You can't make this stuff up, folks!

H/T Hot Air

Lawmakers, aides may get Obamacare exemption

Politico:

 Congressional leaders in both parties are engaged in high-level, confidential talks about exempting lawmakers and Capitol Hill aides from the insurance exchanges they are mandated to join as part of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul, sources in both parties said.

 One of the hallmarks of a too powerful government is when the ruling class exempts themselves from the laws their subjects must follow. Last week, congress quietly repealed much of the STOCK Act, last year's well publicized law that finally made insider trading illegal for congressional employees acting on proprietary legislative information. You'll still go to jail for that, but your betters in Washington? Some animals are more equal than others.

Update: John Boehner has quickly distanced himself from this:

CNN: 3 Reasons The Housing Recovery May Not Last

CNN:

The housing market has made a big comeback over the past year; home prices have surged some 8% and homebuyers can't seem to buy up properties fast enough.
But just as quickly as the market is gaining ground, some industry experts worry it will come crashing back to Earth. Here are three reasons the housing market recovery may not last:

Everyone's got an opinion, so let's look at this one:

 1. The housing recovery is being led by investors. One problem is that investors are leading the latest surge in home prices, said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. They are taking advantage of low interest rates and depressed home prices and when those rates and prices rise, they'll likely pull back, he said.

"An investor-driven boom is likely to end badly," said Baker. "I'm worried that some of the big jumps in prices are driven by the same sort of speculation that drove the [original] housing bubble."

Well, yes and no. Investors large and small are taking advantage of low interest rates and prices. However, they mostly plan on renting and then selling when prices and interest rates do rise.That would be reflection of increased consumer demand in general. Some are doing the traditional fix-up flip, but  rentals are strong because a lot of consumers aren't buying.

Hedge funds are, well, hedging against the inevitable burst of the stock market bubble, and there are now fears of a  spreading triple dip recession in Europe. When things go pop and the real financial condition of governments, and banks in general are revealed, money will be driven toward the still low priced and hard-asset real estate market.

2. The economic recovery is just not strong enough yet. "These days, I worry more about the economy hurting housing than housing hurting the economy," said Jared Bernstein, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington D.C.-based think tank.

The economy is hurting housing and everything else right now. We are in the worst recovery from a recession in history, and in a jobs depression. Food stamp use has doubled since 2008 and a record number of Americans are on disability, many with dubious ailments and bad job prospects. Investors and consumers instinctively, if not actually know that our anemic GDP and job growth, isn't enough to prevent economic decay, much less repair the damage already done. We will continue bouncing along the bottom, and likely dip below into another recession in 2014, when the remaining uncertainties of Obamacare and Dodd-Frank are fully realized.

 3. Government cuts will hurt homeowners. Headwinds from the current round of government spending cuts -- $85 billion worth -- could also curb the housing market's recovery."The spending cuts from the sequestration [will] hit their apex this summer," said Mark Zandi, the chief economist for Moody's Analytics.

A cut of less than 3% in an already bloated budget that already misallocates hundreds of billions, will have little or no effect on the economy, The Obama administration is doing its level best to create headwinds, as it plays the old statist game of making those cuts as visible and painful as possible. As of now, the public doesn't seem to be buying the absurd notion that the federal government is a lean machine, incapable of withstanding any efficiencies. The sequester pales in comparison to the already hurricane force headwinds of this administration's regulatory jihad, along with current and future tax increases. Besides, the worry over the economic impact of spending cuts is evidence of government  already controlling too much of the economy.       

Greece To Sue Germany For WWII Reparations

Daily Mail:

Greece is planning to pursue a long-dormant claim for reparations from Germany over Nazi occupation during World War Two, it emerged today.
Greek Foreign Minister Dimitris Avramopoulos told parliament today that the government was willing to 'exhaust every means available' in its claim.
News of the debt-stricken country's bid for reparations will add to the already strained relationship with Berlin, which foots most of the bill for Greece's 240-billion euro rescue.

Eventually you run out of other people's money, and the desperation begins. Like the beggaring poor relation who resents your help in order to relieve themselves of self-examination and change, so too has Greece turned on its chief benefactor. These absurdities will continue to mount as more EU countries fight over an ever shrinking pie that's been masked by bureaucratic chicanery and central bank manipulations 

It's Not About Islam, Again

Foreign Policy:

According to the Washington Post, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev "told interrogators that the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan motivated him and his brother to carry out the attack." Policymakers and pundits will dismiss this rationalization with little acknowledgment, analysis, or certainly sympathy. Moreover, even if we could agree that we had perfect information for why the attacks happened -- based upon the perpetrators' words, and corroborated with official investigations -- we won't engage in honest self-reflection or change public policy in response. First, no state wants to acknowledge that their policies, institutions, or culture might contain any flaws that could serve as primary motivations for terrorism. Politicians cannot accept any correlation between domestic or foreign policies and terror attacks.

So, let's get this straight. The author, Micah Zenko, believes we should reflect on how our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may have instigated a terrorist attack. Those wars were a result of attacks and provocations by Muslim countries, but we probably brought that on ourselves as well, I suppose. However, even if the perpetrator admits, and the evidence shows that Islam was the motivator, we should reflect on how our 'policies, institutions and culture' contributed to the crime. The values of Islam and those of Islamic societies are never questioned. When we're attacked, it's cause for self-criticism.

The 'we' in the article is the United States, of course, and even though Muslims carry out several terror attacks worldwide every day, that overwhelmingly common denominator doesn't really matter. There just has to be some commonality between the policies, institutions and cultures of The United States, UK, Spain, Indonesia, Russia, India, Tunisia and everywhere else Muslims have slaughtered unsuspecting victims. Oddly enough, the policies, institutions, and cultures of Iran and Saudi Arabia don't inspire much in the way of terrorism on their soil. Weird, huh? 

Actually no, this hackneyed meme'  only applies to the west in general, and America in particular.  As intellectually and morally bankrupt as that sounds, it's what passes for sophisticated thought by self-loathing westerners. The fact that it's espoused by a PhD from The Council on Foreign Relations and Harvard is just more proof that higher education in the U.S. is no longer about the pursuit of truth and knowledge.It's about the pursuit of rationales in support of Left Wing conclusions, no matter how glaringly stupid and morally obtuse those rationales may be.

These terrorists were also products of an American, Blue State education. Perhaps they were just very good students and fully digested the anti-American indoctrination they were fed. 

Update: OK, it's now self-parody:

  "Could the amateur boxing career of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the deceased suspect in last week’s Boston Marathon bombings, have had a role in the massacre? That’s a question leading brain researchers at Boston University’s School of Medicine hope medical examiners look into when they perform an autopsy of the 26-year-old who was killed during a firefight with law enforcement officials early Friday morning."

 Update: And the hits keep coming!

 "[H]e was angry that the world pictures Islam as a violent religion.”

From an e-mail to a New York Times reporter by the former brother-in-law of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, explaining the Boston bomber's motives.

The EU ‘Is the New Communism’

Via The Blaze:

The late, great Milton Friedman predicted this twelve years ago:

“There is no historical precedent for such an arrangement. It involves each country’s giving up power over its internal monetary policy to an entity not under its political control. Such a system has economic advantages and disadvantages, but I believe that its real Achilles heel will prove to be political; that a system under which the political and currency boundaries do not match is bound to prove unstable.”

The larger point is that the EU  jammed together dozens of countries with vastly different political and economic cultures, under the absurd assumption that central planning under an 855 page constitution, along with a common currency , would magically transform these centuries-old cultures into a single European civilization. That goal was supposed to be achieved despite promises to dubious citizens that this new bureaucratic behemoth would respect those cultural disparities. So Greeks would still be Greeks, but would somehow feel a common bond with Germans, because an Athenian could travel to Berlin without dealing with exchange rates. That comradeship would be furthered cemented under the shared misery of relinquishing freedom and national sovereignty to unelected regulators who would develop one size fits all policies. What could go wrong?

Americans would do well to remember this lesson as the federal government arrogates more power unto itself.      
  

The Train Wreck That Is Obamacare

 OpenMarket.org

 At least one union that supported passage of Obamacare, is now calling for its repeal. As The Wall Street Journal notes, the United Union of Roofers, Waterproofers and Allied Workers has given up on salvaging the deeply-flawed health care law...

 Meanwhile, Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., who helped write Obamacare and is up for re-election in 2014, says he’s worried about a “huge train wreck coming” when the Obama administration begins fully implementing the health care law later this year. Baucus “sharply criticized the administration’s outreach efforts in a budget hearing on Wednesday. He told Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius that people and businesses ‘have no idea what to do, what to expect’ from the law.” His colleague, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.V., now admits the health care law is so unprecedentedly complicated as to be “just beyond comprehension” (alas, his inability to comprehend it didn’t keep him from voting to pass Obamacare).

Obamacare is strangling job creation and will harm life-saving medical innovation. Some employers have stopped hiring because of Obamacare, and others are cutting full-time workers and replacing them with part-time workers to avoid Obamacare mandates that apply to full-time employees. Obamacare caused layoffs in the medical device industry through what a liberal Senator conceded was a “job-killing tax” that will “impair American competitiveness in the medical device field.” Obamacare will cut employment by an additional 800,000 because of work disincentives and bizarre income-cliffs.

Full Article

NJ Gov. Christie Seeks Expanded Gun Checks, Video Game Crackdown

It's becoming more evident that Chris Christie wont be running for President, at least not on the Republican ticket. New Jersey is already the second most anti-gun state in the country, with California as #1. Yay! At any rate, he still has a huge lead in his re-election bid, so I guess he's a true believer when it comes to trashing the Second Amendment and proposing useless, emotion-based laws that serve only to expand government power.

 New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is seeking expanded background checks for gun purchases and parental consent for minors to buy violent video games as part of his response to the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.

   Christie, a first-term Republican seeking re-election, also wants to ban purchases of the .50-caliber Barrett rifle, and to make it easier for doctors and courts to commit “potentially dangerous” people to mental-health treatment against their will. His proposals come a week after a task force he created in January released 50 recommendations to reduce violence.

Now, I'm not sure how many crimes have been committed with a $7,000, 30 lb, five foot-long rifle, that fires rounds costing over $4.00 a pop. But I'm willing to bet the number is around zero. If someone knows of an instance in which one of these babies was hoisted through a car window on a Chicago drive-by, I'd love to hear about it.

Over 90% of gun homicides are committed with handguns in urban areas, with young, minority males being the most overrepresented perpetrators and victims. Of course there's also the innocent bystanders killed in the crossfire, but guns aren't the reason those lives are being lost. Addressing that issue would take some courage that most politicians don't possess. Evidently, those deaths don't mean much as compared to shamelessly grandstanding on a pile of dead white kids for political purposes. 

In so far as violent video games are concerned, there's been no consistent empirical evidence that shows a correlation, much less a causation linking those games to violent behavior. But it's always easier to blame inanimate objects rather than the people who commit crimes, or to scrutinize the environment in which they were raised.

Making it easier to commit the dangerously mentally ill is an idea with merit. There was a time when it was too easy to institutionalize people, and the laws were used for many nefarious purposes. Now the pendulum has swung the other way for too long. Most of the shooters in these terrible massacres were later found to be visibly and notably over the edge before their crimes. But current laws don't protect them or us.

MSNBC So Predictable it's Boring

Via Mediaite:

Making the point that the Tsarnaev brothers’ Muslim faith at the moment bears little relevance to the investigation into the brothers’ decision to attack the Boston Marathon last week, MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry observed that Tsarnaev’s faith is about as relevant to the investigation right now as are Ben Affleck movies about violent events in Boston... “I keep wondering: is it possible that there would ever be a discussion like, ‘oh, this is because of Ben Affleck and the connection between Boston and movies about violence?’” Harris-Perry asked. “And, of course, the answer is ‘no.’”

 Oh, no. Their faith isn’t relevant at all. Because we all know that viewers of Ben Affleck movies also commit several bombings and terrorist attacks worldwide every day. Faith would only be relevant in the highly unlikely event the culprit was a conservative Christian. Then MSNBC would be falling over themselves as they tried to tie this on everyone from the Tea Party to Ronald Reagan.

And let's forget about the 15% -30% of  Muslims in most Islamic countries who support terrorism. That's only between 200 and 400 million people. Just open your mind until your brains fall out. 

Add Boston Marathon Bombing to pile of Failed Eliminationist Narratives

From Legal Insurrection:

It started with Bill Sparkman, the part-time Census worker who went missing and then was found dead, setting off an avalanche of mainstream media and left-blogosphere accusations that he was the victim of anti-government “right-wing” hate.  It turned out that Sparkman killed himself, but there were few if any apologies coming.
The Sparkman accusations were based on nothing more than a desire to demonize the newly formed and rapidly growing Tea Party movement as terrorists and un-American.  It was as if they were hoping for an act of Tea Party violence.
Yet there was a theory behind the madness, the Eliminationist Narrative created by Dave Neiwart of Crooks and Liars about an “eliminationist” radical right seeking to dehumanize and eliminate political opposition.  It was a play on the over-used narrative of Richard Hofstadter’s “paranoid style” in American politics.
The Eliminationist Narrative was aided and abetted by an abuse of the term “right-wing” to include groups who are the opposite of conservatism and the Tea Party movement.
In the case of Sparkman, the accusations were just Another Failed Eliminationist Narrative.  And the Eliminationist Narrative would fail time and time again:

• James Holmes
• Jared Loughner
• The Cabby Stabber
• The “killer” of Bill Sparkman
• Amy Bishop
• The Fort Hood Shooter
• The IRS Plane Crasher
• The Pentagon Shooter

We can now add the Boston Marathon Bombing to the pile.  The wild speculation that there was a Tea Party or “right-wing” connection proved false.
It turns out two Muslim Chechens apparently inspired by jihadist videos and ideology turned on the country which welcomed them with open arms. Full article.

The Boston Bombing and The Loss of American Values

 The second bomber has been captured, but the search itself was a disturbing comparison to the American culture that once was. The residents of the Boston area dutifully followed government orders to Shelter in Place, which means to cower at home while heavily armed government personnel assume all the responsibility for the community's defense:

Now, there certainly were valid reasons for wanting people to clear the streets; mainly to allow police to more easily identify the perpetrator and not mistake innocents for the terrorist. But the image of a massive armed government takeover of an entire community, in a blue state in which the Second Amendment has been rendered almost meaningless, isn't comforting in the least.

It’s rather ironic that citizens were unable to defend themselves and told to hide after a bombing on Patriots Day, which celebrates the citizens who fought the British government at Lexington and Concord.
There was a time when citizen volunteers would also be hunting these enemies, in the spirit of self-government and self-reliance. Now they cringes in basements, after handing their rights to a para-military government force; in direct contradiction to the purpose and meaning of the Second Amendment and our founding principles. Yeah, I know. I'm paranoid for not believing America's freedoms are a force of nature that can never be taken away. It's silly to think we're not immune from the lessons of history and human nature.

 “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”
― James Madison, The Federalist Papers

Stephen Hawking lays out case for Big Bang without God

I'm no scientist, not even close. But this report seems to raise more questions than it answers:

PASADENA, Calif. — Our universe didn't need any divine help to burst into being, famed cosmologist Stephen Hawking told a packed house here at the California Institute of Technology Tuesday night...M-theory posits that multiple universes are created out of nothing, Hawking explained, with many possible histories and many possible states of existence.

Evidently, Hawking is saying the universe's origin defies the First Law of Thermodynamics, which says matter can neither be created nor destroyed. In other words, the amount of matter or energy in the universe is constant, and it can be converted, moved, stored or dissipated, but will not be created or eliminated.

That law is a basic part of all physical sciences. Unless I'm missing something, Hawking needs to explain what force was able to do what can’t be done.

Predictable: Boston Marathon Bombing Brings Out Ghouls and Morons

Within hours of this horrific bombing, the left, on cue, begins politicizing the tragedy and once again tries to pin it on imaginary Tea Partiers, right wing extremist or basically anyone who disagrees with the radical left agenda. They've been embarrassingly wrong so many times that it's obvious The Left is incapable of shame.  Logic, history and deductive reasoning should tell you that most likely the perpetrator would be Muslim, followed by an Occupy Wall Street type. As always, reality screws up the narrative.


Wolf Blitzer, CNN 

“One intriguing notion, one intriguing thought here, and I’m curious, Mike, and I’ll ask Matt to weigh in as well,” Blitzer said. “It is a state holiday, in addition to the Boston Marathon. It is a state holiday in Massachusetts today called Patriots Day, and who knows if that has anything at all to deal — to do with these, these twin explosions.”

Patriots Day is a holiday meant to commemorate the anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, the first battles of the Revolutionary War. Blitzer continued to inquire to about that possibility, asking if there might have been an event to mark the anniversary.
“As part of Boston’s — Massachusetts, I should say — Patriots Day, did you notice earlier in the day, Matt, any special Patriots Day events going on, anything pointing to a special day in Massachusetts?”

Well, Wolf. The Marathon is always held on Patriots Day, and it is, after all, a big public event. Maybe that's it.







 Yeah, this bombing never would have happened if Republicans would just rubber stamp a new head of ATF

CNN Analyst: Right wing Groups could be behind Boston Marathon Bombing

Al Sharpton's Producer Tweets: "We don't know anything yet of course, but it is tax day & my first thought was all these anti-gov groups, but who knows,"

Via Gateway Pundit: It took Esquire Magazine just a matter of minutes to blame “Patriots Day” supporters for the bomb blasts today in Boston.

Update: Actor & Sports Radio host, Jay Mohr Tweets: What bothers me most about today is that we're getting used 2 it. ENOUGH. 2nd amendment must go. Violence has 2 stop. Culture MUST change.

What's this 'we' shit, pal? No 2nd Amendment means no terrorist bombs??? Don't quit your day job. The 2nd is the reason you're able to spout stupidity under the 1st.

Washington Post on Gosnell Story: You did it too!

WaPo:

The charge of liberal media bias is perhaps undercut by the fact that a number of conservative media outlets — and conservative leaders — overlooked the story, too, until a flood of tweets and commentaries about it began late last week.

The Weekly Standard and the National Review, two leading conservative magazines, for example, hadn’t published anything on the trial, according to a search of the Nexis database. The New York Post’s conservative editorial board has written one commentary — an editorial lamenting the lack of coverage, which, although it doesn’t mention it, includes its own paper. The Washington Times has published five staff-written articles and guest commentaries on the matter, all focusing on the absence of press coverage.
Fox News has been the only consistent national TV source on the story, having run 11 news reports or commentaries on it over the past month.

The Post, New York Times, ABC,NBC,CBS, and CNN have long claimed a leadership role as to what is considered newsworthy. Despite losing audience to other outlets, they still collectively remain the largest source of news in the country.

By comparing their (in)actions to conservative opinion magazines like National Review and The Weekly Standard, along with a NY tabloid, WaPo concedes to what many of us already knew: That the mainstream media should no longer be relied upon for comprehensive news coverage. And that other than size, they are no different than any run of the mill blog.

But the MSM still claims status and privileges as news organizations with unique and superior standards and integrity others lack. And yet, here's The Washington Post comparing themselves to publications they would normally look down their noses upon.

So, we should at least commend them for finally admitting that they, and the rest of the dinosaur media aren't leaders of anything, and deserve less trust and admiration than they give Fox News. 

 Perhaps the press should give this story the same level of coverage it would if seven infants and a patient were shot to death in a doctor's office. Then we could have thousands of stories and editorials calling for 'reasonable restrictions' and 'commonsense laws' so as to 'prevent this tragedy from happening again.' We could also hear about how no one "needs" a partial birth abortion and that it's 'paranoid' to think anyone's trying to take away your right to an abortion. Of course, we'll also have fawning coverage of celebrities and politicians calling NARAL and Planned Parenthood murderers, and their members a bunch of backwards and violent morons.

Dennis Rodman's Thugtasctic Summer Vacation

 “I’m going back August 1,” the former rebound getter told Gossip Extra exclusively. “We have no plans really, as far as what we’re going to do over there, but we’ll just hang and have some fun!”

Yeah, it’s so much fun legitimizing a gang of murderous goons who run the world’s largest concentration camp and call it a country. I’m sure the people of North Korea will have a lot of fun as Rodman approvingly romps around with the savages who are the source of their misery. It’s an absolute blast being a useful idiot and propaganda tool for the most evil government in the world.

The Media Blackout of Kermit Gosnell Case

The blogoshere and twitterverse blew up this up this week over the Main Stream Media's shocking lack of interest in a mass murder trial that's been going on since March 18. The case of Kermit Gosnell was mostly receiving coverage only in the conservative corners of cyberspace until this week. That's when liberal columnist Kirsten Powers could no longer ignore it, and took the MSM to task on the pages of USA Today:

Infant beheadings. Severed baby feet in jars. A child screaming after it was delivered alive during an abortion procedure. Haven't heard about these sickening accusations?
It's not your fault. Since the murder trial of Pennsylvania abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell began March 18, there has been precious little coverage of the case that should be on every news show and front page. The revolting revelations of Gosnell's former staff, who have been testifying to what they witnessed and did during late-term abortions, should shock anyone with a heart.

Now, we're finally getting some coverage from large media outlets, mostly in the form of ass covering,  lame excuses and attempts to turn this around on conservatives. However, none of the major news outlets have even bothered to cover the horrors revealed in the Grand Jury Report.  

But that doesn't mean this case will ever get the level of coverage it would receive if someone shot seven children and a patient inside a doctor's office. We would hear about that 24/7 for months on end.

 Obviously, this story is toxic to the media's political agenda,. and is an example of how their bias is revealed not just through what's reported, but what's not. Here's a photo of the courtroom media section taken this week:

Coverage of this case also raises the inconvenient fact of Barack Obama's repeated votes against outlawing these horrific practices as a legislator. Planned Parenthood's -mostly ignored- position that mothers and physicians should decide the fate of these babies would receive wider scrutiny as well:

As of this writing, my local paper, The Tampa Bay Times, hasn't covered this story at all since an AP report which made passing reference in December of 2011 regarding another case similar to this one.  The TBT is home to the widely cited and Pulitzer Prize winning Politifact, which purports to "seek out the truth in politics." Thankfully, they've sorted out the facts surrounding the JayZ & Beyonce Cuba trip, which is apparently far more important than the politics surrounding the mass murder trial of an abortionist.  

Update: What I Saw at the Gosnell Trial

"Thursday’s testimony had sensational details. The court staff, convinced it would attract journalists from around the nation, has set aside three rows of seats to accommodate up to 40 reporters. But all Thursday morning, as Ashly Baldwin testified to horror after horror, only one reporter was in the reserved seating — me.
Several local news outlets were there, scattered about the mostly empty courtroom. The Philadelphia Inquirer had a reporter there. NBC10 sent a blogger for its website. The AP stopped in, but the reporter told me that resources are thin and trial coverage is not gavel to gavel.
An hour into afternoon testimony, Jon Hurdle of The New York Times showed up, and a few minutes later was gone.
The lack of daily media coverage for the most sensational abortion trial angers pro-lifers who said there is a “media black out” on the Gosnell trial.
I asked one of the court staff why so few are interested.
“If you’re pro-choice, do you really want anybody to know about this,” he said, motioning to the filthy medical equipment set up in the courtroom.
It’s a good point. As saturation coverage of the Sandy Hook elementary school coverage has caused Americans to reconsider the limits of the Second Amendment, saturation coverage of Kermit Gosnell’s clinic would likely cause the same reconsideration of abortion rights.
The details are that horrifying."

The Slow Death of a Hoax

The bogus hypothesis of Catastrophic Anthropogenic (Man-Made) Global Warming is a terminal case, and now it's just a question of much longer we'll have to endure this nonsense. A good sign has come from the Economist, who has been on board the CAGW ship for some time, but is now having second thoughts over the fact that global temperatures have been flat for almost two decades. When a well respected,  international publication starts looking for the exits, you know the end has moved a lot closer:

OVER the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar. The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO₂ put there by humanity since 1750...Temperatures fluctuate over short periods, but this lack of new warming is a surprise... If they remain flat, they will fall outside the models’ range within a few years.

That doesn't mean they've completely thrown in the towel. When you've banked a lot of your credibility on a fraud, it's natural to slowly back out of the room:

  It does not mean global warming is a delusion... But the puzzle does need explaining. 

The mismatch might mean that—for some unexplained reason—there has been a temporary lag between more carbon dioxide and higher temperatures in 2000-10. Or it might be that the 1990s, when temperatures were rising fast, was the anomalous period. Or, as an increasing body of research is suggesting, it may be that the climate is responding to higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in ways that had not been properly understood before. This possibility, if true, could have profound significance both for climate science and for environmental and social policy.

Or it likely means the alarmists don't know what the hell they're talking about and never did. There's always been a lot of holes in the CAGW argument, that have been met with ridicule, threats, hysteria and logical fallacies. But the biggest ones are also the most basic: How is it that climate scientists can predict the future behavior of an enormous, non-linear system with thousands of variables to any acceptable degree of accuracy?   How can they even measure current worldwide temperature averages to 1/100 of a degree with any confidence? It's just not believable, especially when you consider that all the historic measurements beyond thirty years are just speculative reconstructions of unreliable data. And how is it that alarmist climate scientists are immune from confirmation bias in the face of all the money, power and prestige at stake in this debate?

The Church of Global Warming is also facing an ironic dilemma in its quest to eliminate fossils fuels and dismantle modern civilization:

 But the real capper is that the United States actually achieved its (unratified) Kyoto Protocol target without the help of environmentalists.  In fact, we hit the Kyoto target in spite of environmentalists—it’s entirely the result of the fracking natural gas boom that environmentalists wished had never happened and are retrospectively trying to roll back.  Coal-fired power is being rapidly supplanted by cheap gas-fired power, which has half the CO₂ emissions as coal per BTU of energy.  If environmentalists had their way, CO₂ emissions might actually go back up, because we’d switch back to coal.

That's not good news for CAGW high-priests like Bill Mckibben, who now finds himself simultaneously screaming for reduced carbon emissions while opposing the free market phenomenon of hydraulic fracturing that is largely responsible for reducing those emissions.    

The well-deserved death of this biggest fraud in human history is coming but it wont be easy or pretty. The amount of money, power, careers and infrastructure that depends on the CAGW myth is huge and has weaved itself into much public policy. These parasites will not go quietly and can always be expected to dream up novel arguments and new scares. That's what they do, because it's not about the environment and never has been.   

Your Children are Our Children

This one has created quite an uproar over the last few days. But Melissa Harris-Perry's views are fairly common in leftists circles, especially in academia, where Ms. Perry can be found when she's not broadcasting to MSNBC's miniscule audience. Her Communitarian and collectivist notions of child rearing can be heard almost daily on college campuses throughout the country.

Normally, the left isn't this publicly candid, since even they - mostly - know how toxic an unvarnished expression of their true intentions can be to most Americans. That's why MSNBC can be so useful and instructive. At minimum, dozens of people were involved in the production and airing of this promo, so the network clearly felt it reflected the views of its audience, and themselves:

   “We have never invested as much in public education as we should have because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children – ‘Your kid is yours, and totally your responsibility.’ We haven’t had a very collective notion that these are our children. So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.”

 The United States spends more per student on education than any industrialized country in the world, and receives mediocre results at best.  But that's not quite what Ms Perry is talking about. She wants the community (State) and its values do be the dominant influence in children's lives. Skyrocketing out of wedlock births, especially prevalent among younger and less educated women, have provided the left with a growing number of children for whom the government becomes the second parent, and the school as the place that provides the very food they eat.  Many of these kids will never learn much of anything useful and will be far more likely to have negative outcomes as adults, but they will be sufficiently indoctrinated with a statist value system. If you belong to the community as a child, then you will belong to it as an adult.

The problem for Ms. Perry is that too many families are the biggest influence their kids lives, and they teach them subversive values and beliefs like liberty, individualism and self reliance. They may even tell their kids - as I did with my two college graduate sons - to not believe everything their teachers told them, and to be critically thinking individuals above all else. This is why the left continuously attacks home-schooling, with some making a constitutional argument for outright bans. The left's opposition to vouchers and charter schools is not just about the greed of the NEA. It's about future generations universally believing their self worth is calculated based on their value or cost to the collective.

Like many parents, I view the raising of children as a long process of gradually letting go. That we teach, and then give them increasing levels of  independence and responsibility, until they are ready to make their own way in the world.  

The authoritarians view your children not as an end in themselves, with the right to live life for its own sake, but as a means to their ends. 

  

Why They Wont Learn About Guns

                            


This random act of media honesty has likely cropped up because the willful ignorance of the gun-control crowd is getting awfully hard to ignore, and Jake Tapper is one of the best of a bad lot.

Nevertheless, the gun-controllers betray their desire to ban all, or most guns with these all too frequent gaffes. If you want to eliminate all versions of something, why bother to learn the details? It's all the same to you.

Prohibitionists didn't make a distinction between all the varieties of beer, wine or spirits. They wanted to ban all alcohol, and said so. The gun-banners are forced to make these distinctions because the Bill of Rights and public opinion doesn't allow for such honesty. The trashing of the Second Amendment has to be done incrementally, and it's hard to learn things you don't want to know. 

Cancer Clinics Turning Away Medicare Patients

You didn't get the message when the White House tours were cancelled, so maybe this will get you to pay up, sucker:

Cancer clinics across the country have begun turning away thousands of Medicare patients, blaming the sequester budget cuts.

Oncologists say the reduced funding, which took effect for Medicare on April 1, makes it impossible to administer expensive chemotherapy drugs while staying afloat financially

Patients at these clinics would need to seek treatment elsewhere, such as at hospitals that might not have the capacity to accommodate them.

 “If we treated the patients receiving the most expensive drugs, we’d be out of business in six months to a year,” said Jeff Vacirca, chief executive of North Shore Hematology Oncology Associates in New York. “The drugs we’re going to lose money on we’re not going to administer right now.”

The sequester cuts of $85 billion this year, amount to around 2.4% of the federal budget. Meanwhile, the General Accounting Office has found over $400 billion wasted every year on duplicative, fragmented and inefficient programs that could be eliminated tomorrow without a second thought. That's almost 11% of the same budget. And that's just for starters, since no business or government can say there aren't at least 10% of inefficiencies to cut everywhere, especially this government. American businesses have done just that and more over the last five years, since they can't print money or take it at the point of a gun when times are tough.

But instead of firing some thumb sitting bureaucrats, or curbing the massive fraud and abuse throughout the system, oncologists and their patients are going to take it in the shorts, even though these doctors are barely breaking even on Medicare as it is. This is extortion, pure and simple. The government beast will be fed or you will suffer, and possibly die. The government can never do with one penny less than the ever increasing amounts it demands. That message will be sent in the most emotional and painful way possible.   

Lead House Gun Control Sponsor Doesn't Know What She's Banning

I guess it's too much to ask that when a legislator wants to ban something, they at least know what the hell it is they're banning:

Asked how a ban on magazines holding more than 15 rounds would be effective in reducing gun violence, DeGette said:
“I will tell you these are ammunition, they’re bullets, so the people who have those now they’re going to shoot them, so if you ban them in the future, the number of these high capacity magazines is going to decrease dramatically over time because the bullets will have been shot and there won’t be any more available.”

 Ms. DeGette's claim is tantamount to saying that running out of gas requires the purchase of a new gas tank.. Perhaps the source of her confusion apparently stems from the belief that magazines are bullets, or something. And I'm not even going to quibble over the fact that a magazines hold cartridges and the gun shoots bullets.

But we're just manipulative nit-pickers, according to her office:

“The Congresswoman has been working on a high-capacity assault magazine ban for years, and has been deeply involved in the issue; she simply misspoke in referring to ‘magazines’ when she should have referred to ‘clips,’ which cannot be reused because they don’t have a feeding mechanism,” Johnson said. “Quite frankly, this is just another example of opponents of common-sense gun violence prevention trying to manipulate the facts to distract from the critical issue of keeping our children safe and keeping killing machines out of the hands of disturbed individuals. It’s more political gamesmanship that stands in the way of responsible solutions.”

First Rule of Holes: When you're in one, stop digging.  Clips are most certainly reused. For the uninitiated, a clip is used to quickly load the magazine, while the magazine is the device that loads the ammo into the gun's chamber. Tutorial here.  But DeGette has been working on this issue 'for years', (BTW - What the hell is an Assault Magazine?) so one would think she's become an expert on the matter by now. But knowledge isn't necessary when your true motive is to effectively ban all guns incrementally and make their purchase and ownership so burdensome as to render the Second Amendment meaningless. Learning about guns might expose one to inconvenient facts. Degette and her allies would repeal the Second Amendment if they could, and no, that's not paranoia.  Ask a gun control advocate. If they're honest, that's what they'll tell you.

Obama Administration Pushing Banks to Make Subprime Loans

Yes, this is really happening:

"The Obama administration is engaged in a broad push to make more home loans available to people with weaker credit, an effort that officials say will help power the economic recovery but that skeptics say could open the door to the risky lending that caused the housing crash in the first place."

Skeptics? How about anyone with an ounce of common sense? If you wanted even more proof that government meddling caused the real estate bubble and near destruction of the financial system, look no further. The central planners never learn from the past because someone else always suffers the consequences for their arrogance and stupidity.

  " In response, administration officials say they are working to get banks to lend to a wider range of borrowers by taking advantage of taxpayer-backed programs — including those offered by the Federal Housing Administration — that insure home loans against default."

 That would be the same FHA that's essentially insolvent now that it has taken back and expanded its role as the insurer of loans no one else will touch. When Fannie and Freddie were buying loans to anyone who could fog a mirror, FHA had a lot less business. Meant originally for low income borrowers who could only afford small down payments, FHA now insures - largely at taxpayer risk - loans up to $730,000.

It's also important to note that with a few restrictions, FHA loans are fully assumable. You will never get that on a fully private loan, and with rates as low as they are now,  those fixed rate mortgages will have a lot of value when interest rates spike. And they're going to. Big time.
  

"The FHA, in coordination with the White House, is working to develop new policies to make clear to banks that they will not lose their guarantees or face other legal action if loans that conform to the program’s standards later default. Officials hope the FHA’s actions will then spur Fannie and Freddie to do the same.

The effort requires sign-on by the Justice Department and the inspector general of Department of Housing and Urban Development, agencies that investigate wrongdoing in mortgage lending."

Once burned, twice shy I suppose. Using a series of carrots and sticks, starting in the nineties and throughout the government induced bubble, banks were cajoled, intimidated and enticed to make, buy and sell loans given to objectively unqualified buyers. The pressure came from HUD, Fannie and Freddie, Congress, community groups (ACORN) and others, including the Department of Justice. The Jenet Reno DoJ threatened civil and criminal  prosecutions under civil rights law if lending standards didn't lead to the right amount of loans to the right kind of people.

So when the shit hit the fan and everything melted down in 2008 the lenders were vilified by the same people who mandated they make these toxic loans. I don't necessarily feel bad for them since they made out pretty good themselves. DoJ stopped short of criminal prosecution, most likely because the defendants would then have every reason to pull the covers on the whole thing and expose the rot under the public pronouncements.

Unlike the progressive central planners in Washington, the private sector does learn from the past and wants assurances - for what their worth- that they wont be subject to public opprobrium when this fails again. 

AP Bans the Term Illegal Immigrant

Doublespeak is one of the favorite methods tyrants use to intimidate and ostracize dissenters. Turning the language on its head and shunning those who don't conform, also confuses an issue and conceals its inconvenient aspects and the ugly truth.

The latest entry is the Associated Press's decision to abuse its stature and tell us illegal Aliens - the term under the law - are not even illegal:

The Stylebook no longer sanctions the term “illegal immigrant” or the use of “illegal” to describe a person. Instead, it tells users that “illegal” should describe only an action, such as living in or immigrating to a country illegally.illegal immigration ...Entering or residing in a country in violation of civil or criminal law. Except in direct quotes essential to the story, use illegal only to refer to an action, not a person: illegal immigration, but not illegal immigrant. Acceptable variations include living in or entering a country illegally or without legal permission.

Evidently, the dictionary will now have to change the word illegal from an adjective to a verb in order to conform with AP's declaration. Even the current politically correct term is unacceptable:

The discussions on this topic have been wide-ranging and include many people from many walks of life. (Earlier, they led us to reject descriptions such as “undocumented,” despite ardent support from some quarters, because it is not precise. A person may have plenty of documents, just not the ones required for legal residence.)

Hey, just because you don't have a passport, visa, or green card, it doesn't mean you're undocumented if you can produce a Sam's Club membership card.

Don't Believe in Man Made Global Warming? It's your Stone Age Brain

Religious fascists use all sorts of tactics and weird rationales to convince you of their righteousness. The true believers in the Church of Global Warming are no different. Sometimes they just come right out and condemn you to hell, or accuse you of racism, or something. But often they come at you with some high-minded gibberish from a "really smart person:" Here's an example from Helen Camakaris Ph.D.:

 Cognitive dissonance is that uncomfortable feeling we have when we know we should invest in solar panels but the 46″ wide screen TV wins out; we know we should catch the bus but we take the car anyway. It’s that sense of discord that arises when emotion and reason don’t get along. And unfortunately, it’s alive and well, sabotaging the climate change debate....We haven’t evolved to be successful in the modern world. Civilisation arose only 12,000 years ago; in evolutionary terms that’s just the blink of an eye. Ninety-nine per cent of human evolution occurred during the Stone Age, so our evolved instincts, personality traits, and even some of our cognitive “short-cuts” are much better suited to this Pleistocene world.

 Impressed? I know I am. It takes a lot of thought, such as it is, to come up with the notion that the blasphemers are evolutionary throwbacks. When she says 'we', she really means 'you' since Dr. Camakaris and her brethren have apparently raced ahead of us primitives who act and rely on ancient thought processes.

According to Ms. Camakaris, I am an unreasoning beast when I decide to buy a TV rather than 'invest' in a highly inefficient technology that no one - including her - would buy in the absence of government subsidies and force, and even then, it's still a white elephant.

Evidently, the mere questioning of  anyone's ability to predict the future behavior of an enormous and chaotic, non linear system, is to sabotage the debate, which wouldn't even be a debate if us skeptics were advanced enough to know what's good for us. Of course, the 'really smart people' are also immune from confirmation bias, greed, envy or any of the other faults and foibles of the mere stone age mortals who would disagree.

    We need to design a new kind of democracy where many government decisions are made cooperatively, with multi-party representation and the input of experts...Education must produce adults who can think critically and understand what’s at stake and why our judgement is flawed. To counter self-interest, the government should use incentives and disincentives to guide public behaviour. We need to encourage altruism by instituting reciprocal, incremental improvements, and by showing leadership.

So, now the definition of critical thinking is to not trust your own judgment and leave it all to the self-anointed, who will tell us what to think. And for those of you not fluent in fascist bullshit, when they call for cooperation, multi-party representation and the input of experts, it means SHUT UP!

Great News: Sugary Drinks Are Safe!

Well, that's not what the food police want you to believe, but it is what they're actually saying:

 New research presented at the American Heart Association’s Epidemiology and Prevention/Nutrition, Physical Activity and Metabolism 2013 Scientific Sessions showed that 180,000 deaths worldwide are linked to sugary beverages.

Wow, 180,000! That's a lot, huh? Not so fast. Each year, approximately 60 million people die worldwide, so 180,000 deaths works out to around .03% of the total. Statistically speaking, that's essentially ZERO. Moreover, this propaganda doesn't even claim a causal relationship. That is, it doesn't account for any other contributing factors in these deaths, such as smoking, genetics, physical activity, or any other underlying conditions. And this meme is being pushed by the American Heart Association, no less.

 These agenda driven reports from 'experts',  aren't usually this obvious in their dishonesty, but it illustrates just how much contempt these elitist control freaks have for you. Remember, this is the stuff you need to believe if you don't want to be called anti-science.