Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category

Senator Schumer strong-arms Apple

Friday, July 16th, 2010

I’ve always had the impression that New York Senator Charles Schumer is little more than a publicity hound, and most of what he does just confirms my suspicions.  Yesterday (Thursday), for example, he boldly and courageously demanded – well, requested – that Apple do something about the iPhone 4’s “death grip” problem.  He also want to know what Apple was going to do about the iPhone’s habit of inflating signal strength by showing too many bars on its display

Apple announced on Wednesday – the day before Schumer wrote his letter – that they would hold a press conference today (Friday).  Most of the world seemed to understand that Apple would address both issues.  It seems the Senator from New York either didn’t know that the most anticipated public utterance since King James’ hour-long preen on ESPN was going to happen today, or he couldn’t figure out what King Jobs would want to talk about.

Or maybe he’s just patting himself on the back for getting such a speedy reply from Apple.

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Obamanation: No limits

Saturday, June 19th, 2010

Does anyone else appreciate the extreme irony of referring to the feudal lords that infest the Obama administration as “czars”?  It was, after all, Czar Nicholas II that Obama’s Marxist heroes overthrew and assassinated in 1917-1918. So, it would be much more appropriate to refer to Obama’s deputy dictators as “Commissars”. For example, consider this Q&A between Katie Couric and BP Extortion Escrow Czar/Commissar Ken Feinberg:

Couric: Will BP have any jurisdiction over which claims are actually paid out or will that company just hand over the money?
Feinberg: That company has no say on the claims that I declare to be legitimate and eligible. [emphasis added]

Evidence? Courts? Accountability? Of course not, not in the brave new world of Obamanation. If one of Obama’s minions “declares” that a claim is “legitimate”, “that company” will be forced to pay it. I can see former ACORN activists lining up with bogus claims right now.

The money in question, of course, is the promised $20 billion that Obama extorted from BP under threat of ordering his fellow travelers in Congress to pass possibly unconstitutional legislation to accomplish the same end. It’s worth remembering that our Bigot-in-Chief didn’t even want to talk to the BP CEO because “when you talk to a guy like a BP CEO, he’s going to say all the right things to me. I’m not interested in words. I’m interested in actions.” Count among the words that Obama is not interested in the ones found in the Constitution.

[It’s also worth remembering that Obama’s bigotry has always extended to white people in general, and his white grandmother  – “a typical white person” – in particular.]

Make no mistake – BP is absolutely responsible for all costs associated with the Deepwater Horizon disaster. The company may well face criminal charges related to gross negligence or willful misconduct. If their actions were criminal, BP people should spend some time in jail. It is in part for such things that the law – and the Constitution as the supreme law of the land – were intended. But mere law is not enough for this President.

There was a time when we Americans believed in the rule of law. Then we made the grave error of electing a Marxist ideologue who sees the law as either a weapon for his personal use in accomplishing his objectives or an obstacle to be circumvented.

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The global-warming hoax on trial

Friday, June 11th, 2010

A review of the peer-edited literature reveals a systematic tendency of the climate establishment to engage in a variety of stylized rhetorical techniques that seem to oversell what is actually known about climate change while concealing fundamental uncertainties and open questions regarding many of the key processes involved in climate change. [emphasis added]

Jason Johnston is Robert G. Fuller, Jr. Professor of Law and Director, Program on Law, Environment and Economy at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He holds JD and PhD degrees from the University of Michigan. From these and other facts, I conclude that (a) he is not a dummy, (b) he is trained in the examination and evaluation of both written testimony and physical evidence, and (c) he knows something about the relationship between the environment industry and the fields of law and economics (his PhD is in economics). He is the author of “Global Warming Advocacy Science: a Cross Examination” (which can be downloaded for free here).

The cross-examination conducted in this paper reveals many additional areas where the peer-edited literature seems to conflict with the picture painted by establishment climate science, ranging from the magnitude of 20th century surface temperature increases and their relation to past temperatures; the possibility that inherent variability in the earth’s non-linear climate system, and not increases in CO2, may explain observed late 20th century warming; the ability of climate models to actually explain past temperatures; and, finally, substantial doubt about the methodological validity of models used to make highly publicized predictions of global warming impacts such as species loss.[emphasis added]

Consensus Science

At the heart of the hoax is the phony assertion that there is a “consensus” among scientists that anthropogenic global warming is an undeniable “fact”:

In recent Congressional hearings, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts stated that not a single peer-reviewed scientific paper contradicts the “consensus” view that increasing greenhouse gas emissions will lead to a “catastrophic” two degree Celsius increase in global mean temperatures. Senator Kerry is hardly alone in this belief. Virtually all environmental law scholars seem to believe that there is now a “scientific consensus” that anthropogenic greenhouse gas (ghg) emissions have caused late twentieth century global warming and that if dramatic steps are not immediately taken to reduce those emissions, then the warming trend will continue, with catastrophic consequences for the world. [emphasis added]

If ever there was ever a red flag in any discussion of science, the word consensus is it. The late author Michael Crichton warned of this sort of anti-science in a speech at Cal Tech in 2003.

I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had. [emphasis added] [The text of this speech seems to have mysteriously disappeared from the “official” Crichton site. I’m just sayin’.]

With politicians like Kerry, it’s hard to know if he is just ignorant or willfully lying in order to promote Obama’s Marxist agenda, but Johnston cites dozens of peer-reviewed papers in the course of his cross-examination of the hoaxers.

It is virtually impossible to find anywhere in the legal or the policy literature on global warming anything like a sustained discussion of the actual state of the scientific literature on ghg emissions and climate change. Instead, legal and policy scholars simply defer to a very general statement of the climate establishment’s opinion (except when it seems too conservative), generally failing even to mention work questioning the establishment climate story, unless to dismiss it with the ad hominem argument that such work is the product of untrustworthy, industry-funded “skeptics” and “deniers.”

The danger to America is that, since

the most significant ghg emission reduction policies are intended to completely alter the basic fuel sources upon which industrial economies and societies are based, with the costs uncertain but potentially in the many trillions of dollars, one would suppose that before such policies are undertaken, it would be worthwhile to verify that the climate establishment’s view really does reflect an unbiased and objective assessment of the current state of climate science.

But the leaders to which we have entrusted our economic and political future are not interested. Al Gore, Congress, White House advisors, and the UN’s fraudulent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are focused on destroying America’s free-market economy. Real science can only get in their way, so they evangelize us with their brand of true religion – unquestioning faith in “consensus science” and an inquisition for the “untrustworthy, industry-funded ‘skeptics’ and ‘deniers’”.

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"A blizzard of lies" from Al Gore

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

Al Gore has a huge financial interest in the myth that human activity causes global warming. Perpetrating the fraud of AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) has made him even wealthier than did his family’s tobacco business. And he’s prepared to defend this lie with the same zeal with which he and the tobacco companies defended the lie that cigarette-smoking was not a serious health hazard.

Gore has came out of hiding with an op-ed piece in the New York Times. If the spin makes you dizzy and the fantasy world he inhabits reminds you of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland, you might regain your footing with a dose of reality from Investor’s Business Daily:

If hyperbole and chutzpah had a child, it would be the opening paragraph of Gore’s op-ed in Sunday’s New York Times. Gore surfaced from the global warming witness-protection program to opine that despite admissions of error and evidence of fraud by various agencies, we still face “an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.”

Perhaps he’s trying to protect his investments as he knows them, for he is heavily involved in enterprises that deal with carbon offsets and green technology. If the case for climate change is shown to be demonstrably false, a lot of his green evaporates like moisture from the ocean.

Read the entire IBD piece here.

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Thank you, Massachusetts!

Friday, January 22nd, 2010

Thank you for ending the Democrats’ stranglehold on the Senate. But you have to feel kind of sorry for the troika of Obama, Reid, and Pelosi. They thought they’d have two full years to turn the United States into the Soviet Socialist Republic of America. But they only had a year and they didn’t get it done. What a shame.

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Obamanation: Fun, shout-outs, and – oh, yeah – dead soldiers

Saturday, November 7th, 2009

Does anyone believe that Obama has respect for our military? If so, his shameful conduct following the shootings at Fort Hood should clarify things. He doesn’t. He cares about his political cronies, frauds like ACORN, his communist advisors, and terrorists like William Ayers, but American soldiers? Not so much.

The murdered American soldiers at Fort Hood were just an afterthought to our “Commander-in-Chief”. See Robert George’s story or just go straight to the YouTube video of his casual afterthoughts about the tragedy. A truly stomach-turning performance by a dreadful President.

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Obamanation: Building on lies

Sunday, October 25th, 2009

Obama has told us we need a public health insurance option to “keep insurance companies honest.” An unlikely source – the AP – has taken a modest step toward keeping him (and serial liars Nancy Pelosi and moveon.org) a little more honest.

To quote the lead from this story:

What do these enterprises have in common? Farm and construction machinery, Tupperware, the railroads, Hershey sweets, Yum food brands and Yahoo? Answer: They’re all more profitable than the health insurance industry.

It turns out the health insurance industry’s “obscene profits” (Pelosi) don’t actually exist. It seems the willingness of the health insurance industry to “let the bodies pile up as long as their profits are safe” is no match for the willingness of moveon.org to lie about it.

Pharmas and other health care providers did much better than the insurers. But a public option is not intended to “keep them honest”. Its intent is to drive them out of business altogether and make every American (except for Congress and privileged Government elites, of course) dependent on the government for health care. It’s the very foundation for establishing the nightmare of Obamanation.

Just a reminder – the source for this post is not Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, or the Republican National Committee. It’s the left-leaning AP.

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