Congressman asks Geithner to review Chrysler's Super Bowl ad buy

Congressman asks Geithner to review Chrysler's Super Bowl ad buy

Here we go. Now that the U.S. government is in the automobile business, congress has started second guessing Chrysler's business practices. Here we have a congressman, a republican who has spent the last two decades pretending to do something useful while We the People have been overpaying his salary, who believes that Super Bowl ads are too expensive to be bought with public money. Since he has never had a real job, he has no idea that Super Bowl ads, like all ads everywhere, are priced the way they are because they work for the advertisers.

I guess that when you have never made an honest living (Congressman Heller's only private sector job was selling stock before he moved to the public teat) you actually believe that companies are stupid, and the only smart people are the ones who figured out how to steal from the government. But Chrysler, no doubt, has volumes of research and past results that tell them that this is a cost-effective way to advertise their product. But what does all that knowledge amount to when put up against the populist emotion of a professional political whore?

The result of this can only be a further crippling of Chrysler's, and any other bailed-out company's ability to recover from the tender mercy the government showed them. We all lose. Obama will be pleased.

Night of the Living Government

Night of the Living Government

Evidence of AGW fraud Increases

Evidence of AGW fraud Increases

I took a lot of science courses in school, and once thought I might make my career in physics. I only say this so you'll understand that when I tell you that "Geophysical Research Letters" is the most important and serious peer-reviewed journal in physics, I know what I'm talking about. I spend a lot of time reading on the subject, although I do not subscribe to heavy journals anymore. Today I came across this article in "Science Daily" which is no kind of "skeptic" type site - far from it, but they saw the need to report on this study. Read it here, cause the MSM will never cover this, but if it is true, and it has to be pretty close to the truth, the entire underpinning of the global warming fraud is a lie.

No Rise of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Fraction in Past 160 Years, New Research Finds

ScienceDaily (Dec. 31, 2009) — Most of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activity does not remain in the atmosphere, but is instead absorbed by the oceans and terrestrial ecosystems. In fact, only about 45 percent of emitted carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere.
[Snip}
In contradiction to some recent studies, he finds that the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide has not increased either during the past 150 years or during the most recent five decades.

The research is published in Geophysical Research Letters.

Global Fraud

Global Fraud

This is a sad time for science. Anyone who has been involved in the world of academic science is grieving right now. I thought that the situation in physics over string theory was bad - a researcher needs to be a true believer in string theory to get big grants and choice assignments - but there is no organized effort to discredit other schools of thought (that I am aware of). Now we have this.

The difference is caused by the sheer amount of money and resources at stake, plus the factor that some portion of humanity has a religious belief that humanity has spoiled his nest, and the AGW hypothesis fits that body of belief well. Then we have the statist left which plans to use this issue to garner great power for their cause. We are talking about trillions of dollars here, and the full involvement of politics and industry. Now we see from these emails that careers have been ruined, and governments led astray.

The dichotomy we face is immense. The political and industrial stakes have never been this large. The statist left and the Malthusian true believers will continue to act as if this is good science to further their agenda, even as anyone with a sound basis in science knows just how badly the cause of science and understanding of climate has been corrupted. This will not end well.

We are not being well served by the media either. Maybe they do not understand the issues, but they surely never present them honestly. The question is not even about warming climate. It is only opartially about man's contribution to whatever warming there might be. The real question, which science has not yet even addressed, is whether curtailing CO2 emissions will have any effect on world climate, and if it will have any effect, will this effect be negative or positive. Drowning bears and melting ice have nothing to do with it, but they make good television. Sad.


Note: Some great writing on the same subject:

How to Manufacture a Climate Crisis by Patrick J. Michaels

Climategate's Stubborn Facts by Dexter Wright

Understanding Climategate's Hidden Decline by Marc Sheppard,

Scientists Behaving Badly by Steven F. Hayward

Botch after Botch after Botch by Lorrie Goldstein

Federal Employees at the Trough

Federal Employees at the Trough

By Paul B. Matthews
Originally posted at American Thinker


Last week, USA Today reported that nearly one in five federal government employees now earn over $100,000. The paper also reported the average federal salary rose to $71,260, almost $31,000 more than the comparative average private-sector wage.

Within the Department of Defense, over 10,000 employees (as of June 2009) now earn at least $150,000 per year, a 5½-fold increase in the number of employees eclipsing this salary threshold from just eighteen months ago.

At the same time as federal employee salaries have been soaring, total private sector earnings have steadily declined as the unemployment rate escalates (now at 10%) and the average workweek declines. In fact, in November, private-sector employees worked an average of just 33.2 hours, slightly above the all-time low set in October (33.0 hours) and well below the forty hours guaranteed to federal employees. Simultaneously, average private sector hourly earnings totaled $18.74 per hour, significantly below the implied hourly wage rates ($34.25 per hour) paid to the average federal employee.

However, simply analyzing the growth in total paid compensation fails to capture the true explosion in benefits paid to federal workers.

For example, government employees almost never work on weekends. And if a federal employee does work on Sunday, he becomes eligible for Sunday Premium Pay. Federal employees are also entitled to compensatory time off in lieu of overtime pay, a benefit few private sector firms are able to offer.

Paid time off for federal employees is also extremely generous. Employees with less than three years' tenure earn twelve paid days off per year. For service between three and fifteen years, workers are guaranteed eighteen days off with pay. And when an employee reaches fifteen years of service, this benefit grows to twenty-four days.

Federal employees are also guaranteed ten federal holidays with pay.

With all this time off, some government workers might be hard-pressed to use actually use it. No worries -- federal workers have a very liberal carryover policy: thirty days for all employees. However, if you get stationed overseas, this policy expands to forty-five days. And if you become classified as a "Senior Executive Service," a "Senior-Level" [employee], or a "Scientific or Professional Employee," the policy expands to ninety days.

Naturally, at retirement, or if an employee decides to leave government service, any unused time is compensated for with cash -- a lump-sum payout that could easily amount to between $6,000 and $17,800 based on the "average" federal salary figure. For senior-level employees who earn the highest pay levels, such payouts could easily total $30,000 and might even exceed $50,000, thereby eclipsing the average annual salary of an American in the private sector.

The benefits continue. On top of paid time off, federal employees are also eligible for half a day of sick time per biweekly pay period. Thus, in a 52-week year, each full-time employee may accrue 13 days of sick time. There are also no limits on the amount of sick leave an employee may accumulate. Moreover, when an employee retires, any unused sick pay is added to the calculation of the employee's retirement annuity, thereby increasing the value of the annuity payouts received by federal employees during retirement.

And yet there is still more. As part of the Student Loan Repayment Program, a benefit enacted by Congress in 2007, all federal government employees are eligible for up to $10,000 per year in student loan forgiveness, a benefit capped at $60,000 per individual. (This benefit requires ten years of government service.)

Health care benefits provided to federal employees are also quite extensive and lucrative. Notably, there are a minimum of nine national pay-for-service health care plans from which an employee may select. To supplement these nine national plans, there are a number of additional agency-specific plans as well as state-specific HMO, HDHP, or CDHP plans that are also employee options.

On top of basic health care insurance plans offered to its employees, the federal government also provides a full range of vision and dental care plans. Of course, all of these insurance programs are heavily subsidized (up to 50% of the total cost for a family policy) by the U.S. taxpayer.

Finally, the federal government even provides a subsidized life insurance to its employees. Under this program, employees pay only two-thirds of the monthly insurance premium while the U.S. taxpayer covers the rest.

On top of all these incentives, Congress has recently decided to expand the handouts. While consumer prices have steadily declined throughout 2009 (the annual CPI rate fell 0.2% through October), the U.S. Congress just passed legislation that would provide an across-the -board 2% pay raise for all federal employees. As such, federal employees will soon receive a 2.2% real pay increase as private sector wages remain stagnant or fall.

Currently, the U.S. Office of Personal Management estimates that there are just over 4.2 million federal employees. Thus, based on the average salary figures reported by USA Today, total wages paid to all federal employees now total nearly $300 billion per year, or about $1,000 for every man, women, and child in the United States. Add to this figure the costs of insurance, paid time off, and retirement benefits (which have not even been quantified here), and the total federal outlay to "pay" federal employees soars by billions more.

Simply stated, this trend cannot be sustained.

With last year's U.S. federal deficit of more than $1.4 trillion, it will become increasingly difficult to reduce the government's level of red ink, particularly if the federal government continues to expand. However, it now seems quite obvious that the government employment will continue to expand, especially under a nationalized health care system or once Obama's new Consumer Financial Protection Agency officially becomes part of the government Leviathan.

Americans and the media remain almost uniformly against the large bonuses being paid to Wall Street bankers -- even though these bonuses must come from the (albeit subsidized) revenues generated by these firms. Given what has been going on in the public sector, perhaps it's about time for Americans to refocus their anger on the public bureaucrats who feed daily at the trough of the tax dollars generated by their indentured servitude in the private sector.

Paul B. Matthews is a consultant and a Texas-licensed CPA. He is a former hedge fund manager.

Innumerate Warmists

Innumerate Warmists

A recent article in Scientific American, one of the most virulent purveyors of Warmist hysteria, makes the case that we can all go on a WWS economy, that is, Waves, Water, and Solar. They claim that all we need is

3.8 million large wind turbines, 90,000 solar plants, and numerous geothermal, tidal and rooftop photovoltaic installations

That's all very nice, but it seems to me that they never ran the numbers. Let's give it a try.

3.8 million 5 MW wind turbines. These cost $5 million to $10 million each. Including land and installation, that's $40,000,000,000,000. (40 trillion dollars) They claim that we need to build 1,700,000,000 3 kW rooftop photovoltaic systems. At current prices each of these would cost $24,000, which is another 40 trillion dollars. These numbers are exclusive of installation costs and the cost of a new electric transmission grid needed to make use of it all. Let's be kind and call it a minimum of one hundred trillion dollars to install the hardware.

Where will the money come from? The entire debt of the United States government is officially supposed to be twelve trillion dollars, so this proposal calls for increasing that debt by eight times! That's an order of magnitude more debt, and that's just the money cost. What about the environmental cost? All the mountain tops that will have to be leveled for wind turbine installation, like the proposal they are starting to put into motion in Maine, is an interesting subject for study all by itself.

Beyond that consider that the deserts will need to be covered with photovoltaic arrays. And we have not even considered the tidal dams, the wave energy collectors, and all the other pie in the sky neato-tech that will need to be invented to make this pipe dream come true. And for what? The AGW debate starts with a supposed increase in temperatures, but it seems to end there as well. Forgotten, beyond the question of human causeation, is whether any of this investment and destruction of habitat will change the course of terrestrial weather. Further, we need to see a debate on the effect of warming itself. Is it a bad thing, or a good thing for humanity? Making Canada and Siberia productive for food agriculture might just be a good thing. But to the true believer, this is not even part of the debate. Maybe Gaea is providing for burgeoning population by removing the protective ice cover from immense regions for human habitation and exploitation. Maybe that is what this entire debate is really about.

This all presupposes that climate conditions will remain the way they are, which seems to be to be a revealing bit of the Warmist mentality. If they truly believe that climate is changing due to human activity, then they should also believe that weather will also be changing. After all, isn't the utility of a solar generation site linked to the local weather? If a trend to more cloud cover develops, that would affect generation. And should changing conditions act on the viability of wind farms, should they look to possible changes in wind patterns? Wouldn't the mere existence of massive wind farms remove wind energy from the system, and thus slow the wind itself?

One might say that is all hypothetical, but then the entire body of AGW science is hypothetical. There are no experiments in climate science, only observations and predictions. To the extent that the models in use are now twenty years old, could we not consider the fact that those predictions predict the first ten of those years pretty well, but they fail to predict anything of value for the second decade at all? And now data has been collected that seem to show that wind velocity, and thus power available for harvesting, is reducing. Amazingly, Warmists dismiss this research, because the observations are not predicted their models. Isn't that the exact opposite of the scientific method? Shouldn't the prediction, the theory itself, change when new observations, new data, come to light?

Fin de Siècle

Fin de Siècle

Fin de siècle is a term that refers to the end of an era of impending doom and emerging into a new, brighter future. It seems to me that is a great way to describe the current changes occurring now in the dynamics of the cult that has arisen over the issue of anthropogenic global warming, or AGW.

Until a couple of weeks ago, society seemed destined to accept a fundamental change in the way the resources of the world would be distributed, a power shift that would move humanity incrementally closer to a one world government. We may well be headed toward such a future, and at a certain point it might even become necessary, but now we know that this shift will not happen today - and that's a good thing.

The entire enterprise was predicated on the premise that the AGW "science is settled," the "debate is over." But then a silly thing like reality asserted its will over the proceedings. An unpredicted cooling overcame the earth, and the AGW science teams couldn't explain it without abandoning the very models that had given them such power and predominance in the scientific community. Instead of reacting like scientists should, which would be to take a close look at the data, reevaluate their procedures of analysis, and try to understand why their models could not predict the future. Instead, they reacted in a purely political way, which was use their power to try to move public opinion, rather than seeking a better technical understanding of the dynamics of climate. That act will be the downfall of the predominance of their movement, now that the world has seen the cult leaders at their cynical game, in the leaked CRU emails and files.

All signs point to a cold winter for the northern hemisphere, where the economies designated to supply the cash to the AGW cult all live. They still all have some form of democratic governance in place, and the power grab was based upon having these electorates under the impression that the consequences of failing to accept the prescription would be dire. A couple of decades of brainwashing in grade school has convinced most of the younger generation that the AGW hypothesis is a fact. Seeing behind the methods and motivations of the leaders of the cult will have a profound effect on the discourse, and ultimately the zeitgeist, and the way people reflect and react to discussion of the future will have to change. They will have attained a bit more skepticism. It is natural for youth to be skeptical of the establishment. The Obama campaign tapped into this skepticism effectively. Now the bloom is off that rose.

When you finally realize that the CRU emails show that the observed facts do not fit any known theory of anthropogenic warming, you MUST come to the conclusion that science does not know what the next ten or twenty years of climate will be like. It would therefore be immoral for the governments of the rich countries to implement an unproved and not well understood plan to make serious changes to the way the human race manages international problems.

Back to the drawing board fellas. IF indeed the human race is to take such serious measures, we need to solidify the science. This can not be done unless and until those scientists who are skeptical of Al Gore's "theory" are allowed a full throated part of the public debate. Anything else is junk science, more politics than the quest for objective truth, and the honest seeking of solutions. We the People deserve nothing less from those who choose to rule us.

Bill Ayers Dumps, Demonstrates Against, Obama

Bill Ayers, who tried to blow up the Pentagon, has finally had it with his erstwhile friend. After ghostwriting his autobiography, Billy boy draws the line at war, as in war against Jihad, not war against Israel.

The Truth About Warming Climate

The Truth About Warming Climate

What tends to be forgotten amid human wrangling and debate is that we humans are mostly concerned with our personal situation, and only put matters into a public frame to make our argument sound more outer-directed. To most of us that is mere style, but when we consider people with ambition to attain great power, the consequences can be dire for the rest of us. Take the presidency. A man craves personal power, and circumstances conspire to put him in a position to achieve it. He will do whatever it takes to succeed. Did Obama ever stop to think, for even a moment, if his narcissism and inexperience made him the wrong person to lead a nation in perilous times? Not a single rational person believes that he did, or would. When Algore refused to concede to G.W. Bush in November of 2000 did he, even for a split second, consider whether his actions that day might hasten a disaster on the order of the events of 9/11/01? He surely did not, yet that is exactly what happened. Now we must deal with the climate crisis. And a crisis it is, definitely. Not a crisis of climate however, but a crisis of governance.

I am willing to concede that all the malefactors revealed in the recent document dump at the East Anglia CRU had the best interests of the planet in mind. I will concede, for the sake of argument, that they are true believers in their theory and genuinely want the best thing for humanity. But clearly, when the twenty year warming trend turned cold after 1998 and their models could not explain it, they began to issue fraudulent documents to support their point of view. They destroyed the careers of those who would stand in their way, if they could. To them, the end justified the means. But means are merely the route to a policy position, which, in the way of humans, consisted of a melange of different actors, each pursuing their single interest. The climate true believers made common cause with the statist Left, whose desire to end democracy and individual liberty has always been beyond question. If we believe the Anthropogenic Global Warming crowd, we need to reorder the entire system of government in the world, so that we can marshal the enormous forces required to stop industrial development and reduce human consumption as quickly as can be done.

They almost got away with it too. They still might. But their task is far more difficult now, as their mask is off. The raw power grab will be revealed for what it always was, as the victims, We the People, are going to be more alert to them now, and far less acquiescent to their claims, and especially to their prescription. And that can only be a good thing.


[Update] Just in case you missed what this is all about, Paul Jacob makes the case pithily. He has the links also.

In particular, scientists reported temperatures in the Medieval Warming Period as cooler than they were, and more recent cooling trends as warmer. Anthropogenic global warming catastrophists have engaged in a massive public fraud.

Now, you might not bat an eye were you to learn that economists associated with, say, our recent bailouts, had been fudging numbers. Trillions of dollars to spend!

But when climate scientists get caught lying — as well as conspiring to keep their basic data secret, and hijacking the peer review process — it’s hard not to feel a bit abused. Natural scientists are supposed to be above this.

Public, open criticism is the hallmark of science. Climate researchers who stonewalled to keep their actual data hidden from critics were scuttling science.

Politically Correct? How about Correct, Period?

Politically Correct? How about Correct, Period?

Amazingly, there is a news item out today that is headed "FBI: 10% of U.S. Mosques Preach Jihad." That report is false, and is yet another example of political correctness run amok.

All this talk about the religion of peace, all this talk about moderate Islam, is misguided, and factually wrong. Islam is a religion of war. The Koran, their holy book, was written as a battle manual, and it was used to enthrall most of the known world right after it was written. The actual number of Mosques that teach jihad is exactly one hundred percent of them, not ten. Jihad is dogma to them, as surely as confession is to a Catholic, a religious requirement, a basic tenet of his faith. No other religion teaches that they are at war with the rest of the world, and they will convert, enslave, or kill everybody living here on this planet. This becomes clear if you have the minimum understanding of the history of organized religion over the last three thousand years, and an ideology that allows you to see the truth when it is set before you.

In the beginning the priests would build an idol and a temple and get people to pay them for things like spiritual healing and to make the rains come, the crops grow. Well, the rain didn't always come, and each independent little idol or God had its own exploiters, therefore it was not centralized and thus, inefficient. In order to facilitate better control and to enable the accretion of more power, monotheism arose, in Egypt and other places. The Hebrews refined it and codified it. Their one God was pretty well uninvolved in the daily affairs of men, and His book, the Bible, was about their history, some prophesy, and rules of behavior. The priest class thrived under this new system, but some realized that they could do better, thus a group of them branched out with a new book, a New Testament, which built on, and incorporated the Bible as its preface. This time they improved the cost-benefit ratio, making heaven a goal everybody could strive to enter, and live out eternity with the most holy. Ten percent of all income was what they charged their believers. This turned out to become a much better business, but they could not attract the believers in the old system to join them, and they were lousy rules for recruiters for new members - missionaries were supposed to use persuasion instead of coercion. Then came Mo and his Koran, which was a more modern and far more effective manual for the priest class to make an even better living, which contained a major improvement.

That signal improvement was in directly seizing secular power, and personally leading the army. An army of believers, led by the priests. They moved the reward for supporting the priests into the next world, thus the believers needed to die to get into heaven. In this way the priests didn't have to deliver anything in this world, except leadership. They named their religion "Submission." In Arabic, that is "Islam."

The "Crusades" were a set of defensive wars that ultimately stopped the Muslim army at the gates of Vienna in 1683, and ran them out of Spain as well. This was the end of Muslim expansion by warfare. Since that time the priests of Islam have continued to teach world domination, and in the last eighty years their war against the rest of the world has really freshened, as they teach their children that Allah gave them oil to finance their victory.

This is not surmise, they say this stuff openly all the time. Check out the public statements of "mainstream" clergy in the pages of MEMRI, among other places. Mo wrote in his Koran that the world could be divided into two zones, the Dar al Islam, or the world of the believers, and Dar al Harb, the world of war. They have been teaching this to their children since the seventh century. They are on the march to the victory that Allah promised them. One hundred percent of Muslims believe that, if they keep on having lots of children and following Sharia, they can rule the world, even if it takes another hundred years. For most of them this is soon enough. A fair few of them get anxious though, and try to hurry things along. Like Major Hasan.

Major Hasan responded to his religious teaching and his faith, when he took a gun to kill as many of his comrades/enemies as possible, followed by suicide by cop, as his ticket to be home free in his whorehouse heaven with his seventy two raisins. I am sure that he is quite disappointed to still be alive. He is a perfect example of the jihadi terrorist. Now there are some who insist that he was sick, not hateful. Well, if Hasan is sick, so are all the other suicide bombers, but it the sickness of their society, not some special victim syndrome that affords him a free pass from his guilt. It is hate. Religious, murderous, hate. Pure and simple. And few, if any, of his coreligionists speak out in outrage.

Edmund Burke is supposed to have said that "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Or maybe they are not good men, but pious believers, following the precepts of their church.


[Update - Over at American Thinker, Amil Imani has a post up that complements this one. A good read.]

Is Obama Speech Naive, or Islamist Perfidy?

Is Obama Speech Naive, or Islamist Perfidy?

An interesting analysis of Obama's words and seemingly intentional mistranslation of the Koran makes this observer wonder whether there is something sinister going on here. While the writer/translator tries mightily to sound fair minded, I have no such constraint. When Obama quotes Sura 9 in his speech in Cairo, are we not allowed to remember that he first learned that Sura in a Muslim school in Indonesia? That it could not be unknown to him that this is the very place in their holy book that all Muslims are bound by their prophet to kill all nonbelievers?

Now he does a similar thing in Fort Hood. While his words toward the dead and wounded sound the right tone, his denial of the clear motive the attacker acted under is enlightening. Military brass may have a need to downplay the crisis of political correctness in their ranks, but the president has no need to support the institution. He will, however, support the very devil if it would serve his interest to do so.

Are we allowed to discern the perfidy here, or are we bound to follow The Won into a world in which all evil is American, and all good comes from Allah?

Windows Seven

Windows Seven

I am usually the last guy to upgrade to new software or hardware, but recently my wife bought a new computer with Windows 7 installed, so I had a chance to play around with it a bit. I must say that the program seems to work better than any Windows version I have ever used. This is just a first look, but for me, that is saying a lot. Windows 7 is no Ubuntu Linux, but for the guys in Redmond, this is something new - a program that seems to work right, right out of the box. Last time they did that was Word 5.0, back in the eighties.

I came late to the Windows party. I stayed with Dos 3.3 until everybody was using Windows 3.1, and I had no choice but to switch to it in the mid 1990s, right after the buggy Windows 95 came out. Now I use Widows XP. When I boot into Ubuntu - I have a dual boot system - I marvel at the precision of the program, the way that everything is easily controllable, even the very fact that everything IS controlled by the user. I HATE the way Windows does so much stuff "in the background" where you don't know what is going on.

My computer is always on, and sometimes I can see the little light that means traffic is going over the web start blinking spontaneously for no apparent reason, but with Windows XP I have no easy way to find out what is going on. If I have Linux up, not only can I easily find out what the traffic is, this never happens in the first place. But then I need easy access to all my Windows docs and apps, and Windows is familiar, so as a result of Windows' ease of use, I use Linux infrequently. Also, if I did not have my computer administration and troubleshooting department at hand (my teenage son) I would be daunted by all the understanding that I do not have about Ubuntu Linux, and my expert is not here most of the time during the day. Little thing called high school.

When they decided to make Windows idiot proof, they were thinking about me. But when my computer needs to stay on for a week, such as when I go on a business trip, I leave it running Ubuntu. That way it will absolutely, positively be up and working, and my VPN can access it. Windows XP could never last for a week without needing a cold boot.

I haven't really tested Windows 7, and I probably will wait to use it for a year or two, but what little I saw these last few days is encouraging. Maybe Redmond finally got something right. It has sure been a while since the last time they did that.

Rich Whistling Past the Graveyard

Rich Whistling Past the Graveyard

Frank Rich, the former movie reviewer for the NYT, now the ponderously distinguished political analyst for the NYT, has come out with a remarkable piece of political spin. He has taken the fact that Dede Scozzafava has resigned her campaign so the more popular conservative candidate can have a better chance to beat the democrat, and spun it into unreality. His spin is more like whistling past the graveyard, as if claiming that the republicans are on the wrong track will put them on the approved path to permanent minority status. A bit of his prose:

The battle for upstate New York confirms just how swiftly the right has devolved into a wacky, paranoid cult that is as eager to eat its own as it is to destroy Obama.

Obama is destroying himself, and when liberal republicans make way for honest conservatives to protect their district from democrat victory, is no paranoid cult. It sounds to me more like concerned Americans, willing to go the extra mile, even at the cost of their own careers, for the greater good. That is a good sign for America, and a black mark on the checkered record of Frank Rich.

Five Hundred Posts

Five Hundred Posts

What a long strange trip it's been. Seven years, five hundred posts, and just getting started. There is plenty to talk about, considering the fact that we have a narcissist in the White house, clearly trying to take this great nation down a path that the rest of the civilized world is retreating from, having tasted these fruits, and found them bitter.

Even so, after 500 posts I feel that I have the right, and the need, for a little break. I will be back early in November. It's all good!

Treasury Admits Cost of Cap & Tax will cost 1% of GDP

Treasury Admits Cost of Cap & Tax will cost 1% of GDP

The Treasury Department has been forced to admit that the cost of Cap & Tax will cost 1% of GDP. In respomse to a FOIA request, Treasury submitted a redacted report on the costs. While the dollar amount was redacted, on page three of the .pdf file there is the admission "Exonomic costs will likely be on the order of 1% of GDP, making them equal in scale to all environmental regulations."

Health Care Plan Status

Health Care Plan Status

Obama Abandons Missile Shield, Picks Best Date

Obama Abandons Missile Shield, Picks Best Date

President announced today that it will not continue to build the missile defense system that president Bush promised would protect Europe from missile attack and Russia did not want built. Amazingly, Obama, showing the political deaf ear he has displayed since the moment his brilliant political campaign ended, picked possibly the worst possible day to announce this, the anniversary of the Soviet Invasion of Poland.

While the official story of building the missile shield was that it would protect against Iranian missiles, it could be no secret that building defensive missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic would be even more protective of those nations. Thus, Russia was not pleased. Today, the Vodka is flowing in Moscow, as their dreams of reestablishing their hegemony over Eastern Europe got a big boost from their good friend Obama. Now, if Obama had a clue about how to get some mileage with Russia from this it might not be an entirely bad move, but the supine foreign policy of the current administration does not inspire confidence that they have just acquired a shot of competence.

Fifteen in Congress Who Betray the Public's Trust

Fifteen in Congress Who Betray the Public's Trust

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) is out today with its fifth annual report on the most corrupt members of Congress. Seven Republicans and eight Democrats comprise the list. They are:

Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-Fla.)

Sen. Roland Burris (D-Ill.)

Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.)

Rep. Nathan Deal (R-Ga.)

Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.)

Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-Ill.)

Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.)

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)

Rep. Alan Mollohan (D-W. Va.)

Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.)

Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.)

Rep. Laura Richardson (D-Calif.)

Rep. Pete Visclosky (D-Ind.)

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.)

Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska)

CREW's critieria? The congressmen and women "who have most egregiously betrayed the public’s trust."

Republicans for Sunstein

Republicans for Sunstein

Cass Sunstein was confirmed by the senate yesterday, He was targeted by certain conservatives, notably Glenn Beck and right leaning bloggers, for statements made in his 2004 book and elsewhere, which reveal a man who believes we need a new Bill of Rights, that animals need access to the courts, and a strong stance in favor of gun control. On the other hand, he was in favor of the appointment of now Chief Justice John Roberts, and he is generally of a free market disposition.

His new position as the guy in the White House who reviews federal regulations seems to keep him away from gun control, and his advocacy of new rights, including rights to a job and higher prices for farmers also seem to be beyond his new brief. In any event the key vote in the senate was the cloture vote, where the democrat side needed 60 votes. For your reference, here is a list of the republicans who foted in favor of Cass Sunstein.

Republicans voting for cloture:
Bennett (R-UT)
Collins (R-ME)
Gregg (R-NH)
Hatch (R-UT)
Lugar (R-IN)
Snowe (R-ME)
Voinovich (R-OH)