How can you not believe in God when stuff like this keeps happening!  :)

Big chill buries global warming protest 

Global warming activists had stormed Washington for what was billed as the nation’s largest act of civil disobedience to fight climate change, only to see the city almost shut down by a major winter storm.

As Washington was blasted with its heaviest snowfall of the winter, politicians cancelled appearances and schools and businesses were closed.

The storm also buried under 15cm of snow any hope of global warming activism.

Reports said the activists had hoped to swarm Washington in an effort to force the Government to close the Capitol Power Plant, which heats and cools government buildings, including the Supreme Court and the Capitol.

Fox News said the scene was reminiscent of a day in January 2004, when Al Gore made an address on global warming in New York — on one of the coldest days in the city’s history.

[...]

The storm was more serious elsewhere, paralysing most of the east coast yesterday.

For the first time in five years New York City cancelled school for its 1.1 million students.

I think God invented global warming just so he could mock the climate scientists like this!

We are frequently inundated with frantic cries from the left concerning the widening income gap, or how the rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer. These are, of course, emotional arguments designed to pluck at our heart strings as opposed to rational arguments based on facts and data.

One of the unspoken assumptions in that emotional argument is that “the rich” are invariably the same group of people and that “the poor” are likewise the same. This implicit assumption is key to the emotional reaction that the liberals are counting on because it evokes images of a huddled mass of helpless and starving poor who are trapped in a system which exploits them on a daily basis, and unfairly so. But does this assumption stand up to rational scrutiny?

A November 13, 2007 Wall Street Journal article titled Movin’ On Up discusses some of the findings in a U.S. Income Mobility Study conducted by the Treasury Department which exposes these emotional appeals as being just “so much populist hokum:”

The Treasury study examined a huge sample of 96,700 income tax returns from 1996 and 2005 for Americans over the age of 25. The study tracks what happened to these tax filers over this 10-year period. One of the notable, and reassuring, findings is that nearly 58% of filers who were in the poorest income group in 1996 had moved into a higher income category by 2005. Nearly 25% jumped into the middle or upper-middle income groups, and 5.3% made it all the way to the highest quintile.

Of those in the second lowest income quintile, nearly 50% moved into the middle quintile or higher, and only 17% moved down. This is a stunning show of upward mobility, meaning that more than half of all lower-income Americans in 1996 had moved up the income scale in only 10 years.

So what does this mean? In the ten year period being studied almost 60% of those who started out in the lowest income group in 1996 had made use of the opportunities afforded them in the United States to significantly improve their circumstances by 2005, with 25% of them having risen to the middle and upper-middle income quintiles, and with around 5.3% having completely reversed their fortunes to move up to the top of the income strata. So rather than a stagnant huddled group of people trapped in poverty, as the liberals would like us to believe, we have significant evidence of a dynamic system which affords a wealth of opportunity for everyone to improve their lives if they so choose.

But what of the rich, you ask? The upper 5% or even 1% of the income earners? Well, as the graphic above illustrates these groups have not faired nearly as well since they are the only groups to experience an actual decline in their median incomes over the study period. The upper 5% had their median incomes decline by 6.8% and the upper 1% had their median incomes decline 25.8%.

In a period where the lowest quintile saw their median incomes increase by 90.5% (almost double) the upper 1% actually lost about 25.8% (about one quarter) of their median income. This is hardly an example of the rich getting richer while the poor are getting poorer. Clearly the group that benefited the most over this 10 year period were the poorest in the nation, not the richest. Yet the liberals persist in claiming exactly the opposite.

Also encouraging is the fact that the after-inflation median income of all tax filers increased by an impressive 24% over the same period. Two of every three workers had a real income gain — which contradicts the Huckabee-Edwards-Lou Dobbs spin about stagnant incomes. This is even more impressive when you consider that “median” income and wage numbers are often skewed downward because the U.S. has had a huge influx of young workers and immigrants in the last 20 years. They start their work years with low wages, dragging down the averages.

In other words, overall the median income (in real, inflation adjusted dollars) increase by 24% which means the everyone benefited to some level. Two-thirds of the workforce did better throughout the study period and the one-third that lost out were predominantly in the higher income quintiles:

Only one income group experienced an absolute decline in real income — the richest 1% in 1996. Those households lost 25.8% of their income. Moreover, more than half (57.4%) of the richest 1% in 1996 had dropped to a lower income group by 2005. Some of these people might have been “rich” merely for one year, or perhaps for several, as they hit their peak earning years or had some capital gains windfall. Others may simply have not been able to keep up with new entrepreneurs and wealth creators.

The key point is that the study shows that income mobility in the U.S. works down as well as up — another sign that opportunity and merit continue to drive American success, not accidents of birth. The “rich” are not the same people over time.

So much for that implicit assumption that the rich are always the same group of people. Clearly they are not. This also deflates the class envy notion that the rich only inherited their money, that they didn’t really work for it. To go from middle or even lower incomes to the upper income brackets takes work and as this study shows the percentages of people moving both up and down the income ladder is significant.

All of this certainly helps to illuminate the current election-year debate about income “inequality” in the U.S. The political left and its media echoes are promoting the inequality story as a way to justify a huge tax increase. But inequality is only a problem if it reflects stagnant opportunity and a society stratified by more or less permanent income differences. That kind of society can breed class resentments and unrest. America isn’t remotely such a society, thanks in large part to the incentives that exist for risk-taking and wealth creation.

And this last point is key. America is NOT the permanently stratified, class based society that the liberals would have you think. The American dream is alive and well and providing opportunities for people of all income levels. As has been the case all along, risk taking and hard work are the keys to success, not the luck of the draw in nature’s parent lottery.

Anyone familiar with the Global Warming propaganda machine knows who James Hansen is, and no he isn’t the creator of the Muppets, Jim Hansen, but given their obvious similarities such a mistake is easy to make. No, James Hansen has become the poster boy for Global Warming alarmism over the past few years because of his work at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) which is part of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). For years we have heard just how pure his research in the area of Global Warming is because he is funded by the government and not by energy industry companies.

Well it has recently come to light via Investor’s Business Daily that James Hansen was not only funded by NASA, but that he had received up to $720,000 from George Soros’ Open Society Institute most likely under their “politicization of science” program. An irony under the circumstances to say the least. So here we find out that George Soros paid up to $720,000 to have James Hansen go out and publicly evangelize about Global Warming. I guess it is no surprise, then, that Hansen has gained so much notoriety of late and just why he has been such a vocal proponent of the whole Global Warming theme. Fame and fortune are powerful motivators to be sure.

James Hansen: Global Warming Scientist for Hire!

The Soros Threat To Democracy

By INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Monday, September 24, 2007

Democracy: George Soros is known for funding groups such as MoveOn.org that seek to manipulate public opinion. So why is the billionaire’s backing of what he believes in problematic? In a word: transparency.

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George Soros & MoveOn.org: Exclusive Series

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How many people, for instance, know that James Hansen, a man billed as a lonely “NASA whistleblower” standing up to the mighty U.S. government, was really funded by Soros’ Open Society Institute , which gave him “legal and media advice”?

That’s right, Hansen was packaged for the media by Soros’ flagship “philanthropy,” by as much as $720,000, most likely under the OSI’s “politicization of science” program.

That may have meant that Hansen had media flacks help him get on the evening news to push his agenda and lawyers pressuring officials to let him spout his supposedly “censored” spiel for weeks in the name of advancing the global warming agenda.

Hansen even succeeded, with public pressure from his nightly news performances, in forcing NASA to change its media policies to his advantage. Had Hansen’s OSI-funding been known, the public might have viewed the whole production differently. The outcome could have been different.

[ ... ]

Original Article: High price for load of hot air | The Courier-Mail

Robert Carter makes the case in the above article that the case for Anthropogenic Global Warming is completely overblown both in its effect and in its realistic level of consequences. Here are a few excerpts with some additional thoughts and perspective.

On the same day, NASA chief Michael Griffin commented in a US radio interview that “I am not sure that it is fair to say that (global warming) is a problem that we must wrestle with“.

NASA is an agency that knows a thing or two about climate change. As Griffin added: “We study global climate change, that is in our authorisation, we think we do it rather well.

“I’m proud of that, but NASA is not an agency chartered to, quote, battle climate change.”

Such a clear statement that science accomplishment should carry primacy over policy advice is both welcome and overdue.

I tend to agree. It is somewhat ironic, however, that Michael Griffin expresses the thought that “I am not sure that it is fair to say that (global warming) is a problem that we must wrestle with” while James Hansen of GISS is one of the most visible and the most vocal of the Anthropogenic Global Warming proponents. NASA seems a bit schizophrenic on the issue as an organization.

Nonetheless, there is something worrying about one of Griffin’s other statements, which said that “I have no doubt . . . that a trend of global warming exists”.

Griffin seems to be referring to human-caused global warming, but irrespective of that his opinion is unsupported by the evidence.

The salient facts are these. First, the accepted global average temperature statistics used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that no ground-based warming has occurred since 1998. Oddly, this eight-year-long temperature stasis has occurred despite an increase over the same period of 15 parts per million (or 4 per cent) in atmospheric CO2.

Second, lower atmosphere satellite-based temperature measurements, if corrected for non-greenhouse influences such as El Nino events and large volcanic eruptions, show little if any global warming since 1979, a period over which atmospheric CO2 has increased by 55 ppm (17 per cent).

Third, there are strong indications from solar studies that Earth’s current temperature stasis will be followed by climatic cooling over the next few decades.

So, to summarize Carter’s position, if we adjust the temperature record to account for non-greenhouse influences such as El Nino events and large volcanic eruptions the Earth’s observed warming is minimal despite significant increases in CO2, and given the effects likely to take place from a solar output perspective the next few decades are likely to experience a net cooling.

In fact, there is every doubt whether any global warming at all is occurring at the moment, let alone human-caused warming.For leading politicians to be asserting to the contrary indicates something is very wrong with their chain of scientific advice, for they are clearly being deceived. That this should be the case is an international political scandal of high order which, in turn, raises the question of where their advice is coming from.

In Australia, the advice trail leads from government agencies such as the CSIRO and the Australian Greenhouse Office through to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the United Nations.

As leading economist David Henderson has pointed out, it is extremely dangerous for an unelected and unaccountable body like the IPCC to have a monopoly on climate policy advice to governments. And even more so because, at heart, the IPCC is a political and not a scientific agency.

Australia does not ask the World Bank to set its annual budget and neither should it allow the notoriously alarmist IPCC to set its climate policy.

This is an important point and one that is frequently overlooked. In today’s world we see politicians running around and making outrageous claims with respect to Climate Change based almost entirely on the advice of the IPCC which is at its heart a political, as opposed to a scientific, organization. The reports issued by the IPCC are predominantly written by the politicians first in the form of a summary, and the actual scientific papers are then scrubbed to insure that they do not contradict the political positions. By blindly accepting the positions of the IPCC on Climate Change the world’s nations are effectively delegating their political responsibilities to the bureaucrats of other countries. This is a very dangerous thing to do as most of the other nations in the world have much to gain and very little to loose as part of this exercise.

It is past time for those who have deceived governments and misled the public regarding dangerous human-caused global warming to be called to account. Aided by hysterical posturing by green NGOs, their actions have led to the cornering of government on the issue and the likely implementation of futile emission policies that will impose direct extra costs on every household and enterprise in Australia to no identifiable benefit.

Not only do humans not dominate Earth’s current temperature trend but the likelihood is that further large sums of public money are shortly going to be committed to, theoretically, combat warming when cooling is the more likely short-term climatic eventuality.

In one of the more expensive ironies of history, the expenditure of more than $US50 billion ($60 billion) on research into global warming since 1990 has failed to demonstrate any human-caused climate trend, let alone a dangerous one.

Yet that expenditure will pale into insignificance compared with the squandering of money that is going to accompany the introduction of a carbon trading or taxation system.

The costs of thus expiating comfortable middle class angst are, of course, going to be imposed preferentially upon the poor and underprivileged.

Professor Bob Carter is an environmental scientist at James Cook University who studies ancient climate change.

And here we see that there is an irony that we will be spending $US Billions, or more, to reduce greenhouse emissions in an effort to combat Global Warming inspite of the facts that (a) we are unlikely to have any effect whatsoever on the outcome, and (b) that outcome is likely to be cooling in the next few decades anyway based on the Solar Output trends.

Scientific Credentials:

• Curriculum Vitae for Robert M. Carter
• Wikipedia Entry for Robert M. Carter

Polar Sea Ice Cap and Snow – Cryosphere Today

Hyping concerns over the declining levels of sea ice in the Arctic seems to be a favorite theme among the global warming alarmists. Arctic sea ice is, in fact, at an historic minimum which must be proof of Anthropogenic Global Warming, correct? That is what the alarmists want you to believe, but be aware that they are trying to deceive you with selective data.

While the Northern Hemisphere is at an historic low for sea ice the Southern Hemisphere is near an historic high, so to a large extent the decreases in the Arctic are being offset by increases in the Antarctic. So how bad is the net change on a global level?

See for yourself here.

Things to note in the graph provided is that on a global scale the amount of sea ice has decreased by a little over 5% in the past 28 years. This is a far cry from the alarmist claims being made based on the Arctic alone. Other things of note include:

1. Global level of sea ice typically varies from about +2 Million Square Kilometers to about -2 Million Square Kilometers relative to the 1979 through 2000 mean. We are currently at -1 Million Square Kilometers which appears to be well within the normal range of sea ice variation.
2. We have absolutely no means of identifying whether the levels of sea ice being used as the reference (e.g. 1979-2000) are above normal, at normal, or below normal in relation to a larger historical context. If those years happen to be at a high point in the natural cycles of sea ice coverage then a downward trend for the past 28 years may not be anomalous at all. Without further historical data over a longer period of observation there is no way to say whether we should be alarmed by the observed decrease or not.

Despite the desperate attempts to convince you otherwise, the facts shown here indicate little, if any, cause for concern regarding global levels of sea ice.

Study shows polar bear increase in Davis Strait

One of the most visible scare tactics of the global warming alarmists is to show pictures of polar bears on ice flows with captions claiming that global warming is melting the ice and hurting the bears. So what do the people who actually study and inventory the number of bears say about this? Well at least as far as Canada is concerned it seems that the bears are doing just fine, too fine in fact, and they may become a problem which will have to be dealt with.

Climate change is not hurting polar bear populations in the Davis Strait area of Nunavut, according to Dr. Mitch Taylor, manager of wildlife research and a polar bear biologist with the GN’s Department of Environment.

In fact, polar bear populations along the Davis Strait are healthy and their numbers increasing, an ongoing study is indicating.

Reports in national and international press have projected that two-thirds of the world’s polar bear populations will be lost within 50 years due to the loss of sea ice.

Canada has two thirds of the world’s polar bears. Nunavut is home to 12 of Canada’s 13 polar bear populations, totalling an estimated 14,780.

Daily Kos: Bill O’Reilly in All His Racist Glory

MissLaura over at DailyKos has a hit piece on how racist Bill O’Reilly is.

Her complaint? Bill went to a restaurant in Harlem and had nice things to say about it. Yea, giving the Harlem restaurant a good review is now considered racist by the nut cases at DailyKos. O’Reilly’s main points?

1. It was a nice restaurant just like other famous restaurants in New York.
2. The clientele are normal everyday people out to have a nice dinner.

That’s it? That’s the racism of Bill O’Reilly?

I remember when racism meant things like lynchings, and segregation, and Jim Crow laws in the south. Now it seems that we have come so far in this country that racism has been reduced to giving good reviews to restaurants in black neighborhoods. Is it me, or does this kind of cheapen the meaning of racism and belittle the things that those who really faced racism endured?

Daily Kos: OK, Then, YOU Tell US

Like last May 24 when you, in the word of a former Kossack, played crumplestiltskin in the first minute of the second round over supplemental funding for Iraq. Money that you knew would, in part, pay for a “surge” policy that many of you claimed you objected to. Last May you said yes to an unencumbered supplemental and no to a specific date for completing redeployment of U.S. troops from Iraq. In other words, you joined Republicans to smack a great big APPROVAL stamp on Stay the Course, although the policy isn’t actually called that any longer.

Yesterday, you did it again when you KOed Feingold-Reid. You could just as well have said to Mister Bush: “Sir, you’ve got us by the short hairs so we’re going to give you free rein on Iraq.” And, of course, you also had to add insult to injury and prove your bona fides as a loyal and patriotic rule-player by joining in a hypocrisy-laden smack-down of those who dared challenge the president’s spokesman. Because you’ve bought the paralyzing lie that a general in uniform is the military and must never be disrespected.

Emphasis mine.

But what do we learn from this? The point being made here is absolutely correct. Rather than General Patraeus betraying us, it is the Democrats in Congress who are betraying the left wing nut cases at DailyKos by refusing to do their bidding. Obviously the Democrat leadership in congress understands that cutting funding for the troops is just plain the wrong way to go and yet these nut cases persist. Obviously the Democrat leadership understands that to be loyal and patriotic one must show some level of respect to the leaders of our fighting men and women in uniform, and to support those men and women wherever they are, even in Iraq.

What Meteor Blades is clearly demonstrating here is that anything that IS being loyal and patriotic IS an insult and an injury to what these nut cases stand for. What Meteor Blades is clearly demonstrating here is that even HE understands that he and those like him are the very antithesis of loyal and patriotic, which is a point I have made many times.

During the run-up to the 2000 election campaign season Andy Hiller, a political reporter for WHDH-TV in Boston, ambushed George W. Bush with a now famous pop-quiz in which Bush was only able to name 1 out of 4 foreign leaders. Despite the fact that 9 out of 10 voters could not name even a single leader, the liberal media and prominent Democratic leaders used this as an occasion to draw Bush’s intelligence into question. For example, Al Gore’s campaign had this to say of Bush after the news broke:

“I guess we know that ‘C’ at Yale was a gentleman’s ‘C,”‘ said Gore spokesman Chris Lehane.

CQ National Security Editor, Jeff Stein, interviewed U.S. Representative Silvestre Reyes, D-TX, the incoming chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and turned up some surprising revelations on the competence of Reyes. He has been hand selected by incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and has served on this committee since before the 9/11 attacks. So what conclusion did Stein reach after his interview?

Democrats’ New Intelligence Chairman Needs a Crash Course on al Qaeda:

That’s because, like a number of his colleagues and top counter terrorism officials that I’ve interviewed over the past several months, Reyes can’t answer some fundamental questions about the powerful forces arrayed against us in the Middle East.

It begs the question, of course: How can the Intelligence Committee do effective oversight of U.S. spy agencies when its leaders don’t know basics about the battlefield?

[...]

Reyes stumbled when I asked him a simple question about al Qaeda at the end of a 40-minute interview in his office last week. Members of the Intelligence Committee, mind you, are paid $165,200 a year to know more than basic facts about our foes in the Middle East.

We warmed up with a long discussion about intelligence issues and Iraq. And then we veered into terrorism’s major players[:]

[Al Qaeda]

Al Qaeda is what, I asked, Sunni or Shia?

“Al Qaeda, they have both,” Reyes said. “You’re talking about predominately?”

“Sure,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

“Predominantly — probably Shiite,” he ventured.

He couldn’t have been more wrong.

Al Qaeda is profoundly Sunni. If a Shiite showed up at an al Qaeda club house, they’d slice off his head and use it for a soccer ball.

That’s because the extremist Sunnis who make up a l Qaeda consider all Shiites to be heretics.

Al Qaeda’s Sunni roots account for its very existence. Osama bin Laden and his followers believe the Saudi Royal family besmirched the true faith through their corruption and alliance with the United States, particularly allowing U.S. troops on Saudi soil.

It’s been five years since these Muslim extremists flew hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center.

Is it too much to ask that our intelligence overseers know who they are?

Civil War

And Hezbollah? I asked him. What are they?

“Hezbollah. Uh, Hezbollah…”

He laughed again, shifting in his seat.

“Why do you ask me these questions at five o’clock? Can I answer in Spanish? Do you speak Spanish?”

“Poquito,” I said—a little.

“Poquito?! “ He laughed again.

“Go ahead,” I said, talk to me about Sunnis and Shia in Spanish.

Reyes: “Well, I, uh….”

I apologized for putting him “on the spot a little.” But I reminded him that the people who have killed thousands of Americans on U.S. soil and in the Middle East have been front page news for a long time now.

It’s been 23 years since a Hezbollah suicide bomber killed over 200 U.S. military personnel in Beirut, mostly Marines.

Hezbollah, a creature of Iran, is close to taking over in Lebanon. Reports say they are helping train Iraqi Shiites to kill Sunnis in the spiralling civil war.

“Yeah,” Reyes said, rightly observing, “but . . . it’s not like the Hatfields and the McCoys. It’s a heck of a lot more complex.

“And I agree with you — we ought to expend some effort into understanding them. But speaking only for myself, it’s hard to keep things in perspective and in the categories.”

This exchange is illustrative and disturbing on multiple levels:

First, Reyes has been a member of the House Intelligence Committee since before 9/11 so it is hard to make excuses for him not knowing basic information about Al Qaeda and Hezbollah. I mean all of this information must have been in front of him for over 5 years as part of the committee and there is little question that much of it has been headline news for that entire time as well. How long does he need to grasp some of it? Most people would have absorbed some of it through sheer repetition if nothing else. So what are we to think? He’s a moron. A buffoon. A simpleton. He’s somehow intellectually challenged. Pick your favorite epithet.

Second, how is it possible that someone in this position, with access to the level of information that must be available to him, could be utterly clueless as to who Hezbollah is? This is especially appalling given the recent Israel/Lebanon war that captivated the news cycle for weeks.

Third, what was that exchange about wanting to answer in Spanish about? Was that an attempt on Reye’s part to change the subject and put Stein on the defensive? Or was it an indication that Reyes’ has trouble answering difficult questions in English? Either way it is a cause for concern considering the importance of the position to which he will be appointed.

Finally, the Democrats want us to believe that this “Congressional Oversight” campaign of theirs is not about a vendetta against the Republicans, but as Stein points out “How can the Intelligence Committee do effective oversight of U.S. spy agencies when its leaders don’t know basics about the battlefield?”

The answer, of course, is obvious: “Oversight” is just the new liberal code word for “witch hunt”. Experience, intelligence, basic knowledge of our enemies? These are not needed to conduct a witch hunt, so Reyes ought to be an ideal candidate to lead the effort since he won’t be distracted by all those facts about al Qeada and Hezbollah. At least that’s how the Democrats seem to view it.

Daily Kos: Steny Hoyer next House Majority Leader
Daily Kos: Leadership battles divide Dems, apparently unite Republicans

Less than 2 weeks after a major win at the polls on November 7, the Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives is already floundering badly. This past week has been marked by a civil war within the party concerning who should become the Majority Whip within the House of Representatives beginning next year. This raises serious questions about whether the presumed speaker to be, Nancy Pelosi, really has what it takes to run the people’s house. With this astounding display of her lack of control over her own party members, how does she ever expect to be able to control her Republican opposition?

This mark’s the soon to be speaker’s first major test of leadership where her hand picked choice was shot down by an unbelievably wide margin, 149 to 86. This does not bode well for her ability to deliver on the supposed mandate she has been given to try and rein in the Neocons and the War in Iraq. If this is any indication, the next two years should be quite an interesting display of bumbling incompetance.