls of snow. But perhaps the classic of the genre is a piece from the Boston Globe, dated Aug. 30, 2005, which begins: "The hurricane that struck Louisiana yesterday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its real name is global warming."

The author, Ross Gelbspan, goes on to blame global warming for "a two-foot snowfall in Los Angeles"--something that never happened--along with high winds in Northern Europe, droughts in the American Midwest and Southeastern Europe, rain in India and even a heat wave in Arizona.

It gets better. Gelbspan faults the media for failing to take global warming seriously:

When the US press has bothered to cover the subject of global warming, it has focused almost exclusively on its political and diplomatic aspects and not on what the warming is doing to our agriculture, water supplies, plant and animal life, public health, and weather.

For years, the fossil fuel industry has lobbied the media to accord the same weight to a handful of global warming skeptics that it accords the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change--more than 2,000 scientists from 100 countries reporting to the United Nations.

It is now clear that even if Gelbspan had been describing the media's approach to the subject accurately, they still would have been assigning too much authority to the IPCC. Yesterday London's Guardian, a left-wing paper that has long been squarely in the global-warmist camp, carried a damning report titled "How to Reform the IPCC":

The IPCC says its reports are policy relevant, but not policy prescriptive. Perhaps unknown to many people, the process is started and finished not by scientists but by political officials, who steer the way the information is presented in so-called summary for policymakers [SPM] chapters. Is that right, the Guardian asked?

"The Nobel prize was for peace not science . . . government employees will use it to negotiate changes and a redistribution of resources. It is not a scientific analysis of climate change," said Anton Imeson, a former IPCC lead author from the Netherlands. "For the media, the IPCC assessments have become an icon for something they are not. To make sure that it does not happen again, the IPCC should change its name and become part of something else. The IPCC should have never allowed itself to be branded as a scientific organisation. It provides a review of published scientific papers but none of this is much controlled by independent scientists."

And of course the University of East Anglia emails showed that the so-called independent scientists manipulated data and tried to blacklist colleagues who did not accept the global-warmist hypotheses.

It's true that cold weather, while providing an occasion to mock global warming, does not disprove it. But the mocking would be far less effective had global warmists not spent the past quarter-century making a mockery of the scientific method.

Flopping Aces has another good summary reviewing the IPCC predictions for declining snowfalls and the failed climate predictions of NASA's James Hansen.

PREVIOUSLY on the global warming scandal:
•India rejects UN IPCC
•Climategate: laws were broken
•The collapse of the UN IPCC's credibility
•As the state of California goes bankrupt, it continues to spend on global warming
•Yet another UN IPCC Glacier-gate scandal
•UN IPCC claims of melting Himalayan glaciers exposed as fraud
•UN IPCC responds to Climategate with wild accusations
•Surprise: EU's carbon trading riddled with fraud
•Ma'am Sen. Boxer for and against climate whistleblowers.
•Climate alarmist Phil Jones to step down pending review
•Why Penn State's investigation of its global warmist will go nowhere
•Former boss calls James Hansen call an embarrassment to NASA
•NASA's global warming scientists caught hyping false data

Culture of corruption

Writing in the New York Times, Gail Collins reviews political culture in Illinois and New York:

Our question for today is, who has the most awful political culture, Illinois or New York? ....

So, who’s worse? Both states lost their governors to scandal. But Eliot Spitzer is not about to make his debut on “Celebrity Apprentice.” Point Illinois. ....

Meanwhile, Gov. David Paterson of New York, who is mired in a controversy over a racetrack casino contract, ....

Prof. Jacobson notes an interesting omission from her article:

But [she] forgot to connect the dots: Everyone mentioned in her column was a Democrat in a state controlled by Democrats. [Emph. added]

PREVIOUSLY on the subject of corruption:
•Democrats and ill-gotten gains
•Corruption loses a key advocate
•Dems, taxes, and hypocrisy
•How to buy a congressman
•Poll: Dems think it OK to cheat on taxes
•Obama and Tony Rezko
•Democrats and taxes
•How to buy a judge
•How Al Sharpton buys his political contributions
•Corruption at the World Bank
•Speaker Pelosi and Sen. Feinstein: how their husbands benefit from government contracts
•The rules apply only to other people
•Rep. Kagen investigated by FDA
•Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) under an ethics cloud

The left's sexual disfunction

Pres. Obama never goes anywhere without an array of teleprompters. By contrast, Sarah Palin can deliver a speech using nothing more a few notes jotted on her hand. Here is how the great minds of liberalism respond to that revelation:

• TMZ - Sarah Palin's Hand Gets Job Done‎
• Democratic Underground - I say we call it the "Sarah Palin Hand Job"
• DailyKos - Sunday Talks Liveblog--Sarah Palin Hand Job Edition
• Politics Plus - A Mooseolini Hand Job
• Blonde Sense - Palin's hand job
  

For still more examples, see Legal Insurrection. The left apparently cannot think about Sarah Palin's hand without their thoughts becoming inappropriately sexual. Is this sexist or misogynist? Yes. But, note that when they think about Obama, their thoughts of adoration also become sexual (see here). The key to understanding many in the liberal community, I suspect, is to recognize that, emotionally, they are adolescents.

UPDATE: Red State highlights another example of Palin Derangement Syndrome.

WELCOME to Bit's Blog readers.

PREVIOUSLY:
•Democrats and their Sex-Symbol-in-Chief
•Unbiased reporters and Palin Derangement Syndrome
•A Democrat opposes sexism
•Missing the story
•Strange stereotypes
•Liberals projecting their hate onto Palin

Massive storm threatens Washington, DC

Writing in the Examiner, Prof. Glenn Reynolds (the Instapundit) puts the Tea Party movement in historical perspective:

The Tea Party movement is part of something bigger: America’s Third Great Awakening.

America’s prior Great Awakenings, in the 18th and 19th Centuries, were religious in nature. Unimpressed with self-serving, ossified, and often corrupt religious institutions, Americans responded with a bottom-up reassertion of faith, and independence.

This time, it’s different. It’s not America’s churches and seminaries that are in trouble: It’s America’s politicians and parties. They’ve grown corrupt, venal, and out-of-touch with the values, and the people, that they’re supposed to represent. So the people, once again, are reasserting themselves.

Nate Beeler illustrates how this looks from Washington's perspective:
PREVIOUSLY on the tea party movement:
•3 in 10 Californians identify with tea party protests
•MSNBC's Garafola gets her hate on
•MSNBC responds to tea party protests with obscene jokes
•To protest Obamacare, San Francisco holds a sick-in (Nov. 15)
•A Tea Party greets Obama in San Francisco (Oct. 15)
• Videos of the October 15 San Francisco Tea Party
•San Franciscans speak to Nancy Pelosi (Aug. 14)
•The San Francisco Tax Day Tea Party Protest in Pictures (Apr. 15)
•Farmers protest in San Jose (Nov. 21).
•Tea Party breaks out in Palo Alto (Nov. 21)
•Rep. Eshoo's health care town hall (Sep. 2)
•Rep. Speier's town hall meeting (Aug. 23)
•Million man Tea party