Telegraph.co.uk: Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation
A week after my colleague James Delingpole, on his Telegraph blog, coined the term “Climategate” to describe the scandal revealed by the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, Google was showing that the word now appears across the internet more than nine million times. But in all these acres of electronic coverage, one hugely relevant point about these thousands of documents has largely been missed.
The reason why even the Guardian’s George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) more…..
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Cato: ObamaCare’s Cost Could Top $6 Trillion
Congressional Democrats are using several budget gimmicks to disguise the cost of their health care overhaul, claiming the House and Senate bills would cost only (!) about $1 trillion over 10 years. Now that critics have begun to correct for those budget gimmicks, supporters of ObamaCare are firing back.
One gimmick makes the new entitlement spending appear smaller by not opening the spigot until late in the official 10-year budget window (2010–2019). Correcting for that gimmick in the Senate version, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) estimates, “When all this new spending occurs” — i.e., from 2014 through 2023 — “this bill will cost $2.5 trillion over that ten-year period.” more…..
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Charles Krauthammer: Kill The Bills. Do Health Reform Right
The United States has the best health care in the world — but because of its inefficiencies, also the most expensive. The fundamental problem with the 2,074-page Senate health-care bill (as with its 2,014-page House counterpart) is that it wildly compounds the complexity by adding hundreds of new provisions, regulations, mandates, committees, and other arbitrary bureaucratic inventions.
Worse, they are packed into a monstrous package without any regard to each other. The only thing linking these changes — such as the 118 new boards, commissions, and programs — is political expediency. Each must be able to garner just enough votes to pass. There is not even a pretense of a unifying vision or conceptual harmony. more…..
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Washington Examiner: Growing public backlash over Obamacare
Two-dozen Democrats from Republican-leaning districts, who voted for the House version of President Obama’s increasingly unpopular health care reform, are beginning to feel a growing public backlash. ReversetheVote.org has already raised $123,105 that will be dedicated exclusively to defeating all 24, including Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., in 2010 if they don’t reject the final conference committee version of the bill. They “voted to take away your healthcare and put it in the hands of federal bureaucrats,” the Web site says. “Democrats made a choice … next fall, voters will make a choice.” more…..
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WSJ: Voter Anger Is Building Over Deficits
The generic poll shows a 16-point swing to the GOP over last year.
After engineering an unprecedented spending surge for nearly a year, President Barack Obama now wants to signal that he takes deficits seriously. So this week the White House announced that it is considering creating a commission to figure how to fix the budget mess.
Eureka!
Well, almost. What seems to concern the president is not the problem runaway spending poses for taxpayers and the economy. Rather, what bothers him is the political problem it poses for Democrats. more…..
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Mark Steyn: Major Nidal Hasan had an enabler
Ever since this magazine attracted the attention of Canada’s “human rights” regime, defenders of the system have clung to a familiar argument. In a letter to Maclean’s, Jennifer Lynch, Q.C., Canada’s chief censor, put it this way:
“Steyn would have us believe that words, however hateful, should be given free rein. History has shown us that hateful words sometimes lead to hurtful actions that undermine freedom and have led to unspeakable crimes. That is why Canada and most other democracies have enacted legislation to place reasonable limits on the expression of hatred.”
“Hateful words” can lead to “unspeakable crimes.” The problem with this line is that it’s a historical twaddle, as I’ve pointed out. Yet still it comes up. It did last month, during my testimony to the House of Commons justice committee, when an opposition MP mused on whether it wouldn’t have been better to prohibit the publication of Mein Kampf. more…..
This is the road we’re on, pedal to the metal.
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This conventional wisdom about Obama’s first year isn’t just premature—it’s sure to be flipped on its head by the anniversary of his inauguration on Jan. 20. If, as seems increasingly likely, Obama wins passage of a health care reform a bill by that date, he will deliver his first State of the Union address having accomplished more than any other postwar American president at a comparable point in his presidency. This isn’t an ideological point or one that depends on agreement with his policies. It’s a neutral assessment of his emerging record—how many big, transformational things Obama is likely to have made happen in his first 12 months in office. more…..
No, really, I swear someone actually wrote that. Here we have yet another writer – in this case, one Jacob Weisberg – giving The One credit for things he has not yet done, for massively destructive ‘accomplishments’ he has not yet achieved, proving yet again that the delusion/psychosis of some on the left runs immeasurably deep.
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American Thinker: The Competing Narratives of Barry and Sarah
In the spring of 1964, Sarah Heath, then just three months old, flew into backwater Skagway, Alaska (population 650) aboard a 1930s-era Grumman Goose to start a new life with her parents, brother, and sister.
At that same time, in America’s other new outlier state, Hawaii, two-year-old Barry Obama was just getting used to a fatherless existence in the otherwise-comfortable world his white grandparents and occasionally his mother would make for him.
At the time, not even Nostradamus could have foretold that the paths of Barry and Sarah would intersect in the “historic” 2008 election, Barry as the first major party presidential nominee of African descent and Sarah as the first woman with a real shot at the vice-presidency. more…..
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Hot Air: NYT: Obama’s an amateur
It only took them three years to figure it out, of course. The Gray Lady’s ire focuses on the disaster Obama has made of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, which is usually a rolling disaster anyway. American Presidents haven’t been able to do much to make it better, but as the Times explains, this one’s made it a lot worse than it had to be — mainly because he’s a diplomatic novice with team full of incompetents more…..
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Victor Davis Hanson: We Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet
If you think things have been rough so far, hang on.
Just consider. The price of gas will soon likely increase. The cost of servicing our profligate borrowing will, too. One more terrorist attack like at Fort Hood, or nightly sermons from a grandstanding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, or a new Taliban offensive, and the momentum could shift to radical Islam in its decades-long war against the United States. Next year’s tax hikes will be real and large — and no longer just this year’s idle talk.
As these storm clouds gather, Congress bickers on Saturday nights about borrowing even more money for health-care reform, yet another federal entitlement. more…..
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Gateway Pundit: Pelosi: We Blew Billions & Got Absolutely Nothing For It
Hello?… Is anyone home?
Nancy Pelosi told leftist supporters today that the the reason Americans are mad about their record spending is that “they’re not getting anything for it.”
And, that’s why she wants a new Stimulus Bill! more…..
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Mail Online: ‘This isn’t the Britain we fought for,’ say the ‘unknown warriors’ of WWII
Sarah Robinson was just a teenager when World War II broke out. She endured the Blitz, watching for fires during Luftwaffe air raids armed with a bucket of sand. Often she would walk ten miles home from work in the blackout, with bombs falling around her. As soon as she turned 18, she joined the Royal Navy to do her bit for the war effort.
Hers was a small part in a huge, history-making enterprise, and her contribution epitomises her generation’s sense of service and sacrifice. Nearly 400,000 Britons died. Millions more were scarred by the experience, physically and mentally.
But was it worth it? Her answer – and the answer of many of her contemporaries, now in their 80s and 90s – is a resounding No. more…..
The sadness I feel for Britain is only outweighed by the knowledge that this is America in a few more short years if we don’t rout the socialist/Marxist infestation of government and education/academia.
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-Cnation