While most of the federal government was shut down on Monday due to the weekend’s blizzard (your humble blogger jas just got his internet service restored after 3 days, and has spent the afternoon unburying his mobile CO2 manufacturing unit), the President decided it was the perfect time to unveil his new office of doom-mongering Climate Service:
The Obama administration on Monday proposed a new agency to study and report on the changing climate.
Also known as global warming, climate change has drawn widespread concern in recent years as temperatures around the world rise, threatening to harm crops, spread disease, increase sea levels, change storm and drought patterns and cause polar melting.
Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, announced NOAA will set up the new Climate Service to operate in tandem with NOAA’s National Weather Service and National Ocean Service.
“Whether we like it or not, climate change represents a real threat,” Locke said Monday at a news conference.
Lubchenco added, “Climate change is real, it’s happening now.” She said climate information is vital to the wind power industry, coastal community planning, fishermen and fishery managers, farmers and public health officials.
This new propaganda service arrives on the scene just in time, as the AGW theory melts around us.
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The race-mongering never stops. John Conyers avoided my by no means exhaustive list of the most egregious plays of the race card in 2009, but he’ll certainly be in the 2010 edition:
Fox has obtained a letter that Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) wrote to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton asking that she demote Rajiv Shah, the Director of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
It’s rare for a lawmaker to write to a cabinet secretary and demand specific action on a personnel matter.
In the letter, Conyers says that he was “alarmed and chagrined” to learn that Shah did not bring any African American staff to a meeting of the Congressional Black Caucus on Wednesday to discuss Haiti.
…“This is so serious an error in judgment that it warrants his immediate demotion to a subordinate position at AID,” Conyers wrote, noting that there was “under-representation of minorities in key positions at the State Department.”
How post-racial of him.
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It’s not just exaggerated political rhetoric, the American left really does look fondly upon the blood-soaked socialist ideology:
The Gallup Poll reports that a majority of Democrats, 53%, have a “positive” image of socialism, which includes independents who lean toward the blue party.
Only 17 percent of Republican and GOP-leaners hold socialism in a positive light. In total, more than one-third of Americans, 36%, have a positive image of socialism.
The propaganda of state-run education is at least partly to blame.
So how much blood and misery must an ideology cause before the left abandons it?
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Retracto, an impressive alpaca with a stare that could make Clint Eastwood jealous, has a field day with Salon.com and Max Blumenthal.
Go ahead, liberal media, make my day.
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Paul Krugman’s latest op-ed says deficits don’t matter. It’s all just hysterics driven by politics:
These days it’s hard to pick up a newspaper or turn on a news program without encountering stern warnings about the federal budget deficit. The deficit threatens economic recovery, we’re told; it puts American economic stability at risk; it will undermine our influence in the world. These claims generally aren’t stated as opinions, as views held by some analysts but disputed by others. Instead, they’re reported as if they were facts, plain and simple.
…So why the sudden ubiquity of deficit scare stories? It isn’t being driven by any actual news. It has been obvious for at least a year that the U.S. government would face an extended period of large deficits, and projections of those deficits haven’t changed much since last summer. Yet the drumbeat of dire fiscal warnings has grown vastly louder.
To me — and I’m not alone in this — the sudden outbreak of deficit hysteria brings back memories of the groupthink that took hold during the run-up to the Iraq war. Now, as then, dubious allegations, not backed by hard evidence, are being reported as if they have been established beyond a shadow of a doubt. Now, as then, much of the political and media establishments have bought into the notion that we must take drastic action quickly, even though there hasn’t been any new information to justify this sudden urgency. Now, as then, those who challenge the prevailing narrative, no matter how strong their case and no matter how solid their background, are being marginalized.
Krugman’s head is firmly in the sand on today’s massive, runaway deficit. He’s clinging desperately to the Keynesian claptrap about spending our way to prosperity and one day, after government has grown so big and the economy is in stimulated utopia and we’re all millionaires, reigning in public spending.
But it wasn’t always so. In 2003, when the 10-year deficit projection was a mere fraction of what it is today, Krugman was sounding the alarm:
Last week the Congressional Budget Office marked down its estimates yet again. Just two years ago, you may remember, the C.B.O. was projecting a 10-year surplus of $5.6 trillion. Now it projects a 10-year deficit of $1.8 trillion.
And that’s way too optimistic. The Congressional Budget Office operates under ground rules that force it to wear rose-colored lenses. If you take into account — as the C.B.O. cannot — the effects of likely changes in the alternative minimum tax, include realistic estimates of future spending and allow for the cost of war and reconstruction, it’s clear that the 10-year deficit will be at least $3 trillion.
So what? Two years ago the administration promised to run large surpluses. A year ago it said the deficit was only temporary. Now it says deficits don’t matter. But we’re looking at a fiscal crisis that will drive interest rates sky-high.
…But what’s really scary — what makes a fixed-rate mortgage seem like such a good idea — is the looming threat to the federal government’s solvency.
So smaller deficits under Bush are a “fiscal crisis” and part of a “looming threat to the federal government’s solvency.” But today’s massive deficits under the Democrats just don’t matter, and anyone who says otherwise is a scaremonger promoting “deficit hysteria.”
Just another day in hypocrite paradise.
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The reason Barack Obama made a call to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell” in his State of the Union speech is obviously political. He is in a tough way and needs a win to bring home to his base. That said, he has been consistent on this position from the beginning, and it’s not just his base that should be pleased. Conservatives should support repealing the policy as well, for the simple reason that it’s the right thing to do.
The enforcement of DADT has resulted in the loss of key personnel, such as translators, at a time when we cannot afford such. Why must we fight with one gay hand behind our back?
For years, concerns over unit cohesion have been sufficient to prevent revisiting the 90’s era rule. But are these concerns justified? Twenty-five countries allow gays to serve openly in the military, including the highly effective Israeli Defense Force. The Israeli decision in 1993 to allow gays to serve openly, if they choose, had no negative impact on their effectiveness.
It’s time for the U.S. to stop limiting our resources by denying qualified soldiers the chance to serve on the basis of their preferences in the bed room.
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Keynes’ iron grip on elected officials isn’t letting up:
Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.), the House majority whip, said that trying to find greater savings in the budget, which was released by President Barack Obama this morning, wouldn’t help alleviate the recession.
“We’ve got to make some decisions here as to what’s in the best interests of our country going forward,” Clyburn said during an appearance on Fox News. “And I think the best interest is to invest in education, control these deficits, while at the same time trying to get people back to work.”
“We’re not going to save our way out of this recession,” the majority whip added. “We’ve got to spend our way out of this recession, and I think most economists know that.”
Next up, James Clyburn teaches us how to drink our way out of alcoholism.
Keep in mind, this is the third highest ranking member in the U.S. House. Comforting, isn’t it?
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This story seems like one of those “teachable moments” I keep hearing so much about:
The University of Oregon student body has been learning some useful lessons in liberty as the campus debates what to do about an extremely controversial group’s presence on campus. Last week, the student government narrowly voted to defend free expression when it voted down a resolution designed to push the group off campus for good.
The organization is the Pacifica Forum, a discussion group hosted on campus by an emeritus professor, as permitted by university rules. The group is so controversial, it appears, because every so often it discusses topics that a lot of people on campus find extremely offensive—such as the swastika or Nazism—well, not just because of the topics, but because some of the participants appear to the critics to be voicing far too much sympathy for ideas of white supremacy. You can find this criticism of the Pacifica Forum in full force on the Facebook.com group “UofO students and community members against the Pacifica Forum,” and you can find defenses of the group’s right to free expression in reasonably good order on the website of student publication the Oregon Commentator.
…The group met at the university’s Erb Memorial Student Union until a few weeks ago, when it met in a larger space than usual because of the expectation of hundreds of protesters for the discussion of the swastika on January 15. The protesters came and disrupted the event.
The disruption appears to have been organized by student government president Emma Kallaway, and Vice President Getachew Kassa who, according to the Oregon Commentator’s January 25 issue, helped to coordinate a rally prior to the disruption:
“We wanted to create fear and anger in the forum, and we accomplished that today,” said Kassa.
According to campus newspaper the Oregon Daily Emerald, the disruption was severe enough that law enforcement officers had to remove several protesters from the room.
And that is how not to deal with “bad” speech.
Some people have bad ideas. Some people subscribe to hate, and they seek out like minded people to discuss these views with. That’s just a part of life.
At issue is how you deal with such people. If all they’re doing is exercising their rights to speech and association, then theatrics are the wrong way to go. Protesting, disruption, temper tantrums – all just serve to bring attention on the target group.
The best way to deal with bad speech is with more speech. If people are listening to their ideas, then use your own speech to say why they are wrong. Don’t toss aside your own principles to have them silenced.
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I recount a year’s worth of race-mongering in my latest article on Big Government:
Leave a commentBarack Obama came into office with a promise of ushering in a new post-racial era. One year into his term and Chris Matthews has already declared, “Mission Accomplished!” He forgot Obama was black, you see. America is now post-racial! Sadly, the facts tell a very different story. Over the last year, we have witnessed a proliferation of indiscriminate accusations of racism, or a period of what I like to refer to as hyper-racialism.
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It’s not doing what they claimed it would do:
The 700-billion-dollar US government effort to rescue the financial system has failed to meet key goals such as sparking lending and curbing risky activities by banks, a special auditor said Sunday.
The special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program said in a report to Congress that it is too soon to measure the overall success of the program passed at the height of the financial crisis in October 2008.
The quarterly report said that because of TARP, “there are clear signs that aspects of the financial system are far more stable than they were at the height of the crisis in the fall of 2008.”
Talk about a low bar. Doing nothing would have accomplished that, and at 100% less the cost!
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