Internet companies and civil liberties groups were alarmed this spring when a U.S. Senate bill proposed handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the Internet.
They're not much happier about a revised version that aides to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, have spent months drafting behind closed doors. CNET News has obtained a copy of the 55-page draft of S.773 (excerpt), which still appears to permit the president to seize temporary control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency.
The new version would allow the president to "declare a cybersecurity emergency" relating to "non-governmental&qu ot; computer networks and do what's necessary to respond to the threat. Other sections of the proposal include a federal certification program for "cybersecurity professionals," and a requirement that certain computer systems and networks in the private sector be managed by people who have been awarded that license.
"I think the redraft, while improved, remains troubling due to its vagueness," said Larry Clinton, president of the Internet Security Alliance, which counts representatives of Verizon, Verisign, Nortel, and Carnegie Mellon University on its board. "It is unclear what authority Sen. Rockefeller thinks is necessary over the private sector. Unless this is clarified, we cannot properly analyze, let alone support the bill."
Representatives of other large Internet and telecommunications companies expressed concerns about the bill in a teleconference with Rockefeller's aides this week, but were not immediately available for interviews on Thursday.
A spokesman for Rockefeller also declined to comment on the record Thursday, saying that many people were unavailable because of the summer recess. A Senate source familiar with the bill compared the president's power to take control of portions of the Internet to what President Bush did when grounding all aircraft on Sept. 11, 2001. The source said that one primary concern was the electrical grid, and what would happen if it were attacked from a broadband connection.
When Rockefeller, the chairman of the Senate Commerce committee, and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) introduced the original bill in April, they claimed it was vital to protect national cybersecurity. "We must protect our critical infrastructure at all costs--from our water to our electricity, to banking, traffic lights and electronic health records," Rockefeller said.
The Rockefeller proposal plays out against a broader concern in Washington, D.C., about the government's role in cybersecurity. In May, President Obama acknowledged that the government is "not as prepared" as it should be to respond to disruptions and announced that a new cybersecurity coordinator position would be created inside the White House staff. Three months later, that post remains empty, one top cybersecurity aide has quit, and some wags have begun to wonder why a government that receives failing marks on cybersecurity should be trusted to instruct the private sector what to do.
Rockefeller's revised legislation seeks to reshuffle the way the federal government addresses the topic. It requires a "cybersecurity workforce plan" from every federal agency, a "dashboard" pilot project, measurements of hiring effectiveness, and the implementation of a "comprehensive national cybersecurity strategy" in six months--even though its mandatory legal review will take a year to complete.
The privacy implications of sweeping changes implemented before the legal review is finished worry Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. "As soon as you're saying that the federal government is going to be exercising this kind of power over private networks, it's going to be a really big issue," he says.
Probably the most controversial language begins in Section 201, which permits the president to "direct the national response to the cyber threat" if necessary for "the national defense and security." The White House is supposed to engage in "periodic mapping" of private networks deemed to be critical, and those companies "shall share" requested information with the federal government. ("Cyber" is defined as anything having to do with the Internet, telecommunications, computers, or computer networks.)
"The language has changed but it doesn't contain any real additional limits," EFF's Tien says. "It simply switches the more direct and obvious language they had originally to the more ambiguous (version)...The designation of what is a critical infrastructure system or network as far as I can tell has no specific process. There's no provision for any administrative process or review. That's where the problems seem to start. And then you have the amorphous powers that go along with it."
Translation: If your company is deemed "critical," a new set of regulations kick in involving who you can hire, what information you must disclose, and when the government would exercise control over your computers or network.
The Internet Security Alliance's Clinton adds that his group is "supportive of increased federal involvement to enhance cyber security, but we believe that the wrong approach, as embodied in this bill as introduced, will be counterproductive both from an national economic and national secuity perspective."
If Bush tried this, you lefties would be going absolutely ape-shit.
In an unprecedented show of arrogance and disregard for the electorate, Democrats have called American citizens who dare to dissent from Obamacare unAmerican, a paid mob, political terrorists, brownshirts and Nazis, among others.
Now, opponents of socialized medicine and the Obama agenda are being depicted as Ku Klux Klan members who want to lynch Barack Obama. That's the message of this flyer which was found on cars outside the parking lot at South Lakes High School in Reston on Tuesday night, after the town hall meeting with Jim "I Like To Hit People" Moran and "Screamin'" Howard Dean.
A number of people left last night's polite and information-packed "town hall" meeting in Reston to find these stuffed under their car windshields. We've cropped out the URL at the bottom to avoid giving these folks any more attention than they deserve.
The flyer was mentioned in the comments section of the Washington Examinerstory on the town hall.
There were KKK flyers on the cars in the parking lot when we left. Why the hell does racism figure into this? Is it because the people opposed to health insurance reform don't have logical arguments at their disposal, and so they're just stuck with creating flyers designed to scare people?
What got me even more was their total ignorance of the causes and effects of events that happened before January 20, 2009 -- forgetting, for instance, that the current corporate bailout fiasco was pushed by George W. Bush (NOTE: Excuse me, Mr. Liberal idiot cartoonist, but conservatives, myself included, were strongly opposed to Bush's bailout last fall). Listening to the howls from the stage and checking out the composition of the crowd, it was as if the single reaction from the Teabagger Massmind boiled down to "OMFG, the President is a N1GG3R!" -- like the old-timer in Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles, hollering from the top of the church steeple, "Here comes the new sherriff, and he's a big..." ...and it sure as hell didn't help any as their event was organized and staged by members of a well-known White Power band, Pokerface.
So, considering all this, I thought to myself, "Self, it's time you did a poster that announces the imminent arrival of the National Teabaggers' Convention coming to town on the 12th of September, and maybe inspire some of the local anarchists and antifascists to organize a little welcoming committee." So, I did.
What a difference an election makes, huh? Remember when hoards of angry crowds protesting the election of George W. Bush and later the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq was patriotic? In fact, crowds yelling and carrying signs that were, let’s say, “not complimentary” of the president and his so-called cabal of imperialists, terrorists, and oil criminals was said to be the highest form of patriotism. Extra patriotism points were given to the Michael Moores and Al Gores for doing it overseas. But now, with Democrats in power in Washington, angry protesters protesting ObamaCare—the largest and most unconstitutional governmental power grab since FDR’s New Deal—are considered rude, crude and frightening.
Remember the outrage that ensued with the Patriot Act? Not a day passed without some member of the liberati decrying the perceived violations of civil liberties committed by then-A.G. John Ashcroft. Protesters were virtually convinced their emails were being used as George W. Bush’s and Dick Cheney’s nighttime reading. And don’t even talk about abortion (oh, excuse me, “reproductive rights”.) All George W. Bush had to do is whisper the word and you get thousands of women gathered at the Mall while Whoopi Goldberg and Hillary Clinton cackle at the top of their lungs weilding hangers and babbling something about the “invasion of privacy!”
Oh, and what about the proposal of national voter ID cards in order to greatly reduce voter fraud. But nooo, the liberati cried. Their rejection of this brilliantly simple idea includes such inane arguments as it would disenfranchise poor people, particularly minorities (How, I have no idea) and that it’s akin to Nazi Germany where the fascistic government requires every citizen to have “their papers.”
Yet if the health (s)care bill passes, every citizen of the United States of Obama must have a national health care ID card!
I guess privacy rights are soooo 2004. Because now basically the same people supporting ObamaCare. They must not realize—or most likely, don’t care—that the House bill allows the most blatant violations of privacy.
What follows should be front page news—if the mainstream media were actually doing its job and reporting the news rather than acting as the Democrat Party’s personal propaganda arm. Writing for the CBS News blog (I guess CBS gets one thumb up for that), Declan McCullagh points out these frightening parts of H.R. 3200:
Section 431(a) of the bill says that the IRS must divulge taxpayer identity information, including the filing status, the modified adjusted gross income, the number of dependents, and “other information as is prescribed by” regulation. That information will be provided to the new Health Choices Commissioner and state health programs and used to determine who qualifies for “affordability credits.” Section 245(b)(2)(A) says the IRS must divulge tax return details—there&rsquo ;s no specified limit on what’s available or unavailable—to the Health Choices Commissioner. The purpose, again, is to verify “affordability credits.” Section 1801(a) says that the Social Security Administration can obtain tax return data on anyone who may be eligible for a “low-income prescription drug subsidy” but has not applied for it.
Also, Pg 59 HC Bill lines 21-24: Government will have direct access to your banks accounts for electronic funds transfer.
Oh sure. When it comes to quality and morally imperative health care for all Americans, the I.R.S. and S.S.A. are the first things that come to my mind.
Under the ObamaCare healthcare nightmare, the private details of your medical history would be made accessible to an unknown number of government bureaucrats, for supposedly legal purposes, but also for illegal snooping by thousands of government employees. […]
So much for the “Constitutional right to privacy”—your privacy is only important when it serves progressive objectives, but worthless when they want to seize power.
Exactly. Privacy rights? We don’t need no stinkin’ privacy rights!—Not when there’s a liberal agenda to pursue, that is.
Sometime after 5 pm last Friday, when many political reporters had succumbed to the siren call of weekend houses, the White House sent out a press release admitting that they’d made a little error. The deficit will actually be about two trillion dollars higher than previously estimated. The “7″ is turning into a “9.” This, on top of sinking job approval numbers and the floundering of ObamaCare.
What do you do in the middle of such a storm? Once again, the White House pulled the bogeyman stunt, otherwise known as “Things may be bad now, but you wouldn’t want Farmer Jones to come back, would you?” (As the animals used to tell each other in Animal Farm.)
That’s the meaning of the Justice Department release of a report the CIA did on itself in 2004 about its handling of terror suspect interrogations. The CIA had people like Khalid Sheik Mohammed in its possession and apparently some aggressive tactics were used to get them to divulge what they believed they knew about pending plots to blow up huge swaths of New York and London.
The release has had the desired effect. Suddenly newspapers are full of juicy phrases like “the operative…manipula ted his fingers to restrict the detainee’s carotid artery.”
Never mind that this was a report the CIA commissioned on itself and that it has already dispensed discipline for infractions; never mind that the Senate and House Intelligence Committees were given access to the report in 2006. Never mind that Justice Department head Eric Holder adopted a pious tone back in April to state that “It would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the Justice Department.”
It doesn’t matter what he said then. Holder now says he will now appoint a special prosecutor to re-open cases the CIA has already thoroughly chewed over. As the Wall Street Journal puts it, “Mr. Durham [the special prosecutor] will be under enormous pressure to investigate everyone up and down the CIA chain of command starting with those who merely followed the legal opinions and going all the way to senior CIA officials such as former Director Gerorge Tenet and other Bush administration officals.”
The last time the White House went on a vendetta against the CIA it resulted in the emasculation and risk aversion that eventually produced September 11. Recall that the national unpacking of 9/11 yielded revelations that the FBI and CIA had been forbidden to talk to one another and that both agencies, because of fears of appearing too aggressive and even racist, had deliberately ignored evidence desperately put in front of them by operatives working in the hinterlands.
Holder’s prosecutions will supply the New York Times with lots of scarey, spooky bogeyman headlines in the year to come. But ultimately this diversionary tactic reeks of desperation and it’s not going to make Americans forget the strip mining the administration is attempting on their wallets.
Funny how the domestic news outlets aren't this candid...
Mises Daily by Maria Martins | Posted on 8/26/2009 12:00:00 AM
The very idea of government acting to control any aspect of the practice of medicine should ignite passionate resistance on the part of physicians everywhere. The new proposals to expand the role of government will deal a deathblow to a profession already under siege. Now is the time to accurately name what is being proposed and have the courage to stop it. It is difficult to believe that in the United States, a country founded on the principles of life and liberty, the outright subjugation of a profession by the government would even be considered.
As doctors, we took an oath. We created the profession of medicine and claimed our standard required us to use our own best judgment at all times for the greater benefit of our patient. We claim we base our treatments on "the evidence."
It requires freedom and an independent mind to evaluate the evidence. The evaluation process is the art of medicine. You cannot legislate integrity and competence into doctors whose minds and judgment have been regimented to follow "best practice" guidelines.
It is a betrayal of our duty to our patient to use any consideration of some greater social good defined by the government to alter the best course of action for the patient. Our customer rightly expects us in the doctor-patient relationship to have his welfare as our absolute priority. It is immoral to use "average number of years of life a procedure would buy" — or any other government-inspired social utility — as a justification to limit the options we offer our patient. An attorney would be considered unethical if he used consideration of the greater good of society to influence his representation of an accused murderer.
The state needs us. When politicians say that healthcare must be formed into a mold of their own design, they are admitting their inability to persuade MDs to use their plan voluntarily. Who will provide the care and carry out the directives of any of the proposed healthcare plans? That coverage would be "universal" is touted, but the fact that there are a finite number of physicians is never mentioned.
Medical care is not a right. Medical care is a service provided by doctors and others to individuals who want to purchase it. A patient presents to the doctor with a request for care. The fact that the patient has a serious condition — even a life threatening one — does not entitle him, as his right, to the services of the doctor. To claim that he does means that doctors and others who provide these services have no rights, or that society can deliberately ignore these rights for the "greater good."
Assisting the needy in health care is a "moral imperative" -- not a constitutional right. The two are as different as a squirt gun and an Uzi.
If something is not permitted under our Constitution, the federal government simply cannot do it. Period. The Founding Fathers vigorously debated the role of the federal government and defined it in Article I, Section 8 -- spelling out the specific duties and obligations of the federal government. Most notably, this included providing a military for national security, coining money, establishing rules for immigration and citizenship, establishing rules for bankruptcy, setting up a postal system, establishing trademark and copyright rules, and setting up a legal system to resolves disputes, in addition to a handful of other matters.
Charity is not there.
Congress began ignoring its lack of authority for charity before the ink dried on the Constitution. When Congress appropriated $15,000 to assist French refugees in 1792, James Madison -- a Founding Father and principal author of the Constitution -- wrote, "I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution, which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents."
But what about the Constitution's general welfare clause?
Madison said: "With respect to the words general welfare, I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers (enumerated in the Constitution) connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators."
And consider government welfare's effect on people's willingness to give. During the Great Depression -- before the social programs that today we accept as givens (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid) -- charitable giving increased dramatically. After FDR began signing social programs into law, charitable giving continued, but not at the same rate. People felt that they had given at the office and/or that government was "handling it."
Government "charity" is simply less efficient than private charity. Every dollar extracted from taxpayers, sent to Washington, and then routed to the beneficiary "loses" about 70 cents in transfer costs -- salaries, rent and other expenses. The Salvation Army, by contrast, spends 2 cents in operating costs, with the remainder going to fundraising and the beneficiary. They achieve this, among other ways, by relying on volunteers to do much of the work.
Following Hurricane Katrina, private companies, including The Home Depot and Walmart, provided basic needs, such as water and shelter, faster than did government. What were their motives? Generosity? Positive public relations -- a form of "selfishness"? Does it matter?
A Saudi Arabian father forced his 10-year-old daughter to return to her 80-year-old husband Sunday, after she was found hiding at the home of her aunt for 10 days, Arab News reported.
The young girl's husband, who denies he is 80 despite family claims, accused the aunt of violating the terms of his marriage, allowed by Sharia Law.
"My marriage is not against Sharia. It included the elements of acceptance and response by the father of the bride,” he told a local newspaper.
A member of the National Society for Human Rights said there are no regulations in place to stop the marriage of young girls, which is seen as harmful to their wellbeing.
“Such marriages are considered a gross violation of charters on the rights of children, which the Kingdom has signed and which set the age of adulthood at 18,” Maatouq Al-Abdullah told Arab News.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has shocked the global warming debate by its formal call to hold a public global warming trial to decide on the “evidence” that mankind is driving a climate catastrophe. The Chamber seeks to have a complete trial “complete with witnesses, cross-examinations and a judge who would rule, essentially, on whether humans are warming the planet to dangerous effect.” Some are referring to the potential for a global warming trial as the “U.S. Chamber of Commerce wanting to put AGW (anthropogenic global warming) creationism on trial.”
The environmental activists who are choosing to ride out the unfounded CO2 scare are getting more and more comical and shrill.
Climate campaigner Adam D. Sacks declared in Grist Magazine on August 24, 2009: “We must leave behind 10,000 years of civilization” to deal with global warming."
“If we live at all...'live locally...means we are able get everything we need within walking (or animal riding) distance,” Sacks wrote.
Labor: If there's any question as to why union toughs turned up at recent health care town halls and got violent, consider what they were gooning for: a $10 billion bailout for their mismanaged pensions — at our expense.
Buried on page 65 of the 1,017 pages of HR 3200, the House's health care reform bill, and in a Senate bill as well, stands a $10 billion entitlement to keep pensions for unions like United Auto Workers as shiny and gold-plated as the day Detroit executives signed off on them.
Steelworkers, municipal employees, teachers and other union retirees will benefit from what the bills call "Reinsurance Programs for Retirees." The $10 billion cash infusion is intended to refinance Voluntary Employee Beneficiary Associations (VEBA) insurance to continue coverage for unions' early retirees in restructurings.
It's nothing but another bailout for union-bankrupted industries that can't sustain their contracts. In most of the private sector, companies cut back. They pay for what they buy. They scrimp.
Unions are different. When things get bad, they want taxpayers to pay. And they demonize corporate profits. When profits are a dirty word, one man's wealth is another man's loss, and creating value is no longer recognized as a means of earning money.
It's no surprise that bailouts are the result.
But there's a problem with all this largesse — the poor and middle class who don't get these fat pensions end up paying for them anyway. Back in February, President Obama praised unions for their "sacrifices" in the auto bailouts. We've yet to see taxpayers praised or thanked for their "sacrifices" in bailing out unions.
Unions gave $52 million to elect Democrats in the last election. The link between bailouts and campaign cash couldn't be clearer.
Frankly, their "investment" has paid off handsomely.
Part of their "return" includes GM and Chrysler shares that rightfully belonged to bondholders. Major provisions in the $787 billion stimulus are little more than union gifts. These include huge public works and infrastructure projects that hire exclusively union labor, and protectionist measures that reward unions at the cost of economic growth, such as Buy American provisions.
In other bills they've gotten treaty-busting moves to halt Mexican trucks on U.S. roads, triggering $2.6 billion in retaliatory tariffs the rest of us must pay. They've also kept 46 million Colombians shut out of a U.S. free-trade treaty, costing us $1 billion in tariffs.
Meanwhile, they've also won top spots in the Obama administration for union officials. Now they want another $10 billion in money set aside to cover their unfunded health care liabilities.
This bailout tells us that their demands are insatiable.
Is it any wonder the president's health care bills are tanking along with the president's own popularity? And that polls now show the public sees unions as too powerful?
Until unions learn to live like the rest of the private sector, they will continue to be seen for what they are: a privileged class.
Union bosses who have mismanaged benefits for their own members are poised to receive a $10 billion bailout from U.S. taxpayers in the form of a “reinsurance program” that has been folded into the healthcare bill, according to the Workforce Fairness Institute (WFI).
This provision should be viewed as part of a larger payback effort the Obama White House and top congressional figures have set up in exchange for the support they have received from organized labor, Katie Packer, executive director of WFI said.
Section 164 of the Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 providesthat the government pay 80 cents on the dollar to corporate and union insurance plans for claims between $15,000 and $90,000 for retirees age 55 to 64. Union health insurance funds only have about 30 cents available to cover each dollar of anticipated claims, according to the Lewin Group and other research outfits.
If this provision were to be passed as part of the overhaul package favored by the Obama Administration, the $10 billion figure would probably expand overtime as union plans continue to come under financial pressure, Packer said.
“What we want to see is some kind of accountability,” she said. “These union bosses make promises that they can’t keep. I don’t know what exactly they are doing with union dues and other money but they seem to have hundreds of millions of dollars to spend every time there is a campaign. It’s the labor bosses that have put the companies over a barrel and extracted commitments that they know were unsustainable. Now they expect the taxpayers to bail them out and they use their own workers as victims.”
In an emailletter to supporters, the United Auto Workers (UAW) urged their membership to support the Obama plan and specifically cites the benefits outlined in section 164. It concludes with a call for activism that draws from key alliances.
“Not surprisingly, insurance companies and various right-wing groups are mounting a campaign to block health care reform. To counter their dishonest, disruptive scare tactics, UAW activists need to join with our progressive allies in sending a strong message to members of Congress that NOW is the time to pass genuine health care reform,” the letter says.
The union bailout provision can be found in multiple versions of the bill, which indicates it is being pushed by powerful labor officials who maintain influence with the White House and Congress, Packer said.
In the 2008 election cycle, labor union political action committees (PACS) contributed over $66 million dollars to congressional candidates with 92 percent of those contributions going to Democrats, according to OpenSecrets.org.
The Employee Free Choice Act, which includes the controversial Card Check and binding arbitration measures, remains the major priority for labor bosses, Packer said. But the bailout money labor backers in Congress attempted to conceal in the healthcare bill shows that union paybacks remain in motion, Packer said.
“We see paybacks to labor bosses over and over again,” she said. “We saw it with the bailout to General Motors and Chrysler, we also saw it with the restrictions on companies that don’t use union workers with the stimulus bill. The Employee Free Choice Act is the coup de grace, but the payback remains on going.”
SPPI’s authoritative Monthly CO2 Report for July 2009 announces the publication of a major peer-reviewed paper by Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT, demonstrating by direct measurement that outgoing long-wave radiation is escaping to space far faster than the UN predicts, and proving that the UN has exaggerated global warming 6-fold.
Lindzen’s paper on outgoing long-wave radiation shows that the “global warming” scare is over. Thanks to recent peer-reviewed papers that have not been mentioned in the mainstream news media, we now know that the effect of CO2 on temperature is small, we now why it is small, and we know that it is having very little effect on the climate.
This month’s CO2 Report provides the latest real-world scientific data about the climate –
& nbsp; The IPCC assumes CO2 concentration will reach 836 ppmv by 2100, but, for almost eight years, CO2 concentration has headed straight for only 570 ppmv by 2100. This alone halves all of the IPCC’s temperature projections.
& nbsp; Since 1980 temperature has risen at only 2.5 °F (1.5 °C)/century, not the 7 F° (3.9 C°) the IPCC imagines.
& nbsp; Sea level rose just 8 inches in the 20th century and has been rising at just 1 ft/century since 1993. Sea level has scarcely risen since 2006. Also, Pacific atolls are not being drowned by the sea, as some have suggested.
& nbsp; Arctic sea-ice extent is about the same as it has been at this time of year in the past decade. In the Antarctic, sea ice extent – on a 30-year rising trend – reached a record high in 2007. Global sea ice extent shows little trend for 30 years.
& nbsp; Hurricane and tropical-cyclone activity is at its lowest since satellite measurement began.
& nbsp; Solar activity has declined again, after a large sunspot earlier in the month. The Sun is still very quiet.
& nbsp; The (very few) benefits and the (very large) costs of the Waxman/Markey Bill are illustrated. The Bill would cost trillions and achieve nothing.
& nbsp; Science Focus this month studies the effect of the Sun on the formation of clouds. IT’S THE SUN, STUPID!
Robert Ferguson, SPPI’s president, said: “From the oceans via the surface and the upper atmosphere to outer space, real-world measurements prove beyond reasonable doubt that there was not, is not, and will not be any ‘climate crisis’. All of the results we publish here are of direct relevance to the debate about “global warming”. Yet none of these results will likely be published in any mainstream news medium. The facts are not fitting the theory nor backing the scare, so the media simply suppress them.”
1 Temperatures have been cooling since 2002, even as carbon dioxide has continued to rise.
2 Carbon dioxide is a trace gas and by itself will produce little warming. Also, as CO2 increases, the incremental warming is less, as the effect is logarithmic so the more CO2, the less warming it produces.
3 CO2 has been totally uncorrelated with temperature over the last decade, and significantly negative since 2002.
4 CO2 is not a pollutant, but a naturally occurring gas. Together with chlorophyll and sunlight, it is an essential ingredient in photosynthesis and is, accordingly, plant food.
5 Reconstruction of paleoclimatological CO2 concentrations demonstrates that carbon dioxide concentration today is near its lowest level since the Cambrian Era some 550 million years ago, when there was almost 20 times as much CO2 in the atmosphere as there is today without causing a “runaway greenhouse effect.”
6 Temperature changes lead, not lag, CO2 changes on all time scales. The oceans may play a key role, emitting carbon dioxide when they warm as carbonated beverages lose fizz as they warm and absorbing it as they cool.
7 Most of the warming in the climate models comes from the assumption that water vapor and precipitation increase as temperatures warm, a strong positive feedback. Water vapor is a far more important greenhouse gas than CO2. However, that assumption has been shown in observations and peerreviewed research to be wrong, and in fact water vapor and precipitation act as a negative feedback that reduces any small greenhouse warming from carbon dioxide.
8 Indeed, greenhouse models show the warming should be greatest at mid to high atmosphere levels in the tropics. But balloon and satellite observations show cooling there. The greenhouse signature or DNA does not match reality, and the greenhouse models thus must greatly overstate the warming – and in a court of law would have to be acquitted of any role in global warming
9 The sun has both direct and indirect effects on our climate. Solar activity changes on cycles of 11 years and longer. When the sun is more active it is brighter and a little hotter. More important though are the indirect effects. Ultraviolet radiation increases much more than the brightness and causes increased ozone production, which generates heat in the high atmosphere that works its way down, affecting the weather. Also, an active sun diffuses cosmic rays, which play an important role in nucleation of low clouds, resulting in fewer clouds. In all these ways the sun warms the planet more when it is active. An active sun in the 1930s and again near the end of the last century helped produce the observed warming periods. The current solar cycle is the longest in over 100 years, an unmistakable sign of a cooling sun that historical patterns suggest will stay so for decades.
10 The multidecadal cycles in the ocean correlate extremely well with the solar cycles and global temperatures. These are 60 to 70 year cycles that relate to natural variations in the largescale circulations. Warm oceans correlate with warm global temperatures. The Pacific started cooling in the late 1990s and it accelerated in the last year, and the Atlantic has cooled from its peak in 2004. This supports the observed global land temperature cooling, which is strongly correlated with ocean heat content. Newly deployed N.O.A.A. buoys confirm global ocean cooling.
11 Warmer ocean cycles are periods with diminished Arctic ice cover. When the oceans were warm in the 1930s to the 1950s, Arctic ice diminished and Greenland warmed. The recent ocean warming, especially in the 1980s to the early 2000s, is similar to what took place 70 years ago and the Arctic ice has reacted much the same way, with diminished summer ice extent.
12 Antarctic ice has been increasing and the extent last year was the greatest in the satellite monitoring era. We are running ahead of last year’s record pace.
What will it take for the media to let go of their biases and begin doing their job, reporting the truth?
Exactly a month ago, Michael Ramirez presented this data in an excellent editorial cartoon, but the news media didn’t pay attention. AEI covered the same ground in its August 2008 edition of The American, and the national media still hasn’t caught up. Unfortunately, they will probably not pay much attention to Jazz Shaw, Cato Institute, or Hot Air and Ed Morrissey either when we point out that the number of uninsured Americans is dramatically lower than the 47 million figure bandied about in the debate.
Do you think they’d listen to the Census Bureau? Jazz writes:
Next, we need to go back to the Census Bureau report and turn to page 31 where we are informed that their total number includes the category of those who are listed as “non-citizens&rdquo ; (which are carefully broken out from naturalized citizens vs. native born citizens.) The non-citizen rate of uninsured individuals clocked in at 43.8%, or roughly 9.4 million non-Americans. Since these people are not here legally and not paying into the system, that portion of the crisis is better addressed in a debate on immigration issues, but taxpaying Americans don’t need to be on the hook for that segment of the total.
While the number continues to drop, it’s also worth noting that we’re not talking exclusively about the abject poor who can’t afford insurance. As this Business and Media report informs us, that same Census Bureau summary includes the following:
But according to the same Census report, there are 8.3 million uninsured people who make between $50,000 and $74,999 per year and 8.74 million who make more than $75,000 a year. That’s roughly 17 million people who ought to be able to “afford” health insurance because they make substantially more than the median household income of $46,326.
The liberal Kaiser Family Foundation puts the number of uninsured Americans who don’t qualify for government programs and make less than $50,000 a year between 8.2 million and 13.9 million.
Assuming we bought individual health insurance plans for each of these people at $300 per month, a cost that having a 14-million-member pool should allow. We could insure them for $50.4 billion a year. That would not be a very good solution for a number of reasons, but it costs a lot less than the $2 trillion over ten years that the CBO estimates ObamaCare will cost, plus it avoids the entire issue of overhauling a system most of us like. In fact, if the idea is to save money through ObamaCare, then this should be the baseline: any plan Congress creates should cost less than the $50.4 billion a year it would cost to simply buy insurance for everyone who can’t afford it.
Employees of the FAA’s air-traffic-control unit were asked to help, but the Transportation Department stressed Friday that essential safety personnel were not diverted from their duties.
A total of 1,200 workers, including about 300 contractors from Citigroup, the financial services giant, are now working seven days a week to review applications and reimburse auto dealers for rebates advanced to customers, officials said.
The department tripled its program staff to 1,100 last week, and recently added another 100 headquarters employees…
The National Automobile Dealers Association, which had endorsed the move, urged the Obama administration late Friday to extend the deadline because the program’s Web site was crashing.
Percentage of dealer claims that had been reimbursed by the feds as of Thursday: Seven. How bad does a program have to be to goose sales as much as C4C has and still be badmouthed by the industry? This bad, I guess:
Laura Sodano, a sales manager at Curry Chevrolet in Scarsdale, N.Y., said dealers were not told why their applications had not been approved and were having to review the entire form to determine what went wrong.
“I don’t know one dealership that’s gotten paid yet,” Ms. Sodano said. “If they run out, we’re in trouble. It’s bringing us a lot of traffic, but it’s not a very good program.”…
If the funding is exhausted before all reimbursements are made, some dealers — and possibly G.M. — could end up having to write off the unpaid credits.
There’s actually a serious risk here that the feds are going to mismanage a simple car-rebate program into bankruptcy. Oh, and more good news: Confirming earlier suspicions, it’s foreign carmakers that are getting the lion’s share of the sales. Exit question: Which is more frightening as an omen for ObamaCare’s future problems? Yesterday’s $2 trillion upwards budget revision or this wheezing canary in the coal mine?
"The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money."
—Margaret Thatcher
With a projected $1.8 trillion deficit for 2009, several trillions more in deficits projected over the next decade, and with both Medicare and Social Security entitlement spending about to ratchet up several notches over the next 15 years as Baby Boomers become eligible for both, we are rapidly running out of other people's money. These deficits are simply not sustainable. They are either going to result in unprecedented new taxes and inflation, or they will bankrupt us.
While we clearly need health-care reform, the last thing our country needs is a massive new health-care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new unfunded deficits and move us much closer to a government takeover of our health-care system. Instead, we should be trying to achieve reforms by moving in the opposite direction—toward less government control and more individual empowerment. Here are eight reforms that would greatly lower the cost of health care for everyone:
• Remove the legal obstacles that slow the creation of high-deductible health insurance plans and health savings accounts (HSAs). The combination of high-deductible health insurance and HSAs is one solution that could solve many of our health-care problems. For example, Whole Foods Market pays 100% of the premiums for all our team members who work 30 hours or more per week (about 89% of all team members) for our high-deductible health-insurance plan. We also provide up to $1,800 per year in additional health-care dollars through deposits into employees' Personal Wellness Accounts to spend as they choose on their own health and wellness.
Money not spent in one year rolls over to the next and grows over time. Our team members therefore spend their own health-care dollars until the annual deductible is covered (about $2,500) and the insurance plan kicks in. This creates incentives to spend the first $2,500 more carefully. Our plan's costs are much lower than typical health insurance, while providing a very high degree of worker satisfaction.
• Equalize the tax laws so that employer-provided health insurance and individually owned health insurance have the same tax benefits. Now employer health insurance benefits are fully tax deductible, but individual health insurance is not. This is unfair.
• Repeal all state laws which prevent insurance companies from competing across state lines. We should all have the legal right to purchase health insurance from any insurance company in any state and we should be able use that insurance wherever we live. Health insurance should be portable.
• Repeal government mandates regarding what insurance companies must cover. These mandates have increased the cost of health insurance by billions of dollars. What is insured and what is not insured should be determined by individual customer preferences and not through special-interest lobbying.
• Enact tort reform to end the ruinous lawsuits that force doctors to pay insurance costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. These costs are passed back to us through much higher prices for health care.
• Make costs transparent so that consumers understand what health-care treatments cost. How many people know the total cost of their last doctor's visit and how that total breaks down? What other goods or services do we buy without knowing how much they will cost us?
• Enact Medicare reform. We need to face up to the actuarial fact that Medicare is heading towards bankruptcy and enact reforms that create greater patient empowerment, choice and responsibility.
• Finally, revise tax forms to make it easier for individuals to make a voluntary, tax-deductible donation to help the millions of people who have no insurance and aren't covered by Medicare, Medicaid or the State Children's Health Insurance Program.
Well, I have done it! I have read the entire text of proposed House Bill 3200: The Affordable Health Care Choices Act of 2009. I studied it with particular emphasis from my area of expertise, constitutional law. I was frankly concerned that parts of the proposed law that were being discussed might be unconstitutional. What I found was far worse than what I had heard or expected.
& nbsp; &n bsp;
To begin with, much of what has been said about the law and its implications is in fact true, despite what the Democrats and the media are saying. The law does provide for rationing of health care, particularly where senior citizens and other classes of citizens are involved, free health care for illegal immigrants, free abortion services, and probably forced participation in abortions by members of the medical profession.
& nbsp; &n bsp; The Bill will also eventually force private insurance companies out of business and put everyone into a government run system. All decisions about personal health care will ultimately be made by federal bureaucrats and most of them will not be health care professionals. Hospital admissions, payments to physicians, and allocations of necessary medical devices will be strictly controlled.
& nbsp; &n bsp; However, as scary as all of that it, it just scratches the surface. In fact, I have concluded that this legislation really has no intention of providing affordable health care choices. Instead it is a convenient cover for the most massive transfer of power to the Executive Branch of government that has ever occurred, or even been contemplated. If this law or a similar one is adopted, major portions of the Constitution of the United States will effectively have been destroyed.
& nbsp; &n bsp; The first thing to go will be the masterfully crafted balance of power between the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches of the U.S. Government. The Congress will be transferring to the Obama Administration authority in a number of different areas over the lives of the American people and the businesses they own. The irony is that the Congress doesn’t have any authority to legislate in most of those areas to begin with. I defy anyone to read the text of the U.S. Constitution and find any authority granted to the members of Congress to regulate health care.
This legislation also provides for access by the appointees of the Obama administration of all of your personal healthcare information, your personal financial information, and the information of your employer, physician, and hospital. All of this is a direct violation of the specific provisions of the 4th Amendment to the Constitution protecting against unreasonable searches and seizures. You can also forget about the right to privacy. That will have been legislated into oblivion regardless of what the 3rd and 4th Amendments may provide.
& nbsp; &n bsp;
If you decide not to have healthcare insurance or if you have private insurance that is not deemed “acceptable” to the “Health Choices Administrator” appointed by Obama there will be a tax imposed on you. It is called a “tax” instead of a fine because of the intent to avoid application of the due process clause of the 5th Amendment. However, that doesn’t work because since there is nothing in the law that allows you to contest or appeal the imposition of the tax, it is definitely depriving someone of property without the “due process of law.
Wake up people, we need to stop this crap right now!
The National Automobile Dealers Association is urging the federal government to begin shutting down the Cash for Clunkers program immediately.
In a statement released Wednesday evening, NADA said that, given the rapid pace at which deals are being done, it will be difficult to say when the program’s funds may run out.
But Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said earlier Wednesday that all dealers would be reimbursed.
However, the NADA said, in its statement, that the group had “confirmed elsewhere” that dealers would not get paid if cash ran out.
Although, according to press reports, Secretary LaHood stated today that “there will be no car dealer that won’t be reimbursed,” NADA believes that this is based on DOT’s view that sufficient funds remain available. It is important to note that NHTSA has confirmed elsewhere that if the program’s money runs out before a dealer is reimbursed, that dealer will not be paid.
In a survey of nearly 800 dealers,
97% of dealers who responded, say the government is not reimbursing fast enough
13% of dealers have dropped out the program because the government is not reimbursing fast enough and overall concern payment problems
87% percent of dealers are concerned the money will be exhausted
3% of CARS program deals have been reimbursed
66% of dealers have not received on e payment from the government
25% of dealers are experiencing servere cash flow problems that require short-term loans to alleviate
11% of submitted applications have been approved (though dealers still are waiting for the money)
16% of submitted applications have been rejected
55% of dealers are not confident they will get reimbursed for every deal
40% do not want the program to continue, even if changes are made to the CARS program
And you lefty morons want the Fed to run healthcare?
The computer world is notorious for its obsession with what is new - largely thanks to the relentless engine of Moore's Law that endlessly presents programmers with more powerful machines.
Given such permanent change, anything that survives for more than one generation of processors deserves a nod.
Think then what the Unix operating system deserves because in August 2009, it celebrates its 40th anniversary. And it has been in use every year of those four decades and today is getting more attention than ever before.
Work on Unix began at Bell Labs after AT&T, (which owned the lab), MIT and GE pulled the plug on an ambitious project to create an operating system called Multics.
The idea was to make better use of the resources of mainframe computers and have them serve many people at the same time.
"With Multics they tried to have a much more versatile and flexible operating system, and it failed miserably," said Dr Peter Salus, author of the definitive history of Unix's early years.
Time well spent
The cancellation meant that two of the researchers assigned to the project, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, had a lot of time on their hands. Frustrated by the size and complexity of Multics but not its aims of making computers more flexible and interactive, they decided to try and finish the work - albeit on a much smaller scale.
The commitment was helped by the fact that in August 1969, Ken Thompson's wife took their new baby to see relatives on the West Coast. She was due to be gone for a month and Thompson decided to use his time constructively - by writing the core of what became Unix.
He allocated one week each to the four core components of operating system, shell, editor and assembler. It was during that time and after as the growing team got the operating system running on a DEC computer known as a PDP-7 that Unix came into being.
"Unix is the best screwdriver ever built," said Dr Salus.
And a HUGE thank you to Linus Torvalds for helping bring this excellent OS to the common man.
Who says the Obama White House hates profiteers? It just depends on who gets the profit, it seems. Bloomberg reports that the White House has hired a couple of ad firms to push its message on ObamaCare, and just by sheer coincidence, one of them owes Barack Obama’s adviser David Axelrod a whole lot of money. They also employ his son:
Two firms that received $343.3 million to handle advertising for Barack Obama’s White House run last year have profited from his top priority as president by taking on his push for health-care overhaul.
One is AKPD Message and Media, the Chicago-based firm headed by David Axelrod until he left last Dec. 31 to serve as a senior adviser to the president. Axelrod was Obama’s top campaign strategist and is now helping sell the health-care plan. The other firm is Washington-based GMMB Campaign Group, where partner Jim Margolis was also an Obama strategist.
This year, AKPD and GMMB received $12 million in advertising business from Healthy Economy Now, a coalition that includes the Washington-based Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America, known as PhRMA, that is seeking to build support for a health-care overhaul, said the coalition’s spokesman, Jeremy Van Ess. …
Axelrod was president and sole shareholder of AKPD from 1985 until he sold his interest after Obama’s victory, government records show. The firm owes Axelrod $2 million, which it’s due to pay in installments beginning Dec. 31. Axelrod’s son, Michael, still works there. He didn’t return a phone call. The firm’s Web site continues to feature David Axelrod’s work on the Obama campaign.
Sheer coincidence, I’m sure. Just like George Soros positioning himself for Petrobras dividends a few days before Obama decided to loan the Brazilian company $2 billion for offshore drilling was nothing more than a random juxtaposition of investment and public policy. Nothing to see here, folks! MoveOn!
When Dick Cheney was Vice President, the Left howled when Halliburton continued to receive contracts from the Army, almost all of them competitive-bid situations, claiming that Cheney’s deferred compensation created a conflict of interest — even though Halliburton had placed those funds in a separate escrow. If the Left thought the Cheney-Halliburton connection smelled funny, they must really have their noses out of joint with a White House that uses public money to enrich a close adviser’s son and ensure his own deferred compensation without a bidding process in place to manage it.
I’m waiting for the outrage to erupt. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting …. Wait, I have to breathe sometime.
Dr. Hertzberg's August 19, 2009 Letter To The New York Times is Reprinted Below:
Distortions and misrepresentations of your coverage of global warming/climate change
I am a scientist who has studies the theory of human caused global warming for over 20 years, and it is both saddening and offensive to me as a scientist to see the Times continuously regurgitating the fear-mongering, anecdotal clap trap it is being fed by know-nothing environmentalists and global warming propagandists in the Gore-IPCC-Hansen camp. As an example, consider the latest article in today's Times by Cornelia Dean and her regurgitation from NOAA's Climate Change Center:
"The agency also said that, on average, Arctic sea ice covered 3.4 million square miles in July, 12.7 percent below the 1979-2000 average and the third lowest on record after 2007 and 2006".
That description is a distortion and a complete misrepresentation of the actual data. For your benefit, I have attached the comprehensive, latest data record from Ole Humlum's web site under the heading of "Climate4you June 2009." From the data on page 11 of that site, one obtains the following record for ice coverage for the months of July from 2002 until 2009 (after converting square kilometers to square miles):
July of the year shown below Arctic Ice Coverage - Million square miles:
2002 3.3
2003 3.2
2004 3.5
2005 3.3
2006 3.4
2007 3.3
2008 3.2
2009 3.4
As the above table shows and as the graph from the "Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency" on p11 shows, there is nothing dramatic in the data.
NOAA's statement which claims a July 2009 ice coverage that is "12.7 percent below the 1979-2007 average" is the fraudulent comparison of a summer month ice coverage with a yearly average. All summer ice coverages for every year are markedly below their yearly average.
The data show a 4 % decline in the yearly average Arctic ice cover from 2002 to 2007, and a 3 % increase in Arctic ice cover from 2007 to today.
If you look at the data shown for average atmospheric temperature shown earlier in the collection of data, it shows a significant decrease during the last decade or so. Data for sea level rise shown for the last 20 years or so, show a rate of rise that is about the same as it has been for the last 13,000 years, from when the land bridge between Alaska and Siberia began to flood as we transitioned from the last "Ice Age" to the current Interglacial Warming.
Your coverage of the issue of Global Warming / Climate change is a reflection of either extreme negligence or simply scientific illiteracy.
It reminds me of the way your reporters such as Judith Miller simply regurgitated the Bush Administration's fear mongering clap trap about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. You helped enable the Bush Administration in its disastrous invasion of Iraq without bothering to independently investigate the facts. You are now enabling the Gore-IPCC-Hansen fear mongers in the same way. The Waxman-Markey legislation for a "cap and trade" program, based on fraudulent science, has the potential to be as damaging to the Nation's economy as the Iraq war was to both our economy and our international reputation.
Is it too much to ask for the Times to diligently research the facts before simply regurgitating the propaganda it is fed?
The most egregious recent example on this issue is the article you published a few days ago on "Climate Change as a National Security". Not only was it based on the false premise that human activity is causing climate change, but you added insult to injury by publishing only those letters to the editor that commented favorably on that absurdity. [Climate Depot Note: See Editorial: 'Climate Depot's Inconvenient Rebuttal to NYT's 'National Security' Climate Argument - August 9, 2009]
When he saw the Nazis’ death camps Dwight Eisenhower was so moved by anger and embarrassment he ordered the gathering up German townspeople to force them to face what they had done.
After five decades of continuous Democrat rule Detroit is literally and figuratively a third world city. It is a dung heap every liberal in America should have his/her nose rubbed in so they can never again “blame Bush” or deny responsibility for the disgusting results of their dearest fantasies. The latest news from Detroit brings me to near tears. Detroit an American city; can’t feed its own citizens. People are hungry in the genuine sense, not the phony liberal inflated numbers sense. Detroit doesn’t have a single major chain supermarket. People are forced to “shop” at small corner stores. We know the awful numbers about Detroit, staggeringly high unemployment, thousands and thousands of foreclosed homes, blocks of rubble where people once lived, but incredibly it’s gotten worse!
People are actually growing vegetables in the vacant formerly junk covered empty lots dotting the town. Think about that! People in an American city are growing food in empty lots and living like characters in a bad science fiction movie!
What’s left of the quickly hallowing out middle class are living like hippies on a commune because ferociously destructive liberal policies have driven off the major supermarkets whose operators likely ran away from robberies and shoplifters coddled by the liberals who ruled them. Urban farming is now supporting Detroit’s families!
Have these liberal Democrats no shame? Free food pantries are doing what the city of Detroit can’t. A private group located 20 miles from town has had to step in. Why would a private group have to come into an American city to feed people? Where the hell is Mayor Bing? An agency that distributes food has seen an up tick of 18 % in demand Michigan’s Department of Human Services doling out food stamps is doing 14% more volume since Obama’s election.
The liberal party line of course is that now people are eating healthy foods! One observer leaked the truth however. He said the situation is especially depressing because the rest of Michigan’s surrounding areas have ample food supplies. It wouldn’t occur to these liberals that the difference between Detroit and the rest of Michigan is that the state hasn’t been run be liberal Democrats for fifty years, but it has gone sharply down hill since they elected an all Democrat state government.
In a study sure to ruffle the feathers of the Global Warming cabal, Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT has published a paper which proves that IPCC models are overstating by 6 times, the relevance of CO2 in Earth’s Atmosphere. Dr. Lindzen has found that heat is radiated out in to space at a far higher rate than any modeling system to date can account for.
The pdf file located at the link above from the Science and Public Policy Institute has absolutely, convincingly, and irrefutably proven the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming to be completely false.
Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT’s peer reviewed work states “we now know that the effect of CO2 on temperature is small, we know why it is small, and we know that it is having very little effect on the climate.”
The global surface temperature record, which we update and publish every month, has shown no statistically-significant “global warming” for almost 15 years. Statistically-significant global cooling has now persisted for very nearly eight years. Even a strong el Nino – expected in the coming months – will be unlikely to reverse the cooling trend.
More significantly, the ARGO bathythermographs deployed throughout the world’s oceans since 2003 show that the top 400 fathoms of the oceans, where it is agreed between all parties that at least 80% of all heat caused by manmade “global warming” must accumulate, have been cooling over the past six years. That now prolonged ocean cooling is fatal to the “official” theory that “global warming” will happen on anything other than a minute scale. - SPPI
If for no other reason than this: the IPCC assumes that the concentration of CO2 in 2100 will be 836 ppmv (parts per million volume). However, current graphs based on real data show that CO2 concentrations will only be 570 ppmv in 2100, cutting the IPCC’s estimates in half right there.
Another nail in the coffin of Global Warming is the observed rate of temperature change from 1980, which is observed to be 1.5 degrees C per century. The IPCC modeling calls for a range of 2.4 to 5.3 degree increase per century, which is far above what is observed in real data collected between 1980 and 2009. The graph below clearly represents a far different reality as opposed to the predictions.
Not that you Climate Change zealots will listen to facts, but..
Please study and embrace islam to win Paradise. As you can see in this wonderful video from Egyptian national TV studio the seated scientist from Japan presented his findings of the effect of the holy Quran islam and the islamic prayer call (the athan) on water molecules under electron microscopy.
The egyptian scientist B.sc.Ms.Ph.D explained the water molecules took beautifull shapes everytime they are exposed to air vibrations from reading the holy Quran or saying the word islam or the muslim call to prayer the athan. The scientist added because water constitute 70% of our body this makes us happy and explains the feeling of happiness after people embrace islam and worship Allah. Please watch read the holy Quran and embrace islam.
For The New York Times economic scene section for March 31, David Leonhardt came across with one of the most amazing admissions about Obama that I've ever seen in the Times. Namely that Barack Obama is just like Hitler. Now, many of you may be solemnly shaking your head in agreement, but in so doing you would be missing why the Times was comparing Obama to Hitler. You see, Leonhardt didn't mean it as an insult. He was saying that it was a good thing that Barack was being like Hitler at least in an economic sense.
Here Leonhardt is taking the trains-on-time track with his Hitler angle by saying that, despite that whole Holocaust and World War II business, Hitler's policies were good for Germany. So good, in fact, that he celebrates the ways he sees that Obama is emulating the mustachioed mad-man's economic prescriptions with the massive takeover of the economy and bloated government spending on "stimulus."
You know the left has lost it when they are invoking the "success" of Hitler to prop up The One!
If I might rephrase Leonhardt's opening sentence a bit: "Every so often, the left serves up an analogy that’s uncomfortable, a little distracting and yet still very telling."
The telling thing here is that Leonhardt is willing to ignore the ultimate outcome of Hitler's policies so that he might justify the destruction of the capitalist system, elimination of personal property rights, and to excuse away giving dictatorial power to an all encompassing government juggernaut here in the US. He so dearly wants the Keynesian theory to be the right one that he is willing to turn his face from genocide and world war to prove his wishes beneficial to man.
Here is how he sets up his absurd take on history:
More than any other country, Germany -- Nazi Germany -- then set out on a serious stimulus program. The government built up the military, expanded the autobahn, put up stadiums for the 1936 Berlin Olympics and built monuments to the Nazi Party across Munich and Berlin.
Oh, sure Germany became a powerhouse previous to the outbreak of WWII. But, what Leonhardt criminally ignores is that Hitler made Germany a powerhouse by stealing the personal property and wealth of minorities and business owners alike and remanding them to the state. And then, to sustain this wild growth, he launched a war of greed and acquisition on his neighbors that added to that power but cost the lives of millions. Germany built this empire on the destruction of God-given rights, oppression of religious and ethnic minorities, and widespread death and war.
In light of the final outcome, I'd wager that this Hitlarian bargain doesn't seem very appealing to anyone but Leonhardt.
From here, Leonhardt segues into an appreciation of the policies of the most communist of presidents we've ever had, Franklin Roosevelt. Leonhardt rehashes New Deal apology by claiming that FDR's economic plans helped the USA out of The Great Depression. He says it all proves that, "Yes, stimulus works."
Of course, like many who admire FDR, Leonhardt glosses over the fact that none of FDR's policies worked at all until the gearing up for war began. He also ignores the unsustainability of Germany's economic "benefits" that dictated that it must go to war to expand the pool of wealth from which the state could steal to support its wild growth. In fact, that same war aim that helped FDR's economic outlook was also unsustainable to the point that the singular goal was, indeed, war. At some point, it must be realized, the war will end and one faces either destruction -- whether mutual or exclusive -- or at the very least will discover a cessation of the activity involved in the run up to war and hence the economic "stimulus" that it entails. Leaving? Leaving an empty hole where that artificial war stimulus was and no stable economic activity to fill it.
"Unfortunately, that's sort of the ridiculous pseudo-science garbage that's so common on the left on this issue," Vitter said in an interview with a conservative news radio syndicate. "The real truth is getting out there, and I think citizens are really starting to push back."
"I think there is beginning to be a serious reconsideration of the science of this," Vitter added, saying that supposed growing skepticism of climate change was helping fuel Republican opposition to the cap-and-trade bill before Congress.
Vitter insisted that the month of September, during which the Senate will reconvene after its recess, would be a "critical period" for the advancement of the bill.
The conservative Louisianan expected the cap-and-trade bill would easily pass out of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in September, but face a much more difficult time on the Senate floor.
The climate change bill is one of President Obama and congressional Democrats' top legislative priorities this year. The House passed a preliminary version of the cap-and-trade bill by a narrow margin in late June.
Vitter was confident senators would be able to block a vote on the legislation, though.
"I am very hopeful that we can block draconian legislation on the Senate floor, and that we can prevent it from getting 60 votes," he said. "I think there are several Democrats from the upper Plains states, from the Midwest, also my colleague Mary Landrieu from Louisiana, who are going to have a very difficult time supporting this."
Will media that savaged the plumber now go after the fake doctor?
When regular citizen "Joe the Plumber" asked an innocent, heartfelt, but challenging question of presidential candidate Barack Obama last year, he ended up getting skewered by the "mainstream" media. Every detail of his past was looked at for possible motives and nefarious associations.
Democratic state officials in Ohio even thumbed through his records illegally to find dirt on him.
That somehow doesn't happen with liberals.
A woman at Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee's town hall meeting in Texas recently claimed to be a pediatrician and stood up to support Jackson-Lee and Obamacare. She even got a hug from the congresswoman, which the Houston Chronicle featured prominently.
One big problem. Well, several, really.
Turns out the woman isn't a doctor after all. Reports indicate she's a graduate social work student who just happens to be enrolled at the same university where Jackson-Lee's husband is vice president for Student Affairs.
In addition, the woman is said to be an Obama organizer who, by the way, seems not to be a constituent of Jackson-Lee's.
Democrats have cynically and hurtfully accused passionate Americans at town halls as being stooges of special interest and such. In truth, Democrats have been the ones sending people to the meetings.
We asked Augusta-area Congressman Paul Broun's office if they'd seen any signs of Obamacare opponents who were tools of special interests. No, they told us -- but they've seen suspicious signs of Democratic manipulation: One day after Democratic officials called to confirm Congressman Broun's contact information, proponents of reform started calling and showing up at the office.
If any of them claimed to be a doctor, we hope Broun's office double-checked it.
Is US Chief Information Officer (CIO) Vivek Kundra a Phony?
This is the sort of question you might ask after trying to actually verify his supposed MS in Information Technology from the University of Maryland, College Park campus. The registrar has no record of it. After initially posting this article the degree has cropped up apparently at the nearby University Campus in 2001. This was found by Nextgov.Com. But his degree in biology has yet to appear as his record shows a degree from College Park Campus for Psychology and nothing more.
I have queried the White House for clarification and still have received no response. The internet has answered the MS question. But other issues remain. Regarding a number of interesting and questionable facts, most in regard to Kundra’s bio. The most ridiculous is his assertion that he was formerly a CEO of Creostar. While records for this company are hard to come by a small Dun & Bradstreet service did turn up the following information: there was indeed a Creostar in Arlington, VA. It was founded in 2004 with the contact being Vivek Kundra. The last record for the company (online) showed sales of $67,000 with one employee – apparently Kundra, the CEO.
THE health bills coming out of Congress would put the de cisions about your care in the hands of presidential appointees. They'd decide what plans cover, how much leeway your doctor will have and what seniors get under Medicare.
Yet at least two of President Obama's top health advisers should never be trusted with that power.
Start with Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. He has already been appointed to two key positions: health-policy adviser at the Office of Management and Budget and a member of Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research.
Emanuel bluntly admits that the cuts will not be pain-free. "Vague promises of savings from cutting waste, enhancing prevention and wellness, installing electronic medical records and improving quality are merely 'lipstick' cost control, more for show and public relations than for true change," he wrote last year (Health Affairs Feb. 27, 2008).
Savings, he writes, will require changing how doctors think about their patients: Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously, "as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of the cost or effects on others" (Journal of the American Medical Association, June 18, 2008).
Yes, that's what patients want their doctors to do. But Emanuel wants doctors to look beyond the needs of their patients and consider social justice, such as whether the money could be better spent on somebody else.
Many doctors are horrified by this notion; they'll tell you that a doctor's job is to achieve social justice one patient at a time.
Emanuel, however, believes that "communitarianism&qu ot; should guide decisions on who gets care. He says medical care should be reserved for the non-disabled, not given to those "who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens . . . An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia" (Hastings Center Report, Nov.-Dec. '96).
Translation: Don't give much care to a grandmother with Parkinson's or a child with cerebral palsy.
He explicitly defends discrimination against older patients: "Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years" (Lancet, Jan. 31).
The bills being rushed through Congress will be paid for largely by a $500 billion-plus cut in Medicare over 10 years. Knowing how unpopular the cuts will be, the president's budget director, Peter Orszag, urged Congress this week to delegate its own authority over Medicare to a new, presidentially-appointed bureaucracy that wouldn't be accountable to the public.
Since Medicare was founded in 1965, seniors' lives have been transformed by new medical treatments such as angioplasty, bypass surgery and hip and knee replacements. These innovations allow the elderly to lead active lives. But Emanuel criticizes Americans for being too "enamored with technology" and is determined to reduce access to it.
Dr. David Blumenthal, another key Obama adviser, agrees. He recommends slowing medical innovation to control health spending.
Blumenthal has long advocated government health-spending controls, though he concedes they're "associated with longer waits" and "reduced availability of new and expensive treatments and devices" (New England Journal of Medicine, March 8, 2001). But he calls it "debatable" whether the timely care Americans get is worth the cost. (Ask a cancer patient, and you'll get a different answer. Delay lowers your chances of survival.)
Obama appointed Blumenthal as national coordinator of health-information technology, a job that involves making sure doctors obey electronically deivered guidelines about what care the government deems appropriate and cost effective.
