Wolf Howling

Warmie Angst & The AGW Theory Hanging By A Single Untested Hypothesis

2012-02-02T15:48:00.000-05:00

The warmies are experiencing some epic angst over the letter published several days ago in the WSJ from sixteen distinguished scientists, addressed to our political leaders, stating that global warming is not an issue with which they needed to be concerned. The warmies have responded at the WSJ with a letter from Kevin Trenberth that is jaw dropping in its arrogance and utterly revealing about the state of the anthropogenic global warming theory.

Trenberth's first argument is that the only people that can make judgements about the validity of global warming are "climate scientists." As he puts it, "[d]o you consult your dentist about your heart problem?" But the reality is that "climate science" overlaps significantly with other disciplines, such as physics, meteorology, oceanography, statistics and computer programming to name but a few. Trenberth gives us no reason whatsoever to discount the opinions of experts in these areas when making assessments of global warming. And as Jo Nova responds with tongue in cheek:

If my dentist tells me that my heart surgeon was caught emailing other surgeons about how to use tricks to hide declines, that he broke laws of reason, that his predictions are basically all wrong, or that his model of understanding is demonstrably wrong, then I’m listening to the dentist.

What is most troubling - and unbelievably arrogant - about Trenberth's argument is that he implies that if you are one of the non-scientists, your only recourse is to blindly trust in the pronouncements of "climate scientists." What pure and utter bullshit.

What can - and should - we non-scientists do to assess climate science?

Number one, and perhaps most importantly, we can look at the underlying mechanics of a claimed scientific finding to see whether it is based on an experiment that complies with the scientific method - i.e., all the data, methodology, computer programs, etc. are archived and made public so that the results can be analyzed and reproduced by others. If not - and SO MUCH of climate science does not - then we should accord it zero reliability.

We can even take that a step further in evaluating experiments and just take a look at the size of the experimental sample. If it is large and diverse, then we can mark it down as at least some indication that the results might be trustworthy. If the sample is extremely small, that is a red flag that the scientist may be cherry picking data to get the result that they want - as happened with the infamous Yamal Tree Ring study.

We can look at how the temperature record itself is compilied - and make common sense judgments about whether the methods used are uniform and reliable. And if they are not, if there appear to be significant problems with the numbers of temperature stations, their location, and whether they are subject to heat island effect, then we should be very skeptical indeed

We can look at changes to the temperature records to see whether there is any justification for the changes. And if the changes are to make the older temperatures colder and the later temperatures warmer with no justification given, we can be suspicious that we are being sold a bill of goods.

We can look at the geologic record and see if the claims being made about our modern climate are reasonable within the larger picture. So if at numerous points in history when there was no human contribution to CO2, the climate was warmer than today, we can legitimately ask why we should believe that increasing temperatures, as we emerge from the Little Ice Age, are in any way unusual, and proof of a human component to climate change.

We can look at the computer models to determine whether they are accurately predicting the heating or cooling of our climate. And if they are not (and all IPCC comuter models fail that test today), then we have no reason to trust the pronouncements of the warmies.

And we can tell whether there are gaping logical disconnects in the warmie arguments. Indeed, Trenberth makes a huge, gigantic, massive, leap in logic in his WSJ article, asking us to take an untested hypothesis as fact. I'll save that critically important pearl for last. First, let's deal with the following:

Climate experts know that the long-term warming trend has not abated in the past decade. In fact, it was the warmest decade on record. Observations show unequivocally that our planet is getting hotter.

Wow. I seem to recall that a week ago, all of those climate scientists at the MET and the University of East Anglia, two warmie institutions at the heart of climate science (not to mention Climategate), just told us 'unequivocally' that our planet had not warmed at all over the past 15 years. So Trenberth is deliberately ignoring that to make his absolutist claim. He has obvious problems with veracity. So why should we trust anything that he says.

Actually, this latest finding from MET and East Anglia stands in direct contradiction to Jim Hansen's NASA GISS temperature record. The GISS records show red hot warming over the past 15 years. GISS and MET data line up through 1998, but diverge thereafter because Hansen claims that there is massive warming going on in the Arctic region. There is minimal coverage of temperature stations in the Arctic, and Hansen's claims are based almost wholly on a number of questionable extrapolations. Indeed, even while Hansen is showing the Arctic on fire over the past 15 years, we are seeing increases in polar ice there - something that wholly undermines Hansen's claims. So what Trenberth is doing is the time tested climate scientist technique of cherry picking the data he wants. And since the MET data undermines his argument, he is pretending it simply doesn't exist.

And one more note before leaving the above quote. Trenberth writes that the last decade has been the "warmest decade on record." Now, I will bet that most non-scientists reading that will believe that we are experiencing world record temperatures over the course of geologic time. But in reality, "on record" is shorthand for the period since 1880, when relatively reliable temperature record keeping began. Warmies rarely seem to explain that when they make their pronouncements.

Trenberth later makes mention of his 2009 e-mail wherein he bemoaned the fact that the world had stopped warming and the warmies couldn't explain it. So what has changed since 2009? It's the mother of all logical jumps.

[C]omputer models have recently shown that during periods when there is a smaller increase of surface temperatures, warming is occurring elsewhere in the climate system, typically in the deep ocean. Such periods are a relatively common climate phenomenon, are consistent with our physical understanding of how the climate system works, and certainly do not invalidate our understanding of human-induced warming or the models used to simulate that warming.

Did you catch those two things? One, Trenberth's e-mail is directly undermining the claim of Hansen's NASA GISS that we have had continued warming over the past 15 years. Obviously Trenberth didn't believe it when he wrote his 2009 e-mail bemoaning the lack of warming. And today Trenberth is taking the position that the surface temperatures have not warmed, but the deep oceans have. So there is no doubt Trenberth is being less than honest when he now embraces Hansen's surface temperature numbers as definitive. But that is not the big thing.

The huge, gigantic, enormous thing in the above statement is this - Trenberth et. al, when he couldn't explain the flatlining of temperatures over the past 15 years, built a new computer model that has spit out a projection that significant warming is going on in the deep oceans. How that happens without warming the middle layers of the ocean is a mystery, but that is not the issue. What the computer has spit out is AN UNTESTED HYPOTHESIS. In other words, Trenberth DOES NOT HAVE THE DATA to support his conclusion that global warming has gone deep into the oceans. Deep water temperature testing only began with ARGO in 2003, and there is nowhere near the data at this point to even suggest that the ocean depths have, over the past 15 years, absorbed the massive amount of heat that Trenberth's model projects. So simply put, no one today can validate it. Warming in the deep ocean is not known to be "common" on the basis of any observed data. Trenberth, based on his 2009 e-mail, had no idea that this could have been happening until his latest computer model - the one used to replace all the other failed computer models - spit this out as a possibility. So in other words, this scurrilous man is asking us to accept the absolute truth of anthropogenic global warming not on data or proven fact, but ON FAITH THAT HIS LATEST COMPUTER MODEL is right.

This is incredibly revealing. It means that the AGW theory is literally hanging on by an untested hypothesis today. It also means that, for the first time since the global warming canard started, it is, today, capable of being falsified. After the moving of goal post after goal post, we finally might be at the point that there is no more space for the warmies to move it. It is put up or shut up time for Trenberth and the warmies. Show us observed facts, not computer print outs.

Lastly, Trenberth falls back on the tried and true argument that all people should accept the truth of anthropogenic global warming because it is generally accepted by all right thinking scientists whose papers are accepted for peer reviewed publication. Compare that argument with this:

No theory is carved in stone. Science is merciless when it comes to testing all theories over and over, at any time, in any place. Unlike religion or politics, science is ultimately decided by experiments, done repeatedly in every form. There are no sacred cows. In science, 100 authorities count for nothing. Experiment counts for everything.

That is from physicist Micho Kaku's article, Has A Speeding Neutrino Really Overturned Einstein, in the WSJ last year. It would seem that Mr. Kaku has a very different opinion than Mr. Trenberth as to what constitutes actual "science" and how much trust should be placed in the weight of authorities. Indeed, it would seem that Trenberth is doing anything but making valid scientific arguments.

At the end of the day, there needs to be a reckoning. The "climate scientists" who have sold us on the canard of global warming cannot escape with their careers intact. And to the extent that they have committed knowing fraud, they need to be punished criminally. Those organizations that have told us the sicience is settled need to lose access to all federal funding. And the entire system of federal grants for research needs to be thoroughly overhauled. And lastly, we as a nation ought to demand that any scientist who receives federal funding to conduct an experiment must completely comply with the scientific method, making every bit of data, methodology, and computer programs immediately available so that their work can be validated or falsified. This global warming scam, so costly to our world, cannot be allowed to simply fade into the night as the theory is disproven. They have caused too much damage to entire economies and they grossly eroded the faith of the average person in the trustworthiness of our scientific community. Examples need to be made.

Former CIA Chief Hayden Bathing In Schadenfreude Over AG Holder

2012-02-02T00:53:00.001-05:00

Former CIA Director Michael Hayden has been so overcome by his schadenfreude over the many problems now besetting AG Eric Holder that Hayden had to share it with the world or burst. As you read this, you can almost hear Hayden laughing and rubbing his hands in glee at the poetic justice being dealt to Eric Holder. It really makes for a fun read.

This from Gen. Hayden writing at CNN:

Schadenfreude -- joy at the misfortune of others -- is a bad thing.

So I've been trying to resist temptation these past months as I watch Attorney General Eric Holder deal with public and congressional reaction to the "Fast and Furious" scheme, the failed attempt by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to seed and then track U.S. firearms to Mexican drug cartels.Fast and Furious was a secretive, high-risk operation seemingly intended to deal with an intractable problem abroad. . . .

. . . Now Holder , , , must defend himself against some very tough accusations, including one by some skeptics that the operation was intended principally to discredit, and thereby justify further regulation of, firearms dealers.This is where the schadenfreude comes in.

After the congressional elections of 2006, the CIA was forced to defend edgy (often controversial and sometimes unsuccessful) actions in a tough political environment. President George W. Bush was politically weakened, the Senate and the House were under Democratic control and a presidential election was in the offing.

On the Hill, the questions were aggressive, often partisan and, in my view, sometimes even deeply mean-spirited and unfair to the many intelligence professionals who were putting their lives and careers on the line in a very successful effort to protect America from further attack. The agency dealt with the committees as best a nonpolitical organization could, fully recognizing that, although congressional oversight was a necessary instrument, it could sometimes be a difficult one.

But any personal instinct toward some common "executive branch" empathy for Holder is muted not only by the dubious character of Fast and Furious, but by some of the attorney general's other actions, as well. While out of office, for example, he famously called for a "reckoning" for CIA officers and other officials who authorized and conducted operations that were edgy and risky and intended to deal with difficult circumstances.

Once in office, he launched a "reckoning" of CIA renditions, detentions and interrogations of terrorists by directing the Justice Department to reopen investigations closed years before by career prosecutors. This decision was opposed by then-CIA Director Leon Panetta and seven of his predecessors, and Holder reportedly made the decision without reading detailed memos prepared by those career prosecutors declining to pursue further proceedings.

The CIA officers affected by this may be forgiven some feelings of irony when they now hear the attorney general repudiating some of the charges made against his officers by stating: "Those who serve in the ranks of law enforcement are our nation's heroes and deserve our nation's thanks, not the disrespect that is being heaped on them by those who see political advantage."

Of course, it was also Holder who decided in 2009 to release what had been secret DOJ memos outlining the details and providing the legal justification for the Bush administration's interrogation program. The release was defended by the administration as part of a broad commitment to "transparency."

Holder may have had even more in mind though as, according to a contemporary Newsweek account of the decision, the leadership of the Department of Justice calculated that "if the public knew the details, ... there would be a groundswell of support for an independent probe," and that when the decision to release those memos had been made, the attorney general and his leadership team "celebrated quietly, and waited for the national outrage to begin."

Later that summer, Holder also released a previously classified CIA inspector general report on the interrogation program as the administration seemed to be actively shaping this story to put its predecessor's actions in the worst possible light.

As I said, schadenfreude is a bad thing. But it is sometimes hard to avoid, especially when life seems to come full circle.

Attorney General Eric Holder has made it clear that he thinks he has been subjected to a heavily politicized process over Fast and Furious.

If he has -- and that's still an if -- I suspect that some folks at CIA know exactly how he feels.

You have to love how he refuses to give Holder the benefit of the doubt as to whether he is actually being subject to an unjust process. I had almost as fun reading this as I am sure Hayden had in writing it.

From Our Pockets To Far Left Activist Groups - Democrat Corruption At Work

2012-02-01T17:21:00.000-05:00

That stench of corruption you smell is most likely the odor emanating from Obama Administration and Attorney General Eric Holder's Office. At least a portion of what you are smelling is how the Democrats are funneling tax dollars and bank fines to far left community activist organizations - for these organization to then in turn use in support of Democrats. It is as corrupt a practice as you will find in any banana republic.

It works like this. Democrats pass a law, take Dodd Frank for example, which could also reasonably be called the ACORN Full Employment Act. In it, the Democrats specify that a portion of our tax dollars are to be used to fund local organizations, ostensibly to conduct education and counseling of minorities or the elderly on financial matters. The government than enters into a multi-year contract with one of the many far left activist organizations for millions of dollars. A variety of far left organizations wholly survive on our tax dollars through this scam, the most infamous being, until their recent dissolution, ACORN. It is completely legal. It is utterly corrupt. And because of contractual obligations, the Democrats are able to keep this scam going even during periods of Republican control of Congress.

But that is not the only method by which Democrats funnel millions in funds to partisan left wing groups. A variant on the above theme is for the Justice Department to direct that banks owing fines for "race discrimination" have to pay a portion of the fines directly to whatever private radical left organization the Justice Department directs. This too is ostensibly justified on the grounds of educating minorities. The difference here, as the IBD article below makes clear, is that the left are on far shakier legal grounds when going this route.

Just as an aside, these shakedowns of banks for "racism" in lending practices are precisely what led to our economic meltdown in 2008 by destroying credit standards. Invariably in these cases, no single act of racial discrimination is ever proven to have occurred. Rather a bank is held liable if its lending practices show a disparate impact on minorities. That means that statistically, a bank did not make enough loans to minorities - irrespective of how colorblind the bank's lending standards are, irrespective of its outreach to minorities, and indeed, irrespective of whether it statistically rejected more applications from whites than minorities. It is a travesty. This use of disparate impact theory was held, for all intents and purposes, unlawful by the Supreme Court in the employment context in the pivotal 2010 Ricci v. Destafano case. It should be unlawful in all contexts. There is no place for racism in our society, but the disparate impact theory doesn't punish racism, it punishes institutions for results wholly irrespective of actual racism and thus it deeply distorts our economy.

At any rate, back to the topic at hand. It is the Justice Department funneling fines to left wing organizations that is rearing its ugly head today. This from IBD:

Last week, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith fired off a three-page letter to Attorney General Eric Holder warning that his recent punishment of Bank of America's mortgage unit seemed political. In fact, he may have abused his power.

As IBD first reported Jan. 4, 'BofA Must Pay Excess Settlement Funds To Acorn Clones," the $335 million lending-bias deal requires BofA to fork over a chunk of the payout to leftist groups not connected to the suit.

The unusual term is part of a secret Justice program to redistribute millions in settlement cash to third parties instead of alleged victims.

Critics told IBD it's a "political backdoor" to subsidize Democrat-tied bank shakedown groups. . . .

Under the order, excess funds will be handed to groups that "provide education, counseling and other assistance to low-income and minority borrowers."

The corrupt group, [ACORN,] which has re-emerged under other names after coming under investigation in 2009, continues to receive federal funds. Acorn Housing Corp. got some $700,000 in federal money after changing its name to Affordable Housing Centers of America.

Last year, Holder also ordered two AIG-owned banks to pay a minimum of $1 million to "qualified organizations" that help "African-American borrowers."

More recently, he ordered C&F Mortgage Corp. of Virginia to reward such groups. As of 2010, some $7.6 million was waiting to be handed out from his unsupervised grant program. Recipients aren't restricted in how they use the money. In 2008, Acorn bankrolled get-out-the-vote operations for Obama.

Justice would not provide a complete list of approved nonprofits, but a spokeswoman told IBD the National Urban League and Operation Hope are eligible for cash from the AIG case. Urban League has lobbied to water down credit standards. Operation Hope founder John Bryant serves on Obama's financial advisory council.

Smith demands that Holder furnish a full list of "qualified organizations," along with an audit of payments. Hearings are in order if his response is unsatisfactory.

Hats off to IBD for following up on this like a dog with a bone and getting the Republicans in congress to finally move off their posteriors. Nothing that I am aware of authorizes the Justice Department to direct that fines otherwise payable to the government be directed to non-party organizations.

I am waiting for the day when a financial institution finally appeals the use of disparate impact theory in lending to the Supreme Court. This is social engineering at its worst, it was the "but for" cause of the 2008 economic crash and our continuing economic woes, and yet the Obama administration and the Holder Justice Department are pushing it harder than ever before. It is setting us on a second course for disaster.

A Little Refreshment For The Soul - When Harry Met Buddy

2012-02-01T06:03:00.000-05:00

Harry James was the best jazz and big band trumpet player in my lifetime. Interestingly, quite a few of the great singers and musicians of the era - Frank Sinatra, Doris Day and Buddy Rich to name a few - where graduates of his big band.

One of my all-time favorite songs was one Harry James played with the premier drummer of the era - Buddy Rich. It is called James Session. The first two minutes are the entire band. The last three are Harry and Buddy. Enjoy.

Later in his career, when I was about 14 and had the opportunity to sit and speak with Mr. James during a break in one of his concerts, I asked if he would do James Session. He told me that he and Buddy Rich put that number together and he would never even attempt it with any other drummer. I also asked him about the greatest musical influences on his style. He told me he learned jazz by emulating Louis Armstrong and he learned a sweet, schmaltzy tone with a lot of vibrato from his mother, an opera singer.

And as a bonus, here is Harry's theme song, Ciribiribin. It contains that unique mix of schmaltz and technical mastery that made James the best of trumpeter of my lifetime.

For Trumpeters Only

If you are wondering what Harry played, his mouthpiece was unique. He played a Parduba Double Cup. He was playing in Benny Goodman's band in 1938 in a concert hall across from the Parduba store. He happened to walk in and try out their unique mouthpice, which actually has a second cup inside. It makes it surprisingly easy to go into the upper register and it gives out a really nice tone. When I spoke with him in early 70's at the concert I mentioned above, I asked him what mouthpiece he would recommend because mine ended up cutting up the inside of my lip after a 3 hour session. He asked what I played. When I told him a Bach, he said one word "Nazi," (apparently he had some residual angst left over from WWII) then reached over to his case and gave me his spare mouthpiece. It's the only thing I've played on since.

His trumpet was a custom made King "Golden Flair" dual bore trumpet. That's another one I got through Mr. James. I don't know if King even produces them anymore. You can get a tone out of that horn so full and sweet it will bring tears to your eyes. It is the perfect trumpet for mid-range jazz. It is not the horn if you want to be playing in the high note range above double F - maybe a double G if you're willing to risk a hernia and some burst veins in your eyes. But for everything else, it can't be beat.

Hope, Change, & Lies About Green Energy Jobs

2012-02-01T04:56:00.000-05:00

Anyone remember those green energy jobs promises . . .

First came the hope - Obama would create 5 million green energy jobs in the U.S.

Then came the pocket change - Obama promised to spend up to $150 billion to subsidize this new sector.

Now hope and change meet reality. This from the USA Today:

House Republicans are expanding their probe into the Obama administration's energy programs, investigating $500 million in green job training grants that placed just 10% of trainees in jobs, according to a government report.

The program's goal was to train 124,893 people and put 79,854 in jobs. But 17 months later, 52,762 were trained and 8,035, or roughly 1 in 10, had jobs. Those numbers come from an audit by the Department of Labor's inspector general, which recommended that the administration end the program and return unspent money.

President Obama has made green jobs a cornerstone of his economic agenda. In his first 2012 campaign ad this month, he said clean energy industries created 2.7 million jobs and were "expanding rapidly." . . .

The Green energy jobs revolution has been a monstrously expensive left wing fantasy from day one. Obama's attempt to turn this epic failure into a positive just defies reality - and all of the facts.

To the extent Obama is claiming that 2.7 million jobs exist in the "clean energy industries," that is an out and out lie. There are 2.7 million jobs in America that can nominally be defined as "green collar" - but only if you interpret "green" broadly enough to encompass things such as Mass Transit bus drivers, waste water treatment workers, and virtually any job associated with reclamation or recycling. The vast majority of those positions predated Obama. Today, "[o]nly 138,000 jobs . . . - roughly 5 percent of jobs identified - are green energy jobs that actually produce energy (like wind, solar, hydro)" That's a bit short of the 5 million new green energy jobs that Obama promised.

The reality is that Obama's push for green energy jobs has been every bit the disaster for our nation that his push for green energy itself has been. For Obama now to claim this epic failure as positive marks him as not merely as a facile liar, but as an utterly shameless one.

Science, Anti-Science & Education

2012-02-01T02:26:00.000-05:00

But in the end, this is a victory for science. No theory is carved in stone. Science is merciless when it comes to testing all theories over and over, at any time, in any place. Unlike religion or politics, science is ultimately decided by experiments, done repeatedly in every form. There are no sacred cows. In science, 100 authorities count for nothing. Experiment counts for everything.
Micho Kaku, Has A Speeding Neutrino Really Overturned Einstein, WSJ, 26 Sep. 2011

The above quote of Michio Kaku came as part of his discussion of the CERN finding that neutrinos might travel faster than the speed of light, thus defying Einstein's theory of relativity and falsifying virtually the entire foundation of modern physics. As Mr. Kaku, himself a physicist, makes crystal clear, what separates science from religion is reproducability. Asking the world to take the finding of an experiment on faith - or peer review, for that matter - is not science. Experiments must be archived and all data and methodology made public as the first immutable step in the scientific method. Moreover, if the results are not capable of being falsified, then it falls outside the definition of science and enters into the theological realm of faith.

Why do I bring all of this up? I for one firmly believe in the scientific method. I believe that science, properly done through the scientific method, will tell me the "how" of our world, wherever it may lead. There is no tension between my respect for science and my faith in religion to tell me the "why." And yet, according to our modern Orwellian left, I am "anti-science."

What the left means by that charge is that I refuse to accept, on the basis of peer review alone, the many warmie assertions about anthropogenic global warming (AGW). The IPCC and the modern left have, when it comes to global warming, tried to substitute peer review as the gold standard for reliability as opposed to making their methodology and data fully available for testing by other scientists. They use computer models to forecast global warming, yet they don't release the programming code so that it can be analyzed and either validated or falsified. Jim Hansen - a fraud who should be behind bars - doesn't just massage our temperature record, he blatantly alters it behind closed doors. The warmies top all of this off with the claim that the science surrounding global warming is settled. It is the antithesis of actual science as posited by Micho Kaku. It truly is anti-science.

What rattled my cage on this issue today were two posts. The first is by Rand Simberg, discussing how the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) has "announced that it's going to take on climate change denial" in k-12 education:

. . . [A]fter hearing an increasing number of anecdotes about K-12 teachers being challenged about how they taught climate science to their students, she says she began to see "parallels" between the two debates --namely, an ideological drive from pressure groups to "teach the controversy" where no scientific controversy exists. . . .

“There’s a climate of confusion in this country around climate science,” says McCaffrey, and NCSE’s goal will be to ensure that “teachers have the tools they need if they get pushback and feel intimidated.” Recent surveys, such as one done among K-12 teachers in September by the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA), suggest that attacks on climate education are far from rare. NSTA found that over half of the respondents reported having encountered global warming scepticism from parents, and 26% had encountered it from administrators. And a December survey from the National Earth Science Teachers’ Association found that 36% of its 555 K-12 teachers who currently teach climate science had been “influenced” to “teach the controversy.”

As a threshold matter, if only 36% of science teachers in the U.S. are teaching both sides of the AGW debate, than our science education is in deep, deep trouble. Parent's need to be checking their children's science curriculum and raising holy hell if their children are part of the 64% who are being indoctrinated by the warmies. Indeed, to go one further, any global warming curriculum that does not include at least a class on Henrick Svensmark's theory - that solar activity and its effect on cloud formation is the primary determinant of our warming and cooling - is not a balanced curriculum.

As to the NCSE, they embrace the position that the "science is settled" and that the mountain of contravening theories and evidence are to ignored. The fact that warming has stopped for the past fifteen years despite steadily increasing human contributions of CO2, the fact that the geologic record shows that there has been nothing unusual about the recent warming of our planet, the fact that all of the computer models predicting global warming have proven utterly worthless, the fact that much of the "science" upon which AGW rests has never been subject to the type of analysis, criticism and reproduction that define the scientific method - all of these are to be ignored? Where in hell do people like the NCSE come from? What they seek is indoctrination, not the teaching of science as a method of acquiring knowledge. It is the very definition of anti-science.

The second post that caught my eye was an article at Space.com entitled "The Crackpot Theory of Everything Reveals The Dark Side of Peer Review." It is about an article that passed peer review yet had obvious defects in methodology and findings. Peer review is, at the very best, nothing more than a tool by which scientific publications can be reasonably sure that an article has been reviewed and found plausible by other experts - not that the findings themselves are accurate or have been reproduced. Peer review is not, and never will be, a substitute for the scientific method. It is those who would have it so that are "anti-science."

At any rate, my suggestion is this. The next time a warmie puts a bull horn up to your ear and yells "anti-science," look him square in the eye, tell him global warming is anti-science, and proceed to repetitively kick him square in the crotch until he experiences an epiphany. It seems the only way we will ever get through to these little Orwellian nightmares.

An American's Introduction To Spicy Hot Food

2012-01-31T03:03:00.001-05:00

Natal, South Africa, has the highest quota of Indians outside of India - and it's famous for the Natal Curry Contest.

They have the contest about June/July. It takes up a major portion of a parking lot at the Royal Show in PMB.

Last year, Judge #3 was an inexperienced food critic named Frank, who was visiting from America.

Frank: "Recently, I was honoured to be selected as a judge at a Curry Cook-off. The original person called in sick at the last moment and so I happened to be standing there at the judge's table asking for directions to the Beer Garden when the call came in. I was assured by the other two judges (Natal Indians) that the curry wouldn't be all that spicy and, besides, they told me I could have free beer during the tasting, so I accepted".

Here are the scorecard notes from the event:

CURRY # 1 - SEELAN'S MANIAC MONSTER TOMATO CURRY...

Judge # 1 -- A little too heavy on the tomato. Amusing kick.

Judge # 2 -- Nice smooth tomato flavour. Very mild.

Judge # 3 (Frank) -- Holy shit, what the hell is this stuff? You could remove dried paint from your driveway. Took me two beers to put the flames out. I hope that's the worst one. These people are crazy.

CHILI # 2 - PHOENIX BBQ CHICKEN CURRY...

Judge # 1 -- Smoky, with a hint of chicken. Slight chili tang.

Judge # 2 -- Exciting BBQ flavour, needs more peppers to be taken seriously.

Judge # 3 -- Keep this out of the reach of children. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to taste besides pain. I had to wave off two people who wanted to give me the Heimlich manoeuvre! They had to rush in more beer when they saw the look on my face.

CURRY # 3 - SHAMILA'S FAMOUS "BURN DOWN THE GARAGE" CURRY...

Judge # 1 -- Excellent firehouse curry. Great kick.

Judge # 2 -- A bit salty, good use of chili peppers.

Judge # 3 -- Call 911. I've located a uranium spill. My nose feels like I have been snorting Drain Cleaner. Everyone knows the routine by now. Get me more beer before I ignite. Barmaid pounded me on the back, now my backbone is in the front part of my chest. I'm getting pissed from all the beer.

CHILI # 4 - BABOOS BLACK MAGIC BEAN CURRY...

Judge # 1 -- Black bean curry with almost no spice. Disappointing.

Judge # 2 -- Hint of lime in the black beans. Good side dish for fish or other mild foods, not much of a curry.

Judge # 3 -- I felt something scraping across my tongue, but was unable to taste it. Is it possible to burn out taste buds? Shareen, the beer maid, was standing behind me with fresh refills. That 300 lbs. woman is starting to look HOT...just like this nuclear waste I'm eating! Is chili an aphrodisiac?

CHILI # 5 LALL'S LEGAL LIP REMOVER...

Judge # 1 -- Meaty, strong curry. Cayenne peppers freshly ground, adding considerable kick. Very impressive.

Judge # 2 -- Average beef curry, could use more tomato. Must admit the chili peppers make a strong statement.

Judge # 3 -- My ears are ringing, sweat is pouring off my forehead and I can no longer focus my eyes. I farted and four people behind me needed paramedics. The contestant seemed offended when I told her that her chili had given me brain damage. Shareen saved my tongue from bleeding by pouring beer directly on it from the pitcher. I wonder if I'm burning my lips off. It really pisses me off that the other judges asked me to stop screaming. Screw them

CHILI # 6 - VERISHNEE'S VEGETARIAN VARIETY...

Judge # 1 -- Thin yet bold vegetarian variety curry. Good balance of spices and peppers.

Judge # 2 -- The best yet. Aggressive use of peppers, onions, and garlic. Superb.

Judge # 3 -- My intestines are now a straight pipe filled with gaseous, sulphuric flames. I am definitely going to shit myself if I fart and I'm worried it will eat through the chair. No one seems inclined to stand behind me except that Shareen. Can't feel my lips anymore. I need to wipe my ass with a snow cone ice cream.

CHILI # 7 - SELINA'S "MOTHER-IN-LAW'S-TONGUE" CURRY...

Judge # 1 -- A mediocre curry with too much reliance on canned peppers.

Judge # 2 -- Ho hum, tastes as if the chef literally threw in a can of chili peppers at the last moment. (I should take note at this stage that I am worried about Judge # 3. He appears to be in a bit of distress as he is cursing uncontrollably).

Judge # 3 -- You could put a grenade in my mouth, pull the pin, and I wouldn't feel a thing. I’ve lost sight in one eye, and the world sounds like it is made of rushing water. My shirt is covered with curry which slid unnoticed out of my mouth. My pants are full of lava to match my shirt. At least, during the autopsy, they’ll know what killed me. I've decided to stop breathing - it's too painful. Screw it; I'm not getting any oxygen anyway. If I need air I'll just suck it in through the 4-inch hole in my stomach.

CHILI # 8 - NAIDOOS TOENAIL CURLING CURRY...

Judge # 1 -- The perfect ending. This is a nice blend curry. Not too bold but spicy enough to declare its existence.

Judge # 2 -- This final entry is a good, balanced curry. Neither mild nor hot. Sorry to see that most of it was lost when Judge #3 farted, passed out, fell over and pulled the curry pot down on top of himself. Not sure if he's going to make it. Poor man, wonder how he'd have reacted to really hot curry?

Judge # 3 - No Report

(Stolen shamelessly from Oh What NOW)

Has Obama Launched The Catholic Church On The Tenth Crusade?

2012-01-30T21:38:00.000-05:00

The Crusades were a series of nine major military expeditions launched by the Catholic Church to defend Christianity against Islamic aggression during the Medieval period. It has been over 700 years since a Pope felt Christendom so under threat that he launched a Crusade. Yet Obama may have just kicked off the 10th Crusade - this one to be fought on American soil against the advance of radical secularism at the ballot box on the first Tuesday in November.

In 2008, "Catholics, who accounted for about a quarter of the electorate, supported Obama, at 54% to 46% for McCain." Thus, Catholics form a very important part of the Obama coalition. Which makes it inexplicable that he has gone to war against the Catholics over the issue of whether Catholic religious institutions and related organization will have to "provide health insurance to their employees which includes subsidized contraception, sterilization and coverage for abortion-inducing drugs. Last week, HHS ruled that they must.

But go to war Obama has. And the Catholic Church is responding in kind. The day before the HHS issued its regulations, the Pope weighed in on the "radical secularists" war on religion in the U.S. Obama ignored that shot across the bow - and now, things have escalated. In virtually every Catholic Church in the U.S., letters from the Bishops have been read from the pulpit, all identical in their gist:

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ:

I write to you concerning an alarming and serious matter that negatively impacts the Church in the United States directly, and that strikes at the fundamental right to religious liberty for all citizens of any faith. The federal government, which claims to be “of, by, and for the people,” has just been dealt a heavy blow to almost a quarter of those people — the Catholic population — and to the millions more who are served by the Catholic faithful.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced last week that almost all employers, including Catholic employers, will be forced to offer their employees’ health coverage that includes sterilization, abortion-inducing drugs, and contraception. Almost all health insurers will be forced to include those “services” in the health policies they write. And almost all individuals will be forced to buy that coverage as a part of their policies.

In so ruling, the Obama Administration has cast aside the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, denying to Catholics our Nation’s first and most fundamental freedom, that of religious liberty. And as a result, unless the rule is overturned, we Catholics will be compelled to either violate our consciences, or to drop health coverage for our employees (and suffer the penalties for doing so). The Obama Administration’s sole concession was to give our institutions one year to comply.

We cannot—we will not—comply with this unjust law. People of faith cannot be made second class citizens. We are already joined by our brothers and sisters of all faiths and many others of good will in this important effort to regain our religious freedom. Our parents and grandparents did not come to these shores to help build America’s cities and towns, its infrastructure and institutions, its enterprise and culture, only to have their posterity stripped of their God given rights. In generations past, the Church has always been able to count on the faithful to stand up and protect her sacred rights and duties. I hope and trust she can count on this generation of Catholics to do the same. Our children and grandchildren deserve nothing less. . . .

Those are fighting words. Read the rest of the letter at IBD.

And it is not only Catholics that Obama has to worry about. This is going to effect all Christian organizations - and virtually all have similar opposition to abortion, if not contraception and sterilization. Obama has given the finger to each and every person of the Christian faith.

Even knee jerk uber liberal E.J. Dionne - an Obama sycophant of the highest order - is coming down on the side of the Catholics on this one. In his most recent column, he points out that Obama has violated his promises to America's religious population made in the run up to the 2008 election, as well as violating the historical tradition of government respect for the conscience of the religious. This from Mr. Dionne:

One of Barack Obama’s great attractions as a presidential candidate was his sensitivity to the feelings and intellectual concerns of religious believers. That is why it is so remarkable that he utterly botched the admittedly difficult question of how contraceptive services should be treated under the new health care law.

His administration mishandled this decision not once but twice. In the process, Obama threw his progressive Catholic allies under the bus and strengthened the hand of those inside the Church who had originally sought to derail the health care law.

This might not be so surprising if Obama had presented himself as a conventional secular liberal. But he has always held himself to a more inclusive standard.

His deservedly celebrated 2006 speech on religion and American public life was a deeply sophisticated and carefully balanced effort to defend the rights of both believers and nonbelievers in a pluralistic republic.

Obama’s speech at Notre Dame’s graduation in 2009 was another tour de force. His visit to South Bend was highly controversial among right-wing Catholics. Yet his address temporarily silenced many of his critics because it showed an appreciation for the Catholic Church’s contributions to American life — particularly through its vast array of social-service and educational institutions — and an instinctive feeling for Catholic sensibilities. . . .

Speaking as a Catholic, I wish the Church would be more open on the contraception question. But speaking as an American liberal who believes that religious pluralism imposes certain obligations on government, I think the Church’s leaders had a right to ask for broader relief from a contraception mandate that would require it to act against its own teachings. The administration should have done more to balance the competing liberty interests here. . . .

“The tensions and the suspicions on each side of the religious divide will have to be squarely addressed,” Obama said back in 2006. “And each side will need to accept some ground rules for collaboration.” I wish the president had tried harder to find such rules here.

This decision fully illustrates the arrogance of the left, their disdain for Christianity, and their desire to push Christianity from the public square. It is both the most recent and, perhaps, the most significant attack in the U.S., in what has been a two hundred year war on Christianity. It is a war that started during the French Revolution, was given voice by socialism's greatest philosopher, Karl Marx, and has ever since been prosecuted by the secular left.

Professor Bainbridge, linked at the bottom of the page, points out that if the Catholic charities and social services only served Catholics, than these institutions would fall within the very narrow definition of religious organizations that HHS has carved out for exemption from the new healthcare rules. It is because of the very fact that the Catholic Church gives aid and charity to all regardless of their religion - and has done so since its inception two millennia ago - that HHS has chosen to subject the affiliated Church hospitals, schools and social organizations to this new mandate.

I find it hard to believe that Obama made this unforced error. Clearly he is pandering to his far left base. But in doing so, he is taking direct aim at religion. How historically ignorant do you have to be not to understand that you don't screw with peoples' religion.

True, its been almost a millenium since the Catholic Church launched a Crusade against such a fundamental attack on her religion. And it has been almost four centuries since the last of the Christian religious wars. But to think that Christian passions have so cooled that this will not drive the religious to vote their conscience in the 2012 election is, I think, a grand error.

Obama may be trying to fire up his base, but he has just done so at tremendous cost. If the election is close, this may prove the tipping point.

Update 2: Sen. Barbara Boxer has taken to the pages of the Huffington Post to engage in a truly Orwellian defense of a Obama's new policy. She claims that it actually advances religious freedom in America. Bookworm Room, in one of her finest efforts, has done a fisking of Boxer's column. It is a must read.

Update 1: Bookworm Room has a very thought provoking post on this topic:

There is nothing in the Constitution . . . that authorizes the Federal government (and, by extension through the 14th Amendment, any state government) to mandate that a religious institution be complicit in an act it believes constitutes murder. More to the point, the Constitutional grant of religious freedom, by which the government agrees to stay out of managing a religious institutions affairs, either practical or doctrinal, should prohibit such conduct entirely. This is one more example, as if we needed it, of the Obama administration’s fundamental lawlessness.

Nice Deb also has a great post on this issue: Obama Picks Fight With Catholic Church in an Election Year: Game On (w/videos)

Also much more on the statements issued throughout the U.S. in the comments to a post on Father Z's Blog.

Professor Bainbridge looks at the arguments of the left favoring the HHS decision and discusses how this is an attack on the charitable and social practices of the Catholic Church since its inception. It makes for a fascinating read.

Linked: Larwyn's Linx

Is The Florida Republican Party About To Sacrifice Congressman Allen West

2012-01-30T16:48:00.000-05:00

Allen West is one of the Republican party's most important national assets. He is deeply conservative, highly articulate, very intelligent, intellectually honest and a darling of the Tea Party movement. That he is also black gives extra weight to his highly critical commentary on the racial politics of the left. He is, by every account, a rising star in the Republican Party with national prominence. For all of these reasons, Rep. West is at the very top of the DNC's hit list of seats to challenge in 2012.

I know the world Allen West grew up in. He was a twenty year soldier - and their is no greater melting pot than the U.S. Army. It is a true meritocracy. It is an environment where the color of one's skin is meaningless. I can well imagine that LTC West was as horrified as I by the reality of the racial politics of the left when he was forced out of the service and into the civilian world. For those who don't know, LTC West's career ended in Iraq when he received intelligence that he and members of his unit were being targeted for assassination by several Iraqis. He captured one of the plotters and fired off his weapon to induce the detainee to discuss the plot. That ended the LTC's career. When asked if he would have done it again if the same scenario presented itself, West was unapologetic, stating, "[i]f it's about the lives of my soldiers at stake, I'd go through hell with a gasoline can." That is a soldier.

At any rate, Rep. West is a treasure of a Republican Party desperately in need of men and women like him. And yet, it appears that the Florida Republican Party, led by a Romney supporter, Will Weatherford, is going to sacrifice Rep. West as part of the redistricting process:

One of Governor Mitt Romney’s spokesmen was Florida Representative Will Weatherford, and during the course of his remarks in the “Spin Room”, he shed a very dim light on the ongoing redistricting process in the Florida Legislature. Over the past several weeks, many Republicans have voiced their disappointment towards the Republican legislature after the release of the preliminary redistricting maps. Much of the ire concerns the proposed boundaries of Congressman Allen West’s 22nd Congressional District that would be redrawn to include far more registered Democrats.

West’s congressional district inexplicably sheds the most Republican electoral support, in comparison to all other incumbent Republican and Democrat Congressman. A few weeks back we quoted an unnamed legislator saying that, “Allen West was screwed”, a statement which was originally made about made five months before the proposed maps were made public, leading insiders to believe that the fix was in against Allen West. But in light of Weatherford’s comment, it is increasingly clear that this is a fait accompli. (Read more- Allen West is Screwed)

According to Weatherford, those preliminary maps will not change- at the most, any additional changes would be minimal, and those changes would not make any appreciable difference from the preliminary maps. In addition, Weatherford stated that a deal was struck between him, Senate President Mike Haridopolos, and Senator Don Gaetz to finalize these maps and push them through as soon as possible. Weatherford also said that the proposed maps are in legal compliance with both the Voting Rights Act and Amendment 6.

So based on Weatherford’s comments, the 22nd Congressional District is now very much in play for the Democrat Party, and West is at an even larger disadvantage than he was previously- it will be a very difficult and expensive seat for Republicans to defend.

The only reasonable explanation for this is that the Florida Republican hierarchy has cut a deal with Democrats as part of the redistricting process. As the Shark Tank opined here:

So why would the “most conservative legislature” in Florida’s history look the other way as West’s congressional district lines are re-drawn? Is the fix really in to knock Allen West out of Congress? About five months ago, a very high ranking member of the Florida legislature gave me a very disturbing prediction regarding redistricting- “Allen West is screwed.” Take note that comment was made five months ago, long before the proposed maps were made public.

So are the poobahs in the Florida legislature really gunning to oust Allen West? Was a backroom deal made with the Democrat members of the legislature to put West’s seat into play in order to protect the other congressional seats that would favor any future runs for Congress by existing members of the Florida Legislature? The deals were struck, and the maps drawn behind closed doors.

It wouldn’t surprise us if this were the case. There is no love lost between the Florida legislature and Congressman Allen West, who has proven to be the anti-Republican establishment congressman. Back in the 2008 election cycle when West unsuccessfully ran for Congress, Republicans in the legislature did not support West. Former indicted Republican Party of Florida Boss Jim Greer and Governor Charlie Crist stayed out of the race until the very end, even after West’s Republican primary race was over.

Crist endorsed West four days prior to the general election, and Greer showed his support by writing West a personal check of $500 several weeks before the general election. This was also the case during the 2010 election cycle as state legislators sat on their hands, much like they did with Senator Marco Rubio. The Rubio saga is well documented, as the backdoor dirty deals and threats weighed heavy on the Rubio for Senate campaign against Crist.

In 2010, Will Weatherford, who is the current State House Redistricting Chairman, also supported Crist over Rubio before Crist left the GOP and ran as an Independent.

You may ask yourself why would the Florida GOP legislature not protect one of the most respected and beloved congressman in Washington D.C.? Could the reasons be as simple as sheer arrogance and self-political preservation by the Tallahassee elites?

There is rot at the heart of the Republican Party that I never knew existed until the start of the 2012 campaign season. What the Republican's are doing in Florida to Allen West is simply unforgivable. Weatherford and the Florida Republican Party needs to be condemned in no uncertain terms for this act.

The Daily Mail Crosses The Pond - & Spanks The NYT

2012-01-30T13:55:00.000-05:00

The UK's news paper / website, The Daily Mail, has become the premier website for trans-Atlantic readers. The Daily Mail has now launched a U.S. edition which, according to the BBC, now has more online traffic than that of the New York Times.

That is quite welcome for a number of reasons. One, the Daily Mail has a conservative bent and, indeed, publishes stories that many U.S. papers won't touch on such things as Islam and global warming. For instance, their most recent article on global warming, blogged here, should have been front page news around the world. It is a bombshell story, yet it seems that not a paper in the U.S. has touched it.

The Daily Mail also has some great opinion columnists, including the conservative Peter Hitchens, the acerbic Simon Heffer, and Melanie Phillips, author of Londonistan. The topics these columnists deal with are problems on both sides of the pond.

But while conservative thought subsumes most of the news end of the paper, it is not the only hook that is drawing in all the readers. As the BBC points out, the Daily Mail has a large section of daily celebrity gossip, and no one does glitz better than the Daily Mail. Just visit their website and see.

"Fairness" - The Essence Of Marx

2012-01-30T11:56:00.000-05:00

The worth of a good pundit is that they get to the essence of things with brevity and clarity. And here is Charles Krauthammer doing precisely that in his most recent article on Obama's State of the Union Flop:

Hope and change are long gone. It’s now equality and fairness.

That certainly is a large idea. Lenin and Mao went pretty far with it. As did Clement Attlee and his social-democratic counterparts in postwar Europe. . . .

Back in 2008, Obama was asked if he would still support raising the capital-gains tax rate (the intended effect of the Buffett Rule) if this would decrease government revenue.

Obama said yes. In the name of fairness.

This is redistribution for its own sake — the cost be damned. . . .

Are We About To See The Death Of The Global Warming Scam?

2012-01-30T03:56:00.000-05:00

The article in today's Daily Mail

Forget global warming - it's Cycle 25 we need to worry about (and if NASA scientists are right the Thames will be freezing over again)

- Met Office releases new figures which show no warming in 15 years

So what is the biggest bombshell in this article?

Is it that the MET and the University of East Anglia have confirmed that there has been no global warming for the past 15 years (contrary to NASA numbers from the despicable James Hansen?)

Is it that all of the IPCC computer models - predicated on the theory that the world will warm in direct proportion to increases in atmospheric CO2 - have failed utterly?

Is it that we seem to be heading into a lull in sunspot activity last seen during periods of intense global cooling - (in particular that period known as the little Ice Age that Michael Mann wiped from the historic records with his hockey stick graph?)

Or is it that we are about to see the heretical theory of Henrick Svensmark - that solar activity, not CO2, is the primary determinant of our globe's warming and cooling through cloud formation - finally given a real world trial? Note that the same theory passed its first test at CERN last year.

This from the Daily Mail:

The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.

The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century.Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997.

Meanwhile, leading climate scientists yesterday told The Mail on Sunday that, after emitting unusually high levels of energy throughout the 20th Century, the sun is now heading towards a ‘grand minimum’ in its output, threatening cold summers, bitter winters and a shortening of the season available for growing food.Solar output goes through 11-year cycles, with high numbers of sunspots seen at their peak.

We are now at what should be the peak of what scientists call ‘Cycle 24’ – which is why last week’s solar storm resulted in sightings of the aurora borealis further south than usual. But sunspot numbers are running at less than half those seen during cycle peaks in the 20th Century.

Analysis by experts at NASA and the University of Arizona – derived from magnetic-field measurements 120,000 miles beneath the sun’s surface – suggest that Cycle 25, whose peak is due in 2022, will be a great deal weaker still.

According to a paper issued last week by the Met Office, there is a 92 per cent chance that both Cycle 25 and those taking place in the following decades will be as weak as, or weaker than, the ‘Dalton minimum’ of 1790 to 1830. In this period, named after the meteorologist John Dalton, average temperatures in parts of Europe fell by 2C.However, it is also possible that the new solar energy slump could be as deep as the ‘Maunder minimum’ (after astronomer Edward Maunder), between 1645 and 1715 in the coldest part of the ‘Little Ice Age’ when, as well as the Thames frost fairs, the canals of Holland froze solid.

Interestingly, the MET is still taking the position that there will be no global cooling because it will all be offset by increasing carbon dioxide. Cue Henrick Svensmark:

‘World temperatures may end up a lot cooler than now for 50 years or more,’ said Henrik Svensmark, director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at Denmark’s National Space Institute. ‘It will take a long battle to convince some climate scientists that the sun is important. It may well be that the sun is going to demonstrate this on its own, without the need for their help.’

He pointed out that, in claiming the effect of the solar minimum would be small, the Met Office was relying on the same computer models that are being undermined by the current pause in global-warming.

CO2 levels have continued to rise without interruption and, in 2007, the Met Office claimed that global warming was about to ‘come roaring back’. It said that between 2004 and 2014 there would be an overall increase of 0.3C. In 2009, it predicted that at least three of the years 2009 to 2014 would break the previous temperature record set in 1998.

So far there is no sign of any of this happening. But yesterday a Met Office spokesman insisted its models were still valid.

Talk about your deadenders. The MET is hanging onto their AGW CO2-centric models with the very edges of their bloody fingernails at this point. They won't be able to do it much longer.

‘We’re now well into the second decade of the pause,’ said Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. ‘If we don’t see convincing evidence of global warming by 2015, it will start to become clear whether the models are bunk. And, if they are, the implications for some scientists could be very serious.’

So is tar and feathering serious enough for these world's greatest scam artists, or is something more serious warranted? Perhaps it is for Al Gore, Michael Mann and James Hansen. What do you think, maybe permanent deportation to Siberia where they can live out their lives with a zero carbon footprint?

The real crime with all of this is that, while our governments still push global warming, the reality is that global cooling may soon be upon us - and the effects could be devastating. Unfortunately, our world will not be able to prepare for this eventuality until the AGW gravy train is brought to its final, bitter end. And given that the global warming scam is not about science, but rather about political power, patronage and money, we will be well into global cooling before that will ever happen.

Update: Linked by Paul in Houston

Sixteen AGW Heretics - "No Need To Panic About Global Warming"

2012-01-30T02:37:00.000-05:00

Earlier in the week, the WSJ published a letter from sixteen distinguished scientists, including among their number William Happer, professor of physics, Princeton; Michael Kelly, professor of technology, University of Cambridge, U.K.; Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric sciences, MIT; and Burt Rutan, aerospace engineer, designer of Voyager and SpaceShipOne. The letter was directed towards our incoming political class. To sum up the main points:

- carbon dioxide is not a pollutant; - we actually benefit from higher CO2 concentrations;- the IPCC forecasts of global warming are based on failed computer models; - global warming is not a scientific theory as much as a political one, and one not supported by the facts as we know them today; and- even accepting the dire warnings of the IPCC, there is no economic justification for taking action to combat "global warming."

Do read the entire letter.

Sarah Palin: Cannibals in GOP Establishment Employ Tactics of the Left

2012-01-28T04:39:00.000-05:00

Sarah Palin, on her Facebook page, expresses the same disgust and angst that I expressed here regarding the Republican establishments efforts to demonize Gingrich and to "rewrite history." This brutal rebuke from Ms. Palin:

We have witnessed something very disturbing this week. The Republican establishment which fought Ronald Reagan in the 1970s and which continues to fight the grassroots Tea Party movement today has adopted the tactics of the left in using the media and the politics of personal destruction to attack an opponent.

We will look back on this week and realize that something changed. . . . [W]hat we have seen in Florida this week is beyond the pale. It was unprecedented in GOP primaries. I’ve seen it before – heck, I lived it before – but not in a GOP primary race.

I am sadly too familiar with these tactics because they were used against the GOP ticket in 2008. The left seeks to single someone out and destroy his or her record and reputation and family using the media as a channel to dump handpicked and half-baked campaign opposition research on the public. The difference in 2008 was that I was largely unknown to the American public, so they had no way of differentiating between the lies and the truth. All of it came at them at once as “facts” about me. But Newt Gingrich is known to us – both the good and the bad.

We know that Newt fought in the trenches during the Reagan Revolution. As Rush Limbaugh pointed out , Newt was among a handful of Republican Congressman who would regularly take to the House floor to defend Reagan at a time when conservatives didn’t have Fox News or talk radio or conservative blogs to give any balance to the liberal mainstream media. Newt actually came at Reagan’s administration “from the right” to remind Americans that freer markets and tougher national defense would win our future. But this week a few handpicked and selectively edited comments which Newt made during his 40-year career were used to claim that Newt was somehow anti-Reagan and isn’t conservative enough to go against the accepted moderate in the primary race. (I know, it makes no sense, and the GOP establishment hopes you won’t stop and think about this nonsense. Mark Levin and others have shown the ridiculousness of this.) To add insult to injury, this “anti-Reagan” claim was made by a candidate who admitted to not even supporting or voting for Reagan. He actually was against the Reagan movement, donated to liberal candidates, and said he didn’t want to go back to the Reagan days. You can’t change history. We know that Newt Gingrich brought the Reagan Revolution into the 1990s. We know it because none other than Nancy Reagan herself announced this when she presented Newt with an award, telling us, “The dramatic movement of 1995 is an outgrowth of a much earlier crusade that goes back half a century. Barry Goldwater handed the torch to Ronnie, and in turn Ronnie turned that torch over to Newt and the Republican members of Congress to keep that dream alive.” As Rush and others pointed out, if Nancy Reagan had ever thought that Newt was in any way an opponent of her beloved husband, she would never have even appeared on a stage with him, let alone presented him with an award and said such kind things about him. Nor would Reagan’s son, Michael Reagan, have chosen to endorse Newt in this primary race. There are no two greater keepers of the Reagan legacy than Nancy and Michael Reagan. What we saw with this ridiculous opposition dump on Newt was nothing short of Stalin-esque rewriting of history. It was Alinsky tactics at their worst.

But this whole thing isn’t really about Newt Gingrich vs. Mitt Romney. It is about the GOP establishment vs. the Tea Party grassroots and independent Americans who are sick of the politics of personal destruction used now by both parties’ operatives with a complicit media egging it on. In fact, the establishment has been just as dismissive of Ron Paul and Rick Santorum. Newt is an imperfect vessel for Tea Party support, but in South Carolina the Tea Party chose to get behind him instead of the old guard’s choice. In response, the GOP establishment voices denounced South Carolinian voters with the same vitriol we usually see from the left when they spew hatred at everyday Americans “bitterly clinging” to their faith and their Second Amendment rights. The Tea Party was once again told to sit down and shut up and listen to the “wisdom” of their betters. We were reminded of the litany of Tea Party endorsed candidates in 2010 who didn’t win. Well, here’s a little newsflash to the establishment: without the Tea Party there would have been no historic 2010 victory at all.

I spoke up before the South Carolina primary to urge voters there to keep this primary going because I have great concern about the GOP establishment trying to anoint a candidate without the blessing of the grassroots and all the needed energy and resources we as commonsense constitutional conservatives could bring to the general election in order to defeat President Obama. Now, I respect Governor Romney and his success. But there are serious concerns about his record and whether as a politician he consistently applied conservative principles and how this impacts the agenda moving forward. The questions need answers now. That is why this primary should not be rushed to an end. We need to vet this. Pundits in the Beltway are gleefully proclaiming that this primary race is over after Florida, despite 46 states still not having chimed in. Well, perhaps it’s possible that it will come to a speedy end in just four days; but with these questions left unanswered, it will not have come to a satisfactory conclusion. Without this necessary vetting process, the unanswered question of Governor Romney’s conservative bona fides and the unanswered and false attacks on Newt Gingrich will hang in the air to demoralize many in the electorate. The Tea Party grassroots will certainly feel disenfranchised and disenchanted with the perceived orchestrated outcome from self-proclaimed movers and shakers trying to sew this all up. And, trust me, during the general election, Governor Romney’s statements and record in the private sector will be relentlessly parsed over by the opposition in excruciating detail to frighten off swing voters. This is why we need a fair primary that is not prematurely cut short by the GOP establishment using Alinsky tactics to kneecap Governor Romney’s chief rival.

As I said in my speech in Iowa last September, the challenge of this election is not simply to replace President Obama. The real challenge is who and what we will replace him with. It’s not enough to just change up the uniform. If we don’t change the team and the game plan, we won’t save our country. We truly need sudden and relentless reform in Washington to defend our republic, though it’s becoming clearer that the old guard wants anything but that. That is why we should all be concerned by the tactics employed by the establishment this week. We will not save our country by becoming like the left. And I question whether the GOP establishment would ever employ the same harsh tactics they used on Newt against Obama. I didn’t see it in 2008. Many of these same characters sat on their thumbs in ‘08 and let Obama escape unvetted. Oddly, they’re now using every available microscope and endoscope – along with rewriting history – in attempts to character assassinate anyone challenging their chosen one in their own party’s primary. So, one must ask, who are they really running against?

The Last Refuge Of The Race Hustlers - "Color Blind Racism"

2012-01-27T16:55:00.002-05:00

"Color Blind Racism" was the title of a recent article in the Henry Louis Gates, Jr. on-line publication, The Root. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. last appeared on this blog for his outrageous charge of racism against a policeman for following protocol, and The Root was last mentioned on this blog for its list of blacks whom they would like to see erased from history. The list was a who's who of murders, cannibals and despicable people, and included both Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and right wing black politician Alan Keyes.

So what is "color blind racism?" According to The Root, it is "a racial ideology that expresses itself in seemingly nonracial terms. As such, it is most practiced by people who never see themselves outside their own myopic worldview. " What that means in practice is a redefinition of racism from its actual meaning, a belief that a particular race is inherently inferior, into a wholly new arena, where, mirabile dictu, criticism directed towards blacks, and indeed, the mere mention of any inconvenient fact, is inherently racist. The "Orwellian term, 'color blind racism.'" is, as James Taranto at the WSJ describes it, "the pithiest summation we've ever encountered of the absurdity of contemporary left-liberal racial dogma."

According to The Root, "Colorblind racism is the new normal in American conservative political thought." Their exhibit number one, Newt Gingrich calling Obama the "Food stamp President," stating that the black community should be demanding paychecks, not food stamps. The author does gild the lily a bit. He goes on to tell us that the "bloodthirsty" audience actually applauded these remarks, and that Gingrich than followed up with a plan to "force" inner-city youth to work as janitors. The author ultimately concludes that Gingrich is railing against, not the Washington elites, but the "black 'elite'" in the White House. He finishes with the plea that "[v]oters . . . across the nation must demand that Republicans take responsibility for wallowing in a cesspool of race-baiting for political advantage, ever hiding behind a veil of colorblind ignorance and innuendo."

What I did not find in The Root was any article discussing the fact that Obama had, in fact, put more people on food stamps than any other President. Nor did I find any discussion of the fact that Obama's policies, as bad as they are for the economy at large, are having their most destructive impact on blacks - from a rise in black unemployment to over 16%, to the destruction of the black middle class, to a rise in black poverty to over 25%, and to a rise in black youth unemployment to over 50%. So in other words, any attempt by conservatives to actually address the problems of the black community is, ipso facto, racist.

When you see this wholesale redefinition of racism, what you are really seeing are the race hustlers of the left manning the ramparts in a last, desperate defense. I am sure that a portion of the left is so conditioned at this point to view the world through a racial lens that the die hards will buy it. But for everyone else, the race card is becoming ever less effective. The device is obvious, as is the motivation. The only thing the people at the Root care about is protecting their own political power and race based goodies, irrespective of how dire the impact on the black community as a whole.

As an aside, also from the Root, comes this great ad from Mark Oxner, a white Republican Congressional candidate in Florida:

The race hustlers at the Root claim that this ad, portraying Obama as Captain of our ship of state being rowed by children in chains is a "transparent effort to harness racial anxiety." They act as if they own the trademark on the word "slavery" and that any reference to slavery in any context other than referring to enslavement of blacks by whites (and blacks) in pre-Civil War America is inherent racism. The actual history of slavery in the world, including the fact that twice as many white Europeans and white Americans were enslaved by North Africans during the 1600's and 1700's as were blacks brought to America as slaves during that same time period is apparently of no consequence. It helps to be deliberately ignorant of history - a fact I have pointed out about Henry Louis Gates, Jr. before.

Is It Time Yet For The Tea Party To Form A Third Party?

2012-01-26T12:58:00.000-05:00

When this election season began, I felt no particular affinity for any specific candidate. I looked forward to the Republican campaign for the nomination to shake out who was best qualified to be our President. But that campaign has turned into an intellectually dishonest horror show that leads me to question whether the leaders of the Republican Party represent my interests as a conservative.

As to the horror show, the story of Newt Gingrich's time in the House is ably recounted by Jeffery Lord at American Spectator. It, and the Byron York piece on the ethics complaints against Gingrich, draw an incredibly stark contrast to the screed coming out of much of the right wing punditry - NRO, Coulter, Hinderaker, etc. - and most of which you will find headlined over Drudge today. If you were to read this utterly dishonest tripe, you would think that Gingrich was a Reagan hating neo-progressive who lacked ethics above and beyond the adultery issue and who resigned from his position as Speaker of the House because of valid ethics charges.

There are many legitimate arguments for preferring Gingrich as the Republican nominee. Indeed, Thomas Sowell makes many of those arguments in his latest column. And there are many legitimate arguments for preferring Romney, particularly for the risk averse and for those comfortable with our nation as it is. A handful of people, Charles Krauthammer, Jonah Goldberg and several others have made respectful and fair arguments in this regards.

But in the main, we are not being given honest arguments by the Republican elites. Instead, what we have been fed for months has been dishonest demagoguery and demonization of Gingrich. And just today, that great conservative Bob Dole came out today to tell us that if we elect Gingrich, it will mean political suicide for the Republican party. It is all nothing more or less than the same intrinsic dishonesty that we saw mirrored in the left's efforts to destroy Sarah Palin as a viable candidate and that has been aimed at delegitimizing Clarence Thomas since the day he was nominated to the Supreme Court.

And not only have the elites engaged in these disingenuous attacks, but they invariably coupled their screed with complete and utter contempt for Republican voters and the Tea Party movement especially. We are the uninformed rubes, too easily swayed by passion, unable to see reason. We are calls for fiscal discipline are simply ridiculously unsophisticated. It is arrogance unbound. Apparently, it is they, not the voters, who own the Republican Party.

For the past two decades in which I have been politically informed and active, I have always believed that the single starkest difference between the left and the right was intellectual honesty. We on the right had it while those on the left dealt mostly in demagoguery and demonization. We on the right were ever willing to debate the facts, those on the left were ever willing to cherry pick the facts and use the race card or its many variants to end debate. To use the words of Bookworm Room: "Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts."

I see now, I have been fooled for decades. I feel nothing but disgust and utter contempt for much of the Republican Party today, and those who have held themselves out to be its champions. I think Mitt Romney, motivated by unlimited ambition, is willing to do or say anything to be elected President of the United States. Were it just him carrying on these disingenuous attacks against Gingrich and the rest of the Republican Party looking on with an objective eye, than my angst would be far less at the moment. But those who should be the party's neutral arbiters have wholly dispensed with intellectual honesty in an effort to destroy Gingrich.

So what of this?

The days of accepting the Republican Party as it is are over. It is not a party founded on intellectual honesty - and thus it is every bit as fatally flawed and destined to fail the American people as are Obama and the Democratic Party. It is not a "conservative" party. The reality is that, since the days of Gingrich, we have not not had a conservative option for government, we have had a choice between big D and small d Democrats.

We are in desperate need of a third party - an actual Conservative Party - founded upon intellectual honesty and dedicated to Constitutionalism, balanced budgets, a strong national defense, and doing away with the onslaught of progressivism in the social sphere. We are in desperate need of a party dedicated to making the systemic changes that would restore the Constitutional balance to our government envisioned by our Founding Fathers. The grass roots Tea Party is precisely the vehicle for such a third party.

The Tea Party was courted by Republicans in 2009 and, in the end, agreed to support them. That trust was badly misplaced. It should now be withdrawn and real consideration given to starting a third party at the grass roots level. I say that irrespective of how the 2012 election ultimately turns out.

Gingrich's Super-Pac $6 Million Ad Buy In Florida

2012-01-25T05:17:00.002-05:00

This one is brutal

So what do you think, effective or ineffective? Fair or unfair?

(H/T Hot Air)

Drudge, Crazy Nancy & Newt (Updated)

2012-01-25T04:46:00.001-05:00

Crazy Nancy is again saying that she has something very damaging on Newt that will destroy his candidacy if Republicans are stupid enough to nominate him. And Drudge thinks this is important enough to justify the following screaming headline:

PELOSI THREAT: NEWT WON'T BE PRESIDENT

'THERE IS SOMETHING I KNOW'

The link is to the following video:

Now if Crazy Nancy actually had anything, is there any possibility at all that she would show her hand before Gingrich won the nomination? And think about what her knowledge of Gingrich was from the 90's. She was in the opposing party, a low ranker, who probably never said two words to Gingrich during his Speakership. She was part of the board that heard his ethics complaint, but he was ultimately exonerated on every one of the 84 counts. So what can she possibly have that would destroy a Gingrich bid should he become the nominee?

My guess is that the only thing that she could produce to such an effect to would be one of her old blue dresses with incriminating DNA stains.

As for Drudge, for him to run this wholly unsubstantiated claim as the lead is just incredibly unethical. I guess he is one more to add to the list of the GDS afflicted and to respond appropriately.

Update: It turns out Crazy Nancy nas no incriminating DNA evidence and knows nothing beyond what's in the public realm - but that hasn't stopped Mitt Romney from using it in a mailing today.

What a scumbag.

The Real Story Of The Gingrich Ethics Complaints

2012-01-25T02:47:00.001-05:00

The below article comes from Byron York at the Washington Examiner. It is the definitive story of Newt's "disgrace," as Romney is putting it. It is worth reading in full, for it gives the picture of just how partisan was the attack on Gingrich and just how much the MSM of the time, which then had a total monopoly on the news, hated and demonized Gingrich:

The Romney campaign has been hitting Newt Gingrich hard over the 1990s ethics case that resulted in the former Speaker being reprimanded and paying a $300,000 penalty. Before the Iowa caucuses, Romney and his supporting super PAC did serious damage to Gingrich with an ad attacking Gingrich's ethics past. Since then, Romney has made other ads and web videos focusing on the ethics matter, and at the Republican debate in Tampa Monday night, Romney said Gingrich "had to resign in disgrace."

In private conversations, Romney aides often mention the ethics case as part of their larger argument that Gingrich would be unelectable in a race against President Obama.

Given all the attention to the ethics matter, it's worth asking what actually happened back in 1995, 1996, and 1997. The Gingrich case was extraordinarily complex, intensely partisan, and driven in no small way by a personal vendetta on the part of one of Gingrich's former political opponents. It received saturation coverage in the press; a database search of major media outlets revealed more than 10,000 references to Gingrich's ethics problems during the six months leading to his reprimand. It ended with a special counsel hired by the House Ethics Committee holding Gingrich to an astonishingly strict standard of behavior, after which Gingrich in essence pled guilty to two minor offenses. Afterwards, the case was referred to the Internal Revenue Service, which conducted an exhaustive investigation into the matter. And then, after it was all over and Gingrich was out of office, the IRS concluded that Gingrich did nothing wrong. After all the struggle, Gingrich was exonerated. . . .

At the center of the controversy was a course Gingrich taught from 1993 to 1995 at two small Georgia colleges. The wide-ranging class, called "Renewing American Civilization," was conceived by Gingrich and financed by a tax-exempt organization called the Progress and Freedom Foundation. Gingrich maintained that the course was a legitimate educational enterprise; his critics contended that it had little to do with learning and was in fact a political exercise in which Gingrich abused a tax-exempt foundation to spread his own partisan message.

The Gingrich case was driven in significant part by a man named Ben Jones. An actor and recovered alcoholic who became famous for playing the dim-witted Cooter in the popular 1980s TV show The Dukes of Hazzard, Jones ran for Congress as a Democrat from Georgia in 1988. He won and served two terms. He lost his bid for re-election after re-districting in 1992, and tried again with a run against Gingrich in 1994. Jones lost decisively, and after that, it is fair to say he became obsessed with bringing Gingrich down.

Two days before Election Day 1994, with defeat in sight, Jones hand-delivered a complaint to the House ethics committee (the complaint was printed on "Ben Jones for Congress" stationery). Jones asked the committee to investigate the college course, alleging that Gingrich "fabricated a 'college course' intended, in fact, to meet certain political, not educational, objectives." Three weeks later, Jones sent the committee 450 pages of supporting documents obtained through the Georgia Open Records Act.

That was the beginning of the investigation. Stunned by their loss of control of the House -- a loss engineered by Gingrich -- House Democrats began pushing a variety of ethics complaints against the new Speaker. Jones' complaint was just what they were looking for.

There's no doubt the complaint was rooted in the intense personal animus Jones felt toward Gingrich. In 1995, I sat down with Jones for a talk about Gingrich, and without provocation, Jones simply went off on the Speaker. . . .

Jones and his partner in the Gingrich crusade, Democratic Rep. David Bonior -- they had been basketball buddies in the House gym -- pushed the case ceaselessly. Under public pressure, the Ethics Committee -- made up of equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats -- took up the case and hired an outside counsel, Washington lawyer James Cole, to conduct the investigation.

Cole developed a theory of the case in which Gingrich, looking for a way to spread his political views, came up with the idea of creating a college course and then devised a way to use a tax-exempt foundation to pay the bills. "The idea to develop the message and disseminate it for partisan political use came first," Cole told the Ethics Committee. "The use of the [the Progress and Freedom Foundation] came second as a source of funding." Thus, Cole concluded, the course was "motivated, at least in part, by political goals." Cole argued that even a hint of a political motive, was enough to taint the tax-exempt project, "regardless of the number or importance of truly exempt purposes that are present."

Cole did not argue that the case was not educational. It plainly was. But Cole suggested that the standard for determining wrongdoing was whether any unclean intent lurked in the heart of the creator of the course, even if it was unquestionably educational.

Meanwhile, Democrats kept pushing to raise the stakes against Gingrich. "Anyone who has engaged in seven years of tax fraud to further his own personal and political benefits is not deserving of the speakership," Bonior said just before Christmas 1996. "Mr. Gingrich has engaged in a pattern of tax fraud, lies, and cover-ups in paving his road to the second highest office in the land…I would expect the Justice Department, the FBI, a grand jury, and other appropriate entities to investigate."

With the charges against Gingrich megaphoned in the press, Gingrich and Republicans were under intense pressure to end the ordeal. In January, 1997, Gingrich agreed to make a limited confession of wrongdoing in which he pleaded guilty to the previously unknown offense of failing to seek sufficiently detailed advice from a tax lawyer before proceeding with the course. (Gingrich had in fact sought advice from two such lawyers in relation to the course.) Gingrich also admitted that he had provided "inaccurate, incomplete, and unreliable" information to Ethics Committee investigators. That "inaccurate" information was Gingrich's contention that the course was not political -- a claim Cole and the committee did not accept, but the IRS later would.

In return for those admissions, the House reprimanded Gingrich and levied an unprecedented $300,000 fine. The size of the penalty was not so much about the misdeed itself but the fact that the Speaker was involved in it.

Why did Gingrich admit wrongdoing? "The atmosphere at the time was so rancorous, partisan, and personal that everyone, including Newt, was desperately seeking a way to end the whole thing," Gingrich attorney Jan Baran told me in 1999. "He was admitting to whatever he could to get the case over with."

It was a huge victory for Democrats. They had deeply wounded the Speaker. But they hadn't brought him down. So, as Bonior suggested, they sought to push law enforcement to begin a criminal investigation of Gingrich.

Nothing happened with the Justice Department and the FBI, but the IRS began an investigation that would stretch over three years. Unlike many in Congress -- and journalists, too -- IRS investigators obtained tapes and transcripts of each session during the two years the course was taught at Kennesaw State College in Georgia, as well as videotapes of the third year of the course, taught at nearby Reinhardt College. IRS officials examined every word Gingrich spoke in every class; before investigating the financing and administration of the course, they first sought to determine whether it was in fact educational and whether it served to the political benefit of Gingrich, his political organization, GOPAC, or the Republican Party as a whole. They then carefully examined the role of the Progress and Freedom Foundation and how it related to Gingrich's political network.

In the end, in 1999, the IRS released a densely written, highly detailed 74-page report. The course was, in fact, educational, the IRS said. "The overwhelming number of positions advocated in the course were very broad in nature and often more applicable to individual behavior or behavioral changes in society as a whole than to any 'political' action," investigators wrote. "For example, the lecture on quality was much more directly applicable to individual behavior than political action and would be difficult to attempt to categorize in political terms. Another example is the lecture on personal strength where again the focus was on individual behavior. In fact, this lecture placed some focus on the personal strength of individual Democrats who likely would not agree with Mr. Gingrich on his political views expressed in forums outside his Renewing American Civilization course teaching. Even in the lectures that had a partial focus on broadly defined changes in political activity, such as less government and government regulation, there was also a strong emphasis on changes in personal behavior and non-political changes in society as a whole."

The IRS also checked out the evaluations written by students who completed the course. The overwhelming majority of students, according to the report, believed that Gingrich knew his material, was an interesting speaker, and was open to alternate points of view. None seemed to perceive a particular political message. "Most students," the IRS noted, "said that they would apply the course material to improve their own lives in such areas as family, friendships, career, and citizenship."

The IRS concluded the course simply was not political. "The central problem in arguing that the Progress and Freedom Foundation provided more than incidental private benefit to Mr. Gingrich, GOPAC, and other Republican entities," the IRS wrote, "was that the content of the 'Renewing American Civilization' course was educational...and not biased toward any of those who were supposed to be benefited."

The bottom line: Gingrich acted properly and violated no laws. There was no tax fraud scheme. Of course, by that time, Gingrich was out of office, widely presumed to be guilty of something, and his career in politics was (seemingly) over.

Back in January 1997, the day after Cole presented his damning report to the Ethics Committee, the Washington Post's front-page banner headline was "Gingrich Actions 'Intentional' or 'Reckless'; Counsel Concludes That Speaker's Course Funding Was 'Clear Violation' of Tax Laws." That same day, the New York Times ran eleven stories on the Gingrich matter, four of them on the front page (one inside story was headlined, "Report Describes How Gingrich Used Taxpayers' Money for Partisan Politics"). On television, Dan Rather began the CBS Evening News by telling viewers that "only now is the evidence of Newt Gingrich's ethics violations and tax problems being disclosed in detail."

The story was much different when Gingrich was exonerated. The Washington Post ran a brief story on page five. The Times ran an equally brief story on page 23. And the evening newscasts of CBS, NBC, and ABC -- which together had devoted hours of coverage to the question of Gingrich's ethics -- did not report the story at all. Not a word. . . . .

All of which leads to the question, just how ethical is Romney's attack on Gingrich?

WSJ Goes Into Full GDS Meltdown

2012-01-25T01:53:00.000-05:00

Gingrich Derangement Syndrome is causing a complete melt-down among many of the Republican elite, but few can match the meltdown we see on the pages of the WSJ today from Brent Stephens. I will not link to this piece of excreta.

Mr. Stephen's has become so overwrought at Gingrich's victory in South Carolina - and Romney's weaknesses exposed - that it has led him to pronounce that "Republicans deserve to lose." As to those idiot voters in S.C., Mr. Stephen's has this to say:

That's my theory for why South Carolina gave Newt Gingrich his big primary win on Saturday: Voters instinctively prefer the idea of an entertaining Newt-Obama contest—the aspiring Caesar versus the failed Redeemer—over a dreary Mitt-Obama one. The problem is that voters also know that Gaius Gingrich is liable to deliver his prime-time speeches in purple toga while holding tight to darling Messalina's—sorry, Callista's—bejeweled fingers. A primary ballot for Mr. Gingrich is a vote for an entertaining election, not a Republican in the White House.

The arrogance and the disdain just drip from the pen of Mr. Stephens. God forbid that we, the voters who actually own the Republican Party, should think contrary to him. To the extent that Mr. Stephens requires some reminding of that fact, let's cue up the appropriate non-verbal response.

A Short Guide To Obama's 2012 State Of The Union Speech

2012-01-25T01:27:00.000-05:00

This was an actual State of the Union speech rather than an obvious campaign speech. The surprise of the night - straw men survived as a species with only a few set alight by our Campaigner in Chief. Poor Pinnochio, however, his nose grew so long that he can no longer raise his head. And the number of elephants in the room ignored by Obama (trillions of them and increasing by the minute) was really quite amazing.

At any rate, to keep this short, let's go down the checklist of the obvious:

Blame the economy on prior administration - Check

Wall Street greed caused the economic meltdown - Check

Meltdown caused by a prior administration - Check

3 Million New Jobs - Check

Equal Pay For Equal Work - Check

Fairness as the key to all of our economic woes - Check

GM Success - Check

Oil Bad, Green Energy Good - Check

Making Our Navy The World's Largest Consumer of Biofuels - Check

Libya - Check

Bin Laden - Check

-----------------------------------------------

Now for some of the Notable Omissions:

Hope and Change - No

Entitlement Reforms - No

Obamacare - No

Stimulus - No

Dodd Frank - No

Unemployment Rate - No

Real Unemployment Rate - No

Number of Long Term Unemployed - No

Massive Inflation in Food and Fuel - No

$16 trillion in debt & growing by the minute - No

GM failure to payback billions of taxpayer funds - No

Keystone Pipeline - No

Nuclear Energy - No

Solyndra - No

Gutting our National Defense - No

Making Our Navy Purchase Grossly Expensive Biofuels - No

Egypt - No

Arab Spring - No

Obama Administration opposition to most recent Iran central bank sanctions - No

Cancelling Military Training Ops With Isral - No

The failure of the Democrat Controlled Senate To Pass A Budget For Three Years - No

Recovery Under Obama compared to recovery from all other post-WWII Recessions - No

-----------------------------------------------

Big, Massive Screaming Lies:

Obama taking credit for increasing oil production, reduced oil usage, and making 75% of our offshore areas available for oil exploration and development.

Obama Claims that he is reducing the regulatory burden.

-----------------------------------------------

Request Masses of New Spending For:

Education (must keep the public sector unions in cash)

Federal employment center and Community Colleges

Green energy

Federally funded R&D for everything

------------------------------------------------

Insane Proposals -

1. Tax multinational corporations on their overseas profits not brought into the U.S.

2. Son of Stimulus - "Take the money we’re no longer spending at war, use half of it to pay down our debt, and use the rest to do some nation-building right here at home."

3. No Cost Refinancing Of Loans - To be paid for by a new bank tax . . . which will be paid for by you and I.

For a full discussion of many of the issues raised by Obama's inclusions and omissions, see the Heritage Foundation's Round-up

The President's 2012 State Of The Campaign Speech

2012-01-24T13:37:00.000-05:00

I have no inside knowledge as to what the President will say in his 2012 State of The Campaign speech. But it may be some indication that the capitol police are rounding up straw men in droves and dousing them in EPA approved E-85 gasoline. I expect the carnage to be extensive.

Fred Thompson Endorses Newt Gingrich

2012-01-24T01:07:00.002-05:00

Florida Republican Debate 1.0

2012-01-23T23:59:00.000-05:00

Tonight's debate, hosted by NBC, was the first of two debates before Floridians pull out the canes and the walkers and venture out into the January chill to vote. There were no real highlights.

Out of the gate, Romny went on the attack, throwing every bit of mud he could at Gingrich, hoping that some of it would stick. He came off as angry and shrill. Gingrich refused to take the bait, staying composed. As to how that plays overall, we will have to wait to see the new polls to tell.

That said, I think Romney made a huge mistake by trying to dredge every bit of mud he could find rather than concentrate on just the worst of it all - including that he went a step too far in the attacks. Romney concluded his attack by criticizing Gingrich's support of Medicare Part D while taking money for advising pharmaceutical firms. Gingrich pounced, embracing Medicare and Medicare Part D and that he was shocked (just shocked I say) that Romney would criticize him (or the millions of elderly Floridians on Medicare) for his support of Medicare Part D. That was not a highlight reel, but I bet it plays with a lot of registered reporters in Florida.

The slipperiest answer of the night was from Newt, whose full support of the ethanol mandate is unconscionable. Part of the ethanol program includes large supports for Florida sugar cane farmers. Newt gave a long non-answer, bring up beet root sugar and other farm subsidies, concluding that all subsidies should be taken away, but that removing agriculture subsidies is almost in the 'too hard to do' column.

A question was brought up on the Dream Act. Romney, weeks prior to the debate, said that he would veto it. Many thought this was going to hurt Romney in Florida, with its large latino population. When Gingrich was asked in the debate whether he too would veto the act, he said no, that he would keep that portion of the Dream Act that would allow illegals who join our military to get citizenship through that route - which is actually a long term policy of the U.S. Romney quickly jumped in out of turn, obviously realizing the error of his ways, and said that he agreed with Gingrich.

What really struck me, at the end of debate, was the fact that Romney still doesn't have a good narrative as to why he should be President. He was asked, "[This] is a battle for the soul of the Republican Party. What have you done to further the cause of Conservativism as a Republican leader?" Romney response was anything but a cogent and stirring call to arms. He started off by talking about being a father and grandfather. He then tried to play up his private sector experience, but didn't make any of the points he could have as to why that makes him the best Presidential choice.

One of the things that was blatantly obvious during the debate is that Gingrich is courting Ron Paul in domestic policy areas. Indeed, the only thing that didn't happen on the stage was Gingrich passing folded love notes over to Paul, who in fact repeatedly had eyes for Gingrich. It was a bit stomach churning. Truly, if I was Caliska, and given Newt's history, I'd be worried.

Santorum gave good answers to the few questions thrown his way. Ron Paul sounded sane and sage tonight. I don't think it will help either too much.

In sum, I don't know whether tonight's debate will stop Gingrich's momentum. Gingrich may have helped himself a little with his answers on the Dream Act and Medicare. Let's see the polls.

Gingrich, Communications & The GDS-Suffering Republican Elites

2012-01-23T20:57:00.000-05:00

. . . for years now, I have been screaming that the failure to communicate and respond to these endless [leftwing] attacks was the greatest failing of the Bush Administration - and Republicans generally in all situations. I am convinced that McCain lost the election because of his failure to aggressively attack Obama in the debates and the failure of the entire Republican Party as a whole to respond to the left's outrageous charge that the right was responsible for our financial nightmare. . . .

Having watched the current crop of Congressional Republicans for years now, I am under no illusion that, come 2012, they will be able to effectively communicate. The backlash we see against Obama's policies and vast overreach today has come from the bottom up, with the Tea Parties and social networking. It has nothing whatsoever to do with Congressional Republicans. That does not bode well for the right come 2012.

That said, as I look out at the field of potential candidates who could possibly communicate effectively - those with the necessary intelligence and aggressiveness to actually call the left on their falsehoods and change our national paradigm - the only one I see today who foots that bill is Newt Gingrich. . . .
16 July 2010, Wolf Howling, Looking Ahead: Obama, 2012 & The Biggest Republican Weakness

Gingrich won South Carolina by 12 points and, going into Florida, he now leads the polling by 9 points. Hysterical dysentery has now afflicted those many Republican elites suffering full blown cases of GDS (Gingrich Derangement Syndrome). The disdain they feel for the voters - i.e., the rank and file Republicans and independents who voted in the S.C. primary - and the grass roots Tea Party movement literally drips from their mouths. It appears that before the Conservative rank and file can take back our nation from Obama, we will first have to take back our party from the Republican elites.

As so many people are today pointing out - Gingrich roars. And when he unapologetically does so with passion and eloquence in defense of conservative values, when he does so in shredding an ill thrown race card, when he does so in calling the media out for their bias, that is what the base of the party wants above all else. It is clear that the base understands that it is precisely what the party has been lacking. And it is clear that the base also understands that progressives - who have, over the past century, changed our nation in so many ways - will continue making fundamental changes to our nation until we can get someone who roars in defense of conservative values.

This is not a sudden catharsis, at least for me. I have been pointing it out as the single greatest failing of Republicans almost from the first day I started this blog. For but a few examples, see:

- Advice On How To Lose The 2012 Election
- Looking Ahead: Obama, 2012 & The Biggest Republican Weakness
- A New Cold War In America
- Losing the Message Wars
- Republicans Ponder The Abyss

For the past eight decades, Republicans in government, with the exceptions of Ronald Reagan and then Newt Gingrich, have been fighting a rear guard action, accomplishing little more than minimizing the ever continuing advance of socialism / progressivism in our government and in our society. As to Reagan as President and Gingrich as Speaker, they actually pushed back against the advance and managed conservative victories. They did so because they vocally, passionately and eloquently were able to challenge the falsehoods of the left while promoting conservative ideals.

We can see much the same happening today in some of the states. Take New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie for example. He is a darling of the right today - despite the fact that he is a RINO's RINO on so many conservative issues. But on the two intertwined issues most effecting NJ, the economy and the power of unions, Christie is firmly on the conservative side of the fence. And he has been just a shining success in bluest of blue NJ on those issues. Why? Because he is an incredibly effective communicator who is vocal, passionate and eloquent in the effort to promote fiscal sanity and an end to the power of NJ's massive public sector unions.

But today, the many Republican elites suffering GDS are telling us that the ability to communicate does not matter and that the voters in S.C. were just dumb. They now are trying to frighten the base into voting for Romeny by saying that a Gingich nomination will mean that we lose not just the Presidency, but the House and the Senate down ticket. Let's take a look:

The voters in their infinite wisdom have just given a huge boost to perhaps the only GOP candidate who could shift the spotlight from President Obama to himself, alienate virtually all independent voters, lose more than 40 states and put the House majority in jeopardy.

Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post

. . . with Newt Gingrich you get the name calling for the president — very popular with the tea party crowd in South Carolina, not so popular with independents. He won’t put a fence on the border and wants amnesty for illegals. He took $1.6 million from Freddie Mac. But you know, he attacked Paul Ryan’s plan on Social Security. So with Newt Gingrich, you throw out the baby and keep the bath water… I think South Carolina is going back to their Democratic roots.”

Ann Coulter, Fox and Friends (via Gateway Pundit)

. . . Let’s just pray that Barack Obama’s second term didn’t start today. If Gingrich does get the nomination, this may turn out to be a year in which Republicans more or less ignore the presidential race, ceding Obama his second term, and focus instead on trying to hold the House and, if possible, picking up a seat or two in the Senate, along with doing the best we can in state races where the wipeout at the presidential level doesn’t swamp all efforts to elect Republicans.

John Hinderaker, Powerline

On the heels of Newt Gingrich’s trouncing of Mitt Romney in the South Carolina primary, Republican Party brass are privately expressing deep concerns that former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich’s high unfavorable rating in national polls could prove catastrophic to the so-called “down ballot”–the House and Senate races under the presidential race–and may even threaten the Republican Party’s control of the House of Representatives.

GOP strategist Steve Schmidt, who previously served as Sen. John McCain’s senior campaign strategist, told MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow that if Mr. Gingrich wins next week’s Florida GOP primary, there will be “a panic and a meltdown of the Republican establishment that is beyond my ability to articulate in the English language. People will go crazy.”

Wynton Hall reporting at Big Government

What these GDS-afflicted prophets of Armageddon are relying upon are polls showing that, at the moment, Gingrich has a lot of negative name recognition. Wow, no kidding? It's not like Gingrich suffers from two liabilities - the MSM of the past two decades and now the GDS afflicted right.

Does anyone reading this remember Gingrich's speakership in the mid - 90's, the balanced budgets, the welfare reform, the Contract With America, the good economy, the low jobless rate? I do. And I vividly remember a few other things. The left of the era hated Gingrich with a passion that would not be seen in America again until Sarah Palin came onto the national scene. The MSM of the time was not just as left wing as today, but they had a near complete monopoly on the news. There was no alternative media. They demonized and demagogued Gingrich unmercifully. Indeed, I kid you not when I say I remember the day I looked up the definition of the word "demagoguery" in the dictionary. I had heard the word used by Rush Limbaugh in an interview with the Speaker in response to how the left and the entire MSM was portraying one of his acts.

Update: It appears that my memory of that time - the intense partisan war against Gingrich, the bull shit ethics complaint, and the total war of the MSM declared on Gingrich is accurate. Byron York of the Washington Examiner takes us on a walk back through that time here.

As to when Republican members in the House led a coup against Gingrich, I have no inside knowledge. I do know this. What we got after Gingrich left was a disaster. We got a House that was, for the next decade, nothing more or less than Democrat-lite. There were zero conservative accomplishments, there were zero balanced budgets, but there were huge increases in spending. So was the problem Gingrich's leadership, or the fact that Gingrich took Republicans out of their comfort zone and brought a lot of bad press at the time? I have always believed it was the latter based on what I saw at the time and afterwards.

And now when it comes to negative press, it has been the GDS Republican elites who have picked up where the far left MSM dropped off near a decade ago. As I wrote in Decemeber:

The last two months of flame throwing against Gingrich [by the GDS-afflicted Republican elites] has left me wondering whether we can yet pull defeat from the jaws of victory. Precious little of what is coming from the right leaning pundits has been reasoned criticism. To the contrary, its largely been overheated hyperbole of the ilk used by the left to demonize and delegitimize Sarah Palin.

So when the GDS afflicted right now tells us that a Gingrich nomination would be catastrophe because he doesn't have positive name recognition, that is like the boy who murders his parents then asks the Court for mercy because he is an orphan.

So how are we to evaluate Gingrich's negative name recognition from some earlier national polls when matched up with the most recent polls and with the results of the SC election? First this from Gallup:

The latest Gallup polling shows Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney each trailing President Obama by exactly the same tally — 50 to 48 percent. . . .

. . . Gingrich, in particular, improved versus Obama in the swing states: While he trailed Obama by 6 points overall at that time, he led Obama by 3 points in states that are likely to be hotly contested — a swing of 9 points.

The Gallup poll is not limited Republicans, and it certainly seems that Gingrich is at least as popular as Romney. And then there was the S.C. open primary, where Gingrich not only won running away, but also took the independents. I am just not feeling the hate . . .

In sum, all of prophecies of total Republican annihilation coming from Republican elites who hold the actual voters in utter disdain is nothing more than fearmongering. Their total immersion in GDS suggests that their problems with Gingrich run far deeper than merely wanting to see the Republican party - or conservativism, for that matter - succeed, and their total disdain for the Republican base shows arrogance unbound. Indeed, it leaves me speechless, though still with a desire to communicate clearly with the GDS-afflicted Republican elites. That said, let's cue the non-verbal response.

Update: Doug Ross has also addressed the down-ticket argument with a rather amazing historical fact from Rasmussen. You literally have to go back in time to 1860 to see a scenario play out where an incumbent president loses the White House but his party wins "control of either house of Congress from the other party."

Update: Linked at Larwyn's Linx.

The Prophecy Of Gingrich Aide Rick Tyler

2012-01-22T22:03:00.000-05:00

In May, 2011, the pundits pronounced Newt Gingrich's candidacy, not merely dead, but in an advanced state of decomposition. Oh, ye of little faith! This from Fox documents the Gingrich candidacy memorial service presided over by Charles Krauthammer and attended by Juan Williams.

After the death certificate was delivered to Gingrich campaign H.Q, Gingrich aide Rick Tyler penned a press release so ridiculous, so over the top, that Stephen Colbert brought in John Lithgow to give it a dramatic reading on his show.

Lithgow does Newt (on Colbert) from wally danger on Vimeo.

In case you missed any of it, here is the body of Tyler's oft ridiculed press release:

The literati sent out their minions to do their bidding. Washington cannot tolerate threats from outsiders who might disrupt their comfortable world. The firefight started when the cowardly sensed weakness. They fired timidly at first, then the sheep not wanting to be dropped from the establishment's cocktail party invite list unloaded their entire clip, firing without taking aim their distortions and falsehoods. Now they are left exposed by their bylines and handles. But surely they had killed him off. This is the way it always worked. A lesser person could not have survived the first few minutes of the onslaught. But out of the billowing smoke and dust of tweets and trivia emerged Gingrich, once again ready to lead those who won't be intimated by the political elite and are ready to take on the challenges America faces.

And as rdbrewer writes at Ace of Spades today;

That was all very funny at the time. At the time. Well, what did happen in South Carolina? Out of the billowing smoke and dust of tweets and trivia emerged Gingrich, once again ready to lead those who won't be intimidated by the political elite and are ready to take on the challenges America faces!

Now I'm wondering who this political mastermind is. How could he have foreseen such a result? Does he travel through time? Can he get me some winning lottery numbers? And I'm thinking it looks like we all owe him an apology.

Heh. So let it be written. So let it be done.

(H/T Nice Deb)

GDS Humor

2012-01-22T17:23:00.000-05:00

I can't stand the screeching of the GDS (Gingrich Derangement Syndrome) crowd. But I do appreciate their humor when its well done.

(H/T American Digest)

Gingrich Derangement Syndrome

2012-01-22T05:05:00.000-05:00

While Bush Derangement Syndrome only effected those on the left, the right now has its own analog, Gingrich Derangement Syndrome. GDS apparently afflicts select right wing pundits, most everyone at NRO, and John Hinderaker at Powerline:

So, congratulations to Newt, and on to Florida. Let’s just pray that Barack Obama’s second term didn’t start today. If Gingrich does get the nomination, this may turn out to be a year in which Republicans more or less ignore the presidential race, ceding Obama his second term, and focus instead on trying to hold the House and, if possible, picking up a seat or two in the Senate, along with doing the best we can in state races where the wipeout at the presidential level doesn’t swamp all efforts to elect Republicans.

Now that is a full blown case of GDS.

Lessons From South Carolina

2012-01-22T04:31:00.002-05:00

. . . Newt Gingrich’s rise has a lot to do with Newt Gingrich’s debate performance. But it has just as much to do with a party base in revolt against its thought and party leaders in Washington, DC. The base is revolting because they swept the GOP back into relevance in Washington just under two years ago and they have been thanked with contempt ever since.

Adding insult to injury, the party and thought leaders now try to foist on the base a milquetoast moderate from Massachusetts. Newt Gingrich can thank Mitt Romney and more for the second look he is getting. Base hostility will now be exacerbated by Mitt Romney’s backers now undoubtedly making a conscious effort to prop up Rick Santorum to shut down Newt Gingrich. . . .

People are mad as hell they are about to be stuck with another boring, moderate, uninspiring choice that has at best a 50/50 shot at losing to the worst president since Carter. They are flocking to Newt not because they think he’s a great guy, but because right now, he’s the only one fighting for conservatism and GOP voters are looking for a vessel to channel their anger with Obama and their complete disappointment with the GOP establishment which is now embodied perfectly by Romney. They want a conservative fighter because most conservatives look back at Ford, Reagan, Bush, Dole, Bush, and McCain and see only the ones taking a conservative path against the Democrats actually winning.
Eric Erickson, Newt Gingrich Wins. What It Means. Red State, 21 Jan. 2012

Newt Gingrich just won the South Carolina primary running away, 40% to Romney's 28%. The exit polls explaining Gingrich's win are a gold mine of data for both Gingrich and Romney going forward.

Gingrich:

The exit polls, shown here and excerpted in relevant part in the post below, show that Newt won virtually every demographic and on virtually every major issue. He won across all income levels, including blue collar and white collar types. The numbers show what are Gingrich's winning messages.

Jobs and the Economy:

This was the big issue from the exit polls - critical to 63% of the voters, and Gingrich beat Romney among those voters by 8 points. I found that surprising. What it says is that the electorate responded to Newt's economic experience while in Congress more so than they trusted Romney to be able to translate his business experience into a successful economic plan.

Given the centrality of this issue and the success Gingrich has had with it, Gingrich needs to make this issue number one going forward, not just on the stump, but in a majority of advertisements. He needs to emphasize, at every opportunity, the fact that government does not create jobs, the private sector does. The mission of government is to create a positive playing field for business - and in that, he can legitimately claim that his incredibly successful experience at the federal level is far more significant than Romney's as governor, and of a different nature all together than Romney's private sector experience.

Budget Deficit:

This issue was central to 22% of the voters, and Gingrich crushed Romney among these voters, 45% to 23%. Obviously the fact that Gingrich actually balanced the federal budget during his Speakership weighed heavily on that issue. That said, Romney has pointed out that he balanced the budget as Governor of Massachusetts. What Romney neglects to say - and that Gingrich should be bringing up - is that Mass. law requires a balanced budget. Romney is taking credit for doing nothing more than complying with the law. Gingrich's achievement while as a Speaker was orders of magnitude tougher - a point Gingrich should emphasize.

On The Morality Issues:

Deeply religious and conservative South Carolina has put to rest any questions about whether Gingrich's past moral failings are going to be a drain on him. They aren't. Gingrich captured the vote of women generally (38% to 29%) and of married individuals (41% to 28%) in SC. Moreover, he captured as much of the evangelical vote (44%) as Gov. Huckabee did when he ran in SC in 2008.

Electability:

On the issue of electability, the 45% of SC voters who voted in light of that issue judged Gingrich more electable versus Obama than Romney by 51% to 37%. It seems clear that their decision was based on the debates and Gingrich's willingness to, one, eloquently and passionately burn the race card while defending conservative values (Juan Williams), and two, to take on the press for their bias (John King).

Listening to Fox News tonight, the talking heads who oppose a Gingrich nomination are taking the position that debate performances will matter very little in the general election. In essence, just because Newt is such an effective communicator and defender of conservative values, it has little to do with electability. That is patently false.

Gingrich needs to address this for two reasons. One, this is his single greatest strength. As Eric Erickson notes in the passage quoted at the top of the page, conservatives more than anything else are hungering for a person who can do what Gingrich does. Two, Newt needs to push back against this meme that his communication skills matter only a little. To the contrary, they matter tremendously.

John McCain lost the 2008 election because he ceded the major issues to the Obama narrative. Outrageously, over half the nation still thinks that the subprime crisis was caused by Wall St. greed. Bush failed to reform Social Security because the left was able to demagogue the issue. The Bush presidency was crippled because of Bush's failure to directly challenge the left's despicable campaign to loose the Iraq war. The base understands this. The ability to communicate may well be the single most important skill for any conservative nominee for President today. As Erickson says, look back at Ford, Reagan, Bush, Dole, Bush, and McCain, the only ones who have won have been those that unapologetically and vocally embraced conservativism. Newt needs to emphasize precisely that.

Independents

Self-identified independents broke for Gingrich 31% to 25%. It would seem that he doesn't have anywhere near the problem with independents that his critics would like us to believe. There is no real lesson here other than keep doing what he is doing.

Going Negative On Bain

The majority of voters in S.C., 64%, had a positive view of Romney's experience as a venture capitalist with Bain and, of those people, they broke almost evenly between between Gingrich and Romney. As to the 24% of Republicans that had a negative view of Romney's experience as a 'vulture capitalist,' 50% went for Gingrich, 3% went to Romney. Thus it would seem that Newt's going negative on Bain did make a real difference.

That said, I wonder how much of a backlash there may well be later in the campaign if Gingrich keeps up this attack on Bain and, by extension, capitalism. Gingrich has enough strengths, as mentioned above, that he really should lay off the Bain issue.

What Gingrich Can Expect Going Forward

Gingrich has been the subject of the most concerted internal effort to destroy a Republican candidate since Barry Goldwater in 1964. With this huge Gingrich win in SC, expect the floodgates to open, making the left's efforts to demonize and delegitimize Sarah Palin in 2008 look like a measured effort in intellectual honesty. This is going to get real ugly real quick. Let's hope that Newt can withstand the inferno in the kitchen.

There is still at least one area in which Newt has yet to be truly pressed and which he needs to be fully prepared to address - the fact that he lost his speakership to a coup after three years. He needs to be prepared to answer that in the upcoming weeks.

---------------------------------------------

Mitt Romney

Romney collapsed in South Carolina over two issues. One, his horrid answers when asked about releasing his tax returns. He became not merely defensive, but stuttering and rambling over the issue. Clearly he has some worries over this. But the old adage is true - bad news does not improve with age. He needs to release his tax documents immediately or this is an issue that is just going to haunt him.

Two, Romney's campaign can best be described as defend and coast. He has clearly failed to make the case for his candidacy. Claiming divine right to the nomination based on "electability," he has played a defense to this point - just say the right platitudes and bromides and avoid mistakes. For example, for months Romney refused to appear on television talk shows - at least until it became clear that he would face a real challenge from Gingrich.

In probably the most telling example, both Romney and Gingrich have been presented with what they thought were unfair questions from the press. When Bret Baer asked Romney a question he thought unfair, Romney answered it with a forced smile, then waited for the interview to end before coming back to Baer and expressing his displeasure. When Gingrich was asked an unfair question by John King, in full view of the public, he took out a knife, emasculated King and then nailed his testicles to the podium before asking for the next question. Romney needs to quickly figure out that his acts earned the scorn of the base, while Gingrich's earned him a standing ovation and 40% of the vote in South Carolina.

The Economy & Jobs

Romney has been relying on the bald fact of his experience in business to claim that he could best manage the economy. While that by itself might be a winning message against Obama, it did not work in SC against Gingrich, who was part of one of the biggest expansions of jobs in our nation's history. Romney needs to explain why his experience in business would at least make him the equal of Gingrich. A few anecdotes might do the trick. Regardless, if he can't win on this issue, he has deeply serious problems.

Budget Deficit:

Romney is loosing to Gingrich by 22% on this issue. Romney needs to do a much better job articulating how he will reduce the deficit than he is doing. The program he proposes on his website is far more complicated than what Gingrich has proposed, yet Mitt hasn't made a simple, convincing case as to why his plan is more likely to succeed.

Electability

Romney needs to stop claiming inevitability and electability and start concentrating on all of the issues that undergird such claims. Indeed, any such claims in the wake of South Carolina will just be engender laughter.

Going Negative On Gingrich

The problem with hitting somebody unfairly is that, when they can, they strike back. Gingrich didn't have the funding or time to withstand a multi-million dollar negative assault in Iowa. He did in South Carolina and, though he was outspent by Romney 2 to 1, ran away with the primary. Going negative did not work for Romney in 2008, it likely won't work now with Gingrich having the financial muscle to punch back. Romney is going to have to become much more aggressive in explaining why he would make the best President rather than concentrating on why Gingrich shouldn't be.

Going Forward

This election is still Romney's to lose. He has a superior organization built up over four years, he has the largest war chest, and he is not merely the favorite son of Republican elites, but these same elites suffer full blown Gingrich Derangement Syndrome. The next several contests are in areas favorable to Romney, from Florida to Nevada. Nonetheless, if he continues to play defense and expects the nomination to be handed to him, he could yet pull defeat from the jaws of victory. He needs to start earning the nomination.

As to Ron Paul, he came in last place with 13% of the vote. He is staying in the race just so he can impact on the plank of the Republican Convention. Santorum, who earned 17% of the vote, is in the race at least through Florida, though another low showing will likely see him exiting the race just because of a lack of funds. That is, he would be forced out unless some of Romney's money men prop him up to keep in the race and draining votes from Gingrich. I would not be overly surprised to see that.

Linked: Larwyn's Linx

And The Winner Is . . . Newt Gingrich - Including Among Women, Independents & Those Voting On Electability

2012-01-21T19:29:00.000-05:00

The polls are closed in South Carolina and the last kazoo has sounded. Fox projected the winner of the South Carolina Republican primary to be Newt Gingrich as soon as the polls ended. Update: The final tally is Gingrich 41%, Romney 27%, Santorum 17%, Paul 13%.

Just the fact of Gingrich's win puts a huge dent in the aura of inevitability Mitt Romney has attempted to paint since the start of the race. But it is the exit polls that are truly eye opening.

According to conventional wisdom, Romney is best suited to beat Obama, Gingrich is toast among women voters because of his past affairs, and Gingrich can't appeal to independent voters. The exit polls shred the conventional wisdom and, given that Gingrich won in virtually every possible demographic, ought to be giving the Romney camp nightmares. This from the exit polls:

Women voters: Gingrich 38%, Romney 29%

Independents: Gingrich 31%, Romney 25%

Very Conservative: Gingrich 47%, Romney 19%

Somewhat Conservative: Gingrich 41%, Romney 30%

Moderate to Liberal: Gingrich 31%, Romney 34%

Age 18-29: Gingrich 27%, Romney 16%

Age 30-44: Gingrich 37%, Romney 19%

Age 35-64: Gingrich 40%, Romney 28%

Age 65 and up: Gingrich 47%, Romney 36%

Evangelicals: Gingrich 45%, Romney 25%

Tea Party Supporters: Gingrich 45%, Romney 25%

Income less than $50k: Gingrich 40%, Romney 24%

Income $50k to $100k: Gingrich 40%, Romney 24%

Income over $100k: Gingrich 38%, Romney 34%

With a College Degree: Gingrich 37%, Romney 31%

Without a College Degree: Gingrich 42%, Romney 24%

------------------------------------------

Issues that mattered most:

Abortion: Gingrich 27%, Romney 6%

Budget Deficit: Gingrich 44%, Romney 23%

Economy: Gingrich 40%, Romney 32%

-----------------------------------------

Candidate Can Beat Barack Obama: Gingrich 51%, Romney 37%

Candidate is a True Conservative: Gingrich 37%, Romney 2%

Candidate Has The Right Experience: Gingrich 49%, Romney 34%

Candidate Has Strong Moral Character: Gingrich 6%, Romney 19%

It is of note that Romney came into the SC primary with a 16 point lead ten days ago. He also outspent Gingrich by at least two to one on advertising in South Carolina. And yet . . .

Check back. I will be updating this post with an analysis of the issues Gingrich's victory raises tonight in the run for the Republican Presidential nomination.

A quick parting thought. How would you like to own the Malox concession near NRO headquarters at the moment. And a parting question, who do you think is drinking more scotch or popping more valium tonight, George Will, John Hinderaker, Jennifer Rubin, Ann Coulter or Kathleen Parker?

While We Await The Results Of The SC Primary . . .

2012-01-21T17:56:00.000-05:00

. . . a musical interlude to fill the time from the uniquely talented and patriotic Amy G. While this is safe for work, I can't help but thinking that it shouldn't be.

As I tell my son, everyone needs to find their niche in life. Apparently though, some niches are more unique than others.

Powerline's John Hinderaker Gets Unihinged

2012-01-21T07:59:00.000-05:00

One does not see this too often from John Hinderaker at Powerline - throwing what can only be described as a temper tantrum. But here it is.

It seems that just the thought that Newt Gingrich might win the SC primary has Hinderaker going into a full metal leftie unhinged rant. Labeling anyone who votes for Gingrich "delusional," Hinderaker tells us that electing Gingrich as our nominee would result in the near complete extinguishment of the Republican Party, in addition to causing a whole host of other calamities all the way up to the visitation of the ten biblical plagues on our nation. Well, maybe he didn't say that last bit, but after reading his unhinged rant, one wouldn't be surprised if he had.

In list form, Hinderaker throws the kitchen sink at Newt as to why he is our era's Thomas Dewey, Michael Dukakis, and the Edsel all rolled into one. But he counts them as asides, settling on the utterly bizarre argument that Newt can't win in the general election because of Newt's ex-wife's revelations in the ABC interview on Thursday. Using incomprehensible reasoning, Hinderaker says that Newt - who has acknowledged most of the facts raised by his ex-wife in the interview - is mortally wounded because he called her new allegation, that he had asked for an open marriage, false. Indeed, Hinderaker fails to note that Gingrich's ex has spoken at length publicly on the break up of her marriage with Newt over the past several years - yet this is the very first time she has raised the "open marriage" allegation. His post is one giant non-sequitur. It is he that appears "delusional."

Indeed, if Newt's past infidelity and an unhappy ex-wife are going to be the deciding factor in this election, Hinderaker had best inform Thomas Sowell, Kyle-Ann Shiver, in addition to President Grover Cleveland if they can dig him up - just to name a few in a very long list.. What is it about Newt that drives so many Republicans into an utter frenzy of inchoate rage? In this, John Hinderaker joins the ranks of most of the entire staff of the NRO, Ann Coulter, George Will, Jennifer Rubin and Kathleen Parker, all of whom are exhibiting unmistakable symptoms of Gingrich Derangement Syndrome.

Eric Holder & "Voting Correctly"

2012-01-21T06:42:00.000-05:00

To listen to Attorney General Eric Holder tell it, Republican minimalist efforts to insure the integrity of the vote are unnecessary and motivated purely by racism. And yet:

[In upstate New York,] a widespread investigation . . . has implicated eight Democrats, including county and city elected officials and party operatives [for vote fraud]. Four defendants have already pleaded guilty to a variety of charges, and what has already unfolded exposes just how easy it could be for political insiders to illegally manipulate the electoral system.

Voters told Fox News they never filled out absentee ballot applications for the 2009 Working Families Party primary, and were later stunned to learn the applications were, in fact, turned in to the Board of Elections, with ballots cast in their names. Democratic candidates routinely try to secure the Working Families electoral line to obtain more votes in the general election. The party was associated with the now-defunct community group ACORN.

"Jackals prey upon the weakest member of the herd. That's what happened here," LoPorto's attorney Michael Feit said of the guilty pleas in which former officials admitted forging ballot applications and submitting them as legitimate votes.Feit concedes "there is no question" that someone tried to steal the election. "It is awful, it's despicable, it's terrible," he added. . . .

Two veteran Democratic political operatives in Troy said voter fraud is an accepted way of winning elections, and faking absentee ballots was commonplace.

Anthony DeFiglio, a Democratic Committeeman who pleaded guilty to falsifying business records, told state police investigators that such fraud is actually "an ongoing scheme and it occurs on both sides of the aisle. The people who are targeted live in low-income housing and there is a sense that they are a lot less likely to ask any questions... What appears as a huge conspiracy to nonpolitical persons is really a normal political tactic."

Anthony Renna, another longtime Democratic operative and party committeeman, admitted to forging an absentee ballot application. He said the process of handing in forged ballots and fake votes ensures that "ballots are voted correctly."

"I knew that the actual voters had not voted the ballots or signed the envelopes, but that did not concern me. I am not the ballot police," Renna said in a statement to police. "I have been present when 'ballots were voted correctly' by party operatives. Voted correctly is a term used for a forged application or ballot." . . .

Tell me, is there any other way to interpret the left's war on insuring the integrity of the vote than that they want to insure, in the upcoming election, that the ballots are voted correctly?

And what makes this particularly despicable, in my eyes at least, is that they are using the race card to justify it. A lot of people died to insure that blacks could vote vote and that their vote counted. It seems that our modern day race hustlers have come full circle.

The Pope Speaks To Obama's War On Christianity

2012-01-21T06:01:00.000-05:00

On Friday, the Obama administration announced that under Obamacare, employee health plans, including those of religious organizations, will have to pay for contraception, including the "morning after" pill. This from the AP:

Many church-affiliated institutions will have to cover free birth control for employees, the Obama administration announced Friday in an election-year move that outraged religious groups, fueling a national debate about the reach of government.. . .

"Never before has the federal government forced individuals and organizations to go out into the marketplace and buy a product that violates their conscience," said New York Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. "This shouldn't happen in a land where free exercise of religion ranks first in the Bill of Rights."

The left is now winning the war to marginalize Christianity in America, to replace traditional Christian values with secular values in the law. Obama's act is just the most recent in this regard.

I've written many times before about the left's war on Christianity and Judaism. It has been a long war - it began two centuries ago with the birth of modern socialism in the French Revolution. It was famously given voice by Karl Marx. And it has been pursued diligently by the left in the U.S. through the Courts for nearly seven decades. Obama, our most far left President, marks a change from using the Courts to attack religion to an administration taking openly hostile acts.

Ironically, the most recent obscenity of the Obama administration came just one day after the Pope, Benedict XVI, addressed remarks on the left's war on religion to his Bishops in the U.S., sounding the warning bells and identifying the existential stakes:

. . . One of the most memorable aspects of my Pastoral Visit to the United States was the opportunity it afforded me to reflect on America’s historical experience of religious freedom, and specifically the relationship between religion and culture. At the heart of every culture, whether perceived or not, is a consensus about the nature of reality and the moral good, and thus about the conditions for human flourishing. In America, that consensus, as enshrined in your nation’s founding documents, was grounded in a worldview shaped not only by faith but a commitment to certain ethical principles deriving from nature and nature’s God. Today that consensus has eroded significantly in the face of powerful new cultural currents which are not only directly opposed to core moral teachings of the Judeo-Christian tradition, but increasingly hostile to Christianity as such.

For her part, the Church in the United States is called, in season and out of season, to proclaim a Gospel which not only proposes unchanging moral truths but proposes them precisely as the key to human happiness and social prospering (cf. Gaudium et Spes, 10). To the extent that some current cultural trends contain elements that would curtail the proclamation of these truths, whether constricting it within the limits of a merely scientific rationality, or suppressing it in the name of political power or majority rule, they represent a threat not just to Christian faith, but also to humanity itself and to the deepest truth about our being and ultimate vocation, our relationship to God. When a culture attempts to suppress the dimension of ultimate mystery, and to close the doors to transcendent truth, it inevitably becomes impoverished and falls prey, as the late Pope John Paul II so clearly saw, to reductionist and totalitarian readings of the human person and the nature of society.

With her long tradition of respect for the right relationship between faith and reason, the Church has a critical role to play in countering cultural currents which, on the basis of an extreme individualism, seek to promote notions of freedom detached from moral truth. Our tradition does not speak from blind faith, but from a rational perspective which links our commitment to building an authentically just, humane and prosperous society to our ultimate assurance that the cosmos is possessed of an inner logic accessible to human reasoning. The Church’s defense of a moral reasoning based on the natural law is grounded on her conviction that this law is not a threat to our freedom, but rather a "language" which enables us to understand ourselves and the truth of our being, and so to shape a more just and humane world. She thus proposes her moral teaching as a message not of constraint but of liberation, and as the basis for building a secure future.

The Church’s witness, then, is of its nature public: she seeks to convince by proposing rational arguments in the public square. The legitimate separation of Church and State cannot be taken to mean that the Church must be silent on certain issues, nor that the State may choose not to engage, or be engaged by, the voices of committed believers in determining the values which will shape the future of the nation.

In the light of these considerations, it is imperative that the entire Catholic community in the United States come to realize the grave threats to the Church’s public moral witness presented by a radical secularism which finds increasing expression in the political and cultural spheres. The seriousness of these threats needs to be clearly appreciated at every level of ecclesial life. Of particular concern are certain attempts being made to limit that most cherished of American freedoms, the freedom of religion. Many of you have pointed out that concerted efforts have been made to deny the right of conscientious objection on the part of Catholic individuals and institutions with regard to cooperation in intrinsically evil practices. Others have spoken to me of a worrying tendency to reduce religious freedom to mere freedom of worship without guarantees of respect for freedom of conscience. . . .

The left's war on religion in the U.S. is insidious. And if the history of the 20th century has taught us nothing else, it is that the jettisoning of Christian values for secular ones, where government is the final arbiter of morality, has resulted nightmares and horrors on never before seen or imagined scales. As I have written previously:

When governments and individuals can define by their whim what is moral or immoral, what is desirable and what is punishable, human life is inevitably devalued. Certainly Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Castro, and Pol Pot, between them responsible for the murder of well over a hundred million people in the 20th century, held to socialist belief systems that devalued human life and elevated in its stead political ideology. Many in the green movement argue that man is a parasite on the world and call for strictly limiting his impact using authoritarian means - including population control, forced sterilization and other such methods. . . .

. . . The bottom line is, regardless whether one believes in Judaism or Christianity, we will pay a very heavy price indeed for jettisoning them as the bedrock of Western society. Yet that is precisely what the left has sought for over two centuries, promising in their stead a secular heaven on earth. Ironically, should they fully succeed, history teaches us that their promised earthly heaven will be far more likely to resemble biblical hell.

Linked: Larwyn's Linx

Obama Crisis Management System

2012-01-20T03:11:00.001-05:00

(H/T Maggie's Farm)

SC Debate 2.0

2012-01-20T01:44:00.000-05:00

The two big moments of the debate belonged to Newt Gingrich. For a second time in two debates, Newt got a standing O. Tonight's was in response to the first question of the night, when the CNN moderator John King asked Newt to respond to his ex-wife's allegations that 14 years ago, he asked her to engage in an open marriage. It has got to be a candidate for the ultimate debate smackdown - perhaps now as pithy as "I knew Jack Kennedy, and you, sir, are no Jack Kennedy or as brilliantly humorous as "I will not hold my opponents youth and inexperience against him" - but equally as devastating.

The second big moment for Newt - probably in my eyes but few others' - was proof that he actually may know when to shut up. I don't have the video, but will post it when I can find it. The moderator asked Gingrich in essence to justify the charges in a recent mailing regarding Romney's weak kneed history on abortion. Gingrich did so, pointing out things that Romney had done that favored abortion after Romney's Paul of Tarsus moment on the issue. Romney responded in a huff, at which point the moderator went back to Gingrich for a counter rebuttal. Gingrich's response: "I cede my time to Governor Santorum." Heh. It was a pitch perfect moment, allowing Santorum to do all of the dirty work of really attacking Romney on the issue.

The candidates traded barbs all night, none of which I thought were too devestating. That said, the low point of the evening was yet another self inflicted wound by Romney, when he was heckled for trying to tap dance around why he didn't release his tax records in advance of the SC primary vote.

From Hot Air: "Exit quotation from Jonah Goldberg: “Romney can’t answer questions about his tax returns at all… He’s terrible at it and he needs to get better, quickly.”

The general feeling of the few sites I looked at was that Gingrich won the debate (here, here, here). We will see if SC agrees on Saturday.

I will say in conclusion that Newt was just ever so slightly off his game tonight, at least after the first question. In particular, he missed some real opportunities to make his case more forcefully. The one that struck me most was when Santorum accused Newt of grandiosity, implying that Newt would be too impractical to be President. Gingrich fended it off, but what he should have pointed out are that the problems facing the U.S. are themselves grand in stature today. Our regulatory bureaucracy - built up over 100 years - has become an anti-democratic nightmare that threatens the whole economy. It needs to be reformed completely. Our debt is about to choke us and the welfare state is going to bankrupt our country in the foreseeable future. Obamacare, Obama's war on energy, and the fact that the left has the keys to the courthouse on all environmental issues threaten the very foundation of our nation. The Arab Spring is turning into a nightmare throughout the Middle East, and there is Iran, playing the role of Germany circa 1937. Small solutions that move the bar just a bit are not going to solve these problems. But alas, Gingrich only alluded to that. It was one of several missed opportunities.

The SC Debate

2012-01-16T23:36:00.003-05:00

How many times in a 5 man debate do you see a standing ovation from the crowd. Newt got one, responding to charges of racism from Juan Williams.

The debate was Newts. As Frank Luntz said after the debate, he thinks Newt will get a bounce. Romney's performance was not his best - Santorum went after him hard. Ron Paul I just don't count and, for Rick Perry, it was a good performance, but one given too little, too late.

It is unfortunate that the conservative vote is being divided three ways, because that is what will give Romney the nomination. I see his prescription for healing America as timid and nothing more than palative care.

Something Lost In The Translation

2012-01-16T18:20:00.000-05:00

From a department store in Osaka, Japan, via Counting Cats:

I read somewhere, can't find it now, that there is a type of post-New Year's sale in Japan of overstocked goods that is in fact pronounced as "foo kin." Spelling it out in phonetic English, probably not a good idea.

Of course, this is far from the first time that such translations have led to comic results.

MLK Day 2012: The Civil Rights Movement, The Left & The Legacy of MLK

2012-01-16T12:12:00.000-05:00

Happy Martin Luther King Day.

The third Monday in January is annually set aside to honor the most towering figure of our nation's civil right's movement. And his most eloquent speech was given in 1963, I Have A Dream. That speech was a stirring call for true equality. After opening by noting the promise of our nation, that "all men are created equal," near his conclusion, he said: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

The full speech is in the video below. Do watch it. His moving appeal to equality as the basis for our nation rings as true today as in 1963.

And there is this via Hot Air today from MLK's niece, Dr. Alveda King who asserts in the interview below that had her uncle lived to see today, he’d be considered a pro-life, social conservative.

What follows is reposted and updated from 2008:

(2011 Update) Three years ago, I wrote a post on race in America, surveying our history and pointing out the far left's bastardization of MLK's dream of equality for all. It is appropriate to revisit that post today. I predicted at the time that, with the election of Obama, we would fall ever deeper, and perhaps irrevocably, into identity politics and multiculturalism, moving ever farther away from realizing MLK's goal of equality. I was wrong:
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Liberal African American NYT columnist Bob Herbert recently had this to say in extolling the virtues of the left:

Without the many great and noble deeds of liberals over the past six or seven decades, America would hardly be recognizable to today’s young people. Liberals (including liberal Republicans, who have since been mostly drummed out of the party) ended legalized racial segregation and gender discrimination.

Mr. Herbert pretty much sums up what has been the far left / liberal / progressive line for decades. But then how to explain all the vicious, ad hominem and unhinged Palin-bashing coming from the left? To take it one further, how to reconcile that Palin-bashing with the left's acceptance of people like Rev. Jeremiah Wright as a part of their stable? It seems quite the conundrum unless one knows a bit of history and can identify the massive deceits. Here are some facts, some of which you might not be aware:

- The Republican Party - the party of Abraham Lincoln - was borne in 1854 out of opposition to slavery.

- The party of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan was, as Jeffrey Lord points out in an article at the WSJ, the Democratic Party. And Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) [was the last] member of the Senate who was once a member of the KKK.

- The 13th (abolishing slavery), 14th (due process for all citizens) and 15th (voting rights cannot be restriced on the basis of race) Amendments to the Constitution were enacted by Republicans over Democratic opposition.

- The NAACP was founded in 1909 by three white Republicans who opposed the racist practices of the Democratic Party and the lynching of blacks by Democrats.

- In fairness, it was the Democrat Harry Truman who, by Executive Order 9981 issued in 1948, desegregated the military. That was a truly major development. My own belief is that the military has been the single greatest driving force of integration in this land for over half a century.

- It was Chief Justice Earl Warren, a former Republican Governor of California appointed to the Supreme Court by President Eisenhower, also a Republican, who managed to convince the other eight justices to agree to a unanimous decision in the seminal case of Brown v. Board of Education. That case was brought by the NAACP. The Court held segregation in schools unconstitutional. The fact that it was a unanimous decision that overturned precedent made it clear that no aspect of segregation would henceforth be considered constitutional.

- Republican President Ike Eisenhower played additional important roles in furthering equality in America. He "proposed to Congress the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 and signed those acts into law. . . . They constituted the first significant civil rights acts since the 1870s." Moreover, when the Democratic Governor of Arkansas refused to integrate schools in what became known as the "Little Rock Nine" incident, "Eisenhower placed the Arkansas National Guard under Federal control and sent Army troops to escort nine black students into an all-white public school."

- The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was championed by JFK - but it was passed with massive Republican support (over 80%) in Congress and over fierce opposition from Democrats who made repeated attempts at filibuster. Indeed, 80% of the vote opposing the Civil Rights Act came from Democrats. Women were added to the Act as a protected class by a Democrat who thought it would be a poison pill, killing the legislation. To the contrary, the Congress passed the Act without any attempt to remove the provision.

- Martin Luther King Jr. was the most well known and pivotal Civil Rights activist ever produced in America. His most famous speech, "I Had A Dream," was an eloquent and stirring call for equality. If you have not read the speech or heard it, you can find it here. I would highly recommend listening to it. Rev. King was, by the way, a Republican.

- "Bull" Connor was not a Republican. . . .

Nothing that I say here is to suggest that racism and sexism could not be found in the Republican party or among conservatives at any point in American history. But if you take any period in history and draw a line at the midpoint of racist and sexist attitudes, you would find far more Republicans than Democrats on the lesser side of that line. And you would find a much greater willingness on the part of Republicans, relative to the time, to effectuate equality. That was as true in 1865 as in 1965 - and in 2008.

Sometime about 1968, the far left movement emerged as a major wing of the Democratic Party. This far left wing hijacked the civil rights movement and made it, ostensibly, their raison d'etre. Gradually, the far left has grown until it is now the dominant force in Democratic politics. JFK, Truman and FDR would recognize precious little of today's Democratic Party.

The far left fundamentally altered the nature of the Civil Rights movement when they claimed it as their own. They imprinted the movement with identity politics, grossly distorting the movement's goal of a level playing field for all Americans and creating in its stead a Marxist world of permanent victimized classes entitled to special treatment. The far left has been the driver of reverse racism and sexism for the past half century. That is why it is no surprise that, with the emergence of a far left candidate for the highest office in the nation, Rev. Jeremiah Wright should also arise at his side and into the public eye preaching a vile racism and separatism most Americans thought long dead in this country. Nor is it any surprise that the MSM, many of whom are of the far left, should collectively yawn at Obama's twenty year association with Wright. Wright is anything but an anomaly. To the contrary, he is a progeny of the politics of the far left.

The far left did not merely hijack the civil rights movement, they also wrote over a century of American history, turning it on its head. That is why Bob Herbert, quoted above, is able to wax so eloquently while spouting the most horrendous of deceits. The far left managed to paint the conservative movement and the Republican Party as the prime repositories of racism and sexism. The far left has long held themselves out as the true party of equality. They have done so falsely as, by its very nature, identity politics cements inequality. Beyond that truism, the far left has for decades played the race and gender cards to counter any criticism of their policies, to forestall any reasoned debate and to demonize those who stand opposed to them. They continue to do so through this very day.

For example, Obama has attempted repeatedly to play the race card so as to delegitimize criticism of his policies. And today we have the Governor of New York calling the McCain camp racist for belittling the executive experience one could expect to be gleaned from the position of "community organizer." Apparently, according to Gov. David Patterson, "repeated use of the words 'community organizer' is Republican code for 'black'." What Gov. Patterson is doing is the well worn trick of taking any criticism of something pertaining to one of the victim class and recasting it as an illegitimate attack on the victim class itself. These tactics, which the left has used with incredible effectiveness in the past, have done incalculable harm to our nation over the decades.

We are either a melting pot wherein "all men are created equal" - the ideal of our Founders for which we have long laboured and are ever closer to succeeding - or we are to become a multicultural nation of pigeon-holed special interests. We are to become a nation where groups are encouraged to remain apart, defining themselves by their victim class before defining themselves as Americans. Multiculturalism is unworkable - we can see it destroying Europe and Britain - but that has not stopped the far left in America from their embrace of the concept. Nor has it slowed their efforts to weave multiculturalism irrevocably into the fabric of our society.

The far left has long pushed forward minorities and women to prove that they are the party of inclusiveness. On the right, the process has been slower. You had the percolation of minorities and women to major positions through the natural process of time and selection of the fittest. Only the most jaded would ever argue that Colin Powell and Condi Rice did not earn their positions solely on merit. And love her or hate her, Kristi Todd Whitman was both well qualified and a very good governor.

I have long been waiting for a self-made and accomplished woman or minority to rise to the very top in Republican politics. It is something that would intrinsically expose the incredibly damaging canard that the far left has pushed for near half a century. I had hoped Colin Powell would be that man a decade ago. As to Condi Rice, had things worked out differently for the Bush administration and had she not selected the Sec. of State slot (a killer for anyone with Pres. aspirations) I thought that perhaps she would have a good shot at running in 2008. I've been waiting for Thomas Sowell to run for any elected office for decades - and yes, I would consider him for beatification. These are people for whom neither their skin color nor their gender makes them a victim. These are people for whom what unites us in common as Americans is more important than what divides us into sub-groups. And these are people who earned their success by virtue of their excellence rather than the distortions of identity politics.

It is inevitable that one of the two concepts I earlier described - a melting pot of equals or a multicultural morass of victim groups - will gain ascendance in America. I have long felt that we are at a crossroads in our nation for precisely this reason, and that the ramifications of how we decide this issue will be existential. . . .
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When I wrote this post, I thought that electing Obama would take our nation irrevocably down the multicultural path, strengthening in America the victim class mentality that defines the left. I did not count on the rise of the Tea Party, nor that the left would go all out with the race card in a concerted and transparent attempt to delegitimize the message of that grass roots movement. Instead of strengthening the victim class mentality, all indications are that it has had a contrary effect, exposing the device to much of America. It is a tremendous irony that Obama, a man whose promise to lead us to racial equality was always without the barest hint of substance, may well inadvertently lead us to that promised land regardless. As the race card loses its ability to stigmatize the far left's political opponents, it spells the beginning of the end to the victim politics of the left. When the last vestiges of its toxin are banished from our land, then will come the day MLK's dream is fulfilled, and all of our children will "live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

Update (2011): NiceDeb has a round-up of MLK posts, linking not only to this post, but also to a fine post by Michelle Malkin, asking the left to give the race card a rest on MLK Day. In it, Malkin provides an exhaustive list of the times the left has used the race card in the recent past, concluding with an essay from Jerome Hudson that appears at Human Events:

Like most Americans, I’ve had enough with this administration’s policies. I was fed up and fired up.

I am even more so in the wake of the most moving gathering I’ve ever been privileged to be a part of.

At one point, some of the people attending the Rev. Al Sharpton’s “counter rally,” coined “Reclaiming King,” stopped me. I guess they must have been judging me by the color of my skin not the content of my character, because they asked if I was going to come join them.

“No, I won’t be there,” I told them. “Why?” one of them asked with a grimace on his face. I looked at him and said, “I want to be where the Lord is and the Lord is in this place.”

One of the older black women in the group asked me if I felt like I was “selling out” for being one of the “tokens” in the Beck rally crowd?

I laughed and said “Ma’am, Al Sharpton is a pretender. He is going to tell you to pretend that the color of your skin matters. He is going to ask you to ignore the now overwhelming proof that 50 years after the Civil Rights movement, blacks are now destroying each other faster than the KKK could have dreamed.”

As I walked away, the group stood frozen, not knowing how to reply.

Later, as Sharpton preached a divisive message void of actual solutions on how to “close the education and economic gap” in the “black community,” Dr. Alveda King, Martin Luther King’s niece, invoked the spirit of her slain uncle proclaiming, “I too have a dream, that white privilege will become human privilege and that people of every ethnic blend will receive everyone as brothers and sisters in the love of God.”

Her comments on restoring the “foundation of the family” in America were met, not with boos, but with a thunderous applause.

(What bigots those white folks! Having the audacity to cheer Dr. King’s niece like that. Racists the whole lot of them!)

I was probably the only 24-year old black college student in the crowd. It’s hard to know, because we had over 300,000 people there. But that didn’t matter to me. As we all stood hand-in-hand, American shoulder to American shoulder, our myriad faces streaked with tears as we sang “Amazing Grace.” It was a moment I will be proud to tell my grandkids about one day.

What that moment taught me is this: Something profound is happening in America that runs far deeper than politics. The ground is shifting, and it’s in freedom’s direction.

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Update 2012: It is a tragedy that the goal of MLK, a society where people are "measured by the content of their character and not the color of their skin," has been so distorted and hollowed out to be used as a political tool by the left. All of the most prominent voices of the black civil rights movement today - Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, etc. - invariably seem to be doing far more for themselves than for blacks as a group. Indeed, for but one example, there is Prof. Henry L. Gates who has made an entire, extremely well paying career at Harvard out of arguing for reparations from all whites to all blacks for the original sin of slavery in America. And as I pointed out in a post a few days ago, in taking stock of what the Civil Rights Movement and the Obama administration have achieved through today:

. . . Blacks should be waking up to a hard lesson - that the left wing promises sold to them, the separatism and victimhood, they are all empty. And on the two most important issues facing blacks today, jobs and education, their best hopes lay with the right.

. . . The black middle class has been growing steadily since 1955. But that middle class is under full frontal assault from Obama. According to the Economic Policy Institute, quoted in the Chicago Sun Times, the median net worth for black families has plunged 83% under Obama. Black unemployment has risen to 16.2%, and only 56.9% of black men over the age of 20 remain in today's workforce. According to the Censsus Bureau, the poverty rate for black households in America today is at a staggering 27.4%. As the Sun-Timessummed this up:
Millions of Americans endured financial calamities in the recession. But for many in the black community, job loss has knocked them out of the middle class and back into poverty. And some experts warn of a historic reversal of hard-won economic gains that took black people decades to achieve.

“History is going to say the black middle class was decimated” over the past few years, said Maya Wiley, director of the Center for Social Inclusion. “But we’re not done writing history.”

Adds Algernon Austin, director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy: “The recession is not over for black folks.”
And indeed, it should be noted that Obama's most recent decision to decimate Army ranks will likewise severely restrict another historic avenue for black advancement to the middle class. In the Army, 27.7% of the enlisted ranks are filled by blacks.

[The second way in which the modern civil rights movements has wholly failed the black community is in education, and particularly] the horrid state of public education in the inner cities. Is is, as Juan Williams has called it from the left, "the key civil rights issue of this generation." And as Thomas Sowell has opined from the right, "Republicans have a golden opportunity to go after the votes of black parents by connecting the dots and exposing one of the key reasons for bad education in inner cities and the bad consequences that follow.."

Both Williams and Sowell also agree that the single biggest hurdle to improving education in the inner cities is the power of teachers' unions. The left stands shoulder to shoulder with all public sector unions - teachers' unions in particular - because they provide much of the economic base for Democrats. And indeed, Exhibit one in trying to win the black vote on this issue is Obama who, at the start of his administration, ended the DC voucher program for DC's inner city youth, while at the same time he enrolled his children in the area's best private school.

Obama To Russia On Bended Knee

2012-01-15T00:31:00.000-05:00

We have a huge technological advantage in Ballistic Missile Defense. And, in a world of nuclear proliferation, fully developing that technology and maintaining our technological advantage could be the difference between life or death for the U.S.. Yet we now learn that Obama plans to share our ballistic missile defense (BMD) technology with Russia... including our newest mid-range missile, Standard Missile 3 (SM3). Of all Obama's foreign policy missteps, this one has the potential to be the most damaging to our nation.

Now, to the person of average intelligence, this might seem like an incredibly dumb move. While the U.S. and Russia are no longer sitting on the fence of nuclear war, Russia is hardly an ally, nor are they benign. Indeed, their interests, such as building nuclear reactors in Iran, are directly at odds with Western interests. So why, oh why, would this smartest of Presidents consider sharing BMD technology with Russia? Why in order to allay Russian "fears" about putting some of our SM3's in Europe. This is vintage Obama - naive beyond measure, unable to distinguish friend from foe, and acting in the best interests of a foreign power rather than the U.S.. The appropriate response to Russia's overreaction is to threaten to put SM3's on every street corner in Europe, not to give them the blueprints.

Big Lizards has the whole story with appropriate comment.

Apocalypse Now: Life Imitates Bad Science Fiction

2012-01-14T20:36:00.000-05:00

The plot is familiar to all readers of science fiction and horror. A mad scientist - or the U.S. military - creates a deadly virus that can destroy a substantial portion of the world's population. The bug is released, accidentally or purposefully, and the few survivors face life in a post-apocalyptic world.

Life, it seems, imitates art - or at least bad science fiction.

The H5N1 Bird Flu virus is deadly to humans. To date, 566 humans are known to have contracted the virus, of whom 332 died from it - a mortality rate of 60%. To put that number in perspective, the Black Death of 1348, which killed off half the population of Europe and led to massive societal breakdown, resulted from bubonic plague with a mortality rate of 50%. The Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, which killed upwards of 100 million people, had a mortality rate estimated between 10% and 20%.

Fortunately for humanity, because of the method of transmission, H5N1 has only infected a small number of people. The H5N1 is not passed by airborne transmission. And while it is a virus that requires contact with an infected host, it has never been passed by human to human contact. It has only been passed to humans by contact with infected birds or animals. The fear has always been that it would mutate into an airborne form transmissible between humans, but it has never happened.

Except, that is, until now.

The National Institutes of Health funded two studies of the H5N1, one in Wisconsin and, it is important to note, one outside of the U.S., in the Netherlands. The purpose was to see whether the H5N1 could be altered to mutate into an airborne virus. Let me just ask at this point, why? What possible need was there to experiment with this particular potentially apocalyptic virus to make it airborne? Did they stop to consider for one second the ramifications if they succeeded? Is there anything approaching adult supervision - let alone common sense and sanity - at the NIH?

The NIH research bore fruit. It appears that the researchers in Wisconsin and the Netherlands did in fact manage to genetically alter the virus to make it airborne and, indeed, transmissible between human like mammals. This from Boing-Boing:

Nobody knows a lot about this research, but, at Slate.com, Carl Zimmer explains what is known:
They’ve carried out their experiments on ferrets, which respond to flu viruses much like humans do. What few details we know of the unpublished research comes from a talk Dutch virologist Ron Fouchier gave in August at a virology conference, along with subsequent news reports. Fouchier began the experiment by altering the H5N1 virus’s genes in two spots. Then he passed the virus from one ferret to another, allowing the virus to mutate and evolve on its own inside the animals. After several rounds, Fouchier ended up with an H5N1 virus that could spread through the air from one ferret to the other. If unleashed—and if proven capable of spreading from human to human with the same high mortality rate—it could make the deadly 1918 pandemic look like a pesky cold.

This is sheer insanity. But wait - it gets much worse.

Evidently, the scientific process of making this virus airborne was comparatively easy, at least given a full working lab. And now . . . the scientists want to publish their methods, data and results. In other words, they want to put a blue print for how to make the H5N1 airborne and likely transmissible between humans into the public domain where any Tom, Dick or Mohammed can access it.

The NIH passed the papers proposed for publication to the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity.

On December 20, the NSABB recommended that Fouchier's study, and a similar one conducted by the University of Wisconsin's Yoshihiro Kawaoka, only be published once key data and details are removed, effectively rendering the studies un-reproducible.The board can't technically force this. But the board is also a big deal and so Science, Nature, the NIH, and the paper's authors are all listening. That's why the papers haven't actually been published yet. The people involved are still figuring out how to handle them.

So NIH paid for this research and now our government cannot definitively stop publication of the apocalyptic blue print. Moreover, by funding one of the experiments in the Netherlands, the NIH utterly assured that we would not have the ability to exercise government power over the results. Really, Darrell Issa needs to be giving the NIH a Congressional high colonic. Heads need to roll at the NIH, literally.

And on top of that, the parties are "still figuring out how to handle" the proposed papers? You've got to be kidding. How could there possibly be any thought of publishing the blueprints?

The answer comes from Peter Christian Hall writing for Reuters:

[No one in the history of biological weapons] ever tried to weaponize a flu strain—for good reason.Influenza in general is an equal-opportunity menace, particularly dangerous when a strain is so unfamiliar that humanity lacks immunity to it.

This would put at great risk anyone trying to assemble a pandemic H5N1 to launch at “target” populations. Indeed, such an attack would unleash global contagion that would swiftly and inevitably incapacitate an aggressor’s own people. Influenza doesn’t respect borders.

Oh, well that's comforting. Human nature being what it is, it's not like anyone ever goes postal and tries to take as many people as possible with them. Nor is it like we've had any problems with, say, weapons grade anthrax sent around the country. And of course, of greatest importance, there is no billion person religion in the world that glories in martyrdom and death. There is no theocracy in charge of a country for whom it is even questionable whether the thought of mutually assured destruction (MADD) would keep them from unleashing, say, a nuke attack. What could possibly go wrong? Hell, just publish the results in Arabic and Farsi and write Allah Akbar at the end. What suicidal idiocy.

You really might want to call your Congressman and Senator on this one - like yesterday. I suggest you do it right before you begin building your air-tight bunker and start stocking up on bullets and MRE's.

The Legacy of Margaret Thatcher - & Her Take On Class Warfare

2012-01-14T02:33:00.001-05:00

The grocer's daughter who grew to be Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, aka The Iron Lady, aka Attila The Hen, the lady famously described by French President Mitterand as having "the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe" - is in the news this week as a movie documenting her life, The Iron Lady, hits the theaters. This from the Heritage Foundation via Nice Deb:

As moveigoers head to theaters this weekend, many will want to compare the person they saw on screen to the real woman. As we explained this week, there is no resource better than the Iron Lady’s own words. Our new video attempts to shine a spotlight on her important legacy—one that continues to inspire.

Like President Ronald Reagan, her political soulmate, she came to power at a desperate time in her country’s history, when real leadership and bold ideas were most needed. And by applying conservative principles to the challenges she faced, she was able to achieve real and lasting success. Then, as today, she faced an extraordinary set of challenges and a chorus of voices saying her country’s best days were behind it. Thatcher’s successes are a comforting reminder of the power of a bold, conservative vision at work.

You can find a thoughtful review of the film at Diogenes' Middle Finger.

And now for some bonus footage. As noted above, Thatcher led her nation to an improving economy that saw the incomes of all citizens, from poorest to richest, rise. Yet she was attacked on class warfare grounds during "Question Time" near the end of her term because the income divide between rich and poor had widened.

How's that for hitting the nail on the head.

(H/T Althouse)

As an aside, let me add that I think the British political system is screwed for a number of reasons, but the one thing they do right is Question Time. Every Wednesday when Parliament is in session, the Prime Minister makes an appearance on the floor of Parliament and fields questions from the members of Parliament. It is healthy debate and high drama. It also explains why the average Prime Minister is, in terms of speaking and debating skills, head and shoulders beyond our average President. If there is one British custom we should take from Britain, this would be it.

Right To Work Versus Enforced Unionism

2012-01-14T01:40:00.001-05:00

Here are some facts "readily available from sources such as the National Institute for Labor Relations Research:"

– private sector employees compensation growth in real dollars during the period 2000-2010 grew by more than 11% annually in right-to-work states, and by less than 1% in “forced unionism” states;

– during the same period, growth in manufacturing GDP (in 2005 dollars) grew by 18.6% in right-to-work states against 8.3% in forced unionism states; and

– private sector employees’ cost-of-living adjusted compensation was actually greater in right-to-work states than in forced unionism states in 2010.

It is long past time that the U.S. did away with "closed shop" (forced unionism) states for any profession, public or private. Being forced to join a union and pay dues just so that you can take a job in a particular profession is nothing more than state imposed servitude. And as we can see from the facts above, it poses a heavy drag on state economies.Read the entire article: In Right To Work Battle, Narrative Trumps Fact On NPR

UAW Thugs Appeal Extortion Conviction . . . And Get A Stiffer Sentence

2012-01-14T00:29:00.000-05:00

Sometimes the scales of justice truly balance.

Two UAW officers, Danny Douglas and Jay Campbell, agreed in 1997 to end an 87 day strike at a Michigan GM plant - but only if GM agreed to hire Campbell's son and the son-in-law of another UAW official to high paying jobs for which they were unqualified. For this, Douglas and Campbell were tried and found guilty of extortion. The judge, who could have sentenced the pair to up to 30 years, instead gave them a gentle slap on the wrists of six months house arrest and two years probation.

Not satisfied with even this, Douglas and Campbell appealed their conviction.

The Sixth Circuit Court, applying the wisdom of Solomon, affirmed the conviction. The Circuit Court then remanded the case back to the trial judge because . . . the sentence was too light.

Douglas and Campbell are now headed to jail for 18 months, followed by a year and a day of probation.

Schadenfreude at its purest.

Update: Linked at Larwyn's Linx

So Much To Blog, So Little Time

2012-01-13T20:04:00.000-05:00

There are numerous fascinating posts out over the past few days that I have wanted to blog but have just run out of time. Here they are:

PJM: Michael Ledeen provides a reminder - totalitarianism must win out or be defeated. There is no middle ground. He puts it in terms of Iran, but I think it equally as applicable to the insane idea of negotiating with the Taliban.

That’s no doubt the “deep down” reason why Obama worked so hard — indeed is still secretly working hard — to get his version of the Hitler/Stalin pact with Iran. Somebody ought to remind Obama how that great triumph of totalitarian diplomacy worked out for the two of them.

Big Lizards has some additional cogent thoughts on the Obama decision to negotiate with the Taliban.

NRO: Real capitalism exists only in Communist China - - - well, the special district of Hong Kong, where limited government, a laughably simple tax code, and no major regulatory regime to speak of stand in direct contrast to the U.S. How would we like to see Hong Kong's near 6% growth this year.

The Daily Gator: A rogues gallery of the Top Ten Lunatic Fringe Ron Paul Supporters. Paul almost makes Obama's choice of associations look benign.

PJM: Spengler puts "private equity and creative destruction" into context, taking Gingrich and Perry rightfully to task. Theirs is an attack from the left on capitalism - and I say that as one who would much prefer to see Gingrich in the White House than Romney:

Want to see what America would look like without private equity? Move to Detroit and contemplate the ruins of a city ruined by the placid conformity of auto industry executives. The economic impact of the corporate takeover business can’t be measured by the outcome of takeovers as such. Private equity transformed the way American business thought about the world.

Across The Fence: Mark Meckler, of Tea Party fame, discusses his arrest in NYC for possession of a firearm (unloaded, in a case in his luggage, for which he had a valid permit) after he tried to declare it before boarding a plane at LaGuardia airport. NYC ultimately dropped the charges, but is refusing now to return his gun. It is all a Constitutional travesty.

PJM: Kevin Martin discusses the dissatisfaction of progressive blacks with Obama

Belafonte and others would be hard pressed to find anyone in the black community who could claim they are better off today than they were 3 years ago.

That goes hand in glove with my post the other day, that now is the time for conservatives to make a real push for the black vote. If we can convince 1 in 10 of the reality - that "on the two most important issues facing blacks today, jobs and education, their best hopes lay with the right," then the Democrats will be put in dire straits.

NRO: Five Muslims have been arrested in the UK and charged with violating a new hate speech law for stating in a leaflet that gays will go to hell and should receive the death penalty.

The passage of the law, and its first use this week, is the continuation of a worrying trend in the United Kingdom. Laws governing thought and speech, rather than deed, are becoming commonplace. . . . Worse, it cripples free expression and leaves people looking over their shoulders.

The UK, from which the concept of freedom of speech springs, has taken a worrying turn against it since the 1980's - to the extent that I find myself today, for the first time, coming down on the side of the radical Muzzies.

Ironic Surrealism: Obnoxious, hypocritical, outrageous . . . . are just a few of the adjectives one could quite legitimately apply to the DNC Chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, who has once again tried to blame the Tea Party for the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. What a detestable woman.

Got Medieval: If you like the legend of King Arthur, GM provides some of the fascinating backstory of the legend's author, Geoffrey of Monmouth.

Woman Honor Thyself: Gender confusion [shiver] is being foisted on us by "lefties and Hollywood bozos:"

The underlying and not so subtle aim is to blur and haze the line between men and womens’wear, thus blurring the line between men and women period.

How to Honor Obama's Place In History?

2012-01-11T22:55:00.000-05:00

Should he replace George Washington, our nation's first president and leader of the American Revolution, on the $1 bill?

What about replacing Abe Lincoln, the President who pulled our nation through its darkest hour!

Should Obama replace Alexander Hamilton, a Founding Father, first Secretary of the Treasury and leader of the Constitutional Convention!

What about replacing Andrew Jackson, "Old Hickory", who fought the British in New Orleans and paid off the entire national debt in 1835!

Should Obama replace Ulysses Grant, Union army general, who led the North to victory over slavery during the Civil War!

What about replacing Ben Franklin, a genius, inventor, statesman, political theorist and leading author of the Constitution!

Wait!! I've got it. The place Obama's visage truly deserves to be honored

We finally have someone to put on the food stamp!Obama's put more people on food stamps than any other president. Perfect!!!!

This post shamelessly stolen from an unlinked post on Lohud.com Forums

All Of The Stars Align - Time For Republicans To Court The Black Vote

2012-01-11T03:46:00.000-05:00

. . . One of the things that is long overdue is some Republican re-thinking — or perhaps thinking for the first time — about the approach that they have been using, with consistently disastrous results, for trying to get the black vote.

The black vote was once consistently Republican, from the time of Abraham Lincoln to Herbert Hoover. Even after Franklin D. Roosevelt won over the black vote to the Democrats, it was not considered remarkable when Eisenhower got a higher share of the black vote than any Republican president in recent times has.

It may be years before Republicans can again get a majority of the black vote. But Republicans don’t need to get a majority of the black vote. If they get 20 percent of the black vote, the Democrats are in trouble — and if they get 30 percent, the Democrats have had it in the general elections.
Thomas Sowell, How Republicans Can Win The Black Vote, NRO, 22 Jan. 2010

One of the great travesties of the past half century has been how the far left has fully sewn up the black vote. It was LBJ's championing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 - over the objection on Constitutional grounds of Barry Goldwater - that cemented the black vote for Democrats. Since then, blacks have regularly voted near 90% for Democrats.

The Democrats have been able to accomplish this by treating the blacks as servile victims permanently entitled to special treatment. Democrats substituted a brand of soft racism for the hard racism that was historically the hallmark of their party. And as we see today, that faustian bargain has worked out much better for the hard left than it has for blacks in our society.

But that house of cards is crumbling before our very eyes. Quite literally, all of the stars are aligned for conservatives to make a real push for the black vote. Blacks should be waking up to a hard lesson - that the left wing promises sold to them, the separatism and victimhood, they are all empty. And on the two most important issues facing blacks today, jobs and education, their best hopes lay with the right.

The first star in alignment is jobs. The black middle class has been growing steadily since 1955. But that middle class is under full frontal assault from Obama. According to the Economic Policy Institute, quoted in the Chicago Sun Times, the median net worth for black families has plunged 83% under Obama. Black unemployment has risen to 16.2%, and only 56.9% of black men over the age of 20 remain in today's workforce. According to the Censsus Bureau, the poverty rate for black households in America today is at a staggering 27.4%. As the Sun-Times summed this up:

Millions of Americans endured financial calamities in the recession. But for many in the black community, job loss has knocked them out of the middle class and back into poverty. And some experts warn of a historic reversal of hard-won economic gains that took black people decades to achieve.

“History is going to say the black middle class was decimated” over the past few years, said Maya Wiley, director of the Center for Social Inclusion. “But we’re not done writing history.”

Adds Algernon Austin, director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy: “The recession is not over for black folks.”

And indeed, it should be noted that Obama's most recent decision to decimate Army ranks will likewise severely restrict another historic avenue for black advancement to the middle class. In the Army, 27.7% of the enlisted ranks are filled by blacks.

The second star in alignment is the horrid state of public education in the inner cities. Is is, as Juan Williams has called it from the left, "the key civil rights issue of this generation." And as Thomas Sowell has opined from the right, "Republicans have a golden opportunity to go after the votes of black parents by connecting the dots and exposing one of the key reasons for bad education in inner cities and the bad consequences that follow.."

Both Williams and Sowell also agree that the single biggest hurdle to improving education in the inner cities is the power of teachers' unions. The left stands shoulder to shoulder with all public sector unions - teachers' unions in particular - because they provide much of the economic base for Democrats. And indeed, Exhibit one in trying to win the black vote on this issue is Obama who, at the start of his administration, ended the DC voucher program for DC's inner city youth, while at the same time he enrolled his children in the area's best private school.

Then there is the third star in alignment. Black Republicans are starting to gain a wide voice. When groups like the Black Caucus or the NAACP play the race card now, there are black conservatives like LTC Alen West to respond. And the message of West and his ilk to their fellow blacks is quite literally to runaway from the Democratic plantation.

And finally, the last star in alignment is the race card. There was a time when throwing the race card ended all debate, sending the one whom the card was aimed at ducking and running for cover. For a host of reasons, that is no longer true today. The race card is near bankrupt - though that won't stop the hard left from playing it while there is still any life in their bodies. The race card has been the key to their rise to power. Its bankruptcy spells their death knell. Indeed, expect the race card to fly fast and furious when Republicans seriously vie for the black vote.

For their part, as Republicans vie for the black vote, they must heed the warning of Dr. Thomas Sowell:

There is no point today in Republicans’ continuing to try to win over the average black voter by acting like imitation Democrats. Those who like what the Democrats are doing are going to vote for real Democrats.

Indeed, in the current climate, there is no reason to pretend to be anything other than a conservative Republican when addressing the black community.

It is doubtful that we will ever see again the stars aligned so favorably for breaking the Democrat's stranglehold on the black vote. But according to people close to the issue, it would appear that there is virtually no top down attempt being made by the Republican Party to court the black vote. This from PJM:

Timothy Johnson is the chairman and founder of the Frederick Douglass Foundation. He is less than impressed with the Republican Party’s outreach efforts:I’m a past party official, so I can speak from in house party politics. The short answer is the party sucks at it. That’s the bottom line. The party when it comes down to the black community is doing a terrible job, and is still doing a terrible job.Johnson said that the GOP may have done a little better under the leadership of Michael Steele, but the current leadership has simply given up on getting black votes:
I have candidates who are honest with me and they say, “Tim, I’ve had people tell me ‘Don’t worry about the black community.’” That pisses me off. When they are honest with me and say, ‘Tim, we’ve been told, ‘Don’t worry about going to the black community, they’re not going to vote for you anyway,’” that’s a bold faced lie. You don’t know who I’m going to vote for. I’m an American.

That is just unforgivable. The opportunity is here for a long term shift in the political calculus in favor of the right and very much for the betterment of black Americans as a whole. It just remains to be taken like the low hanging fruit that it is.

Update: Linked at Larwyn's Linx and What Bubba Knows. Thanks all.

Carbon Dioxide, The Wonder Gas -- Will It Save Us From The Next Ice Age?

2012-01-10T03:55:00.000-05:00

CO2 - is there anything it can't do. A few weeks ago, we learned from a peer reviewed study that increasing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere since the dawn of the Industrial Age had played a primary role in increasing agricultural output, and that such higher CO2 concentrations - it is plant food after all - will be the key to feeding the world's expanding population into the future. Today, we learn that CO2 may well be the key to preventing the next catastrophic Ice Age.

Amazingly, this latest study is being reported by the BBC's Richard Black, a true IPCC-loving, Climategate-denying, scare-mongering uber-warmie. To say that I am surprised is putting it mildly.

To give some background, our world cyclically passes through major and minor ice ages - and by that I mean long-term reductions in the earth's temperature giving rise to advancing polar ice sheets and glaciers. There have been five major ice ages in our earth's history. The worst occurred between 850 to 630 million years ago during the Cryogenian period, when the entire earth was covered in ice, even to the equator. The periods in between ice ages have been categorized by a near complete absence of ice on our planet. Technically, we are today still in an ice age that began 2.5 million years ago at the start of the Pleistocene period because "the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets still exist." Fortunately for humanity, we are living in an interglacial period of the ice age known as the Holocene.

With that said, according to the BBC's Mr. Black, a team of scientists headed by Cambridge University researcher Luke Skinner published a study in Nature Geoscience, positing that the next devastating ice age could be expected sometime in the next 1,500 years. Such an event would "cover much of the northern hemisphere, many species would face extinction and the productivity of the biosphere would diminish as fertile farmlands went under the ice." Indeed, the reality has always been that we as a species have exponentially more to fear from global cooling than global warming.

But according to the Cambridge research team, carbon dioxide is our savior. Carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is currently at 390 ppm (parts per million). So long as we keep carbon concentrations above 240 to 280 ppm, glaciation will not begin, and the next cyclical ice age will be put off.

Not surprisingly, nobody is loving life more than Marc Morano at Climate Depot at the moment:

Rev your SUVs! Global Warming To Save The Planet?: Will rising levels of CO2 prevent a new Ice Age & save civilization?

A Spot Of Humor From Down Under . . .

2012-01-09T06:37:00.000-05:00

From my favorite blog down under . . .

‘I was devastated to find out my wife was having an affair but, by turning to religion, I was soon able to come to terms with the whole thing. I converted to Islam, and we’re stoning her in the morning!

The wife suggested I get myself one of those penis enlargers, so I did…. she’s 21 and her name’s Lucy.

Went to the pub with my girlfriend last night. Locals were shouting “pedophile!” and other names at me, just because my girlfriend is 21 and I’m 50. It completely spoiled our 10th anniversary.

My son was thrown out of school today for letting a girl in his class give him a hand-job. I said “Son, that’s 3 schools this year! You’d better stop before you’re banned from teaching altogether.”

Do visit Crusader Rabbit for the rest of the jokes.

Cooking The Employment Numbers

2012-01-08T16:10:00.000-05:00

The Labor Dept.'s December's job numbers - 200,000 jobs created and 8.5% unemployment - were celebrated throughout the MSM as proof that the economy is turning around. The numbers, as always, are seasonally adjusted. But what is different about this year's seasonal adjustment is that the Labor Dept. deviate's significantly upward with past December adjustments. Tom Blumer at BizzyBlog has the analysis:

Yesterday’s raw result, if achieved in either of those two Decembers [2004 and 2005}, would have led to a seasonally adjusted result of about 140,000 — 60,000 less than reported.

In the private sector (blue boxes at right), the raw result in December 2005 of 94,000 jobs lost was only 14,000 jobs worse than the -80,000 reported for December 2011, yet yesterday’s seasonally adjusted result was 74,000 jobs higher (212K vs. 138K). What’s more, the nearly breakeven raw result in December 2006 (only 6,000 jobs lost) led to 37,000 fewer job additions after seasonal adjustment than yesterday (175K vs. 212K).

It would seem that the Labor Dept. has learned new math. In any event, as I have pointed out so often before, the focus on Labor's U-3 number, in this case 8.5%, is ridiculous because it discounts a vast number of long term unemployed, deeming them to have voluntarily left the workforce. The U-6 unemployment number captures more of the long term unemployed, as well as those who are working part time simply because they cannot find full term employment. A comparison of the U-3 and U-6 numbers gives a better feel for true unemployment situation - and it is not 8.5%

Another Poor Debate Compliments Of ABC

2012-01-08T00:40:00.001-05:00

I said it the last time ABC hosted the Republican debate, and I'll say it again - the Republican candidates should never agree to a debate hosted by George Stephanopoulos and Diane Sawyer. Last night's debate was another mini-travesty with the moderators asking utterly inane questions seemingly right out of the Democratic playbook. The worst of the bunch was whether states have a right to ban contraception. As Romney pointed out ten times to Stephanopoulos, that is not an issue any state has raised. Then there was another 15 minutes spent on gay marriage - an issue in which the candidates have not an inch of space between their positions. The only reason to dwell on it in a Republican debate was to prime the left wing pump for the general election.

Romney got through the debate without being seriously challenged by any of the candidates. Newt hinted at a challenge, but could have been much more aggressive in comparing and contrasting his economic plan with Romney's, as well as his experience in creating the conditions for job growth. At this point though, it might all be academic. Michael Barone is calling it for Romney. I will hold my breath until South Carolina.

As always in the debates, the best lines of the night came from Gingrich. Chief among those was his response on the gay marriage issue - refusing to take the Stephanopoulos bait:

Even two of the most despicable pundits on the right, Coulter and Rubin, applauded Newt for that answer on twitter. I can only guess that they feel Newt's candidacy is already mortally wounded, and thus it is safe now to show a bit of magnanimity. If Newt was leading, I would expect the two of them to be banging the drum on how Newt's performance was dismal and how Romney shined. They are a disgraceful pair.

Ron Paul was Ron Paul, taking shots at Santorum and Gingrich, though surprisingly not really taking any shots at Romney. If you were not for Paul before the debate, nothing he said is likely to change your mind.

Santorum got asked a lot of questions and didn't fumble any of them. My sense was that he neither helped nor hurt himself tonight.

As an aside, let me point out that I do not support Santorum for the nomination. Indeed, I rank him just above Ron Paul. My problems with Santorum are two fold. One, he lacks charisma and seems humorless. Two, my sense is that he is committed to social conservatism the way the far left is committed to progressivism. He would push to ensconce his views into law without respect to federalism or majority views, as the far left has done with their own ideology over the past fifty years. While I am a social conservative, I am a Constitutionalist first. I do not think that Santorum is.

Huntsman and Perry did not get asked many questions. I can't see them staying in the race beyond South Carolina.

Stossel: Our Economic Situation In Simple English

2012-01-07T21:45:00.000-05:00

From John Stossel's blog:

Knight Of The Living Racist Dead

2012-01-07T15:37:00.000-05:00

Zombies sucking out the brains of LA Times reporters. Marie Antoinette. Gone With The Wind. Read Bookworm Room, and the Ace of Spades to find the common thread. It is low hanging fruit, but what Book and Ace do with it rises to the level of art.

The Mitts Are Off

2012-01-07T03:13:00.000-05:00

Compliments of Newt: