Activism

MIchele Bachmann: ‘Cap and trade’? More like ‘tax and spend’

MIchele Bachmann: ‘Cap and trade’? More like ‘tax and spend’.

Incredible the sludge the left and oblivious apolitical will swallow in the name of global warming hysteria. I’d say “climate change” (which is and of itself is like saying “soft softness”) but that term is the out many fools on the dirt-worshipping left are using as an escape crutch from the obvious erroneous and embarrassing call on this and last decade’s “Global Warming”.

Global Warming: On Hold?

Here goes… we told you so. Certainly not as contrite as required, climatology “scientists” are being pantsed soundly of late. This latest in an article on the Discovery Channel website…

March 2, 2009 — For those who have endured this winter’s frigid temperatures and today’s heavy snowstorm in the Northeast, the concept of global warming may seem, well, almost wishful.

But climate is known to be variable — a cold winter, or a few strung together doesn’t mean the planet is cooling. Still, according to a new study in Geophysical Research Letters, global warming may have hit a speed bump and could go into hiding for decades.

Earth’s climate continues to confound scientists. Following a 30-year trend of warming, global temperatures have flatlined since 2001 despite rising greenhouse gas concentrations, and a heat surplus that should have cranked up the planetary thermostat.

“This is nothing like anything we’ve seen since 1950,” Kyle Swanson of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee said. “Cooling events since then had firm causes, like eruptions or large-magnitude La Ninas. This current cooling doesn’t have one.”

Instead, Swanson and colleague Anastasios Tsonis think a series of climate processes have aligned, conspiring to chill the climate. In 1997 and 1998, the tropical Pacific Ocean warmed rapidly in what Swanson called a “super El Nino event.” It sent a shock wave through the oceans and atmosphere, jarring their circulation patterns into unison.

How does this square with temperature records from 2005-2007, by some measurements among the warmest years on record? When added up with the other four years since 2001, Swanson said the overall trend is flat, even though temperatures should have gone up by 0.2 degrees Centigrade (0.36 degrees Fahrenheit) during that time.

The discrepancy gets to the heart of one of the toughest problems in climate science — identifying the difference between natural variability (like the occasional March snowstorm) from human-induced change.

Princeton Professor Denies Global Warming Theory

The latest in a very long line of sane to oppose The Cult of Gore Hippies.

Physics professor William Happer GS ’64 has some tough words for scientists who believe that carbon dioxide is causing global warming.

“This is George Orwell. This is the ‘Germans are the master race. The Jews are the scum of the earth.’ It’s that kind of propaganda,” Happer, the Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics, said in an interview. “Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. Every time you exhale, you exhale air that has 4 percent carbon dioxide. To say that that’s a pollutant just boggles my mind. What used to be science has turned into a cult.

How can you not like this guy?

…Happer served as director of the Office of Energy Research in the U.S. Department of Energy under President George H.W. Bush and was subsequently fired by Vice President Al Gore, reportedly for his refusal to support Gore’s views on climate change. He asked last month to be added to a list of global warming dissenters in a Senate Environment and Public Works Committee report. The list includes more than 650 experts who challenge the belief that human activity is contributing to global warming.

“All the evidence I see is that the current warming of the climate is just like past warmings. In fact, it’s not as much as past warmings yet, and it probably has little to do with carbon dioxide, just like past warmings had little to do with carbon dioxide,” Happer explained.

“Their whole career depends on pushing. They have no other reason to exist. I could care less. I don’t get a dime one way or another from the global warming issue,” Happer noted. “I’m not on the payroll of oil companies as they are. They are funded by BP.

Happer explained that his beliefs about climate change come from his experience at the Department of Energy, at which Happer… supervised all non-weapons energy research, including climate change research. Managing a budget of more than $3 billion…

“[Climate scientists] would give me a briefing. It was a completely different experience. I remember one speaker who asked why I wanted to know, why I asked that question. So I said, you know I always ask questions at these briefings … I often get a much better view of [things] in the interchange with the speaker,” Happer said. “This guy looked at me and said, ‘What answer would you like?’ I knew I was in trouble then. This was a community even in the early 1990s that was being turned political. [The attitude was] ‘Give me all this money, and I’ll get the answer you like.’ ”

Happer said he is dismayed by the politicization of the issue and believes the community of climate change scientists has become a veritable “religious cult,” noting that nobody understands or questions any of the science.

He noted in an interview that in the past decade, despite what he called “alarmist” claims, there has not only not been warming, there has in fact been global cooling. He added that climate change scientists are unable to use models to either predict the future or accurately model past events.

“There was a baseball sage who said prediction is hard, especially of the future, but the implication was that you could look at the past and at least second-guess the past,” Happer explained. “They can’t even do that.”

Happer cited an ice age at the time of the American Revolution, when Londoners skated on the Thames, and warm periods during the Middle Ages, when settlers were able to farm southern portions of Greenland, as evidence of naturally occurring fluctuations that undermine the case for anthropogenic influence.

“[Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration] was exactly the same then. It didn’t change at all,” he explained. “So there was something that was making the earth warm and cool that modelers still don’t really understand.”

The problem does not in fact exist, he said, and society should not sacrifice for nothing.

“[Climate change theory has] been extremely bad for science. It’s going to give science a really bad name in the future,” he said. “I think science is one of the great triumphs of humankind, and I hate to see it dragged through the mud in an episode like this.”

Bold added by Tickler

Read the whole article here, complete with deceptive but not-so-subtle staff writer spin in attempt to explain away certain aspects of the professor’s position.

Tim Kring, Added To The Naughty List

Tim Kring – The creator/writer of the NBC series Heroes and has chosen the easy path in taking up the New York/Hollywood cause of uneducated, misdirected, bigoted, and boring attacks on religion with his latest entry in the convoluted world of wish-washy characters and time-travel as plot patch. Season 3, Episode 14 – “A Clear And Present Danger” tries hard, but embarrassingly fails, to paint an abstract called “religion” as the source of evil. Certainly just as all Hollywood liberals can’t be 100% stupid and self-loathing, though their lives reflect it, all religion is certainly not evil. He’s right about one thing though, Obama’s fiasco has brought with it a greater sense of safety for those who have no moral compass.

Read the Full List

NO ID NEEDED! I Just Voted and Found Inconsistencies

I wish I had video of this, but I only have the audio. I’ll do the best I can to describe the missing visuals…

I watched several people walk to the table and point out their name, sign and go into the booth to vote. Not a single person was showing ID, no was asked.

My wife went before me and simply pointed to the paper worksheet with all of the name on them and said “That’s me”. The poll workers both pointed her to the booth and away she went to vote. She could have been anyone Obama bused in from out of state, like he’s known to do.

Me Poll Monitor 1 Poll Monitor 2
“Last name, sir?”
“[My Last Name]”
(flipping through pages to find my name, finds the right page)
“That’s it right there. [First and middle initial].”
(pushes page to me and gives me a pen, pointing to the signature line)
“Do I need to show ID?”
(stands up) “Yes, sir! We have to see ID.”
“No, no, not the ID.”
“Let…”
“Here…”
“Can I see the ID, sir?”
“Are you asking for ID for everyone?”
“No, we don’t need ID”
“No one does?”
“No”
“Sir.”
“So I could be anybody?”
“Sir, can I see the ID, I just said it.”
“So you want it.”
“Yes.”
“After I asked?”
“I’m gonna ask anyway.”
“Were you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“No.” (laughs awkwardly)
“That’s interesting, cause she didn’t want it.” (I pointed to poll monitor 2)
“Sir, I am the chairperson here because … waiting out there so I have to ask.”
“Ah”
“Ok?”
“But my wife just went without showing ID.”
“Who, who, who is the person that just came? Maybe when I went down to the dock.”
“No. You were standing right here. Right in front of me. This woman.” (pointing to the space my wife had just vacated on the floor in front of me) “Who’s in the poll right now.” (pointing to the booth) “Did not show ID.”
“Maybe, I didn’t take notice.”
“She didn’t show ID!”
“I said I did not. I said ‘I’, my mistake.”
“Yes, but shouldn’t you notice?”
“Yeah. Really that’s my mistake. People have to show ID, especially right here…” (points to another persons name on the list) “and then right there” (points to another name on the list)
“But I just watched her not show ID, so how many people have not showed?”
“Yes, but you see, for you…”
“She, she will not show ID here. For you, you have to show ID. Because it is recommended that…”
“For you they’re asking for ID.”
“They ask us. You have to.”
“Uh, that’s not me.” (pointing to the name they are looking at, a few people below mine)
“Ok. We are just saying people like that. People like this…” (pointing back at my name) “we don’t have to ask them.”
“Why is that?”
“Because maybe they a, they, they, they ah, submit your papers they was in… uhhhh”
“I don’t know.”
“The same. (pause) That was why they asked, and they made a special ballot for those people anyway. Another booklet.”
“So for you they didn’t need it, you see?”
“You see, we don’t need it! Anyway…”
“OK”

What else can you say to that? I considered lecturing them about how to run a fair and accurate polling place, but it was clear they were completely in the dark and I’d only be wasting my time on them.

Audio to be included as soon as I can verify that is was legal in my state.

Be Sure To Vote On 11/4! McCain Will Need Every One!

From Karl Rove in the WSJ…

Don’t Let the Polls Affect Your Vote
They were wrong in 2000 and 2004.

…On Monday, there were seven nationwide polls, with the candidates as close as three points in the Investors Business Daily/TIPP poll and as far apart as 10 points in Gallup’s “expanded” model. On Tuesday, the Gallup “traditional” model poll had the candidates separated by two points and the Pew poll had them separated by 15. On Wednesday, Battleground, Rasmussen and Gallup “traditional” model polls had the candidates separated by three points while Diageo/Hotline and Gallup “expanded” model polls had the spread at seven points.

Polls can reveal underlying or emerging trends and help campaigns decide where to focus. The danger is that commentators use them to declare a race over before the votes are in. This can demoralize the underdog’s supporters, depressing turnout. I know that from experience.

On election night in 2000 Al Hunt — then a columnist for this newspaper and a commentator on CNN — was the first TV talking head to erroneously declare that Florida’s polls had closed, when those in the Panhandle were open for another hour. Shortly before 8 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, Judy Woodruff said: “A big call to make. CNN announces that we call Florida in the Al Gore column.”

Mr. Hunt and Ms. Woodruff were not only wrong. What they did was harmful. We know, for example, that turnout in 2000 compared to 1996 improved more in states whose polls had closed by the time Ms. Woodruff all but declared the contest over. The data suggests that as many as 500,000 people in the Midwest and West didn’t bother to vote after the networks indicated Florida cinched the race for Mr. Gore.

I recall, too, the media’s screwup in 2004, when exit-polling data leaked in the afternoon. It showed President Bush losing Pennsylvania by 17 points, New Hampshire by 18, behind among white males in Florida, and projected South Carolina and Colorado too close to call. It looked like the GOP would be wiped out.

Bob Shrum famously became the first to congratulate Sen. John Kerry by addressing him as “President Kerry.” Commentators let the exit polls color their coverage for hours until their certainty was undone by actual vote tallies.

Polls have proliferated this year in part because it is much easier for journalists to devote the limited space in their papers or on TV to the horse-race aspect of the election rather than its substance. And I admit, I’ve aided and abetted this process.

…The last national poll that showed Mr. McCain ahead came out Sept. 25 and the 232 polls since then have all shown Mr. Obama leading. Only one time in the past 14 presidential elections has a candidate won the popular vote and the Electoral College after trailing in the Gallup Poll the week before the election: Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Mr. Rove is a former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.

Hillary Backers: Obama’s Pattern of Fraud

There seems to be a pattern here…

From Newsmax this morning (FULL ARTICLE HERE)…

With accusations of voter registration fraud swirling as early voting begins in many states, some Hillary Clinton supporters are saying: “I told you so.”

Already in Iowa, the Obama campaign was breaking the rules, busing in supporters from neighboring states to vote illegally in the first contest in the primaries and physically intimidating Hillary supporters, they say.

Obama’s surprisingly strong win in Iowa, which defied all the polls, propelled his upstart candidacy to front-runner status. But Lynette Long, a Hillary supporter from Bethesda, Md., who has a long and respected academic career, believes Obama’s victory in Iowa and in 12 other caucus states was no miracle. “It was fraud,” she told Newsmax.

Long has spent several months studying the caucus and primary results.

“After studying the procedures and results from all 14 caucus states, interviewing dozens of witnesses, and reviewing hundreds of personal stories, my conclusion is that the Obama campaign willfully and intentionally defrauded the American public by systematically undermining the caucus process,” she said.

Sounds like ACORN.

In Hawaii, for example, the caucus organizers ran out of ballots, so Obama operatives created more from Post-its and scraps of paper and dumped them into ice cream buckets. “The caucuses ended up with more ballots than participants, a sure sign of voter fraud,” Long said.

In Nevada, Obama supporters upturned a wheelchair-bound woman who wanted to caucus for Hillary, flushed Clinton ballots down the toilets, and told union members they could vote only if their names were on the list of Obama supporters.

In Texas, more than 2,000 Clinton and Edwards supporters filed complaints with the state Democratic Party because of the massive fraud. The party acknowledged that the Obama campaign’s actions “amount to criminal violations” and ordered them to be reported to state and federal law enforcement, but nothing happened.

In caucus after caucus, Obama bused in supporters from out of state, intimidated elderly voters and women… Thanks to these and other strong-arm tactics, Obama won victories in all but one of the caucuses, even in states such as Maine where Hillary had been leading by double digits in the polls.

…Without these caucus wins, which Long and others claim were based on fraud, Clinton would be the Democrats’ nominee running against John McCain.

…Long has compiled many of these eyewitness reports from the 14 caucus states in a 98-page, single-spaced report and in an interactive Web site: www.caucusanalysis.org.

ACORN involvement

The Obama campaign recently admitted that it paid an affiliate of ACORN, the controversial community organizer that Obama represented in Chicago, more than $832,000 for “voter turnout” work during the primaries. The campaign initially claimed the money had been spent on “staging, sound and light” and “advance work.”

ACORN was known for its “intimidation tactics,” said independent scholar Stanley Kurtz, a senior fellow with the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., who has researched Obama’s long-standing ties to the group.

Fully 30 percent of 1.3 million new voters ACORN claims to have registered this year are believed to be illegitimate.

Jeff, a precinct captain for Clinton from Davenport, Iowa, thought his caucus was in the bag for his candidate, until just minutes before the voting actually began.

“From 6-6:30 p.m., it appeared as I had expected. Young, old males, females, Hispanics, whites, gay and lesbian friends arriving. Very heavily for Ms. Clinton, a fair amount for Edwards and some stragglers for Obama,” he said.

That makeup corresponded to what he had witnessed from many precinct walks he had made through local neighborhoods.

“My mind began to feel victory for my lady,’ he said. “THEN: at 6:50 p.m., over 75 people of African-American descent came walking in, passed the tables and sat in the Obama section. I knew one of them from my canvassing. I knew another one who did not live in this precinct. And aside from four or five families that live on Hillandale Road, there are no other black people in this unusually white precinct. And one of those black couples were in my Hillary section,” he said.

Thanks to the last-minute influx of unknown Obama supporters, Obama won twice the number of delegates from the precinct as Hillary Clinton.

After it was over, “a very large bus was seen in the parking lot afterwards carrying these folks back” to Illinois, Jeff said.

Obama’s flagrant busing of out-of-state caucus participants from Illinois was so obvious that even Joe Biden — today his running mate, then his rival — pointed it out at the time.

At a campaign stop before the Jan. 3 caucus at the JJ Diner in Des Moines, Biden “said what we were all thinking when he got on stage and said, ‘Hello Iowa!’ and then turned to Barack’s crowd and shouted, ‘and Hello Chicago!’” another precinct captain for Hillary told Long.

Thanks to Illinois campaign workers bused across the border into Iowa, all the precincts in eastern Iowa went for Obama, guaranteeing his win in the caucuses, Long said.

Obama supporters were also bused into northeast Iowa from Omaha, Nebraska, where Obama campaign workers were seen handing out “i-pods and free stuff: T-shirts, clothes, shoes, and free meals” to students and people in homeless shelters,” according to eyewitness reports Long collected.

In Iowa City, red and white chartered buses with Illinois license plates arrived from Illinois packed with boisterous African-American high school students, who came to caucus for Obama in Iowa after being recruited by Obama campaign workers.

…In state after state, Hillary was leading Obama in the polls right up until the last minute, when Obama won a landslide victory in the caucuses.

The discrepancies between the polls and the caucus results were stunning, Long told Newsmax. The most flagrant example was Minnesota. A Minnesota Public Radio/Humphrey Institute poll just one week before the Feb. 5 caucus gave Hillary a 7-point lead over Obama, 40-33.

But when the Minnesota caucus results were counted, Obama won by a landslide, with 66.39 percent to just 32.23 percent for Hillary, giving him 48 delegates, compared with 24 for Clinton.

“No poll is that far off,” Long told Newsmax.

Similar disparities occurred in 13 of 14 caucus states.

In Texas alone, she says, there were more than 2,000 complaints from Hillary Clinton and John Edwards supporters of Obama’s strong-arm tactics.

One Hillary supporter, who appears in Gaston’s new film, “We Will Not Be Silenced,” says she received death threats from Obama supporters after they saw her address in an online video she made to document fraud during the Texas caucus. “People called me a whore and a skank,” she said.

John Siegel, El Paso Area Captain for Hillary, said, “Some people saw outright cheating. Other people just saw strong-arm tactics. I saw fraud.”

Another woman, who was not identified in the film, described the sign-in process. “You’re supposed to sign your names on these sheets. The sheets are supposed to be controlled, and passed out — this is kind of how you maintain order. None of that was done. The sheets were just flying all over the place. You could put in your own names. You could add your own sheets or anything. It was just filled with fraud.”

Other witnesses described how Obama supporters went through the crowds at the caucus telling Hillary supporters they could go home because their votes had been counted, when in fact no vote count had yet taken place.

“I couldn’t believe this was happening,” one woman said in the film. “I thought this only happened in Third World countries.”

On election day in Texas, Clinton campaign lawyer Lyn Utrecht issued a news release that the national media widely ignored.

“The campaign legal hot line has been flooded with calls containing specific accusations of irregularities and voter intimidation against the Obama campaign,” she wrote. “This activity is undemocratic, probably illegal, and reflects a wanton disregard for the caucus process.”

She identified 18 separate precincts where Obama operatives had removed voting packets before the Clinton voters could arrive, despite a written warning from the state party not to remove them.

The hot line also received numerous calls during the day that “the Obama campaign has taken over caucus sites and locked the doors, excluding Clinton campaign supporters from participating in the caucus,” she wrote.

“There are numerous instances of Obama supporters filing out precinct convention sign-in sheets during the day and submitting them as completed vote totals at caucus. This is expressly against the rules,” she added.

But no one seemed to care.

…In a letter to Rep. Lois Capps, a Clinton supporter calling himself “Pacific John,” described the fraud he had witnessed during the caucuses.

“On election night in El Paso, it became obvious that the Obama field campaign was designed to steal caucuses. Prior to that, it was impossible for me to imagine the level of attempted fraud and disruption we would see,” he wrote.

“We saw stolen precincts where Obama organizers fabricated counts, made false entries on sign-in sheets, suppressed delegate counts, and suppressed caucus voters. We saw patterns such as missing electronic access code sheets and precinct packets taken before the legal time, like elsewhere in the state. Obama volunteers illegally took convention materials state-wide, with attempts as early as 6:30 am.”

The story of how Obama stole the Democratic Party caucuses — and consequently, the Democratic Party nomination — is important not just because it prefigures potential voter fraud in the Nov. 4 presidential election, which is under way.

It’s important because it fits a pattern that Chicago journalists and a few national and international commentators have noticed in all of the elections Obama has won in his career.

NBC correspondent Martin Fletcher described Obama’s first election victory, for the Illinois state Senate, in a recent commentary that appeared in the London Telegraph.

“Mr. Obama won a seat in the state Senate in 1996 by the unorthodox means of having surrogates successfully challenge the hundreds of nomination signatures that candidates submit. His Democratic rivals, including Alice Palmer, the incumbent, were all disqualified,” Fletcher wrote.

Obama’s election to the U.S. Senate “was even more curious,” conservative columnist Tony Blankley wrote in The Washington Times.

Citing an account that appeared in The Times of London, Blankley described how Obama managed to squeeze out his main Democratic rival, Blair Hull, after divorce papers revealed allegations that Hull had allegedly made a death threat to his former wife.

Then in the general election, “lightning struck again,” Blankley wrote, when his Republican opponent, wealthy businessman Jack Ryan, was forced to withdraw in extremis after his divorce papers revealed details of his sexual life with his former wife.

Just weeks before the election, the Illinois Republican party called on Alan Keyes of Maryland to challenge Obama in the general election. Obama won a landslide victory.

“Mr. Obama’s elections are pregnant with the implications that he has so far gamed every office he has sought by underhanded and sordid means,” Blankley wrote, while “the American media has let these extraordinary events simply pass without significant comment.”

Hillary Clinton supporters, belatedly, now agree.

© 2008 Newsmax. All rights reserved.

U.S. Chamber of Commerce vs. Democrats

I think the chamber of Commerce knows a thing or two about how economies are built and destroyed. They clearly see a danger in letting the Democrats run away with the government. From the WSJ…

The nation’s largest business lobby, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, has raised ire among Democratic leaders for pouring millions of dollars into an advertising push to prevent the party from winning dominance in the Senate next year…

The Chamber says it has raised enough money this year from corporations to spend about $35 million on the election, double its budget for House and Senate races in the 2006 election. The group is supporting pro-business candidates, almost exclusively Republicans in contested Senate races.

Business executives fear that Democrats, bouyed by heavy spending from organized labor, could gain enough muscle in the Senate to spark policies favoring increased unionization, higher taxes, more restrictions on trade and more regulation on the financial-services and housing sectors

The Chamber has spent $10 million on advertising on behalf of pro-business candidates in tight races since the end of August. No other single organization has spent more on Senate races, according to data collected by the Federal Election Commission. The Chamber says it will spend millions more in the final weeks of the campaign.

The Washington-based Chamber represents three million U.S. business and most of the thousands of local chambers of commerce from around the country. The lobbying federation says it doesn’t favor either party, but backs “pro-business candidates” from both. It has no legal obligation to be nonpartisan.

Overall, U.S. businesses tend to contribute similar amounts to Democrats and Republicans in their direct giving to candidates and political parties. Through Sept. 30, companies and their political action committees donated $129.6 million to Democrats and $132.6 million to Republicans.

The Chamber of Commerce is attempting to counteract another major font of funding and influence — the $300 million that organized labor will spend on campaigns during this election cycle, most of it aimed at persuading unionized workers to vote Democratic. Much of that money has gone directly to campaigns: Through Sept. 30, labor unions and their political action committees have given $52.3 million to Democrats and $4.8 million to Republicans, according to data compiled by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

Yet another in a very long line of singularly decisionable proofs that Obama and the Democrats are wrong for America. Combine them and I’m shocked that Obama has any but the far-Left sideshow vote.

American fence-sitters are letting temporary emotion and hot-air speech-writing rule the election cycle, rather than substance, experience, and sound policy to our very painful downfall if Obama and and Democrat candidates win.