New Year's Wish

BestView fervently hopes that Obama and his socialist allies makes a big push in 2010 to follow through on the Copenhagen idea of taking 100 billion and giving it to "undeveloped" countries like China for the purpose of cleaning up the environment of that deadly carbon dioxide. Our share would be 10 billion---each year. Bring it on in an election year. We borrow the money from the Chinese and then send it back with a bigger national debt for our great grand kids to pay. Bring it on, BHO.

Another Bow by Obama

Obama begging at Copenhagen. It does not look like the Chinese Premier Wen is impressed with the supplication.

A consensus in the making?

Though the American left and right don’t agree on much, they are both now coalescing around the suspicion that Obama’s brilliant presidential campaign was as hollow as Tiger’s public image — a marketing scam designed to camouflage either his covert anti-American radicalism (as the right sees it) or spineless timidity (as the left sees it). The truth may well be neither, but after a decade of being spun silly, Americans can’t be blamed for being cynical about any leader trying to sell anything. As we say goodbye to the year of Tiger Woods, it is the country, sad to say, that is left mired in a sand trap with no obvious way out.

Agree with Frank Rich? Say it ain't so. Read it all here.

Fraud in Russian Data Revealed

The latest Climate-gate shoe to drop is the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) accusation that the Hadley Center of Britain's Meteorological Office deliberately relied on a carefully selected 25% of Russia's weather stations that fit its theory of global warming.

By ignoring those that don't, the Russians say, the CRU overestimated warming in the country by more than half a degree Celsius.

Russia accounts for 12.5% of the earth's land mass and has weather stations throughout, so ignoring vast swaths of it can greatly skew any analysis. The IEA says CRU ignored data covering 40% of Russia, preferring data from urban centers and data that showed a warming trend. On the final page of the IEA report is a chart that shows the CRU's selective use of Russia

Read it all here.

A prediction for 2010

Time Warner Cable says it may drop all Fox TV offerings next year because they cost too much. BestView predicts the impasse will be all over before "American Idol" and the NFL football broadcasts are affected in January.

Obama's Scary and Untruthful Rhetoric

Read all of this here:


Obama stressed this week that you can "talk to every health care economist out there and they will tell you that ... whatever ideas exist in terms of bending the cost curve and starting to reduce costs for families, businesses and government, those elements are in this bill."

Not "some" or "most" or "Peter Orszag on a two-day bender" but "every" health care economist in the entire world would tell you as much.

This sort of exaggeration reminds us of another whopper the president unloaded. While promoting the stimulus plan in January, he claimed that "there is no disagreement that we need action by our government, a recovery plan that will help to jump-start the economy."

No disagreement whatsoever ... until the Cato Institute found 200 economists from major universities across the country who did have a disagreement -- and judging from the stimulus plan's impressive impotence, perhaps Obama should have lent them an ear.

Who dat?

Recent polls say 27.4% of those asked approved of the job Congress was doing. Isn't that sad on almost every level?

BestView Agrees With Liberals--or vice versa

This doesn't happen often, but the mandate in the so-called health reform bills of various iterations currently being argued behind closed doors in the most open administration ever, is unconstitutional and if it is ever passed will almost surely be ruled so by the Supreme Court. It is odious to think that the federal government would think they can make our citizens buy something or face a prison sentence or fine. That is the conservative position and BestView considers it the common sense view.

But the mandate is now generating significant opposition from liberals such as Markos, Howard Dean, Keith Olbermann, and others. They oppose it because they see it as government extortion on behalf of greedy insurance companies. So, they are on the right side for the wrong reason, but we'll take it if it helps kill this bastard creation.

Science and Fact vs. Al Gore

This op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal offers an excellent counter to the idiotic liberals who think man has a meaningful effect on the earth's temperature. Sadly, very few who are products of the abysmal education system in the U.S. will ever be able to grasp the concepts offered by Mr. Bloom.

Just Make It Up

“In his speech, Mr Gore told the conference: ‘These figures are fresh. Some of the models suggest to Dr [Wieslav] Maslowski that there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.’

“However, the climatologist whose work Mr Gore was relying upon dropped the former Vice-President in the water with an icy blast.

“‘It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at,’ Dr Maslowski said. ‘I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.’

BestView persists in the opinion that the loss to Bush in 2000 drove the guy crazy---literally.

No surprise here

From American Thinker:

The former Vice-President has been caught spewing climate propaganda again. This time claiming “fresh” climate models show that the northern polar ice cap could (75% chance) completely melt in as little as five years.

Gore described the new projections as shocking, but perhaps the biggest shock came to the scientist Gore credited with the research. Timesonline reports:

The climatologist whose work Mr Gore was relying upon dropped the former Vice-President in the water with an icy blast.

“It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at,” Dr [Wieslav] Maslowski said. “I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.”

Mr Gore’s office later admitted that the 75 per cent figure was one used by Dr Maslowksi as a “ballpark figure” several years ago in a conversation with Mr Gore.

To recap, Gore’s “fresh” news was several years old. The data was not so much data as it was a visit with a scientist; and most importantly the polar ice caps are not going to melt in five years.

Sort of a microcosm of Mr. Gore’s post-electoral life, isn’t it?

Liberal Economics

Our politicians in Washington are giving lip-service to the jobless situation and our President Obama is saying he wants ideas on how to get citizens back to work. Here is a list of things he won't do because liberals just don't get it:
1.) Eliminate the minimum wage which prevents black teenagers from getting that first work experience.
2.) Reduce taxes which have been shown to produce $3 in GDP gains for each $1 in reduction.
3.) Eliminate the Davis-Bacon act which reduces the infrastructure spending and hiring by insisting on union wage rates.
4.) Address the trade policy which blocks the importation of sugar at prices which would allow our sugar industry to operate in this country instead of doing all such manufacturing abroad.
None of this will happen. Liberals just don't get it...and that includes many Republicans, by the way.

C-SPAN Schedule, etc.

BestView has been frantically searching C-SPAN for the broadcast of the health care deliberations by Congress which were promised by Obama back during the campaign. So far, we haven't gotten them here in Georgia.

On the other hand, the omnibus spending bill just voted out of the Senate yesterday will soon land on Obama's desk with over 5,000 earmarks on it. I am sure Barack will keep the pledge to eliminate those before he signs anything.

Bush doing this too?

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claims the United States is attempting to thwart the return of mankind's savior, according to reports from Al Arabiya, a television news station based in Dubai.

Ahmadinejad reportedly claims he has documented evidence that the U.S. is blocking the return of Mahdi, the Imam believed by Muslims to be the savior.

“We have documented proof that they believe that a descendant of the prophet of Islam will raise in these parts and he will dry the roots of all injustice in the world,” Ahmadinejad said during a speech on Monday, according to Al Arabiya.

"They have devised all these plans to prevent the coming of the Hidden Imam because they know that the Iranian nation is the one that will prepare the grounds for his coming and will be the supporters of his rule," Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying.

Liberal angst

Some of liberals are just now puzzled by the actions of their messiah. How can he send an additional 30,000 troops to fight in a poppy-infested quagmire and then get on his carbon-emitting airplane to go accept a Nobel Prize for "Peace"? Don't look to us conservatives for answers.

Science Conclusions

When I turn on the TV and hear the argument that anthropogenic global warming is confirmed and no longer subject to question because the majority of scientists in some survey say they "feel" that is the case, I start screaming at the TV. So, all we need to do is just poll a group of idiotic scientists (and believe me the world is full of them) on a scientific question rather than actually do research.
Time to double the blood pressure medicine.

Health Reform

Every day the idiotic aspects of the dems attempt to ruin this country via "health reform" become sadder. Today, it seems the plan is to let 55 year olds enroll in Medicare. So, we take a government plan that is technically broke and we are adding more people while we deny the fact that the quality of health care will not diminish or be rationed. This is so absurd it will almost surely pass.

Science Data

We have the E-mails proving the scientists who are responsible for the "proof" that man has caused the globe's temperature to rise and will soon (50 years?) create unbearable consequences manipulated the data, squelched competing views and data, rigged the peer review system and conspired to perpetuate a giant hoax. Now the left is coming out with a concerted message. The science is tainted, but the threat is real. Trust us.

BestView wishes the U.S. population and politicians was intelligent enough to understand what is going on here.

Don't buy it!

If you are a liberal Kool-Aid drinker who voted for Obama because he was anti-war and would get us out of Afghanistan and Iraq, his announced intention to bring the troops home in July 2011 is just as likely as his offer to change the way Washington works. You have been had.

George Will Not Buying Climate Change Garbage

Barack Obama, understanding the histrionics required in climate-change debates, promises that U.S. emissions in 2050 will be 83 percent below 2005 levels. If so, 2050 emissions will equal those in 1910, when there were 92 million Americans. But there will be 420 million Americans in 2050, so Obama’s promise means that per capita emissions then will be about what they were in 1875. That. Will. Not. Happen.

Read it all here---he nails it.

Liberals Discover Hypocrisy

One of the talking points advanced by liberals in arguments the military activity in Afghanistan is the corruption in their government. This is now being challenged by even the most incredulous of liberals like Zbigniew Brzezinski. As he has pointed out in the very liberal Los Angeles Times, We have a financial sector that is voraciously greedy and exploitative, to put it mildly.We have a Congress which is not immune to special interests. And we have an electoral system that is based largely on private donations which precipitate expectations of rewards.

In addition, we have a President who comes from the Chicago machine version of politics. The Afghanistan version of corruption might look like a clean-up in Washington.

Australia Comes to its Senses

SYDNEY – Australia's plans for an emissions trading system to combat global warming were scuttled Wednesday in Parliament, handing a defeat to a government that had hoped to set an example at international climate change talks next week.

The Senate, where Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's government does not hold a majority, rejected his administration's proposal for Australia to become one of the first countries to install a so-called cap-and-trade system to slash the amount of heat-trapping pollution that industries pump into the air.

Read it all here

More climate change nonsense

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the U.N. construct tasked to push the calamity which will befall all of us if we don't transfer all the wealth in the world to non-wealthy countries because the earth is burning up from carbon emissions.

The head of the IPCC has been trumpeting the imminent melting of the Himalayan glaciers. In fact, if we don't do something fast, the IPCC claims that the glaciers will have melted away by 2035.

IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri reacted angrily citing the IPCC 2007 climate change reports which asserted that the (Himalayan) glaciers are receding faster than in any other part of the world and if the present rate (of melting) continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps even sooner is very high if the earth keeps warming at the current rate.

Wow! The Himalayans to melt away in just 26 years! That's amazing!

Except that this apocalyptic prediction is the result of a typo! The IPCC inserted an extra zero to read the original prediction as 2035 instead of what was actually estimated as occuring in 2350. They're off by over 300 years. Oops, a typo? Best View is dubious.

Thanks to Betsy.

War President

Obama has now adopted his own war and the consequences are predictable. His approval ratings will descend with the lefties joining those of us who decided early that this guy was an empty suit and voted for McCain with our nose held. With many in congress now opposed to his nation building in a country that has resisted building for centuries, Obama will be asking Republicans to join him in bipartianship while he continues to blame them on a daily basis for all problems he inherited.

My sister says she voted for Obama thinking he would bring the troops home from Afghanistan and is now in despair---her words. That is somewhat ironic to BestView since Obama's position on Afghanistan was pretty clear to me when he called it a war of necessity. Now, pursuing a broadened military action there may be the only campaign promise he kept. He certainly didn't bring a change to Washington that anyone can believe in.

Wisdom from Thomas Sowell

This is one of Sowell's Random Thoughts. Read the others here.

In response to news of President Obama receiving the Nobel Prize for peace, an e-mail from a reader recalled a black classmate's comments upon graduating from high school many years ago. When asked to list the advantages and disadvantages of being black, the black student facetiously listed as an advantage "being praised for infinitesimal accomplishments."

The Conservative Approach to Environmentalism

BestView has been critical of the fraudulent climate change (nee warming) propaganda, but this should not construed as opposition to all such efforts. Instead, we should direct efforts toward:

(1) Combating general forms of pollution, (2) cutting energy bills, (3) reducing dependence on energy imports from rogue regimes and (4) increasing the diversity of our overall energy supply. I'll support almost any 'green measure' that makes significant contributions to those four policy goals.

Obama's Next Trip

President Obama will travel to Copenhagen for one day of climate summitry next month and then proceed to Norway to get his laughable Peace Prize. BestView will follow the trip closely to learn who he finds to bow down to and for on this trip.

Remember this?

P.J. O’Rourke quoted in his book “All The Trouble In The World”, one noted environmentalist who said back in the Eighties;

“We have to strike a balance between offering up scary scenarios- and actually telling the truth.”

The fellow who said that was none other than then U.S. Senator Al Gore.

Fraud in New Zealand Climate Data Revealed

First the incriminating e-mails and now proof that the climate scientists in New Zealand manipulated temperature data to enhance the notion that there has been global warming to an extent that suggests man contributed to the phenomenon. Read it all here. Soon we will all be forced to concede that the science of climatology is as sound as the science of astrology or phrenology.

Sympathy for Liberal Press

BestView has profound sympathy for the New York Times, the liberal TV networks, and other outlets which have been duped by Al Gore and fraudulent scientists who have perpetuated the anthropogenic global warming (now change) myth. It will be tres painful to climb back off that limb which any reasonable person must do now that the e-mails have confirmed there is no there there in the climate change data. In an earlier day, the flat earth proponents had a similar problem. Don't look for idiots like Barbara Boxer and John Kerry to give up easily as they try to tax carbon as a pollutant, however. The interesting situation to watch is fellow travelers like John McCain and Lindsey Graham climb off the wagon. It will be fun to watch.

Gold

Demand for gold is growing faster than supply. In London, market makers are trying to settle gold futures contracts with more contracts, not bullion, because there's not enough gold to deliver. Buyers who elect to forego payment in gold are offered cash premiums for doing so. If you really want the bullion, you can buy the ZKB Gold ETF on the Zurich Stock Exchange and take it to the Zurich Cantonal Bank, owned by the Canton of Zurich. There you are given the actual bullion, which can then be stored in Zurich. This situation could lead to what is known as a short squeeze in gold. If there is enough demand for physical gold (instead of paper with promised gold) the price of gold will be bid up just to satisfy the demand and if the commodity is scarce, the price could be truly fantastic. That would not be good, but if it happens, you want to own some gold. This situation has come about due to the loss of confidence in the dollar and the budget deficits in U.S.'s future which will lead hedge funds and countries to put their money into something that will not lose its value over time. Evidence? We're seeing demand for gold all over the world. Pension funds allocate about 5% as protection against the weakening dollar. Chinese citizens are encouraged by their government to hold gold, not dollars. On Nov. 18, Russia's central bank announced it would buy any and all gold its sister organization, the State Depositary for Precious Metals and Gems, was willing to sell. Now the Vietnamese central bank has granted quotas to import 10 tons of gold for use by its banking system and gold traders. India just bought 200 tons of gold and announced it is in the market for more.

BestView has U.S. gold coins in the safe deposit box and will be adding more with an intention of having 5% of assets in gold. If you think Obama is going to reduce spending, forgo his plans to pass new taxes, and defend the dollar, buying gold is not a good idea. If you want to buy some gold coins, the company I use to buy coins online is Coast to Coast Coins at http://www.coastcoin.com/
They have reasonable prices, good communication and reliable delivery of quality coins which are as advertised. Can't ask for more than that.

The jobless demographics

Copy and paste.

http://cohort11.americanobserver.net/latoyaegwuekwe/multimediafinal.html

The California Budget

In California the current budget is $6.3 billion out of balance and the 2010-11 budget has another $14.4 billion hole. If some of the bleaker economic forecasts kicking around are accurate and/or the state doesn't act quickly to close the gap, the $20.7 billion problem could easily balloon to $25 billion or more. As temporary tax increases expire and deferred spending promises come due, the state faces annual deficits in the $20 billion range for many years to come. What to do? Raise taxes, cut spending or create more budget gimmicks? The California Teachers Association-led Education Coalition fired a salvo of complaints about past cuts on schools, and the powerful Service Employees International Union declared, "Budget solutions must include new revenue." February's temporary tax increases have already stirred a backlash, and hitting taxpayers again in the midst of this record-deep recession would be politically almost impossible. They've scraped the bottom of the gimmick barrel, voters are livid and new taxes are functionally off the table. This will be one of the bloodiest skirmishes the Capitol has ever seen – with the only option being that the most populous state in the nation default on its debts.

Read it all here and remember this when you see unions asking for more power.

Climate fraud analysis

Summary of the best analysis of the climategate fraud. Read it all here

This is an enormous case of organized scientific fraud, but it is not just scientific fraud. It is also a criminal act. Suborned by billions of taxpayer dollars devoted to climate research, dozens of prominent scientists have established a criminal racket in which they seek government money-Phil Jones has raked in a total of £13.7 million in grants from the British government-which they then use to falsify data and defraud the taxpayers. It's the most insidious kind of fraud: a fraud in which the culprits are lauded as public heroes. Judging from this cache of e-mails, they even manage to tell themselves that their manipulation of the data is intended to protect a bigger truth and prevent it from being "confused" by inconvenient facts and uncontrolled criticism.

The damage here goes far beyond the loss of a few billions of taxpayer dollars on bogus scientific research. The real cost of this fraud is the trillions of dollars of wealth that will be destroyed if a fraudulent theory is used to justify legislation that starves the global economy of its cheapest and most abundant sources of energy.

This is the scandal of the century. It needs to be thoroughly investigated-and the culprits need to be brought to justice.

Get a set, Bush

When G.H.W. Bush was President the liberal press tagged him with the "wimp" label. BestView now concludes that his son is disgustingly wimpy as manifested by his silence. Day after day Obama goes on television and utters degrading appraisals of his performance as President. It is perhaps understandable that Bush wait a year or so, but the time has come for George to stand up for himself. Staying silent is not justified by any measure. Man up, George.

World's Greatest Scientific Scandal

BestView was wrong the other day when it was posited that the world would ignore the damning evidence that anthropogenic global warming was a hoax, but evidently, and thankfully, this is not to be. The world has taken note and conclusions such as this one in the U.K. is beginning to shake up the Al Gore crew. Read the entire article here.

These alleged emails – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory – suggest:

Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.

Sad wealth transfer

From IBD: Read it all to confirm how the young people in the U.S. are being scammed by us old folks and their government. The sad thing is the young are too distracted, too unsophisticated, and even too poorly educated to realize what is happening to them as they fall for the glib Obama message that "change" and a new way of doing business in Washington will accrue to them during his administration. In fact their future will be severely compromised by the socialist they helped elect.

In fiscal 2008 — the last "normal" year before the economic crisis — Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (programs wholly or primarily dedicated to the elderly) totaled $1.3 trillion, 43% of federal spending and more than twice military spending.

Because workers, not retirees, are the primary taxpayers, this spending involves huge transfers to the old.

Comes now the House-passed health care "reform" bill that, amazingly, would extract more subsidies from the young. It mandates that health insurance premiums for older Americans be no more than twice the level of younger Americans. That's much less than the actual health spending gap between young and old.

Spending for those aged 60-64 is four to five times greater than those 18-24. So, the young would overpay for insurance which — under the House bill — people must buy: 20- and 30-somethings would subsidize premiums for 50- and 60-somethings. (Those 65 and over receive Medicare.)

Saturday Night Live skewers Obama

This segment of SNL is really telling. When he loses the liberal comedy folks, Obama is not winning. Listen here.

The British Press on Scientific Fraud

From the London Times. Read it all.

Last week an apparent hacker obtained access to their computers and published in the blogosphere part of their internal e-mail traffic. And the CRU has conceded that the at least some of the published e-mails are genuine.

Astonishingly, what appears, at least at first blush, to have emerged is that (a) the scientists have been manipulating the raw temperature figures to show a relentlessly rising global warming trend; (b) they have consistently refused outsiders access to the raw data; (c) the scientists have been trying to avoid freedom of information requests; and (d) they have been discussing ways to prevent papers by dissenting scientists being published in learned journals.

There may be a perfectly innocent explanation. But what is clear is that the integrity of the scientific evidence on which not merely the British Government, but other countries, too, through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, claim to base far-reaching and hugely expensive policy decisions, has been called into question. And the reputation of British science has been seriously tarnished. A high-level independent inquiry must be set up without delay.

Fraudulant Science Revealed

Any scientist who had looked at the data for 5 minutes knew immediately that the science behind anthropogenic climate change claims was bogus and didn't make sense. Al Gore, of course, called the science "settled". Well, now a series of E-mails between some of the scientists responsible for the hoax has been obtained via computer hacking. A very good rundown of these e-mail exchanges is given here, but the important thing to look for is how long---if ever--- the scam remains out of the main stream media which has bought so completely into the story. As of right now, the bloggers have it to themselves, but maybe Fox News will blow the thing open and others will not be able to avoid it. Should be interesting.

From the blog:

A CEO is going to hire a new accountant and summons a series of candidates. He asks each applicant, "What is two plus two?" The first two candidates answer, "Four." They don't get the job. The third responds, "What do you want it to be?" He gets hired. The climate alarmists' attitude toward data appears to me much the same as that fictional accountant's attitude toward arithmetic.

Climate change causes prostitution

Since there never has been prostitution before, this must be right: Read the rest of this nonsense here.

The effects of climate change have driven women in communities in coastal areas in poor countries like the Philippines into dangerous work, and sometimes even the flesh trade, a United Nations official said.

Suneeta Mukherjee, country representative of the United Nations Food Population Fund (UNFPA), said women in the Philippines are the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change in the country.

“Climate change could reduce income from farming and fishing, possibly driving some women into sex work and thereby increase HIV infection," Mukherjee said during the Wednesday launch of the UNFPA annual State of World Population Report in Pasay City.

Youtube test

BestView is looking into putting videos up, but until this is done, copy the following and paste in the address line of a web page to see the video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysKAVyXi0J4&feature=player_embedded

World's Biggest Idiot?

Al Gore may not be the world's biggest idiot, but BestView has him in first place right now. This clown recently claimed, in support of geothermal energy, that the core of the earth was "several million degrees" and thus a good source of alternative energy. (Read about it here)

The temperature at the earth's core, 4,000 miles down, is usually quoted as 5,000 degrees Celsius, while some contrarian geophysicists have posted claims up to 9,000 degrees. The temperature at the surface of the Sun is around 6,000 degrees Celsius, while at the center, where nuclear fusion is going on, things get up over 10 million degrees.

This the same grasp of science this moron brings to the global warming situation.

Obama's loss of vision

During his campaign for the White House President Obama said, “We have seen Afghanistan worsen, deteriorate. We need more troops there. We need more resources there… I would send two to three additional brigades to Afghanistan.”
He promised to send another ten to fifteen thousand troops to help those already there. He also declared that the war in Afghanistan was the proper front in the war against terror. Now that he is Commander-in-Chief, his vision seems to be less clear. The military commanders gave the President four troop deployment options earlier this week but he refused all four. Not for military reasons but because of some hooey about the corruption of the government in Kabul and their inability to run a fair election. Mr. President, if our support for governments was based on whether they are corrupt or not and could run a fair election, we would have pulled federal funding from Chicago years ago. The problem with pulling out of Afghanistan, or Chicago for that matter, is that they would fall into violent anarchy.
Read it all here.

Kangaroo Court?

If you bring a terrorist to trial in a U.S. court and promise that he will be convicted and executed, does that lend credibility to your claim that the world will look with favor on our system of jurisprudence or does it suggest to the world that we have a President and Attorney General who openly advocate kangaroo courts?

Jobs according to Obama

More evidence we need them in charge of our health care:

In Arizona's 9th Congressional District, 30 jobs have been saved or created with just $761,420 in federal stimulus spending. At least that's what the website set up by the Obama Administration to track the $787 billion stimulus says.

There's one problem, though: There is no 9th Congressional District in Arizona; the state has only eight Congressional Districts.

There's no 86th Congressional District in Arizona either, but the government's recovery.gov Web site says $34 million in stimulus money has been spent there.

In fact, Recovery.gov lists hundreds of millions spent and hundreds of jobs created in Congressional districts that don't exist.

In Oklahoma, for example, the site lists more than $19 million in spending -- and 15 jobs created -- on Congressional districts that don't exist. In Iowa, it shows $10.6 million spent  and 39 jobs created -- in non-existent districts.

In Connecticut's 42nd District (which also does not exist), the website claims 25 jobs created with zero stimulus dollars.

New infection?

As a former practicing microbiologist, the following caught my eye and I'll be following it.

Read the whole article here.

A cocktail of three flu viruses are reported to have mutated into a single pneumonic plague, which it is believed may be far more dangerous than swine flu. The death toll has reached 189 and more than 1 million people have been infected, most of them in the nine regions of Western Ukraine.

President of Ukraine Viktor Yushchenko has called in the World Health Organisation and a team of nine specialists are carrying out tests in Kiev and Lviv to identify the virus. Samples have been sent to London for analysis.

President Yushchenko said: “People are dying. The epidemic is killing doctors. This is absolutely inconceivable in the 21st Century.”

In a TV interview, the President added: “Unlike similar epidemics in other countries, three causes of serious viral infections came together simultaneously in Ukraine – two seasonal flus and the Californian flu

“Virologists conclude that this combination of infections may produce an even more aggressive new virus as a result of mutation.”

Disgraceful

Guess the party affiliation

From the Washington Post:

The jury of nine women and three men chosen for Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon's trial on theft charges will begin work Thursday, but first a judge will weigh new allegations involving another batch of gift cards said to have been donated by a developer not previously named in the case.

Read the whole article here and see if you can find where the good mayor was identified as a democrat.

Wrong Again

In 2005, global warming worriers warned, as they tend to do after all adverse or anomalous environmental events, that Hurricane Katrina was caused by global warming and foreshadowed an increase in the number and destructiveness of hurricanes.

As this year's Atlantic hurricane season ends, only three hurricanes have formed — half the average of the last 50 years — and none has hit the United States.

Read the entire George Will column here.

Upshot of the Kelo Decision by liberal Supreme Court

From the Wall Street Journal:

The Supreme Court's 2005 decision in Kelo v. City of New London stands as one of the worst in recent years, handing local governments carte blanche to seize private property in the name of economic development. Now, four years after that decision gave Susette Kelo's land to private developers for a project including a hotel and offices intended to enhance Pfizer Inc.'s nearby corporate facility, the pharmaceutical giant has announced it will close its research and development headquarters in New London, Connecticut.

The aftermath of Kelo is the latest example of the futility of using eminent domain as corporate welfare. While Ms. Kelo and her neighbors lost their homes, the city and the state spent some $78 million to bulldoze private property for high-end condos and other "desirable" elements. Instead, the wrecked and condemned neighborhood still stands vacant, without any of the touted tax benefits or job creation.

That's especially galling because the five Supreme Court Justices cited the development plan as a major factor in rationalizing their Kelo decision. Justice Anthony Kennedy called the plan "comprehensive," while Justice John Paul Stevens insisted that "The city has carefully formulated a development plan that it believes will provide appreciable benefits to the community, including, but not limited to, new jobs and increased tax revenue." So much for that.

If Sowell is worried we should all be

Even if this country can survive intact and unharmed after the Obama administration-- or, heaven help us, two terms of Obama-- the gullibility that led to his being elected in the first place will still be there for some other slick demagogue to come along and get the power to put the American way of life, and even our physical safety, at risk again.

Read it all here.

Liberal Speak

One must work hard to keep up with changes in the way liberals refer to their cherished notions that the world at large has rejected. When it became obvious that the worry over global warming was bunk since the world is actually getting colder, they started to worry about climate change as if the climate has ever done anything else. The latest is a liberal demand that the tax payers cough up their tax money for reproductive health care. They are certain this sounds better than subsidizing the woman's ability to abort a living baby.

Health Reform

Misplaced worries?

From the Washington Post

Law enforcement officials also faced questions about whether they had missed possible warning signs. Six months ago, investigators came across Internet postings, allegedly by Hasan, that indicated sympathy for suicide bombers and empathized with the plight of Muslim civilians killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a federal official briefed on the situation. The official, and another source, said investigators never confirmed whether Hasan was the author of the postings and did not pursue the matter.

The postings were among a handful of possible red flags that preceded Thursday's rampage, in which 13 people were killed and 38 were wounded in the deadliest mass shooting on a U.S. military installation to date. Friends and acquaintances said Hasan had been increasingly agitated over the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he reportedly said the U.S. "war on terror" was a "war on Muslims." Officials have seized Hasan's computer to determine his role in the blog posts and other writings.

Cynics are saying ( and BestView agrees) the Obama administration was too worried about Glenn Beck and the Tea Party protesters to pay attention to an islamic time bomb in the military.

Pelosi's way or jail

Today, Ranking Member of the House Ways and Means Committee Dave Camp (R-MI) released a letter from the non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) confirming that the failure to comply with the individual mandate to buy health insurance contained in the Pelosi health care bill (H.R. 3962, as amended) could land people in jail. The JCT letter makes clear that Americans who do not maintain “acceptable health insurance coverage” and who choose not to pay the bill’s new individual mandate tax (generally 2.5% of income), are subject to numerous civil and criminal penalties, including criminal fines of up to $250,000 and imprisonment of up to five years.

BestView suggests many should go to jail where you get the health care, free room and board and don't have to work a job you can't find anyway. If you make a lot of money, you should just pay the fine ($2,500 maximum) and when you get sick, get insurance which can't be denied and save some $12,500 per year.

No scientific debate

Last month, President Obama gave a somewhat chilling, if somewhat ignored, speech on climate change at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He stated that any scientific debate about the magnitude of global warming is unscrupulous, decrying “those who . . . make cynical claims that contradict the overwhelming scientific evidence when it comes to climate change, whose only purpose is to defeat or delay the change that we know is necessary.”

Then, the president talked tough, saying, “We’ll just have to deal with those people,” language familiar to anyone who knows the vagaries of Chicago politics.

More jobs according to Obama

From the Wall Street Journal online:

"President Barack Obama's economic recovery program saved 935 jobs at the Southwest Georgia Community Action Council, an impressive success story for the stimulus plan," the Associated Press reports.

Hey, great news! Just one little problem: "Only 508 people work there." The story continues:

The Georgia nonprofit's inflated job count is among persisting errors in the government's latest effort to measure the effect of the $787 billion stimulus plan despite White House promises last week that the new data would undergo an "extensive review" to root out errors discovered in an earlier report.

About two-thirds of the 14,506 jobs claimed to be saved under one federal office, the Administration for Children and Families at Health and Human Services, actually weren't saved at all, according to a review of the latest data by The Associated Press. Instead, that figure includes more than 9,300 existing employees in hundreds of local agencies who received pay raises and benefits and whose jobs weren't saved.

You read that right: Civil servants got pay raises, and the Obama administration claims credit for "saving" their jobs:

Officials defended the practice of counting raises as saved jobs.

"If I give you a raise, it is going to save a portion of your job," HHS spokesman Luis Rosero said.

Aren't you excited to think that these people may soon be in charge of your health care?

Jobs according to Obama

In an effort to justify the spending of $780 billion on a stimulus package that was supposed to create jobs the Obama boys have begun talking about how many jobs the stimulus money has "saved". So far, they are claiming some 640,000 jobs were saved. Nobody believes this, but now we are reading some things behind the numbers. What they did was send a form to everyone who got stimulus money and asked them to send back an indication of how many jobs were created or saved. One shoe store got about $900 to send some boots to the Army Corps of Engineers. They claimed this order for some 9 pairs of boots saved some 9 jobs.

Other specious examples are given in the Wall Street Journal.

This is just the start

“Gold prices on Tuesday surged to an all-time high after India’s central bank bought 200 tonnes of the precious metal, swapping dollars for bullion as the country’s finance minister warned the economies of the US and Europe had ‘collapsed’. India’s decision to exchange $6.7bn for gold equivalent to 8 per cent of world annual mine production sent the strongest signal yet that Asian countries were moving away from the US currency.”

Iran messing with Israel?

What does this mean in terms of an Israel response?

JERUSALEM — Hamas militants in Gaza have successfully test-fired an Iranian rocket able to reach Israel's largest urban center, the country's military intelligence chief said Tuesday.

Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin told parliament's foreign affairs and defense committee that the rocket could fly 37 miles (60 kilometers), and strike metropolitan Tel Aviv, Israeli media reported.

Until now, rockets fired from Gaza have reached up to 25 miles (40 kilometers), putting one-eighth of Israel's population within rocket range.

Could America go Broke?

Of course. Read the scenario here.

Kerry and Graham

If you vote in South Carolina you already know that your Senator Graham is best known for throwing in with the liberals to support legislation that just boggles your mind. Now he is in bed with John Kerry to support the cap and trade energy taxes which are too extreme for even this dem controlled Senate. Read it here.

Newt advice vs. Palin advice

Newt Gingrich was upset with those of us who agreed with Sarah Palin and prefer voting for a conservative independent than a liberal republican. We are doomed to the wilderness unless we elect anyone who calls themselves a Republican according to Newt. Now that Dede Scozzafava has dropped out of the race for Congress and endorsed the Democrat in the race ( who believes in the same liberal nonsense that she does ) we are left with these comments:

SCOZZAFAVA says: "I have been a Republican my entire life, I will be a Republican until I die. I believe in the Republican party that stands for less government interference in the lives of individuals. I believe in self-sufficiency versus government dependence. I believe in lower taxes, less government regulation, I believe in less government spending."

Pelosi's Health Bill

This analysis of Pelosi's new health bill is so accurate it will make you cry. Read it and weep. A sample is given below:

It's going to take some time to deconstruct this lengthy masterpiece, but as you flip through the pages of the House bill, you will notice the word "regulation" appears 181 times. "Tax" is there 214 times. "Fees," 103 times. As we all know, nothing says "affordability" like higher taxes and fees.

The word "shall" - as in "must" or "required to" - appears over 3,000 times. The word, alas, is never preceded by the patriotic phrase "mind our own freaking business." Not once.

To vote for the bill, a legislator must believe a $1 trillion price tag is "revenue neutral," or that it alleviates any of the pain higher costs bring to the average American. This would require alcohol.

A Prediction

The machine will steal the election for Corzine in New Jersey. He has way too much money to lose this election.

Change you can believe in

The following is a pretty good read. A sample:

The Obama administration has gone after both Rush Limbaugh and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce -- showing an inability to distinguish between the burning of heretics and the burning of bridges. It has courted insurance companies, then publicly demonized them for showing independence. Obama has tended to define all opposition, particularly on health care, as resulting from fear, cowardice and selfishness -- instead of admitting genuine disagreement. At a recent fundraiser, he mocked Republicans as robots who "do what they're told." He has engaged in consistent, classless, self-excusing criticism of his predecessor. Other presidents have been known for a war on totalitarianism or a war on terror. Obama is known for a war on Fox News.

Republican vs. Democrat

This poll shows an interesting awareness gap between republicans and dems.

Getting Smart in New York

Between 2000 and 2008, the Empire State had a net domestic outflow of more than 1.5 million, the biggest exodus of any state, with most hailing from New York City. The departures also have perilous budget consequences, since they tend to include residents who are better off than those arriving. Statewide, departing families have income levels 13% higher than those moving in, while in New York County (home of Manhattan) the differential was even more severe. Those moving elsewhere had an average income of $93,264, some 28% higher than the $72,726 earned by those coming in.

In 2006 alone, that swap meant the state lost $4.3 billion in taxpayer income. Add that up from 2001 through 2008, and it translates into annual net income losses somewhere near $30 billion. That trend is part of a larger march for New York: In 1950 the state accounted for 19% of all Americans, but by 2000 that number had fallen to 7%. The city's main saving grace has been its welcome mat for foreign immigrants, who have helped to replace some of those who flee.

The intelligence of those who saw the light and fled New York is handsomely exceeded by those who would never live there in the first place.

Kill the cows

Lord Stern of Brentford said: “Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is better.”

Direct emissions of methane from cows and pigs is a significant source of greenhouse gases. Methane is 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a global warming gas.

People will need to turn vegetarian if the world is to conquer climate change. This idiot is described in the article as a leading authority on global warming.

Read the entire article here.

Stimulus?

From Betsy:
Congress passed a law that made it possible to have the IRS mail you a check for $8,000 if you claimed you were a first-time homebuyer. That’s all you had to do -- assert that you deserved the credit. The IRS didn’t require you to provide proof that your claim was genuine before your check was put in the mail. Sound like a recipe for fraud?

The tax fraud was so widespread and egregious that it almost makes you laugh.

Did you forget to buy a house before claiming the credit? Not a problem. “We identified more than 19,300 electronically filed 2008 tax returns on which taxpayers claimed the First-Time Homebuyer Credit for a home which had not yet been purchased,” reported J. Russell George, the U.S. Treasury inspector general for tax administration, who testified about his department’s investigation.

Prior Home Ownership

Did you claim the credit even though you owned a home previously? Not a problem. George said his office found almost 74,000 claims “by taxpayers who had indications of prior home ownership within the preceding three years.”

Were you unable to purchase a home because you haven’t finished preschool and don’t know how to read the forms? Not a problem. George cited the “more than 580 taxpayers younger than 18 years of age who claimed almost $4 million in First-Time Homebuyer Credits. The youngest taxpayers receiving the credit were 4-years-old.”

The shocking facts go on and on. About 3,200 claims were filed with individual taxpayer identification numbers, rather than Social Security numbers, suggesting that alien residents joined American citizens in partaking in this rip-off.

This makes you wonder if Congress knew what was in the Stimulus Bill if this would have been part of the legislation. BestView cynically thinks it probably would not have made any difference.

Take this to the bank

Pres. Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder contend that America’s civilian federal prisons are secure. Our “supermaxes,” they insist, are up to the task of confining the most lethal terrorists. Even if that were true (and history shows it is not), the argument is the most hollow of strawmen. These terrorists are not going to escape — they are going to walk right out the prison gates. They are going to be freed by a perverse new legal system, an ad hoc creation of progressive federal judges, assisted mightily by an Obama Justice Department rife with lawyers whose former firms and institutions spent the last eight years representing America’s enemies.

The civilian criminal-justice system is neither designed for nor capable of handling wartime detention cases. The basic presumptions of the civilian system — innocence, privacy, the preference that the prosecution lose any case in which there is the slightest doubt about guilt — have no bearing on the detention of enemy operatives in wartime. Yet, international terrorists present challenges that traditional enemy combatants do not: They do not wear uniforms, they do not carry their weapons openly, they conduct their operations in secret, and they blend into the general population, intentionally creating ambiguity about whether they are combatants or civilians.

Read it all here.

Post-partisan Obama

In the first nine months in office President Obama and/or members of his administration have accused doctors of performing unnecessary medical procedures for profit; demonized bond holders as "speculators;" produced a report suggesting military veterans are prone to becoming right wing extremists; attacked insurance companies and threatened them with legislative retribution; ridiculed talk show hosts and political commentators by name from the White House podium; dismissed and demeaned protesters and town hall attendees as either unauthentic or fringe characters; maligned a white police officer for arresting a black man without knowing the facts of the case; launched an orchestrated campaign to marginalize the country's biggest pro-business group; and publicly declared war on a news organization.

Read it all here.

Beware Liberal Attack on the Constitution

BestView has long been convinced that the congressional mandate to buy health insurance and the tax which is imposed if the law is not followed is unconstiutional. The following editorial in the Investor Business Daily supports this view and explains the situation pretty well. It is scary. Read it all here.

Pig in a poke?

There are some very interesting data being circulated on previous health program estimates and the actual costs...for those who may be tempted to accept the current budget estimates being advanced by the liberals in Congress. For example, we are told that the Baucus version of health insurance reform will reduce red ink by $81 billion in 10 years. Let's look at other estimates such as medicaid.The Ways and Means Committee estimated that the first year cost of that program would be $238 million. It actually cost over $1 billion and the costs have kept going up from there. Its current cost is $251 billion and it went up $50 billion in 2009 alone. Medicare has a similar record. In 1965 Congress said it would cost $12 billion in 1990. It cost $90 billion in fact. The hospitalization program alone was supposed to cost $9 billion and was instead $67 billion and was up 9.8% in 2009 alone. The medicare home-care benefit was supposed to cost $4 billion by 1993, but the cost was actually $10 billion.

About the only thing we know for sure about the current estimates about costs of Obama's health insurance revisions is they are about as reliable as all the other promises he espoused during the campaign.

Change vs. Class

Zero Tolerance

Why do school boards have a zero tolerance policy on first graders bringing weapons like cub scout tools to school? Studies have shown that when school officials are given discretion over such cases, African-American students are disciplined at a disproportionately high rate. Hard for them to avoid controversy it seems.

Prediction

Obama is the early favorite in the next Miss Universe contest.

If it moves, tax it

WSJ reports taxing financial transactions on Wall Street is gathering support in high places. With federal budget deficits soaring, policy makers and other advocates are eyeing the huge sums that could be raised as a way to cover the costs of new initiatives. Labor unions, in particular the AFL-CIO, have proposed a financial-transactions tax as a way to defray costs of a health-care overhaul. Lawmakers have discussed a similar fee as a way to cover the cost of future financial oversight. Liberal advocates are pushing the tax to pay for new stimulus spending. This week, the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute floated the idea of a national transaction tax that would raise $100 billion to $150 billion a year. The tax, at a rate of 0.1% to 0.25% of the value of the trade, would be levied on all financial transactions such as stock trades, but not on consumer transactions such as with credit cards. The money would be used initially to pay for temporary aid to states, hiring incentives for public- and private-sector employers and school construction money.

Inconvenient truth?

Medical malpractice reform would reduce the annual federal deficit, saving the government $54 billion over 10 years, according to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office.

The finding bolsters one of Republicans' top health care reform proposals, and provides them with momentum to press for tort reform to be included President Obama's sweeping health care legislation.

Ouch

The following is a portion of an essay on the Obama peace prize. Read it all here.

In this respect, Obama is the perfect successor to the last American president to win the Nobel: Jimmy Carter. Consider the legacy of Carter's term in office.

Carter withdrew American support for the shah in Iran, then failed to mount any effectual response to the seizure of the US embassy and its staff-all of which allowed the Ayatollah Khomeini to establish a brutal Islamist regime which has been the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism, a supporter of Palestinian terrorism, civil war in Lebanon, and insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a regime that has repeatedly murdered and tortured its own citizens.

By allowing a Communist takeover in Nicaragua, Carter encouraged a legacy of socialist strongmen that is still riling Latin America to this day.

Carter's weakness in Latin America and Iran also emboldened the Soviets to invade Afghanistan, inaugurating three decades of bloody civil war and providing the proving ground for the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

So Carter's legacy is three decades of chaos and killing-and the growth of three of today's biggest threats to world peace. Yet Carter is infamous for his haughty, priggish sense of moral superiority.

This is what the Nobel Peace Prize really stands for: irresponsible moral posturing in the service of the leftist delusion that appeasement will bring peace, when all it really brings is more war.

Come to think of it, that makes Barack Obama the perfect recipient.

Tax increases come first

Under the Democratic bills, federal tax credits to help make health insurance affordable for millions of low- and middle-income households won't start flowing until 2013 -- after the next presidential election. But Medicare cuts and a sizable chunk of the tax increases to pay for the overhaul kick in immediately. No wonder liberals love this.

Saddest news of the week

Director Roman Polanski is feeling depressed two weeks after his arrest in Switzerland to face U.S. extradition for a 1977 case involving the rape of a 13-year-old girl, his lawyer was quoted as saying on Sunday.

Go Joe

All last week the people of Phoenix witnessed public outbursts by their sheriff, Joe Arpaio, as he railed against the Department of Homeland Security for supposedly trying to limit his ability to enforce federal immigration laws. He vowed to keep scouring Maricopa County for people whose clothing, accents and behavior betrayed them as likely illegal immigrants. He said he had already nabbed more than 32,000 people that way, and announced his next immigrant sweep for Oct. 16.

This is the lead paragraph of an editorial in the New York Times which opposes the enforcement of the law by the sheriff out in Arizona. The entire editorial can be read here, but if there was any doubt about whether Sheriff Joe was doing the right thing, this should tip your conclusion to the affirmative.

Getting Close

Peace Prize

When Al Gore and Jimmy Carter won the Nobel Prize for Peace I didn't think it could become more laughable, but I was wrong.

Put me down as dubious

A compromise health care proposal widely seen as having the best chance to win Democratic and Republican support would cost $829 billion over the next 10 years, nonpartisan budget analysts concluded Wednesday.

It also would reduce the federal deficit by more than $80 billion, according to a report from the Congressional Budget Office.

So Congress is going to reduce the deficit by increasing spending $829,000,000,000.00?

Travel Rewards

Hilarious T-shirt idea from a caller to yesterday's Dennis Miller Show:

My President went to Copenhagen and All I got was this Crummy T-Shirt!"

Random thoughts from Thomas Sowell

Surely he is not a racist. Read all his random thoughts here.

Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Muammar Qaddafi and Vladimir Putin have all praised Barack Obama. When enemies of freedom and democracy praise your president, what are you to think? When you add to this Barack Obama's many previous years of associations and alliances with people who hate America-- Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Father Pfleger, etc.-- at what point do you stop denying the obvious and start to connect the dots?

Baucus bill a trap

The Baucus bill includes an "individual mandate" that requires everyone to buy health insurance. This is not some inexpensive, high-deductible catastrophic health insurance. Instead, it imposes a requirement for pricier comprehensive coverage that pays for routine costs like annual checkups. The bill then requires that insurance companies provide coverage to people with pre-existing conditions, and that they charge customers at high risk of medical problems the same rates as those with lower risks-which means that these extra expenses will have to be paid for by raising everyone else's premiums.

And then the Baucus bill delivers the knock-out punch: after forcing us into expensive comprehensive insurance plans and driving up the cost of those plans, the bill would impose a massive 40% tax on "gold-plated" plans-which turn out to include the health-insurance plans of many in the middle class. So that drives up the cost of insurance even higher.

You can see why it doesn't much matter whether or not we have a "public option" in the original bill. Everything else in the bill is designed to make private health insurance unaffordable-so that in a few years, people will clamor for a government-subsidized "public option," and the same politicians who destroyed private health insurance can make a big show of coming to the rescue of their victims.
From Betsy.

IOC Decision

Now that the IOC has rudely rejected the impassioned pleas to give the 2014 Olympics to Chicago, ---despite pleas by Barack, Michelle, and Oprah, it is perfectly clear they are a bunch of racist.

The only downside is now President Palin won't get to preside over the festivities.

Say it again, Joe.

Senate Finance Committee Democrats rejected a proposed a requirement that immigrants prove their identity with photo identification when signing up for federal healthcare programs.

Finance Committee ranking member Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said that current law and the healthcare bill under consideration are too lax and leave the door open to illegal immigrants defrauding the government using false or stolen identities to obtain benefits.

Grassley's amendment was beaten back 10-13 on a party-line vote.


So, you have to show an ID to buy booze, but get free health care without a valid ID. Yes, Joe Wilson, he lied.

Yeah, that pretty well sums it up

Obama's health care plan will be written by a committee whose head says he doesn't understand it, passed by a Congress that hasn't read it, signed by a president who smokes, funded by a treasury chief who did not pay his taxes, overseen by a surgeon general who is obese, and financed by a country that is trillions of dollars in debt. What possibly could go wrong?"

Anonymous

Further evidence of the left discontent

From the Huffington Post, again. This time Bill Maher.

New Rule: If America can't get its act together, it must lose the bald eagle as our symbol and replace it with the YouTube video of the puppy that can't get up. As long as we're pathetic, we might as well act like it's cute. I don't care about the president's birth certificate, I do want to know what happened to "Yes we can." Can we get out of Iraq? No. Afghanistan? No. Fix health care? No. Close Gitmo? No. Cap-and-trade carbon emissions? No. The Obamas have been in Washington for ten months and it seems like the only thing they've gotten is a dog.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-maher/new-rule-if-america-cant_b_299383.html

The left is turning on their man

The following is an introduction to the lead article from the Huffington Post today which dictates liberal thought on the internet. Looks from here that the left is getting upset with their homeboy.

No matter how much he might disdain the George W. Bush presidency, especially when it comes to misuse of executive branch power, Barack Obama may be a "self-entangling giant" who is going down the same perilous path argues no less an initial Obama sympathizer than journalist-historian Garry Wills in the Oct. 8 New York Review of Books.

Is Article 1,Section 2 important?

The controversial tax that both Obama and Baucus would impose on people who do not buy health insurance appears to be a "direct tax" on persons that is unlawful under Article 1, Section 2, of the Constitution, which requires that "direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States ... according to their Numbers . .. ."
In addition, Art. 1, Sec. 9, says: "No capitation, or other direct Tax, shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or Enumeration herein before directed to be taken ... ."
The only exception to the constitutional prohibition against unapportioned direct taxes is for the federal income tax, which was authorized by the 16th Amendment — but the direct tax on the uninsured is not an income tax.

Read the entire article here.

Obamacare fine print

Powerline sends us the following fine print analysis from pages 80-81 of the dems Obamacare legislation:

"Beginning in 2015, payment [under Medicare] would be reduced by five percent if an aggregation of the physician's resource use is at or above the 90th percentile of national utilization." Thus, in any year in which a particular doctor's average per-patient Medicare costs are in the top 10 percent in the nation, the feds will cut the doctor's payments by 5 percent."

The Washington Times explains the consequences of this death panels by proxy:

if a doctor authorizes expensive care, no matter how successfully, the government will punish him by scrimping on what already is a low reimbursement rate for treating Medicare patients. The incentive, therefore, is for the doctor always to provide less care for his patients for fear of having his payments docked. And because no doctor will know who falls in the top 10 percent until year's end, or what total average costs will break the 10 percent threshold, the pressure will be intense to withhold care, and withhold care again, and then withhold it some more. Or at least to prescribe cheaper care, no matter how much less effective, in order to avoid the penalties.

This is certainly a form of rationing. And the editors of the Times don't exaggerate when they say that, while there are no formal death panels, the Democrats' bill will give us the functional equivalent, except that the accountants who serve as the "proxy" panel won't know whose deaths they are causing.

Obama Care

Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) received a handwritten note Thursday from Joint Committee on Taxation Chief of Staff Tom Barthold confirming the penalty for failing to pay the up to $1,900 fee for not buying health insurance.

Violators could be charged with a misdemeanor and could face up to a year in jail or a $25,000 penalty, Barthold wrote on JCT letterhead. He signed it "Sincerely, Thomas A. Barthold."

This is great. In order to prevent someone from trying to get heath care for free, Obama would throw you in jail and give you free health care.

You just wouldn't understand

A proposal by Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., that would have required the Senate Finance Committee to post the final language of the $900 billion health care reform bill, as well as a Congressional Budget Office cost analysis, on the committee’s website for 72 hours prior to a vote was rejected 12-11.

Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., was the only Democrat to side with Bunning. Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-MO, who is not a member of the Finance Committee, said she also supported Bunning’s proposal.

Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., himself admitted that “This probably sounds a little crazy to some people that we are voting on something before we have seen legislative language.” Indeed.

Baucus’ excuse - that it would take his committee staff two weeks to post the bill online – sounds a little crazy too. Finance Committee members are the only ones who vote based on the “plain English” version of a bill, not the legally-binding language.

One big scam

Imagine if there were no reliable records of global surface temperature. Raucous policy debates such as cap-and-trade would have no scientific basis, Al Gore would at this point be little more than a historical footnote, and President Obama would not be spending this U.N. session talking up a (likely unattainable) international climate deal in Copenhagen in December.

Steel yourself for the new reality, because the data needed to verify the gloom-and-doom warming forecasts have disappeared.

Read the whole thing here. Good summary of why BestView is convinced anthropogenic global warming is a crock.

Get your winter coats out

From today's Investors Business Daily. Read it all.

In a speech last week at the U.N.'s World Climate Conference in Geneva, Professor Mojib Latif of Germany's Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University, one of the world's foremost climate modelers and a lead author for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change acknowledged that the Earth has been cooling and is likely to continue that trend for the next couple of decades. Al Gore, call your office.

Latif has been looking into the influence of cyclical changes to ocean currents and temperatures in the Atlantic, a feature known as the North American Oscillation. When he factored these natural fluctuations into his global climate model, Professor Latif found the results brought the allegedly endless rise in global temperatures to a screeching halt.

Latif conceded the planet has not warmed for nearly a decade and that we are likely entering "one or even two decades during which temperatures cool." Latif still believes in a warming trend and thinks it will resume. But he at least acknowledges the empirical evidence of cooling, that there are factors at work here other than your SUV, and that doom will not occur the day after tomorrow.

Obama Wrestling with Himself

Here is Obama in March on Afghanistan:

"If the Afghan government falls to the Taliban or allows al-Qaeda to go unchallenged," he said then, "that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can." Afghanistan, he continued, "is inextricably linked to the future of its neighbor, Pakistan," where al-Qaeda and the Taliban now aim at seizing control of a state that possesses nuclear weapons. Moreover, Mr. Obama said, "a return to Taliban rule would condemn their country to brutal governance . . . and the denial of basic human rights to the Afghan people -- especially women and girls."

"To succeed, we and our friends and allies must reverse the Taliban's gains, and promote a more capable and accountable Afghan government," Mr. Obama concluded. As Gen. McChrystal's report makes very clear, keeping faith with that goal will require more troops, more resources and years of patience. Yet to break with it would both dishonor and endanger this country. As the president put it, "the world cannot afford the price that will come due if Afghanistan slides back into chaos."

Now, he is searching for a strategy. We have a serious case of amateur hour in the White House, but we knew that last November.

What if it quacks like a duck?

The president, appearing on ABC News on Sunday morning, discussed his proposal to require everyone to have health insurance that meets government approval:

For us to say that you've got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase. What it's saying is...that we're not going to have other people carrying your burdens for you anymore.

Right now everybody in America, just about, has to get auto insurance,. Nobody considers that a tax increase.

You just can't make up that language and decide that that's called a tax increase.

Memo to President Barack Obama: It's a tax. Obama insisted this weekend on national television that requiring people to carry health insurance -- and fining them if they don't -- isn't the same thing as a tax increase. But the language of Democratic bills to revamp the nation's health care system doesn't quibble. Both the House bill and the Senate Finance Committee proposal clearly state that the fines would be a tax.

No one needs to buy auto insurance to own a car. The insurance is required to drive the vehicle on public roads. A correct example is homeowner's insurance. It is not required if you pay cash for the property. If you borrow the purchase funds the lender has the right to demand insurance for his property. Not the same set of facts.Obama is obfuscationg with his auto insurance analogy. The purpose of mandatory auto insurance is to make sure the owner or operator of the vehicle while driving on a public roadway is financially responsabile for any damages he causes to someone else on a public roadway. Not to insure himself or his property, that is an add-on. What Obama is attempting to do is analagous to a Manhattanite with a valid drivers license being required to buy auto insurance even though he does not own a car. For the public good to help lower car insurance premiums for everyone else. Of course it is a tax, a fine would require a legal proceeding to have it imposed. So much for the value of a Harvard law degree.

Interesting thought: if Obama followed his own logic about being financially responsible for one's self instead of being a public charge, he would abolish welfare.

The lad is good at exposing liberals

James E. O’Keefe III, the 25-year-old video provocateur whose hidden camera galvanized Congress this week against the advocacy group Acorn in earlier efforts got a woman at Planned Parenthood to agree to target his contribution to abortions of black babies. The You Tube recording is here. His taste in associates, Hannah Giles, is not bad either. She is what they call hot, I suppose.

Huh?

Obama and his liberal sycophants proclaim that the reason we must have health insurance reform is because the health insurance companies are evil and have been ripping us off for years. That might be a reasonable position if these same people were not crafting legislation that mandates everyone buy an insurance policy from these same companies......and if you don't they will fine you. They have lost me somewhere.

We have an ethics epidemic

Yet another member of the black caucus is having problems with the House of Representatives Ethics Committee. I suspect racism. Read it all here.

The House ethics panel said Thursday that it is investigating Rep. Maxine Waters, a California Democrat who came under scrutiny for allegedly helping a bank with which she had ties secure a meeting with Treasury Department officials about obtaining bailout funds.

The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year that Ms. Waters allegedly helped OneUnited Bank of Boston get a meeting with Treasury officials to negotiate a $12 million bailout. On Thursday, the ethics panel acknowledged for the first time that it is investigating her.

Sidney Williams, Ms. Waters's husband, was on the bank's board of directors until last year.

The congresswoman's 2008 disclosure report filed in May showed that Mr. Williams had at least $350,000 in investments in the bank. Ms. Waters serves on the financial-services committee that oversees financial institutions.

Show us the names

The House has just voted to 345-75, to cut off all federal funding to ACORN -- using a procedural trick to force a vote on an amendment.

The overwhelming majority of Democrats voted with all Republicans to ram through the measure, which follows the Senate's passage of an amendment barring HUD from funding the community group, which specializes in social services, housing preservation and foreclosure mitigation.

The "Defund ACORN Act," introduced by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) would bar the federal government from doing business with the group, citing several voter registration fraud investigations. But it would also go much farther, prohibiting "any organization that shares directors, employees, or independent contractors" with ACORN from receiving federal cash.

Now we need to see the names of those who voted for child prostitution, tax evasion, and false imprisonment.

Just Wondering

The efforts of our esteemed legislators to extend health insurance to everyone will require mandates that we all buy a policy. This means that young people just getting started in life will have to go get themselves some health insurance which they currently don't want or need. Well, that is not a decision our government is willing to let them make. As things stand now, they have to choose a policy from among those available in their state which tells the insurance companies what must be covered by policies sold in that state. This is why insurance costs more in New Jersey where they have to offer psychiatric care, abortions, and other things one might not need coverage for.

Here is the question. If a 25 year old male is compelled to buy a policy, will he be required to get one which has maternity benefits he doesn't want or need? Or, will the state allow him to buy a policy that costs a whole lot less than one a 25 year old female would have to buy a much more expensive policy to get Ob-Gyn and pregnancy coverage? BestView bets the male will get the weinie.

Just Wondering

By what constitutional passage is the Federal Government allowed to compel us to buy anything under penalty of criminal fines? The Bauchus helath care plan says if I don't buy health insurance, I can be fined $3,800. I know the STATE can fine me if I drive a car on roads, but does that logic extend to the FEDERAL government if I simply breathe air?

Neal Boortz has it figured out

So .. here is what Jimmy Carter, Bill Moyers, Hank Johnson, much of the Washington and New York press corps, Newsweek Magazine and the brilliant thinkers on the American left would have you believe of Americans right now:

• We would be more than willing to welcome cap-and-trade with open arms, even if we paid a thousand dollars or more extra every year for our energy use, if Barack Obama were only white.
• We would be dancing in the streets celebrating the dawning of government control of our health care if only Barack Obama were white.
• It would be just dandy if government bureaucrats rationed health care for our parents, as long as the president is white.
• We would jump at the chance of the government owning ALL of the auto manufacturing companies .. not just General Motors ... if the president just didn't have dark skin.
• We would applaud those ACORN workers giving tax avoidance advice to a pimp and his prostitute if the workers hadn't been black.
• Most Americans - even ones that don't pay income taxes now - would be more than willing to give 70% of everything they earn to the federal government when asked ... so long as they are asked by a white president.
• We would have been thrilled, I tell you ... THRILLED to have all of those Islamic goons being held at Guantanamo be not only released, but sent to be school resource officers at our local government schools, if only a white president put that plan in motion.
• It would be OK if a white president stood back and allowed Iran to build its coveted nukes ... we're only unhappy about that because a black president is doing it.
• Deficits? We don't care about deficits! Make our children and grand children and great grand children pay through the nose for our president's spending habits ... just so long as the president isn't black.
• Government pork? Like we actually care? Look ... you folks in Washington can spend all the money you want - how about more studies of the mating habits of Polish Zlotnika pigs? - just make sure it's not a black president who signs the spending bill into law.
• We wouldn't care if all illegal aliens were counted twice in the next Census ... just so long as the president isn't black.
• Those Black Panther thugs who threatened voters in Philly? The ONLY reason we're upset that they were given a pass is because Barack Obama is black.
• Every single member of the president's cabinet could be a tax cheat as far as we're concerned ... just so long as the president is white.
• Forced unionization? Bring it on! We love card check! We love the idea of union goons threatening and intimidating workers to sign a card saying they want to belong to a union! What we don't like is that a black president is pushing this idea.
• Single-party talks with that Gargoyle that runs North Korea? It's about time we legitimized that little pipsqueak. We're only mildly upset here because the person who is doing that happens to be black.
• More regulation of the finance sector? We could care less! For all we care you can nationalize the banks and decree that only the government can make home loans .. .and you can even apportion those home loans on the basis of race if you want to ... just so long as the president is white!
• Minimum wage? Like we care about that? Raise it to $15 an hour if you want! Just give us our white president back.
• Read it all here
  

Protest Now Redefined

Previously, protest was patriotic and the highest form of citizenship. Now it is the greatest form of racism.

20 Things the Media Will Not Report

From Free Frank Warner

While Democrats rule, if these news stories occur, don’t expect to see them on any front page:

* The failure of Congress leaders to pay their taxes.

* Congress leaders accepting illegal campaign contributions.

* White House pressuring scientists to exaggerate global warming findings.

* White House claiming health care costs are going down when they are going up.

* White House claiming the deficit is not increasing when it is.

* The FBI wiretapping of Americans for purely political reasons.

* The firing of federal inspector generals for purely political reasons.

* The firing of U.S. attorneys for purely political reasons.

* The distorting of NSA, CIA, FBI or Homeland Security intelligence to serve a predetermined conclusion.

* The abuse of detainees by U.S. soldiers and contractors (unless Congress decides to surrender Afghanistan).

* Congress leaders accepting kickbacks from General Motors or Chrysler officials in exchange for laws giving GM or Chrysler an unfair advantage over other automakers.

* The continued paying of Congress leaders by officials of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in exchange for favorable regulations.

* The refusal by the Justice Department to prosecute Democrats who discourage non-Democrats from voting.

* The refusal by the Justice Department to prosecute Democrats who encourage voting by dead, fictitious or otherwise unqualified people.

* Subjecting Soldiers, Marines, Airmen and Sailors to poor health care at military hospitals.

* The failure of “stimulus” spending to create the jobs the administration projected.

* New health care regulations discouraging the number of breakthroughs in drugs and medical procedures.

* The relaxing of banking regulations after the White House and Congress promised tighter banking regulations.

* The failure of alternative energy sources to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.

* A Democratic burglary of a Republican campaign headquarters.

Amazing

Yesterday, the U.S. Senate voted 83-7 to ban Acorn from getting funds from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Here are the seven senators who voted to continue supporting Acorn despite its practice--now documented in at least three of its offices--of giving law-evasion advice to people running prostitution businesses:

• Roland Burris (Ill.)

• Bob Casey (Pa.)

• Dick Durbin (Ill.)

• Kirsten Gillebrand (N.Y.)

• Pat Leahy (Vt.)

• Bernie Sanders (Vt.)

• Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.)

Obama's new web site

There is a new Web site at HealthReform.gov, a product of the Department of Health and Human Services. Here is how it is presented in the invitation to contact them:

The Obama administration wants to hear your ideas about health reform.

Contact Us: Share Your Thoughts and Ideas

We want to hear what you think about health reform.

• Share your story and send in ideas about why we need health reform this year

• Show your support for President Obama's commitment to health reform.

Maybe they don't want to hear my ideas.